Monday links

• T.L. Davis gives a pretty good description of a real patriot. A few details are quibbleable (aren’t they always?), but it’s succinctly damnfine.
• Lesson from Zendo Deb and California’s Camp Fire: If you see danger coming don’t wait for an official order to evacuate. (Didn’t we already learn this lesson on 9/11? Sadly not.)
• Commander Zero describes a creepy criminal act from which he learned a lesson but his neighbor (the target of the creep) might not.
• California has scrapped its plan to tax texts. But only because the FCC said no; not because they realized it was a bad idea or anything.
• IF this two-year-old article is accurate, Cubans, for all their poverty and oppression, live as long as USA-ans. They pay less in money, but more in tyranny, for their health care. (The Atlantic fails to mention that one of the Cuban cost savings comes from paying their doctors less than spit.) (H/T Shel)
• A young woman of working class background describes her personal hell of student loans and compound interest from trying to “get ahead” via private colleges. She realizes she dug this rut herself and she’s determined to work her way out. So good for her. But I still have a sense of deep not-getting-itness.
• Eric Peters on the inscrutable god Goo-Guhl and his rule over the Internet.
• They’re tiny. They’re adorable. They have no electric service, toilet, or shower. They’re crammed cheek-by-jowl with other one-room cabins. They’re going for well over $300k apiece. (And no, they’re not in San Francisco, Manhattan, or Seattle.)
• Hahaha. For you SuperGrinches out there, here’s a jolly gingerbread house straight out of The Shining. Incredible detail!
• And some neighbor who imagines he or she is a defender of The Real Purpose of Christmas, shows Grinchy spirit with a snotty anonymous note over someone else’s decorations. Said decorator responds hilariously.

Here. Is this more in the proper holiday spirit?