Greta Thunberg Speaking on Climate Peril

In response to Greta Thunberg speaking to the UN about the perils of not addressing climate change and hurting people's lives, this woman demonstrated the sentiment of her second sentence - "I think not"

9/23/2019 FB Posted by: Penny [redacted] So a 14 year old has appropriate credentials and years of scientific knowledge and data to support her opinions? I think not-

Fortunately the follow up comments were universally against Ms. Penny for her complete lack of critical thinking regarding who and what a representative is on any subject. And while she is entitled to her opinion, she is also subject to the public criticism which follows such an ill-informed expression.

Instead of debating the content of Ms. Thunberg's message, the emphasis has been placed on the messenger. Ad hominem attacks are always indicative of the fact the person has nothing to add to the discourse. Unfortunately, the venue for debate in America has devolved into what comedienne Paula Poundstone has described, "America has become one giant game of Dodgeball."

It is a sad state of affairs that there are far too many people just like Ms. Penny on Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms who parrot their indoctrinated counter-measures and eschew the education that was offered to them as they matured from child to adult. When people adopt the ad hominem attack as their modus operandi in the public square they become like the little boy with a BB gun taking potshots at anything that catches their eye.

I Know You Are But what Am I

I Know You Are But what Am I? It's a child's game. It is much like Tic-tac-toe in that the game is played to a draw when Player 1 and Payer 2 are equally matched. Only when one Player is more anal retentive does he "win" by default. This is why the better move is to not play.

There is a poem and song lyric titled "The Drunk Driver Always Has the Right of Way." Sometimes even when you are right you must yield and let the impaired one have his way. This principle also applies in the game of habitual lying. The master liar states his lie. Everyone knows he is lying. He knows he is lying but he doesn't care because the war of attrition is afoot. The people who hear the lies point them out and refute the message being put forth. The liar lies some more. The refutation continues. Eventually, the refutation efforts wane due to sheer exhaustion. Besides, the level of repetition of the lies leads some people to believe them. That phenomenon exacerbates the futility of trying to outmaneuver the liar. He has an unlimited supply of false and misleading statements to use.

The childhood game goes like this. "You are a crybaby." The response is "I know you are but what am I?" This exchange goes on until the Player 1 gives up because Player 2 will never acquiesce. His is a world where he is the king, the master, the mogul who cannot be "one-upped." Eventually, everyone will leave him alone and criticized him behind his back. He becomes like the grumpy old demented grandpa who cannot be reasoned with only accommodated. The cognitive deficit becomes so severe that eventually he must be moved to supervises housing where he can rant and fuss to his heart's content and the staff placates him with "there, there we mustn't get the other residents all riled up.

The problem comes when the impaired one is the head of the household. He still has control of the checkbook and the other finances. Wresting control from him involves a legal battle royale, especially when he still has supporting associates who have something to gain by his absurd behavior.  

The conflict may very well result in the fall of the house. Maddness is highly destructive to everyone who contacts it. It is exceptionally destructive when an entire nation is the household. Eventually the mad one dies or otherwise reaches a state where he cannot function any longer and he fades away leaving a trail of devastation in his wake.

On The Other Hand

On one hand, the President signing an Executive Order to allow veterans to visit any medical facility and have their bills completely covered is extremely valuable to veterans it is what he is doing with his other hand that causes great concern to both veterans themselves and the remainder of the population of the US.

I cannot help being cynical and skeptical about how great such a move might be. The first factor is that this move is "damage control" for a poorly funded, poorly staffed VA medical system. The condition of VA medical services delivery exists at the lowest quality and quantity levels this country has ever seen. In some cases, private delivery of services might be the only care available to a veteran who  to date at the very least has been neglected by the system and at the very worst systematically denied coverage for their conditions.

Missing limbs, paralysis and sensory loss is easy to see and mitigate with hardware and training. Chronic pain, concussive brain damage, PTSD, chemical exposure and depression are essentially invisible and most be proven to be real for the VA to take action. Much of the rehabilitative services veterans need is not something readily available in the private medical sector.

Congress, weapons contractors and Presidents are far more interested in funding and supplying the hardware side of the war equation. They lack the concern and financial interest in dealing with the "residuals" of human disability as the result of their service in the military. Just like corporate missions versus externalizations, the military is expert in breaking people, places and things while being totally inept at making remedies for the people who have been broken. Congress has chronically underfunded the remedies needed by the men and women who now survive the battlefield to return to the civilian world where they cannot cope with the private sector.

The private sector consists of the housing sector, employers who demand 40-50 hours a week for 52 weeks a year, food suppliers, insurance companies and a transportation sector which fails to address the needs of veterans to get to their places they need to go. Not the least of the private sector hurdles is society's attitudes about damaged personalities and broken bodies.

