Wednesday, April 2, 2025

More Crap on Statin Drugs with Dr Sircus



Little to add here.  The whole drug promote has gone on for a long time and too much produces muscle weakness or unwelcome aches and pains.

No evidence we are doing the right thing there.

Dr Sircus does not push vitimin C.  Yet the hard story is out there my entire lifetime.  It certainly shut down my chronic circulatory disease.  i had the Widowmaker twenty years ago.  immediate CPR prevented damage.  That and several other cases made the argument for todays CPR practise which does not bother blowing air.



More Crap on Statin Drugs

https://drsircus.substack.com/p/more-crap-on-statin-drugs

Statins are still very cheap and highly effective cholesterol-lowering drugs, they like to say, but high-risk heart patients may have an even better option, a new evidence review says. Combining statins with another drug, ezetimibe, significantly reduces the risk of death in patients with clogged arteries, according to findings published Sunday in Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

What they do not say is that the chemical combo increases the risk of adverse drug interactions, and thus, side effects are probably multiplied. But what they do say is that this combination therapy would prevent more than 330,000 deaths a year worldwide among patients who have already suffered a heart attack, including almost 50,000 deaths in the U.S. alone, researchers said.

“This study confirms that combined cholesterol lowering therapy should be considered immediately and should be the gold standard for treatment of very high-risk patients after an acute cardiovascular event,” senior researcher Dr. Peter Toth, a professor of clinical family and community medicine at the University of Illinois, said in a news release.

I do not believe a word of it.

Not when the so-called “evidence” is brought to us by pharmaceutical insiders, echoed by compromised journals, and spoon-fed to the public through press releases designed to scare and sell. The idea that combining statins with another drug like ezetimibe — both known to cause adverse effects — will now become the “gold standard” for saving lives is not only scientifically dishonest, it’s medically reckless.

Let’s be clear: Statins do not treat the root cause of heart disease. They merely manipulate a number — cholesterol — that’s been scapegoated for decades. As I’ve written before, cholesterol is not the enemy. It is essential, even protective, especially during physiological stress or inflammation. The real villain isn’t cholesterol — it’s inflammation. It’s oxidative stress. It’s magnesium deficiency. It’s acidic tissue environments.

What’s worse, this “gold standard” of dual-drug therapy does nothing to address the cause of cardiovascular disease—it merely numbs the metrics while the fire burns on beneath the surface. Statins and ezetimibe do not touch the deeper pathology. They do not reduce arterial stiffness, restore endothelial function, or regenerate heart tissue. They suppress, silence, mask, and damage.

This system is built on lies so deeply embedded in medical culture that even “confessions of a cardiologist,” as I once highlighted, are not enough to turn the tide. They know it’s inflammation. They know it’s about the terrain. Yet they keep prescribing drugs that damage the liver, drain CoQ10, suppress cognition, and provoke muscular degeneration.

They are crazy because they dare to call this progress.

Meanwhile, in the natural world, solutions abound — and they don’t require prescriptions. They require understanding. Bicarbonate therapy, magnesium repletion, vitamin D restoration, high-dose omega-3s, infrared therapy, and breathing techniques that regulate CO₂ and oxygen balance. These are the actual “gold standard” therapies. And unlike statins, they don’t cause side effects — they create side benefits.

If we are going to stop heart disease — truly stop it — we must abandon this cholesterol-lowering myth once and for all. The body isn’t betraying us. It’s doing its best under toxic, nutrient-depleted, pharmaceutically hijacked conditions. The betrayal is not in your arteries. It’s in the medical-industrial complex. It’s in the pills sold as salvation while the cause is ignored.

Coconut Water: Far More Than Just a Refreshing Beverage



Somehow coconut water needs to become universally available as should the milk and solids.  We are getting better at it and perthaps using it a a canned fruit pack is a good plan.

we have explored a whole range of food enhancements to work around the present cost driven protocols.  Cane sugar was bad enough, but fructose is simply worse.  A coconut water pack may need added sugars but then cane sugar is fine.  Imagine canned mangos in coconut milk.

We do not have to use honey or maple syrup ,but cane in small amounts works well and preserves.  And canning with pectin allows that to be lowerred well.


Coconut Water: Far More Than Just a Refreshing Beverage

Views 74639

Posted on: Monday, December 3rd 2018 at 12:00 pm

Written By: Sayer Ji, Founder
This article is copyrighted by GreenMedInfo LLC, 2020


Not just one of Nature's most refreshing beverages, coconut water is a powerhouse of deep, evidence-based health benefits

Few beverages on this planet are as biocompatible to the human body and its hydration needs as coconut water. Indeed, coconut water has been reported to have been used for intravenous hydration and resuscitation of critically ill patients in remote regions of the world for over half a century.[1] It is also an excellent preserving medium for avulsed teeth (and semen!), besting even Hank's balanced salt solution, a commonly used medical solution.[2]

While some are concerned about the sugar content of this slightly sweet beverage, recent research shows it actually exhibits blood sugar lowering properties in an experimental model of diabetes.[3] Additional animal research shows coconut water prevents and reverses high blood pressure associated with fructose feeding-induced hypertension, as well being able to reduce oxidative stress and insulin resistance.[4]

Perhaps one of the most amazing properties of coconut water is its superior lipid modulating activity in the animal model vis-à-vis the cholesterol-lowering statin drug known as lovastatin.[5] Which means we can, in clear conscience, modify Hippocrates' famous saying to: "Let What You Drink Be Your Medicine."

Other medicinal properties of coconut water includeAnti-Ulcer Properties: Both coconut milk and coconut water exhibit potent anti-ulcer activity against chemicals such as indomethacin, a Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug (NSAID).

Blood-Pressuring Lowering Properties: When human subjects consumed coconut water for two weeks, it was found to lower blood pressure in 74% of the experimental group, reducing it by up to 24 points (mmHg) systolic and 15 points (mmHq) diastolic.

Anti-Alzheimer's Properties: in an animal model of ovariectomy-induced menopausal changes, coconut water appeared to prevent the decline of brain estrogen (estradiol) levels, as well as the associated accumulation of Alzheimer's disease associated β-amyloid (Aβ) plaque in their brains.

