Time to put your hand out and brush up your Arabic. Buckle up, we are in for a bumpy ride.
“When you’re glued into politics, reading blogs, scrolling through social media, you get inundated with niche issues and everyone is trying to convince you that this is the defining problem that will swing an election. . . . Right or wrong, the economic woes of the public will always be put at the feet of the president. If the stock market sucks, it’s the president’s fault. If you can’t afford DoorDash like you used to, it’s the president’s fault. The midterms are the way for the American public to punish the president in power. Yes, the typical political discussions matter, like quality of candidates etc. However, if people are angry and emotional, they don’t generally make rational decisions. If the reason for them voting is based on spite, do you really have a chance of changing their minds? You can’t fact your way out of shifting an emotional voter.” ~~ Adam Coleman
Corinne Dufour was Hugo Drax’s personal assistant and pilot. She flew Bond over Drax’s estate, giving him a guided tour of the Moonraker complex and flying him to meet Drax. After spending the night with Bond, Corinne revealed the location of Drax’s safe, where Bond photographed secret documents. Drax discovered this, and Corinne was killed by Drax’s vicious pack of dogs.
Miss Caruso was an agent of the Italian Secret Service. She was asleep with Bond at his home when, just before 6am, the doorbell rang. Bond answered the door to find M, who announced an urgent mission. He also casually mentioned that the Italian’s were complaining about their missing agent, Miss Caruso. In a scene lit with humour, Bond continually distracts M to avoid him finding Caruso, with a little help from Miss Moneypenny, who had accompanied M.
Madeline Smith
Match 2
Emily Bolton (Manuela) vs Gloria Hendry (Rosie Carver)
Manuela was an agent working for station VH. She tailed Bond after he left the airport in Reo, and by the time he got to his hotel, she was making him a vodka Martini at the mini bar in his suite. Manuela helped Bond find one of Hugo Drax’s warehouses, but she proved to be a burden as she was almost killed by assassin Jaws.
Rosie Carver was an inept and incompetent double agent, working for the CIA and for heroin baron Dr. Kananga. She checked into Bond’s hotel room as Mrs. Bond, and said she would take him to the spot where Bains, another MI6 agent, was killed. While picnicking near the area, Bond confronts Rosie, revealing that he knows she is working for Kanaga. Bond threatens to kill her, and Rosie runs away, only to be killed by a hidden gun in one of Kanaga’s scarecrows.
“Their economic doctrine is neo-feudal central planning wrapped in environmental hysteria. By mandating the death of the internal combustion engine, outlawing natural gas, and tethering the world’s greatest industrial powerhouse to intermittent windmills and Chinese-made solar panels, they are engineering energy poverty by design. Tripling electricity rates and normalizing rolling blackouts are features of a system built to break middle-class independence. While coastal elites lecture working families from private jets, they push national rent control policies proven to annihilate housing supply. Driving private landlords into bankruptcy clears the field for the state to become the sole arbiter of shelter, reducing self-reliant property owners to desperate tenants begging federal bureaucrats for a roof.
In the streets, they have unleashed a regime of calculated lawlessness designed to terrorize the productive class. Abolishing cash bail for violent predators, downgrading felonies to misdemeanors, and installing rogue prosecutors who legalize rampant theft have turned once-thriving metropolitan centers into boarded-up wastelands. They release career criminals into your neighborhoods and prosecute the lawful citizen who dares to defend his family. Exporting this urban carnage to suburbs and rural towns is a deliberate strategy: manufacture unbearable chaos until a terrified populace surrenders its liberties in exchange for authoritarian state control.” ~~ Saggezza Eterna
“Our thought for the day, riffing a bit off of one of Pournelle’s thoughts on peace: “Communism” is the name of the alleged ideal we attribute to an oligarchy under which, by the cover of pleasant sounding political and social (and genetic) nonsense, that cannot bear objective close scrutiny, all power is gathered into the hands of a new, tiny, highly nepotistic, amorally familistic, corrupt and completely unprincipled ruling class, itself backed up by control over the means of information, a massive propaganda administration, unbounded by even a stunted sense of integrity, a lapdog judiciary, and a secret police with unreviewable powers of incarceration, enslavement, torture, life, and death, in order to advance themselves and their heirs under the lie of advancing mankind. Contrary to the common mantra, not only has it not “never been done right,” it has _always_ been done _exactly_ right for its true purpose, cited above.” ~~ Tom Kratman
