More often than not when we have news out of Hollywood about life issues it is invariably a pro-abortion tale and in the case of scientific studies, it is usually some denizen of Tinseltown coming out forcefully for unethical fetal stem cell research. The destruction of life is de rigueur out there, unfortunately.

But not this time.

You might say that this celebrity has boldly gone where no Hollywooder has gone before. You also might wince at my horrible attempt at humor when you find out that we are here today to celebrate the efforts of Eugene W. Roddenberry Jr., the son of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of “Star Trek.”

You see, in October the son of the “Great Bird of the Galaxy” donated $5 million to stem cell research. But, unlike so many of the Hollywood persuasion, this gift is not earmarked for fetal stem cell research. It is instead going to a facility that specializes in adult stem cell research.

The generous donation from the Roddenberry Foundation was bestowed upon The Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, an independent research institute which is associated with the University of California, San Francisco.

As reported by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the Roddenberry gift will, “expand these existing areas of expertise among Gladstone scientists by creating the Roddenberry Center for Stem Cell Biology and Medicine – named after Gene Roddenberry, who created ”Star Trek.’”

One of the respected scientists at Gladstone is Shinya Yamanaka, M.D., Ph.D., who is pursuing research into reprogramming adult cells into embryonic stem cells.

Why is all this so notable? Because this is essentially a pro-life pursuit instead of one of those usual, liberal anti-life efforts. After all fetal stem cell research has proven ineffective in the many years it has been pursued — no advances in medicine have been credited to fetal stem cells in the last 20 years — but many of the far left are married to it regardless. Worse, fetal stem cell research is highly controversial as human embryos are necessarily destroyed in the effort. This raises ethical questions about human life being destroyed for the sake of science.

Some of you might remember the controversy that President George W. Bush wound up in when he allowed federal funds to be used for fetal stem cell research using stem cell lines created before August of 2001. In 2006 Bush successfully vetoed an effort to expand federal money for fetal stem cell research.

Unfortunately, sticking to his penchant for infanticide, in 2009 President Barack Obama reversed those federal limitations. It should be remembered that before he became a national figure, Obama was the only Illinois state Senator that favored the barbaric practice of partial birth abortions.

Sadly, Obama’s reversal of the Bush-era rule was one built on ideology and not real science. Even U.S. News reported that embryonic stem cell research is an obsolete field, and U.S. News is hardly a bastion of conservatism.

So, kudos to Eugene Roddenberry for putting his money where it will not only do some good but will do so ethically. Unlike the ideology drenched Obama administration, Mr. Roddenberry is interested in real science.

I think his father would be proud.

Via NBC:

The  festival, “9/11 Reclaiming the Truth, Reclaiming our Future,” is organized by the Northern California 9/11 Truth Alliance, a group that formed shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The lineup of films and speakers kicked off at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland this afternoon, and will continue on Sunday at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco after a march from Justin Herman Plaza to the theater.
   
Similar events are being held in Seattle and in Toronto, and a portion of those events will be broadcast live in the Bay Area as part of the film festival.

The slate of films includes “Loose Change 9/11: An American Coup,” “9/11: Explosive Evidence — Experts Speak Out,” and “We Were Also Killed on 9/11: First Responders.”

“We’ve had rallies every year,” said Northern California 9/11 Truth Alliance co-founder Carol Brouillet. She said the group organized its first film festival in 2004 and has had similar events every year since.

She said the main goal of the festival is to inform attendees about “the disparity between the official version and the actual events.” …

The rub below the fold:

However, she believes that the federal government was at the very least informed about the attacks and allowed them to happen as justification for a shift in foreign and domestic policy.

While that view has never gained traction in the mainstream, a recent BBC News poll found that 15 percent of those polled in the U.S. believe that there was a conspiracy behind 9/11 that involved the federal government.

Those last two paragraphs buried near the bottom the story spell it all out. This isn’t really about believing in some sick conspiracy, this is about spreading hatred for America through lies and propaganda.

I may go to Hell, but I’ll have better living quarters than any one of these bastards.

I speak of Berkeley, where a spring forum was held by the chamber of commerce to discuss a sit-lie ordinance – which would ban sitting or lying on sidewalks within commercial districts during work hours. 

It was based on a similar ordinance in San Francisco – but word got out, protests erupted, and everyone ran scared. 

See, the ordinance would have cleared the streets of dirtbags like me who clog sidewalks with aggressive panhandling. 

But now, because protests scared off it’s proponents, fearful students will now flock to safer places, rather than risk getting assaulted by meth-heads. 

