I attended a Bible Study a few weeks ago where the topic was Truth. As part of the introduction, they had us play that icebreaker I have played many times in the past – Two Truths and a Lie. It’s played in many ways, sometimes people write the two truths and a lie on a sheet of paper and people not only have to guess which is the lie, but to which person it applies; and sometimes, as this time, it was just writing them down and reading them out. One of the ladies in our group didn’t realize until after listing hers that she had given us three truths, because she couldn’t think of a lie.
I’ve discovered that I’ve lived an adventurous life compared to the average person. I always felt that if life gave you an opportunity you should seize the day and go for it – jump in the deep end and figure out how to swim. So whenever I have had a chance to try something, whether it is an exotic food item ranging from camel to mutton bird or Haggis, to an opportunity to live in another country or learn a new skill, I’ve almost always gone for it. So my stock answers for this game are, “I’ve gone bungee-jumping; I’ve jumped from a plane; I’ve performed as a fire-eater.”
As we were going through everyone’s responses, trying to figure out what was the lie, and then completing the Bible study, it got me to thinking about how this game was reflected in society today. Oftentimes we hear something or read it or watch it on the news, and what we are absorbing are often truths, but truths embedded with lies, and no real way to discern what is the truth and what is the lie. That came up again when Tucker Carlson released his first tweet in a few weeks where he promoted his new show that will be available on Twitter. He talked about the media and how what we are told is often part of the truth, but not always the whole truth (https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1656037032538390530). There are many types of lies. From personal experience, I have found that lies of omission can be as devastating as lies of commission – neglecting to tell someone the important bits they need to know to make a balanced decision. What we have now from the media and from our political leaders are both. They leave out the important bits, and then outright lie about others – “My family didn’t get money from foreign companies;” “The border is secure;” “Men can get pregnant.”
So where do we go from here? Who can we believe? Who can we trust? America is a high trust society, but there is an element that is working on breaking that trust down, leaving us questioning everything and everyone; pulling us apart instead of joining us together; tearing things down instead of building them up; isolating people so that they are easier to pick off, one by one. Is there an answer? The best answer that I have found is to band with those who are asking the same questions, who are working together to discover the truth. And, as a Christian, to remember that there is only One who is the Truth. If the path that you are on doesn’t lead to that Truth, then it’s time to turn around and find another and to work on creating, on building, on discovering the positives and lending a helping hand to the person next to you, the person behind you. To be the block that stops the person in front of you from sliding down.
We need to channel our childhood, grasp wrists with the person on either side of us and form a strong line for the modern day version of Red Rover, ready not just to stop our opponents from separating us and breaking us down, but also to catch them and add them to our number. We also need to be prepared to tell the truth and admit to our own lies. I had to stop eating fire because it gave me horrible heart burn. ;-) And the worst part about bungee-jumping was that you were falling, falling, falling – and then, all of a sudden, you were falling again. And bouncing there wondering, how the heck do they get you down? Someday, maybe next year, I will join the Leap Year club once again and jump out of that plane.
So, nothing really new, though they either gave us more hope or– Anyway, she’s largely unresponsive.
Apparently it wasn’t a suggestion to euthanize. The doctor is happy we’re not. Tests for Toxoplasmosis (Sp?) are delayed. If it’s not Toxoplasmosis, the doctor is going to assume some form of brain event and put her on steroids to reduce swelling, etc. If it is positive, then it’s just going take a while on antibiotics. Just… patience.
She’s not getting worse, and her internal organs are fine, so they’ve ruled out poisoning. We’ll just visit her and pet her a lot in the next few days.
The good, though not particularly exciting news are that son and future daughter in law went to visit with a cell phone and put us on speaker near her, and she opened her eyes, and twitched her ears, and ALMOST fully woke up.
Dan and I are fine and on the road home, where we hope to reach before tomorrow.
Helena at work supervising my writing two weeks ago.
I’m afraid the news this morning isn’t good at all. It’s not terrible, mind you. Not the worst it could be.
But Helena hasn’t made any progress from yesterday. She’s scooting around, but won’t get up on her legs, not to stand. She swallows the tablet, but won’t eat on her own. She is aware of the nurse, but won’t really interact. though she responds to touch.
Right now the speculation is leaning to something neurological, though not all tests are in, and the vet won’t have the full picture till tomorrow.
It was clear, however, from the nurse’s tone, she thinks Helena has improved as much as she will improve and they’re going to recommend euthanasia tomorrow.
