There are times that one asks how and why it is that the so-called "mainstream media" can fail to take an event that goes on for a long time and yet never ask what changed that might be the cause of that phenomena?

"The battle to protect people from diabetes and its disabling, life-threatening complications is being lost," the federation said in the sixth edition of its Diabetes Atlas, noting that deaths from the disease were now running at 5.1 million a year or one every six seconds.

People with diabetes have inadequate blood sugar control, which can lead to a range of dangerous complications, including damage to the eyes, kidneys and heart. If left untreated, it can result in premature death.

Why?

Let's talk basic biomechanics.  You eat.  When you eat foods that contain carbohydrates as they are digested they convert to glucose.  Your pancreas secretes insulin to promote the conversion of glucose to glycogen, which is then stored, primarily in the liver.  When this storage mechanism is full the energy is diverted to fat.

When you eat a food that contains carbohydrates that are absorbed slowly, that is, you eat things that have a low glycemic index, the response rate of insulin in the body is muted and rises slowly.  When you eat something that contains carbohydrates that are absorbed rapidly, such as sugars, your pancreas is called upon to rapidly increase insulin levels so as to prevent the glucose level in your blood from rising to dangerous levels.

Type II diabetes is the condition where either (1) your pancreas fails to respond to high glucose levels adequately with a release of insulin or (2) your body fails to generate glycogen (and ultimately fat if intake continues) despite a relatively high level of insulin.  This is generally known as "insulin resistance" or "metabolic syndrome" and is distinct from Type I diabetes where the islet cells in the pancreas are destroyed due to an auto-immune disorder (and thus can't produce insulin at all, or at least not in material amounts.)

So, let's see what we have here.

What if you were to eat a diet with no carbohydrate in it at all -- or, in the alternative, ate only very "slow" carbohydrates with very significant other nutrient value such as leafy green vegetables?

You'd expect that a person with compromised insulin response would find much better blood sugar control -- right?

So why is it that the American Diabetes Association recommends that about 1/4 of your food intake be "starchy foods" that are all moderate to high glycemic index carbohydrates?

You don't need carbohydrates, incidentally; they serve no essential purpose in nutrition.  Your body is quite-capable of running on lipids -- that is, fats.  You especially don't need them if they spike your blood glucose levels because you're insulin-response compromised!

But the better question is this: How did the compromise happen in the first place, and why does the prevalence continue to expand?

That's pretty easy to figure out -- these foods, by and large, did not exist a hundred or two hundred -- or a thousand years ago.

Oh sure, there were some exceptions -- but the prevalence of these foods is a modern thing.

And so is diabetes, by and large.

Now I'm sure a good part of this is just bad genetics -- that is, a bad draw from the deck.  But how much of the rise in Type II diabetes is due to our shift from low-glycemic index carbs and fats as our primary energy sources to fast carbohydrates such as refined sugars and synthetic fats such as hydrogenated oils?

More to the point, why aren't we recommending that people strictly limit high-glycemic index carbohydrates?

You'd have to ask the folks involved that -- and in particular, you'd have to address the "part of your good breakfast" crowd that puts forward prescriptions for everyone from toddlers forward starting their day with a bowl-full of high-glycemic-index carbs.

I wonder if we were to get rid of the cereals and toast, replacing it with omelettes and bacon, if we might not have a lower incidence of Type II diabetes..... and if perhaps those currently suffering from it might not have better blood sugar control and less obesity at the same time.

But that would******of the agribusiness and pill mill folks mightily, wouldn't it?

You like death, right?  You want to meet your maker earlier rather than later, and what's better is that you're very interested in following known conflicted advice -- right?

Then step right up and do what you're told, fool:

For decades, if you asked your doctor what your odds were of suffering a heart attack, the answer would turn on a number: your cholesterol level.

....

The end result: Twice as many Americans — one-third of all adults — would be told to consider taking statins, which lower cholesterol but also reduce heart risks in other ways.

There are several problems with this.

First, the lipid hypothesis has never been proved.  

The evidence, however, is that the alternative hypothesis, that systemic inflammation is what causes coronary artery disease (along with dramatically increasing the risk of strokes) is the true cause.

