The music industry always harbored many Marijuana reformers, users and others who were a really big part of the developing recreational drug culture in the U.S. Weed’s creativity stimulation has been a self-evident benefit seen throughout the music industry since it’s inception. The fact that Wilie is still around doing great speaks volumes.
It's This Bad
I re-posted my regularly scheduled anti-VA rhetoric a month ago after getting an appeal notification from the judge reviewing my claim. Until now, I had not even considered a 3rd lane in the ongoing healthcare debacle known as the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. They appear to be equal opportunity fuckers, caring as much about their employees as they do about the vets they serve.
So it’s official: The vets, the claims people and now the whole damn employee’s union in general belong to the big VA Victim’s Club. Fuck you WIlkie and your incompetent gang of medically-challenged administrators.
What Sort of Deranged Sociopath…
…Tries to take away 20 million people’s healthcare in the middle of the biggest pandemic in modern history?
Raging Pandemic Response Plan
Recovery at Last!
It’s been a long two years, but I can now say with confidence my overall health is on the upswing again.
17 JUN 20: Going all day with no structural support now. Still pretty sore by nightfall, but improving. It now seems latent effects of soft tissue damage done by a year long untreated back injury and the remaining nerve damage is what I am going through now. The most recent surgeries, both hip and lumbar fusion, are good to go.
How's Your Cancer Risk?
A big factor in that equation these days might be your proximity to the fracking industry. Glad my Mom moved out of the place at 961 before those new brine tanks on the hilltop across the road got into production. Can I expect to find my old neighborhood hopelessly contaminated soon? Guess I’ll need to add a Geiger counter to my toolbag.
“But in the excitement of this boom there is little mention of the pipes, pumps, and filters in these plants that will become coated with radioactivity. Or of the fountain of radioactive brine and drill cuttings spewing forth from wells. Or of the workers being exposed, the land being contaminated.
One question I ask these companies, says Smith, the New Orleans lawyer, ‘What have you done to go out and find all the radioactive waste you have dumped all over the United States for the past 120 years?’ And the answer is nothing.”
Two Big Problems
Healthcare and cops. What do these seemingly universal, mundane societal institutions have in common when it comes to the “problem” category these days? It is pretty simple when you step back and focus the optics. They are two of the secret societies Kennedy warned us about.
Law Enforcement and Healthcare are insulated from oversight and protected from regulation and legal liability by a system of laws and government designed not for the benefit of the citizenry, but only for the LE/Med operator’s financial gain and grip on power. Municipal security and healthy people are merely secondary considerations. The real purpose of the public-facing houses of law enforcement and healthcare is to form a facade hiding the fat, dumb and happy mayors, doctors, insurance executives and politicians raping society for every penny they can extract.
I find it particularly disturbing how the army of clinicians, patrol officers, nurses, administrators, clerks and other worker bees do not seem to understand how badly they are being exploited. Just look at the budgets. What is the first thing that happens when they get cut? “Follow the Money” was never a more appropriate adage illustrating the degree to which our society has degraded into a financial fuck-all in terms of what the police and doctors are doing. Police get big chunks of the general spending in many jurisdictions, but their budgets pale in comparison to the healthcare money being spent on among other things, cleaning up their messes.
…with the unions and politicians feeding off each other. What makes the lawyers piles of money with malpractice lawsuits backed up for years and allows people like George Floyd to be murdered in the street? Healthcare and cops. It is a mindset purposely designed that way and we are doing it to ourselves. And remember, you are approximately 9,000 times more likely to be killed by a healthcare provider than anyone wielding a gun. The silver lining to this pandemic is laying bare long standing problems. Will we as a society have the wherewithal to fix them?
Parallels
Brazil’s Bolsanaro is stepping up to take the title of Covid-19 epicenter leader. Trump will gladly hand over the mantle, and probably begin tweeting about how he did things so much better. The sad truth is, Trump just set the example for one of his southerly sycophants.
