I very rarely go to the movies. Sure, I saw Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince out of a misguided hope that they’d depart from the source material and have Harry snog Luna, but for the most part I’d rather stay home and watch Conan the Barbarian over and over again on Netflix-on-Demand.

However, I’d heard good things about Avatar. For instance, it was made by James Cameron, creator of Jessica Alba. Also, it was made in 3-D, which everyone knows is 50% better than 2-D. In addition, I heard there was some sort of controversy involving the use of white actors to play “Asian-inspired” characters. (For my money, the characters were more “Amerindian-inspired” from their face paint down to their sacred trees.) Finally, the movie was supposed to be about 8 hours long, which meant that I’d get the most value for my movie-ticket-buying dollar.

So, the movie is set about 150 years in the future. If you’re anything like me, you’re probably wondering how things have progressed between now and then. Here’s what I know:

• hibernation invented (or maybe stolen from bears)
• space travel to distant planets possible
• genetic engineering able to produce hybrids between civilized white people (notable for having five fingers and being civilized and white) and savage blue people (notable for having four fingers and being savage and blue)
• mind melds invented (or maybe stolen from Star Trek)
• new popular mineral: unobtanium
• mild advances in helicopter technology
• either inflation remains in check (“20 million dollars” is portrayed as a lot of money) or else US Dollar has been redenominated
• “cheddar” still used as slang for riches
• invention of oversized robotic military exoskeletons, and correspondingly oversized military knives
• no healthcare reform (see below)

Now then, the Blue Man lives in nets suspended from “sacred trees,” where he carries bows and poison arrows while simultaneously respecting all life as sacred. The sacred tree has pollen that move like jellyfish and glow in the dark and have an affinity for the main character Sully Sullenberger, one of the aforementioned white-blue hybrids powered by the mind-melded brain of a paraplegic marine whose scientist twin provided the DNA before inopportunely dying and being placed in a cardboard box and incinerated.

Meanwhile, Sigourney Weaver is the scientist in charge of the blue-white hybrid project, and the guy who was Phoebe’s dumb half-brother on “Friends” is the MBA-driven leader (I forget his name, but it was something like “Piggy McGreedum” or “Spoily von Selfish”) of Unobtainium Amalgamated, and Michelle Rodriguez is a bad-ass who thinks for herself while getting an occasional DWI, and some guy with white hair (“Killy McKillington”) is an evil military commander (but I repeat myself).

Well, it won’t surprise you to learn that the biggest supply of unobtanium within 200 klicks is located right underneath that pesky sacred tree where the Blue Man lives. And (apparently) transportation technology has advanced so little that killing the Blue Man and blowing up his tree is seen as a preferable solution to just looking somewhere else.

After a comical series of misadventures involving not-dogs and flaming goo and rhinoceri-that-are-also-sledgehammers, Sully Sullenberger is accepted by the Blue Man, who teach him about sharing and caring and the wisdom of the sacred forest and how every creature has a biological FireWire port at the end of its ponytail or one of its tendrils, which can be linked together to share Pure Moods MP3s for noncommercial purposes. I’m just kidding, there are no commercial purposes among the Blue Man.

Sully’s real role, of course, is to convince the Blue Man to leave his ancestral sacred tree, so that von Selfish can get the unobtanium without having to send in McKillington to do some McKilling. If he succeeds, then they’ll pay for doctors to fix his paraplegia, which Obamacare apparently would not do.

It should come as no surprise to you that Sully discovers that (despite their not having bathrooms or electricity or even YouTube, or maybe because of all these things) life with the noble savage Blue Man is better than life among the so-called “civilized” White Man.

Now, life on the Blue Man Planet is ruled by an inter-species Antiochan Contract, where before jacking into and riding (e.g.) a not-horse or a not-pterodactyl, you have to get permission from the Womyn’s center. (For no real reason, not-pterodactyls FireWire with only one Blue Man for life; not-horses are comparatively promiscuous.) After carefully negotiating these treacherous waters, Sully dips his quill into the blue ink.

Where he discovers that (as they say) “Once You Go Blue, Nothing Else Will Do,” and then it’s all-out warfare, with important diversions to criticize greed, belittle terrorism, clamor for health care reform, bemoan the fact that there was “no green” back home on earth, make Desert Storm references, and a bunch of other things, all of which were very loud.

