Pain, Pain, Go Away!

I may have found a reason I have a lot of ups and downs in how I feel: energetic sometimes, then sluggish; feeling great, then slowed down by stomach aches, neck pains and headaches. It reminds me of when I felt so awful I ended up in an ambulance after drinking almond milk that had carrageenan . Carrageenan is a emulsifier. I looked at the cream cheese I'd been using to make cheesecake. (I love low-carb--dessert for breakfast and dip for dinner.) It all had locust bean gum: an emulsifier.  I didn't feel anything until I'd been eating the stuff for a few weeks, and then every time I had some cream cheese, it felt like it was sitting on my stomach and I didn't feel like doing anything. So maybe it's cumulative. After a few days without it, I'm starting to feel back to normal.  These are your guts on emulsifiers. Photo from Pexels . Dr. William Davis says, "Emulsifiers are added to processed foods to keep the ingredients mixed and to prevent separation....The

Attention Citizens! Investigative journalist Alex Berenson is back on Twitter after a settlement with the company. The "wrongest man" of the pandemic consistently called it right, yet he was suspended for misinformation. The final tweet that got him bounced from Twitter: It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission. Don’t think of it as a vaccine. Think of it - at best - as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS. And we want to mandate it? Insanity. — Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) July 6, 2022 Lifestyle Medicine (or, Your Health before Pharma Profits) Over on YouTube, Dr. Suneel Dhand, internal medicine physician who reads and interprets studies and the news on his channel, started posting there again after his two strikes for "misinformation" timed out. One of his strikes was for reading a news article about a COVID outbreak among vaccinated people last year.  I don't agree

With the COVID vaccines looking like they cause heart attacks and reduced sperm counts in young men, 2022 is playing out like the beginning of Idiocracy . (Warning: NSFW.) Of course, Clevon doesn't represent all the vaccine refusers, but Trevor and Carol aren't necessarily smart about anything but test-taking and PowerPoint presentations. These tweets from a few days ago are from someone of the same type, a professor of epidemiology . As such, he must know that masks haven't been shown to stop spread, airplanes are not significant COVID vectors, and a respirator (assuming it's fitted) should be more than adequate protection. And yet Professor Karen tweeted these:  I'm a university graduate myself. But it was the Trevors and Carols and Professor Karens who brought about masking and lockdowns and mostly the Clevons who got us back to normal. Not that I'd recommend Clevon's lifestyle--I'm related to a few Clevons myself. But Trevor, Carol and the professo

Crowds have gathered across the street at the annual festival put on the by church and school. Every year, I go over and enjoy my annual plate of nachos. Not this, year, though! I'd like to say it's because I'm won't eat junk food, but the truth is, I'm sick of spending money.  Earlier this week, I went to the dentist for a night guard. Grinding my teeth a little at night is normal for me, but my car trouble ($1,800 worth) stressed me to the point that eating fermented foods became painful. While I was at the dentist's office, three healthy-looking young patients were in the waiting room wearing masks. These patients were about to walk 10 feet and take their masks off at a place where people come and go all day and sit with their mouths wide open. Even if you think masks do any good, what's the point if you're going to take them off in a minute? When does this end? COVID isn't going away any more than H1N1, hantavirus or the bubonic plague. Yes--tho

Professor of Medicine Vinay Prasad has had enough of "useless fucking cowards." Normally measured and thoughtful in his YouTube videos, he lays out his contempt for cowards and careerists who didn't try to protect kids (and everyone else) from disastrous policies during the pandemic. Dr. Prasad carried out his duties in person at the county hospital throughout the pandemic. He carefully examined the evidence for masking children, injecting children with COVID "vaccines," closing schools, boosters for all, and Paxlovid in the vaccinated, and came out mostly or entirely against them. He says it hasn't helped his career or made him many friends--but it was his duty as a doctor and professor. Dr. Prasad says duty has fallen out of favor; I say it's courage that's lacking. You don't need to be charged with a duty to take the initiative to do some good. Without courage, you can't carry out your initiatives or duties when they're unpopular. He h

