Rogue One Review

The final hour is one of the best hours in any Star Wars movie, period.  But it takes a really long and meandering time to get there.  Full review and spoilers below the cut

Russians and Putin and Bears, Oh My.

It's a story that practically writes itself: A blundering idiot of a candidate calls out for a foreign government to hack his rival's email and splash it across the media landscape.  There are emails of substance, others less so, suddenly leaked, damaging the rival's campaign.  Rival loses, idiot becomes President.

On the surface, it's not hard to accept the story on face value.  Trump's second campaign manager was a lobbyist for the Russian government in Ukraine, and his Secretary of State pick is an oil executive who has cried many a public tear over the sanctions imposed on the Russians in the wake of their seizure of Crimea and their on-going backing of the Ukrainian rebels.  Trump himself has yet to find an unkind word to say about Putin or his government, so all-in-all, things are looking pretty good for Russia in the wake of the elections.  This is the strongest and only proof needed apparently that Putin twiddled with our sacred democratic process.

But I've never really bought the liberal narrative that Russia played a direct and malignant role in the 2016 election.  The story has struck me from the very beginning as a way for Democrats to blame their massive political failure on literally anything other than their own terrible decisions over the last 25 years or so.  Hillary couldn't have lost because she was the worst possible candidate to run in a populist political era, obviously.  It also couldn't have been the fact that she was widely and deeply hated by the people she needed to win and did nothing at all to win them over.  Nope, can't be that.  And it most certainly isn't because the Clintons have spear-headed the Democratic Party's strategy of feeding their old middle-class base to rich in return for political power which embittered said base against her and left for the first person to actually acknowledge that they'd been fucked over.  Naturally, all these reasons had to be dismissed out of hand, because it's hard to embrace the outlandish when the blatantly obvious keeps getting in the way.

More importantly, no one has ever actually submitted or aired any kind of actual proof that the Russians have done, well, anything.  Wikileaks has said from the beginning that the Podesta emails were leaked to them by an internal source, not the product of a Russian hack.  Considering that Wikileaks has always run on whistle-blower leaks, I don't see a reason to doubt it.  And there's also the small matter of, you know, anyone anywhere finding any evidence to the contrary.  The CIA's big report "confirming" Russian involvement has been all over the news lately, but, again, literally none of the stories mention specifically how the Russians tipped the scales and since the report is classified, we can't even see the evidence the CIA is basing their conclusion on. Not to denigrate a national institution or anything, but the CIA has a solid history lying about, well, everything, so I wouldn't exactly count them as a trustworthy source.

Say it's true, though.  The report is accurate and the CIA has known about Russia's play for months.  Well, now you have to deal with the question "Why didn't anyone do anything?"  Harry Reid is blaming James Comey, because why not.  Reid alleges that Comey sat on evidence that proves everything for... reasons.  Well, fine, let's say that's true, too, that the head of the nation's largest law enforcement agency is deliberately allowing a foreign power to directly manipulate the government he works for for no apparent reason.  Sure, okay.  This kicks us up to the final level, and the thing pretty much everyone's been avoiding, why didn't Barack Obama say something?  One assumes the intelligence community would've briefed their boss about Putin fucking with who would be his successor; and yet, Obama didn't do much of anything to counter or even mention this supposed incursion against his political ally.  I'd call that an odd move.

The only way to explain why people kept their mouths shut and nothing was revealed until now is to weave so many layers of conspiracy on top of each other that you may as well start listening to Alex Jones as a "how-to" series.

Honestly, though, even if my skepticism is proven wrong, even if there's actual concrete evidence out there that indisputably proves Putin played in active role in getting his fellow cunt supreme elected, I can't really find the energy to be outraged.  Nothing Russia is being accused of is any different from all the times that we have interfered with, manipulated, or flat-out disregarded democratic elections to make them suit our favor.  Why should we be immune from that?  What makes us so fucking special that we should always be the ones breaking the world but never face any consequences for doing so?

