I read yesterday on Twitter that ASCAP is thinking about going after bloggers who embed videos in their posts. So guess what I’m gonna stop doing? Yep.

I know that’s not really feel-goody of me. But I guess since I wasn’t a regular with the “post a video of a happy song on Friday” thing that I won’t be missed. But I did want to let other bloggers know that there might be a danger in the continued practice.

I think ASCAP is in the right, but wrong in exercising that right. The majority of songs in those videos are still under copywrite. I’m touchy about copywrite, because it’s the only thing protecting my only personal asset. I’m a writer and without copywrite I’ve no hope of earning a living through my words.

But those videos are also publicity. There have been at least three occasions since the inception of Feel Good Friday where I’ve been reminded just how much I love that particular song. I’ve gone straight to my iTunes and BOUGHT the thing. I know this piece of anecdata* probably means very little to ASCAP, but I have to throw it out there. They’ve made more money from me by having the videos freely available than they would have otherwise.

*this is my new favourite word, and you’re bound to see it alot. I came across it at TCP when another commenter (tanglethis?) used it. And since it describes so well that which is in overabundance on the web I have to keep it and love it and take it out to look at how perfect it is.

Yeah, I’m just all kinds of sittin’ here coming up with stuff to yell at the world as it passes by my door. Blame the fact that I was up all night thinking and playing Epic Pet Wars.

I may agree with many things that many of the Tea Party people are trying to accomplish. But they’re not just making statements about how to change what’s different. They’re acting many times with hate. I’m all for limited government (ya think?!?) and better fiscal policy. But I’m not one for mean slogans scrawled on posterboard.

And I’m also over this whole “glorifying the terrorists of the past” thing. Because that’s what the Boston Tea Party was. Terrorism.

I do have one idea though. It makes a statement about the direction we’re headed with all these bailouts and government health care schemes. It poetically echoes the whole Boston Tea Party without being terroristic AND making a modern point.

You know they’re talking about a federal tax on soda to pay for health care, right?

Well, they are. And if you Tea Party People want to step up your game you’ll stop with all this Tea stuff and start doing demonstrations where you put Mentos in Diet Coke and talk about being overrun by hot air. And how government is boiling over with too much interference in private life. It’s perfect.

*Popular beverage of the day? Check
*Protesting a tax thereon? Check
*Making a statement about limited government? Check
*Slightly crazy looking? Check
*Cruel and violent ? No check.

So it’s a little bit messy, yes. Just hose down after you get everything all gross and sticky. You’ll do one better than any Congress in recent memory.

First off–I’ve always believed in ‘climate change’.

Where I’m agnostic is when people talk about ‘human-induced climate change’ with certainty. I don’t believe we can be certain that Evil Mankind is the Cause For The End Of The World As We Know It.

But I have decided I am prepared to make a complete change of view. It just takes one teeny tiny change.

I will believe every thing Al Gore has ever said about Climate Change if he stops making a profit off the concept.

Two of my friends are ruminating on the nature and action of love.

I think there are ways in which they are both right. B. is correct in that there are many kinds of love, and love can surprise you. It can come from nowhere, when you least expect it. Kleinheider is right when he says that Sanford’s infatuation most probably isn’t love.

Since I was 17 I’ve had a test for what love is. A lot of thought and prayer went into that test, because I was in a relationship that had most of the hallmarks of love. I was convinced that the boy I was dating was the only one for me and that I loved him.
I read a lot of things about love; things in the Bible and things in magazines. Books, movies, songs, stories and poems are mostly about love and the things that pass for it for a time so it isn’t hard to do a study on the ways the world loves and thinks it loves.

The simple answer for me came down to this. The absolute perfect love that everyone is after has one characteristic. It does not destroy. There are lesser forms of love, including lust and infatuation and romance, which are all nice for a time and very pleasant. Carefully nurtured they can mature into ideal love in the way a seedling grows into a plant.

But any lesser love which destroys something cannot grow into a full and perfect love because it has destroyed. If a lust love that destroys a family is nurtured it can only go so far. If a romantic love that destroys a woman’s spirit is nurtured it will inevitably continue to destroy until it chokes her heart or is yanked out by the root like the weed it is.

I am very blessed to be in a love relationship that has had a chance to grow, to weather storms and create more love. I know how such love can be both strong as iron and fragile as feathers. But it does involve choice and work and a tamed eye. If you want a strong love that lasts longer than a season, go with the love that creates and nurtures. Avoid the love that destroys.

Two hundred and some years ago–math is not my strong suit–the Declaration of Independence was signed. This is a holiday that is born out of words. Words born from ideas found in books and pamphlets and hot-blooded speakers on street corners.

Words and freedom are twinned and and twining about each other. You can’t have freedom without words, and you can’t have the best words without freedom.

I find my own freedom in words. The books I read take me places I could never go on my own. The words I write allow me to share my self with anyone willing and interested in sharing back. Reading is a form of sharing nearly as intimate as eating and sex. It’s a way to be drawn inside another person, to be taken to the place where the soul beats strongest and most like itself.

