Benefits Attorneys are Professional Gaslighters. Language Itself is Gaslighting. Discuss. Or Don’t, It Really Probably Doesn’t Even Matter.

I spent my entire brief career as an attorney trying to get income- and disability-based benefits for vulnerable people.  It was a grueling and traumatizing career track that I realize now (and kind of realized at the time at different times) was based not in actually helping people by understanding their circumstances and getting people what they desperately needed, but in cruelly gaslighting them and wasting their time and energy doing “intakes” and whatnot when they could least afford the expense.  I have written here before about one potential client that was referred to me by a medical provider because he said people were threatening and following him.  Turns out, this man was quite mentally ill and was having delusions and it was left not up to his doctors (who palmed him off on me) but to me, a young attorney, to put the pieces together for him and to figure out what was really going on, but not before wasting a significant amount of his time.

Of course, even if there were people following and threatening him there is little to nothing a lawyer could’ve done about it.  I told the man to call the police if he felt threatened, and as was the policy of the nonprofit I was working for at the time, got the man’s consent to speak with the referring medical providers about his “case” when what I really wanted to do was punch the lot of them in the mouth for failing their own patient so egregiously and palming him off on me like he was garbage and I was a can.  Don’t even get me started on how much I hated that job.  I wasn’t well liked either and after 10 months was invited to leave.  To be fair, if I hadn’t needed the money myself, having just quit a perfectly good job at a for-profit law firm (which I also hated) in order to take that one, I would’ve quit my dream job at this nonprofit after a couple of weeks once I realized what really went on there, and that “case” with the elderly Spanish-speaking mentally ill man is a decent example of what a day at the office looked like there.  Here’s another:

PSA: How To Report A Threat Of Violence to Increase Chances Of Arrest, Hold & Criminal Charges (Or, The One That Maybe Didn’t Get Away).

It really bothers me that I’m sitting on all this legal knowledge, experience and skill and there’s nothing I can do with or about it.  Because of the pain and symptoms of my disease I am definitely not physically or mentally able to practice law full time anymore, but as I learned early on, to my crushing dismay, there is really no such thing as a part-time attorney.  This profession is still a bros club which means that it requires long hours and plenty of so-called face time, exactly as much as you would expect in order to squeeze most women out of most of the best positions while simultaneously providing cover, excuse and alibi under which powerful men commit adultery, avoid emasculating and squikky domestic chores, and otherwise abuse their power at women’s and everyone’s expense.  Seriously, don’t let the relatively high rate of female law graduates fool you into thinking the law is a reliably safe, lucrative or accessible field for women because it’s definitely not.  Fuck me did I learn that one the hard way.

But you know what?  I’m not dead yet and I’m still breathing and conscious and pissed off enough to write this post so I’m going to write it.  Today, my upstairs neighbor had what was apparently a psychotic break and started throwing bottles of piss and garbage into my yard and threatened my life.  I called the cops and made a report.  He was arrested and removed based on my statement and that of other witnesses (crime victims are technically just witnesses ourselves) and my property manager cleaned and disinfected my yard at my request.  The cops, firemen, first responders and the whole damn town apparently turned up to watch the show.  What they didn’t get to see was the man who threatened and assaulted me get off with a warning or with no consequences at all.  Who knows what the second act will be but the first act saw my assaulter arrested and taken to the hospital first, then presumably to jail.

I am writing this post to give a practical, technical example of proper reporting behavior/content to victims who report threatening or violent behavior, which reporting will leave the cops with little choice but to arrest, hold and charge the perpetrator with a crime.  Little choice is not no choice of course and they could still let him out/off at any time.  That’s probably exactly what will happen in the end, but I gave them as little choice as possible and increased the chances of an arrest, hold and charge the best I could.  Here’s what I did.  The short answer is, you have to answer YES to both of the following questions if you want the incident to be taken as seriously as possible at the reporting stage, hopefully ensuring that your attacker is arrested and taken to jail, that he is held there, and that he is properly charged with a crime.

8th Anniversary of Fukushima Nuclear Disaster. A 3/11 Post. PS. Radiation Causes Inflammation and Autoimmune Disease.

