An off-hand crack I made in my last post reminded me of one of my favorite lines from a Warner Brothers cartoon. The cartoon is A Tale of Two Kitties. It marks the first appearance of Tweety. In the cartoon, two cats — who look suspiciously like Abbott and Costello — are trying to capture Tweety. Here’s my favorite scene:

(Make sure you have the Quicktime plug-in installed. If you have any problems, let me know. Use the contact link in the sidebar. Be sure to tell me which OS and browser you use!)

The cartoon is apparently in the public domain, so you can download the cartoon in its entirety (and with a clear conscience) at Refrederator.

The Hays Office that Catstello refers to is the censorship board that enforced the motion picture Production Code. I thought it would be fun today to take a look at the Code, as a reminder of what happens under censorship.

(Don’t forget that very few movie theaters will play NC-17 movies today, and even if they do, many newspapers and TV stations will not carry ads for them. As a result, virtually no NC-17 films are made. If a picture is initially hit with an NC-17, the producers will re-edit the film to bring it down to an R. This means we still have de facto censorship today; it’s just less restrictive.)

I’ve pulled the facts below from the Wikipedia article. The comments, of course, are mine.

Provisions of the Code

Here are a few specific prohibitions:

“Nudity and suggestive dances were prohibited.” Once you start prohibiting things, the mandate gets taken to extremes. For example, the Wikipedia article on this cartoon has this ridiculous anecdote:

In the film Bugs Bunny Superstar, [director Bob] Clampett said that [Tweety’s] look was based to some extent on his own naked baby picture. He said the censors objected to the bird looking naked, so “we painted yellow feathers on him” in later cartoons, and he became the familiar canary.

That’s right, you couldn’t have a bird that appeared naked. Not that he was, he just looked that way! Of course, dozens of other cartoons had birds losing their feathers or one hungry character imagining that another character is actually a cooked (and plucked) turkey. Consistency is not a hallmark of censorship.

“The ridicule of religion was forbidden, and ministers of religion were not to be represented as comic characters or villains.” Well, there goes my whole shtick! But why should religion be given a free pass? All institutions should be subject to scrutiny. If the portrayal is negative or comic, so be it. If there is no substance to the portrayal, then it will fall flat. If there is truth to the criticism, that is one of the ways that institutions change. Only dictatorships and other oppressive regimes need to hide behind thought suppression.

“‘Revenge in modern times’ was not to be justified.” That means that in a contemporary storyline, a wronged character could not seek revenge. However, a period piece, such as a Biblical drama, could show all sorts of vengeful behavior. The Bible, after all, gave us that lovely justification for every heinous form of punishment ever devised, “an eye for an eye”. Teach those Christian values! Circumvent the Production Code! Make Bible movies!

“The sanctity of marriage and the home had to be upheld.” What is this fundie fascination with the myth of the “sanctity of marriage”? If it really were a sanctified institution, I might grant them this one, but marriage was disrespected back then as much as it is today. I suspect that there were even more marital problems back then. These days, divorce has lost its stigma, so it is easier to get out of a bad relationship. There are also fewer people getting into bad marriages in the first place, because being a single mother has also lost its stigma.

The Pre-Code Days

This may come as a surprise to you, but the United States is populated with a lot of uptight people who are offended by movies that contain the slightest deviation from what their twisted little minds consider “normal”.

A few movies in the teens and ’20s were just the tiniest bit racy by today’s standards. Back then, it must have been causing aneurysms in fundies from coast to coast. In 1915, the activist judges on the Supreme Court ruled that commercial speech was not protected by the First Amendment. Communities everywhere set up local censorship boards. Wikipedia picks up the story, in their article about the MPAA:

In 1922, the movie studio bosses hired Will H. Hays to be the first president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. A former U.S. Postmaster General and election campaign manager for U.S. President Warren G. Harding, Hays was responsible for the creation of the Production Code in 1930. Enforcement of the Code was lax until the major studios agreed — under threat of religious groups to push for stronger state and federal censorship — that all films released on or after 1 July 1934 would adhere to the Code or face a fine.

