Da Bird Flu is on its way, cried Chicken Little. Da Bird Flu is on its way, and it’s coming right here, and we’re all gonna be sick and die!

          Yes, my friends, Chicken Little is right. Da Bird Flu really is on the wing. Some of us will die from Da Bird Flu, mostly folks who are about to die anyway from one thing or another.

          What we have here is hysteria. The Bird Flu hysteria is deliberately encouraged. It is deliberately encouraged by whom? Look who will profit from the hysteria and you will easily see who is encouraging it. DUH!

          Da Bird Flu is the medium/message/massage of what passes for theatre these days – government theatre – immunology theatre – religious theatre. These are all unbelievably funny in the sense of ridiculous, but there is also an economics thread in their fabric. I will now elucidate for you how all this works; why it is being done; what you may reasonably expect from all these theatrical exercises; and anything else you might wish to know, so that you will hereafter be able to relax and enjoy what life/existence you have left.

          Timing is a lucrative issue, because Da Bird Flu mutates. Da Bird Flu you might catch if it were here today aint Da Bird Flu you gonna catch if it arrives next year. Therefore, it is important for drug companies and the government that they own to scare the shit out of you now so that the drug companies can sell their present inventory, which won’t work on next year’s Bird Flu. You will require their next year’s vaccine to ward off next year’s Bird Flu. The fact that Da Bird Flu aint coming here this year shouldn’t mean that they should have a bad day. If they can get the stupid amongst us to run out and get shots, it will be a rich payday. So they will tell us that we are “at risk” because our immune system is compromised from any number of things that might otherwise afflict us, and that “at risk” people cannot afford to play Russian roulette with Da Bird Flu. This gambit alone will sell thirty million doses. Other gambits include telling you that there is a shortage of vaccine and that if you don’t hurry and get your shot, you could be left out there dying on the road with all the other poor bastards who procrastinated. That’s good for about forty million doses in sales. Recently we are being admonished to stop putting bird seed out back for da birds and to bring in the outdoor cats who may be “exposed” to potentially infected birds and who could transmit Da Bird Flu from da birds to us. And of course all cat owners are supposed to panic and run out and get their Bird Flu shots, which sells about seventy five to eighty million more doses. Are you paying attention here? Pseudo benevolent people come onto your tele screen frequently to “discuss” Da Bird Flu. Dr. Marcus Welby has now morphed into Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and the presentation is so fucking slick that most of you poor bastards have no idea that you are intently focused on a goddam commercial for Da Bird Flu vaccine. Wake up, America – learn to recognize adverts when you see them!

          There is so much gallows humor in Da Bird Flu phenomenon. First of all, one would think that everyone who lived through the Asian Flu hoax years ago would by now be very skeptical when Chicken Little runs in screaming that the sky is falling again. But no – we have another generation of suckers with buying power now. And these bozos are just as gullible as the bozos were back in the 50’s and ‘60s when the Asian Flu trick was thought up by some stoner trying to write a term paper to get his MBA. The professor who read and graded the paper gave it a low grade, but immediately sold the “concept” to the pharmaceutical industry for a rather tidy sum and received emoluments and perquisites, encomia and free pussy for life. That in itself is a wonderful story that I simply must write one day when I have more time.

          I know you think I make this shit up, right?

          The Chicago Tribune reported today that most of the experts who prepare the guide to mental illness have conflict of interest level financial interests with drug companies that are never disclosed. This guide defines what is a mental illness recognized by psychiatry and outlines the criteria by which one is diagnosed to have a recognized mental illness. Its importance to the drug companies is that the FDA will not approve a drug to treat a mental illness unless that illness is identified in the guide. So when the drug companies buy off those who write the guide, the corruption “appears” to be elsewhere than in the FDA itself. But if you own the people the FDA relies upon, then you own the FDA for purposes of this discussion. The more illnesses identified, and the more loosely they are defined. the more drugs can be approved to treat them. There are 170 panel members who do this. 42 % of them receive direct research grants from drug companies. 22 % serve as paid consultants to drug companies. 16% are paid participants in speakers bureaus sponsored by drug companies. The remaining 20 % must just be too stupid to dip their beaks into the trough. Every one – 100 % - of the experts who oversee mental illness sections dealing with mood disorders and schizophrenic/psychotic disorders have direct financial arrangements with drug companies. The drugs that treat these are the largest category of psychiatric drugs, which enjoy $ 34,000,000,000 in annual sales.