I was right all along/You come tagging along. -The Hives Remember a few months ago when those of us with concerns about the safety and efficacy of COVID shots were called anti-vaxxers? Now that COVID has spread through the vaccinated, CNN quotes Fauci saying,  “We have very good vaccines, but we’ve got to get better platforms and immunogens, maybe with adjuvants that allow us to have a greater durability of protection,” Fauci said. Adjuvants are extra ingredients in vaccines that help them work better. Just "very good"? CNN says they're "astonishingly good": In clinical trials, the new mRNA vaccines have proven to be astonishingly good at protecting people against illness, hospitalizations and deaths, at least in the short term. Fauci said mRNA vaccines have other advantages, too. It’s relatively fast and easy to redesign them to better protect against new variants, for example. Sure, if by "astonishingly good" you mean a 1% absolute risk reduction of

The Office of the US Surgeon General called for information on the prevalence of misinformation about COVID--and Indiana's attorney general told them to look in the mirror. AG Todd Rokita, along with Drs. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University and Kulldorff (formerly of Harvard), spelled out the misinformation that the CDC and other government organizations spread that "has led to great harm in the lives and livelihoods of Americans" and "shattered the public’s trust in science and public health and will take decades to repair." The memo notes--with citations--the government's failure to accurately count, their natural immunity denial, their false claims that the shots prevented spread, their worse-than-useless mask mandates, school closures, tracing and lockdowns, and their zero-COVID fantasy.  Have you noticed that you never hear "follow the science" anymore? It's because science doesn't support the aggressive busybodies who shouted &quo

I used to love Quest bars. They were an easy snack or even a light meal replacement with low carbs and no junky ingredients. Those ingredients have changed, though. They now contain erythritol (sugar alcohol) and corn fiber. Since I'm one of those people who can't eat erythritol without getting stomach cramps, I won't be eating any more Quest bars.  Likewise, certain brands of coconut milk. Several brands contain guar gum, a thickener, which also gives me a stomach ache. Emulsifiers like guar gum can thin the mucus in your gut, allowing things into your bloodstream that don't belong there. I was feeling bloated and getting facial edema after having coconut milk with guar gum. Since changing to a brand without it (Native Forest), the problems have disappeared.  Oddly, Splenda (sucralose) doesn't seem to bother me.  * * * * * A friend who gave me a little bit of a hard time about being unvaccinated just got COVID. Fortunately, he's doing OK. Three years ago, I tho

Tonight I got rid of my pandemic hair.  I'd only had three haircuts in two years. I'd been going to a Korean salon where they did a great job, but the stylist didn't speak English. Sometimes the owner spoke to me in Korean until she realized I had no idea what she was saying, then repeated herself so I could understand her. After a few months of social distancing, working from home and a month-and-a-half-long quarantine, I wanted a stylist I could make human contact with. I went to another salon and got a good haircut. When I went back months later, a 90-year-old German emigre cut my hair while we had a good chat. I called the salon months later, but they'd gone out of business.  A year after my second pandemic haircut, around Thanksgiving last year, I went to a Mexican salon down the street. We yukked it up while the stylist cut my hair in a chunky and asymmetrical style that I did my best to fix when I got home.  This month, my hair was so long it didn't fit in my

Have You Been Pwned? If you donated to the Canadian truckers via GiveSendGo, your personal information might have been compromised by hackers who attacked the site. No bank information was apparently compromised, but names, emails and locations were hacked and in some cases publicized. To find out if you were a victim, go to  https://haveibeenpwned.com . If you were pwned, make a complaint to your state's attorney general. To be safe, protect your accounts. One way is to put a freeze on your credit so that nobody can take out a loan in your name (IIRC, this is a free service with the credit reporting agencies). You can also use a fee-based service like LifeLock, which monitors your credit and accounts opened in your name. Ivermectin Study from Malaysia This randomized, controlled study didn't find that ivermectin had any effect in older people with comorbidities who had COVID. In fact, the ivermectin arm did a little worse than the placebo group as far as severe illness (the pr

