As regards that horrible attack posted to Facebook: first off, let’s not be like our Progressive friends and immediately leap to the worst possibly conclusion on this. Secondly, don’t engage in overheated rhetoric about it. From what we can tell so far, it is a horror and what we don’t need is everyone adding more fuel to the fire. I’m serious about this – we’re an ace away from someone starting to shoot. In a few weeks, we’ll have a new attorney general and my hope is that this – as well as so many other things – will be investigated.
That said – the whitewashing of this event by the same MSM which made “hands up, don’t shoot” a national phrase is disgusting.
Robert Stacy McCain has a lot to say about why we get terrible things like this:
In her recent book The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe, Heather Mac Donald described how false narratives promoted by the Black Lives Matter movement were “amplified by the media, college presidents, and the left-wing political class.” Despite clear evidence that the group’s protests were jeopardizing public safety and inciting crimes against police, President Obama, Hillary Clinton and other prominent Democrats expressed support for the Black Lives Matter movement. In their book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama, authors Matt Margolis and Mark Noonan describe how the president’s public rhetoric has shown “a tendency to use race as a wedge to divide Americans,” politically exploiting the death of Trayvon Martin and the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson.
Read the whole thing. Start a fire, pour gas on it – don’t be surprised if things go up in flames.
So, Hillary is reportedly thinking of running for Mayor of New York City. The new AG simply must indict her – for her own sake. This is an unhealthy obsession with being in politics…
This subject came up in discussion recently here – Statins may have a lot of problems.
Obama’s version of draining the swamp seems to involve letting terrorists out of Gitmo.
US House votes overwhelmingly for a resolution condemning the UN resolution on Israel. That’s nice – but get back to me when we vote overwhelmingly to defund the UN. Heck, it doesn’t even have to be overwhelming – 218 in the House and 51 in the Senate will be fine – as long as we eventually cut our ties to that corrupt, useless, anti-American, anti-Israel organization.
Ace on the subject of experts – and a lot of other things, do read the whole thing.
Suppose you want an architect to draw up plans for a house. You want a dining room because you never had one as a kid, and always associated it — from old magazine pictures, from old movies, whatever — with a stable and happy home.
Suppose your architect comes back with no dining room — just one big great room combining living room, kitchen, and dining area.
“Where’s the dining room I asked for?” you want to know.
“No one has dining rooms any more,” the expert tells you. “It’s all Open Concept now, one room sweeping into the other, bringing together the family in one big room at all times.”
“That may well be, but I want a dining room.”
“Walls are passe,” the experts smugly tells you. “They interrupt the sight-lines.”
“I don’t care about sight-lines. And honestly, I love my kids, but I’m not so crazy about them so much I want to be locked in a giant room with them 24/7. I want walls and I want a dining room,” you say again.
“No one eats in a dining room and anyway dining rooms are too formal.”
“I’d like to be formal on occasion.”
“Well,” the architect tells you, “I’ve decided that dining rooms are in bad taste and I’m the expert and you can’t have one. You’re getting Open Concept whether you like it or not, Trump Voter.”
At this point, you begin beating the architect about the face and neck and eject him forcibly from your home.
That Russian hacking is beginning to look like Fake News.
Don Surber’s sequel to Trump the Press has been sent to the editor. I think we’re all going to want to read this one.
Blogs For Victory 
In some studies of people taking statins, as many as 20 percent report significant muscle pain, with the incidence rising even higher among people who exercise while taking statins.
That was certainly my experience. I’ve been physically active all my life — tennis, track and basketball throughout grade school and high school. I ran a lot in the 70’s until my knees said no more, did a lot of outside activities in the 80’s — skiing, water skiing, golf, etc.. I took up swimming in the 90’s along with regular gym workouts, which was also when I took statins. I had muscle pain and fatigue with all 3 statins I took, worse with Zocor.
