Articles of Distraction

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Neither is Blowout, The Taking of Pelham 123, Grease, Get Shorty, Be Cool, Face/Off, etc, etc.

Every actor - even greats like Tom Hanks and Gary Oldman - has a few clunkers in their career. Travolta's certainly not an Olivier, but he's a dependably competent actor who has made plenty of good, solidly entertaining films. And I don't think the house looks hilarious.

Not getting the hate.

Boru

^This.

There aren't many actors with lengthy careers who have not mis-stepped along the way.  Sometimes they were simply the wrong person for the part.

From Sweathog to livin' large, there have been stinkers.  

Tarantino utilized great casting.  I can't imagine anyone other than Travolta and Samuel L. in the main roles.  Not a fan of Uma Thurman, but that worked out well too.

I think this hate is the whole Scientology thing, which I don't focus on when looking for entertainment.  

YMMV

Exactly. I don’t dislike, for example, Tom Cruise because he’s a Scientologist. I dislike him because he’s a shit actor.

Boru

[Angrboda]

A decade earlier, a team of Venezuelan police officers, out on a routine patrol along a beach in the state of Aragua, spotted a luxury yacht floating placidly off the coast. When they boarded the vessel, one of the officers later told the Venezuelan journalist Ronna Rísquez, a passenger identified himself as Héctor Guerrero Flores. The officers knew him by his nom de guerre: El Niño Guerrero, the head of the prison gang Tren de Aragua. He was supposed to be in pretrial detention in Tocorón, a prison thirty miles away, for multiple alleged crimes, including attempted murder. Guerrero produced a document from the ministry of prisons that granted him permission to travel. When the officers called their bosses, the order they received was unequivocal: “Withdraw.”

At the time, many of Venezuela’s prisons were governed from the inside by an inmate known as a pran—which, according to some sources, is an acronym that roughly translates to “natural-born killer.” The gang that forms around him is called a carro, or car. It operates outside the prison through affiliated groups, controlling territory and generating revenue through extortion and drug sales. According to Andrés Antillano, a professor of criminology at the Central University of Venezuela, these cars, strung together in the service of the pran, make up a tren, or train. There are several such operations across the country, each bearing the name of the state or region where it operates.

Tren de Aragua, which was founded by Guerrero and four close associates, first came to the attention of Venezuelan law enforcement around 2014. Aragua, an industrial state with a large military presence, offered a number of geographic and material advantages to a burgeoning criminal enterprise. Money flowed to Tren de Aragua from gold mines that it controlled and from taxes that its members imposed on local businesses. In other states across the country, convicts were funnelled into a range of different facilities, but in Aragua the system was more centralized, and the main prison was Tocorón. As a result, the gang was able to rapidly grow its ranks: virtually everyone sentenced for criminal activity would, at some point, need to submit to the authority of its pran.

By 2017, a sharp drop in oil prices, coupled with catastrophic government mismanagement, had led to extreme inflation and an economic collapse in Venezuela. There were food shortages and power outages; a bottle of ketchup might cost nine dollars, while the monthly minimum wage was six dollars. More than seven million Venezuelans have fled the country in the past decade, an exodus that has reshaped life and politics across Latin America.

For criminal organizations, mass migration created a new business model. Tren de Aragua, Rísquez writes, managed “to follow those who emigrated, by land, to other countries in Latin America, mixing in with them and applying their strategies to impose control in each place they reached.” Starting in 2018, authorities in Peru, Colombia, Chile, and Brazil reported incidents involving Tren de Aragua. The gang’s operations were expanding to include the trafficking of migrants and prostitution. A few years later, the body of a former Venezuelan military officer and opposition figure was found in a suitcase in Santiago. Chilean prosecutors accused Tren de Aragua of carrying out the hit.

But, for the most part, the gang’s influence outside Venezuela amounted to disparate groups operating under the Tren de Aragua banner, either as minor partners in smuggling or drug-dealing rings or as something more akin to franchisees—independently run local organizations that used the name of the broader brand. One of the enduring principles of gangland public relations is that there’s no such thing as bad press; in fact, the more people talk about a criminal group, the easier it becomes to intimidate potential victims. “Tren de Aragua is phantasmagorical,” Antillano told me. “It’s everywhere. It has no face, no clear expression. It can be molded.”

