This monthly selection partly replaces the sort of posts that I used to put up on "THE PSYCHOLOGIST". Google deleted that blog. I will not post daily here but I will repost here any comments that I have myself just written that I think might be helpful as a corrective to Left-leaning or conventional thinking.



Email me at jonjayray@gmail.com. Links to all my blogs: here

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15 September, 2024

Truths that may not be mentioned

It has been known for over a century that there are fewer women than men in the top echelons of IQ -- and in mathematics even more so. But we live in an era of such heavy censorship that any mention of that must be fiercely suppressed


In the highly controversial area of human intelligence, the ‘Greater Male Variability Hypothesis’ (GMVH) asserts that there are more idiots and more geniuses among men than among women. Darwin’s research on evolution in the nineteenth century found that, although there are many exceptions for specific traits and species, there is generally more variability in males than in females of the same species throughout the animal kingdom.

Evidence for this hypothesis is fairly robust and has been reported in species ranging from adders and sockeye salmon to wasps and orangutans, as well as humans. Multiple studies have found that boys and men are over-represented at both the high and low ends of the distributions in categories ranging from birth weight and brain structures and 60-meter dash times to reading and mathematics test scores. There are significantly more men than women, for example, among Nobel laureates, music composers, and chess champions—and also among homeless people, suicide victims, and federal prison inmates.

Darwin had also raised the question of why males in many species might have evolved to be more variable than females, and when I learned that the answer to his question remained elusive, I set out to look for a scientific explanation. My aim was not to prove or disprove that the hypothesis applies to human intelligence or to any other specific traits or species, but simply to discover a logical reason that could help explain how gender differences in variability might naturally arise in the same species.

I came up with a simple intuitive mathematical argument based on biological and evolutionary principles and enlisted Sergei Tabachnikov, a Professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University, to help me flesh out the model. When I posted a preprint on the open-access mathematics archives in May of last year, a variability researcher at Durham University in the UK got in touch by email. He described our joint paper as “an excellent summary of the research to date in this field,” adding that “it certainly underpins my earlier work on impulsivity, aggression and general evolutionary theory and it is nice to see an actual theoretical model that can be drawn upon in discussion (which I think the literature, particularly in education, has lacked to date). I think this is a welcome addition to the field.”

So far, so good.

Once we had written up our findings, Sergei and I decided to try for publication in the Mathematical Intelligencer, the ‘Viewpoint’ section of which specifically welcomes articles on contentious topics. The Intelligencer’s editor-in-chief is Marjorie Wikler Senechal, Professor Emerita of Mathematics and the History of Science at Smith College. She liked our draft, and declared herself to be untroubled by the prospect of controversy. “In principle,” she told Sergei in an email, “I am happy to stir up controversy and few topics generate more than this one. After the Middlebury fracas, in which none of the protestors had read the book they were protesting, we could make a real contribution here by insisting that all views be heard, and providing links to them.”

Professor Senechal suggested that we might enliven our paper by mentioning Harvard President Larry Summers, who was swiftly defenestrated in 2005 for saying that the GMVH might be a contributing factor to the dearth of women in physics and mathematics departments at top universities. With her editorial guidance, our paper underwent several further revisions until, on April 3, 2017, our manuscript was officially accepted for publication. The paper was typeset in India, and proofread by an assistant editor who is also a mathematics professor in Kansas. It was scheduled to appear in the international journal’s first issue of 2018, with an acknowledgement of funding support to my co-author from the National Science Foundation. All normal academic procedure.

Coincidentally, at about the same time, anxiety about gender-parity erupted in Silicon Valley. The same anti-variability argument used to justify the sacking of President Summers resurfaced when Google engineer James Damore suggested that several innate biological factors, including gender differences in variability, might help explain gender disparities in Silicon Valley hi-tech jobs. For sending out an internal memo to that effect, he too was summarily fired.

No sooner had Sergei posted a preprint of our accepted article on his website than we began to encounter problems. On August 16, a representative of the Women In Mathematics (WIM) chapter in his department at Penn State contacted him to warn that the paper might be damaging to the aspirations of impressionable young women. “As a matter of principle,” she wrote, “I support people discussing controversial matters openly … At the same time, I think it’s good to be aware of the effects.” While she was obviously able to debate the merits of our paper, she worried that other, presumably less sophisticated, readers “will just see someone wielding the authority of mathematics to support a very controversial, and potentially sexist, set of ideas…”

A few days later, she again contacted Sergei on behalf of WIM and invited him to attend a lunch that had been organized for a “frank and open discussion” about our paper. He would be allowed 15 minutes to describe and explain our results, and this short presentation would be followed by readings of prepared statements by WIM members and then an open discussion. “We promise to be friendly,” she announced, “but you should know in advance that many (most?) of us have strong disagreements with what you did.”

On September 4, Sergei sent me a weary email. “The scandal at our department,” he wrote, “shows no signs of receding.” At a faculty meeting the week before, the Department Head had explained that sometimes values such as academic freedom and free speech come into conflict with other values to which Penn State was committed. A female colleague had then instructed Sergei that he needed to admit and fight bias, adding that the belief that “women have a lesser chance to succeed in mathematics at the very top end is bias.” Sergei said he had spent “endless hours” talking to people who explained that the paper was “bad and harmful” and tried to convince him to “withdraw my name to restore peace at the department and to avoid losing whatever political capital I may still have.” Ominously, “analogies with scientific racism were made by some; I am afraid, we are likely to hear more of it in the future.”

The following day, I wrote to the three organisers of the WIM lunch and offered to address any concrete concerns they might have with our logic or conclusions or any other content. I explained that, since I was the paper’s lead author, it was not fair that my colleague should be expected to take all the heat for our findings. I added that it would still be possible to revise our article before publication. I never received a response.

Instead, on September 8, Sergei and I were ambushed by two unexpected developments.

First, the National Science Foundation wrote to Sergei requesting that acknowledgment of NSF funding be removed from our paper with immediate effect. I was astonished. I had never before heard of the NSF requesting removal of acknowledgement of funding for any reason. On the contrary, they are usually delighted to have public recognition of their support for science.

The ostensible reason for this request was that our paper was unrelated to Sergei’s funded proposal. However, a Freedom of Information request subsequently revealed that Penn State WIM administrator Diane Henderson (“Professor and Chair of the Climate and Diversity Committee”) and Nate Brown (“Professor and Associate Head for Diversity and Equity”) had secretly co-signed a letter to the NSF that same morning. “Our concern,” they explained, “is that [this] paper appears to promote pseudoscientific ideas that are detrimental to the advancement of women in science, and at odds with the values of the NSF.” Unaware of this at the time, and eager to err on the side of compromise, Sergei and I agreed to remove the acknowledgement as requested. At least, we thought, the paper was still on track to be published.

But, that same day, the Mathematical Intelligencer’s editor-in-chief Marjorie Senechal notified us that, with “deep regret,” she was rescinding her previous acceptance of our paper. “Several colleagues,” she wrote, had warned her that publication would provoke “extremely strong reactions” and there existed a “very real possibility that the right-wing media may pick this up and hype it internationally.” For the second time in a single day I was left flabbergasted. Working mathematicians are usually thrilled if even five people in the world read our latest article. Now some progressive faction was worried that a fairly straightforward logical argument about male variability might encourage the conservative press to actually read and cite a science paper?

In my 40 years of publishing research papers I had never heard of the rejection of an already-accepted paper.

https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-published-paper-down-the-memory-hole/

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12 September, 2024

Australia: Wild moment ABC reporter is swarmed by anti-war protesters as chaos grips Melbourne for the second day in a row

Being "anti-war" is childish. These "anti-war" protestors are just egotists doing self display under the pretence that they are saying something original. As a former army psychologist, I think I can can assure everyone that soldiers are anti-war too. They get shot at in wars. But like most people they can see that wars and preparations for war can be needed for defence and are prepared to do something about that instead of closing their eyes to reality

Protesters gathered for the second straight day on Thursday morning to rally against the Land Forces Defence Expo being held at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.

After wild scenes on Wednesday, which saw protesters clashing with police, throwing horse manure and rocks, while officers made arrests and swung batons, tensions were high on day two.

Violence was sparked when ABC reporter Stephanie Ferrier and multiple security guards were interrupted by protestors during a live cross.

It marks the latest instance a journalist has been caught up in the protests after a Daily Mail Australia journalist was shot with rubber bullets by police.

During the ABC live cross, a protester walked in front of the camera and was pushed aside by a security guard.

The protester then appeared to swing a punch at the security guard.

A second security guard then stepped in and appeared to shove the protesters.

Another attendee at the rally could be seen breaking up the fight and urging the pair to 'calm down'.

'At the moment, we're obviously trying to report on this and we're getting a little bit of difficulty here,' the reporter says.

As the reporter attempted to move away from the crowd, more people follow her.

The tense scenes come after Channel 7 Sunrise reporter Teegan Dolling was swarmed by protesters on Wednesday.

One female protester put her hand over the camera lens, Dolling pushed her arm away and what appeared to be private security guarding the reporter stepped in, but the protester managed to put hands on the camera at least one more time.

'That's not on if people are actually mishandling our reporter,' host Natalia Barr said from the studio.

In the hours after the protest, she penned a piece for 7News where she described the protest as 'vile and violent'.

'First there was the stench of OC spray in the air, then came the overwhelming smell of vomit, as protesters threw water balloons filled with sick at police, delegates and media,' Dolling wrote.

'Ducking for cover as padlocks, apples, chairs and horse manure were hurled towards anyone the activists assume held different views.'

She said Melbourne had once been the most liveable country in the world and has seen many protests, but 'none this vile and violent'.

'The aggression came in waves, as police surged towards the 2000-strong group to remove them from the road, escort members of the public to safety, or to extinguish flames,' she wrote.

Ms Dolling said protesters did not heed directions to move and reacted with attacks on police and cruelty towards horses.

It was the city's largest protest in 24 years and resulted in 42 people being arrested.

Disrupt Land Forces say they will continue to protest during the remainder of the conference this week.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13840671/ABC-reporter-anti-war-protest-Melbourne.html

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9 September, 2024

Single-sex schools ‘discriminate’, says principal

This is an old debate with no clear resolution so it is a pity to force it on to anyone. Single sex schools do seem to be good for academic results and don't seem to diminish the enthusiasm of boys and girls for one-another

The principal of a southwest Sydney boys high school, soon to merge with its neighbouring girls school and become co-ed, has referred to single-sex education as “a discriminatory structure”, as the institutions aim to bring together their distinct cultures and ways of teaching.

The principals of both Liverpool Boys and Liverpool Girls high schools are supportive of the merging of their government institutions to become co-ed by 2027.

Principal Michael Saxon, in a report by Western Sydney University, commissioned by himself and Liverpool Girls High School principal Kirstine Gonano ahead of the amalgamation, said it would be a positive step towards diversity and anti-discriminatory practice.

“I think that co-ed will give us back the richness that should exist in every school, and that sense of diversity,” he told researchers. “Single-sex schools are really a discriminatory structure, not sure how they comply with discrimination laws. Co-ed structure gets rid of that discrimination, and we get much better balance in terms of gender and sexuality diversities.”

The 141-page report looked at the differences between teaching practices and culture at the schools ahead of the merger to determine the best way forward and to ensure all stakeholders were represented. Researchers surveyed a small sample of students and about 25 per cent of teachers.

Numerous teachers at LGHS expressed directly to their female students pessimism about teaching male pupils, and about the merger, according to students, with warnings it may “exacerbate the complexities of the transition”.

In a section about the girls’ views on the merger, researchers wrote: “Negative commentary from teachers about boys in general, and about the school merger specifically, is circulating and spreading among the students at LGHS and may entrench stereotypical views about gender and learning”.

One LGHS year 12 student said: “We’ve had teachers complain that they don’t want to teach boys … if not all our teachers, almost all our teachers.”

Ms Gonano told The Australian many teachers’ opinions had changed since the survey was done earlier this year, just after the government confirmed the merger.

She said some of the comments were reflective of the general fear of change, which included the fact there would be 2000 students, up from 1200, and a new high-rise school building. “The co-ed thing isn’t really a thing,” she added.

The NSW government has made a commitment that every student in the state will have guaranteed access to a co-educational public high school by 2027. It previously said 56 per cent of future Liverpool High School parents stated a preference for a co-educational school, and the merger was celebrated by local MPs.

Throughout the study, staff at LGHS argued that what makes the school unique is that it is extremely multicultural and single-sex, which “empowered” its students. “As the school is very multicultural it is essential that the school shows the girls from different backgrounds that there are a wide range of roles for women in society,” the report noted.

Ms Gonano told The Australian: “Our teachers are very committed to school culture and teaching our students, but whether that’s about single-sex education or about empowering the young females in our school … they’re two very different views”.

Boys and girls at both schools also had mixed views about the merger, their main concern being increased distractions in the classroom. Other students believed it would expand their opportunities and resources.

Researchers recommended school management expand “respectful relationship education” ahead of the merger to address issues such as sexual harassment, misogyny and homophobia – with the latter described by students as a “massive issue” – and to introduce gender awareness training, and boost availability of counsellors and mental health resources.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/education/singlesex-schools-discriminate-says-principal/news-story/3c3174fbe532dea9715e64ee5dfda77c

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6 September, 2024

The WAR against OUR Past: inside the ideological project to undermine our history and collective memory

Matt Goodwin below rightly notes the decline in British patriotism and shows how that is a loss. He fails to take note of the fact that it is almost entirely the political Left that is pushing that. So to understand that you have to go down into the psychology of the Left. WHY are they so corrosive of British national identity?

There a number of reasons but a major one is that they are born gloomy. The genetic studies show a strong inherited element in political orientation and the research also shows that your happiness level is largely preset. Most of the time a person is either happy or gloomy or somewhere in between.

So the really interesting question is how the gloomy ones have gained so much influence

Most of the answer is fairly clear. We live in a broadly very sucessful society that is kinder to its people than any previous society has been. And that seems fragile to many people. They fear that it might all collapse. So when the Left come out with all their doom and gloom prophecies, They are closely attended to in case they are onto something. The global warming nonsense is an example of that

And patriotism is also an easy concern. There have been notable examples of people's patriotism being disatrously misused by politicians, notably Adolf Hitler. So anti-patriotism has emerged as a a barrier to a possibly destructive phenomenon.

But patriotism has many psychological benefits, particularly feelings of belonging and solidarity, so the attacks on it can destroy much that is beneficial to people. The gloomy Left are good at detecting possible dangers and that gets attention to them


Here’s a story you might have missed. The British people’s pride in their history has collapsed to a historic low. At least, that’s according to brand new findings from something called the British Social Attitudes survey, which has been tracking what the British think since the 1980s. Here’s what the survey found.

Over the last decade, the Brits have become much less likely to feel pride in their country’s history and achievements. And the numbers are truly striking.

Consider this. In 2013, 86% of all Brits said they were proud of Britain’s history. Today? The figure has collapsed to 64%.

And in 2013, while 62% of Brits said they would rather be a citizen of Britain than anywhere else in the world, today just 49% think this way.

What’s going on? Well, the expert class will tell you this reflects wider changes in British society and, in particular, people’s changing conceptions of who we are.

There are basically two stories of our national identity.

The first, cherished by the elite class, is of a diverse, multicultural, pro-immigration society that largely defines its identity by its celebration of diversity.

This is what we might call a ‘civic’ conception of our national identity, a thinner vision which puts the emphasis on respecting laws and welcoming others.

The second, cherished by lots of people outside the elite class, is of a proud country that has withstood all invaders since the Norman Conquest, and which enjoys a rich and unique historic and cultural legacy that needs to be cherished and preserved.

This is what we might call an ‘ethno-traditional’ of our national identity —a thicker vision which rejects racism but also puts more emphasis on our shared history, ancestry, and distinctive culture and ways of life.

Today, according to the British Social Attitudes survey, the British are gradually moving away from this second vision of who they are to embrace the first —which explains why they are less wedded to things like their history.

As the country’s population is becoming more diverse, university-educated, and as younger Zoomers from Generation-Z and Millennials are steadily replacing older Baby Boomers —with immigrants, graduates, and younger people more likely to embrace this civic vision— more and more people are viewing Britishness or Englishness in these terms, repacking their identity around universal liberal themes like celebrating diversity while downplaying their distinctive ancestry and history.

At least, this is the narrative the elite class promote, largely because it reflects how the elite class like to think about their own national identity.

But there are two problems with this.

The first, as we’ve seen through things like the rise of UKIP, Brexit, Boris Johnson, and now the Reform party, is that, actually, millions of people still think there is much more to Britishness and Englishness than a hollow celebration of ‘diversity’.

While the elite class is wants to repackage our identity around these universal themes —saying the only thing that defines us is that we celebrate diversity and multiculturalism— many other people think ‘no, hang on on a minute, there is something distinctive and unique about coming from these islands and we don’t want all this unique history and culture to be pushed aside for things that could just as easily apply to many other countries around the world’.

As I said last night on television, to say that a nation is welcoming of things like ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ is fine. But it cannot be the entire basis of your identity because if the only thing that defines you is that you welcome others then it’s like saying you have no real identity of you own.

And many people in Britain and England, like many people across the West, do think they have a unique, distinctive, special identity that cannot simply be pushed aside in favour of a rather bland celebration of immigration, diversity and multiculturalism.

The second problem with this elite interpretation of who we are is that it completely ignores an alternative hypothesis for why people’s pride in their history and culture is declining —and this owes more to ideology than demographic change.

As Professor Frank Furedi argues in an important new book, The War Against the Past: Why the West Must Fight for its History, over the last twenty years, across the West, members of the elite class have simply declared war on our past and history.

Cancel culture, Furedi argues, has now moved from focusing on the present towards imposing its narrative on how we view our past and history. The goal of radically revising if not cancelling our cultural inheritance is pursued by reorganising society’s historical memory and disputing and delegitimating its ideals and achievement.

To achieve this objective, the elite class consciously erase the temporal distinction between the present and the past.

This is why they target historic symbols of our identity and Western culture more generally, as if these things constitute a clear and present danger to their wellbeing.

This is why great historical figures of Western science and philosophy – David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Charles Darwin, among many others – are attacked and condemned for their values and behaviour, as if they are our contemporaries.

And this is why this war against our past, against our history, is relentlessly pursued in the institutions that incubate our young people, including our taxpayer-funded universities and schools. We are funding an attack on our own history, in other words.

Increasingly, as I’ve been pointing out for a while, teachers and the curriculum rely on teaching materials and dubious theories such as Critical Race Theory (CRT), which essentially encourage our children to think negatively about their own history, identity, and the West. Routinely, they’re taught there is more bad than good in our history and cultural inheritance when the very opposite is true.

The curriculum guidelines suggest the deeds of the British Empire are somehow comparable to those of Nazi Germany, while children are taught to be critical of their own history, and the history of the West, while comparable examples of imperialism and slavery in non-Western states —including ones still taking place today—are routinely downplayed or simply ignored. In effect, these guidelines seek to make our children feel ashamed about their nation’s past and, by extension, their ancestors.

At the root of this is not just the elite’s desire to repackage our identity around a universal liberal celebration of diversity and multiculturalism but, more accurately, around a conception of ‘asymmetrical multiculturalism’, whereby the British and English are told to celebrate the distinctive identity, history, and culture of minorities while simultaneously being told to forget, downplay, or criticise their own distinctive history and identity, and repackage them instead around universal liberal themes.

As Furedi argues, this elite project of estranging society from its historical and cultural inheritance is proving to be remarkably successful. It is drifting out from the educational institutions and being reinforced by the creative and cultural industries, where the continual revision of our history and past is now visible in everything from Netflix to the latest Hollywood films.

Those who resist, such as by flying the flag, are condemned as ‘far-right bigots’, while icons of our identity and history, from William Shakespeare to Winston Churchill, are continually demonised as the personification of ‘white supremacy’. The absurdity of this imperative to render toxic every great individual of Britain’s past is highlighted by the attempt to turn Shakespeare’s hero, Henry 5th, into a war criminal.

This deep-seated mistrust of tradition and our history also extends to the family, going so far as to warn mothers and fathers to be wary of the child rearing practices used by parents in previous times. The advice and views of grandparents is frequently attacked as irrelevant and possibly prejudicial to the development of the child by so-called ‘parenting experts’. As a result of the institutionalisation of these attitudes, children are no longer socialised into the values that were held by their grandparents, and certainly not by their more distant ancestors. As Furedi notes:

“It is through the alienation of society from its history that opponents of Western Culture seek to gain moral and political hegemony. The stakes are high in this conflict since the project of contaminating the past diminishes the capacity of society to endow people’s life with meaning. A society that becomes ashamed of its historical legacy invariably loses its way. It weakens society’s capacity to socialise children and dooms them to a state of a permanent crisis of identity. It is our responsibility to the young to ensure that they have access to the legacy of the past.”

Human-beings, he points out, are historical animals. The past lives on through us. Or, as Shakespeare reminded us through the Earl of Warwick: ‘There is a history in all men’s lives’. The possession of a sense of the past is integral to what it means to be human. If this sensibility is culturally devalued and people become desensitised to its use then, increasingly, our public life will fall under the spell of social amnesia, which is perhaps what those latest survey results are at least partly reflecting.

Ultimately, it is through our connection with the traditions of past and their cultural inheritance that people learn to understand their place in the world. Without this sense of connection our identity of being part of a wider, distinctive community and nation becomes emptied of meaning. And so, in turn, do we.

The harm that is now being done by this war on the past is all too evident in the contemporary world. And it is our young people, growing up with a weak and troubled sense of connection with what preceded them, who are the human casualties of this war. As Winston Churchill said, ‘a nation that forgets its past has no future’.

https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/the-war-against-our-past-inside-the

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5 September, 2024

More "colonialism" lies in Australia

The article about Aborigines below is grossly misleading. In my usual pesky way, I have gone back to the original source and read the Act concerned. It is here:

https://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/vic/hist_act/tapa1886265.pdf

The Act was a genuinely charitable act designed to protect and support Aborigines in various ways and says NOTHING about taking part-Aboriginal children away from their parents.

It is in fact thoroughly modern in that it defines who is an Aborigine by their associations. Regardless of your ancestry, you are an Aborigine if you associate with Aborigines. A person who is of mixed ancestry can still be an Aborigine for legal purposes. That is pretty much still the law to this day

Amazng! Our ancestors have been greatly and unfairly vilified by biased reporting


The great-grandson of Australia's second Prime Minister has apologised to Aboriginal Australians for the harm inflicted by his ancestor.

Peter Sharp, a descendant of Alfred Deakin, believes the role his great-grandfather played in enabling the devastating Stolen Generations has been downplayed.

The revelation was heard at Victoria's Yoorrook Justice Commission which is investigating claims of ill treatment of Aboriginal people since colonisation.

Mr Sharp said he had grown up believing his famous ancestor was a 'wonderful man', 'a storyteller' and a 'playful' person but had discovered the truth in 2017.

'To all those viewing, who themselves have been and still are being impacted by the introduction of laws and policies in which a member of my family played such a significant role, I say that I am personally and profoundly sorry,' he said.

'It came as a shock to learn that the attempted elimination [of First Nations peoples] continued after frontier violence diminished and I say 'diminished' because it really probably hasn't ended.

'It was a greater shock when I stumbled on the evidence that indicated that a member of my own family had enabled the attempted elimination to be put into law.'

