Everyone is entitled to MY own opinion
Each morning upon rising, and each evening before sleeping, give thanks for the life within you and for all life, for the good things the Creator has given you and for the opportunity to grow a little more each day. Consider your thoughts and actions of the past day and seek for the courage and strength to be a better person. Seek for the things that will benefit others (everyone).
Today, cannabis continues its slow march toward nationwide decriminalization with voters deciding whether to allow recreational use in Michigan and North Dakota, and for medical purposes in Utah and Missouri.
Reprinted from Science – Matt Simon
Today, cannabis continues its slow march toward nationwide decriminalization with voters deciding whether to allow recreational use in Michigan and North Dakota, and for medical purposes in Utah and Missouri. As states keep chipping away at federal prohibition, more consumers will gain access, sure—but so will more researchers who can more easily study this astonishingly complex and still mysterious plant.
At the top of the list of mysteries is how a galaxy of compounds in the plant combine to produce a galaxy of medical (and, of course, recreational) effects. For example, THC feels different when combined it with cannabidiol, or CBD, another naturally occurring compound in cannabis, but the reasons aren’t fully known. It’s called the entourage effect: THC, like a rock star, only reaches its full potential when it rolls with a crew, consisting of hundreds of other compounds in the plant that scientists know about so far.
But the problem with researching a schedule I drug is that the government doesn’t want you to do it. Yet as more states go legal, cannabis continues to climb out of the scientific dark ages. Because it’s not just about giving people a comfortable high, but about developing cannabis into drugs that could treat a massive range of ills.
First, some cannabis basics. THC and CBD are cannabinoids, which means they bind to receptors in the human body’s endocannabinoid system, specifically the CB1 and CB2 receptors. Researchers only discovered the endocannabinoid system in the early 1990s, but it appears to regulate things like mood and immune function.
You may have noticed that cannabis’ effects can differ wildly from experience to experience. Eat a weed brownie, for instance, and the THC goes straight to your liver, where it’s metabolized into 11-hydroxy-THC. That metabolite “has five times the activity at the CB1 receptor, the psychoactive one, as THC itself,” says Jeff Raber, CEO of the Werc Shop, a cannabis lab in California.
That’s why it’s so easy to overdo it with edibles. When you smoke cannabis, the THC at first skips the liver and goes straight to your bloodstream. It’s about five times less potent that way than if you eat cannabis, meaning that chowing down on 10 milligrams of THC is roughly equal to smoking 50 milligrams of the stuff.
Mode of ingestion, then, is a big consideration in the cannabis experience. But so too are factors beyond your control. “We’re pretty aware that the endocannabinoid system is not a static picture throughout the day,” says Raber. “Why it changes, what causes those changes—those are other levels of complicated questions.” Cannabis might hit you differently during the day than at night, and can also depend on your mood or whether you’ve eaten.
But that’s not all. THC also interacts with other cannabinoids in your system, and it has a complicated relationship with CBD in particular. Anecdotally, cannabis users have reported that CBD can modulate the psychoactive effects of THC—think of it sort of like an antidote to the paranoia and anxiety that comes with being too high. That might be part of the reason edibles can feel so powerful: If you eat a brownie loaded with just THC, you aren’t getting the CBD you would if you smoked regular old flower. (Not that some manufacturers aren’t also adding CBD to their edibles. CBD is so hot right now, but it’s hard to find flower with high CBD. Cultivators have over the decades bred highly intoxicating, THC-rich strains at the expense of CBD.)
With cannabis growing more legitimate as a medicine, researchers are finally putting hard data to these anecdotal reports. They’re beginning to understand how CBD might modulate the often unwelcome effects of THC.
Consider the drug Marinol, a synthetic form of THC available since the 1980s. It’s a good appetite stimulant, but it’s also good at getting patients high and paranoid. “When you just stimulate the CB1 receptor with this pure molecule, it’s very intoxicating and patients don’t tolerate it very well,” says Adie Wilson-Poe, who researches cannabis for pain management at Washington University in St. Louis.
However, give patients a drug like Sativex—which combines THC with CBD—or even pure cannabis flower or extracts, and they tolerate it much better. “We specifically see that CBD protects against the paranoia and anxiety and the racing heart that THC produces,” Wilson-Poe says.
It all comes back to the psychoactive CB1 receptor. THC is an agonist that fits nicely into CB1, activating it. “CBD can’t do that at the CB1, but it does sort of sit in the pocket,” says Wilson-Poe. “It can compete with THC for the spot in the receptor.” Which means that if you take CBD with THC, there may be fewer receptors available for the THC to activate, thus modulating the psychoactive effects, like paranoia.
“But that’s probably not the whole story,” Wilson-Poe says, “because CBD has at least 14 distinct mechanisms of action in the central nervous system. So it does a little bit of something at a whole bunch of places, and we probably can’t attribute the anti-paranoia or anti-anxiety effects just to CB1 occupancy.”
