555 KUBIK_ extended version from urbanscreen on Vimeo.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
ART- 3D Hamburger Art
This is pretty cool. It’s a presentation of 3D images projected on the façade of the Galerie der Gegenwart, the third of a trio of buildings which comprise the Hamburger Kunsthalle, an art museum in Hamburg, Germany.
TECHNOLOGY- James Randi Debunks the Audiophiles
I’ve ranted about the silliness of some high markup accessories sold in electronics stores before but I thought this was interesting.
FWIW, I’ve been an audiophile ever since my best friend in high school’s brother introduced me to the concept. I watched records become eight-tracks become cassette tapes. I bought one of the first CD players in the mid 1980s and took it to the electronics store I managed at the time to let my employees see the new paradigm in audio reproduction. I had Dolby surround when nobody knew what it was, owned a second generation VHS machine, bought a six foot projector when the light output was dismal that it required a curved glass beaded screen to be watchable, owned a few Laserdisc players, Betamax machines, DVD players and now two Blu-Ray players and an HD-DVD (that I have one movie for). In short, I’ve been around the block a few times.
But finally the quality got so good and the bullshit got so deep that I gave up the quest for the best thing out there. Nowadays pretty good is actually pretty damn fine. And while I still like for things to look and sound right I can’t work up any enthusiasm for upgrading my 720P DLP theater projector and will probably have my 1080P 72” rear projector in the living room for years, in spite of the fact that it’s almost 20” deep.
A lot of this is due to the overabundance of silly crap in audiophile circles. It’s always been there. Whether it was phonograph cartridges with exotic materials, or tube amps, or later edging your CDs with magic marker. But the reverence for high end cables has always taken the cake for me. How in the world would anybody be stupid enough to pay as much for a cable to hook up a disk player as they paid for the player itself? But in spite of simple logic (Do you think your $400 Blu-Ray player has $400 wires inside of it?) or numerous double-blind tests that prove even the most golden eared ‘philes can’t hear a difference, people still do.
So James Randi, famed magician and debunker of paranormal claims for over 40 years, has finally made the ultimate challenge. Prove you can tell the difference between a regular set of speaker wires and a set of $7,250 Pear Anjou speaker cables and he’ll give you ONE MILLION DOLLARS! The challenge has been out for three years now and nobody has taken the money.
Or, to quote the cut Googlephonics from Steve Martin’s album Comedy is Not Pretty:
I bought a Stereo! Wow! With two speakers!
But then I heard the quad with the four speakers and I was like this is it, so I got rid of the stereo and got the quad.
I’m listening to this thing and I’m like “Hey this sounds like SHIT!”
So, I got rid of that and got the dodecaphonic with the 12 speakers.
This was more to my liking…for a while.
But the ear gets pretty sophisticated pretty fast and I got rid of that and got the milliphonic with the 1,000 speakers.
And I’m listening to that one and I’m like, “Hey, this sounds like SHIT too! The other one was SHIT one, this one is SHIT too!”
So, I traded that in and got the googlephonic, which is the highest number of speakers you can have before infinity.
Sounds like SHIT!
So, then I said, “Hey, maybe it’s the needle!”
I had the typical diamond needle. I searched around got the moonrock needle, cost me 3 million bucks, but what the hey. So, now I have a googlephonic stereo with a moonrock needle.
It’s okay for a car stereo, I wouldn’t want it in my house.
FWIW, I’ve been an audiophile ever since my best friend in high school’s brother introduced me to the concept. I watched records become eight-tracks become cassette tapes. I bought one of the first CD players in the mid 1980s and took it to the electronics store I managed at the time to let my employees see the new paradigm in audio reproduction. I had Dolby surround when nobody knew what it was, owned a second generation VHS machine, bought a six foot projector when the light output was dismal that it required a curved glass beaded screen to be watchable, owned a few Laserdisc players, Betamax machines, DVD players and now two Blu-Ray players and an HD-DVD (that I have one movie for). In short, I’ve been around the block a few times.
But finally the quality got so good and the bullshit got so deep that I gave up the quest for the best thing out there. Nowadays pretty good is actually pretty damn fine. And while I still like for things to look and sound right I can’t work up any enthusiasm for upgrading my 720P DLP theater projector and will probably have my 1080P 72” rear projector in the living room for years, in spite of the fact that it’s almost 20” deep.
A lot of this is due to the overabundance of silly crap in audiophile circles. It’s always been there. Whether it was phonograph cartridges with exotic materials, or tube amps, or later edging your CDs with magic marker. But the reverence for high end cables has always taken the cake for me. How in the world would anybody be stupid enough to pay as much for a cable to hook up a disk player as they paid for the player itself? But in spite of simple logic (Do you think your $400 Blu-Ray player has $400 wires inside of it?) or numerous double-blind tests that prove even the most golden eared ‘philes can’t hear a difference, people still do.
So James Randi, famed magician and debunker of paranormal claims for over 40 years, has finally made the ultimate challenge. Prove you can tell the difference between a regular set of speaker wires and a set of $7,250 Pear Anjou speaker cables and he’ll give you ONE MILLION DOLLARS! The challenge has been out for three years now and nobody has taken the money.
Or, to quote the cut Googlephonics from Steve Martin’s album Comedy is Not Pretty:
I bought a Stereo! Wow! With two speakers!
But then I heard the quad with the four speakers and I was like this is it, so I got rid of the stereo and got the quad.
I’m listening to this thing and I’m like “Hey this sounds like SHIT!”
So, I got rid of that and got the dodecaphonic with the 12 speakers.
This was more to my liking…for a while.
But the ear gets pretty sophisticated pretty fast and I got rid of that and got the milliphonic with the 1,000 speakers.
And I’m listening to that one and I’m like, “Hey, this sounds like SHIT too! The other one was SHIT one, this one is SHIT too!”
