Scorsese and the New York Times are pondering “Bob Dylan and the Myth of Boomer Idealism“, concluding that “We know now that the real story wasn’t the people at the protests and the concerts; it was all the people who weren’t“.
While Bush Senior was busy killing Columbians whom he accused of cocaine, the likes of Obama were getting ready for the US presidency, by snorting it.
I used to call Obamacare, Obamascare (although I was for insuring pre-existing conditions, of course, as everyone else). Obamacare was written by Plutos from the health care industry, anxious to augment their profit base. Accordingly, Obamacare also known as “ACA” has proven an unfathomable disaster: since 2015, life expectancy in the USA is going down (while the health industry’s profits have augmented). So what are those who were fanatically for Obamacare going to do?
Faced with Obamacare life shrinking, fanatical Obama careerists can do like Paul Krugman, the self-described “conscience of a liberal”, and claim that life extension is a terrible thing. (Or then do like the Democratic Congress, which, last week voted to get rid of the “Cadillac Tax” part of Obamacare). Paint life extension as something by the wealthy, for the wealthy. So, by dying younger, implies the self-described “conscience of a liberal” we are fighting wealth.
Oops! Obamacare lied, but graphs don’t. Most dying while profits for the few towered ever more: this is the American way… That all-American cocaine snorting boy, Obama the Great, made it so, and people will be forever grateful to have been f*cked so deep by the Great…
Coherent with Obamacare apparent effect on longevity, Paul Krugman proposes actually to ban ““life extension” research”. Before my take on it, here is some of what Paul says, supposedly writing from the future, a diarrhea of subrealistic delirium:
…people generally get worse as they grow older, because they become more like themselves… Even in the early 21st century, a growing number of people realized that America was becoming an oligarchy, with a hugely disproportionate share of income, wealth and power held by a small number of people…
But while the dynasties of the past often endured for a very long time, the dynasts themselves didn’t. Sooner or later, like everyone else, they grew old and died.
Nowadays, not so much.
It was no secret, back in the ’teens, that some tech billionaires, including Thiel and Larry Ellison, were donating large sums to “life extension” research. After all, these men weren’t just immensely rich, they were accustomed to the belief that there was a technological fix for every problem. So why not a fix for this whole get-older-and-die thing?
What few people seem to have thought about seriously was what would happen if the research actually panned out.
It would be one thing if life-extension technology were relatively cheap and could be made widely available. Even that would have created huge problems… most of us prefer the portmanteau “evergarchs,” for oligarchs who seemingly go on forever. But Morgan’s vision of a society utterly corrupted by near-immortal privilege turned out to be all too accurate.
Indeed, until recently it looked as if the political dominance of the evergarchs would extend indefinitely into the future. After all, the wealthy have always had vast influence, and we’re talking about people who were generally power hungry to start with — that’s how they got where they are — and they’ve had an unnaturally long time to build connections and buy influence.
But nothing is forever, even in an era of life extension. Public rage against the evergarchs has been building for decades, and it may now have reached boiling point.
So what should be done? Some are proposing that we simply try to diminish the evergarchs’ influence with steep taxes on huge fortunes, which is a good idea in any case. But there were real concerns about tax evasion even when oligarchs were merely mortal; imagine how good people can get at hiding their assets when they can spend decades, even generations, building their tax shelters.
No, life extension for a privileged few is, by its nature, a socially destructive technology, and the time has come to ban it. Take the evergarchs off their treatments, so that they start aging like everyone else, and don’t let anyone else get started…
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Life extension, care, is the best, oligarchy, the ugliest, confusing them, the worst:
Confusing life extension and plutocracy: a new disease, an advanced case of Diversion Derangement Syndrome. In DDS, issues of much less importance are focused on, with strong passions (such as oligarchs living forever!)… allowing to smear notions of high value (life extension). (A famous case of DDS is TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome…) However, life extension is pretty much the fundamental concept of medical progress. Thus, associating life extension and plutocracy, is associating the best of humanity, care, with the worst humanity is afflicted by, oligarchy and plutocracy.
At the end of the reign of Obama the Great, for the first time in the USA during peacetime, lifespan started to decrease, several years in a row. Shall we congratulate ourselves, that lifespan is decreasing and celebrate that as our latest method to fight against plutocracy? This is what the great liberal Paul Krugman wants us to feel like.
The fact is, life extension is the most human activity. We are fighting death, day in, day out. Without strenuous efforts to keep infants, or very old or very sick or injured people alive, we would kill the best inner core of what makes us human.
Life extension may also be a few cheap tricks away. Supplements such as NAD may improve mitochondrial breathing, and thus give a better good life extension (so it does on the animal species tested so far). That can be bought for as little as one dollar a day. In general, so far, all advances in medicine have become quickly available to most people. Actually, populations are exploding in parts of Africa, where women have eight children each, precisely because the children are not dying anymore as they used to.
Viewing life extension as a sinister plot means that the great work of Obama the Great, decreasing lifespan is viewed as an anti-plutocratic positive. Personally, I feel that spite for life is the wrong mood to foster among the masses.
If one wants to prevent plutocracy, it’s extremely simple: just limit wealth absolutely, as the Roman Republic did.
And then let’s not do the other thing the Roman State did, which killed it; first kill philosophy (but for collaborating stoicism), and then, and it was the next logical step, having killed curiosity, kill science and technology.
Patrice Ayme
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My brother in law died from the Obamacare famous “out of network” trick. First he was kicked out of the hospital after 5 stents and 5 days… Then, as he got another heart attack shortly thereafter, the hospital he drove to refused to take care of him. He died in a parking lot, trying to reach another hospital at 5 am…
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 