- Dow 100,000? Marc Faber Warns: Central Banks "Will Monetize Everything… Introduce Socialism"
Submitted by Valentin Schmid via TheEpochTimes.com,
They call him Dr. Doom and for good reason. Dr. Marc Faber, author, investment adviser, and publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom report, usually emphasizes the risks in the financial system and never minces his words.
However, his views are more nuanced than most people think, and his advice for investors is more pragmatic than idealistic.
Epoch Times spoke to Faber about central bank manipulation of financial markets, the reasons for income inequality, and how to invest in this environment.
Epoch Times: How long can the central banks manipulate markets?
Mr. Marc Faber: This is an issue that will be decided by central bankers and I don’t have control over the manipulation of central banks. Haruhiko Kuroda of the Bank of Japan (BoJ) expressed the view that there is no limit to monetary inflation. That they can keep on buying assets and they can keep on buying equities and real estate.
So the madness in the present time may go on. In a manipulated market, it won’t end well, but you don’t know when it will not end well, and how far the manipulation can last.
Epoch Times: And then at one point, the central banks own everything.
Mr. Faber: They could essentially monetize everything, and then you have state ownership. And through the central banking system, you introduce socialism and communism, which is state ownership of production and consumption. You would have that, yes, that they can do.
The BoJ owns more than 50 percent of Japanese ETFs (exchange traded funds), which own large parts of the underlying companies. So indirectly they may own 20 percent of the Japanese companies, and they can go up to a higher level.
I don’t think the central bankers are intelligent and smart enough to understand the consequences of their monetary policies at present. They focus on inflation but in my view they shouldn’t do anything. They don’t focus enough on what it does to the average standard of living of the people, to the average household income.
Private ownership and central bank ownership of ETFs in Japan. (Bloomberg)Asset Price Inflation
Epoch Times: If the policies are similar, why haven’t we seen hyperinflation like in Zimbabwe or Venezuela?
Mr. Faber: The developed market central banks can go on for quite some time. If Zimbabwe prints money, the pain is more obvious right away because if you are Zimbabwe, and you print money and the others don’t, and the currency collapses, and you feel the pain much sooner.
If the major central banks, the Fed, the European Central Bank (ECB), the BoJ, the Bank of England, and the Chinese monetize and print money in concert and agreement with each other, they all talk to each other; then the currencies don’t collapse against each other. There may be fluctuations, but we don’t have a general collapse of a currency.
Paper money, in general, can then collapse, and it has to a large extent against asset prices like real estate around the world over the last 30 years, against equity prices, against bond prices—which have been rallying since 1981—and against precious metals since 1999.
Asset price inflation is less obvious to the average person in the street. The average American has no money, so he doesn’t care if prices for paintings and real estate go up—until it touches him.
(World Economic Forum)It’s nonsense to claim that inflation is only going up 1 percent per year in the United States. The cost of living of a typical family is going up much more than that—insurance, transportation, schooling are all going up.
For example, health care premiums for insurance policies [are rising], so the typical household is being squeezed. The central banks don’t care about that; they don’t look at it.
I suppose the system will collapse before we become like Venezuela. In the West, if they start to print money, the end game will be brief. Within five years, I expect the system to implode.
Epoch Times: How can we avoid a collapse?
Mr. Faber: You better ask the bureaucrats what their plans are. They had zero rates since December 2008; soon eight years [passed], and that hasn’t boosted economic activity for the average household, not in Japan nor the United States nor the EU. Now they talk about fiscal spending.
We already have large deficits but no deficit is large enough for the interventionist, so they will boost fiscal spending. They will finance deficits by issuing government debt, which the central banks will monetize. The Treasury will issue debt, and then the Fed will buy all these debts. Of course, that will not end well, but it will postpone the problem for a while.
Then they will find some academics who will blame wealth inequality on the evil capitalists who made so much money out of asset bubbles.
They will blame the economic woes on these people. To some extent this is true. But the rich people did not create the inflated asset values; it was the central banks, by slashing interest rates to zero and negative interest rates in many countries.
First, you create mispricings through artificially low rates and negative interest rates and you boost the income and wealth of the super-rich. It’s at best the 0.1 percent that really benefit from asset inflation, at the cost of all the people that have no assets and so you have this rising wealth inequality. So we have to tax the rich people and tax them more.