I don’t know what to do, and I’m sitting here crying. Please, pray this is just a minor stall, and she improves majorly the rest of the day.
I want to go home and take my little kitten girl home with me.
UPDATE: We’re going home early, and barring her actually getting worse, we’re going to fight for her. She’s young and she should heal.
One of the main problems conservatives have in getting the word out about our actual beliefs is that the legacy media refuses to portray us fairly. And the media that do portray us fairly are automatically assumed to be lying by people who don’t actually know us. One of the problems with this is that certain groups are sure they have to stay with the left, because “everyone knows” that the right is worse. People run into actual racism or homophobia on the left, and since “everyone knows” the right is even worse, they’re stuck.
This came up in a discussion where someone mentioned the video of an interview with a number of queer shooters, including Chris Cheng of Top Shot. They all agreed it was much riskier, socially, to come out as gun owners to their queer friends, than to come out as queer to their gun friends.
This shows an important difference between left and right. Conservatives who disagree with your lifestyle choices are safer than leftists who agree with it. Tolerance means the ability to actively disagree with someone else’s choices without needing to make those choices matters for legal action, disrespect, or shunning. A conservative’s reaction to finding out a fellow gun lover is gay is likely to be “sure, whatever.” Or even “me, too.” After all, some conservatives are gay, we have gay friends and family members.
But the interesting thing about the refusal of leftist governments to protect their citizenry is that more people are buying guns, because they are unsafe and they know it. 2020-2022 saw a huge influx of new gun owners, many of them from the left politically. They mostly bought their guns at shops that were run by conservatives. They are mostly being trained by instructors who are conservative. And these are conservatives of every racial group, both sexes, and various sexualities.
Which means that finally, some leftists are coming into contact with real conservatives. And finding out that no, we don’t want to kill gay people or beat them up. We might think you’re wrong or weird, but mostly we figure people are people and adults are adults. Don’t make us bake the darn cake, or perform your weddings in our churches, or make out in front of us, and we’re good. Really.
On the other hand, there’s an increasing list of things you can’t disagree with on the left, because there is no tolerance on the left. Look at the attacks on any high profile racial minority who disagrees with any part of the left agenda. Look at the attacks on Andy Ngo, a gay man, for covering Antifa. Look at the very term TERF. Even being a radical feminist doesn’t protect you if you deviate at all.
The left is scaring more and more people. I believe that the only thing that’s keeping many of the rank and file in line is believing that if their side has bad people, we must be worse. When it clicks in that they’re wrong, that could be a tipping point.
Maybe gun rights is the common ground that could help save us. Because the less safe people feel, the more they buy guns. And the more people buy guns, the more contact they have with real conservatives, not the leftist media version. And the more contact people have with real conservatives, not the leftist media version, the more they realize that there are real alternatives to the left.
The picture is from a week and a half ago. We won’t have new ones till we return on the 1st or so. That expression is because I called her name, while she was asleep (trying to get her to look at the camera.)
We had a phone call at about nine thirty from the veterinarian ICU nurse (and yes, again I passed out and slept since. Sorry to be so late letting you know.)
Tiny Helena is improving, still by tiny little bits. Improved enough she’d pulled out her catheter overnight, and also sitting up and holding up her own head most of the time. Her eyes are clear, and she’s aware people are there. She is still not eating, so they’re still feeding her.
So, the anti-viral is working and she is improving. Not fully out of danger (till she’s eating on her own) but almost there.
Thank you for the prayers and please keep them up. I promise to send pics and video of her when she’s okay and we’re home. (Which at this rate will probably be at the same time.)
It’s going to hurt money wise, but I don’t care. There is a chance I get my tiny pretty back.
Dominion Voting Machines, Insecure by Design – by Francis Turner
Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice
Required reading for all Dominion engineers and product managers
I have, from time to time, been interested in the question of trust in voting machines and processes. That goes all the way back to the early 2000s and the sloppy Diebold machines in use then. At that time it was notable that Diebold, who also made (make?) ATMs, seemed to have invested a lot more time and effort into making their ATMs secure than making their voting machines secure.
Well anyway there’s only so many hours in a day and only so much outrage I can summon up for sloppy work so I moved on to other things like glowball worming. Anyway given the US 2020 elections and now the 2022 elections have been rife with allegations of vote rigging and other shenanigans I’ve started to renew my interest in the current state of the art.
