Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

“More of this”, i said to the dog.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Bark louder, little dog.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.

No one could have predicted…

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / Repub Failson Nepotism Open Thread: Jared Is ON It

Repub Failson Nepotism Open Thread: Jared Is ON It

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President Trump has made his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, the de facto project manager for constructing his border wall, frustrated with a lack of progress over one of his top priorities as he heads into a tough reelection campaign, according to current and former administration officials.

Kushner convenes biweekly meetings in the West Wing, where he questions an array of government officials about progress on the wall, including updates on contractor data, precisely where it will be built and how funding is being spent. He also shares and explains the president’s wishes with the group, according to the officials familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House deliberations.

The president’s son-in-law and senior adviser is pressing U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to expedite the process of taking over private land needed for the project as the government seeks to meet Trump’s goal of erecting 450 miles of barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border by the end of 2020. More than 800 filings to seize private property will need to be made in the coming months if the government is going to succeed, officials aid.

Kushner has told other West Wing officials that he is in charge of the wall, according to aides, and that it is paramount to Trump that at least 400 miles be built by Election Day…

… Kushner has clashed with the career officials who have questioned some of his ideas, such as installing web cameras to live-stream construction. He has blamed former chief of staff John F. Kelly and former homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen for not focusing enough on the wall, senior administration officials said. For their part, former officials have said Kushner displays a lack of knowledge of the policy issues and politics involved in the immigration debate.

The wall adds to Kushner’s growing portfolio of responsibilities, which some of his critics have said border on comical. Since the start of the Trump presidency, Kushner has been entrusted with striking a Middle East peace deal, taking a lead role on trade policy, overseeing criminal justice reform and modernizing the government, with mixed results. Kushner is also seeking to again push an overhaul of the legal immigration system after his first attempt failed to gain much support in Congress, and he has taken on a leadership role in the 2020 presidential campaign…

One person involved in the construction of the wall, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly, said Kushner has annoyed officials involved in the process because they said he displayed a lack of knowledge about the government procurement process and the “realities” of the project.

“So he took a much more hands-on role in figuring out, mile by mile, how to get more wall up,” this person said. “It didn’t help put wall up faster and cheaper. His interventions actually just created more inefficiency in the process.”…

After Kushner took control of the project, he elevated the regular meetings to executive-level gatherings at the White House requiring the attendance of Cabinet-level officials. He also demanded a new project plan with timetables and construction targets. Kushner has talked with other officials about securing money for the wall — even mentioning using military construction funds again, a notion that is likely to attract resistance from Capitol Hill…

In early January, Kushner asked then-acting CBP commissioner Kevin McAleenan whether closing border loopholes or building the wall would do the most to curb illegal immigration, and McAleenan said closing loopholes would do far more to curb immigration.

Still, Kushner has told others that a wall has to be built because his father-in-law promised it would be…

(Also, “closing border loopholes” is the provenance of Stephen Miller, the son Trump always wanted, and Jared’s too cautious to interfere in *that* relationship.)

Many of us have had the misfortune to be stuck, at some point in our careers, working for a guy like Jared: an ignorant, insufferable, and unfire-able blowhard who thinks his MBA-speak about ‘deliverables’ and ‘six-sigma concepts’ disguises his many inadequacies. He wants to be at the forefront of every new project, especially the big shiny expensive ones, which he inevitably complicates into failure by demanding employees take time away from their actual jobs to fill out forms quantifying copier-paper usage and attend motivational meetings.

Elizabeth Spiers used to be Editor-in-Chief at the NY Observer, before Kushner ran it into the ground:

On my first day of work as the editor in chief of the New York Observer, which had been acquired five years earlier by Jared Kushner, now the son-in-law and senior adviser to President Trump, I inherited an office and a desktop computer, both in fine but used condition. The computer was a recent-model Mac, but when I turned it on, it was inexplicably running Windows. I summoned our beleaguered IT guy to explain, and he informed me that it had belonged to Kushner, who liked the design of Apple products but preferred the Windows OS.

