I know delusions and feels are more "today" than facts, but there's a problem with pandering to them or worse, indulging in them: They are antithetical to professional and personal success over the intermediate and longer term.

So let's talk about facts when it comes to these "Enough" protests.

• No firearm has ever injured or killed someone since the dawn of time.  A firearm is an inanimate object, as is a car or truck, an axe, a BIC lighter, a gallon of gasoline, a pool or a baseball bat.  It is thus incapable of action, and "injure" or "kill" are actions.
  
  
• All intentional injuries and killings are committed by animate things.  In the context in question we are dealing with humans, since nobody is talking about being mauled by bears or mountain lions, or otherwise taken by wildlife.
  
  
• Since we are talking about intentional and unjustified acts we also are inherently adding the aspect of animus to the discussion; for obvious reasons nobody intentionally kills or severely injures someone they like at the moment of the act.
  
  
• There are approximately 100 murders (dead people, not acts) committed each year while utilizing as an inanimate tool the entire class of "evil firearms" that are sought to be restricted or banned.  For context there are approximately 13,000 intentional homicides in which the predominate tool used is a firearm (the rest of so-called "gun violence" are suicides) and virtually all of them involve tools in the category of handguns.
  
  
• Incidentally, since I did bring it up, there are about 200 fatal animal attacks on humans yearly in the United States and another 100 due to accidental events, usually from riding or being pulled by an animal (usually a horse.)  That is, it's twice as likely you'll be intentionally killed (e.g. by bite, goring, etc) by an animal in the US as shot by someone with an "evil black rifle" and approximately the same odds due to accident with an animal you were riding or as a passenger in a thing being pulled by same.
  
  
• To put math to that every three days the number of people murdered in a year through the employment of the tool sought to be banned are murdered using a different, but related tool.  In other words you are approximately one hundred thirty times more likely to be murdered by someone using the tool known collectively as a "handgun" rather than one known collectively as an "evil-looking black rifle."
  
  
• In virtually every such instance in which an "evil black rifle" was used in recent memory the person responsible was known to law enforcement at a federal, state or local level, and frequently at all of the above, to be dangerously unstable or to have committed felony criminal acts for which they had either served a sentence or were not prosecuted.
  
  
• It is a fact that a person who is in prison cannot kill someone who is not in said prison as that act would be a physical impossibility due to lack of concurrent location.
  
  
• It is also a fact that despite it being a severe felony involving life in prison as a punishment to run drugs into this nation and between its states in large quantities thousands of people do so every single day and we catch an inconsequential percentage of them despite spending billions every year in pursuit of same.  We thus know, factually, that it is impossible to actually prevent the importation, movement and sale of dangerous narcotics -- which are also an inanimate object, as are firearms.
  
  
• We also know, factually, that a ridiculously large percentage of the violent crimes, including murder, committed while using the tools collectively known as "firearms" are committed by persons involved in said drug trade, many of whom are not citizens or legal immigrants.
  
  
• In addition the Bureau of Justice Statistics has run studies on so-called "assault rifles"; they found that a mere 1% of the criminal use of firearms involve these tools.

So here's what we have.

17 people were murdered by a nutjob in Florida.  A couple of weeks later another nutjob murdered a young boy and tried to kill many others, severely injuring them.

The first used as his tool a firearm -- specifically, a black rifle.

The second used a knife.

In both cases the inanimate object used as a tool to commit the assaults was incapable of thought, animus or action because it is an inanimate object.

There are in fact thousands of inanimate objects that can be used to assault or murder other humans and many of them are at least as lethal as a firearm if not more-so.

Last year a religious nutjob rented a truck and intentionally ran over people in NY City, killing 8 and severely injuring nearly a dozen more.  He stopped only because he was a poor driver and rammed a bus.  This is not unique; in Europe there have been a spate of these attacks of late and some have been extraordinarily deadly -- in fact there were eight of them in 2017 alone.  This is dramatically higher than the number of school mass-shootings in the United States over the same period of time.

In 1920 someone (the perpetrator was never caught) pulled a carriage full of dynamite and scrap iron to greatly enhance the shrapnel effect up in front of JP Morgan (the bank) in NY City and blew it up.  That killed 38 people, but that wasn't anywhere near the worst attack in the last 100 years.

About 20 years ago a nutjob got 38 people drunk on spiked vodka (with phenobarabital) and then suffocated them with plastic bags.  There is much debate over whether most of the dead killed themselves via that mechanism or "had help."  Note that the tools used (booze, a severe sedative and plastic bags) did not involve any commonly associated with violent homicides.

Not long after the 1920 JP Morgan explosion an even worse mass murder occurred in Michigan.  The perpetrator killed his wife, set his farm on fire and then blew up a school at which he worked as a volunteer.  Most of the murdered were first and second graders and then as the coup-de-grace when the firemen showed up to try to put out what was left of the school he drove his truck into the middle of the rescuers and blew that up with him inside.  The death toll was 44 and again, not one firearm or knife was used.

