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Sola Dosis Facit Venenum?
When
I was studying at McGill University, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do
in life so I majored in economics, minored in mathematics and took a
bunch of health science courses as electives just in case I wanted to
follow my father, brother and friends into medicine. That meant a full
year of organic chemistry, biochemistry and physiology. For my
intellectual stimulation, I audited Charles (Chuck) Taylor's courses in
political philosophy. He's the greatest professor I ever had, a true
genius.
My friends thought I was nuts, a masochist who was biting
off more than he can chew. They were right but I didn't care. I never
obtained the perfect grades needed to apply to medical school because
rote memorization of biochemical pathways just bored me to death. So I
went on to finish my Master's in Economics as I was more comfortable
with macroeconomics (even though the stuff they teach students in
university isn't what I call hands-on economic and financial analysis;
it's way too theoretical, almost entirely based on mathematical
theorems).
I ended up getting an "A" in my Master's thesis criticizing the literature on growth empirics (see my comment on Galton's Fallacy and the Myth of Decoupling).
I was proud of that accomplishment because at that time (1997) I got
diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) at the age of 26 and had to take
some time off from writing my thesis. I went through a tough period
where I withdrew from my family and friends and spent all my time at the
McGill medical school scouring over all the articles on MS I could
find. I wanted to know everything: the good, the bad and the downright
ugly.
This lasted for a couple of months but at one point I got
sick and tired of reading articles on MS and decided to get on living my
life. I did however learn a lot about MS and diet which led me to
Ashton Embry's wonderful site, Direct-MS.org. It's there that I learned about nutritional strategies and the importance of vitamin D3 supplementation. Ashton and I have kept in touch ever since.
I
don't follow or endorse any MS diet but I do believe in eating properly
and high dose vitamin D, which is something I referred to a few times
in my blog. In 2009, I read about a small study from the University of Toronto which showed that of the patients taking elevated doses of vitamin D, suffered less relapses than the control group and had a 40% lower rate of relapses then they had the year before the study began. Another study funded
by the U.K.'s MS Society, the MS Society of Canada, the Wellcome Trust
and the Medical Research Council, found that vitamin D seems to help
control a gene known to increase the risk of MS — a finding that
suggests taking vitamin D supplements during pregnancy and early in
life may help prevent the disease.
About a year ago, I decided to start taking massive doses of vitamin D,
roughly 30,000 IUs a day (30 vitamin D drops) which is well above the
recommended daily allowance (which by the way, is way too low!). I felt
great and started losing a lot of weight, shrinking from a size 36 waist
to a size 32. Losing weight doesn't concern me as I needed to shed
excess weight. But I also lost muscle mass, have back pain and lately I
haven't been feeling up to snuff on the inside and it has nothing to do
with my CCSVI procedure.
Just a general malaise which some of my doctor friends think is related
to my high intake of vitamin D. I decided to pass my blood tests (good
luck finding a GP in Quebec!) and I started reading on vitamin D Hypervitaminosis,
a toxic condition associated with excessively high vitamin D doses
(Much higher than what I'm taking. Those of you who want more
information can go over this excellent presentation on the connection between vitamin D and MS.)
Why am I sharing all this with you? It goes back to what my organic chemistry professor at McGill, Dr. Joe Schwarcz,
told us during a lecture one day: "sola dosis facit venenum," which
literally means "the dose makes the poison." And this is my preamble to
my comment on what I'm seeing in the financial system right
now. There is a tremendous amount of liquidity out there which is making
a lot of people nervous. I'm talking about people managing hundreds of
billions in assets, worried about how all this liquidity is going to
play out in the years ahead.
Liquidity into the financial system
is primarily coming from the Fed which is keeping rates at historic lows
and engaged in massive quantitative easing (QE) campaign buying up
bonds to keep rates low. Why is the Fed keeping rates low? There are
several reasons. First, despite signs that job growth is finally picking up significant steam,
unemployment remains stubbornly high. Second, as I mentioned last week,
the dismal housing market is not recovering and if you saw 60 Minutes
on Sunday night, there is a real risk that a second downturn in housing
is on its way (see video below; simply mind-blowing mortgage scams the
banks were engaging in!).
Go back to read my interview with Leo de Bever on when the music stops. I quote the following:
"Banks
do not mark their commercial real estate to market. Quantitative
easing (QE) is all about giving banks enough of a cushion to absorb
these losses. For Bernanke, keeping the system afloat takes precedence
over everything else. Not sure he's wrong but he's solving one crisis
by sowing the seeds of another."
He referred to Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff's book, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly
and told me that he's worried that something might happen over the
next few years. "What am I suppose to do? If I'm too conservative, I
risk underperforming. But markets are schizoid right now and not at
fair value. Markets are rewarding indiscriminately -- it's a very tough
environment to operate."
