Only if you believe American Constitutional theory trumps common usage. Even in the US when the government does something that it might not supposed to do, the most common question isn't the American Constitutional Theory correct "Is a health care mandate within the Powers granted by Constitution, without unconstitutionally interfering with the rights enumerated in the Amendments?" it's the theoretically incorrect "Do they really have the right to make you buy healthcare?"
Heck, we're both talking about North Koreans. Why would they give a fuck whether Thomas Jefferson thought a "de facto right" was self-contradictory?
How can the power to declare war be relevant to how the US responds to attacks on military infrastructure by foreign military units? Assuming it actually applies to cyber-attacks, pirate raids, or any other number of military attacks that don't involve full scale national mobilization, the war was already started by them.
I never said there weren't civilian administrative procedures. That's a strawman you're creating, apparently because the last time you actually thought about the President's military powers was the Sixth Grade. Every institution, civilian, military, educational, whatever has administrative procedures. The unique thing about military ones is that they start with the death sentence and go down, whereas civilian ones tend to start at nominal fines or being yelled at via paperwork and go up.
As for his power to command foreign banks, yes under US Law he has the power to command anyone to do anything within US Law. They don't necessarily have to obey, and the question as to whether the Courts would allow him to sanction the Royal Bank of Scotland for not freezing Col. Wu's account would actually be fairly interesting and involve statutory law; but if your argument is Obama does not have the right to send a nasty letter to RBC asking them to freeze a bank account and threatening DOOM if they disobey you're sadly mistaken.
US Banks are probably screwed. Just as Obama can enforce a quarantine via commander-in-chief in pretty much any way he wants (as long as he can convince the courts there's a commander-in-chief-style need for a quarantine), freezing Col. Wu's bank account is a perfectly reasonable to Colonel Wu fucking with Americans, so CitiBank better do that shit.
That sounds unfortunately close to what I thought, except with bigger words. And apparent total ignorance of what actual people like when they strongly believe in stories about mythic universal forces interacting as personified avatars. Indian Gods who are in love do not act like that.
Because the Founders clearly didn't want Congress to have any say over day-to-day military operations. They explicitly designed the President's powers to totally pre-empt any Congressional claim to such control. Their reasoning was quite simple: in 1789 there was no telegraph, so a message to Congress asking for authorization to deal with a Spanish Governor who was trying to eat a little bit of Georgia would not be dealt with by Congress until everyone was already dead. The local garrison commander had to have the ability to order his forces into combat without Congressional authorization. Since he gets his legal authority from the President, that means the President also has to have the authority to authorize small-scale military operations without asking Congress.
Congress's checks on the local Army commander's authority were the facts that a) Congress could eliminate his regiment in the next budget, which would fire him, and b) since all military officer-level jobs are Congressionally confirmed they could also refuse to let him have another job.
The Declaration of War clause doesn't actually justify give Congress much power over anything but a Total War we start, and couldn't apply here because if the Chinese are attacking us we get to attack them back. They have started the War.
The "Necessary and proper" clause, combined with the changes in technology that have made Congressional control possible, would a good enough rationalization for a sane Supreme Court. But we do not live in a world where the Supreme Court is sane. We live in a world where the Supreme Court is dominated by textual Federalists who think the solution to this problem is to go through the Amendment process.
Ever been in the military? Nothing involves more administrative procedures then military action. Even during our Civil War there were formal procedures to determine precisely what you were allowed to do to that dude on the gray coat.
As for your claims about statutory basis, I fully understand that Americans have this broad-based-delusion that Congress has a significant say over what the military actually does beyond a) the budget, and b) officer promotions; but there is simply no Constitutional basis for that claim. There's statutory basis, but the basis is generally "Congress pitched a huge hissy fit when President Jefferson used his powers to unilaterally invade the Barbary Pirates so he went along with it when they proposed a retroactive statute to authorize the operation." Then you get case law based on the resulting hissy-fit statutes, but here's the key thing: Nobody ever claimed that anybody had the legal Power to Order the Fleet back into port after Jefferson sent them to Libya solely on his say-so. Nobody tried to make the legal case Nixon couldn't bomb Cambodia stand up in Court. The hissy-fit statutes like the War Powers Act are legitimate to the extent they are used by Congress to explain what, precisely, it intends to fund when it funds the military. They are clearly not legitimate to the extent that they could actually be used against a President in a Court of Law.
