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According to greenmedinfo.com, a form of turmeric extract (curcumin) may help.
A compelling new study published in the Journal of Nutrition and Metabolism has found that a daily dose of a novel form of turmeric extract (curcumin) significantly improved the functional state of the blood vessels of healthy adults within two months.
The randomized, controlled, double-blind parallel prospective study involved fifty-nine healthy adults who were assigned to either a placebo, 50 mg (50 mg), or 200 mg (200 mg) curcumin, for 8 weeks.
The study provided background on what is believed to be a primary underlying cause of cardiovascular disease, namely, the inability of the inner lining of blood vessels (endothelium) to dilate fully as a consequence of mostly symptomless damage that can start early in life:
Nor is turmeric extract the only food-based approach to addressing and even reversing cardiovascular disease. For instance, we have reported on avocado’s ability to neutralize the artery constricting properties of a single, hamburger meal. Also, pomegranate’s ability to reverse plaque build up in the arteries is also well documented and highly compelling. The point is that simple dietary interventions, using time-tested, culinary spices, can have powerful impacts on disease risk, health and well-bing.
There is also a vast body of published literature in existence, a good portion of which can now be found on the GreenMedInfo.com database, that turmeric has literally hundreds of health benefits.
Dr. Mercola and Dr. LaValley Discuss Curcumin
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No sooner did I turn the TV off after the third debate and my phone lit up with this Boston Globe breathless alert: “Donald Trump refuses to say if he’ll accept election results!” I wouldn’t have been surprised if the next alert was: “And he called Hillary ‘such a nasty woman!’”
Those are the two most talked about issues by the media post debate. Not the fact that this is all about the Supreme Court, which Donald Trump clearly pointed out and that if Hillary wins we can kiss the Second Amendment goodbye.
What was disappointing about this one was how much more Donald Trump could have done. He could have hammered away at Hillary much more forcefully, in so many areas. It felt like a lost opportunity. He won the debate. But he could have done more. Here’s what he did do:
On foreign policy: Trump’s strongest point was that we must have other countries get some skin in the game for us to protect them. It’s expensive, he pointed out. And he rattled off the countries where Hillary, as Secretary of State, was an abject failure. Her poor instincts, he noted, created the messes we see in: Saudi Arabia (let them use some of that oil money to defend themselves), Libya (enabling ISIS), Iraq (telling the world our Mosul strategy before we go in), Iran (sending billions and billions), and Syria (he should have called her out on her call for a no fly zone that would essentially mean war with Russia). She rattled off talking points like a wind up toy: eyes wide open, mouth moving, not a thought in her head. Trump simply pointed out, if they want our help they need to pay-up.
On the economy. It’s simple, lower-taxes are a stimulus to the economy, end of story. Trump wants to lower them. Hillary wants to offer free education from pre-school through college. Who is going to pay-up for that?
Supreme Court: Hillary had a lame response about letting the people decide how to be ruled. Trump said he would elect judges that follow the words of the written document. If Hillary wins, there goes the Second Amendment.
There is no doubt in my mind that Donald Trump could have come out stronger, he was flat out of the gates, but eventually warmed up and hit his stride. But he could have done a much better job hitting away at Hillary’s failures. He did enough to show Americans the difference. Unfortunately the media will tell a different story.
At The American Conservative, Daniel Larison calls this an “escape” for Hillary. She hasn’t had to face scrutiny of her record, or lack thereof.
The result of all this was that Clinton was able to escape scrutiny of most of her record. She was never asked to defend her support for the Libyan war, nor did she really have to answer for anything else that she did as Secretary of State. Once again, her opponent didn’t know enough to know how to use her record against her. Despite her poor record on foreign policy, Clinton was able to get off almost completely scot-free.
It’s possible that she escaped because so little of the debate focused on foreign policy, where Clinton trumpets herself as very accomplished. In another article on the debate, Larison explains:
Perhaps more than in any election cycle since 2000, foreign policy has received remarkably little attention in the general election (and it didn’t receive much more during the primaries), and many pressing issues have been ignored entirely throughout the campaign. The war in Afghanistan and the war on Yemen are among the most obvious and damning omissions in my view, but one could find quite a few other other important things that the candidates have never been asked about. We have almost no idea how either candidate would approach approximately nine-tenths of the rest of the world, and the election is in less than three weeks. That is pathetic even by our usual poor political standards.
