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Pills

Best of the Web: Food Allergy and Joint Pain - Is There a Connection?

arthritis pain
© Unknown
Most, doctors specializing in the treatment of arthritis, joint pain, and autoimmune diseases affecting the musculoskeletal system never even consider diet as an important factor in the development of these conditions.

I was formally trained in rheumatology at the VA hospital in Houston, TX, and I can say that diet and nutritional recommendations to patients were discouraged and in most cases frowned upon by our attending physicians. It was actually this experience that prompted me to dig deeper into the connection between autoimmune disease and food.

Over the past 10 years, I have treated thousands of patients with arthritic conditions. The most single effective therapies have always been diet and exercise. The paradox with exercise... It is harder to stick to if it flares up the arthritis. The problem with food...everyone reacts uniquely based on their own unique chemistry. But it only makes sense that if drugs can target inflammation as a treatment, why can't food. After all, isn't food a drug of sorts?

I have found that medical research greatly supports this connection, but more importantly, I have found that patients get better after eliminating inflammatory foods from their diets. What foods should we avoid to help recover from arthritis? Depends on the person. Everyone is unique.

Bad Guys

Best of the Web: Psychopaths often lack insight into their nature: "Sexy Israel" gets treatment for flotilla nightmares and exposes her pathology in the process

(Update below: Actress is Israeli and appears to have been commissioned on Hasbara gig)

I'm somewhat of a fool for excruciatingly bad Hasbara videos, but this one surely takes the cake:


Family

Best of the Web: Thirst for Fairness May Have Helped Us Survive

fairness
© Serge Bloch
Among the Ache hunter-gatherers in eastern Paraguay, healthy adults with no dependent offspring are expected to donate as much as 70 to 90 percent of the food they forage to the needier members of the group. And as those strapping suppliers themselves fall ill, give birth or grow old, they know they can count on the tribe to provide.

Among the !Kung bushmen of the Kalahari in Africa, a successful hunter who may be inclined to swagger is kept in check by his compatriots through a ritualized game called "insulting the meat." You asked us out here to help you carry that pitiful carcass? What is it, some kind of rabbit?

Among the Hadza foragers of northern Tanzania, people confronted by a stingy food sharer do not simply accept what's offered. They hold out their hand, according to Frank Marlowe, an anthropologist at Durham University in England, "encouraging the giver to keep giving until the giver finally draws the line."

Among America's top executives today, according to a study commissioned by The New York Times, the average annual salary is about $10 million and rising some 12 percent a year. At the same time, the rest of the tribe of the United States of America struggles with miserably high unemployment, stagnant wages and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Now, maybe the wealth gap is a temporary problem, and shiny new quarters will soon rain down on us all. But if you're feeling tetchy and surly about the lavished haves when you have not a job, if you're tempted to go out and insult a piece of corporate meat, researchers who study the nature and evolution of human social organization say they are hardly surprised.

Cult

Best of the Web: Monsters among us: Ritual child abuse in France

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© Brian Curnel
Interesting, but shocking German documentary that delves into three cases of child abuse in France. Three victims, 'Deborah', 'Robbert' and 'Noemi' tell about their experiences of abuse, and how they were molested in a pedophile network.

Rumours about these pedophile networks are not uncommon. The Casa Pia case in Portugal, the Dutroux case in Belgium, the Franklin affair in the USA and the Zandvoort affair in the Netherlands to name but a few - in all these cases there have been allegations of cover-ups and involvement of people in high societal standing, and investigations seldom lead to a satisfactory result - the Portuguese Casa Pia scandal, where politicians and a national tv-show host were actually convicted, being the proverbial black swan.

Noemi, in this documentary, claims to have met Marc Dutroux, the Belgian pedophile who was convicted for kidnapping and killing several girls in the late 1990's, through her father. If this is true, it is explosive evidence of the case reaching beyond national borders, something that has always been suspected by researchers.

The two girls and the boy's stories are horrible beyond imagination - not only involving abuse, but also child-murders, infant sacrifices and instances of cannibalism. It's tempting to dismiss their stories as the product of imagination, given the trauma they have been through, but it should be stated that these testimonies are very similar to what the "X-witnesses" in the Dutroux affair claimed.

There is an excellent book: Les dossiers X: Ce que la Belgique ne devait pas savoir sur l'affaire Dutroux (the X-files: what Belgium wasn't allowed to know about the Dutroux affair) in which three investigative journalists research the story of Regina Louf, aka witness "X-1". She was the first to come forward with her story. Many believed her but then the press instigated a character assassination. The writers of this book however, not only find many credible details in her story, about never resolved murders of young girls in Belgium, but they also show beyond a doubt the whole investigation into the case was deliberately derailed by Belgian Justice.

Comment:
We used to call them psychopaths - these creatures that appear on our planet physically in human form, but are not human beings.

We noted they are amoral. That should have given us a clue.

We noted they do not FEEL feelings. That should have instructed us.

