Monthly Archives: July 2025

Epstein, Trump, & the Conspiracist’s Trap

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The first rule of being a conspiracist is that you were never wrong. No fact, no evidence, can ever be admitted to have undermined in any way the fantasy you have told. A conspiracy fantasy is forever treated as fact.

The second rule is that having the secret knowledge of the conspiracy makes you special. You are wiser than those naive yokels believing what the system and the man tell them. Your cynicism against the system is proof of your wisdom. This reinforces the first rule because you can never be the naive one, and as such, your adherence to the “truth” is further evidence of your intelligence.

The third rule is that you are always on the side of the angels. The system and the man are lying to everyone for their own terrible and evil purposes. The conspiracy fantasy “exposes” the truth that the powerful are hiding, and your fight to tell this “truth” makes you heroic. You aren’t an idiot who accepted a fantastic tale of space lizards invading the world—you are the archetypal hero freeing your fellow people from that space lizard tyranny.

These three rules have trapped Trump in a snare of his own devising, and one that he may find terribly difficult to escape.

It is an accepted legal fact that wealthy financier Epstein, with the assistance of at least one person, Maxwell, groomed and sexually abused young girls. It is a matter of record that when faced with legal repercussions, he first received suspiciously lenient treatment and, following that, died in prison before a more serious legal hammer fell upon him. It is also a historical fact that Trump and Epstein enjoyed each other’s company for a number of years, as did numerous other wealthy and politically powerful people. These facts are not conspiratorial fantasy but are its foundation.

The fantasy is that there is a vast and organized group of selected powerful people who engaged with Epstein in the sexual and ritual abuse of children. This cabal includes some of the world’s most influential people, who all happen to be opposed to the political posturing of the conspiracists. Epstein’s lenient treatment is taken as evidence of the shadowy cult’s power and not simply the sad fact of life that in modern America, the rich are never held to the same accountable standard as the rest of us.

Trump, and his surrogates, fed this conspiratorial fantasy to energize their base of voters against the Democrats. The more the base believed, the more energized they became, and the more likely that Trump and company would be swept into power. The fact that it is fantasy would be irrelevant.

Except the rules say otherwise.

The conspiracy cannot be untrue, and Trump supporters know this. It has to be true, and he and his squad of righteous people were going to expose all of it.

Only they didn’t.

They tried to sweep it under the rug. The released information fell far short of what they promised. They lied about it, and for the first time, Trump told them lies that they did not want to hear.

The conspiracists are on the side of the angels. They are defending and saving children by exposing the “truth,” and that is why this story will not die like so many other examples of Trump’s blatant corruption. For the base to accept that there is nothing there and move on to something else, they must accept that they were the naive fools and that they never were on the side of the angels. People don’t work that way—hence the trap.

Maybe Trump will still squirm out of it. Like Clinton before him, he’s proved an evolutionary marvel at escaping political pitfalls, but every story comes to an end, and maybe, just maybe, this is his.

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Star Trek and Changing Social Mores

Paramount Studios/CBS Home Video

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I become Medicare-aged next year, and so to me Star Trek always means the original series and the original crew. Amid the adding and subtracting of cast and the morphing future history of the United Federation of Planets, one of the constants was the friendly combative relationship between Spock, the reportedly unemotional half-Vulcan, and the ship’s chief admitted sensualist and emotional heart of the crew, Medical Officer Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy. McCoy continually needled Spock over his unemotional nature, his strangely colored green blood, and his distinctive appearance as the alien among humans. Spock usually responded in kind with a simply delivered but devastating remark that any observer could judge as victory in their mutual burn contests. Underneath the jibes and jabs was a foundation of deep respect, loyalty, and friendship, displayed most clearly in “Amok Time” when Spock invited McCoy, along with Kirk, to the very private Vulcan wedding ceremony.

What has fascinated me of late is watching younger people, usually those born in the early 90s, discover and react to the original series episodes and how they interpret Bones’ behavior toward Spock. They see it as inappropriate and borderline racist.

They aren’t entirely wrong.

The fact that Vulcans are fictional gives us some distance from the nature of Bones’ ribbing and cutting remarks, but the truth is that if he said similar things about real people and real races, we would be horrified. Denigrating comments about someone’s appearance or culture are something that is far less acceptable today than sixty years ago.

Growing up with these characters, we understood that there was and is a deep respect and love between them. We knowthat McCoy or Spock would lay down their lives to save the other, and that this surface tension is mere “play fighting.” It is not unlike comments my friends and I have made to each other over the years, but when it slides into observations based on biology, that crosses the line.

It gives me hope that the past is seen this way by the generations replacing us.