What's going on in this case is simple: it's established that Commanders-in-Chief can freeze the bank accounts of enemies of the US. This did require a statute, the PATRIOT Act, because it would not have been in the toolbox of an 18th-century monarch or George Washington. But now that it's established, and it's widely considered to have been a useful military tool against Al Qaeda, the administration can use it against anyone it thinks is a military opponent. Congress will bitch, because they always bitch.
But that doesn't mean PLA Col. Wu's attempt to get his bank account bank will actually work.
So he's got the power to unilaterally rule a US Citizen in Yemen is an enemy of the US, and blow up said citizen with a drone (incidentally killing several others), but he can't freeze the US bank account of a Chinese military officer whose busily hacking Americans?
When normal lawyers deal with the Commander-in-Chief clause, which has very few limits (the biggest is that it doesn't apply that often), they really get into trouble fast.
They can arrest you. If you show up in North Korea proper. They also have a de facto right to kidnap you from the streets of your home country.
It's true there are processes in place that prevent the vast majority of states from doing either without going through a lot of legal paperwork (ie: warrants, extradition), but the North Koreans are known for shit like kidnapping the dictator's favorite director from the South because he thought his domestic film industry sucked. And getting away with it.
This is ridiculous. Law is part of the agreement between citizens and their government. Citizens get certain benefits like public education and healthcare, and in return must pay the government taxes and obey their laws. If the citizen disagrees with this, he can resign his citizenship, but by doing so loses the benefits of citizenship as well.
Foreigners, on the other hand, have no such agreement, and therefore it's ridiculous to charge them. What's next, Saudi Arabia charges me for having a beer tonight? North Korea charges me for criticizing their regime? Should I serious have to look up every single country's law before I do something, just to make sure I'm not breaking some obscure country's law?
He's not charging them. He's not arresting them. He's got multiple sets of powers, and he isn't using the law enforcement one here because there is no actual statute passed by Congress to deal with the problem.
He's using his military powers, which are incredibly broad because the Founders really did not want Congress and the Supreme Court to stop expeditions against Tecumseh-types on any basis whatsoever. He has an enemy that is partly military (China's cyber-ops unit is in the military), so he's probably good as long as he doesn't start abusing the law.
Here's the nub of our disagreement: You're conflating "good for the role," with "talented."
If the role does not involve a significant amount of character development, emoting, etc. it does not actually require talent. It does not even require acting. Megan Fox can be called a talented performer, but she has never demonstrated any skill whatsoever as an actress. She does not emote, her characters are one-dimensional (and the dimension is BOOBS!).
So you're claiming movie stars are necessarily more talented then my sister's friends because they have the same credentials as my sister's friends? And more importantly you're claiming Megan Fox and Jennifer Garner are talented?
Okey Dokey Smokey. If you say one woman who has two expressions, and another who has never actually acted on film in her life, are "talented" enough to be more talented then anyone then I'm not gonna argue with you. Movie stars are clearly by definition all insanely talented, even the ones who can't act, and the market for determining which comely young woman becomes a movie star is perfectly efficient. Gwyneth Paltrow would have become a super-famous movie star even if she hadn't met Spielberg as a tiny child.
You don;t know who I;m talking about when I mention my sister's friends.
I'm not saying that most of the hundreds of thousands of people in LA who went there to become movie stars are more talented then Meryl Streep. My sister is not friends with those hundreds of thousands of people, most of whom couldn't at their way out of a paper bag.
However she did go to the University of Michigan and was theatre major. Her friends were a combination of theatre and musical theatre majors. This requires some actual talent.
And any one of those people can out-act most movie stars, because most movie stars are not Meryl Streep. Most movie stars are people like Jennifer Garner and Megan Fox, who get roles primarily because they've got the name recognition to get some butts in the seats and can do one thing really well (Garner in particular is known for have two facial expressions).
What was his justification for wanting it stilted and formal?
The only thing I could think of was he didn't think of these characters as real characters, but rather personifications of a) teenage rebelliousness (Anikan) and b) duty (Amadala). Which meant no smiling.
You're missing the point because you're ignoring the context.
