Lotsa links today, but that’s the kind of week it’s shaping up to be.
I was listening to a podcast a few years back — I think it was Chapo Trap House — when one of the dudebros said something that stuck with me: Eventually, every con man will try to sell you supplements.
And whaddaya know, in a grifter-led administration, many of the incoming grifters are cut from the same cloth:
President-elect Donald Trump’s top political appointees want you to buy supplements.
Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, Trump’s pick for surgeon general, sells her own line of vitamins. Kash Patel, Trump’s choice to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation, recommended pills on Truth Social in February that he said could “rid your body of the harms” from Covid-19 vaccines.
Mehmet Oz, the TV personality whom Trump named to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, promotes supplements sold by online retailer iHerb. He has advertised multivitamins, supplements for “brain power” and fish-oil pills that he said “probably slowed” the progression of his mother’s Alzheimer’s disease.
Kash Patel has pimped even skeevier supplements.
I wonder if these people are expected to kick up to the boss as a result. Probably buying a Mar-a-lago membership at full retail will do.
A friend of mine wrote about the sketchy FDA oversight of various nutritional supplements a while back. The most horrifying was so-called black salve, offered as a treatment for skin cancer:
In late October 2018, a 50-year-old woman filed a complaint with the Food and Drug Administration, claiming that a topical salve she’d purchased to remove a spot on her nose had a horrifying, disfiguring side effect. The paste, called Indian Herb, wound up “eroding” her nose, she said, burning a hole through her skin.
FDA inspectors were dispatched two weeks later to visit the product’s manufacturer, McDaniel Life-Line. But if they were expecting to find a legitimate manufacturing operation when they arrived in tiny Felt, Okla. (pop. 149) that November, they may have been surprised to find that Indian Herb was being prepared in an ordinary kitchen, using a blender and other household utensils, by Bruce McDaniel and his wife, as the FDA wrote later in a letter to the company. The blender was stored in a trash bag kept in the garage when not in use, the letter noted.
And this is the sort of thing so-called “crunchy moms” will reach for instead of a phone to call a doctor. And the likely incoming head of Health and Human Services will think it’s just fine.
Speaking of which, one reason I’m not feeling quite as blue about the incoming administration is due to this story, which I read today, about how so many of the policies cheered on by Trump Country will come back to bite…Trump Country:
The Archer Daniels Midland wet mill on the outskirts of Decatur, Ill., rises like an industrial behemoth from the frozen, harvested cornfields of Central Illinois. Steam billowed in the 20-degree cold last week, as workers turned raw corn into sweet, ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup. Three miles away, a Primient mill, which sprawls across 400 acres divided by North 22nd Street, was doing the same.
To Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald J. Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, this bedraggled city — set deep in Trump country — is the belly of the agribusiness beast, churning out products that he says poison America, rendering its children obese and its citizens chronically ill.
To the workers here, those mills — the largest in the world — are their livelihoods.
Yep. If nothing else, it’ll be entertaining, watching the leopards eat all those faces. Although I suspect nothing will happen.
Good thing the information ecosystem is in such good shape! Oops, maybe not:
The Ashland Daily Tidings — established as a newspaper in 1876 — ceased operations in 2023, but if you were a local reader, you may not have known. Almost as soon as it closed, a website for the Tidings reemerged, boasting a team of eight reporters, Minihane included, who cranked out densely reported stories every few days.
…The reality was that none of the people allegedly working for the Ashland Daily Tidings existed, or at least were who they claimed to be. The bylines listed on Daily Tidings articles were put there by scammers using artificial intelligence, and in some cases stolen identities, to dupe local readers.
That’s a simultaneously horrifying and entertaining story, because one of the bylines that kept appearing in this so-called pink-slime publication was that of a real journalist. Sure, he lives in the U.K. and has only been to Oregon once in his life, but there’s his name on all those AI-written stories. I can hardly wait to see what someone could do with mine.
And that’s the midweek wrap-up. What a time to be alive.
Mark P said on December 10, 2024 at 10:06 pm
I guess these days we have to take our entertainment where we can find it, like sitting in a deck chair smoking a cigar and sipping whiskey while watching the other passengers fight each other for a space on one of the Titanic’s lifeboats.
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Cheez Whiz said on December 11, 2024 at 12:55 am
I have the same reaction to all these horror stories.
“What did you expect?”
Thing is, we’re in this no-mans land where everyone pretends that everything Trump poops out is an accomplished fact, not a proposal.
Why everyone is pre-emptively freaking out is an interesting question, but in a month it won’t matter. Trump will be President and he will will start doing things, and the Republican Congess will start rubberstamping his nominations. THEN you call all start freaking out over something real.But again,
“What did you expect?”
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Jeff Borden said on December 11, 2024 at 10:01 am
There’s an interesting editorial in the Chicago Sun-Times today, reflecting on a speech made by Tom Homan, the incoming overseer of our great deportation, to a Republican holiday party on the northwest side. Homan declared Chicago will be “ground zero” for his troops, prompting the S-T to note Illinois harbors under 500,000 undocumented immigrants. Two large red states led by loud-mouthed immigrant bathers, Texass and Floriduh, are home to millions of these poor souls. But Chicago is the favored punching bag of the shrieking tRumpanzees, so sure, we’re ground zero.
I’m going to enjoy the howls, the moans and the groans from the morons who voted for this. I’m all outta sympathy. They have fucked around and are now going to find out just how big a mistake they made.
