Monthly Archives: August 2010

TV Network “Russia Today” Nominated for iEmmy on Behalf of the President — Obama, Not Putin

August 31, 2010
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TV Network “Russia Today” Nominated for iEmmy on Behalf of the President — Obama, Not Putin

 by Mike Gray   Kim Zigfeld at Pajamas Media connects the dots:   But now we’ll have to rethink the true meaning of tragedy. After all, you can’t blame a fox for stealing chickens. You have to blame the farmer who is too lazy to bother protecting the chickens properly. If Barack Obama had not been so sickeningly deferential towards Putin’s regime when he visited Moscow, if he had not so totally ignored the plight of human rights and democracy, Russia Today would have had nothing to report (but rather, something to cover up) and the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (IATAS) would therefore have had nothing to honor.   After all, if Obama can receive a Nobel Prize, why not, indirectly, an Emmy award as well?   Obama is just the fox. Where is the Republican farmer, who is supposed to be protecting the American chickens? Why hasn’t he done more to stand up against this neo-appeasement policy, as Ronald Reagan surely would have done?   More here.

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The European Welfare State Is Something to Be Envied (If You Don’t Live in Europe)

August 31, 2010
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The European Welfare State Is Something to Be Envied (If You Don’t Live in Europe)

 by Mike Gray   On the Mises Daily weblog, Kaj Grüssner of Finland tells us that, while everything looks great on paper, the reality is different:   Government-run education — “One might think it great that there are so many places of higher learning in a country with so few inhabitants, a proof that its people are educated and civilized. Few things could be further from the truth. …. with higher education so accessible, it lures thousands of people every year to go for a degree, even though they have no business in the world of academia. This produces a great number of bachelors, masters, and PhDs who don’t have any value on the job market because they studied literature, art history, religious studies, or something like that. In many cases, they didn’t choose their major because they actually thought it would give them a job; they chose it because it seemed fun or interesting, or it was easier to get into than law school or medical school. “Unemployment among educated people has become a chronic problem. The other side of the coin is that Finland has long had an acute shortage of people with trade skills: carpenters, plumbers, mechanics, and so

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Which Should Be Reformed First, Government or Culture?

August 31, 2010
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Which Should Be Reformed First, Government or Culture?

by Mike Gray Using as his starting point the famous quotation from John Adams—”Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other”—Adam Graham on Pajamas Media explores the question of just where reform should begin: What Adams suggests is the people’s character impacts our government’s character. The early generations of Americans were independent-minded folks. Help for those in need came from the church, the family, or the community. Citizens expected only a few limited functions to be performed by the state. In 21st century America, we expect the government to provide Social Security retirement and disability, unemployment insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, student loans, and Pell Grants. Parents expect their children to have a free public education through thirteen years of school. Graham’s conclusion: We cannot effect a permanent reduction in the size and scope of government, or meaningful government reform, unless we change our culture’s demand for the government to provide our every need …. those on the right who think conservative goals for limited government can be achieved through passing economic legislation are spitting in the wind. We will never have a limited government until we have

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USA’s ‘Covert Affairs’ a Fresh Entry in Espionage Genre

August 30, 2010
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USA’s ‘Covert Affairs’ a Fresh Entry in Espionage Genre

USA Network has established itself as the master of smartly entertaining TV drama, not just on cable but on all of TV. Starting with Monk at the beginning of the decade and steadily adding a solid lineup of hit shows such as Psych, Burn Notice, Royal Pains, and White Collar, USA has reminded both audiences and the industry that good, old-fashioned, relatively wholesome entertainment that conveyed sound values was the real key to success with audiences. The latest addition to the network’s roster of original drama programming, Covert Affairs (Tuesdays, 10 p.m. EDT), is another solid entertainment with something more. Taking up the 1960s-style adventure formula of current shows such as Fringe and Human Target, the show refreshes the genre by creating realistic moral dilemmas for the characters, without indulging in the sort of flamboyantly gloomy agonizing over the morality of the spy game that has made the genre increasingly boring since John Le Carre introduced it in the early ’60s and began flogging it to death. The central characters are Annie Walker (Piper Perabo), a new CIA agent in her late twenties. Annie is brave, tenacious, devoted to her duty, and attractive. The same is true of her colleague,

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TV’s 2009-10 Primetime Emmys Announced

August 30, 2010
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Here’s everything you could possibly need to know about this year’s Emmy Awards.

