Category Archives: “funny”

To trust or not to trust?

Once you realize a person is prone to lying, trust is often a self-destructive option.  Until you see this pattern of untruthfulness clearly, the question of trusting or not trusting can be tricky.   I think humans want to trust the people around them, this appears to be a default setting.  We homo sapiens are a communal, if also often communally irrational, species, after all, and community is based on trust.  

When you’re a helpless infant you have no choice but to trust the people taking care of you.  This trust is rewarded if you’re nurtured with care.  Trust can be shattered forever if you learn you’ve been continually pissed on by your caretakers and told to shut up and stop whining about a little rain falling on your head.   Most of us have upbringings that fall somewhere in between.  Knowing when to trust and when not to trust is often only learned by hard experience.   We put our trust in somebody, in their expertise, and sometimes that trust is revealed to have been misguided.  The question: how do we know in advance that we can trust someone?

We tend to trust people, I suppose I generalize from my own habit, who are relaxed, friendly, show a sense of humor, make the proper sympathetic facial expressions, and react reassuringly, when you express concerns.   The obvious problem is that these are all the behaviors of the best conmen and almost all manipulators and compulsive liars.

I’m thinking about this because I had a consultation with a friendly, reassuring, good humored and very likeable urologist back in August.  We left the office very impressed with him.   He assured me that during the tests I was going to have two weeks later I’d be under comfortable “conscious sedation”.  I was relieved to hear that since having devices shoved into your penis is not always comfortable, and is usually done without any palliative measures.  The standard line is that most patients tolerate it.  You wince a bit, maybe groan, at the insertion, and the rest is fairly tolerable.  But I was glad to know I’d be sedated, the better to wince less, and maybe not have to grunt.

When I arrived for the tests, and asked about the conscious sedation, his nurse expressed frustration that he always tells his patients they will receive conscious sedation when his office NEVER gives conscious sedation, does not even have tranquilizers they can give patients.  She said he probably thinks it makes his patients more relaxed.  I didn’t need to convince her that learning, at the moment of your test, that the doctor lied to you is the opposite of relaxing.  I endured a ninety minute ordeal with this gentle, determined nurse, as she tried, unsuccessfully to insert catheters into my urethra to drain my bladder for the test.

The doctor came in, sweaty and smiling, and asked how I was doing.  I told him I was wondering what happened to my conscious sedation.  He had a fit, denying he’d ever said that, essentially calling me a fucking liar.  In that moment I knew I was done with this asshole, and managed to remain the adult in the room.  I quickly calmed the angry baby down and got him back to business. He told me he wouldn’t do   further tests, telling me my urethra was already irritated enough for one day. 

Then he wrote a detailed report, which I got a copy of and which was sent to all of my doctors, not mentioning the unsuccessful catheterization, but stating “patient tolerated procedure well.”  It then gave detailed findings of two tests this motherfucker never did.  He billed Medicare for them, and I got bills and a statement from Medicare confirming the charges and what they paid.  Medicare did not seem concerned about the fraud, it was virtually impossible to report it, even as determined as I was to. 

My next urologist was also affable, smiling, quite chill, with a sense of humor and all the other indicators of a nice guy you could trust.  He was openly horrified by the doctor’s false report I presented to him and suggested I contact HR at the place his unethical colleague worked.  (No doctor is going to suggest a disciplinary complaint to the state licensing board).  He did no tests, described a non-invasive surgery that should correct my urinary problem, I postponed the procedure once to have a fuller discussion of it.  He gave me a detailed theory for why this procedure was better than the standard alternative, which I’d had years earlier, to great life changing effect.  I had the procedure Thursday and left the hospital with a catheter and piss bag on my leg, as is common after this kind of surgery.

There was a complication when I removed the catheter the next day as instructed.  I was unable to urinate at all.  After 4 hours with a full bladder, and the constant urge to urinate,  I wound up in the ER where I was “fast tracked” and it only took another 3 hours to have the painful urgency to piss out 600 ml of urine relieved by a new catheter.  

I was sore, irritated and in need of advice afterwards and called the number the urologist had smilingly touted as a 24/7 doctor on call, no worries.  I left increasingly agitated messages.  Five messages and five hours later, at 2:45 a.m., I got a call from a bot, instructing me to go to an ER and have the ER doctor contact their on-call doctor.

