90 Miles From Tyranny

Saturday, May 30, 2015

On the evening of May 3, two men armed with rifles attacked the Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest in Garland, Texas. While both shooters were killed before they could get inside the exhibit, this attack is the 68th Islamist terrorist plot or attack against the U.S. since 9/11.

The incident has raised significant questions about the way terrorists are being recruited in the United States and what America can do to stop them.

These two infographics tell the story about a spike in Islamist terror activity and their top targets.

Girls With Guns

(NaturalNews) If every single person currently taking psychotropic medications or antidepressants were to be pulled off these deadly drugs and given a new, safer regimen instead, society would be much better off. This is the larger inference of a new review published in The BMJ (British Medical Journal), which found that more than half a million people in the West die every year from psych meds, which authors found have "minimal" benefits and a multitude of harmful side effects.

Researchers from the Nordic Cochrane Centre, an independent drug safety analysis group based out of Denmark, looked at the data on antidepressant and dementia drugs and found that, in most cases, they could cease to be administered across the board without inflicting any harm on patients. The demonstrated benefits of these widely administered drugs are lacking, researchers found, and many patients are taking them needlessly.

The paper, entitled "Does long term use of psychiatric drugs cause more harm than good?" looked at a series of randomized trials on antidepressant and dementia drugs and found that, contrary to popular belief, virtually none of these studies took an honest look at the drugs' "side" effects. Likewise, patients who took placebo pills during clinical trials fared roughly the same as those who took the actual drugs, suggesting that psych meds don't even work in the first place.

Using a meta-analysis of placebo-controlled trials in patients with dementia, researchers discovered that more patients die from taking FDA-approved antidepressants than do patients who take no drugs, or who use...

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., claims Americans are suffering from Stockholm syndrome, a condition in which hostages begin to have misplaced positive feelings toward their captors. The captors in this case are the federal regulators who impose some 2,400 new regulations each year, and the senator suggests Americans are not sufficiently wary of their resulting ill effects.

According to a recent report by economists Susan Dudley and Melinda Warren, the cost to taxpayers of writing and enforcing all this red tape is expected to top $62 billion in 2015, about 4.3 percent above 2014 levels. On top of this, the president has asked for a further increase of 5.3 percent for regulatory agencies in 2016. Since 2000, the budgets for these agencies have increased more than 75 percent. This is in addition to the broader economic costs of red tape.

The joint report finds total staff levels within regulatory agencies has increased almost every year since 2001 and now tops 280,000.

“Regulators Budget,” published by the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center and the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy at Washington University in St. Louis, has tracked the total staffing and spending of federal regulatory agencies since 1977. The growth in spending on...