- Tam? Tam, where have you gone? Your blog was one of the stones on which the gunblogosphere was built.
- Doctors getting fed up with their profession. No surprise. Not really news. But an interesting perspective from a physician.
- “Who owns your children?” Bayou Renaissance Man asks after last week’s case of a family subjected to an international manhunt for disagreeing with their son’s doctors.
- What do you know about MaidSafe? Is this the future of communications privacy? (H/T PB in comments)
- Teacher arrested over school shootings — that he wrote about in novels. David Codrea notes that we don’t know the whole story, but it doesn’t sound good.
- Puppy love. Between a cheetah cub and a yellow Lab pup.
Guess it’s a good thing the Secret Service never read Net Assets.
Oh, yeah. I stopped reading Tam’s blog a long time ago. Did she get tired of commenters directing at her the same sort of stuff she’d been saying about other people?
(If so… thin-skinned. Heck. I got death threats.)
About 10 years ago I saw on TV some kijnd of documentary re the medical profession. There was a doctor on it that came right out ans stated thet Medicne is no longer a profession, it is a business. Yup, she hit the nail on the head. Imo, one of the biggest woes of the profession are the damm insurance companies. Why? Well, lets say a doctor has a patient that developed complications after treatment….anything from digestive problems to death. Here come the damm layers with lawsuts against the doctor. Now it is a well known fact that the insurance companies would in most cases settle without going to court. Uh huh, the damm lawyers know this and they get paid without doing anything but filing a paper. There are also patients that use this scam to make money. Just to be on the “safe” side the doctors and hospitals have to make availabe all kinds of tests that in reality have no bearing on the case other than helping them in court. Finally, we have the government…..yup….they create laws that benefit them financially in this as well.
With regard to government owning one’s kids…..why sure….they won’t let a crisis go to waste oven if they have to invent one. This kind of ties in with what I said in the first paragraph…..sure, nothing wrong with a doctor advising against moving or removing a patient from there care…..there is a HELL of a lot wrong with using a law or government to enforce such advise! While I agree…..in so far as the doctor might get upset over not heeding the advise….where the hell do they get off thinking they have the last say and acting like God??!!!! In my own personal life I have maybe gone to the doctor 3 or 4 times since I was 21 years old, I am now seventy five. Last time I saw a doctor was over 20 some years ago. Today, from what I have seen from most doctors, and how they have treated friends of mine, well…..If I want anything from a doctor I will twist his head off and dip what I need out. I’ve taken care of myself for years now with cuts, broken bones, etc, and I sure don’t plan on changing that.
In the beginning I’d visit here and Survival Blog daily without fail. It was Rawles who mentioned Brigid and Tam at the same time, and that led to Roberta too. So I too have a trail of blogs I follow all the time. Except, I never go to Survival Blog any more since the flood happened. Survival Life got morbidly real and SB added to the paranoia, LOL But the main purpose of heading to those blogs was for the women’s gun information, and of course Kathy’s Cornered Cat blog too. – When you start so far behind, I needed all the gun help (from another woman) I could use.
I will miss that.
Tam has a way of making gun things (that rarely is mentioned elsewhere) become something to think about and learn more about. Ex: Who knew what all those numbers in the ammo boxes really were all about, heh.
I will miss that coming from a snark angle, too. Made it fun to learn that way, LOL.
As a blogger who just never got the hang of that daily ritual myself, to put it nicely, I can totally see how hard it is to sit down and write routinely. And freshly. Times years and decades. I don’t know how all of you do it, LOL.
Now there’s all kinds of blogs and articles and places online with women talking/teaching gun stuff. Still not the same as VFTP is/was. We readers get so attached to these kinds of things, maybe even to the point of assuming it will go on forever without realizing how tiring and annoying it is to the writers.
Sad to see Tam go. I still miss Kim DuToit. There seems to be a three way fuse burning on gun bloggers, political/legal pressure, pressure from stupid people, and oppression by employers. Gets to the best of them before it gets to the chaff.
Curt, Obviously, taking care of yourself, full responsibility for your choices and actions, is the ideal. However, medical care IS a business, and absolutely must be. The altruistic nostalgia for a “country doctor” who didn’t charge anyone for his service is a myth, a dangerous myth… And too many people want something for nothing.
A free market business, with people making decisions for themselves, giving and receiving value on a voluntary basis is the only way medicine can survive and thrive. Name any good or service that can be consistently provided at high quality without a good business model. Even churches and charities have a solid business plan if they wish to succeed.
