Hey!! Mr President:

I know you don’t give a damn about anyone but yourself and some of your offspring, but I hope you know that after you leave the office of the Presidency, neither you nor your issue will be able to get even a decent table at a mediocre restaurant.

Your name will forever be associated with lying, with incompetence, with dearth of intellect, with paucity of language, with racism and anti-Semitism (no, they won’t care that your pride and joy married a faux-Orthodox Jew -nope: we of the tribe ain’t buying it), with slovenliness and ultra-bad hair, with cheating at golf (an expression will be added to the panoply of golf-isms which include the word “Mulligan”), with bankruptcy that is preceded by a ton of bravado and, quite frankly, bullshit, with unchecked creepy sexual proclivities, with obvious lying about drug and alcohol use, with puffery and aggrandizement which is suddenly withdrawn when an individual who had been the beneficiary of same errs and tells the truth about you or one of your (mis)deeds.

Oh and much more: in fact, so much that one day there’ll be a nursery rhyme in perpetuity about you. So get ready for an eternity of notoriety, and yes, I know exactly what that word means.

A post I made in a message board for dentists

There have been many discussions about closing versus not closing due to the risk of disease transmission.

My post:

Three words: impending economic devastation.

For forty-one years I operated a solo private general dentistry practice. To say that the profession has metamorphosed is an understatement of grotesque proportions. Dentistry presently is wholly unrecognizable from that which I entered back when Jimmy Carter was President of the United States.

In those days it was a cottage industry: most dentists practiced solo or in a partnership with one other doctor. Many if not most of those partnerships failed badly, often leading to the financial and professional ruination of one or even both of the doctors. Dental insurance was considered a luxury for many working class individuals and was considered an assistance rather than a substitute for payment. Claims were routinely quickly reviewed and approved and processed. Frankly, things were relatively easy to manage and I might add, all forms were hand-written.

Of course, that is ancient history. Today, a dental practice is a business first and foremost. And there are a number of issues which are not addressed sufficiently in school. Chief among them is the notion of capitalization. If you require an explanation of what this implies, you are already in desperate trouble. The second is a mechanism for dealing with catastrophe. Many large businesses carry provisions for major problems which may arise through various means including business interruption insurance which actually compensates significantly, rather than a token amount.

With this horror of an epidemic spreading through the entire world, the lack of preparation for this is evident. It is no one’s fault: it is Capitalism. If you’re a fan of Capitalism,as I am, one must accept the notion of failure, albeit seemingly unfair failure. These are tragedies of personal loss. These are rending-of-clothes tragedies

But far worse would be if one of us were responsible for serious illness or death of a patient, staff member, or family. The old rule “First, do no harm” applies here. We must not hurt anyone. If we treat emergencies then that is laudable because we are weighing risks versus benefits. Doing a tissue transfer on a twelve unit bridge, well, you may be the judge.

These are awful issues with which we all have to wrestle. I wish us all good fortune and success in every aspect of our lives and practices. This is a terrible time for many including, but not limited to, us. Let us not place great tragedy upon our consciences. Do the right thing at the right time.

I'm projectile vomiting listening to this sociopath

Nuff said.

Wtf is that on his right side of his nose between

The nose and the cheek?

5:00PM. Center City Philadelphia

Like a ghost town. All the stores and restaurants are closed. The few people on the sidewalks are largely the”underclass”. I swear the last day I saw it like this was 12/31/1999. Very very creepy.

The only people coming in my office tomorrow are emergencies and the extreme neurotics who found the openings to their delight. Gonna be a tough day all the way around.

What did TS Eliot write? To paraphrase: The world ends not with a bang but a whimper.

Porn problems too!

Philly closing non-essential businesses

Just had conversation with a chief from a major Philly hospital

I trust this person explicitly. Those of you here who know me know I don’t lie or embellish when it comes to repeating conversations. This is what I gleaned from our conversation:

There will be serial deliveries of essential foodstuffs to stores. This may or may not include pet food. Use your judgement accordingly

By the end of the week we are going to be like Italy. Not enough equipment in hospitals so decisions will have to be made which are life and death.

People of advanced age who are infirm who catch this “likely will die” because their lungs will fail OR they will not be triaged to life support because of advanced age.

This is going to be a minimum two month ordeal if not longer. This individual is very pessimistic and normally is very pragmatic. I have known this person for 25 years.

I just had a flashback:

Many many years ago, the evening news programs would report on some problem occurring within the then-Soviet Union. They would present witnesses or principals in the event/tragedy and at the end of the report they would add what Pravda states in their news release from the USSR , and it would always be a giant untruth (read:lie) or variation of the incident which trivialized or negated its occurrence.

Now this is what trump and the gop do now. Just Orwellian in nature. Sick sad world

Concerns not being addressed by media:

Comorbidity and comortality:

Aside from the age range issues, millions of Americans have diseases or conditions which, many years ago, would be life-threatening, but now are reasonably under control via medications including chemotherapy for cancers. These diseases may well be exacerbated in an individual who becomes extremely ill. It is a fact that statistically there will be more serious illness and certainly more deaths because of the superimposition of this new entity. No one has discussed the relative dangers of specific diseases because we do not yet know and will not know for a long while. This is most concerning to me.