The battle over universal health insurance in the United States is so crazy because not a single person participating in the debate seems to be debating universal health insurance.

Those who don’t have health insurance or who can’t afford health insurance or who can afford health insurance and then find out it’s just an illusion once they need it, are all seeking health care, not health insurance.

Those who sell health care in the United States – from the doctors to the hospitals to the insurance companies to the pharmaceutical companies – are fighting for health insurance fees, simply trying to defend unholy, insane levels of profit, as opposed to just insane levels of profit.

None of the companies (remember doctors and hospitals are just companies) who are part of the health care industry care about health care at all. All they care about is retaining wealth via health insurance fees.

The American politicians in the middle? All they care about is skimming off the maximum amount of money without getting turfed out of office by their constituents.

Is it any wonder the debate seems crazy and endless?

The only interesting part of the debate to me is what kind of animal the politicians are going to end up building. Maybe an elephant the size of a mouse? Whatever it is, it’ll be crazy as hell.

Have I got some humidity for you this morning! It’s so humid outside, I can barely see the forest for the fog.

I suppose down south it means uncomfortably sticky but up here at this time of the year, it means uncomfortably fucking cold. It seeps in everywhere, including into your body and into your bones. Spooky, too. It’s like a bad Disney movie out there. If there was a bear, you wouldn’t see it until you bumped into it. Then you want to make yourself the biggest, loudest, meanest, most ferocious beast in the entire forest and scare the shit out of it. Of course, that’s a hell of a lot easier said than done, neh?

The end of November. I can remember when we were being thrilled by the first college football game of the year on TV. How could I not? It was just last week, wasn’t it? Life is a paradox. It’s way too long and way too short and they both happen at exactly the same time. See, THAT should scare a bear! It scared me when I thought about it, anyway!

The Subject of the Debate

Well, what do we have here really?

We have a bunch of corporations called television networks, who’ve made zillions of dollars over the decades, shoving advertisements down our throats at every opportunity and ruining our entertainment.

Charging for the crappy product was well nigh impossible because in the first place, it’s really is a terrible product and with all those horrible advertisements interrupting things all the time, who’d be crazy enough to pay for it?

Now the Internet is causing their business models to dissolve like wet cardboard so, desperate to “recover” so-called lost revenues, on top of all the moronic advertisements, they’ve now decided they must also sell their truly terrible product.

The question arises, who would purchase it? Well, to no-one’s surprise, it turns out no-one would purchase it.

How to Try and Force the Sale of Something Almost No-one Wants

Well, sez the network corporations, we’ve also got the greediest, most incompetent corporations in the world, called monopoly cable companies, who’ve been essentially stealing “our” product for decades and forcing people to purchase it as part of a package of entertainment, whether people want to purchase it or not.

Hey, sez the greedy broadcasters! Since you’re forcing the public to purchase this horrible crap anyway, we deserve to get a cut.

Sure, we buy most of it from the Americans and we’re already getting paid with all those feeble-minded commercials ruining the entertainment but you’re paying us nothing for the privilege of broadcasting our crappy commercials!

(Unsaid but assumed is the unspoken certainty the monopoly cable companies will just pass on the costs to the general public anyway – so what’s the big problem?)

The Actual, Real Argument

It doesn’t cost us anything, sez the networks. It doesn’t cost you anything. The public pays the fees and we can add a few extra little fees on top to pay for the accounting and maybe make a little more profit for both of us. Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink.

The monopoly cable companies respond: We already get your commercial-laden programs for free, you’re already getting paid once, you want to get paid twice for the same thing – like we do – and hey! We end up being the bad guys. We don’t think so. We already own all the politicians and all the various governments and we don’t have to do anything we don’t want to do, so go screw yourselves.

The Usual Result

Merry Xmas and Happy New Year Everyone! We’re all going to get screwed for the holidays!

Has anyone else noticed the volume of scripts running on almost every web page we visit these days? Almost all of them are from third parties, concerned with monitoring, recording and storing your personal IP address and all of your activities, such as every page you look at and every link you click, possibly even connecting you, personally, to each and every word on each and every web page you ever visit.

All of that information has to be transmitted and stored someplace for someone to use, else they wouldn’t be collecting it in the first place, would they? Think about it for a second. If spam is utterly wasting huge amounts of bandwidth and slowing the ‘Net for everyone, what are these scripts doing to our bandwidth? It’s my guess they’re wasting (from our point of view) a hell of a lot more bandwidth than spam.

Page Hangs

I’ve noticed quite often when a web page refuses to fully load and just hangs there forever, there’s nothing wrong with the web page I’m visiting. The problem is more often than not with some script that somehow got stuck, loading from some remote web server, which belongs to some marketing research company I’ve never heard of and I don’t really want monitoring me at all, let alone slowing me down or stopping my surfing.