Of course there's also McVeigh who drove a rental truck full of hand-made explosive that killed over 150 and injured nearly 700 more.

Note however, that the above cited examples are, with the exception of the comet worshippers, used a tool of destruction normally thought of as illegal and ruinous (e.g. explosives.)  This is intentionally deceptive however for these accounts easily found in the media and other references intentionally omit dozens of other mass-murder incidents that didn't use as a tool such things, including one of the worst ever recorded and not in the distant past either.

Specifically, one of the worst mass-murders ever recorded in US history occurred in 1990.  The tool used was gasoline -- about a dollar's worth, to be precise, which the assailant placed at the base of a staircase that was the only way out of a nightclub and set it on fire.

Nearly everyone inside died; on a percentage-of-dead-people .vs. those present basis this was quite-arguably the worst incident of mass-killing in United States history.  The total was 87 dead.

Nor is this the only time that has happened.  In Montreal, in 1972 three people were ejected from a bar for being excessively intoxicated, returned and did essentially the same thing, killing 37 out of roughly 200 present.

Why have I gone through all of this in such excruciating detail?

First, because there are several million of the so-called "evil rifles" in civilian ownership in the United States today.  About 100 people lose their lives to someone using one of them as the tool of their extinction a year, a rate of some 0.0033%.  This is statistically indistinguishable from zero in terms of the rate of abuse.

Approximately 3,500 people drown in non-boating related accidents annually.  To put a rate of risk on that it is more than 35 times more likely you will die by drowning than by being shot with a scary-looking black rifle and every one of those deaths is an accident.  In ten days the total number of people killed a year using such tools die from drowning, most of them children.  Yet nobody requires a license to build or erect and maintain a pool, which is where virtually all such deaths occur, and nobody is blaming pools as they are inanimate objects -- as are firearms.  Instead we (correctly) blame the adults for their inattention and failure to supervise said children who are in and around pools and die as a result.

Further, the murder and non-negligent manslaughter (that is, intentional homicide) rate has fallen from 6.8 per 100,000 in 1997 to 5.3 in 2016, a drop of about 25%.  Since the early 1990s, in short, it's down by roughly half.  This occurred despite a skyrocketing number of firearms sold in the United States which includes a couple of million "scary black rifles."

The drop in rapes has also been sizable over the same period (about 18%) and there is exactly one tool known to mankind that makes a 120lb women the near-exact equal of a 300lb 6'2" brute of a man intent on rape.  It is called a gun, and some part of that drop in violent rapes is likely due to all the guns that have been sold, many of whom are owned by said women.

The drop in robberies is even more-impressive -- close to 45%.  There is again one tool that makes a potential robbery victim the equal of the thug attempting same.  It is also called a gun.

IN OTHER WORDS THE FACTS ARE THAT THE CRIME RATE HAS GONE DOWN DRAMATICALLY OVER THE LAST 20-ODD YEARS, CONTINUING A TREND FROM THE 1980s, EVEN AS GUN SALES AND THE NUMBER OF GUNS, INCLUDING BLACK RIFLES THAT LOOK SCARY AND HAVE BIG MAGAZINES HAS RISEN DRAMATICALLY.  THE PERCENTAGE OF SUCH SCARY-LOOKING BLACK RIFLES EVER USED IN A CRIMINAL ACT IS STATISTICALLY INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM ZERO.

These are facts folks, not opinions.

Now let's add on to the facts.

• Most of the nutjobs who choose to shoot up schools -- or commit other acts of mass-murder -- are well known to authorities long before the act is committed.  In the instant two cases -- Parkland the Stabby Muslim NutJob -- this was the case.  It was also the case in the next-most-recent circumstance in Texas.
  
  
• In the cases where the nutjobs are known to authorities in most cases existing law has been violated at a felony level prior to the offense and the authorities intentionally or negligently did not arrest the perpetrator.  This was the case with both Parkland and the recent Stabby Muslim Nutjob.
  
  
• A person in prison cannot commit murder against anyone other than another person in said prison.  Therefore but for the negligence or intentional misconduct of the authorities the offense would not have taken place.
  
  
• A person who has been "Baker Acted" (involuntarily committed for psychiatric reasons) cannot commit murder either during the time of their involuntary confinement.  Therefore to the extent that any such person had presented evidence of behavior justifying such an action and the authorities did not commit said individual we once again have an assault that took place only due to the negligent or intentional conduct of the authorities.
  
  
• The tools used to commit said acts, whether they be gasoline, knives or firearms, all have multiple legal uses and nearly everyone who acquires, owns or uses them do so legally.  A tiny percentage, indistinguishable from zero, of people who buy gasoline legally use it to commit arson.  A tiny percentage, indistinguishable from zero, of people who buy a knife legally use it to commit murder.  And a tiny percentage, statistically indistinguishable from zero (less than 0.001%) of people who own a gun use it to commit murder as well.
  

