Author Archives: oinsketta

If only we were not living in a post-truth culture

Truth, critical thinking and adherence to the facts matter more now than at any time in our history.  Senator Sheldon Whitehouse lays out an irrefutable case for Trump’s cynical weaponization of the government against the People.  The case is irrefutable, except by calling Whitehouse a hysterical, sick, dangerous, partisan lunatic, and somehow discrediting, among the lowest information Americans out there, the truthful and factually detailed report he delivers to the Senate, and to the People, in this latest installment of The Scheme.

Death by corporate medicine (part 1 of many)

Corporate medicine is medicine conducted, primarily, for the profits of shareholders in the corporation.  Health insurance, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, death prevention in general, forms the most lucrative sector in the American economy. To be sure, decent medical results are required, usually, for a corporately held medical group to stay in business, but make no mistake: the primary goals of the board of directors and CEO of the corporation are for doctors to see as many patients as possible, do as many expensive tests and  surgical procedures as possible, bill for every contact with a patient and make the most money for the corporate “person” that employs the medical staff, invests in the medical technology, conducts public relations and fundraising in the community to be seen as self-less healers.

You will notice fewer hospitals with an ombudsman or patient advocate.  These skilled professionals calm down patients who are upset, make them feel heard, resolve conflicts that can complicate healing.  They also avoid lawsuits against hospitals and doctors.  None of these outcomes are as important as a good security system to remove agitated patients who demand things of doctors or medical staff.   I will be writing about death by corporate medicine again soon, but for the moment, here’s one example of corporate medicine that might seem subtle, though it doesn’t feel that way to the patient.

The patient (me) was scheduled for an emergency cystoscopy, the insertion of a miniaturized camera into the penis, down the urethra and into the bladder.   I’ve had these before, they sound much more nightmarish than they actually are.  The phrase associated with things like cystoscopies is “most patients tolerate” the procedure, often with an initial grunt.   I was nervous about this emergency test, since my urethra was still painful from an unnecessary surgery conducted on me two weeks ago by a surgeon who, although charming and a great salesman, never did any test before plunging into my urethra and tearing the tissue therein.

I was told by my new urologist that if I arrived one minute after my appointment time the emergency cystoscopy would not be done.   I arrived ten minutes before my appointment time.  I then waited ninety minutes for my appointment.   During those ninety minutes I urinated five times.  I was nervous, and annoyed to be kept waiting this long.   I had to go again and again because my bladder doesn’t empty easily, but every one of these pisses was pretty much pain free, especially compared to the relentless pain of the last two weeks.  Then I was escorted in for the cystoscopy.  I told the attendant that a lab report on my recent urine culture was back and that if I had an infection I probably wouldn’t be having a cystoscopy.  He turned us around and took me into a regular consult room.

When the doctor finally arrived, I had one thing to say, a final word to clear up our initial misunderstanding.  I told her I needed ninety seconds.  I wanted to make it clear that I respected her longtime colleague, and my longtime urologist, and that we’d been having a mutual bad day the last time I saw him, that I was under pressure from recently diagnosed kidney disease, the inability to walk and other medical issues.  She cut me off about ten seconds in, I was by now, apparently, her last patient of the day.  She was not interested in rehashing any of this, she said.  She told me I had a massive urinary tract infection and that was the cause of my pain.  Obviously we weren’t going to insert a scope into a painfully inflamed urinary tract.

I could have been told that ninety minutes earlier, by the doctor’s smart, engaging personal receptionist.  The knowledge that I wasn’t going to have to tolerate a painful (initially) procedure  might have saved me two or three trips to the bathroom.  It certainly would have spared me some anxiety.   But that kind of thing is strictly the patient’s concern, not anyone else’s, in a corporate setting where your doctor is seeing twenty other patients a day.

Because I had urinated so many times while in her office, because I had a massive infection, the doctor assumed that I was still in as much pain as a few days earlier when I was still recovering from an unnecessary procedure (as the surgeon conceded afterwards, I need a different one) that had torn tissue in my urethra.   Based on the lab results of a urine culture and her assumption about urinary urgency and pain, she prescribed the Cipro and told me to take two pills, phenoazopyridine, three times daily, to help with the urgency and pain of urination.

