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So, I'm sitting on my reading chair this morning, getting my daily dose of Uncle John and I come across a story about Tommy Douglas. He's a Canadian feller who arguably was the primary mover behind universal healthcare up there. It's an interesting story but that's not what I feel like talking about today. Today I want to get into one sentence out of the article:

Douglas came to believe that medical care was a basic human right and should be available to everyone.

That sentence annoys me. I dislike inaccurate or imprecise speech on important topics and that most certainly qualifies as such, so let's clarify first.

A right is something you refuse to surrender the ability to do (generally to be able to live around other people without too much strife). They have no need of justification. They need only your refusal to surrender them for whatever reason. Drawing a line in the sand on an unpopular one may get you disinvited from the Christmas party or thrown in prison but that is another matter entirely. Rights aren't very special.

A constitutional right is a right of yours that your nation has decided as a whole that the government shall not interfere with. Constitutional rights are a just an explicitly protected subset of rights in general. We in the US find that the ability to speak your mind is a good one to protect while the ability to shoot someone in the face without a good reason is not, for example. Protected rights are special.

An entitlement is something that you do not innately possess the ability to do, it must be given to you. Entitlements do require justification because they by definition are not something you have a right to. Generally they infringe upon the rights of others, though there are a small minority of situations where this is not the case. For this reason, societies must (hopefully carefully) debate among themselves what entitlements they want to create.

A Human Right is a bullshit term as it includes examples of all of the above and gets redefined all the fucking time.

There, important terms clearly defined.

Now that that's out of the way, it's extremely clear that free as-in-speech access to already existing medical care is most certainly a right but free as-in-beer access to medical care is an entitlement.

So, lets have a real discussion as to why my paying for someone I've never met's healthcare should be an entitlement. Without muddying the waters with imprecise, outright wrong, or just plain bullshit terminology.

Free as-in-beer healthcare infringes upon the rights of medical practitioners to charge what they feel is fair for their services. It also infringes upon the rights of everyone who is forced (which literally means threatened with the use of force in this context) to pay for services they neither requested nor received the benefits of. What justifications do you offer for the infringement of your fellow citizens' rights in such a manner?

I'm open to rational arguments here but bullshit rhetoric and tugs at my heartstrings are getting routed straight to /dev/null.

Tomorrow morning I'm going to apply for a state-funded In-Home Caregiver.

This because I just now put a pot in the microwave rather than on the stove. I've been doing stuff like that quite a lot lately. Happily I clued in before I actually nuked it.

If my only problem would be burning down my home and those of my two neighbors I wouldn't need actually home care, just meal delivery. But that's part of that same program.

I'm not yet doing this every day but tomorrow I'll do sing scales before work.

The first time I sang scales I measured my range. I don't recall what it was but I will say I was quite dismayed at how narrow it was.

Today I only sang from C below middle C up to middle C and back. Once I'm confident that I can do so really well, and to project effectively I'll add just one note above and below.

It's not raining so I'll sing around eleven but only one or two sets. I have a shrink appointment in Vancouver at three and just want enough to buy a coffee t drink in her waiting room.

Holiday Classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Accused of Being 'Seriously Problematic'

Twitter video

How braindead do you have to be to make that video? Braindead enough to work at Huffington Post's clickbait division. Wait, is there a division?

What we really need is Christianity to be completely crushed and to only allow the two truuuu pagan Xmas specials to be played on TV: The Year Without a Santa Claus and The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. 🎄💪🎅👍

Spiritual successor to Gaaark's journal.

My essay "An NSFW Review of Portland's Oregon Theater" is #6 at Google for:

          oregon theater

... immediately below oregon dot theater... and #8 for:

          "oregon theater"

In other news, I'm working at home tonight, but didn't get started until just a half hour ago, at which point I decided so as to point out that Portland's Oregon Theater is a great place to get blown. Ten clams most night, twenty or twenty five on "Party" nights, when the management springs for vast quantities of pizza and free snacks, and more women turn up.

Be sure to get your Hepatitis vaccination and bring an economy-sized box of those little rubber raincoats:

            "Suit up before you play." -- Ann Landers, "Dear Abby"

I actually woke up at four in the afternoon - as I write this it's just before 2:00 AM - but took quite a long time to come round. I was reluctant to drink coffee as it's been upsetting my stomach lately, but eventually concluded I'd waste the whole night if I didn't.

