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Jilly_in_VA

Jilly_in_VA's Journal
Jilly_in_VA's Journal
December 1, 2022

Florida Gators QB arrested on child pornography charges, suspended by UF

Backup Florida Gators quarterback Jalen Kitna has been arrested on two counts of distribution of child exploitation material and three counts of possession of child pornography, according to a Gainesville Police Department release.

According to the release, Kitna was interviewed by Gainesville Police detectives regarding the sharing of images on his Discord account and told them that he believed the two images to be legal since he found them online.

Kitna said he realized he should not have shared those two images, based on the reaction from the other Discord user that he shared them with. Shortly after sharing the images, Kitna said his Discord account was deactivated and that he assumed someone reported him to Discord.

Kitna stated that he received an email from Discord stating that his account was deactivated due to a violation of the terms of service. That was later confirmed by an email from Discord.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/sec/2022/11/30/jalen-kitna-florida-gators-arrested-child-pornography/10806192002/

Big oopsy! Shouldn't have shared? Shouldn't have HAD!

December 1, 2022

Why the government lets nursing facilities get away with poor staffing

Regulators have allowed thousands of nursing homes across America to flout federal staffing rules by going an entire day and night without a registered nurse on duty, a USA TODAY investigation has found.

Nearly all of them got away with it: Only 4% were cited by government inspectors. Even fewer were fined.

When other nursing home caregivers are added into the equation, one-third of U.S. facilities fell short of multiple benchmarks the federal government has created for nurse and aide staffing.

Low-income residents, disproportionately people of color, fare the worst. Their nursing homes report the lowest staffing levels, but data show they seldom get in trouble because of it.

A USA TODAY investigation has documented, for the first time, how rarely the federal government enforces decades-old staffing guidelines and rules for nursing homes.

Citations and penalties remained sparse even as regulators developed three ways to measure staffing. In the spring, they will propose a fourth approach.

https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2022/12/01/skilled-nursing-facilities-staffing-problems-biden-reforms/8318780001/

This might be the most depressing article I've read all week. A society is judged by how it treats its most vulnerable.

December 1, 2022

Why the government lets nursing facilities get away with poor staffing

Regulators have allowed thousands of nursing homes across America to flout federal staffing rules by going an entire day and night without a registered nurse on duty, a USA TODAY investigation has found.

Nearly all of them got away with it: Only 4% were cited by government inspectors. Even fewer were fined.

When other nursing home caregivers are added into the equation, one-third of U.S. facilities fell short of multiple benchmarks the federal government has created for nurse and aide staffing.

Low-income residents, disproportionately people of color, fare the worst. Their nursing homes report the lowest staffing levels, but data show they seldom get in trouble because of it.

A USA TODAY investigation has documented, for the first time, how rarely the federal government enforces decades-old staffing guidelines and rules for nursing homes.

Citations and penalties remained sparse even as regulators developed three ways to measure staffing. In the spring, they will propose a fourth approach.

https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2022/12/01/skilled-nursing-facilities-staffing-problems-biden-reforms/8318780001/

This might be the most depressing article I've read all week. A society is judged by how it treats its most vulnerable.

November 30, 2022

Mom of Club Q Massacre Suspect Now Facing Charges Too

The mother of the suspect accused of fatally gunning down five people and wounding 18 at a Colorado Springs gay bar was herself arrested in the hours after the deadly shooting, according to a summons obtained by The Daily Beast.

Laura Lea Voepel, 45, is facing two misdemeanor counts of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest over a meltdown she allegedly had when police showed up at her home around 3:30 a.m. on Nov. 20. Roughly three-and-a-half hours earlier, authorities say 22-year-old Anderson Lee Aldrich opened fire on patrons and staff at Club Q, a local LGBTQ nightspot.

Aldrich, whose lawyers say he identifies as non-binary but whose mother used male pronouns in text messages to him on the day of the shooting, was born Nicholas Franklin Brink in 2000 to Voepel and MMA-fighter-turned-porn-actor Aaron Franklin Brink. The 6-foot-4, 260-pound Aldrich, who is listed as male in jail booking records, changed their name in 2016 to escape their father’s criminal past, court filings show.

After the Club Q massacre, officers with the Colorado Springs Police Department showed up at Voepel’s North Union Boulevard apartment building, the summons states, noting that cops warned Voepel “multiple times to stop yelling” or she would be arrested.

“Subject continued to make unreasonable noise directly next to multiple apartments,” the summons, which was first reported by Denver Fox affiliate KDVR and Denver NBC affiliate KUSA, continues. “While I attempted to place subject into custody, she became combative by physically resisting officers’ control by force.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/laura-voepel-mom-of-colorado-springs-suspect-anderson-lee-aldrich-facing-charges-after-club-q-shooting

Looks to me like the shooter was born with about 4 strikes against him. Lousy genes all around.