We noted they are heartless. That should have set off the alarm.

These creatures lack elements which distinguish the human being. They exhibit no connection with, no understanding of what we call "morality," "honesty," "decency," "fair play," etc. They lack the faculty we call empathy. They lack the faculty we call introspection.

Mankind has spent centuries trying to make sense of these creatures as some form of human being. All in vain. Not only in vain, but at enormous on-going cost to our civilization. These creatures are not human beings gone wrong. They are a different species ... dedicated to the murder of human values ... as a prelude to the murder of human beings ... e.g., the tactics used by Nazis, past and present.

They laugh at us. They say: "No one understands us. People can't put themselves in the minds of men who act without a conscience. They try to understand, but they can't."

These creatures do not THINK human. They do not SPEAK human. They do not know what it is to BE human.

We classify them as "humanoid."

Yes, they have human form. If we manage to resist their onslaught long enough, we will eventually develop technical scanning equipment which will measure how different they are from human beings, despite their similarity of form.

In the meantime, the quality of our lives ... and often our very lives ... depends on our recognizing these creatures for what they are, and taking steps to neutralize their attempts to destroy us.

[...] Humanoids do not understand the distinction we humans make between good and evil. When they harm us, they do not understand why we call them evil. They do not understand why we have laws against murder. Their approach is to boast, even moralize over their victims.

Since they do not understand the reason for such laws, they argue they cannot be held accountable for their actions.

Not so. While they take the position the law does not apply to them, they do know the law was enacted to apply to everyone. Furthermore, if they try to claim they didn't know there was such a law, we respond with a firmly established principle: "Ignorance of the law is no excuse."

When they use those arguments, they make it clear they will continue to operate in accordance with their structure. We may look for remorse (a human capacity). We find none. They do not think of themselves as promulgating evil. They are simply doing what it is in their structure to do. The rattlesnake does not think of itself as evil when it injects poison. It is simply doing what it is in its structure to do.

Experience has shown humanoids continue to behave in the ways of their species . . murdering human values as a prelude to murdering human beings. Nazis demonstrate this graphically.

The issue as to whether to hold them "accountable," in our human sense of the word, has to be divided into two parts. We do not hold them accountable for BEING what they are. We do hold them accountable for the damage they DO.

When a dog gets rabies, we don't hold the dog accountable for becoming rabid. What we do, as a matter of self-protection, is put the dog down BEFORE it bites us, BEFORE it infects us.

We do not hold the rattlesnake accountable for HAVING poison fangs. What we do, as a matter of self-protection, is kill the rattlesnake BEFORE it kills us.

So with the humanoid. We need to be on our guard at the first sign of a murder of human values.
Amos M. Gunsberg, Beyond Insanity


Star of David

Best of the Web: A July Fourth Shame on the Founders

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© N/A
The tendency is to think of ourselves as "exceptional" Not just "all Americans," mind you, but all people. The Declaration of Independence was meant to be a statement expressing the "self-evident" rights of all mankind. Those principles had a universality that was a beacon to the world.

Yes, that was I standing before the U.S. Embassy in Athens on the eve of the July Fourth weekend holding the American flag in the distress mode - upside down.

Indignities experienced by me and my co-guests on The Audacity of Hope, the American boat to Gaza, over the past 10 days in Athens leave no doubt in my mind that Barack Obama's administration has forfeited the right to claim any lineage to the brave Americans who declared independence from the king of England 235 years ago.

In the Declaration of Independence, they pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to a new enterprise of freedom, democracy and the human spirit. The outcome was far from assured; likely as not, the hangman's noose awaited them. They knew that all too well.

But they had a genuine audacity to hope that the majority of their countrymen and women, persuaded by Thomas Paine's Common Sense and the elegant words of Thomas Jefferson, would conclude that the goal of liberty and freedom was worth the risk; that it was worth whatever the cost.

USA

Best of the Web: What Are We Celebrating On The Fourth Of July?

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© Ben Garrison
You see it everywhere - on signs in stores, in TV commercials, newspaper ads, and sales fliers: Happy Fourth of July.

Well, now, isn't that special? What's the big deal about saying, "Happy Fourth of July?" After all, every country in the world has a "fourth of July."

Ask school kids what the Fourth of July is all about, and virtually each and every one will answer something like, "Fireworks" or "Cookouts." Retailers see it as yet another excuse to hold a sale. For most, it's a day off from work. But how many people today understand what July 4th is really about?

The fact that the Fourth of July is a celebration of independence from government tyranny under British rule seems to have been pretty much forgotten, or is viewed as an unimportant afterthought.

What kind of government tyranny did the Colonists want freedom from? Well, for one thing, the kind that involves warrant-less searches of peoples' homes, where government agents could just walk right into your private home for no reason and conduct a search without even getting a court-issued warrant. That was a form of government terrorism waged against the people, and when America declared its independence from British rule it adopted a new rule at home that specifically forbade such tyrannical government actions. To deal with this particular abuse, the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution was created to protect citizens from illegal searches and seizures undertaken by a lawless, tyrannical government.

