A Post 6 Grrrrrl New Year: Carine Ceriano, Debbie Hazelnut, Joan Philbin
by Alphaville Herald on 01/01/11 at 10:58 pm
To end another wonderful year with Post 6, I thought I would grab three of the models who were kind enough to share themselves with us this year and feature a more stylized version of their beautiful avatars. Debbie Hazelnut, Carine Ceriano, and Joan Philbin were all great enough to step up and pose a second time.
Carine Ceriano
Mother Earth seemed unhappy in 2010. Major earthquakes in Haiti and Chile marked the start of the year, and later earthquakes in Indonesia, landslides in Mexico and California, deadly monsoon rains in Pakistan and volcanic eruptions in Indonesia and Iceland shake the very foundations of our planetary home.
In 2010, financial meltdowns and government reactions to them continued to fill the news. Rioting and protests in Greece, France, England, and Ireland over government handling of what is perceived as an economic crisis created by but not suffered through by the wealthy and elite “banker class” helps create a class-war mentality in the minds of many. This feeling even broaches the normally vacuous arena of Will Farrell comedies, when his summer release “The Other Guys” features several minutes of graphics illustrating the disparity between average Americans and the corporate elite that run during the film’s closing credit.
Debbie Hazelnut
The way the world works continues to change at the speed of light thanks to technology. Wikileaks, which had made headlines before 2010, becomes daily front-page news with the release of US State Department cables, reports on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and also with the ongoing legal struggles of its founder, Julian Assange. Attempts to stop Wikileaks by refusing to host the site, or refusing to process donations are met with coordinated attacks by internet citizens, bringing the concept of “Hacktivism” to the world’s attention.
Spain won the World Cup, but its victory was overshadowed by the introduction of the Vuvuzela. The Winter Olympics captivated a resurgent television audience world wide, and America fell in love with the idea of the New Orleans Saints actually winning for a change. The San Francisco Giants won the World Series over a team that was somehow not the super-wealthy Yankees, and in a stunningly predictable turn of events, the effing Lakers and Duke won the NBA and NCAA basketball championships respectively, and with the world seemingly literally coming apart at the seams, this author felt it entirely appropriate to spend an entire paragraph recounting the Beer and Circus sports championships that keep us all distracted.
Joan Philbin
In news that is never reported, tens of thousands of children probably learned that community service is a good thing through their schools and their churches. Hundreds of thousands of hungry people were probably fed and housed through the generosity of strangers. Good deeds were probably done and baby birds probably learned to fly.
2010 was, from a global perspective, a pretty depressing year, but there’s always hope, there’s always tomorrow, and as I write this, that tomorrow is in a different calendar year than the one in which I’m typing. Here’s my sincere hope that your 2011 is your best year yet.
Peace to all,
Timothy Morpork
AM Oderngrl
Jan 9th, 2011
OH, it’s all very lovely to say people should be responsible for their own behaviors but when you “choose” to be hit by a semi-tractor-trailer whilst innocently driving on the highway, you’ll want someone else to keep you alive until you can choose for yourself again. And the only way to pay for that is to make sure everyone has at least a minimal catastrophic coverage. You’d be the first to scream if they didn’t give you the best of care. The law in the US requires that and has done for years. And people don’t “Choose” to be born themselves (except in certain religions) so children have to be covered and paid for by someone until they are responsible for themselves. So quit believing that you can completely control your own health with your own behavior choices and let’s get real about how to pay for a minimal standard of care for everyone in the world’s wealthiest nation.
Persephone Bolero
Jan 10th, 2011
@AM Oderngrl “but when you “choose” to be hit by a semi-tractor-trailer whilst innocently driving on the highway,”
Lasik surgery is one of the few fields of medicine that has not only see rapid innovation in the past 20 years. It’s gotten *cheaper*. Why? Because no public programs or insurance cover it. So, doctors have to pander to the needs of their customers in order to get customers, and they have to compete with each other.
Fact is, medical costs have skyrocketed because people have this third-party payer system. Doctors don’t compete with each other by pandering to the needs of their customers, which would include providing better, more innovative healthcare at lower prices than other doctors. So, doctors and all those in the medical industry have no incentive to provide cheaper, better healthcare.
