This is the 1.5 year clinical trial for the GLP-1 drug Ozempic (Semaglutide) made by Novo Nordisk.
Like all clinical trials it was funded, designed, performed and selectively released by the pharma corporation selling the drug.
The authors report being paid and being employees of Novo Nordisk and a dozen other pharmaceutical companies.
The trial excluded those with a history of mental health problems, pancreatitis, endocrine and thyroid problems, renal impairment, history of cancers, and various other medical conditions.
It is standard practice for clinical trials to exclude people who will have higher rates of adverse effects from the drug. This biases the results in favor of the drug compared to the real world.
The drug group lost an extra -12.7 kg (27 pounds) compared to the placebo group. Weight loss in the drug group ended by week 52. By week 60 the drug group began regaining weight. From weeks 60-68 those in the drug group regained around 5 pounds (figure 1).
89.7% and 86.4% of people in the drug and placebo group respectively experienced adverse events.
9.8% and 6.4% of people in the drug and placebo group respectively experience any life threatening event. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2032183
If you read the adverse event list there is a curiosity. The trial reports similar adverse events rates in both groups but in table 3 the drug group has around 20% more participants reporting adverse events in many of the sub categories.
The reason for this discrepancy is relatively easy to find in table 3. The study didn’t report the NUMBER of adverse events they instead reported the number of PEOPLE experiencing ANY adverse event.
People can experience many adverse events. Someone with 10 adverse events will be reported the same as someone with 1 adverse event. This statistical slight of hand is used to make the drug appear safer than it actually is.
In table 3 you can see the number of adverse events and find out how much this statistic falsehood does.
With the trick you have the drug causing 50% more people to have “any” life threatening event. Without it you get the drug causing 75% more life threatening events.
Likewise, the drug caused 50% more adverse events if you don’t want to state it in a way to deceive people.
We didn’t perform these studies and we don’t have access to the full study data. If the pharma study and authors do things this borderline fraudulent in the open with no consequences what do you think they’ll do in secret? What do you think occurs in an environment where fraudulent practices are this common?
Anybody else having trouble accessing posts at Naked Capitalism? Last few times I’ve tried to read something there – using MS Edge – I get to read a paragraph or two, then MS throws up a “Security Check” screen, with the classic little Captcha box asking me to vow that “I’m not a robot”.
A few weeks ago – on Chromebook, when my desktop (yeah, I’m OldSchool) was busted – I had a different kind of problem. I was checking Yves’ Iran post every AM, and it would load, but reeaaalll slowly.
Is Somebody trying to make it hard for people to access NC? Or is there something sus on those NC pages which triggers MS (and bogs down Chrome)?
Which reminds me, a couple years ago, I suddenly lost access to Sic Semper Tyrannis; never did figure out whether TTG (who was running the site after Pat Lang died) just forgot to pay the bills, or if Somebody was blocking the site.
The way Turcopolier suddenly disappeared, even from being legacy-linkable or even any archives at all, from off the web makes me think TTG very suddenly shut it down. (Turcopolier is what Colonel Lang changed the blog’s name to).
I think the only place it could be found is at the Internet Archive-Wayback Machine, and I doubt those people capture any comments to any of the posts.
In last week’s Open Thread. mago mentioned the Ceuta issue (at least 141 dead people, most of them drowned). It’s part of the usual Moroccan colonialist strategies (the Green March was the most obvious but not the only one; the one in 2021, after Polisario Front’s Brahim Ghali’s hospitalization was also huge but not even close to this last one), but this time it’s openly coupled with US and Israel help. The issue is very complex and a lot could be said about it (immiseration in Morocco especially now with the coming World Cup, gas from Algeria deals, Western Sahara situation, Spanish government international stance, appeasement, Western fascistization, Schengen Area, NATO and a loooong et cetera) but there is something obvious few people seem to be aware of: just look where Ceuta is on a map. Gibraltar is British; if Ceuta became USrael controlled via Morocco, the Strait of Gibraltar would be totally in the hands of the Orange Golem and its Maharal. In this specific geopolitical moment.
Also, when we mention colonialism we immediately think about Europe and here in the West we tend to forget or downplay other instances of it. One clear example is Japan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Morocco’s government is openly colonialist: it currently controls, claims and/or pushes for at least: Western Sahara (phosphates for our American friend), Ceuta, Melilla (btw, these two enclaves are a bunch of centuries older than Morocco), parts of Mauritania and Algeria and even Northern Mali. They also claim an extension of the waters opposite the Canary Islands (fisheries and resources).
