The Flu Shot Scam- Now They Tell Us!

First, let's get one thing perfectly straight, we are talking about big bucks here! In 2012 the CDC estimated that 46% of the population got a flu shot, that's about 145 million people who received a injection costing around $32. This means that Americans spent about 4.6 billion dollars in their attempt to escape the yearly flu epidemic in 2012. The question, of course, is just how effective are these expensive and painful shots in the arm. I maintain that no one has the slightest idea, none at all. At the beginning of this past flu season the CDC predicted that the flu shots would be 67% effective in preventing the flu in high risk segments of the population like the elderly. These wizards of smart now tell us that the vaccine they were peddling was only 9% effective in persons over the age of 65. The truth is that they haven't the faintest idea how effect their vaccine was because their flawed statistics were based on a sampling of fewer than 300 people scattered among five states. To determine the effectiveness of something like a flu vaccine they would have had to performed a double blind randomized study of thousands of people, half of which got the vaccine and half of which got an injection of saline. These guinea pigs would have had to been followed for at least six months before the effectiveness of the vaccine could have been determined. I have no idea why statistical studies like this are not carried out by the CDC, or some other independent medical institution, but the fact is, they are not. I have always been extremely skeptical about the effectiveness of flu vaccines. During my medical career I always got my yearly flu shot and always got the flu, sometimes several times a year. The same was true for my wife who was a nurse. I stopped getting flu shots when I retired 13 years ago. Yep, you guessed it, haven't developed the flu since I stopped getting those vaccinations, no not once! Now, anecdotal observations like this are meaningless from a statistical point of view; nonetheless, there are many good reasons to question the validity of the flu vaccine program. First, and most importantly, we are not dealing with a virus like the ones that cause polio or smallpox. These viruses have remained genetically stable for many years. Rather we are dealing with many strains of the influenza virus which periodically raises their ugly heads to ravish mankind throughout the world. To make matters even worse, the influenza viruses are prone to mutations from year to year that render them immune to vaccines that were developed to destroy them in prior years. For these reasons the researchers who develop each year's flu vaccine are literally working in the dark as the concoct their chicken egg vaccines against the influenza viruses. First, they must guess which strain, or strains of the influenza virus they will be dealing with in the coming year and, even if they guess right, they will have to hope against hope that the viruses selected will not have mutated and become immune to the vaccines that they produce in the chicken eggs. Finally, the manufactures of the influenza vaccines and those who push the use of these anti-viral agents down play the side effects of their vaccines. Your local pharmacy, who is making a bundle on these vaccines, does not inform you that there were over 84,000 hospitalizations related to the influenza vaccine last year in the United States alone, over 1000 of which ended in death. An additional 1600 developed the disabling neurological condition called Guillain-Barre Syndrome. Five children died in Korea alone after receiving a flu shot. So, recognizing the magnitude of the problems inherent in the development of influenza vaccines; the dismal records of past efforts to control influenza outbreaks with vaccines; and the serious side effects associated with influenza shots, why is our government encouraging us to take these potentially dangerous injections? As with many things in life all will become clear if you follow the money trail. For myself, I'm going to pass on my next flu shot and use the $32 bucks to buy a nice bottle of California wine.

Low Information Voters.

