Health Archives - Page 2 of 4

Children

Raising children near their grandparents has scientific benefits (besides the free babysitting)

By Guest Post February 21, 2019

by Abbey Ryan

When grandparents and grandchildren are able to live close together so that each can spend a great deal of time with the other, many fascinating bonds emerge! Not only that, but research shows that raising children near their grandparents presents many scientific benefits, such that go beyond free, convenient babysitting for parents.

While it’s not always easy – or possible – for grandchildren to grow up near their grandparents, the relationship that develops here is well worth the effort. The extra love, attention, and guidance help raise strong adults.

5 Reasons Raising Children Near Their Grandparents Is Beneficial

While the research is quite extensive, here are five simple ways that raising children near their grandparents leads to beneficial outcomes.

#1. The children will have a built-in support system (in addition to their parents).
According to research gathered through the University of Oxford, children who are able to maintain close relationships with their grandparents tend to have fewer emotional and behavioral issues, allowing them to be better at handling traumatic life events in life, such as divorce, bullying, death, or substantial moves. Having a good relationship with grandparents helps allow the grandparents to offer a unique sense of security and support in such a way that parents might be unable to offer. This helps growing children navigate adverse childhood experiences.

#2. By having an inter-generational identity, a child’s resilience is increased.
Understanding who they are, where they came from, and the history of their family (which can happen by knowing one’s grandparents well) can help a person be more resilient. The reason for this is that knowledge and understanding help one feel more in control of their life, even when uncontrollable events occur. Understanding their family and their history can help a person grow to understand they are part of something bigger than just themselves and their life.

#3. Having a close relationship with grandparents help children grow up to be less ageist.
Everyone gets old. This is the way of life. The hope, however, is that our younger generations won’t discriminate against the old, and a way to ensure that this doesn’t happen is by building strong relationships between youth and the elderly – or, grandparents and grandchildren. According to a 2017 study, kids who develop close relationships with their grandparents are less likely to show bias towards older adults, and children who had a poor quality relationship with their grandparents were more likely to have ageist views.

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Diet

American Heart Association President Suffers Heart Attack at 52

By Guest Post February 15, 2019

By Dr. Mercola

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

John Warner, cardiologist and president of the American Heart Association (AHA), recently suffered a heart attack in the middle of a health conference at the age of 52
In all likelihood, Warner followed AHA recommendations, many of which can actually worsen or cause heart disease
AHA supports ample grain consumption and recommends eating harmful fats such as canola, corn, soybean and sunflower oil, both of which are known to cause and/or contribute to cardiovascular problems
Good heart health starts with your diet — what you eat and when you eat. A powerful treatment for heart disease is to work your way up to an intermittent fasting schedule where you’re fasting for 20 hours a day
When you do eat, make sure you eat real food, and consider a cyclical ketogenic diet, high in healthy fats, low in net carbs with moderate protein. Once you’re comfortable with this intermittent fasting schedule, start doing a monthly water only fast, working your way up to multiple days

In the health paradox of the year, 52-year-old cardiologist John Warner, president of the American Heart Association (AHA), recently suffered a heart attack in the middle of a health conference.^1,² In a statement, the association reported Warner was in stable condition after having a stent placed to open a blocked artery. Part of Warner’s speech at the Scientific Sessions conference in Anaheim, California, centered around his own family’s struggle with heart disease.

“After my son was born and we were introducing him to his extended family, I realized something very disturbing: There were no old men on either side of my family. None. All the branches of our family tree cut short by cardiovascular disease,” Warner said in his speech.³

“Together we can make sure old men and old women are regulars at family reunions, that people live long enough and healthy enough to enjoy walks and fishing trips with their grandchildren and maybe even their great-grandchildren. In other words, I look forward to a future where … children grow up surrounded by so many healthy, beloved, elderly relatives that they couldn’t imagine life any other way.”

The AHA’s CEO, Nancy Brown, said in a statement:⁴ “John wanted to reinforce that this incident underscores the important message that he left us with in his presidential address … that much progress has been made, but much remains to be done.”

Many AHA Recommendations Worsen Heart Health

In all likelihood, Warner followed AHA recommendations, many of which are actually recipes for heart disease disaster. Of the foods scientifically proven to cause heart disease and clogged arteries, excess sugar and industrially processed omega-6 vegetable oils, found in nearly all processed foods, compete for space at the top the list. And what kinds of foods does the AHA recommend to protect your heart?

Not only does it support ample grain consumption, it also recommends eating harmful fats such as canola, corn, soybean and sunflower oil.⁵ “Blends or combinations of these oils, often sold under the name ‘vegetable oil,’ and cooking sprays made from these oils are also good choices,” the AHA says. Meanwhile, the association still insists saturated fats are to be avoided.