The 3-D was very impressive. Not only did it not give me the headache I was expecting (which I got from the 100dB explosions instead), but its use was fairly restrained. (Compare with the trailer for Tim Burton Presents Alice in Wonderland 3D which consisted primarily of 60 seconds of anthropomorphic playing cards trying to stab me.)

In the end, the Tree of Souls saves the day, as do other tribes of Blue Men (“Comanche” and “Cherokee”) who ride in on not-horses and help out. At the risk of providing spoilers, let’s just say that McGreedum and McKillington both get what they deserve for trying to rape a planet.

For some reason the movie didn’t contain any references to the McDonalds Avatar Meal, but that’s probably because I didn’t see the IMAX version (which was sold out until approximately March).

In conclusion, did you know that they’re remaking Clash of the Titans? Bastards.

Inspired, perhaps, by Quentin Tarantino’s multi-part epic Kill Bill, auteur Larry Lessig has begun work on the not-dissimilar Change Congress Chronicles.

Volume 1, “Congressman Campbell is a Friend of the Auto Industry,” chronicles Congressman John Campbell, who is a friend of the auto industry.

The film quickly establishes the character of Campbell, who spent 25 of his pre-politics years working in the automotive industry. In the next scene, Campbell landlords for a bunch of used-car lots, earning somewhere between $600k and $6m a year. And a flashback reveals that Campbell has pocketed $170k in campaign contributions from the auto industry over the years.

At which point the film shifts gears to focus on the “Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act of 2008,” which (according to Lessig’s voice-over) is designed to protect consumers from the “shenanigans” of the “money-lending industry” (which everyone knows is a thinly-veiled euphemism for “Jews”).

The film does not delve into the bill’s merits or specifics, relying on astute viewers to infer that it represents an unalloyed good, based on both its opposition to “shenanigans” and its titular references to “consumers” and “protection.”

In an easy-to-guess plot twist, Campbell guts the bill by introducing an amendment that would exempt used-car dealers from its provisions, allowing them to continue their “shenanigans.” The film does not delve into the amendment’s merits either, relying on astute viewers to infer that it represents an unalloyed bad, based on both its opposition to opposition to “shenanigans” and its benefits to the used-car industry, which everyone knows consists primarily of dishonest, wicked people.

The movie ends with a three-fold call to action.

First, viewers are encouraged to “tweet” the Congressman, flooding his twitbox and letting him know that we’re onto him and his anti-anti-shenanigan agenda.

Second, viewers are encouraged to contact Congress, telling them to reject “this special interest legislation.” Presumably this refers to the Campbell amendment, which counts as “special interest legislation” on account of pertaining only to the interests of the “special” used-car industry, and not the original CFPAA, which pertains to the interests of the “unspecial” money-lending industry.

Finally, viewers are encouraged to demand public funding of elections. You see, if there were public funding of elections, then Campbell likely never would have spent 25 years working in the auto industry. And he certainly never would have gotten into the landlord-for-used-car-lots business. So he’d totally have no reason to take a particular interest in how proposed legislation affected the auto industry.

The film ends on a cliffhanger, as it deliberately avoids answering the obvious-to-the-viewer question “as long as Congress has the power to write laws favoring one special interest group at the expense of another, won’t these interest groups use any means they can (which obviously includes a lot more than campaign contributions) to get the laws to favor them and disfavor others?”

I’m excited to see how Lessig resolves this in his next film.

Seattle, in case you don’t follow our local politics, has got a mayoral election going on. (Technically it was last Tuesday, but they’re still counting the ballots.)

It’s a fairly interesting election, as elections go, if only because we junked the good-for-nothing incumbent in the primary, mostly on account of his failure (“think of the salmon!”) to remove snow from our roads last winter, which forced me to work from home for a week.

It’s also fairly uninteresting, in that the two primary-survivors, the Corporate Shill and the Ideologue, are both political neophytes. I actually met both of them, the former during an impromptu pre-primary baby-kissing session at Green Lake, the latter during a town hall at the local community center. They both seemed like, well, aspiring politicians.

And to be honest, neither is particularly appealing as a candidate. After losing their beloved incumbent, the city’s political and business “establishment” seems to have lined up behind the Corporate Shill. So I can’t support him. On the other hand, our douchebag alterna-weekly The Stranger hasn’t stopped tongue-bathing the Ideologue for months. So I can’t support him either.

(My preferred candidate was the former NBA player whose campaign platform seemed sensible. He came in 5th in the primary, I think.)

At last count the Ideologue is ahead by a few thousand votes, although there are still many left to count, so anything could happen.

