Passive Pundit

Husband, father. Quick thoughts on politics, policy, society. Or, on the detritus that doesn't fit at... www.ddoublep.wordpress.com & www.mcleanparlor.wordpress.com.

[humansoflatecapitalism]

[ddoublep]

Me? I come from dude country...

Nikhil Sonnad, writing over at Quartz, has a (non-interactive) map detailing geographic data compiled from Twitter and analyzed by linguist Jack Grieve for the most common words to describe other people.

As you can tell the affection of 'dude,' which I would have most-commonly associated with coastal culture, is surprisingly ensconced in the Midwest. Given my fondness for abiding and Dudeism in general I'm quite pleased to note its strength of usage in my home region:

Feel free to click-thru and check out the others (what's up with you bros in Texas?), but this correlates well with my experience growing up. If I was given a dollar right now for every time I uttered "What's up dude" in my teen years, well, I'd probably have a new Macbook Air or something.

[ddoublep]

Why not a King Cinematic Universe?

So Universal Studios is planning on creating a "cohesive, connected" multi-film experience for its classic slate of monster movies akin to the ongoing mega-successful Marvel Cinematic Universe:

Deadline, however, is now reporting that Kurtzman and Chris Morgan – writer/producer on the Fast and the Furious property since the mid-2000s and co-writer on last year’s 47 Ronin (both for Universal) – have been tapped by Universal, to serve as the architects on a rebooted classic monster universe. To be exact, one where the installments are put together in a “cohesive, connected way” rather than as“projects by disparate filmmaking teams” - possibly even a Shared Cinematic Universe (a la Marvel Studios’ superhero films), by the sound of it.

What Marvel has accomplished with MCU will be difficult to copy (to be honest I’m still in a state of perpetual low-level awe that they've managed to keep that all together so-far). While Dracula and The Mummy certainly enjoy something of a time-honored status in cinema I doubt Universal will be able to uplift those properties to the now-more-culturally-salient status of an Iron Man or Captain America.

Yet this got me thinking about the resurgent interest in bringing some of Stephen King’s better works to the big screen. There are new developments on the film adaptation of The Stand, helmed by The Fault In Our Star’s Josh Boone, now featuring Matthew McConaughey as the book’s memorable evil dude Randall Flagg. We can also now add Cary Fukunaga (of True Detective fame) being picked up to direct a big screen version of It. As a fan of King and movies in general I've got wonder, you know, where is my Dark Tower series? That's a bit of a rhetorical question because to be clear there was a legitimate DT series in development this close to being green-lit; a Ron Howard-directed, Javier Bardem starring as Roland Deschain, multi-film and TV series.

That may be off the table but King's 'magnum-opus,' as anyone who's read the books knows, is ripe for adapting an already fleshed-out 'cohesive, connected' literary universe tying together many of his most successful novels. This was done tangentially (along the lines of literary easter eggs in Rose Madder, Cujo, Bag of Bones and numerous short stories), in mild connections (shared secondary characters or appearances, like the Turtle at the end of It and Father Callahan in Salem's Lot), to verifiable connect-the-dots from one novel to another (Randall Flagg is an antagonist in DT as well The Stand and the Eyes of the Dragon, Roland makes an appearance towards the end of Insomnia). The forty-five novels or so with a link could be whittled down, of course, but Howard's conception of a multi-media approach was solid (see Marvel doing the same across film, network TV, and soon Netflix). The Dark Tower is a rich, genre-bending, series with the mass demographic appeal of King's name. It seems questionable for Universal to pass on this idea while being confident it can create a super franchise out of their staid movie monster properties. 

Maybe I'm just a Roland fan bummed that we'll never get to see Clint Eastwood shoot those boom pistols with the sandalwood grips. But I'm also flippantly optimistic that if you can film a young Arnold for a Terminator reboot then maybe a future Andy Serkis-type could bodysuit a 1985 Pale Rider Gunslinger following the "man in Black fled across the Desert." If the prospect of a Mummy-Dracula-Werewolf team-up looks like a solid bet, why not a King Cinematic Universe?

