The Future Rat Problem in Everett

 In Seattle they "took care of" the stray cat problem, reducing the stray population to almost nothing compared to other areas. In downtown Seattle there are virtually no stray cats at all.

But there is something that took over, two pests that carry diseases that can infect and even kill humans. Rats and pigeons, so many of them.

The pigeons are easy to spot, there are thousands and their fecal matter contains enough worms to kill off pretty much any wildlife. Not that any other type of wildlife is even possible in downtown Seattle, but the pigeons won't stay there, they'll spread out and infect surrounding areas until they've decimated all wildlife in western Washington.

The rats in downtown Seattle own the streets, at night you'll see them rummaging around the alleys. With rats they don't all travel at once, if you see one there are at least a dozen in the nest.

Scouts go out to get food and bring it back to the nest, most communal animals behave this way. As a species we learned that we cannot maintain the rodent population, so we adopted a species that would be perfect for reducing the pests, we call them cats.

But because we didn't want to accept the fact we were destroying the environment we started blaming the cats and dogs for the vanishing wildlife. In reality it is our own presence that is devastating the other populations, and only a few species can live in the environment we've created for us.

Of those species, only cats and dogs do carry very few illnesses that can infect us, the others can wipe out our populations in a matter of a few years. The irony being that many of the animals we've pretty much destroyed would prey on cats and dogs, coyotes, eagles, falcons, wolves, bears, etc.

Where cats and dogs can thrive, no other life can thrive but us, meaning we're the ones who drove out or destroyed the wildlife. Our very presence is has shaped the environment, and given we need wildlife it is time we accept the fact that nature gave us life which can live with us and embrace them.

The cat and dog, nature's response to our devastation of the wildlife, and we're destroying them now. In Everett I am starting to see rats who do not fear humans, rummaging for food without fear at all.

If you see one, there are a dozen in a nearby nest, and for every one you don't see there are several in the shadows watching you. This is the future of Everett, another rat infested diseased city just like downtown Seattle.

The scam of neutering and spaying is going to cost us our world, as we vacate these environments we have ruined it would take hundreds of years for them to stabilize and be reclaimed by nature. Given the lack of larger animals, without cats and dogs becoming the new organisms in that environment, many cities would never recover wildlife.

In nature the only constant is change, we've caused a lot of change and it's time we allow the change to just happen instead of swinging to the extremes that created the problems already. We will be replaced by rats, then when they go extinct because we're no longer here there will just be plants, we've already started a great reset of of the planet.

The Veterinary Scams in Everett

 So I am being pressured into neutering Rhodey, even though after 8 years of life it has never been an issue. I decided to get it done rather than deal with the pressure anymore and discovered a serious scam that all vet clinics are running in Everett.

First the "pre-surgery" exam is a total rip off. They charge for a full blood work when all they are concerned with are two levels, two specific chemicals in the blood which the vet glossed over and this cost more than $300 USD.

Then the surgery, at the discount vet it will cost almost $400 USD because he wasn't able to be neutered sooner due to Compass Housing making him ill. Other vets were quoting nearly $1,000 USD.

I am paid only $900 USD per month for disability. The housing authorities keep saying they have to be neutered or spayed, ultimately making it nearly impossible for a disabled person to actually keep their companions unless they are of perfect health and adopted only from the shelters after they are of a certain age.

Basically, the state is telling us what specific therapy we must have for something that is clearly a very personal thing even when it causes no harm. You see, Rhodey never sprays and he is never out of the apartment unless he's in my control, he is literally the most perfect male cat possible because I actually know how to care for and manage a cat, that is why they are my preferred companions, otherwise I would have chosen a different companion.

I actually understand felines better than I understand the ape known as homo sapiens, or as the low brow like to call us: humans. Humans suck.

The Corruption of Welfare - Not so Corrupt

There is a hidden problem with joining the future that I rarely discuss, because it's not a problem inherent in technology. The lag of upgrades.