Now let me add yet another complication to our growing list of complications: THC and CBD are far from alone in the cannabis plant when it comes to medicinal properties. Those two might be anti-inflammatory, for instance, “but if you were to vaporize a whole flower, you’d be consuming potentially a couple dozen anti-inflammatory molecules at once,” says Wilson-Poe. “In this sense I think of whole-plant cannabis as like a multivitamin for inflammation.” (Because there are so many important compounds at play, some researchers prefer the term ensemble effect over entourage effect. “Entourage” makes it sound like everything is supporting the rock star that is THC, when the reality might be more nuanced.)
There might also be medical applications when you don’t want the entourage effect at work. One of THC’s more famous treatments, for instance, is for lowering eye pressure to treat glaucoma. “We found that it works, and THC does a nice job,” says Indiana University, Bloomington researcher Alex Straiker, who studies cannabinoids. “But it’s actually blocked by CBD. People often think, oh yeah, CBD and THC work together. But in terms of CB1 receptor signaling, they actually oppose each other, or at least CBD opposes THC.” That’s not to say, though, that CBD isn’t having some sort of beneficial effect on its own when it comes to treating glaucoma.
Plus, there are many other kinds of receptors in the endocannabinoid system that these compounds could be targeting. “It’s messy,” Straiker says.
So while CBD seems to mitigate the unfun effects of THC, it also might get in the way of certain medical benefits that THC has to offer. But because there’s seemingly no end to the complexities of cannabis, CBD might also enhance THC’s anti-cancer properties. Research has found that if you apply THC and CBD to cancer cells in the lab, the combination is more effective than THC alone at both inhibiting the growth of those cells and outright killing them. The future of medical cannabis, then, depends in large part on teasing apart the entourage effect—leveraging it in some cases, and maybe breaking up the entourage (or ensemble) when THC or CBD alone is most beneficial.
“We need to understand which constellations of plant chemistry are best suited for which indications and which kinds of patients, and which form of the CB1 receptor you happen to carry, because there are lots of mutations in that gene,” says Wilson-Poe. “So understanding these mechanisms is absolutely crucial for providing these patients with personalized medicine that alleviates their symptoms without producing the unwanted side effects.”
Hate to do this, but we’ve got one last problem. For decades, cannabis users have claimed that different strains of cannabis produce different effects—maybe it makes them sleepy, maybe it gives them energy. And that’s been true even as CBD was largely bred out of cannabis in North America in favor of THC. “Well, if they’re all high THC, it’s got to be from something else,” says Ethan Russo, director of research and development at the International Cannabis and Cannabinoids Institute, who studies the entourage effect. “And that something else is terpenoids.”
Yes, another member of the entourage. Unlike THC and CBD, you can find terpenoids not just in cannabis, but across the plant kingdom. They’re handy little molecules that plants use to ward off insects, and they’re what give cannabis that characteristic smell (same for terpenoids in lemons and pine needles).
And science knows what some terpenoids found in cannabis do pharmacologically in the brain. For example, linalool is one that has sedating and anti-anxiety properties. “So it might make sense that when you combine its anti-anxiety effect with that of cannabidiol [CBD], then they boost each other,” says Russo.
The entourage effect, the ensemble effect—whatever you want to call it, the phenomenon might get more complicated before it gets clearer. But researchers continue to tease apart the chemistry of cannabis, unlocking its true potential as a medicine. Mystery … almost solved.
“A Republic, if you can keep it” “A Wake of Vultures
Order Paperback $11.99 – Order Kindle $2.99 Order Paperback $16.99
Follow me on Twitter @OzarksAuthor
This page and its links contain opinion. As with all opinion, it should not be relied upon without independent verification. Think for yourself. Fair Use is relied upon for all content. For educational purposes only. No claims are made to the properties of third parties.
(c) 2018 Uriel Press
Law-abiding, patriotic, God-fearing citizens have been censored from the soap box, hamstrung by those controlling the jury box and disenfranchised at the ballot box.
The real goal is psychological terrorism—that is, engaging in a scorched-earth effort to destroy the target, and in so doing intimidating anyone willing to enter public service, or even just support a public figure that does not parrot the politically correct line.
The charges do not need to be true, or even credible. People do not recoil because of the charges themselves (although, as we see, the left spares no effort to dream up the worst accusations they can think of). People recoil out of fear.
This tactic relies on the human herding instinct. People naturally shy away from anyone so vilified, whether the charges are credible or not, simply out of fear of being smeared with the same brush. They don’t want to be ostracized by the group.
Such excommunication has real consequences on reputations, jobs, relationships, even survival. The real goal is to threaten the rest of us into silence.
Psychological Terrorism Enables Actual Terrorism
The vilification tactic is a form of psychological terrorism. Furthermore, because the fury displayed by those leveling the charges is so relentless and uncompromising, it carries its own threat. Sometimes people act on it and it becomes actual terrorism.
In 2012, homosexual activist Floyd Corkins attacked the Family Research Council’s office, intending to murder as many as he could. He admitted he was inspired by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which had FRC on its “Hate Watch” list. FRC, a mainstream conservative Christian organization, is still on the list.
