So I finally finished watching what is hopefully the first of many seasons of Reacher on Amazon. This review is spoiler-free, but WARNING: linked article contains spoilers.
They managed to not screw it up by sticking mostly to the book, and they kept my favorite aspect of Reacher: he's basically an anarchist. He's a good guy who tries to write wrongs. He sees rules and laws as tools that he can use when useful (this is rare) and things to ignore when they're not. He does what he wants, ignores orders, and lives his life only for himself and as he sees fit. He's made the words "Don't tell me what to do. Am I being detained?" into a lifestyle. He's not particularly smart, but he's careful, precise, detail-oriented, and most importantly he has lots of empathy for others. This makes him a fun modern day frontier justice-style detective. Oh, and a 6'5", 250-lb, 5% body fat combat machine with enough gratuitous shirtlessness to keep many women and gay men very happy.
The biggest downside of the TV adaptation was the cringe-worthy fight choreography, where the hero alternates between unbeatable and useless punching bag depending on the whims of the director. These days we expect better, and expect both good guys and bad guys to know enough martial arts to make things interesting. It doens't need to be "Into the Badlands" gorgeous, but it should at least be competent and it was most certainly not.
Still worth a watch.
Don’t worry!
His “very smart people” are totally right about things this time when it comes to trade.
There is zero - I repeat, zero - moral difference between the people who pushed for "experimenting" with lockdowns because "we have to do something!" and the people who push for "experimenting" with trade wars because "we have to do something!"
Musk is out.
Musk put himself in a corner where he can't rip into Trump and he has to play nice probably at least through the midterms, but just look at the guy's face and watch him refuse to give a straight answer here. He put a lot on the line with endorsing Trump and starting DOGE, and Trump absolutely stabbed him in the back. Trump's supporters will blame congress, but Trump has very openly and loudly endorsed all of the DOGE-defying moves that congress has made, and has viciously attacked the one congressman (Thomas Massie) who has stood against it.
The reason is simple: Trump cares about trophies. Cutting the budget is not a trophy. DOGE trying to take a chainsaw to government was a trophy, but as soon as DOGE became more of Musk's than Trump's trophy, Trump stopped caring about it because congress offered him a Big, Beautiful Bill as a trophy instead. Just like the FBI offered the opportunity to build a Big, Beautiful new headquarters building for them (Trump loves buildings!). ...
As comedy slowly slides into unfunny wokeness hell, the last comedian standing (assuming he doesn't drop dead first, I mean just look at the guy; he's a trainwreck) will be Doug Stanhope. He closed out his recent special "The Dying of the Last Breed" with this bit on how important it is that we be able to make fun of anything. Because making fun.
Language warning, duh.
Preliminary Q2 numbers for Argentina are in. This is still subject to adjustment but so far their preliminaries have been pretty accurate under the Milei administration.
Slashing spending works. Trump and Bessent are very optimistically projecting economic growth of 3% doing the opposite of what Milei is doing to deliver 7.6% - and climbing!
