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"This Could Only Happen In A Profoundly Corrupt, Dishonest, & Degenerate Society"
Submitted by James H Kunstler via Kunstler.com,
Funny how, in the current national rapture of techno-narcissism, it is harder than ever to do something that for generations used to be as simple as pie: to get somebody on the telephone. It’s especially funny in a time when phones have become a prosthetic extension of every human hand and pretty much the be-all and end-all of human culture. I hold a phone, therefore I am!
It’s not so funny that the places where it is most difficult to connect to a live human being are among the most critical activities, most particularly every branch of health care. Hospitals now operate under the entirely false and obviously dishonest premise that a robotic phone routing system is the best way to handle communications. Notice that, in the logic of this system, no distinction is made between mundane business and medical emergencies. Everybody who calls get’s the same perky robot —always a woman, by the way, in a dishonest attempt to provide false reassurance that a “caring” presence (Big Sister) is at the other end of the line. Whether you call about a billing error or having just shredded your foot in a rototiller, the message at the other end will always be democratically the same: “Your call is important to us.” (Not.)
I dwell on these matters because I spent an inordinate amount of time last week calling around to several hospitals and doctors offices to get some of my medical records for a lawsuit I am prosecuting against the manufacturer of a defective hip implant that gave me cobalt / chromium poisoning. Note also that we have contrived to make it nearly impossible to obtain our own medical records.
Now I am going to reveal to you why it is so difficult to get a live human being on the telephone at these important places: because the more of a racketeering matrix medicine becomes, the more it seeks to evade responsibility for the consequences. That is, the more medicine becomes a criminal enterprise, the less it wants to hear from its client/victims. The same ethos is at work in just about every other realm of corporate enterprise in the USA. Our problem in the USA is not “capitalism,” it’s racketeering. Why we fail to comprehend it is one of the abiding mysteries of contemporary life.
The biggest offender after medicine, of course, is banking. They don’t want to hear from you either. They enjoy the privilege of swindling you by both tiny-and-large increments on transaction payments and near-zero interest rates and mortgage contracts where no title record of collateral can be located, and that all works very nicely for them. But they’re too busy creaming off profits to talk to their customers. In both medicine and banking, even the few remaining human secretaries to whose answering machines calls are torturously routed will not return those phone calls. “Your call is important to us.” (Not.)
Now all of this raises a couple of questions. How did we get to this sorry place? And why are citizens not violently angry about it?
To some degree, this situation represents the sheer diminishing returns and unintended consequences of technology. In a nation infatuated with technology, these entropic effects are always ignored. We just don’t want to hear about it, and our related infatuation with feel-good public relations bullshit spews a fog of concealment over it. We apparently like being deceived and don’t mind being tortured.
Robot phone answering systems also allowed corporations to off-load the cost of doing business onto their customers, mostly in the form of wasting vast amounts of their customers’ time. Included in the off-load was the cost of paying receptionists (as telephone answerers used to be quaintly called) and all their medical and retirement benefits — just another manifestation of the vanishing middle class, by the way, since a lot of women used to be employed that way (let’s skip the gender equality side-bar for now). After a while, the added privilege of companies being able to evade responsibility for their actions hugely outweighed the cost-saving advantage of firing some lower level employees.
It ought to be self-evident that this could only happen in a profoundly corrupt, dishonest, and degenerate society, because it took the form of a social compact that accepted this sort of behavior as okay. Doctors especially don’t want to be accessible to their customers. It enhances their aura of supernatural authority to be as unreachable as possible — and most of them these days are safely embedded in the protective corporate matrix one way or another as well. I suppose you can always pray to them and hope for a reply, since that is obviously the system they are trying to emulate. And, after all, this is an especially pious society. But try asking a plain question like, “how come you charged me $34,000 for four hours of anesthesia?” and you will be hung out to dry until the end of time.
As for outrage, I am frankly amazed that the various armed lunatics at large in America are so busy shooting up schools when many more people are actually being harmed, indeed ruined, by the health care “industry” and the banks.
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Please press 1 to speak to a real Indian retard.
It is simple as this. Large companies are too cheap to pay those who actually do work these days so they layoff the rank and file. Automated telephones are just cheaper. Hint: your business is not that relevant.
So Kunstler still votes and believes in the facade of modern medicine?
Poor guy.
"Please press 1 to speak to a real Indian retard."
Named "Dave".....
"My name is Swami Satchitananda ramachrishnanaga, but you can just call me "Joe"
Seriously speaking when you get the runaround, just press zero (0) if no response press (00) to get directly to the operator.