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Full Week of ‘Hawaii Five-O’ on Spike TV

August 29, 2010
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Full Week of ‘Hawaii Five-O’ on Spike TV

Time to fire up the DVRs: Spike TV is running a week-long marathon of the 1970s cop show Hawaii Five-O, including all twenty-two episodes from the show’s first season. Starring Jack Lord, James MacArthur, and Cam Fong, the series depicted an elite Hawaiian state police unit that fought the Mafia, foreign secret agents, and other sinister forces too powerful or obscure for the regular police. The show ran for a dozen years (1968-80), the longest-running crime show except for Law and Order. Unlike that show and most other police dramas of its own time, however, Hawaii Five-O was tough and self-confident, filled with action and no nonsense about the cops anguishing over whether they’re on the right side of things. On the contrary, the crooks were real crooks, and the cops were the thin blue line that stood between the evildoers and the good, productive people who obeyed the law. The show’s name entered the common parlance as a synonym for tough, no-nonsense cops: the Five-O, reflecting the unusually direct and clear-headed values the show represented. CBS, which originally aired Hawaii Five-O, has scheduled an updated version of the series for this fall.

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The Battle for the Bible Was Long and Arduous, and There Were Casualties

August 29, 2010
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The Battle for the Bible Was Long and Arduous, and There Were Casualties

by Mike Gray I missed it the first time around three years ago, but I recently watched a surprisingly even-handed (for PBS) documentary on the struggle to get the Bible into the hands of the average people and out from under the exclusive control of the ecclesiastics. It was called Secrets of the Dead: Battle for the Bible. The PBS website talks about it: In the United States, there are more than 150 million Protestants divided among some 630 denominations. They worship in vastly different ways but they all trace their roots to one book — the English-language Bible. Today, that ubiquitous book is largely taken for granted, but for the original translators, producing and distributing the Bible in English was a dangerous pursuit involving subversion, obsession, intrigue, treachery, imprisonment, and death. Secrets of the Dead: Battle for the Bible tells the compelling story of faith, flames and martyrdom behind the world’s most famous book. The Biblical texts, translated from the original ancient Greek and Hebrew into equally obscure Latin, were staunchly guarded, making common interpretation impossible and ensuring that no one would question the authority of the Church. Through the stories of John Wycliffe, William Tyndale and Thomas Cranmer

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Are We Heading for a Global Currency? You Bet Your Bottom Bancor

August 29, 2010
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Are We Heading for a Global Currency? You Bet Your Bottom Bancor

 by Mike Gray      On Mises Daily, Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. informs us that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) thinks the world should seriously consider a global currency—issued by and controlled by a global central bank run by the big money elites.      “It’s a long-term plan,” he tells us, “but the plan has the unmistakable stamp of Keynes”:      A global currency, bancor, issued by a global central bank would be designed as a stable store of value that is not tied exclusively to the conditions of any particular economy. …. the elites never give in, never give up. The proposal for a global currency and global central bank is again making the rounds. What problem is being addressed? What is so desperately wrong with the world that the IMF is floating the idea of a world currency? In a word, the problem is hoarding. The IMF is really annoyed that “in recent years, international reserve accumulation has accelerated rapidly, reaching 13 percent of global GDP in 2009 — a threefold increase over ten years.”    You see, monetary policy isn’t supposed to work this way. In their ideal world, the central bank releases reserves, and these reserves are lent out, leading

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Ebert Under Fire

August 29, 2010
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“I do think it is fair to say that Roger Ebert destroyed film criticism,” says New York Press film critic Armond White. Benjamin Kerstein agrees enthusiastically at Pajamas Media. I say it all goes back to New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, but her disciple Ebert certainly popularized her philistine leftist approach to film criticism, while lacking her knowledge of cinema and her occasional perceptiveness.

