Tag: news

Monty Python Meets the Bishop

Forty years ago today, Life of Brian made its British debut. The Monty Python satire, in which a man born next door to Jesus is mistaken for the Messiah, was already playing in America, where the movie had earned such notices as “a disgraceful assault on religious sensitivity” and “Never have we come across such a foul, disgusting, blasphemous film before.” Now it was coming to the Pythons’ home country, where several towns promptly banned any screenings of the picture.

Needless to say, not everyone who disliked the film tried to suppress it. Much of the anti-Brian backlash took the form of criticism, not censorship. And that criticism was never more entertaining than it was the night after the film’s premiere, when two members of the Python troupe—John Cleese and Michael Palin—faced off against two of their critics on the TV show Friday Night…Saturday Morning.

The episode was hosted by Tim Rice—yes, the guy who wrote Jesus Christ Superstar—and for the first quarter of an hour it was an amiable affair. The only people onscreen were Cleese, Palin, and Rice, and they had a fairly normal late-night-talk-show conversation, with jokes and stories and so on. Then the other two guests came onstage. One was the humorist Malcolm Muggeridge, who had converted to Christianity a decade before and was not amused by what he called the Pythons’ “graffiti version” of the Gospel. The other was Mervyn Stockwood, the bishop of Southwark, who set the tone for the hour when he compared the Python picture to “a farce about Auschwitz.”

This section of the program started out rather drearily: Rice asked the bishop what he thought of the movie, and Stockwood replied with a five-minute filibuster of an answer that covered everything from Mother Teresa to Nicolae Ceaușescu. But then the four men started going back and forth, and you got great exchanges like the moment, at the 37-minute mark, when Cleese started reminiscing not-so-wistfully about his days at Clifton College, a preparatory school:

CLEESE: I was given eight or 10 years—10 years—of a form of Christianity which I grew to despise and dislike. Largely, it insulted my intelligence. The sermons that were given, at the age of 11 and 12, I felt insulted my intelligence. When I got into writing this film, we all had exactly the same reaction. We started to discover a lot of stuff about Christianity and I started to get angry, because I started to think, “Why was I given this rubbish, this 10th-rate series of platitudes, when there were interesting things to have discussed? There were factual things.” Nobody ever told me they don’t know what language the Gospels were written in, that they don’t even know who wrote them, and they’re not sure what cities they were written in….

STOCKWOOD: John, it’s bad luck for you, but you see, I used to go to Clifton College to preach very often when you were there.

At times the guests seemed to be talking past each other: Cleese and Palin kept explaining that their film’s protagonist is not Jesus, and Stockwood and Muggeridge kept insisting that he is. But it’s an engaging, sometimes electrifying piece of television—and how often do you get to see John Cleese invoking Karl Popper? Watch the full hour here:

At one point, Muggeridge declared of the film: “I don’t think in the eyes of posterity it will have a very distinguished place.” I guess posterity is a relative thing; the picture’s reputation seems intact today, but we can check in after another 40 years and see how it’s faring then.

Postscript: Not long after the debate aired, the sketch-comedy show Not the Nine O’Clock News spoofed it, with Rowan Atkinson playing a character who was simultaneously a send-up of the Bishop and the Pythons. Watch the original interview before you watch the take-off—otherwise you’ll miss half the jokes:

(For past installments of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)

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Monty Python Meets the Bishop

Forty years ago today, Life of Brian made its British debut. The Monty Python satire, in which a man born next door to Jesus is mistaken for the Messiah, was already playing in America, where the movie had earned such notices as “a disgraceful assault on religious sensitivity” and “Never have we come across such a foul, disgusting, blasphemous film before.” Now it was coming to the Pythons’ home country, where several towns promptly banned any screenings of the picture.

Needless to say, not everyone who disliked the film tried to suppress it. Much of the anti-Brian backlash took the form of criticism, not censorship. And that criticism was never more entertaining than it was the night after the film’s premiere, when two members of the Python troupe—John Cleese and Michael Palin—faced off against two of their critics on the TV show Friday Night…Saturday Morning.

