Idiot of the Week: "Brain Injuries are not Serious"

https://dartcenter.org/content/brain-injuries-remain-undiagnosed-in-thousands-soldiers

There are no words for this week's idiot. Military Times reports that 109 of our Servicemen and Women in Iraq received traumatic brain injuries as a result of the Iran bombing of the U.S. military post in Iraq. This week's IDIOT doesn't consider traumatic brain injuries "serious." Following the idiot's words is a link to the Center for Disease Control's info about what these injuries do to a person. STORY>


Trump says he doesn’t consider brain injuries sustained by US troops during Iran missile barrage ‘serious’
Meghann Myers and Patricia Kime
Click for ARTICLE in MILITARY TIMES January 23, 2020

President Trump said Wednesday that he didn’t consider the traumatic brain injuries reported by U.S. troops following an Iranian rocket attack to be serious.

On Friday, more than a week after Pentagon officials reported no injuries in a rocket attack on an Iraqi base housing U.S. troops, reports surfaced that 11 service members had been flown out of the country to treat persistent symptoms of traumatic brain injury. Tuesday, military officials acknowledged even more troops were being evaluated for injuries.

“I heard that they had headaches, and a couple of other things,” he told a reporter during a press conference at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. “But I would say, and I can report, that it is not very serious.”

CBS News

✔@CBSNews

When asked about the 11 U.S. servicemen injured in the Iran airstrikes, President Trump told @weijia he didn't "consider them serious injuries relative to other injuries I've seen." https://cbsn.ws/36nmHEI 

While most people who suffer concussion recover within seven to 10 days with appropriate treatment, severe or multiple concussions can have lingering and even lasting or progressive effects such as degeneration or brain changes that put aging veterans at risk for dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease and other neurological conditions, according to researchers at the Department of Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System.

The Defense Department has been grappling with the issue of TBI throughout the Global War on Terror, as the sometimes invisible injury can be hard to detect, service members can be reluctant to report their suffering and the long-term damage can wreak havoc on mental and behavioral health.
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Info about Traumatic Brain Injuries from the Center for Disease Control:
Symptoms usually fall into four categories:

Thinking/ Remembering	Physical	Emotional/ Mood	Sleep
Difficulty thinking clearly	Headache Fuzzy or blurry vision	Irritability	Sleeping more than usual
Feeling slowed down	Nausea or vomiting (early on) Dizziness	Sadness	Sleep less than usual
Difficulty concentrating	Sensitivity to noise or light Balance problems	More emotional	Trouble falling asleep
Difficulty remembering new information	Feeling tired, having no energy	Nervousness or anxiety

Some of these symptoms may appear right away. Others may not be noticed for days or months after the injury, or until the person resumes their everyday life. Sometimes, people do not recognize or admit that they are having problems. Others may not understand their problems and how the symptoms they are experiencing impact their daily activities.

The signs and symptoms of a concussion can be difficult to sort out. Early on, problems may be overlooked by the person with the concussion, family members, or doctors. People may look fine even though they are acting or feeling differently.

See Getting Better, for tips to help aid your recovery after a concussion.

When to Seek Immediate Medical Attention

Danger Signs in Adults

In rare cases, a dangerous blood clot that crowds the brain against the skull can develop. The people checking on you should take you to an emergency department right away if you have:

• Headache that gets worse and does not go away.
• Weakness, numbness, or decreased coordination.
• Repeated vomiting or nausea.
• Slurred speech.
• Look very drowsy or cannot wake up.
• Have one pupil (the black part in the middle of the eye) larger than the other.
• Have convulsions or seizures.
• Cannot recognize people or places.
• Are getting more and more confused, restless, or agitated.
• Have unusual behavior.
• Lose consciousness.

RELATED ARTICLE:  Brain Wars: How the Military is Failing its Wounded

April 15, 2011 by T. Christian Miller, Daniel Zwerdling, Susanne Reber, Robin Fields

 This comprehensive multimedia investigation delves into the ramifications of the signature wound of today’s wars: traumatic brain injury (TBI). Originally published by ProPublica and NPR  in 2010. https://dartcenter.org/content/brain-injuries-remain-undiagnosed-in-thousands-soldiers

MILITARY VOTERS: Remember this: No New School at Fort Campbell: The Money Went to Trump’s Border Wall

Attn: voters in the military: Remember this? 

No New School at Fort Campbell: The Money Went to Trump’s Border Wall

Families at Fort Campbell greeted soldiers returning from a deployment in 2015. Projects at the base and around the globe have been shelved in order to fund the border wall.

By Helene Cooper
Sept. 5, 2019

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WASHINGTON — For almost two decades, families at Fort Campbell, the sprawling Army base along the Kentucky-Tennessee border, have borne the brunt of the country’s war efforts as a steady clip of troops with the 101st Airborne Division and from Special Operations units deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq.

