The only reason to make this movie was money

Masters of the Universe is playing at the Morris Theatre right now, and I was lured in. It’s terrible. It’s two hours of pointless reiteration of an intellectual property that was contrived in the 1980s as a tool to sell toys — it had a poorly animated cartoon show, a glorified advertisement, that played every afternoon in that sweet spot when kids were getting home from school. It was repetitive noise. Every episode had roughly the same structure: a squad of freakishly weird characters, led by a bad guy with a skull for a face, would try to take over a castle guarded by a squad of mostly human, muscle-bound leaders, and be inevitably defeated. The same characters fought each other over and over again, and each one was for sale at Toys’R’Us as an action figure. Mattel cleaned up. Every 8-12 year old boy wanted a set of action figures they could play with as they watched the cartoon, and they would bring them to the playground to battle with their friends’ toys.

I know because my kids grew up in the 1980s, and we had to buy all the toys. On their demands, we had He-Man and Beast Man and Moss Man and Man-At-Arms and Skeletor and Orko and others, and we also had the Castle Grayskull play set and various vehicles. This was also the time in my career when we were frequently moving to various places around the country, and one of the sadder things about that was frequently packing up everything we owned into a truck and driving to a different state, a different apartment. One of my memories was the final step in moving out, and that was going through the rooms and sweeping up the detritus and throwing it into one last box. It was always an assortment of He-Man figures and accessories that I had to rescue lest the kids yell at me.

So I had to go see this movie. It was my mental equivalent of tidying up the garbage in the corners of my brain.

It is a competently made movie. It’s got some good actors, Idris Elba and Alison Brie, and some new (to me) players, who did a good job, although I wish all of them were acting in good movies. I normally detest Jared Leto, but in this movie he’s unrecognizable behind a skull face and a comically affected accent, which is the only way to see Leto in anything. The plot is familiar: Skeletor and his weird pack of freaks take over the world of Eternia, He-Man shows up with a magic sword and beats everyone up (there is a lot more killing of bit players in the movie than in the old TV series), and the status quo is restored. Ho hum.

I kept wondering why this movie was made. It wasn’t for Art, because it’s entirely derivative and lacking in novelty. It wasn’t to tell a story that would resonate with viewers, because it could have been a cheap 20 minute cartoon rather than an expensive 2 hour movie. It wasn’t to provide moral instruction, although it did include an appearance by Orko at the end to briefly summarize the lesson taught by the show, just like the old cartoon. I don’t even recall what the message was, it was so perfunctory and so irrelevant to the movie I’d just watched. No, this was clearly the product of a thought by a marketing executive at Mattel. Let’s take another pass at the wallets of the 1980s generation that we successfully bilked 40 years ago! It’s a naked attempt to milk nostalgia.

They got me. I contributed to their $54 million box office on a movie that cost $200 million to make. Be smarter than me and don’t fall for it. The movie is not good enough to outweigh the bad faith premise behind its creation.

Being apolitical is political

The American Diabetes Association has responded to the little incident at a recent meeting, and issued a formal statement.

As many of you are now aware, an incident took place at the American Diabetes Association’s (ADA) Scientific Sessions.

As a 501(c)(3) organization, the ADA has safeguards in place to ensure that it complies with all IRS regulations. This includes maintaining a strictly nonpartisan environment at all organizational events and functions while engaging across party affiliations to advance our mission. We have always, and will continue to welcome scientific inquiry, respectful dialogue, and diverse perspectives in the pursuit of better outcomes for people living with diabetes and obesity.

Oh. They were being nonpartisan. That claim doesn’t hold up.

When the opposition is ignorant, advancing unscientific ideas, and is using them to consciously dismantle the apparatus of science to silence disagreement, you can’t silence yourself to prevent conflict. They have a political agenda and are distorting and destroying science to achieve it, and conceding the argument in advance with silence is political, too — and it’s favoring their position.

I’m not at all impressed with the cowardly, conservative leadership of the ADA.

Model ship building fad

I just posted about building a ship model, and what happens? Ken Ham posts about building a model ark. I begin to suspect that he’s copying me.

We’ve partnered with an Australian businessman to produce a beautiful model kit of Noah’s ark (based on the Ark Encounter’s design) made from authentic Australian hoop pine. Available in three different sizes from “small” (over two feet long and 506 pieces) to large (over four feet long and 760 pieces!), this scale model is extremely detailed and comes apart to show off the three decks. Once complete, it makes a great display for your home or for churches, or it can be used as a conversation starter for outreach.

