“If you forgive the unforgivable, you teach evil that it works.” [source unknown]

Case in point: The Muslims trying to destroy the world from Iran.

Case in point: The Democrats and their enablers in the Republican Party, all the schools, 99 percent of the media and 99 pecent of the corporate and entertainment culture.

So long as we, the Silent Majority, keep doing nothing and saying nothing, we convey: “What you’re doing is OK.”

And we will get more of it. Until there’s nothing left for them to destroy.

 

 

The post At Some Point, the Good Guys Have to Rebel Too appeared first on Michael J. Hurd, Ph.D. | Living Resources Center.

Until we see the day that the FDA is dismantled and replaced by a number of competing, credible private watchdog groups, standards bodies, or something like a Consumers Union or Underwriters Laboratories, it will be what practically everyone relies upon for guidance about the safety and efficacy of drugs.

This is part of why having a single government agency is so dangerous to your health: It's a single point of failure that can be made to fail by politicians -- as it is doing so today under Donald Trump, through his reckless appointment of Bobby Kennedy, Jr. as the head of the HHS.

Case in point: Kennedy is working to give the FDA's imprimatur to a number of fashionable nostrums:

RFK Jr is trying to get 14 peptides, without data on safety or efficacy, licensed and approved by FDA. His favorite is BPC-157. "Only three small human studies of BPC-157 exist, for instance, the largest of which is a telephone survey of 16 people who received an injection of the drug for knee pain, and which was published in a third-tier journal, Alternative Therapies."

Regulars here will know that I am both an advocate of one's freedom to use oneself as a guinea pig if one wants and a proponent of making informed decisions about such things.

So it is that, since "peptides" are all the rage these days, I was glad to see Derek Lowe, a research chemist, write about this fad and how dangerous it can be.

After first giving a good general introduction to the scientific meaning of the term peptide in his trademark relatable and humorous way, Lowe gets into the nitty-gritty of using them as therapies, including a discussion of a treatment that is often abused:

And there are going to be plenty of cases where yes, Peptide X sure does do that thing you're interested in, but it turns out that you can't do That Thing without doing other things that you are surely not interested in. A number of "peptides of abuse" these days, for example, seem to be targeting human growth hormone pathways and associated ones, so let's use that as an example. The pitch is often something like "Here's the signal your body uses to build muscle! Take it directly and get going today!", and with HGH there's also been a longstanding subculture that treats it as a Fountain of Youth signal of some kind. "Replenish your growth hormone levels", the idea is, "and dial back the biological clock!"

But growth hormone (and I shouldn't have to say this) is powerful stuff, and it doesn't just go tell your muscles to swell up. It affects bone tissue and many other tissues as well. I would invite anyone looking to maximize their growth hormone levels to look up a condition called acromegaly, which is what you get when your body keeps on making more growth hormone than you strictly need. Bones in the hands, feet, and head enlarge, and you get all sorts of side effects like joint pain, high blood pressure, type II diabetes, and other things that are probably not mentioned in the peptide supplier's brochure.

Excess growth hormone also increases the risk of some types of cancer... [bold added]

Lowe also notably gets into that fave of Bobby K Junior's, "BPC-157."

Lowe ends with his defense of the FDA, which I would heavily qualify as I did at the beginning of this post. To the extent that so many people rely on the FDA for information about drug efficacy and safety in the world as it is today, though, he is spot on.

Trump's appointment of Kennedy is dangerous for that reason and, in my view, is a reason we would work to build strong, competing, non-governmental institutions that inform the public about drug safety and efficacy.

-- CAV

Recent court actions could finally derail one of the most laughable big government regulatory crusades in recent memory.

At issue is a case that the Biden-era Federal Trade Commission brought against Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits, the nation’s largest alcohol distributor. The agency alleges that the company violated a 1930s law, the Robinson–Patman Act, by offering larger discounts to retailers that buy in bulk.

The underlying issue is simple: Should the government punish companies for giving consumers lower prices?

Because that is effectively what this case does.

