Still alive after the month of Hell. (COVID and Shingles)

For the last month, I’ve been in bed watching TV.

I’m actually quite annoyed at how long this has all gone on.

It all started when I came down with COVID late last month and I went to the CVS when I got back into Illinois and used their clinic to get Molnupiravir to treat it.

After a couple days on that, I started feeling better. I completed my 5 day course and other than a post-viral cough, I felt fine.

A couple days went by and then more trouble. I had a blister in my mouth.

Then another one on the other side, both on my upper lip.

Before I knew it, I ended up getting a mouth full of sores and lips cracking and bleeding.

I called the doctor and she asked me to come by and she’d give me some Valtrex.

We had assumed that it was an HSV-1 outbreak because I’ve had it for about 20 years, and it never crops up except as a mild nuisance about once every 5 years, usually in the winter, and I go on some Valtrex for it and it clears back up quickly.

I ran out of Valtrex again, and my mouth continued getting worse. By last Saturday, my gums had turned completely white and I lost all of the feeling in them, and what I could feel stung, itched, and burned.

The doctor looked at the photos I sent and said I was having an oral outbreak of Shingles, and called in a lot more Valtrex, and here I am a week later, and day 13 of _this_ (day 7 of Valtrex) is the first day I’ve eaten and brushed my teeth without pain.

The correct color is coming back to my gums. My lips are healing. I can feel around my mouth again.

For over 10 days, I was popping pain medicine for my mouth every time my watch beeped. I had it set so that I wouldn’t take more than the maximum dosage, but as soon as each dose wore off, my teeth started to ache (all of them did) and the soreness came back, and I was laying here biting down on a cough drop on each side to help take the focus off of that until I could have more pain pills.

I think I went through more pain medicine between the two infections than I have in the past 30 years, for everything, put together.

I thought the COVID was bad until it let loose the Shingles, which was a fair deal more painful. Not that the COVID was pleasant. There were times when I was coughing so much crap out of my lungs that I kept a bucket next to the futon I’ve been sleeping on so that it could go directly into that.

I had to wear my nightguard even with all of the blankets in the house on top of me because I was chilling so badly that I was afraid I’d crack a tooth and need to go to the dentist when it was over.

The COVID was bad even with the vaccinations and the medicine. And as a bonus, it woke up some dormant infections that a healthy immune system normally suppresses without any help and caused a massive explosion of pain and suffering from that too.

There are still people out there joking about “going back to calling it the flu” or something and a media that runs stories like “Is it the flu, allergies, or COVID?” doesn’t help. You’ll probably know.

I wouldn’t wish this on most of the people I hate.

There were at least three points where if I was in a civilized country I might have gone to the ER out of an abundance of caution, but in the US, pretty much all they do is get you to sign financial responsibility forms, do a hell of a lot of nothing, and then send you home to wait for a bill that costs more than most of the cars I’ve owned.

If you can avoid COVID, avoid COVID. It’s probably not worth doing whatever it was that got you infected.

I get that people have to go to work, but we all need to continue to be vigilant and not take any extra stupid risks.

According to the CDC, I outlasted 97% of Americans as far as when COVID hit me the first time. I have no doubt that some day I’ll likely get it again, but I’d rather minimize it.

There are people out there getting it 3-4 times per year, and not even treating it with pills, and by that point it’s just absolutely devastated their body, and you can tell by talking to them that they’re not right anymore. Not good.

I keep rubber gloves in my car for the gas pump, hand sanitizer, we still wear face masks if we do go somewhere even if those around us don’t, and I don’t do any of my grocery shopping in the store anymore.

But it’s a given that my spouse has to work in person and the customers and coworkers are idiots who don’t understand that they are playing with fire. If I get it again, that’ll be why.

Now that I know how it’s likely to play out, I do plan to always have some COVID tests on hand so if I feel weird at all I can test and get to the medicine quickly, and I’m going to have a bottle of Valtrex ready to go so that if HSV or VZV outbreak follows, I can start on it as soon as the first blister appears.

I’ll at least have the advantage of it not being my first time down at the rodeo.

I do have no doubt in my mind that I may have been hospitalized or dead (or wishing I was dead) had I not gone on the two rounds of antiviral medication.

I’m luckier than most Americans in that I have decent enough insurance that I can see the doctor and get prescriptions filled without worrying too much, but like most Americans, we fear the hospital bill more than what sends us to the hospital. 😛

I finally got COVID-19 despite all of the vaccinations, and it’s pretty damned terrible.

I finally got COVID-19 despite all of the vaccinations, and it’s pretty damned terrible.

When my spouse tested positive for COVID-19 on the 14th of this month (November 2022), I immediately took him to get Paxlovid at the CVS Minute Clinic.

I continued testing myself for the next 14 days and since I felt okay on Friday, I went to see my mom and cousins in Indiana for Thanksgiving dinner over the weekend.

Big mistake.

On Saturday night (actually early AM Sunday) in the hotel room, just hours after dinner, I woke up with all of the COVID symptoms. Mom took me and my spouse back to the train station, and we spent all evening on trains trying to get back home. I was starting to wheeze and gag and cough, but I had an N95 mask on and sealed it properly, and kept my head down and away from everyone else.

A simple carry-on bag felt like lugging around a dead elephant, and my lungs were on fire and filling up with fluid that had a “gritty, sand-like” substance in it.