“Some experts said Brazil’s stumbles are all the more shocking because of its previous success containing malaria, Zika and HIV.”
I’d characterize it more as predictable, than shocking. Selfish, sociopaths really are quite predictable. The only difference between Brazil and the USA in this respect is the scale of incompetence. It will take longer for the virus to wind it’s way through our vast expanses, but the results will eventually end up the same.
“As of May 12, however, Brazil had processed just 482,743 tests. Of the 10 countries with the highest COVID-19 death toll, only the Netherlands had tested fewer people than Brazil – a country with a twelfth of the population.”
I was about to guess Africa was looking to take the worst hit overall, but South America has a good dose in it now. Thanks, Donnie – keep up the good work!
Just How Bad "Is" the VA?
Using us vets as guinea pigs for Trump’s Hydroxychloquine con was beyond the pale. Then I got a letter from a Veteran’s Law Judge last week, reminding me just how deeply I am mired in their bureaucratic nightmare, not to mention the latest medical bullshyt from last year. So I logged on to the website this morning like I do every couple weeks or so, to check on the glacial pace of claims progress. It is depressing, to say the least.
That is the current status of my 2nd claim submitted to the VA over 6 years ago while I was still flying Ikonos for Lockheed with my hips and back going into late stage orthopedic failure. 1st was for the right hip, denied straight up, for reasons of no records. Sound familiar? 2nd was for the cervical spine issue. They denied that too, despite lots of info in the records that time. Basically what happened was the same as I imagine happens to most claims – they just deny everything by default. So I appealed. Then we get thrown into a years-long challenge fighting the government for benefits many have paid for with their lives.
Four years later, after a lawyer gets paid 8 grand to spell out the law for these mutherfuckers, a judge looks at my records, tasks a minion to investigate, and made at least one interesting comment in their final assessment of the case, which incredibly, had nothing to do with this claim. Of course the upshot of it is, they have to go back and re-do everything, entailing possibly the next 16-29 months, as indicated above. Maybe they will get it right next time around.
For some odd reason the judge also made a point of making an un-related statement:
Took 4 years, just to push the appeal through. The VA strategic claims plan is pretty obvious. Just wait ’em out. The tactical plan is same as the shysters who defended Trump’s impeachment: Ignore, distract, deny and lie. And use the hydroxy to speed up the process, whenever possible. My Memorial Day remembrance for perpetrators of VA bullshyt goes out Monday morning.
Don't Trust the VA
Anyone personally familiar with me knows what I went through with the VA over the past 2 years. It’s not like I needed another reason to stay away. Confirmation is evident. Organizational culture develops from the top down. The VA is just another boot-lickin’ Trump lapdog now – like the Justice Dept, the EPA, and every other now-neutered Trump government gang of thieves. They stole my health, and continue following suit in their ongoing game of destroy America from within.
The ‘sumbich is 2 steps away from a genocidal super-villian.
Daily Testing
I eagerly anticipate the day we learn Trump’s daily testing regimen for him and top cronies comes to real fruition. With false result rates up to 50% in some examples, that’s not odds I’d brag about in my fantastically successful non-existent SARS-COv2 testing program. They should have been testing the tests six months ago. Get sick and die, you miserable piece ‘o shyt.
“With a few months left until a second wave of coronavirus infections is expected in the fall, that could leave the U.S. once again unprepared and vulnerable.”
A glaring omission from the Modern Healthcare article overlooks the push to re-start economic activity along with the abysmal testing situation. Countries around the world have already started banning some tests. We won’t have to wait until fall for wave #2.
Cruel and Unusual?
Apparently it’s gotten that way here in Weld county, CO. Maybe not, when optionally participating in the exponential spread of a deadly virus, depending on whether or not you choose to leave your home. We’ll just call it regular punishment for those of us remaining in our home jails while the general population engages in viral sprees of willful ignorance.
