But it’s the only good song on the whole CD!

It’s almost Thanksgiving, and you know what that means: the deluge of Christmas carols is about to commence. This is the time of year when I dread turning the radio on, because I know I’ll hear the same sets of songs over and over again, and the kind of uniform anti-eclecticism characteristic of Top 40 AM radio gets amplified and expanded and starts to spread everywhere. I’m always pleased to see something new, especially since it doesn’t happen very often…Lennon’s Happy Christmas (War is Over), Minchin’s White Wine in the Sun?

Some people get cranky about anything that isn’t sufficiently antiquated or sufficiently reverent, though. Now some people are freaking out over the inclusion of a song they don’t like.

A Christmas CD aiming to raise funds for a Christian charity has been slammed for featuring an anti-Christian song.

Faith and family groups have labelled the song, which includes the lyrics “I get freaked out by churches,” and “I’m not expecting a visit from Jesus”, as “disrespectful” and a “sick joke”.

But the executive producer of Myer’s annual star-studded Spirit of Christmas CD has defended his decision to include the song, White Wine in the Sun.

The song, written by atheist entertainer Tim Minchin, features alongside traditional Christmas carols such as Joy to the World and Little Drummer Boy.

I don’t know. I’m offended by both of those traditional Christmas carols — should I scream at WalMart and demand they be pulled from the store? Or, maybe, I should just look at the CDs and buy the ones with music I like, and understand that other people might want to buy Elmo & Patsy’s Grandma Got RunOver by a Reindeer on the Country Christmas CD.

Minchin’s song is quite nice. Here it is, if you hadn’t heard it before:

There is one thing in this story I find objectionable.

Profits from CD sales go to The Salvation Army.

Uh, what? Tim Minchin’s work is now being used to prop up a notoriously anti-gay organization? That sounds wrong.

An ethical dilemma!

It’s hard not to crack a cheerful smile at this story, but do try to take it seriously. A coven of Westboro Baptist anti-gay kooks went off to protest outside a soldier’s funeral in Oklahoma, and returned to their car to find their tires slashed. When they drove into town on the flat tires anyway, to try and get them repaired, they were refused any help at all.

There’s a grim part of me that feels a kind of satisfaction at that, I’ll admit. But I think it was wrong.

Don’t harm the WBC cretins no matter how awfully they prance. Do not vandalize their possessions. Don’t even threaten them. Even if they weren’t a lawsuit-happy group of parasites, they have a right to free speech and can protest all they want. This seems clear to me, with no ambiguity at all; and if I witnessed someone trying to slash the tires on a car with a “god hates fags” bumper-sticker, I’d try to stop them and alert the police. Somebody crossed the line in Oklahoma when they did property damage, even if it was to an odious gang of idiots.

I’m torn on the refusal to help them afterwards, though. If I were a tire salesman, and Fred Phelps came through the door and asked to buy a new pair of Firestones, what would I do? I despise the man and everything he stands for!

I think I’d sell him his damned tires. I think I’d even help him put them on his car. Oh, but it would pain me. It just seems to me that there is a principle at stake here, of an obligation to grant equal treatment to even the nastiest members of our society, and we violate it if we turn anyone into a pariah because of their beliefs.

So I can feel some schadenfreude here, and think Phelps actually deserves worse…but I’m also disappointed in the people of McAlester, Oklahoma who didn’t demonstrate that they were better citizens than the mad dogs of the Westboro Baptist Church.

Bad move, A&E

The A&E Channel has a new show coming up: Psychic Kids: Children of the Paranormal. Sounds awful already, doesn’t it? But it’s worse than you think: they’re looking for disturbed kids who think they’ve got magic powers, and then they’re flying in “professional psychics” to coach them in dealing with their awesome powers, i.e., indulge their delusions, get off on feeling superior to unhappy kids, and collect a paycheck for psychic child abuse.

They’re putting kids in the hands of a creepy skeevo like Chip Coffey, all for your entertainment.

This is quite possibly the most loathsome thing I’ve ever seen on TV, and my cable gives me access to the Trinity Broadcast Network, so that’s saying a lot.

Skepchicks are mobilizing the skeptic hordes. Call or write to A&E and let them know that their schlock has reached a new and despicable low.

I mentioned that I have cable…but there’s almost nothing on. The quality has been on a steady decline for years; cable stations like A&E, TLC, the History Channel, and the Discovery Channel were all set up with the noble goals of providing good educational/informative programming, and they’ve all sold out to provide little more than dreck ala Psychics with Serious Mental Illnesses Hunting Hitler’s Ghost While Driving A Big Truck with Their Freakish Family. It’s cheap, it’s easy, the ‘talent’ they hire are all boring nobodies with only their disturbed personalities as a selling point — these are modern freak shows, plain and simple — and audiences eat them up.

Meanwhile, look here: somebody has a petition begging someone, anyone to pick up Richard Dawkins’ thoughtful and intelligent documentaries. They’re done, they’re just sitting there, they’re begging to be broadcast…but I guess he just doesn’t have the charisma of a hammy metaphysical child abuser.

What madness will the NY Times take seriously next?

I’ve noticed that the bad practice of “he said, she said” journalism so common at the NY Times disappears when the subject is religion. There, instead, the standard role of the journalist becomes one of the credulous, unquestioning observer. It’s evident in this new article on the revival of Catholic exorcisms, being discussed at a conference.

The purpose is not necessarily to revive the practice, the organizers say, but to help Catholic clergy members learn how to distinguish who really needs an exorcism from who really needs a psychiatrist, or perhaps some pastoral care.

That’s not a quote from one of the participants in the conference, it’s straight from the reporter, Laurie Goodstein. Does she really think there are patients who really need an exorcism rather than psychiatric care? Is demonic posession a real problem? Maybe Homeland Security should be involved, if we actually have an ongoing invasion by demonic creatures from Hell.

No critical thinking is presented in the article, and I was rather disappointed: the usual journalistic substitute for critical thinking is to scurry off and find some random person who disagrees, in order to toss one or two contrary quotes on the page. That’s what they’d do if the subject is evolution or climate change, for instance, and that’s the way so many cranks can get their words in major newspapers. We don’t even get that much here, though: just quotes from various people who think it’s perfectly ordinary for the Catholic Church to be promoting the idea of the Devil instead of dealing with the idea of, you know, real human people and real illness.

I would like to have seen at least one sentence suggesting that it’s nuts to be training witch doctors, but nope…this is the closest we get:

“What they’re trying to do in restoring exorcisms,” said Dr. Appleby, a longtime observer of the bishops, “is to strengthen and enhance what seems to be lost in the church, which is the sense that the church is not like any other institution. It is supernatural, and the key players in that are the hierarchy and the priests who can be given the faculties of exorcism.

“It’s a strategy for saying: ‘We are not the Federal Reserve, and we are not the World Council of Churches. We deal with angels and demons.’ “

OK, so the Catholic Church deals only with the unreal and nonexistent. Now if only we had media that dared to point out that angels and demons don’t exist.

“The ordinary work of the Devil is temptation,” he said, “and the ordinary response is a good spiritual life, observing the sacraments and praying. The Devil doesn’t normally possess someone who is leading a good spiritual life.”

In any other subject, if someone made a specific claim like that, I’d expect a good journalist to ask, “how do you know that?” and try to track down a credible source for such a claim about an individual. When the subject is the Devil, though, anything goes. You can say any ol’ crazy thing about Satan, and the reporter will dutifully write it down and publish it without ever stopping for a moment to wonder, “Hey, is my source just making shit up?”

Oh, well. It’s important news, I guess. “Catholics are crazier than we imagined!” should have been the front page headline.

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.