romad1

Posting this here but it could go in a couple different threads The Coronavirus thread being one other I could think of right away.

Caligula was just a brilliant career choice for any actor. Hellen Mirren and Peter O' Tool maybe not as damaged as McDowell.

i think what happened is Kubrick slowed Ryan O' Neal's career. Kubrick was a sort of career killer for a lot of actors. He took them out of the normal rotation for so long to do his movies that they didn't get seen in normal stuff for such a long time that they didn't produce the same impact on the movie industry as those who stayed out of his clutches. Mathew Modine was a perfectly serviceable brat pack type actor until he disappeared for all those years to make Full Metal Jacket. (BTW, see him in Birdy great Peter Gabriel soundtrack). I think Tom and Nichol as a Hollywood couple did not survive whatever it was that Eyes Wide Shut was. Tom Cruise is just so talented and hard working so he could overcome that sort of thing.

Gavin was a lady killer who slept with Marlene Deitrich. Ryan O’ was semi big deal at the time. I think Redford wanted the POV character for the river crossing which gave him a lot of action scenes.

the scene in A Bridge Too Far where Sean Connery is discussing the situation on the ground with his battalion commanders and the lunatics are laughing at them from the woods comes to mind. "Do you think they know something we don't?"

This is a fun video to watch. Motivation is strong: to liberate the oppressed and to keep the Russians from stealing their children!

This is something else Bill Barr has decided to put in the knife and Trump should be grateful he had such a willing servant when it mattered.

Boston just did whatever they could to give the Tigers an early lead. Was that just to draw in the betting lines?

Yeah, its all a warm goo of stupidity and fascism.

This is an fuggly brand of baseball. No me gusto.

Its not that we aren't important. We exist. He's not spending all his time here.

aye thanks

So, our boy piggie was propagating the Russian devised IC leak thing as it was going down. Do we need further evidence he's not on the level?

In actuality, there are a lot of people outside the US who do look upon it as a big fat dumb place with a generally good heart. The see that the actual makers of things are clever. The business sharps are clever. The entertainment is top notch. But, alas, the accumulated mass of our democracy behaves like a toddler. It doesn't mean we aren't generally on the side of pluralism and human rights. We do have a lot of people trying to do the right things. We do think we are better in alliances even if many of my colleagues wouldn't trust a Brit as far as they could throw him and we've been allied with them for longer than almost anyone. We do believe we are for free and fair trade even if it isn't perfect. So, enough of the moral relativism. America is actually weird in good ways and stupid in some bad ways.

The general struggle between pilgrims and cavaliers began thus. There are of course a lot of other influence: various immigration waves, the various African-American cultures which formed in pockets based on the type of crops and plantation styles and in response to the manner of being freed. Obviously, Hispanic culture has its own long history.

Hamdrink actually had hits in twitter when I searched on it.

So, the other history majors can weigh in as they like. I think in a lot of ways Canada has been more of the sort of society the original Plymouth settlement pilgrims thought they'd like to create. I've had it explained to me many times that the United States has always had the two themes of Plymouth (holy and sacred and for the believers, whomever they are) and Jamestown (lets make some money to propagate a social order that suits those at the top just fine). The Northern culture -- guided by the spirit of the pilgrims and English influences like William Wilberforce/the Clapham sect -- warned by the chaos of the French Revolution and -- tainted by dark satanic mills and the general struggle for labor rights. They, using superior economic power and larger manpower fought to end slavery and imposed a civilization onto the South that many southern Whites resent. The Southern culture -- guided by those cavalier slave-holding cannibals that figured out how to sell plantation crops like tobacco to the World and thus proved that those at the top were God-chosen for power and those just below them on the pecking order, the crackers who imposed their social order on slaves and criminals (hence the boner for cop culture) and hold military duty in high regard. Those just-below the pecking order whites have been militarized by the feudal lords on multiple occasions for all sorts of evil stuff. Now, another guy wrote a very interesting book i base this on. Called Albion's Seed that identified these basic stock cultures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion's_Seed

I take all that talk about being a shining city on a hill as part of the civic (non-secular) religion of America. You can say it and it does hopefully guide people to better normative directions. I think the existence of a thuggish element is always going to be there among any society. The squeal like a pig hillbillies of "Deliverance" were not thinking on the importance to society of the hydro-electric power that dam that was about to flood their farmland would bring. They just wanted to rape Ned Beatty. Americans want to buy into the good story and not the bad. Unfortunately, a lot of thugs are feeding more and more hillbillies with notions these days.

what is the source of this?

And i will fight them like our grandfathers fought the other Nazis

The RT-watching "just asking questions" crowd do seem to think this should lead to an immediate replacement of all non-Trumpies in the IC with loyal Trumpers.

The actual value of the information depicted in the stolen docs isn't that big of a deal even if it did show some estimates of numbers of KIA and so forth. The real intelligence value is knowing where and when things will occur. If Russia doesn't suddenly crap out a bunch of much better troops and equipment they won't have enough stuff to cover the where or the when in any event.

I glanced at the details. They are taken from the same format as the JCS J2 daily brief. But they have been horribly manipulated by the Russian intelligence services.

Also, fuck the use of "southern" as a beneficial adjective to anything. Not that we don't have racists jackals in the North but I'm so sick of the heritage of a bunch of loathsome crackers being identified as benign in any way.

What a jerk.