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The idea of making health care portable isn’t really what makes this video awesome, though the video is pretty funny. Rather this video’s part in the growing swell of reasonable alternatives to a purely market-based health care system, which has by all accounts been proven a failure, is what is truly awesome.

For a confluence of reasons that individually would not be damning, we now have a health care system that provides at best adequate care to people with insurance (which comes at a higher price than citizens of most other developed nations pay) and no systemic care to people without insurance. The steep basic costs of simple care are a contributing factor in Americans’ increasingly unhealthy lifestyles, which in turns fuels a greater demand for health care that more and more people cannot afford. We are in a bad place, charting a course for a worse place, and the influx of (often radically) different health care systems is welcome.

I’m not sure what the answer is, but I’m reasonable sure this system is it’s death knells and I’d prefer we didn’t all die with it.

Bruce Springsteen endorses Barack Obama just before the Pennsylvania primaries:

He has the depth, the reflectiveness, and the resilience to be our next President. He speaks to the America I’ve envisioned in my music for the past 35 years, a generous nation with a citizenry willing to tackle nuanced and complex problems, a country that’s interested in its collective destiny and in the potential of its gathered spirit. A place where “…nobody crowds you, and nobody goes it alone.”

The endorsement of superstars shouldn’t really matter than much. They are, after all, just talented artists at best and marketing vehicles at worse (you wouldn’t care who the Jolly Green Giant endorsed would you?). But Springsteen may be slightly different, because millions have identified with his songs in a profound and personal way beyond what a normal musician achieves. Mariah Carey will likely never have someone claim Hero defined their life. But it’s possible someone might keep a copy of The River for just that reason.

For confirmation of Bruce’s cool (though not precisely his relevance), check out this video of him performing Dancing in the Dark with a street musician in Copenhagen.

It’s been well documented that the American public is suffering Iraq fatigue. We’re tired of the war, tired of the death, tired of the cost and becoming therefore less and less interested in news about the war. During the Vietnam War a similar fatigue balanced against the steep and visible cost of drafted young men triggered a wave of resentment in America that helped bring about change. But but we are engaged in a distant war fought by volunteers and seem more willing to let the war in Iraq go on.

Realizing the fatigue must be battled to keep the American public engaged in the political discourse, anti-war advocates are turning to new methods to drive home salient points. Cue The $3 Trillion Shopping Spree, a fun site that lets you shop with $3t for goods like groceries for a year, sending someone to college, or ending our dependence of foreign oil.

It’s tongue-in-cheek to be sure, but as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu put it:

Satire should, like a polished razor keen,
Wound with a touch that’s scarcely felt or seen.

Vietnam needed the open wound of the drafted dead to raise the public to demand withdrawal. Perhaps satire will wound us enough to act.

If you’d asked me yesterday to describe a setting where a video was the song, I would’ve fumbled for a good description. I would have tried Fantasia, or perhaps live videos. But Moonlight in Glory may be the best answer I’ve found before. Visual audio, at it’s finest. Of course, it doesn’t hurt when the songwriters are David Byrne and Brian Eno, and the visual artist is Trollbäck + Company. If you want to really experience it you should check out a higher res-version—be sure to click on ‘cinematic view’.

Note: I was primed to appreciate this since it mentions Noah—I’m on Genesis 9, which deals Noah in the aftermath of the flood as I transcribe the Bible by hand as a part of the Handwritten Word project.

Scripting awkwardness is an art, making the team for The Office grand masters.

This is not the Bravia José Gonazalez / Bouncing Balls commercial redux, but it’s still a good manufactured wonder-moment. However their is a tragic difference between the two ads done by Fallon London for Sony. In the Bravia ad, they used beauty and whim to sell a better way to see those moments (televisions). In this new commercial, they are using foaming spilling through Miami to sell recording devices (video and digital cameras). Sony is trying to sell the idea that those moments must be documented, not just experienced.

I fall prey to that mentality often, missing experiences that will never happen again so that I can try to record them for posterity. Look around today and you’ll find observers and engagers alongside a smaller number of recorders and creators. But that balance is tipping. The recorders are an ever-growing body, and will soon outnumber the others. That instability will greatly diminish the value, and therefore the appeal, of engaging, observing and creating.

The commercial is pretty, and the idea of Miami temporarily turning to foam is charming. But the idea of a society compelled to invest in recording everything to confer value on beauty and whim is terrifying.

Funny and true.

This week the military and diplomatic leaders in Iraq came before Congress to testify about progress. Members of select committees were able to speak and ask question to find out precisely where we war in our “war on terror”.

A number of Senator performed capably from both parties. Time focused on a single line of questioning that came at the end of a long day of hearings:

Obama hit Petraeus and Crocker with an artful series of questions about the two main threats: Sunni terrorists like al-Qaeda in Iraq, and Iran. He noted that al-Qaeda had been rejected by the Iraqi Sunnis and chased to the northern city of Mosul. If U.S. and Iraqi troops succeeded there, what was next? He proposed: “Our goal is not to hunt down and eliminate every single trace of al-Qaeda but rather to create a manageable situation where they’re not posing a threat to Iraq.” Petraeus said Obama was “exactly right.”

