Dredging the past

One of my relaxation habits is to re-read my old Usenet posts. It's sort of like re-reading a diary (or an LJ for that matter), since I record a lot of personal data along the way.

My current reading has brought me up to late 2002. I read this and shuddered.

On Thu, 26 Sep 2002 10:53:24 -0500, Beth Friedman <bjf@wavefront.com>
wrote:
>I don't know what the percentage is, but there are a hell of a lot of
>conditions that cost $200,000 or more to treat that won't kill you if
>you get proper treatment.

I am fairly sure that my father has run up over $200,000 in the last
fifteen years for medical treatment of a minor, treatable, progressive
health problem. If he had not had treatment, I believe he would now be
dead from it; with treatment, he's healthy, but the problem will
almost certainly recur and need more treatment in the future.

And that's not counting the unrelated pulmonary circulation problem he
had in the late 1980s, a problem which kills about 1/3rd of the people
who leave it untreated but which has caused him no lasting problems
because of quick and thorough and expensive treatment.

Crap. Crap crap crap.

Slightly cheerier Usenet dredging

Also from 2002:

On Wed, 25 Sep 2002 14:45:00 GMT, mikecap@TheWorld.com (Mike Caprio) wrote:
>People also watch The Sopranos faithfully... though I suppose that's a
>cable network so that might be a different thing entirely.

I suspect one of the reasons that the continuing-story shows are
moving to cable is that cable networks have a broadcast pattern which
is friendlier to such shows. Each episode of The Sopranos is broadcast
*five times* in its first week of release; if you miss it because
you're busy or there's a scheduling conflict or your VCR or cable
system screws up, you've got several more chances to catch it before
the next episode.

If you miss this week's West Wing, you're screwed unless a friend
taped it for you. IIRC, Fox broadcast each episode of 24 twice per
week over the air and at least once on their cable channel F/X. ABC's
Alias, which end every episode with a cliffhanger, rebroadcasts each
episode on *its* cable affiliate the next week. I think this is great.

The reason I find this amusing is that nellorat and I just spent a very pleasant hour watching this week's episode of CSI: (the real one, in Las Vegas). I indeed screwed up taping it on Thursday, but went onto BitTorrent, downloaded it while I was at work, and burned it onto a Video CD so we could watch it tonight. This is just plain better than TV, and I think this is the unstoppable wave of the future.

(We then finished with a cartoon--"Fry and the Slurm Factory", the final episode on the Futurama Season One DVD set. That's another huge improvement over television.)

Politics: OMG, a discussion moderator with a spine!

I'm listening to the News Hour (audio rebroadcast on WNYC). A long article just finished on Larry Wilkerson's statements about the "cabal" which hijacked foreign policy after September 11th and lied us into the Iraq debacle. The show followed up with the mainstay of The NewsHour: a moderator discussing the news with a centerist and a right-wing liar.

But the segment went off the rails in an important way: moderator Margaret Warner slapped the right-wing liar down twice in the course of the discussion. Wilkerson claimed that the WHIG plan was to go in, topple Hussein, put in Chalabi, and get out within four months. Now watch this:

MARGARET WARNER: Let's take one other thing that Larry Wilkerson talked about and he also laid at the foot of both the secretary of defense and the vice president what he calls the poor planning for the postwar situation. Now, how much of a role did the vice president have in that?
RANDY SCHEUNEMANN: Well, you know, I guess if the plan was to install Ahmed Chalabi immediately after the invasion, the cabal didn't prove to be very effective. I mean--
MARGARET WARNER: But that isn't the question. The question is: Were they responsible for that plan, which Larry Wilkerson said went completely awry, and they had no follow-up -- that's what he's saying, that we're now playing a pickup game.

Warner had previously allowed Scheunemann to insult Wilkerson's sanity ("I mean think soon we're going to need a psychologist versed in dealing with paranoids to understand his theory"), but when hetried to completely misrepresent Wilkerson's actual statements, she actually slapped him down.

And then again, at the end of the segment:

MARGARET WARNER: I have a very last final question, very brief to both of you: Where was the national security adviser, then Condoleezza Rice, who is supposed to be the honest broker in this?
RANDY SCHEUNEMANN: Well, I'll tell you where she is now --
MARGARET WARNER: No. Excuse me, where she was then.

Smack! Christ. The transcript doesn't convey the anger in her voice as she stopped him from answering the pointless question he wanted to answer and kept him on the subject.

A few more panels like this and I might start believing we have a press, again. It's amazing what the press will do when they decide they don't need to prop up the Preznit anymore.