Nonetheless, the aforementioned douchebag alterna-weekly makes the point that under either administration, the city council (and in particular its president) is poised to control an outsized share of the power in the city. This is probably the case, and I’m sure that any one of the three would continue the current policies of running the city into the ground.

There is one part of the article that leapt out at me as being, well, weird:

[City council president] Conlin sees the city pulling itself out of the gutter by embracing the most progressive elements of his environmental agenda. For example, a company called General Biodiesel—which uses primarily waste fats like cooking grease and tallow—was having a hard time getting permits, Conlin said, and by removing red tape Seattle was able to help that company (and, hopefully, laid down a marker that will help attract other green-job companies). “We should be targeting companies like that and asking, ‘What can we do to help you?’” he said.

I had to read this paragraph several times, because I wasn’t sure what part of was “progressive.” Nominally, it’s a story about making it easier to do business and in particular relaxing a permitting process. These are both pretty anti-progressive positions, so I can’t imagine that’s what he was referring to.

Instead, I figure, what he really meant was something along the lines of “let companies whose names contain green-sounding terms like ‘Biodiesel’ and ‘Renewable’ and ‘Sustainable’ ignore laws and regulations that apply to other, less-SWPL-friendly companies.” And indeed, this is the sort of Seattle “progressivism” I’ve gotten used to.

In anticipation of this new agenda, I’m thinking about renaming my publishing company to something more progressive, like “Compostable House,” “Biodegraded Books,” or “Post-Industrial Press.”

Great news, Senior Citizens! President Obama wants to give you $250!

Why? Probably so you’ll vote for him again come 2012.

There’s some sort of nominally non-tawdry reason, too.

You see, by law, Social Security payments increase each year in a manner pegged to inflation. When Rascal Scooters and Life Alerts and diabeetus testing supplies and Centrum Silver get more expensive, Social Security checks get bigger to compensate.

This year, however, prices haven’t gone up! (According to government bean-counters, anyway.) How will seniors get by if we don’t cut them extra checks?

Listen to the heartless fat-cats in Congress:

“I think it would be inappropriate,” said Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H. “The reason we set up this process was to have the Social Security reimbursement reflect the cost of living.”

Now, at least a few of our elected betters understand that not granting a cost of living increase just because the cost of living didn’t increase amounts to “turning our backs” on Senior Citizens:

“I think that the Obama administration and many members of Congress understand that we simply can’t turn our backs on senior citizens,” Sanders said.

I’m convinced!

My only concern is where the President will get the $13 billion to dole out. Last I checked government revenues were falling short of government expenditures by a trillion dollars, give or take.

But according to a “senior administration official,” Obama’s got this figured out too. We’ll simply borrow the money!

Who wouldn’t want to risk their capital for a sure investment like “give free money to old people”? Obviously it can’t compare with “pay people to destroy functional cars” or “give free money to everybody” or “give more free money to old people,” but in today’s investment climate, I dare you to find something better!

This week’s New Republic features Larry Lessig’s new screed Against Transparency: The perils of openness in government.

The essay is approximately a jillion words long and doesn’t make any sense. As best as I can tell, here are its salient points:

1. Transparency will negatively impact “faith in our political system.”

2. You see, sometimes people use information in ways I don’t want them to.

3. For instance, if you “observed” that someone made a large contribution to a Senator before he voted in their favor, you might conclude that he’d been bought off. But you don’t know that for sure!

4. In fact, using “information,” you could quite plausibly conclude that Hillary Clinton was corrupt. What an unacceptable conclusion!

5. Something about the JAMA.

6. Craigslist and/or the internet killed newspapers.

7. Craigslist and/or the internet killed the music industry.

8. Did I mention that I support Voluntary [sic] Collective Licensing? It has nothing to do with my main thesis, but I’d like to give it a plug.

9. Drug development is expensive.

10. Publicly-funded elections (for which I founded an advocacy organization, but I’m not going to bother to mention that) would give people the impression that their Congressional representatives are trustworthy.

11. In fact, publicly-funded elections can be seen as the political equivalent of Voluntary [sic] Collective Licensing, which I’d like to plug again.

12. Even though it’s impossible to dislike Craigslist, I sort of dislike Craigslist. Damn you, Craig, for not warning us that you were going to put newspapers out of business! That was the only place I could get an accurate horoscope!

13. Swamps smell bad.

14. Therefore, transparency is no good! Voluntary [sic] Collective Licensing is good! Publicly-funded elections are awesome!

