The Equalizer 2

[4.0 stars] [IMDb Link]

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Denzel Washington is Getting Up There (his birthday, as I type, is tomorrow, December 28, and he will be 64 years young.) He remains a believable action star, however. Here he reprises his role as Robert McCall, the Equalizer. His job is to bring his brand of vigilante justice to the people for whom the normal channels are unavailable or inefficacious. This often requires prodigious amounts of spectacular violence, at which McCall excels.

McCall lives modestly in a working-class Boston apartment, but he's well-off enough to jaunt off to Europe to retrieve a kidnapped child from (what I'm pretty sure is) the Orient Express. Mostly he sticks to home: comforting a Holocaust survivor (Orson Bean, not dead yet!) or mentoring a black kid wavering between thug life and nurturing his artistic talent.

But the main plot is driven by international intrigue: a CIA "resource" and his wife have been gruesomely murdered, the scene set up to look like a murder/suicide. This brings in McCall's old CIA boss, Susan (Melissa Leo) to check things out. Which (eventually) brings in McCall, too. The bad guys handle "loose ends" in the classic bad guy way.

A thrilling conclusion is set in Marshfield MA, seaside during a nor'easter/hurricane. And that's neat too.


Last Modified 2024-01-24 11:52 AM EDT

URLs du Jour

2018-12-27

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  • As we hurtle toward year end, it's time to read Dave Barry’s Year in Review 2018. Sample, from January:

    …which sees world tensions rise when North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un states that he has a nuclear-missile launch button on his desk. This leaves U.S. Commander-in-Chief Donald Trump with no viable military option but to fire up his Random Capitalizer App and tweet “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his,” thereby leaving no doubt as to which leader is more secure regarding the size of his button. In an apparent effort to reassure everyone on his mental state, the president also issues a Tweet in which he describes himself as “genius....and a very stable genius at that!” Which is EXACTLY HOW VERY STABLE GENIUSES TALK, OK??

    The intellectual level of the national discourse soars even higher when it is reported that, during an Oval Office meeting on immigration reform, the president referred to some poorer nations as “sh*tholes.” This upsets many people, especially the frowny panel persons of CNN, who find the word “sh*thole” so deeply offensive that they repeat it roughly 15 times per hour for a solid week. Washington is consumed by a heated debate over what, exactly, the president said; the tone and substance of this debate are reflected in this actual sentence from a Washington Post story: “Three White House officials said [Sen. David] Perdue and [Sen. Tom] Cotton told the White House that they heard ‘sh*thouse’ rather than ‘sh*thole,’ allowing them to deny the president’s comments on television over the weekend.” (This is known in legal circles as the “sh*thouse defense.”)

    Dave, seemingly like most of us, has an overriding thought: what is wrong with these people? Unlike most of us, he makes money periodically fleshing out that thought.


  • Veronique de Rugy warns us: Here We Go Again -- Another Chaotic Christmas for Congress.

    The primary job of Congress is to pass a budget. Yet year after year, its members fail to do their job. This year is no different. The week before Christmas, and in the midst of a budget deficit that's exploding along with the national debt, the Senate rushed to prepare a stopgap spending bill to keep the government open for a couple months. In other words, we're left with unnecessary uncertainty and a growing pool of red ink.

    [Amazon Link]
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    Oh, sure, blame Congress if you want. But (a recurring theme) save some blame for the people who put them there. There's that timeless wisdom "when you point a finger there are three fingers pointing back at you". (See Amazon product link cleverly disguised as an illustration at right.)

    I except myself. Of course. None of this is my fault. Or Veronique de Rugy's.


  • Further on that point: Arnold Kling has a should-be-obvious-but-isn't observation: Government is a branch of culture.

    I suggest defining culture as socially communicated practices and beliefs. We may think of government as the subset of practices and beliefs that are defined formally and enforced coercively.

    Take property rights. We can think of them as culturally defined, even in the absence of government. But property rights take on more significance when the government establishes and enforces them. De Soto in The Mystery of Capital argues that without formal property rights an economy cannot develop properly.

