Tag: Stupidity

This is absolutely horrifying

Yes, this is a real story about something that really happened and apparently this isn’t the first time either.

The story, in brief;

  • Unvaccinated knobstick gets Covid and ends up in the hospital
    • to be completely honest, neither side in this drama has commented on the knobstick’s vaccine status but, given the circumstances, I think it’s a safe bet
  • Knobstick’s condition deteriorates and he ends up in the ICU on a ventilator
  • Mrs. Knobstick demands that the hospital give him ivermectin
  • Everyone from the nursing assistants to the Chief Medical Officer at the hospital thank Mrs. Knobstick for the suggestion but inform her that Mr.Knobstick will continue to receive treatments that have actual evidence supporting their use and not something someone on Facebook said was a miracle cure.
  • Mrs. Knobstick goes doctor shopping and finds some quack who prescribes Mr. Knobstick ivermectin without ever having examined, or even seen him.
  • Mrs. Knobstick triumphantly presents Dr. Quack’s ivermectin prescription to the hospital. The hospital informs her that Dr. Quack doesn’t have privileges at their facility and, therefore, isn’t allowed to admit or treat patients there.
  • Mrs. Knobstick SUES THE HOSPITAL AND WINS. The judge orders the hospital to grant temporary privileges to Dr. Quack and to begin treatment with ivermectin

So here you have a judge, someone trained in law and not medicine, overruling the entire medical staff of a hospital in favor of a single doctor who is promoting a treatment that THE FDA HAS SPECIFICALLY WARNED AGAINST USING

A little more detail on Dr. Quack; he is a member, or maybe the founder, of an organization with some Orwellian Newspeak name like “Front Line Covid Treatment Action Alliance” that actively promotes the use of ivermectin for covid. He also has said that ivermectin is more effective than any of the vaccines at preventing covid (it isn’t) and that the FDA not authorizing its use is comparable to the Holocaust (WTF?!)

The hospital, of course, complied with the court order but the ICU staff did exactly what they should have under the circumstances and refused to administer the ivermectin. No one in the facility had ever given ivermectin before, it wasn’t in the hospital formulary and it hadn’t been verified by their pharmacy. Mr. Knobstick still got the ivermectin but Dr. Quack had to come do it himself.

Neither side has commented in detail about Mr. Knobstick’s condition since starting ivermectin. The most a spokesman would say is that he “hasn’t gotten worse”.

Edited to add; and when Mr. Knobstick inevitability dies from complications of Covid-19, do you think Mrs. Knobstick will change her thinking about vaccines and the validity of FDA approved or authorized treatments? Of course she won’t. She’ll go on Facebook and every mommy blog or fitness blog in existence and lament how her poor husband would still be alive if only the Pharmaceutical-Hospital-Reverse Vampire axis of evil had given Mr. Knobstick ivermectin before it was too late, oh and, by the way, don’t forget to follow the link to the Knobstick Memorial GoFundMe page.

I’d like to see more of this

I tried to find a copy of this clip that isn’t embedded in someone’s tweet but I couldn’t so here it is. This is Illinois Governor Pritzker dealing with a right-wing nutbag reporter at a press briefing about the state’s Covid response.

Semi-accurate transcript:

Right-Wing Nutbag Reporter (RWNBR): [recording starts mid-sentence] …protests out here this morning and parents were crying, as governor you should try and calm people’s nerves, maybe, or can you? Because there are low risk groups too…

Unidentified Woman (UW) (off screen): Amy, as a supposed reporter, you should probably stop the misinformation. We are done here. Thank you.

Gov. Pritzker: Thank you. [starts to walk away from podium]

UW (still off screen): You know how you stop schools from being closed? You stop complaining about mask wearing.