The episode was hosted by Tim Rice—yes, the guy who wrote Jesus Christ Superstar—and for the first quarter of an hour it was an amiable affair. The only people onscreen were Cleese, Palin, and Rice, and they had a fairly normal late-night-talk-show conversation, with jokes and stories and so on. Then the other two guests came onstage. One was the humorist Malcolm Muggeridge, who had converted to Christianity a decade before and was not amused by what he called the Pythons’ “graffiti version” of the Gospel. The other was Mervyn Stockwood, the bishop of Southwark, who set the tone for the hour when he compared the Python picture to “a farce about Auschwitz.”

This section of the program started out rather drearily: Rice asked the bishop what he thought of the movie, and Stockwood replied with a five-minute filibuster of an answer that covered everything from Mother Teresa to Nicolae Ceaușescu. But then the four men started going back and forth, and you got great exchanges like the moment, at the 37-minute mark, when Cleese started reminiscing not-so-wistfully about his days at Clifton College, a preparatory school:

CLEESE: I was given eight or 10 years—10 years—of a form of Christianity which I grew to despise and dislike. Largely, it insulted my intelligence. The sermons that were given, at the age of 11 and 12, I felt insulted my intelligence. When I got into writing this film, we all had exactly the same reaction. We started to discover a lot of stuff about Christianity and I started to get angry, because I started to think, “Why was I given this rubbish, this 10th-rate series of platitudes, when there were interesting things to have discussed? There were factual things.” Nobody ever told me they don’t know what language the Gospels were written in, that they don’t even know who wrote them, and they’re not sure what cities they were written in….

STOCKWOOD: John, it’s bad luck for you, but you see, I used to go to Clifton College to preach very often when you were there.

At times the guests seemed to be talking past each other: Cleese and Palin kept explaining that their film’s protagonist is not Jesus, and Stockwood and Muggeridge kept insisting that he is. But it’s an engaging, sometimes electrifying piece of television—and how often do you get to see John Cleese invoking Karl Popper? Watch the full hour here:

At one point, Muggeridge declared of the film: “I don’t think in the eyes of posterity it will have a very distinguished place.” I guess posterity is a relative thing; the picture’s reputation seems intact today, but we can check in after another 40 years and see how it’s faring then.

Postscript: Not long after the debate aired, the sketch-comedy show Not the Nine O’Clock News spoofed it, with Rowan Atkinson playing a character who was simultaneously a send-up of the Bishop and the Pythons. Watch the original interview before you watch the take-off—otherwise you’ll miss half the jokes:

(For past installments of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)

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via IFTTT

Upcoming “Introduction to Constitutional Law” Book Talks and Signings

On 11/13/19 at noon, Randy Barnett and I will be giving a book talk on “100 Supreme Court Cases” at the Heritage Foundation. This event is open to the public. You can RSVP here.

And on 11/16/19 at 10:30 a.m., Randy and I will be signing books at the Federalist Society Lawyers Convention.

The book is, alas, once again sold out on Amazon. (Demand has far exceeded supply, and we are already onto our second printing). In the interim, you can purchase the ebook, or the subscription to video library. We will have copies for sale at both events. We hope to see you there.

Recently, Mark Levin interviewed Randy about the book. You can listen here.

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Review: One Child Nation

Anyone drawn to the now-resurgent notion that collectivism is kind of cool would benefit from a viewing of One Child Nation, a documentary that demonstrates what can happen when state bureaucrats are allowed to fundamentally re-order their country’s most intimate cultural customs. The film’s subject is China’s disastrous one-child policy, which was imposed upon the populace from 1979 to 2015. During that time, no family was allowed to have more than one child; occasional exceptions were allowed, mainly in rural areas, but they had to be granted by Communist Party officials down to the village level. Families that made the mistake of quietly spawning a second child were ratted out to authorities by neighborhood snoops, who were encouraged by the state. Unlicensed babies were seized and placed in state orphanages. Forced abortion and sterilization were key tools in the struggle to contain China’s exploding population, which had topped a billion people.

