Porn, violence against women and racing hearts

The porn industry's newspaper of record, the LA Times, has a piece on yep, how the internet is killing the porn industry. The easy availability of pirated material and the increasing amounts of free, amateur porn is cutting into one of LA county's biggest industries.

That must suck - so to speak - as music, film and writing are major LA industries and have all been hit heavily by the new paradigm, and now porn, a huge employer around here, is going the same way.

Business managers for ... two of the industry's biggest stars, said their clients were using their celebrity to make money in other ways, like dancing in exotic clubs and licensing their name to sex toys and lingerie."The economy has forced us to look in other directions such as tangible goods," said Evan Seinfeld

Where have I heard that word "tangible" from a musician desperate to get some paying product out to customers in this day of free, pirated music? Oh, yeah. Jack White.

LA Times article Tough Times in the Porn Industry here.

At the gym yesterday (listening to English Freakbeat volume 3) I chose a non-Fox TV to run endlessly towards, and ended up watching some dreadful police procedural where the cynical cops in their incident rooms had 24 hours to find a bad guy before a missing woman was raped and carved up by some freak. (I'm not a lip-reader - the subtitles were on.) The profiler explained why the bad guy hated women so much. His mother must have been violent and controlling. Not his father? asks one of the cops. No, to hate women that much, he must have had an evil mother, said the profiler.

I thought blaming women for violence against women had gone out in like, the seventies, but I guess I was too optimistic. Here it was dropped casually into a TV show like everybody knows it's true. If women would just shape up and be nice to men, there wouldn't be any violence against women. Hear that, sisters? Get with the program.

Gunman was bitter over women article here.

An American SF writer tells of his deadly brush with socialized medicine and its attendant Death Panels, rationing and weeks-long waiting lists. His heart started racing while he was in Canada, so he went to a cardiac hospital with an ER. The evil, socialist result? He had the full battery of expensive tests done immediately, was given an all-clear, received lifestyle and stress counseling, and was handed a bill for $480 (because he was not a Canadian citizen), which he paid. Sounds awful and I hope we don't end up with this scary Nazi scheme in our God-given country.

Tobias Buckell's unanticipated personal encounter with the Canadian health system here.