Rebooting Heinlein’s Starship Troopers

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I was watching a video where it discussed sci-fi movies that were going to have a sequel or reboot made soon.  And one of those movies was Starship Troopers.  Now the video spun the fact that the original 1997 motion picture lost money as a case of mistaken identity.  If you saw that movie you know that the director wasn’t faithful to the spirit of Heinlein’s book.  In fact, he used the movie to satirize the Heinlein plot as a story of fascism gone wild.  Paul Verhoeven used all the avenues available to him to paint the government in Heinlein’s novel as basically a nazi-like regime.  He even dressed the military officers in what looked like nazi uniforms.

And according to the narrator of the video the movie failed because audiences mistook the satire Verhoeven produced for actual approval of fascism.  Now I tend to believe that the movie failed because fans of Heinlein’s book read reviews that told them that the movie was a criticism of Heinlein’s story and not an honest presentation of the themes of the novel and stayed home.  This would seem to be a more reasonable explanation for such a popular book failing to attract its audience to the movie.

Now, the video debated whether the director who is supposedly making the new movie would copy Verhoeven’s lead and make the new movie a satire or would instead follow the book’s interpretation of the story.  I guess the guy making this video is hoping for a satire that clearly explains ahead of time that it is mocking Heinlein’s story.  This seems a wildly absurd idea.  If the original satire lost many millions of dollars, who would think it was a safe bet to try the same strategy again and expect a different result?

Now I can’t claim to know whether thirty years later there still exists a large enough audience of Heinlein fans to make a faithful screen adaptation of Starship Troopers a big success.  His original fans have aged pretty radically.  And the later generations are hardly the kind of people who would espouse a world view that requires military service as a perquisite for the right to vote.  So, I wouldn’t see any reboot of Starship Troopers as a guaranteed box office success.

But by the same token if it was made with state-of-the-art special effects and gave us an exciting glimpse of what interstellar warfare might look like, I wouldn’t be shocked if it was extremely popular.  There have been several very popular science fiction war movies in the last ten years and the special effects were very good in some of them and made the movies spectacular to watch.  If you take that technical capability and add a sympathetic hero and his journey through the military experience, I could see young and old viewers enjoying it.

Honestly, I’m not even sure this reboot is going to be made.  Hollywood has lost a lot of money in the last five years and I’m sure they’re getting nervous about big budget science fiction movies.  But I guess I’m secretly hoping someone will do Starship Troopers right, the way Heinlein wrote it.  Fingers crossed.

Gerrymander for Me but Not for Thee

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I was watching a part of the PBS News Hour on YouTube.  Books and Capon were talking about gerrymandering.  Well actually Capon was away.  So, they found some big fat hen from the New York Times to squawk in his place.  Well, the upshot was that gerrymandering would lead to the “end of our democracy.”  Now to be fair Books said that the result of California following what Texas did was equally corrosive to democracy but he blamed Texas for getting the ball rolling.  And he wasn’t sad because the Virginia Supreme court shot down their gerrymander.  So, I guess you could say he was trying to be even-handed with his criticism.  I guess.

But the hypocrisy that both of these lefties commit is ignoring the fact that there are six states in the Northeast that are slightly more than 40% Republican voting and they have exactly zero Republican Congressional House Representatives between them all.  There are 15,430,000 people living in New England.  40% of that is more than six million people who are only represented by Democrats in the House of Representatives.  So, pretending that Donald Trump is responsible for gerrymandering the opposition out of existence is a joke.  The New Englanders have been perfecting this scam for decades.  What seems to be upsetting them is that between this initiative by Trump and the Supreme Court’s overturning of the racial gerrymandering decisions from the last century there is a real danger that Democrats might have a hard time keeping control of the House of Representatives even in midterm elections when Republican Presidents are in the White House.  And if that is the case there would be serious repercussions in the governance of this country.  And with the Democrat leadership announcing that they will eliminate the filibuster and pack the Supreme Court if they get back in power, it should be clear to the Republicans that there must be great fear on the Left about the chance that redistricting will shut them out of governance in the future.  So, packing the Supreme Court and giving citizenship to millions of illegals are their answers to the problem.

Well, we truly live in interesting times.  The war in Iran is threatening to make the midterms a blue wave but at the same time the gerrymandering in the South and elsewhere could counteract this.  And honestly, I don’t think there is any way to avoid these election oscillations back and forth but I do find it hilarious that the Democrats like to virtue signal their moral superiority when it comes to gerrymandering.  All it does for me is confirm just how dishonest they all are.  And it just makes me certain that there is no reason to think that we have any common ground with the Left.  They can justify any of their crimes by claiming they are the victims of fascism of one kind or another and by the end of their narrative we end up as the criminals who must be stopped “by any means necessary.”  Imagine that!

