Saw a powerful and thought-provoking film today on NetFlix called 180° SOUTH by Jeff Johnson which is a film record of his journey to Patagonia in the footsteps of his heros Yvon Chouinard (founder of Patagonia, Inc. the outdoor clothing company) and Doug Tompkins (founder of The North Face and co-founder of ESPRIT). Environmentally-aware, these guys are self-described “dirt bags” who would spend most of their time in the sixties hiking, surfing, camping, and mountain climbing in the great wilderness areas of the west and eventually built businesses around what they loved to do. Their successes eventually allowed them the resources to help create and preserve huge tracks of land in South America even as the countries there were building dams and paper pulp mills and power plants to fuel their fledgling economies. Jeff’s trip (by boat) gets delayed when they shipwreck and are forced to detour to Easter Island (Rapa Nui) to re-mast. The lesson of the deforestation of Easter Island by islanders driven in competition to build ever larger status Moai is not lost on the film-maker (there is still disagreement about this in the scientific community). The film’s name comes from a comment that if progress up a mountain brings you to a cliff does it make sense to march into the chasm when you could instead turn 180 degrees around and take a step forward? Beautiful scenery, interesting characters, important social issues, awesome soundtrack largely by Ugly Casanova (Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse) and James Mercer, though the haunting melody sung by Mahoke, a girl Jeff meets on Easter Island and decides to take the journey with him may rank as my favorite song in the film.

I think its an amazing coincidence that *both* of the candidates for president in the last election had serious questions raised about their American citizenship. To be president, the Constitution requires that a candidate be a “natural born citizen”, but doesn’t strictly define what it means to be ‘naturally born’. We might interpret it to mean that a person should be born within the boundaries of the US (but what about incorporated territories or military bases?), be born to citizen parents (but what if you’re born on foreign soil? or if only one parent is a citizen?), or perhaps it disqualifies any baby born by cesarean section? The supreme court has never settled the issue, but there have been many cases arguing the various merits of each condition over the years.
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The health care bill makes it compulsory for all Americans to buy private insurance in the free market which in and of itself is an incredible irony. What’s so free about a market where you are forced to buy something? There are many who don’t think the solution that passed is Constitutional because while the government has the right to tax, it does not have the right to force citizens to buy a particular product. As Robert Siegel pointed out on NPR recently, It’s even more ironic that a public plan *would* have been perfectly Constitutional, because like social security and medicare it would have been funded through taxation. The flip side which I haven’t heard discussed is that long ago we made it mandatory for hospitals to provide emergency care to people that have no insurance. So we already have a situation where a private firm is legally required to provide a service for free. That certainly seems just as bad as requiring everyone who could potentially require that service to pay some nominal fee upfront. In fact, the health care bill may even correct that injustice. Except of course, that it doesn’t, because the new bill does not cover folks in this country illegally whom the Emergency Room staff are still obligated to help.

I personally favored a solely public plan solution (also called “single payer”) which would have removed private insurance carriers entirely. A single payer system would have removed the middle man and covered everyone in the country – saving perhaps billions of dollars, simplifying an otherwise onerous accounting process for doctors and hospitals and allowed for national standards to be set for provided care. The big losers in this would have been the insurance companies. Insurance companies are essentially bookies that are betting you aren’t going to get sick while you’re betting you are. Their actuaries are usually right (luckily for them) which means much of the money they take in is profit and does nothing to either improve care or provide it. They have no incentive to improve care (which is expensive), but lots of incentive to deny it or cancel it.

I’ve been poking around a bit on Prison Planet lately, thats a website run by Alex Jones, a radio talk show host who has been described as a “paleoconservative” whatever thats supposed to mean. Paleo means old, so I assume it’s being used to create a distance from the “neocons” (meaning New Conservatives) who were neither new nor really conservative in the first place. The first story I ran into over there was titled Louisiana Cops Plan for “End of the World” Scenario which goes on to describe how the program includes access to a .50 caliber vehicle mounted machine gun to help put down looters and rioting in the event of a crisis. I got a little further into the article and it is suggested that cities across America are beginning their own war training in preparation for the coming apocalypse in 2012. No, not the fabled Mayan end of the world, this refers to a prediction by a “futurist” named Gerald Celente.
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