The convoys have continued and caught on. In the middle of winter in Canada, droves are driving to be in conga lines, carry jerry cans, bounce in bouncy castles, and blockade the border. If many more crossings are blocked, the US-Canada border will be closed. As an American, I feel slightly rejected.  But the protestors are winning. Alberta and Saskatchewan have dropped, or will drop, their mandates and Quebec dropped its plans for a unvaxxed tax. Crowds carrying jerry cans (fuel cans) showed up in Ottawa after police threatened to arrest anyone bringing fuel. GiveSendGo, the protestors' crowd funding platform, thumbed their nose at a Canadian court order to block payments to the protestors. More convoys are happening around the world and there is supposed to be one scheduled for Washington, DC. I won't be going. I support the convoys, but it's not my fight: life is normal here at Cafe Americain and it's hopping at work. Dropping everything to go to Detroit to sit in

The young woman in this video shows several signs of being in a cult : submission, persecution complex, isolation with her group, cognitive dissonance, and appearance standards. How many like her will need to be deprogrammed after the two-year fear campaign and demonization of much of the population? I've watched a few hours of live streams from the Ottawa protest and kept up with events there. So far, the only violence I've heard of is a hit-and-run of four pedestrians. The suspect that Winnepeg police charged is a member of Antifa .  I wrote the other day that masks would soon look ridiculous and apparently they already do in downtown Ottawa. I don't want anyone to be harassed for their sartorial choices (though the photo in the video doesn't quite convey that to me). I'd rather see a comedy made about the Canada convoy when it's over. It has all the ingredients of a funny movie: pompous authoritarians: check. Snooty busybodies: check. Wily, fun-loving underd

 At last, the state of Indiana put out a useful tweet: People with weakened immune systems are at greater risk if diagnosed with #COVID19 , but there are treatments that can help prevent serious illness. Learn more at http://tinyurl.com/C19treatment The link goes to the state's page on COVID treatment, which includes the monoclonal antibody Sotrovimab . It's available, has emergency use authorization and effective against Omicron.  The clinical trial participants were at high risk of COVID progression due to age, obesity, diabetes and other risk factors. This was a phase 3, multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. From the  study : In this prespecified interim analysis, which included an intention-to-treat population of 583 patients (291 in the sotrovimab group and 292 in the placebo group), 3 patients (1%) in the sotrovimab group, as compared with 21 patients (7%) in the placebo group, had disease progression leading to hospitalization or death ( relati

Government officials are starting to treat COVID-related junk science like a mask they've sneezed in: quietly dropping it, trying not to be noticed. Here's the White House press secretary saying the Biden administration never supported lockdowns. (They just wanted you fired for not taking an experimental injection.)  🚨 #BREAKING : | Press Secretary Psaki responds to Johns Hopkins Study that says lockdowns had little to no effect on curving Covid mortality. “We are not pushing lockdowns, we’ve not been pro-lockdown — most of the lockdowns actually happened under the previous President.” pic.twitter.com/iOKAFciOwX — El American (@ElAmerican_) February 4, 2022 Here's the State of Indiana obliquely saying that vaccination doesn't prevent spread . Note that the top of the isolation and quarantine flow chart says "regardless of vaccination status."    Confused about how long to isolate?⌛ Get an exact timeline of your isolation with our Isolation and Quarantine

"This is the Ottawa I'm seeing." - Dr. Julie Ponesse Denmark, England, Sweden, and Norway have dropped their COVID restrictions or soon will.  OSHA dropped its vaccine mandate  on employees of companies with 100 or more employees after coming in second at the Supreme Court, and Indiana with 15 other states is  suing the federal government  over the remaining vaccine mandate for Medicaid/Medicare workers. Iowa  is ditching their mandates on February 15.  As their governor puts it , “We cannot continue to suspend duly enacted laws and treat COVID-19 as a public health emergency indefinitely. After two years, it’s no longer feasible or necessary. The flu and other infectious illnesses are part of our everyday lives, and coronavirus can be managed similarly,” stated Gov. Reynolds. “State agencies will now manage COVID-19 as part of normal daily business, and reallocate resources that have been solely dedicated to the response effort to serve other important needs for Iowans.”