Anti-Bacterial Properties: Three novel antimicrobial peptides have been identified in coconut water which exhibited inhibitory activity against both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria.

Anti-Gastroenteritis Agent: When sodium is added (ideally sea salt) coconut water has been determined to be an ideal rehydrating agent in countries where medical supplies are not freely available, and where, say, cholera and other severe forms of gastroenteritis persist.

Ultimately, coconut makes for an excellent alternative to sports drinks, which are increasingly comprised of synthetic ingredients. Also, coconut water is filtered by Nature through an intensive purification process -- far safer than municipal systems which leave up to 600 toxic disinfectant byproducts behind. I'm nuts for the stuff (so much so that I will use a bad pun like this), how about you?



For more coconut related research visit our Coconut Research Page!

References

[1] The intravenous use of coconut water. Am J Emerg Med. 2000 Jan;18(1):108-11. PMID: 10674546 [2] Comparison of coconut water, propolis, HBSS, and milk on PDL cell survival. J Endod. 2008 May;34(5):587-9. Epub 2008 Mar 19. PMID: 18436040 [3] Hypoglycemic and antioxidant potential of coconut water in experimental diabetes. Food Funct. 2012 May 11. Epub 2012 May 11. PMID: 22576019 [4] Therapeutic effects of tender coconut water on oxidative stress in fructose fed insulin resistant hypertensive rats. act Source: Asian Pac J Trop Med. 2012 Apr ;5(4):270-6. PMID: 22449517 [5] Comparative evaluation of the hypolipidemic effects of coconut water and lovastatin in rats fed fat-cholesterol enriched diet. Food Chem Toxicol. 2008 Dec;46(12):3586-92. Epub 2008 Sep 3 PMID: 18809454

Trump tariffs, rattled allies





The whole point of Trumps action have been to rattle allies and that he certainly has.  all final policies are now pending real negotiations and must hit reality..

I would like to see anyone else with an idea.  Tariffs have always been stupid as stupid does.  I am pretty sure that Trump knows this ,but it isw also an act of WAR when you must force real change.  It also shuts down universal rigging through governments.

So once again, expect to be surprised.  Are all farm subsidies now going to end?  Perhaps universal supply management for agricuture generally?  and globally?

Perhaps no seed oils anywhere.  that would be a blessing to our health.

All of this hauls all the global politicians out of their comfort zone.  The USA and the globe needs no income tax.  the USA needs a VAT which actually part of the income tax dissolution bill.


Trump tariffs, rattled allies, and a personal farewell

Shin Nakayama, Nikkei Asia


Good evening. U.S. President Donald Trump's aggressive announcement of a 25% tariff on foreign-made cars and light trucks, starting on April 2, sent allies, automakers, economists and many others scrambling to calculate the impact. Nikkei estimates that Japan's car industry could face losses of up to 13 trillion yen (86.2 billion) due to a decline in domestic production.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Newsletters/Editor-in-chief-s-picks/Editor-in-chief-s-picks352?

When Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba made his first trip to the White House to meet with Trump in early February -- a visit widely hailed as a success in Japan -- a reporter asked Ishiba what Japan would do if tariffs were imposed. In true Ishiba style, he replied: "I cannot answer a theoretical question. That's always our official response." Trump then replied, "That's a very good answer," to laughter in the room.

The tariffs are no longer theoretical, and the optimism of that time has faded. Ishiba told lawmakers during a subsequent parliamentary session: "We need to consider appropriate responses. All options will be on the table." I have spoken to several people about this "all options" remark, and it seems the choices are in fact rather limited.



The big question is whether any effective moves remain to reach a deal with Trump at this point. South Korea's Hyundai Motor Group, for example, announced plans to invest $21 billion in the U.S. in the hope of avoiding tariffs, but did not get an exemption. Meanwhile, Canada and European countries have responded strongly, even considering countermeasures -- in stark contrast to many governments in Asia.

There is no question that the U.S. remains Japan's most important ally. The tariffs will not change their relationship, and Japan will have no choice but to adopt a cooperative stance toward Washington. So "all options" do not include confrontational countermeasures, as some have suggested.

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, also a significant milestone for both Japan and the U.S., which fought fiercely against each other during the war, as I have mentioned in this newsletter several times. To commemorate the occasion, Prime Minister Ishiba, Defense Minister Gen Nakatani and U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth will participate in a joint memorial ceremony for the war dead tomorrow on Iwo Jima, a site of intense fighting near the end of the war.

It is highly unusual for a Japanese prime minister to attend such a ceremony, especially alongside the U.S. defense secretary. However, it is easy to see why Japan would seize this opportunity to showcase the strength of its alliance with the U.S.

I also visited Iwo Jima when I was a college student as a member of the Japan-America Student Conference to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the end of the war. The island became a fierce battleground from February to March 1945, with tens of thousands of soldiers losing their lives. Relics from that violent time were still visible, and I could feel the intensity of the fighting even then. Now, 80 years later, we can confidently say we are in a much better position to manage bilateral relations.

Against ‘natural’ parenting



we have a lot of bad ideas when it comes to parenting and tnis shows us a lot.  In the future we so need the natural community in place and working allowing mohers to multitask properly.  any two mothers can readily work with even thirty or so too young children and babies including tasking older children to help.  A four hour shift does it.   

This is not complicated and frees up all mothers to put serious effort into resting and  doing a wotrk shift or two as well.

 It is impossible with our isolated nuclear family system and a total wastye of human resources as well


Against ‘natural’ parenting

We’re opportunistic, inventive and flexible animals, and there is no ‘natural’ or ‘right’ way to bring up our children


Children at the Appleby Horse Fair in Cumbria, England, in 1972. Photo by Bruce Dale/National Geographic/Getty

Olga Mecking  is a writer, journalist and translator. She is the author of several books, including Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing (2020) and her translation of her grandfather’s Holocaust memoir, 'One Chance in a Thousand'. Born in Poland, she lives in the Netherlands.




Motherhood has never felt natural to me. I wasn’t very good at understanding my babies’ needs or what their cries meant, something that other parents seemed to know without giving it too much thought. ‘She’s just tired,’ they would say. Or: ‘This sound means he’s hungry.’ And I had no idea, and felt like a failure.