I called again when I woke up and got a fairly quick call back from the surgeon himself.  He sounded indignant to have been defamed the way I’d spoken of him in my increasingly agitated messages.  He told me I had a poor recollection of our detailed conversations prior to the surgery.  I was in a pissing contest with a skunk, only my piss was dribbling slowly into a leg bag.  I asked him why he hadn’t done any pre-surgical tests before doing what seems, at the moment, and in light of what he told me after an unnecessary surgery.  He was able to see with the scope that, contrary to his prior test-free opinion, there was no scarring from the previous procedure and that I’d likely need the original procedure repeated soon in any case.  ) He told me he had the notes of recent tests from my previous urologist, the tissue of lies he had attached to my file in the hospital.  He made numerous other excuses and told me how busy he was doing Saturday surgeries at another hospital.  I sensed there was not a trace of his winning smile on his face as he defended himself and his perfect recollection.

So, quite naturally, as an irritating drip of urine intermittently leaks through the painfully re-inserted catheter into the leg bag, I am musing about trust, when to trust, who to trust, if you can ever trust someone who is employed by a demanding bottom-line driven psychopath, which is what every corporation is.  After all, this guy is the director of his clinic, part of a chain across the US, the largest corporate provider of high quality, infallible, humane, patient-centered urologic care.   You can read all about it on their fucking website.

Or just listen to their compassionate on-call doctor, who phones you personally at 2:48 a.m., a mere five hours after your first of five distress calls.

It looks like PBS is trying to preserve public funding and its broadcast license in the Age of Musk

PBS and NPR are under investigation by Elon Musk for disloyalty to the president’s agenda and for spreading factual information that might call into question the wisdom of Mr. Trump’s policy decisions, whatever they might be, no matter how creative, illegal or, frankly, insane.  The psychotic racist Nazi salute shooting billionaire, Mr. Musk, is acting as Mr. Trump’s Roy Cohn and he’s not taking any shit from any commies like the Liberal Corporate Media or Public Broadcasting.  He is, after all, the apostle of free speech. 

I was curious to see what a constitutional scholar interviewed on PBS might have to say about whether any of Trump’s actions constitute executive overreach. Say illegally creating a one man government “agency” and giving that one man the power to shut down any agency he pleases if he feels there could be waste, fraud or abuse in that agency– say giving food to starving African, Asian and Central American children, funding natural disaster relief or paying for medical care for orphans in Congo, Ukraine, or Gaza, which would be egregiously fraudulent, abusive and wasteful indeed…

This “constitutional scholar,” Ilya Shapiro, is from the Manhattan Institute, a “think tank” whose largest single donor is Charles Koch (with a half million annually from a rabidly “Libertarian” billionaire descendant of Andrew Mellon). Note the “scholar’s” fealty to the defense of the lawless president’s actions as perfectly legal and constitutional, certainly matters for the courts alone to decide.  With brazenness characteristic of his kind of partisan, he accuses Obama and Biden of creating agencies willy-nilly, at the very moment that Elon Musk is effectively the president of the United States and head of an agency pulled directly out of Charles Koch’s crusty old Nazi ass in line with his Project 2025.

Let me quote this super-confident illiberal scholar for you when asked about Trump/Musk overreach in shuttering agencies and not spending funds already allocated by Congress.  Recall that Trump was impeached the first time for doing that very thing — withholding money already allocated by Congress to get a quid pro quo from the new president of Ukraine.   Here’s the constitutional scholar:

Executive overreach is when you create new programs out of thin air, like Barack Obama with his pen and phone government, with DACA and all of these other things, or president Biden forgiving student loans, that was blocked by the Supreme Court, then said “I’ll do it another way” or vaccine mandates, all of these things creating new authorities that did not exist.

PBS gives this stinking pile of dung a forum to spout this Nazi apologia, the dictionary definition of gaslighting, presumably to demonstrate to King Musk, head of a perfectly legal newly created pen and phone government agency pulled out of Koch’s adorable tush, in order to show their fairness and willingness not to be shut down by Musk for not advancing the president’s agenda properly.  

Its painful to be living through this fascist nightmare here in the land of the free and the home of One Supreme Unelected South Afrikaan Bureaucrat unvetted appointee/government contractor with absolute power over the government’s budget and access to the personal financial and medical information of every citizen. 

History, take two

Every person who can never be wrong, always blames others and fights to the death every time, knows the importance of controlling the narrative of what actually happened. If you can never be wrong, you tell the story in a way that makes you the brutally, viciously abused victim. The sick person who abused you, in your story, is the one who deserves rage and violence, because you were totally innocent, as always. It’s hard being perfect in a world of jealous weaklings.

Personal Archaeology

Not everyone is wired this way, but for me, I need to unearth clues that help me understand the tangled progress of my life.  I learn many things way too late, and I wonder about these things, once the truth of them hits me like a wall.   Some may find this process painful and do everything to avoid it. 

I am not one of these people, I have left myself countless clues over the decades.  The challenge is to assemble them to  understand what they’re telling me about the progression of my experience.