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The Terrible Chaos of Migraine Triggers

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While I suffer from migraine headaches, I recognize that mine are generally far less severe than many people’s, but that does not alleviate the pain or the unpredictability of my triggers.

Yesterday morning I had a quick follow-up visit with my dentist for her to check the sutures from last week’s minor surgery. Sitting in the office waiting to be called, I passed the time playing games on my phone when a mother and her little girl came in. The little girl, a strange child, was excited for “the doctor to look at her teeth,” and when told she had to wait, shrieked in frustration. Yes, from what I saw, it really looked like the little girl was upset because she had to wait to see the dentist and not from fear of the exam.

However, her single piercing shriek instantly ignited a migraine attack in my head. For me, this is one of the most difficult things to manage: when and if a migraine trigger will actually start an attack, warn that an attack may come, or leave me untouched as though I do not suffer from this condition.

There are times when the triggers, and they are nearly always audio triggers, start a process deep in my skull that I can feel and now recognize as a potential migraine. In those cases, I can flee the stimulus and often avoid the attack itself. Sadly, for me the triggers can be as mundane as the mere sound of someone eating. (I have never watched The Substancebecause I know that there are disgusting shots of people eating and talking as they eat, and the risk of a migraine is simply too great to ignore.)

Other times there is no warning that the trigger will ignite the attack, and from the very first moment of the trigger, the migraine starts. Pain exploding inside my skull, the sensation of pressure builds in my head, and a slowly growing dissociative detachment takes hold.

Yesterday I suffered for most of the workday with a minor to moderate migraine, moved slowly through my tasks, and had very little cognitive ability once I returned home to my sweetie-wife.

If these were more predictable, life would be more manageable, but as it is, I simply have to deal with the triggers and whatever they decide to do on a case-by-case basis.

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Movie Review: Fantastic Four: First Steps

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After three previous attempts and a merger of studios to bring the film rights back to Marvel Studios, there is yet another shot at bringing the exploits of comics’ first family to the larger-than-life screen. The Fantastic Four is this time titled Fantastic Four: First Steps.

First published in 1961, The Fantastic Four is a quartet of heroes with very public identities and celebrity status in the comic book continuum. Though a popular franchise for over 60 years, the group has struggled to find a successful silver screen adaptation. The filmmakers with this reboot have elected to jettison more conventional approaches for a bold vision.

Marvel Studios

Fantastic Four: First Steps drops the audience into a parallel universe where the family of superheroes are already not only known but honored globally for their exploits and bravery. It is an alternate 1960s, and the production is drenched in retro-futurism—a future that people of the 60s envisioned but never came to pass, colorful and optimistic. The team’s ‘origin’ is quickly recounted as backstory for a television special. How scientist Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), pilot Ben Grimm (Eben Moss-Bachrach), Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), and her brother Johnny (Joseph Quinn) ventured into space and returned changed, imbued with amazing powers. In addition to eschewing recreating their origin, the filmmakers also steered clear of the team’s most notorious opponent, Dr. Doom. Instead, they are confronted by the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner), Herald to the god-like being Galactus (Ralph Ineson), whose insatiable hunger drives him to consume planets teeming with life. Galactus is presented in the film as he was in the source material—a kaiju-sized humanoid in fantastic armor. The Silver Surfer has selected Earth as Galactus’ next victim, and the Fantastic Four attempt to negotiate with the god-like being. But when Galactus demands a price too high for the team to personally pay, Earth is set as his next target, and the world turns on its former heroes.

Fantastic Four: First Steps, in my opinion, is a mid-tier Marvel Cinematic Universe entry. Not as weak as some of the franchise films, but also nowhere near the excellence of its best. The script has four credited writers for both screenplay and story, and the final product is a bit muddled, showing what was likely a turbulent development and production. The cast is good, with Pascal and Kirby being outright terrific. Julia Garner plays enigmatic well and has one of the best ‘cheer’ moments in the feature. I think most of my issues—and why this film did not enthrall me completely—stem from the world-building of the alternate Earth failing to convince. It is not the retro-futurism that I found unconvincing (that I looked forward to), but some of the human aspects that were baked into the world that I found beyond my ability to accept. In Iron Man 2, it was stated that Stark ‘privatized world peace’—one moment of hyperbole that could be and should be ignored. Here, a similar concept is baked into this world’s canon.

Still, I did not regret venturing out to the theater for a fun, bright, and optimistic superhero film far from the dark and grounded miasma of cynicism.