The question is whether it's better an actor to take the Mark Hamill/Hayden Christiansen role from a career standpoint. And the answer is almost certainly yes, because even the paid work of a couple blockbuster SciFi films at peanuts ($100k a pop) is more paid work then most actors get over a decade.
Now yes, there's plenty of unpaid work, and the unpaid work can theoretically become paid if you get the right exposure; but a) there are issues you aren't considering (for example, my sister refuses to admit she's doing unpaid work at all for fear of being thrown out of Actor's Equity) which make unpaid work risky, and b) taking unpaid work in independent films is compatible with both career strategies we're talking about, and c) there aren;t a lot of examples of people turning unpaid work into movie star status. Geek idols yes, movie stars who get three flicks a year at the high six figures per film? No.
The problem isn't just the lines. It's the delivery. She does not sound like a woman who is looking forward to an encounter with a lover, she sounds like a woman who is reading her grocery list out loud. And since Portman can actually emote pretty damn well, that means the problem was the director told her to tone down the emoting to the point she sounds more like a PA announcer then a human being.
Lucas remembered the big things that made Star Wars special (ie: massive cool universe, great special effects, and a powerful storyline), but he forgot to take care of the little things that would make it a good movie. So dialogue and characterization sucked.
Both Harry and Hermione have gotten pretty good careers out of Harry Potter. Twilight's stars KStew and that Patkison guy have also had careers. Granted they haven't won Oscars, but they're getting decent parts in major flicks. Stewart actually almost had her own franchise, until she got fired for sleeping with the director. Who kept his job.
The Stars Wars actors haven't. I suspect in the second trilogy it's because Lucas's direction sucked. It's supposed to be a love story about a dutiful young woman falling for rebellious yet charismatic young Jedi, and the tragedy that befalls them both. But IIRC (and I may not, because I refused to see that piece of shit twice) they didn't even smile at each-other. Portman adopted a "It is Amadala's duty to fuck this young man, therefore we shall hold hands solemnly" demeanor the whole damn time, and that guy was all "As an angsty teenager I never experience any emotion but barely concealed rage." Dude she's your girlfriend. She may be the only thing that makes you smile, but if she doesn't make you smile it's time for a new girlfriend.
Which is so obviously wrong that it can only be the result of the director telling them that their characters do not like each-other.
Statistically speaking it's being the guy who drives the tractor in scene 13. Seriously.
My sister is a fairly serious actress in the theatre. She's good enough that she had sufficient paid work to get her union card in NYC. She's considered moving to LA, because most of her acquaintances in the craft in LA actually act as their primary gig; but they don't actually get to do the shit she considers acting (ie: develop characters). They are extras, and on a really good day they get a line and become a glorified extra. They have the talent to be better then most movie stars, but that's really common in LA. To get the good roles you need somebody whose important in the business to tell all his other important buddies you aren't slightly-above-replacement-level-talent, you;re an amazing actor who just needs a good break.
So if you have a photogenic, somewhat talented (but not great), client with few of the connections that would allow him to grab a really great role; you damn well get him to take six figures to act in Star Wars. He's likely to not have a career after that unless he's got a great contact in the business whose willing to vouch for him to directors, but he wasn't likely to get any roles at all without that contact anyway.
Who do you think makes rockets? The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace workers.
Who do you think processes rocket fuel? The Steelworkers.
Who do you think designs the damn things in government labs? Government employees, most of whom are unionized.
The current Republican party will never fund any of these groups, partly because some of them are Evil Unions, and partly because the lesson the GOP base learned from the Bush years was that government spending is an evil in it's own right.
You wanna know what an MD in her first year of residency has? A 350% debt-to-personal-GDP ratio. Post-residency she's still in the 150-200% range. You wanna know what a 19-year-old home depot cashier at $9.25 an hour has? No debt at all. You wanna guess which one of those women will have a more financially stable future?
Compare that to the US. Yes we have a lot of debt. but we have it mostly because some idiot insisted on cutting taxes without cutting spending, financed two major wars 100% via debt, and then didn't notice that light touch mortgage regulations were about to cripple the economy and fuck everyone over. That a) tanked Federal revenue, while b) drastically increasing social spending because unemployed people qualify for a lot more food stamps, which would have been bad enough if that idiot hadn't already had us running a sizable deficit.