Mr Deakin was a young minister in the Victorian government that passed the Aborigines Protection Act 1886.

Commonly known as the Half-Caste Act, it sought to remove children of mixed Aboriginal and European heritage from indigenous communities to be raised by the state.

The Victorian law was matched in various forms by the English colonies that then existed across Australia prior to federation in 1901.

The practice of removing children from Aboriginal communities has been termed the Stolen Generation, and many studies have testified to the impact upon Aboriginal families then and into the future.

Mr Sharp believes Mr Deakin, then Victoria's chief secretary, had intentionally destroyed the state's Aboriginal population in order to create a 'White Australia'.

'I believe that now after nearly 140 years, the evidence shows that Deakin played a key role in ensuring that the critical element of the 1886 Act was to categorically deny any Aboriginal people of mixed heritage the right to be recognised as Aboriginal and, furthermore, to forcibly deny them contact with those deemed Aboriginal, thereby destroying their culture, kinship and language,' he said.

'I believe that the evidence shows that he intended it never to be known and disguised his hand in every way he could. Suddenly I realised he actually meant this. This was deliberate.'

The Yoorrook Justice Commission is due to deliver a report to the state government by June 2025 that will make recommendations for reforms.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13814375/Truth-telling-Victoria-Great-grandson-Alfred-Deakin-apologises.html

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4 September, 2024

Harvard researchers pinpoint TWO ultra-processed foods that surge heart attack risk - as well as 8 that surprisingly don't

I have had a look at the underlying academic journal article behind this report and am most amused. It is very much what I expected from previous studies of diet: Basically an attempt to find things that are not there

It's a general rule in academic reports that the fancier the statistics, the weaker are the effects being analysed. And this report has statistics of blinding complexity. And that foretells what this study has to report. They relied on extreme quintiles to detect what was going on in their data. That throws away the majority of your data before you analyse it. Not very reassuring! It suggests that there was nothing to report in the data as a whole.

And when they did squeeze something out of such tortured data, all they found were hazard ratios close to 1.0, indicating negligible effects

Given their tricks with the analysis, we have to conclude that there was nothing really going on in the data. Eating UPFs had NO effect on health

And, at the risk of beating a dead horse, I note that among the plethora of confounders that they allowed for, one they left out was the big one: income. But they did find that big eaters of UPFs were fatter and smoked more, so that could suggest that income was in fact an important confounder that they missed.

There are NO negative policy implications of this study. Eat what you like. You will be no worse off doing so.

I am 81 and have always eaten what I liked regardless of the vagaries of official diet recommendations so take heart if you too just eat what you like

The journal article:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanam/article/PIIS2667-193X(24)00186-8/fulltext

Sugary drinks and processed meats are the only two ultra processed foods associated with a higher risk of heart attacks and strokes, Harvard researchers have discovered.

The scientists used data collected from nurses and health professionals to test the risk of cardiovascular disease, heart disease and strokes from eating a range of different ultra-processed foods.

But although they have long been vilified not all ultra-processed food (UPF) is made equal.

In fact, yoghurt, wholegrain bread and savoury snacks were shown to slightly reduce the risk of the diseases.

UPFs make up 57 per cent of the average UK diet — and the category includes fizzy drinks, processed meats like ham and bacon, as well as breakfast cereal.

One sign of a UPF food is that it contains ingredients you wouldn't find in your kitchen cupboard, such as unrecognisable colourings, sweeteners and preservatives.

Another clue, some experts say, is the unusually high amount of fat, salt and sugar in each item.

But supermarket staples such as breakfast cereals and pre-packaged bread can be mass-produced and are also considered to be ultra-processed.

That's because they often contain extra ingredients such as emulsifiers, artificial flavours and sweeteners, instead of just flour, salt, yeast and water.

However, the study published in the Lancet this week suggests we should 'deconstruct' the ultra-processed food classification as many of the UPFs have a 'diverse nutritional composition' and therefore have cardiovascular benefits.

UPF intake was assessed through food frequency questionnaires in three studies.

Researchers looked at data from The NHS Nurses' Health Study of 75,735 female nurses aged 30 to 55 years, a second nurses health study of 90,813 women aged 25 to 42 years and a follow-up study of 40,409 men aged 40 to 75 years.

Those who had prior cardiovascular disease, cancer or who had a high BMI were excluded from the study.

A selection of UPFs were divided into ten groups: bread and cereals; sauces, spreads, and condiments; packaged sweet snacks and desserts; packaged savoury snacks; sugar-sweetened beverages; processed red meat, poultry, and fish; ready-to-eat/heat dishes; yoghurt/dairy-based desserts; hard liquors; artificially-sweetened beverages.

The scientists found there was an associated risk of consuming a diet heavy in sugary and artificially sweetened drinks and cardiovascular disease risk.

This risk was also found in diets high in processed meats, such as sausages, bacon and hotdogs.

However, there were inverse associations observed for bread, breakfast cereal, yoghurt, dairy desserts and savoury snacks.

Processed meats and soft drinks should be particularly discouraged due to their consistent adverse association with cardiovascular disease, coronary heart disease, and stroke, study authors said.

But they stress some of the UPFs they studied had potential 'cardioprotective benefits', due to the vitamins, minerals and fibre found in them.

This included wholegrain breads as well as yoghurt, especially fermented types.

Study authors noted the benefit remained despite the usually high saturated fat and added sugar content of the dairy products. They added that yoghurts that contain probiotic bacteria or fatty acids may contribute to lower cardiovascular risk.

Professor Gunter Kuhnle, a food scientist and nutritionist based at the University of Reading, posted a graph from the study on X explaining that the data showed most UPF food groups ‘actually protect and reduce disease risk’.

‘The big problem is so many foods are classed as UPF,’ he told MailOnline.

‘Most studies show people who consume a lot of soft drinks, especially sugar and sweetened drinks, are more likely to be obese and suffer diabetes, as well as other diseases.

‘The data show a huge impact of sugar sweetened beverages and processed meat, while everything else is very neutral.'

For example, bread sold in supermarkets is often classed as a UPF but Professor Kuhnle explains it can still be healthy.

He said: ‘Wholegrain bread is probably a healthy form of bread, whether it is manufactured in a big factory or made at home, the difference between the two will be tiny.’

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13808517/Harvard-ultra-processed-foods-surge-heart-attack.html

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1 September, 2024

Elitism denied: Probably imperative in a democracy

I have a faint claim on an elite identity, in that I have a social science doctorate and a past career as a university teacher, so I was a bit amused by the story below. I really, really am the son of a lumberjack and went to a small and undistinguished Austalian country school. So I am clearly not elite enough


The Eton Wall Game above. Britain's "Public" schools seem to be as influential as ever

During the first TV debate of this year’s election campaign pollster James Johnson handed a thousand viewers a ‘worm’ tracker to monitor their instinctive reactions. In an otherwise tetchy and uneventful hour, one moment elicited a notable bump in Keir Starmer’s favourability. ‘My Dad worked in a factory, he was a toolmaker’, Starmer explained, speaking directly to the camera. ‘We didn’t have a lot of money, and on occasion we were in a position where we couldn’t pay our bills…so I know how that feels’. The worm surged.

A week later at the second leaders debate Starmer told the same origin story. This time the audience audibly groaned. When powerful people successfully convince the general public they’re perfectly ordinary the implications can be powerful. But as this illustrates expressions of ordinariness don’t always land. We also saw this at play when Rishi Sunak – son of a doctor and educated at the elite Winchester College – tried to hark back to his immigrant grandmother to ground himself in a rags-to-riches story in the 2022 Tory leadership campaign. Or more recently when he claimed he ‘went without lots of things’ as a child, including Sky TV. Claiming ordinariness can backfire.

But Starmer and Sunak are not the only influential people to navigate the treacherous terrain of how to tell your backstory. In our new book, Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite, we interviewed hundreds of influential people who told us an upward origin story. But like Sunak many of these claims were questionable. When we surveyed over 3000 entrants of Who’s Who - Britain’s longstanding catalogue of ‘influential and noteworthy’ individuals – we found that 43% of those that told us they came from working-class backgrounds had actually grown up in families where their parents did solidly middle-class professional work.

In interviews this played out in subtle ways. Many mentioned some aspects of their upbringing but omitted others. Others downplayed childhood experiences that might signal privilege; they stressed the inexpensive nature of their private schooling, the periods of economic uncertainty their family had faced, or the working-class struggle of their grandparents. There was a sense that instinctively many felt moved to cast their origin in a humble light. One CEO, Mary (not her real name), explained that she had even gone as far as hiding her elite private schooling from colleagues, and had deliberately omitted it from her Who’s Who profile.

Deflecting privilege is one part of a wider strategy we detected among today’s elite to present themselves as ordinary, regular, and unspectacular. These people generally eschewed their influence, and directly counterposed their meritocratic trajectories with the stuffy aristocratic elites of the past. Claims to ordinariness were also staked via lifestyle. Analysing the changing ‘recreations’ expressed in 70,000 Who’s Who profiles over the last 125 years, our analysis provides a unique window in

https://samf.substack.com/p/common-people?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=631422&post_id=148000138

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29 August, 2024

It wasn’t just race and politics that motivated people who opposed a black "Voice" in Parliament. Here’s what we found when we dug deeper

Jonathan Bartholomaeus didn't dig deeply enough. The only scales he used that gave a substantial correlation with attitude to "Voice" were RWA and SDO -- both of which were strong measures of conservatism.

http://jonjayray.com/sdo.html

http://jonjayray.com/altdef.html

So all he has found is that is was mainly conservatives who opposed the "Voice" idea, which we already knew. There were no other substantial correlations

It is in any case absurd to say that people who defied all the aurhorities on "Voice" were authoritarian. That's what comes of using defecive measuring instruments in your research. Bartholomaeus took his measurement instruments at face value instead of researching their validity. He clearly didn't even look at the questions he was asking. Very foolish. His conclusions below are rubbish

The outcome of the referendum has been chalked up to deepening political polarisation, Australian’s entrenched racial prejudice and the rise of populism.

In short, opposition to the Voice to Parliament has been characterised as a conservative populist backlash with racist undertones. In the wake of a 60/40 “no” vote majority, this message only serves to deepen the post-referendum divide.

However, new research indicates the story is a little more complex. Findings show it was fundamentally the esteem of authority, the desire for an ordered society, and perceptions of justice and fairness that dictated how people engaged with this emotionally charged political issue, and ultimately how they voted.

It is only by a greater understanding of people’s attitudes towards the referendum (even if we disagree with them) that Australians can move forward and have a more productive bipartisan conversation.

Hierarchical status quo

We collected survey data from 253 people before and after the referendum. We wanted to get an idea of the way people’s worldviews would influence their vote and opinions about the outcome of the referendum.

In June 2023 (roughly 16 weeks before the vote) we asked about people’s attitudes towards authority, their opinion about social hierarchy, and their perceptions of justice in society. In October (immediately after the vote) we asked how people voted and whether they thought the outcome of the referendum would be good for Australia.

Our findings show people who voted “no” and who were pleased with the outcome were more willing to submit to authority. They also preferred a hierarchical society where the social status of different groups is maintained.

These attitudes were more important in predicting voting behaviour than a person’s age, gender, ethnicity, income, education, religion or even their political orientation.

Whereas social hierarchy beliefs are broad and refer to a person’s general view that it’s a “dog-eat-dog” world, racism relates more narrowly to discrimination against people based on their ethnicity. While there’s often a complicated relationship between preference for social hierarchy and racism, these findings counter the widespread claims that those who voted “no” were entirely racially motivated or were simply voting along political lines.

In understanding why some people voted “no”, these findings can promote a more open discussion.

For example, in the future when discussing profound and potentially momentous changes to the country (the current debate around nuclear energy, for example), it will be helpful to remember that people differ drastically in their willingness to follow along with authority.

Some will be quick to cotton on to messages from leaders and may act passionately (even aggressively) on these convictions. Others will be slower and more cautious in their support for ideas expressed by authority.

It will also be helpful to remember people have different ideas about how society should be structured. Some people will prefer a society with a clear pecking order, perhaps fearing the chaos of a disordered society. Others are less concerned with a clear structure in favour of things like social mobility.

Our findings show we shouldn’t reduce support for complex issues simply to one’s political orientation or demographic characteristics. We need to seek first to understand a person’s worldview and attitude towards societal change. Only then can we have a productive conversation about what is best for the country.

Perceived (in)justice

Populism is the idea that a small group of elite people are trying to force change on society. A populist backlash occurs when ordinary people rebel against the powerful minority and exert the popular will of the people. Voting down the referendum has been characterised in such terms.

Our data show people who voted “no” view society as a just place in which people are generally treated fairly. They didn’t accept the fundamental premise on which the referendum was sold: that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are, and have been, unjustly treated. This finding provides a helpful insight into the populist explanation for the referendum outcome.

At its heart, the populist narrative is a story of justice. The idea that the elite are pursuing their own agenda to the detriment of the people strikes us all as unjust.

But it is people who already see society as a just and fair place who are especially sensitive to this perceived injustice. These people can act out in sometimes extreme ways. Consider, for example, the January 6 storming of the US capitol.

By understanding the populist account in terms of justice, we can clearly see how the post-referendum divide in society has formed: those who voted “no” feel vindicated at having avoided an unjust change to society, while those who voted “yes” become wary of these people for their extreme and seemingly unwarranted reaction. Understanding not only the important role that justice plays in people’s lives, but also that people can have differing views of what justice is, is crucial to keep in mind.

In a world where political polarisation is increasing and where we are confronted with news (some real, some fake) that continually seems to deepen this divide, taking the time to understand the complexity of people’s worldviews and political opinions – even those you might disagree with – is more important than ever.

Jonathan Bartholomaeus does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

https://www.inkl.com/newsletters/morning-edition/news/it-wasn-t-just-race-and-politics-that-motivated-voice-to-parliament-no-voters-here-s-what-we-found-when-we-dug-deeper

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26 August, 2024

Pauline Hanson's explosive call to SACK teachers for 'brainwashing' students with Welcome to Country rituals

These rituals are "softening up" -- designed to entrench the idea that Aborigines have property rights beyond what other Australians have. They are a prelude to "reparations" -- Transferring to blacks money that they have not earned

Pauline Hanson has demanded 'racist teachers' are sacked and banned for life for 'brainwashing' students with 'divisive' Acknowledgement of Country rituals.

The call comes as Daily Mail Australia can reveal every state school in the country is being officially urged to include the controversial ceremonies.

Primary school parents have reported they were stunned to see their children being forced to touch the ground and chant 'always was, always will be Aboriginal land' at the start of each school assembly.

In NSW, children as young as three are encouraged to take part in the ritual in taxpayer-funded pre-schools by declaring: 'Today we play and learn on [the local Indigenous people's] Country and pay our respects to our Elders past and present.'

Senator Hanson told Daily Mail Australia she was 'disgusted' by the practice and called for heads to roll.

'These racist activists - teachers and lecturers - know what they're doing,' she said.

'The activists are now coming for our kids so they can try again with the new generation they've brainwashed.

Pauline Hanson has called for activist educators to be sacked and banned from teaching for life, accusing them of trying to 'brainwash' the next generation of Australians

'They're getting inside kids' heads as early as possible to program them. It has to stop.

'Any teacher who tries to indoctrinate children should be sacked and never allowed to teach in Australia again.

'Schools are for education, not indoctrination. Children should be taught how to think – critical thinking – not what to think.'

Each state education department offers strict guidelines regarding the inclusion of Welcome to Country and Acknowledgement of Country rituals in the nation's taxpayer-funded schools.

Welcome to Country ceremonies - which can only be performed by appropriate Indigenous Elders - were considered essential at all significant primary and high school events.

Meanwhile, an Acknowledgements of Country - which 'can be conducted by anyone (children or adults) who wishes to pay their respect' - were encouraged as part of the daily curriculum.

Queensland has the strictest rules in place, with the state's education department insisting 'an Acknowledgement of Country is to be provided at all [Department of Education] events'.

This includes graduation and award ceremonies, festivals and event launches, major conferences, significant community forums, and school and venue openings.

The guidelines say the proclamation can also be included at school assemblies, sports days, parent and citizens' committee meetings and fetes.

A Welcome to Country is also mandatory at all major school events in South Australia, while 'an Acknowledgement of Country is optional at other events, meetings and forums, including school assemblies'.

In Victoria, the rituals extend into the classroom, with the state's education department advising 'schools are encouraged to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land at...assemblies, at the start of class, school council meetings and parent information sessions'.

Western Australia's education department guidelines explained it 'supported' the inclusion of 'an Acknowledgement of Country at school assemblies, staff meetings and other internal events'.

Parents have told Daily Mail Australia that they were alarmed to find the ritual was now even being included in young children's birthday parties outside of school.

'I took my daughter to a friend's ninth birthday in Sydney's inner-west and all the kids had to participate in an Acknowledgement of Country,' one parent said.

'It was really strange - none of the children at the party were Indigenous - so it just seemed to be virtue signalling by the parents. It was surreal.'

Senator Hanson said she had told her grandson he did not have to participate in any of the rituals at this primary school.

'When my grandson told me he was being forced to touch the ground while reciting the divisive acknowledgment of country, I told him, "You don't have to do it; this is your land as well," and now he doesn't,' she said.

'I encourage all Australian families to do the same. They're your kids - not child soldiers press-ganged as cannon fodder in racist culture war.

'We must not allow future generations to be indoctrinated with racist divisions. Every Australian citizen born here or overseas has as much right to this land as anyone else.

'Most Australians have had enough of being told their country is not theirs.'

The One Nation leader has also called for a wider ban of the practice in all public, taxpayer-funded settings.

'They’re recited at the beginning of every parliamentary sitting day, every council meeting, and every zoom meeting held by public servants,' she said.

'We hear them at the conclusion of every domestic flight – you can hear the groans in the cabin every time.

'That’s why One Nation last year moved to call for a ban on Welcomes to Country, calling for the promise of leading Voice to Parliament campaigner Marcia Langton to be fulfilled.

'It’s become meaningless and offensive. It’s an activist device, and a vehicle for the same racial division Australians overwhelmingly rejected at last year’s referendum.

'Australia belongs to all Australians, equally. That’s been my position since I first entered Parliament in 1996: equal rights for all, and special rights for none.'

Professor Langton is one of the key architects of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament proposal.

The respected writer last year predicted many Indigenous Australians would no longer participate in Welcome to Country ceremonies if the Voice to Parliament referendum was unsuccessful.

This past week, Prof Langton told Daily Mail Australia she was 'not available' to comment on whether there had been any reluctance or refusal to officiate the ceremonies as suggested.

But Indigenous affairs academic Anthony Dillon said the Welcome to Country and Acknowlegment of Country ceremonies had become so overused they had both become largely meaningless.

'I'm not a big fan of the Welcome to Country or the Acknowledgement of Country,' he told Daily Mail Australia.

'They should be saved for special occasions. In the right circumstances, when done with sincerity, they can be powerful and beautiful.

'But unfortunately, they're overused and have become almost mandatory for any and every occasion.

'I've no problem with them being included in schools just so long as they don't get hijacked for political purposes and stretched into that whole "white man is bad, he must apologise" thing.

'If people want to do them at children's birthday parties, that's fine - I'd probably sit there and cringe a bit and, if they asked me, I'd say I wasn't into it - but that's up to the parents and its fairly harmless.

'At the same time, I'm also not a fan of people who want to make this a big political issue. It's not.

'Instead, what we should be focusing on is getting kids in schools and communities cleaned up.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13763899/welcome-country-pauline-hanson-ban.html

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25 August, 2024

Does the Bible say that Israel is the land of the Jews?

Dr. Naomi Wolf says not, although she is herself Jewish:



I reproduce her comments below. My rejoinder first:

She has a point. In Genesis 12: 6, later amplified in chapter 15, God (Yahweh) says that Abraham and his descendants ("seed) were given ownership of the land of Israel due to their covenant to worship him and obey his commandments. And that was a "covenant" or contract. They got the land as part of a deal, the deal being that they worship and obey Yahweh, the Hebrew God. There were lots of Gods around at thetime so which one you worshipped was important and significant.

But Ms Wolf is right that other people could become covenanters (part of the deal) by also worshipping Yahweh and doing his bidding. So being a genetic descendant of Abrahan was significant but not crucial to being part of the covenanters and gaining their rights.

So outsiders could become adopted into the covenanted people but that did not in any way reduce the Yahweh-given rights of Abraham's "seed" to the land of the Canaanites.

And even the descendants of Abraham could lose their rights by stopping worship of Yahweh.

But that people could be both kicked out of and adopted into the Abrahamic family still left that family with inherited rights to the land concerned

Ms Wolf is correct in saying that behaviour matters in who is bound by and affected by the covenant but WHICH behavour is the point. And it is worship of Yaweh that is the key, not just generally doing good

And that the descendants of the original covenanters and their "seed" continued to regard the land concerned as theirs we see throughout the rest of the Bible. They continued to live there and returned there after both their sojourn in Egypt and after their Babylonian exile.

So if nothing more, it is an historical fact that the Yahweh-worshipping descendants of the Abrahamic covenanters continued to live in what we now call Israel for many centuries after the original covenant.

But perhaps Ms Wolf does us a favour by noting that the people concerned were NOT racists. Genetic descent was important but others could be welcomed into the tribe by worshipping their god and following his rules. And Israel to this day honours that.

But her saying that ownership of the land is "NOT ABOUT A CONTRACT" is a blatant lie. She must not know the meaning of the word "covenant"


"Okay, so I was challenged below: "Read the Bible! God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people."

"So....I may get crucified for this but I have started to say it -- most recently (terrified, trembling) to warm welcome in a synagogue in LA: Actually if you read Genesis Exodus and Deuteronomy in Hebrew -- as I do -- you see that God did not "give" Israel to the Jews/Israelites.

We as Jews are raised with the creed that "God gave us the land of Israel" in Genesis -- and that ethnically 'we are the chosen people." But actually -- and I could not believe my eyes when I saw this, I checked my reading with major scholars and they confirmed it -- actually God's "covenant" in Genesis, Exodus and Deuteronomy with the Jewish people is NOT ABOUT AN ETHNICITY AND NOT ABOUT A CONTRACT. IT IS ABOUT A WAY OF BEHAVING.

Again and again in the "covenant" language He never says: "I will give you, ethnic Israelites, the land of Israel." Rather He says something far more radical - far more subversive -- far more Godlike in my view. He says: IF you visit those imprisoned...act mercifully to the widow and the orphan...welcome the stranger in your midst...tend the sick...do justice and love mercy ....and perform various other tasks...THEN YOU WILL BE MY PEOPLE AND THIS LAND WILL BE YOUR LAND.

So "my people" is not ethnic -- it is transactional. We are God's people not by birth but by a way of behaving, that is ethical, kind and just. And we STOP being "God's people" when we are not ethical, kind and just. And ANYONE who is ethical, kind and just is, according to God in Genesis, "God's people." And the "contract" to "give" us Israel is conditional -- we can live in God's land IF we are "God's people" in this way -- just, merciful, compassionate. AND -- it never ever says, it is ONLY your land.

