Foreign policy discusses Syria from a Startrek perspective, now military "learning lessons" from a dumb TV show. WTF? How about a reality check -- what could you have "learned" from a Hollywood disaster movie that would have helped you survive the Japan 2011 tsunami?

Go ahead, slashdotters, make an experiment. Rent a movie or two and then watch the real thing on the youtubes and tell me honestly what the fuck could you have learned from the movies to help you escape the disaster? Well, that one's easy -- absolutely nothing. Because what Hollywood imagined isn't anything like the real thing.

Sci-fi shows are entertainment, and they don't teach "lessons", just help you kill time.

In many parts of the world "clean energy" is indeed a scam to siphon off government subsidies to selected enterprises. I look at my energy bills in several jurisdictions and I see a huge add-on for "green energy".

One of the said jurisdictions is an Asian country, which, despite the massive "green bill", has been burning gas for the past two years exclusively as a tribute to the fuck-ups of its nuclear power sector.

Another is a small country in Europe, where European and state subsidies and tax transfers have created a huge mess of the energy sector and a situation in which the overinvestment in "green" energy has left the base load generation capacity unable to maintain itself, boding serious trouble in the coming decade.

In the third, also in Europe, local thermal power plant has mostly cut the trees from the adjacent forests and chopped it into pellets, for wood fuel. Again, this has been done with a huge, 300+ million euros grant from the EU for energy from "renewable" sources. Except they cut oak and beech trees that are 100 years old, and in their place only grass and bushes grow.

So, yeah, green energy is a scam in many places, and an ecologically dangerous scam too.