Dear Big Pharma:
Your industry is truly amazing: your accomplishments include:
Now I am beginning to understand all these bailouts and other maneuvers the government is doing and that are going to save all our asses. I don't know who wrote this or when; it was emailed to me from Colombia. Read on...
It is August. In a small town on the South Coast of France, holiday season is in full swing, but it is raining so there is not too much business happening. Everyone is heavily in debt.
Luckily, a rich Russian tourist arrives in the foyer of the small local hotel. He asks for a room and puts a €100 note on the reception counter, takes a key and goes to inspect the room located up the stairs on the third floor.
The hotel owner takes the banknote in a hurry and rushes to his meat supplier to whom he owes €100. The butcher takes the money and races to his supplier to pay his debt. The wholesaler rushes to the farmer to pay €100 for pigs he purchased some time ago.
The farmer triumphantly gives the €100 note to a local prostitute who gave him her services on credit. The prostitute goes quickly to the hotel, as she was owing the hotel for her hourly room use to entertain clients.
At that moment, the rich Russian is coming down to reception and informs the hotel owner that the proposed room is unsatisfactory and takes his €100 back and departs.
There was no profit or income. But everyone no longer has any debt and the small townspeople look optimistically towards their future.
A recent wine drinking session inspired me to write a series ot tweets about resveratrol, one of the current hot items being exploited by spam marketers to relieve you of your hard-earned money. Not a day goes by when I don't receive one or more spam emails – usually beginning with "Live to be 150 ..." – pitching the benefits of the magic resveratrol.
These messages often point out the fact that it would take drinking I-don't-know-how-many-thousand bottles of wine daily to get the amount of resveratrol your body needs and which you can get from one pill or capsule for x cents a day - not to mention the bonuses of $7,777 value that you will get if you buy x package for $29.94+9/10. (Also, there are doctors/scientists working on developing drugs from resveratrol; naturally, Big Pharma must be very interested. Look at this 60 Minutes video). Well, my friends, I think it's all bullshit!
Don't get me wrong: I believe certain supplements are very beneficial.
I have been trying to spread the word about GMOs on and off for several months. For a while, I paid for a Google AdWords campaign for grass-fed meats from US Wellness, based on these meats being guaranteed to not come from cloned animals. I decided to offer these meats for sale on the Timos site only after I ascertained these meats would never come from cloned animals - I even got a statement in writing from US Wellness guaranteeing this to be true. And, in fact, some people did buy meats from those ads.
My big objection to this whole GMO issue is the fact that it's very hard to know the origin of foods or whether they contain GMOs or not. The FDA and other government agencies allow this non-disclosure, in fact, even encourage false labeling (think of "raw" almonds in California). THAT HAS TO CHANGE. When you buy a piece of meat in a supermarket, you have no idea if that meat comes from a cloned animal or not. We cannot count on our government to protect us.
The thing I would like the most is to see disclosure from producers/sellers being compulsory.
FDA Promotes Unsafe Milk Due to Industry Pressure
I browse news about the FDA and Big Pharma a couple of times a week; I don't recall a single one of those browsing sessions not yielding one or more items about the crimes that these two - the FDA and Big Pharma - continue to commit. Here is one such item that particularly pissed me off, published less that a week ago – February 8, 2009. You can read the whole item here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-smith/fda-promotes-unsafe-milk_b_184886.html.
The title of this post, same as the title of the news item, says it all. I have been writing – on this blog and in my timos web site – about the scariest, most powerful drug cartel in the world, the USA Drug Cartel, not only the biggest and richest one but the best protected one, thanks to the FDA gang. This alliance between the FDA and Big Pharma makes the Italian Mafia look like a bunch of choir boys and girls.
... if you tried to submit comments the past few days. The comments feature was broken for a while, but I fixed it as soon as I found out.
What's a bray?
I was surprised a few days ago when I was randomly browsing a series of restaurant menus and seeing, in more than one of them, meat items named "Niman Ranch [some-kind-of meat]".
Apparently, some chefs don't even get out of the kitchen to read the paper or otherwise learn the news. Bill Niman is no longer part of the company, which has now changed the feeding protocols to allow the use of antimicrobials and is moving the cattle to commercial feedlots for finishing – the Niman Ranch feedlot has been sold. Here is a recent article.
Too bad. Those menus now might as well read "Safeway flatiron" or "McDonalds rib eye".
Sad.
A while ago, I "speed-read" a friend's copy of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, but got busy and did not look at it again until three days ago. Now, I am reading it word by word and I'm 2/3 of the way done.
This book should be required reading in all the schools. Do you eat? If so, you MUST read it if you haven't already.
For those following the heart bypass surgery story, I posted Update 2 a few days ago: http://www.timos.com/timos/timoCorner/timoArticle.cfm?itemID=117. This is of interest if you yourself have, or someone you know has, had to deal with heart problems.
I have joined the Health Ranger's Health Revolution Petition, a call for genuine health freedom in America, including an end to free speech censorship.
You should add your name too. This will be delivered to President Obama and to every member lf the House and the Senate. We need 100,000 signatures, so far we have about 15,000.
Please do it now – it's very easy, takes about 1 minute. Just go here: http://www.HealthRevolutionPetition.org/index.html?ID=18951.
