“Why Short Films Don’t Work in Church”

More news in time for Banned Books Week: The Brooklyn Public Library has a big safe for books which are “not for the public.”

The Arctic sea will not be free of ice by 2030, as Greenpeace has said.

Big Hollywood writes: “Although [the retiring head of Greenpeace] admitted Greenpeace had released inaccurate but alarming information, Leipold defended the organization’s practice of ’emotionalizing issues’ in order to bring the public around to its way of thinking and alter public opinion.”

Speaking of emotionalizing issues, what comes to mind when you think of the year 2012? Your son will be out of college? The next presidential election? The end of the world? Maybe I’m stretching, but I won’t be surprised if someone behind this film is arguing that if the next presidential election goes the wrong way, we’re doomed.

A publisher friend asks me, “Do you know of magazines that could be good places to advertise books about WW2?”

Why should I research this question, when I can just ask our readers?

Some liberals are trying to boycott Whole Foods, because the CEO suggested private market-related options for health care reform instead of falling in line with the goons on Capitol Hill.

Larrey Anderson remarks on a dearth of thinkers in America and recommends Paul Johnson’s book, Intellectuals. “Our present situation is not good for the Republic,” he writes. “By selling feel good snake oil intellectualism, we have polarized America into unwavering ideological camps, each camp filled with phony sophisticates. How we got ourselves into this pickle is an interesting story.”

Anderson says we’ve been teaching relative values in our society for at least fifty years, but I believe I read Mortimer Adler say in an essay he wrote in 1940s that we’ve been teaching relative values since the late 1800s.

The new head of the National Endowment for the Arts reveals something of his perspective–Peoria is small potatoes; the NEA is about real venues.

I hear Margaret Thatcher said, “The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” This is why health care reform, if it is a method for reducing some people’s medical bills by giving them the taxes taken from others, is only another problem, not a solution. Why do anti-trust laws not apply to insurance companies? Why are those companies bound by state lines? Is that not a tax-free way to increase competition, if that is the goal for health care reform?

But about socialism, here’s another good critique from the former prime minister:

Portraying Mr. Obama as The Joker from the most recent Batman movie is racist and hateful. The same of Mr. Bush, not so much. I wonder if it would be worth the effort to compose (being respectful of copyright) a variety of politicians as villains. Throwing all ideology aside, there could be Barney Frank as Stephen King’s Pennywise, John McCain as Norman Bates (done as a movie poster so the connection could be made), Arlan Specter as Two-Face, and Rahm Emanuel as Alex de Large.

Course, I usually just think of these things and don’t act on them.

MOVIEGUIDE® has asked the Motion Picture Association of America to drop it’s rating system, which has blurred a good bit over the years. They are asking folks to sign a petition to this effect as well.