Two Americas-The Reality and The Mid-Term Elections

Published: Fri, 04/05/13

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In This Issue:
LIES, LIES, LIES By Richard C. Young
Dangerous Waters By E.J. Smith
You, Artery Clogging Saturated Fat, Cancer and Stroke By Richard C. Young
Shark in the Water: New UUV to Stalk Subs The Editors
Two Americas—The Reality and The Mid-Term Elections The Editors

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LIES, LIES, LIES

You may be as mystified as I am that Barack Obama was voted in for a second term as president following what amounts to the most destructive first term in American history. You need look no further than the temporary debacle (more shortly) entitled The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare. In 1794 James Madison, a gentleman who knew a little about the Constitution, told our Founders, “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending on objects of benevolence the money of their constituents.”

Is there a more egregious violator of James Madison’s dictate regarding income distribution than Obamacare? The Cato Institute’s Michael D. Tanner has laid out a line of lies foisted on Americans by the Obama administration and the Nancy Pelosi-led Congress. Remember all those jobs Obama told us his monstrosity was going to provide? Well Mr. Tanner offers a somewhat altered vision, reporting that the International Franchise Association now warns that Obamacare puts as many as 3.2 million jobs at risk, particularly in industries such as chain restaurants. Michael continues, “It’s hard to imagine how Obamacare could ever create jobs, given the enormous burden it is placing on the private sector.” And then comes income redistribution. Americans are going to get hit with $1 trillion in new taxes. And if one cannot afford Obamacare? No problem, none at all. As Mr. Tanner notes, 25 million will receive subsidies (that would be with your higher tax payments), and another 12 million souls will simply be dumped into Medicaid.

Outraged? You, by now, should be. The good news, as Cato’s Michael F. Cannon tells us, states are in a position to slap vetoes on Obamacare. Mr. Cannon lays it all out in spades. I would hope everyone baragages his or her governor with emails and phone calls demanding governors to refuse to create Exchanges. Harmful, unstable, vulnerable are all labels Michael applies to Obamacare. States are in a strong position to block the employer mandate. Did you know that 34 states, accounting for roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population, have refused to create Exchanges? Michael explains how Obama plans to deny millions of Americans the opportunity to purchase low-cost, high-deductible insurance, but that states can challenge illegal Obamacare taxes in court, citing Oklahoma as exhibit one. Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion would cost individual states up to $53 billion over its first 10 years. Mr. Cannon, unfortunately not our president, knows of whenst he speaks and is providing Americans the straight scoop.

In conclusion, with your emails and phone calling help, states can exercise vetoes over Exchanges and the Medicaid expansion. And each of you can be part of forcing Congress, as Mr. Cannon notes, to reconsider and hopefully repeal.

Patrick Henry told Americans, “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government (i.e., the Obama administration) to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government—lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.” One wonders how long our Founders would have tolerated hearing about a dominator like Obamacare?

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Dangerous Waters

On a recent trip to Key West, my family went on a special Danger Charters cruise to see the Blue Angels. It was a great way to see the show. But that may have been the Blue Angels’ last performance, because their budget is being cut as a result of the sequester. What a joke. It’s yet another example of the government playing games in the name of saving money. Spending on the Blue Angels as a percentage of the total defense budget is peanuts. Not to mention the pittance spent on the White House tours.

But this is all a game to your elected officials. The cancellation of the tours is a psychological blow to Americans handed to them by an inept administration bent on getting the most possible divisiveness out of the sequester. “Announcement of the decision—made in an email from the White House Visitors Office—came hours after The Washington Times reported on another administration email that seemed to show at least one agency has been instructed to make sure the cuts are as painful as President Obama promised they would be,” reported the Times. The tours and the Blue Angels give you a sense of pride in the government. Allowing both to be cancelled is offensive and ignorant of the overspending problems in Washington, D.C. It’s time to clean house.

Two nationally known MDs are concerned, linking red meat and “artery-clogging” saturated fat to cancer and stroke. What should you think about this article?

First you must consider the source. Would you consult your master electrician about a plumbing problem? Probably not. Then why would you consult your physician (trained in prescriptions and surgery) about nutrition rather than a nutritionist/biochemist like Dr. Mary Enig, Ph.D.? Your master electrician, your master plumber, your physician and your nutritionist/biochemist are all seasoned professionals. Each has years of study, examinations and licenses behind them. But is it in your best interest to mix and match? Not for me it isn’t.

So let’s look at the saturated fat ogre. Here is what nutritionist/biochemist Dr. Enig has to say in Eat Fat, Lose Fat; “If eating saturated fat caused heart disease and weight gain, then eliminating those fats should have resulted in a decline in heart disease and an increase in weight loss. But look around you…. While we Americans have been dutifully eliminating fat from our diet, eating low-fat foods, and avoiding saturated fats from tropical-oils, butter, and red meats, obesity rates and overall incidence of heart disease have continued to climb. The truth is that the ‘diet police’ condemned the wrong culprit. It wasn’t saturated fat or coconut oil (a dietary staple in Thailand and the Philippines with consistently lower heart disease than our own) that caused our galloping heart disease rates. An entire body of research indicates grains and sugars (especially high-fructose corn syrup)—not saturated fats—as the cause of obesity, and vegetable oils and trans fats as key factors in heart disease.”

Dr. Enig continues, “The medical literature actually contains only two studies involving humans that compared the outcome (not just indicators like cholesterol) of a diet high in animal fat with that of a diet based on vegetable oils. Both studies showed that animal fats actually protect you from heart disease.”

