Paul M. Jones

People who avoid carbohydrates and eat more fat, even saturated fat, lose more body fat and have fewer cardiovascular risks than people who follow the low-fat diet that health authorities have favored for decades, a major new study shows.

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The new study was financed by the National Institutes of Health and published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. It included a racially diverse group of 150 men and women -- a rarity in clinical nutrition studies -- who were assigned to follow diets for one year that limited either the amount of carbs or fat that they could eat, but not overall calories.

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By the end of the yearlong trial, people in the low-carbohydrate group had lost about eight pounds more on average than those in the low-fat group. They had significantly greater reductions in body fat than the low-fat group, and improvements in lean muscle mass -- even though neither group changed their levels of physical activity.

While the low-fat group did lose weight, they appeared to lose more muscle than fat.

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By the end of the yearlong trial, people in the low-carbohydrate group had lost about eight pounds more on average than those in the low-fat group. They had significantly greater reductions in body fat than the low-fat group, and improvements in lean muscle mass -- even though neither group changed their levels of physical activity.

While the low-fat group did lose weight, they appeared to lose more muscle than fat.

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In the end, people in the low-carbohydrate group saw markers of inflammation and triglycerides -- a type of fat that circulates in the blood -- plunge. Their HDL, the so-called good cholesterol, rose more sharply than it did for people in the low-fat group.

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Those on the low-carbohydrate diet ultimately did so well that they managed to lower their Framingham risk scores, which calculate the likelihood of a heart attack within the next 10 years. The low-fat group on average had no improvement in their scores.

Score another one for Atkins, Taubes, et al. Note also that this is a direct refutation of the Food Pyramid the Federal government has been shoving down our throats for years. What else have they gotten wrong? Via A Call for a Low-Carb Diet - NYTimes.com.

Rhat gave unions their big push in the 1930s was federal legislation allowing them to be the sole bargainer for employees, even for employees who had no wish to join or pay dues. What we do call an organization that is the sole seller? We call it a monopoly. And not the kind of monopoly that some people say Microsoft is or had been. Microsoft always has to compete with other software companies.

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Unions, moreover, have a pretty ugly track record on race relations, which is why two prominent early 20th century black leaders, W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, who agreed on little else, agreed that unions were bad for black workers. When people forcibly prevent you from competing and figure out ways to exclude you from working, you don't feel very good about them.

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Our big challenge with unions nowadays is to rein in unions of government workers who are negotiating high wages and high pensions. That is what is wrecking state and local government budgets all over the United States.

Emphasis mine. Via The Role of Unions, David Henderson | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.

I have argued elsewhere that certain features of empathy make it a poor guide to social policy. Empathy is biased; we are more prone to feel empathy for attractive people and for those who look like us or share our ethnic or national background. And empathy is narrow; it connects us to particular individuals, real or imagined, but is insensitive to numerical differences and statistical data. As Mother Teresa put it, “If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” Laboratory studies find that we really do care more about the one than about the mass, so long as we have personal information about the one.

In light of these features, our public decisions will be fairer and more moral once we put empathy aside.

via Against Empathy | Boston Review.

Except it's not white misogynist Christian Western men attacking college-educated Strong Independent Western women, it's Pakistani Muslim immigrants in Britain attacking children:

At least 1,400 children were subjected to appalling sexual exploitation in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, a report has found.

Children as young as 11 were raped by multiple perpetrators, abducted, trafficked to other cities in England, beaten and intimidated, it said.

The report, commissioned by Rotherham Borough Council, revealed there had been three previous inquiries.

Council leader Roger Stone said he would step down with immediate effect.

Mr Stone, who has been the leader since 2003, said: "I believe it is only right that as leader I take responsibility for the historic failings described so clearly."

The inquiry team noted fears among council staff of being labelled "racist" if they focused on victims' descriptions of the majority of abusers as "Asian" men.

("Asian" is apparently a euphemism for "Pakistani Muslim" in this case.) Via BBC News - Rotherham child abuse scandal: 1,400 children exploited, report finds.

There's so much wrong here I don't know where to start, not least of which is that the police and legal systems turned a blind eye to this horrible activity, thereby enabling the perpetrators. At this time, none of the usual rape culture reporters find it interesting enough to report on. One wonders why.

I can tell you right now, you are not going to like this essay from Fred On Everything. I didn't like it, and yet it shows some sense. You should read the whole thing, but this part especially stands our for me:

As a fresh cop, you will notice that the standard editorial notion, that cops are heavily armed brutes amid a helpless unarmed populations, isn’t quite accurate. When you are on the sidewalks of a bad neighborhood, where you know you are disliked by all and hated by many, you will become aware of your vulnerability. You have to pass close to people. Any of them could blow your head off from behind, stick an ice pick in your back, or brain you with a piece of rebar.

