From My New Undisclosed Location

Well, that's done. I have moved house, into a smaller, but perhaps nicer place. Now I have to unpack - this is an accurate representation of the place:



The world has been busy, meanwhile - Health Care Reform passes, finally - a huge relief. I can't get too excited about the results - it still seems to me that the system is designed to provide a kind of endless preemptive bailout of the Insurance Industry - but it does good things, moves the system in the right direction. We're better off with this reform than without it - we will be better off still if we can build on it. I see the right wing is up in arms - and sometimes almost literally - about this; I am hard pressed to see why. The raving and ranting about it is utterly bizarre - where is this awful "usurpation" people talk about? People are carrying on as if they had found out that the government was running torture chambers in an offshore concentration camp and -

- What? what was that?

Enough. As with most political issues these days, the only real debate is on the left. The Republicans and their tea-bagger friends* have basically stepped out of the political conversation - they rave, they posture, but they believe in nothing, they support nothing - they are nihilists. Thankfully, they are weak and stupid nihilists, but that doesn't mean they can't inadvertently cause good people to collapse in a parking lot from a bad heart... But in this process, in the end, the real debate and work was between the left and the center. The right has stopped trying.

*Tea-baggers... I am not going to refer to these people as "tea party" anything. The tea party was a rebellion against a tax imposed on a colony from England - it represented a real power struggle between absentee government and self-determination. Taxation without representation - really. This stuff? is stealing the good name of Sam Adams (brewer and patriot) for a front group for a corporate lobbying firm. Rounding up nitwits who know about as much about politics as a parrot that's been watching Glenn Beck to stand around and should mad slogans - keep the government out of medicare - or whatever the fuck they're on about... Christ! The whole thing plays like something straight out of The Idiots - a flash mob for morons...

Oh! And happy birthday, Akira Kurosawa (a day or so late) - thanks for summing up how I feel!