Debt Rattle August 25 2020
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Robert Capa Model wearing Dior on the banks of the Seine, Paris 1948 • Pelosi Calls Republicans ‘Domestic Enemies Of The State’ (ZH) • UK Lockd
[See the full post at: Debt Rattle August 25 2020]Robert Capa Model wearing Dior on the banks of the Seine, Paris 1948
My, used-to-be photographer, snapped into focus; composition is perfect.
Eiffel Tower perfectly centered on the bridge arch; fisherman and model left of center is just right.
Depth of field is right on the mark.
A whole photography lesson in one picture…Well played Horse. Well played.
…is just hilarious…thanks…
Segregation in universities hey… Weird.
Kunstler sounds a bit provocative – like the guy deserved it or something – getting shot in the back. Dunno, just threw me – his tone.
If police can’t be trained to deal with that situation properly they need to get trained in other countries where it doesn’t get to that. American cops just seem like crap cops who don’t really know how to do their jobs or are lazy or unorganised or something. I just can’t get my head around the absolute mind-boggling incompetence of Law Enforcement in the US. Just buy more guns and tech. That’ll work. Not.
Wouldn’t happen in Russia.Capable Orlov, with a brief on the Russian Vaccine:
“A: The Soviet Union made a major investment in public health, and eradicated many infectious diseases. The legacy of that is still being used. For instance right now, the plague, bubonic plague, has come back in Mongolia and a neighboring region of the Russian Federation, in Tuva. And the vaccine that was developed by Soviet scientists is being used today to vaccinate the people and stop that epidemic. And there are similar examples. For instance, the Sputnik V vaccine for coronavirus was developed in the Soviet Union in the 80s, and has now been repurposed, basically given a different payload, to develop immunity against the coronavirus.
There are many similar examples of technology being put to good use to save human lives, and a lot of that was done as public policy as opposed to commercial, privatized medicine, which is what, for example, the Americans are trying to do, rather unsuccessfully.
Q: So the next question, and I would ask one more thing regarding the Sputnik V vaccine. You said it was already developed in the Soviet Union. It is now reshaped, or a new version, but the formula is older, from Soviet times?
A: Yes, the technique. It uses the adenovirus, a modified version of it that lacks the ability to replicate within the human body. The vaccine uses the adenovirus as the delivery vehicle. That’s most of what this technology is, and it’s proven, effective, etc.. And the payload is a little bit of the coronavirus genome that’s been chopped out specifically. It’s the bit that generates the spike protein that allows the virus to penetrate human cells. And so the adenovirus is introduced into the body, penetrates cells and releases its payload. The cells then produce the protein—at this point it doesn’t have very much to do with the coronavirus itself except for this one spike protein. That protein then reacts with the immune system and antibodies are generated, which is the end result of the whole process. And since the adenovirus lacks the ability to replicate, it just gets flushed out of the system. So the only new ingredient is the spike protein. It’s not toxic on its own; it doesn’t do anything on its own, really, except trigger an immune response, because the body doesn’t recognize it, which is what it has to do. So that’s the reason that the Russians were able to do this so quickly, and so successfully. Because it’s basically reuse of an existing technique with a slight modification. “
@Eddie: Is your dental practice on Grand Avenue in Round Rock?
I have a picture of (much convalesced) Jenny at the People’s Clinic vegetable garden in this blog post, and stuff bout coronavirus, but I’m going to highlight the same historical human context as I did last night before I went to bed.
http://www.johndayblog.com/2020/08/why-now.html
Why Do Civilizations Collapse? by Samo Burja, looks at the difficulty in transmitting expert knowledge, handing it down as culture, between generations. NASA (under Werner Von Baun, only) sent men to the moon, but now it is mostly a bureaucracy with declining competence. It just can’t do the things it did 50 years ago. The US as a nation has outsourced most industry, due to making higher profits for the global capitalist class. Is it possible to reintroduce industry here? Do the social patterns and human skills exist in the US to do that?
