Time to Play 'Truth or Consequences'

There are lessons to be learned from the baby formula shortage, though few of our elected representatives are clever enough or sufficiently industrious to be instructed. The biggest lesson is this: every time our elected representatives cede another portion of their constitutional authority to unelected bureaucrats, they weaken the sinews of our nation.

The price of gasoline is an obvious example. Prices at the pump have doubled and more since President Biden took office. This did not happen because there is any shortage of crude oil reserves or refining capacity. This happened because Congress knowingly granted unelected bureaucrats at agencies like the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency the power to override market demand for crude oil and refined products.

The choice to utilize that power or not then rests with the executive branch, aka: the President. Trump reigned in Interior, the EPA, et al. The result was that we did what Barack Obama tartly assured America we could not possibly do: we drilled our way to two dollar per gallon gasoline. Biden has given Interior, the EPA, et al. their head to gallop away and even applied a bit of the whip for good measure. The result? It’s a crapshoot whether your next fill up will set you back a Franklin, or just a handful of Jacksons.

Where does it stop?

How does this mindset, or rather lack of mindful attentiveness, lead us to the baby-formula shortage we face today? There are at least three reasons, all inter-related and all applicable to the production of most every vital resource domestically produced today.

Globalization Breeds Automation Breeds Consolidation: It will be a very, very long time till the cost of labor in developing Asian countries like China approaches anything like equity with the cost of labor in nations that are industrially and economically mature. The only way to stay domestically competitive in many an American industry is to rely more and more on automation. While the capital investment to automate processes is significant, the operating costs once the robots go to work are trivial. Plus, they are unlikely to demand mental-health wellness days or gender re-assignment elective surgery.

If one is going to invest in automation, it makes the most sense to make that investment a single time at one big plant rather than multiple times at a plethora of small plants. I do not claim to know the baby formula market, but I have seen this time and again in other markets. As automation takes root, consolidation follows and products that used to come from dozens of factories scattered across the country now come from a handful of plants. The fact that the shutdown of Abbott’s plant in Sturgis, Mich. could have such a marked effect on the baby food market strongly suggests to me that the baby formula market has followed that course.

Bureaucrats Wear Blinders:  Bureaucrats are necessary. I won’t even say they are a necessary “evil,” because there is nothing inherently evil about telling a fair-minded person that his job is to “make sure thus and so is done, and done correctly.” Still, there must be limits to the power of a bureaucrat. A company does not want an accountant to forgo auditing their books in order to stroll over to the Research and Development department to opine on new formulas the chemists are trying out.

But there is another side to that mindset. Having their role narrowly restricted, many bureaucrats seem to believe that the world they are allowed to impact is the only world that exists. As the old saw suggests, a carpenter equipped only with a hammer tends to see every problem as a nail.

Imagine if you had cause to be concerned about the welfare of children at a neighbor’s house. The Department of Children and Family Services sends an inspector over. That inspector is charged with looking at everything that impacts the welfare of the children and to weigh competing factors before making a recommendation. The official may conclude the children are being well cared for, or that there are certain shortcomings in the household that should be corrected. When DCFS does it’s job correctly, it removes a child from a household only if the child is in clear and imminent danger. If the kids are living on fast food and Goldfish crackers, the inspector may recommend dietary improvements. If the children are not being fed and living in filth, they will and should be removed from the danger and neglect.

I'm from the government and I'm here to help.

In our example, what DCFS does not do is to send over an electrician to inspect the wiring and base their decision on whether the home is up to code. But that is precisely the mindset of the bureaucratic inspector, whether from the FDA, the EPA, OSHA or any other of the alphabet soup of government bureaucracies. And that leads us to the final problem:

Nobody Looks at the Big Picture: We are told that the Sturgis plant was shut down because bacteria (described by some outlets as “deadly," but hyperbole is as common in stories involving elements of risk as funny hats are at a Shriners convention) was found in the plant. Not only was the plant shut down, Abbott – surely at the advice of counsel – issued a recall notice for formula already on the shelves. Thus, the fear of tort liability more or less instantly caused a shortage and heedless bureaucratic despotism ensured demand could not be quickly satisfied.

Politicians love to piously declare that they are following the science, although few understand enough science to recognize gravity if you dumped a bushel of apples on their head. The bigger problem is that when they invoke the magisterial authority of science, they only consider one aspect of science, much as the blinkered bureaucrat considers only their own mission and authority.

There is another aspect of science involved here, as with the fossil-fuel debate, the vaccine debate, the gender debate, etc. That is the science of public welfare. That science is not about one thing, it’s about everything. It is precisely that science that our public officials are elected to consider and act upon.

Let's say that bacteria was found at the Sturgis plant. Was it truly “deadly”? Was it found in an isolated area? How widespread was the contamination? Is there anything that could be done to ensure that formula already on the shelves could be used safely? Given the choice between boiling formula before using it and not having formula, I’m pretty sure what choice most mothers would make. Could Abbott have been protected from lawsuits in such a case?

There are many more issues that should have been considered before the plant was shut down and product recalled, because those two drastic actions have had drastic consequences for public welfare. Unfortunately this administration possesses no one with the courage to make those kind of decisions, much less that ability to understand they need to be made.

