Category Archives: current events

Certain stories have only one reasonable response

We like to think that there are two sides to every story. Many times there are way more than two sides. The truth can be very slippery to get a grasp on, particularly when compelling stories that contradict each other are told. There are some stories, however, that almost anyone, weighing the events fairly, will relate to as true.

Some stories are not complicated in the least, if you look at them clearly. If you ask one or two people, or ten, likely they will all have exactly the same response that you did.

I think of the daughter who accused her father of wanting to fuck his son’s girlfriend, after he defended the girl as a good match for his son who made his son happy, in spite of what the daughter thought of the girl. The father was pissed off, felt disrespected, gave his twenty four year-old daughter a piece of his mind. Afterwards his wife told him he was out of line, that their daughter was just trying to be funny. I’ve yet to meet anyone who has agreed with the wife’s assessment that the girl was joking and believed the father had no reason to feel hurt by the remark.

There are some stories that simply don’t have two equally compelling sides or a lot of nuance. Sometimes a story has one demonstrable truth — for example, a three hour violent riot filmed and broadcast in real time, with more than a hundred injured police officers taken to the hospital. There is of course a counter story, in this case that the riot we all watched was, actually, “legitimate political discourse.”

The second story, to be remotely true, must discount the violence that injured outnumbered law enforcement, the breaking and entering, mass criminal trespass, vandalism, the necessity of heroic actions by a few policemen to allow lawmakers to flee the threats to their lives, the gas masks, the gallows and all the rest. One can’t believe the second story without dismissing a huge trove of evidence we all witnessed.

We can, of course, discuss which of these stories is closer to true, and millions will be compelled by one side or the other, but what actually happened is the deciding factor in which story is closer to true.  You can spin a story, as the studiously both-sides New York Times has become so adept at doing, but that is not the same as presenting an intelligible story that doesn’t make both sides, no matter how ridiculous one side is, seem equally plausible.  During legitimate political discourse, for example, people are rarely, if ever, injured en masse or taken to the hospital with grievous injuries. 

Here are two nice headlines for illustrative purposes, from our beloved journal of record

MAGA judge appointed by Trump, nothing political here
One person’s complaint was based on lies, the other’s was based on facts on the ground right now

Some stories are not complicated in the least, if you look at them clearly. If you ask one or two people, or ten, likely they will all have exactly the same response that you did.

A surgeon described to me a ten to twenty minute procedure that involves no cutting, merely the stretching of a constricted structure by a method called dilation.   A little shaving of the place the structure inserts into may be required, he said, but he could only tell that once he was looking through a scope during the procedure.   The procedure he described was much less invasive than the one I was expecting to have and without a side effect I was dreading.  I was relieved. 

A few weeks later when I got the presurgical papers, dilation was not included among the procedures I was scheduled to have.  There was a surgical resection described (likely the shaving he’d referred to) and the possibility of something called a cold knife urethrotomy.  As I’d never heard of this procedure, I looked it up.  Here’s what the device looks like:

I was concerned about this unannounced change of plans.   The risks associated with slicing with a urethrotome are not inconsiderable. The odds of success appear to be depressingly low.  I needed to talk to my doctor.  The corporation the doctor works for, a subsidiary of the the nation’s largest, and presumably most lucrative, corporate provider of such medical services, does not allow patients to directly speak to their doctor.  My need for this procedure is close to an emergency level, but I had to finally cancel the fucking surgery today, as there is no way to give  informed consent without knowing the risks and benefits of a surgical procedure I was never told about.

This outcome is what I mean by certain stories have only one response.  Any patient, or friend of a patient, hearing surgery A proposed, getting notification of surgery B, would have questions of the surgeon.  It is not the result of PTSD, trauma, the experience of abuse or being bullied that would make someone need an answer to this question.  It is the nature of the questionable behavior that makes the question necessary.

It is like having to inform a loved one that they had no right to punch you in the face when they were drunk.   There aren’t multiple sides to this story.  If the loved one tells you to shut up, they were drunk, it only happened three times in fifty years, it doesn’t change the essential nature of the story.  You are not wrong to either need this talked through to ensure it never happens again, to not see this person again, or whatever the solution you need is.  It’s not like there are two equally compelling sides to the story, outside of the question of how you let it happen a second and third time.

