But this past January the state diatetics and nutrition board decided Cooksey’s blog — Diabetes-Warrior.net — violated state law. The nutritional advice Cooksey provides on the site amounts to “practicing nutrition,” the board’s director says, and in North Carolina that’s something you need a license to do.
Unless Cooksey completely rewrites his 3-year-old blog, he could be sued by the licensing board. If he loses the lawsuit and refuses to take down the blog, he could face up to 120 days in jail.
The board’s director says Cooksey has a First Amendment right to blog about his diet, but he can’t encourage others to adopt it unless the state has certified him as a dietitian or nutritionist.
Here’s another interesting view of the case on Ask a Cyber Lawyer. In my case, I give out health advice all day long, especially at the office. What exactly is the difference between using the property on which I am invited – by my employer – to engage in conversation with colleagues and answer their questions, or, publishing it on my own property, such as my blog? Or perhaps a book, where I am invited by a publisher? Indeed, this is a monopoly grab on the part of a very powerful agent of the state, the American Dietetic Association, which is changing its name to the embellished Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.
Dr. Davis Brownstein, the rockstar holistic MD, recently published an article, “The ADA Wants Nutrition Prisons.” Brownstein discusses the intent on the part of the ADA to prevent anyone outside of their licensed circle from dispensing nutrition advice, with the threat of fines and/or jail for outlaw advice givers.
The upcoming issue of the journal Human Immunology will include an article, “The Clinician’s Guide to the Anti-Vaccinationists’ Galaxy,” which will be a propaganda toolbox for primary care physicians to use when dealing with vaccination deniers. Here is a snippet from an article by Dave Mihalovic, a Naturopathic Doctor writing in PreventDisease.com:
Parents who wish to opt-out from mandatory vaccination schedules at their doctor’s office will soon be labeled as anti-vaccine parents in need of further enlightenment. The Clinician’s Guide to the Anti-Vaccinationists’ Galaxy, is being published online this month in the journal Human Immunology and will attempt to address and convince anti-vaccine parents that their misconceptions about vaccinations are based on myths.
The two authors of the propaganda arrangement are Gregory Poland, M.D., a Mayo Clinic vaccinologist, and pediatrician Robert Jacobson, M.D. As usual, we will gently follow the money and connections. According to Mr. Mihalovic, Dr. Poland is “the chairman of an evaluation committee for investigational vaccine trials being conducted by Merck Research Laboratories. He offers consultative advice on new vaccine development to Merck & Co., Inc., Avianax, Theraclone Sciences (formally Spaltudaq Corporation), MedImmune LLC, Liquidia Technologies, Inc., Emergent BioSolutions, Novavax, Dynavax, EMD Serono, Inc., Novartis Vaccines and Therapeutics and PAXVAX, Inc.”
Additionally, Dr. Jacobson “is a member of a review committee for a study funded by Merck & Co. concerning the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine. He is a member of a data monitoring committee for an investigational vaccine trial funded by Merck & Co. He is principal investigator for two studies, including one funded by Novartis International for its licensed meningococcal conjugate vaccine and one funded by Pfizer, Inc. for its licensed pneumococcal conjugate vaccine.”
Read the whole article here. Here is Dr. Poland’s ‘quick’ resume. He even won a Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence for his, well, excellence in support of the government-medical establishment revolving door. A little research on my part found this article from the same two authors in 2011 in the New England Journal of Medicine: “The Age-Old Struggle Against the Antivaccinationists.” Here are the disclosure forms signed by these two doctors for the NEJM article publication. Do look at Dr. Poland’s extensive Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest.
Peter Orszag, a former OMB Director and the current Vice Chairman of Global Banking at Citigroup (no revolving doors between Wall Street and Government!), has penned a piece about why children need more time away from their parents and more time in the education hoosegow.
It’s time for a change: Schools should remain open until 5 or 6 p.m. The result would be better-educated students and less-stressed parents.
After all, says Orszag, the children aren’t tasked enough with their minuscule 7-hour school day. Thanks to Travis Holte for the link.
