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An enticing new study from BMC Medicine reports that people over 55 who drink a little alcohol, averaging about a glass – generally of wine – per day, are less likely to be clinically depressed than those who drink more and those who don’t drink at all. It turned out that low-to-moderate alcohol consumption was linked to reduced risk of depression: People who drank between two and seven glasses of wine per week seemed to derive the greatest benefit, having a third the risk of being depressed as people who did not drink.

Inflation has been notably absent from the economy this summer, despite bullish moves in gold and a continued debate over the tapering of asset purchases by the Federal Reserve. According to Art Cashin, director of floor operations at UBS Financial Services, the central bank's effect on the financial system has worrying parallels to the period leading up to the Great Depression. "The weak data that we've gotten, particularly the housing on Friday, hints that tapering may be held back or may not be a factor, " Cashin told "Squawk on the Street" on Monday. "Many of the proponents of gold...

A ParaPundit post from a few months ago: Greek Economy Shrinks 19 Quarters In A Row So Far. The Greeks have now reached an even worse milestone: 20 quarters (5 years) going down and still counting. The 24% contraction since 2008 is similar to the US Great Depression contraction of 27%. So the Greeks will probably surpass the worst US economic contraction some time in 2014 or 2015. You might think that central bankers and economists know how to avoid economic contractions that severe. But Greece gave up having its own central bank when it joined the Euro zone. The...

Billionaire George Soros' family office hedge fund, Soros Fund Management, filed its 13F quarterly report with the Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday. As Marketwatch reporter Barbara Kollmeyer points out, one interesting highlight from Soros' filing is that he bought a bunch of puts on the SPDR S&P 500 ETF in Q2. It's his biggest holding in the filing.

A White House spokesman called July’s 7.4 percent unemployment rate proof that “the U.S. economy is continuing to recover from the worst downturn since the Great Depression.” He said it with a straight face. The data tell another story: America remains mired in the Great Obama Depression. The unemployment rate that the administration trumpets is a liar’s number. The formula for the unemployment figure that is released every month is rigged to look favorable to the administration in power. The true numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show a far different picture. They show an America that is in...

Ninety years ago today, on August 2, 1923, President Warren G. Harding died at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, California. It was sudden, shocking, and has been fodder for conspiracy theorists ever since. His wife, Florence—described derisively by some as “The Duchess”—didn’t allow an autopsy, so we’ll never know exactly what caused the demise of the 29th President of the United States. It might have been congestive heart failure, or food poisoning, or even something more sinister. Seen in retrospect, through the prism of the scandals associated with his White House tenure, Harding is usually ranked well toward the...

Chester, NJ—A recent clinical trial published in Phytotherapy Research indicated that a high-absorption curcumin (BCM-95 from Dolcas Biotech, based here) had similar effects as a generic form of Prozac (fluoxetine) on depression, sans the adverse effects. “It is a novel and surprising application for this natural medicine,” said Ajay Goel, Ph.D., Baylor Research Institute and Charles A Sammons Cancer Center, Baylor University Medical Center and study co-author. “People with depression have higher levels of inflammation in the brain. Also, people with depression have lower levels of neurogenesis in the brain, meaning they make fewer new brain cells than people with no...

Yes, as the title says, the devil does actually make us do and feel things that are against our best interests and others. We do have a responsibility to see it and not be in a sort of mindless collusion with its evil motives, and this very brief video will direct you to the path of how to do that. The same path that is being used by the U.S. military now for post traumatic stress, because it works wonders to cure it! Fact.

In February, 2009, I wrote for the Wall Street Journal an article entitled Reaganomics versus Obamanomics. The article explained that the emerging Obamanomics was pursuing exactly the opposite of every policy of the enormously successful Reaganomics, and predicted that it would produce exactly the opposite results. Well, the results are in, and under President Obama the American people have now suffered the worst 5 years since the Great Depression, as first explained by Steve McCann of the American Thinker on January 25. McCann writes, “From 2009 through 2012, the Obama cabal, and their allegiance to statist policies, has been in...

Since January 2009, when Barack Obama was inaugurated as president, the United States has seen 54 straight months with the unemployment rate at 7.5 percent or higher, which is the longest stretch of unemployment at or above that rate since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics started calculating the national unemployment rate. Today, BLS reported that the seasonally adjusted national unemployment rate for June was 7.6 percent, the same it was in May. In December 2008, the month after Obama was first elected and the month before he was inaugurated, unemployment was 7.3 percent. In January 2009, it climbed...