“So he was basically using a $2,500 desktop as a monitor?” I asked. The IT guy shrugged…

Reader Interactions

94Comments

  5. 5.

    Jager

    I did a radio station purchase in the 90s with dip shots like Jared the meetings were interminable, the bullshit was intolerable. I made them 5.5 million in 13 months. It took forever to get my 12%. To quote another old radio guy,  “fuck em”

  6. 6.

    Keith P

    It’ll be really funny+sad if Jared tries to run the border wall project via the Agile process.  We’re going to have hours upon hours of morning anchors trying to explain what it is by asking some “expert” stupid questions, and we’ll get the usually gang of Congressional suspects name-dropping terms like “scrum” and “iterative construction”.

  11. 11.

    moops

    @trollhattan:  no, we will be paying for the not-wall.  We will also be paying for whatever it is that Miller wants to do as well.   We will all pay good money to support their racism.

  13. 13.

    lollipopguild

    Jared did such a good job on peace in the Middle East I am sure he will do a bang up job on THE WALL to end all walls. Jared did announce his peace plan, right? I am so busy with infrastructure WEEK and impeachment WEEK and throw people under the bus WEEK that I cannot remember Jared’s plan for  making sure trump gets a piece of the Middle East.

  15. 15.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    I have a confession to make. The Cybertruck everyone’s making fun of? I actually kind of think it looks cool. I liked the aesthetics of the cars from movies like Total Recall and Blade Runner

  16. 16.

    The Dangerman

    Sounds like Trump underbussed Rudy today; Bloomberg (interestingly enough) has the story.

    Jared’s turn will come. Everyone gets rolled over except Ivanka in the end.

  17. 17.

    Keith P

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I don’t have any problem with how it looks.  The thing is made out of cold-rolled steel plates – tough as hell and should be easier for them to manufacturer since they’re not having to run through press molds….they can just let robots pick+place+weld the whole body.

  19. 19.

    The Dangerman

    @Keith P:

     

    The thing is made out of cold-rolled steel plates – tough as hell…

    Isn’t that part of the problem? Car bodies are meant to yield in a crash to dissipate energy. I saw one last night;  the car was beat to shit (clear total), but the driver (I think) was out talking to the CHP.

  20. 20.

    Keith P

    @The Dangerman: They can transmit the energy on other ways, like weakened welds in strategic spots (similar to a crumple zone).  Crash-testing will make sure all of that gets worked out.

  22. 22.

    delk

    When he’s done with the wall maybe he can get the commercial space in Trump Tower Chicago leased. They have been vacant since day one.

  23. 23.

    Matt McIrvin

    @ThresherK: Running Windows on modern Macs is pretty easy, though, if you want to–it’s not so much using it as a monitor, as using it as if it were a less expensive PC.

  25. 25.

    debbie

    I wonder if the Trump-supporting landowners impacted by eminent domain will remain as loyal as the farmers who have basically lost their livelihood? //

  27. 27.

    David ??Booooooo?? Koch

    @debbie:
    You’ve got to
    remember these are just simple farmers.
    These are people of the land.
    The common clay of the new West.
    You know.
    Morons!

  29. 29.

    Aleta

    Those live video cameras and website that the enigmatic young genius wants … have such cost overrun scam potential.

    (from the Post a couple of weeks ago)
    Officials at the Army Corps and CBP also were concerned the cameras would show U.S. work crews violating Mexican sovereignty because they sometimes must stray south of the border to maneuver their vehicles and heavy equipment in the desert. Because some of the remote border areas lack network access, the cameras will require their own web connectivity and attendants who could frequently reposition them to keep the lens pointed at the action.
    …
    It is unclear how much the webcam initiative will cost, nor how the technology will be used.

    .

    As part of Kushner’s communication plan, the White House also plans to work on more aggressively promoting the project with a dedicated border wall website that will feature live feeds from the border and real-time construction data, the official said.

