I see it ruin people’s lives either through the waste of time that it is, or the poison that people are willing to put out online.
It reminds me of how much I loathe wokeness and the push to force people into sheep. Not me. It’s why my blog gets censored by TPTB.
Look at Steven Miller 4 meme’s below for the bookend to this next one.
It always ends with this when you listen to the current administration. It started with Wilson, FDR, BJ Clinton, both Bushes, Obama and Joe. If you think they have your interests in mind, you are sadly mistaken.
FBI, CIA, New Deal, Green New Deal, Welfare, Fake impeachments, the squad, gun control Food Stamps, Covid, Election fraud, Obamacare, BLM, pronouns, woke, climate scams, vaccines, College Loans, inflation, gas prices, food shortages…….on and on and on.
By death, I mean the first time it was allowed to be fully implemented and the world can see the destruction of deficit spending. It is how it will end when Keynes is allowed to play out without interference.
I’ve always wondered what could happen in a pure Milton Friedman or Keynes economy. It’s been more Friedman since the failure of the The New Deal, a Keynesian try and spending your way out of a depression. Of course WWII and a good economy actually did it, supporting Friedman, but it hasn’t stopped many presidents since then of trying it. Friedman’s capitalistic ideas brought more freedom and prosperity than the current philosophy
I don’t think they believe anything about Keynesian economics other than the part about government spending, because the Keynesian politicians use to to launder money back to into their pockets.
We know the New Deal (like the Green New Deal) failed and just spawned other failures like welfare, the Great Society and now Build Back Better.
At least we know how it turns out in a Keynesian model now, Build Back Broke. It gives power to the few and the government, which is not how our republic succeeds.
Everyone can see our economy being destroyed. Gas prices, food shortages, wars, inflation, border security…all there in back and white. They are socialistic policies that have a zero record of success.
The motto of the interloper now serving in the White House is “Build Back Better” – and the trillions to “build back” is an updated version of the New Deal on steroids. The Dems spend to a new level of excess which, for them, is ecstasy. In fact, a better name for their spend, spend, and spend more programs should be “Excess Ecstasy Exhilarates.” The foundation of the New Deal was found in the economic theory of John Maynard Keynes. Keynes was a British economist who developed the theory of ‘deficit spending’ – the idea that the government going into debt would jump-start the depressed economy which, then, would experience reinvigoration. There would be more employed, tax-paying citizens as well as corporate profits which would, in turn, restore the needed balance to the federal books. The deficit spending would restore a solvency that was lost due to the Great Depression.
In practice, this did not work out (unemployment was still in double digits throughout the 1930s), but because of the passage of the Wagner Act, which made it easier for workers to organize into unions, and because of the use of the radio for the well-known “Fireside Chats” – a real novelty in American politics which intensified public support for FDR – and because of residual anger towards the Republicans who had maintained power throughout the 1920s and were thus assumed to be the ones who had caused the Depression, Keynesian economics became the go-to model for economic policy in the United States for all decades since that time.
However, the Keynesian model has been weaponized under Build Back Better in a most sinister way. The present shift is to make us more amenable to the globalist fantasies gaining popularity in recent decades to ensure a transition towards world governance and a cooperative world economy (rather than a competitive one) under the cloak of “meeting needs” and “sustainability.” These two concepts are key pillars in a document written and published by the United Nations called Agenda 2030. Although the original United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 stressed the need for individual rights after WWII and promoted those rights in nearly every sentence of that document, the present document – Agenda 2030 – only refers to rights in one of the ninety-one sections: Section 19.
Instead of rights, needs are emphasized. This is consistent with the Communist Manifesto authored by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848. A key principle in that document is “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” The actual needs of people would be the uppermost goal of envisioned communist society rather than ideas like rights, freedom, responsibility, property ownership, pursuit of happiness, or even security. The new communistic premise is that if needs are met then people will automatically experience security and happiness and will not need the abstract fluff of such bourgeois, outdated, and elitist ideas as rights, freedom, or ownership. Further, the meeting of communist needs must be based on sustainability. If we run out of energy, clean air, or water at some point in the future, we would then not be able to meet peoples’ needs. Therefore, plans and actions to sustain all the materials and planetary conditions that will keep us from running out of the natural resources are “necessary” – even if that means enslavement and tyranny. ‘Sustainability’ works in tandem with the ‘meeting of needs’ as a combination that is a cornerstone for a new world governance policy.
The Build Back Better plan superficially appears to be an updated and extravagant Keynesian or New Deal-style spending program, but the endgame is not economic recovery that forever establishes federal government dominance over the states in the socio-political realm. Rather, this BBB is the connection of an enlarged federal government and authority with a depreciation or elimination of U.S. sovereignty in favor of global, communist-style governance. But as if the endgame were not sinister enough, we see this updated Keynesian expansion of expenditures is not a result of economic collapse due to a devastating Depression, as was the justification in the 1930s.