Corkins was convicted of terrorism, and only stopped by a security guard who was injured in the process. Similarly James Hodgkinson, who attacked GOP congressmen practicing for a baseball game in 2017, engaged in a real act of domestic terrorism, fueled by hatred for Republicans. Hodgkinson “liked” SPLC on his Facebook page.
Antifa, the new name for anarchist left street rioters, has made explicit threats of violence. After chasing Sen. Ted Cruz and his wife out of a local restaurant, an Antifa DC chapter threatened on Twitter, “You are not safe.” And more: “This is a message to Ted Cruz, Bret
Kavanaugh, Donald Trump and the rest of the racist, sexist, transphobic,and homophobic right-wing scum: You are not safe. We will find you. We will expose you. We will take from you the peace you have taken from so many others.”
Another Antifa member, a professor at the City University of New York, tweeted, “Reminder that if Trump does end up winning this stupid thing to assassinate Mike Pence *first*.”
AntiFa “protesters” terrorized Fox News personality’s Tucker Carlson’s family with impunity.
In 2010, Laird Wilcox penned an article titled “The Practice of Ritual Defamation,” that describes the process. The most salient points are quoted here:
This defamation tactic has a long and ignoble history. It was first systematically developed by a regime whose primary governing method was terrorism. One hundred years ago, the first Soviet leader, Vladimir Lenin, announced:
We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing truth… We can and must write in a language that inspires hate, revulsion and scorn toward those who disagree with us.
His goal, adopted and practiced by the world’s communist parties, was to vilify, isolate, and destroy anyone who opposed their political goals, for any reason. In subsequent years, the Soviets told the world’s Communist parties to magnify this criticism:
Members and front organizations must continually embarrass, discredit and degrade our critics. When obstructionists become too irritating, label them as fascist or Nazi or anti-Semitic… constantly associate those who oppose us with those names that already have a bad smell. The association will, after enough repetition, become ‘fact’ in the public mind.
In1965, Frankfurt School Communist Herbert Marcuse argued that, even though America has the First Amendment, the left could never get its agenda adopted because we are an unrepentantly repressive, imperialist, capitalist country. So of course America would never voluntarily adopt the “liberating”tenets of communism. Marcuse argued for what he called “liberating tolerance,” i.e. silencing the left’s critics and allowing leftist ideas only:
Not ‘equal’ but more representation of the Left would be equalization of the prevailing inequality… Given this situation, I suggested in ‘Repressive Tolerance’ the practice of discriminating tolerance in an inverse direction, as a means of shifting the balance between Right and Left by restraining the liberty of the Right, thus counteracting the pervasive inequality of freedom (unequal opportunity of access to the means of democratic persuasion) and strengthening the oppressed against the oppressors.
Marcuse further described the types of people who needed to have their freedom curtailed:
[It] would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc.
In other words, pretty much anyone who disagrees with them. Can you visualize the Internal Revenue Service making up an “enemies list” of those who opposed Obamacare, for example? They did. Significantly, Marcuse referred to opponents as the “party of hate” in opposition to humanity.
The media,particularly, is to blame. It is insufficient to describe the media as “in the tank” for Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Obama,Nancy Pelosi, or whoever. The left media is a leader of the opposition, and has been for decades. It sets the narrative for the day, which is often word-for-word across news outlets; it pushes Democrat talking points and cultural Marxist priorities; it suppresses news adverse to the left and misinforms on the news it does report; it weaponizes language and acts as a self-funded intelligence agency for the left, researching, outing, doxing, and vilifying its enemies.
Anti-slavery activist Frederick Douglass is quoted as saying; “A man’s rights rests in three boxes: the ballot-box, the jury-box and the cartridge-box, and the man who is outside these boxes is in a bad box.” You might add to that a fourth box, “the soap box” or right of free speech.
Law-abiding, patriotic, God-fearing citizens have been censored from the soap box, hamstrung by those controlling the jury box and disenfranchised at the ballot box. Enough is enough. It is, perhaps time to prudently consider the final box before we are boxed out of our heritage and our republic.
Coming Soon To Amazon.com
Follow me on Twitter @OzarksAuthor
This page and its links contain opinion. As with all opinion, it should not be relied upon without independent verification. Think for yourself. Fair Use is relied upon for all content. For educational purposes only. No claims are made to the properties of third parties.
(c) 2018 Uriel Press
The dire prediction is one that is easy to see coming: An eventual economic failure is the lit match, while the total lack of national cultural identity is the gasoline. The media and governmental apparatchiks stand by to stoke the fires.
We are Yugoslavia circa 1980’s.
Rebloged with permission
Many people, the opinions of whom I greatly respect, have written on the state of politics and society in the US in such a way as to suggest the possibility of the US moving into a period of similar to what was seen in the former republic of Yugoslavia from the mid 1980’s through to the late 1990’s, referred to by many as Balkanization. I’m certainly in agreement with these bloggers and writers, Matt Bracken being just one example.
