This song is about an incident that resulted in eleven Italians being lynched in 1891 in New Orelans. Wikipedia has a long article about the lynching. Seems New Orleans is where the Mafia got started in the USA, not New York.
Molly's Game | Official Trailer | Own it Now on Digital HD, Blu-ray™ & DVD
A very great story. Molly Bloom was an Olympic class skier until she had an accident and through an odd chain of circumstances, she ends up hosting poker games. I don't really understand the attraction of gambling myself. I played poker at a friend's house a few times when I lived in Houston, but for me the cards were just excuse to hang out with my friends and drink beer.
The best part of the show was just the idea of people playing poker for those kind of stakes (think of some big number, it doesn't matter if it's accurate, there's probably someone who bet it). If I think about it, there must be a few people who do it, and maybe I just don't hang with those people. I wonder if there is some fundamental difference and what that difference might be. Or maybe it's just that some people like to gamble, and some people don't.
Still, I'm thinking there might be a hundred thousand people in the country who could afford to play in those games, people for whom losing $10K would be no more than a minor annoyance. Of course not every one who has ten million dollars is a dedicated poker player, and a dedicated poker player might very well buy his way into a $10K game with his last $10K.
Molly is a dynamo. No nonsense, straight shooter, straight to the point. She is so direct it's almost painful.
We watched the movie over the weekend, three hours at one stretch was a bit much on account we'd had a rough day. It was great.
In case you haven't seen it, here's a couple sentences from the intro to Wikipedia's article. I'm thinking this should be enough to get you up to speed:
The film follows Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), a truck driver who becomes a hitman involved with mobster Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) and his crime family, including his time working for the powerful Teamster Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino).
Should I put in a spoiler warning? How do you know if something is a spoiler or not? Near as I can tell, what spoils it for one person is an enticement for another. Now maybe someone has done some research (or just thought about it a lot) and figured out how to tell which is which. Just I've never heard of him, or her, and even if they had, I'm not gonna read their lessons, I'm just going to charge on blindly.
Many of the characters in the film were real life people. I'll have to take the word of the story teller's about the mob guys (they're all in Wikipedia), but I remember the name Hoffa and George Meany of the AFL-CIO. I remember that, I didn't have to look it up. Sure, I did look it up, but that was only to check, but that's just the kind of thing I do, I'm trying to be accurate.
Anyway, must of been what was in the news. I was like 12 years old when JFK was shot. I remember the neighbor girl was crying about it. Didn't make me feel like crying. I didn't know the guy and Dallas was a heck of a long way away. Never mind that six years later when I turned 18 we landed on the moon. That's the thing about this movie, we keep revisiting times I remember. Pretty cool, actually.
The first thing I noticed was Frank's experience as a soldier. He was in combat in WW2, he was in it up to his neck, carrying a rifle around in Italy and shooting Germans. So right off we know he knows how to follow orders and kill people.
After the war, and after he's been home for awhile, he gets to meet a neighborhood bigshot. Frank comes in with his hat in his hand, all humble like, showing proper respect. And it's appreciated.
According to the movie, the Chicago Mob got JFK elected and they expected a favor in return, that favor being kicking the Commies out of Cuba. When JFK muffed the Bay-Of-Pigs invasion, the mob got pissed and had JFK whacked.
When the mob boss (Russell Bufalino, played by Joe Pesci) tells Frank that Hoffa needs to be killed (not that he ever says it so many words), he implies that the order has come down from on high, someone higher than the mob boss. We are never given a name, just someone higher up. So maybe there is an Illuminati who all the mob bosses report to, or maybe this mob boss spoke to God, or maybe he just made it up.
I think there was another point I wanted to make, but I can't conjure it right now. Maybe I'll think of it in a bit.
Now I remember (I went back and added links to the text), it was the lifestyle, the clothes, the cars, the nights out at the fancy clubs. Whatever happened to that? Did we run out of money, or would we rather just sit at home and consume packaged entertainment? Or was that something that came out of winning the war and we were all strutting peacocks, but then the feathers lost their allure and people wandered off in search of new campaigns to fight? Or maybe we belong to tribes we no longer believe in.
The primal author of the ‘stay-behind-armies’, Williams informs us, was General Reinhard Gehlen, the head of German military intelligence during the Second World War. Having foreseen early on that the Reich was doomed to defeat, Gehlen had “concocted the idea of forming clandestine guerilla squads composed of Hitler youth and die-hard fascist fanatics” ostensibly to fend off the inevitable Soviet invasion. These guerilla units he referred to as ‘werewolves’.
