Musings of a minor megalomaniac
It’s all online – just a question of who’s looking at it and why.
“The number of cyberattacks and information system breaches in healthcare has grown steadily, escalating from isolated incidents to widespread targeted and malicious attacks.”
“Microsoft said in June that a China-backed hacking group had stolen a cryptographic key from the company’s systems. This key allowed the attackers to access cloud-based Outlook email systems for 25 organizations, including multiple US government agencies.“
Anybody remember the drain pipe bong that got wedged onto the side of the driver’s seat in that car crash from 1978 on Hozak road? I should’ve been a plumber. Seriously. You should see some of the shyt that’s been flowing stuff around in the vehicles here over the years. Just ask Tanner how many fuel filters are on that truck. It still had #6 injector crap out after whatever mileage they got it up to.
The Crafty‘s a nice little device, but the heater is weak. I can drop the temp on it with a long pull. Then there’s the plumbing to deal with. I need at least one hand free to deal with the keyboard and mouse. I could see the Air Max was a winner right away. It just needed teamed up with the Utilian. The white bits are from a refrigerator install kit, and the big black clip making it a 1-hand rig is just two pieces of plastic irrigation tubing glued together.
Now I know why the microwaved bagels I been eating for decades seem to agree with me.
…will McConnell stand up in public getting his due for decades of right wing deception and depravity? I’m guessing the most imminently pressing RINO issue WRT geriatric legislators is figuring out how to keep his vote as long as possible. Then there’s Grassley. And Feinstein. And… The man himself is long gone. I wonder if he’s thinking “why can’t I talk?” Or maybe “crap, now we’re really fucked.”
It’s no longer about legislating or governing. The dysfunction clearly evident in DC today says it all. They’re just clinging to power.
Veterans Affairs CIO ‘cautiously optimistic’ Oracle Cerner can turn around EHR modernization under new contract.
The problem with the whole health records quandary is no system of rules, procedures, tracking and measurement will prevent a dishonest doctor from doing whatever the fuck they want. In the healthcare space, that means omitting or ignoring information they may find personally risky after negligence and incompetence take hold. Get enough of ’em together at one government-run hospital, and there’s no telling how far off the rails it’ll run.
Give the people what they need – not what the doctors and authoritarian whackos want. $3.8 Billion with a B. That’s the number for 2022 Colorado Cannabis Tax Revenue. Not overall revenue – just the tax. I gave up the med card this year, just because I’d prefer my contributions going to the schools, not the doctors.
There are still waaaaaay too many fools smoking cigarettes at triple the heavy metals concentrations found in even illicit weed. I guess that’s just one example of how the natural selection evolutionary process works. Alcohol also appears to be a sort of self-remediating self-medication option, with numerous potential fatal health outcomes awaiting the boozers in their degenerative golden years.
Nobody in this state has any issues getting all the Cannabis they want – except possibly the price barrier. All we’ve done with the state regulatory program is employ a bunch of people making it more expensive and time-consuming for everyone. The only outcomes from ALL Cannabis-related laws simply disappearing from the books overnight, would be alot more satisfied customers, happy store owners, prosperous growers and the disappearance of the black market.
The Veterans Administration has the best long-term disability insurance program anywhere on the planet. It’s sort of a requirement, when the employees keep getting killed and maimed in armed conflicts. The non-combat and off-duty crap gets nasty sometimes, too. I see stuff like this and wonder how in the hell they denied my claim. Guess there’s multiple paths to fucking up the VA disability stuff.
The origin of SARScoV2 is obvious. Whether it started as a lab leak or an edible bat is an irrelevant factoid at this point. China royally fucked the response, any way you look at it. What matters in this case, is that China is dealt with accordingly. The lies and deceit have been tolerated long enough.
The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has suspended and potentially cut off funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology due to concerns about biosafety violations and non-compliance with US regulations. The institute has received over $1.4 million in federal awards since 2014 but has not obtained any new funding since July 2020.
It’s interesting to note how the far-right-leaning, factless twitchy article leading that list talks about nothing but politics. They continue dovetailing everything with politics regardless of the relationship. It’s how repugs build their talking points. Doesn’t matter what it’s about, as long as it’s a sensational topic everybody hears. Ron Paul accusing Dr. Fauci of supporting Chinese bio-weapon programs had to be the pinnacle of MAGA stupidity. It’s still alive and well in the good ‘ol USA today.
“On lab-leak, there’s no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab other than the coincidence of the Wuhan Institute of Virology being there,” Robertson told us.
We had an unusually cool, wet spring and early summer here. Many parts of the country baked in record-high temps. Yeah, anxiety might be an issue…
This will be it for the foreseeable future. Most annoying vape flaw discovered so far: Leaking residue into the case. Pax and DaVinci both do it. How long they last just depends on how heavy a user you are. There was one early on I just didn’t like how it felt in my hand. Another the controls were too difficult to deal with. I already bought a 2nd AirMax for backup with some extra screens and stems – because that’s the only issue(s) I can see. It has a bit of a fussy bowl setup, too small, easily broken, tiny screens to lose, hard to fill. But that’s it – and those things do not affect the device’ stellar performance.
I won’t dwell on the bowl apart from what’s already mentioned, except to say it’s smaller caliber than my pinky finger. That means I need two for a sesh. An NBA player with healthy lungs could probably take the whole thing in 2 hits on high. Spending time fiddling around with stuff is part of the fascination for me (think fidget spinner), so no biggie. Water pipe adapter was broken the first day. I’ll learn to be more careful with it. Dropping stuff due to neurological issues is a never-ending challenge for me now. They say it’s a hybrid heater (convection+conduction) and hard to tell just looking, but the design and way it works feels like induction tech, to me. I suspect that is the reason behind the bowl design.