Rather, simultaneously with expanded spending, the goal of the BBB plotters is to weaken the economy and usher in economic and socio-political chaos and mayhem. The southern border hands-off policy is literally facilitating the entrance of millions of unvetted persons. By limiting or eliminating natural gas and oil production in the territorial U.S. under the guise of protecting the environment, the feds incentivize other countries to expand their production of these energy sources. That production, which still means higher energy prices here in the U.S., has an equally negative effect on the world climate as fuel production in our country. But the brooding minds behind BBB want to see inflated prices. They want to see shortages. They want to see racial unrest. They want to see upsurges in crime as new theories of law inform the release of repeat offenders and shorter sentences to destabilize society. The BBB autocrats want to see a society that increasingly identifies as LGBTQ because this radical individualism weakens the social fabric. They want to see Chinese fentanyl imported to kill our citizens who are weak-minded and susceptible to drug use.
Thus, despite its resemblance to the New Deal, the BBB’s so-called governance (properly called betrayal) is at the front end linked to global health, green initiatives, and “interdependence” as an excuse for diminishing U.S. sovereignty. Initiation of these policies was not to combat financially depressive conditions but rather designed to undermine the freedoms and economic viability of the U.S. This might be likened to prescribing chemo to a patient who did not have cancer, and then, in order to justify the perverse treatment plan, injecting the patient with cancer cells in order to justify that plan. The goal of the sinister and aberrated “plan” would not be the recovery of the patient and return to normal living, but to place the “cured” individual into custodial care rather than independent living. That is the equivalent of a United States with diminished sovereignty in a world governance system.
Since 2010, our government has “given free money” to people. Yes, billions were siphoned off the top to people that don’t need it and were just dipping their hands in the till. There are plenty of cases documented. In the court of law, it’s called money laundering.
COVID Relief Program is the ‘Biggest Fraud in a Generation’
We’ve known about the fraud associated with the COVID relief program known as the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP):
Many who participated in what prosecutors are calling the largest fraud in U.S. history — the theft of hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money intended to help those harmed by the coronavirus pandemic — couldn’t resist purchasing luxury automobiles. Also mansions, private jet flights and swanky vacations.
They came into their riches by participating in what experts say is the theft of as much as $80 billion — or about 10 percent — of the $800 billion handed out in a Covid relief plan known as the Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP. That’s on top of the $90 billion to $400 billion believed to have been stolen from the $900 billion Covid unemployment relief program — at least half taken by international fraudsters — as NBC News reported last year. And another $80 billion potentially pilfered from a separate Covid disaster relief program.
COVID Relief Program is the ‘Biggest Fraud in a Generation’
Like hitchhiking; it’s ass, grass or cash, no one rides for free. The bill is now due and it’s being paid at the grocery store and the gas pump. I’ll give it to you that the gas pump prices don’t have to happen, but the current administration is just giving us pain. It was half the price a year and a half ago and the ability to take it back to that prices is available still, if they wanted to do it.
Even though the MSM, the democrats and those against protecting US citizens are claiming that 2 Senators stopped a power grab, it was really 52. Half of the Senate plus Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin saved us by voting not to kill the filibuster.
Harry Reid threw the nuclear switch on voting in Justices. Not long afterwards in 2016, republicans took control of the Senate where they are approved, and the left is still (bitching) licking it’s wounds that the Supreme Court is (supposedly) 6-3 conservative. Recent verdicts show that Roberts has sided with the liberal judges on important issues like Obamacare by calling it a tax. We still suffer with that albatross. I just went through the process of getting insurance and Healthcare.gov is just another unnecessary layer of red tape that doesn’t really help anyone other than politicians.
Most politicians care most about getting power and staying in power. The two “rebel” democrats risked being outcasts in the next election by doing what was right for the people of the USA. They protected citizens from the government so we don’t have to do it. (see my 2nd amendment post a few down from here)
They should be hailed as hero’s for keeping us a Republic (no Pelosi and Shumer, we didn’t hurt the democracy because we are a Republic) rather than a monarchy.
The House and maybe the senate should flip this November and it also protected the democrats from being run over by a Republican majority, even if it is not 60 members.
Most of all, the ability to stop power grabbing legislature, like the voting act keeps the country protected by those who want to rule us instead of govern us. That was the intent of the current voter protection act, which only protects those in power to keep them there.
So, we escaped that one, but the spawn of Satan who are in charge won’t stop. There will be another power grab soon. I hope that the election cycle, which causes all candidates to lie about being moderate will stop the idiocy. If not, more like Manchin and Sinema will have to grow a spine.
