Well, it’s a proposed disorder. Advocates have so far failed to get it listed in the official bible of the American Psychiatric Association.
Orthorexia is defined as an obsession for eating healthy pure food.
It can lead to social isolation, because those afflicted can’t find anything to munch at parties. They also tend to show disgust when in the vicinity of impure food.
When the obsession reaches great height, profound weight loss and even death can result.
Proponents of the “disorder” tend to talk like this: “Orthorexia is caused by a combination of underlying genetic predisposition and environmental factors…”
As if they knew anything about supposed genetic reasons for anything. When in doubt, when bloviating, cite genetics.
Well, we’ve all known “orthorexia” people. They have super-strict standards for food. They’re cranky. They tend to go on unexpected sudden rants against food they consider “unclean.”
The Republican Party of the post-war era was dominated by “militarists of the period [who] shared with many … industrialists the belief that it was the nation’s inherent right to colonize the continent westward and southward to its geographical limits, and then push ever westward across the waters” (Brodsky, p. 228).
Grover Cleveland considered this imperialistic fantasy to be “every bit as odious as imperialism and misguided nationalism” (p. 228). He was determined that “we never get caught up in conflict with any foreign state unless attacked or otherwise provoked,” in the spirit of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. If he were alive today, Grover Cleveland would be the chief nemesis of the neocons.
After the War to Prevent Southern Independence and the assassination of Lincoln the federal government was said to possess a “treasury of virtue.” The Republican Party, which was the federal government, with a decades-long monopoly of power rivaled only by the Bolsheviks in Russia, made sure that the government-run schools would preach this Virtuous State Philosophy to generations of school children.
And what did the Party of Virtue do with its “treasure”? A first order of business was to commence a campaign of ethnic genocide against the Plains Indians. Initiated just three months after the end of the war, and with Generals Grant, Sherman and Sheridan in charge, all of the Plains Indians — women and children included — would be either murdered or imprisoned on government reservations (“where they can be watched,” said Sherman) by 1890. The Party of Virtue even cynically recruited ex-slaves (the “Buffalo Soldiers”) to assist in its campaign of genocide against another colored race.
The Party of Virtue also broke up the union, which it had supposedly just “saved,” by disenfranchising all the adult white male southerners and denying them congressional representation unless the southern states ratified the 14th Amendment. At the same time, every last adult male ex slave was registered to vote Republican, and assisted in the Republican Party’s twelve-year plundering expedition in the South, also absurdly known as “Reconstruction.”
Onerous taxes were imposed on a region that was in dire need of tax amnesty. Property taxes in South Carolina, for example, were thirty times higher in 1870 than they were in 1860. The purpose of such confiscatory taxation was to force southern property owners to either pay bribes to Republican Party hacks employed as tax collectors, or sell them their land at fire sale prices. Nothing much was “reconstructed” but a great many carpetbaggers became very wealthy.
Then there was the massive corruption and criminality associated with building the government-subsidized transcontinental railroads, a project begun when Abraham Lincoln called a special session of congress to get the ball rolling just a few months after taking office. The infamous corruption of the Grant administrations was an inevitable consequence of these policies.
The average U.S. tariff rate was escalated to nearly 50 percent during the Lincoln administration and remained in that range until the income tax was adopted in 1913. Thus, the Party of Virtue engaged in fifty years of legal plunder through protectionist trade policies.
The taxpayers were plundered further by being forced to pay more and more for veterans’ pensions, for the war created a well-oiled lobby of Union Army veterans. Veterans’ pensions comprised 29 percent of all federal expenditures by 1884.
Government bureaucrats proliferated at all levels of government, as did taxes. The regulatory state was also greatly expanded, imposing regulations on freight rates, grain warehouses, trusts, and myriad occupations.
Fortunately for the ex slaves, very little was done for them by the federal government, allowing them the freedom and independence to pursue their own livelihoods, quite often with astonishing success despite all the roadblocks they faced.
The Great Libertarian from Buffalo
In the post-war years the Democratic Party possessed most of what was left of the states’ rights, strict constructionist Jeffersonians in American politics. The party had its share of scoundrels, politics being what it is, but it still generally championed free trade over the legal plunder of protectionism, and laissez faire over Lincolnian mercantilism. Its greatest spokesman in this regard was President Grover Cleveland, who served two terms as president: 1885—1889 and 1893—1897. His political philosophy was perhaps best expressed in his second inaugural address, where he said, “The lessons of paternalism ought to be unlearned and the better lesson taught that while the people should patriotically and cheerfully support their Government its functions do not include the support of the people.” He was a nineteenth century James Ostrowski.
