Archive for the ‘Uncomfortable Truths’ Category

Philly’s COVID mess

Posted: February 2, 2021 by chrisharper in Uncomfortable Truths
Tags:

By Christopher Harper

Amid charges of chaos and corruption, Philadelphia’s plan to provide vaccines for the Covid viruses has been an absolute disaster.

Less than a month ago, Mayor Jim Kenney announced a major initiative with Andrei Doroshin, the CEO of Philly Fighting Covid.

What was the first indication that there might be a problem? Doroshin is a 22-year-old graduate student without any background in health. His organization included various college friends who had experience in technology, so they used 3-D printing machines to make face shields.

On October 7, he presented a slideshow via Zoom in which he described how he and his colleagues planned to create vaccination sites throughout Philadelphia to provide vaccines.

That’s when the second indication of a problem appeared. In the live stream of his presentation, Doroshin planned to manage five mass vaccination sites and 20 smaller sites scattered throughout the city. He claimed his team could vaccinate between 500,000 and 1.5 million people.

“This is the juicy slide,” said Doroshin, explaining the financing plan. “How are we gonna get paid?” He explained that the vaccine doses were free, provided by the federal government. But Philly Fighting Covid could bill insurance companies $24 a dose for administering it.

“I just told you how many vaccines we want to do—you can do the math in your head,” he said.

A month later, Doroshin made a similar presentation, complete with colorful maps and a $2.7 million projected budget, to the Philadelphia City Council. He said his team at Philly Fighting Covid had begun submitting plans for building out five high-capacity sites that could each take up to 10,000 patients a day.

Within days, the organization faced a variety of scandals. A nurse accused Doroshin of spiriting away doses of the vaccine to give to his friends and family. A City Council member and his family also got preferential treatment.

Ultimately, it turned out that a top Department of Health official gave Doroshin key information about how to handle the accounts and get the job.

The city never signed a formal contract with Philly Fighting Covid nor gave the organization any money, but it did provide its unofficial sanction and publicity. Most important, the city turned over thousands of doses from its vaccine allotment to the group and helped it find recipients by sharing lists of residents who were newly eligible for the vaccine.

Last week, the City of Philadelphia finally cut ties with Doroshin and his group. Still, the organization served as a major clearinghouse to register for vaccines, and now everyone has to sign up again.

Unfortunately for Philadelphia Democrats, they can’t blame Donald Trump for this incredible mess.

The Short Guide to Using MeWe, for formerly Facebook conservatives

Posted: January 30, 2021 by ng36b in blogs, tips, Uncomfortable Truths
Tags: , , , ,

Let’s say you’re a conservative, and after watching Big Tech attempt to single-handedly destroy Parler, blame Trump for inciting riots in the Capitol, and try to shutdown legitimate stock trading on Robinhood, you’re now really worried about social media censorship. You probably saw my previous posts on MeWe and NextDoor, and think there might just be no options.

Don’t lose hope! Since I couldn’t get Parler to test out, I double-downed and worked through the MeWe interface. If you need help building an account, there are hundreds of “How to get started on MeWe” videos to watch. After you create an account, do the following:

  1. If you liked memes, find a memes group. I would regularly browse Facebook and Reddit for memes. It brightened my days up and made me laugh. Reddit has become disappointingly hostile to conservatives, and Facebook is just part of the evil FAANG empire. MeWe has a pretty burgeoning list of meme groups. To find a meme group, on your home page click on “Browse Groups.” Simply type in Memes, and plenty pop up. I recommend “Meme’s From Everywhere” and “Funny memes and humor” as a start. There are plenty of darker and lighter groups, so experiment a bit and find what suits your tastes.
  2. Start a family group. A big reason for Facebook’s success is sharing pictures with your friends. My wife and I still want to share our family’s adventures with our friends, without the creepiness of Facebook sharing our pictures with others. To do that, we created a Family group and invited our friends to it. Now we can share photos and let our friends download and comment. We can even chat our upcoming plans to them. With your own group, its easy to get back to enjoying your friends as friends instead of focusing on where their politics don’t align with you.
  3. Replicate your interest groups. I never got into the groups on Facebook all that much, but on MeWe it really helps you link up with like minded people. I’m on a chainsaw group and I found a few home solutions for creosote buildup in my fireplace. The gardening group I’m part of helped me design a better fence for keeping the deer out of my garden. Its really easy to search the MeWe groups, find interests, and join groups.
  4. Tell the businesses your frequent. The ballet studio my girls attend uses Facebook to push out updates. That’s pretty common across businesses, and if you don’t have Facebook you miss out. We’re encouraging the studio to dump Facebook and switch to MeWe, since privacy for a ballet studio is pretty important, and the studio has a Christian background. Many businesses don’t even know there are other options, so helping them make the switch is key to breaking Facebook’s grip.
  5. Advocate for the missing features. I still need a livestream option, and neither MeWe nor Rumble have that yet. I also wish I could sell stuff on MeWe easily, but the privacy standards are pretty high, so NextDoor will have to suffice for now. You can communicate this to the developers, and with the explosion in growth they have, they are looking to keep their users. They are likely open to adding features, especially if its something their competitors don’t have.

