ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY THE ONLY POST I’M DOING ABOUT COMMON

As you’ve no doubt heard, Bill O’Reilly didn't much care for The Daily Show's bit on Fox News phony outrage over Common (the rap artist) being invited to a White House poetry slam, and challenged Jon Stewart to a debate on The O'Reilly Factor. Stewart cheerfully accepted.

And it went pretty much the way I figured – which is to say, it resolved nothing. Stewart’s fans say he pwned Bill-O, and Bill-O fans say he made Stewart look like a blithering idiot, and absolutely nothing has changed as a result.

Which is only fair, as the whole Common “controversy” has been a non-issue from the start– which of course is why everyone at Fox News (and their viewership) is upset about it. That’s how politics works in America – it’s not about how important and crucial the issue is, it’s how emotionally charged up you can get people to be over it.

Because you can rationalize anything when yr selectively outraged. That way, it doesn’t matter if yr position has a dozen inconsistencies – what matters is how you feel about it RIGHT NOW. That, and whether the person doing the thing that outrages you emotionally is with yr party or the opposition.

Yes.

Or am I being all emo about this?

Apologies. It’s just that I’ve heard all this before. I spent most of the 80s being lectured by evangelical Christians, Tipper Gore and Charlton Heston that rock music was evil and dangerous because Motley Crue and Ozzy Osbourne and W.A.S.P. and Ice-T meant every lyric literally and had some secret agenda to covert the youth of America into devil-worshipping drug-snorting cop-killing rapists (or worse, cop rapists).

As far as I’m concerned, the people criticizing Common over his lyrics about George W Bush or Assata Shakur because they allegedly advocate cop-killing and setting Republican presidents on fire are no different from the dingbats who used to claim that “Suicide Solution” was an intentionally coded message to off yrself, or that Alice Cooper actually enjoyed having sex with dead people.

It’s exactly the same mentality – if you sing it, you advocate it, and anyone who enjoys yr work endorses it (unless it’s music you happen to like, in which case it’s an unfair comparison). Only this time, the object isn’t to censor music so much as to give Obama a hard time. Which is even more cynical, really. 

IRONY: I’m actually not a big fan of Common. I like hip-hop, and Common may have more to say than (say) Eminem, but musically I don’t find him that compelling or exciting.

That said, I’m tempted to go out and buy his latest album, just to piss off Sean Hannity.

I want to live like Common people,

This is dF

CALLING ALL PLANETS

ITEM: SETI has set up a massive radio telescope in rural West Virginia that has begun listening for signs of alien life on 86 possible Earth-like planets.

The 86 were selected from a list of 1,235 possible planets identified by NASA's Kepler space telescope, which is handy because now that the ATA is inactive due to lack of funding, they’ve just got the one Green Bank telescope for now, so it pays to narrow the field from The Known Universe to 86 planets.

Hurrah!

To celebrate, enjoy this compilation of Doctor Who aliens set to the wonderful song “There’s No Such Thing As Aliens” by Sparks.

Keep the faith,

This is dF

AREA 51: A STALIN/MENGELE PRODUCTION

Speaking of aliens …

Yr Batshit Yet Brilliant UFO Conspiracy headline of the day [via nebris]:




Answer: Yes, according to new book Area 51 by Annie Jacobsen, who claims that Stalin was inspired by Orson Wells’s radio adaptation of War of the Worlds:

According to the book, the plot started after the Soviet Union seized from Germany at the end of the war the jet-propelled, single wing Horton Ho 229 – a fighter said to be the forerunner of the modern B2 stealth bomber.

This is where Mengele enters the story. The Nazi doctor, who experimented on prisoners in Auschwitz and fled to South America after the war, was supposedly enlisted to create a crew of “grotesque, child-size aviators” in return for a eugenics laboratory.

The book says that the plane was filled with “alien-like” children, aged 12 or 13, who Stalin wanted to land in America and cause hysteria similar to the 1938 broadcast. But, the plane, remotely piloted by another aircraft, crashed and the Americans hushed up the incident.

And there you have it.

Is it true? Who cares? I wish I’d thought of this for a NaNoWriMo exercise.

Damn Commies,

This is dF