Cleveland began his political career as sheriff of Erie County, New York in 1871, where he earned a reputation for fearlessness and incorruptibility. He was then elected mayor of Buffalo in 1882 where he became known as “the veto mayor.” He earned this noble designation for repeatedly vetoing inflated government contracts with politically-connected firms doing business with the city. He also insisted on competitive bidding on all city contracts, a practice almost unheard of in New York.
Ascending to the governor’s mansion, Cleveland became known as “the veto governor” for vetoing numerous Tammany Hall patronage bills put before the state legislature. Inevitably, this reputation would follow him into the White House where he would veto hundreds of bills, including forty-nine that he pocket vetoed on his very last day in office, March 4, 1897 (see Alyn Brodsky, Grover Cleveland: A Study in Character New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2000, p. 57).
During his first term as president Cleveland vetoed hundreds of pension expansion bills as unwarranted raids on the U.S. Treasury. He became Public Enemy Number One in the eyes of the “Grand Army of the Republic,” the Union army veterans lobbying organization that consistently agitated to plunder the taxpayers. Despite the dwindling number of veterans, expenditures on veterans’ pensions had increased by some 500 percent in the previous twenty years (Brodsky, p. 182), purely because of the political clout of Union army veterans. (Southerners paid taxes to finance the pensions, but did not qualify for them).
Certainly, nobody at the New York Times went to jail because, again, journalists don’t go to jail for publishing classified information in the United States.
The British High Court will soon decide whether to extradite journalist Julian Assange to the United States, where he will assuredly face a long prison sentence.
It is shocking to me that anyone who reads what I write could side with the regime on this.
The University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer recently summarized the situation, and this is my analysis as well:
Assange is a journalist, and he did not break the law, as it is commonplace for journalists to publish classified information that is passed on to them by government insiders. If journalists in the United States were sent to jail for publishing classified material, the jails would be filled with many of America’s most famous reporters from newspapers like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.
But of course, that hardly ever happens. Simply put, newspapers publish classified material, and hardly anybody ever goes to jail. Why is this the case? What is the reason for this situation? Governments of every type, and this includes liberal democracies like the United States and Britain, sometimes go to great lengths to hide their actions or their policies from public view, which makes it almost impossible for the public to evaluate and criticize their behavior….
Thus, a rich tradition has developed over time in the United States, where insiders leak information about classified policies to journalists who publicize the information so that the public can evaluate it and push back hard against misguided policies.
The most famous case that illustrates this phenomenon involves the famous Pentagon Papers, which were a multi-volume study of the American decision to enter the war in Vietnam in the 1964-65 period and then escalated in subsequent years.
Daniel Ellsberg, who was an insider and had access to classified material, leaked the papers in 1971 to The New York Times, which subsequently published them. The story in those documents was starkly at odds with what the Johnson administration had been telling the American people about US policy in Vietnam.
By most accounts at the time, and certainly since then, both Ellsberg and The New York Times performed an important public service…. Ellsberg did not go to jail despite leaking classified information, although it did appear at the time that he might be sent to jail. Certainly, nobody at the New York Times went to jail because, again, journalists don’t go to jail for publishing classified information in the United States.
Now that the Supreme Court has unanimously destroyed the dreams of Davos to use January 6th as a means to keep him off the ballot, Donald Trump has passed the easiest of the hurdles in front of his returning to the White House.
Some things, politically, in the US still function.
This ruling was a lay-up. The SCOTUS had to rule decisively here.
Trump was never convicted of ‘insurrection.’ He was impeached and character-assassinated, sure, but none of that carries any weight of law. But, even if you somehow believe he was guilty of the crimes the Democrats accused him of, the facts of January 6th are so murky from that perspective, there was no way the SCOTUS could concoct a justification for his ballot disqualification.
At stake itself was the SCOTUS’ own validity as an institution. And if there is one thing I believe about organizations it is they always move to defend themselves if their leadership is honest.
Like it or not, the SCOTUS does not exist to enforce anyone’s opinion on reality. They exist to conclude whether an action is or is not constitutional. Did Trump ever lead an armed insurrection against the government? No.
