The producers of Star Trek Discovery (STD) really, really, REALLY want you to know that they will prominently feature a gay character in their cast. This is totally important, you guys.

“There’s a kid out there who’s going to turn on his TV, and they’re gonna see two men love each other and support each other and support each other’s genius, and it’s not going to be an issue,” he said of his on-screen relationship with Lt. Stamets (Anthony Rapp). “It’s just going to be what it is.”

No, it isn’t because you keep banging us over the head with it. You just admitted that the only reason for this character’s existence is to promote a positive image of gay people. And why are you so adamant that the target audience has to be a kid? That’s just plain creepy.

Back in the days of the original series (TOS), were they constantly making a big deal about Lt. Uhuru. Was it a non-stop barrage of, “Hey, Look, we have a Black Woman on our show. And she’s sort of treated as an equal … kind of.” Maybe that generation cared more about doing things and less about making sure other people noticed that you were doing things.

I am also put in mind that every Trek series since the reboot has featured a non-human character learning What It Means To Be Human. Data. Odo. Holodoc/7ofD-Cups. T’Pol. And basically, “what it means to be human” always boils down to having emotions, because Hollywood is stupid. But it almost seems like they are sort of doing that with The Gay Character. (Does he even need a name?). Because this character will also be defined solely by his symbolism.

I feel like when the day comes when a show has a gay character and doesn’t make a giant deal out of it… then, that will be real progress.

Hey, Remember when the Coca-Cola company decided to discontinue a successful product in favor of a new formulation? Yeah, pretty much every human being knows how that turned out… except for the current executives of the Coca Cola company.

On Wednesday, Coca-Cola announced plans to stop selling Coke Zero in the US in August, replacing it with a beverage with a different recipe, design, and name: Coke Zero Sugar.

“It is a reinvention of Coke Zero,” CEO James Quincey said in a call with investors.

Coke Zero Sugar is already a major hit outside the US, with growth figures reaching the teens. In the US, Coke Zero sales grew 3.5% in 2016, compared with Diet Coke’s drop of 1.9% in the same time period.

Maybe it will work this time. Personally, I never cared for Coke Zero. I did like Pepsi One and Pepsi Max, but those, of course, have been discontinued.

Mark Steyn agrees with me, the only reason the left has to remake classic white male characters into trendy new genders and races is because the left utterly lacks the creativity to create new compelling characters.

I do regard this sort of thing as, to coin a phrase, cultural appropriation – in the sense that what our age mostly does is appropriate the cultural creations of greater talents and make them into something other. The Mighty Thor becomes a woman, Spider-Man turns Afro-Hispanic, Green Lantern goes gay; even in the Archie comics, Archie dies taking a bullet for his gay best friend, and Jughead comes out as asexual.

The clever thing is to create Archie (as Vic Bloom and Bob Montana did in 1941) and Captain America and Iceman, and turning them into modular furniture to be repositioned round the room at will – now female, now gay, now Hispanic – is an achievement of a considerably lesser order. As Brendan O’Neill points out, it’s also shallow – although very suited to an age in which Facebook offers you a choice of 50 gender identities.

And when the ratings tank, they’ll blame misogyny. It almost makes you think the writers are building a cushion to excuse poor performance. Blaming the prejudices of the audience is easier than admitting you’re a hack.

The producers of Doctor Who have decided that the next iteration of the titular character will be… oh, what is the PC term… a person with a vagina. This is pretty much what happened after the announcement.

Feminists and Beta Male Nerds: “OMG, Dr. Who is going to be a woman. This is the most awesomest thing in the history of scifi TV.”

Me (and others): “Whatever, it really depends on the quality of the writing and how they develop the character. If it becomes a boring social justice lecture, I’m not interested.”

Feminists and Beta Male Nerds: “OMG! Your male fragility can’t handle a woman in the role of The Doctor! It’s driving you crazy! We drink your tears, penis-bearer!”

One thing is for sure; if the audience for the show declines, the producers can now blame their losses on misogyny. And probably Russian meddling.

In other news of no consequence: DC Comics Reboots Snagglepuss as ‘Gay, Southern Gothic Playwright.’

What a stupid time to be alive.

Watching lefties digest new political happenings is often like a scene from Harrison Bergeron, the dystopian future where no one is permitted to do anything skillfully.