An interesting phenomenon happened in Ceuta after the crisis: lots of right-wing agitproppers and pro-pogromists were spotted, chased and expelled by mobs of citizens brandishing Spanish flags under the slogan “Out of Ceuta, sons of a bitch”, “Ceuta is not Torre-Pacheco” and “You are not going to divide us” (the Muslim and Christian communities in Ceuta). The wide confrontation against that scum and the reappropiation of the Spanish flag by regular people is something I truly didn’t see coming (the flag of Spain has been thoroughly co-opted, bar occasional soccer victories, by far right wing since the Spanish Civil War.)
These last days I read a few scattered news about some random finds in the Danube waters: a mammoth in Romania, two Wehrmacht soldier corpses and their motorbike in Budapest, a bunch of shipwrecks, unexploded 2WW bombs, relics of the Constantine Bridge… All those articles just mentioned the reason why all this was happening as a side note, in a surprisingly casual way: the Danube was running exceptionally low due to an unusual drought. The chant seems to be “focus on the curios, not the pithy, relevant reality”.
I have been having essentially the same problems accessing naked capitalism that you have had. The security alerts are plainly bogus. Microsoft itself appears to be trying to block the site–but i am not sure that that is the whole story.
Funny thing about Settler Colonialism . . . if you look further back in time you see more cases of it.
Japan itself IS a settler-colonialist nation . . . founded by various sorts of East Asian mainlanders on land conquered from the indigenous Ainu people, who are now a tiny conquered Indigenous minority in Hokkaido, Japan; making their last stand there and in the pages of National Geographic Magazine. ( Some may also still survive on Sakhalin Island and some other such places).
The Arab States of North Africa were conquered and settled by invading Arab conquerors building their power on top of the indigenous Berber people already there, and still there to this day.
By the way, I went over to Naked Capitalism just now to see if I experienced any problems and I did not. It is functioning entirely normally for me just now. Of course I am using Mighty Academic Computer-etc. systems and I searched under Yahoo All The Web and NOT under Google or Bing or anything else.
Antidotes for poisonous imperial colonial power grabs must exist somewhere, somehow. Cynics say the people are gelded , ain’t got no balls, but reading Egoculexegono’s report on the Ceueta denizen’s response raises hope.
Even in the dumb and beaten down enclaves of America there are voices waking up and shouting we’re fed up and we’re not going to take it anymore.
Hey, there are more of us than there are of them, and yes, it’s an us and them situation.
Cheering from the sidelines I confess, but it’s time for taking it to the streets. Hit em where they live. Yeah, I know that’s easy to say.
By the way, in a previous thread spud mentioned that the rich are functionally insane, which is oh so true. Sadly, the same could be said of most people.
On another note, having grown up in the state of World Famous Potatoes, aka Idaho, every time I see spud, I think of my homeland.
My recollection is that TTG didn’t necessarily have the keys to everything related to the website. I do remember the domain lapsing previously for a few days.
Marguerite’s interests are/were being looked after by a conservator – I previously saw a final accounting recorded and interpreted this as her having died (as I understand it, this is the usual sequence of events). In fact, what appears to have happened is that she switched conservators. I know that the Alexandria house has been sold – no idea whether Marguerite is still alive or not.
I remember that TTG was continuing the blog with Marguerite’s blessing. I suspect that she may have no longer been in a position to continue to give that blessing and/or some key piece of legal authority may have lapsed. (IIRC Pat set the new site up via Iceland in some way I no longer recall, which implies they might be very hard-assed about access and legal authorities if something lapsed.)
Clashes Erupted.
How many times do we see that phrase in banner headlines across the political spectrum?
Clashes =killing, bloodshed, violence, not kittens having a spat.
And nothing “erupted””. The stew’s been simmering for a long long time.
Language and labeling matters.
Volcanoes sleep and spit and spew before erupting.
Walk Like an Egyptian
Thank you for this detailed explanation of many things SST and Turcopolier. These are things I knew nothing of.
It could well be then, that the blog was suddenly turned off by what Colonel Lang himself might have considered a form of ” force majeure” or at least ” force majeure lite”.