Just this past summer the AHA shocked health experts around the world by sending out a worldwide advisory⁶ saying saturated fats such as butter and coconut oil should be avoided to cut your risk of heart disease, and that replacing these fats with margarine and vegetable oil might cut your heart disease risk by as much as 30 percent. Overall, the AHA recommends limiting your daily saturated fat intake to 6 percent of daily calories or less.⁷

This is as backward as it gets, and if Warner was following this long-outdated advice, it’s no wonder he suffered a heart attack. In fact, it is to be expected. As noted by American science writer Gary Taubes in his extensive rebuttal to the AHA’s advisory,⁸ with this document, the AHA reveals its longstanding prejudice — and the method by which it reaches its flawed conclusions.

In short, the AHA simply excluded any and all contrary evidence. After this methodical cherry-picking, they were left with just four clinical trials published in the 1960s and early ‘70s — the eras when the low-fat myth was born and grew to take hold. The problem is nutritional science has made significant strides since then, and a number of significant studies have firmly disproven the hypothesis that saturated fat causes heart disease, finding no association whatsoever.

In related news, the AHA recently issued new guidelines on blood pressure,⁹ moving the goal post for heart health yet again. Now you’re considered hypertensive if your blood pressure is above 130 over 80. Previous guidelines started hypertension at 140 over 90. This means an estimated 30 million Americans will qualify for the designation of having high blood pressure, and of those, an estimated 1 in 5 are likely to receive the recommendation to take blood pressure medication.

Flawed Fat Recommendations Have Been Followed With Disastrous Consequences

Since the 1950s, when vegetable oils began being promoted over saturated fats like butter, Americans have dutifully followed this advice, dramatically increasing consumption of vegetable oil. Soybean oil, for example, has risen by 600 percent while butter, tallow and lard consumption has been halved. We’ve also dramatically increased sugar consumption, which has also been implicated as a primary contributor to heart disease and other chronic health problems.¹⁰

While following this advice, Americans have gotten fatter and sicker. Heart disease rates have not improved even though people have been following the AHA’s “heart healthy diet.” Common sense tells us if the AHA’s advice hasn’t worked in the last 65 years, it’s not likely to start working now. Modern research is just now starting to reveal what actually happens at the molecular level when you consume vegetable oil and margarine, and it’s not good.

For example, Dr. Sanjoy Ghosh,¹¹ a biologist at the University of British Columbia, has shown your mitochondria cannot easily use polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) for fuel due to the fats’ unique molecular structure. Other researchers have shown the PUFA linoleic acid hinders mitochondrial function and can even cause cell death.¹²

PUFAs are also not readily stored in subcutaneous fat. Instead, PUFAs tend to get deposited in your liver, where they contribute to fatty liver disease, and in your arteries, where they contribute to atherosclerosis.

According to Frances Sladek,¹³ Ph.D., a toxicologist and professor of cell biology at UC Riverside, PUFAs behave like a toxin that builds up in tissues because your body cannot easily rid itself of it. Making matters worse, when vegetable oils like sunflower oil and corn oil are heated, cancer-causing chemicals like cyclic aldehydes are also produced.¹⁴

how the oils turn toxic — Source: The Telegraph November 7, 2015

Vegetable Oils Are Anything but Healthy

Other research confirms such findings by linking fried foods to an increased risk of death. For example, eating fried potatoes more than twice a week has been shown to double a person’s risk of death compared to never eating fried potatoes.¹⁵ Animal and human research has also found vegetable oils promote:

Obesity and fatty liver¹⁶
Lethargy and prediabetic symptoms¹⁷
Chronic pain/idiopathic pain syndromes (meaning pain with no discernible cause)¹⁸
Migraines¹⁹
Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis²⁰

According to Dr. Cate Shanahan,²¹ a family physician and author of “Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food,” the idea that PUFAs are healthier than saturated fats falls flat when you enter the field of biochemistry, because it’s “biochemically implausible.” In other words, the molecular structure of PUFA is such that it’s far more prone to react with oxygen, and these reactions disrupt cellular activity and cause inflammation.²² Oxidative stress and inflammation, in turn, are hallmarks not only of heart disease and heart attacks but of most chronic diseases.^23,²⁴

[T]he folks at the AHA claim saturated fat is pro-inflammatory and causes arterial plaque and heart attacks — but there is no biochemically plausible explanation for their argument,” she told me in an emailed rebuttal to the AHA advisory. “Saturated fat is very stable, and will not react with oxygen the way PUFA fat does, not until the fundamental laws of the universe are altered. _

Our bodies do need some PUFA fat, but we need it to come from food like walnuts and salmon or gently processed (as in cold pressed, unrefined) oils like flax and artisanal grapeseed, not from vegetable oils because these are refined, bleached and deodorized, and the PUFA fats are molecularly mangled into toxins our body cannot use.”_

Open Letter to AHA President

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Defense

Why Snopes Gets an ‘F’

By Guest Post February 5, 2019

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

In their purported fact-checking of a report by CBS correspondent Sharyl Attkisson, Snopes spewed propaganda, not real facts, in an attempt to discredit the report and the potential vaccines-autism link
Snopes wrote the article without contacting Attkisson, who went on to state that they also listed claims she never made, then declared them to be false, and even were incorrect in one of their own claims
It’s dangerous to rely on any one source or group of individuals as authorities on truth, as it sets up the path for inevitable censorship
Industry propaganda and censorship of health and media information that strays from the mainstream is a growing problem
In your search for the truth, always follow your own guiding light — not one maintained by Snopes or any other internet watchdog or censorship authority that tries to lead you down their own biased path

In the barrage of information you come across daily online, how do you know what’s true and what’s nothing more than hearsay, gossip or all-out lies? Some people use Snopes as their go-to source for online fact-checking, believing it to give the unbiased and credible final word on all those widely-circulated stories.

