Superstition

ABC News: Science vs. politics gets down and dirty Malicious, vindictive and mean-spirited. These are words that might surface in divorce court. But they have been lobbed in the course of a different estrangement: the standoff between the Bush administration and the nation's scientific community. The relationship, which has been troubled since the dawn of the Bush presidency, hit a new low last month when Richard Carmona, surgeon general from 2002 to 2006, lashed out at his former colleagues in testimony before a House committee. Joined by former surgeons general C. Everett Koop and David Satcher, Carmona said public health reports are withheld unless they're filled with praise for the administration. "It was Surgeon General Koop who pointed out and still says today … 'Richard, we all have fought these battles, as have our predecessors going back over a century, but we have never seen it as partisan, … as vindictive, as mean-spirited as it is today, and you clearly have it worse than any of us had.' " Though Koop, who served under President Reagan, and Satcher, who was appointed by President Clinton, also spoke of political interference, it was Carmona's testimony that took lawmakers and scientists by surprise. He was, after all, the man who gave the president a hug before TV cameras when he was named surgeon general. Carmona's statements crystallized the schism between the president and many of the nation's scientists, touching off conversations within and outside the administration on how bad things have gotten, who is to blame and what this means for the future. From President Bush's televised address on Aug. 9, 2001, when he announced his intention to restrict federal spending on research on embryonic stem cells, conflicts with scientists have been a hallmark of his administration. The debates have included sex education, space exploration, contraception and global warming. "The science community now recognizes that this administration completely puts its political cart before the scientific horse," says Science magazine editor in chief Donald Kennedy, a former Food and Drug Administration chief. "We've seen it with one issue after another." "Science is Magic that works." -- Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)

Fucking In The Real World

Here's Media & Society: Fox, CBS Reject Trojan Condom-Promotion Commercial Fox and CBS recently rejected a television commercial for Trojan condoms, the New York Times reports. According to the Times, the commercial, which premiered Monday night, features women at a bar surrounded by pigs. When one pig goes to the restroom and returns with a condom purchased at a vending machine, he is transformed into an attractive man. The end of the commercial carries the message: "Evolve: Use a condom every time." Fox in a letter to Trojan said it rejected the ad because contraceptive "advertising must stress health-related uses rather than the prevention of pregnancy." CBS in a rejection wrote that the ad was not "appropriate" for the network "even with late-night only restrictions." Both networks accepted Trojan's previous campaign, which promoted condom use because of the possibility that a partner could be HIV-positive. The Times cites a 2001 report about condom advertising from the Kaiser Family Foundation that found some "networks draw a strong line between messages about disease prevention -- which may be allowed -- and those about pregnancy prevention, which may be considered controversial for religious and moral reasons." The ad will run on ABC, NBC and nine cable stations, including MTV, Comedy Central and Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. In addition, print ads will appear in 11 magazines, including Cosmopolitan and Glamour, and on seven Web sites. All of the ads highlight a Web site trojanevolve.com, the Times reports. Jim Daniels, vice president for marketing at Trojan, said the ad is more expensive than any previous campaigns, but he declined to give a specific amount. Daniels said the company's goal is to "dramatically increase" condom use in the U.S. "The 'Evolve' ad does a nice job of being humorous, but it's also a serious call to action," Daniels said, adding, "The pigs are a symbol of irresponsible sexual behavior and are juxtaposed with the condom as a responsible symbol of respect for oneself and one's partner" For some reason, this distasteful example of blatant and irresponsible hypocrisy got me to thinking about porno flicks. Really. If you're going to watch bad XXX-rated movies, I think you better have patience, an open mind, a strong gag reflex, a healthy sense of skepticism, and a bulletproof ego. If you don’t, it’s going to be very, very depressing. Unless you own a Schwarzenneger-type body, a gargantuan cock, and the sexual stamina of the Energizer Bunny, it's impossible to compete with the guys "acting" in them. Your feeble erotic dreams are a fly crashing into the hard Windshield of Reality. Sorry, no pizza delivery gal wearing high heels and tits bigger than her head is showing up at your front door anytime soon. In short, pornographic film actors are usually lousy role models. But, to be fair, there's one thing that they do correctly that their counterparts in the "legitimate" movie industry doesn't do. They use condoms. In the vulgar and brainless world of pornography (that never pretends even for a minute to be realistic), the majority of the guys fucking are using condoms. Yes, I know there a few that advertise "bareback" sex, but in those films the actors are extensively tested for STDs and HIV beforehand, and then are required to sign legal documents absolving the producers of liability. In mainstream television shows and movies, you'll see celebrities having fake sex most of the time, but condoms simply don't exist. But it's O.K. for Jack Bauer to torture people in front of your kids. (Hey, that dirty Muslim swine deserved it anyway.) So, you tell me, who's being more irresponsible? Who's teling the bigger lie?

