Look the government just doesn’t have any money. None for usaid, none for Ukraine, none for science or education or healthcare, there’s just no money.

Except I guess for performative bullshit like painting over this mural.

It took a lot of persistence and luck. I had found my wife a new doctor to do her medication management and I ended up just politely hounding her staff explaining calmly but firmly the catch-22 I found myself in.

The trick I’ve learned over caring for my chronically ill wife, who I love with all my heart, is to be very nice to the front line medical people but to never give up. They take crap all day from angry people, so I make it my mission to never yell at them, never get cross with them. I just explain what’s going on and my goal is always to get them on my side, be my person on the inside.

That worked here too. After calling a couple times and being nice, one person working the phone remembered me and I could tell they wanted to help. I just kept asking them for options, people like it when they can be part of solving the problem. They got in the doctors ear about this and suddenly if she did a virtual evaluation of my wife she could write a preliminary prescription to fill the gap.

Is this how things should work? No. Should you have to beg and cajole and get lucky that someone will help you? Absolutely not. But this is how I’ve figured out how to navigate this broken system.

Tl;Dr - Be very nice to office staff, be persistent, make it a problem you can solve together, keep reminding them that you are advocating for a flesh and blood human being you care about and that them just suffering will never be a good enough answer.

Also don’t get frustrated if you don’t make progress and need to call back, I think it only took calling 3 days in a row for them to figure out they better help me or they were going to have to talk to me every single day

Anyone that might be thinking this is an exaggeration, it is not.

My wife has adhd and takes vyvanse for it, a strictly controlled substance. I have to be extremely vigilant about making sure her prescription gets to the pharmacy and that the pharmacy fills it correctly.

We recently moved across country. Here’s a fun puzzle to work on.

1. You can not get more than a 30 day supply of the drug
2. Due to lack of providers, you can not get an in state prescription for more than 30 days
3. while it is perfectly legal to fill the out of state prescription, every large pharmacy that can get vyvanse has a corporate policy against filling out of state prescriptions for it
4. smaller pharmacies are willing to fill the prescription, but can’t stock the medicine.

The amount of times I had to explain this to people and just exasperatedly go “so should I just prepare my wife to go through withdrawal of this medication she has been prescribed and taking for nearly a half a decade? Is that ok with you, is that an ok patient outcome? Is that what you’d let happen to your wife”

Luckily shes married to an angry, persistent, yet very polite man who will shame the shit out of people until he gets it fixed. But I have no idea how she was supposed to navigate this alone, while facing the terror of withdrawal.

Things are going great in the states right now.

Everyday I wake up and get to find out if trump had a good or bad day yesterday by whether or not we are waging a pointless economic war against our closest ally.

America is a joke and no matter what actions we take from this point on it would be foolish for any other nation to trust our government to act rationally.

Did you know that a tree will turn sunshine and carbon dioxide into oxygen and shade, for free?!

The tree doesn’t even try to maximize its economic value by charging for this service? It does sell the oxygen or comfort of the shade at all, it doesn’t have a subscription service so that you can pay it monthly for oxygen and shade.

It’s downright unamerican.

By reducing our labor spend on these spend nothing days and not increasing our labor spends on these days surrounding them, we’ve increased our profits!

The “very first thing”?!

This is why you don’t get invited to parties

Yea I feel bad for him too, you can tell when the officer tells him he has no choice to arrest him that he’s realizing how badly he just messed up.

In his mind he was about to lose his pardon and go back into the prison system.

But to me that also makes me think the officer is justified in his use of force. People that think everything is ruined are unpredictable and he was reaching for violence. While he was saying he was going to turn that violence on himself, there’s no particular reason to trust what he’s saying. I think there’s a very real possibility he gets the gun saying “I’m shooting myself” but then once he has it maybe shooting the cop sounds a bit better.

If I’m the officer I’m not rolling the dice to see if he points the gun at his head or mine.