Today is the 8th anniversary of the nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan.  On this day 8 years ago — 3/11/11 — Japan experienced a 9.1 earthquake and resulting tsunami that destroyed a large portion of its eastern seaboard and caused at least 4 nuclear reactors to melt down, irradiating the facility and surrounding landscape with nuclear fuel.  There were multiple detonations at the site in the following days which spewed nuclear fuel rods into the air, water and soil.  The contamination of the Pacific ocean as well as the air at the coastline of Japan quickly spread around the world particularly the northern hemisphere.  Obviously, the Hawaiian islands and the west coast of North America including Canada, the United States and Mexico were hit soonest and hardest. This official model of the path of the contamination plume is taken from NOAA’s website here.  NOAA is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (the US government).  Of course, since the nuclear material has yet to be effectively contained on site and likely never will be, the plume coming out of Japan has never stopped.  It has been an ongoing circulating plume starting anew and aggregating every single day via ocean currents and the atmospheric jetstream for 8 years by now.

Most people and especially most sick people do not have the energy or even the cognition needed to thoroughly research this event and to come to rational conclusions about it including the potential and actual effects on our health and lives.  There is also an active and lavishly funded propaganda campaign that’s been running on us in full force since the event intended to cover up both its occurrence in the first place and its completely predictable effects on the environment and in turn on our planet’s biomass (read: food, pets and ourselves) in the second.  So there’s that.

American Feminism Was (Is) a Psy-Op. Western Medicine Shored up Male Power. Discuss.

This post is about American feminism specifically since that’s the brand I know the most about and the one that affects me every day of my life.  I am not talking about other “feminisms” in other places but here in my own country where, after 100 years of feminist activating, including actual and/or perceived successes American women still face the following oppressive realities of living under American men’s particular brand of patriarchy:

1.  We are removed from natural food and water sources and rely on necrophilic men to supply us and our dependents with the material necessities of life including food, water and plant-based medicine;

2.  Our land including our soil, air, water and biomass (i.e. food, pets and ourselves) have been consistently poisoned since the 1940s (that we know about) with male-made nuclear radiation where this kind of ionizing radiation is known to be dangerous and not compatible with life or health;

3.  Physical and mental “health” have been medicalized where “health problems” are synonymous with “medical problems” meaning that in America, health and Western (capitalistic patriarchal) medicine are the same thing;

4.  All institutional power remains in men’s hands with only token female representation in positions of military, economic, academic, scientific, police, media, regulatory and all relevant political and social power in every area.  This includes 100% male control over Western medicine and therefore over sick and dying bodies.

This is a partial list and a specific progression but it will do for now.

What is a psy-op?  A psy-op or psychological operation appears to be a propaganda campaign including slogans aimed at a political enemy in order to get them to activate toward and achieve state interests.  For our purposes “state” interests is interchangeable with patriarchal interests and refers to male interests and male power achieved at women’s expense while “propaganda” refers to American media including representations of so-called feminist speech.  Working backwards, we can see that once feminists (of all people!) started activating towards and achieving patriarchal goals, there was indeed a propaganda/slogan campaign that preceded it.  Also for our purposes, we can presume both causation and intent where the result of this propaganda campaign — women activating towards male interests — was completely foreseeable and besides, if men didn’t like the result of women activating towards male and against female interests men could’ve stopped or changed it at any time.  Of course they never did.

Cannabis Refugee, Esq. One Year Later. (Meta Discussion)

As my readers may’ve seen or sensed from the recent comments and content on this blog, I have become disillusioned with the CRE writing project and may decide not to continue writing about my experience as a Crohn’s patient trying to survive outside the Western medical system that was not helping me and was only making me worse.  As far as I can tell, this project has not inspired any additional writing or critical thinking on this subject, my posts have not been widely shared or inspired much interesting feedback, and this work has not opened up any additional opportunities for me in the way of writing or activism.  Of course, those were not the reasons I started this blog in the first place but they are to be considered when looking into the future of this project and whether it is in my or anyone’s best interest that it continue.

My original intent in starting this project nearly one year ago was to document my experiences as a seriously ill woman for whom conventional medical treatments were not working including the social, financial and health-related fallout of this system that seems designed to control and punish sick people while we carry the blame and shame for Western medicine’s failures and even its lies.  At times my health and financial situation have been so precarious that I actually believed (and still do believe) that I am going to die here, alone and in the middle nowhere, and I wanted the truth about what happened to me to be known or at least knowable by those who would wonder what the hell could’ve possibly happened that led to that sad and lonely end.