Eleanor Duckwall's Spotlight

My Chinese Herbalist Already Knew: When You Eat May Be Just as Vital to Your Health as What You Eat

Twenty years ago a Chinese herbalist that concocted vile-tasting herb combinations that, when boiled, filled the house with horrible odors told me the same as this contemporary study: your metabolic rhythms, or circadian cycles, are a complex system controlled by hormones and other factors.

He prescribed the foul-tasting herbs in response to the complaint that I awoke in the middle of the night instead of sleeping the necessary eight hours. His explanation dwelt with the function of the liver that becomes very active doing it's blood-cleansing duties. I woke up because my liver was unhappy with my diet, eating times, portion amounts, my level of stress, and the intake of other chemicals in the form of artificial sweeteners and prescribed medications, and essentially needed to be cleansed of a build up of toxins.

The Post-Democratic Age in Europe "officially" begins Dec. 1, 2009

In the video below, Nigel Farage, a member of the European Parliament for UKIP, ventures a spirited debate in the uncompromising style of Britain's Parliament, about the European Union's new president, Herman Van Rompuy, and the the new foreign minister, Baroness Catherine Aston, who receives the brunt of his criticism.

Even though not mentioned here as part of his criticism, Mr. Farage gives valuable information about the Baroness who may be emblematic of world leaders that could result from decisions made at the upcoming Copenhagen Climate Change Conference if world leaders sign a binding political treaty.

Mr. Farage's withering criticism earns him a reprimand from Jerzy Buzek, the President of the European Parliament:

(Via: Gates of Vienna)

The voice over at the end asks the appropriate question: "Who put these guys in charge of the world?"

My question exactly. And it should be yours too.

Who Is Behind the Global Warming Curtain?

Don't you wonder about the real agenda behind the Global Warming and environmental movements? To discover who is behind the curtain we only have to do two things:

1. Follow the money that the movements are generating.
2. Notice whose prestige is ascendent and then discover those that are conferring the honors and at whose behest. They are the real beneficiaries.

What's happened to investigative journalism? They all seem to have disappeared, or the clueless MSMedia have been trained to look away.

This is the reason why newspapers are in trouble. Readers aren't given the hard hitting stories behind the news that expose and explain that which is not obvious.

Oh, Lord We Pray!

The Pilgrims belonged to another age and should be judged in the context of the time they lived

Many Americans today have been fed the liberal line that the Pilgrims were sanctimonious, intolerant bigots that came to the new world to murder the Indians and steal their land while forcing all adhere to their narrow interpretation of Biblical scriptures. What their tutors fail to understand is that the great majority of the world's population during the 17th and 18th Centuries operated in the same intolerant, violent and murderous manner, a reason why the Pilgrims fled Europe in the first place.

History is always written with a point of view, and those that didn't like the Pilgrims/Puritans were happy to saddle them with the reputation and stereotype we have of them today while totally glossing over their religious, racial and xenophobic foibles.

No one had perfectly clean hands or hearts during the period of the European War of Religion that followed on the heels of colonists as they poured into the New World.

The idea of religious tolerance or diversity was offensive risible, and could have been comical if the outcome was not so serious, making it difficult for us to understand. It is always incorrect to judge the past with the standards of present, a concept that some cannot grasp.

1919: Betrayal and the Birth of Modern Liberalism

Most Americans don't know much about World War I, the "War to End All Wars," or the political and ideological movements that were vying for power during the first two decades of the 20th Century. Although we might have heard of Progressivism, more emphasis is usually given to the beginnings of Marxism and Fascism. Progressive ideology is glossed over and ignored to the point that few can recognize the effect of progressives in contemporary politics. What's more they have no idea what it is nor where it came from.

Here is Fred Siegel, visiting professor at St. Francis College in Brooklyn on the birth of modern liberalism:

Disillusionment with Woodrow Wilson changed the American Left forever.

Today’s state-oriented liberalism, we are often told, was the inevitable extension of the pre–World War I tradition of progressivism. The progressives, led by President Woodrow Wilson, placed their faith in reason and the better nature of the American people. Expanded government would serve as an engine of popular goodwill to soften the harsh rigors of industrial capitalism. Describing the condition of his fellow intellectuals prior to World War I, Lewis Mumford exclaimed that “there was scarcely one who did not assume that mankind either was permanently good or might sooner or later reach such a state of universal beatitude.” After the unfortunate Republican interregnum of the 1920s, so the story goes, this progressivism, faced with the Great Depression, matured into the full-blown liberalism of the New Deal.

