IMMIGRATION - The good and the bad.

Most of the residents in the community where I live in Southwest Florida are seasonal, so we have an employee problem, particularly in the food services. This is solved mostly by getting staff during the heavy season to come up from the Caribbean, mostly Jamaica and Haiti. These are great people, friendly and good workers, and are well liked. They get housing and other benefits and the money they make goes a long way when they get back home. This year I hear that we're running into a big problem getting workers because of delays in getting passports and visas from the immigration bureaucracy.

On the other hand, almost every day I watch Bill Melugin on Fox News reporting from the southern border, showing drone videos of multiple groups of hundreds of people coming in long lines, crossing freely. They're taken in and dispersed into the country. No fooling around with silly details like passports and visas. It's now up to about 200K per month we're told, as well as untold undetected others. And along with the young Hispanics looking for the good life and adventure, as did many of our forebears, come others from all over the world, including some who wish to do us harm, and tons of fentanyl taking its gruesome toll.

This gross disregard of one of the Administration's primary functions is getting beyond even Mr. Biden's amazing capacity to deny obvious truth as if he's insulted by your even asking. The sending of busloads to Democrat stronghold big cities, as well as to the hoity-toity hypocrites in Martha's Vinyard, has made some progress in overcoming the major media blackout of the problem, but the insanity persists.

Who's benefitting, besides the Mexican drug cartels? Likely, lots of people in the Washington labyrinth. Certainly not the immigrants themselves who'd much rather come, as did my dad and grandparents, through a less hazardous, and legal, process.

Mr. Trump, whatever your judgement of him, had made significant progress on cutting back on illegal entry, a necessary first step in making sensible reforms to the system. The subsequent Democrat Congress has taken zero interest in following up. Now the Republicans have the House. Let's see if they have the guts to take the problem on.

TIRZEPATIDE - Something new in the diabetes world.

One of the most important developments in the treatment of type 2 diabetes over the past decade or so has been the introduction of the "incretin" agents. Incretins are hormones produced in the small intestine at mealtime that help in glucose metabolism. They have several effects but importantly they increase insulin output by the pancreas at mealtime and also signal satisfaction of hunger to the brain. Medications with these effects are marketed as weekly injections and 2 common ones are Ozempic and Trulicity, (although there are other similar ones) which usually work well to improve blood sugar and produce weight loss.

In the last couple of years diabetes experts have been excited by a new and improved variation known by the scientific name of tirzepatide, and just recently put on the market by Lilly Co. as Mounjaro so expect to see ads.

In clinical trials tirzepatide does even better than the previous agents in controlling blood sugar and reducing weight. Higher doses even seem in some cases to cause weight loss in the range of that produced by obesity surgery. So experts are thinking of it as a possible additional help in the battle against the obesity epidemic that is gradually being thought of as the major public health problem worldwide, a problem with far, far greater health implications than the Covid 19 pandemic that so dominates our news.

For the science minded among you – there are 2 main incretin hormones produced in the small intestine, GLP-1 and GIP. The former agents produce the effect of GLP-1 but tirzepatide stimulates the body's receptors for both GLP-1 and GIP. The most important side effects of all these agents are nausea and sometimes diarrhea, but given judiciously most people tolerate them well.

COMMON SENSE: Thoughts on the Texas School Shooting

The almost immediate response of my liberal friends to the recent unspeakable evil was "gun control". Our political leader, Joe Biden, who started off OK in his response, morphed into a tirade against the "gun lobby" as his big solution, the only one he mentioned, and made himself into an irrelevancy.

 I'm not a gun guy. I never owned a gun and never plan to. The only time I ever shot one was in obligatory ROTC in college. I was allowed to opt out when I was in the Medical Corps during my Army time. So, I'm middle of the road on this issue. I'm willing to listen to restriction ideas if they sound practical, but I get the desire of the average law abiding person who wants to have one for whatever.

 Emily wants to have an age limit on buying guns, and that sounds OK. After all, we have age limits on tobacco and alcohol. But at the same time kids get tobacco and alcohol – no problem. And the average kid isn't the problem. As we're told by experts, a demented 18 year old determined to kill will find a way.

 So, if you're talking "gun control" I want to hear the specifics. Just what laws do you want to be passed and how effective will they be. I'm not interested in something just to make us feel like we've done something. From 1994-2004 we had a federal assault weapons ban which had zero effect on gun violence. It seems to me like the usual "one-stage thinking" that Thomas Sowell talks about. Somebody kills a bunch of people with a gun so we do "gun control". It's like stopping poverty with giving people welfare payments.

 What is the answer? Armed guards and restricted access in all our schools? We've got about 100,000 public schools. It's doable but how discouraging. After all I remember when we used to just walk onto the airport gate, but we've all become accustomed to the present insanity. Maybe there should be a lot more interest taken in evaluating and helping off-beat kids. Easier said than done I guess, but these blossoming psychopaths all have some interaction with the school system where they're observed for a time.

 But to me the problem seems a lot more complicated. Our society has a problem with its soul. Generally, there's increase in violence, murder, drug addiction and overdose, suicide. And we just accept it. Increasingly we walk in the streets of a big city and go around people sleeping on the sidewalk or shooting up and it's just part of the scene.

 I think we have a soul problem folks. We all tend to sugar-coat the past, but I kind of long for the time when there was some sort of moral sense that everyone accepted. Not even the mafia would take out their problems on little kids. Without going into detail, the stuff the major media and present social and political talking heads are pushing as morality today strikes me as part of the corruption. The polls say that ¾'s of us feel that the country is headed in the wrong direction so I'm not alone.

 

 

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Trudeau, the Truckers and Covid mandates

Justin Trudeau has handled the trucker's demonstrations and civil disobedience tactics with harsh police and economic repression. He had a much more reasonable alternative. The truckers are correct. There is no scientific basis for the government imposed mandates to which they were objecting. They are normally law-abiding hard working citizens who kept on the job to keep the goods flowing throughout the pandemic. They deserved a hearing and conciliation early on. Mr. Trudeau thinks like a big government leftist and chose the course of repression. Hopefully Canadians will come to their senses and he will come to regret his choice.

Below is the Covid death trend in Canada during the recent surge. The idea that this had anything to do with government activity is nonsense. This virus is not going away because of government mandates which have done far more harm than good. It's time to end them.

 

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