Big Business

Another Monopoly
September 10, 2026
If all goes as planned, President Trump is going to “save” Argentina by importing tons of their beef into the U.S. Never mind what will happen to our farmers and ranchers. According to Joe Maxwell, a Missouri farmer and President of the Farm Action Fund, “63 farmers go out of business each day in America.”   When asked how could this be, given that beef prices at the grocery store ...
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When Narratives Compete
June 25, 2026
We are all storytellers. It’s part of our DNA. It’s how  we share our experiences, our beliefs, form community, and make sense of the world. Some of our early stories proved to be false but considered endearing - Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny. A more sophisticated word for story is narrative. What is a Narrative? Studiobinder.com provides a good definition: A...
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Vaccines – Part Two
June 12, 2026
Before we explore vaccines in the “modern era,” it would be helpful to determine what makes a competent scientist? These four elements are considered guiding principles: 1. Do not be swayed by unverified information; base scientific discussions on peer-reviewed evidence. 2. Acknowledge uncertainty in origin theories but remain cautious of interpretations driven by ideology or political a...
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Vaccines – Part One
May 15, 2026
Today’s blog post is about vaccines that were first named by Edward Jenner in a 1798 pamphlet. He was referring to the “smallpox of the cow” or cowpox. To quote from the 2025 book Vaccines: Mythology, Ideology, and Reality by Dr. Peter McCullough and John Leake, “His proposal for inoculation with a weak form of disease-causing matter to prevent serious illness became the central concept of...
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A Different Deadly Species
February 19, 2026
The “murder hornet,” the world’s biggest species of wasp, has an MO that reminds me of a particular human species. The murder hornet feeds on other insects and kills off the worker bees until the workforce is severely depleted. Sounds like the MO of the U.S. health insurance industry. Here is a recent photo and clip of the “profit over people” gang before the U.S. House Ways and Means...
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Where Did They All Go?
February 9, 2026
When I was a kid, each summer, in our neighborhood, the ‘”bug truck” would slowly spray clouds of DDT to “protect” us from mosquitoes. It used to be that whenever you hit the road one travel ritual was to clean the bugs off your windshield.  There’s even a name for this concern: the windshield phenomenon. We were a bug-hating nation. Now, entomologists have documented the dra...
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Good News Is Always Welcome
January 22, 2026
Since 1850, according to regeneration.org, “industrial agriculture has created a legacy of water pollution, animal abuse, degraded land, and unhealthy food. It has been responsible for over a third of all carbon dioxide emissions generated by humans. Fortunately, regenerative agriculture is gaining in public awareness and financial support. Here are five examples of what might be ca...
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The Price We Pay
January 9, 2026
If you think the price we pay for groceries these day is high, the price Americans pay in health and wellbeing is even higher. Despite more attention than ever on how unhealthy our food supply is, Europe is miles ahead of us. For example: People with wheat allergies find the bread products in Europe safe to enjoy because the wheat varieties are often softer and lower in gluten, treating methods...
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Why Words Matter
December 30, 2025
Not that long ago, “animal husbandry” was the name of a branch of agriculture concerned with the day-to-day care of animals raised for meat, fiber, milk, and other products. Husbandry has a long history, starting with the Neolithic Revolution when animals were first domesticated, from around 13,000 BC onwards. Now the very same branch is called “animal science.” According to Will H...
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Food & Farming
December 8, 2025
I’ve wanted to write about my website’s Food & Farming Domain for some time, but where to begin? It’s such a complicated and vast topic. Now, however, I’ve found a way in by identifying some of the current issues and in the next post highlighting possible answers. Industrialization began just 80 years ago, after World War II when the factories were still humming when man...
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Let’s Make a Deal
October 28, 2025
I believe that saying what you think without self-censoring in order not to offend someone has never advanced a person’s sense of self. I also believe that people can respectfully disagree on important topics and remain colleagues and friends. Maybe one way to do this is to find commonality before simply discarding the other person. But, these days, that has been lost to righteously choosing a s...
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Who Owns the Land? (Part One)
June 6, 2025
“This land is your land; this land is my land….” If Woody Guthrie were alive today he might need to add another verse to “this land was made for you and me.” The amount of foreign-owned agricultural land has grown significantly in recent years. In 2011, 26 million acres were owned by foreign investors. In 2022, foreign-owned acreage grew to 43.4 million. In most states, very ...
