Idiotprogrammer

George Carlin video on death cliches.(long)  He became caustic in his old age, but he’s shining here.

Wacky singer with a gimmick. And it’s amazing. (Here’s another example)

If fonts were  people…

Charlie the Unicorn (an annoying and funny video). See part 2

Daft Hands (great, funny video). Again, this could outdo their Michael Gondry’s classic  creative video. (Here’s a 10 explication of how Gondry created Around the World.)   The most amazing thing about the video is the first 50 seconds where….nothing happens. I repeat: nothing happens!

I’ve been busy trying to lose weight over the last month, and although progress has been made, it has been frustrating.  Here are some things I’ve noticed which are impeding progress:

1. family commitments. Visiting family members and doing errands for them requires extra driving and time. Also, as  a sidenote, there are often uncontrolled opportunities for snacking.
2. Talking to friends on the telephone. Just one or two unanticipated phone calls a week can cost me about 1 or 2 hours of precious free time. Last week, I had two cases where people called me during times I should be exercising. For one of them, I ended up having to cancel the exercise session because the person could not reschedule another time.
3. Computer problems. Often, my schedule will be disrupted by technological emergencies which cause me to drop everything I’m doing and focus entirely on that. That causes housework, meal planning and exercise plans to be thwarted.
4. Participating in social groups. I love going to groups. I usually hit one or two every week, but make no mistake. On those evenings, it is virtually impossible to exercise and/or do meal planning and preparation.
5. Full time work. My current job isn’t bad, but at times it demands priority when a deadline is coming up. It makes it difficult to take time off or to “recuperate”.  Also, if I work too hard at my job, when I come home I’m too tired to cook a meal or work out.
6. Writing. I try to write on a daily basis. In reality, I’m lucky if I have three productive sessions of writing every week. Sometimes,  I have to weigh the advantage of writing vs. the advantage of working out (and the extra energy it will give me). Almost always, when comparing the two alternatives, writing always wins out. Writing drains a lot of energy from me and often shifts my sleep patterns.
7. Programming. I like programming, but I spend a 100th of the time I need to become proficient. Whenever I do have free time, I try to do it, but often it means deferring exercise.
8. Shopping/Online Research. I could spend hours doing research and shopping online. Ultimately it is a time-saver, but it also consumes a lot of my free time. In the Paradox of Choice, I am someone who likes to have the maximum of information to make a decision.  Yet it always manages to clutter up my evenings.
9. The need to relax. I love watching movies and sometimes TV. I watch a lot less than I want to.
10. Blogging (a minor factor).
11. Lack of time for housework. Falling behind on chores means no time to prepare meals, no working space to exercise and are usually a symptom of lacking adequate time for rest. 

Note that I don’t include reading; I’ve never found that reading is a big obstacle to anything at the moment. Here, you see, is the problem. To have a regular exercise regimen, you need a life schedule that won’t be disrupted. But I’d be the first to admit that I enjoy and even need almost every single activity mentioned on this list. If I didn’t go to social groups, I’d go crazy. If I didn’t fix my computer, I’d go crazy. If I didn’t talk on the telephone to people, I’d grow crazy.  At some point, you need to say, what activity takes priority? Obviously, I could quit my job and stay in my apartment all day and lose weight and exercise regularly, and I’d probably lose weight.  Reasons 1,4 and 5 require a lot of driving around, and driving will just increase the size of the gut. (In a large city like Houston, it also increases your stress level). 3,6,7 and 8 require staring at a monitor, and even though that’s not bad in itself, it is more sedentary than humans are suited for. Saying that losing weight you need to eat less is beside the point. How do you organize your lifestyle so that you have time to avoid these temptations and stay physically active? Weight loss involves self-control, but it also involves planning of meals–something I never seem to have time for. Should I make time for it? Very well…from which of the 11 activities should this time come?

Losing weight is not a challenge of self-discipline or good nutrition; it is a challenge of organization and time management.

Here are some photos and artist rendering of what Dubai looks like now and will look like in the next decade. This is pretty astounding.

