Lady and the Monkey

It was a day when about all I could do was listen to the story of Lady and the monkey.

I could have written about the son of a Federal judge, Salvador Casellas; the trial of the son is in its 11^th day, and everybody is talking about it. Nor is it looking very good for Casellas, who is accused of killing his wife as she sat by the pool one weekend morning last year. The wife is reported not to have struggled against her assailant; a neighbor—though admittedly a junkie—reported seeing a man driving a light grey Mercedes. Nothing too unusual there, but how often do you see someone fling a quite rare and expensive pistol out a car window? Fortunately, the junkie knew what to do: he went down to the drug punto and sold it for a thousand bucks (and some marijuana) to the pushers there. Oh, and today’s news is that the bullets match the gun that Casellas reported as stolen months before the murder.

OK—so a guy whom a friend told me was seriously entitled even as a child is—apparently—not getting away with murder. Anything else happening on the island?

Well, the teachers are furious, as are the judges—both groups got their pensions slashed. So the judges did what judges do: go to court. The teachers went to two very predictable allies—the fire-and-independence breathing archbishop and the new mayoress of San Juan. And the archbishop instantly invoked the magic word: without teachers, he thundered, there is no patria.

Astute readers of this blog will know: anytime you want to talk independence covertly, the word patria is invoked. So the archbishop and mayoress are getting together at the Colegio de Abogados de Puerto Rico, along with assorted others, to forge together “amendments” to the bill.

It’s hard to imagine what amendments could be done to the bill, but it’ll fun to see. In all likelihood, the teachers will propose to increase their retirement to higher levels than they were before the reform, and will lower the number of years teaching to be eligible to retire from thirty to five.

People aren’t getting it—we’re broke, and one more degradation of our credit rating will sink us into junk category; the party, as one economist put it, is over. Nor is it just the central government: El Nuevo Día reports that 16 of our towns have unemployment rates above 20%; one town up in the mountains has a rate of 27.5%.

“Mommy, the teachers begin teaching the moment the bell rings,” said the son of a friend of a friend, whose mother had sent him for a year to Alabama to learn English. The child was astonished—in Puerto Rico, the teachers chat in the hall for ten or fifteen minutes before ambling into the classroom.

So the question on everybody’s lips is whether the two-day strike that the teachers announced for next week will really only be two days. Or will the strike be extended? No one knows.

That said, it seemed easier, yesterday, to hear the story of Lady and the monkey.

“I never liked that monkey,” said Lady, who owns the coffee shop and two other businesses, and she showed me a picture of it: it was barring its teeth in a truly frightening way.

Nor was it an empty threat; the monkey attacked and nearly killed Lady’s stepfather. Among other things, it carried the stepfather up a tree and then dropped him. So Lady’s mother had to go wrestle with the monkey, who was pulling the legs one way as mother was pulling the shoulders the opposite way. Eventually, the monkey let go, and mother dragged the stepfather into the house.

It was a brutal mauling, with large chunks of flesh….OK, I’ll spare you. And Lady, then seven years old, was stunned

There was a bar next door, and one of the patrons, who was completely sloshed, decided that someone had to dispense the monkey. This he proposed to do, if he could get out the door. To no one’s urging, he left the bar, found the monkey, whipped out a gun, and on the first shot got the monkey right between the eyes.

“He was a hero in the town, after that,” said Lady.

“Nonsense,” said Saúl, who had stopped by to use the Internet, and who had stories of his own. “It was just a lucky shot.”

Lady considered this, and went on with the story. A hurricane arrived—these things happen in Puerto Rico—a few days later, and since everybody wanted to be close to the hospitalized stepfather, and nobody wanted to be up in the mountains, their veterinarian offered to take the kids. And Lady was having a hard time of it—having frequent nightmares and flashbacks of the monkey.

And one night she had a particularly bad nightmare, woke up screaming and crying, and went down to get some milk—not knowing that there were two refrigerators: one for food, one for dead animals. So what did she see when she opened the refrigerator door?

Right—the monkey!

We go on to talk about animals—which ones can interact with humans, which cannot. Crows, says Saúl, are very intelligent; snakes are—well—snakes. And he once knew a guy who had a 20-foot long python, as well as a six-year old daughter. And one day, the python began losing weight. The vet, when consulted, was stumped, until he asked, “were there any kids in the house?”