I think that by being true to the people, that Manchin gets re-elected. Sinema faces a state of people less educated on history and what is right vs wrong, but I would vote for her for doing her job.
There is an unbelievable push to get people vaxxed. There is an equal effort to stop the cure and prevent people from being healed. Why is this?
HURTING THE CURE
This week, the HHS restricted mono-clonal doses to “Red States like Florida and Texas”.
The governor said he was surprised at the HHS “abrupt and sudden” announcement that it would be taking control of distribution. He said this took him by surprise because a week prior, on Sept. 9, the Biden administration said they were increasing monoclonal antibody distribution by 50 percent.
Now the HHS, as of Monday, “seized control” of the treatments, the governor said, adding that earlier in the week he received “official word” that Florida’s shipments of the monoclonals would be reduced by 50 percent.
Before, providers and infusion centers, as well as the state of Florida, would simply call Amerisource, a third-party affiliate of Regeneron that makes the monoclonal antibodies treatment, and request whatever amount was needed. Now, DeSantis said this new method will make it “doubly difficult” for hospitals and other providers because they will now have to go through the state to get their treatments.
“They sprung this on us,” DeSantis said at the press conference on Thursday. “They pulled the rug out from under us.”
It is surprising when the hospital Covid cases have been reduced by 50 percent because of this.
He said the results of the monoclonal antibodies are positive and that there have been 24 consecutive days in the decline of the COVID hospital census statewide.
The governor said he is pleased with the trends that are occurring and credits the vaccine and the monoclonals for the reduction in hospitalization rates. Florida hospital admission rates have decreased by 50 percent.
Ivermectin Works
Meta-analyses based on 18 randomized controlled treatment trials of ivermectin in COVID-19 have found large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance. Furthermore, results from numerous controlled prophylaxis trials report significantly reduced risks of contracting COVID-19 with the regular use of ivermectin. Finally, the many examples of ivermectin distribution campaigns leading to rapid population-wide decreases in morbidity and mortality indicate that an oral agent effective in all phases of COVID-19 has been identified.
Yet Celebtards like Jimmy Kimmel trash Ivermectin users and it’s treatment. Fortunately, a Dr has responded with facts about it rebuking him from carrying the water for Big Pharma.
During your show on 8 September 2021, you commented on the shortage of ICU beds, saying “Vaccinated person having a heart attack? Yes, come right on in, we’ll take care of you. Unvaccinated guy who gobbled horse goo? Rest in peace, wheezy.” I take issue with your commentary for three primary reasons: 1) the comments appear to be racially discriminatory, 2) the comments are not founded in science and serve to further divide a country that, unfortunately, is taking medical advice from too many non-physicians, and 3) the suggestion that doctors should selectively treat patients is unethical.
THE VAXX IS A DEATH SHOT
THE “VACCINE” KILLS 70 PEOPLE A DAY NOW
The Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) is exploding with vaccine injuries, at a rate never seen before. The number of injuries and deaths from these vaccines is so immense, all prior vaccine injury data over the past two decades pales in comparison to the carnage observed in 2021.
The government’s passive vaccine injury surveillance system has logged over 675,000 adverse reactions from the vaccines in just eight short months. If these medical issues were divvied up among the roughly 17,000 hospitals in the United States, there have been roughly 40 COVID vaccine injuries for every hospital in the nation.
Over the past forty-seven days of reporting, there have also been 3,296 deaths reported to VAERS. This is equivalent to SEVENTY deaths per day — a sacrificial routine of medical malpractice and wrongful death that must be stopped.
THE VACCINATED CAUSE THE BREAKTHROUGH AND HIGHEST COVID CASES
Singapore has just reached a level of vaccination penetration that many other developed economies would envy: 80% of its adult population has been vaccinated. And yet, it continues to struggle with one of the worst outbreaks yet. On Sunday, the nation of 5.7 million people reported 555 new local COVID-19 cases, the most since August 2020. One day prior, Singapore recorded its 58th COVID death, a partially vaccinated 80-year-old man with a history of diabetes, hypertension and heart problems.
A curious thing has happened since Singapore hit 80%, Cook reminds us: “The community cases have actually gone up since reaching 80 per cent coverage, in part because we’re allowing more social events for those who are vaccinated and, I dare say, more fatigue at the control measures,” Cook told the ABC.
And the outlook isn’t exactly positive: Gan Kim Yong, co-chair of the multi-ministry task force, said the “worrying” spike in infections would “probably get to 2,000 new cases a day,” describing the next two to four weeks as “crucial.”
