Ranxerox

The Gifted has pretty good production values, but I wasn't able to maintain interest in it. OTOH, I have been really enjoying The Runaways, though I am getting a little impatient for they to actually, you know, runaway.

I came across this article also. I couldn't figure whether the decree was coming from outside the CDC, or if it was CDCs leadership making the decree to avoid having budget items shot down summarily by congress. It is tempting to say that self censorship is as bad or worse than external censorship, but if the CDC wants to do the research but wants to spare it from Republican law makers' budget cutting at least research still gets done. On the other hand, if the administration has simply decided to nix all such research, valuable time and data could be lost, and the American people lose out. So, where this decree is coming from matters.

Here is where the matter of viewing differently that I mentioned comes into play. Perhaps I have a significantly higher view of politicians than you or maybe I have a lower view of people in general and don't view politicians as harshly as a result, but whatever the case, Nixon and Trump are the only top party nominees of my life time that I consider to be bad people. All the elections not involving one of the two of them have been matters of choosing the greater good. Ford - Good man. I have nothing negative to say about him. Carter - An extremely good man, but a poor president. Reagan - A good man (or an actor who did a good job playing one) but who fell in with a bad crowd Mondale - Good man. Dukakis - Good man. I have nothing negative to say about him. Bush Sr - Good man and tireless public servant, but due to a life of wealth and privilege held a very inflated view of the importance of rich people. Bill Clinton - A complex figure. I believe that he really did his best to make the world a better place, but had a deep rooted insecurity due to abandonment by his father and a serious zipper problem. Bob Dole - Generally a good man though as Speaker of the House he had obviously had to make some compromises over the years. Al Gore - Like all politicians enjoys the spotlight, but a good man nonetheless. Bush Jr - A good man, but not really smart enough for the job and his vice president/puppet master was a piece of work. Kerry - Very ambitious and probably did exaggerate his Vietnam heroic, but still a tireless public servant and a good man. Obama - Good man. Perhaps better than we deserved. Romney - See description for Bush Sr Hillary Clinton - A complex figure like her husband. She has fought hard for the people and has done much real good, but life under partisan attack has left her very secretive and guarded. I have little doubt that your mileage differs considerably, but that is my take on the presidential candidates of my life time.

Before Doug Jones can be sworn in, the election results must be officially certified. This is normal and it takes time. When McConnell said that Strange would serve until the end of the session, he wasn't making some big, unconstitutional power grab as your article writer asserted. He was just looked at the calendar, and stated the realistic facts. Please avoid linking to articles that are long on hyperbole and short on accurate facts. All elections are an effort to chose the lesser of two evils or viewed differently chose the greater of two goods. People are never black and white, they are always shades of grey and this includes politicians.

At the time Qaddafi was talking about exterminating, his Arab Spring uprisers like cockroaches. The massacres in Burundi taught the Clintons that inaction could have consequences just as dire as those of action. That is why she advocated for the US to take an active role in the struggle. Ultimately, it turned out very badly, but a good case can be made that the fault was in the US doing too little rather than doing too much.

Well, that depends a bit on who you are doesn't it. Maybe some people get to find these to be distasteful opinions, but if are black, Asian, Jewish or homosexual these movies aren't merely distasteful. They are direct spits in the face of you and yours. Just because an insult or an injustice took place a long time ago does not mean that it no longer requires forgiveness, particularly when a physical embodiment of that injustice is sitting right in front of you.

Yes, we can forgive old movies (and books, and plays and comic books). What we can't do is insist that other people other people forgive them as well. For example, I love Will Eisner. The man was genius at visual story telling and created a large swath of the storytelling techniques that are used in comic books today. Beyond his talents as a creator, based on the stories that he chose to write, I believe he was a compassionate and honorable man. Unfortunately, he was also a product of his times, and without even being aware picked up the blatant racism of his day. So, yes I can love Will Eisner's work, but I can't ask anyone else to overlook the extreme racism in his depiction of blacks and Asians. If others find these portrayals as insurmountable obstacles to enjoying his work, I should not tell them to give him another chance, or to be more open minded, or to look at in historical prospective, or any garbage like that. I just need to acknowledge that they have a point and not try to foster my love of Will Eisner on them or judge them over our different perspectives.

Perhaps, but while I am only a little ways in, so far Punisher is rocking it. No regrets.

Well, the reviews are out, and Justice League has Rotten Tomatoes score of 38%. So, binge watching The Punisher it is.

Well, I guess those are weakness that I can live with. I mean, I prefer my plots coherent, but I have noticed that comic book movies that I have had no problem following the plots have often been called incoherent. I think it is because comic book story lines tend to have a lot of moving parts and fantastic elements, and I think that makes it hard for people not use to them to follow everything. Doh! Why would they use Steppenwolf when they could use Darkseid unstead!?! Still, slightly relieved that the underwelming villain wasn't Darkseid. If you have Darkseid as your villain and he is not intimidating as all get out, then story telling just clearly is not your thing.

