Regression

I've found myself getting pretty fired up lately; the incendiaries? Documentaries.

The first, Bush's War, was part of the PBS news magazine Frontline.  I have always found the Frontline series to be informative, hard hitting, and impartial and this particular episode was all three.  Following eight years of misinformation, Bush's War chronicles the buffoonery of our previous administration.  Frontline's narrator, Will Lyman,  waxes poetic about how the decisions of a misguided few lead to the loss of countless lives and resources of a future generation.  Decisions that stretched our military to the limit and created more enemies than it sought to destroy.  It sickens me to say this, but my God what a waste.  Time to tune to something lighter.

Next up, Food Inc.  The film links forty-year old changes in the fast food industry to an unforeseen evolution of the food we eat (You do believe in evolution don't you?)  The story had all the ringings of Sinclair's The Jungle; human rights violations and huge corporations controlling the food supply.  Driven by the demand of an ever growing populace and with production becoming so mechanized, our food is hardly recognizable when it arrives on store shelves.  Food Inc really made me think about what I eat, but perhaps most disturbing, was how disposable the food industry treats its farmers, employees, and customers.  Just call it culling the herd.

But perhaps most disturbing was the Nova special, Judgement Day: Intelligent Design on Trial.  Scopes Monkey Trial part two, only this time, under the beguile of "Intelligent Design"?  Quite a befitting misnomer for something that seeks to set science back more than 150 years. Championing the cause to undo Darwinism, Intelligent Design proposes that certain lifeforms simply appear by means of an "Intelligent Agent", similar to how monkeys just appear out of my butt.  I suppose a 150-year setback isn't so bad when you consider the same lunatics took nearly 500 years to accept Galileo's ideas on science.

What do the three have in common?  Politics.  I'm not one of these political fanatics; right-wing, leftist, conservative, liberal.  The extent of my political motivation is voting in the last four presidential elections, beyond that, I could give about a crap.  That is, I could give about a crap until certain groups' political ideals begin to affect me; be it pissing away eight years and leaving the country in a shambles, poisoning the food supply, or attempting to take science back to the middle ages.  While interest groups and big corporations try to inflict their wills by bidding for politicians' hands, they also impede scientific progress and our advancement as a society.  If you want to get my blood boiling, just try fleecing the country to accomplish your political, or worse yet, religious objectives.  When are we going to be allowed to learn?