Even worse, I didn’t like the feeling of my baby attached to me. I felt ambivalent about nursing her; I didn’t hate it and sometimes I enjoyed it, but I felt burdened by the intensity that raising a child required.

It’s a cliché that parenting is hard but what is even harder is the judgment from other members of society – parents and nonparents alike. When I talked about my experiences in articles and blog posts, one word often came up to describe mothers like me: unnatural.

Current parenting philosophies tell us to raise our kids emulating other primates such as gorillas and chimpanzees or our hunter-gatherer ancestors, as modelled by modern tribes around the world. These philosophies, ostensibly based in evolution, psychology and neuroscience, and espoused on websites such as Evolutionary Parenting, tell us to ‘mimic biological processes’ for the wellbeing of our kids.

But what does that really mean? Picture a chimpanzee mother and her baby blissfully together, the baby clinging to her mother’s back as she jumps from branch to branch in search of food. The pair is completely self-sufficient. They don’t need anyone else to help. It seems it’s the two of them against the world (which, quite possibly, it is). According to many researchers and parenting experts, this chimp mother should be an example for all of us humans. Unsullied by culture, instinctual. Natural. We used to parent like that, they say. And we should parent like that again, or our children will grow up wrong. Unbonded. Unattached.

While many thinkers wrote about the nature of the relationship between parents and children, the most prominent one is John Bowlby, a British psychologist who was caring for orphaned children in the aftermath of the Second World War. Children, Bowlby said, need a secure attachment to a primary caregiver, most commonly the mother, or they will suffer dire consequences such as an inability to start and maintain social relationships or even a variety of mental illnesses.

To test the types of attachment around the world, the American-Canadian psychologist Mary Ainsworth in 1970 devised a measuring tool – the Strange Situation. A mother and baby are in the room together but, after a while, someone the baby doesn’t know (the stranger) asks the mother to leave. The baby’s reaction upon the mother’s return decides the type of attachment. The ‘securely attached’ baby cries as the mother leaves but lets herself be calmed down quickly by the stranger; she is also happy when the mother returns. Insecure attachment, meanwhile, comes in two types – ‘anxious-avoidant’, when the baby doesn’t react to the stranger and seems to be unphased by her mother’s return, and ‘anxious-resistant’, characterised by extreme distress and clinginess when the mother comes back.

Then in the early 1980s, the American paediatrician William Sears read Jean Liedloff’s book The Continuum Concept (1975), which built on Bowlby’s ideas of attachment. Liedloff had noticed that the indigenous babies she’d studied in Venezuela were carried around at all times and tended to cry less than their Western counterparts. As a result, she suggested that American parents were too detached from nature and, by extrapolation, their babies. As a cure, she suggested babywearing, on-demand breastfeeding and instant responsiveness.

Sears built his theory – which he later called attachment parenting – on this framework, advising mothers to give birth without pain relief or any other types of intervention, to breastfeed on demand, and to stay in constant contact with their babies, claiming that it would help parents and babies bond. This, he said, was not just the best way to raise children, but the way we have always been raising children. It is, in other words, natural, hailing back to our ancestors in the Stone Age.

Just picture it: a hunter-gatherer mother with her baby in a sling and a recently weaned four-year old chatting with grandmother nearby. No one ever scolds these children during the incredibly rare moments they act out. Instead, they are indulged by everyone in society, which, by the way, is staunchly egalitarian across all genders and generations. Mother, grandmother and baby are part of a tribe of between 20-200 individuals who provide food and shelter to everyone. All members contribute to everyone’s wellbeing by collecting fruit and berries or hunting for meat as well as performing other work such as weaving. This idyllic picture, some believe, is our heritage, the way we evolved to parent before culture, technology and agriculture changed everything forever. It is with a nostalgic wistfulness that we want to go back to a time when the whole family slept in one bed, children were breastfed until they turned four, and mothers gave birth without pain relief.

Yet for me, it’s hard to buy. Is parenting really programmed by nature as a one-size-fits-all process for us humans, just like the apes? Or is it – like families, partnering and love – part of culture, a matter of environment, circumstance, and as variable as society itself?

While chimpanzees might be our closest living cousins, parenting-wise we are a very different kind of ape. In fact, we are more like birds. To get to the root, I contacted the American primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who caused an uproar in the scientific community in 2001 when she suggested that the human nuclear family has never been the norm. We had to reschedule our interview multiple times, mostly due to the time difference (she’s in California, I’m in the Netherlands) and my chaotic life: I am a mother of three who runs her own business, and my husband works too. Luckily, we manage to make it happen.

When we finally speak, Blaffer Hrdy tells me that the human baby comes with a big brain, a vulnerable body and an utter lack of skill. Since our infants are so needy, how could they be cared for by one mother, alone? Instead, Blaffer Hrdy argues that humans evolved to be cooperative breeders – a term taken from the field of ornithology – meaning that they’ve always had help caring for their young. Moreover, she said, it was this cooperation of emotionally modern humans that allowed us to develop our huge brains.

‘Brains need caring more than caring needs brains,’ she is known to say. There is no such thing as a mother and her baby. There were only, as the title of one of her many books said, Mothers and Others (2009).

Blaffer Hrdy claims that, while humans share more than 95 per cent of their genes with chimps, we parent more like other cooperatively breeding monkeys such as baboons, marmosets, tamarinds or bonobos. What’s more, this need for help wasn’t optional. It was crucial for survival. In marmosets, for example, ‘When a mother doesn’t get support, she’ll reject her baby,’ Blaffer Hrdy explains. And the outlook for a marmoset baby that’s been rejected is anything but good.

Hunter-gatherer women couldn’t rely on provisions from males to keep everyone fed and cared for

Similarly, in humans, one of the possible causes for postpartum depression is lack of support for new mothers. What’s more, it isn’t so much the actual amount of support she gets but her perception of it that makes a difference. ‘A small amount of help can make a difference because it’s a sign of social support,’ Blaffer Hrdy says.

Sharing childcare didn’t just help human mothers keep their babies alive – it also allowed them to continue contributing to society. Indeed, to Blaffer Hrdy, the traditional idea of the father going hunting while the mother stays at home (or in her cave) watching the kids and waiting for her man to come back with meat makes no sense.

