Murphy’s Bye-Laws

The key to healing as many people as possible is to ensure that as many people as possible are broken.  Similar to the dictum that to ensure that as many people as possible fall under your authority in a “law and order” society you expand the law to cover everything under the sun.  We are all guilty of something broken in some manner; this is essentially the healthcare version of the broken window fallacy.

I have had the pleasure of having a rock thrown through my metaphorical window and wound up as shards in the dust pan of a doctor.  Apparently, I am going to drop dead of a heart attack any minute now (or 20 years from now or 50 years from now)(assuming I’m not killed in a gulag first).  I’ve been given this death sentence because there is some sort of metric devised that states what a healthy amount of lipids to have in one’s bloodstream is.  This metric, I’m certain, was devised about the average person across a certain population of a certain location or region by people being paid to drum up a market for drugs and/or treatment.  There is no mention of outliers.  Most statistical analyzes – which these studies are – have outliers that can statistically be ignored to get a reasonable probability of a certain outcome.  Statistics is also not a good way to separate cause and correlation.  Based on a metric devised in this manner, I am statistically safer taking some medication twice a day, everyday, for the rest of my life (sorry, liver, it is for our own good).

I’m not a person obsessed with organic or all natural products, but I do try to choose the more natural, less processed items the majority of the time.  Based on this habit, ingesting man-made chemicals (that aren’t nurishing and don’t even taste good) twice everyday seems kind of counter-intuitive.  I have no idea what long-term effects of these drugs are; they could be slowly exhausting my liver, interfering with other functions, and any number of little accumulating things.  All of this based on some statistics produced by the “science” of advocacy.

My personal statistics, based on observations of myself and my family, say that my body is meant to have such metrics concerning my lipids and such – or at least can handle it.  A similar condition runs pretty uniformly through my immediate family, regardless of variables such as activity, diet, age, and other ailments.  In counting these statistics, there has been one (non-fatal) incident with regards to these numbers before the age of 70.  The rest of the statistics say I will live to a ripe old age (excluding demise by gulag) in spite of the emminent danger posed by some numbers.

It is an uphill battle explaining myself to my family, my doctor, etc when the science (a.k.a. what the media reports on every other month about what is currently bad for our health before reversing themselves a few months later ad infinitum) that finds new reasons for taking pills everyday tells me I need pills.  The state of science, or as I called it earlier, the science of advocacy, leaves plenty of room for scepticism.  But skepticism is better served as the catalyst for science rather than the result of it.  I guess I’m taking my chances, but aren’t we all going to lose eventually?

The economy is collapsing like an 800-pound gorilla on balsa stilts (wearing an Uncle Sam getup, no less).  Most everyone, including the governments at all levels but the top, are feeling the pinch as business slows.  Businesses that are “too big to fail” are dropping one after the other, and small businesses and entrepreneurs are struggling as much or more.  Many people in this situation turn to the government to “do something,”  anything,  to solve the crisis – and not in a “you made the mess; you clean it up” kind of way, either.  In the Youngstown area, this apparently means forcefully trying to close a business because it isn’t in the proper zoning district.  From the Youngstown Vindicator article:

On Nov. 3, 2008, Judge Durkin, of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court, issued a permanent injunction barring operation of the winery in its lakefront location off Southeast River Road, which is zoned as a residential district.

The injunction followed Judge Durkin’s October ruling that the winery cannot validly claim to be an agricultural land use that is exempt from township zoning regulations.

Perhaps they should claim to be cultivating alcohol from the sugar in the grape juice, or even cultivating fertilizer since they started a business and bullshit just pops up!

It is no surprise that zoning ordinance billed as being for your protection really aren’t – unless, of course, you are the owner of an established business with established political ties.  Governmental interference in commerce via zoning, tax, regulations, prohibitions, and accounting laws may as well be the weight tied to the people’s ankles as they try to tread the water that the Federal Reserve just keeps releasing as they open the flood gates further and further open.  My hometown’s economic landscape isn’t any deeper under the water than most, but the residents have been wading through this stagnant filthy water for so long, they seem to thirst for it.

I guess I’ll have to make a trip to partonize this winery in the near future.

I thought I’d take this opportunity to try and recharge my will power this afternoon by writing a blog entry since cheesy, delicious Egg McMuffins are currently unavailable. I need the recharge because my meter is currently reading “fumes.” So before I had to get out and push, I thought I’d try a stop-gap of writing. So far so good.

While on the subject of will power, especially at work, I am reminded of a brief conversation with a druncle this weekend about what constitutes labor. He is a long-time auto worker in Ohio and considered what us “educated kids” do something other than labor. Under the protective umbrella of common usage, labor is typically meant to be manual labor and the shadow of that umbrella cast on everything else makes it look like labor’s arch-nemesis, management. Divide and conquer, I suppose. But there are many ins, many outs, many what-have-yous in terms of classifying and defining labor. Read the rest of this entry »