Monthly Archives: June 2017

Fiction.

Columbia Pictures

The Republican health care bill has stalled in the Senate, at least until after the July 4th recess, and for people who live in states with Republican senators, the delay poses a rare opportunity to reach out and let the senate know exactly how they feel about the AHCA. But before picking up the phone, Slates chosen three movies that will help you understand the Republican health care plan backwards and forwards. Check these movies out and youll be an AHCA expert in no time, ready to talk rings around anyone answering the phone at your senators office. Take a look, and get ready to learn to speak Republican!

Its true that you wont find many wonkish health care policy details in F.W. Murnaus 1922 silent masterpiece. But as a primer in the small government philosophy that underlies the Republican partys signature legislation, Count Orloks vampiric reign of terror is at least as instructive as an Ayn Rand novel. Give it a watch to get pumped up before dialing your senator, and remember: Republicans cant enter your house unless you invite them.

You might think that Werner Herzogs 1979 remake of Murnaus film would have just as little to say about effectively lobbying against Trumpcare as the original version. But have you considered that, in many ways, the Republican health care plan resembles the sort of legislation that might be drafted by a political party that was created to serve the interests of vampires? Whos got his finger on the political pulse now?

Yes, I am literally saying that the people who support the AHCA are vampiresand not, like, sexy teenage vampires, but the German Expressionist kind, the ugliest vampires there ever were. Will watching three different films about the same vampire prepare you to call your senators and beg them not to pass a bill that will cause your fellow citizens to suffer and possibly die, just as surely as they would if Count Orlok were drinking their precious blood? I mean, at this point, what harm could it do?

More here:

These Three Movies Will Help You Understand the Republican Health Care Bill - Slate Magazine (blog)

In Matthew 25: 31-46, Jesus talks about compassion for the least of these. He identifies them as the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and the imprisoned. He says that when time is fulfilled, the goats and sheep will be separated. The sheep are those who show compassion. The goats are those who do not. In the end, the goats will go away into eternal punishment (in today's language, they'd roast in Hell) but the sheep will enter into eternal life.

Jesus makes it very clear where he stands. Central to life in the Christian Church must be compassion for our fellow human beings. When I look at some of the people in our present U. S. Congress who are trying to pass a new health care bill that will hurt millions of poor, disabled, addicted, and elderly people, I wonder if they know that they are acting like a bunch of goats.

Oh, I'm sure some champion the notion of personal responsibility. While being responsible is a good thing, they say that if you are among the hungry, the thirsty, the strangers, the naked, the sick, or the imprisoned, it's your own fault. Yet this is not the message of Jesus. It's the philosophy of a mid-20th Century lady named Ayn Rand who thought that the talented few should be protected not the least of these. Its a notion that ought not be in the vocabulary of the Christian Church.

In my Christian bones, I believe that what is being contemplated in the new health bill is immoral. I wonder how our representatives in Congress would respond to the question: Are you a sheep or a goat?

Link:

The least of these - Ashland Daily Press

Will Pearson andMangesh Hattikudur founded an online empire worth millions on the heels of a campus magazine. Their project boiled down the interesting wormholes of college lectures, offered a curious and fun dorm-roomtone, and eventuallythe duo realized that this approach would make for killer audio.

Seventeen years after launching Mental Flossout of a Duke University dorm room, theyve joinedup with the crew at HowStuffWorks to launch a podcast. With a nod toward those transcendent, stoned conversations you used to have, and a sincere love of nerdy knowledge, the hosts are naturals.

Part-Time Genius, launched this month, offers the weird thoughts and analysisthat made Mental Floss successful, and does soin a format that feels natural and fun in your ears. Listening to the longtime friends discuss why Ayn Rand is a political rockstar or how tax havens became a thing is like hearing your dorm neighbors chat, laugh, and argue through the wall.

Those conversations at night were just so much funthey werent pretentious, they were just super interesting, Hattikudur tells the Daily Dot. Youd have someone whos an economics major relaying the most fascinating topics about why econ is interesting, why beer was sold in six packs, or why Miller Lite is actually a really interesting craft brew.