Even when passages spell out geographical "boundaries" as if God does such a thing, it never says this is exclusively your land. It never says I will give this land JUST to you. Remember these were homeless nomads who had left slavery in Egypt and were wandering around in the desert; at most these passages say, settle here, but they do not say, settle here exclusively. Indeed again and again it talks about welcoming "zarim" -- translated as "strangers" but can also be translated as "people/tribes who are not you" -- in your midst. Blew my mind, hope it blows yours"

https://www.facebook.com/naomi.wolf.author/posts/okay-so-i-was-challenged-below-read-the-bible-god-gave-the-land-of-israel-to-the/10152548360004476/

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23 August, 2024

World’s biggest study finds array of harms from common plastics

This is yet another foray in the war against BPA etc. It appears to be based on a "report" that accepts as proven the harms alleged, depite the repeated failures of the central correlations to reach significant levels in research. See the originating article below:

https://annalsofglobalhealth.org/articles/10.5334/aogh.4056

The world’s first major scientific review into the effects of plastics and microplastics chemicals on human health has found that the chemicals in many common products are associated with a wide range of health risks, including poor birth outcomes and miscarriage, infertility, metabolic disease and endocrine dysfunction.

Australian researchers who carried out the study say it “categorically proves” that none of the chemicals examined, including BPA, flame retardants, PFAS and an array of other common chemicals found in plastics that infiltrate people’s bodies in small quantities every day, can be considered safe.

“This is a red flag for the world,” said Sarah Dunlop, head of plastics and human health at the Minderoo Foundation. “We must minimise our exposure to these plastic chemicals, as well as the many that haven’t yet been assessed for human health outcomes but are known to be toxic.”

The peer-reviewed study published in the Annals of Global Health by Australian doctors and academics associated with the Perth-based Minderoo Foundation was an umbrella review – considered the highest level of scientific synthesis – of almost 800 published studies and 52 systematic reviews into the effects of plastics chemicals.

“To our knowledge, this study is first to investigate the complete, high-level, evidence for human health effects of plastics and plastic-associated chemicals across a broad range of plastic chemical groups,” the authors of the study said.

It follows a Florey Institute study earlier this month that for the first time established a biological ­pathway between the plastic chemical bisphenol A (BPA) and autism spectrum disorder.

The umbrella review investigated five classes of chemicals including bisphenols and phthalates, PBDE, PCBs and PFAS, known as a ‘forever chemical’ used at defence bases that has been found in several crucial water supply plants. Also included were plasticisers and flame retardants – two classes of functional additive with the highest concentration ranges in plastic.

The study found that none of the investigated classes of chemicals are safe with statistically significant harmful impacts found for fertility in men and women, birth weight in babies, children’s neurodevelopment, and the development of Type 2 diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease and asthma.

Bisphenol A (BPA) – commonly found in food packaging, water bottles and cosmetics – was found to be associated with genital changes in infants, type 2 diabetes in adults, insulin resistance in children and adults, polycystic ovary syndrome, obesity and hypertension in children and adults and cardiovascular disease.

Phthalates plasticisers – found in a wide array of plastic products including nail polish, children’s toys, cosmetics and medical products – were associated with spontaneous pregnancy loss, genital changes in boys, and insulin resistance in children and adults.

There were additional associations between certain phthalates and decreased birth weight, type 2 diabetes in adults, precocious puberty in girls, reduced sperm quality, endometriosis, adverse cognitive development and intelligence quotient (IQ) loss, adverse fine motor and psychomotor development and elevated blood pressure in children and asthma in children and adults.

Other types of chemicals were similarly associated with pregnancy loss, decreased birth weight, endometriosis, bronchitis in infants, obesity, and the cancers Hodgkin’s lymphoma and breast cancer.

It is next to impossible for an individual to limit completely their exposure to harmful plastics chemicals, although experts advise reducing consumption of water in plastic bottles, reducing consumption of packaged food, and not heating plastic containers in the microwave.

Regulation of production and plastics chemicals in products is the only way to protect human health. But there is very little regulation of plastic chemicals in Australia or most other countries.

A Global Plastics Treaty is currently being negotiated that advocates of reform hope will set the stage for recognition of the substances’ harmful health effects and increase pressure on governments to regulate.

Professor Dunlop said there was now no doubt that plastics chemicals were harmful to human health.

“Plastic is not the safe, inert material we thought it was,” she said. “It’s made of 16,000 chemicals or so. We are exposed. We’re exposed across our lifespan, and there are health impacts across our lifespan.

“We’ve got to pull together and act fast, because plastic production is soaring. We need to really get the cause of the problem and reduce or cap plastic production.

“The second thing is to take a really good, hard look at the chemicals, because at the moment, unlike pharmaceuticals, which are highly regulated, industrial chemicals are being produced at a rate that is from this just outstripping our ability to identify what’s being produced and outstripping our ability to find out whether or not it’s harmful.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/health/worlds-biggest-study-finds-array-of-harms-from-common-plastics/news-story/09d9382f70c7db3b4edc199946bc0bb9

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August 22, 2024

Have I "radicalised"?

Matt Goodwin describes well below the way a half-mad Leftist elite have taken control of the national discourse in Britain -- to a point where policies and procedures very harmful to the average Briton have been put in place.

A major omisssion from what Matt says below, however, is that he fails to take account of the fact that it is only one half of the elite that is Leftist. At election time, at least half of people in elite occupations vote conservative. As ever, it is minorities and the poor who are the support-base of the Left, not the elite as a whole.

So the deeper question about elite influence is how the LEFTIST elite have gained so much power in the media, in the educational system and to some extent in big business?

An answer is complacency. The destructive Leftist policies all have justifications as being kind and caring. And those who are in a position to see the full picture tend to think that the polices sound good so may well spring from real good intentions and should therefore not be opposed. So we badly need writers such as Matt to alert us to how much damage is being done by the ideas of the Leftist elite

“What happened to you, Matt? When did you change your views? When did you become right-wing? When did you become … radical?”

These are questions I’m asked a lot, usually by disgruntled members of the elite class —an assortment of left-wing academics, journalists, and think-tankers I worked with more than a decade ago.

And while this is deliberate, a concerted strategy to try and discredit anybody who challenges the elite consensus, these questions do need answering for two reasons.

First, because I feel an enormous sense of responsibility and obligation to be as truthful as possible to you, my readers and supporters.

And, second, because as one of my favourite writers, Andrew Sullivan, once wrote, this dynamic should really be the other way round.

It’s not me who has radicalised. It’s the elite class.

Today, we are simply living through the greatest radicalisation of the ruling class in Western democracies since at least the 1960s, if not for more than a century.

What do I mean by this?

Well, let’s start with my own views.

I’ve certainly made no secret of the fact that, over the last fifteen years or so, I’ve become more critical of things like mass, uncontrolled immigration.

Why? Because research shows it creates low-trust societies that are more divided, polarised, segregated, less supportive of welfare, and more violent.

I was recently in Sweden, for example, where I did not meet anybody on the left or right who felt their country’s experiment with mass immigration has been a success.

Let me say that again.

I was in Sweden —notoriously liberal, tolerant Sweden— and I could not find a single soul who thought that mass immigration had made their country a nice place to live.

I’ve also become more critical not of multi-ethnic societies per se but rather the state policy of multiculturalism, which encourages different ethnic and religious groups to live separate ‘parallel lives’, rather than integrate into a wider, shared community.

And I’m not alone in this.

More than a decade ago, leaders from across the spectrum —David Cameron, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, Tony Blair— could all say much the same, and in public.

What else do I think?

I reject anti-Muslim prejudice much like I reject anti-Semitism and racism.

But I do have strong and growing concerns about the capacity and willingness of Islam to integrate into West nations, to respect our rule of law, the rights of women and same-sex couples, and to root out violent Islamism among its ranks.

My critics on the left, who have spent much of the last decade inflating terms like “Islamophobia”, will say this is irrational.

But I would say it’s entirely rational after watching violent Islamists blow up 52 of their fellow citizens on London’s Tube and buses, murder British children at a pop concert, execute British soldier Lee Rigby, police officer Keith Palmer, and Member of Parliament Sir David Amess, attempt to blow up a women’s hospital in Liverpool, and stab and murder dozens of other innocents, like pensioner Terence Carney.

Not to mention my confusion about why so few prominent British Muslims, Imams, and others, for years, failed to call out the industrial-scale rape of young white girls at the hands of Pakistani Muslim gangs in dozens of English cities, and when a few brave souls did call this out much of the left said nothing or dismissed them as ‘racist’.

I also believe passionately in free speech but now worry it’s being undermined by a creeping groupthink, political correctness, and cancel culture —a point The Economist, among many others, has also made in recent years.

I think we’re too soft on criminals and would like to see tougher sentencing, especially for repeat offenders who make the lives of their fellow residents and communities miserable and intolerable because we no longer put them where they belong: prison.

I believe that the family, shaped by my own experience of having been raised by divorced parents, is the most important unit in society, that children who are raised by two parents routinely do better in life than those who are not.

I believe that the nation-state is an incredibly powerful source of belonging, pride, and status for most people, that Western nations got more things right than wrong in their history, and that public institutions, especially schools and universities, should ensure this remarkable cultural inheritance is passed down to our children.

And when it comes to economics, I think capitalism is the most successful economic system we’ve managed to create but also think that global corporations, big business and crony capitalists routinely look for ways to exploit workers.

Like many other members of my generation, Gen-X, I came of age during the 1990s and the 2000s, watching globalisation disproportionately damage the working-class in Western economies and then lived through the Global Financial Crash, with few of those responsible for ruining economies and people’s lives facing any consequences.

These views are not extreme. Nor are they particularly radical.

They basically put me where the average voter is. Across the West, all these views are shared by millions, and usually majorities, of ordinary people.

But now look at the elite class.

Look at the university graduates from the elite institutions, who work in financially secure if not well-paid professional jobs, who live in one of the big cities, the affluent commuter suburbs, and the university towns, whose parents also belong to this class, whose marriages and social networks are likewise filled with people from this class, who share the same backgrounds, values, and political loyalties, and who all lean strongly to the political and cultural left.

They’ve radicalised.

Over the last fifteen years, they’ve swung even more sharply to the left, leaving a large number of people scratching their heads, asking themselves the same question.

What the hell happened to the ruling class, to the people who dominate the most important and influential institutions in my country, who claim to speak on my behalf?

Writing on his deathbed in the early 1990s, the academic Christopher Lasch once said that the revolt that was about to commence in the West would not see the masses revolting against elites but elites revolting against the masses.

And he was right; this is exactly what is now happening around us.

Increasingly, our societies are being radically reshaped around the values, beliefs, tastes, and priorities of a radicalising minority elite, rather than the wider majority.

Just look at where the elite class is today compared to where it was, say, ten or fifteen years ago, and compared to where many ordinary people, like me, still are today.

While large majorities of people in the West, like me, think mass, uncontrolled immigration is unsustainable and damaging Western economies, culture, and ways of life, today’s elite class, as we saw in its reaction to things like Europe’s refugee crisis, Brexit, Trump, and the recent immigration protests in the UK, has now radicalised to such an extent that it views any criticism of this policy, any criticism at all, as tantamount to ‘racism’ and ‘hate’.

Whereas only a few years ago, the likes of Cameron, Merkel, Sarkozy, and Blair could talk openly about the failure of state multiculturalism, triggering a useful debate, today’s elite class, including even Conservatives, could not even handle the likes of Suella Braverman making the very same point without having a complete nervous breakdown and catastrophising about the possible return of fascism.

Similarly, whereas in the aftermath of the terrorist atrocities on 9/11 and 7/7 we could just about have a reasonable debate about how best to integrate newcomers, prevent Islamist terror, and encourage ‘community cohesion’, however flawed those ideas were, today, after things like the murder of children at an Ariana Grande pop concert and the murder of Sir David Amess, the elite class has a total meltdown and insists that we either hold hands and sing ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ or have a completely irrelevant debate about ‘online safety’ and how to ‘be nice’ on social media.

Compare and contrast, too, the reaction to urban disturbances in England’s northern towns, in 2001, with the reaction to the immigration protests this year. Whereas only twenty years ago, the elite class was capable of talking openly about the underlying cause, the fact minority (mainly Muslim) communities were living ‘parallel lives’, and that our model of multiculturalism was very clearly failing, today’s elite class has radicalised to such an extent it is incapable to talking about the cause at all.

So far, weeks on from the rioting and protests, for example, the elite class has still said nothing at all about the root cause of the immigration protests, preferring instead to view them simply and narrowly through the prism of criminality while deriding much of the rest of the country as ‘far-right thugs’ and desperately searching for new ways to curtail free speech and shut down any debate. Today’s elite class, in other words, has radicalised to such an extent it is now completely incapable of even leading a national debate that might give voice to views which challenge the elite consensus.

While many people in the West, meanwhile, like me, used to think that a level of net migration of 150,000 a year was too high —a view, by the way, shared by much of the elite class as recently as fifteen years ago— today’s elite class has radicalised to such an extent that whether on the right or left it now has no problem at all with pushing this number to an eye-watering 700,000 a year while continuously breaking manifesto promises to lower the overall number. The elite class, in short, has morphed from accepting it made mistakes on this issue to now just lying to the British people.

In the 2000s, New Labour politicians could talk openly and honestly about the urgent need to regain control of the borders and swiftly remove illegal migrants from the country; but today, in sharp contrast, the elite class is falling over itself to grant amnesty to nearly 100,000 illegal migrants while branding anybody who talks about ‘stopping the boats’ as ‘far-right’ and blaming them for the outbreak of rioting.

I mean, seriously, am I supposed to be the person who has radicalised here?

While many people in the West, like me, think free speech should be protected and promoted, today’s elite class, as we see through the spread of a chilling cancel culture, an oppressive political correctness, and online mobbings of anybody who dissents on social media, is routinely willing to sacrifice free speech on the altar of ‘social justice’ and protecting minorities from what it calls ‘emotional harm’. Routinely, major surveys now find that the left-leaning elites who dominate universities and other public institutions are the most willing of all to say they’d compromise on free speech and free expression if it means greater protection for minority groups, which helps to explain why they are so eager to shut down voices like mine.

While many people in the West, like me, still think Western liberal societies should be organised around individual rights, today’s elite class has radicalised to such an extent that it actively subordinates individual rights behind people’s fixed group identities. The only thing that really matters to today’s elite class, which is now falling over itself to impose ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ policies on pretty much every institution and government department, is not our individual achievements and character but merely what fixed identity group we belong to. Do we belong to one of the morally superior ‘oppressed’ racial, sexual, or gender minority groups? Or do we belong to the morally inferior ‘oppressor’ majority group, which should be treated with suspicion, if not contempt? Everything, increasingly, flows from these questions.

Even worse, while many people, like me, believe that a child’s early years should be about joy, play, and a politically neutral education, today’s elite class now appears absolutely determined to sexualise and racialise our children, exposing them to radical ideologies that have no serious basis in science and then complaining about the rise of ‘culture wars’ when mums and dads ask entirely legitimate questions about why their child is being taught there are 72 genders, divided into separate ‘racial affinity’ groups in class, or to hate their country, its history, and culture.

While many people in the West, like me, still believe in the critical importance of debating in good faith and ensuring there is a diverse range of opinions in the institutions and national debate, today’s elite class has radicalised to such an extent it can no longer tolerate any dissent at all, which again you see in the authoritarian reaction to people like me. Consistently, the elite class has launched an assault on contrarian thinkers, demanded that alternative television channels like GB News, and social media platforms like Twitter/X be shut down, failed to stop unorthodox gender critical and conservative scholars from being kicked out of universities, and is now increasingly using ‘hate laws’, ‘non-hate crime incidents’ and opposition to ‘legal but harmful’ views to essentially shut down alternative perspectives it does not like.

What happened to me, you ask? No. What the hell happened to you.

Support Matt's Work

While many people in the West, like me, think we should treat people from different racial, ethnic, and religious groups equally before the law, today’s elite class has radicalised to such an extent that, as we’ve seen in its reaction to the immigration protests, the marches after the hideous attacks on Israel on October 7th attack, the Black Lives Matter protests, and the ongoing failure to address ‘Muslim grooming gangs’, it’s now more than happy to treat minorities more favourably than the majority, or simply remain silent when some people from minority backgrounds flagrantly violate our children, laws, and ways of life.

While many people in the West, like me, still believe in the superiority of Western civilisation and Enlightenment values, and on balance think the West got more right than wrong in its history, today’s elite class, which is supposed to value nuance, evidence, and reason, has now become utterly obsessed with feeding its own sense of moral righteousness and narcissism by trying to convince us that everything from our history to science, from cricket to the countryside, are mere manifestations of ‘white supremacy’ and ‘structural racism’. Increasingly, they hate who we are to try and win more social status, esteem, and prestige for themselves, from other elites.

While many people in the West, like me, still believe in the critical importance of a politically independent and ideologically diverse media that prioritises truth, today’s elite class has radicalised to such an extent that once respected legacy media like the BBC, the New York Times, and Financial Times, have morphed into platforms for hyper-political activists who prioritise ideological dogma over truth and reason.

And in the universities, too, I spent much of the last decade watching things like the Grievance Studies Affair and the shocking harassment and sacking of scholars who challenge the consensus, like Kathleen Stock and Roland Fryer, all of which made it obvious that the academy is now openly corrupt, highly politicised, and much more interested in prioritising left-wing dogma over evidence and reason —shocking cases, by the way, about which my critics said … absolutely nothing at all.

While many people in the West, like me, think we should be led by the kind of evidence and logic that underpinned the UK’s Cass Review into what was happening to children in hospitals, which pointed out there was insufficient evidence to be pushing children onto things like ‘puberty blockers’, the elite class today has become so radical that it’s no longer interested in evidence that challenges its worldview at all. Routinely, as we still see in healthcare and education, the so-called ‘expert class’ still put emotional blackmail, superstition, and dogma before empirical evidence, even when it involves the medical treatment (read: mutilation) of our children.

While many people in the West, like me, certainly think voters can be misled but ultimately see them as rational beings capable of making up their own minds, today’s elite class now trace any political outcome it doesn’t like, whether at elections or referendums, to “misinformation”, all while trying to tell us with a straight face that boys can become girls and girls can become boys, or that things like Brexit and Trump were caused by Russia. Who is spreading “misinformation” here?

And while many people in the West, like me, think that people voting for things we don’t like is a bit annoying but perfectly acceptable in a democracy, today’s elite class, as we’ve seen in its reaction to things like Brexit, Trump, Boris Johnson, and fourteen years of pro-immigration liberal Tory government, has radicalised to such a degree that it now genuinely appears to believe it is living amid a fascist uprising, that the West is on the cusp of morphing into something that resembles the Third Reich.

In some other galaxy, where the elite class is just a fringe group of oddball people who have no influence over society, these views might not matter. But because the elite class dominate the most important and influential institutions, it’s used its immense social and cultural power to impose this narrow, illiberal and radical worldview on the rest of us —on ‘meaning making’ institutions like schools, universities, government departments, healthcare systems, legacy media, and creative and cultural industries.

This is deeply problematic because while the elite class likes to think of itself as representing the beating heart of the nation, the blunt reality, as major surveys show, is that most of its views are only held by a maximum of 10-15% of people in the West.

This is why, today, a much larger number of people are looking at the radicalisation of the elite class with a combination of bemusement, shock, and, increasingly, horror, wondering what the hell happened to the people who are ruling over them, claiming to speak on their behalf.

While my critics certainly don’t like it, the blunt reality is that many of these ordinary people are much closer to my views than the radicalising views of the elite class, and yet writers like me who challenge if not oppose the elite consensus are now framed as radical outliers. But as Andrew Sullivan said, this is the wrong way round. It is the elite class that is now the radical outlier.

The real story here, the story my critics routinely ignore or get wrong, is actually not about me at all. It is about the radicalisation of the elite class, a minority radical elite that is imposing its values on the rest of society while simultaneously expecting ordinary people not to notice and certainly not dare say anything about it.

Mass uncontrolled immigration. Broken borders. Segregation. The rise of violent Islamism. A stifling political correctness. Woke ideology. The dismissal of biology, empirical evidence, and scientific fact. The closing down of free speech and the public square. The repudiation of our history, culture, and ways of life. And the general hatred and class prejudice that’s now hurled at millions of ordinary people when they happen to vote for, or say, the wrong thing.

When did I radicalise, you say?

You must be joking. When the hell did YOU radicalise.

https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/have-i-radicalised

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20 August, 2024

Homosexual adoption

Like most conservatives, the adoption of chilren by male homosexual couples disturbs me. I have a strong feeling that all children deserve both a mother and father.

But that is to a degree ignoring rather a lot of reality. Many children grow up to be normal adults even though they have grown up with one parent only. And who is to say that a homosexual parent cannot be loving?

I was discussing that matter with a woman much younger than I am and found that she had no difficulty with children being brought up by homosexual parents. Her basic point is that anything can be bought these days, includng good childcare.

And I was reminded of the fact that the British aristocracy traditionally did not bring up their own children... that was dedicated to a nanny. And strong affectionate ties developed and remained between the children concerned and their nanny,

Winston Churchill was one of those. He was very supportive of his nanny into her old age and she had a lifelong devotion to him.

And step-parents and their stepchildren have often been known to develop and retain strong affectionate feelings beween them. I was such a stepfather myself to three children who grew up to be very well-functioning adults.

So I think we have to let rule us the big conservative principle that each case depends on its individual merits. It is only where there is evidence of some distress in the child that we are warranted to intervene. Parenting can be succesful under many different parental arrangements -- and excludng one arrangeent is dogmatic and can be tyrannical. -- JR

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14 August, 2024

Wealth really does improve health – and here's proof

The high correlation between all indices of wellbeing has been known since the work of Terman & Oden in the 1920s and 30s but is rarely mentionable today. Note that even in the story below the role of hereditary IQ is overlooked

The story below makes much mention of the role of nutrition in health but once you control for poverty, most apparent nutrition effects fade away. Poverty is hugely important and its major predictor is IQ. It is actually the IQ that matters

I was born into the humblest of circumstances but was also born with a high IQ. And I prospered enough to retire at age 39 and get hundreds of academic journal articles published. And I am still alive at 81


Children who went to private school or a Russell Group university have better health in midlife, according to a new study.

The research, by University College London (UCL), found that those who were privately educated were more likely to have a lower BMI and blood pressure and to perform better on a cognitive task by the age of 46 than those who went to state schools.

It also found that people who went to Russell Group universities – such as Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, University College London and Exeter – performed better on memory and attention tests.

Published in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, it reported a 14% lower BMI in those who went to private school versus state school. Studying at a Russell Group university was linked to a 16% better memory recall.

‘Both private school and higher-status university attendance were related to favourable health outcomes,’ wrote the researchers.

They added that, if the status of schooling is the cause of better health, future policies that look at reducing health inequalities need to look not just at qualifications and achievements, but also education quality.

Around 11.7 million people in the UK live in poverty, according to the latest stats. Meanwhile, private schools charge an average of £17,000 a year for day students and £40,000 for boarders, though there’s huge variety in costs.

And this disparity proves that there’s more to the health status of private school goers than just their education.

‘The contrast in the results in the study are concerning, but this is part of a larger problem the UK is facing,’ says Tina Woods, a social entrepreneur and the CEO of Business for Health, a business-led social venture supporting innovation and investment in preventative health and care.

How wealth improves health

According to the study, some reasons why private school and Russell Group educations may lead to better health outcomes include having more resources and facilities to support activity, improved job and financial prospects and being surrounded by people with different health behaviours and cultural norms.

‘Finally, higher-status institutions may have more cognitively stimulating environments through having smaller class sizes, more experienced teachers and high-achieving peers; this may benefit cognition in adolescence, across adulthood and ultimately health in midlife,’ they write.

