Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Monday, July 30, 2007
stupid protestors
Peta or Vick-ophants?
Both look stupid as hell. At least a couple of those Peta chicks look hot. You know they are easy....Just don't take thenm to eat at the Rodizio!!
Friday, July 27, 2007
The very nasty 'Lobster Song' : warning.. graphic!!
So, this saturday I am performing with my band at the 'Universal Joint' in Oakhurst with my band for a 'lobster boil'.
http://www.ujointbar.com/events.html
I've dont plenty of 'crawfish' boils, but this is my first 'Lobster', so I guess I'm moving up the crustaceon food chain....Anyways, I googled 'Lobster Song' to find another tune besides Rock Lobster', and this is what I;ve found:
"Oh, mister fisherman, home from the sea,
Have you got a lobster you will sell to me?"
Chorus: Singing ai-tiddly-ai, shit or bust,
Never let your bullocks dangle in the dust.
"Yes sir, yes sir, I have three,
And the biggest of the bastards I will sell to thee."
So I took the lobster home, but I couldn't find a dish,
So I put the fucking lobster where the missus has a piss.
In the middle of the night, as you well know,
The missus got up to have a heave ho.
Well, first there came a groan, and then there came a grunt,
And the bloody lobster grabbed her by the cunt.
The missus grabbed the brush, and I grabbed the broom,
And we chased the fucking lobster round and round the room.
We hit it on the head, we hit it on the side,
We hit that fucking lobster till the bastard died.
Oh, the story has a moral, and this is it,
Always have a look before you take a shit.
That's the end of my story, there isn't any more,
There's an apple up my asshole, and you can have the core.
Down in Nagasaki the monkey fucked the cat,
And all the cat could do was fuck the monkey back.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
You're Fired! Or...I'm not peddling your ass anymore!
"So you say one of your dogs got a hold on your leg, huh?"
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Breed specific legislation
The issue belies my rock solid Libertarian leanings....Why should the Govt use force to keep people from owning Pit Bull Dogs? It doesn't seem to be in the 'general welfare' of the public..
Then a friend sent me this:
"What Vick is alleged to do and the others have been convicted of doing is nothing short of the same misery purveyed by meth dealers, pedophiles and terrorists on humanity. My opinion is strongly focused by personal experience: In January, 2006 I was attacked by two pit bulls while out riding my bike on a training route with my workmate.
This didn’t take place in some rural back-forty farm, in an inner city alley, or some gang’s ‘hood. It was on one of the most exclusive roads overlooking the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, CA, in a neighborhood of family homes mixed with the estates of Los Angeles’ elite class. We rounded a corner while climbing a hill and the dogs attacked, without provocation, from a blind spot. My friend sprinted to safety; I am lucky to still have my right foot.
The dogs were a breeding pair. The owner claimed that the dogs were friendly, loving family animals. The female was nursing pups at the time, though for whatever reason, the animals had decided to claw through two significant fences to escape their yard and roam the neighborhood. Pasadena animal control captured the dogs in a private elementary school’s playground a few hours after my attack, and all were thankful that this happened on a Sunday when no children were present.It seems we can’t go more than a couple days before an attack is in the news nationally or locally here in the LA area.
The important aspects that should not be lost are that I, much like other fighting dog attack victims, are not in the wrong place at the wrong time, we did not goad the animal for it to happen, and that not every dog gets “one free bite” before it gets labeled “vicious.”
Pit bulls and Presas are bred for the sole reason that two are to be placed into an enclosure and only one comes out. Whether nurtured by their masters for game, or simply expressing their dominant genetic traits, these dogs are time bombs without a fail safe switches, and no way to defuse once the timer hits zero.
The cottage industry that supports dogfighting is no less organized than any good narcotics ring or child exploitation network: Lurking just beneath the surface of legitimacy in backyards in Virginia, Pasadena—wherever the perpetrators can root and seemingly live in the mainstream. Its not supposed to happen in your neighborhood or where you ride, yet it does with increasing frequency. And more often than not there are severe consequences that destroy lives in the process.
I don’t sleep more than three hours at a time without reliving the attack in nightmares. And not the kind you wake yourself from and pass off as a dream; the kind where your heart accelerates out of your chest like a rocket as the monsters rip the muscles and sinew from your ankle, leaving it a sinewy shredded mass of carne asada and blood clots dripping from your leg. Worse still are the PTSD symptoms I have been in counseling for since the attack. The panic, anger, loathing, and depression have been a debilitating, at times insurmountable hurdle in my personal and professional life.
The bankrollers and advocates of dogfighting are irredeemable, projecting their rage and sociopathic needs into their biological weapons. Most of these— like Davon Boddie and others in Mike Vick's posse — are otherwise insignificant garbage piles whose lives are like drunk driving car wrecks left in high school parking lots the week before prom night: Cautionary tales so that your kids make better choices than those who failed before them. It is the pit bull, rather than any measure of self-accomplishment or contribution to society, that makes Davon Boddie anything more than a forgettable punk. Brings him respect and street cred. A playa at the top of a food chain.Why would Vick bankroll Boddie? My theory is they are one and the same, leeching off each others’ depravity to live vicariously in the others’ shoes. Davon Boddie: To have the fame, wealth, access to sex, and reputation that comes with being an A-list clutch player in the league. Mike “Ron Mexico” (look up his alias on Google) Vick: To be the kingpin at the top of a gangsta empire. These two don’t just need each other— they need to be each other.
This is exactly the relationship I see in the assailants whose dogs nearly killed me and others, and their dogfighting customers whose perversions they supply and for which they are rewarded.
The cost of dogfighting is a seven year-old girl with a pound of skin grafts on what’s left of her face where a pit bull used her as a chew toy. It is a nine year-old boy sewn back together like a doll from discarded rag parts just so his parents could have an open casket funeral. It is people like me who struggle to make sense of vicious, random violence that forever changes us physically and mentally.
The posterchild of dogfighting is Mike Vick, who desperately needs five-to-seven with his buddies in a State pen to learn what it really means to be the alpha dog in the exercise yard where there’s no sideline to run to, nowhere a pathetic coward like him can hide. If you live in a community that is thinking of tighter controls or banning fighting dog breeds, as Denver has successfully done, I urge you to speak your mind to your riding peers, friends, neighbors, and representatives. It is a matter of animal welfare, our safety, and our ability to live and ride peacefully in the communities we call home."
Wow. Kinda makes ya think, huh?
Monday, July 23, 2007
The Last Judgement of Micheal Vick
Ughhh...Here come the PETA nuts.
Well, this is what you can expect with Blank letting this thing get out of control. For chrissakes, Arthur, fish or cut bait already.
Micheal Vick: the current day John Rocker, only dumber. That's saying a hell of a lot.
I guess I cant poke fun at my nephew in Cincy about the 'Ben-Gals' anymore.
Know what 'Bengals' stands for? "'Bout Every Negro Got Arrested Last Season". Before anyone gets all uppity, that joke was told to me by a black friend, only he used a different perjorative that I am not allowed to use. But he gave me permission to tell it in its current form!