Technology is a sink or swim endeavor, not something that can be done willy nilly or half assed. The most important thing an organization must do is how decent IT personnel.

To better understand this I will use Washington state as an example of how to do it wrong. The specific point of interest is the Department of Social and Human Services.

This organization is notoriously a mess, the majority of workers are lazy and callous. Visiting in person was always the best method to take care of issues, however, visiting in person has an inherent issue with convenience.

The Moyer traditional method is to call by phone, which should have very few problems. This office ha's average wait times of 60 minutes, even if no one if being helped.

So it was great to hear that they finally have an online method available. That is, until you visit their website.

The Washington state DSHS website is designed as poorly as those old Altavista websites designed for people's parrots and gerbils in the 80s. The Lansing page is bland and login links are obfuscated, and none of it is mobile friendly.

When you manage to find the link to create an account they demand you choose a password based on insane criteria, like including a special symbol. This  ensures that you will forget the password in the future.

So you sludge through their poorly conceived login system, but you still have no access to what they want you to complete.

For that, there is another account system you have to find, yes, it is also obfuscated. Then you create a second passcode.

Okay, now you're ready to begin the rebel process, if you can figure out which text word you're suppose to click on. Instead of obvious menus or links, they bury the correct links in the actual text that drones on about different languages and how to get help if you can't read this page in English.

Ladies and gentlemen, the stupid of that one page alone is a threat to the sanctity of the internet. We have not  reached the end of our misadventure yet.

Once you start filling out the forms, you glance at the URL and notice, it now looks like a document on its own. The session ID is probably about 1k of data on it's own, excessive barely covers it.

Assuming your browser and connection are both perfect, in which case you don't need DSHS anyway, you get through and just wait for the letter telling you their decision.

Most browsers or connections will crash, that session ID and the fact they use JavaScript in ways the spaghetti monster never intended.

If you are a poor person who needs this service, you load the browser back up an navigate to the page again. Instead of your application, you are greeted with a warning that you have to wait 30 minutes for the other session to expire.

Yeah, they don't use cookies, and they have no way of tracking your IP address. In server scripts your IP address is very easy to check, even some of the laziest coders will connect that with the session for reconnects.

Alright, 8 hours later you manage to get this all done and now you can rest easy knowing you have renewed your much needed benefits. Then you get the letter explaining that you no longer get any benefits.

You have to call them anyway, wait more than an hour on the phone listening to the annoying voice telling you that it's better to use the system that just screwed it all up in the first place. This is not how you join the future, or save the planet, this is the result of bad hiring practices that result in nerds working positions where geeks should be.

I type this after being on the phone for 55 minutes, my second time trying to call to figure out why my medical renewal was denied in spite of no major changes. I am still waiting for an operator, and I was using my cheap $15 phone's keyboard.

The Biggest Issues Are Our Smallest Problems

Seattle is one of the least green cities in the USA, in spite of claims made by our tourism industry. Today I want to take the time to explain this in depth, as well as warn tourists what not to expect when visiting this area.

Western Washington is very egocentric these days, people here think it's the best state in spite of some major, and often hidden, flaws. I spent most of my life in Western Washington, as I was growing up I saw a very different region. When we were on the piers we looked out over the Sound to watch the mountains, on clear days you could make out the tall trees.

Today, anything past the shoreline on the other side is shrouded in gray, details lost to the smog. What makes this matter worse is that the city governments continue to claim they are working to keep it all green. None of the policies are actually effective ones, as if they are only pandering for votes.

For example, in Seattle the solution to too much traffic became "let's build a tunnel so more traffic can pass through without having to see how ugly the city has become." I watch the vehicles pass by and most are SUVs or other large vehicles with only one person in them. Mass transit here is fading because Metro and Sound Transit are too greedy.

So our air quality suffers, so much that in less than a week my windowsill is covered in black soot from the cars alone. City and state officials still claim it's not that bad here, some even add insult to injury by claiming we are the most green state in the union.

