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RomaVicta

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by RomaVicta

  1. I've had a thought for years that the Western countries who've alread obliterated their massive forests should pay Brazil handsomely to protect those forests. I know it's ebil globalism and shit, but why leave the burden of averting an international crisis in the hands of a single country? Pay off the current rapacious destroyers of the forest to kill their incentive for continuing. I don't care if they're evil. I don't care what they are. They're in it for money, pay them and be rid of them. In the breathing space before the next round of exploiters appear, take steps preserve and protect the forests. Fund the local, indigenous peoples in the best way to kill any incentive they have to destroy the forest just to feed their people. The US and the rest of the West have got fat eating up other country's resources. It's time to put back where we can. I know the first instinct of many Americans is to invade, but let's try to throttle back a little on that inclination. Maybe help people instead of bombing them. And put a lot of money into carbon capture if there's any future in it. I'm not well educated on it. Oh, and stop riding around in giant fucking pick up trucks if you're not a rancher or outdoor worker for fuck's sake.
  2. You have to believe something environmental is causing the rise in rate of rapid onset dementia in people under 60. I don't have a link for that, but I believe I've read or heard about the dementia rate from someplace reliable.
  3. On the plastics front which isn't really related to climate, there was a similar POV on a Last Week Tonight episode where Oliver narrated the story of how Coca-Cola and other big plastic users somehow managed to push the burden of dealing with plastic on to the consumer. It's our responsibility to save the unimaginably massive tonnage of plastic they create every day. I recall glass bottles with deposits from the old days. As with aluminum, there was an incentive to collect the bottles and turn them in for a little cash. California has a deposit return on plastic bottles that works pretty well. I was in Europe this past summer and was impressed at how much less they rely on plastic. We don't give a shit, or we feel deprived if anyone wants to change anything. It's pathetic. I'm no great citizen but I buy beverages like colas exclusively in aluminum. It helps fund other recycling and gives me a shred of rationalizing that I'm some kind of fucking hero for allowing an ounce of civic mindedness to penetrate my awareness.
  4. John Kerry was on All Things Considered yesterday. He's been fighting the good fight as a Biden envoy and pledges to continue working on slowing climate change [younger viewers may become alarmed and saddened by the following word. Viewer discretion advized.] warming. Made good points about progress and now focusing on the private sector. I just got sad. I hate that, but it's true. Humanity has handed the ball off on warming to natural processes already triggered by anthropormorphic impact. The permafrost thawing (New Yorker article) releasing massive amounts of methane. The threat to the Gulf Stream due to glacier melting and fresh water added to North Atlantic Ocean. Intensification of wildfires due to weather patterns already impacted. Rising ocean temperatures killing coral reefs and supporting plumes of phosphate triggered micro-organism growth that causes giant dead zones in spots like the middle of the Gulf of Mexico every year. There are others that I'm forgetting. My sources are generally The New Yorker and Atlantic over the last four years or so. What do we get from idiots? You can destroy the lives of our children and their's, but you'll never take our hamburgers! Things will cost more if we do anything. Makes any action de facto evil. It's a socialist plot cooked up by the nanny-state-make-us-slaves Dems. It's not happening. It was cold during the winter. So there. Donald fucking Trump. Rush fucking Limbaugh. Ronald fucking Reagan. (Villain Nixon signed off on the EPA. He's a comparative hero. Let that sink in.) Being right will have never been less satifying than it will be for the girl whose head we patted and then dismissed. But don't worry, it's only Climate Change.
  5. Really? One of the best ever? He's a great character, but such things are not as rare as you suggest. In BoB itself, there are numerous characters important and fleeting that are as well drawn. [Amusingly, I see I mistook the Dick Winters character you name for the Lewis Nixon character. Nixon is at least a match in quality, IMHO, to Winters] This includes Spiers and Malarky and many others including even David Schwimmer as Sobel in maybe his best performance ever. You also seem to suggest that there's no reason to try to clear that bar or even use it as a standard. That's the path to straight-to-video or the worst of the streaming services. @locodos writes: There are many ways to tell a story. We've established where we each stand, but your post did give me an idea for narrative approach. Follow the path of a crew member wounded bad enough to be taken out of action. No one can understand what he went through, let's see a few scenes of that. Maybe he's cleared to return and does not want to. Where does that go? What does that illuminate about the experience? It's another way to take the squadron navigator at the retreat approach. Again, just an idea and example, not an argument.
  6. You wanna go outside and fight, Fatty?
  7. Wake me up when they can hand over the tapes of their Supreme Court questioning.
  8. Very kind. I don't think it makes my opinions any more valid, but I can explain what I mean fairly clearly.
  9. Trump's first term and the time since has pretty much proven that you can let the press publish whatever they want and it won't have much impact. "Fake news" are two words that took truth and information out of the equation for a large swath ot the electorate. Hell, he can probably count on stochastic terrorism to further destroy the press. And you. And me. And certainly anybody without my Northern European skin color.
