The Problem With the U.S. Dietary Guidelines

      

 

      Rejecting the advice of its scientific advisers, the federal government has released new dietary recommendations that sound a familiar nutritional refrain, advising Americans to “make every bite count” while dismissing expert recommendations to sharply reduce consumption of sugar and alcoholic beverages.   The “Dietary Guidelines for Americans” are updated every five years, and the latest iteration arrived on Tuesday, 10 months into a pandemic that has posed a historic health threat to Americans. Confined to their homes, even those who have dodged the coronavirus itself are drinking more and gaining weight, a phenomenon often called “quarantine 15.” 

 

 

Earlier this year, a 20-person committee of scientists known as the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee recommended that the departments modify the guidelines to suggest Americans consume less than 6% of calories from added sugars, citing high rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancers in the U.S. – all underlying conditions that contribute to a higher likelihood of severe COVID-19.

For the average American, added sugar accounts for more than 13% of daily energy intake – almost 270 calories – most of which comes from sweetened beverages, desserts and sweets, snacks, coffee and tea, candy and sugars, and breakfast cereals and bars, according to the guidelines.

The committee also recommended that Americans who drink alcohol should drink no more than one drink per day, where one alcoholic drink is equivalent to 12 fluid ounces of regular beer, 5 fluid ounces of wine, or 1.5 fluid ounces of 80 proof distilled spirits.

 

 In general, processed food and beverage companies have an intense interest in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the nation’s leading set of science-based nutrition recommendations.

 But instead the US government released a report that many experts say shows just how much it succumbed to pressures by the meat and the soda industry — yet again.  As expected, due to strong lobbying by the meat industry and the resulting strong pressure that Congress put into the developers of the 2015 DGAs, the recommendation to reduce consumption of red and processed meats was not included.  I know most people believe it would lead to some type of dystopia, but no society has ever become worse off because of fewer government controls. The dystopias happen in the exact opposite environment.

 

 In the midst of a worldwide obesity and diabetes crisis, we don’t need more input from experts who aren’t paying attention to the latest science or who can’t break free from 50 years of conventional thinking about healthy eating. Promoting the same dietary advice over and over again while expecting different results is indeed a kind of insanity, and worse, is doing nothing to combat rising disease and death rates. Consumers need solid information about how to eat for good health

The Nashville Bomber

 

 

      No sooner had Anthony Quinn Warner been named as a person of interest in an apparent Christmas Day suicide bombing in Nashville, Tennessee, than conspiratorial circles began casting doubt on his identity, or else applauding his actions.  Warner, 63, is accused of setting off a bomb in downtown Nashville early Christmas morning, damaging more than 40 businesses, killing himself, and injuring several others. Investigators have not yet identified a motive for the attack. Officials have not announced Warner’s possible motives, or whether the incident is being treated as an act of terror.

Investigators are analyzing property belonging to Warner that was collected during the investigation, including a computer and a portable storage drive, and are continuing to interview witnesses as they try to identify a potential motive for the explosion, a law enforcement official said. A review of his financial transactions also uncovered purchases of potential bomb-making components, the official said.

Warner had recently given away a vehicle and told the person he gave it to that he had been diagnosed with cancer, though it is unclear whether he indeed had cancer, the official said. Investigators used some items collected from the vehicle, including a hat and gloves, to match Warner’s DNA, and DNA had also been taken from one of his family members.

Warner also apparently gave away his home in Antioch, a Nashville suburb, to a Los Angeles woman a month before the bombing. A property record dated Nov. 25 indicates Warner transferred the home to the woman in exchange for no money after living there for decades. The woman’s signature is not on that document.

Warner had worked as a computer consultant for Nashville realtor Steve Fridrich, who told the AP in a text message that Warner had said he was retiring earlier this month.

 

Here is one possible motive:   

AT&T got a contract to do forensic audit on Dominion voting machines and those machines were being moved to Nashville this past week.

The former owner of the AT&T building in Nashville, William Kennard, is a board member for Cerberus Capital Management and AT&T.... He also was Bill Clinton’s FCC chair, and Obama’s Ambassador to the EU. 

Dominion voting is owned by Cerberus Capital Management.... Cerberus is run by Staple Street Execs. Joe Bidens Brother in Law, Steven Owens, is the cofounder of Staple Street Execs along with William Kennard (mentioned above). 

