One of Those (CENSORED) Days

We all have them: one or more days in which every little thing that can go wrong does go wrong, and the universe seems designed solely for the grand purpose of driving us crazy. That's how my last 48 hours has been and I'm really, really hoping that I'm at the end of a bad luck streak rather than somewhere in the middle.

For instance, my annoying urinary tract infection wasn't quite gone (ouch) after finishing my antibiotics, so my doctor told me to come in for an office visit. I showed up early as I always do, confident that I could fill time playing games on my smartphone. Which immediately ran out of power. So I waited in an exam room for over an hour with nothing to do and nothing to look at. And more importantly, nothing to listen to - I have bad tinnitus and I'd just as soon be waterboarded as sit in a really quiet room. Usually, my phone can play some soothing white noise...but not this time.

So I was fairly unraveled by the time the doctor finally arrived. I described where my pain was, after which he had me drop my drawers so he could pinch, pull, twist, squeeze, and do other allegedly medicinal forms of origami with my genitals.  I was then told that everything looked okay from the outside and the doctor had no idea why I was still feeling pain. So that was time well spent. 

While standing at the checkout desk, one lens spontaneously leapt out of my eyeglasses (along with the teeny-tiny screw to hold the glasses together). So I was more or less blind when driving home, and arrived to find Mrs. J in the earliest stages of widowhood since I was gone WAY longer than expected and hadn't called.

Then today, I had to be filling out a "new patient" form online to see a new dentist. As previously reported, my old family dentist is quitting the business because he got tired of having to take remedial courses in fighting human trafficking, fighting the opioid crisis, installing an expensive filter to take environmentally dangerous silver out of any wastewater even though he hasn't done a silver filling in the last 20 years, and small practices like his are increasingly the target of violent drug thieves.

An amusing digression: not long ago, a violent guy came into the little office and threatened bodily harm to the dentist and his receptionist unless he was given a prescription for narcotics. The dentist managed to stall long enough to make a phone call to the police...

"I've got a guy here who says he's going to hurt us if we don't give him a prescription for drugs!"
"Are you a doctor?"
"Yes!"
"So you can legally write a prescription for the drugs?"
"Yes..."
"Well, then write it for him! We don't care about those kinds of things." (click)

So yeah...there goes a good man and a fine dentist. But he did give me one last check-up and found a couple of cavities that had bloomed during the pandemic. So I contacted a new practice and was faced with that "new patient" form online. I filled it out (and it was a LONG sucker) but when I hit the "submit" button I got screaming warnings from my antivirus software that the information was about to be routed to a known phishing site. You know, the kind you'd rather not give your name, address, birth date, and social security number to.

I tried a second browser and got the same result. After which I alerted the dental office and was assured that "other people are filling out the form just fine." Yeah, I'll bet they are. But I was given the option to come in to the office at my leisure to fill out the 20 page form using their office iPad. Which for all I know still routes the information to Russian hackers.

Moreover, I was already a little touchy about the subject of computer security and identity theft since that same morning, I'd discovered that someone was using my charge card number to buy Major League Baseball hats and dine heartily at Buffalo Wild Wings about a thousand miles from where I live. So I had to cancel the card and will have to relink a new card to about a dozen sites.

But wait, there's more!

Daughter Jarlsberg is changing her health insurance and has just set up a new Blue Cross Blue Shield policy through (God help us) Healthcare.gov. But here's the fun part: they won't give you a member ID until you've paid the first month's premium. To pay that premium, they give you a link to a handy website that you can't access unless you enter the member ID which you can't possibly have because you haven't paid yet and, apparently, never can.

This took me to a long, long phone call to customer service ("Home of English As a Second Language!"), during which an electronic eyebrow was raised because the service person discovered that my name was associated with a credit card that had just been canceled.  Even I didn't believe my subsequent explanation that, oh yeah, someone chose today to buy...um...baseball caps with my number so I had to cancel the card a couple of hours ago.

But eventually, payment was sorta kinda made and that highly coveted Blue Cross ID number will soon be winging its way to our currently ant-infested mailbox along with a sprinkling of condolence cards from folks still under the impression I died at the doctor's office.

Which brings us up to this very moment, when it's time for my brief but still painful exposure to the day's news. Clan MacGregor, where is thy sting?

Going For The Brass

Hopefully the cartoon is self-explanatory, but we'll add that we support Simone Biles' tough decision to step aside from Olympic competition. Her gymnastic feats not only break the laws of physics, they flirt with serious injury or death if she's unable to perform less than perfectly.

She didn't let anyone down, and we wish her nothing but success and mental peace in the future.

THE MOST IMPORTANT NEWS IN THE WORLD?

Interested in "Following the Science" about Covid? Because here's the science: there is a safe, cheap, effective treatment and preventative that could have prevented millions of Covid deaths and serious infections. Science has known this for over a year but the news has been, and continues to be, suppressed by politicians, "experts," the news media, and social media censors.

We didn't need to shut down (or at least could have re-opened far sooner). We didn't need to be subjected to nonstop panic-stoking from the government and the media. We didn't need to crush the American work ethic, nor did we need to throw election laws to the wind last year because of the "special circumstances." And God knows we don't now need untold trillions of "Covid relief" dollars to come back from this needless (but fully intentional) nightmare.

The truth of this is incontestible. The reason it's happening and who's behind it - still a mystery - is surely one of the most important and urgent issues for which we should all be demanding answers right now.
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Why is the FDA Attacking a Safe, Effective Covid Treatment?
By David R. Henderson and Charles L. Hooper
Wall Street Journal July 28, 2021 12:34 pm ET

The Food and Drug Administration claims to follow the science. So why is it attacking ivermectin, a medication it certified in 1996?

