Tag Archives: comments

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I love it when people hate what I do…

A little while ago, I got a brand new comment from a new visitor. She showed up just in time for my comment function to be fixed. How lucky for me!

Evidently, “Toni” didn’t like a recent post I wrote about fundies having babies in 2023. She says I have a “sad life”; my blog is “lame”; and I’m condescending. I guess that’s a fair enough assessment by someone who doesn’t know me. *shrug*

The funny thing is, I don’t think I was particularly harsh in the post she complained about. I wished the fundies involved, happy and healthy pregnancies, and even commented that the already born babies are cute. Seriously, I’ve been way more condescending and rude in other posts I’ve written. That one was nothing on the snark scale!

I was going to just trash Toni’s comment, but I figured some of the folks who actually appreciate my “lame” blog might get a kick out of it.

My blog may truly be “lame”, and Toni may see me as “condescending”, but I’d say looking for blog posts like mine, and then taking the time to comment on them, is just as lame. At least I get ad revenue when people like Toni stop by and show me just how “Christlike” they really are… What does Toni get from judging me and leaving me a disapproving comment? Especially when it’s obvious she didn’t read more than one or two posts? But then, my vocabulary is probably too spicy and advanced for someone like her.

For the record, Toni, I didn’t actually express anything mean or nasty about the status of Kaylee’s womb. In fact, I hope she has a healthy pregnancy. Really, I do. I even explicitly wrote that in the post you attacked. Did you read it?

And you certainly aren’t the first person to call me “judgmental”, “condescending”, “rude”, or “lame”. I didn’t change my ways for those previous disgruntled commenters. What makes you think I give a fuck about what you think of me? I must have really gotten to you to inspire such a response. I clearly don’t know my own strength. 😀

People who sing homophobic songs about farm animals kind of invite snark from people like me. Especially when they pump out babies and then get into car accidents without wearing seatbelts or putting their newborn babies in car seats. You’d think having two paralyzed people in the extended family would serve as a lesson about driving unrestrained. I guess young fundies who are “high on God” have more faith and hormones, than common sense and intellect.

Anyway, Toni, your disapproval is noted. I’ll be sure to keep writing judgmental and condescending articles just for you. After all, I LIVE to give myself pats on the back for being so negative! Too bad my mom wasn’t allowed to have an abortion, huh? At least my husband of 20 years is glad she didn’t, anyway.

Thanks again for the AdSense. I’ll put it toward my next trip to Paris.

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modern problems, technology, YouTube

Keeping it simple, stupid…

This week, I mentioned that I’ve been trying to make my home “smarter”. I’m not a particularly tech savvy person, so making my home smarter mostly entails doing very simple things. I replaced twelve light bulbs with smart bulbs. Now, I have twelve lights that can be controlled by an app on my phone. Not only can I turn them on with my phone or iPad, but I can program them to turn on or off, light up in different colors or intensities, or even set them to music. Cool, huh? Well… this new “upgrade” hasn’t come without glitches.

For the past two nights, one of the lamps in my bedroom has been inexplicably turning on at midnight. I don’t know why. I can’t see any evidence that I programmed the lamp to turn on at midnight. I don’t even use that lamp very often.

Bill has had trouble adding all of the lamps to his app. Yesterday, he called up to me and asked me to use my phone to turn on the light for him, because his phone wouldn’t load the bulb into his app, for some reason. Now… I have discovered that we can turn the lights on and off the old fashioned way, but that may cause them to go “offline”, which potentially means adding them to the app again. I don’t know… I’m still learning. At my age, learning this kind of stuff is a challenge.

I remember when I was a teenager, my parents bought their first VCR. For the longest time, I was the only one who could program it. Now I know how they felt.

I bought some smart power strips and outlets, too. From what I can tell, I can use these to shut off power when we aren’t using something without having to unplug the device. That can be an energy saver, which means lower electric bills. I can also program things to turn on and off by using my app. Like, if I wanted to, I could set up the coffee maker with ground coffee and water every night and program it to turn on at a certain time. I could come downstairs to fresh coffee every morning, rather than waiting for Bill to make it. Cool, huh?