Not ones to miss a fascist opportunity when they saw it, the US Office of Strategic Services (the OSS, and the forerunner of the CIA), under the leadership of William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, quickly enlisted both Gehlen and SS General Karl Wolff (in 1945) in forming the Gehlen Organization (later to transform into the present-day German BND) and which received its initial funding from US Army G-2 intelligence resources.
The American point-man on this was Allen Dulles, the first president (in 1927) of the Council on Foreign Relations, and later the first head of the CIA. Duly incorporated into the American fold, the ‘werewolves’ were, given that their initial meddling took place in Italy, rebranded as ‘gladiators’. Operation Gladio was born.
In 1947 the CIA (having, that year, superseded the OSS) was faced with its first daunting task, i.e. how to prevent the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from forming the next government. Elections were scheduled for 1948 and the PCI was a virtual shoe-in not just in Italy proper, but in Sicily as well. Fortunately, ‘Gladio’ was ready and waiting. The gladiators had been training in a special camp set up in Sardinia under the local command of the former WW2 Italian fascist leader, Prince Junio Valerio Borghese.
In addition, hundreds of American mafioso began to arrive on the shores of Italy to lend a hand with the communist ‘problem’. The arrival of the ‘made men’ was the result of Donovan’s efforts from 1943 onward in working with American mobsters Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano and Vito Genovese to conger new (drug) funding for the OSS’s off-books’ operations, and to reinstall the Sicilian mafia on the island in the leadup to Operation Husky (the Allied invasion of Sicily). These forces were now unleashed on the Italian electorate, and through 1948 an average of five people a week were murdered by the CIA-backed terrorist units. The results were grimly predictable. Hallelujah, the PCI were defeated and the Christian Democrats returned to power.
This sounds fantastical enough that it could either be a complete fabrication or the unvarnished truth, so I looked up the names to see if they really existed. I found links for them all and added them to the above text.
From this you could conjure a theory that the War On Drugs exists only to keep drug prices high so the CIA can make enough money to keep funding their counter-communist efforts. Since the so-called communists are not really communists, they are freedom hating, tyrannical dictatorships, you might think that the prosecution and imprisonment of drug dealers and smugglers is all being done in the name of freedom (!?!). Golly, this sounds like Ollie North and the Contras.
The news media makes a lot of noise about addiction, but I wonder how much of a problem it really is. If you look at the estimates of how much heroin and cocaine are being imported, it looks like either everyone is getting stoned every day -or- some people are using a heck of a lot, like a gram a day. I don't think everyone is getting stoned, so there must be large population of heavy drug users.
As for busts (arrests), I wouldn't be surprised if it was just the newcomers who are getting busted. The old established outfits don't want any competition, so they are happy to tip off the cops whenever they get wind of an upstart trying to horn in on their racket.
P.S. I remember seeing a movie or a series that was set during the end of WW2 in Germany, and werewolves, as in "die-hard fascist fanatics", were a bit of a problem. I think there was a train involved, but I cannot remember much more than that.
It's about god damn time we normalized relations with Cuba. Anyone who disagrees is either a moron or is in cahoots with the Mafia (that covers at least half the people in this country). The Google has all the links I could want about the Mafia in Cuba. Remember, the Mafia killed Kennedy.
Some people say we shouldn't be dealing with a police state like Cuba. I say that's a little like the pot calling the kettle black. We have the biggest security organization in the world. OK, China's is probably bigger in terms of manpower, but ours is no slouch. Future wars are going to be cyber-wars fought by secret security organizations. Terrorists just serve to keep people distracted while the king monkeys steal all the monkey biscuits.
P.S. North Korean leadership has no sense of humor. Wait, that can't be true, everyone has a sense of humor. I wonder what makes them laugh? I'll bet seeing SONY fall on their face got a few chuckles out of them.
The Sicilian Girl is a movie based on a true story about a girl who speaks out against the Mafia in Italy.
What's the difference between the rule of law and the mafia? Supposedly one is less subject to corruption than the other, but which one? The law holds that only the state has the right to kill people. Killing someone without the permission of the state is a crime. But what happens when the state is corrupt?
Although he acknowledges that the mafia once performed a useful function in Sicilian society in the early 20th century, by protecting the interests of local peasants against the corruption of Italian national police, those purer aims were lost when drug trafficking became the chief profit center for Sicilian crime bosses.
People are insane. I wonder if the people who originally promoted the idea of making drugs illegal knew what they were doing. Did they know that by prohibiting them they would create an immensely profitable black market, and enslave a whole sub-section of society to a culture that constantly works to undermine the law? I suspect that the most vocal proponents of banning drugs were willing dupes who actually believed that prohibition would be good for society. But I am also sure they were instigators who knew exactly what they were doing, which was to create a system that would gain them more money and power.