Now if any of us actually gave a shit about the deficit (rather then giving a shit about manipulating people to support our other policy positions) it would be trivial to fix. Raise the income tax five points, fire the Army because we've got Marines, abolish NASA, implement a massive Federal VAT, or any number of ideas could fix it single-handed.
But like I said, nobody who claims to care about the deficit actually cares about the deficit. They care about manipulating moderates into supporting their social-engineering scheme to either a) cut government spending because it's a threat to freedom and the American way of life, or b) jack up the income tax rate because inequality is a threat to freedom and the American way of life.
What in my post implied Putin cares what ordinary Americans think? I mentioned him trying to appease a Russian domestic audience with a space station, and potential difficulties he'd have reining in the Donbass rebels, but I said nothing about Western public opinion.
BTW, your premise is wrong to an extent at least. All my comments got a -1 troll, the AC posting that Russia was a superpower got to +4 insightful, and everyone criticizing that blessed comment also got -1 troll. Which means the Kremlin apparently loosed it's merry band of paid internet trolls on Slashdot.
You could actually. $10 Billion a year for 10 years is peanuts in the context of a $Trillion budget.
The issue is that poisonous combination of a) deficit hawks, and b) partisan gridlock which makes it impossible to do anything that costs money. c), the ideological elites absolute commitment to low taxes on itself means that even during flush times (ie: the late '90s- early 2000s) it won't happen.
If you want the government to buy nice things that are not tax cuts you have to vote in the Democratic primaries so that the Dem who wins is not one of those free-market obsessives who are honestly convinced the economy grows much faster with a top tax rate of 38%; and then you have to vote for that guy in the General election.
"Leading" is a relative term in a world dominated by the US. We're a fifth of the economy. We're most of the military spending. We have the most advanced weapons. Our culture is known world-wide. The Chinese could compete with us, if they get a few more years of 8% growth and they can figure out their aging population problem. The Europeans could also compete with us, if they'd ever get off their damn asses and give their precious sovereign right to veto every-damn-thing to the EU.
Russia clearly belongs in the next tier, right along with the Japanese and other regional powers. But it's not like Russia can bail out small Latin American countries without noticing the hit to it's budget. But the top tier clearly could. So could the Japanese.
He would have confirmed this with Obama if he was still on his game. He clearly needs something to show his people that Russia is a leading nation among the entire world, and not just a regional power in Eastern Europe, and what better way then say "we're collaborating with the US on a space station no other two countries could build?"
Putin desperation is either good or bad. If he decides he can declare victory in Donbass and calm things down (and he has the political muscle to keep the Ukrainian separatists in line) it's good for the US. If he decides he needs some other victory to appease his critics then it could get really iffy, potentially nuclear war iffy if he starts supporting separatists in Latvia (which is 25% Russian) or something similarly suicidal.
"British system of 1789," so any present tense discussion of the British government is irrelevant.
And yes, in 1789 the Brits had a an upper chamber selected by the groups intended to run the nation (the House of Lords) and a frequently re-elected lower House that was intended to be the voice of the People (the Commons). The Upper was supposed to cool the relatively hot tempers of the lower, veto any attempts to replace the elite by popular vote, and generally wear the man pants.
The differences between Senate election (at the time Senators were appointed by the State Legislature), and inheriting a Peerage is precisely analogous to the difference between Presidential elections (by a House of Electors appointed by those states) and inheriting the Crown.
My job at Home Depot is probably more threatened by the current management's obsession with cutting labor costs then larger market conditions.
Lots of people, including contractors, would rather go a store with six locations in the County that has everything they need, with better then 50% chance of having a guy who can warn them about the tricky bits; then buy from a company with no locations in Cuyahoga County; or buy from a location with a 100% chance of having that smart guy on the other side of the fucking County. Especially since the specialty shop on the other side of the County is likely to have higher costs, because half it's staff aren't kids just out of high school thrilled to be getting 25 hours a week at $9.25. Which means management's unstated goal on replacing the $10-$20 an hour guys with said kids is much more of a problem then the Internet.
The internet is actually helpful, because it's really hard for Amazon to compete with Home Depot on shipping concrete.
Slashdot Mirror
de facto right
Contradiction in terms.