Larison’s colleague at TAC, Rod Dreher circled back to the idea that Trump may not accept the results of the election. Dreher wrote that Trump disqualifies himself for such antics.
The Republican Party’s nominee for the US presidency said on national television, three weeks before the election, that he might not accept its legitimacy.
On no grounds whatsoever.
Every horrible thing Hillary said tonight, every horrible thing she stands for, every horrible thing her presidency is going to mean for the country and the causes most important to me — all of it is obviated by this statement. A man so vain and so unspeakably reckless cannot be trusted in the White House.
This country is in a hell of a place.
The Third Presidential Debate: Hillary Clinton And Donald Trump (Full Debate)
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The Virginia governor used executive action to help put “the fix” in for Clinton.
Donald Trump has every right to call the legitimacy of this election into question. In fact, on behalf of the more than half of Americans who want no part of “crooked Hillary,” Trump has an obligation to all of us. Was not Bernie Sanders screwed by the in house Democrats keyed to the total farce of the super delegate rigged system just for starters? Rank and file democrats wanted no part of the national security risk Democratic leadership foisted upon them.
Let’s see how may disenfranchised Bernie supporters turn out to cast their vote for a woman they abhor, do not trust, and know to be 100% bought and paid for by radical Middle East Muslim oil tyrants. Have the voters taken a hard look at the rouges gallery of cash contributors to the Clinton Foundation? Why the hell does anyone think all those tens of millions of dollars poured into a foundation that didn’t benefit the discredited Bill and Hillary Clinton? Trump may well be just be getting started with this utterly disgraceful human being.
Pat Buchanan offers some terrific fuel for the fire of indignancy that is so rightly beginning to burn around Clinton’s ankles.
Pressed by moderator Chris Wallace as to whether he would accept defeat should Hillary Clinton win the election, Donald Trump replied, “I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense.”
The establishment is horrified at the Donald’s defiance because, deep within its soul, it fears that the people for whom Trump speaks no longer accept its political legitimacy or moral authority.
It may rule and run the country, and may rig the system through mass immigration and a mammoth welfare state so that Middle America is never again able to elect one of its own. But that establishment, disconnected from the people it rules, senses, rightly, that it is unloved and even detested.
Having fixed the future, the establishment finds half of the country looking upon it with the same sullen contempt that our Founding Fathers came to look upon the overlords Parliament sent to rule them.
Establishment panic is traceable to another fear: Its ideology, its political religion, is seen by growing millions as a golden calf, a 20th-century god that has failed.
When Ben Franklin, emerging from the Philadelphia convention, was asked by a woman what kind of government they had created, he answered, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Among many in the silent majority, Clintonian democracy is not an improvement upon the old republic; it is the corruption of it.
Consider: Six months ago, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the Clinton bundler, announced that by executive action he would convert 200,000 convicted felons into eligible voters by November.
If that is democracy, many will say, to hell with it.
And if felons decide the electoral votes of Virginia, and Virginia decides who is our next U.S. president, are we obligated to honor that election?
We Talked to Five Ex-Felons — They Are All Voting for the Same Person | TheBlaze
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“The Supreme Court should represent all of us. That’s how I see the Court,” replied Hillary Clinton to Chris Wallace’s query on the role of the courts. “And the kind of people that I would be looking to nominate to the court would be in the great tradition of standing up to the powerful, standing up on our behalf of our rights as Americans.”
Where to begin with that answer, asks the WSJ.
The Supreme Court doesn’t—or shouldn’t—“represent” anyone. In the U.S. system that’s the job of the elected branches. The courts are appointed, not elected, so they can be nonpartisan adjudicators of competing legal claims.
But last we checked, the Constitution protects everyone, even the powerful. The law is supposed to protect individual rights, not an abstraction called “the people.”
And then it went downhill from there. Hillary Clinton’s promise? To appoint judges who would essentially rewrite the 1st and 2nd Amendments.
