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Atlas Shrugged Part 2 Teaser Trailer

Hank Williams Jr: "Keep The Change"

The song is exploding the charts!

Free download on Hank Jr's site.

Conservative Movies: "Never Let Me Go"

- NewsRealBlog: "New Conservative Film “Never Let Me Go” Asks: Do Children Have Souls?", by J. Christian Adams

- IMDb page

- NRO: "The Best Conservative Movies"

"Atlas Shrugged (I)", the movie trailer

Related

- IMDb
- Babble: "‘Atlas Shrugged’ Movie of Ayn Rand’s Novel Controversial"
- Slate: "Libertarians Shrugged", by David Weigel
- The Atlasphere: "A Roman copy of a Greek original", review by Shrikant Rangnekar
- Reason TV: "The Making of Atlas Shrugged the Movie" (short interviews with Atlas Shrugged movie producer Harmon Kaslow and screenwriter Brian O’Toole)

The view from the Left (and it ain't pretty) -

- The Progress Report: "The Truth About GOP Hero Ayn Rand"

Christmas Carol from Thrace (Greece)

"Cool It", the Movie

Update

Lomborg is Al Gore Lite - "Cool It" is "An Inconvenient Truth", Children's Edition. Lomborg, an economist, keeps true to the climate narrative and says, "So what?" But Lomborg does not think CO2 reduction is the solution. Neither does he believe the consequences of climate warming are disastrous. That's the subtle difference -

Green Hell Blog: "Bjorn Lomborg is Al Gore lite"

Self-proclaimed “skeptical environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg is uttering untruths about genuine skeptics while promoting his new movie “Cool It.”

Appearing on Fox Business Channel last Friday, Lomborg was asked by host Stuart Varney whether humans were causing [catastrophic] global warming. “Is it us? Is human beings who are doing this?,” implored Varney. (...) >>>

November 16, 2010

In theaters November 12th

Climate catastrophe? The end of civilization as we know it?

Cool It is based upon the book of the same name and lectures by Bjorn Lomborg, the controversial author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. Award-winning filmmaker Ondi Timoner travels the world with Lomborg exploring the real facts and true science of global warming and its impact.

Lomborg is the founder and director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a globally respected think tank that brings together the world’s leading economists to prioritize major global problems – among them malaria, the lack of potable water and HIV/AIDS – based upon a cost/benefit analysis of available solutions.

Amidst the strong and polarized opinions within the global warming debate, Cool It follows Lomborg on his mission to bring the smartest solutions to climate change, environmental pollution, and other major problems in the world.

The official website

Trailers

Blog

IMDb

Facebook

Latma Hosts Film Director, Oliver Moan

LatmaTV YouTube channel

Jewish Heritage: the Three Cantors

The Portuguese (or Sephardic) Synagogue of Amsterdam was built several hundred years ago and was never "electrified". The arc, seats, beams are all hand made by ship builders.

During World War II the Nazis somehow missed it and never entered it, so it is entirely intact and original. It is a real beauty. This concert was done in that sanctuary.

Home Page Esnoga

More pictures

Jewish Historical Museum Amsterdam

"Generation Zero" and the September 2008 Capital Vortex

Largely unbeknowsed to the wider public some analysts have touched upon the shady subject on earlier occasions, each with their own theories. They are brought here together.

Some intrepid commentators are also venturing a guess. One has cobbled together the timeline (see the comment sector at the bottom of the first article, particularly here and here).

You can't make this stuff up. So much coincidence just doesn't happen! You don't have to wear a tin foil hat to see that!



PJM: "Generation Zero Zeros in on Cultural Roots of Financial Crisis", by Mary Claire Kendall

September 18, 2008 — the day the market lost $550 billion in little over an hour, costing Americans $14 trillion — was the tipping point for deeply indebted, over-obligated America.

Candidates on the stump are finding voters deeply attuned to and worried about America’s precarious financial condition, thus the impending electoral tsunami on November 2.

Generation Zero – conservatives’ answer to Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story — zeros in on the causes of this crisis.

The film, made by Stephen K. Bannon (Victory Productions) and David Bossie (Citizens United) — taking about two years and $5 million less than Moore’s love story — makes a convincing case, very artfully, that, in the words of Bulls & Bears’ Tobin Smith, this meltdown was a “failure of culture not of capitalism.”

It opens with Congressman Paul Kanjorski (D-PA) dramatically recounting the cliff we nearly drove over two years ago.