Nobody was proposing that these movies be shown in churches, yet these religious nuts somehow thought it was their business.

Life Under the Code

It sucked.

The Demise of the Code

In 1952, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned its 1915 decision and granted First Amendment protection to motion pictures. The Code stayed in effect, because it was allegedly voluntary, being a set of guidelines self-imposed by the movie producers. At least, however, government’s ability to outright threaten censorship was now gone.

Due to various economic pressures (such as television and foreign films) and the weakening of the religious nutballs’ ability to organize effective boycotts, the Code began to crack.

The whole system finally collapsed, and it was replaced in 1968 by the ratings system we have today. It’s still allegedly voluntary. As I mentioned above, NC-17 films are rare, so we have an economically-imposed censorship instead of a government-imposed one.

The Current Ratings Mess

Libertarians would argue that the market is doing what the government shouldn’t. I suppose they’re right. If there aren’t enough patrons to make certain types of movies financially viable, then those don’t get made.

The current ratings system has two problems, however. The first is that the ratings board is somewhat arbitrary. Movies get slapped with an NC-17, so the producers will shorten one scene by two seconds, and now the film gets an R. Almost every director in Hollywood has complaints about this system.

The second problem is that censorship is being imposed upon the industry by property owners (and possibly cities, but I haven’t found specific instances to cite). Many, if not most, movie theaters have restrictions in their leases that prevent them from showing NC-17 films. Well I never voted for those property owners. They have no right to restrict which movies I watch.

There is such a thing as “community standards”. That should only apply to pornography. Porn is sort of a special case. Since so many people are uptight about this stuff (I’m being sensitive to their concerns here!), society should have the right to determine where in their communities pornography can be exhibited. It should not be banned outright. I actually think that excessive violence is worse, but our society has not pigeon-holed violence the way we have porn. All non-porn films should be allowed to play in any theater anywhere.

Maybe you would argue that a community has the right to say that NC-17 films contain too much stuff that goes against their community standards, and therefore they should have the right to restrict it. I say put the NC-17 films in the theater. If you have accurately characterized your “community standards”, then nobody will go to the film, and they won’t book those anymore. If a bunch of people go see that movie, then I guess your community has different standards.

What if the property owners say that no movie above a G rating can be shown in the theater? A G-only policy would be very restrictive. It is clearly censorship. Well, so is a “no NC-17” policy.

Unrestricted access to ideas is one of our fundamental founding principles. We should defend it in all of its forms.

Happy Thanksgiving. If you were expecting an article about poultry, you’ll be disappointed to learn that the fundies are definitely giving us the bird, but not the one you wanted.

Cabbie X brought to my attention a news article about creationism in Turkey. The article is worth examining, because of the warnings it provides freedom-loving Americans.

A lavishly illustrated “Atlas of Creation” is mysteriously turning up at schools and libraries in Turkey, proclaiming that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is the real root of terrorism. […] At first sight, it looks like it could be the work of United States creationists…. But the author’s name, Harun Yahya, reveals the surprise inside. This is Islamic creationism, a richly funded movement based in predominantly Muslim Turkey which has an influence U.S. creationists could only dream of.

Your first reaction might be “Yeah, so what? It’s a Muslim country. That’s what you can expect from a theocracy.” Except remember that Turkey is a republic. As Wikipedia notes:

There is a strong tradition of secularism in Turkey. Even though the state has no official religion nor promotes any, it actively monitors the area between the religions. The constitutional rule that prohibits discrimination on religious grounds is taken very seriously.

Religion is still more tightly knit with their government than it is with ours, but they do make the attempt to keep a certain amount of separation.

With that in mind, let’s read a little more of the news article:

Creationism is so widely accepted here that Turkey placed last in a recent survey of public acceptance of evolution in 34 countries — just behind the United States.