“The python is making room for your daughter,” said the vet, “so tell me what to do with it, ‘cause you’re not taking it home….”

We sit and ponder this for a moment; Lady has to go off to paint casitas, the ornamental plaster house facades that she sells.

“It’s like a sit-com, coming into this place,” said one of the employees. “You know that the regulars will be there, in their usual places, doing their usual things.”

Lady comes by, kisses me, tells me, “I love you.”

“I love you too.”         

That Old Devil Agenda (reposted)

Apologies to my dear Readers: no new post today. But because I promised to give you updates regarding yesterday's post, I will repost this one from August 19, 2013, which deals with a similarly unfortunate topic: the anti-gay agenda.... Thanks for understanding, and stay tuned!


 
It’s an old tune, a very old tune, perhaps a hymn tune. And the host of Focal Point crooned it very well: we must choose, America, between freedom and the homosexual agenda. And Scott Lively agreed—he notes that Hutchinson, Kansas, a town he deems “sleepy,” is considering adopting an antidiscrimination law for gay people. And that’s the thin edge of the wedge, the first step down the slippery slope. It started off in the 80’s with San Francisco and Madison, Wisconsin (yup, my hometown) and look what’s become of them!

I listened, dear Reader, because I wanted to know—how virulent is this man, who decided to run down to Uganda and tell politicians and cops and preachers the “truth” about the homosexual agenda? As you may remember, things got a little outta hand, and the Ugandans came up with a bill so draconian that the world had to face them down. There was that provision of death for “aggravated homosexuality.” In fact, even Lively himself was upset. As stated in the Wikipedia article on him, he wrote:

[M]y advice to the parliament was to go the other direction from what they did to actually go on a proactive positive message promoting the family, promoting marriage, etcetera, through the schools, and that if they were going to continue to criminalize homosexuality that they should focus on rehabilitation and not punishment. And I was very disappointed when the law came out as it is written now with such incredibly harsh punishments.

So how virulent was he? My initial reaction was, “not so bad,” but that may in fact make him more dangerous. He presents himself as a scholar—no one, he says, knows more about this topic than he. He poses as unbiased; some homosexuals, he asserts, don’t molest children, but many do. He distorts history; the very basis of homosexuality has traditionally been between an adult male and a youth or teenage boy.

He has a flip chart, on which he displays the varying types of homosexuals; in the case of women, there are the butches and the fems, occupying the middle of the line graph. In the case of men, there is the super effeminate male on the right. And on the left, one step past “super-macho?”

Monster.

Yes, these are they hyper masculine, no mercy homosexuals that were the secret power within the Third Reich. These were the homosexuals that killed the Jews, that released the gas.

History is a smorgasbord for Lively—he munches on the Ancient Greek tradition of man / boy relationships, he chomps down on the morsel that there were homosexuals in the early days of Nazism, but that they were rigorously suppressed later. Oh, and that half a million gay people died in the gas chambers.

No, he says, most gay people are miserably unhappy—we are drowning ourselves in alcohol and drugs. And we therefore have to drag everybody down to our level—to our pit of despair and degradation. And how do we do that? By recruiting youths, which is called pederasty.

Nor did Lively concern himself just with Uganda. He also went on a fifty city-tour through Russia, and guess what? Provinces and districts throughout the country began passing draconian laws, essentially similar to Uganda’s law. Here’s what Masha Gessen wrote:

The first time I heard about legislation banning "homosexual propaganda", I thought it was funny. Quaint. I thought the last time anyone had used those words in earnest I had been a kid and my girlfriend hadn't been born yet. Whatever they meant when they enacted laws against "homosexual propaganda" in the small towns of Ryazan or Kostroma, it could not have anything to do with reality, me or the present day. This was a bit less than two years ago.

Hate is a virulent message, true, but does anybody think that one man alone—little Scott Lively—is capable of jumping on a plane, spending a week or two, and getting such spectacular results?

Of course not—here’s what I wrote, citing Wikipedia, on January 22 of this year:

The Fellowship, through Representative Joe Pitts (R.-Pa.), redirected millions in US aid to Uganda from sex education programs to abstinence programs, thereby causing an evangelical revival, which included condom burnings.

