Tag: Bullshit

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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?

Posted on

Too much static!

I’ve been finding it very hard to write lately.

There’s a lot of stuff going on in my life and my local environment that have created a bunch of noise in my head.

I’m worried about a lot of things, and even ignoring the larger issues of the world at large the static is making it very hard for me to put thoughts together in any coherent order.

There have been a lot of false starts in blog posts and other projects, they’re not progressing because lately I have the attention span of a gadfly.

The more I try to set aside time for me. Just me to sit quietly, collect my thoughts and plan a day, the more interruptions, or disasters, rain down on my life.

I’d love to actually plan a day and not have every single plan blown to hell almost instantly. Perhaps I’m asking too much!

The more distracted I am of course the less gets done that I need to do and the greater the frustration I have, because my stuff is piling up.

It’s a vicious cycle and really starting to harsh my buzz.

The latest annoyance is that the most recent MacOS update is killing my laptop’s battery in just a couple of hours. I discovered this when I decided to take my laptop and myself outside to enjoy the nice weather we’re having.

I thought perhaps being outside would assist me in clearing my head. The plan was to remove myself from all the distractions inside the house and just sit looking for a job, and perhaps writing a bit, in the sun and fresh air. HA!

On balance I got about an hour of what I wanted to get done, done before the unusual power drain became apparent. Then I was sucked down the rabbit hole of identifying what was causing the power drain.

Still unsure about that. After turning off all the communication channels. BlueTooth, WiFi, etc. The drain was still happening. That led me to all the crap running in the background, (most of which is Apple’s ill defined subsystems,) according to Apple’s monitoring software there was nothing wrong. Uh Huh sure! Looking at the UNIX monitoring software there were 600 processes running most of those were sleeping but several of their “New” modules were consuming a lot of CPU time. It’s unclear how to actually turn off any of these modules which I’d do in a heartbeat because I don’t use them.

This kind of thing annoys the crap out of me because clearly Apple dropped the ball again! They’re apparently not doing real world testing and that annoys the hell out of me because I’m a software tester that has applied to Apple at least 20 times for testing positions, only to be completely and rigorously ignored.

I’ve said it before. Automated testing has its place, but an actual human working with the machine is still necessary because automation can only spot those items it’s programmed to spot.

In other words, automation will confirm that the software completed the expected task. A human on the other hand will spot things about the requested task completing, with other collateral issues, (like excessive power drains,) and get curious about what’s causing them.

But God Forbid, the great and wondrous Apple actually considered that!

As I said, I’m annoyed. Here’s an axiom for you:

Shitty software is still shitty software regardless of the logo. No-one is immune to creating shitty software. Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, are all guilty of unapologetically foisting shit on the public. Apple never apologizes for anything, no matter how bad it is! (Unless they’re forced to do so by a class action lawsuit.) Just once, I’d love to see Tim Cook apologize for a crappy Mac OS or IOS release in his opening remarks at a convention or online event. I’d probably have a heart attack but it would be worth it.

The MacBook Pro isn’t the only device having battery problems. Apparently, some iPhones are sucking their batteries dry after the latest release of IOS 15. Apples response, in typically Apple fashion is, “**smug** You’ll just have to wait until we get around to fixing it. **smug**”

So for the time being, I’m chained to my power adapter, instead of enjoying the spring weather and being able to write. What happened to my MacBook outlasting the competition?

Oh yeah… poor testing & verification on one of their products core advantages!

To make matters worse, this has been an ongoing issue for at least the last four releases so you’d think someone in their software development and testing team would have a big assed sign that said, “TEST BATTERY LIFE IN REAL WORLD SITUATIONS!”

I’d be happy to design a sign for them if they’d be willing to pay me a year’s salary for it.