Sort of puts things in perspective, doesn’t it? Of the 34 countries surveyed, the U.S. and Turkey were dead last in public acceptance of the fact of evolution. Both countries attempt to keep church and state separate, but they are both so overrun by the ignorant, the deluded, and the fanatical that a large percentage of their populations denies the existence of reality.

The article continues:

Scientists say pious Muslims in the government, which has its roots in political Islam, are trying to push Turkish education away from its traditionally secular approach.

Aykut Kence, biology professor at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, said time for discussing evolution had been cut out of class schedules for the eighth grade this year.

“The students will just learn there is a theory called evolution defended by Darwin back in the 19th century,” he said. “However, views of Islamic thinkers from the Middle Ages about evolution and creation have been included.”

Fundie heaven! Ted Haggard is probably creaming in the mouth of a male prostitute just thinking about that!

Here’s some fun facts from Wikipedia:

The demand for restoration of religious education in public schools began in the late 1940s. The government initially responded by authorizing religious instruction in state schools for those students whose parents requested it. Under Democrat Party rule during the 1950s, religious education was made compulsory in secondary schools unless parents made a specific request to have their children excused. Religious education was made compulsory for all primary and secondary school children in 1982.

You might think that the U.S. would never take it that far. That simply allowing prayer at a high school graduation, for example, does not inevitably lead to government-mandated Bible study in public schools. Well, just take a look at everything our fundies are trying to do:

• Insertion of “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance (they already won that one)
• Prayer at high school graduations
• Posting of the Ten Commandments in schools
• School-sanctioned religious clubs on campus
• Religious iconography in school holiday displays
• Banning of Halloween images at school
• A “moment of silence” every day in schools; but remember, that is just a temporary workaround, because they had previously pushed for…
• Flat-out daily prayer in the classroom
• Warning labels on science textbooks
• “Equal time” for “teaching both sides” of the evolution “debate”
• Teaching “intelligent design”; but remember, that is just a temporary workaround, because they had previously pushed for…
• Flat-out teaching of creationism

Those are just the ones I’ve recalled off of the top of my head.

Here’s another fun parallel from the news article:

After the [1980] coup, the conservative government thought a dose of religion could bolster the fight against the extreme left.

That doesn’t sound familiar, does it? Remember, our fundies call Diane Feinstein an extremist!

How about this tasty morsel, from the same article:

In 1985, a paragraph on creationism as an alternative to evolution was added to high school science textbooks and a U.S. book “Scientific Creationism” was translated into Turkish.

Just like Magaret Thatcher’s Britain was a prototype for the Reagan “Revolution”, modern Turkey is looking more and more like a prototype for the coming American Theocratic Revolution. Whip out your prayer rugs! Ayatollah James Dobson has climbed the tower is calling us to prayer.

Here’s more:

In the early 1990s, leading U.S. creationists came to speak at several anti-evolution conferences in Turkey.

“Several“ anti-evolution conferences? What is it? A mini-industry over there? And what are these conferences like? What are the optional recreational activities you can sign up for? Golf, tennis, sightseeing? No, I bet everybody signs up for the Mount Ararat trip!

Anyway, this news article is just another example of how religious extremists are the same everywhere. If you don’t want the United States to turn into what Turkey is today, or worse yet, what the other Islamic states have become, we must stop the fundies today. We must stop all of their attempts to impose their will upon the rest of us.

I was doing a little research on fetal development. By research, I don’t mean in a lab. If I don’t clarify that, the fundies will read that first sentence and think I’m some sort of monster.

What I mean is that I was reading stuff online about fetal development. Our ancient ancestors had tails. Our fetuses have tails at about the fourth week of development. It eventually gets absorbed into the body.

We used to be some sort of ancient primates with tails. Our environment changed, our lifestyles changed with it, the need for tails went away, so the the tails eventually evolved away.

There are three ways that I can think of that would allow the tails to disappear. The first is through a transcription error during DNA replication, and the tail gene is left out completely. This is extremely unlikely. The error correction processes are pretty good, so it is very hard for an entire gene to be left on the cutting-room floor.

