Looking at the comments, I guess I am not the only one who noticed Feinstein’s claims to be a veteran watcher of imploding bullets. She also states that she has been “up close and personal to the Constitution.” That sounds like quite an introduction she had! Then she proceeds to tell us how long she has been in Congress robbing the little people of their freedoms. Remember, back in 2007, she and her government contractor-benefactor husband were deemed to be worth $53 million, and that was before they benefitted from the housing bubble and foreclosure crisis.

Major media organs like the New York Times hate it that a growing movement is afoot wherein Americans are becoming self-aware and taking charge of their own health matters. This article, “Gluten-Free, Whether You Need It or Not,” is yet another piece from a writer who is horrified that any person should dare to not consult the established medical “experts” and instead deploy self-experimentation as a direct result of education. The author of this piece on gluten-free diets refers to going gluten-free as following a “draconian commandment” and pursuing a “fad.”

Many advocates of gluten-free diets warn that non-celiac gluten sensitivity is a wide, unseen epidemic undermining the health of millions of people. They believe that avoiding gluten — a composite of starch and proteins found in certain grassy grains like wheat, barley and rye — gives them added energy and alleviates chronic ills. Oats, while gluten-free, are also avoided, because they are often contaminated with gluten-containing grains.

Others see the popularity of gluten-free foods as just the latest fad, destined to fade like the Atkins diet and avoidance of carbohydrates a decade ago.

The author seeks out people who have improved myriad health issues by giving up gluten, and then he makes fun of them and their “anecdotal” reports of improvement. The author repeatedly points to the lack of scientific evidence on the part of people who improve health markers after quitting grains, yet he has no problem writing the following:

It does not make obvious sense, for example, that someone would lose weight on a gluten-free diet. In fact, the opposite often happens for celiac patients as their malfunctioning intestines recover.

That sounds pretty anecdotal to me, and in fact there are numerous studies on grain-free diets and weight loss and/or improved health markers. The author’s knee-jerk contention throughout the piece is to not take matters into your own hands and see a doctor. Dependency upon the state and its established medical gatekeepers is an expectation in the era of robotic subservience to one’s Masters. Anything else is deemed reckless and irresponsible.

Dr. David Brownstein makes sense of a CDC report and shows how the flu vaccine is not effective. Even some of the establishment media reported this fact.

Here is a great talk given at The 21 Convention in 2012, by Doug McGuff, MD, a prominent member of the ancestral health (paleo-primal) community: “Fitness, Health, and Liberty.” Doug, an emergency room physician, is well known for his ‘Body By Science‘ program, a high-intensity interval training program.

This is an important presentation because Doug presents the historical picture on how the physician-patient relationship went from a fiduciary relationship between provider and consumer to a 3rd party morass of collectivized medicine that sacrificed individual services to the needs of the masses in general in order to conform to the rules outlined by the medical establishment-insurance industry alliance.

While it is easy to blame the Democrats or blame Obama for the nationalization of medical care, this system began to form many years ago under the auspices of self-serving medical practitioners who built alliances with the government-medical establishment in the pursuit of rent-seeking arrangements. Dr. McGuff notes that doctors, who had short-term gains in mind, ultimately sacrificed their profession to these pursuits and thus “set into motion the long-term unintended consequences that resulted in their ultimate enslavement.”

His discussion of the formation of the “Blues” plans to guarantee payment for services while receiving tax-exempt status in exchange for community ratings is spot on. Community ratings, that did not allow for discrimination based on individual health status, were the beginnings of socialized medicine and thus opened the door to moral hazard and the current system of pre-paid medical care that defies all the principles of personal accountability and the free market.

This presentation is 72 minutes, but it is worth every minute of your time. I work in this industry and can tell you that Dr. McGuff has presented the best short timeline I have seen on the topic of how 3rd-party insurance and government-business alliances came to destroy the U.S. health care system. Dr. McGuff is also a libertarian, as if you can’t tell by the presentation.

