This place is nicer than my hospital. I might come here and bark the next time I am unwell.
Lily is in the back being assessed. It’s a small thing, but the way the nurse so gently picked up Lily was very reassuring.
by John Cole| 69 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
This place is nicer than my hospital. I might come here and bark the next time I am unwell.
Lily is in the back being assessed. It’s a small thing, but the way the nurse so gently picked up Lily was very reassuring.
This post is in: Open Threads, Women's Rights Are Human Rights, Fuck Yeah!, Make The World A Better Place
Yesterday a Southwest Airlines flight from LaGuardia to Dallas lost an engine. That’s lost an engine, as in parts of it flew out. The pilot, Tammie Jo Shults, brought the plane to an emergency landing at Philadelphia. The voice recording between her and air traffic control shows a total professional.
Shults was a Navy fighter pilot with a number of firsts in her record. She retired as a lieutenant commander. More at the Washington Post.
She lives in the San Antonio area. I hope they give her a parade.
And Open Thread!
This post is in: Lily, Open Threads
I just spoke with the vet, and while her platelet count increased, her red blood cell count actually decreased, so I am going to take her to the hospital in Pittsburgh where she can receive a transfusion if necessary. The place I am taking her to is the Pittsburgh Veterinary Specialty and Emergency Center, and this is the place that saved my brother’s girl Ellie.
by Betty Cracker| 148 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity, Assholes, General Stupidity, Our Failed Media Experiment
TPM has an interesting article about Trump’s shady fixer, Michael Cohen, who grew up ass-deep in Russian mobsters on Long Island. An excerpt (link to article here):
From the 70s through the 90s at least, the bosses of the Russian mafia in the U.S. literally ran their crime organization out of the El Caribe.
So Michael Cohen’s uncle Morton Levine’s social club was the headquarters of Russian organized crime in the U.S….
According to Levine, who is apparently still alive, all his nieces and nephews owned shares of the El Caribe and still do. Levine told the AP that Michael Cohen owned his stake in the club until Donald Trump was elected President when he “gave up his stake.”
Isn’t that fascinating? Of course, there’s lots of focus on Cohen now that the FBI has raided his office. But Cohen was a known Trump associate for ages, all the while owning a stake in the Russian mob’s US HQ.
We knew all about the Obamas’ interest rate on their Chicago home prior to the 2008 election. We heard plenty about the preacher at the Obamas’ church.
Reporters dig through records to unearth that shit. I can’t help but think crackerjack New York-area reporters overlooked a rather large story on Trump’s mobbed-up fixer during the run-up to the 2016 election.
by David Anderson| 47 Comments
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance
Barbara Bush died yesterday after a very short period of comfort care after she elected to stop any further attempts at curative care. She may or may not have received formal hospice care.
A source close to the Bush family tells CBS News’ Jenna Gibson that, while Mrs. Bush’s COPD makes it difficult for her to breathe, she is alert and was having conversations last night. She was also having a bourbon.
— Katie Watson (@kathrynw5) April 17, 2018
If I was 92 and knew that I was going downhill, I think I would elect Scotch over bourbon. I would also elect to spend what uncertain time I had left at home with family and friends instead of in the hospital where the quantity of remaining life may be greater at no better and probabilistic lower quality of life.
If she had elected hospice care, she would have had a very short span of hospice utilization. Hospice qualification for someone covered by Medicare has a fairly strong normative pathway. An individual will be identified as having a high probability of death within the next 180 days in the opinion of the treating physician and the medical director of the admitting hospice. Once an individual elects hospice, they give up curative care for the primary diagnosis that led to hospice. Ideally, then the individual uses hospice for several weeks to a few months. Short spans of less than a week and long spans of more than six months are seen as meaningfully problems.
MedPac’s 2018 report on hospice utilization repeats a common sentiment that echoes years of previous statements:
The Commission has previously expressed concern about very short hospice stays. More than one-quarter of hospice decedents enroll in hospice only in the last week of life, a length of stay that is commonly thought to be of less benefit to patients and their families than enrolling somewhat earlier. Very short hospice stays (e.g., 25th percentile) occur across a wide range of diagnoses
We are also moving towards a medical system that is supposed to be “patient-centric” with a dozen distinctive definitions of what that actually means. The patient and their family are the drivers of decisions while the clinicians facilitate and illuminate pathways that can be chosen. So if a patient chooses to try one last round of treatment and then chooses to forego further curative care at the very end of life, how do we reconcile a strong normative belief on “proper” hospice utilization with patient centeredness?
