Polio is Back

I had a nasty case of whooping cough this summer, and the theory is the childhood disease jumped to adults after being cornered by vaccinations.  Almost nothing can be done for it, except wait it out, but you win a 30 year immunity for your efforts.  If so, then it will be what kills me at that point, so fine.

Now a version of polio is back, in kids vaccinated for polio.

Some think there hadn’t ever been enough cases of enterovirus D-68 to unmask the horrifying side effect; only 26 people tested positive for the virus in 36 years. Another possibility is that enterovirus D-68 recently mutated to become more likely to paralyze those infected.
For now, experts say that enterovirus D-68 isn’t enough of a threat to make a vaccine and that many people now have immunity to the virus from the 2014 outbreak. Plus, it will probably mutate again, rendering a vaccine that protects against the current strain useless.

That should read "isn't enough of a threat in America under capitalism to make a vaccine" for the Big Pharm demands about $800 million to develop a vaccine when Jenner first popularized smallpox vaccine at a cost of exactly... ummm... zero.    There is no reason, except for regulations designed to protect Big Pharm monopoly, that a vaccine could not be made.

But not to worry, we have medical tourism now, and just as the art of vaccination came to Jenner by way of an Englishwoman who learned it from Moslem doctors, so places not under the Hegemon can and will no doubt come up with not only a vaccine, but a cure.

But here is the problem, when one in five Brits were dying of smallpox as a matter of course, Jenner introduced the practice, and became world famous.  Napoleon bowed to Jenner although enemies, for vaccination countered one of the main killers in war, disease.

And that is just it: capitalism breeds war, and war always leads to a general suppression of individuals immune systems, and anyone of the billions of bigs hanging around us can get a foothold and make you sick.  WWI 50 million died of the flu.  In the concentration camps disease was the real killer, faster than the ovens.  So one version of polio is gone? In war you'll meet its cousin.

In relative peace we chase down disease pointlessly: we don't need vaccinations in peace time, and certainly not for mild illnesses we can survive in peacetime.  But come war, all of the vaccination is useless because the general immune suppression will give opportunity to another bad boy.  Immunizating for a half dozen poster-boy diseases makes for heartwarming confidence that science can fix all, but come war, all bets are off.

Pynchon said get them to ask the wrong question and the answer doesn't matter.  To immunize or not?  Wrong question.  Capitalism or not?  For with capitalism, as long as we have had it, we have had its necessary wars.  Free markets have provided anything good such as popularizing Jenner's vaccination, but capitalists, greedy for everything, pretend capitalism, not free markets, bring good things forth.

If we deregulated medicine, we'd have more better cheaper faster.  Right now we have snake-oil medicines and social-engineering in the hospital.  Let free markets reign.  In the meantime, there is medical tourism. 

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The Wedge: A Free Trade Zone in Health Care

Talk about escape to anarchy!  Out of the chaos of government intervention, some doctors are opting out to avoid the deleterious "health care" we have in USA, and recover sound medical practice.

"Learn How Patients and Doctors Can Escape Obamacare."

Well, we have had escape with Medishare and Samaritan, neither of which are insurance but both of which exempt one from Romney/Obamacare.  To escape, one is obliged to pay money, but at least it is escape.  The Medishare and Samaritan are both practicing Christian orgs, but the model works, so it could be adopted by wicked pagans as well, not just wicked Christians.  Find a Wedge doctor and have Medishare participation.

There are so many good medical folks who want out of the hegemons system.  This is encouraging. The next thing that is needed is a website that takes voluntarily submitted health care info and tabulates it for statisticians to study and find out what is really going on in medicine, not just what the hegemon allows to be known.

This is so encouraging, to learn that the medical field is no longer strictly SJWs advancing genocidal eugenics for the hegemon.

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White Anglo Saxon Protestants To Allow People Brown and Darker to Make Their Own Medicine!

Let's start with sheer mendacity:

It costs pharmaceuticals companies about $2.6 billion to develop a new drug. If these companies were not allowed to protect their investment with patents, it is doubtful that any new drugs would be developed. So patents are an important incentive.

This is simply not true.  They may spend $2.6 billion, but it costs no more to create a new medicine than develop a new candy.    The drug companies  certainly write off $2.6 billion, so they pay no taxes.    They can charge off the most egregious expenses, under the patterns and practices of capitalism, and then cause economic harm by limiting access to medicine.

Now, since poor countries cannot afford the medicines, USA taxpayers have subsidized the export of USA medicines to these countries, who in turn shipped them back Fedex one prescription at a time, to eager USA end-users.  This hurt profits.  So USA Republicans passed the medicare prescription act, the greatest single expansion of welfare in history of mankind.   The export round trip trade dried up.

Now that there is no market in USA for cheap drugs (taxpayers provide subsidies for the usa made drugs now, in USA)  Big Drug is now happy to allow the Congo and Cambodia to make their own drugs.  How about that!

White folk are allowed to exist first, and if there is room, then people brown and darker can exist.  But not until we are comfortable.  As MLKing said (and it got him murdered) "America is the #1 purveyor of violence in the world."

Is it any wonder people all over the world are sick of their politicians?

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Before You Kill Yourself - Dealing With Suiciders

White males 45-64, already a large group of suiciders, has grown nearly 50% in 15 years.

Men aged 45 to 64 had the highest increase in suicide rate among all groups, rising from 20.8 per 100,000 in 1999 to 29.7 in 2014. 

We live in a regime that believes there are too many people already, so there is not much support for people who are suicidal.  That far more soldiers kill themselves in USA than die in battle is an indication of this fact.  White males 34-64 are owed massive portion of the unfunded liability, so their misery and self-elimination is desirable to the Hegemon.  Both figure out they were lied to. Let the suicides multiply! Bring on the "refugees" to whom nothing is owed!

I've met doctors who care about suicide, and they say you can pretty much ignore chatter about suicide.  We all consider it occasionally, and who would not, given the world we are in?  Where you can pay attention is when the suicider starts talking specifics:  "I've researched shotgun suicides, and people often survive birdshot, but not buckshot, so I got buckshot shells when I bought a shotgun to kill myself."  Now that's serious.  A buddy of mine told me he had been saving up the parts of a speedball to go out wheeeeee!  That's serious planning.

What to do if your buddy is serious about checking out?  Don't argue with him, because it is none of your business and no reflection on you if he kills himself.  With my buddy, I simply noted his life was unique, and he should write it down before he killed himself.  This way you do not get in a pointless argument with him about whether he should kill himself, which would be tedious, but you do note killing himself before telling his story (or doing something valuable) would be wrong.  My buddy took eight years to write his book, it is not a bestseller, but he now says he never felt better, and is considering a second book.  Sometimes I wonder if I went too far.