The worst aspect of this whole thing, for me, is that Democrats will become so wrapped up in making this Russia thing The Real Story of this election and blustering about how anyone who doesn't believe them is just an idiot or a fool or blah blah blah.  This will inevitably prevent them from changing anything and instead of getting their shit together to nominate someone worth voting for, they'll throw out another Clintonite candidate which saddles us with a full eight-fucking-year Trump Presidency.  Just once I'd like the Democratic Party to figure out that to get people to vote for you, you actually have to give them a platform worth believing in.  That really shouldn't be so much to ask for, should it?

One Month Down, So Many More to Go

So, we've now had one month of President-Elect Trump and, at this point, I think it's fair to say that his Presidency will be as awful as most of us expected it to be.

Exhibit A is his cabinet picks, which, so far, are one bag of awful after another. His picks for Secretaries of Education, Labor, and the head of the EPA are all people who spent their careers being actively hostile to the mission of the agencies they will now be leading.   Betsy DeVos is a billionaire Republican donor who has literally spent decades and millions of dollars trying to destroy public education, Scott Pruitt made his name in the environmental game by repeatedly suing the EPA over its environmental regulations and is a full fledged climate-change denier, his latest pick, Andrew Puzder is the CEO of CKE, the company that owns Carl's Jr., has been repeatedly named in class action lawsuits over failure to pay overtime to restaurant managers.  And then there's Steven Mnuchin as the Treasury pick.  Mnuchin is an ex-Goldman Sachs executive who wanted to pad his Bond-villian resume, so he got into the foreclosure industry where he once foreclose on a 90-year-old woman over 27 cents.  It almost seems a shame that he doesnt have a mustache to twirl.

Remember how Trump was going to drain the Washington swamp of all the donors and politically connected CEOS that got top cabinet picks?  Me neither.

Trump also has taken the opportunity to start flinging his weight around on the foreign policy front, too.  I do think controversy over the phone call between Trump and Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen is largely overblown, mostly because I don't think there's anything real behind it.  The Washington Post reports that the call had been in the works for some time, and initially, I thought the call was another one of those situations where Trump does something while being completely ignorant of its consequences.

But when he named Iowa governor Terry Branstad as the Chinese ambassador, I changed my mind a bit.  Branstad has known Chinese President Xi Jinping since 1985, so in that sense, he knows the lay of the land and how to best approach Jinping.  In a larger context, I think this another example of Trump talking out of both sides of his mouth and getting away with it.  On the one side, he gets the China hardliners nice and stiff by thumbing his nose at a decades long policy specifically designed not to ruffle any Chinese feathers.  Then, out the other side, he nominates a man with a deeply established relationship to the same Chinese government he's supposedly dead set on snubbing, so I wouldn't expect any follow through on Trump's blowhard attitudes towards China anytime soon.  Remember, Trump is and always has been about the projection, not the actual substance.

This carries over to Trump's main claim to domestic affairs, too.  Trump is parading the Carrier plant deal as real, concrete evidence that he can save jobs on a mass scale.  Trouble is, dig into the details a bit, and he really didn't save much at all.  For one thing, he didn't save 1,100 jobs- that number is closer to 800.  For another, Carrier's parent company is still going to fire 1,300 people in Indiana.  Oh, also, Carrier is going to invest $16 million to automate the plant in question so it can fire more people down the road.  And, as the cherry-on-top, Carrier is going to get a $7 million tax break, courtesy of the good people of Indiana that they're so busy firing.  Truly, how have we managed without such an obvious economic genius to guide us?


Again, though, the pomp matters more than the circumstance here.  Because even though it's a rather hollow "victory" we're talking about, it's still a sideshow that gives people who have largely been abandoned the top billing they desperately crave.  And hey, it's working out for him, polling wise, so why should he change anything?

It's not really Trump's fault that the American people, by and large, only have time to browse news headlines and not get into the gory details which just makes it easier to pull the wool over their eyes until it all ends in tears.  A con man is nothing without his marks, after all.  So Trump will continue to bask in the glory of his propaganda moves while the world continues to rot behind him and he'll get cheered for it all the through. At least we'll get the schadenfreude of Trumpgrets.