It is kind of exciting to be able to direct appliances to work from my phone. But there’s also a beauty to watching Bill make coffee every morning. He does it so well. In fact, he takes great pride in making coffee. Automating the process wouldn’t necessarily change the process. He’d still have to grind the coffee and put the water in the tank. All the power strip would do is hit the switch remotely, so the coffee gets made while we’re doing our morning routines. It sounds convenient, but it could be more trouble than it’s worth.

Yesterday, I read a distressing article written by a professional copywriter. He says his job is now threatened by AI (artificial intelligence) technology– specifically ChatGPT. ChatGPT was able to create good copy in thirty seconds for free. The same copy would have taken the human being hours to create and he would have charged over $500. Henry Williams, the author of the piece wrote:

The developers admit that the software still has limitations. It tends towards the verbose and repetitive (“honing my craft and perfecting my ability to craft”), and minor changes to question phrasing can be the difference between an amazing response and no response at all. The more we use it, however, the better it will become. As ChatGPT told me, it can already “replicate the writing styles of different authors” and “even be trained to mimic the tone and voice of a particular brand or organization”.

I use YouTube daily, and it’s scary how many channels use AI to create robotic sounding content. Every day, it seems like fewer human beings are involved in the process of writing articles and making videos. Some of the AI generated content is downright horrible, but I have run across some videos that are almost indistinguishable from content made entirely by a living, breathing, human. It’s also been used for creating music “in the style of…” How creepy it is to think of a computer program creating music that sounds like that made by a real person?

This morning, Bill told me about how AI has now managed to pass state bar exams– the tests that actual lawyers often fail with ease. And just now, I found an article about how AI was almost used to fight parking tickets in court. Angry lawyers protested. Who could blame them? That technology could put their livelihoods in jeopardy! I’ve also read about how students can now use AI to write papers, which makes a teacher’s job more difficult. Isn’t it bad enough that teachers have to worry about being shot while they’re teaching? Do we have to add AI to the mix, too?

I have nothing against technology. There are some things robots do better than people. I’m sure, for instance, that robots might be better at certain surgeries than humans are. There’s less worry about human frailties or failures, like shaking hands, fatigue, or emotions getting in the way. But as intelligent as machines and computers can be made to be, they have to be mastered by humans. Otherwise, what good are we?

It used to be that people had to go places to go shopping. They had to interact with other people. There was a human being to ring up the sale and bag the item. Now, a lot of us shop online, and our interaction might come if we happen to see the delivery person… and no one steals our stuff from the porch. Automated cashiers have made it possible to go shopping for groceries and check yourself out. That might seem convenient enough, but it also means that one less person has a job. I don’t like using self checkout lanes, either, because I find that they often mess up the transaction and the process ends up taking longer

I’m sure my angst is for nothing. People have been lamenting “progress” forever. As a writer and musician, though, it does kind of disturb me that AI is getting “too good”. If AI can do in seconds what I do in hours, what’s the point of getting up every day? Are we living in The Jetsons age, now?

One more thing… My friend Thomas, who frequently comments on my posts, informed me that he’s not been able to like or comment on my most recent posts. I have been investigating the issue this morning. It seems I’m having trouble with a “nonce verification error”. I’ve tried disabling plugins, which is a real pain, because it messes up the settings I’m used to using. I tried changing the theme, but that also didn’t work. I did find that I could comment if I did it on my desktop or laptop computers, using Chrome. But I can’t do it on the desktop with Safari, or from my iPad. I tried commenting with Safari on my laptop and it worked.

This is very weird, and I don’t know how to fix the issue. So if you’ve wanted to comment and can’t, all I can tell you for now is to try using Chrome. Hopefully, this issue will be fixed at some point. I have emailed support. Maybe they can straighten this out for me.

I’ve read that Jetpack can cause “nonce” issues. I’ve tried to disable Jetpack, but WordPress won’t let me. Apparently, I pay for it with my subscription. Sigh…

Maybe it’s better to just keep it simple, stupid… The K.I.S.S. method has alway served me well in the past. But then, I think about my mom, who has steadfastly refused to learn how to use the Internet and now has to get one of her daughters to Google for her when she needs help. I don’t think I want to get to that point. I’ll try to keep learning the new methods. I just hope all of these new things we have for convenience don’t end up being too much of a good thing.

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mental health, obits, psychology

This morning, I learned about the late Norah Vincent… now I want to read her books.

