Tag: assholes

Not that anyone asked

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics2 Comments

I don’t have any idea what the hell can be done about the current iteration of the war between Israel and Hamas. Americans like to pick sides during a war, and assign “good guys” and “bad guys,” and as near as I can tell this is a situation where both sides gave up any pretense to the moral high ground quite a while ago. It’s bad guys all the way down. I have said in the past, both in this space and others, that any time I see an unarmed person throwing a rock at a tank, my general inclination is to support the person throwing the rock. And Israel has operated as a de facto apartheid state for most of its existence, and particularly so since fucking Netanyahu came into power. I believe all of that is true, and I believe that both Israel and Palestine have a right to exist. But the Palestinians are controlled by fucking lunatics too, and I refuse to hold people who murder and kidnap civilians at a fucking music festival up as someone who should be supported. I have said before, and I think I still believe this, that Palestine’s only chance at ever actually achieving a two-state solution is to bring forth a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King. The problem is that the hardliners would kill him before the world found out he existed. The closest Israel can claim is Yitzhak Rabin, and he was assassinated by an Israeli.

Neither side wants peace. I’m entirely willing to believe that the people of both Israel and Palestine want peace, and the Palestinian people have absolutely and undeniably gotten the short end of the stick here; I probably can’t honestly say that I understand their rage, having never had to live under apartheid, but I’m at least willing to try. But none of their leaders want peace right now, and there isn’t going to be peace until that changes. Neither side really believes in the other’s right to exist. That’s not something you can really find a compromise on. Palestine will continue to have a steady supply of hopeless, angry young men for as long as Israel denies their right to live freely, and the Israeli government will accept nothing short of full second-class, boot-on-their-necks subjugation for the Palestinians, which guarantees that supply of hopeless, angry young men will never end.

This will end in genocide, eventually. It’s close enough as it is, but that’s where it’s headed. Again.

Welcome to Indiana

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

For me, the best thing about this toxic stew of Jesus-addled jingoistic bullshit is the fact that it’s on a foreign car.

My second favorite thing I just noticed, and that’s the utterly inexplicable “Gosh” above the “this close” sticker. I have no idea, y’all, but I hate it here.

Also, it is somehow still Thursday. At this point I expect to wake up tomorrow and prepare for Thursday 3: The Groundhoggening.

Fuck saving money

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

If there are people– any people– working in schools during the summer, the Goddamned air conditioning in those buildings needs to be on, and it is bloody fucking insane that I’ve had to deal with this bullshit twice this week. It’s going to happen again tomorrow, but I’m going to show up prepared to be a sweaty fuck all afternoon, which I did not do today, because I had already forgotten the lessons Monday should have taught me. And the AC was off, and it was humid as fuck, and I was not dressed to be moving furniture in a windowless classroom with no moving air.

Tomorrow’s gonna suck too, but at least I’ll be prepared for it.

In which things are happening

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics4 Comments

I just want to talk about the news tonight, which you should understand to mean “I want to say things I already said on Twitter earlier today, but I want to use more words.” There were two big stories today; the missing Titanic submersible, and Hunter Biden pleading guilty to a couple of minor tax violations and a gun charge of some sort.

Let’s start with the easier story. I don’t care about Hunter Biden. If Hunter Biden is a criminal of some sort, convict and punish him for his crimes. I’m fine with that, and it doesn’t affect my opinion of Joe Biden, particularly since Dad appears to be going to great pains to get the hell out of the way. There is an argument being made out there that Hunter is actually being treated more harshly than, just for example, someone who hadn’t been targeted endlessly by the entire Republican Party for the last five years, might have been. I, myself, have turned my taxes in late before, although I think in Biden’s case the issue was he didn’t pay taxes at all for two years. I’m unclear on what the deal is with the gun charge although apparently it’s just going to be dealt with somehow. Whatever.

You might think, knowing the– ahem– basic outlines of my politics, that I might be pissed about Hunter Biden being held to a higher standard than most Americans while, oh, I dunno, some other president’s son-in-law can accept two billion dollars from the Saudis the minute his father-in-law leaves office and nobody does anything about it. I am, and this is probably obvious, still pissed about the other thing, but honestly? I’m a teacher and I’m well and Goddamned used to the idea that ethically and legally I get held to a higher standard than most people because of my job. I really don’t have a problem with the idea that the progeny of public officials need to keep their noses cleaner than most. One way or another it doesn’t appear that dude is going to jail. He’ll be fine. I’m not pressed about it.