On the clear weight of the evidence there is no reason whatsoever to ban or restrict any inanimate object on the basis of these assaults.  In EVERY CASE virtually every owner of said devices, whether they be trucks, gasoline, baseball bats, pools or firearms uses them for a purpose other than committing murder.  There is no evidence to suggest that even a single such incident would have been prevented by any form of firearm restriction other than complete confiscation from law-abiding citizens which would likely lead to far greater rates of both property and serious violent crime -- and that assumes you could actually pull it off.

They are, however, many reasons to go after alleged "law enforcement", "mental health" and "other government" persons (including but not limited to school superintendents, principals and others) that have knowingly and intentionally excused, hidden and refused to prosecute felony misconduct either known or suspected by the people who later go on to commit these offenses.

In fact the evidence is that you could have prevented half or more of ALL the documented mass-shooting incidents of the last 20 years, such as in Parkland, had these government officials done their jobs with the information they had in their possession.

In addition there is large body of evidence that many of these shooters were either on or withdrawing from SSRIs, a specific class of drugs known to potentiate violence in young people with bipolar or disassociative disorders.  There is a specific warning in the prescribing information for these drugs related to this and what's worse is that these drugs are known by scientific study to be ineffective for their prescribed condition in persons under the age of 25.  It is a fact that it is almost impossible for anyone other than a psychiatrist or close associate with near-constant and frequent contact with an individual to know they have such a disorder, since during the non-depressed phases they appear to be perfectly fine.  While the risk of producing such an outcome is numerically small if you give these drugs to millions of people without adequate screening you will, statistically, produce some number of these attackers.

In short between the SSRI and government malfeasance connections you could have prevented nearly all of these attacks.

IF you are interested in actually preventing these attacks it is therefore clear that the only logical changes to make are to (1) hold government agencies and employees fully accountable, including criminally, when they fail to do their jobs through either negligence or intentional inaction and (2) stop prescribing all SSRIs and similar drugs to people under the age of 25 unless they are under institutional (and therefore continual) supervision and able to be segregated from innocent people if the risk of known bad outcomes materializes.

These are facts, not suppositions or guesses.

Now let's tie it together.

When you are hired to work for someone one of the key elements in your success if there is any cognitive process required in your job (that is, you're doing more than sweeping floors) is that you are capable and willing to take in information, evaluate it on a dispassionate, factual basis and from that draw conclusions without concealment, deceit or personal political animus.

This process is utterly essential to the operation of any commercial enterprise.

When I ran MCSNet it was an essential element of every single person's job that worked for me.  Even someone who was hired for the most-base position -- answering the front-desk phone and directing calls -- had as part of their job the utter necessity to take the call, discern what the caller was inquiring about or reporting and processing that information without pre-conceived notion, political animus or deceit and upon that analysis routing the call to the appropriate person or department.

This was, arguably, the least-skilled job description in the company.

The people who were in the customer service department had a higher level of discernment required of them.  Their job involved taking said calls passed to them in a call queue, speaking to the customer, determining exactly what they required in order to either assist them or sell to them a specific product or service and then acting on same.  Again, it was utterly essential that they be both willing and able to process the information they received from said person on the other end of the line without political animus, deceit or pre-conceived notion, acting only within the boundaries of the facts they were able to discern.  If the customer's service was off because they did not pay their bill whether they were Democrat or Republican, believed in gun rights or gay rights was utterly immaterial and to the extent that any non-factual matters intruded into their processing of information they were unemployable.

Those in technical support had an even higher level of discernment, in that they had to understand not just the complaint but also the technology behind it.  A small percentage of our customer base at the time (about 10%, more or less) preferred Macintosh computers, while nearly all of the rest had PCs running Windows (95 and later 98 at the time.)  You were unemployable if your personal or political animus drove you toward being unhappy when a PC user called because you liked Macs, or vice-versa as any expression of that to a customer was likely to result in the customer leaving.  I in fact had to fire someone over exactly this issue.

Those in sales or management positions, which were of course fewer in number, had even less room for such garbage.  For those in sales the accurate assessment of the customer's needs and what products and services we had that fit those needs, along with how to package and sell that combination of products and services, was the only determinant.  If you had a problem with gay people, black people, yellow people, green people (Martians) or gun-owning people then you had no place in my company in a management or sales role because your actions would directly damage either sales or the retention of valuable employees and possibly both.  Even worse, if in management, you might advocate for, bias reviews of, and seek to promote for political or other animated reasons rather than predicated on facts, which did double damage because not only would a less-competent (or incompetent) person get promoted the person passed over would likely quit in response!

Now you snowflakes may not understand any of this, or you may think that if you go work for some big company like Google or Amazon, where their entire culture has some sort of animus or bias, that you'll be immune to this because you're on the right side of it.

I will remind you that this is an extremely stupid position to take, for the simple reason that such firms always eventually get hosed.  Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but they always do.  IBM had this point of view for a long time and got away with it.  Then they paid for it as others ate their lunch and they nearly went out of business.  Microsoft was severely damaged by the same crap.  Apple nearly went under too.  NEXT, a very-promising firm with a whole bunch of this sort of crap inside it, did fail.  So have literally thousands of other such firms.