Prior to this morning, I had never heard of the late author, Norah Vincent. Then I read the New York Times obituary that detailed her remarkable life and the books she wrote. Now, I’m going to have to add some of her books to my pile to be read. I wish I had found her in the early 00s, when she was a “media darling” for passing as a man for about 18 months as research for her book, Self-Made Man. The book was an instant best seller. Vincent was a lesbian, and she identified as a woman. Her pronouns were “she/her”. She was not transgender or non binary. She simply wanted to explore what it’s like to pass as a man in today’s world. Or, at least as it was circa 2003 or so, when she was a 35 year old journalist.

Vincent went to great pains to be convincing in her quest to “pass” as a guy. She got coaching from a voice teacher at Julliard, who taught her how to deepen her voice. She bound her breasts with a too small sports bra and wore a jockstrap with a realistic prosthetic penis in it. She cut her hair very short, and learned from a makeup artist how to make it look like she had beard stubble. She even built up her back and shoulder muscles through workouts designed to increase her upper body strength. Then she did hard core “masculine” things, like joining a bowling team, a la Fred Flintstone. During her time posing as a man, she called herself Ned, dated women, went to strip clubs, and experienced being “rebuffed” at bars.

The experience led to a reportedly excellent book, but according to her obituary, it took a toll on her mental health. She was left disoriented and alienated to the point at which she checked herself into a hospital to recover from severe depression. She spent the next year and a half bouncing from hospital to hospital, which resulted in her next book, Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin. That one sounds even more intriguing to me than the first!

More books followed, and people got to know her controversial maverick style. I haven’t read any of Norah Vincent’s books yet, but I can already tell that I’m probably going to enjoy her writing, just by reading her obituary. The author of the obit, Penelope Green, writes:

Ms. Vincent was a lesbian. She was not transgender, or gender fluid. She was, however, interested in gender and identity. As a freelance contributor to The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice and The Advocate, she had written essays on those topics that inflamed some readers.

She was a libertarian. She tilted at postmodernism and multiculturalism. She argued for the rights of fetuses and against identity politics, which she saw as infantilizing and irresponsible. She did not believe that transsexuals were members of the opposite sex after they had surgery and had taken hormones, a position that led one writer to label her a bigot. She was a contrarian, and proud of it.

Even though I doubt I would agree with a lot of Ms. Vincent’s opinions, I have a feeling I would enjoy reading about them. I admire people who are brave enough to express themselves and do so with intelligence and style. I like reading well considered and thought out viewpoints, even if they don’t agree with my own. I read that she was for fetal rights, but somehow, I doubt her argument is going to be the same as some of the pro-life males’ arguments in any comment section of a mainstream newspaper’s. I doubt her comments will be based on religious or political dogmas, as are most opinions shared by everyday people. I do think it’s interesting that she was pro-fetal rights, especially given the way she exited her life.

According to her New York Times obituary, Norah Vincent died on July 6, 2022, at age 53, having gone to a clinic in Switzerland to end her own life. In my review of Amy Bloom’s recent book, In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss, which was about Bloom’s husband’s decision to end his life at Dignitas, a Swiss organization that helps people commit suicide, I wrote about how people can more easily end their own lives in Switzerland than they can in the United States. I don’t know what reasons Vincent used to justify ending her life. According to Bloom’s book, even the folks at Dignitas have to be convinced that the person committing suicide isn’t clinically depressed. The obituary doesn’t mention a terminal illness, other than mental illness. Below is exactly what Penelope Green wrote in Vincent’s obit:

Ms. Vincent died on July 6 at a clinic in Switzerland. She was 53. Her death, which was not reported at the time, was confirmed on Thursday by Justine Hardy, a friend. The death, she said, was medically assisted, or what is known as a voluntary assisted death.

Having experienced clinical depression and anxiety myself, I have a slight inkling of what may have been tormenting her. Whether or not people want to realize it, mental illness is still medical illness, and it can make living very difficult. It sounds to me like Vincent was an unusually sensitive soul with unique ideas and incredible powers of creativity. Sometimes that combination in a person can be devastating, as the person goes from brilliance to despair. Perhaps her creativity made her experience life on a much more intense level that was just too much to bear. Or, maybe something else was going on that she chose not to disclose, because frankly, it’s no one else’s business.