This week, the families discovered that they would not get the new middle school they were expecting so that President Trump could build his border wall. The school is on the list of 127 projects, touching nearly every facet of American military life, that will be suspended to shift $3.6 billion to the wall.

The Pentagon’s decision to divert $62.6 million from the construction of Fort Campbell’s middle school means that 552 students in sixth, seventh and eighth grades will continue to cram themselves in, 30 to a classroom in some cases, at the base’s aging Mahaffey Middle School. Teachers at Mahaffey will continue to use mobile carts to store their books, lesson plans and homework assignments because there is not enough classroom space. Students stuffed into makeshift classrooms-within-classrooms will continue to strain to figure out which lesson to listen to and which one to filter out.

And since the cafeteria at Mahaffey is not big enough to seat everyone at lunchtime, some students will continue to eat in the school library.


“Most of our students don’t know what it’s like to live in a world without war, where you don’t have to worry about Mom or Pop being killed,” said Jane Loggins, a Fort Campbell teacher who is the director of the Federal Education Association’s Stateside Region, the teachers’ union for the Defense Department’s education system in the United States and Guam. “The one big benefit of this school is that we try to support all those emotional needs.”

In normal times, the Fort Campbell middle school project would have a powerful political ally in Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader. In a January op-ed in The Louisville Courier-Journal headlined “Here’s How Kentucky Families Benefit From McConnell’s Clout in D.C.,” Mr. McConnell boasted that he had “secured much-needed assistance for Fort Campbell, Fort Knox and the Blue Grass Army Depot, helping the men and women serving there keep America safe.”

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But that was before Mr. Trump declared in February that there was a national emergency at the border with Mexico, allowing him to divert money from military projects without first getting approval from Congress. The next month, Mr. McConnell backed the president in a Senate vote on the national emergency declaration. (Kentucky’s other senator, the Republican Rand Paul, voted against Mr. Trump.)

Mr. McConnell’s office said that the senator recently spoke with Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper about the issue and is “committed to protecting funding for the Fort Campbell middle school project.” David Popp, a spokesman for Mr. McConnell, said that “we would not be in this situation if Democrats were serious about protecting our homeland and worked with us to provide the funding needed to secure our borders during our appropriations process.”

Asked on the CBS program “Face the Nation” in February about the prospect that the Fort Campbell middle school could be sacrificed for the border wall, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said the border came before education. “It’s better for the middle school kids in Kentucky to have a secure border,” Mr. Graham said. “We’ll get them the school they need, but right now we’ve got a national emergency on our hands.”


MORE: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/us/trump-border-wall-military-families.html?fbclid=IwAR1vdwlYI0QJ3y7zHwHoC4cplimyTpsxJDW_BbUnxcEZnDuJUAHdH94kxWo

Attn Military Folks: Dept of Defense to Lose Another $7.2 Billion for Trump Wall

More than 80 percent of people in the Military voted for the current resident of the White
House. Over the past couple of years, he's pillaged the military budget that he so proudly touted, to fund his own projects. He removed $2.5 BILLION dollars from the Military in 2019, and NOW he's taking another $7.2 BILLION from the Military. In fact, here in Maryland, the upgrades to Fort Meade and all of the surrounding roadways are STOPPED because he has stolen the money from the Dept of Defense. KEEP THIS IN MIND MILITARY FOLKS... when you VOTE. Your commander in chief has upped your budget and removed a LOT MORE of it to fund his stupid border wall. Here's the story>>>


January 14, 2020- Trump is planning to divert an additional $7.2 billion from the Department of Defense in order to fund his wall along the southern border with Mexico. If the plans go forward, it would be the second time the president has ordered that funds allocated to the Pentagon by Congress be diverted for wall construction.

Trump planning to divert additional $7.2 billion in Pentagon funds for border wall
By
Nick Miroff
Jan. 13, 2020 at 7:35 p.m. EST
President Trump is preparing to divert an additional $7.2 billion in Pentagon funding for border wall construction this year, five times what Congress authorized him to spend on the project in the 2020 budget, according to internal planning figures obtained by The Washington Post.

The Pentagon funds would be extracted, for the second year in a row, from military construction projects and counternarcotics funding. According to the plans, the funding would give the government enough money to complete about 885 miles of new fencing by spring 2022, far more than the 509 miles the administration has slated for the U.S. border with Mexico.

Trump took $2.5 billion from military counterdrug programs for border barrier construction in 2019, but this year his administration is planning to take significantly more — $3.5 billion. Trump administration officials also are planning to take $3.7 billion in military construction funding, slightly more than the $3.6 billion diverted in 2019.

Pentagon has warned of dire outcomes if military projects canceled for wall don’t happen

The move would bring the total amount of federal funds allocated to border fencing to $18.4 billion under Trump, who made the border barrier a priority during his campaign for the presidency in 2016. He also pledged to make Mexico pay for the barrier, delighting crowds at his rallies.