So if you have a serious suicide on your hands, tell them before they waste themselves, you need a favor.  You are starting a business, and you need someone to make some sales calls, help you out with some rather tough steps, finding a customer.  Tell them not to worry, it cannot be screwed up, since this is start up, but it could be a huge help either way, in discovering market.  If your business gets going and when you are thriving, they can always ice themselves later.  But the least they can do before ending a miserable life is to help you out.

As an aside, if you read that article, and see where it notes our elders are not killing themselves as often as they used to, I'd just say because the old folks homes are killing them off before they get depressed.  I could not over-rule my siblings and my mother, but I could go in practically every day and see how even the most elite homes actively pursue homicide, by the book.  My mother caught on too late, but by then my brother and I had the 50 staff members treating her like Queen Victoria and utterly terrified of not making her the happiest broad money can buy.  I could walk in the kitchen and order a fruit compote (what is that?), explain it, and it would be delivered in minutes. Doctors and nurses nearly bowed when we walked the halls.  If your mom is in Bide-a-Wee Acres on the Termination Plan (do these homes have any other?), go in and show you care.  No one will mess with her.

Also, I have found this video a comfort whenever I was considering suicide, share it with the serious:



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All Hail IPR-free India!

This is not accidental, one of the agenda items of the powers that be is eugenics, getting rid of those Malthus and Darwin deemed excess.

Access to low-cost quality medicines plays a critical role in public health systems. In the last decade, the public health challenges facing developing countries have expanded beyond infectious diseases to non-communicable diseases (“NCDs”) in large part due to changing lifestyles and environmental risks. The World Health Organisation estimates that 80 per cent of all deaths from NCDs occur in low- and middle-income countries like India.

Never mind correlation is no cause, and anyway there is no correlation between population concentration and poverty, using BigPharma to control population is the point, as when the USA Centers for Disease Control ran the Tuskegee Experiments to not treat Americans of African ancestry for syphilis, to see what would happen.  As if 5000 years of experience needed to be checked.  How come they never included white folk upon which to experiment?  Well, not to worry, no one went to prison for the crime, and now ongoing secret criminal experiments continue and include white people as victims too.

Generic drugs cost a fraction of the monopoly prices charged in countries like the United States, and the presence of multiple generic competitors in India has reduced the price of cancer and HIV treatment by as much as 90 to 1,000 per cent. For instance, first-line HIV treatment that costs over Rs.16 lakh annually to treat just one patient in the U.S. costs the Indian AIDS programme approximately Rs.7,000.

Right.  And India needs to get busy making their own real drugs that work for patients worldwide.  In the meantime, the thugs in government who work for BigPharm are trying to blackmail India into participating in the continuation of the Tuskegee Experiments.

India must clearly reject the intellectual property laws which the United States is trying to force on us. These have led to an unprecedented health crisis in the U.S. itself, with spiralling prices of medicines under lengthy and multiple IP monopolies, with American insurance companies struggling to manage the cost of reimbursing expensive new medicines, all of which threaten people’s access to treatment. Current U.S. intellectual property laws have done nothing but enable pharmaceutical companies to charge exorbitant prices for medicines, such as over $1,00,000 annually for new cancer medicines and $1,000 a pill for new hepatitis C treatments. This has made health care simply out of reach for the vast majority of Americans and the issue of affordable health care has dominated the primaries in the ongoing American presidential elections. This failed model, which has allowed companies to profit from human misery and is even rejected in its own country, is not worthy of our consideration.

Go India!

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Everybody is Lying - A New Opportunity

If you approach any given problem, politics, economic, medicine, education...  the problem is everyone is lying.  People know it, and no longer trust the hegemon, hence the outlier (pun?) candidates.

I was speaking with an int'l banker of a top-notch bank and to my question as to what degree negative interest rates affected his work, he replied in effect nothing compared to the fact everyone is lying.  The facts used as a basis for loans are lies, so making loans is hard.  Well, that same bank is now state's witness to avoid prosecution on gold price manipulation, a form of lying.

Back in the 1970s I was radicalized on medicine by my godfather, and MD, who kept pointing out the science was fraudulent on medicine.  What about the watchdog, the FDA?  Regulatory capture: the regulators are owned by the regulated. He is now deceased but this would not surprise him:

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.”  – Dr. Marcia Angell, a physician and longtime editor-in-chief of the New England Medical Journal (NEMJ) (source)

and this...

“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”  – Dr. Richard Horton, the current editor-in-chief of the Lancet – considered to be one of the most well respected peer-reviewed medical journals in the world. (source)

Yes, we are all on our own.  We are now living in chaos, and the only route out is to escape to anarchy. Self-employment is anarchy, properly understood, for you serve yourself best by serving others best.

So what is the opportunity? let me go back thirty years when I was pursuing a master of arts.  My program obliged me to take a statistics course, something to dread.   The professor announced the first day it was absurd that we would learn statistics in one semester, so instead of teaching us to do statistics,  he'd teach us to be consumers of statistics.  He teach us to test the study, spot failures, look for valid and reliable, in essence when it was science and when it was junk.

Now, at the time there was a database called ERIC, in which resided any educational research that mattered.  The term paper was to find an example of science in that database and test all of the elements of the study, demonstrating we students knew good work when we saw it.  Well! by the end of the course, I was into a dozen studies all of which quickly failed to meet the test, so I visited the professor with the complaint that I could not find any science, so far it was all junk.  He had the most wicked grin on his face.  He replied, "That's right, it's all junk. You passed."

I'd say another problem with lending credit is truth does not matter, since there is no rational limit to what you can "fund."  The hegemon can fund it all.

You win a gold medal by 2/10ths of a second.  In the next 40 years, the ability to spot BS will be a decisive factor, and the ability to spot science exponentially valuable.  If we return to benecredit (interest-free, asset-based vendor financing), you'll only be funded if you are accurate.

The professor who taught the class has long since retired.   I certainly cannot teach his course.  If anyone knows of a good stats teacher who wrote a book of teaches online, I'd be delighted to promote him on this blog.  If you are expert and want to deliver a course through schools noncredit, I'll send you a book on how to, gratis.

Prerequisites to business start-up:  Ogilvy on advertising and statistics as a consumer.



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Health Care in Chaos: Escape to Anarchy

USA's health is getting progressive worse, and even immigrants suffer here:

In 2012, life expectancy in the US ranked 32^nd worldwide.  Strikingly, when poor immigrants come to the United States their health declines and they live shorter lives.  One immigrant succinctly said: “In Mexico, we ate healthily and didn’t even know it.  Here, we know the food we eat is bad for us.  But we eat it anyway.”

