Just For Fun (JFF) we should start a rumor

that large doses of Ex Lax will cure COVID. in fact, baking it into brownies rather than using chocolate does wonders.


Now this is not without precedent: the monologuist Jean Shepherd created a “best seller” out of a book that at the time, did not yet exist. He told his late-night radio listeners To go to bookstores and ask for a copy of “I, Libertine” and when they didn’t have it in stock to order it immediately. It is not difficult to believe that RW talk show hosts on radio and TV were decrying the subject matter of the book with many stating that they were horrified upon reading it.

A time later, Shep wrote and published it. What a hoot.

…but it has to be brand-name Ex Lax, the generic won’t do the trick.

This may be going a long way to prove a point but...

We have a patient who I have seen for about 25 years. She is a professional, reasonably well educated, above-average in appearance, presently single with some children. I have had nothing but difficulty on and off with her over the years but I am one of those people, like an idiot, who thinks that if I get through a situation then it won’t happen again. I do that because i’m a moron.

In my new practice where I’ve moved, she managed to find me and needed some work done. On her first visit, she acted out terribly using four letter words and shrieking in a complaining fashion. I told her she had to keep her voice down that they were other people around, and she negated my entreaties, but did in fact quiet down a bit. After her visit, the office manager called her told her that we wanted to keep her here but did that behavior was unacceptable. The woman apologized 50 different ways and promised that she would not do it again. When I came into the office the manager informed me that she had had this conversation and I replied to her that no we really don’t want her in the practice because this is a never ending issue with her. The manager disagreed with me, which I fully understood, and stated that the patient said that she would behave herself from now on. I thought to myself “yeah right”.

Two weeks later the patient came in to complete her dental work and was more or less fine in the chair, and I knew what was coming. When she went to the front she headed out the door and the manager said excuse me, we have to settle your bill. At which point the woman started screaming at her that she wasn’t going to pay anything and how dare we ask her for money after we had been so rude to her via the phone call, and stormed out the door. Out of curiosity immediately we did a little research and found that she had received the check in full from the insurance company and was thus participating in the theft of services scheme which in Pennsylvania is a felony over a certain amount of money.

I then told the manager that I knew this was going to happen and that was exactly why I had stated that maybe it would be best if she had let her go, by dismissing her from the practice, after that last visit filled with obscenities. Almost unbelievably, the manager said that she would work it out with her and she was sure that she could get her to pay the bill and behave yourself in the future. I then said to her this more or less:

“Your tolerance and acceptance of her inappropriate behavior is exactly why we had Donald Trump for four years and God forbid that have them for another four years at some point. People in general do not know how to deal with severe mental illness and give credence to what these people say as though it means something and that they will “get through to them“. It doesn’t work that way. She set us up to steal the dental services and is daring and defying us to seek retribution. I saw it coming, I understand that you did not see it coming, but you didn’t listen to me and you did not take my word for it nor did you give me credence having known her for 25 years, and then we are now the victims in every way of this woman’s Lunatic behavior once again. Those of us in the population who were screaming when Trump was running for president that there was a basis of dementia and insanity here were nixed by those who “knew better” And are self-judging “better” judges of character.”

Then I went on to say that the manager needs to take my judgment seriously in the future because in all these years of practice, I have never been sued by a patient, nor if I had a complaint to a state board about my behavior. This is because I anticipate for the most part bad behavior and compensate for it a priori. Those of us with good judgment screaming during the entire presidential campaign in 2016 to no avail with so many and now we have a crisis of chronic insanity/fascism pervading the country in extremis. I know that I have not heard the end of the situation with this lady in my office as we have not yet heard the end of the situation with the former guy.

Over my many years I have had to deal with people who were called quirky, eccentric, a little bit wifty , and the like, but in fact these people have some degree of treatable (in most cases) disturbance and are listed in the DSM, sometimes in multiple categories.

