Yet another thing that shouldn't be for profit

There are plenty of things that shouldn't be run on a for profit basis.

Prisons. Jails. Healthcare. Rehab. Armies. Student housing. And schools. Grammar schools. High schools. Colleges. And, yep, nursing schools. 

Across the boards, the need to maximize profits tends to lead to a lot of bad behaviors. Depending on the industry, this can mean pressure to grow in areas that shouldn't be expanding, but should be contracting. (Looking at you, prison industrial complex!) It can mean corner-cutting and shoddy service delivery to minimize expenses. (Dorms are supposed to be crappy, no? And that patient with bedsores can wait to get shifted in her bed. She's on her way out anyway.) 

For-profit schools for younger children often weed out the kids who are most likely to be poor learners in need of extra support and who would thus put some dents in a school's vaunted "outcomes" metrics.  

In higher education, profit maximization often means predatory marketing, pressure on the low-income students they recruit to take on more debt than they can afford, and folks ending up with a substandard, unrespected degree or credential. If they achieve that degree or credential at all. 

So like most of the insitutions of "higher education" that are run as money making schemes, for profit nursing schools are controversial. They tend to focus on non-traditional students who want their education to be fast and flexible. Who are easy to get sucked in.

Florida's Carleen Noreus was the president (owner operator) of two eponymous schools in Florida: Carleen Home Health School, Inc. in Plantation, and Carleen Home Health School II, Inc. in West Palm. (Really? She gave her schools her first name? That should have been BIG RED FLAG #1.) But teaching nursing was apparently way too much work for Carleen Noreus. Those who can, teach. Those who can't teach - or just don't want to - can just sell fake diplomas. Both of Carleen's schools have been shuttered, but while she was open for business:

Prosecutors said she conspired with others to sell fraudulent nursing diplomas and transcripts to people who hadn't completed the required coursework, enabling them to take national nursing board examinations.

Between April 2018 and October 2025, Noreus was responsible for providing 2,956 fraudulent nursing diplomas through the schools, prosecutors said.

Of those, around 2,274 passed nursing board examinations, allowing them to obtain nursing licenses and work as nurses in Florida and across the country, authorities said. (Source: NBC Miami)

The fake credentials she provided were for RN's, LPN's, and for BSN degrees. And goody good that the majority of those who short-cutted their way out of nursing school managed to pass their licensing exams. But baddy bad that they did so without completing important coursework AND without critical clinical experience. 

As a result of her "work," Noreus - who pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering - is facing lengthy prison time once she's sentenced. Not clear what happens to the 2,274 certified nurses who passed their tests with flying colors. Presumably their licenses will be revoked and their careers will crash and burn.

Noreus was one of 13 defendants in this case, which was brought by the DOJ's South Florida District. It's certainly good to know that the DOJ is still capable of focusing on something other than selective persecutions prosecutions of those on Trump's enemies list. 

This prosecution is part of the second phase of Operation Nightingale (such a great name!) "a nationwide effort targeting fraudulent nursing diploma schemes operated by for-profit nursing schools in South Florida." (During Operation Nightingale's first phase, 30 miscreants were convicted.) Florida, huh? Why am I not surprised.

“Nursing licenses must be earned through education, training, and demonstrated competence, not purchased through fraud,” said U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones for the Southern District of Florida. “By selling thousands of fraudulent diplomas and transcripts, the defendant undermined the integrity of the nursing profession and our healthcare system. The Southern District of Florida remains committed to holding accountable those who profit by corrupting professional licensing processes and placing the public at risk.” (Source: US Department of Justice)

Nurses. RNs. LPNs. BSNs. PAs. NPs. 

I respect and admire nurses. Sure, they're not all Florence Nightingales. Not all Edith Clavells. (A WWI nurse-martyr.) They're not all the nurse Cherry Ames-es, the nurse Sue Bartons, of the insipid book series I consumed as a kid. Some nurses are no doubt Nurse Ratchets.

But to me, they've been the human and humane face of medicine. The ones who have more time and patience for their patients.  

I have had nothing but wonderful experiences with nurses, both personally and through second-hand observation. One of the most supportive professionals we encountered during my husband's long cancer fight was the NP who worked with Jim's oncologist. During one particularly gruesome period near Jim's end of life, I emailed Kelly at 5 a.m. on her day off, hoping that she'd get back to me the next day. She got back to me at 5:15 a.m.

