you get 17 days in skilled nursing with post brain tumor removal before . . . .
Genesis 1:28 – Then God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
Well, yes, it is profane, but the point should be made — unless you have a piece of land, some water flowing on it and under it, some decent soil, some brethren, family, you know, dependable family, and extended family, and skills sets that are way beyond some prepper group, and you have to have the typical farmer and rancher who can fix anything and husband anything, and a nursing degree in there coul help,, and, alas, there has to be some of those greenbacks to pay the taxes, the fees, the excise burderns, all the code building costs, so you can have this little slice of heaven without the Blackrocks or even local thug county and state tax collectors at your door — UNLESS you have all of that, pluse creatives in the group, and hard work of communicating and being a tribe of community of purpose, gain, and land ethic, then you will be tossed on the street.
I have a father-in-law with a second skill surgery in six months, that is, surgeons digging in his brain for five hours in an attempt to pull out more cancer masses, that is, the worst of the worst cancers, as Scientific American declares: “New Strategies Take on the Worst Cancer–Glioblastoma; Among the various malignancies that can afflict the human body, few bring with them the dour prognoses of brain tumors”
There are a thousand personal reasons for hanging on and having the quacks open you up once again. The VA and Medicare take care of most of the charges — something like $190,000 MD and surgical and hospital bills added up.
Once released, though, the skill nursing is on the clock. In this case, with his Medicare addition, he has 17 days to improve and move up, that is, back home with his wife, the only person in the game here for this fellow of 78 and she of 75 years on the planet.
That’s 24/7 care person, and she gets 19 hours a week of people coming over so she can do the banking and shopping. The old man is bed and chair ridden, and that clock is ticking until Tuesday, to prove he can arm wrestle his broken body (he has not standing power anymore, for years, before the diagnosis of the big C) into a tranferring situation: from chair to bedside comode; from bed to wheelchair, from wheelchair to toilet.
It’s an apartment, not some big home with handicapped retrofits. The wife is a small of stature woman and he is in the 230 pound range, but losing weight even though he eats well.
There will be chemical therapy, and the radiation, the last one being an in the hospital deal, so eight times they have to get a vehicle to move him from apartment to hospital and back. Supposedly Uber drivers do this for $30 as opposed to $160 for a medical transport.
We live three hours west, on the coast. There are no sibling and grandchildren and children there to swoop them up and take them under their wing. Our home is isolated and not near the VA, but three hourse. Therein lies the problem.
The fact is she worries over every bill, so an $1,800 BILL out of the $180,000 total for the last cancer surgery (they only got 70 percent of it since the rest was “too deep” into the brain where vital functions are controlled), is troubling as they are social security and the one bedroom apartment is $1800 a month.
Making calls, sticking to it, and then having the VA say they will pay the rest helps. Of course, there are ambulance bills, and the VA doesn’t pay for ambulances from one facility to the next, unless that facility is a VA hospital. Now that’s another $660 bill.
The means test she has to fill out is a mountain of paperwork, but alas, she has to do it. Her daughter (my spouse) does what she can here at 130 miles away, but we have our limited salaries and retirement from SS (me) and we living a small bungalow, worthy of us, two, and a cat, but not expandable for a mother and her dying husband.
Yet, like most people, the mother-in-law puts her faith in God, and she loves the USA, loves the military (she’s religious, and Seventh Day) which is weird, and she is stuck.
What would THAT look like if I had a large family, large ideas about land and sustainability, and if the old woman and old man had those families too?
That clock ticking away means that if he can’t get to the john and the chair, then, well, it is foster care home, almost a hospice situation. That means all social security checks he gets for the family will be GONE, going into the private, for-profit adult foster facility, care facility, whatever you want to call it.
What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?
? — W.E.B. DuBois
I wrote about a client who became my friend here: “Once a US Soldier, Always Wounded, Always Losing!”
So my family members dealing with the brain tumor are not here yet, and will not be here if we have any say in the matter:
I write this because I did spend with my wife up in Portland with the mother-and-father-in-law. And, I reeceived this pathetic news (sic) item in some feed: from some charlatan outfit, Investment News: “Boomers bite back: Don’t blame us for retirement ‘Road to Nowhere’!” The premise is never stated: Savagery and Brutality and Exploitatin and Death by a Thousand Retail-Consumer-Casino Hell Cuts or SOCIALISM.
Well, not too long ago, I posted a column warning future generations not to follow the baby boomers’ lead when it comes to retirement planning. And that pretty much led me straight to a journalist’s version of that fiery place.
