lyceum_arabica and I saw Moore's "Sicko" tonight. Well done for emotional impact. Low on stats, though the claims it did make on comparative health measures are AFAIK accurate, and supplementable by how much we spend for our lower outcomes. We wondered how much emigration it might inspire. The credits even mention a http://hook-a-canuck.com/ site[1].

Stats I don't have are on how representative his horror stories are: he got lots of complaints, he showed us people being bankrupted or denied treatment, and health care workers and doctors testifying as to how they're paid better to deny treatment (vs. the British doctor getting paid more for getting patients to stop smoking, or get low blood pressure in the pool), but how many insured Americans do run into such problems? Of course, even those who don't still get the experience of being afraid to be unemployed for a while, or to start a small business, due to the high expense of individual insurance if you can even get it.

He actually didn't make some of the standard financial arguments for universal care. He touched on such systems paying for preventive care, and thus having lower total costs than ER-based care (the US *has* government mandated universal care, really, with ERs having to take in anyone; it's just a really inefficience and ineffective form of care) but not that heavily, and didn't say anything private insurers having high overhead, plus the billing overhead doctors have to deal with, nor the point that insurance works better the bigger the pool that risk is spread among.

Note when I think of universal health care, I think of "Medicare for all", not the epicyclic mandates and subsidies of existing insurers that the leading Democratic contenders talk about, and which HR Clinton was into the first time around, or a couple of states have done (Vermont (Howard Dean) and Massachusetts). Yay, insurance, but you're still dealing with inefficient denial happy profit-driven bureaucracies; much of Sicko is about the insured who get screwed anyway, not the uninsured.

[1] Huh, just noticed James dropped http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/ from his Usenet sig.

I still haven't seen it, but I got this article from my mother.
Gary Leupp on 300

The message is indeed clear. Sparta = Greece = the Western World = freedom. Persia = slavery and oppression. This was perhaps the gist of Herodotus' message; he did write that while the Greeks knew that men were free, the "Asiatics" knew only that one (the ruler) was free. But that was a skewed
notion in his time and can only dangerously circulate in our own, while Iran is in the neocons' crosshairs. Again, I think the Iranians might be over-concerned, since much of the film-viewing crowd won't even associate the ancient Persians with the modern Iranians, but the "clash of civilizations" theme is definitely there.

I would propose that those exposed to it imagine a different Xerxes than the nose-pierced caricature in the film. Imagine a Xerxes who addresses the American audience, including the Christian fundamentalist audience, as follows:

"I am Xerxes, Emperor of Persia, son of Darius, grandson of Cyrus. My grandfather Cyrus liberated the Jews from their Babylonian exile and let them return to Judea and rebuild their temple. My father Darius urged our people to revere the 'God of Daniel.' I myself married Esther, a Jew."

"I come from a long line of believers in the One God preached by Zarathustra, our Persian prophet whose teachings have influenced the Jews during their exile among us. I refer specifically to their concepts of
Satan, Heaven and the future Messiah which weren't part of their pre-exile belief system and are clearly borrowings from our Persian religion.

In short: 300's depiction of the battle of Thermopylae is not merely inaccurate, as any film adaptation of a graphic novel has the perfect right to be. It's what the Iranians say it is: racist and insulting. It pits the
glorious Greeks with whom the audience must sympathize against a "mystical" and "tyrannical" culture posing an imminent existential threat. It is, de facto, an anti-Persian/anti-Iranian propaganda film, and should be rated appropriately: not just R (for racist) but X---for extremely stupid and
vicious and dangerously ill-timed.