The worst “Star Trek” piece you’ll read today. Or likely any day.

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Jul 092023

‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Introduces Another Love Interest for Kirk That Still Isn’t Spock

The whole thing is some weirdo perv’s bleating demand that Kirk and Spock be made gay, because reasons. These people are sad and pathetic, but unfortunately they often have the ears of those in charge. Consequently, they often have the power to see to it that beloved cultural icons – Luke Skywalker, Jean Luc Picard, Indiana Jones – are converted into sad pathetic wretches, their legacies trashed and trod upon. The purpose of doing so falls somewhere between “the narcissism of a mentally ill person” and “the need to see civilization destroyed.”

One of the “arguments” that is made is that Kirk was a “lothario,” a “womanizer” who was nailing any female alien who wasn’t nailed down. And that is kinda the reputation the character has. However, if you look at his actual history of romancing the women on the show, there’s a whole lot less of it than you might remember. From HERE: a list of Kirks love interests. I’ll trim out the non-canonical stuff from the nuTrek movies:

Ruth (Star Trek: TOS, “Shore Leave”): she’s not real, but a robot made in the image of a *past* romance of his.
Dr. Janice Lester (Star Trek: TOS, “Turnabout Intruder”) : a *former* interest of his. No interest in the episode.
Dr. Carol Marcus (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan) : a *former* interest of his. No interest in the episode.
Doctor Janet Wallace (Star Trek: TOS, The Deadly Years) : a *former* interest of his. No interest in the episode.
Lt. Areel Shaw (Star Trek: TOS, “Court Martial”) : a *former* interest of his. No interest in the episode.
Lenore Karidian (Star Trek: TOS, “The Conscience Of The King”) : ok, kinda
Edith Keeler (Star Trek: TOS, “City On The Edge Of Forever”) : Ayup
Miramanmee (Star Trek: TOS, “The Paradise Syndrome”) : Ayup, though his memory has been wiped. Is it really *him?”
Shahna (Star Trek: TOS, “The Gamesters Of Triskellion”) : Ayup… but is it real romance, or a means of escape?
Antonia (Star Trek Generations): his off-screen wife. Is it “womanizing” to get married?

Not in that list:

Dr. Gillian Taylor (Star Trek IV): Flirts, but seemingly goes no further than that. For the purposes of saving the world.
Yeoman Janice Rand (TOS: “The Enemy Within”): Sorta. the “evil” Kirk assaults here. So, ummm…
Lt. Marlena Moreau (TOS: “Mirror, Mirror”): Kinda. Alternate universe, he plays along with the Mirror Kirk’s relationship as a way to survive/escape
Sylvia (TOS: “Catspaw”): not really… he puts the moves on her as a way to escape
Dr. Miranda Jones (TOS: “Is There In Truth No Beauty”): Naw… he flirts a bit, but gets nowhere.
Rayna Kapec (TOS: “Requiem for Methuselah”): Ayup: he falls for and puts the moves on a robot.
Elaan (TOS: “Elaan of Troyius”): Not really… he is *drugged* and mind controlled.

So by my count, there are approximately four “Ayups” in all of Star Trek. Does getting lucky four times (and it’s not entirely clear he actually got *that* far with any of them) over a span of 20 or so years make Kirk a “womanizing” “lothario?”

But more than that: there are around a dozen and a half examples of Kirk being interested enough in a woman to do something about it. In all those episodes and movies, there are zero incidents suggesting he had any such interest in a *male.*

That’s a lot of clothes

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Jun 262023

Clothes are throwaway items now. Back In My Day, socks with holes in them were repaired; now, often enough, shirts are worn only a few times then tossed. Sometimes sent to thrift stores and the like, sometimes simply thrown out. But thrift stores have more clothes than they know what to do with. So often these discarded shirts and shorts are boxed up and shipped to third world countries where the trainloads of discards can be used to eliminate the local indigenous clothing production industry; this is why you often see some illiterate tribesman wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the logo of some midwestern high school baseball team. At some point I suppose this global traffic in clothes might end, but likely not before many places lose the knowledge and ability to make their own clothes.