Can’t remember what my dad took – of course, towards the end, it was most of the pharmacy…until his last doctor (who is still my doctor) said, “knock it off” and just kept him on the blood thinner because of his artificial heart valve. I like this doctor – doesn’t want to over-medicate and is very realistic about things (like when she suspected dad had developed prostrate cancer and just said, “well, George, I think you’ve got prostrate cancer…but, you’ll probably die of other things before it kills you, so don’t worry about it”).
One of the many problems with the statin drugs is they reduce the body’s ability to produce Coenzyme Q10 or CoQ10. CoQ10 is a substance that the human body makes naturally and used by cells to generate energy and perform basic cell function. CoQ10 also functions as a powerful antioxidant to help fight free radicals that can damage cells and DNA. It can enhance blood flow, and reduce the damage oxidized Low-density Lipoprotein (LDL) can do to blood vessels, as well as reduce plaque buildup in the arteries.
Low levels of CoQ10 seem to be a common thread in people with cancer, certain genetic disorders, diabetes, heart conditions, HIV/AIDS, muscular dystrophies, and Parkinson’s disease. Also, low COQ10 levels are associated with fibromyalgia, depression, male infertility and migraines, among other things.
Statin drugs are pushed on people by doctors who are drilled to prescribe this drug (by the pharmaceutical companies as this drug is one of their major cash cows) for ANY patient who cholesterol count is over 185. This number at one time used to be 250 which was later revised to 200 and now stand at 185 or less. Doctors who are more informed about cholesterol will generally look at several factors before determining the need to implement cholesterol reduction actions. One thing they consider is the cholesterol history of both you and your family members. If there is a consistent family history or pattern of a cholesterol count in the 200-300 range AND your overall health seems good, then cholesterol is most likely not a problem.
And as I mentioned previously, cholesterol is used as one of the scapegoats to the “cause” of heart disease. IF there is a need to reduce cholesterol in the body, that can almost always be done with the reduction of carbohydrate / sugar intake. That of course can be a difficult undertaking when nearly every shelf in the food store is lined with items high in carbs and sugar. Add to that, we are constantly bombarded with advertisements from TV / magazines / news papers / billboards, showing pictures of foods loaded with sugar and carbs. Just look at the typical breakfast of children – cereal (especially sugar coated), sweetened juices, donuts / toast / bagels / muffins, pancakes / French toast (loaded with maple syrup of jelly), etc… Is there any surprise when their energy comes crashing down by mid-morning or that we’re see epidemic increases of our youth with diabetes?
One can appreciate the concern for the escalating problems of heart disease, cancer, diabetes etc. The cause of those problems is rarely looked at in relation to the whole body. Drug companies instead, zero in on a certain aspects of the disease (often a specific number like the cholesterol count) and create drugs to drive that number up or down. This is nothing more than treating the symptom and ignoring the underlying cause of the problem. And worse yet is the fact that most of the health problems we face can be dealt with effectively without drugs. But of course drug companies can’t make money telling people about those alternatives. It is well documented that people on 2 or more drugs for specific health problems are often taking additional drugs to counteract the negative side effects of the first 1-2 drugs. What is also telling about the dangers of drugs is that, drugs legally prescribed and taken as prescribed, is now among the leading causes of deaths in the US. We’re not talking about illegal use of drugs or overdoses.
Have you ever looked closely to TV commercials advertising drugs? I have hearing difficulties and use close caption when watching TV. These commercials usually start with showing people with a particular problem and show their drug as THE saving grace. Towards the end of the add they generally list the known side effects which as I read them, find it astounding that anyone would even consider trying them. But by this point in the commercial people who suffer from the problem are already locked in to getting this helping drug.
I especially love the part of these ads where they say “Do not take this if you are allergic to it”. Uh, DUH. Do not take this if you know it will make you sick. Do not take this if you are too stupid to know better.
And are they really telling us we are supposed to self-diagnose and then tell our doctors how to treat us, and with what drugs?
