First of all, thank you for an intelligent, thoughtful and non-polemical discussion of race/minority based politics and its downstream effects especially in medicine.
I entered medical school in 1966 and graduated from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1970. I have been an passionate and active advocate for freedom and fairness all of my sentient life (I got kicked out of an organization for lack of right think/right speak for the first time at the tender age of 14), attending my first political rally for integration in DC when I was 17 years old. So I have a LOOOOOOONNNGGGGG history in these wars.
After the assassinations of MLK and RFK in 1968, my progressive medical school ("liberal" back then, when that had a very different meaning) set up the King-Kennedy Program, which recognized the disparity of preparation opportunities for otherwise suitable candidates for admission to medical school.
In the affirmative action zeitgeist of the time (institutionalized racism doused with a whole lot of self-congratulatory kumbaya, but never dealing with the root causes of the problem), they set up a very generous scholarship for disadvantaged black candidates who had completed university but could not make the grade because of discriminatory educational and social conditions. Well and good.
These fortunate young people would receive a generous financial stipend, room and board, books and supplies, live on campus and receive a year of remedial education to prepare them to stand for the MCATs a year later.
Sounds lovely, right? Except for the fact that the "disadvantaged" students chosen were 1. the daughter of a black neurosurgeon who had attended an elite Ivy League university but was an uninterested and very desultory student, 2. a black Oriental Languages major from Columbia University who had never take an pre med course but thought "it would be fun to be a doctor" and a couple of other students who qualified ONLY because they had a sufficiently discernable amount of melanin in their skin.
Not one of them achieved passing marks for admission when they took the MCAT a year later. But ALL of them were admitted to the medical school class because, and here I quote from what the Dean of Admissions told me when I raised the question of why unqualified students had been admitted, denying places to qualified ones, "not admitting them would be racist".
As they pursued their medical educations, what is your guess as to whether their performance was evaluated to the same standards as more "privileged" students and whether the resulting medical competence they could deliver to every one of their patients was what each of those patients had a right to expect and, indeed, what they were hinging their very survival upon?
If medical education quality, rigor and honesty, delivered to the highest quality, most qualified students makes no difference to outcome, then why spend the time and effort, to say nothing of the money involved, on it? If those components are both significant, then anything like affirmative action or DEI, or, call it what it is, straight up racism, endangers lives, lots and lots and lots of lives and degrades the fluttering tatters of what is left of the dignity and virtue of our allegedly once noble profession.
When do we develop the spine, the fortitude, the guts, the principles, the balls, to look those who want to destroy everything we hold dear as decent human beings, in the eye and the ballot box and the wallet and tell them the truth, with a resounding "Not only 'NO!', but HELL NO!"
By the way, those same destroyers are fomenting the disgusting "Comprehensive Sexuality Education" and 15 minute cities and digital vaccine IDs and CBDC.
And falling for it is made virtuous by the Ministry of Truth.
And say it to groupism (race, gene therapy status, political affiliation, antisemitism, islamophobia, sexism, whatever) in medicine. Say it loud, and often and don't stop saying it until it no longer needs to be said because we have drowned out the race/minority politics crap.
Thank you for sharing your historical perspectives on this. My belief is that the medical field earned a lot of social credit through recruiting the most qualified members of society and then putting them through a rigorous training path which guaranteed they could produce a good outcome which was worthy of that credit.
However, what then happened was once that credit was taken for granted (and pharma money was put behind it) was that a lot of corners started getting cut, unqualified people became doctors and doctors have become assembly line workers pushing what ever the (often corrupt) standard of care was because they had the social credit to be trusted at face value.
In the long term, this along with taking away the autonomy physicians have to do what they feel is right is going to destroy the public's faith in the medical system, and I believe COVID-19 greatly accelerated the process. So, my best guess is that at some point the glowing reputation doctor's have to the public will drop dramatically and it is only at that point that the profession will realize it needs to start performing at a high level in order to regain that lost trust and prestigue (at which point in may be too late).
Yes, exactly. Just on Wednesday, I had the slightly annoying experience of explaining to my nurse practitioner why I had "resigned" from the statin I was still taking a year ago (basically, that I'd done in-depth research and was now wise to the fact that statins did Jack Shit for primary prevention.) She was still required, she explained, by the standard of care, to recommend I go back on a statin because by LDL was a bit high. I realize that regulations require her to so act. But even so, to finally experience this was a bit surreal.
"Standard of care" has killed a lot of people, especially in oncology....I had the joy of spending the weekend at a REAL health conference, filled with energy practitioners, EMF-aware doctors, physicists who study water (and know we are ~70% water), biologists, etc. Everyone spoke of brilliant scientists like Mae-Wan Ho, William Tiller, Robert Becker, Richard Gerber, Beverly Rubik, Gary Schwartz, Fritz-Albert Popp, Krishna Madappa, etc. People were being healed of injuries within days using new technologies instead of being tortured to death by the medical cartels. <sigh>
I was really pleased this week.... I was at the doctors office and the nurse asked me, “ have you had the flu shot this year?” I responded, “No” she asked would you like to have one before you leave the office? I responded, “No” and that was the end of the conversation. ☺️
Many years ago I worked as a Medical Assistant/lab tech for a small HMO in Massachusetts. I was completely disillusioned with the medical field during that time. The particular practice I worked for specialized in Geriatric medicine. 15 minutes, and 15 minutes ONLY was allotted for each patient. Most of them had multiple issues i.e. diabetes, high blood pressure, COPD, etc. yet they still only received 15 minutes with their primary care, PA, or NP. They were on so many meds, from so many different docs, and in my opinion many were not needed but no one seemed to care. Take this for that, then this one for that side effect, and on and on and on.
There was one member Doc of the practice who bucked the 15 minute slots, and suffice to say she was the pariah of the group. Yet I learned more from her and her favorite nurse (He was ex-military and so full of knowledge) than any of the other arrogant, narcissists in that practice.
I stopped that career path fairly soon after because I was simply disgusted by what I saw.
Fast forward 30 years later and I have even less faith in the medical community. They are bought and sold by Pharma, full stop.
Any docs, nurses, PA's or NP's with a shred of integrity are silenced, threatened, and pushed out of their field.
Medical Tyranny is alive and well. Pray for us all.
You Dr. are an example of the saying 'a conservative is a liberal who has been (at least figuratively) been mugged. I posted similar thoughts above in this stream. Thank you for the link to the resistance movement; already signed.
Dr. Kimber, thank you for taking action. Please share the site with as many people as you can reach.
Conservative.... mugged liberal, well, in my case, I have believed, espoused and fought for precisely the same things throughout my life but the background has changed so the scenery now says "Conservative" behind me where it used to say "Classical Liberal". My positions have, for good or ill, neither changed nor evolved!
It is actually pretty weird, when you think about it, which I do often.
What has not changed is my determination to not allow the globalist agenda for depopulation and enslavement, to prevail.
140 years ago they were called Fabian Socialists and then figured out that they were eugenicists and neo feudal supremacists and now we get to call them Globalists. They like us to call them elite, but they are scum, murderous, bat-shit crazy scum.
I will pass the site on. I hope more from this thread do. Thank you for posting the link.
Classic Liberalism is actually conservatism to trace the roots without being tied to political party labels, but splitting hairs. I similarly have largely kept the same philosophy, but have found that as RR said, I didn't leave the Democrat Party, the party left me. And we are learning that his other famous aphorism is so true, the 9 most dangerous words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.' Whether it be regulatory capture or unintended consequences of ideas and programs that seemed good at the time . . .
And I agree that they are scum, elite scum all prettied up in their tuxes and suits in Davos . . .
It's a side issue now (or is it?) The awful truth is that there are valid arguments in favor of "negative" (coercive) eugenics. To argue otherwise is to deny the very basic laws of nature, in this case of natural selection and the survival of the fittest. I do concede that [negative] eugenics is fundamentally at odds with the Western enlightenment concepts of liberty that are the basis of our culture. I will only note that civilization is, by one definition, a rebellion against Nature. In other words, Man's attempt to impose his will upon the outside world, which rapidly runs up against hard limits, much as we might wish that were not so. In the case of our culture, we de facto practice “unnatural selection,” which if we dare admit it, has the net result of the weakening, not the strengthening, of the herd. Nature will eventually impose various corrective measures, the exact timing and details of which are unknown to me, except that they will be most unpleasant for those who must undergo the procedure.
Whoo HOO! Save your boots and save your spurs! The Reich will rise again!
Doorknob, for all the words you have just used, the basis of your argument is that life is hard, I can assure that resources are scarce and I get to decide who lives and dies while I rationalize consummate immorality as "Nature's Plan".
Nope. Not working for me.
Substituting one glossed over genocide for another changes nothing but the party favors.
How about the fact, and it is a fact, that we do not have a scarcity of resources, we have a scarcity of availability, carefully engineered and perpetuated by those in charge of the scarcity.
That is how the math works out when you do it without the political bias. See www.TheMythofOverPopulation.org for some discussion of that reality.
Your handle is, based on your remarks, well chosen. I choose to open doors that do not lead to genocide of anybody, for any rationalization or what is often misnamed a "reason".
I do not take my guidance from the bible, but it has some pretty good ideas scattered through it and one of them is that there are actual commandments, not suggestions, for how to live in reasonable harmony as humans, not as predatory beasts.
True, they are much, much more often honored in the breach than in the observance, but "Thous shalt not kill" is a pretty good rule of thumb and genocide is killing on a huge, massive, humongous dose of Satan's steroids so it strikes me as a great big Thou Shalt NOT".
Call it positive or negative eugenics, you are violating the free will of your fellow humans. Not a great plan, in my view.
Your objections are noted. I re-read my post and I don’t see anywhere I advocated anything, especially genocide. Perhaps you misunderstood my phrase “unnatural selection.” By “unnatural” I mean that man is exercising some control over his reproduction. Yes, I guess that could be taken to mean negative eugenics. I wanted to describe human mating in normal times which is somewhere between haphazard and reasonably well planned. At the other extreme, I suppose, would be a dystopian science fiction world where every future child was genetically engineered or at least the genes of the parents vetted. That would be “positive” eugenics in the sense that the intent was betterment of the species.
The gist of my post was that what civilization wants is often at odds with what Nature "wants." Purveyor of Badthink I may be, I still enjoy the good things that civilization offers. I would rather live in civilization than by jungle law. Problem: the jungle was around long, long before Man appeared on the scene, and it’ll likely be here long, long after we (and our ethics, our laws, our morality, religions, etc.) have gone the way of all flesh..
If I misunderstood your post, you have my apologies.
If we were part of nature in the way wild animals are, we would not have evolved any significant tool use (yes, birds and chimpanzees use sticks for this and that and some fish use bits of debris to cover masses of eggs and so on, but constructions, forming, then farming, then planning, then speaking, then writing, etc., etc.,, etc., is implementation and rearrangement of features found in nature, or they would not be found in us to find outside of us.
But animals control their reproduction, too. Population pressure causes a reduction in fertility in a variety of species. Cetacians determine when to become fertile based on what they experience environmentally, I understand.
But I really do not understand your point.
Reproductive decision-making is not the same thing as eugenics, is it?
In lots of human communities, the top dog on some ladder or other gets the most desirable mate(s),
The concept of eugenics is far from choiceful and benign, however.
So I really am confused. If you care to enlighten me, that would be useful.
Rima E Laibow MD, thank you for adding a comment to A Midwestern Doctor's article. I so appreciate both of you for your contributions for people to have an opportunity to consider what is transpiring around us in this world from a sound perspective.
Dr. Rima, I have been paying attention to matters pertaining to achieving and maintaining good health. In my journey along that pathway I became aware of your work in the early days of internet access to health information. I became aware of you early on, and one thing that caused me to dig deeper and expand considerations contributing to what I perceived as behind the scenes attempts to keep people sick as there was no profit in one being healthy or dead, but rather in 'managing' them through 'illness/disease.' When you spoke of your becoming aware of those who were wanting to 'cull useless eaters' that went deep within my consciousness and was the crack in the door that opened up to me a side of human insanity that needed to be considered in my continued searching. I thank you for your integrity and not backing down on providing truths for people to be made aware of. It has been a valuable tool in understanding and resisting the despotic influences being used against the population of the world and the environment we live in. My prayers for your continued strength and protection as you walk in the light of truth.
Blessings to both you and A Midwestern Doctor for all your efforts.
I have subscribed to over thirty substack writers since the beginning of substack. Over time, I have noticed that many of the writers who ostensibly drew rational conclusions from data and appeared to espouse a reasonable data-driven argument would instantaneously convert to a rabid tribalist when the subject matter switched. Some examples: writers who apparently could see through the Covid propaganda, but then swallowed the Ukraine propaganda; writers who could see through the Ukraine propaganda but then blindly accepted the climate change propaganda, etc. Very few can stay objective from subject to subject. Kudos to A Midwestern Doctor for nailing it again; a data driven, objective, reasoned argument!
