Dear Patient,
In our continual efforts to provide you with the confusing level of treatment you’ve come to expect, we’d like to introduce you to HellthChase, our new cumbersome and contactless check-in solution.
HellthChase invites and obligates you to engage in the unpaid data entry of your health information. Once you’re set up, you can complete a variety of other activities online without having to interact with a human regarding important medical care.
What kinds of activities can I complete on HellthChase?
You can attempt such tedious tasks as:
Are my records secure?
Yes. All personal data entered online is completely hacker-proof. Did you know that prior to web-based recordkeeping, paper records were constantly being snagged from doctors’ offices by cat burglars?
Is that true?
No, but it’s a narrative that HellthChase says inspires instant cooperation from technophobic patients.
Given that I can complete forms at home before my appointment, will HellthChase save me time?
Oh, god, no. HellthChase convinced us to purchase off-brand digital tablets that our receptionists will hand you at check-in. The tablets love to freeze and time out, which allows you to mindfully watch a digital hourglass (HellthChase likes to say they put the “patient” in “Patient Portal”). Once our Wi-Fi has caught up and the screen refreshes or starts over at the beginning, you will get a chance to confirm or re-enter any information you previously completed before your appointment.
Wait, if I have to hold a tablet… didn’t you say it was contactless?
Well, you don’t have to touch the receptionist’s hand; you just have to take the tablet. Technically, you aren’t making contact with a human, which is our ultimate goal. However, holding a tablet that was held moments earlier by another ill person allows you exposure to healthy germs that will keep your immune system robust.
Will this system connect with patient portal systems my other doctors use so I can have one login?
No. As an American with healthcare, you must have unique passwords for at least twenty bespoke portals, none of which connect with one another.
Did my previous online health records migrate over?
Ha ha ha, what? No. Those were lost in a cloud fire. You can declare yourself at the beginning of a fresh start of your health, or if you were a really anxious nerd and you printed your previous records, you can try entering them on your own (but remember the character limit). Or you may give them to your provider, who will just throw them in the trash.
Two days ago, I requested a prescription refill, but I have not heard back. Should I request a refill via my pharmacy?
No. This double-dipping will create confusion and delay. Just be patient. Doctors may take twenty-four to forty-eight hours to respond, but sometimes take 1,204 hours due to regular software updates to the portal.
I received a scary test result via the portal. Can I please speak with a doctor to confirm I’m not dying?
What are you doing trying to interpret your own test results? Those are not meant for your eyes. Wait for your doctor to message you that everything is fine.
Isn’t the point of the portal to access my information?
The point of the portal is that it’s cool and proves we aren’t afraid to stay on the cutting edge of technology, even when it’s not helpful yet. There are definitely notes our doctors make and see, and you will never know about anything you don’t have access to. You really shouldn’t be looking at anything. Except the HIPAA forms.
I’d prefer not to be texted balances due. Can you mail me a bill instead?
No. One hundred percent of ill Americans, you included, are criminals who plan to never pay their medical balances, so for efficiency, we omit sending detailed paper bills. Instead, the portal bombards you with a series of texts with balance reminders, which is not unlike the harassment of debt collectors. Just trust that the amount we say you owe is correct. Pay immediately, or you will be texted repeated threats and insults, you lazy sack of disease-riddled bones.
Can I opt out of this bullshit?
No, you are obligated to take charge of your well-being with HellthChase. Sign in today to take an active role in getting actively frustrated by your healthcare. Your username is your social security number, and your default password is SucKeR.
San Francisco police have been using drones to catch car break-in suspects and investigate sideshows for months but internal emails show they knowingly broke the law by buying the crime-fighting tech.
Now the San Francisco Police Department is asking city leaders to approve the drones after it ignored warnings from within its ranks that it should have held off. Newly unearthed SFPD emails show the first call for caution came months ago from one of its own policy experts.