Taking money from the rich is appealing if you go to voters, and you say to them, “Look, the reason the economy is doing so badly, it’s because of the rich people, the billionaires. We have to take 20 percent away from them and give it to you.” You can be sure that everybody will vote for that because the wealthy are a minority. This is what happens after monetary policies completely fail.
Some well-connected people will hide their wealth but a lot of people won’t. Even if they take 50 percent from the richest, it’s not going to help. The next step will be to take money from less wealthy people; the interventionists will go all the way.
Investment Strategy
Epoch Times: How do you invest in this environment?
Mr. Faber: Most assets by traditional valuations are overpriced. Now are they overpriced compared to zero interest rates or negative interest rates? If you take the 10-year German bonds or the 10-year Swiss bonds or the 10-year Japanese bonds, you have no or negative yield. But you can buy equities that give you a dividend yield of 2 percent or more. Then you say stocks compared to negative interest rates are a bargain.
But they are not cheap by traditional valuation methods.
However, I think it’s dangerous for someone to say: “We all agree that it will end badly, so we keep 100 percent of our money in cash.” First, you have to decide which cash.
Number two, we don’t know what the time frame until it ends badly is. And in an extreme money-printing environment, the Dow Jones Industrial Average can go to 100,000.
An ounce of gold is worth $1,327 on Sept. 11, 2016. (Goldprice.org)It may likely not go up against precious metals, but it can go up in nominal terms endlessly. It’s not going to help the typical household. I have seen many hyperinflating economies, and in each case, the standard of living of average people declined.
That will be the case. If I were interventionist—which I’m not, and I do not support the interventionist—if I were a central banker and I said to myself the right policy now is to increase the negativity of interest rates, we go from 0.5 percent negative to 5 percent negative.
In this particular instance, the people and companies take the money out of the financial system and store it in cash in a vault.
Condo buildings line the beach in Sunny Isle, Florida, on April 5, 2016. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)The measure to implement negative 5 percent is not going to work very well, so one way to make it work is to abolish cash. You can still hoard real estate, food, cigarettes, and precious metals, but you can’t hold cash anymore. So that is likely to happen, in my view, if they go all the way.
Epoch Times: What about gold?
Mr. Faber: I have made a very compelling case for gold in the late 1990s and silver and platinum. I wrote a book, “Tomorrow’s Gold,” which was not about gold but the rise of Asia. The gold price rose very sharply between 1999 and 2011, and it corrected after September 2011. It probably overshot, and the mining shares overshot on the upside, so they corrected.
Now, between last October and December, we had major lows in gold stocks and precious metals prices from where the prices will continue to rise.
They are going to go up tomorrow or in three to five years, I don’t know. If you keep printing paper money, the supply of money increases and assets that are in short supply or limited supply—whether it’s a Ferrari or a Gaugin painting—they are in tight supply, so they will appreciate.
They will not all appreciate at the same time and to the same extent. There will be bubbles in real estate and collectibles; there will be bubbles in equities, as we have had three times since 1999.
Epoch Times: But you would not only buy cash and gold mining stocks, right?
Mr. Faber: I think holding all your assets in cash is very dangerous. I want to be diversified; I hold some cash, bonds, equities, some real estate, and some precious metals.
The moment you diversify, your returns are suboptimal, but it’s likely to preserve your capital.
- The Fed`s Theoretical Inflation and Actual Core Inflation Gap is Widening (Video)
By EconMatters
When will the mainstream financial media do their job and start calling Fed Officials out for switching from the Core Inflation metric to justify a continuance of ZIRP? The actual Inflation Rate is already above the Fed`s stated target of 2 percent.
© EconMatters All Rights Reserved | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube | Email Digest | Kindle
- Your Money Or Your Life: What's Behind The Latest Government Scam To Rob You Blind?
Submitted by John Whitehead vis The Rutherford Institute,
“The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: Your money, or your life. And many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat.”—Lysander Spooner, American abolitionist and legal theorist
It used to be that the Constitution served as a bulwark against government abuses, excesses and wrongdoing.
That is no longer the case.
Having been reduced to little more than a historic document, the Constitution now provides scant protection against government abuses, misconduct and corruption.
Not only are “we the people” painfully vulnerable to the whims of any militarized cop on the beat, but we are also sitting targets for every government huckster out to fleece the taxpayer of their hard-earned dollars.
