A Vietnam veteran who developed high blood pressure years after returning from service used to face a brutal catch-22 when filing a VA disability claim: prove that herbicide sprayed in a jungle 50 years ago caused a condition that millions of Americans develop for other reasons. The medical evidence was nearly impossible to produce, and the VA denied claims like these for decades.
That changed when Congress added hypertension, hypothyroidism, and monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS) to the VA’s presumptive list for Agent Orange exposure. Veterans who served in qualifying locations no longer need to establish a direct causal link between their diagnosis and herbicide contact. The VA now presumes the connection exists.
But the three conditions did not all arrive through the same law, and that distinction creates a split system that determines whether a previously denied veteran gets an automatic second look or has to refile on their own. Continue reading
Back when I was a younger man I used to outwork any two men – well, maybe not any. I did have a great friend, Irvin Harrell who’d go step for step with me on any given day of the week. But the amazing thing was that the older I got the more I saw young men who were doing half the work I used to do getting paid twice the money; by the time I hit 50, I could outwork any three – of what passed for men on any given day of the week.
Every spring, the US government performs one of its rare acts of radical honesty: the Social Security Board of Trustees publishes an annual report stating, in plain language, exactly when the program will run out of money.
No matter how bad things get, some skeptics will simply never admit that what we are experiencing is unusual. We live at a time of seemingly endless wars, growing global hunger, alarming outbreaks of disease and constant natural disasters, but they just keep telling us that everything is fine. Russia and Ukraine are absolutely pummeling one another, Iran and Israel are firing ballistic missiles at each other, and we are facing severe shortages of oil and natural gas in the months ahead. Meanwhile, global food production will be way down this year thanks to a historic fertilizer crisis, unprecedented drought and a “Godzilla El Niño” that is on the way. I just don’t understand how some people can be so cavalier about all of this.
For over 3O years, the federal government has been working to take control of a huge area of Northwest America via the Columbia River Basin plan. So, after all this time the “powers that be” in Montana and the federal government ignored the U.S. Constitution and approved the plan to remove said Constitution from a huge area of Montana (Washington and Idaho are a good part of it, also).
For generations, millions of Southern Poverty Law Center fundraising letters circulated around the country with pictures of Klansmen burning crosses on the envelope and begged donors for help in fighting the Klan. As it turns out those donors who contributed to the SPLC were paying for the crosses and the hoods as the Justice Department indictment of the organization reveals.
This may sound like another article about AI, but it is really about something older and larger. AI is simply the newest layer in a familiar story: each generation is promised that technology will simplify life, save time, and reduce friction. Lived experience often tells a different tale.
In LA, Mayor Karen Bass is a big fan of Fidel Castro and she is in the process of stealing the election from a far more sensible challenger – Spencer Pratt. In most countries around the world, election ballots are counted in a matter of hours. In California, it can take weeks – thanks to mail in ballot absentee ballots abuse. It’s imperative to rein in election abuse in the US, but in Congress the Democrats (and some anti-Trump Republicans) don’t want the ’Save Act,’ which will help end the abuse Democrats employ at the ballot box. 
Unemployment was hovering around 9%. Youth unemployment was a staggering 25%. And government finances were in the toilet, with official debt-to-GDP at 100% and annual budget deficits at nearly 8% of GDP.