In a November 2009 NPR interview, Sharlet alleged that Ugandan Fellowship associates David Bahati and Nsaba Buturo were behind the recent proposed bill in Uganda that called for the death penalty for gays.[75] Bahati cited a conversation with Fellowship members in 2008 as having inspired the legislation.[76]

And who is Sharlet? The author of The Family, which details the shadowy combination of religious fundamentalism, politics, and corporations. Yes, through Doug Coe and his “family,” American tax dollars have made life hell for Ugandan and Russian LGBT folk.

And here’s where—only very slightly—I begin to feel sorry for Lively. He’s been used, and he may have to pay, as he should. Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) paired with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) to haul Lively into court for hate crimes. And on Wednesday, 14 August 13, federal judge Michael Ponsor ruled that yes, the case can proceed.

Good for the judge!

So yes, it’s certainly true that someone out there has an agenda, but is it the homosexuals?

You decide.

Dutch Justice Redux

OK—I have email evidence that at 1:40 AM, I was busy occupying whatever mind I had at that time with the burning question: Was Prince Claus of the Netherlands gay, and if so, was he raping boys in the underground sex cellars of the queen’s personal lawyer, Frits Salomonson. Here’s a jarring excerpt:

I was brought to Salomonson in a black car. His house is decorated with lots of marble details. There was an enormous living room. On the right, a stairway down into the cellars. Leather hats, whips, chains, all that sort of things would hang on the walls. That’s when I saw prince Claus. I was under the influence of drugs and was penetrated. Mister Karel Maasdam abused me in Salomonson’s cellars.

Dear Reader, it has to be said: not everything you read on the Internet is necessarily true, though I can tell you that this blog is ruthlessly and insanely trustworthy. Therefore, I asked Mr. Fernández, who, in regard to the European royal houses, is a walking Hola magazine.

“It’s been rumored for years,” he said. As is the rumor that he had been photographed in gay bars in New York. Oh, and got thrown out of a diplomatic post somewhere or another because of a relationship with a man. And did I mention the rumor that the Dutch government is being blackmailed by Demmink, which accounts for the remarkably relaxed…

Wait, stuporous…

Try somniforesce….

What am I trying to say? That comatose people move faster than the Dutch judicial system when the vexing question of pedophilia strolls into view. Here’s what The Guardian had to say in a report from 2000.

Not just once but repeatedly, evidence had come to the attention of police in England and the Netherlands, that, for pleasure and profit, some of the exiled paedophiles in Amsterdam had murdered boys in front of the camera. Some of the evidence had been pursued. Some of it had been ignored. None of it had led to a murder charge. For a short while, the Bristol detectives thought they might be able to make progress in tracking down the truth; but when two of them flew to Amsterdam in the autumn of 1998 to pass on their information to Dutch officers, they hit a wall.

Terry had described the flat in Amsterdam where he had seen the video; he had named the owner of the flat who was, by implication, also owner of the video; he had provided the name of the man who carried out the killing; he had described events on the video in detail; he had provided the approximate age and the first name of the dead boy.

Dutch police said it was not enough: without the full name of a victim, they would not begin an investigation. Having fought their way through the swamp of inertia which surrounds British policing and prosecution of child abuse, the Bristol detectives had now hit the deeper swamp of virtual paralysis that afflicts its international policing. Within their own jurisdictions, there are now specialist paedophilia detectives - for example, in London and Amsterdam - who will work relentlessly to lock up predatory child abusers.

Yeah? Dutch police won’t investigate a murder without the full name of a victim? And by the way, what’s going on with the Dutch? Here’s the BBC from 2006:

A political party with a paedophile agenda has been registered in The Netherlands, prompting outrage among many parts of society.

The party plans to push for a cut in the legal age for sexual relations to 12 from 16 and for legalisation of child pornography and sex with animals.

Well, it raised eyebrows and ruffled feathers. But despite efforts to disband the party, a group of judges ruled in April of 2013 that the organization had committed no crimes and could not legally be abolished. Oh, and by the way, guess who was on the board of directors.

A priest!

Yup—here’s Huffington Post:

The order's top official in the Netherlands, Delegate Herman Spronck, confirmed in a statement that the priest – identified by RTL Nieuws as 73-year-old "Father Van B." – served on the board of "Martijn," a group that campaigns to end the Dutch ban on adult-child sex.

Oh, and what do the Salesians—the order to which Father van B belongs—do? Here’s more from Huffington:

According to its website, the Dutch arm of the Salesians has 14 employees and 400 volunteers and aims to help poor children.