Did he question a questionable election? Yes.
Is that unconstitutional? No.
Case closed.
But this case was an important first step to shut off the Nikki Haley insurgent strategy of handing delegates to her by default:
Take Trump off the ballot. She’s now the only “Repuglican” left to vote for. She gets to go to the convention with a bunch of unearned delegates to steal the election before November.
Oops. Now she gets further embarrassed on Super Tuesday.
Now the strategy backfires completely and he’s now Obi-Don Kenobi.
Unless somehow Jack Smith or the Fulton County Gang that Can’t Lie Straight put him in jail Trump is the GOP nominee.
So, now, how does Trump take this political resurrection and change the game completely?
With Biden’s disapproval rating reaching historic lows of 59% (6 out of 10 US votes HATE JOAH! Biii-Den!), the path to the White House for Trump goes through Vice-President Kamala Harris.
While conversations abound about subbing in Big Mike and/or Gavin Gruesome, the more likely threat from the DNC is Hillary, who is clearly angling back into the conversation as Biden falters.
But whoever Trump winds up running against, there is one person who Trump can leverage to drive even more people who hate him bat-shit crazy than he does.
And he knows who that is. So, as Primary Trump morphs, just like in 2016, into Candidate Trump, he will look to shore up his weaknesses.
Candidate Trump became a guy who preached bringing the US back from a dark place. He ran on a populist platform that incorporated the Bernie Bros (remember them) as well as the tradesmen.
He broke the Democrats’ Trinity of Victimhood – Unions, Minorities, young people — that was their base and squeaked to victory over The Hildabeast.
If you think it’s Trump’s team or even US ‘white hats’ pushing out this stuff about Biden, you may be missing the obvious player, Hillary.
If there is one thing I know for certain about Trump it is that he’s a master of media. He knows exactly how and when to push everyone’s buttons.
For that reason (and many others) Trump’s only real choice for running mate is Tulsi Gabbard.
But fitness trackers also keep tabs on lesser-known health metrics. For instance, many wearable devices are available to track your heart rate variability (HRT), an indicator of your body’s capacity to respond to stress. While they may not be as accurate as an electrocardiogram (EKG), they may still provide useful data, especially if you notice your HRV worsening over time.
Americans are increasingly taking control of their health via the use of health monitoring technologies, with notable benefits as a result. A Cleveland Clinic survey revealed that 50% of Americans use at least one type of technology to track their health, with most experiencing significant related physical and mental improvements.1
If you’re considering investing in a fitness tracker or other form of wearable, health-tracking technology, however, there are some caveats to consider, including effectiveness and privacy. Here’s what to know about this up-and-coming artificial intelligence (AI) technology, from potential gains to which brand will best protect your personal data.
4 in 5 Users of Health Monitoring Tech Report Notable Benefits
The survey was part of Cleveland Clinic Heart, Vascular and Thoracic Institute’s “Love your Heart” consumer education campaign. It focused on the use of AI for heart health, with 3 in 5 respondents stating they believe this technology will lead to better heart care. When it comes to believing health advice from an AI chatbot is trustworthy, 72% of Americans said they’d trust it, but 89% also said they’d ask a doctor before acting on the chatbot’s recommendations.2
The survey also looked into health monitoring technology, which half of Americans are actively using. The most commonly monitored metric is daily step count, with heart rate and calorie burn coming in second and third. For 23% of survey respondents, health tracking technology is a tool to help them stay motivated and accountable to reach their daily activity goals.3
For most who are embracing this technology, it seems to be working, as 79% said they’ve noticed positive physical and mental health changes. Top uses of health monitoring technology, as well as some of its beneficial outcomes, include:4
Which Health Metrics Should You Track?
Walking even 8,000 steps once or twice a week is associated with significantly lower all-cause and cardiovascular mortality risk.5 So tracking daily steps — and increasing them when necessary — makes sense.
But fitness trackers also keep tabs on lesser-known health metrics. For instance, many wearable devices are available to track your heart rate variability (HRT), an indicator of your body’s capacity to respond to stress. While they may not be as accurate as an electrocardiogram (EKG), they may still provide useful data, especially if you notice your HRV worsening over time.