Why do civilizations collapse? This question bears not only on safeguarding our society’s future but also makes sense of our present. The answer relies on some of the same technē that humanity needed to build civilization in the first place…
During civilizational collapse, no organization can properly hide its own inadequacy, since the whole interdependent ecosystem of institutions is caving in on itself. States, religions, material technologies, and ways of life that once seemed self-sustaining turn out to have been dependent on the invisible subsidy of just a few key institutions…
Despite being an excellent epistemic opportunity, civilizational collapse seldom inspires introspection among thinkers living through it. Mayan or Roman thinkers don’t seem to have reflected on their ongoing collapse. As institutions turn to cannibalizing each other, there is little patronage or emotional energy going towards accurately describing the wider process…
In the West today, we operate under the influence of our own key philosophy, which we can call scientism: the tendency to rely on scientific claims to describe the functioning of society, even when there is no empirical reason to assume that they apply…
Our organs of economic management do not secretly know how the economy really works. Our systems of political regulation are operating on the fumes of their institutional inheritance from two or three generations ago—the last spurt of institutional growth in Western societies happened roughly during the 1970s…
Civilizational collapse always looms on the horizon. Though we usually think of collapse as a slow process, it can in fact happen very quickly, as was the case with the Late Bronze Age collapse…
Our society is dominated by large bureaucracies. These bureaucracies break down the processing of physical goods and information into discrete tasks, such as how a factory worker puts doors on a car, or a stock trader buys futures contracts. These tasks are shorn of their context and executed in a systematized environment whose constraints are quite narrow: put the car door in, increase the portfolio value. Our society is thoroughly compartmentalized. This compartmentalization isn’t driven by the division of labor, but rather by the need to make use of misaligned talent without empowering it. By radically limiting employees’ scope of action, you make office politics more predictable. By fragmenting available knowledge, you can leverage information asymmetries to the intellectual or material advantage of the center. Some of this is necessary for scaling organizations beyond what socially connected networks can manage—but move too far towards compartmentalization, and it becomes impossible to accomplish the original mission of the organization…
If you want to know, say, why the FBI exists, you can find the answer in the documents of its founder, J. Edgar Hoover…
It is very difficult, though, to apply this analysis to the construction of society. No matter how large or how small, institutions always coexist in a symbiotic relationship with other institutions… Society is not a single institution, after all, but an ecosystem of interdependent institutions…
In addition to this complexity, non-functional institutions are the rule. Our institutions today rarely function in accordance with their stated purpose…
Institutions often become non-functional due to the loss of key knowledge at critical junctures. Take, for example, the recent failure of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to reproduce a niche classified material known as FOGBANK that is necessary for manufacturing nuclear weapons. It took the NNSA ten years and millions of dollars to re-engineer a material that their staff in the 1980s knew how to make…
Civilizational collapse, then, looks like this dynamic at the scale of an entire civilization: a low-grade but constant loss of capabilities and knowledge throughout the most critical parts of our institutions, that eventually degrades our ability to perpetuate society…
The key dynamic here is the loss of the subtle social technologies that allow us to solve the succession problem. Running a large and complex institution requires skills which are often difficult to fully pass on. How can a successful founder ensure a successor who leads as competently as they did? The succession problem is the central obstacle to transferring the ownership and knowledge of institutions from generation to generation…
Often the problem is that the kids “don’t get the joke”: if you create an institution with a false premise in order to mislead society as to your true goals, the people you hire into it might be fooled by the propaganda themselves…
We can define civilizational collapse as a process wherein most recognizable large-scale institutions of a society vanish, coupled with a drop in material wealth, a drop in the complexity of material artifacts and social forms, a reduction in travel distance and physical safety of the inhabitants, and a mass reduction in knowledge.