Only if you believe American Constitutional theory trumps common usage. Even in the US when the government does something that it might not supposed to do, the most common question isn't the American Constitutional Theory correct "Is a health care mandate within the Powers granted by Constitution, without unconstitutionally interfering with the rights enumerated in the Amendments?" it's the theoretically incorrect "Do they really have the right to make you buy healthcare?"
Heck, we're both talking about North Koreans. Why would they give a fuck whether Thomas Jefferson thought a "de facto right" was self-contradictory?
How can the power to declare war be relevant to how the US responds to attacks on military infrastructure by foreign military units? Assuming it actually applies to cyber-attacks, pirate raids, or any other number of military attacks that don't involve full scale national mobilization, the war was already started by them.
I never said there weren't civilian administrative procedures. That's a strawman you're creating, apparently because the last time you actually thought about the President's military powers was the Sixth Grade. Every institution, civilian, military, educational, whatever has administrative procedures. The unique thing about military ones is that they start with the death sentence and go down, whereas civilian ones tend to start at nominal fines or being yelled at via paperwork and go up.
As for his power to command foreign banks, yes under US Law he has the power to command anyone to do anything within US Law. They don't necessarily have to obey, and the question as to whether the Courts would allow him to sanction the Royal Bank of Scotland for not freezing Col. Wu's account would actually be fairly interesting and involve statutory law; but if your argument is Obama does not have the right to send a nasty letter to RBC asking them to freeze a bank account and threatening DOOM if they disobey you're sadly mistaken.
US Banks are probably screwed. Just as Obama can enforce a quarantine via commander-in-chief in pretty much any way he wants (as long as he can convince the courts there's a commander-in-chief-style need for a quarantine), freezing Col. Wu's bank account is a perfectly reasonable to Colonel Wu fucking with Americans, so CitiBank better do that shit.
That sounds unfortunately close to what I thought, except with bigger words. And apparent total ignorance of what actual people like when they strongly believe in stories about mythic universal forces interacting as personified avatars. Indian Gods who are in love do not act like that.
Lucas really lost his touch this century.
That is the least relevant statute on the books.
Why?
Because the Founders clearly didn't want Congress to have any say over day-to-day military operations. They explicitly designed the President's powers to totally pre-empt any Congressional claim to such control. Their reasoning was quite simple: in 1789 there was no telegraph, so a message to Congress asking for authorization to deal with a Spanish Governor who was trying to eat a little bit of Georgia would not be dealt with by Congress until everyone was already dead. The local garrison commander had to have the ability to order his forces into combat without Congressional authorization. Since he gets his legal authority from the President, that means the President also has to have the authority to authorize small-scale military operations without asking Congress.
Congress's checks on the local Army commander's authority were the facts that a) Congress could eliminate his regiment in the next budget, which would fire him, and b) since all military officer-level jobs are Congressionally confirmed they could also refuse to let him have another job.
The Declaration of War clause doesn't actually justify give Congress much power over anything but a Total War we start, and couldn't apply here because if the Chinese are attacking us we get to attack them back. They have started the War.
The "Necessary and proper" clause, combined with the changes in technology that have made Congressional control possible, would a good enough rationalization for a sane Supreme Court. But we do not live in a world where the Supreme Court is sane. We live in a world where the Supreme Court is dominated by textual Federalists who think the solution to this problem is to go through the Amendment process.
Ever been in the military? Nothing involves more administrative procedures then military action. Even during our Civil War there were formal procedures to determine precisely what you were allowed to do to that dude on the gray coat.
As for your claims about statutory basis, I fully understand that Americans have this broad-based-delusion that Congress has a significant say over what the military actually does beyond a) the budget, and b) officer promotions; but there is simply no Constitutional basis for that claim. There's statutory basis, but the basis is generally "Congress pitched a huge hissy fit when President Jefferson used his powers to unilaterally invade the Barbary Pirates so he went along with it when they proposed a retroactive statute to authorize the operation." Then you get case law based on the resulting hissy-fit statutes, but here's the key thing:
Nobody ever claimed that anybody had the legal Power to Order the Fleet back into port after Jefferson sent them to Libya solely on his say-so. Nobody tried to make the legal case Nixon couldn't bomb Cambodia stand up in Court. The hissy-fit statutes like the War Powers Act are legitimate to the extent they are used by Congress to explain what, precisely, it intends to fund when it funds the military. They are clearly not legitimate to the extent that they could actually be used against a President in a Court of Law.