A Good Day to be a Writer

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Today I went to my tax accountant to discuss my “royalties.”  I waited until now because tax season is much too hectic to talk about 2026 issues to people in that profession.  I have had a few unhappy incidents with the tax man and I go way out of my way to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

Now this is my new accountant.  In fact, he’s the grandson of my old accountant.  His grandfather is retiring soon so I’m sort of an inheritance.  When I arrived, I saw a kid walking in the front door and after waiting in the waiting room for a few minutes that same kid turned out to be my accountant.  But despite his youthful appearance he proved up to the job of assuaging my fears about ending up in an IRS gulag for high crimes and misdemeanors against the tax code.  Specifically, I was worried that maybe there was some kind of monthly reporting and payment I needed to perform for both the state and federal systems.  I remember when I was dealing with a state agency that required businesses to collect and pay sales tax monthly.

He explained to me that unless I was profiting to the tune of several thousand dollars a month, I wouldn’t need to send any money to the feds but even if I did, I’d be getting it back if I had enough “expenses” (like Amazon Ads and marketing fees) to cover the royalties I received.

At the mention of expenses, I barked a bitter laugh.  I told him the idea that I was profiting from my sales was laughable in the extreme.  Basically, a first book (barring some miraculous viral publicity) was a loss leader for the rest of the sequels.  He agreed that his other author clients had told him about what it took to grow a book business but he also warned me that the feds only give you three years to turn a profit before they stop considering it a business and declare it a hobby for which expenses are not credited.  Well, we’ll have to see about that.

So, we agreed I’d check back with him in June to see if I was any closer to needing to send some cash to the feds.  And he didn’t want to take a fee for his services today but I insisted.  The information I got had so eased my mind that I felt I would be robbing him of a well-earned reward if I didn’t give him fifty bucks.  I mean people who go to therapy to ease their minds pay their psychiatrists many hundreds of dollars and get less peace of mind than I did today.  I would have felt like a thief if I walked out for nothing.

And looking at my book’s Amazon page, I had two new very complimentary reviews.  One was from a friend of mine.  He disclosed our relationship but it was still a very good review.  And another one was from someone who was an Iraq War vet who enjoyed the scenes in the desert.  That kind of made my day.  So today is a good day to be a writer.

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 07MAY2026 – Things to Come

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Yeah 2026 is looking dicey to say the least. 2028 looks good for Presidential unless something goes wrong (or is made to go wrong A La 2020). The Democrat presidential slate is looking very weak in comparison to either Vance or Rubio. The 2028 Senate and House I would say LEAN republican, but it depends heavily on local status, especially the economy, and if the Dems get the House or Senate in 2026 they can play havoc with that.
2028 is critical as whoever holds the executive in 2029 on the lead-up to the census controls how that counting is done. It would help to have Congress just in case some Judge (I’m looking at YOU Boasberg ) gets feisty and throws a hissy fit (sorry, injunction) against counting methods. As it is several blue states are due to lose representation (CA, NY RI and a couple others) to several Red States (Especially FL and TX). The magnitude of those losses depends on how you count. The Constitution says (Article I, Section 2, Clause 3)

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.

 

 

The Thirteenth Amendment and the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 essentially reduce it to “the whole Number of free Persons”. As it is free persons, the clear interpretation is any human beings you find (sadly) not Citizens or Voting age Citizens or similar that would make better sense. Changing that would likely take a constitutional amendment. However, two issues would require at most Congressional support (and possibly are within the realm of the Executive branch).

The first is that currently, many populations are estimated, especially in large cities, and those estimates include folks who may or may not exist. The constitutional language seems clear: “The actual Enumeration” estimation is NOT by any means enumeration/counting and certainly is NOT within what the writers likely envisioned with that language. Certainly, the aspect of recording names and addresses of each person is contrary to just estimating. Throw away the estimates, and large Cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and NYC, as well as likely some Red cities like DFW, Austin, Miami and Atlanta) lose large swaths of their populations.

The second is the last half of the census sentence “and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct”. This seems to give great latitude to Congress on how the Census should/must be run. It may be that Congress long ago delegated this power to the Executive.

So control of the 2030 Census could drive control of the House delegations through 2040. It will be interesting to see if the Democrat side understands/admits this quandary. If the Democrats find some Abigail Spanberger (run from the middle until elected) type candidate, they might be able to squeak things out in 2028. The problem is their base loves the Squad/Mamdani/Platner/etc and the base is who turns out for primaries. That is going to drive the Democrat candidates hard left, and Hard Left does NOT win the presidency. On top of that a Hard Left candidate will only have “coattails” in blue or bluish states, That means getting the House in opposition to a popular Republican candidate will be a challenge (or so I dearly hope).