ClydeStyle

Category: Accountability

  • Can we really trust the FDA? Not by its track record

    There was so much controversy about the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to head up the Food and Drug Administration because of his radical views and conspiracy theories. But if there was ever a government agency that needed shaken up, the FDA was it.

    Now, this is not a blog in supporting of RFK Jr., it is about the harm that has been done by the FDA to the American people because they refuse to let lobbyists keep their checks.

    Right now, there are over 100 countries that will not eat our meat. It is cruel and criminal how we treat chickens, pigs, and cows in this country — and we’re doing it to our own detriment. As a result, countries like Canada have decided to pass on our meat.

    There are some extremely dangerous and cancer causing chemicals that we put in our food that is extremely harmful. I asked A.I. for some specifics on the most dangerous of these chemicals. A.I. broke it down this way:

    The following chemicals are toxic and harmful to human health or banned in other countries. Some examples of these chemicals include: 

    • Lead: A metal found in some dietary supplements, vinegars, and spices 
    • Asbestos: A toxic substance linked to cancer, genetic mutations, and fetal harm 
    • Hexabromocyclododecane: A flame retardant used in some building materials 
    • Azodicarbonamide: A food additive that breaks down into other chemicals, including semicarbazide, which can cause cancer in mice 
    • Brominated vegetable oil (BVO): A food additive used in citrus-flavored drinks that may affect the thyroid 

    Other chemicals that are considered hazardous include: 

    Arsenic, Benzene, Chromium, Cadmium, Mercury, Chlorine, Hydrogen cyanide, Nitrous oxide, and Phosgene.

    Chemicals can be toxic in our bodies, so we should read labels carefully and by organic when possible. Also, processed food is an absolute thumbs down! Lamb and fish are better meat choices, and you should only consume whole foods.

    Our government is more worried about what fentanyl is doing to us than the true enemy, which is sugar. White sugar and other sweeteners like high fructose corn syrup are responsible for the obesity problem in America and all of the degenerative diseases that go with it.

    Artificial sweeteners are also known as sugar substitutes, non-nutritive sweeteners, or non-sugar sweeteners (NSS).
    Here are some common artificial sweeteners:
    Aspartame: A non-saccharide sweetener that’s marketed under the names NutraSweet, Equal, and Canderel.

    Acesulfame potassium: Also known as Ace-K, this sweetener is about 200 times sweeter than table sugar.

    Sucralose: A non-caloric derivative of sucrose that’s 600 times sweeter than sucrose.
    Saccharin: A non-nutritive sweetener that’s made in a lab and looks like a white, crystalline powder.
    Neotame: A sweetener derived from the amino acids aspartic acid and phenylalanine.
    Advantame: An ultra-intense sweetener that’s 20,000 times sweeter than table sugar.
    Stevia: A natural herb that’s zero calories and 10–15 times sweeter than sucrose.
    Cyclamate: A potent sweetening agent that’s been the subject of safety and carcinogenicity studies.

    Artificial sweeteners are often used in foods and drinks to reduce sugar intake. They’re generally calorie-free and don’t raise blood sugar levels, but they have no nutritional value.

    So obesity is not a single person’s fault. The FDA has a dominant role in keeping you fat, sick, and unhealthy. There is no profit in healthy people.

  • Accountability is missing in our government

    I have posted on the problems we face because we don’t read. Critical thinking skills go right out the windows when we don’t challenge our minds to think.

    To leave yourself vulnerable to manipulation is a hurtful and disrespectful truth, but what is worse is that you suffer the manipulation, and you have no idea where it came from.

    Drops of water from the sky on a cloudy day are not a problem until the drops smell like urine. At that point, you have a few choices: Check the weather forcast; assume that someone obviously doesn’t like you much; or grab your umbrella and endure.

    I have not listed my favorite option because when you have been tricked or manipulated, the option isn’t there, and that is to hold someone accountable for the urine!

    I bring this up because the Democrats and Republicans have been playing a game with us. They flood us with information (knowing we won’t read or research anything), and they are never held accountable for lies.

    Why would President Biden allow so many illegal immigrants in our country? The Democrats never gave a reason for this. Clearly, this would not be their agenda as President Obama never did this. He publicly stated that if you were here illegally, you would be deported.

    We know Obama did this because it was the law. Republicans are always for less immigration at our southern borders, mainly because it does not benefit them in any way. It does, however, give an advantage to Democrats.

    You see, these immigrants end up in these so-called sanctuary cities, which are normally in blue states. This is a benefit to them because it raises their census. Biden signed an executive order as soon as he became president to halt a previous executive order from President Trump to not count illegal immigrants in the census. Why does this matter? Because the number of seats you get in the House of Representatives is based on a percentage of the US population. So then, if your numbers get padded by immigrants, you could potentially get more seats and control the House.

