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[Full Disclosure: I have not seen the IT miniseries or read the book. I tried to avoid spoilers in this review.]

It had been almost a decade since my last trip to ‘the movies’ or whatever it’s called when you watch a film at a cinema. Yet over the last couple of weeks, I found myself at a movie theatre twice. This was not my choice, I watch very little TV or film. I was pressured to go by my significant other.

Both movies I was obligated to see shared a similar theme of children being tormented by supernatural forces. While not having the emotional impact of seeing animals in peril for me, it’s a pretty good basis for some level of emotional investment. Far more sympathetic as characters than the older ‘kids’ who get massacred in Friday the 13th type movies.

The first movie was Annabelle: Creation, a prequel to a poorly received spin-off I never saw. With that description in mind, expectations were pretty low, although the positive reviews gave some hope.

In the end, I was pleasantly surprised. It was not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, but there were more positives than negatives.

The ‘horror’ elements were not strong, but the genre is not something i’m a fan of anyway. Obligatory tropes of ‘i want your soul’ and the vomiting into a victim’s mouth didn’t make much impact. A strong cast, solid direction and complementary sound design kept the well paced film engaging, despite the uninspiring plot.

If I were to give it a subjective rating, 6/10 would be fair.

Now we arrive at the reason i’m writing this ramble. The second movie I was compelled to see, IT: Chapter One. Although the subtitle is not featured in any of the marketing for it.

It is an iconic piece of popular culture, originally a novel by Stephen King, the titular character is especially memorable, a supernatural entity manifesting itself as the clown known as Pennywise. This is primarily the result of an earlier adaptation where the character was played by Tim Curry, apparently instilling a fear of clowns in at least one generation. Perhaps because I was not exposed to this portrayal, I am apathetic to clowns.

The new adaptation starts off quite well, although the fake-out scares in the opening moments were unnecessary.

The introduction of Pennywise was well executed, the shift from awkward but comedic to creepy and sinister with just a facial expression was an expected but effective shift in tone.

Immediately after this, it falls apart on a technical level. As Pennywise claims his first victim in the film, unnecessary and poorly done computer animation broke any immersion.

The film jumps forward and we are introduced to the rest of the cast, while the performances are for the most part serviceable to good, there are many characters and they get very little development or backstory. More than one of the boy’s personality is essentially ‘annoying’ and with how little individual screen time or development each is offered, there’s not much to care about.

From here, the film just gets weaker. There are a lot of jump scares, but they are startling at best and not scary in any way. This is made worse by the continual tonal shifts, there are more moments to laugh than there are moments of fear or horror. It’s very crude humour too, which from my limited understanding is fitting in regard to the source material. If used sparingly it would be much better, but too often the sexual humour from a teenager really pulls you out of any sense of tension that had been present. This is compounded by how the film moves from scene to scene with no particular aim or sense of progression.

Almost every time IT/Pennywise makes an appearance, there was computer animation to be found and it was never well done. The character is definitely sinister and I have no complaints about the actual performance. Less computer animation, more context and dialogue would have been cheaper and more effective in creating an atmosphere.

There are some standout moments in the movie. The bloody bathroom scene with Beverly was the most tense and visually engaging, the subsequent montage was definitely not. Nicholas Hamilton’s portrayal of Henry Bowers was excellent, despite the terrible lines he had to read. The few times the film focused on him were the most powerful and emotionally charged.

Some of the notable low points… The rock throwing fight, where there is no impact and it inexplicably goes into slow motion for a few seconds. The scene where the main characters lay around in their underwear after swimming served no purpose, aside from showing the teenage boys find the teenage girl attractive (which was already established at the start of the scene). The love triangle that just faded in and out, left me feeling like scenes were cut. The aforementioned montage after the bathroom scene totally forgot about the stakes that were setup for it.

The film is over two hours long, an hour into it I was checking the time and having whispered discussions with my companions. There was a few other people in the screening, there were no audible reactions from the audience at any joke or scare.

While there are some good moments, ultimately the movie does not deserve the praise it has received. An aimless story, the omnipresent but somehow impotent antagonist, and substandard special effects. The acting was the strongest point, but with a weak script, little character development and uninspired direction, it wasn’t entertaining.