Our Congressional leadership has been indebted to corporate interests who fund their re-election campaigns rather than their constituents. Those corporate interests are enamored of quantity of services over quality. They see the $$ in the numbers of clients served and not in the quality outcomes. As long as there are dollars to treat a condition, there are resources to be applied. Already we have seen Medicaid services being "capitated" and brokered. The broker is paid a fixed amount per client and it is up to the broker to decide how that funding is spent. With a lower outlay of funding for services, they derive a greater overall earnings.

Once the President's Executive Order begins to generate services for veterans there will be an even lower motivation to bring the VA health system up to acceptable standards. Men and women who up to present have not received timely appointments, therapies, and treatment will be shuffled into the general civilian population to compete with them for the services they had expected to get from the VA but now will not.

Going by contemporary evidence there will be zero investment in the private sector infrastructure and staffing levels to handle the influx of veterans who will allegedly be getting quality, timely services in the private sector. This lack of investment was one of the arguments against the ACA. Millions of people would flood the existing medical facilities and make it more difficult for affluent private pay and private insurance patients to obtain prompt services.

So, on one hand... making private services available to veterans is a good short term band-aid. It is not a viable remedy for comprehensive funding and overhaul of VA medical services delivery.

WTC Was a Fake

"The Twin Towers attack was a false flag deep state hoax," according to Ajax Loans of the only true and accurate Internet video blog InfoWhores. There was no attack and actually there never were Twin Towers in the first place.

According to the theorist the fake buildings were really just hologram projections created by a CGI team lead by legendary film maker and NASA hoaxer, Stanley Kubrics. The NSA along with black ops units of NASA planned the fake attack shortly after their contract for Apollo moon landing footage with Kubrics to be used "just in case the Military Industrial Complex needed a really good excuse to go to war with one or two Middle Eastern nations" or someone.

The conspiracy was hatched by first clearing a site in lower Manhattan then 3d filming the fake construction progress in order to fix in the minds of gullible citizens memories of the buildings going up. After the entire film footage was post-producted into holographic form, the only decision to be made was when to utilize it and who to insert for blame.

Interim evidence of legitimacy for the physical presence of the two building was provided by crises actors who were hired to come and go daily and claim they worked in the non-existent offices. Loans vehemently claims even though it might seem to be a major effort, only a few actual people needed to be occasionally seen to "establish" the fake reality.

Ajax Loans pounded his fists on his desk saying Obama needed probable deniability that he was not an American born Christian and ordered Hillary Clinton to use her private email server to contact State Department assassination units to "destroy" the building which were never there.

Inconvenient Truths About This Trump Guy

How ironic that [you] use the term "inconvenient truth" when referring to your blind support of Donald Trump. When Al Gore published his book An Inconvenient Truth about the complicit action of humans in global climate change, he suffered the slings and arrows of those people whose thinking is clouded by cognitive dissonance.

Yes there are a myriad of inconvenient truths related to Donald Trump for an educated libtard to consider and decide to dislike. It is an inconvenient truth that this man is a habitual liar who may not even realize he is misinforming his voter-base. It is an inconvenient truth there are several millions of people who believe what he says and will be devastated by the reality when it rolls up their front lawns.

It is an inconvenient truth Donald Trump is a self-professed sexual abuser and proud of it as though it were a positive attribute.

It is an inconvenient truth this man has more ties to Russian oligarch and mobs money that he himself probably doesn't know how deep in he is.

It is an inconvenient truth Donald appoints people to top executive positions who have in their CV the desire to dismember and disembowel the very agency, bureau, department they are appointed to run.

It is an inconvenient truth any corporate who fawns over how great he is can get him to declare policy that allows them to do damage which previous Dem and GOP Congresses and Presidents acted on to prevent.

It is an inconvenient truth this President insults every world leader he comes in contact with, except Vladimir Putin. What's with THAT anyway?

It is an inconvenient truth Trump supports candidates for their useful fool status as a GOP vote in legislatures even though they may have reprehensible behavior histories that rival his.

It is an inconvenient truth Trump frames his false statements as fact while yelling "Fake News" at everyone else.

It is an inconvenient truth this list could go one for many pages, but I will stop here.

The Cost of Medical Treatment is a Huge Part of the GDP

When the GOP Congress eliminates cancer treatments from Medicare the cancer patients stop being patients and instead become the living dead waiting to die. But there are other parties who will suffer. The pharmaceutical industry that makes the chemo drugs and the radiation therapy industry who zaps cancers for thousands of dollars per year.

It appears the GOP Congress is so bent on altering the spending patterns of the health insurance industry that they forget the money doesn't go to the medical patients but to the hugely profitable medical corporations.

When a person cannot pay large medical bills, they have the option of bankruptcy to shield at least some of their essential assets. Bankruptcy denies the medical industry payment for their services. Being corporations, they rely on the socialist principle of sharing the burden by raising the rates and prices charged to everyone else who can pay or has adequate insurance.