I was unable to convey to her that balancing my water intake (after days of trial and error, 48 ounces seems to be the sweet spot) is the best way to keep the urine flow going throughout the day.  I began telling her that my previous experience with phenoazopyridine had left me unable to urinate at all for hours at a time.  If the goal was, as she said, to keep urine flowing to help protect my kidneys, and empty my bladder as much as possible, this drug, which had not worked for me pain-wise either, was not one to take.  She quickly dismissed my experience and encouraged me to take it three times a day, whatever it said on the box.

Updating this post just now I seem to have deleted my final paragraph. Had the doctor asked me my level of urgency to urinate and pain during urination, instead of making hasty assumptions about what I needed to do, I’d have given her a pain score of two on each of those, as opposed to a solid 7 to 8 several days ago, when my torn urethra was still inflamed. I didn’t need pain medication for the infection, only the antibiotic to cure it. I won’t be taking phenoazopyridine again, and I’ve regained much of my ability to urinate as before after last night’s dose, but … seriously, what do you expect from a doctor who works in the setting of corporate medicine? She doesn’t get paid to schmooze or ask patients about their feelings, there’s absolutely nothing in it for a doctor with a tough quota to meet every day.

Next time, remind me: corporate medicine’s denial of any mind/body, affective/corporeal, emotional pain/physical healing connection.

Speaking truth to powerful idiocy

Marks [former top vaccine regulator, Dr. Peter Marks, who submitted his resignation today after being given the choice to resign or be fired] said that although he was willing to work with Kennedy on his plan to review vaccine safety, “it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”

Source

And truthfully, what psychopath could possibly desire less than that?

Move Fast and Break Everything

Project 2025, the Koch network’s radical reactionary plan to let the richest .01% off the leash of government regulation, confiscatory taxes, majoritarian tyranny and accountability for crimes, while subjugating everyone else, is being carried out on the smash and grab fast track in every one of its fine points. 

The authors of  the radical blueprint for autocracy that Trump lied about knowing the details of (at the same time claiming to disagree with some of the manifesto he said he knew nothing about), was written by many members of Trump 1.0, who are now back in powerful roles in the insane two-year old’s second administration.  It is a detailed action plan for rooting out disloyalty to the Unitary Executive and implementing a fully fascist, corporately-controlled US, fueled by revenge and intimidation of all dissent.   Full steam ahead!

The only problem for Project American Hitler and the Richest White Men of North America, and it may be a problem that saves this tottering experiment in democracy and respect for basic human dignity, is that much of what they are doing is plainly illegal and unconstitutional.   As well as cruel, thoughtless, rash, misogynistic, homophobic, racist, economically imbecilic, driven by a psychopath’s unquenchable need to prevail, destroy the opponent and have every bit of revenge he’s entitled to.    

For example, only Congress can create a government agency, so an outfit like “DOGE”, strictly speaking, and in spite of numerous sworn lies as to who is running Musk’s little “agency”, and the mass media all referring to it as a Department, as though legally created and not pulled directly out of Charles Koch’s crusty 90 year-old sphincter, is illegal under our laws, traditions and the Constitution which vests the power to create a monstrosity like the “Department of Government Efficiency” solely in Congress. Congress is also the only branch of government that can allocate and spend tax money, whether in the interest of “efficiency”, lack of accountability, covering up crimes or any other purpose.

An unelected, insane, unqualified, oligarch political donor unilaterally ending the sixty year foreign aid program to keep starving children alive, protect millions of children in danger of death from malaria, fund NGOs that care for war orphans abroad, defunding the Veteran’s Affairs suicide hotline (for fuck’s sake!), the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, closing Social Security offices, illegally mass firing key staff throughout the federal government via email, the illegal round-up and televised deportation of persons subject to the jurisdiction of the US and its Constitution, the mafia don like shake downs of all perceived rivals, bullying, baseless lawsuits against cowed, spineless mass media corporations, compliant universities, a prominent non-MAGA law firm — all fucking illegal.