“We were having an electronic run on the banks” Kanjorski said the Fed concluded after immediately pumping $105 billion into the system to no effect. The only solution was to “close the operation, close down the money accounts….”

“If they had not done that,” Kanjorksi intoned, “their estimation was that by two o’clock that afternoon, five and 1/2 trillion dollars would have been drawn out of the money market system of the United States, would have collapsed the entire economy of the United States and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed (which would have meant) … the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it.”

“Someone,” Kanjorski concluded, “threw us in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean without a life raft. And we’re trying to determine which is the closest shore and whether there’s any chance in the world to swim that far. We don’t know.”

Generation Zero compellingly argues that only by attacking the causes of this still-bubbling crisis will we make it to shore. And far from being a mystery, the bevy of experts interviewed, including Roger Kimball and Victor Davis Hanson, assert the causes are very clear. (...) >>>

Sept. 19, 2010

AiM: "Who’s Behind the Financial Crisis?", By Cliff Kincaid

The New York Times is quoting a spokesman for George Soros as saying that the well-known hedge fund operator is guilty of no wrong-doing in connection with the financial upheaval currently affecting Greece and Europe as a whole. But Zubi Diamond, author of the powerful new book, Wizards of Wall Street, says the agenda of Soros and other short sellers is clear.

Their purpose, he says, is "to loot America and any foreign country which invested in America. Greece was one of them. Iceland was ravaged and annihilated." (...) The most influential members of Managed Funds Association, the hedge fund short sellers, have an anti-capitalism agenda, an anti-industrialized nation agenda, and a far left liberal, Marxist radical agenda," Diamond says."

Hedge Fund short sellers are not capitalist. They are anti-capitalist and they are not investors; they are anti-investors." He says they "loot" companies and countries. The Times noted that a dinner was held in New York last month where "representatives of some of these hedge funds discussed betting against the euro" in the wake of the Greek financial crisis.

As a result, the paper said, at least four hedge funds had been asked by the Justice Department to turn over trading records and other documents. They were Greenlight Capital, SAC Capitol Advisors, Paulson & Company and Soros Fund Management. (...) >>>

Apr 2, 2010

Enter Stage Right: "A man-made financial disaster", by Alan Caruba

You will recall that, shortly before the end of the 2008 political campaign, the White House announced a threat to the entire financial system and called on Congress to enact emergency spending powers. The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 was enacted on October 3, 2008.

Just eighteen days earlier an event occurred that slid under the radar screen of virtually the entire mainstream media. On Thursday, September 15, 2008, at approximately 11 A.M., the Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous draw down of money market accounts in the nation, amounting to $550 billion dollars. It occurred within an hour or two. The money was removed electronically.

It has never been made public which accounts were affected, nor where the withdrawn funds were sent. If we knew those facts, we would know who launched an attack on the United States that has been more devastating than any in our history.

Had the Federal Reserve not closed down the accounts involved it is estimated that by 2 P.M. $5.5 trillion would have been withdrawn and the entire economy of the nation would have collapsed. It would have been followed within a day with the collapse of the world's economy. (...) >>>

Nov. 16, 2009

Dispelling the Myths on Racism

Run away slave movie channel on YouTube

Runaway Slave - The Documentary, with Pastor C.L. Bryant. An honest discussion about black conservatives in America. "Run away from the slavery of tyranny towards the blessings of liberty!" The film is now in production and is a non-profit project. Look for newsletter sign up and more details coming soon at http://www.runawayslavemovie.com.

"I Am America", Krista Branche

"The Three Terrors"

Produced by Latma TV

There's a rather interesting phenomenon at the periphery of these productions that is very informative about the role of the media in this respect. As is well known the Arab media have a toxic culture of jew hating satire. The Nazis are mere tinkerers in comparison. We don't hear much about that in the Western media.

But when Israelis produce high value productions such as these, they're screaming Racism! with much moral indignation.

But then this is coming from the same people that call Tea Parties racist, whereas these have nothing to do with race, but everything with the size of the government.

Despite the bigotry, these people are mentally very confused and likely go nuts from their own cognitive dissonance.

They present themselves of course as unbiased and completely balanced, entirely in the service of the non existent 'peace proces'.

Moments such as these lay bare their utter hypocrisy and double standards to the fullest extent.

Cuba Isn't Club Carib, but a Political Prison Island!