But let’s not forget that, if you’ve attended private school, you likely grew up in a wealthier family – and money vastly improves health outcomes.

A 2020 study from the Journal of Gerontology, looking at data from over 10,000 people, found that being wealthy adds nine years to your healthy life expectancy, preventing disease and disability.

‘Health inequalities are linked to broader social determinants of health, including income levels, poverty, access to high-quality nutrition, jobs and housing, as well as levels of physical activity that vary across the regions,’ says Woods.

According to research from last year by The Food Foundation, the most deprived fifth of the population would need to spend at least 50% of their income to eat according to the Eatwell guidelines – an increase of 43% from 2022.

Meanwhile, the least deprived fifth would only spend 11% of their income. With the current average rental cost in the UK being around 30% of income, there simply isn’t enough money to spend on health-promoting foods and actives, says Woods.

‘Given the cost-of-living crisis and the rising prices of necessities including food and shelter, those living in more income-deprived areas are likely to suffer and in turn, their life expectancy and healthy life expectancy will suffer,’ she says.

She points to areas like Glasgow, which not only has the lowest life expectancy in the UK but also has in-city disparity. For instance, in Calton, one of the most deprived areas of Glasgow, male life expectancy is 54. In a more affluent area, such as Lenzie, life expectancy is 82, according to The Health Foundation.

‘It’s likely that many in deprived areas cannot afford to make healthy choices, suffer from vitamin deficiencies and are also impacted by unhealthy environments, such as those where dependency on fast food, smoking and alcohol is more prevalent,’ says Woods.

Accessing healthcare

The situation only worsens for those who develop illnesses. Research by the King’s Fund has shown that people in poorer areas are twice as likely to wait more than a year for NHS treatment compared to those living in the least deprived areas.

That’s likely because they have more access to healthcare and can also afford to go private for emergencies or to beat long waits.

The research also found that 42% of adults who had experienced a delay in their treatment saying it impacted their ability to work, meaning the knock-on impact on income can result in even worse inequalities.

The latest study on education’s role in inequality is also concerning given the pipeline from private school to Russell Group universities. Around 6% of children attend private or independent schools in the UK, yet 30% of Oxbridge students are from private schools, according to 2022 data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency.

It means that the privileged continue to benefit, while those without access to high-status education suffer more.

‘Without measures in place to tackle regional health inequalities, including preventative measures such access to education around nutrition and discounted schemes from employers, we face a continued downward spiral for the health outcomes of those living in lower-income areas,’ warns Woods.

‘There’s a big onus here for the government to work with all stakeholders involved in improving health outcomes in local areas to tackle health and wealth inequalities.

‘This means looking at ways to drive down rates of smoking, introducing measures to address obesity, improving access to preventative health and care services and measures to improve housing quality.’

https://www.msn.com/en-au/health/other/wealth-really-does-improve-health-and-here-s-proof/ar-BB1oIHpW

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13 August, 2024

British 'tradwife' who submits to her husband like it's the 1950s reveals she's deleted social media and moved to Australia for a more private life

This idea of the woman "submitting" to her husband seems dubious to me. When I had a tradwife we just came to unforced agreements about things and during my childhood it was definitely my father who submitted to my non-working mother.

I think you can have a traditional marriage as long is there is broad agreement in favour of traditional roles, but after that the detailed arrangements are whatever suits the individual personalities involved. "Submitting" sounds a very unhappy thing to me and and a husband who kept making his wife unhappy would either be a fool or out of love with her


A British woman who became famous as one of the UK's first 'trad wives' has revealed she's moved to Australia after the 1950s-inspired movement 'became a monster'.

The tradwife movement, which blew up in the UK in 2020, says that wives should not work, and rather spend their days cooking, cleaning, wearing modest and feminine dress, and practice traditional etiquette, being submissive to their husbands and 'always put them first'.

Alena Kate Pettitt, 38, originally from Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, who is a self-proclaimed tradwife, tried to showcase the idea in Britain.

But she has since revealed how she's stepped away from the limelight, deleting her Instagram account and moving to Australia to live a more private life, because it's become 'politicised' and due to receiving 'unwanted attention from men'.

She 'stepped away' from her social media page last year, despite it boasting nearly 40,000 followers, and said on her blog that she is 'embarrassed' that she used to take part in the social media fad.

Alena, who started up a 'femininity finishing school' called The Darling Academy, also felt that the tradwife movement had lost its way, becoming more of a superficial trend which had lost control of it's core values.

Speaking to the New Yorker she said: 'It's become an aesthetic, and then it's become politicized. And then it's become its own monster.'

She worried new generations of tradwives are getting 'younger and younger, and more polished than realistic.'

Another reason she ditched her account was because of the 'vile messages, the hatred, the passive-aggressive comments and unwanted attention from men.'

This all fed into the reason why Alena decided to delete her Instagram, however she revealed on her blog that she still upholds her traditional values, only more privately this time around.

Writing on The Darling Academy, she said: 'I tried. I thought that speaking to the media and using a platform with so many users would be a wonderful way to promote the brilliant work of the housewife.

'But as with all kinds of positive activism, good message, or wholesome idea, it will in time become hijacked by the opposite of what you stand for and believe in.'

It appears Alena also decided to take a hiatus from her blog for nearly a year to create 'certain boundaries' which she said were put in place by her husband, Carl, and members of her family.

However the former Marketing Manager recently returned to the platform saying she 'sought permission' from her husband to announce that they are now living in Australia.

Alena explained that the big move across the pond was always on the cards for them, however it came a little bit sooner then they had anticipated after their home address in England was shared online which made her feel 'unsafe.'

Writing on her blog she said their 'hearts were no longer in England', even though they almost bought a 'doer upper' house back in Gloucestershire.

She revealed the house would of been 'too much work' and with her husband working full time the renovations would of been 'painfully slow'.

The mother-of-one added that their privacy and safety was also 'ultimately violated' on a gossip forum when their previous address was shared and the new home was just down the road, saying it didn't have 'enough distance' for her to feel safe.

Describing 2023 as an Annus Horribilis, Latin phrase that means a horrible year, she revealed that she also lost friends after stepping back from social media.

She said it was 'disappointing to feel used', but a 'relief to be free of taking pictures ''for the gram''. '

Sticking to her true traditional values, Alena revealed she is going to blog and write like it was in the 'early days' before social media.

She claimed her content will still be centred around homemaking but with 'healthy boundaries' this time around.

Alena was one of the earliest and best known in the movement of women who spend their days taking care of their homes and families and documenting their activities on social media.

She wrote two books, where she set out her Christian beliefs and principles of womanhood, which her husband helped her to self-publish.

In 2016, she published what turned out to be something between a guidebook to traditional womanhood and a memoir of self-transformation through faith. Pettitt called the book Ladies Like Us. Her next book, English Etiquette, followed in 2019.

Speaking to the BBC in 2020, she explained of her blog: 'I talk about etiquette, feminine lifestyle, homemaking, and being a traditional housewife.

'I wouldn't expect my husband to come home after a long day at work and cook for me. My job is essentially being a housewife.'

Alena gets a monthly allowance for the food shop, along with a buffer for her to 'spend something on myself' so she's not always 'asking him for money'.

Admitting that she didn't enjoy growing up in the nineties era where the emphasis was on breaking glass ceilings, Alena says she was 'born to be a wife and mother'.

Alena enjoyed shows from the 1950s and 1960s, and remembered how her single mother worked full-time, with the house becoming a 'huge burden', which became the turning point for her when she realised she 'didn't want the same life'.

Revealing that her husband also believed in the same traditional values and offered to 'look after her', she admitted meeting him was the moment she felt complete. 'It's almost like the fairytale came true', she said.

Alena says she was a 'career girl' in her twenties and followed messages from hit show Sex and The City, which she interpreted as telling women working was 'liberating and they should follow their sexual desires'.

Not identifying with this persona, she then turned to shows like the Real Housewives, but found the wives were 'too rich to do their own cleaning and everyone was cheating on each other'.

She then went online and discovered an underground movement of other women who felt the same, explaining they craved the sense of 'belonging, home quaintness and tradition'.

Alena, who strongly believes your husband should 'always come first and should know this', said some feminists believe her movement is throwing their work for equality back in their faces.

Revealing her take on feminism, she explained: 'My view on feminism is that it's about choices. To say you can go into the working world and compete with men and you're not allowed to stay at home - to me is taking a choice away'.

Distancing herself from the movement's right-wing links, she argued: 'Being a tradwife is investing in your family and being selfless. So I would say the opposite of that is someone who is selfish and just takes'.

Along with blogs and vlogs dedicated to the movement, which is also taking Brazil, Germany and Japan, by storm, an array of books from the fifties and sixties 'teaching' women how to be the perfect housewives become popular again.

One of the movement's pin-up girls is Helen Andelin, the American author of the 1963 'Fascinating Womanhood' book, which teaches women that subordination is the 'key to a happy marriage' and has regained popularity.

And, a century after the first wave of feminism ended, and sixty years after the women's liberation movement, Helen Andelin's daughter Dixie Andelin Forsyth has launched a worldwide 'femininity class' with 100,000 followers.

Speaking to Stylist, she claimed: 'The movement's rising because women have had enough of feminism in the UK and elsewhere. We say to feminists: thanks for the trousers, but we see life a different way'.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-13718457/Tradwife-submits-husband-like-1950s-reveals-shes-ditched-UK.html?ico=related-replace

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12 August, 2024

An amusing mental somersault: Is "harnessing the power of government" the answer to authoritarianism?

Prof. Stiglitz (below) is undoubtedly a good economist but his Leftism occasionally draws him into failures of logic. Much of what he says below has some truth. There are undoubtedly large inequalities of wealth in society.

But he makes no effort to understand the psychological and sociological causes of that He simply asserts that "neo-liberalism." is the culprit. He says that it has "set us on the road to fascism, to a twenty-first-century version of authoritarianism"

So what is his solution to that? It is "harnessing the power of government" to redistribute resources. So his cure for authoritarianism is more authoritarianism! He is himself a Fascist! Mussolini would approve of his ideas

So for all his pretence of profound analysis he is in the end just an old-fashioned Leftist with old-fashioned Leftist policy prescriptions. Rather pathetic, really

I have previously pointed out another failure of logic in a Stiglitz defence of Leftism:

https://dissectleft.blogspot.com/2023/04/is-cost-of-living-leap-caused-by.html

If you know the Leftist position on anything, you know what conclusion Stiglitz will come to, no matter how many dubious twists and turns it takes to get there. Even his Nobel prize work led to an advocacy of government interventions in the market


How would you define the "good society"?

It's a question Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, is asking everyone, in this fraught moment in history.

His new book, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society, takes a deep look at the question.

"My ultimate objective in this book is to understand what kind of an economic, political, and social system is most likely to enhance the freedoms of most citizens, including by appropriately drawing the right boundaries on freedoms, constructing the right rules and regulations, and making the right trade-offs," he writes.

"The answer I provide runs counter to more than a century of writings by conservatives.

"It is not the minimalist state advocated by libertarians, or even the highly constricted state envisioned by neoliberalism.

"Rather, the answer is something along the lines of a rejuvenated European social democracy or a new American Progressive Capitalism, a twenty-first century version of social democracy or of the Scandinavian welfare state," he writes.

If you haven't heard of Professor Stiglitz, he's credited with pioneering the concept of "the 1 per cent."

That refers to the modern phenomenon of the top 1 per cent of Americans (or more precisely, the top one-tenth of 1 per cent) that have accrued so much wealth and power in recent decades that it's imperilling the US political system.

In 2011, 13 years ago, he explained how the severe growth in wealth inequality, if left unchecked, would keep feeding on itself and drive further inequality and division in politics.

The next year, in 2012, he published The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future (which became a best-seller) to warn of what was coming.

"As our economic system is seen to fail for most citizens, and as our political system seems to be captured by moneyed interests, confidence in our democracy and in our market economy will erode along with our global influence," he warned.

"As the reality sinks in that we are no longer a country of opportunity and that even our long-vaunted rule of law and system of justice have been compromised, even our sense of national identity may be put into jeopardy."

Today, he has returned to that theme in his new book, but from a different angle.

He takes as his starting point the extreme social, political and environmental problems besieging some societies in this age of polycrisis, and wonders how Americans (and citizens of other countries) can reverse the destructive growth in wealth inequality and rebuild a better and healthier society in coming decades.

"The challenges to — and attacks on — democracy and freedom have never been greater in my lifetime," he warns.

What does your ideal society look like?

We may not know it, but when we complain about a new policy, or tax settings, or housing, or our health and education systems, or the rate of population growth, we're often engaging in political philosophy.

Why? Because if we're arguing that some policy isn't good, we must have an idea (whether conscious or unconscious) of what a better policy would be, and that means we're comparing it to some ideal we have in mind.

For example, what's your view on gun ownership?

Should Australians be allowed to have access to guns in the way people in the United States do?

Your answer to that question will say a lot about your conception of "the good society."

Do you think Australians would be freer and happier if the countryside was awash with guns? Would our schools be safer? Would our politics improve?

That's the type of exercise Professor Stiglitz engages with in this book.

He spends a lot of time talking about the economic freedoms that are required for the majority of people to flourish.

He talks about the importance of someone's "opportunity set" — the set of options available to someone during their life, given the resources at their disposal — and how it determines their freedom to act, and what can be gained by good economic and social systems that provide someone with the freedom to live up to their potential.

"People who are barely surviving have extremely limited freedom," he writes.

"All their time and energy go into earning enough money to pay for groceries, shelter, and transportation to jobs … a good society would do something about the deprivations, or reductions in freedom, for people with low incomes.

"It is not surprising that people who live in the poorest countries emphasise economic rights, the right to medical care, housing, education, and freedom from hunger.

"They are concerned about the loss of freedom not just from an oppressive government but also from economic, social, and political systems that have left large portions of the population destitute," he writes.

He reminds us that economic rights and political rights are, ultimately, inseparable.

"When you understand economic freedom as freedom to act, it immediately reframes many of the central issues surrounding economic policy and freedom," he says.

The lies we were told?

To that end, a big chunk of his book is dedicated to arguing why we've been fed a lie by "neo-liberalism."

He says the neoliberal political project has made millions of people in the United States and elsewhere less free, as it's destroyed the US middle class (and severely threatened it in other countries) while enriching the pockets of the ultra-wealthy and undermining democratic institutions.

"The system that evolved in the last quarter of the twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic came to be called neoliberalism," he writes.

"'Liberal' refers to being 'free', in this context, free of government intervention including regulations. The 'neo' meant to suggest that there was something new in it.

"What really was new was the trick of claiming neoliberalism stripped away rules when much of what it was doing was imposing new rules that favoured banks and the wealthy.

"For instance, the so-called deregulation of the banks got government temporarily out of the way, which allowed bankers to reap rewards for themselves. But then, with the 2008 financial crisis, government took centre stage as it funded the largest bailout in history, courtesy of taxpayers. Bankers profited at the expense of the rest of the society. In dollar terms, the cost to the rest of us exceeded the banks' gains.

"Neoliberalism in practice was what can be described as 'ersatz capitalism', in which losses are socialised and gains privatised," he says [his italics].

The title of his book is an explicit reference to The Road to Serfdom, which was published by the famous Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek in 1944.

Professor Hayek was one of the leading figures of the post-war neoliberal political movement.

He wrote the Road to Serfdom to warn people of the threat posed to freedom, as he saw it, by governments in the 1930s and 1940s that were increasingly willing to intervene in the market system to plan, or direct, some economic activity for the masses.

He spent much of his life trying to rid the world of the influence of the British economist John Maynard Keynes, whose policy prescriptions inspired governments in countries such as Australia and the UK to pursue "full employment" policies after the war (policies which, coincidentally, supported the so-called Golden Age of Capitalism from 1945 to the early 1970s).

Professor Stiglitz argues that the conception of "freedom" pushed by Professor Hayek and other neoliberals, including Milton Friedman, led us down another wrong path.

"They talked of 'free markets', as if imposing rules and regulations results in 'unfree markets'," he writes.

"They relabeled private enterprises — companies owned by private individuals — as 'free enterprises', as if giving them that appellation would bestow a reverence and suggest that they should not be touched and their freedom should not be curtailed even if they exploit people and the planet.

"[And] the Right claims that governments have unnecessarily restricted freedom through taxation, which constrains the budgets of the rich and thereby … reduces their freedom to act.

"Even in this they are only partially correct because the societal benefits of the expenditures financed by these taxes, the investments in infrastructure and technology, for instance, may expand their opportunity sets (their freedom) in more meaningful ways," he writes.

Professor Stiglitz was born in 1943. He's 81 years old.

He knew some of the people he writes about in the book and had a ringside seat to the "market turn" that occurred in the 1970s.

He's seen the impact that that market-turn had on the US middle class during the past 40 years.

One can easily imagine that the supporters of the vision of "freedom" that's been promulgated by neoliberalism will find plenty of problems with his book, in both its historical analysis and its policy prescriptions.

But Professor Stiglitz takes no backward step. "Unfettered, neoliberal capitalism is antithetical to sustainable democracy," he concludes.

"It is evident today that free and unfettered markets advocated by Hayek and Friedman and so many on the Right have * set us on the road to fascism, to a twenty-first-century version of authoritarianism * made all the worse by advances in science and technology, an Orwellian authoritarianism where surveillance is the order of the day and truth has been sacrificed to power."

Ultimately, he says we must start using the economic system to provide millions more people with meaningful freedom, and that means * harnessing the power of government * to make it easier for people to access the resources that will enlarge peoples' "opportunity set" and improve their economic and political freedoms.

"We are in a global, intellectual, and political war to protect and preserve freedom," Professor Stiglitz warns.

"Do democracies and free societies deliver what citizens want and care about and can they do it better than authoritarian regimes?

"This battle for hearts and minds is everywhere. I firmly believe that democracies and free societies can provide for their citizens far more effectively than authoritarian systems. However, in several key areas, most notably in economics, our free societies are failing.

"But — and this is important — these failures are not inevitable and are partially because the Right's incorrect conception of freedom led us down the wrong path.

"There are other paths that deliver more of the goods and services they want, with more of the security that they want, but that also provide more freedom for more people."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-11/joseph-stiglitz-the-road-to-freedom-neoliberalism-fascism/104210670

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8 August, 2024

BPA plastic chemicals in the womb have been found to be linked with higher levels of autism

Another vastly over-hyped headline in pursuit of the jihad against BPA. The article itself (below) is moderately sane, with large reservations expressed. e.g.:

“I do want to stress it’s not the cause of autism,”

"if the BPA-autism link was causal in nature"

"may be consistent with autism spectrum disorder,”

And in the journal article we read that effects were observed

"only in males with low aromatase genetic pathway activity scores"

So there is NO evidence that BPA is generally harmful in humans

The journal article is:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-48897-8

Boys with lower levels of a key brain enzyme who are born to mothers with higher levels of plastic chemicals in their wombs are six times more likely to develop autism by the time they are a teenager, a world-first Australian study has found.

A decade-long study by the Florey Institute has for the first time established a biological ­pathway between the plastic chemical bisphenol A (BPA), which is found in food and drink containers, cosmetics and ­packaging, and autism spectrum disorder.

“BPA can disrupt hormone-controlled male fetal brain development in several ways, including silencing this key enzyme, aromatase, that controls neurohormones and is especially important in fetal male brain development,” study co-author Anne-Louise Ponsonby said. “This appears to be part of the autism puzzle.”

BPA is a chemical that is added to plastics to make them more malleable and durable. It is virtually impossible to avoid in daily life.

Several previous studies have posited a link between it and autism, but the Florey study is the first long-term research incorporate human studies to examine the interplay between prenatal BPA, aromatase function and the development of autism in a large cohort of mothers and babies.

Florey researchers have found evidence of higher levels of the plastic chemical bisphenol A (BPA) in pregnant mothers who gave birth to sons with autism. Research published in Nature Communications, led by Florey scientists Dr Wah Chin Boon and…
The peer-reviewed Florey research, published in Nature Communcations, found that the link between BPA in mothers and ­autism in children was particularly evident in the top quarter of boys in the cohort with an ­inherent vulnerability to the endocrine-disrupting properties of BPA plastics – those with lower levels of the enzyme aromatase.

The researchers studied 1770 children over 10 years from two cohorts of mothers and children in the Barwon Infant Study in Australia and the Columbia Centre for Children’s Health and Environment in the US, finding that boys in this group who were born to mothers with higher urinary BPA levels in late pregnancy were 3½ times more likely to have autism symptoms by the age of two, and six times more likely to have a verified ­autism diagnosis by age 11.

“I do want to stress it’s not the cause of autism,” Professor Ponsonby said. “Autism is a multi-factorial disease, and it’s going to have a range of genetic and other drivers. So this is a contributing factor in some cases.”

In the two large birth cohorts studied, it was established that higher BPA levels in pregnant mothers were associated with epigenetic changes, or gene switching which suppressed the aromatase enzyme. As well as ­establishing the link in humans, Florey scientist and co-author Wah Chin Boon was also able to establish for the first time the biochemical pathway in which BPA suppressed aromatase in laboratory mice studies.

“We found that BPA suppresses the aromatase enzyme and is associated with anatomical, neurological and behavioural changes in the male mice that may be consistent with autism spectrum disorder,” Dr Boon said.

“This is the first time a biological pathway has been identified that might help explain the ­connection between autism and BPA.”

Autism affects between 1 and 2 per cent of all children in Western countries and the prevalence is on the rise.

Professor Ponsonby said that the findings indicated that among boys in the general population with a greater inherent vulnerability to the effects of endocrine disruptors, about 10 per cent of autism diagnoses may potentially be able to be prevented by BPA avoidance if the BPA -autism link was causal in nature.

Aromatase has been described as “a master controller of steroid hormone-directed brain development” and is responsible in the brain for converting the hormone testosterone to neuroeostrogen.

“Aromatase is more important in male brain development,” ­Professor Ponsonby said. “These finding may explain some of the male excess observed in ­autism.”

In lab studies, the Florey has also for the first time identified a possible “antitode” to this process – a type of fatty acid that when ­injected in mice was found to ­reverse the disruption of aromatase.

The scientists posited that the fatty substance, which is a major lipid component of the royal jelly of honeybees, may be able to correct a deficiency in aromatase-dependent estrogen signalling in the brain. They say this potential antidote warrants further study.

BPA is a chemical used in the lining of some food and beverage packaging to protect food from contamination and extend shelf life. Small amounts of BPA can migrate into food and beverages from containers. Tiny amounts of the chemical can enter the skin via clothes and cosmetics, and it can also be inhaled in things like paint fumes.

In 2010, the Australian government announced a voluntary phase-out of BPA use in polycarbonate baby bottles.

Food Standards Australia New Zealand recent said that when food safety authorities around the world reviewed BPA “they have generally concluded there are no safety concerns at the levels people are exposed to”.

However, last year the European Food Safety Authority published a re-evaluation of the risks to public health from the presence of BPA in food.

It concluded the tolerable daily intake for BPA should be substantially reduced from the temporary value it had previously established in 2015.

