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VETERANS POST

by Freddy Groves

OIG Holds the VA Accountable

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The Office of Inspector General for the Department of Veterans Affairs has been busy. Despite COVID, the OIG managed to keep working, and it has checked in with its congressionally required six-month report. The eye automatically zips to the bottom line: The dollar impact from its efforts during the past six months amounts to $1,923,417,054.

You don't need to count the commas; that's 1.9 billion dollars it identified in one way or another. For every dollar in the OIG budget, it got back $21 in return.

During the six months, the OIG made 109 arrests, issued 652 administrative sanctions, put out 124 publications, talked to 14,129 hotline contacts and made 389 recommendations to the VA.

The biggest category in that $1.9 billion is "Fines, Penalties, Forfeitures, Restitution and Civil Judgments," which brought in a cool $755 million.

The OIG put out some excellent reports during that time as well. Here are two:

-- The VBA (Veterans Benefits Admin) didn't test the skills of claims processors from 2016 to 2019, even though it's a congressionally mandated requirement. Not only did the VBA not provide additional training to many of those who failed the tests, it didn't even bother to give skills tests to 4,700 of the 10,800 people who are processing claims.

-- VA health care had no way to track patients who had received various medical implants, such as cornea or dental. That means if there was a problem or a recall, there was no system in place to find those veterans. Of 10,000 purchases of implant material, 2,900 purchases were either miscategorized or not even put in the system, making them impossible to track. For 18 months, 45% weren't tracked and $1.1 million in material (714 items) could not be located. Nearly 300 unrecorded items were found in storage.

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STRANGE BUT TRUE

By Lucie Winborne

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* Prior to becoming America's 38th president, Gerald Ford had a side gig as a model. In 1942, shortly after joining the Navy, he landed an uncredited spot on the cover of Cosmopolitan in his uniform.

* Scotland has 421 words for snow.

* Coca-Cola can remove blood stains. Pour a whole can into your wash, along with the blood-stained clothing and your usual detergent, then run a normal cycle. The laundry will come out stain-free.

* "Albert Einstein" is an anagram for "ten elite brains." Hmm, seems fitting to us.

* Sales data gathered by the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council indicates a strong link between the number of hot dogs and sausages sold at Major League Baseball stadiums and their team's ability to win games.

* Your nose is always visible to you, but your brain ignores it through a process called Unconscious Selective Attention.

* "Prison Inside Me" is a hotel of sorts in South Korea where people pay to be locked away in solitary confinement for 24 hours. "Jail mates" wear matching uniforms, sleep on the floor in 54-square-foot cells and are forbidden to speak to each other. Meals are minimal -- a steamed sweet potato and banana shake for dinner and rice porridge for breakfast. Like any good getaway, the prison stay comes with a souvenir: a certificate of parole upon completing one's stint in solitary confinement!

* Who says there's no such thing as truth in advertising? Nebraska's recent advertising campaign slogan, complete with T-shirts and coffee mugs, was "Nebraska: Honestly, it's not for everyone."

* Tickling has been divided into two types. Knismesis refers to "light featherlike" tickling, and gargalesis refers to "harder laughter-inducing" tickling.

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Thought for the Day: "There's something beautiful about keeping certain aspects of your life hidden. Maybe people and clouds are beautiful because you can't see everything." -- Kamenashi Kazuya

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CONTRACT BRIDGE

by Steve Becker

MAXIUM SECURITY

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East dealer.

Neither side vulnerable.

NORTH

[S] A Q

[H] 6 5

[D] A 7 6 4 2

[C] 7 5 3 2

WEST

[S] 8 7 6 2

[H] A 9 3 2

[D] --

[C] Q J 10 9 4

EAST

[S] 9 4 3

[H] Q J 10 7 4

[D] J 10 8 5

[C] K

SOUTH

[S] K J 10 5

[H] K 8

[D] K Q 9 3

[C] A 8 6

The bidding:

East South West North

Pass 1 NT Pass 3 NT

Opening lead -- queen of clubs.

A safety play is an effort by declarer to overcome a potentially unfavorable distribution of the defenders' cards. There are so many different kinds of safety plays that it is better to try to understand the principle behind them than to rely exclusively on memory or past experience.

Take this case where West leads the queen of clubs against three notrump, and East plays the king. South has no choice but to take this trick with the ace because he can't run the risk of East shifting to a heart. This brings him to the critical play at trick two.

If declarer makes the mistake of playing the king of diamonds at this point, expecting to score five diamond tricks, he goes down. As it happens, East has all four missing diamonds and now has a stopper in the suit. South still has a chance to make the contract if East has the ace of hearts, but, as the cards lie, the best he can do is finish with eight tricks.

Before doing anything at trick two, declarer should first ask himself: "What can defeat me?" It shouldn't take him long to realize that the only threat to the contract is a 4-0 diamond division. His next step is to look for a way to deal with that division if it exists.

Declarer notes that he cannot overcome the J-10-8-5 of diamonds in the West hand regardless of how he broaches the suit, but that he can overcome four diamonds in East's hand. Accordingly, he leads the three of diamonds to the ace at trick two, exposing the 4-0 break. He then returns a diamond toward his hand. No matter how East chooses to defend, his diamonds are neutralized, and South makes the contract.