If you’re relying on Snopes as your arbiter of truth, however, you’re in for a surprise: Snopes engages in massive censorship of natural health and general promotion of industry talking points. What started as a tool to investigate urban legends, hoaxes and folklore has manifested into a self-proclaimed “definitive fact-checking resource” that’s taking on topics like whether or not vaccines can cause autism.

Yet, in their purported fact-checking of a Full Measure report1 by award-winning investigative reporter and former CBS correspondent Sharyl Attkisson, Snopes simply spewed propaganda, not real facts, in an attempt to discredit the report and the potential vaccines-autism link. In the end, though, they actually ended up confirming the main point of Attkisson’s report. For this, Attkisson wrote, “Snopes gets an ‘F’ for predictable propaganda in [the] vaccine-autism debate.”

Snopes Attempts to Discredit Investigative Report on Vaccines-Autism Link

Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, a pediatric neurologist, is a pro-vaccine expert witness the U.S. government used to debunk and turn down autism claims in vaccine court. “Zimmerman was the government’s top expert witness and had testified that vaccines didn’t cause autism.

The debate was declared over,” Attkisson reported. “But now Dr. Zimmerman has provided remarkable new information,” she said in the Full Measure report, adding:3

He claims that during the vaccine hearings all those years ago, he privately told government lawyers that vaccines can, and did cause autism in some children. That turnabout from the government’s own chief medical expert stood to change everything about the vaccine-autism debate. If the public were to find out …

And he has come forward and explained how he told the United States government vaccines can cause autism in a certain subset of children and [the] United States government, the Department of Justice [DOJ], suppressed his true opinions.

Zimmerman declined to be interviewed for the report, but referred Attkisson to his sworn affidavit, dated September 7, 2018, in which he stated that, in 2007, he told DOJ lawyers he had “discovered exceptions in which vaccinations could cause autism.

“I explained that in a subset of children … vaccine-induced fever and immune stimulation … did cause regressive [brain disease] with features of autism spectrum disorder,” Zimmerman wrote.

This reportedly “panicked” the DOJ, which subsequently fired him, saying his services would no longer be needed, but essentially attempting to silence him. According to Zimmerman, the DOJ then went on to misrepresent his opinion in future cases, making no mention of the exceptions he’d informed them of.

“Meantime, CDC [U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] — which promotes vaccines and monitors vaccine safety — never disclosed that the government’s own one-time medical expert concluded vaccines can cause autism — and to this day public health officials deny that’s the case,” according to the Full Measure report.4

Attkisson’s report also reveals how Congressmen who wanted to investigate the autism-vaccine link were bullied, harassed and threatened. Dan Burton (R-IN), Dr. Dave Weldon (R-FL) and Bill Posey (R-FL) are among 11 current and former members of Congress and staff who told Attkisson they were warned by PhRMA lobbyists to drop the vaccine safety issue.

Snopes Gets an ‘F’ for Fact-Checking

In an article that attempts to fact-check Attkisson’s investigation, Snopes calls out many of the claims as false while clearly attempting to “debunk” vaccine-autism claims. However, in a rebuttal, Attkisson explains that Snopes earned a failing grade for its reporting.

“[T]he Snopes article debunks claims that were never made and uses one-sided references as its sources — other propagandists — without disclosing their vaccine industry ties.”5

For starters, Snopes labeled Zimmerman as a supporter of vaccination, as though this was something that Attkisson hid. In contrast, this point was central to Attkisson’s story and a large part of what makes his statements regarding vaccines and autism so noteworthy. Some of the additional egregious tactics Snopes used to try to discredit Attkisson’s report included the following:6

Snopes claimed Attkisson’s reading of Zimmerman’s sworn affidavit was flawed when she “simply quoted from the affidavit”
Snopes states that Zimmerman’s view is “not held by many scientists,” but did not survey several reputable scientists who hold the view
Snopes fails to address what its headline promises: the question of whether the government censored its own expert witness’ opinion

It’s important to note that Snopes also wrote their article without contacting Attkisson, who went on to state that they also listed claims she never made, then declared them to be false, and even were incorrect in one of their own claims, specifically that the existence of a potential link between vaccines, mitochondrial disorder and autism was not news at the time of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services omnibus autism proceedings in 2007.

