Month: December 2020

Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 22 – By Any Other Name

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We’re now deep, deep into Season 2 and the amount of “humor” employed by some of the principal characters is obvious to see.  And the costume department has obviously run out of ideas.  In this episode the aliens are dressed as if they found their clothes in a dumpster behind a second-rate department store.  The men are wearing some kind of polyester leisure suit-like apparel while the women are wearing jump suits from which the backs have been cut off from the waist up.

The Enterprise is summoned by a distress signal to an uninhabited planet.  Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and two red shirts beam down to the planet.  There they find a man and a woman, Rojan and Kelinda, who claim they are creatures from the Andromeda Galaxy seeking new worlds because their own galaxy will become uninhabitable within ten thousand years.  They announce that they will commandeer the Enterprise to return home in order to begin an invasion of our galaxy by their people, the Kelvans.  It will be a multi-generational voyage taking three hundred years even at Warp 11 speed.

And using their neural paralysis field devices they disarm and capture the landing party while the other three Kelvans beam aboard the Enterprise and take over the ship.  In addition to the paralysis field, they can also freeze dry humans down into polyhedral bricks, about the size of a softball, made of what appears to be poorly made porous Styrofoam.  When the landing party attempts to escape Rojan has one of his associates turn the two red shirts into these efficient and stackable human pellets.  Rojan then crumbles one of the blocks with his bare hands and restores the other one to inefficient but mobile form.  We then find out that the crumbled crewman was the pretty young girl.  When he realizes this Kirk appears devastated.  Apparently, he hadn’t yet had a chance to put the moves on this yeoman and now he never would!

Back on the ship, the whole crew except for Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Scotty are freeze dried for easy storage.  It’s especially pleasurable to see Uhura and Chekov singled out for treatment.  In one scene Kirk rounds the corner in a corridor of the Enterprise and sees the blocks strewn along the floor along with the odd computer tablet and i-pod.  When Spock had unsuccessfully attempted to mind meld with Kelinda in a scene that I have left out of my plot summary he got an image of a huge hundred-tentacled creature that is the true form of the Kelvans.  Realizing that the Kelvans were unused to sensory stimulation or emotions in their original forms he speculates that if the humans can overstimulate the Kelvans’ senses and emotions they might become vulnerable to attack.  And so much hilarity ensues during this plan.

Scotty takes one of the Kelvans, Tomar, to his cabin and starts introducing him to the wonders of grain alcohol.  Eventually Tomar becomes stupefied and collapses, as does Scotty.  McCoy takes another of the Kelvans, Hanar, aside and under the subterfuge of a medical examination starts giving him “vitamin” injections that are actually some kind of stimulant that raises his anxiety levels to monumental levels.  This has him complaining bitterly to Rojan about the incompetence of that commander’s plan.  This gets him confined to his cabin.

Meanwhile Kirk makes a beeline for Kelinda and starts pouring on the old Shatner charm.  He’s pawing her and kissing her all around the rec room.  I forgot to mention that Kelinda is played by Barbara Bouchet who is a very attractive looking actress.  She played Miss Moneypenny in one of the Bond films and is at the very high end of attractive female Star Trek guest stars.  While playing three-dimensional chess with Rojan Spock mentions that Kirk is putting the moves on Kelinda and this really ticks Rojan off.  So, he hunts them down and gets into a really spastic fistfight with Kirk.  During the fight Kirk keeps up a line of argument to the effect that by the time the three-hundred-year voyage to the Andromeda Galaxy is complete, the descendants of Rojan and his crew will no longer be Kelvans.  They will be completely human and have no desire to help the Kelvans.

He convinces Rojan to give up their voyage to Andromeda and allow the Federation to find uninhabited worlds in our galaxy for the other Kelvans to colonize while Rojan and Kelinda and the other three Kelvans will somehow form a very small colony on the uninhabited world that the Enterprise found them on.  The fact that there are only two female Kelvans and three male Kelvans is not explored further on this episode.  But to my way of thinking there is bound to be trouble in that very small paradise.

To my way of thinking the two highlights of the show are Rojan crushing the polyhedral salt lick made out of Yeoman Thompson with his fingers and Scotty hugging his empty centuries-old bottle of Scotch whiskey to his face and crooning to it, “we did it” after Tomar collapses in a drunken stupor.  And one small note, in the new enhanced graphics of the DVDs I have the Andromeda Galaxy image is very nice.

Now that nuttiness and hilarity is the order of the day on the Enterprise it’s much easier to enjoy the episodes.  Hopefully the people making the show are going along with the joke because adventure certainly isn’t the point.  Kirk wrestling with the pretty alien and McCoy and Scotty providing comic relief sort of works.

As far as Shatner mockery points, he gives some of his patented pathos when the yeoman is crumbled but it isn’t very extreme.  I’ll give this episode an     8  //  5.

Thoughts on the Nashville Suicide Bomber

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Anthony Warner was apparently a guy who thought that telecommunication infrastructure was responsible for his father’s dementia and death.  So, he rigged an RV to be a big bomb and blew up some AT&T telecommunications equipment in Nashville along with himself.  He is said to have been suffering from some kind of cancer and to have been into conspiracy theories about 5G networks.  Warner went to great lengths to warn anyone in the area that a bomb was about to explode.  Because of this no one was killed by the explosion except for Warner.