If not, just go there and bust in the manager's office and very calmly without threats give him/her 15 minutes to do it.
As usual this article is devoid of any real historical relevance or insight into any of the problems mentioned. Pity these people don't feel obligated to educate themselves and come up with something new and worth being written before sitting down to spin up the next blog entry.
Be glad you got the robot ... you could have been routed to Bangalore to speak with "Kevin."
Yeah, an Indian retard helping a transhuman american.
Er, are you calling about your fake hip sir? Or that pacemaker? Oh the knee? The one Sorry..... you take 13 tablets a day currently and? What?
Both the US-EU centric "medical" system and the outsourcing scheme are almost equally wrong and these two wrongs cannot make a Wright.
http://aadivaahan.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/on-outsourcing-and-its-ills/
What? You want some toothless tattooed Bubba in Kentucky to answer support calls from India in lilting Hicklish - "This here's Billy Bob Jefferson Davis McCoy, but ya'll can call me Goopta, of course."
EDIT for tattoos...
Whoa Cowgirl! How many Americans speak Hindi?
The one that bothers me is "para Espanol oprima dos".
I wonder how that makes immigrants who speak other languages feel?
.
"para Espanol oprima dos"
Esperanza for "feeling lucky"?
I was thinking "Bob."
Just wait until you get a Muzzi phlebotomist who can't speak English (as happened to me recently) who tortures your arm for 15 minutes before giving up and turning the job over to someone competent who nails it and draws the blood in under a minute.
Hmmm, sounds more like a bone marrow sample attempt to me.
Don't know if I can trust anyone who works as a flea bottomist !!!
The set-up was at a flea market. That should have been me first clue.
"Named Dave"
That's kind of true except it's their last name and pronounced a little different.
This article from Kuntsler I actually enjoyed and agreed.
"Robot phone answering systems also allowed corporations to off-load the cost of doing business onto their customers, mostly in the form of wasting vast amounts of their customers’ time."
That is absolutely correct.
Having been in sales for the last 15 years of my life I can assure you that this problem isn't limited to inbound customer service calls. Sometime around 2006 or 2007, people simply stopped picking up the phone anymore, just about anywhere in corporate america. It is much more likely that your target will respond to an email than actually pick up the phone, or return a voicemail message. Really changed the dynamics of the sales cycle-- to say the least.
Hey, did you call me at work? How did you get my number???
He's over 65, and thus of the generation that is most stuck in the past. At least his eyes are open.
In my sales office if a call isn't answered ,by a human, by the second ring. a human become's unemployed.
I also refuse to see anyone that is late to an appointment.
Death is the only permissible excuse, in which case I don't want to see a corpse anyway.
That's how business used to be done, no wonder the US doesn't do any real biz anymore.
"It is simple as this. Large companies are too cheap to pay those who actually do work these days so they layoff the rank and file. Automated telephones are just cheaper. Hint: your business is not that relevant."
Rise of the machines
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6gPPj8B_nU
Why America loves War...George Carlin...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lMDbYZ26rg
Dear misterrrrr Jonny Sirrrr... I'm a Amelican consult and my name is Bryan Joe...linsky.
I have a big business uppertunity for you Sir with only onetime deal!
No sir, this is not marketing selling telephone, this is honest businezzzz deal!
Press 1 for English!!!
Why does ZH keep publising this guy's stuff? It either downright wrong, lacking in context, lacking in perspective or superficial. Or all of them at once.
Why does ZH keep publising this guy's stuff? It either downright wrong, lacking in context, lacking in perspective or superficial. Or all of them at once.
"How did we get to this sorry place? And why are citizens not violently angry about it?"
Because they're not starving yet. Patience, grasshopper...
And because people don't care about other people who are doing jobs that are on a lower step on the ladder than they are.
Receptionists are somewhere at the bottom.
Any job that can be replaced by a simple computer programm will be replaced. It's as simple as that.
And all the people who are unemployed will get benefits. Untill there's a full cycle and than we'll start to exclude them and get rid of the people.
And in America that's already happening. Official unemployment: 6% and something. And what do they do to the homeless? A oneway ticket to the Nevada dessert.
How many companies still have a receptionist at the entrance of the building?
Mostly a phone and a number that connects to some sucker who was on leave when they asked who would want to answer the calls.
Sudden Debt, come to Switzerland where there is always a receptionist behind the latest $10,000 dollar designer desk just beyond the latest low-key security guard who has access to every armed cop within a 100 kilometer radius. Oh, I forgot to mention the "receptionist" is built like a Ferrari and dressed in Yves Saint Laurent... ...
