Cultural milestones turn up in the damnedest places, and from the most surprising people. Actress Nichelle Nichols, the African-American who was the communications officer on the original “Star Trek” and the first round of films based on the iconic TV sci-fi series, died yesterday at 89. She was more model than actress, and as her role developed, much to her disappointment, the part of “Uhura” became little more than set dressing. But she played one of the first  black female characters on TV to have a non-subservient role, indeed Uhura was fourth in the “Enterprise” chain of command. (Whoopi Goldberg claimed that when she was a teen and saw “Star Trek” for the firts time, she screamed to her family, “Come quick, come quick. There’s a Black lady on television and she ain’t no maid!”) In her autobiography, Nichols wrote that Martin Luther King told her that she was advancing civil rights objectives, and convinced her not to quit when William Shatner was getting too obnoxious. Her great moment of destiny came, however, in the 1968 episode, “Plato’s Stepchildren,” about a aliens who used mind control. At one point, they forced Kirk and Uhura, who were never romantically involved, to engage in a passionate kiss.

The legend, which is the version of the event  now printed, is that the kiss caused great controversy and upheaval. I saw it: I don’t recall any negative reaction, or any reaction at all. It was a kiss that wasn’t genuine but forced: if the smooch was intended as a statement by show creator Gene Roddenberry, it was a very tepid one. Nevertheless, in the decades since, that moment on a forgettable episode of a cheesy and not very popular Sixties TV series has taken on the reputation of being a societal tipping point, and Nichelle Nichols died as a figure of far more cultural significance than her role as “glorified telephone operator in space” whose catch-phrase was “Hailing frequencies open, sir” would normally create.

You never know.

1. We have freedom of speech. They don’t. And here, many progressives would love to take a lot of it away. Here’s an example of what gets you punished in Great Britain, for example:

Darren Brady, 51, was arrested Hampshire Police and placed in handcuffs at his home in Aldershot for sharing the graphic above, a swastika assembled  out of four LGBT pride flags. On the video of the arrest, shot on a mobile phone, Brady can be heard asking the three police officers: “Why am I in cuffs?” An officer replies, “Someone has been caused anxiety based on your social media post. That is why you have been arrested.” Continue reading →

I owe my outlook on life to Saturday morning cartoons. How sad is that?

I also note that last year on this date, Ethics Alarms included this in the warm-up:

[On] “This Day in History,” the headline on a note reads, “1976: Caitlyn Jenner wins Olympic decathlon.” That may be politically correct, but it’s cowardly (would the trans activist mob pounce if the event was stated straight?) and absurd on its face. Bruce Jenner won the Olympic decathlon, and it was a men’s event. Caitlyn was, as far as we know, not even a twinkle in his eye. Bruce fathered children after winning the gold; the event and the other events in his life when he was a he were not magically altered by his later transgender journey, like “Back to the Future.”

Wow, I thought that was crazy. Look how far the trans madness and the “It isn’t what it is!” mania have progressed in just a year!

In related developments, I noticed yesterday that my gay Facebook friends are aggressively (and often ignorantly) attacking the Dobbs decision with canned abortion activist talking points and obnoxious memes. I find their knee-jerk abortion support damning, especially since they know that if it were medically possible to determine if a fetus was going to develop into a gay adult, many of them would have been snuffed out n the womb just like many Down Syndrome children. I don’t think they are thinking very hard about the issue; I think they are just deciding on their position based on whose “team” they have joined. Progressives include LGBTQ rights on their ideological agenda as well as abortion on demand, so my gay friends are just voting a straight ticket, metaphorically speaking.

What a lazy and irresponsible way to make up one’s mind on a controversy involving the lives of millions of people…

1. Two—TWO!—two fearmongering and irresponsible predictions in one headline! The clickbait is “Shark Week Hysteria” meets “Climate Change Hysteria, just like “Dracula Meets the Wolf Man”!  UPI’s headline: “Shark sightings in the Midwest could become more common, experts say.” It wouldn’t be hard for such sightings to be more common, since they virtually never happen at all. But bull sharks swimming down Chicago streets are a real possibility, “experts” say, because “summers could warm by as much as 11 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century due to climate change.”

Or they might not… Continue reading →