Posted 4:53 PM by Angie Schultz

Godless Columnist

More Bright nonsense, this time from Ben McIntyre in the Times o' London. This article, however, is actually a Bush-basher, disguised as an article on Brights.

The term Bright was coined, consciously imitating the gay rights movement, in reaction to the steady spread of religious politics under George W. Bush.

It may well have been, but without much cause, unless you're a Chicken Little "the-sky-is-falling ewww icky god talk!" dim type of Bright.

In Bush's Washington, "godless" is the supreme insult, for religion suffuses every aspect of this presidency...In large parts of the US, thanks to the atmosphere fostered by the Bush Administration, candidates for office, whether as police chief, judge or senator, are happy to declare their beliefs, while millions of Americans who don't believe, like gays of an earlier era, are obliged to remain silent. There is nothing so overt as "Brightbashing", yet there is an underlying assumption of shared belief, a one-nation-under-Godism that reveals itself in subtle ways. When I covered the last presidential election, I lost count of the number of times I heard a candidate thank God for the weather.

Man, this kind of crap pisses me off. Look, this has been the case in the US for decades, if not centuries. Hard cheese, I know, but there it is. It has nothing to do with Bush. It was much, much worse under Reagan, when the Religious Right were much more of a force. In fact, almost everything I've heard of Bush's religion comes from newspaper columnists sneering at it; I've heard very little about religion from Bush himself (disregarding the weeks immediately after 9/11).

What really disgusts me about this is not the sniping at Bush, or religion, but the fact that someone who obviously knows so very little about the US is paid to write authoritatively on the subject for the Times. And that wouldn't even bug me if this were not seen over and over and over again, in all sorts of foreign venues. Really, it has been an eye-opener. If only Australia were a world power! I could make my living concocting nonsense about it ("In summer, Sydney families enjoy a barbecue of kangaroo caught in the city's vast Centennial Park, roasted over Wollemi Pine coals.")

(And I've not heard "godless" used as an insult since Les Nessman denounced the "godless tornadoes". Seems rather inappropriate for our current foes. But then I'm not a Bush insider, either.)

Not content with the easy target, McIntyre takes on Blair.

British Brights have a far easier time, of course, yet there are hints that Mr Blair, if not actually a Brightophobe, is not exactly an advocate of Bright rights either. His prewar rhetoric was awash with rectitude, giving the impression that the angels were not just on his side, but driving the tanks.

These two sentences alone should be enough to damn [look! I used a religious concept!] McIntyre into irrelevance. Where does this absurd statement come from? Can anyone really say with a straight face that Blair holds a Manichaean viewpoint? Really, at this point he's just throwing any old words down on paper. Do they look good? Must be true, then!

Via Doctor Frank.

Posted 8:31 AM by Angie Schultz

FEAR to Read This Post!

The other day Emily Jones had a post about some dimwit political science professor at Santa Rosa Junior College in California. Said dimwit apparently (reports are contradictory) told his students:

to compose an e- mail to an elected official that included the words "kill the president, kill the president," a school administrator said Wednesday.

...

Michael Ballou [the dimwit] intended the assignment to be an "experiential exercise that would instill a sense of fear so they would have a better sense of why more people don't participate in the political process," said Doug Garrison, the vice president and executive dean of the Petaluma campus.

One kid actually sent such an email, which brought down the wrath of The Man upon Mr. Ballou's head.

Niles and I discussed this. Niles is a cynical pollyanna, so he thought that the point was to demonstrate why it is more people don't become politicians---because they might get nasty emails.

I had a different idea, which turned out to be correct. Joanne Jacobs points to this story in the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, in which all is made clear.

Ballou said the goal of the exercise was to get students to think about what could happen if they did send the e-mail or make such a statement.

"Just the act of saying that and knowing your e-mail could be tapped and your phone listened to, you get a wave of fear over you and you realize we're actually afraid of our own government," he said.

Yes. Just by the simple act of making a death threat to the President you too could become a target of the fascist Police State. Dissent is crushed!

Now, there are contradictory opinions whether the students were actually meant to send an email. Only one student sent one; some thought they were never meant to. However:

At a subsequent class session, Ballou asked if his students had done the assignment, [executive dean Doug] Garrison said.

"A number indicated they thought he was joking," Garrison said. "He said, 'I'm quite serious and want you to fulfill this.'"