Instead, in many hunter-gatherer societies, it was the women, including the mothers, who were responsible for covering the daily caloric needs of their tribe. Meat, after all, was hard to come by, and men often died or were severely injured while hunting. As a result, women couldn’t rely on provisions from males to keep everyone fed and cared for. They had to make their own arrangements, be it hiring babysitters in the form of mostly female kin, or fostering out children to other family members if they had no help available.

That’s why Blaffer Hrdy revised Bowlby’s notion of attachment. Children, she said, could bond with multiple caregivers throughout their lives, yet experience no added anxiety or psychological problems as a result. In fact, she remarks on one very positive aspect of modern parenting that’s available in many European countries: affordable daycare. She asks me about my own experiences, and I launch into a passionate praise of the institution after seeing my own three children thrive in Dutch daycare. I agree with her: I could not have done it by myself. So-called alloparents, whether in the form of wider family members or daycare workers, matter. But they’re not the whole story either.

Even in cultures where children are indulged and treated with respect, there is a dark reality that goes unnoticed because it doesn’t fit into the ‘natural is good’ narrative. A mother’s love is conditional. In fact, in many so-called ‘natural’ cultures, newborns are on probation for a period of time.

Children who are born sickly, deformed, ‘weird’ (which could mean anything from ‘too loud’ or ‘with too much hair’) were quietly, quickly, disposed of. David F Lancy, emeritus professor of anthropology at Utah State University, writes that the tradition of isolating mother and baby from the rest of society didn’t just have the benefit of allowing the mother to rest and have some privacy with her newborn. It was also to give her the choice of whether to keep that baby. This fact is so stark that Blaffer Hrdy asks me not to mention it. ‘If you write about it, people will get upset,’ she tells me.

Shockingly, infanticide is frighteningly common around the world, and historically in Europe too. In his book The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings (2008), Lancy estimates that it was present in 80 per cent of human societies. Infanticide is also common among other mammals such as rabbits, and even in chimpanzees – who are, after all, our closest cousins. So, abandoning newborns is no less natural than, let’s say, feeding them.

To find out about this aspect of parenting, I set up a video call with Lancy. (I’d devoured The Anthropology of Childhood, finding a lot of solace in it.) During our interview, my son somehow managed to disrupt the conversation every few minutes by inserting his head into the picture, while my two daughters complained of boredom.

‘You’re combining working with motherhood which is a widespread phenomenon,’ Lancy tells me, even though the stay-at-home-mother is still considered the ideal in the US, according to a 2012 poll by the Pew Research Center. But such a thing has never existed. Women always had to work, and work hard at that. ‘It’s much rarer to find a society or anyone in a society where the mother is not simultaneously caring for children and also gathering food or whatever, weaving, making a living,’ Lancy says.

That gave me pause. Natural isn’t always good. Attachment is conditional. Working mothers are the norm. In fact, there is no norm.

We didn’t evolve for a certain lifestyle or diet. In fact, we are constantly changing

Modern hunter-gatherer societies, such as the Inuits, are seen as a model for contemporary parents, but it’s important not to treat such cultures as homogeneous or uniform. The behaviour of parents in these cultures changes from one tribe to another. While the !Kung people of the Kalahari Desert fit our ideas of attachment parenting – constant babywearing and indulging children – the Aché of South America practise ‘portable paternity’, in which a woman has sex with multiple men to make sure her child is well-provided for. The Xhosa of South Africa incite their three-year-old boys to fight each other to toughen them up.

There is no single hunter-gatherer society that’s more likely to be closer in style to our ancestors than another. As a contrast to the ideal of the indulgent indigenous parent, Lancy gives the example of the Hadza tribe, where children may be treated more harshly than in many other cultures, and are expected to be independent from very early on.

‘Contemporary hunter-gatherers are variable in what they eat, how they divide labour between men and women, the way they raise children, and a whole host of other features of daily lives,’ explains the evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk in her book Paleofantasy (2013). We didn’t evolve for a certain lifestyle or diet. In fact, we are constantly changing. Modern hunter-gatherers are not living fossils from our past. As the world is evolving, all humans are evolving with it. In other words, we don’t know how we used to parent. We can only know how we parent now – as individuals bound to a certain time, place and culture.

But how did we get the idea of the indigenous parent in the first place, I wonder, and call Charlotte Faircloth, a lecturer in the sociology of gender at University College London. This is the only interview I can do in peace, since I can talk to Faircloth while my children are at school.

‘There’s the danger that this mythical primitive becomes this kind of blank canvas on which our ideas can get played out,’ she tells me. ‘If you look at each individual culture and each individual person, they do not map on this kind of blueprint.’

But this truth gets overlooked because ‘it doesn’t fit into the narrative of the natural’. Instead, we prefer to cherrypick our parenting approaches to feed our biases. Natural parenting has more to do with how we want to be than with how we actually are.

Throughout recorded history, when circumstances changed, parenting changed with them. For example, with the advent of farming and the stability of food it brought forth, mothers started to wean their children earlier, and went on to have more babies, all the better to have more hands to work the fields. In fact, wherever safe weaning foods were available, parents immediately turned to those. Hunter-gatherer mothers co-slept with their children because of breastfeeding, but also because of lack of space. When houses got bigger, children got their own beds and, with time, even their own rooms.

In short, parenting is not set in stone but instead depends on what Charles Super and Sara Harkness at the University of Connecticut called ‘ethnotheories’, or cultural beliefs, that parents held about raising children. We have our ethnotheories, modern hunter-gatherers have theirs. And our ancestors must have had theirs, too.

When I ask Lancy if there’s anything that people all over the world had in common, he hesitates a little before replying. ‘I think the bottom line is that mothers universally respond to their infants’ need for food,’ he says. ‘And that’s it.’ But even that could mean different things – from breastfeeding or collecting berries to earning the money to buy the food. Everything else – who cared for babies, how long they were breastfed, how they were treated, and what they were expected to be able to do – is in flux. Some of that commotion is caused by changing circumstances. Some of it, though, results from changes in human culture and behaviour itself.

Blaffer Hrdy calls us ‘opportunistic’ and ‘flexible’ in terms of parenting arrangements. Her refrain throughout our interview is: ‘it depends’.

