Lists The 12 Darkest Endings on Star Trek: The Original Series For a show that had a reputation for optimism, TOS sure knew how to twist the knife when needed. By Don Kaye | Published on July 10, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share During its initial three-year run (1966-1969) on NBC-TV, one of the defining characteristics of Star Trek (aka Star Trek: The Original Series) was its unabashed optimism about humanity’s future and its relationship to the rest of the cosmos. Here was a science fiction series which proclaimed that by the 23rd century, humankind would all but end war, racism, violence, personal conflict, sexism (well, sort of), and more of our most grievous failings, so that it could soar into the stars as part of a galactic consortium (the United Federation of Planets) of like-minded races and civilizations. In later years, as the influence of creator Gene Roddenberry began to wane, succeeding spinoffs like Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and more recent shows like Star Trek: Discovery began to introduce not just a less rosy view of humanity’s future but also of its two core foundations: Starfleet and the Federation itself. Roddenberry’s mantra that humans would evolve beyond personal disputes was deemed challenging to writing good drama. One entire season of Deep Space Nine put the Federation on a wartime footing, while the other shows explored far darker material as well. The Original Series has been held up in the decades since it was first broadcast as a paragon of Star Trek’s founding attitudes, even if the intervening years have shown them to be naïve at times or not as progressive as they might have seemed back in the 1960s. Yet TOS did its share of delving into the darkness too. Here are a dozen episodes of the series that ended on far grimmer notes than Star Trek was originally known for—and in many cases, the episodes and the show were better for it. “The Man Trap” (S1, E1) The first Star Trek episode to be broadcast on NBC (on September 8, 1966), The Man Trap—written by science fiction author George Clayton Johnson (Logan’s Run)—seems on the surface to be a rather standard monster story. The Enterprise arrives at planet M-113, where the ship is scheduled to drop off supplies for Dr. Robert Crater and his wife Nancy, who are conducting archaeological research there. The landing party is attacked by a creature that can change shape and needs salt to survive, impersonating the long-dead Nancy and members of the crew to get itself aboard the Enterprise and drain its victims—including Dr. Crater—of the salt in their bodies. At the episode’s climax, a disbelieving Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) kills the creature—which has again taken the form of Nancy, with whom McCoy once had a relationship—before it can harm Captain Kirk (William Shatner). Despite nearly being killed, Kirk expresses regret that they were forced to exterminate the last member of an ancient species. Yet the fact remains that they do kill the creature, instead of even trying to communicate with it. Although Star Trek held the idea of contacting and respecting new life forms in near-reverence, basic survival outweighed science this time out. “Charlie X” (S1, E2) A classic early Trek episode, “Charlie X” opens with the Enterprise taking a new passenger on board: Charles Evans (Robert Walker Jr.), a 17-year-old boy who somehow survived for 14 years on the seemingly uninhabited planet Thasus after his parents’ ship crashed. What Kirk and the crew eventually discover is that there are in fact Thasians, highly advanced beings who gave Charlie incredible psionic powers to survive on their world—but Charlie is too immature to control them and wreaks havoc aboard the ship. Since Charlie is too dangerous to enter civilization, he must return to Thasus, where he will live a lonely life among the incorporeal Thasians. Although Kirk tries to convince the Thasians that Charlie could be taught to rein his powers in, it’s no use: despite Charlie’s own frantic pleas that he wants to remain with his own kind (“I can’t even touch them!”), he vanishes from the Enterprise bridge. The existential horror of his fate weighs on Kirk and the crew despite what Charlie has put them through, and the tragedy stems from this young boy being given virtually unlimited power and no human guidance to help him develop as a healthy human being. “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” (S1, E7) Captain Kirk and Nurse Christine Chapel (Majel Barrett) beam down to the frozen planet Exo-III to meet with Dr. Roger Korby (Michael Strong), a brilliant exobiologist—and Chapel’s fiancé—who was thought to be dead. Korby discloses that he has discovered technology, left behind by a long-extinct race, which can create lifelike androids. He has already replaced his assistant with one and manufactured another in the shape of a beautiful woman (Sherry Jackson), with the help of an older android (Ted Cassidy) who once served the planet’s original inhabitants. Korby creates an android replica of Kirk and sends it to the Enterprise, part of his campaign to seed the galaxy with his own civilization of android replacements. The plan is ultimately foiled, and it’s revealed that Korby himself is an android, his consciousness transferred to the robot just before he died of frostbite. By the end of the episode, all the androids, including Korby, are destroyed, with a rueful Kirk telling Spock, “Dr. Korby…was never here.” Written by Robert Bloch, “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” is a grim morality play about losing our own humanity to technology, which cannot (at least for now) duplicate human emotion, judgment, and reason. Literally the entire guest cast is dead by the end of the episode as the androids end up wiping each other out. This is supposed to be an improvement? “The Conscience of the King” (S1, E13) Kirk is made aware by a childhood friend that a man named Anton Karidian (Arnold Moss), leader of a traveling theater troupe, may be Kodos the Executioner, the one-time governor of a space colony who ordered the deaths of half the colony’s 8,000 inhabitants due to a food shortage. Kirk, his friend, and Enterprise crewman Riley (Bruce Hyde) are the last survivors of a group of nine colonists who saw Kodos’ face—the others have been murdered, and Karidian’s troupe was in the vicinity for each death. When Kirk’s friend is killed and attempts are made on both his and Riley’s lives, Kirk confronts Karidian directly, but the man—although clearly tormented by his past—does not come clean. Karidian, who is indeed Kodos, finds out that his daughter Lenore (Barbara Anderson)—who he thought he had shielded from his horrific history—is the one killing the last colonists who can identify her father. In the finale, Lenore attempts to shoot Kirk with a phaser, but her father steps into the line of fire and is killed, driving her insane. Kirk, who came to care for Lenore, is left shaken by the entire incident. That’s hardly surprising; justice for a mass murderer is finally served, but far too late and at the cost of several more lives and a young woman’s morality and sanity. “Balance of Terror” (S1, E14) “Balance of Terror” chronicles a cat-and-mouse game between the Enterprise and a Romulan vessel that has destroyed several Federation outposts along the Neutral Zone bordering Romulan space. Wary of igniting a full-scale war, Kirk must outmaneuver the Romulan commander (Mark Lenard) and destroy his ship—which is equipped with a cloaking device rendering it invisible—before it can return home. This one has it all: action, suspense, space battles, and even a lesson in bigotry, as navigator Stiles (Paul Comi) accuses Spock (Leonard Nimoy) of being a spy for the Vulcan-like Romulans. Although the Enterprise defeats the Romulan vessel, its commander expresses regret to Kirk in their only face-to-face communication, suggesting that in a different reality they could have been friends. He then blows up his own ship instead of being taken prisoner. In a final, tragic scene, Kirk must comfort an ensign who was supposed to get married earlier in the episode—and whose fiancé, a weapons specialist, was killed in the battle. This was the first time that Star Trek addressed the cost, trauma, and needless waste of war, but certainly not the last—although it remains just as powerful and haunting now as it did decades ago. “The Alternative Factor” (S1, E27) “The Alternative Factor” is infamous for being one of the worst episodes of Star Trek’s otherwise stellar first season. After a strange phenomenon causes the entire galaxy to briefly “wink” out of existence, the Enterprise picks up a frantic man named Lazarus (Robert Brown), who says he is pursuing a murderous creature that wiped out his people and is responsible for the cosmic “wink-out.” It turns out that the