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Hmmm. Interesting, and they wonder why we don’t trust them…

REVW0406So this cold is annoying enough that I was thinking about getting some over the counter cold remedy. Then I thought about it and seemed to recall seeing something about the FDA doing a study on cold medications and discovering problems with them.

Off to the internet, Boy Wonder! CBS Reports this

Ahh, there it is:

Advisers to the Food and Drug Administration voted unanimously on Tuesday against the effectiveness of the ingredient found in popular versions of Sudafed, Allegra, Dayquil, and other medications sold on pharmacy shelves.

“Modern studies, when well-conducted, are not showing any improvement in congestion with phenylephrine,” said Dr. Mark Dykewicz, an allergy specialist at the Saint Louis University School of Medicine.

So here’s the deal, these medications use phenylephrine. They used to use pseudoephedrine. Pseudoephedrine worked but was taken out of the normal OTC medications because it was possible to convert it into Meth.

Phenylephrine was grandfathered into use without much in the way of testing for efficacy by the FDA. It should be noted that there are tons of drugs, and products that are grandfathered like this all the time. Some of these grandfathered products are later found to be, at best ineffective, and at worse harmful.

The cold medications appear to be simply useless if they’re not using Pseudoephedrine. But it does beg the question, how many other medically approved products are nothing more than Placebos or as it was said in the past “Snake Oil”. Placebos have their place in clinical testing, because they provide a baseline to determine if a drug under test is doing anything.

In the past, purveyors of  Snake Oil may have been tarred and feathered and run out of town, if they weren’t hung for hurting and swindling people. The FDA was created to provide a measure of safety to the public because of the prevalence of snake oil and quacks.

Yet here we are, the FDA having been complicit in cold remedies that don’t work, a.k.a. FRAUD! The cost of a box of these cold remedies is /was  $10 to $15 and were sold to millions of people. The fraud generated billions for drug manufacturers.

I’d like to have my money back! I looks like I’m due a refund from 1980 forward??? I’d have to find when Pseudoephedrine was swapped out.

On the plus side, we all got over our colds pretty much naturally! This also might explain the apparent conflicting data between the folks who swear by natural remedies versus Doctors recommending OTC remedies. It’s possible that the natural remedies actually performed better because these remedies survived and were handed down based on centuries of accumulated observational data.

The OTC cold remedies on the other hand were not thoroughly tested and no better than sugar pills.

I wonder about the collateral damage during COVID-19. Most people would have initially thought COVID was a cold, they would have gone to their ineffective OTC cold/flu medication. Their symptoms would have gotten worse until they were hospitalized. Then, they would have been given more ineffective treatments because the treatments that actually worked, (as shown time and again in other countries,) were forbidden. By… guess who, The FDA!

I guess my point is why should I or anyone trust the CDC or the FDA at this point? They’re not protecting us from medical quackery, or big Pharma selling snake oil.

Why should I trust a doctor, or a hospital?

Bottom line is this.

If a Doctor or a medical person can not explain something to you, or can’t produce test information showing the efficacy of a treatment, drug, or vaccine.

DON’T FUCKING TAKE IT!

Perhaps I’m being overly harsh. However as we keep finding more out about COVID, and the vaccines, and how it really looks like the medical establishment is covering up something truly evil. We shouldn’t give the medical profession the blind trust that we gave them in the past.

It’s really strange that a tattoo / body piercing shop might be a safer place than a hospital, laboratory,  or doctors office, when it comes to having needles stuck in your skin.

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Oh boy! I was a bad human.

Thank goodness Jesse doesn’t have a phone… or an opposable thumb.

I’ve had a touch of a cold, developing for the pasts few days or so. Nothing serious but it’s tiresome. I’ve been feeling drained but trying to keep regular hours.

Last night Jesse & I went to bed as usual, but I was feeling much more tired than usual.

Perhaps my tiredness has something to do with Southern California Edison choosing the end of November to do routine maintenance which required the power to be of from 9 am to 4 pm.