But if there’s no ‘natural’ parenting, if parental love is conditional, and if modern hunter-gatherers aren’t perfect parents after all, don’t we have to question not just the idea of attachment parenting, but attachment theory itself?

To answer the question, Heidi Keller, a psychologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, studied attachment across cultures, and began challenging the Ainsworth model that has dominated thinking for years. Keller showed that ‘secure’ attachment wasn’t necessarily the only path to excellent mental health. For example, children of the Ivorian Beng or the Cameroonian Nso tend to take strangers in their stride, which is a sign of insecure attachment, according to the Strange Situation test. Instead, Keller found that induction of anxiety depends on context – on the specific culture involved.

Bowlby focused on the mother-child attachment because it aligned with his idea of how mothers should behave

Based on these studies and others, classic attachment theory has begun to reveal some cracks. By measuring the way that parents raised their children and then comparing this to an ideal, Ainsworth and Bowlby used moralistic terms such as ‘competence’ and ‘responsiveness’, thereby judging parents who diverged from the norm, which – not so coincidentally – aligned with the way that Western parents raised their kids. By extending the classic theory, the pressure nowadays on parents to be perfectly responsive, and always ‘on’, has only increased.

It’s no coincidence that Bowlby focused on the mother-child attachment because it aligned with his idea of how mothers should behave. But how important are parents, really? To gain some insight, I called the American anthropologists Sarah and Robert LeVine, whose book Do Parents Matter? (2016) asks the question in depth.

In the 1980s, the couple found themselves in Nigeria, studying children living south of the Sahara Desert. Sarah LeVine reminisces: ‘I was shocked by how mothers related to their babies’ – especially the practice of mothers not looking at their own infants. With her training in psychology and attachment, she thought that the children would grow up to be autistic but, as it turned out, they were fine.

‘Parents only matter up to a point,’ she says. If you don’t believe that context matters, just think of immigrant parents. When they move their families to another country, they find it increasingly difficult to continue parenting the way they were used to. The LeVines experienced these differences for themselves when one of their daughters stayed in the US, while the other moved to Berlin where she is now living. In turn, the LeVine’s two grandchildren grew to become very different people. The US granddaughter is outspoken and fully aware of herself as an individual. Meanwhile, in Germany, children are expected to be better behaved but, at the same time, they also seem, as Robert LeVine put it: ‘Young for their age.’

Of course, attachment is important. For instance, when children and parents are separated crossing the border into the United States, trauma is severe. These children may suffer lifelong unless they are returned to their parents, and even then, may need years of therapy to heal.

But that has little to do with our current culture of intensive parenting, which holds parents responsible for everything that happens to their children, good or bad. Those expectations make many parents confused, exhausted and miserable – and they might not help our kids, in the end.

A recent study of chimpanzees showed distinct cultures in various groups based on the way the chimps crunched nuts and passed on these skills to their young. If chimpanzees are allowed such cultural diversity, why can’t we humans expect the same? As a mother who already combines various cultures, languages and traditions inside my own family, I should have known better than to listen to experts who told me I was doing it all wrong when I didn’t want to wear my children like skin. I’m doing it my way, and the kids are doing just fine.

Tuesday, April 1, 2025

Trump Tackles Election Integrity With Sweeping Executive Order;




This obviously had to happen.  It is completely possible to make voting fraud proof using citizen Id and real time tracking of all voter activity.  At worst, false voting can be deeply minimized.

What has to disappear is the obscene truckloads of fake ballots hauled in after folks are kicked out of the polling stations.

did we really have to watch fraud in motion with no blowback?


Trump Tackles Election Integrity With Sweeping Executive Order; Will Punish States That Don't Comply

Wednesday, Mar 26, 2025 - 03:11 AM

zerohedge.com/political/trump-tackles-election-integrity-sweeping-executive-order-will-punish-states-dont-comply

On Tuesday, President Trump signed a sweeping executive order aimed at election security.


The order will cut federal funding for states that refuse to take steps to secure their elections, tasks the Department of Homeland Security with ensuring that illegal immigrants are not voting, adds a citizenship question on the federal voting form for the first time.

It also orders the Justice Department to vigorously pursue election crimes - particularly in states that are out of compliance with federal law on election security, and seeks to ensure compliance with national election day rules.

The order also calls for the prosecution of foreign interference in US elections (like paying a British spook to produce a fabricated hoax against a candidate - which nothing is ever done about, even now?).

Herbert Hoover, Enemy of Free Markets



I grew up knowing nothing about Herbert hoover and discovered little since.  His political enemies certainly wrote him and even his predessessors out of poular history let alone provide a useful baanced opinion.

In fact it is reasonable to suggest that his actions extended the Crash low of the depression by deeply suppressing the money supply with badly understood interventions.  And once the damage was locked in, rapid recovery was impossible and the bulk of the population lost their spending power.

Germany did the same thing in 1923 by inflating theri currency out of existence.

Natural recovery then took hold once FDR took over, but it was tentative until WAR spending kicked in.

Claiming he was laizzez faire turns out to be absurd.    His policies never had time to work.

Herbert Hoover, Enemy of Free Markets



03/27/2025


https://mises.org/mises-wire/herbert-hoover-enemy-free-markets

American History is the source of many enduring myths. George Washington didn’t chop down the cherry tree, Abraham Lincoln did not free the slaves (or even end slavery in this country), and Jim Crow was not the natural heir to post-war policies in the South in the 1860s and 70s.

But myths persist, not because of any truths inherent in them, but because certain people find it advantageous to promote them. And perhaps there is no greater myth being peddled almost without criticism is that the Great Depression occurred because President Herbert Hoover pursued laissez-faire policies in the face of impending economic disaster. Writes Kimberly Amadeo:


Hoover was an advocate of laissez-faire economics. He believed an economy based on capitalism would self-correct. He felt that economic assistance would make people stop working. He believed business prosperity would trickle down to the average person.

According to the British Broadcasting Corporation:


Herbert Hoover had become president in 1929 after promising to bring prosperity to everyone in America with the slogan “a chicken for every pot.” However, Hoover thought that it was the job of charities to look after the poor, not the job of the government. He also followed the policy of laisse- faire, which said that the government should not interfere in what businesses were doing. He also believed in rugged individualism, which was the idea that people should sort out their own problems.