Basically, everyone has beliefs and then will find ways to support those beliefs.
The core beliefs I hold I never actually discuss on here (because they are "my beliefs" rather than what I believe to be objective reality).
In my case I rarely hold predetermined conclusions about things and just try to figure out what I think is actually true and accept that a lot of subjects are very gray and not at all clearcut.
I've noticed the same thing, and find it weird that people who mistrusted the government and MSM on the vaccines fell right into line on Ukraine. It's the same cabal running both programs people! Same goes for 'climate change' and the LGBQ trans nonsense.
If a man isn’t aware of his limitations (hat tip to Clint Eastwood character) reality will make sure that they are manifest, often in a most definitive way.
One outcome of affirmative action you didn't mention is the impact it has on competent employees who happen to belong to a so-called disadvantaged group. The assumption is that they obtained their position through favouritism (which is what AA really is) and not because they excelled in their field. This creates a stigma where one wouldn't otherwise exist if competency were the only criteria.
It's a valid point I agree with but I chose not to cover it here because I felt it was a tangental point and me citing the bigotry of low expectations would hence come across as me being biased and simply searching for arguments to support my pre-existing position rather than someone who was doing their best to present an objective assessment of the situation.
Sadly, under the system currently in force, the observer is acting rationally. If the only information available is "race" (or sex, other visibly apparent category), then one can make certain assumptions based on known statistics. What follows is my recollection of the race vs. IQ data; I goofed earlier and have slightly edited here to make it a bit more accurate. American blacks mean IQ = 85, whites = 100. Some races, notably Ashkenazi (“European”) Jews and East Asians have even higher, in the 110-115 range.
At least in the time before standards were watered down, to become a doctor of medicine probably required one be in the “gifted” range, which is roughly IQ = 130+
For whites, that is roughly in the +2 standard deviation (SD) range. Stated another way, whites at SD+1 are at about the 85 percentile (for whites), SD+2 puts you in the 97th percentile. If one uses SD+2 as the cutoff that means that only about 3% of the white population is smart enough to train to be an MD.
Blacks due to their different distribution will be much rarer, the higher the IQ goes.
Black SD+1 is about the white mean (IQ=100). Only about 1 in 6 blacks is smarter than the average white. Equivalently, and pessimistically, about 5 in 6 are dumber than the average white.
The disparity grows worse the higher IQ goes. At White SD+1 (IQ=115) that will be SD+2 for blacks and they are rare indeed, as with whites, they are in their 97 percentile. Stated another way, if we call 115 the beginning of “bright” (but still far short of “gifted”) we are talking about 15% of whites but only 3% of blacks. (about 5:1 ratio)
At white SD+2 (IQ=130) we are down to about 3% of whites. For blacks they'd be well into their 99th percentile. I don't have a precise ratio but I'd guess at least 30:1.
Disquieting though these data may be, the inescapable conclusion that must be drawn is that, as cognitive demands increase, blacks relative to whites at a given IQ level will become more and more rare. The imbalance is even worse when one considers that there are about 5 times as many whites as blacks. This means, in our doctor example here, that if our low cutoff is IQ=130, then we would expect 150 qualified whites, but just one black who makes the cut. In the higher professions then, this means that if you see more than the very infrequent black, you know you are likely dealing with people promoted far above what their level of competence would suggest.
As noted elsewhere, it's no secret that standards have been dumbed down over a period of many years. This was done in the name of equity. But the downside is that standards have dropped for everybody. This has dangerous consequences downstream, in the risks of incompetence leading to injury and death.
Nicholas Wade's "A Troublesome Inheritance" makes much the same point. So did Charles Murray's "The Bell Curve." Both these authors were cancelled and Charles Murray was attacked by a violent college mob. Wonder why it's such a sensitive issue? If something is disprovable people typically engage in rational discussion and debate.
Thomas Sowell in his new book “Social Justice Fallacies” gives the best short analysis of affirmative action and its consequences that I have ever read. I highly recommend the book.
As a woman, I have an axe to grind against females being pushed ahead of males as doctors, even if they've got better grades. For one thing, there are enough of us stay at home moms to make the target percentage of women doctors much lower than fifty percent.
For another, the medical student loans make it hard for women doctors to drop out down the line and so they faced a heightened likelihood of abortion to maintain payments on debt. Then, they work this abortion out on their patients via some type of unconscious abortion derangement syndrome.
This is an important point and why I and many of my colleagues try to support female medical students. Unless you've been one or had a lot of close friends who were, it's really difficult to appreciate all the extra things they have to struggle with during the medical training process.
I am a Mrs in graduate biochemistry (rhymes with kisses), and I wonder whether it's possible for a female med student to "drop out" as easily as I did when she meets her mate (or meets her mote (baby!)). In particular, how does student debt get treated? (I had none). Is there any way to debt forgiveness based on how medical careers are oversold to women?
Cool. OMG as a woman, I hate it. Wow. Abortion is a personal decision, not something that women "work out on others" with derangement! And women can be pretty good at not getting pregnant -- that's what birth control is for.
I would not set much store in Zinn's book, I read it and and believed its assertions for years. I was fortunate, however, to have people in my life whom I respected and who had investigated different sources, and introduced them to me. I started to do my own research. I investigated and so came to realize that Zinn had a Marxist-Anarchist axe to grind and that axe was best sharpened by falsifying history and slanting his narrative. Here’s a critique by another historian.. I think you may find it interesting.
But Zinn did not do real history—that is, scholarship that builds on the work of previous historians, gives accurate and detailed information, and presents a balanced view. A People’s History, like the 1619 Project, drew criticism from historians on the left and right. Kazin felt that it shortchanged progressive accomplishments like labor laws and civil rights; Harvard professor Oscar Handlin called it a “fairy tale.” Still, the book kept selling, and sales total about three million today.
In writing Debunking Howard Zinn, I read many of Zinn’s sources and found egregious plagiarism (usually from New Left historians and socialist non-historians, like Hans Koning), deletion of critical information, deliberate misrepresentation of sources, and invention of facts. Zinn used his status as a professor to discredit other historians. He attacked Gordon Wood’s mentor, Bernard Bailyn, whose name appears on many of Zinn’s lecture notes.
My view is that every source of information is biased and you have to factor for that. I didn't agree with many of the points he raised, I just found the one I cited here compelling and never forgot it.
Totally agree with your comment, Cara, thank you for writing this! Many years ago, I read Zinn and at the time believed him. Later on, I realized he was a total fraud as was his work. Thank goodness I woke up, did my own research and realized he was a Marxist. Thanks also for the book recommendation, I will check it out.
If we keep lowering the bar on educational standards, eliminating grades and giving passes on the basis of origin, we are sliding down a slippery slope in all professions and not only medicine. Merit, Knowledge and dedication needs to be prime. My grandsons are building their careers in medicine, and it is apparent they are short staffed and over worked. Just another aspect that does not bode well.
“no group can ever be relied upon to solve a problem its existence revolves around solving.” 2023
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor 1935
I bet if we studied ancient Sanskrit we would find similar sentiments from their wise ones.
I 100% agree with both quotes and frequently cite them. In the case of the former, I came up with myself (I often say organization or cause instead of group)
Basically every not for profit for any cause will, consciously or not, never solve the problem. Yet people keep donating to them. Worse, many not for profits are really political agents in sheep’s clothing, and use those donor dollars to push their politics on everyone.
Even, or especially true for the ASPCA, HSUS, PETA. For most animal rights zealots, they ultimately want to ban pet ownership, ban consumption of REAL meat and milk and eggs. And sadly they are winning right now because the people fall for their expert propaganda with the sad puppy dog eyes and because they have hooked up with billionaires looking to control the food to control the people and further enrich themselves along the way like Bill Gates.
They are regulating agriculture out of existence. See Epoch Times documentary “No Farmers, No Food.”
The problem with health care is the system itself. Doctors are not in the business of healing a patients disease. They are in business of managing a patient's disease for the rest of their lives with drugs, vaccines and surgery.......PERIOD!!!! Medical care is actually about extracting money from the patient (Insurance Companies), and doing anything that would reduce expenses or heal the patient will NOT happen. Otherwise Doctors would be out of business!
I have not used the Medical Cartel System in over 10 years since I had cancer 13 years ago. You could not pay me enough money to use it, because it does not cure anyone, but instead enslaves people by creating a nation of drug addicts, and these drug pushers who peddle these drugs and are identified by their title of “doctor” with a “Dr.” in front of their name along with the initials “MD” after their name. It's what they are trained to do.
After Covid I don't know how any sane person that is not having an emergency/trauma can go see a doctor. During the PLANdemic Doctors and Nurses were killing patients for profit from the Government. Any nurse or doctor who administered Remdesivir or placed people on a ventilator is a murderer. Covid was nothing more then an epidemic of violent government and medical assault against people, of false attribution of death, and of intense propaganda using fraudulent tests and bogus studies.
Health comes from eating right, exercise, lifestyle changes and reducing toxins in your life. Big Pharma is trying to control our food by removing the seeds from fruits and vegetables. Why? Because the seeds are what HEAL the body. Yet, try to find Grapes with seeds in them. You can't! Never buy Produce that has no seeds. It is a hybrid, GMO GARBAGE!!!!! The more seeds they remove from Produce they more we run to doctors and become dependent on Big Pharma.
Medical mistakes kill way more people than any disease every year. They call it the “practice ”of medicine for a reason. I'd rather die an 'honest' death at home, versus being exterminated via government-mandated healthcare at a medical center.
I want to note that what you are saying applies to some doctors but not all doctors. I hate managing patients and feel like a complete failure if I get stuck in that type of a doctor-patient relationship. My goal is to either fix the issue and not see them again unless something new arises or send them to someone who can if I can't.
AMD - yes, not every single doctor. However, for the average person, the doctors who properly treat patients (such as you, and my functional medicine MD), are so few and far between, they are like finding a needle in a haystack. And, as you know, for a physician to have the freedom to help their patient as they see fit, they can’t accept insurance. As a result, even if one is lucky enough to locate such a physician, they likely can’t afford to see them, as insurance won’t cover it. Folks are pretty much steered/forced to see the ‘conventional’ doctors due to insurance constraints. I’m so grateful there a few doctors fighting the system. But it feels like it’s ‘one in a million’ when one tries to find them. I assume you’re frustrated that more doctors don’t speak up? (We already know the reasons why they don’t, as you’ve written about it a number of times). Still, it’s so grievously disappointing.
Some doctors?!?!?!? Really? I guarantee you any person who walks into a doctor's office for hypertension (or any disease) will walk out with one or more prescriptions for drugs. There is no money in curing the patient, ONLY THE TREATMENT!!!
Did you not see during the PLANdemic when so-called scientists in all fields and the entire medical establishment dismissed natural immunity and alternative medicines, and healthy living as the cure to the seasonal flu aka Covid. The seasonal flu was propagandized into the “killer” Coronavirus. It was always about the experimental mRNA vaccines to cause global fear, and it worked for the fearful. Then they started with the enticements with days off from work, money, and the lottery, and it worked for some, but it was not enough. Then came the illegal mandates that coerced many into getting experimental vaccines.
I say screw your germ theory, screw your viral theory, screw your viral transmission, screw your vaccine scientists and screw your toxic vaccines based on all those money-making and people-killing theories. These killers know that their poisonous vaccines and toxic drugs maim and kill. They are fully aware of Terrain Theory that says the cause of illness are toxins in our environment, food, water, air plus parasites, poor nutrition, poor hygiene and poor sanitation.........PERIOD!!!!!!!!!!!
Russ D - I understand your anger (I’m angry about all this, too; including my brother being murdered from those evil injections) - but do you realize that you’re screaming at one of the few physicians who fought against all these things?
I was just talking to my 29 year old daughter and telling her that as a child, eating watermelon meant that you would get a load of seeds in every bite. Now there are personal sized watermelons and even the big ones are practically seedless. I miss the old foods.
I miss eating delicious, juicy watermelons. Usually outside, because spitting out the seeds was part of the experience. We never asked anyone to remove the seeds!
I agree with much you say. I still see my doctors regularly, but am now much more skeptical of any recommended drug or even some diagnostics. especially those touted for screening or primary prevention. Of course, I would not turn down urgent or emergency care. But to the extent possible, I plan to due my "due diligence" when it comes to cost/benefit, risk/reward. You're correct; the system is biased to generate profits. And it's unfair to lay blame the front line medical staff; aware or not, they have little say in how the system runs. Even the infrequent independent doctor, who obviously has far more freedom to practice, must still answer to the state medical board and potential legal issues.