Of course, you’ll accuse me of wanting poor people to get sick and die, and I’ll just save you the trouble of that strawman and say, no, I don’t. In fact, I want healthcare to be as accessible as fast food. Quick, convenient, cheap, and satisfying with an endless supply of choices to fit everyone’s needs. If we could do it for food, which people die without, why can’t we do it for medicine?
Horton Hoonoo
Jan 11th, 2011
I tuned this out because it was getting annoying, but when the discussion turned to a new page I had to come back to see what’s up.
Luxembourg has a socialized healthcare system far more “socialist” than anything Obama has suggested, and yet it is THE country held out at the “awesome” end of the spectrum by that BBC video you linked to.
Please explain this apparent dichotomy to your free market system, and please, if you’re going to again simply say “They have old money” I would like that explained in detail as well. There is old money all over the world, including the United States, but it doesn’t seem to do jack for anyone except the people that are sitting on it or lawyering for it
Please also work in another link to the Heritage Foundation if possible.
kthx.
Persephone Bolero
Jan 11th, 2011
@Horton “Luxembourg has a socialized healthcare system far more”
First, Luxembourg has the 14th freest economy out of 179, according to the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom. So, not surprising, it’s one of the richest countries in the world. So, it has a relatively free market when you look at all indicators, which include ten different factors.
Since the Index of Economic Freedom is the premiere source for this ranking, I use it. Asking me to work in another simply because you don’t like its conclusions is silly. Unless you can explain a flaw in their data or methodology, then there’s no reason to select another, even if a comparable source existed. Do you know of one that has different conclusions? I’d happily examine it.
And yes, it has a lot of old money. Essentially, there are few entrepreneurs in Luxembourg. They don’t have an equivalent of Bill Gates there. They’re not innovating new products at all. Instead, they’re just reinvesting old money from medieval royal families. Investment capital is the backbone of its economy. Since they are a relatively free market, the money doesn’t get squandered away on bureaucratic waste. It’s very easy to invest what wealth it possesses. So, this helps keeps the country wealthy. If its economy was less free, like that you see in African countries, its wealth and standard of living would decline.
The United States has a very large investment industry also, but this capital was built on innovation and industry. There’s no royalty in America, and compared to Luxembourg, the US is very young. So, it doesn’t have much old money.
Horton Hoonoo
Jan 11th, 2011
>>Since the Index of Economic Freedom is the premiere source for this ranking, I use it. Asking me to work in another simply because you don’t like its conclusions is silly.
The Heritage Foundation is the group, along with the WSJ, that does that index. I’m going to build you a clue out of sculpty prims. It will be every bit as real and poignant and your grip on economics.
AM Oderngrl
Jan 11th, 2011
Oh, this should be the”freedom for corporations” index. Here is how they rank the US in “labor freedom” :
94.8% “The United States’ labor regulations are highly flexible. The non-salary cost of employing a worker is low, and dismissing an employee is not burdensome.” http://www.heritage.org/index/Country/UnitedStates#labor-freedom
Only Singapore and Australia are higher, according to their system, in 2010.
Of course, the inability to change jobs or get divorced or leave your parents’ home, for fear of losing your health insurance coverage, and an unemployment rate hovering around 10% do not say much about the freedom of laborers to make their own choices. But, yeah, employers got lots of rights in the US, especially big corporations.
Persephone Bolero
Jan 11th, 2011
@AM Odergirl “But, yeah, employers got lots of rights in the US, especially big corporations.”
If corporations “especially” have rights, then you’re talking a marriage of government and business. That’s the antithesis to a free market. And that’s what we see a lot of in America. It’s called corporate cronyism. It’s where a large corporation has a competitive edge that goes beyond its ability to compete for customers due to government regulations that create barriers to entry and conduct in the marketplace.
And that’s ONLY possible if government regulates business. If government has no such authority, corporations can’t buy such influence. So, when you call for regulations to control these evil corporations, know that they’ll have their lobbyists there making sure those regulations are crafted so that it will ensure that competitors have a harder time entering the marketplace. In turn, you see the phenomenon of these powerful corporations destroying smaller businesses who don’t have the lobbyists and lawyers needed to navigate this complicated regulatory maze.
So, your regulations will create more of the very thing the regulations are suppose to prevent. So, you and others like you will call for more regulations, and more of the same will follow.
Nice job. It’s like the drug war. We outlaw drugs and that creates violence and crime. So, we pour more money into the drug war, which just creates more of the same, justifying an even bigger drug war. So, government grows and grows and grows and grows.
*shrugs*