The Perils of Sloganeering (healthcare edition)
Jul 31, 2009 politics
There’s so much political stupidity on Facebook that I have to just ignore 99% of it. But yesterday I noticed a very conservative friend — known for his opposition to universal healthcare in any form — quip that “the city of Pittsburgh has more MRI machines then [sic] all of Canada…” I took a particular [...]
Tags: acute care, Canada, developed nations, healthcare, hospitals, infant mortality, life expectancy, MRI, MRI machines, OECD, Pittsburgh, single-payer, universal healthcare
Blog Re-design
Jul 29, 2009 meta
As should be obvious, I’ve drastically overhauled this blog (as a way to procrastinate from packing up my apartment). There are still a number of tweaks needed but I’m happy overall with how things turned out. Let me know if you have any suggestions or comments. I wanted to also point out the resources that [...]
Dangerous Knowledge
Jul 26, 2009 movies, philosophy, politics
I guess I’m on a philosophy film kick. The latest was the BBC’s Dangerous Knowledge, a documentary on mathematicians Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing — four geniuses whose neuroses drove them fatally mad. It’s debatable the extent to which their respective theories made them insane — the film obviously plays this [...]
Tags: fascism, Georg Cantor, Germany, Godel, Hitler, logic, Ludwig Boltzmann, mathematics, modernism, Nazism, philosophy, postmodernism, Prussia, Third Reich, Turing, WWI, WWII
Examined Life
Jul 25, 2009 movies, philosophy, politics, videos
I finally got to see Examined Life, a pseudo-intellectual documentary that aims to make philosophy a tad more accessible. The film uses some of academia’s rock stars to talk shop outside of normal confines, which is interesting, but probably still of limited appeal. We get, in order: Cornel West on philosophy Avital Ronell on alterity [...]
Tags: alterity, Avital Ronell, Cornel West, cosmopolitanism, deconstruction, ecology, ethics, feminism, Judith Butler, justice, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Otherness, Peter Singer, philosophy, politics, revolution, Slavoj Zizek, social contract, Socrates
Decluttering Blues
Jul 10, 2009 personal
In the midst of packing I’m also making an effort to throw out the piles upon piles of junk I’ve collected. I was/am something of a packrat, but I’ve decided that it might not be a bad idea to finally throw out broken knickknacks and receipts from 1994. Hard to believe some of the ridiculous [...]
Tags: Faith Academy, pacifism, poetry
Goodbye PokerStars
So I’ve quit poker for good in anticipation of my impending move to Argentina. It was extremely bittersweet for me to cash out my entire PokerStars account today; happy for the money, sad to leave it all behind, disappointed I didn’t win more. But poker has enabled me to have a life that wouldn’t have [...]
Tags: gambling, hold'em, poker, PokerStars
National City Bank Sucks
I’ve had a lot of problems with National City in the past month. In one case, I’d done a lot transactions recently and needed an electronic copy of my bank statement — but was informed by two “specialists” that this was impossible and that hard copies sent via snail mail were the only option. It [...]
Tags: National City
Anarcho-Bokononism
Jul 3, 2009 politics
Ok, there’s no such thing as anarcho-Bokononism. But Bokononism, the fictional true religion created by Kurt Vonnegut in Cat’s Cradle, does have some interesting similarities with Christian anarchism. Perhaps the most obvious is the Bokononist repudiation of granfalloons, or false communities. A “textbook example” of a granfalloon (or false karass) is the association of Hoosiers, [...]
Tags: anarchism, Bokononism, Caesar, Cat's Cradle, Christianity, government, Vonnegut
The Great American Bubble Machine
Jul 2, 2009 politics
Matt Taibbi has a really excellent article in Rolling Stone about Goldman Sachs and their financial tomfoolery: “The Great American Bubble Machine.” As usual, Taibbi has good research and good wit: “[Goldman Sachs] is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” [...]
Tags: capitalism, Eliot Spitzer, Goldman Sachs, housing bubble, junk bonds, Matt Taibbi, recession, Rolling Stone, stock market, subprime mortgages, tech bubble, Wall Street