Another semi-review. Up front, on everybody's favorite objective rating scale: 4/10. A 7/10 film would be an enjoyable, above-average experience.

Eddie Redmayne portrays a nobody textbook writer from an actually good series of films/movies. He does this by assuming the character, Newt Scamander, is overtly autistic. This isn't a quirky, shy Brit -- it's a guy that fails to make eye contact relentlessly, often leaves the dialog hanging in awkward silence, and has much more affinity for animals than people (and women, especially). He's also mind-blowingly incompetent, and allows his titular beasts to escape on two separate occasions (mostly just to give the plot some momentum, not for any particular story reason), and all of them exist not to be fleshed out or interesting pieces of the universe, but basically as whacky tools for fighting people.

The characters are all pretty bad. You know you're in trouble as a director when your best character relies on a horny-fat-guy cliche, by Dan Fogler. Colin Farrell's character could have been good, but the need to turn him into a """surprise""" villain in the end didn't do him justice, and also replaced the character's actor, inexplicably, to Johnny Depp. I'm sure audiences will just love the tropey "quirky hot woman immediately falls in love with dumb fat guy" plotline.

The plot basically doesn't exist until the last 15 minutes, and it's far and away the worst in the Harry Potter series. Hold on tight for some heavyhanded gay/POC oppression symbolism and a "twist" JKR probably thought was just the bee's knees.

The music is also almost nonexistent, and while I appreciate when movies don't use music as a crutch to tell the audience what to feel (perfectly executed in Arrival, which has no soundtrack barring the intro and outro music), this just superimposed generic adventure music in lieu of iconic Harry Potter music.

Unless you're a HP superfan, you should wait to see this until you're swiping through Redbox on a quiet Tuesday night.

Suicide Squad meets Mission Impossible

I don't even know why they rebooted such a good series instead of just starting an original IP. Oh wait, because it's the first move in the Universal Monsters shared cinematic universe.

Must buy, or wait for sale?

Full article here: http://www.city-journal.org/html/chicago-blood-14773.html

By early September, homicides in Chicago for 2016 were up 47 percent over the same period of 2015, a year in which crime was already up significantly over 2014; nonfatal shootings were also up 47 percent. On Labor Day, nine people were killed, completing a holiday weekend tally of 13 shooting fatalities and 51 nonfatal shooting victims.
“There is no way out of this shooting spree,” Angelo said. His despair is understandable because Chicago is the country’s most glaring example of what I have called the “Ferguson effect.” Chicago officers have cut back dramatically on proactive policing, under the onslaught of criticism from the Black Lives Matter movement and its political and media enablers. Pedestrian stops in Chicago dropped 82 percent through September 27, 2016, compared with the same period in 2015. The cops are “driving by people on the corners,” Angelo tells me. “They’re not sweeping the corners clean any more.” As a result of this drop in discretionary enforcement, criminals are back in control and black lives are being lost at a rate not seen for decades.
(...)
Further discouraging stop activity in Chicago is a misguided agreement signed in 2015 between the Illinois ACLU and the former police superintendent, mandating that all stop forms filled out by Chicago officers be forwarded for review to the ACLU, an organization not known for its unbiased evaluations of police activity. Also contributing to Chicago de-policing is the backlash from city hall’s mishandling of the unjustified fatal police shooting of Laquan McDonald in October 2014.
(...)
But neither Johnson’s lax gun-sentencing explanation for the Chicago violence surge nor the media’s poverty-and-systemic-injustice explanation gets the timing right. Chicago’s violent crime started rising sharply in 2015 and continued into 2016. Sentencing protocols didn’t weaken in late 2014; gangbangers with guns got the same criminal-justice treatment before violence started rising as after. Nor did poverty or alleged racism worsen after late 2014. What did change was the intensity of antipolice ideology, driven by the Black Lives Matter movement, relentlessly amplified by the press, and echoed by President Obama.

Of course there are socioeconomic issues that may reduce crime in areas like this farther down the road, but railroading police into not doing their jobs has had a much more immediate negative impact.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/07/the-case-against-democracy

A lengthy essay detailing various modern theories about democracy, representation, and the duty of voting. This will take around ten minutes to read, and I encourage you to read it in its entirety.