The film was directed by Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang, two China-born filmmakers now residing in the West. The picture seems artless—an assemblage of period file footage and talking heads, basically—but its cumulative impact is powerful. By the end I felt that my heart was ready to burst from my chest and leap to its death down on the floor.

The people we see in this film are discussing terrible things they did in the past. An old midwife, who says she carried out between 50,000 and 60,000 abortions and sterilizations over the course of her career (a sterilization took about 10 minutes, she says), recalls inducing the births of infants and then killing them. (“I had no choice,” she says. “We didn’t make decisions, we only executed orders.”) Another woman recalls the birth of the second child for which she had secured permission, and her own mother coming into the room with a bamboo basket and saying, “If it’s another girl, we’ll put her in the basket and leave her in the street.” Yet another woman remembers accompanying her brother to leave his unwanted baby girl on a meat counter in a country market. The child remained there for two days and two nights, unwanted by anyone. “Her face was full of mosquito bites,” says the woman, who apparently watched. “She eventually died.”

The one-child policy was hard on some men, too. An ex-village chief recalls having to demolish the homes of people who had illegally had a second child. Naturally they resented this, and especially the man responsible for it. “It was really tough being an official back then,” he says. He also remembers being called out with a group of other men to subject a rebellious woman to forced sterilization. “I couldn’t take part in that,” the former chief says. “I just stood and watched.”

The growing excess of female children became the basis for a grim trade. One man remembers biking around the countryside in the old days and coming upon four or five abandoned babies on a single ride. (“I just watched them die,” he says.) Perceiving the possibility of profit, he became a trafficker in live infants, selling them to the state orphanages for the equivalent of $200 each. After the government began allowing the adoption of Chinese children by foreigners in 1992, the trafficking in infants reached a mini-industrial scale. One American, a man named Brian Stuy, of Lehi, Utah, who has adopted three Chinese girls with his wife, says the price of purchasing one of these babies can run from $10,000 to $25,000—a very nice profit margin for the state.

Stuy and his Chinese wife, Long Lan, run a company called Research China, which uses an international DNA database to connect Chinese “orphans” adopted by Americans to their Chinese birth parents back in the old country. In the film’s most moving passage, we learn the story of two twin girls, now 16, who were separated when the Chinese government took one of them and sold her to an American couple. Because of Western press interest, the twin left behind on her family’s farm has learned she has a sister overseas, and she wonders about her.

“She probably has milk and bread for breakfast,” this girl says. “Her life must be very good there. I hope one day she will come back.” As her eyes begin to well up, the girl says, “We’d dress the same, have the same hairstyle, go to school together. It would be so great to do everything together.” If it need be said, this is a truly heartbreaking moment. What are the chances these two girls might one day be reunited? (We learn in the film that the Stateside twin has declined to be put back in touch with her birth parents, but that she and her sister are now in touch through social media.)

It’s hard to imagine—no, it’s impossible to imagine—anyone sitting through this film and emerging from it harboring anything but loathing for the inhuman Chinese communist social system it depicts. But as the totalitarian temptation beckons once again in this fraught time, I wonder if Thomas L. Friedman will see it, and what he might say. You may recall that Friedman, the inimitable New York Times columnist, wrote a piece back in 2009—when the one-child policy was still in full effect—suggesting that America might have a few lessons to learn from China.

“There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy,” Friedman wrote, “and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today. One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.”

Sounds like a plan, I’m afraid.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/34NCqwp
via IFTTT

Upcoming “Introduction to Constitutional Law” Book Talks and Signings

On 11/13/19 at noon, Randy Barnett and I will be giving a book talk on “100 Supreme Court Cases” at the Heritage Foundation. This event is open to the public. You can RSVP here.

And on 11/16/19 at 10:30 a.m., Randy and I will be signing books at the Federalist Society Lawyers Convention.

The book is, alas, once again sold out on Amazon. (Demand has far exceeded supply, and we are already onto our second printing). In the interim, you can purchase the ebook, or the subscription to video library. We will have copies for sale at both events. We hope to see you there.