Pajamas: "Forever Fighting Fidel: In Praise of Andy Garcia", by Roger L. Simon

Not all Hollywood stars are knee-jerk “limousine liberals,” “Cadillac communists” or “Penthouse Bolsheviks” (to use a term coined in the Thirties to describe the excessive admiration many chic New Yorkers had for Stalin). And one of those exceptions is Andrés Arturo Garcia Menéndez, known to the world as Andy Garcia.

Of course, Andy – who has been a friend of mine for about ten years – had good reason to wander off the Hollywood liberal reservation. He was born in Cuba in 1956, just before the revolution, to a family opposed to Fidel Castro. They left the country when Andy was five and he has been fighting for his people against the Comandante/Caudillo’s totalitarian rule practically ever since.

When I first met Andy, I was a lefty myself, so we didn’t discuss politics much. We came together over a screenplay I had written called The Gardener, about an illegal alien living in LA, that Garcia wanted to star in. We never found the money, but remained friends, staying in touch often in an attempt to revive the movie that never got made. I also had an interest in things Cuban, having gone to see the seemingly-heroic, at least at the time, Castro speak in Central Park when I was thirteen-years old. Later (1979), I was a delegate to the first festival of the “New” Latin American Cinema in Havana. It was one of my first brushes with communism from the inside and some of my early disaffection with the left (yes, it took a long time for me to divorce myself) must stem from that trip. Cuba was like an island-sized jail to me then and, despite its beauty, I couldn’t have been more eager to leave.

But I maintained my interest in the subject and when I read last week that a demonstration was planned – led by Andy Garcia – in LA’s Echo Park in honor of Cuba’s Damas de Blanco (Ladies in White who fight for the freedom of family members incarcerated by the Castro regime), I phoned Andy to tell him I would like to come for PJTV. Not that it would have mattered. When the cameraman and I arrived at Echo Park on Sunday, we were surrounded by Cuban-Americans eager to tell their stories.

You can see that all on PJTV, but I would like to underscore how politically aware the Cubans at this demonstration were. And how sick they were of Hollywood, especially the love affair many of my colleagues have with Fidel Castro and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. That love affair is reminiscent of the attraction those “Penthouse Bolsheviks” referred to in my opening graph had for Stalin, as in Steven Soderbergh’s endless encomium to Che and Oliver Stone’s semi-sexualized crush on Castro, not to mention on Hugo Chavez.

But those are only obvious examples. This twisted love for totalitarians permeates much of the Hollywood culture. A director friend of mine told me with amusement that while on one of those Eighties cultural exchanges to Cuba, his wife couldn’t resist planting a big kiss on Castro’s cheek when the dictator made a surprise appearance at a reception they were attending. Such stories are typical.

I doubt Soderbergh or Stone or certainly the director’s wife ever spoke with Huber Matos, perhaps the most moving speaker at the Echo Park demonstration. In his nineties now, Matos was one of Fidel’s original comrades in the fight against Batista. (...) Read it all >>>

Footage of the rally in LA against the Castro Bros' island prison >>>

Andy Garcia on IMDb
Garcia's film "The Lost City" (2005)

Related

AOL News: "US slave ship replica sails into Old Havana harbor"

Related articles by Zemanta

• Fidel Castro hails Obamacare (powerlineblog.com)
• The staying power of Andy Garcia (thestar.com)
• Photographer Alberto Korda's shots of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara to be sold (telegraph.co.uk)

A Sea Change in Hollywood?

The observation of a single swallow doesn't mean it's summer, as a local proverb goes. But hey, we're talking Hollywood here. Roger L. Simon has the good news.

Pajamas: "Did the 2010 Academy Awards Mark the End of “Liberal Hollywood”?"

The 2010 Academy Awards may not have marked the end of “liberal Hollywood” as we know it, but they certainly put a solid dent in it. With the pro-military “The Hurt Locker” winning over the enviro-pabulum of “Avatar” and Sandra Bullock garnering the Best Actress Oscar for a Christian movie, the times are a-changin’ at least somewhat, maybe even a lot.

But one thing is now certain. It is time for conservative, center-right and libertarian filmmakers to stop feeling sorry for themselves and go out and just do it. Their “victocrat” days are over. No more excuses. “The Hurt Locker” and “The Blind Side” have proven that it can be done. Get out of the closet, guys and gals. If you want to make a film with themes you believe in, quit whining about Industry prejudice and start writing that script and trying to get it made. That’s not an easy thing, no matter what your politics. (...) >>>

Check IMDb for the entire list of winners of the 82nd Annual Academy Awards and all the photos from the big night: the red carpet arrivals, moments from the show, the press room happenings, and the after-parties.