And so here’s what happens when tolerance triumphs over safety. The end result is filth and lawlessness. 

And the rest of us flee. 

A survey of 1800 students found that half avoid downtown Berkeley because its dirty and dangerous. And women are especially fearful – perhaps because some creepy dudes want more than change. 

But shouldn’t it bug the left that the most progressive people on the planet are willing to sacrifice the safety of its city’s female students – all to save face at their poetry readings? 

Probably not. 

They’d rather put co-eds at risk, than their reputations as open-minded libs. 

So as another progressive Utopia is realized, let us all thank the summer of love – by romanticizing squalor and condemning order – it leaves you with a filthy town and no one to clean it.

Tonight:

Ann Coulter

Jesse Joyce

Matt McCall

After listening to these misty-eyed reveries, I usually press them with what, to anyone else, would be the obvious question: If it was all so great, why did they leave the Haight and the Castro and all of their associated communes and bong-fueled revolutions behind, and fall into a more conventional lifestyle elsewhere? Why not continue living in what was, according to them, the closest thing to paradise on earth imaginable?

The answer, boiled down, is usually some variant of “I realized the lifestyle was killing me — that if I didn’t get away I would soon be dead.” I’ve heard tales of bad drug trips, violence and paranoia, anarchism and terrorism, and any number of utterly disgusting and disease-ridden sexual perversions. Promising paradise and delivering nightmares is as good a definition of socialism as any (socialism, communism, liberalism, progressivism — call it what you will, it’s all the same poison, just delivered in different doses and by different means). Every few decades a new group of idealistic young fools attempt to stage a new revolt (“Yes, we can!”) in an attempt to overturn the wisdom of their forefathers and the immutable laws of reality, and each time they end up like Icarus, staging spectacular belly-flops into cesspools of unintended consequences.

Examine the cinema of the era, and you’ll see this whole thing play out again and again. Easy Rider, Billy Jack, Vanishing Point, The French Connection, Apocalypse Now!, and so many others glorified nihilism, hedonism, revolution, and hopelessness. Again and again we were treated to, on the one hand, liberal myths of heroes striving mightily to fight, escape, or ignore evil conservative society only to be mercilessly extinguished, and on the other stories of conservatives discovering the corruption and emptiness infecting their base values and ideals.

One of the things I am most grateful for in my life is that I came of age not in the late Sixties, when America was descending into this chaos, but in the early Eighties, when Ronald Reagan was dragging us out of it.

Reagan was a longtime FDR-Democrat turned staunch Republican — once, when reporter Sam Donaldson tried to embarrass Reagan at a press conference by asking him pointedly if he bore any of the blame for the country’s fiscal woes, Reagan shot back, “Yes, because for many years I was a Democrat.” He argued tirelessly for a return to can-do American optimism, family values, and conservative policies, bringing both domestic inflation and foreign totalitarians to heel.

Wherever he spoke, one could almost feel the deeply destructive hippie mindset of the Seventies fleeing like a vampire from sunlight. I find it poetically appropriate that would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley Jr. was obsessed with the movie Taxi Driver — it was as if the entire Seventies zeitgeist, encapsulated into one deranged man, was striking out in a last-gasp effort to stave off what was coming. When Reagan not only took the bullet but virtually laughed it off, that was the true end of the Flower Power era and its often insane grip on the popular culture.

At the same time Reagan was transforming us politically, guys like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were transforming our cinema. They were suburban kids who, unlike many of their filmmaking friends, had largely avoided the hippie lifestyle, and their early efforts at politicized “message” filmmaking (Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express, Lucas’ THX-1138) were flops. It was only when they embraced the needs and desires of America’s great middle class, in effect becoming the unwitting cinematic arm of the Reagan Revolution, that they experienced the stupendous success for which they are best known.

They did this not by being avant-garde or trying to impress liberal critics or professors, but by refreshing themselves at the wells of myths, old movies, and pulps (much of them politically incorrect), and then infusing their new versions of those tales with a sense of optimism largely absent from the hyper-politicized movies of the Seventies. Jaws (1975), Star Wars (1977) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), in addition to being monster hits, don’t feel as if they belong in the 1970s at all. Monsters, sci-fi, special effects, genuine everyman heroes, conventional happy endings — they instead are the harbingers of the mass flowering of such films (and books, and video games) throughout the 1980s, movies that inspired and entertained more than they depressed or preached, that recapitulated the alleged “Goody Two-Shoes” cinema of their youth rather than rebelled against it.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Reagan is destined to become something of a Lincoln figure in our nation’s history. He brought optimism and rejuvenation to an America wrecked for over a decade by liberalism (in both parties), and in so doing set the stage for one of the Golden Ages of cinema: the era of the populist, family-friendly, PG-rated blockbuster. It was a great time, for both the nation and its moviegoers.

