Archive for August 11, 2008

Understanding Art & Culture: You’re Doing it Wrong

“Human Events,” the internet’s intellectual toxic waste dump, has a blistering critique of Heath Ledger et al‘s The Dark Knight.  Mindless violence, they say, and there they stop, refusing to even credit, as unredemptive, the movie’s (successful) attempt to convey a message about the nature of good, evil, and how the former ought to fight the latter.

This is reason #1 why we don’t give conservatives full control over the censorship boards, and reason #1 why the law’s ban on obscenity law features an exception for “works of legitimate artistic, political, or scientific value.” Sometimes art reduces to an interesting way of expressing an interesting idea, and sometimes violence, as here, serves the useful purpose of illustrating the price of fighting evil.  But to go this deeply into the issue requires one to stop & think that, possibly, a categorial ban on expression you don’t like might not be the answer.  And we can’t trust “Human Events” to think that far through.

Creationism Would Work… But for Those Pesky Laws of Physics

A popular creationist argument – or, more accurately, rebuttal, since all of “creation science” is nothing but an attempted takedown of evolution – is that those pesky rates of radioactive decay, by which we calculate the age of the earth, are fungible.

Ah, and so is the speed of light.  To disprove methods of dating the universe, creationists have to prove that both the speed of light and the decay rates of radioactive isotopes change significantly over time.  Hilariously, they’re hard at work on the subject.  It’s not going well, but you can’t fault them for trying.

My name is Getty Images, and I approve this message

Did you watch any of the Olympics over the weekend? If you did, than you probably caught at least one, if not both campaign commercials.

The ads were a brutal battlefield of contrasting images carefully crafted to distinguish the candidates from one another. McCain’s negative and baseless attack ad and Obama’s optimistic, yet substanceless fluff piece contrasted sharply, especially when they defined the candidates’ energy policies. Since energy is such an important issue right now, voters need only look at the below images to decide who to vote for.

Ok, ok, so despite picking the same images for renewable energy (wind turbines is an obvious and effective choice), the ads were pretty different. But I laughed when I saw that the two campaigns chose the exact same video.

The turnaround time is so tight on campaign commercials that they pretty much have to be 100% stock. This particular shot comes from the ubiquitous Getty Images. Perhaps Getty should commission a few dozen more shots of wind turbines. They have over 200 clips already, but apparently only this shot over Evanston, Wyoming is presidential material.

Full commercials after the jump.

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Beating Obama Fatigue

Do you hear what I hear?

Frankly, I expected Obama to have picked a vice president by now.  Same with John McCain.  But if Obama’s waiting for just the right moment, that moment may well be now.  I’ve said before that Obama needs to focus on policy, not just to make this finally a substantive election, but also because it’s the one element of his campaign that’s lacking.  However, due to the media’s self-created, and now well-chronicled problem of “Obama fatigue,” taking the stand in defense of his hard policies may not have the effect it once could have.  How, then, to redefine the election on policy terms, instead of letting it continue to degenerate into a spin cycle, while simultaneously recovering some of his lost momentum?

Enter the mythical “Obama VP,” long-prophesied, who will, any day now, emerge from the waiting wings of the Democratic party.  The VP is typically the “attack dog” – saying the nasty things that the candidates themselves can’t say for fear of looking like a jerk.  It might be time to reconceptualize the role of the running mate, though, at least where Barack Obama is concerned.  Whoever he picks as his running mate/VP will outstrip Obama in experience, if not name recognition, and thus lend a trusted, well-informed, tried & true voice to the campaign.  Most importantly, though, it’ll be a fresh face (it won’t be Hillary).  If the media is waiting for a new issue and a new face to cover – since Obama is temporarily “overplayed,” and McCain is just… ugh – Obama’s VP could be the face to recover the media’s attention, and use that attention to refocus on hard Democratic politics.  None too soon.