My issues with IT/Pennywise as a character and the overall plot may be an issue with the source material, but the issues with the script, direction and special effects are very much the fault of the film makers.

I can see why some people have enjoyed watching this, to a point... I cannot understand why it’s currently sitting at 85% on RottenTomatoes and 8.0 on IMDB. This movie floats, like a number 2.

(Really though, 4/10)

In a break from my usual interests of business and geopolitics... Culturally we are still not above paying people anywhere from $50 to in this case, more than $100m for punching each other for the sake of entertainment.

Unbeaten boxer Floyd Mayweather will fight UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor in a much-discussed boxing match on Aug. 26 in Las Vegas, a well-placed source told Yahoo Sports on Wednesday.

Mayweather and McGregor both confirmed the fight on social media on Wednesday.

[...] It is a stunning development given that Mayweather, the greatest boxer of his era, had said he was retired after compiling a 49-0 pro record from 1996 through 2015. But with a fight which could pay each man in excess of $100 million, he reconsidered.

Mayweather is considered the greatest boxer of his generation and among the best of all-time. The fight with McGregor, in addition to paying him in excess of nine figures, will give him the opportunity to improve to 50-0.

Source: Yahoo! Sports

The 'editor in chief and publisher' of the MIT Technology Review Jason Pontin took to twitter today. He was replying to WikiLeaks posting a picture of Eric Schmidt wearing a "Clinton Campaign Staff Badge". I with agree with Jason, that image is pretty meaningless by itself. Schmidt private citizen and can support a candidate if he wants to.

However, Jason goes on to say, after being shown differences between suggested searches on DuckDuckGo and Google; "Well, I doubt it... but oooh, no autocorrect: that will swing an election."

Where he goes off the deep end and is either lying or being completely ignorant is when he says "You have no evidence, except your own paranoia, that Google manipulates search results." ... This is from the Editor-in-Chief of the MIT Technology Review.

Here is the leading paragraph from an engadget article written in 2015:

A few years ago, the FTC decided not to pursue an antitrust lawsuit against Google despite finding that its search algorithm really was biased. Now, we finally know the details of that lengthy investigation, thanks to a report written by FTC staffers that recently surfaced due to an open-records request. According to the 160-page report, the employees found evidence that Mountain View was demoting its competitors and placing its own services on top of search results lists, even if they weren't as helpful.

I'm sure most of us have seen the effects of localization and other 'personalization' on search results and suggestions when using Google outside your normal state/country.

This sets an extremely low standard for what the MIT Technology Review publishes from where i'm sitting.

So about a month ago, I put in a submission regarding the documentary 'A Very Heavy Agenda'. The submission didn't make the cut, and the reason was no one picked it up in the month it was in the queue.

I chose to make this submission to highlight the pundits and think-tanks that have been shaping foreign policy and the military interventions in recent years. These people are going to remain in positions of influence and will continue to be talking heads shaping the debate regarding the role of the US in the world, regardless of who wins the pending presidential election.

An excerpt from a WaPo article on the same subject:

Frederick and Kimberly Kagan, a husband-and-wife team of hawkish military analysts, put their jobs at influential Washington think tanks on hold for almost a year to work for Gen. David H. Petraeus when he was the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. Provided desks, e-mail accounts and top-level security clearances in Kabul, they pored through classified intelligence reports, participated in senior-level strategy sessions and probed the assessments of field officers in order to advise Petraeus about how to fight the war differently.

[...] When they returned in September 2010, the Kagans’ writ no longer resembled the traditional think-tank visit or an assessment mission intended to inform an incoming commander.

They were given desks in the office of the Strategic Initiatives Group, the commander’s in-house think tank, which typically is staffed with military officers and civilian government employees. The general’s staff helped upgrade their security clearances from “Secret” to “Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information,” the highest-level of U.S. government classification.

The new clearances allowed the Kagans to visit “the pit,” the high-security lower level of the Combined Joint Intelligence Operations Center on the headquarters. There, they could read transcripts of Taliban phone and radio conversations monitored by the National Security Agency.

According to the relevant Wikipedia article, around 6 billion people in the world identify with one of the 5 major religious groups in the world. Another couple hundred million identify with "medium sized religions". That's by far the majority of the world's population who are engaged in some form in organized religion and the common interpretations of spirituality.