Rush Limbaugh came up with this term in his rather lame attempt to explain why the republicans failed to prevail in the last presidential election. Apparently, this conservative icon has concluded that republicans lost the election because the average voter just did not understand the issues. The answer, the great one seems to think, is to engage in a massive program to educate the masses before the next general election in 2014. As much as I admire Rush and appreciate his heroic efforts to save our country from socialism, I think he has missed the boat badly on this one, just as he did when he predicted that the country would never re-elect Obama in 2012. We just couldn't be stupid enough to make that mistake again, could we? By the way, I predicted Obama's re-election in my novel Escape From Chaos which was written in 2010. In any case, I believe Rush is badly off tract on this one too. While it is true, that the average person who voted for Obama and his crew of liberal misfits could not tell you the name of their state or congressional representatives if their lives depended on it, that observation is irrelevant and completely beside the point. The fact is that, come election time, these people, although not well informed with respect to the political issues of the day, know full well which side of their bread is buttered and, more importantly, who's buttering it for them. The vast majority of the so called low information voters are single issue constituents of the Democrat party. These people are the new majority in America and they could care less about issues like the national debt, gay marriage, abortion, military readiness or you name it. Oh, a few of their members do, but the vast majority of them have no interest what so ever in the social issues of the day. Rather, these people have spent most of their lives with their hands in someone else's pocket and, come election time, they have been conditioned to vote for the party that will keep the manna flowing from Washington DC. That party would be the Demoratic party of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and our present dear leader Barack Hussein Obama. The reader will note that I always resist the urge to call this guy Barack Insane Obama because this ticking time bomb from Reverend Jeremiah's Wright's church is far from insane. On the contrary , he learned his lessons from Bill Ayers, Saul Alinsky and his communist mother and father well and he knows exactly what he is doing as he leads the nation down the path to financial ruin. In any case, when the handlers of the low information voters herd their liberal friends into the busses that will carry them to the polling booths every two years, the sheeple do not even have to know the names of the candidates on the ballot before they make their marks on the pieces of paper placed before them. In fact, they don't even have to be able to read or write. No, the only requirement for the low information voter to cast their vote is for them to be able recognize the (D) beside the candidates name. They may not be able to tell you the day of the week, the time of day or even who won the last Forty Niners football game, but they do know that (D) stands for something good (in this case gimme, gimme and gimme some more); that (R) stands for something bad(a slight decrease in governmental largess); and that (I) stands for irrelevant (well, in truth they probably don't know the meaning of big words like irrelevant so they just ignore the (Is) who somehow may have accidentally stumbled onto the ballot. To think that any attempt to educate the low information voters would have made had the slightest bit of difference in any past election, is simply absurd! Sorry Rush, but you are way out in left field on this one, maybe even on some other planet smoking high priced fairy dust cigars and drinking vastly overpriced bottles of California wine Nope, the only way to win over the millions of low information gimme voters is to somehow convince them that the Republican party will out spend the liberal Demorats in a feeble attempt to buy their votes. Now, the low information voters may not be all that bright, but they are never going to fall for a line of BS like this, not in a million years they won't! So, barring some unforeseen catastrophe that will bring the masses to their senses and pull us back from the brink of fiscal insanity, we are finished as a country. Might as well stick a fork in us and be done with it! Yes, the Demorats will have won the day but, I think, it will be a very hollow victory for them in the long run, a very hollow victory indeed. I take some solace in the fact that after most revolutions the political leaders of overthrown regimes are the first to be blindfolded and lined up against the wall. I expect that when that day comes, which it inevitably will, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, Barack Obama and the rest of the Washington liberal ruling class will conclude that they simply didn't give the masses enough cake or flat screen TVs to prevent the revolution.

Why Can't We Control The Gangs?

Gang related murders are on the rise in every large city in America with new records for the slaughter of innocents being set on almost a daily basis in cities like Oakland, Long beach, Los Angles, Newark, Chicago, Oklahoma City and Washington DC. The question I would like to ask the politicians on both side of the isle is this. Why is it that we were able to eliminate the powerful and well organized Mafia in a relatively short period of time, but cannot deal with the low IQ uneducated misfits who, for all practical purposes, control the streets of almost every large city in America? Just why is this? There can be only one answer to this question. We, as a society, refuse to deal with root causes of inner city crime! First, let's be clear about one thing, it's not the guns or the drugs that are the problem. No, the mafia had plenty of guns and the mob was involved in every illegal activity imaginable including extortion, illegal gambling, drug dealing, prostitution, the illegal sale of liquor during prohibition and, last but not least, the wholesale bribery of corrupt politicians. The mafia also was much better organized than are the street gangs of today. Yet, despite the magnitude of the problem posed by the mob, the FBI was able to eliminate them and their illegal activities in a few short years. There is no doubt in my mind that gang related crime could be greatly curtailed, if not eliminated entirely, if local and federal politicians had the will to do so. Just how hard would it be to free our streets of criminals who brazenly wear clothing that identifies them as members of a specific lawless gang? I ask again, why don't we lock up these gang-banger and throw away the key? When all is said and done it all comes down to race. The vast majority of street gang criminals are either of Black, Chicano or of Asian descent. Sure there are Caucasian gangs in America, but they are not responsible for the high murder rates in Oakland, Chicago or Washington DC. More importantly, there would be little or no resistance to any program designed to eliminate Caucasian gangs just as there was no resistance to the wide ranging policies that helped us rid ourselves of the mob. The problem is, that to control the members of White gangs, we would have to step on the toes of minority gang members and that, of course, is politically unacceptable. Whether we like it or not, in today's America members of minority groups are in a protected class which makes it difficult or impossible to enforce any policy that could be seen as being the slightest bit raciest. The ACLU would go berserk if congress tried to pass a law like the RICO act (that was enacted to curtail mob activities in 1970) that was designed specifically to curtail the unlawful activities of any minority segment of our population, especially if that group is primarily made up of Blacks or Chicanos. No way Jose, is that ever going to happen in a million years in twenty-first century America. What should be done to stop the carnage? First, all gang related criminal activity should come under the jurisdiction of the federal government and all gang related offenders should be tried in a federal court. If convicted, gang bangers should sent to a federal penitentiary for a minimum of ten years with no time off for, so called, good behavior. If guns are involved in their criminal activity, they should be imprisoned for life with no possibility of parole. Second, if one member of a gang commits a crime (like a drive by shooting) all members of the gang should be treated as accessories to the crime; they should be tried as a group; and again, if convicted, receive the same sentence as the perpetrator of the crime. Finally, all gang members over the age of 14 should be tried as adults, no exceptions. Admittedly, our present laws would have to be tweaked a bit to implement new anti-gang measures such as this, but we were willing to change our laws in our war against the mafia and there is no reason not to do so again as we engage, for the first time, in a meaningful effort to free the streets of our inner cities from gang related violence. Unfortunately, this is all pie in the sky! Nothing of significance will be done and the killings will go on and on and on. The politicians will wring their collective hands and continue to throw money at programs like head start which have no positive effect other than to make the politicos and their liberal supporters feel good. In the meantime, the senseless slaughter of the innocent men, women and children of color in our inner cities will continue as civil society slowly crumbles before our very eyes.