I genuinely hope that the five men aboard the Titan are dead. That probably sounds mean, but the simple fact is that I don’t think there is any chance of them being rescued and it is therefore better for them to have died in some sort of explosive decompression incident, where they likely would have gotten little to no warning of what was about to happen and they didn’t have time for any of it to hurt. Because the alternatives are all terrifying. There is literally nothing they can do inside that thing to save themselves, and while there is a slight chance that the vehicle has managed to make it to the surface and will be found, it seems like there’s a really good chance that the process of heading for the surface would have killed them anyway, and dying from the bends, from what I understand, is fucking awful.

The other option, of course, is that four men who have gone their entire lives not being told “no” very much and the pilot of the vessel are trapped in pitch black, with little to no food and no bathroom facilities, slowly getting colder and colder– the ocean is fucking cold, and it seems reasonable to think that dying of hypothermia at that depth is a genuine danger, and could happen before asphyxiation, depending on a bunch of variables I have no access to– sitting in what amounts to a tin can with no seats and unable to get away from each other. The part of my brain that writes and reads horror stories is pretty certain that there has already been some unimaginable violence inside that tin can, if it’s the case that the submersible lost power or got stuck somehow. I would be shocked if they were rescued. I would be even more shocked if they were rescued and at least one of the five hadn’t been murdered.

There has been some other discourse on Twitter about how everyone on the internet has suddenly become an expert in deep-sea diving, which, on one hand, isn’t entirely without merit, and on the other hand, as someone with no relevant expertise of any kind, I don’t feel like anything that I’ve said really constitutes any kind of leap that an actual expert wouldn’t make, and the places where I could be wrong– maybe however far down it traveled before losing contact with the surface isn’t deep enough for the pressure to crush the ship, or maybe carbon nanotubes insulate really well and hypothermia isn’t a realistic problem. I could be wrong about those things.

Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter all that much, does it? The only way they’re getting rescued is if they’re bobbing around on the surface right now and they are found before they run out of air, and the prospect of running out of air while floating on the surface is a breathtaking bit of irony.

I didn’t mean to put that pun there, by the way, but now that I’ve noticed it I’m leaving it in.

One way or another, though, the basic variables don’t seem to be all that complicated. I am, in general, pro expertise of all kinds, and I wish I knew more about literally everything than I do. And maybe I know so little about this that I don’t even recognize the degree to which I’m wrong; if you don’t quite understand what I mean by that, argue with someone about evolution sometime. So, yeah, I am no kind of expert at all, and I could theoretically be wrong about a whole lot of shit, but as near as I can tell most of the shit I could be wrong about just makes it suck more, and I’m absolutely certain that I know enough about human nature to be deeply worried about what’s happening inside that submersible if they’re still alive.

Anyway, I’m off to play Subnautica, a game about deep-sea exploration, and a game I had planned to start playing this week before I knew any of this was happening. It’s a coincidence, I swear.

Woohoo!

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

Pat Robertson was alive this morning, which I didn’t realize, and he’s dead now, which is awesome. The Supreme Court declined to further shred the Voting Rights act, and it looks like enough states might have to redraw maps now to shift the House back our way. The shitgibbon hasn’t been federally indicted just yet, but it looks like that’s coming. Maybe tomorrow? And I swear I’m forgetting at least one other nice piece of news.

EDIT: Ha! Seven counts! Fuck yeah!

All in all, not a bad day to be a leftie.

What good news have you gotten lately?

On HB 1608, Indiana’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, and being a teacher

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

Because the place I live is terrible, the state legislature has passed, and our governor has signed, a “Don’t Say Gay” bill inspired by the recent bullshit in Florida. I’ve been thinking hard about how I want to deal with this bill as an educator and I think my thoughts are formed enough that I can write about it.

First and foremost: I refuse to out any student to their parents under any circumstances, my teaching license be damned. I simply won’t do it. Any parents who needs their kids’ teachers to let them know that their kid is trans does not need to be notified that their kids are trans. If you could be trusted with that information, you’d already have it.

That said, there’s noncompliance and then there’s noncompliance, and this bill is so sloppily written that one wonders why they even bothered.

(That’s not true. They bothered because they wanted to make it clear to a vulnerable minority that they hate them and think they should be dead. That’s the reason this bill passed. It’s the only reason.)

Anyway, here’s the text of the law:

—

Chapter 7.5. Parental Notification Regarding Identification

Sec. 1. As used in this chapter, “school” has the meaning set forth in IC 20-30-17-1.
Sec. 2. (a) A school shall notify in writing at least one (1) parent of a student, if the student is an unemancipated minor, of a request made by the student to change the student’s:
(1) name; or
(2) pronoun, title, or word to identify the student.
(b) Not later than five (5) business days after the date on which a school receives a request described in subsection (a), the school shall provide notification to a parent as required by subsection (a).