Yes, I started noticing at least a couple of months ago that Naked Capitalism had gotten really spammy with ad serving. I clicked there just now, and it took a full 3 minutes for all the ‘retrieving data’ stuff to finish. Mostly from googlesyndication.com and assertcom.de.
I use a 10(?) year old laptop with Linux Mint, Firefox, Duck Duck Go, standard pop-up blocker and ATT fiber internet. My ISP speed varies considerably from day to day, but this morning seems normally fast.
If I had to guess, I’d look at all those ad downloads first. I have no idea how Microsoft deals with that kind of stuff, but I’m sure that it’s slower and clunkier than Linux.
Also, remember that ‘Yves’ runs what I believe to be a valuable service, but she is certainly not your friend.
I was really impressed by this essay from Substack and wanted to share it. It addresses some issues often discussed on this blog, including the possibilities for a better future.
The author uses the Roman economy as a distant mirror to analogize the civilizational trajectory of the modern fossil fuel economy. The Roman slave-labor latifundia was an extraction engine, and a solar-powered one, but ran aground when it cannabalized the independent citizen farmer and when it could not be fed supplemental resources from new conquests to bolster its meagre surplus. A familiar thesis and analysis, perfectly plausible in outline. Things get interesting when he applies that template to modern civilization running aground on climate change and the billionaire class lover affair with AI and robots.
Potatoes, tomatoes and eggplant are members of the nightshade family as is belladonna, all no nos in the macrobiotic philosophy as if anyone reading this gets the reference or cares, but it was a thing once upon a time and maybe still is along with brown rice and miso soup. Better than protein bars and processed food and mainstream news in my not so humble view, pero que se yo?
So, yeah, spuds, Clinton, ground hog day, banal evil . . .
Whatcha gonna do when the lights go out and there’s no one left to blame and you know you’re going to die?
Only goodness gained in life will help you then.
Salud hermanos y hermanas
Wishing you all the best
mago I remember your posts on macrobiotics. I had a book by the master but I forget
If anyone reading has trouble with stick-to-it-ness…and then you beat yourself up for not only ‘not being perfect’ but really not even giving it a fair shot…
It’s okay. There are still things that can be gleaned from this ‘failure’ even though you aren’t following the wiser person”s counsel to any serious degree.
I wish I could tell you it’s based on principle but I just sort of got sick of them.
The banana pipeline is bad. Very very bad.
I still drink coffee which is akin to chewing coca leaves except I don’t grow the coffee beans and all which is a rather huge ‘except’ right there.
They’re growing tropicals in Vermont now so no reason I can’t grow some coca plants in a greenhouse.
Simply to chew the leaves of course. Don’t get any wild ideas.
Here in NJ you’re not legally allowed to grow any weed but next door in New York Hochul just ‘allowed’ more ‘craft growing’ or something…and it can be sold at farmers markets.
Hochul hasn’t said anything about structural changes to the economy-society.
George Oshawa I never knew, but I hung out with macrobiotic guru Michio Kushi and his wife, the Dragon Lady, Aveline. They both had affairs. They both died of cancer. Just saying.
I also knew their West Coast country counterparts, Herman and Cornelia Aihara. They were kind of the country bumpkins compared to the city slicker Kushis, but Cornelia was a kick ass cook who wrote some great cookbooks, which I once owned but have since lost. It was a cooking class I took from her that launched me on my way.
I’ve got stories from that time from here to Christmas, all the characters I knew, all the events I catered from weddings to seminars. All the cooking classes, all the crazy people and interactions. No bragging, but the main thing Anthony Bourdain has over me was self promotion and motivation to get it out there. Also dead now. Much respect and appreciation for his contributions to the culinary world along with all those I’ve worked and collaborated with along the way.
And most of all to the biggest influence and inspiration in my culinary and personal life, Hiroshi Hayashi. I hope he’s been reborn in a pure realm and benefits countless sentient beings.
Just checking in, 6th day on the road, am in the Yucatan Peninsula, made it alive and in one piece.
Took 2 days across New Mexico and Texas (I have an old dread of Texas since my first posting as a Merchant Marine in Puerto de Arturo in 1980, a racist and awful place. Met a great Saint and benefactor there on our 2nd day however, one can always be surprised.) My younger friend (age 30) & I were in Eagle Pass, I was invited back to see him if I ever again visit USA (unlikely). No hassle crossing the border. US glad to see me gone, me glad to get going.