The Tail Of Two Cities.

When I was a child some 70 years ago, my Aunt Dot and Uncle Herb Lived in the Oakland hills. For those of you who, thanks to the Internet, may be reading this blog from a faraway land, Oakland lies across the bay from San Francisco. In any case, in those days Oakland was an idyllic paradise much the same as San Francisco, but with a far better climate (milder temperatures and no fog). My Aunt and Uncle's home was located high in the Oakland Hills with a view of the south bay to die for. The sight from their large kitchen picture window was particularly spectacular at night when the twinkling lights from the city below extended as far as the eye could see. The middle class homes on Maxwell Avenue were immaculately maintained with tree lined sidewalks and beautiful green lawns. This town was middle class America at its best. At that time, in the 1940s, Oakland's downtown was a thriving center of commerce that would be the envy of any large city today with beautiful theaters, magnificent retail stores and a thriving automobile row that extended for 10 to 12 blocks along North Broadway. Today, much of Oakland is a waste land and stands out, only in a negative way, as the murder capital of California. Before long it may rival Chicago as the murder capital of USA. More than half of Oakland's young black males are either in prison or on parole. Nearly every store front along Broadway is boarded up and auto row is a thing of the distant past. The few business offices that have survived the cities destruction are confined to a couple of high-rises protected by armed guards and surrounded by homeless people who live in, what for all practical purposes, is a third world country. The beautiful residential area where my aunt and Uncle lived in when I was a child is now surrounded by crime ridden slums. High street is now Low Street. What went wrong? How did this atrocity happen? I expect there is more than one reason for destruction of this once beautiful city by the bay, but one event stands out in my mind as more important than all others. In the early part of the last century there was an unwritten rule in Oakland, Blacks were not allowed to own property on the east side of East 14th Street. Yes, this was segregation at its worst but, guess what, it worked for many years! Sometime in the early 1940's this voluntary mandate, enforced by white property owners in the Oakland hills, began to crack as the first blacks crossed East 14th street and began to invade the Oakland hills. Within 20 years the Caucasians, who had made their homes in this beautiful part of the city for generations, had abandoned ship and headed through the Caldecott tunnel to the suburbs along the 680 corridor east Of the Oakland hills. The rest of the story is history. The fact that blacks finally broke the color barrier and gained access to White Oakland was not, however, what brought Oakland to its collective knees. No, not by a long shot, that honor rests squarely on the shoulders of Lyndon Baines Johnson and his infamous Great Society which promised equal justice and equal opportunity for all Americans. Unfortunately, the welfare state constructed by Johnson and his liberal supporters had the opposite effect because their socialist policies supporting welfare mothers destroyed, in a matter of a few short years, the fabric of the black family. When all was said and done, the Blacks in America survived slavery, or at least out lasted it, but they could not overcome Johnson's attempts to right the wrongs inflicted on their far distant ancestors by confederate slave owners who had died hundreds of years before. The fact that over 300,000 northern soldiers lost their lives in the great civil war fighting to free the slaves is of no consequence to modern day Blacks or, for that matter, their new liberal masters. The single parent families fostered by well meaning, but demented, liberals like Johnson, were no match for the pimps, drug dealers and other low-lives who soon came to control every facet of street life in Oakland as they did in every other American city that was run by Black liberal politicians. Things have gotten so bad in Detroit that they dismantling the city brick by brick and returning the land to nature. Alas, even the best efforts of Black grandmothers and their Black church leaders were no match for the chaos that occurred when Johnson's economic policies drove the Black bread winners from their families and turned their children loose on the crime ridden streets of Black America.. What can be done to turn this sinking ship around? In truth, I think nothing! The wonderful shinning city by the bay that was Oakland is gone forever and the new lawless poverty stricken Oakland is here to stay! I am glad my Aunt and Uncle, who were diehard liberals, did not live to see the Oakland of today.