The bad news up front
Dominion’s 2020 era voting systems and infrastructure are, if anything, easier to hack than Diebold’s 2000 era ones. To that end, despite Dominion settling with Fox for $megabuck$, it seems likely that Dominion is in fact guilty of making systems that have design choices that seem to be deliberately chosen to make fraud easy and then not testing to see if there were possible problems let alone making any attempt to fix them. Then, to add insult to injury, they have created machines that implement these poor design choices that are easy to hijack. Finally, needless to say, they have relied on “security via obscurity” and what a British politician called “being economical with the acualité” to disguise these design choices.
Let me start with the most basic. In Georgia always, in other states under certain circumstances, voters use a machine to make select their voting choices and these choices are then printed onto a paper ballot that is then sent to another machine for counting. That ballot has a QR code (the box of dots like the one above) which contains the choices the voter made and some checksum for integrity. That QR code cannot be read easily by the voter (you don’t just need a smartphone with a QR code reader, you need some special software to read it and then you need to be able to map the docoded output to your choices) so the machine also prints a human readable version. However there is no checking anywhere that the QR code corresponds to the human readable version and the QR code is what the voting tabulators use to count.
Does the QR code match the text? how can you tell?
Halderman’s report notes both that it would be easy to have the QR code be different to the human readable part because there are no audits done that check that they correspond and that it would also be easy to change the output of both the QR code and the human readable print out on the assumption that most people will not check the print out.
The first case requires special audit equipment to detect and you would need to be very sure that you could actually trust that equipment so getting it from Dominion would be contra-indicated. The latter case would make it impossible to detect vote rigging via audit if the voter failed to raise the alarm at the polling station.
If you look at the sample above the human readable printout does not seem like a model of clarity (all the extra “vote for”s which add verbiage without adding clarity for example) making it easier to hide a fraudulent entry. Of course voters are likely to check the top of the ballot (i.e. their presidential vote) so changing that might be risky, but changing the votes lower down in the more obscure county level races is much more likely to escape notice. You have to wonder why they made it hard to read.
But that’s not all. Similar QR codes seem to be generated by other voting methods too such as the vote by mail web app which voters then have to print out themselves and mail to the county. What this means is that the 2000 mules sort of vote by mail fraud is made extremely easy.
And it gets worse.
Despite claims that the QR code data is encrypted, it isn’t. Once you know the proprietary format you can decode the data and see what choices the voter made. But wait there’s more. There is a checksum created using a shared key to detect accidental tampering/misprints etc. but that shared key turns out to be very easy to obtain and each vote from a particular county (or possibly multiple counties or part of a county depending on implementation) is indistinguishable from any other vote from that county/region no matter which voting machine (or vote by mail method) was used.
The consequences of a lack of encryption or serial number
This makes printing a few thousand additional votes very, very easy and almost impossible to catch. Halderman discusses a number of ways to modify or print additional votes including sticking a raspberry pi in the printer, but these are kind of incidental, the key point is that there is a clear weakness in the vote printing process that can be exploited in all sorts of ways; these ways would be hard to detect and once detected it would be impossible to detect which ballots where illegitimate so the only recourse would be to run the election again.
Moreover, as he explains later, in the tabulator (ImageCast Precinct or ICP) the scanned images of the votes counted are stored. Gaining access to the tabulator (running an embedded linux version dating from 2007!) means you can simply edit the counts and put the correct number of images in the directory to match. Short of hand checking all the actual print outs with all of the images the machine has stored it is impossible to confirm that the machine’s tally is correct. The only way to detect that the tabulator is lying is to build your own trusted one and rescan all the ballots.
Halderman did not spend much time looking at the tabulator but he identified that the tamper evident shields to block access to USB and Ethernet ports seemed to be easy to bypass in the unit he was provided with. What he doesn’t directly point out is that if an authorized person opens up the machine and installs malware the tamper evident seal can easily be replaced by another one. Even better, if the malware install is part of a scheduled firmware update the tamper evident seal is completely pointless because there need be no detectable difference between a USB stick containing a legitimate firmware update and one containing malware.
In summary
This design choice, with a machine readable QR code that is not readable by a human, seems to be a deliberate choice to make voter self-validation hard. The lack of public/private key encryption and a unique serial number per vote makes adding or replacing votes completely untrackable once they have been inserted into the system somehow because there is no audit trail possible.