We can’t have freedom without words. Without books. Without ideas that make us happy–we talk about how glad we are to hear them. We can’t have freedom without ideas that make us angry–we talk about why they make us angry, and think and use words to fight those other words.

There are many self-evident truths to be celebrated on the 4th of July. And all those celebrations will spring from words of freedom and equality.

Now I’m active on Twitter.

I signed up when it was new and promptly let it lay dormant for ages. Then I started playing this game that required me to be on there for game advantages. Then I realised that everyone who used to have blogs now writes on Twiitter and that Twitter was easier to keep up with than my Google Reader.

So now I’ve got three places to write three very different kinds of things.
Papa Bear

This is my novel. I’ve always been writing a novel; it’s just not always the same novel. I have a really hard time letting my characters go, because I become so attached to them and their worlds. But I’ve buckled down and committed to finish this one story by the end of this year–22 May 2010. (My years go from Birthday to Birthday…seems only fair that I not get cheated out of 5months and 3 weeks.) I can write in my novel when I just want to go on and on forever and be part of that other world.

Mama Bear
This blog is my Mama Bear project. I can be on here when I want to write a lot, but not as much as I would when working on the book. It’s also good to have this be my Mama Bear project because this is where I boss the world around, tell the world what it isn’t doing correctly and make the world feel guilty about not leaving me more comments. Seriously, the world should finish college and lose about 40lbs.

Baby Bear
Twitter. Where they demand that you write everything in 140 characters or less. I have sentences that are longer than 140 characters. If there’s one thing that Twitter has been good for is that it teaching me brevity. I’m learning how to be interesting in short bursts and how to edit thoughts down. It’s killing my vocabulary, though. Or maybe it’s improving it. I’ll admit that I’m a fan of the ten-dollar word. How can you not love words like ’salacious’ and ‘cumbersome’ and ‘Muscovite’?

So, like any crazily crafty woman I’m continually bouncing between these three bowls of porridge. As a writer I’m really marvelling at this great gift. For all of the drawbacks and vales in my life, I’m honoured that God saw fit to put my span of life in the time where writers have so many delicious avenues for exercising their craft. I think of the poor folks who were writers in the days when paper was scarce, ink scarcer and audiences nil. I’m truly blessed. But boy…am I ever gonna get that novel published?

I have Rheumatoid Arthritis. I have private health insurance. That means that I am being given pain pills, but I’m also being given medications called “DMARDS” or Disease Modifying Anti-Rheumetic Drugs. While there is no cure for RA, there are treatment options like Methotrexate, Remicade and Enbrel which slow the progression of the disease and give RA patients a much greater quality of life.

I have a friend who has a similar disease but is on a form of government-sponsored health care called TennCare. Created in cooperation with then VP Al Gore as a model for the type of Health Care proposed by the Clinton Administration, TennCare has been up and running in Tennessee for years now. It was heralded as the answer to prayer by all the folks who found themselves unable to be insured by traditional health care providers. A lot of those people were–like me–suffering from AutoImmune Disease.

My friend on TennCare is not given any DMARDs. She IS given piles of pain pills…as much Vicodin as she can handle. While I’m able to occasionally do the grocery shopping, she spends much of her days in a haze, fighting a losing battle against pain.

Because, you see, Vicodin is a lot cheaper than the medicines that actually control the disease. You could take 300 pills of Vicodin a day and still not come anywhere close to the cost of the drugs which actually modify your disease. And since TennCare is costing Tennesseans so much money already, they aren’t really eager to prescribe the expensive stuff.

I happen to think that it’s no coincidence that Tennessee leads the nation in number of Vicodin prescriptions. Many of those are going to TennCare patients. The characterisation in a lot of circles is that those TennCare patients are junkies who resell the pills on the street. No one wants to admit that the TennCare patients are being given “shut up and go away” drugs in lieu of actual, more costly, treatment.

If TennCare was created as the model for a National Health Care system, don’t you think it’s time that we as a nation take another look at how TennCare is working in the lives of real people?

Folks on my Twitter feed were pretty excited yesterday about Bernie Madoff getting sentenced to 150 years in jail.

I wasn’t one of them.

Jail means Madoff gets to always know where his next meal is coming from. His cable bills and continuing education are paid for until he dies. So, for that matter, are his mortgage, heat and light bills. All he has to worry about are that he may not like the food and he may not care for the company.

This does not suit me.

I think Madoff ought to be sentenced to wearing a Lojack ankle bracelet. He should then be given a job as a janitor in a nursing home, hospital or elementary school. And he should be sentenced to live solely on the pay from that job–and any part time work he wants to get as a greeter at Walmart or a stockboy at Kroger.

In short, he ought to face what other aging Americans whose investments were robbed from them are facing.

He should have to constantly figure out where the next rent payment is coming from. Whether to spend his leftover income on the light bill or some Spam to go with his 25cent mac and cheese.

That would be a fitting way for him to serve the community he helped destroy with his cunning, greed and guile.

Health Care is the big topic of debate right now–when we aren’t distracted by those who no longer need any health care at all–and I am leery of alienating anyone by taking sides.

