Completely unrealistic and more than a little misogynistic

Hey! Hey! I’ll have you know I read the webcomics every morning for a bit of humor and escapism, not to have my faith in humanity shattered further and my cynicism enhanced. So I was reading Something Positive…

Oh, wait. That’s what S*P does. Never mind.

Anyway, I saw this comic and thought, “WTF?”

nightwingnaked

And it’s true. DC Comics is having a contest to give a lucky fan the opportunity to draw one page of their comic book, and the challenge is to audition by drawing a woman character naked and about to kill herself.

This comment says it all:

“I’m a sequential art student, and I find it a bit appalling that the requirement for panel 4 is essentially drawing a female character committing suicide naked,” said one commenter, Seairra Willett, in response to DC’s announcement. “The sexualisation of suicide is something I will not be putting effort into for a talent search,” she added. Many agreed. “This has to be the most repulsive thing DC Comics has done in a while,” said Rae Grimm. Others pointed out that the week of September 10th is National Suicide Prevention Week, but the main thrust of the response was that a strong female character was being reduced to a sexualized nothing, and put in a situation that is, at best, unpleasant.

As any true fan of the comics knows, this is an impossible scenario. How will she stuff herself into a refrigerator after she’s dead?

It’s going to be very popular, I fear

I was stunned by Rebecca Watson’s account of the promotion efforts of a new show that looks like a drunk version of Mythbusters. Then I watched a couple of their videos, which were garbage, and I heard this tag line:

You’ll know stuff your friends don’t, which will give you a temporary feeling of superiority, and might just get you laid.

And I thought, that’s brilliant. They’ve identified exactly what the modern skeptical market wants. And it’s all schlubby guys with women in bikinis as props.

The creator, Jon Hotchkiss, has a horrible blog post bragging about his show on HuffPo, and he also reveals his intellectual lineage: he’s worked on a number of shows I’ve never heard of, but also with Bill Maher, Penn & Teller, and Playboy TV. It shows.

I’ll skip it. It’ll probably thrive anyway.

Read Krugman this morning

The Republican party is appallingly misinformed: there is a Wonk Gap .

But that was then. Modern conservatism has become a sort of cult, very much given to conspiracy theorizing when confronted with inconvenient facts. Liberal policies were supposed to cause hyperinflation, so low measured inflation must reflect statistical fraud; the threat of climate change implies the need for public action, so global warming must be a gigantic scientific hoax. Oh, and Mitt Romney would have won if only he had been a real conservative.

It’s all kind of funny, in a way. Unfortunately, however, this runaway cult controls the House, which gives it immense destructive power — the power, for example, to wreak havoc on the economy by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. And it’s disturbing to realize that this power rests in the hands of men who, thanks to the wonk gap, quite literally have no idea what they’re doing.

There’s another place with a major wonk gap: the media. Television news is unwatchable, and even the major newspapers, like the one that publishes Krugman, are loaded with delusional timewasters and glib liars for conservative policies. How do those clowns get in control of government? Well, one way is that the media are indiscriminate and set up superficial apparatchiks like Friedman and Brooks and Will and whoever as arbiters of rational policy.

The Onion explains it all

The purported managing editor of CNN explains how they picked their top story in a fictitious opinion piece (which still rings very true).

There was nothing, and I mean nothing, about that story that related to the important news of the day, the chronicling of significant human events, or the idea that journalism itself can be a force for positive change in the world. For Christ’s sake, there was an accompanying story with the headline “Miley’s Shocking Moves.” In fact, putting that story front and center was actually doing, if anything, a disservice to the public. And come to think of it, probably a disservice to the hundreds of thousands of people dying in Syria, those suffering from the current unrest in Egypt, or, hell, even people who just wanted to read about the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech.

It’s all about the traffic, I guess, not the news…which any glimpse of CNN, Fox News, or the Huff Po will tell you.

I didn’t say anything about it because I was totally squicked out by the weird things she was doing with her tongue.

