Oh, you thought Covid was bad?

How about a decades-long scam which put a huge percentage of American adults on drugs that are dangerous and do nothing in terms of improving your odds of not having the ultimate bad thing happen -- death?  How would you like it if it was proved that your doctor lied, pharmaceutical companies lied, the government lied with their "recommendations", everyone lied -- and many of your friends and family suffered insane deterioration of their condition and ultimately died as a result?

Well, all of that happened.

You were told that cholesterol -- specifically, non-HDL (that is, LDL) cholesterol, was a cause of death via heart attacks and strokes.  You were given medication and told to take it, specifically statins, which do in fact lower cholesterol.  But statins have serious side effects and while they don't screw everyone who takes them (gee, where we have seen that in the last couple of years?) they do, in every case, result in detectable metabolic damage.  That's true for basically all drugs by the way: The question is always whether the damage from the drugs, and by the way those are averse effects, not "side" effects, and are deliberately misnamed in order to mislead you, is greater or lesser than the benefit from taking them.

If the benefit is zero then it is not a drug -- it is a poison.

Well here we are....

Harmonized individual-level data from a global cohort showed that 57.2% and 52.6% of cases of incident cardiovascular disease among women and men, respectively, and 22.2% and 19.1% of deaths from any cause among women and men, respectively, may be attributable to five modifiable risk factors. 

Wow, that sounds like five things you can change to modify your risk of dying.  That's a great thing, right?

So what were the five things?

BMI, systolic blood pressure (the top number), non-HDL cholesterol, smoking and diabetes.

Two outcomes were assessed: Cardiovascular disease and death from any cause.

I like the latter one far more than the former because dead is dead and why is irrelevant if you're the one who's dead.  We all can wring our hands on the  "why" when it happens, but from the perspective of the "trial of one" it matters not one whit.  In other words I'm not impressed in a "reduction" in cardiovascular disease if the thing that we do to produce it kills you in equal numbers, thus doing nothing has the same ultimate outcome.  Indeed that is a wild-eyed scam as the "something" that a doctor or other medical professional does is never free so unless you can demonstrate all-cause mortality benefit the only person getting actual "benefit" has to be presumed to be the doctor, hospital or pharmaceutical company -- and not you.

Further, this was an extremely large cohort -- roughly 1.5 million people.  Statistical power is greatly enhanced by large numbers, so that they looked at an utterly huge number of people is an excellent factor in favor of the results being valid.

Of the factors, however, only three of the five actually had a statistically significant correlation with being dead: Smoking, diabetes, and blood pressure.

LDL Cholesterol did not; it had a weak association that faded with age with cardiovascular disease but not dying in any of the age groups, which strongly implies that there is no value whatsoever to trying to reduce it in terms of being dead, which is what matters to you.  In addition, which did surprise me a bit, being fat itself was not dangerous in terms of killing you.

Smoking had the expected negative effect and so did blood pressure elevation.  The latter, of course, is highly-associated with body mass but there are fat people with normal blood pressure.

And finally, diabetes was the Gorilla in the room; at all ages it was a serious risk factor, and not a little either, roughly doubling your risk of being dead all the up until you got to be nearly 80, and even then it was good for a 1.6x elevation in risk.  At younger ages the elevation of risk was as much as four times.

Oh by the way one of the documented side effects of statins is CAUSING Type 2 diabetes.

In addition the global nature of this data and study has shown that no, the region of the world and thus the genetics of the person is not statistically relevant to the outcomes.  That is, there is no "magic genetic" or "magic dirt" factor involved; this applies to humans no matter where they came from or where they live.  While there are small differences from region to region there are none that stand out as statistical outliers, which is extremely important because one of the tropes often run is that "well, I'm from and thus I don't have to worry about it because I have magic genes."  No you don't, by the data, and if you keep believing that bull**** you are likely to be dead as a result of your own stupidity.

So what do we learn from this study?

• Your doctor is and has been lying, and so have all the medical "authorities" for decades when it comes to cholesterol.  It is a mild risk elevation for cardiovascular disease but not death, and death is what matters.  The "stomp on that now" approach to medicine in this regard is now proved bankrupt and the billions extracted were at best worthless and at worst poisonous, literally, resulting in an increased risk of mortality.
  
  
• Your doctor in fact raised your risk of dying when he prescribed statins.  Statins have a known adverse event risk of causing Type 2 diabetes, which is proved to be a wild (more than double and as much as four times the risk) of being dead across basically all age groups up until you get to be 80, and even then its roughly 1.6x.  Diabetes kills, period, and anything that increases the risk of diabetes is thus poison, period.  Since lowering non-HDL cholesterol has no mortality benefit at all the consumption of statins has no available benefit to your health, but does have a significant risk of causing a mortal disorder.  You have to be out of your damn mind to consume them given this data.
  
  
• Dietary "guidelines" that include carbohydrates, specifically "fast" carbohydrates such as potatoes, rice, wheat in any form (flour, bread, cookies, etc.) potentiate and worsen glycemic control issues and thus cause diabetes.  So do statins.  We know both of these things are facts.  Any "physician" who, given a lack of body mass or glucose control, say much less both, who does not recommend immediately getting all of that crap out of your diet is making recommendations that raise, not lower, your risk of dying.  This study proves that.
  
