Another Reason

The astute will notice that I am not on Facebook (if I am, it's a fake).   I refused to open a Google Plus account and refuse to have a Blogger public profile.  I put minimal information on my Dreamwidth profile.

Why undersharing data is a smart move.

All the Internet needs to know about me is that I am human.  I don't need to be sold to or stalked or targeted or [ahem.  Thank you, Patrick McGoohan.] briefed, debriefed, or numbered!

(Mind you, it would be hilarious to find out what advertisers think my target market is.  Once.)

Sigh

The New Yorker has four articles pertaining to health care:  one on European socialized medicine (David Sedaris' experience), two marked as Rational Irrationality (columns by  John Cassidy, and one with quotes from the oral arguments.

Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast has another perspective:  that the insurance companies' involvement has helped drive up costs.  I had Blue Cross/Blue Shield/Major Medical (through job) well into the '90s, and I generally (on rare occasions when I needed medical attention and at the dentist's) paid out of pocket because I never remembered that I could offset the fee by that.  (Yes, health privilege, employment privilege, etc.; the thing was that I've never seen more than $35,000/year salary-wise, and mostly in the $20,000 range, and I could afford to see doctors.)

Mr. Frothy-Mix-of-Lube-and-Fecal-Matter Santorum would probably not consider Father S a Catholic.

Father S gave a pretty powerful homily on death and marginalization and rules-lawyers (he didn't use that term) this morning.  There's a reason that church finally got me into Catholicism.

Compare and Contrast

At Mills River Liberal, news that's getting attention and news that...isn't.

Two Things

1. According to the Los Angeles County coroner's report, Whitney Houston drowned.
2. New Sara Robinson article on America as a dysfunctional family.

Just so you know:  Next month the NYTimes will only be permitting 10 free articles per month instead of  20.  There goes the neighborhood.

Do You Eat?

You might want to make sure your shrimp didn't come from the Gulf of Mexico, because a couple of years ago there was this oil spill, you see...

Thanks to Southern Beale.

Loose Ends

• Melissa McEwan at Shakesville on calling Mr. Santorum on his bigotry, hatred, and desire-to-relive-the 19th-century without calling him synonyms of "irrational."  Beause he is a bigoted hate-filled reactionary.  His sanity is a diagnostic issue.
• Jon Carroll, National Treasure, on, well, we can't tell you.

  When you get U.S. senators saying that the Patriot Act is being misused, you have a covert team in the White House operating under a secret legal theory, you have the government prepared to spy on all its citizens all the time, you have the beginnings of a not-very-good science fiction story.

• Ian Buruma in The Globe and Mail about the lying and demagoguery in politics and tribal truths:

  The first people to argue that all truth is relative, and that all information is a form of propaganda that reflects society’s power relations, were far removed from the world inhabited by Mr. Santorum and his supporters. Several decades ago, a number of European and U.S. intellectuals, often with a background in Marxism, developed a “postmodern” critique of the written word. We might think, they argued, that what we read in The New York Times or Le Monde is objectively true, but everything that appears there is, in fact, a disguised form of propaganda for bourgeois class interests.

Switched Again

I put up a bunch of links elsewhere on the Trayvon Martin murder, but flamethrower, so I'm just going to link to Shakesville, where Melissa McEwan has links to articles at Think Progress and Crunktastic.

Meanwhile:

1. New Hampshire legislator parades his ignorance.

   That's what New Hampshirites are up against. It doesn't for a moment occur to Hopper that the "morality and piety" mentioned in the NH Constitution might mean something very different to (say) a Unitarian than it does to him. And he doesn't understand that his own words --
   

   ...if people are self regulated by their own moral compass less government is needed...

   -- undermine both his own position and New Hampshire's famously individualist spirit. "Self-regulated," "their own moral compass" -- gays have selves, too, and moral compasses. Hopper doesn't know this. Someone should tell him.
   
   The paper he cites as evidence of his position, by the way, isn't about marriage equality. It's a Heritage Foundation paper from the year 2000, discussing the evils of no-fault divorce.

2. Science is usually collaborative effort, but the myth is that it's one lone genius.
   
3. In Memoriam:  Coptic Christian Pope Shenouda III.
4. We're losing soil.  Seriously.

   The biggest problem is that it takes such a long time for soil to form – some 10-12,000 years to build up to depths we might describe as productive land. First, the rocks that have made it from the Earth's interior to the surface must be "weathered" by wind and rain, a disintegration that is assisted by microorganisms, insects and lichen. This organic matter decays, feeding more organisms, including, in time, plants. It is the accumulation of hundreds of years of this organic matter, living organisms and minerals that we call soil. It takes a few hundred years to produce each centimetre of soil (although it is a little faster in the tropics), but it can be lost in a matter of hours.

5. The old feminists were right.
6. Why you don't want to leave drug safety to "the market."  (Oh, have I made this point before?  Too bad.  "Enlightened self-interest" gets trumped by ignorance and money every time.) Via Making Light's sidebar.

Yeah, I've got to develop a sunnier outlook. The current one has curdled.