The late Steven Horwitz notes:


Many historians, most of the general public, and even many economists think of Herbert Hoover, the president who preceded Franklin D. Roosevelt, as a defender of laissez-faire economic policy. According to this view, Hoover’s dogmatic commitment to small government led him to stand by and do nothing while the economy collapsed in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash.

But Horwitz adds:


The reality is quite different. Far from being a bystander, Hoover actively intervened in the economy, advocating and implementing policies that were quite similar to those that Franklin Roosevelt later implemented. Moreover, many of Hoover’s interventions, like those of his successor, caused the great depression to be “great”—that is, to last a long time.

As we shall see in this article, no one should be surprised that Hoover’s interventionist policies would block the economic recovery that should have followed the original economic downturn in late 1929. Perhaps we should be surprised that Hoover is portrayed by American historians as a rock-hard free enterpriser when all the evidence points the other way, but there is a “logical” story there, too. But first we look at what Hoover did from 1929-1932.

The standard story of the Great Depression is that it began with the infamous stock market crash of October 1929, with things spiraling downward until the economy hit rock bottom in early 1933 with more than 25 percent unemployment. Because of his previous beliefs that free enterprise would soon result in a recovery, Hoover did little, in the words of John Kenneth Galbraith, but give “organized reassurance on a really grand scale.”

As Murray Rothbard and others explain, however, the idea of Hoover being a strict laissez-faire president does not match his record. Instead of listing all of his interventions into the free market, I provide a number of statements that Hoover made toward the end of his term to defend his record.

On the infamous and destructive Smoot-Hawley Tariff:


By this act we gave protection to our agriculture from a world demoralization which would have been infinitely worse than anything we have suffered, and we prevented unemployment of millions of workmen.

On efforts to keep wages high in the face of falling prices and profits:


At the outset of the depression we brought about an understanding between employers and employees that wages should be maintained. They were maintained until the cost of living had decreased and the profits had practically vanished. They are now the highest real wages in the world.

On raising the top rate of taxation in 1932 from 25 percent to 63 percent:


By drastic reduction in the ordinary operating expenses of the Federal Government, together with the increasing of the revenues in the year 1932, we contributed to balancing the Federal budget and thus held impregnable the credit of the United States.

On the creation of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (which lives today as the Small Business Administration) to prop up failing businesses and give agricultural loans:


In addition to strengthening the capital of the Federal land banks by $125 million we have, through the Reconstruction Corporation, made large loans to mortgage associations for the same purpose, and lately we have organized all lending agencies into cooperative action to give the farmer who wants to make a fight for his home a chance to hold it from foreclosure.

To gain a full picture of Hoover’s economic interventions, one should read Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression, which covers only the Hoover presidency and does not mention Franklin D. Roosevelt’s own New Deal. Rothbard does this not because he believes that Roosevelt bore no responsibility for the length and severity of the Great Depression, but rather because without Hoover’s actions on numerous fronts, there would not have been a Great Depression at all.

Certainly, there had been other economic downturns, and the economy recovered without any government intervention. Less than a decade earlier, the economy quickly contracted but within six months was already moving toward recovery. Writes Tom Woods:


Not surprisingly, many modern economists who have studied the depression of 1920–1921 have been unable to explain how the recovery could have been so swift and sweeping even though the federal government and the Federal Reserve refrained from employing any of the macroeconomic tools — public works spending, government deficits, and inflationary monetary policy — that conventional wisdom now recommends as the solution to economic slowdowns. The Keynesian economist Robert A. Gordon admitted that “government policy to moderate the depression and speed recovery was minimal. The Federal Reserve authorities were largely passive.… Despite the absence of a stimulative government policy, however, recovery was not long delayed.”

As Woods notes, many historians that write about that recession have expressed surprise that the economy recovered without government intervention. Indeed, the typical American historian today sees Hoover’s interventions not as actions that blocked an economic recovery, but as movements that were inadequate, as even more radical measures were needed. John Steele Gordon writing about Adam Cohen’s new book, Nothing to Fear, in the New York Times says:


The mini-biographies that Mr. Cohen gives the reader do much both to illuminate the actors in the story he tells and to show the world in which they developed their ideas about how to make it a better one. They are sure-footed and convincing.

Far less so, however, is his portrait of Herbert Hoover. Hoover, to be sure, was the wrong man at the wrong time. Dour, diffident and beaten down by four years of ever-growing economic disaster, he was the opposite of the ebullient, charming and naturally optimistic Roosevelt. Many early historians of the New Deal presented Hoover as uncaring and devoted to laissez-faire principles and balanced budgets to set the economy right.

This provided a handy foil to set off the glories of the New Deal. But as more modern scholarship has shown, it is at best a caricature. Mr. Cohen accepts this earlier partisan view of Hoover. (emphasis mine)

He states that the Hoover administration ordered the destruction of the main encampment of the Bonus Marchers, who had come to Washington to demand early payment of a veterans’ bonus. In fact, it was Gen. Douglas MacArthur, then the Army chief of staff, who attacked in flagrant violation of Hoover’s direct orders. He says that Hoover did little to help struggling homeowners keep their homes. In fact, Hoover proposed the Home Loan Bank Board in December 1931. Congress took seven months to pass the legislation and limited Hoover’s proposal, making many homeowners ineligible.

Even Rexford Tugwell said in an interview years later that “practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs Hoover started.” He added, “Hoover had wanted and had said clearly enough that he wanted nearly all the changes now brought under the New Deal label.”

This hardly is something new, but it also is clear that most academic historians are happy accepting the party line. They are not interested in contradicting the narrative that their academic forebears created in the 1930s nor do they believe they have any obligation to tell the truth. After all, they are contented to pronounce their “truth.”

The laissez-faire myth of Herbert Hoover does not thrive because it is true, but rather it thrives because it enables modern American academic historians to distort history to their own political ends. Hence, I call them “distorians.”

How the US Debt, Deficit, Economy and Taxes Will Be Fixed





This provides a good breakdown of what to expect.  It will also be fast.  It has to be.  And the whole world will be lining up for wall to wall work outs.

No one yet understands that this is fast track.

understand he has made a carreer out of antagonizing adversaries, then charming them into a fair deal.

