"The More Things Change, The More They Stay the Same"

By Rich Kozlovich

On January January 16 Steve Karp, M.D. published this piece Et Tu, Medicus describing the corrupt infighting and backstabbing that goes on in medicine....regularly....  from med school and into practice!  

He went on to explain how students would blacken out material in library books needed for courses so others couldn't access that information. Students would remove organs from cadavers so other students couldn't complete their work, giving them "a leg up".  Nurses would deliberately slow walk medical orders because they didn't like the doctor, and doctors would give other doctors negative peer reviews in order to eliminate competition.  

I will say this mentality is standard in every profession there is. I was a 40 year veteran of the pest control industry and for 30 of those years I owned my own company and was heavily involved in my industry's affairs, and I had the privilege of serving with some extraordinary people.

However, I can honestly say I found it mind boggling the level of invertebracy and intellectual corruption so many "leaders" displayed siding with environmentalists and their catspaws at the EPA against their own best interests, the interests of our industry, and the nation, and I include the manufacturers as well. Those actions created the bed bug plague that infested America for years.

I would like to say this is unique to our time, but I'm also a history buff, so I know better.  I recently read the March of Folly by Barbara W. Tuchman (1984) describing the decisions made by leaders, both secular and religious, that were obviously detrimental to their organizations and/or cultures.  What you find is a pattern of self serving corruption is what's behind those decisions, and nothing's changed. 

When we become old we have the tendency to review the history or our lives and the history of our culture, and as a result you can't help to see so much has changed, and so much has been lost and forgotten.   Through the centuries there's been so much suffering, pain, blood, and death, and you have to wonder why, and for what?  

• We look at the past with longing.  
• We see what's unfolding before us and find the present is confusing.  
• Because we can't see a clear path the future frightens us.  

We're caught in between what was, is, and will be, hoping for one last courageous moment where someone with stand up and say you're all wrong, you're going in the wrong direction, and I'm going to tell you why.  Hoping all will choose something better, something that will make a positive difference for humanity.   

But even if there is a moment in time where courageous people take a stand and institute great changes for the better it never lasts.  The selfish, the corrupt, the envious, the greedy are always with us, and they soon befoul every pure thing that exists, as a result humanity has been washed back and forth like waves crashing against the rocky shores by the tides of change, ideology, hate, greed, and envy. 

As I watch these nitwit talking heads playing "gotcha" interviews on television, or Senators, and Congressmen being obnoxious questioning nominees for some position or other, I've often thought about an exchange between Lady Astor of England who told Winston Churchill he was disgustingly drunk, and he probably was, but Churchill being Churchill replied:

“My dear, you are ugly, and what’s more, you are disgustingly ugly.  But tomorrow I shall be sober, and you will still be disgustingly ugly.”

I would like to see responses of a similar nature to the stupid people in the media and politics, playing "gotcha" instead of challenging positions based on facts and logic in an honest effort to find truth. 

Culture is king, and the battle to control national cultures has been eternal, and now with globalism being a driving force, the efforts to control world culture is unending. It will never stop because the corrupt, selfish, greedy, cruel, and evil people in society will always be there, and they will always be everywhere so many times hiding who and what they are until they can achieve their evil goals.  

We're heading into a period of turbulence with a new President who really wants to fix things, reduce government and the massive impositions big government has imposed on America.  But entrenched forces of big government tyranny will not go quietly into the night.  A leader needs to be able to recognize who his allies, and who his enemies really are.  

Allies will be issue oriented, if you drift too far from their paradigm they will abandon you.   Enemy allies will go back and forth depending on how the issue affects them. They cannot be trusted at all since their motives are totally self-serving.   Enemies will stand against you no matter what. It doesn’t matter what you do to them or for them as they will do everything in their power to crush you. Their hate may be silent, but it is very real and insidious. 

We're seeing this play out right now with Trump's nominees, some of whom I have serious misgivings about, especially RFK Jr.  The next two years leading up to the midterm elections will be more than interesting as this will be a major battle to control the national culture, especially interesting since the corrupt Pravda media is on it's death bed, and an alternative media is now ascendant, perhaps truth will also become ascendant.  

He Had ‘Foreknowledge of 9/11’. Now He's Free

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

“I am studying airplanes!” Abd al Salam al Hilah told Osama bin Laden’s top Italian operative in the summer of 2000. “We are focusing on the air alone… It will leave them stunned… Remember, the danger at the airports. If it comes off, it will be reported in all the world’s papers.”

Al-Hilah has now boarded another plane that takes him from Guantanamo Bay to Oman.

In New Orleans, Biden wept his crocodile tears, told families of the victims about how much he had suffered when his wife died in a car accident, and then went right back to freeing terrorists.

The terrorists include Al-Hilah, an Al Qaeda facilitator, who knew about major terrorist attacks ahead of time, and conducted conversations with an Imam in Italy soliciting forged documents “for the brothers who have to go to America,” warning to, “never utter their real names.”

The Gitmo evaluation stated that Al-Hilal “had foreknowledge of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 2000 attack on the UK Embassy in Sanaa…the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, a planned attack on the US or British Embassy in Sanaa that was to occur in October 2002, and probably the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack.”

The USS Cole bombing killed 17 sailors and injured 37 in the worst attack on a Navy vessel in nearly 40 years. The Gitmo report noted that Al-Hilal facilitated the travel plans of the Al Qaeda terrorists.

Now with the blood of 17 Americans on his hands, along with many others from other preventable terrorist attacks, including possibly 9/11, Democrats made Al-Hilal a free man.

And he is not alone.

Accompanying him to freedom is Suhayl Abdul Anam al Sharabi, an Osama bin Laden bodyguard, who was listed in the Gitmo evaluations, as one of the airplane hijackers from the original expanded version of the 9/11 plot that would have also hijacked planes in Southeast Asia that was later aborted. The parole board had previously denied his release because of Al-Sharabi’s “possible participation in KSM’s [9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s] plot to conduct 9/11-style attacks in Southeast Asia.” Al-Sharab was also listed in the Gitmo review as having served as the director of an al Al-Qaeda guesthouse and an Al-Qaeda instructor.

Also released by the Democrats is Sharqawi Abdu Ali Al Hajj, a “confidant” of Osama bin Laden, who recruited his bodyguards, moved hundreds of Jihadists into Afghanistan and was associated with 11 of the 9/11 hijackers.

The Democrat administration also freed Tawfiq Nasir Awad Al-Bihani who vowed that if he was released, he would kill Americans, come to America and “fly another plane”.

Hassan Muhammad Ali Bib Attash, an Al-Qaeda terrorist, was freed by Biden and his Democrat allies despite his past role “preparing a terrorist operation against US naval ships and US oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz” that would have involved a boat filled with explosives whose goal was to “destroy the US economy by shutting down the oil shipping lanes.”

