These are the kinds of things you miss when you take a break from the interwebz.

Oh Hunger Games movie, I will watch you, and I will probably like you. But I am still sad you made Katniss and all the olive-skinned people from the Seam white and blond and blue-eyed people. Hair dye doesn’t change that. *sigh*

Speaking of anti-healthcare commercials, here’s one from Healthy Americans Against Reforming Medicine (HAARM). Comedy. All of their videos are hilarious.

So I saw this anti-government healthcare commercial from “The Prosperity Foundation” on CNN this weekend, followed closely by a similar one from some website called CPRights.org (Conservatives for Patients Rights, Google tells me). Ignoring the Orwellian sounding name of the group…

[digression]I mean, really, The Prosperity Foundation? Have conservatives never read 1984? Probably not. They should as it’d cut down on stupidly named organizations like the aforementioned and, my favorite, Project for a New American Century. Then again, they probably have read 1984 and are counting on the fact that most Americans have not so they would not get the horrible irony and would, instead, get sucked in by the innocuous sounding names. Oh well. [/digression]

…ignoring that, this commercial pissed me off. Like, made me almost violently angry. “Government runs healthcare in Canada where care is delayed or denied… some patients wait a year for vital surgeries, delays that can be deadly.” Really? Wow. How horrible. And the other commercial talked incessantly of interference by “government bureaucrats,” waxing poetic about how medical care should be between a patient and their doctor. I agree. And we all know that kind of interference and “deadly delays” never happens with our current system! Insurance companies never delay approval for procedures or flat out deny care, nor do they meddle in choices that should be between a patient and a doctor.

I guess I must’ve been hallucinating when I received a letter from my mom’s health insurance company nearly six weeks – SIX F’N WEEKS! – after my mother’s death informing me, well, informing her really (yes, the morons addressed the letter to her, like they didn’t already know she had died. Uh huh), that a procedure her doctor had submitted for approval over THREE MONTHS before she died was “unnecessary.”

Yeah, it’s the hallmark of a wonderfully functioning system when it takes over four and a half months for an insurance company to conclude that a procedure to help someone fight an agressively spreading cancer is “unnecessary.” I’m certain they weren’t just waiting until she died so they wouldn’t have to pay for some wildly expensive procedure. And I’m certain they didn’t send the request denied form letter when they did to take advantage of the fact that whomever would be reading it would likely be a grieving family member under too much duress to pursue it further. Of course not. Because our system rocks! And hey, at least my mom had healthcare! Woot.

I fucking hate insurance companies and the racket that passes for our current healthcare system. If anyone can’t see that our system needs serious reform, then they are callously retarded. What is wrong with conservatives that the idea of a government caring for its citizens is seen as evil and wrong? No, really, what is wrong with them? Because I just don’t get it.

Another Allah o Akbar video. It’s not much to look at, but the audio is just… wow. Especially when reading the translation:

Tomorrow is Saturday. Tomorrow is a day of destiny.

Tonight, the cries of Allah-o Akbar are heard louder and louder than the nights before.

Where is this place? Where is this place where every door is closed? Where is this place where people are simply calling God? Where is this place where the sound of Allah-o Akbar gets louder and louder?

I wait every night to see if the sounds will get louder and whether the number increases. It shakes me. I wonder if God is shaken.

Where is this place that where so many innocent people are entrapped? Where is this place where no one comes to our aid? Where is this place that only with our silence we are sending our voices to the world? Where is this place that the young shed blood and then people go and pray — standing on that same blood and pray. Where is this place where the citizens are called vagrants?

Where is this place? You want me to tell you? This place is Iran. The homeland of you and me.

This place is Iran.


So powerful. (from The Huffington Post)

Video of the sounds of protesters in Iran who nightly cry out “Allah o Akbar” (God is Great) from the rooftops in Tehran. I first read about this yesterday in an LA Times article. The article itself was about a student being inspired by the protest and all that’s going on in her country, but I personally found myself captivated by this style of protest. I just think there is something so beautiful about a people who are so moved and who have come together so strongly as a community that fear of violent reprisals does not stop them and even at night, even in the confines of their own homes they still must find a way to connect with each and cry out together.

From the article:

Reporting from Paris — Every night at 9, Golaleh goes to the top of her five-story apartment in northern Tehran, where she has a view of the whole city.

“It’s like a date,” she said of the nightly rendezvous, because like clockwork voices of opposition protesters start calling out from rooftops in all directions.
One man usually starts.

God is great, he will shout. Then hundreds respond.

Their cries remain faceless. People stay hidden in the dark so that police cannot track them. “But we can distinguish between them [the voices]: There are men, women and even children” who chant until 10 p.m.

I mean really, is that not beautiful? It’s very poetic, I think, and reminds me of the civil rights era my parents were so fond of talking about with such feverish passion that I never really got, having never experienced anything like that in my generation. All those pictures of people converging on DC, the oracular power of Martin Luther King, Jr…. it must have all been so inspiring!

And now, watching and reading about the people of Iran coming together - it makes me feel this sense of wistful longing that we here in the US could come together like that again… (saudade, is what this feeling is called in Portuguese, described as “a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist… a turning towards the past or towards the future”). I think there is a real hunger for that kind of connection here, but I think what stops us from crying out is the fear that no one will respond.

Or maybe enough of us just don’t care. There must be something holding us back. I would say it’s the lack of a unifying major event - like the Iranian elections - but we had our own stolen elections, we had 9/11, and while we’ve had protests and inspiring groups of people coming together, it wasn’t this many of us at once, with this kind of depth, coming together despite the violence, at night and on rooftops needing to connect with each other. Maybe we as a people are just totally jaded. Or maybe you really have to be experiencing true anguish and adversity to reach out like that. Whatever the reason for our apathy, it’s sad.

Wake up Humans! Brilliant campaign from Amnesty International in Belgium.

Most. Awesome. Thing. Ever. MC Hammer. Flash Mob. Gold Parachute Pants. On Sunset. So Hilarious… can’t touch this.