The coffee of course made me nauseous. Again I was reluctant to take an antacid - ranitidine, generic RanTab - as I suspect - _suspect_ now - that antacids make my suspected - _suspected_ - Pernicious Anemia far worse.

But I just couldn't deal with the nausea anymore so I took a ranitidine. It was not long before my stomach felt just dandy, followed by dizziness, followed by even worse nausea.

Just the one acid would _not_ have caused the dizziness or the nausea, its effect would be far slower than that.

I lay in bed in the dark for a while, eventually to feel just fine and so got back up to prepare for going to work. The nausea and dizziness set back in, so again I lay in bed, intending to work at home so as to not risk getting nauseous on the bus to and fro. Fell asleep but just for an hour or so.

I wanted some coffee when I got back up but would not at first risk getting sick. A couple days ago I was advised to eat something before drinking coffee, and in fact I usually drink it on an empty stomach so I made a Jesus Big pancake. Just one, the size of my whole frying pan you can do that if you add eggs to your Krusteaz.

("Jesus Big" is Newfoundland English for "Ginormous".)

And in fact just to experiment in much the same way as the medical hero who trapped a mosquito against his arm under a cup, then died of Yellow Fever so as to overcome the skepticism of the medical community, I had a whole cup of by now cold coffee. It's been about an hour and I'm still not sick.

I figure I would be nauseous by now, so I screwed around with my logfile analysis, only discover that some completely empty directories at warp life are getting lots of hits, so I redirected them to soggy wizards' homepage.

Tell Me About Your Day.

I'm having a good day. Not every day is good for me but today is.

Radio Paradise is playing some live Grateful Dead.

America’s New Religions

For many, especially the young, discovering a new meaning in the midst of the fallen world is thrilling. And social-justice ideology does everything a religion should. It offers an account of the whole: that human life and society and any kind of truth must be seen entirely as a function of social power structures, in which various groups have spent all of human existence oppressing other groups. And it provides a set of practices to resist and reverse this interlocking web of oppression — from regulating the workplace and policing the classroom to checking your own sin and even seeking to control language itself. I think of non-PC gaffes as the equivalent of old swear words. Like the puritans who were agape when someone said “goddamn,” the new faithful are scandalized when someone says something “problematic.” Another commonality of the zealot then and now: humorlessness.

And so the young adherents of the Great Awokening exhibit the zeal of the Great Awakening. Like early modern Christians, they punish heresy by banishing sinners from society or coercing them to public demonstrations of shame, and provide an avenue for redemption in the form of a thorough public confession of sin. “Social justice” theory requires the admission of white privilege in ways that are strikingly like the admission of original sin. A Christian is born again; an activist gets woke. To the belief in human progress unfolding through history — itself a remnant of Christian eschatology — it adds the Leninist twist of a cadre of heroes who jump-start the revolution.

The same cultish dynamic can be seen on the right. There, many profess nominal Christianity and yet demonstrate every day that they have left it far behind. Some exist in a world without meaning altogether, and that fate is never pretty. I saw this most vividly when examining the opioid epidemic. People who have lost religion and are coasting along on materialism find they have few interior resources to keep going when crisis hits. They have no place of refuge, no spiritual safe space from which to gain perspective, no God to turn to. Many have responded to the collapse of meaning in dark times by simply and logically numbing themselves to death, extinguishing existential pain through ever-stronger painkillers that ultimately kill the pain of life itself.

Yes, many Evangelicals are among the holiest and most quietly devoted people out there. Some have bravely resisted the cult. But their leaders have turned Christianity into a political and social identity, not a lived faith, and much of their flock — a staggering 81 percent voted for Trump — has signed on. They have tribalized a religion explicitly built by Jesus as anti-tribal. They have turned to idols — including their blasphemous belief in America as God’s chosen country. They have embraced wealth and nationalism as core goods, two ideas utterly anathema to Christ. They are indifferent to the destruction of the creation they say they believe God made. And because their faith is unmoored but their religious impulse is strong, they seek a replacement for religion. This is why they could suddenly rally to a cult called Trump. He may be the least Christian person in America, but his persona met the religious need their own faiths had ceased to provide. The terrible truth of the last three years is that the fresh appeal of a leader-cult has overwhelmed the fading truths of Christianity.