Loss of knowledge is especially damaging, since it accelerates the other aspects of collapse and ensures that they will be long-lasting…
Such losses of knowledge are a constant throughout human history: as with FOGBANK, or as with the state of New Jersey recently scrambling to find a COBOL programmer with the ability to overhaul their legacy information systems…
My theory of history is great founder theory: I propose that social technologies do not evolve out of mass action, but rather are devised by a tiny subset of institutional designers. Looking at history, we see that new organizations and social forms often arise within a single generation, showing jumps in social complexity far too rapid to be explained away by collective action or evolution…
It often takes an exceptional individual with exceptional vision to create a new social or material technology…
The result is usually one or more institutions, created by the individual to carry out their goals. Institutions are not naturally self-documenting. The descriptions of themselves that they provide can be misleading…
(Note: Global CO2 production seems to have fallen after 4th quarter 2014, with a bump in much of 2016 and 2017, then gradually declined from 2018 to present.)
The interesting question for the prospective collapse of our own society is this: if you were a late imperial Roman, and someone told you about the ongoing decline in atmospheric lead, how would you process this information? Today, if we saw a drop in lead pollution, our first assumption might be that this is due to the advent of greener technology. Economic decline wouldn’t naturally come to mind…
If we compare the roughly twelve identifiable Dark Ages following civilizational collapse on the Eurasian continent—the collapse of the Bronze Age civilizations, the end of Mohenjo Daro, the decline of the Roman Empire, Han China and so on—we always find that nearly all material technology is not self-perpetuating, but rather rests on foundations of social technology. The only material technologies that routinely survive collapse are small-scale agriculture and small-scale metallurgy, likely because the social technologies needed to sustain such smaller communities can arise organically. Since collapse in material technology is always preceded by collapse in the practice of social technology, Dark Ages are always preceded by Intellectual Dark Ages. Knowledge of these social technologies is highly compartmentalized and, as a result, they are not understood explicitly by all parts of society. This means that a society undergoing an Intellectual Dark Age doesn’t realize it is going through one at all —all the people who would notice are long-gone, and those who remain are miseducated, role-playing the forms left behind by their predecessors without realizing that they’ve lost the substance. Often not just the knowledge, but the socioeconomic niche that once fostered the creation of new social technology has been obliterated in all but name…
But if the Industrial Revolution was over, what would we expect to see? Much as we see a late Roman drop in lead pollution, today we see drops in pollution in the West…
One could hypothesize the American worker and manager have, over time, lost the social technology that enabled them to run the assembly lines in the first place and that, now, our support for outsourcing isn’t so much due to greed as it is an adaptation to inability… We should seriously consider the possibility that we are a post-industrial society not in a positive sense, but in the sense that in our society the Industrial Revolution has stopped…
Our society is the product of what were once advanced, rational, self-catalyzing systems of production, but we have now reverted to a more customary system, where things are simply done as they were 40 or 50 years ago. We have the same bureaucratic and economic institutions as we did then, with some marginal tweaks…
The United States is well-positioned to attempt such civilizational reforms, since it has a remarkable ability to integrate exceptional talent from all over the world and has put that talent to work on some of the most successful institutional projects in history, including the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program. America is, for now, in an unavoidable period of relative decline, and in 2030 or 2040 the largest economy in the world will almost certainly be that of China. But absolute decline is reversible—2060 is still an open question…
The solution lies with a small number of people who can independently judge the generative minds behind the facts, rather than merely minding the integrity of the established body of theories and observations… Engineering society to be self-perpetuating is an extremely difficult challenge, and we can devise all sorts of machinery to do so, but this is the bottom line. Such people are extremely rare, but if we create a socioeconomic niche for them, our civilization can rewrite its own future for the better.
https://thesideview.co/journal/why-civilizations-collapse/That may seem long, but it is my excerpting of the high points of the short read. The long read is 95 pages, and I spent yesterday understanding and absorbing it. Nore essays by Samo Burja, about the workings of human societies are here.: http://samoburja.com/essays/
This is the “executive summary” of “Great Founder Theory”: http://samoburja.com/great-founder-theory/
Here is the full 95 page treatise of Great Founder theory that I digested yesterday:
http://samoburja.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Great-Founder-Theory-v-1.43.pdf“UK Lockdown Was A ‘Monumental Mistake’ And Must Not Happen Again (Exp.)”
