Archive for July 2018
Ricardo Montalbán
Was he a minority, or a white European?
Outrageously biased statement by Sulzberger
A. G. Sulzberger, publisher of the NY Times, says that he told Trump: “I warned that this inflammatory language is contributing to a rise in threats against journalists and will lead to violence.”
Once again, here’s a case of the left imagining Trump supporters doing what the people on their own side are actually doing. Nearly all of the political violence in this country is being committed by the left against Trump supporters and people they label the “alt-right” or “white supremacists” or whatever label they think give them the right to commit violence. And the media spends lots of time talking about imagined violence from Trump supporters while ignoring the actual violence taking place.
No one takes Trump seriously, his supporters understand he’s not to be taken literally, but on the other side of the aisle liberals like Maxine Waters are riling up the Trump haters who do take violence seriously. “Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” Language like that is going to lead to more violence than anything that Trump tweeted.
Furthermore, on a worldwide basis, the most common perpetrators of violence against journalists are Islamic terrorists and organized crime, exactly the people Trump wants to keep out of the country but the media goes crazy that Trump is trying to keep them out of the country.
Journalists have very safe jobs as long as they don’t leave the United States. The people dying at work are the blue-collar workers. Especially dangerous occupations are logging, fishing, roofing, and garbage collection.
Star Trek TOS: Where No Man Has Gone Before, part 2
Sorry, but this is just a poorly organized mish-mosh of thoughts.
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Gary Mitchell is the ladies’ man of the Enterprise. When Dr. Dehner first shows up, Mitchell tries to flirt, but she rebuffs him with a disparaging remark. Mitchell then tells his shipmate that she’s a “walking freezer unit” loud enough so she can hear him! Feminist-leaning modern viewers have called this “sexual harassment” aboard the Enterprise. The best thing about old TV shows is the political incorrectness.
But then, as Mitchell becomes more powerful and even godlike as a result of gaining super “ESP” powers, Dehner’s attitude completely changes. First she champions him at the ship meeting about what to do about Gary, and then she wants to stay on the planet with him. This is a case of Mitchell becoming more alpha, and even the feminist professional woman who disdains his hound-dog behavior changes her attitude towards him as he becomes a super-alpha.
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The blonde Yeoman Smith who’s on the bridge is the cutest Yeoman ever seen on Star Trek, way cuter than Yeoman Rand. Too bad she never made it past the pilot. But it’s not Captain Kirk who she’s into, nope, it’s our friend Gary Mitchell, who she holds hands with as the ship crosses the galactic barrier. That type of behavior was removed from the series after the pilot. Uhura (absent in the pilot) was sexy, but she kept it professional (except in the evil “Mirror” universe).
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The “ESP” stuff is a very 60s thing. Today nobody takes ESP seriously anymore. Sure, there are lots of movies and TV shows about people with paranormal abilities (like the X-Men), but everyone understands that it’s fantasy and not something to be taken as a serious prediction of what the future will be like. But back in the 60s, ESP was more prominent in hard science fiction. It appeared in various Heinlein novels.
In this episode, Spock is able to look at everyone’s personnel records on his computer screen (which was actually pretty forward thinking), and each record includes an ESP rating. In the future as envisioned here, ESP is taken so seriously that everyone in Starfleet is tested and rated and it’s seen as a scientific fact that some humans have a certain amount of ESP.
Of course, as the series progresses, we encounter many aliens with paranormal abilities, including Spock who is able to read minds by doing a Vulcan mind meld.
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The core assumption of this episode is that if one man obtains super powers, he inherently becomes dangerous to the entire human race, and must be cast out or killed. Thus as soon as Spock determines that Mitchell’s ESP powers are increasing “geometrically,” his immediate “logical” recommendation is that he must be killed as soon as possible, or left behind on a deserted planet, put preferably killed.
However, the setup here is that Mitchell is Kirk’s best friend, and Kirk doesn’t initially have it in him to kill him in cold blood, so he decides on the less lethal option to abandon him on a nearby planet that also, quite conveniently, has an automated mining station with everything they need to fix the warp engines.