Every other measure of vape performance is class-leading, in my book. The battery speaks for itself. I’ve had at least ten of these things over the years and this is the first one I could not kill in a day. The damn DaVinci is a nice vape, but goes dead in one sesh before the battery is half worn out. The second most important factor to me is maintenance/cleaning. All this will ever need is soaking the stems out every so often if the residue build up bothers you. They’ll never clog. Just dump out warm right after use and good for another go – indefinitely, far as I can tell.
Operation is simple and intuitive, with MILSPEC-quality buttons and build. Nice work.
This was the main issue with the dearth of Cannabis research (if any) being conducted in the U.S. for the past eighty years: Mississippi ditch weed. The Feds scheduled it and said one place in Mississippi could grow some for science. Then I guess they hired some blind gardeners to tend their garbage crops. Reports over the years indicated potency’s averaging in the 5-10% range.
“Cannabis works in different ways for different people. Different types of studies keep adding detail to the picture of how the botanical drug works.”
I’ll add different strains for different maladies to the mix as well, in my case at least. Did you know that a veteran cannot get a prescription history from the VA by just asking for it? The cover-up continues, at the macro level.
I thought the care I received from the Veterans Administration right up until about two weeks after my last hip replacement was stellar. No question they seem to have a good template for large scale healthcare. It all rests on the people doing the work.
The VA takes care of about 9 million veterans at 1,255 facilities — the nation’s largest integrated health care system. Despite many widely publicized scandals, VA health care has been consistently rated as competitive with private care in dozens of peer-reviewed articles.
Filling the Scott Adams void.
I’m done with it. Got started on the weed to soothe my arthritis back around the time I left Lockheed for greener pastures. Everybody gets it to some extent, sooner or later. For whatever reason, genetics, injuries, mine’s been extreme. I have three orthopedic surgeries to show for it so far – both hips and the right shoulder.
As things went on, the c-spine injury from 2000 deteriorated to where un-checked radiculopathy was inducing constant sleep loss and severe acute nerve flare elbow pain. It was actually kinda funny how the first resident I saw about that episode diagnosed it. She just pushed down on my head to light it up, same as I’d been doing then lately, moving or sitting in certain positions. So I had some physical therapy for the C6-7 nerves and ended up getting the shoulder repaired in the outcome of that diagnosis. a few years later in 2019 I was subjected to another nerve root damage at L4-5 pursuant to left hip malpractice. It was far worse than the c-spine I did myself moving tires, with fusion removal of the leaking disc constituting my fourth orthopedic surgery, following a year later.
I might seem to have an exceptional amount of orthopedic surgery and nerve damage experience, with needs and wants for pain medication and anti-inflammatory only growing over the years. The Veterans Administration put me through the gamut of whatever they were offering for it. Venlafaxine, Etodolac, Tramadol, Gabapentin, and lots of NSAIDs for years only seemed to make me immune to opiates. I’m pretty sure I was on a max dosage of some of that stuff for literally years. Ongoing addiction/withdrawal cycles were no fun, either. I called it quits after watching myself walking around doing the yardwork in my own little movie one day. It’s called de-personalization, and the pharmaceuticals eventually gave it to me real bad – probably close to serotonin syndrome. I understand this is a desirable psychotropic effect sought by certain drug addicts, dunno. Scared the crap outta me, and I was the biggest consumer of psychedelics in our little street gang, back in the day.
The only real reason or purpose I can imagine for the MMJ program(s) was to get a foot in the door. Tax revenue is the primary government objective. That alone makes the Colorado MMJ program an oxymoron on it’s face. It costs upwards of $300 to get the certification and commensurate tax break. Then an annual subscription fee, all of which goes to the doctors, with reduced tax revenue for the government. Being unaware of the actual demographics involved, I’m probably somewhere in the middle of the volume consumer group for example purposes, but WTF do I know?
My tax break enabled me to just about break even, cost-wise. Why spend time giving the doctors money, when it could be going to the schools? All they do is sit around taking appointments, trying to determine if the patient is telling the truth about their symptoms, with no fiduciary responsibility of any kind, handing out medcards for their tidy little profit. Oh wait, I remember now – they’re not handing out anything. The State takes care of that with their online spreadsheet containing another copy of everybody’s PII waiting to be compromised. I saw the no-brainer there right off the bat, but continued doing the MMJ thing eight years just because the queues and wait times are shorter.
The article linked below, is only a high level intro. It’s what the pharma industry needs to focus on, and what doctors need to recognize for what it is. Economic competition is the only reason it was banned in the first place, and the reason pharma and alcohol fear it now. Put it in the repertoire with everything else and be thankful we have something that actually works for some of these chronic, degenerative maladies. My closing remark on the Colorado MMJ program is: No disrespect to the overworked, underpaid IT staff, but that online spreadsheet looks like something I might have come up with twenty years ago.
Medicine is not a rote discipline, much as many in the field would like to believe.
Tomah VA contacting patients whose neurological disorders may have been improperly dismissed.
I wonder if the difference between improperly and deliberately will ever be publicly disclosed? They tried to lump my two spinal injury claims occurring under wildly differing circumstances at different times into one rating for the purpose of a malpractice cover-up.
I suppose an improper neurological exam is better than none.
No news to me. I was on a pretty severe downward spiral my last few years with the VA. The analgesic effect for me is very different from opiates, but works nonetheless. Opiates totally block pain at various types/levels/dosages/usage patterns. I still sense pain, acutely at times, but the chronic stuff less before squelching somehow.
It’s actually kinda disturbing sometimes how when I’m walking the dogs I can physically sense inflammation building in the nerves driving my back, butt and legs. but it doesn’t bother and hurt to the point of stopping me. I just pay a little price later and the next day.