Inspector General Joseph Cuffari successfully oversaw permanent deletion of all Secret Service/DHS texts and phone calls from J6

You can read about this creep, appointed by Donald Trump, and wonder why, after covering up the destruction of all January 6 Secret Service texts and phone logs, and those of other key DHS officials, and paying out over a million to settle suits related to his “official acts” as Inspector General, he is still serving, and ready to do his master’s bidding again on January 20th. Read about him here.

Here’s a disgustingly flavorful chunk of that article, which notes Biden has taken no action for months since getting the report, stating:

The Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency’s integrity committee found that Cuffari provided wrongfully inaccurate and misleading answers during his nomination process to become DHS IG, spent $1.4 million to hire a law firm likely to retaliate against three OIG senior executives who questioned his qualifications and attempted to influence the firm’s independent investigation into those employees. 

Cuffari, who was appointed by Donald Trump, was also accused of diminishing and delaying reports about sexual harassment at DHS, not informing Congress in a timely and adequate manner that the Secret Service deleted text messages related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and deleting his own work-related text messages. 

I never believed for a second that Joe Biden suffers any age-related dementia. He’s slower, he stutters, he’s always been famous for being a gaffe machine, but he’s sharp and coherent every time I hear him speak. With the glaring exception of his glassy-eyed cold medication addled zombie imitation disaster (don’t get me wrong, his zombie imitation was impeccable) during the first half of the infamous debate against Trump, which only confirmed to the live audience what corporate media had been saying the whole time: Biden, unlike Trump, is not fit to be president.

That said, what the fuck, Joe? Why is this openly corrupt Inspector General still in office, four years after covering up the destruction of all evidence of what happened, from the Homeland Security point of view, before, during and after the MAGA riot on January 6th? You can’t blame Merrick Garland for this one, Biden, or the Senate committee that needs to vote out USPS Board nominees to get rid of equally abhorrent fucking Looey DeJoy. Cuffari is an executive branch employee, directly accountable to you. He is untrustworthy and has taken direct action to protect your criminal predecessor/successor. What the fuck, Joe?

Seriously, Joe, what the fuck?

Looey Fucking DeJoy hearing, LOL!

click on it and you get this:

Pages 49-52 of the smirking, corrupt postmaster’s prepared statement address the USPS credo about transparency and accountability. Those policies amount to 403 Error, suckers. There is no such thing as transparency and accountability in a pay to play corporatized democracy where secrecy is essential for corrupt business as usual.

There is no available public information about committee vote deadlocks that stall things like a meaningful hearing with DeJoy BEFORE the election (to ask him why, for example, he refused the IG’s request to post mark mail-in ballots the day they are received or segregate mail-in ballots from the millions of other undelivered letters in the weeks leading up to the 2024 election) or why, and how (and by whom, Kyrsten Sinema?) the confirmation of any of Biden’s three picks for vacant USPS board of directors positions was stonewalled until Trump won the election?

You know what would be nice? A tally of how many mail-in votes were cast and counted in 2024. Would anyone be surprised to see the lowest rates of delivery of Democratic voter ballots (by zipcode) in the seven swing states (all won by DeJoy’s candidate by virtually identical margins)? There is no information anywhere on the internet, outside of recent updates like this one.

If you can do the calculation you’ll find out how many mail-in ballots were cast:

88,380,679 mail-in and early in-person votes cast nationally

48% of these were by mail. Making the total over 40,000,000. How many did DeJoy leave in the sorting houses, mixed with all the other late delivered and never delivered mailings? Nobody seems to have reported on any of that. Though the poor fucker was put through the wringer by House and Senate Committees 40 days before his benefactor is peacefully sworn in as the first felon who incited a riot to disrupt government and stay in power ever legally elected president of these United States.

In the 2020 election, 43% of all votes cast, more than 66 million ballots, were cast by mail (per US Census Bureau — which has no information on 2024, of course). Why the big drop off in 2024 when mail-in voting has increased in every presidential election since 2008? Until 2024, of course when it precipitously dropped by over 40%.

Ballotpedia.org was a decent source for this kind of info. Click.

Hah, what are you going to do? Democracy dies in darkness, boys and girls. LO fucking L!

Another very unweird stable genius

Elon speaks to fellow ordinary American, Tucker Carlson, revealing a completely beautiful personality and an empathetic, thoughtful, humanistic view of the world.

The People rest. You can cut my Medicare and Social Security any time, big feller. Nobody holds it against you that there’s a federal law making it illegal for government contractors, like you, to spend hundreds of millions to get benefactor politicians elected, you’ve earned it, philanthropist.