About a week before the March 5 election, the SFPD was planning what drones to buy if voters expanded police powers by passing Proposition E. But an SFPD analyst noted that Prop. E alone did not grant the department authority to add drones to its arsenal.
Asja Steeves, SFPD policy division manager, said that even if voters passed the law, it doesn’t excuse the department from abiding by Assembly Bill 481. Authored by then-Assemblyman David Chiu, the 2021 law requires police to get the blessing from city electeds before using new surveillance tools.
“Prop. E does not supersede state law,” Steeves wrote in a Feb. 28 email to department leaders obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and shared with The Standard.
Another concern, which Steeves didn’t address, is that evidence gathered through unauthorized technology could give defense attorneys grounds to challenge cases — including those the SFPD highlighted to justify its drone use.
Steeves also told her colleagues that rushing to buy drones could put the SFPD in the middle of a political controversy.
“If we want to stay out of the political fray and buy drones in order to use them in efficient ways that help the department,” Steeves advised, “we may want to wait until after the election to start the AB 481 approval process.”
The top brass didn’t wait.
Prop. E passed, drones were bought, and the SFPD began openly touting its new gadgets. In a press conference last month, Mayor London Breed and SFPD Chief Bill Scott cited the arrests of suspected car burglars as proof that voters were right to give police more leeway.
But civil liberties advocates say the SFPD is proving Steeves right, too, by now scrambling to get into compliance with state law through a proposal from Supervisor Matt Dorsey, a former police communications boss, that would retroactively legalize the department’s drones.
Matt Guariglia, a policy analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the department is trying to quietly correct a mistake it knew full well it was making.
“This email from Feb. 28 is kind of a smoking gun,” he said, referring to Steeves’ warning. “Their own policy person told them ahead of time to pump the brakes on the drones because they’d need prior approval, yet they immediately started buying these drones despite that warning. Everything they did afterwards was in violation of state law.”
SFPD has yet to respond to The Standard’s request for comment. But it made its case for Dorsey’s proposal at the Sept. 9 Rules Committee and is set to resume that conversation in a continued hearing Monday.
Acting Lt. Eric Batchelder kicked off the discussion last week by rattling off the ways a drone’s-eye-view has helped police. He said the department has six drones that were used in 65 missions — 18 of which led to arrests.
Supervisor Shamann Walton brought up some of the same concerns as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but struggled to get a straight answer.
“So right now, the drones are in use — are we operating in violation of state law?” Walton asked.
Deputy City Attorney Brad Russ affirmed that state law requires city supervisors to sign off on drone use, but argued that when voters passed Prop. E “they stood in the shoes of the board for approval — at least for the first year.”
Yet the department is still seeking retroactive approval, which must pass through the Rules Committee before going to the full board for a vote.
Until then, according to state law, it can’t legally use drones — but SFPD apparently can’t be penalized for that either. AB 481 has no enforcement mechanism beyond admonishment from state authorities or pressure from the public.
John Lindsay-Poland, a writer who advocates for demilitarizing the police through American Friends Service Committee, said SFPD appears to be the only agency in California to use drones without prior approval since AB 481 became law.
That’s more than just a black mark on its reputation, he told supervisors at last week’s hearing.
“A law enforcement agency violating the law sets a bad example for the community,” Lindsay-Poland said, “and puts at legal risk the prosecutions in which drones were used.”
So if my historical sources are telling me the truth…
…and I’m synthesizing the history properly…
…then, in fact, the entire edifice of Western civilization – all the cultural, social, and philosophical structures that define the world in which we live today – can be traced back to a stupid loophole in Roman inheritance law.
NOTE: Everything here is taken either from Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order or from a Livejournal post by the Infamous Brad that I am currently unable to find. I get credit for absolutely nothing, except noticing the connection between Section II and Section III.
I.
What do I mean by “the entire edifice of Western civilization?”
