A Geek History of Time - Episode 75 - Deep Space Nine Watch Along Part I

Episode Date: October 3, 2020

Wow. You're gonna like this. Oh no, I'm not. Cause there is no god damn middle. This is not unlike ancient Rome by the way. Not so much the family of circus. Yeah. I did, when I did Miratelia, I had the same issue as before Nancy.

A lot of them wanted to create self-sustaining farms and got into crystals. I know. Okay. I understand that. But yeah, I'm reading Livy, who is a shitty historian. Because Irrigan is. Others say that because Laurentia's body

was common to all the shepherds around, she was called a shewolf, which is a Latin term for horror. You were audible, lassies. It was just most of it, where you slamming the table. As the Romanists at the table, well, duh. Yeah, obviously.

Ipso facto. Right. You know, it's your original form. Ipso, duh. You have a sword rat. This is a key history of time. Where we connect, never re-to the real world. My name is Ed Blaylock. I'm a distance world history teacher.

And part of the time, English teacher here in Northern California, currently trying to use the long weekend we're about to go into to recover from my first full week of distance instruction. Because of course the district I'm teaching in got shut down on day two of our school year, owing to the state being on fire. And so we had, we had day one, we had day one of distance instruction, and then days two and three were canceled, and then we had a weekend, and then we came back on Monday.

And so, you're kind of caught up with us then. Kind of, almost, yeah. So, and so who are you, sir? I'm Damien Harmony. What fresh hell are you undergoing right now? sir? I'm Damien Harmony. What fresh hell are you undergoing right now? Well I'm Damien Harmony I am a distance Latin teacher. Slash tech support. So okay when you say distance teacher slash tech support is just built in. Yeah apparently. Like couple. So we have training today. We had a training today and they said that there's three trainers, one who runs the chat,

one who leads the training and one who takes care of the tech stuff. And I was like, wow, that sounds nice. So where are my other two team members? Right. Yeah. When I'm doing my job, I'd like, you know, can you give me a couple of minions? I'd like to avoid people too. Like, yeah, you know.

And the cool thing is that we can rotate round Robin. So next week you teach and then I do the tech and on and on. That would make sense. So yes, I am a distance Latin teacher in a district that how to put this. We negotiated and got an MOU for the first four days of school. Now, we still have to figure out the next 179.

And negotiations are literally ongoing right now, so we'll date this. Yeah. And I'm going back to them when we're done with this. Hopefully, by the time we're done with this, you know what? No, I've heard enough about how negotiations work with your district. Never mind. I'm not going to say anything. But for those of you in the audience who aren't, you know,

commie, pinco, union types, you need to understand that MOU means memorandum of understanding. And it's a term in labor labor relation. Labor negotiation. Yeah. Labor term's labor contract. That is, okay, look, we're not gonna put this into the actual text of the contract itself because it's a niche case or this is temporary bandaid

until we can negotiate a long-term solution. And so, literally what that means is, okay, we've reached this agreement for the first four days. After that, we still don't know what the fuck we're doing. Yeah, that's how implacable they are. So, but I'm biased because I'm a selfish teacher who wants to not die. So, that's who I am. Come on, how dedicated are you? Like, clearly you're not dedicated to the kids. If you value your life, then what are you in education for? Exactly.

Not that we are bitter at all. So let's just go over what's going on right now. Right now there's a pandemic. There are police officers killing unarmed black people in their custody at alarming rates. There are white nationalists going into those same cities afterward to protest for their rights, which I don't quite get, including shooting at people, running people over and starting fights. There are others who are pretending to be the protesters who are saying, hey, we do want

justice. The schools are basically in a state of physical arrest in that they can't seem to get shit done. All of California is on fire. Two hurricanes blew through the deep south. It's bad. It's really bad. I figured the best way to get away from all of that, Ed, tonight We're just gonna watch a couple episodes of deep space nine because I want to get away for a while I want I want to enjoy Some science fiction which will help me escape

The reality that we're in because that is what science fiction is deliberately designed for is to simply help me escape from the social Problems that we're facing today. Yes, it's just pure fluff. Yes, it's never ever has it ever been used to comment on social ills. Right. No. No. No?

No. So when I just picked these two episodes out of the blue and did a little research, I must have gotten unlucky. I found the two that were social justices. So. Out of all of Star Trek, can, and the only two episodes that are that have social justice, yeah, at all. Season three, episodes 11 and 12 of Deep Space Nine.

