Hemophelia A

     Okay, I have a question.

      It is a question about ethics, about morals, about human values.

     Hemophilia A is a complex of related human health disorders.  What these disorders have in common is a weakness or total inability for a person's blood to clot and thus to control and stop bleeding from wounds.  Scientists have isolated several different factors which can separately or together bring about this symptom.  For the most part these factors are all genetic.  Like certain other traits (baldness, for example), these traits appear primarily in the males of the species but they are primarily passed by the females  (if you are bald, you got the gene for baldness from your mother whose father gave it to her.).  For over 18,000 people in the US, an episode of bleeding  can be life-threatening.

     Baxter International is a pharmeceutical and medical device company specializing in issues involving blood such as hemophilia and dialysis.  One of their top sellers is a drug called "Advate" used to prevent bleeding episodes for hemophylliacs.  In other words, people suffering from these disorders will commonly be maintained on this drug.  They will take it all the time.  Because the condition has no known cure, they will have to take the drug for life.

     Advate treatment can cost a patient as much as $12,500 per week, $600,000 per year, though $120,000 is closer to the average.

http://www.enquirer.com/extremechoices/loc_extremeadvate.html

     Obviously relatively few patients earn enough money to pay for their own treatments.  By and large, the costs for this treatment must fall back on society at large, either the large insurance companies or else the even larger governments must pay most of this cost.

      So my simple question is this:  does the society, the government if you will, which is paying these costs, have the right to demand and to enforce sterility upon the recipients of the treatment?  I will appreciate a variety of responses.

    

Ferguson

If we have rule by law, then a man who is known to have killed by gun an unarmed man, is charged with murder and goes to jail without bond until his trial date.

If we have rule of force, might, and money, then the white people need to wake up to the fact that they are vastly outnumbered in this world today, in all three.

He who lives by the gun will die by the gun.

The day of reckoning is at hand....

Freedom

from The Washington Post this morning:

dangers of sharing ‘Genie, you’re free’

By Caitlin Dewey August 12 at 1:09 PM

On Monday night, as fans around the world began to grieve Robin Williams’s death, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — best known, in many circles, as the people behind the Oscars — sent out what may be the iconic social media image of Williams’s death.

Genie, you’re free. pic.twitter.com/WjA9QuuldD
— The Academy (@TheAcademy) August 12, 2014

More than 270,000 people have shared the tweet, which means that, per the analytics site Topsy, as many as 69 million people have seen it.
The problem? It violates well-established public health standards for how we talk about suicide.

Evidently the slave owners do not like this kind of talk.
Its expensive to obtain slaves and even more expensive to train them and to keep them in line.
Good slaves, especially good rich slaves like dear Robin, are not supposed to die like this.  don't you all know this?  They are supposed to be checked in to a nursing home and slowly bled by leaches until broke, for however long that takes ....

I do hope and pray you all are paying attention! 

idiots

     Two boxes of plastic kitchen tall wastebasket trash bags on the shelf, side by side, for sale at my hardware store this morning.  Same exact size of bag, same quantity, both unscented (praise the Lord!  but that's a different issue.)

     Identical except for one thing ... one of the boxes has all the descriptions and advertising written in english, the other is Spanish.

    Oh yes, and the prices are different, the English box costs $13.99, the Spanish box costs $7.99 ....

trades

     It is difficult for me to know what to make of the current situation.  The US stock market (like many others) is showing historically high valuations, based on the promise that the radically loose money policy of the Federal Reserve and most other central banks must continue.  The politicians and the media continue to beat the war drums as loudly as they can, perhaps as a distraction or perhaps because they really want a war -- it would help with the population problem and it would give an excuse for a crash.  But the markets are no longer behaving as "free", like everything else these days they exhibit strong central control characteristics.  Prices may not be "fixed" but they sure are biased.  One cannot use crowd psychology methodology for market prognostication anymore because the crowd no longer has control -- its been overruled time and time and time again in the last 6 years.

     The most curious thing about all of this is that the media (which has been unabashedly touting Rosie Scenario like a thunderstorm in a hurricane) is chanting, over and over again, the likelihood of a crash, the pullback of the supposed smart money, and in particular the asides of individual central banker figures such as Lagarde and Bullard, that the market is toppy, investors becoming overconfident, bankers taking excessive risks, and a pullback is warranted.