For starters, here’s a photo of its underwater hotel (to be finished in 2009).

Kay S. Hymowitz on Fertility rates and Carrie Bradshaw:

Demographers get really excited about shifts like these, but in case you don’t get what the big deal is, consider: in 1960, 70 percent of American 25-year-old women were married with children; in 2000, only 25 percent of them were. In 1970, just 7.4 percent of all American 30- to 34-year-olds were unmarried; today, the number is 22 percent. That change took about a generation to unfold, but in Asia and Eastern Europe the transformation has been much more abrupt. In today’s Hungary, for instance, 30 percent of women in their early thirties are single, compared with 6 percent of their mothers’ generation at the same age. In South Korea, 40 percent of 30-year-olds are single, compared with 14 percent only 20 years ago.

At the end there is an interesting conclusion:

That raises an interesting question: Why are SYFs (single young females) in the  United States—the Rome of the New Girl Order—still so interested in marriage? By large margins, surveys suggest, American women want to marry and have kids. Indeed, our fertility rates, though lower than replacement level among college-educated women, are still healthier than those in most SYF countries (including Sweden and France). The answer may be that the family has always been essential ballast to the individualism, diversity, mobility, and sheer giddiness of American life. It helps that the U.S., like northwestern Europe, has a long tradition of “companionate marriage”—that is, marriage based not on strict roles but on common interests and mutual affection. Companionate marriage always rested on the assumption of female equality. Yet countries like Japan are joining the new order with no history of companionate relations, and when it comes to adapting to the new order, the cultural cupboard is bare. A number of analysts, including demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, have also argued that it is America’s religiousness that explains our relatively robust fertility, though the Polish fertility decline raises questions about that explanation.

(NYT did a similarly longish piece on European fertility; can’t find the link). The Hymowitz article talked about the cultural reasons behind the trend, linking it to Sex and the City (a show I find to be of immense social significance).

If you haven’t watched This Website is Down (from yesterday’s post), watch it now.

Here’s another crazy “love scene” from my favorite show, Drew Carey Show.  See also the furries Drew Carey love scene linked here from a few days ago.  Update: I guess I never posted that link. Here’s the link to the Drew Carey furry love.

Tom Tomorrow notes that in the satirical Obama cover for this week’s  New Yorker,  the NYT coverage of the scandal interviewed several TV hosts but no political cartoonists. Here’s his great lesson on how to deconstruct (and degut) a piece of satire .

Here’s a good interview with Obama by Farreed Zacharia. I wish someone would appoint him to be secretary of state.   It always is amusing to watch him be a guest star on  ABC’s This Week and to see him undermine every argument made by George Will. Alas, I have stopped watching that show.

A commenter lampoons the attitude that we should bomb Iran in order to “awaken the international community from its slumber and force it to finally engineer a solution to the crisis.”

This is a theory that cries out for broader application: The next time you’re sitting around a conference table at work and things aren’t going anywhere fast, just go ahead and randomly deck someone on the other side. Or maybe cut one of his or her fingers off with a plastic knife from the sandwich tray. That should really stir the pot and push the problem toward resolution.

I frequently download jpgs of public domain paintings for my web projects. It is astonishing how rarely jpegs of paintings are given meaningful labels. I would expect names like mona_lisa_da_vinci_1506.jpg  Instead they have names like n34343.jpg  or picture.asp.jpg or annoying things like that. Why is it so difficult to input or view metadata for images?

I need to delete a test drupal install I made. For some reason it didn’t save my password, and because my SMTP wasn’t set up, I couldn’t mail myself a new password reminder. Suggestion: The install wizard for every CMS should force you to do a test SMTP message to yourself before finishing?

About that test drupal: the only way I can recover is to delete the previous files I installed. But I copied them into a live directory, where some of the files are actually web pages unrelated to drupal. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a linux command to undo a previous command?

Why can’t Windows record the specific model of the motherboard you are using?

Windows provides an auto-shutdown option; usually I have this enabled. But there should always be a way to indefinitely override this auto-shutdown. Frankly, most of the time rebooting is not a priority. I recently received a reminder to update my Adobe Reader software, which I did. After that was done, it said it requires a restart, would you like to restart now?