The whole world needs fair deals and that starts by the way with ending farm subsidies both here and elsewhere.  then negotiating quotas.  Understand that Canada does not need USA dairy products been dumped into our established and managed market.  Nor does the USA want Canadian dairy going on a massive expansion program inorder to displace USA dairy in the USa.  This means quotas until you have an unexpected supply shortage.  Think eggs.


How the US Debt, Deficit, Economy and Taxes Will Be Fixed

March 26, 2025 by Brian Wang

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2025/03/how-the-us-debt-deficit-economy-and-taxes-will-be-fixed.html


The US has been spending $6.5 trillion but taking in $4.5 trillion with a $2 trillion deficit and $37 trillion in debt.


However, the US has $500 trillion to $1000 trillion in assets.

DOGE will cut $1 trillion of waste, fraud and abuse.
Lutnick will increase government revenues by $1 trillion.
This will balance the US budget.

$200 billion out of $1.2 trillion of Covid PPP money went to China fraud gangs. This was known and proven but there was no effort to stop that fraud because of lack of incentives.

Lutnick is going to adjust the GDP calculation for the last 25 years. They will remove the unproductive of what is currently included in GDP.

There was no income tax before 1913. Income tax was started for WW1. There was no removal of income tax after WW1 as the US rolled into the great depression and then WW2.
After WW2 the tariffs was lowered for other countries as they were rebuilt.
After the other countries were bailed out, the tariffs were left at favorable levels to other countries.



The tariffs are targeted at industries and companies can be brought back to the USA or purchased from others in the USA.

The reason US software has not been updated since 1975 is that government accounting was changed that forced government agencies to pay for ten years of software up front.

Google, Amazon, XAI/Tesla and other technology are building all new software for free for the US government. Why do this for free? They will then be able to make the same and integrated software for all of the other countries in the world.

The US sovereign wealth fund will be guaranteed returns. The US government will buy from various companies and those contracts will boost the value of the companies. The US government will take 20% warrants from those companies. If the US government buys huge vaccine orders and that triples the companies value, then providing the US government warrants lets US citizens benefit from the value that is created.

Lutnick’s $1 trillion of revenue will be getting rid of Tax and other scams (cruise ships, maritime ships, Ireland), Gold cards (1 million or so) and tariffs.

Ships will not be able to flag with Liberia and pay no taxes or fees in the USA.



Once the budget is balanced and Lutnick and Elon each do more than $2 trillion combined then at least no taxes for anyone making less than $150,000 per year and possibly no income tax at all. About 85% of americans make less than $150,000 per year.

Bessent says

1. They will reduce the spending at a rate that will not cause a recession. They will get to a 3% of GDP deficit. Every $300 billion/year of spending cut is 1% of GDP.
2. Re-order international trading system (using tariffs) to get jobs back to the US.
3. Low and predictable taxes, slash regulations, predictable regulations and cheap energy. Get 1.5%+ or more in GDP growth.

Years of Climate Action Demolished in Days’ By Trump




It should be obvious that Trump spent the last four years preparing a wall of executive orders all of which serve as a starting point for legistlation and negotiation.  This has always been possible, but has never been done before.  It could well become the new protocol.

After ,we now have four years to convert these warning order into legistlation and established practise.  Al while the enture corpus of the government is deconstructed and rebuilt.


I seriously thik that the DEMs are truly finished. The GOP has already been fully reconstructed and will easily dominate a sucessor socialist upstart and a remnant liberal centrist party should either shake out.  all this can take decades without a lot of luck.


Cheers! Bloomberg columnists: ‘Years of Climate Action Demolished in Days’ By Trump – ’82 actions across 20 govt bodies…in 1st 52 DAYS’ – ‘Climate Onslaught’ – Unleashed ‘climate demolition’


82 ACTIONS ACROSS 20 GOVERNMENT BODIES DURING HIS FIRST 52 DAYS IN OFFICE

5:10 pm






Trump’s environmental directives are gutting basic protections for Americans and the agencies designed to deliver them.


We’ve long known President Donald Trump is a climate-change denier. And we knew that, during last year’s campaign, Trump promised to make the dreams of fossil-fuel tycoons reality if they bankrolled his candidacy. But nothing could have prepared us for the breadth or intensity of the assault on climate action that Trump has unleashed during his first months back in office.

There’s a chance you’ve seen one or 20 news reports in recent weeks detailing some of this activity. Far more likely is that you don’t even know the half of it. Here are just a few of the highlights:


82 ACTIONS ACROSS 20 GOVERNMENT BODIES DURING HIS FIRST 52 DAYS IN OFFICE





52 Days of the Trump Administration’s Climate Onslaught


Every agency with any connection to the climate (meaning basically all of them) has been involved, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Defense Department. International cooperation by NASA scientists, UN diplomats and more has been forbidden, and Trump appointees are meddling in state and local efforts to manage their own environments. Elon Musk’s crew, intent on dismantling the apparatus of government, has frozen research and funding and put vital expertise on the street.


Climate Actions Targeted All Areas of America’s Well-Being


Trump claims his climate demolition will benefit the country. He and his mouthpieces have argued that ignoring climate will lower energy costs for consumers, help the economy and secure “energy dominance” for the US. The truth is much different:


Renewable energy keeps getting cheaper to install and use.


Monday, March 31, 2025

A Morning Dose of Blue Light Can Help Us Sleep Better in Old Age




A better explanation is that blue light energerizes our cellular spirit bodies or super computers.  Extra energy allows more work.

having seen the inner sun which was blue, i have no doubt that this can super charge our spirit body which allows the miracles shown us by Jesus.

So the blue light is important for our general health.

A Morning Dose of Blue Light Can Help Us Sleep Better in Old Age

26 March 2025


Blue light in the morning could do wonders for your evening. (Thinkstock Images/Getty Images)

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-morning-dose-of-blue-light-can-help-us-sleep-better-in-old-age?u

A morning dose of blue light might help older people sleep better in the evening, giving them a boost for their daily activities the following day.

Researchers from the University of Surrey in the UK ran an experiment involving 36 volunteers aged 60 or over, testing their response to two-hour-long sessions of blue and regular white light twice a day over several weeks.