Who enforces the law?  On the federal level a loyal MAGA lie endorsing diehard who was too corrupt and radioactive for Trump to hire back in 2017.  After all, as Florida AG under the Viktor Orban-like Ron “Go-go boots” DeSanctimonious, she had recently taken a $25,000 campaign contribution from Trumpie to drop Florida’s investigation into his fraudulent, now shuttered, Trump University.  Now she’s 100% team Trump, the criminal president’s personal lawyer in a way even the pathetic, historically corrupt Bill Barr refused to be, including endorsing the fiction that the 2020 election was rigged and illegally stolen from the rightful winner, Mr. T.   Pam Bondi is eager and ready to do anything Aileen Cannon would do if she were the AG.  Cannon, of course, is poised to occupy Alito’s or Thomas’s incredibly foul smelling seat among the Immortal Nine, The Federalist Society Six.  Extremists, if they occupy even a one vote majority, can have the final say on virtually everything.  And that is their plan, to seize democracy by a one vote majority and shut the whole goddamned experiment down.

Fortunately the courts are holding so far. They have called bullshit over and over on weak, stupid and lying arguments made by MAGA officials defending illegal actions in court. We may be headed for an Andrew Jackson moment, I sure hope not, but it’s not unlikely when you depend on angry, vengeance seeking psychopaths to do what’s right for others. Jackson was a pugnacious psychopath with a famously foul temper who told the chief justice “you’ve made your ruling, now where’s your army to enforce it, bitch?” I asked a friend who knows American history in uncanny detail what happened after Jackson made that challenge.

“The Trail of Tears,” he said, referring to a mass killing death march under the Indian Removal Act, a death march the Supreme Court had tried to stop as unconstitutional. Fuck me, I thought, no wonder Old Hickory is Old Orange’s favorite president. Made millions capturing and selling slaves, told the Supreme Court to suck his hickory stick, regretted not personally hanging his disloyal Vice President and fellow psychopath John C. Calhoun. No wonder Trump put the guy’s portrait in the Oval Office. Jackson is a president after the Orange Polyp’s own heart, an American Putin, (minus the kompromat on the current American “president” — notice how Trump always claims to know nothing about the actions of his own executive branch).

The mass pain that this president of subnormal intelligence and supernatural stubbornness is inflicting directly on millions of his supporters, as well as on America’s allies (on behalf of a war criminal dictator involved in the, LOL! “Rusher Hoax” that helped place him in office two out of three tries) will not help him in the court of public opinion when the idiotic ideas he’s implementing really start hitting the fan, like the proverbial poop these dumb ideas are. 

Trump’s best hope to become the American Hitler is mass public violence (and he has the proven violent goon squad standing back and standing by, awaiting his next command) and the strong, powerful right arm of devout Christian Pete “I didn’t rape that lying bitch, I was drunk, my lawyers fucking paid her, shut up, for Christ’s sake, I have a hangover!” Hegseth and his generals ordering US troops to open fire on dissenting Americans under an invocation of Mike “Q-Anon” Flynn’s favorite American law, The Insurrection Act. 

I’m betting on democracy, no matter what the oddsmakers and bookies in Las Vegas are saying.  Call me Anne Frank, but I’m betting that Americans are better, and much smarter,  than Trump and his movement think we are.

Message from Big Balls

There is literally no limit to how stupid, vicious and incompetent psychopaths like father of 13 (all by IVF) Musk, his front man DJT and their young, unprincipled anti-government hackers (on the payroll of the government) are. I went on to the Social Security website to download my 1099. In order to log in I needed an email sent to me with a security code. Here’s the email that came from ssa.gov:

Google says: you can’t trust a message from Social Security, proceed with caution, red flag, red flag!

Apparently you can pick up one of these MAGA hats in Greenland or Canada. God bless these United Shayyssssh.

Traitorgate

Mary Trump posted this picture at the top of her piece called The Ongoing National Security Debacle.  I have only one word to add to the caption of this picture worth thousands of words.  Mary’s caption is fine, excellent, really.

Morons.

