This is news?

This is billed as a special news report: do angels exist?. I remember using “special” in exactly that way in grade school, too. Do Fox News reporters also ride the short bus to work?

I suppose I should be grateful that they brought in one skeptic to moderate it a bit, but otherwise…it’s an excuse to quote the Bible a bunch of times and drag in some truly stupid people to testify. Joey Hipp ought to be in jail: after being told, he says, that his wife’s spine was so mangled she might not be able to walk, he strolls up to her hospital bed, takes her hand, and makes her stand up…what kind of dangerous moron would do that? That she isn’t crippled now is due to luck and medicine, not her husband’s demented faith.

I’m also left feeling a bit peeved at angels. That tall, handsome angel in the silver corvette who helped some lady not be late for Bible study should have been off warning Joey Hipp to slow down on his motorcycle before he killed his wife.

But yes, O you fortunate people in distant lands, this is the American news media. I bet you also didn’t realize that Mike Judge’s movie, Idiocracy, was a documentary.

Tell Tim Minchin where to get off

I know Tim Minchin wants to tour the US, maybe this summer, but his agents weren’t exactly frantically lining up the gigs for him just yet. Now you can light a fire under their butts and tell Tim Minchin where he should play. Vote for your home town! Vote for the nearest place with a giant arena!

I voted to have him come direct to Morris, Minnesota, but I’d be fine with Minneapolis.

Is this an evolution game?

I don’t know, because my eyes kind of glazed over as this review explained all the rules for Dominant Species.

It doesn’t exactly look elegant in its implementation — it’s more for hardcore board-gamers than a family fun night, if you ask me — but at least it seems to be taking an ecosystem approach to modeling evolution which is far different than the usual ‘battling individuals’ concept you usually see in games.

I think I’m hoping the world does end in 2012

It would be a mercy. George Lucas is preparing another release of all of his Star Wars movies, after yet again tweaking them.

The new versions will be in…cheesy post-processed pseudo-3-D.

When the first one was released back in 1977 it was phenomenal — a pulpy space opera with dialogue that had the panache of a Hugo Gernsback short story, and we liked it. Then came the sequel, and we were overjoyed…it was still good old fashioned science fiction, but it was better than the first. And from that point on, unfortunately, it was dissolution and decay, beginning with the Ewoks and ending in the terminal embarrassment of Jar Jar Binks. Yet Lucas keeps tinkering with the sell-out garbage, trying to restore that brief moment of magic by hammering it all flatter and paving it over with a virtual steamroller of reprocessing and rewriting.

Nothing will save them, George. They were badly conceived and badly written, and yet another digital makeover will not change that fact. Maybe if you’d written them competently when you made them, you wouldn’t be masturbating their corpses now.

Bad evolution

There have been no science fiction movies that I know of that accurately describe evolution. None. And there have been very few novels that deal with it at all well. I suspect it’s because it makes for very bad drama: it’s so darned slow, and worst of all, the individual is relatively unimportant and all the action takes place incrementally over a lineage of a group, which removes personal immediacy from the script. Lineages just don’t make for coherent, interesting personalities.

io9 takes a moment to list the worst offenders in the SF/evolution genre. There are a couple of obvious choices: all of Star Trek, in all of its incarnations, has been a ghastly abomination in its depiction of anything to do with biology (I think you could say the same about its version of physics). Any episode with any biological theme ought to be unwatchable to anyone with any knowledge of the basics of the field; if you turn it off whenever it talks about alien races or whenever it mentions radiation from a contrived subatomic particle, though, you’d never see a single show. Gene Roddenberry must have been some kind of idiot savant, where the “idiot” half covered all of the sciences.

I’m very pleased to see that Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio gets mentioned for its bad biology. That one has annoyed me for years: Bear does a very good job of throwing around the jargon of molecular genetics and gives the impression of being sciencey and modern, but it’s terrible, a completely nonsensical vision of hopeful monsters directed by viruses and junk DNA. It’s also the SF book most often cited to me as an example of good biology-based science fiction, when it’s nothing of the kind.

Sharktopus tonight

I am less than tantalized by the latest trailer for this awful SyFy movie, but I’ll probably tune it in anyway. I suspect I’ll also tune it out.

Cheesy, schlocky giant monster I can understand, but why all the implicit misogyny in these things? It always looks like women’s purpose is to wear a bikini and die horribly.

Free Gregory Koger

Gregory Koger is an ex-con and a revolutionary communist…and none of that should matter in the slightest. He’s also a person who was beat up, handcuffed, maced, arrested, and now faces the prospect of a three year jail sentence for the crime of holding up his iPhone to take pictures of police harrassment. Koger is the young man who was documenting Sunsara Taylor’s protest of the behavior of the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago (which, by the way, ought to change their name to drop the first word), and who, oddly, was manhandled and arrested for taking videos of the event, while Taylor herself, who was doing all the talking, got away relatively unhassled.

Koger has now been convicted of trespassing, and will be sentenced on Wednesday. The whole thing has been Kafkaesque — it’s the most hysterical, overblown response to a guy taking a picture of a public event that I’ve ever heard of, and it’s a slap against everyone’s personal freedoms.

Here is the statement from Sunsara Taylor:

There is no justice in the outrageous conviction of Gregory Koger on charges of trespass, resisting arrest, and battery for the “crime” of videotaping a statement I gave at the “Ethical” Humanist Society of Chicago after they dis-invited me from a long scheduled presentation I was to give on November 1st, 2009. Gregory Koger is not only innocent of all charges he has now been convicted of, he is a righteous and beautiful human being who all people seeking to live an ethical life should support as well as learn deeply from.

