The fax of life - Vox

“We don’t expect Amazon and Walmart to share background on their customers, but we do expect competing hospital system to do so,” says David Blumenthal, who coordinated health policy for the Obama administration from 2011 to 2013. “Those institutions consider that data proprietary and an important business asset. We should never have expected it to occur naturally, that these organizations would readily adopt information exchange.”

And this is the problem: health care providers are expected to act not in the patients' interests but in the health care providers' interests. What could go wrong?

Following (1998) **

Nifty neo-noir, sort of a proto-type for Memento.

Facebook translates 'good morning' into 'attack them', leading to arrest | Technology | The Guardian

The Israeli Defence Force has been open about monitoring the social media accounts of Palestinians, looking for “lone-wolf” attackers who might otherwise slip through the net. It reportedly does so automatically, using algorithms to look for terms such as “sword of Allah”.

Todd Rundgren on Meat Loaf's 'Bat Out of Hell': Producer Talks Spoofing Bruce Springsteen With Classic Album | Billboard

But I saw it as a spoof of Bruce Springsteen. Because the songs were sort of very basic changes, the themes were all... [Laughs.] By the time it was the '70s, the themes were kind of nostalgic. Even though Bruce Springsteen would represent them as still being real, the iconography was still out of the '50s, you know? It was switchblades and leather jackets and motorcycles and that sort of junk. So I saw the whole presentation as being a spoof of Bruce Springsteen, and that's why I decided to do it.

Wine Country fires: A deadly inferno’s first hours - San Francisco Chronicle

Firefighters estimate that at times, the flames raced 230 feet per second and, inconceivably, threw embers a full mile ahead of the fire front. It moved so fast that chickens, cats and other animals were charred where they stood, left standing like blackened statues.
The fires awed Bill Stewart, a UC Berkeley forestry professor.
“These fires are off the charts,” he said. “There just aren’t enough firefighters in the West to fight that much fire. ... Those trees, on fire, were pure ember machines that really kicked things into a new level. We’ll be studying this for years to come.”

San Antonio Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich Calls President Trump ‘Soulless Coward’

Speaking to The Nation’s Dave Zirin, Popovich lambasted Trump for his “never-ending divisiveness” and called him a “pathological liar” who is “unfit intellectually, emotionally, and psychologically” to be president.

“This man in the Oval Office is a soulless coward who thinks that he can only become large by belittling others,” the coach continued.

“This has of course been a common practice of his, but to do it in this manner — and to lie about how previous presidents responded to the deaths of soldiers — is as low as it gets,” he said.

“The people who work with this president should be ashamed because they know it better than anyone just how unfit he is, and yet they choose to do nothing about it. This is their shame most of all.”

Blade Runner 2049 (2017) **

Another sequel-as-remake that looks gorgeous and has the wonderful Ms. Wright, but is much too long and has much too little of anything new to say. Just watch the original (any version) again instead.

Mudcrutch - I Forgive It All (Official Music Video) - YouTube

Next to this, the best video ever. Certainly the best thing Sean Penn ever directed.

Whatever Works (2009) ***

Sure it has the regular Woody tropes but it also has a lot of good one-liners, a New York Chinatown setting which we don't see a lot of in the movies, plus the great Larry David. Very enjoyable.

Never Let Me Go (2010) **

The performers are fine but the direction fails to bring out the metaphorical aspects of the story relying on a final voice over to spell it out for us.

Tom Petty, 1950-2017 - The Awl

Depending on when and where you grew up, Tom Petty dying feels like America dying. While it’s easy to talk about what someone like Bowie or Prince meant because of the ground they broke and the perceptions they challenged, Petty was always just there, using the standard formula of rock as the foundation for a body of work that almost everyone had at least one or two favorites from. You never listened to Tom Petty and felt bad. Even the sad songs brought grace. (Of course, there was always more going on: These thoughts on the Confederate flag will are a necessary read and probably will be for a long time, unfortunately.) Even when he was on the surface there was something also floating below the surface, and that is probably no small part of what made him so successful. Tom Petty was 66.

Still of the Night (1982) ***

Polite thriller set among the New York upper crust, a Manhattan Murder Mystery without the laughs. Directed with style and more than a few homages.

Man in Vegetative State for 15 Years Responds to Nerve Stimulation

SO, DID THE MAN SUDDENLY WAKE UP AFTER 15 YEARS?

