... for people like me who refused the jabs.
You really ought to read that entire thing.
If you remember me saying that I had to double my "you're hosed" (seriously injured on a permanent basis or dead) percentage from being centered around 3% to about 5-6%. I've seen nothing in the data to change my mind on that. But the bad part is that on the data the negative outcomes are not slowing down materially but uptake of more boosters has basically gone to zero statistically, so those who getting nailed with cancers and neurological problems now are almost-always from the original insanity from 2021 to early 2023.
The problem is that plenty of people will try to sell you some sort of fix. Let me be clear: There isn't one.
All you have is the body's natural capacity to unscrew itself -- which is quite significant but not unlimited. That capacity is why my "you're hosed" percentage is 5-6% instead of 90%. But if you did it there's nothing you can do about it other than pray that you're in the 94-95% bracket and not the 5-6% one.
Where this leads to serious problems is when we start talking about more than ourselves -- specifically, if you're either in a "mixed jab" relationship or not in one but would like to be in one.
Many people at this point know damn well that these things were dangerous because they've seen their friends get screwed. Getting involved with someone always comes with risk especially over the long term but now we have another dimension to it and one that can't be un-done if there is divergence between two members of a couple. This is especially a big deal if kids (under 18) are involved or worse, if they're being contemplated by the couple.
Worse this means people will lie. They have every reason to do exactly that, especially if being truthful means you have to accept being exposed to the personal (always) and potentially the financial anguish if they get fucked or much worse if you make children with that person and the kids get screwed.
This won't sort itself out any time soon folks, but if you disregard these issues you're a fool. Its one thing to date for fun and not care, but if you're thinking about being serious with someone and letting them into your heart (say much less everything else) then its a whole different game.
The people who did this, and particularly those who were in the middle of pushing it on others in the medical system must be held accountable for it. The destruction they're laid upon everyone is not a singular event, it is not over and it will impact family formation, creation and more for the next two decades or more. I remind you that the SV40 polio disaster took decades to peak and recede and this is likely as bad or worse, as while that was horrid it didn't nail anywhere near the percentage of people in the first couple of years this has -- the largest impact didn't start to show up for a decade.
I know, "that's in the past" and "let it go."
No.
I will not.
Those who foolishly made their own decision as a single adult, with no dependents and nobody else who gets burned if it goes bad on them I can respect. They made a decision and they have to live with it. That's fine.
Nobody else, especially those who profited from it or pushed this shit on others, gets off free, I will never trust any part of that structure in our economy and government again and if any or all of it is utterly destroyed by any means, fair or foul, I'll cheer. Every single person involved in that, from physicians to hospital administrators to "influencers" and politicians deserves whatever they get.
The title pretty-much describes the functional reality of most of what's wrong in America today.
America is presumably a capitalist nation. Capitalism is an economic system where buyers and sellers enter bids and offers for various goods and services and the laws of supply and demand tend to dictate where price, production, expansion and contraction fall.
Its not a perfect system; among other things its reactionary by nature, in that until demand shows up supply will not, and thus it is always "behind" if you will. However, it has over time proved to be superior to any sort of central control.
There is a fly in the ointment: Humans are not necessarily good -- either all the time or even most humans some of the time. In fact most humans will pick up a $20 bill that is sitting on the sidewalk and put it in their pocket after taking a quick look around to see if anyone will actually see them do it. This, even if they have reason to believe it fell out of the guy's pocket 20' in front of them and for the majority even if they saw it fall out.
Now just because you took advantage of a situation doesn't make you a bad person. If you in no way influenced the other person's bad decision or the outcome from it then to feast on it is perfectly fine both ethically and morally. You owe that individual nothing and in fact it is precisely this that powers productivity and capitalism forward!
That is, if I can take advantage of some unrelated person's idiocy such that I can rent their office space for a tiny fraction of what they were paying because the owner has to fill it, the original lessee has no money and thus can't fulfil their contract and I have both money and need for the space there's nothing wrong with that. I had no part of creating either party's unfortunate circumstance.
But now let's take a different scenario.