- "The Hurt Locker" on IMDb
- "The Blind Side" on IMDb

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Hurt Locker sweeps Oscars (go.theregister.com)
• 'The Hurt Locker' Guys -- Oscars 2010 Red Carpet (justjared.buzznet.com)
• EPIC WIN: Hurt Locker Kicks Avatar At Academy Awards (inquisitr.com)

This Week in Lost and Found

This post has a specific build-up. It gets progressively worse on the relativism scale (come to think of it, perhaps it's no coincidence this also happens to be the right chronologicalorder) -

New York Times: "Descartes Letter Found, Therefore It Is" 

It was the Great Train Robbery of French intellectual life: thousands of treasured documents that vanished from the Institut de France in the mid-1800s, stolen by an Italian mathematician. Among them were 72 letters by René Descartes, the founding genius of modern philosophy and analytic geometry.

Now one of those purloined letters has turned up at a small private college in eastern Pennsylvania, providing scholars with another keyhole into one of the Western world’s greatest minds. The letter, dated May 27, 1641, concerns the publication of “Meditations on First Philosophy,” a celebrated work whose use of reason and scientific methods helped to ignite a revolution in thought. (...) >>>


Indeed. Number two, art (of sorts) - Van Gogh's "Le Blute-Fin Mill" and an expert's vindication -

News.Scotsman.com: "Art collector Dirk Hannema proved right as Van Gogh work verified" 

An excentric art collector mocked for insisting one of his paintings was an unknown van Gogh has been vindicated 25 years after his death. It is the first to be authenticated since 1995. It was bought in 1975 by Dutchman Dirk Hannema.

Louis van Tilborgh, curator of research at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, said the painting was unusual for the 19th-century impressionist, depicting large human figures in a landscape. It shows Parisians climbing wooden steps to a windmill in the Montmartre district.

But the work was typical of Vincent van Gogh at that time in other ways, with its bright colours lathered roughly on the canvas. Mr van Tilborgh said it was painted in 1886 when the artist was living in Paris. The canvas bore the stamp of an art shop he was known to use, and used pigments common in other works.

The work "adds to his oeuvre", he said. "You can link it to certain works of van Gogh in that period, but not that many of them." Mr Hannema bought the painting from an antique and art dealer in Paris who did not believe it was of much value. But the Dutch collector did: he paid £2,000 for it and another unknown work but immediately insured the painting for 16 times what he paid. >>>


OMG! Fancy that! Another Hitler turning up. It's a ghost this time -

Telegraph.co.uk: "Adolf Hitler nude sketch for sale" 

The two previously unseen pictures turned up in Europe and are expected to raise £20,000 between them. Hitler drew them in the early 1900s when he was based in Vienna and was practising various styles so that he might win a place at art college.

The picture of the elderly woman's face is similar to photographs of his mother and shows a lined and world-weary visage. It was drawn in 1908 - the year after she died from cancer. The closed eyes might signify her demise.

The contrasting nude drawn a year earlier is a young, pert and attractive figure with breasts obscured by an arm and a blank face.(...) >>>

Related:
- Hitler Historical Museum- The Nazi Appreciation Movement (Politeia dossier)

Of a Homely Painter, Nazi Loot and a State Without Honor

Theft comes natural to the statist. First the Nazis, then the Third Way Eurosocialists sucking into their collective whatever they take to be their own.

DutchNews: "Cash call to unite divided Jan Steen painting"

The Hague city council is to begin raising money to buy half a Jan Steen painting owned by an American heiress, Trouw reports on Tuesday.

The Wedding Night of Tobias and Sarah was cut into two at some point in the 19th century and each half went its separate way. One half is currently owned by the council, the other by the daughter-in-law of Jewish collector Jacques Goudstikker.

Goudstikker's collection was confiscated by the Nazis during World War II and later ended up in the Dutch national art collection. The other half had been left to the Hague in its owner's will.

In 1996, the two halves were reunited and repaired and put on show at the Bredius Museum in the Hague. But in 2006, Goudstikker's heiress won the right to claim back 202 works of art from the Dutch state, including half the Jan Steen painting.

The city council had been planning to sell her its half, but a court last week rejected the plan because the painting had been willed to the city. Now the council wants to raise €1.8m to buy out the heiress. However, as Trouw points out, it is not known if she actually wants to sell. >>>

Greek Grace for Weddings and What Not! (II)

Continued from Part I



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