Recently, the New York Times opinion page ran a trash piece by James E. McWilliams called “The Myth of Sustainable Meat.” First off, it is very important to note that McWilliams is a left-wing environmental professor, animal rights activist, and vegan. McWilliams is also not a farmer, but rather, he is an academic who teaches environmental history and writes often about why everyone should worship the at the alter of vegetarianism. He also has a history of attacking the Locavore movement, small farm organics, and grass-fed meat while defending GMOs (genetically modified organisms) and CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Organizations).
Additionally, McWilliams attacks eco-agriculture with the zeal of man who is in the back pocket of Big Agriculture. In fact, many astute writers have attacked his books and articles that read like a collective lobbying manual for Big Agra. Most notably, he wrote a previous article for the New York Times, in 2009, that was a duplicitous, fear-mongering piece condemning humanely-raised, pastured pork (and promoting CAFO-industrial pork) that concluded this:
The fact that we’ve lost our way and found ourselves locked in the mess of factory farming, should not deter us from realizing that — if we genuinely hope to produce pork that’s safe and tasty — instead of setting the animal world partly free, we might have to take greater control of it. Do not underestimate the importance of this challenge. After all, if clean and humane methods of production cannot be developed, there’s only one ethical choice left for the conscientious consumer: a pork-free diet.
To make just one point about this article, one must pay attention to the fine print. Five days after the article was published, the NYT editors took their heads out of their asses and appended the article with this point:
Editors’ Note: April 14, 2009
An Op-Ed article last Friday, about pork, neglected to disclose the source of the financing for a study finding that free-range pigs were more likely than confined pigs to test positive for exposure to certain pathogens. The study was financed by the National Pork Board.
Always follow the money and always pay attention to the political objectives of folks who produce perverted facts, biased studies, and politically-charged arguments that incriminate those who oppose their assorted personal religions and/or compete against their corporate state, butt-kissing benefactors. Not surprisingly, for the last few years, McWilliams has penned his eco-ag misinformation and meat hate screeds all over the pages of The Atlantic.
At Polyface, we only purport to be doing the best we can do as we struggle through a deviant, historically abnormal food and farming system. We didn’t create what is and we may not solve it perfectly. But we’re sure a lot farther toward real solutions than McWilliams can imagine. And if society would move where we want to go, and the government regulators would let us move where we need to go, and the industry would not try to criminalize us as we try to go there, we’ll all be a whole lot better off and the earthworms will dance.
I despise the Safety Nazis and the culture of fear they have created. Wear a helmet. Don’t go out when it’s too hot. Don’t leave your home when it’s too cold, and if you do, heed the 1,001 warnings. Be afraid at all times. Run for cover. Lock your children in enormous safety devices called car seats. Buy a stroller built like an armored Volvo, complete with side air bags and ironclad sun protection. Stay inside if the wind blows or a snowflake falls. Is there a dark cloud or two in the sky? Close the schools. Call your doctor if you sneeze, and call your lawyer if you trip. Don’t ever do anything that has the potential to cause injury. Red alerts, orange alerts, and now text alerts – they are all imbecile alerts that are geared toward emotionally crippling the masses.
The save-you-from-yourself nannies are an intrusive and irritating bunch. “Safety” has become a sick obsession in the modern American culture, and this fear mongering has long been promoted by an overreaching, paternal state that has churned out a nation of helpless idiots through the revolving doors of government schools and a politicized nanny state that holds people captive to their own bogus fears. I have at least one archive dedicated to this topic on my website.
One of the most fashionable forms of lifestyle fascism in the American Folly Safety Parade is the sustained push for mandatory helmet laws and the crush of propaganda asserting that certified, bulletproof, and government-approved helmets are necessary for every activity from the baby crawling to biking along your neighborhood sidewalk.
