Cheerful Curmudgeon

I buy a lot of music on-line and it breaks down like this:

• 1,268 completely unlocked MP3 files, easily playable on any computer or device, all purchased from eMusic.com. (Here’s a link to get 25 FREE iPod® compatible downloads from eMusic! Choose from over 2.8 Million songs! )
• 0 DRM-locked files from iTunes, Audible.com, etc.

I hate paying money to be abused. Here is this morning’s tale of woe regarding customer “service” at the Anthem insurance company.

A few weeks ago, I received a letter telling me that the co-pay on my Zetia would increase dramatically and that I should switch to a statin instead. That is patently ridiculous advice, though, because I am also taking a statin (Lipitor). Were my cholesterol controllable with only a statin, I would not be taking both a statin and Zetia. So I just called the member service phone number and had this conversation:

Me: What is the process for appealing this increase in my co-payment?

Anthem: There is no appeals process.

Me: To whom would I send a letter appealing this increase?

Anthem: To our Grievance and Appeals department.

pregnant pause while I wait for more useful information to be offered — none was

Me: And what is the mailing address of the Grievance and Appeals department?

Anthem: You can send your letter to: Anthem, Grievance and Appeals Department – MO, PO Box 33200, Louisville, KY 40233.

I bit back my sarcastic questions about why she had told me that there was no appeals process. For what I pay for health insurance, why do I expect that I should get an honest answer to a simple and straightforward question?

Am I the only one baffled by the notion that a pregnant teenager is somehow a worthy part of a presidential political campaign? The last time I thought about teenage pregnancy (which is depressingly often, since I have two teenage sons), I considered a pregnancy to be an “Oh shit” moment which would have to be followed by some very heavy conversations with the parents about what comes next. Were it my child who is pregnant, and thankfully my children are not, I cannot imaging a) publicizing and politicizing the event, and b) focusing so heavily on the decision to marry and keep the child and not at all on the bad judgment which led up to the pregnancy.

While the “right to choose” vs. “right to life” debate is certainly a worthy one, I think a more interesting issue is that of helping teenagers avoid pregnancy in the first place. Equally interesting is how to break the cycle of premarital pregnancy which seems to run in families. I.e., a child conceived out of wedlock is more likely to conceive more children out of wedlock. How do we reach, and teach, those teens?

Sarah Palin may have been one of those teens. According to this article in AMERICAblog.com, Palin’s son Track was born just eight months after Palin married. Regardless of whether the boy was conceived before the wedding or born prematurely, this does give us all a good reason to think hard about teenage pregnancy.

Palin, by the way, does not impress me as a good person to have in the White House. I love this poem by my friend jsg:

The News

I am in Wasilla, Alaska
Tracking the orbit of Governor Sarah Palin
Whose pick for VP has energized Republicans everywhere
And independents like myself
Who are moved to the center
By this most courageous appointment
By such smart politicians.

I hope the photos I am attaching
Complement the text.

Here I am in front of the field
Where the Governor got smooched by her future husband
They will marry and eight months later
Her first child will be born
Which no doubt is the basis for the philosophy
behind her later lack of commitment
To sex education and support for unwed mothers in her state.

Her second child, by the way,
Will go to this high school
Here I am standing in front of it
Where she too will smooch her boyfriend
Get pregnant
And whose pregnancy will be announced to the world
By her mother
Whose willingness to sacrifice the privacy of her daughter
To her ambitions for the vice Presidency is only exceeded
By her willingness to rear her own special needs child
In a fishbowl with staff
Hillary Clinton’s identification with ambition is over forever
Since the Republican Sarah Palin
Has demonstrated to what lengths true ambition
Will take a person
And how clever Republicans must be to jettison all their values
To support her.

Here I am in front of the State House
Where not one person who served with Sarah Palin
Was called during the so-called vetting
They are clever the Republicans
And John McCain is some maverick reformer
To have made such a careful decision.

Here’s the road where Governor Palin’s husband
earned a DUI
and was taken to jail.

Here’s the law office of the lawyers just hired
To run interference for Governor Palin over the firing
Of her ex brother-in-law
Who left his employment
Under suspicious conditions
But of course John McCain’s people knew all that
And were courageous and reformers nevertheless.

Here’s an empty room
Where Sarah Palin has avoided
Speaking with the Press.

Here’s a picture of me in the
MIDDLE OF THE ROAD
Both the Republicans and Democrats are courting me
The future belongs to me
I am delighted to be here
And from where I stand -

The Republicans are doing a really bang-up job
Of earning my loyalty.

Your friend in the center,
jsg, usa

Woo hoo! This afternoon, I passed my glider pilot checkride in N5751S, a Schweizer 2-33A! I am now officially allowed to fly airplanes with either one or zero engines.