    Biden, in his fear of a Trump election win, would have tried this and any other method to gain an advantage.

    For the Republicans to tell the truth about this would not have been enough for the American people to get behind securing the border. So, instead, he made up lies about immigrants taking jobs, sending their criminals over to us to rape our women, steal, and sell drugs.

    See how we are so easily manipulated? Accountability is what is needed in our government, and it should be a consequence for knowingly telling the American citizens a bunch of lies!

  • History is who we are and why we are the way we are

    Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” He said it as more of a war cry to call activists and those who care to a sense of urgency regarding injustices. The idea is that if it is allowed in one place, it can be in all places. So then, let us rise up against injustice when we see it because it’s only a matter of time before injustice affects you!

    Injustices have been fluent in America since 1865. That date should sound familiar because it was the year President Abraham Lincoln signed the emancipation proclamation, which freed the slaves in the south. Shortly after this, Lincoln tried to establish a bank for former slaves, but its white board of directors took the money and lost it on bad investments. There was no accountability.

    With the end of slavery in the south, accountability was emancipated completely. Treating a black person wrong was always acceptable as punishment for ending slavery. The time immediately after slavery was very telling because lynching immediately became popular once slavery ended.

    Bastard children, often called mulatto back then, were the result when white men raped very young black girls and impregnated them. These kids were often made orphans because the former slaves owner did not want the child and they would not allow for the victim to have the baby. This injustice became widespread.

    Everyone talks about the destruction of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, OK but that, of course, was not the only time that happened. Time Magazine, in 2021, published an article on the subject and listed other “Black Wall Street” scenarios that many were unaware of because there was never any accountability.

    The article states: “Now, 100 years after the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, awareness of this American tragedy has grown thanks to the work of activists and descendants of victims, local political support, and depictions in the HBO series Watchman and Lovecraft Country. But Tulsa’s was not the only Black Wall Street. The history of other such districts nationwide is still not widely known beyond their home cities, though they were many: Bronzeville in Chicago; Hayti in Durham, N.C.; Sweet Auburn in Atlanta; West Ninth Street in Little Rock, Ark.; and Farish Street in Jackson, Miss.”

    Police brutality toward minorities has been around as long as policing has existed. There are too many cases to name of unarmed Black people being murdered by police because they claimed they feared for their lives.

    The bottom line is that because we violate the famous MLK Jr. quote, we are paying for the widespread lack of accountability because if the injustice didn’t happen to me, why do I care.

    I believe that this lack of accountability negatively affects the reparations’ conversation because many black and whites are ignorant of history. People treat many of the injustices like isolated incidents. Then, the fact that it is widespread means that if we award damages form one incident, we are libel for all the others. This means that justice can never truly be served because America’s history is full of injustices, and to reward them all would be an end to America as we know it.

    Happy Black history month!

  • In sports, we need an acknowledgment of the least valuable player

    Today, for many, can be considered as a hangover day because the Super Bowl was played yesterday. Lots of plans went into watching that game, and many folks will miss work today because of it. Congratulations to the Eagles on the blowout win!

    But I don’t want to talk about the Super Bowl because I live in Detroit, I have to talk about the Lions season.

    For the first time in my lifetime, I heard the media speak about my home team in a different light. They were actually picked as Super Bowl contenders.

    We watched them go 15-2 on the season, win the NFC North, and capture the Number 1 seed in the conference. All season, we saw the Lions overcome adversity to injuries and poor play. We had a great run.

    In their last game, we saw the coaching staff make blunder calls, the bottom finally fell out of our defense, and they could get no stops, and our quarterback, who is 80 percent consistent and reliable, was the least valuable player in the lost.

    We are not used to using this term, but it accurately describes what happened. Jared Goff seemed to be damaged goods when we got him from the L.A. Rams. Our then quarterback, Matthew Stafford, went to the Rams to play in Goff’s place. The year of the trade, he won the Super Bowl for the Rams and was their MVP. They don’t win the big game without him.

    Goff was a major part of the rebuild in Detroit, and it seemed like 2024 was our turn to finally win the Super Bowl. Most of the media predicted it, the fans believed it, but it wasn’t in the stars. We crashed and burned against a 6th seed Washington Commanders team with a rookie quarterback who was an absolute stud. He played like he was a superstar in the league for 10 years. The Lions, on the other hand, did not look deserving of their record, and the Jekyll and Hyde turnaround left fans devastated.