“In fact, this suspected link was not previously known before the so-called ‘omnibus’ groups of vaccine-autism cases litigated a decade ago, and it is not widely known among doctors or the general public today; at least as of recently. That’s why it has proven to be so newsworthy,” Attkisson wrote, adding:7

Snopes demonstrates reckless disregard for the truth when disparaging my reporting by falsely stating that it contains ‘misleading claims’ …

Refuting claims never made in my report and putting out one-sided vaccine propaganda makes one wonder whether Snopes author Alex Kasprak even read or watched the report he attempts to criticize, or just blindly printed the propaganda provided to him by vaccine industry interests.

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Gangs

Dead tourist’s organs stolen before his remains are sent home

By Guest Post February 4, 2019

by Adrianna Zappavigna

The body of a Korean man who died in Mexico was returned to his wife ‘without brain, stomach and heart.’ His widow is now petitioning authorities to return her husband’s organs.

The 35-year-old (known only as Mr Kim) leaves behind two children and a wife, who claims there was nothing natural about her husband’s cause of death.

After Mr Kim’s body was flown back to his family in South Korea “without brain, stomach and heart”, his wife claims the father-of-two was involved in a fight before he died.

THE REAL STORY

She claims he was involved in an altercation at a karaoke bar in Monterrey on the day he died. According to Mrs Kim, her unconscious husband was rushed to hospital the night of January 3, where he was later pronounced dead. All of this was allegedly caught on CCTV.

Her fears of a cover-up were amplified when she demanded a second autopsy be performed on January 21 by the Korean National Forensic Service.

A forensic scientist told her there were signs of external injury and bruising on her husband’s body. He was also missing his brain and stomach. The NFS could not determine the cause of his death due to the missing organs.

“More than a week later, I received the autopsy result that says ‘no external injuries.’ I was dumbfounded,” Mrs. Kim wrote on the Cheong Wa Dae website, where she has launched an online petition.

She claims Mexican police were not investigating her husband’s death because on paper, dying of natural causes was not suspicious.

FIGHT FOR JUSTICE

Mrs Kim is now demanding Mexican authorities return her husband’s organs. “My husband was a citizen of Korea. His three-year-old son and 11-month-old daughter have lost their father,” she wrote. “Please help me and help my husband.”

Since January 22, the petition has garnered more than 17,500 signatures.

KBS World Radio has confirmed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in South Korea has also asked Mexican authorities to return the missing organs, which are believed to be at the Servicio Medico Forense (Forensic Medical Service).

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Children

Top 10 Facts the Vaccine Industry Won’t Report

By Guest Post January 30, 2019

by Mike Adams

The mainstream media is largely funded by drug companies and vaccine manufacturers and demonstrates extreme conflicts of interest in reporting on vaccines. Perhaps that’s why dishonest media outlets refuse to report the following ten stunning facts about the vaccine industry that are all probably true.

FACT #1) Mercury is still used in vaccines, and the CDC openly admits it. There is NO safe level of mercury for injecting into a human child. Not even “trace” levels. There is NO evidence of safety for mercury at any dose whatsoever. Any doctor who says the level of mercury in a vaccine is “safe” to inject into a child is only demonstrating their outrageous ignorance of scientific facts.

Mercury is arguably the most neurotoxic element on the entire Table of Elements. It is used in vaccines for the convenience of the vaccine manufacturer at the expense of the safety of the child. Any doctor who injects mercury into a child — at any dose! — should be immediately stripped of their medical license.

See the list of studies on the neurotoxicity of mercury at SCIENCE.naturalnews.com, now the largest relational research resource for chemicals, health, nutrients, and drugs.

Those study titles include:

Lactational exposure to inorganic mercury: evidence of Neurotoxic effects.

Neurotoxic action of inorganic Mercury injected in the intraventricular space of mouse cerebrum.

Neurotoxic effects in workers of the clinical thermometer manufacture plant.

Neurotoxic risk caused by stable and variable exposure to methylmercury from seafood.

Mother Nature’s micronutrient secret: Organic Broccoli Sprout Capsules now available, delivering 280mg of high-density nutrition, including the extraordinary “sulforaphane” and “glucosinolate” nutrients found only in cruciferous healing foods. Every lot laboratory tested. See availability here.

Additional FACT: There is no “safe” form of mercury as is often ridiculously claimed by vaccine pushers. Both ethyl and methyl mercury are extremely toxic to the human nervous system. Neither should, under ANY circumstances, be deliberately injected into a human child at any dose whatsoever.

FACT #2) Injecting any substance into the human body makes it orders of magnitude more potentially toxic because it bypasses the protections of the digestive tract or the respiratory system. Injecting mercury into a human being — at any dose — should be globally condemned as a criminal act. That it is currently considered an acceptable act in the field of medicine only condemns the true destructive nature of modern medicine. Under the vaccine doctrine, “First do no harm” has become “Poison children for profit.”

FACT #3) For decades, polio vaccines injected into tens of millions of people actually contained hidden cancer viruses (SV40 and others). This was openly admitted by a top Merck vaccine scientist named Hilleman. The CDC recently scrubbed its website of this information in a “revisionist history” purge. Up to 98 million Americans were exposed to hidden cancer viruses in polio vaccines. This is a historical fact. Read more at www.sv40foundation.org

FACT #4) Top virologists working for Merck have blown the whistle and gone public with shocking revelations that claim the company routinely fabricated lab results to claim a 95% efficacy rate of its mumps vaccine in order to continue receiving government contracts on a vaccine that didn’t work.