Many many years ago when I was a student, we had a class member who was an “odd duck” as they used to call them and I was always very careful to minimize my contact with him even though we shared a similar background and upbringing as well as commonality of religious institution belonging. One day I came back from vacation to find that he had been hospitalized by a law-enforcement agency in another state when he was driving back from seeing his parents because of his grossly inappropriate behavior to the police officer who stopped the car. He had shown me the report of the officer and I believed every single word of it given what I knew with him and he spent some fair amount of time in hospital, was released back into the school and had a reasonably successful career,with ongoing therapy, from which he is now retired. I don’t know why people don’t recognize the seriousness of disturbed behavior, perhaps because it’s easier to simply chalk it up to casual observance so it’s not to become terribly involved. Again in extremis we see this with child abuse such as we witnessed this week with The remarkable and heartbreaking testimony of those four brave women who had been so terribly abused and ignored by law-enforcement. It is to the detriment of society that this occurs and we need to do something about it as soon as possible, for we may be facing a greater catastrophe then we know how to handle.

Gorgeous day at the Jersey Beach today except this:

We have come a very "long way" since Reagan said that ketchup was a vegetable

We knew back then that they war had been declared against the Democrats, the liberals, and the New Deal. It was a given, and Pat Buchanan said this on CNN’s Crossfire unabashedly, that their desire was to roll back any programs which assisted the poor, helped educate the masses, gave women and minorities equal rights and footing, and rollback not just abortion laws but also the legality of contraception. I recall Michael Kinsley with his mouth open wide and thought to myself liberals don’t have aggressiveness or answers for this kind of assault.

Then, at the terminus of the Reagan presidency, I heard a speech by one Craig Fuller and thought to myself that I had never heard language used in this Fashion. It was Prototypical of what we hear today: the garbled lies masquerading as assertions of the right wing, couched in convoluted language.

We need to step it up. We need to learn how to fight dirty, to knock the underpinnings out from under them. We cannot win this fight by being nice guys, reasonable, thoughtful, reflective, philosophical, taking the long view, or any measure which is not nuclear in nature. We have allowed this to happen by saying that we are Above the fray, that the voter will know what’s right and wrong. Let me tell you, despite the fact that people knew that cigarette smoking was bad for your health since the early 20th century, (and that is a fact), cigarette commercials promoted not only The allure of smoking but that it was actually healthy for you. Despite “everybody“knowing the opposite, when I was growing up virtually everyone smoked. Perhaps Tommy Lee Jones this character in mthe film Men in Black said it best: individuals may be smart but people are stupid.

What we need to do is to get down on every level: whether it be boycotts, paid commercials which denigrate to an extreme degree the other side, demonstrations both peaceful and if provoked, violent. How many movies have you seen where the protagonist starts out as passive, and becomes aggressively insane and wins the day against the evil doers? It’s a common theme in Hollywood and it should be in our party. If you think they’re all done when they finish with abortion, you have another thing coming.

You know, these people are not particularly creative. What they do is go to established literature or historical Chronicles and draw up plans which have worked in the past, or sound great on paper. There is no question in my mind that the Trump administration, via Stephen Miller and others, went to both Mein Kampf and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L Shirer, took notes, and drew up a plan in a few days. And Of course it worked: The Germans were much more sophisticated and educated than Americans and the Nazis convinced the country to declare war against the world and against minorities. We saw it here after 9/11, a time when even bright progressive people became “concerned about the clerk at the 7-Eleven” because he could be a terrorist. We are prejudiced, we are also at times not too bright. It is time to take the sword out of the scabbard and get to work fixing this country. The other side did it and has had remarkable success in very few years, we are fully capable of the same, we just have to get up the guts to do it.

Philly is completely effed up from the storm.

I’ve been here 68 years and with the exception of the ice storm in 1958 or thereabouts, I have never seen anything like this. We have water flowing on our interstates as though it’s a river, and the problem is it’s not even moving that fast it’s just sitting there. I rarely watch TV with my mouth agape but I am today.