The second way is through a mutation that just turns off the gene. One day out pops a baby without a tail. This is more probable than the first method, because it’s easier to turn a gene off than delete it completely.

The third way is for a gradual elimination. Through a mutation, a baby is born with a shorter-than-normal tail, which provides a survival advantage, etc. Through successive generations, the tail gradually shrinks and disappears. We still have tailbones, so obviously this is the route we travelled.

But here’s an interesting thing about genetics. Most traits are actually controlled by multiple genes. For example, one or several genes might control the length of the tail, others might control what types of muscles it contains, others might code for whether it is covered by hair, etc.

It appears that the gene that codes for the fleshy part of the human tail is still in our genetic code. The bone-genes made the tail shorter; those are still turned on. The flesh-genes were no longer needed, so they eventually got shut off.

Since there is a small error rate when copying DNA, every now and then one of those errors actually occurs in an important gene. Every great now and then, that error occurs in the tail-gene and turns it back on.

I got the above photographs from an interesting page by a guy named Mario Di Maggio. His page gives several stories of modern tail-people. One guy lives in West Bengal, and the locals think that he is the reincarnation of the Hindu monkey god Hanuman. Then there is the baby in India, who the locals think is — you guessed it — the reincarnation of the Hindu monkey god Hanuman. Religion. So predictable.

Di Maggio also has an excerpt about genetic throwbacks from Robert T. Bakker’s book, The Dinosaur Heresies. The article explains a bit about what is going on here. Here are a few choice excerpts:

[W]hen an organ has been “lost,” most of the time its blueprint is still there, in genetic storage. A wealth of evidence supports this theory of re-expression by genes that have been turned off for millions of years. Most of it occurs in throwbacks, the rare appearance of ancient organs in species that, as a whole, had lost the anatomical features millions of generations earlier.

and…

Such throwbacks even occur in human infants. Hospitals occasionally register an entirely modern-looking baby characterized by all the expected organs, plus an unexpected tail, a long, caudal appendage protruding beyond the buttocks for two or three inches. Some of these tails are even bigger than the average caudal remnant displayed by our close kin, the chimps, gorillas, and orangutans.

So, there you have it. One more pebble in the mountain of evidence supporting evolution.

There was one more tasty nugget in that article:

Birds with teeth may have appeared ridiculous to creationists, but in point of fact modern birds do carry the ancestral genetic code for making teeth tucked away in their inactive file.

Well that explains a lot. I always wondered about this guy:

I managed to find a place on the web that still has the Daily Show Gay Penguins segment. If you haven’t seen it yet, or want to watch it again, swim over to this page.

I’m not going to embed it in my page, because I don’t want to steal their bandwidth. If you have any idea who owns that site, please let me know, so I can provide proper credit.

When I was searching for the above, I also came across the campaign site for another gay penguin. This site has not been updated in two years, but it’s still amusing and worth a glance.

Those of you running Internet Explorer 6 will have noticed that the header on this page is screwy. This web site is (usually) 100% compliant with W3C XHTML standards. Your software is buggy, not this site. Microsoft has released IE7. I haven’t used it, so I don’t know if that adheres to W3C standards, either. I wouldn’t be surprised if it did’t.

You should really switch to a better browser. You’ll be glad you did. Your best bet is probably Firefox. Check that one out first. I like Camino, which is a relative of Firefox with a lean, clean interface, but it’s occasionally sluggish.

It’s like shooting in a barrel.

If I commented on every fundie misstep, I’d never get any sleep. I’ve left a few of the more famous scandals alone, because they’ve been so obvious that I doubt I could add anything funny.

Just recently, we had the Mark Foley scandal. There are all sorts of questions about the Republican response. What did they know and when did they know it? Furthermore, if Foley broke any laws, he should be dealt with. I’ll leave it to other blogs to discuss that, though. Here’s what I want you to remember (from Wikipedia):

In the House, Foley was one of the foremost opponents of child pornography. Foley had served as chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children. He introduced a bill in 2002 to outlaw web sites featuring sexually suggestive images of preteen children, saying that “these websites are nothing more than a fix for pedophiles.”

