As was widely reported today, the Adult Entertainment Industry, headed by Larry Flynt and Joe Francis, asked today for a $5 billion federal bailout.  Now, obviously, some people laughed this off, but I really want us to consider this.  Is this really such a bad idea?  Could the industry survive without a bailout?  How many jobs would be created by this bailout?  Let’s take a slightly closer (but not too close–makeup can only do so much!) look at this proposal.

First, could the industry survive without this bailout?  Let’s be honest–there are always going to be people who are willing to have sex for money while professional crews film them, and there are always going to guys and girls who are looking for a little bit more.  Now, it is not up to us to question their morals.  We don’t truly know who all views porn.  We suspect that teens talk about it online while talking about sex but, unfortunately, Captain Obvious hasn’t managed to get a research grant for THAT yet.  Maybe the person viewing it is just a nice person, wanting to save  their virginity for marriage, so they watch porn to help them cope.  Maybe they’re into a fetish but don’t feel like divorcing their partner.  Maybe they’re just bored and wanting to kill time on the Internet.  The point is, we can’t judge them… but they will always exist and people will always make porn.

We gave a bailout to the car industry.  We gave a bailout to the banks.  We’re allowing crooks to run around after stealing billions of dollars.  But we won’t give the porn industry a bailout?

Hell, they’re the porn industry and they still screwed less people than the banks.

The economic affects of this cannot be understated.  A fresh supply of high resolution, extremely niche porn is required to keep the Internet going.  A few years ago Wired linked to a story that claimed less than 1% of the internet is porn, which is truly unbelievable.  How sure of it am I?  Well, I’m really sure.  Why is this?  Maybe because a Broadway Musical contains a song entitled “The Internet is for Porn.” (Youtube Link)  If the entire Internet collapsed, where would we be then?  Do you want to be responsible for the collapse of the entire Information Superhighway (with special “Porn Only” lane, of course)?  Do you want to tell your kids that you killed the greatest learning and collaboration tool ever created because you were scarred from when you found your father’s Ron Jeremy tape?  No, you don’t!  Don’t be that guy!

Of course, the $5 billion wouldn’t just go to bigger breasts on the female (and male?) entertainers.  I’m sure it would allow studios to branch out into other… more obscure, genres.  And when you finally find that one site just for you (girlshavingsexwithguyswhiletheyplayvideogamesanddrinkbeer.com), I’m sure you’ll be glad you supported it, too.

A court on Monday barred the disgraced architect of Pakistan’s atomic weapons program from speaking about nuclear proliferation, less than three weeks after he implicated the army in the sharing of nuclear technology with North Korea.

That’s right–the Pakistani court has the ability to refrain a person from talking completely about a subject because they don’t want to have to admit what happened.  Great.

There are a few disturbing bits of information that are contained in this article.  First of all, leaking any sort of researched secrets is a bad thing to do.  The fact that Khan did so obviously makes him a untrustable scientist, much like Klaus Fuchs in the early atomic age.  But more revelations made by Khan makes him seem much more innocent than originally thought.  He claims that the Pakistani government allowed the shipment of centrifuges to North Korea aboard a North Korean plane with full military knowledge.

The fact that the Pakistani government may have willing provided other countries with their own nuclear secrets is a very scary thought.  Most countries attempt to keep their nuclear secrets to themselves.  Evidently the Pakistani government thought they had something to gain when they gave out their centrifuges to North Korea.  Korea managed to produce a bomb, so I assume that is what Pakistan was going for.  Either way it’s very scary to think that Pakistan is just handing out nuclear secrets/equipment left and right…

I hate to keep a Cold-War mentality about these sort of things (especially since I wasn’t really around during the Cold War) but I can’t see how getting rid of our nuclear stockpile is going to help us in the long-term.  I personally like LGF’s comment:

He’s going to achieve this amazing feat by making sure the US adheres to nonproliferation treaties. [excerpt from article]

Because Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong-Il will look at the US adhering to those treaties, and be embarrassed into getting rid of their weapons programs.