—

I can think of two ways to deal with this law. The first relies on a close reading of the text itself. Note the usage of the words “request” and “change” in the first line of Sec. 2, and the repetition of “a school receives a request” in subsection b.

This does not describe a situation that ever happens.

First of all, I, a teacher, am not a school as defined by the law, and the word “teacher” does not appear in the law. There is not a form that a kid fills out when they decide that they want to be Ryan and not Sophia, nor is there anywhere at all where someone can file to have their pronouns changed. I find out that a kid wants to use different pronouns or a different name when they tell me, generally right after they’ve met. It strains credulity to call that a “request” to “change” anything. It’s them telling me what they want to be called, and it’s not a “request.” I have gone by my middle name for my entire life and have had to tell every teacher I have ever had to call me something other than what was written on the attendance form in front of them. By this law, even a diminutive or a nickname– going by “Andy” instead of “Andrew” or “DJ” instead of “Denise Jane”– requires notification.

There are, plain and simple, no “requests” being made here as the law seems to envision, and even if they are, they are being made to teachers, not to a school, and the law does not state who needs to make said requests and makes no requirement that I, for example, pass on said request to an administrator.

So that’s the first possibility; simply ignore the law, because as written it genuinely doesn’t appear to me to require me to do anything and does not bother to make itself clear enough to make it possible to figure out how to comply. It doesn’t even define “provide notification” in any coherent form other than saying that it should be by writing.

The second option is some form of malicious compliance. Again, the law does not specifically mention trans students, and as such it seems to apply to all of them. Which means that every “Andrew” who wants to be “Andy” or “Emmanuel” who wants to be “Manny” triggers the law, and if Bill wanting to be Bella gets a notification, that means that Robert wanting to be Bob gets one too. The law makes no distinction. It also– and this is potentially important– makes no requirement that the actual new name or pronouns be identified.

So I can either:

  1. literally send a letter to every single parent I have at the beginning of the year stating that I will call every student I have by the names and pronouns they prefer; or
  2. put said policy into something distributed to every parent (or at least accessible to them) at the beginning of the year, such as a syllabus or parent letter or my class website.

When you consider that the law also says that notification is required for any “word” used to identify the students? Shit. Granted, no kid is making a “request” to be called “you in the green hoodie” by anyone, but again, I don’t think “call me Evan” is a request either by the normal definition of the term. So am I notifying every single parent in the building? Because it is entirely within the realm of possibility that I might be using a “word” to refer to literally every kid in the building on any given day that school is in session, and given that I don’t know most of them those references will almost certainly not be using their names as spelled out on their birth certificates or school registrations.

And can I find a way to get every teacher in the building to notify every parent in the building, thus leading to an utter flood of mail and a nice little bit of civil malicious compliance designed to demonstrate how fucking stupid this law is?

Maybe.

Dr. Lawrence Curry, DO update

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

This was kind of an annoying week; I spent way more time than I usually want to trying to get people to call me back who were manifestly refusing to do what I wanted. I’m trying to give people money to mow my dad’s lawn and no one wants money. I tried to cancel a doctor’s appointment, discovered I could book an appointment but not cancel an appointment online, called and was told by a recording to leave a message, and no one called me back. I left messages with various denizens of the city I live in for various other reasons. Very little luck.

So, Dr. Curry. I went back on the 31st and checked his office out again. This is its current condition:

That’s taken through the window, which gives you a sense of the current security level of the office and how guaranteed it is to be broken into by someone looking for drugs in the very near future. I took more pictures, but all of the rest would require some level of image manipulation to hide people’s names and addresses and shit, because there are documents with people’s Social Security numbers on them sitting in the windowsill.

While I was standing in the lot, another car pulled in. It turned out that the driver was the mother of another of his patients, one who also had spent time trying to convince their family member to stop going to this guy. Unfortunately, her daughter in this case is not only on Medicaid, which makes it difficult to just pick up and switch doctors, but she’s also on a thyroid medication that she can’t currently get her prescription renewed for. Because no one can get ahold of this fucker.

Again, this situation is literally going to end up killing someone. He has a lot of elderly and Medicaid patients. (This makes the “no insurance/$50 a visit” thing on his door even worse– if you’re on Medicaid, it’s because you don’t have fifty bucks to toss at the doctor every time you go.)