But there is one thing that is very important. Something that we can–and should–agree on regardless of where we stand on Goverment-Subsidised Health Care.

In 1995 the Association of American Physicians And Surgeons adopted The Patients’ Bill Of Rights.

All patients should be guaranteed the following freedoms:
To seek consultation with the physician(s) of their choice;

Any change in U.S. health care that robs you of your right to pick your own doctor flies in the face of the basic principles of the Constitution. How can you have liberty or the pursuit of happiness if you’re stuck in an unhappy situation by fiat?

To contract with their physician(s) on mutually agreeable terms;

Your doctor wants to be paid, and you want to be able to pay her what you can without having to trade in a couple of your offspring.

To be treated confidentially, with access to their records limited to those involved in their care or designated by the patient;

The records which say you’re complaining about painful intercourse, burning when you pee, cockroaches laying eggs in your belly button or any other private thing are between you and the folks who are trying to help you. Any change to the current system where those records become part of a third party database designed to “assess risk management positions” or “ferrett out patterns of drug abuse” may sound well-meaning but are a direct violation of your expectation of privacy. In the long run they can harm patients by making people less forthcoming with their doctors and therefore not telling the whole story to the treating physicians. Without the necessary information, many avenues of treatment go unexplored and make problems worse. Privacy is essential to optimum patient care.

To use their own resources to purchase the care of their choice;

If you want to use your Christmas bonus to get a boob job, that’s your business.

To refuse medical treatment even if it is recommended by their physician(s);

If you are a woman and your doctor says “get a hysterectomy” but you’d like to keep your own uterus and ovaries for as long as posssible, that is your choice. If you’re a man and you’d like to not have chemo but would rather spend the last few months of your life saying goodbye to your kids and grandkids, that’s your business. No court or hospital or group of doctors should exert control over your most fundamental rights to your own body.

To be informed about their medical condition, the risks and benefits of treatment and appropriate alternatives;

Let’s say there are three ways to treat your problem. You want to know all three. You don’t want to be told only of the option that is least expensive to your insurer–whether that insurer is Blue Cross or Blue State.

To refuse third-party interference in their medical care, and to be confident that their actions in seeking or declining medical care will not result in third-party-imposed penalties for patients or physicians;

You should be able to tell the insurance company to stuff it. If you want to refill your pain meds sooner than they say, and you don’t mind paying the extra $50, that’s your business. If you want to tell the government you’d just as soon stick with Blue Cross, that’s your business.

To receive full disclosure of their insurance plan in plain language, including:
CONTRACTS: A copy of the contract between the physician and health care plan, and between the patient or employer and the plan;
INCENTIVES: Whether participating physicians are offered financial incentives to reduce treatment or ration care;
COST: The full cost of the plan, including copayments, coinsurance, and deductibles;
COVERAGE: Benefits covered and excluded, including availability and location of 24-hour emergency care;
QUALIFICATIONS: A roster and qualifications of participating physicians;
APPROVAL PROCEDURES: Authorization procedures for services, whether doctors need approval of a committee or any other individual, and who decides what is medically necessary;
REFERRALS: Procedures for consulting a specialist, and who must authorize the referral;
APPEALS: Grievance procedures for claim or treatment denials;
GAG RULE: Whether physicians are subject to a gag rule, preventing criticism of the plan.

About two years ago I switched doctors on the advice of several people. The physician I was seeing kept ascribing my various aches and pains to the extra pounds I carried and seemed profoundly disinterested in any other cause for my pain. I loved the new doctor. She took me seriously and immediately sent me to various specialists looking for a cause beyond Fatty Boombaism. Sure enough I is one sick puppy, and now am at last getting it under control.

I like that doctor very much, but the practice in which she works is one of the most hideous places in Nashville. Judging from the location of the office and the signs posted on the wall and the clientele in the waiting room, this practice is one which caters almost exclusively to the lower middle class. Signs scream to the newcomers about Workman’s Comp and Doctor’s Excuses. The reception desk is helmed by workers who ignore patients in favour of conversations about guys who don’t call and annoying other patients who just left. Private details about a person’s medical history, issue of concern, insurance and payment arrangement are dealt with at full volume–often yelled across the waiting room.

“Hey, Your Credit Card didn’t Go Through!!!” Even with the name on the credit card, on the computer screen and the sign in sheet, patients are referred to as “Hey!”

It’s a hideous place with a reputation so bad that every other doctor’s office I spoke to last week (three others) remarked on it. Two of the other offices even said as much as to admit that this practice has a reputation in my area of being ‘hateful’.

I’ve thought about this alot. I know that when it comes to doctors, money can get you a good place in line for a liver. It can get you more comprehensive testing, better medicine for chronic ailments and more prompt patient care.

But it shouldn’t cost any extra to be treated kindly and with respect. It shouldn’t cost extra to have someone speak to you as though you are a human being and not just an annoyance to get past before Beer O’Clock. Frankly, I’m scared about where healthcare is headed in this country. I’m scared mostly because I’m afraid I won’t be able to fire a doctor who doesn’t work for me. I’m scared that I’ll be stuck forever in Hateful Medical Practice, Inc.