creature is also Lazarus—just Lazarus from a different universe that’s composed of anti-matter. He’s also the sane one: he explains to Kirk that should he and the Lazarus from our universe, who is composed of matter, ever confront each other in one of the two universes, both realms will be destroyed. His solution—with Kirk’s help—is to shove himself and “our” Lazarus into a sort of magnetic vault between the two universes, where they’ll remain for all time. All this confusingly plays out with the two Lazaruses constantly switching places amidst a breakdown in logic that even Spock can’t save. Yet that final image—of being locked in a room with your mortal enemy for all eternity—is admittedly a haunting one, and ends an otherwise poor outing on a somber note. “The City on the Edge of Forever” (S1, E28) After Dr. McCoy accidentally gets an overdose of a drug that can drive the user insane, he beams down to a planet and vanishes into an ancient time portal left behind by a long-extinct civilization. His actions change the entire course of history, wiping out the Federation, Starfleet, and the last 300 years of human advancement, while leaving Kirk, Spock, and a landing party stranded on the dead planet’s surface. Kirk and Spock jump through the portal to find McCoy and reset history. They end up in 1930s Depression-era New York, where Kirk meets and falls in love with a young woman named Edith Keeler (Joan Collins). It turns out, however, that McCoy saving Edith from death in a car accident is the incident which changes all of history; for the future to proceed normally, Kirk must let Edith die. “The City on the Edge of Forever,” written by sci-fi legend Harlan Ellison, is still widely considered the best episode of the original series and one of the finest Trek segments ever. It places Kirk in an impossible situation: Edith must perish, or else Kirk will be responsible for sending history down an unimaginably catastrophic path. It’s as tragic an ending as anything seen on TV at that time, and leaves Kirk devastated. It also poses the sobering question: what would you do? “A Private Little War” (S2, E19) The Enterprise visits a supposedly peaceful, agrarian planet named Neural, where Kirk—who has been to the planet before—is shocked to see a group of villagers attack a clan called the Hill People with firearms, which this planet should not be able to develop yet. After Spock is shot and wounded, Kirk and McCoy discover that the Klingons have secretly been supplying the guns to the villagers. The conflict eventually escalates to the point where the peace-loving leader (Michael Witney) of the Hill People—whose wife (Nancy Kovack) is brutally murdered by the villagers—finally asks Kirk for guns as well. A weary captain, convinced that both sides must be armed equally, agrees, telling Scotty (James Doohan) in the end to manufacture a hundred guns, or as he describes them, “a hundred…serpents, for the Garden of Eden.” “A Private Little War” was written expressly as an allegory for the Vietnam War, with the Klingons and Federation standing in for the Soviet Union and U.S. supplying arms to both sides of the conflict. Gene Roddenberry revised the original script to tone down the references, but the allegory still remains, along with the implication that Kirk’s actions—while meant with good intentions—are only going to prolong and expand the bloodshed. “The Paradise Syndrome” (S3, E3) While surveying a world that lies in the path of an asteroid, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy discover that the planet is home to humans who resemble pre-industrial Native Americans. Near their village is a mysterious obelisk that may have been left behind by the higher intelligence that transplanted the humans to the planet ages ago. Kirk accidentally opens the obelisk and falls inside, emerging with his memory erased as he’s treated by the tribe as a deity. As the Enterprise’s mission to deflect the asteroid fails, damaging the warp drive so that it takes months to travel back to the planet, Kirk builds a new life with the tribe, falling in love with a woman named Miramanee (Sabrina Scharf) and getting her pregnant. But when Kirk is unable to deflect the asteroid himself (since he is a “god”), the villagers stone him and Miramanee, killing her. Frankly, “The Paradise Syndrome” has dated badly in terms of its representation of Native Americans (even on another planet). It does end on a somewhat positive note, as Kirk, his memory restored, and Spock finally reopen the obelisk and deflect the asteroid. But Kirk—free, at least for a while, of his responsibilities to the Enterprise—truly embraces his brief new existence as “Kirok” and falls deeply in love with Miramanee. Her death (and that of their unborn child) is not only tragic but needless. “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” (S3, E15) The Enterprise picks up two aliens from the little-known, distant planet Cheron: Lokai (Lou Antonio), who claims he is a political refugee seeking asylum, and Bele (Frank Gorshin), an authority figure who has been pursuing Lokai for 50,000 Earth years and is determined to bring him back to Cheron to face punishment for his alleged crimes. Both humanoids are all black on one side of their bodies and all white on the other, except that Bele and his people are black on the right, while Lokai and his people are white on the right. This seemingly trivial difference has led Bele’s people to allegedly subjugate Lokai’s race for ages, with the two beings seemingly incapable of reasonably settling their differences. When the Enterprise arrives at Cheron, it turns out that Bele and Lokai’s races have completely annihilated each other. Yet these two last survivors still cannot give up their hate, with Bele pursuing Lokai to the planet’s surface. Kirk leaves them there, exhausted and dispirited by their inability to stop hating each other. Yes, it’s heavy-handed, but the climax of “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” and its message about the destructive nature of racism and intolerance, is among the show’s most downbeat. “Requiem for Methuselah” (S3, E19) While scouting a supposedly uninhabited planet for a rare element needed to combat an outbreak of Rigelian fever, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are confronted by an elderly man named Flint (James Daly), who tells them they must leave or be destroyed. Flint eventually changes his attitude and invites them to his home while his robot servant locates and processes the element. Once there, they meet his “ward,” Rayna (Louise Sorel), with whom Kirk quickly develops a mutually intense attraction. Flint, who hails from Earth, eventually reveals that he is more than 6,000 years old, and has spent eons under different names—including historical figures like Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Brahms, Alexander the Great, and others. Lonely, he has built himself an android companion—Rayna—with whom he wants to share the rest of his life. He uses Kirk to bring out Rayna’s emotions, but Rayna, unable to choose between the two men and overwhelmed by her new feelings, self-destructs. Although Kirk only spent a few hours with Rayna, he is apparently stricken with grief over her demise. When he falls asleep in his quarters, Spock actually mind-melds with him to make Kirk forget her. It’s certainly a somber moment: Kirk is so saddened by the entire affair that Spock feels the need to secretly erase his captain’s memories of it. “All Our Yesterdays” (S3, E23) Most of the main cast got a chance to fall in love in Season Three and this, the original series’ penultimate episode, was Spock’s turn in the barrel. When he, McCoy, and Kirk are accidentally thrown back in time on a planet whose sun is about to go nova, Kirk ends up in the planet’s version of the 17th century while Bones and Spock are flung into its Ice Age. There, they meet a woman named Zarabeth (Mariette Hartley), who was sent there from the future as punishment by a tyrannical leader. Since Spock and McCoy were thrown 5,000 years into the past, Spock begins to revert back to the way Vulcans behaved before they embraced logic, expressing anger toward McCoy and falling in love with Zarabeth. But Zarabeth has lied to them, telling them they can’t return to the future when in reality she just wants them to stay because she is totally alone.  Kirk, Spock, and McCoy all get back in time to escape the supernova, and while Spock tells McCoy that he has reverted back to his normal self, McCoy has his doubts. Meanwhile, Zarabeth’s fate—dying alone, thousands of years in the past—hangs heavily over them as the Enterprise warps out of danger. What are some of your favorite examples of darker endings on Star Trek: The Original Series?[end-mark] The post The 12 Darkest Endings on <i>Star Trek: The Original Series</i> appeared first on Reactor.

