Breaking: Kim Jong Il is Dead (Update: a Musical Tribute!)

We don't do breaking news here too often, but this is a big one.  According to a Cnn breaking email, that means his son, Kim Il Song, is now in charge.

Let’s hope in some way that this leads to a free North Korea, perhaps unified with the South, either by voluntary reform or overthrow.

And as for Kim Jong Il, may you roast in flames you evil son of a bitch.

(Pardon my language, but it has to be said.)

Update: Let's have a musical tribute to the softer side of Kim Jong Il:

That's from Team America, an under-appreciated pro-Bush classic from the creators of South Park.

Update (II): This BBC report has the official explanation:

The announcement came in an emotional statement read out on national television.

The announcer, wearing black, said he had died of physical and mental over-work.

Which is almost certainly bull. I wonder what he really died of?

I am guessing heart attack while engaged with a prostitute.  Just throwing it out, ya’ll.


Update (III): BBC has video of the State TV news announcer crying on air.  Heh.

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Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.

Gift Ideas

This ain’t meant to be anything deep, just some finds I have made in the last few days.  And, hey, many of these things can be found on Amazon.  So if you were inclined, you might visit some of your favorite sites, like Patterico’s, Althouse or Instapundit and look for the Amazon search widget, which then helps them keep the lights on.  But that won’t work for everything.

For instance, first up we have the Playstation Move Mayhem Bundle:

I snagged this one at Best Buy yesterday, and then came home and asked my wife to let me keep it.  (Other married gamers will understand.)  This includes the Move Controller, which ordinarily costs about $50, the navigation controller which costs about $30, the Camera which ordinarily costs $40, the Sharpshooter attachment (the most bad-assed “light gun” attachment for the Wii or PS3) which costs $40, and then two first person shooters, which cost about $40 each.  So if you do the math, that is $240 worth of stuff, for the price right now of about $100, but only at Best Buy.  Although you might be able to convince others to match the price.

Peter Hitchens Says Goodbye to His Brother

Here’s the quote that leapt out at me:

Much of civilisation rests on the proper response to death, simple unalloyed kindness, the desire to show sympathy for irrecoverable loss, the understanding that a unique and irreplaceable something has been lost to us. If we ceased to care, we wouldn’t be properly human.

And isn’t that what I have been talking about in the last twenty four hours, how our civilization—and various uncivilized barbarians—respond to life and death? Whether it was mourning the loss of a healer in Afghanistan, or contemplating the funeral oration quality of Schindler’s List, it has all been about how we respond to death.

Anyway, I won’t quote extensively from Peter Hitchen’s first stab at a eulogy for his brother. I will just suggest that you read the whole thing. And I will say this. I am convinced that he is in a better place today. I have always said that funerals were not really for the dead. They were for the living. And in that sense, I hope the friends and loved ones left behind will find peace.

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Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.

Friday Frivolity: The “Bad Jewish Film” Edition!

Over at PJ Media, Ed Driscoll introduces us to the debate with Tablet magazine over whether or not Schindler’s List is the worst Jewish movie of all time. Tablet magazine makes the case as follows:

Last week, Tablet Magazine published our list of the 100 greatest Jewish films of all time. At the very bottom was Schindler’s List. In a brief blurb, I called it an “astoundingly stupid” movie, which, in turn, inspired some of our readers to call me a “piece of shit” and a “neo-Nazi”—all for casting an aspersion on what, if they are to be believed, is everyone’s favorite Holocaust movie.

Which makes perfect sense: More than just a regrettable film, Schindler’s List neatly reflects the Manichean mindset of many American Jews, for whom mythology trumps memory and nothing lies beyond good and evil. Those who howled at me weren’t expressing a mere aesthetic judgment; they were defending a worldview.

To understand this worldview, we need only look at Schindler’s List. The film’s two main characters are Liam Neeson’s Oskar Schindler and Ralph Fiennes’ Nazi officer, Amon Goeth. The first is a philandering and greedy German who sees a little girl in a red coat and has a nearly instantaneous epiphany, realizing that life is precious and that Jews should be saved. The other is a monster; it’s no coincidence that the American Film Institute ranked Goeth at number 15 in its list of the 100 greatest villains of all time, just one spot below the slimy creature who terrorized Sigourney Weaver in Ridley Scott’s Alien. Goeth, too, is an otherworldly sort. He is not, like the real-life murderer on whom he is based, merely a hateful, opportunistic, and cruel young man who relished the chance to play god. He is impenetrable, predatory, inhuman. We have little reason to fear him more than we fear, say, the Nazis in Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark or the shark from Jaws; all are terrifying, but all are the sort of baddies we’ll only ever see on-screen, not the kind of ordinary and crooked and all-too-human scum living quietly next door and waiting for a stab at power.

Well, first, I always find these discussions of supposedly the worst film/song/album cover to be odd anyway. It’s more like the worst among the stuff anyone remembers. I am sure there is a more than a few clearly worse “Jewish” movies around somewhere (being a little unclear on how you decide whether a movie is “Jewish” or not). Like maybe a 90 minute film about a guy farting on a yarmulke to the tune of the Dradle Song.

And in the end I guess I just didn’t see the same movie. For one, I never thought that Schindler was okay with Jew-killing in the beginning, just that the enormity of what had been happening had not occurred to him, until that scene where he watches it on horseback. I think humans have a strong capacity for denial and that was what was in play up until that point. He found ways to ignore just how awful it was until that point. We sometimes need something to shock us out of complacency.