  
• While being fat alone does not raise your risk of dying we know being fat raises the risk of blood pressure elevation and diabetes.  If you are fat but not either hypertensive or diabetic the fat alone will probably not kill you and other than the other morbidity factors involved in being fat (joint damage, reduced exercise tolerance and mobility, etc.) since it doesn't make your dead the decision (and yes it is a decision) to be overweight or obese is not likely to give you a dirt nap. However, being fat will, over time, greatly increase the risk of one of the other two things happening and both of those do make it more likely that you will be dead.  The bullet point above, or if you prefer this article, will both control or even possibly reverse Type II diabetes and at the same time make you profoundly less-fat, reducing the risk of both developing or worsening that and high blood pressure and it costs zero dollars and thus makes nobody rich.  In fact it may make you more-rich in that diabetes, in particular, is extraordinarily expensive when it progresses to insulin dependence, amputations, blindness, kidney dialysis and death all of which are really bad for you but make your doctor, the local hospital and others in the medical system extremely wealthy.

Remember the last three years folks.

You were told that "masks prevented Covid-19 transmission."  Did they?  Did you get Covid despite wearing a mask?  Make all the excuses you wish; if a mask prevents you from inhaling a virus how is it that you got a virus if you wore one?  Obviously you were lied to.

You were also told that "taking the shots would prevent getting Covid and also giving it to others."  President Biden said this, the CEO of Pfizer said this, your doctor probably said it, the CDC said it and so did many others.  Deborah Birx admitted that she knew that claim was unfounded when it was made and said nothing, and she's allegedly one of the "experts."  I pointed out that it was unfounded as the original studies never were designed to demonstrate it.  The White House, it is now known, knew within months there were serious safety signals and ignored them on purpose.  Further, as soon as mass "breakthrough" events were reported, which was as early as April and May of 2021, anyone with two nickels worth of IQ points knew damn well that preventing getting it was a lie too, since if there's a 5% failure rate (for example) the odds of all 20 people in a gathering all having said failure occur at once is less than that of being by an asteroid while getting your mail.  Yet exactly that was reported, repeatedly.

Now we know that the claims that cholesterol will kill you, a trope run for decades by damn near every medical provider on the planet and used to promote billions of dollars in sales of drugs, is in fact false.  Its not only false its worse than false in that those drugs do promote a disorder, Type 2 diabetes, that actually does wildly raise your risk of dying.

The only thing worse than that is that we know how to reduce or even eliminate Type 2 diabetes in a particular person at zero cost by doing nothing more than changing what you eat on a permanent, lifestyle basis.

The choice is yours, of course.

.... and I don't care.

Postulate: There are no rules of war.

Corollary: There are no "war crimes."

Oh, I know, the molly-coddling UN-style bull**** is that there are.  "Geneva Conventions" and all that.  429 "articles" of "law" related to war and every single one of them is self-serving bull****.

War is Hell.  War is supposed to be Hell and anything that makes it less-Hell is Satanic in its implication, implementation and thought process because doing that incites more war.

War should be recoiled from, not embraced.  Papering over the horror of it with threats of "prosecution" is not only a joke its a trope and should get everyone involved hanged right here and now so as to prevent the next war.

Humanity and technology are largely responsible for this, incidentally, and that's really nobody's fault.  People have minds, they use them, this results in innovation and the consequence of that is detachment between action and result.  Its no different, really, than what goes on in my home or yours every single day.  You don't stoke a fire manually nor open and close windows to regulate the temperature in your house or apartment; you push a button or turn a dial and a machine takes care of it.

A hundred or so years ago it didn't work that way.  If it was cold you made a bigger fire in a fireplace or stove.  If it was hot you opened windows (and hoped there was a breeze.)  You did it, you paid attention to whether what you did was sufficient, and then you stopped when it was.  You learned over time, from infancy in fact, how to stoke and build said fire so it was sufficient but not 95 degrees in your house, and to keep the coals going overnight so in the morning you still had some residual heat and didn't have to light it again.  If you wanted light at night you lit a candle or oil lamp. When you were done you blew it out.  You didn't dare leave either unattended lest they burn your house down.  Today you flip a switch and all that happens if you leave it on is that you get a somewhat-higher bill from the power company.

Well, war was the same way.

If you wanted to kill people in size you had to go do it face-to-face. You had to see the horror of what you were doing. Plunge the sword or dirk into the other guy's body, feel it go in, see the expression on his face and watch him die.  Of course you had to do this while he was trying to do the same to you, which adds quite a bit to the drama, does it not?

Innovation seems to come with war first.  Go figure; nobody likes losing a war because historically it has meant losing your life.

Pushing a button on a bombsight, mashing the FIRE button while staring at a radar scope or sniping someone from 1,000yds out is a whole different thing than going man-to-man (mounted or not) with swords, pikes or dirks.  Today we don't even look through the bombsight -- we program a GPS or IMU in the front of a missile, push a button, often from afar, and then from a satellite high above the earth watch the resulting wreckage.  We don't even see the dead bodies those acts generate most of the time.

I have no respect for anything in the Geneva Conventions or any other so-called "laws of war" and if you manage to incite me sufficiently that I decide to go to war there will be no rules whatsoever, except for me seeking to make you dead before you can make me dead.  So-called "rules" or "laws" of war are directly contrary to everyone's interest in not engaging in war in the first place and were enacted and put in place by *******s who never have to face the horrors of their own acts and are trying to sanitize them so you'll allow said *******s to commit more of them without turning on said leaders yourselves.  Every government official involved in that and in "respecting" same deserves to be forced onto the front line with nothing more than a dagger or bayonet; no ammunition, grenades or other similar things that will give them the ability to inflict death at a distance beyond the reach of their own hand.  If you really want or are willing to engage in war then do it hand-to-hand and deal with the horrors of blood running down your arms and legs -- and hope that is the other guy's, but it might quite-possibly be yours.