Australia’s regulator says it has “considered EFSA’s re-evaluation of BPA and has reservations about the approach taken”.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/science/bpa-plastic-chemicals-in-the-womb-have-been-found-to-be-linked-with-higher-levels-of-autism/news-story/5f9ac75fa810cdbfcd447e51c017e224

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6 August, 2024

Brits are finally losing their legendary patience

What Matt Goodwin says below is spot-on but what he leaves unsaid is WHY many Third-world migrants are so toxic to Britain.

They come to Britain hoping to acquire a British standard of living and find that to be beyond their grasp. They just do not have the mental, educational and cultural wherewithall to prosper in Britain and that makes them angry.

They feel angry and ignored and blame Britain for that. Letting them into Britain just makes their difference obvious to them and that hurts. So they strike out at the society that denies them what they had expected and can obviously now never achieve


“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command”,

So wrote George Orwell in his classic book 1984.

This is the quote that came to mind as I watched Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his Labour government struggle to respond to protests that erupted after three girls were brutally murdered by the son of Rwandan migrants.

But why this quote?

Because that's exactly what Keir Starmer and much of the elite class are now asking us to do —reject the evidence of our eyes and ears.

When Keir Starmer first responded to the protests, he could have made it crystal clear that while there is absolutely no place for violence, his government does understand why so many people are so utterly frustrated and fed-up with the state of Britain.

He could have made the point that while everybody in Britain opposes violence it is clear that many people also hold legitimate concerns about the failure of successive governments to control the borders, lower migration, and maintain law and order.

Had he spoken to protestors, it would have become immediately obvious to Starmer and his team that this was not just about mindless violence or even the tragic events in Southport; it is chiefly about people’s concerns over legal and illegal immigration.

And after clips of marauding Muslim gangs attacking white people went viral, both Keir Starmer and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper could also have made it clear that the rule of law will be applied equally, to all groups, irrespective of race and religion.

But they chose not to do that.

Which is why so many people are now even more disillusioned with what they feel is not just a Labour government but an elite class that is deeply biased and out-of-touch with the rest of the country; a class that is more interested in criticising and attacking the British majority than addressing the reasons they feel so utterly disillusioned.

Unlike Keir Starmer, Yvette Cooper, and much of the ruling class, most normal people in this country know full well that these protests do not begin and end with “far-right thuggery”. Only an elite class that has become dangerously disconnected from the rest of the country would see the protests through this incredibly narrow and warped lens.

These narratives are a coping mechanism for an elite that is visibly struggling to make sense of what is unfolding around it, explanations that help it make sense of these troubling and shocking events but which make little sense to everybody else.

Because for much of the rest of the country, for millions of ordinary British people out there, these events are obviously rooted in the disastrous policies the elite class on both the Left and Right has imposed on Britain for much of the last thirty years.

They are rooted in the deliberate decision to pursue mass immigration, to weaken our borders, to usher in unprecedented cultural changes, to fail to integrate newcomers, and then refuse to tolerate any criticism of these policies.

But they are rooted, too, in a palpable sense of unfairness, hypocrisy, and bias when it comes to this elite class —a class that routinely appears more interested in catering to minorities over the majority, attacking rather than listening to the British majority, and violating the British sense of fair play which is absolutely central to our culture.

Many people today, for example, will have listened to Keir Starmer say “people have a right to feel safe in their country” while asking themselves why his Labour government consistently refuse to prioritise the safety of the British people by controlling who is coming in and out of Britain, deporting foreign criminals, and ensuring criminals remain in prison, not letting thousands onto the streets. Had the elite class stopped the boats and controlled the borders people would not be rioting.

Many people, too, will be wondering why the likes of Keir Starmer, Yvette Cooper, Sadiq Khan, and others routinely talk about “hate” and “thuggery” among the British majority while doing all they can to distract us from asking for the real reasons why our children have been blown up at pop concerts, murdered at dance classes, and subjected to industrial-scale, anti-White rape across dozens of English towns.

Many will also be wondering why the elite class has continued to reshape Britain and its institutions –schools, universities, civil service, museums, galleries, and more—around a corrosive identity politics only to now wonder why the British are organising themselves along similar lines. As even Tommy Robinson has asked, if the lesson of the last few years is that competing identity groups can only gain attention, status, resources, and a voice from the elite class by taking to the streets, as BLM and pro-Hamas supporters did, then why would the white working-class not do the same?

And many people will be wondering if Britain really is the successful multicultural society that the Labour Party and liberals tell us it is then why are we are now watching gangs of Muslims roaming the streets chanting “Allahu Akbar!” rather than waving the Union Jack. Is this what successful multiculturalism looks like?

The elite class does not want us to ask these questions because it cannot answer these questions. To spark this kind of national debate about the policies that have been imposed on the country in recent decades risks threatening the power of this class.

Which is why the elite class is now working overtime to channel us into a much more managed and tightly controlled discussion about things the elite class can control.

They want us to talk about regulating social media. They want us to talk about shutting down alternative views, like those on GB News.

They want us to spend our time demonising counter-cultural writers who have been validated by current events as ‘far right enablers’, ‘apologists’ and ‘grifters’, whose voice should no longer be permitted in a tightly controlled public square.

They want us, in short, to talk about anything and everything except how the policies of the elite class have pushed us to this point —to breaking point.

This is why the narratives promoted by the elite class leave us feeling confused, alienated, and disoriented, unsure if what we think is reality really is reality. And this is why so many people in Britain are quietly asking themselves some questions that reflect this creeping sense of confusion, bewilderment, and unfairness.

Is the elite class calling for clampdowns the same class that cheered on protests by the revolutionary Black Lives Matter, which hates the West and praises Hamas?

Is the elite class that was so quick to talk about the legitimate grievances behind BLM rioting across the West the same class that now refuses to acknowledge this “far-right thuggery” is rooted in wider grievances among the British population?

Is Keir Starmer, the man denouncing these protests as “far-right thuggery”, the same Keir Starmer who rushed to Take the Knee days after Black Lives Matter protestors broke the law, injured nearly 30 police officers and defaced national monuments?

And is he the same Keir Starmer who openly praised Extinction Rebellion and leads a government whose MPs have openly socialised and engaged with Islamist extremists?

Is the elite class that is rushing to denounce the protests the same class that remained largely silent as antisemites and Islamists marched up and down the country celebrating the murder and rape of Jews, or simply denying these things took place?

Are many of the towns that are experiencing the most serious violence today, like Rotherham, the same ones where at least 1,400 young white girls were raped by Muslim gangs, a scandal Labour elites said it was “racist” to talk about?

Are the people causally implying that much of the country is “far right” the same ones who tied themselves in knots over whether they should call Hamas “terrorists”?

Are the police chiefs who deny there is two-tier policing the same ones who watched their officers Take the Knee and join Muslim show trials after an autistic boy was threatened for lightly scuffing a copy of the Koran?

The elite class does not want us to ask these questions because to do so would threaten the dominance of a class that is no longer confident and secure in its position. This is why it is now trying to justify even harsher restrictions on free speech, free expression, free assembly, and dissent.

This is why terms like “far right” and “Islamophobia” will now be expanded to silence and stigmatise not only those idiotic thugs who are destroying their own communities but millions of ordinary people who both object to those thugs and the disastrous policies the elite class has imposed on them from above.

This is why we will be told that in order to defend democracy we must not change the direction of travel but rather give up even more of our freedoms and rights, shut down alternative media, deplatform dissenters, and hand even more power to the elite class.

This is why Keir Starmer’s first instinct was not to acknowledge the wider public mood, speak across party lines and set out a plan of action but instead announce tighter restrictions and enhanced state surveillance to manage “the far right”.

So too was it revealing that a senior government advisor, Lord Woodcock, openly called for Covid-style lockdowns to shut down the protests and squash dissent.

And so too was it revealing that even one candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party suggested the state ban the English Defence League –a street movement that has not operated in any serious way for more than a decade.

In this way, the elite class calls to defend liberalism while simultaneously ushering in a dark new authoritarianism that is not liberal at all. Stifling and suffocating debate, shutting down dissent, and screaming at writers who challenge this groupthink are not the signs of an elite class that is confident and comfortable in its own position; they are the signs of an elite class that can sense it is starting to lose control.

And now many people out there can see it for themselves. So, this is not simply about “far-right thuggery”; this is about the unravelling and disastrous effects of an elite project that’s hollowed out, divided, and weakened Britain over many years.

A project that has subjected the British people and their children to increasing crime, chaos, communalism, the balkanisation of their communities, and increasingly chilling atrocities while simultaneously expecting the British people not to react at all.

What Keir Starmer needs to do —right now— is stop talking only about “far right thuggery” and start talking about violent offenders from all communities.

Starmer and Yvette Cooper need to stop talking only about defending mosques and start talking about defending all of our communities.

They need to stop obsessing about notions of “misinformation” and social media and start recognising that people's concerns about illegal and legal immigration are legitimate and need addressing.

They need to stop pretending two-tier policing has not happened, acknowledge mistakes were made and recommit all public institutions to political neutrality.

And they need to start showing they are dealing with the underlying issues by, firstly, doing whatever necessary to regain control of our borders and slow the pace of immigration and segregation in this country. And they need to start doing all these things now.

Because while the elite class might tell people in Orwellian fashion to ignore the evidence of their eyes and ears, what the events of the last few days reveal is that a rapidly growing number of people in this country are now refusing to play along.

The curtain in this country is being pulled back to reveal not just the mindless thugs who have become useful idiots for the elite class but, more importantly, for a much larger number of people, what the policies of this elite class have done to Britain.

And now that the curtain has been pulled back, and the light has poured in, it cannot simply be closed —no matter what the elite class might tell us.

https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/no-this-is-not-just-far-right-thuggery

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4 August, 2024

Drinking from plastic bottles can raise blood pressure due to microplastics entering the bloodstream, study suggests

"Suggests" is the word. The study was based on the responses of only EIGHT people and there was NO measurement of microplastic intake at any point. So no evidence that microplastics caused the differences observed. And the results were highly variable with men mostly not affected. What a heap of steaming manure! The journal article is

https://www.mdpi.com/2673-8929/3/3/26

Drinking from plastic bottles can raise blood pressure as a result of microplastics entering the bloodstream, a study suggests.

Microplastics have also been found in fluids in glass bottles, according to other research, and experts say the associated higher blood pressure can lead to an increased risk of heart disease.

The latest study found blood pressure went down after participants stopped all fluid intake, including water, from plastic and glass bottles, and drank only tap water for two weeks.

Researchers in the department of medicine at Danube Private University in Austra said: 'We concluded, after extensive research, that beverages packaged in plastic bottles should be avoided.

'Remarkable trends were observed. The results of the study suggest, for the first time, that a reduction in plastic use could potentially lower blood pressure, probably due to the reduced vol-ume of plastic particles in the bloodstream.

'The changes we observed in blood pressure suggest that reducing the intake of plastic particles could lower cardiovascular risk.'

Research shows that microplastics – microscopic fragments that are the result of plastic degradation triggered by UV radiation or the result of a bottle being knocked about – are ubiquitous.

Microplastics have been found in saliva, heart tissue, the liver, kidneys and placenta. Several studies have found high concentrations in water in plastic bottles.

In the new study, reported in the journal Microplastics, the researchers had eight men and women get their daily fluid intake from tap water and told them to abstain from drinks stored in plastic or glass bottles.

Several blood pressure measurements were taken at the start and during the study. The results showed a statistically significant decline in diastolic blood pressure – the pressure in the arteries when the heart rests between beats – after two weeks.

The researchers said: 'Based on the findings, indicating a reduction in blood pressure with decreased plastic consumption, we hypothesize that plastic particles present in the bloodstream might contribute to elevated blood pressure.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13706389/Drinking-plastic-bottles-raise-blood-pressure-microplastics-entering-bloodstream-study-suggests.html

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Posts from July, 2024


30 July, 2024

Fizzy drinks are the new tobacco for young people... that's why I believe that Coca-Cola should be banned from sponsoring the Olympics

The evidence for this claim is very poor. The Results section for the academic study they cite is below:

Results During an average of 18.5 years of follow-up, 3447 (22.3%) participants with incident CVD and 7638 (49.3%) deaths were documented. After multivariable adjustment, when comparing the categories of lowest intake of beverages with the highest intake, the pooled hazard ratios for all cause mortality were 1.20 (95% confidence interval 1.04 to 1.37) for sugar sweetened beverages (SSBs), 0.96 (0.86 to 1.07) for artificially sweetened beverages (ASBs), 0.98 (0.90 to 1.06) for fruit juice, 0.74 (0.63 to 0.86) for coffee, 0.79 (0.71 to 0.89) for tea, 0.77 (0.70 to 0.85) for plain water, 0.88 (0.80 to 0.96) for low fat milk, and 1.20 (0.99 to 1.44) for full fat milk. Similar associations were observed between the individual beverages and CVD incidence and mortality. In particular, SSB intake was associated with a higher risk of incident CVD (hazard ratio 1.25, 95% confidence interval 1.03 to 1.51) and CVD mortality (1.29, 1.02 to 1.63), whereas significant inverse associations were observed between intake of coffee and low fat milk and CVD incidence. Additionally, compared with those who did not change their consumption of coffee in the period after a diabetes diagnosis, a lower all cause mortality was observed in those who increased their consumption of coffee. A similar pattern of association with all cause mortality was also observed for tea, and low fat milk. Replacing SSBs with ABSs was significantly associated with lower all cause mortality and CVD mortality, and replacing SSBs, ASBs, fruit juice, or full fat milk with coffee, tea, or plain water was consistently associated with lower all cause mortality.

For start, it was a study of DIABETICS so may not generalize beyond that. And it can be seen that all the HRs were very low and were achieved only by discarding the middle ranges of their data. And there appears to have been no control for the big confounder in such studies: income. Nothing firm can be conluded from this study but the safest conclusion seems to be that Coke causes you no harm

Link for thestudy:

https://www.bmj.com/content/381/bmj-2022-073406

Because Coke is so popular, the superior people WANT it to be bad for you, but the evidence is not very co-operative


If you were watching the Paris Olympics and saw a winning athlete cross the finish line, light a cigarette and boast about the health-boosting benefits of their favourite tobacco brand, you'd be as surprised as you were disgusted.

Yet it's startlingly true that tobacco companies were major Olympic sponsors right up until 1988, when cigarette brands were finally banned from advertising at the Games.

For the previous 60 years, tobacco-funded Olympic medal-winners had lined up to extol the virtues of smoking and push the now bizarre claim that it enabled athletes to lead healthy lives — among them, the iconic Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals for sprinting, relay and long jump at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, but who died from lung cancer aged 66 in 1980, after decades of heavy smoking.

The biggest earner of tobacco funding, though, was the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which took millions of pounds every four years from cigarette-brand sponsorship, from 1920 until it was banned.

But you may be shocked to learn that today the IOC still takes similarly vast sums from another major industry — one that, I believe, when it comes to damaging the health of young people may now have overtaken cigarettes.

That industry is soft drinks — and that money comes from the global beverage giant Coca-Cola, which has sponsored the Olympics Games since 1928.

Sources estimate that Coca-Cola nowadays pays the Olympics around £70 million a year in sponsorship. In exchange, Coca-Cola can use the Olympic Games' five rings on all its products.

As an investigation in the French newspaper Le Monde said in May, this huge money deal enables Coca-Cola to 'promote the world's most talked-about sporting event, all over the world, while generating priceless advertising opportunities for itself'.

Indeed, Le Monde said of Coca-Cola's tie-up with the Olympics: 'The partnership has become so close that it's hard to say who runs the Games.'

Across the Olympics, wherever you look, Coca-Cola branding is ubiquitous. Even before the Games began, the drinks giant had sponsored the Olympic torch relay, so that a Coca-Cola van constantly flanked the torch's two-month tour.

It is time that all this Coca-Cola sponsorship stopped. For good. Because, beyond tobacco, as a doctor who advocates for public health, I fear the health-destroying power of fizzy drinks more than anything else. Soft drinks damage people's bodies, and the bodies of children in particular.

And what's more frightening is that these products are so friendly-looking, so familiar and so pervasive that we've become accustomed to them and have forgotten the damage they wreak.

The harms of soft drinks are extremely well documented over hundreds of scientific papers.

As a 2022 report by the University of North Carolina's Global Food Research Programme warned, they are 'a key driver of modern surges in nutrition-related diseases worldwide, including obesity, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease — the leading causes of disability and death in the world'.

Furthermore, fizzy drinks have no real nutritional benefit. In fact, they contribute to under-nutrition when consumed in place of foods containing essential nutrients. A major review by Yale University of 88 studies showed that consumption of soft drinks meant lower intakes of milk, calcium and other nutrients.

In a large multinational European study published in the BMJ last year, higher levels of consumption of sugar-sweetened and artificially sweetened soft drinks was associated with increased risk of death from all causes. And in the shorter term, there's tooth decay — a national catastrophe in the UK that causes unbelievable suffering.

The link with soda was demonstrated last year when researchers at the universities of Cambridge and Glasgow reported how the sugar tax on soft drinks, introduced in 2018, has helped prevent more than 5,600 hospital admissions for children having to have their teeth pulled out under general anaesthetic.

Part of the problem is a chronic shortage of dentists, but this study underlined how closely sugary drinks also play a key role.

Nor is it just sodas with sugar: low or no-sugar 'diet' versions often contain the enamel-rotting likes of phosphoric, citric and tartaric acids. There is concerning evidence that these acids don't just rot teeth: the phosphoric acid may also dissolve your bones from the inside.

Beyond the sugar tax, these harmful products remain basically unregulated. My seven-year-old can use the money from the Tooth Fairy to go into any corner shop and buy a fizzy drink without it carrying any health warning either for her or her parents.

The idea that the Olympics would partner with brands that market such products is appalling. The Games are effectively the strongest health brand in the world — and sponsorship by the likes of Coca-Cola cements in the minds of children and adults that soft drinks are deeply associated with healthiness, athleticism and building strong bodies.

Indeed, Australian researchers reported in the journal Public Health Nutrition in 2011 that parents perceive food products as healthier when endorsed by a professional athlete, making them more likely to buy them for their children.

(It's not just Coca-Cola: while it's the most active soft drink sponsor in global sports worldwide, other drinks companies have contracts with sporting events, such as PepsiCo's sponsorship of the National Football League in the U.S.)

Big-brand soda sponsorship of sport also effectively undermines the wealth of scientific evidence of the dangers of soft drinks. Consumers look at the Olympic branding and ask themselves: 'Well, how bad can these products be if they're linked with the most elite physical competition in the world?'

The reach of this kind of marketing is titanic. The 2020 Tokyo Olympics had a broadcast audience of more than three billion worldwide, with online videos of the event being watched more than 28 billion times. Such marketing power demolishes anything a doctor can tell their patients.

These brands don't even position themselves as 'health-neutral'. Coca-Cola and the rest trade on the idea that their products can provide 'sports nutrition' — supplying energy for people to do sports and live super-active fun lives.

These companies even fund medical studies. A team from Oxford and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine mapped the universe of Coca-Cola's research funding, which involves almost 1,500 different researchers (probably not all direct grant recipients), corresponding to 461 publications funded by the brand. Many of these promoted the idea that exercise and activities could help offset the excess calories from products such as Coca-Cola.

But we know from the research evidence that this isn't what happens. We know that physical inactivity is not actually a significant part of the obesity epidemic: it's down to calorie over-consumption from soft drinks and other junk foods.

Yet, as it stands, Coca-Cola will continue to peddle this 'health' message for the next two Olympics at least, as they have locked the Games' organisers into a contract that lasts until 2032.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13685447/fizzy-drinks-tobacco-young-people-coca-cola-olympics-cigarette.html

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28 July, 2024

Kamala a "person of color"? Not so much

Below as she was in 1995 with her influential black boyfriend

Source:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8623781/Kamala-Harris-affair-San-Franciscos-black-mayor-Willie-Brown.html

Those white shoulders are unambiguous

So how come? Her father was a Jamaican, was he not? Again not so much. He may have come from Jamaica but there is clearly not much African in him:



His features are well within the Caucasian range

And what about Kamala's mother? She was a fair skinned Tamil Brahmin. Again not so black



Does America need a fake-tan President?

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22 July, 2024

What, Exactly, Is so Great About the Mediterranean Diet?

The journal article referred to below is "Primary prevention of cardiovascular disease in women with a Mediterranean diet: systematic review and meta-analysis"

At: https://heart.bmj.com/content/109/16/1208

Meta analyses are very susceptible to finding what you want to find and the hazard ratios reported were very low, indicating very marginal effects. And it appears that the authors did not even begin to look at confounders such as ethnicity and social class.

So this study is a very poor recommendation for a Mediterranean diet indeed. The diet is essentially a fad and nothing more

Healthful eating is important at any age to lower the risk of obesity and keep the heart and everything else inside the body functioning well. This becomes especially crucial later in life, because good nutrition helps reduce the risk of chronic conditions like hypertension, high cholesterol and cardiovascular disease.

Being smart about what you eat also can affect your mood no matter your age—ultra-processed foods that include hydrogenated oils and high-fructose corn syrup, for instance, can increase the risk of depression—and some studies even suggest that healthy eating patterns can help delay or prevent developing dementia as we get older.

One way to improve your health while also eating some really wonderful foods, says Natalie Bruner, a registered dietitian and nutritionist with St. Clair Health, is to follow the Mediterranean style of eating.

Often referred to as the Mediterranean diet, it’s not so much a “diet” in the traditional sense, which is often defined by a bunch of hard-and-fast rules such as calorie counting and macro-tracking what you put in your mouth each day. Eating Mediterranean style is more of a lifestyle.

Patterned around the foods eaten by people who live in countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea—think Italy, Greece, Spain and Northern Africa—it puts a daily emphasis on plant-based dishes and heart-healthy, unsaturated fats such as olive oil instead the refined or hydrogenated oils that are so common in fast food meals and snack foods.

Half a Tablespoon of Olive Oil Daily May Protect Brain Health
The diet also emphasizes whole, minimally processed foods such as beans, seeds and legumes, antioxidant-rich fresh fruits and vegetables, and moderate portions of lean protein like chicken and seafood, with only the occasional serving of red meat.

Fish that is high in omega-3 fatty acids, such as salmon, is especially key since it can help reduce inflammation and pain caused by arthritis, which is common in seniors, as well as improve cholesterol levels.

“It’s not a diet that’s restrictive,” says Bruner. “You’re eating everything that’s good for you, which is great.”

Dietitians and nutritionists generally don’t like to characterize food as “good” or “bad” because that can lead to restrictive behaviors, she says. Yet multiple studies have shown that those who follow the Mediterranean diet have better cognitive function and brain health in old age, she says.

Because of its anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties and its effectiveness at preventing obesity, there also are a lot of heart health benefits, along with the prevention and progression of diseases such as Type 2 diabetes, which is associated with lifestyle and diet.

For instance, according to a 2023 study in the medical journal Heart, women who follow a Mediterranean diet more closely than others had a 24 percent lower risk of cardiovascular disease. They also had a 23 percent lower risk of mortality.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/bright/what-exactly-is-so-great-about-the-mediterranean-diet-5688853?ea_src=au-frontpage&ea_med=leisure-medium-0

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21 July, 2024

Hatred of feminism linked to violence, report finds

Rubbish! The headine above may perhaps be accurate but the "Report" that underlies that headline shows no such thing. the "Report" is here

https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/items/9c386698-5d92-4667-8bbb-4060ed59f42b

All it shows is that various negative attitudes tend to correlate with one-another. There is NO demonstrated link to violence or any other form of behaviour.

