The New Republic
The New Republic is an American magazine of commentary on politics and the arts, published since 1914, with influence on American political and cultural thinking. Founded in 1914 by leaders of the progressive movement, it attempted to find a balance between a humanitarian progressivism and an intellectual scientism, discarded the latter. Through the 1980s and'90s, the magazine incorporated elements of "Third Way" neoliberalism and conservatism. In 2014, two years after Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, purchased the magazine, he ousted its editor and attempted to remake its format and partisan stances, provoking the resignation of the majority of its editors and writers. In early 2016, Hughes announced he was putting the magazine up for sale, indicating the need for "new vision and leadership", it was sold in February 2016 to Win McCormack. Domestically, The New Republic as of 2011 supported a modern liberal stance on fiscal and social issues, according to former editor Franklin Foer, who stated that it "invented the modern usage of the term'liberal', it's one of our historical legacies and obligations to be involved in the ongoing debate over what liberalism means and stands for."
As of 2004, some, like Anne Kossedd and Steven Rendall, contended that it was not as liberal as it had been before 1974. The magazine's outlook was associated with the Democratic Leadership Council and "New Democrats" such as former US President Bill Clinton and Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman, who received the magazine's endorsement in the 2004 Democratic primary; the magazine endorsed Barack Obama in the 2008 general election. Prior to 2014, while defending federal programs like Medicare and the EPA, it advocated some policies that, while seeking to achieve the ends of traditional social welfare programs used market solutions as their means, so were called "business-friendly". Typical of some of the policies supported by both The New Republic and the DLC during the 1990s were increased funding for the Earned Income Tax Credit program and reform of the Federal welfare system, supply-side economics the idea of reducing higher marginal income tax rates, which received heavy criticism from senior editor Jonathan Chait.
In its current incarnation, The New Republic is in favor of universal health care. On certain high-profile social issues, such as its support of same-sex marriage, The New Republic could be considered more progressive than the mainstream of the Democratic Party establishment. In its March 2007 issue, The New Republic ran an article by Paul Starr where he provided a definition of modern democratic liberalism: Liberalism wagers that a state... can be strong but constrained – strong because constrained... Rights to education and other requirements for human development and security aim to advance equal opportunity and personal dignity and to promote a creative and productive society. To guarantee those rights, liberals have supported a wider social and economic role for the state, counterbalanced by more robust guarantees of civil liberties and a wider social system of checks and balances anchored in an independent press and pluralistic society; the New Republic does not focus on domestic policy, as it brings analysis and commentary of various international affairs.
Support for Israel was a strong theme in The New Republic under Martin Peretz, the former owner of The New Republic: "Support for Israel is deep down an expression of America's best view of itself." According to journalism professor Eric Alterman: Nothing has been as consistent about the past 34 years of The New Republic as the magazine's devotion to Peretz's own understanding of what is good for Israel... It is not too much to say that all of Peretz's political beliefs are subordinate to his commitment to Israel's best interests, these interests as Peretz defines them always involve more war. Unsigned editorials prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq expressed strong support for military action, citing the threat of weapons of mass destruction as well as humanitarian concerns. Since the end of major military operations, unsigned editorials, while critical of the handling of the war, have continued to justify the invasion on humanitarian grounds, but no longer maintain that Iraq's WMD facilities posed any threat to the United States.
In the November 27, 2006 issue, the editors wrote: At this point, it seems beside the point to say this: The New Republic regrets its early support for this war. The past three years have complicated our idealism and reminded us of the limits of American power and our own wisdom. On June 23, 2006, in response to criticism of the magazine from the blog Daily Kos, Martin Peretz wrote the following as a summary of The New Republic's stances on then-recent issues: The New Republic is much against the Bush tax programs, against Bush Social Security "reform", against cutting the inheritance tax, for radical health care changes, passionate about Gore-type environmentalism, for a woman's entitlement to an abortion, for gay marriage, for an increase in the minimum wage, for pursuing aggressively alternatives to our present reliance on oil and our present tax preferences for gas-guzzling automobiles. We were against the confirmation of Justice Alito; the magazine has published two articles concerning income inequality criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States.