It’s a lesson that’s not unique to Singapore; “One main lesson from across South-East Asia is that it is incredibly hard to prevent Delta’s spread and, as Singapore shows, even high vaccination rates will not help that much,” Cook added.
Of course there are the other 2 countries, Israel and the UK that have the same high level of break through Covid cases.
Another series of inconvenient facts exist in VAERS data. People are definitely dying from the vaccines. There are far too many reports to conclude that they’re all just lies or misunderstandings. Moreover, it has been demonstrated that only 1%-10% of actual adverse reactions to the vaccines are reported to VAERS, which means the total dead is almost certainly much higher than what anyone is saying.
Gibraltar has a 99% Vaxx rate:
MONEY
Well, isn’t that always the reason? Isn’t that the lesson from Watergate, follow the money?
Big Pharma gets paid for every “free” vaccination by Government. Government gets lobbying money from Big Pharma to have them push their products. One hand washes the other. In real life, it’s called laundering and crime.
The Government is pushing everyone to get vaxxed, knowing that it is causing the variants and killing people. The long term effects are not known, but it is not good.
Did the FDA largely shrug-off its regulatory duties and abandon its normal standards and protocols because
a– It wanted to rush the Covid vaccines into service as rapidly as possible?
b– It knew the Covid-19 vaccine would never meet long-term safety standards?
We don’t know yet, but the adverse events report strongly suggests that the Covid-19 vaccine is hands-down the most dangerous vaccine in history.
VERDICT
The Government is guilty of getting money from Big Pharma in the form of lobbying. They want control over people and are willing to kill them. They have no idea what the long term effects will be because they rushed it to market without proper testing.
Big Pharma is raking in the profits while having a track record of producing vaccines that don’t work. They paid off the Government to get emergency authorization and didn’t do proper testing to know what the effects will be.
Both are guilty of murder, but neither will be held accountable. Money talks and there is a lot of it going around. The People’s best interest is not a concern for them, power and control are.
Why can’t the US get it right vs. other countries? It is explained below. Most of all, our politicians have gotten in the way of actual healthcare. We need to get rid of them first, although that is not the nature of this article, but the crux of how we got where we are.
Check out the one where other countries deal with their population that smokes way more than the US does….need I say more?
The Bipartisan Policy Report titled “What is Driving US Health Care Spending? America’s Unsustainable Health Care Cost Growth” issued in September lists seven factors increasing American health care costs. The “fiscal cliff” debates include many of these arguments.
While these factors do indeed play roles in American health care, almost all are at work in other industrialized countries, all of whom provide better care to more people for half what we spend. Good intentions aside, the report overlooks critical (and dysfunctional) characteristics of American health care and instead distracts itself with factors never mastered by any country (including ours).
The report was prepared under the direction of former Senate majority leaders Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), former Senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) and former Congressional Budget Office Director Dr. Alice Rivlin. With such participants, the report certainly qualifies as bipartisan, but unfortunately the final product does not qualify as accurate.
Here are the seven factors. They are largely irrelevant in our quest for better care at less cost.
1. Many industrialized countries pay providers on a fee-for-service basis, seemingly rewarding more care rather than better care. Yet their costs are lower and their citizens are healthier.
2. Other countries face aging populations with higher smoking rates and more chronic illnesses than we have. Yet their costs are lower and their citizens are healthier.
3. Other countries face patient demands for the latest therapies. Yet their costs are lower and their citizens are healthier.
4. Other countries do not financially penalize patients seeking care. Yet their costs are lower and their citizens are healthier.
5. Other countries provide patients with no more information about complex health decisions than we do. Yet their costs are lower and their health results are better.
6. Many hospital systems in other countries dominate their markets. Yet their costs are lower and their citizens are healthier.
7. The one exception making us unique is our malpractice costs. Yet defensive medicine costs $55 billion annually, just 0.2% of our $2.6 trillion health care spending.
Thus we face the same challenges every country faces. But American costs are increasing faster and are already twice as high. What are these other countries doing differently? They apply three characteristics missing from American health care:
No country, including ours, has ever resolved the Bipartisan Policy Report factors. Yet our health care costs are the world’s highest. Although the report is bipartisan, it misses the critical factors driving up American health care costs. And unfortunately so does the Affordable Care Act, another valiant but futile effort at addressing our health care crisis. If the US wants a health care system that provides better care to more people for less money, we should take our lessons from countries already doing so, not from think tanks speculating on economic theories never applied successfully anywhere.
Successful systems around the world can teach us proven methods of containing costs while providing better care, but if only we choose to learn from them. These policy makers chose to ignore these lessons. The rest of us should not.
Once again, the rich like their money. Once again, Socialism doesn’t work because growing an economy is the way out of a deficit rather than taxing your way out. So Hollande’s premise during his campaign, like in the US is a facade.