          And, as you might expect in a corrupt situation, the largest population is in that group who are “depressed”. If a doctor can diagnose you as being depressed, he can prescribe anti depressants. Depression is the “soft tissue” syndrome of psychiatry – it is clinically immeasurable and utterly argumentative. If you have a bad week and go whining to your doctor about feeling poorly, you are clinically depressed and immediately given a prescription for some feel good pills. My bet is that the same bullshit is happening in the instance of attention deficit disorder diagnosis in children. Too many kids are immediately medicated when some teacher catches them not paying attention. This sells Ritalin. It’s like we are all in some kind of drug company owned asylum where they knock us out whenever we get on their nerves. This story is not a joking matter. I write it with sarcastic humor just to get attention. But it is deadly serious and we are just too fucking stupid to get the point.

          The next really big joke is that Da Government is marshalling its resources to “deal with” the coming pandemic. HAHAHAHAHA!! GIMME A FUCKING BREAK!! If, God forbid, there were ever to be any public health emergency in this country, it would be dealt with just like Da Government dealt with Hurricane Katrina. Are you really stupid enough to believe that Da Government learned anything from Hurricane Katrina? Will you continue to abuse yourself by having succor in the thought that your government is out there creating resources to save you from a pandemic if one were really to occur? I can guarantee you one thing. If you are that stupid, you really ought to die in the epidemic, for the real benefit of epidemics is that they weed out the stupid and the weak.

          A hysterically funny presentation occurred this morning on CNN, when the director of Public Health for Los Angeles County, California came on to tell us all the wonderful things that they are doing to prevent Da Bird Flu from decimating the LA County population. Amongst these delightful protocols is for people to train themselves to stop touching themselves. Sound Catholic to you? Stop touching yourself, you nasty little sonofabitch. One should be especially wary of touching his/her rectum, genitalia, eyes, ears, nose and mouth. I dare any of you to try to master that regimen. Only a PhD from California could think it possible for men to stop picking their noses and manipulating their genitalia at least once every fifteen minutes. And Californians wonder why we all laugh at them constantly. One can responsibly predict that the sales of Da Bird Flu vaccine will be extremely high in California, the stupid capital of the western hemisphere.

          All of which leads us to appreciate a real reason why Da Government actually is incentivized NOT to have effective resources at the ready should an epidemic occur. If there were to be an epidemic, it would clean out the old age homes and do away with all the compromised immune systems in America. And that, you stupid bastard, would remedy the imbalance in the accounts of the Social Security system. There is not enough money to meet the demands of our aging population, and Social Security may soon be broke.

           Since we don’t choose to provide more money to cover the shortfall, Da Bird Flu will balance the accounts by reducing the number of recipients. Pull your head outa your ass, for God sake! Da Government will never have resources for any epidemic because the economics of having competent resources at the ready are too horrible to contemplate. If we devote resources to saving all who will surely die in the epidemic, we assure the failure of Social Security.

          Besides, we can bestow wealth upon the pharmaceuticals by pretending that there is going to be a Social Security system prescription drug benefit program organized so that money is provided for drugs. That cash flowing into the market immediately is accounted for by increases in drug prices, and the stupid “beneficiaries” are left exactly as they were before the program except that they have more paperwork to do now. The market supposedly sets the prices for things and services, subject to irregularities in market forces brought about by monopoly power and assorted conspiracies to raise prices. One irregularity that seriously affects price levels will occur whenever an idiot throws tons of money into the market that is incompetently targeted.

