government incompetence – The Burning Platform

JUST PADDLING WHILE THE EMPIRE BURNS

The phrase “fiddling while Rome burns” is an intriguing idiom, referencing the great fire which ravaged Rome for six days in 64 A.D. and the legend that Nero, one of the most sadistic, decadent, and cruel rulers of all-time, instead of taking action to stop the fire, played his lyre while composing a song about Rome’s destruction. The Roman historian Tacitus wrote that Nero was rumored to have sung about the destruction of Rome while watching the city burn but it’s likely this was just a myth.

The fire destroyed seventy percent of the city and left half the population homeless. There are those who believe Nero set the fire on purpose, especially after he used land cleared by the fire to build his Golden Palace and its surrounding pleasure gardens. Being a soulless autocrat at heart, Nero did what all feckless politicians do, he blamed the Christians (an obscure religious sect at the time) for the fire and had many arrested and executed.

Whether this story is true or just a parable, the messages are pertinent throughout history, and never more so than now. Occupying one’s time doing inconsequential things while a catastrophic event is underway is the ultimate in leadership failure. Focusing on trivial matters while your people are suffering during a time of crisis is the mark of an ineffectual irresponsible leader or one whose true purpose is to burn down society so it can be “built back better” in the form of a communist totalitarian state ruled by a globalist elite cabal.

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GOVERNMENT AT ITS FINEST

“There is a dedication to willful incompetence in many corporate government departments.” – Steven Magee

I recently concluded a month long interaction with multiple government drones working for the State of Pennsylvania. Some of them were friendly and partially competent. Some were truculent and unhelpful. The fact I had to contact them a half dozen times to get their screw-up fixed is par for the course when dealing with government workers. These interactions prove to me once again everything government touches becomes a bureaucratic exercise in futility. The attitude of government workers is consistently dis-interested and unconcerned with the problems of the citizens paying their salaries.

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Who’s The Real Threat To America? CIA School Bus Edition

How can the people of this country possibly think we need to give the government more power and control over our lives? It is simply mind boggling to me the ignorant masses could possibly think the millions of incompetent, bumbling, corrupt, power hungry, boobs in government agencies across the land actually do anything beneficial for our lives. Just leave us the fuck alone. Disband these worthless agencies and leave people free to fuck up their own lives.

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/01/2016 18:32 -0400

In the wake of the terrorist attacks that left nearly two dozen killed and some 100 people injured, officials in Brussels (not to mention presidential candidates in the US) are wondering whether police in Belgium should have tortured Salah Abdeslam last weekend.

To let Donald Trump and others tell it, torturing Abdeslam would likely have yielded valuable information that may well have prevented the attacks that left some 34 people dead last week.

Meanwhile, “the terrorists” are planning attacks on Belgium’s nulclear facilities – or at least that’s what the mainstream media wants you to believe.

As you can see from the following headline dump however, the real threat to peace in the Western world may emanante from sheer incompetence.

The Central Intelligence Agency said Thursday that it “inadvertently” left “explosive training material” on a Virginia school bus after one of its K-9 units completed a routine training exercise last week.

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Video catches two suspected Mexican drug smugglers climbing over border fence in front of Border Patrol agents!

Via Twitchy

Unbelievable.

A news crew in Mexico accidentally captured two suspected Mexican drug smugglers easily scaling the border fence and entering the United States near Nogales, AZ:

Wow! Drug smugglers caught on camera scaling border fence in Nogales during TV report! Full details on @CBS5AZ at 5!

Watch:

According to this report, the Border Patrol was only “yards away” when the two crossed into America and didn’t do anything. That’s allegedly a Border Patrol vehicle in the top-left frame:

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LETTER WE WOULD LOVE TO WRITE TO THE IRS

Dear IRS,

Enclosed is my 2015 Tax Return & payment. Please take note of the attached article from the USA Today newspaper. In the article, you will see that the Pentagon is paying $171.50 for hammers and NASA has paid $600.00 for a toilet seat.

Please find enclosed four toilet seats (value $2,400) and six hammers (value $1,029). This brings my total payment to $3,429.00. Please note the overpayment of $22.00 and apply it to the “Presidential Election Fund,” as noted on my return.

Might I suggest that you send the above mentioned fund a “1.5 inch screw”. (See attached article…HUD paid $22.00 for a 1.5 inch Phillips Head Screw.)

It has been a pleasure to pay my tax bill this year, and I look forward to paying it again next year. I just saw an article about the Pentagon and screwdrivers.”