I mean, is it enough that we’re quickly headed toward having more people killed by the economic lockdown than the virus? If we have civil war / WWIII, we can kill 800,000 in about twenty minutes, will they be satisfied then? Then suddenly we’ll go: “nobody coulda knowd.” Except everyone. 15 day lockdown, a year later, with curve so flat there are no deaths in NY. But we haven’t killed those last small busineses and had them bought out with Fed money by BlackRock and Bezos, haven’t rigged that last election, haven’t bankrupted those last rural/poor hospitals, haven’t rigged that last election with mail-in voting experts say is unnecessary and the Party themselves says won’t work. AWFLs haven’t killed those last black children and black businesses with love riots and love helping. Not until all the real estate is leveled by 70% white guys, bought by urban developers, and given billions in tax money to rebuild like a bad “RoboCop” movie, will the ‘Rona be done. Dropping 1% a day. And lo! The last day is Nov. 2 !!! But I am a coincidence theorists and that is not suspicious at all.
“The ‘Rona knows!
♪♪ It sees you when you’re sleeping, it knows when you’re awake
It knows when you’ve been throwing bricks, so throw bricks and you’ll be safe!” ♪♪“Lockdowns and facemasks prevent transmission, no science is more basic than that.”
Clearly this calls for linking the study that shows this. Because both CDC studies and the recent June 6 study from the AAPS says they don’t unless they are N95s used properly, and that would therefore include a pile of gloves, rotated and used properly.
“Joe Biden says … he will “listen to the scientists,”
Great! Which ones? The AAPS, the CDC, the WHO, China’s (but I repeat myself) or the Yale epidemiologists that say HCQ is as highly effective and certain against CV as can occur in science. ‘Cause I’m guess he will listen to whatever scientist tells him what he already planned to do anyway, and have Twitter and Facebook outlaw discussions of any scientist who studies otherwise.
“New York University To Implement Racial Segregation In Student Dorms (WSWS)”
Ah, how far we’ve come. Thanks to Social Justice, we have re-enacted segregation in progressive colleges and California is repealing Civil Rights / Equal Rights. …Oh and “White Nationalist” (one of the only few) Richard Spenser is endorsing Joe Biden and the Democratic Party. Can’t make it up. Am I a racist now if I SUPPORT equal rights and frown on official segregation? Trick question: every noun, verb, adverb and adjective is racist, so yes, of course it is.
“Powell Set to Deliver Speech Changing How The Fed Views Inflation (CNBC)”
They are swapping the currency. Right now, they are printing, but to delay inflation, they need to crush the economy…only for outsiders, the people, of course. This is constant: hyperinflations always occur on a terrible, wrecked economies, not strong “overheated” economies as their models demand. Then later, it will flip, and they’ll go “Aw shucks, it got out of hand! All my pals bought up the nation in hyperinflation. Whood a knoowd?” Oh and PS, the Fed’s gold standard gold bug is being nominated to take over, and all the right people don’t want her. Who wants the party to end and responsibility and work to take over again?
Oh…as illustrated by the picture. Except in our case they smash the lower glasses. And blame us.
“In the 1980s, energy companies made up as much as a quarter of the Dow. After Exxon’s exits on Monday, energy will account for just 2% of the index.”
Showing how illusionary, rigged, bizarre and unreal the whole market is, as well known. No doubt Tesla — who doesn’t make any cars, and the cars they do light their owners on fire — is more valuable than Exxon, who powers every car on earth. But at extremes, buy the low, sell the high. And the people buying are really, really high.
“Greece, Turkey Heading For New Crisis (K.)”
Turkey is ever-more attacking Greece and Syria, so “go Cheeto.” Good job Brownie.
“Biblical Travails (Jim Kunstler)”
Ukrainian model: smash everything, particularly the poor, until the army is called out, then have your private agents shoot both sides with snipers. Blame Cheeto. Repeat until all Black folks are dead. Yay DNC! Helping! Going pretty well actually. I mean, unless you’re poor, a minority, or in a Democratic city; then it’s murder. Now if you STOP black people and businesses from being destroyed, you’re a racist. Obviously.
