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It’s going to be a lot harder to be a Doctor or Patient

I’m not an anti-vaxer by any means. I had all the usual vaccines during childhood and have as a result lived a pretty healthy life. I keep up to date on the boosters like tetanus etc.

That being said, I haven’t had a COVID vaccine. This is in part due to medical advice based on a physician observing how my body reacts to drugs that seem to work for everybody else. If there are weird rare side effects associated with a particular drug, I’m the one to exhibit them.

Elsewhere in this blog I’ve discussed my desire to be vaccinated against COVID and my confusion, worry, and ultimate selection process of the vaccine.

To be honest I didn’t see the necessity of being vaccinated against COVID, but was considering the vaccination as a gateway to employment, and resuming normal life. President Biden really. made a mess of employment rules with his attempted mandates and subsequent statements.

Regardless of where you come down on the vaccination question, more data is coming out daily that suggests the COVID vaccines may not be all they were cracked up to be.

First we were told the vaccines would prevent COVID.

Then we were told the vaccines would reduce the spread of the COVID

Then we were told the vaccines would reduce the risk of hospitalization. (This one may still be true for some populations.)

We were told the vaccines were safe and effective. The effectiveness is at this point demonstrably questionable, and the safety question is still out for debate.

We were told we needed a booster, now it looks like another booster may be required every six months.

All this for a virus that is 98% to 99% survivable.

When you put the questions raised about the COVID vaccines against the other medical screwups over the past 20 years it begs the question.

Does the medical / pharmaceutical industry really have the high ground?

Leaky Breast Implants, weight loss drugs (Phen Phen), vaginal mesh, defective replacement knee or hip joints, pacemakers, and a plethora of medications that were found to be harmful enough that they were removed from the market after years of common use because the law suits piled up.

These issues, have always made me question my personal doctor. But now with the constantly shifting story about COVID vaccines, I find that I’m going to be demanding more time from my Doctor during my annual visit. I also find that I’m far less trusting of the medical establishment in general.

As a patient, I’m probably going to be labeled “Difficult” because I’m going to demand logical and concise explanation of the problem, and options to address or solve the problem. I’ve never been one to look at the “One Size Fits all” solution as the only solution. But now…

I’m going to be asking a lot more questions and I’m going to be expecting real answers not platitudes, or hand waving. I’m going to be much more likely to walk out of a medical practitioners office if I’m not getting real, verifiable, information. That information had also be in reasonable, normal, everyday English, not some heavily accented pigeon English.

I’ve always believed if a doctor couldn’t explain something in plain English, they didn’t really understand the subject matter.

I worked with computers. People have a hard time with computers and computer people have our own variation of English or terms to describe the functions of machines. Generally speaking it’s the terminology that causes folks to stumble. The trick is converting all the technical jargon into something that a non-computer person can relate to.

There are some computer terms for which there is no direct translation, at that point it’s best to draw a picture either with words or literally. If a computer person really knows the subject matter they can effectively do either. If they don’t know the subject matter and really understand it, typically they’ll try to baffle with bullshit jargon.

I believe that medical professionals have for too long gotten away with the jargon and perhaps don’t understand drugs, procedures, and medicine as well as they should. I’m all for holding them to the same standard as the lowly computer technician.

This is going to lead to more time spent with patients and impact the Doctor’s bottom line. Their insurance billing is based on number of patients and number of diagnosis per day. I personally think this is a shitty business model that doesn’t really serve patients but that is another story.

Being a Doctor is a tough job. I generally respect the profession.

But given that I feel the medical establishment had obfuscated and perhaps flat out lied to me and every other person on the planet for the past two years, I can’t say that I trust them. I doubt that I ever will trust them again.

This is not just about St Anthony of The Mask, a.k.a. Dr. Doom, a.k.a. Sir Follow the Science.

This is also about those Doctors who were silent, those who didn’t question, those who went along with the establishment and didn’t feel it was necessary to do their own research or thinking.

I especially loath those Doctors and researchers, who abdicated their responsibility to question what they were being told in favor of a fat paycheck and Wednesdays on the golf course.