We get taxed on how much we earn, taxed on what we eat, taxed on what we buy, taxed on where we go, taxed on what we drive, and taxed on how much is left of our assets when we die.
Because the government’s voracious appetite for money, power and control has grown out of control, its agents have devised other means of funding its excesses and adding to its largesse through taxes disguised as fines, taxes disguised as fees, and taxes disguised as tolls, tickets and penalties.
The government’s schemes to swindle, cheat, scam, and generally defraud Americans have run the gamut from wasteful pork barrel legislation, cronyism and graft to asset forfeiture schemes, the modern-day equivalent of highway robbery, astronomical health care “reform,” and costly stimulus packages.
Now the government and its corporate partners in crime have come up with a new scheme to not only scam taxpayers out of what’s left of their paychecks but also make us foot the bill, and it’s coming at us in the form of a war on cash.
What is this war on cash?
It’s a concerted campaign to do away with large bills such as $20s, $50s, $100s and shift consumers towards a digital mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient.
Much like the war on drugs and the war on terror, this so-called “war on cash” is being sold to the public as a means of fighting terrorists, drug dealers and tax evaders. Just the mere possession of cash is enough to implicate you in suspicious activity and have you investigated. In other words, cash has become another way for the government to profile Americans and render them criminals.
The rationale is that cash is the currency for illegal transactions given that it’s harder to track, can be used to pay illegal immigrants, and denies the government its share of the “take,” so doing away with paper money will help law enforcement fight crime and help the government realize more revenue.
Despite what we know about the government and its history of corruption, bumbling, fumbling and data breaches, not to mention how easily technology can be used against us, the campaign to do away with cash is really not a hard sell.
It’s not a hard sell, that is, if you know the right buttons to push, and the government has become a grand master in the art of getting the citizenry to do exactly what it wants. And if you belong to the growing class of Americans—46% of consumers, approximately 114 million adults and rising—who use your cell phone to pay bills, purchase goods, and transfer funds, then the government is just preaching to the choir when it comes to persuading you of the convenience of digital cash.
In much the same way that Americans have opted into government surveillance through the convenience of GPS devices and cell phones, digital cash—the means of paying with one’s debit card, credit card or cell phone—is becoming the de facto commerce of the American police state.
It’s not just cash that is going digital, either.
A growing number of states—including Delaware and California—are looking to adopt digital driver’s licenses that would reside on your mobile phone. These licenses would include all of the information contained on your printed license, along with a few “extras” such as real-time data downloaded directly from your state's Department of Motor Vehicles.
Of course, reading between the lines, having a digital driver’s license will open you up to much the same jeopardy as digital cash: it will make it possible for the government to better track your movements, monitor your activities and communications and ultimately shut you down.
So what’s the deal here?
First, it’s hard to imagine how a cashless world navigated by way of a digital wallet doesn’t signal the beginning of the end for what little privacy we have left and leave us vulnerable to the likes of government thieves and data hackers.
Second, digital wallets will make it that much easier for government agents to take advantage of civil asset forfeiture schemes. ERAD (Electronic Recovery and Access to Data) devices supplied by the Department of Homeland Security allow police to not only determine the balance of any magnetic-stripe card (i.e., debit, credit and gift cards) but also freeze and seize any funds on pre-paid money cards.
Third, the war on cash is about giving the government the ultimate control of the economy and complete access to the citizenry’s pocketbook.
Fourth, every technological convenience that has made our lives easier has also become our Achilles’ heel, opening us up to greater vulnerabilities from hackers and government agents alike. Digital cash will be no different. In recent years, the U.S. government and a host of financial institutions, retailers and entertainment giants have been repeatedly hacked. And these are the people in charge of protecting our sensitive information?
Fifth, if there’s one entity that will not stop using cash for its own nefarious purposes, it’s the U.S. government. Who could forget the $12 billion in shrink-wrapped $100 bills that the U.S. flew to Iraq only to claim it had no record of what happened to the money.
Sixth, this drive to do away with cash is part of a larger global trend driven by international financial institutions and the United Nations that is transforming nations of all sizes, from the smallest nation to the biggest, most advanced economies.
Finally, short of returning to a pre-technological, Luddite age, there’s really no way to pull this horse back now that it’s left the gate.
To our detriment, we really have little control over who accesses our private information, how it is stored, or how it is used. Whether we ever had much control remains up for debate. However, in terms of our bargaining power over digital privacy rights, we have been reduced to a pitiful, unenviable position in which we can only hope and trust that those in power will treat our information with respect.
