I Remember That Episode

 

Raqqa Like A Hurricane

ISIS virtually conquered after losing its capital, reports The China Post.

Worst hit by the news: Former Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. If he’s alive, that is.

Second worst hit: Former China Post editor Joe Hung, who predicted (less than two years ago) that the Islamic State Caliphate was invincible.  (No use clicking through, though. The China Post has killed the link, perhaps realizing that this editorial column was not among the paper’s finest.)

ISIS had hundreds of thousands of fanatical troops and billions of dollars, Joe Hung said. The world would just have to live with the Islamo-Nazis’ new Thousand-Year Reich, he insisted. Because ISIS would bring peace and love and understanding to the Middle East, just like all the Caliphates did before it.

Oh, and never you mind about the lowly infidel (Yazidi and Christian women) relegated to sexual slavery to soldiers of the Master Faith. Yazidis & Christians are little people, and in Joe Hung’s world, the rapes of a few thousand little people are well worth the price of the grand Middle Eastern Utopia he assured us was just around the corner.

A few of Joe Hung’s mighty, invincible rapist-terrorists. After their defeat. Why, they look ten-feet tall, don’t they just?

 

 Either on their knees, or at your throat:

Update (October 19, 2017): Slideshow of triumphant troops after having defeated ISIS in Raqqa.

Update (October 22, 2017):

Set Creativity To Warp Factor 1, Mr. Chewbacca

Mega Star Destroyer

Used to consider myself a little more of a Star Wars guy than a Star Trek guy, but lately I've begun thinking about how depressing the Star Wars cinematic universe really is.

Take any World War 2 movie: no matter how harrowing, it's either explicit or implicit that all the carnage and sacrifice results in 75 years of real-world peace. Even if the characters die, the ultimate payoff to all the conflict is peace.

Now take Return Of The Jedi. Good guys win, galaxy is liberated, everyone lives happily ever after.

Except that they don't live happily ever after. Poor bastard Luke Skywalker spends the next 35 years of his life fighting the remnants of the Empire, until he gets PTSD and crawls into a fetal position in his hermit's cave.

And who can blame him? What's he got to look forward to? Or we, the audience, for that matter? Just movie upon movie of war without end.

And that's why the Star Wars universe is a depressing place. In the Star Wars universe, peace can never be the ultimate payoff. Disney expects yearly returns on a 4.5 billion dollar investment. Can't say that I blame them, but any final "victory" in the latest trilogy is going to seem very hollow when the next band of plucky heroes just have to fight Empire 3.0 in the trilogy which inevitably follows.

More Death Stars, more planetary genocides, more nihilism, ad infinitum.

Sorry Disney, count me out.

UPDATE (Aug 11 / 2017): Just to expand upon one point: in Star Trek, the default state is peace. Of course, in order to have drama, some kind of conflict has to exist. So in any given episode or movie, violence or brinksmanship or diplomacy is used to deal with the conflict.

With the conflict resolved, the Star Trek universe once more reverts to its natural state, peace. (Even if, in the case of the Original Series, that peace sometimes was imperfect and took the form of cold wars with the Klingons or Romulans.)

Conversely, with Star Wars, the default state of nature is war. The audience always knows that war continues between episodes. There's rarely any respite, other than perhaps the occasional happy end-of-trilogy celebration sequence to signify a brief, fragile peace before the resumption of hostilities.

(About the only way to avoid this problem would be to set the next trilogy in the Old Republic or a thousand years into the future in the Third Republic. Which I don't see happening — they'd lose too much on the merchandising of the current characters, etc.)

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She Broke The Glass Ceiling By Being The First Woman To Graduate From The Vulcan Science Academy

Doctorates in spaaace!

President Xitler Of China Murders Political Dissident Liu Xiaobo

Xi Jinping murdered Liu Xiaobo by medical neglect, just as surely as if he had ordered a halt to Liu's food or water in that political prison.

“The last Nobel Peace Prize Laureate to be effectively killed by his own government was Carl Ossietsky, in Germany in 1938,” [Bill] Bishop notes. “Does Xi care that the the likely precedent here for Beijing will be pre-World War II Nazi Germany?”

Chancellor Xitler of China: Xitler Jinping

(Image from Twitter.com)

In an uncharacteristic move, Taiwan's China Post reported on the fate of President Xi's other victims:

"In what amounts to nothing less than a 'war on law' that is unprecedented in its scale and severity," the New York [City Bar Association] said, "Chinese human rights lawyers and activists have been summoned for questioning, kidnapped by secret politic, detained incommunicado in 'black jails' and other prisons, humiliated and subjected to marathon interrogation sessions and other forms of sadistic psychological and physical torture, including sleep deprivation, forced medication (often with grave consequences for mental and physical health), brutal beatings, electric shocks, prolonged subversion in water, death threats, and months of solitary confinement."

If the China Post had been this honest about China over the past 15 years, it might still have a print edition.

But instead, the Post elected to be Chinese Communist Party shills, thereby driving their 65-year-old newspaper into the ground.

Just sayin'.

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