Politblogo

Health insurance price control

Apologies to my incredibly gigantic public, but I haven't been posting much lately.  This is due to sheer laziness and ennui.  I confess that the endless peregrinations about Dion and May bore me to tears.  I can't figure out what's so fascinating about it.

Speaking of peregrinations, here's something I found while aimlessly surfing the internets.  A helpful guide from an American about studying in Canada.  Here's the section on health care, to give you the warm fuzzies.

Study Abroad at a Canadian University: If you are a U.S. citizen, chances are your health insurance won’t cover you in Canada. Be grateful you will be going to a country with affordable healthcare. Actually getting on the plan requires a lot of waiting. Once you do, it usually takes three months for your coverage to begin, so make sure you apply as soon as you get to Canada. In B.C. a private company offers virtually the same coverage at the same price during this waiting period. Once you are insured in B.C. (healthcare differs from province to province), you can see any doctor you like and pay nothing.

But the important part is that our public insurance apparently seems to keep the price of private, parallel forms of insurance down in Canada.  Which is not all that surprising, of course, but I didn't know that they tracked so closely.  (Assuming what this person is saying is still true.)

Later today, if I feel like it, there might even be a Tuesday amusing word.

Tuesday amusing word: frisbee

After a hard day's work of archaeological research into the ancient Bultec civilization, these Smithsonian employees are on their way home after having frusben.

Today's amusing word is "frisbee."  A frisbee is a discus-like, usually plastic object that's thrown around in a popular outdoor pastime.  People who throw frisbees are known as "frisbers."  To throw a frisbee is "to frisb"---hence "frisber" and "frisbee".

People have wondered for a long time about the etymology of "frisb."  There's a clear German cognate, not really in common use---"frisben," which means "to spin a round object in the air."  "Ich frisbe, du fribst," and so on.  It's mostly regular in the German present tense, just like it is in English: "I frisb, you frisb, he frisbs."  But "frisben" in German has irregular imperfect and perfect past tenses.  "Ich frosb" means "I frisbed" in English.  However, the perfect tense looks like this: "Ich habe gefrosben," which looks temptingly close to the English form "I have frusben."  They are not translations of each other, and the English form might be explained by analogy to "to spin": "I have spun". 

Whatever the etymology of frisbing may be, most people know frisbee play as an entertaining and energetic pastime, with few rules.  "Frisbee" is also a pretty funny word, with the "z" sound and the "b" sound next to each other: an unusual combination.  It's verb form "to frisb" is a little awkward-sounding, but no more so than a number of other English words.  In the meantime, this ancient game that comes from the long-vanished Bultec civilization in South America is played by millions of frisbers today.  Happy frisbing!

Scientific measurements of moral inconsistency: now with pants cannons!

Remember all those warmongering wingnuts complaining that Al Gore was apparently using a lot more electricity than he should have been? Pinko Punko at Three Bulls! has developed a system to measure the relative inconsistency in their positions and actions---between warmongering wingnuts and Al Gore.  Don't you just love science?  So objective.

Wah wah! We achieve a rhetorical miracle! at Three Bulls!: Case (A) If one were to advocate a Bob Owens to sign up for a stint in Iraq, how could we measure such a contribution? We could at minimum consider his contribution as that of a warm breathing body to our army in Iraq. Let us say 1/150,000. I know, you say “Pinko, let’s be fair with that denominator.” Let us assume that the United States armed forces actually are represented by a higher number, 1,000,000 and that Bob is not the musclebound killing machine he might appear to be, but a formless mass of disgusting flotsam, prone to friendly fire incidents and grave incompetency, thus his contribution would be rendered at 1% of replacement player. Thus we would have his overall contribution to our forces as 1/100,000,000th of our effort in Iraq as the minimum bound. Since we have been hearing so much that “surge” troops are actually key to our entire war strategy, if we were to assume Bob Owens were a killing machine worth 10 men, and that he would sign up now to take part in our troop surge (a mere 20,000 men and women) we might measure Bob’s maximal contribution to our effort as 1/2000th.

The thread evolves into an enlightened discussion of the science of automatic pantsing.

Peace and rejectionism

Excellent reporter and Israeli policy critic Gideon Levy at Ha'aretz writes about Israel's reaction to the recent initiative in the region and what it implies for Israel's future place in Middle East and in history:

Israel doesn't want peace - Haaretz - Israel News - The world has been turned upside down and it is Israel that stands at the forefront of refusal. The policy of refusal of a select few, a vanguard of the extreme, has now become the official policy of Jerusalem. In his Passover interviews, Olmert will tell us that, "The Palestinians stand at the crossroads of a historic decision," but people stopped taking him seriously a long time ago. The historic decision is ours, and we are fleeing from this crossroads and from these initiatives as if from death itself.