So we're gonna do a watch along, but before we do, we should probably get into the meat of it a bit. So how much do you know about 1995? Okay, well hold on. And technically 94 because this came out in January of 95. Okay, 1994. There was a congressional election. Oh, shit. Okay. So, because 92 was a wild Billy Clinton becoming president of the United States, because in January of 93, that was 93 was the year I graduated high school, and I remember seeing his inauguration

speech in journalism class as a senior in high school. So when we talked about, what was it, the new world order in wrestling? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so 94 would then be the congressional midterm elections during his first term. Yes. during his first term, when a rancid Idaho spud by the name of Gingrich, which by the way manages to sound both like Gingreen and Grinch simultaneously, led a junta promising a contract with America that was basically a thinly veiled set of excuses to do with the case-read mafia wanted done and tried to drown government in a bathtub.

Okay, so you know a little bit about 1994. Yeah, so 1994 was the year of that election. 92. Oh, you're going back too far? Or was it, no, it's 90. Well, hold on. No, I'm not. Because I think if we're talking about start trading and social justice and we're talking about 1994, I have some guesses. Because in 1992, there were the the l.a. riots

uh... which were spasmodic and and uh... terribly terribly destructive and got massive massive airplay on the nightly news with with the mainstream media uh... you know uh... being their usual vulture-like selves, you know, showing, you know, all, again, all these spasmotic violence going on, and not giving an awful lot of attention to the legitimate anger and grievance of the communities that were the uh... badly uh... most badly impacted uh... by all of that

uh... uh... so i mean you know and the and the republican you know the the what i'm trying to say the the republican uh... lawmakers who were behind all of this stuff uh... were basically playing to the same set of

Rhaeg Knight, welfare queen chaos in the inner city, law and order, troops that had been used all the way back to Nixon. And so yeah, that's kind of what I recall. Okay, well here's what I've got. And I kind of put together a bit of a timeline. In January of 1994, I only went back to 1994 because I was looking at the time in which these writers would have written these episodes. And so I go back to 94.

So in January 94, the Northridge earthquake happened. It was a 6.7 on the Richter scale. So destroying large chunks of LA. And this will be important later. In January of 94, the coldest temperatures ever recorded in Indiana happened during a record cold spell. It went down to negative 36 degrees Fahrenheit. a habit during a record cold spell. It went down to negative 36 degrees Fahrenheit. In 94 January of 94, Bill Clinton in his state of the Union address called for an assault weapons ban as well as a welfare reform. So he's doing his standard boilerplate centristum stuff. Okay. Yeah. In January of 94, through March of 94 the tanya harding nancy carrigan tail played out where oh yeah carrigan got clubbed in the kneecap

oh right yeah and then it was just like exploded because it was Jeff goolee and it was uh you know the the bodyguard and and oh my god uh and it was a story in some ways of have and have not. Carrigan was very rich and, you know, entitled. And Harding was. And Harding was. Decided to get in the car. Yeah, decidedly not. Yeah. April of 94, Nixon dies.

Kurt Cobain dies. Oh, wow. And three high schools get burnt down by the same arsonist. Oh, yeah. I had forgotten that last one. Okay. In June of 94, the OJ Simpson murders. Oh, shit, really? Okay.

Now, June leading into July, tropical storm Alberto leaves thousands homeless in the southeast. Okay. Now remember, that's gonna be some overlap with the Palm Sunday tornadoes, by the way. Right. Let's see, oh yeah, Palm Sunday tornadoes

happened in March. I skipped that. Left thousands homeless. Yeah. So now you've got the Palm Sunday tornadoes and then you've also got June until July, Alberto leaving 1000 homeless, which means that some people got hit twice. September of 94, Bill Clinton signs the assault weapons

ban ending all democracy as we know it plunging us into a dystopia where nobody could kill large groups of people quickly and had to do with knives handguns and small magazines. Thankfully, Saint Bush piece beyond to his name, freed us from this tyranny with the Congress of Angels allowing the suppression to sunset in 2004 and school and mass shooting started climbing back up to respectable numbers again Dude, why do you hate freedom? It's inconvenient Yeah, okay, September of 24 baseball players go on strike for the fourth time in 22 years During the season they'd gone on strike previously not during the season and this is because and this is in 22 years

They did it four times because the owners colluded to keep free agency artificially suppressed and we're trying to institute a salary cap The people however did not give a shit and blame the players. For the first time in American history, the workers actually got blamed for the actions of the owners of the industry and the public failed to do its due diligence and pay attention to the actual numbers involved. Luckily, we all learned from this and it's been a workers paradise ever since. Okay, wait. So, so your usual level of dry sarcasm is, of course, evident in the second half of that. And I'm assuming it's also there in the first part as well. Well, they did go on strike for the fourth time in 22 years.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm talking about, I'm talking about the, for the first time in American history, people, you know, blanking workers instead of the owners, because I know, I know, I know about some like coal miners strikes. Well, name 30. Name 30. Alright, name 30. Go ahead. Hold on, let me go get my, you know, we actually probably could.