What's going on in this case is simple: it's established that Commanders-in-Chief can freeze the bank accounts of enemies of the US. This did require a statute, the PATRIOT Act, because it would not have been in the toolbox of an 18th-century monarch or George Washington. But now that it's established, and it's widely considered to have been a useful military tool against Al Qaeda, the administration can use it against anyone it thinks is a military opponent. Congress will bitch, because they always bitch.
But that doesn't mean PLA Col. Wu's attempt to get his bank account bank will actually work.
So he's got the power to unilaterally rule a US Citizen in Yemen is an enemy of the US, and blow up said citizen with a drone (incidentally killing several others), but he can't freeze the US bank account of a Chinese military officer whose busily hacking Americans?
When normal lawyers deal with the Commander-in-Chief clause, which has very few limits (the biggest is that it doesn't apply that often), they really get into trouble fast.
They can arrest you. If you show up in North Korea proper. They also have a de facto right to kidnap you from the streets of your home country.
It's true there are processes in place that prevent the vast majority of states from doing either without going through a lot of legal paperwork (ie: warrants, extradition), but the North Koreans are known for shit like kidnapping the dictator's favorite director from the South because he thought his domestic film industry sucked. And getting away with it.
This is ridiculous. Law is part of the agreement between citizens and their government. Citizens get certain benefits like public education and healthcare, and in return must pay the government taxes and obey their laws. If the citizen disagrees with this, he can resign his citizenship, but by doing so loses the benefits of citizenship as well.
Foreigners, on the other hand, have no such agreement, and therefore it's ridiculous to charge them. What's next, Saudi Arabia charges me for having a beer tonight? North Korea charges me for criticizing their regime? Should I serious have to look up every single country's law before I do something, just to make sure I'm not breaking some obscure country's law?
He's not charging them. He's not arresting them. He's got multiple sets of powers, and he isn't using the law enforcement one here because there is no actual statute passed by Congress to deal with the problem.
He's using his military powers, which are incredibly broad because the Founders really did not want Congress and the Supreme Court to stop expeditions against Tecumseh-types on any basis whatsoever. He has an enemy that is partly military (China's cyber-ops unit is in the military), so he's probably good as long as he doesn't start abusing the law.
Here's the nub of our disagreement:
You're conflating "good for the role," with "talented."
If the role does not involve a significant amount of character development, emoting, etc. it does not actually require talent. It does not even require acting. Megan Fox can be called a talented performer, but she has never demonstrated any skill whatsoever as an actress. She does not emote, her characters are one-dimensional (and the dimension is BOOBS!).
So you're claiming movie stars are necessarily more talented then my sister's friends because they have the same credentials as my sister's friends? And more importantly you're claiming Megan Fox and Jennifer Garner are talented?
Okey Dokey Smokey. If you say one woman who has two expressions, and another who has never actually acted on film in her life, are "talented" enough to be more talented then anyone then I'm not gonna argue with you. Movie stars are clearly by definition all insanely talented, even the ones who can't act, and the market for determining which comely young woman becomes a movie star is perfectly efficient. Gwyneth Paltrow would have become a super-famous movie star even if she hadn't met Spielberg as a tiny child.
You don;t know who I;m talking about when I mention my sister's friends.
I'm not saying that most of the hundreds of thousands of people in LA who went there to become movie stars are more talented then Meryl Streep. My sister is not friends with those hundreds of thousands of people, most of whom couldn't at their way out of a paper bag.
However she did go to the University of Michigan and was theatre major. Her friends were a combination of theatre and musical theatre majors. This requires some actual talent.
And any one of those people can out-act most movie stars, because most movie stars are not Meryl Streep. Most movie stars are people like Jennifer Garner and Megan Fox, who get roles primarily because they've got the name recognition to get some butts in the seats and can do one thing really well (Garner in particular is known for have two facial expressions).
What was his justification for wanting it stilted and formal?
The only thing I could think of was he didn't think of these characters as real characters, but rather personifications of a) teenage rebelliousness (Anikan) and b) duty (Amadala). Which meant no smiling.
You're missing the point because you're ignoring the context.