But there's no money in the alternative hypothesis and in fact there's plenty of disincentives to prove it up.  

Let's leave aside the conflicts for a minute, although I'll get back to them.  I'll simply focus instead on the lipid hypothesis itself.

See, it dates to 1850 or thereabouts.  This is not something new, and with roughly 150 years and billions of dollars to be made from it one would expect that by now there would be a multitude of hard scientific studies that could demonstrate by strict proof that this hypothesis was correct.

So where are they?

Now let's talk about conflicts:

"It is practically impossible to find a large group of outside experts in the field who have no relationships to industry," said Dr. George Mensah of the heart institute. He called the guidelines "a very important step forward" based on solid evidence, and said the public should trust them.

Uh huh.  Sure.  Just like I should trust those who argue that a person with a compromised insulin response should eat carbohydrates that require an insulin response to metabolize -- when there are other options available that fulfill the actual dietary needs of the body? 

Exactly how many attempts to kill people -- albeit slowly -- do you expect me to tolerate?

Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide. High cholesterol leads to hardened arteries that can cause a heart attack or stroke.

There's no proof of that.  In point of fact cholesterol is necessary for cellular metabolism and there is no evidence that the presence of high cholesterol levels causes hardened arteries.  There is, however, plenty of evidence that inflammation leads the body to respond by attempting to encapsulate the inflammed tissue -- this is the ordinary and normal response that heals injuries. 

That is, by the way, the alternative hypothesis -- that it is systemic inflammation that is in fact responsible for coronary artery disease and that while lowering cholesterol may blunt the body's inflammatory response it is neither safe or effective since the underlying condition remains.

Most cholesterol is made by the liver, so diet changes have a limited effect on it.

Right.  And that's the problem -- the evidence strongly suggests that drugging people targets the wrong thing.

It gets worse.  One of the claimed "new indications" for Statin use is this:

—People ages 40 to 75 with Type 2 diabetes.

Statins have listed as one of their side effects the potential to cause Type 2 diabetes!

So now we want to prescribe a drug for people with a given condition that has listed as one of its side effects causation of the condition itself?

Never mind that we're still peddling the crap diet advice:

—People should eat a "dietary pattern" focused on vegetables, fruits and whole grains. Include low-fat dairy products, poultry, fish, beans and healthy oils and nuts. Limit sweets, sweet drinks, red meat, saturated fat and salt.

Really?  Really?

Obesity is without question a major factor in heart disease and stroke.  That's not a hypothesis, it's fact.  Obesity is also a major factor for high blood pressure and Type 2 diabetes.  In short if you're fat the odds are all tilted the wrong way when it comes to your health in both coronary and stroke-risk factors.

The simple answer to this is to quit trying to fight evolution.  That is, stop believing that man is smarter than God - because he isn't.  The processed food industry, along with many others (Nike anyone?) puts forward the premise that man is smarter than God and drills it into your head on a daily basis but what you'll note is the utter absence of anything approaching scientific proof of these assertions -- all you see instead is marketing slogans.

Why?  Strict scientific proof would be the gold standard if it existed.  Since it's absent in said messages and yet it would be the best marketing possible I am forced to conclude that it's absent because such evidence does not exist.

If you stop fighting evolution -- that is, if you stop fighting that which you were born with and that which has evolved over millions of years you come to the conclusion that if it didn't exist 5,000 years ago you probably shouldn't eat it -- and that when it comes to dietary balance you should pay attention to the balance available 5,000 years ago.

You didn't have a given fresh fruit, for example, all the time -- only for a few weeks out of the year when they were ripe and could be picked.  You had an assortment of vegetable material available to eat, but again, in variety through the year.  What you did have available to you nearly all of the time was meat and fish, including animal protein and fats, of various species and types.

Note that there were no transfats, no vegetable oils, no hydrogenated anything and no processed grains of any sort.  In other words all of the things that spike your insulin response today did not exist -- all of the so-called "fast carbohydrates" are modern inventions.

In other words the insulin spike caused by modern eating is biologically abnormal.

Want to fight God?  Go right ahead.  I will simply observe that you're betting against several million years of evolution (or "the guy upstairs", depending on what you believe.)  Either way this is a crappy bet and you're odds-on to lose.