Bulk discounts are the backbone of modern retail. A big reason why warehouse clubs like Costco or big retailers like Walmart have attractive prices is that they negotiate lower prices from suppliers in exchange for large orders. Those savings get passed along to consumers like you and me. That is why Americans can buy groceries, household goods, and electronics at prices that would have been unimaginable a generation ago.

Yet the Biden FTC attempted to use the Robinson–Patman Act—an anti-predatory pricing—to attack that very arrangement.

If regulators succeed in moving this case forward, the result won’t be greater fairness. It will be higher prices.

As Asheesh Agarwal, a former Assistant Director of the Office of Policy Planning at the FTC, wrote on March 27, “the FTC alleges that the distributor violated the Robinson–Patman Act by offering better prices to some retailers than others, harming competition.” However, Southern Glazer’s contends that, “after years of investigation, the FTC still cannot identify a single unlawful transaction.”

Per a March 17 discovery filing, the FTC even admitted as much!

Agarwal summarizes:

When asked whether the FTC could identify any specific diverted customer, an agency witness responded: “The FTC cannot identify any diverted customer. As of today, discovery is ongoing.”

Pressed on whether the FTC could identify a retailer that lost profits due to alleged price discrimination, the same witness admitted: “I can’t identify an instance of a retailer suffering… lost profits as a result of discriminatory conduct by Southern.”

Unfortunately, this war against big-box stores is nothing new.

When they began to expand their presence significantly across the US in the 1980s and ’90s, many people worried these stores would spell doom for locally owned and operated merchants.

After all, the local corner grocery stores and clothing shops, the arguments went, could hardly compete with national chains that were able to stock and sell goods much less expensively thanks to volume pricing. At the end of the day, despite personal loyalty to local business owners, consumers would make their buying choices based on affordability.

But the advent of big-box stores hardly quenched the entrepreneurial spirit. Instead, local businesses found other avenues to pursue—independent bookstores, novelty coffee shops, artisan bakeries, fitness studios, pet groomers, musical instrument stores, and many more have thrived in the new economy.

The number of small businesses has more than doubled across the US since the 1980s, totaling more than 36 million today, accounting for nearly 46% of private-sector employment.

Mom-and-pop stores didn’t disappear—they adapted.

In the meantime, consumers continue to enjoy the lower prices and convenience provided by large national retailers which exist in nearly every community, big and small, offering lower prices and a wide range of choices.

There are thousands of big-box stores covering almost every part of the country. While the numbers fluctuate, one source lists more than 5,000 Walmarts and Sam’s Clubs, more than 2,800 Kroger grocery stores (under various banners), nearly 2,000 Targets, about 2,000 Home Depots, roughly 1,700 Lowe’s stores, and more than 900 Best Buy stores, just to name a few.

While the buying points and strategies may vary, the core business model remains the same. By making purchases in large quantities, major box retailers can negotiate lower per-unit costs from manufacturers. Big-box stores are better able to withstand global market shakeups by absorbing fluctuations rather than immediately passing them on to customers. Customers enjoy wider access to national brands. And by often manufacturing their own store brand versions to compete with popular products, big-box stores help keep national brand prices in check.

That’s why it’s disturbing when government crusaders try to disrupt a successful business model that works for manufacturers, retailers, and consumers. It’s particularly galling when such a disruption comes from an agency charged with protecting consumers.

Fortunately, current FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, as well as Commissioner Maureen Olhausen, are deeply skeptical of this Biden-era case.

When his former boss, Lina Khan, brought the Southern Glazer’s case forward, Ferguson wrote, “We must exercise sound judgment in deciding when to enforce the Act. We fail to do so here.” Olhausen concurred, writing that the complaint “condemns conduct that is plainly innocuous or even pro-competitive.”

Even better, the FTC, now run by Ferguson, recently threw out a similar case against PepsiCo. The agency under Biden had alleged that Pepsi was violating the Robinson–Patman Act by providing discounts to big-box stores, but Ferguson’s FTC said no.