A Northern Virginia school district will teach kindergartners about gay parents and middle schoolers about transgenderism in the wake of a unanimous vote late last month—despite significant parental opposition. The Fairfax County School Board unanimously approved changes to its Family Life Education Curriculum on June 27 that include “broadening examples of family structures to be more inclusive of the many different families in our schools.” The approved changes—set to take effect at the start of the upcoming school year—include showing seventh graders a PBS video titled “Puberty 101,” which introduces transgenderism. “But let me take a minute here and say that in addition to girls’ parts or boys’ parts, there are also people who have different parts, or intermediate parts. People who don’t fit within a traditional binary gender system of male or female,” one of the video’s two narrators says. “There are people who are trans, or people who don’t have a gender.” The public school district adopted the Family Life Advisory Committee’s recommendation to include both “sexuality and gender” in 10th grade Family Life lessons. Board members voted for 10th graders to learn to “recognize the development of sexuality and gender as aspects of one’s total personality,” a change to the curriculum first recommended during the 2022-2023 school year. The school district in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., will further review another proposal to add instruction on the “gender spectrum” at the elementary school level. The advisory committee will compile research on elementary school gender identity lessons and conduct another community review prior to a vote. An overwhelming majority of parents and community members do not support adding lessons on gender identity in elementary schools, the district admitted in a summary of the comments submitted to the district from May 10 to June 10. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, says parents should be able to weigh in on their children’s education, his press secretary, Christian Martinez, told The Daily Signal. “Since his first day in office, Gov. Youngkin has been advocating for parents and students, emphasizing that school boards must not only allow parents to provide input on important school decisions, but also make it easy for them to engage and participate, especially when it directly impacts their child’s learning environment,” Martinez said. Stephanie Lundquist-Arora, a Fairfax mother of three, said she wonders why the district solicited parent feedback if it only intended to ignore it. “When the survey results and community’s comments are counter to their initiatives, which they often are, we are completely ignored,” she told The Daily Signal. “When we tell them that we don’t want school teachers exposing our children to gender ideology, they are effectively patting our heads and covering our mouths. The way they see it, they know what’s best for our children, but parents know that’s ridiculous.” Lundquist-Arora suggested that the board may have scheduled its June 27 vote on the controversial Family Life policy on the night of a presidential debate to distract concerned parents. “It is the board’s modus operandi to wait until we’re not paying attention to pass the things that we object to the most,” she said. A spokesperson for Fairfax County Public Schools told The Daily Signal that parents will continue to be able to opt out of Family Life lessons. Virginia law requires schools to notify parents when instructional material contains “sexually explicit content” and allow parents to opt into non-explicit material.  The district offers a form on its website for parents to opt their child out of all or some Family Life Education lessons. “Parents/caregivers will have the option to opt-out of gender-combined instruction and have their child receive instruction in an all-boys or all-girls class,” the spokesperson said. The post Ignoring Parents’ Objections, Virginia County’s School Board Unanimously OKs Gender Ideology Lessons appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Senate Dem: Get Ready for a Landslide If Biden Stays on the Ticket

A 59-year-old man from Massachusetts has become the first known person to have received a total larynx transplant whilst having active cancer. Patient Marty Kedian has joined a very short list of people who’ve undergone this surgery in the past, with surgeons at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona hoping the procedure could soon be offered to more people who have lost their voices to cancer.Sometimes called the “voice box”, the larynx is a small, tubular structure that sits above the trachea and in front of the esophagus. It has a number of important functions, containing both the vocal cords that give sound to the human voice and the epiglottis that prevents food and liquid from entering the esophagus.Dysfunction of the larynx can result from injury, and surgery to remove it may be needed in cases of laryngeal cancer. This can have life-altering consequences, as the medical team behind the recent surgery explained in their case report: “These patients may be tracheostomy tube dependent, gastrostomy tube dependent, and may lose their ability to verbally communicate.”A laryngeal transplant could be the solution, but the operation is tricky to perform and the results are difficult to predict. For that reason, only a handful of people around the world have undergone this surgery, just two of whom were in the US – one in 1998 and one in 2012.A team at the Mayo Clinic is now conducting a clinical trial to better explore the potential of this surgery. Kedian was the first patient, receiving his transplant on February 29, 2024. His case differs from the two previous US cases in one major way – he had cancer, whereas both previous transplant recipients had suffered laryngeal injury.Kedian had had several procedures to try and remove the cancer and preserve the function of his larynx, but these had left him with difficulty speaking and swallowing, and he required a tracheostomy tube. One of the concerns with performing this transplant in cancer patients is the need to take anti-rejection medication afterward. As these medicines dampen the immune system, there’s a risk of the cancer coming back. In Kedian’s case, though, there was a point in his favor – he was already taking immunosuppressants after a kidney transplant, and it was judged they wouldn’t have an impact on the type of laryngeal cancer he had, a chondrosarcoma.It took 10 months of waiting before a donor larynx of the correct size became available, and then the transplant was accomplished by a team of surgeons in a 21-hour procedure. Pioneering microsurgery was used to reconnect the nerves that help control swallowing and vocal cord movement.Three weeks after the procedure, Kedian was able to say his first word: “hello.” He has since relearned to swallow, and his speech continues to improve. “Every day it's getting better,” he told AP. “I'm pushing myself to make it go faster because I want these tubes out of me, to go back to a normal life.”From the time he was first diagnosed with laryngeal cancer, Kedian was fearful of losing his voice. “I love to talk to people everywhere I go, and I just couldn't. I felt strange, and I wouldn't go out anywhere,” he said in a statement. “I wanted this so I could talk and breathe normally with my new granddaughter. I want to read her bedtime stories with my own voice.”While overall a fairly rare cancer type, with 184,615 global cases in 2020, laryngeal cancer is the biggest cause of damage leading to larynx removal. For the surgical team, transplants offer the hope of a much-improved quality of life for their patients.“People need to keep their voice,” Kedian told AP. “I want people to know this can be done.”The study is published in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

Back in May, we brought you the news that Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) would soon be visible in the night sky, as it made a close approach to the Earth. With its closest approach to the Earth on October 12, at approximately 70.6 million kilometers (43.9 million miles), it was estimated by some that the object would be brighter even than Jupiter from Earth, and perhaps even visible at sunset.But unfortunately – according to analysis by astronomer Zdenek Sekanina, which has not yet been peer reviewed – the comet is doomed to break apart before its close approach with Earth.According to Sekanina, the comet shows signs of disintegrating as it heads towards its closest approach to the Sun on September 27, when it will be 58.6 million kilometers (36.4 million miles) from our star. As comets approach the Sun and heat up, they outgas, losing gas and later (when they are even closer to the Sun) dust, which form their trail or coma. This outgassing acts like thrusters, slightly altering the trajectory, rotation, and speed of the comet. This is termed "non-gravitational acceleration", in that it is acceleration not produced by falling into a gravity well of objects in the Solar System. While the comet has been observed to be accelerating beyond what we would expect from gravitational forces alone, it has not brightened in the way we would expect. "The first issue, which was recently called attention to by I. Ferrin, is this Oort cloud comet’s failure to brighten at a heliocentric distance exceeding 2 AU, about 160 days preperihelion, accompanied by a sharp drop in the production of dust," Sekanina writes in the paper. As comets approach the Sun closer than 2 Astronomical Units (AU) – with 1 AU being the distance of the Earth to the Sun – plasma tails are rarely seen, so it is unsurprising that the comet's trail is found to be dust. However, the tail is unusually thin, and unusually shaped, resembling tails of comets arriving from the Oort cloud. These objects do not fare well during close approaches to the Sun, which isn't great news for Comet C/2023 A3 as it approaches at roughly the distance of Mercury."The comets of this class have a tendency to disintegrate if they are intrinsically faint and depleted in dust by the time they are near 1 AU from the Sun," he adds. "Given the perihelion distance of 0.39 AU, I expect that the object will disappear and cease to exist as an active comet before perihelion."While disappointing for people who want to see the object with their own eyes, it could be good news for astronomers wanting to learn more about the fate of these objects. For Sekanina, the evidence suggests that the comet is emitting large grains fairly far from the Sun, causing its acceleration without an associated coma. The largest of these emitted "blobs" could, he suggests, look like interstellar visitor 'Oumuamua."Most unusual is the continuing absence of an ordinary dust tail, which means that large amounts of dry, fractured solid material do not disintegrate into microscopic dust, but stay assembled in dark and highly porous bizarre bodies that I refer to above as blobs," he concludes. "Once they disperse in space, they are nearly impossible to detect, yet they may be omnipresent though perhaps short lived."Astronomers will continue to track the comet on its journey. It is still possible that the object will not disintegrate and will light up the sky, but if not we will still learn something interesting.The paper is posted to pre-print server arXiv.