A lot of people in the comment section, many of whom obviously didn’t read the article, were making wrong assumptions about her. Some were even bold enough to use her story, which they never bothered to read, to support their own theories about gender politics. I wish people would read more. And I wish they would at least read comments by people who have read before they chime in with their own opinions. Alas, people don’t want to spend the money on a subscription or take the time to read. Yet they want to be heard. I would like to know why we should listen to people who don’t bother to listen to others. I think it would be great if, somehow, social media platforms could determine if people had read before allowing them to post. It’s a pipe dream, I know. Especially given our First Amendment rights in the United States, which overall are a good thing.

I still have a lot of books to be read, so it may be a long time before I get to Norah Vincent. But I hope I do, because she sounds fascinating. I wish I had discovered her before she exited life. And the comments about her are equally interesting– from those who didn’t read and assumed she died in the United States, to those who accused her of being “ableist” for the title of her second book (even though she was suffering from mental illness herself).

I don’t know about you, but it really is becoming exhausting keeping up with all of the “ist” labels people throw out these days. You can’t win, no matter what side of the spectrum you’re on. Why do people have to put labels on behaviors the so-called “woke folks” determine are somehow “harmful”? I don’t like the term “snowflake”, because I think it’s become very cliched. However, I do think that constantly judging and criticizing people for their thoughts and opinions makes life more difficult than it needs to be. It’s tiresome and obnoxious. But maybe I’m just getting old and crotchety… and tired of the thought police.

Gonna close this post now, and head over to Amazon to buy a couple of Norah Vincent’s books, which I hope to review in the near future. I’m sure whomever is in charge of her estate will appreciate the sales. If you want to join me, you can click one of the links below. If you purchase through either link, I will get a small commission from Amazon, which would be nice for me. But if you don’t want to do that, that’s fine too. Because I don’t blog for money, in spite of what some people wrongly ASSUME about me. Below are the two I’m most interested in at this point.

As an Amazon Associate, I get a small commission from Amazon on sales made through my site.

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ethics, social media

Repost: How Facebook can ruin your life…

This is a slightly modified repost that originally appeared on Blogspot on July 30, 2018. I omitted the first three paragraphs from the original post, because they were about the weather. Hot weather isn’t relevant during April in Germany.

The other day, I read a horrifying story about a woman who posted a comment on a news article that set off the ire of a Jewish woman who was addicted to meth.  Monika Glennon, of Huntsville, Alabama, is a native of Poland who married a Marine.  She has two grown children who are in the military and Glennon now works as a real estate agent.   

In 2014, Glennon made a comment on a news article about a fourteen year old girl who took what some thought was an “inappropriate” selfie at Auschwitz.  Glennon was defending the teen, who was caught smiling at a place where many thousands of innocent people were slaughtered.  Glennon noted that at least the girl visited.  Her comment offended a woman named Mollie Rosenblum, who identified herself as of Jewish descent.  She said Auschwitz should be a place of “quiet reflection” and people didn’t seem to grasp the magnitude of the Holocaust.  Glennon responded that Auschwitz belongs to the people and the type of “mob mentality” we so often see on the Internet these days is what led to the Holocaust in the first place.  The heated discussion eventually ended, as they all do eventually, and Glennon forgot about it.   

Then, in September 2015, Glennon got a phone call from one of her colleagues at Re/Max, where she worked asa real estate agent. Someone had posted something horrible on Re/Max’s Facebook page.  At first, Glennon thought maybe someone had posted a bad review.  It was actually much worse than that.  A user named “Ryan Baxter” posted a link to a Web site called “She’s a Homewrecker” that was a fabricated story about Monika Glennon getting caught having sex with the husband of a client.  The link was not only shared on the Re/Max page, but was also sent to all of Glennon’s Facebook contacts, including her husband, friends, family members, and many of her professional contacts.

It turned out in August 2014, Rosenblum made up the story about Glennon and submitted it to the “She’s a Homewrecker” site.  There, it sat for over a year, until the Web site was sold to another company.  A month after the site was sold, the false story about Glennon was published.  Then, “Ryan Baxter” disseminated it among the masses.  Baxter, who was later identified as “Hannah Lupian” of Oxnard, California, was a regular reader of the site and seemingly enjoyed making sure some of the stories got exposure to the masses.  Although Baxter didn’t know Glennon and was not involved in the discussion about Auschwitz, s/he gets off on compounding the damage wrought by sites like “She’s a Homewrecker”. 