Lefties are handicapped by their own needs and delusions, the poor dears. They can’t handle the truth. So they ignore large parts of it, fixate on a fragment or two, distort it, then fall over like a ballet dancer wearing unnecessary weights. Still, they might learn something – on the margins.

Laura Loomer and Jack Posobiec’s Shakespeare in the Park protest was somewhat new-ish: Conservatives bringing home the Left’s disruption tactics (though still being comparatively polite about it). At this link, you can watch Seth Myers and Amy Poehler struggle to address it.

As you’d expect, Myers and Poehler ignore the real context and point of the protest, making a laughable Straw Man out of it; then laugh dutifully, complete with wide eyes and shouting. It’s fine, it’s how they operate. As you’d expect. Except for one thing.

It does dawn on them that maybe people disrupting events isn’t what we all need and the Left should try to walk that one back. They slip in these words to their audience:

Free speech isn’t about just protecting speech you like. So, if you think it’s terrible to interrupt _Julius Caesar_, you have to think it’s terrible to interrupt Ann Coulter…She gets to speak too; liberals cannot be hypocrites when it comes to free speech…so, be OK with it when Ted Nugent says “President Obama can suck my machine gun.”

I left out the crap they wrapped around it. I’m saying, we can be grateful for the small things. Two leftie celebrities had a moment of self-awareness, and smuggled it into their audience. Will it take?

Old and busted: Lou Reed is so cool. He did a song about trannies that makes the squares uptight!

New hotness: Lou Reed is so bigoted. He did a song about trannies that makes us SJWs uptight!

A student group at the University of Guelph in Canada has apologized for including the Lou Reed song “Walk on the Wild Side” on a playlist at a campus event…

The Guelph Central Student Association wrote “We now know the lyrics to this song are hurtful to our friends in the trans community and we’d like to unreservedly apologize for this error in judgement.”…

In a further statement a spokesperson said: “The lyrics, ‘and then he was a she,’ devalues the experiences and identities of trans folks.

Huh? How?

CBS has released a trailer for its repeatedly delayed Star Trek:Diversity Discovery. It looks… tedious… full of itself… somewhat pretentious. Yup, it’s Star Trek, all right. With added virtue signalling. (Female minority captains and a gay guy!)

And I have to buy a subscription to a PayTV service to watch it? SRSLY? Dude, I don’t even have cable.

Frankly, Fox’s new space series The Orville looks like a helluva lot more fun. I wonder how long before Fox gives it the Firefly treatment.

 

If your self-esteem is so precarious that a joke can endanger it, maybe Chappelle isn’t the one with the problem. https://t.co/kbrHf8E9nFpic.twitter.com/Bnki6MWo4M

— Jim Treacher(@jtLOL) March 29, 2017

And I think this Tweet sums up everything:

Imagine being so ignorant that you’d ignore a person’s gender, ethnicity or sexual preference and just treat them the same as everyone else.

This has been in my workout shuffle. I was listening to it during my run and it occurred to me, this is a very problematic song from the perspective of a Social Justice Wanker.

• Cultural Appropriation.  I am committing the crime of Cultural Appropriation just by listening to it. As I understand the modern social justice left, folks should just keep to their own kind, culturally speaking.
• The Video Objectifies Women.  I mean, like, look at them. It’s they’re objects or something.
• The Girls Fingerbanging Each Other.  See, in the video, they totally fingerbang each other. In California or Maryland, finger guns would get any elementary school kid an expulsion and a referral for violent anti-social behavior.
• This verse:  “Check-it-out chocolate. Can I have a bit of chocolate?/But my weight worries me a bit these days.
  However, chocolate. Can I have a bit of chocolate?/But wait a while! Wait a while! Wait! Wait! Wait!” That’s straight up body-shaming right there. 

So in conclusion… I love Japan.

The Social Justice Left is mad because Lady Gaga *didn’t* use her half-time show as an occasion to deliver a diatribe against Trump, Republicans, the NRA, capitalism, Christianity, Heterosexuality, carnivores, gluten… and all the other stuff that they hate.

Given an opportunity, @ladygaga dropped the ball, tacitly supporting fascism by doing nada. Remember that when Trump comes for LGBTs. #SB51

It’s OK, though. The SuperBowl advertisers more than made up for it; spending upwards of $15M per spot to virtue signal to the socialist left.  (How this insane idea that Big Business is conservative is still commonly believed I don’t get. Big Business loves Big Government. Regulations keep competitors at bay.)

