Obama’s New Psychiatric Diagnosis Targets “Internet Users” and “Internet Conspiracy Theorists” for Gun Ineligibility
Anyone who gets his or her news outside of the enemedia and the alphabets (ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC) will be disarmed by the Democrat thought police.
This is serious. The era of the totalitarians is upon us — with a smiley, winking emoticon of course.
New Psychiatric Diagnosis Targets “Internet Conspiracy Theorists” Posted on January 24, 2015 by Dave Hodges, DC Clothesline
The Obama administration has a new partner in crime and it is the American Psychiatric Association (APA). The APA created the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (5th Edition) which was recently adopted. DSM 5 is highly controversial and has sparked outrage from the mental health practitioners.
As many of these practitioners point out, the new DSM-V makes a pathology out of simple and normal behaviors such as grieving for the loss of a loved one.
“If You Question Authority, You Are Mentally Ill”, Report Finds
ZeroHedge.com | 21 January, 2015
This 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:
[…] an “ongoing pattern of disobedient, hostile and defiant behavior,” symptoms include questioning authority, negativity, defiance, argumentativeness, and being easily annoyed.
In short, as Natural News put it: According to US psychiatrists, only the sheeple are sane.
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.
A Practical (and Semi-Optimistic) Plan to Tame the Federal Leviathan
By DANIEL J. MITCHELL
Like a lot of libertarians and small-government conservatives, I’m prone to pessimism. How can you be cheerful, after all, when you look at what’s been happening in our lifetimes.
New entitlement programs, adopted by politicians from all parties, are further adding to the long-run spending crisis.
The federal budget has become much bigger, luring millions of additional people into government dependency.
The tax code has become even more corrupt and complex, with more than 4,600 changes just between 2001 and 2012 according to a withering report from outgoing Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.
And let’s not forget the essential insight of “public choice” economics, which tells us that politicians care first and foremost about their own interests rather than the national interest. So what’s their incentive to address these problems, particularly if there’s some way to sweep them under the rug and let future generations bear the burden?
And if you think I’m being unduly negative about political incentives and fiscal responsibility, consider the new report from the European Commission, which found that politicians from EU member nations routinely enact budgets based on “rosy scenarios.” As the EU Observer reported:
EU governments are too optimistic about their economic prospects and their ability to control public spending, leading to them continually missing their budget targets, a European Commission paper has argued. …their growth projections are 0.6 percent higher than the final figure, while governments who promise to cut their deficit by 0.2 percent of GDP, typically tend to increase their gap between revenue and spending by the same amount.
Needless to say, American politicians do the same thing with their forecasts. If you don’t believe me, just look at the way the books were cooked to help impose Obamacare.
But set aside everything I just wrote because now I’m going to tell you that we’re making progress and that it’s actually not that difficult to constructively address America’s fiscal problems.
First, let’s look at how we’ve made progress. I just wrote a piece for The Hill. It’s entitled “Republicans are Winning the Fiscal Fight” and it includes lots of data on what’s been happening over the past five years, including the fact that there’s been no growth in the federal budget.
You should read the entire thing for full context, but here are a few brief excerpts on why the left can’t be feeling very happy right now.
…Democrats presumably can’t be happy that the lion’s share of the Bush tax cuts were made permanent. …revenues are now projected to average only 18 percent of GDP over the next 10 years…a smaller tax burden than we had throughout the Clinton years. And you can’t finance big government in the long run without a lot more revenue. And they definitely can’t be happy that domestic discretionary spending is now below where it was during the Bush years, when measured as a share of GDP. And with sequester-enforced budget caps, it’s quite likely that number will drop even further. …Perhaps even more important, looking forward, is that House Republicans for four consecutive years have approved budget resolutions that assume genuine reform of Medicare and Medicaid. And they’ve won their biggest majority since before World War II, so GOPers can feel reasonably confident that voters (perhaps sobered up by the fiscal disarray in Europe) understand the need to modernize these programs.
By the way, the point about keeping taxes under control is critical. Simply stated, it’svirtually impossible for government to get much bigger without a stream of new revenue (or, in the case of a value-added tax, a river of new revenue).
Let’s now focus on the second issue, which is how we can maintain this progress.
Here’s a chart I put together back in September that showed projected revenue over the next 10 years (blue line). I then showed what happens if spending is left on autopilot and also what happens if policymakers simply restrain spending so that it grows 2 percent annually (gold line), which is actually a bit higher than inflation.
