Dear Barnes & Noble

Dear Barnes & Noble,

I am fully aware of the fact that each and every purchase I make with my credit card is tracked in a database somewhere. I am also fully aware that my membership in your loyalty club makes it possible for you to keep a secondary database of every purchase.

But frankly, sending me email one month after a visit to your store with the message, "By now you should have read those cookbooks, programming books, and SF novels we sold you. Here's a list of what you bought back in December, in case you forgot. We didn't. Please tell our other participants what you thought about those books," is creepy.

This may be the very moment when I decide to never pay with anything other than cash again. ATMs might be able to track my movements, but at least they won't know when I buy politically sensitive or sexually explicit books. It's one of those things I always "knew" was happening, but it's not until a big nameless, faceless conglomerate tells me right out, "We Know What You Read," that I start to wonder if trading my privacy for convenience is worth it.

Sherri at Philosecurity has a great article on how we trade our privacy for convenience and credit card companies have a vested interest in disregarding your privacy as much as possible: the more information they have about you, the earlier they are likely to discover fraud conducted by others in your name. Anne C at Existence Is Wonderful (from whom I got the Philosecurity link) likewise adds that the modern credit system is irretrievably linked to certain privileges (you cannot buy a house without a credit record, and it's even hard to find a job today without one) and not having a credit history is the equivalent today to being an "economic non-person." Like Anne, I thought I was doing well by having very little credit use history up until about 30; it wasn't until Omaha pointed out that I couldn't buy a car without a credit record that I started to use credit. Now I've become accustomed to the convenience. The cost of that convenience was made eerily apparent to me this morning.

Brains, feeling incoherent today.

A bit of a different format today, I'm not feeling especially coherent. Something is bubbling below the surface of my brain, and I can't quite drag it out into the light. It feels like everything's in high-speed motion and I can't find the time to wrap my head around any one of them.

Anyway, as some of you may know, this past weekend was the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington DC, and the smell of failure was everywhere. Patrick Ruffini kicked off the celebration by regretting the "Joe Plumberization" of the GOP, and turned around and said that the GOP's best chance was to support Newt Gingrich's policy suggestions since Gingrich represented the "intelligence" of the party. Gingrich's ideas were the some old stuff of the past: tax cuts mostly for the wealthy and deregulation of markets and industries.

Government advising truckers: good. Advising doctors: bad

Gingrich's only interesting policy addition is one he's pimped before: revamping the FAA's traffic control system to modern standards, using satellite-based tracking and integrated scheduling. He calls it the "Intelligent Transporation System," and calls for more research into the most effective techniques for easing our nation's transportation burden. This is ironic because Newt's own party, apparently in a "any idea from the opposition is a bad idea" frame of mind, has tried to describe effectiveness research in medicine as "cost-benefit analysis medicine" and "healthcare rationing." Personally, I'd like to know what medicine or procedure is best, mmmmkay?

(Overcoming Bias has a great article on how patients will frequently choose doctors with higher professional profiles and status over doctors with better success rates, an indication that associating with higher-status individuals is a stronger bias to our decision-making processes than our own lives.)

(The preference for evidence-based policy in one arena but not another might be a consequence of near/far thinking: I get the impression that people with the time to be policy wonks and political figureheads spend a lot of time in an immanent mind about air travel; on the other hand, threats to one's health and well-being are often abstract, distant, and threatening, and we prefer not to think about them. Their remoteness, combined with the faceless experience of being herded into aircraft, can make the evidence-based approach to medicine scary and more likely to engender a rapid, emotional rejection.)

(Which brings me to an important idea: Having an Advance Abyssal Plan.)

Unhinged quote-mining

Anne Coulter on Nancy Pelosi: "Is no one going to remark on what a great country it is where a mentally retarded woman can become speaker of the house?"

Michelle Bachman (god, I miss Helen Chenowith) on the RNC's first black chairman: "Michael Steele! You be da man! You be da man!"

Mike Huckabee on Barack Obama: "The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics may be dead, but a Union of American Socialist Republics is being born. Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff."

Accuracy in Media's Cliff Kincaid on Barack Obama: "Back in the 1980's we had a president who was anti-communist, and, back in the 1980's we had a president we knew was born in the United States."

