Do people really take "24" seriously?

After being appalled enough to almost write a bitchy letter to Fox about "24's" Season 4 premiere, in which around a dozen people are killed in order to cover for a sinister plot that is revealed as a red herring by the third episode or so, I pretty much stopped paying attention to the show altogether. I never could tell if the show was meant to be a thrill-ride-type show remarkable mostly for its ability to strain credibility without ever quite breaking it altogether (traumatic amnesia?), or more of an especially prurient form of "terror porn," to steal a phrase, aimed at making us feel safer knowing that someone is out there to gouge out the eyeballs of those who would do us harm.

I still recall how the premiere of the show was delayed post-9/11, then edited to remove the more disturbing scenes of an airplane exploding over the Mojave Desert--now all you see is a orange glow off-screen as the uber-yummy Mia Kirschner parachutes out of the plane and then strips naked in front of a bonfire. I cannot bring myself to fully condemn that kind of filmmaking, but I do have to wonder why it was necessary to blow up a passenger plane in order for an assassin to adopt the identity of a German photographer on board the plane. Couldn't the bad guys have kidnapped the German after he landed, taken his ID and killed him, rather than having the lovely Ms. Kirschner seduce him on the plane, steal his wallet, then blow the plane up? We kinda already gathered that she is evil, and they still could have contrived a reason to get her naked.

Maybe I'm just being square, but "24" is really just the Rube Goldberg Guide to Terrorism. As long as your terrorist places more stock in crafting an elaborate and lengthy plan than in actually succeeding in his mission, a few well-placed electrodes, amputations, and sleepless nights will thwart the plot. I can't claim to know how a terrorist's mind works (I bought a book but haven't read it yet), but common sense would dictate that simplicity would be a key factor, rather than the two or three levels of redundancy necessary to keep a show like "24" going for the requisite 24 episodes.

There seems to be some indication that some of the torture allegations coming out of Iraq may have, at their root, inspiration derived from Jack Bauer's exploits. Really, has there ever, in all the history of espionage and intrigue, been a "ticking bomb" situation like the ones that occur with logic-rattling frequency in the "24" universe?

Anyway, before I end up writing all night about this, I'll just end with this--it's a freaking TV show that makes no sense if you think about it for more than two seconds. Maybe that's why it's so popular.

Death before having to mention sex to kids, say religious conservatives

Perhaps I'm being a little bit melodramatic with this topic, but I really do want to know if religious conservatives find it preferable to keep life-saving vaccines away from people rather than run the risk that kids might get the idea in their heads that sex exists.

From liberal conspiracymongers People for the American Way:

Following a recommendation by the Centers for Disease Control, a number of states have implemented or are considering vaccinating girls attending public school against HPV, a virus that causes 70 percent of cervical cancer cases. While vaccinations against measles, mumps, and tetanus are not controversial, the Religious Right sees HPV differently: It is sexually transmitted. The Family Research Council’s Bridget Maher warned that young women may see vaccination “as a licence to engage in premarital sex,” and former Focus on the Family advisor Reginald Finger said that marketing the vaccine “would undermine the abstinence-only message.”

...

[T]he Religious Right’s strong reaction against “forc[ing] little girls to be shot with a sex virus vaccine” leaves little room in the debate for details about which form parents have to fill out to preserve so-called “parents’ rights.” Instead, the Right’s abstinence-only refrain makes it sound like Texas is requiring girls to carry condoms, as one right-wing group put it. The emphasis on abstinence to the point of excluding other information is already dangerous policy when it comes to sex ed, but it’s doubly so when it comes at the direct cost of passing up a life-saving cure – especially when many on the Right acknowledge that abstinence might not be enough. Vaccination would protect not only the 94 percent of women who have sex before marriage, but also those who “practice[] abstinence and fidelity” yet “could
be exposed to HPV through sexual assault or marriage to an infected partner,” as FRC’s Sprigg admitted.

First of all, can anyone maintain a straight face while arguing that the "94 percent of women who have sex before marriage" do so because they learned about sex in public school? Actually, I'm sure some people can. They're wrong. I'm happy to argue that point further, but I'll move on.

The position seems to be thus:

1. We should not teach sex ed in schools.
2. We should not educate kids about, nor distribute the means of, protection against STD's or pregnancy.