This anti-Humane Society ad, on the other hand; this I like.

So, last month was National Novel Writing Month, which is a thing I did. I treat NaNoWriMo as an opportunity to explore other genres (I did a YA novel one year) and just write for fun. So, this year, I churned out a 105,000 word draft of a novel about a gay, time-traveling rock star who changes history such that Madonna never becomes famous. In revenge, Madonna replaces Huma Abedin as Hillary’s consort in order to get Hillary to start a nuclear war with Russia. And the only way for the time-traveler to save the world is to form an alliance with Yoko Ono to stop Hillary from becoming president.

Yeah, it was a fun ride.

Anyway, Madonna recently shared her political wisdom with The Hill.

Madonna has a simple explanation for why she thinks so many women voted for Donald Trump for president: “Women hate women.”

“Women hate women,” the singer said during an interview with Billboard published Monday.

I don’t necessarily disagree with the “women hate women” thing, but…. no, honey, that’s not why women voted for Trump. They  voted for Trump because Hillary is terrible.

Oh, Madonna also recently said she was “ashamed to be an American.” I thought she identified as British, anyway.

So, there’s this woman, you see, and her name is Lena Dunham. She is the offspring of two New York Trustafarians who thought of themselves as artists. (Her dad liked to paint gross pictures of hairy ladyparts.) In her autobiography, she joyfully recounts sexually molesting her younger sister, and when Republican-bashing and fake-rape-claims became trendy, she obligingly claimed  a ‘college Republican’ raped her when she was in college. (This claim, of course, was false.)  Naturally, she has become a left-wing feminist icon because insecure unattractive women telling outrageous lies to bash men is what feminism is all about these days.

Anyway, so, this Lena Dunham person was at some gala. (Aside: I have never in my entire life been to a ‘gala.’ But every time I read about one, they sound just terrible. I think gala must be a word meaning ‘An event where terrible people go to look at each other.’)  And she was seated across from Odell Beckham who plays football — the real kind, not European Metric Kickball. And she apparently was distressed because Mr. Beckham displayed no interest in the dumpy feminist in the tuxedo sitting across from him.

I was sitting next to Odell Beckham Jr., and it was so amazing because it was like he looked at me and he determined I was not the shape of a woman by his standards. He was like, “That’s a marshmallow. That’s a child. That’s a dog.” It wasn’t mean—he just seemed confused.

I don’t think that’s a fair comparison; people actually like children, dogs, and marshmallows.

(Aside: I think Mr. Beckham was being most polite under the circumstances. Most normal people, upon finding themselves seated across from Ms. Dunham, would suddenly remember that they had promised to pick up their best friend at the airport and drive her to a hospital because of a family emergency involving the babysitters curfew.)

Anyway, Lena Dunham decided to have a bitchfest about the incident with fellow chubby feminist, the unfunny vagina-comedian Amy Schumer. Who gave her what I guess is the best chubby-feminist-to-chubby-feminist compliment she could manage.

You were dressed like a boy, and you looked sexy, and I really appreciated you showing me your tits several times.

I think she stole that line from the note Barack Obama passed to the Danish Prime Minister after Nelson Mandela’s funeral.

So, that’s pretty much the story, and if it seems like a pointless waste of time… yeah, it is.

BTW, Slate seems to think that if a black football player isn’t hitting on a chubby white feminist, he must be gay.  Yeah, that’s got to be it.

Some guy wrote a column in Medium claiming the sitcom ‘Friends’ brought about the downfall of our civilization: Because the smart character (Ross) was – on every episode – the object of ridicule by the dumb, pretty, hip characters (everyone else) and set the tone of our culture ever since.

He has a point.

A left-wing junior college professor suggested that the anti-gun left should get together, storm NRA headquarters, and “leave no survivors.” He now says it was a just a joke and only stupid people would think it wasn’t.

“It was suppose to be a joke, folks. I really do think that Facebook needs something like a “sarcasm punctuation mark.” The less literate among us don’t seem to recognize humor when they see it.”

It’s really a bit scary how often leftist “humor” involves acts of horrific violence against an opponent. When Sandra Bernhardt suggested Sarah Palin should be gang-raped… “just a joke.” Chris Matthews fantasizing about blowing up Rush Limbaugh with a “big CO2 pellet”… “just kidding.” Dan Savage wishing that all Republicans would just drop dead… “just a joke and besides I’d been drinking.”