In its May 2007 issue the magazine ran an editorial pointing to the humanitarian beliefs of liberals as being responsible for the recent plight of the American left. In another article The New Republic fav
2004 United States presidential election
The 2004 United States presidential election was the 55th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 2, 2004. Incumbent Republican President George W. Bush defeated Democratic nominee John Kerry, a United States Senator from Massachusetts. Bush and incumbent Vice President Dick Cheney were renominated by their party with no difficulty. Former Governor Howard Dean emerged as the early front-runner in the 2004 Democratic primaries, but Kerry won the first set of primaries in January 2004 and clinched his party's nomination in March after a series of primary victories. Kerry chose Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, who had himself sought the party's 2004 presidential nomination, to be his running mate. Bush's popularity had soared early in his first term after the September 11 attacks, but his popularity declined between 2001 and 2004. Foreign policy was the dominant theme throughout the election campaign Bush's conduct of the War on Terrorism and the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Bush presented himself as a decisive leader and attacked Kerry as a "flip-flopper", while Kerry criticized Bush's conduct of the Iraq War. Domestic issues were debated as well, including the economy and jobs, health care, same-sex marriage and embryonic stem cell research. Bush won by a slim margin, taking 286 electoral votes, he swept the South and the Mountain States and took the crucial swing states of Ohio and New Mexico. Some aspects of the election process were subject to controversy, but not to the degree seen in the 2000 presidential election. Bush was the first candidate since George H. W. Bush in the 1988 election to win a majority of the popular vote, as well as the last Republican candidate to have won the popular vote. Bush's victory marked the first time that the Republican nominee won a presidential election without carrying any state in the Northeastern United States. Bush would serve until 2009 and be succeeded by Barack Obama, whereas Kerry would continue to serve in the Senate and go on to become the 68th Secretary of State of the United States during Barack Obama's second term.
George W. Bush won the presidency in 2000 after the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore remanded the case to the Florida Supreme Court, which declared there was not sufficient time to hold a recount without violating the U. S. Constitution. Just eight months into his presidency, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 transformed Bush into a wartime president. Bush's approval ratings surged to near 90%. Within a month, the forces of a coalition led by the United States entered Afghanistan, sheltering Osama bin Laden, suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks. By December, the Taliban had been removed, although a ongoing reconstruction would follow; the Bush administration turned its attention to Iraq, argued the need to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq had become urgent. The Iraq issue gave Bush an antagonist to present to the people. Rallying support against a common enemy rather than gaining voters through ideas or policy. Among the stated reasons were that Saddam's regime had tried to acquire nuclear material and had not properly accounted for biological and chemical material it was known to have possessed.
Both the possession of these weapons of mass destruction, the failure to account for them, would violate the UN sanctions. The assertion about WMD was hotly advanced by the Bush administration from the beginning, but other major powers including China, France and Russia remained unconvinced that Iraq was a threat and refused to allow passage of a UN Security Council resolution to authorize the use of force. Iraq permitted UN weapon inspectors in November 2002, who were continuing their work to assess the WMD claim when the Bush administration decided to proceed with war without UN authorization and told the inspectors to leave the country; the United States invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003, along with a "coalition of the willing" that consisted of additional troops from the United Kingdom, to a lesser extent, from Australia and Poland. Within about three weeks, the invasion caused the collapse of both the Iraqi government and its armed forces. However, the U. S. and allied forces failed to find any weapon of mass destruction in Iraq.