But a central strand of modern liberalism was born of a sense of betrayal, of a rejection of progressivism, of a shift in sensibility so profound that it still resonates today. More precisely, the cultural tone of modern liberalism was, in significant measure, set by a political love affair gone wrong between Wilson and a liberal Left unable to grapple with the realities of Prussian power. Initially embraced by many leftists as a thaumaturgical leader of near-messianic promise, Wilson came to be seen—in the wake of a cataclysmic war, a failed peace, repression at home, revolution abroad, and a country wracked by a “Red Scare”—as a Judas. His numinous rhetoric, it was concluded, was mere mummery.

Cloward-Piven Government

Have you heard of the dastardly duo of Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven and the ideology carrying their names?

First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

Glenn Beck viewers should be fully aware of them and strategy as frequently he points out the effect of strategy on contemporary events.

Here is former White House staff economist and budget analyst Jim Simpson (blog Truth and Consequences) at American Thinker:

It is time to cast aside all remaining doubt. President Obama is not trying to lead America forward to recovery, prosperity and strength. Quite the opposite, in fact.

In September of last year, American Thinker published my article, Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis. Part of a series, it connected then presidential candidate Barack Obama to individuals and organizations practicing a malevolent strategy for destroying our economy and our system of government. Since then the story of that strategy has found its way across the blogosphere, onto the airwaves of radio stations across the country, the Glenn Beck television show, Bill O'Reilly and now Mark Levin.

The methodology is known as the Cloward-Piven Strategy, and we can all be grateful to David Horowitz and his Discover the Networks for originally exposing and explaining it to us. He describes it as:

The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven were two lifelong members of Democratic Socialists of America and taught sociology at Columbia University (Piven later went on to City University of New York). In a May, 1966 Nation magazine article titled "The Weight of the Poor," they outlined their strategy, proposing to use grassroots radical organizations to push ever more strident demands for public services at all levels of government.

The result, they predicted, would be "a profound financial and political crisis" that would unleash "powerful forces ... for major economic reform at the national level."

They implemented the Strategy by creating a succession of radical organizations but most notably the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), with the help of veteran organizer Wade Rathke. Their crowning achievement was the "Motor Voter" act, signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1993 with Cloward and Piven standing behind him.

As we now know, ACORN was one of the chief drivers of high-risk mortgage lending that eventually led to the financial crisis. But the Motor Voter law was another component of the strategy. It created vast vulnerabilities in our electoral system which ACORN then exploited. ACORN's vote registration scandals throughout the U.S. are predictable fallout.

The Motor Voter law has also been used to open another vulnerability in the system: the registration of vast numbers of illegal aliens, who then vote reliably Democrat. Herein lies the real reason Democrats are so anxious for open borders, security be damned.

Will Global Warming Gate stop UN COP15 - Copenhagen in December?

The holiday season is the perfect time for governments and NGOs to attempt to pull a fast one. While most of the world is involved in preparations for the upcoming Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, the "Winter Holidays, and even the Islamic New Year all fall around the time that a body of climate-change enthusiasts will meet to formalize agreements and treaties that will change the course of human history on Planet Earth.

The COP15 United Nations Climate Change Conference meets in Copenhagen, Denmark from December 7 to December 18 (2009) to create a "binding climate deal in 2010."

The premise is that science has determined that human activity is responsible for, or at least contributes to, a rise in the Earth's temperature better known as "Global Warming."

Decades of measuring and millions of dollars have been spent to come to the conclusion that human activities must be curbed and completely regulated to prevent possible disasters and tragedies of Biblical proportions.

But is the argument based on truth?

Hackers have accessed E-Mail communications that could prove the whole thing to be a lie. Called Global WarmingGate, released 172 megabytes of data from the University of East Anglie Climate Research Unit that are quite illuminating.

• The data appears to be largely, perhaps entirely, authentic.
• The emails are incendiary.
• The implications shake the scientific basis for AGW, and the scientific reputations of some of AGW's major proponents, to their roots

Brining a Turkey - Kass-style

If you prefer to do your turkey on the grill, here's Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass:

 

An Orthanc in Brussels?

The term "Orthanc" comes from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings whose lexicon derived from Middle English. An impregnable stronghold created by a "cunning mind," a base of operation of evil Saruman who used the population to create weapons for the purpose of conquering a neighboring kingdom of freemen living on "seas of grass."

Those that have read and studied Tolkien know that the "Ring" is the symbol for evil, possessing a will of it's own, "a will to mere power," corrupting the human heart.

Although Europe has a vicious dark past, many see the present and the future in the same terms as does Tolkien in the Ring Trilogy: a blessed land now under attack by dark forces emanating from the stronghold.

To them the EU is the creation of those dark forces, and the stronghold is in Brussels.

A president has recently been chosen in secret by the EU ministers in Brussels. His name is Herman Van Rompuy. Paul Belien writes of this man at The Brussels Journal in his "Meet the President of Europe."