Stayed tuned for tomorrow, when I confidently expect to announce the news: man bites dog…..

Dutch Justice

Full disclosure—in the sixties I would have been called a practicing homosexual. I since progressed through the decades from being gay activist to a radical queer to a militant gay radical to….

…you get the picture.

Second disclosure—one thing nobody has ever been able to call me is a pedophile. There are highbrow and lowbrow reasons for this; the high being that I’m in a monogamous relationship, the low being that I’m not into kids.

A further disclosure: I visited the famous red light district of Amsterdam thirty-odd years ago, nor was it a visit that gave me any pleasure. Why? Well, I was in my late teens, and very much in the dark night of wondering about my sexuality. Nor did it help that I was with two couples—my parents, who had a ferocious Midwestern sense of sexual decorum, and a Dutch couple, who were just a bit rubbing their European sophistication in. So we strolled along, my parents rigidly looking straight ahead, the Dutch couple casually looking into the windows and commenting on the virtues or—perhaps more likely—vices of the women displayed there. It was a walk of perhaps three blocks that lasted seemingly hours.

For those of you with insufficiently lurid imagination here’s a photo:

The thinking at that time was that prostitution was an age-old vice; better to legalize it and regulate it and—presumably—make a little money off it. And what are we thinking now? Well, here’s a quote from Wikipedia’s article on prostitution in the Netherlands:

The Netherlands is listed by the UNODC as a top destination for victims of human trafficking.[22] Countries that are major sources of trafficked persons include Thailand, China, Nigeria, Albania, Bulgaria, Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine,[22] Sierra Leone, and Romania.

Or how about this, from the same source?

When the Dutch government legalized prostitution in 2000, it was to protect the women by giving them work permits, but authorities now fear that this business is out of control: "We've realized this is no longer about small-scale entrepreneurs, but that big crime organizations are involved here in trafficking women, drugs, killings and other criminal activities", said Job Cohen, the former mayor of Amsterdam.[

Well, in a city where things got a little out of hand, the most out of handedness may be the case of Joris Demmink, who was or maybe is (my Dutch being rusty) the Secretary General of the Ministry of Justice. Oh, and who may have raped boys in Turkey in the 1990’s, as well as trafficked kids in Amsterdam.

Or maybe he didn’t because, guess what? Despite having six witnesses come forward, despite four police reports naming Demmink as a suspect, despite the statement of a Turkish policeman who was supposed to protect Demmink but instead pimped for him, despite a lawyer—Adele van der Plas—who has dogged him for most of a decade—well here’s what she said:

“There has never been a credible investigation into his behavior.”

She said the investigations simply are halted.

“The Dutch Ministry of Justice doesn’t take any child abuse case seriously at all,” she said. “All the pedophile rings in Europe have been investigated and some have gone to jail. Not in the Netherlands. The Dutch have been cited by the U.N. as a center of child trafficking.”

Nor was it just van der Plas who thinks so: here’s what Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey said in a congressional hearing last year:

That investigation has never happened – the investigations that have taken place have been a travesty and have done nothing to clear Mr. Demmink’s name. Rather, they have raised further questions,” he said.

So Demmink is or isn’t a pedophile. What do we know about him?

He’s the head of the Dutch judicial system….

Clara Haskil, In Spite of Herself

However bad your life has been or is, you might be cheered to know that Clara Haskil probably had it worse.

Not that she didn’t have some advantages; she started out life as a musical prodigy, and seemed equally gifted at the piano as at the violin. Here’s one description of her powers:

She was not yet five when a professor at the Bucharest Academy visited her parent’s home and played a Mozart sonata. When he finished she repeated the sonata perfectly, while simultaneously transposing it into another key, all without having had any musical instruction.

Right—not your average five-year old….

Later, she graduated with the Premier Prix from the Paris Conservatory, where she studied with Alfred Cortot (she had earlier stuided with Busoni). She began to tour, but then, at the age of 18, everything grounded to a halt: she spent four years in a plaster cast, trying to correct curvature of the spine.

Her health, it seems, was never great. In 1941, she had a tumor on her optic nerve, and had to have surgery by a doctor smuggled out of Paris. And all through her life, by all accounts, she was frail.

She also had a phenomenal memory, once playing four pages of a composition she had never seen but only heard years before. And also—very nice for a pianist—she had large hands.