For example, when asked about the 2008 Heller decision, which upholds an individual right to bear arms, Mrs. Clinton said she supports “reasonable regulation.” Her problem with Heller? It overturned a District of Columbia law intended “to protect toddlers from guns and so they wanted people with guns to safely store them.”
But wait, writes the WSJ.
Toddlers had nothing to do with it. What Mrs. Clinton calls “reasonable” was an outright ban on handguns. The D.C. law allowed the city’s police chief to award some temporary licenses—but not even the police officer plaintiff in the case could persuade the District to let him register a handgun to be kept at his home.
Anyone who did lawfully possess a gun had to keep it unloaded and either disassembled or bound by a trigger lock at all times, ensuring it would be inoperable and perhaps useless for self-defense. As Antonin Scalia wrote for the Heller majority, “Few laws in the history of our Nation have come close to the severe restriction of the District’s handgun ban.”
During the last presidential debate, Mrs. Clinton made it clear that she would neither support any restriction on abortion nor oppose any restriction on gun rights.
“Carhart, Citizens United and Heller were 5-4 decisions, and Mrs. Clinton wants each of them to be litmus tests for her Supreme Court appointments. She mocks Mr. Trump for saying he won’t abide by the election result, but she wants to rewrite the Constitution to fit her own political views.” Read more from the WSJ here.
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Aren’t these exactly the folk who flew into the Twin Towers and then hurried back to their desert bunkers before any serious questions could be asked? And is it not the Saudis who fund global terrorists, working around the clock against U.S. interests? And what about those U.S. hate-spewing Madrasas? Do the Saudis not, on a worldwide basis, fund these institutions of U.S. hatred?
Now after decades of holding the world hostage with oil, the Saudis have mismanaged their finances so poorly that they have come to the international bond market, head-gear in hand, like a Bedouin tribe of global panhandlers. Can you even make up a fairy tale like this?
I’ve explained often that it would be in the best interests of Uncle Sam to cut all ties with the Middle Eastern crowd. Moreover, I would push full speed ahead in establishing our secure national energy base with a complete portfolio of renewable and fossil fuel resources featuring zero imports of oil from the Middle East.
Here The Wall Street Journal lays out the hideous story of Saudi Arabia’s international panhandling mission.
Banks and investors flocked to buy Saudi Arabia’s first global bonds, a milestone in the giant oil producer’s efforts to diversify its economy and embrace global financial markets.
The $17.5 billion sale, the largest-ever debt sale by a developing country.
The offering attracted about $67 billion in orders.
Some money managers said they bought in because the giant bond offering will be a significant part of certain global bond indexes.
Saudi Arabia, he said, “is facing significant challenges coming from falling oil prices and requiring some significant expenditure adjustments. The borrowing needs are quite large.
Saudi Arabia’s fiscal deficit widened to about 16% of nominal gross domestic product in 2015, as oil income tumbled. With income from crude exports accounting for nearly three-quarters of government revenue, the kingdom posted a record deficit of $98 billion last year. It is also embroiled in costly conflicts in Yemen and Syria.
Beyond the borrowing and Aramco sale, Saudi officials have taken other steps. Japanese technology company SoftBank Group Corp. said this month it is teaming with Saudi Arabia to create an investment fund with plans to invest as much as $100 billion in tech companies, part of the kingdom’s effort to lessen its dependence on oil.
How Your Gas Money Funds Terrorism – James Woolsey
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Don’t pay much attention to how either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump say they will deal with foreign policy because it becomes pretty much inoperative in the specifics of any situation that may arise, advises Francis Menton in the Manhattan Contrarian. Focus instead on domestic economic policy. What each of the candidates says on the subject is a good indication of what he or she will attempt to do once in office.
Mr. Menton encapsulates the last debate and the “awfulness of the whole thing.” Hillary went first answering Chris Wallace’s question on the economy and how she intends to create more jobs and growth for the economy.