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Scout said on December 11, 2024 at 11:54 am
The other day a friend of ours said she was going to feel sorry for the people who voted for the pain coming their way. The rest of us just stared at her for moment before we all said, practically in unison, some version of “fuck those idiots”. They’ll get what they deserve… the problem is the rest of us will get screwed too. So yeah, fuck them all. I’ve become a cynical old cranky crone with no shits to give for ignorant, racist, misogynistic morons who swallowed the lies the media and the billionaire tech bros fed them and voted to bring the inevitable chaos down on all of our heads.
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Colleen Condron said on December 11, 2024 at 2:12 pm
I sometimes see records of patients who have chosen alternative therapies for their cancer. They see practitioners who prescribe IV vitamins and macrobiotic diets. One patient treated her breast cancer with cayenne pepper on an open lesion. Now vitamins and good diets certainly can have positive effects, but they aren’t going to slow down or get rid of your cancer. And don’t get me started on the conspiracy theorists who maintain the cure for cancer exists, but is being withheld because pharmaceutical companies make more money by treating it instead of curing it.I am no fan of big pharma, but the idea they are sitting on a cure is real tinfoil hat stuff.
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Dave said on December 11, 2024 at 2:42 pm
I knew a couple who, when she discovered cancer, went to alternative healers. She’s just as dead.
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Jeff Gill said on December 11, 2024 at 2:53 pm
Steve Jobs.
(sigh.)
Oh, and the FBI director is going to jump rather than be pushed. We live in interesting times.
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Mark P said on December 11, 2024 at 3:09 pm
I’m sure you have all heard the joke, what are the last words of a dumb red neck?
“Hey, y’all, watch this!”
I think that’s us, talking to the rest of the world. We just took a vote, and dumb won.
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Julie Robinson said on December 11, 2024 at 3:13 pm
Or is it “hold my beer”?
Cayenne pepper on an open breast lesion? OMG.
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Suzanne said on December 11, 2024 at 3:41 pm
Dave @12, we have a friend who had cancer about 10-12 years ago. Two of his friends were diagnosed about the same time. They vigorously encouraged him to go the natural healing route like they did but he went the chemotherapy route.
He is still alive to have a 2nd occurrence of cancer; his friends both died years ago.
I, too, marvel at the number of times since my cancer diagnosis that I have been told that there is a cure for cancer but big Pharma in collusion with oncologists won’t let anyone know because they want the money to keep flowing. Like my leukemia is exactly the same type of disease as a brain tumor or bladder cancer.
We live in idiocracy and we are all going to suffer. The adults are no longer in charge.
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Colleen Condron said on December 11, 2024 at 3:45 pm
Dave…the saddest cases are the people who come in with early stage disease and choose the woo woo treatment. The cancer grows, and they come back with metastatic disease, and at that point all treatment is palliative….there’s nothing else to be done.
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Sherri said on December 11, 2024 at 3:51 pm
I share everyone’s frustration with the people who voted for the leopards, and I enjoy schadenfreude as much as anyone, and yet…
The problem is, the leopards won’t eat the smuggest faces, or the most deserving faces, they’ll eat the most vulnerable faces. Maybe there’s just no way around it, maybe we’re just doomed to go through a crisis that makes the pandemic look like child’s play, but I can’t cheer it on.
I’m a bad Christian; I walked away from church when Trump was elected the first time, don’t really think the resurrection is all that important, and think scripture should be read with a critical eye. But what I do believe, and even sometimes live in, is love your neighbor. I don’t have to like them, I don’t have to agree with them, but I have to at least be willing to extend them grace. More so if I have any status or power imbalance over them.
I was raised in a church that believed that the most important parts of Christianity were believing that Jesus had been sent to the world to die for sins and convincing others of that. I think the most important part of Christianity is love your neighbor, something the Southern Baptists are not really in to.
Thus endeth my sermon. Peace be with you.
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David C said on December 11, 2024 at 4:24 pm
I was roasted by one of my sisters-in-law for saying the circumstances of Christ’s birth and death are less important than what he did and said in between. It’ll surprise you that she’s a Trump voter.
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Deborah said on December 11, 2024 at 6:24 pm
As I’ve mentioned here before we gave up our car in Chicago but still need one in NM. A few days ago we took our jeep in to the shop for some needed repairs, an appointment we made back in September before we left NM for the fall in Chicago. We had expected to find out the costs would be way high and not worth doing and instead just getting a new vehicle. Only we still have no idea what vehicle we want yet. We wanted an electric vehicle but so far haven’t found one that has enough clearance underneath to regularly drive up the road to our cabin, there are a few but they are outrageously expensive. But today we got some good news from the shop that after they make a few repairs that aren’t too exorbitant we’ll be good to go for probably a couple more years, fingers crossed. We had decided that if they told us an outrageous number we would lease a vehicle for a couple of years and hopefully by that time we will have a clue. Now, thank goodness, we don’t have to do that.
Sherri, I wish I felt the way you do about my fellow man, but I’m getting more and more jaded as time goes on, I’m having a hard time watching the getting their faces eaten and still not understanding what they’ve done, to all of us, unfortunately.
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Sherri said on December 11, 2024 at 6:37 pm
Oh, Deborah, I *feel* the same way. I have to choose to work hard to act differently.
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