Don’t be surprised if you see a lot of Doctors retiring. Some of them are probably realizing that the loss of trust their patients are showing, signals the end of the gravy train.

Others may simply be retiring in shame over how so many of their profession have behaved. These doctors are as much victims of the medical establishment as the rest of us.

I don’t think I’ll ever in good conscience be able to write Doctor as a title of respect anymore. I wonder if anyone would notice that I write doctor and md in lower case and what I mean by that.

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Well that’s interesting…

I upgraded to the latest version of MacOs and immediately started noticing that my 7 hour battery was only lasting about 2 hours.

The computer was running warmer than normal too. In computers, heat equals lots of work and a lot less battery life.

It took a bit of digging but eventually I think I figured part of it out. The Mail application was sucking up 46% of all the CPU cycles. WOW!

While digging around I found that there were a ton of email account duplications. I suspect that this happened due to changes Apple implemented in the password system. Not sure about that. I’m led to this conclusion, by the fact that when I deleted one of the duplicate accounts both accounts were deleted.

The accounts appears to be linked in some way that was not obvious. i wonder if mail was hammering the servers, essentially checking for mail over and over again .

When I re-added the accounts, only one was added. So clearly there was something wrong.

So If you’ve been noticing that your computer is sucking up power after the upgrade to Monterey 12.3 check your email accounts. That may be where the problem is.

My machine is now lasting longer on a charge, but there’s still something running down deep in the bowels of the OS that is consuming a lot of CPU cycles. That’s going to take more time to identify. The machine is still running warmer than necessary given the obvious active tasks.

I’ll have to dig into the UNIX subsystems and see if I can figure that out. I might be successful, I might not.

You might be asking why I put myself through this… A valid question.

I adopt early because of the other half. Sometimes, they just can’t resist clicking upgrade when their computer says, “There’s an update…”

Adopting early allows me to at least have a fighting chance at fixing their machine when they start complaining about a problem.

I’ll try to update this post as I discover more.

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Been giving thought to stuff that pisses me off.

I know, you’re thinking, “Another one of those posts! Next!”

Bear with me. 

Implied Social Worthiness Scores.

The last company I worked for, was very concerned that I didn’t have active Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn accounts. They were also very concerned that I didn’t attend employer sponsored events such as going to the water park, dinners, or baseball games.

I asked them why my having or participating in those things mattered. 

They said It’s about being able to determine if our employees are engaged and happy with the workplace. 

I said that my happiness was dependent on my paycheck. I was there to do a job, I did the job and went home. As to the company events, I couldn’t participate and be a good employee. My schedule was 5am to 1pm Thursday through Monday. Their events typically started at 6pm on a weekend defined as Saturday and Sunday. Since I was usually in bed by 7:30 to 8:00PM, were I to attend their corporate events I would not be good at my job the next day due to tiredness.  As such I was behaving in a responsible way towards my employer.

I said regarding Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. That I found these services to be a waste of time. I felt no need to broadcast minute by minute, the details of my personal or work life to the entire world. (This blog notwithstanding) Therefore if they were concerned about my speaking out of turn about the workplace or my employer, they had nothing to fear. I kept my opinions to myself or confined to a small select group of people that I interacted with in person.

This was not good enough. 

Because I wasn’t posting my life online for all to see, they were suspicious because there was no way for them to apply metrics about my life choices (Judgmental much?) I believe that they were trying to determine my social worth and obtain more leverage over me than a simple paycheck.

Eventually, after many annoying emails from HR and the Activities Committee, I conceded to creating a LinkedIn account. Upon which I would sometimes parrot the company announcements. Other than that, I didn’t post anything.

That wasn’t good enough. Now if I didn’t post something at least once a week I’d get an email from one of the two groups. Always such emails suggested posting something about my life and happiness. (Uh, nobody’s business but mine.)

While creating the LinkedIn account I thought, “This is a slippery slope and since they cajoled me into this, they’re going to apply more pressure for me to hand them a loaded gun in the form of information.”