See the False Claims document these scientists filed with the U.S. government here:
https://www.naturalnews.com/gallery/documents…

FACT #5) In nearly every outbreak you hear about these days, the majority of the children affected by the outbreak have already been vaccinated against the virus! For example, outbreaks of whooping cough routinely involve children who have already been vaccinated against whooping cough. This is yet more proof that vaccines do not confer real-world functional immunity.

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Children

The Moment Nancy Grace Learns Pharma Can’t Be Sued Over Vaccine Injuries

By Guest Post January 28, 2019

Courtesy of Vaxxter

When it comes to vaccine side effects and injuries, suing pharmaceutical companies is simply off the table. The government’s version of “vaccine court,” instead, handles those cases.

For many people, learning this information for the first time can be a bit shocking, to say the least. And that’s exactly what happened to then HLN host, Nancy Grace, back in 2014.

Grace is a lawyer, but it seems the news still came as a surprise to her during her interview with Rebecca Estepp.

Watch for yourself.

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Purpose

3 Websites for Life (& Explaining the New Focus of McGillespie.com)

By Terence Gillespie January 18, 2019

Over the holidays I moved education-related articles on McGillespie.com to a new website created for that purpose. OutliersAcademy.com is a new full-blown educational website with a tagline of “Inspiring the Next Generation of Outliers.” It’s built for students of any age interested in courses, articles, curriculums, etc. that enable one to thrive in the artificial chaos of today’s world.

The Essence of Education

The essence of education is transformation and learning to live in ways that leverage the power of those transformations. The categories of materials on OutliersAcademy.com are centered around the theme of transformation: Education, Entrepreneurship, History, Creativity, Productivity, Economics, Legal, Alternative News Commentary.

New Focus for McGillespie.com

With OutliersAcademy.com to house educational materials, the focus of McGillespie.com will be shifted to Writing, Technology, Family, Health, Personal Experiences, Politics, and news commentary unrelated to my other sites.

By the way, if you’ve signed up for the McG newsletter for educationally related materials, there’s no need to do anything. I’ll re-tag your email so you’ll have access to the new resource library in OutliersAcademy.com (where I’ll be uploading lots a great new material!)

DivineCouncil.org at the Center

DivineCouncil.org is devoted solely to spiritual matters as I believe the essence of human nature (and the origin of physical reality) is spiritual.

DivineCouncil.org is a fully-featured website with a regularly updated article blog, an infrastructure to distribute theological materials to a large subscriber base, and a private forum that could run a large church.

The private forum on DivineCouncil.org provides extensive resource-sharing capabilities. The forum, alone, could serve a large mega-church with dozens of ministries (in fact, many websites with such a forum devote the entire site to the forum.) However, DivineCouncil.org’s forum is devoted to sharing and distributing theological resources, supporting missionaries, and facilitating conversations searchable by keyword & category.

Private threads are also available on the forum for planning, article critique and collaboration, and for matters not appropriate to the entire forum readership.

In short, DC’s forum is everything Facebook is not.

What They Have in Common

There are three things that all three websites have in common: a course library, a private forum, and a store.

Course Library

Given that all courses, regardless of subject, will be housed on OutliersAcademy.com the categories for McGillespie.com and DivineCouncil.org will inevitably spill over to OutliersAcademy.com when courses become available in their respective areas of focus.

Private Forum

The forum on DivineCouncil.org is expensive and requires considerable administration. For that reason, I’ll be leveraging the forum to support OutliersAcademy.com and McGillespie.com, as well. Please see the bottom of the forum on DivineCouncil.org to discuss articles or courses related to OutliersAcademy.com and McGillespie.com.

Online Store

The “Store” button on the menu of all three websites will take you to the online store for that website.

The store was installed to make it possible to sell digital downloads without having to update expiring links for security. However, there are lots of possibilities I’m looking forward to exploring.

Life Admin & Web Cockpit

I have two large computer screens in my office formed into a kind of life-administering cockpit. Between logos, writing tools, and all sorts of apps and gizmos that make it easier (read possible) to administer life and three fully-blown websites there’s usually something interesting on the screen.

Every once in a while a friend is in my office to discuss something in private, and they see something on the screen that prompts them to ask what I’m working on. While answering their questions I become aware, again, how extensive is the infrastructure that keeps my life on track, websites administered, and materials published for their respective purposes.

Everything is Easy?

Far from complaining, I find my work to be thrilling and a joy. However, I also know something about websites that most people don’t: the “cockpit” and tools on my screen are similar or identical to those on the desks of thousands of other website administrators. There are many great choices for tools “out there”, but the best of the breed are usually obvious. Equally well-known is how many tools (dozens or more) are necessary to accomplish the work and still carry on something of a normal life. And those knee-deep in using them know something else that need rarely be mentioned or discussed: The oft-heard advice that “having a website is easy” or “just throw it up online” or “my friend makes $10k a month on his blog and does almost nothing” is worse than bad; it’s defeating and destructive.