While it's certainly possible to win the bet and make enough bank before the destruction happens in your corporate or personal life the odds are against you and in an entrepreneurial environment -- that is, a smaller business where every sale counts the idea that you can inform your decisions in your personal or professional life by completely ignoring facts in favor of political animus is, and ought to be, an absolute and permanent bar on your employment.

If you walked out of school for your "17 minutes", marched on DC or participate in any such act whether physically or on social media whether now or in the future you have indelibly marked yourself as someone who cannot process facts and from them reach conclusions.

You thus have marked yourself as someone who is unemployable in any job that requires any amount of discernment or factual processing of information in order to be successful and that is virtually every job beyond sweeping floors.

Govern yourself accordingly.

Why did Parkland happen?

Because the law is not enforced; the shooter had been reported multiple times for acts that were plenty to arrest him, have him declared mentally incompetent or both.  He could not have shot up anything if in prison or a mental institution.

Why does medical care cost ten times what it does in other nations?

Because the law is not enforced; it is a felony to attempt to restrain trade, create or maintain monopolies, and price-fix.  The health care industry does all three on a daily basis.  You would not need "health insurance" for anything other than catastrophic events, Medicare and Medicaid would not be bankrupting the government and state and local pensions wouldn't be either if the law was enforced and those engaged in same were rotting in prison cells.

Why do we have an opiod epidemic?

Because the law is not enforced; it is a crime to knowingly divert or ship these drugs for other than legitimate uses, and when you ship enough pills into a town of 1,000 to give every single person there multiple doses a day it is clear they are not being used legitimately.  Yet not one pill manufacturing executive has faced indictment for what is clearly criminal behavior.

Why did an illegal invader shoot a young woman in California?

Because the law is not enforced.  He had been deported before, we let him come back in and California in particular gave him sanctuary.  In fact every single illegal invader here committed a criminal act as their first act on our soil.  Were the law to be enforced none of these crimes would have occurred.  There is an existing system to stop 90%+ of illegal invader employment, E-Verify.  Our government has refused to demand that all employers use it, under penalty of imprisonment.

Why did a man shoot 26 people in a Church in Texas?

Because the law is not enforced.  He had been court-martialed for assaulting his wife and child in New Mexico and served a 12 month sentence for same, plus a "bad conduct" discharge.  Under the Lautenberg Amendment this disqualified him from buying or owning firearms and yet nobody in the military went to prison for failing to enter his conviction into the system.

There is no law you can pass that will address any sort of violence nor any other sort of criminal conduct if it is not enforced.

There are over 50,000 gun laws alone on the books between federal, state and local legislation.  Nearly all of them, other than those directly dealing with the interstate trade in firearms, are blatantly unconstitutional.  Yet not only do we keep wanting to pass more laws we won't enforce the ones we already have, specifically when it comes to violent individuals that have been repeatedly reported or even those who have served criminal sentences.

At the same time you're robbed out of more than three trillion a year by the medical system for the exact same reason.  Laws that have existed for more than 100 years are routinely ignored by these companies because there is no risk to them in doing so.  At no time does anyone ever go to prison for outrageous violations of these laws.

A number of years ago a drug company was criminally prosecuted for off-label marketing of certain drugs to teens and children, for which there was no evidence of safety or efficacy.  It was later shown that they actually tampered with a scientific study to try to cover that up.  The scientific facts are that these drugs not only don't work in young people they actually make the risk of suicide go up instead of down and there is a small but non-zero risk of them causing homicidal rage attacks.  These drugs are implicated in many school and other "rage style" attacks, most of which are perpetrated by young people and in fact there is a warning in the prescribing information on these drugs related to this risk.  Yet not one person has gone to prison for the activities of those drug companies or for prescribing them to kids which arguably has resulted in virtually all mass-shootings of this type and what's worse is that we still allow doctors to hand these damn pills out like ****ing candy to children, adolescents and young adults despite knowing they are both ineffective and unsafe.

Who's responsible for all this?

You are.  We all are.  Instead of taking the pop-up spokesman of the day out behind the woodshed when some tragedy happens and refusing to play along with that political game we fawn over them while "supporting" politicians and other "important" people who speechify and demand new laws and "action."

We never demand that the people responsible for their negligent or intentional inaction, or even worse, their complicit and blatantly illegal conduct before the fact that allows these events to occur or even potentiates them go straight to prison.

We also fail to demand that those who rob us out of more than $3 trillion dollars a year collectively, or about one dollar in six that is spent in the economy, go to prison.

Instead, we all play pity party when bad things happen and then mewl out the by-now standard: Please sir, just the tip this time and may I have a stick for my teeth first?

I've been harping on this more-or-less continually since 2011 -- it relates to your personal health and reliance on the health care system in the United States.

Specifically, if you look like you're pregnant and you're not (or can't be) -- let's just make it simple folks; if you stand in the shower, look straight down, and you see gut instead of genitals.....

You can ignore this (again), if you want.  But time's pretty-much up.