Next 3 days a bit of a blur of long drives; have some adventures I’ll share later when less burnt out por el camino (by the road).
6th day today was Hell; every Mexican we met or interacted with was wonderful, warm, amable (amiable) & helpful. Stayed at a discount hotel day 5, either the 2 front desk people or the waiter stole my credit card info in a futile attempt to defraud me. It failed. But my California Credit Union Card cancelled, unusable until I get an address here;
Lesson– Don’t stay in cheap, shady places even when you’re exhausted. Also (not doing an ad here) have a backup Credit Card, AmEx the safest, & if you’re ripped off can always get the money back.
Will do a fuller report in a couple of days. No rest tomorrow, 7th day, headed to my chosen future home. Oh, in closing, never heard a word nor rumor about the Orange Neo-Caligula. Things felt lighter and more copasetic and even communalist until the theft, long journey today with few pesos on us. Greeted by a deluge, now blue skies and freedom. Later, Gators.
Oakchair
This is the 1.5 year clinical trial for the GLP-1 drug Ozempic (Semaglutide) made by Novo Nordisk.
Like all clinical trials it was funded, designed, performed and selectively released by the pharma corporation selling the drug.
The authors report being paid and being employees of Novo Nordisk and a dozen other pharmaceutical companies.
The trial excluded those with a history of mental health problems, pancreatitis, endocrine and thyroid problems, renal impairment, history of cancers, and various other medical conditions.
It is standard practice for clinical trials to exclude people who will have higher rates of adverse effects from the drug. This biases the results in favor of the drug compared to the real world.
The drug group lost an extra -12.7 kg (27 pounds) compared to the placebo group. Weight loss in the drug group ended by week 52. By week 60 the drug group began regaining weight. From weeks 60-68 those in the drug group regained around 5 pounds (figure 1).
89.7% and 86.4% of people in the drug and placebo group respectively experienced adverse events.
9.8% and 6.4% of people in the drug and placebo group respectively experience any life threatening event.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2032183
If you read the adverse event list there is a curiosity. The trial reports similar adverse events rates in both groups but in table 3 the drug group has around 20% more participants reporting adverse events in many of the sub categories.
The reason for this discrepancy is relatively easy to find in table 3. The study didn’t report the NUMBER of adverse events they instead reported the number of PEOPLE experiencing ANY adverse event.
People can experience many adverse events. Someone with 10 adverse events will be reported the same as someone with 1 adverse event. This statistical slight of hand is used to make the drug appear safer than it actually is.
In table 3 you can see the number of adverse events and find out how much this statistic falsehood does.
With the trick you have the drug causing 50% more people to have “any” life threatening event. Without it you get the drug causing 75% more life threatening events.
Likewise, the drug caused 50% more adverse events if you don’t want to state it in a way to deceive people.
Another trial was pretty much the same and used the same lying with statistics the previous trial used.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7905697/#H1-3-JOI210014
We didn’t perform these studies and we don’t have access to the full study data. If the pharma study and authors do things this borderline fraudulent in the open with no consequences what do you think they’ll do in secret? What do you think occurs in an environment where fraudulent practices are this common?
elkern
Anybody else having trouble accessing posts at Naked Capitalism? Last few times I’ve tried to read something there – using MS Edge – I get to read a paragraph or two, then MS throws up a “Security Check” screen, with the classic little Captcha box asking me to vow that “I’m not a robot”.
A few weeks ago – on Chromebook, when my desktop (yeah, I’m OldSchool) was busted – I had a different kind of problem. I was checking Yves’ Iran post every AM, and it would load, but reeaaalll slowly.
Is Somebody trying to make it hard for people to access NC? Or is there something sus on those NC pages which triggers MS (and bogs down Chrome)?
Which reminds me, a couple years ago, I suddenly lost access to Sic Semper Tyrannis; never did figure out whether TTG (who was running the site after Pat Lang died) just forgot to pay the bills, or if Somebody was blocking the site.
Are They coming for Ian next?
different clue
@elkern,
The way Turcopolier suddenly disappeared, even from being legacy-linkable or even any archives at all, from off the web makes me think TTG very suddenly shut it down. (Turcopolier is what Colonel Lang changed the blog’s name to).