Hillary …proceeded to lay out a vision where all improvement in human economic condition comes from additional government spending, rules, and programs, all to be paid for by taxes and yet more taxes on the successful. She didn’t put it in exactly those terms, but the idea that private economic activity is the source of wealth and needs to be allowed to flourish doesn’t seem ever to have occurred to her. Here is the somewhat edited version:
I want us to have the biggest jobs program since World War II. Jobs in infrastructure and advanced manufacturing. I think we can compete with high wage countries and I believe we should. New jobs in clean energy. Not only to fight climate change, which is a serious problem but to create new opportunities and new businesses. I want us to do more to help small business, that’s where two-thirds of the new jobs are going to come from. I want to us raise the national minimum wage because people who work full time should not still be in poverty. And I sure do want to make sure women get equal pay for the work we do. I feel strongly that we have to have an education system that starts with preschool and goes through college. That’s why I want more technical education and community colleges, real apprenticeships to prepare young (people) for the jobs of the future. I want to make college debt-free and for families making less than $125,000, you will not get a tuition bill from a public college or a university. . . . [W]e are going to have the wealthy pay their fair share. We’re going to have corporations make a contribution greater than they are now to our country. That is a plan that has been analyzed by independent experts which said that it could produce 10 million new jobs.
“This is an economic program truly worthy of a Venezuela or a North Korea, and couldn’t be more destructive on many levels, writes Mr Menton.
A government “jobs program” is going to create zillions of jobs in “advanced manufacturing”? Can anybody give a single example where any government has succeeded at such an endeavor? Indeed, this is exactly what New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is in the midst of failing at spectacularly. And there will be lots of jobs in “clean energy,” to create “new opportunities and new businesses”! Sure! Dozens more Solyndras! How ignorant do you have to be not to know that so-called “clean energy” jobs only exist by reason of massive government subsidies, which tells you that they destroy rather than create wealth, and that the so-called “opportunities” can only exist for Hillary’s politically-connected cronies like the “FOBs” and the donors to the Clinton Foundation. And then we’ll price all poor kids completely out of the job market with a greatly increased minimum wage! And then, deep into unsustainable and exploding deficits resulting from out-of-control entitlements and the new Obamacare program, let’s create another huge new entitlement of free college! It can all be paid for by having the “wealthy pay their fair share.” Does she have any idea that much of this money to be taken from the wealthy was going to be invested in businesses and now won’t be?
Donald Trump delivered a few good zingers –“[H]er plan is going to raise taxes and even double your taxes. Her tax plan is a disaster. . . . We will have a massive, massive tax increase under Hillary Clinton’s plan” –before veering into irrelevant tangents and forgetting to mention what his plan would be or how it would be better than Hillary’s.
Our economy is burdened by “too high taxes, too much spending and too many regulations,” writes Mr Menton.
We have before our very eyes the living cases of Venezuela, not to mention Cuba and North Korea, to teach us what happens to an economy when the government takes everything over. And we have the entire European Union to show us that when the government gets up to 50% of the economy and above everything goes into stagnation.
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The Cato Institute’s Doug Bandow calls into question America’s interests in defending the Philippines.
The Philippines needs America far more than America needs the Philippines. Manila spends less than 1 percent of its gross domestic product on its military and its best ships are U.S. cast-offs. It doesn’t help defend the United States from anyone.
Rather, Manila expects Washington’s protection even though the archipelago matters little for the United States. America retains the Pacific as a barrier and faces no serious threats to its homeland.
Insisting on defending the Philippines irrespective of its actions is particularly dangerous. Manila relies on American support rather than its own military in confronting China and could drag the United States into a conflict easily.
President Duterte is not a reliable ally. The United States should not allow such an unpredictable regime to be a trigger for war.
Should the U.S. Be For or Against Nuclear Non-Proliferation? The Case of U.S. Allies in Asia
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Does gun control reduce violence? No. But if you ask the Hillary supporting Center for American Progress (CAP) they’ll roll out their special report saying that it does. The report, as an aside, has been referenced by The New York Times. That’s a bad start. Robert Verbruggen at The American Conservative, explains how the report references the “Gun Violence Index.” The index is basically a measure of gun deaths. But two-thirds of gun deaths are suicides, not violence. Stricter state guns laws do not correlate with less gun violence. Verbruggen explains:
We can see the importance of this second point in CAP’s own data. Most strikingly, the report’s central claim—that states with stricter gun laws have less gun violence—does not hold for homicide, which is what most people think of when they hear “gun violence.” Not that most readers could tell that from the report: the finding is relegated to a footnote, and even there the authors fail to note that the correlation is far too weak to be considered statistically significant.
