Rick McGinnis on the pedophilia culture of Hollywood:

More than any other business, Hollywood is a place where talent, youth and beauty are exploited, with a premium paid for all three. It’s also an industry that’s learned to shield itself from criticism by celebrating its venal and amoral customs with skilful self-parody, so that proud mea culpas from selfish sociopaths have somehow shifted the focus from actual predators and criminals thriving in the background.

Parents’ groups have been demanding more family-friendly fare from Hollywood for years, but a glance at the credits of the three men at the centre of the recent scandals suggests that what goes on the screen is almost irrelevant, and that child abuse actually thrives where children have roles.

Resistant, as ever, to what would be by necessity a profound change, Hollywood may have actually gone past the point of redemption.

Yep:

In a famous report to President Johnson, Moynihan used the phrase “tangle of pathology” to describe the black family, arguing that some of its problems stemmed from high rates of out-of-wedlock birth, not just from racism. That made Moynihan a pariah; other Harvard professors wouldn’t let their kids play with his.

As Haidt tells the story, Moynihan committed “the cardinal sin”: “blaming the victim, where the victim is one of your sacralized victim groups.”

(Previously)

Thanks to the loyal 5FF reader who sent this in:

The New Orleans man whose post-Hurricane Katrina heroics and tribulations were chronicled by best-selling author Dave Eggers in the book “Zeitoun” was convicted last year of battering his wife, who told police that she had received several prior beatings, but never called cops on her spouse.

Published in mid-2009, the nonfiction book describes how Zeitoun, a Muslim who was born in Syria, rode out Katrina after sending his family to Baton Rouge (where Kathryn grew up). After the levees broke, he used a borrowed canoe to rescue stranded neighbors and abandoned pets, while also distributing supplies and checking on tenants in buildings he owned.

The book, which features on its cover a drawing of Zeitoun paddling a canoe, also details how he was detained in a makeshift jail when cops and National Guard members suspected that he and several companions might be terrorists.

Eggers, who has described the Zeitouns as a “beautiful family,” worked closely with the couple on the book, which has won critical acclaim and many awards, including a 2010 American Book Award and a 2010 “Distinguished Honor” from the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights.

The film director Jonathan Demme is also working on a screenplay adaptation of “Zeitoun.”  

(KEEP READING...)

Thanks for being good for something, Herman!

Inside comedy baseball:

Reason:

As transfer payments to elderly Americans — irrespective of wealth or need — increase in absolute and relative terms, de Rugy argues that we should scrap entitlements and replace them instead with a “social safety net” that helps poor Americans of whatever age. “There’s absolutely no reason to continue paying for lots of people who have accumulated wealth their entire lives,” de Rugy tells Reason’s Nick Gillespie.

HiLowBrow:

The sacrifice Lydon makes for his art is not his life or self (he’s the healthiest of egos, by which I mean an honest one), but his illusions and yours. He clears away the worship that can cloud minds on either side of the stage; his life may be a work of art but none of it is an act.

Will this guy be one of them?

Be sure to check out his new book…

The Khadrs were once upon a time considered among the most reviled, most dangerous people ever to make this country their home.

Thanks to years of hard cheerleading on our campuses, in our political movements, and in our newsrooms for the family’s most favoured son, Canada will soon become Omar Khadr’s country.

The rest of us will just be forced to live in it..

Lynn Crosbie:

Like Jameson, she was raped before working in the skin trade – and Lords was raped at the age of 10. “Were you overdeveloped at 10?” Larry King asked her, astonishingly, in 2003.

She describes this crime as someone having taken her “power away,” and she says she took this power back through what Waters calls “sexual terrorism” – a wild, risky girl, she dramatized the rape by becoming a sexual powerhouse.

Still, as Lords recently revealed, “as free and loose as I might have been with my body, and as destructive as I might have been, my soul was where the pain was.”

Here is a more profound paradox: If porn stars are both reviled and loved, how does their own self-image operate in this continuum?

Scaramouche on the Coren/Kay interview:

Alas, they fail to get to the crux of the matter: that we, the taxpayers, have wasted a colossal amount of our cash on an edifice that validates “human rights,” a concept that used to mean something, but that in our time has become stripped of meaning…