Daily Archives: September 10, 2016

What is Freedom – Holistic Politics

Posted: September 10, 2016 at 5:25 am

What is Freedom?

Freedom. We sing about it in our patriotic songs. We teach it to our children in school. Hollywood and Madison Avenue glorify it. Here in the United States, freedom is the civic religion.

But if freedom is our civic religion, why is the libertarian movement in the U.S. so small? Why is government so big and our jails so full? Is all our talk of freedom mere lip service? Are we a nation of sheeple duped by the powers that be?

To some degree, yes. But these are not the major reasons why the libertarian movement is so small. Pure libertarians lack credibility with the masses because they dont necessarily offer liberty. Abolish the government willy nilly and reduced liberty is the likely result. The power vacuum left by vanished government is likely to be filled by feudal warlords, a military junta and/or invading armies. Anarchy with liberty may be possible but it is not automatic. The People are prudent to refuse the risk.

What about moderate libertarians? What about those who would like to shrink the federal government to its Constitutional bounds? Why havent freedom lovers joined their banners en masse? Well, some did, for Ron Pauls recent run for President, but not nearly enough to win the Republican nomination, much less elect a President. This is supposed to be the Land of the Free. What gives?

It took me years to figure it out, but I believe I have the answer. It is an answer most active libertarians will not like to hear. Pragmatic libertarians do indeed offer liberty, but liberty is not the same thing as freedom!

By liberty I mean what my libertarians friends mean by liberty: liberty is the absence of coercion. It is a state of being where transactions are voluntary, where all constraints are the result of honest contracts. I like liberty. I wish we had more of it, here and in other parts of the world. I even have a series on libertarian strategy in the the hope that libertarians become more successful in increasing liberty. But liberty is not the same thing as freedom. Freedom is something bigger.

So what is freedom?

You can pull out a dictionary for a stilted definition. I will define it simply: freedom is being able to do what you want to do. Free speech and free beer both speak of freedom. Free speech is a freedom that comes directly from liberty. Free beer, however, requires more than mere permission to drink fermented barley. It requires that someone has gone through the trouble to brew the beer and is willing to give it out. If no one is so inclined brew beer and give it away, the ideal of Freedom as in Free Beer contains a conflict. Free beer for you means beer servitude for someone else.

This is why freedom-loving Vulcans stick to promoting liberty. They see the potential conflict inherent in free beer freedoms as a contradiction. Liberty can be granted to all who respect the liberty of others or at least thats the ideal. (In practice we run up against a few conflicts or even contradictions.) So many libertarians would define freedom down to mere liberty, and thus wall off from their minds the messy business of balancing trade-offs.

I say mere liberty because for many people more liberty need not translate into more freedom. A marginal increase in liberty can result is subtantially less freedom, especially in the short run. This, I submit, is why libertarianism has limited popularity here in the Land of the Free. For millions of people liberal and conservative ideas offer more increments freedom than many libertarian ideas.

Consider a single mom who has to put in 50 hour weeks at Dennys to support her children. A cuddly fascist offering government childcare and socialized medicine along with his program of censorship of naughty TV and conquering Bolivia for no good reason offers more freedom to this mother than a smaller government libertarian. This is but one illustration. I give others elsewhere.

Libertarianism has limited popularity for good reason.

This is not a libertarian site. It is a pro-freedom site. Here, we attempt to balance several freedoms, including:

Back when I was a libertarian and active in the Libertarian Party, I spent thousands of dollars and hours promoting the party and the cause. Converts and recruits were few and far between. Today, I am mostly out of the game, playing Candy Land with my young daughter instead of placing signs, dropping leaflets, working booths and attending meetings. Yet I have well over a hundred people lining up to join my nonexistent new political party proposed elsewhere on this site.

Freedom is popular here in the Land of the Free.

What is not popular is knowledge of how to be more free. Many liberals call for mass bureaucracy because they know no other way to achieve freedom from the boss. If that is you, or you wish to persuade such liberals otherwise, see the red titles on the sidebar. Likewise, many environmentalists believe we have to abride economic freedom and/or our prosperous way of life in order to preserve nature. For you I have the green article series. For those of you who desire a safe and moral place to raise your children, there are the blue articles.

If you are ready to dive in and look at specific proposals, feel free to jump to the relevant article series. On the other hand, if you are a top down thinker, or a libertarian/small government conservative who has a hard time grokking the distinction between liberty and freedom, please continue with this series.

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What is Freedom - Holistic Politics

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Top Officials Want to Split Cyber Command From NSA

Posted: at 5:22 am

Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper testifies before a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on "Worldwide threats to America and our allies" in Washington on February 9, 2016. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

"There is a pressing need to clarify the distinction between the combat and intelligence collection missionsBecause the two roles are complementary but distinct, the Director of NSA and the Commander of US Cyber Command in the future should not be the same person, the panel concluded.

But Obama decided against doing that.

"Following a thorough interagency review, the administration has decided that keeping the positions of NSA Director and Cyber Command commander together as one, dual-hatted position is the most effective approach to accomplishing both agencies' missions," White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden told the Washington Post at the time.

Now, officials have decided that separating the two agencies would be more efficient and better enable cyber command's mission, officials said.

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Top Officials Want to Split Cyber Command From NSA

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Apple Cider Vinegar Melts Away Psoriasis Flakes

Posted: at 5:19 am

Its made from squashed apples and it makes your flakes cry. Every man or woman with psoriasis needs a bottle of it. I have two.

There are two types of people in this world. Those who use apple cider vinegar (known as ACV) for salad dressings, and those who drink it and rub it onto their skin. Guess which category flakers fall into? The weird kind. To find out why apple cider vinegar and psoriasis isnt as crazy as it sounds, read on!

