#bill weller

[take2intotheshower]

Kurt Weller in Blindspot Season 5 #5

(Blindspot Season 5, Episode 5 - Head Games)

[nachosncheeze]

21 Days of Remi, Day 15 - The Mark

[narvaldetierra]

Blindspot Rewatch ~ S03E20 ~

The team meeting Bill Nye aka Patterson's dad

[wistfulwatcher]

Blindspot | 3.20, "Let It Go"

[cidraman]

You wanna get nuts? C’mon, let’s get nuts!

[michaelworthy25]

RoboCos - The Future of LoL Enforcement

[truechatinc]

Kevin McCarthy made a series of promises to conservative Republicans to win the house speakership and keep legislation on track, but with a possible government shutdown and his own job on the line, things are coming due. Justin and Lance discuss the turmoil between McCarthy and the republican party. tags: tsou, justin weller, lance jackson, Kevin McCarthy, speaker, republican, house of representatives, government, politics, voting, laws, bills, united states

[gurumog]

Naked Lunch (1991) Twentieth Century Fox Dir. David Cronenberg

Monique Mercure as Fadela Peter Weller as Bill Lee Roy Scheider as Dr. Benway

[vintagesffantasyactors]

Sci Fi/Fantasy Men Round 1 Masterpost

All polls are now up!