My ortho is a PA. When needs be, he consults with the orthopedic surgeon he works with to review XRays and MRIs, and I have 100% trust in him. 

Sure, those 2,274 wannabe nurses passed their licensing exams. Who knows what prompted them to participate in this scam. They ran out of money. They flunked an exam and didn't want to take a course over. Who knows?

But I wouldn't want one of them showing up at my bedside, that's for sure.

I guess this is just what happens when you put the profit motive first. 

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Image Source: Daily Nurse

Good news for those who aren't a whiter shade of pale

A couple of weeks ago, I had what is likely my final visit with my dermatologist.

I was there for a periodic skin check, but the doctor found nothing to be worried about. On the one hand, I have very fair skin and skin cancer hits us pale faces more often than it does those with darker skin tones . On the other, although I did suffer a couple of hurty-hurt sunburns when I was a young fool, I've never been much of a sunworshipper. And there's no immediate family history of squamous cell carcinoma (vs. "good" skin cancer, which is basal cell) or melanoma. Plus I'm old. So unless I spot some worrying skin lesion, there's no need to come back. Ever. 

I do have vitiligo, an autoimmune condition that causes white patches to appear on my body. Mine are on my legs, arms, and armpits (of all things), but because I'm so light-skinned those white blotches just blend right in and aren't noticeable unless you're looking. And trust me, ain't nobody looking. Except Dr. Angel - my dermatologist's real name - and she has to look to find it.

Vitiligo can, of course, be awful, especially if it appears on your face. And especially if you have dark skin. For some vitiligo sufferers, it's obvious and disfiguring. 

Anyway, skin tone matters for a lot of reasons, and some of them - like the likelihood of cancer and the impact of vitiligo - are medical. And it's not just in medically obvious ways.  Skin tone is used to help "diagnose low blood oxygen, neonatal jaundice, and hospital-acquired pressure injuries [i.e., bedsores]." And most of the diagnostic tools that look at skin tone have been oriented towards white people. 

There was a standard for measuring skin tone, used from the mid-1970's on, that covered a six point spectrum. But four points on the scale were for those with light-colored skin, with two additional points for brown and Black skin. But those two points didn't incorporate the full spectrum of possibililties.

Enter the Monk Skin Tone (MST) scale which was developed by Ellis Monk  - a Harvard sociology professor - in 2019. Some

of Monk's academic work had focused on colorism (prejudice, often intra-race, towards those with darker skin).  Encouraged by colleagues and his wife (because behind every great man...), Monk began working on a more expansive way of evaluating skin color.

The sociologist ended up developing a 10-tone, open-source scale aimed at improving inclusivity in skin tone classification across technological and clinical domains...Its original form, with colored spheres, reflected a much wider range of skin tones. But Monk settled on a 10-point scale for pragmatic reasons. “Ten points are pretty much the breaking point for having people be able to consistently use it as a subjective scale,” he said. (Source: Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences)

The MST is being used beyond medical applications, and is improving search engine, driverless car, and facial recognition technologies. Facial recognition tecnology in particular is notoriously less effective in differentiating one Black person from the next - which has resulted in many innocent people being accused of crimes they had nothing to do with. Etc. 

But the MST is now being adopted by the medical industry. And this cost-effective device is saving lives. 

Among the life-saving applications are pulse oximeters - you know, the little finger thingies we all bought for ourselves during COVID - which:

...measure blood oxygen by analyzing light as it passes through the skin via a small finger clamp. However, darker skin absorbs light differently than lighter skin. Because pulse oximeters originally used white skin as the standard, people with darker skin would get inaccurate readings. And because these inaccurate readings skewed higher, many people with dangerously low blood oxygen ended up with too-high readings, meaning they would appear to have normal blood oxygen.

Then there are bedsores.  

The[se] injuries are traditionally under-diagnosed in darker-skinned people, but a laminated badge displaying the MST scale, along with 15 minutes of training, is helping nurses recognize more incidents of HAPIs. A 2026 study finds the badge, which costs approximately $2, reducing these injuries by 94 percent at a 900-bed Level I trauma hospital in Los Angeles.