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Are All Anti-Statists Impious Anarchists? New Book Says No

August 29, 2010
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Are All Anti-Statists Impious Anarchists? New Book Says No

by Mike Gray On the libertarian website Mises Daily, Jeffrey A. Tucker reviews a book published five decades late: Forty years ago, historian Ralph Raico completed his dissertation under the direction of F. A. Hayek at the University of Chicago. Its title masks its power and importance: The Place of Religion in the Liberal Philosophy of Constant, Tocqueville, and Lord Acton. While Raico was doing his research, an intellectual controversy was well underway: The argument between conservatives and libertarians was fundamentally about the Cold War, but that was not the only subject discussed. Instead, the conservatives came to characterize the libertarians as not only strategically flawed but philosophically corrupt. And why? Because they had inherited the secularism, the anticlericism, the essential immoralism and antinomianism of the old-liberal school of the Enlightenment (a word to be spoken with sneering disdain). You see, the conservatives said, the libertarians imagine a world of autonomous individualism in which people run around and do whatever they want, free of the shackles of religion and morality, and this, they believe, is the true end of existence. Freedom and nothing else is their rallying cry! Thus did the conservatives attempt to paint the libertarians with the brush

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When You Could Be Dying, Does It Matter If Your Doctor Is Religious?

August 28, 2010
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When You Could Be Dying, Does It Matter If Your Doctor Is Religious?

by Mike Gray According to a survey conducted in Britain, ScienceDaily reports that theist or agnostic doctors are almost twice as willing to take decisions that they think will hasten the end of a very sick patient’s life as doctors who are deeply religious, suggests research published online in the Journal of Medical Ethics. And doctors with a strong faith are less likely to discuss this type of treatment with the patient concerned, the research shows. The findings are based on a postal survey of more than 8500 UK doctors, spanning a wide range of specialties, which was designed to see what influence religious belief — or lack of it — had on end of life care. According to BBC News, the topic of euthanasia has divided Europe. In France, for example nder the “end of life” law, doctors are advised to avoid taking extreme measures to keep dying or brain-dead patients alive. Active euthanasia, even at a patient’s request, remains illegal. However, Luxembourg’s parliament has voted to legalise euthanasia, after a passionate public debate. It is a predominantly Catholic country and the medical profession was broadly against the legislation. As for the Netherlands: In 2002, the Netherlands was the

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Edmund Burke vs. The French Revolution

August 28, 2010
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Edmund Burke vs. The French Revolution

by Mike Gray Ellis Washington continues his supplemental reading of Benjamin Wiker’s new book and encounters the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, Edmund Burke, atheism, and the problem of sin. Burke’s views on the French Revolution are still in print; Washington notes that Burke’s prescient worldview came from years of cloistered study, scrupulous and often unpopular observations (i.e., his support of the Irish Catholics over British hegemony, freedom for the American colonists, favoring limited monarchy checked by a strong Parliament) and a profound reverence for the lessons of history against the savage beauty of human nature – all this emanates from Burke’s conservatism. Burke’s comment on history is worth repeating: History consists for the great part of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites. … in other words, sin. The French Revolution, says Washington remains a point of historical revisionism and idealism and is still widely viewed by liberals as an anomaly of the lofty principles of revolution – as opposed to Burke’s contemporary narrative based in realism as the predictable catastrophe of the French Revolution. …. Burke, a student of history and traditions, understood

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"Culture is the expression of the guiding philosophy of the day."—Murray Rothbard
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