Terror, used as the ultimate excuse for Israeli refusal, only helps Olmert keep reciting, ad nauseum, "If they [the Palestinians] don't change, don't fight terror and don't adhere to any of their obligations, then they will never extract themselves from their unending chaos." As though the Palestinians haven't taken measures against terrorism, as though Israel is the one to determine what their obligations are, as though Israel isn't to blame for the unending chaos Palestinians suffer under the occupation.

Israel makes a point of setting prerequisites and believes it has an exclusive right to do so. But, time and time again, Israel avoids the most basic prerequisite for any just peace - an end to the occupation. Of all the questions asked during his Passover interviews, no one bothered to ask Olmert why he didn't react with excitement to the recent Arab initiatives, without preconditions? The answer: real estate. The real estate of the settlements.

This may seem like a thorough denunciation, and it is, but Gideon Levy is a little charitable in a way.  He doesn't seem to explicitly note that Israel's position of rejectionism has been its standard behaviour for a very long time, and with unchanging rhetoric and motives.

Greek Orthodox Easter: delicious

Today I spent most of my day at the house of a group of Greek dudes who are friends of mine, because they were celebrating Easter with a traditional Greek Easter luncheon.  On the menu:

• Fresh-baked, warm, Greek-style foccacia bread with rosemary.
• Tzatziki (two kinds, with two levels of garlic) for the bread, and, in fact, for everything else, since Greeks eat tzatziki with everything.
• Homemade spanakopita.
• Greek salad quite unlike the restaurant kind.  Very tomato-ey and with a lot more oil and feta.
• Salad with lettuce, dill, and olive oil.
• Potatoes baked crisp in a bath of olive oil and rosemary.
• Barbecued chicken.
• Swiss and Muenster cheeses.
• Gyro bread.

But most importantly, there was a lamb on a motorized spit over a charcoal-filled firepit.  The lamb was spun for hours over the pit (it was dead already, don't worry) while being regularly brushed with a mixture of olive oil, oregano, salt, and pepper.  People kept wandering up to it and tearing off slices even before it was finished.  And when it was finished, it was so delicious all the way though.

Unfortunately, I had to leave early, just after the lamb and been put on the table for the twenty or so of us to descend on it, so I did not fill myself to bursting with the afternoon lamb.    But what I had was delicious.  The crispy outside layer, and the lambishly tender meat underneath.  With a bit of tzatziki, heavenly.  Mmm.

Next year, I will have to figure out how to gatecrash a Passover seder.  But this Muslim's verdict on Greek Orthodox Easter: delicious.

Some kinds of Internet censorship don't quite work

From the Grope, I found this news article about Thailand's military government blocking YouTube because of videos insulting the King.  Naturally, any electronic link to the outside world can be subverted:

Tech-savvy Web surfers in Thailand have been able to access the videos through proxy servers – computers outside the country that relay YouTube content back to the original viewer under the guise of a different Web site. Proxy servers are a common way of evading censorship around the world.

These kinds of targeted blockages are very hard to enforce, as anyone who's asked the US media companies, some of whom are dropping Digital Rights Management technology, which is an attempt to use people's own computer hardware to enforce blockages.  But it's too easy to set up alternate ways to gain access to digital material. 

What does work, however, is monitoring people, which is appallingly easy and creates a more widespread chill over speech.  What also sometimes works is very large, blanket bans.  But if you want foreigners to stop insulting your monarchy on the Internet, you're probably out of luck.

Musical "Friday", airbrushed photo edition

E Nomine is a German group that mixes heavy metal with operatically-influenced orchestral music, melodramatic choral singing, and Euro techno-dance stuff.  I understand that this sort of combination has been popular in Germany since, oh, Wagner.   Many of their music video clips are on YouTube, and I am going to present to you two of them this "Friday".   They both come from E Nomine's lengthy opus, Die Prophezeiung, which is an extremely overwrought long apocalyptic fantasy heavy-metal symphonic poem.  It's not called "The Prophecy" for nothing.

The first is their very famous and popular "Deine Welt" ("Your World") from near the beginning of the opus.  It involves the growly voice of E Nomine's narrator proclaiming things about "the biggest apocalypse in the world" or something like that. (Even a non-German speaker should be able to tell when he says that.)  He is backed up by a strenuous operatic choir singing agitated claims that "That is the hour!"  In the middle there is a calm segment and a woman singing in Latin.  In most of Die Prophezeiung, singing parts are done in Latin and spoken parts in German, but "Deine Welt" has some German song.

The second is "Der Blaubeermund", which is still close to the beginning but after "Deine Welt".  As far as I can tell, with my poor German, it means something like "The Blueberry Mouth."  I don't understand the German growly narration, but apparently it has something to do with obsession and necrophilia.  It alternates between the narrator and a female operatic singer who declaims "I love you, my beautiful star" in Latin and is backed up by a male chorus.