[ddoublep]

C. Wright Mills on American Socioloy

Writing in 1959 on American sociology's early empirical embrace:

Given this, in so far as sociology is defined as a study of some special area of society, it readily becomes a sort of odd job man among the social sciences, consisting of miscellaneous studies of academic leftovers. There are studies of cities and families, racial and ethnic relations, and of course 'small groups.' As we shall see, the resulting miscellany was transformed into a style thought, which I shall examine under the term 'liberal practicality.'

Studies of contemporary fact can easily become a series of rather unrelated and often insignificant facts of milieu. Many course offerings in American sociology illustrate this; perhaps textbooks in the field of social disorganization reveal it best.

The context comes from assessing 'tendencies' in the field, then, but the warning of pursuing "insignificant facts of milieu" is still relevant.

[probs99]

[ddoublep]

"But the game is rigged."

A gun to the gut, asked how many times I've read Ta-Nehisi Coates and muttered "Damn he's good," I'd probably be sporting a new hole in my stomach. The man is...just that good. In particular these two 'graphs, on poverty, privilege, and power:

We talk about a culture of poverty as a way of damnation, but not as a way of comprehension. America loves winners, and tells us that we can all be winners, and it says this at such a volume that when you do not win, you might believe that something deep in your bones condemns you to losing--and believing that you might take whatever is given to you. You might be thankful for your squalor. You might come to believe that it is a divine plan for you to be under and down. I don't want to overstate this. I simply want to say that if I punch you in the face enough times, and you lack the power to stop me, you might come to believe that it is what you deserve. Rousseau says that strength must be transformed into right; likewise, weakness becomes destiny.

But the game is rigged. I know this because I loved my craft for many years and it meant nothing to anyone save my mother, my father, my siblings, my wife and a few close friends. At 25 my only noteworthy success was playing some part in the creation of my son. I stayed loyal to his mother. I think I stayed loyal because I could park myself there--perhaps I failed at all other things. But I was a good father and I was a loyal spouse. And then one day a  man of some privilege (bearing his own struggles) spoke to another man of some privilege and I became a man of some privilege with a megaphone, which I now employ, across an ocean, to bring these thoughts to you. And I love both of these men of privilege--power is a fact, it is not morality. Losing is tragic, but it is not noble. How many freedom fighters turned despots in the possession of superior guns?

Read the rest here.

[amibe-laurentienne]

[ddoublep]

Obamacare Is Going To Be Great

Jonathan Cohn has a great post about the Affordable Care Act's alleged bro problem that I think can be made a bit pithier: It turns out to be a huge win once you consider the income redistribution element. The chart above compares the "teaser" rate on a catastrophic insurance plan...

A rather (typical) straight-foward post from Matt Yglesias. Most policies involving the redistribution of money from the top to the bottom elicits the  the umbrage of conservatives. Everything else is filler or, especially in the case of the still-occuring rate shock debate, a grand exercise in concern trolling. 

[ddoublep]

Medicaid Expansion and Low-Income Voting

As the timeline for implementing the Affordable Care Act shrinks towards 2014 one of the more…

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[ddoublep]

Trickle-down Austerity in Greece

From a haunting NYTimes photo essay, shot by Angelos Tzortzinis, on Greece. The caption for this picture starts, "A prostitute who bears scars on her arm from the time she tried to kill herself in jail sat in her hotel room." Grecian austerity is being written on the veins of drug-addicted prostitutes and the homeless. From the essay:

For Mr. Tzortzinis, who grew up in the area, seeing women give themselves for as little as 5 euros underscores one of the many horrors of Greece's drawn-out crisis.

"These women need help," he said. "But they cannot help themselves. Nobody is helping them."