Now, the nitty gritty stuff. Most businesses here still ban nonhuman animals from their stores based on the state's outdated health regulations. The homeless are often corralled into out if site locations and centers, but we still have a huge problem with people being unable to afford even closet sized apartments.

The cost of living in Western Washington is three time higher than our government reports to the federal government. Most of the homeless in Seattle work. You read that right, many have two jobs but still cannot afford a place to live, especially with the prices of food here and our severely defunded food stamp program ran by a bunch of corrupt and lazy morons who care as much about the people they're suppose to help as one does about dog shut stuck to the bottom of one's shoe.

Why did I revisit all this? Because it's a huge problem with a lot of cities and states in the USA, denial. Many city and state governments want tourism to make up for their bad budgets, but all that does is create a vicious cycle where the citizens wind up with a bigger deficit and the cost of living sky rockets.

By lying about the problems, most cities in the USA are creating a vacuum of poverty, sickness, and pollution. The solution must now come from the people, stop touring. It's that easy, if you want to tour, go to Europe, Canada, or Mexico. Force the local governments to acknowledge the problems they are hiding from, force them to consider actually improving commerce in these cities to build a sustainable economy.

In the USA, we have a tradition of only taking care of issues when they scream at us for attention, look how well that worked for Detroit.

Obamacare - Total Deception

Let's take a quick look at what one of the nearly forgotten policies enacted recently has actually done for the people, specifically, for the patient in need. When the policy was proposed, originally, I knew there was something off about it, there was too much press and too many conflicting explanations from both sides of the political fence. So what I did was read the thing.

Even after modifications made, the law itself is nothing more than a ploy to give insurance companies a free meal ticket. Sure, it stipulates they cannot discriminate for any reason, but if everyone has to buy the insurance they will still accumulate massive compulsory profits. Originally that was all that bothered me, and it's a pretty huge problem. That was before I had to deal with the medical industry at length, which resulted in me doing a bit more work on the issue.

I did one thing that patients are not suppose to do, I looked at my hospital bill. The prices for some things were clearly inflated for no reason. I detailed much of that in previous posts so I won't get into the specifics of what I saw. This was before the law was enacted, this is what the taxpayers had to pay because the doctors won't give me the one surgery I need to get back to work.

Then it hit me, if everyone has to pay into insurance, then no one will have any control of the actual costs of medical care ... except the doctors. Suddenly this house of cards had a basement, a dark and frightening one. The notion that a patient needs insurance to pay for something as simple as an exam is, on it's own, ridiculous. It would be like saying you couldn't buy a loaf of bread, instead you gave your money to this other guy and he bought it for you, but the grocery he went to would decide what bread you got, how old it was, and how much it cost.

That is what insurance really is, it's a middle man that can hide the actual costs from the person who is suppose to benefit from what the actual provider gets to decide is right. All rights to your healthcare, all choices, all your freedom is gone in this scenario. Other countries implemented national health care, and it works. It works because the patient still has control of their healthcare. What we have in the USofA is nothing short of a scam.

Of course both doctors and insurance providers would be on board, and they all were. The amount of profit that doctors and insurance providers get in this bargain is outrageous, especially considering how poorly cared for our patients in the USA already are. We spend more money on healthcare, yet have one of the lowest health ratings in the world, and it has nothing to do with our diets. It has everything to do with our complacency, accepting something that is presented to us on a silver platter, even if it's stale and moldy.

Shelter Life - A Time of Deep Insight

In previous posts I have stated I was "100% passable," that essentially means I have no traits that are considered opposite of my gender identity, even my voice and face offer no reason for anyone to question my gender. While this has produced a lot of complications and resulted in discrimination by the medical industry, it did offer me a very unique position in the shelter system while I was a resident of it. I had informed the staff of my situation, only to reduce the risk of discrimination from them, but the other residents had no idea.

This was not a deception, nor a lie, I never once lied to the residents, they just made their own assumptions and accepted those without question. Who was I to correct them, right? It was their belief and they were, and are, entitled to those beliefs, it is not my right to shatter their beliefs with facts and reality. At the time I just really didn't care, shelter life was about living through the day, and nothing more.