Here, I mean the vague-but-enormous memeplex that can be summed up in the word “individualism.” The thing where each person is understood to be a social unit unto himself, with his own destiny and with rights to his own person, capable of charting an independent path through life. The thing where you pick your own job and your own mate and your own friends and your own hobbies and your own ideals. The thing where “freedom” is even a meaningful concept because we conceive of humans as being potentially free of each other.
Obviously, this whole individualism thing has both a lot of sources and a lot of ramifications. But an absolutely central part of it, something without which it cannot survive or cohere, is economic individualism: the idea that an individual person can own property in his own right, with full and complete title to it, including the right to alienate (sell) it as he pleases. Without that, well, people can’t really act as free individual agents unless they’re prepared to give up all their resources, because all their resources are at least partly controlled by someone else.
[Within any kind of historical economy, anyway. Let’s leave complicated ideas about the post-scarcity future for another discussion.]
The main alternative to individualism is the tribe. Within a tribal system, an individual basically isn’t a meaningful social unit, he is a component of his kinship group. The tribe owns all the property, and you can’t sell it off, because everyone in the tribe (including all those yet to be born) have a claim on it. You have duties to the tribe, and those duties define your life, even if maybe you personally would rather do something else. You are bound to work, and marry, in a way that advances the tribe’s interests. If you have wealth or power, it is incumbent on you to use it in a way that advances the tribe’s interests. You get the idea.
This tribe thing is the default social setup for humans. It dominated most of the great premodern civilizations. In India, pretty much all of society was built around kinship groups (jatis). In the Arab world, tribal ties were always paramount – so much so that basically every successful Arab empire had to use slaves to run the government and the military, just on the grounds that foreigners without families wouldn’t funnel all the empire’s resources to their tribes. The situation in China was a little different, since the kinship groups got kicked in the teeth early by Qin Shi Huangdi’s massive centralized bureaucratic state, but they were always there and always fighting to hang onto what power they could. Etc.
But not in Western Europe. Individualism took root in Western Europe really early. You had contracts, and common law, and alienable property, going back to at least the early Middle Ages. Same goes for the primacy of the nuclear family over the extended family,
and cultural models of the non-family-defined free man. The Enlightenment was building on a very firm foundation.
When people talk about the importance of the Hajnal line, this is the thing that they’re trying to get at.
II.
Why Western Europe, and not anywhere else?
Because, right from its inception, the Roman Catholic Church – and only the Roman Catholic Church, not (for example) any of its Eastern Orthodox counterparts – engaged on a systematic campaign to destroy the family.
…I say that in in a funny way, but it’s true. There were a staggering number of major rulings issued by the early Church that amounted to “kinship groups aren’t allowed to do the things that make them function.” Most famously, cousin marriage was banned, which meant that it was extremely difficult for kinship groups to avoid diffusing into each other and that they couldn’t shore up the most important alliances across generations with family ties. Less famous but also very important was the banning of “Levirate marriage” (the marriage of a widow to her husband’s brother), which is a really useful technology if you want to keep all your tribe members within the tribe. The very fact that the Church pushed hard for the legitimacy of female-owned property was a big part of this, since it meant that kinship groups were risking losing some of their stuff whenever one of their members got married. And all sorts of rules about priestly behavior, including clerical celibacy, meant that priests couldn’t continue to serve as useful assets to their clans.
(Insofar as this stuff didn’t come from the Church directly, it mostly came from lawmaker monarchs like Charlemagne, whose agendas tended to be intertwined with the Church’s agenda.)
OK. So, uh, why was the RCC such an implacable enemy of the kinship-group system?
The short answer is “because it was closely allied with the social subclass of wealthy widows.” Widows tended to give lots and lots of money, and land, to the Church. This didn’t work so well if a widow’s stuff would all just get reappropriated by her husband’s clan. So the Church did everything it could to support a woman’s right to keep her dead husband’s property, and the women reciprocated by donating a hefty proportion of that property.
