"V" - The Final Battle by Dennis McCarthy

Bad movie I have The Complete First Season Wagon Train 1957

The Fast and the Furious X - Movie Review by Efe Teksoy

FAST X, SHADOWS OF THE PAST COME TO DAYLIGHT Cinema Writer/Film Critic Efe TEKSOY; wrote the action and adventure film “FAST X”, for America’s Los Angeles-based Internet Newspaper @alaturkanews. A GHOST FROM THE PAST The Fast and the Furious series, which has created a global sensation in the cinema world for more than two decades, has made its mark among the most important and popular…

View On WordPress

Hey, got 82 minutes? How about a full orchestra concert of Trek's music?

Dennis McCarthy

Dennis McCarthy Catholic Memorial Football Captains #1. Visit: https://www.instagram.com/dennymenace/

some black and white artwork by the late great John Paul Leon.

an epiphany: Silver does not, and cannot, have a backstory, simply because he is the archetypal pirate. and pirates do not have histories.

I do a lot of research on pirate history in my free time, and one thing that has always really struck me is just how little we have to go off of. We do have primary source records of their exploits - primarily reports from the crews of ships they attacked, and if they were unlucky enough, transcripts from their trials and executions , but as soon as you ask "well, who were they before they were pirates?", almost always, there is simply nothing to draw up, even for the most famous of figures. Calico Jack Rackham appears on the scene in 1718, already Charles Vane's quartermaster, with nothing to say of where he came from. Samuel Bellamy sailed from Cape Cod to raid the treasure-wreck of the Urca d'Lima, but his life in Massachusetts is marred in speculation. Blackbeard made landfall in Nassau soon after the War of Spanish Succession, but so many pirates used pseudonyms that we cannot even be sure that his real name was Edward Teach. All we can say is maybe, maybe, maybe.

so of course Silver, being the icon that we can trace nearly all of our modern conceptions of piracy to, would have no past. the real ones didn't either. As far as written history is concerned, the sea conjured them up. Even if their stories were not unremarkable, they were simply... without relevance.

Denny McCarthy

Innerspace (1987). A test pilot is miniaturized in a secret experiment, and accidentally injected into a hapless store clerk.

The cartoonish premise and pacing really wouldn't work without an actor like Martin Short in the lead role, and the decision to cast him is probably one of the better ones in 80s sci-fi. This really is a bonkers movie, but it gets away with it more often than not - it's genuinely funny, and the design feels pretty innovative and high quality for the era. Also I might have an extra sweetspot for it given it spawned one of my favourite episodes of Futurama haha. Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan's storyline didn't do much for me at all though. 7/10.

Florida schools have approved the use of “supplemental curriculum” created by PragerU, an unaccredited right-wing advocacy group that seeks to offer an alternative to “dominant left-wing ideologies,” in classrooms days after the state Department of Education approved new, controversial academic standards for Black history curriculum.

PragerU CEO Marissa Streit announced that Florida approved the nonprofit as an official vendor, allowing teachers to incorporate its educational entertainment videos, self-described as “edutainment,” as supplemental materials in classrooms.

“We have seen that our schools have been hijacked by the left. They have been politicized, they have been used by union bosses, they have been doing everything under the sun not for our children,” Streit said.

“And so we have launched PragerU Kids and we started providing great 'edutainment,' educational entertainment for children across America. But we didn’t just stop there. Now we’re actually making turnkey curriculum. Content for your schools. And the state of Florida just announced that we are now becoming an official vendor. This means that if you are a teacher in Florida, you cannot be fired for using PragerU content.”

The Miami New Times confirmed that the Florida Board of Education approved the materials, saying that it aligned with the state's revised civics and government standards.

WHAT IS PRAGERU?

Prager University Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that creates educational videos that it says promote American values. PragerU’s website says that it “offers a free alternative to dominant left-wing ideology in culture, media and education.”

The driving force behind much of PragerU’s growing popularity stems from its series title “5-Minute Videos,” which boils down everything from economic and political science topics to life lessons and cultural topics into bite-sized, 5-minute videos.

Many of the most popular videos tackle controversial topics. As of this writing, the five videos showcased under the “Most Popular 5-Minute Videos” tag include “Do You Understand the Electoral College,” “Was the Civil War About Slavery,” “The Inconvenient Truth About the Democratic Party,” “Why I Left the Left” and “War on Boys.”

WHO FOUNDED PRAGERU? PragerU was founded in 2009 by Allen Estrin and conservative radio talk show host Dennis Prager.

WHAT DOES PRAGERU’S CURRICULUM TEACH?

PragerU believes that American schools are “indoctrinating” students who are being taught “radical ideas” about critical race theory, systemic racism, gender fluidity, anti-Americanism and that math is racist. It says it has designed its curriculum to provide “both sides of the argument” and help kids understand history, economics, foreign affairs and philosophy.

PragerU’s website provides users with access to its educational videos but does little to shed light on what specific key concepts it hopes to instill through its curriculum.

Examples of lesson plans can also be found on the website, but they only provide basic, surface-level views of what will be taught. A lesson plan regarding the Federalist Papers only has four learning objectives:

• Identify who wrote the Federalist Papers • Explain why the Federalist Papers were written • Recognize why the framers of the Constitution created a federal government with checks and balances • Appreciate the system of government established by the Founding Fathers

The full lesson can be learned in about 50 minutes, according to the site.

WHY CRITICS PUSH BACK AGAINST PRAGERU CURRICULUM

PragerU has a long history of experts rebuking ideas presented in many of its videos.