We got home last night. I had been taking Tylenol every 6 hours on the way back to try to keep moving. I took a COVID test, and it was positive.

Since I had expected it to be, I scheduled an appointment at the local CVS Minute Clinic for this afternoon while I was still in Indiana.

I went to bed, and again, the COVID symptoms came back with a vengeance. Worse than Saturday/Sunday.

Sore joints, burning in the lungs, burning in the nose, sharp stabbing pains all over my body. Headache, extreme chills (so bad that I had to put my dental guard in to avoid tooth damage from chattering, and this while I was under two comforters and a winter sleeping bag splayed out as a blanket, and had a space heater aimed right at me.

Sinus drainage, sneezing fits. Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria.

In such pain I was literally screaming, as best I could, before giving up and calling my spouse on the phone, dialing it with my nose, last night, to ask him…one….word….at…a….time to get me Tylenol, water, throat numbing spray, cough drops, and hot tea.

I had 3x monovalent Pfizer vaccine. For me it was 2/26/21, 3/21/21, 8/29/21, and then a bivalent on 10/6/22, and it was similar for my spouse.

Roy Schestowitz recalled that I drove across the state of Illinois and back 4x to get the vaccine sooner. I did everything I was “supposed” to do and still got it, and it’s kicking my ass.

I’m really not a complainer.

I’ve been sick before and just toughed it out, but this is next level shit. I’ve gone through more Tylenol in the last 3 days than I have in the 20 years prior to that. I usually skip it even when I have a headache because I don’t want to take the stuff. I don’t like taking a lot of pills. But now I’m even on experimental pills!

My spouse is now undergoing “Paxlovid rebound”, but the Nurse Practitioner wouldn’t prescribe me Paxlovid, because it interacts with three of my medications.

One of those I can’t stop taking and the interaction is potentially life threatening (came up on the screen in red).

Also, I have high blood pressure and am on medicine for it, and the Paxlovid can raise blood pressure.

So I’m not even angry at the NP for that. Handing me something that could put me in an even worse predicament than just COVID would be reckless and I’m glad she didn’t do it.

Most people, however, don’t even know what pills they are taking, or what they do. Mom’s a nurse, and she’s been one long enough to experience many people where if the doctor says swallow a pill, they swallow it, and if they say list your medicines, they shrug and go “uh nuh”.

So I know everything I’m taking and knew to talk to the NP about interactions. Many people are probably getting Paxlovid prescriptions when it risks damaging their body.

I ended up suggesting Molnupirovir (Lagevrio), which is currently under Emergency Use Authorization, in only the United States, iirc.

It’s not as effective, apparently, but it doesn’t have all of those drug interactions. It’s supposedly designed to screw up the virus by inserting the drug into the RNA, causing the virus to undergo catastrophic replication error.

Merck originally said it was 50% effective at keeping mild to moderate COVID from progressing to “hospital or death”, but later studies show it’s more like 30%. It still beats nothing. I took my first dose right away.

Pfizer brought a bunch of products to market that don’t seem to be leaving the people taking them much better off in the end. Bourla himself, I’ve heard, has had COVID twice?

To top it all off, I’ve never seen this many people in public, no masks on even, hacking and coughing. Usually not even bothering to cover it.

Mom’s starting to come down with symptoms, again. It couldn’t possibly past the incubation phase from when I was near her.

She said it’s probably that supervisor at work who wears her mask under her nose that stopped for 15 minutes to have a pointless conversation with her, and then tested positive.

Then I got another call today where she said COVID is in the building and bowling over everyone. Staff. Residents.

My cousin said it was in the facility she works in like that too.

But Biden said “Pandemic’s over, Jack!” and then got an ice cream cone.

And have you checked out these Black Friday deals?

Do your part for the ECONOMY.

Now, the mainstream media is bullshitting us and saying it’s “still out there” but “it’s very mild” and “deaths and cases are steadily going down”.

That has not been my experience in this matter.

Walmart COVID Leave Policy doesn’t pay employees if they get COVID.

Walmart COVID Leave Policy doesn’t pay employees if they get COVID.

I noticed that they stopped doing it in March, stating that the leave of absence policy had cost them $400 million in paid time off, so if it happens to you now, you’re just entirely on your own.

My spouse works at Walmart, so it looks like he just won’t get paid until he’s well enough to return to work. Lucky for us, we have some money in the bank and even if that wasn’t enough, I could keep things moving along until we get our tax check and cash out some savings bonds. This is very unusual for a household that has one person working at Walmart though. And so I can shrug and say “At least our income taxes won’t be so bad next year.”.

The CDC and the doctor (who prescribed Paxlovid) said take 5 days off and go back on Sunday.

The CDC bases the “5 days” advice on the 5 days where you’re “the most contagious”.

However, most Walmart workers can’t afford to take an unpaid week off work, so the two that came in and knew they had it were probably just trying to make money and hope that none of their coworkers, who now have it, would notice.

And they ended up causing a superspreader event that has several people at the local store out sick with COVID, plus however many of their family members come down with it.

The disruption to Walmart’s long term profitability of not giving any leave for vaccine side effects or COVID itself is going to be worse for the bottom line than just paying it out as a form of Short Term Disability, but we live in a society that’s being super cruel to service workers, and then the problem rebounds onto everyone.