Anyway, it seems to me the obvious solution for this is so obvious that it’s obvious: FIRE. Clothes are largely made from plastic and cotton; these will happily burn. Sure, some unfortunate fumes will be generated, from the toxic to the CO2; but if incinerated in a large and modern facility this can not only be done fairly cleanly it can also generate a lot of power. Use the combustion to boil water, run the steam past turbines, shazam, electricity. But for whatever reason we don’t much burn our garbage these days, preferring instead to burn rocks and goop we dug up out of the ground. So what happens to all these discarded garments?

If you’re Chile, you dump them in the desert. There it can be picked through by locals and by a company that is trying to separate out the various materials and make something of them.

High fashion! Mountain of discarded clothes in Chilean desert is visible from space (satellite photo)

A recent satellite photo shows the pile:

It’s a little difficult to judge scale from that. At lower left you can see an urban area; the pile is clearly a number of city blocks in expanse.

An article from 2021 shows the pile (from the ground) as it existed in 2021. It was *huge:*

Chile’s desert dumping ground for fast fashion leftovers

Here’s the location on Google Maps, satellite view:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Giant+Pile+of+Unsold+Clothing/@-20.2353681,-70.0930992,836m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m15!1m8!3m7!1s0x91523e70293c5633:0x671ff739632f5660!2sAlto+Hospicio,+Tarapac%C3%A1,+Chile!3b1!8m2!3d-20.2686722!4d-70.1049169!16zL20vMGd4cjc3!3m5!1s0x915215426eb9ae75:0xbb5867ab02cd19a1!8m2!3d-20.2350799!4d-70.0911125!16s%2Fg%2F11styh04ds?entry=ttu

Interestingly, the Google Maps satellite photo, which seems to have been taken in July of 2022, shows just bare Earth. It seems that there was a huge pile in 2021, it was dealt with in 2022, and its huge again in 2023. So processing seems to be keeping up. Or… when the photo was taken in 2022, the pile had been buried in the dirt.

Russian Civil War: Well that was fast

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Jun 252023

I believe I am unanimous when I say…

An army – a *small* army – of poorly trained, ill-equipped chuckleheads managed to get within range of Moscow without getting kerploded by the Russian Army and Air Force. There is no getting past the fact that this makes the Russian military and leadership – especially Putin – look even more like incompetent ineffectual corrupt and cowardly boobs. Hell, at this point it might be best for everybody if we just have Finland send a few hundred drunken bums into Russia to conquer the place.

This was not something I expected to see anytime soon, but here we are. What’s next? The President of the USA hosting a bunch of half naked perverted weirdos on the White House lawn?

Well there’s yer problem

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Jun 212023

As is well known by now, Disney has been making a mess of many of the properties they’re in charge of. The Marvel movies/shows have plummeted downhill; Pixar movies stink; the endless CGI “live action” remakes are soulless cash grabs at best, and to all reports that forthcoming Indiana Jones movie is gonna be *terrible.* And then there’s the smoking ruin of Star Wars. Why is this happening? To an outsider, it looks a lot like sabotage… a vast organization that wants to tear down not only its own legacy, but poison the culture as a whole. That’s crazy conspiracy theory talk, of course. But then… there’s this:

Disney’s Chief Diversity Officer Latondra Newton Exits

The fact that Disney – or any corporation – has not just a “diversity officer,” but a *Chief* “diversity officer” is of course a stinging indictment about their wisdom and sanity. But there’s one line in the article that jumped right out at me:

Disney HR chief Sonia Coleman’s note to staff announcing Newton’s departure … She has been dedicated to ensuring every person sees themselves and their life experiences represented in a meaningful and authentic way.

Ah. No. That’s just… NO. Bad storytelling company. Bad. BAD.

I don’t want to see myself and my life experience in *any* sort of way in any sort of movie that Disney might make. I want to see stuff that would inspire me to emulate. I don’t want to see what I am; I want to see what I can become. Once again, there are two world views:

1: “Look, Captain Kirk is on TV. I want to be like Captain Kirk.”

2: “Look, Captain Kirk is on TV. I want Captain Kirk to be like me.”