I recall when nearly no one had health insurance, but people were healthier and medicine generally more effective.  Charity covered those who could not pay.  To this day I pay cash, and refuse Rmoney/Obamacare.

Uninsured Americans actually report fewer health problems than those who are insured privately and publicly.  They use less health care services, maybe because they have had to learn how to stay healthy without doctoring. 

As a child with the gift of ADHD/ADD, I was often in the hospital getting sewn up and once did a stretch being observed for skull fracture. (My favorite question was "What happens when I push this button?")  No one ever talked money or worried about medical bills, because hospitals charged what things cost, not what insurance companies will pay.  Doctors made a lot, but so did florists and restaurateurs.

It is individual behaviors that determine the health of a population, largely a lack of exercise, obesity and tobacco use.  Most of the credit modern medicine takes for improved health numbers emanates from a steep decline in smoking rates, not an increase in the availability of new medicines or other treatments.

No kidding.

It didn’t help that government, which fashioned the Affordable Care Act, also produced the Food Pyramid that misled Americans to consume refined carbohydrates that convert to sugar in the body at the expense of fats that quell appetite.  Nina Teicholz tells the whole story in her best-selling book THE BIG FAT SURPRISE ... We have a massive diabesity epidemic going on in America spawned by the food industry that spikes foods with high fructose corn sugar (even ketchup, bacon, peanut butter) that induces sugar-craving yeast overgrowth, and other chemicals that cause consumers to lose control of their appetite.  The medical profession then treats diabesity as if it is a lack of exercise and lack of self-control when leanness in other nations like Japan and France is not attributed to frequent attendance at gymnasiums or the reading of diet books.  [American Family Physician 2001]
There is a disconnect between the food industry that is fashioning prepared foods that are spiked with corn syrup and other pleasure-center stimulants that encourage overeating against the backdrop of modern medicine that pretends to treat this behavior as a drug deficiency.  [American Diabetes Association]
Executives from the largest American food companies walked out on a 1999 conclave that explored why half of the nation is diabetic or pre-diabetic and is addicted to food.  They protected their financial bottom line.  [New York TimesFeb 20, 2013]  The diabesity epidemic is good for business.

That's capitalism, happy to kill its customers, indeed, intent on doing so under malthusian eugenics imperatives.  There is a way to end all of this, simply end the subsidies.

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Is The Drug Company Greed New?

A doctor working 500 years ago was complaining about greedy drug companies:

Among his ‘heretical’ actions were his opposition to the revered Galeno-Arabic system, the burning of Avicenna’s writings in a public square, and his attack on the greed of apothecaries
.
There is ever a simple solution: deregulate the drug companies, delegitimize them.  In a free market none of their depredations can maintain.

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Your Genome Map Breakthrough Needs Freedom

An exciting breakthrough in mapping your genome now needs freedom to reach its potential:

What in our genes causes us to have arthritis, diabetes or a cancer that doesn’t respond to treatment? To uncover the answers in the 6 billion bases of DNA that make up the human genome requires sequencing populations.
“If you have 10,000 people with Alzheimer’s and 10,000 people who never showed signs of the disease, the idea is that you could sequence both those groups and learn something about Alzheimer’s,” Wilson explained. “Because every human is different from every other human, you can’t do that with just five people with Alzheimer’s and five people without. You won’t have enough data to pinpoint the differences.”

A decade ago they adapted the dot matrix printer to do 10,000 medical micro-experiments in the time it took to do one.

Right now medicine is in lockdown in the USA, with the FDA owned by BigPharm.   They will want to keep a lid on this and continue their control of medicine, as the phone companies once kept control on communication.

Figuring out fast what ails you also informs doctors of exactly the precise dosage and combination of chemicals to help you.  And if you allow your records to go public on some "google doc" countless researchers will achieve validity and reliability (science) on what is working and what is not.

This breaks the nonsense argument it takes billions to create a medicine thus we need patents to help BigPharm recover its investment.

Today compounding pharmacies, the local drug stores that can make up your drugs to prescription on the spot will do very well making up the medicines your doctor designs based on your genome, and informed by the free market science out there...

Imagine...

Crowd source studies

Crowd sourced funding

Crowd sourced refereeing

open-sourced science

the mid boggles at the implications...

If we want to see an economic expansion as great if not greater (is not health more important than tweeting?) than the internet revolution, then we need to deregulate medicine that way we deregulated telephony in 1980.  That would do it.

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Health Care Options

The one largest inhibitors to new business start-up is a socially conditioned issues:  "health" "care" "coverage."  Why anyone would worry about this is beyond me, but there you have it.

As a kid, I was often in the emergency room being sewn up after one adventure or another.  I have prodigious scars all over my body, and plenty-o-teeth have been left behind.  And happily I lived in a very mixed neighborhood economically, for when I took a skull fracture, the consensus that I "walk it off" was countermanded by a neurosurgeon down the block who ordered me into the emergency room. One week hospitalization.

The cost was never a concern.  There was no such thing as "health" "insurance" outside the blue chips, and it had began in WWII only to get around wage and price controls.  My parents paid cash, but then hospitals were run by Catholics who relied on God to make up the difference between what they took in and what went out.

All that is gone now, crowded out by cheap EZ credit and destroyed by the overinvestment/bankruptcy game, plus regulation to keep out competition.  The crisis that followed is "solved" by romney/obamacare, soon to be replaced by Hillary Single Payer.

For the time being, there is a working alternative, in fact several, now priced at what the fine for non-insurance under romneycare/obamacare.  These plans are cheaper and better than romney/obamacare, yet exempt from the Hegemon's plan.

It is the genius of USA politics to allow conscientious objection to eliminate opposition, and then when the deed is done, to come back and wipe out this remnant.  I suspect this exemption is temporary, especially when a politician made of sterner stuff, Hillary, demands total compliance of all her subjects, or she will Libya them, like an ambassador.

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Obama's Precision Medicine Initiative

You can go back 15 years at least in my online class transcripts a find my monologue on tailored medicine, something so radical I was criticized for the idea.  Now comes the president of the USA:

Most medical treatments have been designed for the “average patient.” As a result of this “one-size-fits-all-approach,” treatments can be very successful for some patients but not for others.  This is changing with the emergence of precision medicine, an innovative approach to disease prevention and treatment that takes into account individual differences in people’s genes, environments, and lifestyles.  Precision medicine gives clinicians tools to better understand the complex mechanisms underlying a patient’s health, disease, or condition, and to better predict which treatments will be most effective. 