Because of his work, Monk has been "awarded the National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award. Monk was the first sociologist to win this $2.5 million grant." Unfortunately, the grant was canceled in 2025, presumably by DOGE know-nothings. Presumably because Monk's work is about color. And we can't have that. So what if a bunch of old Black folks get bedsores? Solving that problem is so patently unfair to whites. 

Despite termination of his NIH grant, Monk intends to continue this work, having seen applications for common medical tests such as EKGs and EEGs, which also take measurements through the skin.

“People have been operating blind to color,” he said. “You can’t do that, because the skin is your interface with the technological world.”

Good for Professor Ellis Monk. And good news for those among us who aren't, like me, a whiter shade of pale. 

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Image Source: Research Gate

For the record, although some days I feel as pallid as an A, I'm pretty sure I'm a B on the scale. 

Release the kratom? What's it worth to you?

Although I've been known to pop a mini-can of Diet Coke to jolt me out of my longing for an afternoon snooze, I've never imbibed an energy-boosting drink. No Jolt. No Red Bull. No Monster Energy. (Seriously, who needs the energy of a monster?)

Most energy drinks are, like my mini-can of Diet Coke, caffeinated. Just a lot more potently caffeinated than my mini DC.

But there's another category of energy boosters - often sold in gas stations to help drivers ward of falling asleep at the wheel -  that use kratom leaves, which are also supposed to be useful for painkilling.

Admittedly, there aren't many things beyond water you can put in your mouth without risk of something or other. And even bottled water is so unregulated that there could be something no good lurking in every gulp of H2O. But "kratom has been linked to liver toxicity, seizures and thousands of deaths." 

From 2020 through 2024, kratom was found in the system of more than 5,200 people who died of drug overdoses, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention based on death certificates and other official reports. Though often found in combination with other drugs, one study determined that those using kratom carried a sixfold increase in the risk of overdose death. (Source: NY Times)

Oh that...(Guess I won't be looking for kratom gummies to kill the pain in my paining knees.)

Despite linkages to things like death, there are many kratom proponents working to make sure that kratom-based supplements and drinks aren't regulated. One of these proponents is Markwayne Mullin, former senator R-Oklahoma and now Secretary of Homeland Security, who was a big booster of kratom boosting before being tapped to run DHS (and I'm guessing since as well). 

Was good ol' boy Markwayne doing this out of the goodness of his heart? Well, bless your heart for thinking the best, but Mullin was in fact an investor in Botanic Tonics, a kratom company, to the tune of as much as $1M. 

Last summer, while still a senator, Mullin:

...endorsed proposed federal restrictions on more powerful synthetic supplements that compete with kratom for shelf space. In explaining his position, Mr. Mullin pointed to a history of addiction in his family, though health experts say kratom products have also been shown to be addictive.

Oh that... 

Jerry Ross is Botanic Tonics founder, and he's been spearheading kratom-related lobbying efforts. Successes include getting the FDA to remove info on its kratom webpage regarding a case against Botanic, and then - what the hell - getting the DOJ to drop the case entirely. (I won't mention that Jerry Ross is an ex-con, because I really do believe in rehabilitation.)

All this successful "advice-giving" don't come cheap:

Mr. Kennedy, as health secretary, called the governor of Ohio to try to head off a state ban on kratom in the fall of 2025. Months later, Botanic Tonics donated $1 million to a political committee associated with Mr. Kennedy.

Ross also donated over $400K to the RNC.

The lobbyists, of course, pooh-pooh the implication that they're up to anything untoward. 

The CEO of a rival kratom company has said that "'It’s not pay to play. It’s pay to have conversations. It’s pay to have a chance at the table...I mean, that is the world that we live in.'” 

He's right, of course, but what a hell world. And also upside down world, as the Trump admin promotes risky, unproven products as a means to Make America Healthy Again. (As in healthy back when kids were crippled and killed by polio? MAHA? HAHA!) What, us science?

Speaking of pooh-poohing, it will come as no surprise that the White House (via spokesman Kush Desai) is claiming that it would never be influenced by lobbyists with checkbooks. 

“The only guiding factor behind the Trump administration’s health care policymaking is gold standard science,” he said in a statement. The administration, he added, was working “to get this critical matter correct and ensure the health and safety of Americans.”

