Dilks For Virginia Governor 2025 Exploratory Committee

10/10/2021

If you have spent more than a nanosecond considering a vote for youngkin, read the following
and think about having a trump act-alike as Virginia's next governor...
“Governments are scrambling to get subsidies in place to avoid a tremendous political backlash,” Yergin said. “There’s a pervasive anxiety about what may or may not happen this winter, because of something we have no control over, which is the weather.”

Advocates for renewable energy say the global crisis shows the need to move further away from coal, gas and oil as prices for those commodities spike. Their critics contend just the opposite — that wind and solar have been tested and came up lacking.

09/20/2021

...That sets the scene and creates the uniqueness in which this research was conducted over forty-one-years. No one could know what I was doing. I was not interested in how people responded to a famous person with a brain injury. To the best of my ability, I kept my identity hidden. I wanted to observe how people responded to a person with a brain injury. I wanted to experience the real-world consequences of a person recovering from brain injury in a stressful work environment when things in that environment went belly up. The intense emotional recovery approach I was duplicating from my physical and cognitive recovery, i.e., repeatedly interacting with society under the harshest possible conditions until my response felt natural and appropriate. My forty-one-year emotional recovery experience is what constitutes my autoethnographic, phenomenological, reflexive research journey...

09/12/2021

“There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home,” Bush said in a speech at the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville. “But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols — they are children of the same foul spirit, and it is our continuing duty to confront them.” - former US President George W. Bush

"In their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit, and it is our continuing duty to confront them,” Bush said, seeming to refer to those responsible for the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.

09/04/2021

INTRODUCTION

The societal acceptance of war-based brain injury requires a clear and comprehensive acknowledgment of the discrimination against military veterans during their long and arduous physical, cognitive, and emotional recovery phases. To define the societal barriers attached to military veterans diagnosed with brain injury (Metraux et al. 2013), the Thesis uses an experience-based phenomenological and autoethnographic analysis through Levi Secord's concept of "do justice and to love mercy." Concluding that sayings like "The Silent Epidemic" demonstrate, as implied by (Fins 2017), (Herman 2011), and (Kreutzer et al.1994), brain injury community re-entry is more social than neurological, demanding enforceable standards addressing discrimination against military veterans with physical, cognitive, and emotional disabilities. By extending existing clinical frameworks of brain injury recovery, this Doctoral Thesis challenges the latter by introducing three inter-related concepts: "Developmental Construction Theory of Brain Injury Rehabilitation" (DCT), Brain Injury Social Contract, and the importance of Rehabilitative Endurance (Lorenz et al. 2018) (Mossberg et al. 2010). Therefore, an Interview design of nine participants from three cohorts (e.g., Medicine, Legal, and Financial) can combine with and influence themes from a qualitative meta-ethnographic synthesis of nine published brain injury IPA studies that introduce the possibility of Full-Time-Return-to-Work (Greenspan 1996) as an ultimate, not acute, recovery goal.

08/24/2021

The fact is that government processing time for SIVs crept up to 996 calendar days in the last quarter of Donald Trump’s presidency — almost three years. Thanks to Stephen Miller

The White House national security adviser claimed the Trump administration did not process any special visas for Afghans after March 2020. Not so.

07/14/2021

Tucker Carlson huddled in a low-ceilinged dungeon that had served as a holding pen for Africans bound for enslavement in the United States. It was a July day in 2003 in Ghana, and Carlson stood alongside some of America’s most prominent civil rights leaders.

At the time, the conservative commentator co-hosted the CNN show “Crossfire,” walked through the memorial, where a guide told how the shackled Africans who did not perish during the voyage were sold as human chattel in America.

The civil rights leaders prayed, cried, and sang “We Shall Overcome.” They peered toward the sea from the Door of No Return. But Carlson seemed strangely detached, according to two of the civil rights leaders who were present.

“When we got to the castle and the dungeon, it had an emotional impact on all of us, as Africans in America,” said the Rev. Albert Sampson, a former associate of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Then there was what he called “the tragedy of Carlson.”

Carlson did and said nothing, which was CNN's realization that Carlson did not belong at CNN...

07/11/2021

https://www.country1st.com/join2?recruiter_id=50045

In 2018, the Trump administration expanded the role of nuclear weapons by declaring for the first time that the United States would consider nuclear retaliation in the case of “significant non-nuclear strategic attacks,” including “attacks on the U.S., allied, or partner civilian population or infrastructure.” The same principle could also be used to justify a nuclear response to a devastating biological weapons strike.

But the Washington Post's analysis suggests that using nuclear weapons in response to biological or cyberattacks would be illegal under international law in virtually all circumstances. Threatening an illegal nuclear response weakens deterrence because the threat lacks inherent credibility.

I want you to think about this...

Our movement rejects tribalism and the dangerous political (and now social) culture that accompanies it. We are a movement of reasonable people of goodwill from across the political spectrum. When we band together -- seeking understanding, collaboration, and common ground -- we can achieve durable s...

