Seems to make sense

Three rules to remember:

1) When you give a government a power, it will never voluntarily relinquish it 

2) If you give a government a power, it will ultimately abuse that power to the maximum extent possible 

3) Nobody ever complied their way out of totalitarianism

~ Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Deep heart, yes...

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart

 ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Yep

If you’re bored, go on a walk.

If you’re anxious, go on a walk.

If you lack ideas, go on a walk.

If you need space, go on a walk

If you need exercise, go on a walk

If you need sunlight, go on a walk.

Walking is a medicine 

Now you tell me...

Don’t chase, don’t beg, don’t stress, don’t be desperate. 

When you relax, it will come to you.

~ Stoic Wisdon 

Word...

Reputation is what men and women think of us; character is what God and angels know of us.

~ Thomas Paine

A child’s poem

They try to tell us stories of hatred, but I know a better one: 

Once, I dreamed I carried love & temperance 

alone through the sand toward your direction. 

But I never made it, did I?

Long, but worth it and enlightening

Excellent speech by Dr. Marty Makary: 

 

I'm trained in gastrointestinal surgery. My group at Johns Hopkins does more pancreatic cancer surgery than any hospital in the United States. But at no point in the last 20 years has anyone stopped to ask, why has pancreatic cancer doubled over those 20 years? Who's working on that? Who's looking into it? 

 

We are so busy in our health care system billing and coding and paying each other and every stakeholder has their gigantic lobby in Washington D.C. and everybody's making a lot of money except for one stakeholder, the American citizen. They are financing this giant expense of health care system through their paycheck deduction for health insurance and the Medicare exercise tax as we go down this path of billing and coding and medicating. 

 

And can we be real for a second? We have poisoned our food supply, engineered highly addictive chemicals that we put into our food. We spray it with pesticides that kill pests. What do you think they do to our gut lining and our microbiome? And then they come in sick. The GI tract is reacting. It's not an acute inflammatory storm. It's a low grade chronic inflammation. And it makes people feel sick and that inflammation permeates and drives so many of our chronic diseases that we didn't see half a century ago. 

Who's working on it? Who's looking into this? Who's talking about it? Our health care system is playing whack-a-mole on the back end and we are not talking about the root causes of our chronic disease epidemic. We can't see the forest from the trees sometimes. We're so busy in these short visits, billing and coding. We've done a terrible thing to doctors. We've told them put your head down, focus on billing and coding. We're gonna measure you by your throughput. And good job, you did a nice job. We have all these numbers to show for it. 

Well, the country is getting sicker. We cannot keep going down this path. We have the most over-medicated, sickest population in the world. And no one is talking about the root causes. The Pima Indians are the perfect example. Here is a group where the obesity diabetes rate was less than 1%. The land in New Mexico and Arizona had its rivers supplied, diverted by ranchers and settlers, and the land and the soil was destroyed. The government, recognizing this tremendous injustice, started to send free government food, but it wasn't organic kale and fruit and vegetables, it was processed and junk food. Instantly, the Pima Indians developed an obesity, diabetes rate of 90 percent. And what did the United States government do? What did our health care system do? The NIH dispatches its researchers to draw the blood of the Pima Indians to look for a gene that predisposes them to obesity and diabetes. What are our leaders doing? 

The H in NIH is supposed to stand for health. Where are they spending their money on food as medicine and looking at the estrogen binding properties of pesticides that are driving our fertility rates down? They're funding research in Wuhan, China, and they're funding research on a new food compass to replace the misinformation they put out with the food pyramid, telling us lucky charms is healthier than steak. Somebody has got to speak up. Maybe we need to talk about school lunch programs not just putting every kid on obesity drugs like Ozempic. 

Maybe we need to talk about treating diabetes with cooking classes, not just throwing insulin at everybody. Maybe we need to talk about environmental exposures that cause cancer, not just the chemo to treat it. We've gotta talk about food as medicine and research these areas. 20% of our nation's kids are on medication. And as you heard, half are obese or overweight. Are they more disobedient than children in Japan or have we poisoned the food supply? Is this a chronic disease epidemic that has been a direct result of what adults have done to children? 