The question remains, though…why did this particular form of mutual back-scratching manifest only in Catholic territories? Why weren’t the Orthodox churches, or the various Hindu temples, doing exactly the same thing?
III.
It turns out that upper-class Roman men liked younger women. Much younger women. The average patrician wedding involved a man in his late twenties or thirties, or even forties, and a girl in her early teens.
(Brief explanation: as a rule, everywhere, aristocratic men get married when their financial and political prospects have been firmly established. Why would a bride’s family choose to roll the dice? In Rome, for various reasons, this didn’t happen until fairly late. But Roman medicine was super shitty and nutrition was poor, so it was generally desirable to marry the youngest possible woman for fertility-maximizing reasons.)
This meant that, if an upper-class Roman wife managed to avoid dying in childbirth, she was almost certain to outlive her husband by quite a lot. Aristocratic Roman society was filled with youngish widows. There was at least one in basically every patrician family.
The result: as civilizations go, Rome was slightly more concerned than average about the plight of women who’d lost their husbands. Which is important, because traditional kinship-group-based inheritance law is ridiculously terrible for widows. All the husband’s stuff gets reclaimed by the tribe, the widow is left dependent on the mercy of a family that isn’t even her family (as such things are understood), and she is very likely to die or to be functionally enslaved.
So the Romans came up with a kludge. Widows were, technically, allowed to keep their husband’s property in their own name…but there were a ton of restrictions on what they could do with that property. The idea was to keep the great estates intact until the women in question either died conveniently or found a way to get married again.
One of the very few things that propertied widows could do with their money was donate it to temples. Unimpeachably respectable, right?
…except that Rome was infested by this up-and-coming, wildly expansionist cult that was desperate for cash and upper-class recognition.
A whole bunch of the early Roman bishops got their churches off the ground essentially by serving as money-laundering operations for rich widows. The patrician women in question would “donate” vast fortunes to the Christians, with the explicit understanding that they would continue to control most of the money. Even so, the churches were getting vastly more support from this system than they were going to get anywhere else. And some of the widows in question even came to decide that they were actually pious.
So the Church fathers arrived at the conclusion that wealthy widows were their best friends. And the rest is, as they say, history.
In mid-August, with parents prepping children for the new school year and classrooms being swept and decorated to welcome them, Brenda Lebsack was thinking about advertising.
Lebsack, a Santa Ana teacher, wants parents to know that most kids in Santa Ana’s public schools can’t read or do math at grade level.
“My message is, ‘70% of SAUSD students are not meeting reading standards and 80% are not math proficient, yet we have a 91% graduation rate,” Lebsack says. “Our graduation rates keep going up while our academic scores keep going down.”
So, she called a phone number on the city’s bus stops and asked about advertising that fact in Spanish and English on bus benches and shelters. She even proposed including a QR code for a quick link to the government data supporting her claim.
The woman on the other end of the line “told me some of the basic parameters and rules of the ads, basically that they cannot be political,” Lebsack recalls. “She said she would email me information within a day.
Lebsack says she “waited and waited, but the call never came.” So she called again and left a message. The advertising representative texted back, “Good morning, unfortunately the topics are political and we are unable to move further. Thank you for the inquiry. Have a great day!”
It’s unclear how letting parents know that their schools are failing is “political” – Lebsack’s ad copy doesn’t mention a candidate or campaign. But it’s very clear that the First Amendment prohibits Santa Ana – prohibits every American government – from censoring speech, especially when it’s political.
The First Amendment declares, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
From the earliest days of the republic, the courts have said that clear limit on government power applies to every level of government in America – not just to Congress or the president, in other words, but also to state and local governments and districts, from Washington, D.C. to Sacramento and all the way down to Santa Ana and the bus benches Santa Ana owns on the streets of the fourteenth-largest city in America’s most populous state.
Isn’t Brenda Lebsack’s message about her city’s schools protected by the First Amendment?