[inaudible cross-talk, RWNBR appears to say something like “…read some of those studies”]

Gov. Pritzker: [walks back to podium] I’m going to take the podium again and just respond to that. Let me just say this; you are spreading misinformation. I wish you would stop spreading misinformation. You come in here with a political agenda and you spread misinformation and I just think you should stop. We now need to protect our children, we need to protect the people in our communities, parents, grandparents, teachers; you are working against that. And it is extremely upsetting for all of us who are trying to keep the rest of the state safe. [Walks away from podium]

Clever title

Something that I never really understood, in all my years of working in health care, is the patients with serious illnesses that couldn’t stop talking about how lucky they were. Couldn’t wrap my head around it. How can people consider themselves “lucky” when they also have advanced heart failure, or some kind of progressive neurological disease? Or cancer. Someone who was really lucky wouldn’t be sick in the first place, right?

What I think I am beginning to understand is that I’ve been looking at it from the wrong perspective. This is not “lucky” in the sense of “I just won the lottery” this is “lucky” in the sense of “the building I was in exploded and collapsed around me but I didn’t die”.

So with that out of the way, I am exceptionally lucky. This whole thing could be so much worse.

I have a support system of friends and family without which my current situation would have gone from difficult and unpleasant to catastrophic. The material and mental support I have received has made it possible to navigate this whole thing with at least some sense, somewhere in the back of my mind, that things were going to be okay eventually. The loudest part of my brain is still saying that things are terrible now and the whole thing is so unmanageable that things are going to be terrible forever, but the actually smart part of my brain knows that even though I have fallen out of an airplane, I have a parachute. Lucky.

On the other end of the spectrum is the American health care system and everything surrounding it.

I have been missing a lot of work. Like I think I’ve probably only worked maybe 5 or 6 days in the last several weeks. When this whole thing started I tried to get a medical leave from work. The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA) requires employers to provide employees with job-protected and unpaid leave for qualified medical and family reasons. It also set up a federal system for managing leave granted under the law but said that employers could set up their own system as long as it was substantially similar to the federal program and provided substantially similar benefits. I knew going in that, one way or another, I should be able to get some kind of approved leave.

I feel like I should say, at this point, that I am not an expert at navigating the consumer side of health care. Far from it. There are almost certainly easier and better ways to attempt what I have been attempting but they certainly aren’t obvious.

Anyway, so I contact my primary care doctor, human resources at work and the third-party company that manages medical leave and related things for my employer. Got paperwork rolling and things were looking okay. Then I find out that I don’t qualify for medical leave through my employer because I haven’t worked there long enough. I can’t remember what the requirement was exactly but I wasn’t even close. Fine, if I can’t get this through my employer I’ll just dive into the state and federal systems. Except I don’t qualify for those either because my employer has their own system set up and I have to go through that.

So I gave up on the idea of medical leave and some time passed. As it became more and more apparent that I was not going to be working full time through this I started looking in to the short term disability insurance that I pay for as part of my health benefits at work. This seems, on the face of it, to be a perfect fit for short term disability. I am, to a greater or lesser extent, kind of disabled right now but, because I am very lucky (see above), it should be pretty short term. Great, lets get this going.

Step One: You must be on approved medical leave to access your short term disability benefits.

Well shit.

So there it is, the Greatest Health Care System In the World™ – pay a lot, get a little.

Edited to add; This is how dumb I am – The whole time I was dealing with this whole question of leave and benefits and insurance I was thinking that what I really needed was a social worker. Many astute readers will immediately pick up on the fact that I know a social worker, and a really good social worker at that.

I still think it is extremely unlikely that I will be able to get any kind of coverage for the time I missed but at least I have a couple new leads to follow.

Life’s little annoyances

Why does Windows not tell me when my graphics drivers are out of date? I get notifications that I can link my Android phone, which I don’t have, to my computer, which I don’t really want connected to my Android phone, which I don’t have, or any other phone that I do have for that matter but there isn’t anything that will tell me that my drivers are two patches out of date.

Apparently this is what I worry about when I stop watching the news.

I really need to stop paying attention to the news

We are so, so, SO fucked.