Antivirus/antispyware software is always a pain in the neck. So is anything that offers to install a toolbar. If you really want to give us something to install, make it a firefox toolbar, which I can disable whenever I want.

I’ll think of more. 

Hilarious video (which is 10 minutes long and full of profanity).

Aside from the pure genius of the video, I like the fact that it shows people’s desktop(s) and how cluttered everybody’s is. It would be interesting to see how people’s desktop experience vary. The thing about this video is that the idiosyncrasies detailed here are not particularly unusual in the world of home or corporate computing.

The “colorful” arrangement of icons on the desktop is actually pretty clever; it’s easier to remember where objects are. We may laugh, but the sales guy has the right idea.

Once at Walmart, I ran into a man who was an  eccentric health nut. He was talking to strangers about fruits and vegetables, so of course I had to talk with them (that’s my   job, I guess).

We talked about lots of random things, but he shared with me a tip about identifying a good watermelon. He said, don’t bother thumping the watermelon or smelling the top of it. That won’t help at all.  The key is to buy the  watermelon in July. That’s when the highest number of watermelons are at their ripest. Timing, not appearance was the key to determining ripeness.

Was he right? Who knows? But it sticks in my mind.

In Albania I used to buy a watermelon every day or every other day.  Albania had special insects that looked like honeybees which feasted on these things. You always had to shoo them away if an open watermelon were around.  You never completely finished a watermelon (even in Albania). The refrigerators weren’t even big enough to save leftovers. Luckily, watermelons were cheap and plentiful.  When Peace Corps volunteers were  waiting around at their training site (trying not to deydrate), someone  would appear with a watermelon and a knife, and suddenly the training yard became a mini-celebration.  When we were growing up, my dad used to paint a face on every watermelon he butchered. It was a silly, stupid ritual, but of course we loved it.

Watermelon sellers in Albania were particularly confident of their watermelons. They would cut out a cylinder from the top and let you taste  it–just to be sure it was sweet. 9 times out of 10 it was–and if it wasn’t, then you’d essentially just wasted the man’s watermelon. The produce sellers didn’t mind though.

Often, I noticed that all sorts of animals would feast on the leftover watermelon in the trash heaps, especially cows.

Nowadays there are seedless watermelons, even watermelons which are yellow in the middle. They make a sloppy mess out of the kitchen,  but that’s ok.  Oh,yes, the seeds. You had to spit out the seeds and make sure you didn’t swallow any. Annoying, yes, but a small price to pay. Just once I’d love to bury a seed and watch it grow into a fat delicious mess.

Quite by accident I read in my JHU alumni magazine an sad account of a man’s murder in Baltimore and how his Anna wife copes with it. Michael Anft wrote this excellent piece. Speaking of how one of the perpetrator fell through the cracks, he writes:

As Eric’s life began to spiral once again, his mother kept trying to regain control, but she had little help. Her mother and sister, both of whom had often watched her children as she worked jobs as a server at the Maryland Club and Hippodrome Theatre, had died in recent years. She contacted Patterson and asked that a counselor keep a close eye on Eric. She also asked for contacts of organizations or programs that could help keep her son off the streets after school, or offer him some guidance. Her options were limited. Several programs in the neighborhood, such as the Police Athletic League center and a Boys & Girls Club, had closed down. Other options, such as the Choice program—a well-regarded case management, mentoring, and monitoring plan based at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County that serves two hundred troubled city kids—wasn’t available, because Eric was not yet under the eye of the juvenile justice system.

“There’s no programs, nothing for kids to get into, except for trouble,” Reed says.