I owe it all to the Silver Creek Glider Club and the good folks there.

LibraryThing did something amazing last Thursday: it made images of the covers of a million books available for anyone to use for free. This is way better than using Amazon.com’s book covers because you can display them without linking to Amazon. If you are a library or an independent book store, having links on your web site which can draw your patrons or customers to Amazon is not a particularly good thing. It is obviously better than a commercial book cover service because, well, it’s free.

Here is an example. I own a copy of 100 Great Fantasy Short, Short Stories. Since I am using a LibraryThing cover, I can legally link the image to the LibraryThing description (which I have done) or I could have linked it to my own LibraryThing catalog or to anything else I choose.

There are a couple of small potential problems and these prompted me to write a little caching script for the LibraryThing covers. First, you need to use your own developer key to obtain the covers from LibraryThing and there is a slight chance that you could exceed the maximum number of covers per day that LT is willing to provide to you. Second, since I am quite sure that this service will be very popular, LT’s servers could get a bit overburdened if everybody hits them for images.

The solution? Install my little LTcovers PHP script on your own web server. It is just a single file and needs a single directory in which it can store copies of the book cover images that you need. As your patrons/customers/users display covers on your web site, LTcovers will grab the images from LibraryThing and keep a local copy. Once configured, it needs no maintenance.

What do you need?

1. The ltcovers.php script. Right-click on that link and “Save As” ltcovers.php on your own web server.
2. Your own LibraryThing developer key. It’s free and you need to have your own.
3. You might want a 1×1 pixel transparent GIF image as a default image, in case you request a cover which LibraryThing does not have. You can download one from here. (Use “Save As” again.)

My LTcovers script is available for free under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

The images from LibraryThing are available under these terms, “You also agree to some very limited terms: You do not make LibraryThing cover images available to others in bulk. But you may cache bulk quantities of covers. Use does not involve or promote a LibraryThing competitor. If covers are fetched through an automatic process (eg., not by people hitting a web page), you may not fetch more than one cover per second.”

I hope that between LibraryThing and this script, you can save a few dollars (if you are now paying for a commercial book cover service) and provide a better experience for your web site visitors (if you are now linking to Amazon).

Shameless commercial plug: If you want to use LTcovers but cannot install it on your own web server, Hen’s Teeth Network will be glad to provide you with a small hosting account quite suitable for running it. We will even install LTcovers for free if you sign up for one of our hosting accounts.

I don’t often find myself smiling while reading about the killing in Iraq and Afghanistan but I did today when I ran across a short article in Wired, Shrinks Help Drone Pilots Cope With Robo-Violence. Like many people, I was concerned that fighting a war via remote controlled vehicles would turn the killing into a video game, completely disconnecting the soldiers’ consciences from their actions. It is a very hopeful sign that the men and women firing missiles from drone airplanes are disturbed enough by what they are doing to require counselling.

It has often been a problem that the men who run the wars are not the ones on the front lines, personally experiencing the maiming and killing. Even the vocabulary of war encourages pretty much everybody to ignore the consequences: people become “units” or “troops.” We talk about things like “troop strength” and not “the number of men able to stand and fight.”

At least this summer, the people in California who are killing people in Iraq get what they are doing. I am sure that the people who program the drones will try to solve this problem, making the people who do the killing a bit more efficient. With luck, it will take a long time.

In January 2001, The Onion satirized George W. Bush’s first inauguration speech in Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over’. The sad part is, most of the satire turned out to be true.

For instance,

Bush swore to do “everything in [his] power” to undo the damage wrought by Clinton’s two terms in office, including… going into massive debt to develop expensive and impractical weapons technologies, and passing sweeping budget cuts that drive the mentally ill out of hospitals and onto the street.

and

Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years. “You better believe we’re going to mix it up with somebody at some point during my administration,” said Bush, who plans a 250 percent boost in military spending.

and

Bush had equally high praise for Attorney General nominee John Ashcroft, whom he praised as “a tireless champion in the battle to protect a woman’s right to give birth…. John Ashcroft will be invaluable in healing the terrible wedge President Clinton drove between church and state.”

and

Bush concluded his speech on a note of healing and redemption. “We as a people must stand united, banding together to tear this nation in two,” Bush said. “Much work lies ahead of us: The gap between the rich and the poor may be wide, be there’s much more widening left to do. We must squander our nation’s hard-won budget surplus on tax breaks for the wealthiest 15 percent. And, on the foreign front, we must find an enemy and defeat it.”

I just read a letter to the editor in my local newspaper. It begins,

Are you kidding me? Jefferson Middle School says that no kids can bring peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch because there are kids with peanut allergies?

Peanut butter is dangerous to the 1.3% of Americans who have peanut allergies. We should certainly protect the kids from dangerous stuff, especially since about 125 Americans die every year from allergic reactions to peanuts.

While we are at it, let’s protect our little darlings from a few other things which are also likely to kill them:

• School buses – Though not as dangerous as peanuts, we still might seriously consider keeping kids away from machines which kill an average of 20 of them every year.
• Water kills 8x as many children per year as peanuts – About 1,000 kids die every year by drowning in residential swimming pools. Better outlaw them.
• Schools – Of the 22,000,000 children injured in the United States each year, about 10% to 25%, or 2,200,000 to 5,500,000 children, are injured at or near school! Clearly, peanuts are an insignificant risk compared to the school itself.

Perhaps a little more analysis of the scale of the risk is in order before banning something. Peanut butter certainly comes to mind, as do other things like:

• Parents watching middle school children until they board the school bus.
• Playgrounds without swings or teeter-totters.
• GPS tracking of children’s cell phones.
• Helicopter parenting, in general.

Remember, just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.

Remember, too, that just because something is dangerous, does not mean that you necessarily need to do anything more than educate your children.

For several years, my son planned to join the Army. As a father, I had mixed emotions: pride that he wanted to volunteer for a very tough job and fear that he would be killed… or worse. He and I had several discussions about the dangers; largely fruitless because teenagers believe they are immortal and invulnerable.

The Rand Corp. has just published a large study of emotional trauma to Iraq War veterans. The AP article, About 1 in 5 U.S. troops suffers mental fallout, study finds, includes:

Roughly one in every five U.S. troops who have survived the bombs and other dangers of Iraq and Afghanistan now suffers from major depression or post-traumatic stress, an independent study said Thursday. It estimated the toll at 300,000 or more….

Only about half of those with mental health problems have sought treatment. Even fewer of those with head injuries have seen doctors.

Army Surgeon General Eric Schoomaker said the report, from the Rand Corp., was welcome….

“There is a major health crisis facing those men and women who have served our nation in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Terri Tanielian, the project’s co-leader and a researcher at Rand. “Unless they receive appropriate and effective care for these mental health conditions, there will be long-term consequences for them and for the nation.”

The casualties of war include many more people than the few who actually die on the battlefield, the few who are officially counted by the US government. We do a disservice to the injured, to their families, and to ourselves by ignoring the problem.

Our country is founded on several key values and two of the most important are the right to vote and the belief in presumed innocence. Several school districts in St. Charles county, Missouri, seem determined to teach some important lessons to their students vis á vis these rights:

1. United States citizens of voting age are presumed dangerous to students.
2. United States elections are so dangerous that students of any age must not be allowed in the building while voters are present.

Here’s the article:

STLtoday – News – St. Louis City / County
Schools will close for general election

01/29/2008

ST. CHARLES COUNTY — Students in the Fort Zumwalt, Wentzville and Francis Howell school districts won’t have classes on Nov. 4 while the buildings serve as polling places for the presidential election.

St. Charles School District students will be dismissed early that day. The county does not use any schools in the Orchard Farm district, so classes will be scheduled as usual Nov. 4.

Rich Chrismer, director of elections for St. Charles County, said the Election Authority and the school districts were responding to concerns about student safety.

Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines paranoia as “a tendency on the part of an individual or group toward excessive or irrational suspiciousness and distrustfulness of others.”

Mixed messages confuse and hurt children. They need adults to model consistent, rational rules. Forbidding students and adults from being in the same school building on November 4, when the same students and adults can share restaurants, stores, libraries, and any other public place on that day, or any other day, simply teaches the children that adults make crazy decisions and cannot be trusted.

Kids are bright. They will notice subtle points such as:

• The presence of their own parents and neighbors is a safety risk.
• Eighteen year old classmates become dangerous while voting but magically are safe again the next day.
• Eighteen year old students, sent to the middle schools and elementary schools by the school district to tutor younger students, become magically dangerous one day a year.

If you have a student in any of these school districts, I encourage you to discuss this matter with them. As parents, we already face credibility issues with our children. Ignoring this “close the schools on election day” decision will only reinforce those issues. Better to have your children know how you feel about this than to have them guess your thoughts based on your silence.

You might also contact the school districts:

• Ft. Zumwalt, Dr. Bernard J. DuBray, Superintendent, (636)272-6620
• Wentzville, Dr. Terry Adams, Superintendent of Schools, (636)327-3800
• Francis Howell, Dr. Renée Schuster, Superintendent, (636)851-4000
• St. Charles, Dr. Randal D. Charles, Superintendent of Schools, (636)443-4000

We adults have a responsibility to the next generation: teach respect for other people, not fear of them. Paranoia is not safety.