There is war in the streets of America tonight

[Bicycle Bill]

Darren and "Doc" at home .....



-"BB"-

[Darren]

Duplicate

[Econoline]

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!!!!1!!111!!!!

I'll save Darren and everyone else here lots of time: here's a summary of all his past and future posts, in one chart.

Everything is connected.

[Darren]

[Darren]

"New York City’s plague of gun crime continued this weekend — with 15 people shot in the same number of hours since midday Saturday, police sources told The Post.

The shootings — including a 21-year-old man left fighting for his life after being shot in the head while sitting in a car in Sheepshead Bay early Sunday — were more in one day than the whole of the same week last year, sources said.

They capped 43 shootings so far this week — more than triple last year’s tally of 13 for the same period, sources said."

[RayThom]

Darren... Word association:

Thorazine

Trilafon

Stelazine

Prolixin

Navane

Moban

Mellaril

Loxitane

Haldol

[dales]

Delysid

[Darren]

[Darren]

"The row of 30-some tents stretching down San Vicente Boulevard in front of the West L.A. Veterans Administration campus just off the 405 Freeway doesn’t resemble many other Los Angeles encampments. The tents are huge and the space around them is kept pristine by their occupants. Then, there are the American flags adorning all the tents.

This is Veterans Row, and its residents are angry.
...
The 388-acre parcel of land, located between the affluent communities of Brentwood and Westwood, has long been a locus of controversy. The expansive campus came into public possession after California landowner and socialite Arcadia Bandini de Stearns Baker deeded it to the federal government as a home for disabled soldiers in 1887.

“This was a fully functional city within the county of Los Angeles,” Carolina Winston Barrie, the great-great-niece of de Baker, said in a 2012 interview with NPR. “It had everything—a post office, the trolley station.” She noted that there were “150 acres under cultivation. Orange trees all over the place. You can’t see an orange tree anymore.”

Over the decades, the site fell into neglect while VA officials opened up the land to commercial and non-profit use. In 2013, a federal judge ruled that the VA had misused the area by allowing non-veteran related tenants on the land, including the laundry facility for Marriott Hotels, production set storage for 20th Century Fox, and a local soccer club. Brentwood School, a $40,000-a-year K-12 private school, was faulted for running a 20-acre athletic complex on the property.

These problems persisted years later. A 2018 federal audit found that more than 60 percent of the campus’s land-use agreements were illegal or improper, citing a dog park, Red Cross offices, a Shakespeare festival, and a parrot sanctuary. That same year, an operator of a parking lot located on the property pleaded guilty to bribing a VA official with nearly $300,000 as he pocketed $11 million in unreported revenues."



https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/vet ... OM01inEBNQ

[RayThom]

"The row of 30-some tents stretching down San Vicente Boulevard in front of the West L.A. Veterans Administration campus just off the 405 Freeway doesn’t resemble many other Los Angeles encampments. The tents are huge and the space around them is kept pristine by their occupants. Then, there are the American flags adorning all the tents.This is Veterans Row, and its residents are angry....The 388-acre parcel of land, located between the affluent communities of Brentwood and Westwood, has long been a locus of controversy. The expansive campus came into public possession after California landowner and socialite Arcadia Bandini de Stearns Baker deeded it to the federal government as a home for disabled soldiers in 1887.“This was a fully functional city within the county of Los Angeles,” Carolina Winston Barrie, the great-great-niece of de Baker, said in a 2012 interview with NPR. “It had everything—a post office, the trolley station.” She noted that there were “150 acres under cultivation. Orange trees all over the place. You can’t see an orange tree anymore.”Over the decades, the site fell into neglect while VA officials opened up the land to commercial and non-profit use. In 2013, a federal judge ruled that the VA had misused the area by allowing non-veteran related tenants on the land, including the laundry facility for Marriott Hotels, production set storage for 20th Century Fox, and a local soccer club. Brentwood School, a $40,000-a-year K-12 private school, was faulted for running a 20-acre athletic complex on the property.These problems persisted years later. A 2018 federal audit found that more than 60 percent of the campus’s land-use agreements were illegal or improper, citing a dog park, Red Cross offices, a Shakespeare festival, and a parrot sanctuary. That same year, an operator of a parking lot located on the property pleaded guilty to bribing a VA official with nearly $300,000 as he pocketed $11 million in unreported revenues." https://cdn2.lamag.com/wp-content/uploa ... 00x667.jpg
https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/vet ... OM01inEBNQ

And...?

[Crackpot]

Apparently there a war going on there

[Econoline]

And...?

Isn't it obvious?

[ex-khobar Andy]

George Soros still hasn't paid me for those 'Women's March' excursions I went on. I told him I take PayPal.

[Darren]

And...?

Ray, if you'd like to see single payer healthcare, the Veteran's Administration hospitals are the canary in the coal mine. The article is a very small indicator of how screwed up the VA is with corruption and incompetence combined.

Fortunately the Trump administration recognizes and continues to work on the issues. Like any federal behemoth it won't change overnight. Doc and I've seen changes especially with the Community Access program that hold promise for the future.

Doc was recently confronted by a doctor that flat out refused to believe something that I witnessed. Another aspect that arose placed him at loggerheads with another specialist who did acknowledge the problem.