Yeah. Oh, I'm sure we could. Yeah. I'm sure we could. Also, it's worth noting that, you know, one of one of the armed rebellions in american history that you don't tell you about was in fact you know a call mine strike a massive coal miner strike uh... that that actually turned into no kidding a shooting war yes between you know security personnel and and the national guard of the state in question and you know miners who you know didn't want to die on the job

or get paid starvation wages. So, right. Or living company towns. Like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, like I said, workers paradise ever since then, right? Oh yeah, ever since then, yeah.

Like, I don't understand what you and I bitch about all of it. I mean, frankly, I just, I only bring up issues because I have nothing else to do with my time. Right. You know, because we live, we live in such an enlightened, you know, it's been fantastic. It really has. This is all totally normal and fine. Yeah. Yeah. In October 1994. All right. Yeah. October 1994, a man opens fire on the White House with a semi automatic rifle trying to kill Bill Clinton. And this is only six weeks after a Cessna crashed on the south lawn. Okay. I remember both of those. Yep. Was I'm trying to remember what? Do you remember the details

of the Cessna thing? Because I'm trying to remember whether that was actually some nut job like trying to try to whack Uncle Billy or if that was just a really, really unfortunate, not entirely competent civil pilot. I don't, you know, it's funny. I did a dive on it, but I've done so much research since then on other things that it kind of fell out. Yeah, because the guy with the AKS the AKS I know or SKS I know SKS Jesus Christ, you know this stuff. Well, I know.

I know. I know. So anyway, you know, the guy with the guy with the guy with the Chica Rifle, I remember as as no seriously if you open fire on the White House it's pretty clear what your intentions are. But, but, but I remember at the time, kind of wondering, okay, well, do we know that this guy was like loony enough to be trying to come a cosy run, or was this just like I'm trying to showboat and I like really fucked up or, or was this just I'm, you know, I had a mechanical failure of some kind at literally the absolute worst possible time. And the worst possible place.

It the worst possible place. Yeah. So, because, I mean, like, again, as I mentioned, any number of times before, I've grown up around airplanes and like crazy shit like that just does just happen. So I kind of want to do the dive again on that and figure out, was that guy actually a loony or just really unfortunate? Right. What I'm looking at now, because you asked and I had time, he was not mentally well. He bore, he was basically doing a

What do you call it a publicity stunt? Okay, yeah, so it's it still caused them to re-examine their security stuff Including putting surface tear missiles Good well, they've neither confirmed nor denied that rumor, but yeah, yeah, so yeah Well, you know, even if you do it then after September 11th, you know they've done it. Oh, yeah, yeah They took down the solar panels might as well put up something yeah, well, so Whatever they've got is almost certainly man portable because that's easier to you know pack away and and it doesn't you know you can't spot it with with satellite imagery until you know you need to use it. So anyway sorry. Yeah. In November of 94 hurricane oh actually before hurricane Gordon happened there was a major commercial conference about the worldwide web in San

Francisco. The first of its kind. Oh wow. Yeah. Like something that's so like literally we couldn't do this podcast. It would not exist. We're not for this thing. And yeah. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry. I just need to marvel for a second and how how how long ago that was like. Yeah. Well, okay, well, you're seeing you're in high school Well, okay, no, before talking about 94. I was a freshman in college. Oh, okay. Yeah, and this would have been by 94 by 94 I would have been well by that time in 94. I would have been a sophomore Okay, so all right, so I was a Emerson in high school.

You okay? Yeah. So in November of 94, Hurricane Gordon left thousands homeless. Oh yeah. That's three things that have made thousands homeless, not to mention the earthquake that started this whole thing that also left people homeless. Yeah.

November of 94, the Republicans, like you said, get the house to send it and they start the contract with America, which was totally rad and perfectly fine. Also, November of 94, George W. Bush, you may have heard of him. He becomes the governor of Texas. It's the last election I recall him winning. November of 94. Prop 187 passes.

Do you remember prop 187? Oh, shit. Yep, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Okay, right now I'm having a brain fart. I know what I'm talking about. Prop 187 says that, basically, California voters decided that they didn't want public services going to certain people.

All right. Okay. Yeah. Do you remember which of those certain people were undocumented immigrants? Yes. In November of 94, Tupac gets shot five times and robbed. He has not killed yet. Okay. Yep. In fact, this might have started the beef that he had, which ended up leading him getting killed. But people can tell us that on the Twitter. In December of 94, Mexico's economy completely implodes and needs bailing out by the US. Maybe we should think about that in terms of Prop 187. Oh wow. Yeah, okay hold on. I'm trying to remember did that have something to do with oil prices at the time? I'm trying to remember what the...

