Support of Public Services Health Insurance

Apparently, John Boehner hasn't "met one American" who supports a public health insurance option (you know, like our public postal option, public library option, and public security [police] option). I think our current public services have improved the public good and kept private costs down for the same services, and I believe it will do the same for health insurance.

If you think so too, you can sign the petition here.

It Occurs to Me...

... that I shared a lot more on "teh Internets" when "everybody" wasn't reading it.

Sad.

In other news... I got the biggest of my book checks today! Big CC debt will all be paid off on Monday!

Divide and Conquer

Excellent.

Katha Pollitt Moneyshot

"The widespread support for Polanski shows the liberal cultural elite at its preening, fatuous worst. They may make great movies, write great books, and design beautiful things, they may have lots of noble humanitarian ideas and care, in the abstract, about all the right principles: equality under the law, for example. But in this case, they're just the white culture-class counterpart of hip-hop fans who stood by R. Kelly and Chris Brown and of sports fans who automatically support their favorite athletes when they're accused of beating their wives and raping hotel workers.

No wonder Middle America hates them."

Read the rest.

Someday I Will Be Famous Enough to Fix My Covers

I saw the initial row over this, but somehow the resolution totally passed me by (I don't spend nearly as much time on the internets these days). There are lots of stories about SF/F publishers whitewashing covers. So even if you've got a heroine who's a far darker shade of pale, it's unlikely it'll be seen on the bookshelf.

This was one of those, "Yeah, and this surprises people because...?" But it's important to remember that our silence as authors can be read as complicity. If you don't say something publicly - even if you're fuming - readers assume you're just going along with it. And that's a shame. Because as somebody who has sometimes wanted to drag a publisher out and kick them in the shins publicly, I can tell you I'm not so keen on doing it because it means, you know, I might be out a meal ticket.

That said, I need to choose my battles. Because if I end up with a whitewashed cover someday, I'm going to have to say something about it. Even if it means the loss of a meal ticket. Because at the end of the day, it's about systematic silencing, erasing. It's about lying.

That said - and understanding what JL was up against - I find this to be a pretty cool win.

Bloomsbury backs down in Larbalestier race row

Spicest Soup in the Universe

I made it, I did.

Also, I am back from a weeklong vacation, which was very nice.

And now I have a whole lot of work to do.

My First Podcast Interview!

Podcast interview with me at Buena Vista U! (oh man, I had no idea she was going to use *all* this stuff)

Listen in!

Quote of the Day

"Tarantino, I think, gets a lot of pleasure out of demonstrating over and over again that you can get the 18-45 male audience that Hollywood desires into seats, and you can give them a story about a hyper-competent female hero who kicks ass in every way, and they won’t run screaming out of the theater clutching their balls in fear."

Pretty much...ditto everything she says in this review. It was a fantastic movie, and in my opinion - Tarantino's best.

(read the rest)

Boxers, Before & After Fights

Before and after.

(via Tyim)

Perspective

"He bested the heroes, killed the defenders, overtook the world. Then he killed the narrator and he was the villain no more."
- Vijayendra Mohanty

How (not ) to Write About Africa

I've read Binyavanga Wainaina's essay How (not) to Write About Africa a few times, but here's a great spin on it: How (not) to Write About Africa read by Djimon Hounsou.

(via deadbrowalking)

You can bet this is showing up in a GW book or two....

Moscowitz is founder of the International Security Coalition of Clergy, whose mission is to train Jews in self-defense and advance fighting techniques in the event of a terrorist attack on a synagogue. He says business was slow for his Coalition until May, when the FBI arrested a group accused of plotting to blow up synagogues in The Bronx. But now Moscowitz's 100-hour synagogue self-defense course is in high demand.

Squee

Lena Headey, my favorite Spartan (and second fav Sarah Conner) is playing Cersei.

OMG.

OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG!!!

Quote of the Day

"We're trying to make our life into a fairy tale."

The Importance of Tragedy

One of the things I always thought odd about American taste in fiction and cinema is our aversion to tragedy. Filmmakers, in particular, are constantly changing movie endings for American audiences to "lighten" them up. Many British books just aren't carted over the ocean for the simple fact that they're just "too depressing."

I had a lot of trouble understanding this phenomenon. I figured it had something to do with our belief in the American Spirit and Manifest Destiny. I figured we were terrified of tragedy, and in love with the idea that science and progress and good, god-fearing folks could overcome everything.

But it still bugged me. Because I love tragedy. I love watching the inexorable trudging on events toward a inevitable end knowing there's no way to stop it... but watching our heroes bravely try anyway. I like the cathartic rush.

Then I watched this TED talk with Alain de Botton and was suddenly stuck by what he had to say about our aversion to tragedy. Tragedy, he points out, was created to teach us compassion. Instead of looking at somebody who's down on their luck and saying, "God, she's such a loser. She must have done something pretty terrible to end up that way," we learn the old "there but for the grace of god go I" lesson. We learn that each person who's down on their luck isn't a loser, but merely "unfortunate."