Fauci—and the World—Agonistes

What are we doing? Policies that we continue to accept from those we hire to represent us and keep us free:

Yet we show no sign of terminating our acceptance of these policies. People refuse to listen to doctors using successful treatments, instead still listening to Dr. Anthony Fauci, who said in 2012 in answer to a question about the risk of a pandemic resulting from his gain-of-function research,

In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic? Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario – however remote – should the initial experiments have been performed and/or published in the first place, and what were the processes involved in this decision?

Scientists working in this field might say – as indeed I have said – that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks.

Dr. Monte in the house.

While the risk to him was and remains near-zero, millions around the world paid the ultimate price for a risk he took with their lives without their knowledge or permission. His policies are still killing us.

And still we listen to him as he not only changes his mind daily on the virus but demands vaccinating all of humanity against the very pandemic his use of our tax dollars created, using vaccinations from which his organization may profit, all the while refusing and rejecting proven, safe, FDA-approved drugs doctors are using successfully to treat it all over the world, but are prohibited from using here. Meanwhile...

NIH, on rejecting therapeutics:  "The NIH COVID Treatment Guidelines Panel reviews available information with an emphasis given to adequately-powered, well-conducted, peer-reviewed clinical trials;"

None of which was done for these "vaccines" that have killed thousands, have killed or permanently sidelined professional athletes in top shape here and across Europe, and of which we have zero knowledge of long-term effects.

Among the complaints about therapeutic drugs is that they are “off-label.” Yet, "an estimated 12 percent to 38 percent of prescriptions are written for FDA-approved drugs used "off-label" (including Botox and Viagra)." Viagra, due to its function of dilating blood vessels, recently is credited with saving the life of a dying Covid patient in England. One might ask, why is Viagra off-label okay, but doctors are losing their license for other FDA-approved drugs being prescribed off-label? And, why? One doctor reasonably asks,

If I'm wrong with the treatment I'm giving, people are still going to die. If I'm right, how many lives have we saved? How many can be saved? Why are we erring on the side of death instead of treatment?

In November 2020, nine months into the pandemic, Dr. Fauci co-authored an article in the authoritative Journal of the American Medical Association titled "Therapy for Early COVID-19: A Critical Need," in which he asserted that "interventions that can be administered early during the course of infection to prevent disease progression and longer-term complications are urgently needed." Treatments, he wrote, "must be safe with few adverse effects, easy to administer, and scalable."

Yet the NIAID, FDA, pharmacies and many doctors dismissed the efficacy of a number of drugs used around the globe for the interventions he requested, causing one doctor to note:

We could have prevented this tragedy for $1. Dexamethasone, 5 cents. Ivermectin, 1 cent. Colchicine, 50 cents. Aspirin, 100 pills for four bucks," he said. "If we had given people aspirin, ivermectin, colchicine, and if they get complicated, a little dexamethasone, we could have saved the world with one dollar.

One dollar.

Do the vaccines even work? Alex Berenson notes:

This absolutely brutal preprint from Denmark shows zero vaccine effectiveness against Omicron beginning two months after “peak” protection, and sharply negative protection three months out. In other words, vaccinated people were much MORE likely to get Omicron beginning about 100 days after the second dose.

A study from Canada is similar.

Other studies are showing the Omicron may be a good thing for the less-vulnerable. Its symptoms resemble the common cold and the recovered wind up with immunity to the full range of Covid-19 variants, rather than just the one part of the spike of the “vaccine.”

Our elites have done all this to us for money & power. By August, we had minted nine new billionaires in healthcare. By November it was 44. We have added billions of dollars to the accounts of already-billionaires Gates, Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and Bezos for doing nothing but keeping businesses closed and conversations censored.  (Windfall profits tax, anyone?). We have spent on this pandemic more than we spent to win World War II, a war fought for, rather than against, our liberties, a war costing Americans fewer lives than have resulted from this gain-of-function (virus weaponization) research.

The public enemy.

Even knowing as we do now that natural immunity (get it, treat it, get over it = immunity) is broader and stronger than these "vaccines," we still demand “vaccines” that raise the viral load of the vaxxed and turn them into spreaders and have, without exception spiked infections (the most-vaxxed countries are seeing the highest spikes in infections). Many still also demand masks that have been shown useless (and worse) in study after study, and allow politicians hired to protect our liberties instead to destroy them rather than adapt policies to the body of Covid science that has grown rapidly with the pandemic.

It is unconscionable to allow people to die in hospitals when one hundred percent of those “at death's door” receiving ivermectin on the order of a judge have recovered against the will of hospitals whose reason for existence is treatment. Once the first judge ordered the first hospital to provide ivermectin to a dying patient on whom all other treatments had been tried, and that patient recovered to live another day, all future in-hospital deaths of covid patients are on the hospitals refusing therapeutics - not the virus. One day soon this will be recognized by class-action lawyers and hospitals will find that the Nuremberg Defense won’t work for them, either.

Ask yourself why. Why no therapeutics? Why a mandated vaccine? Obviously, something is in play here, and it isn’t our health.