This is nothing new.  He wants $215 million to get in front of this.  We need exactly zero dollars to make this happen.  If we were to deregulate medicine, this is exactly where we would go, and it would revive the USA economy just as a deregulation-lite of telephones back in 1982 gave us the unforeseeable "new" of cheap cell phones and the internet & www.  Countless unemployed would find work immediately, our exports would boom, meritocracy would win out.  But when they want $215 million, they want it for lockdown, not for expansion.

What militate against this in USA -

The FDA...  the FDA is a regulator captured by the regulated.  I has hundreds of millions to spend on terrifying people that innovation will maim and kill them.  Their job #1 is to keep America safe for big medicine.

USDA... deregulation in medicine would extend to livestock, veterinarian medicine.  It is a crime to test for mad cow disease as a part of an export program.  It is a crime to acquire a mad cow disease test kit that was not gained by licensed permission from the USDA.

Patents...  Orwell warned the USA would use totalitarian thought control, Huxley warned it would use totalitarian medicine control.  50 years ago the question was which one was right?  Turns out both.  patens regime is existential in USA, and if medicine is for one person, then patents are moot.  That will never be.

We have draconian medical secrecy laws, not for patient benefit, but as usual, to hide Hegemon wrongdoing, such a the Tuskegee experiments.  A critical part of this will be checking the reliability of valid claims, to achieve science and progress, crowd sourced science (and experiments need crowd to become science.)  There is nothing to keep people from volunteering their information, but there will be Hegemon interference with people freely exchanging it or storing it.

Further, to benefit most USA would need to be a welcoming destination for medical tourism.  Under totalitarian fascism, our airports and country is in travel lock down, both ways.  Try leaving USA anonymously.

This is a non-starter if the government is involved, except to deregulate.  On the other hand, some other country that is trending toward freedom, say India, China, Russia, may very well create the milieu in which this will work, and attain the benefits therefrom.

This degeneration of the USA is a self-inflicted... as we applaud violence and welcome choices in our elections such as Bush/Clinton yet again, we just go deeper and deeper.

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The Free Market Treats Ebola

At a gown and tuxedo-studded Christmas event, I was speaking to a pancreatologist, an MD, who was explaining how when a liver quits he can get the pancreas to take over the functions.  He teaches at University of Washington, so he is no nut.  He and a colleague in the midwest have successfully performed the treatment on some 400 plus patients, and I asked how come it is not more widely used when the more common therapy (by far) is more expensive, less successful and more painful?

Essentially the problem is marginal and new has to overcome busy.

Getting cells from a liver to the pancreas done right takes a hot shot surgeon, so you need a team of an MD that goes to this diagnosis and cure, plus the hot shot surgeon.  There is no shortage of hot shot surgeons who would do it, and they love the challenge, but too few doctors who go to the diagnosis and cure.  How come?  Whole lotta medicine to learn, and core curriculum is "this class of disease is handled this way, and here is how." Medical school covers "best of" and then they have to practice within what they learned, of course, with no time for the marginal and new.

Next, doctors certainly can specialize in this and take continuing education seminars on the procedure (he teaches this often) but new and marginal has a problem in our litigious society: when 30% die under the standard therapy for which 100,000 people have been treated, it only takes one dead on a marginal therapy to make a lawsuit.  "Doctor, how come you treated "dearly beloved" with something unusual?"

I tell you know I know doctors who reserve cures for people they know won't bitch if it goes wrong.  There are no guarantees in life, but 98% cure odds are better than 12%.  Romney/Obamacare is built on the hopes and dreams of that minority of voters with the dreadful combination of entitlement and fear.  Medicine is going into lockdown in USA, bringing forth the worst fears of the ACA critics, but there is always medical tourism.  It was one thing to use travel to access nice clothes, but to have watched USA get to where another nice thing about travel is to get quality medicine is tough to bear.

So how do you overcome the problem of "original and new" overcoming "busy?"  A cardiologist took my seminar in San Diego (twice!) and I asked him about heart therapy out of Brazil in which a doctor was making a small cut, sewing it up, and curing a famous disease in USA at nearly none of the cost and much less pain.  The doctor said he knew the procedure well, was doing them all the time, the heart is just a muscle, the problem in essence just a hernia, and the cure like any other hernia, cut it and sew it up.  The problem was it was disapproved initially in USA, according to this cardiologist, because at about $100,000 worth of drugs for the USA alternative there was so much money in the USA way.  When the drugs went off patent, then it was allowed.

The cardiologist explained the heart of the problem of distributing marginal and new ideas to busy doctors.  Pointless compliance keeps them busy (romney/obamacare is pointless on steroids) but the big problem was referral fees are illegal in medicine.  He was quite cross that the lawyers who outlawed referral fees for doctors allow it for lawyers, in fact commonly sell cases to each other, adding incalculable cost to "justice and equity."

This is not to say that referral fees do not happen, of course they do, when a doctor prescribes pfizer drugs, he can expect all sorts of goodies from Pfizer.  Pfizer has a "how to" on their website in case anyone wants in.  And these are approved by the regulators.  And of course as we see time and again, even with it allowed, a fine of a couple billion is acceptable when the profits are in the tens of billions.  So here again, within the patterns and practices of capitalism, pain and suffering and death, killing customers for money, is commonplace.

The solution?  According to the cardiologist get rid of the non-referral laws.  If the cardiologist can kick back a grand to the family MD who refers a case to the cardiologist, then that family MD will far more prefer to take $1000 from the cardiologist than $1000 from Pfizer.  Simpler, easier.  Overall, the patient is out $15,000 (or insurance company) instead of society out $100,000.

But sadly, all practicing lawyers are government employees, without exception, and when it gets down to it, they will always defend the government program, which is currently the patterns and practices of capitalism.

Freedom to and freedom from is the essence of free markets.  To allow doctors the freedom to contract for fees and freedom from force and fraud when contracting for fees, is the free market answer to the system we now have.

(Kant spotted instantly and explained 250 years ago how the USA would fail given our legal system... in essence all lawyers being government workers and the conflict of interest... well, anyway, I've pointed this out before...)

Walmart will give you most  of your medicines at $4 a month if they are generics.  That is how cheap medicine is, but as long as we have patents, will have the FDA complimenting the lie that it takes billions to develop medicines, and BigPharm buying the politicians that keep the FDA in business and in BigPharm pockets.  "Affordable" "Care" Act is going to get you $1000 medicines at taxpayers expense for $500, when it is unlikely the best cure and 50% have no effect but 100% of the time the synthetics go through you and pollute the environment forever.  But that minority of fearful and entitled, mostly white progressives, directs what happens to the rest of us.