Which leads me to explore what Mr. Newsom finds acceptable:

Exhibit A. Turning the world’s most beautiful city, San Francisco, into a sprawling toilet with a half billion dollar deficit. Being S.F.’s mayor should be a dream job. It’s like being King of Gumdrop Village on Rainbow Island. It’s packed with great food, tourists, amazing scenery and fun people. But Gavin has left the city oilier than his own pompadour. If one block doesn’t smell of excrement, it’s because it smells of feces. And vice versa. Gavin has taken a jewel of a city and pooped all over it. Which leads me to:

Exhibit B. Letting panhandlers rule. I’m from the Bay Area, and spent a lot of time wandering SF’s streets, either working, or drunk. Now, no way. The last time I was there, my 85 year old mom was surrounded by the most aggressive panhandlers I’ve ever seen – as we walked over others, apparently napping. Instead of worrying about the potential ramifications of enforcing a law in another state, Gav should address the heaps of humanity that litter his very own streets.

Exhibit C. Banging your pal’s wife. While getting divorced, Gavin starting sleeping with the wife of his close friend and campaign manager. Maybe there aren’t enough women in San Francisco, but you’re the Mayor. And you’ve got hair. Either you’re too lazy, or you lack character.

Probably both.

Bottom line, Gav: Before you crap all over Arizona, clean up the crap in your own yard.

And if you disagree with me, you’re a racist homophone.

Tonight we’ve got S.E. Cupp, comedian Jesse Joyce, and Mr. Oldspice himself, Isiah Mustapha!

Plus, other stuff!

Consisting of four skilled musicians plus one lyricist from England’s West Country (among them the now legendary guitarist Robert Fripp) King Crimson enjoyed a rapid ascent to fame and success. The band formed on January 13th 1969; were declared the ‘best band in the world’ by Jimi Hendrix in April; played with the Stones at Hyde Park in July; recorded their first album In the Court of the Crimson King in July and August; released it to great acclaim in October; then played their last gig together on December 14th in San Francisco, having imploded while on tour.

To celebrate the band’s 40th anniversary, ITCOKC has just been re-released in a deluxe, remastered edition. Playing it now, decades after its release, the record sounds ambitious, grandiose, with a majesty bordering on the utterly pompous- it could only have been made by very young men, absolutely confident of their abilities and vision. ITCOKC provides the listener with a gateway into a curious parallel universe where rock is not blues-based but rather European, avant-garde, jazzy, pastoral and apocalyptic. The most famous track is probably 21st Century Schizoid Man, a blistering assault on the listener for its time. My own favorite however is the eponymous final track, which is ominous and foreboding and yet quite possibly about nothing whatsoever- and who can object to such a bizarre clash of meaning and meaninglessness? Not me. ITCOKC is a message from a lost world, where things were cosmic, and the world of popular music was filled with uncharted possibilities. 

Audiophiles take note: the sound quality of the new edition (remastered from the original tapes) is excellent, and there is also a 5.1 stereo surround mix on DVD for those in possession of high quality sound systems. As is usual with re-releases there are various bits and bobs tabbed on as extras; however the best bonus is unquestionably the excision of 3 minutes of meandering improvisation from the track Moonchild. 

Having disintegrated at the end of 1969, King Crimson went through a dizzying series of personnel changes over the next five years. Thus the second album in this series of anniversary re-releases Red, has an almost entirely different line up from the band’s debut. Reduced to a trio of Fripp (the only constant in the group’s history), Bill Bruford and John Wetton the band had actually ceased to exist when Red was released in 1974 The buzz prior to the breakup was that Crimson were about to achieve Pink Floyd levels of success, albeit with infinitely superior levels of musicianship. Fripp didn’t much care: he had experienced a spiritual awakening and believed the world was ‘coming to an end’.   

Gone was all the florid stuff about purple pipers from ITCOKC; this King Crimson had a much darker, more brutal and yet still complex sound. Fripp’s guitar frequently had a harsh, grating quality; Wetton’s bass was incredibly heavy; Bruford’s drumming was jazzy and crisp. And yet in spite of this stripped down quality the record shows King Crimson still searching for new possibilities, exploring the space between jazz, improvisation and some alien form of the then embryonic heavy metal. The album’s finale, Starless is lyrical, melancholic, sinister, the sound of a man alone and adrift in the depths of space. It veers between mournfulness to terror and then back again. It is the sound of a last farewell, a slow descent into the abyss. It is also the rest of the record in microcosm, veering between aggressive assault and more delicate, exploratory passages. Red is one of the best albums of the 1970s. If you don’t own it, you should. 

