About.me? It’s all about me!

Okay, this social network thing is now officially getting out of hand.

AOL (a shadow of itself that seems to have the money to purchase just about anything for no reason at all) just announced its purchase of About.me, a beautifully designed piece of social networking fluff that serves America’s only truly burgeoning business, the propagation of unabashed narcissism.

It’s a classic piece of “stats for nothing” technology. You can measure how many people have visited your page, and then bounced to your twitter and facebook profiles. For an audience of one, you, that’s really important stuff.

I speak as a recovering narcissist. I realize that the very posting of this little nugget is an irony in itself, but I felt (note the use of I) the need (note the use of need) to post it.

At a certain point in time, the post and share phenomenon will start to lose its sheen. After all, the bitter truth has always been that most people have precious little to add to the wisdom of the world. Not surprisingly, most of the creative funnel is quickly forgotten. One wonders whether all our creative juices are being frittered away on post and share. That would be bad for us as individuals and for the nation at large. After all, what does America have left but its creativity?

Waste that on a social networking torrent of post and share and we’re left with nothing. May God help me! (I mean us!!)

As someone wise once told the fabulous person that is myself as I (that’s another way of saying me) fretted about death. “Simon, you have to remember, you’re really not that important”.

Now that’s true wisdom.

Here’s a link to my about me page. It’s art.  The art of me.

A Single Payer Health Care System IS Constitutional

When a Federal judge in Virginia struck down the mandate portion of the new Health Care Law, on the grounds that it contravenes the Commerce clause of the 14th Amendment, he was clearly signposting a Supreme Court decision. Right now, the current makeup of SCOTUS suggests that it could bury the mandate element of the law, and with it, the equation that put the Health insurers on board in the first place.

But the decision raises even more profound implications. For example, it appears that the mandating of purchase of private health care may, in the eyes of some, contravene the Commerce clause, but that mandating the purchase of public health care is not. In other words, a single-payer system would be constitutionally sound, and could not have been challenged in Federal Court. The reason is simple. If it were successfully challenged, then the whole edifice of public mandates, including Medicare and Social Security could have been thrown into constitutional doubt. After all, we the people are mandated to pay for these entitlements as taxation.

Another element worthy of discussion is whether healthcare, public or private, constitutes a product for sale. Ultimately, the providers of the healthcare are the same, so the ‘product’ publicly or privately sold is essentially identical. Therefore it’s an absurdity to suggest that private health care is a product and public health care is not.

What all this really points to is that the US Constitution protects a single-payer system, but not a public mandated private system. Our boys in the White House didn’t do their constitutional homework, including their boss – a constitutional lawyer. I guess he was too busy cutting deals with the bad guys.