Precious

The movie I rented last night was "Precious." You know the story: Obese, illiterate teen, repeatedly raped by her father, abused by her mother. Kids are products of their environments and their environments offer no hope

I can handle heavy movies but I was disappointed by this one. The movie claimed to be an unrelenting portrait of the lives of the impoverished and abused, however, I found many aspects of her story unrealistic. Pregnant with her second child by her father, the principal puts her into an alternative school where she receives a stipend; camaraderie in her small class of about eight students who don't judge her; and the undivided attention of a teacher who takes interest in her. Is this reality for the thousands of inner city students who need it? Unfortunately not.

Moreover, Precious, the girl, shows no initiative and has no personality. Granted she's had it beaten out of her, but often the students who rise above their circumstances are those who can see past them and strive for something greater. Precious never shows any initiative and when she is seen stealing in the movie, it is hard to see her as any better than her mother who has been stealing from the welfare system for years.

In the end Precious is given some devastating news that reinforces a truth for girls like her: there is no redemption and no light at the end of the tunnel and none of it was her fault. She only wins by knowing that she has learned to read and is making an attempt to edumacate eh, I mean educate herself. But here again Precious, the movie, fell short. The teachers and social workers who helped her were fair skinned caricatures. "Come on Precious. You can do it. What is this word?" Says her hip lesbian teacher in a two minute scene that magically transforms her reading skills from a second to seventh grade level. The rest of the classroom scenes consisted of students swearing and reading poorly written journal entries about their lives. Any teacher knows that this is not the way to teach students to read.

My rating: 2 Stars.

The Face of the Democratice Party

Ahhh. It seems they may need a new face to represent them. Perhaps one that isn't being eaten by botulinum toxins. How about...



That's a bit better. The reason I bring up your favorite political party is to mention that Michelle Obama has made childhood obesity one of the causes she will be working for this year. The number of obese children in the country is rising at grotesquely rapid rate. This epidemic is going to lead to a plethora of health problems for people, which will ultimately result in more medical bills, higher health insurance costs, and most importantly, lives lost.

With the passage of the new health insurance bill, being a Democrat is now considered a pre-existing condition. Ha. Since I brought up this hot button topic, here is good, concise summary of the bill that has most people baffled. I wish Barry-O luck getting elected again, but we actually won't see much of a change for a few years. Here, from the Capitalist Bible known as the Wallstreet Journal, are the main points of the bill.

2010
Coverage
■Subsidies begin for small businesses to provide coverage to employees.
■Insurance companies barred from denying coverage to children with pre-existing illness.
■Children permitted to stay on their parents' insurance policies until their 26th birthday.

2011
Coverage
■Set up long-term care program under which people pay premiums into system for at least five years and become eligible for support payments if they need assistance in daily living.
Taxes and fees
■Drug makers face annual fee of $2.5 billion (rises in subsequent years).

2013
Taxes and fees
■New Medicare taxes on individuals earning more than $200,000 a year and couples filing jointly earning more than $250,000 a year.
■Tax on wages rises to 2.35% from 1.45%.
■New 3.8% tax on unearned income such as dividends and interest.
■Excise tax of 2.3% imposed on sale of medical devices.
Cost control
■Medicare pilot program begins to test bundled payments for care, in a bid to pay for quality rather than quantity of services.

2014
Coverage
■Create exchanges where people without employer coverage, as well as small businesses, can shop for health coverage. Insurance companies barred from denying coverage to anyone with pre-existing illness.
■Requirement begins for most people to have health insurance. Subsidies begin for lower and middle-income people. People at 133% of federal poverty level pay maximum of 3% of income for coverage. People at 400% of poverty level pay up to 9.5% of income. (Poverty level currently is about $22,000 for a family of four.)
■Medicaid, the federal-state program for the poor, expands to all Americans with income up to 133% of federal poverty level.
■Subsidies for small businesses to provide coverage increase. Businesses with 10 or fewer employees and average annual wages of less than $25,000 receive tax credit of up to 50% of employer's contribution. Tax credits phase out for larger businesses.
Taxes and fees
■Employers with more than 50 employees that don't provide affordable coverage must pay a fine if employees receive tax credits to buy insurance. Fine is up to $3,000 per employee, excluding first 30 employees.
■Insurance industry must pay annual fee of $8 billion (rises in subsequent years).
Cost control
■Independent Medicare board must begin to submit recommendations to curb Medicare spending, if costs are rising faster than inflation.

2016
Taxes and fees
■Penalty for those who don't carry coverage rises to 2.5% of taxable income or $695, whichever is greater.

2017
Coverage
■Businesses with more than 100 employees can buy coverage on insurance exchanges, if state permits it.

2018
Taxes and fees
■Excise tax of 40% imposed on health plans valued at more than $10,200 for individual coverage and $27,500 for family coverage.
—Sources: House bill; Kaiser Family Foundation
Corrections & Amplifications

The House health legislation imposes a 2.3% excise tax on the sale of medical devices. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said the tax was 2.9%, the figure before a last-minute change to the legislation.

Benjamin Zander on music and passion

Thank goodness for guys like this. "Awaken Possibility in other people!"
Benjamin Zander on music and passion Video on TED.com

Who the hell is she?