I was born in the late 1980's, in the UK, my formal education spanned the 1990's and early 2000's. Unlike most who frequent this site, I never went into formal higher education beyond day releases arranged by my employer at the time.

Older generations of the family, parents and grandparents, have never displayed or discussed any religious affiliation. One of my grandparents was by all appearances an atheist. Strongly against religion being taught in school, in any form. Passing away before I was even a teenager, never had the opportunity to discuss the nuances of the anti-religion disposition.

With that, religion never being discussed in the home, the contrast to that with my state-sponsored education, in the 1990's especially, gives me pause for thought. There were christian prayers and hymns every day in my primary education. The only reason possible for not taking part in that was being one of the few Muslims or Hindus in the school. Everyone else had to participate. The only time religion was mentioned at home was "if you're asked what religion you are, you're C of E" ... I had no idea what that meant at the time, just knew what i was told to say if the question ever came up. As a child, i was never introduced to the idea you could not have a religious affiliation. We're all Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs of some stripe or other...

Both my parents, and my mother's parents were very concerned about the social isolation and stigma resulting from not publicly identifying with the established religion. I was going to be christened to ensure I would have the ability to get married.

Now times have apparently changed since then, and I doubt primary education in mainstream state schools have hymns and prayers still. In hindsight, to me it's quite surprising it was still the standard in the 1990's. There was numerous attempts made to indoctrinate the youngest and most impressionable into Christianity, sponsored by the state, there was non way to opt-out of this. It was very much part of the curriculum. It continued to a lesser extent in high-school, everyone got given a bible for some reason, although I do not recall prayers and hymns.

I do believe in a spiritual side of life, my experiences make it impossible to deny. However, that blending organized religion, faith and education, especially when state-sponsored for the general population is very troubling to me.

Organized religion is often just a tool for control, and what better time to introduce people to that than in their formative years, in a formal authoritative institution in which they have to attend continuously for years, but have little to no agency within. This kind of education does not encourage actual learning.... Text books, like the bible are gospel. Critical thinking and comprehension get in the way of rote memorization of various elements of propaganda, especially in the social sciences. Religion and formal education institutes seem primarily designed to give us a framework for our worldview to be confined within, not to expand out from, in the hopes of avoiding the difficult questions that might arise.

The psychological prison needs to be just big enough that we can't see all the bars at the same time.

Has anyone else had similar experiences of an apathetic family and a proactive state in religious indoctrination?

Chris Evans has announced he is leaving his role as a presenter on BBC Two's Top Gear after one series.

He tweeted: "Stepping down from Top Gear. Gave it my best shot but sometimes that's not enough.

"I feel like my standing aside is the single best thing I can now do to help the cause."

His resignation comes after falling ratings for the show - which hit a series low on Sunday night, with an average of 1.9 million viewers.

Source: BBC

It is just over a year since Evans was given the job of reinventing Top Gear for the post-Clarkson era, an appointment that was controversial from the start after he had repeatedly denied he had been approached to host the show.

The then BBC2 controller, Kim Shillinglaw, said Evans’s “knowledge of and passion for cars are well-known and combined with his sheer inventiveness and cheeky unpredictability he is the perfect choice to take our much-loved show into the future”. But Shillinglaw lost her BBC2 job before the show went on air, one of a string of senior departures to hit the show, also including that of its executive producer Lisa Clark.

Source: The Guardian

Below is the closing section to an article written by Cognitive Dissonance of TwoIceFloes.com, he is also a contributing author at ZeroHedge.com, and by far their best in my opinion.

To change the world I must first change myself. To approach this in any other manner is to adopt the techniques and mindset we decry as dishonest, disingenuous and corrupt. I have come to realize the approaching trials are about so much more than just survival. This is about personal growth and spiritual transformation, of reaching for and achieving a higher plain of existence greater than the lowest common denominator, the heart of the fraud the Empire promotes and which “We the People” are addicted to and dependent upon.

And this, I suspect, is what truly holds so many people back.

For to break from the herd and look squarely in the mirror requires a fearless self examination and assessment, precisely what we are conditioned to avoid at all costs in our mindless pursuit of self absorbed consumerism. The promoted myth is simple enough; when we exit the education indoctrination system the only remaining items left to pursue are specific skills required to further our ‘career’, which in turn provides the money to pay the debts that support the self destructive consumer lifestyle.

