Category Archives: National

Self-Interest Vs. Selfishness: A case for Capitalistic society emerging from a moralistic foundation

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Lately I am hearing lots of statements suggesting the GOP, Tea Party, and conservatives should stay out of social issues or compromise their values to cater to the left, so that we can find a “middle-ground”. Previously when people inquired about my political beliefs, I said that I was “socially liberal and fiscally conservative”. After years of questioning my political opinions, my research led to an awareness of cultural Marxism, the Frankfurt school, and theorists such as Saul Alinsky, who proved that social issues have always been one of the leftists’ key instruments to effect political and fiscal change. I have since decided that my beliefs are more aligned with the “Classical Liberal” ideology.

Government regulation should be as closely limited to preserving the inalienable rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness as possible. Since issues Americans are currently facing, such as a depressed economy, immense national debt, Obamacare, education, and immigration among others that are undeniably infringing upon those rights, it is understandable why popular sentiment even amongst some republicans is that we need to stay focused on these issues and give into or ignore social platforms to find solutions and win elections. Any CEO knows establishing priorities is tantamount to success, however they also know that it’s nearly impossible to achieve growth and prosperity without having a solid foundation. The values embedded in the culture that manifested the United States Constitution lent itself to a society of self-interested individuals who could compete in a free-market that incentivized resourcefulness, ingenuity, and progress fostering the betterment of man.

More at Politichicks

courtenay-turnerCalifornia PolitiChick Courtenay Turner is an actress, producer and passionate patriot who aspires to inculcate conservative values into the American culture via entertaining stories.

8 Foods Even The Experts Won’t Eat

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Food scientists are shedding light on items loaded with toxins and chemicals–and simple swaps for a cleaner diet and supersized health. Experts from different areas of specialty explain why they won’t eat these eight foods.

Clean eating means choosing fruits, vegetables, and meats that are raised, grown, and sold with minimal processing. Often they’re organic, and rarely (if ever) should they contain additives. But in some cases, the methods of today’s food producers are neither clean nor sustainable. The result is damage to our health, the environment, or both. So we decided to take a fresh look at food through the eyes of the people who spend their lives uncovering what’s safe–or not–to eat. ” Their answers don’t necessarily make up a “banned foods” list. But reaching for the suggested alternatives might bring you better health–and peace of mind.

1. The Endocrinologist Won’t Eat: Canned Tomatoes

The resin linings of tin cans contain bisphenol-A, a synthetic estrogen that has been linked to ailments ranging from reproductive problems to heart disease, diabetes, and obesity.

2. The Farmer Won’t Eat: Corn-Fed Beef

Cattle evolved to eat grass, not grains. But farmers today feed their animals corn and soybeans, which fatten up the animals faster for slaughter. But more money for cattle farmers (and lower prices at the grocery store) means a lot less nutrition for us.

3. The Toxicologist Won’t Eat: Microwave Popcorn

Chemicals, including perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), in the lining of the bag, are part of a class of compounds that may be linked to infertility in humans, according to a recent study from UCLA. In animal testing, the chemicals cause liver, testicular, and pancreatic cancer.

4. The Farm Director Won’t Eat: Nonorganic Potatoes

Root vegetables absorb herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides that wind up in soil. In the case of potatoes–the nation’s most popular vegetable–they’re treated with fungicides during the growing season, then sprayed with herbicides to kill off the fibrous vines before harvesting.

5. The Fisheries Expert Won’t Eat: Farmed Salmon

Nature didn’t intend for salmon to be crammed into pens and fed soy, poultry litter, and hydrolyzed chicken feathers. As a result, farmed salmon is lower in vitamin D and higher in contaminants, including carcinogens, PCBs, brominated flame retardants, and pesticides such as dioxin and DDT.

6. The Cancer Researcher Won’t Drink: Milk Produced With Artificial Hormones

Milk producers treat their dairy cattle with recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH or rBST, as it is also known) to boost milk production. But rBGH also increases udder infections and even pus in the milk.

7. The Biotech Specialist Who Won’t Eat Conventional Soy: GMO Unfermented Soy

Genetically engineered food is a cause of great concern due to the manipulation of DNA and genetic code including transfers from one species to another. Fermented Soy Is The Only Soy Food Fit for Human Consumption and since almost 90% of soy in the world is genetically modified, if you are not ensuring sources are organic, long-term health problems are inevitable, especially since soy has been found to affect hormonal balance and even cause cancer.

8. The Organic-Foods Expert Won’t Eat: Conventional Apples

If fall fruits held a “most doused in pesticides contest,” apples would win. Why? They are individually grafted (descended from a single tree) so that each variety maintains its distinctive flavor. As such, apples don’t develop resistance to pests and are sprayed frequently.

Read more details at Eat Locally Grown

New “anonymous” controversy on the web: Supporting corporate greed.