Hardwired... To Self-Destruct Review

It may have taken eight years, but finally, the world has a new Metallica album again.  Hardwired... To Self-Destruct sees the band continue to indulge their thrash heritage that they returned to on Death Magnetic; and while the mixing is, thankfully, less abrasive this time around, Hardwired feels less like an album and more like a really well put together mix-tape.

Starting with the landmark Master of Puppets, each Metallica album, including St. Anger, had a central purpose, a core idea or attitude that the band explored or played around with. Hardwired doesn't achieve that level of cohesion, the album is split into two separate six song sets that don't feel related to or gel together at all, and, also, the theme of addictive self-destructive behavior is a road so well traveled by Metallica that nothing here feels new, exactly.  Almost every song on this album sounds like it would be a really strong track three or six from their Ride the Lighting to ...And Justice for All prime in the 80's, but on their own, they have a hard time carrying the weight of an entire album.

That isn't to say the songs are bad.  Individually, the songs on the album are the some of the most solid and consistent the band as ever put together; "Atlas, Rise!" is the most Maideny twin guitar harmony song the band has done in a good long while, "Am I Savage?" shows the band learned a lot of lessons about slithery guitar riffs from their much maligned Load and Reload period and continues to put those lessons to good use.  The album's closer, "Spit Out The Bone" is an instant classic, it's easily one of the most ferocious songs the band has ever done, that they can still produce something that's as ambitious as the things they did in their prime is testament enough that the band isn't just coasting along or plodding through old glories without the old enthusiasm.  It's just that, well... it takes a long time for the album to get to that point, and by then, even a song as awesome as "Spit Out The Bone" can't inject everything that came before it with that same kind of life or energy.

So while I'm disappointed that the album feels less like something made to listen to all the way through and more like "Hey, here's a bunch of songs that will be good for a Spotify playlist," it's still good to have music made by a classic band still pushing and reaching for something new and different, even if they don't quite get there.

Grade: B

Doctor Strange Review

Magic has come to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Guardians of the Galaxy brought in the cosmic aspect of the Marvel comics, but where that movie used inventive and surprising casting to bring life to its standard plot line, Doctor Strange  is bogged down by the utter predictability of its storytelling.

We meet Dr. Stephen Strange at the height of his life; performing routine miracle surgeries, respected, rich, and totally aware of the magnificence that is him.  That is, until a car crash destroys his hands, robing him of the very thing that made him the man he was.  Broken, beaten, and crushed under the weight of so many failed surgeries to restore his hands, he finds his way to Nepal and joins a sorcerer's club where he learns magic and the true nature of the universe(s).

The sad thing is that you know exactly how the movie will play out within the first five minutes.  Haughty, prideful hero is crippled and humbled, said haughty hero finds new thing which he initially sucks at but quickly masters, wise, magnanimous mentor turns out to be not so wise or pure, best friend/sub-mentor begins the road to evil and enmity, great and terrible forces threaten existence but are repelled in the end with tactics haughty hero incorporates after lessons in humility, the end.  The casting is as boring as the plot; Cumberbatch adds materialism and an American accent to his Sherlock ticks, Tilda Swinton and Mads Mikkelson pull off their roles as the sage mentor and  evil harbinger just by showing up and speaking into the camera.  There's no real shading or depth of character here except for Chiwetel Ejiofor's Mordo, who gets some actual motivation for his eventual break from the hero's path instead of the usual mustache-twirling evil that makes up the entirety of his characterization in the comics.  That they didn't waste an actor of Ejiofor's caliber is pretty much the only good thing I can say about how this movie's writing.

Which is a shame, because the hollowness of the story and characters neuters the actually pretty amazing visual tapestry the movie plays out on.  The magical constructs all feel like real-world objects, and watching people battle it out on warped, bent over backwards buildings that constantly alter perspective is a marvel (sorry) to take in.  The highlight is an astral projection fight between Strange and a Monk of Evil in a hospital, which has some of the most fluid and impressive lighting and effects work I've seen in a movie in a long time.

It's just too bad that no one thought to apply that same sense of dazzling, no-holds-barred attitude to literally any other aspect of this movie.

