Michael S. Duffy

Ph.D., Film Scholar/Media Historian, Special/Visual Effects, University of Nottingham and #NYU Alum

[Gerald Posner @geraldposner]

What kind of incoming congressman won’t say the Iranian terror regime is an adversary of the United States?

Adam Hamawy, New Jersey’s first Muslim congressman-elect, was a defense witness for the Blind Sheikh convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing plot. His campaign refused to answer reporters’ questions about whether he is the young man in the 1993 photo kneeling at the sheikh’s feet while the sheikh called for terrorizing the enemies of Islam.

On CNN he still can’t call the Iranian regime an “adversary” or Israel an “ally.” Instead he says the U.S. was “pushed into this war by Israel” and treats Iran’s decades of killing Americans as equivalent to U.S. military action. Iran, through its proxies, has killed more American troops in terrorist attacks than any other nation. It funds Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. Their method is deliberate terrorism; ours is conventional military force. Making a “both sides” comparison is ridiculous.

This is the new progressive Democratic left: they can’t even acknowledge that the Islamic Republic of Iran—the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism for nearly half a century—is not a friend of America.

[Hillel Neuer @HillelNeuer]

No joke: Tomorrow at 10 am, the U.N. plans to elect the Islamic regime of Iran to its main subsidiary organ shaping priorities on women's rights, counter-terrorism and peacekeeping. We urge all states who nominated Tehran — 🇨🇦🇬🇧🇫🇷🇩🇪🇪🇸🇳🇱🇳🇴🇫🇮🇨🇭🇦🇹🇦🇺🇨🇭— to reverse course and vote No.

[Spader Lover (Cosmic Muffin Lover) @SpaderLoverGirl]

James Spader said his dance moves as Virgil are HIS OWN “SIGNATURE” dance moves 😂😭❤️😍

[moviemattk (thefilmmemes) @moviemattk]

BREAKING NEWS:
Reports have come in that Godzilla has been tested for the role of James Bond.

[PsyopAnime @PsyopAnime]

it's really not that hard. Paramount already emailed me months ago.

@davidellison you know what to do. pick up the phone and call PsyopAnime.

p.s - tell Greta I said hello

[The Hollywood Reporter @THR]

Stacy Keach, Who Played Badasses With the Best of Them, Dies at 85 https://t.co/EGYX8MsxNJ

[Israel War Room @IsraelWarRoom]

Congressman-elect Hamawy is unable to acknowledge the fact that Iran is an American adversary.
He should tell that to the families of the hundreds of American troops killed by Iranian IEDs in Iraq, as well as the hundreds of Marines killed by Hezbollah while carrying out a peacekeeping mission in Lebanon.

[Avent @aventyoutube]

The imagination places the future world for us either above or below or in reincarnation. We dream of travels throughout the universe: is not the universe within us? We do not know the depths of our spirit. The mysterious path leads within. In us, or nowhere, lies eternity with its worlds, the past and the future.

—Novalis, Pollen and Fragments

[Nervana Mahmoud @Nervana_1]

Oh my….

Is that #AbdulElSayed with Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood Morsi?

[Open Source Intel @Osint613]

Former MI6 Chief Richard Moore on Xi Jinping, Ukraine and Iran:

"Xi Jinping is watching very carefully what's happening in Ukraine. He's watching what's happening over Iran.

The danger is that if they start to believe that the West, and in particular the United States, does not have the will to see off people like Putin or indeed the Iranian regime, then he will add that to a narrative of Western decline.

That might lead him down the path into doing something, miscalculating over Taiwan or whatever."

[Soror Adriana @SororAdriana]

“Be radical, have principles, be absolute, be that which the bourgeoisie calls an extremist: give yourself without counting or calculating, don’t accept what they call ‘the reality of life’ and act in such a way that you won’t be accepted by that kind of ‘life,’ never abandon the principle of struggle.”

— Ernest Van der Hallen

[Iran International English @IranIntl_En]

An alleged Iran-backed operative orchestrated a foiled plot to attack US military aircraft at an air base in England while detained in an American prison, using coded phone calls to relatives in Iraq, the New York Post reported on Tuesday, citing a new federal indictment.

Mohammad al-Saadi, a dual Iranian-Iraqi national, allegedly coordinated the plot targeting RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire with two Iran-based accomplices, Mohsen Mohajeri and Mohammad al-Hassani, who prosecutors believe are part of a network linked to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the report said.
https://t.co/CsJzUxJMJw

[Auguste Bardamu @AugusteBardamu]

Jean Cocteau a initié sexuellement et plongé dans l'addiction à l'opium un collégien de 15 ans, publié un éloge vibrant du sculpteur officiel d'Adolf Hitler sous l'Occupation, et usé de ses relations pour faire échapper son amant collaborateur à la justice à la Libération.