As Frank Zappa said: Communism doesn’t work because people like to own stuff.
Margaret Thatcher noted that socialism doesn’t work because sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.
France’s Constitutional Council on Saturday rejected a 75 percent upper income tax rate to be introduced in 2013 in a setback to Socialist President Francois Hollande’s push to make the rich contribute more to cutting the public deficit.
The Council ruled that the planned 75 percent tax on annual income above 1 million euros ($1.32 million) – a flagship measure of Hollande’s election campaign – was unfair in the way it would be applied to different households.
Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said the government would redraft the upper tax rate proposal to answer the Council’s concerns and resubmit it in a new budget law, meaning Saturday’s decision could only amount to a temporary political blow.
While the tax plan was largely symbolic and would only have affected a few thousand people, it has infuriated high earners in France, prompting some such as actor Gerard Depardieu to flee abroad. The message it sent also shocked entrepreneurs and foreign investors, who accuse Hollande of being anti-business.
Two disturbing articles came my way. I watch the economy and look for trends. I found two that are similar because of political policies, yet would be so easy to fix if the respective governments would stop spending, handing out money to those who don’t deserve it, stop handing to themselves and stop the regulations.
We are headed into a depression and it appears that is what the governments want. History shows they can control a distressed population more easily than a productive, self-reliant successful one…so the preponderance of evidence shows it is intentional.
You’ve been warned, get out of debt, get a strong cash position, stock up on supplies (they are much cheaper now before inflation) and do everything you can to be self reliant rather than convenient. This is against all the pundits who want you to buy into this is just a phase, just like right about 1926.
Here they are.
THE USA
Link to the full article here:
#1 According to the World Bank, U.S. GDP accounted for 31.8 percent of all global economic activity in 2001. That number dropped to 21.6 percent in 2011. That is not just a decline – that is a freefall. Just check out the chart in this article.
#2 According to The Economist, the United States was the best place in the world to be born into back in 1988. Today, the United States is only tied for 16th place.
#3 The United States has fallen in the global economic competitiveness rankings compiled by the World Economic Forum for four years in a row.
#4 According to the Wall Street Journal, of the 40 biggest publicly traded corporate spenders, half of them plan to reduce capital expenditures in coming months.
#5 More than three times as many new homes were sold in the United States in 2005 as will be sold in 2012.
#6 America once had the greatest manufacturing cities on the face of the earth. Now many of our formerly great manufacturing cities have degenerated into festering hellholes. For example, the city of Detroit is on the verge of financial collapse, and one state lawmaker is now saying that “dissolving Detroit” should be looked at as an option.
#7 In 2007, the unemployment rate for the 20 to 29 age bracket was about 6.5 percent. Today, the unemployment rate for that same age group is about 13 percent.
#8 Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs. Today, less than 65 percent of all men in the United States have jobs.
#9 If you can believe it, approximately one out of every four American workers makes 10 dollars an hour or less.
#10 Sadly, 60 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were mid-wage jobs, but 58 percent of the jobs created since then have been low wage jobs.
#11 Median household income in America has fallen for four consecutive years. Overall, it has declined by over $4000 during that time span.
#12 The U.S. trade deficit with China during 2011 was 28 times larger than it was back in 1990.
#13 Incredibly, more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities in the United States have been shut down since 2001. During 2010, manufacturing facilities were shutting down at the rate of 23 per day. How can anyone say that “things are getting better” when our economic infrastructure is being absolutely gutted?
#14 Back in early 2005, the average price of a gallon of gasoline was less than 2 dollars a gallon. During 2012, the average price of a gallon of gasoline has been $3.63.
#15 In 1999, 64.1 percent of all Americans were covered by employment-based health insurance. Today, only 55.1 percent are covered by employment-based health insurance.
#16 As I have written about previously, 61 percent of all Americans were “middle income” back in 1971 according to the Pew Research Center. Today, only 51 percent of all Americans are “middle income”.
#17 There are now 20.2 million Americans that spend more than half of their incomes on housing. That represents a 46 percent increase from 2001.
#18 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the poverty rate for children living in the United States is about 22 percent.
#19 Back in 1983, the bottom 95 percent of all income earners in the United States had 62 cents of debt for every dollar that they earned. By 2007, that figure had soared to $1.48.
#20 Total home mortgage debt in the United States is now about 5 times larger than it was just 20 years ago.
#21 Total credit card debt in the United States is now more than 8 times larger than it was just 30 years ago.
#22 The value of the U.S. dollar has declined by more than 96 percent since the Federal Reserve was first created.
#23 According to one survey, 29 percent of all Americans in the 25 to 34 year old age bracket are still living with their parents.