I think this is some reckless logic here. It's possible the "robot" answering systems are designed to efficiently destribute incoming calls to the correct desk at the hospital, thereby elminating the need for a staff of telepohone operators, thereby saving costs. But the author reads it to mean they're trying to avoid responsibility. Seems as if this is a leap.
It's actually both and the hidden truth is that everyone who had this job quit as they can not take the complaints and the venting.
For the NY VA Hospitals, this posting re. administration telephone service is dead-on.
Try visiting the Planet Earth some time to see what he means.
Waiting for the 21'st centrury version of Nat Turner......
"I am frankly amazed that the various armed lunatics at large in America are so busy shooting up schools when many more people are actually being harmed, indeed ruined, by the health care “industry” and the banks."
It's called false flags.....look it up.
My thoughts exactly. It;s the only rational explanation for the fact that every mass shooting in the country happens at a school, or some equivalently helpless, harmless target.
Yep like my grandfather said to me when i was young. If the gov talks about banning something don't stand next to bus full of nuns and babies
No, not false flags. It's a question of least resistance and anyway who exactly is shooting up America's schools?
America's school students!
The Missing Secrets - Nikola Tesla - Must SEE!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r-3FNtgOFM
Tesla was brilliant, but really, why not just capitalize on those "mysterious secrets" rather than endlessly speculating about them?
Discernment.
Oh, I'm sure anybody who has tried has received a visit from men in black suits and skinny ties, sooner or later. Possibly their last visit from anybody.
The dumbos that keep yapping about Tesla's secrets being suppressed are so technologically ignorant they do not realize that his discoveries are fully in use today in the form of our alternating current power grid, power transformers, AC motors, and countless other applications. Also, Tesla was not alone in making these discoveries, there were others working along the same lines. Tesla just seems to be the most famous. Heinrich Hertz was also a proponent of electromatic energy and probably more advanced than Tesla as his work had more theoretical underpinning behind it. In fact he is so famous that "Cycles per Second" was officially declared to be named "Hertz" in his honor.
We may be using Tesla's discoveries, but we sure aren't using ALL of them. You need to do a little homework on Tesla. HINT: he died broke.
Oh Tesla Tesla Tesla Tesla Tesla Tesla and Telsa and Tesla and...and and and ...
haarp, global warming, 9/11 and starfish prime etc ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5-xRAlwPzo
.
blah, blah, blah ....
Live telephone answering service is a key component of client relations.
Why do they need client relations when you can't go to anyone else?
All symptoms of a dying economy. From robo operators to check your own ass out. Now it has moved on to waiters.
Between government raping you on taxes to your customer base earning less and less you are fucked. Toss in the banks and you have the end of a debt based currency.
There is just no way out of this. Growth (meaning credit expansion) worked for a while due to low debt load and cheap oil, but that is DOA as well.
The entire world is stuck in this endgame of a debt money ponzi. The only way out is for newer, more important money to help fund more debt (derivatives and SDRs) based expansion.
We have been eating our tail for a long as time and we are about at our neck.
pods
"As for outrage, I am frankly amazed that the various armed lunatics at large in America are so busy shooting up schools when many more people are actually being harmed, indeed ruined, by the health care “industry” and the banks."
I assume this is an oblique reference to Sandy Hook which is a truly mysterious event, particularly because one can't get any verifiable information without drawing official ire.
So what happened that was not reported?
My point is that little/nothing can be verified.
If my child had been cut down in this alleged monstrous act NOTHING would have kept me from seeing/holding my child one last time, yet we are told the parents were told they'd see coroner's pictures only??
Or, where are photos showing... anything inside the school?
Or, Robbie Parker video of him yukking it up big time then 'getting into character' for the camera.
Or, no emergency helicopters called, but porta potties on the scene within 3 hours.
Wolfgang Halbig -- a national school safety consultant -- can't get any answers, only law enforcement threats, etc..
Its even worse than that. Where were the other 600 kids and buses to get them out of the school? First responders were denied access to the school and supposed victims. Nobody was injured? All dead? None of it adds up or withstands any kind of scrutiny.
It is, and was, a total cover up and false flag operation.
Right. Questions and no verifiable answers.
Wolfgang W Halbig
Options for this story
Fourteen simple questions that MUST require an answer.
Please stay focused on the first fourteen questions then we go to the next ten questions and then we go to the videos and police reports.
1. Who on Dec 14, 2012 was the Incident Commander as required by the Federal Emergency Management Administration in directing the Mass Casualty Shooting Incident at the Sandy Hook Elementary School?