“the WFP is requesting $5 billion in emergency funds within the next six months that will help in the effort to thwart a global famine.”
Money is not food. I don’t know why they think it is. Money is not any “thing” at all: it is a CLAIM on real things. That I don’t have to provide and ain’t gonna. Oh, and they’d already HAVE food if these same “helpers” hadn’t got into the third world and screwed up their previous system. Helping! Po’ little children, unable to think or act for themselves. They need Great White Karen of the UN to show them how to put seeds in soil and milk cows. Although she’s never seen a cow in her life. Helping! Socialism, always helping! Can’t sleep, gotta help! With Help Bricks and Help Fires! If that doesn’t work, Help Bullets and Help Bombs! Can’t sleep now, gotta snort more “Help Meth” and keep helping!
Civilizations collapse because they keep adding (static) infrastructure, while the underlying energy to support infrastructure waxes and wanes with the seasons. Part of that infrastructure – or most perhaps – is the bureaucracy, class, and traditions of the culture. Look at us: maximum work = minimum reward; minimum work = maximum reward. And you think that society won’t welcome the Visigoths as the new kings? Like they are right now by burning everything? (i.e. other people’s property) It would be worth it just to have the Roman Senate taken down a peg.
More to the point, how do you avoid it? WHY WOULD YOU??? The system desperately needs to be re-localized, re-simplified, and un-techofied. It desperately needs the non-working “traditions”, i.e. rentiers, monopolies, and oligarchs, to be utterly crushed by fair competition and localism.
…Which is of course why they are trying MOAR centralization, MOAR infrastructure, more surveillance, force projection, market rigging, more dependence on their system via UBI and Universal (hypercentralized) healthcare. Which everyone is apparently for, being as it destroys themselves and the poorest, weakest, and most vulnerable most broadly and certainly. ANYTHING but families caring for you, ANYTHING but communities you can meet instead of see on your phone and be charged, data-mined, and extracted to use. Okay then, clearly nobody learns anything from history.
Or as Orlov would say “the Technosphere is trying to erase humanity.” Humanity overwhelmingly applauds and helps it annihilate all friends, families, and neighbors. Which we approve. Because we keep ADDING weighty, tax-gobbling infrastructure, control, centralization, and untouchable oligarchs under their own untouchable legal structure. Yes! National Health Care! National UBI Checks! National Elections! Worldwide Social Credit Scores! STOP. Grow a garden. Stay home. Stop supporting the Technosphere that is killing you and everyone you know. Every day it’s gotten more centralized it’s gotten worse. So every day it decentralizes, then….?
Despite the ads from experts-who-lie-about-everything, the Dark Ages were incredibly quiet. When you cram wars from 1,000 years of 50 countries into one chapter, it seems like a lot. However wars up to the American Revolution had sides of a mere 500 men. That’s like a sporting event. It wasn’t until “The Calamitous 14th Century” https://www.amazon.com/Distant-Mirror-Calamitous-14th-Century/dp/0345349571 that they really got back to wiping out areas we would call “whole nations.”
I’m not saying it’s great, it is primitive; however, it had 60 feast holidays and 52 Sundays off, and was hardly ever as bad as advertised by the present system, Progress: godless, inhuman technology, which is its sworn enemy. Sworn to lie, slander, and misrepresent. So how was the nuclear fallout in Eastern Europe and the Pacific under Charlemagne? How was the cod and seal population? Black rhinos? Hey, how were the forests doing worldwide, England, Ohio, even Japan? Did people live with their friends and die surrounded by children and family, not alone in a nursing home, choking on a tube? Gee, sounds horrible. We never want it to be so dark we have our families live with us again. While we’re on the edge of poverty, without access to health care.
Oh wait: we do now, but WITHOUT 60 feast days and 52 Sundays and WITHOUT our friends, families, and children around. Gosh, certainly wouldn’t want that. Please continue to support a few billionaires in palatial estates on St. James, borrowing your daughters, jailing your whistleblowers and journalists without trial by remote control, while burning your cities and shutting off and/or bombing your water, power, and hospitals, while re-instating slavery in Libya and worldwide. I mean, wouldn’t want to go back to the “Dark Ages” or anything.
