Dennis Tafoya

Movie poster: Born to Kill (1947). Lawrence Tierney, Claire Trevor, Walter Slezak.

1947 in movies: Born To Kill, Robert Wise. “We're going in the same direction, you and I."

The best. All of the outlets and writers I love are long form. Skip Hollandsworth, Patrick Radden Keefe, William Langewiesche, Pamela Colloff, David Grann - I’ll read anything by these folks.

Can you pick an app based on which AI bullshit is most likely to end up paying writers more money in settlements? (Though I haven’t gotten a dime yet).

Hopefully that involves a trip in a leaky submersible.

We have to keep demanding truth, keep demanding that all of this is documented as much as possible. It makes me crazy to think someday anyone might think there was any kind of consensus approval of these dimwitted, corrupt, authoritarian assholes.

Poster for LIT LUNCH event at Finnbar on March 22 at 3:00pm, sponsored by Frenchtown Books. Author Dennis Tafoya will be discussing his book, DOPE THIEF, adapted by Peter Craig and Ridley Scott and currently streaming on APPLE+.

I'll be at the March 22nd LIT LUNCH at FINNBAR, sponsored by Frenchtown Bookshop. The lunches are prepared by bestselling cookbook author and former Chez Panisse head chef Cal Peternell. You can get tickets here: frenchtownbookshop.com/events/44068...

Excellent - and love that banner pic. If we ever needed ‘Lillian Gish with a shotgun’ energy, we need it now.

Everything they do is in bad faith.

I remember when it came out. All respect to character powerhouse Strother Martin, but if he’s top billed you’re definitely fighting for air.

Family favorite. Dicko!

Ray Liotta as Henry Hill in Goodfellas.

IYKYK.

Love Them! I always thought there was something about vets and PTSD going on, too. The little girl having seen something too horrible to process; Whitmore and Arness are veterans; and when they find the crucial witness to the ants in LA, he’s a traumatized vet in a VA hospital.

Has he MET any republicans?

Terminator skull with glowing red eyes.

Did any of the fiction, TV or movies about machines getting violent and destroying humanity turn on the idea that crappy, malfunctioning AI would be pushed into terrible uses by people who were just trying to recoup their investment in subpar technology?

Wow, reading now.

A large stuffed folder of files with the title “Epstein” is seen with what looks, at first glance, like a red page marker sticking out of the bottom. On closer inspection it is the bottom of a Trump red neck tie. French newspapers once again showing the kind of basic journalistic integrity lacking from most US national newspapers - whose collective negligence has helped ensure a man implicated in the world’s most notorious sex trafficking ring gets to remain President. That the orange pedo felon remains in office is a plague on all their houses. Cunts, one and all.

The cartoon that appeared this week on the front page of France’s most influential national newspaper, Le Monde

Brilliant work by the cartoonist, Guffo.

KAVANAUGH STOP:
(American political term)
A Kavanaugh stop is a law enforcement practice in the United States in which federal agents can stop and detain a person based on their perceived ethnicity, spoken language, or occupation…

In 2024, according to the US Marshals, they got arrest warrants more than 28, 000 times. That’s just the Marshals. His answer (like all his statements) is bad faith bullshit, but at least the record is clear that federal law enforcement can get the warrants to comply with due process.

"I'm coming to Boston and I'm bringing hell with me."
--Homan in February

"Do I expect violence to escalate? Absolutely."
-- Tom Homan in March

"I actually thought about getting up and throwing that man a beating right there in the middle of the room"
-- Homan in July, referring to a D congressman

Lily Gladstone in Certain Women.

Yeah, the Kavanaugh Stop is going to stick like Dred Scott.

His argument is so obtuse it’s infuriating. Corporations, through lobbies that get to WRITE legislation, that spend massive amounts of campaign money (or bribes - see the Supreme Court), and make or withhold investments affect all areas of American life. These things are entirely measurable.

Newman & Woodward

📸 Gordon Parks (1959)

Great recommendation! Edmond O’Brian is one of my favorite character actors (he’s amazing in Seven Days in May). Great poster with insane-looking EOB.

Since July, I've tracked at least 2,300 cases in which federal judges have ruled ICE has illegally detained people without bond or due process.

This is one that stands out:
storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

This quote was about bungling burglars & Nixon.
It was comical.
Now it’s about murderous bastards & Trump.

I’m always frustrated by pleas with no allocution in cases like this.

Headline in New York Times - Are Republicans Growing a Little Uneasy about the ICE Raids?

The most consistently delusional NYTimes device: Republicans (evangelicals, trump voters, etc) are reappraising their support for their party’s extreme agenda.

Tough to say anything about this that Hannah Arendt didn’t already cover. Fascistic regimes rely on a repudiation of actual history in preference of ahistorical nationalist and racist myth and the politics of grievance.

Why don’t you quit cryin’ and get me some bourbon.