The initially well-intended Civil Rights law is the new original sin of America. It outlawed all discrimination on the basis of race and sex, but was later interpreted by courts and bureaucrats to require discrimination against white people and especially white men. Later legislation and court decisions added punitive damages and legal fee awards to terrorize employers and universities into becoming racist to fight racism. (See "The Origin of Woke" by Richard Hanania). The Supreme Court's ruling against university affirmative action is a step in the right direction, but the administrative agencies that propagate the DEI ideology really need to be dismantled. I agree with you that DEI has become a distraction from the underlying problems that cause disparate impacts, but DEI exists precisely because it is taboo to discuss the actual causes.
In the past week, Jeff Childers (Substack's Coffee & Covid) eloquently penned the same thought. (I've paraphrased slightly to make it more general-purpose):
Conservative media is mainly designed to provide its readers with information. Liberal media is designed to give its readers permission to think certain thoughts. This article signals to Democrats that it is now acceptable to talk about a previously forbidden topic.
Well, the entire elite ruling structure of America now has completely turned against people like me—lower middle class (whatever the hell that means), European (German Anglo), family on both sides here since the 1600s early 1700s, bit of indentured servitude and Palentine German stock. In truth, there never has been a guaranteed space for someone like me in America (the original Palentine ancestors were forced to live between Native Americans and bourgeois Anglos as a buffer) but the rules of engagement were clearer before the Immigration Act of 1965 and the reframing of America as “colonist racist” at that time. Elites either engineered this change in mythology, or well meaning wealthy Baby Boomers, protected by the lack of “immigration” from the 1920s to the 1960s, naively deluded themselves into believing that a multicultural secular leftist globalist utopia was an inevitable and desirable future, a/la Lennon’s “Imagine.” In San Diego, where one side of family has been since the late 1800s, stable affordable middle class and lower middle class neighborhoods have been turned into unrecognizable, strange globalist crap holes. The only thing that unifies people in these “communities,” if they can be called as such, is fucking Amazon and mimetic-induced desire for more crap. True, that’s always been an American value of sorts, but this is different: Now, especially since “COVID,” there has been a heavy ESG push to “race-based advertising.” And whereas before I could unify with other European Americans to ignore and mock the ridiculousness of advertising, we now have the added bonus of being called “racist” if we mock and degrade this equally ridiculous advertising of Amazon and Blackrock ilk. I am not seeing a way out of this for a better America, as the monster controllers have played so many cards over the past decade. Welcome to feedback from others.
I have a simple solution for dealing with corporate sponsors of 'woke' ideology as typically seen in their TV commercials. I don't buy their products. I call it the Disney Effect, which probably needs no explanation.
Truth is, hardly anything these pander bears make is really necessary and many of their products are actually harmful, so just stop buying them. If it's a necessary item you can almost always find a substitute, like ditching Gillette and going back to straight razors, or using cloth diapers instead of disposables.
Read the labels. Pay attention not only to what's IN the product (which you should always do) but where it was made and by who. Bear in mind, branded consumer products usually have a parent company which you can find on the net. Don't just stop buying the offending branded product, ditch their entire line.
Same goes for sports events, motion pictures, music, anything that offends thee just cut it off. TV especially. Put it to the test. Take a break from TV and see how fast it clears your head. Don't worry, if something important happens you'll hear about it.
I agree with everything except maybe the sports events. A lot of people stopped gathering to watch sports after the political stunts. I wonder if that was just one more way to divide or alienate us. To disrupt our culture.
One of the things I feel is sad about "diversity" is that in practice its just us exporting our corporate brands and their hegemony to the entire world.
Rather than rebuild a basic Public Health system that covers the basic needs, we are collapsing our medical system. Epoch is exposing how rural America is becoming void of Heathcare. US keeps sending billions and billions to other countries and we could use the money to rebuild our country!
I saw a documentary several years ago about a gentleman who'd started a charity to take mobile health care facilities to communities who lacked them. He originally imagined working in Latin America, but realised the need in the USA. It was heart-breaking to see, before dawn, the morning after they'd set up in a community who'd lost their hospital, a crowd of people queuing for treatment. I remember one lovely young lady, with long tanned legs (like I always wanted as a teenager) aged about thirty. She was having all her teeth removed. The doctors and dentists worked and worked as long as they stayed there. I'm in the UK, and our National Health Service (all treatment, ambulances, operation, child-birth etc, paid for from taxes, and free at the point of demand) is being run down. Insurance companies are rubbing their hands waiting to get their teeth into it.
I just signed up for paid subscription. I’m retired RN/NP who spent nearly 4 decades in hospital healthcare & you remind me of so many old school, common sense colleagues I’ve worked with. I enjoy & savor each of your posts. Your devotion to truth in medicine is sorely needed & much appreciated. I know you must spend hours on each post & I’m grateful for that. Know that you are making a difference.
I’m 69 & retired now but tempted sometimes to step back in unfortunately I let my license expire last year after maintaining for 6 years post retirement.
There are only two ways to amass great wealth and power. The 1st way is illegal as you pointed out. The 2nd way is immoral. John D Rockefeller and Bill Gates did it via the immoral route. Elon Musk we will learn took the immoral route as well. The immoral route is not illegal but it’s taking advantage of of people and the laws up to the point of having laws put into place that protects you at the expense of your competitors and customers.
The immorality of Rockefeller and Gates is using their position to force people to do business with you or under cutting price to force out competition. Sam Walton and Jeff Bezos are prime examples. Then raising prices once the competition is gone. Gates stoled the technology that became windows. None of it is illegal but a moral person would not have done it.
All well and good, but how many of us have shares in Microsoft or Exxon (for example) via our pension plans or 401 Ks? The house we live in and the cars we drive were paid for by investments in Apple, Oracle, and several mining explorers that hit grade. How much of that was legitimate and how much was immoral? Not trying to be smart here, I wonder about that myself. I was careful in my choices and avoided obvious conflicts like arms manufacturers, but again, how many of us have Raytheon or General Dynamics in our portfolios and don't even know it?
I have Apple shares inherited from my dad that he bought @ ~ $5 a share that I can’t afford to sell to rebalance my investments for the massive capital gains taxes I would have to pay, so I do my donations that way.
Yours is what's known as a luxury problem. I too benefited from my parents, but perhaps not to your degree. I'm not rich by any means, but on the other hand, not everybody can retire in his early 40s, either. Anyway, if I ever find myself in possession of a time machine, one of many tasks on my list is to return to 1962, perhaps a bit earlier, and beg Dad to invest a few thousand dollars into the stock of an obscure languishing New England textile mill named Berkshire Hathaway. 😁
One way to make income off your APPL shares is by writing call options. You gain the premium if the option expires worthless, if not you have to sell a small amount below market to meet the call. You can keep that going for years, raking off small amounts each time to offset your eventual tax liability. It's not quite as simple as that of course, you also need an ability to read stock charts, but there's books that can teach you that, and like everything else, you get better at it with time.
I never reached the level of wealth where I had to worry much about taxes, but if I did, I would set up a foundation and fund scholarships, relief aid or legitimate medical research. You won't come out ahead necessarily, but you can pay yourself a reasonable salary, plus you get the pleasure of spending your money on what YOU, not the government, feels is important.
So true but what amazing development would have happened if Rockefeller or Gates had not acted in the way they did. There is a lot of things that didn’t happened that could have.
It's difficult to make moral judgments about technological advances. Most people don't realize that many technological advances came about due to warfare. Aviation advanced very rapidly in WWI & II for example. Radar, sonar, radio itself, all developed quickly due to the demands of war. Railways, motor vehicles and ships, same thing.
Metallurgy advanced historically due to the demand for stronger armour, swords and spears. Even the stirrup was a war development that enabled cavalry riders to stay on their horse, thus making them more combat effective. Stone masonry evolved due the need for fortifications and buildings that couldn't be attacked with fire. The list is endless.
We are a war-like species and have advanced due to that fact, despite how uncomfortable a truth that is. Even the pharmaceutical industry played a major role in developing treatments for wounds and prevention of infectious diseases, the principle aim being to support armies in the field.
Good points. It's not just humans that are warlike. Nietzsche called it "will to power." A biologist would call it survival instinct. Virtually all animals and even plants (plants!!!) tend to favor their own kind, and to repel outsiders.
The problem with bonds, which I assume you mean by 'low-yield' is that they don't do well in a rising interest rate environment, which I'm sure you've noticed. If you have to liquidate you can take a bad hit, but just sitting still can hurt you if rates stay high, which is a roll of the dice at this point.
Ask your financial advisor about this, don't take my word for it, but the best place to be is in dividend yielding corporations that 1. have been around a long time with a good history dividend growth, and 2. make something people need through good times and bad. Food producers for example. After that, it's just a matter of dollar cost averaging for new purchases, and dividend reinvestment, which you can automate.
None of them will be squeaky clean of course, but neither is what the government spends the money you lent them on. That's the ethical question you have to ask when you buy any govt. paper. What is this being spent on? Right now it's 155mm shells for Ukraine. Personally I would never buy govt. paper, not just because of the ethics, but because govt. borrowing undermines the value of your currency. As an American you won't see this as much as in some countries, but America is not immune to a currency crisis, and already the pieces are being assembled to replace the dollar as a reserve currency. Very negative for bonds ITLR.
I confronted this whole problem of where to put my money once I'd met our basic needs, reminding myself constantly that just to have that option put me in the upper 10% of people on earth, as far a choices go. (I pulled that number out of thin air, but it's probably not far off).
It came down to a recognition that we live in a highly complex environment in which it's simply not possible to predict the outcome of even the best intentions. Best we can do is avoid the obvious pitfalls, like funding govt. excess for example. If I were to lend money, it would be to a company that fits the above description, but not if they were carrying a lot of debt. Far better to own the shares. This forces you to pay attention to what they're doing, which is a way to participate in the economy, as opposed to sitting on the sidelines letting others make decisions on how to spend the money you just lent them.
In early America, you had to be a property owner in order to vote. They were referring to land mainly, but ownership in a company also meets the definition. Now imagine if as part of your high school graduation you had a small sum of money granted to you for the purpose of investing, which you'd have learned about in a grade 12 course. You'd have to keep at least one share in order to vote, but you'd be given an incentive to participate, along with an understanding of what's actually at stake in making an economy run. This is where the schools have failed us IMO. They don't educate people to the underlying physical reality of how things actually work. It's just assumed that they do and always will, right up to when the lights go out and chaos rules the streets.
You've probably read Talib, right? This is what he means when he talks about having "skin in the game."
Excellent points and it shows that morality is rarely black and white but many shades of gray. Sure, if you are an individual investor, you have great liberty to choose your investments. But even here would require much due diligence. And those choices get rapidly limited. For example, on an employee plan you can probably choose from several different funds, but each fund may invest in dozens or hundreds of stocks. Even the government bond fund is problematic, as you're implicitly loaning money to an extremely corrupt institution. Or, as in my case, my retirement funds come from a source over which I have absolutely no control.
Thank you for this thoughtful and informative post. Our Country and others have lost their way. Merit should be the only consideration when considering admission to any medical school. The health of future patients depends on their caregivers being fully qualified. We cannot impove the status of of any individual or group of individuals by giving them preferred status over those who are better qualified. This will only lower the quality of the care for the patients and will not produce the desired effect on the group for which it is intended. We’ve been trying to do this for 60 years without success, but instead of recognizing our failures, we have doubled down on them. This is insanity but, I believe it is part of a plan to separate and destroy us.
When you have someone like Ben Carson, MD who grew up in a single parent home, living in the ghetto of Detroit with all his accomplishments, in spite of all that, and you have the recent POTUS Barak Hussein Obama Sotero (or Sotero Obama) foisted off on this country, in spite of his Kenyan birth, this DEI or DIE as far as patients go, this is just an attempt to perpetuate racism in service of maintaining power of people who are reliable Democrat voters and office holders, without doing anything for the supposed victims of 'systemic racism'.
Systemic racism is the welfare system which perpetuates single parent households which disproportionately affect blacks, urban poorly functioning public school systems which serve as employment agencies for largely unqualified public school teachers. It is at that level that the problem has to be attacked. Stable 2 parent households with Father or father figures, and at least one of the parents getting out of the house to earn a living, schools that truly educate rather than baby sit and indoctrinate children who are interested in learning (or whose parents make them at least pretend to be interested in learning until they are interested in learning),
Do that for a generation and you will see an impressive increase in the number of qualified POC applying and qualifying legitimately for space in medical school and likely succeeding legitimately.