HRV measures the variations in time between your heartbeats — a function controlled by your autonomic nervous system (ANS). As such, HRV is said to be a “proxy of autonomic activity” that’s associated with executive functions, emotional regulation and more, including decision making. Meanwhile, abnormal HRV can signal problems ranging from neurological to psychological conditions.6
You can also keep an eye on your VO2 max, a measure of oxygen consumption during exercise that is commonly used as a marker of fitness level. Standing time is another health point to consider tracking. While regular physical exercise is important, so, too, is doing virtually anything other than sitting — including standing. This is why many fitness trackers have goal settings for not only calories burned and steps taken in a day, but also reaching a standing-time goal.7
Research published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that sitting for more than three hours a day causes 3.8% of all-cause deaths in the 54 countries surveyed.8 More than 60% of people globally spend more than three hours a day sitting.9
Incorporating more standing into your day is an easy way to sit less, and it offers additional health gains, including benefits to blood sugar levels.10 Tracking your sleep cycle is another valuable use for health monitoring technology, which can reveal if you’re spending enough time in the appropriate sleep stages.
Second, the hegemony of the Civil Rights Act is entrenched in practice by the reality that in practice, officials spooked by the bad press surrounding DEI and CRT are increasingly careful in their use of words. If an equality scheme is not brazenly labelled “DEI” it is difficult to ascertain whether it is designed to promote opportunity or whether it is attempting surreptitiously to promote outcome.
A number of Republican states have banned DEI, resulting in the termination of DEI schemes in higher education institutions. The NYT reports that “In 2023, more than 20 states considered or approved new laws taking aim at D.E.I”.
Much hard work by Republicans went into getting these DEI schemes banned, especially in raising public awareness about the sinister machinations behind friendly-sounding words like diversity and inclusion. Adopting beguiling labels for their schemes is a favorite commie strategy, and it works because it marches under the banner of values many people would support. It has taken a long-running campaign by Republicans to persuade the public that these virtue-signaling labels are nothing more than a smokescreen.
But as Republicans continue to rejoice about the collapsing DEI empire, few have noticed that the seeds of the next threat are already being sown: the announcements abolishing DEI have come together with ominous expressions of commitment to enforcing equality of opportunity:
“In keeping with State of Florida legislation, the Division of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) has been eliminated,” the school’s webpage says. “FIU remains committed to cultivating an environment of accessibility and equal opportunity, where all are welcomed to learn, earn, and thrive.”
What’s the problem, one might ask? After all, everyone supports equal opportunity and welcoming everyone to thrive. While many conservatives are against DEI, surely supporting “genuine” equal opportunities will work very well as long as it doesn’t turn into equity? Many conservatives naively hope that equality enforcement is a great idea in principle. As Lew Rockwell has observed:
It’s conservatives, not liberals, who are naive about the real meaning of anti-discrimination law. They say they love the Civil Rights Act, “Dr.” King, and the “ideal” of the color-blind society. They want to protect “individuals” from discrimination, but not “groups.” They like “equality of opportunity” but don’t like “equality of result.”
In his op-ed for the NYT Chris Rufo explained the reasons for abolishing DEI and then observed that promoting colorblind equality would be a good replacement for DEI:
“After abolishing D.E.I., legislators can adopt a policy of colorblind equality to help establish the equal treatment of individuals, regardless of race, sex or other characteristics.”
In abolishing DEI, the expressed aim is therefore to shift from equality of outcome (equity) to promoting colorblind equality. In Florida it was announced that equal opportunity initiatives and programs would continue after the end of DEI:
“Housing isn’t driving anything. Housing’s just gone along for the ride. The driver is Maxine Waters and her buddies in Congress. They’re driving the inflation bus, not housing. Housing’s just riding in the bus along with everything else. The driver of inflation is deficit spending and the money that the Federal Reserve prints to monetize that debt.”
With price controls look for shortages that will make covid shortages look mild.
This week, Peter reacts to politicians’ sophomoric views on inflation and explains the recent surge in the price of gold. He also comments on the first day of Jerome Powell’s congressional testimony. Be sure to watch Peter’s special extra episode from earlier this week if you missed it.
Peter thinks the price of gold has finally broken free from resistance, and it’s going to keep rising. Because retail investors have been dumping gold recently, a retail sell-off is unlikely to bring gold below where it is now:
“This rally is the first rally to new highs where the public is not participating. In fact, for weeks—actually months— leading up to the new high, the public was getting out of gold. … I think that’s a great contrarian indicator, and I think that’s a sign that this rally has legs, because normally the market peaks when you get a rush of buyers that come in. And now the market gets overbought, it gets saturated, and then there’s a correction.”