What’s really sad about the Express article is that it isn’t hindsight. It was known at the time it was insane. What else could they have done? They could have done what Sweden did. Or they could have stopped the plane loads of virus coming into the country in the first place. And parliament was useless. Parliament still is useless. Where is parliament? Parliament has gone on ****ing holiday with ****ing face masks on. Not only was lock down a massive mistake, it was highly likely to be illegal. Everything that’s going on now is still illegal and the excuses for doing it are becoming ever more flimsy. Oh it’s to save the NHS, oh no wait, it’s to make the letter R=0, oh no wait, it’s to stop a second wave, oh no wait, it’s time to go to a restaurant with no mask on to try to fix the mess, here’s some free money.
Our country and our economy is all but destroyed by a whole parliament full of useless incompetent idiots. What’s the point in voting?
Vaccine
It better be right, because it will kill front line workers who will be the first to get the vaccine.Isn’t it funny how – after a (too) long career in government, Nancy Pelosi is allowing herself to be defined by Donald Trump? His name will be her epitaph, and she can’t see it.
John Day re off -label drug use -here is a link to a study by Stanford University citing a lack of evidence for off- label prescriptions:
https://www.webmd.com/drug-medication/news/20081124/off-label-drug-use-common. This was posted on WebMD.
If you want more links I will find them.
My key point remains that pharmaceuticals, once approved for their intended purpose, get a free pass for use as a physician sees fit, whereas herbal medicine gets no such free pass. This is a double standard.” …. herbal medicine gets no such free pass ….”
Proof that the USA population has been been properly conditioned.
What about in other countries?@Sumac.Carol
I read that study. It does not say what you said it says. You say what you want to be true. That’s human. Please read both of my prior responses to you, which are the same response, the same explanation.
What this report says is that a lot of drugs get used for 3 or 4 things which are not the one thing they were approved for, after lots of time and money was spent to get that approval to get to market.
All of the cases mentioned here are either moderately or very much things I am familiar with.
This report does not damn them, but says the FDA has not specifically looked at widespread patterns of current use. Everything that is mentioned has been studied, and I have read a lot of the studies, and I have a little to a lot of experience with most of these drugs and their side effects. I absolutely minimize the use of sedatives in the elderly, for instance, and always have. This is my daily professional life.
I can advise any patient on how to take herbal remedies. It’s covered under my license to practice medicine and surgery. I have often advised horsetail for chronic bladder irritation, St John’s wort as an option for depression (not to be mixed with certain other specific medicines, and not with Hepatitis-C treatment), butterbur for migraines and allergic rhinitis and skullcap or Sleepy Time tea at bedtime (and melatonin). I have taken glucosamine daily for 20 years for a bad disc and sequellae of that.
Making medical claims without doing the FDA-approvaldrill is forbidden by US law
Germany is different. I had the German Commission-E monograph until somebody took it from my office (high street value back then)
Nobody is a victim in this process, though it DOES serve established corporate pharmacy interests first, and everybody else second. It does offer some protections, and all vaccines should have to go through all of the same approval process as every other drug, but are exempted, because if theyy were not, then a lot of them would qo away, and that’s against some big vested interests.
I give you Ron Paul and Robert Kennedy Jr.
The lack of hindsight is another sign of the collapse of civilization. Nancy Pelosi can call others enemies of the state but she is as much of one as the Clinton or Bush families. All became enemies of good government once the Western “free trade” Empire was placed above of the best interests of the American people. They still deny the existence of the Pandemic Depression; let alone, the fall of the Free World. The differences between the Democrats and Donald Trump come down to he has yet to start a war, he is really accelerating deregulation and privatization (the Post Office), and added China to the Cold War 2.0 with Russia that Joe Biden started.
But the revisionist history of the lockdown is ludicrous. They dismiss reality.
