So then Are Bert and Ernie Ex-Gay?

Responding to an online attempt to have Bert and Ernie get married, now that it's legal in New York, Sesame Street let it be known that Bert and Ernie are not gay. The couple – er, uh, roommates "remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation." Tell that to Tinky Winky.

Bert and Ernie have long been the targets of claims about their sexuality, so it's a surprise to hear that they have none. None. Perhaps they spent their summer recess at Marcus Bachmann's "clinic."

But Batman and Robin are still gay, right?

London Burns: Chaos Isn't As Fun As We Thought It Would Be

Readers and viewers of science fiction are familiar with stories of post-apocalyptic societies. Government authority is either non-existent or it has been reduced to some authoritarian remnant as a sliver of society tries to hold on. On the streets and in the countryside, gangs alternately destroy anyone who gets in their way and they try to defend their turf. For the good person stuck in such a place, it is hell.

Of course, in the movies and books that use such scenarios, it's hell, but exciting hell. Exhilarating. A test of brawn against brawn, with an occasional use of brain. These stories are places we can go to experience what we have not, thank goodness, had to experience in our own lives.

We have been lucky. History is full – full – of such times, pretty much everywhere in the world, where there is a breakdown in order and local gangs and warlords take over. In such situations, there is no room for brains, caution, and grace. In such situations – think of Baghdad during the botched U.S. reconstruction or Somalia today – the strong survive and the weaker ones get raped, pillaged, and/or killed. Here and there, we get a taste of other such stories in real life, even in places where the government isn't discredited and authoritarian and the situation is not post-apocalyptic. Here in the United States, we still get murder and mayhem following electric outages or unpopular courtroom rulings.

In the United Kingdom this past week, there were four days of rioting allegedly sparked by the police killing of an armed (though non-shooting) man. People have died, including most recently a 68-year-old man who tried to get some of the rioters to stop setting afire a trash bin near his apartment building. More than a million people watched the YouTube video of the innocent Malaysian kid (bleeding profusely from a broken jaw given to him when the gangs beat him up) who was "helped" to his feet by rioters, who then robbed him.


The news programs, chat shows, political scream fests, blogs, and internet forums have been filled with people trotting out excuses for the rioters. Even when they include the caveat that "I'm not defending them" or "I'm not offering excuses," they are offering excuses.

The BBC quoted the state-run Chinese newspaper China Daily: "The riots offer food for thought not just for the UK but also for other developed countries. They were the outburst and explosion of a society that has been suffering in silence and which had reached the tipping point... Those who are taking to the streets are people who have nothing to lose."

And you know what? I don't buy it. I'm not exactly on the side of the right-wingers who are saying it's all a criminal matter, but frankly I think it mostly is. It is mostly people taking advantage of the absence of law and order by running rampant and spreading chaos. With the exception of China Daily and some others, what I'm mostly hearing is a lot of comfortable white Westerners parrot the ideological line that poor people are rioting because they they're poor and have no future.

Having grown up in the United States without money, at times in HUD housing, almost always in hand-me-downs, I simply think that's not true. Even if you take away the ridiculous notion that we'd have rioted in little ol' Green Bay, Wisconsin, you're still left with the fact that in no way would my parents, schools, city government, friends, or church have condoned crime as a response to not having what I wanted or needed. Yes, people have it worse off than I did, but when we are talking about the allegedly rioting poor in the UK, we have to acknowledge that there are billions of people who are worse off than they are. Usually unspoken in this political claim, but I think it's there so I'll go ahead and criticize it anyway, is the implicit allowance of crime as a response to joblessness or poverty.

I was particularly amused when some commentator, speaking after seeing a video of hooded youths rampaging through a UK city center, said something about poverty-stricken people of color having no other outlet for their rage. Of course, even with their hoods, we got enough glimpses of the youths to see that none of them looked "of color," unless we have now expanded that politically loaded term to include pink.

The desire to grant lenience to roving street thugs who burn, loot, assault, and kill is rooted in a political ideology that is in search of evidence.

Yes, I do think there is a bit of the economic explanation that is at work in these types of things. Maybe as an initial spark, or even in the initial reluctance by authorities to crack down too hard lest they be accused of overreaching. But I do not think it's the majority of the reason a small portion of people take to murder and pillaging. That requires a certain mindset that says that violence is in any way acceptable as a response; it requires parents who don't parent, schools that don't school, churches and other religious organizations that are afraid to teach, and governments that don't lead or protect. It doesn't require, but it certainly does benefit from, a reflex reaction from many people to blame the police and defend the rioters when rioters riot.

We hear the same weak logic with regard to terrorists. The story goes: Young Muslims are reacting to a lack of hope and possibilities, so they become terrorists. Last year, Ayaan Hirsi Ali was asked about that, and her reply (and remember, she is someone who has had Islamist death threats against her for years) was: "I have a problem with that. If we find it acceptable – if we even remotely entertain the idea – that if you lose your job, that there is one way to express your misery and that is by killing other people, we are really going down."