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Things to Look Forward To

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After two days of dental surgery, chiropractic, and pulmonary medical appointments, Amazon drivers taking a reserved parking space, and my front passenger tire going flat due to a tiny screw, I can finally start to relax and look forward to a few weeks of hopefully nice events and activities.

First off is this weekend’s opening for Fantastic Four: First Steps. I am quite happy with the trailers and the interesting approach to produce the film in a retro-futurism style that echoes the comic book’s 60’s origins. So far, there haven’t been any decent Fantastic Four movies, but this one is the first to be produced under the Marvels Studios’ guidance following that studio’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox.

Next on the things that are making me happy is the next 7-8 weeks of televised science-fiction with the third seasons of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and Foundation. Full disclosure, while I have read a lot of classic SF, I never managed to get into Asimov’s Foundation series. His fiction often struck me as dry and with characters created to solve puzzles rather than experience emotional lives. So, I know that this show is deviating wildly from the source material, but it doesn’t bother me. Strange New Worlds is of course as I have previously written about is breaking ‘canon’ with Treklore, but it is doing so while giving us more realized and fleshed out characters so that’s a trade I am perfectly willing to make.

And finally, next month is the World Science Fiction Convention in Seattle, Washington. It has been a number of years since I have been able to make a WorldCon and this I hope will be the restorative vacation/holiday I need just before the really busy period at the day-job commences.

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In Defense of The Last Jedi

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Yesterday, while recovering from minor oral surgery, I watched a YouTube video from the channel ‘Feral Historian’ where he discussed the history of myths and their cultural command throughout human civilization, concluding with the observation that while Disney owns the intellectual property of Star Wars the myth of that franchise belongs to the wider American and even global culture. It is a very fine distinction that can ‘separate ownership’ from ‘belongs to’ but in my opinion his essay seemed to boil down to essentially, ‘Not my Luke Skywalker.’

It is a fairly common refrain that the character of Luke Skywalker as presented is strikingly at odds with how the character is in the original trilogy. That his fall and sulky isolation degrades his heroic stature and is an insult to the fanbase.

I don’t agree. In fact, I think there are signs and traits exhibited in the original trilogy that support the actions taken by Skywalker in The Last Jedi.

Disney/Lucasfilm

Luke started his journey to becoming a Jedi Knight driven by anger and a thirst for vengeance after discovering the charred corpses of his Aunt and Uncle. His first steps into that wider mystical existence were steps that often lead to the Dark Side. This is a small factor, Luke clearly tries to devote himself to the Rebellion and the fight for freedom, but it is an important emotional fact to keep in mind.

In The Empire Strikes Back it becomes clearer that the Dark Side of the Force holds an allure and draw to Luke just as it did for his father. (In either the original backstory presentation as told by Obi-Wan or in the retconned version of the prequels.) When confronted with a cave that is ‘strong with the Dark Side’ Luke is told by Yoda that he must confront it, and he should do so without his lightsaber.

He ignores the sage advice of his tutor, strapping on his weapon, and venturing into the lair of the Dark Side. There he is confronted by a vision of Darth Vader. There was the unmistakable sound of a lightsaber igniting, and Luke raised his weapon to fight. Only after Luke has lit his weapon does the image of Vader ignite his.

Luke, even after being told that hate and anger are paths to the Dark Side, starts the violence of the encounter. Defeating the image of Vader, it was revealed to be Luke under the mask, his real fight is and always had been with himself.

Luke, again ignores the counsel of his teachers, abandons his training to fly into a trap set by Vader and the Emperor in the Cloud City of Bespin. There he is maneuvered into a confrontation with the real Vader and having not learned the lesson of the cave, Luke starts aggressively, lighting his weapon first. Luke escaped but was bitter that he was not told what he thinks he should have known and not reprimanding himself for repeatedly ignoring the people wiser than himself in these matters.

The Return of the Jedi in addition to the space and ground battles represents Luke’s final temptation by the Dark Side and he starts the story off in a bad place. Setting aside the elaborate and knowingly doomed attempts to make a deal with Jabba the Hutt, when Luke enters Jabba’s palace his very first action, though difficult to see due to the bulky costumes, is to force choke the Gammorrean guards and reserve the ‘Jedi Mind Trick’ for the majordomo. While there are no on-screen fatalities from the choking it is quite reminiscent of the scene from the original Star Wars when Vader is simply annoyed by an Imperial Officer.

Luke displayed a fair amount of control as the Emperor pushed, prodded, and tempted Luke to give in emotionally to the Dark Side as the Rebel forces are being destroyed in the battle of the Second Death Star but eventually Luke did break, seizing his weapon, and giving in to his anger. He briefly regained his calm but only until, again unable to control his emotional nature, it is revealed he has a twin sister and all of Luke’s composure vanishes.

