Poorly-based official wisdom once again

More evidence that statins are bad for you.  The official enthusiasm for statins was so great that it was even proposed that they put statins into the water supply. Sadly, official health advice  is often so wrong that it should never be accepted without scrutiny.  It is as likely to do you harm as good.  The bureaucracy is not wise. It is invariably captive to the intellectual fashions of its day 

So the power of the State should never be used to enforce any form of health compliance.  In addition to the example below, consider the case of Jehovah's Witnesses and their refusal to accept blood transfusions.  In some cases laws have been passed to force transfusions on them.  But a study of survival after heart surgery showed that no Jehovah's Witness died of it but many others did.  They have certainly had the last laugh -- and in consequence blood transfusions are now much more sparingly prescribed than they once were

That Jehovah is clearly one heck of a clever guy. Maybe more people should heed his advice


Healthy patients taking the heart drug statins have a significantly higher risk of new diabetes and a very high risk of serious diabetic complications, a study has found.

The research, published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine in May 2015, tracked individuals in a database for almost ten years. It discovered statin users had a higher incidence of diabetes and also weight gain.

Patients using the drugs were also more likely than the others to develop diabetes with complications including eye, nerve and kidney damage.

Professor Ishak Mansi, a heart specialist at the University of Texas who led the study, said the association between statin use and diabetes complications 'was never shown before.

Users of statins were more than twice as likely to develop diabetes and were 250 percent more likely than their non-statin-using counterparts to develop diabetes with complications.

Patients included in the study were identified as healthy adults and researchers assessed of 3982 statin users and 21,988 non users over the decade.

'The risk of diabetes with statins has been known, but until now it was thought that this might be due to the fact that people who were prescribed statins had greater medical risks to begin with,' said Dr Mansi in a statement.

Mansi told the Express that those results are 'alarming'.

He added that drugs may be doing more harm than good for people at low risk of heart disease: 'I am sceptical about the prescribing guidelines for people at lower risk (of heart disease). I am concerned about the long term effects on the huge population of healthy people on these drugs who continue for many years.'

SOURCE

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The 2nd Amendment as an antidote to Muslim terrorism

The Islamic State’s call for “lone wolf” attacks on Western infidels might have met its match in the Second Amendment, as an armed man saves lives by shooting a jihadist wannabe bent on heeding that call.

Vaughan Foods employee Traci Johnson is alive today because the business she works for is not a gun-free zone at a time when the Islamic State is encouraging attacks on infidels in the West like the one in Moore, Okla., where co-worker Colleen Hufford was stabbed and beheaded.

The alleged attacker, 30-year-old Alton Nolen, was stopped as he was stabbing and preparing to behead Johnson by Mark Vaughan, the food distributor’s chief operating officer. Vaughn, who is also a reserve county deputy, drew the gun he was carrying and stopped Nolen, police say, before he could claim more victims.

“This was not going to stop if he (Vaughan) did not stop it,” Moore Police Sgt. Jeremy Lewis told the media.

Some will claim this is more “workplace violence” — a phrase used by the Obama administration to describe the carnage left by Maj. Nidal Hassan at Ft. Hood — the work of a disgruntled ex-employee with no significance beyond that.

But the similarities are eerie and may indicate the shape of a new threat we face.

Nolen was a recent convert to Islam and while still an employee at Vaughan tried to convert his co-workers, they said. He was convicted in 2011 of multiple felony drug offenses, assault and battery on a police officer and escaping from detention.

He was released from prison in March 2013. It is suspected that much of his Islamic conversion occurred while he was in prison, an increasingly common phenomenon among African-American inmates.

Nolen’s Facebook page contains such items as a burning lower Manhattan after the 9/11 attacks and a photo of the pope with the caption “Sharia Law is coming!”

In March, Nolen posted a gruesome photo of a beheading with the explanation that “Islamic terrorists behead their victims” because of a precedent bestowed by their prophet, a reference to the Prophet Mohammed’s frequent beheadings of those he considered infidels.