In Glennon’s case, the damage was substantial, and took a lot of time, money, and effort to resolve.  Although the story about her was completely made up, it cost Glennon a lot of business.  She wrote to the sites that had posted the fake story, but none of them would take down the link.  She later pursued the matter in court, which cost her over $100,000, although the culprits of the attack were found and had judgments levied against them.  Unfortunately, the people who attacked Glennon have no money, so Glennon will likely never see a cent of what she should be paid for their attack on her character and business. 

I’m glad that Monika Glennon sued the people involved and managed to win her case.  It’s very troubling to see how simply stating one’s opinion can cause others to become unhinged enough to try to ruin the lives of perfect strangers.  What seems like fun and games to troublemakers like Hannah Lupian and Mollie Rosenblum can have some serious real world effects.  This is why I get so upset by the Internet justice warriors who go on a rampage trying to destroy people’s lives.  Sometimes the court of public opinion gets things wrong.  Monika Glennon was absolutely right to point out that “mob justice” mentality is what led to the Holocaust in the first place.  People get blinded by rage and decide it’s up to them to go on the rampage and destroy another person’s livelihood.  They don’t seem to understand the third and fourth order effects of such destructive actions.

In other news, there is a very active political thread going on in the Duggar Family News group and Trump loyalists are showing their asses to the masses.  They keep arguing about Hillary Clinton and comparing her to Trump.  You know, I’m not a fan of Mrs. Clinton’s, but she definitely would have been a better president than Trump is.  And I was not a fan of Bill Clinton’s, but again– way better than Trump.  At least Clinton wasn’t constantly spewing his nonsense to the masses on Twitter and pissing off all our allies.

I will never understand how so many people have been duped by Trump.  It’s very sad to see.  Indeed, this story about Monika Glennon kind of has a parallel to the Trump era.  Maybe there aren’t any concentration camps set up on the scale of what was around in 1940s Europe, but the same kind of ignorance is definitely there.  The other day, I watched a very moving video documentary about a woman who survived Auschwitz.  If you have time to watch it, I highly recommend making the effort. 

So worth the time.

And below is the comment Monika Glennon left on my original post. Several years on, I understand even more why she took the actions she did. In fact, after our situation with the ex landlady, I can really relate.

Monika GlennonSeptember 15, 2018 at 1:47 AM

Thank you for your kind words. Your blog showed up in my google search of my name. I truly appreciate the support. You are right, i will never see a cent of it. BUT i have learned that justice is not equal to all, and i hope….i really hope…it will change. This is what still pushes me forward. Best Regards. MonikaReplyReplies

  1. knottySeptember 15, 2018 at 6:17 AMHi Monika! Thanks for reading and commenting! Your story gave me chills and I just had to write about it. It’s absolutely horrifying that a person can simply decide to tell such egregious lies about another person and pass it off as truth. I’m so glad you had the courage to take action and were able to prevail, even if you won’t actually get the money you were awarded.  

    I’m honored that you took the time to leave a response to this post and I hope this mess will be behind you. I wish you all the best!
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healthcare, law

Do you go to bloggers for advice about life and death decisions? I don’t.

Many thanks to a reader who contacted me on Facebook this morning. This person probably spared you all another rant on a topic I’ve already covered. I was considering writing about Delta Airlines’ proposal for all U.S. based airlines to share their “no fly” lists. But then I got this message, and I must admit, it left me scratching my head.

The commenter evidently didn’t want to leave a response on the blog itself. They found my official OH Facebook page and decided to leave me a somewhat well-written and, at least on the surface, reasonable response to a post I recently wrote about COVID-19. They wrote I shouldn’t be writing such “strong opinions” against the use of Ivermectin in the treatment against COVID-19, reminding me that I have a “public” audience who might be negatively affected by my comments. They reminded me that no one should claim any “definitive knowledge as yet”– I’m assuming about COVID-19– and implied that my opinion lacks a “rational basis”.

