Doctor Who: Wild Blue Yonder Review UPDATE Cue Amy Farah Fowler

Posted: December 4, 2023 by datechguy in culture, doctor who, entertainment
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Plot: The Doctor and Donna are lost at a spaceship at the end of the universe. The Tardis has skedaddled and they are only left with each other a robot and each other and each other but who is who?

Writing: It’s a tough call because it’s such a different type of episode. It’s both deep and loose with various clues all over the place. Also given the nature of the episode we don’t know how much is necessary to set up the final special, how much is just for the sake of now and how much is just for fun. I think it’s the type of episode you need to watch 2 or 3 times to really judge and thanks to the nature of the specials you might not be able to judge it standing alone till you see number three but one thing is certain, it’s head and shoulders above the last one and more in keeping with the hopes of fans. Too bad they couldn’t have led with this one but I guess you needed Donna on board and functional to do so.

Acting: With the exception of the very start and the very end it’s pretty much Tate and Tennant and they carry it very well. I’m likely biased because I’m fond of him but Bernard Cribbins appearance at the end is the icing on the cake.

Best Moment: The penultimate appearance of Wilfred Mott (like it could be anything else)

Worst Moment: The whole “War Song” Debate and why would British Choir students be singing the US Airforce Hymn anyways?

Oh Brother Moment: The “why is Mrs. Bean funny?” business. The answer should be obvious to a brit: “because it reminds you of Mr. Bean which is hilarious.” How do you not get that?

The What’s going on? Moment(s): Why is Tennant 2.0 constantly crashing the TARDIS into things. Is that basically what the revised Tennant does when flying the TARDIS these days, just crash?

The Ah HA moment: The HADS. You see a lot of it in Big Finish Doctor Who but not so much of it on TV.

The “I Don’t Give a Fig about Newton” moment: Again the Newton stuff might all be a one off gag although the “Mavity” stuff suggests otherwise. Newton is mentioned a bit in the original series and a bit in Big Finish. (For the best of the batch see David Warner as Sir Isaac in the 30 min 5th Doctor and Nyssa story “Summer” in the Circular Time CD. You can buy it here for under $4 )

The Elephant in the Room Part 2: Is it just me or was there a solid attempt to cement the new canon during one of those exchanges?

Bottom Line: Again this isn’t the type of story I’m generally into and to some degree is was CGI driven, possibly to make the writing easier but it generally works as straight Sci-fi, as a psychological thriller and as a deep dive into the characters. It has an unfair advantage as it not only so much better than the one before it and by default so much better than anything of the last few years and it’s slightly hurt by references to said episode but that’s just talking about established events and thus not something that should effect this as it’s own story which it is. But even if The Star Beast and the Jodi Whitaker era didn’t exist this story would stand as a solid if not spectacular Tennant Era story.

4 1/2 stars, but I reserve the right to go as high as 4 3/4 or down to 4 1/4 after watching it a few more times and that’s the thing that gives this a real advantage. Jacqueline King‘s performance not withstand I have absolutely no interest in watching The Star Beast a 2nd time. This story however is very re-watchable in fact it almost demands it.

Ranking in the current season (counting the children in need special)

  1. Destination Skaro
  2. The Wild Blue Yonder
  3. The Star Beast

I wasn’t ranking my top 10 of an era during the Tennant Years as quite a few of them predated the blog but if you take my top 10 of the Capaldi era which is the last list I made from 2017 (via the wayback machine)

1st The Husbands of River Song
2nd World Enough and Time
3rd. Last Christmas 
4th. The Caretaker
5th  Extremis
6th. The Return of Doctor Mysterio
7th. The Girl who Died
8th. The Witch’s Familiar
9th. Hell Bent
10th. Mummy on the Orient Express

And consider the bottom episode on the list: (reviewed via wayback here) it doesn’t make this list, although in fairness it’s again not the type of episode I usually go for.

Update: It just hit me after I published that The other than corrupting the English language the Doctor doesn’t actually save anyone or have any real effect on events except to almost screw things up. If he never lands there the ship explodes and the bad guys are defeated, it just happens without Donna & he almost dying in the process.

Cue Amy Farah Fowler:

Liberals decry ideological divide between young people that threatens marriage, of course they blame conservatives

Posted: December 3, 2023 by John Ruberry in culture, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

In an op-ed from last month that was credited to the Washington Post editorial board–ominously, it was published to mark Thanksgiving Day–readers are warned about the continuous ideological divide among young people. 

Ideological polarization is now a mainstay of American politics. Millions of young Americans went home this Thanksgiving and potentially found themselves in uncomfortable situations with relatives — especially uncles, apparently — who love former president Donald Trump, hate vaccination or think the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection had very fine people on both sides. 