Before I plead my case to the boomer community, here’s what happened.
Highlighting a study by the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies that said the median amount baby boomers, or those born between the years 1946 and 1964, have saved for retirement is a totally inadequate $144,000, I wrote that the boomer generation was on the “Road to Nowhere,” even going so far as to reference the lyrics and title of the well-known Talking Heads song.
At the time I wrote, “Sorry to be blunt, boomers, but it’s not just the soundtrack in our heads that’s telling us that you are traveling down a troubled path, it’s the data on our screens, too. Statistics from industry experts clearly show that your financial future is indeed certain — just not in a good way.”
Fine. Admittedly I was being, well, “blunt.” But I was writing as simply and directly as possible for what I believed was a noble reason. That is, to encourage Generation Xers, millennials and Gen Zers not to repeat the mistakes made by their elders.
And then the boomers lowered the boom … on me!
Emails flooded in, accusing me of ignoring the repeated financial indignities suffered by boomers, a large number of those hardships that weren’t of their own making. (source)
These only scratch the surface:
Responded Thomas: “How are boomers supposed to retire? They’re still raising their adult kids AND adult grandkids who refuse to get out of their house and get on with life! Tell the ‘you get’ generation to stop whining about every little thing, pull themselves up and get on with it already!”
Wrote Wendy: “Because it was active lobbying again and again by the investment firms for policies eliminating pensions. And then there was active lobbying against a government run retirement program for low and middle income people in my state because the financial firms didn’t want competition for fees. Because of that, a lot of elders are already homeless or living in poverty.”
You can read her piece, but it is boiler plate, really. The fact is that wars and war machine and tax havens and tax breaks for the rich and corporations, and the fact we pay for externalities of the dirty-pollution-injuries-destruction-environmental hell capitalism does to the world.
The for=by=because of=with THE people is and has never been a truism in this settle (theft) colonial (enslavement) state (empire of chaos, lies, terror to, for, on THE people).
I could put in a thousand graphics like this one
Or quote that war monger, multimillionaire (a billion at least) Hank:
Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world. — Henry Kissinger, interview with the Observer, 1983, on his book, Years of Upheaval
You want to see where that for-with-by-because of the people Capitalism goes?
This is cognitive dissonance, and this society is broken on so many levels. It is a war mongering state, and just this little doozy is emblematic of the Demon-Crats (the Repubicans want war with China and is in a War against the people of the USA, you know, “those” people who are chumps and didn’t save enough!).
I am also in constant argumentation with the beautiful people, the levelers, the milquetowast landed gentry, those with the retirement (state or county and federal) and those with trust funds and houses paid off) who want more more more for the dirty *elensky (Z being banned in UkroNaziLandia) as well as the Orthodox Church!
“Ukraine shells Donetsk during Easter service: A woman was killed and six other people injured after missiles struck near an Orthodox cathedral”
“Hedge funds making billions from Ukraine turmoil – study: Experts blame the organizations for exacerbating the food crisis by “betting on hunger”’
“German arms business booming amid Ukraine crisis: The country reportedly ranked sixth globally in weapons exports in 2022”
It goes back and back and back, arming hundreds of countries, endless profits in the trillions for the Offensive Weapons Merchants of Death and thousands of corporate — big and small — offhoots that make bank on war, war mongering, color revolutions, PR, construction, retail shit, services, etc.
So, yep, nuclear war is the end game, but before that, we have a history of corruption, murder and theft and graft in UkroNaziLandia:
The Ukraine government, headed by Volodymyr Zelensky, has been using American taxpayers’ funds to pay dearly for the vitally needed diesel fuel that is keeping the Ukrainian army on the move in its war with Russia. It is unknown how much the Zalensky government is paying per gallon for the fuel, but the Pentagon was paying as much as $400 per gallon to transport gasoline from a port in Pakistan, via truck or parachute, into Afghanistan during the decades-long American war there.
What also is unknown is that Zalensky has been buying the fuel from Russia, the country with which it, and Washington, are at war, and the Ukrainian president and many in his entourage have been skimming untold millions from the American dollars earmarked for diesel fuel payments. One estimate by analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency put the embezzled funds at $400 million last year, at least; another expert compared the level of corruption in Kiev as approaching that of the Afghan war, “although there will be no professional audit reports emerging from the Ukraine.”
“Zelensky’s been buying discount diesel from the Russians,” one knowledgeable American intelligence official told me. “And who’s paying for the gas and oil? We are. Putin and his oligarchs are making millions” on it.