Joseph McCarthy of The Weather Channel in 2016 wrote an entire feature on PragerU’s video called "Fossil Fuels: The Greenest Energy," which had garnered 1.5 million views at that time. McCarthy wrote that the video was presented by a proponent of fossil fuel, Alex Epstein, and that the video “flubs a major date and soberly transitions between obvious inaccuracies and out-of-context claims."

Paul Gottfried in 2017 wrote pinned a story in The American Conservative lambasting PragerU presenter Dinesh D’Souza for claiming that fascism was a left-wing idea. D’Souza claimed that it could be proven that it was a “leftist” idea by examining the political writings of Mussolini’s court philosopher Giovanni Gentile.

Gottfried, a paleoconservative scholar, wrote that “their judgment also clashes with that of almost all scholars of Gentile’s work, from across the political spectrum, who view him, as I do in my study of fascism, as the most distinguished intellectual of the revolutionary right.”

These are just the tip of the iceberg, however. The Daily Beast points out that PragerU videos have claimed there’s no wage gap between men and women and that it has praised Confederate General Robert E. Lee for crushing an attempted slave rebellion.

And others have noted inaccuracies in videos claiming that Europe is “committing suicide” by allowing mass migration, that “whiteness and conservatism” are under attack and more.

Civic groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League have also criticized PragerU’s videos, describing some as a “dog whistle to the extreme right” and “filled with anti-immigration and anti-Muslim rhetoric.”

The weakest Speaker of the US House of Representatives since the Great Depression has become the ex-Speaker.

The unfitness to govern by the Republican Party was once again on full display as millions of viewers saw the inept Kevin McCarthy get the boot.

The House GOP is being compared to a failed state, and it didn't just start to get that way under Kevin McCarthy.

The House GOP Is a Failed State

For nine months, McCarthy had the title and the gavel and a Capitol suite with a nice view. But he never really held the office of speaker in anything like the historic meaning of that job. He never inspired fear. He sought favor from GOP colleagues — 210 of whom actually stayed with him until the end — but he had scant influence to bestow favors in return. He wasn’t associated with any particular governing idea. At the start, his speakership was effectively an optical illusion. At the end, it was an exercise in self-abasement. The main consolation is that he has plenty of company. For a quarter-century, every Republican to ascend to the speakership has descended from it with his standing diminished. It’s a line that travels from Newt Gingrich to Dennis Hastert to John Boehner to Paul Ryan to McCarthy. A lot about the times in general, and the GOP in particular, has changed in the decades since Gingrich and his self-proclaimed “revolutionaries” roared into power in the 1994 elections. He was shooed from the speakership four years later by GOP colleagues who had grown tired of his rap and mounting evidence that voters felt the same way. But a pattern was set that has endured long past Gingrich.

While Trump worship is ultimately at the center of the current fiasco, the GOP dysfunction pre-dates his 2015 escalator ride.

Most of all, McCarthy showed his malleable core on the paramount question of Republican politics, or for that matter all American politics: Where do you stand on Trump? “I’ve had it with this guy,” McCarthy sputtered to colleagues after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, saying he would push Trump to resign immediately. McCarthy denied news reports that he had ever said this, until my colleagues Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin revealed in their book, This Will Not Pass, that they had the moment unambiguously on tape. No matter, McCarthy soon enough was reliably back in the Trump fold, and Trump was unreliably and indifferently in the McCarthy fold. If so, however, Trump didn’t put much passion into it. Many people believe the former president has the instincts of an authoritarian. Authoritarians, however, generally prefer order and discipline. Trump has shown no sign that he cares much about the ostentatious disorder and indiscipline of the House. Certainly he didn’t try to marshal support for the man he calls, in cuddly moods, “my Kevin.” The House GOP now resembles a failed state. The party elects leaders with no capacity to lead members who have no interest in being led. McCarthy is like one of the succession of short-lived Soviet leaders who followed the long reign of Leonid Brezhnev, before the radical disruption of Mikhail Gorbachev at the end of the Cold War.

The House GOP resembles the old Soviet Union – a lumbering failed state immobilized by ideological rigor mortis.

Carl Hulse at the New York Times doesn't think that the Republicans will change much as a result of this.

[I]n today’s Republican Party, doing the right thing is considered a transgression, not a virtue – a sign of unforgivable allegiance to the political establishment. That was the central problem for Mr. McCarthy, and for his eventual successor. House Republicans, beholden to a base that reveres former President Donald J. Trump and detests compromise, have become ungovernable. And it is doubtful that his precipitous downfall will break the fever.

The only way Republicans might change is with Trump's departure from the scene. Even then there may be divisions between self-designated Trump successors and more traditional conservatives. The prognosis is not good for the GOP.

EXTRA! A look back at the Republican House Speakers of this century. It so happens that the most successful one was also a child molester.

Curently up all night trying to go back to a sleeping schedule before skewl and being depressed and crying while watching donnie loves Jenny cause when will I have a relationship like theirs

The Howling (1981)

"What about killing it with silver bullets?"

"Oh sure, silver bullets or fire, it's the only way to get rid of the damned things, they're worse than cockroaches. They come back from the dead if you don't kill 'em right, plus they regenerate - y'know what that is? Cut off an arm, cut off a leg, stick a knife in their heart: nothing. They may look dead, but bam, three days later they're as good as new."

"You believe in this?"

"What am I, an idiot? I'm making a buck here; you want books, I got books. I got chicken blood, I got dog embryos, I got black candles, I got wolfsbane."

Dennis McCarthy

Dennis McCarthy Boston College Football QB. Visit: https://www.instagram.com/dennymenace/