Michael & Us

“The U.S. health care system ranks last compared with five other nations on measures of quality, access, efficiency, equity, and outcomes,” the non-profit group, which studies health care issues, said in a statement.
Canada rates second worst out of the six overall. Germany scored highest, followed by Britain, Australia and New Zealand.
“The United States is not getting value for the money that is spent on health care,” Commonwealth Fund president Karen Davis said in a telephone interview.
The group has consistently found that the United States, the only one of the six nations that does not provide universal health care, scores more poorly than the others on many measures of health care.
Link:
Report: U.S. health care expensive, inefficient: America ranks last among six countries on key measures, group finds

Michael Moore is, well, not my favorite person.

BUT I WAS STUNNED TO READ THIS ACCOUNT OF HOW HE GOES ABOUT HIS FILMMAKING.

A New Corollary of Godwin’s Law?

Recently there was a story in the Catholic press about a speech in which an Italian churchman apparently referred to things like abortion and euthanasia as "terrorism with a human face."

Now there’s this story about L’Osservatore Romano referring to an Italian commedian’s jibes at B16 and the Church as "terrorism."

The paper is quoted as saying:

"This, too, is terrorism. It’s terrorism to launch attacks on the
Church," it said. "It’s terrorism to stoke blind and irrational rage
against someone who always speaks in the name of love, love for life
and love for man."

I don’t know what all the commedian said, but the story refers to him saying:

"The Pope says he doesn’t believe in evolution. I agree, in fact the Church has never evolved," he said.

He also criticized the Church for refusing to give a Catholic funeral to Piergiorgio Welby, a man who campaigned for euthanasia as he lay paralyzed with muscular dystrophy. He died in December after a doctor agreed to unplug his respirator.

"I can’t stand the fact that the Vatican refused a funeral for Welby but that wasn’t the case for (Chilean dictator Augusto) Pinochet or (Spanish dictator Francisco) Franco," he said between musical acts at the open-air concert.

This kind of thing leaves me scratching my head.

I’m one of the biggest B16 fans there is, but I don’t see how this kind of stuff amounts to "terrorism." Either there’s something missing from the new story that the commendian said that would qualify in this regard or there is something in Italian culture that would allow these statements to be taken as incitements to violence or the word "terrorism" means something different in Italian . . . or I don’t know what.

While people regularly talk about how hard it is to give a rigorous definition to the term, it seems to me that at the core of the idea of terrorism is using either violence or threats of violence to cause fear in order to get someone to do what you want.

If there isn’t at least the threat of violence, it isn’t terrorism. It’s something else. For example, if someone threatens to release damaging information to get someone to do what he wants, it’s blackmail.

If violence or the threat of violence isn’t being used as some kind of coercion (either on the social policy level or on the personal level) then it isn’t terrorism. Violence without the purpose of coercision is just violence. Thus murder–even mass murder–is not terrorism.

So I don’t see how abortion or euthanasia or joking (even joking badly or offensively or mean-spiritedly) about the pope is terrorism.

But like I said, maybe the press reports have left stuff out, or maybe "terrorism" means something different in Italian.

I just hope we aren’t approaching an ecclesiastical equivalent of Godwin’s Law–something to the effect of "The more sharply felt the subject matter of a dispute is, the more likely a churchman is to call it ‘terrorism.’"

That would only rob the word of its meaning.

Would that count as lexical terrorism?

Burn Victim Towel Animal Update

Well, the burn victim towel animals have continued to appear in my cabin.

Below is a recent one, which is obviously a dog.

Towel_dog

The folks who guessed a penguin for the first one were correct. At least that’s what the cabin steward said it was.

One reader suggested a snow covered penguin, but I think there’s more to it than that. It was not only jet white, it also had no eyes.

Can you think of any albino, eyeless penguins?

I can.

According to H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness . . .

Suddenly a bulky white shape loomed up ahead of us, and we flashed on the second torch. It is odd how wholly this new quest had turned our minds from earlier fears of what might lurk near. Those other ones, having left their supplies in the great circular place, must have planned to return after their scouting trip toward or into the abyss; yet we had now discarded all caution concerning them as completely as if they had never existed. This white, waddling thing was fully six feet high, yet we seemed to realize at once that it was not one of those others. They were larger and dark, and, according to the sculptures, their motion over land surfaces was a swift, assured matter despite the queerness of their sea-born tentacle equipment. But to say that the white thing did not profoundly frighten us would be vain. We were indeed clutched for an instant by primitive dread almost sharper than the worst of our reasoned fears regarding those others. Then came a flash of anticlimax as the white shape sidled into a lateral archway to our left to join two others of its kind which had summoned it in raucous tones. For it was only a penguin – albeit of a huge, unknown species larger than the greatest of the known king penguins, and monstrous in its combined albinism and virtual eyelessness.

When we had followed the thing into the archway and turned both our torches on the indifferent and unheeding group of three, we saw that they were all eyeless albinos of the same unknown and gigantic species. Their size reminded us of some of the archaic penguins depicted in the Old Ones’ sculptures, and it did not take us long to conclude that they were descended from the same stock-undoubtedly surviving through a retreat to some warmer inner region whose perpetual blackness had destroyed their pigmentation and atrophied their eyes to mere useless slits.

The one in my room must have been a baby.

I’ll keep an eye out for shoggoths oozing out from under my bed.