Both songs have a dance beat and some other alterations that make them a little inferior to the versions I originally heard, which comes from a (re?)mix of Die Prophezeiung that's much more weighted towards the operatic than to the techno. And that concludes today's "musical" "Friday".

Sovereignty pointless: Canada can sell gas

The following op-ed appeared in today's Le Devoir

Le nouveau Canada, un pays plus convivial?. Pourquoi le Canada a-t-il réduit sa dette de façon aussi considérable? Le contexte énergétique y a contribué pour beaucoup. En 1995, le baril de pétrole valait environ 20 $; il coûte près de 60 $ aujourd'hui. Le Canada est actuellement considéré comme le pays qui a les plus vastes ressources pétrolières au monde après l'Arabie saoudite, surtout grâce aux sables bitumineux de l'Alberta. Au rythme où le pétrole canadien est exploité actuellement, ces réserves pourraient durer plus de 200 ans.

Le Canada est dans une position très avantageuse: il est très envié à travers le monde pour ses immenses ressources pétrolières et gazières et les capitaux y affluent. Des investissements massifs, de l'ordre d'une dizaine de milliards de dollars par an, sont en cours en Alberta, principalement dans le domaine des sables bitumineux. Les Albertains d'abord mais aussi tous les Canadiens du reste du pays commencent à en profiter, et ce n'est qu'un début.

Where to begin?  He says, because Alberta has gas, there's no point in separating.   Now, I'd be happy with this formula if it weren't for the fact that it is massively bad idea on so many levels to be oil-and-gas-dependent like that.  Of course, we just know that Alberta politicians would love to share all that tasty oil revenue with Québec. 

That's just the beginning of what's wrong with that article.  And why for ROCians who have any environmentalist sympathies or social justice sympathies, Québec federalists are often a pretty dangerous bunch with whom to be throwing in your lot.

Easter Bunny: terrifying

Today I was shopping in a mall which I visit frequently because of its proximity, and I was blissfully walking through the halls which were curiously bedecked with pastel bunting like it was some kind of lavendar Christmas when I chanced upon a truly horrible sight.  In place of the Santa Claus that would be there on a normal Christmas, there was a man in a bunny suit.  Normal, you say?

Wrong, I say!  Since when did the Easter Bunny get his own mall display like Santa Claus so that children could sit on his knee.  What's the Easter Bunny supposed to bring on Easter anyway? What do you bring to a crucifixion?  Flowers?  Condolence cards?  And why is a crucifixion coloured pastel? 

Worse, this Easter Bunny suit was the most horrendous thing you had ever seen.  It had this cruel rictus toothy grin glued onto its frighteningly large face.  All it needed was some tentacles dangling from its mouth, and it could have been the Easter Cthulhu.  There was a little girl in its presumably necessary pen, pushed in by her naive or psychopathic parents like live food pushed, terrified, into a predator cage, and like the prey, she was pressed up against the cute little fence/prison bars as far away from the monstrous thing as she could go as her parents coaxed and prodded her towards the abomination.   I don't blame her.  But then she presumably was being offered the privilege of being eaten first.

So the moral of the story is, having live monstrous Easter Bunny displays in malls is an abomination and should be halted forthwith.  You took the Nativity, O Consumerism, can't you leave the Crucifixion in peace?  And I'm not even Christian.

Tuesday amusing word: defenestrate

I haven't posted in the past coupla days because I was feeling sort of uninspired.  I hope I'm not sliding into a hiatus.  But whatever, I can still give you a Tuesday amusing word.

Today's amusing word is not onomatopoeic, for once, nor does it involve an "oo" sound.  It belongs to another, smaller class of amusing words: polysyllabic words constructed from Greek or Latin roots to represent odd or unusual nontechnical concepts (PWCFGOLRTROOUNC).  These words usually have a relatively brief representation in plain English on their own as a short phrase or even another single word (which is why we generally exclude technical words from this category).  The existence of a PWCFGOLRTROOUNC word is usually totally unnecessary, often designed merely to impress or amuse, given the level of pomposity in the speaker (which I do not consider to be necessarily a bad trait).   The PWCFGOLRTROOUNC category also overlaps with the other categories of amusing words.

"Defenestrate" is clearly a member of PWCFGOLRTROOUNC.  All it means is "throw out via a window."  But it is not constructed of barbaric Germanic words, but instead a set of refined Latin morphemes.  Therefore, it is an educated, refined way of throwing people out of a window to their deaths.  And that conjunction of lethal violence and genteel erudition is, despite its gruesome results, humourous.  Not quite as humourous as a random pun, actually not very humourous at all, but funny enough to merit billing as an amusing word.