Saturday, July 21, 2007
The Travel Act
As part of United States Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy's program to combat organized crime and racketeering, Congress enacted the Travel Act in 1961 as part of the same series of legislation as the Wire Act discussed above.[99] The Travel Act, which is aimed at prohibiting interstate travel or use of an interstate facility in aid of a racketeering or an unlawful business enterprise, provides as follows:
(a) Whoever travels in interstate or foreign commerce or uses the mail or any facility in interstate or foreign commerce, with intent to -
(1) distribute the proceeds of any unlawful activity; or(2) commit any crime of violence to further any unlawful activity; or(3) otherwise promote, manage, establish, carry on, or facilitate the promotion, management, establishment, or carrying on, of any unlawful activity, and thereafter performs or attempts to perform -
(A) an act described in paragraph (1) or (3) shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both; or(B) an act described in paragraph (2) shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results shall be imprisoned for any term of years or for life.(b) As used in this section
(i) "unlawful activity" means
(1) any business enterprise involving gambling, liquor on which the Federal excise tax has not been paid, narcotics or controlled substances (as defined in section 102(6) of the Controlled Substances Act), or prostitution offenses in violation of the laws of the State in which they are committed or the United States,(2) extortion, bribery, or arson in violation of the laws of the State in which committed or of the United States, or(3) any act which is indictable under subchapter II of chapter 53 of title 31, United States Code, or under section 1956 or 1957 of the titled and
(ii) the term "State" includes a State of the United States, the District of Columbia, and any commonwealth, territory, or possession of the United States. (c) Investigations of violations under this section involving liquor shall be conducted under the supervision of the Secretary of the Treasury.[100]
"Unlawful activity," as defined in subsection (b) refers to a business enterprise involving, among other things, illegal gambling. The Sectional Analysis of the House Report on Senate Bill 1653 specifically states that the term "'business enterprise' requires that the activity be a continuous course of conduct." [101]
A conviction under the Travel Act necessitates a violation of either a state or federal law. [102] However, the government need not prove that the defendant specifically inte nded to violate state or federal law. [103]
The courts have determined that the use of the mail, telephone or telegraph, newspapers, credit cards and tickertapes is sufficient to establish that a defendant "used a facility of interstate commerce" to further an unlawful activity in violation of the Travel Act. [104] It is important to note that the Travel Act "refers to state law only to identify the defendant's unlawful activity, the federal crime to be proved in § 1952 is use of the interstate facilities in furtherance of the unlawful activity, not the violation of state law; therefore § 1952 does not require that the state crime ever be completed."[105]
End notes:
[99] See Racketeering Enterprises - Travel or Transportation Act, Pub. L. No. 87-228, 75 Stat. 498, 561-562 (1961).[100] 18 U.S.C. § 1952.[101] U.S. Code & Cong. News, 87th Cong. 1st Sess., 2666; see also United States v. Ruiz, 987 F.2d 243, 250-251 (5th Cir. 1993), cert. denied, 510 U.S. 855 (1993) (government is not required to prove that the defendant personally engaged in a continuous course of conduct, but rather the government must prove that there was a continuous business enterprise and that the defendant participated in the enterprise); United States v. Vaccaro, 816 F.2d 443, 454 (9th Cir.1987), cert. denied, 484 U.S. 914 (1987) (defendant's involvement in three jackpot cheating incidents over a three-year period was sufficient to show a continuous and illegal conduct for a Travel Act conviction).[102] See 18 U.S.C. § 1952(b)(i).[103] See United States v. Polizzi, 500 F.2d 856, 876-877 (9th Cir. 1974), cert. denied, 419 U.S. 1120 (1975) (government need only show that the defendants had a specific intent to facilitate an activity they knew to be unlawful under law - i.e., carrying on a hidden ownership interest in the Frontier Hotel in violation of NRS 463.160).[104] See United States v. Heacock, 31 F.3d 249, 255 (5th Cir. 1994) (interstate mailings); United States .v Villano, 529 F.2d 1046, 1050-1051 (10th Cir. 1976), cert. denied, 426 U.S. 953 (1976) (interstate use of telephones for bookmaking); United States v. Erlenbaugh, 452 F.2d 967, 970-973 (7th Cir. 1971), aff'd 409 U.S. 239 (1972) (although exempt under 18 U.S.C. § 1953, "scratch sheets" from the Illinois Sporting News newspaper that were transported by train from Chicago to Indiana and used by customers of an illegal bookmaking operation constituted use of an interstate facility under the Travel Act); United States v. Campione, 942 F.2d 429, 435-436 (7th Cir. 1991) (use of interstate telephone facilities to secure credit card authorization was use of an interstate facility to promote an unlawful activity, such as prostitution); United States v. Miller, 379 F.2d 483, 485 (7th Cir. 1967), cert. denied, 389 U.S. 930 (1967) (use of a Western Union tickertape to post baseball scores in furtherance of an unlawful gambling activity under Indiana law constituted use of an interstate facility); see also United States v. Garner, 663 F.2d 834, 839(9th Cir. 1981), cert. denied, 456 U.S. 905 (1982) (evidence showed that defendant practiced a blackjack cheating scheme in California and Nevada that was later used at Harrah's Lake Tahoe and the court held that the "government is not required to establish an interstate connection with respect to each defendant's activity. . . only. . . that the scheme as a whole had substantial interstate connections").[105] Campione, 942 F.2d at 434; see also United States v. Peskin, 527 F.2d 71, 79 n. 3 (7th Cir. 1975), cert. denied, 429 U.S. 818 (1976).
(a) Whoever travels in interstate or foreign commerce or uses the mail or any facility in interstate or foreign commerce, with intent to -
(1) distribute the proceeds of any unlawful activity; or(2) commit any crime of violence to further any unlawful activity; or(3) otherwise promote, manage, establish, carry on, or facilitate the promotion, management, establishment, or carrying on, of any unlawful activity, and thereafter performs or attempts to perform -
(A) an act described in paragraph (1) or (3) shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both; or(B) an act described in paragraph (2) shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results shall be imprisoned for any term of years or for life.(b) As used in this section
(i) "unlawful activity" means
(1) any business enterprise involving gambling, liquor on which the Federal excise tax has not been paid, narcotics or controlled substances (as defined in section 102(6) of the Controlled Substances Act), or prostitution offenses in violation of the laws of the State in which they are committed or the United States,(2) extortion, bribery, or arson in violation of the laws of the State in which committed or of the United States, or(3) any act which is indictable under subchapter II of chapter 53 of title 31, United States Code, or under section 1956 or 1957 of the titled and
(ii) the term "State" includes a State of the United States, the District of Columbia, and any commonwealth, territory, or possession of the United States. (c) Investigations of violations under this section involving liquor shall be conducted under the supervision of the Secretary of the Treasury.[100]
"Unlawful activity," as defined in subsection (b) refers to a business enterprise involving, among other things, illegal gambling. The Sectional Analysis of the House Report on Senate Bill 1653 specifically states that the term "'business enterprise' requires that the activity be a continuous course of conduct." [101]
A conviction under the Travel Act necessitates a violation of either a state or federal law. [102] However, the government need not prove that the defendant specifically inte nded to violate state or federal law. [103]
The courts have determined that the use of the mail, telephone or telegraph, newspapers, credit cards and tickertapes is sufficient to establish that a defendant "used a facility of interstate commerce" to further an unlawful activity in violation of the Travel Act. [104] It is important to note that the Travel Act "refers to state law only to identify the defendant's unlawful activity, the federal crime to be proved in § 1952 is use of the interstate facilities in furtherance of the unlawful activity, not the violation of state law; therefore § 1952 does not require that the state crime ever be completed."[105]
End notes:
[99] See Racketeering Enterprises - Travel or Transportation Act, Pub. L. No. 87-228, 75 Stat. 498, 561-562 (1961).[100] 18 U.S.C. § 1952.[101] U.S. Code & Cong. News, 87th Cong. 1st Sess., 2666; see also United States v. Ruiz, 987 F.2d 243, 250-251 (5th Cir. 1993), cert. denied, 510 U.S. 855 (1993) (government is not required to prove that the defendant personally engaged in a continuous course of conduct, but rather the government must prove that there was a continuous business enterprise and that the defendant participated in the enterprise); United States v. Vaccaro, 816 F.2d 443, 454 (9th Cir.1987), cert. denied, 484 U.S. 914 (1987) (defendant's involvement in three jackpot cheating incidents over a three-year period was sufficient to show a continuous and illegal conduct for a Travel Act conviction).[102] See 18 U.S.C. § 1952(b)(i).[103] See United States v. Polizzi, 500 F.2d 856, 876-877 (9th Cir. 1974), cert. denied, 419 U.S. 1120 (1975) (government need only show that the defendants had a specific intent to facilitate an activity they knew to be unlawful under law - i.e., carrying on a hidden ownership interest in the Frontier Hotel in violation of NRS 463.160).[104] See United States v. Heacock, 31 F.3d 249, 255 (5th Cir. 1994) (interstate mailings); United States .v Villano, 529 F.2d 1046, 1050-1051 (10th Cir. 1976), cert. denied, 426 U.S. 953 (1976) (interstate use of telephones for bookmaking); United States v. Erlenbaugh, 452 F.2d 967, 970-973 (7th Cir. 1971), aff'd 409 U.S. 239 (1972) (although exempt under 18 U.S.C. § 1953, "scratch sheets" from the Illinois Sporting News newspaper that were transported by train from Chicago to Indiana and used by customers of an illegal bookmaking operation constituted use of an interstate facility under the Travel Act); United States v. Campione, 942 F.2d 429, 435-436 (7th Cir. 1991) (use of interstate telephone facilities to secure credit card authorization was use of an interstate facility to promote an unlawful activity, such as prostitution); United States v. Miller, 379 F.2d 483, 485 (7th Cir. 1967), cert. denied, 389 U.S. 930 (1967) (use of a Western Union tickertape to post baseball scores in furtherance of an unlawful gambling activity under Indiana law constituted use of an interstate facility); see also United States v. Garner, 663 F.2d 834, 839(9th Cir. 1981), cert. denied, 456 U.S. 905 (1982) (evidence showed that defendant practiced a blackjack cheating scheme in California and Nevada that was later used at Harrah's Lake Tahoe and the court held that the "government is not required to establish an interstate connection with respect to each defendant's activity. . . only. . . that the scheme as a whole had substantial interstate connections").[105] Campione, 942 F.2d at 434; see also United States v. Peskin, 527 F.2d 71, 79 n. 3 (7th Cir. 1975), cert. denied, 429 U.S. 818 (1976).