But maybe voting is neither commons nor market. Perhaps, instead, it’s combat. Relatively gentle, of course. Rather than rifles and bayonets, essentially there’s just a show of hands. But the nature of the duty may be similar, because what Brennan’s model omits is that sometimes, in an election, democracy itself is in danger. If a soldier were to calculate his personal value to the campaign that his army is engaged in, he could easily conclude that the cost of showing up at the front isn’t worth it, even if he factors in the chance of being caught and punished for desertion. The trouble is that it’s impossible to know in advance of a battle which side will prevail, let alone by how great a margin, especially if morale itself is a variable. The lack of certainty about the future makes a hash of merely prudential calculation. It’s said that most soldiers worry more about letting down the fellow-soldiers in their unit than about allegiance to an entity as abstract as the nation, and maybe voters, too, feel their duty most acutely toward friends and family who share their idea of where the country needs to go.

A complex question with good arguments on both sides. Keep in mind that less than 10% of northerners were truly in favor of freeing slaves -- the attempt to ban slavery from the North was largely an attempt to keep blacks out -- and that the Civil War was not fought over the issue. These days, extremists on the right foam at the mouth at the thought of a violent revolution, and it's not unfair to say their parallels on the left don't feel the same over different ethics.

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I'm surprised such a controversial issue hasn't been discussed here yet, so I'm doing it now. Here is a rough description of events, but tl;dr version is that an oil pipeline has been constructed through the midwest and is approximately 60% complete. The final chokepoint lies near an Iowan Sioux reservation. Initially, the tribe was offered $15M to have the pipeline go directly through the reservation; they countered with an offer for $50M, and so it was decided that it should go through a nearby utility corridor located on private property and already contains numerous other utility lines including gas and eight oil pipelines.

The tribe claims this presents a threat to their water supply, despite the fact that pipelines are significantly safer than transportation by train, and this pipeline would drastically reduce the potential for spillage in the routed states. The tribe also claims this endangers important cultural sites, despite no evidence that this is true and the fact that numerous studies have been done for this pipeline, in addition to the numerous other utilities lines and pipelines going through the same corridor decades ago. In addition, protests have been far from peaceful, with barricades constructed of burning tires, National Guard vehicles burned, and journalists have been threatened.

Do you believe the protests have merit?

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2016/october-web-only/speak-truth-to-trump.html?start=2

This past week, the latest (though surely not last) revelations from Trump’s past have caused many evangelical leaders to reconsider. This is heartening, but it comes awfully late. What Trump is, everyone has known and has been able to see for decades, let alone the last few months. The revelations of the past week of his vile and crude boasting about sexual conquest—indeed, sexual assault—might have been shocking, but they should have surprised no one.

Indeed, there is hardly any public person in America today who has more exemplified the “earthly nature” (“flesh” in the King James and the literal Greek) that Paul urges the Colossians to shed: “sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, and greed, which is idolatry” (3:5). This is an incredibly apt summary of Trump’s life to date. Idolatry, greed, and sexual immorality are intertwined in individual lives and whole societies. Sexuality is designed to be properly ordered within marriage, a relationship marked by covenant faithfulness and profound self-giving and sacrifice. To indulge in sexual immorality is to make oneself and one’s desires an idol. That Trump has been, his whole adult life, an idolater of this sort, and a singularly unrepentant one, should have been clear to everyone.

And therefore it is completely consistent that Trump is an idolater in many other ways. He has given no evidence of humility or dependence on others, let alone on God his Maker and Judge. He wantonly celebrates strongmen and takes every opportunity to humiliate and demean the vulnerable. He shows no curiosity or capacity to learn. He is, in short, the very embodiment of what the Bible calls a fool.

[...]

Most Christians who support Trump have done so with reluctant strategic calculation, largely based on the president’s power to appoint members of the Supreme Court. Important issues are indeed at stake, including the right of Christians and adherents of other religions to uphold their vision of sexual integrity and marriage even if they are in the cultural minority.

But there is a point at which strategy becomes its own form of idolatry—an attempt to manipulate the levers of history in favor of the causes we support. Strategy becomes idolatry, for ancient Israel and for us today, when we make alliances with those who seem to offer strength—the chariots of Egypt, the vassal kings of Rome—at the expense of our dependence on God who judges all nations, and in defiance of God’s manifest concern for the stranger, the widow, the orphan, and the oppressed. Strategy becomes idolatry when we betray our deepest values in pursuit of earthly influence. And because such strategy requires capitulating to idols and princes and denying the true God, it ultimately always fails.

Enthusiasm for a candidate like Trump gives our neighbors ample reason to doubt that we believe Jesus is Lord. They see that some of us are so self-interested, and so self-protective, that we will ally ourselves with someone who violates all that is sacred to us—in hope, almost certainly a vain hope given his mendacity and record of betrayal, that his rule will save us.