Sanad Ali Yislam Al Kazimi, an Osama bin Laden bodyguard, bragged that “all Muslims are against the US, even Muslims within the US,” and that “he could raise $100,000 US in any mosque in the US in 30 minutes using Koran passages, which Muslims could use to fight Americans in any country”. Now thanks to the Democrats, he’ll have a chance to do that.

Al-Kazimi, was freed from Gitmo despite taking part in a plot to fly a plane into a US Navy vessel in Dubai. Al-Kizmi allegedly taped flying lessons and plotted out routes for transporting explosives. Al-Kazimi had described the leader of ISIS as a true follower of Islam.

Other released Bin Laden bodyguards include Uthman Abd al-Rahim Muhammad Uthman and Moath Hamza Ahmed al-Alwi. The Democrat administration also freed Khalid Ahmed Qassim despite a warning that he “will pose a threat if released” and Omar Mohammed Ali al-Rammah who had been caught in possession of detonators abroad. Also out is Hani Saleh Rashid Abdullah, an Al-Qaeda terrorist who “planned to participate in terrorist operations targeting US forces in Karachi, Pakistan and possibly inside the United States” and was taken in an Al-Qaeda safe house where “a laptop computer recovered from the safe house where detainee was captured contained data that could be used to target aircraft for hijacking operations.”

Democrat officials embedded in the Department of Defense described this mass release of Al Qaeda terrorists, deemed too dangerous to free even under Obama, as a “resettlement” with the “partner” government of Oman.

Two previous Gitmo terrorists, Abdul Zahir and Abdul Karim, had been urgently transferred to Oman by Obama as part of a mass release of terrorists four days before Trump’s first inauguration.

Zahir had taken part in a grenade attack against American and western civilians in Afghanistan.

Zahir was freed by Obama despite a warning that he had “made statements openly indicating his intention to rejoin the fight against US forces” and that “due to his placement and access in Afghanistan when he was originally captured, it is likely he will return to the fight.”

Last year, the Taliban asked Oman to release Karim and Zahir, and the “partner” government eagerly obeyed. The Taliban held a ceremony celebrating the return of the Al Qaeda terrorists.

The Taliban have an embassy in Oman and Iran also has extensive ties to the country.

Releasing Islamic terrorists to Oman is as good as giving them a free pass to rejoin the fight. The Democrats chose to free 11 Al Qaeda terrorists to a known terror gateway despite the fact that the Omanis had already allowed past Jihadis to rejoin their comrades in Afghanistan.

Defense Department officials falsely claim that the Al Qaeda terrorists being freed “underwent a thorough, interagency review by career professionals who unanimously determined all detainees as transfer eligible consistent with the national security interests of the United States.”

Freeing Al Qaeda terrorists endangers national security and is motivated by an urgent need to implement the original Obama policy, as the DOD press release admits, of “closing Guantanamo Bay” and freeing all the terrorists without regard to the results of the 2024 election.

Defense Department officials partaking in the mass release of Al Qaeda terrorists are violating their oath, their professional responsibilities and the national security of this country, exposing Americans abroad and at home to Islamic terror threats out of their obedience to their party.

Obama operatives inside the Pentagon have achieved their goal of reducing Gitmo’s population to 15 terrorists, of whom they still intend to transfer another 6 if they can get away with it before President Trump takes office. And if their previous actions under the Obama administration are any guide, they will try to free Al Qaeda terrorists even a few days before the inauguration.

Their goal is to get the number of Al Qaeda terrorists in Gitmo into the single digits.

A number of others including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, have received plea deals from Democrats over the protests of families of 9/11 victims.

The media’s reporting on the mass release of Al-Qaeda terrorists refers to them only as “detainees”, never uses the name “Al-Qaeda” and strongly implies that these are innocent men who were locked up for no reason in an Islamophobic panic after September 11. Not a single story by any major media outlet or newspaper mentions any of their past activities.

The AP, for example, describes the Al Qaeda terrorists only as “Yemeni men” and emphasizes that they “were never charged with a crime.” It refers to Al-Haji, an Osama bin Laden confidant who was moving as many as 15 Jihadists a week, only as a humanitarian political prisoner who “had undergone repeated hunger strikes and hospitalizations at Guantanamo to protest his 21 years in prison”. An article about the release of Al-Qaeda terrorists never mentions Al-Qaeda.

What is the AP, which has a history of complicity with Islamic terrorist groups, and other media organizations hiding? The fact that even after the New Orleans Islamic terrorist attack, the Democrats and their media allies will not stop aiding, abetting and freeing Islamic terrorists.

We can’t defeat Islamic terrorism until we defeat their allies within.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.  Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

 

Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left tells the untold story of the Left's 200-Year War against America, and readers love it.

How the good old boys handle the new Trump administration will tell us a lot.

How the good old boys handle the new Trump administration will tell us a lot.

By Leesa K. Donner Jan 16, 2025 @ Liberty Nation News,Tags: Articles, Media, Opinion

 

In 1965, Barry McGuire recorded and released the iconic protest song “Eve of Destruction.” It shot up the charts and quickly became an anthem that marked the tumultuous decade. It put the issues of the day into sharp relief: The draft, the possibility of nuclear war, the March in Selma, the Watts riots, and the John F. Kennedy assassination were but a few of the references outlined in the popular tune. Quite simply, the lyrics gave a voice to a younger generation at odds with the establishment.

Today, as we sit on the precipice of a second Donald Trump administration, another division appears to be taking place – not a generational one between young and old, but rather a battle between the new media and the establishment media.

It is a time of crossroads, and the late, great legacy media elites now have a choice to make: Will they go with the winds of change, or will they stand guard over their once powerful – now waning – influence over American culture and politics? Put another way, one wonders if they will choose to survive or if they are determined to preside over their own destruction.

Legacy Media Hanging by a Thread

By every measure, the legacy media appear to be hanging on a thread of vivid color. The slips employees are getting are pink, and the bottom line that chief executive officers are looking at is red. It’s just a holy mess from all angles – especially for news businesses that must pay attention to their bottom lines.

Still, and astonishingly, it doesn’t seem like the good old boys have seen enough light to change their ways. A few examples of how they have covered the incoming Trump administration is indicative of their mindset. For example, when former special counsel Jack Smith dumped a 137-page report that endeavored to prove Trump tried to obstruct justice in the aftermath of the 2020 election, Washington’s most well-known legacy paper – once proudly owned by the Graham family and now by tech magnate Jeff Bezos – covered it as if Trump had been tried and convicted. The newspaper’s standard 5,000-word hyperbole article was more of a one-sided defense of Smith than a paper giving both angles of the story. But it is hardly alone.