I'm going to take their word for it here. It's not like they'd ever sell a pardon or make coin trading on insider info or award an inflated no-bid contract to someone willing to shovel some cash their way. (Only kidding.)

Not that corruption will automatically disappear when these guys are all good and gone, but, man, they are so openly and blatantly coin-operated it ain't even funny.

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Image Source: ClipartMax

ICE, ICE, Baby. (This is absolutely chilling..)

First, it was Paigelynne Gonyea. She's a Syracuse, NY, digital content creator. She's also a poll worker. In June, she was working the state primary election when she got a call from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Gonyea invited them into the polling place - there were no voters there at the time - where they were not supposed to go.  Only voters and election workers are allowed in. But Gonyea felt that the Syracuse Central Library polling location was a safer place to have her close encounter with ICE than being on the outside. Quite reasonably, she had a bit of fear about being roughed up, dragged off, or worse.

The agents handed Gonyea a form letter that says they were investigating threats made against ICE personnel. The form says the agents had identified an Instagram account they believe breaks federal law. They asked her to remove and discontinue the behavior, according to the unsigned document she shared on Instagram.

“This notice officially informs you that it is unlawful to threaten to assault, kidnap, and/or murder a federal official or that federal official’s immediate family member with the intent to impede, intimidate, and/or interfere with the federal official’s duties or retaliate against a federal official due to the performance of their duties,” the document said.

The document said she could be subject to both federal and state prosecution. (Source: Syracuse.com)

The agents were armed with copies of some of her social media posts - and her driver's license. 

Trouble was, Paigelynne Gonyea hadn't exactly been threatening much of anything. She had named the individual who shot and killed Renee Good - his name was by then public knowledge - and suggested that he should be indicted. Seems to me to be a pretty common opinion among folks who oppose the violent tactics ICE has been known to employ. 

The agents accused her of doxxing, but Gonyea didn't recall giving out anyone's address or phone number: just his name, which was all over the news. ICE counterclaims that she had, indeed, posted the guy's address. Mostly, I'm thinking that it tends to be pretty easy to find someone's address on the 'net. Still, it might be ill-advised to publicize it, given how many loosely wired people there are out there who might take a listing of someone's address as license to go after them. Best not play that game. And god knows I wouldn't want someone putting my particulars out on social media. Let someone google for themselves if they feel the need to know.

But I do have this question: if information is in the public domain, how is putting it out there - however nasty and ill-intentioned -  a crime?

The entire episode was so far-fetched that a Republican election official thought it was a hoax, and called a contact at DHS to see whether it was legit. It was.

Things got even worse for another Upstate NY resident. 

David Streever is a journalist/tech marketing guy. His wife is an Episcopalian priest. They live with their two kids in Rochester, NY. 

When the ICE agents showed up on his doorstep - the same day as their encounter with Gonyea - Streever wasn't home. He was in Finland with his older child, visiting an amusement park. But he saw the agents on his phone via his doorbell camera app - Yay, technology! There's no escape! - and the agents did speak with his wife, home with their little one. 

The two federal agents told Streever’s wife they had come Tuesday afternoon to deliver a warning letter about an email Streever had sent in January to Todd Lyons, then the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (Source: Syracuse.com)

In the email, Streever - undestandably upset about the killing of Renee Good, of Alex Pretti - had compared Lyons to Reinhard Heydrich, a notorious Nazi who was monstrous even by monstrous Nazi standards. He wrote to Lyons that:

“You will never know peace. You will seek to lose yourself, to escape the burden of knowing the truth about yourself. But wherever you go, you will find yourself. You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth.”

Are we no longer allowed to tell those in high places what we think of them? 

If anything, it strikes me that Streever is assuming the best of Lyons: that he has a conscience, and that what ICE is doing is going to live with him forever. 

Anyway, a couple of days later, Streever and his little girl headed home. After landing at JFK, they headed off to a hotel to crash before heading back to Rochester. 

At 9:55 p.m., the front desk rang his hotel room. A special agent named Trevor Pitts had come looking for him, the staff said. The hotel staff did not tell the agent that Streever and his daughter were upstairs, Streever said. The agent left his card.