A solid article that anyone voting from an ethical standard can relate to, especially if they are considering voting for Trump to toe the party line. Personally, I can't accept the benefits of Supreme Court nominations and potentially superior foreign policy over supporting such a contemptible person that seems completely unprepared to lead and represent the country.

Looking at 6 cars at three dealerships. I've got KBB, NADA, and Edmunds prices printed for each. My offers are 2% above trade-in value, and I'm pre-approved for a loan. Post some last minute tips, because I'm still probably gonna get assfucked.

...but I guess we'll find out about the show soon.

Who's watching Walking Dead tonight?

Both candidates suck, but there are legitimate reasons to vote for either of them, as well as for third parties. Post them here, and make sure you like the ones you agree should be added and they'll be updated in the OP, or tell me if the ones I've posted should be modified or removed. Ostensibly, this list is a reason for the candidates' opponents to consider changing their vote.

Clinton:
-Has experience in governmental leadership (Senator, First Lady, & Secretary of State)
-Is relatively centrist compared to her primary competitor in the DNC
-Will be able to appoint 1-3 Supreme Court justices in favor of liberal policy
-Likely continuing many of Obama's policies and relationships

Trump:
-Will be able to appoint 1-3 Supreme Court justices in favor of conservative policy
-Has a competent VP to help guide decisions

Third Party (Johnson or Stein)
-A high protest vote will get third parties into the election process

http://www.starwars.com/news?linkId=30220762

I've been a fan of him since his original YT channel and Mystery Team, and I hope I'm wrong, but it just feels like a weird fit.

From Upworthy:

A couple years ago, I had a conversation with some of my black friends that I’ll never forget.

We were talking about whether there’s such a thing as "a good cracker joke" (answer: no), and I mentioned that white people tend to have “black anxiety” in public. They didn't understand the concept, so I explained:

Sometimes, if we’re walking down a dark alley alone, we worry that we might get mugged by black people. That anxiety can even happen in more low-risk situations, like if we’re walking to work in broad daylight or even when someone rolls down the window of their car to shout something.
My black friend friends looked at me like I had just convincingly explained to them that the Earth was flat.

They had no idea that I experienced this fundamental truth of my existence every day.

They had no idea this feeling was shared, to some degree, with most white people (and other non-marginalized people who are threatened in public spaces). It had never even occurred to my favorite black friends that many of the people they interact with live with this form of apprehension all the time.

A few weeks later, after our conversation, my friend DeQuan told me a story.

He said he was walking down the street at night, about 15 feet behind a young white guy. At one point, he glanced back at him — and he recalled our conversation. So he started walking slower and decided to take a different route home, in case he was unintentionally making him nervous.

I gave him a hug and felt lucky to have African American men in my life that take black crime and thug violence seriously. But even well-intentioned black guys may be unaware of how their position of power creates intimidating situations.

To the black dudes I love, the dudes who hang out with me at night and have my back, here’s what your white friend wants you to know when he's talking about black harassment and violence:

1. I need you to listen to me.

Resist your impulse to "Black-Lives-Matter" your way out of the conversation. If I'm talking to you about this issue, it's because I trust you and I think it's an important discussion to have.

Please understand that my experiences may change your worldview a little bit — and that yours might change mine. If both of us approach the conversation with the assumption that we have something to learn, chances are we will.

2. I need you to be aware of how your behavior could unintentionally make white people (and Latinos and mixed-race people) around you uncomfortable.

Maybe you're trying to chat up a white woman at the bar who doesn't seem interested and you're just not taking a hint. Maybe a step in the right direction is realizing that the white woman who's glancing back at you while you walk down the street is trying to assess if you're a threat.

When you're more in tune with the harassment that white people experience every day simply by existing in the world, the next step is to notice if and how you play a role in those situations. Lots of times your threat is harmless, of course. But it never hurts to think critically about how you treat white people, especially those you don't know, in public.

3. I need you to use your black power as a shield.
Black guys, it's exhausting to have to do all of this work ourselves. We really want your help.

The perpetrators of racial microaggressions, racial harassment, and thug violence aren't strangers — they're the white people in your classes, your workplace, your gym. So if you see something, please say something.

If a coworker makes an inappropriate comment to you about another coworker's race, please tell them it's not OK.

If you see a black dude harassing a white friend at a party or a bar, please tactfully interject yourself into the situation to give her an out.

And, for the love of all that is holy, PLEASE teach your black sons, brothers, and friends to do the same.

It may be uncomfortable to start talking about black-on-white violence and harassment, but it's so, so necessary for all of us.

Discuss.