Look around and you can’t miss it. The world is on the brink… politically, economically, financially, monetarily, and militarily. Events are accelerating. Over the last decade trend forecaster Gerald Celente has been blaring the alarms. If you’ve been paying attention, then you’ve heard them. You know we’re going under. And this time they’re not going to be able to stop it.

Economic growth goes sharply down, while stocks go sharply up. Welcome to Obamanomics. On Wednesday the Commerce Department released a gloomy revised report on the first quarter of 2013. Gross domestic product (GDP) growth was revised down to 1.8% from the original 2.4%. Consumer spending, estimated at 3.4%, turned out to be 2.6% Every category sank with the exception of home construction and government spending, the latter of which was mostly pre-sequestration. Bad news, right? Not to the stock market. Broad markets closed up almost 1% Wednesday after suffering a slump late last week. You would think that a weaker-than-believed...

The Fed over here has ordered – and I want everybody to listen because this is insider information – the Fed has ordered the U.S. pension funds to begin to acquire U.S. debt. That is coming down the pike, it’s going to start happening, the states are going to start carrying it in order to fatten up their books… So, we are moving into the last stages before an all out collapse. That’s exactly where we’re headed. Now the Rubicon has been crossed… the armies are surrounding the Capital itself.

Hi Freepers, I have a question for you. It is late, so if anyone answers me, I’ll probably have to answer most posts tomorrow. I have this weird dichotomy going on. I go to church and pray a lot—but there is a part of me that just wants to die, although I don’t really want to. I was just listening to the Stone Temple Pilots—“I Got You”—about heroin. For a few moments I thought about how I might procure some, because tomorrow I have to go to the American Embassy in Ottawa to fix my papers so I can go...

6 Reasons Bernanke Is Wrong, And The Future Is Going To Be Bleak Rob Wile May 20, 2013, 10:10 AM Saturday morning, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told graduating Bard College students why he believes the future will be better. In theory, this is a pretty banal argument, especially in a graduation speech. But it looks a little different coming from an conscientious academic. Halfway through the speech, Bernanke presents the evidence of those who argue against this view — that actually, our best, most innovative days are way behind us. In a footnote, Bernanke discusses the folks he's really...

The Battle of Athens (sometimes called the McMinn County War) was a rebellion led by citizens in Athens and Etowah, Tennessee, United States, against the local government in August 1946. The citizens, including some World War II veterans, accused the local officials of political corruption and voter intimidation. Here is what happened: Following World War II in 1946, violence erupted when returning American soldiers discovered their Tennessee county had been taken over by political corruption. Their plan to take it back involved bullets—lots of bullets—and dynamite. Why Athens in McMinn County, Tennessee became a battleground was due to Paul Cantrell,...

According to Diane Abbott, Britain is facing a crisis of masculinity. In a speech made on Thursday under the auspices of the thinktank Demos, the shadow health minister warned of a generation of angry, inarticulate young men who had no idea of their role in society. Raised on a diet of pornography and consumerism, they were "caught between the stiff-upper-lip approach of previous generations" and the "pornified ideals" of a youth culture that featured Viagra as a party drug and promoted sexism and homophobia.More prone to depression and less well educated than young women, and perhaps jobless despite a degree,...

Certain types of antidepressants may put people at an increased risk for developing a deadly superbug infection, a new study suggested. Researchers from the University of Michigan revealed that individuals who suffer from depression and those taking antidepressants such as mirtazapine and fluoxetine had a much higher chance of contracting Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) – a life threatening infection that can cause severe diarrhea and inflammation of the colon. One of the most common infections acquired by patients at hospitals, C. difficile has been occurring with more and more frequency, resulting in the deaths of 14,000 individuals in the United...

The past 2 decades have witnessed an alarming increase in the number of Americans diagnosed with mental illness. Is modern psychiatry reaping an immense profit by impulsively—perhaps even deliberately–conflating mental illness with a growing, public aversion to the demands of personal responsibility? In the summer of 2011, The New York Review of Books published two lengthy articles by Marcia Angell, MD—Senior Lecturer in Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine. In these articles, Angell reviewed three books which take a critical look at psychiatry and its relationship with the...

Abstract: Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup®, is the most popular herbicide used worldwide. The industry asserts it is minimally toxic to humans, but here we argue otherwise. Residues are found in the main foods of the Western diet, comprised primarily of sugar, corn, soy and wheat. Glyphosate's inhibition of cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzymes is an overlooked component of its toxicity to mammals. CYP enzymes play crucial roles in biology, one of which is to detoxify xenobiotics. Thus, glyphosate enhances the damaging effects of other food borne chemical residues and environmental toxins. Negative impact on the body is insidious and...