Inside Fed's look at the Mike Vick case
Why Micheal Vick is in bigger trouble than you think
I work quite a bit with the US Attorney's Office and we send scores of cases to them for a variety of problems.I can tell you that the US Attorney's Office, who will prosecute this case, is very short on staffing and funding, especially this year, and as a result, they are more "cautious" than usual with the cases they will and will not presecute.
What speaks HUGE volumes to me is that the US Attorney's office knows that Vick has cash and will hire a top flight legal defense team, which means that the US Attorney's office has to put whay littel resources they have into prosecution.
Moreover, the US Attorney's Office rarely likes a tough fight if the case is not really really good, especially against a celebrity for fear of losing and going against 1st clss defense attorneys that few can afford. Trust me, there will be no Public defenders office on this one.
Moreover, they indicted this case is only two to three months after investigation -- which is LIGHTNING fast for them. I mean REALLY fast. Unreal fast. Shocking fast. For a case with this type of high profile risk if they lose, this is ungodly fast.
I have NO personal or inside knowledge, but I will tell you that the FEDS must have a REALLY REALLY good case that they KNOW, not they think, but they KNOW they will win.
Michael Vick should be very afraid of these facts. I am shocked they named him, as they could have done the 3 cousins or whoever the other three idiots are with no worries.I mean, the US Attorneys cold have added Vick later or stalled it out but they took this one and squeezed.
Many of you who do not work in this system cannot appreciate the underlying meaning of what is going on. I have been a Fed 10 years, and I dont remember ever seeing a case we built up for proseuction, especially a high profile one, move like this.
I am not sure Johnny Cochran could help him on this.
I work quite a bit with the US Attorney's Office and we send scores of cases to them for a variety of problems.I can tell you that the US Attorney's Office, who will prosecute this case, is very short on staffing and funding, especially this year, and as a result, they are more "cautious" than usual with the cases they will and will not presecute.
What speaks HUGE volumes to me is that the US Attorney's office knows that Vick has cash and will hire a top flight legal defense team, which means that the US Attorney's office has to put whay littel resources they have into prosecution.
Moreover, the US Attorney's Office rarely likes a tough fight if the case is not really really good, especially against a celebrity for fear of losing and going against 1st clss defense attorneys that few can afford. Trust me, there will be no Public defenders office on this one.
Moreover, they indicted this case is only two to three months after investigation -- which is LIGHTNING fast for them. I mean REALLY fast. Unreal fast. Shocking fast. For a case with this type of high profile risk if they lose, this is ungodly fast.
I have NO personal or inside knowledge, but I will tell you that the FEDS must have a REALLY REALLY good case that they KNOW, not they think, but they KNOW they will win.
Michael Vick should be very afraid of these facts. I am shocked they named him, as they could have done the 3 cousins or whoever the other three idiots are with no worries.I mean, the US Attorneys cold have added Vick later or stalled it out but they took this one and squeezed.
Many of you who do not work in this system cannot appreciate the underlying meaning of what is going on. I have been a Fed 10 years, and I dont remember ever seeing a case we built up for proseuction, especially a high profile one, move like this.
I am not sure Johnny Cochran could help him on this.
Friday, July 20, 2007
excuse me?
Excuses come in the form of out and out rationalization or denial of responsibility. Those special projects we were going to work on would be done, if only we weren't so tired after a day's work at the factory. This same tiredness doesn't seem to affect other areas of our life such as Sunday night bowling.
Let's take bowling for another example. Why is it that we have a bad shoulder or knee which only bothers us on nights when we haven't bowled so well?
Research into the world of excuse making, can be very enlightning. It seems there are many different strategies involved in this explanation of, or preparation for, failure.
According to Dr. C.R. Snyder, clinical psychologist at the University of Kansas, men and women make an equal number of excuses, but women use a verbally more sophisticated strategy, as opposed to men's macho bold-faced denial, or self-handicapping alibis for poor performance.
Starting back in early childhood, parents who love their children very much, can still expect a great deal from them, and set standards accordingly. Years later, these same children often catch themselves making "excuses" for not living up to those standards. Dr. Snyder points out that self-concept develops in the early school years when children begin learning to compare their idealized version of themselves with reality. Seven-year-olds start worrying about what others think of them and by the age of nine kids start dealing with the concept of self-criticism.
Excuse making becomes a way of protecting young egos. Children sometimes feel that criticism is tantamount to epic rejection. After reading Dr. Snyder's theories, many of us can probably identify with techniques we use in our own excuse making process.
Plain and simple "denial of responsibility" is one of the most common. For example, that scratch on the car was probably made when the wife had the car last, not when I "barely brushed" that car in the parking lot at work.
Or how about the "it really wasn't that bad" ploy. The diet wasn't really broken, as the peice of cake was small and there wasn't much ice cream in the bowl.
Research shows that the most popular excuse making technique is the "extenuating circumstances" one. If some fan hadn't hollered too loud, that flyball wouldn't have been dropped out in center field. Of course, there is some half-truth to this technique, which makes the biased account more favourable to the excuse maker.
Dr. Snyder's points out that there are ways to end or at least reduce excuse making. First of all, we can lower any unrealistically high standards we may have set for ourselves. We probably have spent an awful lot of time trying to explain (make excuses for) why we are not perfect at various things. We can try writing a few small articles before jumping head-on into an epic novel. Or we can learn to be happy with a few good bowling scores, instead of always shooting for that "perfect game."
By taking things slowly and systematically anyone can get their excuse making under control. Dr. Snyder assures us of this.
The great William Shakespeare gave us the real reason to try and put a halt to excuses when he said "And ofentimes excusing of a fault/Doth make the fault worse by the excuse."
Let's take bowling for another example. Why is it that we have a bad shoulder or knee which only bothers us on nights when we haven't bowled so well?
Research into the world of excuse making, can be very enlightning. It seems there are many different strategies involved in this explanation of, or preparation for, failure.
According to Dr. C.R. Snyder, clinical psychologist at the University of Kansas, men and women make an equal number of excuses, but women use a verbally more sophisticated strategy, as opposed to men's macho bold-faced denial, or self-handicapping alibis for poor performance.
