Archive for February 2015
MH370 hijacked by Russians?
According to Jeff Wise, Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 was hijacked by three Russian passengers and flown to Kazakhstan. Maybe sponsored by Putin himself?
This is more plausible than the plane flying to the middle of nowhere over the Indian Ocean, which makes no psychological sense. Why would anyone do that?
Google meets Logan’s Run
I’ve always said that Logan’s Run is the most prescient sci-fi movie ever filmed. This is proved once again, with Google creating a new plan for its corporate campus that looks just like the domed city from Logan’s Run.
Spock is dead
I am very sad. I already miss him. The NY Times obituary is very good. Obviously it was written well in advance of his death.
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A comment posted at the NY Times:
As a girl growing up in the 60s in Singapore, I wanted to be like him. I wanted to be calm, collected, impeccably logical and unfettered by life’s messiness. He was my hero and when I think of people I gravitate towards, they have that essence. Love him.
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There was a question about Leonard Nimoy’s politics. Unfortunately, a quick internet search provides evidence that he was a Democrat, but I am unaware that he used his fame to lobby public opinion or that he made any mean-spirited remarks about Republicans, so I don’t think he’s one of the bad guys.
If he was a Democrat, perhaps he was an old-school Democrat who believed in economic equality for regular working Americans, and considered his wealth to be accidental luck and not something that entitled him to pay low taxes.
Gentrification in north-central Harlem?
The NY Times Census Map shows that the area between Frederick Douglas Boulevard and Bradhurst Avenue (bordering Jackie Robinson Park) is undergoing significant gentrification. So maybe the kid in the article I blogged about yesterday (who bought an apartment at the northern end of that Census tract) is making a wise investment after all.
Where lions fear to roam
There’s a NY Times Article about a guy who was able to purchase a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan for under $100,000, plus it cost him another $70,000 to fix it up.
Wow, that’s cheap! What’s the catch? The location at 150th St and Bradhurst Avenue. I have to admit that I’ve never even heard of Bradhurst Avenue before. That’s because it’s in a part of Harlem that I’d be afraid to visit, even during broad daylight, only a block away from the Harlem River Houses and a few blocks from the Polo Grounds Towers where according to the NY Times, gunfire is a common occurrence. This is the very heart of the ghetto.
Star Trek: TNG S02E01, Space Rape
So OK, Space Rape isn’t actually the name of the episode, but that’s what happens.
This is the first episode of Season 2, and there have been some significant and positive changes to the show.
Geordi La Forge is now the Chief of Engineering instead of just some helmsman on the bridge.
Worf is now in charge of security.
Riker has a beard.
There’s a new transporter Chief, O’Brien, who appears to be the only non-officer on the entire ship.
There’s a new doctor, Pulaski. Gates McFadden (“Gates” is a pretty weird name for a girl, who names a girl baby “Gates”?) was a horrible actress so I can see why they might try to replace her. Pulaski is obviously supposed to resemble Doctor McCoy from the original series, and she is supposed to have an adversarial relationship with Data the way that McCoy had with Spock, but I don’t think it worked out so well. DeForest Kelley and Leonard Nimoy were much better actors.
The ship now has a bar/lounge called “Ten Forward” (I guess this means it’s the most forward room on Deck 10), making the Enterprise seem even more like a luxury cruise ship instead of a quasi-military vessel. The bartender, Guinan, is played by Whoopi Goldberg (demonstrating once again that the Jews control Hollywood).
The teenager Wesley Crusher is still onboard even though his mother has left. He is now called “Ensign Crusher,” even though he failed the entrance exam to Starfleet in the previous season. There were many episodes in Season One in which everyone is too stupid to figure things out except for Wesley, but no one pays attention to him because he’s just a teenager. (How did the rest of the officers manage to get admitted to Starfleet Academy, unless they used to be smart like Wesley but then serving in Star Fleet caused them to become stupid?) But then this theme stopped later in Season 1. In the first episode of Season 2, Wesley doesn’t do anything except talk to Whoopi Goldberg in the bar, leaving the adults to figure out how to save everyone on the Enterprise from being killed by a plasma virus.