So, I traded that in and got the googlephonic, which is the highest number of speakers you can have before infinity.
Sounds like SHIT!
So, then I said, “Hey, maybe it’s the needle!”
I had the typical diamond needle. I searched around got the moonrock needle, cost me 3 million bucks, but what the hey. So, now I have a googlephonic stereo with a moonrock needle.
It’s okay for a car stereo, I wouldn’t want it in my house.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
POLITICS- Dennis Prager Has 10 Questions About Health Care
Dennis Prager has written an article that asks 10 questions about the health care debate and postulates that no one can answer them. I haven’t said anything about health care because I’ve been waiting to see not if the Democrats were going to screw it up but how the Democrats were going to screw it up. If you think the Dems are any less beholden to money they get from the Insurance industry than the Reps are then you think the Dems weren’t equally responsible for the banking meltdown or the Iraq war. I’ve got news for you, both parties are working for the same people and those people aren’t the American public at large. That’s why Dems keep talking about needing a Bi-Partisan plan even though they have enough votes to do it unilaterally. They need some cover for the crap they are going to build into the bill to protect the insurance industry!
But Prager is just a moron. So here are the answers to his idiotic questions.
1. President Barack Obama repeatedly tells us that one reason national health care is needed is that we can no longer afford to pay for Medicare and Medicaid. But if Medicare and Medicaid are fiscally insolvent and gradually bankrupting our society, why is a government takeover of medical care for the rest of society a good idea?
Since this question (and the other nine for that matter) isn’t a question but a group of questions I’ll take each one in turn. (I used to listen to Prager’s radio show in Denver so his inability to count isn’t surprising to me.) First of all, it isn’t a “government takeover”, it’s an alternative to having a quarter of the country without health insurance. And it’s a way of having some control over costs that we are all paying anyway.
> What large-scale government program has not eventually spiraled out of control, let alone stayed within its projected budget?
This is a good point and why I’m not completely without sympathy for the Tea Party Revolutionaries and anyone else who thinks government isn’t the first, best answer to most problems. Unfortunately, we only have two choices: (1) deal with the problem or (2) ignore the problem. We’ve been ignoring the problem and that has escalated costs anyway. Unless you are happy that if you aren’t rich in our society then eventually you are going to get a major illness and when you do it’s going to take away everything you’ve been able to acquire during the course of your life then you realize we have to do something.
> Why should anyone believe that nationalizing health care would create the first major government program to "pay for itself," let alone get smaller rather than larger over time?
Because insurance companies are profitable. Saying that you don’t think the government can do it is not the same as saying that it can’t be done. Insurance companies do it.
> Why not simply see how the Democrats can reform Medicare and Medicaid before nationalizing much of the rest of health care?
Medicade and Medicare are in trouble because the population is aging. Having a universal health care system would actually help these systems by including the younger wage earning population. It’s called “dispersed risk” and it’s the reason insurance was invented in the first place.
2. President Obama reiterated this past week that "no insurance company will be allowed to deny you coverage because of a pre-existing medical condition." This is an oft-repeated goal of the president's and the Democrats' health care plan. But if any individual can buy health insurance at any time, why would anyone buy health insurance while healthy?
Because they were required to. Like they are required to buy car insurance.
> Why would I not simply wait until I got sick or injured to buy the insurance?
See above answer.
> If auto insurance were purchasable once one got into an accident, why would anyone purchase auto insurance before an accident?
Because they are required to. Why is this so hard? If you want to drive a car, you have to have insurance. If you want to live in a country where health insurance is considered a right, you have to buy health insurance. It’s no different than wanting the roads paved or the military to protect us from invaders. We all pay for the things we decide are necessary for the common welfare. It’s the purpose of government in a democracy.
> Will the Democrats next demand that life insurance companies sell life insurance to the terminally ill?
Straw man. Nobody is talking about life insurance.
> The whole point of insurance is that the healthy buy it and thereby provide the funds to pay for the sick. Demanding that insurance companies provide insurance to everyone at any time spells the end of the concept of insurance. And if the answer is that the government will now make it illegal not to buy insurance, how will that be enforced? How will the government check on 300 million people?
Uh, the way they do with taxes? And you notice that here he does realize what ‘dispersed risk’ is even though he pretended not to earlier.
3. Why do supporters of nationalized medicine so often substitute the word "care" for the word "insurance?"[?]
I don’t know why either. What we are talking about is a government run health insurance plan, not government run health care. I’m sure the Republicans would have called it something more attractive.
>[I]t is patently untrue that millions of Americans do not receive health care. Millions of Americans do not have health insurance but virtually every American (and non-American on American soil) receives health care.
And that’s the whole problem. These people are being cared for and we are all paying for it. The only difference is that we have no control over that. And the result of having no control is that most of that care is being delivered in Emergency Rooms. If you don’t have health care you don’t go to your local doctor- he’s going to tell you to fuck off. You go to the Emergency Room where they HAVE to take you. The result is that when you show up in an ER you sit in the waiting room bleeding while the treatment room you should be in is filled with the child of some welfare mother who waited until her child had been throwing up for three days before seeking treatment. Giving people who rely on ER’s for standard treatment an option, and making them use that option is the only way to keep the system working.
> No one denies that in order to come close to staying within its budget health care will be rationed. But what is the moral justification of having the state decide what medical care to ration?
Because the state has to be responsible to the whole citizenry while the insurance companies only have to be responsible to their stockholders. Do you think care isn’t rationed now? Are you familiar with the word “triage”? This claim is simply more rhetoric without understanding. Something I’ve found Prager to be full of. (As well as the other thing he’s full of.)