2. Who and Why did they not request the Life Star Helicopters knowing that children and school staff are seriously injured and clinging to life?
3. Who and Why did they not allow the Paramedics and the EMT’S inside the Sandy Hook School to treat the seriously injured or those children and school staff clinging to life?
4. Who declared all 18 children and six school staff members legally dead within the first 8 minutes?
5. Who was the Certified Environmental Bio-Hazard Decontamination company contracted by the Newtown Public Schools to remove 45-65 gallons of blood, skull fragments, brain tissues, bodily fluids, blood soaked carpets and any other decontaminated are a inside the Sandy Hook School?
6. Why does an off duty Lt from the Newtown Police Department refuse to leave his off duty work assignment at a construction site on Dec 14, 2012 when hearing that shots have been fired at the Sandy Hook Elementary School?
7. Who at the Newtown Public Schools notified all of the parents in writing as required by CT law that had children attending the Sandy Hook Elementary School as well as every school staff member every school year of all the potential life threatening chemical hazards. The school had high levels of lead paint throughout the entire school, Asbestos in the ceiling tiles and floor tiles, asbestos in the insulation and most of all this school had a very high levels of PCB? Check out what PCB is and it should scare any parent.
8. Who provided the urgent medical care to the two children who were not transported to the Danbury Trauma Center until an hour after the school was deemed safe for that 15-mile drive?
9. Who treated those two children who had been shot multiple times like three to 11 times since they did not allow the paramedics and EMT’S inside the Sandy Hook Elementary School?
10. Why did the parents of the two children who died at the Danbury hospital not allow their children to donate their organs to other children waiting for the gift of life?
11. What happened to the 500 children and 60 school staff members from Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec 14, 2012?
12. Who was the police officer calling into the Newtown Police dispatcher stating in his words that he has multiple weapons, he has a rifle and a shotgun and who has the rifle and the shotgun as the chain of evidence should show that was found in classroom eight (8)?
The question for 9 and 10 is in their own police transmission words and cannot be made up.
13. Why would a police officer by the name of Lt Vangehle at 9:45:21 am on Dec 14, 2012 from the Newtown Police Department after finding a kindergarten female child in the hallway make her go into room eight (8) and leave her? Room eight is a gruesome crime scene with dead children and school staff. Why?
14. Why would two CT State Troopers enter room ten (10) at 9:55:31 am on Dec 14, 2012 which is a gruesome crime scene with dead bodies of children and school staff and tell a kindergarten boy who they find in the bathroom who’s name is redacted and tell them so it must be more than one to stay and they will be both back when it is safe?
Yes. Good point.
Thanks for this info. I apologize to those that flamed me.
I had no knowledge of the mysterious nature of the aftermath. I try not to watch the news too much. But I agree that apperently something is being covered up.
It was too much for me to watch at the time it was in the news.
And thanks for the additional flame too.
Man, I had to log in purely to up you for that post.
That, level of "You have given me new information, I've used the space between my ears to take it in and actually think about it and - you know what? I might not have been as right as I thought" ...
That, right there, is the reason why I continue to read the hedge. Some of the folks post tribal two-legs-bad-four-legs-good nonsense, but most of the folks are capable of cogent and independent thought.
Wherever you go JRobby, may your god(s) go with you. Whomever they may be.
Thanks Ponzi
The truth is that I was going through a difficult period when Sandy Hook happened. Then I was incarcerated for half of 2013. So current events were not part of my daily routine. It really seems like a long time ago now.
I used to check out ZH daily and participate in 2008/2009. I see nothing has changed. There are some really brilliant contributions and posts and there are those "reply"posters that continue to be consumed by ego/anger.
I was incarcerated for being an addict. Poor man's rehab. Something I have finally discovered is that there are things that I have no control over and never will so I let it go now. That does not mean that I have no concern for what everyone is going through now in year 6 of this "recession". I have family members and friends struggling to get by. I see ZH as a barometer of how much more people will accept before they finally are willing to join together and do something about it. Looks like it is going to be quite a bit more to me.
It is May 2014 and I see that nothing has changed since 2008/2009. If there are more people aware of the fraud being perpetuated by the oligarchy, I am not seeing any new signs that things will change. It has been one sided. Additional reductions of civil liberties, alarming distortions in the marketplace that can only end badly and no new solutions being proposed.
I recognize very well the power of those in control and what they are willing to do to retain that control. What will the rest of us do?