    Just as an economy has both a formal sector and an informal sector, culture has both a formal and an informal sector. The formal sector is where norms are enforced by government.

    As a corollary, Kevin D. Williamson (in an NRPlus article) notes:.

    The United States is a republic, not a monarchy or an empire or a blood-and-soil nation of the ancient kind. The American federal state is not the American people. The U.S. government exists at our sufferance, not the other way around. And if it is making more trouble for us than it is worth, then we should reconfigure it along more sensible and effective lines. What prevents that from happening is not what President Trump et al. like to call “the Swamp” or what Senator Sanders calls in his honking accent “allah-garky.” What prevents meaningful reform is our own narcissism, which is so deep and all-encompassing that we can no longer think about government in instrumental terms but instead can understand it only in totemic terms — i.e., in terms of what it says about us and how it makes us feel about ourselves. That kind of immaturity is how you lose a republic and get . . . whatever it is we’re getting.

    Not an entirely cheerful message there, Kevin.


  • At NR, Jonah Goldberg observes, for better or (mostly) worse, Trump's Character Is Destiny.

    Weirdly, it’s gotten to the point that when I say President Trump is not a man of good character, I feel like I should preface it with a trigger warning for many of my fellow conservatives.

    Most of the angry responses are clearly rooted in the fact that they do not wish to be reminded of this obvious truth. But others seem to have convinced themselves that Trump is a man of good character, and they take personal offense at the insult, even though I usually offer it as little more than an observation. They rush to rebut the claim, citing banal or debatable propositions: He loves his children! He’s loyal to a fault! He’s authentic! Never mind that many bad men love their children, that loyalty to people or causes unworthy of loyalty is not admirable, and that authentic caddishness is not admirable. Moreover, he is not remotely loyal to his wives or the people who work for him.

    What’s most worrisome is that these defenders are redefining good character in Trump’s image, and they end up modeling it.

    New Year Resolution: don't be like that.


  • We missed this cheerful holiday story, originally told by WBZ-TV in Boston, and echoed by Jazz Shaw at Hot Air: Teamsters union takes all but $15 of UPS workers' pay.

    Sheila O’Malley of Charlestown couldn’t believe it when she opened her paycheck from her seasonal job at UPS. “I was shocked,” she told the I-Team. She worked 41 hours that week, many of them during the overnight, and ended up with just $14.52.

    Sheila assumed it was a mistake and the money would be refunded. In part, because Sheila, like other thousands of other seasonal part time UPS workers, signed an agreement to pay the $500 Teamsters union initiation fee in $32.00 weekly installments. But UPS told her it wasn’t a mistake. A spokesperson for UPS told the I-Team, “Local 25 reversed this long standing practice by rescinding this policy.”

    Man, the Grinch had nothing on the Teamsters. Save that for the next time one of your Wobbly Facebook friends posts that it's a real problem that more US jobs aren't unionized, like they were in the Golden Age.


  • [Amazon Link]
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    Clay Routledge writes on a recurring theme at Quillette: From Astrology to Cult Politics—the Many Ways We Try (and Fail) to Replace Religion.

    When people turn away from one source of meaning, such as religion, they don’t abandon the search for meaning altogether. They simply look for it in different forms. As I discuss in my new book, Supernatural: Death, Meaning and the Power of Invisible World, the decline of traditional religion has been accompanied by a rise in a diverse range of supernatural, paranormal and related beliefs.

    Nearly one third of Americans report having felt in contact with someone who has died, feel that they have been in the presence of a ghost, and believe ghosts can interact with and harm humans. These numbers are going up, not down, as more people seek something to fill the religion-shaped hole in their lives. By no coincidence, infrequent church attendees are roughly twice as likely to believe in ghosts as regular churchgoers.

    As a regular non-churchgoer, I should have a "religion-shaped hole" in my life. I'm not sure what I've filled it with, however. Jack Reacher novels, maybe?


Last Modified 2024-01-24 11:52 AM EDT