It is baffling that the American public has been so effectively stampeded into near-total dependence on a shoddy, crude and ineffective system of health care, paying an extremely high price for drug and surgical interventions.

Did you know that our health care system is the third leading cause of death in the United States?  In a year 2000 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Barbara Starfield, M.D., wrote that physician error, medication error, and adverse events from drugs or surgery cause 225,400 deaths per year, making this the third leading cause of death, after heart disease and cancer.  Why would anyone let themselves be put at the mercy of a hospital, when most chronic illnesses are preventable?  (Answer: Because they don’t know any better.) Continue reading →

Obesity is America’s number one health problem. It commonly leads to diabetes, Type 2, heart disease, kidney disease, and sometimes cancer.

It alone is growing so fast that it will bankrupt our health care system by 2017 or sooner.

If obesity is driving up health care costs, what can we do about it? Ask doctors to charge less? Force the drug companies provide free diabetes medicines and diet pills to obese people? Ask the insurance companies to provide their services for free? Continue reading →

I have been re-reading James Howard Kunstler’s “The Long Emergency” recently and I recommend you read it, if you haven’t already.  Kunstler is a big thinker and, unfortunately for his career, is not on board with the happy-face mood of our country.  His is not the message America wants to hear at this moment, but if you want to see around the next turn of fate to protect yourself and your assets, you need to get familiar with what he has to say.

For a prophet of doom, Kunstler is a lot of fun to read — a big improvement over the Old Testament prophets.  I think you could summarize his attitude to his writing with the phrase, “You’ve got to laugh to keep from crying.”  And he will make you laugh!

He writes somewhat like Hunter S. Thompson, but describes the real world with humorous insight rather than his personal hallucinations. Continue reading →

The reason that European nations have better health is not because they have “free” access to doctors occasionally.  It is because–for the most part–they don’t eat the crazy American fast food diet.  Europeans eat real food.  They often walk rather than drive to places they need to go, because they live in walkable cities–not in a suburb linked to their place of work by an hourlong drive to go ten or twenty miles.

Health care is our American obsession because we refuse to do the things that are conducive to health(eat more vegetables and fruit, less meat and dairy products, more whole grain products, less liquor and beer, fewer sweets and soft drinks, cut out tobacco entirely, and get regular daily exercise), so we need a backup plan to pay for the expensive medical repairs we’re sure to need. Continue reading →

Why are U.S. media always referring to Iran’s “nuclear weapons program” when the question arises of what Israel has the right to do about it?  From the reports of the UN inspectors, Iran has only a fledgling nuclear enrichment program directed toward creating nuclear power for its national use.  Nothing more.

But the mass media usually refer to Iran’s program as aimed at creating a nuclear weapon.  So it was reported on a Yahoo! News blurb the other day. Continue reading →

Americans in the past fifty years have come to believe in a “something for nothing” economy. As little children we were raised to the crooning of Jiminy Cricket singing, “When you wish upon a star your dreams come true.” While it is true that America has been the land of great possibilities, there are limits that we have failed to acknowledge. FULL ARTICLE

Those who think for themselves and have even a rudimentary knowledge of our recent history will remember that the “brilliant” Ivy League grads now running the Treasury Department were recently employed by Goldman-Sachs and other Wall Street firms whose crazy speculations and sophistry created the economic problems we face.  Putting the foxes in charge of guarding the henhouse has never seemed a wise policy, has it?  So why take your cues from the clueless and self-dealing grifters who gravitate to federal moneypots?   FULL ARTICLE

We will soon have an administration staffed by Neo-Libs instead of Neo-Cons.  Is there a difference?  They all seem  to like making war far from our shores (as long as they and their kin aren’t fighting it).  Even the old NeoCons are praising the new administration, which is not a good omen of Change. FULL ARTICLE