"Reports" are a common way of bypassing the critical scrutiny that publication in academic journals articles requires

A new report has warned that anti-feminist beliefs are a strong predictor of violent extremism, with 20 per cent of Australian men surveyed believing feminism is dangerous to society and should be fought with violence if necessary.

According to the survey of 1020 men and women, 30 per cent of all respondents agreed or slightly agreed with hostile sexist attitudes and 19.4 per cent of the men believed it is legitimate to resist feminism using force.

Some of the statements put to the respondents include that feminism has ruined modern relationships and feminists are trying to get more power than men.

The research found hostile sexist attitudes and attitudes permissive of violence against women are strongly associated with most forms of violent extremism, including extremism motivated by religion, ethnicity and incel ideologies.

The Misogyny, Racism and Violent Extremism report said addressing the role of racial and gendered biases as underlying drivers of violent extremism and terrorism is significant but an “overlooked” security concern.

Report author Dr Sara Meger, who teaches international security and gender in international relations at the University of Melbourne, said she sent her research to commonwealth agencies in the hope it will help the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation redefine what is recognised as violent extremism.

“The biggest shortcomings we had this year with the Bondi Junction attack is that the current acting definition of terrorism can’t grasp how someone is motivated for a hatred of woman or anti-feminist ideology,” Dr Meger told The Australian. “We were motivated to do this research because … we thought we needed some empirical data to corroborate the growing recognition that there is some sort of element of gender ideology driving violent extremism.”

Independent MP Allegra Spender has called for a greater focus on violence against women following the Bondi stabbings.
The report also found that if policy were to define violent anti-feminist beliefs as a form of extremism, it would be the most prevalent form in the country.

It said that young people and boys are more likely to support violent extremism in all forms and those in the 18-39 age bracket are more likely to agree with restricting a woman’s right to choose her sexual partners compared to older respondents.

Dr Meger said “online echo chambers” are the biggest influence on younger generations preferencing these views over older people.

“These young men for whatever reason who are struggling socially, financially, emotionally, they’re looking for answers in these online forums. They find an easy one and blame feminism. Some forums might say feminism is the reason your life isn’t as good,” Dr Meger said.

She said it would take a whole-of-society approach and more online content regulation to prevent young Australians from adopting harmful views.

“I think it’s going to be a very difficult issue as there’s such mistrust with authority figures that goes along with this radicalism and polarisation,” she said.

The report said terrorist attacks and incidents of mass violence in Australia were found to have gendered and racialised determinants, and pointed to the Lindt Cafe siege terrorist who had a domestic violence intervention order against him at the time of the attack, and the Bondi Junction killer who was described by his father as frustrated by his lack of dating success.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/hatred-of-feminism-linked-to-violence-report-finds/news-story/1285876eb4b77f1d13a9c21386013c1d

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21 Jul 2024

The key to tackling Florida's coral crisis might just be found off the shores of Honduras

This is all a lot of nonsense. "Bleaching" is not the death of coral. It just means that the coral has expelled its algal symbionts. Australian corals regularly undergo bleaching and bounce back with no human intervention.

And if more heat-tolerant species are really needed, there are already plenty in the Red Sea and Northern Australia. Australia's warmest waters are in the Torres Strait which is in the mid tropics. And that is where corals flourish most abundantly in Australia. Like most living things, corals LIKE warmth. Even people do, as Boca Raton shows.

Most bleaching is in fact caused by fluctuating water levels. Corals are close to the surface and do NOT like dessication

Scientists from the University of Miami are collaborating on an effort to address Florida's coral crisis as last summer's record-breaking marine heatwave severely impacted coral reefs in the Florida Keys, pushing them to the brink.

Axios reports that researchers are studying elkhorn coral colonies to develop solutions to the rising ocean temperatures caused by climate change and have suggested an unlikely solution: the research team plans to breed the Honduran corals with Florida's surviving corals to produce offspring capable of withstanding warmer temperature. The report details the process further:

"Led by Andrew Baker, director of the Coral Reef Futures Lab at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School, a team collected the elkhorn fragments from a reef in Tela Bay off the northern coast of Honduras, where the corals have somehow thrived in the same extreme heat affecting Florida's population. They hope to breed them with Florida's surviving corals — a technique called "genetic rescue" — to produce offspring able to survive warmer temperatures, Baker said in a news release.

The extreme heat last summer resulted in the complete destruction of one reef and widespread coral bleaching, a phenomenon where corals turn white due to stress. This die-off led scientists to move thousands of corals to laboratories to protect them until temperatures normalized. As the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service reported back in August:

Essentially, corals around Florida are experiencing extreme levels of heat stress that have never been recorded before. All of the Florida Keys are at Alert Level 2 for bleaching conditions, which means severe, widespread bleaching and significant mortality are likely. Some sites have already been exposed to two times greater the amount of heat stress than when mortality is expected to begin, and so far, the most extreme heat stress is in the lower and middle Florida Keys.

Five years ago, the The Florida Aquarium's Coral Conservation and Research Center in Tampa participated in a coral cross-breeding project using elkhorn corals from Curaçao and coral sperm from Florida. Although the effort produced hundreds of offspring, they could not be released onto Florida's reefs due to genetic differences.

According to experts, the Honduran corals are more closely related to Florida corals, and scientists hope that the offspring from this current experiment will meet regulatory requirements for release into the sea.

Coral reefs are critical, as they provide shelter for a quarter of ocean animals and drive significant tourism in Florida.

https://www.latintimes.com/key-tackling-floridas-coral-crisis-might-just-found-off-shores-honduras-556512

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Jul 15, 2024

Study finds women who regularly eat ultra-processed foods are more likely to develop lupus

The journal article:

Ultra-Processed Food Intake and Risk of Systemic Lupus Erythematosus among Women followed in the Nurses’ Health Study Cohorts

The link

https://acrjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/authored-by/Oakes/Emily+G .

This study was impressive for the range of controls used and for the fact that the HRs, while low, were a little higher than in most diet studies. But it was again a study of tertiles only, suggesting that there was no overall significance. Lupus is in any case a rare disease (213 cases out of 204,175 in this study). So the study is NO warrant to avoid UPFs

Women who regularly eat ultra-processed foods (UPFs) have a higher risk of developing a debilitating autoimmune disease, a study has suggested.

In a trial, those who had a diet rich in these foods – which are packed with artificial sweeteners and preservatives – were 56 per cent more likely to contract lupus, which leads to joint pain, skin rashes and fatigue.

And those who regularly consumed artificially sweetened beverages and sugary foods also had a 45 per cent greater risk of developing the condition.

The study, by researchers at Harvard University in the US, also found there was no connection between obesity and lupus – which suggests that the artificial ingredients in UPFs are to blame.

UPFs – such as ready meals, ice cream and some frozen food – have previously been linked to a number of life-threatening diseases, including cancer, Alzheimer’s and heart disease.

Systematic lupus erythematosus is a long-term condition where the immune system mistakenly attacks healthy tissue in the body.

Studies have shown that roughly one in every 1,000 people in the UK has lupus – and 90 per cent of sufferers are female.

While its causes are not fully understood, it has previously been linked to viral infections, certain medications, sunlight and the menopause.

But the research from Harvard, published in the medical journal Arthritis Care And Research, suggests there could be a correlation between the disease and eating foods that contain artificial colourings, sweeteners and preservatives.

However Professor Gunter Kuhnle, of the University of Reading, warned the research may not be conclusive.

‘Ultra-processed food may be one of the risk factors [for lupus] but there are likely to be other factors as well that may be more important,’ he explained.

‘People with a high-fat and high-sugar intake are more likely to have other conditions.

‘They are already less healthy, and that may be one of the reasons why this group of women are developing lupus.’

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13632237/Study-women-ultra-processed-foods-autoimmune-disease.html

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Jul 14, 2024

The Lubavitcher Rebbe on How (Not) to Combat Antisemitism

Antisemitism has come roaring back recently so I think we need to understand it as well as we can, and the Rebbe had some thoughts on it that seem persuasive to me. So I am going to post just one thing here today, an extended coverage of what he had to say on the matter. I will not attempt a summary of it but I did particularly like his idea that we should not try to contradict or argue against antisemitic statements but instead we should stress our common humanity

I think I do to an extent live my own life in the way he advises. My girlfriend is a furious antisemite while I have been a gentile Zionist since I was aged about 10. How does that work? I simply don't judge women according to their political opinions. For a long-term relationship it is the personality of the woman that matters. And I think my girlfriend is a good woman

But Leftists are not like that. If you have the "wrong" opinions according to them they cast you into outer darkness. They are not psychologically strong enough to bear contradiction

And the explanation that the Rebbe offers for antisemitism also seems right to me. He says that it "fills a hole" in the life of the antisemite. It fulfils a need. And I can see that in my little sweetheart. She has seen a lot of unhappiness in her life so she needs an explanation of that. So she blames "The Jews"

As the Rebbe advises, I don't argue with that

Purim of 1965 was a rare occasion when the Rebbe spoke about anti-semitism in-depth. He discussed why they hate us, and provided an overview of the Jewish approach to combating it throughout the generations.

Purim is, of course, the classic antisemitism story. Haman presented to Achashverosh an ambitious but very real plan to kill every Jew in the entire world in one day, offering ten-thousand silver pieces—today’s equivalent of several billion dollars—to pay for the expenses of getting the job done.

Achashverosh agreed to the plan, but told Haman to keep his silver.

The Talmud3 uses a parable to explain an exchange between Achashverosh and Haman:

There were once two men, who each owned a field. One had a mound in the middle of his field; the other, a ditch.

The owner of the ditch, noticing the other’s mound of dirt, said to himself, “How I wish I could use that dirt to fill my ditch; I would be willing to pay for it!”

Meanwhile, the owner of the mound thought to himself, “If only I could use that ditch as a destination for my troublesome pile of earth!”

One day, they met one another. The owner of the ditch laid out a proposition: “How about you sell me your mound, so I can fill in my ditch with its dirt?”

To which the latter replied, “Take it for free—if only you had done so sooner!”

The Rebbe asks: True, Achashverosh had a problem to deal with—an empire of 127 nations, with many Jews living amongst them. They were a nuisance, a “mound of dirt,” in his valuable field.

But what does Haman’s “ditch” represent? And in what sense does eliminating the Jews parallel the leveling of a field? You’d think that you fill a ditch by adding to the field, not by eliminating something?

The Rebbe explains that the underlying cause of the condition called antisemitism has two precursors:

One antisemite says to the Jew, “You don’t belong in my world. You people are a mound in my field. Get out!”

Achashverosh fits the description that the Midrash assigns to Esau, who said to Jacob, “Didn’t we agree that this world is mine, and the next world belongs to you? Why are you mixing into the affairs of this world? You belong in your synagogue dealing spirituality!”

For Haman, however, the problem runs deeper.

Why does the Jew irk him so much?

Because the Jew exposes a gaping void in this person’s life. G?d gave the Torah to the Jews, and with it, a higher purpose. When he sees the Jew, he cannot escape the ditch in his own field. This latter problem is the void that constitutes this latter antisemite’s “Jewish problem.”

When the antisemite sees the Jew, he cannot escape the ditch in his own field. This is the void that constitutes this antisemite’s “Jewish problem.”

If he really wanted, he could lift himself up, but he doesn’t want to do the work. So he chooses a far simpler solution: Get rid of the Jew entirely. The “ditch in his field,” his void, will be leveled when there’s no one to remind him of his own emptiness.

It doesn’t matter what the Jew does or doesn’t do. It won’t help to stop acting Jewish, to make Shabbat on Sunday, to eat, speak and dress the same as everyone else. These two causes of antisemitism have nothing to do with your actions. A Jew is a representation of Torah, and your very existence makes the antisemite feel inadequate.

So what can we do about it? Here are the Rebbe’s responses to several cases of antisemitism:

After the 1967 Six-Day War, the French president, Charles de Gaulle, decided to stop selling arms to the countries which had been involved in the conflict. In truth, De Gaulle—who had made statements to the press about how the Jewish people “through the ages” had “provoked” and “caused ill will” in certain countries—was moving against Israel alone; the Arab countries were being supplied by Russia. The Jews—“an elitist and dominating people”—were deeply offended by his words. Jewish and non-Jewish leaders sharply attacked his blatant antisemitism.

In 1970, France, now under de Gaulle’s successor, Georges Pompidou, suddenly announced the sale to Libya of 50 Mirage ground-attack aircraft, and later another 30 Mirage III?E interceptors and 20 trainer reconnaissance planes. This constituted a major threat to Israel, as these could easily be resold to Egypt or Syria (and in fact, that, precisely, was the plan). When President Pompidou visited the United States, there were a series of strident demonstrations organized by Jews in Washington, DC, New York and Chicago.

As Pompidou stepped from his limousine onto the red carpet to wave and smile at the crowd, he was greeted with a chorus of boos, hecklers, and chants of, “Shame on you, Pompidou!”

The protests caused to a huge diplomatic ruckus and, if not for a hastily arranged trip to New York by Nixon himself, Pompidou’s visit would have been entirely derailed.

Several months later, in an address that can loosely be termed, “How to Handle Antisemites in Public Office,” the Rebbe addressed the fact that the president of France was confronted publicly by protesters who hoped that the French government would be intimidated into cancelling the ban on weapon sales to Israel.

Officially there was an "embargo," but France was, in fact, selling weapons to Israel. But only small arms, items that could be shipped without publicity. But after the protests, he canceled small arms sales, as well.

After some time, when the protests quieted down, Israel once again began dealing quietly with him, and Pompidou managed to extract three hundred Jews from Egypt! No protests, no publicity, no issues!

The Israeli government asked the newspapers not to write about it [in order to protect Pompidou from pressure by foreign governments and his French constituents]. We know about this only from non-Jewish newspapers.

This demonstrates clearly that the only way to deal with an antisemite is not by coming to him every day and shouting: Listen here, you are an antisemite! Listen here, you are a thief, a murderer, etc.! Rather, speak to him in a diplomatic way.

He knows well what they think of him, but he is a human being after all and behaves like a human being.

Once Pompidou was treated this way, 300 Jews were extracted from Egypt and Israel once again began receiving arms from France.4

In a different talk that same year, the Rebbe said that he had asked a leading activist, “Why are you running around and crying antisemitism, when you see it’s simply not effective in creating change?”

The fellow replied, “I figured out ten years ago that is a good modus operandi, and I don’t have time to rethink it. Stop telling me what to do.”

This demonstrates clearly that the only way to deal with an antisemite is not by coming to him every day and shouting: Listen here, you are an antisemite! Rather, speak to him in a diplomatic way.

Efforts to shine a spotlight on antisemitism often succeed in achieving only one thing, the Rebbe stated, with a tinge of irony: attracting attention to the individuals or organizations leading those efforts.

(It’s important to note that certain situations clearly demand a different response. For example, the Rebbe established a very vocal and assertive approach to Israel and its relations with its antisemitic neighbors and other foreign nations; how it must defend itself by all means, without apology, and how Israel must be so strong militarily that her enemies are afraid to attack. These are subjects for a different essay.)

Jesse Helms and Friendship

For the duration of his first two terms in the Senate, 1972-1984, US Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) was a staunch opponent of Israel’s cause. In 1973, he proposed a resolution demanding that Israel return the West Bank to Jordan. During Israel’s 1982 war with Palestinian terrorists in Lebanon, he demanded that the United States sever diplomatic relations with Israel.

A year or so later, circa 1983, Senator Helms took part in a Friends of Lubavitch event in Washington. In an interview with JEM’s My Encounter with the Rebbe project, Professor Alan Dershowitz described what he found unacceptable about Senator Helms’ participation:

When I was involved in politics, in civil rights and human rights, the enemy of civil rights and civil liberties was Jesse Helms, the United States Senator from North Carolina. He stood against everything that I stood for and many of my friends and colleagues stood for.

And so I was a little surprised, disappointed, when Jesse Helms was honored by the Rebbe and Chabad, and so I wrote a very polite letter to the Rebbe—who I had met previously a number of times—respectfully wondering why they chose to honor a man who was against integration, was against gay rights, women’s rights, equality for all.

The Rebbe wrote back a very poignant and very powerful letter saying we honor not only to recognize the past but to influence the future, and watch carefully to see whether or not we have had an influence on Jesse Helms.

In a three-and-a-half-page letter, the Rebbe explained to Professor Dershowitz that Senator Helms had attended an event at the Capitol, along with other senators and congressmen, in order “to pay tribute to a Jew and a Jewish movement.”

The Rebbe wrote that he’s “long been concerned about the state of our nation’s public schools, the American family and society,” and the event was geared to upgrading the ethical and moral foundations of education.

After a full two pages, the Rebbe signs off — and then there’s a one-and-a-half page postscript. (Note: Always watch out for the Rebbe’s PSs!) An excerpt:

I trust you will agree that in regard to persons of influence, whether in Washington or elsewhere, the first objective should be to persuade and encourage such a person to use his influence in a positive way in behalf of any and all good causes which are important to us. We should welcome every public appearance which lends public support to the cause, especially when there is a likelihood that it may be the forerunner of similar pronouncements in the future.

The Rebbe gives several examples, continuing:

My experience with such people has convinced me that politicians are generally motivated more by expediency than by conviction. In other words, their public pronouncements on various issues do not stem from categorical principles or religious imperatives. Hence, most of them, if not all, are subject to change in their positions, depending on time, place, and other factors.

I believe, therefore, that the proper approach to such persons by Jewish leaders should not be rigid. As a rule, it does no good to engage in a cold war, which may often turn into a hot war; nor does it serve any useful purpose to brand one as an "enemy" or an "antisemite," however tempting it is to do so. It can only be counter-productive. On the contrary, ways and means should be found to persuade such a person to take a favorable stance, at least publicly. We haven't too many friends, and attaching labels, etc. will not gain us any.5

“Sure enough,” Professor Dershowitz continued, “shortly thereafter, Helms assumed a very influential role in the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and before long, he became one of the strongest supporters of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, and of other Jewish causes as well”…

Politicians are generally motivated more by expediency than by conviction. In other words, their public pronouncements on various issues do not stem from categorical principles or religious imperatives.

“[The Rebbe’s approach] had an enormous influence on persuading Jesse Helms that, even with his very conservative values, he could become a beacon for the Jewish State.” Indeed, many on the Christian right who had previously been venomous foes of Israel followed right behind him.6

Leaders and Alliances

Rabbi Yehoshua Kling was the rabbi of Lyon, France, for eight years, and thereafter, of Nice. In a meeting with the Rebbe in the mid-1970s, he sought advice for antisemitism that his community was facing.

The Rebbe explained that, in most cases, cues for antisemitism—whether by a political movement, or a certain population or demographic—come from the heads of a group, rather than the foot soldiers. It is one of those areas where the rank-and-file takes cues from their leaders.

The best way to proceed is to build connections with the leadership of these communities, and to utilize those relationships to influence them to work against antisemitism.
For this reason, he explained, the best way to proceed is to build connections with the leadership of these communities, and to utilize those relationships to influence them to work against antisemitism, or at least to stop practicing it. Conversely, spending time with the “foot soldiers” to change their attitude is, for the most part, an inefficient deployment of resources.

Defuse the Issue

This leads us to a key aspect of the Rebbe’s response to antisemitism: In the cases we can find, the Rebbe responds to each situation by doing his best to defuse it, resisting the urge to call out an incident and give it oxygen. The Rebbe repeatedly seems to turn the discussion from the ugliness of a particular incident to a more global conversation; from highlighting a problem to investing in big-picture solutions.

In late 1991, the Rebbe received a letter from the office of the President of Poland apologizing for an antisemitic incident in Warsaw. After expressing gratitude for the correspondence, the Rebbe continued:

You express the hope that in the future, intolerance and prejudice will disappear from the Polish people, and that you are working towards this end. We appreciate the sentiments expressed in your letter, and we pray that your hope and efforts will materialize very soon indeed…

Our Sages explain why the creation of man differed from the creation of other living species and why, among other things, man was created as a single individual, unlike other living creatures [which were] created in pairs. One of the reasons—our Sages declare--is that it was G?d’s design that the human race, all humans everywhere and at all times, should know that each and all descend from the one and the same single progenitor, a fully developed human being created in the image of G?d, so that no human being could claim superior ancestral origin; hence they would also find it easier to cultivate a real feeling of kinship in all inter-human relationships.

In the summer of that same year, a spasm of virulently anti-semitic riots, unfolded on the streets of Crown Heights, just outside the Rebbe’s windows. A black leader visited the Rebbe, expressing his solidarity. The Rebbe replied in terms similar to the above-mentioned letter:

…I hope that in the near future [New York’s] melting pot will be so active that it will be not necessary to underscore every time that these are “negro,” these are “white,” they are “Hispanic” etcetera, etcetera. Because they are not different. All of them are created by the same G?d, for the same purpose: to add in all good things around them…

That summer, numerous police officials, leaders of organizations and politicians visited to express their horror and outrage. The Rebbe did not spend words on condemnations, labels, or blame—even rejecting suggestions for counter-demonstrations. Rather, he consistently turned the conversation to finding shared values, emphasizing what we share as members of the human race.

Healing the Cause, Not the Symptoms

Let’s return to the second cause of antisemitism explained above. How do we fill the void? How do we address the emptiness that gives rise to hatred of Jews?

Every human being, by their very nature, needs meaning; a sense of higher purpose. These individuals are part of the same civilization as us.

Well beyond the context of antisemitism, the Rebbe returned to this theme time and again: We’re not living on an island. Ultimately, it’s in everyone’s interest that the coinhabitors of society have direction and meaning in their lives, which can only begin in earnest from an understanding of the difference between right and wrong, and by living life in accordance with that understanding.

And in Torah’s view, the only true way for a human being to lead a life of goodness and kindness and of true tolerance for the “other,” is when it is based upon the knowledge of an Eye that Sees and Ear that Hears, a Director of this world, Who cares and pays full attention to every detail, every choice, and every action of your life.

This leads to many related areas that are beyond the scope of this article; topics that the Rebbe spoke about often and at length, such as education and universal values.

Education, in the Rebbe’s view, is the cornerstone to all of civilization. As he explained in his letter to Professor Dershowitz, the Rebbe passionately advocated that public schools in the United States devote a moment of silent contemplation to the beginning of every school day. The Rebbe’s very strong and specific opinion on the importance of a Moment of Silence in the US public school system was laid out in numerous talks and letters.

In a similar vein, the Rebbe spoke often and with great urgency on the importance of publicizing the Seven Universal Laws that G?d gave for all of humanity such that individuals, and eventually society as a whole, will begin to live by Torah’s guidance for life. Here, too, the Rebbe argued that this is the only path for civilization to save itself from cannibalizing itself.

What’s more, it’s our duty. Torah teaches that we owe this to the society in which we live.

So you can’t fight antisemitism with a stick. We’ve got to help society find the “on” switch to turn on the light. It’s merely a “side” benefit, as Jews, that we’ll be helping to heal our gentile neighbors of the disease of antisemitism. Helping them to heal their emptiness is the only true way to ensure the next Haman won’t have a need to fill that ditch in his field.

Summary

Key directives we’ve garnered from these incidents and the Rebbe’s responses:

We need to realize that G?d protects us and will continue to do so.

Do engage in practical security, the natural means through which we protect ourselves.

Exert your influence through quiet diplomacy, but don’t lose your backbone. Maintain pride in yourself as a Jew, and in your Jewish observance.

