Political Violence

In response to the ghouls who are trying to exploit the mass murder at the political gathering in AZ, blaming the politicians and pundits for the tone of their rhetoric being too combative:

"Yes, the quality of political debate is abysmally bad. That is a direct result of how the exercise of political power has more intensely affected the lives of citizens. Voters recognize how all the government programs, laws, regulations, taxes, etc. are dominating their lives and threatening their futures more and more each day, so they are understandably alarmed and getting more desperate to stop the “other side” from taking advantage of them.

"All of this is the predictable result of putting moral questions up to a vote, of rulers making election contests into mock battles, pitting one “side” against another. (Warren mentions the “Coke vs. Pepsi” mentality, which is spot on.)

"Around the 2010 election, I read somewhere [added: here via Beck] that an election is nothing more than two or more armies getting dressed up, marching to the battle field, then counting which side has the most soldiers and awarding the spoils of victory to that side without actually drawing blood. And, as Billy Beck has pointed out for many years: “All politics in this country now is just dress rehearsal for civil war.”

"My solution? Stop voting. Stop giving your permission to politicians to wield power over your neighbors. Work with your neighbors to solve problems via reason and persuasion, instead of resorting to force. Government, by definition, is the use of force."

(My comment here and here.)

Beck on Beck

Billy Beck makes some observations about Glenn Beck, with which I tend to agree. I don't get the ubiquitous hostility and charges of craziness directed at him. His emphasis on faith at the Lincoln Memorial rally pretty much proved most of the pre-event hysteria dead wrong. It wasn't a "right-wing" political festival. Instead, it was a boring gathering of milquetoast religious speeches, something which isn't going to do any good to further the individual rights of Americans.

I've never listened to or watched Savage or Levin. I can't really argue too much about Billy's opinion of Hannity. For one thing, he tells people who phone him "great Americans" without knowing anything about them, other than the fact that they call him a "great American". But he's still smarter than Bill O'Reilly or any of the chumps at MSNBC. (Yeah, I know, that's not saying much.)

I was, however, surprised to see faint praise for Rush Limbaugh. I don't agree, because I don't think you can put your finger on "the bounds of his logic" because he so often makes ridiculously specious arguments with no logic. When Limbaugh is on the right side of an issue, or making a valid point about freedom and individualism, most of the time he's backing into it by accident, or at the very least, unable to universally apply such principles across party boundaries.

Stephen Colbert Testifies Before Congress

What Congress Critter thought this would be a good idea? I'm all for mocking politicians and see no reason to show them respect. They are, after all, whores and thieves on the scale of trillions of dollars. But those people seem to think highly of themselves and the "dignity" of their profession, so what moron figured bringing Colbert before their committee made any sense?

Stephen Colbert is very quick-witted and can be very funny at times. But his always-on "Opposite Day" shtick gets tedious after awhile. And, his character is hard-wired to lampoon Republicans/"conservatives"— some of them make it so easy—but any good satirist ought to see just as many, if not more, targets among the Democrats/"liberals".

Shades of Red

Warren Meyer points out how Obama fits the mold of a "Corporatist" more than a Socialist. I've also seen people describe him as a Mussolini-style Fascist.

Of course, the media marginalizes anyone who uses such terms (while stupidly lumping libertarians and anarcho-capitalists into the "far right-wing" category, along with neo-Nazis and skinheads, when they are as different as can be).

The term "collectivist" nicely ties the -isms with which to describe Obama into a simple category. Unfortunately, the average person is unfamiliar with the term, and doesn't think much beyond the arcane, useless 1-dimensional left-right continuum.

Dieticians Wrong About Fat, Ignore Processed Carbohydrates

See update below.

Anyone who has been reading about honest nutritional science will not lift an eyebrow when Radley Balko says, "What do you know, the experts may have been wrong again..." to blame saturated fat for cardiovascular disease:

Ultimately, saturated fat...may be neutral for the heart. Meanwhile, some mono-unsaturated fats...and some poly-unsaturated fats...could be good for the heart.

...

If saturated fat doesn't adversely affect cardiovascular health, what does? Sorry, Nabisco: We should be giving a closer look to foods with a high glycemic index—a measure that reflects a food's influence on blood sugar levels, based on how quickly it is digested and absorbed. Typically, that means carbohydrates like cereal, bread, chips, and cookies.

In a 2000 study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Harvard researchers...found that the quintile of women who ate food with the highest glycemic load—a measure that incorporates portion size—had twice the risk of developing heart disease than the quintile who ate food with the lowest glycemic load. A 2008 meta-analysis of 37 studies reported a significant association between intake of high glycemic index foods and increased risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, gallbladder disease, and breast cancer.

Read the full article for more details.

Meanwhile, CNN stupidly ignores the role of sugars in an article titled Fatty foods may cause cocaine-like addiction. Ironically, they call processed food "purified" and "evolve[d]" when comparing its addictive qualities to "evolved" drugs like cocaine (as compared to coca leaves).

Look at the ingredients on your box of "low-fat" whole-grain packaged food. You'll see dozens of laboratory chemicals and industrially mutilated plant byproducts. How is that more pure than a grass-fed rib-eye steak? Or a serving of vegetables, nuts, or fruit you buy in their whole, unadulterated form and prepare yourself? And, how can they use the word "evolved" without remembering how the human metabolism evolved almost entirely before agriculture (and definitely before industrial junk food and sedentary TV/Internet lifestyles)?

Eat like our paleo ancestors did, whole foods including fatty meat, fish, vegetables, nuts, and fruit. Skip the packaged stuff. Stay active as much as possible, but don't engage in unnatural aerobic or "cardio" workouts (animals don't run on treadmills--they walk around all the time and occasionally sprint).

Addendum: Mark Sisson gives the lowdown on sugar, how it is so destructive to our health. And still, the "common wisdom" is that fat is the evil.