Recently, Mark Levin interviewed Randy about the book. You can listen here.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2oXU9li
via IFTTT

Review: One Child Nation

Anyone drawn to the now-resurgent notion that collectivism is kind of cool would benefit from a viewing of One Child Nation, a documentary that demonstrates what can happen when state bureaucrats are allowed to fundamentally re-order their country’s most intimate cultural customs. The film’s subject is China’s disastrous one-child policy, which was imposed upon the populace from 1979 to 2015. During that time, no family was allowed to have more than one child; occasional exceptions were allowed, mainly in rural areas, but they had to be granted by Communist Party officials down to the village level. Families that made the mistake of quietly spawning a second child were ratted out to authorities by neighborhood snoops, who were encouraged by the state. Unlicensed babies were seized and placed in state orphanages. Forced abortion and sterilization were key tools in the struggle to contain China’s exploding population, which had topped a billion people.

The film was directed by Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang, two China-born filmmakers now residing in the West. The picture seems artless—an assemblage of period file footage and talking heads, basically—but its cumulative impact is powerful. By the end I felt that my heart was ready to burst from my chest and leap to its death down on the floor.

The people we see in this film are discussing terrible things they did in the past. An old midwife, who says she carried out between 50,000 and 60,000 abortions and sterilizations over the course of her career (a sterilization took about 10 minutes, she says), recalls inducing the births of infants and then killing them. (“I had no choice,” she says. “We didn’t make decisions, we only executed orders.”) Another woman recalls the birth of the second child for which she had secured permission, and her own mother coming into the room with a bamboo basket and saying, “If it’s another girl, we’ll put her in the basket and leave her in the street.” Yet another woman remembers accompanying her brother to leave his unwanted baby girl on a meat counter in a country market. The child remained there for two days and two nights, unwanted by anyone. “Her face was full of mosquito bites,” says the woman, who apparently watched. “She eventually died.”

The one-child policy was hard on some men, too. An ex-village chief recalls having to demolish the homes of people who had illegally had a second child. Naturally they resented this, and especially the man responsible for it. “It was really tough being an official back then,” he says. He also remembers being called out with a group of other men to subject a rebellious woman to forced sterilization. “I couldn’t take part in that,” the former chief says. “I just stood and watched.”

The growing excess of female children became the basis for a grim trade. One man remembers biking around the countryside in the old days and coming upon four or five abandoned babies on a single ride. (“I just watched them die,” he says.) Perceiving the possibility of profit, he became a trafficker in live infants, selling them to the state orphanages for the equivalent of $200 each. After the government began allowing the adoption of Chinese children by foreigners in 1992, the trafficking in infants reached a mini-industrial scale. One American, a man named Brian Stuy, of Lehi, Utah, who has adopted three Chinese girls with his wife, says the price of purchasing one of these babies can run from $10,000 to $25,000—a very nice profit margin for the state.

Stuy and his Chinese wife, Long Lan, run a company called Research China, which uses an international DNA database to connect Chinese “orphans” adopted by Americans to their Chinese birth parents back in the old country. In the film’s most moving passage, we learn the story of two twin girls, now 16, who were separated when the Chinese government took one of them and sold her to an American couple. Because of Western press interest, the twin left behind on her family’s farm has learned she has a sister overseas, and she wonders about her.

“She probably has milk and bread for breakfast,” this girl says. “Her life must be very good there. I hope one day she will come back.” As her eyes begin to well up, the girl says, “We’d dress the same, have the same hairstyle, go to school together. It would be so great to do everything together.” If it need be said, this is a truly heartbreaking moment. What are the chances these two girls might one day be reunited? (We learn in the film that the Stateside twin has declined to be put back in touch with her birth parents, but that she and her sister are now in touch through social media.)

It’s hard to imagine—no, it’s impossible to imagine—anyone sitting through this film and emerging from it harboring anything but loathing for the inhuman Chinese communist social system it depicts. But as the totalitarian temptation beckons once again in this fraught time, I wonder if Thomas L. Friedman will see it, and what he might say. You may recall that Friedman, the inimitable New York Times columnist, wrote a piece back in 2009—when the one-child policy was still in full effect—suggesting that America might have a few lessons to learn from China.