After many rumors and speculation, it appears that, yes, Sarah Palin did go the real food route. And good for her for dissing Mrs. Obama’s government war on obesity.

Genetically engineered salmon is one step closer to your unsuspecting plate. First came the farm-raised fish lacking the health benefits of wild-caught fish, and now food culture is taking one more step toward lunacy by creating genetically modified animals in the form of Frankenfish. The FDA will likely approve this untested experiment for human beings for consumption as food, thanks to a biotech company called AquaBounty Technologies. The company created this so-called food product via a new gene construct that combines Chinook salmon growth with a regulator gene from an eel-like fish called an ocean pout. This concoction is then injected into Atlantic Salmon eggs, and the result is a non-food product that reaches market size in half the time of one of nature’s salmon.

Another interesting article on the stupid tricks of the industrial food system is presented at Mother Jones: “9 Surprising Facts About Junk Food.” Tom Philpott discusses some of the insights from Michael Moss’s new book Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. The book investigates the tactics of the industrial food machine and how manufacturers carefully craft chemicals in such a way to subvert natural satiety sensors to overwhelm the human brain and keep people desiring more food. From the book:

Some of the largest companies are now using brain scans to study how we react neurologically to certain foods, especially to sugar. They’ve discovered the brain lights up for sugar the same way it does for cocaine, and this knowledge is useful, not only for formulating foods. The world’s largest ice cream maker, Unilever, for instance, parlayed its brain research into a brilliant marketing campaign that sells the eating of ice cream as “scientifically proven” way to make ourselves happy.

Here’s the NPR interview with Michael Moss.

Because the market is swamped with sugar beverages disguised as “vitamin water” and “energy drinks,” milk is no longer the American household staple. Milk consumption has been declining rapidly, and while all sorts of reasons are trotted out, the reality is that people have become educated just enough that they are suspicious of grocery store milk due to the use of recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) in cattle to boost milk production at decreased costs. Folks are becoming aware of the tricks of the industrial food machine, and they are beginning to question the status quo.

As a solution to sagging milk sales, the International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA) and the National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF) are petitioning the FDA to “amend the standard identity of milk” and other dairy products. That is, the proposed solution to sluggish industry sales is to hook more children on dairy products by adding chemical sweeteners. Dairy special interests want to be able to add high fructose corn syrup, aspartame, and other chemicals to milk while bypassing the requirement that the products be labeled “artificially sweetened.” The attempt is to pass this off as a health benefit for children because the chemical sweeteners are not considered to be sugar. A portion of the proposed rule reads as follows:

IDFA and NMPF state that the proposed amendments would promote more healthful eating practices and reduce childhood obesity by providing for lower-calorie flavored milk products. They state that lower-calorie flavored milk would particularly benefit school children who, according to IDFA and NMPF, are more inclined to drink flavored milk than unflavored milk at school. As further support for the petition, IDFA and NMPF state that the proposed amendments would assist in meeting several initiatives aimed at improving the nutrition and health profile of food served in the nation’s schools. Those initiatives include state-level programs designed to limit the quantity of sugar served to children during the school day.

I’ve ordered this book that is being released today, and it promises to be a good one: Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal. Here’s a nice mini-intro to the book on the Organic Connections website. The book is all about chemicals laced with food, such as Pop-Tarts, and why they are so far removed from being food, and how consumers have been hoodwinked by the lies and slick marketing of the Industrial Food Machine. Additionally, I plan to review this book in the near future.

When you hear the term “Detroit food economy,” it doesn’t refer to Detroit’s great economy of self-sufficient, homesteading urban farmers who defy government edicts and turn vacant land to productive use, nor does it refer to North America’s oldest and largest anarcho-farmer’s market that puts the industrial food system to shame. “Detroit food economy” is actually braggadocio terminology for the giganta-welfare model that proudly gives away 100,000 free meals a day to children of negligent, self-serving parents.