The New York Times covered the Smith story in much the same manner:

“The report amounted to an extraordinary rebuke of a president-elect, capping a momentous legal saga that saw the man now poised to regain the powers of the nation’s highest office charged with crimes that struck at the heart of American democracy.”

Instead of balanced reporting, The Times’ coverage waffled between sounding like sour grapes and an epistle of lamentations.

In yet another example, both newspapers are covering the confirmation hearings of Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense as if he were a convicted criminal. The sheer column inches of negativity about the decorated veteran are staggering. Clearly, his checkered personal past is an issue, but it’s not as if womanizing and imbibing too much alcohol are novel topics in Washington. A better way to tackle the Hegseth process would have been to point out he has a few skeletons in his closet, but he also comes to the table with a stellar service background.

It’s News, Captain – But Different!

Others in the old guard network appear to be lining up as part of the loyal opposition. The New Republic recently ran a piece on Trump’s hyperbolic assertion that he will end the Ukraine-Russia war on “day one.” Taking him literally rather than seriously (a standard head-fake used by the legacy media), TNR came out swinging, “Donald Trump is backtracking on his big campaign promise to end the Ukraine war in 24 hours, according to his special envoy to Ukraine.” The article droned on about a 100-day timeline offered by a Fox News TV guest and President Trump’s day-one remark. Such coverage has caused a mass exodus from the legacy media to smaller outlets where Americans feel they can hear either the facts, more balanced coverage, or – wonder of wonders – both.

It’s worth taking a moment to juxtapose the social media platforms’ response to the new administration and that of the legacy media. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg may not be genuine in turning over a new leaf, but at least he’s trying to take a less aggressive stance and promises that he has learned his lesson. X, of course, had its come-to-Trump moment when Elon Musk purchased Twitter. And even Bezos has managed to tamp down the rebellion between Amazon and the incoming president, though one wonders if Bezos will eventually try to right the ship at Washington’s flagship newspaper, which has been bleeding red for a while now.

There are two ways to look at this: Either those in the legacy media can’t stop themselves from engaging in a constant drumbeat of left-wing coverage, or they don’t care what will happen should they continue on such a trajectory. Either way, they are participating in a near-certain death spiral. Standing on the eve of destruction, they may want to rethink their descent into the abyss.

~

Liberty Nation does not endorse candidates, campaigns, or legislation, and this presentation is no endorsement.

Read More From Leesa K. Donner Executive Editor

The OECD Pushes Leftist Policy in Chile

January 16, 2025 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

My primary criticism of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is that the Paris-based international bureaucracy is trying to become some sort of global tax enforcer for left-wing policy.

Indeed, I founded the Center for Freedom and Prosperity in 2000 precisely because the OECD started its “harmful tax competition” project, which threatened low-tax jurisdictions with financial protectionism if they didn’t agree to help Europe’s welfare states enforce their anti-growth tax laws.

For the past 10 years, I’ve been fighting the OECD’s campaign to impose corporate tax harmonization and increase tax burdens on business (which, of course, means higher tax burdens on workers, consumers, and shareholders).

But there’s another activity of the OECD that also deserves attention. My secondary criticism of the bureaucracy is that it urges bad policy on a country-by-country basis.

On several occasions, I’ve criticized the bureaucrats for pushing bad policy on the United States (the fact that American taxpayers pay the biggest share of the OECD’s bloated budget makes that doubly outrageous).

Today, I’m going to criticize the bureaucrats for pushing bad policy on Chile.

I’ll start with the observation that Chile currently has a left-wing president, so it hardly needs any help doing dumb things.

Yet the OECD just published its Economic Survey of Chile and explicitly recommends higher taxes to fund bigger government. They don’t even hide this statist agenda. It’s explicitly summarized in Table 1.4 of the report.

Here’s some of what was written.

Tax revenues of close to 21% of GDP are insufficient to meet spending needs and future fiscal pressures due to necessary spending in the green and digital transitions, to deal with more frequent and severe climate risks, and higher spending from population ageing. A comprehensive tax reform can increase fiscal space. Such reform should consider raising more revenue from personal income taxes, …higher immovable property taxes, and environmental and tobacco ones, even if transitory, while gradually lowering regressive income tax deductions and exemptions.

You may be wondering about the Chile’s fiscal situation. Has government been starved of resources? Has spending already been cut to the bone? Are the OECD’s recommendations a way of compensating for excessive frugality in the past.

Hardly.

Here are two more charts from the report. As you can see from the one of the right, the spending burden in Chile has already been on an upward trajectory.

At the risk of stating the obvious, I’ll point out that the public sector in Chile already is way too big and exceeds the gr0wth-maximizing size of government.

Yet the current socialist government wants to make it bigger and the OECD is aiding and abetting that mistake.

I’ll close with one final chart from the report. It shows that Chile was doing a decent job of converging with the developed world but that progress ground to a halt about 10 years ago and now there’s backsliding.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think any of this is a coincidence.

There was a great period of pro-market reform in Chile in the late 1970s and early 1980s, followed by a couple of decades that can be described as status quo.

And during that time, there was a lot of economic progress.

But things started heading south about a decade ago.

• I wrote back in 2014 that the country’s newly elected leftist president was taking the country in the wrong direction. And she did.
• She was then followed in office by Sebastian Pinera, who supposedly leaned to the right but governed like a big-government Republican.
• And now the country is plagued by Gabriel Boric and his awful economic agenda.

So I’m not surprised that Chile no longer is converging.

And I’m not surprised that the OECD is pushing Chile to further sabotage its own economy.

Diversity Insurance

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

Is your home on fire because your local fire department is run by three lesbians named Kirsten and there’s no water because that department is also being run by a diversity hire?

Sorry, maybe you should have bought diversity insurance.

The vital infrastructure of yesterday’s cities used to be run by somebody’s brother-in-law while the vital infrastructure of today’s cities is being run by a professional grievance expert with the right combination of skin color, sex and sexual appetites and makes that brother-in-law, who at least managed to marry into the right family, look like a genius. That’s bad news for you.

Every town, city and state is just one crisis away from melting down like a Somali ice cream cone. Your power grid consists of solar panels, wind turbines and other technology that could barely power a medieval grain mill on the best of days roped together with batteries stolen by migrants from defunct Teslas, and a few actual leftover power plants paid for with carbon credits for a turbine in Montana. The power company has a climate plan, an equity plan and weekly DEI sessions, but it doesn’t have a plan for what to do when the power goes down.

Your government is run by a few kids who spent their college careers demanding safe spaces and complaining about insensitive Halloween costumes and older drunken politicos waiting to die in office who are scared to death of them. Instead of planning for an actual disaster, everyone spent the last year arguing about Gaza ceasefire resolutions and making plans for when the sea levels are projected to rise in the 2030s. No one has been inside their actual offices since the pandemic and the only work government officials have done was in pajamas.