Far too many people think the destruction of western medicine started with Obummercare, or even Medicare, but it began a long time before that. The formation of the AMA and the professional license laws were the actual kiss of death, though the patient lingered in agony for more than a hundred years afterwards. Medicare and Obummercare, along with all the other government interference over that time, merely drove knives into it… Then consider the people now entering the professions, graduates of the dumbed down government schools. They have been systematically trained not to think critically, not to question “authority,” and never to think for themselves.
No wonder good people are leaving medicine in droves. I retired early too.
I sympathize with the doctor’s plight ― but only up to a point. While what he says is truly what’s happening ― he should ask himself, WHY did it happen?
Where were the doctors when HMOs, Medicare and Medicaid went into effect? Did they protest the entrance of politics into their profession? NO!
The author cites being unable to keep up with paperwork. Why doesn’t he opt out of the burdensome paperwork, and join, say, Simple Care? Or do as this doctor did http://www.mprnews.org/story/2011/06/20/ground-level-rural-health-care-renegade-rural-doctor ,and go out on his own?
He cites being unable to see his patients in the allotted time. But who determines his schedule, who decides how long he should spend with each patient, if not himself?
Everyone wants a CT scan (lab work, X-rays, whatever) ― but why doesn’t he educate his patient to that patient’s condition, and how a diagnosis is arrived at in the best interests of the patient?
Doctors (and most medical personnel) are reluctant to explain how the system works because they like being the expert. Many doctors are so sure they are indispensable, they refuse to validate even such age-old practices as midwifery, acupuncture, and herbalism ― all of which were around and working well before the doctor was born. Technology should improve on the old ways if it can, but should not be relied on to _automatically_ replace what will work best for the individual patient.
It’s true doctors are being jerked around, but (like most Americans being jerked around these days), they have delivered themselves into the hands of control-freaks by saying, “Do something about it.” Well, they *did* do something about it, and look where the doctors ended up ― regulated by bureaucratic “experts” who know nothing about the medical field. Passing laws is easy; making them work against the natural state of a profession is the hard part.
A profession is only “noble” as long as it’s allowed to function nobly. When the practitioners of that profession give in to the demands of outsiders, they have little room to complain. This author may not have had influence in the state of medicine today, but at least he should be smart enough to recognize its history. I don’t think he fully understands the role medicine ― including medical educators, hospitals being run by CFOs, drug companies, government, medical schools and their research departments in cahoots with fedgov― contributed to its own demise.
I enjoyed VFTP, but Tam didn’t seem to care for dissenting opinions.
It was mostly condescending ones that bugged her.
I guess if he same crowd showed up at my blog, if I had one, and consistently disagreed, I might not like it either. I wouldn’t have a blog if that happened all the time .
But in her case, it appears to be a stalker of some sort that’s causing the all hate and discontent.
Carl, no, that’s not why. …I’m working hard at not sniping back at your catty speculation; it was beneath you.
I read Tam’s blog regularly – learned some things – got some good material sometimes to send as a link to my Mom (who I’m always trying to nudge in terms of getting proficient and aware with her firearm habits). I’d read the comments sometimes if the subject was of interest.
But – I’ve rarely been tempted to comment there myself and never have. It was pretty obvious to me that there were a lot of elbows and knees at play in the comments. As Tam would probably say… I didn’t want to chance getting all butthurt over something!
I’ll miss VFTP – like I miss the old Wolfesblog. (still mirrored by BSC afaik)
Hi Roberta,
Re Tam and the icky comments; one of the commentariate over at Only guns and money, points the finger at an individual. I don’t know how valid the identification is.
Unless that individual is a total psychopath with zero stress response, I suspect he’ll be getting a strange hot feeling around the seat of his underwear.
I’ll put heavy emphasis here and the couple other places that I comment – because it’s not always obvious when you’re on the receiving end, that Tam was in no way responsible for the actions of any el creepo who stalked her
and her decision in stopping blogging can in no way be connected to any action that any other individual might decide to take against the critter who’s identity has been posted (regardless of whether the stalker and the individual being fingered are one and the same or are totally unconnected).
One of the more obscure areas of libertarian thought is, dispute resolution theory, and the role of restitution.
Generally, restitution is portrayed as compensating for loss and attempting to make the injured party whole again.
That isn’t inconsistent with the tougher interpretation, that the restitution is the price of buying off the possibility of a vendetta.
I don’t know whether there is anything yet on the dark net that’s equivalent to an anonymous kickstarter or indigogo for injured parties and their friends to place contributions towards getting individual miscreants errrr “punished”
I suspect that for any individual, learning that someone has set up an account with your name on it, could be a very sobering and probably underwear warming experience.