    The city of Detroit was left stunned as the unthinkable happened — we got beat bad on national television! The fans wanted blood. As usual people need to place blame, and it seems unanimous that fans are angry at some of the calls by the coaching staff, but the guy who was supposed to be the golden goose, laid no golden eggs for us.  It seems as though Goff can’t win the big game, and that’s why Sean McVay got rid of him in L.A. He saw something in Goff that wasn’t right and needed a quarterback with heart.

    We can only think about what Stafford would have done with this team as he never had nearly this amount of talent around him when he was here. Detroit has a lot of self reflection to do in the off-season. Time will reveal everything!

  • Immigration isn’t everybody’s issue

    If you looked up, fear mongering in the dictionary, you would see a picture of old Uncle Sam because America’s preferred use of getting a reaction from its citizens is always fear. Politicians and talking heads often want to inform the general public what they are afraid of, and lately immigration is high on the list.

    It seems that the “powers that be” like to use the “magic” approach to politics. They like to distract you with the right hand while stealing from you with the left. Today, that right hand wants us to be concerned about border security. Why?

    We are told that migrant crime is high. It is not. We are told that they will take all of the good jobs. False. Mexico is dumping its prisoners on us. There are far more women and children coming over.

    There are always going to be poverty crimes because you have poor people. So, it makes sense that poor migrants will commit petty crimes at times. The jobs that they work are definitely jobs that Americans would not take. You can tell that our government doesn’t really want to fix this problem based on the amount of help wanted signs at the border. You could leave Mexico on the right day at the right time and have a job in the US within 48 hours.

    But why is this such a big issue or better, what are we avoiding by spending the time talking about this? Well, nothing has been done about the criminal justice system. We still have people in prison for cannabis in places where it is now legal. Nothing has been done about voter suppression. There have been attempts to dump student loan debt, but nothing concrete. And let’s not even begin the conversation on reparations.

    The more we talk about immigration, the less we spend on issues that really matter. If Congress was paid based on the work they completed, our Congress would go broke.

    We must not let what matters to us die on someone’s desk in Washington. We need to make a statement with our voting and even seek even greater ways to get our positions heard.

  • Our political parties have failed us completely

    Next month, our Supreme Court will hear arguments as to whether former president Donald Trump is eligible to run for president given the 91 charges he is facing. The people are confused as to what is really happening because Trump is claiming he is immune from wrongdoing and that the charges are not valid.

    There would have been a time in our recent history that the Republican party would select a more presidential candidate. George Santos was booted out of Congress for all the lying and cheating he has done. How is Trump different?

    Would Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush or George W. Bush approve of such a candidate like Trump? Further, with the danger of election interference by Russia and Trump facing a ton of debt, are we not taking a chance with him being vulnerable to more corruption because of his debt?

    Then there is current president Joe Biden. He might as well be 300 years old because, for some reason, despite the level of stress that comes with the job, would any former president agree with Biden continuing in this role? It is hard to believe that Bill Clinton and Barak Obama would agree that Joe is ready for another term. We know that both parties could support better candidates. But at this point, they can not be trusted.

    The two-party system does not work for this reason. They have lost the trust of the people, and that is probably the only thing that can be agreed on.

    So what is the country to do? This clear, good Ole Boy network in politics has betrayed us. The parties have lost sight of what the people really want. The majority of the people are tired of seeing money by the billions sent overseas, and we have millions of struggling people here.

    We are tired of wars and being involved in wars. We are tired of our government taking care of everyone else by us.

    Solution: All three branches of government need to be replaced. One huge election and nobody over 70 should be allowed to take any position. Our smartest and brightest people are between 40 and 60 years old, and we need to tap into that market. We need to have a greater balance of medical professionals, former teachers, business executives, and blue-collar workers in Congress. We should maintain a third of each. We need to pledge to take care of home first and settle our own issues so that we can reach out together as a country to help others, but not until we are good at home. Finally, we need to be as diverse as the U.N. white people should not dominate the branches. We need to embrace diversity and build a country that works for everyone and not just some.

  • Gambling is the latest self-inflicted wound

    New research from Ohio State University says America has a gambling problem. This is an old problem with a new twist. Just before the pandemic, many states added gambling online and really made it very easy to place a bet.

    Obviously, gambling is a money maker, but what is the cost of making that money? Our young adults used to ruin their credit by signing up for multiple credit cards as companies in the 80s gave away cards to any full-time college students.

    Students who were not mature enough to handle the credit killed their credit scores and graduated with a credit score in the 400 to 500 range. Now gambling has become the new vice. One in 10 college students admit to having a gambling problem. Seventy-five percent of college students have placed a bet in the last 6 months, and 90 percent of the betting was done online.