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The Perry Rhodan Reading Project: Get Caught Up

While researching an article on Germany's long-running space opera Perry Rhodan for the next issue of my magazine Galaxis (due out in early September), I discovered The Perry Rhodan Reading Project, a very engaging and interesting blog written by Kent G. Hare. He's a professor of early European history at a university in Louisiana, and he has been reading through the Rhodan series issue by issue, starting from the beginning.

Perry Rhodan, for those of you who don't know, has produced literally thousands of books, magazines, audio books, comics, and more since it premiered in 1961.

Hare's blog is his story-by-story chronicle of the plots and his reactions to each book. He also takes the occasional detour, for example with his review of the much-derided 1967 European film version of Perry Rhodan. And it's all illustrated with some great covers of the Rhodan books and magazines.

Check out The Perry Rhodan Reading Project for more.

Stock Market Tumbles Again

Days like this make me glad that I am too poor to have a bunch of investments in the stock market. (And no, the above Apple dashboard gadget does not display my portfolio; merely stocks and indices of interest.)

So do we still want to put our all-critical Social Security retirement money into the stock market?

Oh, and just in the time it took me to write the above two paragraphs, the Dow dropped another 20 points.

Defy the Ban: Send a Student a Copy of Slaughterhouse Five

The recent move by a Republic, Missouri, school board to ban Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s anti-war classic Slaughterhouse Five is not occurring without consequence. The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library is offering to send up to 150 copies of the book to students in the high school who were going to read the book before it was banned.

The Library says, "We think it’s important for everyone to have their First Amendment rights. We’re not telling you to like the book… we just want you to read it and decide for yourself." Students can apply for the free books online at the Library's web site.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about this move by the school board is that it was done at the behest of a Missouri University professor. He reportedly objected to the book's profanity, sexual content, and perceived insults to Christianity. The school board, never one to second-guess a learned professor, agreed to ban the book with reasoning that, with one or two word substitutions, could have come from North Korean censors: The book offenses include creating "false conceptions of American history and government or that teach principles contrary to Biblical morality and truth."

Yes, Biblical morality is being used by a public school system to ban one of the most celebrated books of the past century.

You can help the Library underwrite the cost of this effort by donating to the cause. And maybe buying a copy of the book yourself, and be sure to pass it along to a young person after you're finished reading it.

Pack Up the Bags, Honey, We're Going to Jupiter!

At Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Space Launch Complex 41, a crane is lowered over the nose of the Atlas payload container enclosing the Juno spacecraft. Photo by NASA/Cory Huston

This morning, NASA is scheduled to launch its Juno spacecraft on a journey to explore the largest planet in our solar system, Jupiter. Able to look into the planet's cloudy covering, Juno might be able to learn the secrets of the gas giant. NASA says that, "The answer might confirm theories about how the solar system formed, or it may change everything we thought we knew." No danger of oversel there!

Juno won't arrive at Jupiter until August of 2016, so don't sit at your computer waiting for the Jupiter pictures. (Actually, you should sit at your computer awaiting NASA news, but in the meantime, while Juno is wending its way to Jupiter, check out the Cassini-Huygens mission reports.) By the time Juno finally arrives at Jupiter (presumably wheezing from the effort of running the entire distance), it will survey Jupiter and its moons for a year to draw up a map of its magnetic field. One of the results hoped for is the answer to whether there is a solid core underneath Jupiter's swirling clouds.

"If we could start to understand the role that Jupiter played and how the planet formed and how that eventually governed the creation of the other planets and the Earth and maybe even life itself," the mission's principal investigator, Scott Bolton, told NASA, "then we know a little bit about how to look for other Earth-like planets, maybe orbiting other stars and how common those might be and the roles that those giant planets that we see orbiting the other stars play."

I'm somewhat mentally focused on the gas giants these days, because I've been working on a pictorial spread featuring Cassini's cool Saturn visit, which will appear in the second issue of Galaxis, my free digital science & science fiction magazine. Something else to keep you busy until August 2016.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft took this true-color simulated image of Jupiter in 2000. Jupiter's little moon Europa is casting the shadow on the planet. Photo by NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Why Couldn't the New Spider-Man Be Asian?

NMA World wonders where the Asian superheroes are, in the wake of the announcement that a new Marvel Spider-Man would be part black and part Latino.



Of course, as the immortal KevJumba points out, Hollywood doesn't even want to have Asians play Asian characters:

Laugh It Up, Fuzzball

The Carol Burnett Show in the 1970s was a Saturday night fixture at my house, and at least part of the enjoyment came when one of the incredibly talented cast members would do his or her best to crack up his colleagues. An outtake:

Five Years of Rifftrax Highlights

A peek at one of my favorite sources of retail humor:

Sex and the City ... Berlin 1931, That Is

Deutsche Welle has an (English language) article about German novelist Irmgard Keun, who wrote a number of popular books, including The Artificial Silk Girl, which has been compared to Sex and the City.

I've increasingly been thinking about the idea that women in the West were more independent in the years between the world wars than they were after World War II, when they were sent back home and told to spend their time being amazed by their electric washing machines.

I haven't read The Artificial Silk Girl yet, but I've put it on my Amazon wish list. Thanks, DW.