As PJ/Maryland says in Joanne's comments (comment #6):

Reading between the lines, this sounds like a very strange assignment. Both news articles use the word "compose"; my take on "composing" an email means to write it, not to actually send it. I'm mystified as to how simply typing a few words into a computer are supposed to "instill fear". ("Did you complete your assignment?" "Yes teacher, I typed 'kill the president' into an unaddressed email in my Outlook Express, and then deleted it." "Good, now tell us about the fear you experienced.")

This sounds like what he meant to me, too. Perhaps his point was that by just having the words "kill the president" on your hard drive, you should feel fear. The NSA robo-sniffers, which sift through all the world's hard drives, will find it---after they've automagically discarded all the "spoiler" text ("atomic bomb explode bin laden chinese anthrax haarp black helicopter area 51") placed on countless Usenet posts and email messages by crafty conspiracy aficianados---and come for you in the middle of the night and you'll never be heard from again. FEEL THE FEAR!

(Just think, if you have read about this story anywhere on-line, you now have the words "kill the president" on your hard drive! Do you feel the fear yet?)

Just to be very clear: I don't think that Ballou ever meant to urge his students to send death threat, let alone urge them to carry out death threats. And, unlike some people, I don't think he's an idiot for using the phrase "kill the president" as an example. Where I do think he's an idiot is that he seems to think that we all naturally fear the US government, and that somehow typing death threats onto the screen is supposed to make us realize that.

There are two depressing facets to this story. The first is that neither the professor or his students seem to be able to grasp the difference between legitimate dissent, and threats:

In a brief interview outside his classroom at the college's Petaluma campus, Ballou called the federal investigation of his assignment "farcical" and the result of a "growing police state."

His students agree:

Before class Wednesday, several students supported Ballou and expressed surprise that the exercise had brought the Secret Service to the campus.

"The point of the assignment was to experience fear of the government," said Andrea Joy of Windsor, adding that she didn't send an e-mail. "Everybody did by just suggesting the assignment. At no point was Michael advocating any violence.

"The reaction really validated his point," Joy said.

Why, it's getting so that you can't make a simple death threat to a public official without Ashcroft's goons marching jack-booted into your house! Dissent is crushed! (Actually, I'll bet that both Ballou and Joy are enjoying the delicious frisson of fear they get from knowing they are dangerous dissenters against the Establishment. The Man is coming down on the People!)

They also don't seem to grasp the difference between saying, and doing. The police didn't come investigate because the NSA X-ray vision satellite read his lips, but because other people made complaints. (In addition to the email, one student---a high school student taking this college course---told his parents, who called the police. Did the kid or the parents misunderstand (or exaggerate) what was said into a real threat? Or maybe both the emailer and the high school kid are informers paid to seek out any whisper of dissent!)

The second depressing point is that this bozo is teaching "Introduction to U.S. Government". I looked for an on-line syllabus for the class, but found nothing. I imagine it looks something like this:

Week 1: Your government: fear it
Week 2: Reasons you should fear the government
Week 3: Fear of the government throughout US history
Week 4: Lab work: feeling fear
Week 5: Analysis of the fear we felt in Week 4
Week 6: Brave anti-government tactics
Week 7: The so-called "Constitution"

Since this is a summer course, there are only seven weeks.

Michael Ballou also runs this pop-up infested Angelfire site, meant to call attention to the plight of adjunct professors.

Now, I don't want to go into it in this post, but this is a legitimate concern. Instead of hiring full-time faculty, many colleges have decided they can save money by hiring several part-timers. The part-timers are paid far below what the regular faculty get for much the same work.

However, Ballou's site badly designed, poorly written, and above all, whiny. He seems to be one of the Perpetually Aggrieved.

Every cloud has a silver lining, though. After his recent little stunt, he probably won't have to worry about being an second-class academic citizen anymore.

UPDATE: I wrote this several days ago and put off posting it because I feared (there's that word again) that perhaps I wasn't getting the whole story, and that there would turn out to be less than meets the eye here. Now, Ballou hisself has replied to Emily in the comments section of her original post! (Emily replies to the reply here.)

Huh. Turns out I needn't have worried. It's every bit as stupid as I had supposed. I like this bit especially:

2. The exercise was not to "instill a sense of fear" as one newspaper reported, but to bring out the fear and paranoia that already exists within each one of us. And it's not fear of Al Qaida or Saddam. It's fear of our own government surveillance and of each other. Next we examine who benefits from this state of insecurity and what can be done about it. It's a graphic exercise that has worked well in the past. My class assignment brings out the fear each of us is already carrying around and then discusses how people or institutions capitalize on that baggage. It was not about pulling fire alarms just to see if the fire trucks appear.