I speak as a former medical school and residency faculty member, and there were at least 2 affirmative action (2 for's --POC and female), that really didn't belong in residency, but no one was going to let them know that -- I worked closely with one of the women as her advisor and did what I could to improve her clinical reasoning skills. The other one was just an air head, IMHO. Hopefully their patients have not been harmed. (OTOH, I had one black man who struggled initially, but was able to finish the program and into practice successfully.
No. If it is honest , it would conclude: finish school (depending upon the century & decade: 8th grade, high school, learn a marketable skill, get married, have children in that order. Oh & stay married for your children’s sake.
"Systemic racism is the welfare system which perpetuates single parent households which disproportionately affect blacks,..."
A common problem with social analysis these days is confusion between cause and effect.
When the USA was a manufacturing nation, Detroit was the center of the auto industry and a model of urban modernity. Blacks employed in that industry earned enough to marry, buy a home and save up for their kid's education. Problems associated with Black urban populations existed only at the margin and were often dealt with by the community itself. Discrimination existed of course, but Blacks had the economic means to overcome that, for example by supporting Black colleges and scholarships which their employers also chipped in on because it was to their mutual benefit.
That all ended with the introduction of foreign competition and as a result, the decline of manufacturing, primary industry (steel especially) and the railroads, which also employed Blacks in greater proportion to their demographics.
Elimination of import tariffs, offshoring of manufacturing and financialization of the remaining hollowed out economy disproportionately affected Blacks and led ultimately to their impoverishment, the response to which was Johnson's "Great Society" establishment of the welfare class, a response to a situation created, as usual, by government itself. The rest, as they say, is history.
I have an article coming out about the systematic dismantling of the working class by the predatory upper class and how we keep on blaming the wrong people for it.
Just finished reading the book, “White Trash”. I bet that it gives in detail what you will be covering in summary in your upcoming article. Thank you for taking on this topic.
It looks like you were not living in the US at the time that you write about, and you are a little young to understand the chronology through which I lived. Foreign competition was minimal when the not so Great Society legislation was passed (of which LBJ famously said this will have the N!993*s voting for us for the next 200 years, racist that he was) which put the nails in the coffin of the black family. Absent that, blacks would have likely migrated to greener pastures just like they did to get to Detroit and the northern urban centers, just like substantial numbers of blacks left the Deep South after the Civil War and became cowboys in the western plains.
You have the chronology exactly backwards. What you describe in your last paragraph came after the Great Society, which was not implemented in response to those things (because it came first) but as a means of shifting the black voting block (which had been Republican to the Democrats permanently, as I noted above.
The fact that welfare was available (for the price of kicking the man out of the home, and ultimately tying blacks to increasingly failing urban public school systems in the new urban Democrat 'plantations'.) took away the incentives to move to greener pastures where, while life would be hard at first, advancement through economic opportunity and freedom would be much more possible--but alas that is a hypothetical because the Democrats needed their plantations . . .
Nissan began exporting the 'Datsun' line in 1958, around the same time as Japanese transistor radios started to appear. America's steel industry began it's decline around the same time as competition from Germany and Japan started making inroads. Their industry was destroyed in the war, and so they were able to undercut US steel because of improved technology that US companies failed to adopt, relying instead on tariffs to offset their higher production costs. The decline in US manufacturing started much earlier than you think, but was hidden by the fact that the consumer wasn't as deeply affected as later on when their jobs started to disappear and inflation kicked in circa 1971.
It's possible I have the Great Society chronology wrong, but the decline in the US standard of living, including Black families who bore the brunt of it, was already a trend by the end of the 50's. My mother, for example, had to work part-time to pay off the mortgage, and my dad had a decent job by the standards of the day. That was in 1962, which should give you some idea of how long I've been around.
I agree when you state that welfare took away the incentive to look for alternate work, but where did the impetus to construct a welfare state come from in the first place? Johnson's racial attitude aside, I assume it was a response to an already existing situation since government is rarely proactive. I'm sure warning bells were already being sounded by industry who, facing increased foreign competition, were agitating for tariffs, which would have raised prices - unpopular for politicians everywhere. Easier to buy off the unemployed with handouts which would have alienated fewer voters.
I'd love to delve deeper into this but my wife just called me because we're suppose to go out. I gave her the stock response: 'just a minute honey, someone is wrong on the internet!' That got a laugh, but of course I didn't tell her that somebody might be me:)
Well I have been around since 1950. Datsuns may have been imported beginning in 1958, but I don’t believe they were a big factor in auto sales initially. As a pre teen boy, they were certainly not on my radar! And I didn’t recall, recognize any on the road until the mid 60’s. Full lineup of Fords , Chevy’s plus 4 -5 other GM brands , 3 Chrysler brands, a smattering of European cars beside the VW.
What I do know was the primary driver for the Great Society was the racial politics.
There were more R votes for the civil rights legislation than Democrat votes; blacks can count, & even racist LBJ knew that! Government may not be proactive, but politicians certainly are, especially when it comes to spending our money & money that we don’t have. Democrats certainly had plenty of practice doing that during the Depression and WWII, the former to no good effect & the latter out of necessity, but the habit was established.
I will give you the possibility that a case could be made for the blacks being hit first & harder ( but I would like to see #s) and I think they would rather have had a job & a safe neighborhood and good schools for their kids: they got none of that, just a welfare addiction.
Listen, I grew up in a Republican home, by 1968 I was an anti war , pro civil rights activist/legislation-- read Great Society legislation, much to my parents dismay.
The old Churchill story: liberal with a heart when young , by my 30s with 2 daughters, I was conservative, just as the demographers say!
My Dad sold rail car parts to the railroads & rail car manufacturers, and his career plateaued & tailed off in the late 60s.
"There were more R votes for the civil rights legislation than Democrat votes..."
I didn't know that. It seems counter-intuitive given the social activism going on in the Dem party at the time.
I'm not American BTW. I grew up in Alberta, son of a British Royal Navy officer and later Canadian Army major. I was expected to follow the family tradition and did until I met my first US draft resisters, ironically on an army base, where the unused H-huts from WWII were being used as a hostel. That was in 1969. I went off on a major tangent from there, left home early, went to sea working on oil tankers and later got involved in human rights issues surrounding the wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua and the coup in Chile. Pretty chilling stuff, no pun intended. I wouldn't describe myself as a socialist, but I don't buy the mainstream conservative outlook either, having been exposed to so many different cultures in the course of my life, and being married to two foreign women, the second of whom I'm still with after 36 years!
I travelled a lot in the US back then, and I can say the rust belt was already well established by the mid 70's. The railroads were also in trouble, and I recall the mergers and bankruptcies very well. NYC + PRR = PC -> CR + govt. bailout. BNSF, same thing.
I take a scientific and engineering view of the world. You can't consume what you can't produce, at least not for long. Eventually the bill comes due, which is what we're seeing now. The strength of a nation ultimately lies in its resource and manufacturing sectors, especially energy and steel which you need for defence. The USA has so many advantages. Ample resources, friendly neighbours to the north and south, plus two great oceans preventing any sort of military invasion. Only Russia can make the same claim in terms of resources, both material and human, but without the advantage of defensible borders. None of this should have happened and it breaks my heart to see America and its neighbours in such disarray.
Oh, and the social activism represented only a small part of the Democrat Party (certainly not the Dixicrats). Read about the 1968 Democrat Convention and associated riots/protests (you might want to read more widely than Wikipedia, as I am sure they have an incomplete picture of the goings on. Mayor Richard Daly certainly didn't have no truck with those people.
Yes, the reason that you didn't know that about the US Civil Rights legislation is that the education departments and teacher's colleges and teacher's unions populated the teaching ranks with leftists (sorry to burst your bubble, about the circles we both travelled in in the late 60's (I graduated HS in 1969) and early 70's: liberal as a youth or no heart, conservative after 35 or no brain per Churchill, fits my evolution.)) Anyway the leftists in education have been rewriting history since at least that long.
The Democrat party historically had 2 main bases roughly half and half: the Southern former Confederate States aka DixieCrats responsible for Jim Crow, the KKK and their grandparents fought the US Civil War as Confederates, the other base was the Northern urban centers predominantly immigrant populations or children of immigrants and unionized industrial workers (and minimal unionized government workers (not legal until JFK created by executive order--and not a logical arrangement government bargaining against itself with taxpayer's footing the bill & no say in the negotiation). There were not enough Democrat votes for civil rights legislation, and actually no votes that in the 1950s there were several Republican civil rights laws that were proposed that failed because of solid DIxicrat opposition.
What you say about the rust belt is true as well as the timing, but the first Great Society (GS)legislation was passed in 1965 after LBJ's landslide win over Goldwater in 1964. Probably between the ever expanding costs of the social programs of the GS programs and the expanding Vietnam War & taxes to pay for same as well as the increasing labor costs in manufacturing hindering industry from re-tooling to meet the foreign competition as tariffs were lowered, the rust belt was if not born, it was exacerbated. The choice was symbolized as between guns and butter, and the nation didn't choose, or chose both sparking an inflation that was tame compared to subsequent ones, but still devastating in its own way.
My Dad sold rail car parts to the railroads and he saw the NYC + PRR = PC --> CR impact as his career was downsized and ultimately he lost his job and spend some time unemployed and working selling Encyclopedia Britannica and hearing aids door to door, before getting back into the industry asa production supervisor until he retired ~1980.
While you were in Latin America, I was in college and medical school and only dimly aware of all the ins and outs of those tumultuous times, Went to West Virginia with its own labor problems.
Today's Democrat Party is not your grandfather's Democrat party: it is a party of government unionized government and other government workers, academics, NGOs, and health care workers, in short essentially of non-productive workers who are insulated from the market economy of cost conscious supply and demand. They don't understand your engineering mind set. For them the bill never comes due, and if someone calls them on it, they are aggrieved and cry racism. They are almost all un reconstructed leftists of various shades and susceptible to whatever crazy fad comes out of academia --hence 57 flavors of genders, etc. The much deminished industrial unions contribute $$ to the party, but by and. large the rank and file members are more traditional/conservative and vote independent and Republican.
Can't say I like the way they framed the question: "Is it jobs or culture?" Why only two choices? Maybe it was both, or maybe it was something else? And why call it a myth? The loss of jobs was real and can be measured. I like to start with things that can be measured.
Race hustlers like Jackson and Sharpton no doubt played a role in stirring up discontent, but weren't they just capitalizing on something that already existed? What was that, if not the undermining of self-esteem that derives from decent employment and raising a family? And how do Faracon and Malcolm X fit into the equation? They were all about self-discipline, and a lot of blacks picked up on that. Not everyone turned to crime or became a welfare case.
I would cite loss of good jobs as a primary cause, but today I'd cite a whole range of subsequent causes and effects, including race hustling, religion, media portrayals, the drug culture and many other forms of opportunism, both internal and external.
He was not(I know trusted people who were shown the hut that he was born in by his paternal grandmother in the village in Kenya.
Furthermore, he is not a natural born citizen ( father has to be aUS citizen, & his father never was--a Kenyan born British subject). To be a legitimate POTUS one must be a natural born citizen--and, contrary to popular opinion, the 14th Amendment does not change that.
First of all, thank you for an intelligent, thoughtful and non-polemical discussion of race/minority based politics and its downstream effects especially in medicine.
I entered medical school in 1966 and graduated from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1970. I have been an passionate and active advocate for freedom and fairness all of my sentient life (I got kicked out of an organization for lack of right think/right speak for the first time at the tender age of 14), attending my first political rally for integration in DC when I was 17 years old. So I have a LOOOOOOONNNGGGGG history in these wars.
After the assassinations of MLK and RFK in 1968, my progressive medical school ("liberal" back then, when that had a very different meaning) set up the King-Kennedy Program, which recognized the disparity of preparation opportunities for otherwise suitable candidates for admission to medical school.
In the affirmative action zeitgeist of the time (institutionalized racism doused with a whole lot of self-congratulatory kumbaya, but never dealing with the root causes of the problem), they set up a very generous scholarship for disadvantaged black candidates who had completed university but could not make the grade because of discriminatory educational and social conditions. Well and good.
These fortunate young people would receive a generous financial stipend, room and board, books and supplies, live on campus and receive a year of remedial education to prepare them to stand for the MCATs a year later.
Sounds lovely, right? Except for the fact that the "disadvantaged" students chosen were 1. the daughter of a black neurosurgeon who had attended an elite Ivy League university but was an uninterested and very desultory student, 2. a black Oriental Languages major from Columbia University who had never take an pre med course but thought "it would be fun to be a doctor" and a couple of other students who qualified ONLY because they had a sufficiently discernable amount of melanin in their skin.