Grade: B-

So That Happened

So... Donald Trump is going to be President. Right. That's still a crazy sentence to write, but, what're you gonna do? There's been a lot of posts over the last week trying to sift through the debris and figure out just what the hell went wrong, but the answer isn't all that complicated: Hillary Clinton had massive flaws as a candidate that she barely cared to recognize, let alone fix, and it cost her the election. She did very little to bridge the wide policy divide between herself and young voters, so it really shouldn't come as a surprise that those voters declined to vote for her.

The Clinton team also laid the blame for their defeat on James Comey, but, again, if the mere existence of more emails is enough to topple a campaign that'd gone on for two years, that campaign has more substantial problems than politically-minded FBI agents. It's not like Clinton wasn't warned, repeatedly, about these faults and how to correct them; it's just that, in the end, she decided that saying Trump is incredibly uncouth would be enough to win the day and we're just going have to live with the aftereffects of that decision for longer than any one term in office.

Which brings us to the question on everyone's mind: What happens now?  Trump is about to find out that when you ride the anger of a mob to victory, that mob expects you to deliver.  And now that Republicans control both Congress and the White House, I expect the GOP as a whole to slowly realize that now that there isn't an "Other" for them to point to, there's nothing to separate them from the anger of their voter base, should they fail to do so.

And fail they most definitely will.  Anyone expecting an economic miracle from massive tax cuts for the rich and corporations need only look at Kansas, which has been in a perpetual state of budget crisis since Sam Brownback cut taxes down to nearly nothing and got exactly fuck-all in return.  W. Bush pushed through what was then the largest tax cut in history which produced the worse economic growth since the Great Depression.  But maybe, this time, it'll work out the way Republicans always say it will, and then, we can all go buy ourselves some ponies with the windfall.

Also on the "guaranteed disasters" policy list is the intention to gut all the financial regulations that came from the Dodd-Frank bill.  Now, that bill has a litany of problems, but it at least acknowledges that having an unrestricted financial sector is a bad thing and maybe we should at least try to rein it in.  Republicans, obviously, disagree, and think an industry with such a sterling record of money laundering, identity theft, collusion, and good old-fashioned theft is best left to its own devices in policing and monitoring its own behavior.  And if 2007 taught us anything, it's that nothing can ever, ever go wrong when nobody pays attention to what the financial industry is doing.  Nope.  They've got it all covered.

But wait, Trump said that one time that he would reinstate Glass-Steagall.  To which I say, if anyone really believes that a virulently anti-regulation party is going to reinstate one of the most famous and stringent banking regulation bills in our country's history,  than their ability for self-delusion borders on the professional and we should all be appropriately impressed.

And then we have the Obamacare plans.  Trump recently said that there are parts of the law he likes, but his Congress and his base sure as fuck will still hate it and will expect him to follow through on his "Repeal and Replace" promise in the first 100 days.  That most of those people will suddenly find themselves without health insurance is, of course, not something they're thinking about, but, hey, a Democrat did it so by definition it must be the worst thing ever.  What will be really interesting to see is if Republicans actually follow through on Paul Ryan's plan to dismantle Medicare.  Now, Medicare is the most popular government program, ever.  Attacking it is the surest form of political suicide and that's before you factor in that Medicare is usually the single biggest factor that the GOP's aging voter base is even alive.  I've never thought much of Republican politicians mental prowess, but even I think they can't possibly be so stupid as to directly attack a huge and loyal part of their base so brazenly.

*Speaking of the little shit, I'll be legitimately surprised if Paul Ryan is still Speaker of the House come January.  The only way I see Ryan keeping his position is if he goes through a humiliating and debasing apology gauntlet Trump will put in front of him to prove his loyalty.  I don't doubt that Ryan will submit himself to said gauntlet, but I wonder if it will be enough to save him, in the end.

I also think you can toss the whole "drain the swamp" ethos out with the garbage, too, especially since the people running Trump's transition team are the same kind of swamp things he spent so much time railing against like, three weeks ago.  As usual, it's not that Washington is full of political insiders that's the problem, the problem is those insiders aren't working for your side.  Appointing Reince Priebus as Chief of Staff is a pretty telling move, namely, that the main qualifications to serve in a Trump cabinet are less about your political abilities and more about your loyalty to Trump.  I'd also bet money that the other big reason Priebus has the job is that Trump needs a conduit to the mega-donors and other party elites that hate his guts.  So it'll be interesting to see how Trump fills out the rest of his cabinet, which I'm sure, will provide no shortage of horror shows in the years to come.