The police have been defunded. The few remaining cops don’t answer calls because they don’t want to be featured on the evening news. The ERs closed because they were filled with migrants using them in lieu of health insurance. The doctors triage by asking for pronouns. And in the event of a major disaster, relief workers screen for Trump signs and offer handbooks about checking your cishet privilege.

How do you cope with all this? Diversity insurance.

Regular insurance covers natural disasters but diversity insurance protects you against the unnatural disaster behind the natural disasters. Natural disasters are unpredictable, but DEI disasters are extremely predictable so the one thing you know is that whenever a disaster happens, an army of DEI hires will make it that much worse. If a firestorm breaks out, the DEI hires will have misplaced all the water. If a hurricane strikes, DEI staffers will insist on handing out relief supplies based on the sexual preferences of the recipients. If the power goes out, DEI hires will make sure that it never comes on again because that would be bad for the environment. And if an asteroid is headed for the earth, the DEI hires will issue press releases warning that black people will be hardest hit by the total extinction of the human race.

Someday, top government, corporate and emergency positions will no longer be staffed by sociology majors who got into Harvard by writing about the time racist police officers randomly stopped them while they were going 95 miles an hour and smoking pot in a school zone, but until then, diversity insurance is your best defense against every important position being held by DEI morons.

Morons who hate you and view every job, no matter the title, position or mission statement, as an opportunity to deconstruct the parts of western civilization that don’t directly benefit them.

Until then, there’s diversity insurance.

Diversity insurance will insure you against DEI hires. When crime waves terrorize your neighborhood, everything is on fire, including the fire department, and the economy craters because the only economics training the people in charge of it have is saying “late stage capitalism, am I right” and rolling their eyes, diversity insurance will be there for you.

Diversity insurance can’t stop DEI, but it can heal some of the damage done by DEI.

You may think that you don’t need diversity insurance because you don’t live in New York, Los Angeles or Minneapolis, but DEI can strike when you least expect it. Even if you’re in the reddest town in a red state, and you wouldn’t vote for a woke in a million years, companies, including the ones responsible for your water, power and emergency services, are still hiring college graduates from top schools who only know that everything is racist. Especially you.

And even if your town hasn’t been infested yet, the state and federal level is full of them. So is your insurance company. And the private equity funds that control it. And the union retirement pensions that control the private equity funds. And the DEI hire politicians that control the union pensions that control the private equity funds that control your insurance companies.

Diversity insurance however doesn’t do DEI hires. Unfortunately diversity insurance also doesn’t exist. Insurance is supposed to protect you against possible disasters, not absolutely certain ones. And DEI is the most certain disaster since the Titanic decided to match wits with an iceberg. Insuring against diversity has worse risk rates than a house built on a mudslide in the middle of an earthquake that is sliding into the ocean just as a hurricane shows up.

It’s easier to insure an 18-year-old driving a Porsche in Chicago than against DEI.

There’s no such thing as ‘diversity insurance’. And there’s no way to escape diversity except by returning to a system based on merit and occasional nepotism which is still better than a system whose only concept of merit is a combo of toxic politics and correctly colored body parts.

You may not be interested in DEI, but DEI is interested in you and will destroy you. The only insurance against it is destroying it as thoroughly as a DEI hire can destroy your local fire department, police force or a sub sandwich. Either you destroy DEI or it will destroy you.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading. 

 

Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left tells the untold story of the Left's 200-Year War against America And readers love it.

How Did Pete Hegseth Do?

Democrats think Pete Hegseth is really weird.  Imagine that!

By Rich Kozlovich

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On Friday, November 29, 2024 I published this piece, What About Pete?, and it was hit a whole lot more than I expected.  That meant to me Pete Hegseth as SecDef was an issue that resonated with the nation.  And now after his hearing we should ask:  How did Pete Hegseth perform?

He was greeted by a round of applause as he entered the chamber, and gave his opening remarks, with interruptions from Democrat activists, was questioned over allegations of "sexual assault, alcoholism, and mishandling of finances", which he had to respond to over and over again as Senators keep repeating what Sen. Jim Banks called BS anonymous accusations, and as for their claims about his drinking habits, Sen. Markwayne Mullin called his accusers hypocrites asking  ‘How Many Senators Have Showed Up Drunk to Vote at Night’.

 Hegseth came out swinging against what he called, and I think legitimately so, an orchestrated smear campaign the Pravda media threw up against him saying:

“A small handful of anonymous sources were allowed to drive a smear campaign and agenda about me, because our left wing media in America today, sadly, doesn’t care about the truth. All they were out to do [was] to destroy me. And why do they want to destroy me? Because I’m a change agent and a threat to them, because Donald Trump was willing to choose me, to empower me, to bring the Defense Department back to what it really should be, which is war fighting,”

As for this blatantly false issue of racism, and White Supremacy being rampant in the military, he dealt with that easily and intelligently, which must have driven the Democrats crazy and they acted that way with double standards, manufactured outrage and smears.  That's all the Democrats have, and that's all they offered.   

• Sen. Mark Kelly claims he doesn't have the qualifications to be SecDef, and repeats all the smears, which were repeated regularly.   
• Senator Mazie Hirono who has no fear her membership in the Club For the Galacticly Stupid will be revoked.
•  Tim Kaine’s line of questioning indicates he has a strong foundational Judaic/Christian moral code, except he was running to be Hillary's Vice President, so that confirms the only time leftists think that code is of value is when they can use it against their adversaries.   
• Gillibrand lost her mind outraged that Pete wouldn't want mothers serving on the front lines. 
• Pocahontas Warren looked like a fool and was roundly laughed at by the audience. 
• The one I really liked best was stolen valor Senator Blumenthal who claims Pete is so unqualified,’ it’s almost a ‘joke’.

So, according to the stolen valor Senator a 44 year old ... legitimate....combat veteran officer,  serving in Iraq and Afghanistan was "a joke" who:

Earned the "Bronze Star.[he's authorized] to wear the Joint Service Commendation Medal, two Army Commendation Medals, three Army Reserve Components Achievement Medals, the National Defense Service Medal with a Bronze Service Star, an Afghanistan Campaign Medal with two campaign stars, an Iraq Campaign Medal with two campaign stars, the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal, the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, the Armed Forces Reserve Medal with “M” Device, the Army Service Ribbon, two Overseas Service Ribbons, the D.C. National Guard Emergency Service Ribbon, a NATO Medal, a Joint Meritorious Unit Award, a Combat Infantryman Badge, and an Expert Infantryman Badge. 

A  retired a major, who refers to himself as a recovering neocon now believing invading Iraq was a mistake with critical insights on weapons procurement, training, DEI insanity, planning, and more.