USA in this 50 years before and 50 after today will go down in history as the most brutal medically in the history of mankind.  Unspeakable suffering, and completely preventable.  People committing suicide, and now physician assisted, rather than cure or offered palliative care.

Now comes the Ebola "crisis" and a couple of doctors who have to leave the USA to do what pioneers such as Jenner could do before regulation, and the capture thereof by BigPharm.

If direct intravenous oxygen turns out to be successful, we can expect the government of Sierra Leone to announce to the world that it has a treatment for Ebola, as Dr. Rowen and his team are going there at the invitation of its President. That will make international news very quickly. On the other hand, there are commercial interests that stand to make billions, maybe trillions of dollars, on Ebola treatment drugs and/or vaccines, whether such drugs are effective or not. So it would be naïve to think that they will not make a sincere effort to suppress inexpensive oxidation therapies for the treatment of Ebola and other potential pandemic diseases…
“Will it be suppressed? Probably yes,” Dr. Rowen says. “I’m not afraid to tell you that my biggest concern in this is that we will be in greater danger from those interests than we will be from the Ebola itself… But you know, it’s something that I have to do. All of us who are going, we’re being guided by something much higher. It’s something that I have to do no matter the risk, because the risk is far greater if we don’t do it.”

Note they will test a cure.  Note they fear for their lives from the capitalists.  And here is the problem, if they mysteriously contract ebola and die, there is no knowing what happened.  And it gets more complicated, because if their therapy does cure patients (technically there are no cures for viruses, your immune system just wins the fight), then that is just valid, in that case not yet proven reliable.  You need many doctors in many places replicating the therapy before you get validity and reliability, and thus science.

This is not a race against time, it is a race against capitalism, the patent regime, and its sycophants.

A country that runs many exposed medical crimes, such as the Tuskegee experiments, and then off-shores them to places such as Guatemala as well, and in which no one is ever prosecuted, is not going to stop.  Doctors know this.  Some are committed to medicine in the face of unspeakable evil.

Right wing Christians love to use the most tendentious of translation of Romans 13 to promote servitude to the state.  But here is what Daniel says, 4:17 -

Daniel 4:17King James Version (KJV)¹⁷ This matter is by the decree of the watchers, and the demand by the word of the holy ones: to the intent that the living may know that the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will, and setteth up over it the basest of men.

And Peter speaking to the hegemon, Acts 5, v 29 - 32 RSVCE,

²⁹ But Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than men. ³⁰ The God of our fathers raised Jesus whom you killed by hanging him on a tree. ³¹ God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. ³² And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him.”

Talk about speaking truth to power.

Apparently the USA does not have the internal mechanisms to investigate, charge and prosecute wrongdoing, if it is done any State workers.  Too bad.  But we can hope for the future.  There is an election coming up, and we can vote for change.  Our options are a Clinton and a Bush.  The Bible says there is a reason we are ruled over by the basest of men (which includes women.)

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Guns and Schools

Yet again a kid kills at school.  When I hear "we have to do something about the guns" I know there will be no change.

Variously we are told the shooter in this instance was involved in a rivalry over a girl, or was heartbroken or whatever, or awkward and then shot the place up.  Now, think back to when you were in high school, if say from 1980 back.  Prior to 1980, we we not shovelling drugs at kids who did not fit into the factory model of education.  That became widespread up post-1980.

I graduated high school in 1973, in Seattle, and I cannot think of anyone I knew who did not have guns in the house.  We went shooting often enough, and the college at which my father taught to this day has a gun and rifle club.  We all knew where the weapons were and how to use them.  Today, I cannot think of many people I know who keep guns handy.  Yet, with all of this "gun control" there are the shootings.  Why no shootings back then when guns were easier, and more now when guns are less easy?  It's the drugs.  We drug kids to behave in ways they normally would not.  In enough instances, the abnormal behavior is to shoot 'em up.

If you recall, you too had rivalries over someone attractive to you, or you discovered the blues, that experience when you realize you cannot make someone love you.  Or you felt like an outsider, or whatever.    What did we do back then?  We grew up.    Kids are not chemically imbalanced until the drugs are introduced by the doctor to whom the kid is referred by the school counselor.  We infantilize kids instead of letting them grow up.

When I hear "it's the guns" I know the solution will not be forthcoming.  It is against the law now, but just make a law that says all shooters' medical records become permanent public record immediately and then you'll see: it's the drugs, not the guns.

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Money Community Economies and Credit

An acquaintance of mine, at 92, still lives a throwback lifestyle.  Sharp as a tack.  A recent visit to a doctor had her prescription sent to "the corner pharmacy" which delivered it early that evening.  They added the charge to her bill, which she settles up at the end of the month.

(She found surimi in and among her shrimp in a salad and her notice of it has led to this particular store banning all surimi in all instances.  "Surimi is not shrimp."  "Yes, ma'am." The last dozen visits has been the occasion of a dozen reminders.  Truth in advertising is maintained by a 92 year old.)

Now think about that, and compare it to your doctor visit.  Do you argue with the doctors, and make them back up their diagnosis with science?  If a prescription is needed, is that information communicated to your corner pharmacy which in turns delivers it to you home, and then bills you?  And you pay up at the end of the month?

No, if you are typical, someone you don't know says things about you quickly and leaves you not sure about your condition, or at best hopeful.  Then you have to make time to stand in line somewhere to get  your prescription filled, or try to save money by going to Walmart or Costco or some place.  And here again, someone who does not know you is filling that prescription.

Her pharmacist knows her personally, and will advise her even more fully than the doctor.  Her pharmacist exists still, one of those gift-shop in the front, pills in the back shops, that were in every neighborhood in my youth, largely because they are a "compounding pharmacy."  Pharmacists are free to make any drug they want, and compounding pharmacists do so from scratch when needed.

Most doctors are getting a cut of the prescription action, one way or another, from big pharm, and most pharmacists are simply filling that prescription.  Ka-ching!  But if pressed, doctors can change the formula, and compounding pharmacists can make that up.  And do.  And 50 years ago, this was true of almost all pharmacists.

What changed is banks learned they could lend asset-less backed credit to any and all. With this credit with no rational limits, they needed to find a market for it.  Consumers!

My twenties I regularly received credit cards, loaded with credit, ready to use, unsolicited in the mail.  I believe by 1980 I had some fifty credit cards of various styles.  At the time airlines had their own internal systems, but eventually they found they could switch to United Air Lines Visa, dump their operations, and make more money brokering visa than running their own.