This is why they are so hard to reach or to persuade and why nothing that Trump does or could do changes their minds. You cannot argue logically with a religion — which is why you cannot really argue with social-justice activists either. And what’s interesting is how support for Trump is greater among those who do not regularly attend church than among those who do.

(She's a Molecular Biologist.) To Wit:

Quite likely I have Pernicious Anemia.

I quite _desperately_ hope I really do.

While it was once a fearsome and cruel way to die - one of my Great-Grandfathers died of it - while it cannot be cured the first effective treatment was the "Liver Therapy", eating vast quantities of raw liver :-0, for which Liver Therapy's three developers shared the 1934 Medicine Nobel.

I expect because I'd rather die in a fearsome cruel way that even just a tiny bit of liver - even cooked - the beneficial part of the liver was ultimately determined to be Vitamin B12. This lead to a great many lives being spared by regular B12 injections for the rest of one's life.

That I regard P.A. as likely is the result of my having experienced increasingly frequent and increasingly severe Neurological symptoms starting in May 2010 with Brain Seizures and Dissociative Fugues - more commonly known as "Fugue States" - then later Broca's - or Expressive - Aphasia in both my writing and my speech.

A week ago Saturday I was _completely_ convinced I was dying when quite suddenly and completely out of nowhere, an incredibly loud ringing in my ears - Tinnitus - was followed with dizziness so severe that even small head movements brought on intense nausea, followed shortly after by numbness in both my lips, then the soles of both my feet.

I rode in style with Lights And Sirens but found myself strangely unable to enjoy the experience.

I went to the ER _every_ time, sometimes on the bus, sometimes in an ambulance. Four CT Scans, an MRI and a whole bunch of physical stroke exams were _always_ perfectly normal, resulting in every medical or mental health professional I've ever discussed this with being completely stymied.

After that Lights And Sirens ride, I _finally_ got referred to A Neurologist With A Clue. She asked me a whole bunch of questions, I pointed out a few things that she hadn't asked about, then she gave me a more-thorough physical stroke exam.

That I'd experienced numbness in my feet led her to order a blood test for Methylmalonic Acid. If B12 is low in the blood, Methylmalonic Acid will be high. She also ordered an Electroencephalogram but they're so booked up I won't get my EEG until April.

Just this morning I met online someone with Pernicious Anemia, who mentioned that _some_ but not all P.A. patients are able to take 3,000 mcg of Methylcobalamin daily, rather than get the injections.

I'm busted flat just now - no clients for several _months_ - so I asked my brother-in-law to order some Methylcobalamin tablets for me. There are lots of different brands of these, as Vegans _must_ take B12 supplements or they'll get the very same Neurological problems as I've got.

(Vitamin pills and fortified foods always have _Cyanocobalamin_ labeled as B12. This because Methylcobalamin is hard to synthesize; two percent of the Cyano form is converted to the Methyl by the liver.)

Tuesday a week ago I was completely convinced I was _already_ far too disabled to work as a coder. Riding home on the bus I was completely overcome with grief and struggling desperately to avoid screaming in agony.

The following morning I initiated my application for Social Security Disability Insurance. I've _never_ regarded my Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder as a disability. To willingly apply for SSDI is quite a cruel blow to me.

If you have _any_ blood relative who had Pernicious Anemia, I suggested you get your own Methylmalonic Acid test. There are some other types of Vitamin B12 Anemia; in my specific case, I'm pretty sure that it was my taking antacids for nausea that triggered each of my Neurological attacks.

This because the reaction between a stomach enzyme called Intrinsic Factor and something else that ultimately results in absorption of B12 requires an acid stomach.

In addition, older folks like you and I are far more likely to get P.A. because of the degradation of our stomach linings as we age.

On the morning of Halloween, I underwent a Radical Nephrectomy of my right kidney due to a 5.6 cm Renal Cell Carcinoma. Happily, the pathologist's report on his biopsy of my now-external kidney said it had "Negative Margins Of Excision", which means that there were no cancerous cells in the normal tissue surrounding my tumor.

