by Isabelle Z., Natural News:
So many foods claim to be superfoods these days that the distinction doesn’t carry as much weight as it once did. While these foods are hardly bad for you, some of the recent entries aren’t quite as remarkable as their predecessors. However, one of the original superfoods, the blueberry, continues to prove it deserves this label, and this was recently underscored by a study that showed how useful it can be in preventing chronic illness.
by Paul Craig Roberts, Paul Craig Roberts:
This is from Ron Unz, a fearless commentator: https://forward.com/series/salary-survey/2015/jonathan-greenblatt/anti-defamation-league/
It shows the extraordinary salary—a paycheck in the 1% range—of the head of the Zionist Anti-defamattion League (ADL), an organization that despite its title defames everyone who makes the slightest criticism of Israel. For example, when the Israeli Army machine-guns 89 unarmed prostesting Palestinians, including medics treating machine-guned 3-year olds, as Israel did today, or was it yesterday, or every day, and some person with a moral conscience says Israel should not have done that, the ADL brands that person “an anti-semite who wants another holocaust for the Jews.”
by Chris Calton, Mises:
In 1852, Abraham Lincoln gave a speech in Springfield, Illinois in which he talked about the attempts at required militia training. He described how much of a joke the citizens made of any attempt at mandatory militia training. “No man,” Lincoln said, citing the rules, “is to wear more than five pounds of cod-fish for epaulets, or more than thirty yards of bologna sausages for a sash; and no two men are to dress alike, and if any two should dress alike the one that dresses most alike is to be fined.” He also described the militia figure of “our friend Gordon Abrams” at a militia training, “on horse-back . . . with a pine wood sword, about nine feet long, and a paste-board cocked hat, from front to rear about the length of an ox yoke, and very much the shape of one turned bottom upwards.”
Lincoln was attempting to ridicule the dismissive attitudes of his fellow Illinoisans toward compulsory militia training. The conventional wisdom in military theory is that, for effective defense, the military must be centralized and continually maintained in the form of a compulsory standing army. Even from supposed “small government” advocates, this notion is never contested. However, the evidence from the time suggests that had it not been for the decentralized and voluntary militia system, Lincoln himself may have had significantly more trouble at the beginning of the Civil War.
RELATED: “The American Militia and the Origin of Conscription: A Reassessement” by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel
During the Jacksonian era, the militia system in the states shifted largely from a compulsory to a voluntary system. Because of this, the Mexican War was first war fought by the United States that did not require a draft (the Civil War drafts are often cited as the first cases of conscription in the United States, but this ignores conscription administered by the states that took place during the Revolutionary War and War of 1812). During the Mexican War, roughly 50,000 troops were raised, all of whom enlisted without any compulsory measures.
When Lincoln started to mobilize troops against the Confederate States, he called 75,000 men. Not only was this number larger than that of the Mexican War, the Southern states had previously provided a disproportionate percentage of the Mexican War veterans. Lincoln’s request was a tall order. Not long after, he would ask for 42,00 more troops, and Congress would finally authorize up to 500,000 volunteers.
RELATED: “Decentralize the Military: Why We Need Independent Militias” by Ryan McMaken
The Confederacy had likewise established a small army only weeks before the firing on Fort Sumter, originally consisting of 100,000 men, and after Lincoln’s mobilization of the Union army, added another 400,000. All of these men, on both sides, were volunteers.
By the time Congress assembled in the North to approve the 500,000-man army, half this number had already mobilized, even despite a number of defections. In both the Union and the Confederacy, the governments had to turn volunteers away because so many people offered their services so quickly.
Even the supplies for these men were provided with little to no central administration. In some cases, uniforms, mounts, and munitions were supplied by state or local governments, but many of the supplies were provided by private donations or even the enlistees themselves.
Only two days after Lincoln’s call for troops, to give one prominent example, a regiment of 850 volunteers from Massachusetts was already marching toward Washington, fully armed. The Confederacy was similarly so successful in providing volunteer enlistees that the Secretary of War had to turn away roughly 200,000 volunteers.
