A black bus that looks like a monstrous hearse, and not one US flag in sight. This is the bus Darth Vader would have picked. Not just a misery tour, but a genuinely stupid idea.
Day: August 17, 2011
A few days ago communist China launched its first (albeit recycled) aircraft carrier. Whatever else this is, it is an attempt to project Chinese authority over the Western Pacific.
A renewed reason to demonstrate and affirm moral and material support to our non-communist allies in Asia.
But virtually simultaneously, the news that the US has bowed to pressure from communist China, and will not supply F-16 fighter jets to Taiwan as expected.
China has called the sale a “red line.” A recent editorial in the state-controlled People’s Daily called for the use of a “financial weapon” against the U.S. if new F-16s were released.
The U.S. decision comes as a blow to the self-ruled island’s effort to counter China’s growing military, whose first aircraft carrier began sea trials last week, and therefore to its independence.
There are fears that losing Taiwan could spell the end of U.S. power projection in the region. Losing Taiwan would “change everything from the operational arch perspective to the posture of Japan and the U.S.” in the region, said Raytheon’s Asia president, Walter Doran, a retired admiral who once commanded the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
An ordinary level of commonsense financial management would not have left the West so vulnerable to the pressure of a threatened ‘financial weapon.’
A set of balls in the White House would also help.
I have been ambivalent about Torchwood from the beginning. The constant ‘gay is cool’ theme was annoying. Captain Jack is cool, and he has casual gay sex, which he ‘needs.’
But gay is not cool. Indulging in homosexual acts is vastly more dangerous to one’s health than smoking or obesity. Let’s see the White House or the Australian Federal Government issue health warnings on that, and then I’ll start to listen to Michelle’s food advice.
Despite that, the stories were often compelling, and raised some worthwhile issues. At the end of Children of Earth, Jack sacrifices his gransdon, and his relationship with his daughter, to save millions of others.
In Miracle Day, the gay sex has become gay porn. And the story is so agenda driven that it is tiresome.
A ‘small town mayor trying to make a name for herself’ the ‘darling of the Tea Party,’ is presented as an even more grotesquely unattractive character than a pedophile murderer.
She calls for those who should be dead but aren’t to be placed in concentration camps.
Of course, for the last century it has been left wingers who have put put people in concentration camps, from Hitler’s National Socialists, to Stalin and Mao. Those same central planning leftists are the ones who have said that lives of certain classes of people, the handicapped, the mentally deficient, children in the womb, have no value.
The Tea Party is made up of people who value individual dignity and freedom, and the right to life of every human person.
So inventing a Hitleresque petty villain and trying to convince viewers she is somehow like Sarah Palin is as far from saying anything truthful as it is possible to get. And truth is important, especially in fiction.
And you could have guessed the plotters behind the scenes of Miracle Day are a huge pharmaceutical company which is only interested in profits, and is prepared to destroy millions of lives to get them.
It’s dreary and predictable. Goodbye Torchwood.
Qohel Blog Author Peter Wales