On May 1, George W. Bush landed on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, in a Lockheed S-3 Viking, where he gave a speech announcing the end of "major combat operations" in the Iraq War. Bush's approval rating in May was according to a CNN -- USA Today -- Gallup poll. However, Bush's high approval ratings did not last. First, while the war itself was popular in the U. S. the reconstruction and attempted "democratization" of Iraq lost some support as months passed and casualty figures increased, with no decrease in violence nor progress toward stability or reconstruction. Second, as investigators combed through the country, they failed to find the predicted WMD stockpiles, which led to debate over the rationale for the war. Bush's popularity rose as a wartime president, he was able to ward off any serious challenge to the Republican nomination. Senator Lincoln Chafee from Rhode Island considered challenging Bush on an anti-war platform in New Hampshire, but decided not to run after the capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003.
On March 10, 2004, Bush clinched the number of delegates needed to be nominated at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City. He accepted the nomination on September 2, 2004, retained Vice President Dick Cheney as his running mate. During the convention and throughout the campaign, Bush focused on two themes: defending America against terrorism and building an ownership society. Bush us
Richard Linklater
Richard Stuart Linklater is an American filmmaker. Linklater is known for his realistic and natural humanist films, which revolve around suburban culture and the effects of the passage of time, his films include the observational comedy film Slacker. In 2002, he began filming a passion project that took over twelve years to complete; the film was released in 2014 to widespread critical acclaim. In 2015, Linklater was included on the annual Time 100 list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Many of his films are noted for their loosely structured narrative. Linklater was born in Houston, the son of Diane Margaret, who taught at Sam Houston State University, Charles W. Linklater, III, he attended Huntsville High School in Huntsville, during grades 9–11, where he played football for Joe Clements as a backup quarterback for the #1 ranked team in the state. For his senior year, he moved to Bellaire High School in Bellaire, Texas because he was a better at baseball than football and Bellaire had a better baseball coach.
As a teen, Linklater won a Scholastic Writing Award. Linklater studied at Sam Houston State University, until dropping out to work on an off-shore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, he read novels on the rig and, upon returning to land, developed a love of film through repeated visits to a repertory theater in Houston. At this point, Linklater realized, he used his savings to buy a Super-8 camera, a projector, editing equipment, moved to Austin, Texas. He enrolled in Austin Community College in the fall of 1984 to study film. Linklater founded the Austin Film Society in 1985 together with his frequent collaborator Lee Daniel. One of the mentors for the Film Society was former New York City critic for the SoHo Weekly News George Morris, who had relocated to Austin and taught film there. For several years, Linklater made many short films that were exercises and experiments in film techniques, he completed his first feature, It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books, a Super-8 feature that took a year to shoot and another year to edit.
The film is significant in the sense. The film has his trademark style of minimal camera movements and lack of narrative, while it examines the theme of traveling with no real particular direction in mind; these idiosyncrasies would be explored in greater detail in future projects. Linklater created Detour Filmproduction, subsequently made Slacker for only $23,000, it went on to gross more than $1.25 million. The film is an aimless day in the life of the city of Austin, Texas showcasing its more eccentric characters. While gaining a cult following in the independent film world, he made his third film and Confused, based on his years at Huntsville High School and the people he encountered there; the film garnered critical praise and grossed $8 million in the United States while becoming a hit on VHS. This film was responsible for the breakout of fellow Texas native Matthew McConaughey. In 1995, Linklater won the Silver Bear for Best Director for the film Before Sunrise at the 45th Berlin International Film Festival.
His next feature, subUrbia, had mixed reviews critically, did poorly at the box office. In 1998, he took on his first Hollywood feature, The Newton Boys, which received mixed reviews while tanking at the box office. With the rotoscope films Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, his mainstream comedies, School of Rock and the remake of Bad News Bears, he gained wider recognition. In 2003, he wrote and directed a pilot for HBO with Rodney Rothman called $5.15/hr, about several minimum wage restaurant workers. The pilot deals with themes examined in Fast Food Nation; the British television network Channel 4 produced a documentary about Linklater, in which the filmmaker discussed the personal and philosophical ideas behind his films. St Richard of Austin was presented by Ben Lewis and directed by Irshad Ashraf and broadcast on Channel 4 in December 2004 in the UK. Linklater was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for his film Before Sunset. Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly both used rotoscoping animation techniques.
