Blame Trump?

The man who sent bombs to prominent Democrats turned out to be a Trump fan.  Therefore, Trump is to blame for the bombs being sent.  The man who shot up a synagogue and killed 11 turned out to be a Trump hater.  Therefore, Trump is to blame for the massacre.  It sure looks like if something bad happens, Trump is inevitably the root problem.

Of course, by this logic, Bernie Sanders has to take responsibility for the Bernie Bro crackpot who shot Steve Scalise at the Republican baseball practice and Obama gets credit for the Black Lives Matter nut who killed several police officers in Dallas.

 

Adversarial rhetoric is not the same as incitement.  Hold the person who did the shooting or mailed the bomb responsible.

Tim Pool

I've been watching a lot of Tim Pool lately.  Though Tim is on the left in political views, he is open about it and makes considerable efforts to play the news straight.  He has an analysis channel where he just reports news - mostly - and a second channel where he often vents.  What is interesting about Tim is that, though disposed to be a Democrat, he is annoyed by the tactics the Democrats have been using of late.  He has repeatedly reported that the amount of left on right violence far exceeds any right on left violence.  His videos tend to be 10 to 15 minutes long providing a lot of depth to the topic with multiple sources; he often reads a news story verbatim.

 

Tim is open about his political views so the viewer can factor in any bias.  This makes him dramatically more trustworthy than many journalists who present themselves as objective and unbiased despite always spinning stories in an anti-Republican or pro-Democrat narrative.  Tim doesn't do that.  Tim is what a journalist should be.

 

Highly recommended.  Check it out:

 

Timcast on YouTube

The Year of the Comet (1992)

Margaret Harwood (Penelope Ann Miller) works for her father, a seller of fine wines.  During one particular wine tasting, Oliver Plexico (Tim Daly) asks if she has any Budweiser in the back.  Shocked by his lack of culture, she continues her work.  Unhappy to be little more than a servant in the family business, she demands and gets the job of surveying a wine cellar in Scotland.  To her utter amazement, she finds a bottle of Lafite 1811, bottled in the year of the comet; it is worth a fortune.  Thus begins a series of thefts and recoveries as multiple parties attempt to take possession of the bottle.  Oliver, who appears to be a fixer for one of the men at the earlier wine tasting, is her initially unwanted ally but later lover.  Yeah, this is something of a romantic comedy of the Romancing the Stone variety.  Though fun, it falls far short of that bar.  Tim Daly plays a combination of the comic oaf and the supreme jack-of-all-trades.  His trademark line is "I never said I wasn't ..."  It was okay to start but when he got to "I never said I didn't go to MIT" he had gone too far.  With his final reveal, it becomes hard to understand why he is chasing Maggie.  Love is blind.

 

This 1992 movie marks the final appearance of Louis Jourdan.  He plays the most durable of the villains but not particularly threatening.  In fact, the threat level of the villains drops as the movie progresses, a reverse of what one would expect.

 

Mindless popcorn fun.  Thumbs up.

Trunk Music

Bosch has spent the last 18 months either on leave or stuck on the burglary table as he is eased back into the department after the events of The Last Coyote.  He has also managed to get his house rebuilt.  With the death of Lt. Pounds, Lt. Grace Billets has taken over Hollywood Division.  She proves to be a refreshing change from Pounds.  Finally back on homicide, Harry gets his first call.  A man is dead in the trunk of his car, two bullets in the back of his head.  A little investigation shows he laundered money for the mob and was scheduled for an IRS audit.  Harry and partner Jerry Edgar head to Las Vegas.  To Bosch's shock, he discovers that Eleanor Wish played poker with the dead man on occasion.  He had had an affair with her in The Black Echo.  The stars seem to align and a suspect is nabbed in Las Vegas but then everything goes sideways.

 

Another great book by Michael Connelly.  Excellent pacing, great characters, and there are no coincidence.  Well, except maybe at the very end.  Highly recommended.