Not one of them achieved passing marks for admission when they took the MCAT a year later. But ALL of them were admitted to the medical school class because, and here I quote from what the Dean of Admissions told me when I raised the question of why unqualified students had been admitted, denying places to qualified ones, "not admitting them would be racist".
As they pursued their medical educations, what is your guess as to whether their performance was evaluated to the same standards as more "privileged" students and whether the resulting medical competence they could deliver to every one of their patients was what each of those patients had a right to expect and, indeed, what they were hinging their very survival upon?
If medical education quality, rigor and honesty, delivered to the highest quality, most qualified students makes no difference to outcome, then why spend the time and effort, to say nothing of the money involved, on it? If those components are both significant, then anything like affirmative action or DEI, or, call it what it is, straight up racism, endangers lives, lots and lots and lots of lives and degrades the fluttering tatters of what is left of the dignity and virtue of our allegedly once noble profession.
When do we develop the spine, the fortitude, the guts, the principles, the balls, to look those who want to destroy everything we hold dear as decent human beings, in the eye and the ballot box and the wallet and tell them the truth, with a resounding "Not only 'NO!', but HELL NO!"
By the way, those same destroyers are fomenting the disgusting "Comprehensive Sexuality Education" and 15 minute cities and digital vaccine IDs and CBDC.
And falling for it is made virtuous by the Ministry of Truth.
Please visit https://PreventGenocide2030.org for a peaceful mechanism to take action to say "NO! and HELL NO!"
And say it to groupism (race, gene therapy status, political affiliation, antisemitism, islamophobia, sexism, whatever) in medicine. Say it loud, and often and don't stop saying it until it no longer needs to be said because we have drowned out the race/minority politics crap.
Thank you for sharing your historical perspectives on this. My belief is that the medical field earned a lot of social credit through recruiting the most qualified members of society and then putting them through a rigorous training path which guaranteed they could produce a good outcome which was worthy of that credit.
However, what then happened was once that credit was taken for granted (and pharma money was put behind it) was that a lot of corners started getting cut, unqualified people became doctors and doctors have become assembly line workers pushing what ever the (often corrupt) standard of care was because they had the social credit to be trusted at face value.
In the long term, this along with taking away the autonomy physicians have to do what they feel is right is going to destroy the public's faith in the medical system, and I believe COVID-19 greatly accelerated the process. So, my best guess is that at some point the glowing reputation doctor's have to the public will drop dramatically and it is only at that point that the profession will realize it needs to start performing at a high level in order to regain that lost trust and prestigue (at which point in may be too late).
For what its worth, I currently have a very low opinion of the Medical industry.
These days, Before I see my physicians, I study up on my situations so I cannot be bamboozled or intimidated
by their rhetoric. They do not like a prepared patient.
Yes, exactly. Just on Wednesday, I had the slightly annoying experience of explaining to my nurse practitioner why I had "resigned" from the statin I was still taking a year ago (basically, that I'd done in-depth research and was now wise to the fact that statins did Jack Shit for primary prevention.) She was still required, she explained, by the standard of care, to recommend I go back on a statin because by LDL was a bit high. I realize that regulations require her to so act. But even so, to finally experience this was a bit surreal.
It's part of the muppet show they perform to get paid.
"Standard of care" has killed a lot of people, especially in oncology....I had the joy of spending the weekend at a REAL health conference, filled with energy practitioners, EMF-aware doctors, physicists who study water (and know we are ~70% water), biologists, etc. Everyone spoke of brilliant scientists like Mae-Wan Ho, William Tiller, Robert Becker, Richard Gerber, Beverly Rubik, Gary Schwartz, Fritz-Albert Popp, Krishna Madappa, etc. People were being healed of injuries within days using new technologies instead of being tortured to death by the medical cartels. <sigh>
What conference was that?
They almost always discredit your suggestions.
I was really pleased this week.... I was at the doctors office and the nurse asked me, “ have you had the flu shot this year?” I responded, “No” she asked would you like to have one before you leave the office? I responded, “No” and that was the end of the conversation. ☺️
Many years ago I worked as a Medical Assistant/lab tech for a small HMO in Massachusetts. I was completely disillusioned with the medical field during that time. The particular practice I worked for specialized in Geriatric medicine. 15 minutes, and 15 minutes ONLY was allotted for each patient. Most of them had multiple issues i.e. diabetes, high blood pressure, COPD, etc. yet they still only received 15 minutes with their primary care, PA, or NP. They were on so many meds, from so many different docs, and in my opinion many were not needed but no one seemed to care. Take this for that, then this one for that side effect, and on and on and on.
There was one member Doc of the practice who bucked the 15 minute slots, and suffice to say she was the pariah of the group. Yet I learned more from her and her favorite nurse (He was ex-military and so full of knowledge) than any of the other arrogant, narcissists in that practice.
I stopped that career path fairly soon after because I was simply disgusted by what I saw.
Fast forward 30 years later and I have even less faith in the medical community. They are bought and sold by Pharma, full stop.
Any docs, nurses, PA's or NP's with a shred of integrity are silenced, threatened, and pushed out of their field.
Medical Tyranny is alive and well. Pray for us all.
I could tell you stories. It indeed looks bleak...... if anyone should become ill and get turned into a cash cow by some institution.
You Dr. are an example of the saying 'a conservative is a liberal who has been (at least figuratively) been mugged. I posted similar thoughts above in this stream. Thank you for the link to the resistance movement; already signed.
Dr. Kimber, thank you for taking action. Please share the site with as many people as you can reach.
Conservative.... mugged liberal, well, in my case, I have believed, espoused and fought for precisely the same things throughout my life but the background has changed so the scenery now says "Conservative" behind me where it used to say "Classical Liberal". My positions have, for good or ill, neither changed nor evolved!
It is actually pretty weird, when you think about it, which I do often.
What has not changed is my determination to not allow the globalist agenda for depopulation and enslavement, to prevail.
140 years ago they were called Fabian Socialists and then figured out that they were eugenicists and neo feudal supremacists and now we get to call them Globalists. They like us to call them elite, but they are scum, murderous, bat-shit crazy scum.
I will pass the site on. I hope more from this thread do. Thank you for posting the link.
Classic Liberalism is actually conservatism to trace the roots without being tied to political party labels, but splitting hairs. I similarly have largely kept the same philosophy, but have found that as RR said, I didn't leave the Democrat Party, the party left me. And we are learning that his other famous aphorism is so true, the 9 most dangerous words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.' Whether it be regulatory capture or unintended consequences of ideas and programs that seemed good at the time . . .
And I agree that they are scum, elite scum all prettied up in their tuxes and suits in Davos . . .
It's a side issue now (or is it?) The awful truth is that there are valid arguments in favor of "negative" (coercive) eugenics. To argue otherwise is to deny the very basic laws of nature, in this case of natural selection and the survival of the fittest. I do concede that [negative] eugenics is fundamentally at odds with the Western enlightenment concepts of liberty that are the basis of our culture. I will only note that civilization is, by one definition, a rebellion against Nature. In other words, Man's attempt to impose his will upon the outside world, which rapidly runs up against hard limits, much as we might wish that were not so. In the case of our culture, we de facto practice “unnatural selection,” which if we dare admit it, has the net result of the weakening, not the strengthening, of the herd. Nature will eventually impose various corrective measures, the exact timing and details of which are unknown to me, except that they will be most unpleasant for those who must undergo the procedure.
Whoo HOO! Save your boots and save your spurs! The Reich will rise again!
Doorknob, for all the words you have just used, the basis of your argument is that life is hard, I can assure that resources are scarce and I get to decide who lives and dies while I rationalize consummate immorality as "Nature's Plan".
Nope. Not working for me.
Substituting one glossed over genocide for another changes nothing but the party favors.
How about the fact, and it is a fact, that we do not have a scarcity of resources, we have a scarcity of availability, carefully engineered and perpetuated by those in charge of the scarcity.
That is how the math works out when you do it without the political bias. See www.TheMythofOverPopulation.org for some discussion of that reality.
Your handle is, based on your remarks, well chosen. I choose to open doors that do not lead to genocide of anybody, for any rationalization or what is often misnamed a "reason".
I do not take my guidance from the bible, but it has some pretty good ideas scattered through it and one of them is that there are actual commandments, not suggestions, for how to live in reasonable harmony as humans, not as predatory beasts.
True, they are much, much more often honored in the breach than in the observance, but "Thous shalt not kill" is a pretty good rule of thumb and genocide is killing on a huge, massive, humongous dose of Satan's steroids so it strikes me as a great big Thou Shalt NOT".
Call it positive or negative eugenics, you are violating the free will of your fellow humans. Not a great plan, in my view.
Your objections are noted. I re-read my post and I don’t see anywhere I advocated anything, especially genocide. Perhaps you misunderstood my phrase “unnatural selection.” By “unnatural” I mean that man is exercising some control over his reproduction. Yes, I guess that could be taken to mean negative eugenics. I wanted to describe human mating in normal times which is somewhere between haphazard and reasonably well planned. At the other extreme, I suppose, would be a dystopian science fiction world where every future child was genetically engineered or at least the genes of the parents vetted. That would be “positive” eugenics in the sense that the intent was betterment of the species.
The gist of my post was that what civilization wants is often at odds with what Nature "wants." Purveyor of Badthink I may be, I still enjoy the good things that civilization offers. I would rather live in civilization than by jungle law. Problem: the jungle was around long, long before Man appeared on the scene, and it’ll likely be here long, long after we (and our ethics, our laws, our morality, religions, etc.) have gone the way of all flesh..
Are you prepared to commit to this idea even if it was your child?
Hi, Doorknob,
If I misunderstood your post, you have my apologies.
If we were part of nature in the way wild animals are, we would not have evolved any significant tool use (yes, birds and chimpanzees use sticks for this and that and some fish use bits of debris to cover masses of eggs and so on, but constructions, forming, then farming, then planning, then speaking, then writing, etc., etc.,, etc., is implementation and rearrangement of features found in nature, or they would not be found in us to find outside of us.
But animals control their reproduction, too. Population pressure causes a reduction in fertility in a variety of species. Cetacians determine when to become fertile based on what they experience environmentally, I understand.
But I really do not understand your point.
Reproductive decision-making is not the same thing as eugenics, is it?
In lots of human communities, the top dog on some ladder or other gets the most desirable mate(s),
The concept of eugenics is far from choiceful and benign, however.
So I really am confused. If you care to enlighten me, that would be useful.
Rima E Laibow MD, thank you for adding a comment to A Midwestern Doctor's article. I so appreciate both of you for your contributions for people to have an opportunity to consider what is transpiring around us in this world from a sound perspective.
Dr. Rima, I have been paying attention to matters pertaining to achieving and maintaining good health. In my journey along that pathway I became aware of your work in the early days of internet access to health information. I became aware of you early on, and one thing that caused me to dig deeper and expand considerations contributing to what I perceived as behind the scenes attempts to keep people sick as there was no profit in one being healthy or dead, but rather in 'managing' them through 'illness/disease.' When you spoke of your becoming aware of those who were wanting to 'cull useless eaters' that went deep within my consciousness and was the crack in the door that opened up to me a side of human insanity that needed to be considered in my continued searching. I thank you for your integrity and not backing down on providing truths for people to be made aware of. It has been a valuable tool in understanding and resisting the despotic influences being used against the population of the world and the environment we live in. My prayers for your continued strength and protection as you walk in the light of truth.
Blessings to both you and A Midwestern Doctor for all your efforts.
I have subscribed to over thirty substack writers since the beginning of substack. Over time, I have noticed that many of the writers who ostensibly drew rational conclusions from data and appeared to espouse a reasonable data-driven argument would instantaneously convert to a rabid tribalist when the subject matter switched. Some examples: writers who apparently could see through the Covid propaganda, but then swallowed the Ukraine propaganda; writers who could see through the Ukraine propaganda but then blindly accepted the climate change propaganda, etc. Very few can stay objective from subject to subject. Kudos to A Midwestern Doctor for nailing it again; a data driven, objective, reasoned argument!
Basically, everyone has beliefs and then will find ways to support those beliefs.
The core beliefs I hold I never actually discuss on here (because they are "my beliefs" rather than what I believe to be objective reality).
In my case I rarely hold predetermined conclusions about things and just try to figure out what I think is actually true and accept that a lot of subjects are very gray and not at all clearcut.
I've noticed the same thing, and find it weird that people who mistrusted the government and MSM on the vaccines fell right into line on Ukraine. It's the same cabal running both programs people! Same goes for 'climate change' and the LGBQ trans nonsense.
If a man isn’t aware of his limitations (hat tip to Clint Eastwood character) reality will make sure that they are manifest, often in a most definitive way.
