Shorties of the Baskervilles

Maui may be running out of sand.

Romance Filter (Happy Valentines Day): Diamonds and the ethical purchase thereof.

Real conservatives don’t shut up and drink the Kool-Aid, but they may get flamed by people who claim to be real conservatives and like their Kool-Aid.

Enjoy some taxpayer-funded prepackaged news. You would think that they could have saved some of that sixteen hundred million dollars by consolidating those 343 PR contracts. For that matter, when we are talking this kind of money, wouldn’t it be cheaper to create an in-house PR agency and in-source it?

Maybe the White House thinks the Vice President shooting somebody is funny, (yeah, freaking hilarious) but Asian news sources are calling it “a bizarre and sinister episode.” So tell me, is it funnier now, since the victim has had a heart attack because “Some of the birdshot appears to have moved and lodged into part of his heart….”?

Bad enough that the courts are split on whether it’s ok for the FBI to track where you are via your cell-phone just because, now the Federal government would like to set up a giant omnibus electronic medical records database. Never mind that even Consumer Reports says “Electronic Medical Records Have Potential for Misuse.” Even news outlets less than 200 miles from Dubya’s Crawford ranch are publishing opinions against this sort of thing. Here’s the short version: creates big commercial database; subject to misuse and outright hacking; will be used by insurance companies to deny payment or coverage; will be used by other entities to “legally” discriminate based on medical conditions past or present; will probably not result in better care, particularly in the sort of emergencies where an omnibus medical record would be darn handy. ER docs are too busy saving your life to try and figure out how to get a remote computer database to barf up your records and — since they will likely contain streams of incomprehensible but succinct billing codes — then interpret them.