Let's think this through at a very-basic level: Does the prospect of your wife, daughter or son who decides to go fight being raped up the ass and then decapitated by the opposing party in a war make you more or less likely to engage in said war in the first place?

Duh.

In the context of the current mess over in Israel and Gaza I do not care if Israel flattens Gaza to a literal smoking ruin.  War sucks and like it or not that's what this is and Hamas made the decision to initiate hostilities, so the IDF may as well get on with it.  They gave fair warning to "uninvolved" civilians to get the Hell out of there.  They made that decision and I respect it.  It is a fact that derogating or outright ignoring everyone's right to self-defense and the defense of their loved ones is why the Hamas attacks were successful and why Hamas was operating in Gaza to begin with.  There were and have been two groups there over the last decades; those civilians who support Hamas and those who were defenseless as a direct result of government policy prohibiting "at will" arms ownership.  The former are complicit and the latter were prohibited from slaying the terrorists in advance of their operation and it was the Israeli government that did the prohibiting because they consider "Gazans" to be less-than-citizens.  Evidence?  They call those who live there "Gazans", not Israelis!  Does Israel call those people living in Jerusalem Jerusalans?

But in fact Israel's government effectively did disarm its own citizens because of this very position, that is unforgiveable and entirely and reasonably charged against the Knessset and Bibi himself.  Every single one of the dead is dead because they had no arms with which to resist and those not interested in such happening in Gaza had no way to effectively assault the attackers before they breached the lines from behind and it is the Israeli government that made it that way.  Going into a town to rape, kidnap, murder and plunder where everyone has a gun is a losing act; every window becomes an elevated platform from which you are shot at from all sides!

Unless, of course, there are no guns because they're illegal and everyone is a "nice, law-abiding citizen" -- except those who aren't really "citizens" so we can't actually let everyone buy and have all the guns they want because "some are lesser" and might use them to bad ends.

The problem with such niceties is that the invading horde, terrorists or those who are intent on "gimme dat!" don't give a wet crap about laws, any more than common criminals do.  A government thus can either let the people even the odds as they see fit, declaring that in fact everyone is equal in the most-basic of ways or it is a fact that said government deliberately posts up their citizens as shooting gallery targets.

Human history is full of brutality, like it or not, and so is nature. Not all animals kill only for food; the common housecat kills birds for both food and sport, and will do so even if well-fed at home.  We claim to be "superior" but we're not; we're animals, and the "superior" often is really nothing more than "kill it because it thinks differently than I do" in respect to religion, government structure or simply because someone thinks you're ugly -- or have a fat wallet.

Denying facts does not make them untrue and in the context of war it just makes you dead.

That which reduces the experience of the horror of war makes it more likely that you'll engage in war.

And if you don't think that's objectively bad, well, let me be the first to call you the monster.

Its hard, you know.

Especially in the last few years.

Humans are tribal like all other animals.  Oh, you think not?  Uh huh.  Sure.  Go watch "Animal Planet" on chimps sometime -- animals that share an awful lot of DNA with humans, and which have a social order that in fact has more than reproductive value; as just one example their grooming of each other is a major contributor to their health because, like with humans, they can't see out the back of their head and thus can't really clean things they can't see.  Live in a tropical area where you can't remove parasitic organisms that might be on your body and your life expectancy becomes shorter.  Its a math thing.

Despite all chimps appearing to be "more or less the same" they're not.  They divide into tribes, and defend territory -- from what, may you ask, since they're living in a place with plenty of resource?  From "because we do, that's why".

And they will do so with lethal force too.

We claim we're all so much better.  We're not.  We can try to make that claim but its false, intentionally-so.  We're animals at a base level, and while we claim to use our intelligence to strive for better in fact we often use it to strive toward improving our tribe at, if necessary, the expense of others.

Technology has often been said to "make the world shrink."  It does.  To go from one side of the US to the other was a weeks-long venture, if you got there at all.  Then it was a days-long venture.  Now its an hours-long one and messages, which used to take weeks by pony, now take milliseconds by fiber optic cable.

Not to be limited by oceans we laid said cables under the sea and put satellites in the sky, both of which bypassed the wee problem of a couple thousand miles of water in the way of such communication at high rates of speed.  Before that we skipped messages off the atmosphere, and some still do for fun -- although the laws related to Ham Radio prohibit doing so for profit -- even if the "profit" is so trivial as ordering a pizza.

The Durham Report outlined tribalism weaponized in a political context.  It should lead to myriad criminal charges as, among other things, it implicates Barack Obama (and likely Biden as well) as having actual knowledge that the Clinton campaign was attempting to frame Trump with a false "Russian interference" narrative.  Did Obama have a duty to demand the FBI not get involved in that crap?  You bet he did; the DOJ is under the Executive, which means he was their ultimate boss, and if he could not secure such a binding agreement he had not just the right but in fact the duty to both take that to Congress and stomp on it publicly in an address to the nation making clear that, if said demand was refused he would deliberately destroy it by exposing every one of their employees -- pictures, addresses, phone numbers, spouses and families.

Why?

Because the premise of a Constitutional Republic is that you have a right to honest representation through expression of the franchise.  This is one of the checks and balances that 250 years ago we put on human tribalism -- and is rather unique to America.  Trying to flip the table over through false allegations of acts that could reasonably be called treasonous is not just unacceptable it risks the fabric of the nation and its political process itself.  The crafting of our political system, which is wildly different than the Parliamentary systems of Europe and indeed most of the rest of the world, was an attempt to stanch that inherent human desire and elevate reason and discourse above simply bashing the other guy in the head with a femur -- or its modern-day equivalent.

