Musings of a minor megalomaniac
I guess they teach the basic stuff first in law school like everywhere else. Seems Francie is learning the “run out the clock” legal tactic. There’s no statute of limitations for the Photo Album, so here they are, just in time for Valentine’s day!
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The economy was starting to pick up again with Covid burning out in many places. Who/what do they think they are influencing with this little stunt? The stock market and auto industry are reeling. Nice work fuckwit sucker Canadian truckers.
(Late Update) Rumor has it the fuckwits plan to stage this nonsense at the SuperBowl and proceed across the country from there. I though people might get serious about Covid when it threatened the SB last year. If there’s one thing NOBODY tolerates in this country it’s interfering in their moneymaking activities. Good luck with that.
Repugs gotta make the white trash feel bad enough to get angry and do stupid shyt for ’em.
Too many cooks in the kitchen. Sounds simplistically over-generalized, but it’s an endemic issue in large-scale activities of all kinds. A bunch of people head out to tackle this big program, service, project, scheme, whatever, and before long they are going their own directions in oblivion, sans oversight. Over the past few decades we’ve had doctors, corporations, computer programmers and of course the government and law enforcement, all keenly interested and involved in medical pain management care – all working against or in ignorance of one or the other to varying degrees, with different and potentially even competing goals in mind.
Szalavitz’ Wired magazine article was the last piece of the puzzle, for me. I’d been ruminating about my recent VA experiences after the previous post, when the epiphany hit me. These people are all working in more-or-less cordoned-off information and knowledge silos. A big, important project like the opiate crises gets everybody gen’d up heading off in different directions, forming big negative feedback loops responsible for the failures.
I was a government-certified opiate addict for a few years recently. Think about that for a minute. It’s not what you might imagine. I was still with Lockheed, at the outset of that little experience. It took a long time for the VA to start writing Tramadol prescriptions – no Madison candyman stories or any of that bullshyt. Then it took three years of waning efficacy on a withdrawal-addiction roller-coaster ride including a couple of red flag episodes before I’d had enough. I transitioned to Cannabis after that, but now I want to know my Narxcare score, both then and now, because I suspect it was a factor in the debacle that followed.
The circle is squared. Like Khazak crypto miners draining their power grid, computer algorithms drive the opioid crises, draining time, energy and money out of society, their cash engines fueled by pain and death. Where have we heard that before?
My share of low quality VA healthcare almost got me killed.
“A recent in-depth report found that VA administrators are overruling doctors’ decisions for the sake of cost control and keeping veteran patients in the VA health care system.”
Took me a year to get through that gauntlet after running into some provider issues. Now I spend most of my time sitting around crippled from malpractice.
At least Texans had enough of a wakeup call last year to avoid the deadly outcomes we saw then. Abbott and Cruz must be two of the biggest fuckwits ever to soil the Texas landscape. Just type in your state on that URL to see how you compare.
SDMB Political Analysis, Feb 4, 2022
I have been saying this for a year or more and it has never come close to coming true.
I believe the White Christian Nationalist movement which has taken over the Republican Party is entering their own modern day “Dark Ages.” I believe they have an unenlightened and repressive agenda at best, and are certainly behind the times as to understanding science and human rights.
They are however very good at consolidating their power and influence. They are also quite good at persuading low information voters and they are MASTERS of frightening the old, weak, and mentally deficient into adopting their agenda – which boils down to a simplistic culture war where they get to claim to be on the side of the most holy and all powerful God. Their other tactic to win this wrong headed culture war is to suggest to the weak minded – “remember how great your life was when you were young?”
You are right, they are destined to fail… eventually. But the middle ages while the church ruled all of Europe lasted for hundreds of years and the very term Renascence was coined to celebrate the rebirth of science and art after centuries of being suppressed by the church. Well not only are modern “Christians” not embracing new science and art… they are revisiting items that were supposed to be resolved.
For example, it was accepted until recently that racism and sexism are bad and should be avoided. In the last fifty years American Protestant Christendom has reversed its position on abortion and adopted the views of the Church of Rome (which is still holding grudges from the Great Schism of 1054). As recently as the 1970’s Francis Schaeffer could not find any evangelical or fundamentalist to stand against abortion. (See Katherine Stewart [The Power Worshipers] and his own son Franky Schaeffer [Crazy for God] for documentation of this fact.)
It gets worse however, many of these followers recognize no power but God and are therefore anarchists as far as “Earthly” governments are concerned. They deny not only new science they fear, but older science like vaccines which they had embraced for more than a century. To make matters worse, a large section of the misinformed are now flat Earthers!!