The Union was less successful than the Confederacy in mobilizing troops, yet their military still grew by a factor a fifteen in only a few short months. By comparison, the conscription-driven military growth for World War I only grew by a factor of three during the first four months of the war.
On both sides of the war, it is also worth noting that the voluntary nature of the early regiments drove men to fight more bravely. Voluntary regiments, as Jeffrey Rogers Hummel notes, “were bound together by ties of community and sometimes kinship, which were only strengthened as they carried the same personnel from battle to battle. No modern bureaucracy callously transferred men in and out, ticket punching them through some idealized career path, and disrupting the unit’s hometown cohesion in the process.”2
Modern military theory recognizes this. Men simply fight more courageously when they are fighting for friends and family, rather than some abstract cause put forth by politicians. So the question is, why is this model not used today?
by Dmitry Orlov, Russia Insider:
They sound good, until you start examining the details …
Orlov is one of our favorite essayists on Russia and all sorts of other things. He moved to the US as a child, and lives in the Boston area.
He is one of the better-known thinkers The New Yorker has dubbed ‘The Dystopians’ in an excellent 2009 profile, along with James Howard Kunstler, another regular contributor to RI (archive). These theorists believe that modern society is headed for a jarring and painful crack-up.
He is best known for his 2011 book comparing Soviet and American collapse (he thinks America’s will be worse). He is a prolific author on a wide array of subjects, and you can see his work by searching him on Amazon.
He has a large following on the web, and on Patreon, and we urge you to support him there, as Russia Insider does.
His current project is organizing the production of affordable house boats for living on. He lives on a boat himself.
If you haven’t discovered his work yet, please take a look at his archive of articles on RI. They are a real treasure, full of invaluable insight into both the US and Russia and how they are related.
There is a lot of attention currently being paid to cryptocurrencies. On the one hand there are those who claim that their rise in value is actually a symptom that conventional, fiat currencies are crashing. This begs the question as to why precious metals aren’t skyrocketing, and the usual answer is that their prices are being manipulated using the futures market that keeps “paper” gold cheap while “physical” gold is growing scarce; at some point these manipulations will stop working and gold will shoot up to $10,000 an ounce. (Sounds good to me!)
This also begs the question as to why, if fiat currencies are crashing, there isn’t much inflation at all. Even in countries that have been plagued with high inflation for decades, such as Russia, this is no longer a problem; there, inflation is now under 3%. There isn’t much inflation in the US either, provided you exclude from it all of the local extortion rackets: real estate, health care and education. (Armed robbery usually isn’t part of the basket of products and services used to compute inflation.) Hyperinflation is not hard to find (in Venezuela) but this is not commonly seen as a worldwide, systemic problem.
On the other hand there are those who think that cryptocurrencies are another type of tulip mania or South Sea bubble: just another irrationally exuberant event that will end with a resounding crash. The standard retorts are “Bah, humbug!” and “This time, it’s different!”
A more thoughtful retort is that Bitcoin (and other cryptos) are works of genius, based on the innovation of the blockchain (a sort of distributed ledger where every anonymous participant gets to verify every transaction) and the “proof of work” principle by which Bitcoin is “mined” using computers. In essence, instead of putting their trust in governments (which print money) and central banks (which really print money), Bitcoin users put their trust in algorithms, which are open source and defended through lack of public acceptance of any modification that might compromise them.
Cryptocurrency fans sometimes go on to say how cryptocurrencies are all about liberty and anarchism, cutting out the middlemen—the bloodsucking bankers and governments—and allowing people to trade one on one, simply by rubbing their digital wallets together and trusting the clever algorithms to sort it out.
This sounds good, until you examine some of the details.
First, bloodsucking bankers and governments are unlikely to be defeated by an algorithm, no matter how clever, because they use far less technical means to enforce their interests: security agencies, criminal investigators and prosecutors, tax auditors, courts and prisons.
Already, any use of Bitcoin is, under US tax regime, a potentially taxable transaction: if you got paid in Bitcoin and then bought something with it, and if its price went up in the meantime, then you get to pay 20% capital gains tax on the difference. With its promise of anonymity and its ability to transcend borders and circumvent fiscal and monetary authorities, Bitcoin has become a magnet for drug dealers, narcotraffickers, human traffickers, hackers/extortionists and other bad actors. If you use Bitcoin, you automatically end up on the radar of those who hunt for them.