Uh, dumb asses it’s Winter. The daily high temps was 44°F yesterday. Heat is an issue as is the fact that this time of year the sun drops behind the mountain between 3 and 4 pm. So we’re in a deep twilight and the temperature starts falling rapidly, well before official sundown. But it didn’t matter, because Southern  California Edison didn’t get the power back on until 5:30 pm or so. But that time my house temp had dropped below 48° F.

After getting a $400 to $500 bill for natural gas last year I’ve been keeping the house in the low 60s hoping to avoid an obscene natural gas bill again, because of Biden non-economics and shitty planning on the part of the natural gas company.

Sitting on the couch shivering in 3 blankets due to the slight fever and the cold. I thought about calling Southern California Edison and asking them if this was part of some evil plan,

Last year the blizzard coupled with complete lack of planning, caused us to be ignored, essentially out of food, fuel, and snowed in, for several weeks. Older people died. The cost of natural gas was so excessive that lots of people, myself included let their homes be very cold. Older People also died due to that. Now as we enter winter Edison decides to fiddle around with “Upgrades” that should probably have been done before it got cold.

Shivering on my couch. I really wondered if this was all an elaborate plan to force the white people out of our homes up here so that Biden’s newest crop of illegals or BLM’s richer activists could be given the white people’s homes up in the mountains.  Perhaps it was the fever, but damn I feel like it’s death by a thousand cuts lately.

In fact Edison, if they had a brain between them, would do better doing upgrades in the mountains in late summer when it’s blazing hot down in the valleys. Their crews would be more comfortable and they could do other upgrade work in the valleys as fall rolled off the valleys. Their crews would be more comfortable and possibly safer.

The thing is, the workers don’t appear to be actual Edison employees. They’re contractors. So calling Edison and raising hell doesn’t matter in the least. The contractor handles the scheduling of their employees. This gives Edison the ability to wash their hands of any situations that may arise.

I didn’t make the call. I had enough presence of mind to realize I was cold, hungry, angry, and not feeling well.

Anyhow, Jesse and I went to bed about 10pm. I’d decided “fuck it” and set the temp to 68°F when the power came back on. It sets back to 64° F at 11:00, so I wasn’t going to be running up the bill too much.

I was asleep instantly. Something woke me about 11:30, then Jesse woke me around 12:30 and wanted out. He seemed like he was trying to toss his cookies. I knew he’d be a while, so I sat on the couch, then wrapped up in a blanket…

My alarm sounding in the bedroom at 6am woke me. Poor Jesse was sitting “pretty” looking at me through the sliding door. The temp was 34°F and had probably been colder. He’d been outside all night because I fell into a deep sleep.

I feel like a total shit! Because I left the poor guy outside all night and this cold is draining me.

Jesse and I are on the bed now. He’s sleeping under a blanket that I might designate as “his” in the near future. He seems to like this blanket more than any other in the house. If I’m using it, he’s typically got his paws and chin resting on it. Other blankets, he’s not interested in.

I’ve apparently been dozing off because I keep finding my computer is asleep though from my perspective I’m mid thought.

I might not get a lot done today.

I have to give Jesse his heart worm preventative today. That’s going to wait a while, he’s sound asleep and I’m going to let sleeping dogs lie.

The way I feel right now,  I might not get out of bed until noon or later. Jesse seems content with that idea.

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I gotta ask

PRI 86511250Will Susan Sarandon be fired from Rick and Morty?

She’s been dropped by her talent agency for her insensitive and possibly antisemitic remarks.

What she said is on record.

Justin Roiland.on the other hand was only accused of sexual misconduct. When it came to trial guess what? The charges were dropped.

BUT…

He was kicked off pretty much every show he was working on, before he ever walked into a court room. 

He no longer voices Rick and Morty and oh, btw just to ram it home. HE WAS FUCKING INNOCENT!

Susan Sarandon voices the asian psychologist Dr. Wong. WHAT???? OMG! Susan Sarandon is a white woman. How can a white woman possibly voice an Asian character? The Horror!

Originally it was just the double standard we had to worry about. Under double standard rules Justin Roiland looses everything instantly due to an accusation.