Trump's "tax cuts" are going to accelerate the deficit spending trend that Obama (and Bush before him) initiated.  The Fed's machinations over the last 100+ years are utterly irrelevant because all of them are in fact driven by Congress.  The Fed is a creature that operates at the behest of Congress, as a creation of Congress, and every single dollar it has "printed" it has "printed" because Congress spent money it did not have.

In other words, Congress ran a deficit.

The Fed has its share of detractors and I'm among them.  But those who refuse to place responsibility where it belongs are fraud-running jackasses, and while I'm happy to try to educate folks those who refuse to learn and cling to that which is trivially disproved mathematically wind up on my "ignore" list.

The bottom line: It is Congress, which is elected by you, that has destroyed the purchasing power of the currency and enabled all of the fraud and force in our economy today.

Every.
Single.
Bit.

Health care costs have exploded because of fraud, extortion and just plain intentional bloat.  Hiring ratios of 10-30:1 for administrators to doctors and nurses are just a start.  You pay for every one of those people but they never provide a single second of care to a single person.  This crap standing alone is strangling the economy and it's strangling the Federal Government.

Then you add onto it monopolist protections system-wide.  You can't get a price before a procedure and you can't hold someone to a price.  How much you pay has nothing to do with the complexity and everything to do with how you pay (or whether you can.)  The health system is the only form of "business" in which a hospital or physician bills you for fixing their screw-ups -- and if those screw-ups kill or permanently maim you they're "entitled" to bill you for that too.

The entire health system in this country, top to bottom, is a racketeering enterprise on grand scale, it currently consumes one fifth of all money spent in the United States, stealing at least 80% of that, and in many cases produces negative or zero net value while doing so.

The Federal Government knows this.  It also knows that if the Attorney General, Congress or the President puts a stop to it there's a monstrous recession -- in fact, from an economic definition perspective an immediate Depression will result.  It wouldn't last long and we'd be far better off when it was over but the next 12 to 18 months would be nasty and whoever is in office at the time will get blamed -- and lose their jobs.

As a result none of the people in office -- not federal, state or local -- will do it unless the public rises and demands it, making clear that there are three -- and only three -- alternatives: Do it, leave peacefully and be replaced by someone who will, or rest in pieces.

Ultimately the people of any nation have the right to issue such a demand -- but only in concert, as a body politic.  1776 was such a demand and when the answer "nuts!" came back from the British monarchy the colonists reply was "ok, since you insist in pieces it shall be."

No lone person has the right to do it (we call that terrorism) but the people as a body politic always do, provided the alternatives are laid on the table.  That's the very premise on which a representative republic is based.

Well, you won't do it.  Not collectively, or in sufficient numbers.

You'd rather get screwed on-balance.

As a result your only alternative is to not need the medical scam.

Sadly if you do need it and the tipping point comes -- which may be as early as this year, you're going to be severely hosed -- or worse, dead.

There's much more, of course -- autos, "higher" education and other areas of grift and scam (FANG-cough-cough!) but this one you can actually take some level of personal control over and thus to a meaningful degree evade.

I've written many pages on this topic, and unfortunately there are some who have enough bad luck, or have just let things go too long, for whom there is no way out at this point.  There's nothing that can be done if you're in that position.  But if you're not, and most people who are today dependent on the medical scam can make a difference, then you're running out of time -- fast.

Start reading, and start doing.

I will lay out the indictment here in brief form.  It's aimed at the American public at large because this is what is tolerated on a daily basis and what it costs us.  I'll leave this open for comment for a couple of days, after which I'm locking the topic.

Let's see if anyone can make the case for what they intend to do both personally and collectively about any of this -- and I'll keep this one short.  Trust me, there may be more where this came from if I decide it's worth my while.  After all it's not like I don't have 11,000 articles written over the last decade to draw from..... oh wait....

Let's start with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.  There is now incontrovertible evidence that several years before the Uranium One deal was signed off on by both Hillary and Obama, a deal that sold 20% of American uranium assets to Russia (and we all know what uranium is used for, right?), the FBI had an ongoing investigation into the Russian principals of that transaction for bribery and extortion.  There are only two possibilities, of course: Either the FBI (all of it) intentionally concealed the existence of the investigation from the administration or the administration knew damn well that the deal was coerced and went along with it despite having full knowledge of same.

Do I particularly care which it is?  No, because the FBI is the government.

What I do very much care about is that the Russian Government actively practiced extortion and bribery within our borders for years and exactly zero was done about it to this very day more than a decade later.  The FBI knew about it and did exactly nothing.  Not one person has been indicted, the acts themselves were covered up despite being known to the government and the "deal" that appears to have been procured through felony unlawful acts has not been forcibly unwound.  In other words the Russians have been allowed to keep what they stole; this is equally egregious to the FBI watching a mobster rob a bank, knowing who it is that robbed the bank and then not only refusing to prosecute them letting them keep the money.