Corporations were ruled to be people by a corporatist United States Supreme Court. The kind of person a corporation is has all of the characteristics of a psychopath. Here’s a checklist from the excellent 2003 documentary The Corporation, which lays out the case in a manner so irrefutable it will make your spine tingle.

You can see the entire movie here, on YouTube, for only the cost of having to skip the infernal corporate ads inserted every ten minutes.

Your spine will tingle at the recognition that we are all prey and the corporate person, an eating machine without any other consideration, has virtually no constraints on its appetite.

History lesson from Heather Cox Richardson

I have to say, Jefferson’s words (which, of course, applied only to wealthy white men) get to me every time. Who can reasonably argue with the idea that the ideal government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed? Informed consent can only be given based on knowledge of the alternatives. This remains true today, when tsunamis of deliberate disinformation can drown all reasonable discussion among those who must give their consent. Here’s Heather:

The Founders of what would become the United States rested their philosophy on an idea that came from Locke’s observations: that individuals had the right to freedom, or “liberty,” including the right to consent to the government under which they lived. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

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Why they marched a Confederate battle flag through the Capitol on January 6th

The driving will of the super-wealthy to become ever wealthier cannot be overstated. While most people could live very comfortable lives on $10,000,000 or $100,000,000, those people are, objectively, losers relative to those competitors who have a billion (one thousand million) or a hundred billion (a hundred thousand million). The greed of those obsessed with owning everything is apparently insatiable.

We can see it every day among our greatest, most admired and important citizens. Elon Musk made $64,000,000,000 in the week following Trump’s election, after spending chump change, $200,000,000, to advance Trump’s electoral chances. An astounding, immediate thirty-two fold return on investment. 3200% profit, most excellent! Mark Zuckerberg rushed down to Mar-a-Lago to sample the famously delicious “ring”.

What is the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire? A millionaire is rich, a billionaire is an insatiably greedy psychopath.

In the old South these best of the best inherited vast fortunes based on slave labor. They inherited land, slaves, a lavish lifestyle of privilege and every advantage. A tiny percentage of white people ruled everybody in the antebellum south, in the manner of the old aristocracy in Europe. Poor whites were regarded, by the “Planters”, as rough tools to keep the slaves in line and were respected about as much as these genteel best of the best respected their dark-skinned human chattels. The poor whites, for their part, got to feel infinitely superior to, and brutally abuse, Blacks who showed them disrespect.

Poor whites died, or were maimed, by the tens of thousands supporting the cause of slavery and defending their masters’ right to rule them as well as their actual slaves. The myth they fought for was their superiority as white men, as a matter of their manhood fighting Northern Aggression to preserve a traditional, Godly way of life. After the Civil War, the Lost Cause myth [1] emerged quickly to explain why they had been righteous to fight, why their fight had nothing to do with slavery and why the South had never actually lost the war. Fast forward 156 years and you have rioters unfurling the Confederate battle flag in the Capitol. Here’s the story, drawn in a straight line, in under five minutes:

[1] Compare this racist alternative history of the Civil War to other myths about lost causes.

Hitler came to power after decades denouncing the “November Criminals” who, in 1918, “stabbed the victorious German Army in the back” by traitorously negotiating a humiliating surrender when the German Army was on the cusp of glorious victory (like they were again in April 1945, when the madman eventually shot himself in the mouth in his bunker).

Trump came to power endlessly screaming about a lost election that was stolen by sick, dangerous criminals and traitors (of both parties) that made a riot by patriots necessary, heroic patriotic martyrs who were viciously persecuted and unfairly locked up for justifiably attacking and hospitalizing more than 100 Capitol policemen in an attempt to selflessly save the nation they love. USA! USA!!!!

Why Biden can’t do it (or can he?)

Do it, Joe Biden!

Horrifically enough, Biden can’t legally order FBI vetting of Trump’s mad cabinet picks.

