Best of 2013: Film

The Best Film of 2013 was Gravity. A stunning film on a number of levels but the one that sticks with me is how scientifically real it was. No sound in space so they compensated with music. Bullock was magnificent in what will hopefully be the beginning of more strong roles like this for women.

This was the first trailer I saw. I nearly shat myself...

 

Best of 2013: Television

The best television series of 2013 was Boardwalk Empire. This show just keeps getting better and better. The writing is fantastic but it's really the cast that sends this show into the stratosphere. Michael Stuhlbarg as Arnold Rothstein is my fave but I like him in everything. Michael Shannon plays the most disturbed character I have ever seen on TV. Michael Kenneth Williams is simply a national treasure. And Buscemi is a master! Every episode is so intense that my palms sweat with each new chapter.

Here is the trailer for the latest season.

 

Best of 2013: Music

The best album of 2013 belongs to Fremantle, Western Australia’s San Cisco. Much of their music was released late last year but they didn’t secure a record deal here until early this year. I have played this disc so much that it is nearly worn out. My 14 year old daughter loves it and can’t get enough of all the catchy pop hooks and down under bliss. Parts of it remind me of the 80s but yet it still sounds very fresh. I’d urge you to check out all their EPs as they have many tracks not on the album.

 Here is the track that helped them get a US record deal.

Oh, I See

Sarah Palin: MSNBC ‘despicable’

When the Left is outraged about something like Phil Robertson, they are infringing free speech and hampering freedom. But when the Right is outraged about something, well, then it's OK, I guess.

Amazingly, There's a Disease that Bloodletting Cures!

My brother-in-law recently came home for a family gathering and stayed at our house. He was sick as a dog with the flu, and during the gathering he dropped a bombshell: he has hemochromatosis, and urged his brothers and sisters to get tested for it.

Hemochromatosis is a genetic disease, more common in northern Europeans, especially among the Irish, affecting as much as 0.5% of the white population in the United States (with a 1 in 8 or 10 chance for carriers of the genetic mutation). Sometimes called the Irish Disease or the Celtic Curse, hemochromatosis causes iron to concentrate in the joints, liver, endocrine system, heart and pancreas. This can cause arthritis, diabetes, cirrhosis, testicular failure and heart problems.

It affects men more than women, at least until menopause. That means there's actually a good thing about having periods if you have this disease.

Hemochromatosis can also cause your skin to turn a bronze color, which may mean that John Boehner has a medical problem, instead of a fixation on tanning beds.

The interesting thing about the disease is the treatment: bloodletting! Bloodletting is usually scorned as an egregious example of foolish medical treatments: George Washington's doctors killed him by bleeding him of almost a gallon of blood in 10 hours. Of course, he had a throat infection, so his doctors were idiots.

Phlebotomy (as it's now called) is still the best treatment for hemochromatosis. Even better, that blood isn't simply wasted nowadays: it can be donated to others.

Bloodletting might have also had a few other positive effects. It can lower blood pressure by reducing volume, and it can reduce fluid overload in heart failure. For the most part, however, it was no better than a placebo, and probably hurt many more people than it helped, not least of all because of the terrible infections you can get from opening a vein with unsterilized instruments.

The lesson to be learned is that all of us are different: a treatment that works wonders for one person can be deadly for another. That goes for bloodletting, as well as chemotherapy, blood pressure and other medications, as well as diets and even vitamins.

In medicine one size does not fit all.

Is Looking into the Genetic Crystal Ball Worth It?

Last month the FDA ordered 23andMe to stop selling their genetic testing kit, saying that the company had not proved the effectiveness of their tests.

Before that order went into effect, Kara Peikoff, decided to check out how reliable these tests were. She had her DNA tested by three different companies, and reported on the results in The New York Times. It turns out these tests are basically worthless. They provided contradictory results for some diseases they tested for, and textual interpretations of the results differed markedly: one company said her risk for type 2 diabetes was "medium" at 10.3%, while another company company said it was "decreased" at 15.7%.

These tests claim they check for hundreds of diseases, but:

There are only 23 diseases that start in adulthood, can be treated, and for which highly predictive tests exist. All are rare, with hereditary breast cancer the most common. “A small percentage of people who get tested will get useful information,” Dr. Klitzman said. “But for most people, the results are not clinically useful, and they may be misleading or confusing.”

That makes these tests worse than worthless, and actually harmful. Which means they're just ripping their customers off.

What makes more sense, if you're worried about a genetic predisposition to a particular disease that runs in your family, is to get tested for that disease. That's what Angelina Jolie did: she decided to have a preventive mastectomy after genetic testing showed she was likely to develop breast cancer.

