"biting the Invisible Hand that feeds them"

Peter Foster reviews the latest in "The Hunger Games" movie series and finds:

... [the movie] hasn’t quite produced the flood of anti-capitalist flapdoodle that the first did, but one of its stars, Canadian actor Donald Sutherland, still hopes that it might send U.S. youth to the barricades.

One of the more intriguing aspects of our relatively free Western society is that it allows people such as Mr. Sutherland to become fabulously rich while biting the Invisible Hand that feeds them.

Donald Sutherland, another Hollywood Canuk in the dumb and dumber set.

Celebrity farewell to Jack Layton

Christie Blatchford penned an excellent column about the celebrity treatment Jack Layton's untimely death is receiving.  Naturally, as can be seen in the comments, Jack's fans are not pleased with Christie's take :)

Jack Layton was a likeable, upbeat guy who lived and breathed socialist politics and died too young. But he deserves honest appraisal not the fawning, over-the-top sentimentality served up by most of the media. Jack's final "letter to Canadians" was the first thing I read after learning of his death and I was disappointed to find it full of NDP talking points and concluded with meaningless platitudes. It sounded as if it had been written by party hacks, which, as Christie points out, it had. They didn't do him any favours.

Whatever. R.I.P. Jack Layton.

Update (from the comments):

dmorris: "I heard the Taliban was sending a squad to do the 19 gun salute,hope they restrain themselves and use blank cartridges." :)
Calgary Junkie: Christie on the Bill Good Show yesterday (10:00 am).

Upperdate: Paul Tuns [via].

Banned by Boing Boing

My previous post, on the death of Richard Dawkins' father, credits the blog Boing Boing.  I had signed up for commenting privileges at Boing Boing where I wrote the "... May God rest [his] soul ..." remark. Within half an hour my comment had been deleted and attempts to sign-in again were greeted with "You do not have permission to leave comments on this blog":).  Man! That's pretty fierce gate-keeping. OK, I admit there was an element of snark in my comment. But it was pretty mild snark given that (1) Mr. Dawkins senior was an Anglican, and (2) it was, mostly, a sincere wish on my part (and Boing Boing's comment Nazis couldn't have known otherwise.)

Conclusion: The Boing Boing comments section is an echo chamber run by some apparently extremely thin-skinned people, whose idea of intolerable commentary, like many lefty scolds, is anything that doesn't precisely fit their idea of how the world should be.

Who/what is Boing Boing? I hadn't heard of it until recently while reading a book on the history of blogging, "say everything" by Scott Rosenberg.  Rosenberg presents Boing Boing's story as an example of blogging pioneers who have become wildly successful.  It's kitschy, a little kinky with a taste that runs to the oddball in stories, graphics and videos posted mostly by four individuals. There's some interesting stuff. 
[By the way, Rosenberg also holds up Daily Kos as another leading example (which maybe says something about Rosenberg). Full disclosure: A few years ago, I lasted longer (a couple of days) at Daily Kos before being banned for some comments surrounding Lloyd Axworthy's anti-Americanism.]

Anyway, Boing Boing is a top rated blog with, according to Rosenberg, millions of 'customers' and revenues in the multi-millions.   Given their success presumably they know what they're doing.  And if a comments policy requiring milquetoast pc blandness attractive to products of the schools of self-esteem is part of that success then I suppose good for Boing Boing.  But in the long run ....?

Stephen Harper’s stalker, Yann Martel

According to an interview with author Yann ("Life of Pi") Martel:

... Every two weeks for the past two years, Mr. Martel has mailed a book to the Prime Minister's Office. He tucks a letter to Mr. Harper inside the front cover explaining his selections...

... Mr. Martel has received only the most perfunctory letters from the Prime Minister's Office thanking him for his packages -- five letters in total, none of them signed by Mr. Harper himself-- a minimal response compared with the nearly 70 letters Mr. Martel has mailed.

Harper’s non-responsiveness sets Martel’s imagination (not to mention
condescension) working:

"Obviously, Harper is a very bright man. Obviously he can process information, he can understand political and economic ideas. But with books you explore the other. You develop your sensitivity for the experience of others," said Mr. Martel. "Books make imaginative leaps into other lives. If he doesn't have that, that means he's only led his own narrow, intellectual life."

And the absence of information about his reading habits makes Harper ... "scary" (of course) and cues yet more condescension:

He is not interested in debating the merits of reading fiction, which I find scary," Mr. Martel said ... "The reading of fiction is an essential tool of reflection."

No doubt Martel thinks he’s doing something useful but he comes off more as an obsessive, hectoring kook. It’s not much wonder Mr. Harper doesn’t respond. In fact, he should consider getting a restraining order.

Black reviews Atwood

I never doubted that Conrad Black would make good use of his time in jail. It’s hard to imagine the author of biographies of Roosevelt, Nixon and Duplessis whiling away the hours wallowing in self pity or otherwise wasting his time. Aside from being highly intelligent, educated, industrious and intellectually energetic the guy is well connected with the publishing field. All he needs is a library, a pencil and paper (even the roll in his cell would do) and he’s in business as a serious writer.

The latest example of his time well spent is his review of Margaret Atwood’s recent CBC Massey Lectures Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. As is fashionable in leftist circles Atwood attempts to justify an anti-capitalist line of thinking that links the world’s moral and material woes to financial culprits. Conrad admires Atwood’s talent:

Payback is well written, even by Margaret Atwood’s very high standards, and is an etymological tour de force, ... a stimulating, learned and stylish read from an eminent author writing from a heartfelt perspective.

But he isn’t buying her "heartfelt" thesis. Atwood’s references to Faustian pacts with the Devil, Ebenezer Scrooge, The Merchant of Venice, Henry VIII and many others are skillfully rebutted with Black concluding:

I don’t really see a straight line from the Egyptian Crocodile God to the Cockroach Spirit, and the economic-terrorists have oversold the green scare.

Excellent stuff [via the Post]. Now wait for the letters of praise along with more futile calls for the Post to keep ‘the criminal Black’ out of its pages.