Self-love is the greatest of all flatterers.
François de La Rochefoucauld
Month: January 2026
Activity on the ZMan’s Webpage
One of our friends here informed me that a new post has appeared on the ZMan’s site.
Someone must have been given access to the ZMan’s content and he is posting some of the content that wasn’t previously free (ZMan referred to it as “behind the green door”).
Well, it’s new to me so I will have to check the site from time to time to see if there will be recurring new stuff.
Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 19JAN2026 – Star Trek Decline
I’m an old line Star Trek fan. I remember it live on TV when I was a kid. I was young enough that when it went to Friday night at 10pm in the third season I had to get a bedtime dispensation. Luckily, it was Friday night so leniency prevailed. I then watched them repeatedly out of WPIX from NYC who ran them twice a day 5 days a week
Recently we’ve been watching Enterprise Honestly, it is pretty good (although I think they abused the T’pol character and being first officer/XO gets her compared with Spock)
Strange New World was also not half bad although it plays havoc with continuity and characters from Star Trek and Next Generation. I tried Discovery and Picard and disliked both. Lower Decks is a gem and cleverly makes many things from the original animated series, particularly the Caitian and Kzinti species canon. It always feels like the best of the humorous original Trek (e,g, A Piece of the Action) episodes. I was hoping for a Horta crew member but no such luck.
You say they spent $100 million on the Starfleet Academy series? Well they probably gotten a better return if they had taken that to Vegas and bet it on roulette or simply just burned it. Other than Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks the Modern Treks haven’t gotten much attention with occasional exceptions (Picard’s Ending). The recent movies (Kelvan time line) varied from meh to worth watching at home (and #4 apparently justifiably gone into permanent development hell).
Like Disney with Star Wars they seem to have gone out of their way to find a producer that dislikes the original material. This never works well as seen by Kathleen Kennedy wrecking the Star Wars movies and then moving on to wreck the Acolyte when the TV side had been showing her up. Honestly there are a WHOLE bunch of Scifi properties that could be acquired and developed for say 20 million each. that’s five of them and I bet 2-3 succeed at some level maybe even take off. Thats not something that this 90120 in space series is going to do. Who was the target? Young teens? Are you even going to get them to watch something based on a 60 year old premise? 20-30 something affluent women (the Karen/AWFL Demographic, I want that watching my show)?They’re busy picking on various folks Throwing it into the weird far future of Discovery which had pretty dismal numbers just baffles me. I can tell you the target demographic ISN’T me.
Star Trek – Starfleet Academy – A Rant
Paramount spent somewhere north of a hundred million dollars on a tv series called “Star Trek – Starfleet Academy.” I guess they realized after the fact that it was unwatchable and so they put the first episode on YouTube for free. But nobody watched it. Now that’s an exaggeration. Technically thirteen hundred (1,300) people viewed it. But on YouTube that’s equivalent to zero.
So basically, they spent a hundred million dollars on something that no one wants to see.
If you watch the trailer you’ll understand why. Starfleet Academy seems to be made up of fat lesbians. Some are human, some are alien but all of them are fat and all of them are lesbians. Once again this is an exaggeration. They also have Holly Hunter as the captain or head schoolmarm or something. And I believe there is a gay Klingon. So, yay.
Just as with Star Wars, Star Trek has finally reached the epitome of destruction. Over the course of the last sixty years or so it went from a mildly entertaining sci-fi adventure series to a Woke DEI Struggle Session. Well, who wouldn’t pay to see that?
As with Star Wars, the makers of this new show miscalculated something about the audience and their products. And it’s this: The audience that enjoys the “message” they’re pushing in these shows doesn’t like science fiction. And the audience that likes science fiction doesn’t like their “message.” It’s like that day in math class where they explain Venn diagrams and unions and intersections and all that jazz. Well, the circle of people who like the message and the circle of people who like science fiction do not intersect at all; open space between the blue and red circles. No purple.
This show was green-lit before Paramount was purchased by David Ellison. He isn’t woke. I’m guessing that losing a hundred million dollars on a show nobody wants to see is going to make him very mad. Hopefully this will result in the series being cancelled and the team responsible for this travesty being fired.
Coincidentally, Kathleen Kennedy has just been fired from running Lucas Films over at Disney. It was described as her desire to get back to personally producing pictures for Disney but I’m pretty sure they’ve had enough of her “golden touch.” She singlehandedly incinerated the Star Wars brand and lost many hundreds of millions of dollars at Disney by doing the same thing that the Star Trek franchise did. They made a Star Wars brand for girls and girls don’t like science fiction.