Well, if a person doesn't feel fear and paranoia of the government, and you seek to bring it out, I'd say that was a pretty good definition of "instill". I still don't know why I'm supposed to fear simply by typing "kill the president" on my computer. Is it the death threat I'm supposed to worry about? Or is it political? If I typed "impeach the president", would that make me fear too? How am I supposed to feel fear if no one knows what I've typed?

The rest of his very long answer (there are ten points!) is incoherent and laden with his own intellectual and psychological baggage. Please don't take my word for it, but go over to Emily's and see for yourself.

Hmmm...I could interpret this to mean that Michael Ballou is spying on us, seeing how he showed up on Emily's site and all. Should I feel fear?

Posted 3:38 PM by Angie Schultz

Adventures in Advertising

Prim and proper Andrea Harris is raising a delicate eyebrow at a booze commercial. She thinks the innuendo in it is a little "out there".

Let me tell you about Australia. Most Australian commercials were much like American commercials---some amusing, some annoying, most boring. But some of them were more than out there.

Take, for example, the Bacardi Breezers commercials. These would involve a handsome young person in sober dress talking to someone in a dull business situation. Then something would be said which would cause the young person to think back to happier times, when he was blind stinking drunk on Bacardi.

For example, one showed a job interview. Our Hero is asked, "How many people did you have under you?" and he flashes back to the time when he was floundering on his back on a sticky dance floor with two hot babes, awash in spilled Bacardi. In another commercial, Our Hero is a woman, who remembers the time when she was riding a half-naked man bareback---er, piggyback---and urging him on with her cowboy hat.

I would have loved to see one of those "Bacardi urges you to drink responsibly" disclaimers on those.

Another set of commercials were for Tim Tams, an authentic Australian treat. They're rock hard cookies which comes in many flavors now, but it's basically a dry chocolate cookie covered with over-sweet chocolate. In these commercials, two pretty young women have somehow summoned up a very hunky genie and have demanded that he give them endless Tim Tams.

Now, a time-honored way of eating Tim Tams (which are shaped like small candy bars) is to suck liquid up through them, thus softening the hard cookie inside. Can you see where this is going? So in one commercial the two young women do this, while the camera lingers lovingly on their rosebud-like lips, puckered tightly about the Tim Tams. sluurrrp...slurrrrp

Abruptly one young woman stops and asks the other, "Whatcha thinking about?" The other woman considers for a second. "Nothing." "Me too," her friend agrees, and they go back to their Tim Tams. sluurrrp...slurrrrp The hunky genie, sitting on the couch between them, writhes a bit, then conjures up a pillow and ostentatiously places it on his lap. Ha ha!

(Here's an article discussing the relationship between Tim Tams and oral sex. They also mention the much-missed Mint Slice---a chocolate mint cookie---which is much better than the Tim Tam and clean of sin to boot. Except maybe gluttony.)

However, for sheer what-the-hell mindboggle, nothing beats the YoGo commercials. YoGo is what Americans would call pudding; it comes in little plastic tubs. It's sold with a series of claymation commercials featuring YoGorilla and his pal Snake (Here's a picture.) In the first commercial, they're tooling down the highway in their sports car when there's a call on the mobile TV-phone. A raspy-voiced white-haired rhino with a vaguely Southern US accent is calling to tell them that aliens have stolen the world's supply of YoGo, and that he himself is down to his last tub.
(Note that when the world's in trouble, the one who summons YoGorilla is not the Australian PM, not the Queen, not the Secretary General of the UN, but the POTUS.)

Standing next to the President's desk is a vaguely canine woman sporting a puffy black hairdo and wearing a blue dress. As the President gestures, he knocks the tub over and the YoGo splashes all over the skirt of her dress. She looks disgusted.

After some adventures in subsequent commercials, YoGorilla and Snake land the alien spaceship on the White House lawn before cheering crowds, and are greeted by the Rhino-Clinton and Lewinsky-Dog, the latter still in her stained dress.

Oh, yeah, it's American culture that's vulgar, that's right...

Posted 5:07 PM by Angie Schultz

The Perfect Movie

Note: Very often, some goofy idea will catch my fancy, and I'll spend some pleasant thinking about it, tweaking it, trying to get it right. And when it finally is, it goes nowhere. It stays in my head, useless, until something pushes it out.

But now that I have a blog, I can save these little pointless gems forever. The only downside is that you have to suffer through them too. Hard luck for you.