Yes, it's always curious when all the evidence gets destroyed, records get sealed, and the municipality involved is the sudden recipient of lots of money with no strings attached.
http://www.newstimes.com/local/article/No-trace-of-Sandy-Hook-Elementary...
http://www.sott.net/article/269193-Sandy-Hook-cover-up-continues-Connect...
http://www.newtownbee.com/news/news/2013/11/18/general-electrics-15m-don...
authorities tend to be testy like that when portions of the story are entirely fabricated out of whole cloth, as was the case with that nonexistent ar-15.
Oh yes, Sandy Hook. The aerial photos of the parking lot with one triage area and everyone smoking and joking because the police instantly assessed that everyone was dead. Immediately fence the school and destroy every piece of evidence. Suppress all medical information "to protect us". Finally state police released photos (limited) and not a bullet hole visible in the hallways (kid was a perfect marksman hitting only kids and teachers). And on and on.
@sodamnmad
5.56 round would have easily penetrated bodies and kept on going through walls especially at that range. The whole story is one big BS job foisted upon public.
I'm still waiting to hear the authorities identify the guy wearing camo who was chased down in the woods nearby. Only official word I ever heard was, "He's nobody." Well, I saw photographs of him and news helicopter video of him being chased down, so "nobody" seems a bit of a stretch.
Not to mention the creepy 'coroner' yukking it up at the press conference.
i bet he wishes he had his old hip back now. [/snark]
Well my time here on the net is coming to an end, you see my computer is old and crashes a lot lately. I will not be buying another, I refuse to buy a spy-phone so the flip top is being replaced with a phone that has a slide out keypad for the "occasional" text. While I once loved technology I now despise the usurpation of that tech just to spy on the populce and gather "ammunition" for future persecution/coersion to benefit the state. I suggest you all get a copy of The Gulag Archipelgo to see what TPTB have in store for you before you give them any more ammo.
I ended up in a call center gig between contracts about a decade ago. They were trying to ràmp up a sales division with an automated line. They asked;
"What would you do if an automated call was placed to your home to make sales?"
The overwhelming response was; "hang up"
Management got all upset; "come on, it's not like the machine could hard-sell you, con you."
They ended up not doing it. Everyone just kept hanging up. They hate the phone trees that much!
So the company was basically asking its employees to judge the likeability of a technology that would favor their replacement. Sweet.
Why are you trying to call a hospital? If its an emergency fucking dial 911. IF its not an emergency why are you calling a fucking hospital?
Why are you trying to call a hospital? If its an emergency fucking dial 911. IF its not an emergency why are you calling a fucking hospital?
Where else is he going to get the medical records from a surgery performed at the hospital?
His surgeon's office???
That's funny, every time I call the telephone company, cable, post office, airlines, amazon, or any other business, I always get a person at the other end.
Cuz customer service is still important in Japan.
.
WTF else you gonna do in Japan? Way I hear it, procreation isn't in the Top Ten list.
because if its one thing the Japanese are known for, it's their people skills.
"Doctors especially don’t want to be accessible to their customers. It enhances their aura of supernatural authority"
This is sickening. The level of illness in our society caused by ego will destroy this planet.
"I am frankly amazed that the various armed lunatics at large in America are so busy shooting up schools when many more people are actually being harmed, indeed ruined, by the health care “industry” and the banks."...
And just who are those "armed lunatics" shooting up schools?... military bases?... And Marathons?...
I've got a formal request for all you intelligence professionals and military continuing to look the other way for your daily bread and pension(s) to get us into another World War...
Stop what you're being paid to do, and be the surgical instrument that removes the cancer in Washington before it's too late!
There are no conspiracies, just ask Kuntsler.
/s
I must say that some automated systems are way smarter than some receptionists I had to deal with.
That's because it's not "lunatics" that are shooting up the schools. They are all false flags.
"As for outrage, I am frankly amazed that the various armed lunatics at large in America are so busy shooting up schools when many more people are actually being harmed, indeed ruined, by the health care “industry” and the banks."
The same people that own the Telco services are also the principal brokers of the phone numbers. It seemed like a good idea to the telco's in the late 80's as a cash grab because of telephone penetration in residential homes.
Here we are 20+ years later and call display is now a mandatory item. Because if a person picks up a telemarketer, the number is flagged as 'active' then instead of getting one annoying call...the phone number is then given to a legion of marketing morons to sell dick medication, home financing, 'free' cruises, magazine subscriptions, etc.
Why aren't citizens pissed?