(Technically speaking, it’s 0.13, with 50 observations, one for each state. That translates to a “p-value” of 0.37, far above the traditional 0.05 cutoff. If you generated the data at random, there would be more than a one-in-three chance of getting a correlation this strong.)
None of this is necessarily to deny that weak gun laws or high gun ownership—CAP’s report makes no attempt to distinguish between the two*—can have bad consequences. They do seem to correlate with suicide rates, as well as some specific types of homicide, including police and intimate-partner violence. Even when it comes to overall homicide rates, some more advanced studies (though far from all) argue there’s a correlation there once the data have been adjusted to account for differences in demographics and culture.
Of course, such adjustments are crucial if we are trying to discover causation, and not mere correlation. But CAP’s analysis makes no attempt to perform them. And even if we could definitively say that strict gun laws reduce violence, the analysis would say nothing about which gun laws in particular help, because they’re all compressed into a single scale.
UNH Law Federalist Society Presents John R. Lott Jr.
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Something weird is going on in American politics. (Yes, I know…) Julian Assange, who rose to fame by leaking the bloody and erratic day-to-day secrets of American foreign policy, is now reviled by the Left and enjoys a Strange New Respect on the Right. In both cases, the sentiment is fueled by partisan bias.
As Assange has shown himself to be a willing adversary of Hillary Clinton, and by extension an ally of Donald Trump, Clinton boosters and Trump defenders have taken their cues accordingly. But the larger question, raised both by Assange’s defenders and his adversaries, is how to deal with US-Russia relations.
As Assange has bothered Clinton and fit into the Trump narrative, Clinton has responded tersely, as she did when asked to confirm whether she had joked–or not–about droning Assange. But as Assange’s adversaries try to turn him into a nerdier, more ineffectual Lavrentiy Beria, it’s worth asking whether Russia should be as central a focus of U.S. foreign policy as it has been, and as Hillary Clinton would certainly have it be.
And befitting his professed admiration for Vladimir Putin, Trump has indicated that he’d like to destroy the free press in the United States and morph into our own Putin, unencumbered by law or public opinion. A less civilized Silvio Berlusconi with nuclear weapons.
The bigger problem, for everyone here, is that Putin and Russia are weak, and hardly warrant the attention Trump and Clinton heap on them.
Despite Russia’s standing during the Cold War or its nuclear arsenal today, it can do little to harm people who live in the United States. Russia makes a good bogeyman because of the living history of the Cold War, but Clinton and other Russia hawks should really knock it off.
It’s true that Russia is the only country to invade and occupy a foreign country since the United States did it in 2003. (We had to sail halfway around the world to do it.) It’s also true that Putin harbors grand aspirations about reassembling something like the Soviet empire across eastern Europe. But the thing to do with those aspirations is to make clear that they cannot be attained, with or without the United States.
Russia’s economy is roughly the size of Brazil’s and Belgium’s combined. Its population is under severe duress, and a Russian baby boy has a shorter life expectancy than he would have in the 1950s. And as I pointed out here,
Its military, though large and nuclear-armed, is hardly in better shape. While beating up on the poor Georgian army in 2008, the Russian side experienced serious operational difficulties. Without a sophisticated, nationwide air defense system, Georgian forces shot down five Russian planes, including a Tu-22 M3 strategic bomber. Russian ground forces suffered severe communications and targeting difficulties. The Russian military is weak and constrained, and the further it gets from home, the weaker and more constrained it gets.
With Hillary Clinton, it is tough to separate the personal from the political. Whether she’s turned into a clenched Russia hawk because she’s bitter about the campaign emails hack, or because she thinks it’s good politics, or because she believes in confronting Putin, it’s terrible policy. Gearing up for a big confrontation with Russia is unnecessary, dangerous, and likely to be costly. If this were being written in Estonian, the argument would be different, but from thousands of miles away, Russia looks a lot like what it is: a weak, defensive state with ambitions and reach that can only extend around its borders, not around the globe.
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