Nolen might be a lone wolf, but he’s just the type the Islamic State is looking for: individuals angry at a society and culture they see as victimizing and oppressing them.

They don’t need to sneak across the border — they’re already here. They don’t even need passports, which many have, such as the Minneapolis airport worker who fought and died for IS in Syria.

No direct connection has been established. But Nolen is what IS spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani said the group is looking for in a videotaped statement released shortly before the attack in Moore.

“If you can kill a disbelieving American or European — especially the spiteful and filthy French — or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that just joined a coalition against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way, however that might be.”

That was the possible motivation of 18-year-old Abdul Numan Haider, who was shot dead after he stabbed two Australian counterterrorism officers on Sept. 23, police said. Haider had been asked to come to a police station after he’d been seen with an Islamic State flag at a shopping center.

The incident happened mere days after Australian authorities conducted raids nabbing 15 suspected of IS ties.

The Islamic State has issued a global call to lone wolves. One could be standing behind you on the bus, walking next you at the mall or sitting in the next cubicle. In the age of the Islamic State and solo terrorism, gun-free zones are simply an invitation for a terrorist attack.

In Moore, Okla., the life-saving value of the Second Amendment was proved once again. It may be our secret weapon in the ongoing war against terrorism.

SOURCE

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The Absurdity of Regulation

While the constitution grants Congress the power to legislate, recent administrations have chosen to circumvent this authority, using regulatory agencies instead to advance their agenda and create de facto laws. Regulations are especially dangerous to liberty, because those craft them are not elected and therefore not accountable to the people. For this reason, rules are often arbitrary, capricious, and selectively enforced. Sometimes, they are downright absurd.

We've all heard stories of children's lemonade stands being shut down for lacking the proper permits. Now, a similarly ridiculous example is the kerfuffle over a neighborhood tree house that critics say intrude into public space. Of course, the location of this nonsense is Washington, DC, the regulatory capital of the country. A family's tree house is under legal scrutiny because it protrudes into an alley by about 20 inches. There have been orders to stop work, and the city has said the family should have obtained the proper permits before building.

Far from being a case of negligence, however, it appears that the family did everything in their power to ensure the building was legal, including filling out paperwork, seeking tree house guidelines (which don't exist), and even hiring a specialist to ensure they weren't harming the tree. They also distributed fliers to neighbors prior to building, so no one can claim they weren't consulted. It was apparently not enough.

Incidents like this may seem trivial, but they highlight the dangers of a legal and regulatory system blind to common sense and individual circumstances. Whereas the system of Common Law once valued reasonable solutions based on tradition and reason, the more modern system of statute law leave no room for the application of judgment, even when the outcome is plainly unjust. It's a triumph of mechanical bureaucracy over humanity.

When we allow black and white regulations to cover every aspect of life, whether or not an individual is subject to punishment or left alone becomes merely a matter of authorities' discretion, having very little to do with the individual's behavior or whether anyone has actually been harmed. This is why it's so important to hold regulatory agencies accountable and roll back some of the overcriminalization that is in danger of making us all guilty in the eyes of the law.

SOURCE

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Senator Jeff Sessions Stands Against Executive Power

Jeff Sessions support is coveted by both Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, with many suggesting he may endorse the latter. This week, he warned Americans to choose their next leader wisely:

    Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, a leading voice on trade, immigration and executive powers, is urging Americans to choose their next president carefully because 2016 "is the last chance for the American people to take back control of their government."

    In a sober interview with Secrets, the Republican warned that liberal special interests, Wall Street moguls, and international media conglomerates are fast turning the United States into just another member of the European Union and that the effort is being led by a Democratic president eager to go his own way with executive orders.

    "This election is different because we have pell mell erosion of law, the constitutional order, where President Obama has pushed an agenda that eviscerates the immigration legal system, and pushed this trade agreement that will commence decades of transferring American economic power to an ever-expanding international commission. It's just not going to stop" unless voters take action, he warned.

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- mostly Muslim "refugees" and such things

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