Apparently the victim’s wife and a friend of the victim kept an ongoing journal, so you can follow the slow-motion heartache that accompanied the man’s detiorating condition. Apparently the victim (named Zach Sowers) did not die immediately, but suffered severe trauma and brain injury. Even so, if you start reading posts from the beginning, you see the expectation from his loved ones that he would improve. Every little step was seen as a positive sign (and thankfully, Zach received some of the best medical care in the country).  For almost 6 months his condition was improving and Zach entered  rehabilitation, but he suffered  all kinds of medical complications. Yet Zach seemed to be sentient and aware of the presence of his wife and other people in the room. The journal recorded their hopes and dreams, the way the community united around this incident and yes, the emotional drain on his wife and family. He had such a hopeful future, and his wife was there to keep him company. She would always be there; that was never in doubt. Yet at some point a few months after the initial event it dawned on the  survivors that wishing for a semi-complete recovery might be foolish optimism. She began to accept the fact that her husband’s condition may never improve, that normalcy may never come to him, that maybe the best hope she had was that he would be communicative (albeit paralyzed).  Even that seemed wistful. Zach’s medical bills were piling up, and there was  a point at which his insurance coverage would run out. (That was why she and her friend were having fund-raisers like Neighbors’ Night Out).  The hard thing about private insurance is that it’s hard  to put a price on the medical care a person ought to receive (and society ought to pay for).

Zach didn’t immediately die, so there wasn’t  immediate closure. In fact, according to Michael Anft’s article, when she  heard about what happened to her husband, she was so relieved to hear definite news that she did not immediately realize how terrible his injuries were.  Strangely, there is not much anger in the journal entries; they were too focused on being there for Zach.

When she first got to see the victims at the court, she said:

After lunch, I returned to the courthouse feeling slightly more refreshed and ready to continue with the rest of the hearing. But after ten minutes of the defense attorney ranting about Price’s psychological background, I was overwhelmed with sadness and depression. Sad that I was sitting in a courthouse because my husband was assaulted by 4 random teenagers. Sad that Price’s mother seemed to have made a genuine effort to keep her son off the street (at least she made it appear that way to the judge). Sad that I am learning more about criminal justice and neurology/neurosurgery than the average 27 year old.
…

Also, for those that have ill feelings toward Zach and me for our media attention (and even to those who are upset for no reason at all), I suggest you redirect your animosity elsewhere. If you’re upset over our media attention, then be active and get media attention for whatever it is you believe in. Contact the mayor, city council, whatever; just don’t contact me as my focus is on healing Zach, seeking justice for Zach and trying to make a difference. It’s ridiculous to waste time posting your jealousy for Zach’s’ attention when you could be seeking out attention for your own cause. The city is a serious war zone and to criticize me for my efforts of bringing the issue to light is completely idiotic. And unless you have lived my exact life and suffered my exact same tragedies, than you have no room to judge, and I will not waste any energy on your ignorance.

Rather than go to trial, the prosecutor did  plea bargaining. Sanft reports:

Prosecutors say they had solid reasons for pursuing the plea deal that left three of the four Sowers assailants eligible for parole in four years. Among other wounds, Sowers incurred something doctors call “diffuse axonal injury” in his brain, the result of microscopic damage to nerves. Magnetic resonance images revealed no blotches of deadened neural activity in the brain to point to, no medical “smoking gun” that would sway a jury. What’s more, the neighbor who reported the crime couldn’t pick Ramos out of a police lineup, and police lifted only one Ramos fingerprint from the roof of the Sentra. Prosecutors say that an attempted murder charge against Ramos could have petered out in a jury room.

Anna writes shortly thereafter:

If you’re going to commit a crime, do it in Baltimore City.” This is a saying I heard a few months ago and I certainly learned the validity of it on Monday morning as the plea agreement was reached without my consent. Actually, I think the saying was told to me as a joke. I certainly wasn’t laughing. I truly wish justice meant “an eye for an eye.” I have absolutely no sympathy for these four defendants. I hate them and I will hate them forever. I will never forgive and never forget and no one can judge me for that. Because of them, I have no husband. I come home to an empty, dark house and a mailbox full of medical bills. And what do they get? Well, because we live in Baltimore City, Ramos gets only 40 years for: carjacking a woman in Elkton, attempting to murder my husband, conspiring to rob my husband, robbing my husband and robbing a woman the day after Zach with a gun (Price had the gun)! The 40 years Ramos got was a concurrent sentence for all of these horrific offenses!! And same for the other 3 savages. They were given 8 years for basically the same thing, minus the carjacking. All 4 were involved in a separate robbery with a handgun after they attacked Zach, and all they got was 8 measly years! As much as I am disgusted by the “stop snitching” subculture, I hope that subculture’s own thugs live up to their word this time.