But this very unique position, being an atheist and transgendered, helped me to become more critical of what the women said, their choices of words and conversations. They spoke so openly around me, since I never added anything to the conversations and they believed I was just like them. What I had heard was appalling, today I speak against it all the time, working to dispel the myths and misconceptions I had heard in these times I was incognito.

The very few who managed to figure out what I was, usually by some rather aggressive curiosity, still did not see me as any different than the others, just more informed and a great source of information. The more educated women often turned to me as their encyclopedia of obscure information, information that they had not even considered studying until they met me. I was the sage of the shelters for women, considered wiser than my age, but you had to ask the right questions, or you'd not get the right answers.

The conversations of the others, the ones who never had any reason to consider me different than they were, had become the focus of my attention very quickly. There were other transgendered women in the shelters, one who's brain was scrambled by psychiatric medications for problems she did not really have, another was very young and passable enough as to not be seen as much of a threat, and the last that I knew of was an older one who had fallen prey to the nonsense and become an alcoholic. All the the three were always treated so well to their faces, the women behaved with respect and even acted like they were best friends of these women.

But when these transgendered women were not present, the vile hatred that filled the conversations regarding them was a shocking contrast. Many of the things they said about the one who had given up were so horrible that I cannot repeat them legally, or morally. Sure, she had become weak, fallen into a pit of despair, allowing the negativity of those around her break her own resolve. But that was no reason to hate her, it was only a valid reason to pity, and try to help, this poor creature. But the women honestly hated her, and for reasons that defied logic.

They would refer to her in the inappropriate gender when she was not present, and often say it was unfair she was allowed in their shelter. Before I left, I had already signed my lease and was working to leave so I saw no reason to remain the observer, I confronted one, asking why it is they believed a shelter was a place for sexual activity. It was at that moment they realized just who had been watching them for all that time, who was taking notes, and the look of horror on their face, the raw guilt of knowing they were complicit, was worth having endured hearing those horrible words they spewed.

Last I had seen, she was no longer a bigot, but instead treated everyone equally. Such a drastic change in a person, I was given hope for humanity by it. The damage she had done could never be repaired, but she was no longer a threat to humanity because of one simple question. The transgendered woman is still in that deep dark pit though, sadly, it does not appear she has the strength to lift herself from it, drowning her pain in alcohol. She could help so many people with her own story, if only she'd see the value of them.

The younger one was very stereotypical, one of those transgendered women who seemed to be only interested in sex and clothing. When I first met her I thought she may be a lost cause, that some people will just be stereotypes. I did speak with her, often helping her out when I could, offering a hand in friendship to her as often as I could. The other women seemed to have almost no interest in her, even when she was out of sight they didn't gossip about her at all. It was as if those who fit the stereotypes were somehow better than those who didn't, to them. That bothered me more than the gossip though, accepting that stereotypes are better is essentially saying we are all robots with predefined personalities.

I could never bring myself to tell her how much damage she was doing to the transgendered community as a whole, because even if she was a stereotype, it was still her choice to be who she wanted to be. It was that internal conflict that probably encouraged me to be so kind to her, it never occurred to me that sharing my story may change profoundly alter her perspective. She was an interesting person, often upbeat and without a care in the world. I was envious of her at those times, how even the worst of life couldn't touch her.

At that time I had started getting into a routine, which is the worst thing to do when living in a shelter, you become a permanent fixture of that culture. It felt like I had lost the will to fight, the will to cause change in the world. So I just regarded her as a distant friend, one who I would help when I could, when it was convenient. I should have become more involved in her life and formed a much stronger bond, but hindsight is always better.

She got out of the shelter system before I had, of course she had discovered what I was before that and seemed to regard me with some pity, and some respect. I ran into her one day, much later, and it was like seeing a different person, not just different, but a complete person. Her knowing me had altered her own perception of herself so much that I now saw a beautiful young, intelligent, and secure lesbian.