    What’s worse is that there are many actors, comedians and athletes are being used to market gambling sites to our young people. Kevin Hart, Jamie Foxx, and others have been seen representing various sites.

    There used to be a time when it mattered to the spokesperson what they represented. Stars were picky about what they wanted to lend their name to, but it doesn’t seem to be an issue today.

    As a country with many other issues to deal with, we have now added gambling, and it’s self-inflicted. Things did not have to go this way.

    As if student loans were not enough, students will now have to deal with less than perfect credit in a society that is ruled by credit. Is this another trick to ruin young people before they start? Someone has to consider future generations and spare them this burden. Capitalism is killing us!

  • King’s dream would be different today

    In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did his famous “I have a dream” speech, and it had everything g to do with equality, diversity, and inclusion.

    He dreamed of an America that would serve everyone and allow for freedom for everyone. His speech pointed out our areas that needed work and delivered a hope that things would change.

    Now, more than 60 years later, that dream never came close to happening, but what’s worse is that the country is on the brink of anarchy.

    Politicians are complete sellouts, and the greedy has completely taken over. We live in a time where something caught on camera can’t be trusted. We live in a time of alternative facts and fake news. The Republicans could care less about anyone in America, but themselves and the Democrats are rationing our resources to foreign lands despite all the things we need here.

    King’s speech was about taking care of the republic and making sure that the least of us could make it. Our government has lost sight of that dream.

    At the time of King’s speech, neither candidate for president would be considered a good choice. Joe Biden tried to run for president in 1988 and 2008 before winning in 2020. He copied a British politicians speech and tried to make it his own in 1988, and when he was found out, he dropped out of the race. His work on the 1994 crimes bill and what has happened to more than a million African American men as a result should have kept him out of the oval office forever.

    There is no other era in history where Donald J. Trump would be considered a serious candidate for president. On the issue of integrity alone, he would not pass. This is how far we have fallen.

    King’s speech today would emphasize taking care of America first on every level; canceling student loans; no more wars; universal healthcare; and reforming criminal justice system, prisons, police force, corporate greed and increasing social security benefits.

    If we don’t start taking care of America, there soon won’t be an America!

  • We need to stop the hand out, for a hand up

    Tis the season to be jolly! And in our jolliness we have been know during this time of the year to give hand outs.

    This does happen throughout the year, but definitely, during this time, there are hands out for whatever you can give. There is a segment of our population that really needs the handout. There are some in that population that expect a handout. Some are even living for the handout!

    This needs to change. We do so much during g this time of the year because somewhere, someone came up with the idea that in America, everyone should have Thanksgiving dinner. You need a good meal on that day – never mind the rest of the year – that day is special and it would be a shame for anyone who doesn’t sit down with a formidable feast on that day.

    Well, I believe no one should starve at any time in America. We have too much, we give too much, we help too much, and we have an unemployment rate under 4 percent.

    I guess even if you offered opportunity instead of a handout, there would be some who would not take advantage. The truth is that we have created a culture of people who are lazy, depressed, hurting, grieving, and full of expectations.

    Whether folks realize it or not, opportunity is what they need. The true ability to pull yourself out of a whole is always better than waiting on someone to build you an elevator.

    This country should be the land of opportunity. The American Dream should be for everyone. And it should be known and available to everyone. That is how to make this country great and how we put real “thanks” into Thanksgiving!

  • Election season is one big storm for both parties

    The Republican party sees themselves as this big.

    It is sad that we can not put our trust in either political party. I can’t remember things being this bad, and I’ve been paying attention for nearly 50 years.

    Our criteria need to change. We desperately need an age limit, and I would add a financial limit. Imagine if Congress could only be between the ages of 35 to 65 and could not reside in a household that makes more than 400k? The smartest people in our society are definitely not the richest. The level of greed in our government is killing us and not a benefit to the middle class and poor.

    In addition, we need to give up the party system. We already know that there are conservatives and liberals in both parties already. Neither party has been a benefit to the average American. Further, the rich in Congress is out of touch with what the middle class and poor need.

    This is a perfect symbol of the Democrat party.

    We need good wages and a better credit system that works for us and not against us. We need universal healthcare, and everyone should be able to afford to by a house. For example, instead of loans being based on income, the majority should be based on work consistency. A two parent family should be able to live comfortably in America.

    We spend way too much on the military, and as a country, we don’t need to be involved in everything. We have spent more money on Ukraine than we have provided for our poor in this country.

    Every politician has this Pinocchio effect.

    Corruption is at an all-time high. Promises are made and not honored; a “tit for tat” mentality runs rampant with our government; and far too many people are struggling.

    What was once progression has turned into our demise. We need to take serious notice of the America we think we are. Change is need immediately!