All of this allowed concentration of credit-extension farther and farther away form the transaction, the community, with more and more centralization of transaction, and the ability of the hegemon to peek in on who was spending what with more and more specificity.  Taxing became easier.  Match this massive data flow with computers, and the Center could more and more spot trends and predict outcomes ever further from the transaction.  FICO thrived.  Get big or get out was actualized.  Safeway for food, Gap for clothes, Ikea for furniture, CVS/romneycare for medicine, NFL for entertainment, Fox for info, Ferguson for law enforcement, 9-11 for defense, Comcast for utilities, ad nauseum. The more the centralization the further from accountability to the customer.

Two generations believe their fundamental relationship in the economy is with a bank, instead of the stores one patronizes, and your status is determined by a credit score.  You pay interest depending on your credit score.

Dave Ramsey is anti-debt, and has become a multi-millionaire out of bankruptcy preaching anti-usury, yet he has to give into his audience wanting to buy a home on credit.  So if people take his advice on the one hand and get rid of credit card debt, then they run into a problem on the other, no credit score to get a loan.  Such are called the unscorable.

One of the side effects—or side benefits—of becoming and living debt free is that you eventually fall off the FICO radar. You become one of the 64 million “unscorable” consumers who haven’t had an active credit account for at least six months and therefore can’t qualify for a mortgage with many lenders.

Distraught at losing some potential usury slaves, the bankers come up with a solution.

The unscorable group has grown large enough that it’s getting attention with Experian, Equifax and TransUnion, the three credit bureaus FICO uses to determine its scores. They have developed the VantageScore model that looks at 24 months of credit history instead of six months. It also includes rent and utility payments—even public records when they’re available.

What is happening... they are going local for the credit info...  decentralized.

In another place Ramsey notes (and even big banks will do this) a practice called a manual mortgage, in which they study your circumstances based on local experience.  he may not know this, but in banks it is called a "portfolio loan."  That is to say, the bank is keeping the risk on the books, instead of acting as a broker and passing the loan risk off to taxpayers via Fannie and Freddie (which just last week again lowered their standards to restart the housing bubble - as I said, there is no rational limit to lending asset-less backed credit) and keeping the profits, the banks can do what all banks in all instances did 40 years ago, and ran the risk and kept the profits.  Mortgage bankers knew every customer personally.  Not any more.

But to capture the growing group of independent, the usury-free, the banks must return to old practices. But personalization costs more, so will their cheap credit still be so cheap?  Will the cost of duplicating what is already known locally about a customer overwhelm the advantage of EZ cheap credit centrally provisioned?

EZ credit at inexpensive interest allows more people to consume than no-interest credit allows.  The pharmacist is not going to extend credit to someone he knows cannot pay.  There is a pitch-perfect justice in someone who is profligate has that very profligacy checked by the community in which he lives.  The community is strengthened by curbing profligacy.  Interest free credit builds communities.

With EZ credit at low interest, people tend toward eternal debt.  But also deadbeats spend prodigious amounts before they are destitute and cut off.  Their selection of goods and services are items that please deadbeats, and this market is so large, whole factories and industries grow up to serve this mal-investment.  And once cut off, why, does EZ credit stop?  Not at all, they are issued an EBT card in which credit is extended to them with no requirements whatsoever.  By failing to meet commitments at usury, they are returned to no usury loans, but there is no community to curb their profligacy.

A downward spiral.  Cheap EZ credit destroys communities.

Kentucky Fried Chicken, drug dealers and McDonalds rejoice.  The pendulum may be swinging back, since Mickey D saw a 30% cut in profits last quarter since their highly subsidized food is so nasty.  McDonalds will try to turn things around by... wait for it... tailoring their menu to local tastes.  But if they do, how do they take advantage of the EZ credit subsidized ingredients that makes their model profitable?  If they need not buy a billion pounds of reprocessed potato starch to supply the exact same french fries to all locations, and buy a 50 pound sack here, and a 50 pound sack there, how will they compete with a local burger joint whose tiny market for fresh fries is ten times the volume of any one given Micky D unit?  Micky D can't have it both ways, mass volume purchase and localized product. If the EZ cheap credit is not advantageous for what one can do with it, for size no longer delivers what enough customers want, then there is for the corporate welfare queen a downward spiral.  Just like the EBT set.  Cheap EZ credit ruins economies.

One quarter a trend does not make, but it is worth watching.

But with all these movements toward local I think the pendulum is swinging back.  People are sick of getting sick from what they eat.

So as you start a business, recall what once was: extractors fronting processors at no-interest credit, processors fronting manufacturers at no interest credit, manufacturers fronting distributors and retailers at no interest, and retailers fronting Larry Lunchbucket at no interest until the end of the month, when the bills were settled up.  Larry's $100 got passed back from the retailer, 60 to the distributor, 40 to manufacturer, 10 to processor and 5 to extractor.  No banks involved, no interest involved.  Now every step is run through the banks because their credit is EZ and the cost seems ot be cheaper than maintaining your own credit monitoring in house.

And indeed, those small businesses could not compete against EZ credit at low cost to consumer vs credit monitoring of the market at no cost to the consumer.  But, in a mere forth years, the goods and services called forth by the putative winners of this regime, corporate and private welfare, no longer match the needs.  With no real feedback loop except "cheaper" what range of goods and services narrowed over time and through malinvestment and misallocation no longer meet consumer demand to the degree that the economy is stagnant, and six years in has shown no improvement.  This is scary to those picked as winner in this regime.

And those who realize what is up look to gold as a hedge.  Very good.  In times of economic distress, gold is king, it is money that will extinguish debts, and call forth goods and services when no one will extend credit (and no one will accept currency as money, since it clearly is not money.)

But, gold and silver, as money, is a medium of exchange.  Holding on to it to get to the point where the economy is healed and businesses are again extending credit within their communities is a rational plan. But if things get to that point, you'll have bigger problems than if gold will buy things.

Instead of hedging future fears by hoarding medium of exchange, why not invest that money is a business now, in which you extend credit to your customers, the worthy ones, like the pharmacy down the street, and maybe front-run the pendulum which very well may be swinging back, and find you are not a part of the problem, but part of the solution.

Dump the banks and the EZ cheap credit, and square and etc... build a solid customer-based business, not one based on EZ cheap credit.  Be a part of the real economy, not the false economy.

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Ending Paralysis - A Cure?

A technique to repair spinal cords to eliminate paralysis has been proven valid, and now it needs to be proven reliable.  The researchers are awaiting a patent so they can raise the billions to test reliability, a and thus achieve that extremely elusive event, science.

Wait.  There are some 3 million people suffering from paralysis on earth, and there would be more if they were not let to die in 3rd world countries.  We learn...