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ifqxqmkIs it to laugh?

enhanced-buzz-wide-31817-1383664975-44Guy Fawkes was a terrorist or a martyr—depending on your perspective—in England. In 1604, he was involved in a plot to blow up Parliament using kegs of gunpowder below the House of Lords in an attempt to restore the Catholic church to power in England. The plot completion was set for the normal meeting of July 28, 1605, but the present threat of the plague set the meeting back to November 5th. The plot was discovered, however, and Guy Fawkes, also known as Guido Fawkes, was captured guarding the powder before the plot could materialize. The main target of the plot was King James I.

Interestingly, Fawkes used the pseudonym of John Johnson and the Tor Johnson Halloween mask reigned supreme in the late 1950s to early 1960s. Fawkes was subsequently tortured and convicted to hang. He fell from the gallows, however, cheating the hangman by breaking his neck. Each year on November 5th, he is burned in effigy.

V2The mask was first seen in a comic book series called V for Vendetta which was adapted into a movie in 2005—400 years after the plot to blow up the House of Lords. The man in the Guy Fawkes mask was “V,” shadowy rebel taking on the tyrannical government of his time.

The mask has recently become the face of “anonymous,” the face against the greed of the capitalist corporations. Hundreds of anonymous videos have taunting and threatening the rise of the corporate oligarchy.

Around November 5th of this year, however, Internet Business Times reported that a series of pictures have been published on the Internet showing a sweat shop factory in São Gonçalo, Brazil laboring to create the popular anonymous masks. The kicker? Since Time Warner adapted the comic book series, they own the rights to the image reaping huge profits from sale of the popular anonymous mask.

Ironic, isn’t it?

International Business Times
BuzzFeed

Fast and Furious movie star dies in car accident.

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enhanced-buzz-26543-1385868933-1040-year old Paul Walker known for the Fast and Furious movie franchise died in a single-vehicle accident that resulted in a fiery explosion. The accident occurred about 3:30 p.m. Pacific time Saturday in Santa Clarita, Calif.

The actor was a passenger in a Porsche GT in which the driver somehow lost control slamming into a tree. Both in the car were killed.

Georgia man charged with theft for plugging in electric car

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leafGEORGIA—A man in Atlanta was confronted by police when he plugged his Nissan Leaf into a school outlet “stealing” about five-cents worth of electricity. He was arrested for the “crime” ten days later.

According to ArsTechnia,

Kaveh Kamooneh plugged an extension cable from his Nissan Leaf into a 110-volt external outlet at Chamblee Middle School while his son was practicing tennis. A short time later, he noticed someone in his car and went to investigate—and found that the man was a Chamblee police officer. “He informed me he was about to arrest me, or at least charge me, for electrical theft,” Kamooneh told Atlanta’s Channel 11 News.

Sergeant Ernesto Ford of the Chamblee Police Department told News 11 that a theft is a theft and he would arrest anyone for theft.

How the US gave guns to Mexican cartels

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The Border Gun ScandalBy John Dodson

In September 2009, John Dodson, an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, was assigned to the ATF’s Phoenix office. What he found there shocked him. The bureau was encouraging gun dealers to sell weapons in bulk to known straw buyers, who would funnel those guns to Mexican drug cartels. Known as Operation Fast and Furious, it ended with the death of at least one American law enforcement officer. Dodson became a congressional whistleblower, and the investigation into the operation is ongoing. In this exclusive excerpt from his new book, “The Unarmed Truth,” Dodson explains how tragically inept Fast and Furious was.

‘It’s like the underwear gnomes,” my ATF colleague Lee Casa told me one time as we recounted the latest bizarre goings-on in Phoenix.

“What?” I asked.

“You ever watch ‘South Park’? There’s this episode where all the boys get their underwear stolen by these underwear gnomes. They track them down to get it back and one of them asks why they are stealing everyone’s underwear. The gnomes break out this PowerPoint and reveal their master plan: Phase One: Collect underpants . . . Phase Two: ? . . . Phase Three: Profit.”

“We’re doing the same thing,” he explained. “We know Phase One is ‘Walk guns’ and Phase Three is ‘Take down a big cartel!’ ”

Both of us were laughing now; a more fitting and appropriate allegory could never be found. Casa concluded, “Just nobody can figure out what the f–k Phase Two is!”

What was happening did at times almost seem like a spoof. Letting guns “walk” was a tactic that I had never before seen or even contemplated. It simply wasn’t done.

I couldn’t understand how anyone could argue that allowing guns that ought to have been in law-enforcement custody to go to known or suspected criminals — people who shouldn’t have been near a gun, people who almost certainly would be passing them on to Mexico’s most brutal drug cartels — wasn’t madness.

Read more at the New York Post

Should We Bail Out Cities?