 

We like to blame people for their diseases, but maybe we need to look inward. We see all these shiny objects thrown at us. Politicians talk about, oh, we've got a new healthcare proposal. Medicare can now negotiate the prices of ten generic drugs. Don't be fooled. These are things in the periphery. It's not to say they don't have merits, but the proposed program savings in year one by their own description is six billion dollars. In a four point five trillion dollar economy that's expanding at eight percent per year in the commercial sector, that's a two hundred billion dollar expansion, we save six billion dollars. 

The best way to lower drug costs in the United States are to stop taking drugs we don't need."

Think first of your parents

Your life is a precious gift from your parents. 

 

Think about them and the rest of your family. You don't have to suffer alone. 

~ sign at the entrance of Japan's 'suicide forest', Aokigahara forest, located at the foot of Mount Fuji

Follow the money

The more that is spent, the worse it gets, because the money doesn’t go to the homeless, it goes to the hundreds of “charities” that then treat the homeless as sources of revenue. 

The more homeless there are, the more money these organizations get, so their incentive is to increase, not decrease, homelessness!

Whatever you incentivize will happen.

~ Elon Musk

It's called the Cobra Effect.

In colonial India, under British rule, the city of Delhi had a problem with cobras. To control the cobra population, the government offered a bounty for every dead cobra.

Huge numbers of dead cobra were handed in but the cobra problem got worse, not better. Why? Because people realized they could profit from this bounty by breeding cobras, not to kill them in the wild, but to kill them for the bounty. This turned into a small-scale cobra farming operation.

When the government became aware of this practice, they discontinued the bounty program. Without the incentive, the cobra breeders released their now-worthless snakes into the wild. As a result, the cobra population in Delhi ended up increasing rather than decreasing, exacerbated by the government's own policy.

Marketing 101

You can love me.  You can hate me.  

I don't care.

Buy a ticket.

~ Muhammed Ali

I can relate

I Get Along Without You Very Well

I get along without you very well, 

Of course I do, 

Except when soft rains fall 

And drip from leaves, 

then I recall The thrill of being sheltered in your arms. 

Of course, I do, 

But I get along without you very well. 

I've forgotten you just like I should, 

Of course I have, 

Except to hear your name, 

Or someone's laugh that is the same, 

But I've forgotten you just like I should. 

What a guy, what a fool am I, 

To think my breaking heart could kid the moon. 

What's in store? Should I phone once more? 

No, it's best that I stick to my tune. 

I get along without you very well, 

Of course I do, 

Except perhaps in Spring, 

But I should never think of Spring, 

For that would surely break my heart in two.

Attitude

Anybody can play.  

The note is only 20 percent.  

The attitude of the motherfucker who plays it is 80 percent.

 ~ Miles Davis

Meditate on this

An athlete won’t judge you

for working out.

A millionaire won’t judge you

for starting a business.

A musician won’t judge you

for trying to sing a song.

It’s alway people going nowhere

who have something to say.

~ Unknown

Learned truth

Once you carry your own

water, you will learn the

value of every drop

~ Unknown

Yes

One day, in retrospect 

the years of struggle will 

strike you as the most beautiful.

~ Albert Camus

Can confirm...

Well, there is no greater education than travel.

~ Rebecca, on Ted Lasso

For so many years...

For so many years, I thought you felt nothing. 

I’ll take your anger over indifference any day.

~ Rebecca’s mom, to Rebecca, on Ted Lasso

One way or the other

Aut viam inveniam aut faciam

I shall either find a way, or make one. 

~ Latin proverb, most commonly attributed to Hannibal in response to his generals who had declared it impossible to cross the Alps with elephants.

You mean there’s hope?

Regrets are a waste of time. 

Regrets cause depression. They're a big waste of time.

• You didn't invest early? 
• You didn't treat that person right? 
• You let her get away?
• You didn't practice the right habits? 

It's okay as long as you take positive action today, there's hope.

~ interwebs wisdom

Maybe…eventually…if you say so…not yet...

    tempus omnia vulnera sanat

Time heals everything

Vision for the future

 Gene Rodenberry’s (the creator of Star Trek) vision of the 24th century:

• there will be no sexism
• there will be no racism
• there will be no hunger 
• there will be no greed
• and all the children will know how to read

Lovely, indeed

You’re a good cook, Maggie.

You look lovely in the candlelight.

~ Rock Torrey (John Wayne) in In Harm’s Way