I’m sure there’s lots of people
If I allowed myself to see
Who find me just as dubious
As these strange ones are to me

Non-substantive triviality:

Yo-Yo Ma Radio has added more songs.

I read that Alfred Hitchcock was a misogynist asshole. I am disappointed.

Friends are killing me softly with all the requests to accompany them to Eat Prey Love.

I’m a pretty good girl friend, and I love that friends want me to accompany them to the movies, but by asking me to see this film they clearly show they know me not at all. Moreover, I’m in the middle of some minor research, am trying to squeeze in a four or five day trip to Banff around Labor Day, and I’d rather see Eraserhead — a film that always makes me gag.

True Blood Quote Musings:

I liked Eric’s dual meaning quote of the Magistrate’s Fuck the Authority, but Russell’s We will eat you after we eat your children is the cake topper this week.

Peace

The bill from the immediate care center is for the suturing of a finger. The immediate care center accepted insurance, but as he has a $1200 deductible he expected this to be something he had to pay in full because the deductible hadn’t been met. The bill has two columns of charges. The amount insurance would pay if he had no deductible is $329.78. The excess was 446.22. So he had to pay $329.78 because his insurance company has a contract with the immediate care center, which is owned and run by the local hospital.

This is good yes?

Is $329.78 a reasonable charge for the service? According to him the doctor spent 1/2 hour with him, at most, suturing his finger. That would mean the doctor portion could be $329.78 an hour ( 164.89 for the half hour) with the $164.89 going toward cost of equipment and administrative fees — I’m not sure exactly how they divide it up that is just one of many possibilities. That seems reasonable to me. Yet, if the individual going there did not have insurance it would have cost him $776 for the same service, jacking the doctor fee up to what is equal to $776 an hour ($388 for the half hour) with $388.00 in administrative/medical equipment fees. Not so reasonable.

There is apparently some kind of “gun to the head” situation going on here. Have insurance, even though we jacked up the premium 18 percent this year, or get charged double what you’d have to pay if you had insurance? I can only ask why. Why do people without insurance get what appears to be an unreasonable charge? Why is there not just a fair and reasonable charge?

Things I’ve read:

The biggest political fight of the week, sadly, over liberals not coming out and complaining loud enough about that ridiculous misogynistic playboy article (sorry about this link) touted proudly on Politico and complained about on some AOL political site. Both posts were pulled. The article was a sick piece of work about women Guy something or other would love to fuck even though he hates them. Having decried Playboy as a piece of misogynistic trash when I was 18 years old it is merely redundant to do so again. The more disturbing thing is reading the comments on various sites, where it doesn’t look like either liberal or conservative men have a great deal of respect for women. The largest difference I see is that conservative sites remove comments that show that to be the case, or don’t allow comments at all, and liberal sites do not, flaunting their misogyny for all too see. Men are way too skilled at attacking a women on their looks, sex appeal, choice of clothing, or their attitude, rather than her ideas. A reinforced nugget of previous knowledge was all that excursion onto the blogesphere got me.

Surviving the World. Loving it.

Top Ten Black Blogs for June. Some great blogs there, with more added every month.

The worst in-kind donations, from Good Intentions are Not Enough

Ross Douthat Makes No Sense.

Kabul’s K Street Project seeking more lobbyists. Where Afghanistan’s ambassador learns the rules of acceptable corruption in D.C.

What I Watched:

Mildred Pierce, pretty good movie if you like that kind of thing.

peace

Up to a couple of hundred thousand blogs are started every day, so suing bloggers, especially if they own homes and have large bank accounts, big gossipy mouths, and not an ounce of common sense, could be quite lucrative. You can goggle Internet Defamation and see it’s a growing niche, the blogger version of ambulance chasers. There are also internet sites selling bloggers insurance, capitalizing on the fear of being sued niche. Media Bloggers is one to those. Thanks to our advancing technology we have a whole new niche, ripe for exploitation, and it involves lawyers and insurance. Go figure. If common sense would only prevail we’d have none of this, but somewhere along the line someone decided that freedom of speech meant something other that what it really means, and others have spent years making money from the confusion. It’s only going to get worse.

When people start yammering all over the internet they might want to delay reading about how to blog, how to get readers, how to get comments, how to get links and fame, and how make money. Instead, after reading a few simple books on basic writing, go directly to What is defamation, yes Virginia you can in some cases be sued for your opinion.

One thing I did find at Media Bloggers was a link to this mini course, Online Media Law, a joint project of “Media Bloggers Association; Citizen Media Law Project, which is jointly affiliated with Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Center for Citizen Media; City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism and Baruch College; and Media/Professional Insurance”, at News University. You have to sign up for News University, but it only takes two seconds, and after doing so you can enroll in the course at the bottom of the page. You can read through the course quickly. You can also take an assessment quiz before or after reading through it.

The assessment is common sense, if you don’t do well it would benefit you to read the course. I got 1 wrong. Erring on the side of caution, I presumed someone could be sued for calling someone a jerk. Hypothesizing the “what if the name caller had a PhD in jerks”, not the honorable degree in jerks that most of us think we have, but a real one, yeah lets just assume for a minute that there is such a thing. What if the Doctor of Jerks had a personal website, but his about page states his credentials and links to his authoritative research on jerks. Say he calls his neighbor a jerk, or calls someone a jerk in the comments of another blog. Is he more liable because of his expertise, even if he was just ranting in a non professional way on his or someone else’s personal blog?

Gets kind of murky there for me….

Some links:

Top Ten Rules For Limiting Legal Risks
Citizens Media Law Project
Center for Citizens Media
Teaching Copyright

peace