Then, in about 1920, she was afflicted with stage fright; here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

Frequent illnesses, combined with extreme stage fright that appeared in 1920, kept her from critical or financial success. Most of her life was spent in abject poverty. It was only after World War II, during a series of concerts in the Netherlands in 1949, that she began to win acclaim.

Born in 1895, she would have been 54 before “winning acclaim.”

But what acclaim it was—everyone was raving about her: here’s Charlie Chaplin:

"In my lifetime I have met three geniuses; Professor Einstein, Winston Churchill, and Clara Haskil. I am not a trained musician but I can only say that her touch was exquisite, her expression wonderful, and her technique extraordinary." (Swiss Radio interview, 19 April 1961.)

Well, everyone was raving but Clara; here’s  one account:

In years to come I heard her many times, both publicly and privately. For these experiences I remain eternally grateful. As I left the hall, a friend who knew Haskil offered to take me backstage. She seemed inconsolable and unhappy, excusing her poor performance to anyone who congratulated her.

She lived through two world wars, and not without adventure. Here’s a vivid description of her escape from Paris (she was born a Sephardic Jew):

We left Paris at night from the Gare Montparnasse, which was plunged into murky darkness, and before dawn we left the train at Angoulême. Our luggage had gone ahead of us, since, as we expected to have to do a lot of walking, we did not want to be heavily laden. In the sinister railway station, cold and dark, we huddled together, speaking in hushed tones; then we met the guide who was to lead us through fields and woods to the free zone. A taxi drove us to the edge of a forest, where we listened to the scarcely reassuring advice of our guide. He was obviously frightened and told us that the prisons in the neighborhood were full of people like us who had been caught. One road was especially dangerous; we had to crawl across it for, not very far away, as we could see, was a German police station. It was the end of march. The wind was cold but spring had come; there were violets in the woods and birds were singing, but we were not in a mood to enjoy that particular morning walk. On every signpost was a skull and crossbones and a menacing warning to anyone who ventured into this forbidden zone. Our guide wheeled his bicycle ahead of us and we followed in a single file. Le Guillard carried his viola and Clara’s suitcase since she, after a night without sleep, was physically and emotionally exhausted. Each of us wore several overcoats and my wife carried our cat in its basket. Our hearts beat wildly; at last we had crossed that terrible road. I remember that at the exact moment that our cat started miaowing our guide showed us the road we should take to rejoin the railway; he claimed his fee, mounted his bicycle and rode off as fast as he could. Relieved and reassured at having survived this disagreeable experience we soon found a farm whose hospitable owners were used to groups of people in our situation and gave us something to eat.

At last, in 1960, she fell down a staircase in a Brussels rail station, and died in a matter of days.

May her death be happier than her life! 

That Well-Hated Company

Well, you have to admire Peter Schiff—as someone who has tried to engage in debate about gun control, I know that what he was trying to do in a Wal-Mart parking lot wasn’t easy.

And what, you ask, was he doing?

Only asking two questions: did they support higher wages for Wal-Mart workers? If so, would they pay 15% of what they had spent at the store today? He promised to give the money to the workers at the end of the afternoon. Oh, and good try—saying you had no cash! He took plastic.

Understandably, he didn’t get many people to donate….

Well, he comes right out and says it—we love those low prices, but most of us have no idea how tricky the retail business is. The iPad you bought at Wal-Mart? The company didn’t make a dime on it. In fact, Wal-Mart and everybody else makes no money on electronics; for Black Friday, they’re bleeding money, and people in the stores are begging customers to buy the cables, the stands, the insurance for the gadgets. That’s where the money is.

Think that’s bad? Wal-Mart is also the leading grocer in the USA, and that business is even worse. You’ve got perishables, for one thing, and the margin is miniscule. So despite the huge sales, the actual profit is—comparatively—small. So I believe Schiff when he says:

A raise to a $15 hourly minimum would increase its $26 billion annual payroll of hourly workers by 50%, or $13 billion per year. This is approximately 80% of the company’s total operating profit of $16 billion. Taking those increases from profits would devastate the company’s finances, place it a serious disadvantage to its competitors, and force a dramatic restructuring.  