A new study of exoplanet LHS 1140 b using the Webb Space Telescope shows that it could potentially be a habitable water world, according to a study published on the preprint server arXiv. At the same time, a planet similar to Earth is relatively close to us, reports Space. Scientists are now searching for habitable planets outside the solar system. To do this, the planet must be in the habitable zone of its star, that is, this is a section of space where conditions allow liquid water to exist on the surface of the planet. So far, researchers believe that the main component for the emergence of life is water. Although the planet LHS 1140 b, which lies 48 light-years away, which is considered relatively close by cosmic standards, has been studied before, it was only data from the Webb telescope that revealed its surprising characteristics. Still, scientists say their findings still need to be confirmed, but the data nevertheless shows something surprising. Scientists believe that this super-Earth is actually covered in water ice, but has an ocean on one side. This happened because the planet turned out to be facing only one side towards its star, where the ice had melted. Astronomers believe that it is a rocky planet that has an atmosphere and also has an ocean of liquid water. That is, this world may be potentially suitable for life. Past observations of planet LHS 1140 b have suggested that it could be either a mini-Neptune, meaning smaller than Neptune in the solar system, or a super-Earth, meaning a rocky planet larger than Earth. New research shows it’s still the second option. Scientists also believe that the planet has a nitrogen-rich atmosphere, just like Earth. At the same time, the planet revolves around a star that is 5 times smaller than the Sun and is not very active, which means that its radiation should not evaporate the atmosphere and allow liquid water to exist on the surface. But then the fun begins. Researchers suggest that the mass of this planet may consist of 10%-20% liquid water. But that’s not all. Scientists believe that this super-Earth is actually covered in water ice, but has an ocean on one side. This happened because the planet turned out to be facing only one side towards its star, where the ice had melted. At the same time, the ocean, according to scientists, occupies only part of the second hemisphere and its diameter is approximately 4 thousand km. The authors of the study believe that the temperature of the ocean water on the planet LHS 1140 b could be approximately 20 degrees Celsius. But additional observations are required to confirm the astronomers’ conclusions. If there is an Earth-like planet relatively close to us, with an ocean of water on the surface, it would be an important step forward in the search for habitable worlds. The post Earth-like water world: a habitable planet discovered near us appeared first on Anomalien.com.

Mockingbird media outlet Politico seems to have a presidential preference for 2024. Hillary Clinton. Yes, the desperation among Democrats is so great with the rapid decline of Joe Biden that they are willing to dig up failed retreads from the past if they have the proper approval. And how do we know that Politico favors that particular failed retread? Because they are hyping a highly dubious poll by partisan hack Fernand Amandi as you can see in this Tuesday story, "Poll finds Biden damaged by debate; with Harris and Clinton best positioned to win." A top Democratic pollster has a new survey showing President Joe Biden still in contention against Donald Trump, but at further risk of losing the election — with other leading Democrats now surging ahead. The national poll, conducted and commissioned by the firm Bendixen & Amandi after Biden’s politically disastrous debate and shared exclusively with POLITICO, found Biden trailing Trump, 42 percent to 43 percent. ,,,Vice President Kamala Harris is now running ahead of Trump, 42 percent to 41 percent, the survey found. And former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the 2016 nominee who is not being seriously discussed as a candidate by voters anxious about Biden’s chances, is slightly ahead of Harris. Clinton leads Trump 43 percent to 41 percent. The poll also tested other potential Democratic tickets — and found one headed up by Clinton, with Harris staying on as her vice presidential nominee, in the strongest position. Clinton-Harris is beating Trump 43 percent to 40 percent, a four-point advantage over Biden-Harris. Fernand Amandi, the veteran Miami-based pollster whose firm advised former President Barack Obama in his two presidential campaigns and conducted the new poll on Biden and Democrats, pointed to the more than one-third of Democrats who both don’t view the president as fit to run and said he shouldn’t continue on in the contest. “Voters have significant concerns about President Biden’s advanced age, and their concerns have only grown louder,” he said. “But [they are] still not enough where it has made the race a blowout for Trump.” And now Amandi's surprise, SUPRISE, over who performed the best in his poll consisting of 1000 people nationally: Amandi said he was most taken aback by the Democrat who outperformed the others. “I’m really surprised by Hillary’s strength,” he said. “While some dismiss her as yesterday’s news and a candidate of the past, voters at least in this poll suggest they may be open to a Clinton comeback and that a ticket with Clinton as president and Harris as vice president is even ‘stronger together’” he added, referring to the slogan for Clinton’s unsuccessful campaign in 2016. Could you be just a little more subtle in promoting You-Know-Who, Fernand, before passing it along to Politico for greater amplification? The new survey of 1,000 likely November voters had a 3.1 percent margin of error and was conducted between July 2 and July 6. That's not a survey of 1000 voters in a particular state or even in the battleground states collectively but nationally. An average of 20 voters per state and even less per state in the below average population states. Check out the Bendixen & Amandi poll featuring the "mixed mode hybrid methodology" for yourselves which claims to have a margin of error of only +/- 3.1%. Not to be confused with those much inferior polls with a margin of error of +/- 3.2%. This latest poll gives off similar vibes of a Bendixen & Amandi poll in March 2019 with a +/- 4.0% margin of error that showed that Donald Trump had only 40% support in Florida for reelection. Oh, and that poll was also hyped by Politico. Unfortunately for the pollsters and Politico, the poll fell well outside of the margin of error in 2020 when Trump won Florida by a margin of over 370,000 votes. You would think that just based on accuracy alone, Politico should refrain from hyping the Bendixen & Amandi polls featuring their "mixed mode hybrid methodology." However there is another reason to shun Fernand Amandi; his unsavory reputation as a Slimemeister. Just a few weeks ago in June, Amandi spouted yet another Trump-Hitler comparison on MSNBC when he told host Joy Reid, "But you also have to acknowledge the fact that Trump is utilizing the same language, the same demonization, and the same use of immigrants, now, in 2024, that Hitler used for Jews in the 1930s." To paraphrase an old proverb for Politico, when you lie down with Fernand Amandi, you get up with fleas. And that is an accurate proverb within a +/- 3.1% margin of error.

Fishing is the easiest way to harvest any sort of food from nature. Fortunately, a survival fishing kit is not only a standard part of a bug out bag, but also most survival kits. The post Redesigning the Survival Fishing Kit appeared first on Survivopedia.

