DL Open Thread: Sunday, September 8, 2024

Absolute Must-Read Of The Day:  The Prince Documentary You Might Never See.  You’ll learn more about Prince from this article than you ever knew.  Warts and all.

Kamala Harris And Penzey’s Spices–Perfect Together.  BTW, she’s a serious cook:

Ms. Harris bought five different spices at the store, according to her campaign: Creamy Peppercorn Dressing Base, Fox Point Seasoning, Trinidad Lemon-Garlic Marinade, Turkish Seasoning, and Tuscan Sunset Salt Free Italian Seasoning.

For those of you unfamiliar with the mission of Penzey’s:

What if your business, just by being its best self, could make a whole lot of the problems the world faces a chunk easier to solve? Given that possibly wouldn’t you owe it to everyone to try your best to do that?

Customer B.B. writes: “Penzeys makes everything better.” We noticed that ourselves pretty early on, and at first didn’t quite know what to make of it. But for some time now, without coming right out and saying it, we’ve been running our business as best we can to encourage the kindness and compassion that’s needed to take on the world’s problems and the resolve needed to overcome the obstacles in the way to solving them.

Now, for a host of reasons, I think the time has come to admit what we are actually up to and come right out and say it. So here goes. We are trying to make the world a better place. And with your help there are days where we actually seem to be doing that. Our goal now is to have more of those days.

Part of all this works because as a Spice business what we do is so intertwined with history as to be almost inseparable. In a world of constant change and disconnect, the spices we use and how we use them really do open a door to those that came before us and the hard-won wisdom that they learned.

But maybe the greatest value of Penzeys isn’t in what we connect you to, but instead in what you connect us to. Through you we connect to humankind’s million-year tradition of caring enough to cook and all the good things those million years of cooking have set in motion.

Before cooking, strength was the power to drive others away. With cooking, strength became the power to welcome others in. Through cooking we learned the world becomes a better place when we care about others. That was true one million years ago. That will be true one million years from now. It is this strength to stand up for what is right and speak out against what isn’t that Penzeys seeks to grow.

Plus we have really good Spices and Seasonings.

Yes they do.

Another Media Fail:

But it is not just history that Maga wants to silence and it isn’t just Maga that has acquiesced. Because we have not normalized the important conversation about our racial history and its present consequences, the dangerous nexus between anti-democratic forces in our nation and its racist foundations is among the least talked about dimensions of our slide into fascism.

The anti-woke assault on race-conscious history and knowledge and against the hard-fought policies to promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is extremely dangerous, not only to people of color, but to stakeholders of racial justice and democracy. Despite the intentional misdirection, the war against woke is not just a war against critical race theory, but it is a war against Black history and the entire infrastructure built out of the civil rights movement. It is a war against our multiracial democracy that too many are unable to name. And because assaults that cannot be seen or named cannot be fought, the consequences are disastrous.

The mainstream media contribute to our collective incapacity to wrestle with the forces that continue to bedevil our democracy. In coverage of the January 6 insurrection, the racist and white nationalist underbelly that informs the mantra “we want our country back” is merely a footnote in the story of how we almost lost our democracy. This erasure denies the centrality of the racist narrative that defines who this nation belongs to, who gets to govern and who gets to belong.

Exclusive notions of who belongs and who doesn’t are fundamental features of fascist regimes. Yet in the drama unfolding in the United States, the racial narratives that continue to target racial others to receive the wrath of disgruntled masses escape the grasp of those who now decry the collapse of our democracy. The media’s widespread reluctance to confront the racist underbelly of the “big lie” obscures the impossibility of saving our democracy without addressing racial denialism.

What You Don’t Know About Your Insurers’ Ghost Network Could Kill You.  We have an elected insurance commissioner, don’t know why.  Maybe he could do something about it?  I mean, if he’s not too busy collecting campaign contributions from those he’s supposed to regulate?:

It’s hard to know if your health insurance plan is as good as advertised. You pay a monthly premium to access a network of health providers. But call the numbers in your provider directory, and you’re bound to find ones who can’t — or won’t — see you.

These errors are at the heart of a ghost network. Some providers have moved, retired or even died; others left insurance networks because of low pay and intense scrutiny. Even though these providers no longer accept your insurance, their names may remain in the directory. When that happens, policyholders are left to believe that the plan has more options than actually exist.

“Any inaccuracy constitutes a ghost network,” said Abigail Burman, a consumer protection attorney who studies provider directory errors. “This is basic information. It needs to be right.”

Insurers’ failures to correct these errors have led to dire consequences for people seeking mental health care, as demonstrated by a recent ProPublica investigation of one man’s months of struggle to access treatment. Because of the widespread nature of ghost networks, some policyholders are more likely to pay out-of-network costs and face a greater chance of treatment delays — if they get treatment at all.

But insurers haven’t had to make it a priority. Simon Haeder, a Texas A&M University professor who studies ghost networks, said that insurers have “very little incentive” to closely monitor directories. Unless tougher regulations are passed, he said, policyholders will continue to struggle with directories full of “inconsistent, outdated or incomplete data.”

Not likely something a laissez faire insurance commissioner funded by the insurance lobbyists and Big Pharma would spearhead.  I’m telling you, that position should be appointed.  It serves no public purpose to have politicians in that role.

What do you want to talk about?