Well, here we are. A decade into the complete feminization of action adventure and all the major franchises have been rendered toxic and unwatchable. Even the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been losing money on its girl-boss outreach program. Now what?
I guess we’re all hoping that losing all that money will finally get the studios to step back and reflect. We’re about to find out. Summer 2026 is right around the corner and we can expect to get some kind of answer from the tent pole summer movie list. If it’s more estrogen laden, DEI boiler plate then I guess they still have some more money to burn. But I can always hope.
19JAN2026 – Quote of the Day
What we term virtues are often but a mass of various actions and diverse interests, which fortune or our own industry manage to arrange; and it is not always from valour or from chastity that men are brave, and women chaste.
François de La Rochefoucauld
19JAN2026 – Photo of the Day
The Honeymooners – Complete Series Review – Episode 06 – The Sleepwalker
This is a very simple story. Ed Norton is walking in his sleep and because of this Ralph is being forced by Alice and Trixie to go out on the roof and lead him back to bed. But Ralph is apoplectic because of all the sleep he’s losing. The climax of the story has Ralph sleeping in Ed’s bedroom to prevent him from sleepwalking but even in his sleep Norton is too clever for Ralph and escapes. Finally Ralph summons a psychiatrist to get to the root of Norton’s problem and after being administered Pentothal he regresses to his childhood and we find out that he is pining for his lost dog Lulu. The psychiatrist thinks Norton should be psychoanalyzed for several months to ascertain the correct treatment but Ralph dismisses him and says he’s going to get Norton a dog to replace the lost Lulu.
In the final scene Trixie has come down at midnight to thank Ralph for his idea about the dog and to announce that Norton and Lulu are upstairs sleeping like babies. After she leaves Ralph announces that he should have been a psychiatrist and that he’s going to have some warm milk and get a good night’s sleep. But as Alice goes to put a milk bottle outside their door Norton sleepwalks in carrying Lulu.
Now this is a very minor episode with a very limited appeal. The scenes with Norton sleepwalking are mildly amusing but nothing more. I’d call this one of the weakest episodes in the series. Lulu!
18JAN2026 – Quote of the Day
Our virtues are most frequently but vices in disguise.
François de La Rochefoucauld
18JAN2026 – Photo of the Day
The Left Coast is Finding Out What Zero Carbon Means, the Hard Way.
California, Oregon and Washington (also known as the Left Coast) are some of the most progressive parts of the United States. And one particularly rabid part of their agenda is green energy. They have been punishing the oil companies for anything and everything they could think of for more than the last twenty-five years.
And now they’ve succeeded in convincing the oil companies to get outta Dodge. That right. California used to be a large-scale extractor and refiner of petroleum. But those days are over and now the state no longer produces enough oil to cover the gasoline and other petroleum energy products it needs. And this is even worse for Oregon which has a very tenuous lifeline of gasoline that travels through a single pipeline. Oregon has literally zero oil refining capacity. Oregon’s woman governor sent a letter to Shell Oil begging them to return to the state. She promised tax subsidies and protection from environmental harassment. They said no thanks. After losing money on all their ventures on the Left Coast they’ve permanently moved on to working with the more lucrative LNG projects elsewhere on the planet.
Now Washington state has a less dire situation but only by comparison. These states convinced themselves that electric cars and solar panels were the imminent future of transportation and energy production. But none of that turned out to be true. Now they’ve realized late in the game that they’ve chased away they petroleum industry and left themselves without the fuel stocks they need just to keep their economies running. Now isn’t that special!
So, what’s my point? Well, basically I’m just gloating. Schadenfreude is a large part of the pleasure for us on the Right, here in the era of Trump. I extract enormous satisfaction from watching morons like Newsom and Oregon’s Governor Tina Kotek panic when they discover that fossil fuels still provide the power that keeps their fantasylands from collapsing back into the stone age. And that they’ve effectively driven away the people who provide these extremely valuable resources. Listening to them beg grown-ups to give them another chance just does my heart good.
If you watch that first video, you’ll hear that Oregon predicts that if there is a pipeline problem anytime soon $9-$12 a gallon gasoline will be very likely. Now think about what that will do to the cost of living. All I can say is it couldn’t happen a nicer bunch.
Alright, I guess that’s enough gloating for now.