It’s not effective to confront someone by proving that he or she is an antisemite. On the contrary, where possible, do your best to engage them.

Concentrate on building relationships with leaders rather than chasing down the misdeeds of the followers.

Don’t spend your energy answering specific individual complaints against the Jews.

Emphasize how we’re all in the image of G?d; the things that all human beings share.

https://www.chabad.org/therebbe/article_cdo/aid/5992855/jewish/The-Rebbe-on-How-Not-to-Combat-Antisemitism.htm

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Jul 11, 2024

Air pollution can decrease odds of live birth after IVF by 38%, study finds

Oh Dear! Another "pollution" study that does not measure anything about people and pollution at all. The constancy of these empty reports has become boring. The journal abstract is here:

https://academic.oup.com/humrep/article/39/Supplement_1/deae108.182/7703768?searchresult=1

They have NO data on how much pollutant each person actually breathed in at the time concerned. They have data only on what the weather was like in one place at one time in Perth.

It's the usual failure of control. WHY was time a factor in implantation success? They say it was times of low pollution that generated the improvement. But was that in fact the influence at work?

That low pollution days were also days that were more congenial to exercise was not looked at but it is an easy inference that they were. So maybe what they have really found is that doing light exercise before implantation is beneficial, which is not at all improbable. It was the exercise that conferred benefit, not the low levels of pollution

And the odds ratios were in any case very low, suggesting a high probability of non-replicability

I'll leave it at that


Air pollution exposure can significantly decrease the chance of a live birth after IVF treatment, according to research that deepens concern about the health impacts of toxic air on fertility.

Pollutant exposure has previously been linked to increased miscarriage rates and preterm births, and microscopic soot particles have been shown to travel through the bloodstream into the ovaries and the placenta. The latest work suggests that the impact of pollution begins before conception by disrupting the development of eggs.

“We observed that the odds of having a baby after a frozen embryo transfer were more than a third lower for women who were exposed to the highest levels of particulate matter air pollution prior to egg collection, compared with those exposed to the lowest levels,” said Dr Sebastian Leathersich, a fertility specialist and gynaecologist from Perth who is due to present the findings on Monday at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology annual meeting in Amsterdam.

Air pollution is one of the leading threats to human health and is estimated by the World Health Organization (WHO) to have caused 6.7 million deaths in 2019. Microscopic soot particles have been shown to cross from the lungs into the bloodstream and are transported to every organ in the body, raising the risk of heart disease, gastric cancers and dementia. The contamination has also being linked to reductions in intelligence.

“Pollution is harmful to almost all aspects of human health and it’s no surprise to me that reproductive health is also affected,” Leathersich said. “I’m hopeful that these findings will help to highlight the urgency of the situation – that climate change poses a serious and immediate threat to human reproductive health, even at so-called safe levels.”

The study analysed fertility treatments in Perth over an eight-year period, including 3,659 frozen embryo transfers from 1,836 patients, and tracked whether outcomes were linked to the levels of fine particulate matter, known as PM10. The overall live birthrate was about 28% per transfer. However, the success rates varied in line with exposure to pollutants in the two weeks leading up to egg collection. The odds of a live birth decreased by 38% when comparing the highest quartile of exposure to the lowest quartile.

“These findings suggest that pollution negatively affects the quality of the eggs, not just the early stages of pregnancy, which is a distinction that has not been previously reported,” Leathersich said.

The team now plan to study cells directly to understand why pollutants have a negative effect. Previous work has shown that the microscopic particles can damage DNA and cause inflammation in tissues.

Prof Jonathan Grigg, whose group at Queen Mary University of London uncovered evidence that air pollution particles are found in the placenta, said: “This study is biologically plausible since it has recently been discovered that inhaled fossil-fuel particles move out of the lung and lodge in organs around the body. Reproductive health can now be added to expanding list of the adverse effects of fossil fuel-derived particulate matter, and should prompt policymakers to continue to reduce traffic emissions.”

The link was apparent despite excellent overall air quality during the study period, with PM10 and PM2.5 levels exceeding WHO guidelines on just 0.4% and 4.5% of the study days, the scientists said. Australia is one of just seven countries that met the WHO’s guidelines in 2023, and this study is the latest to show evidence of harm even at relatively low levels of pollution.

Prof Geeta Nargund, a senior NHS consultant and medical director of abc IVF and Create Fertility, said further work would be crucial to better understand the full impact of air pollution, which disproportionately affects those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

“In the face of a global fertility crisis, a clear picture of the link between environmental factors such as air pollution and fertility health or treatment outcomes could play an important part in tackling falling fertility rates,” she said.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jul/07/air-pollution-live-birth-ivf-fertility-study

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8 July, 2024

Is Trump a Fascist?

It's almost a conditioned reflex for Leftists these days to call Trump s Fascist. But they generlly just spit it out without making any real argument to support their claim. So the Leftist guy writing below is a refreshing change. He actually defines what he means by Fascism. And it is in part an accurate definition.

His basic problem is that he simply has no awareness of history -- no idea of what Fascism was when Italian dictator Benito Mussolini invented it. And a lot of national leaders of his time followed in Mussolini's footsteps, Franco, Pilsudsky, Salazar, Horthy, Peron and a certain Mr. A Hitler

So what WAS Fascism, historically? It was socialist. Mussolini was a respected Marxist intellectual. Is Trump a respected Marxist intellectual? I think you can see the problem.

The one thing the Fascists believed in and pursued is state power. As Mussolini defined his creed: "Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato".

Trump by contrast, is a fairly traditional American conservative, with a committment to capitalism, patriotsm and individual liberty. He has never even tried to maroon his political opponents on remote islands (as Mussolini did) nor has be sent them to concentration camps, as Hitler did. And he has gained power exclusively by way a democratic election, which neither Hitler nor Mussonini did. Mussolini gained power via the famous "March on on Rome"

So in good Leftist style, the writer below is simply blind to the facts. He cannot see the difference betweeen a popular conservative and a dictator. He puffs up trivialities into major issues: Very Leftist.

Mainstream media have treated President Biden with prejudice and arrogance. Quite a few Democrats, reacting to this, treat any mention of President Biden’s fitness as disloyalty. This is mistaken, if understandable.

One source of the negative energy is Trump’s fascism. Focusing on it will not answer the question of what Democrats do, but will help us to understand the context in which the discussion is taking place. By fascism I just have in mind (1) the cult of personality of a Leader: (2) the party that becomes a single party; (3) the threat and use of violence; and (4) the big lie that must be accepted and used to reshape reality: in this case, that Trump can never lose an election.

Much more could be said (as I have done elsewhere), but it is the official big lie and the threats of violence that are dangerous to those whose job is to report truth. Trump is on the record as regarding reports as enemies of the people. What should I make — a journalist might ask — of Trump’s talk of arresting journalists? When not confronted, such questions become self-realizing fears.

That’s the subtle version. Meanwhile, those higher up in corporations might like the ratings Trump brings, or like Trump himself. And so it is easiest to keep things personal — give Trump time, on the self-deluding logic that he will discredit himself, and focus on Biden’s age rather than his achievements. For reporters it can feel like the work is being done when only Biden is at the receiving end of criticism — whereas, in fact, the ground has been shifted by fascism, or by the inability to confront it.

And so fascism spreads and settles in our minds during this, the crucial period between Trump’s first coup attempt and his second. The Biden administration is being held to standards, while the previous Trump administration is not; and Biden personally is being held to standards, while Trump as a person is not. This helps to generate a fascist aura. There must be something special about Trump such that he is different from others: a Leader beyond criticism rather than just an indebted hack or a felon from Queens or a client of a Russian dictator.

It should seem odd that media calls to step down were not first directed to Trump. If we are calling for Biden to step aside because someone must stop Trump from bringing down the republic, then surely it would have made more sense to first call for Trump to step aside? (The Philadelphia Inquirer did). I know the counter-arguments: his people wouldn’t have cared, and he wouldn’t have listened. The first misses an important point. There are quite a few Americans who have not made up their minds. The second amounts to obeying in advance. If you accept that a fascist is beyond your reach, you have normalized your submission.

When media folks describe discussions among Democrats as chaos and disarray, they are implicitly suggesting that it is better for a leader of a party to never be questioned. (Why, after all, is being part of an array a good thing?) An obvious point goes missed: Democrats can say what they want, because none of them is afraid. And that is good! Governor Maura Healey can express her dissent and Joe Biden can express his frustration with her — but no one is worried about her physical safety.

Trump, by contrast, controls his party through stochastic terror, threats issued through social media that his cult followers can be expected to realize. Republicans leave politics because they fear for themselves and their families. Those who remain all obey in advance. That is new, and it should not be normal, and it should not spread any further. But it becomes normal when we treat discussions, and not coercion, as abnormal.

https://snyder.substack.com/p/fascist-froth

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8 July, 2024

Selective school students were asked if they were satisfied with life. Then they were scored

Hmmm... this is a tricky set of numbers. The first thing you need to know is that happiness levels (aka life-satisfaction) seem to be set at a level which changes little in response to life events -- sometimes amazingly so. To oversimplify a little, you are born sad or born happy and where you are on that continuum never changes much and soon reverts to type. So looking for long-term changes in it is perverse. See:

http://jonjayray.com/happines.html

But what is also true is that amid our general background feelings, we can all experience events which we really like or really dislike. So a much more interesting number would be how many of those events we experience. I think there is no doubt that people from advantagous backgrounds experience many more "like" events and fewer "dislike" events.

It's complicated but that's people

Sending a child to selective school makes little difference to their life satisfaction, employment and educational outcomes by the time they reach 25, a major study of Australian pupils has found.

The findings have triggered concerns about the academic segregation of students in selective schools and raised the prospect of rolling them back in a push to make the education system more inclusive and equitable.

The Victoria University study tracked 3000 students over 11 years at three stages, starting when they were 15. It included non-selective and selective school students across a mix of sectors.

Selective school graduates recorded a 0.19 point increase in general life satisfaction at age 25, a figure the report authors deemed insignificant.

“These very modest findings indicate that attending an academically selective school does not appear to pay off in large benefits for individuals,” the report said.

At age 19, 77.6 per cent of non-selective school-educated graduates were either employed or in education, compared to 81 per cent of selective school graduates– but that difference disappeared by age 25. Individuals used for comparison in the study were matched to peers who attended a different type of school but came from a similar social background.

Other research into UK selective grammar schools found employment and life benefits may emerge after age 25, with students who graduate from a selective school more likely to work in a job with higher occupational status, obtain higher level educational qualifications, earn higher incomes and own a home at age 42 compared to government school students.

The research did not measure the prestige of their subsequent university degree, other training or the quality of their employment.

NSW is the selective school capital of Australia, with 21 fully selective and 26 partially selective schools. By comparison, Victoria has four while Queensland and Western Australia have one. Previous research has found selective schools in NSW are dominated by children who come from the country’s most educationally advantaged homes.

The report’s findings prompted the researchers to call for further examination of selective schools in Australia.

“Rather than tweak some aspects of the enrolment processes, we see greater value in conducting a thorough and critical examination of fully and partially selective schools, and scaling back selectivity if the supposed benefits are not found,” it said.

Report author Melissa Tham said applications for selective schools were increasing every year.

“We need a full review of selective education, and we need a critical examination of whether these schools actually improve our students,” Tham said.

“Some could get into a selective school, and then they could go on to get a great ATAR and go on and become a doctor. But you just don’t know whether they would have been able to achieve that if they just went to a regular school.”

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/selective-school-students-were-asked-if-they-were-satisfied-with-life-then-they-were-scored-20240705-p5jrh0.html

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Posts from June, 2024


29 Jun 2024

Trump’s All-Tariff Revenue Plan Won’t ‘Starve the Beast’

I know where he got this idea.  He has am economics degree from the Wharton school and economists have long pointed out that the  best tariff is a uniform one. It raises revenue without distorting resource allocation while giving ALL American industry some protection from imports.  In these days of both general and political supply-chain issues, protecting domestic production has taken on some urgency. If you need  a spare part for your car, would you rather it be coming from Dearborn or on a slow boat from China?  

So the idea has much to recommend it even though it violates strict "free trade" principles.  Sometimes security matters more than money.   So, as usual, Trump has the right ideas for the times and ideas that step outside the usual boring old ideas of the Left.

And extending the idea to where the IRS can be abolished has enormous appeal  and is an idea that I have often mulled.  In an economy as large as America it could well be workable without seriously affecting the availability of goods and services.  Capitalistic American businesses would leap at the opportunities opened up

During his recent trip to Capitol Hill, former President Donald Trump floated a plan to finance the federal government in large part with revenue raised by import tariffs. The details are sketchy, but the proposal’s main idea is to rely much less on the complex U.S. income tax code, which penalizes work and imposes huge compliance costs on both individual and business taxpayers.

The former, and possibly future, president’s idea draws attention to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century U.S. public finance, when, in fact, tariffs ranked among America’s principal sources of government revenue, along with the proceeds from selling public lands and from imposing selective excise taxes on consumer goods—most notoriously Alexander Hamilton’s tax on alcohol, which triggered the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion. The national government was of course much smaller then.

It was not until the 1860s, when Abraham Lincoln’s Treasury levied taxes on income to help support the Union’s military operations, that Americans first faced such levies. Although Lincoln’s income tax was declared unconstitutional, the ratification of the 16th Amendment on February 3, 1913—one of the fruits of an earlier Progressive Era—made income taxes a fact of life.

Individual income taxes have accounted for more than half of the federal government’s revenue ever since ($1.7 trillion of the $3.3 trillion total raised in fiscal year 2024). Payroll taxes to finance the New Deal’s Social Security and the Great Society’s Medicare programs rank second (34.3% of total federal receipts). Import tariffs (“customs duties”) generate only $48 billion nowadays, just 1.5% of the total. The Trump plan would stand this on its head.

Implementing Trump’s all-tariff revenue plan would require a major retooling of American public finance. I and many other taxpayers would cheer the elimination of income-tax withholding and doing away with the intrusive and reviled Internal Revenue Service (IRS), some of whose criminal investigating “special agents” are authorized, as we recently were reminded, to carry firearms.

No one has estimated the level of tariff rates necessary to offset $3.3 trillion in income tax revenue that possibly would be “lost” under Trump’s plan. Would some tariffs be set at 100% of a product’s pre-tariff domestic price, as the Biden White House recently recommended for electric vehicles imported from China to “protect American manufacturers from [China’s] unfair trade practices”?

Tariffs are simply taxes that domestic consumers pay when they purchase goods from overseas. If a tariff is set high enough, imports could drop to zero, along with any anticipated tariff (tax) revenue. Many Americans willingly pay 69 cents a pound for bananas; how many would pay $1.40 a pound? Or think big: The base price for a 2024 Porsche Boxster is currently $70,400; would you pay $140,800 for the identical car?

Like income taxes, there are ways to avoid tariffs. Tariffs encourage smuggling, for example, which would likely lead to the hiring and deployment of more customs agents. During colonial times and other high-tariff periods, customs agents often were as abusive as today’s IRS agents.

Tariffs imposed by one country also invite retaliation by others—a tit-for-tat among trading partners known as “countervailing duties.” The problem is: Tariff wars shrink international trade, increasing their harmful economic effects. Many economists are convinced that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, along with other domestic policy blunders, triggered the Great Depression, or at the very least made it worse.

Despite the harm they cause, tariffs appeal to politicians because it gives them an opportunity to do what they do best: give away goodies to special interests at public expense.

The recipients in this case are domestic manufacturers and suppliers—and especially their unionized employees, who in an open, competitive marketplace often can’t compete with overseas producers of the same or similar products. Tariffs exploit the power of government to raise the costs of those overseas products, giving advantage back to the locals. While domestic producers (and their employees) might gain from protectionism, consumers lose, especially low-income consumers, who can least afford the higher prices.

Asking tariffs to replace income taxes and other federal revenue sources asks the wrong question. The right question is whether government is too large. If the answer is “yes,” tariffs would be a plus if they generate less revenue than other methods of public finance.

Unfortunately, in addition to taxing, Washington has other options for financing its profligate spending, including borrowing. The beast cannot be starved—a mantra of tax reformers during the 1980s—if those options remain on the table.

https://heartlanddailynews.com/2024/06/trumps-all-tariff-revenue-plan-wont-starve-the-beast/

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17 Jun 2024

Scientists raise alarm over common sunscreen ingredient being found in frozen pizzas and candies

Another scare about a "possible" harm. The link to the main article is here:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38367662/

There are HUGE barriers to using this study a a basis for policy:

* How were the respondents selected? Were they a representative sample of any specifiable popuation? If not, no generlizations can be made from them. That may seem a harsh stricture but in my extensive reseach I always used representative samples. You can do it if you try. If you don't do it you are just playing games

* Once again only high and low scorers were used in the analysis. What happened to the middling scorers? Would including them have made the overall corelations insignificant? It often does.

* I have not been able to see details of the confounders that they alowed for but I doubt that they allowed for the big confounder: income

* They had NO clinical evidence of health problems. The differences they found may or may not lead to illness. Many ingested substances lead to physiological changes without ill effects. We call them drugs

* Since it is ubiquitous, if it did lead to illness of any kind we would surely by now have heard a raft of complaints about it. We have not. If people have ingested it a trillion times without harm, what more do we need to call it harmless?

Scientists have raised concerns of the effects of a common ingredient of sunscreen being used in foods including frozen pizzas, bakery products, and children’s candies.

Titanium Dioxide (TiO2) is a synthetically produced substance that is not classed as hazardous and is used in a vast range of industrial and consumer goods.

It is found in products including sunscreen, sunscreen, cosmetics, paint, plastics, paper, and wallpaper due to its non-flammable and insoluble properties. It also absorbs UV light, though cannot penetrate through the skin.

TiO2 is also regulated by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a type of food coloring and used in a variety of FDA regulated foods, including cottage cheese, salad dressing, and brightly colored sweets such as Skittles – so long as the quantity does not exceed 1 percent by weight of food.

In foods that contain TiO2, it will appear on the ingredients label as either “artificial color” or “colored with titanium dioxide”, though it is not required to be listed, according to the FDA.

Though it is currently approved by the FDA in the US, the substance is currently under reviewed following a 2023 petition by environmental groups, which are seeking to have it banned from foods.

In February, California lawmakers advanced a bill to bar foods with titanium dioxide from being served in public schools. The substance was banned by the European Union in 2022.

Chief among the concerns is that TiO2 contains nanoparticles which – due to their miniscule size – can get inside cells and cause harm to internal organs.

An article in npj Science and Food cited studies done in animals that found that consumption of titanium dioxide nanoparticles led to damage to the liver, immune and reproductive systems, as well as DNA.

Other research found that as well as such damage, the particles can inhibit the spread of beneficial gut bacteria.

A study of 35 healthy adults, published in February, found that those with higher levels of TiO2 in their stool also had higher levels of certain gut inflammation. They also had indications of more gut permeability or how “leaky or separated the cells are,” said Dr Kelsey Mangano, lead scientist of the study.

The concern is that chronic increased gut inflammation and permeability could increase the risk of health issues including colon cancer, nutrient deficiencies and the low-grade inflammation, Dr Mangano said.

Despite this, organizations including the Consumer Healthcare Products Association (CHPA) have opposed a “knee-jerk” ban on the substance, stating that it would have “far-reaching consequences”.

A statement released by the CHPA in August 2023, in response to the FDA announcement of a review of the use of TiO2 described a ban as “unjustified”.

“We strongly urge the Food and Drug Administration to deny the petition to repeal [a section of its regulations], which permits the use of TiO2 in food and dietary supplements,” the statement read.

“While consumer safety is of paramount importance, a knee-jerk ban on TiO2 in food and dietary supplements would be unjustified. Based on extensive scientific research and regulatory evaluations, TiO2 is deemed safe for use as a food additive when consumed within established regulatory limits.

“Furthermore, its regulatory approval, manufacturing oversight, and industry best practices ensure the responsible use of this ingredient. Continued adherence to these safety measures and ongoing research will contribute to maintaining the safety and integrity of TiO2 as an essential food additive.”

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/frozen-pizza-candy-titanium-dioxide-sunscreen-foods-b2561031.html

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June 16, 2024

Is fake meat bad for you?

This is a funny one. Food freaks are suspicious of highly processed food, but overlook that fake meat is a highly processed food. There has been quite an upsurge in sales of fake meat in the last couple of years so it seems that lots of people think they are doing themslves good by avoiding the dreaded red meat. So some journalists are having fun with that. They are condemning fake meat as unhealthy.

Real vegetarians won't be bothered. They mostly live on lightly processed legumes -- nutmeat and the like -- as a protein source. Fake meat would be a low priority for them

I have never had any time for fake meat. I had a very nice piece of thinly sliced Scotch fillet steak for dinner last night washed down by a good Australian Shiraz. The wine:



So it is all a non-issue to me. I have always eaten whatever I fancy and at age 80, living with no pain or discomfort, I think I have had the last laugh. But it is nice to see a piece of research intelligently dissected below. I don't agree with all her conclusions but for someone writing in a mainstream source she does pretty well. She is a clever Greek girl, judging by her name

By EVANGELINE MANTZIORIS

We're hearing a lot about ultra-processed foods and the health effects of eating too many. And we know plant-based foods are popular for health or other reasons.

So it's not surprising new research out this week including the health effects of ultra-processed, plant-based foods is going to attract global attention.

And the headlines can be scary if that research and the publicity surrounding it suggests eating these foods increases your risk of heart disease, stroke or dying early.

Here's how some media outlets interpreted the research. The Daily Mail ran with:

Vegan fake meats are linked to increase in heart deaths, study suggests: Experts say plant-based diets can boost health – but NOT if they are ultra-processed

The New York Post's headline was:

Vegan fake meats linked to heart disease, early death: study

But when we look at the study itself, it seems the media coverage has focused on a tiny aspect of the research, and is misleading.

So does eating supermarket plant-based burgers and other plant-based, ultra-processed foods really put you at greater risk of heart disease, stroke and premature death?

Here's what prompted the research and what the study actually found.

Remind me, what are ultra-processed foods?

Ultra-processed foods undergo processing and reformulation with additives to enhance flavour, shelf-life and appeal. These include everything from packet macaroni cheese and pork sausages, to supermarket pastries and plant-based mince.

There is now strong and extensive evidence showing ultra-processed foods are linked with an increased risk of many physical and mental chronic health conditions.

Although researchers question which foods should be counted as ultra-processed, or if all of them are linked to poorer health, the consensus is that, generally, we should be eating less of them.

We also know plant-based diets are popular. These are linked with a reduced risk of chronic health conditions such as heart disease and stroke, cancer and diabetes. And supermarkets are stocking more plant-based, ultra-processed food options.

How about the new study?

The study looked for any health differences between eating plant-based, ultra-processed foods compared to eating non-plant based, ultra-processed foods. The researchers focused on the risk of cardiovascular disease (such as heart disease and stroke) and deaths from it.

Plant-based, ultra-processed foods in this study included mass-produced packaged bread, pastries, buns, cakes, biscuits, cereals and meat alternatives (fake meats). Ultra-processed foods that were not plant-based included milk-based drinks and desserts, sausages, nuggets and other reconstituted meat products.

The researchers used data from the UK Biobank. This is a large biomedical database that contains de-identified genetic, lifestyle (diet and exercise) and health information and biological samples from half a million UK participants. This databank allows researchers to determine links between this data and a wide range of diseases, including heart disease and stroke.