One outcome of affirmative action you didn't mention is the impact it has on competent employees who happen to belong to a so-called disadvantaged group. The assumption is that they obtained their position through favouritism (which is what AA really is) and not because they excelled in their field. This creates a stigma where one wouldn't otherwise exist if competency were the only criteria.
It's a valid point I agree with but I chose not to cover it here because I felt it was a tangental point and me citing the bigotry of low expectations would hence come across as me being biased and simply searching for arguments to support my pre-existing position rather than someone who was doing their best to present an objective assessment of the situation.
Sadly, under the system currently in force, the observer is acting rationally. If the only information available is "race" (or sex, other visibly apparent category), then one can make certain assumptions based on known statistics. What follows is my recollection of the race vs. IQ data; I goofed earlier and have slightly edited here to make it a bit more accurate. American blacks mean IQ = 85, whites = 100. Some races, notably Ashkenazi (“European”) Jews and East Asians have even higher, in the 110-115 range.
At least in the time before standards were watered down, to become a doctor of medicine probably required one be in the “gifted” range, which is roughly IQ = 130+
For whites, that is roughly in the +2 standard deviation (SD) range. Stated another way, whites at SD+1 are at about the 85 percentile (for whites), SD+2 puts you in the 97th percentile. If one uses SD+2 as the cutoff that means that only about 3% of the white population is smart enough to train to be an MD.
Blacks due to their different distribution will be much rarer, the higher the IQ goes.
Black SD+1 is about the white mean (IQ=100). Only about 1 in 6 blacks is smarter than the average white. Equivalently, and pessimistically, about 5 in 6 are dumber than the average white.
The disparity grows worse the higher IQ goes. At White SD+1 (IQ=115) that will be SD+2 for blacks and they are rare indeed, as with whites, they are in their 97 percentile. Stated another way, if we call 115 the beginning of “bright” (but still far short of “gifted”) we are talking about 15% of whites but only 3% of blacks. (about 5:1 ratio)
At white SD+2 (IQ=130) we are down to about 3% of whites. For blacks they'd be well into their 99th percentile. I don't have a precise ratio but I'd guess at least 30:1.
Disquieting though these data may be, the inescapable conclusion that must be drawn is that, as cognitive demands increase, blacks relative to whites at a given IQ level will become more and more rare. The imbalance is even worse when one considers that there are about 5 times as many whites as blacks. This means, in our doctor example here, that if our low cutoff is IQ=130, then we would expect 150 qualified whites, but just one black who makes the cut. In the higher professions then, this means that if you see more than the very infrequent black, you know you are likely dealing with people promoted far above what their level of competence would suggest.
As noted elsewhere, it's no secret that standards have been dumbed down over a period of many years. This was done in the name of equity. But the downside is that standards have dropped for everybody. This has dangerous consequences downstream, in the risks of incompetence leading to injury and death.
Nicholas Wade's "A Troublesome Inheritance" makes much the same point. So did Charles Murray's "The Bell Curve." Both these authors were cancelled and Charles Murray was attacked by a violent college mob. Wonder why it's such a sensitive issue? If something is disprovable people typically engage in rational discussion and debate.
Thomas Sowell in his new book “Social Justice Fallacies” gives the best short analysis of affirmative action and its consequences that I have ever read. I highly recommend the book.
As a woman, I have an axe to grind against females being pushed ahead of males as doctors, even if they've got better grades. For one thing, there are enough of us stay at home moms to make the target percentage of women doctors much lower than fifty percent.
For another, the medical student loans make it hard for women doctors to drop out down the line and so they faced a heightened likelihood of abortion to maintain payments on debt. Then, they work this abortion out on their patients via some type of unconscious abortion derangement syndrome.
This is an important point and why I and many of my colleagues try to support female medical students. Unless you've been one or had a lot of close friends who were, it's really difficult to appreciate all the extra things they have to struggle with during the medical training process.
I am a Mrs in graduate biochemistry (rhymes with kisses), and I wonder whether it's possible for a female med student to "drop out" as easily as I did when she meets her mate (or meets her mote (baby!)). In particular, how does student debt get treated? (I had none). Is there any way to debt forgiveness based on how medical careers are oversold to women?
OMG, as a woman, I love ^this^ comment. ❤️
Cool. OMG as a woman, I hate it. Wow. Abortion is a personal decision, not something that women "work out on others" with derangement! And women can be pretty good at not getting pregnant -- that's what birth control is for.
You clearly have not encountered those women. That’s a good thing.
They do exist nevertheless
What if you wanted to be a doctor and they tell you that even though your grades are good you can't do it.
She's not espousing freedom, she's pushing control.
I would tell them, “Um, I’m a woman, not a guy that you need to hold back in order that I can get ahead.”
So you're for a version of affirmative action which doesn't go on merit.
You assume every woman wants to have kids.
You also assume that they all get abortions instead of using protection.
What cult are you part of?
I guess it's the hippocrats vs the hypocrites.
I would not set much store in Zinn's book, I read it and and believed its assertions for years. I was fortunate, however, to have people in my life whom I respected and who had investigated different sources, and introduced them to me. I started to do my own research. I investigated and so came to realize that Zinn had a Marxist-Anarchist axe to grind and that axe was best sharpened by falsifying history and slanting his narrative. Here’s a critique by another historian.. I think you may find it interesting.
https://www.realclearpublicaffairs.com/articles/2020/05/26/howard_zinns_assault_on_historians_and_american_principles_486279.html
An excerpt:
But Zinn did not do real history—that is, scholarship that builds on the work of previous historians, gives accurate and detailed information, and presents a balanced view. A People’s History, like the 1619 Project, drew criticism from historians on the left and right. Kazin felt that it shortchanged progressive accomplishments like labor laws and civil rights; Harvard professor Oscar Handlin called it a “fairy tale.” Still, the book kept selling, and sales total about three million today.
In writing Debunking Howard Zinn, I read many of Zinn’s sources and found egregious plagiarism (usually from New Left historians and socialist non-historians, like Hans Koning), deletion of critical information, deliberate misrepresentation of sources, and invention of facts. Zinn used his status as a professor to discredit other historians. He attacked Gordon Wood’s mentor, Bernard Bailyn, whose name appears on many of Zinn’s lecture notes.
My view is that every source of information is biased and you have to factor for that. I didn't agree with many of the points he raised, I just found the one I cited here compelling and never forgot it.
There's a difference between biased and historically incorrect.
Totally agree with your comment, Cara, thank you for writing this! Many years ago, I read Zinn and at the time believed him. Later on, I realized he was a total fraud as was his work. Thank goodness I woke up, did my own research and realized he was a Marxist. Thanks also for the book recommendation, I will check it out.
Thanks! So many have been bamboozled by that book!
Exactly!!!
If we keep lowering the bar on educational standards, eliminating grades and giving passes on the basis of origin, we are sliding down a slippery slope in all professions and not only medicine. Merit, Knowledge and dedication needs to be prime. My grandsons are building their careers in medicine, and it is apparent they are short staffed and over worked. Just another aspect that does not bode well.
Correct, this applies to a lot of other fields too. I just comment on medicine since I've seen what happens there firsthand for a long time.
“no group can ever be relied upon to solve a problem its existence revolves around solving.” 2023
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor 1935
I bet if we studied ancient Sanskrit we would find similar sentiments from their wise ones.
I 100% agree with both quotes and frequently cite them. In the case of the former, I came up with myself (I often say organization or cause instead of group)
Basically every not for profit for any cause will, consciously or not, never solve the problem. Yet people keep donating to them. Worse, many not for profits are really political agents in sheep’s clothing, and use those donor dollars to push their politics on everyone.
Even, or especially true for the ASPCA, HSUS, PETA. For most animal rights zealots, they ultimately want to ban pet ownership, ban consumption of REAL meat and milk and eggs. And sadly they are winning right now because the people fall for their expert propaganda with the sad puppy dog eyes and because they have hooked up with billionaires looking to control the food to control the people and further enrich themselves along the way like Bill Gates.
They are regulating agriculture out of existence. See Epoch Times documentary “No Farmers, No Food.”
The problem with health care is the system itself. Doctors are not in the business of healing a patients disease. They are in business of managing a patient's disease for the rest of their lives with drugs, vaccines and surgery.......PERIOD!!!! Medical care is actually about extracting money from the patient (Insurance Companies), and doing anything that would reduce expenses or heal the patient will NOT happen. Otherwise Doctors would be out of business!
I have not used the Medical Cartel System in over 10 years since I had cancer 13 years ago. You could not pay me enough money to use it, because it does not cure anyone, but instead enslaves people by creating a nation of drug addicts, and these drug pushers who peddle these drugs and are identified by their title of “doctor” with a “Dr.” in front of their name along with the initials “MD” after their name. It's what they are trained to do.
After Covid I don't know how any sane person that is not having an emergency/trauma can go see a doctor. During the PLANdemic Doctors and Nurses were killing patients for profit from the Government. Any nurse or doctor who administered Remdesivir or placed people on a ventilator is a murderer. Covid was nothing more then an epidemic of violent government and medical assault against people, of false attribution of death, and of intense propaganda using fraudulent tests and bogus studies.
Health comes from eating right, exercise, lifestyle changes and reducing toxins in your life. Big Pharma is trying to control our food by removing the seeds from fruits and vegetables. Why? Because the seeds are what HEAL the body. Yet, try to find Grapes with seeds in them. You can't! Never buy Produce that has no seeds. It is a hybrid, GMO GARBAGE!!!!! The more seeds they remove from Produce they more we run to doctors and become dependent on Big Pharma.
Medical mistakes kill way more people than any disease every year. They call it the “practice ”of medicine for a reason. I'd rather die an 'honest' death at home, versus being exterminated via government-mandated healthcare at a medical center.
"The Love of Money is the root of all evil"
I want to note that what you are saying applies to some doctors but not all doctors. I hate managing patients and feel like a complete failure if I get stuck in that type of a doctor-patient relationship. My goal is to either fix the issue and not see them again unless something new arises or send them to someone who can if I can't.
AMD - yes, not every single doctor. However, for the average person, the doctors who properly treat patients (such as you, and my functional medicine MD), are so few and far between, they are like finding a needle in a haystack. And, as you know, for a physician to have the freedom to help their patient as they see fit, they can’t accept insurance. As a result, even if one is lucky enough to locate such a physician, they likely can’t afford to see them, as insurance won’t cover it. Folks are pretty much steered/forced to see the ‘conventional’ doctors due to insurance constraints. I’m so grateful there a few doctors fighting the system. But it feels like it’s ‘one in a million’ when one tries to find them. I assume you’re frustrated that more doctors don’t speak up? (We already know the reasons why they don’t, as you’ve written about it a number of times). Still, it’s so grievously disappointing.
Some doctors?!?!?!? Really? I guarantee you any person who walks into a doctor's office for hypertension (or any disease) will walk out with one or more prescriptions for drugs. There is no money in curing the patient, ONLY THE TREATMENT!!!
Did you not see during the PLANdemic when so-called scientists in all fields and the entire medical establishment dismissed natural immunity and alternative medicines, and healthy living as the cure to the seasonal flu aka Covid. The seasonal flu was propagandized into the “killer” Coronavirus. It was always about the experimental mRNA vaccines to cause global fear, and it worked for the fearful. Then they started with the enticements with days off from work, money, and the lottery, and it worked for some, but it was not enough. Then came the illegal mandates that coerced many into getting experimental vaccines.
I say screw your germ theory, screw your viral theory, screw your viral transmission, screw your vaccine scientists and screw your toxic vaccines based on all those money-making and people-killing theories. These killers know that their poisonous vaccines and toxic drugs maim and kill. They are fully aware of Terrain Theory that says the cause of illness are toxins in our environment, food, water, air plus parasites, poor nutrition, poor hygiene and poor sanitation.........PERIOD!!!!!!!!!!!
Russ D - I understand your anger (I’m angry about all this, too; including my brother being murdered from those evil injections) - but do you realize that you’re screaming at one of the few physicians who fought against all these things?
I was just talking to my 29 year old daughter and telling her that as a child, eating watermelon meant that you would get a load of seeds in every bite. Now there are personal sized watermelons and even the big ones are practically seedless. I miss the old foods.
I miss eating delicious, juicy watermelons. Usually outside, because spitting out the seeds was part of the experience. We never asked anyone to remove the seeds!
Indeed. Dismantle the “system.”
I agree with much you say. I still see my doctors regularly, but am now much more skeptical of any recommended drug or even some diagnostics. especially those touted for screening or primary prevention. Of course, I would not turn down urgent or emergency care. But to the extent possible, I plan to due my "due diligence" when it comes to cost/benefit, risk/reward. You're correct; the system is biased to generate profits. And it's unfair to lay blame the front line medical staff; aware or not, they have little say in how the system runs. Even the infrequent independent doctor, who obviously has far more freedom to practice, must still answer to the state medical board and potential legal issues.