Ben Browder vs Mark Goddard

Jonathan Harris vs Richard Biggs

Jeff Conaway vs Rene Auberjonois

Lionel Jeffries vs Alan Napier

Paul McGann vs William Forward

Bill Paxton vs David Boreanaz

Jonathan Frakes vs Kerwin Matthews

Kurt Russell vs Jason Isaacs

Sam J Jones vs William Shatner

Michael O'Hare vs Edward James Olmos

Walter Koenig vs Frazer Hines

Edward Van Sloan vs Peter Cushing

William Russell vs Anthony Stewart Head

Alex Winter vs Michael J Fox

Brent Spiner vs Lance Henriksen

Jerry O'Connell vs Scott Bakula

Harrison Ford vs John Phillip Law

Christopher Lee vs Kiefer Sutherland

Adam West vs Danny John-Jules

Bruce Campbell vs Ted Raimi

Avery Brooks vs Ken Marshall

Vincent Price vs Dwight Frye

Michael Dorn vs Jerry Doyle

Gary Conway vs Andre the Giant

Cary Elwes vs Michael York

Charlton Heston vs Leslie Nielsen

Arnold Schwarzenegger vs Rutger Hauer

Dean Jones vs Ernie Hudson

Alec Guinness vs David Warner

Jeffrey Combs vs Peter Weller

Keanu Reeves vs Keir Dullea

Christopher Lloyd vs Malcolm McDowell

Dean Cain vs Christopher Reeve

Peter MacNicol vs Warwick Davis

Alexander Siddig vs Gareth Thomas

Clancy Brown vs Patrick Stewart

Patrick Swayze vs Bruce Willis

Cesar Romero vs Colin Baker

Haruo Nakajima vs Duncan Regehr

Ray Bolger vs Dick Van Dyke

Chris Sarandon vs Wesley Snipes

Patrick Troughton vs Jason Miller

Mandy Patinkin vs Jason Carter

Milos Kopecky vs Georges Melies

Michael Keaton vs Tony Todd

James Spader vs Brendan Fraser

Michael Shanks vs Oded Fehr

James Doohan vs Ricardo Montalban

Will Smith vs David Duchovny

Jeff Goldblum vs Donald Sutherland

Kevin McCarthy vs Leonard Nimoy

Harold Ramis vs Bill Pullman

Claude Rains vs Fredric March

Peter Davison vs Garrett Wang

Kyle McLachlan vs Nicholas Lea

Doug Jones vs Vladimir Korenev

Karl Urban vs Harry Hamlin

Tom Baker vs David Tomlinson

Buster Crabbe vs Billy Dee Williams

Patrick McGoohan vs Ed Wasser

George Takei vs Guy Williams

Paul Darrow vs Bruce Boxleitner

Brad Dourif vs Christopher Walken

Andrew Robinson vs Armin Shimerman

Nicol Williamson vs Sam Neill

David Bowie vs Joe Morton

Peter Capaldi vs Alan Rickman

Mark Hamill vs Rick Moranis

Arnold Vosloo vs Boris Karloff

Peter Jurasik vs Roger Delgado

Andreas Katsulas vs Craig Charles

Stephen Furst vs LeVar Burton

Richard Dean Anderson vs Laurence Fishburne

Tim Russ vs Colm Meaney

Colin Clive vs Tim Curry

Val Kilmer vs DeForest Kelley

James Stewart vs Conrad Veidt

Gene Wilder vs Bela Lugosi

Raul Julia vs John De Lancie

Nicholas Courtney vs Mitch Pileggi vs Rod Serling

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Mike Smith :: Las Vegas Sun

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

April 29, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

APR 30, 2024

In December 2020, when the pandemic illustrated the extraordinary disadvantage created by the inability of those in low-income households to communicate online with schools and medical professionals, then-president Trump signed into law an emergency program to provide funding to make internet access affordable. In 2021, Congress turned that idea into the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) and made it part of the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law). 

The program has enabled 23 million American households to afford high-speed internet. Those benefiting from it are primarily military families, older Americans, and Black, Latino, and Indigenous households. In February, the Brookings Institution cited economics studies that said each dollar invested in the ACP increases the nation’s gross domestic product by $3.89 and that the program has led to increased employment and higher wages. It also cuts the costs of healthcare by replacing some in-person emergency room visits with telehealth.  

Slightly more of the money in the program goes to districts represented by Republicans than to those represented by Democrats, which might explain why 79% of voters want to continue the program: 96% of Democrats, 78% of Independents, and 62% of Republicans.

But the ACP is running out of money. Back in October 2023, President Joe Biden asked Congress to fund it until the end of 2024, and a bipartisan bill that would extend the program has been introduced in both chambers of Congress. Each remains in an appropriation committee. As of today, the House bill has 228 co-sponsors, the Senate bill has 5. 

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has said he supports the measure, but House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has not commented. Judd Legum pointed out in Popular Information today that the 2025 budget of the far-right Republican Study Committee (RSC) calls for allowing the ACP to expire, saying the RSC “stands against corporate welfare and government handouts that disincentivize prosperity.” More than four fifths of House Republicans belong to the RSC. 

The differences between the parties’ apparent positions on the ACP illustrates the difference in their political ideology. Republicans object to government investment in society and believe market forces should be left to operate without interference in order to promote prosperity. Democrats believe that economic prosperity comes from the hard work of ordinary people and that government investment in society clears the way for those people to succeed. 

Wealth growth for young Americans was stagnant for decades before the pandemic, but it has suddenly experienced a historic rise. In Axios, Emily Peck reported that household wealth for Americans under 40 has risen an astonishing 49% from where it was before the pandemic. Wealth doubled for those born between 1981 and 1996. This increase in household wealth comes in part from rising home prices and more financial assets, as well as less debt, which fell by $5,000 per household. Households of those under 35 have shown a 140% increase in median wealth in the same time period.

Brendan Duke and Christian E. Weller, the authors of the Center for American Progress study from which Peck’s information came, say this wealth growth is not tied to a few super-high earners, but rather reflects broad based improvement. “A simple reason for the strong wealth growth is that younger Americans are experiencing an especially low unemployment rate and especially strong wage growth,” Duke and Weller note, “making it easier for them to accumulate wealth.” 

In honor of National Small Business Week, Vice President Kamala Harris today launched an “economic opportunity tour” in Atlanta, where she highlighted the federal government’s $158 million investment in “The Stitch,” a project to reconnect midtown to downtown Atlanta. This project is an initial attempt to reconnect the communities that were severed by the construction of highways, often cutting minority or poor neighborhoods off from jobs and driving away businesses while saddling the neighborhoods with pollution. 

While some advocates wanted to use the $3.3 billion available from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act to take down highways altogether, the administration has shied away from such a dramatic revision and has instead focused on creating new public green spaces, bike paths, access to public transportation, safety features, and so on, to link and improve neighborhoods. More than 40 states so far have received funding under this program. 

The administration says that projects like The Stitch will promote economic growth in neighborhoods that have borne the burden of past infrastructure projects. Today it touted the extraordinary growth of small businesses since Biden and Harris took office, noting that their economic agenda “has driven the first, second and third strongest years of new business application rates on record—and is on pace for the fourth—with Americans filing a record 17.2 million new business applications.” 