America’s founders, however, did not believe in trusting government officials or giving them too much power. In fact, they believed those entrusted with power will eventually pervert it into tyranny. As Thomas Jefferson observed, “Let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”
Unfortunately, that Constitution has since been shredded.
Our republic has been transformed into an oligarchy.
We have come full circle, back to a pre-revolutionary era of taxation without any real representation.
We the people, once free citizens of a free nation, are now at the mercy of cutthroats and villains masquerading as government agents and elected officials. We continue to be robbed at gunpoint, treated like cattle, tracked incessantly and forced to serve and obey. We continue to be branded rebels and traitors and enemy combatants, shot without hesitation for daring to resist an official order or challenge injustice, and duped into believing all this was done for our “good.”
In the end, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we are no better than when we first started out more than 200 years ago as indentured slaves to a government elite intent on using us for their own profit and gain.
- Trump Campaign's Response To Hillary's Collapse (& DNC Leaks)
- "I Protected Hillary Clinton In The Secret Service – Here's Why Her 'Fainting' Video Really Scares Me"
Submitted by Gary Byrne via Independent Journal Review
I protected First Lady Hillary Clinton, President Bill Clinton, and their family while I served in the Secret Service Uniform Division as an officer from 1991-2003.
By now, you have most likely seen the startling video of Hillary Clinton ‘fainting.’ Through the lens of my 29-year-career in The Service, I can see what a naked-eyed media pundit cannot: There is something seriously wrong with Mrs. Clinton.
Pneumonia or overheating are highly suspect excuses and I’ll explain why.
My analysis is not partisan. I cared for and protected the Clintons for many years. It was my duty to guard Mrs. Clinton in the Secret Service and I was so close to the First Family that the Supreme Court subpoenaed me to testify on the details of Bill Clinton’s late-term scandals.
These are the facts.
Watch Clinton’s Secret Service’s detail in the video. Their behavior is extremely professional and very telling. Each agent is to be commended.
At the beginning of the video, Hillary is with a protective detail of Secret Service agents, as well as two female staffers. One staffer stands very close at her back and another is shoulder-to-shoulder and arm-in-arm with Mrs. Clinton to give her balance and prop her up.
Mrs. Clinton leans against a “ballard,” the metal columns we use to stop incoming 5-ton vehicles, and “bicycle racks” (our nickname for the portable metal fences) to restrict pedestrian access to an area.
As the van pulls up, she has a rigid wavering posture. She awkwardly leans on the ballard and stares straight ahead with her neck craned and extended up as her body is supported at the side and rear by her staffers.
One agent gets the door, but no one moves to enter. The Secret Service doesn’t like to wait—standing still in the eyes of the Service is waiting for an attack to happen. But the staffer can’t move Mrs. Clinton. Anything that holds up a motorcade is extremely dangerous and anything that ties up a Secret Service agent’s hands from drawing their pistol or intervening a threat is a hazard.
The female agent at the front of the van is scanning. She sees Mrs. Clinton odd behavior as well. The female agent begins backing up to the entrance of the van to shield both sight and anyone approaching—as is procedure. She keys her mic signaling that the van is about to move. The agent is to be commended for maintaining her blank expression.
The agent who opened the door moves to take the place of the staffer and take Mrs. Clinton’s arm, but as they switch control, she nearly falls completely. The bald agent, who I believe is the shift leader, knows what is going on with Mrs. Clinton and – this oddity is very telling – crosses between her and her exit (the van door).
As Mrs. Clinton jerks back and forth and her legs fold, the bald agent takes her right arm. The staffer also tries to also grab underneath Mrs. Clinton’s armpits to lift Mrs. Clinton.
Close examination of Mrs. Clinton’s legs reveal her feet and legs have extended and are not holding her weight at all. The toes of her right foot drag and skid on the pavement.
* * *
Continued reading at the Independent Journal Review
- This Is How Much It 'Costs' To Get An Ambassadorship: Guccifer 2.0 Leaks DNC 'Pay-To-Play' Donor List
After addressing a cybersecuirty conference in London, notorious hacker 'Guccifer' shared over 500Mb of documents detailing 100,000 DNC donors contact info and donations. A large number of the largest donors received senior diplomatic or political positions following thge donations, ranging from UK Ambassador to Assistant Attorney General. The DNC released a statement pre-emptively claiming that this was the work of Russia (and reigniting Trump's links to Putin).