But according to Blumenthal he's "a joke".  Blumenthal was a military disgrace, he's a disgrace as a Senator and as a human being.   As Patricia McCarthy argues, Democrats on the Armed Services Committee have seriously humiliated themselves, saying: 

All the Democrats on that panel disgraced themselves.  Each came with a planned attack, their scripts filled with smears that have been debunked and hypotheticals that had no bearing on defense policy.  They hammered him with personal attacks, disparaged his rather spectacular résumé, and asked questions that they then refused to let him answer.  They were all about getting sound bites for the likes of Joy Reid and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, who never care about facts or the truth.  Their plan was to humiliate and destroy him despite his obvious qualifications. What they actually did, however, was show their own true colors.  This is a cabal of contemptible people.  

It's well known that rules are just for Republicans, not for Democrats, so they tried to change the hearing rules to accommodate their schemes.  That dog just won't hunt now, but what must have really made them nuts is when Hegseth's FBI background check was submitted to the Senate it contained one word that must have crushed their most ardent dream of destroying him.  That word was, “unremarkable.” 

On the other hand what we saw in his favor was "remarkable".   Hundreds of Navy SEAL, veterans, Green Berets, and other branches marched to D.C. to publicly support him.  He's considered to be an incredibly talented, battle-proven leader’, whereas there's absolutely no excuse for the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal General Austin oversaw.  An absolute failure as SecDef the entire Democrat party praises even now.    

America’s military is in trouble and the reason for that is the left has infected the military with a "focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion" which openly and deliberately  works at:

"reducing the number of white male officers a priority. Racial quotas not only damage the ability of the military to promote the best and brightest to the highest ranks, but they also demoralize those who either didn’t get a promotion and those who serve under commanders who they may now wonder whether or not they got their positions on their merits."

Noel Wiliams asks, "Who has come out looking better: the future SecDef, or the intemperate senators who grilled him? "

 

Fact-Checkers Heading Down Same Black Hole as CNN, MSNBC

Mark Zuckerberg disbands his army of ‘truth tellers’ who are shocked, shocked at their dismissal.

by Joe Schaeffer | Jan 15, 2025 @ Liberty Nation News, Tags: Articles, Opinion, Politics

(Photo by Lori Van Buren/Albany Times Union via Getty Images)

A self-anointed coterie of journalists that has forfeited the public’s trust with repeated, egregious displays of personal bias is astounded that it can’t skate by on credentialism any longer. Where have we seen that before? The gravy train for fact-checkers appears to be grinding to a halt, and all the muttering in the world about “codes of principles” and “identifying truth” won’t be able to save another crumbling annex of the big-box media edifice from fading into irrelevance on a CNN or MSNBC scale.

On Jan. 7, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to end the “fact-checking” programs at his company’s major social media sites, which include Facebook and Instagram. The reaction of the fact-checkers to this unexpected move reveals the full extent of their disconnect from the vast majority of Americans who do not share the basic assumptions of their urbanite progressive mindset.

Fact-Checkers Not Biased But ‘Why Does Trump Lie So Much?’

Writing about itself in a “why I’m important” manner, the woefully compromised Poynter Institute conveyed the deep distress felt by staffers at its International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), which has partnered with Meta.

“The fact-checkers used by Meta follow a Code of Principles requiring nonpartisanship and transparency,” IFCN Director Angie Drobnic Holan is quoted by her employer as saying. “It’s unfortunate that this decision comes in the wake of extreme political pressure from a new administration and its supporters. Fact-checkers have not been biased in their work – that attack line comes from those who feel they should be able to exaggerate and lie without rebuttal or contradiction.”

She doesn’t even realize she’s doing it. Drobnic Holan, former editor-in-chief of Poynter’s flagship PolitiFact fact-checking site, couldn’t resist taking a loaded shot at President-elect Donald Trump while earnestly stressing her professional evenhandedness.

It’s a question often asked of the Ivory Tower leftists: Do they not realize that the plebes have access to the Internet now? We can fact-check the fact-checkers. It’s quick, it’s easy, and the results speak louder than the canned jargon of dominant media journalists. Attempting to control online platforms only makes Americans more determined to dig beyond the duplicitous surface.

“It’s astounding even now, two years into Donald Trump’s presidency, how many things he says on a daily basis that just aren’t true.” That’s the lead sentence of Drobnic Holan’s 2019 essay in progressive establishment magazine The Atlantic titled “Why Trump Is the Most Fact-Checked President.”

“Why does Trump lie so much? Only he can answer that question, but it’s certainly a long-standing behavior that dates back to his time in luxury real estate and reality television,” the self-proclaimed transparently nonpartisan Drobnic Holan continues.

She’s not an exception.

‘There’s a Lot More to Fact-Check on the Right’

“We heard the news [of being dropped by Facebook] just like everyone else,” Alan Duke, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Lead Stories, mournfully related to Wired.com. “No advance notice.” Lead Stories began fact-checking for Meta in 2019.

Locked into his pre-conceived biases, Duke never saw the ax coming.

“We don’t have anything against anybody. We don’t have an agenda. We are looking for facts and we fact-check the right and the left,” Duke, a former CNN employee, told the network in an article published Oct. 29, 2020, less than a week before the presidential election. “It just so happens that there’s a lot more to fact check on the right. It’s just mathematical.”

See how he assumes everyone would readily understand such faulty logic?

Science Feedback is another Meta fact-check partner about to lose its sweet gig. It, too, was featured in multiple big-box media accounts of Zuckerberg’s surprising move. “Science Feedback is a left-of-center publishing organization that operates the blogs Climate Feedback and Health Feedback,” watchdog website Influence Watch states. “Both websites publish opinion articles claiming to assess the scientific merit of popular media articles and scientific claims.”

Want a sample of their work? “Tire fires in Kuwait have a much smaller climate influence than methane emissions from cows, contrary to claims,” a Jan. 6 post on the group’s site proclaims.

Here’s another: “No, marine emissions study didn’t find that climate change is ‘greatly overestimated,’ contrary to recent claims,” a Dec. 20 post reads.

This is what Facebook users will be missing out on now that Zuckerberg has pulled the rug from under the fact-checkers.

And what a cozy carpet it was.

“Meta has provided millions of dollars to fact checkers all over the world that has enabled fact checkers not just to provide fact checking for Facebook and Instagram, but also to raise the visibility of fact checking and to enable fact checkers to hold public officials accountable for what they say. That’s huge,” PolitiFact founder Bill Adair sighed to a sympathetic NPR on Jan. 10.

For Discerning News Hounds

Poynter will manage to survive for some time. It receives funding from several well-heeled sources, “including corporate partners, philanthropic foundations, government agencies and individual donors.”