And if there's a disease that you may get that has no effective cure or for which there are no preventive measures (such as Parkinson's), you may not wish to be tested at all. It really depends on what kind of personality you have. If you would feel less stressed by knowing what your chances are, even if you knew it was likely, you should consider testing. But if you'd feel that the angel of death was standing over you for the rest of your life, you may well be happier not knowing.

At this point, these tests are woefully inaccurate because they examine only an extremely small number of SNPs (segments of DNA). Until the cost of whole-genome sequencing drops to an affordable level, these tests are a total waste of money.

As one of the doctors for The Times article said:

[The tests] may be interesting as a kind of entertainment, but do not take them seriously yet in driving your health care or your lifestyle. If you want to spend money wisely to protect your health and you have a few hundred dollars, buy a scale, stand on it, and act accordingly.

Make A Man Out of Him-Buy Him A Gun!

The Connecticut state police have released everything they have on the Sandy Hook shooting and it's not just disturbing. It's shovel to the head stunning how many fucking morons there were in his life that they didn't notice he was going to do this. This includes the media who keep wondering what his motive was. How about he was a fucking psycho and his mom was a complete idiot in allowing him access to guns?

Check out some of the information that was released.

In a section of the book labeled "Granny's Clubhouse of Happy Children," typed as dialogue from an imaginary television show, Granny and her son, "Bobolicious," terrorize a group of children. In one episode, Bobolicious tells the children they're going to play a game of "Hide and go die." Granny uses her "rifle cane" to kill people at a bank, hockey game and Marine boot camp. She also goes back in time and murders the four Beatles, according to a police synopsis.

Hey, someone get this kid a gun so he can straighten himself out. He needs to understand that his 2nd amendment right shall not be infringed! Time to make a man out of him!! Better hurry, the gubmint is a comin' to take those guns away...

The book also contains several chapters with the adventures of "Dora the Beserker" and her monkey, "Shoes" — a clear knockoff of the popular children's show "Dora the Explorer." When Granny asks Dora to assassinate a soldier, she replies: "I like hurting people ... Especially children." In the same episode, Dora sends "Swiper the Raccoon" into a day care center to distract the children, then enters and says, "Let's hurt children."

Even after this, his mother thought it would be just fine to get him a gun for Christmas. So, I have to wonder, how many of these morons are helping out the next school shooter? Maybe they'll have to learn their lesson the way Nancy Lanza did.

The fact that we have to put up with these Neanderthals given that it's the 21st century is beyond frustrating. All I can say after reading all of this is they better start praying over their arsenal today that no one I love is hurt because of their fucking cult. Even the slightest whiff of an issue in my circle of life and they will be living in hell for their rest of their floppy titted days.

If they think they have problems now, wait until this thousand ton force of nature takes their fucked up and quite literally death causing ideology and shoves it straight up their paranoid and psychotic fat asses.

Now What?

Issa on defense over Benghazi statements

On Sunday, “Meet the Press” host David Gregory asked Issa to respond to The Times story, which was published online Saturday. The story also said the Benghazi attacks were “fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.”

Here is the full story from the New York Times. I wonder if there will be any retractions and mea culpas from the right wing blogsphere (I'm waiting, Kevin). After all, their investigative abilities and infrastructure is ever bit as extensive as the Times, right? Once again, never buy into right wing hysteria and witch hunts. Invariably, they are just fucking wrong.

And the bubble continues to contract..

Riiiiight

I love how every photo of the president these days is some variation of this one.

Liberal media my ass!

Quite Popular

Pope Francis is quite popular, as in, sky high approval ratings. A whopping 88 percent of American Catholics highly approve of Pope Francis. Among the American people as a whole, his approval rating stands at an incredible 75 percent.

So even though conservatives have made the pontiff the newest target of their hatred, Americans overwhelmingly side with him. This suggests that even many conservatives love the Pope despite what right-wing leaders think. After all, it’s unlikely that these numbers are composed only of those who lean liberal.

Man, that's a whole lot of "fake" Christians!

Simple Math

Check out this piece on how Utah is set to end homelessness. The answer?

Government spending.

Utah has reduced its rate of chronic homelessness by 78 percent over the past eight years, moving 2000 people off the street and putting the state on track to eradicate homelessness altogether by 2015. How’d they do it? The state is giving away apartments, no strings attached. In 2005, Utah calculated the annual cost of E.R. visits and jail stays for an average homeless person was $16,670, while the cost of providing an apartment and social worker would be $11,000. Each participant works with a caseworker to become self-sufficient, but if they fail, they still get to keep their apartment.

