Joshua Malbin

Every municipal workers’ union in New York is watching very closely. The MTA agreed to binding arbitration, and when it didn’t get what it liked, went to court to avoid having to honor the result. What’s “binding” about it if you’re not going to be bound? What’s to stop the city from pulling the same stunt if the MTA wins in court?

Here’s more from Workers Independent News (.mp3).

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The topic:

A study commissioned by the National Football League reports that Alzheimer’s disease or similar memory-related diseases appear to have been diagnosed in the league’s former players vastly more often than in the national population — including a rate of 19 times the normal rate for men ages 30 through 49.

The PR:

An N.F.L. spokesman, Greg Aiello, said in an e-mail message that the study did not formally diagnose dementia, that it was subject to shortcomings of telephone surveys and that “there are thousands of retired players who do not have memory problems.”

“Memory disorders affect many people who never played football or other sports,” Mr. Aiello said. “We are trying to understand it as it relates to our retired players.”

Jeez. “We are very concerned about the findings of this study. Our scientific and medical advisors are reviewing them carefully to determine what steps we need to take to ensure our players’ safety.”

Is that so hard? It still doesn’t commit to a damn thing.

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Vote!

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For those of you who were asking at dinner last night: “What was up with all the people walking invisible dogs in Carroll Gardens today?”

It was an Improv Everywhere mission.

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The movie Surrogates takes an intriguing premise, deploys it without sense, and misses every opportunity to rescue it.

In 2017, 99% of human beings have given up on leaving the house, preferring instead to do their business via a remote-controlled robot, colloquially a surrey. Means present no obstacle, agoraphobia is presumed a natural condition, and the shape of daily life does not change substantially. Very well; Twilight Zone episodes have asked more of your suspension of disbelief.

An intriguing non sequitur has it that crime is the faintest shadow of its pre-surrogacy self. People don’t, it seems, use their surrogates to break into their neighbors’ apartments and rob or diddle their desensitized plugged-in selves. Again, very well; but when a weapon proves capable of killing people via their avatars, a shock to the system is suggested — it’s the first homicide in a long time — and discarded almost immediately.

Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of Surrogates is in the presentation, by the actors, of a slightly distant and robotic affect. This isn’t easy, but neither is it interesting to watch, and it becomes impossible to care about the characters. A central character, played in human form by the compelling and lovely Jamie Cromwell, has six different surreys in play throughout the movie. Though an interesting premise, this prevents the audience from forming any kind of relationship with a chief antagonist.

Failure abounds. A critical reveal about an anti-surrogacy leader named The Prophet and played by Ving Rhames takes place in front of a minor character; the surprise isn’t permitted to rise to the level of a cheap thrill. The movie offers neither an avid defense nor a substantial critique of surrogacy; you can send your surrogate to a club and jump off a balcony or screw a stranger, but it doesn’t tickle the id the way, say, the virtual reality in Caprica does. And the opportunity to satirize mass-media fear-mongering remains entirely latent. Not only is Bruce Willis’s protagonist ambivalent about surrogacy from the start, depriving the story of either a conversion or a catharsis, but his ambivalence is rooted in that cheapest of tragedies, the death of a child. On top of that, the action sequences are undermined by careless editing.

I liked the preview…

…mostly because Bruce Willis’s surrogate makes him look like he’s had awful plastic surgery in the high Hollywood tradition, and it’s comforting when the film reveals his appropriately aged human self. One could imagine a satisfying B-movie mash-up of The Matrix, Blade Runner, Minority Report and “The Picture of Dorian Grey”, but sadly, this one wasn’t it.

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I like that people put books they don’t want anymore on their stoops for other people to take for free. I wasn’t even out looking for them today and here’s all the ones I picked up going to and from the farmer’s market.

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In the season premiere of Dollhouse it was totally disorienting to hear Jamie Bamber and Alexis Denisof speak in their native accents (British and American, respectively). Dichen Lachman did a British accent for the first time, which shouldn’t be any weirder than her American since she’s Australian, but it was.

According to Alan Sepinwall the Epitaph One material was cut for time, which is a serious bummer since that’s what I was most looking forward to (especially Felicia Day). I hope that doesn’t keep up, since Epitaph One was a way better direction for the show that what it had been doing.

Also Amy Acker is apparently only around for three episodes. Sad.

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Yeah, yeah, all of you who know me are thinking. Here comes the predictable rant about Park Slope parents blah blah.

This time that’s not what I have in mind.

Climate researchers now predict the planet will warm by 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century even if the world’s leaders fulfill their most ambitious climate pledges, a much faster and broader scale of change than forecast just two years ago, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations Environment Program.
…
The increase is nearly double what scientists and world policymakers have identified as the upper limit of warming the world can afford in order to avert catastrophic climate change.

And that assumes several things I don’t believe will happen, for example, that the U.S. Senate will pass the global warming legislation currently on the table without weakening it even more.

In fact what’s happening is that because the Senate almost certainly won’t pass ACES by December, the U.S. won’t be able to participate realistically in negotiations for the successor treaty to Kyoto. And without meaningful U.S. participation, the Copenhagen negotiations probably won’t go anywhere, at least for a while.

Obama said earlier this year that he would like to show up in Copenhagen with a climate bill passed by the Senate in his hands. However, with the debate on health care raging and the fragile economy just getting off life support, some have expressed doubt that lawmakers have the political will to pass a bill.

Without a commitment from the U.S. to significantly reduce its industrial emissions, the best that environmental advocates can hope in Copenhagen is an extension of negotiations.

Here are three small reasons I’m pessimistic today.

1) Rich nations are already failing to live up to their promises about helping poor nations adjust to global warming, even though rich nations are causing the problem and the global poor are the ones who will suffer.

2) I saw this post from the liberal AmericaBlog: Enviros want your quilted toilet paper. Yes we do. Because only old-growth trees have the long fibers needed to make puffy paper, and we’d really rather you use recycled paper to wipe your ass. If we can’t even make that small step (and judging by the comments, even liberals aren’t willing to) can we really make bigger steps like reducing our meat consumption?

3) Oh, speaking of meat consumption: “For every newly converted vegetarian, four poor humans start earning enough money to put beef on the table.”

Those of us in our thirties now will probably die before the worst of the climate catastrophe, though our lives won’t be as nice as our parents’.  Children born now won’t be so lucky. Think twice before you inflict the coming world on them.

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I’m a member of the Freelancer’s Union for the health insurance. Before the primary and now before the runoff I’ve gotten calls from some phone bank of theirs, urging me to vote for David Yassky for Comptroller and Bill de Blasio for Public Advocate.

Okay, whatever. But what was odd was the reason given both times: Yassky and de Blasio will fight for a new law to give unemployment benefits to freelancers.

It’s a small point, but Comptroller and Public Advocate are not legislative positions.

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Moore’s choice to make “capitalism” his straw man (rather than, say, greed or Reagan-era deregulation) puts him in closer company than he might like with some pretty nasty world-historical bedfellows.

Dear Dana Stevens,

This may come as a surprise, but capitalism has some pretty nasty world-historical bedfellows too.

Also, did you know that Stalin was an atheist?

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