NPR is listed among those entities, “[p]artnering through the shared values of truth and public accountability for a unique, multi-year contract in which Poynter senior vice president Kelly McBride serves as the NPR Public Editor,” as Poynter put it.

Fact-check: This relationship is not disclosed in the NPR article lamenting the demise of the Facebook fact-checkers.

“Fact checkers worry about the viability of their industry without Meta’s support,” the NPR piece lamented. But are they worrying about the right thing? Sugar daddies can be extremely valuable, but a tottering big-box media is learning the hard way that integrity in the public eye, once destroyed, is usually irretrievable.

~

Liberty Nation does not endorse candidates, campaigns, or legislation, and this presentation is no endorsement.

Read More From Joe Schaeffer Political Columnist

Critically Thinking about the Federal Department of Education

By John Droz, Jr. @ Critically Thinking About Select Societal Issues

Three Powerful, Practical, Plausible Recommendations to Improve DOEd

There is now an unprecedented opportunity that Critical Thinkers (that’s us) should take advantage of.  Arguably, for the first time in modern US history, the federal government is:  

1. ) open to making radical changes in government agencies,
2.  ) has the right political perspective, and 
3.  ) is receptive to citizen inputs.

Yes, there are always reasons to be skeptical — but the upside is so great that we should assume the best, and offer assistance. For those who are incurably cynical and say no, then you are foregoing your future rights to complain!

I’m polling my Critical Thinking Substack readers as to their best ideas regarding the Department of Health and Human Services (FDA, CDC, etc.), Department of Education (DOEd), Department of Energy (DOE), EPA, and Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). [If you have any good connections with the upper echelon of any of these federal Departments, please email me.]

Let’s say that this is the scenario:  

a) we are given five (5) minutes for a face-to-face meeting with the Secretary of each of these Departments, and 

b) we are asked to limit our suggestions to three (3) items.  

Due to these rules, we need to filter out many ideas so that we are left with just three (3) succinct, important, doable recommendations.

This is the second in my series of commentaries to each of the above-mentioned Departments. Below are my suggested three (3) recommendations for the federal Department of Education (DOEd). Critically Thinking readers can constructively weigh in with support or any improvements on what I’ve proposed, in the Comments below...

We’ll then try to get the end product to the new Department of Education Secretary, probably Linda McMahon.

Recommendation #1 —

Redefine its Mission. Here is the boilerplate pablum that is their current mission statement. This should be upgraded to say something like: meaningfully assisting States in producing high school graduates who are competent, productive, healthy, critical thinkers (e.g., see this fine piece). In other words, the Department should leverage the power and money of the federal government to aggressively assist States in fixing the currently deplorable K-12 education system. (Note: in 2024 the Department had $80± Billion in discretionary funding (out of a $250± Billion budget) — that is a LOT of leverage!)

In the process of reformulating DOEd’s mission get rid of bureaucratic bloat. Strip down the Department to the bare essentials. (Right now there are over 4100 employees. How about aiming for 400 — a 90% reduction? Four hundred competent, motivated, mission-focused employees can do a LOT!)

Recommendation #2 —

Clearly spell out what the primary objective of K-12 education should be. Assuming that the 3Rs are properly taught, the #1 objective of every state education system should be to produce Critically Thinking graduates. In other words, States should radically change their education systems from their current focus on teaching students WHAT to think, to instead teach them HOW to think. Since no State is currently doing that(!), this would revolutionize American education. (Note: presently less than ten States even mention Critical Thinking in their Mission statements!)

DOEd should put this as a condition for States to receive money from DOEd. In other words, unless a State can show that their K-12 education curricula is properly teaching students to be Critical Thinkers, they are not eligible for certain DOEd funds.

Recommendation #3 —

DOEd should take an unequivocal stand against age-inappropriate books being in K-12 school classes and libraries (e.g., see here and here). The fundamental problem is that the American Library Association (ALA) does not recognize the issue of age-appropriateness! DOEd has the power and authority to stand up against ALA — much more than most States do.

This idea is already societally accepted in the US. A good example is that the rating systems for movies and TV are based on age-appropriateness. The movie website says: “Established in 1968, the film rating system provides parents with the information needed to determine if a film is appropriate for their children.” Exactly the same thing applies to books being considered for K-12 schools!

To make a profound improvement in K-12 education, the Department should specify that they will not provide any certain DOEd funds to a State that does not have an enforced appropriate official written policy regarding the age-appropriateness of materials associated with their K-12 schools. [Towards that same end the Department should aggressively oppose legislation that undermines the concept of age-appropriateness — like this.]

—————————————————————————————

Yes, I am fully aware that there are a multitude of other education-related issues — and several of them are significant (e.g., see here). The question is, if you only had five (5) minutes to speak to the DOEd Secretary, and were limited to your three (3) best recommendations, what would they be? These are my recommendations.

---

Here is other information from this scientist that you might find interesting:

I am now offering incentives for you to sign up new subscribers!

I also consider reader submissions on Critical Thinking on my topics of interest.

Check out the Archives of this Critical Thinking substack.

WiseEnergy.org: discusses the Science (or lack thereof) behind our energy options.

C19Science.info: covers the lack of genuine Science behind our COVID-19 policies.

Election-Integrity.info: multiple major reports on the election integrity issue.

Media Balance Newsletter: a free, twice-a-month newsletter that covers what the mainstream media does not do, on issues from COVID to climate, elections to education, renewables to religion, etc. Here are the Newsletter’s 2024 Archives. Please send me an email to get your free copy. When emailing me, please make sure to include your full name and the state where you live. (Of course, you can cancel the Media Balance Newsletter at any time - but why would you?

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And a New King Arose in Egypt - Israel, D.C. and the Hamas Surrender Deal

"And a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph." Exodus 1:8 

Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

Every country fights Islamic terrorism alone. What should have been a world war against a common enemy has become a lonely battle in which each country strives separately against a global threat. And within each country, individuals have been abandoned by their governments to face sudden death.

This is not just Israel's story. It is all our stories. But it is most clearly seen in Israel.

Jews tend to view this as antisemitism and it's often in the mix. But it's not just antisemitism. It's cowardice. The world powers, old and new, recruit their own Jihadists, form their dirty deals for oil and blood, and sell each other out. That they sell out Israel is a given. What else would you expect of people who sell out their own children to grooming gangs and let mosques rise in every one of their cities?

The blood was hardly dry on the streets of the French Quarter before we had all officially moved on for the hundredth time. And there is every reason to think that we will go on moving on for the foreseeable future. People wait for some fundamental wake-up call that will break with the old corrupt blindness.

For now at least they have waited in vain.

Insurgent politicians arise, talking big, but offer only differences of style not substance.