Cas Anvar apparently hasn’t worked since 2020 when allegations of sexual assault surfaced on Reddit and Twitter. There were supposedly over 30 women coming forward saying that Anvar did something to all of them. He was fired from all of his projects, I believe his agent dropped him and since that time he’s been off the radar. In his case, the production company he was working for launched an investigation. To date, there have been no charges filed, no results of the investigation have been published, and yet… Another male actor has been expunged from the record.

Jonny Depp was unemployed and unemployable due to Amber Heard’s accusations. To be clear Jonny Depp was THE VICTIM of Amber Heard’s emotional and physical abuse. Depp, No work. Heard, still working and has the gall to bitch about her role being minimized in the latest Aquaman movie. (Has that even come out? Was it another woke preachy blunder? Is that why I don’t know if it’s out or not?)

We don’t just have a double standard anymore. Now it appears the standards are gerrymandered to inflict harm on someone to virtue signal, to whatever crowd, or cause célèbre has the most attention of the people at the moment. At least mccarthyism followed a draconian and somewhat logical, albeit cruel pattern. This, whatever it is, appears to be pure anarchy.

Perhaps that was always the way it’s been. Maybe these old eyes see more clearly, or perhaps the “standard bearers,” in this sense are less adroit at surreptitiously applying the double, triple, or quadruple, standards.

Maybe it’s a bit of all of the above.

I’m still debating spending the money on Season 7 of Rick and Morty.  Susan Sarandon appears in at least one episode.. I don’t know if I’m supposed to show my “virtue” by purchasing this season or not purchasing this season. The characters of Rick and Morty previously voiced by Justin Roiland are now being voiced by two different actors. 

They’re doing a pretty good job of mimicking Roiland’s Rick and Morty. There’s something off in the delivery and cadence that’s not as crisp. Honestly, I’m annoyed at the production in general because of the way Justin Roiland was treated, that’s why I haven’t purchased the new season yet. 

Now with Susan Sarandon shooting her mouth off in support of Palestine, maybe I’ll just wait for the season to be discounted, or pass on it entirely.

I’m wondering if Season 7 will be the last of the show.

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We have WIND!

And a lot of it.

There’s a severe weather alert in effect for us. 70 MPH wind gusts are possible. Based on what I’ve been hearing they’re already happening. Technically the worst of it shouldn’t be here until later tonight. The advisories don’t expire until Tuesday.

Great!

Winds this strong can pick up all kinds of crap and throw it.

I’ve already been out this morning, moving things around to secure them. I’ve stacked chairs so that their combined weight should prevent them from blowing off the deck. I’ve tucked the picnic table chairs under the stairs  to keep them in place. Other outdoor / deck things I’ve moved into the basement. 

I’ve got an event to attend this evening so yippee! The freeway will no doubt be a lot of fun. Hopefully I can make it to the venue and back without incident or debris on the road.

I’m thinking the pup will have to be inside, in his crate while I’m gone. He’d probably be okay roaming the house but I’d prefer to come home to things as I left them rather than shredded fabrics or whatever. He’s not done that kind of thing in a very long time, but if he’s bored and I’m gone for hours, he might go down the “Bad Dog” road.

My original plan was to leave him outside. He likes this time of year and often spends the evening surveying the world from his deck until 9:30 PM or so. With the strong winds such as these, a balmy 49°F quickly becomes uncomfortable as heck. 

According to the navigation information I’m going to be spending an hour and a half on the road, there and back. I know approximately where the venue is, I don’t recall it taking that long to get there. But it is in LA County and well,,, I guess that alone explains a bunch of ills.

I haven’t been in LA County for years. Literally! I think the last time I crossed the LA Country line was in 2020. I crossed then, only because I was taking a drive toward Mountain High in the summer. I wanted to get to the peak where it’s possible on a clear day, to see all of the LA Basin and sometimes the ocean.

Actually crossing into the LA Basin is another matter. I think the last time I did that, was in 2018. Going into the LA Basin tonight should be interesting.