They used data from nearly 127,000 people who provided details of their diet between 2009 and 2012. The researchers linked this to their hospital records and death records. On average, the researchers followed each participant's diet and health for nine years.

What did the study find?

With every 10% increase of total energy from plant-sourced, ultra-processed foods there was an associated 5% increased risk of cardiovascular disease (such as heart disease or stroke) and a 12% higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.

But for every 10% increase in plant-sourced, non-ultra-processed foods consumed there was an associated 7% lower risk of cardiovascular disease and a 13% lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.

The researchers found no evidence for an association between all plant-sourced foods (whether or not they were ultra-processed) and either an increased or decreased risk of cardiovascular disease or dying from it.

This was an observational study, where people recalled their diet using questionnaires. When coupled with other data, this can only tell us if someone's diet is associated with a particular risk of a health outcome. So we cannot say that, in this case, the ultra-processed foods caused the heart disease and deaths from it.

Why has media coverage focused on fake meats?

Much of the media coverage has focused on the apparent health risks associated with eating fake meats, such as sausages, burgers, nuggets and even steaks.

These are considered ultra-processed foods. They are made by deconstructing whole plant foods such as pea, soy, wheat protein, nuts and mushrooms, and extracting the protein. They are then reformulated with additives to make the products look, taste and feel like traditional red and white meats.

However this was only one type of plant-based, ultra-processed food analysed in this study. This only accounted for an average 0.2% of the dietary energy intake of all the participants.

Compare this to bread, pastries, buns, cakes and biscuits, which are other types of plant-based, ultra-processed foods. These accounted for 20.7% of total energy intake in the study.

It's hard to say why the media focused on fake meat. But there is one clue in the media release issued to promote the research.

Although the media release did not mention the words "fake meat", an image of plant-based burgers, sausages and meat balls or rissoles featured prominently.

The introduction of the study itself also mentions plant-sourced, ultra-processed foods, such as sausages, nuggets and burgers.

So it's no wonder people can be confused.

Does this mean fake meats are fine?

Not necessarily. This study analyzed the total intake of plant-based, ultra-processed foods, which included fake meats, albeit a very small proportion of people's diets.

From this study alone we cannot tell if there would be a different outcome if someone ate large amounts of fake meats.

In fact, a recent review of fake meats found there was not enough evidence to determine their impact on health.

We also need more recent data to reflect current eating patterns of fake meats. This study used dietary data collected from 2009 to 2012, and fake meats have become more popular since.

What if I really like fake meat?

We have known for a while that ultra-processed foods can harm our health. This study tells us that regardless if an ultra-processed food is plant-based or not, it may still be harmful.

We know fake meat can contain large amounts of saturated fats (from coconut or palm oil), salt and sugar.

So like other ultra-processed foods, they should be eaten infrequently. The Australian Dietary Guidelines currently recommends people should only consume foods like this sometimes and in small amounts.

Are some fake meats healthier than others?

Check the labels and nutrition information panels. Look for those lowest in fat and salt. Burgers and sausages that are a "pressed cake" of minced ingredients such as nuts, beans and vegetables will be preferable to reformulated products that look identical to meat.

You can also eat whole plant-based protein foods such as legumes. These include beans, lentils, chickpeas and soy beans. As well as being high in protein and fibre, they also provide essential nutrients such as iron and zinc. Using spices and mushrooms alongside these in your recipes can replicate some of the umami taste associated with meat.

https://www.salon.com/2024/06/13/are-plant-based-burgers-really-for-your-heart-heres-whats-behind-the-scary-headlines_partner/

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10 Jun 2024

Real Reasons for the Current Societal Breakdown

I think most of what Israeli writer Tessa Schlesinger says below is broadly right. I do here regularly write about the undesirable happenings in our society. But I think we need a broader view. Where I differ is with her belief that we are in a Societal Breakdown. To me society seems very orderly and functions to the benefit of most of us pretty well most of the time. Though Japan is the only place where the trains always run on time. Governments, particularly, mess things up with stupid policies and actions but nobody starves and even born losers are accommodated to some extent.

There are indeed social problems but they are minor compared with living through two world wars and the Great Depression of the interwar years. We have seen much worse than the world of today

Let me give an example of how well-functioning society is. I am a regular customer of Doordash. I go online and order from a very large menu a meal that sounds good and 15 minutes later a young person on a two-wheeler of some sort comes to my door and hands me a chef-cooked meal. And I pay only a few dollars more than if I had driven to the restaurant and sat for a time at one of their tables to get the same food. The convenience of it is to me a modern miracle.

So how does this great convenience come about? Think of the steps involved:

There has to be a website that passes on my order and takes my money via my credit card number. Then the restaurant accepts my order and makes my meal in their usual way. Then the deliverer has to be ready for a phone-call telling them to collect the food and then he/she has to find his/her way to my place. And it all functions smoothly. No breakdown there. Very reliable.

And so it is with most things in our day. Everything goes pretty much to plan and we sleep safely in our beds at night. There are some places where Leftist governments have allowed racial antagonisms to flourish so we cannot safely go out at night but that is because Leftists WANT to create disorder. Society is not broken down enough for them. Vote them out of office and order will return

That is of course very simplistic but my point is that we concentrate on disorder and overlook the extent to which society is NOT broken down and not in need of fixing. And when something goes wrong people often can fix it thenselves, Feminist-inspired divorce laws make marriage perilous so lots lots of people live together without government paper-work. And finding a partner for a relationship has always been difficult but dating sites sometimes offer a solution for that. After a lot of knockbacks I met my present girlfriend that way. But I agree that sometimes things do go badly wrong. See below

And there is one example of what Tessa Schlesinger wants that is actually in existence. She focuses on the loss of religion and wants some replacement for it. But both America and modern Israel were founded by profoundly religious people. What happens when a society was largely founded by criminals?

I live in such a place: Australia. And Australians are very skeptical religiously. There are churches but most people who go there are ethnics or Pentecostals of one sort or another. So do Australians lack an effective moral code? Far from it. They may never have set foot in a church but they have a traditional moral code founded in traditional English working class values.

Only "old" Australians (people whose roots go back to the time before the postwar flood of immigration) follow it but among them it is very influential:

* Thou shalt not dob in thy mates
* Thou shalt not bung on an act.
* Thou shalt not be a tall poppy
* Thou shalt give everyone a fair go
* Thou shalt be fair dinkum
* Thou shalt not crawl to the boss

And Australia is a very relaxed and pleasant place.

So an ethical non-religious society is not only possibe, you can actually go there on an airliner. And they speak English and you can drink the water!!

For a translation of the above commandments into standard English see:

https://memoirsjr.blogspot.com/2005/10/australians-only-have-five-commandments.html


One of the causes of the west’s current breakdown goes back to the 60s — when some very silly people wanted to create a better world, and they thought that not judging people, or making them strive so hard academically, would make the world a better place.

Another major cause was the work of Dr. Benjamin Spock whose book on how to rear a baby resulted in parents not disciplining children adequately, and in allowing children to grow up with the idea that their uninformed opinions were just as valuable as an informed opinion.

In the 1960s and 1970s, blame was placed on Spock for the disorderliness of young people, many of whose parents had been devotees of Baby and Child Care. Vice President Spiro Agnew also blamed Spock for “permissiveness”. These allegations were enthusiastically embraced by conservative adults, who viewed the rebellious youth of that era with disapproval, referring to them as “the Spock generation”. Wiki

Spock was a pediatrician who was interested in psychology, particularly the work of Sigmund Freud. In his book, Spock said, “John Dewey and Freud said that kids don’t have to be disciplined into adulthood but can direct themselves toward adulthood by following their own will.”

Those widespread consequences

Consider that if the zeitgeist of the age was that children could bring themselves up, that the only reason they turned out to be ‘unwise’ people was because parental discipline and forced education made them forget their natural creativity and goodness. Without the limiting areas of discipline and education, all children would grow up to be brilliant and kind adults. There would be no more crime.

So many things came into being as a consequence.

English teachers no longer taught grammar because children would learn grammar on their own. They would just magically pick it up as they went along.

Children should always be happy. Flower power, smoking weed, taking hard drugs, having sex outside marriage, and living together were new values replacing the old. Consequently, in later years, women started complaining that men didn’t want to make a commitment. Of course, they didn’t. Why should they? They had all the sex they wanted. Interestingly, while I was living in the States, I read that one third of baby boomers never got married.

The number of children growing up in single families (divorced parents, kids born outside holy wedlock) escalated. So kids hD no fathers.

Homework disappeared from schools, difficult subjects were no longer mandatory, exams went the way of the dodo, and any form of knowledge was dumbed down. In fact, by the end of the 60s, the classical system of education was outlawed, and the bs system of education that is now regarded as ‘education’ became the norm.

The new rule was that no matter how wrong someone’s response was at school, they were praised in order to give them confidence.

The outcome was that a lot of very ignorant people thought that their opinion had the same weight as people who were a lot smarter and a lot more knowledgeable. So, today, there are an increasing number of very un-smart people in positions of power.

Formal religion went out the window. With it, ethical teaching disappeared. Unfortunately, the only source of ethics (not morality) was religion. When that disappeared, there was nothing to replace it.

Duty became a dirty word. Self-involvement replaced society commitment.

Gossip became widely accepted (inviting endless slander and destruction of innocent people).

Societies are built on ethics — not money

Ethics and morality are not the same. Morality is mostly taught by religions. They are also based on the supposed commands of non-existent gods.

For instance, there is no good reason why people shouldn’t have sex outside marriage — provided that the resulting children have a stable environment in which to grow up and mature.

Structures in society evolve over hundreds of years. They are the invisible pillars that ensure that a community works in such a way that optimal outcomes are ensured for both survival and well being.

If you look at the different religions of the world, many of them had opposing beliefs, but Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, and others all survived because they ensured that people had a definite way of handling various situations. Those ways did not conflict with each other — there was social cohesion.

As an atheist, I do not believe in many of the tenets of religion, yet much of it can be interpreted in solid ways that ensure optimal survival and well being.

There is no doubt that there were some extremely cruel rules in all these societies. The Spartans of ancient Greece left babies outside their front doors. If they survived, they were considered strong enough to live. Then there was senicide.

The Inuit, in times of famine left their old people outside to die in the cold.

A few days ago, I read that the harsh laws of Islam were there to protect the greater number. Once people saw others stoned to death or their hands cut off, then others would not repeat that action.

In Christianity, when a single young woman became pregnant, she was outlawed from society.

Structure in society came at a cost.

That cost was immense cruelty to some.

Of course, during the 60s when all these rearrangements of culture was happening in the west, many people were concerned about that kind of cruelty inflicted on individuals. So they outlawed those rules. What they didn’t do was create a replacement system in which those new rules would flourish.

Of course, during the 60s when all these rearrangements of culture was happening in the west, many people were concerned about that kind of cruelty inflicted on individuals. So they outlawed those rules. What they didn’t do was create a replacement system in which those new rules would flourish.

Let me give some examples of that.

Senicide would be considered barbaric by most of us. We would insist that food be shared by everybody. Yet, if there were a tribe of 100 people, and there was barely enough food for 50, what is to be done. In those days, the elders decided that the young were important to the survival of the tribe. The old, they decided, had lived their lives, and their need for food was endangering the survival of the rest of the tribe.

Morality, in my opinion, never came from the gods. They were rules that evolved over a period of time, and as it became known to the leaders of the tribes that some behaviors were harmful to the tribe, they outlawed them. What better way to ensure obedience than to say that the gods commanded it?

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what the rules are, so long as the rules ensure that the community survives, and that it survives in a better way than it would survive without those rules. Those rules are the pillars on which all societies are built.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what the rules are, so long as the rules ensure that the community survives, and that it survives in a better way than it would survive without those rules. Those rules are the pillars on which all societies are built.

Multiculturism and individualism

Neither multiculturism nor individualism bind the community into a cohesive whole. Multiculturism breaks down society because everybody is playing by different rules (in my opinion) and individualism breaks down society because everybody is playing by different rules (in my opinion).

Societies, nations, communities are built on behavioral structures, and change

Societies evolved. Because they do, a rule that worked well in the past may no longer work in the present. Perspectives change. What was viewed as an unbreakable command of the non-existing god might now be perceived as enormous cruelty.

Clearly, society cannot remain the same — it needs to grow and change to meet new needs and new perspectives. So when change comes, it needs to be accompanied by new rules and new structures. For instance, it’s all very well to stop condemning single mothers for daring to have sex outside marriage. However, if so, then society also needs to build the facilities and resources to prepare for those children. Single mothers are the poorest demographic on the entire planet.

The poverty gap that leads to increased violence

History has shown us that whenever there is great inequality in society, there is a point at which violence erupts. It was the study of history that led to the implication of welfare systems, public education, and better working conditions for worker at the start of the 20th century.

Unfortunately, because history, and the deep study of it is no longer mandatory, the highly destructive idea that greed was good, that the economy was everything, that competition brought out the best in people, that ‘diversity’ was good, and that the rich should not be taxed, made its appearance. Most people simply did not understand the relevance of those changes made at the start of the 20th century.

It is not poverty itself that leads to violence — it is resentment against others. When people live by vastly different rules, sooner or later they clash. If one culture believes that it’s okay to murder their daughters if they marry out of their religion, and another culture sees that as murder, then, sooner or later, the nation which is home to these two opposing cultures will begin to fall.

Yet, in Hinduism and Islam, where those beliefs are part of the culture, societies have survived. In the west, where those values were seen as horrendous, those societies survived as well. Again, the point is not that some cultures are wrong while others are right. My point here is that differing precepts and decreasing standards inevitably lead to the breakdown of societies. (I do, however, believe that some societies have contributed far more to the modernization of the world than others.)

And that is where we are now.

We are in decline because we never understood the real structures of what made a nation (or society) sustainable and strong.

What we should have done was outlaw those horribly cruel rules that made the lives of some so very miserable, and then we should have implemented more rules which prevented the harm that would result from eliminating those rules.

What we should have done was outlaw those horribly cruel rules that made the lives of some so very miserable, and then we should have implemented more rules which prevented the harm that would result from eliminating those rules.

Life in the future

Nations, cultures, societies come and go. They last for a time, and then the rot from within invariably brings them down. Look at the USSR which dissolved into the Russian nation. The totalitarian regime which forced people to become nothing more than utility objects meant that when that system dissolved, there was no societal structure to replace it.

In the past, it hasn’t mattered if a society disappeared. We are all here despite the Babylonians, the Hittites, and the Prussians no longer existing. One lot of people replaces another lot of people. Now it matters. It matters because our actions have resulted in the possible destruction of environmental systems on which human life (and other life) depends. It matters because the enlightenment of humanity, arrived at through many millennia of learning, is now being destroyed. It is now, once more, being replaced by religious garbage, philosophical tenets that do not work, and the blind leading the blind.

I am reminded of a verse in Proverbs in which it says something about it being an unwise course of action for a fool to give instructions to a wise man. That, unfortunately, is where we are now. Interestingly, Proverbs (in the bible) is full of ancient wisdom, long forgotten. It is also, as with all these holy books, full of ideas that have long been proven wrong.

The world is over-populated. Those without wisdom are leading. Those without knowledge are opining everywhere. Those with power are destroying what does not suit them. And so it goes.

I started writing very young. My first pieces were published by a national newspaper magazine.

Ethics

In the years that I have been writing, the underlying ethos has been about ethics. During the sixty-odd years of my putting pen to paper (that was how it started), I have always been concerned about benevolence, about the rules that so many seem to break without regard for the consequence.

Of course, sometimes, I’ve written the occasional light-hearted piece, but the general gist of most of my words has been about what is ethical. Sometimes this has been interpreted by readers to mean that I’m on the left, and other times it has been interpreted to mean I’m on the right. In reality, I’m apolitical. I support those who have an underlying ethic to their policies.

I define ethics as those rules that lead to the greatest chance of survival and the greatest opportunity for well being for the greatest number over the longest period of time. Ethics are not based on empathy (as some would have you think). They are based on determining outcomes before the outcomes arrive, and putting into operation those laws/rules which would prevent the worst and result in the best.

For instance, the ethical course of action would have been to consider better ways of production in the early 20th century in order to prevent further climate change. That would have resulted in the greater good for the greatest number over the longest period of time.

The breakdown in society and nations is a direct result of the destruction of the pillars of society — without replacing them with something better.

There is no point in my writing further on these topics. I have done so for a few decades (as have others). It is pointless. The only readers I have are those who already agree with all of this, and they are the few — not the many. Also, the few pennies I am paid is not worth it.

It is not nihilism that makes me conclude that we are in the last few generations before there is nothing left of modern civilization. Our descendants, if there are any, will be living a barren existence.

https://medium.com/tessas-web-log/real-reasons-for-current-societal-breakdown-3498da0e4ce4

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6 Jun 2024

Good survey methodology

I was talking to my son about the quite stupid study of the Mediterranean diet that I critiqued yesterday.  He challenged me to nominate a feasible methodology that I would accept as credible.  I have done a heap of published survey research so I think I can do that

For a start, I accept that a classical before-and-after study of diet is virtually impossible because of the long lag needed to detect lifespan effects.  But a correlational study can still have considerable credibility if it makes extensive use of statistical controls. The first computer program I ever wrote  way back in 1967 was to do partial correlations so  I have myself long used statistical controls.  When the "Summer of Love" was happening in San Francisco, I was writing FORTRAN code!

But to use statistical controls you have to have measures of the likely confounders, and getting measures of some of the confounders can be pesky.  Both income and IQ are broadly influential and very influential in the case of income.  Poor people routinely do badly on almost all ill health measures.  But to make your findigs credible you usually have  to take at least income  into account, with neuroticism (chronic anxiety as measured for example by the Eysenck N scale) an important third factor)

And the although the difficulties are great, they are not insusuperable.  I have managed them at times.   The Goossen hidden scale of intelligence is particularly useful as long as it is kept up to date.  And the usual demographics should of course be used.  Other confounders examined will depend on the study concerned

And how do we deal with the problem of "faking good" on self-reports?  That is actually one of the easy ones.  I have almost always embedded a social desirability or "lie" scale in my questionnaires

And of course the study must be double blind.  That is as important in survey research as it is in experimental research. So  persuasive  survey research can be done but such research is sadly rare  in epidemiology.  Epidemiologists generally seem to be blissfully  unaware of the precautions psychologists  routinely take in survey research.

June 05, 2024

Harvard scientists find new incredible benefit of following Mediterranean diet

Incredible is the word.  This study has so many holes in it that I found it hard to know where to start pointing them out. 

 So I'll start with the big picture:  Japan has the longest lived national population by far.  So shouldn't we all be living on a diet of rice and fish? That  may suggest that a Mediterranean diet is NOT optimal. Another permissible inference is that both diet and geography do not matter as influences on lifespan

OK: On to the study below.  The journal article is here:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2819335

I think the most obvious point is that the hazard ratios were tiny, indicating extrememly marginal effects.  And very weak effects  tend to be unreplicable -- nothing to be relied on for policy purposes.

And as a study based on self-reports it is very questionable. Pychologists have known since the '30s that self reports often misrepresent behaviour:  Mainly because respondents tend to "fake good" on questionnaires.

And it's alarming that no allowance for confounders was reported.  Income is the big confounder.  Poor people regularly have worse healh.  So was it poor people who did less well on the questionnaire.  Were the less long-lived people in the study simply poorer?  We don't know.

And possible psychological confounders are ignored too.  Was it more stable personalities or higher IQ people who stuck more to the diet?  Was it their characteristics that extended life?  We don't know.  High IQ people do in general tend to live longer

So there was a tiny tendency for the diet regulars to live longer  but was it really the diet that mattered?  What if the regulars  lived longer because they were also smarter, richer, more emotionally stable etc?  Was the diet simply a marker for something else? Was the real cause of the longer life something other than the diet?  We do not know and the researchers appear to have done nothing to find out.  

They did put a lot of work into their study so it is quite sad that the safest conclusion we can draw from their work is that  we do not know if diet matters

The Mediterranean diet has been found to reduce the risk of death by all causes by nearly a quarter in women.

A study of more than 25,000 healthy middle-aged American females with an average age of 55 found that following a diet rich in fish, legumes, vegetables, nuts, and whole grains was linked with a 23 percent lower risk of dying by the end of the 25-year study. 

Every woman was quizzed on their adherence to the diet annually, and thos who stuck closely to it over that 25-year period enjoyed a 16 percent lowered risk of death from all causes.  

The Mediterranean diet, which has been crowned the best diet for seven years in a row, has been shown to reduce inflammation in the body, improve the body's regulation in insulin, and manage weight, all of which protect against heart disease, dementia, and diabetes.   

The diet is common in Greece, Italy, and Spain, countries that border the Mediterranean Sea. 

The latest study from Harvard University is among the largest, with 25,315 women involved and perhaps the longest-running, with the women being followed for more than two decades.

At the start of the study, women filled out health questionnaires about their dietary habits, their health, their height and weight to calculate BMI. 

They also had their blood pressure assessed.

Participants filled out health questionnaires every six months during the first year and annually thereafter. 

Researchers assigned scores for adherence to the diet on a scale from zero to nine, with a higher score indicating that the woman stuck to the diet closely.

The scoring was based on the intake of nine dietary components, including a high intake of vegetables (except potatoes), fruits, nuts, whole grains, fish, and monosaturated fats.

If a woman ate less red and processed meats, she got points. If their alcohol consumption fell between five to 15 grams per day, they got an additional point. 

Then, the participants were broken into three categories based on their scores, with low adherence scores ranging from zero to three, intermediate adherence scores being a four or five, and high adherence scores falling between six and nine.

Over about 25 years, researchers counted 3,879 deaths, including 935 from heart disease and 1,531 from cancer.

Women with high adherence scores of six or higher were 23 percent less likely to die from all causes, while those with a score of four or five had a 16 percent lower risk.

The researchers said: ‘Our results suggest that a proportion of the lower risk of mortality may be accounted for by several cardiometabolic risk factors, in particular, biomarkers related to metabolism, inflammation, TRL pathways, insulin resistance, and BMI.

They added: ‘Most of the potential benefit of adherence to the Mediterranean diet and mortality remains unexplained, and future studies should examine other pathways that could potentially mediate the Mediterranean diet–associated lower mortality as well as examine cause-specific mortality.’

Their study was published in the journal JAMA Network Open. 

Few diets are loved by doctors as much as the Mediterranean diet. In addition to reducing one’s risk of heart disease, obesity, and dementia, it has a protective effect against stroke and can extend one’s life.

A 2016 study in the journal Current Opinion in Clinical Nutrition & Metabolic Care reported that people who followed the diet lived about four and half years longer than those who didn’t.

It is meant to be as enjoyable as it is straightforward. It prescribes loading up on veggies and fruits, cutting back on red meat, and incorporating fats, especially extra virgin olive oil, nuts, peanuts, olives, and avocados.

The diet also recommends exercise, the first dietary pyramid to do so. The prescription is based on the lifestyles of people in Mediterranean-bordering countries, specifically Sardinia, Italy, and Ikaria, Greece.

Both are considered Blue Zones – areas of the world where people consistently reach 100 years old. People in Blue Zones plant gardens, go on walks with fellow members of their community, dance with friends, and perform manual labor that anchors them to their surroundings.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13480755/Harvard-scientists-new-incredible-benefit-following-Mediterranean-diet.html

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