Probably just coincidence…
The dcoments contained detailed lists of 100,000 alledged donors, addresses, and phone numbers, and well as amounts donated…
Here is the first cut of the alleged major donors on the leaked documents and the positions they received (via Magafeed.com)
- #1 Matthew Berzun … Ambassador to UK
- #2 Julius Genachowski … Former chairman to FCC
- #3 Frank Sanchez…. Under secretary of commerce
- #8 Kirk Wagner… Ambassador to Singapore
- #9 Alan Solomont … Ambassador to Spain
- #11 John Roos… Ambassador to Japan
- #12 Nicole Avant… Ambassador to Bahamas
- #13 Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe … Ambassador to the UN
- #16 Steve Westly – CFO of California
- #17 Don Beyer – Ambassador to Switzerland
- #21 Don Gips – Ambassador to South Africa
- #22 Howard Gutman – Ambassador to Belgium
- #24 Cynthia Stroum – Ambassador to Luxembourg
- #27 Mark Gilbert – Ambassador to New Zealand
- #31 Norm Eisen – Ambassador to Czech Republic
- #37 Bruce Oreck – Ambassador to Finland
- #43 Tony West – deputy Attorney General
- #45 Bill Kennard – Ambassador to EU
The DNC responded to the latest hack claim Tuesday through its Interim Chair Donna Brazile, who stated that the “DNC is the victim of a crime,” which she blamed on “Russian state-sponsored agents,” while also cautioning that the hacked documents were still being authenticated by the DNC legal team, as “it is common for Russian hackers to forge documents.” DNC pre-emptively published a statement in an attempt to change the narrative…
The DNC is bracing itself for the release of more documents pic.twitter.com/y1uVz8jUW9
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) September 13, 2016
Once again blaming Russia (and Trump)… As RT reports, it's not the first time that the name of Vladimir Putin has been brought up in the US presidential campaign, but this time the US president used this “argument” while openly campaigning for Clinton against Trump. The situation has become “really ludicrous and it borders on the ridiculous,” believes Gregory R. Copley, editor of Defense & Foreign Affairs.
“In my 50 odd years covering the US government, I have never seen this level of partisanship within the administration where a sitting president actually regards the opposition party as the enemy of the state,” Copley told RT.
The analyst said that the democrats are “blaming the messenger to revert the attention from the message.”
“The message which Donald Trump delivered on RT was unambiguous in his campaign. Just like the fact that WikiLeaks revelation of the hacked emails was very explicit in showing up what the Democratic party itself was doing,” Copley added.
The US establishment is “sacrificing key bilateral relationships in order to win [a] domestic election,” believes Copley. He added that neither Obama nor Clinton are interested in unifying the country, but they are rather “interested in winning and engaging in what modern democracy seems to have become – the tyranny of the marginal majority over the marginal minority.”
“When you think about the number of times that the Clinton campaign has brought up President Putin and the alleged Russian hacking of Hillary Clinton’s service, it makes you wonder just how desperate they are,” Copley noted. “President Obama has lost literally all prestige in an international community…with the loss of prestige he has become desperate.”
Some of the alleged major donors (via Magafeed.com)
Richard M. Lobo
It appears Richard M. Lobo’s wife, Caren Lobo, donated $716,000 to DNC. Obama then nominated Richard Lobo for Director of the International Broadcasting Bureau.
From BBG.gov:
Richard Lobo was nominated by President Obama to be Director of the International Broadcasting Bureau in February, 2010, and was confirmed to the post by the Senate in September of that year.
You can find Caren Lobo’s donation in this photo.
Pamela Hamamoto
Pamela Hamamoto paid DNC $605,000 then became the Permanent Representative of the United States of America to the United Nations and Other International Organizations in Geneva.
Jane Hartley
Jane Hartley paid DNC $605,000 and then was nominated by Obama to serve concurrently as the U.S. Ambassador to the French Republic and the Principality of Monaco.
Crystal Nix-Hines
Crystal Nix-Hines paid DNC $600,000 and then was nominated by President Obama to the position of United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization with the rank of Ambassador.
Bruce J. Oreck
Bruce J. Oreck donated $1,136,613 to the DNC and served as US ambassador to Finland 2009 to 2015.