Donald Trump, as transgressive a psychopath as we’ve ever had running this country, is doing what he does best, the thing he shares with angry South African superfreak Elon Musk and their proudly stinking ilk, saying a loud, saucy “fuck you!” to the law and the norms it rode in on. His minions love him for his transgressiveness.

The law in question is The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022. This law was designed to fix flaws in the previous laws to make sure a lawless, insane fucker like Trump couldn’t run roughshod over the law to, say, try to get his minions, and an enraged lynch mob, to overturn the lawful results of an election., while refusing to put his estimated $700 trillion dollar brand into a blind trust to avoid conflicts of interest while president.

This law provides that the incoming president must sign papers submitting to the provisions of this orderly transition law, allowing his administration to smoothly flow from the one before it. Trump being Trump is doing what he did when Mueller found his final answer to written questions “inadequate” or however the ultra-polite Mueller put it. Trump left his answer to the final, incriminating question completely blank. Nada. Ain’t signing it. Fuck you, pedophile commie cuck losers!

Biden can’t legally order FBI vetting of any of the incoming corrupt incompetents Trump has nominated until, and unless, Trump signs the paper ensuring an orderly, legal transition of power without obvious conflicts of interest.

This would be a perfect test of the absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts the Federalist Six put into place recently to protect their criminal benefactor. It is clearly an important part of Biden’s official presidential duty to ensure a peaceful, legal transfer of power. If he has to break a law that his successor refuses to obey, in order to enforce the law and protect the republic, why the hell not? What are they going to do, prosecute him?

As for why Trumpie is not obeying the law? As Trump said when asked, after a secret, private meeting with Putin in Helsinki, if Putin interfered in the 2016 election “I don’t know why he would.” Trump ain’t signing Jack Shit, Jack Smith! Also, there is no legal way to enforce the law against him, given that the law smashing turd is firmly in charge of the enforcement of all laws and norms, given his huge, 49.9% electoral mandate and the abject sycophancy of his spineless henchpersons and handmaidens.

I take back what I said up top. Do it, Joe Biden.

Pete Hegseth, part 2

Timothy Snyder:

[Trump nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete] Hegseth does not need to know early American history, though, since he disavows the American republic.  He is a Christian Reconstructionist who believes that God’s law should prevail.  The Constitution has to be understood, Hegseth claims, as subordinate to a broader unwritten Covenant with God, the meaning of which is of course known to him personally.  He thus opposes the constitutional structure of the United States as it figures in the actual text. 

Hegseth denies the rectitude of the First Amendment, which separates church and state: “without God, America is not America.”  He says explicitly that “the diminished role of Christ’s Kingdom in America’s founding” is to blame for the malaise that followed.  Switching his metaphysics for a moment, he claims that the separation of church and state opened “the gates of Mordor.”  Constitutional patriotism is not a good thing, since it can “untether us from the timeless truth, from the Bible.”  Of course, as is always the case, God’s law turns out to mean what Hegseth and his friends say that it means.

The enemy within, broadly defined as “the Left,” is presented as already having a plan to annihilate everyone else.  This is, of course, what fascists always say: it is legitimate to destroy the other side, because however invisibly and conspiratorially and secretly, it is planning to kill you first.  Thus for Hegseth, the Left has the goal of “erasing America’s soul, culture, and institutions. We are the ones standing in their way—and have been targeted for annihilation.”  Hegseth does not dwell, for some reason, on the actual countries that actually want the American system to break.

Only the “enemy within” captures his imagination. Hegseth enjoins his readers to “remember the plan the Left has for you—utter annihilation.”  And again: “In more ways than you can imagine, leftists have surrounded traditional American patriots on all sides, ready to close in for the kill: killing our founders, killing our flag, and killing capitalism. The only option for survival in a near ambush is to charge; to close with, and destroy, the enemy.”

Trump’s nominee for the position of secretary of defense seems to believe that we need a cleansing civil war.  He instructs us that “we are not only fighting a battle against foreign enemies.”  “Sometimes,” he writes, “the fight must begin with a struggle against domestic enemies. Those who would violate the Covenant that binds us as a community of faith and that grants us blessing.” 