Link: Societal Ills Spike in Crisis-Stricken Greece

More comments over at The McLean Parlor.

[ddoublep]

Star Trek Into Mundanity

Here's the thing about the new Star Trek Into Darkness; if you don't think about it too much, it's pretty good. A solid summer popcorn sci-fi action flick, even. JJ Abrams is good at that sort of thing. Any more thought and it's laughingly bad compared to it's original inspiration, and even to the first one (which I enjoyed). 

Enter this absolutely joyful, and explicit, io9 faux "Spoiler FAQ," which also counts as fair warning here for those who've not seen it yet:

Why don’t you like it?

I liked it just fine, the first time I saw it in Wrath of Khan. Of course, the reason I like it is is because Kirk and Spock’s friendship has been part of pop culture for 15 years, so Spock’s death and Kirk’s anguish was given some actual agency, instead of now, when Kirk and Spock have known each other for four hours of screentime, two of which they didn’t like each other. I also liked it the first time because it was new and not a crass, creatively bankrupt attempt to manipulate the audience’s emotions, not through sadness because there’s clearly no way Kirk is actually going to stay dead, but because the scene is nothing more “HERE IS SOMETHING YOU HAVE SEEN BEFORE WITH A SLIGHT DIFFERENCE SO YOU WILL LIKE IT” as opposed to even trying to give us something, anything, genuinely new.

Oh.

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up for me. Perhaps I'll feel differently when it's released in a few months and I muster the willingness to watch Into Darkness again.

I don't know. I joked earlier to someone that for longtime sci-fi fans, before Abrams reboot, there was already a franchise standard bearer for don't-think-about-it-too-much flashy entertainment; Star Wars. Given that Abrams has been given that series too, well, I imagine it'll be right up his alley. 

[ddoublep]

This Is Your Economy on Austerity

The Grey Lady has a piece on economists warning the efforts to reduce the deficit are slowing the…

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[ddoublep]

The military's sexual assault epidemic

File under 'news you could use to make yourself incredibly angry:'

Sexual Assaults in Military Keep Rising—And Nearly 90 Percent Never Report It

The number of servicemembers who reported being sexually assaulted rose consistently over the past four years, according to an internal Pentagon report released Tuesday, despite recent efforts by the Obama administration to address the problem. But because only a fraction of servicemembers ever report assaults to their superiors, the Pentagon also conducts an anonymous survey to estimate the true scope of the problem, and those reveal a much larger number: For 2012, for example, the report estimates that the real number servicemembers experiencing "unwanted sexual contact" is closer to 26,000, which means about 90 percent of servicemembers assaulted kept quiet about it.

For an extra dose of rage-face also read about the recent sexual battery arrest of the man in charge of investigating such assaults in the military. 

[ddoublep]

The ACA's part-time conundrum

From Sarah Kliff at Wonkblog:

This isn’t an issue specific to Indiana: From movie theater chains to state governments, there is a lot of debate over how large businesses will react to the requirement to provide insurance to full-time employees who work more than 30 hours a week.

The health care law requires companies with 50 or more employees to provide affordable insurance coverage to workers. For part-time employees, who work fewer than 30 hours, the story is different: A company does not get penalized for not providing health insurance coverage.

Of course it's a little more complicated than that; firms must have fifty plus one full-time, non-seasonal, workers to incur the penalty portion of the Affordable Care Act.

Still. There is definitely a strain of relatively straight-forward logic accompanying the decision to grow your part-time workforce in response. Of course that has consequences as well, something rarely kept in mind by ACA detractors (though Kliff covers it). There's also a compelling logic to not avoid the penalty and simply have a more well-rounded semi-professional employee base.

Everybody assumes the worst, which is a fair-minded populist cynicism, and that firms will make their employees 'pay' for such new restrictions. Yet somehow that remains a indictment of the legislation for many rather than the companies themselves. I'm mystified that some assign such innocent reverence for the inevitable logic of firm reactions and not for the logic of elected officials pursuing their ideological priors.

