Month: May 2020

14MAY2020 – Boosting My Morale

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I remember how much fun it was to watch the compilation videos of the 2016 election and the reactions of the Left.  To hear them go from arrogant assurance to nervous uncertainty to shocked disbelief and finally crash land into wallowing misery was a comedic masterpiece on par with the best of Seinfeld or Monty Python.  The loopiness of the lefties both famous and unknown was marvelous.  Their gob-smacked stuttering shock was music to my ears.  In every way it was poetic justice.

And I’ve missed that experience.  It’s a great tonic to see your enemies driven before you in panic and derision.  At the very least, it’ll be six months until the election and even the debates, if they happen, are months away.  So, what’s a deplorable to do?

YouTube may be the Great Satan but it is the lazy man’s answer to any audio-visual search that could exist.  So, I searched under President Trump and Acosta and I found all kinds of comic gold.  It really is remarkable just how much abuse Jim Acosta has absorbed in the last three years.  President Trump has called him a hack, a liar, a purveyor of fake news, an employee for a fake news network.  The only thing he hasn’t done is make fun of his mother.  And then I saw some videos purporting to show the President attacking female reporters unfairly.  More gold.  For them his favorite line is calling their questions nasty.  One compilation claimed that the President especially attacked women of color.  And of course, that was the focus of that video.  But it’s great to see the President doling out equal derision and scorn to all fake news purveyors regardless of race, color or sex.  In fact, I like to think that the President would be proud to give the same messages of scorn to a tall muscular man in a sun dress as he does to a petite Chinese woman or a plain old doofus like Jim Acosta.  His message is one of egalitarianism.  No matter who you are and what you look like all it takes to qualify as a purveyor of fake news is a bedrock lack of honesty and an IQ of about 85.  In a way the White House Press Corps has become a sort of Ellis Island or mixing pot of dishonest talking heads.  Probably the biggest distinguishing characteristic is just how rude any particular reporter is willing to be to the President of the United States.  In this competition women have without a doubt taken the lead.  And this is another area where women’s rights could advance.  I have always harbored the hope that one day in the middle of one of Acosta’s rude outbursts against the President that he would instruct the Secret Service to drag Acosta out by the arms and legs and hurl him out the door.  If they tossed him just right, I always thought that he might bounce a couple of times like when you skip a flat stone over the surface of a lake.  The move could be nick-named the “Acosta.”  What would be great is if someday a woman could be acosta-ed just like a man without any sexism about how women aren’t just as capable of two or even three bounces on that polished White House floor.  That is my dream.  That a reporter not be judged by the choice of its pronouns but rather on the basis of its aero dynamicity and bounce elasticity.  Kinda chokes you up, don’t it?  I can almost hear the Battle Hymn of the Republic playing somewhere in the background.

13MAY2020 – OCF Update

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Looking around it looks like we’ll be hearing about the same issues for the foreseeable future:

  • The Blue and Red States will be touting their opposing strategies for weathering the COVID-19 epidemic. Currently the Blue States have selected as their strategy of inflating the death toll to include anyone who dies in their states.  Along with this they are dragging their feet on re-opening their businesses.  The Red States are moving ahead with normalizing life in their states.  Interestingly they are not seeing large numbers of deaths like we see in New York and New Jersey.  And even with the death toll inflation in the Blue States it appears they haven’t been able to hide the fact that the epidemic is receding.  I’ll predict that in a couple of more weeks even the blue States will be anxious to declare victory and start opening up their businesses and try to salvage their economies.
  • The Flynn prosecution will spawn a controversy with the Right touting the DOJ investigation into the illegal basis of the Russia-gate prosecutions and the Left condemning Barr and Durham as partisan hacks motivated by allegiance to the Trump administration. With Durham releasing information about the scope of the conspiracy this may quickly turn into the most interesting story of the summer and fall.  If the DOJ decides not to prosecute the conspirators but instead expose and embarrass them through publication of their dishonest actions it could have the effect of vindicating President Trump and vilifying Obama and his whole administration.  And that would be very bad for a Biden candidacy.
  • The Trump and Biden campaigns will spar ceaselessly over any and all issues. What you will hear endlessly is that Joe Biden is ahead by some number of points, between 5% and 10%.  It’ll never be explained how someone as universally disdained by even the Democrat voters as Biden could manage to remain perpetually popular and ahead but that is their story and they’ll be sticking to it.
  • Currently the Tara Reade story will be a lightning rod allowing the Republicans to brand anyone who condemned Justice Kavanaugh on the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford but disbelieves Reade about Biden as hypocrites. If Reade begins to gain traction with women voters, I think we’ll finally see the Democrat party either convince Biden to step aside or begin the process of selecting an alternate candidate.  And that will be a difficult process.  Bernie Sanders will be bypassed again and that is bound to alienate his many staunch supporters.  If Bernie is left waiting at the altar again the Bernie Bros will stay home in droves, or even worse, a bunch of them will vote for Trump.
  • Nancy Pelosi has assembled a three trillion-dollar bill that would allow the bankrupt Blue States to stick the federal government with the cost of the public sector union pension funds. The Senate Leader Mitchell McConnell isn’t interested in funding this.  But President Trump may be interested in additional relief for small businesses that have been crushed by the long shutdown.  He may try to broker a deal between the House and Senate.  I know that the President also favors some kind of public works projects.  This will be a large story in the fall.
  • The China story will be a continuing saga for the Trump re-election campaign. The President has indicated that he holds China responsible for the outbreak and the subsequent damage to the American economy.  It remains to be seen if this translates into a specific policy or policies.  You could imagine some kind of incentive for American companies that relocate industrial capacity from China to the United States.