I'm a dude with political power. I also own a bunch of rental properties. This puts me in a position to influence policy in a manner that causes a supply/demand imbalance in the rental housing market. Let's say that, for example, I arrange with the Federal government to "welcome" a few thousand "migrants" into my town, all of whom come with serious federal subsidies amounting to a couple of thousand dollars a month plus they have work permits.
Think about what happens here. The local employer base can pay these people less because they have a $24,000 annual tax free subsidy that the Federal government "gives" them. In truth they didn't give anyone anything -- they stole it from US Citizens since the government can't make money -- it can only transfer it from one person to another. In addition the local residents do not qualify for that same $24,000 annual subsidy and thus the price of rent now increases dramatically because the supply of housing does not change much on a rapid basis but the demand does and the people that are presenting the new demand are obtaining, by force, the $24,000 from the rest of the US population.
As the landlord I'm happier than a pig in shit. I can (and do) double or even triple the rent. When the American citizens can't pay and the "migrants" can, guess who gets the apartment? While my costs might go up a bit (more people, more wear, etc.) my profits skyrocket.
The problem is that I didn't honestly earn the money. I deliberately put in motion a scheme where I indirectly stole tens of thousands of dollars per person, per year for each apartment through the tenants and ultimately from every US Citizen. The harm to anyone citizen is diffuse but just as someone who skims ten cents each from 10 million account holders in a bank I still stole a million bucks.
Worse, the harm is not entirely diffuse. The townsfolk who are displaced get the immediate negative impact of having their place to live ripped out from under them. Given the further-depressed wage base in the local area which I created whether on purpose or simply as a reasonably foreseeable consequence of the policy I screwed them twice -- first by ripping their place to live out from under them by soliciting the subsidy and then again by destroying wages in the local area so they can't replace either their job or their apartment.
This isn't a "natural" capitalist circumstance and there is no creative destruction of someone who made a poor decision and as a result someone else who happens along gets to feast on the back of the voluntarily poor decision of the schlub who made it.
To some people these situations may look similar -- but they're not.
How about the medical field. We now know that "big sugar" bribed medical researchers; they paid for work to target their desired results and there was no disclosure that they funded that work. Now that would be bad enough but in fact it gets worse because if you can manage to convince people of something like this and it screws you then the business interests who make money because you're screwed love it -- so long as you don't blame them.
In other words in a capitalist system your incentive is to spend the least you can on medical care to obtain an acceptable result. Your physician's and the local hospital's incentive is to get you to spend every available dollar to obtain an acceptable result, and if you run out of dollars then advocating for shifting some of that price onto other people by force (since they'd never do it voluntarily) is next. There is no incentive in the medical system to promote anything that leads you to spend less or even better, nothing even if the result would be objectively superior!
The tension between buyer and seller is normal in a capitalist system however as soon as others are forced to pay the bill then your incentives are destroyed and the provider is enriched at the cost, forcibly extracted, of others.
The nuances of this are complicated but it all comes down to one thing: Capitalism isn't forcing others to pay someone else's bill; that's theft and since theft always involves involuntary taking no matter the actor involved it is supposed to be a crime. Further, when such theft distorts the market then the people who are priced out of whatever it was by said theft are immediately and irreparably harmed.
How do we redress this? Well, there are plenty of laws on the books (8 USC 1324 and 15 USC Ch 1) dealing with most of these practices but nobody has been criminally prosecuted and sent to prison for either of these offenses in decades despite there literally being too many instances of these acts on a daily basis to list. They continue because nobody goes to jail; the richer you are (that is, the more you exploit people and rob them on an individual or collective basis) the more prison sucks compared to your daily lifestyle. It thus is the ultimate progressive punishment; the homeless man doesn't think of prison as all that bad compared to the alternative while Jeff Bezos, a Mayor or Governor would find it an extraordinarily bad thing.
That's how it should be.
But financial punishment is not enough when the harm is irreparable. Money damages do not bring back dead people or restore a destroyed life. Time can never be recovered and thus there are crimes for which the only reasonable punishment is execution. This set of offenses, in size, is of that kind and character and incidentally this behavior by American government and business interests is, when you boil it all down, in fact identical in form and fashion to slavery which we allegedly banned by Constitutional Amendment.