I have read several excellent pieces about this foul bit of ongoing fascist foreplay, the illegal, asshole use of a chat group, on personal phones, to plan and gloat about a secret military strike. Timothy Snyder’s analysis of the larger point of this group chat bullshit is brilliant. Heather Cox Richardson’s keeps to her very high standard of excellent, insightful reporting — if you only read one, her’s is the one to read. Robert Reich is on fire on the obvious, burning question of Where Are the fucking Democrats at this moment?

This kind of coverage (the three mentioned above, I haven’t read Mary’s yet) is a huge part of the fight we all need to participate in, now and not when we are done trembling about the lack of amenities at the eventual death camp many of us will be shoehorned into.

When you are up against Nazis you are fighting psychopaths, whatever spineless mainstream Democrats may say about the virtues of playing possum while the Nazis magically self-destruct because of their own hubris, irrationality, stupidity and incompetence.  The very things that drive Nazis.   The exact things we have to remain educated about, highlight and fight at every turn.  At every fucking turn, my friends.

There are two kinds of anger

There are two different forms of anger, one saves your life, the other destroys it in the end. The life-saving form of anger has an evolutionary/survival purpose. Suddenly flooded with adrenaline, cortisol and who knows what other miracle substances, you explode in a show of threat to scare off something that is threatening you. This anger, when successful in keeping you safe, is followed by relief. The flight or fight chemicals in your bloodstream dissipate and you go about your business. There is another kind of anger that is extremely dangerous to our bodies, our lives and the lives of those around us. This shapeshifting anger lingers, keeps your body coursing with fight or flight chemicals, which do great harm over time. This kind of anger is always ready to leap out when enflamed, often is not aimed at an appropriate threat, can’t be calmed, does not dissipate when the threat is warded off because the threat, which is internal, is never gone.

Anger that makes someone back off when they are in your face and unable to control their aggravating emotional reaction is good anger, anger necessary for survival, it makes the immediate pain stop.   It doesn’t need to stick around after it has done its job.  Seedj and I have expressed this kind of anger regularly to each other, especially during these recent hellishly aggravating weeks, when we have stepped over some line in our mutual pain and frustration and angered each other.  Anger is not easy, not pretty, not clean but it is sometimes necessary, and when it is, if understanding and reconciliation follow as soon as possible, no harm is done. You can learn valuable lessons from another person’s explanation of what made them angry, learn to do better. Anger is particularly common when personal stress is running high, and aggravated by external events in the larger world, where, at the moment, every corporation and institution appears to be lining up, and ponying up big bucks to Dear Leader, to fund the gold-plated, gloriously violent MAGA swastika revenge parade that America’s greediest, along with the stupidest, angriest and most violent, are all spoiling for.

The anger that kills is the building set of grievances that gather, linger and are endlessly swallowed after occasional bitter complaining, constant passive-aggression, or violence, achieving nothing to resolve any of the causes.  This inchoate anger is the unresolvable, constantly recurring, self-fueling anger that creates every cripplingly painful health problem Dr. John Sarno talks about.    It has no end, is tangled in a self-hatred and self-blame that can never be surmounted, so it also kills relationships, including the crucial one with the self.  

By the time posting a picture like this is “domestic terrorism” American will be great again (and I will be interned in Camp Schumer)

I’m going to take a break from thinking about my vexing personal situation, worries about a suddenly intermittent ability to pass bloody urine since an unnecessary urethral surgery done by a master salesman so confident he felt no need to do a single pre-surgical test, to muse a bit about another dangerous psychopath everyone in the world knows, and a good percentage of the world hates.

Those who hate him, or course, suffer from a special mental illness his handlers have cooked up (a regurgitated version of [Dubya] Bush Derangement Syndrome from the pre-Obama era), so we can, fairly and honestly, consider him universally loved, perhaps even intergalactically so.

