Straight from the Oh-Shut-The-Fuck-Up news desk:

JERUSALEM (AP) — The outbreak of swine flu should be renamed “Mexican” influenza in deference to Muslim and Jewish sensitivities over pork, said an Israeli health official Monday.

Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman said the reference to pigs is offensive to both religions and “we should call this Mexican flu and not swine flu,” he told a news conference at a hospital in central Israel.

Both Judaism and Islam consider pigs unclean and forbid the eating of pork products.

Scientists are unsure where the new swine flu virus originally emerged, though it was identifed first in the United States. They say there is nothing about the virus that makes it “Mexican” and worry such a label would be stigmatizing.

With all the frenzy and fear and misinformation surrounding this latest pandemic, what we really need right now are a few incredibly stupid religious sensitivities rolled into the mix. 

(Via Cyn-C)

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Quickly cutting to the chase: this movie is evangelical Christian fundamentalist propaganda masquerading as sci-fi. At the end of it, when half the theater was groaning at the impossibly stupid ending, I expected hardcore fundies to start handing out pamphlets about hell and salvation. If you watch the trailer for this film, you'll think this is a tidy numerology/armageddon/slightly paranormal sci-fi thriller. You'd expect something squarely out of the M. Night Shyamalan playbook. But, no. Spoilers follow, so if you're planning to see this movie, stop here.

The single star I give this is for some respectable effects during disaster scenes. And that's it. The movie is actually reasonably entertaining until about 2/3 of the way through, where its Pentecostal underpinnings wake up and trash the entire joint. Nicholas Cage plays an MIT astrophysicist who is impossibly dopey both as a scientist and a single dad (in one of his graduate level astrophysics classes -- at MIT, remember -- he challenges his students with stumpers like "How hot is the sun?" and "What is the sun made of?"). Further coloring the image of the foolish scientist, Cage's house looks right out of Fight Club and you have to wonder what an MIT prof is doing in such squalor. Oh, right: he's depressed, drinking his money away every night after he puts his detached, creepy son to bed. Cage's character is socially retarded, aloof and friendless, awash in his decidedly unspiritual world.

Contrast that with Cage's dad's character, a Pentecostal preacher who lives in what appears to be a stately Southern plantation house, complete with abundant sunshine flowing through grand windows. The dad's character is dressed impeccably and is always within earshot of his wife, dressed equally well but likely lobotomized, as she sits on the couch and stares out the window, as if awaiting something grand. The father's deep booming voice hints at a man of conviction, whereas Cage's scattered, afflicted character seems utterly rootless.

The main plot device is page of numbers that details major human disasters, along with bodycount and geocoordinates. Cage's character discovers, through cliché smart-guy-working-late-at-night-on-a-computer scenes, that the word will be ending, um, tomorrow. Oh, and his kid hears whispers in his head, but seems utterly unfazed by them. Oh, and then a bunch of Aryan looking guys keep showing up on the edge of the forest outside of Cage's dilapidated house, and they're creepy at first but eventually just come across as a bunch of Billy Idol look-alikes with black eyes.  When Cage's character realizes the world will be ending, he rushes back to his MIT office where he discovers that one of his own calculations about a terrible solar flare in another galaxy is -- WHOOPS! Carry the one! -- really going to happen to us. Stupid scientist. Math sucks.

From there, the movie turns into an unauthorized version of Tim LaHaye's Left Behind series. Ultimately, Cage winds up in a forest clearing with his son and the daughter of another woman, and as the solar flare is beginning to ravage Earth, a spaceship appears and lands. The Billy Idol rejects suddenly turn into blue, glowing aliens, replete with cytoplasmic, ethereal wings. Cage and his son go to board the ship, but are stopped because "only those who heed the call" can be allowed to board. Cage has a stilted, tearful goodbye with his son, and then he lies on the forest floor, crying, as his son and the little girl board the ship and ascend into the heavens.

In the final scenes, we see the Earth being destroyed by solar fire while the children, up in heaven, are dressed in wedding-white linens and running through a field of amber grains, giggling like they've been huffing nitrous. They run towards a giant, shimmering, golden tree -- the tree of life -- in some of the most shameless fundamental religious imagery seen anywhere. Cage goes and reunites with his dad, who, as the world is ending, says, "This isn't the end, son. It's the beginning." Cage, the dumb man of science, suddenly realizes his spiritual self and says, "I know." Having had religion soundly trounce science, the world ends and everyone burns. But don't worry, a gaggle of all-white children are up in space eating from a giant tree and they will repopulate the world when all the jerks are dead, this time without all that silly math and science stuff.