It’s strange to me that once LA was someplace that I enjoyed. I worked in the area and there was a lot to do and see. Over time, LA lost its sheen and I became reticent to go into the city, especially if I didn’t have to. In part I chalked it up to not wanting to make the drive, when I didn’t have to make it for work.

The other half used to say, “It’s not that bad…” he’d cajole me then we’d go do something together. I noticed however that in more recent years, even prior to COVID, we’d only do things in the daytime and would be out of LA by early evening.

I thought it was his work schedule, or the distance, or that we were getting older and “Growing Up”. I wonder now if it was all of those things and that we’d seen changes in the city that concerned us on a subconscious level.

During the COVID lockdowns and the “Summer of Love” we watched in horror the events unfolding in LA and in an odd way silently agreed neither of us needed to go to Los Angeles for anything.

So we didn’t, even after the lockdowns ended and things started to return to normal.

We weren’t afraid per se, we just didn’t see any need to expose ourselves to the insanity that LA had become.

It’s amazing how much has changed since I moved to California in 1978. 

Followup 11/20/2023:

Prayers answered about the wind. It died down about 30 minutes before I left home. Jesse got to stay outside where he could run around and not be cooped up “His Room,” meaning his crate.

The expected winds along the South facing foothills also didn’t materialize until well after 9PM. While I was at the venue I checked the conditions and noted that the High Wind Advisory and High Wind Warnings were not being shown on the weather app. Driving home there were a few gusty conditions but nothing like the 70-75MPH winds the warnings all mentioned. I got home about 11pm to find the pup curled comfortably on his outdoor bed sound asleep.

The garage door opening didn’t even rouse him. It was the lights throughout the house, as I was getting out of my suit that caught his attention. He gave me the obligatory sad puppy face (for guilt’s sake) and then spread himself crossways on the bed making sure that I understood for my transgression (of leaving him,) I would have to wrestle my way into the bed, or bribe him.

The dinner was very good. The music was lovely, I’ve always been a sucker for Viola da Gamba. Chatting with the folks at the table was fun and interesting. The talk about Samuel Johnson was also interesting. It had never occurred to me that there would be competition among lexicographers either contemporaries or those separated by time.

I’ve never opened a Johnson Dictionary, I don’t usually like Merriam Webster Dictionaries, (Although due to their ubiquity I seem to find myself using them often.) I’m more of a Funk & Wagnalls kind of guy, I have spent many happy hours wandering through the Oxford English Dictionary , and various other unabridged dictionaries.

I can say that the speaker last night gave me a new appreciation of the dictionary. Now if only more people used a dictionary and the words and meanings contained therein more frequently.

The point of a word is to convey meaning, if a word is disconnected from its commonly accepted definition then meaning is lost. If only one word in a sentence suffers this kind of misuse, the context of the sentence can still allow the reader to glean the meaning intended by the misused word. That ability rapidly degrades if several of the words in the sentence are also ambivalently defined.

There is no better example of this, than Kamala Harris’s famous “word salads”.

I walked away from this event having learned some new things, and heard a number of new words being used conversationally. (NO, Not new dirty words… Dang it!) Even If those new words were being spoken by an attorney.

It’s time for me to be off and continue with my chores around here.

Have a good day.

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WOW! Apple does it again! Not in a good way!

Apple one icons logo 100857611 largeThe other half and I decided to go with the Apple One subscription back when they first started it. 

Both of us were paying for Apple Music and individual iCloud Storage. We’d purchased Apple TVs for the living and bedrooms, but Apple’s original programming wasn’t anything we were interested in at the time. 

I knew that I was going to be interested in Foundation when Apple released the first season.

When we did the math, we found we were already spending nearly the initially high 29.95 monthly fee for Apple One individually, since we could share the Apple One subscription we went for it.

Honestly we were only interested in the Music and iCloud storage. There was a high probability that Apple TV+ would become interesting to me. Although to date I’ve only watched Foundation and Invasion. There are some Apple produced movies that looked somewhat interesting but not enough to captivate my attention so that I sat down and spent 2 hours of my life watching them. 