The initially well-intended Civil Rights law is the new original sin of America. It outlawed all discrimination on the basis of race and sex, but was later interpreted by courts and bureaucrats to require discrimination against white people and especially white men. Later legislation and court decisions added punitive damages and legal fee awards to terrorize employers and universities into becoming racist to fight racism. (See "The Origin of Woke" by Richard Hanania). The Supreme Court's ruling against university affirmative action is a step in the right direction, but the administrative agencies that propagate the DEI ideology really need to be dismantled. I agree with you that DEI has become a distraction from the underlying problems that cause disparate impacts, but DEI exists precisely because it is taboo to discuss the actual causes.
"but DEI exists precisely because it is taboo to discuss the actual causes."
This is a really really important point.
In the past week, Jeff Childers (Substack's Coffee & Covid) eloquently penned the same thought. (I've paraphrased slightly to make it more general-purpose):
Conservative media is mainly designed to provide its readers with information. Liberal media is designed to give its readers permission to think certain thoughts. This article signals to Democrats that it is now acceptable to talk about a previously forbidden topic.
I've not read Hanania, but another good book is Christopher Caldwell's "The Age of Entitlement".
Well, the entire elite ruling structure of America now has completely turned against people like me—lower middle class (whatever the hell that means), European (German Anglo), family on both sides here since the 1600s early 1700s, bit of indentured servitude and Palentine German stock. In truth, there never has been a guaranteed space for someone like me in America (the original Palentine ancestors were forced to live between Native Americans and bourgeois Anglos as a buffer) but the rules of engagement were clearer before the Immigration Act of 1965 and the reframing of America as “colonist racist” at that time. Elites either engineered this change in mythology, or well meaning wealthy Baby Boomers, protected by the lack of “immigration” from the 1920s to the 1960s, naively deluded themselves into believing that a multicultural secular leftist globalist utopia was an inevitable and desirable future, a/la Lennon’s “Imagine.” In San Diego, where one side of family has been since the late 1800s, stable affordable middle class and lower middle class neighborhoods have been turned into unrecognizable, strange globalist crap holes. The only thing that unifies people in these “communities,” if they can be called as such, is fucking Amazon and mimetic-induced desire for more crap. True, that’s always been an American value of sorts, but this is different: Now, especially since “COVID,” there has been a heavy ESG push to “race-based advertising.” And whereas before I could unify with other European Americans to ignore and mock the ridiculousness of advertising, we now have the added bonus of being called “racist” if we mock and degrade this equally ridiculous advertising of Amazon and Blackrock ilk. I am not seeing a way out of this for a better America, as the monster controllers have played so many cards over the past decade. Welcome to feedback from others.
I have a simple solution for dealing with corporate sponsors of 'woke' ideology as typically seen in their TV commercials. I don't buy their products. I call it the Disney Effect, which probably needs no explanation.
Truth is, hardly anything these pander bears make is really necessary and many of their products are actually harmful, so just stop buying them. If it's a necessary item you can almost always find a substitute, like ditching Gillette and going back to straight razors, or using cloth diapers instead of disposables.
Read the labels. Pay attention not only to what's IN the product (which you should always do) but where it was made and by who. Bear in mind, branded consumer products usually have a parent company which you can find on the net. Don't just stop buying the offending branded product, ditch their entire line.
Same goes for sports events, motion pictures, music, anything that offends thee just cut it off. TV especially. Put it to the test. Take a break from TV and see how fast it clears your head. Don't worry, if something important happens you'll hear about it.
I agree with everything except maybe the sports events. A lot of people stopped gathering to watch sports after the political stunts. I wonder if that was just one more way to divide or alienate us. To disrupt our culture.
One of the things I feel is sad about "diversity" is that in practice its just us exporting our corporate brands and their hegemony to the entire world.
Seems like the name-calling and advertising are working on you.
I’d suggest ignoring it.
Rather than rebuild a basic Public Health system that covers the basic needs, we are collapsing our medical system. Epoch is exposing how rural America is becoming void of Heathcare. US keeps sending billions and billions to other countries and we could use the money to rebuild our country!
https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/flatline-5519424?utm_source=Enews&utm_campaign=etv-2023-11-10-2&utm_medium=email&est=udvdRREtJAH%2BquVHcBGMeBAsar%2Bc%2FMh3FCNQA%2BIPD%2Brd%2BV3hwSbVza1rve4XML8%3D
I saw a documentary several years ago about a gentleman who'd started a charity to take mobile health care facilities to communities who lacked them. He originally imagined working in Latin America, but realised the need in the USA. It was heart-breaking to see, before dawn, the morning after they'd set up in a community who'd lost their hospital, a crowd of people queuing for treatment. I remember one lovely young lady, with long tanned legs (like I always wanted as a teenager) aged about thirty. She was having all her teeth removed. The doctors and dentists worked and worked as long as they stayed there. I'm in the UK, and our National Health Service (all treatment, ambulances, operation, child-birth etc, paid for from taxes, and free at the point of demand) is being run down. Insurance companies are rubbing their hands waiting to get their teeth into it.
I just signed up for paid subscription. I’m retired RN/NP who spent nearly 4 decades in hospital healthcare & you remind me of so many old school, common sense colleagues I’ve worked with. I enjoy & savor each of your posts. Your devotion to truth in medicine is sorely needed & much appreciated. I know you must spend hours on each post & I’m grateful for that. Know that you are making a difference.
Thank you! You should switch into the holistic/private practice field. There's a big demand for NPs who can deliver patient focused integrative care!
The best metaphor I can provide is that I am always astounded when I run into people who tell me I have to read this Substack.
I’m 69 & retired now but tempted sometimes to step back in unfortunately I let my license expire last year after maintaining for 6 years post retirement.
Ah got it.
There are only two ways to amass great wealth and power. The 1st way is illegal as you pointed out. The 2nd way is immoral. John D Rockefeller and Bill Gates did it via the immoral route. Elon Musk we will learn took the immoral route as well. The immoral route is not illegal but it’s taking advantage of of people and the laws up to the point of having laws put into place that protects you at the expense of your competitors and customers.
There are a few exceptions but in general I 100% agree with you.
The first (Producing something of immense value) only if you exploit IP, can keep it a trade secret, or your name have incredible cachet.
The immorality of Rockefeller and Gates is using their position to force people to do business with you or under cutting price to force out competition. Sam Walton and Jeff Bezos are prime examples. Then raising prices once the competition is gone. Gates stoled the technology that became windows. None of it is illegal but a moral person would not have done it.
And how badly Amazon's employees are treated.
All well and good, but how many of us have shares in Microsoft or Exxon (for example) via our pension plans or 401 Ks? The house we live in and the cars we drive were paid for by investments in Apple, Oracle, and several mining explorers that hit grade. How much of that was legitimate and how much was immoral? Not trying to be smart here, I wonder about that myself. I was careful in my choices and avoided obvious conflicts like arms manufacturers, but again, how many of us have Raytheon or General Dynamics in our portfolios and don't even know it?
I have Apple shares inherited from my dad that he bought @ ~ $5 a share that I can’t afford to sell to rebalance my investments for the massive capital gains taxes I would have to pay, so I do my donations that way.
Yours is what's known as a luxury problem. I too benefited from my parents, but perhaps not to your degree. I'm not rich by any means, but on the other hand, not everybody can retire in his early 40s, either. Anyway, if I ever find myself in possession of a time machine, one of many tasks on my list is to return to 1962, perhaps a bit earlier, and beg Dad to invest a few thousand dollars into the stock of an obscure languishing New England textile mill named Berkshire Hathaway. 😁
One way to make income off your APPL shares is by writing call options. You gain the premium if the option expires worthless, if not you have to sell a small amount below market to meet the call. You can keep that going for years, raking off small amounts each time to offset your eventual tax liability. It's not quite as simple as that of course, you also need an ability to read stock charts, but there's books that can teach you that, and like everything else, you get better at it with time.
I never reached the level of wealth where I had to worry much about taxes, but if I did, I would set up a foundation and fund scholarships, relief aid or legitimate medical research. You won't come out ahead necessarily, but you can pay yourself a reasonable salary, plus you get the pleasure of spending your money on what YOU, not the government, feels is important.
So true but what amazing development would have happened if Rockefeller or Gates had not acted in the way they did. There is a lot of things that didn’t happened that could have.
It's difficult to make moral judgments about technological advances. Most people don't realize that many technological advances came about due to warfare. Aviation advanced very rapidly in WWI & II for example. Radar, sonar, radio itself, all developed quickly due to the demands of war. Railways, motor vehicles and ships, same thing.
Metallurgy advanced historically due to the demand for stronger armour, swords and spears. Even the stirrup was a war development that enabled cavalry riders to stay on their horse, thus making them more combat effective. Stone masonry evolved due the need for fortifications and buildings that couldn't be attacked with fire. The list is endless.
We are a war-like species and have advanced due to that fact, despite how uncomfortable a truth that is. Even the pharmaceutical industry played a major role in developing treatments for wounds and prevention of infectious diseases, the principle aim being to support armies in the field.
This is also an important point.
Good points. It's not just humans that are warlike. Nietzsche called it "will to power." A biologist would call it survival instinct. Virtually all animals and even plants (plants!!!) tend to favor their own kind, and to repel outsiders.
This is also very true.
I've made a point to prioritize low yield investments I feel are moral over high yield ones that I don't.
The problem with bonds, which I assume you mean by 'low-yield' is that they don't do well in a rising interest rate environment, which I'm sure you've noticed. If you have to liquidate you can take a bad hit, but just sitting still can hurt you if rates stay high, which is a roll of the dice at this point.
Ask your financial advisor about this, don't take my word for it, but the best place to be is in dividend yielding corporations that 1. have been around a long time with a good history dividend growth, and 2. make something people need through good times and bad. Food producers for example. After that, it's just a matter of dollar cost averaging for new purchases, and dividend reinvestment, which you can automate.
None of them will be squeaky clean of course, but neither is what the government spends the money you lent them on. That's the ethical question you have to ask when you buy any govt. paper. What is this being spent on? Right now it's 155mm shells for Ukraine. Personally I would never buy govt. paper, not just because of the ethics, but because govt. borrowing undermines the value of your currency. As an American you won't see this as much as in some countries, but America is not immune to a currency crisis, and already the pieces are being assembled to replace the dollar as a reserve currency. Very negative for bonds ITLR.
I confronted this whole problem of where to put my money once I'd met our basic needs, reminding myself constantly that just to have that option put me in the upper 10% of people on earth, as far a choices go. (I pulled that number out of thin air, but it's probably not far off).
It came down to a recognition that we live in a highly complex environment in which it's simply not possible to predict the outcome of even the best intentions. Best we can do is avoid the obvious pitfalls, like funding govt. excess for example. If I were to lend money, it would be to a company that fits the above description, but not if they were carrying a lot of debt. Far better to own the shares. This forces you to pay attention to what they're doing, which is a way to participate in the economy, as opposed to sitting on the sidelines letting others make decisions on how to spend the money you just lent them.
In early America, you had to be a property owner in order to vote. They were referring to land mainly, but ownership in a company also meets the definition. Now imagine if as part of your high school graduation you had a small sum of money granted to you for the purpose of investing, which you'd have learned about in a grade 12 course. You'd have to keep at least one share in order to vote, but you'd be given an incentive to participate, along with an understanding of what's actually at stake in making an economy run. This is where the schools have failed us IMO. They don't educate people to the underlying physical reality of how things actually work. It's just assumed that they do and always will, right up to when the lights go out and chaos rules the streets.
You've probably read Talib, right? This is what he means when he talks about having "skin in the game."
Excellent points and it shows that morality is rarely black and white but many shades of gray. Sure, if you are an individual investor, you have great liberty to choose your investments. But even here would require much due diligence. And those choices get rapidly limited. For example, on an employee plan you can probably choose from several different funds, but each fund may invest in dozens or hundreds of stocks. Even the government bond fund is problematic, as you're implicitly loaning money to an extremely corrupt institution. Or, as in my case, my retirement funds come from a source over which I have absolutely no control.
I choose my own investments with Ally.
Thank you for this thoughtful and informative post. Our Country and others have lost their way. Merit should be the only consideration when considering admission to any medical school. The health of future patients depends on their caregivers being fully qualified. We cannot impove the status of of any individual or group of individuals by giving them preferred status over those who are better qualified. This will only lower the quality of the care for the patients and will not produce the desired effect on the group for which it is intended. We’ve been trying to do this for 60 years without success, but instead of recognizing our failures, we have doubled down on them. This is insanity but, I believe it is part of a plan to separate and destroy us.
