Month: September 2017

It’s really not working anymore. Trump’s typical strategy of focusing on something outrageous and stupid in order to draw attention from things he has no answer for is utterly failing.

Continue Reading “Freak Out Friday – September 29, 2017” →

I really began my career in book sales working for Playboy Paperbacks in NYC. Despite the name of the company, we published quite a few high class novels including a novelization of “Elfquest” by Wendy and Richard Pini. One time his daughter, Christie, came by to visit. That was cool. Never had a chance to meet Hef himself, though. But I will always be grateful to Playboy Paperbacks for giving me my start.

RIP Hef.

PAD

Facebook has erupted with people trashing this perfectly sweet family comedy.

With a style that is 180 degrees away from “The Big Bang Theory,” “Young Sheldon” tells the backstory of Sheldon Cooper (a perfectly cast Iain Armitage) as he starts his first day of high school at the age of, I dunno, eight. Nine. Something like that. He’s in the same class as his mortified older brother and is immediately ratting out kids who aren’t following the dress code. We see the groundwork being laid both for the pain-in-the-ášš that is his older self, but the same one who has love deeply buried in him that he was able to become engaged to Amy in the preceding episode of BBT. It is filled with tons of sweet moments, and yet all over Facebook people are slagging in, a number of them doing so without even bothering to watch it.

Is this where we are in Trump’s America, where even a delightful new program that should be unassailably adored is slammed by know-nothings who can’t even take a half an hour to see it and develop an informed opinion?

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What it comes down to is this:

With very few changes, “The Orville” could easily be “Star Trek.”

By contrast, with very few changes, “Star Trek: Discovery” could easily not be “Star Trek.”

My full Cowboy Pete review is over on my Patreon page if you want to hear my full thoughts on ST:D, along with “Gotham,” “Kingsman,” and “The Orville.” You can find it here.

PAD

He’s going to get us into World War III. The reality of that assessment is becoming more and more certain with every passing week.

1) First off, I actually know what a “dotard” is. I knew the word long before Kim Jong-un labeled Trump as such. And frankly, I hate to say it, but that’s pretty much a fair assessment. If Trump doesn’t have syphilis, then he is definitely skidding into mental degradation attached to age. Indeed, it actually has the merit of being an insult. Nicknaming Kim Jong-un “Rocketman” is not an insult. Derived from an Elton John song, that’s the kind of name one tags to a baseball hitter. “And that’s gone, a bomb into the upper decks off the bat of Rocketman!” “Strike three, an absolute meteor blows right past the batter and it’s game over, a one hitter for the Rocketman!” . While Trump makes Kim sound way cooler than he is, he busily terrifies the world with his rhetoric, such as…

2). Serial Killer.. This was a no brainer speech. Trump just had to get up before the United Nations, speak about efforts to attain world peace, and not get up there and sound like a thumping lunatic. Instead he did the exact opposite. There are approximately 25 million people residing in North Korea, and Trump stood in front of the United Nations and swore that he was going to destroy them all. One assumes that he means he is going to launch nuclear missiles and blow the entire country to hëll. Twenty five million people, dead, because Trump is engaged in a dìçk measuring contest with the country’s leader. Perhaps he believes that his comments are going to convince Kim Jong-un’s own people to execute him and throw him out of power. I very much doubt that’s going to happen. Instead Kim Jong-un is going to use Trump’s speech in front of an organization that’s dedicated to world peace as proof that the only thing which will keep his country safe is having its own nuclear arsenal. I very much doubt Kim Jong-un will launch the first missiles at us because I frankly don’t think he’s that insane. But I totally believe Trump is that insane. I could very easily see him giving Kim Jong-un some sort of deadline to stand down that Kim will fail to meet, assuming that Trump would never take the first strike, and then Trump orders it done. At which point we are then counting on the military to stand up to the president and effectively perform a coup d’etat. Is it possible? Very much so. Because if it isn’t, we’re going to be at war with what’s left of North Korea. So for all you idiots who saw no difference between Hillary and Trump, do a single one of you think that she would have done that? Of course not. No sane person would have.

3). Hail Mary. For some reason that I am still rather fuzzy on, the GOP must pass a health bill before the end of September. It has something to do with only requiring fifty votes; as of October 1, they would need sixty votes, which means that they would actually have to get help from the Democrats. Because they are SO desperate to avoid having to actually reach across the aisle and work with the opposing party, they are slamming forward at top speed the Graham-Cassidy bill, which seems to exist mainly to make all their previous undertakings regarding health care look even better. This one is apparently the worst of all. Various large states such as New York will see cuts in Federal support of tens of billions of dollars. Care for pre-existing conditions would go out the window, particularly in states that voted for Trump. Poor children and non-disabled adults would get hit hardest with massive Medicaid cuts. Every medical organization you can name plus most health insurers have come out against it.