The end. I am not kidding.

If you are a rational person, the more you think about this movie after having seen it, the angrier you get. The manipulation and imagery are so purposeful, so in-your-face, that you can't help but resent it. The numerology basis of the film could be interesting, but infused with hardcore fundamentalist quackery, quickly becomes a mockery of reason.

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What's the word that tries to explain the incongruity of what's expected to happen and what actually happens? Oh yes, irony:

Christine Maggiore, a Van Nuys woman who garnered national attention as an outspoken skeptic of the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, has died, according to the L.A. County coroner’s office. Maggiore, 52, was founder of Alive & Well AIDS Alternatives, a nonprofit that challenges “common assumptions” about AIDS. Her group’s website and toll-free hotline cater to expectant HIV-positive mothers who shun AIDS medications, want to breast-feed their babies and seek to meet others of like mind. She also had written a book on the subject, titled “What if Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong? In 2006, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office decided not to file criminal charges against Maggiore, whose daughter died the year before in what the county coroner ruled was AIDS-related pneumonia. Los Angeles police had been investigating whether Maggiore and her husband, Robin Scovill, were negligent in not testing or treating Eliza Jane Scovill for the human immunodeficiency virus before her May 2005 death.

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Here's a pharmacy in Virginia that won't sell contraceptives based on its own pro-life religious grounds. As a rule, if you walk into a pharmacy adorned with crosses and pictures of saints, you might want to go somewhere else. Just guessing. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQf0-UlkT7Y] (via Chris)

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Here's a walking, talking example of human ignorance explaining to PBS's "Now on PBS" why she dislikes Barack Obama based strictly on (incredibly irrational) "religious" grounds. Money quote: "I can't imagine a President of the United States being named President Obama. I really have a problem with that, and I'm not the only one." [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4wQfQtpDAc] This election has brought so much nonsense to the surface. I couldn't dream this stuff up if I sat here and tried. (via Chris)

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Nothing like having a fringe, young-Earth creationist a heartbeat away from the most powerful office on planet Earth.  At what point do you start to get scared, America?

Soon after Sarah Palin was elected mayor of the foothill town of Wasilla, Alaska, she startled a local music teacher by insisting in casual conversation that men and dinosaurs coexisted on an Earth created 6,000 years ago -- about 65 million years after scientists say most dinosaurs became extinct -- the teacher said.

[…]

Palin told him that "dinosaurs and humans walked the Earth at the same time," Munger said. When he asked her about prehistoric fossils and tracks dating back millions of years, Palin said "she had seen pictures of human footprints inside the tracks," recalled Munger, who teaches music at the University of Alaska in Anchorage and has regularly criticized Palin in recent years on his liberal political blog, called Progressive Alaska.

Sam Harris is right: there is a mad love of mediocrity in this country.

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Dale and Leilani Neumann refused to seek medical attention for their 11-year-old daughter, who was suffering from acute untreated diabetes.  Eventually her condition, called ketoacidosis (a lack of the proper amount of insulin in the body), became fatal.  The parents refused medical help because they thought their daughter was being attacked spiritually and that prayer was the answer.

Family and friends had urged Dale and Leilani Neumann to get help for their daughter, but the father considered the illness "a test of faith" and the mother never considered taking the girl to the doctor because she thought her daughter was under a "spiritual attack," the criminal complaint said.

Even more gruesome is what happened after the girl died.  When told that the body would be taken away the next day for autopsy, the parents replied,

"You won't need to do that. She will be alive by then."

The two parents are being charged with second-degree reckless homicide.  Anything less than a full conviction is not justice in my book.

Look, if you want to adhere to some stupefyingly twisted view of religious dogma, be my guest.  But in the process, you have no right to bring up a child in this world.  When your ridiculous beliefs affect an innocent life, then you're no less insane than the guy who takes a chainsaw to his neighbor because the voices in his head told him to.  You are the same criminal.

Link

(via kottke)

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