Or something like that.

No ‘rouge’ nation/state/terrorist group/club is going to stop attempting to acquire or produce nuclear weapons because the US is sticking to treaties that we should be sticking to right now.  That’s a rather ridiculous idea, to be frank.  I would think that if a terrorist group realized that the US was no longer going to have nuclear weapons they would be more inclined to attempt to get and use a nuke against the United States.  After all, if the US doesn’t have nukes anymore it makes it much tougher for us to inflict massive amounts of damage without taking over their country and attempting to regulate it in a Western democratic style.

Obama has a great quote in the article itself:

“All of this will demand the greatest resource that America has, and that’s our people,” Obama said. “In the Cold War, we didn’t defeat the Soviets just because of the strength of our arms. We also did it because at the dawn of the atomic age and at the onset of the space race, the smartest scientists and most innovative work force was here in America.”

That’s correct.  Starting with the beginning of the Manhatten Project and ending sometime in the middle to late 20th century, America had the best scientists and engineers.  Is that honestly the case anymore?  More and more people are shying away from careers in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) and we’re rapidly losing to countries like China who send their best students to America to benefit from our great colleges.  I honestly wonder if we have the capability to make the same kind of technological advances that we made with what seemed like such ease during that period.

I’d also like to take a second to expand on my personal annoyances with Obama.  For one part, he seems to be against nuclear energy.  Then again, he’s also for nuclear energy.  Would he please pick a side?  It’s rather ridiculous.  If you’re going to be against it then just be against it.  I did get a bit of humor out of this article being that I go to Purdue, I’m in Nuclear Engineering and, oh yeah, Obama made this statement in West Lafayette.  For those who don’t know, West Lafayette is the home of Purdue as well as Indiana’s only nuclear reactor, PUR-1.  Well, at least he targeted his comments well.  I will spare everyone reading this my rant on why we don’t have more nuclear power plants–but I’m sure I’ll return to that topic eventually.

Anyhow, we’ll see if Obama actually follows through on this claim or if it’s just more pandering, this time to the more liberal sides of the party.  I can only hope that he’ll realize what a large mistake he’s making.

Before I go on my rant about why this law is absolutely ridiculous, I feel that I should quote the parts of the law here that seem most inflammatory here.  Also, please note that a parish is the Louisiana equivalent of a county in the other US States.

Section B1:

The State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, upon request of a city, parish, or other local public school board, shall allow and assist teachers, principals, and other school administrators to create and foster an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that promotes critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.

Such assistance shall include support and guidance for teachers regarding effective ways to help students understand, analyze, critique, and objectively review scientific theories being studied, including those enumerated in Paragraph (1) of this Subsection. [The previous paragraph]

Section D:

This Section shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion.

Okay, so, the groundwork of the law has been laid out.  There are a few interesting parts of this law to me.  Why did they choose to enumerate the specific topics they did?  Why did they choose such vague wording when describing the instruction of students?  Why in the hell can no one but scientists figure out what the word ‘theory’ in a scientific context means?  They’re so bent on promoting the ’scientific method’ with the damned hypothesis that you think they would use that word instead of theory.

A large problem with this law is that it puts certain ‘controversial’ topics into the law which, to be honest, is not necessary even if they’re trying to push the inclusion of creationism (or ID or whatever).  Why specify evolution, global warming, and human cloning?  As far as I know there is no ‘theory’ of human cloning.  It’s something we may or may not be trying to accomplish, but it’s not a theory.  Global Warming, as far as I know, doesn’t really have a theory attached, but I’ll let that one slide.  Evolution (and “the origins of life”) is a well established theory that, like any other theory, is subject to any new findings we happen to discover or develop on the subject.  Personally, I think that String Theory (once again, not an actual theory) is more controversial than Evolution–We have evidence of one and we have highly idealized, incomplete, mathematical models for the other.