I remind you that if the government merely suspects you have $10,001 in your briefcase due to selling a substance they don't like they will steal it from you at gunpoint even if they are unable to prove that you did anything illegal.  At the same time the millions of dollars that these people funneled to the Clinton Foundation remains there, it has not been seized and the deal has not been unwound, nor has one single indictment been leveled.

I further remind you that before you scream "Democrats!" that Donald J Trump has been President now for nearly 10 months and he and his attorney general Jeff Sessions have done exactly nothing about any of this.  Trump and his administration along with both sides of the aisle in Congress are therefore explicitly confirming on a literal daily basis that this is "acceptable behavior" and not worthy of criminal punishment.  Let me remind you that Trump, during the campaign, repeatedly cheered on the premise "Lock Her Up."  Well?  Whether you're a "MAGA" supporter, an "establishment" Republican or a Democrat of any stripe go **** yourself with a rusty chainsaw because you are all explicitly supporting an administration that has intentionally refused to act on the "buying" of 20% of our nation's nuclear energy and weapons raw material by Russia through acts of bribery and extortion.

Considering that having our energy infrastructure strangled by a hostile government is arguably one of the greatest threats that we could face this activity is especially outrageous.  However, I can understand why you might stick you head in the sand on this; after all, the lights haven't so much as flickered in your house, right?

Ok, so maybe I'll let you slide on that one.

I won't let you slide on the $15,000 a year that is stolen from every family in this nation on an annual basis by the medical scam in the United States.

The means by which it happens are so varied and outrageous that they are almost beyond belief.  I have heard many people scoff at me when I point out that we overpay by five times in this country for medical care.  That is, if we stopped the scams I assert that your cost for medical care (and health insurance) would come down by 80% in a day.  I'm utterly confident in this number, however, and I would like to give you just a few reasons why.

One, for instance, is the fact that virtually every eye-drop medication is intentionally designed to waste half of the drug prescribed.  If that crap was to be stopped and the companies were prevented from simply doubling the price per-vial by competition the cost of said drops on a per-month basis would instantly fall by half.  Remember, this is without any other competitive pressures of any sort being brought to bear -- it would simply result from putting a stop to the intentional practice by the drug companies of designing a dispensing device that intentionally and unavoidably causes you to waste half the medication by having it run down your face.

Never mind the fact that such a practice also likely causes some percentage of users to suffer side effects that are harmful when the medicine goes in places it isn't intended (like your sinuses and throat), which you then must pay more money to counteract or treat.

The second I've written on several times: Drugs (such as antivenoms for scorpion stings and snakebites) that are sold in Mexico OVER THE COUNTER for $100 or so, yet in the United States a few dozen miles north the exact same drug, made in the exact same factory by the exact same company is available only from a hospital under prescription and costs tens of thousands of dollars.  This crap is true for almost every drug with varying differences by nation, with the United States paying the most in essentially every case.  While the really crazy ripoff percentages come for drugs that are relatively rarely used (like snakebite antivenom) they often amount to 500% or more for "mainstream" pharmaceuticals, whether they be for Hepatitis-C, diabetes (insulin), high blood pressure or hundreds of other conditions including various forms of cancer. The only reason this situation persists is that it is a federal offense for you to cross the Mexican (or any other) border, fill a suitcase with said drug for cash and then bring it back to the US and sell it for whatever you can fetch.

The third is "CON" laws in many states that require before you open or close a medical facility you receive a "Certificate Of Need."  The board evaluating your application?  It's made up of the owners of the existing medical facilities in the area.  This, along with other aspects of price fixing, is largely why you can literally fly to Narita, Japan, have an MRI done (for cash) and then fly home while spending less than the local imaging center charges you for the exact same scan and reading of same.  You are literally bilked out of anywhere from 5-10 times the cost in that first-world, first-class nation for the exact same thing.

Then there's The Surgery Center of Oklahoma, which I've written on several times.  They're a cash-based surgery center that will give you a price, soup-to-nuts, for a procedure just like the corner grocer does.  Hospitals and doctors for years have said you "can't" do that with medicine; this organization has proved that's a lie.  They not only do it their business is thriving.  Because they have quoted you a price and that's what you pay they also have every incentive not to screw up and give you an infection while there.  A traditional hospital gets to and does bill you to treat an infection they gave you while you were in surgery.  That incentive for them to not screw up is reflected in outcomes: The Surgery Center posts their infection rate and on a typical year it's twenty-five times lower than the national average.

Most of this is "hidden" from you through employer-provided insurance, but the scam continues nonetheless. The average Florida family pays over $18,700 a year for "health insurance" irrespective of who writes the check and if it was a more-appropriate $4,000 you'd get the nearly $15,000 a year difference in your salary.

Cut the crap, America.  Not only does the medical scam in this country, all of which I remind you is illegal and has been for 100 years, which medical and insurance firms twice tried to claim exemptions from when sued, the cases went to the US Supreme Court and the medical and insurance firms lost both times, cost every single family in this nation $15,000 each and every year, or enough to make the mortgage payment on a middle class house it also results, if you wind up in the hospital, a risk of infection twenty five times greater than what a market system brings you.

