But last night, plans of a future war, was all I saw, on Channel 4...

CORUSCANT - Should the League of Non-Aligned Worlds decide to launch a strike on the Romulan Star Empire, its pilots would have to make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs through Reaver space, resupply their Tillium reserves en route, disable the shield generator, and attack multiple Borg unimatrices simultaneously using at least 100 White Star vessels.

That is the assessment of a bunch of nerds making mash-up space battle videos for YouTube, who say that the planet-killing device in The Doomsday Machine from TOS was obviously more realistic than the Death Star, although the Shadows' planet-killing cloud of nuclear warheads from B5 is really the only plausible device of its type, since obviously no directed energy weapon could ever blow up an entire planet--I mean, the whole idea is ridiculous--I mean, how could a beam weapon generate energy in excess of the kinetic energy of a massive collision between two planetary bodies . . . and, like, even that wouldn't necessarily break up an entire planet . . . like, how could you induce a planet to explode? It doesn't make any sense! Maybe you could drop a singularity into its core and make it implode, like in the Star Trek reboot, but . . .

What? Oh. "All the trekkies are like, 'Oh, yeah, our deflector shield technology is obviously superior to anything in the Star Wars universe,' but that doesn't mean that a Galaxy Class vessel is going to go up against a Star Destroyer," said Greedo175 during a wide-ranging debate at Memory Alpha.

-Elizabeth Bumiller, The Times

The Grey Lady reveals itself as one of the finest fanfic sites of the current era as it hungrily fantasizes about war between Israel and Iran.  Were I a pessimist, I would perhaps view this as laying the groundwork, but I have lately been feeling an unseemly sort of optimism, and all this jingoism toward Iran is sounding increasingly impotent and fantastical.  I say this with full knowledge that we are making cross-border incursions and doing drone strikes and plotting assassinations.  Nevertheless, the scifi quality of our major propaganda organs' coverage of the future war suggests that we are stymied, that low-level conflict is the best we can manage.  It's still hell, but it's a higher circle of hell.  Baby steps.