It was, if I recall correctly, it was the peso had just thoroughly devalued. Oh, yeah, okay, yeah, because I do remember, yeah, I remember high school friends talking about, you know, how incredibly cheap it was, like even more than ever before, to go across the border to, you know, be obnoxious Americans in a foreign city in Tijuana. Yeah, because you're a San Diego baby. So, yeah, yeah, yeah,

Miramasa High School, yeah, no. So yeah, I remember. I remember. I remember. I remember. No, the Marauders. The Marauders. The most expensive Marauders.

Yeah. A bunch of white kids going down to Mexico and they're named the Marauders. That's great. Yeah, I know. Yeah, I know. Yeah. Just as a total side note, did you ever watch the series Veronica Mars?

No, but I totally wanted to I just didn't have time. Okay, here's the deal. You need to watch it because we need we need to talk about that Okay, because because in any way when you watch, when they talk about Neptune high, my high school would be like a slightly down market version of Neptune high. So like all of the tensions and all of the everything that you see in that high school environment existed in one level or another in mine, and the divide between the really comparatively very well off white kids and the working class

other other kids from from the other other neighborhood feeding into the school was was a thing and a source of tension. And so I watch I watch all of that every time I rewatch Veronica Mars I watch all of that and I'm like oh my god I was never cool and I'm never bad as enough to be Veronica but like this environment this particular jungle is one I recognize you got to well you kind of want to recast it with yourself yeah Kind of do, like, current me in old knees body. Yeah, like, dude.

So, anyway, but we're getting off the subject. So, so, Mexico's economy completely collapses and we were busy telling people fleeing across the border to try to find a job that kind of we're not going to give you shit. Yeah. So, okay. Yeah. So, okay. Yeah.

So, um, I'm not gonna brave, but not necessarily the compassionate or the generous. No. Right, got it, okay. Yeah, the, the, apparently the Statue of Liberty, um, was just kidding.

It's apparently a lying. JK, JK. Yeah. In fairness, it's a poem, not a policy. Is it really in fairness. I know I you know I kind of think it is like you should really judge a country by its policies not its poetry like Okay, Mary and and and therefore I can poke my finger in America's eye for much further back going Your racist assholes about people coming in like every change you get. Oh, oh, yeah.

So yeah, I do think in fairness, that's worth doing. Okay. Sure. I know you thought I was going a different way. I did. I genuinely did, but there we go. All right. So that's the timeline leading up to what would have been in the writer's minds,

just what's in the news and the, you know, in the ethosphere. Now, here's what's in the news, in the, you know, in the ethosphere. Now, here's what's going on, a layer behind that. Homeless rates had crested in 93. At 15.1%, and they were starting to come down to 14.5% in 1994. So they were dropping by half a percentage point. Now, it's not much, and nobody at the time knew that it was going to plummet during the rest of the Clinton presidency. What was known at that time was that it was a big problem, and there was a lot of effort

toward eliminating it. Not all that effort in the right direction, by the way. And actually, homelessness, here's a little aside, homelessness doesn't start to rise again until a certain Texas governor becomes president. I'm just gonna leave it there that it also rose sharply after he left office as the economy was an atail spend due to deregulation that started haltingly at first in the 80s and then sped up in the 90s.

And really took off starting in about 2001. By 2009, it was awful and the economy wouldn't recover back to the close to the 2000 numbers until about 2018, also true about homelessness. Yeah. Now, here's what has not happened yet. OK. Oklahoma City bombing didn't happen yet.

Bill Clinton's predations on Monica Lewinsky had not happened yet. OK. And the contract with America had started, but the meanness of it hadn't really hit the streets yet. Okay, so all of that, okay, no, I'm just, okay, okay, I buy that, okay. Okay, so everybody knows we've turned off the video,

so we can actually see each other because I think it's improving the audio quality, but it also means that it's kind of, do you want to, no. No, hey, yeah. Yeah, we're not, we're not seeing any of the visual cues from each other about, okay, and you go ahead, yeah. So, good worry, how you doing now.

But, got to love that show. I have fallen in love with that show. If anybody wants some free advertising, letter Kenny is where it's at. So, so fucking... Anyway, the amount of events that left people homeless, and the way that folks were scrambling to work towards something, the fact that the Rodney King riots, as you'd mentioned,

had happened in April of 92, and the civil run rest that it revealed, combined with homelessness and the unrest that was growing to really high numbers by early to mid 90s. Is it really any wonder that deep space nine, the first science fiction on television with a black captain and technically started as a commander? I know, but he ends up getting promoted. Is it any surprise that DS9 would take this on?