     

    With Trump, Kushner and other senior White House officials asking for progress updates and images of construction crews in action, CBP officials hired a private contractor earlier this year to build a website that would allow users to track the project’s advance.
    …

    The White House officials were unimpressed with the CBP version of the site, and they are planning something more dynamic that will include the camera feeds. In general, Kushner believes the project has suffered from lackluster effort and a lack of urgency, the White House official said, and he does not believe contractors’ claims that their construction methods are proprietary.

    Ory Rinat, the Trump administration’s chief digital officer, is working on Kushner’s border wall site, according to two people familiar with the initiative.

  30. 30.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Another Scott: Over the past few days on Twitter I’ve been seeing an explosion of outright terror over Kamala Harris’s mental-health plan, with people describing it as a recipe for familial abuse. I’m not yet sure exactly what it’s about, though.

  31. 31.

    MisterForkbeard

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Hey, I want one too. It’s like… Elon Musk played a PS1 copy of Destruction Derby or something and really liked how a grand total of 20 polygons makes a car look.

     

    It’s like driving my childhood.

  32. 32.

    JoyceH

    I just love this. In order to try to get Trump the number of miles of wall he wants before the election, they’re going to be attempting 800 seizures of private property. In Texas. I repeat, before the election. Awesome.

  35. 35.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Major Major Major Major:

    Well, like, that’s just your opinion mannnn. But seriously, fair enough.

     

    I can vaguely appreciate the aesthetic but the low polygon count combined with a refusal of all artistry is just ?? You can’t have both.

    However, isn’t what is considered art pretty subjective?

  36. 36.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Keith P:

    I do wonder how the cybertruck will comply with EU car safety standards (since the US has allowed entities like EU to ursup international standards setting) such as crumple zones

  37. 37.

    Jay

    @Keith P:  Goku, et al,

     

    it’s 301 Stainless, so rust anyways, dissimular metals corrosion, spalling and cheap.

     

    Motive geeks are dissing it because as designed and presented, it won’t even come close to passing the extremely lax standards for a big assed pickup truck. The production Tesla won’t look anything like that.

     

    the Truck guys are laughing at it because it looks like RoboCop, the Honda Ridgeline and the Pontiac Aztek had a 3 way with out Protection. It ain’t a truck.

  40. 40.

    Frankensteinbeck

    I remember the article about how he ran his newspaper. I remember “We’ll put it on the cloud” speech. Yes, Jared will turn an already failing attempt at building a wall into an epic clusterfuck. He and Donald are true intellectual equals.

    @Keith P: 

    Crash-testing will make sure all of that gets worked out.

    Yes, but one way it may work that out is by proving that the entire design is a failure. Musk’s history suggests that is likely.

  43. 43.

    Jay

    @Matt McIrvin:

     

    Harris’s proposed Plan, as it sits right now, removes HIPPA protections for medical privacy for a bunch of “ mental health” reasons that will be easilly gamed and abused for the vulnerable. Eg, Trans Kids, LBGTQ youth, atypical, children of Fundies.

     

    POC , women and others already get suboptimal care because #reasons, ( quite often because some people also enter the Medical fields to indulge in their facism), Harris’s Plan as proposed does much of the same but for “mental health” and tosses in lots of institutionalism.

     

    A lot of the people “freaking out” online, are people who as vulnerable youths had to leave families, communities, medical “professionals” behind in order to survive and thrive.

     

    Conversion Therapy anyone.

  44. 44.

    MisterForkbeard

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Yeah. I’m a big fan of the Twisted Metal 2 screenshot too, if you haven’t seen it already :)

     

    @Jay:

    Io9 had the best description of it I’ve seen. “It’s like a Delorean had sex with math.”

    @Jay:

    It’s a problem, but how it’s been treated really does bug me. Instead of people saying this is a hole in her plan she needs to fix (and the rest of her health plan is pretty great!), I’ve seen a lot of wailing about how Kamala doesn’t care about LGBTQ and must think conversion therapy is okay. Which is preposterous. :/

  46. 46.

