Hollywood loves Christmas, or Winterfest, or whatever they’re calling it these days. This is because many Americans make it the most wonderful time of the year for the studios, offering them gifts of gold. For example, on December 25, 2015, we gave Buena Vista/Disney $49.3 million for the right to spend 2 hours and 16...
Month: December 2017
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On the Altar of Empire
The GOP-controlled Congress has received a report from the Pentagon advocating the conscription of women—the daughters, young wives, and young mothers of America, ages 18 to 25—according to the Washington Times. This is truly unprecedented. At the tail end of the Obama administration, then Defense Secretary Ash Carter, who opened combat roles to women (with...
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Fact-Free: Where No Center Holds
Facts were fuzzy in the ancient world. From Homer to Herodotus, from Thales to Plotinus, from the Old Testament to the New, myth, science, and history met and mingled, merging into amalgams that were almost invariably greater than the sum of their parts and yet less than what might pass our modern-day tests of peer...
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Regional Anthem
A century ago, the American Midwest was in the ascendant, widely acknowledged as the nation’s vital Heartland, a place characterized by a morally strong and independent populace, a relatively egalitarian distribution of wealth in land (the classic 160 acre family farm), and true democratic values. The print media of the day celebrated its distinctive farm...
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Is Europe Burning?
In 1966 a film called Is Paris Burning?, based on a novel of the same name, was a cinematic sensation. Its subject was the liberation of Paris by the French Free Forces and the French Resistance in 1944. More than 70 years later Europe itself is afire as a combined Resistance force including rightists, “populists,”...
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The Politics of Peace
Step by step America is being primed for war with Iran. President Trump has not actually torn up the “Iran deal”—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that is supposed to defer the day the Islamic Republic might seek a nuclear weapon—but he “decertified” it in October, and his administration is under constant pressure from the...
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Why Are We Here?
Where does life come from, and why is it what it is? These are great mysteries. Even so, Darwinian theorists tell us it is nothing but a mechanical process that in principle is entirely explicable by reference to biochemistry, and thus to well-known properties of matter. The key, they say, is random variation and natural...
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Stupid Is Not Enough
When Donald Trump defeated Ted Cruz in the 2016 Indiana presidential primary, the race for the Republican Party nomination was over. The prize was Trump’s. The next day, House Speaker Paul Ryan announced that he was not yet ready to endorse the standard-bearer. George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Jeb Bush quickly followed suit,...
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