I'm not sure of the identity of Jaci Stephen. I've never met her. She's just some English chick who wrote this column and blog on her enchantment with Los Angeles. I suppose if you keep on the straight and narrow path, LA is alright. A diverse city with lots of neat shops, restaurants, beaches, movies etc., LA has a lot to offer in the way of leisure activities. Just take a GPS unit, drive carefully, and find a few wholesome friends.

What's a Post Turtle?

You can insert the name of any political leader you like. Julius Malema is the leader of the ANC's Youth League.

While sewing a cut on the hand of a 75 year old farmer, who's hand was caught in the gate while working cattle, the doctor struck up a conversation with the old man. Eventually the topic got around to the ANC and Julius Malema The old farmer said, 'Well, you know, in my opinion, Malema is a 'Post Turtle''. Not being familiar with the term, the doctor asked him, what a 'post turtle' was. The old farmer said, 'When you're driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that's a 'post turtle'. The old farmer saw the puzzled look on the doctor's face so he continued to explain. 'You know he didn't get up there by himself, he doesn't belong up there, he doesn't know what to do while he's up there, and you just wonder what kind of dumb bugger put him up there to begin with. .

David Brooks writes excellent columns.

The Spirit of Sympathy

Human beings, the philosophers tell us, are social animals. We emerge into the world ready to connect with mom and dad. We go through life jibbering and jabbering with each other, grouping and regrouping. When you get a crowd of people in a room, the problem is not getting them to talk to each other; the problem is getting them to shut up.

David Brooks

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To help us in this social world, God, nature and culture have equipped us with a spirit of sympathy. We instinctively feel a tinge of pain when we observe another in pain (at least most of us do). We instinctively mimic, even to a small extent, the mood, manners, yawns and actions of the people around us.

To help us bond and commit, we have been equipped with a suite of moral sentiments. We have an innate sense of fairness. Children from an early age have a sense that everybody should be treated fairly. We have an innate sense of duty. We admire people who sacrifice for the group. We are naturally embarrassed when we’ve been caught violating some social code. We blush uncontrollably.

As a result of this sympathy and these sentiments, people are usually pretty decent to one another when they relate person to person. The odd thing is that when people relate group to group, none of this applies. When a group or a nation thinks about another group or nation, there doesn’t seem to be much natural sympathy, natural mimicry or a natural desire for attachment. It’s as if an entirely different part of the brain has been activated, utilizing a different mode of thinking.

Group-to-group relations are more often marked by calculation, rivalry and coldness. Members of one group sometimes see members of another group as less than human: Nazi and Jew, Hutu and Tutsi, Sunni and Shiite.

Political leaders have an incentive to get their followers to use the group mode of cognition, not the person-to-person. People who are thinking in the group mode are loyal, disciplined and vicious against foes. People in the person-to-person mode are soft, unpredictable and hard to organize.

There’s a scene in Anthony Trollope’s political novel, “Phineas Finn,” in which young Phineas, about to enter Parliament, tells a party leader that he is going to think for himself and decide issues as he sees best. The leader, Barrington Erle, looks at him with utter disgust. To Erle, anybody who thinks that way is “unstable as water and dishonest as the wind.”

In the United States, leaders in the House of Representatives have done an effective job in getting their members to think in group, not person-to-person, terms. Members usually vote as party blocs. Individuals have very little power. That’s why representatives are often subtle and smart as individuals, but crude and partisan as a collective. The social psychology of the House is a clan psychology, not an interpersonal psychology.

The Senate, on the other hand, has historically been home to more person-to-person thinking. This is because the Senate is smaller and because of Senate rules. Until recently, the Senate leaders couldn’t just ram things through on party-line votes. Because a simple majority did not rule, and because one senator had the ability to bring the whole body to a halt, senators had an incentive, every day, to develop alliances and relationships with people in the other party.

For decades, individual senators have resisted their leaders’ attempts to run the Senate like the House and destroy these relationships and these humane customs. A few years ago, when Republican leaders tried to pass judicial nominations on party-line votes, rank-and-file members like Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton spoke out forcefully against rule by simple majority.

But power trumps principle. In nearly every arena of political life, group relationships have replaced person-to-person relationships. The tempo of the Senate is now set by partisan lunches every Tuesday, whereas the body almost never meets for conversation as a whole. The Senate is now in the process of using reconciliation — rule by simple majority — to try to pass health care.

Reconciliation has been used with increasing frequency. That was bad enough. But at least for the Bush tax cuts or the prescription drug bill, there was significant bipartisan support. Now we have pure reconciliation mixed with pure partisanship.

Once partisan reconciliation is used for this bill, it will be used for everything, now and forever. The Senate will be the House. The remnants of person-to-person relationships, with their sympathy and sentiment, will be snuffed out. We will live amid the relationships of group versus group, party versus party, inhumanity versus inhumanity.

We have a political culture in which the word “reconciliation” has come to mean “bitter division.” With increasing effectiveness, the system bleaches out normal behavior and the normal instincts of human sympathy.

The Drakensberg Boys Choir - Shosholoza

With the World Cup in Cape Town coming up in June, it seemed fitting to post this song. They sing this song at all the soccer matches. Shosholoza means "forward" (keep on pressing forward).