No, it shouldn't be. Right. It really shouldn't be. Right. It really shouldn't be. That's a really good point. It should not be. Yeah. So in 94, deep space nine was writing about the not distant future,

but the distant haste of the series. Okay. Okay, so it's 94, they're writing about 2024, which is 30 years from when they wrote it and that's a standard thing. It's usually a generation or two You know, it's a difference. It's in San Francisco and San Francisco is supposed to be a wildly out of control to the point of people Just giving up on fixing it and instead just trying to contain homelessness brutally instead just trying to contain homelessness brutally. In 94, that didn't seem like it would be too far from the mark given the homelessness rates steady in-cline over the prior decades. And again, what's neat about this is that it is written about the distant past of the characters that we love or are still growing to love by this point, but it's absolutely our near future. So it's this really cool prism

Yeah, well, I'm gonna I'm gonna argue that by season three By season three they'd they'd grown the beard to to borrow terminology from talking about you know the series predecessor And I think I think there were a lot of people by season three who were very much fans. I think it had gotten there at that point. I don't think, I mean, the series hadn't gotten the chance yet to really get into the deep lore

that wound up developing over the next, you know, multiple seasons. But I think it was pretty solidly a popular choice. There was some division, of course, within the fandom because the series had been started after Roddenberry had passed. And one of his primary tenets had been that nobody in Starfleet is ever going to disagree with each other. And we're all, we're supposed to be portraying people as always utopian, better versions of ourselves. And the folks behind Deep Space

9 went, you know, let's actually show these people having these disagreements. Like this is the first time that we really start seeing any deep disagreements within Starfleet over policy. And the series wound up getting really dark. Well, now I have a theory behind this. When it comes to it. So, the first Star Trek and Star Trek the next generation Both of them occur on the enterprise and the enterprise flies from spot to spot

by By design you can have bottle episodes Oh, yeah, you have archetypical characters That you then put into different situations and then you tell us about ourselves that way, very valid way of doing a narrative. Deep Space Nine is literally a station, which means that the plot has to come to it and it's a station on the frontier by the way. So it kind of ties back to that old western.

But the plot comes to it and But the plot comes to it. And when the plot comes to it, your characters end up being developed by the plot. So the result is you have the largest plot arcs. You have the largest character development overall, largely because it was on a station. OK. Yeah.

All right. Yeah, I know that makes perfect sense. You know, of course, part of the reason that the original series and next generation after it were you know, bottle episode stuff was because the TV executive said, you know, we can't have these big long arcs. You have to have the ability for somebody to jump in and watch an episode and without having too much backstory, they got to worry about.

Because that was the era of that level of TV. We hadn't yet seen in genre TV something like the X-File. Well, I mean, by 1985, of course we had, but, you know, when, obviously, for the original series and for the next generation, we hadn't seen the X-Files, which I think was one of the bigger examples, like it was one of the first times in a series that tried to do an overarching story arc, really managed to capture the public's imagination in a big way and prove that no, we can actually do this. And so I think DS9 was the beneficiary of that development of the industry and of the art form.

Yeah. I agree. So. Now, this particular set of episodes is about the future. And as we know, anything written about the future is actually written about the present. This particular episode dropped a character, Dax. Jadziya Dax, she's the only actual alien of the three characters that get dropped in the middle of San Francisco. She's also the only one that can present as white.

And she presents as white, it drops her, Dr. Bashir, who is of North African descent and Commander Cisco, at that time he is still a commander who is African American. In the middle of San Francisco in 2024. Now I'm looking at my calendar and says 2020. So in four years in San Francisco this is going to happen. So you have two men of color and a woman who passes for white. She ends up in the upper classes and Bashir and Cisco end up locked into the sanctuary district. Okay.

It's also no coincidence that this occurs in San Francisco. Most things do because Starfleet, right? But also, when Reagan cut funding to social programs and institutions as a governor, the homeless problem in San Francisco increased quite a bit. The rough estimate of the amount of homeless people with mental illness issues is upwards of 45%. And people who are homeless who have severe mental illness issues is roughly 25%.

Oh, wow. So in the episode, when the cops mentioned dims in a reference to the two men of color who have no ID, which I would point to vagrancy laws that enabled people to arrest black folks and enslave them again legally, it's very specific writing. When yeah when Gabriel Bell gets stabbed spoiler alerts here on a Almost 30-year-old episode no medical care was given in a Survey of the homeless and five major American cities 49% of the homeless reported having violence done to them 62% said that they'd witnessed violence and 50% of homeless women reported sexual violence within the last 12 months.

And then there's targeted because they're homeless violence. 1,769 acts of violence against the homeless individuals or individuals who are homeless by housed perpetrators occurred from 99 to 2017 according to the National Council on Homelessness. 476 of those resulted in death. You want to guess who the perpetrators tend to be? I'm going to go out of the limb here. I'm gonna say they are overwhelmingly young. Yep, under the male.