Where Are My Pearls?

skippy links to Rachel Maddow's blog at msnbc in which Steve Benen (with me so far?) cites Josh Barro at Forbes, who says that Mr. Santorum intends to use his office to prosecute porn producers.

Mr. Barro warns:

On pornography, though, Santorum’s views can’t be written off as purely personal—he has stated a clear intent to use the levers of government to stop adults from making and watching porn.

And of course this upset me so much that I had to comfort myself with warm porn.  As it happens, the red states consume about as much porn as the blue states.  Presumably people in conservative areas are expected to elect someone who will ban their porn, and then consume more of it in (ha-ha) secret, with all the potential for blackmail that usually produces.

Not my idea of a good time, but I'm not a Dimmesdale.  (Back off, Spiny Norman!)

Speaking of Corporate Perfidy

Avedon brought this up this morning, and after yesterday's post I figure it needs to be noted:  Telecom providers are trying to prevent or restrict municipal wi-fi in the states, even where they are explicitly not planning to offer services.

This is the paragraph that got me:

Private providers are arguing that municipal networks create unfair competition, forcing them to lower their rates because municipalities have the ability to offer rates below cost. Even if true, we are left to wonder why this is a concern in areas where the providers themselves have said they do not plan to do business. According to a post on Ars Technica yesterday, Charter Communications in Minnesota has done this and apparently so quickly that they put hand written fliers in residents mailboxes.

In other words, it's only fair competition if only cable companies are involved. Mm-hmmmm.  And what do cable companies do once they're the only game in town?  Mmmm-hmmmmm.

Theodore Roosevelt is spinning in his grave, as are the 19th century progressive reformers and "Fighting Bob" La Follette.  (Some more Republicans erased from the party history...)

Info Dump

There is a nice long article in the April Harper's about campaign finance and SuperPACs that really needs to be required reading, but it's not yet online, so while you're waiting, have a lengthy piece on how corporations are destroying open markets (if you haven't noticed that, I refer you to bank consolidations).  (ETA:  Also, consider subscribing.)

...[M]any if not most Americans can no longer count on open markets for their ideas and their work. Because of the overthrow of our antimonopoly laws a generation ago, we instead find ourselves subject to the ever more autocratic whims of the individuals who run our giant business corporations.

The equation is simple. In sector after sector of our political economy, there are still many sellers: many of us. But every day, there are fewer buyers: fewer of them. Hence, they enjoy more and more liberty to dictate terms—or simply to dictate.

Think of this as a companion piece to this post.

Maybe we should have been careful which dystopian future we wished for...

Well, I Guess I'm Cranky

• Terrance (Republic of T) on Romney's delegate trouble and what it may portend.

  Conservative columnist Michael Medved believes it doesn’t have to be this way. With GIngrich and Ron Paul out of the way by November, he says that no matter who gets the nomination — Romney or Santorum — should stop using the moderate as “a curse word,” so as not so scare away what moderates and independents haven’t quite made it to the exits — yet. Has he listened to these guys lately? Has he listened to Romney? Has he listened to Santorum? Not gonna happen, Mike.

• The only time airline deregulation was useful to me was during the days of People Express.  Otherwise the end result of losing the Civil Aeronautics Board has been that air travel has become worse, and not just because of the terrorists.  Via Just An Earth-Bound Misfit, I, who also makes a sharp point about corporations.
• Angry Black Bitch crafts a retort to conservative "logic."

  I woke up this morning pondering this shit…only to arrive at the conclusion that these battles are so draining because it takes a lot of energy to process illogical shit when you start out assuming there’s some logic behind it.
  
  Think about it – how often have you heard some conservative statement and tried to figure out how the asshole saying it even got there only to find your Afro hurting by the time you come to the conclusion that he or she must have pulled that bizarreness out of their ass?

• Two dates for the recall election of Gov. S. Walker of Wisconsin have been approved. (Via Southern Beale.)
• Well, we didn't need those nasty birds anyway.  (Well, I don't need Scotts Miracle Gro, either.  Deal.)
• The problems with that study showing that red meat is Bad For You. (Via Shakesville.)
• Conflicted conservative on war with Iran.

  Let's face it, when it comes to matters of war and peace, trusting what our own government tells us has been a reliable way to be wrong. The border crossing of the Mexican-American war. The Gulf of Tonkin incident. WMD in Iraq. Our government has been found to be dishonest or incompetent too many times for us to just assume that, of course, Iran must be developing a nuclear weapon and they must be as close to achieving it as our intelligence services say.

• It is a Law of the Universe that >2 people cannot agree on pizza toppings (which is not to say they won't compromise).

Working Life

Or, why you don't want to work overtime.

This is what work looks like now. It’s been this way for so long that most American workers don’t realize that for most of the 20th century, the broad consensus among American business leaders was that working people more than 40 hours a week was stupid, wasteful, dangerous, and expensive — and the most telling sign of dangerously incompetent management to boot.

[...]

The most essential thing to know about the 40-hour work-week is that, while it was the unions that pushed it, business leaders ultimately went along with it because their own data convinced them this was a solid, hard-nosed business decision.

Sara Robinson, of course, at her gig at Alternet, explains it all for you.

