Barenaked Ladies Perform The Big Bang Theory Theme at SDCC

Barenaked Ladies appeared at  the San Diago Comic-Con to perform the theme song to The Big Bang Theory. Here’s the words below (as if you don’t know them by heart).

Our whole universe was in a hot dense state,
Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started. Wait…
The Earth began to cool,
The autotrophs began to drool,
Neanderthals developed tools,
We built a wall (we built the pyramids),
Math, science, history, unraveling the mysteries,
That all started with the big bang!

“Since the dawn of man” is really not that long,
As every galaxy was formed in less time than it takes to sing this song.
A fraction of a second and the elements were made.
The bipeds stood up straight,
The dinosaurs all met their fate,
They tried to leap but they were late
And they all died (they froze their asses off)
The oceans and pangea
See ya wouldn’t wanna be ya
Set in motion by the same big bang!

It all started with the big BANG!

It’s expanding ever outward but one day
It will cause the stars to go the other way,
Collapsing ever inward, we won’t be here, it wont be hurt
Our best and brightest figure that it’ll make an even bigger bang!

Australopithecus would really have been sick of us
Debating out while here they’re catching deer (we’re catching viruses)
Religion or astronomy, Encarta, Deuteronomy
It all started with the big bang!

Music and mythology, Einstein and astrology
It all started with the big bang!
It all started with the big BANG!

Quote of the Day

“Political experts and pundits and people who know the Bushes are saying that Jeb Bush is smarter than his brother. That’s damning with faint praise, isn’t it? Who the hell isn’t smarter than his brother, for God’s sake?” —David Letterman

Daniel Schorr Dies at 93

Daniel Schorr

For those of us old enough to have lived through the Watergate era this is a huge loss. Daniel Schorr died today at age 93. Besides working at CBS during the Watergate era, Schorr worked at CNN in its early days and most recently has been a commentator for NPR.

Daniel Schorr made Richard Nixon’s “enemies list” and Nixon’s feelings toward Schorr can be seen from this excerpt from the Watergate tapes:

In White House recordings from 1971, Nixon and Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman discuss a tax investigation of Schorr in the Oval Office.

“You take a fellow like this Dan Schorr, he’s — I notice — he is always creating something, isn’t he?” Nixon said.

“Oh … He incidentally is on — you don’t, shouldn’t get involved in this, but he’s on our tax list, too,” Haldeman said.

“Good,” Nixon replied.

“They’re going after a couple of media people,” Haldeman said. “They’re going after Dan Schorr and (Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Star columnist) Mary McGrory.”

“Good,” Nixon said again.

Schorr received three Emmy Awards for his coverage of Watergate in 1972, 1973, and 1974. He also won a Peabody in 1992 for “a lifetime of uncompromising reporting of the highest integrity” and was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Society of Professional Journalists in 1991.

NPR has posted this tribute to Daniel Schorr.

Firing of Shirley Sherrod Demostrates Why Right Wing Smears Should Not Be Taken Seriously

Hopefully the premature firing of Shirley Sherrod has been a learning experience for all involved–especially anyone who pays attention to right wing smear campaigns. Media Maters has prepared a time line of the whole affair. To summarize quickly, Sherrod became a target of Andrew Breitbart. Breitbart, like Fox and other conservative attack dogs, uses material taken out of context to attack his targets. He prepared a 2 minute 38 seconds video clip which gives the impression that Sherrod, a black employee of the Department of Agriculture, was refusing to help a white farmer because of his race. The right wing noise machine quickly used this to claim there was racial discrimination in the department.

The full video provides a totally different story as described by AP:

A complete, 43-minute version of the video surfaces the next day, Tuesday, and casts a much different light on Shirley Sherrod’s comments: They were part of an NAACP speech about how she overcame her racial prejudice to help the farmer, not about prejudice that stopped her from helping him.

You would think that by now people would realize that you cannot pay any attention to such right wing smear campaigns. Unfortunately the Obama administration, which certainly should have known better, paid attention to the initial attack and Sherrod was fired. Subsequently the full story came out with both Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack and President Obama offering apologies. Sherrod was also offered another job.

The publicity surrounding this might have created a tipping point where more people recognize the dishonesty of the right wing noise machine in mind. This will hopefully lead to fewer people taking them seriously when they launch their next smear campaign, along with realizing that taking quotes out of context to suggest an entirely different meaning is a common strategy employed on the right.