This may be anecdotal, but it's also true.  A few years ago I was having happen to me what happens to most men and women as they get a bit older.  My waistline was expanding, my body mass was going up slowly but inexorably, my athletic performance was going down and while I didn't have anything serious going on medically the path I was on was quite clear, if I bothered to look.  

I ran cross-country when I was in High School -- as "recreation" (we had to take a sport every semester.)  I never was any good at it and in fact I hated it, but I did it.  I always had an issue with heel striking while running, and had various so-called "professionals" tell me that this orthotic or that "funky shoe" would fix whatever was going on.  They were all full of crap and none of it worked.  Through my 30s several times I tried to lose the "spare tire"; I bought exercise equipment and used it diligently, counted calories and similar.  Sure, it sort of worked -- if I kept at it with diligence I could lose 10lbs or so.  But as soon as I dropped the diligence -- even a bit -- the weight came right back on.

When I saw what was going to happen with Obamacare and came to the conclusion that our government was going to destroy any hope of my having access to reasonable health care and so-called "safety net" programs as I aged, mostly due to the fact that the people in our nation simply insist on being stupid, I came to the conclusion that my 210lb body was either going to have to become a 150lb body or I was going to end up weighing 300lbs by the time I was 70 and somewhere between here and there I would likely wind up with a serious chronic and debilitating disease or be dead outright.

Worse, none of the so-called "standard advice" like you have in that article had worked.  I had tried it all. You've probably tried it.  It doesn't work folks, and the reason it doesn't work is that your body actively fights what is being propounded because you're trying to fight how the human animal has evolved over millions of years.

It fights because that's how you are hard-wired by God.  When you take in fast carbohydrates which includes nearly all grains (e.g. breads, etc), sugars (especially "high-fructose corn syrup") and other items with a high glycemic index your body reacts by spiking its insulin production because it was never designed to process any of those things and you are insulting your body's systems.  If you consume enough carbohydrate to fill your glycogen stores before that energy can be consumed (which are quite limited) the rest is stored as fat -- it has to be otherwise it would wind up as excessively-high blood sugar.

The problem is that due to the spike in insulin when that processing is complete you feel hungry again even though you just packed on the remainder of your intake into fat cells.  The calories you just packed on and stored as excess are not burned up before you become hungry!  Your body is wired this way because absent processed foods it is nearly-impossible to trigger this response; it is simply an amplification of what would otherwise be the normal response to eating brought about by the engineering of foods we were never designed to consume.

Can you resist this?  I suppose you can try but if you're wondering why all these "diets" fail this is the reason -- you're fighting how your body is wired.

Likewise, I found that all the so-called "running shoes" were trying to prevent my body from being harmed by heel striking while I ran.  This is backwards as it was trying to prevent an injury rather than prevent the cause of the injury, which is the excessive shock loads placed on your joints.

Your body knows how to run such that you do not heel strike and instead use your calf muscles as shock absorbers but in order for it to do so you must not interrupt the signals that would be otherwise transmitted from your foot to your brain -- and you also probably ought not alter the natural mechanical relationships that exist between your foot and leg structures.

How did I figure this out?  I started thinking for myself and integrating what we all learn and in fact know to be true and when that conflicted with the so-called "conventional wisdom" I decided to err on the side of that which we had scientifically proved instead of what someone with a lot of letters after their name was pontificating on.

So I bought a pair of "Five Fingers" shoes and began the "Couch to 5k" program.  When I started I could not run a quarter mile without stopping to walk, my per-mile time was over 12 minutes, I couldn't do more than a mile and a half in total and my max heart rate exceeded 170bpm even with that very-moderate level of exertion.  I felt like I'd been hit by a damned truck while doing it too.

In short I was a fat, out-of-shape bastard -- like many of you.

At the same time I began moving my butt I got rid of all processed foods and began eating a high-fat, low-carbohydrate (vegetables and a few fruits only), moderate-protein diet.  No hydrogenated anything, no sugars, no processed grains.  The simple filter before it went down the pie hole was this: if it didn't exist 5,000 years ago don't eat it.