Mea Culpa

Even this blog page, provided gratis by WordPress, sometimes loads endlessly when I try to access it.

Of course, as on almost all web pages, there’s the google-analytics script running on my WordPress blog page. It’s not my idea. I guess WordPress and/or Google wants it running for some unexplained reason. Perhaps they sell the information to advertisers? I don’t know because they didn’t ask me.

There’s also a script from Quantcast, another company that runs scripts on many of the web pages I visit. They appear to be collecting information for advertisers. That’s not my idea either but once again, no-one asked me. Quite often when my blog page loads endlessly but never finishes, I’ve noticed it’s waiting for something called pixel.quantserve.com. I guess, when the Quantcast server is busy and slow, so is my blog.

A script from something called Snap loads. I’m unclear as to why a product called Snap needs to run scripts in someone else’s computer memory every time they load my bog but I guess it’s another WordPress thing. It may be very useful but I don’t know what it is or what it does, so I don’t really know if I want it running or not. In any case, no-one asked me.

Finally, there’s a script called WordPress Stats, which seems fairly self-explanatory. I kind of like that one because it lets me know how many people visit this blog and what they’re interested in viewing when they visit. Of course, it’s possible it might collect a lot more information than that but I never see it.

Disclaimer

I have no financial or any other interest in any of the software I mention on this blog. If I did so, I’d say so.

Monitoring the Monitors

If you’re interesting in freaking yourself out one of these days (and who isn’t?) there’s a Firefox add-on called Ghostery and it allows you to see what companies are running what scripts on what web pages. It doesn’t do anything else, it just pops up a list of the people who are spying on you. If you install it in your Firefox browser, you may be in for a bit of a surprise.

Since I’m curious, I’ve got my Ghostery set to pop up the list of scripts on each web page I visit for just a few seconds. These days, it never stops popping up lists. Some web pages, like my WordPress blog, have only three or four scripts running. Other pages have a dozen or more scripts running. If you ever wondered why a relatively simple looking web page takes forever to load, it’s certainly possible it might be all those scripts trying to install on your machine — from a whole slew of machines you’re not even visiting! How cool is that?

Most people don’t realize it but the scripts don’t run on the web page they’re visiting, the scripts run on your computer and if you use a Microsoft product, they run on your computer in Administrator mode, which is the default mode for most Windows computers surfing the ‘Net. Of course, that’s also how you get virii, trojans, rootkits, spyware and other malware installed on your machine without your knowledge.

Blocking Scripts

As an aside, to block all of these intrusive scripts and as a byproduct, speed up your surfing enormously, there’s another add-on for Firefox called NoScript. It also shows you the scripts on the web pages you visit and it allows you to block scripts you choose to block and run scripts you choose to run — and you really do want lots of these scripts to run on lots of web pages. For instance, some web pages are nothing but a script and for other web pages, you need to allow scripts to run if you want to see videos or animation etcetera.

Warning!

Frankly, as much as I like it and depend upon it, NoScript is a major pain in the ass and you definitely need to know what you’re doing to use it properly but I wouldn’t surf without it. For instance, I block all the scripts running on my own blog. I block google-analytics everywhere and a host of other commonly encountered snooping scripts everywhere. I have to block or allow new scripts each and every day and that’s the pain in the ass. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if you want a script running or not – or which scripts you want running and which ones you want to block.

Amazingly enough, I can still surf the web just fine without allowing most scripts to run on my computer. Imagine that!

Please don’t install NoScript, then come back and complain you can’t do certain things on certain web pages. I’ve already told you, it can be a real pain in the ass.

Making Money? Bandwidth Hogging is Suddenly Not a Problem

It seems we have to learn to live with these intrusive scripts, following us around everywhere in combination with tracking Cookies and routing our private, personal information back to a seemingly endless number of marketing research companies. We have no power and no say in the matter but the next time you read about ISPs throttling people’s bandwidth because the people are doing something bandwidth-intensive, like perfectly legal torrents, keep in mind these very same ISPs don’t seem to be even slightly troubled by the proliferation of off-site scripts, wasting lots of bandwidth, twenty four hours a day.

It seems in the world today, if you make lots of money at something, it’s automatically ethical, acceptable and legal. That’s called corporate thinking and somehow our elected representatives have also enthusiastically adopted that thought process. It’s the kind of thinking that led directly to the financial meltdown, through which all of us are now suffering.

The next time some web page starts loading and never stops or the next time your surfing seems more than a little bit slower than the speed you’re purchasing from your ISP, keep in mind it’s those nice people who are trying to sell you things, things you neither want nor need, who are causing a lot of your grief.

Be sure to buy something from them, right?