This assumption was borne out when someone on the Activities Committee saw me getting out of a new car one morning. I had no sooner sat down at my desk, than there was an email suggesting that I post pictures of my “pretty” car on LinkedIn and use it as a first post to Twitter and Facebook too. The rationale was that everyone would love to see success and share in my happiness.

Frankly, that creeped me out on a number of levels.

Since I chose not to post it on LinkedIn, they did. With a picture clearly showing my license plate number. “Someone got a new car… Let’s all congratulate him”

I viewed this as an invasion of privacy. They seemed to view it as a corporate success story. Completely missing the rest of the story… 

My old car had been totaled and this was a logical replacement. I wouldn’t have gotten a new car, if my old one, which I loved, and was in fine working order, hadn’t been destroyed. The new car represented not success, but a major life setback, because my old car was completely paid for. The new car represented payments, tighter budgeting, and a loss of disposable income.

I let it go, they were being childish and I didn’t need to point that out. LinkedIn did it for me, deleting the post as a violation of their terms. This of course was before LinkedIn became part of Microsoft.

It is possible that my lack of compliance in the social media arena led directly to my not being on the “retain list” when the layoffs happened. There is no way to prove it, but I do wonder from time to time.

It always leads back to the same question for me. Why couldn’t they just let me be a good worker and do my job? All I wanted from them was a paycheck, medical insurance, and something productive to do. Why do so many companies these days feel that external activities are so dang important?

People who can’t take what you say at face value

I’m currently involved looking after a neighbors cat. There is a lot of other drama in this situation. I won’t bore you with the details.

There are a couple of points that are really annoying. The largest is the delivery of supplies for the cat.

To the person’s credit, they don’t feel that I shouldn’t incur costs for litter and food and I applaud that.

But I said in the beginning, “Don’t worry about this, you’re ill and we can settle up at a later date. If this is only for a few weeks.”

That apparently was not heard. Instead, the person has to schedule delivery of cat supplies from a market 2 miles away. You’d think that’s fine except that I’m at or near the market pretty frequently so it’s no big deal to go in to get what’s needed.

I was also serious about this only going on for a few weeks. We’re now at 5 or 6 weeks and there appears to be no plan for it to end. 

The problem with delivery is there’s a four hour window. So without thinking about it, this person has chained me to my home for half a day, watching for a delivery of stuff to appear on their doorstep. I know, they’re trying not to inconvenience me, but they’re doing a great job of that, in trying not to.

The other annoyance is that no matter what I say, the schedule is completely arbitrary. The person is 40 miles away and has zero idea what I’m planning to do or if I might plan to go do something to do with my life. They’re not intentionally trying to be selfish, but in that they’re succeeding mightily.

When I said don’t worry about it, I meant it. I told the person I’d keep receipts and we could just add it up whenever was convenient. They could write me a check and that would be all there was to it. It’s not like I can’t take 5 minutes while I’m in town to pick up a bag of cat food.

That would be far less inconvenience to me than having half my day shot to hell.

I just don’t understand why people refuse to acknowledge that you mean what you say. Is it that so many people don’t mean what they say?

Then there’s the gift as thank you for watching the cat. It will be alcohol, it’s always alcohol. That’s really nice, except that I don’t drink very much anymore. I still have an unopened bottle of Gentleman Jack from last year.

I don’t drink alone and am alone more than not.

In this particular situation, a better gift would be informing me that arrangements had been made for someone in their family to pick up the cat and look after it while the neighbor is laid up.

It would be much better for the cat and me.  As it is, the poor thing is alone too much and is craving attention. I’m spending at least an hour a day playing with and cuddling the poor creature. That’s an hour I’m not playing with my dog who also likes a lot of attention. By the time I add it up I’m spending at least 2 hours, often more, of my day tending to animals, and not doing stuff that I need to do.

It’s not that the critters aren’t deserving of attention and love, it’s that I need to reclaim my life. That being said, it’s not the fault of the animals wanting the attention that their respective humans agreed to give them when we brought them into our homes.

In the case of cats, I like cats. But after my last cat passed away, I found that I enjoyed not having to scoop litter boxes, deal with nasty fur balls, the smell of cat urine or canned cat food.