Small businesses owned by historically underserved populations “are growing at near-historic rates, with Black business ownership growing at the fastest pace in 30 years and Latino business ownership growing at the fastest pace in more than a decade,” the White House said. The administration has invested in small businesses, working to level the playing field between them and their larger counterparts by making capital and information available, while working to reform the tax code so that corporations pay as much in taxes as small businesses do.  

“Small businesses are the engines of the economy,” the White House said today. “As President Biden says, every time someone starts a new small business, it’s an act of hope and confidence in our economy.” 

In place of economic growth, Republicans have focused on whipping up supporters by insisting that Democrats are corrupt and are cheating to take over the government. Matt Gertz of Media Matters noted in February that “Fox News host Sean Hannity and his House Republican allies spent 2023 trying to manufacture an impeachable offense against President Joe Biden out of their fact-free obsession with the president’s son, Hunter.” At least 325 segments about Hunter Biden appeared on Hannity’s show in 2023; 220 had at least one false or misleading claim. The most frequent purveyor of that disinformation was Representative James Comer (R-KY), chair of the House Oversight Committee, who went onto the show 43 times to talk about the president’s son. 

The House impeachment inquiry was really designed to salt right-wing media channels with lies about the president and, in the end, turned up nothing other than witnesses who said President Biden was not involved in his son’s businesses. Then the Republicans’ key witness, Alexander Smirnov, was indicted for lying about the Bidens, and then he turned out to be in contact with Russian spies. 

Comer has been quietly backing away from impeaching the president until today, when he popped back into the spotlight after news broke that Hunter Biden’s lawyer has threatened to sue the Fox News Channel (FNC) for “conspiracy and subsequent actions to defame Mr. Biden and paint him in a false light, the unlicensed commercial exploitation of his image, name, and likeness, and the unlawful publication of hacked intimate images of him.” His lawyer’s letter calls out FNC’s promotion of Smirnov’s false allegations. 

Last year, FNC paid almost $800 million to settle defamation claims made by Dominion Voting Systems after FNC hosts pushed the lie that Dominion machines had changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. 

Legal pressure on companies lying for profit has proved successful. Two weeks ago, the far-right media channel One America News Network (OAN) settled a defamation lawsuit with the voting technology company Smartmatic. Today, OAN retracted a false story about former Trump fixer Michael Cohen, apparently made to discredit the testimony of Stormy Daniels about her sexual encounters with Trump. OAN suggested that it was Cohen rather than Trump who had a relationship with Daniels, and that Cohen had extorted Trump over the story.  

“OAN apologizes to Mr. Cohen for any harm the publication may have caused him,” the network wrote in a statement. “To be clear, no evidence suggests that Mr. Cohen and Ms. Daniels were having an affair and no evidence suggests that Mr. Cohen ‘cooked up’ the scheme to extort the Trump Organization before the 2016 election.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[hebuiltfive]

WIP NOT-WEDNESDAY!!

The more I listen to this album, the more haunting it becomes and the more haunted I become by it.

Scott seems to be the muse that keeps fitting the bill too. Here's a snippet from something I've been working on. Try and spot the lyrical influences!

----------------------

"... don't you see? We're trying to protect you..." One ne'er-do-weller wrote in the months that followed. "... we are only trying to save your good name..."

They cried and cried, yet they never truly realised that this was his good name to destroy should he so wish it.

"... for so long you've saved us; let us save you. Wake up, Scotty, this isn't right..."

They screamed and screamed, yet despite their pleas Scott couldn't shake the feeling of it having never felt more right.

They were beyond the lust now, beyond that wild honeymoon phase. It was love.

But how could he even begin to try and explain that to those shouting the loudest for his unhappiness? Why should he even have to explain himself?

"Wake up! Come to your senses! This b**** is trouble for you!"

No, he wasn't coming to his senses! Never before had anything looked so clear to him. He wasn't going to throw that all away because of what they couldn't see.

Scott had warned her that the vultures that would swarm in once news got out of this affair.

Hannah had reminded him it wasn't an affair, not anymore. She told him that they both knew what it was, that they both knew what it all meant for the two of them, that they both knew who each other were.

He had loved her a little bit more after that.

[take2intotheshower]

Favourite Patterson Moments from Blindspot Season 4.