Super Computer in TN was connected to the AT&T internet in NASHVILLE.... yesterday evening the Cumberland river cooling system was compromised due to internet outage and Supercomputer fried.....
If you don’t know, “Kraken” is a reference to a supercomputer former prosecuter, Sidney Powell, has been talking about. 

So, the explosion “just happened” to be at the AT&T location where they “just so happen” to control the cooling system for the super computer and house the dominion voting machines and drives for forensic audit... 

Does it make sense now why no lives were lost? Does it make sense now why the FBI task lead couldn’t even put together a coherent sentence in the press conference yesterday? Does it make sense why the mayor was making light of the situation, almost laughing yesterday?

Democrats care more about helping illegal aliens than Americans

     What explains the Democratic romance with illegal aliens?  There is no clearer and more shameful example of betrayal in modern American politics than Big City Democrats who support foreigners over their own citizens.  Democrat lawmakers care more about illegal aliens than they care about their own constituents.  The phenomena is very real — the poor, mostly black residents of many urban neighborhoods have been forced to put up with levels of violence and squalor that would turn the stomachs of white, liberal suburbanites. Instead of facing that reality and demanding change, those left wing suburbanites just ignore it.  The irony of today’s Democrats is that they espouse values claiming to care for minority communities, but in reality the low-income communities they represent are mostly populated by minorities who have had their economic interests betrayed at every turn by the Democratic Party’s dedication to fighting for open border policies.

 

      The open borders rhetoric coming from the Democratic Party today fails to represent the economic interests of black Americans. It is a reflection of mostly white, bleeding heart liberal priorities — bolstered by corporate America’s desire for cheaper labor — and it has co-opted the voices of black Americans, whose votes the Democratic Party takes for granted.

 

      Asked if an illegal immigrant in the interior of the country who hasn’t committed another crime should be deported, Joe Biden replied that such a person “should not be the focus of deportation.” Kamala Harris said he “absolutely” should not be deported.  This is a promise to gut interior enforcement that, coupled with the latitudinarian attitude at the border, would be a huge step toward open borders.

 

 

     Illegal immigration is a hugely divisive issue for Democrats. Here are some different groups -

     1.) Union Democrats - These are mostly white middle aged male blue-collar worker types from the east coast who DEFINITELY disapprove of illegal immigration. They vote Democrat because their dad did and they view themselves as workers and not management, but they hate the concept of illegal aliens stealing their jobs just as much as any Trump supporter.

     2.) "Victims Are Great"/"Guilt Porn" far-left Democrats (Social Justice Warriors) - A small but growing segment of the democratic party who defines everything in terms of racial and social identity, and views victim hood as the ultimate "good". Meaning being in a position of poverty or disenfranchisement automatically makes you right in their eyes. Mexicans are viewed as being "nonwhite" by them (even though many Mexicans are clearly white), being white is viewed as a negative by them. So, illegal immigrants are all precious little victims who deserve to be treated like royalty in their mind, because, you know, white privilege something something. The simple fact that illegal immigrants are poor and desperate makes them good people in the eyes of this group, any evils they do can be explained as being the fault of rich white people somehow. This group always finds a way to make it a rich white guy's fault. We should all be giving up our homes and positions to people who fit the victim profile. They probably disapprove of the US being a country in the first place and would rather the world was a border less love fest.

     3.) Intellectual Democrats - you won't get a straight answer on illegal immigration from this group of scientists, professors, and business people. These are the Democrats who are in a position with something to lose - coming across as racist or afraid of immigrants makes them look bad, and they know it. Often, they are the ones who lose their jobs when the SJW crowd gets up in arms about something. So, you're likely to hear something like "undocumented immigrants are a complex issue" when they open their mouths, with no indication as to what their opinion actually is. You would think they are running for office with the way they avoid the question.

     4.) Average Joe Democrats - These guys are the ones who turn up for presidential elections but wouldn't be caught dead voting in any other election. They largely don't even view themselves as Democrats, rather they simple vote for Democratic candidates every 4 years. They generally don't have opinions on undocumented immigration. They'll say stuff like "well obviously its bad that people come into the country illegally, but i don't know, aren't they taking the jobs Americans don't want anyway?" 