    Jay

    @Martin:

     

    on the bright side, the 301 stainless panels won’t be cheap to replace because of all the spalling and dissimilar metals corrosion.

  47. 47.

    NotMax

    @MisterForkbeard

    Except for the fact that so few would have any idea what I was talking about, would phrase it as the offspring of a union between a Bricklin and a Studebaker Weasel.

  49. 49.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Major Major Major Major:

    I understand. Coincidentally, a fic I’m plotting is going to feature a villain heavily inspired by Lex Luthor, Elon Musk, and Mark Zukerberg, and Mike Bloomberg. Tech billionaire who thinks he’s humanity’s savior, is a total fascist xenophobe, with a paternalistic elitist streak.

     

    Futher, are you familiar with the planetarium hypothesis or the zoo hypothesis?

     

    I had an idea for this story that the Milky Way galaxy is populated by less than a dozen intelligent advanced species, with a hegemonic power in control of the galaxy, where a sort of prime directive is imposed on all galactic powers. Humanity is intentionally isolated. Think of the space around our solar system as just a projection that makes it appear that the universe is lifeless.

     

    However, one rogue species, for undetermined reasons, decides to invade Earth without the knowledge of the main galactic power and humanity has to bootstrap itself to FTL travel to get aid from the hegemonic power, which is perhaps reluctant to intervene, given their view of humanity’s political, economic, and cultural backwardness

  52. 52.

    Jay

    @MisterForkbeard:

     

    over the past three years,  there has been a huge, massive, indepth and infamous conversation online and in the media about disparities in medical care and medical professionals bia/prejudice/ignorance in regards to women, POC, LGTBQ, neuro atypical, etc.

     

    Harris’s proposed Mental Health Act is written as if that conversation had never happened and nothing had been learned. It also feeds the Kamela is a Cop narrative, ( in a community that was a strong defender of Harris) because it has a bias that the Mental Health Community has been fighting hard against, because it get’s people killed.

  53. 53.

    moops

    @Martin:  301 Stainless has pretty good resistance to road salt corrosion, if it has been alloyed as spec’d.     You still need to clean your car after bad weather.  No stainless can withstand ocean water, but that is not the use case here. Steal in the ocean just need maintenance and painting.

  54. 54.

    Martin

    @MisterForkbeard: Agreed regarding Kamala. I don’t think a lot of people have run into the other side of HIPAA when even a patient who wants to give consent can. HIPAA is not really a patient bill of rights – it’s mostly a care provider bill of rights. It protects their liability, not the needs of the patient. When my daughter was  5150ed we were effectively cut off for 3 days. She wanted more involvement from us, but the hospital wouldn’t honor that.

     

    Kamala gets the LGBTQ rights issue. She was atty general when CA was fighting through that, and she put a lot of time and energy into healthcare as atty general. What people might need to consider is what CA law is, which she backed. Minors have the right to protect their medical records from their parents. They can get an abortion without parental notification. This applies to ALL medical care, from age 12 onward. That includes behavioral health. And that law was enacted specifically to protect LGBTQ kids.

     

    So in CA, you have legal control starting age 12. HIPAA is completely separate from this, and even if your kid wants mom and dad involved, the care provider may override that out of concern for their liability. That’s the gap Harris is trying to address.

  56. 56.

    Martin

    @moops: 304 minimum, 316 better. A little molybdenum goes a long way.

     

    Washing off after every drive? Is this a pickup truck or a supercar? I don’t disagree with what Musk is trying to do here, I just think he’s not doing it great.

  58. 58.

    Jay

    @Martin:

     

    funny, the online LGTBQ and Community Mental Health people have a 180 degree completely different view of Harris’s proposed Mental Health Plan issues.

  60. 60.

    Jay

    @Martin:

    So in CA, you have legal control starting age 12. HIPAA is completely separate from this, and even if your kid wants mom and dad involved, the care provider may override that out of concern for their liability. That’s the gap Harris is trying to address.

