I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made:
Marvellous are thy works;
And that my soul knoweth right well.
Psalm 139:14 (KJV)
Cholesterol is good for you. It is in the lining of your cell walls. About 25% of your body’s cholesterol is in the brain. The body produces stress hormones, sex hormones, and vitamin D from cholesterol. Cholesterol is necessary to repair the body and when a person is stressed or injured, the liver produces more cholesterol. But medical doctors have set arbitrary limits of how much of this good stuff you should have, and therefore to lower your cholesterol, they will prescribe a drug with many known side effects including muscle damage, kidney failure, peripheral neuropathy and memory loss. Statins are derived from the poison husk of red rice which kills its predators. Interestingly, statin poisons lower cholesterol, and perhaps that is the point: if you lower cholesterol, your mortality rate goes up.
Doctors have decided that this cholesterol which our livers produce and release into the blood stream is bad for us. Yet the mechanism which the liver “decides” to release cholesterol may be a necessary part of the normal function and often of healing the body. Who do you think is smarter? Your doctor or your liver?
Actually it isn’t a question of whether the liver is smarter but of the designer of the liver being smarter. If the one who designed your liver knew what he was doing, then perhaps we should not second guess this mechanism governing cholesterol production and thus allow a mere human being to determine what our serum cholesterol levels should be. For the designer of the liver may actually be smarter than the doctors who are trying to fix arbitrary limits on the liver’s production of cholesterol.
The final concern has to do with money. The designer owns the cattle on a thousand hills (Psalm 5.10). He is wealthy beyond our imagination. The pharmaceutical companies require continual sales of statins to pay their employees (not least of all their CEOs gargatuan 7 figure salaries), their shareholders, and their promotion efforts, including the transfers to doctors on panels which decide what cholesterol levels should be. In investing, we call this a conflict of interest. The designer has no conflict of interest, because he has no need of our money.
Carney has much practice devaluing the Canadian loonie. He is perfectly suited as the new head of the Bank of England. From Zerohedge:
As Mark Carney steps aside from his role at the Bank of Canada to undertake all manner of easy money in the UK, we thought a reflection on the ‘stealth’ QE that he has been engaged with, very much under the radar, in the US’ neighbor-to-the-north was worthwhile. It seems quietly and with little aplomb, Carney’s BoC has grown its balance sheet by over 21% YoY – the most since 2009. If that was not enough to make someone nervous, the quantity of Canadian government bonds on the BoC’s balance sheet has grown at a remarkable 46% YoY! All of this has taken place during a time when ‘supposedly’ the Canadian economy has been reasonably strong and foreign demand for debt high. With Canada’s CAD267bn debt due in 2013, we suspect this ‘stealth’ QE will continue to rise.
Where is this easing reported in the Canadian news media? Inflation in Canada is rampant–that can be seen in the price of housing alone. But who is covering the monetary expansion of the loonie? So now we Canadians who have Canadian dollars suffer the abuse of both ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) and QE.
It’s all monopoly money.
The law of supply and demand should dictate that when a physical commodity is scarce and there is unsatisfied demand, that the price of that commodity will increase. Yet in the last few weeks, the world market price for the scarce commodities of gold and silver, which are still at least a week away from physical delivery in our local Canadian PMX, has shrunk. How is this lower price helping to assure that buyers and sellers are able to make transactions? Lower supply of the physical item should result in a higher price, and instead, we see the price go down. Clearly, the price setting mechanism is broken, for if there is supply but no demand, the price goes down. In this case, we have great demand but no supply. So the price should go up. The fact that the price has gone down is proof that the gold and silver markets are manipulated and not free.
The virtues of (actual) “free markets” are well-known to anyone familiar with basic market dynamics: they self-correct. If supply exceeds demand, the price falls to a sufficient level to discourage more supply and encourage more demand – until those simultaneous dynamics achieve equilibrium: supply and demand matching, with prices stable.
Conversely, where demand exceeds supply; prices must rise sufficiently so that more supply is encouraged and more demand is discouraged, until once again equilibrium is achieved. Thus a permanent supply-deficit is ipso facto proof of price-suppression.
The problem with the price-suppression of any kind of physical “good” is always the same, one inevitably runs out of inventory as the repressed supply and excessive demand caused by artificially low prices means that buyers will always outnumber sellers.
Now this should help explain why investor grade bars and coins are not available at bullion stores–the price is manipulated too low. Buyers are readily available but sellers are scarce, and so physical metal is not available.