I found an article from several years ago that suggested that at that time he had “over 6,000” patients, by the way.

I went to the nearest pharmacy, just for the hell of it, and they told me that as far as they knew he was still practicing but that his hours were limited to “between six and eight in the morning.” I told the pharmacist that the lobby had been cleared out and she seemed surprised by that; apparently they’ve seen him relatively recently, so I very well might just drive over there at seven on Monday and camp out in the parking lot for a little while and see if anyone happens to drive by.

Dr. Curry also had an FNP working for him. She has also disappeared. She’s considerably younger, so I have to assume she’s going to turn up somewhere with another job? I’m still trying to find her. She’s got privileges with a hospital south of me but it’s not like you can call those hospitals and find those people; that’s not how it works.

I also called the local newspaper and a couple of lawyers. One called me back and explained that he couldn’t help me. One has not. The newspaper guy called me back and said he was treating the situation as an action line situation, where they just help out readers with shit, but that he was looking into things and would get back to me if he found anything out. I haven’t heard back yet, which I’m choosing to not treat as sinister just yet.

We’ll see what Monday morning has in store for me.

Have you seen this man?

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy7 Comments

So this asshole here has been my parents’ primary care physician for, more or less, my entire life, and was my doctor during the time when I had no choice in the matter as well. His name is Dr. Lawrence Curry, and you can damn sure bet that I want Google to pick up on the fact that I’m using the name Dr. Lawrence Curry of the McKinley Medical Clinic a whole lot in this piece, because I am pissed.

I’ve never liked Dr. Lawrence Curry, D.O.; his receptionists are rude, he clearly doesn’t have time for his patients (oh, you wait, if you think that’s an unfair thing to say) and he consistently overbooks so that you are guaranteed a multiple hour wait any time you set foot in his smelly, dirty office, which will be playing vaguely racist black and white comedies the entire time you’re there on a tiny and yet incredibly loud TV in the corner. But I’ve never mentioned him here, at least not by name, although I think I might have bitched about the TV show that was playing in Dr. Lawrence Curry, D.O’s office the last time I was in there without actually using his name.

I saw my dad yesterday, and he asked me for my doctor’s name and phone number. This surprised me; as I said, I’ve been trying to get him to change doctors for forever with no luck. I asked what happened, and he said something curious– that the office wasn’t answering the phone any longer. Which is … kinda weird for a doctor’s office, even Dr. Lawrence Curry, D.O.’s, right? So I called the number on their typo-ridden, shitty website, and it’s disconnected.

Huh.

I had to go see Dad today for something unrelated, so I decided to hell with it, I’m curious, and I swung by the office. Not a car in the parking lot. This was on the front door:

Fuckin’ classy, eh? Apparently dude doesn’t have access to a printer. Note also that today is May 30th, which is relevant, because this is their lobby on May 30th, two days before they apparently stop accepting insurance:

Now, I didn’t get a picture– I should, and I will probably swing by tomorrow and take a closer look, because I’m pissed, and I’m pretty sure there are some laws being broken here– of the office/reception space, but it sure as hell looks to me as if everyone’s medical records are still in there. Hundreds if not thousands of patients; as I said, my mom and dad have been seeing this guy for 40+ years.

Dr. Lawrence Curry, D.O., has literally just ghosted all of his patients. Fucking disappeared. Shut down the office without telling anyone– the Shipshewana office mentioned on his website has a disconnected phone number too– and disappeared. Poof. Not an email, not a letter, nothing, and you can tell from looking at recent reviews of his practice on, well, basically any rate your doctor site. There’s one semiliterate screed that suggests that all of his employees quit, which wouldn’t surprise me, because he’s an asshole– but it’s literally so full of typos and crappy grammar that I can’t take it seriously.

Oh, did I mention that his practice shares a building with a physical therapy group? This is on their door:

If it seems like I’m taking this personally, it’s because I am– as I’ve said, I’ve thought the guy was a bastard for decades, and even if he was dead it’s fucking inexcusable that his patients literally have had to do research to find out that their doctor wasn’t their doctor any longer, and now all have to find new doctors– when one of my doctors retired some time ago she passed all of us on to someone else, but that isn’t the case here, because the practice is simply gone. And, again, there look to be several thousand HIPAA violations sitting in cabinets just waiting for some fucker to break a window and go on an identity stealing spree. I want every piece of paper in that office with a member of my family’s name on it, God damn it, and if putting this fucker on blast on the internet helps in any way with making that happen I’m sure as shit gonna do it.