Just recently, I learned of a good man who was lured into a one SAS-(software as service)-does-all program for administering the totality of his business website needs. As of 2019, no such automated service can fulfill this promise. Such a promise can only be made (let alone fulfilled) by an actual person (or persons) doing the work. Yes–even in 2019– actual people still have to do the grunt work to keep a good website going; piece-by-piece, update-by-update, integration-by-integration, codemod-by-codemod, glitch-by-glitch, support-call-by-support call.

Automations like drip marketing are awesome, spreadsheets can do wonders, google drive is cool as long as it’s free, and there are lots of great courses out there to help. My new favorite beast(s) are Zapier integrations to take the drudgery out of inter-app coordination! But, don’t be fooled: there’s still a SWAMP of technology to wade through to keep everything in place for a functional website that fulfills its purpose well.

Pro Tip: Before you start a website for your business (or pay for an automated do-all-service) ask, beg, or purchase the advice on everything it really takes from someone already doing it. . . .successfully.

Library on McG Will Remain

The free-resource Library on McGillespie.com will remain and another one created on OutliersAcademy.com for resources related to the OA categories listed, above.

3 Websites for Life!

In retrospect, the unfolding of these three websites (over ten years) was natural and inevitable. Now with the “birth” of OutliersAcademy.com, I have the same feeling with regards to websites as when our second child was born. There is an indescribable feeling of “completeness of platform.”

In 2019, I’m more committed than ever to nourishing my family … and these three websites … for life!

Health

How to Wake Up on Time Without Using an Alarm Clock

By Terence Gillespie April 25, 2018

These three steps will take you ~30 seconds before going to sleep. Be exact with the times.

Look at the clock and say the time, out loud.
Figure out what time you must wake up and say it out loud.
While you’re going to sleep, work out how many hours and minutes there are before you must wake up.

The times must be exact. If you’re restless, working out the times may help you fall asleep.

I’ve had to wake up for as many life-changing appointments as anyone. These three steps are how I’ve managed to do that without using an alarm clock for 40 years.

Don’t take my word for it, just try it.

Before you do, four pre-sleep conditions ruin this no-alarm-clock procedure. Don’t rely on it if:

You’re drunk.
You’re sick.
You’re jet-lagged or whacked out in a different time zone.
You’re exhausted.

If you’re any of these before going to sleep, then use an alarm clock. If the alarm on your phone is loud enough, then don’t buy one.

You’re rarely ever going to need an alarm clock, again.

Family

Flu Shots Don’t Work, Take Vitamin D

By Terence Gillespie November 16, 2017

Doctor Mercola informs us . . .

It’s that time again. Flu season. And with it, a constant barrage of reminders to get your annual flu shot. Interestingly enough, what you’re being told about the influenza vaccine’s effectiveness and the reality are two very different stories. In January 2015, U.S. government officials admitted that, in most years, flu shots are — at best — 50 to 60 percent effective at preventing lab confirmed type A or B influenza requiring medical care.1

At the end of that same year, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) analysis2 of flu vaccine effectiveness revealed that, between 2005 and 2015, the influenza vaccine was actually less than 50 percent effective more than half of the time. I wonder if the reality might be even worse than that.

Research from 2011 shows just how easy it is to inflate efficacy rates simply by using different end points.3 At that time, they found that by using serologic measures, i.e., the increase in influenza antibodies identified in the blood, results in an overestimation of vaccine efficacy.

During the 2015/2016 flu season, FluMist, the live virus nasal spray that typically has been recommended for children in recent years, had a failure rate of 97 percent.4 Its failure was so epic, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended FluMist be taken off the list of recommended flu vaccines for the 2016 to 2017 season, a recommendation CDC officials ended up heeding. There are many other examples of the influenza vaccine not protecting people as promised. So, what might we expect from the vaccine this year?

Take it from Doctors and health experts; when it comes to preventing the flu …

Flu shot’s don’t work.

Vitamin D does work.

Children

A Master Chemist Gives 3 Reasons He’ll Never Vaccinate His Kids

By Terence Gillespie November 6, 2017

Shane Ellison has a masters degree in organic chemistry and is a two-time recipient of the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Grant for his studies in biochemistry and physiology.

Here are Three reasons Shane will never vaccinate his kids:

Instead of using an unproven hypothesis to question parents who have opted out, pro-vaccine parents should be questioning the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. With dozens of vaccines being forced on the public, some healthy skepticism could go a long way toward raising a vibrantly healthy child.

My background as a medicinal chemist taught me to rely on proven research. I learned to be less sensitive to emotional arguments and more sensitive to facts supported by reproducibility. This is one of the main principles of the scientific method. It refers to the ability of a test or experiment to be accurately reproduced. As a parent, I have a responsibility to use my training to make decisions for my family. Especially when it comes to potentially dangerous vaccinations.