So what is it that Wal-Mart does that is a red cape to so many liberal bulls? Sure, they pay miserably, but guess what? The supermarket next to me pays just as little, and has just as many part-timers, if not more. And I used to ask people who hated Wal-Mart which job they’d prefer: Wal-Mart or McDonalds? Trust me, not a lot of people chose McDonalds.

Still don’t think that Wal-Mart arouses deep passions? Here’s what Schiff wrote about the reaction from the Left.

The reaction I have seen online leads me to believe that the left wing of the political spectrum is home to some of the most intolerant, hypocritical, vindictive, and judgmental people in the country.  In the comments on my Facebook and YouTube pages I have been called some of the most vulgar names imaginable.  I, and all members of my family, have been wished slow and painful deaths, with some even inferring that they would be willing to hasten the process themselves.  Others did not think I should actually forfeit my life, just my liberty, as they thought I should be thrown in jail.  Many on the religious left have even offered prayers that my soul could find a special place in hell where my torment could surpass the anguish of the commonly damned.

The insults were not limited to me, but extended to woman who appeared in the video with me. She did not utter a single word, but merely stood by my side holding a sign.  Yet many made extremely rude comments about her physical appearance.   I thought liberals didn’t do that?

People often charge that Wal-Mart drives everybody out of business, an argument I find a little strange. Look, guys, this is business, remember? This is about competing for customers, who are driven by (mostly) price, service, and very marginally loyalty. And competition means there winners and losers—and what happens when you lose in business?

Is it the fact that Wal-Mart is and was an essentially southern company? Is that what’s bugging all the (mostly) northern liberals?

It’s true that Wal-Mart is rigidly, adamantly anti-union. And also true that at the first hint that employees are organizing, management calls a hotline, and a TEAM flies out to the store. At that point, the manager loses all control—the anti-union is calling the shots. And yes, as a former part of management at Wal-Mart, I had to go through the famous training on what to say—and not to say—to non-management employees.

It’s also true that this morning’s edition of The New York Times had an article about the Local 1 of the stagehand union. Here’s the headline:

Hey, Stars, Be Nice to the Stagehands. You Might Need a Loan.

Here’s a quote from the article:

Five stagehands at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center were each paid more in total compensation in 2011 than the highest-paid dancer at New York City Ballet, filings showed. And, in 2010, “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” paid its stagehands a total of $138,000 a week, while the principals and members of the ensemble earned slightly less than $100,000 put together, according to documents submitted to the state attorney general’s office.

Look—there’s something screwy when a stagehand can earn than the highest paid dancer at City Ballet.

So what is it about Wal-Mart that we hate? Let’s be honest: too many of us are living lives completely dedicated to possessions, to consuming, to have more and more for which we have to work harder and harder at jobs we hate. We’ve become junkies.

And Wal-Mart?

Our pushers.

Wisconsin is Open for Abuse

It’s the time of the year when my mood turns cynical, or rather, more cynical, since I’m never entirely free of the outlook.

But in this case, it seems absolutely justified, since the great—well, at one time—state of Wisconsin passed a law that forbids…OK, here’s the headline:

New state law conceals records of abuse, neglect in nursing homes

I came upon it via Ralph Nader, whom you can see and hear below, on his talk on the defining question / issue of our time: the corporation. And, in passing, he mentioned that tort lawyers are finding it difficult to sue nursing home chains. Why? Because the homes are owned by a corporation with few assets that are owned overseas (probably a tax shelter) by another corporation, which in turn may be owned by another corporation. So even if you sue successfully and get a judgment, can you collect? Nope!

Well, that was sufficiently interesting to turn off Nader—sad the things you can do cybernetically but not in real life—and google “tort law nursing homes.” And that’s where I came across the state law, which was meant to promote a more business-friendly environment in the state.

And what’s the essence of the law? Here’s the State Journal:

The law, which went into effect in February 2011, bars families from using state health investigation records in state civil suits filed against long-term providers, including nursing homes and hospices. It also makes such records inadmissible in criminal cases against health care providers accused of neglecting or abusing patients.

What does that mean? It means that if you—as did Joshua Wahl, in the article cited above—leave Mother in a home and she is lying in her feces for hours at a time, she will very likely develop a bedsore. And if, as happened to Wahl, the bedsore is never adequately treated, Mother may develop an infection that may turn into septicemia. And that’s life threatening.