The CEO of Dominion recently whined to TIME that even though Fox settled rather than going to trial, Dominion was likely to go out of business because their brand was irredeemably tarnished. I found this quote from the article to be deeply ironic:
As for Dominion’s future, Poulos is taking it one day at a time. The company is still focused on providing trusted voting systems to clients, with Poulos emphasizing that Americans do not have to trust Dominion blindly because of its commitment to transparency and its existing capability of producing paper ballots. But that defense may come too late.
Given the design decisions it made I find it hard to read “Americans do not have to trust Dominion blindly because of its commitment to transparency ” without laughing. The QR code is anything but transparent to the voter while being exceedingly transparent to the knowledgeable fraudster and the lack of easily verifiable audit trail is disturbing if you assume that the company wanted to make a “transparent” and trustworthy system.
The interesting questions though are
whether the sub-optimal design choices were made from incompetence or malice?
how many other voting solutions are as bad?
So how would you fix it?
I thought about ending the post there, but then I figured that opens me up to the charge of complaining without coming up with an alternate solution.
So what would I do instead. Obviously junk the QR code. But more importantly I’d want to come up with a system that allowed for a couple of basic validation checks
First voters have to be able to read what the machine outputs and confirm that it is what they voted for. That means no QR code. It also means a form with a more easy to understand output. Something like this:
The Checksum would be the data of all the other fields encrypted using the private key that is the pair to the public key in the document. The tabulator and any auditor could use the public key to decrypt the checksum and confirm that it matched the ballot.
Since no ballot could be made at the same time from the same machine the checksums would be almost certainly unique (there is a very slight chance of a collision but it’s extremely small) and in the case of a collision it would be possible to decrypt the two checksums with the different keys to confirm that they were in fact unique.
The private/public key pair would be created on the voting machine in a secure subsystem that would never reveal the private key but would encrypt anything passed to it with that key (this is a standard piece of hardware). In order to make some attacks difficult I suspect the secure subsystem would need its own clock and it would need to print out the date / time when it made an encryption as well as, of course, using that date/time as part of the data encrypted. That would make it easy to detect anomalously fast voting.
This checksum would absolutely stop the replay and copy attacks that the Dominion system allows. The human visible table allows the voter to do verification and in fact the voter could be given a copy of the checksum (and public key) so that if desired the voter can confirm on a different machine that the votes were cast as intended.
By doing this it becomes possible to create an auditable system that is much harder to fraud. There is probably a way to make it work for mail in ballots too (a browser session or smartphone app would create the page which could then be printed off and mailed back) and in fact it might allow for remote electronic voting because all that happens in that case is that the app prints off the vote in a central precinct instead of at the voters computer.
There may well be additional lacunae that I haven’t thought of. I can see, for example, that the desire for a private confirmation number would make it possible for others to see how you had voted (great for audits, not great in terms of voting privacy/secret ballots) and I’m not entirely sure how to fix that – though I guess making keeping the number optional would do. Perhaps an abbreviated “Proof of voting” checksum could be created that didn’t include all your votes.
Picture of Helena on my knees from last week. She nestles there, past my laptop.
Okay, she’s not well YET (keep up the prayers.) but they put her on an anti-viral last night, and today she was sitting up and raising her head. Not for long. She doesn’t have the strength to do it for long, but for a little bit.
And therefore they’re now leaning to a type of neurological virus that’s literally imbibed with mother’s milk. Most cats who have it, have it dormant, hers just activated suddenly. They are testing, and might also put her brother on anti-virals though he’s fine so far.
Anyway, continue praying. She MIGHT come out of this all right. Let us hope so. It’s going to be ruinously costly, but I don’t even care if I get her back okay.
That picture above is Helena-kitten sleeping on my shoulder and effectively pinning my left arm down.
I’m hoping very much that’s not my last picture with her alive.
We were always going to board the older cats. They need meds, and we couldn’t leave them in the house alone. And we’re gong on a grand tour halfway across the country for a solid two weeks, before coming back home. But we were going to leave the two younger kittens in the house alone for three days with a ton of food (everyone will be gone for three days, including our local friends) and then have people feed them the rest of the time.
As time drew near, though, both Dan and I started getting…. feelings. And the feeling was: Board the littles too. So, Friday I called and booked them in.
Tuesday we gook all the cats in just before noon. And went back home to pack without “help” and clean before leaving early on Wednesday.