(Why should I be required to show more courage than Columbia University, ABC, Disney, Chuck Schumer, bumbling numbskull John Fetterman, the Republican-led Congress, various law firms the president has threatened? Only one reason, actually: not to obey a wannabe American Hitler and his stinking horde in advance, fighting fascism fucking 101, brothers and sisters. I know well how many of the dead the original Hitler caused to be slaughtered (full disclosure, I may have an ax to grind, dozens in my family were killed by Elon’s and Don’s Herr H.), his one small fault now reduced by many to merely hating Jews a little bit (and who doesn’t? [1]), though the well-documented history of his impressive mass murder score is being erased, possibly by Musk employee Big Balls himself, as I tap this keyboard)

Anyway, sorry for the distraction. I was going to show you a picture, which I display under the for now robust protections of free expression provided by the First Amendment, which may soon be banned, even criminalized as “domestic terrorism” by Elon “Free Speech” Musk, enemy of unelected bureaucrats, and Pam “Too Corrupt to Serve in Trump’s first term” Bondi. Here you go:

Now these two photos of the same man are equally handsome, a fair minded person might say. One wears makeup, had painful scalp reduction surgery (which caused him to violently assault his first wife, who’d suggested the plastic surgeon who left him in agony) and spends twice the average worker’s annual income every year in hair dressing to make himself look tall and tan and young and lovely as the Girl From Ipanema. The other, non-cosmetically enhanced head merely reflects the results of 78, going on 79, years of life’s inevitable changes.

We live in a culture of illusion/deception by advertising, with a focus on youthful beauty, and Trumpie is touted as a genius because he has played to this illusion/deception “like nobody’s ever seen.” Leave aside the well-known fact that the man is a compulsive liar. There are other ways to refer to someone who constantly spouts falsehoods (see — NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX, Völkischer Beobachter). In the law there is a distinction between “puffery” — making exaggerated claims of one’s own power to intimidate an adversary that do not cross the line into outright lies — and making false statements under oath or as an officer of the court (all lawyers who appear before judges are considered officers of the court) which are punishable as perjury. I apologize, insincerely, for this perverse insistence on drawing logical and semantic lines in the sewage we are all ankle deep in during Musk/Trump 2.0 Triumph of Wanton Irrationality Crusade.

The entire billionaire funded reactionary right-wing project of the last several decades, now in full stinking flower, has been to destroy meaning, to nullify rationality itself. Our current age of irrationality makes actual dialogue or negotiation between political opponents impossible since an irrational argument, asserted loudly and repeatedly, is just as good, for purposes of swaying public opinion, as a detailed, fact-based one that logically and completely refutes the other based on a body of what was once called incontrovertible evidence. Today, these irrational monsters controvert and crowds cheer, it’s not a problem at all.

This “the only the reality is what we say it is” leaves only constant warfare between hated enemies, rather than the sometimes contentious policy debates integral to a functioning democracy. Nazis don’t want democracy, they want Nazism, duh. You are either a woke snowflake who hates everything the rightful oligarchs of America stand for, OR, a courageous and fearless patriot who wants to turn America back to the paradise it was before insane deep state regulations destroyed the ability of Robber Barons to make, and keep, unregulatable wealth and operate as they saw fit, for the benefit of themselves and their poorly paid virtual slaves alike.

I was hoping for something a bit more profound today, and frankly I’ve disappointed myself. It’s hard to get out of your own feelings about being injured, physically and psychically, by a master salesman psychopath by writing about another one we are all sickeningly familiar with, or in love with his carefully manufactured false image (those who do not suffer from the widespread plague of TDS). His image again, please:

This thin-skinned stable genius strongman was recently bitterly crying over an official portrait of his, hung somewhere in 2019, that shows him looking a bit fat, bloated, an unhealthy color more like the unretouched one above than the carefully beautiful John Boehner-toned one he projects every day (he bragged that he was prettier than Kamala Harris, you be the judge, carefully…). The portrait’s painter, according to the strongest, most secure man in the free world, is a hack who is losing her skills, a bitch, probably an abortionist, sick, dangerous, a deranged enemy lunatic pet-eating sickie who deliberately tried to humiliate the world’s most handsome man after making Obama look so much more handsome than she made him look. Or, perhaps she’s just a portraitist who faithfully painted what she saw.