The treatment, which was carried out by surgeons in Poland in collaboration with scientists at University College London, involved transplanting cells from Fidyka's nasal cavity into his spinal cord.

Polish doctors?  That means they were trained under communism, a system with no IPR.  Yet now their work is being co-opted by capitalists who will "monetize" the practice.

I understand there are doctors and there are surgeons, the doctors diagnose and prescribe, but when it comes to cutting people up and changing things around, they call in the "fighter jocks" who do almost nothing but surgery.  So who knows who contributed what in the collaboration to the result, but we do now collaboration among the skilled happened, and UK researchers worked with Polish surgeons.  I wonder what the Polish surgeons get in compensation?  (I hope Cuban doctors are observing.)

What we know:  there is a valid treatment to cure paralysis.

We know what was spent to get to that result.

We have no idea what it cost to get to that result, because we have a system in which results are gamed with a view to creating great personal accumulation of wealth defined as personal assets, in this instance the mechanism is IPR.  What a result costs is always less than what is spent under the IPR regime.

We can imagine the testing would come faster if no one was working with a view to IPR.

We can imagine the cost of testing for reliability would be less, perhaps dramatically so, if the work was done without and eye to IPR.

They quote they need billions to continue the work.  Let's say 3 billion they want to spend, never mind what it may cost.  3 billion dollars divided by 3 million cases is about $1000 per case.  

At indigogo and kickstarter people are raising money to get better cheese.  How much more so would people kick in to see paraplegics walk?

But we will not go that route.  The suffering will continue until asset-less backed credit is used to secure "property" "rights" in a technique that for decades those who control asset-less backed credit can control and monetize who gets what help at what price.

Will a communist country step up and apply one of their few advantages over capitalism and make this cure more, better, cheaper faster?  Cuba?  Vietnam?

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Ebola and the Social Contract

When no one is punished, in fact, the perpetrators are rewarded, you can expect this kind of thing to go on and on.

The US Department of Defense (DoD) is funding Ebola trials on humans, trials which started just weeks before the Ebola outbreak in Guinea and Sierra Leone. The reports continue and state that the DoD gave a contract worth $140 million dollars to Tekmira, a Canadian pharmaceutical company, to conduct Ebola research. This research work involved injecting and infusing healthy humans with the deadly Ebola virus. Hence, the DoD is listed as a collaborator in a “First in Human” Ebola clinical trial (NCT02041715, which started in January 2014 shortly before an Ebola epidemic was declared in West Africa in March.

Then there is this, as if someone designed this strain...

Dr. Osterholm just gave a talk shown on C-Span explaining that a top Ebola virologist – the Head of Special Pathogens at Canada’s health agency, Gary Kobinger – has found that the current strain of Ebola appears to be much worse than any strain seen before … and that the current virus may be more likely to spread through aerosols than strains which scientists have previously encountered.

There is no way, we have no effective means of law enforcement to address this, so the only means would be truth commissions.  Who, what, where, when and why.  Even capital crimes must be immune, pardon the pun, to get at the truth.  Maybe then, we might take steps to curb some of the terror.  Instead, we blame the black guy.

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Medical Tourism - Ebola Cure

What to make of a country where for 40 years they can allow suffering and death by a horrible contagious disease, as a government project, only ending in the 1970s?  Well, when no one was jailed, let alone executed for these deaths, why would this stop?

And a country that after claiming to fight a war to end slavery, actually amends the constitution to enshrine slavery as legal.

And a country that not only brings in massively infectious diseases to play around with in government laboratories less secure than you average high school, but imports people infected with this disease.

After getting a patent on ebola.

Of course I have no proof, but using disease as a weapon is nothing new, and I have no doubt the country above, the USA, is doing so now.  No one can be this stupid, it must be intentional.

Happily we have people who take all these USA actions into consideration and reacts.  The Chinese already have an apparent ebola treatment, in fact 15 of them, and I wonder if they began working on it the day USA took out a patent for dual use (weapon/medicine) on ebola.  This comes out of their military defense program. They must have the same suspicions as I.

China of course, as any sane country would do, forbids anyone from importing infectious diseases, so they are working with synthetic versions.  I would bet they have crews in Africa working on it too.

Odd too, Cuba, which for 50 years has been under assault by USA, seems to be best prepared to deal with such horrors, "punching above its weight" in fighting the disease in Africa.  Cuba sends doctors.  USA sends soldiers. What does this say?

We've seen this before, Mutually Assured Destruction,  MAD, in which both sides have weapons so horrible neither will use them.

After tidying up this outbreak, it is important to trace it back and find out what happened.  Of course we have never done this for crack, even though we know the time and place it first appeared in USA, and on whose watch.  And we know some serious talent went into the design of that drug.

Going to prison or worse keeps people quiet.  We need to have truth commissions and guarantee no prison, even for capital crimes, if people come clean.  We are in the most opaque times in history.  Truth commissions may allow us a peaceful revolution.

And of course, this crisis feeds the USA habit of blaming the black guy, as if this is his fault.

Drudgereport.com

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Aricept and Mom

If an elder ends up in a "nursing home" visit often and make yourself known or the end will be painful and near for the inmate.  It's funny how people will say "mom needs to be in a "care" facility" because they cannot take care of her 24/7 (as if she needs 24/7) and then can make an hour a day to visit.  (You don't need to be there more than ten minutes to keep the screws on their toes.)

My mother was in one of these lovely on top, hell-hole down below places when she fell ill and was sent to the hole.  I came back from travel to visit and her first words were "I thirst."  She looked horrible.

I got her water and other liquids, and inquired of the nurse what her condition was.  As a younger sibling, I was not on the list of approved discussants.  Clearly her treatment was killing her.  I made a nuisance of myself and managed to see the pills my mother was being given, and I later inquired obliquely as to the same pill on the pill cart being given to another.  Out of context, the nurse simply said "Aricept."  I went home and looked it up.  It is for dementia, Alzheimers.

Odd, I thought, as a medical lab scientist working in University laboratories, my mother had 40 years earlier volunteered for a longitudinal study on Alzheimers.  No drugs, just habits and outcomes.  Every year she was subject to a battery of measurements as a part of this study.  And every year they told her she was fine, no symptoms.  So how come the pills?

Aha! Alzheimers cannot be diagnosed until after death, you see, in an autopsy.  So we cannot know if she really has it until she is dead and autopsied.  Now shut up. OK, but if she has no symptoms, why the treatment? HEPA secrecy laws forbid anyone to answer my questions.  Incidentally, Aricept side effects are appetite suppressant.  And if not being fed, well, liquids come with the food.  Medical secrecy laws are to protect the powers that be, not their victims.