Once again the re-release features bonus tracks plus a 5.1 stereo surround mix; it also includes ultra-rare video footage of the band in action on a French rock show, complete with period visual effects. 

King Crimson’s dissolution in 1974 was not final. Fripp returned with yet another configuration of the band in 1980 and since then King Crimson has materialized and dematerialized periodically, whenever- as Fripp puts it- there is music to be played that only King Crimson can play. A man of ferocious personal integrity, Fripp pursues his own path. Rumors swirl that he may reactivate King Crimson next year. If we are lucky, he will: for even after 40 years and nearly as many members the Crimson King sounds fresh, challenging, aggressive and uncompromising. The same cannot be said for any of Crimson’s peers who played at Woodstock, nor alas, for the works of the King’s other great contemporaries Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch. Although Oscar is still moderately aggressive, it must be admitted.  

For South Pasadena-based actor Greg Sestero, however, the dream became reality when his friend Tommy Wiseau managed to raise $6 million to write, direct and star in a movie called “The Room.” Keeping a promise he made years before when the two thespians met in a San Francisco acting class, Wiseau hired Sestero to be his co-star.

That should have been a happy ending, with the film either fading into oblivion or rising out of Sundance-style film festivals to become an indie sensation. Instead, “The Room” became wildly popular for an entirely different reason: it’s regarded as one of the great camp classics of all time, a movie considered so bad it’s brilliant.

Its monthly midnight showings at the Laemmle Sunset 5 theater in West Hollywood routinely sell out all five of the theater’s screens simultaneously, with crowds that have turned the viewing experience into the craziest interactive movie party since “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

The entire crowd will walk out for five minutes during an especially long and graphic sex scene before reclaiming their seats, or members will throw spoons at the screen whenever a framed picture of a spoon appears onscreen (that happens a lot).

But the film is a hit on its own bizarre terms, and Sestero is proud to note that this Saturday’s screening should be the biggest one yet, as both BBC and a Canadian news team are sending cameras to record all the madness.

“I didn’t think this was drama or comedy,” explains Sestero. “I just thought this thing is going to be wildly entertaining. I think with Tommy, that’s one way to describe him – whether it’s an acting class or hanging out, going anywhere is an entertaining experience.”

Perhaps Entertainment Weekly describes the film best. In a recent story, the magazine noted that even celebrities have joined the film’s rabid fan club, with Cameron Diaz attending New York screenings and Paul Rudd hosting elaborate viewing parties of the film’s DVD in his home.

As writer Clark Collis notes:

The Room is a San Francisco-set love triangle involving a banker named Johnny, his friend Mark, and Johnny’s fiancée Lisa, who is sleeping with both men.

The film does seem to be beset with problems. Various subplots are inadequately resolved or simply disappear altogether, including the throwaway revelation that Lisa’s mother is suffering from cancer. The film’s many rooftop shots feature an unrealistic San Francisco backdrop, thanks to some less-than-impressive greenscreen work. There are lengthy, un-erotic sex scenes, the last of which prompts a section of the audience to depart the auditorium temporarily in mock protest.

Finally, in one sequence, a sharp bone seems about to erupt from Lisa’s neck for no reason at all.

Sestero first showed interest in show business by writing an unproduced sequel to “Home Alone” that the original film’s writer, John Hughes, acknowledged warmly in an encouraging note after the aspiring scribe sent him a copy. He notes that “The Room” hasn’t ended his career, but has amazingly opened new doors for him, including upcoming roles in two films by Regent Entertainment, producers of the Oscar-nominated film “Gods and Monsters.”

Between roles, he and Wiseau hopscotch the planet hosting screenings in more than 30 cities – from London to Sydney – where the fan base has also rapidly grown. And while he’ll be in New York promoting the film during the Aug. 29 LA screening, Sestero sounds like he’s ready to defend the film for a long time to come.

“It was one of the three top-selling DVDs on Amazon a few weeks ago,” says Sestero. “We were at Comic-Con last month and it’s insane how many people know about it. All I can say is people are riveted. Except for the sex scene where people purposely walk out for a minute, not one person leaves their seats in the entire movie, even to get a drink or go to the bathroom. How often do you notice that?”

“The Room” plays at midnight Saturday at the Laemmle Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. Advance ticket purchases are highly recommended.