If the robbery isn't enough is a twenty-five times greater risk of a bankruptcy due to infection caused by the hospital, or, in the extreme cases, your death enough to get you off your ass?  May I remind you that roughly 200,000 people die in this country every single year due to preventable medical screwups, and that's only counting the ones that aren't successfully hidden.  In fact this is the third leading cause of death in the United States!

That isn't enough to get you off your ass?  Go **** yourself with a rusty chainsaw.

Think there are no answers to this rampant scam and the death it brings?  The hell there aren't.  There are remedies available at both state and federal levels.  I remind you that virtually every state (if not every) has an anti-trust law roughly parallel to the US Federal law (15 USC Chap 1.)  This means state prosecutors can bring these cases too, and state legislatures and executives could demand they do so.  Either the States or the Federal Government could start right here with a one-sentence law and follow it up here.

County and local governments could condition the issuance of business licenses (without which no medical facility or drug store can operate at all) on the posting of prices and non-discriminatory billing.  They could do that right now via city or county ordnance and if they did it would resolve their budget problems as well as fixing health care for you, their constituent.  Instead they******you on property taxes and engage in financial shenanigans that ultimately will bankrupt both them and you.

They don't fix the problem instead of screwing you because you refuse to make this issue, which robs you of a ****ing house every single year, the political point that they must face and resolve or be ejected from office and shunned to the point that they can't even walking the family dog without facing birds flown in their face by everyone they meet, with your treatment of such bastards extending from the lowliest cop on the beat to the Governor of every single state of the Union -- and every government employee in between.

Let me know when you stop consenting to being financially raped, along with accepting a twenty-five times greater risk than necessary of being severely injured or killed as a direct result of virtually every hospital in the United States having every reason to not give a damn if they give you an infection because they profit from it when it happens.

You don't want to do it?  You don't care that you're robbed out of a house every year?

Fine.

I don't want to hear your complaints when the economy collapses as this scam exceeds the ability to extract any more money from the people, or at least as bad or maybe worse forced rationing comes into play, you need medical care of some kind and you're simply told "Nope", leaving you die in agony after bankrupting you.

There's a meme flying around the last few days that has managed to "snag" a few people I know on Zuckerpig's site related to vaccinations.

I've seen two variations of it.  One "features" a kid (but not an infant) who cannot be vaccinated because she's immunocompromised and a "attenuated" live ******* could kill her.  The other features an infant too young to have been vaccinated against the evil (in this case, whooping cough.)

Both are attempts to shame people who are "anti-vaxxers", and take a shot at the autism claims.

Let's start there.

There is no evidence that *******s in fact cause autism. Zero.  There are a lot of claims that said occurs, but there's no scientific evidence for it.

The "meme" is basically a my kid got screwed because of you evil bastards who didn't vaccinate your kids.

The problem is that the meme is false.

Let's deconstruct it because down this road lies a dangerous and false set of beliefs.

First, there's the explicit claim that "if your kid was vaccinated mine would not have gotten sick."

This is false unless every single kid is vaccinated with *******s that are 100% effective.

But most of these memes include a kid who can't be vaccinated either due to age (too young) or immune compromised.  Therefore if exposed they are likely to get ill.

Second, no ******* is 100% effective.

Behind the dangerous falsity of these memes is a blatantly false claim about how "herd immunity" works.  It does not prevent disease from being transmitted, in short.

What herd immunity does is attempt to prevent transmission from turning into epidemic.

That is, let's say you have measles.  It doesn't matter why you have measles.  Maybe you didn't get vaccinated whether for "conscious objection" reasons or not (e.g. you're a refugee) or maybe the ******* failed (and yes, they do!)  It doesn't matter why you have measles, all that matters is that you do have measles.

Measles happens to be extremely contagious.  That is, if you have it and come close enough to someone to transmit it, and they are not immune (either from vaccination or previous exposure) the odds are extremely high they will get it.  Different diseases have different efficiency of transmission; some like chicken pox and measles are very easy to transmit, others like HPV or HIV require direct intimate (bodily fluid) exchange.

Herd immunity has exactly nothing to do with the singular event of someone who has a disease coming into contact with the unprotected person.  If that happens and the vector is completed then the odds of infectious transmission are extremely high.

What herd immunity does is make the percentage of people who are immune high enough that the probability of the infected person contacting a susceptible person and transmitting the disease falls below the infectious percentage (that is, what percent of those who come into contact will get it.)  So long as that number is <1.0 for anyone who has the disease then you have what is called "herd immunity" because the infection cannot reproduce at a rate sufficient to nail everyone who is susceptible.

You'd think that herd immunity would make a disease eradicated because with an insufficient transmission rate it would quite-quickly wind up disappearing.  You'd be right about that except for one problem: For it to work you must reach that level for all populations that can serve as both reservoirs and impacted entities (which may include species other than humans.)  If you do that the disease literally disappears.

So why do Whooping Cough, Chicken Pox and Measles still exist?

Because there are populations where that level of immunity was never achieved.