So why should this story mean anything to anybody who doesn’t live in Nashville?  Because there are probably at least a million guys like Warner scattered around this country.  If the activities of the government and numerous corporations haven’t produced that number of angry disgruntled men like Warner in the last twenty years, I’d be shocked.  The only variable is how many of these men are as angry as Warner.  But it doesn’t take a genius to guess that the number is a lot higher than one.

Our society is targeting the demographic that Warner belongs to.  Older white men are portrayed as the villains of every social meme being pumped out by the media, governments and NGOs.  Many of the millions of small businesses that have been destroyed by the COVID shutdowns are owned by these men.  They have seen the work of a lifetime destroyed and themselves and their families impoverished by bureaucrats and politicians who are picking them as the losers in the COVID game.  And they are also forced to hear the BLM apologists identify them as evil racists who are responsible for all the ills of society.  And finally, they just witnessed their votes being cancelled out by widespread fraud that installed a regime that will accelerate the damage that is inflicted on them by the government.

I’m no prophet but I’m sure the real question is why this is the first such suicide bomber to strike.  My guess is that the FBI probably has a list of thousands of such men that they think likely to do almost the same exact thing as Warner.  They probably monitor sales of explosives and raw materials that can be turned into explosives.  They monitor the on-line discussions of angry individuals and look for any signs that anger has been converted to action.  And I wouldn’t be surprised if they haven’t foiled many such plans.  But it is also certain that they cannot anticipate every one of these attempts.

I think it is safe to say that there will be further cases in the near future.  I also think it is safe to say that some of them won’t be as concerned with preventing deaths as Mr. Warner was.  And that makes you wonder what will be the consequences of such actions.  We currently live in a virtual police state with surveillance cameras everywhere and every communication scrutinized by intelligence agencies.  I guess they could begin performing pre-emptive interrogations utilizing water boarding and sodium pentothal on the general population but somehow, I think that might exacerbate the levels of anger already out there.

The interesting thing about Warner is that he doesn’t appear to have been in any way a munitions expert.  He was some kind of IT worker.  The newspapers described him as a geek which I assume means he had some computer programming skills.  So here is this random guy who becomes radicalized by the circumstances of his life and stews over it until he one day decides to cash in his chips while striking a blow for a 5G-free world.  What this makes me think is that we have allowed all the normal people in this country to become isolated from each other and from reality, to the extent where alienation is the rule and not the exception.  In the old days this guy would have had friends, relatives and coworkers who would have kept him grounded in reality.  But he lived for twenty-five years in one place and his next-door neighbor didn’t even know his name.  His only remaining family was a sister and nephew who lived half the country away and he worked as a contract IT worker out of his house.  He never got married or had children.  He left his worldly possessions to an ex-girlfriend who lived in California and probably didn’t even remember him.

In my opinion Anthony Warner is the tip of the iceberg.  Much worse things are in store for us in the near future.  When a society sanctions riots, looting and arson against its own citizens no one should be surprised when those citizens stop playing nice.

What Will the World Look Like on January 22nd 2021?

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According to current US federal law the man who will be President of the United States for the next four years will be sworn in on January 20th 2021.  Who that man will be is the subject of the most heated debate this country has seen in the last two hundred years of presidential elections.  So far, the electoral college has declared Joe Biden to be the winner of the presidential election.  It only remains for the Congress to certify this declaration on January 6th.  Whether there is a way to convince Congress to intervene against the Electoral College vote is what is currently holding the entire country mesmerized.

President Trump has stated on numerous occasions that he has sufficient proof of electoral fraud to permit the election results to be put aside.  Whether that proof is overwhelming enough to convince most of the American people is the first question.  The second question is, even if this proof is convincing, will Congress act on this proof and overturn the Electoral College result?  As with everyone else I am waiting impatiently for the event.  January 6th is ten days away.  When and how will this proof be presented?  Will it be broadcast to the whole nation or will it be transmitted to the Supreme Court?  Will it be incontestable or just testimony that cannot be verified independently?

The whole situation is so unprecedented that until recently I would have declared the very idea of Congress taking such unprecedented action as inconceivable.  But I would also have thought that the fraudulent voting activities that openly went on in the swing states inconceivable too.  And the idea that a corrupt dementia patient will be installed in the White House by means of an openly stolen election is so outrageous I would be willing to accept just about any series of events that would prevent that disaster from taking place.

At the same time I think the Left would resist any attempt to prevent Biden from reaching the White House by any means necessary, up to and including armed insurrection.  This makes it even more mind boggling to imagine what kind of proof would be so unassailable that spineless politicians would risk their precious necks to do the right thing.

For all of these reasons and because of how many legal challenges have already been shot down by the courts it seems like it would take a certified miracle to fix this heinous crime that is wending its way inexorably toward fruition.  But I want to believe that it will happen.  Because otherwise it will be an enormous step in the total unwinding of the normal reality I used to believe we inhabited.