–

It is hard to find a common thread here (other than Voluntary [sic] Collective Licensing), but if I had to guess I’d say that Lessig’s intent is to maintain “faith in our political system.”

Lessig obviously has such faith, as you’d be hard-pressed to believe “there’s no personal corruption [in Congress]” based on evidence or reason or transparency. I don’t really get why New Republic lets him proselytize, though.

The Pro Football Hall of Fame Committee announced Friday that its newest inductee was San Francisco 49ers wide receiever Michael Crabtree, just three days into his NFL career, “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen cooperation between owners and agents.”

The award cited in particular Mr. Crabtree’s effort to reduce the correlation between draft position and compensation. “He has created a new negotiating climate,” the committee said.

Mr. Crabtree, who made football history by being selected three slots after the substantially-less-promising Darrius Heyward-Bey, made repairing the fractured relations between himself and the 49ers a major theme of his protracted holdout. Since joining the 49ers he has pursued a range of policies intended to fulfill that goal. He has vowed to show up for practice, as he did in an afternoon earlier this week; reached out to his teammates, delivering a major locker room speech this Thursday; and sought to defuse tampering charges between the 49ers and the New York Jets.

“Only very rarely has a player to the same extent as Crabtree captured the league’s attention and given its quarterbacks hope for a better future,” the committee said in its citation. “His playing style is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the league must do so on the basis of catches and yards-after-catches that are viewed by the majority of the world’s population.”

But while Mr. Crabtree has generated considerable good will around the league — his wide-receiving counterparts are eager to meet with him, and polls show he is hugely popular — many of his football efforts have yet to bear fruit, or are only just beginning to do so. Shaun Hill has not yet completed a pass to him; Isaac Bruce, however, recently agreed to throw the ball around with him, which Mr. Crabtree has called “a constructive beginning.”

In that sense, Mr. Crabtree is unlike past inductees such as former Cowboys wide receiver Michael Irvin, who was inducted in 2007 for being what presenter Jerry Jones called “The Playmaker.” (Mr. Irvin failed to win in 2005, as some had expected, after he became embroiled in a variety of legal controversies.)

Peter King, a member of the Hall of Fame Selection Committee and a writer for Sports Illustrated, said that Crabtree had already contributed enough to football to earn the award.

“We are not awarding the prize for what may happen in the future, but for what he has done in the previous few days,” Mr. King said. “We would hope this will enhance what he is trying to do. Now, where’s the nearest Starbucks?” The prize comes as Mr. Crabtree faces considerable challenges at home. On the football front, he is trying to learn the 49ers’ substantial playbook after having missed the first few months of the season. On the endorsement front, he is wrestling with declining support among teenagers for Crabtree-branded shoes and energy drinks.

For Mr. Crabtree, the award could, in a strange way, prove an on-field liability. As he traveled overseas during his campaign for a rich contract, he was subjected to criticism from owners who argued he was too much the entitled prima donna. Being inducted into the HOF at such an early stage in his career could further that kind of criticism, especially in the NFL’s hypercompetitive environment.

Last night, at my friend Cesar’s behest, I watched Keith Olbermann’s “Comment” on health care reform.

In fact, in order not to miss the program, I changed the channel to MSNBC several minutes early, where I was treated to a discussion of Archie comics and a “debate” over whether the 16th-century Amerindians were actually clamoring for English colonization. (Both participants in the debate were remarkably shrill, so I can’t say for sure which side either was advocating.)

I should probably confess that I don’t watch TV news. I can’t stand it. Not CNN, not MSNBC, not Fox, not Northwest Cable News, not Jon Stewart, not KOMO4 or KING5 or KONG6 or KIRO7. I would rather watch repeats of “Saved by the Bell” than the “Today” show. I don’t even enjoy “McLaughlin Group” anymore. I’d never actually seen an episode of the Olbermann show before yesterday.

It was apparently a departure from his typical format, and it consisted of an hour-long rant about healthcare that was (I think) Olbermann’s argument for Obama-style HCR. If you are interested in the rant, I’m sure you can track it down online.

I, however, was watching it in order to find fault with it. And fault I found!

1. Olbermann opened with an excruciatingly-detailed account of his father’s recent kidney problems. Eventually he mentioned that his father is 80 years old (and therefore, presumably, covered by Medicare, and therefore mostly irrelevant to the argument over HCR).