Not that I’m complaining about government overreach, or tyrannical pandemic measures. On the contrary, I firmly believe the angst addressing these issues is purely misplaced by people under the influence of the Trump propaganda machine. They would more appropriately be angry at a government failing to perform it’s primary function of effectively protecting their health and economy – not the consequences of failing to do so.
Fuckassery 101
It didn’t take long for some of the PPE idiocy to turn up. Jared Kuntner had a group of volunteer college kids with no disaster or pandemic response management experience working on it. Reminds me of the SEI&V group at Locmar. Few others in the current administration appear even remotely qualified for their jobs, so I guess that is par for the course.
Regardless, It’s not a huge leap to lay the lion’s share of the PPE debacle blame squarely at the doorstep of the healthcare industry. Previously inexpensive equipment made from paper and plastic, yet critical in managing contagious outbreaks, is suddenly found in short supply – why? Allow me to offer a few relevant buzzwords:
BEANCOUNTERS CHINA LABOR COST PROFIT, etc. The healthcare industry in this country has been in the crapper for a long time. It just took a raging pandemic to expose their priorities. The mutherfuckers here in Denver call it a “timing” issue, they are now profusely apologizing for. Fire the lot of those cocksuckers, starting with that greedy bitch below. The “health” category on this site details a number of VA healthcare issues if you are curious to see exactly what they did to me, personally. Current summary here. Yeah, I have an ax to grind.
HMO’s, hospitals and the insurance companies they are in cahoots with dropped the ball big time. It’s been laying on the ground for years waiting for something like a PPE shortage to develop, while the bean counters pocket pennies and patient costs rise, right along with the now skyrocketing cost for the most mundane, basic medical equipment.
The Stupid Leading the Blind
Expecting more of the same from the impostors posing as government officials here is par for the course. Stay-at-Home has become Safer-at-Home in Colorado where infection and death rates have not peaked. Restrictions are being tightened in some places and loosened in others, while not one lifting criteria set by the Federal government has been reached, as the Poseur-in-Chief foments rebellion.
Some people already know where this is headed. The infectious disease experts have only just begun to understand it’s clinical implications. Nobody in their right mind believes any progress against SARS-COv2 will be made without effective testing and tracing. The U.S. healthcare system has not yet scratched the surface on that part of the project, while food lines continue growing across the country. It really hurts watching the country I dedicated the best years of my life to going down the tubes.
“The White House will not allow the leading immunologist on the coronavirus task force to testify to Congress next week, calling the request ‘counter-productive’ to the administration’s efforts to contain the virus.” I think they mean counterproductive to their efforts to contain their incompetence.
Singapore, a small, wealthy SE Asian nation, initially seeing stellar results, is now suffering a 2nd wave of hotspots. China fucked up, and the U.S. doubled down on the exact same, stupid do-nothing response. What do we call a high-intensity combination of willful ignorance and cognitive dissonance? U.S. Pandemic Response 2020! With PPE stocks already depleted, and crowds of angry bankruptcy candidates demanding their freedom, it’s gonna make the 1st wave look like a warm-up.
Asshat in the Mayo
I’m not going to waste much time on the smarmy cocksucker known to me and many others as Mike Dense, except to say that world-class GOP hubris and arrogance were on full display for all to see yesterday. Abbey Zimet framed it well.
2nd Followup
Saw Dr. Donner again Monday. No surprises, and I am instructed to just stay the course and be careful with it.
“27 APR 20: 2nd followup with Dr. Donner showed the lumbar healing as expected. Questions about losing the brace and increased activity were met with “be careful and don’t push it” response. So it looks like another couple months of convalescence is in order. Flexibility loss and muscle soreness from the nerve damage clenching are the only troubling symptoms remaining. Minor healing discomfort in the lumbar is all that remains there. Rehab now seems to apply to the entire midsection. The new left hip did not get properly re-habbed, due to the back injury. Right side was severely beaten by the left hip incubation period and following year of back injury abuse. Bones and joints seem good as they can possibly be now, if I can just struggle back to some state of relative normalcy.”