    And if the kid does not want’s Mom and Dad involved at all, Kamela’s proposed act allows the “Medical Professional” to ignore HIPPA if they “feel” it is in the patient’s, family or communities best interest. So against a minor’s wishes, parents can be told, against a patient’s wishes, ( with no imminent threat of harm or self harm), police can be told, or whole communities.

  66. 66.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Major Major Major Major:

    Well, they’re only influences on the character. Think atheist right-winger with a god/messiah complex that believes climate change is real, that drastic action is needed to save humanity (and himself), that only he is uniquely suited to doing so and ruling over humankind as an immortal “benevolent” dictator is the solution

  67. 67.

    Jay

    NatObserver is looking for new subscriptions to add to their US Election coverage:

    <blockquote>And if the promise of unparalleled evidence-based reporting isn’t enough, well… I can also promise that we’ll cover white nationalists instead of employing them.

     

    Caroline Orr (@RVAwonk) </blockquote>

     

    One of the few media outlets that can and will make that promise,……

  68. 68.

    Redshift

    I suspect “convening biweekly meetings” is Jared’s only core competence.

     

    The other thing that struck me is the congruence between livestreaming Wall construction and demanding a public announcement of an investigation from Ukraine. In both cases it shows that getting something done isn’t what’s important to them, it’s being seen as getting something done.

  70. 70.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Major Major Major Major:

    Yeah, it’s definitely a villain-type (visionary villains, knight templars, tautological templars [tv tropes])

    I find compelling and interesting. I’ve been cycling through a few plotlines over time and just hadn’t settled on what I wanted to use the character in. I believe I’ve found one.

     

    It’s sorta funny how ideas come to me, like the one about humanity creating a FTL ship out of desperation to save Earth. It’s like a eureka moment and they come together to form a larger whole

  71. 71.

    Citizen Alan

    @Matt McIrvin:

    As I understand it, people want laws that will allow make it easier to lock up potential stalkers and spree killers for mental health reasons but also want those laws designed so that homophobic and transphobic parents can’t use the same laws to send their kids to gay therapy. I don’t know how to thread that needle either.

  72. 72.

    James E Powell

    Open question for an open thread. Asked sincerely and without any intent to be mean.

    Lately I’m getting frequent emails from the Great Orange Satan begging for money. Times are hard, money’s too tight to mention, if we can’t get donations we can’t go on, etc., etc.

    Is the GOS something we need to be saving? Does it serve a useful function? Would it matter if it were gone?

  75. 75.

    mrmoshpotato

    @James E Powell: Is this Great Orange Satan being blamed for great rock and roll?

     

    Or just responsible for horrible things like massive tax cuts for the rich which they don’t need, kidnapping brown children from their desperate parents, emboldening white supremacist Nazi trash, etc?

  76. 76.

    Jay

    A fan of Charles Manson and follower of Hitler, James Mason published essays in the 1980s that now act as the inspiration for a militant neo-Nazi group linked to multiple murders in the U.S.

    “Revolutionary discipline must mean that WE will be the single survivor in a war against the System,” Mason wrote in 1985. “A TOTAL WAR against the System.”

    But nowadays, Mason isn’t waging war with the system. He is, in fact, dependent on it.

    The 67-year-old white supremacist lives in a government subsidized apartment in Denver and eats at soup kitchens.

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1091681?__twitter_impression=true

  77. 77.

    Jay

    @Citizen Alan:

     

    it’s actually not a difficult needle to thread.

     

    far more people with mental health issues are destroyed by “the system”, than harm others. ( eg. shot by LEO vs. Shooting others)

     

    ditto for “at risk”,

     

    parts of Harris’s plan are great, amazing actually, funding, beds, more professionals, community services, decriminalization, prison supports, etc.

    parts are bad, really really bad.

  80. 80.