Earlier this year the agency put out a special warning that “you should not use ivermectin to treat or prevent COVID-19.” The FDA’s statement included words and phrases such as “serious harm,” “hospitalized,” “dangerous,” “very dangerous,” “seizures,” “coma and even death” and “highly toxic.” Any reader would think the FDA was warning against poison pills. In fact, the drug is FDA-approved as a safe and effective antiparasitic.

Ivermectin was developed and marketed by Merck & Co. while one of us (Mr. Hooper) worked there years ago. William C. Campbell and Satoshi Omura won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for discovering and developing avermectin, which Mr. Campbell and associates modified to create ivermectin.

Ivermectin is on the World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicines. Merck has donated four billion doses to prevent river blindness and other diseases in Africa and other places where parasites are common. A group of 10 doctors who call themselves the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance have said ivermectin is “one of the safest, low-cost, and widely available drugs in the history of medicine.”

Ivermectin fights 21 viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, the cause of Covid-19. A single dose reduced the viral load of SARS-CoV-2 in cells by 99.8% in 24 hours and 99.98% in 48 hours, according to a June 2020 study published in the journal Antiviral Research.

Some 70 clinical trials are evaluating the use of ivermectin for treating Covid-19. The statistically significant evidence suggests that it is safe and works for both treating and preventing the disease.
In 115 patients with Covid-19 who received a single dose of ivermectin, none developed pneumonia or cardiovascular complications, while 11.4% of those in the control group did. Fewer ivermectin patients developed respiratory distress (2.6% vs. 15.8%); fewer required oxygen (9.6% vs. 45.9%); fewer required antibiotics (15.7% vs. 60.2%); and fewer entered intensive care (0.1% vs. 8.3%). Ivermectin-treated patients tested negative faster, in four days instead of 15, and stayed in the hospital nine days on average instead of 15. Ivermectin patients experienced 13.3% mortality compared with 24.5% in the control group.

Moreover, the drug can help prevent Covid-19. One 2020 article in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications looked at what happened after the drug was given to family members of confirmed Covid-19 patients. Less than 8% became infected, versus 58.4% of those untreated.
Despite the FDA’s claims, ivermectin is safe at approved doses. Out of four billion doses administered since 1998, there have been only 28 cases of serious neurological adverse events, according to an article published this year in the American Journal of Therapeutics. The same study found that ivermectin has been used safely in pregnant women, children and infants.

If the FDA were driven by science and evidence, it would give an emergency-use authorization for ivermectin for Covid-19. Instead, the FDA asserts without evidence that ivermectin is dangerous.
At the bottom of the FDA’s warning against ivermectin is this statement: “Meanwhile, effective ways to limit the spread of COVID-19 continue to be to wear your mask, stay at least 6 feet from others who don’t live with you, wash hands frequently, and avoid crowds.”

Is this based on the kinds of double-blind studies that the FDA requires for drug approvals? No.
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Mr. Henderson, a research fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, was senior health economist with President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. Mr. Hooper is president of Objective Insights, a firm that consults with pharmaceutical clients.

Derailed Train of Thought

Yeah, he really said all that

I'm still in "looking aghast from the sidelines" mode, but felt like it was time to post a little something to remind people that I'm not dead, dying, nor incarcerated. Yet. Plus, this will give us a nice clean slate for the comments area, where intelligent and well-informed people are still posting the best chat on the Internet.

And despite my ongoing sabbatical, I still hear the drumbeat of ongoing news. Although it might just be my throbbing headache. 

• Nancy Pelosi is single-handedly choosing the (ahem) "bipartisan" members of a committee to investigate the January 6th Patriots Picnic in Washington, which Dems and the media are breathlessly calling "the most deadly assault on the Capitol in 200 years." A ludicrous thing to say, even though it was the most deadly event in Ashli Babbitt's life.

• The Dems look likely to pass Bernie Sanders' 3.5 Trillion Dollar (actually 5.5 Trillion) spending bill soon, meaning the value of Monopoly money is about to surge when measured against the buying power of the American dollar.

• The Olympics are allegedly taking place in empty stadiums, which is a pretty good metaphor for the lack of enthusiasm people are feeling for the event. Personally, I've given up caring about the USA teams because there's been so much political nonsense and so many personal anti-American demonstrations on and off the field leading up to this event.  Here's a wild idea: in the future, howzabout we ask athletes if they have any problem with showing respect to the American flag before putting them on Team USA?

• Although it almost looks like a hint of sanity, I'm not getting my hopes up too much over the fact that Joe Biden ("The Most Popular Man Ever To Run For Office!") keeps seeing his approval ratings fall, recently hitting the 50% mark. Even more telling is a recent poll that shows a majority of Americans (Conservatives, Liberals, and Independents) now view our nation's future pessimistically, with actual optimism falling a full 20 points since May. Nice job of uniting the country, Joe!

• Federal officials have already apprehended ("Welcome to the United States! Here's a plane ticket and some walking around money!") over 1.1 million people crossing our border with Mexico this year. We know that the Democrats' goal is to alter voting demographics permanently, but just how much impact can these "immigrants" have? Here's a fun fact: if you put all of those people in one place and called it a state, it would immediately have a greater population than nine of our existing states do. 

Of course, the Left's goal isn't to create a new state, but rather to ship just enough of those people to existing states to change the demographics, cause redistricting, and sway elections (at the same time the Dems are coincidentally trying to federalize elections to ban voter IDs). Currently, our military is being used to fly these intruders to all 50 states rather than, oh, carpet-bombing our southern border. Which strikes me as a damn shame.

• On a personal note, I'm currently recovering from a very uncomfortable urinary tract infection. I won't go into details, but as a gesture of solidarity, I will never again participate in a weenie roast.