Of course, the Washington Post doesn’t mention in that op-ed the many failed and unpopular leftist policies of the Joe Biden administration, such as reckless spending and an attack on fossil fuels that have caused the worst inflation rates in decades, open borders that have migrants sleeping in police stations and worse, an American-weakness approach to foreign affairs that has led to wars in Ukraine and Israel, and ramming anti-nature transgenderism down our throats.

Locally, our major cities are becoming unlivable because of rampant lawlessness caused by full-time criminals who are emboldened by catch-and-release Democratic so-called prosecutors. 

When, you are a liberal, you are never wrong. Never. Just ask a liberal about that.

More from that editorial:

The problem with polarization, though, is that it has effects well beyond the political realm, and these can be difficult to anticipate. One example is the collapse of American marriage. A growing number of young women are discovering that they can’t find suitable male partners. As a whole, men are increasingly struggling with, or suffering from, higher unemployment, lower rates of educational attainment, more drug addiction and deaths of despair, and generally less purpose and direction in their lives. But it’s not just that. There’s a growing ideological divide, too. Since Mr. Trump’s election in 2016, the percentage of single women ages 18-30 who identify as liberal has shot up from slightly over 20 percent to 32 percent. Young men have not followed suit. If anything, they have grown more conservative.

 However, that polarization is the fault of libs. Yes, I said it.

Look at what Axios, in a biased piece, said in 2021. The stats come from a Generation Lab/Axios poll:

Between the lines: Democrats argue that modern GOP positions, spearheaded by former President Trump — are far outside of the mainstream and polite conversation [bold print emphasis mine].

  • Some have expressed unyielding [again, my emphasis] positions on matters of identity — including abortion, LGBTQ rights and immigration — where they argue human rights, and not just policy differences, are at stake.

Women are more likely than men to take a strong partisan stance in their personal choices.

  • 41% of women would go on a date with someone who voted for the opposing candidate, compared to 67% of men.

A woman named Lyz, who has a Substack titled Men Yell at Me, doesn’t think the Post op-ed goes far-leftist enough. Her post has the headline “Liberal women should not marry Republican men.” Lyz used to be married to a conservative man. And her idea of “compromise” is that liberals–by now a theme will be apparent here–are always right. 

The use of the word “someone” here is particularly nefarious, because it’s not just “someone” being asked to compromise. It’s women. It’s women being chided for not partnering with men who do not agree that they should have the right to an abortion, equal pay, a living wage, and childcare for those inevitable children they ought to have. (Because, in case you missed it, there is a moral panic about women not having babies as well.) It’s women being asked to martyr themselves on the cross of heterosexual marriage in order to prop up the status quo.

I’m a conservative and many of my friends are. Not one of us doesn’t believe in “equal pay.” Some conservatives are pro-abortion–but almost no liberals are. I could go on, but for the sake of brevity I won’t. 

Returning to marriage: Successful relationships involve compromise. And that does not mean changing your political stances. What happened to, “We agree to disagree?”

Some liberals–maybe most–don’t get it.

“It’s my way or the highway,” leads to traffic jams filled with cars with no passengers.

Dan Bongino often says, “The problem is we as conservatives think liberals are people with bad ideas. Liberals think conservatives are bad people with ideas. There’s a big difference there.”

Indeed, there is.

John Ruberry, who has been happily married for nearly three decades, regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

15 Thoughts on 15 Years of Blogging Under the Fedora. Thoughts 11 to 15 Back to Blogging… The Truth, WQPH, Trump and my boys, The Fall and One More Year

Posted: December 3, 2023 by datechguy in blogs, catholic, catholic devotions, dablog, under the fedora
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I talked about Stacy McCain being most influential on me and he mentioned something in a post yesterday that really hit the lesson he taught me:

 I was talking to a nice Republican lady who, remarking on what I’d said about liberal bias in the media, asked, “What makes you different?” That is to say, why am I not part of the liberal hivemind? On the spot, the best answer I could come up with was, “Well, I was a reporter before I got into politics.” I didn’t get into journalism because I wanted to change the world. I got into journalism because I needed a job. I started out on the bottom rung of the newspaper business, as a staff writer for a local weekly, and worked my way up, spending five years as a sports editor before landing a gig as an assistant special projects editor at the daily Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune. It wasn’t until I’d been in the business about seven years that I became interested in politics, during the first term of the Clinton presidency, when I had my own road-to-Damascus epiphany and abandoned the Democratic Party, of which I had hitherto been a staunch supporter.