Robert A. Mandell
Robert A. Mandell donated $1,121,250 to the DNC then President Obama named Mandell the Ambassador to Luxembourg in June 2011.
You can find Robert Mandell’s donation in this photo (as Bob Mandell).
Julius Genachowski
Julius Genachowski donated $3,494,919 toDNC and served as Chairman of the FCC from 2009 to 2013.
You can find Robert Mandell’s donation in this photo.
Karol Mason
Karol Mason donated $856,000 to the DNC and Obama appoints her as Assistant Attorney General, Office of Justice Programs.
* * *
It's probably nothing…
- The US Military Has "Never Been Fatter"
The men and women serving in the U.S. military are getting fatter at an alarming rate. Could this trend be a simple reflection of the fact that pilots sitting in a command center far away from the battlefield flying drones in today’s modern military just don’t require the same level of physical fitness? Or, perhaps our military leaders, like our college professors, have shied away from committing “micro-aggressions” against our soft-skinned millennial soldiers by asking them to do things like exercise.
While it may not be exactly clear why it’s happening, according to data published by the Military Times, the fact is that America’s military is packing on the pounds.
As the Military Times points out, compared to the U.S. civilian population, the rate of overweight troops is far smaller. While that may be true, there’s a reason we don’t ensure our national security to overweight, pampered, unemployed millennials living at home with mom…they probably wouldn’t be very good at it. But just to confirm the stats, the map below from The State of Obesity, highlights that over 30% of the civilian population in many states is technically obese.
As Army Command Sgt. Maj. John Troxell points out, while rising obesity rates in the U.S. military don’t yet raise a “readiness concern” the “obesity trends are troubling.”
“If I have to climb up to the top of a mountain in Nuristan, in Afghanistan, and if I have someone who is classified as clinically obese, they are potentially going to be a liability for me on that patrol,” said Army Command Sgt. Maj. John Troxell, the military’s top noncommissioned officer and the senior enlisted adviser to Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford.
Troxell said today’s force is combat ready, but he believes the obesity trends are troubling, and demand careful consideration from senior leaders. “I don’t think it’s a clear readiness concern right now. But I think it’s something that needs our attention. And we really have to look across our services at what we’re doing every morning or every day to prepare the men and women for what could be the worst day of their life,” Troxell said in a recent interview.
As for the reasons for the growing obesity rates, the Military Times points out a number of potential contributing factors including a lack of healthy food on base and a younger generation of soldiers that grew up playing video games on the couch rather than engaging in physical activities outdoors.
“This is about the national security of the United States,” said retired Army Lt. Gen. John Bednarek, who was the highest ranking American general in Iraq in 2014. “It’s a long term trend and we cannot turn a blind eye. The bottom line is that our commanders and senior enlisted leaders have to take a look at what we are serving, whether it’s in the [dining facility] or aboard a ship in the mess. Are we providing healthy choices? Are we providing fruits and vegetable options up front? As opposed to the first thing they see in the morning is the grill with a 22-grams-of-fat sausage patty?”
Troxell said that he believes the urgent demands created by combat may have led some unit-level leaders to prioritize missions over traditional physical training. “In some cases,” he added, “the first thing that gets cut is the fitness session that was on the training calendar, when actually that is probably the most important thing we do every day.”
Add to that wartime eating habits. “At the dining facilities that we had in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was really four or five times a day. It was unlimited chow of all kinds that service members could indulge in. And all of the sudden it led to some overeating and pretty soon we had people whose body mass was going up to what doctors would say is clinically obese,” Troxell said.
Troxell also said that some of the military’s current fitness challenges reflect the new generation of young people joining the services.
“The men and women that are coming in today weren’t doing the things as they were growing up that I was doing when I was growing up, such as playing outside until dark, racing with my friends from one crack in the cement to another crack in the cement. More and more, young men and women are attracted to things that happen indoors and allow them be on a couch, like playing video games,” Troxell said. “Men and women are growing up differently. There is less physical activities and more mental activities.”
But, like with the Reuters presidential poll, the easiest way to fix an undesirable result is simply to “tweak” the way the data is collected, measured and analyzed, which the U.S. military intends to do promptly.
Top military health plan to publish a new policy later this year that could have a sweeping effect on how the military defines and measures health and fitness.