Starting back in early childhood, parents who love their children very much, can still expect a great deal from them, and set standards accordingly. Years later, these same children often catch themselves making "excuses" for not living up to those standards. Dr. Snyder points out that self-concept develops in the early school years when children begin learning to compare their idealized version of themselves with reality. Seven-year-olds start worrying about what others think of them and by the age of nine kids start dealing with the concept of self-criticism.
Excuse making becomes a way of protecting young egos. Children sometimes feel that criticism is tantamount to epic rejection. After reading Dr. Snyder's theories, many of us can probably identify with techniques we use in our own excuse making process.
Plain and simple "denial of responsibility" is one of the most common. For example, that scratch on the car was probably made when the wife had the car last, not when I "barely brushed" that car in the parking lot at work.
Or how about the "it really wasn't that bad" ploy. The diet wasn't really broken, as the peice of cake was small and there wasn't much ice cream in the bowl.
Research shows that the most popular excuse making technique is the "extenuating circumstances" one. If some fan hadn't hollered too loud, that flyball wouldn't have been dropped out in center field. Of course, there is some half-truth to this technique, which makes the biased account more favourable to the excuse maker.
Dr. Snyder's points out that there are ways to end or at least reduce excuse making. First of all, we can lower any unrealistically high standards we may have set for ourselves. We probably have spent an awful lot of time trying to explain (make excuses for) why we are not perfect at various things. We can try writing a few small articles before jumping head-on into an epic novel. Or we can learn to be happy with a few good bowling scores, instead of always shooting for that "perfect game."
By taking things slowly and systematically anyone can get their excuse making under control. Dr. Snyder assures us of this.
The great William Shakespeare gave us the real reason to try and put a halt to excuses when he said "And ofentimes excusing of a fault/Doth make the fault worse by the excuse."
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Mike Vick is a joke
Leno
Boy has it been a hot summer. They call this the dog days of summer. Especially if you’re Michael Vick.
Atlanta Falcons Michael Vick has been indicted for his alleged involvement in a dog fighting ring. You know how he got caught? A pointer picked him out.
Did you hear his excuse? He said, "The bitch set me up.”
Kimmel
Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick was indicted yesterday in connection with some vicious dog fights that allegedly went on at a house he owned in Virginia. Some of these dogs were executed. Michael says he was just following Bob Barker’s lead trying to control the pet population.
Let’s not rush to judgment. Maybe he had a good reason for electrocuting and shooting those dogs. Maybe they were conspiring to kill him.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Carbon Offsets or Absolution?
some very, very interesting things in the 'comments' section of Treehugger.com, a well known lefty 'environmental' website.
It appears that even some 'progressive types' are catching on..Good for them.
In other home related news, this stay at home Dad is dealing with contractor hell. My ceiling above the dinig room table fell due to my dumb ass putting an AC unit in the swetering heat of the upstairs room, which caused condensation to travel 4 or 5 feet down a beam into the insulation. Doh! Already the shenanigans begin with the first contractor~ who shows up late, takes an hour and half 'paid trip' to the Lowes to get drywall, doesnt finish the job, has to leave early and wants a check. This is the 7 th time I have had this experience with a natural raised 'American' contractor. However, the roof that the Mexicans put on my rental unit 6 years ago is still going strong (knock knock ), they showed up, put in a 12 hour day on the hot roof, ate lunch on site, billed me fairly and finished quickly.
The American contractor showed up with a huge musical clef tatooed on his forearm....And throughout our day long 'adventure' revealed he was thrice divorced with 3 kidsand living at home with his parents at 36...
I love hearing the mexican radio staions and the sound of power drills and hammers, and the aroma of beans and tortilla's cooking on the flatbed....
Thursday, July 12, 2007
our prayers for Ladybird Johnson
Lady Bird Johnson, 1912-2007
The more so as details of the outrageous and roguish behavior of her husband, President Lyndon B. Johnson, emerged in tape recordings and extensive scholarship, including a volume by LBJ biographer Robert Caro, which detailed Johnson's philandering and mean and humiliating outbursts in front of others against her ideas and lifestyle, even down to how she fixed her hair and the shoes she wore.
Once, when LBJ was still the Senate majority leader, Sidey was having a late drink with him in the Johnson ranch house in Texas. Lady Bird and a staff member came down the stairs responding to LBJ's shout. They were both in pajamas and night robes. Johnson stood up, gathered them in his huge arms and began to fondle a breast of each woman. Sidey later said that Lady Bird's restraint — she did nothing, but sweetly — is what calmed him down. After the White House, when confronted with some of these stories, Lady Bird shunted all wrath aside.
"Lyndon always did like the ladies."
Like everyone else who studied the couple, Sidey had wondered during his coverage of the Johnson saga, almost from day one, how Lady Bird stood it and never — yes, never — retaliated with anything but a serene and enduring love of the rarest kind. "I adored him," was about as far as she would go to describe her feeling which he said was "awesome in both its physical and intellectual dimensions." She found a natural force, understood that and guided it to the top. Otherwise she might have been a forgotten housewife in clunky shoes and he just another eccentric and embarrassing politician in mohair suits who marched into oblivion.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
John Stossel on Micheal Moore
I interviewed Michael Moore recently for an upcoming "20/20" special on health care. It's refreshing to interview a leftist who proudly admits he's a leftist. He told me that government should provide "food care" as well as health care and that big government would work if only the right people were in charge.
Moore added, "I watch your show and I know where you are coming from. ... "
Film maker Michael Moore smiles as he gets out of mini-van that he drove to movie theatre for a special Canadian screening of his new movie "Sicko" in London, Ontario, Canada Friday June 8.
He knows I defend limited government, so he tried to explain why I was wrong. He began in a revealing way:
"I gotta believe that, even though I know you're very much for the individual determining his own destiny, you also have a heart."
Notice his smuggled premise in the words "even though." In Moore's mind, someone who favors individual freedom doesn't care about his fellow human beings. If I have a heart, it's in spite of my belief in freedom and autonomy for everyone.
Doesn't it stand to reason that someone who wants everyone to be free of tyranny does so partly because he cares about others? Wishing freedom to one's fellow human beings strikes me as a sign of benevolence. But Moore and the left don't see it that way.
Moore thinks respecting others' freedom means refusing to help the less fortunate. But where's the connection? All it means is that the libertarian refuses to sanction the use of physical force (which is what government is) to help others. Peaceful methods -- like voluntary charity -- are the only morally consistent methods. I give about a quarter of my income to charities because I've seen that private charity helps the needy far better than government does
Moore followed up with a religious lesson. "What the nuns told me is true: We will be judged by how we treat the least among us. And that in order to be accepted into heaven, we're gonna be asked a series of questions. When I was hungry, did you feed me? When I was homeless, did you give me shelter? And when I was sick, did you take care of me?"
I'm not a theologian, but I do know that when people are ordered by the government to be charitable, it's not virtuous; it's compelled. Why would anyone get into heaven because he pays taxes under threat of imprisonment? Moral action is freely chosen action.
If Moore's goal is to help the less fortunate, he should preach voluntary charity instead of government action.
Surprisingly, he did show an understanding of the importance of the libertarian philosophy to America. "John, your way of thinking actually was great for this country. I mean it; it helped to found the country. It helped build us into one of the greatest nations, perhaps the greatest nation, that the earth has ever seen. Limited government, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, every man for himself, forward movement, pioneer spirit. That's why a lot of people in these other countries really admire us, because there's this American get up and go."
I interrupt here to point out another smuggled premise. Did you catch that "every man for himself" line? America was never about every man for himself. A free society is about voluntary communities cooperating through the division of labor. Libertarianism is far from "every man for himself."
After acknowledging that limited government helped make America great, Moore went on to say, "But I don't think that what you believe is what's going to allow us to survive."
He means that if government does not assure people health care and food, our society will disintegrate.
But why would a philosophy that was good enough to build a successful society be unsuited to sustaining that society? Individual freedom, with minimal government, made it possible for masses of people to cooperate for mutual advantage. As a result, society could be rich and peaceful. As the great economist Ludwig von Mises wrote, "What makes friendly relations between human beings possible is the higher productivity of the division of labor. . . . A preeminent common interest, the preservation and further intensification of social cooperation, becomes paramount and obliterates all essential collisions."
