The origin of SARScoV2 is obvious. Whether it started as a lab leak or an edible bat is an irrelevant factoid at this point. China royally fucked the response, any way you look at it. What matters in this case, is that China is dealt with accordingly. The lies and deceit have been tolerated long enough.
The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has suspended and potentially cut off funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology due to concerns about biosafety violations and non-compliance with US regulations. The institute has received over $1.4 million in federal awards since 2014 but has not obtained any new funding since July 2020.
It’s interesting to note how the far-right-leaning, factless twitchy article leading that list talks about nothing but politics. They continue dovetailing everything with politics regardless of the relationship. It’s how repugs build their talking points. Doesn’t matter what it’s about, as long as it’s a sensational topic everybody hears. Ron Paul accusing Dr. Fauci of supporting Chinese bio-weapon programs had to be the pinnacle of MAGA stupidity. It’s still alive and well in the good ‘ol USA today.
“On lab-leak, there’s no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab other than the coincidence of the Wuhan Institute of Virology being there,” Robertson told us.
This will be it for the foreseeable future. Most annoying vape flaw discovered so far: Leaking residue into the case. Pax and DaVinci both do it. How long they last just depends on how heavy a user you are. There was one early on I just didn’t like how it felt in my hand. Another the controls were too difficult to deal with. I already bought a 2nd AirMax for backup with some extra screens and stems – because that’s the only issue(s) I can see. It has a bit of a fussy bowl setup, too small, easily broken, tiny screens to lose, hard to fill. But that’s it – and those things do not affect the device’ stellar performance.
I won’t dwell on the bowl apart from what’s already mentioned, except to say it’s smaller caliber than my pinky finger. That means I need two for a sesh. An NBA player with healthy lungs could probably take the whole thing in 2 hits on high. Spending time fiddling around with stuff is part of the fascination for me (think fidget spinner), so no biggie. Water pipe adapter was broken the first day. I’ll learn to be more careful with it. Dropping stuff due to neurological issues is a never-ending challenge for me now. They say it’s a hybrid heater (convection+conduction) and hard to tell just looking, but the design and way it works feels like induction tech, to me. I suspect that is the reason behind the bowl design.
Every other measure of vape performance is class-leading, in my book. The battery speaks for itself. I’ve had at least ten of these things over the years and this is the first one I could not kill in a day. The damn DaVinci is a nice vape, but goes dead in one sesh before the battery is half worn out. The second most important factor to me is maintenance/cleaning. All this will ever need is soaking the stems out every so often if the residue build up bothers you. They’ll never clog. Just dump out warm right after use and good for another go – indefinitely, far as I can tell.
Operation is simple and intuitive, with MILSPEC-quality buttons and build. Nice work.
This was the main issue with the dearth of Cannabis research (if any) being conducted in the U.S. for the past eighty years: Mississippi ditch weed. The Feds scheduled it and said one place in Mississippi could grow some for science. Then I guess they hired some blind gardeners to tend their garbage crops. Reports over the years indicated potency’s averaging in the 5-10% range.
“Cannabis works in different ways for different people. Different types of studies keep adding detail to the picture of how the botanical drug works.”
I’ll add different strains for different maladies to the mix as well, in my case at least. Did you know that a veteran cannot get a prescription history from the VA by just asking for it? The cover-up continues, at the macro level.
It should be interesting to see how it goes down when this takes hold in the conventional healthcare system.
I thought the care I received from the Veterans Administration right up until about two weeks after my last hip replacement was stellar. No question they seem to have a good template for large scale healthcare. It all rests on the people doing the work.
The VA takes care of about 9 million veterans at 1,255 facilities — the nation’s largest integrated health care system. Despite many widely publicized scandals, VA health care has been consistently rated as competitive with private care in dozens of peer-reviewed articles.
I’m done with it. Got started on the weed to soothe my arthritis back around the time I left Lockheed for greener pastures. Everybody gets it to some extent, sooner or later. For whatever reason, genetics, injuries, mine’s been extreme. I have three orthopedic surgeries to show for it so far – both hips and the right shoulder.
As things went on, the c-spine injury from 2000 deteriorated to where un-checked radiculopathy was inducing constant sleep loss and severe acute nerve flare elbow pain. It was actually kinda funny how the first resident I saw about that episode diagnosed it. She just pushed down on my head to light it up, same as I’d been doing then lately, moving or sitting in certain positions. So I had some physical therapy for the C6-7 nerves and ended up getting the shoulder repaired in the outcome of that diagnosis. a few years later in 2019 I was subjected to another nerve root damage at L4-5 pursuant to left hip malpractice. It was far worse than the c-spine I did myself moving tires, with fusion removal of the leaking disc constituting my fourth orthopedic surgery, following a year later.
I might seem to have an exceptional amount of orthopedic surgery and nerve damage experience, with needs and wants for pain medication and anti-inflammatory only growing over the years. The Veterans Administration put me through the gamut of whatever they were offering for it. Venlafaxine, Etodolac, Tramadol, Gabapentin, and lots of NSAIDs for years only seemed to make me immune to opiates. I’m pretty sure I was on a max dosage of some of that stuff for literally years. Ongoing addiction/withdrawal cycles were no fun, either. I called it quits after watching myself walking around doing the yardwork in my own little movie one day. It’s called de-personalization, and the pharmaceuticals eventually gave it to me real bad – probably close to serotonin syndrome. I understand this is a desirable psychotropic effect sought by certain drug addicts, dunno. Scared the crap outta me, and I was the biggest consumer of psychedelics in our little street gang, back in the day.
