July 2009
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Peter Singer: Why We Must Ration Health Care →
nytimes.com
This is an excellent article about the practical challenges and methods by which any public health care plan must be managed. Singer tackles the issue of “rationing” head on. In so doing, he gives the best explanations I’ve ever read for VSLs (Value of Statistical Life) and QALYs (quality adjusted life years), which are central to the work I do every day on how to improve food safety policy.
Look! Using a Shoe Organizer for Container Gardening →
ohdeedoh.com
Check out this awesome container gardening idea - a hanging shoe organizer. How ingenious, not to mention attractive, is this idea?
No.
I’m sorry, but no.
Why is it that so much of the “upcycle” movement feels a whole fucking lot like “how to live like a poor redneck while strutting around like a saviour”? I mean, hey, I can put plants in any fucking thing that holds dirt. LIKE A TOILET! OR AN OLD PAINT CAN! OR SOME OLD TIRES! OR A FUCKING SHOE ORGANIZER! If you’re poor, it’s called “making due” but if you went to college it’s called “greening your carbon footprint.”
I’m sorry, but indoor closet organizers should not be used outside on your back porch to grow marigolds. They should be used inside to store your extensive collection of Birkenstocks and Crocs, you dirty fucking hippie!
Best Places to Live 2009: #80: Bettendorf, IA →
money.cnn.com
Interesting. Two of our four Quad Cities (on the Iowa side, of course of course) are in the Money Magazine’s 2009 “list of America’s best small towns.”
Bettendorf, the whitest and richest of the QC, pops onto the list at number 80. Of course, the blurb is kind of ridiculous and off-base, but one can’t complain too loudly.
Not to be outdone, Davenport makes the list of top 25 towns with affordable housing, coming in at number 16. This blurb is a little more spot on.
The QC is still quaddy, but lists like this at least show that there is an upside, even if I feel like I have to strain my eyes to see it. Then again, I live on the Illinois side, which apparently didn’t do enough wooing of the editors…
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Comet Gain - Movies
One of my favorite songs by a band making a bit of a comeback these days. Comet Gain has a new record out, composed of B-sides and rarities, dating from 1998-2008, and it’s awesome. It’s called Broken Record Prayers and I highly recommend you pick it up. It can be found everywhere (1,2,3,4).
I fell in love with Comet Gain in 2002, when they released Realistes, which I picked up on a whim one day because some record store (DCCD? the place across the street?) had it up on the board. Jangly and sloppy, with occassionally spoken or off-key singing, boy girl vocals, pop by way of punk, with terrific melodies and a simple but propulsive Jam-ish rhythm section. Horns pop up here and there. It’s the sort of thing, albeit with more oomph, that Art Brut did a few years later.
This song is probably not the best song to showcase them, as it’s a bit more ballady than most of Realistes, and far more repetitive and chorus-heavy than most of their songs. But it just sticks with me. In some ways, to me, it’s like Montreal by The Wedding Present - one of their wussiest songs and from the late period when they were mostly off their game, but I adore it in a way I can’t quite describe. It just takes me somewhere I like to go.
Glenn Greenwald on Chuck Todd →
salon.com
Greenwald is often annoying, but just as often right. He nails Chuck Todd fair and square here, and makes a solid case for media bias and complacency. Perhaps most importantly, he shows how anonymous leaks and a media hungry for access drives the mainstream conventional wisdom:
Note how those anonymous claims now just become an unquestioned part of these discussions by “journalists.” Some anonymous intelligence official chats on the phone with Brzezinski and makes a bunch of Cheney-defending assertions; she excitedly writes it all down and goes on the TV and repeats it as Truth (and, of course, calls what she’s doing “reporting”). And now, all of that is just assumed to be true by these “journalists”: there was no real program, it never got off the ground, Congress was briefed anyway, Cheney did nothing wrong, there were no briefing obligations at all. Therefore, there’s nothing to see here.
Nobody even thinks to question or challenge that. It’s just accepted as true. Therefore, all of this is just petty cable catnip obscuring what truly matters, decrees NBC ”reporter” Chuck Todd.”
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