Results?  Five months later I ran 3.73 miles without stopping at a 9:04 pace with my heart rate in the 150s.  My body mass was down 30lbs.  I kept going and eight months later reached my goal body mass of 155.

A year later I was running 10ks at an 8 minute pace, 5ks sub-22 minutes and my body mass had been completely stable, never varying by more than 5lbs.

More importantly, there both remain.  I'm objectively in the best health I've ever enjoyed in my life, absent perhaps my adolescence.  I run 5 and 10ks for fun all the time, competing once in a while just to do it.  I'm contemplating entering a half-marathon next spring.  I'm not hungry all the time, I eat what I want when I want -- but what I want are things that existed 5,000 years ago.  I'm 50, my A1c is normal, resting heart rate is in the low 50s, BP is normal and most-importantly I feel good.

Here's before -- and today -- in pictures.

We're all going to die some day and I've come to grips with my own mortality.  But irrespective of what some guy with a bunch of letters after his name wants to try to tell me I'm not intentionally putting poisons in my body that have listed side effects including causing type 2 diabetes and serious, even fatal muscle tissue breakdown (such as rhabdomyolysis.)  Yeah, I know, that latter side effect is "rare", but if it happens to you then you're utterly screwed.  I'm certainly not going to take crap like that in pursuit of an unproved hypothesis related to cholesterol, when the evidence continues to pile up that cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease in the first place.  

I note that our own government and doctors have told us for years to prefer things like margarine over butter, for example -- and yet we are now warned about trans-fats. Was that a "mistake" or a lie driven by pecuniary interest?  It doesn't matter if you're dead, does it?

We are all issued exactly one meat sack in this life and if you pay attention every doctor and other so-called "professional" in the field flat-out admits that they are practicing medicine.

Well, absent damn good cause they're not going to practice on me.

The FDA should be disbanded.

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday took a first step toward potentially eliminating most trans fat from the food supply, saying it has made a preliminary determination that a major source of trans fats -- partially hydrogenated oils -- is no longer "generally recognized as safe."

If the preliminary determination is finalized, according to the FDA, then partially hydrogenated oils will become food additives that could not be used in food without approval. Foods with unapproved additives cannot legally be sold.

How did they get "generally recognized as safe" status in the first place?  Was there science behind that determination?

Nope.

There was lots of lobbying and, well, "just doing it" though.

And guess what -- the introduction of these "foods" is highly-correlated with the rise in incidence of coronary disease and obesity.

The replacement of saturated fat with these fats was claimed to be "healthy" -- that was the justification.  That was a lie.

The reason these engineered fats were introduced is that they are shelf-stable.  That is, because of the hydrogenation they are highly-resistant to oxidation, which means they do not spoil at room temperature even over extended periods of time.  This allows bulk manufacturers to make and ship things that can be sent over large distances without refrigeration and will sit for months or even years on a shelf without degrading.

Of course fully hydrogenated oils are not covered by this "revelation" -- yet.

But as I have said for quite some time, why would you eat something that has been designed to evade biological breakdown when that is exactly what is supposed to happen to food in your gut?

Between "cheap" carbs (such as high-fructose corn syrup, another Frankenstein creation) and hydrogenated oils you're committing slow suicide.  

Stop eating them.

Then stop listening to your government and start listening to facts.

Among them are the fact that the so-called "food pyramid" was never created by scientific inquiry -- rather, it was a combination of agribusiness influence and outright government corruption.

The amount of brainwashing that goes on in our society today in this regard is hideous and infests virtually everyone.  We "learn" from an early age that fats, especially animal fats, are bad for us while all that is easy and cheap to make, especially cereals, breads and similar, are good.  That "margarine" and other "lighter" (but engineered) oils are good, what they displace (e.g. butter) is bad.  That the word "light" on a label means that it's better for you than the same product without the "light."

So what has following this advice gotten us?  Record obesity and Type II diabetes, along with heart attacks, strokes and massive and outrageous morbidity.

You government has been literally killing you.

The truth?  God knows better than man.  Man corrupts any time it's profitable, and boy is it profitable when it comes to this sort of thing.

What do you want to eat?  What you ate before your government was around -- or any government was around.  