“There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy,” Friedman wrote, “and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today. One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.”

Sounds like a plan, I’m afraid.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/34NCqwp
via IFTTT

Iran Reportedly Shoots Down “Foreign Drone” Over Southern Port City Of Mahshahr

Iran Reportedly Shoots Down “Foreign Drone” Over Southern Port City Of Mahshahr

Moments ago, local Iranian news outlets confirmed the Armed Forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran have shot down a drone from a “foreign country.” 

  • IRANIAN OFFICIAL CONFIRMS DOWNING OF A DRONE BY ARMY, SAYS IT BELONGS TO A FOREIGN COUNTRY – YOUNG JOURNALISTS CLUB

The unidentified drone was downed near the port of Bandar-e-Mahshahr on the Gulf coast, ISNA and Tasnim, reported.

Tasnim reported that a domestically manufactured Mersad surface-to-air missile was defending Iranian airspace at the time of the incident. 

 

 

 


Tyler Durden

Fri, 11/08/2019 – 06:44

Tags
War Conflict
Politics

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2WVhAYW Tyler Durden

Families Of Cartel-Assault Victims Insist Deadly Attack “Was No Accident”

Families Of Cartel-Assault Victims Insist Deadly Attack “Was No Accident”

Contrary to our expectations, the slaying of nine members of a Mormon community living in Northern Mexico at the hands of Mexican cartel gunmen seems to have already dropped out of the news cycle, perhaps because it’s already become clear that neither the US nor Mexico is planning to hold the attackers accountable.

Senior Mexican security officials who are obviously worried about more bad press insist that the attack was a case of mistaken identity. But keep in mind, these are the same people who initially told the world that federal police just happened to stumble upon the son of El Chapo in Culiacan (denying that his arrest had been the target of an organized operation).

Security Minister Alfonso Durazo, whose name has been in the press frequently in the aftermath of the attack, said earlier this week that the gunmen may have attacked the women because they suspected they were members of a rival gang during a period of intense turf wars.

In this incident, however, there could be serious consequences to believing the wrong thing. There are many other American-Mexican Mormons living in the area, part of a community that has been growing in the area since the 1940s. And apparently almost none of them believe the government’s theory that the attack was an accident.

“It was no accident. It was deliberate,” said Loretta Miller, 53, the mother-in-law of the victim Rhonita Miller and grandmother of her four dead children. “We just don’t know why our family was targeted.”

The victims, who were buried on Thursday, included three women and six children, some newborn babies. They were traveling in a caravan of three vans when suspected cartel gunmen rained down a hail of gunfire.

Eight other children survived the attacks, many with serious gunshot wounds.

100s of community members attended the service for one of the murdered mothers and her two young sons on Thursday, forming a long line at the funeral parlor in the mountains of Mexico’s Sonora state. The eulogies for Dawna Ray Langford caused many the audience to tear up.

Many hugged each other tightly. Sons, a daughter, her parents and other relatives, many in tears, eulogized Ms. Langford, who had 13 children and two grandchildren. “She never once made a selfish decision,” said Crystal Langford, her daughter, in tears. “It was always for her kids and her family.”

“She was a fighter,” said Karen Woolley, her mother, as she remembered the day she gave birth to Ms. Langford.

Services for another six victims – four children and two mothers – were being held here, but their remains will be taken back for burial at Colonia LeBarón, a community formed decades ago by a dissident faction of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Services for the other six victims will be held during the coming days. Some of the speakers, particularly relatives of the deceased, angrily called on all Mexicans to resist the cartels.

Members of the community lived peacefully alongside the cartel for years, passing through cartel checkpoints has become a fact of life for many. But some of the children who survived the massacre described how Christina Marie Langford, one of the three mothers killed, jumped out of the car with her hands up, but was shot down anyway.

Whatever happened that day, many of the residents of La Mora and Colonia LaBaron, the villages where the community lives, are contemplating moving back to the US.


Tyler Durden

Fri, 11/08/2019 – 06:21

Tags
Law Crime

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2PVzl9f Tyler Durden