As justified as her expression was at that moment, I want to reiterate that this was only a small part of the journal. The journal –which served a practical purpose of keeping the community informed — ended up becoming a testament to a woman’s love (and  the love offered by other family members). What they went through was horrifying, and yet they kept their feelings of compassion and hope and even a sense of humor. As I read this journal, I find myself wondering what would happen if I were a crime victim or if another person close to me were killed; it would devastate us, but it would not kill us; we would survive, we would never lose our ability to connect with other human beings.  I would probably put up a similar kind of blog. Anna and Zach spent a few years together — time which seems all the more precious in retrospect.

I lived in Baltimore for one brief year. Crime used to be bad,  but not this bad.   Yet it was the first time I confronted the realities of urban living. A woman down the street was murdered, and we were all shaken. Once, while walking  to a party in downtown Baltimore, a crackhead tried to sell me crack. It was scary, and yet this was the first time I had lived in a city where people actually walked to work, bought groceries from the corner grocery store, had a neighborhood farmer’s market,  took the bus regularly, walked through seedy neighborhoods. One of my favorite moments during my stay was walking with friends to the old Baltimore Oriole stadium. It was  a 30-45 minute walk, and the neighborhoods were old and had personality. Houston, by contrast, doesn’t allow these kinds of interactions.  Houstonians stare at each other through car windows and locked doors at red lights, and occasionally at supermarkets. If a person died in Houston, the only way you’re going to hear about it is to watch the local news.

Due to overwhelming demand, I have formed a new facebook group about my national media watchdog campaign. Also, watch Idiots of Ants facebook parody.

In other news, I am busy with several websites, but it just occurred to me that the wide columns probably make for a crappy reading experience. Maybe it’s time for a new wordpress theme. Thinking, thinking.

i hesitated about linking to this article titled "16 Commandments of Poon", but I think the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. (Btw, don’t bother reading the comments).  Occasionally I stumble upon pages about how alpha males should behave. I don’t know how seriously to take  well-written  nonsense like this. Perhaps it was written ironically.

To my female readers: if you meet a man who follows any of these rules, run away! run away!  

For the men, I posted some cynical rants by  Heartless Bitches  in my semi-defunct Unsolved heart weblog.  For future reference, I’ll look around for something less cynical to post about relationships.

Click and clack on how your automobile can use less gas:

The softer your tires are, the greater the friction between the road and the rubber, and the harder your engine will have to work to move the car. When we check tire pressure on our customers’ cars, we notice that they are often nowhere near the recommended pressure. Here’s why it matters: Under-inflated tires lowers gas mileage by 0.4 percent for every one pound of drop in pressure of all four tires. So, if you’re down by 10 pounds… you’re losing 4 percent in fuel economy.

Youtube video about Furries on Drew Carey. When I watched this first on the show, I laughed really hard. Make sure to read the pointless youtube comments.

Steve Kinzer on how the US orchestrated a coup (actually several) against a democratically elected leader in Iran in 1953. I had heard of this, but I didn’t realize how blatant the US had been about it. Embarrassing.