The question is whether it's better an actor to take the Mark Hamill/Hayden Christiansen role from a career standpoint. And the answer is almost certainly yes, because even the paid work of a couple blockbuster SciFi films at peanuts ($100k a pop) is more paid work then most actors get over a decade.
Now yes, there's plenty of unpaid work, and the unpaid work can theoretically become paid if you get the right exposure; but a) there are issues you aren't considering (for example, my sister refuses to admit she's doing unpaid work at all for fear of being thrown out of Actor's Equity) which make unpaid work risky, and b) taking unpaid work in independent films is compatible with both career strategies we're talking about, and c) there aren;t a lot of examples of people turning unpaid work into movie star status. Geek idols yes, movie stars who get three flicks a year at the high six figures per film? No.
I must have been confusing, because that was my point.
Lucas told them not to act.
The problem isn't just the lines. It's the delivery. She does not sound like a woman who is looking forward to an encounter with a lover, she sounds like a woman who is reading her grocery list out loud. And since Portman can actually emote pretty damn well, that means the problem was the director told her to tone down the emoting to the point she sounds more like a PA announcer then a human being.
Lucas remembered the big things that made Star Wars special (ie: massive cool universe, great special effects, and a powerful storyline), but he forgot to take care of the little things that would make it a good movie. So dialogue and characterization sucked.
Both Harry and Hermione have gotten pretty good careers out of Harry Potter. Twilight's stars KStew and that Patkison guy have also had careers. Granted they haven't won Oscars, but they're getting decent parts in major flicks. Stewart actually almost had her own franchise, until she got fired for sleeping with the director. Who kept his job.
The Stars Wars actors haven't. I suspect in the second trilogy it's because Lucas's direction sucked. It's supposed to be a love story about a dutiful young woman falling for rebellious yet charismatic young Jedi, and the tragedy that befalls them both. But IIRC (and I may not, because I refused to see that piece of shit twice) they didn't even smile at each-other. Portman adopted a "It is Amadala's duty to fuck this young man, therefore we shall hold hands solemnly" demeanor the whole damn time, and that guy was all "As an angsty teenager I never experience any emotion but barely concealed rage." Dude she's your girlfriend. She may be the only thing that makes you smile, but if she doesn't make you smile it's time for a new girlfriend.
Which is so obviously wrong that it can only be the result of the director telling them that their characters do not like each-other.
What's the alternative to being Mark Hamill?
Statistically speaking it's being the guy who drives the tractor in scene 13. Seriously.
My sister is a fairly serious actress in the theatre. She's good enough that she had sufficient paid work to get her union card in NYC. She's considered moving to LA, because most of her acquaintances in the craft in LA actually act as their primary gig; but they don't actually get to do the shit she considers acting (ie: develop characters). They are extras, and on a really good day they get a line and become a glorified extra. They have the talent to be better then most movie stars, but that's really common in LA. To get the good roles you need somebody whose important in the business to tell all his other important buddies you aren't slightly-above-replacement-level-talent, you;re an amazing actor who just needs a good break.
So if you have a photogenic, somewhat talented (but not great), client with few of the connections that would allow him to grab a really great role; you damn well get him to take six figures to act in Star Wars. He's likely to not have a career after that unless he's got a great contact in the business whose willing to vouch for him to directors, but he wasn't likely to get any roles at all without that contact anyway.
Who do you think makes rockets? The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace workers.
Who do you think processes rocket fuel? The Steelworkers.
Who do you think designs the damn things in government labs? Government employees, most of whom are unionized.
The current Republican party will never fund any of these groups, partly because some of them are Evil Unions, and partly because the lesson the GOP base learned from the Bush years was that government spending is an evil in it's own right.
You wanna know what an MD in her first year of residency has? A 350% debt-to-personal-GDP ratio. Post-residency she's still in the 150-200% range. You wanna know what a 19-year-old home depot cashier at $9.25 an hour has? No debt at all. You wanna guess which one of those women will have a more financially stable future?
Compare that to the US. Yes we have a lot of debt. but we have it mostly because some idiot insisted on cutting taxes without cutting spending, financed two major wars 100% via debt, and then didn't notice that light touch mortgage regulations were about to cripple the economy and fuck everyone over. That a) tanked Federal revenue, while b) drastically increasing social spending because unemployed people qualify for a lot more food stamps, which would have been bad enough if that idiot hadn't already had us running a sizable deficit.