John Bolton jokes about Iran nuking Chicago. This one you have to listen to, because Bolton merely makes a throwaway snark about the destruction of Obama's hometown and the crowd laughs and cheers. What is it with the conservative wackaloons wishing for the destruction of a major American city for their precious "I told you so" climactic moment?

Rick Santorum on Barack Obama:: "I want his policies to fail."

Mark Levin on Barack Obama: "Yes, I want him to fail."

Michelle Malkin on Barack Obama: "It doesn't make me some kind of racist to disagree with the President." Huh? Who said it did, Ms. Malkin? Kinda defensive there, aren't we?

Erick Erickson's take: "I want Barack Obama to fail and I want to help ensure he does. If Barack Obama is successful in implementing his stated agenda, America will fail and the American dream will die for millions."

John Wayne (yes, this John Wayne): "Well, I didn't vote for him but he's my president, and I hope he does a good job."

The star of the show: Dear Leader, Rush Limbaugh!

Rush was the star of CPAC this year. He went an hour over the 20-minute time limit for his speech and not one person dared tried to move him from the podium. He was apparently "electrifying" as he told his audience that the way to win the hearts and minds of the American people was to stop playing the Democrats game. The Democrats, you see, had won by showing they had a competent policy-making mechanism. "One thing that we can all do is stop assuming that the way to beat them is with better policy ideas right now. I talk to people about the Obama budget or the Obama Porkulous bill or whatever else TARP 2 whatever it's going to be, and they start talking to me in the terms of process and policy. I say stop it." Because, you know, it's not about governing; for this conservative movement, it's about power, about having or not having it, about stomping out alternative suggestions and worshipping the ideology of the "Contract on with America" and never, ever having a discussion about the inherent conflicts, contradictions, and interesections with reality that making good policy is all about.

Most of Rush's speech is vapid cheerleading. He talks about "conservative principles," but his entire career rests on violating those principles and abusing the innate forgiveness of his ennablers, because as long as his voice garners attention his tribe will keep grooming his fur.

With a trend like this, the country is safe from another George Bush. And poor Ike wouldn't have a hoot in Hell of getting elected. Mitt Romney is still the front-runner, according to the poll at CPAC.

Brains, astroturf vs. grass

[Late note: the article on which this entry is based has been taken down from Playboy, no explanation given. One of the authors has reprinted the article on her own blog, along with a followup. Whether or not it came down for journalistic failure or other reasons is still unknown. The whois registry and the Lewis Lapham article are still well worth contemplating.]

You may have heard something this weekend about the "New Tea Party," a minor kerfluffle in which the right tries to motivate its base to make its numbers known and protest the "stimulus" thingy going on in Washington. Dave Weigel took some great photos.

The whole thing was sparked by a now famous rant from CNBC Chicago Mercantile reporter Rick Sanetelli, who seemed to lose it on the trading floor and "surrounded by multimillionaire traders, railed on the Obama administration for trying to help struggling homeowners and berated people who are getting foreclosed on as 'losers.'" Santelli moved into a full-throated tirade and called for a new "tea party."

A few years ago, I read Lewis Lapham's article (I love Lapham's writing; he's such a great stylist, and has only gotten better recently) Tentacles of Rage, in which Lapham described how, back in the late 1960's, the upper 2% of our country decided that it needed a propaganda machine to counter the general leftward tendency of the nation and poured nearly a billion dollars (that was a lot of money in 1971) into the formation of a network of "think tanks" dedicated to publishing, reinforcing, propagandizing, and legitimizing in the minds of the voters notions of market deregulation and taxation policies that, naturally, favored most that upper 2%.

Santelli's rant wasn't so spontaneous after all [warning: the post goes to Playboy's political blog; text SFW; some of the ads, maybe not so]. A well-financed machine, seemingly organized by The Sam Adams Project. The material is a bit sketchy, but the fact that "ChicagoTeaParty.com" was registered in August 2008 by a well-known Republican operative turns out to be true:

Zachary Christenson
Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com) 
Domain Name: CHICAGOTEAPARTY.COM 
Created on: 03-Aug-08 

Things that make you go hmmm....