And at a very simple level that should be easy for everyone to understand, if some government decides that Bitcoin is not its friend, it can simply ask you, nicely at first, to relinquish your cyberwallet to it. I doubt that too many of the Saudi princes that were recently disencumbered of much of their net worth while being tortured by Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh ended up playing coy with their Bitcoin stash. Remember, Bitcoin is a popular instrument of extortion, and governments are the biggest extortionists in the world.
Worse yet, if a government decides that Bitcoin is its friend, it can ask, nicely at first, that all Bitcoin transactions be disclosed to it in a timely manner, complete with the tax ID of the party at each end of every transaction. This would be a clever way for a government to shift to using digital cash without having to pay for any of it. All it would have to do is order “compliance”; Bitcoin’s developers would then have to bring their architecture into compliance or risk prosecution for noncompliance. This seems like a cheap and cost-effective way to move closer to financial totalitarianism, placing every single transaction under the government’s microscope.
Second, few people have the technical savvy to understand all the intricacies of the protocols, and as the old saying goes, “A fool and his money are soon parted.” Your digital wallet can be stolen (hacked) or become corrupted, and there is no accurate estimate of the number of Bitcoins that will never be heard from again, making the current market capitalization claims less than reliable. Any world-savvy grandmother can sew a few gold coins into the hem of a grandchild’s coat as a safeguard against unforeseen expenses; but how many grandmothers, or grandchildren, would know how to do that with crypto?
Third, there is the matter of durability and access. Gold does not rust or tarnish. It can become lost, but then it can (at least theoretically) be recovered. A digital wallet, once corrupted, cannot be recovered. A single electromagnetic discharge from a sun flare or a stratospheric nuclear explosion from one of Kim Jong Un’s rockets can wipe out a huge amount of cryptocurrency. Network outages render cryptocurrencies inaccessible. How much Bitcoin trading went on in Domenica, Barbuda or Puerto Rico after the recent hurricane? Unlike a physical pot of gold, cryptocurrency is invisible and cannot be validated without special equipment connected to the internet.
Read More @ Russia-Insider.com
by Aaron Klein, Breitbart:
The statements may raise more questions about the veracity of the dossier accusing Donald Trump and his 2016 presidential campaign of ties with Russia. The questionable document reportedly served as part of the basis for the FBI’s investigation into Trump’s presidential campaign.
Simpson’s statements are significant in light of the disclosure last April that Fusion GPS’s anti-Trump work was financed by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
In August 22 testimony released last week and reviewed in full by Breitbart News, Steele stated, “Another thing we say about our work is it’s custom information, it’s a customized product. You tell us what your problem is and we customize a research solution.”
Simpson was responding to a question about “concerns that the work being done was driven in a direction designed to reach a particular conclusion for a client or because of the client’s identity.”
Simpson claimed that the client doesn’t dictate a specific “result” for the firm to conclude in its work. “In general when people come to us and they tell us what their challenge is, we stipulate that they retain us for 30 days, they agree to pay our fee, they don’t tell us what to do, they don’t tell us, you know, what result to get. I like to call it a holistic methodology.”
As Breitbart News reported yesterday, Simpson conceded in his testimony that he opposed Trump’s presidential candidacy and that his negative opinions of the politician may have “entered” into his “thinking.”
In October, the Washington Post reported that in April 2016, attorney Marc E. Elias and his law firm Perkins Coie retained Fusion GPS to conduct the firm’s anti-Trump work on behalf of both Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
Through Perkins Coie, Clinton’s campaign and the DNC continued to fund Fusion GPS until October 2016, days before Election Day, the Post reported.
While it is not clear how much the Clinton campaign or the DNC paid Fusion GPS, the UK Independent, citing campaign finance records, reported that the Clinton campaign doled out $5.6 million to Perkins Coie from June 2015 to December 2016. Records show that since November 2015, the DNC paid the law firm $3.6 million in “legal and compliance consulting.”