I don’t know a thing about this commenter, nor does s/he know much about me. Based on what I could see on Statcounter, this person with a very bare Facebook profile, comes from Las Vegas and read two posts over the course of about three minutes. He or she probably doesn’t know that I have a master’s degree in public health. Perhaps he or she would not be “impressed” by that. In any case, earlier in the comment, the person “informed” me that sometimes physicians prescribe drugs off-label. That’s not news to me, and in fact, I even mentioned that in the post I’m assuming was referenced in the message. That post was mostly my positive opinion about Judge Charles Cunningham of Louisville, Kentucky, who recently ruled that the wife of a COVID-19 patient could not compel hospital doctors to prescribe Ivermectin off-label to treat COVID-19.

I write that “I’m assuming”, because the commenter didn’t specifically reference a blog post in their message. Regular readers might remember that I recently took down my generic “contact” page, because I kept getting comments from people who didn’t specify the posts to which they were referencing. Statcounter is a pretty good tool, but not everyone who visits my blog shows up on it. If there isn’t an IP trail on Statcounter, and the specific post isn’t mentioned, I’m sometimes left wondering which post to address. It wasn’t the first time I got a comment with no reference, so I determined that the contact page wasn’t helpful and removed it. And now, I’m thinking the Facebook page probably isn’t helpful, either, since I’ve run into the same issue this morning.

Anyway, this person who wrote to me evidently thinks that patients or their loved ones should be able to go to court to demand that legal experts force medical experts to prescribe medications for off-label use. And the person subtly chastised me for disagreeing with that idea by posting a strongly worded opinion piece on my blog. Then, at the end of their message, they wrote this:

“NO ONE should claim any definitive knowledge as yet – which defaults to each of us knows what is in our own best interests. And in a life or death situation, anyone who interferes ought to be imprisoned, or worse. Think about how you would feel if the situation were reversed, and perhaps you will avoid making such strong opinion calls, without a rational basis – you have a public audience. Who knows how much harm you could cause…. thank you…”

On the surface, I guess the above portion of the comment sounds reasonable enough. Most people would like to make their own decisions about “life or death situations”. But there’s a reason why people go to medical school to become physicians. There are good reasons why physicians must be trained and licensed before they can practice medicine and make treatment decisions for others.

I don’t go to lawyers or judges for medical treatment decisions. I go to competent healthcare professionals who have specific training and experience in treating medical issues. If I, as a competent adult, choose not to go to a healthcare professional and seek alternative care from someone else, that might be my decision and it might only harm me. Some people would probably think it unwise, but I suppose it would be my “right”. And if I had a disease that wasn’t contagious, maybe that would be okay, if ill-advised.

When it comes to COVID-19, I think we have to consider the impact one person’s decisions might have on another’s. COVID-19 is an extremely contagious and potentially deadly virus, and it seems to be getting more contagious with each new variant. There aren’t enough hospital beds to take care of all of the people who need them, to include people who have other medical problems besides COVID. Ivermectin is currently not approved by the Food and Drug Administration for treatment against COVID. Is it being studied by researchers? Probably… but at this point in time, Ivermectin is NOT currently supported by the medical community for use in treating COVID-19. That is a fact. I don’t know if Ivermectin ever will be named the key to conquering COVID-19, but at this point, it is still not recommended.

What I do know is that some people are taking it upon themselves to self-medicate with the drug. Most of them don’t know what they’re doing. Some of them are getting very sick and, no doubt, taking up hospital bed space needed by people who don’t routinely take drugs intended for veterinary use. So the fact that it’s being widely touted by certain groups as a “cure” or effective treatment is, in my view, irresponsible and potentially dangerous.

Moreover, even in the case of “off-label” use for drugs (and I once had a doctor who prescribed a drug for me for “off-label” reasons), there’s usually a consensus that the drug is useful for that purpose. At this point, I haven’t seen much support for Ivermectin to be used in that way by reputable medical professionals. I’ve only seen it touted by people who are pushing conspiracy theories.

Even if Ivermectin is a great drug for COVID-19, and I have not yet seen any compelling evidence that it is, it should certainly not be used by laypeople who have no experience with its use. People should not be going to their local feed and tack shop, buying up horse wormer to ward off COVID-19. That’s my opinion, of course. You can take that for whatever it’s worth.