Existing Laws Turned Out To Be Valuable In Hindering Times Square Bomber

It might not have just been luck which led to the failure of the bomb to go off on Times Square. As I noted yesterday, thousands could have been killed if  the plan had been successful. A report in The Wall Street Journal shows how current laws were effective in reducing the possibility that a working bomb could have been made:

Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad used inferior explosives to avoid detection, New York’s police commissioner said Tuesday, helping to explain why an international bomb plot ended up a dud…

A key question in the early stages of the investigation had been how a trained terrorist could craft such a poorly made bomb, consisting of weak fireworks, propane tanks and nonexplosive fertilizer.

“He tried to lessen the explosive nature of the fertilizer that was used because he thought he would get a higher profile as he went to buy it,” Mr. Kelly told reporters, adding that Mr. Shahzad “sort of dumbed that down.”

Mr. Shahzad also used M-88 fireworks that were much weaker than other alternatives, Mr. Kelly said.

Law enforcement agencies, particularly the Federal Bureau of Investigation, maintain a number of “tripwires” designed to encourage people who sell everyday products that could be used to make explosives to notify agents of any suspicious behavior or purchases. Mr. Shahzad was apparently so worried about the tripwires that he deliberately built a weaker, less effective bomb.

In other words, it was basic law enforcement policies which prevented a successful terrorist attack–not torture and not invading another country.

Posted in Terrorism. Tags: . 2 Comments »

Captain America Is No Flag-Waver

For several days before Comic-Con officially opened there has been lots of news, with much of it being dominated by Marvel. There has been the release of the above movie poster for Captain America, and now there is even some political controversy surrounding the movie. The shocking news is that Captain America isn’t going to be a flag-waver. The Los Angeles Times reports:

The director of “Captain America: The First Avenger,” the 2011 summer blockbuster that will coincide with the character’s 70th anniversary, says the screen version of the hero will be true to his roots — up to a certain point.

“We’re sort of putting a slightly different spin on Steve Rogers,” said Joe Johnston, whose past directing credits include “Jurassic Park III” and “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.” He’s a guy that wants to serve his country, but he’s not a flag-waver. We’re reinterpreting, sort of, what the comic book version of Steve Rogers was.”

None of that is surprising, of course — Christopher Nolan pared away significant parts of the Batman mythology (such as Robin the Boy Wonder and any super-powered villains) that didn’t fit his grim take on Gotham City, while Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr. manufactured a version of Iron Man that is hard-wired for far more humor than the old-school Marvel Comics character…

“He wants to serve his country, but he’s not this sort of jingoistic American flag-waver,” Johnston said. “He’s just a good person. We make a point of that in the script: Don’t change who you are once you go from Steve Rogers to this super-soldier; you have to stay who you are inside, that’s really what’s important more than your strength and everything. It’ll be interesting and fun to put a different spin on the character and one that the fans are really going to appreciate.”

Some pundits will pounce on all of this as another desecration of an American touchstone, but how many of them have ever read the books? The character, created by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, was certainly unconflicted about his country and its mission during the clear-cut days of the 1940s, but it didn’t always stay that way. In late 1974, for instance, in the months after President Nixon’s resignation, Steve Rogers chucked the star-spangled costume and changed his hero name to Nomad (although, by 1976, Cap and original artist Kirby had the hero in bicentennial mode).

In recent years, Marvel star writer Ed Brubaker’s work on the character has been exceptional and never two-dimensional. Brubaker (the son of a Navy intelligence officer who was stationed at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba) came to recognize that Cap is a vessel that can contain whatever any generation or reader wants to put in it. In 2007, Brubaker told the New York Daily News: “What I found is that all the really hard-core left-wing fans want Cap to be standing out on — and giving speeches on — the street corner against the George W. Bush administration, and all the really right-wing fans want him to be over in the streets of Baghdad, punching out Saddam Hussein.”

How much of a flag-waver Captain America should be depends a lot upon the era in which the story takes place. If this is to be a World War II story going back to his origins, then James Joyner has a good point:

I’ve got no problem with rebooting decades-old comic book characters and tweaking their origins to fit modern sensibilities.  After all, Marvel and DC have done this multiple times with their flagship characters.

But here’s the thing:  They’re still setting Cap’s origins in WWII and having him as an American super-soldier fighting the Nazis (including, one presumes, the Red Skull).  It would be incomprehensible for that character to be other than a flag-waving patriot, as that was simply the norm.

If Johnson were re-imagining the character with an origin in 2010, on the other hand, the change would be perfectly natural.   American soldiers fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, for example, very much think they’re the good guys.  But cynicism and ambiguity about the mission are part and parcel of their culture.

But a WWII Cap?  It doesn’t make sense.

It doesn’t completely make sense if it is to be a WWII Captain America, but I’m not certain that the entire movie deals with that era. Another consideration is that the movie is being made for modern audiences, not those of the World War II era. Just as M*A*S*H successfully took Vietnam era views and portrayed them during the Korean War, it is conceivable that a World War II era movie might be written with more modern cultural views. I think we need to suspend making a decision until we see what the actual story is and to what degree Captain America ceases to be a flag-waver.