If Dr. Phil is a fraudulent hack, is it OK to respect his opinions?

No.

This has been a brief example of easy answers to stupid questions. For the longer version, take a look at Dr. Phil’s recent excursion into JAQing off over rape, where he asked if it’s OK to have sex with a drunk girl.

What’s also awful about that notorious tweet is that his twitter history shows what he’s doing: he’s trolling for story ideas for his ghastly little show. If you think that stupid question was bad, just imagine an hour of folksy Dr Phil trying to sympathize with a rapist who uses drugs to remove women’s ability to deny them.

Remember when TV was called a “vast wasteland”? That was in 1961. They hadn’t seen anything yet. If the FCC had seen Dr Phil coming then, they would have shut down all the networks on the spot.

Well said

Read what Mano says about Glenn Greenwald. I will simply agree 100% with it.

One of our major problems in the US is that the journalists have mostly curled up and died, and we’re getting our news from lickspittles and news organizations shackled to both corporate interests and political favoritism. I appreciate someone who breaks out of that incestuous relationship.

Five year olds asking questions! Teenagers going to the bathroom! Fox News can’t cope!

Fox News is such a joke, and Michelle Malkin is demented. They are now horrified at passage of bill in California.

“There is such an impetus to pander to political correctness,” Malkin explained. “I think this is social engineering run amuck. Apparently according to the bill that was signed, transgender is defined anyway they way to! As long as a child has the self-perception that they are transgender, they will be able to go into any bathroom that they want. Really, I think it’s a usurpation of local, parental and community control.”

“Five-year-olds are now exposed to — I don’t know — ‘What is transgender? Hey mommy, what is transgender? Am I transgender?’” co-host Eric Bolling asked, adding that it was “very scary, slippery slope.”

“And also, we know that kids like to pull pranks,” co-host Gretchen Carlson pointed out. “Can you imagine now, the boys want to go into the girls bathroom and the girls want to go into the boys bathroom, and they can just say, ‘Oh, well, I was transgender for the moment.’”

So if a person identifies as transgender, which is not something you can casually do on a moment’s notice, they’d rather force them to conform to expected gender identities? Because that’s exactly what this is about. The bill is primarily about ending stereotypes and giving equal support to all genders. It’s all about making schools supportive places for everyone, not just those to conform to majority norms.

Read Assembly Bill 1266 for yourself. The Fox News idiots haven’t.

221.5. (a) It is the policy of the state that elementary and secondary school classes and courses, including nonacademic and elective classes and courses, be conducted, without regard to the sex of the pupil enrolled in these classes and courses.

(b) A school district may not prohibit a pupil from enrolling in any class or course on the basis of the sex of the pupil, except a class subject to Chapter 5.6 (commencing with Section 51930) of Part 28 of Division 4 of Title 2.

(c) A school district may not require a pupil of one sex to enroll in a particular class or course, unless the same class or course is also required of a pupil of the opposite sex.

(d) A school counselor, teacher, instructor, administrator, or aide may not, on the basis of the sex of a pupil, offer vocational or school program guidance to a pupil of one sex that is different from that offered to a pupil of the opposite sex or, in counseling a pupil, differentiate career, vocational, or higher education opportunities on the basis of the sex of the pupil counseled. Any school personnel acting in a career counseling or course selection capacity to a pupil shall affirmatively explore with the pupil the possibility of careers, or courses leading to careers, that are nontraditional for that pupil’s sex. The parents or legal guardian of the pupil shall be notified in a general manner at least once in the manner prescribed by Section 48980, in advance of career counseling and course selection commencing with course selection for grade 7 so that they may participate in the counseling sessions and decisions.

(e) Participation in a particular physical education activity or sport, if required of pupils of one sex, shall be available to pupils of each sex.

(f) A pupil shall be permitted to participate in sex-segregated school programs and activities, including athletic teams and competitions, and use facilities consistent with his or her gender identity, irrespective of the gender listed on the pupil’s records.