Andrew Patrick Nelson Rides Again I did not approach this article lightly. I actually went a little overboard in my journey to unveil the film’s mystique. Since we began our Wednesday Western journey a few months ago, "Stagecoach" has been on heavy rotation. Of the movies I watch obsessively, I have probably watched "Stagecoach" the most, or at least as much as " True Grit" and "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." It just never stops being profoundly beautiful. It’s not just the perfect Western; it might actually be the perfect movie. I read everything I could find, dove into the story as deeply as I could. My first draft was 10,000 words long, and it was scattered, chunky, and at times barely coherent. The second draft sank as well. I was wandering the desert, folks. I had begun to feel lost in my own passion for this masterpiece. So I turned to the Western evangelist himself, Andrew Patrick Nelson, who just began his role as chief curator at Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West, which has been named the top Western museum in the nation by True West magazine. The first part of this article lays out some context that’s useful for the Q&A. It was an electric conversation. We dove deep, yet we barely covered "Stagecoach" in its entirety. Here’s the full interview: Is Stagecoach the best movie ever made? Interview with Andrew Patrick Nelson www.youtube.com (Video and audio used with permission from Kevin Ryan.) Where you can find it "Stagecoach" is remarkably easy to find — thank God. Amazon Prime: Free with subscription. MAX: Subscription. Tubi: Free. AppleTV: $3.99 to rent, $14.99 to buy. Fubo: Subscription. Sling: Free. PlutoTV: Free. Xumo: Free Coach Ford "Stagecoach" was the first of John Ford’s 14 collaborations with John Wayne. It also marked the first Western that John Ford filmed in the iconic Monument Valley on the border between Arizona and Utah, a cinematic choice that shaped the optics of all future Westerns. Archive Photos/Getty Images John Ford, with his record four Oscars for Best Director, had a reputation for being volatile and antagonistic on set. Andrew Patrick Nelson walks us through this more below. Ford was especially ruthless to the Duke, who viewed Ford as an authority figure deserving a kind of artistic obedience. Ford shaped Wayne's voice, his walk, his reactions. At one point, Ford shouted at Wayne, “Why are you moving your mouth so much? Don't you know you don't act with your mouth in pictures? You act with your eyes." John Wayne talks about it in Peter Bogdanovich's documentary "Directed by John Ford." Wayne was 30 years old at the time, with about a decade in the industry. He referred to Ford as “Pappy” and, more telling, “Coach.” “Took us about a week to make that picture, and it was fun all the way. Pappy always knew how to keep what we call a ‘happy set.’ And I was usually the butt of the jokes on that happy set.” For all of Ford’s seeming brutality, he truly believed in the Duke. In a letter, Ford said of John Wayne: "He'll be the biggest star ever because he is the perfect 'everyman.'” "Stagecoach" is itself the ballad of the Everyman. Watching it, again and again, you’ll say, “This is just so good.” 'Stage to Lordsburg' "Stagecoach" is based on Ernest Haycox’s “Stage to Lordsburg,” a 30-page short story you can read in one sitting. The language is sparse but whimsical in a frontier way. One sentence in particular captures its purpose: “They were all strangers packed closely together, with nothing in common save a destination.” It captures the brutality of the American West, where people drop dead or collapse without eliciting much of a response. The story offers much less of the liveliness found in the movie’s ensemble approach, where the collective breaks into factions as the stagecoach launches toward Lordsburg. The film is better than the story, but that’s not exactly fair because the film is one of the best ever made. It is the "Citizen Kane" of Westerns. A cinematic triumph, a genre-transcending film. It lifted the Western genre from the realm of the B movie and raised it to the rank of Hollywood feature film. Nine strange people The film somehow manages to feel simultaneously claustrophobic and too wide open. At its core, it is a human story. The dialogue is as rich as the strife is constant, a dynamism that could just as easily have made it a stage play. In this sense, "Stagecoach" has more in common with "The Breakfast Club" than many of the Westerns that preceded it. The film’s tagline captures this: “A powerful story of nine strange people.” United Artists/Getty Images At first, they seem to be Western stock characters. The drunk doctor, the banished prostitute, the stoic cardsharp, the taciturn salesman, the snotty socialite, the judicious marshal riding shotgun, and Buck, played by the wonderful Andy Devine, a John Ford mainstay, the “sweetheart”-repeating driver who could easily have been played by Chris Farley. John Wayne stars as the kind-natured gunslinger Ringo Kid, who has just broken out of prison in order to avenge the deaths of his brother and father. This is young John Wayne: rail-thin, with a smile that hasn’t been Marlboroed into crease lines. The film takes place during a stagecoach trek from Arizona Territory to Lordsburg, New Mexico, as Geronimo and his Apache warriors terrorize the area. Despite the danger, nine passengers cram into the Overland stage. The rivalry between Dallas, the prostitute, and Lucy, the highfalutin snob, is revealing. The clash of femininity is dramatic, like a comparison between the two Marys: Mary Magdalen and Mary the mother of Christ Jesus. There are a ton of flaws with this comparison — Mary never had to learn not to be judgmental, but she did give birth in the middle of nowhere. But the point is that Dallas, the whore, proves to be supremely maternal. Ford’s brilliance (and it is his, because none of it appears in the Haycox short story) is in how he weaves this revelation into the overall love story of Ringo and Dallas. Each character undergoes anguish and frustration and joy, among countless other intense emotions. It turns out to be ahead of its time in several ways. At one point, the acerbic banker, who scurried out of town with a briefcase full of embezzled loot, goes on a moralistic rant, complaining that “what this country needs is a businessman for president.” Eccentrics trapped on a journey through hell is not an especially new narrative, but it has proven to be an unexpectedly difficult one to pull off well. "Stagecoach" does this and more, revealing the beautiful complexities of human relationships: love, death, and life. Q&A with Andrew Patrick Nelson ALIGN: It’s impossible to fully capture why "Stagecoach" is so great, but let’s start with John Wayne’s entrance, when he spins the Winchester and the camera jerks toward him and there's a slight change in his expression. ANDREW PATRICK NELSON: That's one of the most famous introductions in the history of cinema. It's of course not the first time audiences had seen John Wayne. They'd seen a lot of John Wayne up to this point, dozens of B Westerns by this point. But the way that that scene is constructed, you kind of get a sense that there's a sound off screen. We go outside, we see characters looking at something, we cut to what they're looking at, and then we get that remarkable push in. There's even a moment where it goes out of focus and then back into focus. This tells us that this is maybe a different John Wayne, and your observation about the grimace is a really good one, that there's a kind of darkness to this character lurking beneath the kind of the boyishness or even the cocking of the rifle as a kind of playful gesture, in some way kind of ostentatious. And that is an important part of the character for the rest of the movie. You could argue that that's an important part of who John Wayne is for the rest of his career. Somebody who has a kind of a world-weariness, has seen things, kind of has an inner darkness and yet feels compelled to do the right thing. So there you have Orson Welles telling you that essentially everything you need to know about making movies is in "Stagecoach." And I think there's something to that. ALIGN: So that was the end of his career in B movies? NELSON: No, it wasn't. That's the funny thing. You know, people sometimes talk about "Stagecoach" as the movie that relaunched Wayne's career, quite famously, or maybe infamously. He was in a film in 1930 called "The Big Trail." That was the first movie where he got the name John Wayne — he was Marion Morrison by birth. And that film was intended to launch him as a superstar, but it did not do very well for a variety of reasons. So he spends the rest of the '30s making B Westerns for studios like Republic. So in 1939, he's still under contract with Republic. Fil:The Big Trail (1930 film poster).jpg – Wikipedia no.m.wikipedia.org So he keeps making B westerns for the next, I think, five years or so. It's really not until, I would say, "Red River" is kind of the next real turning point in his career when he's unquestionably an A-list star, one of the biggest if not the biggest star in the world. ALIGN: What an interesting movie to make him a star. NELSON: Yeah, well, I think there's some continuity there. You know, a number of biographers of Wayne have sort of zeroed in on "Red River" as the moment that he kind of establishes the template for a lot of his later roles, where he's sort of playing an older man in that point, which he would grow into over the course of the next two decades. He's sort of that melancholy figure, world-weary but also a guide to younger men, a kind of reluctant authority figure. And he plays variations of that particular character in most of his best-known roles from the mid-1940s on. Universal History Archive/Red River ALIGN: Where does "Stagecoach" stand in the timeline of Ford and Wayne? NELSON: Ford and Wayne meet each other in the late 1920s. Wayne has some small roles in early Ford