If the United States has descended all the way down to banana republic status then everything else that is dependent on the United States being a great and stable nation is also without foundation.  Think of the things that rest on the certainty that the United States is the unshakable moorings of our civilization.  The mutual defense organizations like NATO are founded on the stability and strength of the United States and its military and economic might.  The US dollar is the reserve currency of the whole world.  It is based on the integrity that the US government has in the eyes of the American nation.  If all of these things are just fairy tales that the American elites tell the peasants and now those peasants have stopped believing them what might not happen?

What if a disgruntled American general decides to hijack a bunch of ICBM silos and declare himself the Emperor of Middle America?  How soon before the Russians and the Chinese start to think that lobbing a rogue missile into Manhattan would be an excellent way to get a nuclear civil war going?

We live in very troubled times.  And it’s pretty clear that most of our leaders are useless.  When you look back in history, times like these seem to breed revolution and then tyrants of one stripe or another.  It’s genuinely depressing to think about but it has to be faced.  We will need an extraordinary amount of luck to navigate the next few years without crashing on the reefs that these troubled seas contain.  But I suppose it won’t be boring.

Shut Up and Sing – 2020 Version

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Artists are annoying.  I think it’s because they also tend to be locked into the hive.  I guess it’s inevitable that people who exist in a world that is suffused in emotion will end up surrounded by and aligned with emotionally unstable personalities.  I’ve met up with this often when I lived in New York City.  I’d have a friend whom I met in an office job who was also a struggling actor and he would introduce me to his circle of friends and they would be almost without exception at least moderately abnormal.  And that’s putting aside that more than half of them were homosexuals.  That was the just the baseline demographic of their profession I suppose.  But all of them exhibited a whole array of off-putting behaviors.  Some of it might have to do with the large percentage of them that admittedly were on anti-depressants.  And I guess most of them were recreational users of various legal and illegal drugs.

But in addition to all these lifestyle influences all of these people shared an ethos.  They were outsiders who to a greater or lesser degree despised the normal world because it forced them to bump up against reality, when what they really wanted to do was live in their imagined world where being a forty something unknown actor, dancer, singer, musician or painter came along with an upper middle-class income and a deluxe Greenwich Village apartment.

And because of this outsider mentality they also embraced all the other groups and ideologies that also despised normalcy.  Back in the sixties and seventies it was communism.  Later on, it was whatever flavor of the month progressive name-tag was trendy.  Feminism, LGBTQ, Immigration Rights, Environmentalism, Animal Rights, whatever.  I have been at a gathering where a strident lesbian told me that once Western culture was deconstructed, women’s rights would flower throughout the much more progressive third world.  When I asked her about widow burning in India (sati) she flipped out and started shrieking obscenities.  I never found out whether she had just never heard of sati and thought I was making it up or whether the cognitive dissonance short circuited her fragile programming and kicked her into the middle-aged cat lady equivalent of the blue screen of death.

But in any case, the “artistic” community is monolithically embedded into the Leftist world.  So much so that even if you yourself didn’t believe in the things that they do, if you wanted to be a musician or other kind of artist you would not be allowed to coexist in their world if you did not mouth the words that they require you to say.  You would not be allowed to use their infrastructure, their platforms, their networks.  You would not get noticed by their critics and would never be invited onto their interview shows.  You wouldn’t exist.

Until recently I thought maybe country music was resistant to this pressure.  As a distant example think back to 2003 when the Dixie Chicks were ejected from the country music scene because of their anti-military rants against George Bush during the Middle East Wars.  That was a sort of unique situation in the entertainment world.

But I have been disabused of that mistaken belief.  Country musicians of various levels of celebrity and of various styles and levels of talent have of late thrown themselves whole heartedly on the woke bandwagon.  The latest example that came to my attention is Tyler Childers song “Long Violent History.”  I enjoyed Childers’s album “Purgatory.”  It had some good songs and his voice is interesting to listen to.  I especially liked a murder ballad he wrote called “Banded Clovis” that updated the tradition to our age.  His next album wasn’t really as good but I was interested to see what his following album would bring.  Recently I read a review announcing that his album had come out as either a vinyl or MP3 edition.  So as a CD guy I shrugged it off and figured I’d wait until the later release.  The announcement said that the album was an instrumental bluegrass collection.  Now that got my attention.  I was definitely in the mood for something like that.  But then one of the lefty sites had the breathless news that the last song was called Long Violent History and was a BLM propaganda song.  And they had a link to a video by Childers explaining why he had written the song.  So, I listened to his “explanation.”  Well, it was all that “what if you were hassled by the police and in danger of being killed at every turn?” blah, blah, blah.  So, there they go again.  If they will permit us to buy their music, we have to listen to the anti-white rant too.  Some great bargain.

Well, I guess I’ll have to forego Mr. Childers’ fiddle album.  I’m sure it’s good and it would be enjoyable but I don’t feel like paying to be preached at by him.  I’ll look around and listen to someone who at least hides his contempt for me and just shuts up and sings.