I think the only place it could be found is at the Internet Archive-Wayback Machine, and I doubt those people capture any comments to any of the posts.
Maybe Larry Johnson knows what happened.
Egoculexegonos
In last week’s Open Thread. mago mentioned the Ceuta issue (at least 141 dead people, most of them drowned). It’s part of the usual Moroccan colonialist strategies (the Green March was the most obvious but not the only one; the one in 2021, after Polisario Front’s Brahim Ghali’s hospitalization was also huge but not even close to this last one), but this time it’s openly coupled with US and Israel help. The issue is very complex and a lot could be said about it (immiseration in Morocco especially now with the coming World Cup, gas from Algeria deals, Western Sahara situation, Spanish government international stance, appeasement, Western fascistization, Schengen Area, NATO and a loooong et cetera) but there is something obvious few people seem to be aware of: just look where Ceuta is on a map. Gibraltar is British; if Ceuta became USrael controlled via Morocco, the Strait of Gibraltar would be totally in the hands of the Orange Golem and its Maharal. In this specific geopolitical moment.
Also, when we mention colonialism we immediately think about Europe and here in the West we tend to forget or downplay other instances of it. One clear example is Japan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Morocco’s government is openly colonialist: it currently controls, claims and/or pushes for at least: Western Sahara (phosphates for our American friend), Ceuta, Melilla (btw, these two enclaves are a bunch of centuries older than Morocco), parts of Mauritania and Algeria and even Northern Mali. They also claim an extension of the waters opposite the Canary Islands (fisheries and resources).
An interesting phenomenon happened in Ceuta after the crisis: lots of right-wing agitproppers and pro-pogromists were spotted, chased and expelled by mobs of citizens brandishing Spanish flags under the slogan “Out of Ceuta, sons of a bitch”, “Ceuta is not Torre-Pacheco” and “You are not going to divide us” (the Muslim and Christian communities in Ceuta). The wide confrontation against that scum and the reappropiation of the Spanish flag by regular people is something I truly didn’t see coming (the flag of Spain has been thoroughly co-opted, bar occasional soccer victories, by far right wing since the Spanish Civil War.)
Egoculexegonos
These last days I read a few scattered news about some random finds in the Danube waters: a mammoth in Romania, two Wehrmacht soldier corpses and their motorbike in Budapest, a bunch of shipwrecks, unexploded 2WW bombs, relics of the Constantine Bridge… All those articles just mentioned the reason why all this was happening as a side note, in a surprisingly casual way: the Danube was running exceptionally low due to an unusual drought. The chant seems to be “focus on the curios, not the pithy, relevant reality”.
Gaianne
Elkern–
I have been having essentially the same problems accessing naked capitalism that you have had. The security alerts are plainly bogus. Microsoft itself appears to be trying to block the site–but i am not sure that that is the whole story.
–Gaianne
different clue
Funny thing about Settler Colonialism . . . if you look further back in time you see more cases of it.
Japan itself IS a settler-colonialist nation . . . founded by various sorts of East Asian mainlanders on land conquered from the indigenous Ainu people, who are now a tiny conquered Indigenous minority in Hokkaido, Japan; making their last stand there and in the pages of National Geographic Magazine. ( Some may also still survive on Sakhalin Island and some other such places).
The Arab States of North Africa were conquered and settled by invading Arab conquerors building their power on top of the indigenous Berber people already there, and still there to this day.
Other examples may exist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_people
different clue
By the way, I went over to Naked Capitalism just now to see if I experienced any problems and I did not. It is functioning entirely normally for me just now. Of course I am using Mighty Academic Computer-etc. systems and I searched under Yahoo All The Web and NOT under Google or Bing or anything else.
mago
Antidotes for poisonous imperial colonial power grabs must exist somewhere, somehow. Cynics say the people are gelded , ain’t got no balls, but reading Egoculexegono’s report on the Ceueta denizen’s response raises hope.
Even in the dumb and beaten down enclaves of America there are voices waking up and shouting we’re fed up and we’re not going to take it anymore.
Hey, there are more of us than there are of them, and yes, it’s an us and them situation.
Cheering from the sidelines I confess, but it’s time for taking it to the streets. Hit em where they live. Yeah, I know that’s easy to say.