Perhaps, the cat thing wouldn’t be so trying if the person’s house was neat and clean. It’s not! The place is a disaster and I do my level best to not touch anything other than what is absolutely necessary. The place is a hazmat site waiting to be discovered and red tagged.  At least the stench of stale pot smoke has finally dissipated.

I’ve gotten in the habit of not eating breakfast before I go over there because I always feel like I’m going to vomit. When I come back, I’m not in the mood to eat. I guess the upside is that I’m saving money and losing weight.

Honestly 30 to 45 minutes is about all I can take. I’ve considered bringing the cat over to my house, and all that entails. I haven’t because I think my dog would decide to play with the cat and that wouldn’t end well for either of them. 

The cat is fully armed and not afraid to scratch or bite with little or no provocation.

Then there’s the issue that the dog likes being able to go in and out to the back yard which means the door is open. That wouldn’t work with the cat.

I’ve considered opening the windows at the neighbor’s house but that doesn’t work because the windows and screens are in such poor repair that I fear the cat would escape via one of them, never to be seen or heard from again.

I’m not even going to delve into the mess caused by the neighbor rerouting all their mail to my small PO Box but neglecting to tell me that they’d done so. That, at least was relatively easy to fix. I’m now getting my mail again!

In summary,

The road to hell is most definitely paved with good intentions.

Nice guys do in fact finish last.

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Beware the echo chamber…

After two years of more of less isolation, perhaps we’ve all fallen into our own personal echo chambers.

It’s not intentional. It’s simply what happens in isolation. There will be those who say we’ve not been isolated because we have the internet and the news, etc. But we have been isolated from people and friends who challenge our beliefs.

It’s the personal interactions, it’s the people we care about, our friends, family, etc. who add balance to our thoughts and opinions. Without those people challenging us, we fall into patterns where it’s far too easy to self validate what we think and as humans do, we assume that we’re right.

COVID has provided a perfect storm in this regard.

No matter how egalitarian we try to be in our news absorption we inevitably develop biases and preferred news sources. It could happen because those sources have pretty people, or entertaining pieces, or that they simply validate what we’re already thinking. Eventually we choose those sources that we’re comfortable with. Then we narrow our focus to only the comfortable.

Without discussion and interaction. Without people we respect and care about pushing back and saying, “Well this report here says thus and such,” it’s easy to create an echo chamber and not notice it.

I’m guilty… Are you?

That’s not about laying blame. None of us should feel threatened by this realization. It’s just a sign post that says, “Hey there, we need to do better.” None of us are perfect, but we all should at least aspire to keep walking that path and get as close as possible.

The problem with echo chambers is they feed division. Everyone walks around with their own entrenched beliefs and they defend them.

How many people have said, or been heard to say, “You are wrong and I don’t want to be friends anymore,”? Isn’t that the same as a dating profile saying “Republicans don’t contact me,”

That’s not healing, that’s not being open minded. It’s in the discussion of even closely held beliefs that validation, or error is uncovered. Sometimes neither validation or error is uncovered but the discussion provides enlightenment.

The enlightenment I’m talking about is understanding what drives the core belief. For example. Just because someone was tried for a crime and there was nothing uncovered in a trial that was legally actionable. It doesn’t mean there was nothing there in the first place. It may mean that someone was skating along the boundaries of the law and they were clever enough or lucky enough to stay just out of reach.

Al Capone is a good example. For years the FBI and other law enforcement knew Capone was in charge of a massive criminal organization. They could never actually pin anything on him directly. They didn’t have sufficient evidence and no matter how many times they arrested Capone, the case always fell apart. Until the IRS got involved. Then it was a whole new ball game.

Maybe, a way forward for all of us, is to have those uncomfortable discussions. But both parties really need to listen.

That’s the hard part, listening and divorcing yourself from your beliefs for a time. That way, you can get into the head of the other person thereby understanding the factual or not so factual underpinning of why they believe a certain way about something.

It doesn’t matter if you agree or not with their belief. What matters is that we all acknowledge that no-one is an idiot for thinking in a way we don’t agree with. It’s just that we each put “facts” together in some kind of order that makes it possible to cope with the world around us.

