thegente

BINGO!! No change will ever come about if people continue to keep silent with their heads down watching BS TV, MSM news, and continuing to accept that "they" are the "authority" and not speaking out...WE THE PEOPLE need to start telling "them" what to do....Thx Jim

Thanks Jim...I don't really see this as much as a move to put more bucks in big pharma's pockets (but that will be a side benefit for the crooked), but more of a way to get rid of politicial dissedents in the near future. Too many folks waking up to the police state, complete govt fraud and treason, and so they will begin labeling anyone who ask questions or rattles the cage as "mentally unstable"...and try to either improson or simply marginalize them. I will never respect a corrupt system that has no respect for me or mine. Period. If everyone just "shut their mouth" and "respected authority" the United States would never have existed.... This is America, not Nazi Germany, Free Speech and dissent is what made this country great.

Oh boy...now I've heard it all. I guess I must be bat-shyte bonkers according to "them"....hahaha http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-21/if-you-question-authority-you-are-mentally-ill-report-finds "If You Question Authority, You Are Mentally Ill", Report Finds inShare Submitted by Pater Tenebrarum via Acting-Man blog, Only the Sheeple Are SaneThis post is about an issue that is by now a bit dated (though the topic as such certainly isn’t), but we have only just become aware of it and it seemed to us worth rescuing it from the memory hole. In late 2013, the then newest issue of the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM for short) defined a new mental illness, the so-called “oppositional defiant disorder” or ODD. As TheMindUnleashed.org informs us, the definition of this new mental illness essentially amounts to declaring any non-conformity and questioning of authority as a form of insanity. According to the manual, ODD is defined as: In short, as Natural News put it: According to US psychiatrists, only the sheeple are sane. […] an “ongoing pattern of disobedient, hostile and defiant behavior,” symptoms include questioning authority, negativity, defiance, argumentativeness, and being easily annoyed. Every time a new issue of the DSM appears, the number of mental disorders grows – and this growth is exponential. A century ago there were essentially 7 disorders, 80 years ago there were 59, 50 years ago there were 130, and by 2010 there were 374 (77 of which were “found” in just seven years). A prominent critic of this over-diagnosing (and the associated over-medication trend) is psychologist Dr. Paula Caplan. Here is an interview with her: Allen Gregg in conversation with psychologist Dr. Paula Caplan As MindUnleashed notes: “Are we becoming sicker? Is it getting harder to be mentally healthy? Authors of the DSM-IV say that it’s because they’re better able to identify these illnesses today. Critics charge that it’s because they have too much time on their hands. New mental illnesses identified by the DSM-IV include arrogance, narcissism, above-average creativity, cynicism, and antisocial behavior. In the past, these were called “personality traits,” but now they’re diseases. And there are treatments available.” Edward Abbey on what happens when no-one ever stirs things up There is an obvious danger involved with such loose definitions such as the one employed in identifying the alleged illness of “ODD”. A chilling example was provided by the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s. In a 1959 speech, Nikita Khrushchev made the following remark: Obviously, questioning the best socio-economic system ever devised had to be a sign of insanity, and after Khrushchev’s speech Soviet psychiatrists immediately went to work to discover and institutionalize all those mentally ill “communism deniers”. “Can there be diseases, nervous diseases among certain people in the communist society? Evidently there can be. If that is so, then there also will be offenses which are characteristic of people with abnormal minds. To those who might start calling for opposition to communism on this ‘basis,’ we say that now, too, there are people who fight against communism, but clearly the mental state of such people is not normal.” The road to what followed had already been paved in 1951, when in a joint session of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences and the Board of the All-Union Neurological and Psychiatric Association, several leading neurologists and psychiatrists were accused of pursuing an “anti-Marxist and reactionary” deviation from the teachings of Pavlov. The session took place on Stalin’s behest so as to “free Soviet psychiatry of Western influences”. The psychiatrist who wrote the policy report associated with this purge was Andrei Snezhnevsky, who invented (err, “discovered”) a new mental illness, which he termed “sluggish schizophrenia”. After Khrushchev’s 1959 speech, the term was widely adopted and the illness was diagnosed throughout the Eastern Bloc. The symptoms of the alleged “illness” were such that even the slightest change in behavior patterns could henceforth be interpreted as a sign of mental