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How One Man Shaped Medicine
August 1, 2024
In 1910, two of the richest men in America – Nelson D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie – hired Abraham Flexner to review medical institutions across North America. The two had questions regarding the quality of the medical teaching facilities in the US and Canada. Despite his non-medical background, focused solely on the classics, Abraham Flexner was chosen for his perceived objectivity. Unlik...
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Fifteen-Minute Cities
July 1, 2024
I live in a fifteen-minute city if I limit my walk to the library, the bookstore, a small grocery store, local restaurants, and lots of banks. It’s a lovely walk on a graveled, wooded trail. But it’s miles from the rest of the actual city where we have to drive for gas, Costco, larger grocery stores, a few beleaguered malls, medical and personal services. Maybe this is the case for you too? We...
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It’s a No Foolin’ April
April 1, 2024
In September 2022, the White House hosted a conference that focused on nutrition, health, and hunger in America. Dariush Mozaffarian, one of the main organizers of the event, is a cardiologist and Dean of the Tufts School of Nutrition. He and his students developed a new food pyramid. It took three years and used taxpayer funds to complete. Here is a portion of the results of that study highlighte...
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How Sausage is Made
November 1, 2022
As a kid, I watched my Grandma Rosie make link sausage (all that gross fat and pork). Gross! Remembering that experience, I am thinking about the midterm elections on November 8th. Like who can ignore them? I thought since we have candidates promising us the sun and the moon, it would be a good time to brush up on how our laws are actually made. We’re told there might be new sausage chefs eager ...
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Down the Rabbit Hole
October 1, 2023
It’s Not Just for Rabbits A friend sent me an email several months ago suggesting her healthcare experience as a topic for a blog post. She was excited to find a Primary Care Clinic in her city that sounded perfect. They advertised, among many things, time to get to know you as a patient and a multi-team approach. She liked her doctor who looked at her mild osteopenia recorded in a DXA* scan, p...
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PE – Not Your Gym Class
June 15, 2022
Do you remember when the health insurance wordsmiths came up with “patient-centered care?” Like, who else was being treated? Martians? Now, we have yet another turn of phrase - “profit-centered care.” The latest is private equity (PE) companies acquiring hospitals, doctors, clinics, rehab centers, nursing homes, emergency rooms, and anything else remotely related to give investors a “hea...
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Unions on the Rise
May 15, 2022
When Amazon General Counsel David Zapolsky called Chris Smalls “not smart or articulate” in 2020, he unintentionally put another log of motivation on an existing fire. In Amazon’s mind, Smalls was just a Black warehouse worker; a mouthy guy who didn’t talk like a Harvard grad. Smalls was essentially fired for speaking out about Amazon’s COVID-19 safety failures. Many of us, especially d...
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Symptomology
September 29, 2020
As some of you know, I’m working on a hybrid—part memoir and part how to get us off our collective ass and provide affordable, accessible healthcare to our people. The biggest barrier is that all we read and talk about are the symptoms—not the disease. This is like hearing an odd noise coming from under the hood of your car. You drive to your regular automotive shop and the son of the boss w...
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Manufacturing Hate
December 3, 2019
I just experienced my first ever “book shaming” at a local coffeeshop. After I’d settled in with my latté and muffin, I took a book out of my carry bag. Because it was close quarters, I felt the man next to me shift in his chair to see what I was reading. I admit to being curious about what people read but to my knowledge I’ve never judged a person solely on a book. First I heard the mean...
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Reworking the Workplace
November 15, 2019
I wish that when we talk about polarization we were only talking about how to protect polar bear habitats in the Arctic. But, alas, now the term’s most common meaning refers to the act of dividing, often people and opinions, into completely separate groups. We’ve gone binary in the U.S. This applies to today’s workplace as well and poses a significant challenge. Possibly for the first time i...
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Who Owns the Land – Part II
June 26, 2025
Would you be surprised if I told you that these numbered circles represent a recent tally of data centers in the U.S. What is a data center? According to Cisco, one of the tech giants: “At its simplest, a data center is a physical facility that organizations use to house their critical applications and data. Data centers accommodate the following:   Email and file sharing, productivity ...
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