          In the ‘70s, some bozo decided that there ought to be something called dental insurance. I remember that in Michigan, where I was living when that happened, the dental insurance covered 50 % of the cost of dental care. In reality, of course, a big chunk of money flowed into the market, but nothing else changed. The inescapable result of that is/was that the prices for dental care were raised to accommodate the additional funds. What you previously paid to cover all your dental care immediately became what you paid to cover the half of the price of your dental care that the insurance didn’t cover. Similarly, when da government came out with drug benefits under the social security program, the price of Flonase in Houston, where I now live, went from $ 48 a bottle to $ 96 a bottle, because there was more money to be absorbed for the same amount of Flonase. DUH!!!

          Do you remember when we took civics in high school and all the bullshit they taught us about government? That’s all that ever was – just pure bullshit. Never trust authority! Always question and doubt everything. Whenever someone tells you about something that is coming that will benefit society, you ought by now to know that you are about to get fucked without being kissed.

          Have you ever thought about what makes you vulnerable to any malady that might fly in on the wings of Da Birds? Consider the following, you imbecile.

          If you are an American, you bathe too much and use anti bacterial soap. You get immunized from everything and even get allergy shots for those tense moments when you are not in filtered and cooled air. Since your body rarely has to rely upon its own natural abilities to ward off illness, its natural resources to ward off illness shrivel up. Whatever you might get by way of benefit from being in the sun a bit is lost because you are hysterical about skin cancer or – and this is no joke – you don’t want people to think that you work outdoors for reasons of social status – the whiter you appear, the higher up the social ladder you are presumed to be.

          Europeans have deliberately kept themselves dirty and smelly, but their immune systems are so much stronger that they have to have wars every so often to reduce overpopulation. It has gotten so that you have to buy a transatlantic airplane ticket to go smell someone who smells like normal, healthy people really smell. Third world countries also have better immune systems in their population, but going there to smell people won’t work due to the fact that the place stinks so bad that you can’t hardly smell the people.

          Generations of not being overly clean and artificially immunized have resulted in people who are less likely to be wiped out by itinerant maladies. The almost dead will still be wiped out everywhere, but I am talking about those who don’t have one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. One of the many signal benefits that we in America will reap from all the immigration flooding into the country is that stronger immune system genetics will be reintroduced into our national DNA.

          There is a rational argument for not being like the Europeans. We really don’t care to make war on our neighbors, and that’s a very positive attribute. I would rather risk smelling good than have to go about killing people in Louisiana because Texas is becoming overcrowded. Isn’t that the excuse the Nazis used, that they needed Lebensraum – room to live? When you realize that in the twentieth century a whole nation of people thought it perfectly OK to murder millions of their neighbors over real estate, would you really want to be like them?

          The other excuse for World War Two was, of course, that the aggressors represented a master race that, as a matter of merit, should rule the world. The latest theory about why anyone would consider themselves to be a master race is that when you live next to France it is so tempting to see yourself as superior. So who did the master race defeat? They beat the French and the other Europeans. Is that an accomplishment? And – to show their utter stupidity – they didn’t kill off all the French, Dutch, Belgians, Danish, Swedes and Norwegians, so there wasn’t any more room for the Nazis anyway. I could occupy Italy with just a credit card. Of course, when the master race came upon real resistance, the English and the Americans, they died like flies and ran, shitting in their pants all the way home.

          Whenever I see people today who think the third reich was something great, who go around in Nazi bullshit attire, I wonder why in hell anyone would idolize the biggest losers of the twentieth century.