derangement. Political dissent was for instance considered to by a symptom of “sluggish schizophrenia with delusions of reform”. Snezhnevsky personally signed a decision declaring several prominent dissidents legally insane – among them also neurophysiologist Vladimir Bukovsky, who was the first to expose and criticize the abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union and spent altogether 12 years in prisons, forced labor camps and locked up in psychiatric hospitals for his efforts. Snezhnevsky’s theories became the only ones acceptable in Soviet psychiatry, and it was obviously held to be quite dangerous to oppose them. Ironically, in 1970, one year before Vladimir Bukovsky managed to smuggle out 150 pages that documented the silencing of political dissenters with the aid of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, the American Psychiatric Association named Snezhnevsky a “distinguished fellow” for his “outstanding contribution to psychiatry and related sciences” at its annual meeting in San Francisco. Soviet psychiatrist Andrei Snezhnevsky, hero of socialist labor, owner of two Orders of Lenin as well as four Orders of the Red Star and USSR state prize. Photo credit: tapemark.narod.ru Money and the Invention of new Categories of Disease There is a basic problem with psychiatry and psychology: they are largely thymological, as opposed to natural sciences. If you break your arm and visit 10 different medical doctors, you will get the same diagnosis from every single one of them – they will all tell you that your arm is broken. A standardized treatment exists for dealing with a broken arm. Make a list of psychological problems you are experiencing and visit ten different psychiatrists, and chances are very good that you will receive 10 different diagnoses coupled with 10 different proposals for treatment (including prescriptions for very powerful psychotropic drugs). Genuine severe mental disorders may be connected with chemical imbalances in the brain to some extent (no conclusive proof for this actually exists), but by and large there is little that can be objectively “measured”. The psychologist or psychiatrist must largely rely on the same ability that also characterizes the work of the historian – i.e., what Mises called “understanding”. They can only judge behavior. So why have so many former “personality traits” been transformed into symptoms of mental illness? One major reason is money. Here are a few data points that shed light on the monetary side of the psychiatry business; the data are by now slightly dated, but they suffice to get the point across. As of 2010: Stefan Molyneux whom we got the above data from also reports that according to the US National Institute of Mental Health (in 2010) “26% of Americans suffer from mental illness” and “nearly 58 million Americans will suffer from an episode of mental illness in any given year”. There you have it – we’re literally surrounded by lunatics. As Molyneux rightly points out: if there is a disease for which we have effective cures, then application of this cure should reduce the prevalence of the disease. Global sales of anti-depressants, stimulants, anti-anxiety and anti-psychotic drugs had reached more than $76 billion per year. Globally, 54 million people were taking anti-depressants that are known to cause addiction, and often violent and homicidal behavior. In the US, 20% of all women were taking mental health medication in 2010. Essentially every fourth female is prozac’d into quietude. 20 million children worldwide had been diagnosed with mental disorders and were prescribed stimulants and/or powerful anti-depressants. In 2002, more than 100 million prescriptions were written for anti-depressants alone (cost: $19.5 billion nominal) In France, one in seven prescriptions is for a psychotropic drug and more than 50% of the employed were taking such drugs (as of 2010, 1.8 million people). Between 1986 and 2004, combined spending on anti-psychotic drugs and anti-depressants jumped from $500 million to $20 billion. In the US, the mental health budget, adjusted for inflation, has soared from $33 billion in 1994 to $ 80 billion in 2010 (similar increases have occurred elsewhere). (data via Stefan Molyneux) For instance, a number of infectious diseases have been nearly, or completely exterminated by effective vaccines. We should therefore expect that with the arrival of psychiatric medications that allegedly “correct chemical imbalances in the brain”, there should be a decline in the number of mentally ill people. The first such medications were introduced in the mid 1950s. So what happened? In 1955, there were 355,000 adults confined to mental hospitals all over the US on account of being diagnosed as mentally ill by psychiatrists. After 50 years of medical treatment with anti-psychotic drugs, that number has risen to more than 4 million patients (as of 2007). Some success! While the prescription of psychiatric medications to children soared from the mid 1980s to today, so did the number of youth receiving disability payments from the government for mental disability. It rose from 16,200 in 1986 to 561,569 in 2007 (a 35 fold increase). It appears that all those meds prescribed to “ODD” and “ADHD” children have had the exact opposite effect from that advertised. Number of Americans disabled by mental illness since Prozac was introduced. Again, there exists no convincing proof as of yet for any chemical, biological or genetic causes of mental illness. The categorizations found in the DSM are arrived at by “peer consensus”, not by any objective measurements. And yet, drugs that alter chemical balances in the brain are prescribed as treatment. The greater the number of new diseases manufactured by said consensus, the more treatments can be prescribed. As Dr. Thomas Dorman, internist and member of the Royal College of Physicians of the UK, and Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Canada, put it: It is not too difficult to see the enormous monetary incentives that are driving this business of declaring as many people as possible to be mentally ill. There no longer is such a thing as a harmless “eccentric”. Any deviation from the norms laid out by the psychiatric profession mean one is in need of treatment. Only the sheeple are sane. “In short, the whole business of creating psychiatric categories of ‘disease,’ formalizing them with consensus, and subsequently ascribing diagnostic codes to them, which in turn leads to their use for insurance billing, is nothing but an extended racket furnishing psychiatry a pseudo-scientific aura. The perpetrators are, of course, feeding at the public trough.” Stefan Molyneux’s podcast on mental illness from which we have taken most of the statistics presented above can be seen here: Stefan Molyneux on mental illness. Freethinkers Medicated Into Silence by Good SerfsHowever, there may be another reason why anti-authoritarianism specifically has made it onto the list of behaviors held to be symptomatic of mental illness. Psychologist Dr. Bruce Levine has laid the problem out in an article entitled “Why Anti-Authoritarians are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill”. A few pertinent excerpts follow below. First Dr. Levine explains why there seem so few anti-authoritarians in the US. The reason in his opinion is that many have been medicated into silence: (emphasis added) “Anti-authoritarians question whether an authority is a legitimate one before taking that authority seriously. Evaluating the legitimacy of authorities includes assessing whether or not authorities actually know what they are talking about, are honest, and care about those people who are respecting their authority. And when anti-authoritarians assess an authority to be illegitimate, they challenge and resist that authority—sometimes aggressively and sometimes passive-aggressively, sometimes wisely and sometimes not. Some activists lament how few anti-authoritarians there appear to be in the United States. One reason could be that many natural anti-authoritarians are now psycho-pathologized and medicated before they achieve political consciousness of society’s most oppressive authorities.” But why does this happen, apart from the monetary incentives discussed above? Why are psychiatrists so eager to medicate anti-authoritarians into a stupor? In Dr. Levine’s opinion, the reason is that the career of most psychiatrists involves an extraordinary degree of compliance with authorities, to the point where they are not even aware anymore of how obedient they have become. When confronted with patients who aren’t exhibiting a similar degree of obedient behavior, they immediately suspect that there is something to diagnose and treat: (emphasis added) “The selection and socialization of mental health professionals tends to breed out many anti-authoritarians. Having steered the higher-education terrain for a decade of my life, I know that degrees and credentials are primarily badges of compliance. Those with extended schooling have lived for many years in a world where one routinely conforms to the demands of authorities. Thus for many MDs and PhDs, people different from them who reject this attentional and behavioral compliance appear to be from another world—a diagnosable one. I have found that most psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals are not only extraordinarily compliant with authorities but also unaware of the magnitude of their obedience. And it also has become clear to me that the anti-authoritarianism of their patients creates enormous anxiety for these professionals, and their anxiety fuels diagnoses and treatments. “I see before me words you should not have written…”, by Raymond Pettibone, the cover artist of punk band “Black Flag”. In connection with ODD diagnoses, Dr. Levine not unreasonably asks “Do we really want to diagnose and medicate everyone with “deficits in rule-governed behavior”?”