By the way, in a previous thread spud mentioned that the rich are functionally insane, which is oh so true. Sadly, the same could be said of most people.
On another note, having grown up in the state of World Famous Potatoes, aka Idaho, every time I see spud, I think of my homeland.
Carborundum
My recollection is that TTG didn’t necessarily have the keys to everything related to the website. I do remember the domain lapsing previously for a few days.
Marguerite’s interests are/were being looked after by a conservator – I previously saw a final accounting recorded and interpreted this as her having died (as I understand it, this is the usual sequence of events). In fact, what appears to have happened is that she switched conservators. I know that the Alexandria house has been sold – no idea whether Marguerite is still alive or not.
I remember that TTG was continuing the blog with Marguerite’s blessing. I suspect that she may have no longer been in a position to continue to give that blessing and/or some key piece of legal authority may have lapsed. (IIRC Pat set the new site up via Iceland in some way I no longer recall, which implies they might be very hard-assed about access and legal authorities if something lapsed.)
tl;dr – epistemology is a thing.
mago
Clashes Erupted.
How many times do we see that phrase in banner headlines across the political spectrum?
Clashes =killing, bloodshed, violence, not kittens having a spat.
And nothing “erupted””. The stew’s been simmering for a long long time.
Language and labeling matters.
Volcanoes sleep and spit and spew before erupting.
Walk Like an Egyptian
Dan Kelly
Every time I see a potato I think of Bill Clinton.
https://youtu.be/R1b-isEeGV0?t=679
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftBank_Vision_Fund
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cihl96oem7E
https://youtu.be/MKnIlrZVtWY?t=609
different clue
@Carborundum,
Thank you for this detailed explanation of many things SST and Turcopolier. These are things I knew nothing of.
It could well be then, that the blog was suddenly turned off by what Colonel Lang himself might have considered a form of ” force majeure” or at least ” force majeure lite”.
Eric Anderson
I’ve no issue accessing NaCap.
Running Safari.
Clear your cache.
Eric F
@elkern,
Yes, I started noticing at least a couple of months ago that Naked Capitalism had gotten really spammy with ad serving. I clicked there just now, and it took a full 3 minutes for all the ‘retrieving data’ stuff to finish. Mostly from googlesyndication.com and assertcom.de.
I use a 10(?) year old laptop with Linux Mint, Firefox, Duck Duck Go, standard pop-up blocker and ATT fiber internet. My ISP speed varies considerably from day to day, but this morning seems normally fast.
If I had to guess, I’d look at all those ad downloads first. I have no idea how Microsoft deals with that kind of stuff, but I’m sure that it’s slower and clunkier than Linux.
Also, remember that ‘Yves’ runs what I believe to be a valuable service, but she is certainly not your friend.
StewartM
Youtube takedowns of Jordan Peterson:
Genetically Modified Skeptic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NvID5SiDUw
Hakim:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ3RL3WZaXg&pp=ygUVSm9yZGFuIFBldGVyc29uIEhha2lt0gcJCcQLAYcqIYzv
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXwUaUf_pOs&pp=ygUVSm9yZGFuIFBldGVyc29uIEhha2lt
bruce wilder
I was really impressed by this essay from Substack and wanted to share it. It addresses some issues often discussed on this blog, including the possibilities for a better future.
The Slave Economy Never Ended
https://open.substack.com/pub/quyma/p/the-slave-economy-never-ended-it?
The author uses the Roman economy as a distant mirror to analogize the civilizational trajectory of the modern fossil fuel economy. The Roman slave-labor latifundia was an extraction engine, and a solar-powered one, but ran aground when it cannabalized the independent citizen farmer and when it could not be fed supplemental resources from new conquests to bolster its meagre surplus. A familiar thesis and analysis, perfectly plausible in outline. Things get interesting when he applies that template to modern civilization running aground on climate change and the billionaire class lover affair with AI and robots.
mago
Potatoes, tomatoes and eggplant are members of the nightshade family as is belladonna, all no nos in the macrobiotic philosophy as if anyone reading this gets the reference or cares, but it was a thing once upon a time and maybe still is along with brown rice and miso soup. Better than protein bars and processed food and mainstream news in my not so humble view, pero que se yo?
So, yeah, spuds, Clinton, ground hog day, banal evil . . .
Whatcha gonna do when the lights go out and there’s no one left to blame and you know you’re going to die?