Freedom and benevolence go hand in hand.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
An interesting take on 'safety' in East Atlanta from 'metroblogging'...
Everybody and their brother is talking about the kidnapping that took place in my neighborhood, East Atlanta, on Saturday night (Sunday morning, actually).
In case you haven't heard about it, two lawyers were abducted after leaving a bar on Glenwood Avenue, then driven to a house in Cabbagetown, where they were held hostage until they were found by police on Sunday. Most of the discussion is about whether the neighborhood is a safe place to live. As far as I can tell, though, most residents, especially those who have been around for years, think it is as safe as any other urban neighborhood in Atlanta. I agree.
One problem with this discussion is that Atlanta as a whole, when compared with other cities in our nation, is just not that safe. A recent Creative Loafing article by John Suggs included a comparison of the likelihood of being a crime victim in Atlanta with other U.S. cities. Based on FBI statistics, he came up with the following: One in 64 people in Atlanta were victims of violent crime in 2006. Compare that with NYC (one in 149 people) or LA (one in 127 people). Yikes.
But what about within our city? I took a cursory look around the web to see if I could find crime statistics for different Atlanta crime zones/precincts. Either I am a terrible researcher, or someone doesn't want me to be able to compare the crime rates for Atlanta neighborhoods. I could find monthly crime reports by zone, but no way of comparing all zones during a month, and more importantly, I'd like to know how they compare over a larger period of time (for instance, within the year 2006). Anyone know of a good place to find reliable crime statistic comparisons for neighborhoods or zones in Atlanta? Please enlighten me.
Another interesting question raised by this incident is this: Which neighborhoods are perceived as being the safest and which are seen as the most dangerous? People who live in the burbs probably feel that intown living is more dangerous. I live in a supposedly sketchy neighborhood, but i would way rather walk home from a bar late at night in my neighborhood than walk home in Buckhead late at night; This is purely conjecture, because I just don't go to Buckhead. (Note: I also don't walk anywhere late at night by myself. Period.)
What can one do to stay safe in Atlanta? We have a dog. Dogs go a long way towards keeping people from lurking around. So do motion sensor floodlights and leaving cars empty of tempting valuables. Reporting crimes and suspicious behavior helps the police to better manage staffing in problem areas. The single biggest thing we can do, though, to improve security is get to know one another. Introduce yourself to your neighbor. Smile at a stranger. Kind behavior begets kindness.
In case you haven't heard about it, two lawyers were abducted after leaving a bar on Glenwood Avenue, then driven to a house in Cabbagetown, where they were held hostage until they were found by police on Sunday. Most of the discussion is about whether the neighborhood is a safe place to live. As far as I can tell, though, most residents, especially those who have been around for years, think it is as safe as any other urban neighborhood in Atlanta. I agree.
One problem with this discussion is that Atlanta as a whole, when compared with other cities in our nation, is just not that safe. A recent Creative Loafing article by John Suggs included a comparison of the likelihood of being a crime victim in Atlanta with other U.S. cities. Based on FBI statistics, he came up with the following: One in 64 people in Atlanta were victims of violent crime in 2006. Compare that with NYC (one in 149 people) or LA (one in 127 people). Yikes.
But what about within our city? I took a cursory look around the web to see if I could find crime statistics for different Atlanta crime zones/precincts. Either I am a terrible researcher, or someone doesn't want me to be able to compare the crime rates for Atlanta neighborhoods. I could find monthly crime reports by zone, but no way of comparing all zones during a month, and more importantly, I'd like to know how they compare over a larger period of time (for instance, within the year 2006). Anyone know of a good place to find reliable crime statistic comparisons for neighborhoods or zones in Atlanta? Please enlighten me.
Another interesting question raised by this incident is this: Which neighborhoods are perceived as being the safest and which are seen as the most dangerous? People who live in the burbs probably feel that intown living is more dangerous. I live in a supposedly sketchy neighborhood, but i would way rather walk home from a bar late at night in my neighborhood than walk home in Buckhead late at night; This is purely conjecture, because I just don't go to Buckhead. (Note: I also don't walk anywhere late at night by myself. Period.)
What can one do to stay safe in Atlanta? We have a dog. Dogs go a long way towards keeping people from lurking around. So do motion sensor floodlights and leaving cars empty of tempting valuables. Reporting crimes and suspicious behavior helps the police to better manage staffing in problem areas. The single biggest thing we can do, though, to improve security is get to know one another. Introduce yourself to your neighbor. Smile at a stranger. Kind behavior begets kindness.
Friday, July 6, 2007
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Monday, July 2, 2007
NY Post review of 'Sicko'....
Michael Moore’s latest documentary “Sicko” is an urgent bipartisan plea. Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, Yankees and Red Sox can surely all agree, says Moore, that our health care system ought to be run by Fidel Castro.
The silliness of Moore’s oeuvre is so self-evident that being able to spot it is not liberal or conservative either; it’s a basic intelligence test, like the ability to match square peg with square hole.
Even Moore does not believe what he says, and his films don’t bring about change-—union membership did not skyrocket nor corporate downsizing trickle off after "Roger and Me," there was no movement towards banning guns after "Bowling for Columbine," and John Kerry did not have to fill out any change of address forms in 2004. Moore's documentaries are mere political slapstick that could have been made by a third Farrelly brother or an eighth Stooge. I will pay him the honor of treating him with his own meds. How else can I deal with a film that calls Hillary Clinton "sexy"?
The bulk of "Sicko" is given over to the stories of Americans who got the run-around from health insurers. These people were told they didn’t qualify for benefits because the requested procedures were too experimental or because of pre-existing conditions. The most absurd example of several is, perhaps, that of the woman who says that after she received benefits, the check was stopped because she had previously suffered an undisclosed yeast infection.
There is no way to know whether this claim is true because Moore’s style is to present whatever information he likes without checking it. He told "Entertainment Weekly" "absolutely not," when asked whether he felt any need to get the other side of the story. So, over time, his work rusts out from within as the facts eat away at it. The central idea of "Bowling for Columbine," for instance—that the killers were subconsciously driven to their actions by the presence of a weapons manufacturing plant in Littleton---turned out to be not only conceptually insane but literally untrue. The plant did not make what Moore called "weapons of mass destruction" but rather space launch vehicles for TV satellites. “Roger & Me,” which presented Moore as unable to secure an interview with the GM chief Roger Smith, was also a 90-minute lie: Moore did talk to Smith, a fact revealed by Ralph Nader.
One Los Angeles woman in “Sicko” says her daughter died because her insurance company told her to take her daughter to a different hospital than the first one she went to, and there are several other similarly grim tales. Moore is smart enough to know that a depressed audience is an absent audience, so he mixes the genuinely sad cases with ones that are just dopey, such as the one about the young six-foot beansprout rejected for coverage because he was underweight.
Regardless of whether any particular claim in "Sicko" is true, no one doubts that lots of insured and uninsured Americans face health-care crises. So far, Moore is master of the obvious. We all hate insurance companies and red tape, and we all want to improve the system. Where do we go from here?
To France, Britain and Canada, says Moore, who presents each of them as a health-care paradise. But lots of people in those countries have health-care nightmares of their own. Here’s how easy it is to lie by anecdote: Say I wanted to make a film about gay black Republicans who live in Chelsea. I find ten of them, make a film about them, and you walk out of the theater thinking: Wow, so many gay black Republicans in Chelsea! The six years it took me to find these ten guys will go unnoted.
All three countries are edging away from how Moore portrays them. Moore knows that in France, where he praises not only the health service but limits on working hours, expansive unemployment benefits and the country’s three preferred forms of exercise—street-marching, banner-hoisting and strikes—a new conservative president was just elected by promising to cut back on such nonsense. (According to Moore, if you need a babysitter or help with the laundry, the French government will send a trained professional right over.)