All of this and I haven't even touched on the threats to women's rights, the LGBT community, Muslims, Hispanics, the Supreme Court, the Iran Nuclear Deal, the Paris Climate Agreement, the cuts to renewable energy, immigration, education, or what will happen to protestors like those standing against the DAPL.  It's simply too much to process all in one go.  But, I do know this, the poor, the broken middle class, the working man who barely scrapes enough to get by, all those people who voted for Trump are going to be fed to the wolves on a silver platter by that pampered and spoiled child.  Trump, if left unchecked, will usher in the world as they always thought it should be, and, far from being masters of their own destinies, they'll be ground to dust by corporations and the rich in a economic system that keeps them around because shit doesn't clean itself. This wouldn't be so terrible, if not for the fact that we'll all be trapped in that world, too.

*This paragraph has been edited to clarify the point I was making.

And Here, We, Go

Tomorrow, we'll finally cast our ballots and put this slog of an election behind us once and for all.  There does seem to be a general sense of relief going around at the prospect, which, isn't all that surprising.  The dampening effect that voting means either Clinton or Trump will be the next President hasn't really sunk in yet, but, at this point, people can only deal with crushingly hopeless situations one at a time, getting a jump start on the next awful situation looming over the horizon just shows a lack of basic survival skills

As of now, things are too close to call.  I imagine Hillary desperately searching for the "why" of it all on the eve of the election: How could decades worth of work ingratiating herself into the upper echelons of politics and business leave her in a dead heat with a used car salesman lucky enough to pop out to a rich family?  How could it all really come down to this?  It's telling that Hillary will never really be able to comprehend that the single biggest threat to her endgame is all the things she did to get to this point in the first place.  I've said it before, but, still, watching Hillary see her life's ambition slip away in front of her because she was bogged down by the weight of the backroom bullshit she's pulled over the years would be a great thing to see.  Irony always stings deeper when it plays out on the biggest stage possible.  In a better world, she would get all that she has coming to her and we'd all be the better for it.

Unfortunately, we happen to live in this one.  And Hillary getting her comeuppance means being saddled with what is quite possibly the stupidest person to ever run for President.  Not that I think Trump is actually going to be that involved in his Presidency, no, I expect much of the day-to-day decisions are going to fall to Mike Pence.  Pence, at least, actually has a coherent and consistent political and philosophical outlook he operates by; the only downside is that outlook would put him on pretty friendly ground with the Taliban if they spoke English.  For the Trump supporters inclined to find themselves in a tizzy, remember, Trump stamping his name on something while other people do all the actual work that he takes credit for is literally how he makes his money.

Ultimately, this election is like one of those choose your own adventure stories where you made all the wrong decisions and now have to decide what your horrible ending will be.  For my money, picking the woman who will continue to sell out the average citizen to her donors is the better pick.  The only reasons why are that Clinton's awfulness is actually quantifiable, we know what to expect and can plan accordingly to survive it or beat it.  The other good thing about Clinton is that she is so dependent on being seen as an actual, compassionate person that she is a slave to the political winds; if popular sentiment can generate enough blowback against her, she won't do anything that she sees as a political risk to jeopardize her position.  So Hillary can at least be countered or out-maneuvered because she is, at heart, a political animal, and she plays the game to such a rigid extent that it's pretty easy to see her coming.

It is true that electing Hillary is going to lead to "more of the same" and that continuity doesn't mean anything good for, well, pretty much anyone who isn't already stupidly rich. But electing Trump is basically calling a hurricane down on a rickety old building and hoping there will be something left worth salvaging afterwards.  As a general rule, megalomaniacal, impetuous children and religious fanatics aren't really the kind of people who come along in a dire moment of need and turn their countries back towards prosperity; rather, they're usually the ones who bring down whatever ruin they claimed they could save the country from in the first place.  

To close, I'd like to leave you with a little something to remember just in case you start feeling that the only way for us to go from here is up: