Roger Stone predicts a Civil War if Trump is impeached. What happens when they find out how they lost their health insurance?#
Experian writes to say my email address is on The Dark Web. They offer advice how to deal with it. Change your password. Buy $29 service from them. Buy the deluxe $109 service again of course from them (guessing at the prices, they don't say in the email). Okay first what is The Dark Web? I honestly have no idea. Second. I publish my email address on my blog. I don't in any way try to hide it. Experian is one of the three credit-rating agencies. This is dishonest. Deceitful. Sleazy.#
There are a lot of posts going up today of the form: "I was a healthy person subsidizing sick people until something bad happened and I needed health care." But that doesn't tell the whole story. I was a healthy person subsidizing sick people until I needed life-saving heart surgery 15 years ago. Because of a sequence of COBRA, RomneyCare and ObamaCare, I have been insured ever since. Each year because of my age, I pay huge premiums. At times as much as $1500 a month with high dedictibles. In the interim, each year I used a fraction of that amount of health care. In other words as a person with a pre-existing condition (the definition of not healthy) I have been subsidizing sick people who need more health care than I do, and am happy to do it. #If your site pops up a dialog asking the reader to subscribe to an email newsletter, I won't post it to my linkblog. I'll find another site that explains the concept. Same with videos that autoplay. You really hate your users if you do that. I don't support sites that hate their users. #
Repubs invent these scary concepts that don't have any substance, because the words sound important and menacing. We don't want to be governed by Shariah Law. That kind of implies that Shariah Law is being imposed on us. That's the joke. It isn't. They play the same ugly game with voter suppression (they call it something else). And unmasking. I guess they must have been masked for a reason, you say. To protect someone. And to unmask them, well that's obviously bad, right? Haha. You fell for it. Even when you argue against it, saying it's harmless, you're falling for it. Maybe the best thing is to play along? Why were they masked in the first place? What were they hiding? Maybe you have to play the game to defuse it. Bottom line -- Repubs are scum. If you're a Repub and don't feel you're scum, maybe it's time to start something new. #
- I just cross-posted something from this blog to Twitter and Facebook. It gave me a nauseous feeling when the first comment came in on Twitter, from a stranger, who said that unmasking was bad and provided a link to support his belief. A bot. Even if he's flesh and blood, even if he thinks he's sentient, he's just human spam. This is the end of the line for discussion boards. We tried that a long time ago and blogging won out, for good reason. No. More. Cross-posting.#
I was in therapy for eight years, a long time ago, and while I often asked for advice there was only one time when the therapist gave it. #- She said this: Sometimes people are wrong. #
- There had been a family trip I wasn't allowed to participate in. I had asked to go, and was told no. I was angry and disappointed. I couldn't find a way for it to make sense. Her point was this. They are being bad family members. You can stop grappling with this. You can stop trying to see it from their point of view because they are just wrong. #
- I asked why this time she made an exception. She said she was human too, and didn't want to go through this with me, yet again. I suppose she wondered why I couldn't figure it out. Or maybe she thought I was ready to hear it. I learned something about myself then, that through nature and/or nurture, my sense of self had disappeared. I had lost the ability, if I ever had it, to see things from my own point of view. It was a big day for me. I'll probably never forget it. #
- After that event, I saw lots of opportunity to see things from my own point of view. An example. I had gone to a conference and had mistakenly scheduled two things for the same time. I was fretting. What do I do about this? Which one should I go to and which should I blow off? My new inner voice found the answer, in a question: What do you want to do? That would not have occurred to me before. #
- The piece that inspired this story tries to answer the question of why therapists don't just tell you what to do. The purpose of therapy is to help you discover yourself. I know that sounds dorky and new-age-y, but it is literally what you're doing. You're bouncing around the world, looking for answers everywhere but the only place that can provide them, inside yourself. But if you don't know you exist, how can you find that place? A therapist patiently shines the light on that space, over and over, hoping that this year, or maybe next, you'll figure it out. #