Baratheons show why you should stay out of family feuds
At the beginning of HBO's Game of Thrones, Robert Baratheon appeared to be on top of the world. Robert was King of Westeros. Robert had won the kingdom with his strong right hand, which he used to wield a war hammer so heavy most other people couldn't lift it. Robert had personally killed the previous heir to the throne, Rhaegar Targaryen, hitting him so hard with the aforementioned war hammer that the encrusted rubies on Rhaegar's breastplate were being found in the river months or even years later. Robert had his godfather Jon Arryn as Hand (Prime Minister), his two younger brothers Stannis and Renly as council members and his best friend Ned Stark as backup in case anyone started to act funny.
Robert married the realm's most beautiful woman, Cersei Lannister. Robert could thus count on his father-in-law's support. Tywin Lannister is the realm's richest and most ruthless leader. With the exception of a brief revolt by the Westeros Appalachia equivalent, Cthulhu worshiping pirates from the Iron Islands, Robert brought and kept the peace. Or so it seemed. Unfortunately for Robert his desire and ability to win the throne and avenge himself upon the people who had stolen his true love Lyanna Stark and murdered his best friend's father and brother were always greater than his desire and ability to rule ably, pay attention to details, or sniff out enemies smart enough to avoid direct confrontation.
Woman speaking to Biden: You snapped my bra strap!
Biden: I'm sorry I don't remember doing that.
2nd woman talking to Biden: You rubbed my neck and gave me a back massage!
Biden: You really need to be more specific young lady. I give a lot of back massages.
3rd woman speaking to Biden: You grabbed my _____ and called me "Sugar-***"
Biden: Oh yes! Sugar-***!! How the hell are you sweetheart! I missed you!
Former President Joe Biden has not announced that he will be running for President in 2020. But he's pretty clearly thinking about it. I've read some previous speculation that he remains a little miffed at being shouldered out of the way by Clinton in 2016. Usually it's the VP of a successful administration that gets the official nod to be the party standard bearer in the next election, not the Secretary of State. Oh well so it goes. I don't believe in too many conspiracy theories. And there's no evidence of anyone directing any attacks against Biden. But it is "interesting" that Biden, who has by all accounts been a pretty handsy guy with both men and women for all of his political career, has recently been accused by a number of women of behavior that either made them uncomfortable or was downright inappropriate.
Act of Violence
directed by Fred Zinneman
Act of Violence is a noir film directed by Fred Zinneman, who also directed High Noon. Although Act of Violence is not quite as iconic as High Noon, it ought to be. It feels more personal as well. Perhaps it was, dealing as it did with issues of hard choices made during war and what they cost. The director fled to the US before the Nazi takeover of most of Europe. His parents weren't so fortunate. They died in a concentration camp.
It's easy for people in today's world to talk about what they would have done were they enslaved in 1730s Alabama, facing a lynch mob or segregation in 1903 Mississippi, or locked up in a death camp in 1944 German occupied Europe. Talk is cheap. The reality is that heroism and self-sacrifice is rare.
Many people will do whatever they can do to survive for as long as they can survive. The threat or promise of death or mutilation can break brave men and women. Just about everyone has a breaking point. This film asks the viewer if someone is a hero because they held out as long as they could or are they a villain because they acquiesced or surrendered to evil? There aren't necessarily easy answers to these questions. They vex generation after generation.
Frank Enley (Van Heflin) is a real estate developer and philanthropist in post-war California. He's also a war hero. Frank is a former Air Force pilot who was shot down over occupied Europe and survived in a German POW camp. Frank has an attractive wife Edith (Janet Leigh, future Psycho actress and mother of Jamie Lee Curtis) and a toddler. Everything is looking up for Frank. His future is so bright he's got to wear shades! But the news of Frank's success attracts attention: the wrong kind of attention.
For almost the entire past two years most of the media and many elected Democrats were on the verge of orgasm about the imminent release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report, telling anyone who would listen or watch that this report would prove that President Trump and/or his campaign colluded with Russian individuals in and out of government in order to defeat Hillary Clinton and steal the 2016 election.
MSNBC led the charge, with virtually all of its analysis or news programs being devoted to breathlessly listing everything they thought Mueller must have been doing. "Sources say this" or "Reports claim that" were the most common phrases heard on these programs as DC insiders and parasites competed to show us how much they were in the know. The media told us that Mueller was beyond reproach. His conclusions must be trusted, the media told us. The media invited a number of former intelligence industry personnel, people known to be well, liars, to tell us what they thought Mueller was going to find.To a man or woman, they were all certain that Mueller was going to finally get the goods on the treasonous Trump.