I’ve written in these pages that I personally think something was amiss in the most recent election. For that matter I could make a case that something has been amiss in elections going back decades.

When I’ve said that I thought the most recent election should be investigated. It wasn’t to depose Biden and install Trump. I honestly don’t care about which of the two is president.

I’m not even sure if constitutionally Biden could be removed at this point. I don’t even want to consider the chaos that removing a Biden Administration and installing a Trump Administration would cause. I guess I’m more of a, “Well, we’re here now, we just have to muddle through,” we have to do better next time. I don’t like Biden. I personally think he’s incompetent, but Harris is no better.

I as a voter, don’t like being placed in a situation where I feel that I have to choose the devil or the deep blue sea.

That doesn’t mean that I’m pro Trump. I personally think that he did some things that were beneficial for the country in the near term but I don’t have enough knowledge of politics to be able to project how those near term benefits play out over time. I’m willing to acknowledge that perhaps the folks who were screaming about his policies know, or knew something I missed.

When I say I think we should look at the elections, I’m saying that from a perspective of fixing what’s broken.

How do we change the system to make sure that the next election, everyone feels confident enough in the system that they believe the results represent the will of the electorate? I’d like for everyone to be able to comfortably say, “I didn’t like the result but that’s okay, because the system was fair and it works.“

I’d be willing to bet that average folks on both sides of the political gulf could get behind that. The politicians might not like it all that much, but the people they’re supposed to represent might like it a lot.

It hit me, that folks might not understand the nuance I’m talking about. I’d like to see a disassembly of the voting process to find the bugs and plug them. That would be a big task, and it would take representation from all parties, not just the big two. That’s also why I’m in the near term pro voter ID.

I’m not about preventing someone from casting their vote. I am about preventing someone from casting 20 votes. Yes, it would be inconvenient to have to present ID to obtain a ballot. but the benefit outweighs the inconvenience. God knows, I remember how slow it was to write a check and present ID in the grocery store line.

I’d like to see the next election, be clean. I’d like for there to be no margin for a candidate to do what Trump did this last election. We should remember that before Trump, there was Al Gore claiming the election irregularities.

Folks call it “The Big Lie”. I call it a warning sign. How about we figure out a way to eliminate the possibility of “The Big Lie” altogether? That seems like a worth while enterprise doesn’t it?

I’m amazed how many people have Trump living in their heads rent free. I’d prefer to push him into history and deal with what is in front of us. Yes, I acknowledge that Trump is living in my head rent free too. I try very hard to only let him have a cheap studio apartment with a leaky toilet. It’s hard to do because there’s so much media attention still focused on him.

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Democrats, Shut up about the FL Parental Rights Bill

To everyone who’s got their panties in a twist…

I’d tell you to read the bill. Unfortunately you seem to have a difficult time understanding English. I’ll chalk that up to your teachers spending too much time with silly fluff passing as education and not actually grading your work, thereby neglecting the more basic aspects of your fundamental education.

After all, it’s unfair to be mean to the village idiot or call them out for being an idiot.

I’ve read the bill. It’s here if you’d like to, or can, read it for yourselves.

I’d remind you Democrats, that you’re the same people who look at a man, a stranger, with suspicion ready to call a cop, if that man happens to see your child about to fall and catches the child out of instinct.

You’re the people who in years gone by attempted to destroy at least one California man because he happened to be naked… IN HIS OWN KITCHEN one sunny morning. He’d forgotten that a set of curtains was open. This allowed a nosey busybody to see his nudity from a sidewalk through a hedge.

You’re the people that call child protective services on parents if their child happens to mention they’ve seen Daddy or even Mommy in the shower.

You’re the people that have made changing clothes for PE and taking showers after PE something sexual and sick instead of what it is, simple functionality.

All of these things, you’ve created and nurtured with the mantra, “It’s for the Children.”

