Like most Americans, I shed no tears over bin Laden’s death. I’m not going to start waving a giant flag while chanting “U.S.A!”, but I’m glad he’s not sharing the planet with me any longer. The world is still full of dangers and, a year from now, most people will be hard-pressed to name the date of his assassination. But at least we have Twitter to record events in their posterity.
I’ll probably spend part of the weekend perusing the content on Dark Horse’s new digital comics store. I’ve been meaning to check out the Hellboy universe for a while and the Dark Horse store is only too happy to get me started. The Umbrella Academy looks interesting as well. I still wish I could get all my comics from one site instead of having to visit different sites for different titles, but the Internet gods haven’t see fit to grant my request yet. Ah well, the big red guy is waiting for me.
A local TV station in Tuscaloosa captured some terrifying footage of the huge tornado that struck that city yesterday. I can’t even imagine the fear that residents must have felt when they saw this thing tearing a path towards their homes.
The SETI Institute is shutting down a radio telescope array designed to search for extraterrestrial signals because of a budget shortfall. My Altairian overlords are actually quite relieved. They were were worried that humans might start receiving messages from the Stellar Alliance warning us of the Altairians’ invasion plans. Of course, those warnings were sent a thousand years ago and the Altairians have since, er, assimilated the Alliance. Still, those messages might have set off a panic. My masters can certainly deal with a planetary freak-out, but their methods can be messy. Now that humanity has gone off-line, we can enjoy a few more years of blissful ignorance before you all get hauled off to the asteroid mines and I get my genetically engineered harem.
Remember Senator Rick Santorum? This darling of the right lost his re-election bid in 2006 and has spent the last few years cruising the conservative talk show circuit while steadfastly refusing to Google himself. He’s now gotten it into his head that he might like to run for president and he recently made a visit to Iowa to test the waters. In an interview with The Des Moines Register, he explained that his opposition to health care reform is the guiding force steering his political ambitions. Santorum has a young daughter with a disability and he also discussed how “socialized medicine” is a threat to kids like her:
“I look at how society with socialized medicine treats children like Bella, and children like Bella don’t survive,” Santorum told The Des Moines Register on Monday, the first leg of a three-day swing through Iowa. “Children like Bella are not given the treatment that other children are given.”
Santorum said the new health care law, championed by President Barack Obama, will mean disabled people are denied care more often, and repealing it is the best way to address mounting national debt.
It goes on:
In the Register interview, Santorum spoke at length about his belief that care will be reduced for disabled children: “In socialized medicine countries, where is what Obamacare is and leads us, children with these types of disabilities simply are not given the access to care. Care is rationed, and it’s rationed by government agencies who decide which lives are valuable and should be cared for. … They just simply refuse care. It’s just too expensive. These children are not a good investment of critical taxpayer resources.”
So we have another Republican saddling up his white horse in a noble quest to save us unsuspecting gimps from the evils of socialism. Cynical fearmongering has become such a predictable feature of Republican politicking, but I still get annoyed when noxiously self-righteous pricks like Santorum try to portray their opposition to health care reform as a selfless effort to protect people with disabilities. I’m willing to bet a hundred bucks that Santorum also loves the Ryan plan to slash Medicaid, which really would jeopardize the well-being of millions of people with disabilities. Perhaps he can explain his opposition to socialized medicine to a roomful of middle-class families who rely on Medicaid to care for their kids with disabilities. Perhaps he can explain to them how private insurers stand ready to provide for their children’s significant needs at a fair and reasonable price without any pesky government oversight.
I’ll almost feel sorry for Mitt Romney when he has to start formally debating Santorum and his goofy, crazed ilk. Almost.
I’ve already explained at length why Paul Ryan’s plan to transform Medicare is a deeply flawed idea. But let me try to make my objections a little more concrete via judicious use of YouTube. If Ryan’s plan becomes law, millions of senior citizens and people with disabilities will be unable to afford expensive medical devices. Instead, they’ll be forced to jury-rig solutions that are barley adequate and quite possibly hazardous to themselves and others. They may even resort to using lawnmowers to power their manual wheelchairs. I’m not sure what dire circumstances pushed that poor woman to such desperate measures, but I sure don’t want that to become a common sight across the nation.
And in case it needs to be said, I’m only half-kidding.
I’m uploading a few gigs of music to my Amazon Cloud Drive as I write this. When Amazon first unveiled its remote storage and streaming service, I didn’t think I’d have much use for it. Then I realized it might be nice to have access to some of my music collection from my work computer. Because sometimes writing a policy bulletin demands the accompaniment of Gorillaz. Apple will likely unveil a similar service in the near future and the competition should result in cheap, plentiful storage for anyone who wants it. Cloud computing boosters love to proclaim that soon nobody will need anything more than a few gigs of local storage because inexpensive wireless broadband will let us access our data from any device. Perhaps, but I’m not quite ready to give up my capacious local storage. Servers crash with disturbing frequency and I’m not ready to entrust my choice collection of, uh, stuff to some faceless corporation.
Linda Holmes at NPR’s MonkeySee pop culture blog has a great essay about how I shouldn’t despair about not getting around to every book, movie, or TV show on my “to consume” list. The sheer amount of human creative output is so vast that we can never hope to absorb the totality of even the best works. Even though digital technology has made all this content more accessible than ever, we will die without having experienced little more than a sliver of all that humanity has thought, dreamed, and shared over the millennia. And that’s okay.
I would sometimes chastise myself for failing to read a certain author or to familiarize myself more with a certain genre of music. But I continue to read, to listen to music, to watch movies. I’ll eventually get to some of the things on my list, but not all of them. My curiosity will never be satisfied, nor should it be. I’ll do my best to explore and sample, which is probably the best any of us can do.
The Star Tribune appears to be on something of a disability kick lately. Here’s an article by local TV critic Neal Justin on the increased visibility of people with disabilities in reality series. The current season of The Amazing Race features a deaf man and another man with Asperger’s Syndrome while American Idol includes a man with Tourette’s. I’ve noticed this trend also and it’s encouraging to see reality series including people with disabilities in a way that scripted television never has. Of course, most reality TV contestants also tend to be quite attractive, but we can’t expect TV producers to completely give up their old ways. Baby steps, etc. Still, I’m hopeful that somebody at MTV will watch my audition video. I could teach those Real World snots a thing or two.
Some Minnesota schools are beginning to add wheelchair track and field to their athletics program. These events don’t yet qualify for team points in competitive meets, but I suppose it’s a start. And check out the biceps on one of the students featured in the article. He could knock me into a coma with a couple slaps.