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Monthly Archives: August 2006

IS IT SAFE?

Posted on by Posted in Current Events, Movies, Politics

Movie buffs will remember this line, from Marathon Man (1976). It is spoken by Laurence Olivier, playing ex-Nazi dentist Christian Szell, who is using the tools of his trade to torture Dustin Hoffman, portraying a New York graduate student, to reveal certain information. Szell wants to know if his evil plans have been found out, or if it is still safe to continue with his nefarious plot.

In addition to the physical torture, which actually had to be partially edited out, after preview audience members supposedly vomited, the good doctor drove his victim and viewers crazy with his incessant repetition: Is it safe? Is it safe? Is is safe?

So, let’s take a page out of his book, and apply it to the terror threat on our shores, and in the skies…

Just a few days ago, in what was obviously a dry run for an onboard attack, a dozen cell phone wielding suspects were dragged off an aircraft, after they refused to stop what they were doing. Incredibly, the captain was lured out of the cockpit (nice move, don’t you think?), and the plane returned to its starting point. The perps were detained for a day and then released.

A cover story was issued saying that they were all exchanging phone numbers, and none of them heard the crew’s instructions to shut off their phones. R-i-i-i-ght. The good news is that their fellow passengers were not afraid or embarrassed to speak up.

Numerous other “minor” incidents, including a raving woman who somehow was able to get several forbidden items onboard, have appeared in recent days. In most of these cases, we have been assured that nothing sinister is afoot.

As to the matter of various liquids being banned since explosive devices could be put together in-flight, we are told that while such devices might be fabricated, the perps would be quite conspicuous. Maybe. Still, as Ann Coulter has pointed out, given this new wrinkle in the security equation, what was up with everything that was being done—security-wise—between 9/12 and the liquid ban? Some sort of Kabuki theater?

Is is safe? Even if it is, consider the great cost. How much money should be spent, how many millions of travelers inconvenienced, and how many airlines need to go under? If “security” is the answer to this problem, then the answer to the Titanic disaster would have been finding more powerful pumps to remove the water, rather than avoiding the iceberg in the first place.

It looks to me like the terrorists have won their objective here. Air travel has been ruined.

What makes this even worse, if that’s possible, is that the only reason aircraft were chosen as objectives is that they represented a soft target. Now that this target has been hardened, the perps need only move on to other soft targets.

A moment’s reflection will convince you that it is simply not possible to harden up all targets, since the sheer number of them is virtually without limit. Therefore, enhanced security can NEVER be the answer, can it?

Is it safe?

The Government has an intractable problem. It cannot very well admit that it is powerless to protect its citizens, and, at least for now, it is prevented by a self-imposed political correctness to even target the most likely suspects. Of course, by the time it develops the political will to do exactly this, the bad guys will have recruited enough useful idiots who don’t fit the profile. Remember, it was the girlfriend of the Lockerbie bomber (1988) who unwittingly brought the explosive device onboard. A suicide bomber by proxy, if you will.

Much as the passengers aboard the cell phone flight had to take charge, and it took a normal citizen to effect capture of the Beltway Snipers and the Night Stalker, it is quite clear that we have to be our own best security force. Your tax dollars at work, I guess.

Is it safe? Only if we are all vigilant.

SNAKES ON A PLANE

Posted on by Posted in Movies

Snakes on a PlaneBoasting a title way more evocative than anything from the 1950’s and 1960’s cavalcade of lurid monikers that included such classics as Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman (1958), I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958), I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), Blood Feast (1963), Mars Needs Women (1967), and, of course, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? (1964), Snakes delivers, and should delight most fans.

Pic begins with shots that recall the TV Series Hawaii Five-O (1968-1980), and then center on surfer dude Sean Jones (Nathan Phillips), tooling up the road on his motorcycle. He stops in front of a house in the country only to witness mobster Eddie Kim (Byron Lawson) literally whack a luckless prosecutor. Unseen by the baddies until he hightails it out of there, Sean is now a very marked man.

In fact, he’s marked enough to be targeted for a hit the moment he returns home. Fortunately, this hit is foiled by tough guy FBI Special Agent Neville Flynn (Samuel L. Jackson), who convinces Sean that he must travel to Los Angeles to testify against Kim.

Despite Neville’s best efforts to decoy their flight, Kim arranges to load hundreds of poisonous snakes on board, and these serpents are all hopped up on pheromones, making them even more vicious, and possibly more photogenic. The snakes are set to be released from their confines via some sort of electronic gizmo only when the aircraft is well over the blue Pacific, and beyond the point of no return.

