No Health Care? Tough. This is America. Die.

Here's a rundown of the right's genius response to heath care reform based on interviews at this recent health care town hall in Alhambra CA.

1. Solution for the 48 million uninsured: Life is tough. Get over it. Die.
2. Solution for those uninsured who end up walking into hospitals: Well there should be some kind of program for them (duh - like government socialized health care?).
3. Major concern: the health care reform is not about health care (What's it about then? Toilet paper?).
4. Yup. Major problem with socialism: Toilet paper (Wasn't that a 60s U.S. propaganda spin?)

So if we keep the current system and 48 million people remain uninsured, who picks up the bill when they walk into the hospital? The government.

So, it is then the government's prerogative to insure these people ahead of time in order to save money on their hospital bills, is it not? It is also only fair that everyone else has the same option to choose that government insurance as well.

Keep posted on our projects and videos: Sign up at http://outinthestreet.ning.com.

The End is Here

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? How about if our troops kill a million innocent Iraqis and none of it is reported (no pictures, no video). Did it happen? What about if five billion people around the world decide to stop using banks and the present day financial infrastructure has to rely on corporate social welfare to survive, but they eventually fade away anyway. Did they ever really exist? I mean, the money we all have is our money. Even if it's in a bank, it's our money. Take the bank away and it's still our money. Banks are a mere illusion that charge fees for a show.

Suppose they gave a war and no one showed up? Suppose a lot of filmmakers (tired of playing Hollywood games) went out and made their own films, self-distributed them and banded together to help each other in what eventually became an alternate movie industry of and by real filmmakers instead of executive fat cats who do nothing but collect dust, money, and hookers. Suppose said fat cats disappeared from the movie scene altogether. Were they ever really there to begin with? I mean the filmmakers still make their movies with or without them.

What if people stopped using insurance companies altogether and got the government to be there for them in case of medical emergencies and accidents, just like the police and firefighters, and then no one would have to dole out 30% to insurance company administrators? Would those administrators have ever really existed?

If you were one of the million plus Iraqis who was killed, and who saw your family, friends, neighborhood, and country annihilated before your eyes, I think that would qualify as your rapture. By the same token, if you're a conservative authoritarian who lives by the rule of law and order and follows whatever the current law and order of the day has been determined to be by whoever is in charge, but then things suddenly turned on you and suddenly there was no law and order as you once knew it, there was no democracy or free market capitalism, and there was absolutely nothing you could do about it (What can you do? Drop a nuke on Wall Street?) - if all of that were the reality (which it is by the way) would that be your rapture?

The end is here.

Right Wing Nut Cases

The other day I went to a health care town hall meeting in Alhambra CA, with Congressman Adam Schiff. (D-CA) who supports a single payer health care system. The meeting was jammed with the now typical right wing nut cases. I hesitate to call them Republican, though most Republicans support what they do, but some do not, as you may have heard about Rep. John Isakson (R-GA) citing Palin as "nuts" for her "natterings about the health-care reform bill [that] are anything except the figments of a discombobulated imagination." In fact I heard that a number of advertisers are pulling out of Glen Beck's Fox News show, due to his remark that he considered Obama racist. Meanwhile, though down for a while it appears Obama's ratings are back up in the 60% area. Ain't that a bitch? What the hell is going on? Is there some kind of rational thought virus going around?
Let me push this a little further. I recently saw a video with Douglas Rushkoff, author of NY Times bestseller, Life Inc. who talks about how our current bank centered money system evolved from a personal based money system due to the aristocracy becoming comparatively poor to the masses of average people. He talks about a future utopia where people won't need money or at least not government issued currency. They'll trade on their own merits and labor. Money will come from the people up instead of a government controlled trickle down, which basically means people are pissed on by the government. This sounds kind of nuts at first but not when you think about how nuts our banking system is today it's certainly no where near as nuts as the right wing nuts going off at health care rallies, not to mention Sarah "fucking nut case" Palin.
So here's the thing. If you read John dean, another Republican gone rational, in his book, Conservatives Without Conscience, he talks about authoritarian conservatives, the worse kind of conservatives. These "nuts" (if you will) believe that people follow the rule of a leadership. It's a Nixonian, Cheyenian, Bushian, Palinesque kind of do what ever I tell you to do, and think whatever I tell you to think, organizational structure. Authoritarians are either leaders or followers. None of them subscribe to the idea that people can think for themselves. No. They are on a groupthink Orwellian mindset. So, what I'm thinking now is that we've had eight years of authoritarian conservatives running our government and its not easy for them to let go of that power they thought they had over us. Ergo, town hall nut cases.
The town hall nuts that I interviewed for a forthcoming documentary, stated that they were not protesting nationalized health care because of nationalized health care (I told you they were nuts). No. They stated their concerns are really about socialism in America. That America would become a socialist state. That nationalized health care was just the first step toward a terrible socialism, as bad as Nazi Germany, Russia or Cuba.
Now you have to feel sorry for these people. Obviously they are simply misinformed. They just didn't get the memo. The socialism town halls are not scheduled until like 2015. Someone must have got their dates mixed up. France, England, Canada and a total of 39 major countries have very successful socialized medicine programs. They have yet to become socialist states or Nazi Germany. In fact if any country is headed down the road to totalitarianism it's the present day capitalist United States of America, with it's now policy of corporate outsourced military, preemptive war, torture, and international terrorism on the greatest scale ever in the history of the world. If these people were really worried about a government socialism that takes away our freedoms they'd repeal the Patriot Act, and pull all (not just a token few) our troops out of the preemptive wars we continue to wage in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obviously they are not doing anything of the kind and reports of them being lead by paid insurance industry at these town halls shills seem quite reasonably true.
I personally observed a select few individuals at the town hall I was at, who consistently shouted out in disruption trying to interrupt proceedings with inane requests, or they'd attempt to lead the crowd in Palinesque chants about freedom and so on.. But most of the people there didn't bite. They didn't go along enough to make those chants turn into an angry mob of protests and disruption. People are on to this tactic. These few agitators later banded together to laugh and joke about how things were going. Obviously they aren't too smart to be so easily observed this way.
The jig is up guys. We all know for a fact that you're just a bunch of fucking nuts.