Regardless of whether such accounts exist yet or not.
If I was el creepo, I’d be seeking an arbitrator and offering Tam some substantial (both meanings of the word) restitution by now.
I’m not sure about Maidsafe. First, I would expect that the protocols could be pretty easily tracked. Second, we’ve seen how effective the Federales have been in subverting TOR. Third, I could see the Fed.Gov ginning up some sort of “anti child porn” crusade (for teh childrenz!) to go after this.
Net/net, the problems are not technical, they’re social and in particular they’re about an out of control government. I don’t think that engineers can fix this.
So one teacher gets arrested for writing fictional books about school shootings, but the woman who tweets about wanting to stab her students get an administrative slap on the wrist, and that’s it?!?
*sigh*
http://www.mercurynews.com/education/ci_26419917/newark-teacher-who-wrote-nasty-threatening-tweets-given
@WolfSong: There more to that story. We now live in this fast-paced interconnected world where there’s a constant rush to get a story out, and it gets echoed all over the internet, often truncated and then repeated. Thoughtfulness is the casualty.
Bear:
Tam is dealing with a nutter who is vearing towards physically acting out, IMO. This isn’t just an internet spat.
The medical profession: everything the government touches turns to shit.
Who owns your children? That depends on you. If you submit, the state does. If you are willing to go to war with the state, you do. The comments on that article are worth reading too.
@Borepatch
1) Not sure what you mean by this, but it seems doubtful to me anyway. The current internet was created with almost no thought toward security and privacy, and everything has been bandaids since then. It is crazy to transmit unencrypted information, but that is the system we have. Eliminating the server has to be a huge advance.
2) Well, the US Navy created TOR IIRC, so maybe that’s not too surprising. But how effective have their attacks been, anyway? Outside of attacking a few bugs and running some exit nodes? I don’t think TOR is hopeless; probably usable with some care. Bugs are being fixed.
3) No doubt. The question is, will it matter? If people adopt this, then it won’t.
[ I don’t think that engineers can fix this.]
Think of firearms technology. Everybody can and should own a battle rifle or battle carbine. That’s one technology that defends against government. So does encryption. Tech tools actually are crucial in this struggle.
BTW, everybody needs at least one bag of DE for preservation and for de-worming animals. In fact it doesn’t hurt to eat some yourself to clear out any parasites you might have.
http://freshwaterorganics.com/Diatomaceous-Earth-50.html
This company is run by a friend of mine who is also an anarchist by the way…
Woops, that comment should have gone under the prep article, doh!
Thanks for that, jed.
I appreciate the extra info.
🙂
@Kristophr: Tam is dealing with a nutter who is vearing towards physically acting out, IMO. This isn’t just an internet spat.
That’s why she carries a handgun, right? If a handgun doesn’t leave her feeling safe against a garden variety celebrity stalker, even with all her skill and practice, then the handgun as a category of weapon isn’t good enough. That’s a fine subject for a gun writer/journalist to write about.
What would she feel comfortable with? A house with doors and windows strong enough to keep someone from sneaking in undetectably? A hat with a missile launcher? A flock of drones overhead? Personal transportation improved from horseback to the intercontinental jet airplane, but personal self-defense weapon only improved from the revolver to the glock? I think the personal self-defense weapon has been technologically frozen in amber by a century of the most amazingly effective gun control. That’s another fine subject for a gun writer/journalist to write about.
Anon wrote: “That’s why she carries a handgun, right? If a handgun doesn’t leave her feeling safe against a garden variety celebrity stalker, even with all her skill and practice, then the handgun as a category of weapon isn’t good enough.”
You’re ignoring the difference between being able to protect oneself and actually being in a situation where one might have to. You’re ignoring all the psychological factors about the experience of being stalked or threatened.
If you’ve never had a stalker, you don’t know the sheer ickiness of having some creepy-crawlie dogging your life. You don’t know the constant sense of threat and vulnerability. You don’t know a lot about the complexity of the experience.
Life’s one hell of a lot more involved than, “Hey, if my guns and my training are good, then hey, I don’t care who’s out there with bad intentions. Bring ’em on.”
Claire:
Anon is jtc, or Pawnbroker, the nutter she is being chased by.
I suggest deleting his crap.
And see if you can get his IP and Whois, and forward it to Lawdog, Mattg, or Roberta x.
We are compiling evidence for legal action.
And please belay my request to delete. Leave the evidence up.
Kristophr — Thanks for the heads-up. I knew Tam had a stalker but wouldn’t know how to recognize the creep from a comment. I’ve contacted Roberta X and will leave Anon’s comment in place.