I suppose the resulting assumption, then, is that people are endowed by God with all the necessary knowledge re: sexuality on their 18th birthday? Well, since our tax dollars are also being spent to encourage abstinence among adults, maybe that is not the case.

Some say it is a slippery slope (yes, I'm talkin' to you, CK)...okay, where would said slope lead? If we have to give sixth-grade girls shots of yet another vaccine is the slope that we would have to tell them more and more about sex, or that we would have to start giving them more and more vaccinations? Today, an HPV vaccine...tomorrow, a vaccine against, uh, herpes...by next year, we will be vaccinating our children against livestock-based STD's. I don't see it happening.

If the concern is about having to explain it to kids, a few questions:

1. How many sixth-grade girls really listen to their parents? Seriously, I have no idea, but I doubt it's a huge number.
2. How is vaccinating someone against a virus that renders its victims infertile and/or kills them a bad thing? Why not play up the aspect of "this will protect you from an unpleasant bug" rather than "now you can shag little Johnny from down the street with reckless abandon"? It's the religious conservatives who are constantly cataloguing the omnipresence of sexuality in our culture--a catalog I would totally want to see, BTW.

My point is this: kids aren't taught sex ed, kids aren't taught about contraception, kids aren't protected against preventable STD's, kids develop hormones, nature takes its course in secret because the 'rents would totally freak, and then adults act surprised and horrified when teens turn up pregnant or with STD's or cancer.

Sure it's a slippery slope--I just have not been convinced that it's a slope leading anywhere particularly bad.

And no, I don't have kids. Anyone who thinks I lack the right/ability to opine on this subject because I am not a parent probably has kids who will grow up to join a Sataninc cult and/or lesbian commune to spite your haughty sense of morality. Or maybe I'm wrong.

BTW, WWJD? He seemed to have a thing for helping the sick. Preventing disease in the first place would have freed him up for even more miracles.

Postmodernism, redux

The smarmy genius behind the Sokal affair has written a great piece in the LA Times about Washington's general aversion to science that conflicts with prescribed policy positions.

It's amusing to me (for so long as I can keep from vomiting), the way opponents of such concepts as evolution and global warming seek to use politics to prevent observable scientific phenomena from seeing the light of day. Not too long ago, it was postmodernists--usually painted into the same rhetorical corner as "liberals," "secularists," "abortionists," and presumably vampires and werewolves--who made the most impassioned arguments about the inherent unreliability of science. It would appear the wheel is still spinning.

Postmodernism essentially said, inter alia, that scientific observations cannot be trusted because everything is influenced by cultural dialogue, or something like that. I have never been a student of postmodernism, so I may be misstating its premises somewhat. Nevertheless, it is not clear to me how cultural perceptions can affect gravity.

The Sokal affair was an amusing effort to address the general lack of scientific rigor in postmodern thought. From the Wikipedia entry:

The Sokal Affair was a hoax by physicist Alan Sokal perpetrated on the editorial staff and readership of a leading postmodern cultural studies journal called Social Text (published by Duke University). In 1996, Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, submitted a pseudoscientific paper for publication in Social Text, as an experiment to see if a journal in that field would, in Sokal's words: "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions".

The paper, titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," was published in the Spring/Summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue of Social Text, which had no peer review process, and so did not submit it for outside review. On the day of its publication, Sokal announced in another publication, Lingua Franca, that the article was a hoax, calling his paper "a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense", which was "structured around the silliest quotations I could find about mathematics and physics" made by humanities academics.

In short, this event exposed the intellectual bankruptcy of much (if not all) postmodern thought.

Now if only someone would do something similar for attacks from the opposite side of the political spectrum.

The motivations of critics of global warming seem clear to me. There are many financial interests at stake, and who wants to give up their big cars, frequent flyer miles, and giant houses if they do not absolutely have to?

The motives of intelligent design proponents, on the other hand, are less clear to me, at least insofar as financial interests are less readily apparent. It seems like we have a dispute over the philosophical implications of either (a) accepting the reality of widespread observable phenomena, regardless of any metaphyiscal implications; or (b) clinging to the dictates of an ancient, repeatedly translated, poorly-edited book of which no original drafts remain (Am I talking about the Bible or the original scrolls describing Yggdrasil? You decide. I don't even know if Vikings used scrolls.)