Now Streever was really creeped out: How did the U.S. Department of Homeland Security know he was in a hotel in New York City? And why was his email from January suddenly so urgent? 

With a bit of googling, Streever discovered Paigelynne Gonyea, and, inspired by her speaking out about her meet up with ICE, decided to go public as well.  

“A threat is when someone tells someone else that they’re going to do a thing to them, and there’s nothing in the email of what I will do to him,” he said. “It’s really about how he will feel and what his boss will do [i.e., 'even Trump will turn on you'], which I think was right on both counts.”

Bad enough showing up on his doorstep, but tracking him from his vaction in Finland to his airport hotel at JFK? Absolutely chilling. 

Streever and Gonyea aren't mad bombers. They're not threatening death and destruction. They're exercising their rights - and courageously opposing what they view as terrible behavior on the part of a terrible regime. 

Like pretty much everyone else in this country, I'm all in favor of ICE going after the bad guys: immigrants (here legally or not) who are committing heinous crimes. By all means, get rid of the gang bangers, the drug runners, the bad actors. (Note: but still don't deprive them of their rights and use violence where not needed.] But that's not what they're doing. In their eagerness to meet their deportation goals, the government's catching all sorts of folks in their dragnets. The vast majority have no criminal record. Many are trying to pursue legal avenues to stay here. Many have been here since they were kids and know no other life. A few weeks back, they even rounded up a Catholic nun on her way to Mass. 

Pro tip: if you don't want someone to compare you to a Nazi, don't act like a Nazi.  

As of this writing, Gonyea is exploring her legal options. Streever is suing DHS/ICE. Good!

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Image Source: Homeland Security Employee Gift Shop

It was an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, 4-inch Hermes bagatini

One of the more annoying and/or idiotic things to emerge in the post-9/11, post-shoe-bomber has been the ever-evolving bag policies at concert and sports venues.

Last month, I went to the Springsteen Hope and Dreams concert at the Boston Garden (technically, it's the TD Garden, formerly the Fleet Center, and originally - at least at that location - the Boston Garden, which it will remain for me forever and ever, unless I'm just calling it The Garden).

Naturally, I checked in on the bag policy and found out that you're now restricted to a 4"x 6"x 1.5" bag. Not much you can fit in there. Good thing I don't wear makeup. Good thing I no longer have to carry tampons.

Fortunately, it was cold and rainy, so I was wearing a raincoat with pockets ample enough to hold my phone, mini-wallet, kleenex and lip balm. Not to mention my personal workaround for all venues: a tiny fold up grocery tote that unfolds large enough to fit everything I've stuffed in my pockets, plus clothing items: scarf, hat, gloves, sweater. 

The Garden, with its eye on the $ prize, lets you tote in a shopping bag if you bought gear at the Boston ProShop.

Back to cold and rainy: when I checked on the bag policy, I also checked on the umbrella policy. No surprise, you can't bring an umbrella in, which is admittedly not an irrational prohibition. After all, everyone could decide to open their brolly up. Mayhem! Or use it as a weapon. 

But what was great about the info page on the umbrella policy was the suggestion that The Garden offered: Wear a raincoat! Wear a plastic poncho! Wow, never would have thought of either of those. Thanks for the most excellent advice. (This reminded me of the old Cool Whip ad in which folks asked "Sarah Tucker" how she made Pudding in a Cloud, which was a bowl of Cool Whip with pudding plunked in the middle. Even someone who'd never been in a kitchen in their life should have been able to figure out the plot there.)

At Gillette Stadium, where the Patriots play and where I last saw Bruce and the East Street Band a couple of years ago, you can bring in a 12"x12"x6" bag. But it MUST be clear. If you don't want to spring the big bucks for a clear stadium bag, you can use a 1 gallon freezer bag.

And if you want to conceal the fact that you're carrying a couple of tampons, you can use an opaque 6.5"x4.5" wristlet or clutch. (Ignore the fact that a clutch, of whatever size, is the least practical handbag ever invented.)

Fenway Park also allows a 12"x12"x6" bag, and while they recommend clear, it doesn't have to be, as long as it has only one compartment. Which means you can bring your size-M Longchamp bag. I love me my Longchamp bag, but its drawback is - you guessed it - that it only has one compartment. Peculiarly, even if the dimensions are okey-dokey, you can't bring a duffle or backback style handbag.