It’s not that detailed because it fails to include the large concrete office building asymmetrically grafted onto one side. The article reveals the construction method of the model.

Ick. It’s assembled from thin sheets of laser-cut pressboard, one of the cheapiest, laziest way to make a model…and which will almost certainly be incapable of holding together in water. It wouldn’t be worth the $200 and/or $800 they are asking for the two model sizes. I guess the extra layer of fakery and religion must add value to this piece of crap. My model only had love added, and I didn’t charge anyone for it.

Don’t waste your money on this inauthentic, cheaply-made nonsense.

Institutional cowardice opposing scientific truth

An article published in the journal Diabetes Care, a journal of the American Diabetes Association, and authored by credible scientists in the field, begins with this condemnation of the policies of the NIH administration:

Just a year ago, in these very pages, we highlighted the many threats the current U.S. administration posed to the health of our nation. Since then, there have been actions by the administration that have caused grave health consequences, and their current approach will continue to do so. The numerous measles outbreaks and associated avoidable deaths have resulted in part from hyping disproven theories of harm rather than publicizing the effectiveness of the measles vaccine. Plugging the concept that diabetes is curable by “changing the food source” simply ignores the large body of work that has demonstrated that it is not merely a disease of poor nutrition and the immense challenges of reinventing the food industry. Peddling conspiracy theories represents failures by officials of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), whose primary goal is to protect our health. These two examples represent just two of the broken promises made by the current HHS leadership during their confirmation hearings. And, despite promising oversight, representatives on Capitol Hill have shirked their responsibility and have allowed the country to continue along misguided paths that even they recognized as irresponsible.

It goes on at considerable length, documenting all the failures of Jay Bhattacharya and RFK jr. Read the whole thing.

The authors were at a meeting of the American Diabetes Association handing out copies of that editorial to attendees, when the society administration called in uniformed security to kick them out of the meeting, and cancelled their registration.

The incident took place Friday morning at a meeting of the American Diabetes Association in New Orleans, shortly before Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, was scheduled to speak. An organizer announced just before Dr. Bhattacharya’s session that he would no longer be speaking; a senior adviser at the N.I.H. took his place.

The researchers were handing out copies of the editorial, recently published in the association’s flagship journal, which detailed the effects of N.I.H. cuts and other Trump administration actions on diabetes research and outcomes, when security staff asked them to step outside and tried to take away the papers, said Aaron Kelly, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Minnesota who was among the researchers escorted out. A video taken by MedPage Today, which first reported the news, shows a tense confrontation, including a man in uniform putting his hands on an expert.

Wow. That’s fascism in action, suppressing the free discussion of scientific assessment of the field. And this action was ordered by the officers of the American Diabetes Association!

Hours after he was removed, Dr. Kahn received an email from the American Diabetes Association stating that his behavior had violated the conference’s code of conduct.

“You were respectfully informed that distribution of materials was not permitted and given the opportunity to remain in the meeting if you stopped handing out the materials,” the email read. “When you continued the behavior, we had no choice but to remove you for the remainder of the meeting.”

The email went on to note that there are “a lot of logistics and security measures taken when a federal official is in attendance.” A spokesperson for the N.I.H. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Several of the researchers said they believed they were removed partly because the association feared repercussions from the Trump administration.

The order refusing to allow the distribution of papers is pure bullshit. It is common practice for researchers to bring along copies of their relevant papers and hand them out. I’ve been at poster sessions where the author brings in a small stand and has a stack of papers that people can take away. Why would you limit the dissemination of information at a meeting whose purpose is to disseminate information?

That it was a “security measure” is equally disingenuous. What was the guy going to do, rush the stage with his papers and slash Bhattacharya with vicious paper cuts?

This action by the American Diabetes Association was simply cowardice by the organizers of the conference. They should be ashamed. This is going to go in the history books as another example among many of chickenshit institutions caving to their own oppression by the Trump administration.

Dr. Kahn said that the editorial aimed to advance science.

“It is no longer enough to stand idly by or work behind the scenes with lawmakers,” the experts wrote in their editorial. “Moreover, it is no longer appropriate to fret about political backlash. Now is the time to recognize and fight to reverse the spiraling fall of the United States of America’s status as the foremost nation in health care innovation.”