Wednesday, December 30, 2015

The Irony of "Public Health"


Obesity researchers then were eying sugary drinks with great suspicion. For decades, dietary guidelines had told Americans to cut back on fat. When it came to weight gain, most experts thought, a calorie is a calorie, no matter the source. Because fat has more than twice as many calories per gram as carbohydrates or protein, people should avoid fat. Then in the 1990s, some nutrition experts—watching obesity rates surge despite that advice—started rethinking carbohydrates.
Some scientists argued that eating carbs floods the bloodstream with sugar, which triggers a sharp release in the hormone insulin. Insulin brings blood sugar down and also tells the body’s cells to store fat rather than burning it. After a carb-led surge in blood sugar, the scientists argued, the outpouring of insulin is so great that within about two hours the blood sugar level crashes down to below normal. That low blood sugar makes people feel hungry, prompting them to eat more. By this line of thinking, a calorie wasn’t just a calorie.
At around the same time, Dr. Robert Lustig was arguing that sugar is not just another carbohydrate but is uniquely bad—he called it toxic. When the fructose in sugar hits the liver, he said, it sets off a hormonal chain reaction causing chronically high insulin levels that, over years, lead to obesity and diabetes.
Yet another group of researchers was showing that calories in beverages are not nearly as filling as calories in food. In one study, when people ate calories in food they compensated by eating less later in the day, but when they drank their calories they actually ate more food later.
In the end, it didn’t matter much to the health department whether soda leads to weight gain because it delivers unnecessary calories, or because those calories come from carbohydrates, or because those carbohydrates are sugar, or because the sugar is in liquid form. Sugary drinks make people fat.
http://www.salon.com/2015/10/17/coca_colas_sneaky_evil_politics_how_big_soda_twisted_race_and_used_the_koch_brothers_to_fight_a_tax/

The irony here - a public health advocate, cheering for the latest round of government manipulation, who won't tell the rest of the story:  government manipulation pushed the population towards sugar, and was the cause of the obesity epidemic and the resulting costs to the national health care coffers.  All those "life saving medications" we are paying for are largely those that treat hypertension, vascular diseases and the diabetes that causes them (and probably causes many cancers too).

The Koch brothers work to their own self interest by opposing government over reach, and make enemies in the process because so many love government over-reach.  Coke exists to sell a toxic product and probably cannot face up to that fact and survive.  Coke and the sugar industry did a fabulous job using the idiots in federal government to manipulate the public's perception of the risks of sugar ingestion whilst those same federal government idiots were telling the public to avoid fat. Neither Coke or any other citizen or business entity on their own did even a fraction of the damage in human health and suffering that our government has.

Will the government lovers ever acknowledge the shortened lives and suffering on their hands?  

Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Out of Control Executive

I doubt Donald T would do anything to reel in this out of control executive branch.  Instead, he's double down.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/428882/obama-violate-constitution-top-ten-2015

Friday, December 11, 2015

A Rational Case for Gun Ownership | RealClearPolitics


An interesting read, but he certainly misses the point that the "original intent" was that government should not be powerful enough to disarm the citizenry it supposedly serves.

The fundamental error of gun-control advocates is philosophical: They do not really believe that we have free will. 

If the goal is to reduce gun murders, the obvious means is to establish stronger punishment for criminals. Since the overwhelming majority of shooting deaths are by people with prior felony arrests, and since only about 1 percent of such shootings are by legal gun owners who are committing a crime, why is the primary focus on the law-abiding individual? Why isn't there a greater demand for longer sentences for felonies, or for the elimination of parole or for the construction of more prisons?  

Obama Care - Needs CPR?


So let’s recap. Obamacare has depressed job growth, costs are escalating at a higher rate, barely a dent has been made in the numbers of uninsured, and insurers are either exiting the markets or failing altogether. Under any other circumstances, a program that failed on its promises so badly would have all sides moving quickly to repeal it and work on a replacement.
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2015/12/10/Obamacare-s-Condition-Has-Gone-Critical-Life-Support

"What men imagine they can design."

Wednesday, December 9, 2015

AGW Cuts

The stupidity of the climate summit:
The reason that there will not be a legally binding agreement (or at least not a genuinely enforceable one) is the growth of something which the Left has always called for, but doesn’t quite like when it gets it – the power of the developing world. India, for example, sees it as “carbon imperialism” for the West to deny it the fossil-fuelled industrialisation which gave us a more than 100 years’ start on the rest of the world. A great many formerly backward countries are at last getting rich and they will not sacrifice their new prosperity on the altar of eco-virtue. Nearly seven years ago, at COP 15 in Copenhagen, Barack Obama, bearing his Nobel Prize and at the height of his moral prestige, pleaded with them, to no avail. What will make them listen to him now, in the twilight of his presidency?

The genuine end of the colonial era and the rising power of what used to be called the Third World is producing several such effects. Non-Europeans feel bold enough to challenge the sacred doctrines of our elites. Within the Anglican Communion, for example, Western churches tend to see homophobia as the worst of all sins, but African ones persist in the teaching of all mainstream Christianity everywhere in history, which is that marriage is between a man and a woman.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/climatechange/12023819/The-end-is-nigh-for-climate-change-activists.html

Another telling one:
Congress is focused on one small aspect of NOAA’s temperature fraud – the changes they made to eliminate the hiatus ahead of Paris. This was needed by the White House to give Obama a big lie to push his agenda in Paris. The hiatus killed their whole story.
But that is just the tip of the iceberg. Look at the massive fraud NOAA is engaged in at Indiana. They show Indiana warming at 0.1F (0.05 rounded up) per decade. Note the large spike after 1999.
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2015/11/22/noaa-data-tampering-much-worse-than-it-seems/

Number 3:
There has been no warming since the start of the record. Yet the current version of GISS, which is based on adjusted GHCN data, has miraculously morphed into a sharply rising trend.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/11/26/massive-tampering-with-south-african-temperatures/

Pressure Cooker Control

After all, California already has strict gun control, as does France, which just had its second terrorist massacre this year. Not to mention that the one time when terrorists with assault rifles and body armor were foiled, it was because an off-duty traffic cop in Garland, Texas, was carrying a gun—and used it to shoot the two heavily armed Islamists before they could kill anyone. 
Or that “common sense gun control” would have done nothing to stop Richard Reid (the unsuccessful shoe-bomber); the Tsarnaev brothers in Boston (pressure cookers) or the 9/11 hijackers (box-cutters). Maybe the president should be demanding common sense pressure-cooker control.
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/the-liberal-theology-of-gun-control-1449533861-lMyQjAxMTE1ODAxODgwNjgwWj

Monday, December 7, 2015

Liberals Don't Understand Guns or Violence or the Law

Here the relevant case study is probably not Australia, but France. The French have the kind of strict gun laws that American liberals favor, and they have fewer gun deaths than we do. But their strict gun laws are part of a larger matrix of illiberalism — a mix of Bloombergist police tactics, Trump-like disdain for religious liberty, and campus-left-style restrictions on free speech. (And then France also has a lively black market in weaponry, which determined terrorists unfortunately seem to have little difficulty acquiring.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/06/opinion/sunday/liberalisms-gun-problem.html?ref=opinion&_r=1

So they say stupid stuff that makes it hard not to hold them in contempt.