I currently have two bottles in my cupboard: Bragg, the big daddy brand of ACV that all hippies swear by, and a random Italian brand that I picked up from my local shopkeeper Vimal for cooking with that cost just $2.

You might think that Im bonkers, but there are tonnes of people out there with psoriasis that swear by ACV.Over the centuries, its been used time and again to treat skin conditions cultures as diverse as the ancient Egyptians, to the Romans, and even American used it, the latter in the 19th century, when it was used as a wound disinfectant. Ive even read that the Victorians lathered it on as a perfume called Vinegar de Toilette!

Tonight, were drinking from the bottle! (Just kidding. Please dont try this unless you have dentures handy.)

The first time I came across using apple cider vinegar for psoriasis was when I was researching the effects of bad diet.One popular, albeit alternative theory, is that it is caused by a leaky gut and candida overgrowth, which allows toxins to infiltrate the body.

This, in turn, can be down to a highly-acidic modern diet, full of processed foods and empty carbs.What ACV does for us flakers is that it reverses this by making pH levels in the body more alkaline, thus helping the digestive tract to function better, and by killing toxins as it is anti-fungal and anti-viral.

You might be thinking, Wait a minute, isnt it acidic!? and thats true, but the end products it creates while being digested turn out to be alkaline. It also includes a boat load of essential nutrients (such as Vitamins C, A, B1, B6, potassium & iron for starters), and alpha hydroxy acids, which exfoliate the top layers of the skin and are now used in a lot of dermatological creams.

To me knowledge there are no clinical studies out there supporting the use of ACV for psoriasis probably because theres no way a company could slap a label on it, patent it and sell it for a million dollars but the anecdotal stories of it working are plenty. There are also Amazon reviews for Braggs apple cider vinegar from people who have psoriasis.

Heres what Nigel, from the UK, says on a website called Curezone:

About 2 weeks ago I was surfing this forum when I saw several posts about ACV. Not knowing what it was, I proceeded to read the posts and finally I figured out it was apple cider vinegar. I set out to my local grocery store and started on the treatment of 2 teaspoons mixed with honey. 2 weeks later here I am, VERY HAPPY and giddy! The ACV treatment is working. The patches are diminishing. They are no longer rough and flaky. Instead, smooth, REGULAR, HEALTHY skin is now there (only thing that remains is a mark where the patch once was!)

This comment was left by Sreenivas, from India, on a site called EarthClinic:

I read your comments and bought the organic ACV and the result was amazing. I drank 1 tea spoon of ACV with 250 ml of water for about 2 weeks and I see 90% improvement. I got psoriasis in 2007 on my hands and my feet. Cracks, blisters and discharges was something I have lived with while trying all kinds of creams, tablets. It worked like magic for me.

I also found this testimonial from a mid-50s flaker in the US:

Drank 2 teaspoons of natural ACV with 16 oz. of water each day and the red, painful, scaly condition just disappeared! This is the cloudy version of ACV with all the active nutrients. Not the clearer, grocery-store ACV. My skin was freaking me out and scary painful when acting up. And no, I would not have believed something so simple would have worked.I thought this psoriasis was going to flat out eat me alive!

This is one of the original posts that made me want to experiment with ACV, left by a guy in London!

ACV definitely works.I was on prescription topical steroids and it just made it worse. Every time I came off the steroids the psoriasis would bounce back worse.I apply ACV at least twice daily with a sponge and bowl to affected areas and here are my observations.Day 1-3)Massive reduction in skin production & much cleaner appearance.Day 3-7)Small amount of outer shrinkage of spots of psoriasis.Week 3)Hollowing out of spots of psoriosis to form a ring of psoriosis with healthy skin on the insideWeek 6)Ring breaks up into smaller spots which turn into scabs that reveal deep itchy lesions if picked at.Week 12)Lesions slowly heal and close up.

ACV is quite versatile

Most people recommend drinking apple cider vinegar for psoriasis, and thats how I normally take it.What I do is mix two to three tablespoons of ACV in a tall glass of water, normally once a day in the evenings, just before dinner in order to get those gastric juices flowing, baby.

The best kind to get is organic ACV, without preservatives or any other additives. The cream of the crop is organic ACV with what is known as the Mother,a little tangled clot of enzymes, bacteria and living nutrients. It is created during the fermentation process and is the most nutritious thing in the whole bottle!

Ive been drinking it for around a year, off and on, and I really like the effects. It takes around 2 weeks to see the main improvements, but I find that when Im using it my skin doesnt feel like a pile of wood shavings, and its a nice light-pinkish in colour.

Apart from slurping it up, you can also use ACV topically. I normally do this with cotton pads or a sponge, but you can also apply it straight to the scalp or soak your hands and feet in a bowl. Ive even heard of people with penile psoriasis dipping their bits in it, but remember, only try this if you have nuts of steel as the stinging and pain will be pretty, pretty high!

Mmm, vinegary elbow

Research shows that when used externally, it promotes blood circulation in the small capillaries of the skin, has antiseptic qualities which prevent bacteria, and regulates pH levels on the skin.

Most people Ive spoken to apply it on their body for 20 to 30 minutes before rinsing it off, but you can also leave it on overnight. You can even pour some into a bath if your psoriasis coverage is extensive.

Tags: ACV, apple cider vinegar, psoriasis

redblob I'm just an average 26 year old living with psoriasis. Over the last decade, I've tried everything, from real snake poison to rubbing banana peels over my body. I've finally found an approach that's working for me, and I'm sharing it with all the flakers out there. But Psoriasis Blob is not about one man, it's a growing community of great, red people.

Hi, I'm Jack. I had psoriasis for over ten years before I managed to tame it. Now my skin's as smooth as a baby's. On most days! Read my story.

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Apple Cider Vinegar Melts Away Psoriasis Flakes

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