The point of that digression is that I cut my teeth as a reporter covering local stories that had nothing to do with politics, and thereby developed the belief that the three most important things in journalism are accuracy, accuracy and accuracy

Having a Computer Science degree back from 1985 the idea of the importance of facts was already imbedded. The biggest lesson I learned from being credentialed press and sharing rooms with them as they wrote and talked is that this is not the norm for journalists. It was all about producing spin and a particular result. That (along with a natural degree of sloth) is why you never see my videos edited. Like the images from the Ghost of Christmas Past they are what they are.

That reputation for accuracy and the reputation as “The hardest working blogger at CPAC” are still a source of pride to me.

The biggest thing to come from the blog and the Radio show that came from it has been my association with WQPH 89.3 FM Catholic Radio which began around 2012 when I was approached by Mary Ann Harold the head of the station. I had at first thought it would be a full time job but instead it’s was more of a Special project for the blog that continues to this day.

In 2017 My Catholic Radio Show “Your Prayer Intentions” now in its 6th year, premiered on WQPH every Saturday at noon. 2017 also saw the publication of my book “Hail Mary the perfect Protestant (and Catholic) Prayer adapted from a blog post which you can still buy at Amazon or from me directly if you want it autographed. The most significant thing from WQPH came in 2014 a few months after the Harvard Satanic Mass scandal & the MIT procession on a trip to Alabama, but if that story is ever posted it will be after I’m gone.

What I thought would be the biggest moment of my blogging career was when I was called on twice during the 2016 presidential campaign by Donald Trump during press conferences. The first in Derry NH which I had to cover after the contract job

The second when I covered his rally in Worcester before going to work at what was then a temp warehouse job on the 10:30 to 7 am shift. He recognized me and gave me the complement that remains on the top of the blog to this day.

Covering Trump fairly didn’t endear me to the GOP in MA and neither did my endorsement of Trump when he won the primaries or my famous post defending Trump after the Billy Bush bit came out which called out the left for trying to use our own morality against us while repeating these words which turned out to be a prophetic after the 2020 steal:

…I know that there will be times that Donald Trump will disappointment me just as I expected Mitt Romney to disappoint me on social issues and John McCain to disappoint me on immigration and George W Bush who disappointed me on spending and the bank bailouts.

But while Trump will occasionally disappoint me (when he does I’ll call him on it) I am convinced he will neither persecute me nor strip me of my rights for holding my Conservative Catholic beliefs and acting on them.

I am very sorry to say I can not make that same statement about Hillary Clinton, and I’m even sorrier to see the day when I would say this about a presidential candidate.

but this led to the real high point of blogging for me was CPAC 2018 where my two sons came with me as credentialed press. It made for a better CPAC:

In other words, he make sure that I was OUTSIDE the activist/msm/news/blogger bubble for at least a few hours. This not only decreased my tension level immensely but it provided me the chance to speak to actual Marylanders and Virginians who were not there specifically to serve me as a CPAC convention goer and thus more free to be themselves and give their own opinions in conversation.

No blogging moment will beat that EVAH!

Despite the two highs of 2016 & 2018 the blog’s decline in traffic seemed to start in 2014 after my Jeffrey Epstein post to the point where contract work was necessary.

In 2016 the decline in traffic and rank (this blog was once in the top 100,000 in the world) meant I took a 3rd shift temp job. The job became permanent in 2017 and any lingering dreams of the blog becoming more than a part time job at best were gone and my ability to go to cover any event had to be sub servant to the steady income to pay bills that came from attendance at work.

Problems at GoDaddy led me to finally leave them by 2019. After election 2020 like many others I found myself suspected from Twitter multiple times while the election was in dispute over false charges that led to a pattern of suspension, appeal, apology and reinstatement then suspension again until the courts ruled against Trump. This was shortly followed by my banning by Youtube erasing more than a decade of work. Meanwhile the new owner of my hosting company became invisible I was not only forced back to my old wordpress blog, but had lost my domain, more than 75% of my daily traffic, all of my ad and guest post revenue and a decline in DaTipJar revenue and subscribers to the point where the blog has become an expense rather than an asset.

The fall was slow, then gradual then like the fall of communism all at once. Right now after paying my writers I barely bring in enough to pay the annual fees to wordpress let alone the costs of covering Pintastic NE or any other event that I can manage on days off or using vacation time.

So here we are 15 years later like Sam Rothstein in Casino back where we started at our original site.

I’m drawing about a 1/3 of the traffic that I did back in the Scott Brown days but not worrying about trying to regain lost glory. Still giving our opinion and occasionally covering something from the Catholic Men’s Conference to Pintastic NE and writing about the news of the day and my online baseball leagues.