. As he points out, many of the people who have enriched humanity with revolutionary new scientific concepts, inventions or works of art, would have been diagnosed as mentally ill anti-authoritarians in today’s day and age and may well have been medicated into a such a daze that their creations would never have seen the light of day. He cites Albert Einstein as a pertinent example: (emphasis added) “Albert Einstein, as a youth, would have likely received an ADHD diagnosis, and maybe an ODD one as well. Albert didn’t pay attention to his teachers, failed his college entrance examinations twice, and had difficulty holding jobs. However, Einstein biographer Ronald Clark (Einstein: The Life and Times) asserts that Albert’s problems did not stem from attention deficits but rather from his hatred of authoritarian, Prussian discipline in his schools. Einstein said, “The teachers in the elementary school appeared to me like sergeants and in the Gymnasium the teachers were like lieutenants.” At age 13, Einstein read Kant’s difficult Critique of Pure Reason—because Albert was interested in it. Clark also tells us Einstein refused to prepare himself for his college admissions as a rebellion against his father’s “unbearable” path of a “practical profession.” After he did enter college, one professor told Einstein, “You have one fault; one can’t tell you anything.” The very characteristics of Einstein that upset authorities so much were exactly the ones that allowed him to excel.” It is probably a good bet that a Haldol-addled Einstein wouldn’t have excelled at much. Well, he even looked crazy: theoretical physicist and reputed anti-authoritarian Albert Einstein, who invented a few unimportant little formulas like E=mc2. Rumor has it he also invented gravity, which we have been struggling against ever since. Photo credit: Getty Images As Dr. Levine points out, once they are diagnosed as mentally ill, anti-authoritarians are especially likely to become victims of a vicious cycle: “Many anti-authoritarians who earlier in their lives were diagnosed with mental illness tell me that once they were labeled with a psychiatric diagnosis, they got caught in a dilemma. Authoritarians, by definition, demand unquestioning obedience, and so any resistance to their diagnosis and treatment created enormous anxiety for authoritarian mental health professionals; and professionals, feeling out of control, labeled them “noncompliant with treatment,” increased the severity of their diagnosis, and jacked up their medications.” (emphasis added) Dr. Levine then concludes that the direction in which the system has evolved is indeed reminiscent of a “Sovietization”; just as the ruling classes once employed an authoritarian religious establishment to enforce compliance with the status quo, they can nowadays rely on psychiatry to do the job: “What better way to maintain the status quo than to view inattention, anger, anxiety, and depression as biochemical problems of those who are mentally ill rather than normal reactions to an increasingly authoritarian society. […] So authoritarians financially marginalize those who buck the system, they criminalize anti-authoritarianism, they psychopathologize anti-authoritarians, and they market drugs for their “cure.” (emphasis added) Evidently the system provides ample scope for both intentional and unintentional abuse. Conclusion:In order to prevent misunderstandings, we should point out that we don’t want to assert here that there exists no such thing as mental illness, or that psychiatry is completely useless in diagnosing it or providing effective treatment. The same holds for psychotropic medication: there certainly exist medications that can be helpful in alleviating symptoms of severe mental conditions and allow people to lead fairly normal lives that would otherwise be out of reach for them (i.e., we don’t fully agree with Stefan Molyneux’s conclusions; this is simply based on the fact that we personally know of two cases in which appropriate medication helped people exhibiting severe symptoms associated with schizophrenia). However, it is important to realize that the sciences dealing with the human mind are thymological in nature and cannot make claims based on objectively measurable physical quantities. And yet, the field has turned into a “growth industry” in every respect; the number of behaviors regarded as “abnormal”, as well as the number of medications prescribed for treating such behaviors has grown exponentially. This is a dangerous development and the fact that almost every quirky personality trait is suddenly deemed a sign of disease is certainly giving one pause (it is dangerous in several respects: consider for instance the great number of mass murderers who were prescribed psychotropic drugs. Correlation is not always causation of course, but still…) The psychopathologizing of anti-authoritarian behavior is yet another step on what looks like an increasingly slippery slope and it strikes us as especially harmful. As Dr. Levine inter alia points out: “It has been my experience that many anti-authoritarians labeled with psychiatric diagnoses usually don’t reject all authorities, simply those they’ve assessed to be illegitimate ones.” In other words, the term “anti-authoritarian” does not necessarily stand for a blanket rejection of all authorities, but rather a healthy questioning of the legitimacy of existing authorities. This seems all the more necessary today, when governments in the name of providing all-encompassing security (a task at which they are predictably failing) are seeing fit to let individual liberty die a death of a thousand cuts. Anti-authoritarian street art that has unexpectedly popped up on a wall in Montreal. Average:

Very well said Dive, and I think a willful ignorance and cognitive dissonance of the public at large help enable the govt and media's of easily controlling the populace...

Really good article that puts all phony mainstream media hype in true perspective, along with how easily most Americans perceptions of reality are shaped by it. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-19/propaganda-fear-mongering-works Propaganda & Fear-Mongering Works President Obama inShare13 Submitted by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog, When I see the results of polls like the one below, I realize there is no chance the majority will do anything to reverse the course of our nation in terminal decline. It will take a complete collapse and bloody reset before we have a chance at putting this country back on a sustainable rational course. How the f..k can Americans actually think terrorism should be Obama and Congress’ top priority? Are Americans really that stupid? WTF do they want Obama and Congress to do? Double the DHS budget? Increase electronic surveillance on our communications? Give local police more military hardware? Ban guns? Repeal the 4th Amendment? Do the ignorant masses know their actual chances of being killed by a terrorist? To say the chances are astronomically miniscule is an understatement. See for yourself: You are 35,079 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack You are 33,842 times more likely to die from cancer than from a terrorist attack You are 23,528 times more likely to die from obesity than from a terrorist attack You are 5,882 times more likely to die from medical error than terrorism. You are 4,706 times more likely to drink yourself to death than die from terrorism. You are 1,904 times more likely to die from a car accident than from a terrorist attack. You are 2,059 times more likely to kill yourself than die at the hand of a terrorist. You are 452 times more likely to die from risky sexual behavior than terrorism. You are 353 times more likely to fall to your death doing something idiotic than die in a terrorist attack. You are 271 times more likely to die from a workplace accident than terrorism. You are more than 9 times more likely to be killed by a law enforcement officer than by a terrorist. You are 110 times more likely to die from contaminated food than terrorism. http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-terrorism-statistics-every-american-needs-to-hear/5382818 What policies do Americans want Obama and Congress to prioritize in 2015? According to the Pew Research Center’s policy priorities survey, 76 percent of people in the United States believe tackling terrorism should be the nation’s top priority this year. It is the first time in four years terrorism has made the top of Pew’s list and its appearance for 2015 can be attributed to economic improvement as well as persistant terrorist threats. Despite considerable improvement, the economy is still an area of concern for Americans and 75 percent of them want President Obama to give it attention. Job creation is closely linked to economic improvement so it comes as little surprise that it rounds off the top three with 67 percent of respondents expecting it to be prioritized. * * * The fact Americans think terrorism is our top priority proves that Edward Bernays was an evil genius. The combination of mass media and propaganda can convince the willfully ignorant and dumbed down populace of anything. Facts are unnecessary when fear and feelings are far more powerful. We are truly doomed.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. H. L. Mencken