#24 Back in 1950, 78 percent of all households in the United States contained a married couple. Today, that number has declined to 48 percent.
#25 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 49 percent of all Americans live in a home that receives direct monetary benefits from the federal government. Back in 1983, less than a third of all Americans lived in a home that received direct monetary benefits from the federal government.
#26 In 1980, government transfer payments accounted for just 11.7 percent of all income. Today, government transfer payments account for more than 18 percent of all income.
#27 In November 2008, 30.8 million Americans were on food stamps. Today, 47.1 million Americans are on food stamps.
#28 Right now, one out of every four American children is on food stamps.
#29 As I wrote about the other day, according to one calculation the number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the combined populations of “Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.”
#30 Back in 1965, only one out of every 50 Americans was on Medicaid. Today, one out of every 6 Americans is on Medicaid, and things are about to get a whole lot worse. It is being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to the Medicaid rolls.
#31 In 2001, the U.S. national debt was less than 6 trillion dollars. Today, it is over 16 trillion dollars and it is increasing by more than 100 million dollars every single hour.
#32 The U.S. national debt is now more than 23 times larger than it was when Jimmy Carter became president.
#33 According to a PBS report from earlier this year, U.S. households that make $13,000 or less per year spend 9 percent of their incomes on lottery tickets. Could that possibly be accurate? Are people really that foolish?
#34 As the U.S. economy has declined, the American people have been downing more antidepressants and other prescription drugs than ever before. In fact, the American people spent 60 billion dollars more on prescription drugs in 2010 than they did in 2005.
THE EUROPEAN UNION
Link to the full article here:
The following are 11 facts that show that Europe is heading into an economic depression…
1. The economies of 17 out of the 27 countries in the EU have contracted for at least two consecutive quarters.
2. Unemployment in the eurozone has hit a brand new all-time record high of 11.7 percent.
3. The unemployment rate in Portugal is now up to 16.3 percent. A year ago it was just 13.7 percent.
4. The unemployment rate in Greece is now up to 25.4 percent. A year ago it was just 18.4 percent.
5. The unemployment rate in Spain has hit a brand new all-time record high of 26.2 percent. How much higher can it possibly go? This is already higher than the unemployment rate in the United States ever reached during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
6. Youth unemployment levels in both Greece and Spain are rapidly approaching the 60 percent level.
7. Earlier this month, Moody’s stripped France of its AAA credit rating, and wealthy individuals are leaving France in droves as the socialists implement plans to raise taxes to very high levels on the rich.
8. Industrial production is collapsing all over Europe. Just check out these numbers…
You don’t have to be an economic genius to understand that the perpetual uncertainty over the Eurozone’s future has led to a widespread freeze on industrial investment and development. Industrial production is collapsing at an accelerating rate, falling 7% year-on-year in Spain and Greece, 4.8% in Italy, and 2.1% in France.
9. There are even trouble signs in the “stable” economies in Europe. In Germany, factory orders in September were down 3.3 percent from the month before, and retail sales in October declined 2.8 percent from the previous month.
10. The debt of the Greek government is now projected to hit 189 percent of GDP by the end of this year.
11. The Greek economy has shrunk by more than 7 percent this year, and it is being projected that the Greek economy will contract by another 4.5 percent in 2013.
But sometimes you can’t really get a feel for how bad things really are over there just from the raw economic numbers.
Many people that are living through these depression-like conditions are totally giving in to despair. Just check out the following example from an RT article from earlier this year…
A 61-year-old Greek pensioner has hung himself from a tree in a public park after succumbing to the pressure of crushing debt. A note in his pocket indicates he is merely the latest in a rash of economic crisis-induced suicides.
The pensioner’s lifeless body was found dangling by an attendant in a public park not far from his home in the suburb of Nikaia, Athens. The attendant also found a suicide note in the man’s pocket, The Athens news reports.
The man, identifying himself as Alexandros, said he was a man of few vices who “worked all day.” However, he blamed himself from committing one “horrendous crime”: becoming a professional at the age of 40 and plunging himself into debt. He referred to himself as a 61-year-old idiot who had to pay, hoping his grandchildren would not be born in Greece, as the country’s prospects were so bleak.
I went to a hospital today to have a procedure done. When the nurse apologized for the quantity of paperwork, I casually mentioned that things might become more complicated with Obamacare.
I was not ready for the answer. Actually, being in a very socially liberal city and healthcare system, I thought I was going to hear support for the program. I instead was told how government has corrupted the system, made it worse for both Doctors and patients and other horror stories. I replied that the government has not helped healthcare in a long time to which the nurse responded that the decline of morals in our culture was the beginning of the problem. How correct this nurse was.
Next, I met with the Doctor to go over what the procedure was going to entail. I again mentioned whether the healthcare system was affecting his job. Again I received a surprise answer.