That I was one month later in the ER three times in just one week, all with unexplainable Neurological symptoms is I am quite certain the result of my having eaten Calcium Carbonate Antacid Tablets just like they were M&M candy every day since my surgery.

Forty days later I'm _still_ getting nauseous every single day. Just now I grew concerned about this when I learned that one's risk for Stomach Cancer is _significantly_ increased by having Pernicious Anemia. If this persists for more than the next few days, I'll schedule a visit to my Primary Care Physician so that either she can examine my stomach herself, or she could refer me to a gastroenterologist.

Some EMT suggested my brain disorders could be due to a Psychosomatic Illness. I at first agreed but upon further reflection realized that's _not_ how Psychosomatic illnesses work: they have real bacteria, real viruses and real carcinomas, but the ultimate cause is the human mind. The link between our minds and these very real diseases is as yet quite poorly understood.

Once I do have my Neurologist's final diagnosis, I'm going to dig up the names of every EMT who ever transported me, every medical professional who's ever treated me as well as every Radiologist who's ever reported on my brain scans to explain what My Sparky Brain ultimately turned out to have.

Vitamin B12 Anemias are actually quite common. That leads me to regard all those ER docs and nurses to have been profoundly clueless.

It was that my dizziness came back today that led me to ask Stanley to order that Methycobalamin. I'm confident enough that I really do have PA that I really don't want to wait for my Neurologist to order any treatment, whatever that treatment might ultimately turn out of be.

Hopefully,

Mike

Meet the RIP Bullet: The Deadliest Ammo on Planet Earth?

Found when searching for "planet nine".

It would NOT help to consume B12-rich foods. I've been doing just that for months.

This afternoon at just my first consultation with what I regard as an uncommonly astute Neurologist, she ordered a blood test for a Vitamin B12 metabolite. I'll have to ask again what its name was, then write it down.

To more-concisely state my own HYPOTHETICAL addition to my exceedingly astute Neurologist's HYPOTHESIS. That is, I am not _yet_ cured of Broca's Aphasia, Short-Term Memory Loss, Long-Term Memory Loss, Brain Seizures and Dissociative Fugues:

I am genetically predisposed to Pernicious Anemia, a once-fatal genetic inability to metabolize Vitamin B12. It was ultimately cured by daily Vitamin B12 Injections. The original cure to Pernicious Anemia was to eat vast quantities of raw liver every single day! :-0

If I _do_ have Pernicious Anemia, it hasn't killed me because only my Great-Grandfather had it - but he _died_ of it. His DNA's contribution to my genome would be no more than one-eighth, because I had eight grandparents. But _chronic_ B12 deficiency is _quite_ certain to lead to bizarre, unexplainable brain disorders. Just eating such B12-rich foods as beef or yogurt is insufficient.

We know that chronic B12 Deficiency 707a11ee FUX0R5 the brain because from time to time, a Vegan doesn't clue in to that B12 is _only_ found in animal products, and doesn't know to eat Nutritional Yeast.

It's widely - and yes I Am Absolutely Serious - that fungus makes B12, but it does not. Rather, Nutritional Yeast is nutritious in other ways, and _quite_ tasty so it's common for people whose feet don't reach all the way down to the ground to season their food with it.

If your a Vegan, you don't eat _fortified_ Nutritional Yeast and you don't take B12 supplements then your entire brain will go totally on the fritz; it could even kill you.

If I understand correctly, while natural B12 is Methylcobalamin, it works just fine to take Cyanocobalamin supplements, which in my understanding can be economically synthesized whereas industrial production of Methylcobalamin cannot. But that's OK because it's the Cobalamin group that's the actual nutrient as employed by the body after being absorbed by the intestine.

Vitamin B12 Deficiency Anemia - in addition to Pernicious there are some other types - can cause "numbness in the hands and feet". I got a Code 3 ride in an ambulance Saturday evening: Lights And Sirens, but I'm afraid I didn't get to enjoy the ride. Among some other bizarre symptoms, I had numbness in my lips and the soles of my feet.

ALL the ER docs and EMTs are by now completely convinced that this is purely psychiatric. I made plain that I regarded its being due to My Sparky Brain as eminently reasonable, but pointed out that "Just knowing that won't make it go away".

