Scootter: What would happen if we (US) just packed up our troops from everywhere closed down our bases. Stopped helping everyone and anyone in need and took care of our own. If that involves ceasing support to all kinds of oppressive regimes, coercive culture transfer and interference in internecine conflicts, then there would be much fewer people out there intent on hurting us.
medicboy: I eat mostly what I shoot... I see your "shooting my meat" with my growing vegetables and raise you driving 140 miles to the only farm in lower NY State that is allowed to sell raw milk, bying raw milk from mostly-grass fed
Guerncy cows and making sour cream and butter and other stuff out of it.
People - especially those not very smart and educated - tend to believe what their government tells them about safety of the products.
It does not matter what you eat "mostly".
You would have to be very well educated to avoid the poisons in the foods that government approves as safe. And if you were educated, the items I mentioned would not be a surprise to you.
Do you know how many products contain soy derivatives and how harmfull they are?
Do you know how homogenisation and pasterisation change properties of milk?
Do you know what "hydrogenation" is and where trans-fats come from if they do not occur in nature?
Do you know that a modern Holstein cow besides being sick and requiring a lot of antibiotics, has naturally elevated hormone levels in milk/meat even if it is organically grown without bGH?
I suggest you start with
http://www.westonaprice.org/ and
http://www.realmilk.com/ on the nutrition.
As for american girls reaching puberty 3-4 years earlier, just type in "girls early puberty" into your google search and prepare to be scared.
Ritalin is not so much "a bunch of lazy parents who think there kids are overactive" but a bunch of government bureacurats in schools that do not want to deal with boys behaving like boys should and scaring parents into drugging their kids under threat of taking their children away:
Parents throughout the country are being pressured and coerced by schools to give psychiatric drugs to their children. Teachers, school psychologists, and administrators commonly make dire threats about their inability to teach children without medicating them. They sometimes suggest that only medication can stave off a bleak future of delinquency and occupational failure. They even call child protective services to investigate parents for child neglect and they sometimes testify against parents in court.
Still, the number of boys suffering from real disorders has grown drastically.
As for soy formula, I certainly hope your son is going to be OK.
I would recommend you research the issue and watch his thyroid function.
Do a search on the web on soy. Make sure to check
New Zealand Ministry of Health ReportFrogm4n: there is really no way to truely measure if japan is worse off then we are. but there is one thing we do know. They are in a period of deflation and we are not as of yet. You are confusing "deflation" with "economic decline" and I am pretty sure you are not using the right definition of "deflation" either.
"Deflation" is an increase in a stock of money - which is clearly not the case with Japan.
What they have is a general drop in prices which is confusing the illiterates like rude who cannot tell a yen-expressed value of japanese GDP from the production of real goods.
Sure, the
nominal GDP expressed in yen may be falling but the
real one is raising at a pretty decent clip, as well as real private income. Their salaries drop but the prices of their products drop even faster as their productivity grows.
Since early 2000, Japanese
real private sector GNP has risen 3.5% overall, and by 2.9% per head, for a modest, but perceptible, annual rate of gain of 0.9%.
For its part, U.S. real private sector GNP grew by an almost identical 3.6% between 1999 and 2002, but, with our population rising four-five times faster than Japanese, income per head in the U.S. barely increased at all over the period.
You also have to acknowledge that the fruits of previous Japanese prudence—their vast stock of assets held abroad—bring in a good deal of income too.
In fact Japan subcidises $100 billion of our yearly consumption by selling us products in exchange for dollars that we print and their government take our of circulation with their tax money.
miko