I wish you the best on MeWe, maybe Peter will start a DaTechGuy group on MeWe so we can share thoughts about our favorite blog!

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Stop Defending Donald Trump

Posted: January 23, 2021 by ng36b in News/opinion, Uncomfortable Truths
Tags: , , ,
Wait, what??

I’m not a fan of killing babies. There is just something so inherently wrong with taking a small, innocent child and murdering them in cold blood. Maybe its my Catholic upbringing. Maybe its my experience fighting so hard to keep a kid, only to lose them after heart surgery. Maybe its because I actually enjoy (most) of the time with my kids. Or maybe its a combination of all these things and more. I don’t really know. But murdering young babies, including unborn ones, is pretty awful.

Murdering babies is so awful that its pretty high on my list of “things I care about when I vote for someone.” Other things high up on the list include not infringing on gun ownership, insisting on following the rule of law, and avoiding dumb overseas conflicts while stepping in when needed to maintain good international order when needed. There is a lot in the middle. For example, I can be persuaded on different economic models, so if one is a bit more “left leaning,” but it has some data behind it, I can be talked into setting down my Ayn Rand novel and trying something new.

I’ve had this world view for quite some time, and then Donald Trump became President. Increasingly, when asked how I could ever vote for such a vile human being, I would find myself saying “I know he’s not a nice guy, but…” Recently, my wife almost had the same argument with a friend, who challenged her on her views on abortion. My wife had written a long response, including the obligatory “I don’t like Donald Trump either, but I agree with his views on abortion.”

When I read that, something clicked in my brain, and I asked out loud “Why do we feel we have to defend Donald Trump’s personal life?”

I’m not related to Donald Trump, nor do I have any control or influence over his decisions. As a politician, I voted for him ONLY based on his positions aligning with my own on a variety of matters. That’s it. His personal life doesn’t mean anything to me. Neither did any previous President’s life.

Almost every politician engages in some ugly behavior, and the ones that don’t seem to simply don’t get caught or highlighted by the media. John McCain dumped his wife for a younger, prettier gal. Joe Biden swam nude around female Secret Service agents and can’t seem to keep his hands to himself. Plenty of elected officials engage in insider trading and abuse their elected position for money. I’m opposed to all this behavior, and it disgusts me when I see it. I’m also not voting for these people to spend time around my kids. I’m voting for them to advocate and legislate for the policies that I agree with, which will cause me to vote for people I don’t like personally.

That vote doesn’t mean I have to defend their personal decisions. After reading my wife’s response, I recommended she take out all the defense of Donald Trump and simply ask “Why are you claiming to be a Christian and yet think its OK to kill unborn children?” Because, really, that’s what it is about.

The next time you hear yourself saying “I don’t like Donald Trump’s tweets/behavior/rhetoric/bombastic nature/etc.” stop yourself. Stop defending Donald Trump’s behavior. It’s not your job to do so. Stay focused on why him, or any other elected official, earned your vote in the first place.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

The blame game

Posted: January 12, 2021 by chrisharper in Uncomfortable Truths
Tags:

By Christopher Harper

After hundreds—perhaps thousands—of demonstrations over the years in Washington, D.C., how could law enforcement officials have been so poorly prepared for the attack on the U.S. Capitol?

For the most part, that question has gone unanswered as the media and Democrats blame President Trump.

The chaos showed that government agencies had no coordinated plan to defend against an attack on the Capitol.

The U.S. Capitol Police chief, Steven Sund, said he asked his supervisors for the National Guard to be put on alert long before the rioters exploded into the House and Senate. That request was denied.

“If we would have had the National Guard, we could have held them at bay longer, until more officers from our partner agencies could arrive,” said Sund, who, along with other law enforcement officials involved in the mess, has resigned.

Sund said that House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving rebuffed the idea, arguing he was uncomfortable with the “optics” that such a move would bring. Senate Sergeant at Arms Michael Stenger told Sund that he should informally reach out to his contacts at the Guard and ask them to be on alert, Sund added.

Both Irving and Stenger have since resigned from their posts in the fallout of the riots.

Despite numerous postings on social media calling for violent action, various federal agencies apparently failed to take the rhetoric seriously.

Dozens of posts listed assault rifles and other weapons that people claimed they were bringing to Washington. People discussed what types of ammunition would be best to carry and whether medical personnel would be available to treat the injured.

“It was such an embarrassingly bad failure and immediately became an infamous moment in American history,” said R.P. Eddy, a former American counterterrorism official.

Despite all of the red flags, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser sent a letter to top federal and local law enforcement officials that warned against massive police deployments. Bowser had complained loudly about the large presence of riot police during last June’s protests by Black Lives Matter.

All of the requests for support came far too late, resulting in National Guard troops arriving hours after the assault started.

“We rely on Capitol Police and federal law enforcement to provide an assessment of the situation,” Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman said. “And based on that assessment that they had, they believed they had sufficient personnel and did not make a request.”

Ultimately, the rioters are responsible for the mess they created.

Now the politicians are shoveling the blame toward Donald Trump when the House and Senate leaders didn’t like the optics of a sufficient number of cops to handle the rioters.

As a result, the optics got a lot worse.

Older Entries
Newer Entries