By Melissa Dykes

What happens to your health freedom under government healthcare? UK judge rules hospital can withdraw life support for baby against parents’ wishes after doctors say he has brain damage.  Death panels are real.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2saOEsxbGVo?feature=oembed&w=777&h=437]

Aaron & Melissa Dykes are the founders of TruthstreamMedia.com, Subscribe to them on YouTube, like on Facebook, follow on Twitter, support on Patreon.

Watch their mini-documentary Obsolete here and their new series The Cold Noir here.

By LocalOrg

Here is a list of 10 things Americans should have been doing to strengthen their communities and empower themselves sociopolitically, economically, and technologically over the past 2 years instead of having obsessed over the ultimately irrelevant process known as Election 2016.

It is ultimately irrelevant because regardless of who wins, just like in 2008 when Barack Obama took office, all of the abuses and wars raging now will continue, and all the wars meant to begin under the previous president will be justified and executed under whoever the new president happens to be.

Imagine if you accomplished even one of these 10 things in the list below over the past 2 years, and if many more did so as well. What a world we would live in instead of clinging to the false hope of some establishment representative finally “changing things” for us instead of just stringing us along for another 4 years…

1. Start a local organic farm:  takes about 1-2 years if you seek guidance from others already doing it.

2. Visit your local makerspace/hackerspace to learn a new skill: can take as little as 1-2 weeks to learn a new skill.

By Scott Lazarowitz

It should be of no surprise that establishment Republicans in Congress are rearranging the deck chairs from ObamaCare to “ObamaCare Lite,” in their saving the Affordable Care Act (ACA) from being fully repealed.

But conservative opponents, such as Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee, who want ObamaCare fully repealed, are still not going far enough.

The problem is that other government entitlement schemes are interconnected with ObamaCare, and avoiding the “pain” of change would require repealing the other schemes. After all, the reason why medical care has gotten so expensive is because of government interventions, which distort decision-making by medical care providers, drug makers and patients, and drives up the prices, as Hunter Lewis writes at the Mises Institute.

Lewis acknowledges that there will be difficulties after ACA is repealed. Some people may lose their health care plans inflicted by ObamaCare.

However, when ObamaCare became law many people lost their insurance plans and doctors, despite President Obama’s promises to the contrary. Many employers changed full-time jobs to part-time, and many doctors retired early because of the demands of ObamaCare.

As Rand Paul stated in a recent interview with Sean Hannity, rather than expanding subsidies or Medicaid he wants to “expand the economy.”

By Joe Jarvis

That’s what this world needs: skills. Raw resources are useless without the skill to properly apply them.

There are skills for financial gain, skills for personal gain, and skills for a backup plan. Most of them overlap; something once a hobby can become a career, for instance becoming a tennis instructor. Or a skill that is a “backup plan” can become the bread and butter in an emergency, like keeping bees or growing a garden.

Do you enjoy earning money in currency trading? In case your interests have switched towards the forex market as a way of financial skills obtaining, there’s virtually no time than now! There are many online futures brokers to choose from and the best one is futures broker uk that provides a large variety of services to its clients.

Tangible assets are a needed hedge when it seems everything–the stock market, real estate, bonds–are overvalued or in a bubble. A good useful skill is as tangible an asset as they get. And unlike resources, a skill cannot so easily be taken from you.

Most people understand the need to acquire some sort of work skills in order to make money, be productive, and create wealth. But a lot of people decide to be trained in skills that other people, organizations, society, or those in power tell them they should desire. And then, they usually stop after acquiring one major skill.

But just like we diversify investments in order to spread risk, the same makes sense when it comes to the skills you invest your time to acquire. Be creative in your skill-set. There is really no one that can tell you what will be best for you, or for future job markets, or in an emergency.

Sometimes the demand for a particular skill can disappear as technology advances and years of training can become practically useless. In this situation, it makes sense to have something to fall back on so you aren’t forced into a low-skill labor job just to make ends meet.