But the real story this episode is how Deanna Troi is raped by an alien space being, gets pregnant with some sort of super-fast-growing baby (which Dr. Pulaski insists is a normal baby even though it’s obviously not). Nevertheless, Troi loves her rapist and insists on giving birth, ignoring Worf’s sensible suggestion to have an abortion. So Star Trek becomes pro-life, even in cases of rape.
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Riker’s Beard
The opposite of jump the shark, i.e. when a TV show goes from unspectacular/boring/outlandish to completely awesome. It references Star Trek: The Next Generation, which was unspectacular until season 2, when Commander Riker grew a beard. The show kicked ass from then on.
“Man, Dollhouse really pulled a Riker’s Beard last week with that awesome episode.”
Except the first episode sucked, so maybe it took a bad episode before the beard started improving the show?
Self-actualization from career
As I’ve written many times before, the ultimate life goal for today’s upper-class is to have self-actualization from one’s career. I use the term “self-actualization” that was popularized by Abraham Maslow. I think that most people who buy into the philosophy don’t actually use that term, but clearly the influence of Abraham Maslow is what’s behind the whole philosophy.
Why do people seek this from their job? Why can’t they just work at a boring and meaningless job and then seek self-actualization in their non-working hours? Or save up enough money so they can retire early and pursue self-actualization full-time? Or if their parents are rich, why do they have to have a job at all? Why not just pursue self-actualization and forget about having a job? In fact, that’s what rich people used to do. In Downton Abbey, no one is working at a job. In Edith Wharton’s book, the House of Mirth, none of the women were interested in working at a job (but that was before Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique), and the man that the protagonist, Lily Bart, liked most as a person, Lawrence Selden, she didn’t consider to be an acceptable spouse because he worked at a real job (as a lawyer).
Today, it’s just not considered socially acceptable to not work. Not working is for poor people (who collect welfare). Upper-class people have to demonstrate their superiority over the lower classes by having a career. Class stuff doesn’t always have to make any sense.
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To clear this up with a chart:
Poor people: Don’t work at all.
Proles: Work crappy jobs that are injurious to their health like construction or coal mining.
Middle class: Boring meaningless cubicle jobs.
Upper class: Work that is meaningful and enriches their lives, making them better people while helping others, and achieving what Abraham Maslow called self-actualization.
Meaning from work
Rachel Feintzeig writes in a management column in the Wall Street Journal:
Faced with a cadre of young workers who say they want to make a difference in addition to a paycheck, employers are trying to inject meaning into the daily grind, connecting profit-driven endeavors to grand consequences for mankind.
In part, professionals are demanding more meaning from their careers because work simply takes up more of life than before, thanks to longer hours, competitive pressures and technological tethers of the modern job. Meanwhile, traditional sources of meaning and purpose, such as religion, have receded in many corners of the country.
I should remind you that a bias held by nearly all journalists, which crosses political lines (even David Brooks and Charles Murray seem to agree), is that the ultimate goal in life is to find self actualization from one’s career.
Giuliani was right
The far left is not patriotic for two reasons:
1. Leftist liberals hate the very concept of nationalism, and one cannot be patriotic while hating nationalism.
2. Leftist liberals hate the strong and favor the underdog. Thus the United States, as the world’s most powerful nation (most powerful military, most powerful economy, and the most cultural power), is the nation most hated by the left. The goal of the left is to equalize things, so they would like to lift up other nations and bring the United States down in order to make the world more equal.
On top of that Obama has a special thing for anti-neo-colonialism, meaning that he believes that the United States’ involvement in the world harms the less developed nations of the world, which is why he supports anti-American foreign political movements like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the guy who tried to become President-for-life of Honduras but was kicked out by that county’s legislature and Supreme Court.
Giuliani is also correct that Obama, being raised in Indonesia, a Muslim country, with a mother who’s an extreme America-hating leftist, is going to have a different view of American than the vast majority of Americans who grew up here. One of the reasons why the Founders put in the Constitution that the President should be born here was to ensure that the president would be a true American patriot and not think like a foreigner with different loyalties.
Yes, the left understands all of this, and they also understand that no liberal would ever be elected if the American public knew what liberals really thought about America. And the best way to make sure the public never finds out is the shut down any talk about the truth. Which is why the liberal-controlled MSM went all-out attack mode on Giuliani.
Lion of the Blogosphere 