He is very nearly turned to the Dark Side with only the image of his father’s mechanical, hand so much like Luke’s own, shattered the rage that had propelled him, allowing him to accept death rather than be seduced by the Dark Side. Luke did not get to that moment of serenity quickly or easily. He is an emotionally volatile man, given to storm changes in his mood, demons that have been present throughout the character’s arc.

Which brings us to The Last Jedi and its Rashomon-like backstory of Luke and that night with Ben Solo.

Luke, sensing a Dark Side power he had not encountered since Vader, nearly twenty years earlier, reacts as he has always done when suddenly confronted in this manner, ignites his lightsaber. It is a moment of fear and weakness, but a moment was all that was required to destroy the future. Luke did not strike, but before he could take any further action, Ben awoke, and the die was cast for both their fates. Luke, always a person short on patience and given to grand gestures, flees in the face of his failure.

Here it is important to remember that Luke is also older than he was when he confronted his own failings. When one is young it is much easier to ‘pick yourself up’ and start over. There is an air of limitless possibility and invulnerability to youth but as you age you become more cautious, you feel the failures more painfully, and you are so much more aware that time is closing off all those limitless possibilities of youth. The idea that Luke flees, hides his failure and his shame from everyone else, wallowing in self-hatred for what he has done, is wholly in character with the young man I met on the silver screen in 1977.

He may not be ‘your Luke Skywalker’ and any honest critique cannot be wrong, but he is not divergent.

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Cowardice, CBS, & Colbert

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As you may have already learned, last week the Columbia Broadcasting System, CBS, announced that it was ending The Late Show with Stephen Colbert effective May 2026. The Late Show began in 1993 with David Letterman hosting the series, who handed the program off to Colbert in 2015. CBS, a division of Paramount, in its announcement of the show’s termination took pains to make clear that the decision was “purely a financial decision.”

CBS’s explanation has been met with considerable skepticism, with many believing that the network, under direction from its parent corporation, made the move to placate President Donald Trump due to Colbert’s continual and savage criticism of the president. The truth is that without someone bringing forward documented evidence, we can’t know if that was the reason or if the shifting nature of late-night television and the aging of the audience out of the demographic desired by advertisers played the deciding factor in ending the long-running program.

What I think we can say is that Paramount burned all of its benefit of the doubt over this decision in a 16-million-dollar bonfire.

Trump, a petty and vindictive man, launched a lawsuit seeking damages against CBS for the manner in which it edited an interview with Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential contest. It was a lawsuit without any legal merit at all. There was simply no theory of the case by which one could come to any reasonable conclusion that the interview had harmed Trump in any fashion. He still won the election; it was not his words that had been edited. All he had in his claim was that he suffered “emotional distress.” The big man behind the “fuck your feelings” crowd had had his feelings hurt.

But Paramount, seeking federal approval of its sale to Skydance, understood the Mafia-like mentality of this man and settled for 16 million dollars. In effect, not a bribe but a shakedown: “That’s a nice sale you got there, Redstone. It’d be a shame if anything happened to it.”

Everyone in the industry understood precisely what had transpired when Paramount/CBS agreed to give 16 million dollars to Trump for his hurt little feelings. So, naturally, everyone views this decision with an ocean’s worth of salt. Trump crowing on social media over the cancellation only elevates the idea that this was a move to further placate the man. After all, if the 16 million is a shakedown, Paramount has no way to enforce it. Trump can take the money for his Presidential Library—yeah right—and still have his administration kill the deal in “the public interest.” Paramount has to keep him happy until it is done, and if that was the real motivation for the move, then it will not be the last.

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Revisiting Across 110th Street

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This Sunday, as part of Film Geeks San Diego’s Neo-Noir festival for 2025, we watched the 1972 film Across 110th Street. Often considered a ‘blaxploitation’ feature, I think the film is more accurately part of the crime sub-genre than that one. While the movie has a large cast of Black actors and the setting is the gritty, grimy conditions of their lives in run-down Harlem of the early 70s, the novel was written by a white author, and the film was produced and directed by a white filmmaker, which I think takes it seriously away from the ‘own voices’ nature of most blaxploitation movies.

I watched this film on the Criterion Channel a few years ago, but it is a different experience watching it on the big screen, even if that screen is the 50-seat micro-theater of San Diego’s Digital Gym.

In the story, three Black men rob a ‘counting house’ where the Italian Mafia counts and acquires the funds from the Black Harlem gangsters that are their subjugated gang. The robbery goes awry with both Italian and Black gangsters being killed along with a pair of New York police patrolmen, sparking an intense hunt for the robbers by the police and the criminal gangs.