 

      But there is a more sinister long-term answer for the Democrats’ whole-hearted embrace of illegal immigration.  A 2018 Center for American Progress (CAP) Action Fund memo sheds light on this. The memo, co-authored by former Hillary Clinton communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, argues that the Democratic Party needs to protect illegal immigrants brought here at a young age as a result of President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program because they are “a critical component of the Democratic Party’s future electoral success.'' This is an astonishing statement. With declining support from white and older Americans, the Democrats have concluded that their future lies in importing a new electorate from south of the border.  So it is full speed ahead on illegal immigration for the Democrats, and they don’t want Republicans gumming up the works even if their name is not Donald Trump. They will claim their position is rooted in compassion and in upholding American values when in fact it is primarily about naked politics and importing a new set of voters, as their ideas become increasingly too far-fetched for the citizens who currently reside legally within America’s borders.

 

      Anyone who supports illegal aliens and opposes law enforcement’s efforts to protect communities from criminals should be shown no quarter – not in the media, not in the courtroom and not in our political campaigns.

BLM’s Defund Agenda will Hurt the Black Community

 

 

 

      Black Lives Matter (BLM) organizations are flexing their new political muscles. They are pressuring the incoming Biden Administration as well as state and local lawmakers to fulfill their personnel and policy demands. However, their radical ideas could be devastating to the black community leaving minority neighborhoods more lawless and dangerous.  Most people think that Black Lives Matter is a grass-roots, black created, black run organization dedicated to fighting racism. It most certainly is not. The Black Lives Matter movement is the creation of a group of a few very wealthy individuals, non-profit corporations, and the corporate media (incidentally, 90% of the U.S. media is controlled by only six corporations).  Who funds Black Lives Matter? It’s funded by billionaires George Soros (Open Society Foundation), Rob McKay (Taco Bell heir), the Ford Foundation, the Borealis Philanthropy, the Democracy Alliance, and many others. Not exactly what I would call a black run grass-roots organization. If these facts alone don’t cause you to rethink the whole Black Lives Matter thing, then you just aren’t paying attention.

 

 

      Many Americans thought they were embracing progress toward greater equality as they chanted or posted #blacklivesmatter. They were actually supporting organizations that advocated for far-left policies, the cornerstone being to defund police in America. The constellation of organizations that comprise the BLM movement also have a host of other demands that would undermine public safety in the black community. After the November election, BLM has the megaphone, the manpower, and the political might to get it done.

 

      Local chapters are pushing for their police forces to be defunded among sundry other priorities including removing resource officers from schools, legalizing sex work, and even reparations.  Nationally, BLM movement has drafted a comprehensive federal policing and justice reform bill, the  BREATHEAct.  The BREATHE Act would starve law enforcement of significant federal infusions of cash and reshape our criminal justice system. Championed by Squad members, U.S. Representatives Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, this bill would strip federal resources from incarceration and policing, reduce immigration enforcement, close prisons and immigration and youth detention centers, pilot universal basic income programs, and give voting rights to incarcerated individuals and illegal immigrants (in local and states laws.)

 

     When criminals know that there are fewer police patrolling or likely to respond and investigate crime, they may feel emboldened. This summer violent crime in cities spiked across the nation after months of lockdowns, rising unemployment, police funding cuts, and mass protests. In the nation’s 50 largest cities, reported homicides increased by 24 percent this year. Minneapolis, Minnesota, which is on the path to dismantle its police force, shifted $1 million from its police force to hire violence interrupters. Instead of more peace, the city experienced a spike in the number of reported violent crimes such as assaults, robberies and homicides compared to 2019. Startlingly, more people have been killed in the city in the first nine months of 2020 than were slain in all of last year. Burglaries, auto thefts, and arson have also all increased.

 

      Black Americans recognize the recklessness of defunding police, which is why 81 percent of them want the same or more police presence in their neighborhoods. BLM’s defund-the-police movement employs dehumanizing rhetoric to encourage disrespect, disobedience, and even violence against officers. Not only do police officers believe that their jobs have become more difficult, but police forces face significant retention and recruitment challenges.  When police budgets are cut, the first things to go are often youth programs, diversity initiatives, and police training programs — the very programs that have proven effective in reducing negative interactions between the police and members of the community. Such programs should receive more funding, but defunding the police will only gut them.

      In the African American community where there is the highest crime rate and the biggest problems with drug abuse, they push to release the inmates from prison and put them back on the streets, let drug use and drug dealing run wild, and then take away the police. What do you think the outcome of these policies will produce? More crime and drug abuse in the African American community. High crime and drug areas minus police equals hell, – easy math. Policies that promote more crime and drug abuse in the black community are what I call anti-black policies.