That was not engineered food.

It was foods such as eggs, meats, fishes and unprocessed plants, subject only to being cooked.  

Fat in food does not make you fat.  Carbohydrates, especially easily-digested carbohydrates, make you fat because they are released quickly in the digestive system and when your body's glycogen reserves, which are modest in size, are filled the body must convert the remaining carbohydrate to fat and store it in order to avoid driving your blood sugar through the roof.

Worse, the insulin response that is necessary to this process (and to maintenance of your blood sugar level within the normal range) results in you feeling hungry when the process of carbohydrate-to-fat conversion nears completion.  The hunger response is not linked to your glycogen reserve level, something that anyone who eats low-carb (and thus has low glycogen reserves all the time) can tell you is a fact.

Unfortunately if you eat when your glycogen stores are high you will immediately store all of what you take in to fat rather than using it for energy.

Now add to this how one makes a particular thing (e.g. salad dressing, etc) "light" -- you remove fats and replace them with carbs.  The "light" version will actually make you hungrier and thus fatter, exactly the opposite of what you would expect!

The other problem is that everyone has claimed that saturated fats are "unhealthy" and the opposite are "good."  But there is no scientific basis for this; "observational" studies are worse than useless as they identify "things" that are simply not true because they fail to isolate the causative factors.  For example, you could say by observational study that water causes cancer because everyone who has cancer has consumed water.  This would obviously be nonsense, but it is exactly what observational "studies" offer up all the time!

What's worse is that the other half of the claim on fats in the diet, that polyunsaturated fats are "healthy" (while the other kind are bad) may be literally killing you.  Most of those oils are very high in Omega-6 fatty acids -- indeed, processed seed and vegetable oils are pretty-much where it all comes from in our diet, and none of that is natural; without industrial processing these "foods" would not exist.  The really bad news is that systemic inflammation is caused by too much Omega-6 in the body, and the body's response to inflammation is to try to "fix it" under the assumption that the reason for the inflammation is some sort of intruder that doesn't belong in the body at all.  That's great if the cause of the inflammation is a thorn you stepped on that is causing an infection.  It will kill you if the inflammation is in your coronary arteries because you're eating crap that was engineered by man and our body responds to it as if we were eating a poison!

Finally, cholesterol.  There are literal billions of dollars made every year prescribing statins to "lower" cholesterol.  The problem is that cholesterol is necessary for life, that it is synthesized by the body and that most forms of it in the body are either benign or helpful.  Worse is that the standard three-panel test for cholesterol (LDL, HDL and Triglycerides) is worthless because the triglyceride number is not directly measured and only one subtype of LDL is harmful in the body!  The only meaningful test is one that is much more expensive and thus rarely used.  At the same time statins have a litany of side effects that are in and of themselves dangerous, including cognitive impairment and muscle damage, some of which can be permanent.

As an aside counting calories is virtually guaranteed to fail.  The reason is that 3,000 calories are, more or less, one pound of body mass.  That is, 30,000 calories are 10lbs.  If you're off by as little as 100 calories a day you will gain or lose 10lbs a year.  In 10 years that's 100 lbs and that's enough excess to call anyone fat.  

100 calories is about the caloric content of one banana, less than one 12oz can of sugared soda (that's ~140 calories) or ten potato chips.  Can you possibly count your caloric intake in a day closely enough to be less than 100 calories "off"?  No.

But your body can do this on its own if you don't destroy its hunger/satiation balance.  Just as a normal human body has one teaspoon of sugar circulating in the blood stream at any given time (yes, just one teaspoon), an amount impossible to accurately regulate manually yet one that in a healthy person is automatically maintained the desire to eat or not is also automatically regulated and will maintain caloric balance on its own if you don't destroy it.

Stop listening to the crooks that have less interest in your health and more interest in selling you cheap engineered products that are very profitable for them even though they are in fact slow poisons.

The simple way of looking at this is that if whatever you're about to stick in the pie hole couldn't exist without modern chemistry you're at risk of consuming something manufactured without regard to your health and safety, but rather only with regard to someone's profit.