And what did Trump say? He said it was a great bill. Of course he did.

Because he’s a dotard.

Did he do anything right this week? No.

PAD

So BBC America was running a selection of popular ST:TOS episodes, and I was watching “Friday’s Child.” That’s the one where a pregnant Julie Newmar is Eleen, the wife of a tribal chieftain who gets overthrown and slain, and by their law they are about to kill her as well. And she is willing to die, accepting of their law.

And Kirk decks the executioners.

Now this is beyond question a violation of the Prime Directive. Starfleet officers cannot interfere with the social development of a planet, period. In this case the social development called for Eleen to be executed. Kirk not only interferes, but he jeopardizes their mission because they are in competition with a Klingon who is standing right there and was perfectly willing to led Eleen be killed. The Klingon obeys their laws while Kirk does whatever the hëll he wants.

The point is, Picard was much more faithful to the Prime Directive. He quoted it constantly and it impacted on all his decisions. So if Picard had been standing there and they were about to execute Eleen, would he have allowed it to happen?

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Trump hasn’t done much that a president would actually do to help people this week, but he has been running off at the mouth big time.

1). Make a mountain out of a hill. ESPN anchor Jemele Hill stated on her private twitter feed that she believed Trump was a white supremacist. You know, the way millions of people have been saying and which his own repeated actions would tend to make any reasonable observer believe. Certainly his tendency to give white supremacists and Nazis every ounce of consideration and slack, and his knack for being endorsed by David Duke and white supremacists, would make any reasonable observer make that supposition. And as noted, it wasn’t as if Hill said that on the air. Nevertheless the White House is in full attack mode, and Trump tweeted that she should “Apologize for Untruth.”

Really? Seriously? The guy who claimed that Ted Cruz’s father was involved with JFK’s murder is complaining about untruths? The guy who stated for years that Obama wasn’t born in the US, or that Obama had him wire tapped, is complaining about untruths? The guy whose track record of lies is unprecedented among politicians in the modern era is suddenly concerned about truth?

No, Donald. No. You don’t get to lie about everything under the sun and claim that both the white supremacists and their opposition were equally involved and then demand apologizes for speculation that your own actions launched. The fact that ESPN is “distancing” themselves from Hill is saddening and I hope that they allow her to weather out the storm rather than sacrificing her on the altar of adherence to truth that this president consistently refuses to follow.

2). And he did it again. Trump was asked on Air Force One about his meeting with Senator Tim Scott, the only black Republican in the Senate. It was obviously a softball question. All he had to say was that it went fine and they discussed finding ways to…I dunno…solve racial tension or something. Instead out of nowhere he started defending again his idiotic assertions about Charlottesville, claiming that many people said “Trump might have a point.” The obvious response is that yes, people did say that. They were white supremacists and Nazis. Trump is so obsessed with being right even though he’s invariably wrong that he had to come back and say, “See? See? Told you so.” The obvious assertion is to claim that Trump has doubled down. But since he already did that, we’d have to say he…what? Tripled down? Quadrupled down?

Here’s a thought, Mr. President: if you’re so concerned about being called a white supremacist, how about you analyze the behavior that you are employing that is prompting people to speculate about it.

3). Waiting for the facts. Remember how a few weeks ago, Trump was standing there telling the world that he didn’t want to issue condemnations of white supremacists because he wanted to wait for all the facts? Yeah, that lasted just long enough for the explosion in London, about which Trump claimed that the identities of the people who set it were known to London authorities and he claimed simply validated his travel plan. Because let us remember this about the man who, on 9/11, boasted that he now had the tallest building in New York: There is no subject on Earth that Trump cannot make it be about himself.

Did he do anything right? Well, that kind of depends who you talk to and when. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer dined with him on Wednesday and stated that they had come away from it having “agreed to enshrine the protections of DACA into law quickly, and to work out a package of border security, excluding the wall, that’s acceptable to both sides.” Except Paul Ryan quickly claimed there was no deal in place, and Thursday morning Trump likewise asserted that no deal had been made. Pelosi and Schumer later “clarified” their statement that Trump was going to support congressional endeavors to put DACA into law. But even that was enough to infuriate millions of Trump supporters, including Ann Coulter who wrote a “Why I Love Trump” book last year and now hates his guts.

So Trump has now managed to pìšš øff both conservatives (with his alleged support for DACA) and liberals (with his continued apparent sympathy for white supremacists.) Gee. Maybe he really did manage to unite everybody.

PAD