As an avid cyclist, the folks I ride with are a mixed bunch. Very few are helmetless, many are helmet Nazis (they love preaching safety and the wearing of helmets to others while they wear shorts in 20-degree weather on their 50-lbs overweight, heart-attack-ready bodies), and some are helmet neutral – they don’t think too much about your choices and why you make them. Most recently, I received the standard summary lecture from a very overweight, helmeted cyclist whose belly hung halfway between his seat and the ground, yet he gave me the snide lecture on no-helmet riding by summing it up as, “it’s your noggin.” Apparently, being without helmet for two hours is undertaking a risk while carrying around an obese, disease-ridden body for twenty years is no risk at all. It is astounding how folks will perceive peril and create their own twisted reality to suit their inclinations.
When I do the group rides, I usually wear a helmet unless it is so cold that I need to wear my warm, hippie beanie. Then I may go no-helmet, and immediately, the Nazis begin to buzz and give rise to the predictable comments. On Saturday, March 24th, 2012, I rode with a group of cyclists, most of who are very recreational riders. I wore my helmet as our group of 70+ folks left Grand Circus Park in downtown Detroit for our first 2012 group ride. No big deal – I just felt like wearing a helmet, as I usually do in these rides. These folks were mostly recreational cyclists, with only a few of them being experienced cyclists or skilled riders. A few of the riders, like me, used to be dedicated lycra jockeys but gave that up for adventure riding and fun exploration. The problem with these rides is that most folks don’t hold a steady line and are predictably unsteady on their bicycles. That kind if riding can wreak havoc on a pack.
A little over an hour after we started, I ended up in what was the most violent bike crash I have had in 27 years of serious cycling, mountain bike racing, track riding, and high-speed training pacelines. As we approached a median with two routes around it (on the right and the left) most of us were on the left side of the landscaped median. A few cyclists on the far right side of pack went around the right side of the median, and a guy from the far left side of the pack saw those few folks going right, and so he decided to veer on a strict right line across the front of the pack, from left to right, to catch the turnoff and follow them. No experienced pack rider would ever do such a thing knowing that seventy bikers were right on his tail. It is hard to believe that anyone with any common sense could be so careless. But this stuff happens.
He blind-sided me from my left side, and I t-boned the rear of his bike. All I knew was that it felt like I was shot from a cannon as I flew up and then landed on my left side, on the cement, with my hip and shoulder taking the entire hit as my bike slammed my body to the ground, and then my neck whiplashed, causing my head to slam the pavement with ferocious force. Since this was a purely recreational ride, our speed was a very slow 12-13 mph. And still, it was a violent meeting between the pavement and me. This collision came just six days prior to a scheduled hip surgery, so immediately post-crash, I was concerned about the damage.
The fallout was a brutal headache and perhaps a slight concussion, neck whiplash that my chiropractor has mostly fixed, a bruising where the helmet dug into my head, a black-and-blue hip, and a shoulder that was mostly frozen. I still have a very swollen anterior rotator cuff in that shoulder four weeks later. That means another trip to my shoulder orthopaedic surgeon for a check on a joint that has already endured two surgeries. But mostly, it was the fierce head slam that left me in goose bumps. I remember thinking “I’m done” just as my head was smashing the cement, and then I felt the most meaty part of my helmet take the hit, causing my head to bounce, and then the helmet seemed to absorb the cement like a sponge. Immediately, I felt perfectly alive, and I was stunned that I was still conscious.
I could not have survived the force of that blow, intact, without that helmet. I would have been another closed head injury casualty on a ventilator, with my family and friends stopping by the hospital to help me with basic life functions. I keep thinking what if that had been one of those days where I didn’t wear my helmet. I had nightmares for several days, repeating that incident in my head without the helmet. Bizarre but true. These types of events can often be life changing.
This story, however, is more about the risk and how we each subjectively perceive it, and not the accident itself. Some folks believe that not wearing a helmet while cycling or motorcycling is “stupid,” though this comment is actually pretty dumb on its own. The lack of a helmet is not a result, at all, of lacking intelligence, or even common sense. The wearing or non-wearing of a helmet reflects how you comprehend and rate risk.
There is a website called Helmet Freedom: Risk in Perspective, and its motto is “Cycling without helmet laws is safe. Fear is unhealthy.” I like that motto because as much as the fear mongering and obsession with safety is worldwide, in America, the totalitarians-at-large have turned safety fixation into a national pastime.