And later on, after Mitchell has escaped from his prison cell down on the planet (why does an unpopulated automated mining station have a prison cell?), and the ship has been repaired, it would appear that Kirk has gotten what he wanted, Mitchell is alive on the planet (along with Dehner who now also has super ESP powers) and Kirk can leave him there. But now Kirk has changed his mind and decides that Mitchell must be killed, and that the way to kill him is not by using the ships phasers safely from orbit, but by Kirk going man-to-man against Mitchell who has godlike powers.
This is an example, that will be repeated in many future episodes, where Kirk goes irrational alpha-male, and needs personal and physical revenge against someone who wronged him. By all logic, Kirk should have been killed in the encounter, because Mitchell is now too godlike to be harmed by the cool-looking phaser rifle (which never appeared in any future Star Trek episode), but because of an unlikely and fortuitous turn of events, and a speech, Kirk is able to bury Mitchell alive, and Dehner conveniently dies on her own without Kirk having to do the dastardly deed of killing a woman.
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It seems to me that Kirk isn’t the only one behaving irrational alpha-male in this episode. Mitchell supposedly has super-intelligence in addition to super ESP powers, he is able to read, and remember with perfect recall, a large portion of the ship’s library, but somehow he’s not smart enough to realize that he could much more effectively get what he wants (perhaps transport to a human-inhabited planet so he can take over the human race, or something like that) by pretending to be harmless and benevolent, but instead he shows off his super powers and says stuff like “SOON I’LL SQUASH YOU LIKE INSECTS.”
In episode after episode, Kirk is never able to humor hostile aliens when it appears, at least to me, to be the most prudent course of action. The message is that a true alpha-male, like Kirk, or Mitchell in this episode, is unable to even pretend to be a beta male, not even for a short time, not even when it would be highly advantageous to do so.
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In the briefing room aboard the Enterpise, Dehner says “a mutated superior man could also be a wonderful thing. The forerunner of a new and better kind of human being,” and down on the planet she says “before long, we’ll be where it would have taken mankind millions of years of learning to reach.”
This reflects two themes that run throughout Star Trek.
The first, is that the inevitable future is for mankind to evolve into something superior to what we are today. But that is totally false. It’s not how evolution works. There is no force that causes humans to get better with each passing century. Humans got to where we are because the environment was such that what we consider to be better humans had more descendants and passed on more genes. That type of evolution is no longer happening. Today, it’s the worst of humanity who have the most descendants and pass on the most genes. The human race is devolving and not evolving.
The only way that mankind is going to become better in the future, or even stop its decline, is through artificial means like eugenics or genetic engineering. And that brings us to the second recurring theme of Star Trek, that shortcuts like that are evil and lead to monsters like Gary Mitchell, Charlie X, or Khan Noonien Singh.
Princess Mae
She’s a short plump bleach-blonde Filippina unwed teenage mom with multiple trashy tattoos, and she has over a million Instagram followers. Not only does she have a million followers, she also has an extraordinarily high engagement rate; several of her more recent posts exceed 200,000 likes. With that much engagement, she can easily make mid six figures a year hawking clothes and beauty products.
Her existence also disproves a common theme I see in the comments that American women are too “fat” to be attractive. In fact, the thick look is becoming more popular with every passing year. Soon we will hear about women dieting to gain weight so they can look more like Princess Mae! (Although they probably won’t be successful because it can be even harder for a naturally thin person to gain weight than for a naturally fat person to lose weight, plus even if there is successful weight gain, more likely than not the weight won’t get distributed to the right places.)
Advice for Republicans from Willis L. Krumholz
Stop treating the media like something other than Democrats looking to obscure the truth, promote their party line, and embarrass you and everything you believe in. Interrupt. Argue. Set the agenda. Be dogged, just like Trump.
News from the Harvard lawsuit
I don’t think I learned much, if anything, new from the article. It confirms that Harvard values athletes, legacies, relatives of people who donated money, and the more money donated the more Harvard values them. And that Harvard uses a “personal rating” that describes Asian applicants as being smart and hard-working, but boring (“boring” is my word, not a word used in the article), too boring to achieve great things after graduation, too boring for Harvard.