Michele leads us to this site, which allows you to pick a movie by genre, then select director, writer, budget, male and female leads, and two male and two female supporting actors. It then gives you the chances of Oscar nomination and who's likely to give it good and bad reviews.

So I tried to set up my perfect movie, but sadly I was constrained by having to pick a cast from among the living (if that's the word I want). As we all know, the most perfect type of movie is the 1950s science fiction B movie, which is surpassed only by the rare 1950s science fiction A movie.

Now, it won't do to make a 1950s-style science fiction movie today. The hallmarks of a good 1950s SF flick were new and shiny then, but now they're old and weatherbeaten and torn. The things which, in those days, aroused a sense of wonder in your audience, now only arouse a sense of ridicule. They've seen it, examined it, chewed it up and excreted it.

The only solution then, is to make a real 1950s B movie, using genuine 1950s cast and crew. Here, then, is my perfect movie:

An astronomer finds a faint, never-before-seen star cluster in a very unusual pattern. He goes to Europe to present this find at a conference. Meanwhile, an archaeologist is studying some newly-discovered relics which feature dots in, you guessed it, a very unusual pattern. He goes to Europe to present this find at a conference. In a train station, their briefcases become switched (original, eh?), which goes unnoticed until they arrive at their respective hotel rooms. As each man examines the strange briefcase, light dawns in his mind, accompanied by creepy music as your neck hairs stand at attention.

After they compare notes, the archaeologist decides to go in search of the lost civilization which made the relics, and the astronomer insists on going along. They start in the jungles of Brazil (or possibly Africa), searching for the man who sent the relics to the archaeologist: his old mentor. Old mentor is found, and of course has a daughter who used to be in love with the archaeologist (yes, I'm stealing freely from previous movies).

So they all go up on the plateau (of course there's a plateau) from which the relics came. After some standard adventures, they find a Lost Civilization, the survivors of Atlantis, who are in reality the remnants of a marooned colony of humanoid aliens. The Atlanteans know about the existence of the outside world, but they have been laying low, because they've been expecting a rescue ship any millennium now.

Naturally, their time is running out, because they won't be able to hide from our technology much longer. Also, some elements of the Atlantean society are getting restless, saying that the rescue ship is never coming, and they ought to try to join the outside world.

Also, there's a complication in that there's a slave revolt brewing. Yes, the Atlanteans are very advanced, and they have gadgets which use forces we've only begun to glimpse, but they still have slaves. There's a beautiful, heroic slave girl. Also an evil princess, slimy suitors, dinosaurs, a volcano, spaceships, man-eating plants, a fortune in gems, molten lava, ritual combat, fantastic architecture, beautiful sets, incredible vistas, rich colors, filmy costumes, and lots and lots of dancing girls. (No Lost Race movie would be complete without dancing girls.)

In the end, (most of) our heroes escape, the wicked are punished, and Atlantis is destroyed again. That's all I'm sayin'. I will steal freely from the Hammer production of She, the 1960 Irwin Allen production of The Lost World, The Mole People, Lost Continent, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and many, many more.

Leigh Brackett will write the screenplay from a story by H. Rider Haggard (which he hasn't written yet). George Pal will direct, and Willis O'Brien will do special effects. As for casting...John Agar will play the archaeologist, Peter Graves will play the astronomer. Agar's mentor will be played by Claude Rains (haven't decided on the daughter yet, maybe Phyllis Coates?). For the beautiful but evil princess I have in mind Coleen Gray (who was The Leech Woman), unless I can think of someone else (Coleen's beautiful, but she's not the best actress in the world). The beautiful and brave slave girl (who will fall in love with the archaeologist) will be played by Rosenda Monteros, who was Ustane in the above-mentioned remake of She (just do the same role, honey---you get to live this time). Slimy suitor to be played by Basil Rathbone. Also starring: Hugh Beaumont! Russell Johnson! Celia Lovsky! Edward Everett Horton!

But, of course, the web site wouldn't let me make this movie. You had to pick your cast from among the living, if you can imagine (writers can be dead, though---I chose Alexandre Dumas). So I picked Ridley Scott to direct, David Duchovny and Halle Berry to star, with supporting actors John Rhys Davies, David Spade, Susan Sarandon, and Janeane Garofalo. (I intended nasty ends for those last two, naturally.) I had a $100-109 million dollar budget (I mean, really, how could you make an epic for less these days?) and only brought in something like $20 million.

It would have been different if they'd have let me cast John Agar.