The VA has a computer system that vets access to communicate with providers. The doctor never responded to emails about the issue. Now we have to "work" with the VA administration to get another specialist which, based on other local resources, may be difficult.

I suspect if you'd been a vet, you'd have been killed off way before now.

This is positive,

"WASHINGTON -- Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie said the agency's telehealth services at Walmarts will expand in parts of the country with limited access to the agency's hospitals, calling the move the "wave of the future."

Wilkie said the agency's plan to have a larger footprint in areas where it is more difficult to get to a hospital will kick off after the coronavirus pandemic starts to wind down. Since VA and Walmart announced their private-public partnership last year, five telehealth centers have been opened in stores in mostly rural parts of the country and at Veterans of Foreign Wars sites."

[RayThom]

And...?

Ray, if you'd like to see single payer healthcare, the Veteran's Administration hospitals are the canary in the coal mine. The article is a very small indicator of how screwed up the VA is with corruption and incompetence combined...

No, Darren, I'd settle for your stopping the "cut and paste" performance you use for each and ever one of your thread posts. If you and "Doc" have something to say -- say it.

I could do the same thing but I'm not starved for attention as your apparently are.

Help is available, but you have to recognize you need it first.

[Darren]

"Reta Mays faces seven counts of second-degree murder and one count of assault with intent to commit murder in connection with the deaths of veterans at the Louis A. Johnson Veterans Medical Center in Clarksburg.

The victims include Robert Edge Sr., Robert Kozul, Archie Edgell, George Shaw, W.A.H, Felix McDermott and Raymond Golden, according to the court document.

Mays, first hired in 2015, is accused of "willfully," "deliberately" and "maliciously" administering insulin to patients who were not prescribed the drug. Medical experts say when a non-diabetic patients are injected with insulin, it causes an individual's blood sugar to plummet to dangerously low levels, which could be fatal.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/fired ... Ak?ocid=sf

[ex-khobar Andy]

As usual it's difficult to discern your point, Darren.

[Darren]

A small nuke detonated at the New York Times. What insight can we gain about their views of America if they actively censor opposing viewpoints?

I recognized the Times for what it was at least thirty years ago after seeing a prominent front page above the fold, error of fact. Was it shoddy fact checking? I don't think fact checking was relevant in its effort to get the message out.

_____________________________________________________________________________

" In her letter to Sulzberger, (Bari) Weiss picks up where she left off in those tweets. Noting that she’d been hired three years ago as a non-leftist opinion-page editor because somebody at the Times realized that the paper’s “failure to anticipate the outcome of the 2016 election meant that it didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers,” she laments that

the lessons that ought to have followed the election – lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism (prejudice), and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society – have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.

Because she diverged from that orthodoxy, writes Weiss, she was “the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m ‘writing about the Jews again.’ Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers.” All of which goes to show, she argues, that “intellectual curiosity – let alone risk-taking – is now a liability at The Times.”

I used to read the Times every day. Religiously. No more. But I do drop in now and then, if only to see what new craziness is afoot. I don’t stay for long – it’s like visiting Chernobyl. But even on my brief visits I’ve been stunned by the editors’ decision to fill their pages with insipid, overwrought anti-Trump screeds that seem indistinguishable from one another. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s wondered how this happened. Weiss explains:

Why edit something challenging to our readers, or write something bold only to go through the numbing process of making it ideologically kosher, when we can assure ourselves of job security (and clicks) by publishing our 4000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world? And so self-censorship has become the norm."

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/0 ... uce-bawer/

[Big RR]

he lessons that ought to have followed the election – lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism (prejudice), and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society – have not been learned.

she should see th elog in her won eye before she criticizes others. Pot, meet the kettle.

[RayThom]

A small nuke detonated at the New York Times. What insight can we gain about their views of America if they actively censor opposing viewpoints? I recognized the Times for what it was at least thirty years ago after seeing a prominent front page above the fold, error of fact. Was it shoddy fact checking? I don't think fact checking was relevant in its effort to get the message out.

_____________________________________________________________________________

" In her letter to Sulzberger, (Bari) Weiss picks up where she left off in those tweets. Noting that she’d been hired three years ago as a non-leftist opinion-page editor because somebody at the Times realized that the paper’s “failure to anticipate the outcome of the 2016 election meant that it didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers,” she laments thatthe lessons that ought to have followed the election – lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism (prejudice), and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society – have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.Because she diverged from that orthodoxy, writes Weiss, she was “the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m ‘writing about the Jews again.’ Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers.” All of which goes to show, she argues, that “intellectual curiosity – let alone risk-taking – is now a liability at The Times.”I used to read the Times every day. Religiously. No more. But I do drop in now and then, if only to see what new craziness is afoot. I don’t stay for long – it’s like visiting Chernobyl. But even on my brief visits I’ve been stunned by the editors’ decision to fill their pages with insipid, overwrought anti-Trump screeds that seem indistinguishable from one another. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s wondered how this happened. Weiss explains:Why edit something challenging to our readers, or write something bold only to go through the numbing process of making it ideologically kosher, when we can assure ourselves of job security (and clicks) by publishing our 4000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world? And so self-censorship has become the norm."https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/0 ... uce-bawer/

Darren, you of all people should know their policy... "All the News That's Fit to Print."

What searing flash in your grey matter brought this latest burnt offering to fruition?