Is there any over reaching federal intrusion  big or small, that couldn't possibly be justified by claiming it was for the sake of "security"?

That's about the size of it.

People get freaked about cyber security and opportunistic politicians make noise about it to appease those people.

Frankly, nobody has a bigger interest in the network security of Sprint/Nextel than Sprint/Nextel.  Their interest is a financial one.   Security breaches and the appearance of such is really bad for business.

If you left it to them, we could let the market sort it out because markets are really good at doing that.

CS is right.  The government demanding control over a seat on a corporate board sounds like fascism.

And long ago the standard started being not constitutionality of a government action but common practice.  So if we get an established practice of government demanding seats on the boards of large corporations (to ensure network security, don't ya know?) then eventually they can demand a seat on the board of Ford or GE (do with that latter one what you will) and it won't be a question of propriety or constitutionality but of common practice. 

David Icke was right!

I don't see that there's a "fault" to be had, Joseph. It's an interesting discussion to have.

There's not a lot of people who are pro-abortion.  Or did you just mean that term to cover everyone who is pro-choice?

Look, I'm not "pro-abortion."  I'm just an anti-prohibitionist.

Where is Jonah Goldberg?  

I know he's a serious intellectual now, but is there somebody who can ring is red emergency Bat-phone and tell him to come by and talk to us about this?

You know, I think all the recasts are correct.  I never had a complaint about them.

They weren't just recasting the original series, they were recasting younger versions of all the characters.

I buy the recasts.  I'm cool with them.  Scotty's little green helper?  I'm cool with that too.

With regards to parodying Deforrest Kelly, yeah, fine, I get that.  But that's not the only Trek cliche they play with.  They also play with the red shirt thing.

Yeah.  That too.

The problem with having a public-private partnership is that if its the govt providing a service through a private entity, usually the private entity has a monopoly on the service (the municipality doesn't break up the contract to two or three providers of the same service) so the market mechanisms that provide the beneficial outcomes are diminished.  

And those contracts are subject to cronyism and all sorts of crooked mischief.  

If its not a public entity providing the service at all, then companies have to compete for service, providing better outcomes.

So contrast if my town provided the garbage service through a contractor versus not providing it at all.  In the former case the very lucrative contract would be awarded to one company and there would be negligible (if any) cost savings versus half a dozen private trash haulers competing for my business.

Yeah, this whole discussion is premised on the notion of 3 million socons sitting on their hands on election day.

The notion and especially the figure sounds especially dubious to me.

That explains both the accent and the skin tone.  I like that.

That's good.  I need to spread it around.

I agree with you to a point.

It's awesome to have new Star Trek, if this is the form it has to take, fine.

And as Kurt Loder put it, its adequately respectful to the source material.

But

Star Trek isn't just some comic book.  Its more than that to me.  It's special.  Star Trek 2 was beautiful and almost spiritual.  I have an intense personal connection to the source material.  It's very special to me.  And it needs to be treated appropriately.  

Nimoy said before the first movie that it's good and you'll really enjoy it unless you get hung up on the cannon.  I'm one of those cannon nazis.  All of Star Trek existed in the same cannon, the same universe.  Then that first movie created an alternate cannon.

This is the comic book movie version of it.  And if it has to be that way, fine.  So be it.  But it lacks that spiritual essence.

Ugh.  Here's the thing about that scene.  He yells Khaaaaaaaaaan.  Okay.  Khan's the bad guy.  Somebody has to do it at some point.

BUT that whole scene, Kirk and Spock through the glass.  It mirrored ST2.

 Scotty tells Spock he can't go in.  Spock knocks him out.  He fixes things.  Everybody knows he'll die.  Kirk can't go in because it'll flood the whole compartment.  They say goodbye through the glass.  Spock does the hand thing.  We all cry.

The whole thing is mirrored. 

Scotty tells Kirk he can't go in.  Kirk knocks him out.  He fixes things.  Everybody knows he'll die.  Spock can't go in because it'll flood the whole compartment.  They say goodbye through the glass.  Spock does the hand thing.

Mirrored.  Very similar wording.  I think the shot is even reversed.  In ST2, Kirk is on the left Spock is on the right.  They're aligned the same way in STID, except outside-inside is reversed.

Re-imagined.  Beautiful, I guess.

Then Spock yells Khaaaaaaaaaaan!!!!!

Which is from a whole different scene in ST2!

I enjoyed it but that's because I accepted it for what it is.

It's a movie with Star Trek trappings and windowdressing in the the age of comic book movies.  So we have cg.  We have space battles.  We have action sequences.  We have more more more more more.

It is what it is.  People who know Star Trek know that its mostly thought and psychological and talking.  Even Star Trek II was that, punctuated with fighting scenes.

It could be that in the age of comic book movies the audience won't sit still for Moby-Dick.

One thing I find really annoying is the uber badguy supership.

In ST3 we had the Enterprise looking small and minor next to the Excelsior.  But the Excelsior was just the next generation of ship.  A natural extrapolation. 

Then in Nemesis the bad guy's supership was something enormous and ridiculous with like hundreds of phaser banks and so forth. 

Why not make it thousands of phaser banks.  Why not millions?

And then in this new movie we have this badguy supership that's clearly way super advanced beyond the Enterprise.  We don't know how its better or more advanced its just bigger and more more more.

You don't need the escalation of superships to have a good story.  Wrath of Khan wasn't supership versus supership.  It was a psychological battle.  It was fought by duplicity and trickery.  And then Kirk wins by goading Khan into following him into the nebula and making the match even.

Ii feel the need to point out that in many cases (maybe all, I'm not an expert) theses "state employees" aren't paid out of taxes. They're paid by their programs which are massive revenue generators for their specific colleges. So yeah, they're top paid employee, but they're also a net gain because they're a revenue generator. (And the freely paid kind of revenue, not the coercive kind.)