From the Ace post:
An awful lot of the argument here is very personal indeed, because 90% of the idiots asserting they are “experts” who should be obeyed in all things have absolutely nothing to their credit which would remotely justify any claim of status as “experts” in any recognizable field at all.
As Amazona has so accurately noted on numerous occasions, many of them are self-proclaimed intellectuals who produce nothing but ideas, and the ideas don’t even have to be rational or productive for their peers to pronounce them as great thinkers. I doubt I’ll live long enough to see such people relegated to the dustbin of history, but I’d like to think that eventually they’ll abort themselves into oblivion or maybe just think themselves to death.
I can’t take credit for the observation that the only things “intellectuals” produce is ideas—and even when the ideas are wrong, they still get the title. That is from Thomas Sowell.
The dining room story sounds familiar, in its tone if not its subject. After being a rancher for many many years, always driving a big pickup–and I mean, big, as in one-ton crew cab, big enough to pull a big trailer full of horses—I decided I wanted a car. How complicated is that? I lived in the mountains of Wyoming, so when I got in a vehicle it was probably going to be a long drive, over and through mountains no matter which way I went, and then either on more mountain roads or on interstate highways, in three states where I was likely to hit a blizzard in July, and I tend to drive fast. That lined out for me what kind of car I wanted and needed—big, heavy, and AWD.
So time after time I would go into a dealership and say “I want to buy a big, heavy, four-door sedan with all-wheel or four-wheel drive”. And the salesman would show me an SUV. “No, that’s not a sedan.” “Well, we do have this crossover.” “Is it a four-door sedan?” Well, it has four doors and it’s AWD and it’s so much better than a sedan.” “Why?” “Well, you can carry so much stuff in it.” “You mean like I can do in my Excursion or my one-ton long-bed pickup?” And the salesman would argue with me. It would always end up with me saying “stop insulting me and SHOW ME A GROWN-UP LADY CAR WITH A FREAKING TRUNK!”
I ended up doing all my research online and then going to dealerships that sold the kind of car I wanted—by that time I realized I would have to buy used, as what I wanted new was out of my ballpark—-and saying “I want to test drive THIS car and THAT car and I know the difference between a car and an SUV so don’t even go there.” It wasn’t quite as bad as a Ford salesman trying to convince me that a pickup with a camper shell was JUST like a Suburban–I just waited till the Excursion came out. Or the salesman who, after I told him exactly what kind of pickup I wanted down to technical specs said he had several on the lot that met my requirements and when could my husband get there to look at them.
That got ugly.
But back to your theme—-Trump voters are tired of being told what they think and what they like and what they believe, and what has the Left so freaked out is having their faces shoved in the fact that they have not been as successful as they thought they were in creating an entire nation of mindless sheeple. Fifty percent or so, but just not quite enough. Those who bought into the lies are simply baffled to learn that so many of us never did, and that many more did and then caught on. Basically the underlying angst of the average middle class Liberal is the realization that while he was being smug about knowing it all, half the country thought he was a sap and a sucker and didn’t have a clue. Ouch. That stings.
A really interesting article at Personal Liberty Digest this morning. We talk about fake news all the time, but I’ve never seen a comprehensive list of all the ways the media perpetrates fakes news before. I can relate to just about every one.
I always enjoy your links to Personal Liberty Digest, so much so that I finally subscribed.
This is a great one, echoing some of my own questions, and last bit, asking for something—ANYTHING–that even sounds Russian reminds me of my own snarky comment about being misled by a dropped comment to Boris that we are out of vodka.
http://personalliberty.com/top-11-russian-hack-questions-rogue-electors-ask-cia/
Here’s an excellent example of an article not matching the headline: (#11 to add to the list)
Dow once again flirts with 20,000 as markets react to solid jobs report, improved wage growth
When you drill down into the article you get statements like this:
So this month was 15% below expectations, last month was revised up and the month before that was revised down — and that’s “SOLID.”
and this:
and this:
Reminds me of the old saw, “close enough for government work.”
