One year ago today: December 10, 2016, the wood pile idea.
Five years ago today: December 10, 2012, listening to ‘new country’.
Nine years ago today: December 10, 2008, $80 per hour.
Random years ago today: December 10, 2006, a generic day.
Try some lobster bisque, they said. It’s a perfect warm-me-up on a day like this. I suppose because it is warm, since it has almost no taste. Think of very weak lo-sodium cream of tomato soup, that’s what it seems to me. If you’re expecting something flavorful like clam chowder, no dice. Let me read that menu again, make sure I’m spelling this right. Yep, lobster bisque. Soup and old John Wayne movies, today’s feature film is “Desert Command”. I can’t decide if I’ve seen it before or just a dozen with the same theme. You gotta love the old racial slurs and stereotyping of the Arabs.
[Author’s note: then again, there’s a strong argument to be made that those 1930s remarks did, as often happens, turn out to be quite prophetic and well-founded in fact. This jives with my contention that most of what the media today calls “prejudice” is, of one were to look back far enough, based on solid evidence. Saying otherwise is trying to fool all of the people all of the time.]
Take the day off. It’s too cold to work outside, I think the radio said down in the mid-30s. For Florida, that is sub-arctic and few, such as myself, are ready for it. Imagine the population indoors huddled around space heaters. Except me, I have the insulated room. I used the time to relax and write letters. Then up to the coffee shop to work the Sunday crossword. This is relatively more thrilling than spending the same amount of time in Miami. You know how I’ve been an opponent of “crime labs” in the sense that they represent an unfair advantage to the authorities in a courtroom. There is no corresponding “innocence lab” to assist the accused.
Well, danged if the world isn’t again catching up to where I was on that topic ten or more years ago. I won’t deep read the article until later today, but finally a few in the media are beginning to question just how scientific these expert witnesses actually are. It intrigues me extra because blogs, being a form of diary, are admissible evidence. That’s where, I understand, the old English saying comes from that if you keep a diary, one day the diary will keep you. This is because people have been hanged over their notebooks. I like English law because the accuser must prove a motive, but dislike how they are more slack about circumstantial evidence.
Here's your photo of lobster bisque.
After a week of therapy for my arm, I report no improvement. Consisting of a series of exercises which require 15 minutes twice a day, they have done no good so far. My instructions are not to push the envelope. Fine, unless these are the very muscles required for normal activity, which around here includes speed-typing, playing bass, and working the gear shift in the car. (It’s an automatic, but I sometimes have to work the lever with my left arm.) Some of the movements, such as rolling a ball in small circles with the palm of my hand, almost instantly nullify any good the other movements might bring.
I even tried the exercises on my other hand and they cause the same results, with less pain.
Puerto Rico.
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Lots of reading coming up, concerning privacy. Because there was an unsuccessful attempt to invade mine. Invade? Yes, to garner information behind my back for a purpose to which I never openly agreed. There was no reason for the attempt, they claimed to be just assuring their profit. Um, in my opinion, business is necessarily a risk and no business therefore has any right to ensure itself a profit by sneaking around in the shadows.
[Author’s note: pay attention to the next section if you value your privacy. This is a far different concept than “keeping secrets”, which carries negative connotations. You should always resist any encroachment on your right to privacy, no matter how small. The law will change not in your favor and there will come a time when privacy becomes your most valuable commodity. Pity those who gave it away without a fight.
The best policy with databases is to just not go along with them. You don’t really need grocery cards and gas cards. The true purpose of these cards is to track your behavior, something that can never remain innocent in the long run. Remember the Internet maxim: nothing is free—if you are not paying for the product, you ARE the product.]
Also keep in mind that I subscribe to the old ACLU definition of information privacy. It’s in this blog somewhere. It concerns the Constitutional issue of private papers, that computer files are included in that concept. If you give someone information, does that become their property? I say no, and that they have no right even to use it a second time, much less to keep it on file beyond that usage. If they want the information again, they should have to ask you again. Keep this mind as you read the next passage. It was originally not going to be posted, but I decided you are worth it.