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iALF7L8oomuABy Megan McArdle Nov 26

In the latest City Journal, Steve Malanga writes about an issue that hasn’t yet gotten a lot of attention but is virtually guaranteed to become a serious topic of national debate in the not-so-distant future: Do we bail out cities that have become insolvent?

Malanga quotes a Steve Rattner op-ed from the summer: “The 700,000 remaining residents of the Motor City are no more responsible for Detroit’s problems than were the victims of Hurricane Sandy for theirs, and eventually Congress decided to help them.” Rattner is right, of course; Detroit was largely undone by massive structural changes in the auto industry, which now employs only a small fraction of the people that it used to. And yet, there’s more to the story, isn’t there? Detroit’s biggest problem is the combined burden of its pension funds and retiree health benefits. And the reason that its pensions are in such a state is that they were bizarrely mismanaged by people who apparently didn’t quite get fifth-grade math.

It’s true that it would be easier to deal with these problems if Detroit were more like New York and less like, well, Detroit. But it’s also true that if Detroit had been responsible about its pension contributions instead of underfunding the pensions while simultaneously handing out extra benefits above and beyond what the city already couldn’t afford, its retirees would not now be facing dire straits. New Yorkers did not get to vote for the corrupt Detroit politicians who appointed the terrible Detroit pension managers who made all of Detroit’s problems so much worse than they had to be. Why should they have to pick up the check for all those mistakes?

Read more at Bloomberg

IS IT REALLY 79,000 YEARS until the next Thanksgivukkah?

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I was astounded to read that this rare event – Thanksgiving and Hanukkah – might not occur again for 79,000 years! Here’s why:

Well, almost never. If the Jews don’t ever abandon the calculations based on the Shmuelian calendar, Hanukkah will keep getting later and later — moving through winter, then into spring, summer, and finally back into fall — so that tens of thousands of years from now they will again coincide. But long before then the springtime holiday of Passover will have moved deep into summer, so be on the lookout for a memo with a calendar update in the next several thousand years.

But another source (A Jewish source) says it will be 2070AD! But it will be the next to last time.

You’ll notice that these dates are getting further and further apart. That’s not just FDR’s fault. Both the Gregorian calendar and the Jewish calendar are slowly drifting in relation to the actual solar year—but at different rates. After 2165, Chanukah would have completely drifted out of November—unless one of these calendars (or Thanksgiving) is changed.

More at Virginia Right

Bicyclist hit by US Forest Service truck to dispute ticket

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A bicyclist who was ticketed after he was hit by a US Forest Service pickup Saturday in north Fort Collins said he plans to dispute the citation in court.

Roger Hoover, 51, said he was slowly riding his bike in front of the law-enforcement truck, which was blocking the crosswalk, when it pulled forward and hit him. He was ticketed with leaving a place of safety into the path of a moving vehicle.

“I thought that basically any time somebody runs over a pedestrian with a car, that it’s the car’s fault,” he said. “Apparently not.”

Read more at the Coloradoan

U.S. Border Patrol Agents Assaulted by Large Crowd of Mexican Nationals

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600px-11-25-13-US Border Patrol Agents Assaulted by Large Crowd of Mexican Nationals_photo 1

Mexican illegals assaulting U.S. Border Patrol Agents with rocks and bottles near San Diego, Nov. 24. No shots were fired and no arrests were made per Mexican Government demands.

SAN YSIDRO, Calif.—–Border Patrol agents working near the U.S./Mexico International Border yesterday were assaulted with rocks and bottles.

On November 24, 2013, more than 100 people illegally crossed the International Border from Mexico one-quarter-mile west of the San Ysidro Port of Entry in the Tijuana River channel. The group advanced toward a Border Patrol agent positioned one-eighth of a mile north of the border. The agent ordered the group to stop. The group ignored his commands and continued to advance. The agent deployed his PepperBall Launcher System, an intermediate use-of-force device, in an effort to stop the group and protect himself. The crowd failed to respond appropriately.

Numerous agents responded to the scene as the crowd became increasingly unruly and began throwing rocks and bottles. The crowd struck several agents in the arms and legs with rocks; one agent was hit in the head with a filled water bottle. Agents deployed several intermediate use-of-force devices and Mexican law enforcement authorities were contacted. The use of intermediate use-of-force devices eventually caused the group to return to Mexico and disperse.

Paul Beeson, San Diego Sector Chief Patrol Agent said “While attacks on Border Patrol agents are not uncommon, the agents showed great restraint when faced with the dangers of this unusually large group, and fortunately no one was seriously injured.”

No one was arrested and no one was able to continue north.

To prevent the illicit smuggling of humans, drugs, and other contraband, the U.S. Border Patrol maintains a high level of vigilance on major corridors of egress away from our Nation’s borders. To report suspicious activity to the U.S. Border Patrol, contact San Diego Sector at (619) 498-9900.