Huh. Whouda thunk it? Simple math...

Uh Oh

Tom Steyer may be liberals' answer to the Koch brothers

For years, liberals have fretted about the power of ultrawealthy people determined to use their billions to advance their political views. Charles and David Koch, in particular, have ranked high in the demonology of the American left. But in Steyer, liberals have a billionaire on their side. Like the Kochs, he is building a vast political network and seizing opportunities provided by loose campaign finance rules to insert himself into elections nationwide. In direct contrast to them, he has made opposition to fossil fuels and the campaign against global warming the center of his activism.

And he's much younger than the Kochs, now in their 80s.

Can't Private Industry Get Anything Right?

A couple of weeks ago Target's point of sale terminals were attacked by hackers, who stole the credit card and PIN numbers of as many as 40 million customers. Target isn't the only company to have this problem; earlier this month JPMorgan Chase admitted half a million card users' data were stolen. That was more than two months after they found out, and that was two months after it happened. The same thing happened to Sony in 2011.

People who ordered gifts weeks before Christmas were disappointed when both UPS and FedEx failed to deliver on the promised dates:

Mr. Yslas said that he ordered the gift from Chef Uniforms early in the month, and that it was shipped on Dec. 14, with an estimated delivery of Dec. 19. But on Dec. 19, U.P.S. changed the estimated delivery date to Dec. 23. The package arrived in Fort Worth on Dec. 22, and U.P.S. changed the estimated arrival to Dec. 24. On Dec. 23, U.P.S. pushed that to Dec. 26. Mr. Yslas said he had complained to U.P.S.

(Meanwhile, the US Post Office began making Sunday deliveries for Amazon.com.)

Yesterday Delta Airlines' website was so screwed up that thousands of people were getting round-trip tickets to Hawaii for eighty-six bucks.

Curiously, the folks who have been complaining about how the healthcare.gov website problems prove that government can't get anything right are silent about these private industry screwups.

They also forget that a private company, CGI group of Montreal, is behind the healthcare.gov website. The company's mistakes have not been limited to the federal website; they also did the work on the Massachusetts and Vermont health care websites. Those states are withholding payment from CGI Group because of numerous problems.

There's nothing intrinsically different between government and corporate bureaucracies. They're all run by human beings who make the same kinds of mistakes for the same reasons. The main difference is that we control government through the power of the ballot, while private industry can keep their dirty little secrets behind closed doors as long as they can buy off or threaten people into silence with lawsuits. So while it may seem government is less competent than private industry, the fact is that private industry is simply better at keeping secrets: just ask the NSA.

Some people seem to think that the healthcare foul-up is due to rank government incompetence, while data breaches are concentrated attacks committed by brilliant hackers. Target isn't saying how that credit card data was stolen, but most data breaches are due to rank incompetence: someone puts an unencrypted file on a web server and forgets it there, or loses a laptop with thousands of medical records, or doesn't upgrade to the latest version of the operating system, or visits a porn site and gets infected with malware that steals their password, and so on.

Ultimately, the health care website is just a front-end that allows consumers to make apples-to-apples comparisons between equivalent health insurance plans offered by private industry. That's all it is.

To sell it the president just needs to (using a word that's so popular with Republicans these days) "rebrand" it with buzzwords conservatives like: the new health care system is a public-private partnership that sets up a marketplace where standards-based insurance plans engage in healthy competition, allowing consumer choice. As with charter schools, some consumers get vouchers to help pay for private industry health plans. The system encourages personal responsibility and prevents freeloaders and takers from dragging the whole system down.

Oh, and if he cussed out some teachers, called a few women sluts, slammed the work ethic of blacks, and insulted the intelligence of Latinos that would seal the deal.

The Good Guy With A Gun Lie

Great piece in last Sunday's Times on mental health and guns. It sadly shows how the system we currently have is failing.

The police seized the firearms, as well as seven high-capacity magazines, but Mr. Russo, 55, was eventually allowed to return to the trailer in Middletown where he lives alone. In an interview there recently, he denied that he had schizophrenia but said he was taking his medication now — though only “the smallest dose,” because he is forced to. His hospitalization, he explained, stemmed from a misunderstanding: Seeking a message from God on whether to dissociate himself from his family, he had stabbed a basketball and waited for it to reinflate itself. When it did, he told relatives they would not be seeing him again, prompting them to call the police. 

As for his guns, Mr. Russo is scheduled to get them back in the spring, as mandated by Connecticut law.