Everywhere he looks, Moore finds French happiness. But this phrase is as close to an oxymoron as French rock. In a poll, 85 percent of the French recently said their country is heading in the wrong direction. Right direction? Nine percent. In France in 2003, 15,000 mostly elderly hospital patients died in an August heat wave--because hospitals lack air conditioning and doctors were on vacation. The French parliament blamed the health care system. That’s five times 9/11’s toll, all of it preventable, all of it unlamented by Moore.Moore knows that in Britain, where National Health Service spending has more than doubled since Tony Blair was elected, with little to show for it, there is a two-tier health system: the smart set carry private insurance, which Moore wants to outlaw in the U.S. The cliché in London (check out this story and this one) is that the well-shod go to the same doctor as the suckers on the National Health Service. The difference is that private clients get treated right away while the NHS losers wait two years to get their strep throat looked at.
Moore glosses over wait times, hoping his audience is too stupid to notice. He asks a handful of Canadian patients how long they had to wait to see the doctor. Oh, 20 minutes, 45 minutes, everyone says. So if Moore finds five people who didn’t have to wait, there’s no waiting for anybody! “To any Canadian who has ever been forced to go to emergency, this would seem unbelievable,” writes Thomas Malkom, a vehemently pro-Moore columnist for Canada’s paper The Star. The Canadian Supreme Court struck down a law forbidding private insurance in a 2005 decision, ruling that "Access to a waiting list is not access to health care" The decision resulted from a Canadian case in which a man waited a year for hip-replacement surgery, and Canada has started down the road of privatization. Check out the Canadian movie "The Barbarian Invasions" (which is, like "Sicko," a fiction film) for a view of how Canadians view their system: agonizing waits; trips across the border to Vermont to get access to modern technology; fetid facilities modeled, seemingly, on an American one—the Confederate field hospital in "Gone with the Wind."
Here is Dr. David Gratzer, the Canadian author of "The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save Health Care," who believes both the US and Canadian systems are deeply flawed:
"Like most Canadians, I believed that we had the best-run health-care system in the world. Because the system was publically owned, I assumed that compassion came before profit and that everyone got good care. . .After I entered medical school, however, my view of Canadian health care changed…I trained in emergency rooms that were chronically, chaotically, dangerously overcrowded, not only in my hometown of Winnipeg, but all across Canada. I met a middle-aged man with sleep problems who was booked for an appointment with a specialist three years later; a man with pain following a simple hernia repair who was referred to a pain clinic with a two-year wait list; a woman with breast cancer who was asked to wait four more months before starting the lifesaving radiation therapy. According to the government’s own statistics, some 1.2 million Canadians couldn’t get a family doctor. In some rural areas, town councils resorted to lotteries: the winners would get appointments with the only general practitioners around."
Mere anecdotes? Yes, but mine cancel out Moore’s. Where are the stats? Moore emphasizes life-expectancy figures in which the US slightly lags some other Western countries. But life expectancy involves many factors; two that Moore is especially knowledgeable about, obesity and homicide by firearm, are special American plagues. Here’s a stat: The percentage of patients having to wait more than four months for non-emergency surgery is about five times higher in Canada and seven times higher in Britain than it is here. [see Gratzer, 171]
In his EW interview, Moore tacitly admitted that "Sicko" lies about wait times, saying, "Well, okay, let’s set up a system where we don’t have the Canadian wait. Let’s set up a system where we take what they do right and don't do the things that we do wrong." Yes, and let's also make sure that every girl gets to be the prettiest girl in town.
Those who have mastered basic economics can skip this paragraph. Not everyone can have everything they want because there is not an unlimited supply of anything (except maybe air); that’s why Canada and Britain have lotteries to determine who gets treatment. Deciding who gets what and when involves rationing, either by price or by waiting or some combination of the two. If the Mets announced that World Series tickets were free to anyone lining up in front of the Shea Stadium box office, you’d have to go get in line now. Medicare, which isn’t an unlimited benefit, is by itself projected to eat up a third of federal tax revenues by 2030[see Gratzer, p. 7]. There isn’t enough money in the U.S. to pay for free, wait-free top-quality universal health care. The law of supply and demand can no more be repealed than the law that all documentary films must be left-wing. Gratzer's book suggests a real-world solution: decentralization that gives patients more choice: "both failed options [HMOs and Medicare/Medicaid] share one fatal feature. They remove choices from patients and give them to government or corporate bureaucrats. Restricting patient choices in this way, flouting the laws of basic economics, has been a mistake. It's the reason why, while pocket calculators have declined in price from $500 to $5, the price of pacemakers keeps rising."
When Moore visits a British pharmacy in which all drugs cost ten bucks, what he isn’t showing is who invented the drugs: evil American profit-hungry pharmaceutical firms that would effectively be shut down if there were a $10 price limit on all prescriptions. Firms spend hundreds of millions developing and testing a drug while the patent clock ticks down, only to be forced to start over if the drug is rejected by the FDA. If a drug is approved, they have only a few years to recoup costs (and the cost of all the previous failures) by charging "exorbitant" market prices because the drug will soon go generic, i.e. non-exorbitant, i.e. virtually free. The Brits freeload on American technology. Being regulated to death is the reason the once-vibrant European pharmaceutical industry has been lapped by its U.S. counterpart in the last few decades. Want your drugs invented and open-heart surgery performed by the people who gave us FEMA, Amtrak and the CIA? Does the Post Office do a better job than FedEx? I can't mail a package via the federal government without waiting in line 20 minutes--and the Post Office is the best-run federal agency.
Moore is outwardly a genial buffoon; inwardly he is an authoritarian buffoon. He lets it show in two long episodes: a straight-faced interview with the UK’s infamous Commie, Tony Benn, whom Moore presents as an expert on the transformative power of socialism, and the famous-before-anyone-saw-it sequence, first reported in The Post, in which Moore takes some 9/11 rescue workers with lingering health problems to Cuba.
Moore, at a Havana hospital, says he requested that his group receive exactly the same care as any Cuban who walked in—"and that’s exactly what they got." As comedy, this statement is on a par with the sex scene in "Knocked Up," the chest waxing in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and the moment in "An Inconvenient Truth" when Al Gore tells us that the ecology’s no. 1 enemy, China, is in fact "on the cutting edge" of environmentalism.
In the Cuba section of "Sicko," so many guys in white coats (don't look at the camera, guys!) scurry around Moore’s patients listening to symptoms, peering at X-rays and firing up high-tech medical equipment that the scene seems to have been co-written by Groucho and Karl Marx. If Fidel himself gets this level of care, it’s no wonder the guy has outlasted nine presidents.
You can’t film anywhere in Castro’s Alcatraz without government say-so, meaning the whole scene was as phony as what happens when Frank Bruni walks into a four-star restaurant, and if there is a Michael Moore of Cuba, he is in jail right now. Reporters without Borders calls Cuba the world’s second biggest prison for journalists after China. But Moore solemnly reports Cuba’s official health statistics, which are of course a fiction dreamed up by El Presidente, because Moore's motto is to trust no authority figure from cringing corporate spokesman on up to Washington windbags. Except dictators. Dictators, he’ll take your word for it. I expected Moore to protect himself with a thin coat of disclaimer, just a line to say, "Look, I know Cuba is actually a prison nation where nobody’s gotten a new car since Fredo betrayed Michael, but I’m just using this as an extreme example for ironic purposes." Instead, his irony runs the other way: He plays scare music over an image of Castro to get a laugh. I say that again: he thinks the idea that Castro is evil is so obviously ridiculous that he says it sarcastically and expects you to giggle along. Moore calls Cuban health care among the best in the world. Nonsense. Cuba is short on everything from clean drinking water and aspirin on up.