Only goodness gained in life will help you then.
Salud hermanos y hermanas
Wishing you all the best
Dan Kelly
mago I remember your posts on macrobiotics. I had a book by the master but I forget
If anyone reading has trouble with stick-to-it-ness…and then you beat yourself up for not only ‘not being perfect’ but really not even giving it a fair shot…
It’s okay. There are still things that can be gleaned from this ‘failure’ even though you aren’t following the wiser person”s counsel to any serious degree.
I mean, Ohsawa only lived until 72.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoFZhD8jpFg
I am kidding. A little.
George was a good dude.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Ohsawa
https://youtu.be/zBmIoUO7_Gc?t=50
I stopped eating bananas.
I wish I could tell you it’s based on principle but I just sort of got sick of them.
The banana pipeline is bad. Very very bad.
I still drink coffee which is akin to chewing coca leaves except I don’t grow the coffee beans and all which is a rather huge ‘except’ right there.
They’re growing tropicals in Vermont now so no reason I can’t grow some coca plants in a greenhouse.
Simply to chew the leaves of course. Don’t get any wild ideas.
Here in NJ you’re not legally allowed to grow any weed but next door in New York Hochul just ‘allowed’ more ‘craft growing’ or something…and it can be sold at farmers markets.
Hochul hasn’t said anything about structural changes to the economy-society.
Help me great spirit.
Dan Kelly
‘I had a book by the master but I forget ‘
What did I forget?!
If I were still writing with pen and pad that wouldn’t have happened.
I was going to write that I forget most of what I once read and pitifully attempted to practice.
mago
George Oshawa I never knew, but I hung out with macrobiotic guru Michio Kushi and his wife, the Dragon Lady, Aveline. They both had affairs. They both died of cancer. Just saying.
I also knew their West Coast country counterparts, Herman and Cornelia Aihara. They were kind of the country bumpkins compared to the city slicker Kushis, but Cornelia was a kick ass cook who wrote some great cookbooks, which I once owned but have since lost. It was a cooking class I took from her that launched me on my way.
I’ve got stories from that time from here to Christmas, all the characters I knew, all the events I catered from weddings to seminars. All the cooking classes, all the crazy people and interactions. No bragging, but the main thing Anthony Bourdain has over me was self promotion and motivation to get it out there. Also dead now. Much respect and appreciation for his contributions to the culinary world along with all those I’ve worked and collaborated with along the way.
And most of all to the biggest influence and inspiration in my culinary and personal life, Hiroshi Hayashi. I hope he’s been reborn in a pure realm and benefits countless sentient beings.
Mark Level
Just checking in, 6th day on the road, am in the Yucatan Peninsula, made it alive and in one piece.
Took 2 days across New Mexico and Texas (I have an old dread of Texas since my first posting as a Merchant Marine in Puerto de Arturo in 1980, a racist and awful place. Met a great Saint and benefactor there on our 2nd day however, one can always be surprised.) My younger friend (age 30) & I were in Eagle Pass, I was invited back to see him if I ever again visit USA (unlikely). No hassle crossing the border. US glad to see me gone, me glad to get going.
Next 3 days a bit of a blur of long drives; have some adventures I’ll share later when less burnt out por el camino (by the road).
6th day today was Hell; every Mexican we met or interacted with was wonderful, warm, amable (amiable) & helpful. Stayed at a discount hotel day 5, either the 2 front desk people or the waiter stole my credit card info in a futile attempt to defraud me. It failed. But my California Credit Union Card cancelled, unusable until I get an address here;
Lesson– Don’t stay in cheap, shady places even when you’re exhausted. Also (not doing an ad here) have a backup Credit Card, AmEx the safest, & if you’re ripped off can always get the money back.
Will do a fuller report in a couple of days. No rest tomorrow, 7th day, headed to my chosen future home. Oh, in closing, never heard a word nor rumor about the Orange Neo-Caligula. Things felt lighter and more copasetic and even communalist until the theft, long journey today with few pesos on us. Greeted by a deluge, now blue skies and freedom. Later, Gators.
different clue
Oh my goodness . . . the weatherman in this little weather-damage newsbit could have been a poet and he wants us all to know it.
Strong storms slam Chicago area
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLfLP73-zHY
mago
Keep on keeping on señor Level and keep us updated.
Chinga los diablos