Monday Miscellany!

• The NSA monitored millions of phone calls placed by French citizens last year. France is, needless to say, pissed off. Despite what the talking heads in Washington DC think, this kind of shit hurts us with our allies WAY more than does realizing we made a mistake in Iraq and fixing that mistake.


• Same sex marriages in New Jersey started at Midnight EST this morning after a court refused to stay a previous ruling making same-sex marriage legal. In response, Gov. Chris Christie dropped his appeal of the original ruling. Game over.


• Israel is cranky with the United States over our making peace with Iran. File under "deal with it."


• President Obama is trying to get ahead of the disastrous Healthcare.gov rollout. It's a good thing, too, because Consumer Reports slammed the site as too broken to be worth using right now. Their advice, which I would follow, is to wait a month and hope things are working better then. (EDIT: Looks like DHHS is sending in a "surge" of techs to fix HealthCare.gov. I wish them luck, but quite frankly, this is no guaranteed fix. In fact, a huge influx of new personnel to work on the issues creates a massive short-term communications mess that can outweigh the gains from increased capacity. And no, open sourcing the site won't help. Come on.)


• A man with a concealed handgun stopped a mass shooting in Arizona this weekend. Save that for later, kids.


• FaceBook is acting spotty, no doubt spreading the kind of panic we used to see when LJ or Yahoo Groups would have unannounced 24-hour downtimes.

Kirk Hammett wants us off his lawn. #Metallica

Kirk Hammett is of the opinion that streaming and social media killed the music industry.

Thing is, the last decade saw the rise of acts like Arcade Fire and The Black Keys, in many ways precisely because they learned how to use streaming and social media to promote their work.

On the other hand, Metallica has put out one good album since the 1980s.

You do the math.