Monthly Archives: June 2007

Watch your language: please stop saying “covered”

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My letter to Michael Moore:

I just saw you on “Now” and you make an impassioned case for eliminating the health care insurance industry, the largest extractive industry in this country, and yet you keep talking about getting everyone “covered”. Why don’t you talk about getting everyone “care” or “treatment” or “cured”? If we eliminate the insurance industry, we eliminate “coverage” and can just focus on care!
Keep up the good work!

Let’s see what happens…

…Follow Up: I immediately got this message back:

   ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
<mmflint@aol.com>

   ----- Transcript of session follows -----
... while talking to air-xa02.mail.aol.com.:
>>> RCPT To:<mmflint@aol.com>
<<< 552 mmflint MAILBOX FULL
554 <mmflint@aol.com>... Service unavailable

Oh well…try again later.

Memories

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Three years ago this evening, my mother passed away.  I thought of this today, quite by accident.  I was clearing out old boxes of mail and what-not, and I came across the old cards of condolence.  As I read each one before consigning it to the recycling pile, it suddenly dawned on me what day it was — the third anniversary of her passing.

Helen Louise Byers - Graduation Photo

Here, then, is a link to a journal I kept of the last 25 days of her life.  I have just forced myself to re-read it, and have used up the better part of a box of Kleenex in the process…

E.J. Tells it like it is!

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court.jpg

I have been struggling with how, and whether, to address the shameful series of decisions recent of the Supreme Court. The fears of reasonable people everywhere that the 2000 appointment of Bush to the presidency would lead to a jaundiced court have come true in a stark and dreadful way. E.J. Dionne, Jr. has hit the nail on the head in his column today:

If another conservative replaces a member of the court’s
moderate-to-liberal bloc, the country will be set on a conservative
course for the next decade or more, locking in today’s politics at the
very moment when the electorate is running out of patience with the
right.
That’s why a majority of senators should warn Bush now that they will not take up his nominee unless he strictly construes the Constitution’s provision that he appoint justices with “the Advice and Consent of the Senate.” The rule should be: If the advice isn’t taken, there will be no consent.
And if conservatives claim to believe the president is owed deference on his court appointees, they will be — I choose this word deliberately — lying. In 2005 conservatives had no problem blocking Bush’s appointment of Harriet Miers because they could not count on her to be a strong voice for their legal causes. They revealed that their view of judicial battles is not about principle but power. When they went after Miers, conservatives lost the deference argument.
E. J. Dionne Jr. – Not One More Roberts or Alito – washingtonpost.com

Open Source Politics — Part Deux

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Via /. this Marketing Blog posting from Douglas Karr on the Presidential candidates (declared and not) and what their websites are running on.

So that got me wondering… what are the other candidates’ sites running? Does this provide some insight into their overall candidacy?
Is the next President of the United States running Linux? | The Marketing Technology Blog

Interesting is the balance between the parties. While the whole field is pretty much evenly split between Windows (43%) and Linux/FreeBSD (57%) the split by party is Republicans, Windows (69%) to Linux (31%); Dems Windows (10%) to Linux/FreeBSD (90%). The lone Dem using Windows is, predictably, Hillary Clinton.

How They Found Us

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Wit of the staircase has a regular feature that we like, “How They Found Us” in which Wit relates some of the search terms which led net-stumblers to alight on her site. We emulate that here.

dick_cheney.jpg

First off, the search with the highest “Ew” factor: DICK CHANEY CROTCH We can’t even begin to guess what they were thinking when they keyed that monstor in!

Alexandra Kosteniuk

And our favorite, which has been used dozens of times: pawn sex

Sanity in the UK

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darwin_ape.jpg

By way of /. and The Register, we today find this beacon of sanity from the British government, in response to an electronic petition on the topic of “Creation Science” and “Intelligent Design”:

The Government is aware that a number of concerns have been raised in the media and elsewhere as to whether creationism and intelligent design have a place in science lessons. The Government is clear that creationism and intelligent design are not part of the science National Curriculum programmes of study and should not be taught as science. The science programmes of study set out the legal requirements of the science National Curriculum. They focus on the nature of science as a subject discipline, including what constitutes scientific evidence and how this is established. Students learn about scientific theories as established bodies of scientific knowledge with extensive supporting evidence, and how evidence can form the basis for experimentation to test hypotheses. In this context, the Government would expect teachers to answer pupils’ questions about creationism, intelligent design, and other religious beliefs within this scientific framework.
nocrescied – epetition response

Pawn is already feeling better about his decision to move back to the UK!

More Straight Talk from Robert Fisk

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Bloodstained Hands

Pawn will admit to being a little surprised when talk turned to Tony BLair being given the role of some sort of über-envoy to the Middle East. Now Robert Fisk, in his trademark no-hold-barred style lets loose a fusillade of invective on the issue:

I suppose that astonishment is not the word for it. Stupefaction comes to mind. I simply could not believe my ears in Beirut when a phone call told me that Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara was going to create “Palestine”. I checked the date – no, it was not 1 April – but I remain overwhelmed that this vain, deceitful man, this proven liar, a trumped-up lawyer who has the blood of thousands of Arab men, women and children on his hands is really contemplating being “our” Middle East envoy.
Robert Fisk: How can Blair possibly be given this job? – Independent Online Edition > Robert Fisk

Youtubamania – Or, How One Thing Leads To Another

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I finally figured out how to get YouTube videos to display full screen on my computer, and just in time. World Cafe tonight had The Puppini Sisters as their guests. What great music — Close Harmony, inspired by The Triplets of Bellville — and I had to go to YouTube to find any good online examples of their work:

Anyway, they explained on the radio, when asked about their audience, that “Well, there’s a massive gay component.” Leaving aside, for the moment, the double entendre there, they went on to tell the story of their first big public appearance at a popular gay night club in London where the local anthem was “Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush. They do a cover of it, which is a very strange thing in its own right:

I fell hard for Kate Bush after seeing her on Saturday Night Live in the 70’s:
She never comes to the US, as she won’t fly, so she doesn’t have a big following here. Anyway, I looked on YouTube for this cover, and of course it listed Bush’s original music video as well. You must check it out for its naive over-the-top emotive dance. The first 60 seconds, at least, are an unfortunate indictment of artistic masturbation:

Lastly, this somehow lead to Pink Martini, and their song Hey Eugene, which is fall down funny in its story, and a catchy little number to boot:

That concludes our tour this evening,

Manufactured Landscapes

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Nickel Tailings #34

A film following photographer Edward Burtynsky through the making of his recent project Manufactured Landscapes opens today in New York. This is director Jennifer Baichwal’s second documentary covering a photographer. She also directed The True Meaning of Pictures on Shelby Lee Adams‘ Appalachia. The word invariably used to describe this film is haunting… and indeed it is. I look forward to seeing how she has covered Burtynsky.
Heading East’s Raul Gutierrez

The photos, and the film, treat the massive disruption to our environment being created in the developing world as it goes about taking care of the dirty work which we in the developed world no longer care to see bespoiling our own frontiers.

Bacon in China

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Pawn is a fan of Francis Bacon (as written before on these pages) and was surprised to find the image above in a recent collection at Michael Wolf’s web site:
MICHAEL WOLF | PHOTOGRAPHY | HONGKONG
This is a copy of one of Bacon’s more famous paintings from a series on Pope Innocent X (1953):

Image:Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X.jpg – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Having seen the orignal in person some months back, I am tempted to order a copy from China (see Heading East).