So, at around 30 minutes in (to the movie, not the flight), the snakes emerge and it doesn’t take too long for the passengers to get hiss-terical. Combining the rules of disaster and horror flicks, we can almost predict who will get nailed. Certainly, there is no shortage of cliché characters, but that is all part of the fun, isn’t it?

Writers John Heffernan, Sebastian Gutierrez, and David Dalessandro come up with all sorts of nasty places to get snakebit. Suffice to say that audience members of both sexes will cringe.

Interesting plot elements include how they actually do get the snakes off the plane, and how a video game addict saves the day. Beyond that, what started out as a silly idea several years ago, and got hyped on the Internet, is now an entertaining summer release.

Most of the critical reaction is positive, save the usual naysayers, who cop a frankly ridiculous “But, it’s marketing, not feeelm” attitude. I for one have had it with this “art versus commercial” debate that has gone on forever. Let’s see what Leo Tolstoy had to say about art…

Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.

Conspicuously absent in all this is a condemnation of commerciality. Moreover, Tolstoy held that most celebrated works of “high art” are nothing more than clever imitations of existing art. He called these “counterfeit” works, and felt that they are not really art, at all. There were some surprising selections included in these counterfeits, by the way. Finally, he divided true art into good and bad, depending on the moral sensibility with which a given work infects its audience.

Let’s examine moral sensibility in Snakes for a moment.

Sean does the stand-up thing and agrees to testify, being protected by Flynn. Several of the passengers are heroic, and some even undergo a good character arc. The bad guys, including the snakes, get their just deserts.

Of course, there are dozens of plot holes, and there is no reason to detail them here. But where life does come close to imitating art in this case—and this is on the mind of any air traveler—is that the worst snakes on a plane are now of the human variety.

SEE NO EVIL

Posted on by Posted in Current Events, Politics, The Media

Only a few days before the British announced that they had thwarted a major terrorist plot, another story broke that you may have missed. And missing it would have been easy since it was not exactly widely covered by the elite media.

It seems that anti-abortion group Operation Rescue purchased a building that was previously used—for 23 years—by the now defunct Central Women’s Services, of Wichita, Kansas. Central was a well-known abortion mill, and had run into money problems, owing, at least in part, to its sordid reputation even within its own miserable industry.

Taking a page out of forensic science, Operation Rescue personnel used the reagent Luminol to test various surfaces for blood. Luminol testing will reveal minute blood traces, even if the surfaces have been cleaned.

Operation Rescue staffers were quite surprised to find the walls splattered with blood traces. The Luminol revealed at times clear spatter patterns and at other times smeared areas where it appeared that clean up efforts were attempted. According to Cheryl Sullenger, media coordinator, “The walls looked like there had been a chain saw massacre in there. We couldn’t believe our eyes.  We certainly did not expect to find that much blood in the recovery area.  It appeared that carpeting had been laid after some very bloody event or events had taken place in that room.  We were absolutely shocked.”

She went on to note that the blood had worked its way into the ventilation system.

Findings of less than pristine surgical practice at an abortion clinic are certainly nothing new, yet the concept of how all this blood could be so widespread does give one pause. The mind can only conjure up grotesque images better suited to horror movies, and it is thus difficult not to conclude that the procedures were done with considerable élan, if not some bizarre ritualistic glee.

But, the story here is not what was discovered. Rather, it is the nearly complete news embargo even though plenty of local reporters were given a tour of the facility, and the pathetic excuse-making that is emerging from the pro-abortion crowd.

The naysayers will point out that certain substances can give false positives in Luminol testing, and apparently became infatuated with the notion that the reagent, which reacts with blood hemoglobin, can respond to inorganic iron. As such, believe it or not, RUST was given as the explanation.

Well, I suppose that rust all over the sinks and counters is better than blood, but then, how to explain the “rust” on the walls and ceilings? And, cold comfort it would be that all wetted surfaces are covered with rust in a surgical facility! Of course, some still believe that Cuba is a workers’ paradise, also.

Welcome, dear reader, to an essential component of modern Leftist thought, and that is the denial of objective morality, and along with it the concepts of objective good and evil. The only “evil” in their system is the person who disagrees with them, George W. Bush, for example. The only “good” is some facet of their outrageously superficial and utterly sophomoric worldview.

You see, abortion-on-demand somehow liberates women. One might argue that the woman would be even more liberated if she had not agreed to the particular sexual encounter in the first place, but this is already penetrating too deeply. In the Leftist system, the price for women’s liberation is blood—lots of it.