As you can see, it’s very simple to achieve a budget surplus. And we don’t even need the same amount of spending restraint that we enjoyed over the past five years!
The challenge, of course, is that Obama and many other politicians (including quite a few Republicans) don’t want government on a diet. After all, why let government “only” grow 2 percent each year when you can please the lobbyists, bureaucrats, cronyists, contractors, and other insiders by letting spending increase two or three times faster than inflation?
Fiscal probity isn’t easy. Genuine spending restraint not only means saying no to special interests and campaign contributors, it also means picking smart fights. In some cases, Obama and the left may dig in their heels and threaten a partial government shutdown in hopes of getting bigger budgets.
Sometimes such fights are unwise, but there’s a very strong case to be made that the GOP ultimately prevailed in the 1995 and 2013 shutdown battles.
The bottom line, as illustrated by this amusing A.F. Branco cartoon, is that Republicans shouldn’t automatically wilt if there’s a fight over something that really matters – such as a growing burden of government spending.
In early October, President Obama warned his supporters to “make no mistake: these policies [of mine] are on the ballot. Every single one of them.” After the November elections, he probably wishes he hadn’t said that. The scale of the liberal defeat is remarkable, as are its causes.
In 2008, Obama had long coattails: When he took office in 2009, the House of Representatives had 256 Democrats. In 2015, it probably will have 188.
But the underlying reasons for Obama’s failure run deeper than the normal swings of the political pendulum. Four of them are vital. The first is that a good part of Obama’s appeal in 2008 was that he was supposedly above politics. He was compared to Abraham Lincoln, a canny politician we now misremember as being above the partisan fray.
This was nonsense. If you want to get anywhere in politics, you have to be a politician. And the essence of politics has not changed since Aristotle’s time. That doesn’t mean that politicians are all liars. But it does mean that anyone who looks for salvation in a politician is going to be disappointed. Obama was hyped so high in 2008 that he had nowhere to go but down.
Another reason for Obama’s failure was that he sought, in his words, to begin “the work of remaking America.” The entire American political system was designed by the Founding Fathers to frustrate his plans. The Constitution, with its checks and balances and its separation of powers, was intended to limit the government and prevent transient majorities from having their way.
Within those limits, Obama has actually – and from a conservative perspective, regrettably – done a lot: Obamacare itself is proof of that. But inevitably, having set out to, as he claimed, fundamentally transform the United States, Obama has come up short. He has increasingly resorted to unilateral executive actions precisely because he resents the system’s constraints, but that just feeds the narrative that he’s more emperor than president.
The third reason for Obama’s failure is that most of his ideas were wrong. There were no shovel-ready jobs waiting for the stimulus spending. Fixing health care did not require ripping apart the insurance market. The answer to a weak economy was not expensive green energy.
Iran was not waiting for an outstretched hand of friendship. Russia wanted a reset for malicious reasons of its own, not because it wanted to be our friend. Al-Qaida was not on the run. The Arab Spring was not a new democratic dawn. The European Union was not a force for prosperity. Israel was not the reason the Middle East is so troubled.
Everyone makes mistakes. But it’s hard to bounce back from so many fundamental errors, especially when – and this was Obama’s fourth error – the administration has been terrible at the boring business of being competent.
The fiasco of Obamacare was bad enough. But then there was the Veterans Administration scandal, the Secret Service’s prostitute parties, the Internal Revenue Service targeting of conservative groups, Ebola and the Justice Department’s gun-running into Mexico, to name only a few of the screw-ups that have tainted the administration.
We should never attribute to malice what can plausibly be explained by incompetence. And conservatives aren’t shocked when governments make mistakes: It’s what we expect them to do. But incompetence wears more heavily on liberals, because they are the ones who always want government to do more. The evidence is overwhelming that government can’t do it well.
Obama came into office wanting, in his words, to make government cool again. But as respected U.S. political analyst Michael Barone points out, since Watergate and with the exception of the 9/11 aftermath, trust in government peaked under Ronald Reagan, precisely because Reagan sought to limit government. Under Obama, it has fallen to near-historic lows.
The conservative triumphs in 2010 and 2014 have not irrevocably set America’s destiny: there are no permanent victories in politics. But there was a fundamental contradiction between the apolitical fantasy that Obama embodied and the real-world desire of the American people to support liberal policies, especially when incompetently administered.
Once the fantasy wore off, reality set in. And for liberals, reality is often bad news.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel resigned Monday, becoming the first casualty of the Obama administration since Democrats suffered significant losses in this month’s midterm elections.
Hagel, the only Republican in Obama’s cabinet, was brought to the Pentagon to reduce budgets and wind down the war in Afghanistan.
His departure comes as the White House faces criticism over its handling of a new terrorist threat — the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and questions had been raised about whether Hagel was the right man for that job.
Obama announced Hagel’s departure in a White House ceremony were he was flanked by Hagel and Vice President Biden. He hailed Hagel as an “exemplary defense secretary” who had put the military “on a firmer footing.”
“I’ve known him admired him and trusted him for nearly a decade,” said Obama, who then added that Hagel had decided “it was an appropriate time for him to conclude his service.”
A senior administration official said the two had been discussing the possible transition since October. The president plans to nominate a successor shortly, but Hagel said he would remain in the post until that person is confirmed by the Senate.
Hagel, clearly emotional, said the “greatest privilege” of his career was leading the men and women of the Pentagon.
Zuckerman: Exec Amnesty ‘Fundamental Disruption’ In Way Gov’t Works
US News and World Report Chairman and Editor-in-Chief and publisher of The New York Daily News, Mort Zuckerman, argued that President Obama’s executive action on immigration was “very negative” and “a fundamental disruption in the way our government was supposed to work” on Friday’s “McLaughlin Group.”
“I think the residue of this [the president’s executive action on immigration] is very negative for this country. I really do. I think it’s going to be extremely difficult to address a lot of issues in this country as a result of the breakdown in whatever constructive relationship would have exist[ed] between the president and the Congress. “that is not what the president ought to be doing.”
Zuckerman later added, “I think it is a fundamental disruption in the way our government was supposed to work.”
President Obama has taken significant steps to the left since his party’s devastating losses in the midterm elections.
In a surprise, he announced a major deal on climate change with China during a trip to Beijing Tuesday. That followed another unanticipated move — a Monday statement pressuring the Federal Communications Commission to adopt new net neutrality rules for the Internet.
The moves are helping to rally a dispirited Democratic base while re-establishing Obama’s political leadership after he was sidelined during the midterms.
“He’s at his best when his back is against the wall,” said Democratic strategist Bob Shrum. “Jeremiah Wright in 2008, Scott Brown’s election in 2009, after the first debate in 2012 — he comes back and tends to fight pretty hard.”
“He’s a fourth-quarter player, and he’s in the fourth quarter of his presidency,” Shrum added.
The moves are also prompting questions about whether Obama is shifting to the left in his final two years in office, or if the moves are meant to cushion the blow when he moves to the center to negotiate with a Republican-controlled Congress.
The question is weighing heavily on members of both parties, particularly ahead of Obama’s decision on whether to take expansive executive actions on immigration.
Obama calls on FCC to keep Internet ‘free and open’
The president says that all Internet service providers should “protect Net neutrality” and agree to not block or throttle Internet traffic.
by Don Reisinger
@donreisinger
November 10, 2014 6:56 AM PST
President Barack Obama has issued his strongest message yet that the Internet should be kept “free and open.”
In a statement released Monday, Obama called on the Federal Communications Commission to maintain Net neutrality and ensure that Internet service providers (ISPs) are not allowed “to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas.”
“That is why today, I am asking the Federal Communications Commission to answer the call of almost 4 million public comments, and implement the strongest possible rules to protect net neutrality,” President Obama said in the statement.
The FCC is working on a new set of rules for Internet oversight in the US. Those rules were expected to be made available later this year, though reports now claim they may be delayed until early 2015.
The agency earlier this year saw a vigorous response from the public to its call for comments on its Open Internet proposals, with the FCC’s servers sometimes stumbling and crashing under the overwhelming input. The comment window closed in September.
Net neutrality, which is the principle that ISPs and governments treat all Web traffic the same, has long been a debate around the US with no clear victory for either side. Consumers and many Internet companies argue that the Internet should remain open and that all traffic should be treated equally. Opponents have argued for a toll road of sorts that would provide better service to companies that pay to support their high traffic volumes. That has created widespread concern that ISPs could throttle service in some instance, intentionally slowing down some content streams and speeding up others.
NJ Senate Candidate Jeff Bell: ‘The Federal Government Hasn’t Handled A Single Thing Right’
October 14, 2014 2:28 PM
By Dom Giordano
“This federal government is completely dysfunctional. They haven’t handled a single thing right and their idea is that they can impose a top down model on every issue, whether it’s monetary policy, disease control, the Common Core education standards and the Affordable Care Act above all.” Jeff Bell
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – Dom Giordano talked to New Jersey Senate Candidate Jeff Bell on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT. Bell, a Republican, is challenging incumbent Corey Booker in November’s election.
Bell claimed that Senator Booker supports all of President Obama’s economic policies and said rather than helping the middle class, they put them at a disadvantage.
“Most people don’t want to get into the Wall Street stock market casino and it’s a tremendously wearing thing for the middle class, not for the rich people. People that don’t need a loan find it very easy to get a loan at these low interest rates.”
He believes returning to the gold standard would stabilize the economy and boost small businesses.
“The gold standard is the system that levels the playing field. If you know what you’re money is going to be worth one year from now, two years from now, five years from now, then you can navigate. It’s a simpler world. You can get interest on savings. The long term interest rate is up, enough to get savings. Small business is the most important element, from and economic standpoint, that would be liberated because they have a difficulty getting lines of credit that are so low that community banks don’t want to make risky loans when they have so little return.”
Bell also insists the federal government is not equipped to handle crises like Ebola.
“This federal government is completely dysfunctional. They haven’t handled a single thing right and their idea is that they can impose a top down model on every issue, whether it’s monetary policy, disease control, the Common Core education standards and the Affordable Care Act above all.”
Rep Garrett with two vets at the Glen Rock street fair . These two gentlemen were at the fair representing the VFW. Join me in thanking them for their service to our country!
Rep Scott Garrett crusade against “for-profit policing” gains traction October 6th 2014 the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, In September Rep. Scott Garrett (R-NJ), and Rep. Tony Cárdenas (D-CA), introduced H.R. 5502, the Fifth Amendment Integrity Restoration (FAIR) Act, to protect Americans from having their property seized without the due process of law. The FAIR Act makes a number of changes to civil asset forfeiture laws to restore the constitutional protections guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment.
Recently unconstitutional civil asset forfeiture or Policing for profit has started to gain traction with the media .
Garrett said “I’m glad to see that more people are starting to draw attention to civil asset forfeiture laws. My bill, the FAIR Act, would protect Americans from unconstitutional civil asset forfeitures.”
Learn more here: https://1.usa.gov/1s6Yg99
John Oliver rips into the scandal of for-profit policing Updated by Timothy B. Lee on October 6, 2014, 9:40 a.m. ET tim@vox.com In America, people are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. Yet a crazy loophole in US law has allowed the police to take billions of dollars worth of property from ordinary Americans without even charging them with a crime.
John Oliver explains how this scheme, known as civil asset forfeiture, works:
U.S. threatened massive fine to force Yahoo to release data
By Craig Timberg September 11 at 9:16 PM
The U.S. government threatened to fine Yahoo $250,000 a day in 2008 if it failed to comply with a broad demand to hand over user communications — a request the company believed was unconstitutional — according to court documents unsealed Thursday that illuminate how federal officials forced American tech companies to participate in the National Security Agency’s controversial PRISM program.
The documents, roughly 1,500 pages worth, outline a secret and ultimately unsuccessful legal battle by Yahoo to resist the government’s demands. The company’s loss required Yahoo to become one of the first to begin providing information to PRISM, a program that gave the NSA extensive access to records of online communications by users of Yahoo and other U.S.-based technology firms.
The ruling by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review became a key moment in the development of PRISM, helping government officials to convince other Silicon Valley companies that unprecedented data demands had been tested in the courts and found constitutionally sound. Eventually, most major U.S. tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Apple and AOL, complied. Microsoft had joined earlier, before the ruling, NSA documents have shown.
This is why the government should never control the internet
By Robert M. McDowell
Tomorrow is the deadline for the public to comment on the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) attempt to regulate the Internet under the seemingly innocuous moniker of “net neutrality.” The architect of this movement, and the man who coined the term “net neutrality,” is Columbia law professor Tim Wu. Unfortunately, he has proved to be immensely influential among regulators.
Net neutrality rules have been sold for a decade as a way to keep the Internet “open and free” by keeping Internet service providers (ISPs), such as phone and cable companies, from blocking or degrading Web sites. Its advocates have argued that ISPs have an economic incentive to act anti-competitively toward consumers and competitors. In a common hypothetical they cite, ISPs would slow — or buffer — traffic for Netflix unless it unfairly pays for more access points, or “off ramps,” and better quality of service.
In truth, however, market failures like these have never happened, and nothing is broken that needs fixing. If consumers were being harmed by ISPs, ample antitrust, competition and consumer protection laws already exist to fix the problem. And major broadband providers have pledged, in their terms of service, to keep the Net open and freedom-enhancing. Why? Because it is good business to do so.
Additionally, Netflix produces upwards of 34 percent of the Net’s traffic at peak times. It can clog any pipe it touches. That torrent of traffic imposes delivery costs that Netflix would prefer to pass on to others. But the market is sorting out these growing pains as the open Net grows, just as it has successfully from the beginning. (My views on this subject long predate my affiliation with the Hudson Institute, but in the interests of full disclosure: Hudson receives financial support from media, technology and telecom companies, as well as foundations, including those on both sides of the net neutrality debate.)
Obama’s Naive Belief in Predetermined History
By Dave the Sage on August 29, 2014 • ( 1 )
– By Victor Davis Hanson –
In his therapeutic 2009 Cairo speech, Obama outlined all sorts of Islamic intellectual and technological pedigrees, several of which were undeserved. He exaggerated Muslim contributions to printing and medicine, for example, and was flat-out wrong about the catalysts for the European Renaissance and Enlightenment.
He also believes history follows some predetermined course, as if things always get better on their own. Obama often praises those he pronounces to be on the “right side of history.” He also chastises others for being on the “wrong side of history” – as if evil is vanished and the good thrives on autopilot.
When in 2009 millions of Iranians took to the streets to protest the thuggish theocracy, they wanted immediate U.S. support. Instead, Obama belatedly offered them banalities suggesting that in the end, they would end up “on the right side of history.” Iranian reformers may indeed end up there, but it will not be because of some righteous inanimate force of history, or the prognostications of Barack Obama.
Obama often parrots Martin Luther King Jr.’s phrase about the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice. But King used that metaphor as an incentive to act, not as reassurance that matters will follow an inevitably positive course.
Another of Obama’s historical refrains is his frequent sermon about behavior that doesn’t belong in the 21st century. At various times he has lectured that the barbarous aggression of Vladimir Putin or ISIS has no place in our century and will “ultimately fail” – as if we are all now sophisticates of an age that has at last transcended retrograde brutality and savagery. …
If Obama believes that evil should be absent in the 21st century, or that the arc of the moral universe must always bend toward justice, or that being on the wrong side of history has consequences, then he may think inanimate forces can take care of things as we need merely watch.
In truth, history is messier. Unfortunately, only force will stop seventh-century monsters like ISIS from killing thousands more innocents.
Rand Paul: ‘Big Government Has Been at the Heart of the Problem’ in Ferguson
Katrina Trinko / @KatrinaTrinko / August 14, 2014
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., today blasted “big government” in response to the current situation in Ferguson, Mo.
In an op-ed published in Time, Paul wrote, “Not surprisingly, big government has been at the heart of the problem.” He continued:
“Washington has incentivized the militarization of local police precincts by using federal dollars to help municipal governments build what are essentially small armies—where police departments compete to acquire military gear that goes far beyond what most of Americans think of as law enforcement.”
Talking about the photos and footage coming out of Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis, Paul wrote that they “resemble war more than traditional police action.”
The Kentucky senator, however, also sounded a cautious note about the protests in Ferguson, writing, “The outrage in Ferguson is understandable—though there is never an excuse for rioting or looting.”
“There is a legitimate role for the police to keep the peace,” Paul added, “but there should be a difference between a police response and a military response.”
There have been protests in Ferguson since the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was killed in an interaction with a police officer Saturday.
A startling new political science study concludes that corporate interests and mega wealthy individuals control U.S. policy to such a degree that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
The startling study, titled “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” is slated to appear in an upcoming issue of Perspectives on Politics and was authored by Princeton University Professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Professor Benjamin Page. An early draft can be found here.
Noted American University Historian Allan J. Lichtman, who highlighted the piece in a Tuesday article published in The Hill, calls Gilens and Page’s research “shattering” and says their scholarship “should be a loud wake-up call to the vast majority of Americans who are bypassed by their government.”
The statistical research looked at public attitudes on nearly 1,800 policy issues and determined that government almost always ignores the opinions of average citizens and adopts the policy preferences of monied business interests when shaping the contours of U.S. laws.
The study’s findings align with recent trends, where corporate elites have aggressively pursued pro-amnesty policies despite the fact that, according to the most recent Reuters poll, 70% of Americans believe illegal immigrants “threaten traditional U.S. beliefs and customs,” and 63% believe “immigrants place a burden on the economy.”
The solution, say the scholars, is a reinvigorated and engaged electorate.
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