          NAH! I think, on further reflection, that I’d just as soon remain as I am and simply bathe less frequently. Besides, I have highly energized sirtuins extending my longevity as the direct result of my high intake of resveratrol. If you have that you can give the finger to Da Bird Flu. This is real redneck biotechnology at work here. Think of it as the Muldoonian Paradox. You don’t have to have a bloody PhD or MD degree to figure out life its own self (as Dan Jenkins would so eloquently say). Today, if I get a hankering for anything European, I can simply buy it on line from Amazon. Now there’s a great joke for you. The so called neo-Nazis go online to buy bullshit Nazi paraphernalia from a company that was founded and is operated by a Jew. Jeff Bezos is laughing all the way to the bank. Harry Truman noticed the same humor in talking about the KKK wearing those stupid sheets. Here are these bozos running around in the street in the stupid bed sheets screaming about murdering the Jews, and, according to President Truman, in all likelihood it was a Jew who profited from selling them the sheets. So, Truman asked, who is the superior race, the idiot in the sheet or the Jew who profited selling him the sheet?

          The lesson here is that if you can get your adversary to walk around wearing a ridiculous costume, which could be a sheet, some Nazi outfit or a large radio loudly playing music held on his shoulder close to his ear, you are probably the superior person. And if you can get the stupid bastard to buy it from you, you are really superior. Theoretically, you could become so outstandingly superior that they will name a lake in your honor.

          How does that relate to Da Bird Flu? Do I have to spell out everything for you? Can’t you think in more than one dimension? In this context, the truly superior person is now going out and, like a hedge fund, is buying stock in pharmaceutical companies and selling short the stock of companies that sell bird seed. There are all sorts of short term counter cyclical investment opportunities that will be influenced by Da Bird Flu bullshit. People with real insight into the infinite layers of investment opportunity presented by Da Bird Flu bullshit will be the Bill Gates and Warren Buffet of tomorrow. Birdseed and pharmaceuticals are only the most obvious counter cyclical investment opportunities here. If you start making a list of everything that will fluctuate counter cyclically because of Da Bird Flu, you will make a bloody fortune. And once you master this technique of wealth building in Da Bird Flu phenomenon, you can then apply the same insights and techniques to make money over any kind of calamity, real or imagined. What comes immediately to mind is the business about our having more intense hurricane seasons over the next several years. Think of the smart sumbitch who sold all those crappy little FEMA trailers to Da Government for $ 20,000 a piece. You can bet your sweet ass that s/he aint drinking Sneaky Pete any more. That sumbitch is now a single malt person. Sweet are the uses of adversity!

          There is a serious message intended in my writing of this. It aint all just a wild rant.

          The lesson is that we have to be much more circumspect in making decisions for ourselves about our own life choices. We cannot safely delegate serious life decisions to institutions that we were raised to believe were trustworthy. Even our doctors have agendas they do not disclose, and we need to make our own investigations into what they would prescribe and why they are prescribing it. A great deal of disability in this country amongst older folks is that they are simply over medicated. Children are wildly over medicated, and parents need to be able to protect them from that because it is now frequently the case that they are being medicated to further some agenda more than their having a real need to be medicated. What we have been taught to trust simply is not trustworthy. Fortunately, the Internet makes the digging out of critical information something that almost any of us can accomplish. In addition to simply corruption, there is also the problem of supposedly scientific agencies inserting extreme political agendas into their positions and rulings. We recently witnessed this in the instance of the FDA when they made a present of their medical device approval powers to the extreme religious conservative factions of the Republican Party on the matter of pregnancy control and termination. We recently saw da government insert itself into the private matter of people’s end of life options, and da government’s social agendas foreclose access to effective medical use of what could easily relieve a lot of suffering for terminal cancer patients due to absolutist views by the religious right. Everyone who is past age 60 should join the Hemlock Society just so that they have easier access to information that could be extremely useful in dealing with their own meaningless suffering in furtherance of some inhumane institutionalized policy. Soon, if we are really diligent about being well informed on what to do for ourselves and on how to do it in spite of tyrannically imposed obstacles, only the stupid will suffer needlessly.