Between his literary canon and getting swept away by Hollywood success, he opined enough on the subject that one gets a range of ideal or preferred physical types. Thus, one’s left with the problem of “Which one” is paradigmatic? Preferred? Exclusive?

So…eh?

It came out early in 1946, after World War II ended and the atomic age dawned, and there will still German Hitler followers like our ingenue’s father and smooth older charmer Claude Raines, cast as the villain, left to mop up, while hunt for uranium ore was all the rage in parts of the world like the US West, yet before the Cold War commenced. And thus the tale about future Nazi dreams in Brazil of the nuclear superweapon!

“Notorious” got plenty of Oscar nods in clouding winning for Best Screenplay. Later, the Screenwriter’s Guild of America voted is a top 100 screenplay.

Another enhanced historical note: the real James Bond was based on the exploits of Serbian rich playboy Dusko Popov. He was the Second World War’s greatest spy and a double agent awarded with both the Iron Cross from Germany and the Victoria Cross from Britain.

His importance to the war effort proved in several theatres of info and disinformation.

Popov could not convince J Edgar Hoover of the signal interest of Japan in Pearl Harbor, however. He eventually was called by his British handlers to go to Brazil to track down uranium…years before Hiroshima or “Notorious” was made.

On the ship back to the US, Popov was informed about the Japanese “Surprise” attack on Hawaii.

My point being, there are wonderful documentaries on Dusko Popov, the real life James Bond, on YT — from short to medium to an hour long.

Perhaps could set up for your daughters or family by setting out Popov’s career espionage? And then segue to the fictional story “Notorious” (again, free on YouTube — some have better sound and print quality than other versions), to the happiness of post WWII life, with a surprising sinister undercurrent, that makes this “against all odds” spy romance such a winning thriller down to us, today!

Finally, there is Bond, James Bond. Whose exploits in film and novel draw on current events of international intrigue, power rivalry, technology — and Hitchcock blended all this before out time masterfully. Prefiguring our ongoing pop culture, with the deepest perceptions.

I think having a religious faith helps.

A lot of us have a sense of things falling apart. This is both real and crazy. Neoneocon puzzled me yesterday by having a “the center cannot hold” post, all lamenting that America as she was is gone. She’s both wrong and right, and from the morose tone more wrong than right.

On a little thought I came to understand it. A lot of us have a sense things are falling apart, and we’re right, they are. But it doesn’t follow the falling apart is bad. Or that what emerges will not be American. Stop staring at me. I haven’t lost my mind.
….
Someone said that centralization inevitably leads to fascism. They’re not wrong. A powerful centralized government eventually controls education, which leads to control of industry and news. Which leads to fascism. Or crony capitalism. They’re the same, though possibly different phases.

Part of what annoys our left is that they think they were so close to imposing this on us.

The truth of course, is they never were. It was just vitiated information, which is a side effect of centralization, making it appear like that.

But the devil is in the details, and in the details they never had us.

America is a spirit of hunching your shoulder and telling your “masters” to go p*ss up a rope. And THAT spirit is still very much alive, which is why in 2020 in the face of the most determined gaslighting and panic porn and for the love of heaven mass house arrests, all designed to demonize Trump and make us vote for the potted plant, we hunched our shoulders and voted for Trump in such numbers that they had to fraud at the last minute, in quantity enough to be visible.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, combined with how their cunning plans keep falling apart, has had the left in a panic ever since.

Yes, things are falling apart. Most of what’s falling apart, though, is the house that FDR built, an un-American, where it wasn’t outright anti-American, structure, which couldn’t long stand in the land of the Free. It already stood too long. And yes, it needs to come down.

Lots of interesting points in the … part.

I think it’s a misconception that this is fundamentally an intellectual debate. The “Gramscian march” shouldn’t be equated with the gradual acceptance of a set of ideas. The march takes over institutions, not ideas. And it does so by using various tactics. For example, the doctrine that any racial disparity is racism is a political/legal tactic. Hence it is bullet-proof against factual rebuttal. They know what they allege isn’t accurate, but it’s too useful to abandon. And the fact that it’s not true means they have to anathematize saying otherwise. Ditto “trans women are women” etc. etc.

And once these tactics are available, not only can their original wielders continue their projects with them, but lots of other folks can decide they are useful to them as well, quite cynically. In many cases, they are persuasive enough that people don’t see any “catastrophic reality” around them, but rather a catastrophically sexist, racist past they still must escape from, and bad actors like those MAGA Republicans intent on dragging them back there.

Commentators on Biden’s speech noted that there appeared to be a deliberate referencing of the movie “V for Vendetta.”

I’m horribly out of it popular culture-wise, so I did screen the movie. What a weird experience! The dystopian, Fascist setting is uncannily the same, but the good and bad sides from the film have been switched. The villains in the film are persecuting gays and Muslims etc., and are generally the evil repressive Christian/white/bourgeois also highly familiar from “Handmaid’s Tale” etc. Yet at Independence Hall last week, the “victims” from the film were up there on the podium bathed in hell light using *deliberate* echoes of Hitlerian speeches, denouncing the “bad guys” of the film — the *exact same* “bad guys” — looking decked out like them.

You’d think that the Biden speech would cause a “Are we the baddies?” moment to the left, but apparently they loved it.