Month: March 2020

Thanks to Mike van de Water for the find!

In today’s world of Netflix, Hulu, and other streaming services, Heat Vision and Jack would have found a home and an audience. However, in 1999, when the only options were the major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox) or syndication, it never stood a chance.

There was a lot of talent behind the show:

• The titular characters: Owen Wilson as Heat Vision and Jack Black as Jack Austin
• The series “big bad”: Ron Silver as himself
• The director: Ben Stiller (who also guest-starred in the one episode that was made)
• The writers: Rob Schrab and Dan Harmon (who now write Rick and Morty)
• The theme song: Yaz’s Situation, sung by Tom Jones

The show was about the highly improbable, sci-fi flavored adventures of Jack Austin and Heat Vision:

• Jack is a former astronaut who was exposed to “inappropriate levels” of solar radiation. As a result, he gained a superpower: exposure to sunlight makes him the world’s smartest man. He’s on the run from NASA, who want to extract his brain for their own nefarious purposes.
• Heat Vision is Jack’s unemployed roommate, whose mind was transferred into his motorcycle when the series villain, Ron Silver, fired a brain-stealing ray gun at him.
• Ron Silver is both an actor and a black ops agent for NASA, charged with the task of recovering Jack’s brain. He is ruthless and seemingly indestructible.

Heat Vision and Jack was ridiculous, great fun. Thankfully, it’s been uploaded to YouTube:

And just in case you can’t get enough of that theme song:

The Trump/Pence campaign — that’s right, they want another four years to make an even bigger mess — don’t want you to see this ad featuring the evolution of Trump’s statements on COVID-19 between January 20 (No biggie) to March 22 (Totally under control):

In fact, they’re so against your seeing it that they released a cease and desist letter demanding that TV stations immediately remove the ad from rotation.

In case you needed more, here’s an (admittedly incomplete) list of Trump statements on the novel coronavirus and COID-19:

• Jan. 22: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China.”
• Feb. 2: “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China. It’s going to be fine.”
• Feb. 25: “CDC & my administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus.”
• Feb. 25: “I think that’s a problem that’s going to go away. They have studied it. They know very much. In fact, we’re very close to a vaccine.” [White House | New York Post]
• Feb. 26: “We’re going very substantially down, not up.”
• Feb. 27: “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
• Feb. 28: “We’re ordering a lot of supplies. We’re ordering a lot of, uh, elements that frankly we wouldn’t be ordering unless it was something like this. But we’re ordering a lot of different elements of medical.”
• March 2: “You take a solid flu vaccine, you don’t think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?”
• March 2: “A lot of things are happening, a lot of very exciting things are happening and they’re happening very rapidly.”
• March 4: “If we have thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work – some of them go to work, but they get better.”
• March 5: “I never said people that are feeling sick should go to work.”
• March 6: “I think we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down… a tremendous job at keeping it down.”
• March 6: “Anybody right now, and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test. And the tests are beautiful. They are perfect just like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right? This was not as perfect as that but pretty good.”
• March 6: “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”
• March 6: “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”
• March 8: “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on Coronavirus.”
• March 9: “The Fake News media & their partner, the Democrat Party, is doing everything within its semi-considerable power to inflame the Coronavirus situation.”
• March 10: “It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”
• March 13: National Emergency Declaration.
• March 17: “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”

Tap the image to see it at full size.

Thanks to Jason Amburgey for the find!

Not familiar with the thought experiment known as the Trolley Problem? Here’s an explainer:

For the longest time, the Trolley Problem was considered an abstract philosophical brain-teaser without any practical applications, but the prospect of autonomous, self driving vehicles changed that. For more about this change, see this Atlantic article: Would You Pull the Trolley Switch? Does it Matter?

I’m definitely the guy in the upper center.

On March 16th, former Texas Congressman, libertarian, and America’s worst Ayn Rand fan (which puts him up against a lot of competition) Ron Paul published an article titled The Coronavirus Hoax. It thesis is that COVID-19 may be a ploy to scare the populace into giving up freedoms in exchange for the promise to be saved by the government, a recurring theme in the monotonous litany that Randroids ceaselessly spout.

In it, he said that the reports of COVID-19’s death rate being higher than the flu as “a claim without any scientific basis,” claimed that Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infection Diseases, was “chief fearmonger of the Trump Administration,” and concluded his screed with the line “People should ask themselves whether this coronavirus ‘pandemic’ could be a big hoax.”

Republican Senator and Florida Man (in every sense of the phrase) Marco Rubio and Rand Paul having lunch together, during which time Paul was waiting for the results of his COVID-19 test. Marco, you’ve got to pick better lunch buddies.
From the Washington Post. Tap to see the source.

In a bit of irony that’s so story-like that it’ll make you suspect that we’re just characters in a novel whose writer has become bored and decided to “really liven things up,” Ron Paul’s son Rand Paul, a Republican Senator for the state of Kentucky, tested positive for COVID-19.

(And in case you still didn’t know, Rand Paul’s first name comes from Ayn Rand, because Randroids are like that. You’ll find more than a few children in Silicon Valley named after the polemicist-pretending-to-be-a-philosopher whose original name was Alisa Rosenbaum.)

Rand Paul’s office has been rather vague on when he took the test, and what he did, where he went, and whom he was in contact with between taking the test and getting the positive result, which is worrisome.

By the bye, you might not be aware that both Pauls have medical degrees. Ron was an OB-GYN and flight surgeon, and Rand was an opthalmologist. You’d think that they would know better about viruses and pandemics, but nothing about Randroids surprises me anymore.

Also worth checking out