"Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain." -- Friedrich Schiller
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Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book." The quote, in case you didn’t know, is not from nattering m...
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Among us elitist, Liberal swingin' dicks who live lives of unspeakable privilege and luxury out here in the Middle of Amer...
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David Bowie was a very smart man. I've never been a very good liar, so I'll have to sort of color inside the lines, I guess.
OK, a couple of things: First, and you know this already, Mr. Obsessed with the trade deficit won't admit to himself that it's not fucking 1950 anymore and we have a service economy, not a goods economy. We can't, won't and shouldn't return to that goods based economy, for a number of reasons, chief among which is the fact that a factory job won't buy you the life it bought those white folks in 1950. But for services, we sort of run a trade surplus, you know, like the moron says endlessly he wants us to have. One of those services where we tend to eat the lunches of our foreign competitors? FUCKING EDUCATION.
So banning Harvard from enrolling foreign students shoots MAGA in the foot and ricochets right back into their nuts. I almost want to laugh.
And second, about social security fraud, after my stroke seventeen years ago, I collected state disability benefits until they ran out. They are very similar to unemployment insurance, but they last a year instead of six months. My sister, may she rest in peace, applied for them for me while I was still in the stroke ward at Summit, not quite able to sit up on my own yet. When they were about to run out, I contacted the office of state disability insurance and asked them about extensions. It took several tries and a lot of waiting to get a live human on the phone, and as soon as I did she told me "Oh, you need to apply for social security disability."
Which I did. I sort of run with a "colorful" crowd, so I happened to know a couple of folks who had gone through the application process, one who traded me a used Yamaha mixer to help him with his (you are required to have a second person attest to your story by filling out part of the application, and he just didn't have anyone), and another who went through a couple of years of wrangling to get his. Neither of these guys was as disabled as I was, but neither of them was what I would characterize as employable. The process takes a few months after you submit your application, and mine was slowed down by their not having all of my tax documents on file. That scared the shit out of me, as I failed to file a tax return for two years in the nineties. I got them their documents and they mailed them back to me.
All the while I was without any income, and my sister paid my rent three times. My second friend put me in touch with the attorneys he used to contest his claim (Boxer and Gerson, as in Mr. Barbara Boxer) and they told me that I didn't need their services until I had been denied three times, and to call back after that happened. I was examined by Dr. Than Q Tran, who was assigned to me by SSA, and he quite thoroughly and quickly examined me and apparently approved my case, because in September of 2009, I was paid for all of my benefits retroactively to my stroke in the form of a check for just over ten thousand dollars, which paid my and Briana's rent for six months and bought us a nice, used Toyota Corolla. In the years since, I have been examined three times by doctors picked out by the SSA, and had to refile the application paperwork multiple times.
So not only is it not not easy to fraudulently obtain social security benefits, there is an entire legal business dedicated to helping folks with legitimate claims obtain the benefits they paid into their entire working lives.
Thank you again for the podcast. The cat jumped up onto this laptop while I was typing this and all he had to say was "ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssrd" which I won't even try to translate...
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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