With tomorrow’s ruling expected on the Affordable Health Care Act, all forms of media including the Internets are a buzz with what will or won’t happen, pre-defending a decision, and praising and/or deriding the court as stalwart defenders of the Constitution/activist evil-doers.

I heard an analyst opine that the choice before the court is basically a philosophical battle between “conservatives” who believe in libertarian ideals and “liberals” who see a fundamentally broken healthcare system that cannot be fixed by the private market.

If the conservatives prevail, then the only funding mechanism to try to actually cover the costs of uninsured free-riders on the medical system in America that the Congress has managed to come up with in 40+ years goes out the window. I’m frustrated with the court spending so much airtime talking about broccoli and Chevys in the oral arguments. The scenario is pretty simple. If the libertarian ideal is to work and nobody—especially the rich—are required to buy medical insurance or contribute to a single payer system, then we must follow through and remove requirements to treat people without regards to their ability to pay. That means when you are bleeding to death on the highway in an accident, they can check your insurance status or verify you have say a $30,000 bond that proves the bills get paid, and if you don’t they let you die. If you show up at an ER with a gunshot wound or your child is unable to breath due to an asthma attack, they again can refuse to treat you if you can’t prove the bills will get paid. That may be exactly what the Atlas Shrugged crowd would want to happen--they seem to be quite happy asserting "being poor or unlucky" as a terminal condition. Then again they aren’t the nurse or doctor watching someone die in front of them when they have the means to help either. They are also assuming that they won't be the one watching their own child suffering despite the clear evidence from Wall Street that even the rich can be laid low overnight. Maybe the court should have spent more time talking about that than trying to pretend they were arguing the fate of vegetables.

It doesn’t really seem to matter if the rest of the bill is upheld or not. If the mandate is thrown out, then we are right back to the problem of no way to pay the country’s medical bills. Hoping that the next Congress will come up with something better in a timely manner is at best naïve. At this point they can’t seem to agree to tie their shoes. Leaving it to the states has proven impossible as state after state has attempted to do something about the mess and it has failed because it’s not something that can be resolved at that level.

The conservative movement in America and elsewhere is unfortunately disinclined to make decisions based on evidence. They want to believe that individual choice will resolve the crisis, when all evidence shows it can’t—in fact the rational choice for individuals under the current system is exactly how we got in this mess. Personally I find it strange that they have full and complete faith that individual banded together as corporate entities will always do what’s best for the country, but individuals banded together through government will always fail.

Then again, it seems you have to have a very high tolerance for cognitive dissonance to be agreeing with these views in the first place. The whole premise of the "Tea Party" movement seems to be that doing nothing is what they should be doing, and frankly they are doing an excellent job of doing nothing at all.

This week is total "9/11" overload. It's like Giuliani running for the presidental nomination... There's been retrospectives on every form of media all week. I watched the NOVA on Rebuilding Ground Zero, listened to some of the NPR stories, read a few editorials, etc. I half expected to see the Food Network run a special on how our taste in cheese has changed since 9/11...

August 16th, 2011 marked my tenth year in Seattle. I can say I'm in a much better place than I was at the 5 year anniversary.

Best wishes to all the families still living with the loss of that day. I hope the memorial opening is seen as a fitting tribute. I hope nobody dies a violent death today in Iraq or Afghanistan (although the chances of that seem pretty low). If Cheney or some other Bush administration person claims the Iraq war was 'worth it', they are free to FOAD. I'm glad Bin Laden is not around to record more of his crazy, fundamentalist bullshit. I wish the Religious Right in America would take the time to reflect on the fact that it's the "Fundamentalist" part not the "Muslim" part that was the seed of all this pain.

I think I'm done. So I think it is best if I just avoid Facebook and all forms of "live" media for the rest of the day. I will spend it instead putting together a raised bed in the yard, playing games with friends, and enjoying time with DrB and Professor X.

There's something cloying and whiny about the way the political right complains about 'media bias'. It seems like they try to prove their own point with Fox being an appallingly poor source for objective news analysis. I would absolutely support the complaint that most "news" in America is really insipid, uninformative, and cursory sound bites completely lacking in context or analysis. That's not a 'bias', that's just crappy pseudo-journalism.

So another visit to Seoul and another round of talks for a Korean audience has come to a close. I'm sitting in the business class lounge waiting for my flight to Narita to board. From there I'll be transferring to a new plane and heading back to Seattle.