As someone with a master’s degree in public health and actual work experience in epidemiology, I think I know how to research these things. However, I will admit that I don’t have all of the answers. I just know enough to find someone who knows more than I do and listen to what they have to say. I think that’s a pretty wise way to live life, but your mileage may vary. So far, it’s served me pretty well.

I do think it’s interesting that many people who wouldn’t get a COVID-19 vaccine because “it’s [wasn’t] FDA approved” (a situation that is changing) and “we don’t know the long-term effects of the vaccine”, are all into using Ivermectin off-label to treat COVID-19, which is definitely not FDA approved. We’ve seen some real and documented evidence by trusted entities that COVID vaccinated individuals are staying out of hospitals and not getting as sick as unvaccinated people are. Most of what I’ve read about Ivermectin treatment in COVID-19 cases is that people are overdosing on it and getting sick. I don’t know about you, but that makes me think that taking Ivermectin isn’t the smartest idea.

Moreover, an article by The Guardian from July 2021 reports that a “huge” study endorsing Ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment was withdrawn over ethics concerns. I will admit that I haven’t looked for anything from September that refutes this article, which basically states that a lot of medical providers were defrauded, but I do know that July wasn’t long ago. And as a run-of-the-mill blogger, I’m not going to take the time to go poring through medical journals for an opinion based blog post that gets maybe 25 hits in a day.

The person who wrote to me this morning reminded me that hospital doctors must “toe” the “party line (and it’s “toe”, not “tow”) or they’ll get fired. The person also wrote that the “ban” against Ivermectin is “politically motivated.” As I mentioned up post, this person appeared to be writing me from Las Vegas, which means he or she is residing in the United States.

They might be interested in knowing that I live in Germany, where Ivermectin is also not recommended for treatment against COVID-19, outside of a clinical trial. So, if banning Ivermectin for COVID-19 use is “politically motivated” in the United States, am I to believe that the ban is also “politically motivated” in Europe? Because Germany is not the only European country that does not recommend the use of Ivermectin for treating the coronavirus. Here’s a link from March from the European Medicines Agency, which is as official in Europe as the CDC and the FDA are in the United States. Likewise, the World Health Organization also recommends that Ivermectin only be used in clinical trial settings…

In other words, Ivermectin should probably NOT be used by any old physician who is throwing everything against the wall to see if something sticks. Who knows what the motivation is behind those physicians who are touting off-label use of Ivermectin? Perhaps they are politically and financially motivated. As a matter of fact, how do I know what my commenter’s motivations are for taking the time to write to me after having spent about three minutes reading two posts on this blog? Why does it even matter to that person what my opinions about Judge Cunningham and Ivermectin use in COVID cases are?

In any case, what I really want to address in today’s post is this person’s parting shot to me.

Think about how you would feel if the situation were reversed, and perhaps you will avoid making such strong opinion calls, without a rational basis – you have a public audience. Who knows how much harm you could cause…. thank you…

So basically, the commenter seems to think that because some people might somehow construe my opinions as “medical advice”, I shouldn’t express myself on a blog because I might unintentionally cause them “harm”. Or, at least that’s what I think I’m reading. And people who read my blog are not smart enough to think for themselves and are coming to me for advice on life and death issues. Right. Does this person think the same thing about people who express opinions on social media platforms?

This is a blog. It’s not even a very popular blog. On a good day, I crack about 200 hits. The vast majority of people who read this blog are total strangers to me. Anyone who goes to a blogger for medical advice, particularly when the name of the blog is “The Overeducated HOUSEWIFE” and not “The Overeducated Physician”, is not long on common sense. Why would any sane person go to a self-proclaimed housewife for medical advice? But I guess, since this person seems to think I have so much power because of my “public audience”, I’ll put up a legal disclaimer.

If you are seriously unwell and need medical assistance, I think you should seek the advice of a competent and licensed healthcare provider in your area. You should not go to a personal blog written by a total stranger for medical advice. I would hope that notion would be common sense, but now I realize that some people need to be explicitly told. So thanks to this morning’s commenter for that. I’ll make a note of it.

As always, I wish everyone who reads my blog continued good health and success in life. And please, if you are going to send me a Facebook private message on my OH page, do me a favor and reference the post to which you are referring. Or, even better, simply comment on the post itself. I usually provide links on the official OH page for those who don’t want to make a WordPress account.

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