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Deus Vult — God wills it.

Tattoo on Pete Hegseth’s strong right arm. A man of unquestioning faith, only God knows how much Hegseth knows about His eternal, awesome, incomprehensible, all-merciful, terrifying will. Deus vult, baby.

MAGAmania, yo, gigantic mandate!

Trump transition spokesperson Alex Pfeiffer told Will Steakin of ABC News that discussions of Gaetz’s payments [apparently for sex with two seventeen year-olds] “are meant to undermine the mandate from the people to reform the Justice Department.”  (Heather Cox Richardson)

Gaetz would have been the perfect MAGA Attorney General to carry out Trumpie’s mandate to reform the DOJ, considering it’s currently impossible to reanimate the corpse of Roy Cohn, the only better pick for that role.   Here’s Trumpie’s latest bestie, South African twat Elon Musk, making a genius case for Matt Gaetz:

If you’re a super-wealthy, born-entitled, angry, attention-craving dork with an oversized taste for trolling and dominating others, you want a smart AG with a spine of steel and an ax to grind. Of course you need a super-loyal bully with an ax to grind, got to have that revenge motive working. What good is power if you don’t get to swing a sharpened ax to make sure your will is forever obeyed?

Meanwhile, the MAGA spokes-shills are tirelessly spinning the myth of MAGA’s enormous, throbbing mandate.

A spokesperson for the Trump transition said of [Trump Secretary of Education pick Linda] McMahon’s misrepresented credentials [lying about having a BA in education while running for a school board position]: “These types of politically motivated attacks are the new normal for nominees ready to enact President Trump’s mandate for common sense that an overwhelming majority of Americans supported two weeks ago.” (Heather)

That overwhelming majority of Americans now stands at an impressive 49.9% of those who voted (in an election with a turn out about 10,000,000 voters lower than 2020). Within the margin of error, true, and we don’t know how many mail-in ballots were undelivered from Democratic-leaning districts in swing states by the smirking Trump megadonor postmaster (and the odds are that we may never learn that number– try finding any clue on-line), but an OVERWHELMING majority, nonetheless.

Compare that mandate to the one Dick “I Am Not A Crook” Nixon, patron saint of these modern day MAGA zealots, got in 1972 (after the infamous Watergate break-in, before Nixon’s inglorious resignation to avoid indictment two years later):

Leaving aside the question of why I get these from the goddamned Richard Nixon Foundation…

So far we are not even talking about walking Putin talking point, friend of the Syrian dictator and good looking woman who allows the loathsome Orange Polyp to literally paw her in front of a large audience, Tulsi Gabbard, Trumpie’s pick for Putin-approved Director of National Intelligence [1].  Gabbard, a former Democrat, was a dark horse 2020 Democratic contender for the presidential nomination (like her whacky fellow traveler Bobby Kennedy Jr. in 2024) before waking up one day suddenly loving of the taste of the GOP strongman’s “ring”.   They all have to kiss it, come on.  Lindsey Graham will tell you exactly what it tastes like and why it is so hard to stop “kissing”. Take one look at the smile on MAGA Mike Johnson’s cherubic face, it speaks louder than all of the Christ-fearing extremist’s words ever could.

In other news, hate crimes are up in the USA, and on the rise, as white supremacists stage shows of force in towns and cities all over America. This trend started under the first Trump administration, which saw a 20% rise in hate crimes. Here’s a trusted fake news site, Newsweek, from November, 2020:

Hate crimes have surged nearly 20 percent during the administration of President Donald Trump, according to a new FBI report on hate crime statistics. The report also shows that hate-motivated murders, largely committed by white supremacists, spiked to their highest number in 28 years.

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Nothing wrong with violent expressions good old fashioned hatred, of course, if the people your followers hate are hateful, sick, blood poisoning, dangerous enemy-within vermin. Nothing to worry about, unless you’re a hateful loser. That’s why the massive congregations of wealthy Christian theocrats, the Klan and American Nazis helped give MAGA it’s overwhelming mandate.