In their eyes, profiling young middle eastern men for airport security and other types of surveillance is evil, since it is racist. We must protect their rights. One might argue that protecting the rights of the vast majority of Americans who are not young middle eastern men, and helping to not completely strangle air travel might trump these claims of racism. Besides, we have already paid a bloody price for not being vigilant.

No matter. Nothing is more important to the Left than ideology. That, along with self-hatred and hatred of America. And anyway, as a bonus, if we cannot stop the perps and another 9/11 goes down, strike a blow against Amerika, right? After all, we brought it on ourselves. See no evil.

Let Cindy Sheehan and her ilk cry all over the media about American soldiers dying in Iraq, but believe me when I tell you that if these same men and women had the opportunity to join some sort of latter-day Abraham Lincoln Brigade, their deaths would have been justified and celebrated by the very same band of hateful hypocrites.

The day that they protest abortion and its tens of millions of victims, and the day they stand up against international terrorism is the day I will believe how sincere they are about the sanctity of the soldier’s lives.

Just don’t hold your breath.

GIBSON MELTDOWN: MAD MEL BEYOND TEQUILADOME

Posted on by Posted in Uncategorized

Break out the handkerchiefs. If just about anyone else had been arrested for drunk driving, and uttered some nasty ethnic remarks, not a soul would have cared. But then, anyone else would have probably been in cuffs.

There are so many angles on this story, so let’s have at it. But first, understand that nothing I say here should be interpreted as defending him whatsoever. Mel Gibson, plain and simple, is a Hollywood brat, and there are many more like him. One might ask why a married man with seven kids is hanging out in some bar with much younger women, why he is too stupid to even get someone to drive him home, and mostly why he just couldn’t have kept his mouth shut.

Don’t expect good answers to any of those questions. After all, when one’s every whim is satisfied in nanoseconds, why SHOULD he have any personal responsibility, off the movie set?

Celebs getting preferential treatment is nothing new, and it’s virtually a way of life in LA. No surprise there, although it’s never been explained why this goes on, since these folks are usually high maintenance and are hardly ever worth the trouble. Besides, with the very real possibilities of a drunk speeder causing mayhem on Pacific Coast Highway, prudence suggests that kissing up to the glitterati should be way down on the list of priorities.

The sad truth is that the lives of many people are empty enough that they must fill them up with living vicariously through entertainment, sports, or political figures. I’m sure that far more people have heard of Mel Gibson than Nikola Tesla, even though Tesla has had infinitely more to do with improving mankind’s lot. But then, the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus,” according to the late John Lennon.

As to the anti-Semitic remarks, Gibson probably heard all he said, and much worse, from his notorious father. Since he has never distanced himself from Hutton Gibson’s point of view, including buying into the absurd heretical nonsense of there not being a valid pope since Pius XII, starting his own “church,” and remaining silent while dear old dad bloviates about a Jewish population explosion during World War II, one can safely conclude that he really is anti-Semitic.

What will happen is that he will toady up to certain anointed officials, slip some money under the table, visit the Holocaust Museum, take some sensitivity training, blame it on alcoholism, claim to be suicidal, be characterized as a victim, have photo opps with professional Jews such as Dennis Prager, be defended by his friends in the industry, and everything will be all right. It will be a mere speed bump on the superhighway of entertainment fame and fortune.

At the same time, though, few seem to care about real anti-Semites that actually kill Jews, as feckless diplomats try to engage terrorist thugs as a matter of national policy, and even many so-called Jews on the Left denounce Israel’s attempts to defend itself. There is no better word than “travesty” to describe how these clueless louts fawn over the rather obvious theatrical attempts by Hezbollah to sway the media, with obviously staged and amplified “atrocities,” and the same Green Helmet man suspiciously showing up at completely unrelated events.

Some are suggesting that anti-Christian bigots are using this case as an opportunity to trash the guy who made The Passion of the Christ (2004). This is credible, although not in the way it is usually presented. There really are many in Hollywood who were quite infuriated that a film with a religious theme could be so financially successful, and could also put a dent in the virtual non-stop parade of mostly ill-conceived pathetic derivative trash and self-congratulatory “counter culture” hokum. The anti-Christian component is just an added bonus.

Lest we forget, Gibson’s outspoken condemnation of the entire gay rights movement has put him in hot water with all the Hollywood lockstep limousine liberals, presently gushing over with schadenfreude. Based on this issue and factoring in his pro-death penalty and anti-abortion positions, the elite Left has cast him on the Right, even if he agrees with them on the Iraq war and Bush—at least.

From Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle to Mel Gibson: We love building them up, and then tearing them down. And that may be the sickest thing of all.