One of the reasons I rushed down to Highland Park and got him on Paxlovid is that we have to get this under control as fast as possible. Every day he’s off work does cost us more.

The government didn’t make that easy. As I said in my last post, all of the test-and-treat centers are in rich cities. They don’t have a single one in the city we live in. Population 90,000.

No more masks or COVID tests for nursing home workers soon thanks to Bailout Biden. Bonus: Lots of Democratic Party nonsense lately.

No more masks or COVID tests for nursing home workers soon thanks to “Bailout Biden”.

I was on the phone with my mother in Indiana last night and learned something very troubling.

Mom informed me that very soon, they won’t have to test or wear masks at the nursing home she works at because “Bailout Biden”‘s Administration won’t be buying masks and COVID tests for people who have to work where the 90 and 100 year olds live.

Instead, he gave Intel $20 billion so they could fire all those thousands of people today instead of buying PPE for nurses.

On the vaccine front, whatever Fully Boosted even means anymore in Vaccine Choose Your Own Adventure, your guess is as good as mine I suppose.

So I think we need to give up on trying to suppress every mild case of illness and just try to keep the more extreme outcomes away, and figure out what the minimum number of doses that does this is. The fact that they’re seriously talking about “four boosters per year” is very alarming. So, we need to scrap this idea and go to something that’s actually tenable.

That’s what an ethical person would say to do.

Unfortunately, anti-Free Software troll Matthew J. Garrett had a bad episode last night on IRC to try to disrupt the room, and the topic changed to vaccines for a while to distract from chat about the criminal activities of one Bill Gates.

(Garrett may be working for Microsoft soon if his employer doesn’t go under before that. Their CEO is trying to get Aurora Innovation, Inc. acquired. It’s currently running out of money, losing three-fourths of a billion dollars a year on barely a tenth as much revenue, having never turned a profit.)

There’s no evidence that the vaccines shape the spread of COVID much.

That seems to have happened mainly from damned near everyone getting it at once last winter (look at the graphs) despite being vaxxed and boosted.

The reason we won’t see a surge on a graph again this winter won’t be because COVID’s not spreading, it’s because “Bailout Biden” scuttled the tests, even for nursing home workers, and all the money for the masks too.

It went to the Intel Bailout instead.

By that, I don’t mean literally went to Intel, but that Congress could have chosen to put the $20 billion into COVID supplies instead of a failing chip company making buggy processors for Windows PCs that nobody wants to buy. CHIPS Act was basically like the GM bailout, except I don’t even think Intel will last 10 more years.

The several thousand getting sacked are largely marketing and R&D. They’re keeping the managers to preside over a smaller cubicle farm with less stuff in the pipeline. This is insanity.

Meanwhile, rush hour gridlock is back in Chicago because instead of shutting down the offices with the expensive rent and $5,000 coffee machines, CEOs adopted a “quit working from home, get your shots, and come back, or don’t bother coming back” policy, and now the Democrat Party wants to turn all freeways in Chicago into Toll Roads.

It’s amazing that instead of putting a lid on COVID, saving money, and reducing traffic fatalities, it was decided instead to cause a surge of COVID with lots of expensive offices, by bringing rush hour back in the middle of a global energy crisis.

If “Bailout Biden” really wanted to help the climate and punish the Saudis for colluding with Vladimir Putin on oil production cuts, we’d go back to mandatory work from home and be done with a terrorist state dictating our policies in exchange for some oil.

I don’t really like the term “government corruption”, because when you try to point something out as being an example of government corruption, you make it sound like it’s the exception rather than the rule.

It would be more notable to try to point at any examples of government virtue, if any such examples were to exist.

“Today in a shocking and rare case of government incorruption….”, the news from a parallel universe could say, “Democrat Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago was caught funneling taxpayer funds intended to help police beat up the homeless and burn their belongings into public housing.

When pressed for a comment, Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois said ‘I’m shocked. Shocked and dismayed! And I vow, as your Governor who packed that ballot box fair and square, to get to the bottom of this incorruptibility and alarming level of accountability involving taxpayer funds. This is exactly the kind of behavior that my Administration has been working very hard to root out here in the Prairie State.'”

It really does amaze me how obtuse Matthew Garrett can be when he wants to be. He tried to imply I was racist when I said people in Chicago are woke and the only reason Lori Lightfoot is the Mayor is because she’s a black lesbian.

I was saying that the “qualifications” aren’t the best policies, it’s ticking off boxes.

I said I’m gay and I wouldn’t want anyone to vote for me if it was only because I was gay. That’s not important. You have to worry about how they’ll run your city or state and affect your life.

I’ve passed up voting for two gay people (Lori Lightfoot and Pete Buttigieg) because I didn’t feel they were qualified to do what they were running for.

I don’t feel Pete Buttigieg should even be the Transportation Secretary. He had his “let them eat brioche” moment the other day when he said you’ll never worry about gas prices if you buy an electric car.

So many things wrong with that, like the fact that those cars are an unreliable burden with sky high maintenance costs and that California’s electric grid is on the verge of collapse and they already can’t beg, borrow, or steal enough of someone else’s electricity to run what they have now.

I say this because these crooked assholes actually had the nerve to bomb my email box this morning begging me to go vote for their candidates. Saying that “internal polling” shows they may actually lose the Illinois Supreme Court.

I already voted, for the Republican, Mark C. Curran.