Working with Bob Sabiston and Sabiston's program Rotoshop to create this effect, Linklater shot and edited both movies as live-action features employed a team of artists to "trace over" individual frames. The result is a distinctive "semi-real" quality, praised by such critics as Roger Ebert as being original and well-suited to the aims of the film. Fast Food Nation is an adaptation of the best selling book that examines the local and global influence of the United States fast food industry; the film was entered into the 2006 Cannes Film Festival before being released in North America on November 17, 2006 and in Europe on March 23, 2007. The film received mixed reviews. Linklater fared better with the critics with A Scanner Darkly, Me and Orson Welles, Bernie, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Before Midnight, the third film in the Before... tril
Conscription in the United States
Conscription in the United States known as the draft, has been employed by the federal government of the United States in five conflicts: the American Revolution, the American Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Cold War. The third incarnation of the draft came into being in 1940 through the Selective Training and Service Act, it was the country's first peacetime draft. From 1940 until 1973, during both peacetime and periods of conflict, men were drafted to fill vacancies in the United States Armed Forces that could not be filled through voluntary means; the draft came to an end when the United States Armed Forces moved to an all-volunteer military force. However, the Selective Service System remains in place as a contingency plan. United States Federal Law provides for the compulsory conscription of men between the ages of 17 and 45 and certain women for militia service pursuant to Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution and 10 U. S. Code § 246. In colonial times, the Thirteen Colonies used a militia system for defense.
Colonial militia laws—and after independence those of the United States and the various states—required able-bodied males to enroll in the militia, to undergo a minimum of military training, to serve for limited periods of time in war or emergency. This earliest form of conscription involved selective drafts of militiamen for service in particular campaigns. Following this system in its essentials, the Continental Congress in 1778 recommended that the states draft men from their militias for one year's service in the Continental army. For long-term operations, conscription was used when volunteers or paid substitutes were insufficient to raise the needed manpower. During the American Revolutionary War, the states sometimes drafted men for militia duty or to fill state Continental Army units, but the central government did not have the authority to conscript except for purposes of naval impressment. Post Ratification of the Constitution, Article I.8.15, allows for Congress to conscript. Giving it the power to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.
Article II.2.1 makes the President the chief of the militia. The second amendment protects the infringement of the militia regulations, being necessary to the security of a free state; the Second Militia act of 1792 defined the first group who could be called forth as all free able-bodied males between the ages of 18 and 45. President James Madison and his Secretary of War James Monroe unsuccessfully attempted to create a national draft of 40,000 men during the War of 1812; this proposal was fiercely criticized on the House floor by antiwar Congressman Daniel Webster of New Hampshire. The United States first employed national conscription during the American Civil War; the vast majority of troops were volunteers. The Confederacy had far fewer inhabitants than the Union, Confederate President Jefferson Davis proposed the first conscription act on March 28, 1862. Resistance was both violent, with comparisons made between conscription and slavery. Both sides permitted conscripts to hire substitutes to serve in their place.
In the Union, many states and cities offered bonuses for enlistment. They arranged to take credit against their draft quota by claiming freed slaves who enlisted in the Union Army. Although both sides resorted to conscription, the system did not work in either; the Confederate Congress on April 16, 1862, passed an act requiring military service for three years from all males aged 18 to 35 not exempt. The U. S. Congress followed with the Militia Act of 1862 authorizing a militia draft within a state when it could not meet its quota with volunteers; this state-administered system failed in practice and in 1863 Congress passed the Enrollment Act, the first genuine national conscription law, setting up under the Union Army an elaborate machinery for enrolling and drafting men between twenty and forty-five years of age. Quotas were assigned in each state, the deficiencies in volunteers required to be met by conscription. Still, men drafted could provide substitutes, until mid-1864 could avoid service by paying commutation money.