Other than the fact that I've just been to a bag-restricted concert, and that I'm heading to another one (Noah Kahan at Fenway) in a few weeks, the reason I'm thinking about bag size is that I recently read about a bag that Kim Kardashian used when she was attending a show on Broadway.

Kardashian carried a minuscule metal Hermès Kelly bag that measures 11 centimeters wide (just over 4 inches) and 7 centimeters tall (just under 3 inches). She was fortunately flanked by security guards who could hold her belongings, as the impossibly tiny bag is only big enough to fit a few credit cards.

The purse a limited-edition sterling silver Kellymorphose Sac Bijou released in 2021 as part of a jewelry collection based on the French brand’s iconic handbags.

Designed by Pierre Hardy, the fully articulated piece can be worn as a necklace or — à la Kardashian — held daintily by the hand. It’s currently available to purchase on the luxury secondhand market for between $84,000 and $100,000. (Source: Page Six)

I suppose if you have it, spend it, bu $100K for an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, 4-inch Hermes bagatini, even if it is fully articulated? That is just insane - and makes the $5.5K cost of the vintage dress Kardashian wore (which I rather like) seem just a step or two above some throwaway garment bought on Temu. 

But Kimmy's a bag lady, with a collection that includes many Hermès bags, Kellys and others, and a Birkin "which can fetch up to half a million dollars at resale." Gulp. 

Yes, I know that Kim Kardashian does some good in the world. She seems sincerely committed to criminal justice reform and has other philanthropic involvements as well. But $100K for a bag that could only hold a tampon if it were OB not Tampax (if you know, you know)? 

The world is truly gone an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny bit crazy. 

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Semiquincentennial? I celebrated on June 18th.

I don't remember all that much about my personal celebration of our nation's bicentennial. The year before, on April 19, 1975, I'd gone to the reenactment of the Battle of Lexington, which was quite enjoyable. The night before, my cousin Barbara hosted a big spaghetti supper and pajama party - there must have been a couple dozen of us at her house, occupying every nook and cranny with our sleeping bags - and at dawn we all descended on Lexington Green. Patriots fired at Redcoats. President Gerald Ford was there. It was more or less the kickoff of the 200th anniversary of the United States. 

Eleven days later, the last of the American military was helicoptered out of Saigon, and the Vietnam War was officially over.

On to the next. 

In 1976, I remember plenty of hoopla, but I wasn't all that interested. I had a crappy job, a new boyfriend, and I was still pissed at the government over the Vietnam War, which I'd spent my college years and beyond protesting. 

The Pops concert on the Esplanade had an immense audience, but I wasn't in the crowd. That event, which had previously been lowkey and pleasant, was turning into a thing. No thanks. Did I watch on my little b&w TV? Yes/no/maybe.

The following week, I did see Queen Elizabeth buzz by in her limo when she was on her bicentennial visit to the colonies of yore. I may have even gotten a royal wave. 

I have been dreading, our 250th, the semiquincentennial. I have been dreading seeing Trump taking ownership of it, ego branding it, descretating it. As he did the White House lawn with the tawdry, pay per view UFC event. As he did when he sat there smirking while one of the idiot, punch-drunk racist fighters used a slur against Michelle Obama. As he did when he destroyed the beautiful reflecting pool - paying an inept and/or corrupt contractor a super-inflated fee to botch the job. Trump just had to have it done by the Fourth of July. Well, the contractor sure managed to f it totally up well before our birthday.

I have been dreading the big day-of splash, which Trump has taken over, with promises to turn it into a "classic" Trump rally. That should be uplifting. Me-me-me. More me-me-me. Bragging about saving the country from the destruction wrought by Biden and Obama, being an even more powerful leader than Stalin and Hitler. (Which he has actually done recently.) Grievances, both petty and ginormous. Name calling. (His latest nickname is for Senator Jon Ossoff, who he's dubbed Oss(jerk)off. Ho,ho, ho.) Blame gaming. DJT can't manage to settle on whether Obama or Biden is more responsible for destroying the country. Or maybe it's all us Dumocrats. Get it? Get it? Democrats are Dum(b). Har, har,hardy, har har. (So, Mr. President, is there a "d" in "dumb" of not?)