     I call this "curious" because this sort of behavior has never preceded a proper bubble collapse.  In 2008, in 2000, in 1987, everybody was exuberant about how the markets would never go down again.

     I cannot afford to lose here.  I have backed off of oil and gas for strictly seasonal reasons.  I'm out of gas entirely while in oil, I sold December 38's on Suncor for a very nice premium.  I put the loose cash into some large cap health issues and then sold January deep in the money calls against them.  I am happy to collect the 5% or so delay premiums and the 3% or so dividends for a six month holding period before they get called away, but in a crash I'm fairly well protected and will have plenty of cash to repurchase stuff.

     Then, I've retaken a significant position in silver.  That's always a wild card, because the silver market has always been controlled by unseen hands.  Nevertheless in a panic it could be very, very profitable.

     Finally, I've bought a significant amount of insurance in the form of VIX calls.  What I'm holding at the moment are August expiration ... but as ugly as things look right now, I'm tempted to predict that I replace them with further out instruments if they expire worthless (or also if I make a smart profit off of them)....

     In short, things look as if a major pullback, more than 20%, is really likely, it only requires for the powers that be to want it to happen.  On the other hand, a further rise from here looks to be almost impossible, there's just no fantasy that anyone can spin anymore fantastic enough to convince very many people that real growth is possible.

     Good trades to everybody -- chiz

Drought

     There's a long article on Zero Hedge this morning about the extreme, prolonged drought occuring in the southwestern US, primarily in California.  Then, there's pages and pages of comments.  A lot of folk who sincerely believe that the problem is simply too many grass lawns being watered, too many cars being washed, or even too many showers being taken alone. 

     I guess that agriculture has become so automated, mechanized and dominated with huge organizations that responsible, so-called educated people don`t understand it anymore.  Particularly, americans don`t seem to realize how much farmland is irrigated and how much water is being used.  The results of this drought are going to be major.  The effects will be seen istrong price increases and in shortages of all sorts of vegetables, fruits, and meats.

     But that isn`t what I want to say.  I am really, really disappointed that no one seems to want to point out anymore the most basic, obvious truth to the situation.  What has changed from 100 years ago?  Well, we have built the huge dams on the Colorado and other tributaries, and huge piping systems to pump that water to lands where it can be used, so a whole lot more food is being grown.  but what else?  Has anyone noticed that the number of human beings living out there has increased by more than ten-fold?  Is anyone considering the logarithmic increase of the number of human beings on this planet?  Worldwide, our population has increased by over 150% since I was born!  

One out of fifteen people who have ever lived, in the million or two million years since mankind evolved on this planet, is still alive today!!!

 There are too many fucking people on this planet!

And nobody dares even to say so anymore.  Not one commenter on the thread even hinted at this.  It will be a far greater crisis coming upon us than even the most extreme fabrications that the global warming advocates of political change have proposed.

If, for example, there were to come to pass a sudden end of the natural gas used to manufacture nitrogen fertilizer on this planet, within six months most human beings would turn to cannibalism and half the population would be gone already ....

And nobody dares even to say so anymore.

    

gas facts

been reading arcane details all day.

a few facts, just additional color on the North American natural gas markets ...

The vast majority of nitrogen fertilizers manufactured worldwide are manufactured using natural gas as a feedstock.  This industry has grown up during my lifetime and is directly responsible for enabling the most recent worldwide population growth of 3 billion people ... without it they would die within less than a year ....

Ukraine has been a major manufacturer and exporter of nitrogen fertilizer for the world.  thinn about that statement hard in terms of current events.

Russia of course is also a major fertilier exporter.  In fact, the USA agriculture industry has been a major dependent of imports of russian fertilizer for the past 25 years.

Cheap natural gas in the USA for the last 5 years or so has stimulated the construction, renovation and expansion of fertilizer manufacturing plants.  Russian fertilizer imports have declined from around 500,000 tonnes per year to around 200,000.

Current total demand for natural gas in the USA is more than 25 trillion cubic feet.  Total demand for natural gas is growing rapidly while all other significant energy sources, coal, oil, nuclear and hydro, are all declining.

Natural gas pipelines between New York and eastern Canada have been reversed in the past few years so that Marcellus gas is being exported to Canada in quantity.

Anyone with interesting, hard facts about natural gas is encouraged to post comments.

-chiz