Worldview #2 is the one known as “representation.” It is cancer. It should be mocked, spat upon, driven from polite society out into the wasteland to die shriveled and alone, huddled against some broken forgotten ruin of a statue of a long unremembered tyrant. “Representation” does not inspire people to greatness; at best, it inspires smug complacency. It does not bring people together; it only divides. Because if Person A finds themselves represented by Character A who shares all the “important” weird little identity politics quirks of Person A… then Character A does *not* represent Person B who doesn’t share those quirks. Character A will only appeal to a thin slice of the audience… and then will not inspire those people to much of anything, because Character A tells them how awesome they Already Are. You don’t need to change, because you’re perfect just the way you are. (Unless, of course, you need to go on a risky series of hormone treatments and lop off your dangly bits.) And if Character A *doesn’t* share your identities, and in fact is quite different or even opposed, then you will feel outraged that someone isn’t catering to you.

So, yay for Disney getting rid of this one little symptom of the larger problem. Now get rid of the entire department, and let not the precepts of DEI ever be spoken of again.

“The War Of The Rohirrim:” Well, I’m excited. Aren’t you?

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Jun 152023

In the appendix to the Lord of the Rings, Tolkein included a short story about Helm Hammerhand, a serious badass and one man wrecking crew who lived hundreds of years before the events of LotR. A few years ago Warner Bors annlunced that they were doing an animated film about the events described in that story… and as spinoffs of lotR go, that one made sense. it’d make a fun action flick, animated or no.

But wait. There’s less.

New Report Shows ‘The Lord Of The Rings: The War Of The Rohirrim’ Will Inject Feminism Into Tolkien’s Classic Tale Of Helm Hammerhand

Basically: Helm Hammerhand, main character of the story… isn’t the main character of the story. Instead, it’s a female character who was so unimportant in the story that she didn’t even merit getting *named.*

The producer, one Philippa Boyens, claims that this effectively all-new character (named Hera, because the writers are such spectacular Tolkein experts that they know that the characters in Rohan are named after Greeks, not northern Europeans) is based largely on “Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians and daughter of Wessex king Alfred the Great.” OK, sure, great. It’s quite possible that a movie about Æthelflæd would be a spectacular thing. So… why not make a movie about Æthelflæd? Oh, right, because it’s easier to ride the coat tails of an existing property.

Who is this for? A movie about Helm would bring in the existing fans. This thing is likely to turn a lot of them away.

Defining “Woke”

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Jun 062023

“Woke” has becoming an ever-present word in recent years, especially since the BLM/Antifa riots and city burnings of 2020. But what does it actually mean? The original meaning, apart from “past tense of wake,” as given by dictionary.com is this:

having or marked by an active awareness of systemic injustices and prejudices, especially those involving the treatment of ethnic, racial, or sexual minorities

That meaning was used for some decades by those on the left, in particular black people. But recently the word has been taken up by people on the right as a term of disparagement, the second definition at dictionary.com:

Disparaging. of or relating to a liberal progressive orthodoxy, especially promoting inclusive policies or ideologies that welcome or embrace ethnic, racial, or sexual minorities.

It’s that second definition that interests me. As written, it’s fair as far as it goes… but it doesn’t really go far enough.

“Woke” is kinda like “obscenity:” you know it when you see it. But a proper definition, reasonably accurate and objective, is important for all things especially when it comes to things that will be important for policy decisions. If some classroom assignment or book is “woke,” what does it really mean, especially if “woke” is meant to mean that it should be disallowed? The fact that some statement or book or person is an “inclusive progressive” is not sufficient to be defined as “woke.” To me, this seems better:

Disparaging. of or relating to a liberal progressive orthodoxy, especially promoting policies or ideologies that preference ethnic, racial, or sexual minorities and focus to an obsessive degree on largely or entirely imaginary oppression, threats, enemies or slights

A near-universal feature of someone that most regular people would look at and call “woke” is that they are multicolored, unhinged and divorced from reality. Often shrieking about how oppressed they are while their flags are flying from every government building for an entire month out of the year and they get to dominate any and all discussion, threatening the lives and livelihoods of those who not only express differing opinions, but who use “unapproved” words. it’s not about “inclusion” and “welcoming,” but domination and madness.

Thoughts?