4. According to Dr. David Gratzer, health care specialist at the Manhattan Institute, "While 20 years ago pharmaceuticals were largely developed in Europe, European price controls made drug development an American enterprise. Fifteen of the 20 top-selling drugs worldwide this year were birthed in the United States." Given how many lives -- in America and throughout the world – American pharmaceutical companies save, and given how expensive it is to develop any new drug, will the price controls on drugs envisaged in the Democrats' bill improve or impair Americans' health?
This is the same argument the republicans use to prevent taxing the rich. If you tax the people with all the money they won’t invest it. BULLSHIT! In fact, this is bullshit squared. First of all, European drug companies were suddenly working in an environment where they didn’t have to develop new drugs to get paid, they could just import drugs from America and get paid for them. By making the European drug companies compete on a level playing field with American companies you not only spur development on both sides of the Atlantic, you stop Americans from having to bear the brunt of all the R&D for the whole world. When the rest of the world stops being able to profit from American research subsidies perhaps they will get back into the business of developing drugs and treatments.
5. Do you really believe that private insurance could survive a "public option"?
Ah! Finally we get to the heart of it. This isn’t about what’s best for America or Americans or even the world. This is all about protecting the insurance companies obscene profits.
6. Or is this really a cover for the ideal of single-payer medical care?
Huh? Personally I’m a proponent of going back to the system we had before the end of the second world war. If medicine wants to compete in the free marketplace, then let them get paid the same way everybody else does. I don’t have plumber insurance, or furniture insurance, or television insurance. When I want one of those things I pay for them. Likewise, fifty years ago if you wanted to see a doctor you paid him out of pocket. It kept costs in check. It established a meritocracy (truly great doctors could command a premium payment). And it was a free market. Is that what the conservatives want? Hell no.
> How could a private insurance company survive a "public option" given that private companies have to show a profit and government agencies do not have to – and given that a private enterprise must raise its own money to be solvent and a government option has access to others' money -- i.e., taxes?
Duh. The whole debate is about whether there should be a middle-man in healthcare who decides who lives and dies and whether they should have any accountability to the average citizen or just to making money off the deal. Leave it to Prager to miss the whole point. If insurance companies can’t compete then tough. They shouldn’t have gamed the system until they broke it.
7. Why will hospitals, doctors, and pharmaceutical companies do nearly as superb a job as they now do if their reimbursement from the government will be severely cut?
Because half of more money than you should have is better than none? Because if they wanted to be whores for money they would have been political pundits, not doctors? Because caring for the sick has always been a calling while being a propagandist for your rich masters was always a job for wanton whores?
Dennis, everybody ain’t like you. Some of us have a conscience. There have always been doctors, even when getting rich wasn’t part of the equation.
> Haven't the laws of human behavior and common sense been repealed here in arguing that while doctors, hospitals and drug companies will make significantly less money they will continue to provide the same level of uniquely excellent care?
Again, everybody isn’t like you. Some of us think that there is more to alleving human suffering than making a fat paycheck.
8. Given how many needless procedures are ordered to avoid medical lawsuits and how much money doctors spend on medical malpractice insurance, shouldn't any meaningful "reform" of health care provide some remedy for frivolous malpractice lawsuits?
My answer to this has been the same since I was in college twenty years ago in Florida, when doctors were getting out of the profession because their malpractice premiums were skyrocketing. Fifty percent of the malpractice claims at that time were against four percent of the doctors in the state! Which is easier? Getting rid of the four percent who were making all the mistakes or driving all the good doctors out of the system?
Frivolous lawsuits? Often the only way we have to weed out bad doctors is through the civil courts. You want to take away the last check and balance in a health care system run by doctors who wont censure their own even when there is compelling evidence that they are incompetent?
9. Given how weak the U.S. economy is, given how weak the U.S. dollar is, and given how much in debt the U.S. is in, why would anyone seek to have the U.S. spend another trillion dollars?
Given how we’ve gone into debt to fund a worthless war and to fund a bailout for Goldman Sachs and the other richest people in the country, how can we insure the plebeians? Agro-business subsidies? Sure! Corporate welfare? You betcha! Why is it that the Republicans always draw the line only when some regular citizens might get some good from it?
> Even if all the other questions here had legitimate answers, wouldn't the state of the U.S. economy alone argue against national health care at this time?
Again, WE ARE ALREADY PAYING FOR THE UNINSURED! Do you think when someone uninsured gets treatment that the Health Fairy pays for it? Your health care costs and insurance payments go up to pay for the treatment! The only difference is whether you want to pay a 1-2 percent surcharge for Medicare’s overhead or a 20-30 percent surcharge for the insurance industry’s overhead.
10. Contrary to the assertion of President Obama -- "we spend much more on health care than any other nation but aren't any healthier for it" -- we are healthier. We wait far less time for procedures and surgeries. Our life expectancy with virtually any major disease is longer. And if you do not count deaths from violent crime and automobile accidents, we also have the longest life expectancy. Do you think a government takeover of American medicine will enable this medical excellence to continue?
Sorry, this is just more Prager bullshit. We pay more than almost every other industrialized nation as a percent of GDP, we don’t have the longest life expectancy, and we don’t have the most access to treatment. Don’t trust me- look it us for yourself!
But Prager is just a moron. So here are the answers to his idiotic questions.
1. President Barack Obama repeatedly tells us that one reason national health care is needed is that we can no longer afford to pay for Medicare and Medicaid. But if Medicare and Medicaid are fiscally insolvent and gradually bankrupting our society, why is a government takeover of medical care for the rest of society a good idea?
Since this question (and the other nine for that matter) isn’t a question but a group of questions I’ll take each one in turn. (I used to listen to Prager’s radio show in Denver so his inability to count isn’t surprising to me.) First of all, it isn’t a “government takeover”, it’s an alternative to having a quarter of the country without health insurance. And it’s a way of having some control over costs that we are all paying anyway.
> What large-scale government program has not eventually spiraled out of control, let alone stayed within its projected budget?