In fact, some of the most successful people have gotten to their final career destination by melding a seemingly random mixture of skills. Yoky Matsuoka is a Japanese woman who was a semi-pro tennis player in her younger years but went to school for technology and ended up in robotics. She was interested in the complex way the arm and hands moved during a game of tennis, and by combining her love of tennis with robotics, she helped develop the most state of the art robotic hand yet seen.

[Read about Matsuoka and other “Masters” in Robert Green’s Mastery. I listened to it on Audible during my free trial. Try Audible and Get Two Free Audiobooks.]

It always makes sense to have a plan b as well, to have something to fall back on. This could be in the event of losing a job or being stranded in the wilderness, or the economy collapsing.

There are certain skills that protect you from ruin in a really dire situation. For example, if an EMP attack took out the power grid, would you rather have 20 Bitcoin, or the ability to forage for wild edible plants? If you need to protect yourself in an L.A. riot type situation, a gun is a great resource, but it is practically useless without the skill to hit the target.

But backup training and useful hobbies don’t just have to apply to apocalyptic scenarios. Learning graphic design might be a fun side project that also gives you a backup plan if you lose your job. Being forced into a career change is not a far-fetched “catastrophe” for which to plan.

One skill I enjoy sharpening is foraging for wild edible and medicinal plants. In the event of a zombie apocalypse, I would be able to survive better. Let’s face it, I’m a bit of a prepper, so being able to find food in a natural environment gives me a sense of freedom, knowing that I wouldn’t immediately starve to death if left to my own devices.

In fact, though I am only an amateur forager currently, I think I might have enough skills to die very slowly if I suddenly had to forage for all my food. So slowly, in fact, that I may even hone those skills in the meantime enough to prevent the death. What I should do is start practicing complimentary skills like hunting and fishing so that I always have a way to find food, as long as I have access to nature. Here’s a video with a little foraging overview of wild edible plants where I live.

Secret $1.8 Million Cryptocurrency Script

It makes sense to pursue things you are passionate about because otherwise there just won’t be enough energy and fervor put into shaping a skill to be useful.

Anything that seems like a fun hobby where a skill must be gained, there is no harm in pursuing it. In the short term, it will be a fun side activity but might become quite valuable in the long run. A friend of mine enjoyed singing for the elderly at assisted living and nursing homes. When he was unexpectedly let go from his job, he managed to turn his singing into a full-time career where he makes as much if not more money than before and enjoys much more freedom.

Often our skills end up being melded with others to form a unique type of skill-set with endless combinations. It’s the same reason why there can be infinite songs if you arrange a limited number of notes in different ways. Well, there are more skills than musical notes, and more are being invented every day. This provides for an endless combination of skills to be innovative in our hobbies, backup plans, and career goals.

I use examples from my own life about the type of freedom I pursue, and the skills which interest me, but that doesn’t mean these are the only or best ways to go. I really want to hear from all of you in the comments what you have done to diversify your skill-set. I bet we will find quite the diversity.

Joe Jarvis writes for The Daily Bell, where this article first appeared.

Image Credit: Pixabay

By Joe Jarvis

How many successful people can there be? It seems like, after every article you read these days, the author bio talks about a book they have written, an invention they created, a prestigious award or some other indicator of great success. Yet I’ve never really heard of most of them.

I used to get pangs of jealousy when I would see descriptions like that of successful people; it almost felt like there were a limited number of “success” spots on planet earth, and if they were taking one up, it made it that much less likely for me to get one.

But it’s not true. There is no limit to the number of successful people that can exist, especially since everyone has a slightly different idea of success.

And in the same vein, there is no limit to how many wealthy people there can be. Wealth is not a zero-sum game, there is not some amount of wealth out there that once it is grabbed, is gone. Anyone can create wealth. Growing a garden is a great place to start creating the necessities to live and giving yourself a little food shortage insurance plan.

When people say the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, that is a huge misrepresentation of what is really happening, even if the rich have far more compared to the poor.