Apparently beer was sold in six packs because it was the perfect weight for women to carry.

The podcast works as a standalone experience, lacking a throughline between episodes.I was fascinated by studieson how humans can feed 10 billion people or how to live without sleep; I wasted my time while listening to Pearson and Hattikudur discuss the ultimate superhero animalwhich is the point.

Pearson saysthat just like with Mental Floss, theyre buildinga database of episodes that listeners can scroll through years from now, cherry-pickinginteresting topics.

I love the idea of being able to create a show where something that the guys did for Stuff You Should Know five years ago is still being discovered today, says Pearson, referring to another HowStuffWorks podcast. And that was really appealing to us for being able to create this really fun archive that people could dig into once they discovered a show.

Other show topics include: the enduring survival of rats, how boy scouts conquered the U.S., degrees of cleanliness, and a deep dive into what the most American place in the country actually is.At its best, the series takes topics youve never considered and makes them into essential and engaging lectures.

Pearson and Hattikudurlikewise deliver strong guest experts, many of whom are alumni of Mental Floss. Its a whos who of internet culture: guests include YouTube sensationSimone Giertz, Saturday Night Lives Streeter Seidell, and best-selling author John Green. In each episode, guests compete for the coveted Part-Time Geniusaward: a handwritten note of praise from the hostsaddressed to the winners mom or boss.

In addition to these gueststars, the show also spotlights fanswho have day jobs tangentially related to the topic du jour, sayZumba instructors or architects, who come on to ask trivia questions. This segment can be inane, but I appreciate that it brings the listener back from an encyclopedic journey to a fun, informal aside.

How Stuff Works is a network consistently ranking in the top five of overall podcast listener metrics, and is pushing for more podcast market dominance. In addition to bringing on Pearson and Hattikudur, its recently also hired the founder of Cracked.com, Jack OBrien, who will be launching HowStuffWorks first West Coast Studios and spearheading the networks expansion into comedy.

The launch of Part-Time Genius marks the 14th podcast series in the HowStuffWorks network, which was founded nearly 20 years ago in 1998. The podcast joins the ranks of notable shows likeStuff You Should Know,Stuff Mom Never Told You,andStuff You Missed in History Class. This spring HowStuffWorks debutedFoodStuff and released the second season of The Stuff of Lifethe company says its reaching nearly 30 million unique visitors a month.

We joined HowStuffWorks as well because of their plans for the future, Pearson says. The company will be launching additional shows and the opportunity to play a role in how those take shape and how those launch will be a lot of fun as well I think youll see over the next six-to-12 months.

HowStuffWorks is a quirky network for the nerdiest of nerds, and Part-Time Genius fits right in.

Go here to read the rest:

'Part-Time Genius' takes encyclopedic adventures into weird, wild stuff - The Daily Dot

Our college professor sons were up from San Diego, and, as is our practice, we sat on the back porch drinking and discussing the current state of affairs. After a while, I noticed one word entering the conversation so often that it was beginning to chafe. I stood up and shouted, "Enough! Enough of the T-word. I hereby banish its use!"

It was futile, of course, you can't get away from it now. As the racist Alabama governor, George Wallace, famously said about Southern bigotry, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." Just substitute Trump and you get the picture in the Disunited States today.

It's not just the frequency of the moniker that troubles me. It's the fact that ascribing all present and coming woes to one man misses the point.

See, here's the thing: Donald Trump is not really running this show. He is a narcissistic, ignorant blowhard, who ran for president as a goof. He was as startled as anyone when America's electorate threw a pre-kindergarten tantrum ("This'll show the grownups! Nyah nyah!") and put him in the White House.

When someone ostensibly in charge isn't up to the job, it means that someone else takes over (see: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney).

In the case of Trump, many people are pulling the strings, from the captains of industryespecially the death/weapons and air pollution industriesto every Republican in Congress, most notably Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.

