Medary.com

That's more like it. After a three-week stall, I weighed in today with a 10.5 pound loss for the week. 231.3 pounds. Since my first initial visit with Dr. Tague at the Center for Nutrition, I've lost 47.7 pounds from the 279 pounds I started with.

Woo. And Hoo. And I did the math correctly this week, too.

I was getting a little nervous about making 230 by Halloween. I think I've got a pretty good shot at it, now. I'm off all of the blood pressure medications for now--we'll see how that goes, but I'm hopeful that I'm off of them for good--or at least for a good long while.

Anyway, I had my third "body composition analysis" this week. The numbers are really, really good:

	Today, October 24th	August 11th	Difference
Weight:	231.3 lbs	274.5 lbs **	-43.2
Lean body mass	167.6 lbs	177.0 lbs	-9.4
Body fat mass	63.7 lbs	97.5 lbs	-33.8
Body mass index (BMI)	31.1	36.9	-5.8
Percent body fat	27.5%	35.4%	-7.9%

** Yes, I gained 5.5 pounds in the week from my first Body Composition Analysis (274.5 pounds) to my first visit with the doctor (279.0 pounds). A last fling, of sorts.

Oh, yeah. I got another ribbon--my 40-pound ribbon. (Snookums likes the ribbons.)

On October 22, 2007, I posted:

I'm traveling, so posting has been nonexistent for a while.  But now, I'm sitting in a hotel lobby on the side of the world that's in the light when it's nighttime back home in the USA, and it's a depressing thing.  No, not the hotel lobby itself, which is as fine as any you could hope for.   But this side of the world is ugly, nasty, poor, and heartbreaking.  It's disgusting, messy, and dirty.  But people live here, laugh here, have fun with friends here.

The news is filled with terror attacks, monkey attacks on city assistant mayors, more terror attacks, cricket, more terror attacks, Bobby Jindal, and more terror attacks. 

Time to start thinking about coming home.

From the book Power in the People by Felix Morley, as linked by Gary Galles at the Ludwig von Mises Institute:

Nothing that advances the power of the State over Society, thereby subjecting the individual to the State, can properly be called liberal.

From the book Power in the People by Felix Morley, as linked by Gary Galles at the Ludwig von Mises Institute:

The one enduring political folly is to concentrate in the hands of ambitious men power that they do not have the restraint to exercise wisely.

From the book Power in the People by Felix Morley, as linked by Gary Galles at the Ludwig von Mises Institute:

The reformer…is usually disposed to believe that improvement can be imposed by government fiat…placing great confidence in the coercive power of the State.

Notice on the chart below the "infection point" -- the point at which the red line indicating the "current recession" goes from a shallow slope to a nose dive.

Want to guess when that happened?

I'm going to guess it was just after the government passed the TARP bank bailouts in late 2007..

No end in sight?

Since then, we've seen the Democrats in Washington busying themselves with passing the Obama Stimulus, the Obamacare Health Care CHANGE!!! and the Obama Cap-and-Tax job-killer bills.

Permanent depression. Is that really what the Democrats want? Because that's what they're working very, very hard on achieving.

Hat tips all around:
Big Government
The Scariest Jobs Chart Ever
Another Involuntary Landlord and Summary

Update: Re-re-edited after confirming that the inflection point is in fact around the time of the TARP plan which was supposed to save us all from what eventually happened anyway.

From the book Power in the People by Felix Morley, as linked by Gary Galles at the Ludwig von Mises Institute:

There are many Americans who attest their willingness to accept political dictatorship, if the State will only furnish them with periodic handouts and otherwise show continuous benevolence in the ordering of their lives.

Offered for the edification of libertarians and most conservatives, this handy guide on how to successfully lie. Leftist/collectivists, in and out of the Old Media, seem to know these things instinctively.

From the always-insightful Richard Fernandez at Belmont Club, apropos of the unmasking of Shepard Fairey's ripping off of the Associated Press' picture of Obama for his much-hyped "Hope" poster:

1. The first and most important thing is for the impostor to claim the motivation of revolutionary impulses. That way even those who know he is lying will think he is lying in a “good” cause. If the last refuge of scoundrels is the flag, the ultimate protective banner is the Red Flag. Hannah Arendt once wrote “Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear.” Find the hole in your audience’s brain and drive your truck of manure through it.


