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.