“You don’t have to be Einstein to figure out what’s going on here. The media loves scaring the shit out of us because it scores ratings and it’s no accident those Big Pharma ads come right after they’re through scaring the shit out of us. If you ask me, the biggest mistake we ever made was letting these companies hawk their wares on television.” (>>)

“Researchers generating a computer model of a woman with Barbie-doll proportions […] found that her back would be too weak to support the weight of her upper body, and her body would be too narrow to contain more than half a liver and a few centimeters of bowel. A real woman built that way would suffer from chronic diarrhea and eventually die from malnutrition.” (>>)

“Now I just glance at the Times homepage to make sure we’re not being invaded by Canada. After that I don’t care.” (>>)

“But I can’t help wondering, what would have been the reaction if Susan Boyle couldn’t sing?” (>>)

“Whereas before, torture was the ‘tool of the enemy,’ now torture is the tool of Jack Bauer. Its use is a heroic act of defiance, often of petty bureaucratic limitations, or of conceited liberals whose personal conscience means more to them than the safety of their fellow citizens. While Bauer is presented as an ultimate heroic figure (and also a figure with some heroic flaws), those who challenge use of the rough stuff are naïve, and their presence and involvement in the national security process is threatening.

“The myth of the ticking bomb is the core of the program. Torture always works. Torture always saves the day. Torture is the ultimate act of heroism, of defiance of pointy-headed liberal morality in favor of service to the greater good, to society.

“[Camus said,] ‘We must fight for the truth and we must take care not to kill it with the very weapons we use in its defense…’ This is the fundamental dilemma that ’24’ dodges. What are the values for which Jack Bauer is fighting? Is he not abdicating them by his conduct?” (>>)

“Watching Hurricane Ike come in (the storm went over my home and family in Houston) you would have thought it was the end of the world. The city of Galveston sent out an alert saying all those who did not evacuate the island faced certain death. More than twenty-thousand people stayed, and nobody died. There were six deaths in Texas related to the storm, which was a decrease from how many people would have died that night were there to have been no storm. All those cars off the streets proved safer than a storm serge and one-hundred-mile-per-hour winds. (This is not to invalidate the devastation caused by the storm, which was severe and tragic) But the media ran with the story because, perhaps, tension keeps us watching. And now that the country can be called to help out in Galveston, the media has moved on to other areas in which it can create tension and sell more advertising.” (>>)

“How many soldiers got killed in Iraq today?”
“I don’t know.”
“How many people died in Darfur today?”
“I don’t know.”
“But everyone knows Paris Hilton’s out of jail.”
“Yeah.”
“Doesn’t that strike you as fucked up?” (>>)

“During June 2005, CNN, FOXNews, NBC/MSNBC, ABC, and CBS ran 50 times as many stories about Michael Jackson and 12 times as many stories about Tom Cruise as they did about the genocide in Darfur.” (>>)