Read More @ Breitbart.com
by Cristina Laila, The Gateway Pundit:
Top FBI lawyer James Baker gave an explosive testimony in a closed-door deposition Wednesday, according to FOX News’s Catherine Herridge.
James Baker was very close to fired FBI Director James Comey, so this is a very significant development.
Comey’s confidant, Mr. Baker resigned from his position in May of this year.
FOX News reported:
by Susan Duclos, All News Pipeline:
2017 was a scandal ridden year for much of the mainstream media with “fake news” news stories tanking the stock market, retractions, apologies and deletions, but no network was embroiled in controversy as much as CNN.
From threatening to reveal personal information of a random internet user for creating a meme because they didn’t approve of his online “behavior,” which resulted in the viral trending hashtag of #CNNBlackmail, leading to the “great meme war of 2017,” to multiple completely false articles that had to be retracted, changed, corrected, causing the forced resignation of three high profile employees, 2017 was brutal for CNN.
It looks like 2018 is going to be worse for the network.
So far this year CNN has gone dumpster diving in Russia in a pathetically desperate attempt to justify their obsession with the “Russian collusion” narrative they have spent a year pushing, and despite finding nothing in the literal garbage they were digging through, they actually put the segment on the air as shown in the screen shot above.
CNN was roundly criticized by members of the left and right after ambushing an older female Trump supporter, confronting her on her lawn, revealing her identity, address and phone number, which caused her to be harassed online and off, in order to attack her for daring to share a promotion for a Trump event that supposedly was instigated by Russian trolls. They did this on the same day it was revealed that CNN itself had promoted an anti-Trump event that was also allegedly instigated by Russia trolls.
CNN’s actions were called “ugly,” “gross,” “despicable” and “awful” and that was just by leftist journalists.
Then the network traveled to Thailand to interview an alleged prostitute who calls herself a “sex coach,” because she claimed she had “evidence” of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, saying in exchange for her story she wanted asylum in the United States.
The level of “journalism” by the CNN, has sunk to the level of the Jerry Springer show and their ratings have tanked because of the last year of scandals, lies, and pushing onto viewers what CNN thinks they should focus on rather than what interests everyday Americans.
The proof is in the numbers where CNN did not even make the top twenty cable news shows for February, and in fact only took one of the top 25 spots with Anderson Coopers’ show, which came in as number 24. According to Forbes “CNN had significant declines in February, with ratings dropping 19% in total day and 16% in prime.”
Things have gotten so bad for CNN that Chris Cillizza, CNN’s editor-at-large was taken to task on March 6, 2018, publicly via Twitter by former CNN Anchor Soledad O’Brien, over a piece he wrote and published on CNN titled “Donald Trump is producing the greatest reality show ever,” which he promoted on Twitter. O’Brien’s response was brutal, stating “This terrible analysis by @CillizzaCNN is in part why people hate the media.” (Archive.is link to CNN article here)
Cillizza first thanked her for reading, then she offered some friendly advice saying “You’re welcome. You have a big platform, be thoughtful about the stories you tell and how you tell them.”
Not able to leave well enough alone, Cillizza then decided to ask her if she bothered to read the piece or was she just going by the headline, she said she read it, then he said he didn’t understand her criticism…… then she explained and her explanation was far more brutal than her initial assertion as she told him exactly why the articles was so “terrible.”
Read More @ AllNewsPipeline.com
by Dave Kranzler, Investment Research Dynamics:
Existing home sales declined nearly 2{5f621241b214ad2ec6cd4f506191303eb2f57539ef282de243c880c2b328a528} in June from May on a SAAR basis (Seasonally Adjusted Annualized Rate). (SAAR is the statistically manipulated metric used by industry organizations and the Government to spin bad monthly economic data into an annualized metric that hides the ugly truth).
Here is the NAR-spun fiction: “Closings were down in most of the country last month because interested buyers are being tripped up by supply that remains stuck at a meager level and price growth that’s straining their budget…” – Larry Yun chief “economist” for the National Association of Homebuilders.