1) To have avoided the 182,348 American deaths to date, all international flights into the USA and ports would have to have been closed and sealed in January 2020. Simply impossible for the rulers of the Western Empire to do.
2) There would have to have been an American public health system to test, trace and isolate the infected like in South Korea and New Zealand. Six months later there is still not one. The reason is that absolutely no money is to be mooched by the connected with a government run healthcare system. A conscious decision was made to wait for a for-profit vaccine or treatment next year. The hundreds of thousands of coronavirus deaths are collateral damage and of no concern to the ruling class as long has the hospitals are profitable and they can get treated if needed.
3) The lockdowns were imposed because the hospital systems in Italy and New York State were overrun by the ill. Texas was at the breaking point, but cornavirus treatment appears to have evolved to keep the system running. The healthcare Industry (20% of the US economy) has one prime objective – to make more money. If anyone is cured it is due to the workers in the system.
John Day: you said that off-label use is seldom based on anecdotal evidence.
The report says “it is common for doctors to prescribe drugs for conditions they aren’t specifically approved for, but in many cases there is not enough evidence to justify the practice”. The report goes on to say that, regarding the drugs covered in the study, “many of the most common uses for the drugs have not been adequately studied” and “we are talking about millions of prescriptions a year, and the size and rigor of the studies that have been done may not justify this”. If the studies are not adequate, are you suggesting that “anecdotal evidence” is an inappropriate descriptor?
I am not commenting on your particular practice – it really confuses things in fact to get in to your particular practice, because no one can know how representative your practice is of the medical community. Based on my own personal experience with my physicians, they have uniformly known zilch about non-prescription alternatives for any of my ailments, but that could be due to many factors. The commentary is on the regulatory system which only provides a “gold star” (FDA approval) for expensive, patentable medical interventions, and herbs will never make it on this list, nor will epsom salts. You say that “Nobody is a victim in this process, though it DOES serve established corporate pharmacy interests first” — really??? Let’s talk about hydroxychloroquine for covid…@Sumac.Carol, You wrote:
“John Day: you said that off-label use is seldom based on anecdotal evidence.
The report says “it is common for doctors to prescribe drugs for conditions they aren’t specifically approved for, but in many cases there is not enough evidence to justify the practice”. The report goes on to say that, regarding the drugs covered in the study, “many of the most common uses for the drugs have not been adequately studied” and “we are talking about millions of prescriptions a year, and the size and rigor of the studies that have been done may not justify this”. If the studies are not adequate, are you suggesting that “anecdotal evidence” is an inappropriate descriptor?”
Yes, precisely, “anecdotal evidence” specifically refers to findings that were not well studied. Fauci misused the term, when he disparaged studies he did not like, which went against the interests he served. He makes no mention at all of retractions of studies he cites when they are proven to be fabricated. (Fabricated is worse, of course.)
I gave my own freedom to advise herbal and alternative remedies as an example of the freedom of licensed physicians to do so. Your claim was that it was forbidden. It’s not.
Doctors not knowing about non prescription treatments is typical. They have to seek out such knowledge at their own expense, and get no CME credit for doing so.
OK, “talk about hydroxychloroquine for COVID”. What do you want to say?
I’ll note that nobody is making money off it, and nobody will pay for long US studies to prove it should be approved for this use. The rest of the world operates somewhat differently. The US is the big profit center for big pharma. They don’t care much about India. There is no way that approval could come quickly enough to make a difference in treatment, since formal approval, after prospective randomized studies, would take at least 18 months.
I am no fan or friend of big pharma, which has captured the regulator, the FDA, and has certainly captured the CDC and NIH, through monetary flows into research grants. Fauci has directed over a half trillion dollars of research money since the mid 1980s. That’s power, and it’s captured.
The first step, in my opinion, would be to take the massive profits out of the US drug market. Single payer price bargaining, as other nationalized systems use, could do it. The bureaucratic jungles that have grown in the past 60 years are different. Such things can almost never really be reformed to serve a true purpose, after they have long served hidden masters.
New bureaucracies to replace them would have a chance, with the right heads to start them. A chance…
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