Times Square Bomb Could Have Killed Thousands

After the attempted Times Square bomber failed to properly explode his bomb it is easy to forget how much destruction there could have been if the bomb had exploded. An FBI simulation of the effects has been published by The New York Post:

A secret FBI test of a correctly made version of the Times Square bomb revealed that it “would have killed thousands of people” if it had been made to explode as terrorists had intended, law-enforcement sources told The Post yesterday.

Had he built the Times Square device the way he had originally intended to, terrorist Faisal Shahzad, would have turned his SUV and nearby vehicles into a fatal spray of razor-sharp fragments and transformed building windows into glass guillotines hurtling to the streets, cutting down hundreds of people walking by.

The results were discovered after feds composed the type of bomb Shahzad set out to make — with the exact components he had initially intended to use — and exploded it in Pennsylvania last month.

“It would have been the biggest thing ever to happen in this country since Sept. 11,” another source said.

“It definitely would have been bigger than [the 1995] Oklahoma City” bombing of the federal building that killed 168 people, the source said. “There would have been a lot of casualties.”

“People would also have been stomped to death from running away. It would have been panic. The buildings would have been severely damaged.”

Fortunately the bomb didn’t explode and a street vendor notified authorities about the smoking vehicle.

Posted in Terrorism. Tags: . 3 Comments »

Democrats Up or Down, Depending Upon The Poll

More polls are conclusively showing only one thing–polls taken far in advance of an election are of little value (probably as most voters have not even given the election all that much thought). First there’s the polls on this year’s off year Congressional elections. Public Policy Polling finds that Barack Obama’s approval has hit a new low (as Obama continues to follow Ronald Reagan’s trajectory in the polls). The conventional wisdom is that off year elections are a referendum on the recently elected president. For this we’d expect that the Democrats would be falling behind the Republicans in the generic Congressional election. Instead the two are at a 43 percent tie.

Making matters even less clear. Gallup found that the Democrats have shot up to a six point lead over the Republicans in the generic poll. Perhaps some voters are starting to remember exactly why they voted against the Republicans in 2006 and 2008. No matter how bad the economy is, it makes no sense to vote for the party which caused this mess.

Yesterday, probably before these results were available, Nate Silver made some predictions based upon the finding that Republicans are more enthusiastic about voting at present than Democrats are. Nate looked at the odds of the Republicans taking control of the Senate:

Our latest Senate simulation has the chamber convening in 2011 with an average of 53.4 Democrats (counting Joe Lieberman and Bernie Sanders), 46.1 Republicans, and 0.5 Charlie Crists. This is an improvement for Republicans from our last forecast three weeks ago, which had 55.2 Democrats, 44.2 Republicans, and 0.6 Crists. The changes, however, predominantly reflect several methodological improvements we have made rather than any particular national momentum, although the dynamics of some individual contests are certainly evolving.

The model gives Republicans a 17 percent chance of taking over the Senate if Charlie Crist caucuses with them, up significantly from 6 percent three weeks ago. If Crist does not caucus with them, their chances of a takeover are 12 percent. However, the model does not account for the contingency that someone like Joe Lieberman or Ben Nelson could decide to switch parties, which makes their chances slightly better than we suggest here.

If the polls are inconclusive regarding the 2010 elections, polling on the 2012 election is even less clear.  For example, a recent PPP poll found Sarah Palin tied at 46 percent with Obama in a hypothetical 2012 match up. However a  Time Magazine Poll shows Obama leading Palin by 21 points, 55 percent to 34 percent. In other words, the polls show either a tie or landslide which might exceed Lyndon Johnson’s victory over Barry Goldwater.

Mark Williams Expelled From Tea Party Federation

It’s pretty bad when you are so crazy that even the crazies ostracize you. Mark Williams of Tea Party Express was thrown out of the Tea Party movement by The National Tea Party Federation for Williams’ racist writings. The last straw for Williams was  a mock letter to President Lincoln, asking for a return to slavery:

Dear Mr. Lincoln

We Colored People have taken a vote and decided that we don’t cotton to that whole emancipation thing.  Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards.  That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop!

In fact we held a big meeting and took a vote in Kansas City this week.  We voted to condemn a political revival of that old abolitionist spirit called the ‘tea party movement’.

The tea party position to “end the bailouts” for example is just silly.  Bailouts are just big money welfare and isn’t that what we want all Coloreds to strive for?  What kind of racist would want to end big money welfare?  What they need to do is start handing the bail outs directly to us coloreds!  Of course, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is the only responsible party that should be granted the right to disperse the funds.