The doctor told me of his passion for his practice all of his life. He then told me that what is being done to us by Washington has him considering getting out. He was honorable enough to not practice if he couldn’t do his best. It was a John Galt conversation. There are others like this doctor. I’ve found that if you are contemplating your retirement in your mind, you are already in the process of retiring.
To a person, the hospital staff admitted that Washington and the damage they have done and are doing to our healthcare system makes it worse for patients and providers. This is not a partisan statement for the record.
Let me point out that this was a highly successful practice with state of the art equipment and professional personnel making these perspicacious comments to me.
It was clear that they wanted to help people and do their job, but our own government is in the way. It seems obvious that they have overstepped their role in making sure that medicine is safe and lawful.
If I hadn’t heard it from the horse’s mouth, I wouldn’t have known. I did go in looking for a cure, but I left with a dose of information. It is easy to conclude that we need to fix or excise Washington from the healthcare system and put it back in the hands of the doctors.
After 18 years in private practice, many good, some not, I am making a very big change. I am leaving my practice.
No, this isn’t my ironic way of saying that I am going to change the way I see my practice; I am really quitting my job. The stresses and pressures of our current health care system become heavier, and heavier, making it increasingly difficult to practice medicine in a way that I feel my patients deserve. The rebellious innovator (who adopted EMR 16 years ago) in me looked for “outside the box” solutions to my problem, and found one that I think is worth the risk. I will be starting a solo practice that does not file insurance, instead taking a monthly “subscription” fee, which gives patients access to me.
I must confess that there are still a lot of details I need to work out, and plan on sharing the process of working these details with colleagues, consultants, and most importantly, my future patients.
Here are my main frustrations with the health care system that drove me to this big change:
Here are some things that are not reasons for my big change:
What will my practice look like? Here are the cornerstones on which I hope to build a new kind of practice.
This is the first of a whole bunch of posts on this subject. My hope is that the dialog started by my big change (and those of other doctors) will have bigger effects on the whole health care scene. Even if it doesn’t, however, I plan on having a practice where I can take better care of my patients while not getting burned out in the process.
Is this scary? Heck yeah, it’s terrifying in many ways. But the relief to be changing from being a nail, constantly pounded by an unreasonable system, to a hammer is enormous.
Economist John Williams of Watchdog.com describes why we will suffer from hyperinflation that will begin no later than 2014 and why.
Open ended QE will cause treasury debt which leads to long range insolvancy of the US Government. If they had to report income under GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) rules, we are losing $5 trillion annually. Taking 100% of peoples income would still not pay for this debt.
We are broke.
Government has been kicking the bucket down the road and the result will be inflation.
The global loss of confidence in the dollar happened with the raising of the debt ceiling last year.
The Fed’s primary goal is to keep the banking system solvent. They haven’t done anything to stimulate the economy.
More evidence that inflation is just around the corner from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
Mostly the media and the double speak of certain candidates….and the double standard of who is held responsible for what.
I wrote this as humor years ago. I thought it was a joke, but due to tracked digital footprint and Big Data, it turns out to be true.
I checked in with KevinMD for this piece of helpful information. The free market will produce a better product than the government will ever be able to handle. Capitalism always provides competition which drives DOWN prices and drives UP services.
f you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.
-Lord Kelvin
Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.
-Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Of course the quantified self movement with its self-tracking, body hacking, and data-driven life started in San Francisco when Gary Wolf started the Quantified Self blog in 2007. By 2012, there were regular meetings in 50 cities and a European and American conference. Most of us do not keep track of our moods, our blood pressure, how many drinks we have, or our sleep patterns every day. Most of us probably prefer the Taleb to the Lord Kelvin quotation when it comes to living our daily lives. And yet there are an increasing number of early adopters who are dedicated members of the quantified self movement.
They are an eclectic mix of early adopters, fitness freaks, technology evangelists, personal-development junkies, hackers, and patients suffering from a wide variety of health problems. What they share is a belief that gathering and analysing data about their everyday activities can help them improve their lives.
According to Wolf four technologic advances made the quantified self movement possible:
First, electronic sensors got smaller and better. Second, people started carrying powerful computing devices, typically disguised as mobile phones. Third, social media made it seem normal to share everything. And fourth, we began to get an inkling of the rise of a global superintelligence known as the cloud.
An investment banker who had trouble falling asleep worried that his concentration level at work was suffering. Using a headband manufactured by Zeo, he monitored his sleep quantity and quality, and he also recorded data about his diet, supplements, exercise, and alcohol consumption. By adjusting his alcohol intake and taking magnesium supplements, he has increased his sleeping by an hour and a half from the start of the experiment.