If the Democrats keep up what they’re doing, the 40% surge in violent crime since Pritzker was elected in 2018 will look like a walk in the park.

I support knocking over the FOID Act and letting the people lock and load and shoot back if the police aren’t going to do anything.

Imagine how pissed I was when I found out that John Idleberg, Sheriff of Lake County, Illinois, supports the bill the state House has passed that would turn up to 3 grams of fentanyl, crack, or heroin into a Class A Misdemeanor.

(Three grams of fentanyl is enough to kill 1,500 people of a drug overdose. We do not need this bill in the middle of a drug crisis! This would benefit dealers, not people who are using.)

So I voted Republican for Sheriff too.

Illinois is giving up on having a justice system under the Democrats, and our state economy is almost unbelievably bad even by the abysmal standards of what’s left of this country.

Pritzker is bragging that we took out more loans to pay off loans from the Federal Reserve, that we in turn took out to cover his COVID spending, which honestly mostly had nothing to do with COVID anyway.

He’s spent the last two years with dictatorial powers and it’s time for that to stop. I doubt he gets voted out, but I voted to try to box him in. You do what you can.

Healthcare companies are licking their chops about the “commercialization” of COVID vaccines and therapeutics.

Healthcare companies are licking their chops about the “commercialization” of COVID vaccines and therapeutics.

Right now, the US federal government pays about $16.50 per dose of COVID-19 vaccine under the Warp Speed deal with Moderna, according to CEO Stéphane Bancel.

However, he was “optimistic” that they’d get $60 per dose out of Medicare.

Medicare only tends to pay about 60-70% of what private insurance does, so that means your insurance will end up “negotiating” to get to $80 or more per dose.

The companies are really jonesing to fleece the American public.

They were not happy that the “vaccine passports” and mandates went away, because their thinking obviously was that they could come back every year and lock us all in our houses until we paid for the annual booster and some app on our phone turned green again.

The situation as it stands now is that the monoclonal antibody therapies have already gone that way. No more clinics where you can go get them free of charge, and the vaccines will be this way next year.

Since the monoclonal antibodies have to be administered in a clinic, not at a pharmacy, you know what that’s going to cost. Get ready to start seeing $60,000 bills again if you pass up the vaccine and have to go to the Emergency Room for the antibodies.

We took the bivalent booster.

According to CNN, the government may not even pay for the vaccine soon because it’s running out of money appropriated by Congress, and the Biden administration is prioritizing what it needs to fund.

The Pfizer one. Nobody charged us for it. I suppose that’ll be a similar experience if there’s another one next year because it will seem like my insurance pays for it, and then premiums go up again, because insurance hides the cost of everything.

I was on the fence about the bivalent booster.

But a few things are becoming clear.

One of those things is that the government in the US is pulling up the stakes and leaving everyone to fend for themselves if they do get severe COVID, so the other option is to get vaccinated if I want to be sure no $60,000 ER bills are coming my way over this.

I think that’s part of the point.

I haven’t heard what they’re planning to do about Paxlovid and Molnupirovir yet (what mom took after she got COVID). Those have been “free” up to now (government), but that’ll probably change soon too.

The government wants the economy open and it wants it open now.

For this reason, and the fact that President Biden and Governor Pritzker (of Illinois) along with others want re-elected, they have every reason to be sirens luring people to crash into the rocks with talk of the pandemic being “over”.

Richard Stallman noticed part of this and condemned Biden, whose evidence was that people had stopped acknowledging it.

We had a discussion in Techrights IRC the other day. The troll, Matthew Garrett, was in there acting as if the vaccines are perfect (hardly), and Roy and I were dismayed because the vaccines are not perfect. They’re just….part of what we do have to deal with this, and just bringing up that the only test for the latest boosters were done on mice and that there are too many gaps in the CDC’s data went completely unacknowledged by Garrett, who says he is a “biologist”.

A man who ignores facts in evidence or flaws in data to reach a preconceived conclusion is not a scientist. This is bordering on religion.

If they were really as effective as they were touted to be, why are so many cases (80,000+) still happening, despite testing being down over 90%?

Even with those caveats, it seems that Biden realizes that the one lever he still has to compel people to get their vaccinations is fear of the American healthcare system (massive bankruptcy-inducing medical bills), and the Republicans aren’t going to do shit to fix that. So, use it.

From what I’ve seen in Illinois, it’s the rare person who is still wearing a mask, and that’s amusing in a way. Last year, everyone who wanted to go maskless was turned into a pariah. They were being arrested and heckled by the police. Fist fights were breaking out. Some people even got shot and killed.

Now if you are wearing a mask, you’ll be the 1 in 100 people doing it and everyone will look at you funny even though all of 12 months ago it was a whole different story.

The “maskless jerks” who should “be arrested” according to Stallman are 99 out of 100 people in Illinois, and maybe a touch past that.

Not even the pharmacy staff giving the vaccines are wearing masks at this point.

The government is so done with this.

They’re done trying to get it under control. They’re done spending money on it. They’re done not collecting taxes from people going out and doing their usual levels of reckless overspending.

So now they don’t even want to know. All of the testing mandates are gone, all of the testing centers are shut. If you get COVID, you’re on your own.

Soon you may not even be able to get a free COVID shot because if you don’t have insurance, they may cost more money than you can afford.