This part of the show had two points that I could tell. First, it helped stretch Olbermann’s rant to an entire hour, creating additional commercial breaks that could be sold to AARP and HealthReformNow.org and DeathPanel.net and the hundreds of other people eager to advertise their opinions on HCR. And, second, it helped establish Olbermann’s bonafides. This time, I was supposed to infer, it was personal.

2. He next asserted that the entire debate was motivated by “fear of death.” After all, that’s why we have insurance and go to the doctor. Fear of death. Like, that time I couldn’t stop sneezing and wanted allergy meds? Fear of death. The ingrown toenail that kept recurring? Fear of death. Myopia? Fear of death. Acne? Fear of death. Birth control? Fear of death. EVERYTHING IS FEAR OF DEATH. Apparently. (Admittedly, the time I saw the doctor because I was afraid I was dying, that was fear of death.)

3. After this he launched into the syllogism part of his performance:

i. Government is supposed to provide defense.
ii. Health care is a kind of defense.
iii. Therefore, government ought to provide health care.

4. Statistics. Did you know that 122 people die every day because of lack of health insurance? Really, 122 people. That’s what he said, anyway.

Now, (for instance) car crash statistics (“X people are killed each day in car crashes”) can be compiled by counting the number of people who die in car crashes. However, with the exception of people who are refused lifesaving treatment at emergency rooms on account of their uninsured status (which I estimate is about 0 people a day) you can’t actually identify people who died “because they lacked health insurance.”

Instead, you have to use some sort of regression analysis. And indeed, I searched for the 122 a day number and traced it back to a 2002 study:

They came up with this figure by looking at long-term studies that measured the links between insurance status and death rates. The IOM then used annual statistics on insurance rates and deaths to determine an estimate of extra deaths attributable to the lack of insurance.

Alas, another researcher controlled for more variables and found no effect at all:

In other words, once you compare death rates in an apples-to-apples fashion — comparing insured smokers to uninsured smokers, for instance — the likelihood of dying evens out. This, in turn, would mean that IOM’s estimate of 18,000 deaths would drop essentially to zero.

I haven’t read either paper, so I’m not equipped to judge whose methodology seems more reasonable. However, I am equipped to judge that an unqualified assertion that “122 people die every day on account of having no insurance” is misleading at best.

5. More statistics. The regression analysis relied on above concluded that the uninsured had a 40% higher death rate than the insured. But analysis of an earlier time period had estimated the gap at 25%.

“By extrapolation,” Olbermann concluded, “three years from now the chance will be 43% higher! By 2022 the figure will be 53% higher! If we do not reverse this trend…”

But two debatable regression coefficients do not a trend determine, making this “extrapolation” grossly deceptive.

6. Life insurance. Did you know that some employers take out life insurance policies on their employees? Macabre! What does this have to do with HCR? Nothing!

7. “Insurance companies have bought the government.” This is what he said. Insurance companies have bought the government. If you think about it, this should make you suspicious about the details of the HCR (which is being crafted by the government, which has been bought by the wicked insurance companies). Unfortunately, Olbermann did not think about it. (Or at least, he didn’t mention it.)

8. If there was some sort of natural disaster, he continued, the government would spend a lot of money very quickly. (And waste a ton of it, he did not point out.) But isn’t healthcare also a national disaster? QED.

9. “I want my goverment to spend taxpayer money,” he finally asserted. I think this was really the main thrust of his argument, and while I can see why some people might find it compelling, I really didn’t.

10. Most bizarrely, I’m pretty sure that he never mentioned any of the specifics of Obama-style HCR (although he did suggest that we rename it “Medicare for Everybody”).

I certainly learned a lot about Keith Olbermann’s opinions on HCR. However, I learned almost nothing about the HCR proposals actually being considered.

I certainly got the message that I should support Obama’s HCR plan. However, I wasn’t given any idea what Obama’s HCR plan would do.

In the end, this was probably the most irresponsible aspect of the program. Olbermann badgered his audience into supporting a bill that probably even he doesn’t know the details of.

At last it was over, and I changed the channel to “Top Chef.” (Go Kevin!)

Due to a combination of carelessness, disorganization, and ineptitude, I let my domain expire a couple of years ago.  For many dark months, it pointed at a page of useless ads that I can’t imagine anyone being willing to click on.

Recently I checked and discovered that it was about to expire, and so I entered into an “auction” to get it back.  Armed with my economics degree and my copy of Auction Theory, I proceeded to grossly overbid, at which point I got my domain back.

Now, what should I do with it?