henrygandorf

cross him off, then.

there was an ongoing debate on the west wing about whether smart presidents make good presidents. when asked "does it bother you that some of our smarter presidents have been some of our worst presidents?", seborn (rob lowe) says something to the tune of, "i don't care about that, when i'm looking for the guy, i start with the guy with the big brain." obviously there's a long history of tracking who's "smart" and who isn't, and i'm not interested in tests that go back before ww1. the ability to take in information, process it, and form an articulate response that is accessible to the american people is incredibly rare these days. that's why newsom and pete stand out so clearly. it should be the hope of every american that the president is, at the very least, "smarter than me". it's a low bar, but one that has been sorely neglected, while half the country seems to feel more comfortable with someone who's "as dumb as me". at this point, i'll take a great communicator who's smart enough to surround himself with intelligent people with good ideas. if the communicator is also smart and has good ideas, that's a fucking bonus. but it's so freaking sad that while some people wouldn't vote for pete because he was gay, plenty others wouldn't vote for him because he was too smart. and before people get their panties in a bunch, i'm talking about ind/republicans and focus group/cable news nonsense, not people on here. 2028 should be a lot of fun.

love newsom but worry that a ca politician can win nationally. fox news has been poisoning the country against everything california for decades, despite there being more trump voters here than any other state. he definitely has the presidential voice, and much like pete, won't hesitate to go on fox news and eat their lunch for them. we should also throw josh shapiro into the mix, who is every bit as sharp but from the right part of the country. winning as a dem is all about the rust belt right now.

also andor.

the odds don't matter. casinos like getting interest free loans for a year. find yourselves a bookie.

i'm rewatching s1. it makes you like every character more. except sydney.

then you might as well just say "humans have done horrible things to other humans over the centuries, so some hatred against humans is understandable." things get repeated, start as stereotypes and tropes, turn into assumptions, then morph into accepted facts. people say things like "jews control hollywood" without realizing it's an anti-semitic trope. some jewish people i know actually think it's some sort of compliment. it isn't. it's ignorance. i've been avoiding this thread, so like some others, i am not caught up, nor will i read 30 pages to qualify myself to post here. apologies to absolutely no one if i repeat what others have said, as if certain arguments have already been litigated and have become message-board law.

can you explain why you put savages in quotation marks?

we are talking about right now. you're saying you're not defending the jews. you should be. it's not a monolith. if you don't agree with what israel or netanyahu is doing, that's ok. but saying you're not defending the jews is not what you're trying to say i don't think. but i could be wrong. why is some hate of jews justified from history?

to add to this, hamas knows israel cares about civilians. why else would they hide their bases of operation in hospitals and schools. israel. or netanyahu. both would be better words here. not sure why so many have a problem differentiating.

the simpsons is discussed in the doc.

gee, you think so, doctor? (quoting the reporter, not the poster)

watched this last night and it's great. as an added bonus, hbo max has added a bunch of his movies as well.

i don't feel attacked, i think this is a fair question. first off, i pay my fair share and then some. i subscribe to everything, including a live/cable option (directv stream) which i know a lot of people have gone away from. i go to movies in the theater, and have paid a premium for nice, la theaters since back when assigned seats were a new feature. i also won't see a movie without popcorn and snacks, which i always purchase from concessions. movies fuel the entire industry, and concessions fuel theaters, so $16 popcorn buckets don't bother me. over the years, i have used torrents when it is necessary. i don't download anything available on a mainstream platform like prime, netflix, hulu, peacock, apple, disney, and so forth. i use it when a movie is unavailable and i'm trying to show it to someone who hasn't seen it (usually my wife). keep in mind this is a film that i not only likely paid to see in a theater, but in many cases, have also previously purchased the dvd. but like i said, we no longer own a dvd player and i have no idea where my old movies even are. i also used to use torrents when i needed movies for travel before the days of being able to use a streaming platform on my laptop. much easier to have a file than tote around a bunch of dvds, especially when you live on a bus. though we did buy plenty of seasons of tv in their old school boxed sets, like the office, lost, 30 rock, etc. but the biggest factor is whether i even have a choice with something i'm looking to watch. in many cases, there are no other options. i downloaded max dugan returns a couple months ago, which is available pretty much nowhere. same with the color of money, and many other 70's/80's movies. if they existed somewhere, i wouldn't need torrents. in the case of my nephew, he's not going to buy amc+, so this is a way to introduce him to "prestige" tv and what i believe is the greatest drama of all time. with this experience, he will (hopefully) seek out other high-end productions, both tv and film, and that will affect his life, just as mine was affected as a teenager when i watched butch cassidy, jaws, the sting, the godfather, and all the president's men with my dad. in turn, he will spend his money on things actually available to him and not relegated to a fringe (at best) streaming platform. this is a situation where if not for me and wetransfer, he would simply go without. i cannot allow that. but here's the sad truth of it all. when you pay $3.79 on amazon prime for an old movie, that money is not ever getting to the writers or actors, or even the producers. it just isn't. that money will go onto the amazon ledger and pay for storage, servers, attorneys, executives, until they turn to 3rd party sourcing companies that purchased libraries from obsolete production companies like vestron or orion and say, sorry, here's your three cents. i also will download british shows that aren't available yet on us tv or britbox/acorn, like catastrophe. but once i like something, i'll make sure everyone in my life knows to watch it on whatever platform carries it, which i believe was prime. *i don't use torrents to download first-run movies or pirated home video shit, in case that part was unclear. it's not even about the money, it's about the quality. fuck all that.

i didn’t write the tweet, just thought it was funny.

maybe if they didn't spend so much money on handguns and accessories they could afford to shop at a non-flea market.

so you're saying it's better now than in the mid 90's? well i would hope so. i think the bigger complaint here is that while some movies are hard to locate, others just aren't available anywhere for free. and many of these were available weeks/months ago on a platform they pay for. this is not a personal problem for me, because i've been using torrents for 20 years. my nephew wanted to watch mad men, which went from netflix to prime to freevee to amc+ which i'm pretty sure is fake because nobody i know has it. so i downloaded the entire series and wetransfer'd it to him, which he then downloaded and dumped onto a usb drive and put in the back of his tv. the whole process took an hour. i had hundreds of dvds, and most of which i did not pay $20-$30 for, but we no longer own a dvd player and i don't really miss those days. i think the point is that when you pay for (or have access to) multiple streaming services, you expect to have everything at your fingertips. at certain points this was the case, now, not so much. oh fuck yeah.

elsbeth was one of the better recurring characters on the good wife. bunk was a paramedic in "the money pit" and a beat cop in "it could happen to you", before becoming a murder police in the wire, and then whatever this ^^ is. i'm a big fan of people getting promoted across different projects. john amos ran a burger franchise before getting into the military in die hard 2 and eventually became chairman of the joint chiefs in the west wing. real success story.