 

      What we are seeing happening in the world right now under the guise of “eliminating racism”, – the destabilization of society, the protest, rioting, looting, burning, and killing are not spontaneous, grass-roots events. It’s all thoroughly coordinated by those at the top of the Black Lives Matter / medial cabal. They are indeed the enemy of African Americans, but they are actually the enemy of us all. African Americans are just being used as cannon fodder in their game of global domination.

Why doesn't America implement a national gun licensing system?

 

 

     The obvious answer is because we don't license civil rights.  It's simple, really.  We have 100+ years of history of seeing licensing systems abused, and we've seen the advocates of these licensing schemes working desperately to allow the issuing authorities to continue to abuse them.

 

      What would be the point? - When you purchase a firearm from a licensed firearms dealer in the United States, you already have to undergo a background check which allows you to purchase the weapon. If someone can pass the background check to obtain the weapon, what would additional licensing and/or paperwork do, exactly?  Anyway, if they are a criminal, they are simply going to avoid any process that requires them to provide ID or undergo a background check, which means licensing wouldn't catch them.

 

 

      There’s also the fact that a gun licensing scheme, aside from being very expensive, would amount to little better than a gun registry. American’s don’t like gun registries, because that means that when the government decides that we can’t be trusted with firearms, they know exactly who has what. And that’s not something that anyone should be happy about. Look at what happened when Australia implemented their gun control scheme. They basically had a ‘buyback’ that was mandatory, where you had to sell them whatever firearms you owned at a reduced price, and then you couldn’t buy most of the common firearms of the time. Oh, and if you didn’t show up for the mandatory buyback, they came to your house, because they had this handy little registry that said where the gun was and who exactly had it. It made firearm confiscation a breeze.   America has had bouts of firearm confiscation (New York, California, D.C.). None of this could have been possible without registration. Americans are rather stubborn about individual rights, and reject measures that materially endanger them. Hence, most Americans who know the history of gun confiscation here reject licensing.

 

      In this country, there is a sharp division of power between the federal government and the state governments. With a few notable exceptions (the automatic weapons ban in 1934 and the 'assault weapon' ban in 1994), the states are in control of that kind of legislation and enforcement. Many states have an equivalent to the 2nd Amendment of the Bill of Rights to the US Constitution in their constitutions, too. In those two cases I mentioned the federal government laid down a blanket ban with limited exceptions, and took on the mantle of regulating and enforcing them. Since federal law of that kind would trump state laws, no state can allow open ownership of automatic weapons, for instance. However, it is only in a situation where there is a compelling interest on the part of the federal government, traditionally involving interstate commerce in some way, that they can do this sort of thing.  

     There is nothing which the federal government could do without infringing on the rights of state and local governments. Some states, for instance, have stricter laws than others. To try and coalesce gun regulations and policing so that all the states would be satisfied would be nearly impossible. The US Congress would have to pass such legislation, and since they are representative of the populations of the states where they were elected, we could easily have 50 different versions of such a law with few agreeing on any of them. This is how we check the power of the federal government, and it was designed into the Constitution for a reason- to prevent a tyrannical central government from exercising dangerous control over our everyday lives. I dare say, every single country of Europe could more easily be overtaken by tyranny because of their highly centralized power structure. Here, it would be much more difficult. Most Americans, no matter their political bent, prefer it that way.

 

 

     Americans are allowed to have guns because it is not that uncommon for Americans to find themselves in situations in which the use of lethal force in self-defense is justified — and without guns, the use of lethal force in self-defense is just too difficult for most Americans.

     Any policy that deliberately tries to suppress the use of lethal force in self-defense when it is justifiable amounts to the protection of criminals as they are committing violent crimes — which would make those who implemented the policies accomplices in those crimes, from a moral perspective.

The crisis of liberalism

 

 

 

 

     The progressive desire to marry dominance of culture with dominance of politics should by now come as a shock to no one. One consequence of the Trump years has been the abandonment of any pretense that much of mainstream media, culture, and academia is anything other than liberal, and the radicalization of many already openly liberal institutions. In response to what they identified as the unique threats President Trump posed to the American political system, many on the left adopted a decidedly antagonistic pose toward him. In some cases they were right to find Trump’s words or actions abhorrent; in many others, they treated a more typical, if almost always clumsily advanced, conservatism as fascism, or indulged outright lies about him and other Republicans. Trump, of course, often invited such treatment and seemed to relish the scorched-earth political combat.