Double Bleg

First, I see that Ron Paul’s newsletters have come into the news with him being accused of being a racist.  Does anyone know of anywhere I can read them in the raw, outside of a paywall?  Please let me know in the comments

Second, a few people have complained about how these posts show up in Google Reader.  I have been using the service myself just to see how it appears and in my system it seems fine.  Let me know if this or any of the last two posts have the same problems we have been talking about.

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Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.

Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011

He has finally succumbed to cancer.  Vanity Fair has the news.

I think it would be crass to comment overly much about his atheism, but he will be missed.

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Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.

Karen Woo and the Dead End of Islamofascism

I think there could be no more potent symbol of the sheer nihilism of Islamofascism than the recent death of Karen Woo.  Here’s a picture of her:

The picture suggests that she was more than just a pretty face and indeed she was:

A British doctor shot dead  by the Taliban was part of a humanitarian mission that had helped 2,000 Afghans, an inquest heard yesterday.

Dr Karen Woo was executed alongside nine other aid workers after they tried to cross a mountain river in August last year.

The 36-year-old, who was due to get married a fortnight later, suffered  ‘catastrophic’ injuries from two gunshot wounds in the attack.

Shortly before her death she had helped to save the life of a baby boy who was struggling to breathe.

Her team had been halfway through a 120-mile, three-week expedition in the northern Nuristan Province when they were ambushed.

But I am sure they had a real good reason for the attack, right?

I Have No Justification...

...or rather, I have removed the justified formatting from most of the substantive posts going back about five days and I won’t be using that any longer.  I preferred that look, but I was getting a few complaints that if you read this site in Google Reader it looked absolutely awful.  I’m not sure why, but then again I never use that program.

Also I have disabled the site’s default use of the mobile version of the site.  I have found that when I read my own site on iPhone, the mobile version can get very messed up

So, do you like the changes?  Hate them?  Let me know.  And feel free to sound off on any other issues related to presentation.  I tweaked the look recently and even got a logo for the site (the lighthouse above).  A few people liked it, but I want to hear from the rest of you.

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Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.

The NTSB’s Proposed Ban on Cell Phones Is Even More Ridiculous Than You Think (Because It’s Not Just a Ban on Cell Phones)

Update: Glenn Reynolds, of Instapundit fame, writes in Popular Mechanics about why this recommendation is wrong.  He also notes importantly that this is just a recommendation—they are not going to coerce states into this as I wonder below.  You would tend to think that if they were just making recommendations, they would make sure that the recommendations were not so completely idiotic that they would be rejected out of hand.  And at Instapundit, he has more.

So the news comes out today that the NTSB wants the states to ban all of the use of cell phones, except in emergencies.  From Cnn’s article:

A federal safety board called Tuesday for a nationwide ban on the use of cell phones and text messaging devices while driving.

The recommendation is the most far-reaching yet by the National Transportation Safety Board, which in the past 10 years has increasingly sought to limit the use of portable electronic devices -- recommending bans for novice drivers, school bus drivers and commercial truckers. Tuesday's recommendation, if adopted by states, would outlaw non-emergency phone calls and texting by operators of every vehicle on the road.

But there was one line in that Cnn report that puzzled me:

It would apply to hands-free as well as hand-held devices, but devices installed in the vehicle by the manufacturer would be allowed, the NTSB said.

When I read that, I wondered what the hell they were talking about.  I mean I hadn’t seen a cell phone that was permanently installed in a car since Bill Clinton was President.  I considered several interpretations, but rather than speculate, I went and found the NTSU’s official releases, to see if it might shed some light on the matter.

The truth of the matter is that they are talking about something much more radical.  Take this language from the main index page for this “Gray Summit” providing recommendations:

To the 50 states and the District of Columbia:

1.      (1) Ban the nonemergency use of portable electronic devices (other than those designed to support the driving task) for all drivers; (2) use the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration model of high visibility enforcement to support these bans; and (3) implement targeted communication campaigns to inform motorists of the new law and enforcement, and to warn them of the dangers associated with the nonemergency use of portable electronic devices while driving. (H-11-XX)

Folks, they are not talking about cell phones only.  They are talking all electronic devices.  And if you were uncertain just how radical their intentions are in this, take this screencap of a slide from the Power Point style presentation they gave:

Obama Campaign Gathering Republican Email Addresses?

Okay, this is creepy:

The Obama presidential campaign is launching an effort to collect Republican email addresses by inviting its supporters to submit information about their Republican associates to the Obama 2012 website.

The effort could help the Obama campaign build a database that would enable it to target Republican voters during the general election campaign. But, more perniciously, it could also become part of an Democratic effort to influence Republican primary voters to select a candidate Democrats think Obama could most easily defeat....

The Obama information collection effort is cast under the mischievous guise of asking Obama supporters to "have a little fun at the expense of a Republican in your life" by signing them up to get an email from the Obama campaign ribbing them for having "inspired" the Obama supporter to donate.

The result, however, is that the Obama campaign gets a new trove of Republican email addresses that it could never have collected through voluntary submissions.

Now as of this moment if you go to the linked Obama donation website, you see this phrase included: "(Don't worry—we won't hold on to any of their information.)" First, this is apparently a recent addition to the page, as this doesn't appear in google's cache of the same page, although to be strictly fair, this might be simply clarifying what they intended all along. Second, this amounts to a matter of trust; do you trust them to do what they say they will? And more importantly, should you be risking someone else's privacy by doing so?

And of course this all fits a pattern. Previously, it was "Fight the Smears" and "Attack Watch," urging liberals to snitch out any person criticizing the President. Why exactly shouldn't we believe this is more of the same?

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Follow me on Twitter at @AaronWorthing, mostly for snark and site updates.