Obama asked Crocker about Iran: We couldn’t expect Iran to have no influence in Iraq, could we? “We have no problem with a good, constructive relationship between Iran and Iraq,” Crocker replied. “The problem is with the Iranian strategy of backing extremist militia groups and sending in weapons and munitions that are used against Iraqis and against our own forces.” Obama then pursued Barbara Boxer’s previous line of questioning: If Iran is such a threat to Iraq, why was Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad greeted with open arms and apparently a lot of official kissing in Baghdad last month? “A visit like that,” Crocker said, avoiding the question, “should be in the category of a normal relationship.”

At which point, Obama dropped the hammer. The current situation in Iraq was “messy,” he said. “There’s still violence; there’s still some traces of al-Qaeda; Iran has influence more than we would like. But if we had the current status quo and yet our troops had been drawn down to 30,000, would we consider that a success?” Crocker, semi-speechless, chose to misinterpret the question, saying a precipitous drawdown to 30,000 troops would be disastrous. But Obama’s question was more diabolical. He was saying, Hey, al-Qaeda’s on the run, and Iran is probably more interested in harassing the U.S. military than having another war with Iraq. How much better does the situation need to be for us to leave? He had taken Joe Lieberman’s dart and beaten it into a plowshare.

When General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker took the stage before the Senate, and then the House there were a few important notes. The first was that neither was equipped to answer the fundamental questions of the war; answers about why we are there, why we’re not leaving, and our fiscal policies are the territory of Bush, Rice and others. But Petraeus and Crocker have provided generally honest appraisals about what is happening, and the course they believe we should take.
Because of their limited context it was difficult to leverage any pressure for bigger answer - Senator Russ Feingold expressed his dismay he only has the general and ambassador to question for that very reason. Obama’s point was important, then, because is was one of the few moments when we did get a bigger answer than Petraeus and Crocker could give. But leading them to agree that we had reasonably met the measures of success we’d accept as a premise for future drawing down right now, it’s a reasonable inference that there is a separate agenda at work in Iraq.
When Secretary Gates announced yesterday that that military would not reduce its size this year, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said:

The president still doesn’t understand that America’s limited resources cannot support his limitless war. Let me be clear: This is not a so-called troop pause. With today’s announcement, the president has signaled to the American people that he has no intention of bringing home any more troops.

Instead he is leaving all the tough decisions to the next administration. President Bush has an exit strategy for only one man, himself, on January 20, 2009.

Perhaps there is another reason, more or less noble. But at least we have an idea why we’re not staying, thanks to this week’s hearings.

General David Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, originally uploaded by Andrew Gascho.

There are times abstracted commercials make no sense, like esurance’s secret agent cartoons. But when you’re an established brand with a solid reputation sometimes you need something radically different than your standard message in a standard delivery. I think this is up the same alley as the nearly-famous Honda ad, which worked for so many of the same reasons the above Audi ad does.

Update:
Peter rightly questioned whether the Audi commercial has an obvious message.
Both commercials I reference above drive home valuable messages to viewers. Honda presents their attention to detail and precision assembly that have helped Honda earn a reputation for reliable and pleasurable to drive cars. In Audi’s advert, we get the sense of beauty and class that accompanies even the mechanics of their vehicles; even their engines are luxurious.
Both commercials require some interpretation to draw any conclusions, so they obviously carry a baseline experience of ‘cool’ as a fall-back.

From the NY Times in 2004:

The torch relay that culminates in the ceremonial lighting of the flame at the Olympic stadium was ordered by Adolf Hitler, who tried to make the 1936 Berlin Games a celebration of the Third Reich. Hitler’s Nazi propaganda machine also popularized the five interlocking rings as the symbol of the Games.

Now, both are universally recognized icons of the Olympics. But historians say neither had much, if anything, to do with the Games born centuries ago in ancient Olympia.

“The torch relay is so ingrained in the modern choreography that most people today assume it was a revival of a pagan tradition - unaware that it was actually concocted for Hitler’s Games in Berlin,” the author Tony Perrottet wrote in “The Naked Olympics” (Random House, 2004).

Perrottet added, “Ironically, considering its repellent origins, the torch race has come to symbolize international brotherhood today, and remains a centerpiece of our own pomp-filled Olympic opening ceremonies.”

This week in Time:

[The Chinese internal security guarding the torch’s] presence has only exacerbated the protests that surround the relay, says Steve Tsang, a China specialist at Oxford University. “It is very much self-inflicted damage to China’s position in the international community,” he says. “In any event you’d have protests … but the scale became much bigger when interest groups knew beforehand that they would be guaranteed prime-time television coverage. What was the Chinese government thinking? How could it send the People’s Armed Police to beat up protesters, even push around foreign celebrities holding the torch, and not attract even more attention?”

More on the history of the torch at Wikipedia.