Give these “believers” (who seem to know NOTHING of the message of love and peace that Jesus of Nazareth taught) a hundred years and like The Spanish Inquisition, they will be digging up Galileo and Copernicus in order to burn them at the stake. That will be after they have already burned Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Brian Greene, Bill Nye, Lawrence Krauss, and others at the stake. I was okay when the church only disputed NEW science that they had not grown up with, but now they have far too much power and they are going after well established science. Oh man, imagine what that mob at the Capitol on January Sixth would do if they could get their hands on a living Charles Darwin!!
These nuts want the very thing they HATE!! They want a Theistic Government like all those around the globe they rail against – but they want their Theocracy to be based upon their particular sect of Christendom. They are a very tribe that has no place for enlightenment – simple rules carry the day. Islamic Theocracies = BAD! “Christian” Theocracies = GOOD! (YAY!!)
National laws suppressing women’s rights are wrong in Islamic countries – but somehow fine here in America as long as it is a good, Godly and “Christian” cause behind it.
I believe I am the last former Republican who is ever going to get out. Those who remain will not even consider new information and some of them “Rebuke” news sources they see as ungodly (which is all of them left of OANN, even Fox for some of them). Even after January Sixth I stayed in the GOP hoping they would self correct and steer out of their gutter using all the momentum they had built up. But then they refused to confirm the second impeachment of Donald J. Trump and I was finally out. Unlike the elected officials who broke with Trump (I didn’t have that worry- I had never supported him), I kept going as far and as fast as I could.
A little postlude detail:
The GOP and specifically Trump must be suffering because even though I am no longer on their roles they have been calling again lately. They want to know if I am as fed-up with the Socialist agenda Nancy, Chuck, and Joe are pushing as they are – to give me a chance to donate to those committed to reversing their evil efforts. After listening to their spiel, I tell them how little I think of the GOP and those who remain with them and they respond: “Donations are not tax deductible.”
The American Right Wing IS going to fail. It is just a matter of seeing if they destroy the nation before they do. (I secretly hope Alvin Toffler is correct and the rate of change in society is now too quick to allow the republican Party to stop or even reverse it.
Here is an example of the what the United States will be in fifty or a hundred years if the Republicans succeed in consolidating all their power:
Shocking. Truth from a repug? Took awhile.
It’s all about pandemics, human rights and climate change this year. This is the 1st and last I’ll have to say about it.
Not a big fan. Don’t find them amusing at all, and I’m originally from Pennsylvania! They dig big holes that can cause all sorts of problems. The long walk home with a bent motorcycle wheel was one thing. Complete destruction of an undermined garage floor was another. I did enjoy watching the dogs tear one to pieces one day, but other than that, screw Punxsutawney Phil – giant eastern woodland rats with shovels. The prairie dogs handle those chores out here.
At least 7 inches of new snow fell here by the end of the day yesterday. I managed to shovel the whole place front and back by making it into an all-afternoon affair. Twenty minutes at a time, 4 sessions starting just before noon with hour-long rest breaks in between got it done. Snow-Joe shovel with an extra handle I got a couple years ago makes it possible. The lumbar feels pretty strong on the Z axis now, but any deviation invokes increasing discomfort, pain and paralysis.
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We have the cartoon critics on the low end and holocaust invokers on the high end of conservative phony outrage. What’s the difference between American conservative outrage and last century hitlerian-nazi mindfuckery? About 80-90 years later on a different continent.
This racist WWE fighter turned stand-up comedian, turned reality TV show host, turned podcast commentator is an every-man’s version of the smooth-talkin’ politician wannabe. Interesting guests, controversial topics, with lots of insightful judgement and advice that sounds good to misinformed idiots. Some might even consider it great entertainment. Too bad Rogan’s content creators have no clue about half the shyt running out their mouths. Wanna put shyt on the Internet, mutherfucker? Welcome to my nightmare.
You “don’t always get it right?” Who made you the arbiter of always and right? Anybody listening to his podcast two years ago heard about how he was getting lockdown ready “for a month.” He’s one of those fuckwits who thinks everything’s in his lane – total moron. Look what all that popularity got you now. Joe Rogan, his MAGA community and every one of his anti-vaxx guests can suck my dick and choke on it.
Let there be light! Infrared light, that is. Time to get this baby lined up and calibrated.
So his bluff gets called and now he is being “lured into a war.” This little tin-pot fuckface could really use a few AMRAAM’s up his air force’s ass.
