"At turns tasteless and nauseatingly patriotic, but also somewhat entertaining. I have to admit, I wasn’t having a bad time watching the movie until the last act, which is so grossly blatant in its preachy message and saddled with an overwrought closing voiceover, (“Put your feelings in a box. Lock them away.”), that it left a truly bad taste in my mouth...Must say, this is not the same movie I saw. Now, granted, being a military mom, I'm going to take certain aspects of it differently -- harder -- than the keyboard-jockey in his paper-strewn lair, but at least I won't come out disgruntled because the directors didn't make the film I thought they should make. It's simply comic to read critical complaints about the fact that the character of the SEAL team was emphasized at the expense of the individuals, coupled with some nasty barb about the film's failure to be sufficiently "authentic" -- because, of course, who knows better than a film critic what the authentic character of a highly trained military squad involved in chaotic, split-second life-or-death situations, during which they must maintain focus and pursue their objective, should look like?
Maybe it’s cynical, but I feel like this is [I'm not making this up. -- ed.] a really sugar coated view of what really goes on...Act of Valor was a surprise hit, topping the box office it’s [sic] first weekend and making nearly twice it’s [sic] budget back in three days, grossing $25 million. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the movie did great guns in middle America, where it earned $18 million, but on either coast Act of Valor only made a combined $7 million... I can’t say I’m shocked, because this movie is tailor made for the whole middle of America."
In my family circular, I indulged in some less than charitable remarks, with a soupçon of hate speech, about politicians and journalists. I will refrain here. But I can't muffle myself when it comes to what may be the ultimate finger in the eye to Act of Valor delivered, as only a Canadian can, by Rick Groen at the Toronto Globe and Mail....Unfortunately, in the name of drama, they’re shipped out to the usual bogus plot – in this case, something about saving America from the clutches of suicidal terrorists doubly wrapped in their beliefs and their bombs. [emphasis mine -- ed.]
But say this for the real Seals. As performers, they are to the action genre what the male stars are to porn flicks – laughably wooden in the dialogue department, yet pretty impressive wielding their weapon of choice.
...As played by Alex Veadov, a professional thespian, the charismatic Christos [sic] steals every scene he’s in, especially the one set on his luxury yacht adorned with a full crew of female admirers in uniformly skimpy bikinis. [Sorry -- no objective viewer can watch the scene between Christo and real SEAL interrogator 'Senior Chief Miller' and say that Veadov stole it. -- ed.]Suddenly, that recruitment poster takes an inadvertent but enticing turn into shallower waters: Join the Christos [sic] Navy, be all that you can be.
...it’s easy to make out the moment when the code of honour meets an act of valour, prompting a brave lad to take one for the team, falling on a grenade in order to save his comrades.
All hail that flag-waving moment, when the deal is really Sealed: How sweet and fitting it is to die in defence of a movie cliché.
Wow! -- Who knew (?) that in 2004 when Cpl. Jason Lee Dunham, the Medal of Honor recipient whose name now graces a new Navy destroyer, fell on a grenade to save his fellow Marines at a Karabilah checkpoint, he was giving his life for a "cliché" of the most significant kind: the kind you see in a movie, our ultimate yardstick for measuring the world. If you're a journalist hack.
Finally, some otherwise reliably conservative bloggers at Atlas Shrugs and Ricochet see anti-Semitism as not only the core of the villain "Christo" [you can't make this up], but as the core of the entire film. Oh please. I'm done here.
It's not an ordinary film to be measured by ordinary standards. But it's a fine piece of work. See it, unless you can't take films that end with the folding of a flag at Arlington.
days shy of his 89th birthday, and just a month after his last visit to Chambers Cove, Newfoundland, where he was rescued from freezing, oil-clogged waters in 1942, Lanier Phillips, the lone remaining survivor of the Truxtun/Pollux sea disaster passed on to his final reward. 
Between the two ships, 389 men went into the icy water clogged with a foot-deep coating of oil.
Some who made it to shore expired at the bottom of sheer cliffs before they could be rescued. But, in what seems like a miracle but is in fact just a testimony to the essential goodness of the human person, 186 survived to tell the tale. They did so thanks to the inexpressible courage and perseverance of the few sailors who clawed their way to the top of the cliffs, and of the townspeople of Lawn and St. Lawrence who, without hesitation, mobilized every able-bodied boy and man to haul the desperate crews up the cliffs in the freezing dark, and every available woman in the towns to wash, warm, feed, and nurse the survivors back to life. (Described in a rescuer's letter regarding the Pollux break-up near Lawn.)
an honorary degree by Memorial University of Newfoundland. 
Today, while the glitterati self-medicate on their benevolent wonderfulness at the Women in the World confab, Afghan women contemplate their next move in the face of the Karzai government's acceptance of a throwback declaration from the council of leading Muslim clerics that women are a secondary species whose future lies in Sharia servitude.
us.' That looks vaguely like bad Latin to me [I await correction] but what better title for an article on the overreaching arrogance of the sitting President than a line that contains the words 'Prius' and 'dementat'. ...he has struck what was surely intended to be a lethal blow against the oldest organization on earth -- an organization with something on the order of a billion members, with a cadre of hundreds of thousands of highly trained and dedicated personnel, and a history of overcoming political threats that make Obama look like a kindergartner.Ahem.
...a man of vast though superficial sophistication and little insight who has punched all the tickets available to him in his epoch and culture and truly believes there is nothing else. And now this man, afraid of revealing his own college transcripts, thinks he can take on the Church of Peter, founded a millennium before the appearance of any nation now existing on this earth...
History has its own rules that are not our rules. One of them appears to state that a man who overreaches himself will fall in proportion to the extent that he has overreached. Obama has overreached himself as far as any political figure in the American record, and his fall will be proportionate. He cannot avoid this or mitigate it. His action against the Church is an example of that small class of acts that cannot be uncommitted.
The B-16 bomber, powered by Conclave!
J-P II -- Santo Subito!
I'll see your freakin' UN, and raise you a World Youth Day, Madrid 2011
Sisters of Life
MOP's, Jamaica
Friars of Renewal, The Bronx
Dominicans of St. Cecilia
Missionaries of Charity
Version 1: All Pompeii ruins à la mall parking lot, with Stonehenge center
Version 2: Fewer purposeless columns, more 'minimum security prison exercise yard' appeal, Stonehenge knocked over
, the private-equity arm of the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan', says the Wall Street Journal. That's right folks! The Ontario [that's CANADA] public school teachers' union -- those dog-eat-dog capitalists who own pieces of international airports around the the world, and who just sold their majority share in the Toronto Maple Leafs, because they do NOT like LOSERS.