 

     Trump lost, but not in the landslide for which his opponents had hoped; down-ballot Republicans did far better than expected, making gains in the House and giving themselves a good chance to hold the Senate.  Outside the liberal tent, the feeling of being suffocated by the left’s cultural dominance is turning voting Republican into an act of cultural rebellion — which may be one reason the Obama years, so good for liberalism in the culture, have seen sharp G.O.P. gains at every level of the country’s government.  In the aftermath of Biden’s victory, progressives would do well to ask themselves why that is — why the 2020 election was not the decisive despoliation of the Republican Party that they’d hoped for.

 

     Talk of socialism and defunding the police may excite Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her fans, but it angered swing-district Democrats struggling to hold their seats, and the party’s House majority shrank when it had been expected to grow.  If left-wingers continue to push leftward while castigating those who won’t come along for the ride, then their power could fade even as their control over many institutions lingers.

 

      The liberal meltdown we saw over the last four years is exactly what happens when people who don't understand politics get all their news from late night comedians. Infotainment is poisoning the discourse. Democrats now frequently support larger expansions of government, and more vehemently scorn Big Business and Big Finance, than most liberal Democrats did a few years ago.

 

    The activist left has remade the Democratic Party in several ways. First, it has pushed Democrats, who in the Bill Clinton and Obama eras sought the approval and support of corporate and Wall Street titans, to treat monied interests as adversaries. In 2008, Obama raised more cash from the financial, insurance, and real-estate industries than his Republican opponent, John McCain, did. Once in office, he named former investment bankers to serve as three of his first four chiefs of staff. 

 

      Among many liberals, there is an understandable impulse to raise the drawbridge, to deny certain ideas access to respectable conversation.  Democrats are having to reckon with reality. When your strategy is incessant fear-mongering, you're gambling as to whether your voters will stand and fight or take a flight.

The Myth of the Food Desert

 

 
     Many think that a key cause of nutritional inequality is food deserts – or neighborhoods without supermarkets, mostly in low-income areas. The narrative is that folks who live in food deserts are forced to shop at local convenience stores, where it's hard to find healthy groceries. If we could just get a supermarket to open in those neighborhoods, the thinking goes, then people would be able to eat healthy.

     The food desert narrative suggests the lack of supply of healthy foods is what causes reduced demand for them.  But in the modern economy, stores have become amazingly good at selling us exactly the kinds of things we want to buy. Lower demand for healthy food is what causes the lack of supply.  In other words, people don't suddenly go from shopping at an unhealthy convenience store to shopping at the new, healthy supermarket.  The trouble is that it is impossible to truly see a causal relationship between inner-city obesity and the distance of the supermarket when you live, for example, in New York.

      Fairway has been thriving in West Harlem for 15 years, with gorgeous, accessibly priced produce practically spilling out onto the sidewalk. Plenty of local black people shop in it. It's a walk away for many, and for others, there is even a shuttle service. It is not inaccessible to poor blacks and Latinos in any way.

      Yet obesity is still rife in West Harlem, including among teenagers raised on food bought there, in a way that it is not in Greenwich Village. Throughout the city, there are supermarkets amply stocked with fresh produce priced modestly, in struggling neighborhoods where the average weight of people is distinctly higher than on the Upper East Side.  The U.S. Department of Agriculture's food desert locator — unveiled in 2011 — found almost no food deserts in New York City except in some of the wide-open spaces near Kennedy airport.  As far back as 2006, there was sunny coverage in these parts of the Healthy Bodegas Initiative, stocking bodegas in Harlem, the Bronx and Brooklyn with fresh produce and lowfat milk. The media have been less interested in the uninspiring outcome. By 2010, people were buying more vegetables in only one in four bodegas, for example.

 

       The key point is that supermarkets have never been inaccessible to poor people in the way that we have been told.  Overall, these results indicate that the nutritional quality of household purchases responds very little, if at all, to changes in retail environments. This suggests that policies which either encourage the entry of new stores offering healthy foods or encourage existing retailers to offer more healthful products will do little on their own to resolve socioeconomic disparities in nutritional consumption.

 

 

      I personally have found the food deserts argument dubious and think the problem stems from poor eating habits formed at home, and not addressed in school. Certainly the prevalence of cheap sugar and our method of food production is an issue; however the wide blame placed on food deserts, almost entirely by liberal, is even possibly wrong.