ETA:  via The Sideshow, Corey Robin on the Secret History of the bathroom break.

Yahrzeit

Yahrzeit.

On The Massacre in Afghanistan

• The Associated Press story, appearing in San Francisco Chronicle.

• The way he told me of his experiences, though, hinted at a reality that few soldiers like to discuss: that sometimes they kill because the opportunity is there, and because, at the time, for some of them, it seems fun. Seven years later, that same soldier got it touch with me in a letter to say, ruefully, that he was a different person than the young man I had met. I had the sense that he sought some kind of atonement for the things he had done, but also wanted my understanding. He expressed a stark sense of self-awareness, and I wondered where it would lead him.

  Jon Lee Anderson at The New Yorker.

• Again: we're there because...we're there. We don't want to look weak. We want to complete the mission. The U.S. military, for all it's professionalism, does not do a good job of admitting when it is losing. I think it is easier for those of us with less intimate knowledge of events, with less of a dog in the fight, to state the obvious. We can win a counter-terrorism war. But we cannot win a nation building war.

  Jesse Curtis at Walk On.
  

Did someone say something about being condemned to repeat Vietnam?  Because obviously no one learned anything from that.

In Memoriam

Peter Bergman, Firesign Theater.

Reason magazine obit.
L. A. Times announcement.

Value of Order

The form for reporting sexual assault in the military.

Sentenced!

Mr. Dykstra, to three years.

Lenny, Lenny, Lenny.

Reminder

Via Shakesville:  taxpaying and health care.

Furthermore, you might ask if I support universal health care. Yes, indeed, I do. But halt your crying about the horrible burden of the “taxpayers,” struggling against the weight of my supposed promiscuity (along with most of the women, married or not, in America). Because guess what. I am a taxpayer. You think your taxes are the ones supporting me, supporting the “lifestyle” you so hypocritically disdain. What, then, are my taxes supporting – yours? Shall I stop paying? If it’s you taking care of me one way or another, O mighty “taxpayers”, then perhaps I’ll withdraw my own support from the system since my dollars don’t seem to be doing much good. Good luck to you when you need ventilators, pain relief and open-heart surgery. I’ll be in jail, assuring that you can finally gripe about your taxes supporting me with some feeble shred of honesty.

Oh, And...

In case you're wondering why I'm not bloviating about Super Tuesday's results:

1. Mardi Gras was two weeks ago;
2. These say it better than I can (also, this) (Best of Show);
3. I'd need carbolic soap to clean the blog afterward.

In Memoriam

Donald Payne, probably my former Congressperson.

The Watchmen Don't Watch the Watchmen, Either

Although recent disclosures that in 2007 the New York Police Department spied on Muslims in New Jersey have unleashed a furor, interviews with a dozen former state and federal officials show the department's presence here was widely known among the state's law enforcement officials.

Really, I don't have to make this stuff up.  There's a huge headline on page 1 of [today's] Star-Ledger:  THEY ALL KNEW.

  Screen cap.

Bug Report

More bacteria on meat resistant to antibiotics.

That's going to be one hell of a plague when it gets here...

How...Special

Mr. Santorum would nullify existing same-sex marriages.  (The article refers to an interview which I tracked down; statement in question approximately 12 minutes in.  I want cookies and a pony, folks; I had to listen to that.

Via skippy, from The Reaction:  Santorum claims Democrats are anti-science.  Ignoring that his team, as it were, never met a resource they didn't want to exploit into non-existence.

And now I need to get a bucket, a mop, and serious detergent to clean up all that frothy lube-and-fecal-matter.

Dreamtime

In which a house that I am very familiar with appears with the staircase...altered.

(The rest was Freudian revisionism.  Hmmmmm...)

Another!

Maryland!

1. It happened in Wisconsin. And he had other ID. It's the principle of the thing.

   Paar said he was shocked to learn that the card, which he uses to receive his VA benefits, isn’t an acceptable form of ID under the law, noting that VA cards are the only form of identification some veterans have. He has already reached out to the VA about the problem as well as to the offices of Sen. Herb Kohl and state Rep. Robert Turner, D-Racine, he said.
   Signed into law last May, the voter ID law requires voters to present a driver’s license, state ID, passport, military ID, naturalization papers or tribal ID in order to vote. A photo ID from a college or university can be used but it must have an issuance date, an expiration date, and a signature. In order to use the ID to vote, a student must also provide a document proving current enrollment.
   The reason Paar wasn’t allowed to use his VA card is simple, Government Accountability Board spokesman Reid Magney said: Lawmakers who authored the bill did not include VA cards as an acceptable form of ID. [emphasis added]

   Via skippy.
   
2. The picket sign may be a fashion statement in Hipsterland, but it's a political statement in South Carolina.

While I Still Can

In baseball-but-not-spring-training news (because there have already been season-ending injuries), Lenny Dykstra has filed to withdraw his no-contest plea to charges of false financials and grand theft auto.  Yes, molto complicated.

In other news, Andrew Breitbart is dead.  Allegedly of natural causes.  I will not speculate.  That is for conspiracy theorists.  I will also not memorialize him.