If our current laws worked, Mr. Russo should never be allowed to possess a gun again.

The other takeaway from this piece is this...

It was the shock of a potentially avoidable tragedy that pushed Indiana lawmakers to act. Reports of gunfire brought Officer Timothy Laird to Indianapolis’s south side one night in August 2004. Kenneth C. Anderson, a schizophrenic man who the police later learned had just killed his mother in her home, was stalking the block with an SKS assault rifle and two handguns. As Officer Laird stepped from his patrol car, he was fatally shot. Four other officers were wounded before one of them shot and killed Mr. Anderson.

Good guys with guns get shot ever year. Criminals are not deterred by them. Here are the latest statistics. That's 31 deaths last year. Recall these gun myths as well which include the statistics like this one.

Chances that a shooting at an ER involves guns taken from guards: 1 in 5. 

So, the notion that there are Jack Bauers and John McLanes in waiting out there to save the day is the product of the Gun Cult's hubris filled video game like fantasy. We don't need bloviating assholes in our schools with firearms. Considering they are belligerent adolescents who likely spend too much time playing their X Boxes and Play Stations, it makes perfect sense that they think we live in a fictional reality.

As Adam Lanza showed us, that's a pretty dangerous thing to believe.

Huh?

Sarah Palin: I didn’t read ‘Duck Dynasty’ interview

So, all the bitching and she didn't even read it? Still the ignorant and belligerent adolescent, I guess. Here is the full interview with Phil Robertson from GQ for those of you who read.

I'm still wondering how "immunity from dumb ass shit I say filled with hate, anger and bigotry" got translated into a first amendment issue. I'm also wondering why the outrage at outrage doesn't work both ways. Where's the outrage about the fictional War on Christmas?

Hitting Close To Home

I found this review of Chris Faraone’s latest book, I Killed Breitbart, to really hit home on the familiarity level. Internet comments sections are certainly full of "weirdos, hucksters, and rubes who comprise some of the loudest corners of our national conversation." The "barbaric buffoonery of online discourse" does indeed color far too many comments sections filled with people who think they are actually making a difference. Ah well...

No Need To Confess

Paul Ellis has a great essay on why there is no need to confess your sins in order to be saved. He lists 12 main reasons and each one is well sourced with Biblical verse. Make sure you read the sub links to each one as well.

Nikto had a comment recently that I wanted to bring out front in its entirety as it relates to this post. He was replying to a comment that Not My Name made regarding a verse from the Bible.

Your description of that passage is exactly why it makes little sense to dwell on every little nuance in the bible. It doesn't appear to have been written down until centuries after the events occurred. There were numerous copies that disagree with each other. Councils like that in Nicaea picked and chose which books to include in or exclude from the bible, which passages in those books to include or exclude. They made those decisions for political and social reasons as much as theological ones. 

In this day and age most every passage is interpreted differently by one Christian sect or the other, again to suit their particular political or social agenda. The end result is that there is no way for any human alive today to claim to have any knowledge whatsoever what the true word of the lord can possibly be. 

That means that the hundreds of Christian sects claiming to be the sole purveyors of the word of god are misled at best or lying at worst. All of them are guilty of the greatest hubris, thinking that they alone can possibly speak for god. If one sect happens to get everything right, how can we meager humans possibly decide which one that is? 

If it's impossible for us to pick the one true sect of Christianity, what does that say about a god who condemns us to eternal damnation for failing to adhere to a set of rules that he has completely failed to lay out clearly and concisely? The federal government manages to publish a new set of tax forms every year; why can't the creator of the universe be bothered to send down a new set of stone tablets every century or so? 

Any rational person must therefore come to one of two conclusions: either all religion is hogwash, or the exact details and rules are irrelevant. In either case, the only thing we can do is make a good-faith effort to be moral and ethical, and exercise humility. 

Condemning others for failing to abide by your particular set of religious dictates is the height of arrogance. You can pick the bible apart all you want to justify your dogmas, but you have no authority to impose your beliefs on others. If someone tries to do that -- be they Osama bin Laden, Ayatollah Khamenei, Patriarch Kirill 1, David Koresh, Joe Smith, Pat Robertson, or Charles Taze Russell -- you know they're either trying to steal your money or gain political power. 

Interestingly, Pope Francis has in recent days spoken with much less hubris than previous popes. Whether that will result in major changes in the Catholic Church remains to be seen, but it is a hopeful sign.

Yep.

