I looked at our thermometer and it read 86 F. The sensor is 5' above ground on the trunk of a Honey Locust, so it is in the shade. The trees branch at 15' so if there is any breeze at all, it can be felt beneath the shade trees. The 60' tall Honey Locust were the first trees I planted BEFORE we moved into our house outside of Eaton Rapids. They 12' and 18' feet south of our house.
Out of curiosity, I looked at temperatures in Lansing, the closest place that might qualify as a city.
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| This station is on the Groesbeck Golf course on Lansing's northeast corner. Roughly 17 miles as the crow-flies from where I live. |
Micro-climate is for real.
In the news
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| So surprised. He never did that before |
Gulf-stream showing signs of collapsing. Europe's climate will be the equivalent of Montreal, Quebec if the Gulf Stream fizzles. France is currently the sixth largest exporter of wheat after Russia and Ukraine and kiss those Bordeaux and Champaign vineyards good-bye.
Walmart and Target lobbying for $2500 fines for people convicted of stealing grocery carts. I had a neighbor in Lansing who was building a fence from carts he stole from Krogers. Cheap air-tags and geo-fencing is going to smack those people down. There is already a product that locks up a wheel when the WIFI signal disappears.
Black bear has bling removed by Michigan DNR. Now do nose rings on annoying 25-year-old SJWs.
In other news
I went to the doctor today.
About six months ago the old curmudgeon and I had a conversation.
"I don't like drugs" I said.
"These drugs have a good track record" he replied.
"You know, having 'The big-one' and falling over dead is not a bad way to go" I replied, referring to heart-attacks and high blood cholesterol.
"The chance of you having a stroke and not being able to take care of Mrs ERJ is almost the same as you having a heart attack. She would be burdened with having to take care of you" the curmudgeon snapped back.
My courage deflated. "OK, what is the very lowest dose of the statin with the fewest side effects..."
One of the things they don't tell you about statins is that the seem to put a little bit of extra starch in the noodle, if you catch my drift. Vascular system is vascular system and the noodle is a hydraulic cylinder. I only mention this because it might provide additional data for others who are confronted with this issue.
The curmudgeon was happy with my blood pressure at 132/80. Not the blood pressure of a teen-ager. I was happy because I had been chugging electrolyte that was rich in sodium the day before. I am guessing that little of that extra sodium was actually "extra".
Joe,
ReplyDeleteDo your own research on statins.
Big, long term Japanese study shows very poor results with lots of dangerous side effects.
Cholesterol at 300 was considered normal, until Pharma came out with 200 as normal….. the same time Crestor was released on the public.
Coincidence?
Mike in AR.
Winner winner chicken dinner!
DeleteThey're all pushers.
People look down at the drug dealer selling little baggies of a plant... while the guy in the white lab coat drives a Mercedes. He bought that with the money hey won at Bingo I bet!
The long term mortality data shows that taking a statin increases life expectancy by 3 days. That is without considering the side effects that all drugs come with. The "perfect" cholesterol number was 233 in those studies of mortality.
DeleteI agree with Mike...my wife was a nurse for 50 years and she
ReplyDeletewas greatly opposed to their use.
I avoided them for many years until I had s stroke in spring of 2024. Have had high blood pressure since I hit 190/110 at my draft physical at age 21 (just finished cross country season my last year of college). Cardiologist in the 1990’s was happy if I was below 150/90, the guy who is a kidney/hypertension wants me below 130 on top, I guess new protocols.
ReplyDeleteNailed it.
DeleteThe only reason anybody is on any of these concoctions, is because people who stand to benefit financially decided a different number on the test (or a new test), was now the right answer to a question nobody was asking.
Does your barber ever tell you your hair looks great just the way it is?
The Milgram experiments showed us if you put a person in a white lab coat and tell everyone they are an authority, 80% of the population will comply with whatever they're told entirely unquestioning, 10% will ask a question first and then comply, and only 10% will refuse to accept without proof. The curmudgeon falls into one of those groups.
I too think I would rather pop a clog and have a few minutes of staring at the sky be my last moments on earth than some of the drawn out alternatives capped off by an extended stay in hospice whacked out on morphine until your carcass starves or dehydrates into organ failure.
