Flying blind and looking for any sign of light

Flying blind and looking for any sign of light July 27, 2015

• So, this month I learned that nonprofit medical clinics that serve poor women are obliged to subsidize the medical research of large, for-profit biotech corporations — even if those corporations are imaginary. Because ethics, apparently.

That’s a new and novel ethical claim, but I will do my best to keep up.

• Former Baptist pastor and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee says that the international agreement that prevents Iran from developing a nuclear bomb is like the Holocaust and will “take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.”

For those keeping score at home, this is far from the first time that Huckabee has invoked Nazis, Hitler and the Holocaust. He has a long history of making such analogies when talking about abortion and marriage equality. But while Huck has previously said that anyone who opposes criminalizing abortion or who condones marriage for same-sex couples is just like Hitler, this is the first time he has invoked the Holocaust to criticize those who don’t want to follow up the invasion of Iraq with the invasion of Iran.

mrrobot

• I watched the first two episodes of Mr. Robot and, whether or not they keep me, they’ve got me so far. Rami Malek is mesmerizing, but what’s really hooked me is the way the story’s unreliable narrator structure keeps us off balance. “You’re only in my head,” Elliot tells us in the first episode, “Remember that.”

And we are. We’re never allowed to see some detached, “objective” view of anything in this story except what we see in his head and through his heavy, piercing, nervous eyes. Even in the scenes where he isn’t present, when we might expect some other point of view, everyone else continues to speak of “Evil Corp.” — the nickname he has mentally “overwritten” for the actual name of the Microsoft/Apple/Enron conglomerate at the rotten core of this story.

I’ve started watching closely to see if other characters interact with Christian Slater (and which ones) — thinking he might be a Tyler Durden figure. But I’m not sure that matters here. We are only in Elliot’s head, and in his head, Evil Corp. has no other name and Christian Slater is “real,” and there is no other, more reliable narrative to compare it against. Don’t know where this is going, but so far that’s a lot of fun.

• Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry has a plan to prevent shootings in movie theaters — allowing everyone to bring guns into movie theaters. Perry is either an idiot or a very shrewd man who’s just invested all of his money in Netflix.

• As an American, it’s been explained to me that the British House of Lords is like their version of the U.S. Senate. Here’s further evidence that’s an accurate description.

Via Christian Nightmares and Everything Is Terrible, here’s a bite-sized sample of a 1980s video warning of the New Age Movement, featuring CCM stars DeGarmo & Key. You may need to watch it twice, since all you may take in from the first viewing is the hair … good Lord, the hair.

That’s a fun reminder that religious right culture warriors have always been entrepreneurial — marketing and testing an endless stream of new revenue streams based on new bogeymen. Some of those can be milked for decades of direct-mail success while others — like the brief anti-New-Age fad — come and go, quickly forgotten after they begin to fade as effective fear-factors.

 


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