Whatsthatsmell?

Just thinking out loud...

I'm wondering how instructive it would be for some regulatory body to look into recent stock market transactions by employees of a particular bank that's about to get taken over...

Just saying...

Breaking News Story about Palin...

(Hat tip to Uncle Joe)

Chuckle of the day...

Mark at Blognor Regis on why Gary Glitter should have elected to get shot by a Vietnamese firing squad:

1) When your Rock and Roll legacy has gone down the pan like no others', going out in a blaze of glory in front of a firing squad in a squalid Indo-Chinese prison yard gives you at least one notable and slightly cool footnote. And, hey, it makes a change from the usual air-crash.

This makes me sick...

Here.

This is really horrible.  It is very reminiscent of a disturbing scene in this book, which I was talking about with a friend last night.  And what the book set out to do using fictional allegory has actually come true.

Say a prayer for the victim.

Saw Death Sentence the other night...

Death Sentence is a revenge film wherein Kevin Bacon is the protagonist whose son is randomly killed by a gang-banger in an initiation killing.  Instead of fingering the perpetrator in court and thereby sending him away for 1-5 years on a plea bargain, something flips and he decides to get even.

What ensues is an escalation between Bacon and the gang to which this fine young man belongs.

It was fun to watch, although I think it spent way too much time on character development.  Also, it preached a bit.  By taking it back to the gangbangers the overall PC message running through the film was that Kevin Bacon brings any subsequent misfortune upon himself.  And he "becomes" one of them.  Also there were a few whiny moments where the gangbangers complained about the media not caring if one of them from the wrong side of town was to get killed...No sh** Sherlock.  The difference is that the kid who was killed at the beginning was not a fellow drug dealer, just a guy getting a slurpie in a gas station.

This kind of wound me up a bit, because whether Bacon's character broke the law or not in becoming a vigilante, what he did was not the same as what the gangbangers did to start it.  His character was looking for justice.  The gangsters were looking for trouble.

Maybe I'm mistaken, but I don't remember Death Wish expressing the same sort of PC moral equivalence wherein all violence is wrong even if it is just or in self-defense.

It reminds me of another fun to watch recent violent film featuring Clive Owen: Shoot 'em Up.  That film, like Death Sentence, had some fantastically over-the-top violent action which felt cathartic.  But, get this, the bad guys are a pro-gun rights gun manufacturer and his political stooge.

I mean...FFS...WTF...

I am getting tired of being preached to by people who capitalise on the cinematic portrayal of mindless violence telling me how wrong violence is, especially in self-defense or in aid of justice.

Is it me?  Am I being to sensitive to this crap?

Here we have some major ultra-violence laced with mealy-mouthed platitudes about how wrong it is.

It's not as if the industry of Hollywood is a bastion of morality, anyway.  Members of the most cutthroat, superficial, amoral industry in the world are presuming to be my moral compass.

Puh-LEASE!!!!

Listen Hollywood: If you're going to make millions from a film where the body count from violent means exceeds, say, 5, in the first five minutes of the film, then don't tell me how wrong it is.  I might be so suggestible as to stop watching your crap films altogether.

More Solzhenitsyn

In no exact order:

Quoting the head of the Cheka, Martin Latsis from the newspaper Red Terror, in 1918:

"We are not fighting against single individuals.  We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class.  It is not necessary during an interrogation to look for evidence proving that the accused opposed the Soviets by word or action.  The first question which you should ask him is what class does he belong to, what is his origin, his education and his profession.  These are the questions which will determine the fate of the accused.  Such is the sense and the essence of the red terror."

And I wonder how far away we are from this:

So, who really won the Cold War?

Particularly here in Great Britain:

How many citizens who were robbed knew that the police didn't even bother to look for the criminals, didn't even set a case in motion, so as not to spoil their record of completed cases - why should they sweat to catch a thief if he would be given only six months, and then be given three months off for good behaviour?  And anyway, it wasn't certain the bandits would even be tried when caught.

Finally, sentences were bound to be reduced, and of course for habitual criminals especially.  Watch out there now, witness in the courtroom!  They will all be back soon, and it'll be a knife in the back for anyone who gave testimony!

Therefore, if you see someone crawling through a window [...] shut your eyes! Walk by!  You didn't see anything!

Three guesses as to who wrote that. 

Peter Hitchens?  No.

Melanie Phillips?  No.

Theodore Dalrymple?  No.