The new Republican talking point is that it’s the CDC recommending for people to start wearing masks again that is causing all the vaccine hesitancy in red states. The Governor of Missouri was on Fox this morning and said the following;

The recently updated CDC guidance regarding mask wearing for fully vaccinated individuals is disappointing and concerning. It’s disappointing because it is inconsistent with the overwhelming evidence surrounding the efficacy of the vaccines and their proven results, and it only serves to disrupt the increases we are seeing in vaccine uptake. This self-inflicted setback encourages skepticism and vaccine hesitancy at a time when the goal is to prevent serious illnesses and deaths from COVID-19 through vaccination. It’s concerning because the nation’s top public health agency appears to be cowering to the political pressures of those who only want to force mandates and shutdowns, which only further prolong the recovery we as a nation are working towards. This decision only promotes fear and further division among our citizens.

How is Missouri fairing with the latest surge in cases? I’m glad you asked!


This pandemic is never ever EVER going to end and all it’s going to take is one unlucky mutation incubated in some ignorant-ass yokel and The Stand will no longer be a work of fiction.

There is nothing that I, personally, can do about any of this and when I think about the fact that I am likely looking at ANOTHER year of wearing isolation gear and shoveling corpses in the ICU it just makes my dissatisfaction with current circumstances in general that much worse.

So this is it. I’m swearing off news media for at least a week. Maybe a couple months. FSM knows I’m not going to have to follow anything too closely to know when the surge hits the Trump-Humper counties in Washington because I’ll be neck deep in it at work.

I’m counting on my friends and family to keep me up to date in anything interesting and non-covid related that happens. Also, if anyone has any suggestions for podcasts with episodes of around 20-30 minutes that I can listen to on my commute I would welcome them.


Remarkable self-awareness

Again stepping away from the cancer doom-and-gloom for a moment, I ran across the above comment in a libertarian discussion forum. I thought it perfectly encapsulated the thought process of the overwhelming majority of self-identified “libertarians”, especially the mental gymnastics required to somehow be wrong about everything all the time.

For those who can’t effectively see the tiny text, it reads as follows;

We’ve spent years with the position that we didn’t need the state to force us to behave. That we could be smart and responsible without having our hands held.

And then in the span of a year, a bunch of you idiots who are definitely reading this right now went ahead and did everything you could to prove that no, we definitely are NOT smart enough to do anything intelligent on our own, and that we apparently DO need the government to force us to not be stupid.

All you had to do was either get a shot OR put a fucking mask on and stop getting sick for freedom. But no, that was apparently too much to ask. So now the state has all the evidence they’ll ever need that, without being forced to do something, we’re too stupid to do it.

So thanks for setting us back, you dumb fucks.

Edit: I’m getting called an authoritarian bootlicker for advocating that people be responsible voluntarily. Awesome, guys.

Some Rando on the Internet

Several people, myself included, have mentioned that movies like Jaws have to be re-evaluated in the light of the pubic and especially political response to the pandemic. I have never had much faith that the general public will behave responsibly, even under the most extreme circumstances, but I always raged about how unrealistic Jaws was because the mayor of the town refused to close public beaches in spite of the fact that it was nearly certain that more people would be killed by the shark. I couldn’t imagine anyone being that stupid and shortsighted. I think it’s pretty clear now that many (most?) politicians would opt for the easy, expedient solution that is beneficial in the very short term even if it means worse political fallout in the medium- to long term. Like keeping businesses open because “ERMAHGHERD TEH ECONOMIES!” even though that means thousands of people will die a few weeks from now.

All this goes to explain why we’re looking at yet another Covid surge and could potentially be seeing 200,000 new cases per day nationwide again by October.

Keep wearing your masks.

Edited to add;

Or, and stay with me here, it is just possible that some of us don’t wish death on people with whom we disagree politically. Crazy to think, huh?

This pandemic is never going to end.

edited further to add;