Have been on ride alongs George, several of my close friends are police, and I grew up in some very bad neighborhoods ad a child and have been on my own since 15. I have seen what the police have to deal with 1st hand, and yes they do have to deal with stressful and dangerous situations, but most (not all) have an "us vs them" mentality, which I have witnessed 1st hand as well. Seen police harassment of completely innocent folks to the extreme for absolutely no reason whatsoever, and as I've stated numerous times, I've never needed police to protect me, myself and my own looked after that. My opinions are are shaped by experiences, not media hype. I give respect to those who show it to others...this knee-jerk hero-worship of police is media brainwashing of the masses at it's finest. The police were never put in place to protect and serve the public good, they have always been a buffer between the elite and common folk. I'm done, last post on this subject for me...Saturday afternoon fun calls. Have a Good weekend George!

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-09/all-over-america-government-officials-are-cracking-down-preppers All Over America, Government Officials Are Cracking Down On Preppers 01/09/2015 18:55 -0500 Florida Global Warming New York City New York State Obama Administration Reality inShare1 Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog, Why would the government want to punish people that are just trying to work hard, become more self-sufficient and take care of their families? There are approximately 3 million preppers in the United States today, and often they appear to be singled out for punishment by bureaucratic control freaks that are horrified at the thought that there are families out there that actually want to try to become less dependent on the system. So if you use alternative methods to heat your home, or if you are not connected to the utility grid, or if you collect rainwater on your property, or if you believe that parents should have the ultimate say when it comes to health decisions for their children, you could become a target for overzealous government enforcers. Once upon a time, America was the land of the free and the home of the brave, but now we are being transformed into a socialist police state where control freak bureaucrats use millions of laws, rules and regulations to crack down on anyone that dares to think for themselves. For example, people have been burning wood to heat their homes since this country began. And this is still very common in rural areas. But the Obama administration does not like this at all. The Obama bureaucrats at the EPA fear that our little wood stoves may be contributing to “global warming”, so they have outlawed the production and sale of 80 percent of the wood stoves that are currently in use. The following comes from a recent Forbes article… Does that make you angry? It seems that even wood isn’t green or renewable enough anymore. The EPA has recently banned the production and sale of 80 percent of America’s current wood-burning stoves, the oldest heating method known to mankind and mainstay of rural homes and many of our nation’s poorest residents. The agency’s stringent one-size-fits-all rules apply equally to heavily air-polluted cities and far cleaner plus typically colder off-grid wilderness areas such as large regions of Alaska and the American West. While EPA’s most recent regulations aren’t altogether new, their impacts will nonetheless be severe. Whereas restrictions had previously banned wood-burning stoves that didn’t limit fine airborne particulate emissions to 15 micrograms per cubic meter of air, the change will impose a maximum 12 microgram limit. To put this amount in context, EPA estimates that secondhand tobacco smoke in a closed car can expose a person to 3,000-4,000 micrograms of particulates per cubic meter. Most wood stoves that warm cabin and home residents from coast-to-coast can’t meet that standard. Older stoves that don’t cannot be traded in for updated types, but instead must be rendered inoperable, destroyed, or recycled as scrap metal. It should. There are other preppers that try to use very “clean” methods to power their homes, but that is still not good enough for some government control freaks. For example, one prepper down in south Florida that had gone “off the grid” was recently ordered by a court to connect back to the grid or face eviction from his home. The following is an excerpt from a recent article by Guiles Hendrik… Incredibly, most Americans still seem to believe that we live in a “free country”. But we don’t. Our lives are very tightly constrained by literally millions of laws, rules and regulations, and more are being added every single day. Think you are still free to make choices in your life? Do you think the government will allow you to live independent of their utility monopolies? If you think so, try opting for renewable non-grid tied power and utilize environmentally friendly composting toilets and your own self-sufficient water supply. Today, those life choices could land you in jail if you live in South Florida. Take the case of Robin Speronis. Robin Speronis has lived off the grid, independent of the city’s water and electric system. A Florida court ruled this off-the-grid living illegal last week and has given Robin until March to connect her home to a municipal water line or face possible eviction. Further, officials in the city of Cape Coral have justified this by deeming Robin’s home “unsanitary,” citing the International Property Maintenance Code. First of all, since when did we begin to locally recognize “international codes?” Where in the US Constitution does it provide for international jurisdiction over local codes? Ironically, this “international” code mandates that homes be connected to an electricity grid and a running water source, even though most of the world lives without reliable electricity and municipal water and sewer. Further, the code is outdated and obsolete because it was written without consideration to both old and new technologies that relegate the need for grid tied power and municipal water as unnecessary and expensive; especially, in locations where it simply isn’t feasible to have grid tied utilities. Nonetheless, Speronis’ home does in fact have power and water through far cheaper and more environmentally friendly means — solar panels and rainwater, but that reality is ignored by the local government. Even some of our most basic fundamental rights have been seriously eroded. One of these is the right to make basic health decisions for our own children. In New York state, children that have not received all of the designated vaccines can now be banned from attending public school, and this requirement was recently upheld by a federal appeals court… So what are we free to do without government interference these days? New York state’s requirement that children be vaccinated before attending public school does not violate their constitutional rights, a federal appeals court in Manhattan said on Wednesday. In affirming the requirement’s constitutionality, a three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also upheld a previous ruling by a federal judge that students exempted from the requirement for religious reasons can be barred from school when another child has a disease preventable by a vaccine. The decision was the latest to go against three parents from New York City who say their religious rights were violated when their children were kept out of school as a result of the immunization policies. The parents’ lawyer, Patricia Finn, said her clients planned to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Not much. In fact, in some states we can’t even sit on our own land and collect the rain as it falls from the sky for our own personal use. If you do this in the state of Oregon, for example, you could go to prison… Gary Harrington, the Oregon man convicted of collecting rainwater and snow runoff on his rural property surrendered Wednesday morning to begin serving his 30-day, jail sentence in Medford, Ore. “I’m sacrificing my liberty so we can stand up as a country and stand for our liberty,” Harrington told a small crowd of people gathered outside of the Jackson County (Ore.) Jail. Several people held signs that showed support for Harrington as he was taken inside the jail. And of course these are just a few examples. Almost every single day there are more stories in the news about government bureaucrats cracking down on preppers. They almost seem to relish the opportunity to go after the “non-conformists”. But the good news is that the number of Americans that are seeking to become less dependent on the system just continues to grow. So what about you? Are you a prepper? My friend Daisy Luther recently wrote a piece entitled “45 MORE Signs That You Might Be One of Those Crazy Preppers“. The following are some of the most interesting “signs” from her list… *You spend your days off digging an underground bunker in your backyard. *Your family doesn’t dare take something from the food stockpile without marking it off the list. *Your kids know how to don a gas mask in 30 seconds. *Everyone in your survival group carries the same firearm so that ammo is standardized. *Your family is no longer surprised when you announce, “Hey, we’re going to learn how to make (insert anything here)!” *You have long since accepted the idea that if you’re not on someone’s list, you’re probably not doing it right. *You don’t just rotate food, you rotate ammo. *Moving to a new house is no longer “moving”, but “strategic relocation”. *Your kids think it’s a fun game to see who can find the most potential weapons in a room. *Your EDC includes a knife, firearm w/extra mag, flashlight, mylar blanket, Chapstick, and an ounce of silver — and that’s just for when you’re walking the dog. *One criterion for your new winter coat is that it fits over your body armor. You can read her entire article right here. America was built by people that loved their families, worked hard and were self-sufficient. Now our government is specifically targeting those kinds of people. What in the world is happening to us?