The main problem with this law, however, is that this law puts the critiquing of well-established scientific theories into the hands of someone who may not even have a degree in their field!  A science education degree does not give a person the same amount of knowledge and authority on evolution as a degree in, say, Biology would.  Why are we allowing teachers to disagree with the scientific community at large?  Not only are they most likely wrong, but their own personal viewpoints are being pushed as facts to their students when they are, clearly, not.  There is a reason that scientific theories are scientific theories.  They have been vetted over a period of many years (usually decades) and have been proven to explain the natural actions of the universe.  It is ridiculous to think that a class of high school students could find a huge flaw in well-vetted scientific theories.  This point alone makes it very obvious what the legislators were going for.

I wish states would stop passing laws like this.  It always ends up the same way.  The law gets passed, a parent gets pissed, sues, wins.  What follows is a horribly drawn-out series of appeals in which, eventually, the parents wins out because the case finally hits a judge that realizes that ID is just repackaged creationism.  Then the school has to pay out a bunch of public tax money to lawyers, the parents, etc.  And we wonder why schools don’t have enough funding?  Oh well–now we just have to wait for the courts to overturn this and hope this doesn’t sway even more young people into believing religion because of lies marauding as science.

First of all, I wasn’t too happy when Obama announced what I call the “One-Step Forward, Two Steps Back” education plan earlier this year.  What the plan amounts to is cutting the funding on NASA’s development of their next spaceship which, by the way, is currently projected to come into service 5 years after the Space Shuttle is discontinued.  After five years Obama pledges (which means a lot) to restart the funding on the project which would put the project ten years past the decommissioning of the Space Shuttle.  I don’t understand the idea of cutting one of our most important scientific ventures for the ability to, among other things, give more pre-school access to children.  Do I think pre-school is important?  Yes.  Do I think we should be relying upon the goodwill of Russia to send our astronauts into space?  Hell no.

Now, of course, Obama has added onto the waste of the government by pledging more money to faith-based initiatives.  This is getting to be quite ridiculous.  If it involves faith, the government needs to leave it alone.  The really ridiculous part of this is that Obama wants to allow faith based groups to ’selectively’ hire and fire based on religion in their ‘non tax-payer supported’ sections.  This seems, to me, to be cruising for a problem.  The loopholes that groups could easily exploit to take advantage again boggle my mind.  If their publicly funded part had one person and their other section had the rest of their employees, they could very easily grab federal money to support both parts.  Why is the government wanting to limit this funding to religious groups?  Why not social groups?  Why not sports groups?  Why not groups based around sexual orientation?  It seems ridiculous that the religious groups get a huge wave of funding simply because they are religious.  Why do they get that free pass?

Obama differs from Bush in his public reasoning for the groups:

Obama also chose a different emphasis for why religious charities are an important answer to solving poverty and other social problems: because they better know the people who are hurting, instead of Bush’s argument that religion itself is a transforming power the government must not be afraid to harness.

(And, for the record, that’s an AP story, I hope they don’t send me a Cease and Desist Letter!)  While I don’t know if Obama is being completely truthful, I must admit that his reasoning falls in line with mine much more than Bush’s policy does.  That being said, it still sounds slightly bogus–why are religious groups that much more in tune with the poverty-stricken people than, say, a teacher group that wants to help kids in their free time?  I think that a random religious person may very possibly be less in tune with poverty than a teacher who teaches at an inner-city school (like the one I am currently employed at).

The other interesting thing is that Obama, in this speech, seemed to comment on a lot of things in addition to this, including:

• Talking about his support for expanded Electronic Eavesdropping by the Federal Government
• Talking about his plan for an Iraq pullout that has been expanded to 16 months now
• Expressing his distaste for the Supreme Court ruling that struck down a Louisiana law that allowed the state to execute criminals that rape children

Obama is certainly the Democrat candidate and it is never certain that he will follow through on his campaign promises, but this is rather scary for those who support Obama and were hoping for a candidate that was separate from the Republican tactics we have seen in the past 7 years.  He’s trying harder and harder lately to show how ‘hard’ he is on terrorism and how much he’s a centrist candidate and while that’s probably popular to the masses, it’s scary to me.