The health care industry could not ask for a more ideal opponent than Moore; the idea that US health should go to a single-payer model is held by plenty of reasonable people, but Moore is not one of them. Despite his apparent belief that he can seem moderate by narrating the film in a sing-song, I’m-talking-to-a-child-or-moron tone, the man can no more hide his Marxism than his belly. He presents not only Tony Benn but Che Guevera’s daughter as voices of sanity and, through a French doctor, Moore sneaks in the Marxist slogan "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." Everyone who has ever lived in a country that put this idea into practice has found that it actually means this: Give the country whatever it asks for and take back whatever it gives you, and do so without complaint or go to prison. Moore also runs lots of old Soviet propaganda footage with comical music on the soundtrack as if to suggest that Stalin was just another campy, overhyped entertainment figure--Martin Short with a mustache.
Moore has been along long enough that his ideas are starting to contradict one other; on his Web site, he once said of Al Qaeda’s grunts in Iraq, "They are the REVOLUTION, the minutemen," but in this film he tries to jog around to the right of Paul Wolfowitz: He pretends to be aghast that the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay (is any other group of 380 people in the world receiving as much attention as these guys?) get top medical care. So, Mike: don’t these heroes, these minutemen, deserve a doc?
Moore comes up with a few zingers, though fewer than in previous films. There’s a funny montage of a Congressman making speeches on health care in which he keeps tearing up on cue and talking about how much he loves his mama. Even I laughed when, following an American north of the border to get some CanuckCare, Moore said, "We’re Americans. We go into other countries when we need to." The founder of socialized medicine in Canada is described as the most important man in the country’s history, "even more than Wayne Gretzky!"
Let’s not give too much credit to Moore, though, for what he did about a guy who runs an anti-Moore Web site who was going to be forced to shut it down—because of a health crisis he couldn’t afford. When Moore found out about it, he anonymously sent a $12,000 check, or .0005 of the money he was paid to make this movie. An anonymous check is not actually anonymous if you announce it in a movie; then it becomes simply a bargain method for buying stories in the press that paint you as a nice guy. Moore, of course, has a Castro-ish history of suppressing dissent.....
The silliness of Moore’s oeuvre is so self-evident that being able to spot it is not liberal or conservative either; it’s a basic intelligence test, like the ability to match square peg with square hole.
Even Moore does not believe what he says, and his films don’t bring about change-—union membership did not skyrocket nor corporate downsizing trickle off after "Roger and Me," there was no movement towards banning guns after "Bowling for Columbine," and John Kerry did not have to fill out any change of address forms in 2004. Moore's documentaries are mere political slapstick that could have been made by a third Farrelly brother or an eighth Stooge. I will pay him the honor of treating him with his own meds. How else can I deal with a film that calls Hillary Clinton "sexy"?
The bulk of "Sicko" is given over to the stories of Americans who got the run-around from health insurers. These people were told they didn’t qualify for benefits because the requested procedures were too experimental or because of pre-existing conditions. The most absurd example of several is, perhaps, that of the woman who says that after she received benefits, the check was stopped because she had previously suffered an undisclosed yeast infection.
There is no way to know whether this claim is true because Moore’s style is to present whatever information he likes without checking it. He told "Entertainment Weekly" "absolutely not," when asked whether he felt any need to get the other side of the story. So, over time, his work rusts out from within as the facts eat away at it. The central idea of "Bowling for Columbine," for instance—that the killers were subconsciously driven to their actions by the presence of a weapons manufacturing plant in Littleton---turned out to be not only conceptually insane but literally untrue. The plant did not make what Moore called "weapons of mass destruction" but rather space launch vehicles for TV satellites. “Roger & Me,” which presented Moore as unable to secure an interview with the GM chief Roger Smith, was also a 90-minute lie: Moore did talk to Smith, a fact revealed by Ralph Nader.
One Los Angeles woman in “Sicko” says her daughter died because her insurance company told her to take her daughter to a different hospital than the first one she went to, and there are several other similarly grim tales. Moore is smart enough to know that a depressed audience is an absent audience, so he mixes the genuinely sad cases with ones that are just dopey, such as the one about the young six-foot beansprout rejected for coverage because he was underweight.
Regardless of whether any particular claim in "Sicko" is true, no one doubts that lots of insured and uninsured Americans face health-care crises. So far, Moore is master of the obvious. We all hate insurance companies and red tape, and we all want to improve the system. Where do we go from here?
To France, Britain and Canada, says Moore, who presents each of them as a health-care paradise. But lots of people in those countries have health-care nightmares of their own. Here’s how easy it is to lie by anecdote: Say I wanted to make a film about gay black Republicans who live in Chelsea. I find ten of them, make a film about them, and you walk out of the theater thinking: Wow, so many gay black Republicans in Chelsea! The six years it took me to find these ten guys will go unnoted.
All three countries are edging away from how Moore portrays them. Moore knows that in France, where he praises not only the health service but limits on working hours, expansive unemployment benefits and the country’s three preferred forms of exercise—street-marching, banner-hoisting and strikes—a new conservative president was just elected by promising to cut back on such nonsense. (According to Moore, if you need a babysitter or help with the laundry, the French government will send a trained professional right over.)
Everywhere he looks, Moore finds French happiness. But this phrase is as close to an oxymoron as French rock. In a poll, 85 percent of the French recently said their country is heading in the wrong direction. Right direction? Nine percent. In France in 2003, 15,000 mostly elderly hospital patients died in an August heat wave--because hospitals lack air conditioning and doctors were on vacation. The French parliament blamed the health care system. That’s five times 9/11’s toll, all of it preventable, all of it unlamented by Moore.Moore knows that in Britain, where National Health Service spending has more than doubled since Tony Blair was elected, with little to show for it, there is a two-tier health system: the smart set carry private insurance, which Moore wants to outlaw in the U.S. The cliché in London (check out this story and this one) is that the well-shod go to the same doctor as the suckers on the National Health Service. The difference is that private clients get treated right away while the NHS losers wait two years to get their strep throat looked at.
Moore glosses over wait times, hoping his audience is too stupid to notice. He asks a handful of Canadian patients how long they had to wait to see the doctor. Oh, 20 minutes, 45 minutes, everyone says. So if Moore finds five people who didn’t have to wait, there’s no waiting for anybody! “To any Canadian who has ever been forced to go to emergency, this would seem unbelievable,” writes Thomas Malkom, a vehemently pro-Moore columnist for Canada’s paper The Star. The Canadian Supreme Court struck down a law forbidding private insurance in a 2005 decision, ruling that "Access to a waiting list is not access to health care" The decision resulted from a Canadian case in which a man waited a year for hip-replacement surgery, and Canada has started down the road of privatization. Check out the Canadian movie "The Barbarian Invasions" (which is, like "Sicko," a fiction film) for a view of how Canadians view their system: agonizing waits; trips across the border to Vermont to get access to modern technology; fetid facilities modeled, seemingly, on an American one—the Confederate field hospital in "Gone with the Wind."
Here is Dr. David Gratzer, the Canadian author of "The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save Health Care," who believes both the US and Canadian systems are deeply flawed:
"Like most Canadians, I believed that we had the best-run health-care system in the world. Because the system was publically owned, I assumed that compassion came before profit and that everyone got good care. . .After I entered medical school, however, my view of Canadian health care changed…I trained in emergency rooms that were chronically, chaotically, dangerously overcrowded, not only in my hometown of Winnipeg, but all across Canada. I met a middle-aged man with sleep problems who was booked for an appointment with a specialist three years later; a man with pain following a simple hernia repair who was referred to a pain clinic with a two-year wait list; a woman with breast cancer who was asked to wait four more months before starting the lifesaving radiation therapy. According to the government’s own statistics, some 1.2 million Canadians couldn’t get a family doctor. In some rural areas, town councils resorted to lotteries: the winners would get appointments with the only general practitioners around."