[1] But Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence makes McMahon look like a prize. As military scholar Tom Nichols points out in The Atlantic, former representative TulsI Gabbard is “stunningly unqualified” to oversee all of America’s intelligence services, including the Central Intelligence Agency. Nichols notes that her constant parroting of Russian talking points and her cozying up to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad make her “a walking Christmas tree of warning lights” for our national security.  

Former Republican governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley suggested that Gabbard is “a Russian, Iranian, Syrian, Chinese sympathizer” who has no place at the head of American intelligence. A Russian state media presenter refers to Gabbard as “our girlfriend” and as a Russian agent. (Heather)

Pete Hegseth

The New York Times reports the details of the incident that caused Fox News host and defender of Navy SEAL war criminal Edward Gallagher [1], Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Defense, to pay an undisclosed amount of money to a woman in exchange for a non-disclosure agreement.

Trump himself couldn’t have done it better. Perfect agreement! 

The salacious details don’t matter (read the NY Times account anyway), the agreement is ironclad and absolutely nothing wrong happened, per the agreement and the undisclosed sum of money paid to settle the matter and keep it private forever (see NY Times account).

In other news, Matt Gaetz, also totally innocent and viciously persecuted by angry, name-calling libtard cucks armed with disgusting leaked private details of Mr. Gaetz’s personal life, cleared the way for Aileen Cannon’s appointment as Attorney General of the United States of America.

[1] Gallagher was turned in by his fellow Navy SEALs after, among other things, witness accounts that he stabbed a wounded teenaged Iraqi prisoner to death, and posed with the corpse, holding the cadaver’s head by the hair (as one does). A military tribunal convicted Gallagher of posing for a photograph with a corpse and texting the photo to friends. Gallagher was outraged. So was Hegseth, who became his powerful advocate. Trump gave Gallagher a full pardon. A perfect pardon! As all presidential pardons now are, according to the Federalist Society Six. Here are some of the now irrelevant details about the accusations against Gallagher:

Gallagher was accused of multiple offenses during his final deployment to Iraq and during the Battle for Mosul. The most prominent accusation and the best-attested to was the murder of a prisoner of war, a war crime.[9] Khaled Jamal Abdullah, a captured 17-year-old fighter of the Islamic State, was being treated by a medic.[12] According to two SEAL witnesses, Gallagher said “he’s mine” over the radio, then walked up to Abdullah and allegedly proceeded to stab him with his hunting knife without explanation. Gallagher and his commanding officer, Lieutenant Jake Portier, then posed for photographs of them standing over the body with some other nearby SEALs. Gallagher then text messaged a friend in California a picture of himself holding the dead captive’s (ISIS) head by the hair with the explanation “Good story behind this, got him with my hunting knife.”[9][13]

Prosecutors alleged that Gallagher’s sniper work during his 2017 deployment became “reckless” and “bloodthirsty”.[5] He allegedly fired his rifle far more frequently than other snipers;[5] according to testimony, the other snipers in the platoon did not consider him a good sniper, and he took “random shots” into buildings.[1] Other snipers said they witnessed Gallagher taking at least two militarily pointless shots, shooting and killing an unarmed elderly man in a white robe as well as a young girl walking with other girls.[5] Gallagher allegedly boasted about the large number of people he had killed, claiming he averaged three kills a day over 80 days, including four women.[1] Gallagher also was reportedly known for indiscriminately spraying neighborhoods with rockets and machine gun fire with no known enemy force in the region.[9]

A charge of obstruction of justice was brought against Gallagher for alleged witness intimidation. According to the claim, Gallagher allegedly threatened to kill fellow SEALs if they reported his actions.[5] The Navy cited his text messages as attempting to undermine the investigation, with messages sent to “pass the word on those traitors”, meaning cooperating witnesses, and to get them blacklisted within the special warfare community.[9][1] This resulted in him being confined in the brig for a time with heavy restrictions on his ability to communicate, although this confinement was later lessened.[5]

Gallagher was also charged with nearly a dozen lesser offenses.[5] Some of these charges, such as flying a drone over a corpse, were dismissed during preliminary hearings.[14]

According to the original Navy prosecutor Chris Czaplak, “Chief Gallagher decided to act like the monster the terrorists accuse us of being. He handed ISIS propaganda manna from heaven. His actions are everything ISIS says we are.”[6][5] Gallagher’s lawyer, Phillip Stackhouse, alleged the accusations were without foundation and came from a small number of disgruntled SEALs who could not meet Gallagher’s leadership demands. The accusations against Gallagher were recorded to be fabricated by teammates that started a mutiny in the SEAL platoon.[5]

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Führereid

We are in for a hell of ride, boys and girls, a Führereid, if you will.

