Trump with his ever changing tariffs reminds me of the demented tailor who made a man a custom suit that on first fitting didn’t fit. The left arm was too short and the right too long. Rather than altering the suit he told the customer to simply pull in the left arm and extend the right arm as far as he can while hunching his shoulders and then used a few safety pins to fix the length.
The pants of the suit didn’t fit at the waist, they were too small so the tailor told the guy to leave it unbuttoned and zip the fly down. The left leg was too tight so the tailor cut the seam to loosen it and the right was too long so he used the safety pins to shorten the leg.
At the end of the fitting the demented tailor exclaimed, “look, a perfect fit.”
Medicynical Note: Credit to my late Uncle Abe who told a similar story in our living room in Newark New Jersey 75 years ago, smoking a stinking cigar and dancing around demonstrating the ill fitting garment (unzipped fly my addition)
Somehow as this unfolds I ruminate on Orwell’s “Animal Farm”, “1984”, and Kubrick’s”Dr. Strangelove (a movie in case younger folks are unaware of it).
DOGE comes directly out of 1984..–“Department of Government Efficiency” it sounds a little like “The Ministries of Truth, Love, Plenty, and Peace”– maybe next week they will show up.
Our legal system’s regression reminds me of Animal Farm’s “All Animals Are Equal but Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others” except that I replace the animal reference with pigs as it’s more descriptive of now.
And lastly Strangelove with Musk’s “sieg heil” reminding me of Strangelove’s (Peter Sellers) abortive but clearly similar genuflection to Hitler. And Trump yesterday deciding to take over Gaza is a little like Gen. Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) launching a nuclear war on a whim. The ineffectual resistance from Repubs and Dems is a little like Capt. Lionel Mandrake’s (also Peter Sellers) futile attempt to stop the war. But now, in addition to annihilating a people the goal is to make money by privatizing the occupation. A little like Keenan Wynn’s “Bat Guano” and his reverence for and defense of the private property of the Coca Cola company.
Only in America would a company working to cut payments for health care not benefit the patient. The NY Time describes the scam. “The firm, MultiPlan, and the insurance companies it serves often collect larger fees when payments to medical providers are far lower than the amount billed.”
“The Times investigation found that MultiPlan had encouraged some insurers to use its most aggressive pricing tools, leaving medical providers with slashed compensation and employers with high fees — in some instances higher than the medical care payment itself. And left some “patients with unexpectedly high bills as they were asked to pick up what their plans did not cover.”
Medicynical Note: Everyone wins…… except the patient.
The health insurer pays less for care and makes more money. Multiplan makes money because it gets a fee and piece of the “savings.” Providers including hospitals and their health care groups, lest you worry about them, have their own ways of increasing billings and get paid one way or another. Check out the salaries of health care company CEO’s and execs if you doubt me. And guess who gets pay for it all.
These scams are a little like the shell game. The money keeps moving and the last concern is value, access, and affordability of health care. As a result of games like these and there are many, we spend more for healthcare than anywhere else by a wide margin. We are the only place in the world where people go bankrupt from health care costs.
America doesn’t have a healthcare system. Instead it has a sophisticated revenue generating system that does healthcare. In In it, income generation takes precedence over patient outcomes.
Trump and Biden were too old in 2020 and now one has more or less gracefully moved aside while other has moved from being a sociopath to verging on being a psychopath (google psychopath and see). He has no deeply held views or core values. He. like his similarly empty suited VP candidate, will say and support absolutely anything if he thinks it will get him what he wants i.e. power and/or money. And the next day, week, or month, or after the elections will say and/or do the opposite. And now he’s saying it in an increasingly disorganized way because he literally losing it, in public.
He’s tried to destroy our electoral system and is at it again now. He denies global warming because, you know, money. And he will destroy Social Security and Medicare (Project 15). He’ll also destroy NATO, give up Europe, invite the Chinese to dominate Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines and threaten Japan and Australia because he really really doesn’t care about people, history or the future. He might continue to support Israel because he needs the support of evangelicals.
He doesn’t believe in anything but money and power. His talking in tongues religious supporters would impose a state religion and a nation wide abortion ban and attack the rights of our gay communities. In that they would have the support of the soulless republican very conservative Catholic majority on the Supreme Court.
Never in American history has Democracy been in greater danger than from this addled old man and his corrupt power hungry anti-democrat and anti-democratic monied supporters from the far far right.
Medicynical Vote: As I have done in numerous previous presidential elections I am voting against a candidate as much as I am voting for the other. By all means let’s VOTE against Trump together.
“Deputies responding to a disturbance call at a Florida apartment complex burst into the wrong unit and fatally shot a Black US air force airman who was home alone when they saw he was armed with a gun, an attorney for the man’s family said on Wednesday.
Medicynical Note: I can only conclude that our gun crazy country condones the murder of innocents as a cost of doing business—the gun industry’s business. The dead are literally viewed as “collateral” damage. In this case, we allow the police all manner of privilege because perps might have guns that our laws make available to anyone. So the killings of innocents are tragic but of course necessary (sic) accidents. All to justify the phony idea that our founders would have wanted anyone to have access to the most aggressive weapons because we’re a “free society.” Of course the families of Roger Fortson and the innocent victims of other shootings might disagree—A freedom for me and death for you society.
