Relatively Unrelated Relativity

Or Rossum's Universal Robots.  Your call.

• Long essay at Shakesville from Melissa McEwan, encapsulated in the first two lines and given detail and specifics thereafter.  Coda here.
• "Amazing amounts of money get looted in the normal operation of American health care."  Mr. Somerby at the Daily Howler on the lack of reporting on health care pricing.
• Why you don't want municipal services privatized.  Southern Beale with two examples, one local, one in Oklahoma.
• "Stop and frisk:"
• Pecunium's take;
• Zandar's take;
• Comrade Misfit's take.
• [It turns out I got this item from a locked post, so.] 
• [Warning for ableist language, specifically the word "madness" when what is meant is "irrational and self-destructive patterns of behavior or belief."]  Reprinted at AlterNet, Henry A. Giroux's article in CounterPunch on trends in the United States that appear to be irrational and self-destructive.

  ...[R]esponses to social issues are increasingly dominated by a malignant characterization of marginalized groups as disposable populations. All the while zones of abandonment accelerate the technologies and mechanisms of disposability. One consequence is the spread of a culture of cruelty in which human suffering is not only tolerated, but viewed as part of the natural order of things.
  
  Before this dangerously authoritarian mindset has a chance to take hold of our collective imagination and animate our social institutions, it is crucial that all Americans think critically and ethically about the coercive forces shaping U.S. culture—and focus our energy on what can be done to change them. It will not be enough only to expose the falseness of the stories we are told. We also need to create alternative narratives about what the promise of democracy might be for our children and ourselves.