And as much as I can empathize with the feeling of fear and loss in that moment, ultimately he made a bunch of choices that led to that. He did whatever he did to get his license suspended, he drove on a suspended license, and even in this instance he broke the speed limit knowing that the results of even a minor infraction could lead to the loss of his freedom.

At some point he has to be responsible for the consequences of his actions.

Police Activity posted the bodycam footage.

https://youtu.be/zf6BgUd86I4

It’s under 7 minutes and when the shooting happens it’s blurred out. It’s relatively tame from a gore point of view, but it’s still a video of someone being shot so watch with care.

Here’s my synopsis of the footage for people that don’t want to watch it themselves, you can skip the preamble if you just want to understand the shooting. In my opinion the officer acts reasonable, friendly, and professional throughout.

Preamble

• Officer pulls the guy over for going 70 in a 55
• Guy offers up unprompted that he’s a J6 defendant that was recently pardoned
• Officer doesn’t seem to care one way or the other asks for license
• Guy says he’s coming from church and his mother’s grave. He doesn’t have a license and has been trying to get a hardship license, produces an expired license
• Officer asks how often he’s been caught driving suspended
• Guy says “in my life”
• Officer clarifies “recently”
• Guy indicates not much
• Officer goes back to his patrol car to run the guys information.

Shooting

• Officer asks the guy out of the vehicle, they go to the rear of his vehicle
• Officer explains that he’s reached habitual traffic offender status because of driving suspended.
• Guy begs for leniency
• Officer explains its now reached the point of being a felony and he has no choice but to arrest him.
• Guy says he’s not going back to jail
• Guy runs away from the rear of the vehicle and jumps back into the drivers seat
• Officer gives foot chase back to drivers door, he provides verbal commands to stop
• Before the officer can reach the guy, he says “I’m shooting myself” and reaches for something in the passenger seat.
• Officer says “no no no” and fires three shots at the guy.

This is shown from his bodycam and also from his dashcam.

A felon retreated into a vehicle, stating he wouldn’t go back to jail, produced a firearm, and threatened violence. Was the guy lying about shooting himself, was his plan to fire the firearm at himself or the officer? Based on my view of the video, the officer acted within his lawful authority, was polite and professional, and only used force consistent with what the situation required. But I’d encourage you to watch the evidence and make up your own mind.

There are a ton of bad cops and awful shootings. I don’t like J6 but I don’t see this as justified because the guy is an asshole, but justified because of his actions at this traffic stop.

I mean I’m sure the forms aren’t identical but is having to tell the same information so much of a burden that removing it materially changes anything?

It seems like to work would be in tracking the spending and then once that is done what all is there to save from only having to hand that data to one watchdog instead of two?

Unless of course one of those watchdogs, being a smaller state agency, could be cheaply bought and have their reporting requirements gutted.

When powerful people want small government what they really want is cheaper bribes.

Every thing she lists is fluff.

If you are an employed professional you are spending your year doing your job. Not going back to school to pick up a certificate for fun or finding a documentary to be in (what even is this?)

I imagine the husband biting through his cheek during this grilling thinking “yea I’m busy fucking doing things.”

How do you define “violent aggression” then?

If someone poisons the air you breathe or the water you drink, is that violent aggression? Because there’s a long history of corporations knowingly doing just that to communities they believed were powerless to stop them.

If officers under the color of law routinely harass members of your community, openly admitting that they can choose who they want to stop under perfectly legal pretextual stops and then find a reason to beat or intimidate you, is that violent aggression?

Violent aggression can take many forms. What does violent aggression look like? If I buy the company that employs the people in your town and then fire everyone and move it overseas so I can make more money, that’s aggressive certainly, it will cause suffering, is it violent? Is violence just physical force? If I put a sheriff between me and the violence, if I use economic means but then enforce them at the barrel of someone else’s gun, am I being violent or are they?