November 30, 2022

QAnon influencer's 'groomer' past shaken loose by ill-conceived defamation suit against newspaper

Court records reveal a QAnon influencer has a criminal past involving a sexual relationship with a minor.

Conspiracy theorist Phil Godlewski filed a defamation suit against the Scranton Times-Tribune that inadvertently outed him as the sort of "groomer" that fellow QAnon adherents are purportedly worried about, and the newspaper has filed a new motion that claims he perjured himself and broke other courtroom rules, reported The Daily Beast.

The Pennsylvania-based Godlewski has more than 600,000 followers on the right-wing social media app Telegram and another 156,000 subscribers on the alternative video platform Rumble, and he bought a $1.7 million house earlier this year with money he made directing his fans to sign up for multilevel marketing schemes and other financial arrangements.

But the conspiracy theorist pleaded guilty more than a decade ago to corruption of a minor and sentenced to three months under house arrest after he was indicted on a variety of charges related to an alleged sexual relationship with a girl he met when she was a 15-year-old high school freshman and he was a 25-year-old high school baseball coach.

https://www.rawstory.com/phil-godlewski-pennsylvania/

Be sure your sins will find you out. That's what my grandfather used to say.

November 30, 2022

This Couple Died by Suicide After the DEA Shut Down Their Pain Doctor

It was a Tuesday in early November when federal agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration paid a visit to the office of Dr. David Bockoff, a chronic pain specialist in Beverly Hills. It wasn’t a Hollywood-style raid—there were no shots fired or flash-bang grenades deployed—but the agents left behind a slip of paper that, according to those close to the doctor’s patients, had consequences just as deadly as any shootout.

On Nov. 1, the DEA suspended Bockoff’s ability to prescribe controlled substances, including powerful opioids such as fentanyl. While illicit fentanyl smuggled across the border by Mexican cartels has fueled a record surge in overdoses in recent years, doctors still use the pharmaceutical version during surgeries and for soothing the most severe types of pain. But amid efforts to shut down so-called “pill mills” and other illegal operations, advocates for pain patients say the DEA has gone too far, overcorrecting to the point that people with legitimate needs are blocked from obtaining the medication they need to live without suffering.

One of Bockoff’s patients who relied on fentanyl was Danny Elliott, a 61-year-old native of Warner Robins, Georgia. In March 1991, Elliott was nearly electrocuted to death when a water pump he was using to drain a flooded basement malfunctioned, sending high-voltage shocks through his body for nearly 15 minutes until his father intervened to save his life. Elliott was never the same after the accident, which left him with debilitating, migraine-like headaches. Once a class president and basketball star in high school, he found himself spending days on end in a darkened bedroom, unable to bear sunlight or the sound of the outdoors.

“I have these sensations like my brain is loose inside my skull,” Elliott told me in 2019, when I first interviewed him for the VICE News podcast series Painkiller. “If I turn my head too quickly, left or right, it feels like my brain sloshes around. Literally my eyes burn deep into my skull. My eyes hurt so bad that it hurts to blink.”

After years of trying alternative pain treatments such as acupuncture, along with other types of opioids, around 2002 Elliott found a doctor who prescribed fentanyl, which gave him some relief. But keeping a doctor proved nearly impossible amid the ongoing federal crackdown on opioids. Bockoff, Elliott said, was his third doctor to be shut down by the DEA since 2018. As Elliott described it, each transition meant weeks or months of desperate scrambling to find a replacement, plus excruciating withdrawals due to his physical dependence on opioids, followed by the return of that burning eyeball pit of despair.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxnyb9/dea-fentanyl-doctor-patient-suicide

I have worked with chronic pain patients and I believe the DEA is overreaching. There's a difference between them and the doctor-shopping addicts. I know, my ex DIL was one of the latter.

November 30, 2022

Man dies after catching on fire at Tennessee hospital

A Middle Tennessee woman became a widow on Thanksgiving after she says her husband caught fire while being treated at TriStar Centennial Medical Center.

Kathy Stark has been by her husband’s side for the past 35 years, through sickness and in health. She said Bobby Ray was bedridden for the last seven years, and earlier this month, went to the hospital for bed sores and a foot infection.

Eventually, he was transferred to TriStar Centennial, where Kathy said he coded and staff tried to revive him.

“Then they started the paddles, and it just blew up, everything,” Kathy said. “I saw that and I just burst out.”

Kathy said she saw flames cover her husband’s body.

https://www.wate.com/news/man-dies-after-catching-on-fire-at-nashville-hospital/

Weird, but also a horror story.