Am I talking out my ass?  Well, you tell me -- on the left is what I was eating the so-called "food pyramid."  On the right is what I have looked like for the last two years -- roughly 60lbs lighter.

I pay no particular concern to trying to "meter" calories yet my body mass has been +/- 5lbs for the last two years with zero excursions beyond that boundary.

That means that I have managed to maintain my caloric intake to within a tolerance of 50 calories a day (at the outside) and in fact it's probably closer to 20 calories -- or an amount that sums to roughly two potato chips or a couple of broccoli crowns on a daily basis.

That's obviously impossible by actually trying to count intake, as to be that accurate I'd have to have a scale with me at all times, eat only the prescribed amounts and have effectively zero error, no "snacks" or other impulse consumption and similar.  Outside of a laboratory where one is confined 24x7 that's impossible.

You can choose to not be a fat bastard, no matter where you are now.  

The way you choose isn't a function of how much you exercise, although you might find, as I have, that exercise is actually enjoyable, especially when you're not 50+ lbs overweight.

Your body mass is a function of what you eat and whether you listen to those who are effectively trying to slowly poison you for profit -- or not.

In 2007 I began writing The Market Ticker due to the outrageous conduct of various branches in the Administration and portions of the Capital Markets.  Endemic fraud in the financial system that had generated unbridled and outrageous credit creation threatened the collapse of our entire economic system.

The consequence of this should have been thousands of indictments, prosecutions and imprisonments -- of banking executives, of members of Congress, of various executive branch officers in various agencies and more.  The banking system should have been forced to match assets to liabilities and either put up the margin to back their bets or liquidate them -- and if that forced them out of business and collapsed asset prices by 90%, so be it.

Instead our government took the easy way out.  It doubled down on the fraudulent models of the past.

But the models of the past were unsustainable and no amount of gaming arithmetic changes the outcome.  Indeed, the laws of mathematics state that the longer you allow an exponential system to run away from you, the worse the correction to reality you must sustain is.

From 2007 to 2013 the government has grown from $2.7 trillion to $3.68 trillion, a 36% increase. Marketable federal debt has gone from $4.96 trillion to $12 trillion, up 120% (that is, more than a clean double.)  

At the same time median family income has dropped from $56,000 to $52,000 in 2013 dollars (that is, adjusted for "inflation"), a roughly 7% decrease.

Oh, and that's before taxes.

Everyone talks about there being a "tsunami" of incoming inflation to be expected.  The real tsunami is government spending and debt and it already happened.  In real-dollar terms the federal government alone is taking from you nearly twice as much today as it was in 2007 and 80% of the minimum-wage-earner's buying power has been destroyed from 1980 to today.

And this is before Obamacare really kicks in.

Then there are the outrageous actions of our government in Benghazi.  What we are covering up there has not yet been determined with accuracy, but we don't need the fine details to understand the essence of the act.  That our tax money was funding terrorists and other bad guys in some form or fashion, and that we were probably providing them weapons is unfortunately pretty-much beyond dispute.

Never mind the outrageous and unconstitutional acts of the NSA in spying on people.

But perhaps the most-outrageous of all has been Obamacare and the medical "industry", which has used the power of government to utterly destroy any pretext of a fair and free market, creating a system where your medical care costs five times or more what it should.  That, incidentally, means that you should be able to pay cash for what your deductible is on your insurance (including Medicare!) were that outrageously corrupt system to be exposed to the white-hot light of either the market, prosecution under the Sherman Act or both.  Instead of making strides to resolve that outrage, no matter how small, Obama and Congress have doubled down with signature legislation embodying in statute the utter financial rape of our entire society and both sides of the aisle in Congress not only allowed it to happen but continue to allow it to proceed to this very day.

I've been a contributor to the government in the form of taxes my entire adult life.  I've written plenty of checks to the IRS, some of which gave me writer's cramp.  Never have I claimed a federal or state benefit check -- no food stamps, no welfare, no medicaid, nothing.  But I have been poor enough to qualify earlier on in my life -- I was simply too proud to do it, and found some how, some way to not.