The solution to the problem is well known and accepted in all other industrialized nations i.e. gun control. But our Supreme Court Republican appointed justices huddle in their homes protected by guards with guns, too politicized and merciless to care. They need their armed guards of course, because, you know, there might be a picketer nearby who might carry, you guessed it, a gun. They are pathetic miserable faux devout group of jurists. They are destroying America ruling by ruling.
“Four law enforcement officers were shot to death and four others were wounded on Monday in a gun battle that erupted while they were serving a fugitive arrest warrant at a house in Charlotte, North Carolina, authorities said.”
“The fugitive, who opened fire on officers as they arrived at the residence, was himself fatally shot during the gunfight, and two other suspects were arrested after an ensuing standoff, according to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department.”
Medicynical Note: Our Supreme Court in its wisdom interpreted the second amendment written into our constitution in 1791 to mean that almost any type weapon should be available to almost any citizen. As a result we lead the world in mass shootings, shooting of innocents by police, shooting of perps by police, school shootings, accidental shootings, gun suicides, gun murders and shootings of police by perps.
Rather than take the hint that guns in our society are a risk to everyone our courts and segments of our society maintain that bearing weapons even the most deadly types, is our inalienable right. This despite the fact that they so clearly facilitate all the above categories of death by guns. You’d think that police who are rightly terrified of running into a perp with a gun as above would support some form, any form of effective gun control, but for some weird reason they don’t.
So the shootings will continue and sadly, brave officers and others will die and our Supreme Court Justices will sit in their homes protected by armed guards because you know a peaceful picketer might possible be carrying a gun.
But in America thousands die from gunshot wounds each year. People doing good, people behaving badly, people making a mistake, mass shootings, school shootings. Each a family tragedy. Each in a way preventable. (Compare our gun deaths with other industrialized countries if you doubt this)
Medicynical Note: You would think from the funeral service, the mass mourning of this good man, the attendance of dignitaries that all of these folks would be looking to find a way to decrease gun violence. You would be wrong. That’s America.
Putin is the guy Trump likes and wants to emulate. Trump’s surrender of Ukraine would be one of Trump’s first acts as President. Sort of like Chamberlain in the run up to WWII.
He not only attempted to overthrow an election, he’s setting up to do it again and then appease Putin.
It’s a disgrace that this reporter and others have been jailed in Russia.
And:
Medicynical Note: Trump and his top supporters really abhor a free press. That’s a fact.
It’s hard to believe that even Wyoming considers this as a possible “freedom.”
Even the delusionary originalists on the Supreme Court could not have thought this a rational idea. Though who knows?
Medicynical note: America’s blind allegiance to what a few Supreme Court Justices invent and interpret as the “founders” intentions is insane. In their hands it has become a dumbed down shortcut to indoctrination. Rather than think and use their brains and consider modern America, some justices/judges mumble something about the founders and then simply apply their financial and political benefactors biases to their judgments. Whether we are talking guns or separation of church and state or women’s rights or racism or opposition to gay rights or money=free speech our conservative justices have distorted America and its values into an unrecognizable mess. That this was even considered is an insult to intelligence. I’m not sure what it implies about Wyoming and it’s lawmakers..
“Olavarria assumed a mass attack was underway by an adult. In a sense, though, what actually happened turned out to be even more unsettling: A 6-year-old first-grader with a handgun had shot his teacher, Abigail Zwerner, in a classroom at the Newport News, Va., school.”
Medicynical Note: Our politicized somewhat corrupt Supreme Court did this. They are to blame. On one hand the court doesn’t hesitate to undermine and reinterpret the long accepted Jeffersonian concept of separation of church and state saying in essence that they know better than the founders. But on the other hand it believes it must not and cannot in anyway adapt the second amendment to modern society, because, you know, the founders. And in doing so is, in a way, responsible for this shooting and many other gun deathsin America.
It’s not rocket science. This court has worked to facilitate gun ownership. It claims this was the “intent” of the founders second amendment written during the musket era 250 years ago. And that they, the founders, would not have wanted availability, ownership or open carry of guns restricted. So, in modern day America we now have frequent mass shootings, school shootings, guns used in homicides and suicides and inexplicable accidental shootings. We lead the industrialized world in all categories of gun deaths, it’s not close. The crowning achievement of our gun laws IMHO, is this innocent six year old (I consider any six year old to be an innocent) bringing his mother’s gun to class and shooting his teacher, who almost died.
Yet, this court, the enthusiastic facilitator of our open carry gun laws, is the same group that has members who have complained about and demanded protection from peaceful protesters because they might be carrying a weapon. Because they feel threatened. That’s kind of pathetic when you consider the terror of kids nationwide being drilled on how to respond to a shooter in their schools— an event that was almost never an issue prior to this court’s gun rulings.
Medicynic 