Now if any of us actually gave a shit about the deficit (rather then giving a shit about manipulating people to support our other policy positions) it would be trivial to fix. Raise the income tax five points, fire the Army because we've got Marines, abolish NASA, implement a massive Federal VAT, or any number of ideas could fix it single-handed.
But like I said, nobody who claims to care about the deficit actually cares about the deficit. They care about manipulating moderates into supporting their social-engineering scheme to either a) cut government spending because it's a threat to freedom and the American way of life, or b) jack up the income tax rate because inequality is a threat to freedom and the American way of life.
Which one are you?
What in my post implied Putin cares what ordinary Americans think? I mentioned him trying to appease a Russian domestic audience with a space station, and potential difficulties he'd have reining in the Donbass rebels, but I said nothing about Western public opinion.
BTW, your premise is wrong to an extent at least. All my comments got a -1 troll, the AC posting that Russia was a superpower got to +4 insightful, and everyone criticizing that blessed comment also got -1 troll. Which means the Kremlin apparently loosed it's merry band of paid internet trolls on Slashdot.
You could actually. $10 Billion a year for 10 years is peanuts in the context of a $Trillion budget.
The issue is that poisonous combination of a) deficit hawks, and b) partisan gridlock which makes it impossible to do anything that costs money. c), the ideological elites absolute commitment to low taxes on itself means that even during flush times (ie: the late '90s- early 2000s) it won't happen.
If you want the government to buy nice things that are not tax cuts you have to vote in the Democratic primaries so that the Dem who wins is not one of those free-market obsessives who are honestly convinced the economy grows much faster with a top tax rate of 38%; and then you have to vote for that guy in the General election.
"Leading" is a relative term in a world dominated by the US. We're a fifth of the economy. We're most of the military spending. We have the most advanced weapons. Our culture is known world-wide. The Chinese could compete with us, if they get a few more years of 8% growth and they can figure out their aging population problem. The Europeans could also compete with us, if they'd ever get off their damn asses and give their precious sovereign right to veto every-damn-thing to the EU.
Russia clearly belongs in the next tier, right along with the Japanese and other regional powers. But it's not like Russia can bail out small Latin American countries without noticing the hit to it's budget. But the top tier clearly could. So could the Japanese.
He would have confirmed this with Obama if he was still on his game. He clearly needs something to show his people that Russia is a leading nation among the entire world, and not just a regional power in Eastern Europe, and what better way then say "we're collaborating with the US on a space station no other two countries could build?"
Putin desperation is either good or bad. If he decides he can declare victory in Donbass and calm things down (and he has the political muscle to keep the Ukrainian separatists in line) it's good for the US. If he decides he needs some other victory to appease his critics then it could get really iffy, potentially nuclear war iffy if he starts supporting separatists in Latvia (which is 25% Russian) or something similarly suicidal.
"British system of 1789," so any present tense discussion of the British government is irrelevant.
And yes, in 1789 the Brits had a an upper chamber selected by the groups intended to run the nation (the House of Lords) and a frequently re-elected lower House that was intended to be the voice of the People (the Commons). The Upper was supposed to cool the relatively hot tempers of the lower, veto any attempts to replace the elite by popular vote, and generally wear the man pants.
The differences between Senate election (at the time Senators were appointed by the State Legislature), and inheriting a Peerage is precisely analogous to the difference between Presidential elections (by a House of Electors appointed by those states) and inheriting the Crown.
Depends on the market.
My job at Home Depot is probably more threatened by the current management's obsession with cutting labor costs then larger market conditions.
Lots of people, including contractors, would rather go a store with six locations in the County that has everything they need, with better then 50% chance of having a guy who can warn them about the tricky bits; then buy from a company with no locations in Cuyahoga County; or buy from a location with a 100% chance of having that smart guy on the other side of the fucking County. Especially since the specialty shop on the other side of the County is likely to have higher costs, because half it's staff aren't kids just out of high school thrilled to be getting 25 hours a week at $9.25. Which means management's unstated goal on replacing the $10-$20 an hour guys with said kids is much more of a problem then the Internet.
The internet is actually helpful, because it's really hard for Amazon to compete with Home Depot on shipping concrete.