This is a good point and why I’m not completely without sympathy for the Tea Party Revolutionaries and anyone else who thinks government isn’t the first, best answer to most problems. Unfortunately, we only have two choices: (1) deal with the problem or (2) ignore the problem. We’ve been ignoring the problem and that has escalated costs anyway. Unless you are happy that if you aren’t rich in our society then eventually you are going to get a major illness and when you do it’s going to take away everything you’ve been able to acquire during the course of your life then you realize we have to do something.
> Why should anyone believe that nationalizing health care would create the first major government program to "pay for itself," let alone get smaller rather than larger over time?
Because insurance companies are profitable. Saying that you don’t think the government can do it is not the same as saying that it can’t be done. Insurance companies do it.
> Why not simply see how the Democrats can reform Medicare and Medicaid before nationalizing much of the rest of health care?
Medicade and Medicare are in trouble because the population is aging. Having a universal health care system would actually help these systems by including the younger wage earning population. It’s called “dispersed risk” and it’s the reason insurance was invented in the first place.
2. President Obama reiterated this past week that "no insurance company will be allowed to deny you coverage because of a pre-existing medical condition." This is an oft-repeated goal of the president's and the Democrats' health care plan. But if any individual can buy health insurance at any time, why would anyone buy health insurance while healthy?
Because they were required to. Like they are required to buy car insurance.
> Why would I not simply wait until I got sick or injured to buy the insurance?
See above answer.
> If auto insurance were purchasable once one got into an accident, why would anyone purchase auto insurance before an accident?
Because they are required to. Why is this so hard? If you want to drive a car, you have to have insurance. If you want to live in a country where health insurance is considered a right, you have to buy health insurance. It’s no different than wanting the roads paved or the military to protect us from invaders. We all pay for the things we decide are necessary for the common welfare. It’s the purpose of government in a democracy.
> Will the Democrats next demand that life insurance companies sell life insurance to the terminally ill?
Straw man. Nobody is talking about life insurance.
> The whole point of insurance is that the healthy buy it and thereby provide the funds to pay for the sick. Demanding that insurance companies provide insurance to everyone at any time spells the end of the concept of insurance. And if the answer is that the government will now make it illegal not to buy insurance, how will that be enforced? How will the government check on 300 million people?
Uh, the way they do with taxes? And you notice that here he does realize what ‘dispersed risk’ is even though he pretended not to earlier.
3. Why do supporters of nationalized medicine so often substitute the word "care" for the word "insurance?"[?]
I don’t know why either. What we are talking about is a government run health insurance plan, not government run health care. I’m sure the Republicans would have called it something more attractive.
>[I]t is patently untrue that millions of Americans do not receive health care. Millions of Americans do not have health insurance but virtually every American (and non-American on American soil) receives health care.
And that’s the whole problem. These people are being cared for and we are all paying for it. The only difference is that we have no control over that. And the result of having no control is that most of that care is being delivered in Emergency Rooms. If you don’t have health care you don’t go to your local doctor- he’s going to tell you to fuck off. You go to the Emergency Room where they HAVE to take you. The result is that when you show up in an ER you sit in the waiting room bleeding while the treatment room you should be in is filled with the child of some welfare mother who waited until her child had been throwing up for three days before seeking treatment. Giving people who rely on ER’s for standard treatment an option, and making them use that option is the only way to keep the system working.
> No one denies that in order to come close to staying within its budget health care will be rationed. But what is the moral justification of having the state decide what medical care to ration?
Because the state has to be responsible to the whole citizenry while the insurance companies only have to be responsible to their stockholders. Do you think care isn’t rationed now? Are you familiar with the word “triage”? This claim is simply more rhetoric without understanding. Something I’ve found Prager to be full of. (As well as the other thing he’s full of.)
4. According to Dr. David Gratzer, health care specialist at the Manhattan Institute, "While 20 years ago pharmaceuticals were largely developed in Europe, European price controls made drug development an American enterprise. Fifteen of the 20 top-selling drugs worldwide this year were birthed in the United States." Given how many lives -- in America and throughout the world – American pharmaceutical companies save, and given how expensive it is to develop any new drug, will the price controls on drugs envisaged in the Democrats' bill improve or impair Americans' health?
This is the same argument the republicans use to prevent taxing the rich. If you tax the people with all the money they won’t invest it. BULLSHIT! In fact, this is bullshit squared. First of all, European drug companies were suddenly working in an environment where they didn’t have to develop new drugs to get paid, they could just import drugs from America and get paid for them. By making the European drug companies compete on a level playing field with American companies you not only spur development on both sides of the Atlantic, you stop Americans from having to bear the brunt of all the R&D for the whole world. When the rest of the world stops being able to profit from American research subsidies perhaps they will get back into the business of developing drugs and treatments.
5. Do you really believe that private insurance could survive a "public option"?
Ah! Finally we get to the heart of it. This isn’t about what’s best for America or Americans or even the world. This is all about protecting the insurance companies obscene profits.
6. Or is this really a cover for the ideal of single-payer medical care?
Huh? Personally I’m a proponent of going back to the system we had before the end of the second world war. If medicine wants to compete in the free marketplace, then let them get paid the same way everybody else does. I don’t have plumber insurance, or furniture insurance, or television insurance. When I want one of those things I pay for them. Likewise, fifty years ago if you wanted to see a doctor you paid him out of pocket. It kept costs in check. It established a meritocracy (truly great doctors could command a premium payment). And it was a free market. Is that what the conservatives want? Hell no.
> How could a private insurance company survive a "public option" given that private companies have to show a profit and government agencies do not have to – and given that a private enterprise must raise its own money to be solvent and a government option has access to others' money -- i.e., taxes?
Duh. The whole debate is about whether there should be a middle-man in healthcare who decides who lives and dies and whether they should have any accountability to the average citizen or just to making money off the deal. Leave it to Prager to miss the whole point. If insurance companies can’t compete then tough. They shouldn’t have gamed the system until they broke it.