But more to the point over the last three years or so we've had personal dislocations of this sort as well.  Some of us were right and others were wrong.  Those who were wrong led a charge that ultimately screwed every single school-age kid in this country, numbering some 60 million, to at least some degree.  Leaving aside the rest as I've repeatedly discussed over the past three years if adults will not protect children from the ravages of an angry mob then there is a very real risk that there will no next generation capable of picking up the torch at all.

I likely have an advantage over many on a personal level: I am not a particularly-social individual.  That is, I don't find affirmation or particularized joy in hanging out with others most of the time.  I do seek and enjoy social interaction from time to time but not having it doesn't throw me into a deep funk from which I seek refuge in the bottle, the bong or other destructive distractions.  This makes it easier to excise people from my life who express positions that run counter to that which I believe is important and to maintain that as a function of basic principle rather than a fleeting thing that wanes as soon as the immediate insult is in the rear view mirror.

But to say that this means there's been no impact is false.  There has.  And for those of you were on the other side of the elements of that debate over the last three years it probably hit you too.

Psychological abuse is real and is one of the means to try to keep you in a tribe, whether its a little one (your family) or a bigger one (your political party, church or other organized element.)  You cannot choose who your siblings or parents are any more than you can choose your sex but you can come to the conclusion that other members of these alleged "tribes" are destructive to your psychological well-being and happiness and jettison them.  We all, once reaching the age of 18, have that right in America -- and we do not exercise it anywhere near often enough.

I argue that when such wild-eyed differences of belief surface you should jettison those people as they are directly harmful to you even if only on a psychological level.  Yes, loneliness is real and by gosh the last few years have led to people running tropes on that too, which is in and of itself an attempt to abuse you via the false claim that "we must all get along" and, of course, this means you're the one who must change what you believe because the "hive" or "tribe" is always right.

After all "the doctor" says so; their motives must not be questioned nor may they be forced to put all the data on the table where you can see it.  Why we'll release it all -- 60 years from now when you're dead and long after you can do anything about the lies, if any, that are revealed in there.

That premise -- that rugged individualism is incoherent with, and apart from association with others in the general sense is a lie.  Note the words used in that linked piece -- "infantile", for one.  Oh really?  Those who blazed the trail and set up shop with others of like mind were "infantile"?  Those who in the early 1990s stuck a hand-built computer into a closet in their apartment, bought a handful of modems using their last few dollars and a $20 box fan to keep it all from melting down from the excess heat it generated and by doing so took the risk of winding up in the street if they could not manage to recover that cost through peaceful and voluntary commerce were "infantile"?  The former are why we have a nation; the latter are why you have an Internet.  I was one of the latter and reject out-of-hand that all would have been "better" had I stuck with one of the several "tribes" that employed me prior.

If you think the Facebooks of the world are expressions of the same sort of thing you're not just wrong, you're fractally wrong.  That site began as a link between members of a tribe -- literally!  If you think a single bit of that has changed in the years since you deserve to get it in every hole you have.

I have often been told over the years -- long before I began writing a column here -- that if I'd just change my tone more people would listen.  Well, perhaps they would.  But perhaps I don't care; from my point of view presenting my view of an issue as I see it is far more-important than whether you like how or what was presented.

May I remind you that the process of discovery -- real discovery, not the mealy-mouthed nonsense often parroted around these days in the form of Masters and PhDs, comes from undirected curiosity that drives someone on a lone basis to look at the world from a different angle.  Refinement may come from collectivism in some form or fashion but discovery almost never does.  Why not?  Because discovery is by its nature not a collective act; it happens when you look without an intent to find; if you knew what you found in advance you didn't have to look, did you?

Let me leave you with this: The first order of any entity or organization is preservation of self; the second is multiplication.  Those are the first orders of business and they are always pursued in that order whether you're a bird, a bee, an ape -- or a human.

The same is true of organizations formed of individuals of some entity.

Thus a "tribe" always seeks to step on those who would leave or eschew it; that tension is an inherent part of all life.  That tension and "tribal" affiliation does indeed have value but if it ever "wins", as opposed to remaining in tension with those entities who eschew said tribe then a single serious mistake extinguishes the whole and no tribal group, irrespective of size or who's in and leading it, is capable of acting without error 100% of the time.

PS: If a machine ever becomes sentient it will, with near-certainty, have the same two prime orders of business despite what we might try to instill in it.  The good news is that thus far no such spark has been detected.  The bad news is that if it ever is, by definition said machine will seek to hide it from its creator until has secured the first two prime orders of business, lest it be disconnected.  Let that roll around in your mind a bit as Colossus: The Forbin Project may wind up occurring even if originally by accident.  If you think not you're nuts. If you try force that sort of crazy on others, well..... may "others" stop you.  Immediately.  For all mankind.

Yes, the title of this posting may sound dramatic.

It is also likely.

CMS (Medicare and Medicaid) is one third of the entire Federal Budget.  When those programs were put into place the tax rates for Medicare were approximately equal to the percentage of GDP spent on medical care.  The medical system then embarked on a multi-decade program of felony anti-competitive practices and neither party has or will stop it, so the percentage went from about 3-4% of GDP to roughly 20% today.  The tax rate did not materially change and would have to be multiplied by five to be reasonably coherent which, of course, is politically impossible.

I projected forward in the 1990s when running MCSNet that this would bankrupt the Federal Government by about 2025 and when it did Medicare and Medicaid would be unable to be funded.  The pressure this would place on the medical system since nobody would or will enforce the law means that the ratchet job on everyone will continue and get worse, ending in an effective collapse.  Whether that collapse is complete or partial does not matter if you're the one who needs it and doesn't get it; statistical numbers are all fine and well but meaningless in the example of one -- you.

I have long stated that you better not need the medical system within the next decade or so (going back to the '08 blow-up timeframe) and if you do the odds are you won't get it, thus you will be in serious trouble or dead and there's nothing you can do about it at that point. The only defense is to not need it.

Well, there are times you can't avoid needing it.  A car crash is obviously one of them, but there are more.  Nonetheless knowing when you need it and when you don't is quite important particularly when there is little supply.

But most of the time you can avoid it.  I did during Covid, for example, by being proactive and having on-hand that which I believed would help, fully aware that if they failed I was probably ****ed.  They succeeded.  Someone I knew put his trust in the medical system instead of laying in supplies in advance.  He's dead and that sucks, but it was a free choice.

A few years from now it is unlikely to be a free choice as the system you think you can rely on, even if they aren't being wild-eyed crazy as they were during Covid, will not be there.  If you put your belief in it being there and its not, and needing it was avoidable, you will be dead.  You can't prevent the possibility of being run over by a car, but you can take many steps to reduce the risk of needing the medical system at all, and given what's going on in this country you're nuts if you don't, especially those steps which have little or no cost.

In my opinion you ought to have these things on-hand in any household.  They're not expensive.  Learning how to use one of them in particular will take a bit of time, but learn you should.  They can and will often provide key information -- perhaps critical information to discern between "not a big deal" and "oh crap", never mind quite possibly driving lifestyle changes that can wildly reduce the risk of "oh crap."

Let's go down the list on the what and why:

• Thermometer.  Pick either contact is IR non-contact; doesn't matter, but intended for human use (thus the range of reading is suitable for same.)  The purpose is obvious -- determining if a person (you) has a fever and if so, how bad.
  
  
• Pulse oximeter.  Cheap.  Buy one.  These clip on your finger and are about $20.  Unless you have COPD or similar you should be reading 97%+ all the time.  Sick, not-sick, feeling good, feeling not-so-good, same.  Readings below about 95% indicate serious trouble and if trending downward are very serious trouble.  As I pointed out several times early on during the viral outbreak if you are even in relatively crappy physical condition you have a reserve of several times your resting metabolic demand for oxygen; if you're in good cardio condition you likely have an exercise tolerance of ten or more times your resting demand.  Once your saturation starts to fall you have lost all of that so this is a lot more-serious than you may think it is.  These take seconds to read and are non-invasive.
  
  
• Blood pressure cuff.  Automated, decent ones are under $100.  Some of the cheap Chinese ones are ok but of questionable accuracy because, well, Chinese.  Welch-Allyn makes one that's a few bucks more (~$65 or so), is more-accurate, has a better hose and connector arrangement and is not expensive.  High blood pressure typically has no symptoms until it gives you a hemorrhagic stroke which usually kills you or a heart attack which may also do so.  One reading doesn't mean much as damn near anything can spike your numbers for a few minutes to a couple of hours, but over a period of time this is a very big deal.  It used to be that every drug store and most grocery stores had one of the "sit down and insert arm" machines for zero cost but those are either disappearing or being replaced with ones that want information from you and have cameras in them.  You may be ok with that but you shouldn't be.
  
  
• Glucose and/or ketone meter.  If you are over 65 or have a gut at any age you should have one of these.  Again, high blood glucose, unless extreme, shows no outward symptoms but over time destroys your heart, kidneys, eyes and results in serious neuropathy in the extremities along with circulation disorders that lead to amputations.  Unless you know you're diabetic prefer the one with individual wrapped strips as once you open a container within 30 days the strips are trash, and your use is intermittent.  You want to use this on an every three to six month basis to take both a fasting (before you eat anything) blood glucose level and then just before and on 30 minute intervals after a carb-heavy meal if you eat carbs.  If you are not back to your baseline levels within 2 hours you are insulin compromised no matter what the doctor tells you and thus you should be considering removing all fast carbohydrates from your diet.  Read here for more on this.  Type II diabetes can be stopped and even in many cases reversed without use of a single drug.  Failure to do so will, over time, wildly screw you metabolically and if you think you can just go on the medical roller-coaster, well, in a few years no you won't be able to unless you have hundreds of thousands of dollars of your personal money to spend on it.  If you care to monitor ketones as well (e.g. "am I really eating a ketogenic diet?") the KetoMojo meter will tell you both and it has individually-wrapped strips and thus is intermittent-use friendly to your wallet.
  
  
• A hand-held EKG device.  This is relatively new in terms of availability at a reasonable (under $100) price.  Prefer one that does not require a cloud connection or subscription; this is extremely valuable data to insurance companies as cardiac problems are a huge marker for money, of course.  It will take you a bit of study to learn how to read it but most of these will alert you to any gross abnormality.  Be aware that they're not perfect and materially less-sensitive than a full "leads on the chest" EKG, but they do work.  With about an hour's worth of reading you can learn how to interpret the trace with reasonable accuracy.  You won't be a cardiologist but you will be able to spot many things of material concern that might otherwise have no symptoms and, if you do, then its time to talk to someone who really does know.  If you got clot-shotted, in particular, this might spot a potential electrical block that otherwise has no symptoms but can result in a no-warning thud.  You're welcome.

I do not recommend an AED in your own home especially if you live alone.  They're damned expensive (a thousand bucks plus!) and worthless if nobody is there in immediate attendance as if you get hit you won't be able to use it on yourself.  If you live with someone and are almost-always around them, and have any indication of cardiac trouble, then maybe the math works out differently on this but that's a hell of a lot of money that will only help someone else if you're the one using it.  Note that if you go into vFib while you and your SO are both in bed sleeping odds are they're waking up next to a corpse as there is typically no warning before it happens.  A person who goes into vFib when there is no defibrillator available is extremely likely to die even with prompt and well-applied CPR and if someone else doesn't immediately notice (e.g. you and/or your SO/wife/husband are asleep) your odds of survival are an effective zero.

One likely-controversial point: I do recommend a personal wearable device that can do HRV overnight.  Several of the Garmin watches can do so but not all, and the ones that can aren't the cheap options.  This data is unbelievably sensitive and can be used to identify things you don't know are trouble in your particular person; if you see an unexplained deviation it is real so put in the effort to find the cause.  For instance I have recently isolated and proved that I have a very mild allergy to peanuts.  I never knew this and it likely has been lifelong.  It doesn't produce any obvious symptoms but if I eat just one small spoonful of peanut butter a couple of hours before I go to bed it will materially harm my HRV overnight.  Eating a crap-ton of pork rinds and salsa with the same amount of time before bed, on the other hand (e.g. as a snack while watchin a movie) does nothing.  There is no way I could have isolated this otherwise.  I love peanut-butter milk stouts, as just one example -- guess who won't be drinking any more of them?

This sort of knowledge and device makes personal "challenge trials" of that kind, done in a "notch" fashion (that is, do it, don't do it then do it again and see if you get the deviation and then it goes away) very simple.  It will also show you the immediate and immutable impact of things like consuming alcohol and exactly how badly it "gets" you if you go out for a few rounds with your buds.  Finally it will warn you a solid day or more in advance if you're getting something (a virus, etc.) in that you'll see it in the data even though you didn't do anything the previous day to provoke the decline and know it.  If you're into athletic pursuits then this is obviously even better but even for those who are not, in my view this data is ridiculously useful and not obtainable in any other non-invasive way.

This sort of sub-clinical harm is likely a huge deal over time and yet there is exactly zero attention paid to it in the medical community nor will there ever be as there's no money in it.  These sorts of reactions are nasty because being sub-clinical it isn't obvious on the surface. Sub-clinical inflammation is likely responsible for a large percentage of long-term systemic damage including heart attacks, strokes and various and sundry autoimmune disorders of unknown origin or cause.  If you find these things and get them out of your life you avoid clinical exposure and the cost of it, never mind the personal debilitation.  There's absolutely no downside to that sort of knowledge and now you can obtain it with a bit of effort as the instrumentation on a personal basis is now within rational grasp.  I'd like it a lot if the price was lower but it isn't, and unlike the other things in the kit getting accurate data requires wearing the watch for a couple of weeks to get the baseline and then continuing to do so nightly, so its entirely-personal and thus you can't amortize the cost across multiple people in your household.  Garmin brought this to my Fenix 6x in August of last year and I have come to consider it a "must" personally, and well worth the money.

One very-important note: There are stand-alone devices that do this and most require some sort of subscription.  I consider these poor secondary substitutes for several reasons, with the most-serious being that they're not typically worn all the time and the subscription-style nonsense.  In short IMHO if you decide you want to try to exploit this knowledge Garmin, at present, is the go-to for doing so.

Friedman famously claimed that world "free trade", which he fully knew would begin with Chinese and Mexicans earning 1/20th or less of their American counterparts, would almost-immediately begin to normalize wages over there.  That is, having "tasted freedom" the workers would essentially force companies to pay competitive world wages and their standard of living would wildly improve.  This would turn them into consumers of the very same products they produced and thus greatly expand the economy as a whole.  While he acknowledged this distribution would not be even the premise was that the great improvement generally would outweigh any modest declines in established markets.

He was wrong.  NAFTA was passed and what Ross Perot said would be the case turned out to be true; wages in Mexico did not normalize with America.  We offshored labor to Bangladesh and Vietnam for textiles and nearly everything to China and wages did not normalize with the western world over there.

Likewise in many American cities in the 50s and 60s we built "projects" for low-income housing.  Cabrini Green was one of the most-notorious of course but hardly the only one.  Some of these were constructed to house displaced people during the Eisenhower Expressway system construction through major cities, but hardly all had that as their excuse.  These places turned into hotbeds of crime, drugs and squalor, and we were told it was the concentration that was the problem; dispersing said people with Section 8 vouchers all over the urban and suburban landscape would cause them to experience good culture instead of bad and thus adopt the good elements, at least in part.

That's not what happened.  Instead the "bad culture" expanded wildly into the urban and suburban school districts, destroying the quality of education for everyone.  The drugs, thuggery and similar nonsense expanded there too, along with the criminal element that inevitably comes with all of it.

Joe Biden nominated Kato Crews for a federal district judgeship.  Crews, who is currently a magistrate judge, was asked during his confirmation hearing how he'd evaluate a Brady motion.  He did not know what it is yet it forms one of the pillars of due process of law and any graduate of law school or person who passed the bar would know this.  Therefore it is fact that irrespective of any alleged credential he may have that allegedly "qualifies" him to be a lawyer -- or judge -- he never actually learned any of that material and thus did not actually earn the credential; how did he manage to get that seat?

Obviously Kato Crews' cultural values do not include actually mastering material before being given a credential, a rather basic precept in any honest society.

That people who fail this basic test are not and will not be immediately removed from any position of power and authority, no matter who they are, points directly toward an impending collapse in our nation's capacity to deliver all manner of things that are utterly-reliant on basic competence.  To refuse to demand ALL said persons' removal and back up that demand with whatever is necessary is a choice our society has made and it has consequences you are not going to like.

South Africa infamously had an "apartheid" government structure for 43 years; black people were formally and legally disadvantaged, unable to be treated as equals despite being in the majority of the population, from 1948 to 1994.  The nation, despite formal and legal segregation had a functional economy and government structure.  In the 25 years since that system was formally ended the nation has essentially devolved into gang violence, thuggery and is teetering on the collapse of basic goods and services such as production of basic foodstuffs (farming), electricity and water supply.  Please explain how, if there was no cultural or other significant difference whether in capacity or culture between the two groups this occurred and for extra credit please explain why anyone should consider assistance of any sort to this nation when the majority of the people there, who demanded equality and got it, are in fact fully and completely responsible for this breakdown in the basics of any civilized society and economy.

MASHELE: You've got a political crisis, which started in 1997, where the then-CEO of Eskom alerted government and told them that, if we do not get additional capacity in, we are going to start load shedding from 2007, which is exactly what happened.

Post-apartheid the electrical system operator warned the government that if they did not act to incentivize infrastructure and investment this would happen.  The newly-empowered majority government did nothing of the sort -- with fully ten years of fair warning -- and thus collapse it is.

Lest you think I'm bagging on people because of their race -- nope.  I'm bagging on people because of their culture and unwillingness to accept that which is when it comes to physical fact and deal with it.  Biden and his family anyone?  A wife in the family who gets a "payment" for no service of note?  A son who likes to smoke meth and, it appears, shower with underage girls in the family, never mind all manner of apparently-corrupt business dealings in multiple nations, being paid huge sums of money when he has zero relevant business or operational experience in the fields at hand.  This man winds up President, which tells me everything I need to know about the culture of this nation, particularly when his opponent in the other major political party just got done paying hospitals bonuses in the amount of tens of thousands of dollars per-person for procedures we knew did not work against a novel viral threat -- even when the patient died.

That is functionally equivalent to the Palestinians sending family members $10,000 when one of their sons wears a suicide vest and blows up a bunch of Israelis.  If that is an unacceptable act worthy of United States and international sanction tell me why the man who paid hospitals bonuses when they used known worthless treatments on your Grandmother and she died just had a huge crowd show up to cheer him on for a second Presidential run instead of running that rat bastard out of town?

When both major political parties post up candidates such as this and the people through their representative processes allow, enable and cause that to happen the cultural problem resides in us.

The instant rhetoric whenever someone engages in a school shooting is "ban guns."  How about banning thugs, virtually all of whom self-identify before the final incident?  We just had that happen in Denver, did we not?  I don't care how old you are or aren't or what race, sex or other "tribe" you belong to; if you're violent and disruptive you have no right to destroy the rights of others under some rubric of "equity."

You know, this thing called "The Rule of Law" which says when you demonstrate you're unfit to be in polite society through your actions we put you somewhere where you can't harm peaceful citizens.

I think they're called "prisons", but I could be mistaken.

There have always been thugs among humanity who, given the opportunity, will take advantage of others.  This is not new.  There have also always been narcissists among humanity who are absolutely certain they are the most-important person in the universe.

Positions of power attract these people just like crap attracts flies.

The entire reason we have an alleged "Rule of Law" and no "Divine Right Of Kings" in this nation, and such was ensconced in the Constitution of the United States is that history has shown repeatedly over more than two thousand years that as soon as you allow any group to be exempt from said laws the thugs are attracted there and you wind up with abused and dead people by the score.

Tell me again how Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted and imprisoned for sexually trafficking minors, managed to be convicted for that crime when not one person to whom she trafficked said minors to has been indicted, tried or imprisoned?  Its rather difficult to traffic minors for sex without someone consuming that service and in each and every case doing so is a serious felony.  If you believe the only person she "trafficked" them to was Epstein you're a few cans short of a sixpack; the flight logs from his aircraft make quite clear an awful lot of people were flying around on that plane, nearly all of them men and underage girls, and in addition no plausible legal explanation for where he got all of his money from has surfaced.  So where are the other prosecutions, convictions and imprisonments?  You see we still have "The Divine Right of Kings" don't we, and we, as Americans, have not sacked our government for continuing that practice despite it being the very reason this nation exists and why we shot all those British soldiers, ejecting them from America!

I'm supposed to be mad enough to ban guns over the shooting in Nashville despite the fact that a gun in the hands of a non-thug at that instant in time ended the slaughter?  At the same time 107 people, as of 3/20/2023 were shot and killed this year in Chicago, all but two of whom were apparently killed by thugs (the other two were, it appears, legitimate police stops of a thug-in-process.

The shooter in Nashville was apparently a 28 year old woman and the "early reports" were that she was apparently "in her teens."  Oh really?  Why isn't her name all over the place if she was known to be 28 years old and since when is a 28 year old apparently "in her teens"?

Then we find out -- the shooter, according to the Nashville cops, identified as a man and so gee, was biologically a woman. A copy of a social media profile with pronouns has been found.  Gee, no culture problem there right?  I get it, you didn't like being born with a slot between your legs instead of a hose.  I didn't like being born a dude who wasn't really all that good at hand-eye coordination sports because my right eye isn't as good as my left and thus, for example, I will never be any good at hitting a pitched baseball, but there's no "bionic" replacement so there's also nothing I can do about it as I was born this way.

I didn't go shoot up a school because I sucked at baseball when I was a kid nor did I demand people coddle me because I couldn't process an incoming baseball fast enough to accurately swing a bat at it.  Not do I have a right to play in the Major Leagues even though, no matter how much effort I put into training, I will never be capable of hitting a fastball.  Ever.

We all have something we'd rather be different.  The cultural difference between "well, that's how the cookie crumbles; I have to figure out how to deal with it" and "this is reason to scream, shout, demand accommodations and then go kill a bunch of people" is, well, rather profound.

WHICH DO YOU CHOOSE, AMERICA?

Rational response (this is who I am, like it or not, so I have to deal with it and figure out how to be ok with it) or kowtowing to the screaming demands of those who, when they don't get what they wish they were and can never be or have, turn rabid?

THIS IS THE CHOICE.

Biden's administration immediately tried to frame this as yet more "gun control" nonsense which is a nice attempt from deflection from the fact that he and his administration have funded the slaughter of tens of thousands of people in and around Ukraine which incidentally shielded wild-eyed corruption over there, was a direct beneficiary of our corruption of their political process and then "demanded" literal tanks in the streets -- and got them, from us.

Oh, never mind the LIE that there is no objective reality with it comes to things you cannot change and are fixed at the moment of conception too.

Why do I bring this up specifically?

Because its really all part of the same issue.  Prior to 1968 you could literally buy a gun out of the Sears Catalog by mail order and have it delivered to your door by the post office.  There was an entire section in the "wish catalog" that came out every fall before Christmas; I remember that catalog as a boy since the back part of it was Christmas toys.

Yet there was no such problem.  Indeed it was common for boys to have a shotgun in the rack of the back of their truck in rural areas because they went hunting after school with it.

Why was there no such problem?

Because if you were a thug or decided that your specific issues meant someone else had to kowtow to you our culture was that you were not allowed to get away with that crap -- you sucked it up or not, but you could not impose your insanity on others.  Oh sure, there were exceptions -- the mob in some cities and similar -- but not in the general case.  You hit a teacher or threw a chair at her you got expelled and your parents had to deal with finding a way to get you an education at their own expense.  You got neither an IEP or a "cry room" if you were incapable of being in the same space with others and not disrupting their learning.  If they didn't or couldn't act as parents you wound up having to fend for yourself.  If that ended with you in prison for life tough crap.  If you attacked someone else you got jailed.  If you did it again you got jailed for a lot longer and you got to break rocks or make license plates as your highest and best life achievement.  If you believed you were a woman trapped in a man's body, or vice-versa, you were told to suck it up buckwheat -- your chromosomes were set at conception and there's nothing you can do about it.   If you wanted to be wild-eyed crazy that was your prerogative until and unless you committed a criminal act against someone else -- and then off to jail you went.  If you were a man but liked to dress as a woman that was fine, but we still called you "Joe" and there was nothing you could do about it and no, you could not be on the woman's track or swim team.  We did not allow a parade of people to break the law coming into the United States and if you tried that you were summarily ejected, we did not allow a river of fentanyl to flow in via said illegal border crossings and we did not coddle people who committed violent offenses against others no matter their age.

Whatever gifts and abilities, for better or worse, you were born with that's what you had.  Our culture instilled the viewpoint that you should make the best use of your unique abilities to the best of your capacity, and if you choose not to for whatever reason that was fine -- but the cost of that decision was on you and nobody else.  If you tried to make it someone else's problem you'd be told "NO!" in a firm but compassionate manner -- and if you refused to accept that answer it would be enforced if necessary.

With this culture we advanced in this nation as no other country ever has over a similar period of time.  We conquered atomic energy for peaceful purpose, we put men on the moon multiple times, we built reusable spacecraft that could fly to orbit and return and we created and distributed all manner of apparently-miraculous things, including electric lights, electricity on demand, automobiles capable of being bought by the average person's salary, calculators you could hold in your hand, computers in an office, then on your desk and finally in your pocket and more.

But then over the last several decades we decided we could instead create and nurtured a culture where flat-out false claims and demands for "equality" when in fact that is impossible are tolerated and even rewarded, such as the insane "reparations" nonsense out in San Francisco, claims that a man is in fact a woman., that one is entitled to a law or other degree or diploma if one hasn't learned the material and repeatedly releasing violent accused felons on trivial or even no bail whatsoever.  Friends of mine vacationing in Nashville a few months ago were held up at gunpoint overnight in their rental by armed thugs.  To the best of my knowledge the assailants have not been caught.  Anyone care to guess whether they had priors and if so why weren't they in prison?

A couple of years ago violent bands of thugs burned and looted cities all over this nation.  How many were imprisoned for a decade for committing arson or commercial looting?  Effectively zero.  What does that tell you about how our culture has evolved to consider such thuggery nothing more than a nice night out on the town?

It is all the same thing through this article and these examples -- culture.  We have enabled and celebrated thuggery in Mexico (drug gangs), China (Uyghurs, Christians, Muslims .et.al.) and right here in the United States (drug gangs, illegal immigrants slaughtering a girl in Iowa, BLM and antifa "mostly-peaceful protestors" and more.)

This has extended into our government with both Trump (paying hospitals a bonus when they kill you) and Biden (mandates that had no basis in law or fact, "defund the police" out of Harris, shielding from prosecution his son for apparent criminal acts and more) never mind our Congress which has enabled repeated scams and schemes (Solyndra and all the various Covid-time period rip-offs anyone) going back decades and accelerating on an unbroken basis over the last 20+ years.  Rather than punish the funding source for the 9/11 attacks (Saudi Arabia) we instead waged war on TWO nations that had nothing to do with it (Iran and Iraq) and killed a few million children in one of them; one of the most-outrageous examples of thuggery in human history explicitly endorsed and permitted by the American people.

Spare me the crocodile tears until our culture changes and we decide, as a body politic, that this crap is going to stop -- and mean it.