Ron Cady - hear, hear!
When you have someone like Ben Carson, MD who grew up in a single parent home, living in the ghetto of Detroit with all his accomplishments, in spite of all that, and you have the recent POTUS Barak Hussein Obama Sotero (or Sotero Obama) foisted off on this country, in spite of his Kenyan birth, this DEI or DIE as far as patients go, this is just an attempt to perpetuate racism in service of maintaining power of people who are reliable Democrat voters and office holders, without doing anything for the supposed victims of 'systemic racism'.
Systemic racism is the welfare system which perpetuates single parent households which disproportionately affect blacks, urban poorly functioning public school systems which serve as employment agencies for largely unqualified public school teachers. It is at that level that the problem has to be attacked. Stable 2 parent households with Father or father figures, and at least one of the parents getting out of the house to earn a living, schools that truly educate rather than baby sit and indoctrinate children who are interested in learning (or whose parents make them at least pretend to be interested in learning until they are interested in learning),
Do that for a generation and you will see an impressive increase in the number of qualified POC applying and qualifying legitimately for space in medical school and likely succeeding legitimately.
I speak as a former medical school and residency faculty member, and there were at least 2 affirmative action (2 for's --POC and female), that really didn't belong in residency, but no one was going to let them know that -- I worked closely with one of the women as her advisor and did what I could to improve her clinical reasoning skills. The other one was just an air head, IMHO. Hopefully their patients have not been harmed. (OTOH, I had one black man who struggled initially, but was able to finish the program and into practice successfully.
Did you ever read the Brookings Institute's research on how to consistently prevent poverty?
No. If it is honest , it would conclude: finish school (depending upon the century & decade: 8th grade, high school, learn a marketable skill, get married, have children in that order. Oh & stay married for your children’s sake.
So what does their research say?
"Systemic racism is the welfare system which perpetuates single parent households which disproportionately affect blacks,..."
A common problem with social analysis these days is confusion between cause and effect.
When the USA was a manufacturing nation, Detroit was the center of the auto industry and a model of urban modernity. Blacks employed in that industry earned enough to marry, buy a home and save up for their kid's education. Problems associated with Black urban populations existed only at the margin and were often dealt with by the community itself. Discrimination existed of course, but Blacks had the economic means to overcome that, for example by supporting Black colleges and scholarships which their employers also chipped in on because it was to their mutual benefit.
That all ended with the introduction of foreign competition and as a result, the decline of manufacturing, primary industry (steel especially) and the railroads, which also employed Blacks in greater proportion to their demographics.
Elimination of import tariffs, offshoring of manufacturing and financialization of the remaining hollowed out economy disproportionately affected Blacks and led ultimately to their impoverishment, the response to which was Johnson's "Great Society" establishment of the welfare class, a response to a situation created, as usual, by government itself. The rest, as they say, is history.
I have an article coming out about the systematic dismantling of the working class by the predatory upper class and how we keep on blaming the wrong people for it.
Just finished reading the book, “White Trash”. I bet that it gives in detail what you will be covering in summary in your upcoming article. Thank you for taking on this topic.
It looks like you were not living in the US at the time that you write about, and you are a little young to understand the chronology through which I lived. Foreign competition was minimal when the not so Great Society legislation was passed (of which LBJ famously said this will have the N!993*s voting for us for the next 200 years, racist that he was) which put the nails in the coffin of the black family. Absent that, blacks would have likely migrated to greener pastures just like they did to get to Detroit and the northern urban centers, just like substantial numbers of blacks left the Deep South after the Civil War and became cowboys in the western plains.
You have the chronology exactly backwards. What you describe in your last paragraph came after the Great Society, which was not implemented in response to those things (because it came first) but as a means of shifting the black voting block (which had been Republican to the Democrats permanently, as I noted above.
The fact that welfare was available (for the price of kicking the man out of the home, and ultimately tying blacks to increasingly failing urban public school systems in the new urban Democrat 'plantations'.) took away the incentives to move to greener pastures where, while life would be hard at first, advancement through economic opportunity and freedom would be much more possible--but alas that is a hypothetical because the Democrats needed their plantations . . .
Nissan began exporting the 'Datsun' line in 1958, around the same time as Japanese transistor radios started to appear. America's steel industry began it's decline around the same time as competition from Germany and Japan started making inroads. Their industry was destroyed in the war, and so they were able to undercut US steel because of improved technology that US companies failed to adopt, relying instead on tariffs to offset their higher production costs. The decline in US manufacturing started much earlier than you think, but was hidden by the fact that the consumer wasn't as deeply affected as later on when their jobs started to disappear and inflation kicked in circa 1971.
It's possible I have the Great Society chronology wrong, but the decline in the US standard of living, including Black families who bore the brunt of it, was already a trend by the end of the 50's. My mother, for example, had to work part-time to pay off the mortgage, and my dad had a decent job by the standards of the day. That was in 1962, which should give you some idea of how long I've been around.
I agree when you state that welfare took away the incentive to look for alternate work, but where did the impetus to construct a welfare state come from in the first place? Johnson's racial attitude aside, I assume it was a response to an already existing situation since government is rarely proactive. I'm sure warning bells were already being sounded by industry who, facing increased foreign competition, were agitating for tariffs, which would have raised prices - unpopular for politicians everywhere. Easier to buy off the unemployed with handouts which would have alienated fewer voters.
I'd love to delve deeper into this but my wife just called me because we're suppose to go out. I gave her the stock response: 'just a minute honey, someone is wrong on the internet!' That got a laugh, but of course I didn't tell her that somebody might be me:)
Well I have been around since 1950. Datsuns may have been imported beginning in 1958, but I don’t believe they were a big factor in auto sales initially. As a pre teen boy, they were certainly not on my radar! And I didn’t recall, recognize any on the road until the mid 60’s. Full lineup of Fords , Chevy’s plus 4 -5 other GM brands , 3 Chrysler brands, a smattering of European cars beside the VW.
What I do know was the primary driver for the Great Society was the racial politics.
There were more R votes for the civil rights legislation than Democrat votes; blacks can count, & even racist LBJ knew that! Government may not be proactive, but politicians certainly are, especially when it comes to spending our money & money that we don’t have. Democrats certainly had plenty of practice doing that during the Depression and WWII, the former to no good effect & the latter out of necessity, but the habit was established.
I will give you the possibility that a case could be made for the blacks being hit first & harder ( but I would like to see #s) and I think they would rather have had a job & a safe neighborhood and good schools for their kids: they got none of that, just a welfare addiction.
Listen, I grew up in a Republican home, by 1968 I was an anti war , pro civil rights activist/legislation-- read Great Society legislation, much to my parents dismay.
The old Churchill story: liberal with a heart when young , by my 30s with 2 daughters, I was conservative, just as the demographers say!
My Dad sold rail car parts to the railroads & rail car manufacturers, and his career plateaued & tailed off in the late 60s.
"There were more R votes for the civil rights legislation than Democrat votes..."
I didn't know that. It seems counter-intuitive given the social activism going on in the Dem party at the time.
I'm not American BTW. I grew up in Alberta, son of a British Royal Navy officer and later Canadian Army major. I was expected to follow the family tradition and did until I met my first US draft resisters, ironically on an army base, where the unused H-huts from WWII were being used as a hostel. That was in 1969. I went off on a major tangent from there, left home early, went to sea working on oil tankers and later got involved in human rights issues surrounding the wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua and the coup in Chile. Pretty chilling stuff, no pun intended. I wouldn't describe myself as a socialist, but I don't buy the mainstream conservative outlook either, having been exposed to so many different cultures in the course of my life, and being married to two foreign women, the second of whom I'm still with after 36 years!
I travelled a lot in the US back then, and I can say the rust belt was already well established by the mid 70's. The railroads were also in trouble, and I recall the mergers and bankruptcies very well. NYC + PRR = PC -> CR + govt. bailout. BNSF, same thing.
I take a scientific and engineering view of the world. You can't consume what you can't produce, at least not for long. Eventually the bill comes due, which is what we're seeing now. The strength of a nation ultimately lies in its resource and manufacturing sectors, especially energy and steel which you need for defence. The USA has so many advantages. Ample resources, friendly neighbours to the north and south, plus two great oceans preventing any sort of military invasion. Only Russia can make the same claim in terms of resources, both material and human, but without the advantage of defensible borders. None of this should have happened and it breaks my heart to see America and its neighbours in such disarray.
Oh, and the social activism represented only a small part of the Democrat Party (certainly not the Dixicrats). Read about the 1968 Democrat Convention and associated riots/protests (you might want to read more widely than Wikipedia, as I am sure they have an incomplete picture of the goings on. Mayor Richard Daly certainly didn't have no truck with those people.
Yes, the reason that you didn't know that about the US Civil Rights legislation is that the education departments and teacher's colleges and teacher's unions populated the teaching ranks with leftists (sorry to burst your bubble, about the circles we both travelled in in the late 60's (I graduated HS in 1969) and early 70's: liberal as a youth or no heart, conservative after 35 or no brain per Churchill, fits my evolution.)) Anyway the leftists in education have been rewriting history since at least that long.
The Democrat party historically had 2 main bases roughly half and half: the Southern former Confederate States aka DixieCrats responsible for Jim Crow, the KKK and their grandparents fought the US Civil War as Confederates, the other base was the Northern urban centers predominantly immigrant populations or children of immigrants and unionized industrial workers (and minimal unionized government workers (not legal until JFK created by executive order--and not a logical arrangement government bargaining against itself with taxpayer's footing the bill & no say in the negotiation). There were not enough Democrat votes for civil rights legislation, and actually no votes that in the 1950s there were several Republican civil rights laws that were proposed that failed because of solid DIxicrat opposition.
What you say about the rust belt is true as well as the timing, but the first Great Society (GS)legislation was passed in 1965 after LBJ's landslide win over Goldwater in 1964. Probably between the ever expanding costs of the social programs of the GS programs and the expanding Vietnam War & taxes to pay for same as well as the increasing labor costs in manufacturing hindering industry from re-tooling to meet the foreign competition as tariffs were lowered, the rust belt was if not born, it was exacerbated. The choice was symbolized as between guns and butter, and the nation didn't choose, or chose both sparking an inflation that was tame compared to subsequent ones, but still devastating in its own way.
My Dad sold rail car parts to the railroads and he saw the NYC + PRR = PC --> CR impact as his career was downsized and ultimately he lost his job and spend some time unemployed and working selling Encyclopedia Britannica and hearing aids door to door, before getting back into the industry asa production supervisor until he retired ~1980.
While you were in Latin America, I was in college and medical school and only dimly aware of all the ins and outs of those tumultuous times, Went to West Virginia with its own labor problems.
Today's Democrat Party is not your grandfather's Democrat party: it is a party of government unionized government and other government workers, academics, NGOs, and health care workers, in short essentially of non-productive workers who are insulated from the market economy of cost conscious supply and demand. They don't understand your engineering mind set. For them the bill never comes due, and if someone calls them on it, they are aggrieved and cry racism. They are almost all un reconstructed leftists of various shades and susceptible to whatever crazy fad comes out of academia --hence 57 flavors of genders, etc. The much deminished industrial unions contribute $$ to the party, but by and. large the rank and file members are more traditional/conservative and vote independent and Republican.
John McWhorter has a lot to say about the myth of loss of industry as a root cause
https://glennloury.substack.com/p/setting-the-record-straight-on-deindustrializati
https://glennloury.substack.com/p/debating-the-deindustrialization
Can't say I like the way they framed the question: "Is it jobs or culture?" Why only two choices? Maybe it was both, or maybe it was something else? And why call it a myth? The loss of jobs was real and can be measured. I like to start with things that can be measured.
Race hustlers like Jackson and Sharpton no doubt played a role in stirring up discontent, but weren't they just capitalizing on something that already existed? What was that, if not the undermining of self-esteem that derives from decent employment and raising a family? And how do Faracon and Malcolm X fit into the equation? They were all about self-discipline, and a lot of blacks picked up on that. Not everyone turned to crime or became a welfare case.
I would cite loss of good jobs as a primary cause, but today I'd cite a whole range of subsequent causes and effects, including race hustling, religion, media portrayals, the drug culture and many other forms of opportunism, both internal and external.
Obama was born in Honolulu.
He was not(I know trusted people who were shown the hut that he was born in by his paternal grandmother in the village in Kenya.
Furthermore, he is not a natural born citizen ( father has to be aUS citizen, & his father never was--a Kenyan born British subject). To be a legitimate POTUS one must be a natural born citizen--and, contrary to popular opinion, the 14th Amendment does not change that.