7. Why will hospitals, doctors, and pharmaceutical companies do nearly as superb a job as they now do if their reimbursement from the government will be severely cut?
Because half of more money than you should have is better than none? Because if they wanted to be whores for money they would have been political pundits, not doctors? Because caring for the sick has always been a calling while being a propagandist for your rich masters was always a job for wanton whores?
Dennis, everybody ain’t like you. Some of us have a conscience. There have always been doctors, even when getting rich wasn’t part of the equation.
> Haven't the laws of human behavior and common sense been repealed here in arguing that while doctors, hospitals and drug companies will make significantly less money they will continue to provide the same level of uniquely excellent care?
Again, everybody isn’t like you. Some of us think that there is more to alleving human suffering than making a fat paycheck.
8. Given how many needless procedures are ordered to avoid medical lawsuits and how much money doctors spend on medical malpractice insurance, shouldn't any meaningful "reform" of health care provide some remedy for frivolous malpractice lawsuits?
My answer to this has been the same since I was in college twenty years ago in Florida, when doctors were getting out of the profession because their malpractice premiums were skyrocketing. Fifty percent of the malpractice claims at that time were against four percent of the doctors in the state! Which is easier? Getting rid of the four percent who were making all the mistakes or driving all the good doctors out of the system?
Frivolous lawsuits? Often the only way we have to weed out bad doctors is through the civil courts. You want to take away the last check and balance in a health care system run by doctors who wont censure their own even when there is compelling evidence that they are incompetent?
9. Given how weak the U.S. economy is, given how weak the U.S. dollar is, and given how much in debt the U.S. is in, why would anyone seek to have the U.S. spend another trillion dollars?
Given how we’ve gone into debt to fund a worthless war and to fund a bailout for Goldman Sachs and the other richest people in the country, how can we insure the plebeians? Agro-business subsidies? Sure! Corporate welfare? You betcha! Why is it that the Republicans always draw the line only when some regular citizens might get some good from it?
> Even if all the other questions here had legitimate answers, wouldn't the state of the U.S. economy alone argue against national health care at this time?
Again, WE ARE ALREADY PAYING FOR THE UNINSURED! Do you think when someone uninsured gets treatment that the Health Fairy pays for it? Your health care costs and insurance payments go up to pay for the treatment! The only difference is whether you want to pay a 1-2 percent surcharge for Medicare’s overhead or a 20-30 percent surcharge for the insurance industry’s overhead.
10. Contrary to the assertion of President Obama -- "we spend much more on health care than any other nation but aren't any healthier for it" -- we are healthier. We wait far less time for procedures and surgeries. Our life expectancy with virtually any major disease is longer. And if you do not count deaths from violent crime and automobile accidents, we also have the longest life expectancy. Do you think a government takeover of American medicine will enable this medical excellence to continue?
Sorry, this is just more Prager bullshit. We pay more than almost every other industrialized nation as a percent of GDP, we don’t have the longest life expectancy, and we don’t have the most access to treatment. Don’t trust me- look it us for yourself!
TELEVISION- Shatner on Palin
I hate to perpetrate a silly internet meme but this is JUST TOO GOOD.
And she might have been president!
And she might have been president!
Monday, July 27, 2009
TELEVISION- Craig Ferguson's Monologue Last Tuesday Night
Rarely do you get to see something this true on network TV.
Craig hints at another truth. Young people are also EASIER to sell crap to because they tend to be more impulsive and more prone to folly than older people.
I used to have a young friend who once said, “I’m never going to lose touch with what’s going on in youth culture as I get older.” I pointed out that being interested in the same things when you are 40 that interested you when you were 20 can be a kind of failure. As you grow older (and hopefully wiser) your interests should change. If not, you wind up being that old guy at the club who everybody else makes fun of because he’s kind of creepy. At some point you go from “still cool” to pathetic. Youth culture is only revered by the young, the dysfunctional, or people who want to sell things that more discerning adults either don’t have any interest in or time for.
Craig hints at another truth. Young people are also EASIER to sell crap to because they tend to be more impulsive and more prone to folly than older people.
I used to have a young friend who once said, “I’m never going to lose touch with what’s going on in youth culture as I get older.” I pointed out that being interested in the same things when you are 40 that interested you when you were 20 can be a kind of failure. As you grow older (and hopefully wiser) your interests should change. If not, you wind up being that old guy at the club who everybody else makes fun of because he’s kind of creepy. At some point you go from “still cool” to pathetic. Youth culture is only revered by the young, the dysfunctional, or people who want to sell things that more discerning adults either don’t have any interest in or time for.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
MOVIES- Knowing is better if you don't know, you know?
Here there be Spoilers. If you can spoil this movie by giving away any of the plot points, which all telegraph themselves so clearly as to be anticlimactic. No, the pleasure of this movie (and there is some pleasure to be enjoyed watching this movie, even if it is guilty pleasure) is simply by sitting back, putting your mind in a jar for the evening, and watching it transpire.
KNOWING is the same kind of movie that Hollywood has made a lot of lately. Pseudo-serious, pseudo-smart action flicks that try real hard to look like they have something profound to say but don’t have a single idea in their itty-bitty heads. Adaptations of Phillip K. Dick stories sort of started this trend. MINORITY REPORT, PAYCHECK, and the Cage vehicle NEXT were all examples of this type of movie. Lift the central conceit out of a Phil Dick story, ignore all the subtlety and ambiguity to dumb it down for a moviegoing audience, and fill it out with standard movie clichés (the dead wife, the estranged father, the protagonist playing the part of Cassandra as the rest of the world thinks he’s crazy, a couple of chases). Dan Brown’s DA VINCI CODE was a better-done version of this, while The National Treasure movies were among the dumber examples of this mini-genre. Take a fringe idea like that the Founding Fathers of the US were Masons and that Masons are in league with the Illuminati and the Tri-lateral Commission to run every government in the world and they put a treasure map with the location to the Masonic treasury on the back of the Declaration of Independence. (Or something. Who the hell knows what the mish-mash the plot of NATIONAL TREASURE was?) Drop in the parent sub-plot and some car chases and VIOLA! You’ve got a movie.