    Amir Khalid

    Your bad guy is going to incorporate parts of someone else’s fictional villain, and of what you think you know about three specific real-life guys. Those parts will likely turn out not to fit together as well as you hoped. Instead, make this guy his own person. He’ll make more sense that way, and be more memorable.
    Think about what drives him. What made him who he is. How and why he formed his bad guy plan. What equips him to carry it out. Whether he really is doing it To Save Mankind, or just rationalising some other motive, not necessarily simple greed. What internal and external resources he has, how he came by them. His quirks. What concepts he can’t see or understand. (Voldemort was ultimately defeated by love, which he had never experienced in his life and never grokked.)
    You have to do this with all significant characters in your story, so that they will be believable as people rather than walking bags of clichés. Especially so with the designated villain, if you want him to carry much of the story. You could, of course, just have him make a cameo here and there doing his Ebil Fings. That wouldn’t let you off having to make him believable, but mystery can make a character loom ominously in the reader’s imagination.

  81. 81.

    piratedan

    the part that is the toughest to reconcile is how the personal data is used, period.  Depending upon the provider and the bad faith exhibited by said provider, HIPAA can be used to protect or harm, strangely enough, just like damn near everything else.  What you do see with a fair number of medical institutions is that many of them do try to protect your data and not share it, the hard part is just like anyone else, the people who work for them.  Depending upon how well they’re locked down in their internal networks and how well they train their people, leads to how safe your data is with them.  There are bad actors are ALWAYS trying to penetrate those networks because of the type of data that can be pulled (all that juicy insurance info and financial data) and most people don’t lie about their medical issues, so the opportunities for someone to potentially leverage that information is high.  Some providers/hospitals/physician groups are patient advocates to a certain degree, others see you as a consumer of services.

     

    I think the actual laws in regards to the handling of that data are fairly well crafted, like most problems, it comes in how those who deal in bad faith or when applying their own biases and prejudices is where the walls break down, but I think that is true just about with every damn thing.  Very few institutions honor the spirit of the law and instead turn the minutiae into being weaponized.

  83. 83.

    Mel

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):I think Major is right: the early skeleton  of the story  has lots of potential, and an intriguing premise.

     

    A couple of questions that might be helpful as you develop and flesh out the story and people it with specific characters:

     

    1. Why is earth the planet chosen for the invasion? It would seem that the invading force is somewhat more advanced, so what is it about earth that makes it worth the costs of warfare and the potential risks of being caught violating an interplanetary agreement? The quick and easy answer is usually either a resource that the invaders lack, or a need to find a new home b/c of environmental destruction on the invaders’ home world. That can still produce some entertaining, engaging stories, but it’ can be difficult to avoid falling into plot developments that readers feel like they’ve seen too many times.  If you create a truly unique, unexpected but believable motivation/ reason for the invasion, it would make for a more powerful piece .

     

    2. On earth, who will be the person or organization that spearheads the FTL project? Is it government, grassroots, an unexpected source? (Personal plea: please please please no down at the heels, abrasive but tenacious, brilliant-but-misinderstood types. I’ve often thought it would be interesting to have a thoroughly unexpected, non- physics person (a librarian? an auto mechanic? a special education teacher? a hairstylist?) somehow happen upon an answer, and desperately struggle to try to get their idea heard by “experts”. (Toss in your own take on this angle someday in  one of your pieces of short fiction, publish that story, and I will send you a care package of the best chocolate chip cookies in the world!!) I’m just so burnt out on heroes of the Zeframe Cochrane / Han Solo mold!

     

    Just some thoughts to take or leave.

    Keep us posted as the story unfolds!

  84. 84.

    Mel

    @Amir Khalid:

     

    Yes!!!!  Did you teach writing or journalism, or work in journalism or publishing?

    How ‘s your guitar journey? I’ve decided to jump back in to the musical river and am hunting for a (frustratingly elusive) Silver Princess banjo.

  85. 85.