Many eligible men pooled their money to cover the cost of any one of them drafted. Families used the substitute provision to select which member should go into the army and which would stay home; the other popular means of procuring a substitute was to pay a soldier whose period of enlistment was about to expire - the advantage of this method was that the Army could retain a trained veteran in place of a raw recruit. Of the 168,649 men procured for the Union Army through the draft, 117,986 were substitutes, leaving only 50,663 who had their personal services conscripted. There was much evasion and overt resistance to the draft, the New York City draft riots were in direct response to the draft and were the first large-scale resistance against the draft in the United S
Slacker (film)
Slacker is a 1990 American independent comedy-drama film written and directed by Richard Linklater, who appears in the film. Slacker was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize - Dramatic at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991. In 2012, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally or aesthetically significant". Slacker follows a single day in the life of an ensemble of under-30 bohemians and misfits in Austin, Texas; the film follows various characters and scenes, never staying with one character or conversation for more than a few minutes before picking up someone else in the scene and following them. The characters include Linklater as a talkative taxi passenger, a UFO buff who insists the U. S. has been on the moon since the 1950s, a JFK conspiracy theorist, an elderly anarchist who befriends a man trying to rob his house, a television set collector, a hipster woman trying to sell a Madonna pap smear. The woman selling the pap smear appears on the film poster, was played by Butthole Surfers drummer Teresa Taylor.
Most of the characters grapple with feelings of social exclusion or political marginalization, which are recurring themes in their conversations. They discuss social class, terrorism and government control of the media. Richard Linklater as "Should Have Stayed at the Bus Station" Rudy Basquez as Taxicab Driver Mark James as "Hit-and-Run Son" Bob Boyd as Officer Bozzio Terrence Kirk as Officer Love Stella Weir as Stephanie from Dallas Teresa Taylor as Pap Smear Pusher Mark Harris as T-shirt Terrorist Frank Orrall as "Happy Go-Lucky Guy" Abra Moore as "Has Change" Louis Black as Paranoid Paper Reader Sarah Harmon as "Has Faith in Groups" John Slate as Conspiracy-A-Go-Go author Lee Daniel as GTO Louis Mackey as Old Anarchist Scott Rhodes as Disgruntled Grad Student Kim Krizan as "Questions Happiness" Athina Rachel Tsangari as Cousin from Greece Kalman Spelletich as Video Backpacker Slacker's working title was No Longer/Not Yet; the film was shot in 1989 with a 16 mm Arriflex camera on location in Austin, Texas with a budget of $23,000, premiered at Austin's Dobie Theater on July 27, 1990.
Orion Classics acquired Slacker for nationwide distribution, released a modified 35mm version on July 5, 1991. It did not receive a wide release but went on to become a cult film bringing in a domestic gross of $1,228,108; the cast includes many notable Austinites, including Louis Black, Abra Moore, members of some local bands of the era. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, "Slacker is a movie with an appeal impossible to describe, although the method of the director, Richard Linklater, is as clear as day, he wants to show us a certain strata of campus life at the present time". In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, "Slacker is a 14-course meal composed of desserts or, more a conventional film whose narrative has been thrown out and replaced by enough bits of local color to stock five years' worth of ordinary movies". Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly gave the film an "A-" rating, writing, "Slacker has a marvelously low-key observational cool... the movie never loses its affectionate, shaggy-dog sense of America as a place in which people, by now, have too much freedom on their hands".
In his review for the Washington Post, Hal Hinson wrote, "This is a work of scatterbrained originality, funny and ceaselessly engaging". Rolling Stone's Peter Travers wrote, "What Linklater has captured is a generation of bristling minds unable to turn their thoughts into action. Linklater has the gift of a true satirist: He can make laughter catch in the throat". In his review for the Austin Chronicle, Chris Walters wrote, "Few of the many films shot in Austin over the past 10 or 15 years attempt to make something of the way its citizens live. Slacker is the only one I know of that claims this city's version of life on the margins of the working world as its whole subject, it is one of the first American movies to find a form so apropos to the themes of disconnectedness and cultural drift". Time magazine's Richard Corliss wrote, "Though set in the'90s, Slacker has a spirit, pure'60s, in this loping, sidewise, delightful comedy, Austin is Haight-Ashbury". On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 86% based on 35 reviews, an average rating of 7.3/10.