In my own research, I have uncovered facts that every parent should be aware of. Here are three primary reasons why I have not and will not vaccinate my own children and why I’ve used vaccine exemption forms for public school and more:

Herd Immunity: Three Reasons Why I Don’t Vaccinate My Children… And Why Vaccine Supporters Shouldn’t Care That I Use Vaccine Exemption Forms

Survival

Solved Twice in 4 Words: World Hunger

By Terence Gillespie July 12, 2017

World hunger is solvable in four words because it’s not a hard problem.

The first solution is “Sardines, crackers, water filters.” These four things could be made available to the world’s population with little more than existing manufacturing and distribution channels.

The second (and better) 4-word solution is to “grow and harvest locally.”

Grow and Harvest Locally

The challenges of providing food to difficult places on earth are best framed as they would be in providing food for astronauts engaged in interplanetary travel. Bringing food to a distant planet is unfeasible. Therefore, what’s transported are seeds and knowledge. Food is harvested at the destination from those ingredients.

On earth, food comes from land, water, sun, work, and education. Everywhere people are currently starving, the first three of those ingredients are already present.

Is it feasible to harvest or grow food in all of the world’s biomes?

If viewed from the vantage point of intra-planetary “space” travel, then, yes, of course, it is.

Then, Why Does World Hunger Persist?

Because stated desires are mistaken for intent, an unchallenged shortage mentality, the mistaken belief that personal contributions don’t matter, and lack of knowledge about how to harvest food from local land and waters.

Still, world hunger will not end until the usual suspects abandon artificial prosperity blocks. The only thing powerful enough to do that is overwhelming abundance.

Stated Desire vs. Intent

A stated desire to “end world hunger” is not the intent to do anything, at all, about hunger. Unless the speaker has a grocery bag in their hands, it’s virtue signaling.

Virtue Signaling

Virtue signaling is like wind past the ear; pleasant, but empty except for any action the listener might take. The speaker withdrawals from the Bank of Elegance to purchase the listeners good will. “Rather than pay in action, or in fact, they enchant with the grace of their salute. The true courtesy is the performance of duty: the spurious, and especially the useless, is deceit. It is not respect but rather a means to power.”¹

“Leaders” touting a desire to end world hunger ought to be accountable for grocery deliveries in proportion to the loudness, and reach, of their speech.

Shortage Mentality

Is there a shortage of sardines, crackers, or water filters?

If you don’t know the answer, then shortages aren’t the problem. Anyone with a spare $900 could ship a ton of sardines to Venezuela, today!

Price controls, and a lack of imagination cause shortages. Free markets resolve most shortages. Those that remain require imaginative substitutes. If sardines come up short, substitute a can of spam. Starvers can’t be choosers.

The First Best Solution is You

Personal steps taken towards the resolution of large problems are not meaningless; nor are they mere gestures. They’re the first best solution because the need is met:

Personally, imparting knowledge and experience to the doer.
Locally, improving the immediate environment.
At the least possible cost as people make sure of that when their time and money is at stake.

Passing the buck to a group masks the reality that doing so gives it to another person. Unless people (who make up every group) have the expertise, the price of the solution increases and the likelihood of success, or any action at all, is decreased.

‘Wars’ on Effects

Wars declared on effects, rather than causes, are guaranteed (designed?) to never end. Even my 4-word solutions to end world hunger presume that hunger, itself, is the problem.

Hunger is an effect of a shortage of food, not eating food that’s available, or not digesting food that’s eaten. Hunger doesn’t cause these conditions. However, where there are no medical, or psychological, problems, making food available to the hungry is the solution because it addresses the cause.

Sadly, more food than needed to feed the world must be made available to the world, to overcome artificial prosperity blocks by the usual suspects.

Prosperity Blocking by the Usual Suspects

Western countries are using aid to Africa as a smokescreen to hide the “sustained looting” of the continent as it loses nearly $60bn a year through tax evasion, climate change mitigation, and the flight of profits earned by foreign multinational companies, a group of NGOs has claimed.

Attempts to make the population less hungry are direct threats to the rackets that profit from hunger. From the vantage point of the scoundrel, world hunger is not a problem, but an opportunity. A hungry population is a controllable, and profitable, population.

Any good thing can be blocked, or destroyed, with a tiny fraction of the energy it takes to create it. Therefore, worldly power is obtained, more quickly and easily, by blocking the good than it may be obtained by producing the good.

Prosperity blocking is widespread, efficient, and predictable. I was tempted to say the resolution to world hunger is in three words: “Stop Blocking Prosperity.” But abundance, not the blocking of it, is the correct solution.

Food Like Air

Recent attempts to outlaw the collection of rainwater proves that nothing is outside the scoundrel’s willingness to block. The more precious the good, the more profitable the block. But, where abundance reigns, prosperity blocks fail.

Rainwater blocking fails only where the abundance of rain overwhelms the block. The second 4-word solution to end world hunger is best because it leads towards making food available in overwhelming abundance.

Only when food is available like air will world hunger come to an end.