Thematically, Across 110th Street is very much about the old being supplanted by the new. Within the police, for purely political posturing, the investigation is given to a young and relatively inexperienced officer, Lieutenant Pope (Yaphet Kotto), solely because Pope is Black, infuriating Captain Matelli (Anthony Quinn), a racist cop but with decades of experience in Harlem. The Mafia Don sends a hotheaded and expendable nephew, Nick D’Salvio (Anthony Franciosa), to identify, find, and make an example of the three robbers. Nick’s interfacing with the local Black criminal organization, run by ‘Doc’ Johnson (Richard Ward), reveals serious friction between the gangs with the implication clear that the Italian Mafia’s days controlling Harlem are rapidly closing. In both cases—the criminals and the police—it is the younger, more vibrant actors that repeatedly succeed in uncovering information leading to the three doomed robbers while the tired and brutal methods of the older generation prove ineffective.

As was typical for films of the 70s, now released from the restrictive Motion Picture Production Code, Across 110th Streetis a violent, cynical affair populated with characters of whom none can truly be called heroes save for the still, in many ways naïve, Lt. Pope.

Directed by veteran television director Barry Shear and utilizing new lightweight cameras, Across 110th Street was filmed on location using location sound instead of the more conventional studio shoots and dubbing of location dialog, giving the film a realism that indicated the future of cinema. While the feature may not fit neatly into the genre of ‘blaxploitation,’ its treatment of its Harlem-based characters indicates a compassion and understanding that is often absent from films of the period. The characters, good and bad, have depth and characteristics beyond the needs of the plot. Even the racist and bigoted Captain Matelli has a compassion even for those for whom he normally harbors only resentment and hatred.

Across 110th Street has now been released in a newly restored 4K Blu-ray from Shout Factory. It was this release we watched, and the film looked fantastic.

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Superman and Assimilation

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James Gunn’s relaunching of a film franchise based upon DC comic book heroes has begun with his Superman and in these politically charged and patently insane partisan times it of course has launched a million takes.

Sonny Bunch, culture editor for The Bulwark, an online home and community for displaced former Republicans and centrist Democrats, recently revealed that his interpretation of this variant of the character was to see it as a conservative character, principally due to Clark Kent’s end-to-end assimilation as an immigrant of American culture and values.

This is, of course, a ludicrous interpretation. Clark Kent AKA Kal-El, rocketed to Earth from the doomed planet Krypton as an infant.  Assimilation implies, quite strongly, the discarding of some of a person’s former cultural practices and traditions while adopting the same from their new home’s culture. Kal-El carried with him none of that planet’s culture and was raised in the heartland of American as the only culture he knew. This was no more assimilation than it is for any person born and raised in Kansas.

But assimilation is a Trojan Horse argument, meant to ‘other’ the immigrant and as such make it easier to treat them as non-persons, which of course makes it easier to be cruel and uncaring.

America is an idea, and anyone can become an American, but that process does not at all require them to reject everything of their former culture and it never has. American culture is an amalgam of cultures from around the globe, our food, our holidays, our practices are not and never have been just one thing, one culture, one idea.

The poisonous idea at the heart of MAGA and its hatred of ‘DEI’ is the idea that there is one way and only one way to be American. It is the desire to use a great metal stamp to force everyone into a single mold, a single form and to fear and hate anything that resists that process.

Nothing is more ‘Big Brother’ than MAGA.

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Standard Orbit Achieved

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Tonight is the return of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds for its third of five seasons. It is a shame that when this series completes its run, the episode total will be only 50 fewer than the ‘failed’ original series with its three seasons. It is a shame because this is the first Star Trek series in a very long time that, to me, has the voice and feel of the original series.

CBS Studios

Credit: Paramount Pictures

Yes, this series, produced nearly six decades after the original, has a very different tone and sensibility from its progenitor. It ‘violates’ established lore and canon numerous times, such as repeated contact with the Gorn prior to Kirk’s encounter following the destruction of Cestus III, or the sexual activity of Vulcan’s outside of pon farr, the time of madness; but as I have written about in other posts these divergences have led to more complex characters and more interesting plots, so I am not irritated by them.

Sunday evening my sweetie-wife and I rewatched the season two finale, which, of course, following the modern trend established by Dallas decades ago, ended with something I truly despise: a cliffhanger. That said, I and thrilled and excited to be returning to Pike’s Enterprise. To re-engage with what has surprised me, my favorite character, Christine Chapel, and the rest of the stellar crew as they sail the stars seeking out strange new worlds.

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