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Casino Royale

The readers know that I like watching videos on DVD.

I am not a streamer.  Never found the need for it.  Call me an old fogey; ok boomer; or any other insipid names but that is no matter.

I watch what I own.  That too is a perhaps tad parsimonious, perhaps uninspired choice on my part...but if I like to rewatch what I own then hey - what say you?

So with that I pushed in my HD DVD of the first incarnation of Daniel Craig as 007 in the DVD player and enjoyed two and half hours of fantastical action interspersed with witty dialog.

'Casino Royale' has been remade with Craig playing a revised script.  As we face the Covid madness and its impact on our planet and the various trajectories the global leaders are taking their respective citizenry I am struck with some of the parallels with this movie.

No one has the right answer.  Some are smarter at addressing the challenge with imperfect information and some are worse.   The Americans clearly are the latter.

In the film, onboard a train the Moneypenny aka Vesper character asks Bond (who MI6 has decided to sponsor with $10M buyin to play at a poker game in Montenegro which the villain is attending) if he realizes he is gambling with the treasury's money in playing poker against a madman who is funded by terrorists.

To quote her - 'I hope you have given thought to the notion that if you lose our government would have directly financed terrorism'.

The parallel is the way the US government is doling out its stimulus.  Without much preparation and anchored with some serious partisan dimwits at the helm, trillions of USD are being directed to supposedly stop the reverberations of this pandemic. Some are indirectly going to end up in the wrong hands for all the wrong reasons.

A recent news story suggests that FEMA signed with a company with no background in making masks and which is bankrupt to source masks by paying them millions.  More anecdotes abound.  SBA loans were scooped up by many undeserving entities, with ties to Washington lobbyists.

When Bond's character asks about his involvement in betting at the game to defeat the villain - 'so you don't think this is a very good plan do you?',  she retorts - 'so there is a plan? I got the impression we were risking millions of dollars and hundreds of lives on a game of luck!'

Are we?

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