07/07/2021

The following might explain a bit of my life's 40-year research path many of you unknowingly shared with me. Keep in mind the following is 540-words of a 100,000-word document.
Anyway...

"The putative protagonist in this research story is the only documented fully recovered survivor of brain injury (GCS

07/02/2021

Read the following to see why trump and people like him (and there are others) scare me to death and should scare you.

Cruelty is the Point...
"Trump summoned the most treacherous forces in American history and conducted them with the ease of a grand maestro."
Like many of us, Adam Serwer didn't know that Donald Trump would win the 2016 election. But over the four years that followed, the Atlantic staff writer became one of our most astute analysts of the Trump presidency and the volatile powers it harnessed. The shock that greeted Trump's victory, and the subsequent cruelty of his presidency, represented a failure to confront elements of the American past long thought vanquished.
In this searing collection, Serwer chronicles the Trump administration not as an aberration but as an outgrowth of the inequalities the United States was founded on. Serwer is less interested in the presidential spectacle than in the ideological and structural currents behind Trump's rise--including a media that was often blindsided by the ugly realities of what the administration represented and how it came to be.
While deeply engaged with the moment, Serwer's writing is also haunted by ghosts of an unresolved American past, a past that torments the present. In bracing new essays and previously published works, he explores white nationalism, myths about migration, the political power of police unions, and the many faces of anti-Semitism. For all the dynamics he examines, cruelty is the glue, the binding agent of a movement fueled by fear and exclusion. Serwer argues that rather than pretending these four years didn't happen or dismissing them as a brief moment of madness, we must face what made them possible. Without acknowledging and confronting these toxic legacies, the fragile dream of American multiracial democracy will remain vulnerable to another ambitious demagogue.

06/30/2021

Think hard about the following and then think about what the former president was saying...

“The current heat wave is another visceral reminder that the world is not moving fast enough to curtail the use of fossil fuels and reduce carbon emissions,” the Los Angeles Times noted in an editorial. “To prevent the worst effects of climate change will take dramatic change on the part of the world’s industrialized nations, most especially the United States.”

“There is a way out of this nightmare of ever-worsening weather extremes, and it’s one that will serve us well in many other ways, too,” climate action advocates Michael Mann and Susan Joy Hassol wrote in the New York Times. “A rapid transition to clean energy can stabilize the climate, improve our health, provide good-paying jobs, grow the economy and ensure our children’s future.”

06/18/2021

Racism, Brain Injury, and the CDC
J K Dilks
A 2016 Proceedings from the National Academy of Sciences cited a University of Virginia study that found 50% of medical students believed African Americans did not feel pain the way Whites did. The students' belief that African Americans required more radiology came out of the 19th Century. Who is to say an untruth about persons diagnosed with brain injury hasn't also sifted through to medical schools?
For example, the baseless theory that a fixed number of time-dependent recovery plateaus that, over time, have transformed into social identity and social connectedness plateaus being the primary foci of rehabilitative care, monopolized brain injury recovery schedules for years and is wrong. Erstwhile law-abiding citizens diagnosed with brain injury stuck in a justice system that upbraids survivors of brain injury mooring themselves to a catch-as-catch-can recovery approach that prizes the punitive over the rehabilitative is where the downfall begins. Hundreds are powerless and voiceless for every one of us who is not. Exposing survivors of brain injury to the harsh punishment and treatment given by the criminal justice system as though they are the feral few is inappropriate. Time and dedication to recovery, undeterred by plateaus, are positively related and independent of social virtue.
The plateau theory created an environment where recovering survivors of brain injury subserve economic privation when a person lacks the basic skills to maintain an acceptable standard of living as a by-product of brain injury. Economist Joseph Stiglitz expresses this market failure relationship in a different form: economies with imperfect information concerning qualities of individuals differ in fundamental ways from economies of perfect information.
What was once the world's most deregulated medical community, nimble enough to offer quality brain injury rehabilitative care, has failed. Beginning in the 1980s with the founding of the National Head Injury Foundation, the witting complicity of organizational brain injury leadership ultimately described in 1992 by the New York Times article, "Treating of severe brain injuries is profitable, but not for patients," exposed a cascading crisis, which denied hundreds of thousands of survivors their only opportunity ever to re-enter their community.

Every day that passed without science and modeling to provide any guide to understand the abstract brain injury recovery concept, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention became less relevant because it couldn't make common-sense recommendations. The CDC's overly timid approach plus the 1970s reported memoir of positive brain injury recovery I brought to national prominence through the 1976 Washington Post article, "Paralysis No Bar to Dilks," about an Olympic pole-vaulting hopeful who had arranged his entire life around developing an athletic skill he no longer had creates a troubling contrast.

The latter meant that by 1992 when NIDRR Director, Dr. William Graves, asked me to join the CDC team to help develop the CDCs brain-injury definition, the incredible sojourn in collegiality and comity associated with the 1970s contours of brain injury rehabilitation directed by Roger Gisolfi, MD, Neil Medoff, MD, and Occupational Therapist Alice Burton was lost.