This ranting clown is still bustin out the crystal ball? Oh boy...

Already has more than once bud...and I'm..still kickin. One more time for effect: when seconds count, police are only minutes away...enjoy your weekend Gym

We've already gone over this. I protect myself and my own Gym...don't need police to protect me...maybe you do. Case closed.

While their job can be stressful and dangerous at times, Police are not erven in the top ten most hazardous professions: The 10 Deadliest Jobs: 1. Logging workers 2. Fishers and related fishing workers 3. Aircraft pilot and flight engineers 4. Roofers 5. Structural iron and steel workers 6. Refuse and recyclable material collectors 7. Electrical power-line installers and repairers 8. Drivers/sales workers and truck drivers 9. Farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural managers 10. Construction laborers http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelynsmith/2013/08/22/americas-10-deadliest-jobs-2/ ****************************************************************************************************** http://open.salon.com/blog/richard_rider/2010/11/08/police_firefighter_work_dangerous_yes_and_no Police & Firefighter work dangerous? Yes. And no. Rate: 0 Flag Do police and firefighters (who, oddly enough, have almost the same chance of dying on the job) really have higher workplace fatality rates than other occupations? Yes. And no. Check out the 2006 fatality statistics published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor. The national average mortality rate on the job for all occupations is 4 deaths per 100,000 workers. Police and firefighter deaths on the job are a bit over 4 times that average. Clearly their jobs are more hazardous than what most working people have to face. But let's compare that public safety mortality rate with some other blue collar, mostly male jobs. The figures below are the number of on-the-job deaths annually per 100,000 workers, by occupation (and note the average for men vs. women): Policemen: 16.8 Firefighters: 16.6 Men: 6.9 Women: 0.7 Farmers and Ranchers: 37.2 Grounds Maintenance Workers: 13.5 Fishers and related Fishing Workers: 147.2 Construction Laborers: 21.4 Roofers: 33.5 Structural Iron and Steel Workers: 61 Operating Engineers and other Equipment Operators: 18.2 Aircraft Pilots and Flight Engineers: 90.4 Refuse and Recyclable Material Collectors: 40.7 Logging: 87.4 Mining: 28.1 Taxi and limousine drivers: 22.1 Truck Transportation: 27.2 You can read the entire document by clicking here. As you can see, a number of occupations entail as great or greater risk. Indeed, a grounds maintenance worker faces almost as much mortality risk as our police and firefighters. Construction laborers face a 28% higher risk. Truck drivers are 63% more likely to die on the job. Roofers face twice the mortality risk of our public safety workers. And then there are some REALLY dangerous occupations to consider. A common lament is that "police and firefighters' wives -- when they send their husbands off to work -- don't know whether or not they will return that evening." [somehow it's unmanly to reverse the genders.] True enough. But the fact is that there are millions of workers who go off to work each morning with less of a chance of returning home than the odds facing a police officer or firefighter. One reason few people are aware of this fact is that when a public safety employee dies on the job, there is a huge amount of publicity. You seldom have a private funeral for a cop or firefighter -- it's an "all hands on deck" evolution. Meanwhile every day people die on the job in these other riskier occupations, and such tragedies seldom get even a mention in the papers, let alone on TV. Every occupational death is a tragedy, and no one should downplay that fact. But the idea that police and firefighters face incredible dangers is simply not true. Public safety jobs entail risk, but not THAT much risk.MORE: http://www.bankrate.com/finance/personal-finance/10-most-dangerous-jobs-us-7.aspx http://www.businessinsider.com/most-dangerous-jobs-in-america-2014-12 Looks like media hype, rather than fact, has shaped public opinion and perceptions of reality -yet again.

I could have built a dome city out of all the "Windows" called by these idiot gurus over the last 7 years...sheesh.

Thank you for clarifying Gym, I appreciate it. When a system is completely broken, corrupt and rigged, how does one go about working within it? I think the only way is to start locally and push back from there, voting changes nothing brother. Enjoy your New Years, enough politics for today, be safe! Voting on the Federal level I meant...

How very American of you...you disagree with me, so you think I should leave America. Get back to me when you can actually discuss a topic, instead of your usual emotionally charged circular-logic outbursts. Happy New Year

what happens is someone with more or bigger guns comes along to start telling you how you will live! The reason to strengthen local ties. What have people done throught history when an enemy threatens them? They band together and defend themselves. Watiting for someone else to save you is about the most idiotic thing I can think of. Stand up for yourself.

Did I ever say we need NO Law enforcement? No I did not, I said I don't need Police to protect me, and if me or my family's life is threatened, I will not hesitate to protect myself or those I love and care for, and yes the police can come clean it up after. We need less idiotic laws that generate revenue for the State that end up with Police in situations they should have never been involved with in the 1st place, along with better testing, higher IQ's, and more thourough training on how to interact with the public. I have several close friends who are police officers, and I watched most of them change from their original intentions of "protect and serve", to the current "us versus them" attitude so prevalent in todays police. The public is now viewed as the enemy. I know they have to deal with plenty of human garbage oon a daily basis, and I realize what that can do to a person, but if you can't deal with it, quit, just like any other job. just because you deal with a lot of dirtbags daily doesn't give you a license to go ape-shyte when you feel like it. I believe People need to rely more on themselves, become more involved in their LOCAL communities and look out for one another, and stop relying on government for all of their protection and needs, it just feeds the beast. Our current incarnation of "Law Enforcement" is over-miliitarized and completely unaccountable. If there are only a "few bad-apples", then why are they almost NEVER weeded out and prosecuted, or fired without benefits? If someone wishes to become a Police officer, they should be held to a higher standard of accountablility, not be above the laws that you and I are held to in strict adherence. We wouldn't protect pedophile priests and make such excuses, why would we make excuses for a police officer that may have comitted murder, or at the very least unintentional manslaughter? I know not all police are bad, but THEY are the ones protecting the bad apples, so that makes them accountable too, just like priests who aren't pedophiles themselves, but look the other way, or cover it up as well. Our entire system is broken, and needs to be be rebuilt from scratch.

Who am I going to call when the bad guys are banging on my door? Me, myself and Sig Sauer...handled every threatening situation I've been in all by myself, never needed police to "feel safe"...it's called the 2nd Amendment. Remember, when seconds count, the police are only minutes away.

Also, don't depend on an RV for your future...best advice, put em in a drawer, and go do something now to help secure said future....if an RV happens, great, if not, you've already been working towards a better life in the meantime...lot more to life than fretting over idiot gurus and half-translated Iraqi news gibberish.

Yep Dive, was all about the expansion of Federal govt and centralizing power...like you said, slavery was just the cover story to gain more supporters...like govt ever gave 2 craps about a person's well being. Hollywood has played a huge part in propagating all these falsehoods that have been foisted upon the American people, just another arm of the propaganda machine.

Well Jim, all of the war mongering coming out of DC is exactly what the *****-puppets are paid to do by their banker/corporate masters...we haven't had real representation for the People in well over 100 years...let's just hope the idiots don't start lobbing nukes...maybe if and when the Fed crumbles and we have a real and sound monetary system, things may turn around here in America.

Spot on Dive!

This is just the window dressing for the real issues: banker backed overthrow of the Ukrainian govt, GazProm pipeline thru Turkey, and Russia circumventing the USD in direct sovereign currency swaps and gold exchanges.... not to mention the BRICS bank. The Fed doesn't like it's ponzi scheme messed with. Thanks JimCor

Hi Dwitte, and some people did try to storm Wall St, and the press made them look like criminals and got Main St. on Wall Street's side. Anyway, I'm in a bit of a rush, but the derivatives market won't change anytime soon, so read up on it, and just google "banks leveraged at 30 to 1", there is a wealth of information out there, and it's stuff you won't hear on CNBC, Bloomberg or Moneyline. MSM is complicit in the ponzi scam. Zerohedge.com is an excellent source of what's REALLY happening with the financial system, and they are usually pretty reliable. Just take your time and read up, education and knowledge are the best weapons, and the more that know what's really going on will wake up pissed off, and someday we may have enough folks to say something about it. Have a good weekend, I gotta hit the bricks!

Good comment Hooter, it IS all funny money, and it's not really The American public's debt, but the US corporation's...and once the Fed does implode (and it will, al ponzis eventually do) this will force the USA to print asset backed currency, which will stop the free money party on Wall St, and end the perpetual MIC endless wat-for-profit nonsense...until the corporation goes bankrupt we are stuck though. Lots of other countries are dumping the dollar which should hasten the Feds demise..another reason for all the war rhetoric with Russia, they've pretty much dumped the dollar, and we all know what happens to countries that don't tow the central banker-Fed-USD line... Sorry, the auto complete on my phone is a pain in the butt...I meant war-for-profit...