(The American economy is unusually bad right now even in light of the last 15 years. With hyperinflation and unemployment, maybe people don’t have $80 for a COVID shot so they just take their chances.)

This will completely unravel what’s left of the effort to shape the spread and keep people out of the hospitals, and cause an even bigger disaster for everyone (including government programs that have to pay the bill sometimes when people go to the hospital).

With the transition of COVID vaccines from “government pays” to “everyone for themselves”, the US turns into what Pfizer has already done globally in a microcosm.

1.7% of their vaccines have gone to non-rich countries. Their goal has been to sell a product to the rich. They can’t seem to get away from selling some to poor people, but their goal is to make it as few doses as possible.

There’s no money in it. It’s just something they do in order to stop the media from reporting that it’s 100% to rich countries, what an outrage. I wonder how Mr. Garrett, “biologist”, feels about that.

Good luck, America.

Are we finally post-COVID thanks to Paxlovid?

Are we finally post-COVID thanks to Paxlovid?

I blogged, previously, that my mom and my brother both came down with COVID-19 and the flu at the same time.

I leaned on them to go get Paxlovid, because they both sounded like hell over the phone, and it took some doing, but they finally agreed.

About the only side effect they both had from the medication was that if they ate anything a couple of hours after one of their doses, it had a strange “metallic”-like taste to it, so they both had to take it, quickly eat breakfast, and then not eat anything for a while. Then eat dinner, then take the pills again at bedtime.

I was fairly impressed by how fast the antivirals turned both of them around. I thought for sure that we were going to be talking about hospitalizations and that I’d be in Indiana consenting to medical care for both of them while they were unconscious on a ventilator.

The fact that President Biden now has COVID-19, and is on Paxlovid, and it’s basically just a cold, even at his age (he’s not in good health….better than Trump, but they’re both quite old), makes me wonder if there’s even any rational point to take more vaccinations, or if we should just plan to go to a test and treat center if and when we have any actual problems.

I don’t leave the house very much and my spouse goes to work (still wearing an N95 mask). Neither one of us have had COVID as far as I know. The major reason I thought “Oh shit!” when I heard mom and my brother had it was because neither one was vaccinated for either, and, when I asked mom what the plan was, she said “Nothing. We’re just going to ride it out. What else is there to do?”. (She’s a nurse. A nurse should know better!)

After they both took it, she’s back to work and doing her running around again, and she’s gone from not even knowing that there was a pill for COVID to leaning on the Nurse Practitioner at the nursing home she works at to quickly prescribe some whenever a resident tests positive. So at least something good came out of this, I guess.

I noticed today that I had been credited on someone else’s blog related to the Lenovo scandal in 2016 (with the BIOS lock). They were talking about everything I had to go through, including filing an antitrust complaint with the Illinois Attorney General, to get GNU/Linux to work on the Yoga 900-ISK2, and talking about getting Arch Linux to work on theirs.

But I was disturbed to find them promoting Ivermectin for COVID in another post. The one about Arch on the Lenovo was good. I’m glad that lots of people are interested in GNU/Linux replacing Windows on their computer. but I was displeased to be mentioned on a site that suggested Ivermectin is a cure for COVID that is being covered up.

We have actual pills for COVID that shut it down now. The Paxlovid, and the other one from Merck that’s somewhat less effective, Molnupiravir. There’s no reason anyone should be dying of COVID at this point other than their own stubbornness. These are wonderful medications that were developed at a speed that would have been unbelievable not just within my lifetime, but only 5-10 years ago, for any disease.

In fact, I was recently banned from a NSFW room on a Discord server, of all places, for saying that male circumcision was basically a waste of money, and had no merit. The debate devolved into a free-for-all where I was slandered, without evidence, as an “anti-vaxxer” (nope), and an AIDS denier (hardly….I’m a gay man and I know all too well what people are going through with HIV, knowing at least 8 people with it, although not having it myself), and all sorts of other things.

I brought up the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation experimenting on Black African people with it, by (lying and) promising that it would make them “totally immune”. 12 million “snip and releases” later…. (They make it sound like they’re running a trap-neuter-return program for feral cats. Don’t you love the racism?) HIV/AIDS is still one of the major problems plaguing the continent.

There are no conclusive studies showing that male circumcision lowers the risk of HIV/AIDS. What lowers the risk of HIV/AIDS and where the money should be spent, are preventive measures such as condoms and PrEP medication, which work.

The racist Gates Foundation and racists in the US federal government aren’t the only ones to spout this HIV/AIDS prevention bullshit as it pertains to Male Genital Mutilation. My mom told me it lowered the risk of HIV many years ago when I complained that I was circumcised as an infant without my consent. That couldn’t possibly be why they did it. They had only isolated the virus that causes AIDS 15 months before I was born in 1984. People had little idea what spread it or what might protect against or prevent it. Paranoia was rampant. There wasn’t even a drug that people who had it could take. The first one wouldn’t be out for another three years. You can’t tell me that anyone knew anything about what circumcision may or may not do in 1984 as it pertains to HIV/AIDS. Don’t even try!

The simple truth about circumcision was that religious fundamentalists wanted to ruin your sex life and the whole idea was basically thought up by the guy who invented the lamest breakfast cereal ever, Corn Flakes. John Harvey Kellogg.

I fear we’re always going to have conspiracy theories about things like COVID, or HIV. It will never end.