What do I know? The best I can do is something like this self-pitying self portrait as a partially crucified Picasso with pissbag and stylish, crucifix-coordinated shorts.

[1] By the way, according to Hannah Arendt’s short, encyclopedic primer on the original Nazis, Eichmann in Jerusalem (Penguin edition, 2006, p. 133), Hitler himself had a list of 340 Jews on his personal “don’t touch Moishe” list.

Psychopaths do not all literally kill people with their own hands

The vast majority of psychopaths, like the current acting administrator of the Social Security Administration, a formerly mid-level SSA dude named Dudek, may never have committed any kind of physical violence against anyone.  He may display other marks of psychopathy, but, not to worry, the American Psychiatric Association does not even have a definition of this familiar personality type in DSM V.  Here’s what this one boasted of recently on social media:

Dudek was a mid-level staffer at SSA until he won his position atop the agency by secretly cooperating with DOGE’s demands to review sensitive records after SSA’s head, Michelle King, stood in the way. “I confess. I bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done,” he wrote on LinkedIn. source

Another apparently non-violent psychopath, this one a billionaire cabinet member purportedly vetted and duly confirmed on a narrow party-line vote, added this bit of clarification about the kerfuffle at Social Security and who is actually to blame for the confusion and possibility that for the first time since the social safety net’s creation, checks for seniors and the disabled will not arrive on time (back to Heather):

SSA oversees Social Security benefits for nearly 70 million people and, according to the agency, was expected to distribute about $1.6 trillion in benefits in 2025. For many people, that check is vital to survival. But billionaire Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick suggested that concerns about a stoppage in checks were overblown. He told billionaire podcast host Chamath Palihapitiya: “Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling, and complaining.”

source (for both quotes above)

Anyone with a problem with the behavior of a psychopath is just a whining, complaining bitch to be bitch slapped by the psychopath.   I am very sensitive at the moment to the issue of psychopathy, having been recently “treated” by a top urologist, charming, reassuring and a master salesman, who, truthfully told me (the only true statement I heard from him, with the knowledge of hindsight)  the “minimally invasive” surgery would tear tissue in my urethra, and it tore such tissue (as my pain and difficulty urinating, since the removal of a catheter and “leg bag” I wore for a week, confirmed). 

Hours after the surgery he told me he’d have to do a TURP, the one he’d sold the “dilation” as a way to avoid (knowing my concern that a TURP at this point would almost certainly end my sex life), since the dilation clearly wasn’t the surgery indicated, as he saw instantly the first time he actually looked into my bladder with a cystoscope (during the unnecessary, urinary tract lacerating surgery I’d just endured).  Psychopath and motherfucker both, this unaccountably unethical asshole (unless his procedure left me with a permanent, legally cognizable injury, the jury’s still out as my ability to urinate waxes and wanes).

The main hallmarks of a psychopath are steely determination, lack of regret, adeptness in gaining control over others, self promotion, acquisition, particularly of wealth and power over others, a driving need to be the un-contradictable final word on everything.   They are often charming, always persuasive, attuned to the needs of others in order to exploit them, they make great salesmen.   The bulk of the titans of corporate boardrooms, and most CEOs, are psychopaths.   They seem to make great leaders because they are bold, fearless risk-takers and they project a supernatural level of cool self-confidence, which is comforting to subordinates.  

Until their real nature is revealed.   They have no concern for the well-being of others, no regret for anything they’ve done, and they maintain a righteous, vindictive rage, unabated, over years, even decades.

It’s hard to read the signs sometimes, since psychopaths are generally adept manipulators who will tell you exactly what you need to hear. 

Even if the signs are as clear as this one, in the lobby of my psychopathic former urologist’s office.  In fairness to him, his office is part of the nation’s largest network of corporately owned humane, caring, supportive, patient-centered urology practices in the United States.  The Supreme Court-created corporate person is a psychopath since it is only obliged to make the most money for shareholders and minimize liability for harm it does in pursuit of profit by any means necessary.  Though my sloppy former doctor is the top dog in his office, I guess the “boss” made him put the sign up, they probably have one in each of their hundreds, if not thousands, of compassionate healing centers nationwide.