Barring a sudden change in fortune allowing the blog covering its costs as it once did I figure I can afford to hang around one more year for the election before the blog becomes too much of an expense to carry.

So you can expect me and my magnificent seven writers to be here for the election and to at least finish year 16. After that, who know but for all those who have stopped by over the last 15 years and especially to those who have contributed over the years and those few remaining stalwarts who still do, let me say this.

Thanks so much, it’s been an incredible 15 year ride. We’ve done and learned a lot together. I’ve seen a lot of the country and those who run it. I’ve seen many incredible things and I’ve met many incredible people along the way including quite a few of you dear readers. None of it would have been remotely possible without you. Me and mine are better for having been on this ride. I hope that you feel the same.

Grooming standards and military recruitment

Posted: December 2, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in culture, News/opinion
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I’ve written a lot about the military’s recruiting crisis, and the overall military retention issues. Most of the retention problems are brought on by the military’s own stupid policies (such as cutting training pipelines, treating people like garbage, and focusing on killing babies instead of foreign terrorists) and others are assisted by members of Congress, most notably John McCain pushing for the changes to the military retirement system.

In an odd twist of fate, the Navy gave me a set of temporary orders to help assist in recruitment efforts in the town I grew up in. Over the past week, I interacted with both high school and college students, and the results were a bit surprising.

I accompanied two other Sailors for a few hours recruiting at a high school not far away from me. We sat at a table outside the lunchroom, handed out the main recruiter’s business card and some other Navy paraphernalia, and answered questions.

Image generated by Bing…I don’t look this good in uniform :)

The first thing I noticed is that despite it being winter and cold (it was 25F when I walked in the school), many of the students were in basketball shorts and even the occasional booty skirt, which I define as a skirt that barely covers your rear end. I had long pants, long sleeves and was wearing a jacket and I was still a bit cold since we were next to a window that leaked a lot of heat. I don’t even want to comment on the grooming standards, because there really were none.

That being said, the more surprising thing was the aimlessness of most of the students I interacted with. Our conversations would go something like this:

Kid: “I’m interested in joining the Navy.”
Me: “Great! Did you have a specific rate or job you’re interested in.”
Kid: “Not really, what’s available?”
Me: (Remembering there are 89 ratings in the Navy) “There’s lots of jobs! What sort of things do you like to do?”
Kid: “Meh, I don’t really know.”

This wasn’t just one conversation…it was the overwhelming majority of conversations. I mean, who the heck can’t tell me what they like to do??? Even if it was “play computer games,” I can turn that into “Would you like to fly drones?” The body language was also telling. Almost nobody looked me in the eye when we talked. Fidgeting, nervous, and just anxious in general. Since I was speaking to mostly juniors and seniors, the effects of being the high schoolers that grew up in COVID lockdowns were quite noticeable.

I spoke with the guidance counselor as well for some insight. She is assigned by the state, which specifically puts guidance counselors at schools to assist in career development. That’s a good thing, considering my guidance counselors were worthless when I was in high school. The one at this high school did everything from arrange ASVAB testing to factory tours and industry placement, on top of assisting in college applications and FAFSA forms.

It sounds like a much-needed change. The guidance counselor had similar experiences to mine with kids not having any clues about their direction in life. Most of them had to be pushed to do something, anything, to at least get somewhere. It wasn’t that they were opposed to one thing or another, it was that they didn’t have the desire for…anything, even stuff you would think is fun. We’ve already heard the rates of sexual intercourse and alcohol use are down among high school students. These are good things, but what we’re not catching is that teens are choosing to do…nothing. It’s similar to the “lying flat” movement in China. Teens today aren’t having sex, partying, going to the movies, working jobs, or…much of anything else.

Given that, it’s not surprising the grooming standards dropped. If you don’t have to impress the other sex, why bother dressing nice? Or combing your hair? Or picking out half-way fashionable clothes? Or taking a shower (yup, saw that too…). If you don’t care about much of anything, then much of anything goes. While plenty of people focus on the physical standards and obesity as issues, what I saw on the front line was a lot of aimlessness, of kids drifting through life without a clue, simply unsure of themselves.

I wasn’t that way growing up. As a junior, I knew I wanted to do engineering of some kind. Most of my peers were the same, having at least an idea of what they wanted to do for the next few years. My senior year I settled on electrical engineering, and I stayed that course in college. I currently have one kid in high school focused on the medical field, and whether she becomes a nurse, doctor, or some other job, she at least has direction and purpose.

More than anything else, our high schoolers need right now is a bit of direction and purpose. That might fix the recruiting crisis and a whole lot of other problems at the same time.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

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