Many government ministries in Kiev have been literally “competing,” I was told, to set up front companies for export contracts for weapons and ammunition with private arms dealers around the world, all of which provide kickbacks. Many of those companies are in Poland and Czechia, but others are thought to exist in the Persian Gulf and Israel. “I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there are others in places like the Cayman Islands and Panama, and there are lots of Americans involved,” an American expert on international trade told me.
The issue of corruption was directly raised with Zelensky in a meeting last January in Kiev with CIA Director William Burns. His message to the Ukrainian president, I was told by an intelligence official with direct knowledge of the meeting, was out of a 1950s mob movie. The senior generals and government officials in Kiev were angry at what they saw as Zelensky’s greed, so Burns told the Ukrainian president, because “he was taking a larger share of the skim money than was going to the generals.” (source —”Trading with the Enemy”)
Since I was a toddler, there began a host of freakshows on TV news, in politics, in celebrity “news” that caused gastric rumblings in me. As I became a journalist — newspaper reporter at age 18 — it only got worse, the despicable people in the news, on front pages, and on Ted Koppel or “60 Minutes.”
Add this one this morning:
Truly stomach turning, these criminals, in the People’s (sic) House (sic). But there are millions to despise:
The crimes of presidents:
Chomsky, who himself perpretrates a crime, a spoken crime, a desire to “put it” to fellow (sic) citizens (persona no grata): … see below.
“People who refuse to accept vaccines, I think the right response for them is not to force them to, but rather to insist that they be isolated. If people decide, ‘I am willing to be a danger to the community by refusing to vaccinate,’ they should say then, ‘Well, I also have the decency to isolate myself. I don’t want a vaccine, but I don’t have the right to run around harming people.’ That should be a convention,” said Chomsky.
“Enforcing is a different question. It should be understood, and we should try to get it to be understood. If it really reaches the point where they are severely endangering people, then of course you have to do something about it,” he added.
Speaking on YouTube’s Primo Radical on Oct. 24, Chomsky said that for the unvaccinated people who are segregated from society, how they obtain groceries should be left up to them. “How can we get food to them?” asked Chomsky. “Well, that’s actually their problem.”
Something about that from Kissinger, no?
So, you have 17 days, until you end up homeless, or in a place where people — that family, that dwingling community — can’t help you. Food prices are up twice or three times the prices in 2019. Not some bullshit 5 percent inflation crap.
Everything has at least doubled in price. That’s 200 Percent inflation, which is just another way to say, “make the profits, the killing now, at any cost to our family, our nation, our fellow We=By-Because of the People!
This is 1974. It’s axiomatic of how my mother-in-law and father-in-law are being treated. Figure out how!
At the convention of the World Food Conference, leaders of the underdeveloped nations hoped to press for changes in international trade relations while U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger hoped to use the conference as a forum to link food shortages to overpopulation. Kissinger tried to put the blame for the food crisis on the oil producing nations and the “energy crisis” they brought about and made it clear that the U.S. no longer plans to provide most of the world’s food aid. The underdeveloped nations did not accept this. They still blame the crisis on the U.S., which they say controls more food than the fuel the oil producing nations control. The U.S. has historically used food as a tool of foreign policy, and with the increasing dependency of the U.S. on the raw supplies of the underdeveloped world, there is growing talk of using food to blackmail nations into adopting population control programs. One such proposal came in Rome by former U.S. government official Richard Gardner, who suggested a “global survival pact” under which rich nations would conserve food, energy, and raw materials in return for commitments by Third World nations to change their suicidal demographic, agricultural and environmental practices. Another proposal was made by Congressman Jerry Litton who said he would introduce legislation banning food aid to any country with above average population growth and which was not doing anything to reduce it. (source)
And, leave it to National Propaganda-Pesticide-Petroleum-Pharm Radio to do this:
Thus employer-based insurance, which started with Blue Cross selling coverage to Texas teachers and spread because of government price controls and tax breaks, became our system. By the mid-1960s, Thomasson says, Americans started to see that system — in which people with good jobs get health care through work and almost everyone else looks to government — as if it were the natural order of things.
But to Thomasson and other economic historians, there’s nothing natural or inevitable about it. Instead, they see it as the profound result of historical accidents. (source)
War Criminal of the Day!
Well, Mister Citi Bank, Senator Bank, that is, and now, VP to President, a long long war criminal in politics.
Paul Haeder, Author 
Dominion huh?
What is that, anyway?
