The Legend of Tarzan 2016

This flick hit the theaters back in July 2016.  Publicity work must have been pretty bad, I never heard of it until I did a search for "Tarzan" on Netflix.  I'm an old Tarzan fan, got started reading my father's collection of Tarzan novels in grade school.  I have seen most, perhaps all, of the Tarzan movies and TV shows going all the way back to the Johnny Weissmuller movies.  This was a medium speed Tarzan movie, not great, but watchable. 
   The cast were names I had never heard of, but they did a reasonable job working against a faint to flaky plot and really terrible continuity situation.  The movie starts up with a very British lord John Clayton in London, does flashbacks to a boy Tarzan being raised by Kala the she-ape deep in the jungle, pops back to the present (1890) flashes back to a young Tarzan whipping Kerchak hand to paw, pops forward to the same young Tarzan meeting Jane, and so it goes.  The flashback scenes are cute and all, but the constant flashing back and forth is confusing, and when laid on top of a weak plot yields a confusing movie. 
   The soundman was only fair to poor, a lot of Jane's lines were unintelligible to me.  The cameraman is still  turning the lights off, yielding a pure black scene with just a hint of  someone's white face floating around in the blackness.  They have a lot of pretty nicely done CGI animals, lions, great apes, wild buffalo, elephants and suchlike.  They have a stern wheel river steamer that looks pretty good although it is almost certainly CGI.
   Tarzan is properly ripped, has a good six pack abs. He looks a little too skinny for the part, I expect Tarzan to be built like Schwarzenegger.  This Tarzan doesn't really look strong enough to rassle with great apes and live to tell about it.  We don't see Tarzan without his shirt until halfway thru the movie, and he never does get down to the traditional loincloth,  he is wearing pants right up the the end of the flick. 
   Jane is nicely played, young, beautiful and tough.  She spits in the bad guy's face, and later escapes from the bad guy's river steamer by diving over the side into crocodile infested waters, while still wearing the ankle length white dress she was wearing when captured.  We never learn just how she avoided or dealt with the crocs.  We see her climbing out of the  muddy river with the white dress now stained river-mud-color.  A few scenes later the dress goes back to being white, and still later back to river-mud-color.
   Overall, not too bad, at least for us dyed in the wool Tarzan fans.  

Waterboard 'em enough and they will say anything you want

Interrogating prisoners is something of an art.  Coercion, whether the 3rd degree methods of modern police to real old fashioned medieval torture,  is a deal between the interrogators and the subject.  Talk and it will stop hurting.  Most subjects understand this.  And, most subjects want it to stop hurting, and so they talk.  They will lie their heads off and say anything the interrogators want them to say.
   For criminal police work, where all they have to do is make the subject say " I confess" this probably works.  For military intelligence work where we want the location of enemy troops, supplies, other assets, or operational plans,  or names of leaders and agents, targets for airstrikes, success of past attacks, or size of military units, it's not so effective.  The subject, under duress, will invent answers to the questions.  This defeats the purpose of interrogation, by filling the intelligence files with nonsense.  
    So I am not in sympathy with president Trump's call to waterboard more subjects.  I don't think you get useful intelligence this way.  CIA used to have some pretty good interrogators.  They got Khalid Sheik Mohammad to sing like a canary.  Then came the great CIA shakeup over black sites, waterboarding, VHS tapes of interrogation. I wonder if CIA has anyone left who can interrogate effectively.  Or would dare to do so from fear of prosecution.
   What we ought to do is take more prisoners.  Obama liked killing 'em rather than taking 'em alive, probably to try to empty out Gitmo.  Seal Team Six had Bin Laden at their mercy, they had plenty of airlift, they should have cuffed him and flown him out.  Rather than calling in an airstrike, send troops in by helicopter to capture alive as many as possible.  Take the prisoners to Gitmo and grill 'em medium rare.  Do fancy televised trials for the higher ups like Bin Laden.

God Speed Mary Tyler Moore

The TV is carrying news of her death at age 80.  She put on a lot of really good TV in her day.  I watched a lot of it.  There isn't anything nearly as good on TV these days.  God Speed.