I listened to this rubbish on NPR today, where the Executive Director, Office of Food Services for Detroit Public Schools (yes, they have such a title) talked about her program that made her a local hero for managing to make it a sweeping entitlement for almost all Detroit children to get free breakfast, lunch, and dinner, thanks to bilking the taxpayers to fund this entitlement swamp. The same old bilge is trotted out to try and sell the warm-and-fuzzies to the bleeding heart, peabrain masses:

So to see the food program for the kids is a great blessing. You may have some kids this may be their only meal.

Only meal? But wait … it doesn’t end there … Detroit has also managed to plunge this city into further bankruptcy by also providing these kids with two meals/day all summer long via the summer food service program. The NPR show I listened to today also discussed why these programs should be expanded to include the parents … (yes, parents) in the free breakfast-lunch-dinner welfare-o-rama. The parents are hungry and they have to eat, too.

These are the same parents and/or kids that I see at the bus stops or restaurants, or elsewhere in the city, with smartphones (hint: pricey data plans), big-ticket baggy jeans adorned with leather or embroidered patterns, very expensive leather coats with the same adornments, $200+ hair jobs (including  hair extensions or wigs), $60+ nail salon workups (gel or acrylic, with airbrushed nail color), Cadillac Escalades and $30k+ Dodge Chargers, and an assortment of other VIN (Very Important Needs) adorning their bodies and cars. Imagine what you could afford in terms of ostentatious indulgences if you could pass off $400+/month in food bills to the redistribution state and its hoodwinked captives?

Detroit has been getting a lot of attention for its recent shootings. Not the usual criminal stuff, but the step-up in self-defense shootings as people have come to realize that the police only exist to mark the outlines of bodies with chalk.

- Here is the story of a shootout at a tax preparation business in a suburban Detroit residence. A couple attempted to rob the tax preparer in spite of the fact that a security car was sitting out front. What did the security guard use to defend his clients? One of those demonized AR-15s. But of course, no one could possibly ever have a reason to need a high-capacity magazine.

- Another Detroit senior has shot back at apparent criminals. His story is that two teenagers tried to attack and rob him, a 70-year-old girls’ basketball coach of a Detroit high school, as he escorted a couple of his players to their cars after a game. One of the criminals intending violence was killed. All I saw on the news that evening is the family members of the two teenagers talking about what great kids they were, and how they would never do such a thing. Yet one of them had already been expelled from school, according to ABC News. Then it was revealed that the coach is also a Detroit Police Dept reserve officer. While the mother of the dead child claimed her son would never do any such thing, the Wayne County’s Prosecutor’s Office called this a textbook case of self-defense.

- A candy store owner was almost the victim of a thug who intended to rob his wholesale business. The owner pulled a gun and shot the guy dead.

- Another great defensive measure occurred when two kids (brothers) attempted to rob two utility workers as they came down a pole. One of the utility workers was armed, and he shot the attackers, hitting both. Immediately following the incident, the family once again chimed in with the usual response:

“My 16-year-old, he’s a smart kid, intelligent kid. He wasn’t no ghetto gangster, no robber, never beat up a person or nothing like that,” said Mitchell. “I never heard of my sons carrying no guns. I just don’t understand.”

Really? Smart, “good” kids who have so little respect for human life that they sling around guns as if they were toys. This man who saved two lives may be punished for carrying a gun while on the job.

Now here are some stats from The Daily:

Justifiable homicide in the city shot up 79 percent in 2011 from the previous year, as citizens in the long-suffering city armed themselves and took matters into their own hands. The local rate of self-defense killings now stands 2,200 percent above the national average. Residents, unable to rely on a dwindling police force to keep them safe, are fighting back against the criminal scourge on their own. And they’re offering no apologies.

Now – before you brand Detroit as being unique in this regard (crime), these desperation crimes are occurring all over, whether it is Memphis, St. Louis, Oakland, or, of course, Chicago. Just try defending yourself in Washington, D.C. or the wonderful city of Chicago, America’s gun-free killing field. At least here we can defend ourselves, and without – for the most part – overzealous prosecutors incarcerating victims who choose to serve and protect themselves and their family. This is posted at my new blog, “Detroit: From Rust to Riches.”