In 2022, when record numbers of Venezuelans began making the overland journey to Central America and the United States, Tren de Aragua was reported to be active on the outskirts of the Darién Gap, a treacherous jungle linking Colombia and Panama. That October, the Department of Homeland Security got its first tip about Tren de Aragua, from an investigation in Lima, Peru. “We were seeing criminal activity following the Venezuelan diaspora,” a former high-ranking D.H.S. official told me. It would be a year before government intelligence suggested that the gang was present in the U.S. Another former D.H.S. official told me that the department ultimately estimated that there were about a thousand potential members in the country. “Even then,” he said, “the connections to the gang were weak or spurious.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/...-the-state

[Angrboda]

Brower regularly spoke out during the first year of Israel’s war in Gaza as protests mounted on Gonzaga’s campus and beyond. She joined protests calling for Palestinians’ rights, called out Gonzaga’s connections to defense contractors, and spoke at a campus walkout where she praised students’ “moral clarity”.

But tensions around her activism were escalating. Someone ripped off signs she had put outside her office reading “peace and liberation for all” and “let Gaza live”. She caught campus security taking photos of her office, leading to a heated exchange. Colleagues she did not personally know accused her of “Holocaust denial” on faculty email lists. A sticker affixed to her office door called her an “extremist”.

Then in December 2024, while she was off for winter break, Brower received an email from the university’s Office of Inclusive Excellence notifying her that a colleague had filed a complaint accusing her of violating institutional policy and that the university would conduct “a prompt, thorough, and impartial investigation of these allegations”.

When Brower pressed the administration for details of the allegations raised against her, the administrator who contacted her denied her request. “I was completely in the dark,” she added.

The interview took place nearly a month later, and to Brower, it felt hostile and deeply uncomfortable. “I was told at the very start, you are presumed innocent, basically until proven guilty,” she recalled. “But the experience of going through the process felt as if they were presuming guilt from the get-go.”

It was not until the investigation was closed in July that Brower was read the charges she had faced. It turned out the complainant had accused her of antisemitism for attending a student-run protest in which other speakers used the word “genocide” in reference to Israel’s actions in Gaza. They complained that she had shared with a faculty mailing list a letter signed by hundreds of Gonzaga students accusing the university of having fallen into a “sinister trap of division, silence, and censorship” over the war – phrasing that the complainant claimed was antisemitic. And they pointed to another letter signed by 70 faculty members criticizing the university’s response to student protests, which Brower forwarded to the same list at a time “too close” to the anniversary of the 7 October Hamas attacks, she was told.

The university should have quickly concluded that “this is not a claim worth investigating”, Brower said of the allegations. Instead, she said they tried to use the complaint “as a sort of backdoor mechanism to shut me up”.

When she sat down for her interview, Brower quickly concluded that the investigator assigned to her case had “very little understanding of the conflict between Israel and Palestine or the ideological conflict about how we talk about these things in the US”.

According to Brower, notes by an attorney who joined her at the meeting and a summary of the interview provided by the university, the investigator asked whether Brower had spoken about the “Jewish people as committing genocide” – to which she replied that she had used the word “genocide” in reference to the Israeli government’s actions and that she would never say “a people” are committing genocide. “They asked me questions that intentionally conflated Jewish people with Israel,” Brower said, suggesting the investigator did not have a grasp of the issues at the heart of the matter. “They did this thing that made it very difficult to clearly answer questions – I think because the investigator themselves didn’t really understand what they were investigating.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...tisemitism

[Angrboda]

Is “radical-left” violence really on the rise in America?

ON SEPTEMBER 10th Charlie Kirk, a right-wing activist, was shot dead while speaking at a university in Utah. Although a suspect is in custody, the motive of the killer is still unknown. President Donald Trump, who has himself been the target of gunmen, pinned the blame on rhetoric from the “radical left”. Assessing political violence in America is inherently subjective: analysts must determine which forms of violence count as political and assign ideological labels to attackers or victims. But the studies and datasets available—largely compiled by researchers whom sceptical conservatives would probably dismiss as biased—suggest that the killing of Mr Kirk is not representative of broader trends.

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Data from CSIS also show that after a lull in the early 2000s, terrorist attacks and plots against government targets—including politicians and state employees—are rising again. The increase in those motivated by partisan political beliefs is particularly striking: between 2016 and 2025 there were 25 such incidents compared with just two in the previous 22 years.

That marks a shift from earlier eras. Some social movements in the 1960s were brutally violent but not partisan, notes Lilliana Mason of Johns Hopkins University: “It wasn’t that Democrats were on one side of it and Republicans were on the other.”

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Researchers stress that violent attacks remain rare. “The amount of actual political violence that has occurred is nowhere near what it was in the 1960s,” says Ms Mason. She also sees a different trend: attacks against political figures to get attention, not to advance a cause. “A lot of these are people who probably would have committed violence in some way,” she says. “It’s just that our politics has kind of aimed them towards political targets.”

[Angrboda]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/20...-kff-poll/

[Paraselene]

Madonna announces new album and says she’s heading ‘back to the dance floor’

Pink

[Paraselene]

Gay heavy metal legend Rob Halford gets hitched to long-term partner

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