Anyway, assuming the worst case scenario and Wal-Mart and McD's and others vastly increase their part-time workforce, does that make the ACA an unintended job's bill?

[ddoublep]

On the Oregon Medicaid study: "Keep calm and collect more data"

The New England Journal of Medicine sent out a press release Wednesday evening with the click-bait title of "The Oregon Experiment — Effects of Medicaid on Clinical Outcomes" (abstract here, the full paper is gated). Some background: because of a lack of funding the state of Oregon conducted a lottery system for Medicaid enrollment, and the ensuing results are being studied as a rare randomized controlled trial (RCT). The lottery has allowed healthcare researchers to, essentially, study the effects of Medicaid coverage in a way that people can begin to talk in terms of empirical causality. The first results (see here & here) were promising; for those who 'won' the lottery Medicaid appeared to provide increased health benefits and greater income security. This second result, however, is a little bit more mixed:

Let’s review. The good: Medicaid improved rates of diagnosis of depression, increased the use of preventive services, and improved the financial outlook for enrollees. The bad: It did not significantly effect the A1C levels of people with diabetes or levels of hypertension or cholesterol.

There is much, much more on this from folks smarter and more able to suss out the details behind this study than I can. For a wonderfully BS-free version go see Matt Yglesias' take. I've read them all and so should you. For what it's worth, on matters such as these, at the very least you will should be reading the folks at The Incidental Economist (where the above quote comes from). They're serious, fair, and do this sort of thing for a living.

Unfortunately it was also an opportunity for some conservatives to, what in some cases I can only describe as gloatingly, declare everything they've ever argued negatively about Medicaid as validated. That is, yet another opportunity for them to delegitimize the program. I won't bother linking to those simply because their arguments are (to be polite) disingenuous at best, or (to be impolite) a massive dollop of conservative derp at worst.

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[ddoublep]

This is not the slam-dunk evidence you're looking for

A new study from the Society of Actuaries this week made the rounds on various conservative outlets with headline number of 32 percent — the amount by which the SOA prediction that claims costs for insurance companies offering policies on the individual market will rise after the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

Unfortunately some have interpreted this as meaning that individual policy premiums will rise by the same amount, which isn't true. Although traditionally claims costs are thought to strongly influence premiums the connection between the two after the ACA will be decidedly murkier to discern:

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[ddoublep]

On "pulling a check" in disability

Over the weekend NPR's "Planet Money" released a story on the rise of Americans on disability. I thought it decent overall, but I see some others had issues with the "This American Life" complimentary piece (which I haven't listen to) on disability and children. In the past I've enjoyed both program's work — their "guide" to the financial crisis is probably one of the best — but PM in particular is known for their 'laymen' approach to reporting on economics. Oftentimes that's helpful, but not especially in the case of the section on kids:

As I got further into this story, I started hearing about another group of people on disability: kids. People in Hale County told me that what you want is a kid who can "pull a check." Many people mentioned this, but I basically ignored it. It seemed like one of those things that maybe happened once or twice, got written up in the paper and became conversational fact among neighbors.

Then I looked at the numbers. I found that the number of kids on a program called Supplemental Security Income -- a program for children and adults who are both poor and disabled -- is almost seven times larger than it was 30 years ago.

The reporter, Chana Joffe-Walt, goes into some anecdotal detail afterwards, but I think the impressionistic damage is already wrought upon the reader's mind — here are the moochers we always knew existed! Parents retarding their children's progress to get their grimy hands on undeserved cash from hard-working folks, as I imagine some people I know would instinctually respond. Furthermore, the contextual picture doesn't really expand past that point. Joffe-Walt concludes that portion with something most people would agree with; namely, that a child's education shouldn't be held back by disability or a program that "stands in opposition" to their potential.

That's all well and good, I suppose. Who would oppose such a safe, centrist judgement?

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