If you experience panic on seeing someone who doesn’t look exactly like you in a public restroom, the problem lies with you, not them. If they’re there to intimidate the users, sure, there’s not good — but that’s not at all a transgender issue. I remember the boy’s room as the place where you had to be wary of bullying by people who identified as boys, so that’s a concern that exists independently of recognizing the reality of transgender students.

The Incomplete Map of the Cosmic Genome

If you’re one of those privileged people who has an iPad, and if you’re also one of those quality people who appreciates the brilliant Robin Ince, take a look at the The Incomplete Map of the Cosmic Genome for iPad on the iTunes App Store.

Now you might be wondering what it is. I’ve got it, and I still am. It’s one of those thingumabobs that fits words like “eclectic” and “ooooh” and “oh, what a colossal time sink”. It’s a…well, it’s a…OK, it’s a miscellany of enthusiastic science presentations.

It’s also kind of like a good science programming channel (you know how those have vanished from cable) with Infrequent/Mild Profanity or Crude Humour. If that helps. Download it yourself and try it and explain it to me.

They keep stuffing things in there, and you open it up and tap on something and there’s Brian Cox telling you how wonderful the universe is, or Steve Jones talking about Alfred Russel Wallace, or…ooh, an appreciation of Jacob Bronowski. I didn’t see that last time I browsed it. Excuse me, I have to vanish for a little while.

For shame, Discovery Channel

It’s shark week. I’m not going to watch a bit of it; I’m actually boycotting the Discovery Channel for the indefinite future. The reason: An appalling violation of media ethics and outright scientific dishonesty. They opened the week with a special “documentary” on Megalodon, the awesome 60 foot long shark that went extinct a few million years ago…or at least, that’s what the science says. The show outright lied to suggest that Megalodon might still exist somewhere in the ocean.

None of the institutions or agencies that appear in the film are affiliated with it in any way, nor have approved its contents.

Though certain events and characters in this film have been dramatized, sightings of “Submarine” continue to this day.

Megalodon was a real shark. Legends of giant sharks persist all over the world. There is still a debate about what they may be.

There is no evidence of this species’ persistence, nor did they present any. They just made it all up; reality isn’t awesome enough, so they had to gild the giant shark story. They’ve gone the way of our other so-called “documentary” channels dedicated to fact-based education — the History channel, Animal Planet, TLC. Garbage rules.

This also makes me sad because I already have to deal with irrational loons telling me that since coelacanths exist, scientists are wrong and humans walked with dinosaurs. I await with gritted teeth the first creationist who tries to argue that the survival of the Megalodon to modern times means it’s perfectly plausible that medieval knights hunted dragons/dinosaurs.

Thanks, Discovery Channel. And screw you.

Prime snide kookrant

I was surprised when I read the excerpt from the sneering letter to the editor-in-chief of Science magazine — it’s someone patronizingly chiding the little woman with the big job at a science journal in decline. It’s bad enough that it’s so condescendingly goofy, but it’s also complaining that Science has foolishly jumped into the “debate” about global climate change. There is no debate; it’s happening, there is a substantial anthropogenic component, and the science is rather firmly settled, so what would be then inappropriate is refusing to address an important environmental issue.

But then I read the full letter, and learned two things that made it even more laughable: 1) it’s an open letter published on the wacky denialist website, What’s Up With That, which means it’s going to be instantly ignored by any credible scientist, as Marcia McNutt is, and 2) it goes on and on and on and on. It’s absurdly preachy and unprofessional, and tells me that the author has no idea what kind of letter would be published by the magazine.

Further, McNutt is a professor of marine geophysics at Stanford, and what impresses the kook who wrote that letter?

McNutt is a NAUI-certified scuba diver and she trained in underwater demolition and explosives handling with the U.S. Navy UDT and SEAL Team.

The comments are also delusional. People are opining that Science is a dying journal. Really?

Climate change denialists are just about as out-of-touch and clownish as evolution denialists.