Sunday, July 10, 2011

Back in town

Took a nice little Jeep expedition. Managed to drag a tow hook and bring home a big glop of mud, found that my tailpipe is hanging too low and is too long with the new gas tank tuck (it got a divot on its top from my *other* tow hook), managed to hit a tree with one of my front fender flares when I didn't compute my cut just right and put a wrinkle into it as well as popped out one of the screws holding it. I found out that my tow hooks are now what limits my departure angle since the gas tank is no longer hanging down. Nothing not fixable with a sawzall, a heat gun, and removing those stupid tow hooks, which really aren't necessary because I have a receiver hitch D-ring...

I see I got a Libertarian invasion while I was out of town. Like rats, those Libertarians are, constantly moving in and trashing lesser blogs with their incessant prattling about how the solution to all problems is Santa Claus (oops, "Free market", same thing), how pink unicorns shitting rainbows will solve the problems that Santa doesn't solve (oops, "charity", my bad), and their whining about how paying their share of what it takes to keep a civilization running is "slavery" (a whining that they do using a network originally created by tax money, astoundingly enough). I guess I'll need to dust out the place and spray a little of the insecticide of reality and facts around here, that usually keeps the infestation down to the point of reasonableness. I swear, you spend a day enjoying yourself with a bunch of fellow Jeepers and come back and the children have trashed the place. Siiiigh!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

10 comments:

  1. I dunno, maybe you'll have to tent the place.

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  2. Sorry, Daddy, I'll tidy up, honestly I will.
    DD

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  3. My two dogs once ate the couch when we were gone past dinner time once. Got 3 dogs now, and they are bigger!
    Drive on mick, it don't mean nuthin.
    You attracted gnomes because you are right.
    My thoughts anyway.
    w3ski

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  4. A lot of Glibertarians remind me of Jehovah's Witnesses and communists. They tend to be white, superficially polite, relentlessly peddling a crackpot ideology of how things are in the world, and baffled as to why people don't like them.

    I used to try to debate politely with Jehovys and other delusionals. Now I just tell them to fuck off if they keep in my face. You can't talk sense into stupid, deluded people who think they're smart.

    At least many of the delusional people on my ward are either trying to get better and they compliantly take the medications that stop them from hearing imaginary voices inside their heads. Or they're so whacked-out that I can give them injections to calm them down and shut them up. I wish I could do the same with Glibbering idiots.

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  5. Bukko, do you ever read yourself?

    Jest askin', agin'.

    DD

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  6. Bukko's right, though. When Reagan emptied the mental institutions, the notion was that the crazy people would end up in community-based boarding homes for the disabled. Instead, as Michelle Bachman so aptly demonstrates, they ended up in charge of the Republican Party because crazy people are the best liars of all because (duh) they DON'T KNOW THEY'RE LYING. And being a good liar is a *massive* advantage in politics, for reasons I shan't discuss further in this particular missive :).

    - Badtux the "The crazies are running the asylum!" Penguin

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  8. When Reagan emptied the mental institutions, the notion was that the crazy people would end up in community-based boarding homes for the disabled.

    How right you are, Tux! Have I ever bloviated on your blog about my experience with that?

    When I was still a newspaper reporter in the late 80s-early 90s, writing for the Tampa Tribune in its bureau in the rural central Florida town of Arcadia, I did a lot of stories about the G. Pierce Wood state mental hospital there. I coulda won a Pulitzer Prize based on that place, because there was so much pathos, like the number of children born to female mental patients who were raped/coerced into sex by fellow patients or staff, and what happened to them. There coulda been lots of articles about poor medical treatment and bureaucratic waste of money, too. But the bosses in Tampa were more concerned with having me crank out a stream of pedestrian stories about the goings-on with the county commission and such every day, instead of freeing me for some long-form investigative journalism. I regret and resent that.

    Anyway, one of the main issues at the time was over a mental patients' advocacy group that was suing the Reagan and Bush admins to do just what you mentioned. The group's goal was to stop warehousing the mental patients way out on the Florida prairie and put them in community treatment homes closer to where they came from instead. I was puzzled that Reagan/Bush I and the Republican governor weren't fighting this group harder. I didn't realize it at the time, because although I was cynical then, I was not as deeply paranoydical as I am not. The token resistance put up by the government was like B'rer Rabbit hollering "Please don't throw me in the briar patch!"

    It turned out as you said. The 1,000-bed mental hospital was shuttered in stages, but the community programs were mostly never built. The mental patients were turfed out to nursing homes or SROs or simply became homeless, so they could wander off and die in the bushes. That was the goal of the murderous libertarian political class all along. All the proudly liberal stories I wrote about what a good thing this "advocacy group" was doing turned out to be the touting of a sham. I now wonder whether the group was a covert front operation.

    Ironically, after I had to switch careers, I wound up working at one of the few community treatment houses that was created, a 30-bed home in a town close to where I lived. It was a Potemkin project that was supposed to cycle mental patients out of the big hospital, get them so they could live a bit more independently, and then set them up in rent-subsidized apartments. Only, in the four years I worked there, it was mostly the same bunch of mental misfits the whole time. There was no through-put, but the halfway house could be held up as an example of "See, we're doing what we said."

    I owe my present easy-peasy job on the psych ward (easy compared to the medical ward, at least) to that. When I got bumped from my medical ward post in a downsizing, I was able to boast about my psych cred when I applied for an intra-hospital transfer to where I'm working now. I love my current job with the nutters, whereas I despised the stress, shit and death on the medical ward. It's weird how something evil that Reagan did three decades ago is benefitting my life today.

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  9. My mother was DON (Director of Nursing) at a nursing home when the first wave of de-institutionalization happened. Suddenly a dozen or so crazies showed up in the nursing home. My mother was irate. She'd worked psych before and knew what it took to deal with crazy people and she also knew that a) the nursing home didn't have the personnel and facilities to deal with crazies, all the employees were trained in how to deal with fragile old people, not how to deal with crazy people, and the facilities were optimized for the safety of old people with mobility problems, not for the safety of people with mental problems, and b) mixing younger healthier crazy people with frail old people was a recipe for elder abuse. The owner of the nursing home, a doctor, told her "No problem, I'll just keep'em so doped up they can't make trouble." Yeppers, those crazies were doin' that Thorazine Shuffle *BIG* time, they were so zonked out they might as well have been comatose. Dr. Feeljoy (not his name) was not a psychiatrist, BTW. He wouldn't have known lithium from Tylenol, he certainly didn't know how to adjust meds to the point where people were functional. But he sure did know how to prescribe that Thorazine to keep'em well sedated! My mother became concerned about the ethical and legal consequences of being part of this, and eventually left.

    Now, how, exactly, is that better than their previous stint in the state mental hospital? Yeah, they weren't chained and whipped, but they were certainly getting the pharmaceutical equivalent from Dr. Feeljoy. And they certainly weren't going to get *better* under this treatment... all that was going to happen was that they would get comfortably numb, while doing that Thorazine Shuffle in circles in the hallways.

    But I guess the GOP had a solution for that one too -- run'em for Congress as Teabagger candidates. Hey, explains a lot, right? :)

    - Badtux the Snarky Penguin

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