The political, sociological, ethnic and racial trajectory in the US is eerily similar to that of the former Yugoslavia in many ways. In the coming years, this could even expand into the sphere of religion, though for now there doesn’t seem to be such widespread religious friction as much as there is racial/ethnic and political.
The similarities begin where Yugoslavia’s end did: With the economy. It’s always the economy. Yugoslavia was totally socialist in their economic model. For you on the left, yes, it was indeed “real” socialism, complete with the never-ending litany of financial Band-Aid’s designed mainly to keep the rigged carnival game going for as long as possible for whomever was sitting at the top getting rich. The US economy may not appear to be socialist in the same way, for whatever reason many Americans maintain the idea of some bastardization of capitalism corrupted by, well, socialists.
Both Yugoslavia and the US endlessly investigated and studied how best to fix the economic woes, and some decent ideas, even some great ideas, were formulated… And then were largely ignored, either due to a lack of will to implement them or a lack of ability. Probably it was lack of political will, since in both country’s cases, the ideas that would have worked best included laundry lists of major money cuts and reductions of federal power. The politicians in power are generally never going to go for a plan like that. They’d rather drive the train straight off the cliff themselves before letting someone else drive it to safety.
The idea so far is that the economic system in the US is simply not sustainable. The Band-Aid of borrowing more money from the US public, China, Japan, etc. and periodically raising the debt ceiling to allow it is not going to work forever, and it doesn’t require one to have any advanced understanding of economics to grasp this. You don’t need to be an expert economist to realize that $20 trillion in debt and hundreds of trillions more in unfunded liabilities is virtually insurmountable at this point. The fact that the US dollar is the currency of the world is not going to shield us from the inevitable forever. The economic problems that Yugoslavia faced in the early 1980’s, and that the US now faces, are like a lit match being held over a barrel of gasoline.
And that leads me to discuss that gasoline.
Yugoslavia had an extremely diverse country racially, ethnically and religiously. The geographic location and the early economic prosperity (or the illusion of it) attracted a lot of people from all sorts of backgrounds. After a while, the government began to show heavy favor toward certain ethnicities at the expense of others. Rigorous controls were put on employment and educational systems, favoring one ethnic group over the other with claims that there was history of abuse that needed to be atoned for. Criminal behavior by members of certain ethnic or racial groups were largely ignored by the media and law enforcement apparatus, while even the most benign actions of other groups were seized upon and used for narrative building.
Does any of this sound familiar? In the US we have a long list of “protected” groups who are favored with advantages in employment, educational and entitlement systems. Race alone is often used by the media and government, often one and the same, to build a narrative of victimization.
In Yugoslavia circa 1980’s, and in the US today, you’d see a very socially diverse people from numerous ethnic, racial, economic and religious backgrounds. When these diverse groups mingle and mix, everyone has to accept that different cultures will have friction arise when the “negative” aspects of a particular culture become unacceptable to another. In times such as those, it’s necessary for the opposing cultures to have the freedom and ability to separate for a peaceful outcome. Problems arise, always, when incompatible cultures are forced to mix in society with no avenue for voluntary separation, and these problems are heavily exacerbated when government and media get involved to force one culture to accept and integrate what they feel are the “negative” aspects of the opposing culture. An obvious and perhaps overly-simplistic example is when white, Christian American citizens are forced to accept and live alongside immigrants who wish to practice Sharia law and alter their own lives and habits in order to accommodate some of these sensitivities. A very basic example, yes, but I think it makes the point.
We are meant to swallow the lie that says “diversity is our strength” without consideration for merit, performance, ability, intelligence or actual results.
This is not meant to be an indictment on any specific culture or ethnicity, but more of a history lesson, a social observation and a dire prediction.
The history lesson is the continued failure of all socialist based economic models, whether we want to consider them “real” socialism or not. The sort of hard socialism seen in 1980’s Yugoslavia and the crony-capitalist soft socialist version seen in the US today are both examples of that failure system. As I stated earlier, it does not take any level of economic expertise to understand that our current system is insolvent and that we have passed the point of no return on a future crash of our financial system. Now that less than half of the people in the US are net-taxpayers and over half of the people in the US are receiving some sort of government assistance simply to survive, we have become a welfare state, with only decreasing numbers of producers with increasing numbers of consumers. Mathematically, it is not sustainable. Historically, it is disastrous.
The social observation is that such a mass of diverse peoples must have a voluntary pressure outlet in order to maintain peace. We must accept reality that not all cultures are able to be forced together with peaceful results. Forced proximity, with advantages, disadvantages and blame doled out to certain peoples, with a lack of opportunity to separate peacefully will always result in strife and eventual violence.
The dire prediction is one that is easy to see coming: An eventual economic failure is the lit match, while the total lack of national cultural identity is the gasoline. The media and governmental apparatchiks stand by to stoke the fires.
We are Yugoslavia circa 1980’s.
My advice? Stay out of Sarajevo.
The Gray Man is a Southern born and raised Christian American, Army combat veteran and former intelligence collector. He has worked in many foreign locations, including Afghanistan, South Korea and Germany. He has deployed with or worked alongside US Army special operations units and Cav LRS units. He is currently working as an ER nurse living in the rural Deep South, preparing for whatever man and nature can dish out.
“A Republic, if you can keep it” “A Wake of Vultures”
Follow me on Twitter @OzarksAuthor
This page and its links contain opinion. As with all opinion, it should not be relied upon without independent verification. Think for yourself. Fair Use is relied upon for all content. For educational purposes only. No claims are made to the properties of third parties.
(c) 2018 Uriel Press
The standard trope of leftist identity politics is the weaponization of victimhood. Thus, if you belong to a class of people recognized as historically oppressed—such as women, people of color, or homosexuals–then you are assumed to have a claim on people who do not belong to such a class—especially white Christian men.
Republished with permission from Intellectual Takeout
At some point you’ve probably heard an opinion of yours about morality, religion, or politics summarily dismissed with a reaction like: “You only say that because you’re a _____!” or “That’s just an excuse for _______.”
Frustrating, isn’t it? If you’ve supplied reasons for your position, they don’t tackle those reasons. They just assume you’re wrong and purport to explain, usually in terms unflattering to you, why you make your error.
What many might not realize, however, is that this action is a fallacy known as Bulverism. The name was coined by C.S. Lewis in an essay included in his widely read collection God in the Dock. In essence, Bulverism is a toxic hybrid of two better-known fallacies: petitio principii (begging the question) and ad hominem (impugning one’s opponent’s character without addressing his argument).
For reasons that should alarm critical thinkers, Bulverism has become so common – especially in politics – as to approach the status of a rhetorical norm. I shall explain that shortly, but first a caveat.
Not every criticism that sounds like Bulverism is a fallacy. For instance, if somebody denies a basic principle of logic, such as that of non-contradiction, it’s usually pointless to address her argument because she’s already abandoned an indispensable “first principle” of argument. It makes sense in that case to seek an explanation for her position other than the one she gives, if she bothers giving one. Or if somebody denies a well-established fact, e.g. that the shape of the Earth is roughly spherical, it’s often useless to address his argument and probably more useful to seek to understand his psychology.
But Bulverizing people about their positions on controversial matters has become all too common these days. You know the sort of thing I mean:
“Conservatives only want to rein in ‘entitlements’ because they hate the poor and the sick!”
“Liberals only talk about women’s ‘reproductive health’ because they think killing a baby in the womb is like breaking an egg to make an omelet!”
“You only believe in God because you can’t face life without an imaginary Big Daddy to turn to!”
“You only disbelieve in God because you want to get away with doing whatever you like!”
In essence, what’s always been an occasional rhetorical trope now seems to dominate public discourse.
That, I submit, is ultimately because Bulverism has become philosophically respectable. The permission real thinkers have given themselves to Bulverize has trickled down to the masses.
This trend seems to have started with Karl Marx. He defined religion and morality in general, and especially political positions other than his own, as “mystifications,” or rationalizations of the self-interest of whatever the economically dominant “ruling class” happens to be.
A few generations later, Sigmund Freud purported to explain nearly all human behavior as expressions or distortions of two “drives”: the sex drive and the death drive.
More recently, this kind of thinking is represented in the thought of Jacques Lacan, whose work is widely studied in humanities departments. The Frankfurt School that arose toward the end of Freud’s life produced a powerful tool, “critical theory,” that proposed to examine all human phenomena in terms of power relations. Its default tendency was to ask: “Who has the power here, and how do they benefit?”
In the late 20th century, such thinkers as Jacques Derrida (and, more broadly, those called “post-modernists”) extended that tendency of critical theory to consideration of the very structure of language itself.
Today we confront the phenomenon of “cultural Marxism.” Often defined too broadly, it simply means the extension of Marx’s critique of false consciousness from economics alone to race, gender, and even sexual orientation.
Cultural Marxism finds its characteristic expression in leftist “identity politics.” (There’s a sense in which all politics is identity politics, but I made the necessary distinction here.) The standard trope of leftist identity politics is the weaponization of victimhood. Thus, if you belong to a class of people recognized as historically oppressed—such as women, people of color, or homosexuals–then you are assumed to have a claim on people who do not belong to such a class—especially white Christian men. The motives of the “oppressed” are assumed to be good; the motives of the non-oppressed are assumed to be bad. People of even moderately conservative views are thus seen as fair game to be Bulverized. And they are, regularly. Thus: “You only say that because you’re (white) (Christian) (a man) (cis)!”
The only solution to widespread Bulverism is widespread rejection of the sort of philosophizing that makes it respectable. We might have to wait a long time for that. In the meantime, I heartily recommend a read of Lewis’ essay.
This post The Creepy Normalization of Bulverism was originally published on Intellectual Takeout by Michael Liccione.
“A Republic, if you can keep it” “A Wake of Vultures”
Follow me on Twitter @OzarksAuthor This page and its links contain opinion. As with all opinion, it should not be relied upon without independent verification. Think for yourself. Fair Use is relied upon for all content. For educational purposes only. No claims are made to the properties of third parties. (c) 2018 Uriel Press
In a press conference where he stated the fake pipe bombs were “not hoaxes”, he described them as containing “energetic material that can become combustible when subjected to heat or friction.”
Wow! That sounds scary, doesn’t it?
Except in reality, almost anything can qualify as something that quote “becomes combustible when subjected to heat or friction.” This includes, by the way, a box of Cheerios, a loaf of bread, a tub of margarine, frozen corn…
FBI director Christopher Wray is lying to America about the fake pipe bombs. Yes, they were hoax devices. Christopher Wray may be just as dishonest as former FBI director James Comey. Suddenly Wray is trying to convince the world that the hoax pipe bomb props which were mailed to Democrats are really, somehow, IED’s (improvised explosive devices). In truth, real mail bombs don’t contain timers for the simple reason that such devices are intended to be detonated by the physical act of the recipient opening the package, not based on a specific time (since nobody knows exactly when someone will receive a package sent through the U.S. Postal Service).
Not only did these hoax pipe bombs contain mock timers crudely taped to PVC pipe; the timers had no alarm function, meaning they couldn’t even “theoretically” be used to detonate anything. They were a hoax, props, in other words, not functioning explosive devices. But director Christopher Wray is claiming they are (some how) real “IED’s.”
The FBI director also lies about “energetic material” and tries to give us techno-jargon to confuse the public. The really huge red flag in all this is how FBI director Christopher Wray resorted to techno-jargon to try and make nonexplosive materials sound like explosives. In a press conference where he stated the fake pipe bombs were “not hoaxes”, he described them as containing “energetic material that can become combustible when subjected to heat or friction.”
Wow! That sounds scary, doesn’t it?
Except in reality, almost anything can qualify as something that “becomes combustible when subjected to heat or friction.” This includes, by the way, a box of Cheerios, a loaf of bread, a tub of margarine, frozen corn, old newspapers, a pair of smelly socks, a bicycle tire and even a piece of glass. All these items burn if you cook them at a high enough temperature, which is essentially what director Wray is saying.
But none of these things are explosives. If you receive a fake pipe bomb filled with Cheerios, the Cheerios would not suddenly transform it into a real pipe bomb. According to Wray, stuffing Cheerios into a PVC pipe turns the device into an IED. The phrase “energetic material” applies to literally everything that has mass, since all mass has energy, as physics is long since taught us. Christopher Wray might as well have said, “the PVC pipes were filled with stuff, and stuff might burn if you cook it.” That’s essentially what he said. Every scientist in the world should be calling out Ray for his misleading claim.
Sayok was not charged under “weapons of mass destruction” because the bombs weren’t explosive devices. As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy noted, if the mailed IED devices were “functionally explosive” they would fall under the category “weapons of mass destruction [defined by US code] and the indictment would include 18 US code 2332 a. The absence of this charge infers the devices were not functionally explosive.
In other words, Sayok wasn’t charged with sending explosive devices for the simple reason that fake pipe bombs did not contain explosives. They contained “energetic material” according to FBI director Wray, a definition that applies to anything since all matter is energy according to Einstein’s theory E equals MC squared.
The question becomes was Sayok set up and selected precisely because he was an unstable person with a criminal history that would make this hoax convincing to the public? Inquiring minds want to know.
“A Republic, if you can keep it” “A Wake of Vultures”
Follow me on Twitter @OzarksAuthor
This page and its links contain opinion. As with all opinion, it should not be relied upon without independent verification. Think for yourself. Fair Use is relied upon for all content. For educational purposes only. No claims are made to the properties of third parties.
(c) 2018 Uriel Press
Let us consider who are the real inspire winners of violence and where the real threat to stability in life rests.
Something about the mad bomber doesn’t pass the smell test.
At a time where merely wearing a and and MAGA at can get you fired, or merely harangued out of your favorite restaurant, we are asked to believe that Cesar Altieri Sayoc was allowed to drive around safely in a van abundantly and meticulously adorned with pro Trump stickers and a few depicting his personal animus toward the usual anti-Trump suspects, all of their colors vibrant, un-faded in the semi tropical Florida sun.
The van was never overturned or torched wherever he parked or drove it. No tires were ever slashed, no windows were ever smashed in with a baseball bat. It was never even keyed. And there it was in pristine condition, undamaged and ready for its close-up before a media avid to blame president Trump for Sayoc’s actions.
Why would an ardent or, as the media says, “unhinged” Trump supporter, watching, as the rest of us have, the so-called “blue wave” distract before it reaches sure, amidst a roaring economy and widespread outrage over the treatment of Judge Brett Kavanaugh and the oncoming illegal alien invasion, do something so idiotic, something that could only slow the Trump train, and help Democrats blame “both sides” and trumps allegedly “toxic rhetoric”?
Why would the allegedly “MAGA Bomber”, follow mainly liberals on Twitter and have a van covered in brand-new Pro president Donald Trump stickers? It’s as if he isn’t a supporter and wants it pinned on the president.
Sayok – the allegedly mad bomber – had Trump stickers all over his vehicle. But on Twitter, he only follows 32 people – many of whom are left-wingers like Lina Dunham, Barack Obama and Jimmy Kimmel. What gives?
It doesn’t make sense, but maybe Sayok is a few fries short of a happy meal and logic doesn’t apply.
Logic most certainly will not apply to the Trump critics were already blaming Sayok’s actions on the resident of the White House. One celebrity has thought of blowing up the president. One celebrity has displayed a replica severed head of the president, a third stated he would like to punch the president in the face, and, as another notes ” it is been a long time since an actor assassinated a president.” Toxic atmosphere and toxic rhetoric indeed.
Let us consider who are the real inspire winners of violence and where the real threat to stability in life rests. And while were at it, let us answer the curious questions surrounding Cesar Altieri Sayok.
“A Republic, if you can keep it” “A Wake of Vultures”
Follow me on Twitter @OzarksAuthor
This page and its links contain opinion. As with all opinion, it should not be relied upon without independent verification. Think for yourself. Fair Use is relied upon for all content. For educational purposes only. No claims are made to the properties of third parties.
(c) 2018 Uriel Press
There are recent indications that Ford and her lawyers know what’s coming. Almost immediately after Kavanaugh was sworn-in to the Supreme Court, Ford’s attorneys announced they were ending all matters pertaining to his confirmation. Subsequent to this announcement, both Ford and her attorneys have been out of the public eye.
By Terry Ray
If you’ve gone home-shopping, I’m sure you have had the experience of leaving a house thinking it was wonderful but the next morning, after your brain had distilled the memory, you realized it actually wasn’t that great.
I had the same experience with Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Right after she had finished, I thought she was very credible and deserving of my sympathy.
By the next day, however, I began having “buyer’s remorse” on Ford’s story. The whole thing began to feel, just not right, and the more I thought about it the more I began to feel it was fabricated.
I started looking at her story in the entire context of the hearing – and it just didn’t add-up.
Just when all seemed lost for the liberal senators on the committee – their staged interruptions of the confirmation committee hearings having not worked as planned – they had to go to a Plan B. It had to be something that wouldn’t just disrupt the hearing – it needed to completely blow up the whole process.
It had to be just right for the moment or it would fail, like their interruption ploy. And it was just right — and it came within a whisker of succeeding.
It you break down what they needed to accomplish in Plan B, you will understand what they had to do.
The “Me Too” movement was in full force during the hearings. Many very powerful men were being brought down, one after another, by the sheer force of a bald accusation of sexual harassment.
The movement had become so powerful that no denial by the accused man was strong enough to overcome the assumption that the woman was right.
“MeToo” had become a type of social hysteria, like Arthur Miller portrayed in his play (and movie) “The Crucible.” Hysterical young women were accusing village members of practicing witchcraft and these bare accusations were enough to get them burned at the stake.
With the “Me Too” hysteria pervading every aspect of American society all the liberal senators had to come up with was a sexual assault claim. It didn’t need to be provable, it just had to be made and made well. With this objective in mind, they set out to create Plan B.
To make the claim powerful and emotional they decided to use an accusation from a 15-year-old girl. To preclude any possible way of disproving it, they decided to use the timeframe of Kavanaugh’s high school years. Who could disprove a story that happened over 30 years ago?
They settled on using a story of a teenage high school girl claiming the teenage Kavanaugh tried to rape her – to the extent she feared for her life.
Their first task was locating the right woman for the part. They put together a list of all the girls who were in high school at the same time as Kavanaugh and that could have been in the same social group as Kavanaugh’s all-boys’ high school.
The list then had to be pared-down to women who were left-wing zealots and willing to commit perjury in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The woman had to be well educated, articulate and hold a very respectable position in society.
By the end of the screening process, they had settled on Christine Blasey Ford – a Ph.D. psychologist and university professor. She was a perfect fit.
Their goal with Ford was to create a character who was brave but frightened, and who would induce believability, credibility, and sympathy for herself, and disgust and hatred toward her attacker. They constructed a process to do just that and we watched it play out before our very eyes.
It worked-out just as planned – with an Academy Award-worthy performance by Ford. The liberal conspirators were almost giddy with what they had just pulled off, but were forced to maintain their alternating poses of sympathy and anger for the need of victim justice.
After the Ford performance had played so well, no Republican senator — all men — would dare question this fragile, brave, sympathetic, credible victim. Doing so could run the risk of ending their careers. Given their predicament, they were forced to hire a female sex-crime prosecutor who proved to be a disaster.
Plan B was working perfectly.
Ford’s performance was nearly perfect. Her testimony had been rehearsed to the point that she delivered it with compelling conviction and authority. She had rehearsed the answer to every question the liberal senators were going to ask her – including the “100% certain,” answer.
Ford was also totally prepared for the inept proxy questioner. In response to each question she asked, Ford read, verbatim, the canned response her attorneys had written for her.
For any question that might be problematic, her two attorneys would advise her not to answer under their exceedingly wide definition of the attorney-client privilege.
The most remarkable part of Ford’s performance was her voice. She was somehow able to affect the high-pitched voice of a frightened little girl and was even able to mimic the rising tone at the end of her sentences.
When I first heard this voice coming from a seasoned, middle-aged woman, I was speechless. I couldn’t believe that tiny voice with a juvenile cadence was emerging from her mouth. It was incongruous to the point of classic irony, and I was astounded that her handlers had the audacity to try to pull this off – but they did. And they did it successfully.
I finally realized why they had her do this. She was telling a story about being sexually assaulted when she was a child, so to support this illusion, they had her deliver the story in the voice of a child, as though she were that abused child on the witness stand. It was another stroke of theater genius – outrageous but brilliant. And everyone bought it.
But as I wrote earlier in this article … Ford was almost perfect in her testimony because she made some fatal mistakes. These mistakes will very likely lead her to a long, all-expense-paid stay in a federal penitentiary.
Ford’s liberal handlers had prepared her well – but not quite well enough.
Ford’s entire story was, of course, pure fiction and thus perjury, but it was so carefully constructed that no prosecutor could possibly convict her of perjury.
But there were other lies for which she could very likely be prosecuted and convicted.
1) The lie detector testimony.
Ford was directly asked if she had ever been instructed on how to pass a lie detector test or had instructed anyone else on how to do it. She unequivocally answered, “No.”
Apparently her handlers didn’t know about a former boyfriend of Ford’s who could prove she was lying. A man who Ford had dated and lived with for several years as an adult, submitted a detailed sworn statement after the hearing that Ford had instructed a friend of hers, who was seeking a federal job, on how to pass a lie detector test. That is perjury.
2) The testimony on her fear of flying and small enclosures.
The same man who submitted the sworn statement on the lie detector issue also detailed that Ford flew on airplanes frequently and had no fear, whatsoever, of flying. He also detailed that she had no fear of small enclosures and had, in fact, lived in a very tiny apartment for a long period of time. He also added that Ford had never once mentioned anything about ever being sexually assaulted and certainly never mentioned Brett Kavanaugh.
Ford testified under oath that she was reluctant to fly to Washington to be questioned because of her profound fear of flying. She also testified that she had argued with her husband about her wanting two front doors on their house because of her profound fear of being enclosed.
Both these statements are lies and constitute perjury.
3) The testimony that her attorneys did not tell her that the Senate committee investigators were willing to fly to her to conduct an interview.
This is an outrageous statement and cannot possibly be true. No attorney would ever do this – even the cretins who represented her. She was lying and prosecutors could easily ferret out the real story. It’s perjury.
4) Ford’s testimony that she had a therapy session in 2012 where she “recovered” the memory of Kavanaugh’s assault.
Ford steadfastly refused to turn over the therapist’s notes on the alleged “recovery” session to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The only logical reason she would do this would be if the notes contradict her testimony — or perhaps there never was a therapy session in the first place and, thus, no notes.
There are recent indications that Ford and her lawyers know what’s coming. Almost immediately after Kavanaugh was sworn-in to the Supreme Court, Ford’s attorneys announced they were ending all matters pertaining to his confirmation. Subsequent to this announcement, both Ford and her attorneys have been out of the public eye.
Although Ford’s story was like a page out of Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible,” the end of her story will very likely resemble Dostoyevsky’s novel, “Crime and Punishment.”
The views expressed in this opinion article are those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by the owners of this website.
“A Republic, if you can keep it” “A Wake of Vultures
Follow me on Twitter @OzarksAuthor
This page and its links contain opinion. As with all opinion, it should not be relied upon without independent verification. Think for yourself. Fair Use is relied upon for all content. For educational purposes only. No claims are made to the properties of third parties.
(c) 2018 Uriel Press
Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes.
“Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints.”
– Ephesians 6:10-18
“A Republic, if you can keep it” “A Wake of Vultures”
Follow me on Twitter @OzarksAuthor
This page and its links contain opinion. As with all opinion, it should not be relied upon without independent verification. Think for yourself. Fair Use is relied upon for all content. For educational purposes only. No claims are made to the properties of third parties.
(c) 2018 Uriel Press
The Lord is my Rock, my fortress and deliverer
“The Lord is my Rock, my fortress and deliverer,
my God, my Rock, in whom I find shelter,
my shield, the power that saves me,
my stronghold.
) I call on The Lord, who is worthy of praise;
and I am saved from my enemies.
Psalm 18:2-3
“A Republic, if you can keep it” “A Wake of Vultures”
Follow me on Twitter @OzarksAuthor
This page and its links contain opinion. As with all opinion, it should not be relied upon without independent verification. Think for yourself. Fair Use is relied upon for all content. For educational purposes only. No claims are made to the properties of third parties.
(c) 2018 Uriel Press