Mostly I've been "celebrating" the semiquin by losing sleep, fretting over whether we're going to make it as a democracy for the next 900-something days, let alone the next 250 years. 

And then I watched the ceremony opening the Obama Presidential Center, and realized that this - and not Trump's demented, racist, misogynist, dictator-worshipping, ill-informed, stone-stupid, and lying, lying, lying blather and pronouncements - is what our country about. This is what is worth celebrating.

By the time Jennifer Hudson finished her beautiful rendition of The Star Spangled Banner, a song that usually doesn't do all that much for me, I had tears in my eyes. From then on out, everything was pure gold. 

The performances - by A-listers AND members of the community - were lovely, stirring, pride-inducing. I knew I was going to like John Legend, but who knew I was going to swoon over Marc Anthony? 

And the speeches by Michelle Obama and Barack Obama were brilliant. Touching, moving, heartfelt, true, measured, uplifting, intelligent. Oh, what we have been missing. Instead of rhetoric that moves the heart, the mind, the soul, we've been subjected to lies and incoherence. Imagine any other president badmouthing prior presidents when meeting with world leaders at the G7?

Speaking of prior presidents, I was very happy to see George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Joe Biden there, along with their wives. I wasn't much of a W fan, but I never doubted for a moment that he loved our country and did what he thought was best. I just thought that most of the time he was dead wrong. (And I'm thrilled that Trump wasn't invited. A well deserved dis, given that he's been crapping all over Obama and his Center, including sharing a meme that showed the Center in a couple of years time, turned into a trash-strewn homeless encampment.) 

Without even seeing a program, I knew that the last two performers would be Bruce Springsteen, who sang an un-banger version of Land of Hope and Dreams, and that Stevie Wonder would close the show out. And bring down the the house. 

I had to leave for an appointment during Stevie Wonder's part, but listened to the live stream in my Uber. (It's an appointment I normally would have walked to, but I didn't want to miss any of Obama's speech, so...)

This is the America I want to see: intelligent, inclusive, proud, honest, hopeful. This is the America I want to love. This was my semiquincentennial.

Oh, on the Fourth, I'll no doubt read the Declaration of Independence, which I always do. I'll no doubt put on the Pops concert, and watch the fireworks out my window. Or out my sister Kathleen's window, which is a perfect view. 

But the Obamas gave me all the semiquincentennial celebration I need. 

These are the words that are on the Center. They're from Barack Obama's speech at the Edmund Pettus Bridge commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery march for Civil Rights. 

You are America. Unconstrained by habit and convention. Unencumbered by what is, ready to seize what ought to be. For everywhere in this country, there are first steps to be taken, there is new ground to cover, there are more bridges to be crossed. America is not the project of any one person. The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word ‘We.’ ‘We The People.’ ‘We Shall Overcome.’ ‘Yes We Can.’ That word is owned by no one. It belongs to everyone. Oh, what a glorious task we are given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours.”

Ah, the audacity of hope!

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Image Source: People

Spies are everywhere. (So glad I'm out of the fray.)

A few weeks ago, my sister Trish retired. A week before her big day, she turned 67. Since she always had a part-time job in high school, and throughout college, she figures she'd been working pretty much steadily for 50+ years. She'd spent 30 of those years with the company she retired from, and might have been convinced to stay on a while longer if it had not been for the company's mean-spirited decision to totally do away with work from home a few days a week and return to a full five-days in the office mandate.

Interestingly, a number of her colleagues of similar age and tenure with the company are retiring for much the same reason - even though most employees worked fully from home without any productivity issues. 

You won't get any argument here - or from my sister Trish - that being in the office at least some of the time is important for a lot of reasons - including, for many, the desire to have the in-person camaraderie and social-life-at-work aspects. (A positive for both me and my sister during our careers.) But Trish had an onerous commute and once she got to the office (which had even done away with cubicles - let alone offices - for the masses - for a fully open concept approach) none of the members of her team were there. The people she worked most closely with were in NY, London, Atlanta...