My German vocabulary is extremely limited. Virtually every phrase I know is an idiosyncratic, specialized term I learned while studying the history of the Nazis. I know words like vernichtungslager (annhiliation camp) sonderbehandlung [1] (“special handling” stamped on the papers of Jews being expedited to the camps) and Lebensunwertes Leben [2] (“lives not worth living”, as deemed by the Nazis). Today I added a highly pertinent phrase, Führereid, the blood oath of personal loyalty to the infallible party leader, Herr Hitler.

We are living at a moment when an eighty-nine year-old psychopath, Charles Koch, is excited to see the culmination of his life’s work, his father’s Hitler-admiring dream come true in the administration of seventy-eight year old psychopath Donald “Jesus” Trump (Donald’s psychopath father was literally named Frederick Christ Trump). This is as serious a moment in history as any evil genius (such as Koch) could create in the lab. Wuhan’s got nothing on this gathering plague.

In order to be an elected (or appointed) Republican in good standing, one must do exactly what the leader demands.  If that demand is to publicly stand behind a thoroughly debunked lie about a stolen election that got several of Trump’s attorneys disbarred, and others to take guilty pleas, if you know what is good for you, you will say, at the very least, that there are legitimate and serious questions about 2020 that were never answered (like, why are numerous Stop the Steal riot conspirators not serving long prison sentences?). 

To be a Republican official in good standing you must state that it is perfectly fine for the leader to violate the Espionage Act by stealing (and most likely selling) secret documents, commit crimes while campaigning and then while in office (34 counts of which he’s been convicted for), have a fraudulent university and charity closed down, incite a deadly riot in a crazed attempt to stay in power, make vile, racist misogynistic threats (as a man convicted of committing a close variant of rape and then repeatedly defaming the victim), proudly echo Hitler in overheated rhetoric about vermin, blood poisoning and the “enemy within”.  

Now, all that’s left for you, if your job is important to you, is to argue why it is necessary to shut down FBI vetting of wildly incompetent, badly compromised cabinet nominees, (as was already done with lifetime appointee Boof Kavanaugh), and the way is clear for Führerswortes haben gesetzeskraft (“the Führer’s word has the force of law”.)

For totalitarianism to take hold of a nation several things must happen.  Language and meaning must be distorted beyond rationality, as in “alternative fact”, so that no reasonable discussion may ever take place.  Fear must be so pervasive that citizens and officials obey pressure to conform in advance (Bezos, Mika and Scarboro, etc.) and are terrorized when they think of organizing to dissent.  Political opponents become sick, evil enemies to be imprisoned, killed or otherwise silenced.  Blackmail becomes the coin of the realm and only powerful insiders are excused for crimes, for all others, justice!

Resisting this oligarch-funded tsunami of blind obedience to their collective will is going to require great creativity, organization, doggedness and, unfortunately, a great deal of collective suffering.   We have to be creative, united, resolute and ready to rumble.  The first thing Biden has to do is order FBI vetting of this drawer full of creepy crawlers Trumpie has nominated as his cabinet.  Then, as Steve Bannon (soon of the long prison sentence for defrauding MAGA nation) says “strap in.”