I put that question to Focus Media Group, the Florida-based company that manages bus bench advertising for Santa Ana and governments all over the country. In an email, Focus Media’s director of municipal relations replied, “We do not set the advertising standards or determine what is deemed acceptable for our clients’ advertisements.”
Who does? “These guidelines are dictated by our municipal contracts, in this case, specifically with the City of Santa Ana,” the spokesperson said. “Currently, we are seeking additional guidance from the city to ensure our actions are fully compliant with their requirements.”
I followed with a question about how Focus makes these decisions. “Does your company interpret those guidelines in order to determine whether advertising content is permissible?” I asked. “Or do you send all advertising content to city staff for their direct approval?”
“Please refer to the comments in my previous email,” he replied. “We have no further comments at this time.”
That time was two weeks ago. After telling me they’d look into the matter, Santa Ana city officials ignored multiple requests for comment.
In the meantime, school has started and Lebsack worries that she’s lost what parents and educators like to call “the teachable moment,” in this case the time just before classrooms opened – when Lebsack might really have drawn the public’s attention to the city’s failing schools.
Santa Ana’s 2022 advertising contract with Focus is available on the city website. And it shows what sure looks like a straightforward violation of the First Amendment. In one place, the contract says bus bench advertising is banned if “the City in its sole discretion deems it offensive to community standards of good taste.” In another, the contract asserts the city’s right to prohibit “messages that are political in nature, including messages of political advocacy, that support or oppose any candidate or referendum, or that feature any current political office holder or candidate for public office, or take positions on issues of public debate.”
For good measure, the contract also bans “images, content or copy related to religion or religious ideas or viewpoints.”
These would seem to be clear violations of the First Amendment, says Julie Hamill, president of the California Justice Center.
“The First Amendment does not allow city officials to exercise unbridled discretion to deny a sign permit on the basis of ambiguous or subjective reasons,” Hamill said. “Santa Ana’s standards include a number of unconstitutional provisions, including a prohibition of signs that ‘promote material which the City in its sole discretion deems offensive to community standards of good taste.’”
As for the city’s “blanket prohibition on religious signs,” Hamill says that’s also bound for a collision with the courts. “That’s a content-based restriction that will not survive a First Amendment challenge,” she says – and then, because she’s an attorney, she helpfully adds a citation (Reed v. Town of Gilbert, 2015) and an explanation of that decision (“Content-based restrictions that target speech based on its communicative content are presumptively unconstitutional and may be justified only if the government proves that they are narrowly tailored to serve compelling state interests.”
And you can practically hear the opening to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly – the spaghetti western surf guitar over Mexican rhythms – when Hamill concludes, “I could highlight every unconstitutional provision in the City’s sign standards but I don’t have all day. I encourage the city to retain a First Amendment lawyer to assist them in revising their sign standards.”
The problem of poor-performing public schools and government censorship isn’t limited to Santa Ana, of course. California ranks No. 1 in per-student spending but near the bottom of student achievement. Hoping to hide that fact, state superintendent of public instruction Tony Thurmond, facing a tough re-election campaign in 2022 delayed the release of nationwide testing until after Election Day. Lance Christensen, Thurmond’s opponent in that race (and my colleague at California Policy Center) told EdSource, “The fact that the department is not willing to publish now suggests that scores will be lower and the current state superintendent does not want to be held accountable for the results.”
Facing public criticism for what looked like a transparently bad magician’s trick, Thurmond released the test results just days before Election Day, but late in the voting cycle. “Monday’s public release of the data almost didn’t happen,” reported the Los Angeles Times. And now that it had, the data showed that “two out of three California students did not meet state math standards, and more than half did not meet English standards.”
More baffled than angry, Lebsack says “it’s just really insane that they just shut us down like that.” She can’t understand why Santa Ana wouldn’t want locals to know what government officials already know – because the data is on government servers, and it shows that the public schools we pay for are failing our children.
Will Swaim is president of the California Policy Center and co-host of National Review’s Radio Free California podcast.
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