And wethe press, the populaceseem unaware of this. We gape, with near stupefaction, at the orange-haired clown in the center ring, oblivious to the fact that others are controlling his freakishly fascinating and appalling actions. We don't notice that those same manipulators have sent people prowling beneath the bleachers to pick our pockets as we gawk at the ostensible main attraction.

It's long past time that we give them the credit they are due.

Let's begin with McConnell, this era's Dick Cheney and the most powerful man in Washington for the past six years.

McConnell is happy as a pig in slop at what Trump is doing and so are his 51 stooges in the Senate.

Comedian Jon Stewart used to mock McConnell, portraying the chinless Kentuckian as a slow-talking tortoise. But there is nothing amusing about this particular land-dwelling reptile, whose shell conceals a cornucopia of sinister tricks.

This is the man who chose to nullify the American people's right to choose their president when he spent six years derailing the man they said they wanted to lead them, Barack Obama. This is the guy who had such little respect for America's political institutions that he denied the people a Supreme Court Justice for a year because he feared that a jurist chosen by the man who represented the people would be beyond his control.

McConnell won that last battle and eventually got Trump to rubber-stamp his choice for the court, a guy who will join the GOP's other corporatist judges to ensure that money remains the deciding factor in politics until your grandchildren have grandchildren. This court is about to put its seal of approval on gerrymandering that will keep Republicans in power indefinitely. McConnell (not Trump, despite appearances) may get another pick soon as well.

Almost as bad are the 51 other members of the U.S. Senate, who do whatever McConnell tells them to do. They are supposed to represent the citizens of Maine or Wisconsin or Arizona or Georgia. They don't, and if you scrunched all 51 of them together you wouldn't get a single backbone.

One GOP senator, Dean Heller of Nevada, is hinting that he is going to oppose the repeal of the Affordable Care Act on the grounds that it is too cruel (other GOP senators oppose the bill because it isn't cruel enough). But Heller's coyness comes with fine print: He opposes the bill "in its present form." When the time comes, he will do as Uncle Mitch tells him to do, as have such other "mavericks" such as Susan Collins of Maine and John McCain of Arizona.

With a Senate divided 52-48, any three Republicans could have given the country a Supreme Court justice 18 months ago and could stop today's Republican efforts to harm the poor and middle-class people in their states who get sick. All they have to do is stand up to McConnell.

The far-right House of Representatives is led by Ryan, who, it turns out, is an Ayn Rand cultist: "government is bad so I'll go to Washington and see if I can destroy it." When the House voted to overturn the Affordable Care Act and deprive millions of Americans of medical care, Ryan gushed that he had been working on limiting health care for 20 years. He was so excited he was drooling.

Like McConnell, Ryan has puppets in the House, some of them from around here, like Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield and Devin Nunes in the Central Valley.

Behind these people are America's titans of industry, the corporate hierarchy, who are supposed to look out for their fellow citizens but don't. There are so many foxes in the country's henhouse that the chickens don't stand a chance.

So we have military warlords whispering (flatteringly, to be sure) in Trump's ear that the world needs more weapons, and, presto, a multi-billion-dollar arms sale to Saudi Arabia goes through and the military gleefully explodes what some deranged general called "the mother of all bombs" in the Middle East. These men and women could easily, and may, persuade Trump to use The Bomb.

There are too many others to mention. People in charge of environmental protection who don't believe the environment needs protecting; people in charge of peoples' health who worry only about the health of Big Pharma's bottom line; those in charge of education who disdain public schools.

None of them care whether your grandchildren will have bad lungs from polluted air, or whether you have a job to take care of your family, or whether you can send grandma to get her teeth fixed, or whether your kid misses school because he is sick.

To them, the Constitution and traditions of this country are abstract and out-of-date.

To repeat: It's not Trump who is running the country. It is all these people and organizations who are taking us to ruin, using the pliable and easily manipulated Trump as their front-man.

We need to acknowledge that and somehow hold them accountable, if we hope to change it.

Bob Cuddy wants to drain the swamp from Arroyo Grande. Send comments through the editor at clanham@newtimesslo.com or write a letter to the editor at letters@newtimesslo.com.

The rest is here:

The T-word - New Times SLO