Companies that Don't Clean Up After Themselves

Remember the market, that perfectly efficient generator of wealth and goodness that can do no wrong? Well, it ain't working very well for natural gas. So many goombahs have jumped into the fracking boom that the price of gas has collapsed. Many drillers have gone bust, leaving private property owners, states and the Bureau of Land Management to clean up their messes.

Case in point: Wyoming. According to a story in The New York Times:

Hundreds of abandoned drilling wells dot eastern Wyoming like sagebrush, vestiges of a natural gas boom that has been drying up in recent years as prices have plummeted.

The companies that once operated the wells have all but vanished into the prairie, many seeking bankruptcy protection and unable to pay the cost of reclaiming the land they leased. Recent estimates have put the number of abandoned drilling operations in Wyoming at more than 1,200, and state officials said several thousand more might soon be orphaned by their operators [2,300 are idle but have not been abandoned].

Wyoming officials are now trying to address the problem amid concerns from landowners that the wells could contaminate groundwater and are a blight on the land.

When these companies declare bankruptcy the weasels who promised to clean up after themselves disappear into the wind, leaving the local people to live with toxic waste and water that burns when it comes out of their wells. In Wyoming drillers pay a paltry fixed amount to cover cleanup costs, regardless of how many wells they drill: it's nowhere near the amount needed to pay for all the wells the drillers have abandoned.

Wyoming is now on the hook for tens of millions of dollars in cleanup costs. In a few years states like North Dakota that are raking in cash now will be digging themselves out of another toxic mess. But there's another similar threat appearing in Minnesota, one that should be nipped in the bud before it festers.

PolyMet Mining is a newly formed Swiss-backed Canadian company set up to exploit copper and nickel deposits in northern Minnesota, near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA). The metals are bound into sulfide rocks in very low concentrations: less than half a percent. The metals are mined by grinding up the rock in huge open pits and processing it to extract the metals, freeing sulfides in the process. Each ton of rock will produce only a few pounds of copper or nickel.

PolyMet is promising that they'll provide a couple of hundred local jobs for 20 years. However, the tailings from these mines will leach toxins like sulfuric acid and arsenic for the next 500 years. If these wastes run off into the lakes, streams and rivers in the area, it would decimate wildlife in the area, making the BWCA unusable. If the runoff reaches Lake Superior, it will kill fish and wildlife there as well.

PolyMet has promised to provide ongoing mitigation for the next five centuries. But as we've seen, companies simply cannot be trusted to make those kinds of promises, for even five, 10 or 20 years. Anyone promising to clean up the site for 500 years is simply lying. The foreign owners of the company don't give a damn about what happens to the land or the people after they've extracted the precious metals; the subsidiary of the international monolith that owns PolyMet will simply declare bankruptcy when the metals are all gone and walk away leaving a horrible, expensive mess.

Northern Minnesota already has already gone through this before: in 1960s and '70s Reserve Mining Company dumped tons of taconite tailings from their iron mining operations into Lake Superior every minute, polluting the lake with carcinogenic asbestos fibers. Lake Superior provides drinking water for cities on the lake. Miners also got mesothelioma from the asbestos. Reserve Mining was sued multiple times and declared bankruptcy in 1986.

The underlying problem with resources like natural gas, crude oil, iron, copper and nickel is that the price doesn't depend on how much it costs to clean up the mess that extracting them produces: it depends on much customers are willing to pay. The cost of extraction, cleanup and pollution mitigation varies wildly depending on the local geology and climate. A copper mine in a Utah desert isn't going to have the same pollution mitigation costs as a copper mine in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. But now that is that we've exhausted all the deposits where mining and mitigation are cheap we're looking to places where it's more expensive and more dangerous.

Just as not every high-school football player can expect to play in the NFL, not every copper and nickel deposit can be mined at an acceptable economical and ecological cost. Reflexively "Saying "Not in My Backyard" is just as bad as plunging ahead with every hare-brained scheme a foreign bamboozler comes up with.

Northern Minnesota is just too wet to safely exploit low-concentration metal deposits with current technology. The BWCA provides thousands of permanent jobs in tourism and recreation: it makes no sense to risk the loss of those jobs when -- not if -- PolyMet fails to live up to its word to keep the lakes and steams clean.

Anyway, why do we need so much copper and nickel in the first place? Electronics: everyone is buying a new smartphone and a new tablet every year. This suggests a more reasonable alternative: instead of trashing pristine places like the BWCA, why aren't we building these devices so that their component metals can be efficiently recycled, rather than just dumped in landfills?

That would make the phones cost more. But shouldn't the gluttonous people who cause a problem pay for its solution, rather than dumping all the environmental cleanup costs on the people who happen to live near the mines?

Merry Christmas!