You’re the people that have so confused things, that multi-urinal men’s rooms are going the way of the Dodo. I can only attribute this to penis envy on the part of some very angry harridans who felt it unfair that men could go into a men’s room and relieve themselves in a couple of minutes. As opposed to the harridans waiting in line while their sisters occupied the ladies room for 15 or 20 minutes.

Now, you village idiots are screaming bloody murder because parents and real people who have nieces and nephews are pushing back against discussing sexuality, any sexuality, with Elementary School children aged 4 to 9 in a classroom environment.

There was a time when that would have gotten you on a perverts list.

So you’re saying it’s bad if a child sees Daddy or Mommy’s privates at home, but it’s perfectly okay for that same child to be taught and shown the ins & outs of all kinds of sexual behavior well before they’ve got any clue about what their parts are for.

Until I was 10 the only thing I knew my penis could do was pass urine. Fortunately, somewhere between 10 and 12, one or both of my parents realized that I’d discovered an alternate function. They provided a very helpful gender specific, age appropriate book, that explained the changes that were happening. The book just appeared on my bed one day.

Inside the book in my father’s bold handwriting was a note. The note said, “You’re normal, If you have any questions now ask myself or your mother. You and I can talk whenever you’re ready.”

As I recall, there were very helpful line drawings that showed me the internals and externals of my plumbing. They were relatable and informative, as was the text of the book.

This was 1970. I remember feeling safe and not threatened. They knew, I knew, they knew I knew they knew, and in all we were a knowledgable family. (To paraphrase Hepburn from The Lion in Winter.)

What my parents didn’t know, and I didn’t admit to myself until I was between 18 and 21 was that I had rather broad sexual tastes. I tried both genders, choosing whichever one was at the time, more interesting.

Looking back, knowing there was the freedom to be who I was, would have been helpful. That being said, in the 70’s and 80’s men who “did” with men were still subject to arrest and imprisonment. For that matter, in some states, any sexual activity other than putting tab A in slot B was illegal. Yep, oral sex was illegal even between married consenting adults.

Talk about government overreach!

I’m pro sex education for teenagers. I think that it is something that could be very good especially if it dispelled fear, and shame, and made it clear that sexual expression is natural and healthy.

I’d also say that letting appropriately aged children know that whoever they want to be with is okay. Perhaps it would be helpful to explain what responsibilities come with sex. Tell the students that their bodies are theirs, and they don’t have to do anything they don’t want to or are not ready for. There’s no shame in saying “No.”

When I was 10, I was developing a bit early. None of my friends in that age group were close to the “discovery” I made. By the time I was 12 things had changed. That book my parents gave me was read cover to cover by all my close friends. They also read my Father’s note to me. The note itself was the perfect size to be a great bookmark.

They were ready and knew I had resources.

I will not discuss the projector incident(s)… 8mm was a very popular format. That’s a funny story, because 25 years later I found out that the projector and associated films were not owned by my Father or Mother. They belonged to a close family friend who hung around after my parents were divorced. A bunch of 13 year old boys watching silent dirty movies projected on a nicely painted flat white closet door must have been a sight. Ahh, the good old days!

I am absolutely opposed to talking about sex with children in elementary school. I believe that the innocence of children is to be protected and cherished. Let children be children and let their bodies tell them when it’s time to start growing up.

I started that process young, and I had parents that understood. I realize that not all children are as fortunate but I can tell you without question, at 10 my body showed me a neat trick. I wouldn’t have been ready for all the permutations and combinations of human sexuality. It was all I could do to just understand what was going on with me.

I didn’t care then, that in the future my tab A was supposed to fit inside someone. At the time my personal tab A was making me very happy all on its own. The very concept of putting a part of me inside someone was, in the vernacular of my 10 year old self, “Icky”. I didn’t want or need to know about the wild world of sexual sports.

There’s stuff I’ve seen and done, that I wish I hadn’t. Once you see or experience something you don’t forget, even if you want to. I think that is probably more true of children because they don’t have filters. It’s the adults in the room that are supposed to provide the filtering.

So Democrats, quit mislabeling the FL bill as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Call it what it is, “The Protect the Innocence of Children Bill”

After all Protect the Children is your favorite chorus isn’t it?