And the ridiculous idea of “reduce[ing] the size and intrusiveness of government.”  What kind of massa would ever not want to control my life?  As Coloreds we must have somebody care for us otherwise we would be on our own, have to think for ourselves and make decisions!

The racist tea parties also demand that the government “stop the out of control spending.”  Again, they directly target Colored People.  That means we Colored People would have to compete for jobs like everybody else and that is just not right.

Perhaps the most racist point of all in the tea parties is their demand that government “stop raising our taxes.”  That is outrageous!    How will we Colored People ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn?  Totally racist!  The tea party expects coloreds to be productive members of society?

Mr. Lincoln, you were the greatest racist ever.  We had a great gig.  Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house.  Please repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments and let us get back to where we belong.

Sincerely

Precious Ben Jealous, Tom’s Nephew  National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Head Colored Person

Posted in Social Issues. Tags: , , . 3 Comments »

SciFi Weekend: The Pandorica Opens (Or As Amy Pond Would Call It, The Invasion Of The Hot Italians); Torchwood Casting News; Changes for Mad Men

The Pandorica has opened and the big surprise was that nothing was inside. Instead it was a prison designed to hold the Doctor. In recent years Doctor Who has ended with big episodes. Steven Moffat is ending the season by bringing together many of the Doctors enemies, including Daleks and Cybermen. Instead of them acting with evil intent, they believe they are acting to protect the universe by locking up the Doctor, who they think is behind the cracks in the universe.

The episode started out with scenes involving many of the characters from previous episodes as a message for the Doctor is ultimately rerouted by the Tardis to the prison where River Song is being held. A message is sent about a  vision from Van Gough demonstrated by a  painting showing the Tardis exploding. This was hidden away until found by British forces during World War II and taken to  Winston Churchill, who naturally tried to make a phone call to the Doctor.

A lot happened once the Doctor and River got back together. They traveled back to 102  AD, which Amy Pond described as the invasion of hot Italians–when ancient Romans invaded England. Later in the episode River returned to the present and found that the Romans were actually recreations from a book in Amy’s bedroom. This was all a trap created from images in Amy’s mind. The images included Rory,who was also revived as a Roman. Unfortunately the Romans turned into Autons and the episode ended with Rory appearing to kill Amy. Besides this fate for Amy, and the Doctor being locked in the Pandorica, River was aboard the exploding Tardis, as all the stars in the sky were going out and the universe was coming to an end.

I don’t want to say too much about the episode and risk spoiling the conclusion (which already aired a month earlier on BBC America). There’s plenty of time to talk about fez hats next week. I can’t resist one nitpick. If  the Doctor went back to 102 AD,  wouldn’t Stonehenge have looked different back then?

There’s also one key lesson from the Doctor to keep in mind: Nothing is ever forgotten, not completely. And if something can be remembered, it can come back.”

Next week: The Big Bang. I’ve also been holding back information on the Christmas Special as this would spoil the conclusion of The Big Bang.

Ausiello has some information on the new characters being added to Torchwood:

Among the casting intel I’ve gathered on the new season (airing on my new favorite cable network, Starz), the show is out to cast a new series regular — Rex Matheson, a wickedly funny (operative word: wicked) CIA agent born to make waves. Almost as key to the new season are recurring characters Esther Katusi, a CIA grunt in her early 20s who learns what she’s really made of only when she’s forced to, and Oswald Jones, a convicted murderer and pedophile who will be as shocked as anyone to learn how easily infamy and fame can be exchanged for one another.

There’s similar information from TV Guide:

And Starz’s new season of Torchwood is shaping up with the search for one series regular and two supporting roles. Rex Matheson is a white, twenty-something CIA agent who sounds sort of like FX’s animated Archer spy: a fearless, cocky thrill seeker. Recurring characters include Esther Katusi, a newbie Watch Analyst in the CIA who is deeply (and secretly) in love with Rex. And Oswald Jones is the dangerous psychotic villain. He’s a forty-something murderer and pedophile who gets sprung from the slammer into the spotlight. Rex — catch this sicko!

Mad Men is returning with major changes which were set up last season. Don Draper has lost Betty. Will this lead to better stories of Don Draper chasing women, or is an important element of the story lost when he is no longer cheating? There’s also a new start up firm, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.

I hope they pull it off. Sometimes losing some of the stable anchors for a show hurts. Dallas was never the same when J. R. Ewing lost both Sue Ellen and Ewing Oil was broken up. On the other hand, Thirtysomething did fine after the Michael and Elliot company folded. This ultimately led to bringing in Miles Drentell, which was a big plus for the series. Of course Michael still was with Hope.