Penn and Teller: Bullshit! – Boy did we get cheated on this DVD with only two episodes from the 2006 Showtime season, whereas previous DVDs had four or five episodes each. Totally bullshit, guys. Anyway, the first program is about numbers: one, two, a few, several, many, a bunch, a lot, an assload, a s--tload, a f--ing s--tload. But numbers don’t lie, people manipulate them to mislead, such as Las Vegas’s bad math or lottery drawings (almost anything is more likely to happen to you than your winning a state-run lottery, including dying from drinking tap water).

A professional con artist demonstrates how to cheat someone out of ten dollars while making change and the scam involving a pigeon drop. Polls deceive because interview questions can be biased simply by shifting from general to specific (e.g. “Do you support free speech?” versus “Do you think it’s appropriate for students to display anything they prefer on T shirts?”) Two “experts” analyze the national debt without agreeing on any numbers (about $8 trillion versus $6.5 trillion – that breaks down to at least $23 per person per day) or percentages except the portion (20%) spent on national defense. My favorite part shows how timeshare-sales presentations are boondoggles. (I’m an expert on that subject: only fools buy into timeshares.) The second program takes on abstinence. The federal government has spent over one billion dollars in tax dollars ($176 this year alone) on various campaigns (many of them religion-based) to educate Americans, especially teenagers, that abstinence is the only sex education they need.

If these motherf--ers had their way, every school would offer pledge programs of abstinence only without any mention of condoms for sex education and Creationism in biology classes. While teen pregnancy rates have been declining in the US, this nation still has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the Western world with 800,000 teenage girls getting pregnant annually. The world standard is 8.5 sexual partners per person, even though government-sponsored literature attempts to convince us that one sexual partner is “the expected standard.” Misinformation comes in numbers, such as saying that in 1968 when only syphilis and gonorrhea were serious sexually-transmitted diseases only one in 47 Americans had an STD but now one in four Americans suffer, without mentioning that in the nearly 40 years intervening herpes has been included as an STD. Four adult virgins (two men and two women) reveal their resistance to temptation, their adherence to God’s will, waiting for the perfect person to come into their lives and expecting the first time will be awesome. Fortunately sanity is represented by Planned Parenthood and former surgeon general in the Clinton administration, Dr Elders, who says “We’ve tried ignorance” to educate America’s youths, now it’s time for a comprehensive health education that includes information about condoms, diseases, masturbation, and abstinence.

Research shows that 90% of men and 70% of women say they’ve masturbated, and the rest lied. You can’t get a venereal disease or pregnant from masturbation; it’s a natural activity (you can’t tickle yourself but infants play with their genitals for pleasure); practicing self love (not abuse) promotes health (you won’t go blind) by relieving stress and reducing the chances of prostate cancer in men. In conclusion, Penn sums up: Don’t let anything be thrust into you that you don’t choose to accept, neither someone’s dick or dogma. (A few days after we watched the DVD, I read in The Denver Post that Democratic leaders in Congress announced their intention to “let a $50 million grant program for abstinence in education expire June 30” because Title V, as the program is known, “has not proven to be effective.” Representative John Dingell, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over Title V funding, “cited a recent report to Congress that showed students in four abstinence-until-marriage programs were just as likely to have sex as those who were not in the abstinence programs. They also had sex about the same age as students who did not take part in the four programs – 14.9 years, according to Mathematica Policy Research.” Dingell and Colorado Representative Diana DeGette “said they would prefer the money be used for comprehensive sex ed programs that would include abstinence as part of the curriculum.”)

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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