Dissidents from this narrative were not welcomed in the media, particularly not on MSNBC. In fact anyone who had questions was dismissed as a Russian useful idiot, a bot, or worse a Russian sympathizer. Well as it turns out Mueller released his report, though it has not yet been made public. But we do know that Mueller isn't going to be seeking any more indictments, most especially not any indictments against President Trump and his family. According to Attorney General Barr:
Special counsel Robert Mueller did not find that the Trump campaign “conspired or coordinated” with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 elections, according to Attorney General William Barr’s summary to Congress delivered Sunday.
Man Eater
by Gar Anthony Haywood
This book is seemingly written deliberately to be very similar to Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard, screwcap films by Preston Sturges, It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, and perhaps most of all to Everybody Smokes in Hell by John Ridley. As many of the #metoo, Sony hack and related allegations and revelations have shown Hollywood can be an amoral, even immoral cutthroat environment where everyone is out to get over on everybody else and maybe get laid in the process.
Like the stories referenced, Man Eater posits that the streets and their twisted tenets of respect, honor and vengeance really aren't all that different from Hollywood. The stakes are higher in the streets perhaps but it's really the same game.
Ronnie Deal is a mid level project executive for a Hollywood studio. She has a secret past which she doesn't share with anyone, least of all her insincere female boss and a male peer who's trying to prevent Ronnie from moving up the ladder by any means necessary. Ronnie is also stunningly attractive, something which she cynically uses when she thinks it's necessary.
Having been temporarily embarrassed and outmaneuvered by her aforementioned male rival, causing her to lose a movie deal, Ronnie travels to a bar after work to stew over the insults and general sexism of the world. She's in no mood then, to watch quietly as a intimidating muscular man named Neon Polk starts to harass and assault a tiny woman named Antsy Carruth. Surprising herself with her aggression and fearlessness, Ronnie decides to strike one for the sisterhood by sucker punching Neon upside the head with a beer bottle and doing a Texas two step on his face. Both women flee.
The 2016 Presidential election still vexes Democrats. Few pundits thought that Trump could win. Most experts argued that not only would the electoral "blue wall" of upper Midwest states prevent a Trump victory but also buoyed by demographic change as well as gender solidarity, Clinton would win in states that had long been Republican leaning-i.e. Georgia, Texas, Arizona and North Carolina.
We know what happened. Clinton won the popular vote but lost the election. Trump became President. Some Democrats still blame Jill Stein and Bernie Sanders. Others blame Russians. And so on. Democrats blame a number of people or events besides Clinton for Trump's victory. But lately more people want to blame the country's political institutions and rules: the Senate, the Electoral college, the voting age, separate state elections, etc. As discussed before some people are furious that Wyoming and California have the same number of Senators. They're irked that running up the popular vote count in one state (as Clinton did in California and New York) is not helpful to winning the Presidential election. Some Democrats want to make the Senate representation proportional by population (if not jettison it entirely), and eliminate the Electoral College.
It remains a source of amazement and amusement to me that some people still believe that the earth is flat. From what I can tell this is only a very small minority of folks. Some of them are obvious trolls. Others believe everything is a conspiracy. Still others are just low IQ people with an extremely limited grasp of science and logic. Some think that being contrary by definition means being smart.
Others flatter themselves that they're just smarter than everyone else. And some are people who reject all science, logic and math as Eurocentric and thus by definition untrue and racist. So it goes. But it's funny to me that when the evidence conclusively disproves the flat earth theory, flat earth adherents drop the evidence and not the theory.
In what may be one of the most satisfying TV moments we can recall, a group of conspiracy theorists have accidentally spent thousands of dollars to prove that yes, actually, the Earth is round.
The scene in a new Netflix documentary called Behind the Curve, which follows a group of Flat Earthers, a "small but growing contingent of people who firmly believe in a conspiracy to suppress the truth that the Earth is flat".
One of those Flat Earthers is Bob Knodel, who hosts a YouTube channel entirely dedicated to the theory and who is one of the team relying on a $20,000 laser gyroscope to prove the Earth doesn't actually rotate. Except... It does.
