Month: April 2009

An eye-popping demo of the combination of HD video and super-slo-mo technology. Mormon porn? Wait for the jello cube at the end, and you'll see what I mean.

I-Movix SprintCam v3 NAB 2009 showreel from David Coiffier on Vimeo.

Hat tip: Buzzfeed.

"Some things in life need to be mysterious … Sometimes you need to just keep walking," – Peggy Noonan on how to respond to incontrovertible evidence that the president of the United States committed war crimes.

An organ procurement transplant coordinator reflects:

Working with donor families made me believe in the kindness of our species again. Go work in an ER for 5 or 6 years and you may come away with a dim view of humanity. It's not fair, of course, you don't get to see people in their best light. But as a [transplant coordinator], I would walk away after a case, over and over again amazed at how people in the worst moments of their lives could find it in their hearts to help another, a stranger they would most likely never meet. It touches me still.

On Fox News, waterboarding someone 183 times in a month is not even close to torture, and the only bad thing in constructing and using the torture techniques devised and designed by the Gestapo, the Khmer Rouge, the Communist Chinese and Stalin was that the evidence was not kept secret. It is asserted as fact that this waterboarding saved lives, even though we have no solid evidence for that, apart from the word of those who ordered the torture.

Remember also that there is no legal debate of any kind as to the legality of waterboarding someone once, let alone 183 times. It is a war crime. Again: there can be no debate about this. No legal authority of any kind in any country until the Bush administration has ruled otherwise. The waterboard is prominently featured in the torture museum of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. But there is no concern at Fox about the rule of law at all. Recall that the GOP impeached a president for perjury in a civil lawsuit. Because it was a breach of the rule of law. But war crimes? It’s time to move on …

Chris Buckley becomes Rush Limbaugh. If you want to know how America became a torture nation, read it.

Now you can calculate whether you are losing money with Netflix.

Norm Geras longs for the old days:

You see, in your old-fashioned type of shower, you can apply soap to the various parts of your body and the soap stays there long enough for you to spread it about in cleansing movements, before allowing the water to wash it away. Not this shower, however. The billion side jets are taking the soap down into the watery below before you have a chance to use it. As quickly as you soap it on, just so quickly is it washed away.

Conor Friedersdorf has a proposal:

Let’s have an argument about what should be cut (the substance and what’s politically possible), and meanwhile we can test whether Daniel Larison is right about whether various strands of conservatives have anything to gain by engaging one another. This seems like the kind of “proposal-based” discussion that would be enriched by reader participation, especially if Andrew, Glenn Reynolds, The Corner bloggers, Hit&Run and others enlist their audiences. And just to make things interesting, JournoListers, I’ll solicit your help too — imagine how thoroughly you could embarrass the right blogosphere if your brain trust is better able to articulate ways to save the American taxpayer money!

My tentative nominees: spend trillions less on foreign wars of choice; take WFB’s advice — end a drug policy that includes military intervention in sundry foreign countries, billions in wasted military aid to dictators, and the costly imprisonment of countless non-violent offenders as part of a strategy that doesn’t even work; means test Social Security and Medicare; repeal prevailing wage mandates for government contracts; abolish public employee unions; lower costs at public universities by scaling back excess professorial research in the humanities, and put two-thirds of the saved man-hours into educating undergraduates; allow federal bureaucrats to anonymously submit egregious and otherwise unknown examples of government waste, and give them a sizable monetary reward should an act of Congress end the wasteful practice due to information they provided.

I’d happily sign on to all that, and I’d support any candidate who proposed it, or something like it.

Peterborough, Ontario, 11 am

Ezra Klein breaks out the spreadsheets and shows that American healthcare costs more per unit. He then theorizes why that is:

The hypothesis I'm going to offer is not definitive, and is not meant to be. But my read of the evidence is that at the root of our health care problem is an almost pathological aversion to making hard choices — an aversion that has, in its steadiness and implications, become the most consequential choice of all.

At the risk of cannibalizing an upcoming print feature, health care costs are on autopilot. In other areas of life, decisions are made based on whether a particular use of money is a good value as opposed to other uses of that money. Given a budget of $10, a hungry journalist who wants to expense his lunch must choose between the sandwich and the soup. He cannot choose both.

The American health care system doesn’t work like that. There is no budget. We don't want one. We’re profoundly uncomfortable saying that a person’s life, or health, is not worth the price of a particular procedure. And so we don't. We are too terrified of waiting for a procedure to even think of not providing it. We ask only that the procedure be proven effective against a placebo. Beyond that, we make no decisions, and we prefer it that way. Better to let five people die passively than kill one consciously.