Domination and control?
Stewardship and caretaking?
Voting machines?
Toxic energy conglomerate?
For anyone concerned with brevity, or lack thereof, I recommend that you practice dominion over your eyeballs, and move on when you have digested your limit of text.
Trying to exercise control over this keyboarded reaction is a futile pursuit.
Many of the definers of dominion reference christian origins of the term.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t remember jesus running around in a garden, eatin’ apples, and playing with snakes.
But, this is the way of modern homo-erectus.
Make $hit up.
Do the origins really matter?
I’m more concerned with the implementation.
We’ve got all kinds of sprays, and powders, and potions, to exercise dominion over the swarms of locusts.
But, we forget to order the pollinators not to eat that crap, and now we have a bit of a conundrum.
Bipeds, like police, only make a situation worse, when they arrive on the scene, to solve(?) a problem.
And, let’s explore this dominion idea a little further, with an eye on the present.
It seems like the Department of Natural Resources has a whole different idea about dominion, when it comes to exercising our god given rights over fish, fowl, and beasts, with our favorite blunderbusts.
What kind of divine intervention is this?
I used to be confused about the proliferation of blunderbusts, and their relatives, being deployed upon all of the red, and brown, and yellow, and black, and poor pink peoples, until I realized that they are viewed as beasts, the same as the locusts.
I was going to say white tail.
But, the two legged beasts aren’t even “harvested” for sustenance, just annihilated.
Seems like the root animal is in there someplace.
Like the author, I have managed to survive long enough to receive monthly payments, from the social insurance that my employers and I have been financing throughout my lifetime.
My mate, not so much.
Two years of checks, and then dead.
When the financial, retirement, experts, prattle on about holding off on “taking” your social security until age 70, I want to go all Iraq, and Georgie Bush, and throw my god dam shoes, at the screen.
If only I could get up close and personal.
I’ve got a pair of Red Wings, with affiliated straps, that could, quite probably, cause a concussion.
I know many, many, individuals who have engaged with financial planners, and managed to secure a life of leisure, luxury, and laissez- faire, into their “golden years”.
Benefits for me, and none for thee.
As an accounting and finance guy, I rolled with that model, until Lehman Bros., and GM, and Countrywide, and MetLife, reminded me, that in a casino, the house always wins.
I may have been a fool, but I was most certainly “fooled”.
The means tested programs and certainly better than nothing.
But, when I was denied medical aid, because my gross social security was pegged at over $22,000, I asked myself, “ who’s getting the other half that’s not being deposited into my bank account?”
Elensky?
Nuttyyahoo?
The Pentagram?
If all this seems terribly disjointed, so be it.
It should be.
Unlike puppies, or little kitties, I have no actual tail to chase.
It’s all an apparition.
Except for the deprivation of, and the predation on, the vulnerable.
According to one’s abilities, and according to one’s needs looks more and more prescient, with each and every passing day, here in the good ole USA.
Back to dominion.
More and more, it’s becoming a crime to feed the hungry.
Might attract undesirables.
And, should some “sucker” make a generous gift to some down and out brother, or sister, benefits will be reduced accordingly.
Succor is most assuredly dissuaded, and criminalized.
The desired outcome must certainly be, “hurry up and die, old, useless, eater.”
As an “old fuck” (Carlin attribution), I’ve been taught by a previous generation to live within my means.
But, that’s because I have means by which to live.
I’m not forced to try to eke out survival on $2 a day.
My representatives in government have managed to steal enough of other people’s shit, so I can bask in this EMPTY life of leisure and luxury.
Compared to my brothers and sisters from afar anyway.
I hope that you, and your
in-laws, and your partner, and family, and friends, make this coming transition with as little undue suffering, as possible.
It’ll save room for all of the future indignities that our masters have in mind for us.
I’d be there tomorrow, to be of assistance, if I could.
Like Jimmi H. I’m Experienced
But, as dominion would have it, my masters in “the state” have to keep me where I am, so I don’t subvert their notions about what is just.
Anything that I can do from a distance, please elaborate.
I came to this biosphere naked, and without a portfolio, and I don’t see the need for one on my way out.
The things that I want to take with me, when I leave, can’t be denominated in monetary terms.
The things that I want to appreciate while I’m still here, can’t be measured in that way either.
So, while the tenor of this reply may appear dour, on its face, there’s a sliver of real gold to be mined, in between the lines.
We may not have all of the cash in the world, but we have access to riches that money can never buy.
And, I think, that if we can pool those riches, the dependence upon greenbacks will fall away.
