Month: October 2021

James T. Kirk – Physics Thought Experimental Monkey

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Since I started watching and reviewing Season Three of Star Trek (The Original Series) I’ve found myself becoming openly hostile and irritated at the thought of having to get through the remaining fifteen or so episodes.  But I feel that I need to do something to improve the situation.  After all I started the exercise because I remember enjoying the show when I was a kid and maybe somehow, I could regain that youthful exuberance toward this venerable enterprise.

So, I looked around to see something on the web that would provide a fun Star Trek experience and what I found was “Does Kirk die when he goes through the transporter?” by a German lady physicist named Sabine Hossenfelder.  She has a soothing voice and pleasant appearance and I thought this just the type of woman scientist that James T. Kirk would be putting the moves on minutes into his introduction to her.  How perfect that she would be theorizing on the death of Kirk in her video.  I’ve always thought that the concept of the transporter was the most absurd of the various technical absurdities in the Star Trek storyline.  If it also kills Kirk, all the better.

Anyway, take a look and tell me what you think.

How Do You Coexist with People Who Won’t Tolerate Your Existence?

photog Current Events

An open question in my mind is a hypothetical.  Bear with me for a moment.  Let’s suppose that sometime in the coming months a portion of the country will begin to go its own way on federal laws that overstep what is tolerable by the people living there.  Maybe it will start with gun rights or abortion or illegal immigration.  Under this hypothetical, a state, let’s say Texas, will defy some federal laws and somehow manages to make it stick.  For the sake of argument let’s say that the federal government decides that ignoring the decision is in their short-term interests and they take no action.  And let us further suppose that this behavior is copied by the rest of the red states and after a certain amount of time it becomes the status quo with both red and blue states ignoring whatever federal laws they don’t agree with.  It’s not a very improbable supposition if you look at what’s going on with drug and gun laws in the blue states.  It only requires that some red state shows the backbone to defy the tyrants in Washington D.C.  So, this is the scenario.

Now here’s the question.  If these states start making their own laws, will they mimic the blue states and make these laws punitive against the subset of their citizens that have blue state lifestyles and values?  As an example of blue state behavior, I will mention Colorado’s repeated prosecution of a wedding baker for refusing to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex wedding.  Even after the Supreme Court decided in his favor the authorities in Colorado are still harassing him.

Obviously if red states wanted to rearrange the social order, they could outlaw homosexual marriage.  They could reinstate sodomy laws, effectively criminalizing homosexuality.  They could ban pornography.  There are many steps that they could take to reverse the current legal status of many things they object to.

And that is my question.  Would they draw the line at preventing the rights of normal people from being trampled on?  This would involve restoring the bill of rights, that is, freedom of speech, religion, association.  And also restoring equal protection under the law by eliminating affirmative action for women and minorities.

Or would they go well beyond that to remove the innovations that the Left has pushed on us under the label of social justice?  This would include eliminating abortion, homosexual rights including marriage, so-called transgender status and other progressive mandates that have been forced through over the years.

Admittedly, this is all a hypothetical exercise.  Even the first group of changes that just restore the rights of normal people aren’t anywhere on the horizon in any red state right now.  But if our side ever gets going with reestablishing our rights then the question will be asked whether we want to limit the changes to things we’ve lost or extend it to reordering society so that those who despise us aren’t accommodated by the law.

So, there’s the whole question.  I’m not sure what the Red States would do in this scenario.  Maybe it will be a range of things depending on the state.  Maybe a place like Florida would be in the first case.  Whereas some place like Alabama might be closer to the second case.  One thing that might color the way people act is the knowledge that making it uncomfortable for people who have been persecuting you for the last fifty years might motivate them to leave and go live in a blue state.  And in fact, thinking about the policies like the one in Colorado leads me to believe that blue states have been doing this exact thing all along.  So, as the saying goes, “What goes around comes around.”  Who knows, whole cities like Austin might empty out overnight.

Anyway, what do you think is the likely behavior?

 

Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.

Of Eye Motes and Gored Oxen

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I make it a point to know by whom and in which an article is published.  Places like the New York Times and the Washington Post have had to resort to deceptive titling to fool normal people into clicking on their absurdly biased news and opinion content.  Ninety nine out of a hundred times I skip right past their offerings.  But today I saw an article entitled “Why Merrick Garland Can’t Win” (please do not click on this unless you’re willing to read leftist crap) written by Dahlia Lithwick in Slate.  Now if there was ever an article with three strikes against it this would be it.  But before I start my rant I just want to ask how does anyone get named Dahlia Lithwick who isn’t a character in some Victorian Romance novel?

I make it a point to know by whom and in which an article is published.  Places like the New York Times and the Washington Post have had to resort to deceptive titling to fool normal people into clicking on their absurdly biased news and opinion content.  Ninety nine out of a hundred times I skip right past their offerings.  But today I saw an article entitled “Why Merrick Garland Can’t Win” (please do not click on this unless you’re willing to read leftist crap) written by Dahlia Lithwick in Slate.  Now if there was ever an article with three strikes against it this would be it.  But before I start my rant, I just want to ask how does anyone get named Dahlia Lithwick who isn’t a character in some Victorian Romance novel?