An Immigration Reform We All Can Agree On.

When all is said and done, I do not believe in any more immigration, legal or illegal. After all, we already have 313,914,040 people in this country, more than enough, tens of millions more than enough! There are over 7000 so called institutions of higher learning in the USA and if they can't turn out enough engineers to fill the needs of the hi-tech America, we should concentrate on the overpaid incompetents that run these places rather than relying on the colleges in China and India to fill our needs. As I have discussed at great length in some of my previous blogs, we also do not need a single more illegal from South America to meet our agricultural needs. All we have to do to solve this problem is to force the low-lives on welfare and those on extended unemployment who can work to go to work. It's as simple as that! But, of course, there is no place in today's America for common sense answers to issues like the soaring national debt or immigration reform. But there is one immigration reform that is long overdue that we should be able to agree on. That is immediate repeal of Section 1 of the Constitution's 14th Amendment. This amendment, which made every person born in the USA an automatic citizen of the country, was passed during reconstruction to assure that black children born to salves were made citizens of the country. It was not the purpose of this Amendment to give automatic citizenship to children of illegal's who gave birth while trespassing on US soil. One could write a book on the legal implications of these anchor babies and the problems they cause society, none of which are good for America. However, we all should be able to agree that there is no justification for Section 1 of the 14th Amendment of the constitution in today's America, none at all! In this respect, it is of interest to note that birthright citizenship for the children of illegal's has been rescinded by Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, the United Kingdom and even, God help us, socialist France. It's time we got with the program! Eliminating anchor babies will not solve all of our immigration problems but it will be a baby step in the right direction.

The Liberal Biased Free Press.

I read our local liberal rag, The Contra Costa Slimes, religiously just to keep abreast of the communist activity in our area. The stupidity and naivety of this newspaper's editorial staff never ceases to amaze me. I could write a blog about the editorials these clowns create every day for the next year and not begin to scratch the surface of the misinformation and outright lies that are propagated daily in the editorial pages of this newspaper. Today, however, I want to take these liberal bastards to task for something they did not chose to cover in their tabloid. The annual Walk of Life, commemorating the 40th university of the dreadful Roe vs. Wade decision, took place in San Francisco on January 26 of this year. An estimated 40,000 people of all ages and racial ethnicities participated in this event. Amazingly at it may seem to those of us who oppose infanticide, the event was completely ignored by the Contra Costa Slimes. It was as if an event that drew 40,000 protestors never even happened. I am sure the Slimes can come up with a number of excuses for their decision not to cover an event of this magnitude. Maybe all their reporters called in sick that day. Alternately, maybe, in the view of the Slimes, a protest that does not result in millions of dollars in property damage or a killing or two, does not deserve attention from the press. Whatever the reason, rest assured that the liberal bias demonstrated by the papers refusal to cover the Walk of Life march for moral sanity did not go unnoticed by the few conservatives and people of faith who remain in the bay area. One last thing while I am on the subject of the liberal bias of the local press. The under informed members of the Slimes editorial board spend a great deal of time nit-picking the policies of the liberals who control every aspect of our lives in the now, not so great, state of California. They rail against Governor Brown's train to nowhere; they scold the liberal politicos who support the corrupt leaders of our public employee unions and their unsustainable retirement programs; and they routinely criticize the decisions made by our incompetent brain dead school administrators. Yet, come election time, the Slimes editorial board supports every liberal Demoratic candidate on the ballot (yes, this in not a miss spelling, I meant to say Demoratic). You see, when all is said and done, the editorial board at the Slimes do seem know right from wrong. At crunch time, however, they just can't bring themselves to do the right thing, no matter how hard they try.