They know and have been migrating en mass to newer, better, cleaner, cheaper and far more flexible technologies. The idea that an analogue phone service being managed by aging digital telco infrastructure is irrelevant now. The situation is it's been 14 years since the last real upgrade to the telco infrastructure, everything else that's 'new' in the telco universe is window dressing. The proverbial putting lipstick on a pig.
Today a cell phone. A single device that costs nothing to make, very little to manage has every single function that a telco offers and it fits in your hand. (Plus it's a functional PC for many.) Garage techs have been messing around with them for years, thanks to the introduction of Android to the phone market. It's called cell based mesh networking with a light sprinkling of distributed super computing. Here check this out.
http://www.servalproject.org/
Install the app. The app acts as:
And all it requires is people installing it and knowing someone else that has it installed. Single free, open source application sole purpose is to aggressively take over ALL telco segments without mercy. For free, minus the cost of owning and charging an android phone. Just takes a community to make it work. So if given the decision to pay a couple hundred a month for a cell phone service and internet, or free.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.servalproject
Here's the app.
Game on.
//Cheap to run power wise, fully scalable, and anyone can install it with the click of a button to unshackle themselves from telco's.
Fascinating CPL.
The local internet. APPL is trying to do that for machines.
And there-in lies the difference.
Fine. Now make hardware that isn't pre-compromised from the factory, doesn't talk to a geo-location satellite when it bloody well wants to and has requisite external antenna and "foot-warmer" jacks plus physical disconnects on all I/O and we're in bidness.
It's not the f'ing software that's the problem so much as it is the bullshit hardware.
Please drive thru.
Even if you got through to a real person, medical records are not going to be released without your signature. Why are you trying to do this over the phone?
Kunstler is partially correct, but he doesn't look at the deep causations.
It's well organized irresponsibility. And therefore it's intentionally created. No one should believe, that the managers of a company do not freely decide to vanish from being reachable from the public. It are certain characters that do so and the selection process of the society has been established that way and it removes the upright, honest and direct people from leadership positions.
Why is that?
First it is always established in the political world via anonymous voting and majority decisions - instead of decisions of a PERSON. This removes the responsibility from the person to an anonymous group or mass.
Then this organized irresponsibility is slowly spread throughout the whole society (while the private market economy is affected in the latest stages, when the whole society is already "democratized" and degenerated) until the whole society is stripped of the idea of responsibility, authority, uprightness and honor.
This system is called "Democracy", which name is a lie in itself, because not the people rule, but the Money Masters, and therefore in fact it is a Plutocracy. And in the long run it destroys every nation.
You sir are correct. I feel obliged to point this out because anti-democracy advocates still take a lot of bashing these days, but the impulse needs to be nurtured and supported.
Democracy is always a code word for the rule of the money-powers, the banks and bourses. Money being a purely intellectual and extensional thing, it is capable of being multiplied without limit. It recognizes no natural boundary; all moderation and proportion (the essential structures of authority, honor, and uprightness) are overwhelmed by the intrinsic immoderateness of money as soon as the latter becomes the determining measure of social worth.
The last throes of every civilization are accompanied by the formless warfare of the money-powers. Politics and leadership fade in importance and their thrones are usurped by economics and the exigencies of the banks. These wars are the most horrifying of all because they are formless. Having no structure of their own and no reason to exist besides gain, the money-powers will harvest in a few generations what it took centuries of culture to build up.
Finally, when men are exhausted and sick to death of the intellectual world and its money, a new type of monarch emerges, the Caesar figure. He puts and end to the money-powers but it is not so easy to recover the joy and prosperity of earlier times. His task is the unwearying care for the exhausted world until a new culture can rise up from the ashes.
Technology and mechanization are the fruits of dollar worship. The higher up the pole people put the worship of profit the worse this will get. I'm not saying profit is a bad thing but once profit trumps all else, then it becomes a bad thing.
Once you are making a profit, you then need to consider what that next dollar of profit will do to your fellow man and community. If that next dollar of profit results in the cutting of muscle and not fat, then you are hurting the body. Sadly, corporations, with their psychopathic and sociopathic leaders, cannot see this. They are trained and economically rewarded to cut profit without concern for the consequences in the bigger picture.
Until businesses and business leaders step back and ask themselves if they really need that extra dollar in profit or would it be better to send middle management home for some quality family time (for example), things will continue to get worse
Also, have you tried calling "friends" lately? Seems they are always away or not in the right mood to pick up when they see who is calling. I think it is just another subtle manifestation of the breakdown of what used to be called "community" and the one for all and all for one idea.