No. It wasn’t a scene from a daytime soap opera, but his progress was surprising. In medical terms, his condition shifted from a vegetative state to a minimally conscious one. After a month of vagal nerve stimulation, the man was newly able to respond to simple commands, such as slowly turning his head from left to right, Sirigu says.

He was able to stay awake for much longer than before while listening to a therapist read a book. And he responded to perceived threats, opening his eyes wide when someone suddenly approached his face, Sirigu says. People in a vegetative state show no response at all to such invasions of space.

Bob Costas defends Colin Kaepernick and the NFL protests after Trump's attack — Quartz

Kaepernick has repeatedly said that his protest had nothing to do with the US military. But even before Trump became president, American sports, and football in particular, have been increasingly militarized, almost becoming a brand extension of the US armed forces. The Pentagon pays the NFL millions of dollars each year to host patriotic events during games, which include full-field displays of the flag.

“[Patriotism] has been conflated with a bumper-sticker kind of flag-waving and with the military only,” Costas added, “so that people cannot see that in his own way, Colin Kaepernick, however imperfectly, is doing a patriotic thing.”

I find Costas repugnant, but in his own way, however imperfectly, what he is saying here is insightful. The USA is, and has been since we got the bomb, a military machine. War and violence are so ingrained and assimilated into the culture one wonders if it can ever be undone.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) **

Droll satire of upper middle class mores. Pretty tame.

Elisabeth Moss' Emmys-Night Swearing Has Storied Tradition in Scientology, Say Insiders | Hollywood Reporter

"Scientologists are urged to communicate with 'average people,' and to do so effectively you have to 'go down the tone scale.' So they all use 'fuck, fuck, fuck' every time they talk. It’s fascinating," Lugli explains. "The quote-unquote philosophy behind it is you match the tone level in order to communicate on the same level of the people with whom you’re communicating. If you’re too 'high-tone,' people will not understand you."

Not everyone requires swearing. Journalists and gay people, for example, are classified as "1.1" on the scale, which signifies "covert hostility," according to Lugli. "That means I have to communicate just slightly above you — which can be anger or hostility. That's where you get Tom Cruise telling Matt Lauer he's being 'glib,'" he explains. (The Church of Scientology and a rep for Moss declined to comment, but the church has denied animosity toward gay people.)

Ken Burns' VIETNAM WAR - Limits of 18 hours | HuffPost

"The American involvement in Vietnam began in secrecy. It ended 30 years later in failure. It was begun in GOOD FAITH, by DECENT PEOPLE, out of fateful misunderstanding, American overconfidence and Cold War miscalculation.” (My emphasis added)

Really?

The film is remarkable in its liberal use of the secret recordings of White House conversations. We hear the voices of President Lyndon Johnson, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. These recordings reveal cynicism, paranoia, and deception that have little in common with “good faith” or “decent people.”

Conscious of their audience, the film makers are reluctant to be too harsh in condemning American motives. The theme, in effect, is that the American War in Vietnam was a bi-partisan, well-intended, accumulation of unfortunate mistakes made by six Presidents over 30 years.

The Senate’s Military Spending Increase Alone Is Enough to Make Public College Free

One of the most controversial proposals put forward by Sen. Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential campaign was a pledge to make tuition free at public colleges and universities. Critics from both parties howled that the pie-in-the-sky idea would bankrupt the country. Where, after all, would the money come from?

Those concerns were brushed aside on Monday night, as the Senate overwhelmingly approved an $80 billion annual increase in military spending, enough to have fully satisfied Sanders’ campaign promise. Instead, the Senate handed President Trump far more than the $54 billion he asked for. The lavish spending package gives Trump a major legislative victory, allowing him to boast about fulfilling his promise of a “great rebuilding of the armed services.”

The bill would set the U.S.’s annual military budget at around $700 billion, putting it within range of matching the spending level at the height of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Images (1972) ***

Stylish puzzle picture (literally) from Robert Altman regarding a children's book author whose grip on reality is often tenuous. Beautifully shot in Ireland with the lovely Susannah York.

Dick (1999) **

At the time of release an amusing attempt to explain the 18 minute gap in the Nixon tapes, the identity of Deep Throat and a number of other baffling questions which arose during the Watergate scandal. Now it plays more like an alternative history since all the questions have been answered and as always the truth is stranger. Still it's well cast and well played with a great soundtrack of pop hits of the time.