They are all convinced that It's All In My Head because _all_ my symptoms are perfectly symmetric between the right and left sides of my body; Dr. Hamburg gave me a far more extensive neurological exam today, but _every_ component of that exam was intended to detect neural asymmetries. It Found None.

BUT!

Systemic brain disease in the case of B12 deficiency is actually a _blood_ disorder. Again my previous understanding was incomplete, in that I've read repeatedly that B12 is "required to make red blood cells". While strictly speaking true, B12 is required to make _every_ kind of human bodily cell.

That it's so crucial to Red Blood Cells is due to their average lifetime of forty days. That means our Red Blood Cells consume B12 far out of proportion to all our other cells.

Cobalamin is a key part of the process that transcribes DNA into Amino Acid Chains.

It happens that I'm quite certain that I have - or perhaps "had" by now - an l-Tryptophan deficiency. I'll explain this in more detail late tomorrow night, but my self-diagnosis I'm quite certain is correct due to my diet having been exceedingly poor since my divorce with Bonita.

Simply Put: cooking for one makes me miserable, I far prefer to each cold chili directly from the can with a spoon.

I've been working around my I Hate Cooking blockage by carefully and methodically selecting then eating vast quantities Of Truly Fat-Ass Lazy Yet Nutritionally Balanced Foods.

In the specific case, that's Chickpeas and Sesame Seeds - Hummus - Soy Beans - Tofu - and Sardines.

I've had a problem with my sardines so far, the ones I've got were cured with salt; I cannot tolerate eating a sardine all by itself. Just now I found it minimally acceptable to eat sardines on bread, but tomorrow I'll chop some up then stir them into Spaghetti Sauces.

This Time For Sure:

Nighty-Night! Don't Let The Code Bugs Byte. ZZZzzz...

Chihuahuas aren't really dogs, of course. Dogs are pretty smart in general, and chihuahuas are just plain stupid.

Anyway, after reading that chihuahuas are good for people with asthma, I decided to get one for the wife, many years ago. The creatures aren't very durable, and the wife wore that one out. But, the presence of the chihuahua really does seem to help with her asthma. The always present inhaler has pretty much disappeared from her life. There's one laying around, but she almost never needs it, and when she does need it, she has to search for it.

But, back the the stupid creatures - I usually address the chihuahuas as "Stupid". "You want out, Stupid?" A normal dog will spring into springy mode immediately, bouncing up and down in front of the door, waiting for you to catch up to him. The chihuahua, instead, looks at you blankly, mulling the concept of "outside" for awhile. Sometime later, sometimes even on the same day, the creature decides, "Yes, outside!" then starts jumping up and down.

So, the wife heard me telling her pet, one more time, that he was dumb as a rock. "Why do you say he's stupid?" "Because he's dumber than a rock, of course." "Well, you're going to give the dog a complex!" "He already has a complexion - kinda black with a red tint, which is why you named him Cocoa." "Well, stop calling him stupid!"

Hmmmm. I snatched the animal up, walked through the door, attached his tie-out lead, and put him down. Then, I walked around the yard picking up several rocks. I didn't even pick and choose for smart looking rocks, I did my best to just pick them at random. I carried the rocks inside, and arranged them on the floor. The wife is looking at me weird, but she often does that, I paid her no mind. After awhile, I brought the animal back inside, and carried him to where the rocks sat in a semicircle. The wife followed me into the living room, and watched while I administered an intelligence test to the animal and the minerals.

Sample question found on Youtube for intelligence tests for rocks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pH2P3qQYUFc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw1BmB5ALHo

The chihuahua scored behind six rocks, and ahead of four other rocks, "proving" that a chihuahua is truly "dumb as a box of rocks".

Be warned - testing the IQ's of rocks can be time consuming, and tedious. You must be prepared to wait for the rocks, and you must be able to "interpret" the rock's answers. Which is only fair, because you also have to "interpret" the chihuahua's answers. If you've ever been employed as an historical site "interpreter", you'll be well prepared for this endeavor.

I wish there were a real dog that were purported to be "good for asthma". Why not a border collie? Or, and Irish setter? *sigh*