Weekend Colbert

In a few decades time, people like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert will be widely acknowledged as the heroes they are. People whose 'fake' news shows have more legitimate news and commentary than the vapid 'real' ones. Their buisiness is satire, yet they are far less disingenuous than the Serious Reporters.

And of course, most importantly of all, they are funnier than anything else on the tee vee. In fact, you can watch all kinds of Colbert videos from Colbert on Demand.



The video above was part of Colbert's Better Know a District segment, in which he aims to interview all 435 US Representatives. So far he has interviewed more than 60 - a few have been in on the joke but most have not. How can you be a high-ranking national-level politician in the US and not know who Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart are? Especially after the 2006 White House Press Correspondents' Dinner. Especially if you agree to do an interview with them. Seriously, if they are that cocooned, they are really just asking for it.

Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA-3) interviewed in the video above plans to run for governor of Georgia in 2010. I would love to see an opposition ad against him that was just the Colbert video with no commentary.


Got any fun stuff planned for the weekend?

Is Fox Even Pretending Anymore?

Watch this video, and I apologize in advance for the potentially irreparable metaphysical damage that can come from watching Bill O'Reilly:



Ooohh, pretty scary stuff! I'll bet they ride around in tinted pick-up trucks blasting Ani DiFranco, wearing designer flannels. When they lose one of their own, (maybe in a shootout with a gang of Furries?) they throw some Doc Martens over the electrical wires. Don't shoot me with your pink Glock!

There's just one problem. All of those lesbian 'crimes' did not actually happen, and no police department has found any evidence of actual 'lesbian gangs.' Literally, it is entirely fabricated. There are not 'hundreds of lesbian gangs' in every state, beating up men, converting youth to homosexuality, and raping children. (I hope I didn't need to tell you that.) The 'detective' they interview has not been a police officer for some time, and is a member of an anti-gay hate group. O'Rielly just loosened his bigotry belt, and let it all hang out.

Is Fox even trying to maintain the charade of being a legitimate news organization? Usually they try to project their delusions with slightly more subtlety.

Jesus with Dinosaurs, Part I

Religious fundamentalism is, in my view, the biggest threat to societal cohesion that we face today. Deadly serious, fatally misinformed, fundamentalists work fanatically to force their terminal world-view on others. In my hometown of Atlanta, this takes the form of one Gwinnett mother's attempt to ban Harry Potter through the courts because they "promote satanism" - even though she admits she has not read the books, and based on her court testimony, has no idea what they are about. Elsewhere, and in history, fundamentalism has more insidious manifestations. The solution to this threat? Mock the hell out of them. Nothing kills germs like sunlight and laughter.

Young-earth creationists are particularly entertaining - they insist the Earth is 6,000 years old, despite the crush of research suggesting otherwise (radiometric dating, ice cores, fossils, the size of oil/coal reserves, accumulation of erosion, cave formation, the size/nature of the universe, the hydrogen/helium proportions of the sun, and so on and so on.) They have a love-hate relationship with science, desperate to cherry pick supporting evidence, but distrustful of an enterprise that is not a priori loyal to their literalist world view. When confronted with a possible conflict to their young-earth world-view, the conflict must be reconciled to minimize the cognitive dissonance. In the case of dinosaurs, many young-earth creationists believe they are real - but were formed with the rest of the creation 6,000 years ago and lived and walked with Jesus - and are now (for whatever reason) in hiding in the deepest depths of Congolese and Amazonian jungles. The same is true of unicorns (not joking).

This has lead to a particularly interesting microgenre of art: the Jesus-with-Dinosaurs composition. Comical, compelling, and slightly disturbing, there has been a rapid growth in their appearance on fundamentalist websites. This is one my favourites:



I like how the creator has put a great big smile on the face of that pygmy brontosaurus. The image is from Conservapedia, the fundamentalist counter to Wikipedia, created because of the "bias" in Wiki, such as allowing non-US citizens and non-Christians to have input in creating articles. Although toned-down recently, many of the original Conservapedia articles were hilarious in their absurdity, such as defining Jews as (paraphrased, but very close) "people who get touchy when they hear about the holocaust" and unicorns as "controversial animals which we know exist because they are mentioned in the Bible." Good times.