2. The second rule is to put forward the most extravagant claims. Don’t be half-assed about lying. The more extravagant the fib the better. A sufficiently resourceful fraud clears his path of unbelievers by sheer audacity alone. Tell a big enough lie and no one would believe you could be so bold. As the fictional Rudolf Rassendyl proved in the Prisoner of Zenda that it is better to pass yourself off as King of Ruritania rather than a minor noble. A minor noble may be questioned, but the King will not be. It is all or nothing. And given that no one wants to tug at the Royal Robe to see if it is real ermine, the fraudster often gets it “all”.


3. The third rule is that when questioned, destroy the questioner. When impersonating the King be determined to have everyone who doubts your identity thrown in the tower for treason. Once you succeed in beheading the first challenger there will be no second challenges.


4. The fourth rule is the most important. Avoid trying to bluff those who are too big to be faced down. What undid both Fairey and Ward Churchill was that they didn’t know when to stop their imposture. They finally took it too far. Fairey, who had been successful up to that point tried to bluff his way past a major news organization and failed. Ward Churchill was already a professor when he made his “little Eichmanns” speech after 9/11 unleashed a tide of outrage he couldn’t outface. If Fairey had not launched his poster and Churchill had not made his “little Eichmanns” speech, they might still be intellectuals in good standing.

On October 18, 2006, I posted:

If you're in Missouri, you know that the Democrats have a nice political machine going on over there in St. Louis. One of the big cogs in that machine is a group called ACORN. This group represents on its donation page as being a "charitable organization" but is in actuality a partisan political action organization. (OK, the national ACORN is a partisan outfit, but state ACORN chapters are technically non-partisan--and if you believe that's how it really works, you'll believe almost anything as long as it has "Bush Lied" attached to it. Which, sadly, seems to describe a large, vocal, and influential segment of Americans today.)

St. Louis' Gateway Pundit links to a Democratic-leaning St. Louis blog, Pub Def, which is tearing the cover back on ACORN's shady dealings. The deal: hire lower-income people to go out and shake the trees for Claire McCaskill votes.

Note to Democrats: This works a lot better if you actually pay those folks you hire to do your dubious Get-Out-The-Vote effort.

One big question: What are the links between ACORN, the Missouri Democratic Party, and the Claire McCaskill U.S. Senate campaign? Click on this link to see the Pub Def video, showing the unpaid ACORN workers saying that their get-out-the-vote campaign was called Project Victory 2006. As both Pub Def and Gateway Pundit note, this is (oddly enough) the same name under which the Missouri Democratic Party is running it's "coordinated campaign effort:"

We are pleased to introduce Project Victory 2006, the Missouri Democratic Party's coordinated campaign effort for this election year! We are excited about this year's campaign and expect that our field effort will be incredibly strong and well-received. We are proud that more than 75 percent of the Project Victory's staff members either are from Missouri or attended college in Missouri, and we expect this to be a tremendous asset.

There's coordination, and then there's Democratic coordination, which apparently includes not paying poor people that you've hired (by a "non-partisan" front group for a radically partisan national organization) to pound on doors campaigning for your candidates.

You can pick what part of this scandal offends you more--non-partisan groups engaged in blatant partisan political behavior, or the spectacle of Democrats telling poor people to get out the Democrat vote for money, and then stiffing them.

Oh, right, Mark Foley was a gay pedophile-wanna-be. Never mind. Meanwhile, how are those sweetheart real estate deals going, Senator Reid?

If you're bound and determined to vote against the Republicans, you really should open your eyes to who you'll be voting FOR.

Wherein Sarah Palin demonstrates a better understanding of human nature than the Senate Finance Committee:

The bill prohibits insurance companies from refusing coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and from charging sick people higher premiums. [1] It attempts to offset the costs this will impose on insurance companies by requiring everyone to purchase coverage, which in theory would expand the pool of paying policy holders.

However, the maximum fine for those who refuse to purchase health insurance is $750. [2] Even factoring in government subsidies, the cost of purchasing a plan is much more than $750. The result: many people, especially the young and healthy, will simply not buy coverage, choosing to pay the fine instead. They’ll wait until they’re sick to buy health insurance, confident in the knowledge that insurance companies can’t deny them coverage. Such a scenario is a perfect storm for increasing the cost of health care and creating an unsustainable mandate program.

Emphasis mine.

Explain to me again how Palin is such a stupid, backwoods rube and our august Senators are the font of wisdom on this Earth?