What we really have here is a dispute over the nature of reality--is our purpose in this life to be gleaned from what we can observe about our physical reality, or can our purpose be determined based on what we really, really, really, really, really want to be true?

I'm going to go with the first choice, that any purpose in this life, to the extent there is one, is determined from what we can see and prove about the world. A cell phone is not powered by faith (sorry, creationists). Neither is it powered by cultural memes (sorry, postmodernists).

Here are the points I am trying to make in this post:

1. Postmodernism is an unverifiable load of crap.
2. Intelligent design is an unverifiable load of crap, as well as a breathtakingly dull cop-out. To say that life is so complex that it just must have been created by something, end of story, has about as much intellectual heft as the arguments I painstakingly crafted in high school to get out of doing homework--at the end of the day, many questions were left unanswered.
3. Therefore, both "liberals" and "conservatives" have, at varying times, put forth worldviews that are at staggering odds with observable reality.
4. No postmodernist has ever been elected president, held a leadership osition in Congress, attempted to subvert school boards or state boards of education, or generally ventured off campus.
5. Intelligent design proponents and global warming critics have done all the things listed in #4. That's what makes me want to vomit.

Apocalypse soon to follow...

Texas Gov. urged against cancer order - Yahoo! News

I never thought I would see the day, but I agree with Texas Governor Rick Perry on something. The apocalypse cannot be far behind.

I don't normally like government mandating much of anything, but mandatory vaccines are generally fine by me, unless there is clear evidence of adverse side effects that are worse than whatever they are vaccinating against.

Here, the adverse side effect, if I am understanding critics of the vaccine correctly, is rampant teenage fucking.

I have yet to see any particular study, or even an argument, demonstrating some likelihood that, if this vaccine becomes widely available, then we will all have to navigate through a dense gauntlet of naked adolescent flesh in flagrante delicto just to but groceries.

"Perry defended his decision, saying his fellow conservatives were wrong to worry that mandating the vaccine will trample parents' rights and promote premarital sex.

"'Providing the HPV vaccine doesn't promote sexual promiscuity any more than providing the Hepatitis B vaccine promotes drug use,' Perry said in a statement. 'If the medical community developed a vaccine for lung cancer, would the same critics oppose it claiming it would encourage smoking?'"

Do people honestly believe that, upon being administered the vaccine, young Texans will instantly shed their clothing and go at it? They can't, really. Do young Texans fell they need adult approval before doing that anyway? Of course not. Do kids even pay attention to what is being injected into them? I doubt it.

There must be some other rationale behind this opposition that has not occurred to me. The effect of the opposition, however, is clear. Women will continue to get HPV and, as a result, cervical cancer.

Answer me this, David Dewhurst, et al: why are you in favor of exposing children to the risk of HPV? I mean, if you have the tools to fight a threat, and you deny people said tools, aren't you just as culpable for the harm caused by that threat as the threat itself?

Wake the f--- up, people. People have sex. Remember when government officials told people they couldn't drink alcohol? How'd that work out? Now imagine telling a bunch of kids not to shag. If you can be honest with yourselves for even one microsecond, you'll see my point.

If one can accept the blindingly clear fact that people will have sex no matter what, the actions of a determined few to (a) deny young people education about sex and (b) deny young people the tools to do it safely are notihng less than criminal.

If you persist in opposing tools to help people protect themselves from illness, at least have the common human decency to personally visit every single HPV-positive cervical cancer patient in America to explain why your politics is more important than their lives.

Irony

From the February 3 Washington Post:

President Bush, forced by circumstance to reach out to some of his strongest adversaries, appealed directly to House Democrats on Saturday to work with him to reform the immigration system, limit the cost of Social Security, curb the consumption of gasoline and balance the federal budget.

Visiting the Democrats' annual retreat for the first time since 2001, the president told lawmakers there are "big things" they could accomplish by working together and sought to defuse any bad blood with self-deprecating humor. He opened his public remarks with an allusion to his tendency to mispronounce the name of the rival party by calling it the Democrat Party, seen by many party activists as a
calculated insult.

"I appreciate you inviting the head of the Republic Party," Bush said to laughter. He drew scattered applause a few moments later when he used the correct name in calling on the "Democratic Party" to work with him to address the mounting future liabilities of Social Security and Medicare.