Male, male, all, yeah. Male and white. Yes. And if we have socioeconomic data, I'm gonna say they are solidly bourgeois. Yeah, yeah, they're definitely home. I couldn't get, I couldn't scratch further than that, unfortunately.

Now, California leads by more than triple the next state in terms of incidents. Some of this is based on population, of course, but also you have, San Francisco is a really good example. Tremendous halves and have not disparity. Well, and what's remarkable, I mean, in my own experience, what's remarkable about the Bay Area in particular, because, again, San Diego

baby, and like I already talked about the fact there was, there was, you know, class consciousness and, you know, distinction in a big way, where I went to high school. But the starkness of the difference in a place like Oakland, where you can literally have different sides of the same street, like there'll be one district on one side of the street as median know median home prices of a million plus and Literally on the opposite side of the street You're looking at houses being a third of that value or They're not actually being individual homes. You're looking at you know

apartment complexes and other other other kind of low-income housing and and like and and literally it's a street. Yeah. And, you know, where I grew up, you kind of had to move through one neighborhood into another neighborhood, into another neighborhood to get that kind of, okay, well, you know, we're moving out of scripts ranch. Any of my friends from high school are going to know exactly what I'm talking about but you start in scripts ranch where I'll admit

was my neighborhood and you know you you had you know people with you know $700,000 homes and and then you move into you know part of Miramasa where you know you're looking at homes in the $400,000 range to another part of Miramae, so where you're looking at homes in the $150,000 range. But there's a great nation. Right. The Bay Area is literally the halves and the half-nots

are literally rubbing elbows. Yes. And yet, they're ignored. Yeah, well, yeah. You step over them as you're ignored. Like, that's, you step over them as you ignore them. Like, it's impossible to ignore and you ignore them. Yeah. By the way, all these numbers do not include police brutality. Nor do they include digital bullying,

which has been on the rise since 2017. Yeah. So yeah, it's, yeah. How to put, also the amount of violence spiked during the housing crash. So in 2009, you see a large number go up. Oh, well, yeah. Yeah, which, yeah, you got to go kick someone when you're feeling down. Yeah. Oh, which yeah, you got to go kick someone when you're feeling down. Yeah And reporting has gotten lower and lower since 2017. That's the other thing

Because Herman Cain is now the secretary and he is not an expert on housing and urban development And yet he's in charge and so he dictates the the Focus of that bureaucracy and it turns out it's not the homeless Well, no So I forget what did Herman Kandu for a living prior to becoming the head the the HUD secretary? I I really I really genuinely have trouble actually saying this out loud because it's so hard to when you hear the man fucking speak But he was a brain surgeon neurosurgeon right? Yeah, well, yeah

brain surgery literally a brain surgeon Yeah Neurosurgeon, right? Yeah, well, yeah, brains are literally a brain surgeon. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the man who tried to argue that the pyramids were built as a green storage structures. He knows about housing and urban development. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. No, Joseph. Those were those were built by Joseph. They grander, the silos, the Joseph built, you know, and you know, advised Pharaoh to build. No Herman. I swear he's even he's the guy that has pictures of Jesus and him in a picture too, right? Well, yeah, I think he does. Yeah, yeah, because I remember I remember hearing that he had pictures of him and Jesus and not just one pictures of him in Jesus.

And and because I was like, wow, that's really funny because I know that Alex Rodriguez, the baseball player, had pictures of him as a centaur. Pictures. Right. I remember that. Yeah. I did pictures. Yeah, it's just like, wow, I kind of want to see what you did there. Yeah, thank you. I kind of want to do that. I kind of want to have pictures of me as a pan. Oh, there you go. Because I got the belly for it and I got the bouts for it. That could work. That could work. All right. So yeah, no, Herman, Herman Cain is Herman Cain is a very special individual. Like he is walking evidence that you can in fact be smart enough in a particular area to do something that requires a very great deal of study and a very great deal of work.

And you can be that kind of book smart and then be a complete ignoramus. Yes. Like across the board in so many other ways. Um, like yeah, yeah, it it it boggles the mind. It toggles the mind. It doesn't, it doesn't, because if you think about someone who is a tremendous scholar and can't figure out how to unclog a toilet, or, I mean, like you get people that are savants in thing. Yeah, well, well, yeah. And, you know, depth of knowledge and like, I get a kick out of the fact that people

always quote Einstein when he talked about where the bees go the humans will go and it's like he's not an expert on zoology or botany or ecology he understands gravity and mathematics and quantum physics really well. Yeah, it doesn't mean he knows fuck all about those things. That doesn't mean it was a damn thing. Well, you know, and there's been a story on Facebook that a bunch of my friends, I think mutual friends of ours, have jumped onto that I don't remember which university it was. I think that Chicago had handed their COVID planning over to a pair of doctorates in physics. And these two physicists had apparently said, well, you know, this has really been a challenge