…. I was woken at seven thirty by a very shaken vet. I thought Havelock, because he’s old and overweight, and keeps getting into the kitten food.
No. It was Helena. When they came in at 7:30 am, Helena kitten was collapsed in her cage. They suspected cardiac issues.
We said “Do everything to the limit of the possible, no expense spared.” Yeah, I know we’re idiots, but …. she’s so tiny and pretty and affectionate. I’ll just have to work MUCH harder this year.
She’s been in kitty ICU for 2 full days now — yes, that one is going to hurt badly monetarilly, don’t care – and she’s stable. They have her on IV feed and an antibiotic JUST in case.
She might be improving, but it’s fractional. Yesterday, she raised her head. And she seems slightly more awake.
While they’re waiting on a cardiac panel, at this point they don’t expect it to be her heart. They think she got into something, probably weird, at our house. I’ll be honest, we’re pretty good at kitten proofing, but the two disasters have learned how to open the closet in the craft room, and I don’t even KNOW all that’s in there.
They think it’s poisoning and since it didn’t kill her outright and she’s improving, they think it will a waiting game.
I pray they’re correct. I didn’t sleep very well, and kept having nightmares.
If I act distracted at Liberty con, you will know why. It’s not you. It’s that I’m worried about my tiny-pretty. And if you see me crying ugly…. Well, let’s hope you don’t see me crying ugly.
Please, if you’re the praying kind, pray. I don’t want to be grieving for the cutest and sweetest cat I’ve ever known. She and Indy-Pol pulled me out of deep depression. If she goes it …. I don’t know.
If you’re not the praying kind, pray anyway. The novelty of it might surprise Himself enough to move Him. PARTICULARLY if you don’t believe he exists. I know what authors are like. An unexpected character poking Him will get his attention.
I’ll be at Liberty Con. Nothing I could do anyway, since she’s in ICU. And honestly, the only reason to go back would be to say goodbye.
We stopped on the way to say goodbye, just in case. I don’t want that to be our last time with her.
Anyway, if I’ve seemed a bit out of touch, it was that, more than the trip. It was worry. I’ll try to be human at LC anyway. And hope for the best.
The Left does not use words the way that you use words. We say the same things. We mean different things.
If socioeconomically, white people are found to be doing better in one area or another, the Left will shout white supremacy. We understand that to be an accusation that we believe white people are intrinsically better. The Left simply regard it as a tautological statement—that is, if the system is resulting in more successful white people, it is a system which favors whites. Having determined that that is always bad regardless of cause, they then go searching for causes. When they fail to find secret Nazis—and can’t manufacture any, must be said— that’s when things get funny. That’s when you get them beclowning themselves creating pamphlets where they say an expectation that people show up to something at an appointed time, or work hard at a task they’re being paid for, is white supremacy. Because they saw a system resulting in different outcomes. They searched for actual discrimination, and couldn’t find any because there was none. So then they looked for any difference at all that caused people to be treated differently. And those, they found, so QED, that the culture favors the things that the white people are doing is the problem. What the things actually are is immaterial. It doesn’t matter if those things happen to be predicated on respecting others and their time, doing what you’ve agreed to do, and other basic behaviors that minimize strife and maintain social trust. As a matter of faith we are told to accept that the world would be better if people didn’t hold these behaviors as models, and we’ll go ahead and ignore that history has to date been a long journey specifically away from human cultures where people didn’t hold these behaviors as models. That their codification has slowly and painfully elevated humanity out of what resembled Hell on Earth is immaterial; as it results in disparity at certain places and certain times, we must accept that Hell would be preferable. Reason be damned, I want this fence down now!
Yet for all that, the people who say so will not move to the neighborhoods where a majority of people abide by those rules, probably reasonably as they wouldn’t last the night. Oh, well, they’ll say, everyone there is so impoverished, you know, there’s a lot of crime. “Poor but honest” isn’t a characterization to the Left, it’s a paradox. And this makes a great deal of sense besides, as famously, people in such places who make a great deal of money almost inevitably become paragons of virtue once their impoverishment is alleviated.