November 29, 2022

Florida's Child Welfare System Is Found to Be Complicit in Sex Trafficking

As the recently reelected Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) continues to demonize drag queens, trans kids, and queer people in general as threats to Florida’s children, a sex trafficking crisis amongst teens in the state is metastasizing under his care.

According to a stunning new report published in the South Florida Sun Sentinel Monday, Florida’s foster care system has for years proven to be a breeding ground for sex trafficking victims, placing vulnerable kids and teens directly in the path of drug use, sexual and physical violence and, often, death. More damning, though, is the revelation that Florida’s elected officials have long been well aware of the crisis and have taken little to no action to save the state’s most at-risk girls.

The Sentinel’s analysis of data from Florida’s Department of Children and Families (DCF) showed that when a girl enters the state’s welfare system, her chances of being sex trafficked increase. Already a “top venue” for trafficking due to high volume of tourists and hotels, Florida has seen alarming increases in reports of child sex trafficking to the Florida Abuse Hotline, with 3,182 reports last year alone. Despite the increased risk, as of last month, the Sentinel reports there are just 18 family foster homes approved to care for trafficking victims in the entire state, and documents reviewed by the Sentinel show the state has for years known that sex traffickers specifically target underaged girls within its care.

Jayden Alexis Frisbee, the Sentinel reported, is one of the girls lost to Florida’s welfare system. She died last year at the age of 16 after she was shuffled between 16 different group foster homes within the span of a year and a half, only to repeatedly run away and fall prey to sex traffickers in the area. After she was beaten, abused, and drugged, she died in a Jacksonville Studio 6 motel bathroom. She had become the state’s responsibility but, following her death, officials took over a month to identify her body.

The insufficient care and concern well documented across the DCF is in part due to the Florida legislature’s 1998 decision to privatize the foster care system. Each county works with a private contractor who then hires subcontractors to run group homes. This vote, the Sentinel explains, took place after years of negative headlines detailing “neglected, abused or missing children” within the foster care system caused outrage amongst the public. The transfer of power to private organizations, then, was a means of “deflect[ing] blame away from the state.”

https://jezebel.com/floridas-child-welfare-system-is-found-to-be-complicit-1849827559

And this surprises anyone exactly how? Look at some of their elected officials...Matty Gaetz, for example

November 29, 2022

Uvalde mom files a federal lawsuit against police, gunmaker in school massacre

The last conversation Sandra Torres had with her 10-year-old daughter was about her nervous excitement over whether she’d make the all-star softball team. Hours later, Eliahna Torres was one of 19 children and two teachers massacred at their elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

With little closure and few answers about law enforcement’s 77-minute wait on May 24 in the school hallway rather than confronting the gunman, Sandra Torres filed a federal lawsuit on Monday against police, the school district and the maker of the gun the shooter used.

“My baby never made it out of the school,” she said. “There’s no accountability or transparency. There’s nothing being done.”

The lawsuit accuses the city, the school district and several police departments of a “complete failure” to follow active shooter protocols and violations of the victims’ constitutional rights by “barricading them” inside two classrooms with the killer for more than an hour. The city said it doesn’t comment on pending litigation and the school district and police did not immediately return messages.

Torres is being helped by the legal arm of the group Everytown for Gun Safety. Her suit also names the manufacturer of the AR-style semiautomatic rifle that Salvador Ramos used to fire more than 100 rounds in the horrific mass shooting.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/texas-mom-sues-police-gunmaker-uvalde-school-shooting-rcna59139

November 27, 2022

Frontier Airlines drops its customer service line

Frontier airlines will no longer let customers call a phone number in order to speak with a live agent. And while the budget airline is known for its cost-cutting measures, most major airlines still operate customer service lines.

Customers will instead have to rely on other ways to contact the airline: a chatbot on its website, a live chat available 24/7, its social media channels and even WhatsApp, according to Frontier spokesperson, Jennifer De La Cruz, who confirmed the news to NPR on Saturday.

The change, said De La Cruz, "enables us to ensure our customers get the information they need as expeditiously and efficiently as possible." She said the airline found that most customers preferred communicating through online channels.

When customers call the airline's now-defunct customer service line, they hear a prerecorded message telling travelers about the other options they have for contacting the airline.

"At Frontier, we offer the lowest fares in the industry by operating our airline as efficiently as possible," the airline's customer service line now replies.

https://www.npr.org/2022/11/26/1139291958/frontier-airlines-drops-its-customer-service-line

Here is your clear "shithouse of the skies" winner for the week!

Profile Information

Gender: Do not display
Current location: Virginia
Member since: Wed Jun 1, 2011, 07:34 PM
Number of posts: 9,965

About Jilly_in_VA

Navy brat-->University fac brat. All over-->Wisconsin-->TN-->VA. RN (ret), married, grandmother of 11. Progressive since birth. My mouth may be foul but my heart is wide open.
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