The Surrender to Hamas Deal is a bipartisan betrayal of Israel in which the outgoing Biden administration and the incoming Trump administration got together to throttle Israel and demand that it accept a Hamas deal, overseen by its state sponsor Qatar, trading thousands of terrorists for hostages, live or dead, abandoning Gaza, and allowing Hamas under a fake 'technocratic' government to take it over again. Followed by an extended reconstruction that the United States will be paying for.

This is not "peace through strength", it's "war through weakness". It demonstrates once again that if Islamic terrorists take hostages, keep fighting and have their allies run information campaigns, they will win even if they lose. The Surrender to Hamas Deal sells out American interests along with Israeli ones. The next step is the Hamas-PLO unity government put together under Chinese and Russian aegis in Beijing and Moscow since Oct 7 which the United States will now have to arm, fund and recognize.

America has once again sold out allies and empowered enemies. The message once more is that it's better to be our enemies than our friends. And that the best possible strategy is to be a terrorist.

The old boys and the new boys in D.C. got together to carry out the same policy. When it came down to it, the only differences were style, not substance. And the policy is surrendering to Islamic terrorism. That has implications beyond Israel. And those implications are catastrophically bad for America.

"Well, the chances are against it, and the odds are slim/That he'll live by the rules that the world makes for him/'Cause there's a noose at his neck and a gun at his back/And a license to kill him is given out to every maniac," Bob Dylan sang a long time ago in Neighborhood Bully.

That may have been the old Israel. The one that dismissed the UN as 'Oom Shmoom.' The new Israel, the one of Netanyahu and Start-Up Nation. The one that sees Hasbara as an existential strategy cares very much. It waits around for someone to take its side and to see that truth that Dylan sang. It spends so much time arguing with the world that eventually it loses its belief in its own rightness. And gives in.

Then it waits once more for global support that will never come.

The old Israel understood that leaders who sell out their own countries to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and that ilk can hardly be expected not sell out Israel. It isn't that they're antisemites. They can hardly be expected to do for Israel what they will not do for America, England and France.

The old Israel understood that it had to stand alone because no one would stand with it. Knew that it had to believe in itself because no government, whatever promises were made during election campaigns at rubber chicken dinners, would stand with it.

The new Israel keeps winning wars and losing faith. It waits for a better day, but no better day is coming. And unless the world wakes up and fights back, the demographic trends and political radicalization will not make the western world any friendlier to Israel.

The early days of January should have made it finally clear that there is nothing to wait for. Perhaps the day will come when an American government wakes up and takes a stand against Islamic terrorism.

And perhaps the L-rd and all His angels will sweep the enemy from the field.

It is difficult to know which day will come sooner.

This Shabbat, Jews all over the world will read the story of Exodus or Shemos which begins with the rise of a new Pharaoh who does not know Joseph. That Pharaoh dies and the Jews welcome the news of a new ruler. But when their enslavement does not change, they cry out to G-d as they never had before because now they know not to put their trust in any prince. Now they know that their one king is G-d.

And then G-d hears. And then G-d acts.

For now Israel stands alone. It stands faced with a crisis caused by a generation of giving in to pressure from D.C. politicians. The process that began with Prime Minister Shamir agreeing to take back Hamas terrorists and negotiate, however indirectly, with the PLO over a Palestinian State, that continued with the Oslo Accords, the withdrawals from Lebanon and Gaza, negotiation after negotiation, that has nurtured, armed and created an enemy state inside Israel is the greatest threat to its survival.

'Palestinianism', not Iran, is the greatest threat to Israel. The answer is not geopolitics of regional accords, it's the defense of the land and its borders against an enemy that lies within them.

Israel, like America and Europe, has fallen for the absurd internationalist nonsense that the primary problem is to cope with international affairs in international forums rather than to clean house.

In America and Europe that means mobs of migrants flooding across the border while their governments are concerned about geopolitical problems. In Israel that meant treating the Abraham Accords like the greatest thing since Sinai while ignoring the enemy armies preparing across the border in Gaza.

Israeli leaders have spent too long looking to America for hope when they should have looked to their own people. The future of Israel does not lie in making apps or in lobbying D.C., but in the settlements where armed family men stand watch against the enemy. And if there is any hope to be found for confronting Islamic terror, it will not be in D.C., but in those small settlements.

And perhaps out of those small villages will come the hope of not only Israel, but the world.

 Daniel Greenfield is a columnist, an investigative journalist and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

The Scourge -- Or Not -- Of "Ultraprocessed Foods"

January 14, 2025 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian 

 “Ultraprocessed foods.” That sounds really bad. In fact, not just really bad, but really, really bad. Bad on a level with, maybe, “assault rifles” or “cis-heteronormativity.” Definitely, with a condemnatory name like that, “ultraprocessed foods” would be something that no sensible person would ever eat, or at least certainly not in large quantities.

The term “ultraprocessed foods” has been in usage for a while, but the frequency seems to have exploded everywhere in the past few months. Perhaps that has resulted from the naming of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be the next Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has made a thing about proclaiming a health crisis in the U.S., which he asserts is substantially brought about by our “broken food system.” On November 15 — just after President-elect Trump tapped Kennedy to lead HHS in the new administration — The New York Times had a piece outlining Kennedy’s critiques of the “food system.” Number one on the list of Kennedy’s critiques identified by the NYT was “ultraprocessed food.”

After reading this, I thought it might be time for me to get on top of what this “ultraprocessed food” stuff might be. Is this something that you need to really be concerned about, or is it just another one of the usual scare tactics of the left to try to take more control of your life? The answer, as will not surprise you, is the latter.

Fortunately, I went into this investigation comfortable in the knowledge that this “ultraprocessed foods” thing had little or nothing to do with me. I only eat the healthiest of the healthy. For example, yesterday for dinner for Mrs. MC and myself, I went to the store and bought a fresh salmon filet, some new potatoes, and a head of broccoli — the freshest of possible “whole” foods. I sautéed the salmon in a pan, and for the potatoes and broccoli, I mixed them in a bowl with just some oil and salt and roasted them in the oven. Delicious! And also, the farthest thing possible from “ultraprocessed food.” Or so you might think.

And then, to begin my research, I followed a link in The New York Times piece cited above, and came to this April 21, 2023 article in Nature Communications, one of the many affiliate publications of the premier British science journal Nature. Or maybe I should put the word “science” there in scare quotes, because Nature has so thoroughly disgraced itself by falling for and propagating the climate scam, let alone who knows what other pseudoscience. But for whatever residual level of credibility they may have left, I was still surprised to learn that the article claimed that some 73% of the U.S. food supply is “ultraprocessed.” How is such a high level even possible? This seemingly very precise figure had supposedly been determined by a new “machine learning algorithm”:

Here we introduce a machine learning algorithm that accurately predicts the degree of processing for any food, indicating that over 73% of the US food supply is ultra-processed.

