goooobullshit!(omgtits)

I saw Penn and Teller's "Bullshit!" today; a series I don't catch often, not having cable.

Though their defining best episodes generally came early in the series (esp. profanity in season 2), this one was pretty good. It managed to stop me a couple times when I was standing up to turn off the TV and do something else, I'll give it that.

Cheer. The problem the show addresses is that cheerleaders suffer far more injuries of all types than other common school athletic programs combined, and there aren't enough safety measures, spotters, and proper health and safety training among cheer instructors. This is related to the fact that cheer is not counted among 'competitive sports' in the Title IX program.

Here, P&T spend some time railing against feminism and government programs being the problem (before they've got around to detailing the safety issues) and then they spend the entire rest of the episode showing that in fact much of the problem comes from the involvement of the Varsity corporation, which through a long list of company initializations (not acronyms, fellow citizens) is involved in just about every part of every cheer program in the country, and is raking in tons of money from that.

The early vitriol against "feminism" seems out of place, but seeing as the rest of the program is filled with refreshing anti-corporatism, they probably felt it necessary. Otherwise they'd have had to denounce themselves as bleeding Bolsheviks or something. Also in that early part, they talked to someone from the Cato Institute in order to... talk to the Cato Institute? Really, for all the guy actually contributed to the topic, the only reason for including him seems to be to name-drop Cato. (Underwriting involved?)

Anyway, girls and young women across the country are suffering serious, sometimes crippling, occasionally lethal injuries at a rate much higher than even in ice hockey and soccer, while engaged in acts of athleticism that are more or less a mix of gymnastics, track, and dance. Things Penn and Teller don't quite get around to asking or explaining include pretty much anything related to what to do about it.

Is the one "grandmother-(or-whatever)-to-Title-IX" they briefly talked to the biggest obstacle? Just what would it take to get cheer included in Title IX? How exactly would that improve safety? Although they show Varsity stands to gain from cutting corners around the safety issue, and they say Varsity is involved with the decision to keep cheer out of Title IX, they leave many details of that involvement vague. Just what can people do to get better safety training, safe practice, spotters, etc. in school cheer programs? Will it require people to write Congress? To contact Title IX? Can it be improved State by State? Through school boards? Could improved awareness, organization, and involvement by parents at the local level bring schools together to form rival cheer programs with real safety and sports health measures in place that are not beholden to the Varsity corporation?

On all these things Penn and Teller both remain silent.

breastcancervaccine

Been hearing this over the last hour on the BBC.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8714085.stm

seisdemayo

I don't think it makes sense to argue "It's the law" or "they broke the law" when some of the major points under contention are "is the law just?" and "what ought to be the law?". It's also odd, though more disappointing than surprising, that people who claim to dislike big government and the threat of government tyranny are just fine with that government being extra strict toward someone they don't like. No, this isn't just about Arizona, or even just about immigration.

aninescapablebias

The fundamental ideological bias is ideology itself --the notion that believing the correct principles will lead to the correct conclusions. It's not unlike the basic function of scientific thinking --that knowing the underlying workings of nature will make one better able to understand and predict the specifics of the natural world. Also, easy comfort is found in one's perceived ability to impugn other's ideas by appeal to their specific failures on other issues. If the other guy's value system leads him to conclude that orphans should be loaded into giant hamster-wheel generators or all bridges should be one-way roads like God intended, it's tempting to think his entire value system is discredited by that conclusion. Just as tempting, but even shakier as a useful judgement, is taking one's incomplete strawman idea of what the other guy's value system is or must be, and trying to construct a thoroughly horrid conclusion from it in order to accomplish the above.

The opposite to the fundamental bias of ideology would be that no social or political questions are connected at all, that no underlying principle could possibly lead to better conclusions across multiple issues. I'm not convinced humans can actually think like this. I suspect anyone who might claim to be guided by such pragmatism would be simply unaware of their underlying ideological framework.

onblogging

James Edward Raggi's blog has a particular geek focus that may or may not interest the half-dozen viewers I get, but he's explained well the nature of blogging in general and the position bloggers find themselves in whether they know it or not.

http://lotfp.blogspot.com/2010/03/little-perspective-on-internet-and.html

Think I'll have to do a bit of policing in the comments.

Anything deemed to be spam, advertising, link shilling, or thinly-veiled excuses for the same will be removed.

adarkknight

How to use Joker in the next Batman movie:

The action rises, as Bats and the new villain vie against one another. There's aerial fistfights, underground vehicle chases, oh-so-serious brooding and shouting and looming, relationship troubles, all the usual fare. At some point, and you could probably get away with it more than once, someone's brilliant plan of the moment goes catastrophically wrong, hundreds of people are imperilled, fire and destruction reign. One expects this in an action movie anyway, but both the hero and villain are robbed of whatever goal they are trying to achieve. And in the wreckage, the Joker's card is found, maybe several, maybe hundreds raining down, with a handwritten message: "MISS ME?"

You could probably get away with making the Joker an offscreen bogeyman for at least two films, if pulled off right. Until a successor to Heath Ledger is found.

itscalledtheruleoflawpeople

The only problem with trying KSM and his allies in criminal courts (apart from the absurdity of using NYC itself, as Keith Knight pointed out, that leaves them no excuse for changing the venue of police brutality cases anymore) is that the practice of keeping them as military prisoners (under the bullshit term "enemy combatant" invented to evade Constitutional and treaty laws dealing with prisoners) has destroyed, corrupted, or never bothered to gather the lines of evidence that would make a criminal prosecution feasible. Said again THE POLICY OF TREATING TERRORISM AS A SINGULAR MILITARY FOE RATHER THAN A CRIMINAL ACT AND CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY IS THE SOURCE OF THE PROBLEM!

There is no Constitutional alternative to the criminal justice system. People calling for the military to simply take KSM, the Detroit bomber, and others and "try," convict, and punish them are calling for the end of the Constitution itself, the end of the Rule of Law, and the rise of martial law. Not that there's anything new in that. The Cheney administration spent most of the decade eagerly and openly dismantling as much of the Constitution as they could get their claws on, appealing to a mal-educated public's tough-guy-action-movie fantasies to expand central executive power. And a compliant complacent Congress and SCOTUS happily rolled over and let them do it. (Condoleezza Rice at one point actually invoked the popularity of "24" as proof the American people weren't interested in Constitutional restraints on the government anymore.)

Unfortunately, there's no easy unraveling of the prosecution problem now. What little evidence was gathered is dispersed among numerous uncoordinated government bodies, corrupted by entropic time, and tainted with questionable interrogation and imprisonment techniques. Even though KSM was caught not by a military operation, but by a joint international law enforcement operation, it's reached the point where the best hope for conviction by means that let America remain America rests on the likelihood that he wants persecution, martyrdom, and infamous credit for what he's done. Small favors. At least the Detroit bomber is a fresh case that's been handled through professional criminal investigation after the whole National Security angle failed to stop him.

checkinginwithanaphorism

The word 'freedom' is robbed of all meaning when it is used to refer to private dominion.