pictures, but the standard narrative, and there are people who offer alternatives, is that Ford took great offense when Wayne took Raoul Walsh up on his offer to be the lead in "The Big Trail." And, you know, Ford and Wayne have an interesting relationship. One way to put it would be kind of adversarial, but one of great respect. I think it's telling that Wayne called Ford "Coach." Because I think that's something of the relationship. So this is a moment where in one telling Ford is letting Wayne come back into the fold, that he has a role for him. It's in an ensemble, so it's not really the protagonist in the sense of getting the most screen time or anything like that. And Wayne at that point wasn't the most famous actor in the picture. Claire Trevor gets top billing. Thomas Mitchell is very famous at that point. But this is the moment that kind of rekindles something that had begun and continues on. But again, I'll tell the famous story about "Red River." Supposedly after Wayne makes "Red River," Ford was shown the picture by Hawks and he says something like, "I never knew that big, dumb son of a bitch could act." And it's after that point that we begin to get pictures like "The Searchers," for example, with Ford and Wayne, or "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." But you can't overstate the importance of "Stagecoach" and re-establishing what is the most famous and most important actor/director combination in the history of Western movies. ALIGN: "Stagecoach" is an ensemble film. How does this make it unique as a Western? NELSON: On the theatrical release poster for "Stagecoach," the tagline is “A Powerful Story of Nine Strange People." Which is a strange tagline for a Western. It's not what you're expecting, right? It isn't it isn't “a thrilling adventure of the Old West" or something like that. So the context there is important. Around this time, the mid- to late 1930s, Hollywood was really big on ensemble dramas and was big on trying to find stories where you could get a big cast, a couple of big names, but a lot of supporting characters, and confine them in a particular location for the duration of the movie so as to create some drama. "Grand Hotel" is a famous example of this. So "Stagecoach"; in a way it's "Grand Hotel" out West, where we get this eclectic cast of characters. And we find a narrative conceit that will keep them together, people who wouldn't ordinarily be together in the same location for a prolonged period of time. So that in a way, it makes "Stagecoach" a kind of different Western because it's not like the Westerns that follow. The imperiled stagecoach doesn't become one of the great conventional Western stories. It's not the story of the righteous lawman or the antihero outlaw or the wagon train or the building of the railroad or the pioneers. It's very unique in that respect. But it is also important for the Western because of those characters. A few years ago, Cowboys and Indians magazine redid its list of top 100 Western movies. And the senior film writer there is Joe Leydon, who's a friend of mine. And I had him on my podcast, and I asked him about something in particular that happened when he redid the list. So what he did is he made "Stagecoach," in his view, the greatest Western ever and put "The Searchers" down to number two, which I thought very controversial. So I of course confronted him about this, and you know, his response, in part, and this is a great point, is that in "Stagecoach" you have so many of the conventional Western characters that we would come to associate with the genre. Now they didn't establish these character types, but they certainly cemented or maybe crystallized is a better word. Now, you have all of them there. And even though they don't necessarily appear together in the same configuration, they kind of, I don't know, propagate or proliferate in the Western from this point on. So in terms of influence, it is difficult to overstate the movie's significance. ALIGN: As we've talked about before, there's also a connection to some sort of archetype that existed in the West. Let’s start with Doc Boone. NELSON: In general, Ford is much more interested in society's outcasts, let's say. And it's such that he finds ways to make characters who in a different Western could be an upstanding member of society — the town doctor — into an outcast. His first appearance, we see him inebriated. We see him being kicked out of town. So Ford has a particular facility with that. And it's something that later filmmakers pick up on, and it kind of makes historical sense because if you're a physician, you had access to alcohol and other drugs. The laudanum-abusing doctor, the ether-abusing doctor. We see that in later Westerns, even in "Deadwood." But it makes what could be a very stock character into a much more complex one, and that's what Ford is really good at. And that's what the best Westerns do. I mean, you can't say enough good things about Thomas Mitchell's performance, though. It is so moving, the pathos. We just have a great deal of sympathy for this character who has a great moment of triumph in the film where he is able to overcome his vices in the name of a higher calling, maybe the highest calling in his profession. But Ford is not the type of filmmaker to suggest that all of a sudden the character is better. He begins drinking immediately, he kind of descends back into the morass where we found him initially. It's really quite remarkable. And then he continues to have that rise and fall arc. It's really remarkable. ALIGN: Ford has a lot of boozy humor. NELSON: Boozy humor. That's a good way of putting it. I mean, one of the most, I suppose, criticized aspects of Ford's films is his preference for a kind of broad humor, slapstick humor, humor that is based in what some might perceive to be ethnic stereotypes. A lot of scenes that revolve around drunkenness and drinking and things of that nature. And some people see these moments as kind of weaknesses of his movies, but I see them more as his interest in trying to provide us with fully fleshed-out characters, three-dimensional characters who can have moments of sadness and moments of happiness and moments of embarrassment and so on. And that makes for more interesting characters. So, you know, is Doc Boone as compelling a character if he isn't drunkenly reciting Shakespeare at different moments or insulting people? I mean, we get that, but then we also get these moments of great sadness and pathos. I mean, that's the richness of human experience that Ford is very skilled at offering audiences. For a film that's less than two hours long, I think it's pretty remarkable how fully fleshed-out the characters are. And again, I think it's that balance of what a recognizable genre like the Western makes possible that we see a character type and we think, “OK, well, we're familiar with this.” Like we're bringing some information. So there's a certain economy in the storytelling that maybe you don't have to do as much to establish who this character might be or what the profession is, because you can rely on the audience's knowledge. And then that frees you up to spend more time on the nuances, sort of on the complexities. And he does that with really every character trapped in that stagecoach. Each has a kind of arc where they get a comeuppance, they get redemption, they get a moment of heroism. It's really ... deftly handled because, you know, as you would know, it's hard to tell a story with a lot of characters and do them all justice, which is why we see it so infrequently. ALIGN: Let’s talk Andy Devine. What a fascinating actor. NELSON: He pops up in many, many of Ford's films. Devine is a character actor and he has a signature attribute, and that is his his voice. So you kind of hear that voice, there's a very few actors, maybe Walter Brennan is another where, you know, you hear the voice and you think, “OK, well, I know who that is.” And they're called character actors for a reason, because they tend to play similar characters, but similar is not the same. And, you know, Devine is a different sort of character in "Stagecoach" than when he's playing Cookie as a sidekick to Roy Rogers or something like that. He's a different character in "Stagecoach" than he is in a later picture like "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." The point of that character is to help provide a contrast with some of the other characters, while still providing his moment of heroism, his character in "Stagecoach." He's still wounded. He's still driving the stagecoach with one arm — he still gets his moment of heroism. But broadly, I mean, Devine was there to be the comic relief and to help us appreciate the more stoic qualities, let's say, in some of the people he found himself around. But I mean, a great, great, great performer. ALIGN: Andy Devine and Ford kind of butted heads on set, right? NELSON: That's my understanding. Obviously actors are not the characters that they play. You know, sometimes they have a vested interest in making us believe that there's some continuity between who they are and what we see, because we want to believe we're getting something authentic as opposed to a great performance of a piece of deceptive artifice, something like that. But I mean, yeah, Devine can hold his own. And this is one of any number of anecdotes about Ford, who would push people. He would push them and push them and needle them and he would berate them. And very often it worked, but he would often get actors to this sort of moment where they would finally say "enough" and they would push back. And that's the moment where you probably had earned Ford's respect. Now, today we recognize there are many problems with that type of leadership style. But in the case of Devine, this was a guy who was able to stand up, and then he has a very long and productive relationship with Ford after this. I mean, he's in almost every Ford Western. ALIGN: And it's also not unusual. Like Kubrick was notorious