Julia #AntiChristoFascist

Troy – I remember laughing a bit at Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom back then with their overly pathetic ways, but in retrospect it was a great movie. Hector (Eric Bana) was the real hero. And Helen was German, just to get it out of the way. 1. The whole war was started by one man’s inability to resist temptation – and sustained by another man’s wounded ego. Paris steals another king’s wife because he can’t help himself. Achilles withdraws the best army in Greece because Agamemnon bruised his pride. Thousands die for these two reasons. The Iliad is not a celebration of war. It is the oldest and most honest account of why wars actually happen – vanity, lust, and the management failure of great men. 2. Achilles is not a hero. He is a weapon with feelings. The greatest warrior in the world spends half the film sulking in his tent while his countrymen die. His moment of peak destruction comes not from duty or courage but from grief and rage. He is extraordinary and catastrophically selfish. The film knows this even when the audience doesn’t. 3. Hector is everything Achilles is not. He didn’t want the war. He told Paris to return Helen before the ships left. He fights not for glory but because Troy is his – his city, his father, his wife, his son. He stands at the gates knowing he will lose, because his people’s courage depends on his. He dies for the same reason all the best men die in all the best stories – because someone had to, and he wouldn’t send anyone else. 4. The scene before Hector faces Achilles — saying goodbye to Andromache and his infant son — is the emotional center of the entire film. Not the battles. Not the gods. A husband and a father who knows what is coming and goes anyway. Eric Bana in thirty seconds makes every Brad Pitt slow-motion combat sequence look like what it is: spectacle. Hector is the substance. 5. Agamemnon is the political lesson – the man who uses other men’s causes to advance his own. He doesn’t care about Menelaus’s honor. He wants Troy’s position, trade routes, gold. The noble justification is the packaging. The empire is the product. Every leader who ever sent other people’s sons to die for reasons he couldn’t state publicly. 6. Paris is the most honest character precisely because he is so consistently useless. He started the catastrophe, hides behind Hector throughout, survives everything, and ends up killing Achilles with a lucky arrow. History is full of Parises – the reckless, charming, consequence-free man whose disasters are cleaned up by better men until there are no better men left. 7. The film was dismissed as Hollywood excess. In retrospect it is one of the last major productions that took the original moral seriously: that the most important thing on the battlefield is not who wins, but who deserved to. Troy fell. Hector was right. And the man who was right, who fought for the right things, in the right way, for the right people – died first. The Iliad has been saying this for three thousand years. We keep making films about Achilles anyway.

THE BARBARIANS ARE INSIDE THE GATE! We are fighting right now in Congress over whether we're going to maintain our status as a constitutional republic OR trade that in, dismantle the foundations and GO DOWN THIS DARK ROAD OF DEATH TO COMMUNISM. THAT is the question.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries told colleagues he will oppose Rep. Thomas Massie's amendment to the appropriations bill that would cut off all U.S. aid to Israel.

Protestors in Maine are now surrounding Susan Collins’ office after ICE murdered a 26-year-old Colombian man who was authorized to work in the US and had a social security number. Collins voted to give ICE $70 billion.