The pay, bonus plan, and benefits were pretty good at Trish's company (where, as it happens, I had worked many years ago when it was pretty much the same entity, but as part of a much smaller corporation and with different ownership). And Trish's work over the decades had been reasonably interesting and challenging, and she had some terrific colleagues. But there were reasons beyond the WFH fatwa to want out of this company, of course. The pressure to deploy AI. The Trumpian senior management. (A former executive, who is also the spouse of the company's CEO, holds a senior position in the Trump administration.) And the creepy electronic surveillance. Badge swipe to use the bathroom, anyone?

But as far as I know, Trish's former place of employ was not using emotion AI (alternate term, affective computing) to analyze the personality types of its employees:

Some products analyze video of meetings or job interviews or focus groups; others listen to audio for pitch, tone, and word choice; still others can scan chat transcripts or emails and spit out a report about worker sentiment. Sometimes, the emotion AI is baked in as a feature in multiuse software, or sold as part of an expensive analytics package marketed to businesses. But it’s also available as a stand-alone product, and the barrier to entry is shin-high. (Source: The Atlantic)

There is nothing new about using software to monitor employees. For a long while, there have been apps that measure how many keystrokes someone sitting at a computer is making to assess whether they're working. Or at least pecking at the keys. On the emotion tracking side, call centers have long (notoriously) "listened in" on customer service reps to track tone of voice and word choice. 

What's changing is who's being monitored.

In 2022, the writer Cory Doctorow theorized about what he called the “Shitty Technology Adoption Curve”: Extractive technologies, he wrote, come first to people in precarious circumstances—like, say, low-wage jobs—before they are refined and normalized and brought to people in greater positions of power. “Each disciplinary technology,” he later wrote, “starts with people way down on the ladder, then ascends the ladder, rung by rung.”

And so emotion AI is working it's way to the top, and has stepped onto the white-collar rung.  

Shitty Technlogy galore!

The Slack integration Aware advertises its ability to continuously monitor messages for “sentiment and toxicity”; Azure, Microsoft’s cloud-computing software, also allows employers to, theoretically, use AI to batch-analyze workers’ chat messages. MorphCast’s Zoom extension tracks, in real time, meeting participants’ attention, excitement, and positivity. The emotion-AI company Imentiv advises clients on applying emotional analysis to the job-interview process, promising employers detailed analysis of candidates’ emotional engagement, intensity, and valence, as well as personality type. A number of HR companies are turning toward AI that applies sentiment analysis to employee surveys. Framery, which makes soundproof phone pods and sells them to companies such as Microsoft and L’Oreal, has tested outfitting its chairs with biosensors capable of measuring heart rate, breathing rate, and nervousness.

Years ago, I had a colleague who was criticized by his (jerk of a) boss for his terrible body language at a meeting. What he had been doing was leaning in, nodding when he agreed with something, and offering positive input. Trouble was, the meeting was with his boss's enemy, who was presenting the plan for a new product, and she felt he should have been leaning back and glowering with his arms crossed. (Although I've had a few exchanges and, early on, a couple of lunches, with my former colleague over the years - make that decades - since we last worked together, I hadn't thought about this incident, or this idiotic boss, in years. She's still out there, only now she's out West selling insurance.) 

Of course, there's nothing new about personality typing in the workplace, either. Forty years ago, when I was working at Wang Labs - of all awful places - my team had an offsite in which we all took the Myers-Briggs assessment. (INTJ, baby.) It was supposed to help us figure out how to get along with folks with different personality types. Turns out most of us were brainy, analytical introverts, and we all got along just fine, thank you.

This was by no means the only personality-typing test I took part in over the years. It must have been a big corporate off-site dealio in the 1980's and 1990's. 

So people have been reading employee emotions for eons. But the software spying is something new.

But, blessedly, none of it was emotion AI. 

When it comes to emotion AI, there are plenty of skeptics. Unless there are safety or health reasons for it, the EU has banned workplace use of emotion AI. 

Good for the EU!

Needless to say, we won't see any similar pushback in the States anytime soon. That said, I can see some states trying to regulate it.

But it's gut wrenching to see the dignity, privacy, and autonomy of workers so eroded by the masters of the universe buying into whatever the tech bros are selling.

Spies are indeed everywhere. I'm so glad I'm out of the fray, and delighted for my sister Trish that she is, too. Who wants AI capturing every grimace and eye-roll. 

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Image Source: MadIsMadFunny