Bourbon is recommended.
by Alain Chamot (1971-2020)| 11 Comments
This post is in: On The Road, Open Threads, Readership Capture
Good Morning All,
This weekday feature is for Juicers who are are on the road, traveling, or just want to share a little bit of their world via stories and pictures. So many of us rise each morning, eager for something beautiful, inspiring, amazing, subtle, of note, and our community delivers – a view into their world, whether they’re far away or close to home – pictures with a story, with context, with meaning, sometimes just beauty. By concentrating travel updates and tips here, it’s easier for all of us to keep up or find them later.
So please, speak up and share some of your adventures and travel news here, and submit your pictures using our speedy, secure form. You can submit up to 7 pictures at a time, with an overall description and one for each picture.
You can, of course, send an email with pictures if the form gives you trouble, or if you are trying to submit something special, like a zipped archive or a movie. If your pictures are already hosted online, then please email the links with your descriptions.
For each picture, it’s best to provide your commenter screenname, description, where it was taken, and date. It’s tough to keep everyone’s email address and screenname straight, so don’t assume that I remember it “from last time”. More and more, the first photo before the fold will be from a commenter, so making it easy to locate the screenname when I’ve found a compelling photo is crucial.
Have a wonderful day, and enjoy the pictures!
Errors and leaving things until the last minutes meant I don’t have pics from BillinGlendale today, but I will soon!
Today, pictures from valued commenter J R in WV.
Back in February we had spring, far more spring than we have today.
So I went outside with a camera, the Olympus TG-5 that I used for whales and sea-lions in my last set of photos from Baja California. It has a Macro close-up mode which I used for most of these photos – mostly moss greening up after winter.
Spring moss 1
Taken on 2018-02-20
My yard
f/6.3 for 1/100 at 30mm with flash
Green moss with some older spore fronds
Moss and tiny fern
Taken on 2018-02-20
My yard
f/6.3 for 1/30 sec at 30mm with flash
Moss on a boulder with a tiny new fern
Macro Moss
Taken on 2018-02-20
My yard
f/11.0 for 1/60 sec at 65mm with flash
Moss preparing to reproduce
Taken on 2018-02-20
The yard
f/11.0 for 1/60 sec. at 65mm with flash
These are newly grown sprouts that will develop spores
Creek in Yard
Taken on 2018-02-20
The yard
f/4.9 for 1/160 at 100 mm
Moss on a small rock
Taken on 2018-02-20
The yard
f/2.8 for 1/400 sec. at 25mm
Thank you so much J R in WV, do send us more when you can.
Travel safely everybody, and do share some stories in the comments, even if you’re joining the conversation late. Many folks confide that they go back and read old threads, one reason these are available on the Quick Links menu.
One again, to submit pictures: Use the Form or Send an Email
This post is in: Activist Judges!, Dolt 45, Open Threads, Trump Crime Cartel, All Too Normal
A source close to Trump said he's still "apoplectic" about the FBI raids on Michael Cohen's hotel room.
He reportedly continues to be fixated on the raid over everything else, including James Comey's new book. https://t.co/tNr2gI1V0h
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) April 18, 2018
Has it ever occurred to Trump to at least pretend he’s not a guilty fraud around the help so they stop leaking these temper tantrum tales? Or is John Barron tipping reporters on this stuff for some dumb reason?
— Schooley (@Rschooley) April 18, 2018
Also, too…
Breaking: Supreme Court invalidates part of federal law requiring mandatory deportation of immigrants convicted of some crimes. For first time, Justice Neil Gorsuch joins with more liberal Justices to produce 5-4 majority –@Arianedevogue reports
— Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) April 17, 2018
a week from now we’re going to get a times story about how trump's aides had to spend thirty minutes explaining why he can’t fire gorsuch https://t.co/KYPv87lMGw
— Ashley Feinberg (@ashleyfeinberg) April 17, 2018
You can’t always get what you want…
"Every 5-4 decision is because of me," Trump told the Washington Examiner in an interview published Monday, saying that his nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the high court had likely swung the bench to the right for decades.https://t.co/MIBmJWosDF
— Krysynda (@KrysyndaDay) April 17, 2018
Wednesday Morning Open Thread: There Will Be Twitter-TantrumsPost + Comments (172)