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals

DACA is an Obama executive order to the immigration folks to ease off deportment of young illegal aliens who were brought into the US by their parents when they were small children.  The Wall St Journal runs two letters to the editor today, one advocating that president Trump continue the policy, and one advocating ending it. 
   Cool and all.  But isn't this a matter for Congress?  Someone ought to submit a bill to Congress to make DACA the law of the land.  I'd expect it to have a good chance of passage.  And then the argument would be over. 

Chuckie the Schumer wants 6 hours of "debate" about Mike Pompeo

Debate used to mean a contest of ideas between two opposing parties, for example Lincoln and Douglas.  What Chuckie wants is six hours on national TV to trash Mike Pompeo in the hopes of weakening President Trump.  And Chuckie found some obscure and anti democratic Senate rule (the Senate has a load of 'em) to force the Senate into giving him six hours. 

Mortgage backed securities in the news again

You would think after they caused Great Depression 2.0 that we would have clamped down on mortgage backed securities.  Apparently not.  Top item on the Friday Wall St Journal.  "Bonds backed by certain risky single family mortgages topped $1 trillion for the first time in November amid warnings about that corner of the housing market." 
$1 trillion is very serious money.  The US GNP is only $17 trillion. 
And mortgage backed securities are just flat dangerous to the world economy.  The "backed" part is pure moonshine.  All the seller of mortgage backed securities promise is that the mortgage payments will be used to pay off the bonds.  But, if the mortgages stop paying, the bonds go bust.  That's what took down the entire world financial system in 2007-2008.  A disaster which we still haven't recovered from.  Before Great Depression 2.0  our GNP grew at 3.5% a year.  Since Great Depression 2.0 GNP growth has been 1% a year.  That's eight years of poverty. 
   To sell a mortgage backed security a financial  house has to buy up a batch of mortgages from the likes of Countrywide and Freedom Mortgages.  Who are happy to sell, turning mortgages  (promise to back in the future) into cash right now.  And, they are happy to write subprime and NINJA (no income, no job, no assets) mortgages, so long as they can find suckers to buy them before they default. 
   Basically we should not allow the sale of mortgages.  If the mortgage lender know they are stuck with the mortgage forever, they will be more careful about who they write mortgages for, since they will own them.  And as a homeowner,  I am not happy with the idea of my mortgage falling into the hands of God knows who, who can stick it to me in a dozen different ways. 
   Mortgages are good deals for the lender.  They are backed (really backed, not moonshine backed) by real property, if the borrower defaults, the lender gets the house.  The borrowers are strongly motivated to keep up the payments lest they find themselves out on the street.  It's simply to assess the risks involved at the time you write the mortgage.  You inspect the property to see if the property is worth more than you are gonna lend on it.  You interview the borrowers and check their credit history, and see how much they are earning.  You don't write a mortgage when the monthly payments are more than 25% of the borrowers income.  Pretty simply stuff. 
  

Donald Trump vs the MSM. Who will win?

President Trump understands that the MSM is out to get him.  They have a giant megaphone, and with only a few honorable exceptions, they all speak with one voice.  They don't like Donald Trump, and they plan to make his term as president as miserable as they can. 
   President Trump has been pretty vigorous in trashing the MSM for dishonesty and slanted stories.  He understands publicity and public relations as well as they do. The presidency is still a bully pulpit.   He understands that mud sticks.  When they smear you, you have to say something, the public isn't going to forget the smear.  If they don't hear the target defend himself, they assume he is guilty.  They assume that an innocent man will defend himself against the smears, no defense, and the guy is probably guilty.  Trump understands this, and had defended himself vigorously, and so far, it has worked for him.  His twitter account is smoking hot, and it puts President Trump's views in front of the entire nation, and the MSM does' get a chance to slant or edit his views.  The MSM has been bitching about Trump's tweets because they cut the MSM out of the game.  It's like FDR's famous fireside chats in the 1930's.  Roosevelt's words went nationwide unedited and unslanted. 
    And the MSM has damaged it's credibility during last year's campaign.  Now, few Americans believe what they see on TV or read in the papers.  When Trump slams the MSM, the voters are inclined to believe him.
   I don't see a truce coming.  I think we are going see a head on collision between the President and the MSM.  There is a fair chance the MSM will loose.