How is it that Gregory Koger came to be my videographer last November at the “Ethical” Humanist Society of Chicago?

Gregory’s struggle to understand the source of his own long and bitter experiences of injustice and dehumanization as a young man led him to conclusions that were about much more than himself.

How many young men these days put their bodies on the line to defend the doctors who provide the right to abortion women need to even have a chance at a decent and equal life?

Gregory traveled to Kansas to defend Dr. Leroy Carhart when Carhart was declared “Enemy #1” by the same forces who had long-persecuted the recently murdered Dr. George Tiller.

How many Americans these days take responsibility for stopping the torture committed by the U.S. government in our names, not only under Bush, but also under Obama? How many who claim to oppose the wars and occupations by the U.S. government of Iraq and Afghanistan do more than complain under their breath and then change the channel or turn the page?

Gregory donned the orange jumpsuit of Guantanamo detainees in public protests and he marched against these wars, determined to make his opposition felt by people everywhere, including our sisters and brothers across the globe.

How many white people even notice, let alone stand up against, the systematic police terror and brutality that is a fact of life for youth, especially Black and Latino youth, in the inner cities everywhere?

Gregory went to the Southside of Chicago to speak out against a spate of police shootings of young Black men. He has consistently exposed the disproportionate incarceration and violence experienced by Black people in the criminal justice system.

It is through his activity in these realms, as well as his work with the Prisoners Revolutionary Literature Fund to get revolutionary literature into the U.S. prison system that now holds more than 2.3 million human beings, that I came to know Gregory. It was his interest in morality and ethics, in philosophy and revolution, as well as his passion for film that led him to volunteer for me the weekend I was scheduled to give a talk titled, “Morality Without Gods,” at the “Ethical” Humanist Society of Chicago.

The themes of my talk, which drew on the theoretical framework developed by Bob Avakian in his book, AWAY WITH ALL GODS! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World, examined the basis for a morality that is rooted neither in the brutality and ignorance of Biblical times nor the narrow-minded individualism and relativism of modern U.S. capitalism. I posed the need for a morality that both reflects and serves the struggle to bring into being a world free of all forms of exploitation and oppression, a communist world, a world where everyone contributes whatever they can to society and gets back what they need to live a life worthy of human beings.

The irony is bitter; when it comes to “morality without gods,” it is difficult to think of a starker living contrast than that between Gregory Koger and the conduct of the “Ethical” Humanist Society of Chicago.

I recount all this not only to demonstrate how deeply immoral it is that the “Ethical” Humanist Society of Chicago, spearheaded by their president Matt Cole, has viciously and vengefully persecuted Gregory Koger. I recount this to make clear that it is not only Gregory who will suffer due to this outrageous and unjust verdict, but that all those who are victims of the many injustices and oppression that Gregory fought against will also suffer.

It is incumbent upon all who care about the truth, who care about justice and the human spirit, who care about freedom and rights of the most oppressed and exploited in this country and worldwide, to not only join in insisting that Gregory be immediately released on bail and his conviction overturned, but to learn from Gregory’s example and step up their own involvement in the struggle for human emancipation.

WHAT YOU CAN DO:

  • Immediately send statements of support for Gregory to the defense committee AdHoc4Reason@gmail.com

  • Donate money for the appeal. Go to the defense committee website for more information

  • Show your support at the sentencing hearing on September 8.

  • More information will be coming; keep in touch with the Ad Hoc Committee at AdHoc4Reason@gmail.com

The conviction was insane to begin with, but imprisoning a social activist for the crime of photography is simply beyond the pale.

Drop the charges and free Gregory Koger.

Time to revoke Disney’s ownership

Disney has always been aggressive about extending their copyright to the various Disney characters — they keep going to congress and getting more years tacked on. It’s clearly past due that we should revoke all that (come on, Ol’ Walt died when I was in 4th grade, and I don’t care if his cryogenically frozen head is occasionally revived to dispense marching orders and consume baby brain smoothies). As evidence, I present to you the latest atrocity from the Disney channel, “Disney Blam!” What they do is take classic old Disney cartoons from the 40s, 50s, and 60s and ‘update’ them by adding obnoxious voiceovers. The narrator yells out grating descriptions of what’s going on visually, shouts “BLAM!” too frequently, and adds slo-mo instant replay to scenes where characters get bonked on the head. Really. It has to be seen to be believed.

Don’t you feel dumber for having watched that? Or at least, that Disney Corp. thinks you’re an idiot?

Why, in my day, I remember when we could expect five year olds to be able to watch these with comprehension, without some jerk on the soundtrack pointing out “BLAM! He got hit in the head with an anvil!” It’s not as if these things were ever intellectually subtle, you know.

Stop the disease before it spreads to Tex Avery and Chuck Jones! The Idiocracy will have arrived when the media overlords decide that Roadrunner cartoons need a play-by-play for their audiences to appreciate them.

(via Jhonen Vasquez)

Congratulations to Phil Plait!

I just saw the premier of his new show, Bad Universe, and it was lots of fun…and he’s a very entertaining host. I do have a few questions, though.

  • Why does he hate Sydney so much?

  • He was blowing things up right and left, and he was just talking about little rocks. What’s he going to do when he has shows about black holes or supernovae?

  • Hey, where was the biology? Most species don’t go extinct by way of astronomical disasters, so the explosions are a bit unrepresentative of how the universe is likely to destroy us.