Month: January 2020

Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 1 Episode 13 – The Conscience of the King

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This episode is essentially a murder mystery story.  Kirk is the detective and the members of the crew and a band of traveling Shakespearean actors are the props.  The leader of the acting troupe is suspected by Kirk of being a mass murderer who slaughtered four thousand of his citizens where he was a colony leader.  The only surviving witnesses who can identify the murderer are Kirk and Lt. Riley of the Enterprise.  The biggest complication is that, of course, the suspect’s daughter is a buxom blonde that has caught Jim Kirk’s eye.

Other than the love interest, which is slightly tedious, the Shakespearean motif is relatively amusing, with chunks of Macbeth and Hamlet slung around at slightly appropriate moments.  Spock is alarmed by the Captain’s secretive and erratic behavior and McCoy is his usual contrary self.  Outside of the plot we are regaled with Lt. Uhura singing something Star Treky and we are given one last walk through by Yeoman Janice Rand on the bridge.  Apparently she was fired shortly before this episode and this was her swan song.  A pity.  She was pretty.

The plot and the love story resolve themselves as the guilty receive poetic justice and madness and death are the fruits of murder.  I’d give the story a 7.  Shatner has almost no opportunity to perform any tumbling, bare chested gymnastics or over the top histrionics.  I’ll call it a 1 on the Shatner mockery scale.  That a 7 // 1.  Not too bad.

05JAN2020 – Quote of the Day

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Human rights’ are a fine thing, but how can we make ourselves sure that our rights do not expand at the expense of the rights of others. A society with unlimited rights is incapable of standing to adversity. If we do not wish to be ruled by a coercive authority, then each of us must rein himself in…A stable society is achieved not by balancing opposing forces but by conscious self-limitation: by the principle that we are always duty-bound to defer to the sense of moral justice.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

First al Baghdadi, Now Soleimani

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President Trump seems to understand effective use of military assets.  Apparently, he is leveraging intelligence capabilities, possibly Israeli, to surgically remove key actors that pose the greatest threat to our interests in the Middle East.  Qasem Soleimani was known to be the operational brains behind the Iranian proxy strategy that allowed them to sow chaos and control large swaths of Lebanon, Syria and Iraq without the necessity of sending significant numbers of Iranian fighters into those areas.

Knowing precisely where and when to send a drone weapon requires real time eyes on the target.  I would be surprised if it was an American agent that provided this intel.  Maybe it was an Iranian or an Iraqi but it is surprising to think we have that network in place there.

Regardless of the source of the intel.  President Trump has demonstrated that, militarily, he is very careful about engaging in military operations but he isn’t averse to using them when the reward is extremely valuable.  Killing fifty or even several hundred street fighters in Baghdad or Syria is relatively counterproductive.  The reduction in the number of hostile gunmen is negligible and the ill will it produces significant.  But killing Soleimani represents a force multiplier of several orders of magnitude above killing even a few hundred gunmen.  His strategic and tactical value is hard to overemphasize.  Soleimani’s network of personal connections and his power within the Iranian regime will not be quickly replaced.  While some other agent will be placed in his spot it is not likely that the same level of effectiveness will be realized soon or even over the long haul.  Good generals are relatively rare and ones who can work cooperatively with far-flung and dissimilar groups even less common.  Good.

This willingness to use military capability is surprising to me.  There are so many possibilities for disaster that I am surprised that President Trump has ventured to perform these missions.  But maybe I underestimate just how critical was the need to eliminate Soleimani.  We still have untold thousands of servicemen in the Mid-East.  It’s possible that the Iranians have been ramping up the violence of their proxies in order to embarrass President Trump who has proven to be much tougher on them than the groveling Obama.  Or maybe I have underestimated President Trump’s military abilities.  I won’t anymore.

It is painful to think that if someone like President Trump had been in the White House after 9/11 that the United States might have achieved all the strategic aims called for by that tragedy without the disastrous cost in American lives and the other unanticipated consequences of George W. Bush’s inept wartime command.  Handled differently, all the weapons programs of Iraq and Iran might have been confiscated and all the middle eastern immigrants that now clog Europe and America might still be where the belonged at home.  And all of this could have been achieved without any significant cost in military lives.  Well, that’s in the past now.

There is a certain amount of doubt about the fallout from an action such as this.  It may be that the Iranians will do something large and disturbing.  There is always that outside possibility.  But based on the shaky domestic situation in Iran itself, with the population openly hostile to the regime, I don’t think there will be much downside.  In fact, maybe this will give the Iranians pause and bring them to the negotiating table.  Time will tell.  My guess is that this elimination will end up improving the overall middle eastern condition both for us and our allies.  Good work, President Trump.