The “why” of the pace of getting COVID therapeutics to market so fast when everything from HIV vaccines to cancer to the flu have been mostly a bust.

The truth is, simply, that some problems are more difficult to solve than others.

There’s also the obvious effect of world governments willing to throw any amount of money at whoever solved the problem of getting their economies running again.

In the end, the US government cares nothing if my mom and brother live or not, but they passed laws to give people COVID drugs so that people won’t be too spooked to leave the house and buy things and cause the economy to seize up.

COVID treatments being “free” in the US to anyone that needs them is also a revolutionary idea, in the US anyway. When mom and my brother got sick, she was worried about what the pills would cost. It was the next place her mind went right after “I don’t think they can do anything about this.”.

For people not in the US and unfamiliar with our system, she actually had a good point on that one. Usually, when you’re sick, the doctor visit alone is very expensive, then they prescribe you a bottle of pills that could cost hundreds or even $2,000. The entire concept of “I’m sick, but the medicine will be free.” was a foreign idea to her entirely. But they went to the pharmacy and got it, no charge.

I was talking with one of my doctors about bipolar disorder, which is a condition that I have that needs medical treatment. We can’t discuss “What is the best, most advanced, most likely to work, least likely to have side-effects?”…..because it always comes down to money. My insurance only likes to cover generics. If you want them to cover Vraylar or Latuda or other more recent treatments, you have to get pre-authorization, and even then you’ll pay half the retail cost. The whole setup is so you won’t even fight it. Your doctor is not going to submit 4 pages to the insurance company trying to get you pre-authorized to be on something when his time is valuable. You’re not going to ask him to, because even if he did and they say yes, you’re forking over $700 for a month’s worth of pills.

I’m just glad there’s something I can take that the insurance will pay for. That’s how everything works here.

Each states is somewhat different too.

In my home state of Indiana, where they live, their system of government has a bunch of “Townships” leftover from the 19th century. They never managed to get rid of them entirely. In many cases, the state just started giving them odd things to do, and in some cases that includes “poor relief” of various kinds. Like, if your landlord is about to evict you, you can take the letter to the Trustee and they may decide to help you with your rent.

One thing that I thought was weird is that Indiana law also tasks the Trustees with dispensing insulin to the poor. Insulin can cost thousands of dollars a month in the US if you are uninsured. People self-ration and die of diabetes all the time. It’s terrible. This happens while other people watch and do nothing to change the system.

In Indiana, if you’re poor and need insulin, you can “go ask the Trustee”. However, state law also says they can refuse to help you if you’ve ever been convicted of a felony. That means if you stole a TV set from someone 40 years ago when you were 18 and haven’t been in any trouble sense, and have served your punishment, a township Trustee can sentence you to death for that at age 58.

The legislative Republicans have been called back into a special session next week to ban abortion, because they’re “pro-life”. Figure that out…

Mom wants to know why I won’t move back. She was also stunned to hear that when CNBC compiled the Ten Worst States to live in, Indiana was at #8, mostly for being stingy with public health and only spending $76 per resident, per year. (And having lousy access to childcare.)

“We’re very pro-life here in Indiana! We’re so very pro-life that we will literally watch you die, when we could easily help you!”

I think for their next trick, the Republicans should go find someone who is drowning and refuse to toss them a life preserver in order to teach self-reliance.

Walmart closes the stores at night because the prices go up so fast and they don’t want you to see them do it.

Walmart closes the stores at night because the prices go up so fast and they don’t want you to see them do it.

Inflation in the United States is now so bad that in the last month, groceries have gone up in price more than they have in the last 8 years before that.

The government won’t admit it, but when I did my shopping at Walmart today, it was all around.

60 eggs went from $5.48 to $7.02.

20 pounds of Basmati Rice went from $18 to $28.77.

2 pounds of frozen peas were better, they only went from $2.00 to $2.22, which is 11%.

And meat went up again.

This is just the latest round.

Sometimes they just don’t bother to price things accurately because when all groceries go up, they miss shelf tags, so you have to bring the phone so you can load an app, which scans a barcode, and then this becomes very time consuming.

That alone pisses me off bad enough that I may start shopping at Aldi again. At least they have THE PRICE you will pay at the register on the signage.

When I was a child, we had stores. Actual grocery stores, not Walmart.

They had nothing like this efficiency, and a gallon of milk would cost you about 98 cents, and this was 25 years or so ago.

I recall that when Walmart opened up in Marion, Indiana, they used to get into price wars with the other grocery stores until they put them out of business.

You had milk for 98 cents, Walmart had it for 76 cents. (It was $3.84 today at Walmart.)

You put Coca Cola on sale for $3.98 for a 24 pack, Walmart put theirs up at $3.48. Stacked entire pallets of it. (It was on “rollback” today for $9.48).

I gave up drinking soda a long time ago because the habit just became too expensive. But I keep an eye on it.

Since 2020, Walmart has raised the price of Coca Cola by 35%.

My spouse, who is from the Philippines and is not used to living in a “normal” country with “real money” says “this just happens, even in the Philippines”. It’s not normal for prices to go up this fast in America. In fact, it hasn’t happened in my lifetime. You read about it happening in the 1970s, but things were different then. Wages kept up with it. Everyone was furious, but wages kept up.