Turning our back on this meme and consciously choosing a life of more focused labor and dedication to self sufficiency and independence is not aligned with the bargain we struck with the system back when we entered grade school all those years ago. I made a deal with the devil in return for a life of leisure when I hit age 65. To question this fundamental ‘truth’ requires us to question everything, something very few of us are willing to do.

Are you?

The Associated Press has recently put out a short article on President Andrew Jackson after it was announced his portrait would be replaced on the 20USD bill with one of Harriet Tubman, an iconic abolitionist and humanitarian. The article doesn't necessarily portray a positive image of Jackson.

Travis Loller, the writer of the piece describes Jackson's populist position in the political circles of the day, his status a military hero, providing the "infamous Indian Removal Act of 1830, which forced tribes from their land in the Southeast and pushed them into an uncertain future" as some context. The article continues noting his unprecedented use of veto power while in office, and his opposition to states seceding from the union.

The last section in my opinion, is included as a bit of trivia at best, quoting historian Daniel Feller, director of the Papers of Andrew Jackson at the University of Tennessee.

Paper money was printed by individual banks, and their value could fluctuate greatly. Some of it was worthless, and Jackson felt bankers were abusing the citizenry.

"Jackson thought that paper money wasn't real money," Feller said. "Real money was gold and silver."

The reality is, Jackson had quite a lot to say on this topic of money and banks. His image on a Federal Reserve Note could be seen as counter-intuitive at best, given his public position on the subject of central banking as we still know it today.

But if they have other power to regulate the currency, it was conferred to be exercised by themselves, and not to be transferred to a corporation.

If the bank be established for that purpose, with a charter unalterable without its consent, Congress have parted with their power for a term of years, during which the Constitution is a dead letter. It is neither necessary nor proper to transfer its legislative power to such a bank, and therefore unconstitutional.

I wonder what he would think of current monetary policy and 'tools' that the Federal Reserve and other privately owned/operated, completely unaccountable central banks are using today.

Reuters reports:

Top gold consumer China launched a yuan-denominated gold benchmark on Tuesday, in an ambitious move to exert more control over pricing of the metal and influence in the global bullion market.

The benchmark is a culmination of efforts by China over the last few years to reform its domestic gold market, attempting to gain a bigger say in the bullion industry, long dominated by London where the global spot benchmark price is set.

As the world's top producer, importer and consumer of gold, China has baulked at depending on a dollar price in international transactions, and believes its market weight should entitle it to set the price of gold.

ZeroHedge continues:

The mechanics of the Shanghai fix are comparable to those of London: the benchmark price will be set twice a day based on a few minutes of trading in each session. The London benchmark, quoted in dollars per ounce, is set via a twice-daily auction on an electronic platform with 12 participants.

The 18 trading members in the yuan price-setting process includes China's big four state-owned banks, foreign banks Standard Chartered and ANZ, the world's top jewelry retailer Chow Tai Fook and two of China's top gold miners.

As reported by CBS Local:

“What I also know, because I handle a lot of classified information, is that there are — there’s classified, and then there’s classified,” Obama told Fox News. “There’s stuff that is really top-secret, top-secret, and there’s stuff that is being presented to the president or the secretary of state, that you might not want on the transom, or going out over the wire, but is basically stuff that you could get in open-source.”

As written on a Reuters blog by Peter Van Buren last year:

Employees at the highest levels of access are expected to apply the highest levels of judgment, based on the standards in Executive Order 13526. The government’s basic nondisclosure agreement makes clear the rule is “marked or unmarked classified information.”

In addition, the use of retroactive classification has been tested and approved by the courts, and employees are regularly held accountable for releasing information that was unclassified when they released it, but classified retroactively.

Back on the Fox via CBS story:

“There isn’t a president who’s taken more terrorists off the field than me, over the last seven-and-a-half years,” Obama explained to Fox News. “I’m the guy who calls the families, or meets with them, or hugs them, or tries to comfort a mom, or a dad, or a husband, or a kid, after a terrorist attack. So let’s be very clear about how much I prioritize this: this is my number one job.”