By literally nursing my mother back to health in spite of the top-flight health facility she paid for, I was able to get her coherent enough to order the staff to let me look at the records.  I tell you secrecy is meant to protect the state, the drug companies and malefactors.  The records named names, and I raised a stink, the Aricept stopped.  My mother recovered.

They had sold off her apartment to another so now they had a conflict of interest in keeping her in the hole.  They promised to move her to the new highrise, and she died on the day she was to move.

Do I think there is a concerted effort to kill off the elderly?  Of course!  Make as much money as can be made off others' suffering, and then kill them off.

Yet pharmacy records revealed that most of these patients, almost 54 percent, received at least one of what the researchers delicately called “medications of questionable benefit.” More than a third were given a cholinesterase inhibitor (Aricept is the best known) and a quarter received memantine (Namenda), both commonly prescribed for dementia. More than 20 percent were on statins to lower cholesterol, and 7 percent were on blood thinners.

We tolerate this because we benefit from the elders being hurried along.  Matters are arranged so we cannot know.  "It won't be long now" came the words.  She'll be gone in weeks. My mother grew and changed her last four years more than in her entire life, it was amazing to encounter.  I am glad I stopped in our instance what is widespread.

Yes, under capitalism, drug companies are out to make a buck killing the undesirables.  It is the only system that is willing to kill its customers (but outside of capitalism these people would not be customers.)  Future historians will look back on 20th century medicine as the most cruel and brutal in history.

We need a web-based system of matching the young with the old living in their own homes, for the benefit of both.  That would probably be a good business.  Remember, what goes around comes around.

Deregulate medicine, so we can have competition, and lowering costs while ever improving patient and doctor satisfaction.

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Medicine, Panic and Control

It is now downplayed, but after Saudi Arabians attacked us on 9-11, there was an anthrax scare that we were assured come to us from Iraq.  It turned out to be from Fort Dix, NJ.  A USA thing.

The CDC is notoriously lax with the most deadly viruses.  The CDC ran the abominable Tuskegee Experiments.

Today we have a mysterious virus attacking kids in USA, sending people with common colds to the hospital.  Panic!

Although there's been no confirmed cases of the enterovirus at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, officials admitted 540 patients Friday, said Dr. Derek Wheeler, associate chief of staff at the hospital.

Ebola in Africa, a disease for which we recently became the proud owners via out patent regime, is exploding in Africa.  Sick Americans are brought home, introducing the disease here, contrary to all medical protocols.  Human rights are out the window in Africa as panic spreads to include human rights violations.  WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!

Hugh Hewitt mentioned on his radio show today that Washington is beset with fears over the 9-11 anniversary coming up.  We destabilize Moslem regimes no threat to us.  We overturn democratic elections. We train extremists.  We fund extremists.  We arm extremists.  We bomb extremists.  The we announce our borders are porous.    What happens when you do all of that?  The Irish did more to England with less abuse from England.  No wonder they are nervous in DC.

But don't worry.  That horse is lame.

The US Surgeon General wears a flag officer's uniform (Navy is traditional, but is can be any branch).  The CDC and FDA and NIH are under the Surgeon General.  I am told FDA inspectors are now showing up at business inspections in military uniforms, with battle ribbons, etc.  The FDA has snipers.  They are notorious for unwarranted military style raids.  There is very strong evidence FDA employees poisoned Chilean grapes for political reasons, and today the FDA uses this event as a teachable moment for why the FDA is needed.  The case goes cold as it got clearer.

When people behave badly with power and there is no sanction, the culture changes in the organization.  This case is not cold, the evidence is well preserved, and the people in involved well documented.  No one needs to go to jail, but a truth commission can reveal who did what.  Or off to jail if when the truth is out, those who failed to sing can go to Sing Sing.  We do this anyway, immunity from prosecution for testimony.

But as it is now, we have people who cannot be trusted, regulators who are owned by the regulated, who, if an when a PANIC breaks out over a virulent disease, will be ready to bring a military grade oppression to USA.  You see, in a health panic you are guilty until proven innocent, quarantined until proven healthy, suspected of ebola so sent to the ebola concentration camp, where you'll contract ebola.

Ready?  On three, everyone panic...  one...  two...

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The Pope on Dope

This is big news, but as usual, you have to go to the source to get the story right, and even then you have to read it with discipline:

Let me state this in the clearest terms possible: the problem of drug use is not solved with drugs! Drug addiction is an evil, and with evil there can be no yielding or compromise. To think that harm can be reduced by permitting drug addicts to use narcotics in no way resolves the problem. 

So far do good.  Addiction is evil (evil means "lack of good" in theology) and feeding addictions won't solve the problem.  Fair enough.

Attempts, however limited, to legalize so-called “recreational drugs”, are not only highly questionable from a legislative standpoint, but they fail to produce the desired effects.

 This is tricky.  Legalizing drugs is not to end drug use, but end state incarceration of nonviolent criminals.  So to people wanting to end addiction, legalization is no help, to be sure.  But that is not the point of legalization.  Imprisoning people does not end addiction either.

Substitute drugs are not an adequate therapy but rather a veiled means of surrendering to the phenomenon.

Right again, methadone is a scam.

Here I would reaffirm what I have stated on another occasion: No to every type of drug use. It is as simple as that. No to any kind of drug use (cf. General Audience, 7 May 2014). But to say this “no”, one has to say “yes” to life, “yes” to love, “yes” to others, “yes” to education, “yes” to greater job opportunities. If we say “yes” to all these things, there will be no room for illicit drugs, for alcohol abuse, for other forms of addiction.

Now he does not mean "no to any kind of drug use, since this is in the context of addiction.  Surely he is ok with morphine in the operating room.  It is the coda where he makes the point: just say yes.  The pope is not saying criminalize dope, he is saying free things up so fewer want dope.

A good friend of mine was a deep undercover narc, about 12 years.  His observations:

1. Addicts were in pain, and used dope as self-medication.

2. There are wide swathes of pain not recognized in medicine. So people in pain look elsewhere when they cannot get relief from formal medicine, or do not otherwise have access to it.

3. Perfectly good drugs for political reasons are forbidden, or made so onerous to prescribe that they are abandoned.  Some peoples problems need these drugs.  Here again, people must go underground to get the pain addressed.

4. As people are denied the pain-management they need, they have to turn to criminals, and there is the downward spiral. The criminality from prohibition invites the official corruption we all see.

It seems to me there is not much there for the anti-legalization crowd, especially since the laws are more decriminalization than legalization.

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