The website's critical consensus reads, "Slacker rests its shiftless thumb on the pulse of a generation with fresh filmmaking that captures the tenor of its time while establishing a benchmark for 1990s indie cinema." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 69 out of 100, based on 16 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". American Film Institute recognition: AFI's 100 Years... 100 Laughs - Nominated Slacker was released on VHS in June 1992 by Orion Home Video. An estimated 7,000 copies were shipped. A book titled Slacker containing the screenplay and writing about the film was published by St. Martin's Press in 1992; the film was re-released on VHS on March 7, 2000, by MGM. The film was released to DVD worldwide on January 13, 2003. A two-disc Criterion Collection boxed-set edition was released on August 31, 2004, in the US and Canada only; the set has many "extras", including a book on the film and Linklater's first feature film, It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books, released on home video for the first time.
Entertainment Weekly gave this edition an "A-" rating. The release of the film is taken as a starting point for the independent film movement of the 1990s. Many of the independent filmmakers of t
Gezira Scheme
The Gezira Scheme is one of the largest irrigation projects in the world. It is centered on the Sudanese state of Al Jazirah, just southeast of the confluence of the Blue and White Nile rivers at the city of Khartoum; the Gezira Scheme was begun by the British while the area was governed as part of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Water from the Blue Nile is distributed through canals and ditches to tenant farms lying between the Blue and White Nile rivers; the Gezira is suited to irrigation because the soil slopes away from the Blue Nile and water therefore runs through the irrigation canals by gravity. The soil has a high clay content. Reginald Wingate, the British governor-general of Sudan envisaged the farmers growing wheat but this was abandoned as the colonial authorities thought that a better cash crop was needed; when it was discovered that Egyptian-type long staple cotton could be grown, this was welcomed as a better choice as it would provide a raw material for the British textile industry. Cotton was first grown in the area in 1904.
After many experiments with irrigation, 24 square kilometres was put under cultivation in 1914. After the lowest Nile flood for 200 years, the Sennar Dam was constructed on the Blue Nile to provide a reservoir of water; this dam is about 3 kilometres long. The Gezira Scheme was financed by the Sudan Plantations Syndicate in London and the British government guaranteed capital to develop it; the Sudan Gezira Board took over from private enterprise in 1950 and was chaired by Arthur Gaitskell. Farmers cooperated with the Gezira Board; this network of canals and ditches was 4,300 kilometres long, with the completion in the early 1960s of the Manaqil Extension on the western side of the Gezira Scheme, by 2008 the irrigated area covered 8,800 square kilometres, about half the country's total land under irrigation. The main crop grown in this region was still cotton, they Planted a Stone, a 1953 documentary film about the creation of the Gezira Scheme Sudan: Options for the Sustainable Development of the Gezira Scheme, Government of Sudan and the World Bank, 17 October 2000 FAO report on Sudan economy UN book "Lessons learnt"
Marty McFly
Martin Seamus McFly is a fictional character and the main protagonist of the Back to the Future trilogy. He is portrayed by actor Michael J. Fox. McFly appears in the animated series, where he was voiced by David Kaufman. In the videogame by Telltale Games, he is voiced by A. J. Locascio. In 2008, McFly was selected by Empire magazine as the 12th Greatest Movie Character of All Time. Marty was born in California to a family of Irish descent. Little is known about Marty's life prior to the first Back to the Future film, except for the fact that he set fire to the living-room rug when he was 8 years old, he met his friend Dr. Emmett "Doc" Brown when he was around fourteen after hearing that Brown was a dangerous lunatic. Marty, being the “red-blooded American teenager” he was, wanted to go see what it was all about for himself, he was fascinated by all his inventions. When Doc caught him, he was glad to have someone who liked his work and their friendship started there. In 1985, Marty plays guitar with his group The Pinheads and likes listening to Huey Lewis and the News, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Van Halen.
