James Lileks offers his two cents on the upcoming Captain America movie and how Hollywood will, ahem, “update” the character:

Then you hear the movie is set during World War II, and you relax. That was the Good War, after all. It has the Tom Hanks seal of approval (the European part, anyway). Sure, Eva Braun will probably look like Sarah Palin, and Hitler will probably tell the rest of Europe they are either with him or with the Bolsheviks, but it’ll be okay. We have permission to be patriotic about World War II.

Sorry. “We’re sort of putting a slightly different spin on Steve Rogers,” said Joe Johnston, whose past directing credits include Jurassic Park III and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. “He’s a guy that wants to serve his country but he’s not a flag-waver. We’re re-interpretating, sort of, what the comic-book version of Steve Rogers was.” Johnston further explained: “He wants to serve his country, but he’s not this sort of jingoistic American flag-waver.”

What a relief! They waved flags at the Nuremberg rallies, you know. The fact that he mentions the absence of waving flags twice suggests he’s nervous about the project’s inherent problem for Hollywood: How do you make a movie about Captain-frackin’-America without affecting international box-office?

Read the rest here.

I cannot sum this one up any better than the headline: Marine absorbs IED blast, walks away.

Marines who witnessed the event from inside the compound caught glimpses of [Cpl. Matt] Garst’s feet flailing through the air just above the other side of the building’s eight-foot walls. The explosion knocked him at least fifteen feet away where he landed on his limp head and shoulders before immediately standing back up.

Not quite sure of what had just happened, Garst turned back toward the blast, now nothing but a column of dirt and smoke rising toward the sun.

“My first thought was, ‘Oh s—, I just hit an IED,’” he said. “Then I thought, ‘Well I’m standing. That’s good.’”

Read the rest of the story here. It includes Garst’s response to the incident: “It pissed me off.”

The song ‘We’re Not Going to Take It’ was part of the ‘filthy 15,’ for violence — they said it was a violent song. They wanted to rate everything. I went down to Washington with Frank Zappa and John Denver to testify before Congress, and I was the scourge of society. I was the poster boy for everything wrong with society. Let’s cut to 25 years later. I’m still married — none of my kids have been busted for drug possession. Can Al and Tipper Gore say the same thing? I don’t think so.

– Twisted Sister singer Dee Snider, looking back at the music labeling controversy lead by the Gores in the 1980s.

So add “being shit on” to “unresponsive British festival crowds” on the list of “Things the Kings Of Leon do not enjoy,” and “coping with shitting pigeons” to the list of “Reasons why Cyndi Lauper is more rock ‘n’ roll than Kings Of Leon.”

– Sean O’Neal, Onion AV Club.

Behold the inevitable result of going vegetarian. You start by swearing off red meat and pretty soon you are burning down innocent businesses.

Jeremy’s latest is a review of Pete Hitchens’ The Rage Against God. You could read the review as a response to a certain famous atheist Peter knows quite well. Jeremy certainly does:

In [Christopher Hitchen's] telling, religion, not the love of money, is the root of all evil. In his best-selling book [God Is Not Great], Christopher argued that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was not really a religious figure and the Soviet Union was, in effect, a theocracy.

That’s one of a few arguments that Peter sets out to destroy. In Chapter 11, “Are Atheist States Not Actually Atheist?” Peter writes that “intelligent Christians must - if they are candid - accept that faith has often led to cruel violence and intolerant persecution. They may say, as I would, that this was because humans often misunderstood or misuse the teachings of the religions they follow. This is not because they are religious, but because Man is not great.”

And atheists, Peter suggests, “in return, ought equally to concede that Godless regimes and movements have given birth to terrible persecutions and massacres. They” - and for “they,” we may read “Christopher” - “do not do so, in my view, because in these cases the slaughter is not the result of a misunderstanding or excessive zeal. Utopia can only ever be approached across a sea of blood.”

For instance, one thing that Christopher has clung to stubbornly even as he has ditched most of his Marxist politics is his insistence that one great accomplishment of the Soviet Union was the creation of a secular Russia. But at what cost, Peter asks: The U.S.S.R. provoked conflict with and then brutally persecuted the Orthodox Church; it effectively forbade Christians from positions of power; it banned religious instruction for children. It even issued propaganda raging against Christmas trees.

Read the whole thing here.

UPDATE: Jeremy emails: “In honor of Christopher, I wrote this in a bar and did not hold back.”

Good to know, Good to know …

Harrison Ford turned 68 years old today. Hopefully now he’s old enough to know better and avoid George Lucas whenever he talks about continuing a certain film franchise.

It sure seems like Patterico has punched some serious holes in this Radley Balko post about an alleged injustice.

That’s how Borat might describe my latest article in Real Clear Politics, “Obama’s hard choices for other people.” Here’s a bit of it:

At the recent G20 summit, President Barack Obama announced that next year he would “start presenting some very difficult choices to the country,” and hoped that “these folks who are hollering about deficits and debt” would “step-up.” In any event, he was “calling their bluff.” The world would soon find out how much of the deficit talk is “real” and how much is “just politics.”

Obama may speak of tough choices but he has been remarkably unwilling to make them, or to force his close allies to do so. [more...]