Dicks

Gag Order A Nebraska judge bans the word rape from his courtroom. By Dahlia Lithwick Usually we leave it up to the linguists and philosophers to muse on the crazy relationship between words and their meanings. In the law, words—the important ones, at least—are defined narrowly, and judges, lawyers, and jurors are trusted to understand their meanings. It's precisely because language is so powerful in a courtroom that we treat it so reverently. Yet a Nebraska district judge, Jeffrey Cheuvront, suddenly finds himself in a war of words with attorneys on both sides of a sexual assault trial. More worrisome, he appears to be at war with language itself, and his paradoxical answer is to ban it: Last fall, Cheuvront granted a motion by defense attorneys barring the use of the words rape, sexual assault, victim, assailant, and sexual assault kit from the trial of Pamir Safi—accused of raping Tory Bowen in October 2004. Safi's first trial resulted in a hung jury last November when jurors deadlocked 7-5. Responding to Cheuvront's initial language ban—-which will be in force again when Safi is retried in July—-prosecutors upped the ante last month by seeking to have words like sex and intercourse barred from the courtroom as well. The judge denied that motion, evidently on the theory that there would be no words left to describe the sex act at all. The result is that the defense and the prosecution are both left to use the same word—-sex—-to describe either forcible sexual assault, or benign consensual intercourse. As for the jurors, they'll just have to read the witnesses' eyebrows to sort out the difference. Men don't rape women. Dicks do. But dicks never take responsibility for the horrible things that they do to women. Instead, they play the sick game of Blaming The Victim. ("That stupid bitch made me rape her!") What's worse, although dicks are too stupid to understand the word "No", they're still cunning enough to manipulative the language and give themselves an alibi. And dicks always get help from other dicks. In this barbaric interpretation of the law, Jeffrey Cheuvront proved himself to be no different than the rapist in his courthouse: That stupid bitch made me rape her again! In this case the subtext is this: We Own You. And property doesn't have any rights. Or a voice. As George Orwell wisely observed, "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity". In other words, don't piss on my face and call it rain. That's what dicks do. Go to Slate and read the rest.

Superstition

O.K., this shit is embarrassing. WASHINGTON (AP) -- A House committee launched an inquiry Tuesday over a former museum administrator's claim that the Smithsonian Institution toned down a climate change exhibit for fear of angering Congress and the Bush administration. The inquiry comes a day after The Associated Press reported that Robert Sullivan, a former associate director at the National Museum of Natural History, said Smithsonian officials softened last year's ''Arctic: A Friend Acting Strangely'' exhibit. Among other things, the exhibit's text was rewritten to inject more uncertainty into the relationship between human activity and climate change, Sullivan said. The House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming sent a letter to the Smithsonian requesting all letters and e-mails about the exhibit. The committee chairman, Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., wrote to Acting Smithsonian Secretary Cristian Samper, saying, ''It would be a tragedy if one of our nation's most revered scientific institutions were somehow complicit'' in an effort to deny scientific consensus on climate change. It's not just a "tragedy", it's suicidal. As Kurt Vonnegut observed, "Science is magic that works." To believe otherwise wastes valuable time, makes us dumber, and drags the United States culturally and economically to the status of a third-rate country. Do you think Bush is still pissed off about that C- he got in biology?