Mere anecdotes? Yes, but mine cancel out Moore’s. Where are the stats? Moore emphasizes life-expectancy figures in which the US slightly lags some other Western countries. But life expectancy involves many factors; two that Moore is especially knowledgeable about, obesity and homicide by firearm, are special American plagues. Here’s a stat: The percentage of patients having to wait more than four months for non-emergency surgery is about five times higher in Canada and seven times higher in Britain than it is here. [see Gratzer, 171]
In his EW interview, Moore tacitly admitted that "Sicko" lies about wait times, saying, "Well, okay, let’s set up a system where we don’t have the Canadian wait. Let’s set up a system where we take what they do right and don't do the things that we do wrong." Yes, and let's also make sure that every girl gets to be the prettiest girl in town.
Those who have mastered basic economics can skip this paragraph. Not everyone can have everything they want because there is not an unlimited supply of anything (except maybe air); that’s why Canada and Britain have lotteries to determine who gets treatment. Deciding who gets what and when involves rationing, either by price or by waiting or some combination of the two. If the Mets announced that World Series tickets were free to anyone lining up in front of the Shea Stadium box office, you’d have to go get in line now. Medicare, which isn’t an unlimited benefit, is by itself projected to eat up a third of federal tax revenues by 2030[see Gratzer, p. 7]. There isn’t enough money in the U.S. to pay for free, wait-free top-quality universal health care. The law of supply and demand can no more be repealed than the law that all documentary films must be left-wing. Gratzer's book suggests a real-world solution: decentralization that gives patients more choice: "both failed options [HMOs and Medicare/Medicaid] share one fatal feature. They remove choices from patients and give them to government or corporate bureaucrats. Restricting patient choices in this way, flouting the laws of basic economics, has been a mistake. It's the reason why, while pocket calculators have declined in price from $500 to $5, the price of pacemakers keeps rising."
When Moore visits a British pharmacy in which all drugs cost ten bucks, what he isn’t showing is who invented the drugs: evil American profit-hungry pharmaceutical firms that would effectively be shut down if there were a $10 price limit on all prescriptions. Firms spend hundreds of millions developing and testing a drug while the patent clock ticks down, only to be forced to start over if the drug is rejected by the FDA. If a drug is approved, they have only a few years to recoup costs (and the cost of all the previous failures) by charging "exorbitant" market prices because the drug will soon go generic, i.e. non-exorbitant, i.e. virtually free. The Brits freeload on American technology. Being regulated to death is the reason the once-vibrant European pharmaceutical industry has been lapped by its U.S. counterpart in the last few decades. Want your drugs invented and open-heart surgery performed by the people who gave us FEMA, Amtrak and the CIA? Does the Post Office do a better job than FedEx? I can't mail a package via the federal government without waiting in line 20 minutes--and the Post Office is the best-run federal agency.
Moore is outwardly a genial buffoon; inwardly he is an authoritarian buffoon. He lets it show in two long episodes: a straight-faced interview with the UK’s infamous Commie, Tony Benn, whom Moore presents as an expert on the transformative power of socialism, and the famous-before-anyone-saw-it sequence, first reported in The Post, in which Moore takes some 9/11 rescue workers with lingering health problems to Cuba.
Moore, at a Havana hospital, says he requested that his group receive exactly the same care as any Cuban who walked in—"and that’s exactly what they got." As comedy, this statement is on a par with the sex scene in "Knocked Up," the chest waxing in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and the moment in "An Inconvenient Truth" when Al Gore tells us that the ecology’s no. 1 enemy, China, is in fact "on the cutting edge" of environmentalism.
In the Cuba section of "Sicko," so many guys in white coats (don't look at the camera, guys!) scurry around Moore’s patients listening to symptoms, peering at X-rays and firing up high-tech medical equipment that the scene seems to have been co-written by Groucho and Karl Marx. If Fidel himself gets this level of care, it’s no wonder the guy has outlasted nine presidents.
You can’t film anywhere in Castro’s Alcatraz without government say-so, meaning the whole scene was as phony as what happens when Frank Bruni walks into a four-star restaurant, and if there is a Michael Moore of Cuba, he is in jail right now. Reporters without Borders calls Cuba the world’s second biggest prison for journalists after China. But Moore solemnly reports Cuba’s official health statistics, which are of course a fiction dreamed up by El Presidente, because Moore's motto is to trust no authority figure from cringing corporate spokesman on up to Washington windbags. Except dictators. Dictators, he’ll take your word for it. I expected Moore to protect himself with a thin coat of disclaimer, just a line to say, "Look, I know Cuba is actually a prison nation where nobody’s gotten a new car since Fredo betrayed Michael, but I’m just using this as an extreme example for ironic purposes." Instead, his irony runs the other way: He plays scare music over an image of Castro to get a laugh. I say that again: he thinks the idea that Castro is evil is so obviously ridiculous that he says it sarcastically and expects you to giggle along. Moore calls Cuban health care among the best in the world. Nonsense. Cuba is short on everything from clean drinking water and aspirin on up.
The health care industry could not ask for a more ideal opponent than Moore; the idea that US health should go to a single-payer model is held by plenty of reasonable people, but Moore is not one of them. Despite his apparent belief that he can seem moderate by narrating the film in a sing-song, I’m-talking-to-a-child-or-moron tone, the man can no more hide his Marxism than his belly. He presents not only Tony Benn but Che Guevera’s daughter as voices of sanity and, through a French doctor, Moore sneaks in the Marxist slogan "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." Everyone who has ever lived in a country that put this idea into practice has found that it actually means this: Give the country whatever it asks for and take back whatever it gives you, and do so without complaint or go to prison. Moore also runs lots of old Soviet propaganda footage with comical music on the soundtrack as if to suggest that Stalin was just another campy, overhyped entertainment figure--Martin Short with a mustache.
Moore has been along long enough that his ideas are starting to contradict one other; on his Web site, he once said of Al Qaeda’s grunts in Iraq, "They are the REVOLUTION, the minutemen," but in this film he tries to jog around to the right of Paul Wolfowitz: He pretends to be aghast that the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay (is any other group of 380 people in the world receiving as much attention as these guys?) get top medical care. So, Mike: don’t these heroes, these minutemen, deserve a doc?
Moore comes up with a few zingers, though fewer than in previous films. There’s a funny montage of a Congressman making speeches on health care in which he keeps tearing up on cue and talking about how much he loves his mama. Even I laughed when, following an American north of the border to get some CanuckCare, Moore said, "We’re Americans. We go into other countries when we need to." The founder of socialized medicine in Canada is described as the most important man in the country’s history, "even more than Wayne Gretzky!"
Let’s not give too much credit to Moore, though, for what he did about a guy who runs an anti-Moore Web site who was going to be forced to shut it down—because of a health crisis he couldn’t afford. When Moore found out about it, he anonymously sent a $12,000 check, or .0005 of the money he was paid to make this movie. An anonymous check is not actually anonymous if you announce it in a movie; then it becomes simply a bargain method for buying stories in the press that paint you as a nice guy. Moore, of course, has a Castro-ish history of suppressing dissent.....
also, some weak humour:
9 WORDS/PHRASES WOMEN USE1. Fine: This is the word women use to end an argument when they are right and you need to shut up.
2. Five Minutes: If she is getting dressed, this means a half an hour. Five minutes is only five minutes if you have just been given five more minutes to watch the game before helping around the house.
3. Nothing: This is the calm before the storm. This means something, and you should be on your toes. Arguments that begin with nothing usually end in fine.
4. Go Ahead: This is a dare, not permission. Don't Do It!
5. Loud Sigh: This is actually a word, but is a non-verbal statement oftenmisunderstood by men. A loud sigh means she thinks you are an idiot andwonders why she is wasting her time standing here and arguing with you aboutnothing. (Refer back to #3 for the meaning of nothing.)
6. That's Okay: This is one of the most dangerous statements a women canmake to a man. That's okay means she wants to think long and hard beforedeciding how and when you will pay for your mistake.
7. Thanks: A woman is thanking you, do not question, or Faint. Just sayyou're welcome.
8. Whatever: Is a women's way of saying the HECK with YOU!
9. Don't worry about it, I got it: Another dangerous statement, meaningthis is something that a woman has told a man to do several times, but is now doing it herself. This will later result in a man asking "What's wrong?" For the woman's response refer to #3.
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