(I say the Philippine Peso isn’t real money because it’s not a world reserve currency. Even the British Pound is still like 2-3% or something in foreign reserves. And the Philippines government is notoriously corrupt on all levels. It’s more like a token for exchanges that happen inside of a country. They can’t transact in their own money internationally, and they pay a heavy price for that. But it’s “not supposed to happen here” and the fact that it is kind of tells you what sort of rot must be setting in on the American economy.)

Walmart, while raising grocery prices another 25%-30% or so overall, AGAIN, this month alone, gave my spouse a raise.

A 2.1% raise. Less than 15 times less the price hikes on groceries and gasoline.

We had already turned off the heat in our apartment this winter to keep the electric bill down.

People in Europe are probably being hit worse because they refused to see that they were arming Putin and in fact also giving him “[natural] gas as a weapon”. Russia’s on the other end of those pipes and can just turn it off while it’s freezing outside in the Eurozone. They were fools who were just looking for the cheapest upfront energy to power their economies (especially German manufacturing).

Anyway, Richard Stallman still says inflation benefits the poor because they’re in debt.

Well, the ones who aren’t in debt will be soon if rents, food, and utilities go up like this. It will not benefit the poor, but he quotes Creepy Uncle Bill’s (Gates) Lamestream Media.

Where we get to read what a serial philanderer and Epstein associate pays them to publish.

That was hardly the worst part though. The COVID vaccine fascism that Richard Stallman puts out could almost be its own energy source, and also hyperlinks to Gates-funded media.

Creepy Uncle Bill must be upset that Moderna stock has lost 90% of its value since last summer, with a lot of that happening after the Supreme Court struck down most of Biden’s mandates to roll up your sleeve and take a huge health risk in exchange for benefits that are greatly diminished in light of the new COVID variants.

(And the new studies showing that it never was much more efficacious than Pfizer’s shots, but has 5 times the risk of heart inflammation.)

But it kind of says everything about where America is at now as a country, that shit continues hitting the fan year after year, and almost nobody even talks of COVID anymore, like it was something from 40 years ago. Just because we have so many bigger problems.

Hyperinflation is here, and the government just straight up lies about it. I haven’t seen anything that’s only going up at 7.12% annualized.

Have you?

7.12% per week is what it feels like at the store.

The doctor refused to treat my blood pressure, so I took matters into my own hands. Bonus: Insomnia, Depression, and COVID-19

Back in March, I started having problems with my blood pressure running too high.

Coincidentally(?) it was after the second Coronavirus vaccine (Pfizer) and I don’t know if the two are related, but I’d never had it shoot that high before. On a bad day, I’d be in pre-hypertension and on most days it would be on the high end of normal. But in March I started having blood pressure running so high I could feel it in my eyeballs. When I checked, it was running at 147/99, and in about that range. Not good! But since you’re not going to have a stroke in the next five minutes, good luck getting any medical care in America.

You can almost fill a book with things that doctors either don’t know or won’t tell you, so when I visited the doctor, I was told “No, we’re not putting you on meds and if you really want to get it down, go on a DASH diet and get rid of most of your dietary salt.”.

So, obviously, I like to eat. Who doesn’t? But after three days using the American Heart Association’s slow cooker DASH diet, I could tell that there’s really no making up for salt in your cooking in a lot of places. You can reduce the salt, and honestly in many recipes you should seek out reduced sodium options such as reduced sodium chicken broth (the tetrapak, not the can!) or reduced sodium ketchup, or using coconut aminos instead of soy sauce (or if you can’t afford coconut aminos, at least use reduced sodium soy sauce), and obviously if the recipe calls for salt, you can use Morton Lite Salt (half potassium chloride and half sodium chloride) or just omit it entirely or use less if some other ingredients are really salty already.

But most people do what I did. DASH diets don’t work because, they work, but the patient will not comply with them. It fails to anticipate what patients will do. You have a medical mutiny, not a patient who is getting better. And some doctors realize this and say “You should cut down on the salt, but here’s some medicine.”. Nope, I got one of those government doctors at the Health Department who just said “Go on a DASH diet. Here’s the bill.”.

Fortunately, I’m not one to skip my homework, and it got me thinking about supplements that can reduce blood pressure. There’s quite a few options, and they “stack”, as in, they can all contribute a modest reduction, and do not conflict with one another. So while you can take too much of something, you can take the right amount of multiple supplements that aren’t going to hurt you, but collectively contribute to solving the “big problem”.

I started taking a 400 mg Magnesium supplement at night, which is not harmful. It’s about the RDA for a man my size anyway, and then I started taking Omega 3 from fish oil. (1280 mg of Omega 3 per day at bedtime).

This along with modest reductions to my sodium (using less sodium options for processed foods and backing away from the salt shaker, and ordering my french fries without salt….that kind of thing) turned out to cause my blood pressure to drop to 126/84 as of my last reading, Not too bad.

But I think I can do better, so I upped my Omega 3 recently to 2,000 mg Omega 3. (1 of those “horse pill” sized “Spring Valley” capsules from Walmart when I wake up, and one at bed, along with the magnesium.) I’ll take more measurements as time goes on, but I really think 120/80 is attainable.

If you need to go further, concentrated garlic supplements, I’m told, also have an effect (a small one, but it’s a nudge). Go for odorless obviously. Mom has horrible blood pressure problems, from age mostly, and she’s used garlic for years because sometimes the prescription drugs can’t even get it under control by themselves.

