I'm interested in international relations, American foreign policy, climate change, US presidential elections, public debate, Kansas Jayhawks basketball, film, and major league baseball.
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| Photo taken by RAP in LA, August 15, 2025 |
The graphic below identifies the top 25+ films from 2025 that critics ranked on their end-of-year "best of" lists. The full list goes to 100 and if you are interested in seeing it, I'm sourcing the list from the same website as I used last year. I'm fairly certain that the methodology for compilation is the same. Here's the detail I posted last year:
Films are sorted by the percentage of lists they are included on.* This is typically the same as sorting by number of lists included, but can vary when films make lists across multiple years. For example, if one film makes 10 lists in a year with 100 lists available, it’s ranking will be higher than a film that makes 15 lists when 200 lists are available. The times a film appears at the top of a list is used as a tie-breaker.
“This raid wasn’t about public safety,” [Chicago] Mayor Brandon Johnson said several days later. “It was certainly not about immigration. This was about a show of authoritarianism, a forceful display of tyranny.”
This political violence is not a series of isolated incidents and does not emerge organically. Instead, it is a culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society. A new law enforcement strategy that investigates all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies — including the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions behind them — is required.
There is no data to support these claims. A recent think tank study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies report noted a recent uptick in left-wing political violence, but there were only a small number of total deaths this century and their data revealed that the right had been responsible for far more political violence for several previous decades. The death tally for the last decade was 112 killed by the right, 13 by the left. See Figure 3 and Table 1 if you click that link. That's 125 people total, or around a dozen per year.
Portland, Oregon, where it looks like a war zone. And I get a call from the liberal governor, sir, please don't come in, we don't need you. I said, well, unless they're playing false tapes, this looked like World War II. Your place is burning down.
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| White Flame Brewing, Hudsonville |
