The Sound Of Settled Science

Unsettled Science 48 Comments

Nutritionists, Leslie explains, had decided that dietary fat was the enemy of good health, based in large part on a huge Seven Countries Study, published in 1970, which looked at 12,770 middle-aged men in countries ranging from the U.S. to Yugoslavia.
“The Seven Countries study had become canonical, and the fat hypothesis was enshrined in official advice,” Leslie writes. By 1980, the U.S. government issued its first Dietary Guidelines telling the country to cut back on saturated fats and cholesterol, and Americans dutifully complied.
That’s precisely when the nation’s obesity rate started to skyrocket.

Was There Nothing That Obama Couldn’t Do?

Political Animal Radioactive Terrorism The One 20 Comments

He wasn’t anti-nuke. He was on the other side.

When federal prosecutors and agents learned the true extent of the releases, many were shocked and angry. Some had spent years, if not decades, working to penetrate the global proliferation networks that allowed Iranian arms traders both to obtain crucial materials for Tehran’s illicit nuclear and ballistic missile programs and, in some cases, to provide dangerous materials to other countries.
“They didn’t just dismiss a bunch of innocent business guys,” said one former federal law enforcement supervisor centrally involved in the hunt for Iranian arms traffickers and nuclear smugglers. “And then they didn’t give a full story of it.”
In its determination to win support for the nuclear deal and prisoner swap from Tehran — and from Congress and the American people — the Obama administration did a lot more than just downplay the threats posed by the men it let off the hook, according to POLITICO’s findings.
Through action in some cases and inaction in others, the White House derailed its own much-touted National Counterproliferation Initiative at a time when it was making unprecedented headway in thwarting Iran’s proliferation networks. In addition, the POLITICO investigation found that Justice and State Department officials denied or delayed requests from prosecutors and agents to lure some key Iranian fugitives to friendly countries so they could be arrested. Similarly, Justice and State, at times in consultation with the White House, slowed down efforts to extradite some suspects already in custody overseas, according to current and former officials and others involved in the counterproliferation effort.
And as far back as the fall of 2014, Obama administration officials began slow-walking some significant investigations and prosecutions of Iranian procurement networks operating in the U.S. These previously undisclosed findings are based on interviews with key participants at all levels of government and an extensive review of court records and other documents.
“Clearly, there was an embargo on any Iranian cases,” according to the former federal supervisor.
“Of course it pissed people off, but it’s more significant that these guys were freed, and that people were killed because of the actions of one of them,” the supervisor added, in reference to Ravan and the IED network.

Energy Scam

Drain The Swamp 12 Comments

Recently the Trump administration began the ‘close out’ of the ENERGY STAR program, essentially repealing the ENERGY STAR mandate which granted the EPA’S Billionaires Club a complete monopoly over all government procurement for decades. Media Foundations can’t afford to report on the ENERGY STAR repeal, because no other industry profited more from the Junk Science produced by this corrupt federal agency than members of the Liars Club. […]
ENERGY STAR is arguably the most corrupt federal program in US history, built entirely on myth, fraudulent scientific research and bogus technical reports. Which explains why most Americans have never heard of the ENERGY STAR program, and couldn’t locate a single shred of evidence supporting the EPA’s phony claims of hundreds of billions of dollars allegedly saved by EPA Partnerships.
How will media spin this fiasco ? The US has never developed a National Standard for the measurement and verification of energy efficiency in products, all energy-savings claimed are estimates made by bureaucrats. Yet lawyers somehow managed to turn the ENERGY STAR brand of ‘certified’ government energy efficiency into a multi-billion dollar commodity, and relied on mainstream media to promote their delusional energy-saving claims to the Global community.

Sorry, forgot the link! It’s here.

Le Vote

Political Animal 44 Comments

Bumped for update:

France could face its own ‘Frexit’ in the future after far-right leader Marine Le Pen and independent centrist Emmanuel Macron beat the two main parties to go head to head in the upcoming presidential elections.
With 34 percent of the vote counted, France’s Interior Ministry says that far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen is leading with 24.6 percent of the vote followed by centrist Emmanuel Macron with 21.9 percent.

Fernandez;

In France the percentage of such dead end jobs is at 40%. An entire generation of Europeans is facing economic stagnation and internal cultural exile in their own countries. That is surely explosive and would normally lead obviously to what Spengler calls an extraordinarily dangerous French moment. What is truly scandalous is how long it has taken to recognize the smash. The crises of globalization is only belatedly being acknowledged after years of denial by the mainstream press. A Narrative that stubbornly characterized Brexit as an irrational aberration and Trump as joint product of Russian hacking and bigotry may now reluctantly face the fact that a genuine challenge to the world order now exists.
[…]
Coming on the rise of authoritarianism in Turkey, a victory by Jean-Luc Mélenchon or Marine Le Pen would leave the European project is dead in the water. The first piece of baggage they are likely to pitch overboard to lighten ship would be the Euro. CNN reports that while “the threat to the euro is most acute in France … it’s now under threat from politicians on both the left and right who want to bring the lira, drachma, peseta and French franc out of retirement.” Many southern European economists can see no way out of the prison of flyover country and catastrophic youth unemployment without the right to print their own currencies.
The center may hold in France but it is unlikely to hold for long. The long and agonized effort rearguard effort to explain away the challenge posed by Brexit, Trumpism and now France as just the result of yahoos hearing themselves hog calling have been one futile exercise in self delusion. There’s a hole in the bottom of the Titanic and the water has reached F Deck and now gurgling up the staircase. It’s time for the passengers in first class to seriously consider they may actually actually drown before the night is out. Sneering comedy skits on the Daily Show, Full Frontal, and Last Week Tonight won’t cut it any more.

French Presidential polls are open, and so is your open thread.

Those Moderate Muslims!

Religion Of Submission 36 Comments

Michiganistan;

A Detroit-area physician and his wife have been arrested and charged with conspiring to perform female genital mutilation procedures on girls as young as six, the Justice Department announced on Friday.
Dr. Fakhruddin Attar and his wife, Farida Attar, conspired with another doctor, Jumana Nagarwala, to perform the illegal procedures at Attar’s clinic in Livonia, the Justice Department said.
Nagarawala, who worked as an emergency room doctor in Detroit, was charged earlier this week in the case.
“According to the complaint, some of the minor victims traveled interstate to have the procedure performed. The complaint alleges that the FGM procedure was performed on girls who were approximately six to eight years old,” the Justice Department says.

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