Inspired in part by the Academy Award-winning Milk, California’s senate has passed a bill making slain San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk’s May 22 birthday a Golden State holiday. But the celluloid hero portrayed by Sean Penn bears little resemblance to the genuine article, who lashed out at political opponents as “Nazis,” purportedly staged a hate crime to engender support for a lagging campaign, and promoted Jim Jones to President Carter “as a man of the highest character” just a few months before the Peoples Temple leader orchestrated more than 900 murder-suicides. My City Journal article shows how Sean Penn’s Harvey Milk is as real as Toby Maguire’s Spider-Man. Only people so ignorant as to get their history from Hollywood would place the formerly obscure San Francisco city supervisor alongside the likes of Jesus Christ, George Washington, Christopher Columbus, and Martin Luther King in celebrating a holiday in his honor.

Before you tell me it is just a movie, recall the words of series creator Gene Roddenberry: “I have no belief that Star Trek depicts the actual future,” Roddenberry said, “it depicts us, now…”  And right now, the latest Star Trek depicts men as insecure, impulsive lechs who need women and aliens to keep them out of trouble.

Consider four attributes of the ideal man: self-control, bravery, confidence and sex appeal.

In the original series, Kirk has supreme self-control. He sacrifices himself for the safety of his crew and, in more than one episode, even chooses duty over true love. In the latest “Star Trek,” Kirk is Peter Pan, an irresponsible, reckless man-boy.  (Warning: plot spoilers ahead.) The new Kirk tears down an empty Iowa highway in a stolen hot rod and drives off a cliff, jumping out to save himself, not the car.  He gets into bar fights to serve his vanity, not some higher cause like rescuing the crew from aliens. 

While the original Kirk used reason, the new one mostly leaves that to Spock.  Even when the new Kirk does sometimes get things right, he does so by being impulsive not shrewd.   The 1960s Kirk destroyed evil computers with logic problems to save the ship. The new Kirk almost gets thrown out of Starfleet Academy for manipulating the computer program to his advantage. 

Even bravery gets a dressing down in the new “Star Trek.”  In the film, Captain Pike lectures Kirk about the importance of the peacekeeping and the humanitarian missions of Starfleet to the multi-cultural, multi-world Federation.  The original Kirk bluffed aliens, threatened planets, started wars and keenly understood the necessity of maintaining peace through strength.  The new “Star Trek” punishes Kirk on an icy planet because of his aggressive desire to take the fight to the enemy rather than consulting with the bureaucracy of the Federation.   But then again, what do we expect with the headquarters of Starfleet being based in San Francisco?  In the end, Captain Kirk is honored for his correct decision to attack the enemy, but only because, I suspect, the producers do not want an empty box office.

One of the most dramatic differences between 1966, when the “Star Trek” series first aired and today is the diminishing role of the father – and that change is mirrored in the two “Star Treks.”   In the 1960s series, Kirk and Spock respect and honor their fathers, who were clearly present in their earlier lives.  Today’s Kirk is fatherless.  Naturally, he is also reckless, aggressive, impulsive and desperately seeking guidance.  While the original Kirk was an authority, the new Kirk is openly insubordinate. The film’s producers consider these behaviors normal tells us how much American society has changed in the past 40 years. 

The 1960s Kirk was a skillful seducer of women across the universe, a trait feminists now find unacceptable.  So the new Kirk is a lecherous lad who suffers rejection by confident, professional women throughout the film.  In fact, Mr. Spock gets more female attention than Kirk.  When Kirk first meets Uhura, she immediately dismisses him as an uneducated Iowa farm boy.  She later passionately kisses the emotionally distant Spock. Women are a civilizing force in making men accountable for their behavior throughout history.  Feminism changed that. It was only in sexual liberation that women unleashed the Kirks from of their cages, transforming the male-female relationship into one of suspicion and cynicism.  In Kirk’s old days, men’s adventurous freedom-loving thirst was quenched with a love of women and new landscapes.  Today’s Kirk gets the blow off while Uhura throws herself at the emotionally unavailable Spock.  (Of course, feminists are still unsatisfied.  Melissa Silverstein writing for WomenandHollywood.com summarized the new “Star Trek“: “The three female characters of significance were insignificant – one gave birth, one was a mother, and one was a girlfriend.”)

“Star Trek” might be set in the 23rd century but the emasculation of men affects us today. How are we going to fight war and recession without a country of Kirks? 

Heather Smith is a radio and documentary film producer based in Washington, D.C.  www.politicaldiva.com