Ha, I’ve driven at least one set of bureaucrats up the wall. You see, for many decades, myself and other like-minded individuals obeyed a deliberate policy of protecting personal information. It’s a simple formula—if you are not protecting your own personal information, nobody is protecting it for you. I get a laugh out of people who pay banks and such extra to “protect” their data. It just means they’ve lost any semblance of control over their own affairs.
You never truly find out how deep the prying goes until you get letters from departments you’ve never heard of demanding information for their files. It’s not difficult to keep under the radar. At street level, for example, I have nothing in my own name. No credit cards, no cellular plan, no electricity bills, no grocery card, no gas cards, etc. These are designed to track you in combination. Now, I have legit phone, and utilities, and such, but they do not contain personal information. It’s easy, if you know how. This brings us to the situation at hand.
I have a medical bill that is due to be paid by my legal representative. That’s as it should be, but you see, the hospital are scoundrels for trying to put a lien on my person should there be any problem collecting. I certainly never agreed to that. It is the form of this lien that bent the hospital out of shape. They tried to sneak in the back door and use public and private database records to locate and discover all my information and assets. And they came up with nothing. Talk about furious.
The paperwork they sent is most revealing. They apparently think they have a right to know who lives in my house, whether I’m related to them, and if those persons have any insurance. Sorry, I do not hand out third-party information. If you want to know who lives in my house, you ask them, not me. They have nothing to do with my medical. Can’t find my house? Too bad, asshole, I saw that one coming, too.
It reminds me of those old student loan collection forms. Remember those gems? I wish I’d kept one as a relic of the pre-computer methodology of these government jerk-offs.
For those who may not know what I’m referring to, back in the 1980s, the government used to send out an annual survey to delinquent student loan people with questions like:
A) Do you have money that belongs to you in somebody else’s bank account, and if so what is the account number and branch?
B) Do you have a vehicle that is really yours but registered in another name, and if so where do you park it at night?
C) Are you secretly working anywhere for cash and if so what day and time do you get paid?
I know it seems inane, but since the forms always arrived near tax time, they must have worked on at least some people. Myself, I missed a few payments, but eventually paid off the loan by the time I was 35, that is, the age when my life was half over. Sadly, that’s the loans I took waiting for my parents to pay up the money they promised me for university in return for wasting my youth working on their farm. In the end, I never got a penny from them, but by the time I was 20 years old, I was $8,000 in debt. That’s the equivalent of $80,000 today. Thanks again, mom & dad, cheating your own son. That’s effective parenting. Toughen the little bastard up.
By the way, when I die, one year later all the names and identities of all the bad people mentioned in this blog will be published for the world to see. This means you, Ken Sanchuk. You should maybe keep your promises next time, except there is no next time. This is how you will go down in history.
ADDENDUM
By now, if you’ve been reading over the years, you also know about my policy of spoofing. When you know somebody is surreptitiously collecting private information on you, the trick is to provide them with inaccurate data. This is not illegal unless you do if for a fraudulent purpose. The hospital tried to buffalo me by revealing all the information they had on me, apparently thinking I would be overwhelmed and see things their way. Too bad for them, the info was coded so I could look up in my records to see where they got it.
Their primary source was a Bank of America account I used to cash my paychecks in Doral, Florida. Opened before 9-11, that account had a post box address, the phone number of the now bankrupt company I worked for, and listed Lady Dianna as my next of kin. They got my birth date from the version I used to log on to the AARP job computer. And my social insurance number was hardly any better. But the funniest part was the address they had on file was from 2002. The Hialeah dog pound.
Some sources maintain that the American Constitution is silent on the topic of personal privacy. They must be a small-minded bunch. The specific items mentioned in the Fourth Amendment are not an exclusive list, but in their day meant complete privacy of a individual's affairs and must rightfully be taken to have the precise same meaning today regardless of how technology changes.
Don’t hand me that guff that “we” gotta pull together to make the system work. No, it’s the other way around. “They” have to design a system that works without offending other people’s space.
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