for basically bullying some of his actors. NELSON: Hitchcock falls into that vein too. And, you know, there are complexities here, because if you were to talk to some of the actors, they wouldn't see it the same way as some observers did in terms of the relationships being abusive. But this is one of the challenging things about film history. There’s a particular dynamic on set with great directors — and this isn't unique to film; this was in the theater as well, the dance, other arts. This idea that you needed not to encourage but to kind of berate people, to get them into a state where they could push themselves, where you could break down certain barriers. Controversial by today's standards. But I always go back to the fact that when these people looked back on their relationships, working with these directors, whether it's a Kubrick or a Hitchcock, most of the time, they tell a very different story than sort of a straightforward one of hierarchy and abuse and so on. I mean, there are nuances to human relationships. They're complex and troubled, and that's certainly the case with artists, maybe more so. Maybe this sounds like an excuse, but it's the idea that Ford saw something in Wayne. Maybe he didn't see it as clearly until Howard Hawks had coaxed an amazing performance out of him. But he saw something, and they developed a relationship where he knew how to get great performances out of Wayne. And I think Wayne understood that when he was working with Ford, he was going to be better. And so he allowed Ford to get away with things that very few other directors could get away with. Maybe Wellman, maybe Hawks, to a lesser degree. But Wayne is a willing participant in this. He understands the nature of the collaboration. And it's hard to argue with what we see on screen. The Wayne we see in "Stagecoach" is in many ways the Wayne of Republic serials. Many of those B movies do have hints of that darkness, but, you know, Ford brings it out in his direction, his understanding that, for example, characters can convey more just with a glance. There are some really important moments in "Stagecoach" and also in later films like "The Searchers" where all Wayne does is he kind of stares off into space. He just sort of … looks. And Wayne has talked about this as something that Ford encouraged, that he would play some mood music off set, which maybe he is a layover from Ford's silent days. And he would tell him just kind of like look and feel. And in those moments when the Ringo Kid is sitting on the floor of the stagecoach and he's sort of staring off into space he's sort of contemplating the horrible deed that he has to do to rectify the injustice against him. I mean, there are few moments in cinema just as powerful as that glance. And it's one of a number of glances, right? It goes back to that introduction where we have that look on his face and the dialogue is minimal. I mean, that's the mark of a great filmmaker doing something with variations and getting an amazing, sensitive performance out of an actor that many wouldn't think was capable of that. ALIGN: I like your use of that word sensitive too, because it's a mix of that. And you can see death on his face a couple of times as he realizes that his father and his brother are dead and he's got to kill two people or three, three brothers, in order to rectify those deaths. NELSON: That's the tragedy of the Western. You know, I often bring this up when people tell me that Westerns are just straightforward, triumphalist narratives. The Western hero is a fundamentally tragic character, usually because he's, as you said, he's sort of marked by violence and death. And then he needs to exact some kind of vengeance, but because of his association with violence and death. He actually has no place in the society that he is often helping to bring into being. and "Stagecoach" is a great example. Spoiler alert for those who haven't seen it, but at the end of the movie ... we start in one town, which seems to be full of sanctimonious busybodies. And then we arrive in another town that does seem to have some law and order, but they quickly disappear. And it seems to be populated solely by gangsters and whores and, as a kind of encouraging vision of what the nascent frontier civilization is going to become, neither is very attractive. And so at the end of the movie, you have the hero and heroine leaving society for Mexico, safe from the blessings of civilization, as Doc Boone puts it. So there's, again, this kind of great tragedy and darkness in the Western; you're going back to these early films, these early sound films like "Stagecoach." ALIGN: I love Ford’s gift for irony, like you were saying about the Ladies of the Law and Order League. NELSON: There's no shortage in Westerns of temperance leagues that are sanctimonious and hypocritical. You know, the last time we talked, you asked me about the depiction of religion or Christianity in the Western. And I think I kind of fumbled that answer, but when I thought about it, there aren't a lot of great depictions of preachers, for example, in Westerns. And I think there's a sort of a general sense, definitely in Ford's films, maybe other great Westerns, that the institutions of man are corruptible because we ourselves are all fallen and we're sinners. And so we can't help but make institutions that are going to be likewise corrupt. I mean, I think most Westerns are about this. And at the same time, they invoke this idea of a kind of a higher authority, a cosmic justice, that there are these moments when great men of skill and violence, they're not so much ... taking the law into their own hands; they're kind of exacting a type of justice that can't exist on the earthly plane because it's been corrupted, something like that. But that is like a deeply sad and troubling implication of the Western. And yet we see it time and time and time again. And I find that just fascinating. ALIGN: That's a great transition to another character whom I find fascinating, which is the whiskey drummer whose name I forgot. So that's perfect because nobody remembers his name. Nobody remembers his occupation. NELSON: So the actor is Donald Meek and the character is Peacock. Now you have timid, nervous, another great performance that comes out in, you know, the stutters, the slips, the inability in most cases to stand up to Doc Boone. The interesting character, the whiskey drummer again, who could be a very conventional character, but we get a guy who's nominally from the East, even though he keeps making the distinction that he's not from Kansas City, Missouri, he's from Kansas City, Kansas. And we understand that one is east and one is west, baby. So he's at least conceptualizing himself in this way. And he again has one of these great moments where he becomes the kind of conscience of the picture at a particular junction. But that is followed up with when they're crossing the desert and the wind is blowing and they're all caked in dust and Boone has started drinking again, and he tries to get Boone to stop, but he can't. ALIGN: Talk to me about Ernest Haycox. NELSON: Ernest Haycox was a prolific writer, mostly of short stories, especially in the 1930s and '40s. But before and after that, I think he has over 300 credits to his name, wrote mostly in Collier's weekly in the '30s and then switched over to the Saturday Evening Post. And there's a writer named Richard W. Etulain who has written a really good book about Haycox. So if people are interested in him, that's the book to read. You know, he makes a case that what Haycox was able to do is kind of elevate the Western from a sort of formulaic and somewhat lowbrow form of popular fiction to something that was more sophisticated and respectable. And he did that in a number of ways. His attention to history and historical details was somewhat different. His interest in three-dimensional characters, let's say. So he's a major figure in the popularization of not only the Western but also a particular type of Western that lent itself well to serious cinema in some cases. "Stage to Lordsburg" was a story published in Collier's magazine in 1937. Probably his most famous work is the basis for "Stagecoach." And as you mentioned earlier, the movie is different from the story in many ways. It's cinematic in ways that the story is not, but very important. Let's see. "Troubleshooter" was a story from 1936 that became serialized as "Union Pacific," another Western released in 1939. So, you know, in this important year for Western movies, it's telling that two of those movies have their inspiration in the work of this one great writer. ALIGN: Any final words on "Stagecoach"? We barely touched it. We dove in deep. We had a deep discussion and yet just barely touched the surface. NELSON: I think it's an important film. I think there's so many stories told about it. Maybe the one to end on is the Orson Welles anecdote, where famously Orson Welles in his early 20s was, in the late 1930s, given kind of an unprecedented contract by RKO studios to make movies. He had proven himself as kind of wonder kid of the theater and was given almost complete authorial agency over the production of a film, and he of course had very limited experience with motion pictures and yet was able to turn out "Citizen Kane," you know, which many would argue is the greatest film of all time. And when Wells was asked how did you learn to make movies, he would say that he just watched "Stagecoach" over and over and over again. So there you have Orson Welles telling you that essentially everything you need to know about making movies is in "Stagecoach." And I think there's something to that. It is very easy to find one particular thing about the film and to go very deep. And then you begin making connections between that one thing and other things, and you understand just how thoughtful and sophisticated the picture is. So it may not be as good as "The Searchers," but it is hard to name many Westerns better than "Stagecoach."