He is a talented skateboarder and proven to be an excellent pistol shot, a skill he has honed by endlessly playing shooting games such as Wild Gunman at his local 7-Eleven. Marty is a friendly, easygoing but accident-prone everyman who can sometimes lack critical thinking skills, he has shown some good and basic street fighting skills and throws punches in hand-to-hand confrontations. He is loyal to his family and friends, regardless of, his major character flaw is his pride, which causes him to take unnecessary risks to show others that he is not a coward. However, during a visit in 1885, when his ancestor Seamus McFly mentions that his brother Martin was killed in an argument after someone questioned his bravery, Marty begins to re-think his stance on what other people think of him. By 2015, Marty's life has spiraled out of control due to long-term pain from a hand injury that leaves him unable to play guitar; this injury occurs in 1985, after Marty accepts school enemy Douglas J. Needles' challenge to a road race and crashes into a Rolls-Royce.
In 1885, Biff Tannen's great-grandfather Buford goads Marty into a showdown, which Marty wins despite refusing to draw a gun against Buford. Once he returns to 1985, he remembers both this event and Seamus' advice and declines Needles' challenge, avoiding the collision that would have ruined his musical talents. Over the years, Marty learns how to make his decisions on his own terms instead of being influenced by others, thereby changing his future for the better. Marty McFly is the youngest of three children of Lorraine Baines-McFly, he has a brother, Dave McFly, a sister, Linda McFly. In addition, he has an uncle, serving a prison sentence in 1985 and is denied parole. Marty's secondary entourage consists of girlfriend Jennifer Parker and best friend Emmett Brown, a scientist whom Marty and Jennifer call "Doc." There is an implication that Marty is ashamed of his family and does not spend much time at home, preferring to hang out with Doc, Jennifer, or the guys in his band, The Pinheads. However, Marty's relationships with his family changed after he returns from 1955, with him no longer being alienated by his parents and his father working as a local college professor and a successful novelist in the alternate timeline he inadvertently created.
Marty meets his great-great paternal grandparents Seamus and Maggie, when he was stranded in 1885. He meets their infant son William, Marty's great grandfather. Through his interaction with Seamus and Maggie, Marty discovers that Seamus had a brother named Martin, thus Marty's great-great granduncle. How Marty and Doc met was not explained although co-writer Bob Gale provided an explanation in 2011: "For years, Marty was told that Doc Brown was dangerous, a crackpot, a lunatic. So, being a red-blooded American teenage boy, age 13 or 14, he decided to find out just why this guy was so dangerous. Marty snuck into Doc’s lab, was fascinated by all the cool stuff, there; when Doc found him there, he was delighted to find that Marty thought he was cool and accepted him for what he was. Both of them were the black sheep in their respective environments. Doc gave Marty a part-time job to help with experiments, tend to the lab, tend to the dog, etc.". By 2015, Marty has married his girlfriend Jennifer and they had Martin "Marty" Jr. and Marlene.
Marty has had many false names through the Back to the Future series because of encountering his relatives at some point, most notably Lorraine mistakenly thinking his name is Calvin Klein, due to it being Marty's brand of underwear. In the first film, Marty uses the alias of "Darth Vader, an extraterrestrial from the Planet Vulcan" while wearing a radiation suit in an attempt to coerce George into asking Lorraine out to the dance. In Part III, Marty claims to be "Clint Eastwood" when asked for a name first by Maggie McFly and by Buford Tannen. In Back to the Future: The Game, he uses one of the three aliases. Media related to Marty McFly at Wikimedia Commons Marty McFly on IMDb