Star Trek TOS: Where No Man Has Gone Before, part 1
I was thinking that I should watch more original-series Star Trek, and instead of randomly jumping around as I’ve done in the past, I figured I should just start from the beginning, although even the “beginning” isn’t so clear cut. I decided that the beginning is this episode, which was the third episode aired but is actually the pilot episode: the second pilot episode. The first pilot, lost for a long time but now available on Netflix, didn’t have William Shatner in it, and most of the footage was recycled into a two-part flashback episode that aired later in the first season.
I know that some readers are thinking “Star Trek isn’t important, why aren’t you writing about Trump?” There has been too much writing about Trump, and Star Trek is damn important because of the very strong impression it made on nerds of my generation (late Baby Boomer and early Generation X) because every day when I came home from school, what was on TV (on Chanel 11) was reruns Star Trek. (I’m not old enough to have watched this when it originally aired.)
It’s strange re-watching the Original Series. In my memory it is so awesome, but then I watch it and it’s so dated, the special effects are so bad, the acting is so bad, and it’s so full of plot holes. Even Kirk seems less awesome than I remember. At the same time, I also see a lot of philosophical details that I missed entirely when I was younger.
Even though this pilot got some stuff wrong (such as Spock being a cowboy-like gunslinger toting around a huge phaser rifle), it sets up a lot of the recurring themes for the rest of the series, such as:
- Kirk beats Spock at “chess” because Spock is put off by his “illogical” moves (more on this later).
- Logical Spock argues with an emotional doctor (in this episode the female psychiatrist Doctor Dehner because McCoy isn’t around yet), with Kirk being the referee who understands both the logical and emotional points of view.
- Kirk is concerned about the safety of his ship.
- But then Kirk’s actions seem more like he has a personal grudge against Gary Mitchell. Alpha males don’t like to be crossed, and overreaction to being crossed is what makes people afraid to cross them in the first place.
- Kirk gives an overacted speech that saves the day. (Speeches never save the day in real life, but it happens all the time in Star Trek.)
- Kirk gets into a fistfight, and during the fight his shirt gets mysteriously ripped. You would think that they’d have more advanced fabrics in the future that don’t get ripped so easily.
Let’s talk some more about this “tridimensional chess” that we see Spock and Kirk playing. For starters, it’s not a real game, it’s just a prop that was designed to look cooler, more futuristic, more advanced and harder to play, than regular chess. The chess theme is pretty dated. Chess was more popular in the 1960s than it is today, partially thanks to Bobby Fischer the American chess champion of the 1960s.
Today we know that computers can outplay even the best humans at chess. Even a chess program running on your iPhone can beat the best human grandmasters. And computers operate on pure logic, so it’s totally illogical that Kirk could beat the more computer-like brain of Spock through illogical moves. I suppose the intent was to show that pure logic isn’t enough to be a Starship Captain. But for playing chess, yes, pure logic is what you need. That computers can beat any human at chess has ruined the mysteries of the game and is partly responsible for its decline in popularity.
Gene Roddenberry liked to believe that people in the future would be “better” than they are today, so they are seen entertaining themselves by playing a game of chess (perceived as a game for smart people) that was even more advanced and difficult than regular chess. The reality, at least in the short term, is that people in the future would entertain themselves by watching reality TV shows and playing mindless videogames. Gene Roddenberry total got that wrong.
In Star Trek the Next Generation, the crew is often seen playing poker, and that’s a more likely game that will be played in the future than some funky version of chess.
This post is taking me longer to write than I thought it would, so I will continue tomorrow with a review of the actual plot of the episode.
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CBS CEO Leslie Moonves taken down!
Another Hollywood scum pushing SJWism taken down by the monster he helped to create.
The top out-of-sight were #withher
The most top-out-of-sight place in the United States is Nantucket, and we see from the new New York Times voting map that Nantucket went 64% for Clinton and only 29% for Trump.
Michael Cohen
He’s entitled to defend himself.
But it seems to me like his lawyer is some guy who hates Trump and is using Cohen to take Trump down rather than representing Cohen’s interests. The same with Stormy Daniels’ lawyer, but she’s a dumb bimbo pseudo-prostitute, while Michael Cohen, even though he went to a TTT law school, ought to know better.
Lion of the Blogosphere 