(CIA Operative) Kermit Roosevelt set about trying to create chaos in Iran. He was able to do that very quickly by a series of means. The first thing he did was, he started bribing members of parliament and leaders of small political parties that were a part of Mossadegh ‘s political coalition. Pretty soon the public started to see the Mossadegh ’s coalition splitting apart and people denouncing him on the floor of parliament. The next thing Roosevelt did was start bribing newspaper editors, owners and columnists and reporters. Within a couple of weeks, he had 80% of the newspapers in Tehran on his payroll and they were grinding out every kind of lie attacking Mossadegh . The next thing Roosevelt did was start bribing religious leaders. Soon, at Friday prayers, the Mullahs were denouncing Mossadegh as an atheist enemy of Islam. Roosevelt also bribed members of police units and low-ranking military officers to be ready with their units on the crucial day. In what I think was really his master stroke, he hired the leaders of a bunch of street gangs in Tehran, and he used them to help create the impression that the rule of law had totally disintegrated in Iran. He actually at one point hired a gang to run through the streets of Tehran, beating up any pedestrian they found, breaking shop windows, firing their guns into mosques, and yelling—“We love Mossadegh and communism.” This would naturally turn any decent citizen against him. He didn’t stop there. He tired a second mob to attack the first mob, to give people the impression that there was no police presence and order had completely disintegrated. So, within just a few weeks, this one agent operating with a large sum of cash and a network of contacts and various elements of society, had taken what was a fairly stable country and thrown it into complete upheaval.

…

The first coup that Roosevelt organized was scheduled to take place on August 15th of 1953. On that night, an officer, who had been brought into the plot, was supposed to arrive at Prime Minister Mossadegh ‘s home around midnight with an order signed by the shah firing him as prime minister. Now, they knew that Mossadegh would refuse to accept this order, since in Iran, which was then a democracy—only parliament had the right to hire and fire prime ministers. When he resisted, he would be arrested. That was the plan. The C.I.A. had a general already designated to take over the next day as prime minister of Iran. But what happened? Mossadegh got wind of this plan. When the officer arrived at Mossadegh ’s house at midnight, loyal officers stepped out of the shadows. Soon, the officer who was supposed to arrest Mossadegh was himself under arrest. So now, the coup had failed and the Shah, who had been waiting out the results at his resort near the Caspian, immediately fled the country. He went to Baghdad and then on to Rome where he told people that he was going to be looking for work, since he obviously wouldn’t be able to go back to Iran.

Now, what neither he nor anyone else knew was that Kermit Roosevelt despite being ordered by the C.I.A. to come home, decided: I can still do this. I can try again. He was really a true-life James Bond. On his own, he activated his mobs on the 19th of August, just four days later, in a second coup attempt. They rampaged through the streets by the tens of thousands. Many of them, I think, never even really understood they were being paid by the C.I.A. They just knew they had been given a good day’s wage to go out in the street and chant something. Many politicians whipped up the crowds during those days. Roosevelt had been spending $11,000 a week just to bribe members of the Iranian parliament. There were only 90 members. The average annual income in Iran at that time was about $500. So, you can imagine what this sum must have meant. At crucial moments, police and military units joined the crowd. They started storming government buildings. There were gunfights in front of important buildings. The crucial battle, the climactic battle was actually in front of the prime minister’s house. It started at nightfall. There was heavy gunfire, including an artillery duel. About 100 people were killed just in the battle in front of Mossadegh ’s house. Towards the end, members of a military unit, whose leader Roosevelt had bribed, arrived with a column of tanks, and with that, Mossadegh was no longer able to survive. By midnight, on August the 19th of 1953, his house was in flames, and he had fled over the back guard wall to surrender himself a couple of days later. And the general, who was a C.I.A.—who the C.I.A. had selected as the designated savior of Iran was installed as prime minister.

Houston Radio talk show host Leo Gold on lessons he learned about foolish investment opportunities. He’s a great radio commentator with a progressive edge. Other notable essays: On mileage runs (how frequent fliers burn up carbon), trying Zen meditation, how West Virginia is tarnished by coal mining

Here’s his piece on viewing the "beauty" of the I-59 bridges in Houston:

Abby and I sat on one of the new elegant bridges spanning US 59, what was once a country highway, now an Amazon-wide multi-lane ribbon of concrete carrying all manner of gasoline-powered vehicles.  For her, a two year old, it’s mesmerizing to watch the headlights and taillights pass underneath, the hypnotic monotony that is one of America’s largest rush hours.  What I notice, though, is the sound – an ongoing collective roar like a mechanized wild snake.  It’s loud, and the air is not particularly pleasant.  A couple of years ago, the mid-century raised freeway near our house, the kind that was rammed through many inner cities from New York to Chicago to LA, was taken down and depressed below grade, turning what were dingy vagabond underpasses into suspension bridge overpasses.  No question, it’s been a great improvement.  And with landscaping all around the banks of the motorized river, for a moment you might even think it’s enough.