Is there something messed up about people who think violent threats against people who disagree with them are the height of wit?

‘House Hunters’ is a fake reality TV show on HGTV where couples pretend to shop for houses, awkwardly act out scenes where they pretend to choose a house, and then at the end of the episode stand on a balcony drinking wine/have guests over for a staged dinner party. It’s like the ‘CSI’ of HGTV, with like 12 or 15 different minor variations. ‘HouseHunters International’ ‘HouseHunters Renovation,’ ‘HouseHunters Sharia’ (that would be a good one, yes?).

It blows my mind that people in Los Angeles will pay north of a half million dollars for an old rundown bungalow. We bought a big historic church for less than a quarter million. When we were house-hunting (which we actually weren’t, the church was just an opportunity that popped up), we had just a few practical ideas; affordability, suitability, convenience to work, quality neighborhood.

The people on HouseHunters are either insane or coached to be insane because that’s good TV. There was one gay couple who demanded that the house had to have a grand staircase so that in case they adopted a child they could one day pose the child for prom pictures in front of the damn staircase. There was a woman in Boston who wouldn’t look at a house more than ten years old because she was convinced it would have ghosts. At the end of the show, she walked around the house performing a cleansing ritual that involved burning incense and chanting against the spirits that might dwell in the house. (What do you wanna bet she thinks southern Christians are weirdoes?)

The husbands on these shows are like nebbish Republicans. Their main concern is staying within budget, and they have a pretty short list of practical wants. Their princess wives are like Democrats; they have to have a particular style, they have to have crown molding, they have to have stainless steel kitchen appliances, they have to have granite countertops, they have to have a formal dining room, and damn the expense, they’re going to get it. Nine times out of ten, the husbands cave to the wives and go way over budget so that the wife can get her gawdam crown molding. “The important thing is she’s happy,” they say at the end of the show behind the kind of forced smiles you see on Congressional Republicans and other hostages. And then the wife always says something like, “I didn’t get everything I wanted, but we can always upgrade,” and then she cackles like Nancy Pelosi.

The Coalition of the Self-Righteously Aggrieved is demanding that Captain America be a gay man, and James Bond be a woman.  And, of course, Ghostbusters has been rebooted with an all-feminist “Grrl Power” cast. (And, apparently, it sucks.)

This is a recurring theme among the social justice left. Instead of creating their own organization for pale young boys, they insist on taking over the Boy Scouts. Instead of creating new woman heroes, or gay heroes, or hijra-genderqueer-two-spirit heroes… they want to take over something that was created by someone else.

Lame.

Why is the Social Justice Warrior imagination so incredibly stunted that it cannot even imagine imagining its own new things? Why can it only imagine old things, given a new racial or sexual make-over?

Why are they altogether incapable of any kind of creative or productive thought whatsoever?

Oh that’s right: Because these are stupid, useless, trivially-minded people.

On a related note, is it too soon for the Socialist Juicebox Wankers to begin attacking the new Star Trek movie as racist? I mean, the villain is a black guy. And the hero is a white woman. A very, VERY white woman.

I mean, like, if she were any whiter, she could be an editor at the Huffington Post.

Chinese “Year of the Monkey” poster or conceptual title art for Alan Ball’s new HBO series. You tell me.

1. I am almost sure these 1970’s PSA’s marked the beginning of ‘Special Snowflake’ culture.
2. A PSA where a throbbing orb comes into a little girl’s bedroom at night to teach her about touching things. In particular, “smooth” and “soft” things. And she concludes that the best things to touch are… I won’t spoil it.

Was everybody in the 1970’s on acid?

In news we don’t actually care about, but is moderately entertaining:

Caitlyn Jenner is done dating women.

In the season 2 trailer for “I Am Cait” she flat out says it … “To be honest I don’t see myself dating women in the future.”

Pretty sure this is just a publicity stunt for that reality show. This question may sound snarky, but it’s actually serious: Does the dating pool for this sixty-something trainwreck include anyone who isn’t a gold-digger or a fame-whore?

The nice thing is that we won’t have to rely on conjecture. Because the media will make sure we’re kept up-to-date on EVERY.FREAKING.DETAIL.

David Bowie, dead at 69.

Keith Richards, still alive.

How does that work again?

For those who believe these deaths happen in threes… Natalie Cole and Lemmy.