and we recognize the importance of doing this work, but our sense of intellectual curiosity is really taking a hit here because this just isn't as stimulating to us as the stuff we normally do. In that remarkably arrogant way that physicists are about anything that's not physics, like, well, I don't understand why you guys need to have your own field, just do the math this way and then add this

that and the other thing. And it's like, that's not how any of this works. Oh, wow. And so, like that's not how any of this works. Oh wow. And like so yeah, I guess, you know, one of the theories from one of my friends is that like the university went to the epidemiologist because they have an epidemiology department, right? They went to the epidemiologist and said, what do we do? And the epidemiologist said, you send everybody to the fuck home. And that just wasn't, you know, that that wasn't acceptable. So they said, well, who else do we have who smart? Oh, the physicists, physicists

were like, yeah, we can do this. We know physics, fuck that. So, yeah, so Hermann Kain is another example of that. Like, clearly, to become a neurosurgeon, you do need to have a working brain. And yet he seems to be willing and able to turn it off. Well again he's not a humanity's guy. He is a he understands neurology which I'm going to really paint with a roller like a giant industrial size roller. That's like plumbing for thoughts. You know like ultimately it's this tube goes here and does this and sends this thing there. These impulse is good to this place. He understands human circuitry.

He doesn't understand fuck all about society or history, apparently. Well, yeah. The writers and the creators of this show brought their own baggage, of course. Now, I repair the, and I may be I'm butchering his name. So, you know, geek timers go ahead and tell us. But the executive producer specifically was trying to recall the Attica riots in 1971 when he envisioned the Gabriel Bell riots in his episode. He was also very inspired by the homelessness that he saw in Santa Monica.

And here's a quote by him. He said, quote, the future week's extrapolated is very, very likely to happen in some form or another. It was intended as a wake up call. This is why Star Trek is science fiction and Star Wars is not, by the way. Now the rate of it.

Oh yeah. Well, you're saying because of that conscious, conscious, social statement being made. Okay. Yeah. So Robert Hewitt Wolf, the original writer of the screenplay, he said that he originally pictured Cisco going back in time and being homeless. This idea didn't work as well, but clearly he had his contemporary times on his mind.

And that plot ended up getting explored in Voyager, Futures End. And it makes sense. Homeless guy claims that he's from the future and nobody believes him and step right by him, etc. Yeah, well, yeah. Yeah, it's easy. It does. I mean, yeah. Jonathan Frakes directed this, by the way. Oh, well, yeah, it's easy. It does. I mean, yeah, yeah, Jonathan

Freak's directed this by the way. Oh, really? Yeah. And this episode actually got him the directing job on first contact. Really? Which is really interesting, because that's another go back in history version of Star Trek. Okay. Yeah, yeah, it is. You're right. I thought of that. But yeah, that makes perfect sense. And now you understand why number one was in all of the still shots, whereas, like, you know, Picard was in the dynamic shots. Yeah. Because for me, it's like, I'm going to be over here. Now people have asked bearer why he only showed one side, the liberal side. And I love his answer.

He says, quote, people are still even writing what that we only presented one side in past tense, and that we should have presented both sides and not just the liberal point of view. And I'm still trying to think what that means. In other words, we should have showed the positive aspects of putting the homeless into concentration camps. And I do admit we probably failed in that. We really did not show the many, many wonderful aspects of life without money and living in overcrowded camps. Yeah.

Now it makes sense that people are asking that nowadays because we have a president who said there are very good people on both sides of a Nazi march that killed Heather Hire. Yeah. Now the frustrating part is how prescient this episode continues to be. The bell riots are named for a black man whose death sparked change on a larger scale. We have the George Floyd protests.

And a Breonna Taylor protests. But specifically, they're like looking to make a law that's called the George Floyd, like they're naming the legislation for him. Yeah. By the way, COVID and protests, former heads of the CDC, okay, so I just wanna point out, because a lot of people are like,

oh, well, you know, with COVID and all that, the former head of the CDC, Dr. Tom Frieden, said that if the government's trust quote, is undermined by violent policing, or it's undermined by ham-handed public health actions that don't respect communities, that's going to have a negative impact on our ability to fight disease. Thus, the protests for Breonna Taylor and George Floyd were more important to public health than was

our social distance. 1200 doctors said, quote, staying at home, social distancing and public masking are effective at minimizing the spread of COVID-19. To the extent possible, we support the application of these public health best practices during demonstrations that call attention to the pervasive lethal force of white supremacy. Yep.

However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of black people in the United States. We can show that support by facilitating safest protesting practices without distracting, from demonstrators ability to gather and demand change.