It's a tough environment because everything is going straight up. As I wrote last week, it looks and feels a lot more like 1999 than 2008. And as public pension plans fuel the explosive growth in hedge funds,
there is going to be a lot more volatility in the financial system as
funds go long and short stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies.
Leo
de Bever is right, the Fed is sowing the seeds of another disaster but
this bubble can go on a lot longer than the doomsayers think. We'll see
what this week's Fed minutes say but judging from the comments, some
FOMC hawks are already very nervous. Nonetheless, the Fed Chairman feels
that the dose of monetary easing is right and the policy remains
reflate risk assets and introduce some inflation in the system to avoid a
prolonged period of debt deflation. For now, it seems to be working but
when the music stops playing, watch out, all those hedge funds and big
bank prop desks will be liquidating their positions faster than you can
say "QE".
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I know this seems wasteful and below most of you ZH doomers, but maybe you should call your Democratic Senators and tell them to support Paul Ryans new budget as the only hope for our children, *if any of you were lucky enough to have a woman stand your weak pimply bodies pumping away at them for 30 seconds (probably less) without realizing what they were doing and forcing you to stop. Fucking herbs. BTFD, SYFE, PSFC, and STFU
Hi Leo, I think it is great that you are able to use your disease for analyzing the economic mess we are in. My sister suffers from M.S. and I sent her to India this year to have the CCSVI, but it has not helped much. She also takes large doses of vitamin D, but not as much as you, have you been able to gain any weight back, and how are you feeling?
I've worked for some big ass companies in my career and many of them where in such a financial mess, you just can't imagine.
On the outside, all of them where top notch companies where every just wanted to work for.
All I could think off was: Always have a backup plan, because this place will soon go bust.
AND EVERY TIME, they found a way out.
Sure, the mess got bigger but the bigger the mess the more options they got.
And even after a decade. Those companies are still arround. The mess is still there. And one of them even build the Nuclear reactor in Japan we've all heard something about.
And you know what?
They'll still be there in 50 years.
So will the US.
BUT! in Every cycle, something changed.
And people don't like change. And change isn't always good.
MS is caused by something called mycoplasm or prion or by a half dozen other names, according to Dr. Donald W. Scott of the Common Cause Medical Research Foundation. This is a weaponized form of the brucella virus created by the U.S. Army in Fort Detrick, one without a cellular membrane.
How does he know? Well, for one thing, he was once given a U.S. Army pamphlet from a Korean War vet that explained that MS could result from his type of work which was handling the biological weapon shells that the U.S. Army was firing at the North Koreans and Communist Chinese during the Korean War. This pamphlet had to explain what MS is because at that time it was extremely rare for anyone to exhibit even the symptoms of MS. This Army document went on to state that if any veterans came down with MS that they should not worry because they would be covered by the VA and any medical treatments that would be needed.
Mycoplasm, crystalline bits of the weaponized brucella virus, is in every person in North America, and it remains dormant in the majority of people until a body trauma occurs, like a minor car accident bump, a child birth, getting shot, etc. Once it crystalizes out of solution in the human blood, it starts working on destroying certain neurological centers in the body, depending on one's genetic disposition and overall health and immune system.
So, in the same couple, the wife may exhibit MS or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome while the husband has Parkinson's Disease--both of these diseases are caused by the same mycoplasm virus.
For more information on this insidious biological warfare that has been waged against the people of the West, especially in North America, see the following video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8FX-B9vcgg
According to Dr. Scott, "this disease agent causes many illnesses including AIDS, cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, Crohn's colitis, Type I diabetes, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, Wegener's disease and collagen-vascular diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and Alzheimer's."
Leo,
From what I know MS is an autoimmune disorder.
I always had the thought that perhaps antihistamines might slow an autoimmune disorder, and perhaps the drugs they give organ recipients to slow the body's autoimmune response (?). It would be interesting to see if any research has been done in that area with regard to MS.
The homeopathic remedy would be ingesting myelin sheaths to trick your body into not harming that which sustains it. I draw this from various homeopathic remedies, such as ingesting the oil of poison oak/poison ivy to prevent a histamine reaction to it externally. I never had the guts to try it but remember seeing that. I suppose pork nerves would do it but that would be risky and kind of creepy.
That's a high dose of Vitamin D, I'd make sure you get a liver function test to make sure you aren't stressing it out or your endocrine system in general.
Economy:
The FED is spinning cotton candy. If they raise rates it will crush housing as not enough people have employment to maintain the loans or buy even bargain housing. The excess liquidity is creating inflation, whatever anyone else says it is here, and stagflation on its heels. The excess liquidity is killing the value of the dollar, reserve currency or not. Precious Metal's and Oil, along with the silly equity buying crowd, are telling us that there is excess liquidity.