And how about this to scare you:

We show that the increased reliance of an individual’s diet on ultra-processed food correlates with higher risk of metabolic syndrome, diabetes, angina, elevated blood pressure and biological age, and reduces the bio-availability of vitamins.

Here is another piece from Harvard Health Publishing, June 17, 2024, with the title “Ultra-processed foods? Just say no.” The thesis, based on “new research,” is that consumption of “ultraprocessed foods” increases the risk of cognitive impairment and strokes:

[I]f you . . . eat some ultra-processed foods, is that bad for your brain health? A new study appears to deliver resounding yes: eating ultra-processed foods is linked to a greater risk of cognitive impairment and strokes.

Both of these pieces give examples of things that are said to fall in the “ultraprocessed” category — things like Twinkies and non-diet cola — but no precise or comprehensive definition. Surely nobody has a diet consisting of 73% Twinkies and non-diet cola, or of anything comparable. They must be sweeping lots of other things into the definition. But what? How are we supposed to avoid these things without a comprehensive definition?

At this point, before I might find myself prematurely in the grave, I decided it was time for some of my own research. For my first subject of inquiry I picked potato chips. “Ultraprocessed” or not? Remarkably, I find some debate in the literature about whether potato chips are “ultraprocessed” versus merely “processed.” But plenty of articles call them “ultraprocessed,” for example this piece from Canada’s Global News, October 12, 2023 (“From pop to potato chips, report finds ultra-processed food can be addictive. . . . Ultra-processed foods like sugary drinks, potato chips and ready meals can cause withdrawal symptoms similar to people trying to quit smoking. . . .”).

There was a reason I looked up potato chips first. On a bag of potato chips, the ingredients are listed as: potatoes, oil, salt. Those are the exact same ingredients as in the potato dish in my super-healthy meal last night. Could I really have been eating “ultraprocessed food”? I’m now starting to understand how 73% of an American diet can be “ultraprocessed.”

Let me try three more common items that have been promoted to me for decades as the quintessential super-healthy foods: whole grain breakfast cereal, Greek yogurt, and whole wheat bread. I find all three of those considered together in this July 6, 2022 piece from a source called Very Well Health. Surprise:

Whole grain breakfast cereal, Greek yogurt, and 100% whole wheat bread have more in common than being part of a “balanced breakfast”—they can all be classified as “ultra-processed” foods. . . . Some estimates have found that up to 73% of the American food supply is ultra-processed foods. However, experts don’t agree on what to do about ultra-processed foods—or even how to classify them.

So, if whole grain breakfast cereal, Greek yogurt, and whole wheat bread are “ultraprocessed foods,” are they part of the cause of “higher risk of metabolic syndrome, diabetes, angina, elevated blood pressure and biological age” that Nature attributes to “ultraprocessed foods”? Are they part of the cause of “greater risk of cognitive impairment and strokes” that Harvard Medical School attributes to “ultraprocessed foods.” If they are not, then how do we tell which of the “ultraprocessed foods” are the ones that must be avoided and which not?

The Very Well Health piece, in contrast to the pieces from far more “prestigious” sources like Nature and Harvard Medical School, is actually relatively informative on this subject. The piece provides some history, which I will spare you, of how the “ultraprocessed foods” characterization got started and developed. A fair summary is that it is a part of the overall UN effort to smear the West and the productive countries and companies of the world.

I’m certainly not recommending a diet consisting of nothing but Twinkies and non-diet cola. However, I’ve done plenty of research to conclude that the category of “ultraprocessed foods” is completely meaningless as a guide to trying to figure out how to eat a reasonably healthy diet. The pseudo-category of “ultraprocessed foods” includes plenty of things that are very healthy, plenty of things that are fine in moderation, and plenty of things to (mostly) avoid — and no assistance in distinguishing which ones are which. Institutions like Nature and Harvard Medical School that purport to reach epidemiological conclusions based on this pseudo-category only demonstrate their own incompetence.

As to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — if there is one Trump cabinet pick whom I would be happy to see not confirmed, he would be it.

Republican Budget Games: Will They Join Democrats to Punt the Debt Limit?

January 15, 2025 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

My recent book explains that we are stumbling our way to a fiscal crisis.

If there’s any hope of avoiding a disaster, it will probably happen when and if good members of Congress (a vanishing breed) refuse to allow an increase in the debt limit without attaching some much-needed spending restraint.

It doesn’t need to happen that way, but this table from Brian Riedl’s chartbook shows that the only attempts to deal with America’s fiscal problems in the past 40 years have relied on the debt limit.

By the way, not all of the laws on Brian’s list were good.

In some cases, such as the 1990 Bush tax increase and 1993 Clinton tax increase, they made fiscal policy worse rather than better.

But at least lawmakers were forced to do something instead of simply kicking the can down the road.

The campaign to get rid of the debt limit has created unusual alliances. Trump doesn’t like it, but neither does Peter Orszag, who was in charge of the budget under Obama. He has a column in the Washington Post on this topic.

Here are some excerpts.

The United States is weaker, not stronger, because of the debt limit. …Now that President-elect Donald Trump is calling to get rid of it, lawmakers should take advantage of the opportunity… Imagine there is a test you take every so often in which you roll three dice, and if you get all ones, something terrible happens. Otherwise, nothing happens. In almost all instances (215 out of the 216 possible scenarios), all three dice will not come up ones.

But you’ll understandably worry about the extreme case. …This, in a nutshell, is what the U.S. debt limit has become. …the debt ceiling imposes no discipline on our fiscal policy. It only creates risks. …Defaulting…could erode trust in the dollar, the world’s reserve currency, and damage the global economy and financial markets.

For what it’s worth, I agree with some of his analysis.

It would not be good to bump into the debt limit. Yes, it would be possible to “prioritize” spending at that point, but it would be a mess. An unprecedented mess.

In an ideal world, we would not be rolling the three dice in Orszag’s example.

Now for some disagreement. Orszag does not seem to appreciate that we’ve already rolled three ones. Based on current projections, the United States is going to suffer a Greek-style fiscal crisis.

We don’t know whether it will have in five years or 25 years, but it’s inevitable in the absence of desperately needed entitlement reform.

The bottom line is that there is a small risk of something bad happening when politicians fight over the debt limit, but there’s a guaranteed disaster if we let politicians keep kicking the can down the road.

 

I’ll close with an analogy. If you’re a drug addict, you may suffer severe withdrawal symptoms if you stop using. That would not be fun, I’m sure. But if you keep using hard drugs, you almost surely will have a terrible life and die early. Given those two options, I know which one I would prefer.

P.S. I have disagreed in the past with Orszag’s views on value-added taxes and the Congressional Budget Office.

P.P.S. Since Trump and Democrats are agreeing about the debt limit, this is a good time to remind people that bipartisanship often is a bad thing.