How about this? The Democrats are claiming that the FBI and other “intelligence” agencies have confirmed that the Russians hacked the DNC email server. This is the headline, in one form or another, for days, and it has morphed from simply hacking into the server to actually influencing the election. (Side note: the ineffective Republican non-response has, predictably, failed to point out that the only way the hacked emails could have influenced the election was by letting people learn the truth about Clinton.)
Now it turns out that no intelligence agency examined those emails or that server before the conclusion was reached, …well after the initial compromise had been mitigated… The FBI took the word of a third party private company, after the DNC refused to allow the FBI access to the server. (Because that’s what you do when you have been robbed: You refuse to let law enforcement into the house to see the scene of the crime, and instead have your brother-in-law tell them what he concluded after he took a look. It’s not as if he could trample or on destroy evidence or plant fake evidence.) emphasis mine
“The FBI repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to servers and data, only to be rebuffed until well after the initial compromise had been mitigated. This left the FBI no choice but to rely upon a third party for information. These actions caused significant delays and inhibited the FBI from addressing the intrusion earlier,” the senior law enforcement official said Thursday night in an email.
The “third party” to which the official was referring is Crowdstrike, a California-based cybersecurity firm, hired to do the work of the FBI even though, as one law enforcement official told BuzzFeed, it’s unusual for the FBI not to conduct its own forensic research.
http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/01/05/dnc-rejected-fbi-request-to-examine-hacked-email-server-law-enforcement-official-says/
Note the use of the passive voice here: hired to do the work of the FBI. This allows the statement to avoid the obvious question—hired by whom? Seriously, folks. Who do you think hired Crowdstrike? Maybe the same people who then gave the company access to the servers and data? Do ya think?
So the DNC claims it was hacked, denies access to law enforcement, hires its own firm to “investigate” and then passes on the conclusion of its own hired guns to the FBI and the Complicit Agenda Media, all of whom run with the fake news story and saturate all media with their version of what happened and who did it. It takes weeks for it to finally trickle out, buried in back pages of newspapers and on conservative online sites, that the entire story was cooked up, start to finish, including the conclusion, by the DNC.
While the people who first publicized the hacked info repeatedly insist they got it from a DNC insider, and that the Russians had nothing to do with it. “Got it” as MET THE GUY, IN PERSON, one human being to another, not from some anonymous online tipster.
And don’t forget, the President of the United States used this bogus information, this completely-from-the-beginning fiction, as the basis of initiating an attack on Russia, through its diplomatic corps and sanctions.
Here’s #12 to add to the list. Continue to use data that has been disproved for partisan purposes.
You had to know it was just a matter of time before people started fighting back against the Surveillance State.
My theory—we don’t need gun-free zones, we need the whole country to be a tantrum-free zone. We have created a generation of weenies who feel entitled to pitch wall kicking screaming/cursing/shooting fits when things don’t go their way.
We are so squishy, we don’t tell Kaepernick to man up and stop being such a sissy, we have other snowflakes praising him for having a tantrum. We don’t tell the screeching inauguration-protest Twinkie she is an idiot. We pass laws to shove “fluid gender” crap down everyone’s throats rather than say the obvious, that these poor confused people have mental problems that can’t be solved by wearing skirts or peeing in the ladies’ rest room. We have lost the ability to ask people to act like responsible decent human beings.
So what we have is a bunch of spineless, whiny, brats. Some just whine, some act out with guns, but the problem is that society tolerates them, even validates their infantile tantrums, instead of doing what we used to do and saying “cut it out and go to your room till you learn how to behave”.
From what I heard today the Florida shooter was just having a bad day, got kicked out of the National Guard, and had a hissy fit that happened to involve him shooting a bunch of people to express how unhappy he was. These days, if you aren’t happy it’s everyone’s problem, not just yours. Yes, he was suffering from some mental health problems, but he suffered from them in a cultural climate in which it is now acceptable and maybe even expected to deal with any kind of frustration or confusion by indulging in a public display.