I have tolerated running a company in a state where an employee that was fired for not showing up for work was able to collect unemployment, along with several others fired for cause.  I paid the increased rate of tax for what were bogus claims on my account and which drove up my tax rates.  I complained, but I paid.  I have put up with the ignobility of never actually owning real estate, having to rent it every single year from the State and County governments, even though claiming that you have "ownership" of something that you then must pay to keep is an abject fraud.  I have been "promised" both Social Security and Medicare even though it is mathematically impossible for me to ever receive them, and have paid taxes to support those programs for decades, while those who made the promises knowing they're false have never faced indictment, prosecution or imprisonment.  I have watched our government reach its hands down the crotch of sick 80+ year old leukemia patients claiming they might be "terrorists" while at the same time a man who states openly he attacked other Americans and killed them on a military base in the service of Islam is called an incident of "workplace violence" and those injured or killed are denied just recognition of being harmed in combat against a self-declared terrorist and/or taking heroic action to save others from same.

We all have our point at which we simply refuse to consent.  A few, like Joe Stack, take that refusal and turn it into acts of violence.  Singularly such acts are futile and amount to nothing more than martyrdom at best and a waste of human capital at worst.

But others, like myself, are unwilling to waste our lives.  One can recognize there is a non-violent means of refusal that no government can counteract or put a stop to.  It is far more effective and personally-satisfying than active, violent resistance, especially when the latter is singular and most of America is busy watching Dancing With The Stars, unworthy of anything more than being sheep to provide warmth for the "leaders" and occasionally a plate full of mutton.

Some of us have entrepreneurial ideas that might change the world.  But the drivers for entrepreneurs are more complex than simply the satisfaction of seeing something we imagine come to fruition.  For some it's simply the acquisition of wealth to the exclusion of everything else, but if I wanted to make that my focus in life I'd choose to be a bankster and figure out how to rip people off and get away with it.  After all it's far easier to abuse leverage to rob people than it is to build things, in today's environment the odds of going to prison for doing it are somewhere between slim and none, and Slim left the bar an hour ago.

At the end of the day you have to be able to sleep with yourself every night.  And unfortunately there can come a point where the cost-to-benefit ratio is simply all out of whack.  I've been blessed with both industry and luck; via both I was able to answer the "do you have enough?" question in the affirmative close to twenty years ago.  My motivating factors left the realm of making sure I could eat at that point and now the balance has unfortunately shifted to where what I do every day is work rather than joy.  

In no small part this shift is due to the zombie-like activity of many in this nation, including in places and among parts of the population where you'd think it would not be present.

I refuse to continue to silently accede to, and actively fund through my drive to acquire that measured in and rewarded by "wealth", the rampant theft and fraud that has and continues to take place in the economic sector, especially in the banking and health care areas of our economy.  None of this could ever exist except through the insertion of the guns of government up the noses of the American people.  

I can no longer live with being one of the better sources of funding for these abuses.  This decision did not come lightly, easily or quickly.  But I'm convinced it's the right choice as things stand today.

In short, if you want it in two words, it's this: I'm done.

I choose instead of either active participation through funding of our government's BS or violence to peacefully withdraw my consent.  To refuse to labor.  To make do with less -- a lot less.  I choose to reduce my voluntary contribution to the tax hoard that is misspent or forms the foundation against which our government borrows, giving the proceeds to those who think that doping it up is a grand past-time or shoveling guns, missiles and money to terrorists while groping our grannies, using the very existence of the terrorists we gave the guns and missiles to as justification for what any civilized society would call sexual assault.

The portion of that which I earn by my efforts that I am able to retain in real terms shrinks by the day, and I have concluded that the balance of benefits and harms, especially the harms done to others using my tax dollars, is no longer acceptable to me.

My decision will not change until America changes.  Until it wakes up.  Until the people demand and the government of this county, this state and this nation recognize everyone's fundamental rights -- that shall not be infringed means what it says, that shall pass no law means what it says and all branches of government stop using taxpayer dollars to arm terrorists, maintain and promote medical monopolies, promote and empower banking cartels while excusing violence and fraud, both financial and corporeal, committed against the people of this nation by those entities and the agents of government itself. 

