Highlights from the Ralph Nader Radio Hour, film critic Michael Snyder on which films to watch and which to avoid, and Pacifica Radio’s John Matthews talks about California’s effort to curb campus rape.
California’s Fight To Curb Campus Rape
R.I.P. Saturday Morning Cartoons
Saturday morning American broadcast TV was once animation’s home field. Filling a cereal bowl with artificially colored sugar pebbles and staring at the tube was every kid’s weekend plan. Not any more: For the first time in 50-plus years, you won’t find any animation on broadcast this morning. It’s the end of an era.
Yes, The CW, the final holdout in Saturday morning animation, ran its last batch of Vortexx cartoons last weekend. This week, where you once saw shows like Cubix, Sonic X, Dragon Ball Z and Kai, Digimon Fusion, and Yu-Gi-Oh!, you’ll instead find “One Magnificent Morning,” a block of live-action educational programming.
It’s the end of an era, but it’s been a long time coming: NBC ditched Saturday morning cartoons in 1992, CBS followed suit not long after, and ABC lost its animated weekend mornings in 2004. The CW, a lower-tier broadcast network, was the last holdout in a game that the Big 3 left long ago.
What killed Saturday morning cartoons? Cable, streaming, and the FCC. In the 1990s, the FCC began more strictly enforcing its rule requiring broadcast networks to provide a minimum of three hours of “educational” programming every week. Networks afraid of messing with their prime-time slots found it easiest to cram this required programming in the weekend morning slot. The actual educational content of this live-action programming is sometimes debatable, but it meets the letter of the law.
Read more here This Is the First Weekend in America With No Saturday Morning Cartoons
Us vs. Them: What’s Wrong With You People?
#ouchy #yolo
Internet, we need to talk. In a nuanced, thoughtful, intelligent way. I don’t want this to turn into some kind of knee-jerk confrontation. But it will, won’t it? You’ll end up citing the Nazis while frothing at the mouth, won’t you? That’s what you do. Every. Single. Time. What’s wrong with you, Internet? Why can’t we just agree to disagree? By which I mean, of course, agree that you’re an idiot.
There’s incensed Internet drama everywhere I look these days. Journalism drama. Publishing drama. GamerGate. Oh, GamerGate. I’ve tried to make sense of you, I really have, but every attempt drives me back to the immortal words of Cracked:
“Gentlemen,” we said amid the stunned silence, “do you realize that if what they’re saying is true, then this is still the most pointless fucking bullshit anyone has ever forced us to read?”
I love you, Internet, but sometimes it seems like you’re mostly an outrage factory. A hate-inducing tweet or blog post appears, and everyone in its target audience attacks like a school of piranha, erupting into vituperative geysers of rage and scorn — usually without ever clicking through to the primary sources, which often tell a rather more nuanced tale.
Read more here Us vs. Them: What’s Wrong With You People?
Grow Your Own Penis
Home grown dicks coming soon to a crotch near you!
Penises grown in labs are coming! Get your mind out of the gutter, you know what I mean. This will come in handy for men who have had their junk cut off by angry wives and girlfriends. Who knows, maybe one day they will create a serum that you can inject into your existing penis to make it even bigger. One can wish, right?
Researchers at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, are assessing engineered penises for safety, function and durability. They hope to receive approval from the US Food and Drug Administration and to move to human testing within five years.
Read more here Scientists ready to test lab-grown penises on men
Apocalypse Soon: Meet The Scientists Preparing For the End Times
The men were too absorbed in their work to notice my arrival at first. Three walls of the conference room held whiteboards densely filled with algebra and scribbled diagrams. One man jumped up to sketch another graph, and three colleagues crowded around to examine it more closely. Their urgency surprised me, though it probably shouldn’t have. These academics were debating what they believe could be one of the greatest threats to mankind—could superintelligent computers wipe us all out?
I was visiting the Future of Humanity Institute, a research department at Oxford University founded in 2005 to study the “big-picture questions” of human life. One of its main areas of research is existential risk. The physicists, philosophers, biologists, economists, computer scientists, and mathematicians of the institute are students of the apocalypse.
Predictions of the end of history are as old as history itself, but the 21st century poses new threats. The development of nuclear weapons marked the first time that we had the technology to end all human life. Since then, advances in synthetic biology and nanotechnology have increased the potential for human beings to do catastrophic harm by accident or through deliberate, criminal intent.
In July this year, long-forgotten vials of smallpox—a virus believed to be “dead”—were discovered at a research center near Washington, DC. Now imagine some similar incident in the future, but involving an artificially generated killer virus or nanoweapons. Some of these dangers are closer than we might care to imagine. When Syrian hackers sent a message from the Associated Press Twitter account that there had been an attack on the White House, the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock market briefly fell by $136b. What unthinkable chaos would be unleashed if someone found a way to empty people’s bank accounts?
Read more here Apocalypse Soon: Meet The Scientists Preparing For the End Times
David Goes At It With Henriette & Judy
David goes at it with Henriette Mantel and Judy Gold, plus Pacifica Radio’s John Matthew on the epidemic of rape on college campuses, and what California’s governor Jerry Brown is doing about it.