Syringe

Best of the Web: 35 Years Of Death Penalty Regrets

lethal injection2 execution
© Unknown
Thirty-five years ago, on July 2, 1976, on the eve of massive bicentennial celebrations, the U.S. Supreme Court in Gregg v. Georgia voted 7-2 to re-instate capital punishment. There had been no executions in the U.S. since 1967.

The U.S. could have been a leader in the subsequent worldwide trend toward death penalty abolition; instead the U.S. has become an outlier along with a minority of other countries (like China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia) that still kill prisoners.

What might have been?

Three of those 7 justices (Stevens, Blackmun and Powell) have since regretted their vote in Gregg, meaning that if there could be some sort of time-travel Stevens, Blackmun and Powell's Excellent Adventure do-over, the death penalty might have never come back.

But, as with executing likely innocent people, you can't go back in time to undo your mistakes. The death penalty did come back.

Evil Rays

Best of the Web: 14 Propaganda Techniques Fox "News" Uses to Brainwash Americans

propaganda
© Lance Page / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: Alan Turkus, ario_, Eddi van W.)
There is nothing more sacred to the maintenance of democracy than a free press. Access to comprehensive, accurate and quality information is essential to the manifestation of Socratic citizenship - the society characterized by a civically engaged, well-informed and socially invested populace. Thus, to the degree that access to quality information is willfully or unintentionally obstructed, democracy itself is degraded.

It is ironic that in the era of 24-hour cable news networks and "reality" programming, the news-to-fluff ratio and overall veracity of information has declined precipitously. Take the fact Americans now spend on average about 50 hours a week using various forms of media, while at the same time cultural literacy levels hover just above the gutter. Not only does mainstream media now tolerate gross misrepresentations of fact and history by public figures (highlighted most recently by Sarah Palin's ludicrous depiction of Paul Revere's ride), but many media actually legitimize these displays. Pause for a moment and ask yourself what it means that the world's largest, most profitable and most popular news channel passes off as fact every whim, impulse and outrageously incompetent analysis of its so-called reporters. How did we get here? Take the enormous amount of misinformation that is taken for truth by Fox audiences: the belief that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that he was in on 9/11, the belief that climate change isn't real and/or man-made, the belief that Barack Obama is Muslim and wasn't born in the United States, the insistence that all Arabs are Muslim and all Muslims are terrorists, the inexplicable perceptions that immigrants are both too lazy to work and are about to steal your job. All of these claims are demonstrably false, yet Fox News viewers will maintain their veracity with incredible zeal. Why? Is it simply that we have lost our respect for knowledge?

My curiosity about this question compelled me to sit down and document the most oft-used methods by which willful ignorance has been turned into dogma by Fox News and other propagandists disguised as media. The techniques I identify here also help to explain the simultaneously powerful identification the Fox media audience has with the network, as well as their ardent, reflexive defenses of it.

Bad Guys

Best of the Web: US - 9/11 The World Trade Center Towers Were 'Vaporized' Into Dust

Where is the missing 1200 feet of heavy building materials? It was vaporized according to the engineering firm that built the buildings (and helped engineer the demolition of them). Controlled demolition turns buildings into dust at near freefall speed, not 'collapses'. Steel dust? That requires far more energy than a collapse event could produce and still have near full gravitational acceleration (violates conservation of momentum/energy). The buildings were demolished with well placed explosives ..... without a shadow of a doubt, as clear as it can get.


Comment: For more information concerning the vaporization of the World Trade Center, see this SOTT link:

Dr. Jim Fetzer: Nevermind a controlled-demoliltion, the WTC was vaporized on 9/11


Bad Guys

Best of the Web: Demystifying 9/11: Israel and the Tactics of Mistake

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© Unknown
Many years ago I read a fascinating discussion of the "tactics of mistake." This essentially entailed using a target's prejudices and preconceptions to mislead them as to the origin and intent of the attack, entrapping them in a tactical situation that later worked to the attacker's strategic advantage.

This is what unfolded in the 9/11 attacks that led us into the matrix of wars and conflicts, present (Afghanistan and Iraq), planned (Iran and Syria) and projected (Jordan and Egypt), that benefit Israel and no other country - although I concede that many private contractors and politicians are doing very well for themselves out of the death and misery of others.

I am also absolutely certain as a strategic analyst that 9/11 itself, from which all else flows, was a classic Mossad-orchestrated operation. But Mossad did not do it alone. They needed local help within America (and perhaps elsewhere) and they had it, principally from some alumni of PNAC (the misnamed Project for a New American Century) and their affiliates within and outside of the US Government (USG), who in the 9/11 attacks got the "catalytic event" they needed and craved to take the US to war on Israel's behalf, only eight months after coming into office.