The Hitler Oath (German: Führereid or Führer Oath) — also referred in English as the Soldier’s Oath[1]—refers to the oaths of allegiance sworn by officers and soldiers of the Wehrmacht and civil servants of Nazi Germany between the years 1934 and 1945. The oath pledged personal loyalty to Adolf Hitler rather than loyalty to the Weimar Constitution of the country. Historians view the personal oath of the Nazi Germany as an important psychological element to obey orders for committing war crimes, atrocities, and genocide.[2] During the Nuremberg trials, many German officers unsuccessfully attempted to use the oath as a defense against charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.[3]

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(check out the punishments at the bottom for those who refused to take the oath)

[1]

[2] source

Doctors were the ones primarily responsible for applying the plan in order to eliminate people labeled as incurably ill, children with hereditary defects, criminals, the mentally ill, the physically disabled, pedophiles, homosexuals, and adults or elderly people considered “unproductive.”

Aktion T4 was implemented through two channels: euthanasia, practiced on people who fit into those categories, and sterilization en masse, so that there would be no new children with what the doctors considered disabilities that would make people unhappy. And we are speaking here of German patients.

Doctors considered that each of those persons was a “life not worth living” (Lebensunwertes Leben), and presented them as such. It is calculated that between 200,000 and 275,000 people were systematically murdered out of “compassion,” while massive sterilization programs reached more than 400,000 people—always, in every case, against the patient’s will and without consent.

Concierge medical care

America is rapidly becoming, if you have the money and you want responsive medical care, the land of concierge doctors and nurses.

The number one hospital for orthopedic surgery, HSS, where I had my left knee replaced almost 600 days ago, boasts on huge banners all over its grounds that it has been the top hospital for orthopedics fourteen years in a row. That doesn’t mean they provide aftercare, and they don’t claim to. If you have a problem, pain, stiffness, difficulty walking, sleeping, whatever, when the x-rays show a perfect mechanical result, it’s not their problem, since the operation was 100% successful, even if you can’t walk more than a block 18 months after surgery.

They don’t claim to be the number one hospital for follow-up care, as you learn when they provide zero aftercare, can’t get you in to see their physical therapists for post-surgical evaluation and offer no solution (other than another operation, a 50/50 coinflip) to a not uncommon, foreseeable but difficult to fix chronic disability they did not help you avoid.

Corporate medicine increasingly works this way in the United States. Health care is an enormously profitable sector and vampire entrepreneurs are increasingly getting in on this lucrative growth industry. More and more doctors work for corporations that take care of all the business aspects of medical care. The bottom line is probably better for all of them and it’s easier to be a doctor in our country if you don’t have to compete with giant medical corporations that have the wealth and infrastructure to put you out of business.

The only casualty is the patient, sometimes. In the event of a good result, there’s no problem. In the event of a problem, complication, need for follow-up, corporate medicine has an answer — concierge follow up, done by telephone, billed as a regular doctor visit, sometimes 100% paid by insurance, or in the case of someone over 65, if you have purchased supplemental insurance for your 20% Medicare copay.

I had a call from my new urologist’s office the other day. These folks are hard to reach or get a return call from on a good day and I’m not optimistic about reaching anyone there if something goes wrong with my upcoming procedure. The caller, a likable guy named Tony, called to offer me a direct number to call and talk to a dedicated nurse any time after my upcoming surgical procedure.

We wound up speaking for a while and it emerged he was not affiliated, nor did he know, the medical practice he was calling from. Somehow, through corporate wizardry, his call appeared to be coming from the difficult to reach office with an offer to give me a direct after care line. Tony worked for a third party selling concierge assurance to rightfully nervous patients.

He agreed it was crazy that he couldn’t tell me the price I’d have to pay for one of these follow up calls billed as a doctor visit. He was with me when I pointed out the madness of healthcare being the only store in America where they can’t tell you the price of anything before you buy it. The standard line is that the doctor has to wait for insurance to bill them before they can tell you the price. My standard reply is to ask if I’m the first patient who ever came to them with this insurance that they take every day. Their standard reply is some kind of smile reflecting an attempt to be civil. None of these folks have any control of anything, and it’s pointless to antagonize them with questions there are no reasonable answers to. Tony and I parted as friends, our call recorded, and by midway through he was no longer trying to sell me a service he could not tell me the price of, but one I’d definitely be on the hook to pay 20% of.

America the beautiful. Exceptional. About to become even more exceptional. I’m keeping my fingers crossed it won’t become too much more exceptional. It’s already much more exceptional than is healthy for almost every American.