With the way depression drugs are being handed out (pushed on) to kids (and adults), is there any surprise or thoughts that this won’t get worse?
Yes, kids are being taught that they should never have to feel sad, or unhappy, or frustrated, or experience failure. If anything like this happens, they are to drug themselves into a different state of mind, and/or act out however they want.
And no one is supposed to “judge” or, horror of horrors, “SHAME” anyone for doing so. We need to get back to the attitude of “suck it up, buttercup” and save our empathy for the few times there is a real crisis or problem.
And BTW, depression is a normal part of life. Not ongoing clinical depression, but being sad, being blue, being blindsided by something in life that knocks you for a loop and makes it hard to get our of bed some mornings. It happens.
There is a massive sense of entitlement out there.
Something that just got under my skin tonight – the Mrs and I were out and there were these two ladies playing different banks of machines, shouting across the room at each other in a freely profane manner. That was bad enough – but when one of them needed to take a break, she shouted for the attendant to watch her machine. He patiently explained that he already had a call to assist another guest and he had to take care of that, first. Vulgar Shouter went off on him. It’s like she expected that the world would just stop and take care of her least whim…and, of course, that the world didn’t mind her shouting obscenities across a room. And there are just so many people like that these days…just really getting under my skin.
That’s just it—there are no standards, and having standards sets YOU up for criticism. I am particularly irritated by the new meme of “shaming”—–this is intended to put the criticism on those who are offended, not on the offenders. The underlying message of this new buzzword is that there is nothing for which any of us should feel shame, but finding something offensive or wrong indicts the person who is offended.
Well, sometimes. It all depends on what the behavior is, and who is doing it, and where on the political spectrum the offenders and the offended happen to be.
I see a few things at play where depressions/anxiety drugs escalated over the past few decades. One was when psychiatrists needed to validate themselves and helped to accomplish this when they became the dispenser of these type prescriptions, often with impunity. Once depression came to be defined by its symptoms, the definition of the mental illness took on a life of its own. Mental health advocates, for instance, liked the fact that it produced high estimates of the amount of depressive mental disorders so that it seemed as if depression was a “public health problem” of massive proportions. They in essence, created a need for people to use these drugs.
A second was perpetrated by teachers who didn’t want to deal with “unruly” kids. Many times they would call for meetings with parents and stress the need to do “something” up to and including having the kid take anxiety meds. One of the drugs of choice for this is Ritalin which is commonly used to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in children and adults. Basically what Ritalin does is exhaust the adrenal glands which in turn provides outward sighs of reduced fidgety. Some of the known side effects include nervousness, agitation, anxiety and irritability, trouble sleeping, decreased appetite, etc… But in my opinion 2 of the more serious aspects of these types of drugs is they often reduce the users’ ability for clear thought and decision making along with reduced empathy. Which basically means they can’t think straight and don’t give a crap about much of anything. In most every case, those who carry out mass campus and school murders are on one of the psychotropic drugs. Anyone believe these incidents will not increase?
Every year, 230 million prescriptions for antidepressants are filled, making them one of the most-prescribed drugs in the United States. Pharmaceutical companies found that they could portray people who suffered from widespread psychosocial problems in their advertisements while at the same time marketing their products as treatments for depressive mental disorders. And, of course, many individuals find it more acceptable to frame their problems as the result of a mental disorder and to take psychotropic drugs to attempt to relieve their distress than to see their suffering as the result of personal psychosocial problems (as defined by the psychological health professions).
I had a relative nagging me to go on meds because, after my husband’s sudden death, I was “depressed”. To which I replied “Well, yeah. That is normal. It’s a normal and important reaction to something like this.” But she was obsessed with the idea that I should be medicated because I was sad.