On TedX Copenhagen, bicycle advocate Mikael Colville-Andersen gave a talk, “Why We Shouldn’t Bike With a Helmet.” In his talk, he discusses the culture of fear that controls the public. He calls it a “pornographic obsession with safety equipment” in a “bubble society.” While the culture of fear ignores facts and science, the fear mongering is big business, and it is lucrative.
Mr. Colville-Andersen points out the inanity of the mindsets that hanker for excess “safety” at every junction in life, for every man, woman, and child with a pulse. For example, he points to the Thudguard child helmet, a monstrosity of the purveyors of fear that he describes as “the ultimate example of the slippery slope we are on. Is this really where we want to be headed after 250,000 years of Homo sapiens?” Products like this abound, however, and the dumbed-down public has become dependent upon safety decrees and devices while they are psychologically enslaved to the paternal-authoritarian decrees of their safety masters.
The big news in Michigan has been Governor Rick Snyder’s recent repeal of the mandatory helmet law for motorcyclists. While helmet laws have been steadily encroaching upon every facet of life, the most visible and controversial helmet laws, for motorcyclists, have been flipped in my home state. Immediately, I noted that the vast majority of riders were out, helmetless, starting on day one of the big news.
I have ridden often without a helmet; in fact, each time I visit Ohio I take my helmet off immediately after I cross the border. I’ve teased the wild curves and steep hills of the Ohio Valley many times without wearing my helmet, pushing my Sportster 1200 to the limit in the valley’s mind-bending twisties. As much as I love my hair flying or sporting a naked do-rag, at this point, I have no desire to strip off my helmet and dodge a bunch of numbskulls mindlessly yapping on the their cell phones, and worse, texting while attempting to drive.
In fact, I don’t see myself without a helmet while bicycling in the near future, no matter how innocuous the ride may seem up front. When you have an experience such as I had, it can be a game changer. There are countless pros and cons when looking at the research around helmets. Some research claims helmets cause more injuries, while most claim they prevent injuries. Mostly, the pro-helmet law forces employ simplistic and collectivist arguments to justify their authoritarian posture and lifestyle laws.
Either way, common sense tells me that not wearing a helmet may find me incurring substantial and unnecessary risk. And just one experience demonstrated to me how a collision could potentially turn a productive and happy life into a vegetative state. Your experiences are your own, and no one else can own the consequences of those experiences or relate to your personal misgivings. But then again, just one experience has likely shaped my behavior going forward, for all time. And I still don’t like the helmet nazis.
Whenever I see this intellectual debris being touted in the media and the self-declared childhood consulting community, I am reminded that America is becoming a wasteland of mind-numbing idiocy where the masses of mini-authoritarians are hell-bent on managing, planning, and dominating every aspect of human living. Children are usually the target of the totalitarians-at-large, and as usual, no stone is left unturned, including recess. School recess has long been on the radar map of the lifestyle bureaucrats, and a couple of recent online pieces are rather revealing. Here, a blogger points to a study that reveals the “benefits” of organizing child recess. The reason given for organizing, structuring, planning, and controlling every aspect of your child’s playtime is the following:
It turns out, through study by researchers at Stanford University and Mathematica Policy Research, that organized recess improves transition times back to classroom learning and reduces bullying.
…Teachers at schools with the [organized recess] program found that there was significantly less bullying and exclusionary behavior during recess than teachers at schools without it, but not a reduction in more general aggressive behavior.
The helicopter mindset justifies recess control as a tool for eliminating bullying, and, according to this article, reducing exclusionary behavior. Be mindful of the fact that the modern victimology-psychology establishment considers exclusionary behavior (not including a child in a particular activity) to be a form of “bullying,” and thus a social menace.