I have seen enough frauds committed by and with the active involvement of government to become convinced that this is what, in the main, my tax dollars are buying.  Whether it be Angela Corey's apparent intentional withholding of evidence from George Zimmerman's counsel (and now her firing of one of the people who tried to do the right thing), the rip-off of pension funds and the taxpayer through both looting of the funds and ridiculously over-promised rates of return or the literal thousands of citizens that have had their homes foreclosed upon through blatantly fraudulent process and perjured documents, enough is enough.

I will not accept mere political promises as they are rubber checks without a penalty for being fraudulently issued and over the last 20 years they have always bounced.  I instead demand action, indictments, prosecutions, break-ups of monopolies, impeachments, business closures, the end of deficit spending and reform. These are not discussion points, they are demands.  They are demands that I have every right to make because it is with the fruits of my hand and mind that this government has foisted upon the American people these frauds, costs and harms.  I have written too many large checks to the IRS over the years only to see this crap not only continue but accelerate in the harm done to our nation -- and especially our youth.

I hope, pray for and encourage others to also peacefully withdraw their consent.  If enough of us who are the producers in this nation do so then government will have no choice but to bow to our will or collapse.  My decision in this regard, if ratified by concurrence of just a small percentage of the population, represents what I believe is the only remaining lawful and peaceful way to accomplish that goal.

If there are an insufficient number of others willing to also participate then my personal conviction that it is unacceptable to fund the screwing of others, whether it be financially or through actual acts of violence, will be demonstrated to be that of a tiny minority.

I accept that this is not only possible, it's likely.

But should that be the case then this nation does not deserve to survive as a Constitutional Republic -- and in the end, it will not, becoming something much darker, uglier and unworthy of any of my support.

There is only one way to know which of the two possibilities is true -- and that is to act, and see who also acts.  To lead not through exhortation (or worse, extortion) but rather by example.  To see who chooses to not only continue to consent but actively supports the murder of others, physical violence served upon those who simply wish to enjoy their unalienable rights and the financial******of our own citizens en-masse -- especially our children and young adults.

If and when things change I will reconsider my position and lower my middle finger.

But not before.

I therefore choose to reduce the ability of our government to tax my income to as close to an effective zero as I can reasonably achieve in keeping with what I enjoy doing, which is putting before the people a chronology of lies, frauds and scams in the hope that others wake up.

But I will do so on my terms, not someone else's.

Therefore, Tickerforum's donor program has been closed, effective today.  Existing gold donor privileges will remain active through their expiration date -- or 12/31, the latest a quarterly donor could expect them to remain active (and the longest donation formally permitted since mid-2010.)  Those who set up recurring donations have had their profiles canceled at PayPal.  

For those who wish to comment and discuss politically-related topics the politics areas will remain fully-accessible for the present time.

The formerly-anticipated newsletter, coding for which is in fact complete and ready to go, will not be launched.  My personal activity in the markets and otherwise, including entrepreneurship, will for nearly all intents and purposes cease by the end of the year.

The Market Ticker will continue to operate in an advertising-supported format but other than macro-level economic reports (e.g. the payroll report, Z1, etc) you will find the balance shifts toward less market-related material and more politically-related material -- simply because I have withdrawn from market-related activity beyond the macro level.  There will be fewer articles, and many days with none at all -- a rarity up until now.  Old articles will disappear from public view, a change recently implemented and one now filtering through the various Internet archives as they "refresh" their links.

Finally, for those who argue that I should become more involved in political pursuits, no matter what they may be, I will answer your question in advance and save you the time you'd otherwise use to solicit me for such purposes: No.

On a net basis this should reduce my "income footprint" to be within the "Screw You Uncle Sam" range.  The comment capacity on The Ticker will be commensurately reduced, as I have observed that for the most part those who are not donors to the system comprise the vast majority of inane (or worse) comments.  But for those who can form a cogent opinion and use logic, your input to the discussion will still be possible.

The activities that I choose to undertake in the entrepreneurship area will all be of a long-term capital gain in nature, where the government is able to garner little of what I come up with, and then only on my schedule, not theirs -- a schedule that may well be "never" if I so choose and there is no reform.

It is time for those of us who care to direct our energies in a different way, and I know of no better means of laying that forward than through personal example.

For whatever you deem it to be worth, here's my example.