This time I managed to avoid too many long, uncomfortably formal banquet dinners consisting of a bewildering array of tentacle-y and fishy foods, all accompanied by lounge music sung phonetically by Koreans. This time, however, I did run into a new phenomenon: When stuck in heavy traffic (traffic is Seoul is horrible), the taxi driver subjected us to a movie. The first two times it was Saving Private Ryan--yes, it’s so relaxing to take your mind off traffic by watching brave young men torn to shreds on the beaches of Normandy—and the second was Category 7. The latter is one of those Hollywood atrocities funded by Sci-Fi Channel programmers and offset by German government subsidies. The worst part is that it is a sequel to Category 6. Yes, 16 hours of terrible made-for-TV stupidity, a sub-plot per second rate, and meteorologically challenged "science" beyond the pale of normal terrible movie-making. For the record, the Saffir-Simpson scale only goes to Category 5 because it is defined as a open bound which precludes the existence of a “Category 6” or a “Category 7”. Apparently the writer (characters by Matt Dorf!) read some stupid article in 2005 saying we should add a “Category 6” to the scale for a few specific “Super Typhoons”. Shannen Doughtery as a rocket scientist!? Randy Quaid as a crazy drunk (ok, I buy that one) with an extreme weather fetish. Tom Skerritt as a grizzled SR-71 Blackbird pilot, flying the damn thing into a storm after "loitering" for hours in the air. Um, the Blackbird is perhaps the most unstable airframe ever built without computer controlled flight surfaces. It is meant to fly on the edge-of-space and they always flew in good weather until they were above anything humans would call weather! Oh, and all the pilot acting was shot while they were in an F-15 cockpit mockup! Throw in Robert Wagner and you have yourself a full-on Hollywood work program (I'm just here to get the good insurance this year, baby!)

At least I enjoyed MSTing the thing with co-workers:

“Hey, Shannen, can you bring your own clothes for the shoot? Whatever you wear slumming around the house on a Sunday painting would be great. We spent our entire budget on Gina Gershon’s collogin injections and Randy’s booze supply. Oh, and bring your truck. We need something that looks cool.”

Well, with that off my chest, it is time to head to my gate.

Update: Made it to Narita. Flight to SEA is on time and boards in under an hour. PS: I hate Macs. There isn't one to be found anywhere in South Korea unless it is being carried by a foreigner, but here in Japan they put them into the business class lounge. Um, hey Steve, humans can handle more than one button. Really. They can.

Starbuck's is in financial trouble!!?!? It's A Sign of the Apolocalypse!

That or stupid amounts of over-saturation of the market with four stores per corner in Seattle.

And maybe the fact that a Latte and gallon of gas are about the same price...

Is it just me or is the Republican justification for continuing to pour men & women in the grinder--and money we don't have and won't ever have at this rate--in Iraq the same justification for gambling addicts? "We've lost so much, it would be a waste to quit now".

It seems like our country's leaders, and definitely many of our corporate leaders, have taken the popularity of Poker to heart. "Go All In" should not be such an acceptable and common gambit.

As the years roll by, certain aspects of the culture in which I live annoy me more and more. The highly commercialized nature of national holidays, perpetuated primarily to artificially increase demand for goods you can otherwise get easily and cheaply the rest of the year, is one of those things that is really beginning to bug the s*it out of me. I was incredibly annoyed last year when the week of Halloween, you couldn't tell there was in fact a major national holiday happening between then and Christmas. And now February brings the triumvirate of hate that I have now for Valentine's Day.

It's a holiday that is steeped in idiotic commercialism--the late-night commercials for custom Teddy Bears I saw the other night was particularly galling, but diamond ads remain the very peak of the misogyny in advertising. It still reminds me of Kim and her high-maintenance desires for complicated romance rituals, always with a little twist of detail she expected without actually telling anyone--never mind that no one had ever heard of that detail because it's something her mom made up for her a child. And then there's the way that the whole holiday grinds at singles. My situation is far from the isolation it once was in that regard, but I'm certainly not on track to having an SO anytime in the foreseeable future. All this for a made-up stupid holiday just to sell flowers, chocolate, crappy overpriced insincere greeting cards, and diamonds at prices even more artifically inflated by the evil of the De Beers price control!

Maybe I'm just bitter...

Ok, I know that it's because I'm bitter.

2 * $27 tickets (before fees) totals to $96

Even more stupid that they think people should pay $2.50 a ticket to save them the factional labor, printing, and mailing costs for tickets. Asshats.

Earlier this week I took my car in for regular maintenance. They mentioned that I will probably be needing to replace the tires sometime next spring or summer. My first reaction was a little voice in my mind saying (in my father's voice of course), "The dealer is just trying to screw me like they always do. Didn't I just replace the tires like last year?"

Actually, Chuck, you old fart apparently no longer able to discern the passage of time, the set of tires on your car was put on there in April 2005. In the intervening two and a half years you've put 43,000 miles on the car and said tires. The original factory tires lasted to about 70,000 miles.

Romney's religion speech annoys me because he invoked the writers of the Constitution's use of "God" as evidence that we are supposed to be a "religious" nation, and then immediately connected it with the statement: "He should remain on our currency, in our pledge, ...". This is all very nice and comforting to the religious right, except that it is misleading at best. The text of the Constitution doesn't invoke God or religion at all. God is mentioned in the Declaration of Independence in non-denominational tones, which is not surprising given that many of the Founding Fathers were Deists rather than Christians (I wouldn't call the phrase "Nature's God" or "their Creator" to really speak of a Christian perspective). The phrase "IN GOD WE TRUST" wasn't on the currency until 1863 and even then that was just coins. It wasn't on paper until 1957. The phrase "Under God" wasn't present in the Pledge of Allegiance until 1954.

It's a modern fiction to say that the United States of America is a "Christian Nation". We had and have many Christians here, but that's not exactly the same thing. The persecution complex the Christian right like to use to make it seem like they are "under attack" even when they are already well-represented in the majority might feel assuaged by this kind of rhetoric, but it's historically misleading if not an outright lie.