(originally posted for the Blindspot 30 Day Appreciation Challenge)

[indelibleevidence]

Unpopular, negative Kurt Weller opinion under the cut:

(Seriously, you only have yourself to blame if you click this and then dislike the opinion. You have the option of just scrolling past.)

Fanboy!Kurt was horrendously out of character, and I get awful second-hand embarrassment every time I watch his Bill Nye flailing.

[throwawaydracula]

The reaction to Stoker transcribing accents/dialects is just so fascinating to me because it's really not that uncommon in older English language pop fiction. Here's a bit of The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens.

‘Wery glad to hear it,’ said Mr. Weller. ‘Poetry’s unnat’ral; no man ever talked poetry ‘cept a beadle on boxin’-day, or Warren’s blackin’, or Rowland’s oil, or some of them low fellows; never you let yourself down to talk poetry, my boy. Begin agin, Sammy.’

If you're wondering what the hell kind of English accent does that v/w shift, the answer is 1830s Cockney, although apparently Dickens did miss the mark himself just a bit. George Bernard Shaw had this to say about it:

“When I came to London in 1876, the Sam Weller dialect had passed away so completely that I should have given it up as a literary fiction if I had not discovered it surviving in a Middlesex village, and heard of it from an Essex one.”

Shaw also cited James Elphinstone's translation of Martial into the phonetic Cockney of the late 1780s:

Ve have at length resoom’d our place, And can, vith doo distinction, set; Nor ve, the great and wulgar met. Ve dooly can behould the play, Sence ve in no confusion lay.

Note here Elphinstone's convention of rendering 'u' with a double 'o', which Stoker also uses. Going back to Shaw, one of the more amusing notes in the play Pygmalion is attached to Eliza Doolittle's opening line:

THE FLOWER GIRL. Ow, eez ye-ooa san, is e? Wal, fewd dan y’ de-ooty bawmz a mather should, eed now bettern to spawl a pore gel’s flahrzn than ran awy atbaht pyin. Will ye-oo py me f’them? [Here, with apologies, this desperate attempt to represent her dialect without a phonetic alphabet must be abandoned as unintelligible outside London.]

I concede that Stoker leans harder into this attempt at capturing Cockney than he needs to; yes, Thomas Bilder's accent comes across a bit cartoony. Dickens didn't lean quite as hard, and Shaw just gave up after giving an example. It just wasn't particularly beyond the pale. I mean, look at this bit of 17th century West Country dialect from Lorna Doone, published about ten years before Dracula:

“I wor over to Exeford in the morning,” John began from the chimney-corner, looking straight at Annie; “for to zee a little calve, Jan, as us cuddn't get thee to lave houze about. Meesus have got a quare vancy vor un, from wutt her have heer'd of the brade. Now zit quite, wull 'e Miss Luzzie, or a 'wunt goo on no vurder. Vaine little tayl I'll tull' ee, if so be thee zits quite. Wull, as I coom down the hill, I zeed a saight of volks astapping of the ro-udwai. Arl on 'em wi' girt goons, or two men out of dree wi' 'em. Rackon there wor dree score on 'em, tak smarl and beg togather laike; latt aloun the women and chillers; zum on em wi' matches blowing, tothers wi' flint-lacks. 'Wutt be up now?' I says to Bill Blacksmith, as had knowledge of me: 'be the King acoomin? If her be, do 'ee want to shutt 'un?'

Note that R. D. Blackmore was dead serious about capturing this dialect. He did intensive, painstaking research. The point was not to mock these characters, it was to try to capture, through language choices, a spirit and mood particular to a time and place. It matters who has this dialect and who doesn't in the narrative. While Stoker didn't have such lofty ambitions, don't think the point is to mock either. I think it's Stoker trying to do the old 'capturing local colour' thing. He wasn't alone in that. Off the top of my head, Sholem Aleichem transcribed a Jewish German's accent phonetically in some story whose title escapes me in order to differentiate him from the Eastern European Jewish characters with whom he identified. I've seen people hammer Brian Jacques (a much more modern writer) for the same thing Stoker's doing, and I guess it's just been normalized for me. Do know if you go on reading fiction from the place and period-- especially pop fiction not intended as high art, like Dracula-- you will encounter more of this kind of thing. It was a convention. Conventions come and go.

[wistfulwatcher]

Blindspot | 3.20, "Let It Go"

[cidraman]

Bat v Robo.