In a final nail in the saturated fat coffin, Dr. Enig writes, regarding women, “A truly surprising result of all studies involving women is the finding that in women, high cholesterol levels—even as high as 1,000mg/dl—are not a risk factor for heart disease. In fact, for women, low cholesterol is more dangerous than high cholesterol.”

I am going to continue my series on red meat/saturated fat and cholesterol in coming weeks And I plan to bring you a lot more input from Dr. Mary Enig, whose research on nutrition I follow rather than that of media-favored MDs. It’s just common sense. I will also bring you compelling math on the number needed to treat (NNT). I will be outlining for you severe pharmaceutical industry fraud.

Closing on the upbeat, I bring you a little more “Let Them Eat Fat” (tongue in cheek) greatness from controversial writer Ron Rosenbaum. “The hysterical crusade against fat has become a veritable witch hunt…. We are discovering that fatty delights can actually be good for you. They allow Spaniards, Italians and Greeks to live longer, and they make us satisfied with eating less.

Mr.Rosenbaum continues, “Roast Goose for instance is a supremely succulent, mind-altering flavorful fatty food. In most of America, roast goose would be reviewed as the raven of cardiac mortality, hoarsely honking ‘never more.’ And listening to the doctors on cable TV, you might think that it is better to cook up a batch of meth than to cook with butter.”

A new breed of unmanned underwater vehicle will soon take to the deep to track enemy submarines with sonar capabilities never before available on such a platform. These new SHARK vehicles are one of the latest creations from the super secretive military think tank DARPA. Read more about this new advance in underwater warfare below.

DARPA’s Distributed Agile Submarine Hunting (DASH) Program has tested two complementary prototype systems as part of its Phase 2 development effort. The prototypes demonstrated functional sonar, communications and mobility at deep depths. The successful tests furthered DASH’s goals to apply advances in deep-ocean distributed sonar to help find and track quiet submarines.

The first prototype is the Transformational Reliable Acoustic Path System (TRAPS), developed by a team led by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). TRAPS is a fixed passive sonar node designed to achieve large-area coverage by exploiting advantages of operating from the deep seafloor. This expendable, low-size, weight and power (SWaP) node communicated to a stationary surface node via wireless acoustic modems, with further secure RF reach back to the performer’s facilities via satellite.

“The goal is not only to show we can address the most challenging problem in ASW [anti-submarine warfare], but that we can do so with systems that are scalable and affordable,” said Andy Coon, DARPA program manager. “A single deep sea node provides a field of view with significant coverage allowing for a limited number of nodes to scale to large areas. Within the trade space of deep ocean sonar, we need to get creative to achieve affordable hardware and operations. We purposely have avoided increasing the size and complexity of arrays to achieve our aims. This is a gamble, but we believe the potential payoff will be high.”

The second prototype is the Submarine Hold at RisK (SHARK), an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) developed by a team led by Applied Physical Systems (APS). SHARK intends to provide a mobile active sonar platform to track submarines after initial detections are made. APS team member Bluefin Robotics recently deployed the prototype to depth in February 2013.

“Sending the prototype deep for the first time was like going to another planet and took nerve,” Coon said. “I am very pleased with the team and the vehicle’s performance at sea. We knew the design requirements of the system were challenging for industry to meet, especially when constrained to a price point that required designers to incorporate Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) components not normally used at these depths.”

A third DASH team member, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, supported the physical network layers that both teams used.

TRAPS and SHARK are scheduled to demonstrate their core sonar functionality together. Subsequent efforts may follow to realize multiple sonar nodes as well as the integration of the SHARK UUV with its sonar.

A majority of Americans have had it up to the gizzard with both the Marxists and the neocons. Unfortunately these two groups have controlled the political stage over the last four presidential cycles.The words conservative and liberal have morphed into a mishmash of conflicting viewpoints. Both the Democrat and Republican parties have been co-opted by strident groups with a narrow self-interest. The American public is largely dazed and confused not fully understanding the shell game that has been perpetrated. It is finally sinking in that annual trillion dollar deficits forcing a massive buildup in debt is a losing hand. The unconstitutional federal government spending to fight wars of no national security importance continues. The fraud and lies of Obamacare are resulting in state-by-state rebellion. In the end, Obamacare, dragged down by it’s own monstrous weight on the economy, must disintegrate and disappear.

Emerging from the wreckage comes the specter of two Americas. On the one hand, the tax cutting, right-to-work red states. On the other, the Obama model tax boosters favoring government investment and union power (Read: Laffer and Moore: The Red-State Path to Prosperity). The old Confederacy is on the ascendance as Americans migrate south in waves. (Read: How the South will Rise to Power Again ). Americans are going to look at the fiscally conservative states to relocate to in retirement as well as for business. And the “new wave” will want representation in Washington by a new group of hardliners against the power of central government. Rather a states’ rights approach will be wanted, much in line with the explicitly stated vision of the Founders, in the Constitution.

Senator Rand Paul has captured the attention of a rapidly growing base of Americans of all stripes. The unifying theme is small government and disengagement from foreign entanglements. And the charge is being led not in Washington, but as the Founders would have wished, at the state level. Governors like Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal are making mockery of the Marxist-style, union-centric government in Washington. Battles are being won daily. And for the first time in decades, a meaningful change in America may be able to win the war. We will get a good first look at the midterms in 2014.