New Orleans   Let’s get this straight, ok? 

            So, it’s clear that the NSA has trolled through all of our telephone calls and likely has stored most of our emails on metadata back-up servers somewhere 50 to 100 feet below ground in Kansas or Nebraska or North Dakota or somewhere. 

            Now Target has come forward and said the hackers didn’t get just a couple of million credit card and pin numbers so that they could power up the cards for purchases, but that the number is more like 70 million or one for almost every five people living in the USA.

            And, this Snapchat thing that somehow claims it’s cool if you post wild photos of yourself and your friends because your folks and future employers don’t bust you, because the messages disappear within minutes of posting, despite all kinds of warnings about its lax security then sees 4 million of its users info hacked through the egg dripping on their face.

            The moral seems to be that we should go back to cash in our pockets, masks on our faces, and maybe some discretion in our personal lives, while using hand signals to communicate sensitive information to our work colleagues, family, and friends.  And, of course never shop at Target, but since I didn’t in the first place, no reason to start now.

            At least those are the lessons I was drawing and you probably were as well, but it turns out that just proves we are not elected Congressman who are part of the majority party of Republican electeds in the House of Representatives.   They looked at the Target problem, the NSA mess, and all of this and decided after almost nonexistent debate that they would best serve the citizens of the country by passing a measure to require the Obama Administration to quickly report any breach in the www.healthcare.gov site where people enroll for Obamacare.

            Huh? 

And, this action was also taken in the wake of sworn testimony that rightwing hackers have tried to break into and shutdown www.healthcare.gov more than a dozen times in “denial of service” attacks where you try to overwhelm the site with mass email blasts.  So, in effect these distinguished Congressmen in the wake of all of this mayhem and attendant assaults on privacy, want to make sure that the Administration quickly reports to them and the rest of the country, if their associates on the rightwing fringe are successful to hacking the insurance site.

            There’s a level at which all of this is almost beyond hilarious, but perhaps more troubling than the lack of good governance and realistic public policy considerations, is the horror that in our modern lack of self-reflection, we may have all woken up to find that we now live in a world that has lost any sense of irony or embarrassment at the ridiculousness of our situation