By cutting off people from a payment system who have expensive illnesses and conditions the Congress is denying those people that same socialist sharing of the cost burden which they grant to the recipients of payment.

Ultimately cutting a $1 trillion from the payments of medical services reduces the earnings of the medical corporations by $1 trillion.

Don't Blame Donald Trump

Don't Blame Donald Trump

When Donald Trump began his campaign for the presidency he rightfully claimed he was not a politician, not a Beltway insider, not someone who would maintain the status quo. On these grounds he was being accurate.

Since ascending to the halls of power, he has proven those claims over and over. Not being a politician means he is not connected or beholden to a constituency to whom he is dedicated and responsive. Not being a Beltway Insider means that he has zero connections to the existing power structure in any of the three Constitutional branches of government.

Being politically tabla raza, he only has the references for correct actions which the Republican Congress and conservatively minded politicos demonstrate in the exercise of their offices. Two of the tenants of that way of thinking are "blame the victims" and "disrespect losers."

The conservative legislative attitudes are similarly manifest in recent Judiciary appointments. The blame the victim approach has become rampant in Republican legislatures and gubernatorial offices. The list is long and varied but here are a few examples.

·         People receiving public assistance are lazy and don't want to work (although many of them do.)

·         Single mothers are irresponsible by becoming pregnant even though it was a man who did the deed.

·         When a 4 year old girl is raped by an adult, she came on to him and was a willing participant.

·         When a woman is raped or molested on the street or in a public accommodation, the clothing she chose to wear caused the crime to be committed on her person.

·         Children whose parents cannot afford to provide adequate meals are takers when they want the school system to provide nutrition as well as education.

·         When a police officer beats a citizen to death or shoots an unarmed person, it was the dead person who was at fault for making the officer fearful for his life.

·         People who live next to a toxic industrial site are to blame for their cancers and other diseases because they did not move away.

·         The battered wife is the cause of her beatings by not being a good wife or by challenging the authority of her husband. Her not leaving him is also her fault.

·         A woman seeking an abortion is promiscuous and responsible for getting pregnant and must be required to carry to full term. See second item above.

·         Being homosexual is just cause for getting beaten, burned, dragged or lynched by an alleged heterosexual. Well, just because.

·         Not being able to obtain a well-paying job is one's own fault for not being skilled enough in a wildly changing labor market.

The Conservative and Republican mentality is heavily oriented on Biblical writings. God made peoples' skin brown to punish them for some ancient sin therefore, today they deserve the distain visited upon them for economic gain by others. It is their own fault for being brown and poor and disenfranchised.

Then there is the disrespect part. Poor people need to have their diets controlled via restrictions of what can be purchased with SNAP Debit Cards. They must be drug tested and pass in order to be worthy of feeding their children. Their benefits must be time limited so they do not become generationally dependent. Not only these limitation must be imposed, conservatives must vocally denounce recipients at every opportunity.

Donald Trump has far too little worldly experience to be responsive to the needs of the people of America and the world for that matter. In his world-view anyone who doesn't have everything they want is a Loser. Anyone who doesn't fit his winning-style is a Loser. He has even gone as far as saying he doesn't like Senator John McCain because he was a Vietnam POW. "I don't like people who were captured." Trump was casting McCain as a Loser.

In Trumps world asking him for something they need is a double insult in his mind. First, in the asking is the implied statement that what he has done was not enough nor was appreciated. Second, it casts the asker as a Loser.  His attack on San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz for criticizing the White House on its hurricane Maria relief efforts angered Trump in a trifecta of factors. A Hispanic female dared to say HIS efforts were subpar. In response he besmirches her leadership abilities, the competency of the PR people, and their desire to have everything done for them. Then as though punctuating his distain he made his tweeted comments from his golf club.

Her actions showed how much of a loser she was and the people of PR are in his mind. The fact that they need any supports in indicative of that status. To be fair to the man, he treats everyone that way. Well except for Caucasian Nationalists and all their ilk. They get a pass for being who they are and what they want.

Donald Trump is pulling his actions from the Fascist Dictator playbook. The mere asking for something shows you are not worthy. Pointing out racism runs against the claim there is no racism in America. Showing the world there are people in desperation in Puerto Rico is blasphemous after the dictator has said everything there is being handled in an amazing way. The death toll is a boasting point. He says providing 3,000 meals is great response when there are 3.5 million people who need a meal a day or more.

I suspect Donald Trump really believes what he is saying. He has no idea how far PR is from the mainland when he says it is an island far out and surrounded by the sea. For a man who departs and arrives at airports by jets, he has no idea about actual distances. For a man who points to items on a menu in a private club dining room, he has no idea how difficult it is to feed a family several times a day every day. This is not his fault. No one ever showed him the realities. "It is easy to hurt others when you can't feel pain."

The unfortunate part of the entire scenario is even if he does learn important lessons, they will be too late for the people who are in harm's way and he will not have the opportunity to employ those lessons a next time.