A California teacher used CureTogether, an online health website, to study her insomnia and found that tryptophan improved both her sleep and concentration. As an experiment, she stopped the tryptophan and continued to sleep well, but her ability to concentrate suffered. The teacher discovered a way to increase her concentration while curing her insomnia. Her experience illustrates a phenomenon that Wolf has noticed: “For many self-trackers, the goal is unknown … they believe their numbers hold secrets that they can’t afford to ignore, including answers to questions they have not yet thought to ask.”
Employers are becoming interested in this approach in connection with their company sponsored wellness programs. Suggested experiments include using the Jawbone UP wristband to see if different amounts of sleep affect work performance such as sales or using the HeartMath emWave2 to monitor pulse rates for determining what parts of the workday are most stressful.
Stephen Wolfram recently wrote a blog illustrating just how extensive these personal analytics experiments in self-awareness could become when coupled with sophisticated technologies. Wolfram shares graphs of his “third of a million emails I’ve sent since 1989” and his more than 100 million keystrokes he has typed.
Anyone interested in understanding just how far reaching this approach may become in the future should examine the 23 pages of projects being conducted by the MIT Media Center. My favorites from this fascinating list include automatic stress recognition in real-life settings where call center employees were monitored for one week of their regular work; an emotional-social intelligence toolkit to help autism patients learn about nonverbal communication in a natural, social context by wearing affective technologies; and mobile health interventions for drug addiction and PTSD where wearable, wireless biosensors detect specific physiological states and then perform automatic interventions in the form of text/images plus sound files and social networking elements.
It is easy to get caught up in the excitement of all this new technology and to start crafting sentences about how the quantified self movement will “transform” and “revolutionize” health care and spawn wildly successful new technology companies.
Jackie Fenn’s “hype cycle” concept has identified the common pattern of enthusiasm for a new technology that leads to the Peak of Inflated Expectations, disappointment that results in the Trough of Disillusionment and gradual success over time that concludes in the Slope of Enlightenment and the Plateau of Productivity. Fenn’s book, Mastering the Hype Cycle: How to Choose the Right Innovation at the Right Time can help all of us realize that not all new technologies becomes killer applications.
Jay Parkinson, MD has also written a blog that made me pause before rushing out to invest in quantified self companies or predict the widespread adoption of this approach by all patients. Parkinson divides patients into three groups. The first group is the young, active person who defines health as “not having to think about it until they get sick or hurt themselves.” The second group is the newly diagnosed patient with a chronic illness that will affect the rest of their lives. After a six month period of time coming to terms with their illness, Parkinson believes this group moves closer and closer to group one who do not have to think about their disease. The third group are the chronically ill who have to think about their disability every day. Parkinson concludes that “it’s almost impossible to build a viable social media business that focuses on health. It’s the wrong tool for the problem at hand.”
The quantified self movement should be closely monitored by all interested in the future of the American health care delivery system. The potential to improve the life of patients with chronic diseases is clearly apparent; whether most people will use the increasingly sophisticated tools being developed is open to debate.
From the Raleigh WRAL sometimes news.
WASHINGTON — Death, taxes and now health insurance? Having a medical plan or else paying a fine is about to become another certainty of American life, unless the Supreme Court says no.
People are split over the wisdom of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, but they are nearly united against its requirement that everybody have insurance. The mandate is intensely unpopular even though more than 8 in 10 people in the United States already are covered by workplace plans or government programs such as Medicare. When the insurance obligation kicks in, not even two years from now, most people won’t need to worry or buy anything new.
Nonetheless, Americans don’t like being told how to spend their money, not even if it would help solve the problem of the nation’s more than 50 million uninsured.
Can the government really tell us what to buy?
Federal judges have come down on both sides of the question, leaving it to the Supreme Court to sort out. The justices are allotting an unusually long period, six hours over three days, in sessions that started Monday, to hear arguments challenging the law’s constitutionality.
Their ruling, expected in June, is shaping up as a historic moment in the century-long quest by reformers to provide affordable health care for all.
Many critics and supporters alike see the insurance requirement as the linchpin of Obama’s health care law: Take away the mandate and the wheels fall off.
Politically it was a wobbly construction from the start. It seems half of Washington has flip-flopped over mandating insurance.
One critic dismissed the idea this way: “If things were that easy, I could mandate everybody to buy a house and that would solve the problem of homelessness.” That was Obama as a presidential candidate, who was against health insurance mandates before he was for them.
Once elected, Obama decided a mandate could work as part of a plan that helps keep premiums down and assists those who can’t afford them.
To hear Republicans rail against this attack on personal freedom, you’d never know the idea came from them.
Its model was a Massachusetts law signed
Delusions of Adequacy 