But in America, we don't believe in misfortune. We believe in pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. We figure that bankrupt people living out of a friend's house, unemployed, with chronic medical conditions, working temp jobs, are just... losers. Lazy. Meritless. After all, if they worked hard and had merit, they'd be winners, right? They'd be successful American entrepreneurs.

But what our American dream ignores - each and every time - is the influence of tragedy on people's lives. We don't like tragedy. We don't like the idea that sometimes you really do get hit on the back of the head with a shovel for no reason. Sometimes, shit happens.

Because if shit happens, then we can't ignore the bum on the street. We can't plead entitlement for healthcare. We can't just say, "If you don't own your own house, you're a loser," or "if you don't have a car, you're a loser."

Without tragedy, without teaching compassion and morality by putting us all in the shoes of good people who experience bad things, we look down on the poor, the uninsured, the bankrupt, the destitute, with scorn, derision, and not one ounce of compassion. After all, they must have *done* something (or *not* done something) to get there, right? I'm good, I'm hard working. That will never happen to *me.*

I mourn our lack of tragedy.

Excuse me, ma'am, I'm busy trying to figure out which way I'll choose to prevent you from receiving healthcare

In conversation with my mother:

"Well, with this Obamacare thing, we'll all get rationed healthcare."

"Mom, do you even know what `public option' means?"

"The government's taking over healthcare!"

"Mom, the government isn't running healthcare. All they want to do is expand Medicare to cover people who don't have insurance or are underinsured. That's it."

(long pause)

"Are you SURE?"

"Yes, mom. I have a chronic health condition. This is something I actually looked into."

"Well, what's to stop employers from just dropping our insurance then, if there's a public option?"

"Because Medicare SUCKS, mom. Doctors treat you like crap. You still pay copays for insurance. It's a shitty insurance program for poor and desperate people. Nobody fucking wants to be on Medicare. But for poor people, or people with chronic conditions, or other folks who can't afford health insurance - it's *something.*"

"But --"

"Ok, mom. Think of it this way. It's like the post office. You can go to the post office and have a letter sent for cheap, and it takes 5-7 days to get there, right? And you wait in a long line and the employees are surly. Or you can go to UPS or Fedex and get it shipped overnight and walk right up to the counter and everyone treats you great. You still get your letter sent. It's just that the service and speed you get from the post office sucks compared to UPS and Fedex. But! It's affordable. The postal service makes it possible for everyone to send a letter, not just rich people. All they want to do is create an insurance version of the U.S. postal service. And the post office certainly hasn't put DHL, Fedex, or UPS out of business."

"Are you SURE?"

"Yes, mom."

"But... then why do they make it sound like a government takeover of healthcare?"

"Speaking as somebody in marketing and communications, I can tell you exactly what I'd say as a communications manager at a big insurance company... and `government takeover of healthcare' is it. These are the same talking points the insurance companies dragged out back in 1993, the last time we tried to get healthcare reform going. Because the other stuff in this bill - which the insurance companies aren't keen on advertising - is that there's going to be a lot more regulation for the insurance companies. Dropping bank regulations on the banking industry in the 90s helped create the greedy meltdown last year, and having an unregulated insurance industry is what's turning health care into a greedy meltdown. The bill will eliminate lifetime caps on coverage and force them to cover people with pre-existing conditions (among other things). These companies make billions of dollars a year. This is their marketing strategy. Tell people the government's taking over healthcare, and people freak out. I do a lot of marketing stuff. I provide people with a lot of talking points. Now think of somebody who's making about 8 times what I make sending press releases to every talk show host and major news outlet in America about what's become a totally political issue and spending millions in money lobbying your representatives. Scary talking points make much better news than `expanding Medicare.' People who are afraid are really easy to manipulate."

"Well, I just don't know how it'll all turn out."

"I don't either. But it'll be really interesting to find out."

(for those interested, here is the actual latest version of the bill. Wiki-like forum where you can actually comment on diff't sections of the bill. Very cool.)

Real News

"After months of committee meetings and hundreds of hours of heated debate, the United States Congress remained deadlocked this week over the best possible way to deny Americans health care."

I love The Onion.

V Remake

Would not be at all excited about this... except that got the absolute most perfect person to play the alien leader, Anna. This clip shows just how perfect she is.

Perrrrrfect.

When Your Results Confirm Existing Biases, Check Your Controls

I do love it when somebody has one of those, "Oh, shit, we totally missed something incredibly obvious" moments.

The mere act of physically approaching their potential romantic partner, behavior far more typical of men than women, makes people more confident and increases their attraction to their potential partner. In other words, by acting more like men (by physically approaching their dates), they begin to think more like them as well (by being more confident, aggressive, and less selective). In support of their embodied cognition hypothesis, Finkel and Eastwick show that, whether they are men or women, “rotators,” who approach their dates, have greater self-confidence than “sitters,” who are approached, and once they statistically control for self-confidence, the institutional arrangement (whether men or women rotate) ceases to have any effect on whether men or women were more selective.

Quote of the Day

All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.

— H. P. Lovecraft