I was interested in the Apple Fitness guided training. I’ve used it a few times just to get a feel for it. At first it only worked on the Apple TV so training had to take place in the Living Room or the Bedroom. Honestly, that didn’t really work. Since then Apple has expanded the functionality to iPhone and iPad so it’s a little more portable.

It’s understood that Apple is a “Woke” company. Okay, that’s fine, I’ve always known Apple was full of blue haired people with so many piercings they can’t get through a TSA metal detector. However, recently I thought I’d get more familiar with Apple Fitness and take advantage of regular workout routines during the Winter. 

Opening the Fitness+ tab on the Apple TV I was a little put off.  It wasn’t that DEI was front and center, it was.

It was that so many of the workouts appeared to be geared for way younger folks than I am. After some digging I was able to find some things geared toward older adults. I’ll try a sampling to see if Apple Fitness+ is for me.

The other half and I also liked being able to share our purchases and subscriptions to many applications.

Neither of us cared about Apple Arcade, we were adults, while I looked at some of the games, none were interesting to me and so that part of the Apple One subscription was never used.

Apple News+ is okay but neither of us were really interested in much of the magazine offerings and I literally locked out of my news feed, the extremist news organizations both left and right. The other half eventually got tired of News+ and stopped using it altogether. I know this because he needed help turning off all the News+ notifications. He generally preferred BBC and NPR until the age of COVID. Then he, like me, found  very few news organizations that passed the reliability test.

At this point I could take or leave Apple News+

All of this has come to mind because of a few things.

1) The other half is dead.
2) Apple One increased its prices from 29.95 which was already expensive to 32.95 back in spring. At the time, I wasn’t capable of making too many decisions and chose to let that go.
3) Apple sent a notice of another rate increase either Friday Night or Saturday morning, (which is kind of chicken shit,  because NONE of the executives will be in over the weekend so the folks answering the phones get to take the brunt of the complaints,) The new rate is 37.95 a month.

At this new rate, we’re starting to approach old Cable TV rates. (Yes I know the Cable TV people charge far more obscene rates these days. That’s why I don’t have Cable.) As a point of interest, that’s also why I’m looking at new places to live where I can receive local TV with a damn antenna. I don’t even care if it’s only one channel as long as it’s in English. (Where I live now, I can receive one channel but it’s in Korean? or Chinese neither of which I speak.)

I know I’m not getting $37.95 value out of the Apple One subscription. I no longer have a family. (I do have a family but they don’t live with me and have their own stuff going on. It’s a big pain in the ass or was, to merge this stuff or unmerge it, if necessary.) The merge / unmerge task is so daunting, my other half is still listed in family sharing on the account. Although in truth, I’m not ready to remove him. It seems so final and I’m not ready for that yet.

The problem is that when I look at what I”m actually using regularly, and try to break out only those items, I come up with a cost that’s about the same as Apple One. Obviously this pricing structure is to keep Apple One subscriptions. 

As an older person, I don’t want to spend any more money than I have to. Well, I never wanted to spend more money than I had to. The problem for me now is that since I”m not employed, and living on retirement, I am far less loose with my money.

I’m sure there are a lot of people in the same boat I am. We’re either retired or nearing retirement and being forced out of our jobs explicitly, or surreptitiously. (Ask one of my friends about his experiences after 25 years or more with the same company. Ageism is real. Oh, and by the way, there’s nothing you can do to fight it! The law may be on your side, but lawyers… You’re lucky to get one of them to return your call or email! Maybe the next time I reach out to an attorney, I’ll say Trump did something to me. Perhaps then I’ll be worth calling back!)

In any case, all of us in this position are re-evaluating where our money goes and trimming the fat. If only we could trim the fat of taxation that gets us very little of use in our daily lives but might just drop a nuke in our backyards…

I digress.

Apple One has become too damn expensive! So effectively older folks or poor people are completely priced out of the Apple One service. DEI my ass!

I’ll evaluate Apple One for the next month or two. Maybe it’s time to cut this shit down to only what I find useful. If we can’t come to an arrangement that works for me, then maybe it’s time for me to stop paying for Apples services entirely.