Now that Ferguson oversees the commission, and now that the legal momentum is on their side, there is a good chance that the Southern Glazer’s case will soon find itself in an FTC wastebasket.

Fingers crossed. Our Costco and Walmart savings may hang in the balance.

When oil prices rise, economists ask what it means for inflation. Politicians ask what it means for voters. Since the Iran conflict and the disruption in the Strait of Hormuz, that has become the more urgent question.

This is no longer just a macro and monetary policy story. It is a cost-of-living story. And in Britain, that means it quickly becomes a political one.

According to the official definition in England, a household is fuel poor if it lives in a property with a fuel poverty energy efficiency rating of band D or below and, after meeting its required energy costs, is left with a residual income below the official poverty line. That is a helpful definition because it gets to the heart of the issue. Fuel poverty isn’t just about the cost of energy. It’s about the collision of low income, poor housing and unavoidable energy use.

The important phrase is “required energy costs.” The Government does not measure fuel poverty by what households actually spend, but by what they would need to spend to heat the home adequately. That is economically sensible. Poorer households often under-heat their homes, ration usage or go without. Actual spending can therefore flatter reality. For many households, demand for heat is not especially elastic. It is constrained by necessity, not preference.

In 2025, 2.36 million households in England—9.4%—were classed as in fuel poverty, down from 9.9% (2.47 million) in 2024. Closing the gap costs about £379 per household, a shortfall of around £896m.

And that headline figure understates the wider political exposure. For the first time, these statistics include a new affordability measure of median required energy costs as a proportion of household income (after-housing-costs). For England, this amounted to an estimated 6.8% of households. For low-income households, that figure was an estimated 14.9%. On the old 10% affordability measure, 7.63m households (30.4%) would have been spending more than a tenth of income on energy. Even on the Government’s own numbers, millions remain dangerously exposed to another spike in prices. This is why oil shocks matter politically.

The pressure is already building again. Cornwall Insight expects the typical dual-fuel bill under the price cap to rise to £1,929 in July, up from £1,641 in April—a jump of £288, or roughly 18%, more than wiping out the previous cut.

For better-off households, that is unpleasant. For poorer ones, the choice is between cutting back on heating, food and everything else. That imbalance is what turns an energy shock in to a political event. The same rise in prices has very different effects on people depending on household incomes.

In Westminster the debate has already shifted from whether government should step in to how much support should be offered, how quickly and to whom. Opposition parties are competing over relief, whether through scrapping VAT on energy bills, cancelling the planned fuel-duty rise, or promising fresh subsidies.

We have seen this before. Prices rise, ministers cap them, hand out support and tax firms “windfall” profits. Last time, that approach cost £44 billion. According to the National Audit Office, it also prevented around 289,000 households in England from going into fuel poverty.

That is understandable politics. But it also revealed something bigger, more insidious about the British state. That of market intervention and compensation. Starmer has said this week that household support will be kept under review, and urged people not to panic. In other words, the state is already being positioned once again as the shock absorber.

That changes people’s expectations. Once households have been protected from one energy shock, they expect protection from the next. Once firms have seen ministers tax “windfall” gains in one crisis, they start pricing in intervention in the next. Temporary measures stop looking temporary. The state shifts from emergency backstop and becomes part of the normal response.

This is the ratchet effect. Support schemes are easier to introduce than withdraw. Yet none of this resolves the underlying structural problem. Transfers can soften the hit, but they do not insulate and make homes more efficient. Rebates can reduce bills, but they do not improve supply. Windfall taxes may buy temporary fiscal room, but they do nothing to make Britain less vulnerable to the next shock.

So the country becomes more managed, but not more resilient. That is the real political economy of successive energy shocks.

Modern Britain is drifting into a model where every shock becomes a bill for the state. Each energy crisis exposes the same weakness: we compensate and subsidise the damage rather than reduce the risk. That may buy time, but it does not build resilience. Eventually the money runs out, or the politics does. Either way, this is not a strategy. It is a habit—and a bad one at that.

This article originally appeared at CapX.