Sorry to hear about metal poisoning from the hip implant. Was this a result of inadequate premarket toxicity screening by the manufacturer or improper manufacture or a buyoff of the FDA or whoever regulates these items? I know decades ago when I was still in medical practice in my little S California desert town, several patients and attorneys tried to get me allied with them in a lawsuit against a major utility company alleging that one of their facilities had poisoned the water with chromium salts. At the time, I didn't think that there was convincing evidence as the types of conditions I was seeing could be caused my multiple environmental agents other than certain metals (reasonable doubt). Eventually however the plaintiffs did win. If there was a precedent that chromium could be toxic shouldn't there have been extra caution by the hip manufacturer before using it as an ingredient in an implant?
Welcome to Daily Gripes, I'm your host James Cunstler.
Utter drivel.
Why is this guy bitching?
Like most Americans, he probably wants a system where someone else pays his medical bills (if not government, then his employer, or a 3rd party insurance company) and then he is surprised when he is ignored as a consumer?
Wake up.
I have shared an office with people who, sitting 7 feet away from me alone in the office with nobody else to disturb, will Instant Message me with a question, rather than just ask verbally.
People are unbelievably fucked in the head.
Yep. Modern life.
In my job in the cube farm at Megabank, we were always in meetings online with fifteen people in nineteen locations in twenty-six time zones, so everyone was always shouting at their phone and staring at the screen, and if you walked over to say hello and they seemed quiet, actually they were listening on their ear buds and blue tooth and would wave you away, so IM or email were the only ways to reach them anyway.
We did have a couple of fancy Cisco teleconferencing rooms that were never really used for their intended purpose, we called them the "holodeck" and would sometimes manage to put three or four local bodies into one to participate in the larger calls.
+ 1000 upvotes for Smegley Wanxalot
Imagine how many hours of "hold music" the NSA has stored.
OMG, two, no three, of my favorite topics all in one.
First the easy one, that nobody can be reached by phone anymore. WSJ columnist ran a story on this circa 2001, in part quoting my report and response. Thirteen years later and its worse than ever. This was NOT about phone robots and trees, that's actually yet another rant.
Second, medicine in the USA today. Great technology *exists*, but the odds of you getting it competently delivered and in some manner that you can pay for it well, are vanishingly small. Obamacare makes it much worse. Unless you can pay multi-millions out of pocket, good luck in any major hospital, make sure your affairs are in order and by all means sign the DNR they ask you for whether you're being admitted or just want to buy a Coke in the snack bar.
Best of luck with your lawsuit. The incompetence and thuggery in medicine are why I cannot get too upset at lawyers and their malpractice suits.
Third, getting back to the phone tree business - if they would only put the trees together competently they might be useful, but they are too deep, too slow, hang up on you, give you no valid choices, ... so why are they there? Because the same would be true of humans, I suppose. Here is the thing, bureaucracies never work and get worse with size. Phone robots fit this environment beautifully! I wonder if there is any solution at all.
Bloggers have to stoke the inflammatory rhetoric or get piled on and forgotten. It just gets more & more shrill with each passing year. And it slowly, subtly, relentlessly dumbs down with its constituents.
The only blog I can think of offhand that does holds its class and does not participate is Rick's Cafe Americain. There are a few others out there. I am glad I am not and never will be in this game.
I opened up my Windows 8.1 (an unfortunate purchase) and marvelled at how much it looked like the guy's screen watching Oh My Balls on Idiocracy.
And of course sites like Yahoo! have become open sewers of Amerikana ... "Joyanna be pissed with G-Plenty" making the social page headlines.
Beam me up baby.
I don't think it's fair to just malign healthcare and the banks. We are in a Fasco-Corporatist State and pretty much everybody is running interference with a shitty phone tree. You can add to the list the telecomms, the tbtf manufacturers, the govt. (all of it...), media (the worst of the lot...). etc. etc. ad nauseam. About the only people answering their phones these days, are people selling you something you will probably regret if you buy it.
Now, on the apathy front, it's more than just malignant degeneracy by tptb. It is also due to the fact that we as human beings are not particularly good at dealing with chronic over-stimulation. If you take the time to look around you, you will see the effects of this over-stimulation induced apathy everywhere around you. People can't even muster the strength to be respectful and polite anymore. This will continue to get worse until the final collapse prior to the singularity... ;-D
Do they actually MAKE products that don't have a built in regret factor?
Hmmm, Uhhhh, Hmmmm, I think they used to call it "Planned Obsolence"... Nowadays, we just call it noisy shiny crap...
;-D
Somebody going postal probably has a good chance of having a jury find them innocent if they were to shoot up an IRS or DMV office.