Democrats rose to politely applaud Bush before and after the speech, a sign of the outwardly cordial and respectful nature of the day's session.

From the Merriam-Webster Dictionary:

Irony: (1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result (2) : an event or result marked by such incongruity.

More on Molly

From an excellent post by Kevin Hayden:

If you ever heard her speak, while her wit was sharp as steel, her delivery and voice had the grace of silk. It’s been said that ‘diplomacy is when someone tells you to “Go to hell” and makes it sound like an enjoyable place to visit.’ Molly was no diplomat, but face-to-face in a debate, I’m sure her opponents felt like they’d just gotten beat up by Audrey Hepburn or Shirley Temple.

Consider what she wrote in September, the same month her friend Ann Richards also fell to the only foe that ever defeated Molly.

The earthy Texas humor in her writing gave way to an exquisite grace that was utterly disarming. Listen to her speak of Tom Delay, to understand what I mean about the grace in the way she spoke.

Teens develop mad crushes on rock stars and actors. I spent much of my adult life mad about Molly. It didn’t matter that she was tall and large and fit no conventional definition of beautiful. Because when she smiled, nobody smiled wider. She was, to me, the greatest columnist that ever lived. I will miss her.

My condolences to her family, friends, coworkers, neighbors, employers, every liberal in America, to Texas, to America itself and to the world.

If anything, I’m sure Molly would be about laughter now, not sadness. And encouraging us to fight on in her stead.

Sure, I’m sad, but there’s no time to wallow. In her honor, go needle a Republican. Then let’s go Chimpeach the Shrub.

A few choice selections from her NYT obituary:

After Patrick J. Buchanan, as a conservative candidate for president, declared at the 1992 Republican National Convention that America was engaged in a cultural war, she said his speech “probably sounded better in the original German.”
...

Her subject was Texas. To her, the Great State, as she called it, was “reactionary, cantankerous and hilarious,” and its legislature was “reporter heaven.” When the legislature was set to convene, she warned her readers: “Every village is about to lose its idiot.”

Her Texas upbringing made her something of an expert on the Bush family. She viewed President George H.W. Bush benignly. (“Real Texans do not use the word ‘summer’ as a verb,” she wrote.)
...

In 1976, her writing, which she said was often fueled by “truly impressive amounts of beer,” landed her a job at The New York Times. She cut an unusual figure in The Times newsroom, wearing blue jeans, going barefoot and bringing in her dog, whose name was an expletive.
...

She quit The Times in 1982 after The Dallas Times Herald offered to make her a columnist. She took the job even though she loathed Dallas, once describing it as the kind of town “that would have rooted for Goliath to beat David.”

But the paper, she said, promised to let her write whatever she wanted. When she declared of a congressman, “If his I.Q. slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day,” many readers were appalled, and several advertisers boycotted the paper. In her defense, her editors rented billboards that read: “Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?” The slogan became the title of the first of her six books.
...

Ms. Ivins learned she had breast cancer in 1999 and was typically unvarnished in describing her treatments. “First they mutilate you; then they poison you; then they burn you,” she wrote. “I have been on blind dates better than that.”

But she continued to write her columns and continued to write and raise money for The Observer.

Indeed, rarely has a reporter so embodied the ethos of her publication. On the paper’s 50th anniversary in 2004, she wrote: “This is where you can tell the truth without the bark on it, laugh at anyone who is ridiculous, and go after the bad guys with all the energy you have.”

Texas will never be as great as it was with you in it.

RIP, Texas ladies

Texas has been diminished more than I think we can ever really know with the loss of two of its greatest, Ann Richards and Molly Ivins, in so short a time.

I lack the words.

We'll miss you.



Ann Richard's keynote address, 1988 Democratic National Convention

Ann Richards quotes (among others):

“Poor George [Bush], he can't help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”

“I've always said that in politics, your enemies can't hurt you, but your friends will kill you.”

Molly Ivins on Ann Richards:

“Anyone who ever heard her speak at an AA convention knows how close laughter and tears can be.”

More Ann Richards quotes:

"I get a lot of cracks about my hair, mostly from men who don't have any."

"The here and now is all we have, and if we play it right it's all we'll need."

Molly Ivins' columinst page at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram