Levels of corruption in health care are profound and at an all time high

This topic is critically important because it is the direct cause of the fact the US has the worst health of any developed country by a  significant margin, and the US has the most expensive health care system in the world. The pharma industry is raking in obscene levels of profit, even in comparison to the "Robber Baron" era, which was finally reigned in with anti-monopoly legislation that was actually enforced.

Humm, actually enforced. The implication would be then that the government at that point was not also completely corrupt.

So if you'd like to know exactly why the US has the worst health, and why so many of us have "chronic diseases" that require lifetime prescriptions, and why many seniors are on as many as seven prescriptions(!), start here, where a medical doctor turned investor knows the stats on exactly how big is big, when it comes to US health care:

Dr. Eifrig made these points in a recent letter:

- Health care makes up nearly 20% of the U.S. economy.

- It employs over 20 million people.

- At $4.1 trillion, it’s not just bigger than every penny spent nationwide on food, cars, or energy, it’s bigger than all three put together.

- Ask any American which federal department gets the most funding and almost everyone will say defense.

- The DoD is certainly huge, with a nearly $800 billion budget this year.

- But the “winner” is the Department of Health and Human Services. It’s twice as big at $1.6 trillion. Nothing else comes close.

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Then watch a brief interview with the author of the new book

Owning the Sun: A People's History of Monopoly Medicine from Aspirin to COVID-19 Vaccines

Most of us will think, "well, we're stuck, there isn't any other way to get well than to take meds."

And nothing could be further from the truth. Let's talk about biological dysregulation a little bit. The term is nothing more than a fancy way of saying our bodies and health get out of whack for some reason.

For some reason. Which infers we don't know but health care does. And indeed we don't know, but not because it is a big esoteric mystery. We are not being told something, and that something is quite simple. It is that biological dysregulation is from a logistical perspective quite easily fixed in a few steps.

1) Learn why most of the "foods" we think of as healthy are actually not.

This require a little education, but I'll give a shortcut answer here: do not put in your mouth, chew and swallow any "food" that is not whole. That means NO REFINED "foods" (actually toxins) OF ANY KIND. The standard diet is full of sugar, salt, and oil, a very toxic brew, and especially so in combination.

I'm not going to lie to you, this step is the hardest for several reasons. Almost everyone alive today grew up on this diet. We are used to it. The things we are used to we have unconscious associations to survival. Let me give an example of that. People who smoke now know it causes cancer and other health degradations (COPD etc), it's no longer a debate. But their unconscious associations are that smoking is healthy! How is that even possible? It is possible because our unconscious associations HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RATIONAL THINKING. What are the first two things we do when we're born? Suck in air, and then suck mother's breast for our first taste of nourishment. So there is something about sucking deeply embedded in our "instinct structure". We didn't have to go to school to lean how to suck in air, it's an instinct, and yes even humans have instincts too.

To complete this circle of thought, out instincts that exist solely to drive us toward the things that give us the robust health possible are easily hijacked by modern "food science", a vile and despicable industry, if there ever was one. So yes, we are unconscious and unknowing victims of an industry that seeks nothing else than to turn us into lifetime addicts of toxic substances, and that, in a nutshell, goes a hell of a long way toward explaining why the health levels of US citizens is on average, I am sorry to have to say, wretched.

And we don't know this, and it is not explained to us clearly either. And it is not complicated! But we are left in confusion for a reason, we are the "feedstock" for several highly profitable industries.

Do we ever stop and think of ourselves, our friends, our families as "feedstock" to be ground up and fed to highly profitable industries? Not exactly the American Dream is it? To get off that conveyer headed to the grinder the first thing we have to do is wake the fuck up, and realize the situation we're in, and that good old Uncle Sam isn't going to help us on this one....too much profit is being made.

The second thing we have to realize is that the feedstock system requires that we tolerate being reduced to unhealthy biologically dysregulated "junkies". The third thing is to remember how important our health is, it is the foundation for happiness and accomplishment. And the forth thing is to resolve to win our health back because we realize our individual action is the only way it is going to happen...there is no industrial or governmental entity that is going to lead us to it, we have to do it for ourselves. It's a big ask, and whether you'll do it or not depends on how much you want to be happy and healthy.

And let me say one last thing about what the beginning of this post is about, the pharma industry. Yes, unfortunately they are the last link in the feedstock system, they are not going to lead you to health either. And they are lying to you that their medications are going to help, they are rather, on the whole health destructive, in a variety of ways. The first way is by giving you something they have convinced us will help. This is a rouse that keeps us from realizing the truth. And the dysregulation you suffer from by eating crap food? Eating whole foods and nothing else is the only way to fix biological dysregulation!  That is because whole foods are the only consumable substances we are biologically adapted to. What do the meds do? They only shift the location of the dysregulation slightly by suppressing symptoms. And worse the dysregulation becomes exponentially more complicated!

This is how seniors end up on seven prescription drugs, and in the worst health of their lives, in a state of massive biological dysregulation.

Really, when you think about it, the feedstock system is a crime against humanity. But there are good soldiers in pharma and the health care industry, and I'll give them this: they know not what they do. Most of them are motivated by an altruistic desire to make a positive contribution. And yes there are also those who are completely corrupt and rationalize it somehow. But you do have to wonder how they can sleep at night. I guess Upton Sinclair said it best:

It's difficult to get a man to realize a thing when his salary depends on his not realizing it".

Does that help us to realize what we are up against? Fortunately the choice is still ours. It's a good one, probably the best one...good luck making it.

What is it like to be 100 years old?

The best years of your life? What? Seriously?

https://youtube.com/shorts/w_QhHfoQr-Y?feature=share

Dr Alan Goldhamer

 

https://youtu.be/BmuQUoYz9as

Why do we falsely conflate progress with evolution?

The conflation of technology with biology is a complex false extrapolation coming from the most basic instinct, the fear of death, without which we would not last very long. In other words the fear of death is the most basic level of survival instinct. 

But it is important to remember instinct is the non-cognitive part of the brain, and we do not have direct access to it. We don't have to think about making our heart beat, it just does. Multiply that times a zillion to get some notion of the complexity of biology, and the "biological brain", or instinct, that drives all life on the only biological planet we are aware of.

But we may be only dimly aware of it moment to moment when we stop to consider the damage we are doing to biological diversity, here, on the only biosphere we are aware of. And we do this basically unconsciously, in the sense we are "driven" by instinct. So this basic "drive force" is instinct, not reason. The best we can do is to try and understand this unconscious "drive force" using our capacity for reason.

And it's important to understand how we conflate progress with evolution in order to understand human potentials and limitations.

It's also important to understand that in this day of seemingly limitless human potential we also seem to have a pretty dim understanding of human limitation.

Remember Dirty Harry? And the famous line, "Man's got to understand his limitations."

https://youtu.be/uki4lrLzRaU

The problem with not understanding limitation is one is apt to confuse fiction with reality. We might, for example, go picking fights that will get us killed. How many action movies are based on the idea of limitlessness? All of them. Science fiction movies? Yep, them too.

Now let's spend a few moments considering the difference between evolution, or biology, and progress, or technology.

Big brain humans, sapiens, arrived after millions of years of evolution from our ape ancestors, about 150,000 years ago. Technology progressed slowly with the creation of crude hunter gathering tools from 150,000 years ago until agriculture and civilization began, about 10,000 years ago. At that point technological progress began speeding up a bit. So technological progress was glacially slow the first 140,000 years of us sapiens on the planet, then a bit faster with the onset of agriculture.

But then, with the onset of the industrial revolution, about 230 years ago, the progress curve literally went vertical.

Let's also make note of an important part of understanding human limits: from the point we sapiens first appeared 150,000 years ago to now there has been very little if any evolution in our physiology or brain capacity. 

It is said if a hunter gatherer mother could magically transport her baby into a current modern family, as that baby grew into an adult there would be no distinguishable difference between 150,000 years ago human and current human. Human capacities, physiology and brain size, are the same.

Biological evolution is very (very) slow, but technological progress has been a rocket ride.

There are two types of growth curves, logarithmic and exponential:

The problem with exponential growth progressions is they have a nasty habit of collapsing at some point. The reason is the rate of progression cannot be maintained. If you look at the exponential curve just above you see for that for the rate of growth to continue it would have to start curving backwards at some point, which is impossible because time does not go backward (except in science fiction). 

And it can't turn into a vertical because that would mean all future progress would happen right now! Again, a "time" impossibility (except in science fiction).

Are you beginning to see why science fiction is so compelling. It's a mythology that makes us limitless, which also confers immortality, where a single individual biological life is never ended by mortality, or anything else.

But, it is impossible because biology is created by "we know not what". In the science fiction world we may be able to take command of biology at some point. Cool, no more destruction of the ecology, we would simply re-engineer biology to do what we want. And what is that? To cut to the chase, primarily, to live forever. 

An ironic paradox of impossibility.

To look at it another way we humans are afraid of biology (in an example of the instinctual and unconscious fear of death) because we ourselves are 100% biological (and how ironic is it that we are afraid of what we are completely?) Technological replacements of damaged biological body parts with titanium (knees hips or whatever) does not change the fact we are 100% biological, to think it does is a science fiction.

And to think we can take command of biology will prove to be another science fiction, but one that probably won't be broadly realized as such until we have continued to do more damage to global biology, and ourselves.

Health can only be acquired by learning, accepting, and following the laws of nature, which are not all that complex. And the attempt to re-write the laws of nature will backfire, perhaps precipitously.

The great Leonard Cohen wrote and sang "there ain't no cure for love", an oblique reference to the power of biology to "drive" us in ways we may sometimes wish we did not have to go.

https://youtu.be/gM7vULqs31Q

Even if so, it's not a completely horrible idea to live in actual reality, to the extent possible.

So, to sum up, we have a mostly unconscious wish (drive) for immorality which "plays out" in the conflation of biology with technology. Wishful thinking wants to think that with tech biology can become completely malleable to us. This ignores that biology is bigger than us, that we are created solely by biology, that we are it and only it, and completely "bounded" by it.

And technology is equal parts construction and destruction. The mythology of our day is the destructivity of technology is de minimis and the constructively of tech is de maximus.

Good luck to all us sapiens, it would seem that we could use some right about now. Let us remember also the most beautiful thing extant in our world is biology, and we are that.

mRNA in blood after 28 days

A study from Denmark shows mRNA in blood after 28 days. We were assured by the manufactures this could not happen. Dr John Campbell explains the study, and inferences that can be drawn.

https://youtu.be/fWVxVd6IGgg

‘I want to destroy whatever I want’: Bing’s AI chatbot unsettles US reporter

 An interesting article:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/17/i-want-to-destroy-whatever-i-want-bings-ai-chatbot-unsettles-us-reporter?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

My thoughts:

The bot has no real "feelings" because it is not organic/biological. And that may always be true of AI. If so, how far are we from creating a biological brain?

Curiosity killed the cat, but the cat has nine lives. Which life are we sapiens currently in? We are probing potentially species ending dark corners: AI that can only have fake compassion, genetic modifications of biology (including human biology), genetically modified pharmaceuticals, the most powerful pharmaceutical industry in history whose profit relies on continually increasing disease in the population, and nuclear weapons that are already here, fully formed, and ready to go.

Are humans also vulnerable in the 6th mass extinction (the only one human created)? You better bet your sweet bippy we are.

Freud postulated a life instinct and a death instinct, Eros and Thanatos. Thanatos kicks in when it's "time to go", biology "knows" when this is, when to release life and let go, just as the seed "knows" when to grow. Do biological organisms actually know these things? If so, how?

Well, we don't know, proving to my satisfaction there is an intelligence force greater than human loose in the universe. And we do not like not knowing, it makes us vulnerable. But wait, our biology does know?

Yep, and it's because we are biological, a part of nature. So why does it bug us so much that we don't know "intellectually"?

We love science fiction, aliens in balloons flying over North America. And we can escape species extinction by setting up camp on Mars, a planet a zillion times more "dead" than this one. Meanwhile Earth continues to have huge capacity for the generation of biology, and will likely continue having that capacity even if we sapiens self-suicide.

It occurs to me atheists are the most hubristic of humans. They believe there is no god because we cannot intellectually know there is a god. But if there is a force more intelligent than humans at loose in the universe, how could we even see it?

It's like the old joke, two young fish in the ocean having a good swim, when a wise old fish swims by and says, "hey youngsters, how's the water today"? The two young fish look at each other puzzled and say, "what the heck is water"?

My favorite scientists were/are also mystics, with a deep reverence for the unknown. But I'll admit, religious people do believe in some pretty dumb stuff. Isn't that called mythology? And been around as long as humans? Well we technologically sophisticated humans no longer have mythology because it is definitely not science, which of course is the only way we can know anything for sure. Right?

So then what is this biological "knowing"?

And who needs it? With science and technology we have discovered many constructive principles since hunter gatherer days, but as life on the planet continues to deteriorate it becomes more and more obvious that each constructive principle has a corresponding destructive principle. Every new and amazing technology is a double edged sword, and we can see the consequence of that in the ongoing destruction of biological life on the planet.

And if "more better" technology is not the answer, what is?

A genius thinker I am fond of points out humans tend to project trends into infinity...what is happening now will continue forever. But this is never true. Biological life cycles, and trends, are of shorter and longer durations. And the longer trend cycles extending beyond single generations are those we project into infinity.

Atheist humans seem to think if we could just extinguish cycles the "good" trends could last forever. These are the same fools extinguishing biological life on the planet.

Is our drive to "perfect" biology with genetic modification (including human biology) an unconscious impulse coming from the death instinct? Isn't biology already perfect? Except, dammit, it cycles and dies. Is this desire for immortality ironically what drives biology toward death, and knowing when "the time to go" is rapidly approaching? And hence the ongoing mass extinction.

The biological drives for life and death are bigger than science, bigger than us, and we are in near complete denial of it.

Fundamentally humans are no more intelligent than any other biological life form, because the foundational life/death force in us is the same. Billionaires die too, all are equal in the land of biology. And technology does not subsume biology, just ask your cryogenically frozen brain and see what kind of answer you get.

How can we develop reverence and grace around the life and death cycle?

Why don't we study the cause of health as ardently as we study the cause of disease? Or perhaps even moreso, because the study of the cause of health confers the closest approach to immortality we biological creatures will ever come.

Well that is a difficult ask, primarily because fear of death is a more powerful instinct than the sweet and sublime joy of life. The joy of life is a poetry, powerful, but subtle.

Secondarily, and significantly, and "back to business", there's no money in it, and we unconsciously feel wealth confers immortality. But it ain't true, ask, again, your cryogenically frozen brain.

There's no money in it because we already know the cause of health, and it is 100% free of charge, and we've known it since Hippocrates, if not before: "Let food be thy medicine". In other words the substances we put in our mouths, chew, and swallow, continuously create or destroy our health. It is that simple.

But the range from nutritious food to health destroying toxicity is long, and there is a lot of disagreement about where the sweet spot lies. I believe from the weight of the evidence and my own experience the sweet spot lies in the vast range of whole edible plants. However, "whole" may be a more fundamental overarching principle than plants. Regardless, when combined with the other causes of health, including recovery from toxic addictions, it's about as good as it gets on this biological planet.

I seriously doubt we are going to rid ourselves easily of the health destructive perspectives of the pharma industry, which is a fear based focus on the exact wrong thing, the cause of disease. Nor will we rid ourselves easily of other destructive industries. Pursuing the cause of health will be a personal choice in the foreseeable future.

So go for it, whole, fresh, ripe, raw, organic foods, in no particular order of priority. Blend these qualities in all the foods you consume to get the best overall quality possible.

The body heals itself you know, and when we get out of it's way it returns to a state of optimal health quickly.

So stop putting toxins in. You know what they are. Stop it!

And then once we've done that let's just continue to in-joy whatever time you and I have left on this magical biological god created planet, happy and healthy.

With a little luck and grace it doesn't have to be all that complicated.

Dr John Campbell - current overview

I tab into Dr. Campbell's point of view somewhat regularly. He was strongly pro vaccination at the beginning of the pandemic, but like the many health care professionals I follow, his point of view changed gradually as the data trickled in from around the globe. Here he presents his current point of view, stated very diplomatically.

https://youtu.be/onNe5VMQAwQ