  10. Go ahead and disagree with me, but don't assume that I don't know about the casualty rates among bomber crews. There are movies that take place over the course of a day or two that have great character development. It's not a matter of time; it's a matter of dramatization. Every bomber crew wasn't lost on their second mission. This series chooses principal characters from history who actually didn't die right away. They're not much more than 2-dimensional as presented. I would suggest that the value you are getting from the characters as portrayed is from what you bring to the series yourself. There's nothing wrong with that. I've liked movies that others haven't cared about for the same reason. The Banshees of Inisheren was perhaps more profoundly meaningful to me because I happen to know about that time in Irish history. The same may be happening for you in this series. For brief depthening of a character, one great example comes to mind. In the original Cape Fear, the opening is of Cady walking the sidewalk and his path is intersecting that of an attractive woman at the courthouse struggling to carry books. Just before their paths cross, she fumbles the stack onto the ground. Cady just strolls by without a glance. Bingo, in under a minute, we have key insight into Cady. This happens in movies all the time.
  11. Thinking this matters much is old politics. The networks will break out their templates and line up their panels. "Did he help himself tonight?" "I thought his delivery was surprisingly good/bad." "There were 55 ovations which is a little more than average." "Do you think Kamala looked presidential enough sitting in the back?" "Let's look at the reaction of a bunch of brain dead undecideds locked in a glass booth. Everytime they touch their genitals it's good for Biden. Everytime they throw their own shit at the glass walls, it's bad for Biden. Sandra?" Not a single whisper about the fate of the republic in the face of two broadly different candidates. All are equal in the template. They'll get GOP response and comments that are nothing but lies and not call them out. When Trump wins, orders the military to seize voting boxes, and pardons insurrectionists (fuck anybody's legal definition quibbles), Wolf and the boys and girls will raise the pertinent question, "Is this going to hurt Trump in the polls?" "Let's go to our panel of experts..."
  12. Thanks for clarifying.
  13. Pacific has great source material in one of the best first person accounts of war I've ever read. I thought the series was pretty good. I think the Pacific campaign was so very nightmarish that it almost defies portrayal on screen. It didn't help that the filmmakers chose to shoot the Guadalcanal sequence in almost complete darkness. I think the series is good not great.
  14. This was reported in an obscure publication called the New York Times. ... Below, is a dated discussion of it between myself and @956 Worldwide.
  15. What I quoted from one of your posts: Perhaps you can explain where I go wrong in my interpretation of "large conventional military response" while referring to this campaign.
  16. I know this is the kind of series that many people love and get defensive about if the love is not shared, but I'm not much grabbed by it either. I think Hanks and Spielberg can be carried away by the golly-gee-whiz belief in the WW2 generation veneration. Band of Brothers stands out and is excellent because they don't fall prey to it. I'm guessing the source material and the first hand meeting of the men had much to do with keeping them real. The best episode for experiencing the characters has been the one in the retreat with the actress you keep referring to. It's the best written with a cast that elevates the writing. It's also, oddly enough, the best look into just how damaging the bomber crew experience was. Most of the prior episodes, I started just speeding through the scenes of the guys kidding around and laughing at shit that isn't funny hoping to persuade me that there is wit present. There never was. It never feels real. "But these are real people. This really happened." Plenty of pictures about real people and their real experiences fail to dramatize them in a way that brings the story home to the viewer. The earlier comment about character development is apt, IMHO. These two guys were great pilots who were friends and really cool. Those are other guys are gunners and bobardiers who seem kinda interesting, but we'll never really know. I've watched the action scenes because that is the best place for war movies to bring out character. BOB does this brilliantly through an array of characters. I like seeing the bomber experience. Much detail is present that hasn't been present before. There's not much insight into individuals. The Gregory Peck movie, 12 O'clock High, is superior in every regard except techinically. You get a full range of characters and you see what the experience does to them. I binged this up until the last episode I saw that ends with the reunion of the friends. The scene in the German city had a lot of value. The Germans in that sequence display more depth and range than the bomber crews have thoughout the series: you get grief, horror, fury, cruelty, and vengeance. You get an aspect of war. Frankly, I've forgotten to catch up since then. I will, but I'm not particularly anxious to. I wish I was having the reaction of those who are loving the show. Band of Brothers and Generation Kill are easily the best war series I've seen about any war.
  17. Well, if they're going to put the longhorns on somebody, I guess vengeance is the best.
  18. If everything ran perfectly, I have no moral objection to capital punishment. We get it wrong too often. We apply it unequally. We can't even find a humane way to do it.
  19. Didn't much care for Maestro. Seems Bernstein and everyone he knew were smokers. Oh, and they all talk at the same time and laugh at things that aren't funny. Hard to loose with Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan in the lead, but they found a way. Mulligan was the only thing even vaguely interesting about the movie.
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