Category Archives: “funny”

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.

Seeing the people we know as lab rats

A gigantic rat I was good friends with, about 6’4″ with hands like boulders (inexplicably, he was a skilled guitarist and pianist), once accused me of regarding everyone I knew as lab rats. I remember feeling defensive when he made that observation, though, forty years later, I can acknowledge it was somewhat insightful.

It’s not that I view myself as a superior and dispassionate scientist methodically conducting experiments, collecting data and forming data-based scientific judgments, exactly, but something like this is always in progress when we interact closely with others and learn from our experience.

I give my friends the benefit of the doubt. This is something I have always done and it is how I want to be treated by others. I understand now that not everyone is capable of this. I have that understanding only after years of testing the hypothesis that kindness, patience, seeing things from the other person’s perspective, defusing tension with humor, extending sympathy, etc. will always yield the desired result — peace, love and understanding. My informal lab studies have demonstrated, conclusively, that not all lab rats are capable of the mutuality I am always seeking with people I interact with.

What to do with this data? When you encounter a lab rat who is anxious, becomes defensive and aggressive at the first sign of any conflict, angrily blames the other rats, is always ready to fight to the death — that rat may not be the best subject for a study of the healing power of empathy. You can run the experiment with this kind of rat over and over, and after a while you will be able to predict the outcome with close to 100% accuracy.

Teach this rat to speak, express his point of view, let this rat interact with other rats, design a minor conflict. Take out your clipboard and get ready to record your observations.

This rat will find other rats to ally itself with, involve them in the conflict by enflaming their sense of right and wrong, exploiting their anger at being trapped as lab rat experiment subjects. The rat will then approach the rat it has a beef with, backed by these allies. If the surrounded rat stands his ground in any way, the affronted rat will go for the throat. There is a big vein or artery there that you can rip open and it’s curtains for the vicious, defiant fucker. End of story. Anybody else want to fuck with the expressive talking rat?

All the scientist can do is make notes and add it to the data. You can run this experiment as many times as needed, though in the end the conclusion about how this particular specimen will always act will be hard to empirically disprove.

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.