Stories behind the stories?

I already ranted about the Benghazi story behind the story that was obvious to everyone except Candy Crowley.

but that isn't the only place where no one wants to discuss the "elephant in the room" because of political correctness.

Why worry about the NSA when Facebook already knows a lot about you?

It would far outstrip any regime past or present in how intimately it records the lives of its citizens. Private conversations, family photos, and records of road trips, births, marriages, and deaths all stream into the company’s servers and lodge there. Facebook has collected the most extensive data set ever assembled on human social behavior. Some of your personal information is probably part of it.

the good news: 

And yet, even as Facebook has embedded itself into modern life, it hasn’t actually done that much with what it knows about us. 

the bad news:

Now that the company has gone public, the pressure to develop new sources of profit (see “The Facebook Fallacy”) is likely to force it to do more with its hoard of information.

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Dirty little secret: it's not just the US who is spying on you.

UKMail story about hackers meeting

Alexander also said the vast majority of countries have similar 'lawful intercept' programs and the NSA's version was an unusually good model because it was subject to U.S. court review, albeit in secret.
Though not as critical as Congress and the courts, the security professionals at Black Hat still represent a key audience for Alexander. 'This is the greatest center of technical gravity in the world,' he said of his audience. 'It is important that we put the facts on the table.'

Related item
Austin Bay gives background on why stealing secrets is wrong and can kill people.

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Google backpacks and pressure cookers, get a visit from the feds.

Visit terrorists in Russia, well, just ignore the Russkis when they warn you, because that would be profiling.

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Zimbabwe's election was a farce.

Well, at least this time they stole the votes, they didn't go around and terrorize voters. Of course, everyone who is competent has already left to work in South Africa.
Remember the movie "District Nine", about discriminating against ET's? that started with a short public service film about prejudice against Zim refugees...

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FARC is slowly dying, but embedded in this strategyPage report on Colombia is this factoid:

In the United States cocaine use is down by nearly half in the last decade. That’s largely because cocaine production is down in South America by nearly as much.

the bad news is that the druggies in the US are now into Meth and prescription drugs.

And we docs are being excoriated for prescribing them wrong, and there is a lot of pressure to "educate" us on how to prescribe narcotics to our hurting patients, even though most of the problems are from stolen drugs or diverted from Mexican pharmacies, or drugs from pill mills...it's easier to blame the docs than the real cause: a society that winks at drug use.

I'm feeling nasty today, so will discuss the questions that that no one in the press seems to have wanted to ask: Did anyone ask if Gosnell was an "affirmative action" medical student who was so incompetent that he couldn't get a good job, so went into the abortion/pill mill business? Back in the 1970's a lot of incompetent students being pushed through our medical school to make up for sins of discrimination; never mind that women and Jews also were discriminated against: we didn't count...
 
Another nasty question vaguely related to this: Ireland passed an bill legalizing abortion after a big kerfuffle about an immigrant who died because the docs wouldn't abort her because of a "Threatened miscarriage" at 17 weeks. The elephant in the room:  LINK ...link2? LINK3..
but that doesn't exonerate the docs, since this was in the "differential diagnosis" list, and induced abortion has a much higher sepsis rate than spontaneous ruptured membranes...

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another nasty drug story below the fold from StrategyPage: the war against drugs in Iran due to opium from Afghanistan;

The government admits to having two million addicts (most to opium, a fifth to the more expensive heroin). This is believed to be a low count, but for a country of 75 million it’s a major social and criminal problem.

 this contributes to their HIV problem (UNICEF says there are 96thousand people living with HIV: IV drug use is associated with HIV in parts of China, Iran, and the former soviet states). Side fact  that suggests HIV is from injection drug use is that only 4.5 percent of "sex workers" in Iran are HIV positive (a very low rate). Heh. There are sex workers in religious Iran?

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the "WAGD" post of the day:

two health care workers in Saudi were diagnosed with SARS
that means it can be spread from person to person....

Croftsblog noticed this a month ago and said one nurse was from India, the other from the Philippines...
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