But sitting on the bridge over Freeway 59 is not like sitting on London Bridge over the Thames, or the Ponte Vecchio over the Arno in Florence, or over the Seine in Paris.  In Houston, we have created rivers of automobiles, of sound and pollution, and we live and work among it.  There are no quiet waters sliding by along US 59, people walking along the banks for an evening stroll, the sun setting peacefully over a distant bridge.  No matter how nice the bridges or the landscaping, there’s no hiding what flows past.  The improvements are nice, but in sense they are the proverbial lipstick on the pig.

Businessman and KPFT radio commentator Leo Gold tells an amazing tale of how Blue Cross Texas rejected his medical coverage (and later found that the Texas health insurance risk pool assigned him to be insured by…the same company!).

I looked a little deeper at the Pool’s information, and to my surprise I discovered that the fulfillment arm of the Pool – the physician network, treatment management functions, and so forth - was contracted to an outside company, and lo and behold, that company is Blue Cross. The relationship between the Pool and Blue Cross is so intertwined that Blue Cross representatives regularly attend and participate in the Pool’s Board of Directors meetings. I’m not saying there’s anything illegal about this, but let’s consider the ironies: a Republican legislature, inveterately and philosophically opposed to government health care, writes legislation that allows insurance companies to exclude applicants who simply have a therapist, thereby ensuring that there will be a need for a government health insurance pool; and that government health insurance pool, because it does not have the resources to offer all elements of a health plan to its participants must contract with the very entity whose refusal of coverage resulted in the need for the pool in the first place. It’s no wonder that we Americans spend 15% of our GDP on health care, with all the inefficient bureaucracies, public and private, designed to pass people from entity to entity like hot potatoes.

I had a similarly bad experience with Blue Cross Texas two years ago. When I signed up, I made a similar mistake of being honest. I mentioned to the Blue Cross interviewer that my doctor offhandedly mentioned that I should have a freckle checked by a doctor. Blue Cross Texas turned me down for coverage…all because of a freckle! You see, Blue Cross Texas expected me to (pay to)  visit a dermatologist who would look at my freckle and perhaps remove it. Listen, I’ve had this thing since the time I was a teenager.  If Blue Cross Texas were willing to pay for me to visit a dermatologist, I might have consented, but the real problem is that the system penalizes honest disclosures.  This suggests the need for a system which does not depend on prescreening individuals.

Gold was using a psychotherapist for various reasons, and now Blue Cross is providing a perverse incentive not to seek alternative help unless sanctioned by Blue Cross itself.  That is an example of how health care privatization is removing choices–by forcing disclosures!

The question becomes: what restrictions should an individual agree to simply to receive discounts on medical care? Should the individual:

• agree never to receive alternative care from an agency unless Blue Cross were notified?
• promise to disclose every kind of visit that he has made to a health provider?
• agree to disclose every kind of medicine he has ever taken?
• promise to tell all future providers about any past care he has received?
• have no choice but to visit health providers who promise to share medical records with the the health insurance provider?

Obviously Leo Gold is a healthy person and able to afford coverage (and so am I). But what about  people  like Esmin Green or Belinda Bach who couldn’t possibly  afford coverage? A company like Blue Cross Texas would easily and gleefully ignore them while at the same time issuing press release about its latest profitability. This is what we call "the American Way."

Jesse Jackson has remained a pretty marginal figure (even though he is an honorable and honest man).

Wow, yesterday he learned an important lesson: to get coverage by the major media, all he has to do is to accidentally mutter an off color phrase in a semi-public forum.

The American public loves a laughingstock they can taunt. Jay Leno, etc. When my ebook comes out next month to massive media fanfare, I’ll be sure  to make numerous faux pas around anyone with a microphone. 

In other news, Glen Greenwald points out how MSM pundits frequently create a dichotomy between "left wing values" and the "American people."