Il reste pourtant célébré dans l'histoire culturelle française comme le prince des poètes, l'académicien enchanteur de La Belle et la Bête et l'incarnation de la grâce artistique du XXe siècle.

Dans l'imaginaire collectif, l'écrivain et cinéaste demeure un génie fantasque et lumineux, figure de la liberté créatrice et de l'avant-garde parisienne.

La réalité, documentée par sa correspondance, son journal de guerre et la biographie de Claude Arnaud publiée chez Gallimard en 2003, révèle un artiste beaucoup moins irréprochable, marqué par ses relations troublantes, ses addictions et ses compromissions politiques.

En mai 1919, Cocteau, âgé de 29 ans, rencontre Raymond Radiguet, un adolescent de 15 ans qui vient de quitter l'école.

Une relation intense se noue entre les 2 hommes. Cocteau devient son mentor et son compagnon de vie. Leur proximité alimente les soupçons d'une liaison sexuelle, sans qu'elle soit formellement établie.

Leur vie commune est marquée par les excès nocturnes et l'alcool. Radiguet meurt le 12 décembre 1923, à 20 ans, d'une fièvre typhoïde.

Pour surmonter ce deuil, Cocteau sombre dans l'opium dès janvier 1924 et partage cette drogue avec le jeune Maurice Sachs, rencontré à 17 ans, puis avec Jean Desbordes, 19 ans, qui devient son compagnon et partage sa dépendance dans les fumeries de Toulon.

Sous l'Occupation à Paris, entre 1940 et 1944, loin de toute résistance active, le poète fréquente les salons de l'ambassadeur allemand Otto Abetz et l'officier Ernst Jünger.

Le 23 mai 1942, en pleine déportation des Juifs de France, Cocteau publie à la une de Comœdia son texte Salut à Breker, un hommage dithyrambique à Arno Breker, le sculpteur favori d'Adolf Hitler qui expose alors au musée de l'Orangerie.

Cocteau choisit ainsi publiquement de célébrer l'un des artistes majeurs du régime nazi. En retour, Breker lui apporte une protection personnelle auprès des autorités allemandes.

Pendant ce temps, son ancien compagnon Jean Desbordes, engagé dans le réseau de résistance F2, est arrêté en juillet 1944 par la Gestapo française de la rue de la Pompe.

Il meurt sous la torture le 9 juillet 1944. Sa sœur aurait demandé à Cocteau d'intervenir pour le sauver. Si ses démarches réelles restent discutées, la mort de son grand amour demeure un épisode sombre de son histoire.

À la Libération, en août 1944, Cocteau doit répondre de son hommage à Breker et de ses fréquentations allemandes devant les comités d'épuration.

Mais il bénéficie du soutien de figures majeures de la Résistance intellectuelle, comme Louis Aragon, Elsa Triolet et Paul Éluard, dont les interventions permettent son acquittement.

L'artiste que la France honore comme un magicien candide a ainsi partagé l'opium avec de très jeunes compagnons, célébré le sculpteur préféré d'Hitler sous l'Occupation et bénéficié à la Libération de la protection d'écrivains résistants.

Derrière le magicien des mots se dessine le portrait beaucoup moins lumineux d'un artiste dont le génie n'a jamais garanti la probité morale.

[Dr. Jebra Faushay @JebraFaushay]

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off came out 41 years ago and it’s time for a part two.

If you were a fan of the movie, you’re going to love this sequel!

Actually, it’s a commercial for elder care. It had such potential!

[Steve Asbell @steveasbell]

No one will ever top this.

[mark @midsommark]

This will be the sixth time we have destroyed the DC cinematic universe, and we have become exceedingly efficient at it.

[Sensei Johnny Lawrence @JohnnyLCKai]

That famous scene from Predator only with Superman and Batman.

[alexei @alexeixbt]

most of us move through the day believing our thoughts are simply a description of reality, when much of the time they are a story shaped by old experiences, unmet needs and the way our nervous system learned to keep us safe.

metacognition is the moment you step back far enough to notice the story itself, to see the assumption you made about someone, the blame you reached for, or the old pain that got activated by something happening today.

that pause matters because the reaction that comes from an old wound feels completely justified in the moment, and it usually lands on the people closest to us.

when you can observe your own thinking, you create a small space between what happens and how you respond, and that space is where your choices live.

this is a skill you can build, and it grows every time you catch yourself mid-story and ask what is actually true right now and what part of this belongs to you.

[warpaint1317 @warpaint1317]

Prime Video has removed all the subtitles for foreign language dialogue that John Milius included in the original Red Dawn.

Part of why this bothers me is there are numerous examples of how our own government would operate against us, as pictured in the un-scrubbed version:

[LuthorCorp @LuthorCorpNews]

Our CEO, Lex Luthor, is set to take over as Head of DC Studios.

(Source: @DEADLINE)