They also effectively argue that those things are intrinsic to white people, that they’re baked in and immutable. The way they view the problem is: the rules favor these behaviors, and these behaviors cannot be taught to group A, and are intrinsic to group B, so the group B will always win. The only way to make the groups equal is to discard the rules entirely. Which is to say, they isolate and analyze the problem exactly as Hitler would. They believe, in full agreement with Hitler, that there are irreconcilable differences between races (this despite the fact that neither he nor they can actually define what a race is because it’s an extremely artificial concept, but I digress). They even concur that these differences are actually an existential threat to society. They consider themselves superior solely because faced with the same set of beliefs the lesson they’ve taken from history is that society will just have to go. And in the resulting new society that will emerge after, they imagine, they will be discriminated against, and that will be fair turnabout. In fact, they’re lining up to self-discriminate for brownie points now, and advising their fellow “whites” to do the same. The official anti-white-supremaciststatement is thus that society will and should inevitably be taken over by non-whites who will reduce whites to chattel. Curiously, as near as I can tell, that appears to also be the official white-supremacist outlook. And obviously the only rational thing a self-identified white person could do, presented with those options and no other information, is side with the people willingly submitting to be subjugated.
And that’s how it has to be, because obviously traits aren’t teachable. If these were teachable traits, it wouldn’t matter that society favored them even if they were entirely arbitrary (and as discussed above, they aren’t). Non-white people would simply learn them and that would be the end of the problem. The only impediment would be, say, if non-white groups had malignant subcultures that encouraged people to resist learning ways of approaching the world that help them to get ahead, and punished people so severely for not fitting in with the group that, even if they would otherwise have made productive progress by rejecting the group’s ideology, they are pulled down into the crab bucket if they try. But such (purely hypothetical) cultures, you would not be allowed to displace because that would be favoring a “white” culture over a “non-white” culture, because per the Left’s definition, the only authentic non-white culture is a dysfunctional low-trust culture that punishes people for doing things that will improve their lot and the lot of the people around them. Remember, that’s the official stance of the self-proclaimed anti-white supremacists.
Behold! These are the so-called thought-leaders of Western civilization, on the one hand restating Hitler’s central and most destructive thesis, on the other claiming to oppose what they imagine is the incipient rise of Nazism. Here, naked and glassy-eyed, stares the core philosophy of, *ahem*, “anti-Nazis” and “anti-fascists”— Mein Kampf in Birkenstocks. All the same dumb, dead-end ideological poison, but now it’s suicidal, rather than homicidal, so everything’s better.
The Left says all the time that they think they don’t communicate their message well. I thank the good lord they don’t communicate it more clearly. If people actually heard and believed them we’d probably have the race war they seem to so desperately desire. Instead the world has the Patriot Front (Group), and other less-organized random groups of “Nazis” who curiously are never followed and identified when covered by the same media who track down and personally threaten any and every ordinary conservative who gets in the way of the Left’s agenda.
Because it doesn’t profit a journalist to delve too deeply into the affairs of intelligence agencies.
But obviously, there is an alternative to all of this stupidity. Americans are better, and more critically, American culture is better than these race hustling halfwits. The man beside me is equal to me before God. He ought to be equal to me before the law, and one day, God willing, he will be. Communities that are already struggling don’t deserve the scourge of having their worst offenders released back into their midst with barely an acknowledgement of wrongdoing, again and again and again. Justice is still blind— to race, to political party, to everything except the question in the balance of her scales. Americans understand that and respect justice. But counterfeits abound, sullying everything they touch. “Racial justice” is just racial supremacy for browner brown-shirts. “Social justice” is socialist tyranny, returned in its most wretched and contemptible form: a patronizing but demonic voice telling society to kill itself for its own good. These so-called forms of justice refuse to be blind, cannot accept that men are equal, and their judgments are accordingly perverse.
Well, fie on them all. We beat the Nazis when their leader was named Hitler. Now their stupider and more depressive successors have chosen Ibram X. Kendi as their leader, and we’ll beat them again. And we mortally wounded communism, but we didn’t finish the job. That was a mistake. This time we ought to learn the lesson we knew from the movies as kids, and not turn our back until the monster is definitely dead.
American culture is the ultimate inherited treasure of Western civilization. It is thousands of years of lessons on building the best, most productive, safest, most trustworthy human culture. It allows for cooperative coexistence of people with a wide number of harmless variations, broader than virtually any other culture, and well it should, for this treasure is the rightful inheritance of every American, of every race and creed, be they born here or abroad. Shared properly it is both more valuable than any redistributed wealth— not least because it is a source of ongoing success rather than the disbursement of stolen goods— and more durable than any material thing in this uncertain world. Embody it and teach it to your children. There will always be tyrants, arguing for why now, today, this time, one group or another is special and should be treated differently. But they are wrong.