Who are those people?

Do you really want the bad news?

They're largely illegal immigrants and refugees -- that is, people from third-world ****holes where there is no vaccination and thus those diseases are still common.

So if you actually want to reduce the risk of your little kid getting Whooping Cough then you want to kick out every single illegal immigrant and every refugee, and prevent any from coming into the country until they are both vaccinated and quarantined for a sufficient time to know their immunity is good.

The fact is that we have "herd immunity" for most common diseases for which *******s are available today in the Untied States and other western nations, despite the few "objectors."  The exceptions are nearly all traceable to not those scared of autism but rather to refugees and illegal immigrants, both of whom come in without any documentation as to their immunization status and in many cases with not only no immunizations but latent disease as well!

That's where the problem is but what you have to understand is that the random risk of someone, even if we kick all those people out, getting past the screening or simply having a vaccination failure -- and it does happen -- still exists.

In short if your kid is either incapable of taking the *******s or is too young to have done so herd immunity does not protect them from the singular infection that could hose them.  If someone who has failed immunity to said disease for whatever reason, including not of their own fault, is shedding the virus (or whatever) and manages to meet the transmission requirements to your kid they're going to get sick -- period.

*******s are also not without risk.  The HPV *******, for example, has a record of occasionally causing Guillian-Barre syndrome.  Some cases of this "side effect" are fatal and many cases that are not fatal produce permanent partial paralysis.  Since HPV is a sexually-transmitted disease and cannot be transmitted by casual contact to claim that everyone "must" have said ******* is an outrage -- that is a matter of personal choice where one must weigh the risk (very small, but real) of a severe adverse event against the risk of transmission of the condition through voluntary or violent sexual encounter.

Frankly, I don't think anyone has the right to make that decision for someone else and thus it's a decision that should be made by adults at the time of turning 18.  That's my view and others may differ; one of the pleasures (and pains) of being a parent is that you get to choose in that regard for your kids -- but not for mine.

There are, however, some states that have tried to mandate it for anyone in schools and from my perspective what that amounts to is an admission that the school cannot manage to keep kids from ****ing one another in the buildings and on the school grounds, which says a lot about their level of competence in running said school!

So let's not conflate "*******s" into one bucket, because they're not.  There are those that I believe you can make a very clean argument for -- DTaP, MMR and Polio being the poster children for that group.  Why?  It has nothing to do with "herd immunity" but everything to do with the fact that if you contract these conditions they are dangerous and can kill or permanently and severely harm you and the *******s, while not 100% effective, are extremely good at providing lifetime protection against the disease in question.  Here the balance of risks and benefits are clearly on the side of choosing the vaccination.  If you draw the "short straw" and get harmed by the ******* that's awful but you are far more-likely to get injured or killed by the disease itself and remember -- herd immunity does not prevent you from getting sick -- it only prevents your illness from turning into an epidemic!

Then there are those *******s that have a less compelling argument: Varicella (Chicken Pox) is in that category.  That's a live (attenuated) *******.  Further, in up to a third of the people vaccinated it fails to provide complete protection -- that is, if exposed you will get the chicken pox and can transmit it anyway, although it will likely be a milder case!  Whether that one's worth the risk (and there are some risks, but not terribly severe ones) is an open question.  Chicken Pox almost never produces any permanent harm in someone who gets it, which makes the balance much harder to accurately estimate -- but since the ******* itself is an attenuated virus the risk of taking the ******* is rather low too.  Note that one of the "memes" circulating relates specifically to Chicken Pox exposure to an immunocompromised person and the ******* has a 30% failure rate.  So much for the claim in the meme that the transmission was "preventable" -- the truth is that it probably was not as the odds are much higher that the person who gave the kid the pox was vaccinated but had a partial failure than someone who wasn't vaccinated at all.  (Note that the zoester *******, given to older adults for shingles, is even harder to evaluate -- shingles sucks but since the ******* for it too is attenuated the risk of it giving you shingles if you have an un-diagnosed immune problem is quite real and, if it happens, you're hosed.)

Finally, in the next (and last) bucket we have the HPV ******* (and others that are similar and undoubtedly will be developed in the future.)  That ******* only protects against some strains of HPV, not all and thus might lead someone to engage in riskier behavior than they would otherwise believing they are immune from that condition.  Since virtually all cases of HPV transmission are a result of voluntary intimate contact anything that causes people to believe they're immune from a potential bad outcome but is less than 100% effective might actually increase, rather than decrease, the risk of disease.  In addition there is a small but non-zero risk of a severe or even deadly side effect.

In short you cannot take all of these different immunizations as a "package"; they each have individual risks and benefits and must be evaluated on that basis.

Finally, the bottom line when it comes to vaccination is that, to nearly a 100% degree, they are all about personal benefit in the form of immunity (partial or complete) conferred in the person vaccinated.  The side effect of "herd immunity", if achieved, prevents transmission of the disease in question from turning into an epidemic but does not, in any case, prevent one infected person from infecting a second susceptible person.