The Magnesium turned out to have a knock-on benefit. It makes you really really sleepy about an hour after you take it. I’ve struggled with insomnia my entire life and this stuff puts me right to sleep.

Which brings me to a sidebar moment. Doctors really have no idea what to do about sleep, but they pretend like they do on TV. The truth about prescription sleeping pills is that your body adapts to them quite rapidly and they no longer work after a while. Some even cause your hair to fall out, and most can cause side effects like sleepwalking.

Around 2006, I went sleep walking on Ambien and tried to make a peanut butter sandwich out of my phone and then I turned the stovetop on (I don’t know why.) and went to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Then I woke up, sitting on the toilet, with a pizza box on fire on top of the stove and the fire alarm going off, and I had to put it out with an extinguisher.

Luckily, there was no damage and the landlord never found out. It was just a hell of a mess to clean up from the fire suppressant foam. Anyway, that’s what you get from the “professionals”.

The Benadryl in disguise stuff (OTC, Unisom, Zzzquil, etc.) is less harmful, but your body adapts to it within about two weeks and it won’t make you sleepy anymore.

But Magnesium, this stuff, whoa. Look out! It puts me to bed and then I just wake up in the morning. It’s a very useful supplement. Possibly the biggest find I’ve ever made. But doctors won’t tell you that.

Are there clinical studies on supplements? Yes. But…

Interestingly, the studies seem to be architected in order to find out that the supplements “don’t work”. Which isn’t science. It’s more drug company bullshit.

In one case I found, they called for 18,000+ people 50 years old or so, who had no history of depression, to take some Omega 3 and some Vitamin D (I take 5,000 IU of Vitamin D per day), and then followed them for 5 years, and then concluded it had no effect on depression.

“Here’s some people who made it 50 years with no history of depression, and who aren’t depressed! Let’s see what this does to the depression they aren’t having! Oh, look, it didn’t do anything for depression! Womp womp! Want some antipsychotics? We call them mood stabilizers now. They’re really quite nice! The FDA was very nice too. It let us take the studies that showed them not helping the patient and feed them right into the shredder. We used the model that Oliver North did for Iran-Contra.”.

But many other studies have suggested that the anti-inflammatory properties of Omega-3 help with depression and stress. Many people also take it for arthritis pain relief.

As another aside, I added an Ester-C (non-acidic vitamin C supplement) and a Stress-B Complex vitamin daily as well.

I figured it can’t hurt. The Stress-B even has quite a bit of zinc in it (and more vitamin C).

The FDA recommends very small doses of vitamins, lower than what people actually need in order to stave off or reduce the seriousness of certain disease processes. For example, you _can_ take a 1,000 IU Vitamin D supplement like Fauci recommended, but it won’t move your actual Vitamin D level that much.

My husband’s level only went from 19 to 26 with 5,000 IU per day of Vitamin D (which is really the most you should ever take if you aren’t having your levels checked!) but he does have his levels checked, so we talked to his doctor and I said, “You know what, I’m getting tired of you guys prescribing him Vitamin D when his levels drop, taking him off, and then his levels drop again. We’re going to do 10,000 IU per day and you can just draw his levels every time he’s in here.”.

Aren’t you just sick of doctors?

And on the subject of Vitamin D deficiency, that’s likely to lead to severe COVID. In fact, 90% of Americans are Vitamin D deficient or insufficient for at least most of the year, but they tell everyone to get a COVID shot every 90 days now (LOL) but never mention Vitamin D’s role in preventing severe COVID and thus, hospitalizations.

And while people continue to get statin drugs, the doctors never tell you that Omega 3 supplements can also help with your triglycerides and HDL. Why would they? The drug companies buy them steak dinners at $500 a plate restaurants and pay tuition. Then you go in and get a prescription for whatever the latest bribe was.

I once had a psychiatrist, who, like clockwork, would try to prescribe me something, and then I’d go to the Open Payments website for CMS and look, and sure enough they had bought him dinner or put him through a class or something. In any other field, this would be called what it is. Flagrant and open corruption.

I’m just not seeing any really good reason to not take Omega 3 supplements. There’s a laundry list of conditions they may help or are proven to help (like blood pressure) and nobody has come out with anything to suggest that it would be harmful in any way. They appear to help with a number of conditions I have, and it’s something the doctors will never ever admit.

I talked to my psychiatrist about Omega 3. He said, “Well, they’re studying it and have been for a while. We don’t know whether we should recommend it or not yet, but I don’t think it’s harmful. You can keep taking it if you think it’s helping you.”.

I said, “Well, I know how these studies can go even when they mean well. Like, take scurvy for instance. Some doctors in the 1550s noticed if you drank lemon or lime juice or ate the lemons and limes, you didn’t get scurvy, and if you had it, they would reverse it, but the medical community was so resistant to change, that they didn’t give sailors lemon juice for 50 more years after millions more had died of scurvy, and handwashing between patients met similar resistance. So they can study this and I’ll take it now, because in 50 years I’ll probably be dead or won’t have long to benefit from it if they ever admit it works.”

Some studies have been so promising that certain psychiatrists recommend Omega 3 as an add-on to an antidepressant or an antipsychotic while they are treating depression or Bipolar Disorder, but many don’t. And we don’t have 50 years.