America’s Healthcare is not the worst in the world, but that’s only because the rest of the world is further along on the road towards socialism and everything centralized.
Since 2008 and the increasing centralization of everything, ours has gotten halfway to as stupid as the rest of the world except Canada which outright kills people and China, where they come to your house and kill you if they feel like it.
Thursday we had a doctor’s appointment and both of us got prescriptions which are urgently needed, not to say vital. We are leaving town tomorrow, on a trip we’ve nicknamed “The Grand Tour” that will keep us out of the house for two weeks.
…. and we’re trying to get the prescriptions for a week.
This is partly the doctor, partly the pharmacy. Somehow, when I asked the doctor to send my Adderal to the one store in town that had it on hand, not only didn’t it get sent, but I got transferred there. So I kept waiting for a call from my pharmacy to pick up the prescriptions…. and nothing. A call on Friday late resolved that.
And then the Pharmacy. So, the Pharmacy finds out from the insurance that our prescription isn’t covered, and they SUPPOSEDLY faxed the doctor. In a year and a half not a single one of those faxes has got through. IF they’re actually sending them, they have the wrong fax number. BUT never mind. (We have reason to think they never arrived, because the doctor was genuinely shocked at us still being without a prescription after a month.)
So we call the doctor. The doctor is trying to get things that will be approved. After… oh, an entire day of one of their people working on us non-stop, we get a call at 8 am today saying that we can have these alternatives. Note both alternatives are retarded. One is a different brand of something I tried before, which doesn’t work, and raises my cancer risk. BUT I have to try three of these, before they re-approve the med I was on for 5 years that worked, before our prescription insurance changed. Since we don’t want to spend $700 a month, we go “sure, we’ll try it. Get it out of the way.” THE OTHER ONE IS MAYBE $100 dollars cheaper than the prescribed, in a thousands of dollars med. WHICH IS URGENTLY NEEDED BY MY HUSBAND MORE THAN ME. I’m still waiting on a prescription from the replacement for Adderal, and that’s the doctor’s office, but they’re swamped, because, well, they’re dealing with the life saving stuff.
So, with that resolved and sent across town because our pharmacy can’t get it in before midday tomorrow, when we won’t be here, my husband calls on his prescription which was originally the same as mine that got refused. (Note that mine the substitution makes a little bit of sense, but none whatsoever for him. PLUS the pharmacy had told him it was “getting filled and would be ready Tuesday.” So he didn’t worry, and just called in case it would be easier at the other pharmacy where I was picking mine up. So he calls, and he gets told the pharmacy has “faxed your physician”. NOTE THAT THEY HADN’T TOLD HIM THERE WAS ANY PROBLEM WITH IT AT ALL. IN FACT, THE PHARMACY HAD TOLD HIM IT WAS “IN PROCESS” AND WOULD BE READY TODAY.
I can now pick up my modified prescription. So we tried to transfer Dan’s. We got the same “Your old prescription is being processed. We’ll call you when it’s done.” At this point I’ve been on hold with the doctor for over 40 minutes. I suspect they’re calling the pharmacy.
Look, this is all because of the bureaucrats in the middle. First it’s because medical insurance, which started to get around a fine bit of bureaucratic meddling “maximum wages” has morphed into an hydra of stupidity to the point that instead of being “insurance” it’s just a third party payer, which like all such distorts the market so you can’t afford to be without it. At the same time, of course, the government tried to “fix” healthcare by expanding insurance, because Obama is of course a foreign (In culture, I couldn’t care less where he was born) communist. And to him this makes perfect sense.
Like all government “solutions” this insanity is more wasteful than it would be without it.
Look, I don’t care how expensive my meds are. Tying up me, the doctor’s office, the pharmacy and doubtless someone at the insurance for almost three days has to cost more than that.
And BTW if I have to hear one more time to a COVID advert while waiting to talk to the pharmacy SOMEONE is going to die. Through a killing scream on my part.
It’s the same as the low-flush toilets you have to flush five times and therefore use double the water. It’s the same as the dishwashers that have to be put on pot scrubber and take three hours washing and use tons of water to actually clean.
All these central measures to save money not only end up costing more, but also end up costing lives.
We need to stop the insanity. Because this has gone too far and people are getting hurt.
According To Hoyt 