I have to give him this: He's consistent.
With only three months until the election, the Biden administration is attempting to score political points by launching a proceeding to loosen federal restrictions on marijuana. Unable to satisfy either the legal or scientific standards for making this change, the Biden-Harris administration is engaging in a cynical shell game, rewriting the rules and ignoring the science to achieve its partisan objective.
Oh, false.
First, Marijuana never met the standard for Schedule I -- no medical use and high potential for dependence and abuse.
The former is false; marijuana has had a hundreds of year history of medical use in various forms. The FDA and DEA continue to claim that there's no "accepted medical use" but the FDA also will not permit formal testing and no company will pay for the extreme levels of security and such required to do it because there's no way to make a patented profit off it.
Barr's argument is that despite over a hundred years of known, documented use in the United States "weed today is different because people make it stronger."
So let me see if I get this right: I should be able to buy beer provided it is no more than 5% ABV. I should not be able to buy whiskey, because it is typically eight times as strong as beer -- never mind that this also means that a typical user might pour himself two fingers of same over stones (or rocks) and thus drink 1/8th the amount. Oh, and the four high-grav IPAs in my fridge right now should be a felony offense?
Could I take a "modern" joint of 30-50% THC and smoke the whole thing instead of taking a single puff? Certainly, but I could also take the entire bottle of whiskey and chug it, and if I did that it would probably end very badly for me due to vomiting, alcohol poisoning and possibly death!
This is plainly fallacious. In the U.S., the availability of drugs for medical use is not based on their political popularity but only on the FDA’s decision, based on rigorous scientific study, that the drug is safe, effective and uniformly made. The FDA has still not found an acceptable medical use for marijuana.
The FDA found that Covid shots were "safe and effective"; we can argue over safety but not effectiveness as their claim was formally, as Biden said, if you take this shot you won't get Covid. Not only did the FDA say this so did the manufacturers in public statements. Those statements were categorically false: Biden took the shots and went on to get Covid more than once, thereby falsifying his own claim. So did myriad others in the Administration and advisory roles, including Fauci himself.
On the other hand people like myself who refused that false claim (and thus also avoided the risk since it is now known there's also unsafe, exactly as I expected and warned about since there was 10+ years of data on that technology and it had never once passed safety review and thus never was formally trialed for effectiveness against anything else) only got covid once.
This comes at a time when cartels and transnational criminal organizations with connections to Mexico and China have expanded their operation of marijuana cultivation and distribution inside the United States.
This has nothing do with legal marijuana cultivation, processing, sale and consumption. I fully support finding and prosecuting every single illegal grow and everyone connected with it to the fullest extent of the law, including hammering said persons with selling knowingly-mislabeled or adulterated drugs which, under existing law, is a very-serious federal offense.
This, incidentally, is the entire point of legal distribution: Enforcement of labeling and purity requirements along with attempting to limit sales to and use by minors. There is absolutely no way to do this with illegal drugs and that is a huge problem -- a significant percentage of those poisoned by fentanyl did not intend to buy or use an opiate yet they bought adulterated drugs on the street and thus were, from a legal point of view, poisoned.
Existing federal authority allows for 20 years in the slammer for adulterated drugs (21 USC Sec 333) so for those products that have an active ingredient other than listed, or which have other substances in them which have a reasonable probability of causing serious adverse consequences or death to humans or animals there is already an existing remedy under Federal Law.
So which world would you rather live in?
One where we throw in jail all the counterfeit and illegal producers and generate tax revenue from the legal, tested and thus reasonably-assured "as labeled" producers and outlets or street dealers who sell whatever, from wherever, adulterated with whatever might be in there whether they know it or not?
Bill Barr's position is that "well if you use illegal drugs you deserve to die!"
I find that position not only reprehensible but criminally corrupt besides, particularly given the proved corruption within our FDA which has been on full public display over the last four years (and much longer, if you bother to look or care) and would like to see that rat bastard rot in prison -- or worse.
Enjoy!
PS: I said there'd be something on seed oils and carbs -- ran long on the other issues and decided to leave it out..... perhaps next time!