As long as my Systolic, Diastolic, heart rate and respiratory rate are all above zero I figure I'm doing OK.
ReplyDeleteIn about 20% of cases, mostly long-term users, atorvastatin (Lipitor) has been shown to increase ED problems. Don’t let your doctor lie to you, these are not harmless drugs.
ReplyDeleteWell, as long as it makes my wiener stiffer, I guess I will do what the nice man in the lab coat, with the big car and fancy home says.
ReplyDelete...
Said no thinking prepper man, ever.
Milton
Re the lion gnawing on the dude. Darwin will not be denied, only delayed.
ReplyDeleteI discussed statin side-effects with a friend who was a retired epidemiologist. He said that his friends suffered from unpleasant side-effects "at a rate higher than the literature would have me believe." So, not for him. Nor for me.
ReplyDeleteWorth a read.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/why-are-statins-so-dangerous
A long-term study out of the UK showed that while statins lower cholesterol effectively, that has basically zero impact on heart health. So the whole link between cholesterol and heart attacks/strokes is likely wrong.
ReplyDeletehttps://x.com/wideawake_media/status/1937422331359429018
ReplyDeleteYMMV, and take it for what it's worth:
ReplyDeleteMy doctor thinks she put me on a statin several years back, even though all my cholesterol studies were perfectly normal.
Since my out-of-pocket on them is exactly $10/quarter, I fill that Rx.
I now have bag with several years' worth of them sitting in their original bottles.
PMD hasn't uttered a peep in that amount of time, and my annual HDL/LDL bloodwork remains just fine.
IOW, she can't effing tell they're all still sitting in the bottles.
She's a pretty good doc otherwise, and $40/yr to shut a nagging scold up rather than getting her all wound up to bitch at me is cheap at twice the price, and there are other things where she's spot-on as a practitioner. My using a statin without documented medical necessity just isn't one of those things.
You do you, but skipping a statin isn't the worst thing you could do. As you noted, ALL meds have side effects, and some are worse than the pretended benefit.
Caveat emptor has never been revoked.
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Moving on, Target and WalMart lobbying for beyond felony-level fines (anything north of $1K is considered a felony) is recockulous, as the carts aren't worth 10% of the suggested fine. It's the same reason library fines beyond the price of the book itself are routinely thrown out as well.
The most they could ever get a court to enforce (as if there's a cop anywhere arresting anyone for shopping cart theft, in the last 30 years) is replacement value, which is reasonable. That would apply to the two persons nationwide ever charged under such laws for that crime since Carter was president.
Given that both Target and WalMart apparently hire one or more employees per store to chip and file the wheels until every cart has at least one wheel with one flat side, and at least 1 wheel out of four is welded sideways until it pulls the cart to the side like a cow with a cement block molded to one hoof, and 50% of them have one wheel with enormous gum bumps built in, and enormous divot craters taken out that make them shake like a chihuahua crapping razor blades in a hurricane, there should be an automatic 20% store discount taken off your bill every time they put their craptastic carts back into service instead of fixing them.
Maybe by not buying the ones with wheels that have a 7-minute lifespan before they self-destruct.
Just a thought, especially when finding a cart that simply rolls straight and quiet is a minimum 10-cart search with every trip to those establishments, exactly like trying to find a straight, unwarped, untwisted 2x4 at Homeless Depot's lumber pile. Your odds are better buying Powerball tickets.
If the store managers were required to pay a $2500 fine for returning broken carts to service without any corrective maintenance, I could see making the fine for stealing one of them more substantial as well.
Not before then.
I lived on Lansing's East-side back in the early 1980s (the 200 block of S. Francis Street if any of the locals care). The house I was renting was next to a multi-generational, welfare family.
DeleteThey were building a fence in the back-yard by stacking the grocery carts they had wheeled home from the Krogers.
I doubt that the fine would be levied against the customers who wheel them to the closest bus stop and leave them there. It would be for the customers who have dozens of them in their back-yard or who toss them in the river/drainage ditch behind the house/apartment block.
Good points about filling the script and not taking it.