Now, let’s imagine you are the incredibly slacking type who doesn’t turn Mother over every two hours and perform a thorough inspection along with good skin care. You shockingly assume that that’s their job, after all. What resource do you have, to make sure that old Mother is getting the proper care? The friendly smile of the home’s administrator?

You know, of course, that the state inspects the facility, and there’s that official-looking certificate on the front door (or next to it). And so you decide to go online and check if the Wisconsin Department of Health Services has any info on Mother’s nursing home (now euphemistically called a “skilled nursing facility”). Well, I did—and came upon a page which, in miniscule type said this:

Wisconsin Nursing Homes: State Citations Issued from 10/01/2012 to 09/30/2013 Information is current as of 10/28/2013

OK—I’ll save you a trip to search for the magnifying glass—it’s Wisconsin’s citation of nursing homes for an entire year, from October 2012 to October 2013. And guess what? I was looking up my own mother’s old nursing home, Ingleside in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin. So I was on the “I” page, and how many citations were there for an entire year for nursing homes beginning with “I” in Wisconsin?

One.

OK, it’s diluted but it’s there. Jack, my old journalist father, sometimes spurs me to action. And so I went page by page counting nursing citations in Wisconsin. I can hear the bated breath out there….

There were 28.

Here’s the link: try it yourself.

Yeah? Well, let’s do a posthumous—in my mother’s case—search for records on Ingleside. So I did a search in the “providers” page, entered the name, the county, and the city. And guess what? The search turned up this:

No records were found for your search criteria

(At least that’s what happened to me. It has to be said, however, that the talented Ms. Taí came up—somehow—with a helpful six-page report. Here’s the link, and good luck!)

https://www.forwardhealth.wi.gov/WIPortal/DQA%20Provider%20Search/tabid/318/Default.aspx

OK—Ingleside doesn’t exist, what about the Attic Angels, where I worked many a night shift?

Also not found….

Four Winds in Verona?

Curiously, the site found it! Wow, and there was a map!

What wasn’t there?

Anything else….

All right—time to trot over to Google, to check out how many nursing homes—including the phantom one that had sheltered my mother three times in three years—there are in Wisconsin. And I chose what must be an industry (word used quite intentionally) site. Here’s the dough:

Wisconsin contains 390 certified Medicare and Medicaid nursing homes. These nursing homes have a total of 34,876 available beds for skilled nursing residents and at the time when we updated this data 82% of those beds were full. The overall average Medicare 5 Star Quality rating for Wisconsin skilled nursing homes is 3.5 which ranks 13 nationally.

What! We’re only 13 nationally when in an entire year we only had 28 citations for 390 certified homes! Wow, those twelve other states must be immaculate!

Walker, with his “Wisconsin is open for business” slogan, seems to have gutted any effective regulation of at least nursing homes. And you know, I spent a portion of today inventing new, Walkeresque regulations. Things like:

Inspectors are encouraged to choose between on versus off site inspections.

Or how about…

Inspectors are under no circumstances permitted within 50 yards of the facility. Inspections should be limited to general questions—e.g. “everything going OK in there”—to passing staff members. Non-responses will be considered a “overwhelmingly positive.”

You know, I worked for years in those places. I know perfectly well that in even the best homes I could have found a dozen citations, had I been armed with the regulations. Considering a little time to rest up in a nursing home?

Enter at your own risk!

A Christmas Reform

It was close and it was bitter, but last night the senate approved the “reform” of the teachers’ retirement plan.

In fact, it couldn’t have been closer—since it passed 14 to 13 with four members of the ruling Popular party breaking ranks and voting no. And the final product wasn’t entirely without a few sweeteners. For one thing, teachers over 55 with 30 years of service actually got an increase in the minimum pension to $1625, and there’s a window for teachers with 28 to 30 years to retire with 70% of their monthly salary. Oh, and teachers got a raise of $25, as well.

“They haven’t been doing their jobs,” said a friend, just now. Her child is being home-schooled, but parents who can afford it send their kids to private schools. Why? Because if Missi or Míster—as teachers are known here; it’s a Puerto Rican thing—is sick, the school lets the kids go home. Or maybe home, since nobody may be there; so that means the streets. So if—unreasonably—you insist on knowing where your kids are and what they are doing, you shell out eight to ten thousand per kid per year for a private school.