New life saving Hep-C treatment $1,000.00 per pill. Your money or your life asshole!
Tell me about it. I'm currently taking Sovaldi. F*uck you Gilliad!
I am a major science fan so I used to have some degree of faith in the medical system. But over the last 10 years or so I've used it a few times and in retrospect it has become clear that more often than not, the doctors and / or professionals I sought actually did more harm to me than good. Furthermore, they generally wouldn't listen to my account of what my issue was; seeming to be offended that just some guy could spend time on the internet and actually know more about his own condition than the doctor does... too bad, since I took all the pre-med courses and really know what I'm talking about -- I'm not just "some guy". I can figure it all out over the internet. It's not necessarily a criticism of doctors that I knew more about my condition than they did, since there's just too much information out there these days for one person to have at their fingertips. But they should have given some credit to my own research.
Anyways, my suggestion is to just educate yourself about medicine / biology and use the internet to make your own diagnosis. Use the doctors, don't let them use you. Then go to Mexico to get the treatment / drug if possible.
Hey Kunstler. It all started from 911 and the upsetting revelations of our very dishonest and misleading government who figured out that its easiest to lead public outrage and inquiries to brick walls with the federal logo on it rather than address issues patiently and honestly. Other agencies figured the game out, including the sec. The bullshit example our entrusted and respected agencies and officials have set for corporations and americans alike has had a debilitative effect on attitudes toward others we deal with. If those at the highest level of public service dont give a flying fuck about the populace, why should anyone else? Anyone in authority positions over others these days from doctors to bank managers have taken on the paulson-esque approach (the hank variety of course) and nothing will change until our leadership changes and leads by example.
I left the health field after 32 years. I worked as a therapist in orthopedic rehabilitation. During that time I have seen the level of care destroyed. Where I was given 50 minutes to treat a patient 30 years ago, now I am expected to get by in 20 to 30 minutes. During that time Medicare's control of the billing processes has created providers that provide what is paid for, and what is paid for well. Need it or not. Hospitals intentionally obfuscate their cost list to hide the fact that they knowingly transfer the cost of treating indignent patients forced on them by government, to private and Medicare patients. Documentation to avoid the government agencies wrath is the center of treatment, not the patient, and not recording what was actually done. The entire system pushes honest people towards "indiscretions" just to get by. My conscience will not allow me to "make sure all patients receive such and such treatment during their time" for reimursement. Modalities that have not been used in decades due to their lack of effectiveness have been hauled out of closets because they get paid for. Even getting to the phone was hard for me because I was given no time for such things. Measure it yourself--would you rather get 50 minutes of one-on-one treatment or 15 to 20 minutes of hurried "one on one" and package of crap modalities and procedures you won't even benefit from? (But don't worry, the insurance company is paying for them).
Lookout Mountain, same problem here in Switzerland with physical therapy which is also strictly allocated hourly by the insurance companies. It's a real shit situation for both therapists and patients.
When was the last time anyone here tried to get a mob boss on the phone? Or a politician? You want medical people to answer the phone? What planet are you FROM?
Many corporations have dummy phone lines for customer service; I spent 5 hours on one once just to see how long it'd take before I got really bored with it.
I have a high tolerance for boredom. I am a product of the skool sistim and a veteran soldier.
And perchance a masochist?
An involuntary masochist. Like everyone else alive these days...
A masochist enjoys the punishment. I may suffer, but I do not enjoy it.
Back in my days of financial sheepdom I had a Bank of America card with a 24-hour international customer service number that I managed to call collect. From New Zealand. After about 20 minutes of listening I just put the phone on the desk. I had called in the morning and when I left work the phone was still saying "Your call is very important to us. Please continue to hold and a customer service representative will be with you shortly". They disconnected the call sometime overnight.
That trick only worked once.
And let's not forget what seems to be a favorite phrase of all "phone-tree" systems: "Please listen carefully as our menu has changed". No shit.
Those armed "lunatics" who do school shootings are mostly employed by the CIA and FBI, who are not at all angry with the banks. Their job is to frighten you into giving up your guns.
Bingo. If they started shooting up Banksters and Politocriminals, they might get some sort of award. One wonders why they go to schools.......oh yeah, they are gun free zones unlike banks and the hallowed halls of congress. The seek the path of least resistance.
Hello. My name is Habib. I will be irritating you today. May I have your life history and every account number and password you have ever had so that I may pass you on to my associate who will ask you again for the same things?
Even if you get a real person, they are located in India or Phillippines. The fun only begins then.....