If you were looking for the Urban Planning class, you’re in the wrong place.
This is philosophy 101.01.01.
I’m going to stop now, before the brevity police have an aneurism.
Best wishes, el cofrade
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You are on that hyperbolic (a good tool) roll. I sent some stuff on the HIV-AIDS lies lies lies.
But here, the former president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki:
The “Prelude” in the “Castro Hlongwane…” booklet includes this quotation:
“In money terms, first there is the pharmaceutical industry. If AIDS in Africa is now a national
security threat, as President Clinton has declared, American money will be appropriated for the
very expensive drugs to spend in Africa – billions of dollars of potential profits.
If Washington doesn’t appropriate funds, there’s the fear that African nations might buy generic,
foreign-made copies of U.S. drugs. Then there is the public health establishment. More billions can
go for salaries, offices, staffing, travel and long reports. The World Health Organisation budget has
skyrocketed along with African AIDS statistics.
Many public health officials are well meaning, seeing AIDS fears as the only way to get money to help the misery afflicting so much of Africa. In America, government AIDS money is spreading far and wide. Federal spending now tops $10 billion and is increasing yearly even as caseloads fall.”
(AIDS Hype in Africa? No HIV Test Required, Disease Defined Differently Than in U.S., by Jon Basil
Utley, Robert A. Taft Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, USA, April 30, 2000.)
In 2000 I addressed the 13th International AIDS Conference which was held in our country in Durban. Here is part of what I said:
“Let me tell you a story that the World Health Organisation told the world in 1995. I will tell this
story in the words used by the World Health Organisation.”
“This is the story: The world’s biggest killer and the greatest cause of ill-health and suffering across the globe is listed almost at the end of the International Classification
of Diseases.
It is given the code Z59.5 – extreme poverty.
“Poverty is the main reason why babies are not vaccinated, why clean water and sanitation are not
provided, why curative drugs and other treatments are unavailable and why mothers die in
childbirth. It is the underlying cause of reduced life expectancy, handicap, disability and starvation.
Poverty is a major contributor to mental illness, stress, suicide, family disintegration and
substance abuse. Every year in the developing world 12.2 million children under 5 years die, most
of them from causes which could be prevented for just a few US cents per child. They die largely
because of world indifference, but most of all they die because they are poor.”
“Beneath the heartening facts about decreased mortality and increasing life expectancy, and many
other undoubted health advances, lie unacceptable disparities in wealth.
The gaps between rich and poor, between one population group and another, between ages and
between sexes, are widening.
For most people in the world today every step of life, from infancy to old age, is taken under the
twin shadows of poverty and inequity, and under the double burden of suffering and disease.”
Click to access MbekiOnAIDSMarch2016.pdf
You think any of those EuroCentric and Anglo-Saxons and Klanadians and U$ of Israel Firsters and Isra-Hellions give a shit about the Afrikkan nations?
+–+
Tied to poverty, are the forces of poverty. A good one today from an aggregator:
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/04/16/a-multipolar-world-between-pride-and-shame/
We often focus more than anything else on the concrete and material aspects of political, economic and social life, giving less importance to the spiritual and affective aspects of living. However, these aspects in the lives of peoples and societies can have a decisive impact on the development of world events and international relations. Hero of Peace, comrade Brian Willson, a veteran of the U.S. war against the people of Vietnam, speaks of the emotional inability of U.S. society to face the shame of its bloody racist and imperialist history. And this comment by Brian has much to do with the progressive collapse of the power, prestige and influence of the West.
The crisis of the West is due in large part to the inability of its societies to face, accept and assimilate the shame they feel consciously or unconsciously for their centuries of crimes against humanity. This fundamental failure on the part of the United States, and by implication, Europe, prevents their societies and their leaders from confronting their own history and current affairs with humility, frankness and sincerity. It is a political-affective weakness that keeps its societies and governments locked in a highly dangerous and disastrous spiral of self-harm, addiction and fantasy that now leads them not only to attack vulnerable countries but also to attack themselves.
In relation to self-harm, the United States is characterized by its culture of violence expressed in countless incidents of killings in schools and colleges, the routine use of lethal force by law enforcement, its odious criminal justice system that forces innocent people to accept guilt because they cannot trust the legal system and are threatened with long years of incarceration. The U.S. prison system holds more than 2.3 million people, one-third of the population of Nicaragua and more than 20% of the total number of people incarcerated in the world. The U.S. prison industry is worth more than $75 billion each year.
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