Violence up close is easy to define, but how many layers of indirection do we need for violent acts to become ok. Politics is all about choices and a lot of choices end up harming a great number of people. We are living through and will continue experiencing natural disasters super charged by climate change. Communities flooded and burned down and destroyed by hurricane force wind, all because a few people would like to have more money and convinced some politicians that it was ok. Is that violence?

Sure if I said I was going to burn your house down that’s violent, but if I aggressively pursue bribing (sorry, lobbying) politicians so that they will support policies that my own scientists tell me will result in your house burning down, is that still violence?

That’s the real question people struggle with.

This has real “let them eat cake” vibes

Eggs have traditionally been one of the cheapest staple sources of protein for the working poor.

The right is living out their wet dream right now, in charge of almost every facet of the federal government.

And your concern is that people aren’t being nice enough to them and their supporters.

Collaborators can eat shit

I dunno, reading the FAQ this seems like some of the least bad public private partnerships

https://potholepatrol.co.za/faq/

It’s an insurance company that doesn’t want to pay out for people damaging their cars on potholes. Seems like a rare win for everyone. Insurance company pays out less, people don’t slam into potholes damaging their cars, and I guess the insurance company gets some advertising.

There are so many dystopia things going on, but I think this one is fine.

There’s no way a busty woman talking about bitcoins could honeypot any of these people. No sir. These young men are definitely above that sort of thing and no enemy of America would be wise enough to take advantage of these young lads.

Nope, totally safe and secure. We should all sleep soundly tonight knowing some 19 year old has access to our national treasury under the order of a ketamine addict.

You know what they say when you are at the top of a global order and reap substantial benefits from having that coveted position?

Blow it all up and hope that it’ll come out better by having you… at the top… which is where you already were… hold on.

American ruling class, “Oh would you look at that, we just found a 24.99999% price hike that we definitely have to do because economy. Still cheaper though than the Canadian and Mexican imports.”

It’s just the rest of America that is going to get fucked.

Amazing what $500B can do to change someone’s mind.

I still remember being taught about how politics is America is a pendulum.

It swings too far to the right and people get pissed and send it leftward. Then it swings too far to the left and people get pissed and send it rightward.

I have waited my entire life for the swing leftward, and I think I identified what broke America.

Let’s say that this pendulum swinging is necessary, we are a pack of goldfish swinging from left to right looking for something good with short short memories. This system can be metastable, you don’t make a ton of progress on anything but you just sorta bounce between the two sides and the status quo sticks around and you don’t slide into madness.

When 9/11 happened and Ws war on terror emerged, I worried that it would break the system. But in 2008, Obama emerged with a progressive message of hope and change. The pendulum I was told about was about to swing left. I had lived through the right swing of Ws time in office, and now I got to see what the left had to offer (which as a leftist was very exciting).

I watched two phenomenons happen concurrently that broke the system.

1. Obama captured the leftward energy that should have swung us back to the left and held it solidly in the center / center-right. He ran as a progressive firebrand and then governed from the center / center right. The big hop and change we got was nationwide Romneycare, a program devised by the Heritage Foundation which has done nothing but entrench the powers of the insurance industry into law.
2. Racism broke a large part of the voting public away from reality.

Obama wasn’t the first to do this, Clinton’s triangulation strategy was also a democrat governing from the center.

So we have a captured Democratic Party, beholden to the donor class and they capture the periodic leftswing energy and hold it center / center-right. Things fail to get better and the population goes “well fuck the left doesn’t have any answers, let’s swing the pendulum back the other way”

Over time the result is that the Overton window shifts and shifts and shifts until an oligarch is doing nazi salutes and the corporate media is going “oh he probably isnt really doing a nazi thing, he’s just advancing policies that nazis would love and saying things nazis would say and is excited and you know how hard it is to not do a nazi salute when you are excited.”

Our only hope now is that trump doesn’t slowly boil us into fascism and overplays and the people revolt. But Americans have proven to be willing to just take it in the ass rougher and longer than I’d ever imagine.