So, before I decided to read this screed, I knew that nothing that Dahlia Lithwick could write or Slate would publish had any possible chance of me agreeing with it.  So, they were completely dependent on the title to fool me.  Based on the title it sounded like it was an essay proving that Merrick Garland won’t be able to distort his role as Attorney General to harm conservatives.  Well, I know from long experience that this is a ploy.  Instead, it will be a defense of Garland and all he does.  But I clicked on it.  Maybe I thought I needed to suffer for some terrible sins in my past.  But for whatever reason I decided to click on it.  And when I did, I found myself through the looking glass.

Dahlia Lithwick was moaning about how the evil deplorables were impugning the good name of Merrick Garland by pretending that he was the fascist instead of themselves!  Here’s a sample:

“Garland is currently attempting to restore confidence in an independent, professionalized, apolitical Department of Justice, but he is doing so in the face of claims by his opponents that the DOJ is the new KGB and that its jackbooted thugs are coming to arrest you in the dark of night for expressing peaceful opposition to a classroom curriculum. If you forge conspiracies where no conspiracies exist, at bare minimum you will have raised the questions. The questions backfill the truth. It doesn’t matter what the Garland DOJ is doing—trying to protect school officials who are threatened and stalked. The point is to say he’s creating an army of federal forces to enforce critical race theory in school. Try as he may, Merrick Garland cannot perform boring independence fast enough to outrun GOP claims that he’s a wild-eyed, violent socialist. And while the GOP currently exists only to cast everything you thought you believed into doubt, the real endgame is vigilantism. The endgame is to ensure that people mistrust government, election systems, school boards, the media, and the justice system enough to lend a hand in their destruction.”

Notice that the Department of Justice is just doing its boring job locking up innocent citizens that it wants to destroy for the FBI set-up on January 6th but it’s also doing its job when it allows BLM and antifa to run amok for a year in the streets of America’s cities.  And it’s equally doing its job when it threatens parents for opposing the brainwashing of their children.

But none of that is what is distressing Dahlia.  What bothers her is that we no longer believe this narrative.  Her side can pretend to believe every lie that the Deep State feeds to the media but we aren’t allowed to believe what our own damn lying eyes see in front of us.  She insists that we must believe in the honesty of the Deep State or the terrorists win.  She’s angry that after having the football pulled away a thousand times we’ve finally smartened up and don’t want to play the fool for her side again.  Poor Dahlia, so sad.

Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 06 – Spectre of the Gun

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In this one, an alien race with telepathic powers decides to kill Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty and Chekov by forcing them to re-enact the Gunfight at the OK Corral as the Clantons.  I can see why CBS would be glad to film this episode.  They could reuse some of the old sets from their Rawhide series.

They were kind enough to throw in a pretty girl as the love interest for Chekov and we did get some western style background music.  The whole thing had a kind of Twilight Zone feel to it.  The plot device that is used to save our friends is the realization that none of the western setup is actually real so that if Kirk and friends know that the bullets aren’t real then they won’t be harmed by them.

So, the majority of the episode is Kirk, Chekov and McCoy interacting with the Earps and other townspeople while Spock builds a gas bomb that when tested on a skeptical Scotty doesn’t work.  But its failure confirms for Spock that the world they are inhabiting is an illusion that can’t harm them if they can ignore it.  At some point one of the Earps that is in love with Chekov’s girlfriend shoots Chekov and apparently kills him.  But at the end of the show when Chekov ends up alive McCoy explains it by saying that to Chekov the only thing that was real was the girl.  Now that doesn’t make a lot of sense because he did act like he had been shot when it happened but that’s what they give us to hide the plot hole so I guess we’ll have to live with it.

The climax is the gunfight.  Spock has prepared his human friends with the Vulcan mind-meld so that they will thoroughly believe the bullets are fake and so they will not be harmed.  The Earps blast away at the four Enterprise crewman and we see the fence behind the crewmen splintered by sustained gunfire as the Earps empty all their guns.  Then Kirk beats up Wyatt Earp and draws his gun as if to shoot him but then changes his mind and throws the gun away.  Almost immediately Kirk and company find themselves back on the Enterprise and discover that Chekov is unharmed.  The alien changes his mind about earthmen and decides he wants to be friends.  The show ends with Kirk and Spock discussing the violent nature of humans and how they have overcome it.

This is not a highly creative script.  The plot is similar to several that preceded it.  The acting and the dialog are just average and there wasn’t even much humor to make it more interesting.  Scotty did get to comment approvingly on the bourbon that the town had to offer for his drinking pleasure.  And Chekov was a source of amusement as the crew tried to drag him away from the woman who was infatuated with him. Shatner didn’t have much chance to show off his overacting ability.

I’ll give this a 5 // 2.