Well, somebody came out and said it, namely an adviser to the president of the House; and here, dear Readers, are his intemperate words:

“Faltan cada rato. Trabajan cinco horas diarias. Tienen 60 días de vacaciones al año. Ganan más que el salario promedio anual. No pagan seguro social. Salen de la escuela antes que los estudiantes. Llevan 15 años con los mismos planes y materiales. Ah, pero ni pal car...jo le pidas que pongan de su parte porque te muerden, te gritan suciedades y te rompen las puertas. Sí. Así son”, dijo Hernández en una entrada a su cuenta el pasado 19 de diciembre.

El mismo día, Hernández declaró: “Y si después de pasar por 12 años por 12 manos de diferentes maestros no aprendes inglés, agradece a un maestro o a los 12 que no hicieron ningún esfuerzo por lo que se les paga”.

(“They call in sick. They work 5 hours a day. They have 60 days of vacation a year. They earn more than the average annual salary. They don’t pay Social Security. They leave the school before the students. They’ve spent 15 years with the same lesson plans and school materials. But don’t frigging ask them to do their part because they bite you, shout obscenities and break down the doors. Yup, that’s how it is,” said Hernández in an entry on his Facebook page on 19 December.

The same day, Hernández declared, “And if after 12 years of passing through 12 hands of different teachers you don’t know English, thank a teacher or the 12 who didn’t make any effort to do what they’re paid for.”)

Understandably, the teachers were howling—nor did it help that Hernández has a contract for $84,000, whereas the base salary for teachers is $21,000. Hernández’s boss came out and stated that the opinions were not his nor the House’s, and that he regretted that such expressions had been made.

Did Hernández back down? Nope, he responded to The New Day’s lead—which used the word insulto and yes, it means what you think—and said this:

No he insultado a nadie. Di mi opinión basada en mi experiencia en las escuelas donde han estudiado mis hijos. Sin faltar respeto a nadie". 

(“I haven’t insulted anybody. I gave my opinion based on my experience in the schools where my children have studied. There was no lack of respect for anyone.”)

Well, the governor has just signed the legislation, and the teachers? They’re threatening a strike, which—according to the governor—is unconstitutional.

It’s the usual story: who is to blame for the sorry situation we’re in? The usual culprits…

…everyone and no one!

Beethoven in the Dark Night of the Soul

I knew that they were there, and I knew that everybody said they’re a majestic, a towering, a titanic achievement—but isn’t that a little off-putting? Besides, I’m really not much into piano music—I really prefer string chamber music and especially vocal music. So I’ve given the Beethoven piano sonatas a wide berth—which is to say I never listen to them.

Big mistake, because the third movement of the opus 109 sonata below is one of the most beautiful compositions Beethoven ever wrote. And what an astonishing performance!

This is late Beethoven, written at a period when the composer had abandoned all hope of marriage or a family, and after a disastrous affair with his nephew. He had money and fame, but his health was poor, and his hearing was going—if not already gone.

You’ll know the familiar stories: he conducted the premiere of the Ninth Symphony, and had to be turned around to see the cheers and applause of the audience; he burst into tears. He went off to Heiligenstadt to recuperate—or at least try to—and there wrote his famous Heiligenstadt Testament, in which he wrestles with whether to commit suicide. He engaged in a custody battle for his nephew against Johanna, the 9-year old’s mother; the case dragged on forever, and the nephew turned out to be a disappointment.

What I didn’t know was that Beethoven had a group of devoted friends, all of whom were writing to him in “conversation books,” of which there may have been 400 (his first biographer, Anton Schindler, may have destroyed some of them). At any rate, the books that remain are a treasure for historians and musicians alike.

Nor did I know that the famous strong-willed character was quite so strong; here’s Wikipedia again:

Sources show Beethoven's disdain for authority, and for social rank. He stopped performing at the piano if the audience chatted amongst themselves, or afforded him less than their full attention. At soirées, he refused to perform if suddenly called upon to do so. Eventually, after many confrontations, the Archduke Rudolph decreed that the usual rules of court etiquette did not apply to Beethoven.[89]

Right—good to know!

The conventional theory is that late Beethoven is difficult to listen to, and it’s true that Beethoven goes places no one else had gone. But in the last movement of this piano sonata, Beethoven does something that few composers can do: he writes the music of a man who has suffered, gone through the suffering, observes it dispassionately, and refuses to back down. If any music could be called transformative, it’s this.