A lot of Americans buy medications from Canada since it can be cheaper out-of-pocket than buying it with health insurance in the US. You might re-order early if you're one of them. I don't know whether the protest will affect delivery, but it can only make it worse. And the protestors are not going away. The US-Canada border crossing at Coutts, Alberta / Sweet Grass, Montana is gridlocked with hundred of trucks in an anti-mandate protest, bottlenecking the road to one lane. Back east, hundreds of trucks are still parked and honking in Ottawa as shown above.  Truckers in the Canada convoys say they're staying put until all the country's COVID mandates are lifted. They have over $8 million in funds, their own lawyers, and in many cases, beds and mini-fridges in their trucks. Locals are bringing them food and tow truck drivers are refusing police requests to tow the trucks. Convoy leaders say they have the resources to settle in for four years .  Meanwhile, Canada's pr

If you're an American who orders medications from Canadian pharmacies--or a Canadian who orders medications from Canadian pharmacies--this would be a good time to refill your prescription. Thousands of truckers are protesting vaccine mandates across Canada, their Prime Minister is in hiding, and the convoy organizers say they aren't leaving Ottawa until the mandates are lifted. They have $8 million for sustenance in a GoFundMe account, which GoFundMe has begun to release . While I support their cause, this can only make supply chain problems worse. Some police departments on Twitter reported counting only about a hundred trucks in the convoy, but this looks like a much larger protest. Keep in mind it was nine degrees Fahrenheit in Ottawa--that's minus 13 Celsius--and Canadians are even less given to protesting than Americans. Meantime, the FDA has pulled authorization for monoclonal antibody treatments saying they don't work against, Omicron . However, delta is still i

A huge convoy of truckers that started on the west coast of Canada has begun arriving in Ottawa, the country's capitol. They are protesting vaccine mandates and they're not alone. Other convoys headed for Ottawa started around Canada and the United States--even farmers driving tractors have joined them. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called them a small fringe group, but according to the video below, the head of the convoy crossed into Ontario as the tail was crossing the border into Manitoba. That's close to 500 miles (800 kilometers) long.  Various news sources I've read say the vast majority of the truckers are vaccinated. The point isn't the vaccines, it's the mandates. As Canadian vlogger Viva Frei puts it, Canada and particular his home province of Quebec is being run by idiots. (As are parts of the US.) The idiots running Quebec forbade unvaccinated people to use big box stores, but allowed them to go to pharmacies...not realizing that Wal-Mart (a big bo

Something here doesn't add up. Pandemic of the Vaccinated The latest breakthrough numbers for Indiana are in and they don't look good for the vaccines: 87% of last week's cases are among the vaccinated as are 44% of deaths. And yet they account for only 2% of hospitalizations. Either the injections make you both more likely to get infected and yet far less likely to get very sick but they don't prevent you from dying...or something here doesn't add up.  Could the vaccinated be getting Omicron while the unvaccinated are getting much sicker with delta? Omicron accounted for 98% of cases as of January 10 in Indiana according to the state's coronavirus website. So there were (by my calculations) 1,600 cases of delta and 3,526 hospitalizations last week. Even if every man, woman and child with delta went to the hospital, over half the patients there had Omicron.  Hospitals Overrun with Unvaccinated? How do Indiana's hospitalization numbers compare to Denmark'

For the first time, the vaccinated account for over half of the past week's COVID cases in Indiana. They made up 55% of cases, while 54% of Hoosiers are vaccinated. This is based on records I compile using data from Indiana's coronavirus website and the Regenstrief website that shows hospitalizations here. Click image to enlarge. Numbers at 12/30/21 are likely off due to delays in reporting over Christmas. COVID is spreading like a brush fire through the highly vaccinated office where I work, where there's been more coughing and sneezing in the past week than I've heard in two years. Coworkers are grabbing up tests, even as some of them doubt negative results. Why they bother to take a test if they're already so sure of the outcome that they doubt the result, I don't know. A few unvaccinated coworkers and I haven't been among the sick so far. The table shows a small proportion of breakthrough hospitalizations and deaths among the vaccinated, but keep in mind