This should not be confused with permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay at home orders. We're looking at you, Orange County. Oh, shit, I'm looking at Michigan too. Yeah, well, yeah. Lincoln, Tucky. And like, yeah, any number of other places. Yeah, well, yeah. And Kentucky and like, yeah.

Any number of other places. And there's a local dude up here in like Rocklin who's trying to run for office and he's saying, send the kids to school. Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He doesn't deserve his name.

No. Yeah, no. And so some things to, yeah, some things to keep in mind as we're watching this is that watch how Bashir and Cisco are really, really shook after a few days visit too, like emotionally. And DAX as well, although she lived the higher life, but she still saw her friends in peril, and she's also lived over 300 years. And what they're shook about is kind of like how could they let it get here, and it's the classic frog in the boiling pot argument, right?

And Bashir says in the show, so wait, you know, when you watch it, you'll get to this, quote, if we are frightened enough or desperate enough how would we react would we stay true to our ideals or would we just stay here right back where we started and I would say that 2016 showed us that it's at best a coin flip yeah and I think that 2020 is going to show us for certain which way we're going to go. Yeah. So that's the primer for watching the episodes. Okay. So what we're going to do here is we're going to kill this episode. And then we're going to record both of the watch along episodes.

We're going to release this episode and the first episode together on the same time in the same week. So that way they'll release as a pair and then the following week will be the second week of the past tense. Okay, so before we get going, do you have any books that you would like to recommend? I actually do for a change. I just picked up, hold on a second, I grabbed it. I just picked up the flying tigers, the untold story of the American pilots who aged the secret war against Japan by Sam Kleiner. And it is so far, I've only gotten a little ways into it.

And I had not previously known the story of Claire Chinalt, the founder and commander of the Flying Tigers, and his biography up to 1937 is really remarkable. And one of the most interesting things is I can already see even before the Air Force was the Air Force when it was the Army Air Corps and from the very beginning of Army Aviation there has been a conflict between two different wings of the organization, the fighter mafia and the bomber mafia. And in the very earliest phases, as it turns out, in the very earliest phases of Army aviation, people were convinced that nobody could stop bombers. And Shenalt was trying to say no with smaller aircraft, with guns, we can stop bombers.

Right, right. And so a big part of what the flying tigers were kind of about was kind of proving his theory. He actually went to work at first for Chiang Kai's Shek in 37. He left the US Army because his career had stalled He actually went up, he went to work at first for Chan Kai Shaq in 37. He left the US Army because his career had stalled because the other generals in the Army Air Corps were like, no, no, whatever. You're a stunt pilot.

Go, go away. And so he said, all right, I will. And went to work for Chan Kai Shaq trying to teach the nationalists how to build an Air Force. So yeah, so so far it's I haven't even gotten to the founding of the Flying Tigers proper and it's a great read. And I very highly recommend it. Okay, nice.

How about you? I'm going to recommend, as teachers, not a bad book to read this year, how to be an anti-racist by Abraham X. Kendi. OK. Really good book. My mom actually sent it to me.

And several of my teacher friends has started a reading group that I missed, unfortunately, about it, but it's a very solid book and it's how to put it. I mean, the name's in the title, like, you know, what you think it's. Yeah, exactly what it says on the tin. Yeah, you know, and yeah, read it.

Okay, all right, and yeah, read it. All right, very cool. So cool. Well, for, oh, where can we find each other on the social medias? You can find me on Instagram as Mr. Blalock. You can find me on Twitter as EH Blalock. And as it turns out, I just went to my TikTok account today. And I may have been misquoting my address. I'm actually EH Blalock and as it turns out I just went to my TikTok account today and I may have

been misquoting my address. I'm actually EH Blalock there as well, not Mr. Blalock which I think is what I've been putting down. You can find both of us collectively on the Twitter at Geek History Time and where can they find you if they're looking for you, Mr. Harmony? Well, if you're looking for me, you can find me at DA Harmony, as 2H is in the middle, on the Twitter and on the Insta. You can also find me every Tuesday night at 830 on Twitch.tv forward slash Capital Punds. I'm going to be doing a fundraiser show for the Stonewall Foundation on October 1st.

I'm not sure if this episode will drop before or after that. So if it's after, then I did it. And it was awesome with capital punishment. Otherwise, go check it out. They're trying to raise money for LGBTQ youth and scholarships and what have you. And there's a couple other shows. I know that this won't drop in time to advertise those.

So just check me every Tuesday night at 830 on Capital Ponds. So it's twitch.tv-cappetal-ponds. All right. There you go. All right. Well, for a geek history of time, I'm Damien Harmony. And I'm Ed Blaylock. Engage.

history of time, I'm Damien Harmony. And I'm Ed Blaylock. Engage.