The “idea” in KNOWING is two-fold. First, it eschews the Cassandra motif to directly rip off the Cassandra story. Nick Cage knows the future but no one believes him and he can’t change it in spite of his foreknowledge. But that’s just smoke and mirrors for the grand larceny of the payoff. This is what science fiction readers call a “Shaggy God” story, one of the most egregious SF cliches there is. Yes, after two hours of father-son angst, scenes of someone watching late night TV with a liquor bottle in their hand as shorthand for the grief and loss of having a spouse die, Nick Cage screaming at people, rushing from place to place very quickly for no apparent reason, etc, the payoff is “And she called him Adam, and he called her Eve”. There’s even a capping scene where the future parents of mankind are running through a golden field wearing white homespun smocks toward a lone, iconic tree. All that’s left out is a serpent, which is another aspect of the “shaggy God” story- a tree of knowledge without an adversary. The story is a complete waste of space. There’s no real drama; people just say what they’re feeling. There’s no clear-cut through-line; the movie jumps from sci-fi to horror to mystery instead of taking an idea and running with it. There’s no sense of real people being informed and changed by the events of their lives; every character is the sum total of their relationship with their parents, their job, and whatever traumas they have had.
None of this is anything new for director Alex Proyas. His career has been a litany of visually interesting movies that are ambitious in concept but completely oblivious to cliché. Ironically, I still continue to watch his movies because they are so visually interesting, not because there’s going to be any meat beneath the skin. But at least he tries, which says more about how worthless most commercial films are than how great his films have been. He first came to attention with THE CROW, an adaptation of a graphic novel that was basically I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE with bad art and purple prose and enough supernatural bullshit thrown in to make it palatable for comic book sensibilities. In those aspects, the movie was a faithful adaptation of the book, except with better visuals. Next was Dark City, a better-than-average SF film that was dark and moody, brutal with it’s characters, and ultimately ended with a SF cliché that was already old when John Campbell was still editing Astounding. Then came the much maligned (and rightfully so) I, ROBOT. Again, this was him taking Campbellian SF and putting its central concept (the Three Laws of Robotics) out so he could put it through the sausage grinder of commercial movie stupidity. All these are genre movies that are visually arresting but so mired in mediocre stories that they can only manage to be a little better than average. It’s not an uncommon problem with SF films. There have been numerous SF films about the earth being hit with a comet or meteor: ARMEGEDDON, METEOR (both the 1979 and 2009 versions), and DEEP IMPACT to name a few, but nobody has bothered to adapt Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s incredible Lucifer’s Hammer. Why keep making inferior (vastly inferior) stories when such an excellent story about the scenario has already been written?
So the bottom line on KNOWING is that it’s not a bad popcorn movie but it isn’t a particularly good one. It has a good airplane crash in it, and I have a personal failing that if a movie shows me a good plane crash I feel more generous toward it than I should. (I used to have recurring dreams about seeing a plane crash when I was younger so I guess there’s something Freudian there.) And at least Proyas doesn’t lead up to the destruction of the earth and then have it saved at the last minute. (Oops, spoiler. But only if you aren’t the kind of person who would tune in for a good look at the end of the world. If you are, and I am, then it’s actually not so much a spoiler as a teaser.) Don’t expect much (And how much could you expect? Nick Cage is in it, for God’s sake! Is there a better litmus test for low expectations than that?) and you won’t be disappointed.
KNOWING is the same kind of movie that Hollywood has made a lot of lately. Pseudo-serious, pseudo-smart action flicks that try real hard to look like they have something profound to say but don’t have a single idea in their itty-bitty heads. Adaptations of Phillip K. Dick stories sort of started this trend. MINORITY REPORT, PAYCHECK, and the Cage vehicle NEXT were all examples of this type of movie. Lift the central conceit out of a Phil Dick story, ignore all the subtlety and ambiguity to dumb it down for a moviegoing audience, and fill it out with standard movie clichés (the dead wife, the estranged father, the protagonist playing the part of Cassandra as the rest of the world thinks he’s crazy, a couple of chases). Dan Brown’s DA VINCI CODE was a better-done version of this, while The National Treasure movies were among the dumber examples of this mini-genre. Take a fringe idea like that the Founding Fathers of the US were Masons and that Masons are in league with the Illuminati and the Tri-lateral Commission to run every government in the world and they put a treasure map with the location to the Masonic treasury on the back of the Declaration of Independence. (Or something. Who the hell knows what the mish-mash the plot of NATIONAL TREASURE was?) Drop in the parent sub-plot and some car chases and VIOLA! You’ve got a movie.
The “idea” in KNOWING is two-fold. First, it eschews the Cassandra motif to directly rip off the Cassandra story. Nick Cage knows the future but no one believes him and he can’t change it in spite of his foreknowledge. But that’s just smoke and mirrors for the grand larceny of the payoff. This is what science fiction readers call a “Shaggy God” story, one of the most egregious SF cliches there is. Yes, after two hours of father-son angst, scenes of someone watching late night TV with a liquor bottle in their hand as shorthand for the grief and loss of having a spouse die, Nick Cage screaming at people, rushing from place to place very quickly for no apparent reason, etc, the payoff is “And she called him Adam, and he called her Eve”. There’s even a capping scene where the future parents of mankind are running through a golden field wearing white homespun smocks toward a lone, iconic tree. All that’s left out is a serpent, which is another aspect of the “shaggy God” story- a tree of knowledge without an adversary. The story is a complete waste of space. There’s no real drama; people just say what they’re feeling. There’s no clear-cut through-line; the movie jumps from sci-fi to horror to mystery instead of taking an idea and running with it. There’s no sense of real people being informed and changed by the events of their lives; every character is the sum total of their relationship with their parents, their job, and whatever traumas they have had.