    Amir Khalid

    @Mel:

    Well, I used to be a journo. I’m flattered that you think I once taught writing, like at a college or something.

    Have you heard? I’m getting another Tele, a Squier Standard. The Girl I will keep in Keef tuning, 5-string open G; the Standard will be in standard tuning, naturally. My announcement here on Saturday got me the usual good-natured ribbing about GAS from the jackaltariat.

  89. 89.

    J R in WV

    @Matt McIrvin:

     

    Over the past few days on Twitter I’ve been seeing an explosion of outright terror over Kamala Harris’s mental-health plan, with people describing it as a recipe for familial abuse. I’m not yet sure exactly what it’s about, though.

     

    Here’s a link to the plan  on her web site.

     

    Here’s what may be the relevant scary part:

     

    That’s why Kamala will work with Congress to:

    • Codify that HIPAA permits health providers to receive information from family members.
    • Protect health providers who disclose protected health information if they make such a disclosures out of a good faith belief that it was necessary to enhance the health, safety, or welfare of the person involved or the general public. Family and friends supporting persons with mental illness often bring home their loved ones with no knowledge of the diagnosis, treatment plan, medication, signs of deterioration, or even suicidal or homicidal ideations. Nondisclosure can therefore put persons with mental illness and the family and friends who support them at risk and hamper recovery support.
    • Permit disclosure of “financial” and “treatment and care” health information to family members that provide housing, case management, and transportation support to loved ones with mental illnesses.

    I can see where disclosing information about mental illness to members of a family who are seeking, for example, to prevent a child from transition or denying gender confusion, or family members who have been gas-lighting an emotionally vulnerable relative causing great distress would be a terrible plan. But… How are parents making a great effort to help a loved one copy with difficult issues supposed to support them without any information? How can they help a patient with following their medication schedule properly?

     

    I take 8 medications at bedtime, and I’m not a mental health patient. Spouse is, and takes a dozen in the evening and 6 or 8 in the morning. We both have traditional elder physical problems like blood pressure, cholesterol levels, oseoarthritis, etc.

     

    On the other hand, I’ve been married for nearly 50 years to a person with occasional mental health issues, and not knowing the diagnosis, the treatment plan, etc would be a distinct disadvantage to my being able to support them. They share as much as they can, I know the diagnosis and the medications, and I can see what’s going on. But if they were reclusive and secretive things would be more difficult. I imagine she has listed me as a person with whom her medical information may be shared on the paperwork, but that’s a guess.

     

    So there are, as so often, two sides to those complex issues…

     

    edit test

  90. 90.

    J R in WV

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

     

    @Major Major Major Major:

    could be interesting, villain sounds a bit scenery-chewing for my tastes.

    I get what you’re getting at. But I do want to definitely be balanced and not be over-the-top

     

    Once upon a time we could have rejected a villain as “scenery chewing” or “over the top” — back before real life introduced us to leadership like Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, Donald J Trump, Mao, Stalin, Hitler, just to list a very few modern examples.

  92. 92.

    J R in WV

    @Mel:

     

    I’ve decided to jump back in to the musical river and am hunting for a (frustratingly elusive) Silver Princess banjo.

    I have a friend who is a blue-ribbon winner in old time banjo music, who buys and sells and rebuilds string instruments including violins, guitars, mandolins and banjos. His name is Paul Gartner and he has a Facebook page, which I know nothing about.

     

    He may be able to offer advice, locate, or otherwise at least talk coherently about the elusive banjo. He doesn’t play mandolin but is pretty good with fiddle, banjo and guitar. He loves bringing an old damaged instrument back to life, but also will trade undamaged goods. If you’re willing to search and use Facebook…

  94. 94.

    low-tech cyclist

    A couple days late, but:

    Kushner has told other West Wing officials that he is in charge of the wall, according to aides, and that it is paramount to Trump that at least 400 miles be built by Election Day…

    “If I can get some work out of that boy of yours, I can have the bunker finished by Election Day.”

    – from Firesign Theatre’s Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers

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