Home movies are a little different

when dad works in the effects business.

It’s Draw Muhammad Day!

I read Ann Althouse’s objections to the idea here and here. I’m not convinced. This is nothing like burning flags to protest an anti-flag burning law. The target of the putative offense is not a law (except in the fevered minds of people who think Sharia is an actual law). When she quotes Taranto, both she and he miss the point.

The problem with the “in-your-face message” of “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” is not just that it is inconsiderate of the sensibilities of others, but that it defines those others–Muslims–as being outside of our culture, unworthy of the courtesy we readily accord to insiders. It is an unwise message to send, assuming that one does not wish to make an enemy of the entire Muslim world.

The point is that Islam is unworthy of courtesy. You have to put on the blinders of suicidal multiculturalism not to see that it’s an abhorrent culture. Note that this is not the same thing as saying that all Muslims are abhorrent. There are indeed moderate Muslims, but there is no moderate Islam.

Which reminds me,, I have a question for the parts of the “right” blogosphere went apoplectic over a Muslim woman winning the Miss U.S.A. contest:

Are you nuts?

What could be more western, more American, than parading around in a bikini? And what could be more opposite to that misogynistic burka that extremist Islam wraps its women in? This is a very encouraging sign of moderation and integration into our culture.

Besides, how could she not win?

Update:

Shame I missed this until the day after:

Bill of Rights 2.0

I can do anything good.

When The Time Is Ripe

A fourth-year CalArts film.

Score One for Horowitz

Daniel Foster has the summary on The Corner:

Horowitz fields a “question,” such as it is, from a UCSD Muslim Student Association hack in a keffiyeh. Horowitz asks her if she will condemn Hamas. She won’t, and relates her worry that publicly expressing support for the terror group at an American university will lead to her immediate arrest by the Department of Homeland Security. (Ha! If that were true, Gitmo would be the size of Connecticut.) But despite her paranoid effort at self-restraint, she is eventually goaded by Horowitz into revealing exactly what she is:

I find support for Islamic extremism hard to understand, but when a woman supports it, it’s just too weird to grasp.

See No Evil

As if we needed more evidence that the paleomedia is still in the tank for socialism, here’s a sobering article by Claire Berlinski on the Soviet empire’s hidden history. You owe it to yourself to read the whole thing. Here are some excerpts, with emphasis added by me:

In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.

…

Perhaps it doesn’t surprise you to read that prominent European politicians held these views. But why doesn’t it? It is impossible to imagine that figures who had enjoyed such close ties to the Nazi Party—or, for that matter, to the Ku Klux Klan or to South Africa’s apartheid regime—would enjoy top positions in Europe today. The rules are different, apparently, for Communist fellow travelers. “We now have the EU unelected socialist party running Europe,” Stroilov said to me. “Bet the KGB can’t believe it.”

And what of Zagladin’s description of his dealings with our own current vice president in 1979?

Unofficially, [Senator Joseph] Biden and [Senator Richard] Lugar said that, in the end of the day, they were not so much concerned with having a problem of this or that citizen solved as with showing to the American public that they do care for “human rights.” . . . In other words, the collocutors directly admitted that what is happening is a kind of a show, that they absolutely do not care for the fate of most so-called dissidents.

Remarkably, the world has shown little interest in the unread Soviet archives. That paragraph about Biden is a good example. Stroilov and Bukovsky coauthored a piece about it for the online magazine FrontPage on October 10, 2008; it passed without remark. Americans considered the episode so uninteresting that even Biden’s political opponents didn’t try to turn it into political capital. Imagine, if you can, what it must feel like to have spent the prime of your life in a Soviet psychiatric hospital, to know that Joe Biden is now vice president of the United States, and to know that no one gives a damn.

…

We rightly insisted upon total denazification; we rightly excoriate those who now attempt to revive the Nazis’ ideology. But the world exhibits a perilous failure to acknowledge the monstrous history of Communism. These documents should be translated. They should be housed in a reputable library, properly cataloged, and carefully assessed by scholars. Above all, they should be well-known to a public that seems to have forgotten what the Soviet Union was really about. If they contain what Stroilov and Bukovsky say—and all the evidence I’ve seen suggests that they do—this is the obligation of anyone who gives a damn about history, foreign policy, and the scores of millions dead.

The greatest propaganda coup in Soviet history was convincing the world that the Nazis were right-wingers and not the socialists they really were. As bad as the Nazis were (and they were terrible) communism is worse by any measure. And yet it still enjoys a free ride in the press.

This should be a huge story. Huge. That it isn’t is shameful.

Attack!

What’s the Best Way to Pop a Bubble?

Try to read the whole thing. But at least get this bit:

The critics of investors who go short (i.e., bet that an asset’s price will decline) and of the firms that create the investment vehicles by which they may do so are mistaken when they say these investments produce nothing of value. Most obviously, many investors who take short positions are simply trying to hedge other long bets. Their short positions therefore produce valuable risk reduction that enhances liquidity. But even the derivatives traders who aren’t hedging their own bets — even those who are merely “speculating” or, to use the favored term of derision, “gambling” — are producing something that’s absolutely essential to economic growth: information. When an investor buys a put (an option to sell), short sells a stock, or purchases a credit default swap on a debt security, he’s sending a powerful signal: “I believe this asset is overvalued, and I’m willing to bet my own money on that belief.”

Freedom works. And the idea that a government Oracle can “manage” markets is as dangerous as it is stupid. “Fat Cats”, on the other hand, help everybody and harm nobody. Stop and think about it: What do the rich do with their money?