None of this is anything new for director Alex Proyas. His career has been a litany of visually interesting movies that are ambitious in concept but completely oblivious to cliché. Ironically, I still continue to watch his movies because they are so visually interesting, not because there’s going to be any meat beneath the skin. But at least he tries, which says more about how worthless most commercial films are than how great his films have been. He first came to attention with THE CROW, an adaptation of a graphic novel that was basically I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE with bad art and purple prose and enough supernatural bullshit thrown in to make it palatable for comic book sensibilities. In those aspects, the movie was a faithful adaptation of the book, except with better visuals. Next was Dark City, a better-than-average SF film that was dark and moody, brutal with it’s characters, and ultimately ended with a SF cliché that was already old when John Campbell was still editing Astounding. Then came the much maligned (and rightfully so) I, ROBOT. Again, this was him taking Campbellian SF and putting its central concept (the Three Laws of Robotics) out so he could put it through the sausage grinder of commercial movie stupidity. All these are genre movies that are visually arresting but so mired in mediocre stories that they can only manage to be a little better than average. It’s not an uncommon problem with SF films. There have been numerous SF films about the earth being hit with a comet or meteor: ARMEGEDDON, METEOR (both the 1979 and 2009 versions), and DEEP IMPACT to name a few, but nobody has bothered to adapt Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s incredible Lucifer’s Hammer. Why keep making inferior (vastly inferior) stories when such an excellent story about the scenario has already been written?
So the bottom line on KNOWING is that it’s not a bad popcorn movie but it isn’t a particularly good one. It has a good airplane crash in it, and I have a personal failing that if a movie shows me a good plane crash I feel more generous toward it than I should. (I used to have recurring dreams about seeing a plane crash when I was younger so I guess there’s something Freudian there.) And at least Proyas doesn’t lead up to the destruction of the earth and then have it saved at the last minute. (Oops, spoiler. But only if you aren’t the kind of person who would tune in for a good look at the end of the world. If you are, and I am, then it’s actually not so much a spoiler as a teaser.) Don’t expect much (And how much could you expect? Nick Cage is in it, for God’s sake! Is there a better litmus test for low expectations than that?) and you won’t be disappointed.
Friday, July 10, 2009
MOVIES- Watchmen on Blu-Ray (Twice, like Dr. Manhattan)
WATCHMEN* is being released on Blu-Ray in a couple of weeks. It’s billed as the Director’s Cut but in a strange piece of pissing-right-there-in-your-Wheaties marketing an advertisement for the Ultimate Double-Secret Super Director’s Cut is included in the box! At least there’s a $10 coupon for the more complete edition included. Or is it a coupon for K-Y Jelly?
It’s easy to be snarky about DVD marketing. Rarely is a movie released nowadays that doesn’t have at least two variations on disk. First there were the widescreen/pan-and-scan variants (disk has two sides = problem solved). Then there were the theatrical/director’s cut flavors (DVDs have this thing called Branching technology that allows them to random access different parts of the disk so different versions of the same movie can co-exist on the disk). Then there was just the constant re-release of movies, often with little or no difference even in the special materials, just new cover art. I believe much of the problem of slow acceptance of HD disk formats such as Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is due to consumers having been so burned that they figured it was just another way for Hollywood to re-sell them movies they already owned again. After years of VARIANT COVER nonsense even comics fans figured out they were being played for fools (thought Marvel and DC are still in there swinging at the low hanging fruit), can movie fans be that much stupider?
I used to say that if I wasn’t buying a movie on DVD, just licensing it’s use, then whenever a new edition came out I should be given that version either gratis or at a substantial discount. After all, I already hold a license to use it.
And that’s why it’s easy to be snarky, but it isn’t exactly fair to be, when it comes to the new WATCHMEN release. True, Warner Bros. isn’t exactly advertising that they already plan for a bigger version of the same movie to be released in less than six months but you can’t really blame them for that. And they are softening the blow for anyone unaware of the later edition by including the coupon (which harkens back to my “I already own a license” idea). There are some value-added advantages to owning the earlier Blu-Ray- such as participating in the 2009 Comic Con showing via BD Live, in addition to satisfying the childish ‘I want it NOW’ feeling we all succumb to from time to time. The special features look fantastic, it does include 24 minutes of added footage (although not the Tales of the Black Freighter story-within-a-story from the graphic novel) and Amazon is even sweetening the pot by allowing you to watch the movie via internet on the day of release if you’ve pre-ordered the disk.
My first impulse was to wait for the expanded edition. I’ve vowed that I wasn’t going to repurchase any more movies that I already own except in extreme circumstances. (Do you have any idea how many copies of Terminator 2 or Blade Runner I’ve bought since owning them on LaserDisk? Neither do I.) But since buying the version with the Black Freighter included and commentary by Dave Gibbons** is a certainty and since the net cost of the first version is only $13 on Amazon when you consider the coupon, I have to say that somebody will be getting a slightly used copy of WATCHMEN- the Director’s Cut on BD for Christmas and I’ll be buying two copies of the same movie this year after all.