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Ah, but how do you know when your life is in danger? Therein lies the rub.

As an object lesson, watch the following video where an armed (!) police officer gets beaten senseless by an unarmed (!!) assailant:

Now, if she had shot him, we would have heard about another white cop killing an unarmed black man. But as we can see, "unarmed" does not mean "harmless, timid, or otherwise not-dangerous". She was lucky that he did not kick her head in while she was down. Keep this in mind the next time you hear about someone being "unarmed."

Former acting director of cyber security for the Department of Health and Human Services Timothy DeFoggi was convicted for a myriad of gruesome child pornography charges Tuesday, the Department of Justice announced.

DeFoggi, who had top security clearance in his capacity as cyber security director, first joined the child pornography website PedoBook in March 2012. The Omaha World-Herald reported that he was arrested in April of last year, when law enforcement officials serving a search warrant found him downloading child pornography in his home.

In addition to viewing and soliciting child pornography, reportedly asking another member of the site whether he’d share pictures of his son, he suggested meeting a fellow pedophile in person to violently rape and murder children together.

These are the people in charge of "Security." As with the NSA, the IRS, and everything else at the federal level, how can you ever trust a word any of them say? And you want your *medical records* entrusted to them? Via Former HHS Cyber Security Director Convicted For Child Porn | The Daily Caller.

The people they are policing aren't enemy combatants, but their fellow citizens -- and, even more significantly, their employers. A combat-like mindset on the part of police turns fellow-citizens into enemies, with predictable results.

I sometimes think the turning point was marked by the old cop show Hill Street Blues. Each episode opened with a daily briefing before the officers went out on patrol. In the early seasons, Sergeant Phil Esterhaus concluded every briefing with "Let's be careful out there." In the later episodes, his replacement, Sergeant Stan Jablonski, replaced that with "Let's do it to them before they do it to us." The latter attitude is appropriate for a war zone, but not for a civilized society.

via Police problem is unaccountable attitude: Column.

Memorizing the answers to simple math problems, such as basic addition or the multiplication tables, marks a key shift in a child’s cognitive development, because it helps bridge the gap from counting on fingers to complex calculation, according to the new brain scanning research.

The progression from counting on fingers to simply remembering that, for example, six plus three equals nine, parallels physical changes in a child’s brain, in which the hippocampus, a key brain structure for memory, gradually takes over from the pre-frontal parietal cortex, an area of higher order reasoning.

In effect, as young math students memorize the basics, their brains reorganize to accommodate the greater demands of more complex math. It is a gradual process, like “overlapping waves,” the researchers write, but it clearly shows that, for the growing child’s brain, rote memorization is a key step along the way to efficient mathematical reasoning.

via Math wars: Rote memorization plays crucial role in teaching students how to solve complex calculations, study says.

The vacuuming up of highly talented, i.e. smart, people, from all over the country, into the megalopolises, where they assortatively mate and form their own "new class", alienated from their origins, and leaving the towns and rural areas without their talent. They assortatively mate, but then have few children.

(Thus reducing average IQ levels.)

Other IQ shredders include the universities, though there's a lot of overlap between them and the big cities. It doesn't even seem to matter whether the students are in STEM or ethnic grievance studies, the results for fertility are the same - although the results for IQ are better or worse depending on field of study, since the STEM kids are much smarter than those in the humanities.

via Mangan's: Shredding IQ.

Under what circumstances, if at all, should the capacity for force and intimidation be deployed against the public by the state? This becomes controversial when one wants to answer that the capacity should be preventative rather than responsive.

Responsive force entails responding to a situation where public safety is being threatened.

On the other hand, preventative force and intimidation is far more problematic from a civil liberties perspective because it is the police force itself introducing the element of disruption into the civil equation. When a massive force rolls into Ferguson during a peaceful rally in the middle of the day, can we really say this doesn’t result in intimidation, at the least, and antagonism, at the worst? Does the presence of intimidating MRAPs, military-esque rifles, and costumed-up police force have no effect on the public to which it is directed?

And for those inclined to say “yes” there is no effect, I respond: standard gun safety rules dictate that you DO NOT point your gun at something you are not prepared to shoot. Do you really think you have the right to free speech or free assembly when you are, literally, in the state’s crosshairs?

All emphasis mine. Via The PJ Tatler » A Preventative, Militarized Police Force Is a Threat to Free Speech.