June may be over, but in American politics, it seems every month is Pride Month. In Washington, Joe Biden is angrily refusing to step down, frustrating the dreams of an entire class of vicious but wimpy politicians and pundits who really thought D.C. worked like a season of Aaron Sorkin’s “The West Wing.”And about 800 miles away in Milwaukee, former President Donald Trump’s campaign is effectively steamrolling grassroots activists, breaking protocols and precedent to shape a platform in the Republican nominee’s image. But first, the Democrats. For four years, the party had held the line on Biden’s clearly degenerating mental state with winks, nods, and blacklists. That ended with his debate performance, but to what end? After the gun smoke cleared, Biden was still standing and even calling in to an episode of his favorite “Morning Joe” to angrily denounce his critics and defiantly promise to stay in the race. The past two weeks haven’t shown any sudden turn toward honesty in reporting but have instead exposed a panic that Donald Trump might win. Only the Lord himself could dislodge Biden from the Oval Office, the president told George Stephanopoulos. Short of that, Biden’s arrogance will keep him firmly in place. While endangered swing-state Democrats held a secret meeting complete with tears, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jefferies (D-N.Y.) joined his New York colleague, left-wing Squad leader Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in publicly standing behind their man. The president, meanwhile, held a video call with members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Caucus members, who have enjoyed important chairmanships and White House access during Biden’s administration, pledged their continued loyalty — and warned that black voters don't want a change to the ticket. Conservative pundits who had expected a quick decapitation were correct to point to the Democratic Party’s determination to win at any cost, but they forgot there isn’t any special genius behind that viciousness. And while Democrats display a will to power that’s unique in American politics, that power isn’t centralized in the New York Times editorial board or the D.C. morning show hosts or even the Obamas in Martha’s Vineyard. And the White House has a good deal of that power. That’s not to say Biden’s problems are going away. His mental decline isn’t going to reverse, and every misstep will hurt a lot more than it would have before the June debate. Even a strong teleprompter read at the NATO conference in D.C. will only soothe rather than heal, and the years-old leaks from worried world leaders will carry new weight in this media environment. Biden’s chances of surviving, however, are decidedly better today than they were on Sunday. The memo has gone out that he's not leaving the stage, and that means further intraparty fighting that Republicans will use to win. That could shut people up fast. It’s important to remember that the past two weeks haven’t shown any sudden turn toward honesty in reporting but have instead exposed a panic that Donald Trump might win. If Biden survives the first week of elected Democrats getting chased through the halls for comment, he’ll get a week’s rest while the Republicans meet at their convention in Wisconsin. After that, it’s just a week and a half with Congress in session before the long August recess and the Democratic National Convention. And then he’s the nominee. Speaking of conventions, there’s more than a little pride afoot in Milwaukee as well. Republican delegates flew in Sunday for their quadrennial meeting, where they form committees and subcommittees, offer amendments, take votes, and hammer out the party platform. Only this time, they didn’t. There were no press, no activists, no subcommittees, and no amendments. Delegates were handed a shiny party platform, entertained with speakers and multimedia presentations, and then suddenly there was a motion to approve, it was seconded, and it was done. Upset delegates were told to pipe down, followed to the bathrooms to prevent them from using their phones, and generally bullied. We’ve seen this on the state level before. President George W. Bush’s team, for instance, famously bulldozed the Texas state convention in 2008 as a sort of cementing-his-legacy action. “Parliamentarians were escorted off the floor,” one attendee recalled to Blaze News. “It was a joke.” The national level is another thing, however. "It’s never happened before,” Utah platform committee delegate Gayle Ruzicka told a reporter Monday. "They didn’t allow any amendments; they didn’t allow any discussion. They rolled us, that's what they did. You know, I spent thousands of dollars to be here, and everything they told us they were going to [do] isn’t what happened. None of it happened. I’ve never seen this happen before. I don't understand why they did it.” Another delegate confirmed this treatment to Blaze News, adding that it was “unprecedented.” In the end, the Trump team got what it wanted: watered-down sections on life and marriage as part of a broader platform that reflects the candidate more than the party activists so loyal to him. And that’s not all: By Tuesday afternoon, word was out that America’s most popular Republican governor, Florida’s Ron DeSantis, wouldn’t have a speaking role at the convention either. “They’re exerting an insane amount of control over the convention,” one Republican Senate aide remarked. It’s all personal. The president is angry at several national pro-life groups and angered by disappointing 2022 electoral results that he blamed in part on them. He thinks many of them are grifters, and he’s got a point about a few. Nor does he have any love for DeSantis, whose sins include both challenging Trump for the nomination and winning re-election by a historic margin in his home state. In short, they’ve stung the nominee’s pride. Sure, he might be right about this slight or that, but when you stack up the treatment of delegates, activists, pro-lifers, and other Republican officials, you see a pattern. A pattern that risks turning a show of unity into a show of force. Trump’s got the advantage right now. It would be prideful and foolish to spend it on friendly fire. Sign up for Bedford’s newsletter Sign up to get Blaze Media senior politics editor Christopher Bedford's newsletter. IN OTHER NEWS Republicans gear up for Wednesday fights The House is expected to vote Wednesday on both Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy’s bill to prohibit illegal immigrants from voting and Illinois Republican Rep. Mary Miller’s bill for disapproval of the Biden administration’s Title IX order giving men access to women’s sports and bathrooms. While neither bill is going anywhere the U.S. Senate, both fit well into the summer’s election prep — and Democrats are set to fall into both traps. While maintaining that illegal immigrants cannot vote in the first place, the White House, for instance, has condemned the bill making it explicitly illegal for the millions of people the Biden administration has allowed over the border to vote. Officials claim it’s not happening, and they don’t want any law to make sure it’s not happening. This might be good politics with their activists, but it’s terrible with voters. Immigration is consistently a top issue with voters. Likewise, a bill condemning men in women’s bathrooms and sports is meeting unified Democratic resistance. What will be more telling on this one is if any gutless Republicans join the Democrats in their opposition.