Even more promising for gold is the fact the central banks are increasing their purchases of the yellow metal, and they aren’t planning on selling it anytime soon:
“The central banks are the buyers, and they’ve got huge war chests of foreign currency reserves, plus they can print their own money and use that to buy gold. And I don’t think the central banks are that price sensitive. … They don’t want to run the price up, they want to buy it, but their goal is to have more gold, and their goal is not to sell any of this gold.”
If the retail sector stops selling and central banks keep buying gold, they’ll inevitably bid its price up even higher than it is today:
“The market is under supplied, and it’s about to run into a huge increase in demand. And what does that tell you? That means that the price of gold has a long way to go to catch up to clear that market. Gold is very undervalued right now, and it has been for some time, and that is the opportunity to buy it before it’s repriced to a realistic valuation.”
Pivoting to recent political news, Peter takes aim at Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who spuriously claims that housing prices cause inflation. Peter corrects her:
Last week President Biden delivered a dark and angry speech meant to convince the low percentage of Americans who still feel positive about his presidency that everything is fine and will only get better if he is re-elected for a second term.
Unfortunately we have come a long way from the optimism of a Ronald Reagan, who won a second term partially on the popularity of his “Morning in America” campaign commercials. Reagan was far from a perfect president, but it was that sense of optimism in otherwise difficult times that resulted in a record re-election victory. Biden’s speech, by contrast, was dark and angry, attacking not only his political opponents but even seeming to threaten the Supreme Court!
What if a conversation between Russian officials discussing the explosion of a bridge in Germany had been revealed? Would Western press coverage also treat the leak as something more serious than threats of military attack?
This forced the mainstream Western media – especially German ones – to report the leak. But whoever thought that a miracle would happen, that is, that the Western press would finally raise the issue of NATO’s military threats against Russia… well, those people are simply very naive.
On March 1, the editor-in-chief of the Rossiya Segodnya group, journalist Margarita Simonyan, revealed, on her Telegram channel, a 38-minute audio in which officers from the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) discussed the possibility of sending missiles long-range Taurus to Ukraine and whether they would be able to reach the Crimean bridge in the Kerch Strait, which connects the peninsula to the mainland and is Russian territory.
The Russian press, naturally, made much of the revelation. This forced the mainstream Western media – especially German ones – to report the leak. But whoever thought that a miracle would happen, that is, that the Western press would finally raise the issue of NATO’s military threats against Russia… well, those people are simply very naive.
The Western mass media, as always, tried to manipulate the news and hide the main issue.
The New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC, The Guardian, Die Welt and Der Spiegel published 39 articles on the topic on their respective websites between the time the news was revealed and the evening of March 6th (when I write these lines).
The two North American newspapers did not want to highlight the matter. The Post published two reports and the Times only one. The three expressed concern about the fragility of German intelligence security systems in the face of Russian espionage.
The Europeans, as has been the case for some time, carried much more propaganda against Russia. The BBC published four articles, all referring to the failure to protect Luftwaffe communications. The Guardian published five articles. The majority warns of the Germans’ failure and treats the Russians as great, threatening villains. However, it is necessary to make an honorable mention of Simon Jenkins’ column, the only one who was allowed to say that the leaked conversations demonstrate that NATO is threatening Russia with an escalation in the conflict.
As we all know, this drop of water in the middle of the ocean has no chance of counterbalancing the flood of war propaganda and fake news from the British press against Russia. Newspaper owners only allow freedom of expression when it is harmless – and try to isolate minimally independent opinions.
Now let’s talk about German newspaper coverage. Die Welt published 18 pieces about the leak scandal, and treated it as such. Of course, the main reason for the scandal was – for German war propagandists – the interception and dissemination of the conversation, not its content.
The entire repercussion of Die Welt revolves around failures in the security system of the German armed forces and Russian espionage. The possibility of Olaf Scholz sending the Taurus to Zelensky is briefly discussed and it is even stated that Germany is putting its Western allies in danger by allowing the interception of conversations that may mention confidential and compromising information – such as the participation of British soldiers in Ukraine, as mentioned in the conversation in question.
MCViewPoint 