So what do we find out about this guy? He’s apparently a pedophile!

Next comes the the oh-so-pious Ted Haggard.

Here’s what I want you to remember about this guy (from Wikipedia):

Haggard has condemned homosexuality, preaching that “we don’t have to debate about what we should think about homosexual activity; it’s written in the Bible.”

Even if you haven’t been paying attention to the news in the last few days, I bet you can guess what we just found out about this guy. That’s right, he’s apparently gay!

The story goes that he had monthly “visits” for the last three years with a male prostitute, but only for massages. Don’t worry. This story has a “happy ending!” (*ahem*, sorry)

The prostitute said they engaged in sex; Haggard says they didn’t. It’s the typical “he said, he said” dilemma. Whom to believe? For added hilarity, Haggard has admitted purchasing methamphetamine from said body worker.

Haggard says that he bought the ,
but he’s no er.

He says he threw the drug away without using it. He wants us to believe that he’s a user but he isn’t. Kind of like an earlier public figure who “didn’t inhale”.

As far as the butt sex goes, he claims that he didn’t have any. He only went for a massage. I guess he wants us to believe that he “didn’t swallow”.

I don’t care what he did with the hooker; they’re both consenting adults. Nor do I care if he bought drugs; meth addiction is far worse than anything our criminal justice system could do to this guy. Imprison the dealers, but detox the users.

The problem

What upsets me (aside from the damage that Foley did to his victims) is the hypocrisy. These are both public figures that held themselves up as being morally superior, but they were the exact opposites of what they professed. The anti-child-predator crusader is (apparently) a child-predator himself. The homophobe is (apparently) a homosexual himself.

These aren’t isolated cases. We see it repeatedly. I’ve said it before, and they’re making me say it again: I’m over-generalizing a bit, but fundies have some serious repression going on.

Is it their repression of all sexual urges that causes them to be attracted to the first warm body they see when the dental dam finally bursts? Or do they have pre-existing inclinations that they shamefully try to hide from themselves by becoming fundies? (It’s probably the latter, but psychology is a dicey art at best.)

We as a society have several solutions to this ongoing problem:

1. We need to come to terms with the reality that human sexuality is a broad spectrum. There is no single “right” way to love another person. As part of this, we need to decide what is acceptable within the common values of society and what is not (the Left has already figured this out, but the Right still seems several hundred years away from catching up).
2. We need to stop listening to those who rabidly dictate public morals, based solely upon narrow, unwavering, and unthinking interpretations of 2000-year-old fantasies. Instead, listen to the reasonable moral leaders, those who consider the effects upon society of various behaviors.
3. We need to recognize that those who most strongly fear and hate people who are different from themselves may actually have deep-seated issues that they are projecting onto the world around them. Do not hate them. They need our help. Organize an intervention today!

By now, you have probably heard that YouTube was forced to remove all content from Comedy Central, as well as just about everything else. The only stuff left is about two million videos of skateboarders falling off of railings.

I do believe in copyright and intellectual property, but I believe in liberal fair use laws. The mega-corporations have bought Congress, so they are rewriting the copyright laws to severely restrict fair use.

To be “fair”, the posting of entire Daily Show segments to YouTube probably never fell under the fair use umbrella, even in the days before the corruption of the copyright laws. Nevertheless, I am bummed that I can’t watch them there anymore.

In several prior posts, I had linked to Daily Show and Colbert Report segments on YouTube. If you go to those posts now and click on the Play button, you will see that they don’t work. There is nothing wrong with your browser or this blog. The problem is giant corporations being dickish.

If that weren’t bad enough, they have to rub salt in our wounds. Comedy Central is running a commercial to promote their own web site:

Missed any shows? Now you don’t have to get it one piece at a time from some crappy blog!

Humph!

For more info about which way things are heading, visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation.