Is the FDA and Aspartame Responsible for the Increase of Brain Cancer?

The video below reveals the Food and Drug Administration’s process for the approval of aspartame, or name brand, NutraSweet. It appears that research was skewed and the approval came due to political and financial pressure.

Madoff Is a Piker

by John Stossel

Bernard Madoff, who stands accused of bilking sophisticated investors out of $50 billion, is reported to have told two of his executives that his business was “a giant Ponzi scheme.”

Perpetrators of Ponzi schemes lead clients to believe their money is invested and that their profits are the fruits of the money manager’s savvy. But in fact, the “profits” are merely revenue provided by the next group of dupes. Eventually, when no more new dupes can be found, the scheme crashes.

Political leaders say Madoff’s alleged crimes show what’s wrong with the country. President-elect Obama said the “massive fraud that was made possible in part because the regulators who were assigned to oversee Wall Street dropped the ball.” Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid added, “[R]egulators have been asleep at the wheel.”

Politicians go on and on about Wall Street “greed” and “irresponsibility.”

But Madoff’s scam was small compared to Ponzi schemes the government itself runs: Social Security and Medicare.

Read the full story here.

CIA: Osama helped Bush in “04

On Oct. 29, 2004, just four days before the U.S. presidential election, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin-Laden released a videotape denouncing George W. Bush. Some Bush supporters quickly spun the diatribe as “Osama’s endorsement of John Kerry.” But behind the walls of the CIA, analysts had concluded the opposite: that bin-Laden was trying to help Bush gain a second term.

This stunning CIA disclosure is tucked away in a brief passage near the end of Ron Suskind’s The One Percent Doctrine, which draws heavily from CIA insiders. Suskind wrote that the CIA analysts based their troubling assessment on classified information, but the analysts still puzzled over exactly why bin-Laden wanted Bush to stay in office.

According to Suskind’s book, CIA analysts had spent years “parsing each expressed word of the al-Qaeda leader and his deputy, [Ayman] Zawahiri. What they’d learned over nearly a decade is that bin-Laden speaks only for strategic reasons. …

“Their [the CIA’s] assessments, at day’s end, are a distillate of the kind of secret, internal conversations that the American public [was] not sanctioned to hear: strategic analysis. Today’s conclusion: bin-Laden’s message was clearly designed to assist the President’s reelection.

Read The full story here.

R. J. Rushdoony on America’s Reformed Christian Roots

This Independent Republic, a study of American themes of freedom, is an excellent example of Rushdoony’s conservative approach to history. The book arose from messages he delivered at a 1962 summer conference of the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists; it was there that Gary North became a Rushdoony convert.

Rushdoony’s thesis is clear: the United States had Christian, Augustinian, feudal, and Protestant roots. The American Revolution was conservative in nature, “to preserve American liberties from the usurpation and invasion of Parliament.” The revival of American government, Rushdoony believed, would depend upon “the Christian renewal of the citizenry,” the revitalization of “local units of government,” and the strengthening of Christian schools. The Nature of the American System was a complementary work, calling attention to the neglected themes of America’s Christian past—in opposition to “present Gnostic and messianic movements.”

Read the full article here from The Chalcedon Foundation.

Madoff Explained

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

The mystery of Bernard Madoff will be storied a hundred years from now. As history’s biggest financial criminal, he took a cheap rip-off that you can use at home – the Ponzi scheme – and turned it into a global empire worth some $50 billion.

One ingredient was financial intelligence. Madoff had buckets of it. Early in his career, he was the real deal, an actual innovator. He combined this with an amazing lack of conscience, for his scam was rooted most fundamentally in lying and stealing. The difference between him and all who came before was his grand scale, the grandest scale imaginable.

There is a saying in the world of Austrian economics about the business cycle. The puzzle is not to explain business failures. Those are part of the normal course of life, and the sign of a healthy economy. The puzzle is to explain the “cluster of errors” that appears at the beginning of a recession. How could so many have been so wrong about so much at the same time? The business cycle is a system-wide failure, not merely the mistaken judgment of a few.

So it is with Madoff’s scheme. The mystery isn’t how one person was able to fool a few. The scheme in which yesterday’s “investors” are paid off with the money of today’s victims is known in all places and probably all times – and it always goes belly-up to the originator’s complete disgrace. It is a classic example of how moral laws are self-enforcing in the world of economics.

The critical difference this time is that Madoff ran his scheme during an economic boom, a time when people’s normal sense of incredulity is put on the shelf. This is part of the grave cultural distortion introduced by funny money. Money is the most widely demanded good in society, and the Fed is making new quantities of it not as a reflection of new real wealth, but purely as an administrative decree.

Read the full story here.