Sounds good to me.
[T]he chairman feels that the dose of monetary easing is right... .
He would, wouldn't he? But you don't have to have been pre-med at McGill (the Yale of Canada) to know that Dr. Bermonkey is a quack of the first order. Not only will this end badly, but Bermonkey's policies will have made a bad ending much, much worse. But only for the 99.99999% of the population, who don't feed at the Fed trough.
austute...I hung with med students out of high school. They had photographic memories. No mere mortal can compete with that. The university game was shear production/regurgitation/speed of learning. I get everything anybody else gets....it just takes me twice as long. That means, to the university system, I can work for them fixing their broken shit. So that is how I pay my 2.3 X earnings mortgage.
It's better than living under a bridge. I did that for a month too, so I know.
There is some wicked Darwinism going on. Those fucks aren't any 'smarter'...they're just faster.
The fascist medical guild is part and parcel of that Darwinism.
I always thought that smart was the speed. smart didn't make them intelligent. smart did't give you a heart.
They aren't smarter. And they aren't faster. They just use drugs.
I guess this is off topic but.....
30,000 IU does seem like a pretty high dose. I was on 10,000 for a while for other reasons, and I had my blood tested - Vit D came in at 90 ng/ml. I believe that's pretty close to as high as you want over long periods. I backed off to 5,000 IU, and my blood level fell to 60.
I can't believe that getting a blood level test would be that tough. Most family practice docs in the US will do them - and they cost around $50 (if not less). Certainly, all alternative docs will do them, and they are pretty easy to find at acam.org. I don't believe Acam docs exist in Canada though, but you don't live that far from the US.
Good luck - James
It's F'n OVER FOLKS.
PERIOD.
Unless you cut the head off the snake, you're all done.
I'm too old to care.
If you want to live and you want your kids to live, kill the snake.
While we're quoting Latin aphorisms, Leo, here's one especially for you:
Tu ne cede malis
It is quite obvious that you never took that one to heart.
Perhaps you mistook it for Tu ne sede malus, a rather more prosaic and far less profound directive.
I never obtained the perfect grades needed to apply to medical school because rogue memorization of biochemical pathways just bored me to death.
I guess no English glasses while at university. The word is ROTE.
...the word is 'classes'
What does it matter what sort of glasses Leo wore when he was in school? They are usually just the rose colored sort now.
I think the word is "classes". You shouldn't correct others' grammar before checking your own work.
No rose colored glasses and I thank anyone who corrects my mistakes. I just found another typo. ARGH!!!
Proof reading one's own material is usually fatal
touché
Thanks for correcting my English. My bad, must have been thinking of rogue traders!!!
I'm getting really tired waiting for all of this to collapse.
Think about the amount of time between when we all 'knew' the Soviet Union was FUBAR, and the time until it collapsed.
I'm with you. I want the economy to go tits-up sooner than later because I'm a firm believer in creative-destruction. But as the former USSR showed us, this stuff can drag on for decades -- getting progressively worse for everyone except a smaller and smaller circle of elites.
People like Karl Denninger and others keep insisting that "the end is nigh". I really would love for them to be right, but we're clearly smoking different stuff. Historically speaking, we are nowhere *near* to our max-pain threshold. How many americans are working 14 hour days and coming home with less than enough to eat? How many people are living in actual physical fear of the Federal government? How many people have had relatives that have been 'disappeared'? Because that's what pre-revolutionary societies tend to look like. Anyone complaining about food-prices and gasoline relative to income (and thinking that we are close to a revolution) has clearly never traveled much in the developing world. Even though food and gasoline prices in the USA relative to income are appreciating in price -- they are still dirt cheap. Comparatively speaking, Americans have *loads* of expendible income -- although, to be sure, less and less every day.
This will drag on for much, much, much longer than most people are thinking, and more than I would personally like it to.
Maybe some of the Fed guvs are feeling like stooges for the politicians. Time for the politicians to make the tough choices? Not that they want to, the global economic roller coaster may force them to.
The only 'tough choice' I see any politicians making lately is whether or not they are going to use lethal force on their subjects. I suspect our politicians will extend and pretend until that is their only choice too.
Leo, I feel for you, as my cousin's wife at age 48 is in the same boat.
These bastards are so disconnected to escape belief. I'm doing over 50% of my business in REOs now, and they talk about the recovery.
I have to get up at 4:30 to dig a heating oil tank up and wiil leave it to ZH to carry on.
I don't think one person out of 1,000 gets it. And what's worse, about 90% of those couldn't give a sh*t.
I think the number is greater than 90% or maybe thats just this part of the states. (Austin Texas)