- Archie Bunker Still Lives Within Some, Many, Or Most Of Us
Politicians are human and occasionally they cannot contain themselves, allowing their true sentiments to come out; sometimes in droplets hardly noticed, but sometimes in damaging blurbs. We, certainly the media, usually point to these blurbs as gaffes. But in reality they simply represent what these politicians think but are not supposed to acknowledge in a world where we must try, at times force ourselves, to be painfully politically correct in order to achieve some modicum of conviviality.
Hillary Clinton had her sentiments blurb out, as carefully hidden as they always seem to be, and gave us another slip of the tongue; her very untimely depiction of “Trump’s deplorables,” similar in nature, and of equal magnitude, to Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” gaffe of four years before; September gaffes both, as if precursors to some mythical October surprise. And, needless-to-say, both were made before their respective elite party audiences and, expectedly, during fundraisers.
Clinton, a consummate politician, didn’t take long to express her “regret.”
Since Trump’s entire campaign is a serial-gaffe without apparent consequences, this non-Republican Republican candidate is not expected to regret a single thing he has ever said or might say in the future. He has been granted a press bull, to say whatever comes to his mind… and remain “bull-holder” immune.
So Clinton, in the open camaraderie of a fundraiser, came out of her political shell and tainted half of Trump’s followers as bigopats (bigoted patriots)… which she referred to as “deplorables.” Although quantification, even when generalized, is not recommended in politics, the truth of the matter is that the bright gal from Wellesley College was not only on target but might have been appraisal-short. [RE: my June 16, 2016 article, “Bigopats: Undocumented Largest Group in American Politics.”]
However, although Americans readily will admit that the nation is fragmentally divided economically, socially and politically… most prefer to keep this humpty-dumpty (post-fall) status on the QT. And a quarter of the electorate (24-28 percent by my account in the referred article), although confirmed by voice and action as bigopats, prefer to be tagged as patriots… divested of any intolerance or prejudice that circumvent their lives. But voicing this out loud, no matter how true, is frowned upon as divisive for us, the citizenry, and truly anathema for American career politicians.
We, in these United States of America, may feel that “we’ve come a long way, baby,” as the 1968 marketing of Virginia Slims cigarettes proclaimed, but in matters of bigotry the TV character of the 1970’s, Archie Bunker, is alive and well after the past four decades; its soul living in some, many or most of us… white folks. To QT it or deny it does not and will not serve us well. Americans are no better or worse than any other people on this planet when it comes to intolerance and prejudice. But our challenge has been always greater than that of most other nations because of our diversity, erroneously self-depicted as a melting pot… something which had really only applied to Euro-Americans of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Archie Bunker’s depiction as the archetype of the bigopat had a positive impact in many of us… sort of an American mild version of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution a decade earlier in China, without extreme shocking societal changes; yet, sufficiently strong to shame us to change. But change comes very slowly as resistance to change endures, particularly when such change implies giving up privilege and power, which in an unjust society must take place.
So, Hillary Clinton was probably right on the mark in her quantitative assessment of her nicknamed “deplorables,” but way off the mark in expressing such unwelcome truth.
Only prophets, philosophers and martyrs can express the unadulterated truth; but that is not the case with politicians who always do it at their peril… and expressing regret often proves not to be enough.
- Doctor Explains Why Hillary's 9/11 "Medical Episode" Is More Consistent With Parkinson's Than Pneumonia
A few weeks back, Dr. Ted Noel, an anesthesiologist with 36 years of experience, gained notoriety by sharing his opinion on his website, Vidzette, that Hillary likely had Parkinson’s disease.
Now, Dr. Noel has posted a new video in which he explains how Hillary’s behavior on 9/11 and the subsequent decisions made by her campaign staff and secret service detail are more consistent with Parkinson’s disease than pneumonia.
Among other things, Noel points out that if Hillary actually was suffering from such a severe case of pneumonia that it forced her to literally collapse on a sidewalk, it’s extremely unlikely that she could make a seemingly full recovery after only 90 minutes at Chelsea’s apartment and feel well enough to great onlookers and snap a selfie with a child. Per Noel, Hillary’s recovery timing is more consistent with how long it would take her to ingest a dosage of Levodopa and wait for her Parkinson’s symptoms to subside. Noel also points out that sunglasses with dark blue lenses, like the ones Hillary wore this weekend despite the cloud cover, have been noted by doctors to help treat patients with major motion disorders such as Parkinson’s disease.
With that preview, here is the full analysis:
And here is Noel’s original video from August 29th:
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