* Original review of WATCHMEN here. I honestly have never figured out what all the hate was for this movie (except for the possible reasons mentioned in the review). Sure, it’s not Citizen Kane, but it’s a damn fine comic book movie and had it not been an adaptation of such a revered graphic novel I can’t imagine that it wouldn’t have done better. I loved Dark Knight, but Watchmen was everything everyone said about DK- moody, serious, literary, visually fantastic, morally ambiguous, and nuanced- only more so. Sure, I could quibble too. The soundtrack was much maligned but nobody I’ve read picked out the biggest soundtrack mistake I noticed- that if you were going to play Simon and Garfunkle over the Comedian’s funeral scene you should have played The Boxer rather than Bridge Over Troubled Water. Watchmen is one of the ten best comic book movies ever made. (In no order they are: Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, X-Men, Iron Man, SpiderMan II, SpiderMan, X-Men II, Superman II, and Road to Perdition.) If you can’t enjoy it then you need to examine why.
**…and all I have to say to Alan Moore about being such a party pooper about the whole thing is that I would have loved to hear you talk about the movie on the audio track and I would have been proud for you to be financially improved by a small bit of the money I’ve spent and will spend on the fruits of your imagination. But seriously, you’re taking yourself way too seriously. You wrote some entertaining comic book stories and, yeah, you may even be the best writer comics have ever seen. But get over yourself. Lighten up. The world would be a much better place if self-important assholes like you would just try to contribute to the total amount of fun that exists instead of going all teen-aged angsty and pouting for the last half of your life. William Faulkner went to Hollywood and wrote screenplays! Sure, he was a drunken reprobate, but in my experience drunken reprobates are more fun than egomaniacal goth “wizard” shitheads any day of the week. Why don’t you crawl up J. D. Salinger’s ass and then have him crawl up the ass of James Joyce’s rotting corpse so all of you can consider yourselves kings of infinite space there in your nutshells? In short- Fuck you, Alan Moore. What a crybaby!
It’s easy to be snarky about DVD marketing. Rarely is a movie released nowadays that doesn’t have at least two variations on disk. First there were the widescreen/pan-and-scan variants (disk has two sides = problem solved). Then there were the theatrical/director’s cut flavors (DVDs have this thing called Branching technology that allows them to random access different parts of the disk so different versions of the same movie can co-exist on the disk). Then there was just the constant re-release of movies, often with little or no difference even in the special materials, just new cover art. I believe much of the problem of slow acceptance of HD disk formats such as Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is due to consumers having been so burned that they figured it was just another way for Hollywood to re-sell them movies they already owned again. After years of VARIANT COVER nonsense even comics fans figured out they were being played for fools (thought Marvel and DC are still in there swinging at the low hanging fruit), can movie fans be that much stupider?
I used to say that if I wasn’t buying a movie on DVD, just licensing it’s use, then whenever a new edition came out I should be given that version either gratis or at a substantial discount. After all, I already hold a license to use it.
And that’s why it’s easy to be snarky, but it isn’t exactly fair to be, when it comes to the new WATCHMEN release. True, Warner Bros. isn’t exactly advertising that they already plan for a bigger version of the same movie to be released in less than six months but you can’t really blame them for that. And they are softening the blow for anyone unaware of the later edition by including the coupon (which harkens back to my “I already own a license” idea). There are some value-added advantages to owning the earlier Blu-Ray- such as participating in the 2009 Comic Con showing via BD Live, in addition to satisfying the childish ‘I want it NOW’ feeling we all succumb to from time to time. The special features look fantastic, it does include 24 minutes of added footage (although not the Tales of the Black Freighter story-within-a-story from the graphic novel) and Amazon is even sweetening the pot by allowing you to watch the movie via internet on the day of release if you’ve pre-ordered the disk.
My first impulse was to wait for the expanded edition. I’ve vowed that I wasn’t going to repurchase any more movies that I already own except in extreme circumstances. (Do you have any idea how many copies of Terminator 2 or Blade Runner I’ve bought since owning them on LaserDisk? Neither do I.) But since buying the version with the Black Freighter included and commentary by Dave Gibbons** is a certainty and since the net cost of the first version is only $13 on Amazon when you consider the coupon, I have to say that somebody will be getting a slightly used copy of WATCHMEN- the Director’s Cut on BD for Christmas and I’ll be buying two copies of the same movie this year after all.
* Original review of WATCHMEN here. I honestly have never figured out what all the hate was for this movie (except for the possible reasons mentioned in the review). Sure, it’s not Citizen Kane, but it’s a damn fine comic book movie and had it not been an adaptation of such a revered graphic novel I can’t imagine that it wouldn’t have done better. I loved Dark Knight, but Watchmen was everything everyone said about DK- moody, serious, literary, visually fantastic, morally ambiguous, and nuanced- only more so. Sure, I could quibble too. The soundtrack was much maligned but nobody I’ve read picked out the biggest soundtrack mistake I noticed- that if you were going to play Simon and Garfunkle over the Comedian’s funeral scene you should have played The Boxer rather than Bridge Over Troubled Water. Watchmen is one of the ten best comic book movies ever made. (In no order they are: Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, X-Men, Iron Man, SpiderMan II, SpiderMan, X-Men II, Superman II, and Road to Perdition.) If you can’t enjoy it then you need to examine why.
**…and all I have to say to Alan Moore about being such a party pooper about the whole thing is that I would have loved to hear you talk about the movie on the audio track and I would have been proud for you to be financially improved by a small bit of the money I’ve spent and will spend on the fruits of your imagination. But seriously, you’re taking yourself way too seriously. You wrote some entertaining comic book stories and, yeah, you may even be the best writer comics have ever seen. But get over yourself. Lighten up. The world would be a much better place if self-important assholes like you would just try to contribute to the total amount of fun that exists instead of going all teen-aged angsty and pouting for the last half of your life. William Faulkner went to Hollywood and wrote screenplays! Sure, he was a drunken reprobate, but in my experience drunken reprobates are more fun than egomaniacal goth “wizard” shitheads any day of the week. Why don’t you crawl up J. D. Salinger’s ass and then have him crawl up the ass of James Joyce’s rotting corpse so all of you can consider yourselves kings of infinite space there in your nutshells? In short- Fuck you, Alan Moore. What a crybaby!
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