Conclusion

196 countries would have plenty to spare after gearing up factories and transportation to provide 7.5 billion people with sardines, crackers and water filters. The unchallenging project would realign providers and channels to tackle more challenging problems like getting fresh fruit and vegetables on the plates of everyone in the world!

The better solution is to frame the challenge of food provision as intra-planetary travel where it must be harvested from, or on, the ground of the hungry. Only when food is available in such abundance that it overwhelms the prosperity blocks from the usual suspects, may attempts to end world hunger be successful.

The Art of Worldly Wisdom, by Balthasar Gracian, page 115, “cxci Do not take Payment in Politeness”. ↩

Children

Story Cubes for Storytelling

By Terence Gillespie March 31, 2017

Four months ago, I received a “Must Read!” article from my wife: “6 Ways electronic screen time makes kids angry, depressed and unmotivated“. Sure enough, our 8-year-old son was showing some of the symptoms described in the article:

Disrupts sleep and desynchronizes the body clock.
Desensitizes the brain’s reward system.
Produces “light-at-night.”
Induces stress reactions.
Overloads the sensory system, fractures attention, and depletes mental reserves.
Reduces physical activity levels and exposure to “green time.”

Reset Your Child’s Brain

That lead to reading the author’s book, “Reset Your Child’s Brain: A Four-Week Plan to End Meltdowns, Raise Grades, and Boost Social Skills by Reversing the Effects of Electronic Screen-Time by Victoria L. Dunckley, MD

We didn’t go through all “TEN STEPS TO PREPARE FOR A FAST” that Victoria recommends:

Define problem areas and target goals
Get your spouse and other caregivers on board
Set a date and create a schedule
Inform relevant adults in your child’s life
Obtain toys, games, and activities to replace screen-time
Schedule breaks or treats for yourself
If possible, enlist a playmate’s parents to join you
Inform your child and involve the entire family
Perform a thorough “screen sweep”
Set your intentionMy wife and I talked for an hour on Friday night mapping out activities, games, and alternatives and how to break the news to the kids. Then, on Monday, we went cold-turkey on the ipads for both boys.

My wife and I talked for an hour on Friday night, mapping out activities, games, and alternatives, and how to break the news to the kids. Then, on Monday, we went cold-turkey on the ipads for both boys.

The Results?

After two weeks, the symptoms were gone! Now, at four months, the absence of these two “little” ipads in their lives (and ours) has been working out, splendidly.

The ipads were replaced with more outdoor time, interactions between them and with us, looking out the window on the way to school, lots of storytelling, and one thing we’ve still got to work on: watching Japanese dance videos on YouTube (via the TV).

Storytelling Design

The bromide that “Children are natural storytellers” is true, but it’s deeper than that. Children live in the story version of their lives, going in and out of what we adults would call the “real” version.

Here’s Lucas living in his story. Notice that his dad is standing six-feet away, recording him, but he takes no notice. Then, when his stuffed animal drops, he’s jarred into the “Real” life of eating his cereal.

Have you ever tried to get a yes or no answer from a child? They answer every question with a story because they’re living in one. By telling you a story, they’re not evading; they’re giving you a more complete answer.

Rory’s Story Cubes

A month after the ipads “disappeared”, I found a game that fit Victoria’s advice to replace screen-time with other activities: Rory’s Story Cubes.

They come in packs of nine cubes. The 6-sides of each cube has a picture on it of either a thing or an action (a noun or verb in adult-speak). You roll the cubes and make a story out of the ones that roll face-up.

As I was reading the box, and wondering if the game would be too much for our 4-year-old, Lucas rolled the cubes and cut me off saying, “Once upon a time …”

It was more than adorable; it was wondrous to watch his brain firing on all cylinders, reaching into the vast experiences of his four years of life experience, and telling us a story. “Can you believe this?!”, I asked my wife.

It’s not only possible; it’s their preferred means of expression. Children are designed to communicate in story. Before they have words for the things around them, before they put words together in sentences, they’re tracking the story of what’s happening to them, and around them. A few weeks after they’re born they look at you while you’re changing their diaper and you can see them taking it all in. There are no words, but they’re recording the beginnings of their own story.

The Gillespie Cubes

When playing, we give each player six cubes to roll for a new story. We have 27 cubes in all (Rory’s 9-cube starter and 9-cube action sets, 3-cube pre-historia, 3-cube sports, and 3-cube medic sets). If I was purchasing for the first time, again, I’d get this bundle:

As long as you have the self-contained 9-cube starter set there’s no wrong way to add to the set.

If you’re expecting this article to end with us going through every step of the book and living happily-ever-after, that didn’t happen. Although Victoria’s book outlines steps to reintegrate screen-time back into your child’s life in a non-destructive way, we haven’t even thought about bringing the ipads back to battery life. We’re on pause, for now, and not looking for the “play” button.

There are a few things that would make me reconsider: if the Kahn Academy greatly improves their app, or a similar life-changing technology appears on the scene. If so, we’ll make the kids earn every minute of screen-time like an allowance. Until then, we’ll stick with the best killer apps, of all: playing outdoors, talking with people, reading, and telling stories.