Convention for the Sake of Convention

There is a disturbing trend in Hollywood toward convention. By that I mean movies that are made with the conventions you'd expect to see in a given genre or even by studio. We expect certain types of films from Disney, and maybe certain other types from Warner, and something different again if the genre is horror, or romantic comedy and so on. This is convention and some people will even call it craft. This is especially proliferated in TV. I can't think of one sitcom that doesn't use bank lighting. That means banks of soft lights that flood the set in brightness. While in horror films we see mostly darkness with only glimmers of light here and there. Much more dramatic. But still so very conventional and expected.

Now take something like Pirates of the Caribbean. Generally it's lit with bright soft sunlight with everyone flooded in brightness. But there are occasional scenes of something more dramatic, as in the stables. But even there, it's pretty much all flat and soft. It's not until we get to the underwater scenes with the pirates walking or the moonlight on the deck of the ship, that we find something really interesting.

Anyway, my point here is that Hollywood and TV generally use conventions for the sake of conventions. There's no motivation there. Why would every room and scene in a sitcom be flooded with bright soft light? It's not real. The rooms in our houses aren't' like that. Look around in your house. The light is brighter near the window, or at night only around your lamps, and it drops off into darkness as you get away from the light source. So what then motivates studios to use something like bank lighting? I can't think of hardly a single place in real life where everything is flooded evenly with soft all penetrating light. Even in an office of overhead fluorescents, the light drops off near the corners of cubicles.

Obviously these so called Hollywood artistic professionals either can't be bothered to make something look interesting and real, or they don't want to spend the time on it. So we end up with pasty plastic looking people with caked on makeup to make sure they are evenly lit like everything else on the set. This is completely what you call unmotivated lighting. There is no motivation for this other than the studio budget or the grip's inability to do something interesting.

So you say, this is no trend. It's always been this way. Well maybe. But it seems so much of a standard now that if you make a film without pasty lighting, you get criticized for being too artsy. You become the one who is accused of not having motivation for the lighting you use. In other words, if it's not a horror film or some dark drama, you had better flood the place with pasty light and cake on the makeup.

But people ultimate don't buy it. It may be subconscious. But we all find something fake in these bank-ly lit scenes. That's one reason why reality programs have taken off. They don't light anything. They just shoot whatever is out there in real life. Of course this is the opposite extreme. Although in both cases of bank lighting and reality shows we have the common element of lazy unmotivated lighting. Seldom do they take the time to light something with true motivation for how the light should fall on the subjects.

Convention for the sake of convention is a lie. It's lazy, and it's ugly. It's an indication of poor sloppy work and under par production.