A rather surprising turn in what I had known, she had broken free of living the stereotype and become someone unique who no longer cared what society thought, and no longer behaved how society expected her to behave. I felt as if I had just seen a daughter graduate from higher education, at least I imagine the feeling was the same. I do not know where she is now, but I am certain she is well and happy.

The third transgendered woman, the one who's mind was destroyed by psychiatrists, I had never known her prior to that. Though I could say she is the second friend of mine that psychiatry has killed. You see, I always defended her, stood up for her even against those in charge. She is also what has encouraged me to actively fight against psychiatry, to take it to their throats. She was a very well educated nurse, before the psychiatrists got hold of her, well adjusted, pleasant. The people who knew her before they killed her would reminisce about how great of a person she was.

I had made friends with many of the staff, and one in particular had known this woman for many years, and seen what horrible monsters the medical community is to transgendered people. The staff member was a cis woman, one of those women who truly treated everyone equally and had no hangups at all. I am honored to call her a friend, but it was her who had informed me of the sad tale of the transgendered woman who was slaughtered by psychiatrists in the guise of helping her.

She had an emotional breakdown, a very common thing for many humans, our minds can only take so much stress before this happens. The best treatment for such a case is to place them in a safe environment and allowing them to just work it out in their heads. This is the only treatment that has ever worked, ever. But that is not what they did. Instead, the psychiatrist used her being transgendered as an excuse to declare her unfit, then force her to take medications that completely destroyed her. That is murder, it is a form of murder that is not only legal, but considered acceptable by everyone.

When she was finally released her mind was completely shattered. She could no longer differentiate between reality and imagination, her perception of reality was so skewed that she could not even remain focused on one task. She had a place to live, but kept returning to the shelter, the last place she had ever felt safe in. She had to be reminded to bathe, could not manage her own bowels or urination, and went on incoherent rants.

She would let very few people near her, trust was gone, and rightfully so. With no friends, and the one time she trusted some stranger they killed her, she was lost in a maddening cloud of reality and delusion. I still cry thinking about it, knowing full well that if I give them a chance, they will do that to me as well, just for being different then them. The rather peculiar part, something very few people knew, was that she would talk to me. Though I could only understand some of what she said, I listened to every word.

I always treated her with respect, always kind to her, never once did I mock or get angry with her. Sometimes her delusion would overpower her behavior, and she'd become a bit of a nuisance, others would scream and yell at her, demanding she be quiet and settle down. I'd glare at them for a moment until they were all silent, then calmly, politely, and respectfully ask her to calm down. The sheer anger of the other women when she would apologize to me for being too noisy was something of a mixed emotion. On one hand, it felt good to let them know that I was more capable of handling the situation than they were, but it was a horrible notion to think that they did not understand why my method worked better.

All our lives, the transgendered people are told what we should do, how we should act, what we should be. All our lives we are considered outcasts yet also expected to conform to being outcast. We are rarely ever offered any real choice in our lives, we treat everyone with kindness, treat everyone equally, and offer help when we can. But when we need help, when we are forced to put ourselves into dangerous situations, we are the ones blamed for it, always. We are scorned, tormented, beaten, and discarded. People feign friendship, then wish us harm when we are not present, insult us when we make even a tiny mistake.

Is it not enough that we have more problems to deal with socially? No, of course not, the medical industry does not care about us, they are just as abusive to us. When the safest place for a transgendered is in the shelters, there is something wrong with your society. It's not our problem, it's not our flaw, it's society that is wrong. When hospitals turn us away for simple needs, or worse offer us to the butchers we call psychiatrists, where can we turn for our health? When everything we do right is considered wrong, why should we continue to conform to your ideals? When we abandoned by those we once cared about, why should we care about anyone but our own?

Society does not teach us well, young and old, the transgendered community has no reason to regard society as important, nor valuable to us. Yet, we are all still have such kind hearts as to still hold out our hands in aid, not only to our own, but to other people. Who is the purest in a society, if not the one who society harms most?