A letter to the IRS

Via Political Humor

WITHOUT GOVERNMENT….

but-without-government-who-would-paint-the-turds

GOVERNMENT AT ITS FINEST

Via Knuckledraggin

WHEN THE SHEET HITS THE PLAN

Guest Post by Stilton Jarlsberg

obama, obama jokes, political, humor, cartoon, conservative, hope n' change, hope and change, stilton jarlsberg, obamacare, blue cross

Not long ago we reported on the absolutely nightmarish process of trying to get a new insurance policy through Healthcare.gov after Blue Cross Blue Shield killed our existing plan and – in a letter to the medically homeless – specifically blamed Obamacare.

But we eventually did get a crappy, overpriced HMO policy on Healthcare.gov, and on Monday our proof of insurance cards arrived. Which is when the trouble started.

The two cards (one for each of the senior Jarlsbergs) had the names of two different PCP physicians on them (in an HMO, your “PCP” is the alleged doctor who becomes the gateway to either allow or deny all other healthcare services). Despite the fact that we’d named another doctor during the application process – indeed, we were required to pick a doctor – the new physicians were complete strangers whose names indicated they “weren’t from around here,” nudge-nudge wink-wink.

A quick online search showed that both doctors had pretty dismal reputations. One of them only had office hours two days a week, and only for five hours each of those days. Good luck getting an appointment! The other doctor required a 45-minute drive and ran a combined “family practice and low-cost lasik surgery” center in a strip mall.

A panicked call to Blue Cross put us on hold for 50 minutes before ever speaking to a human. Finally, we were told that we could absolutely change our PCP doctors because the ones shown on our cards were “dummy doctors.”

Say what?!

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The Embassy in Bogotá: Into the Third World

Guest Post by Fred Reed

I wonder whether Americans realize just how closely the United States is coming to resemble a country of the Third World, not just in its corruption and attributes of a police state, but in the incompetence of governmental bureaucracies. Federal agencies don’t work. They are rotted by affirmative action. The bureaucrats are inattentive, unaccountable, anonymous, can’t be fired, and get paid whether they do their jobs or not. Congress is not interested.

A few examples, from my experience or that of people I know, mostly involving veterans, but typical.

Nightmare the First: Incompetence at State

A few weeks ago my wife and I, traveling in Colombia, managed to lose our passports, so we went to the US Embassy to get a replacement. I see very poorly thanks to an ancient federal war to enrich the arms manufacturers and a bungling naval eye surgeon–the feds, to put it mildly, do not get the best people in any field. Consequently Violeta had to fill out the forms for me to apply for an emergency passport.

In three separate places, she printed my name: Frederick Venable Reed. Venable. V-E-N-A-B-L-E. In my hearing, Vi spelled it out for the woman, letter by letter. And of course my passport records in the State Department’s data base spelled it correctly.

So we get the passport, $135, take it to the Mexican Embassy to start getting my residency proved, and fly to Santa Marta for a week of beaches and huge shrimp, expecting to find everything done on our return.

No. Instead, we find that the passport has my middle name as “Venerable.” If you do not travel much, this may seem minor. It is not. No country will accept approximations on passports. Far worse, it can look like a fraudulent document, and then you are in big trouble. So back to the embassy, which charges me another $135 to correct their mistake and, for complex reasons I won’t bore you with, ten extra days in Colombia trying to unscrew the downstream results of incompetence. Airline change fees, hotels, meals. It was not fun.

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VA Inspector General Report: 307,000 Veterans Died Waiting For Health Care

After seeing how the government manages the healthcare of our veterans, we decided to put them in charge of the healthcare for the whole country. We deserve to get it good and hard.

Guest Post by Matt Vespa

Before Dan Doherty departed, he wrote about how the Veterans Affairs estimated that hundreds of thousands of their patients had died while waiting for care. At the time, Scott Davis, a program specialist at the VA Health Eligibility Center, divulged a report that was conducted within his department and that of the VA Office of Analytics titled “Analysis of Death Services. It was released in April of 2015. Now, we the Veterans Affair Inspector General’s report has given the exact number: 307,000. That’s how many veterans have died before their application had been process by the Eligibility Center (via CNN):

Hundreds of thousands of veterans listed in the Department of Veterans Affairs enrollment system died before their applications for care were processed, according to a report issued Wednesday.The VA’s inspector general found that out of about 800,000 records stalled in the agency’s system for managing health care enrollment, there were more than 307,000 records that belonged to veterans who had died months or years in the past.

In a response to the House Committee on Veterans Affairs’ request to investigate a whistleblower’s allegations of mismanagement at the VA’s Health Eligibility Center, the inspector general also found VA staffers incorrectly marked unprocessed applications and may have deleted 10,000 or more records in the last five years.

In one case, a veteran who applied for VA care in 1998 was placed in “pending” status for 14 years. Another veteran who passed away in 1988 was found to have an unprocessed record lingering in 2014, the investigation found.

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