Recently, I had the opportunity to watch the film, “In Search of the Perfect Human Diet,” a documentary by CJ Hunt, who went on a ten-year global search to explore anthropologial understandings of the dietary evolution of our species. The film chronicles Hunt’s ten-year search to find the perfect human diet. The film’s website describes the movie as a:
documentary that bypasses common contradictory dietary bias and the recycling of confusion, by filming interviews and explorations with many of the world’s top scientists and researchers in the fields of archaeological science, paleo and forensic anthropology, nutrition and metabolism, biomolecular archaeology, and the emerging field of human dietary evolution.
Hunt has experience in television, broadcasting, and voice-overs, and thus he has a smooth presence in front of the camera. He became interested in nutrition after he went into cardiac arrest as a 23-year-old – due to a genetic defect – while jogging.
The film moves effortlessly though various themes, discussing the groundswell of interest in ancestral health. The film focuses on (1) the hard scientific evidence of what was previously unknowable, and that is that our ancestors ate a diet that today is called “paleo” or “primal”, and (2) how our species declined in health when domesticated grains and plant foods became our major source of protein. Hunt notes that this knowledge is a game changer.
The best part of the film is when Hunt talks to Loren Cordain, Ph.D, and visits with him on a football field that Cordain uses to show a sense of scale in human dietary evolution. This portion of the film should be seen by every layman in order to understand the impact of the modern human diet and its place in human history. Other paleo-primal authorities are featured, such as Dr. Michael Eades, Robb Wolf, Dr. Lane Sebring, Gary Taubes, Boyd Eaton, and David Getoff.
I was especially pleased that Hunt bashed the prevailing media and government message that meat and fat and animal protein are bad, and therefore we should eat less of these foods. He admits that he hopes that the work being done in the ancestral health community will serve to elevate public conversation to the truth, and that government officials will embrace truth when forming public policy. Additionally, the federal food pyramid gets no love in this film. CJ Hunt has been paleo-primal for five years.
An old-but-new scheme has landed upon the shores of the American Diet Wasteland: the feeding-tube-up-your-nose, drop-weight-quick weight loss plan for women who want to fool themselves for the one very expensive day of their life. A reader, Bill, writes me to say:
Here’s the latest for those neurotic brides-to-be out there: the K-E Diet. As unbelievable as it sounds the K-E Diet consists of a feeding tube that runs through the nose to the stomach which provides a slow drip of 800 zero carb calories a day. Side effects? Bad breath, constipation, public acknowledgement of one’s lack of self-esteem, lack of willpower and ignorance of preparing and eating real, non-processed food.
It’s a truth is stranger than fiction situation. I imagine this could be a Beta test for what the PTB have in mind for all the serfs. “Soylent Green ” is passé, this is a dystopia where no one can grow food anymore and gov’t centers distribute liquid food bags to the populace and everyone has a tube in their nose and they stink.
It’s funny, yet pathetic, how the high-strung woman in the video notes that she prefers the degradation of the feeding tube because she “doesn’t have time to work out an hour and a half per day every day.” 1.5 hours per day? For…? Unfortunately, mainstream magazine and TV trash, along with the governmentized, mainstream fitness industry, has indoctrinated people with the notion that one needs to do more to be in better shape. Accordingly, ignorant, whining individuals then exacerbate those claims in their own mind so they have the ultimate excuse for the opt out.
Post-marriage, these soon-to-be wives can only hope that Stouffer’s or Banquet can manage to reinvent the frozen, microwave meal for the feeding tube set. Then we can all make the claim that we have no time to cook, and we can walk around the mall all weekend with the whole family feeding on the run on easy-drip processed foods in between Cinnabons and Auntie Ann’s pretzels. Or, I can see the drive-thru attendant at a future McDonald’s: “Miss, would you like a feeding tube to slow-drip your Chicken McNuggets?”
Imagine the day when cops break through your door, and not because they suspect dope or other non-criminal “criminal” acts, but because a neighbor called the local police hotline to report smelling cigarette smoke? We’re almost there. The creep Bloomberg doesn’t want to “ban” you from smoking in your own apartment. He just wants to use government force to rewrite housing rules so it looks and smells like a ban, but we can’t call it a ban. Thanks to reader Chris Bieber for the link.