Blog update

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Jun 052023

It seems that the issues that caused me to both ramp up use of Twitter and get the “backup blog” continue. It now appears that every weekend the servers at the hosting service get overloaded and I can’t log into the blog until Monday morning when the staff get in and clean things up. Last weekend was a three-day weekend, and the problem persisted until Tuesday. Consequently… no new blog posts on the weekend, it seems. So if you want to make sure to keep up with my thrilling adventures and opinions, this isn’t really the place for it. Instead:

https://unwantedblog.com/

The Unwanted Blog Twitter

Target Targeted

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May 272023

It seems obvious by this point that a rational corporation would, when presented with the option of weighing in on politically decisive “culture war” topics, just stick their fingers in their ears and hum real loud until whatever -themed month it is ends, and spend their time trying to sell their normal merchandise to their normal customers. But, no. Due to the insidious and invasive influence of “woke” ideologies and diversity initiatives, companies have been led to believe that they *have* to build up their diversity social credit scores, or else… something.

Target stores are the latest to discover that attempting to appease a small group of weirdos ticks off a far larger group of people who don’t want to sterilize, mutilate and drive insane their children.A lot of customers have expressed outrage; a few by pestering the employees (these are just regular folk trying to earn a paycheck, leave ’em the frak alone); a few others by causing damage (come on, you’re not on the left… the law *will* go after you for vandalism). But by far, from Targets perspective the biggest threat to the corporation are the large number of customers who are simply not spending their increasingly thin dollars there. Apparently Target has lost about nine *billion* dollars so far. So Target has decided to move their displays of child-grooming-friendly products further back in the store where they’ll be less conspicuous. This, supposedly, is in response to threats to the stores, products and employees from customers who don;t like those products.

But now they’re getting threats from the *other* side… bomb threats from weirdos ticked off that Target is now attempting to appease right wingers.

You know who’s not getting bomb threats from *either* side? Companies that didn’t delve into goofy identity politics in the first place. There might be a lesson there.

Utah Target Evacuated After Reports of Trans Extremists Threatening to Bomb Multiple Target Locations for Removing Satanic Groomer Products

Republic? Democracy? Or something else?

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May 202023

So, what is the current form of American government? To the simple, it’s a democracy. To those who actually have *some* understanding of the theoretical workings of the US Federal government, it’s a representative republic. But to those who have watched how the Feds and a startling number of state and local governments work, a more accurate descriptor is one that most probably haven;t heard of… but rest assured, you *will* be hearing it a lot so long as the means of communications remain reasonably free and accessible:

Anarcho-Tyranny

Coined in 1995, “Anarcho-tryanny” is a form of government that is characterized by taking a hands-off approach to dealing with actual criminality at all levels… but exercising draconian oppression upon the average citizens. Sound familiar? Cities that let criminals loot and burn and protest and terrorize at will… but toss people who defend themselves into the hoosegow for show trials. States that do diddly to deal with gangs and murderers of all stripes, but ban common firearms and standard magazines. Federal law enforcement agencies that welcome in whole armies of invaders, and hire armies of armed bureaucrats to hunt down small business owners who might have made small mistakes on the deviously complex tax returns.

And then there are the “glowies.”

If you, as an average, law-abiding citizen who wants nothing more than to be left alone to live your life and pursue happiness, fear the government descending upon you more than the guy breaking into your car or shoplifting your store does… you may be in an anarcho-tyranny.

A fair explanation of why Modern Trek doesn’t fit Classic Trek

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May 132023

Strange New Worlds’ Upgraded Tech Has a Canon Explanation

As readers of this blog are doubtless aware, I am unimpressed with Kelvin-timeline Trek and *especially* “Discovery” Trek. STD sucks on a whole multitude of levels, from bad writing and terrible characters, terrible politics and worse ideology; not a lot can fix that. But one thing that the article above *can* deal with is the fact that STD simply doesn’t fit canon-wise with TOS. And what is that explanation? Time travel. There has been a *lot* of time travel in Trek over the years. And Trek has demonstrated that changing the timeline is possible; the universe does not necessarily reset to some special chosen track.

So why does STD not fit with TOS? Because time travelers have mucked up the timeline and have, like in the Star trek: Lens Flare movies made post 2009, created offshoot timelines where things are different. And of course, if the relatively tiny groups of people followed int he shows and movies encounter time travel as often as they do, it’s reasonable to assume that the whole galaxy is filled with people and races constantly mucking up the timeline, unseen by Starfleet.

This seems like a compromise that trek fans should be able to accept: TOS/TNG/DS9/VOY were one timeline… one that got diverted for 2009 and again for STD. They are different canon. I’ve been saying *that* for a while, but here’s a fair in-universe explanation for it.

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