The later is a sore point with me. Not so much there killing, but that Thor never even asked about them when he got back to Asgard following Hela's conquest. Yes, I know that they had settled on making the movie a comedy, but some of the best comedies that I have seen have had sad and poignant moments. Thor could have taken a moment out to mourn his friends and we still would have laughed when the Hulk attacked Surtur. Indeed, taking time out to observe the sad moments would have made funny moments even sweeter.

Is my memory playing tricks on me, or did Wonder Woman have a bunch of early reviews before it came out. Justice League comes out Friday and there still hasn't been a single early review. That doesn't seem like a good sign, I want this movie to be good. Heck, I want it to be awesome, but I am not going to go see it unless it has a Rotten Tomato score of at least 70%. I have Friday off and I could certainly take in a movie, but I have this uneasy feeling that I will spending Friday binge watching The Punisher on Netflix instead. Hope I'm wrong about that.

The heptathlon is a track and field competition. Maybe, Amazons don't spend all that much time running away. Have you looked at the physiques of female boxers and MMAs. A lot of them have some serious muscles.

The former. The guns aren't absent because everybody felt so safe that they weren't buy them. The guns are absent because they put serious restrictions on gun ownership. Now, it is very possible and even probable, that because US citizens live in a land with a lot guns and gun violence, they have a stronger desire for the protection that guns offer. Still, make no mistake, the reason we have so many murders is because we have so many guns. Not the other way around. International Comparison Of Mass Shootings The above linked article is imperfect that it focuses specifically on mass shootings and not other types of murders. However, it is still informative with regard to other theorized causes of US gun violence and why they don't stack up.

You do know that in first world countries with strong gun laws there are far fewer murders than here in the US, despite the fact that they still have cars, right?

TMI

Actually, that is the one statement that the article never makes. So, if that statement is to be believed (and if not then why believe any of the rest article?), then Hillary owned the butcher shop, but never put her thumb on the scale with respect to her primary with Bernie Sanders. From the sound of it, Hillary was inheriting a bankrupt DNC and goinginto vigorously contested primary. She had to bail out the DNC because she knew that she would need it in the general election, but couldn't just give away her money because she knew she might need it in the primaries. So, she acted like a lawyer and gave the money but attached strings to it. All fairly rational. My question is why did Obama leave the DNC in so much debt. Is this normal for a re-elected president? It seems the debt would have been fairly easy for a charismatic fund-raiser with no future elections of his own to worry about like Obama. Why leave the organization bankrupt that way?

No, but I can see that the current royal family are already tyrannical despots. They force a segment of their population into backbreaking, slave labor for the "crime" of having the wrong genes. That is not the sort of thing that maintains itself. When individual slaves act up you have to make an example out of them. When there are slave revolts they must be brutally crushed. These are just things that have to be done when you maintain slaves. To make matters worse, it is clear that this is not economic based slavery. This is punitive slavery. We see slaves mining by digging with shovels and even their hands, despite Attilan being a high tech society. They could mine with machines and it would be faster and more efficient, but they are choosing not to do so. Since efficient mining isn't the point, clearly leaving miner too exhausted to revolt or fight back must be. Inhuman in old sense of the word as to mean cruel and barbaric. Still, Maximus could turn out to be worse. His hold on power will almost certainly be tenuous, and weak rulers often resort to extreme violence to maintain their position. It is not that he necessarily will want commit massacres, but he is likely to find it necessary to hold on to his rule. So Attilan is likely to move from a barbaric but stable government to one marked by violence and chaos.

I thought that the first two episodes were okay. Right now I find myself seeing Maximus, if not as a good guy, at least as a lesser evil compared to the rest of the royal family. Kudos to the writers for putting enough depth into it make that possible. Still, I suspect that it will be a be a problem latter when I am expected to root for the royal family, or Maximus has his kick the kitten moment and I feel let down by a show that was complicated becoming simplistic.

Trump and his people aren't competent enough to pull something like this. Really, they would be reporting on the plot on the front page Washington Post before it got out of the spitballing phase, and since nothing would have actually have happened yet, the Trump administration would successfully play off as some poor taste joking. Then Trump would hold a rally and ask if the joke was really in all that poor of taste. His audience would assure him that no not really. There might be some chanting of "Blow them up! Blow them up!"

The Orville answers the question what would Star Trek have been like if it were sitcom. I had been hoping that it would be an action/adventure show that had some jokes, but episode 2 made it clear that was not to be. Security Officer Alara Kitan saves the day not exciting action or a realistic solution, but instead by supplying a punchline. That is a sitcom way of handling problems, not a action/adventure show solution. So, is there anything wrong with this? Well, if you like sitcoms, nothing at all. However, as someone who doesn't like sitcoms much, I will be sitting this one out.

Does this make you feel inadequate? Are you suffering a crisis of identity?

For me it's Legends of Tomorrow and Riverdale.

Dates of interest for DCEU fans. Gotham season premier September 21 Supergirl October 9 Flash October 10 Legends of Tomorrow, also October 10 Arrow October 12 Justice League November 17 And as a bonus date, the CW, non-DCEU, comic book based show Riverdale comes back October 11

Well, the review that bigdamnhero posted mentioned how tone deaf episode 3 was with its message. So we know that they got watch at least 3 episodes.