As you can see these are interesting times but currently all of these issues will be moving forward in fits and starts.  Right now, none of them has a blockbuster event occurring so there will be a lot of opinion stories producing a lot of smoke and heat but little light.  I’ll try to restrain myself from piping in on every little ripple in the pond.  What I’m hoping to see is something from Durham.  As I’ve said, I don’t think we’ll get anything too spectacular.  But I would like to see something before summer.  Failing that I’d like to see the President formulate an economic rescue plan for small businesses that is more comprehensive and fairer than the halfway measures we’ve seen so far.

So, there’s my update.  Stay tuned for whatever is breaking next.

Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 3 – The Changeling

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The Enterprise is responding to a signal from the Malurian system.  But upon scanning the solar system they find that all of the four billion people there are dead.  They are attacked by an incredibly potent enemy that drains the ship’s deflector shield in a few blasts.  Kirk attempts to reason with the unseen enemy.  He names himself James Kirk in his address and the enemy seems to break off the attack at this mention.  We find out that a small three-foot-long robotic device that calls itself Nomad is the attacker.  It agrees to break off the attack and come aboard the ship.  We learn that Nomad was an Earth probe from the 21st century.  Nomad has mistaken James Kirk for its creator, Dr. Jackson Roykirk.  We eventually learn that the original Nomad was a probe designed and programmed to seek out interstellar life.  It was damaged and somehow merged with an alien probe called Tan Ru that was also damaged.  Tan Ru was enormously powerful and had as its mission to sterilize soil samples for planetary colony evaluation.  Once the two probes were integrated, their new mission was to seek out biological life and if it was imperfect, which it always was, to sterilize it.  This explained what had happened to the Malurian system.

Nomad starts exploring the Enterprise with unsurprisingly dire results.  He hears Lt Uhura singing and he analyzes her mind and finds it irrational so he erases her memory.  When Scotty attempts to come to her aid Nomad strikes him with an energy bolt that kills the engineer.  When Kirk complains that Nomad has destroyed on of the creator’s “units” Nomad agrees to repair the dead human.  And he does, much to the amazement of Dr. McCoy.  Kirk attempts to immobilize Nomad in a containment cell but Nomad leaves and when his two guards attempt to stop him, he disintegrates them.  Nomad repeats this action once again in another scene.

Kirk becomes exasperated with Nomad’s casual destruction of biological units and tells Nomad that Kirk himself is a biological unit.  This is a big mistake.  Nomad decides that he should sterilize the Enterprise and then head back to the point of origin, Earth, to decide how to eliminate imperfection there too.  Kirk hits on a plan and tells his men to stand by with anti-grav units to transport Nomad when Kirk gives his command.

Kirk tells Nomad that he is not the creator.  That he has mistaken James Kirk for Jackson Roykirk.  And since that is an error, Nomad is himself imperfect.  And since all imperfection must be sterilized Nomad must sterilize himself.  As Nomad’s processor attempts to reconcile this fact.  Kirk has his crew use the anti-grav units to carry Nomad to the transporter and right before he gives to signal to beam Nomad off the ship, he says to Nomad, sterilize the imperfection.  Kirk watches through a view screen as an intense flash signals that Nomad has sterilized himself right out of existence.

While Mr. Spock bemoans the loss of such an amazing creation Kirk observes that the machine thought Kirk was its mother.  He adds, “You saw what it did for Scott.  What a doctor it would have made.  My son, the doctor.  Kind of gets you right here, doesn’t it?”

I really like this episode.  The plot is a well thought up science fiction story that provides the Enterprise crew with something different from the usual human dramas that typically develop.  The plot device of Kirk outsmarting a machine is one that is repeated several times in the series but in this episode, it is used to good effect and the humorous ending is especially well done.  There is no Shatner mockery points to be found in this episode so I’ll give this a  9 // 0.