The focus on the elderly was deliberate: as we get older, we tend to spend less time outdoors and more time exposed to artificial light, while our aging eyes also let in less blue light. These different factors can all affect the body's circadian rhythms, and subsequently our sleep patterns.

The researchers compared light of different colors and its effects. (Constantino et al., GeroScience, 2025)

"We believe that this is one of the first studies that have looked into the effects of self-administered light therapy on healthy older adults living independently, to help aid their sleep and daily activity," says chronobiologist Débora Constantino from the University of Surrey.


The results were striking: the blue light treatment preceded significantly better quality sleep an increase in regular daily activity. However, this was only true for morning doses, with evening exposure correlating with greater difficulties falling and staying asleep.


Timing is crucial, in other words. The researchers suggest morning doses help train our daily rhythms and teach the body when to be awake, and therefore when to sleep. Evening doses, on the other hand, disrupt the same patterns, which is also why your phone or laptop might come with a blue light filter for evening use.


"Morning blue-enriched light may have increased the signal for wakefulness during the day, increasing sleep pressure and the homeostatic drive for sleep in the evening, thus improving sleep consolidation," write the researchers in their published paper.


The study also showed that daylight exposure – exposure to light above an intensity equivalent to the ambient light of an overcast day – boosted daily activity levels and meant participants tended to get to bed earlier. This fits in with what we know about daylight, which has more blue wavelength light in it, and can boost our mood and levels of alertness.


This idea that blue light therapy could be helpful as we get older has also been shown in previous studies, though those studies usually involved elderly people with dementia who were living in controlled environments. This new research represents more of a real world test.


"Our research shows that carefully timed light intervention can be a powerful tool for improving sleep and day-to-day activity in healthy older adults," says chronobiologist Daan Van Der Veen from the University of Surrey.


"By focussing on morning blue light and maximizing daytime light exposure, we can help older adults achieve more restful sleep and maintain a healthier, more active lifestyle."

The research has been published in GeroScience.

Why Americans Are Working Less






Obviously it has all been changing and also for the better.  The really nasty stuff has been even outsourced.  Grade six farmboys are no longer available to carry buckets of molten steel.  Better yet, the advent of working robotics is upon us, and all those farmboy mechanics will be in serious demand.


Best practice means we need farm boys to manage the natural herd rotations  actually 24/7.  ANd to properly address woodland grooming to support wild husbandry.  Also farm girls obviously.


We have been trying to shed manpower on the farms which means earning the least per acre in practise and also mining the soil base.  that now must change out..

Why Americans Are Working Less

Wednesday, Mar 26, 2025 - 04:45 AM


By Jim Harter of Gallup

Full-time employees in the U.S. have been working fewer hours per week for the past five years. What are the implications for employees and their organizations? And what’s driving the trend?

Gallup finds that average hours worked have dropped progressively since 2019 when U.S. employees reported working an average of 44.1 hours. In 2024, they work 42.9 hours per week.



The decline in hours worked is more pronounced among younger (those younger than 35) than older workers (those aged 35 and older). Between 2019 and 2024, older employees have seen an average reduction of just under one hour per person per week, while younger employees have reduced their hours by nearly two hours.

Over a year, that’s the equivalent of older employees taking an extra week off of work and younger employees taking two weeks. These trends apply to full-time employees working at least 30 hours per week.

Possible Reasons for the Drop in Average Hours Worked per Week

Several new findings may explain this shift:Overall employee wellbeing has been on the decline.
Employees now have less trust in institutions in general and feel more detached from their employers.
After a decade of steady improvement, employee engagement has reverted to its 2014 level.
Advances in technology may be making work more efficient. Gallup finds that nearly half (45%) of employees say AI has helped them improve their productivity. However, a workforce that is becoming more technically efficient and less engaged may lack the motivation needed for long-term growth.
Employees -- especially younger ones -- now place a higher priority on their overall wellbeing. In fact, work-life balance and better overall wellbeing now rank among the most important considerations when choosing a new job.

Additionally, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows declines in overall hours worked per person, particularly in industries that traditionally employ more young workers such as retail, leisure and hospitality.
The Connection Between Hours Worked and Employee Burnout

Burnout may be a major reason why employees are working fewer hours. The World Health Organization (WHO) has classified “burnout” as a work-related syndrome resulting from chronic stress.

Previous Gallup research has found that an unmanageable workload is one of the contributing factors to burnout. This may help explain why employees report higher burnout (very often or always) as the number of hours they work rises above 45 hours per week.


Leaders and managers should view signs of burnout as a red flag. Employees who say that they feel burned out very often or always are:32% less likely to say they feel great responsibility for the quality of products/services their organization offers customers
58% less likely to say their coworkers always do what is right for customers
56% less likely to say their organization always delivers on the promise they make to customers
74% more likely to be looking for another job

In short, burned-out employees are unmotivated to serve customers and perform below their potential.

Gallup finds that the overall work environment strongly influences burnout risk. Employees of all ages who work 45 or more hours per week -- and are either not engaged or actively disengaged -- are at a greater risk of burnout. Younger workers are especially vulnerable, with more than half of those who are disengaged reporting that they often or always feel burned out.

Engaged employees, however, report much less burnout. About one in 10 engaged younger workers and even fewer older engaged employees report burnout very often or always when working less than 45 hours per week.

Although the burnout rate doubles for engaged employees working 45 or more hours per week, 80% of younger workers and 86% of older workers report that they rarely or never feel burned out, even when working 45 or more hours per week.


Burnout Isn’t Just About Hours -- It’s About Management

As Gallup has found in previous research, burnout is driven by much more than just hours worked. Other major causes include being treated unfairly at work, receiving unclear communication from managers, lack of manager support and experiencing unreasonable time pressure. These are all influenced by how employees are managed.

Organizations that focus too narrowly on hours worked -- and develop a one-size-fits-all “hours worked” policy -- risk missing the mark. Gallup data show that employees of different ages have varying preferences regarding work hours. Some thrive on a steady 9-to-5 schedule, while others prefer a more flexible approach that blends work and personal life. Some may choose to work extra hours to complete a meaningful project or simply because it is their way of excelling at work.

For managers, the key is staying closely connected to each employee, ideally weekly. This helps them support high performance by aligning work with employees’ strengths and accommodating each person’s unique work-life needs.