The only real reason or purpose I can imagine for the MMJ program(s) was to get a foot in the door. Tax revenue is the primary government objective. That alone makes the Colorado MMJ program an oxymoron on it’s face. It costs upwards of $300 to get the certification and commensurate tax break. Then an annual subscription fee, all of which goes to the doctors, with reduced tax revenue for the government. Being unaware of the actual demographics involved, I’m probably somewhere in the middle of the volume consumer group for example purposes, but WTF do I know?
My tax break enabled me to just about break even, cost-wise. Why spend time giving the doctors money, when it could be going to the schools? All they do is sit around taking appointments, trying to determine if the patient is telling the truth about their symptoms, with no fiduciary responsibility of any kind, handing out medcards for their tidy little profit. Oh wait, I remember now – they’re not handing out anything. The State takes care of that with their online spreadsheet containing another copy of everybody’s PII waiting to be compromised. I saw the no-brainer there right off the bat, but continued doing the MMJ thing eight years just because the queues and wait times are shorter.
The article linked below, is only a high level intro. It’s what the pharma industry needs to focus on, and what doctors need to recognize for what it is. Economic competition is the only reason it was banned in the first place, and the reason pharma and alcohol fear it now. Put it in the repertoire with everything else and be thankful we have something that actually works for some of these chronic, degenerative maladies. My closing remark on the Colorado MMJ program is: No disrespect to the overworked, underpaid IT staff, but that online spreadsheet looks like something I might have come up with twenty years ago.
Medicine is not a rote discipline, much as many in the field would like to believe.
I wonder if the difference between improperly and deliberately will ever be publicly disclosed? They tried to lump my two spinal injury claims occurring under wildly differing circumstances at different times into one rating for the purpose of a malpractice cover-up.
I suppose an improper neurological exam is better than none.
The Veterans Administration is too big to fail. Seriously.
No news to me. I was on a pretty severe downward spiral my last few years with the VA. The analgesic effect for me is very different from opiates, but works nonetheless. Opiates totally block pain at various types/levels/dosages/usage patterns. I still sense pain, acutely at times, but the chronic stuff less before squelching somehow.
It’s actually kinda disturbing sometimes how when I’m walking the dogs I can physically sense inflammation building in the nerves driving my back, butt and legs. but it doesn’t bother and hurt to the point of stopping me. I just pay a little price later and the next day.
Keep it to yourself if you must, but between the Catholics forcing unwanted births and the Dutch seeding the planet, our human so-called race is speeding headlong into oblivion.
What happens when artificial intelligence finds artificial procreation?
“VA Chief Acquisition Officer Michael Parrish earlier this month told lawmakers the department was negotiating the addition of new accountability and enforcement mechanisms to the $10 billion EHR software contract.”
So accountability and enforcement mechanisms sounds like an afterthought? You can be absolutely certain accountability was the main issue in my malpractice scandal. We’ll soon see how enforcement shakes out in that case…
The effects of marijuana legalization across the country are beginning to have real impact. As expected, some of those effects will be indirect and unintended. Lots of people are getting off opiates and the alcoholic beverage companies are losing sales. Those companies are looking for new products and markets, with their version of insobriety now trailing economic indicators in the competition with weed .
It ain’t just your father’s Sunny-D anymore. It’s the tip of another iceberg, and alot of kids are gonna get drunk.
Four kidnapped Americans crossed into Mexico for health care. Don’t know what more evidence you need to know how seriously fucked healthcare is in this country today.
My current healthcare plan involves dying at home sans any professional medical intervention of any kind.
LATE UPDATE: Two shot to death, two returned, along with the purported five Gulf Cartel members who did it, with a letter of apology. Ooops, sorry wrong place, wrong time, better luck next time!
Maybe they’ll get another crack at it. This is one of those bi-partisan topics the MAGA can’t make much money with, so they’re just actively ignoring it because alot of the base likes to get high. I’ll remain cautiously optimistic.
I had an interesting conversation about medication with a C&P examiner one day…
… is not generally speaking, a healthy thing to do. But that goes for pretty much any combusted material you might inhale – even from mundane environmental sources. I imagine from a strictly particulate standpoint, many commuters get way more dirt in their lungs just sitting in traffic or tooling up and down the thoroughfares than us lucky people inside or out in the country. You could probably choke yourself with just about anything if you go crazy enough with it.*
Smoking anything is really old school in this era of modern electronics. Above low 400°F temps is where carbon monoxide and other toxic combustion byproducts begin to appear. I didn’t listen to the Forbes audio piece linked by Cannabis Culture – media click mongers. It was nice how in the text they pointed out glaring shortcomings in an earlier study which tried to assert just the opposite.
Here’s the deal – compared to smoking, vaping is safe and effective.* It also appears to be the only way for me to ingest an effective dose without invoking hyperemesis by eating the stuff. Just now off another 3-day vape break, and as before, detect no change in pulmonary function, feel or effect. In fact, I suspect something in the Kief I’ve been using actually improves it, by stimulating mucous membrane activity and opening the small sacs deep down in there.
It’s certainly not for everybody, especially the rare cases in people lacking the liver enzymes to metabolize it. But if you can tolerate it, it’s the best remedy for any number of chronic conditions including arthritis and nerve root damage. My VA prescription history stands as proof. Link withheld to preserve bandwidth.
I’m looking to start a culture war with the pharma companies.
