As IF Times

Source: Saturated fat is GOOD for you despite diabetes, cancer, and heart risk warnings | Health | Life & Style | Daily Express

Gee I hope this isn’t fake news. It does seem too good to be true. Imagine that we can safely eat foods that taste good and historically enjoyed by generations of people without annoyance by finger wagging food nannies.  Cheese, butter, marbled steaks, wine: bring it on!

As anyone who’s lived long enough will know, almost every food or food group has at one time or another been tagged as risky for consumption.  Yet over time, subsquent research overturns those views and then, once shunned foods come back to favor again.  This includes coffee, eggs, red meats including bacon, dairy and certain sweet confections.  For some reason, foods that resemble kibble have always been blessed as desirable by the food nannies.  Consequently, nuts, oats, seeds, root vegetables, seaweed and dandelion greens acquired favored food status.  If people paid attention, they would notice that these are things that wild animals eat….principally because they haven’t evolved to cook eggs, meats, dairy and make coffee.

Oddly, you never find heaping helpings of granola and kibble at high level political meetings of State Poobahs.  Those menus usually feature expensive cuts of meat, rare cheeses, decadent desserts and choice bottles of wines.  Oh the sacrifices those people make for their minions!

Humans can exhibit much of the behavior famously shown by lemmings.  While only one in a crowd can influence that crowd, once that crowd gets a head of steam going, it takes a lot to move them the other way, even to the threat of their own existence.  We saw this in the most recent US presidential election for example as the left continued to pursue directions that were non-sensical and suicidal.  We see this in the ongoing cult of global warming believers.  Many may recall that it was only a couple of generations ago that an earth-wide cooling phase was threatening man’s continued existence.  Remember overpopulation? How about the once prevailing wisdom of bleeding people as the accepted way to treat malaise?

The gullibility of people was perhaps best exemplified in the late 1930’s when Orson Welles’s famous radio broadcast of War of The Worlds created mass panic among the listening population.  The parallels to today’s Global warming narrative is eerie.  Except that the fiction is fueled by much more reach, more money and many more influential people.  The first clue that the premise is iffy is that it’s being championed by lawyers and entertainers.  At least in Welle’s case, there was a strong disclaimer of fiction at the outset of his broadcast.

So as far as the change of heart on what constitutes ‘healthy’ food intake is concerned, I hope it’s all true, but who knows. What I do know is that it’s better to eat good food and live a decent life than to eat granola and still have the possibility of dying early. If you only go around once, eat what you want and enjoy it.  Who wants to be 113 anyway?

Source: Why Stephen Hawking is Right to Urge Caution Before Contacting Alien Civilizations

Someone’s been watching too many movies from the ’50’s; reading too much science fiction or just plain removed from reality.

Imagine the scenario of an Alien civilization coming into contact with Earth and invoking that famous line, “take me to your leader!”.  Who would that be? What if the craft landed in Arghistan and the spokesman for the planet wound up being the local head yak herder?  What if they landed in the deep Amazon jungle and their odd appearance and strange language caused them to be ushered into a large soup pot?  What if they landed on Chicago’s south side and after being shot, led to the crib of a Snoop Dog gangsta twin?

All of these are less scary than if the Aliens were to land at UN headquarters and exposed to that body of idiots.  Is it really in the realm of possibility that someone, some body of people would speak on behalf of all Earthlings?  You can’t even get people to agree on how weather happens.

There are likely 2 scenarios under which an Alien lifeforce would make contact with our planet.  One scenario would be under the general realm of discovery.  They figured out how to get here and they’re curious to have a look.  We’d be a curiosity to them as an ant farm would be to a 9 year old.  Another possibility is that they have some reason to exploit whatever resources we may have.  In that case, the human population are just nuisances like noseeums at a beach.

Either way, the advice of anyone as to how to deal with this is as useful as an inflatable dart board.  Yet, someone has funded some society named Breakthrough Message, that wants to design a message to be transmitted to the galaxies in order to contact Alien civilizations.  The program pledges to: not transmit any message until there has been a global debate at high levels of science and politics on the risks and rewards of contacting advanced civilizations.  I wonder if Christopher Columbus was given similar guidelines when Queen Isabella sent him off.

It’s laughable that this policy statement includes high levels of politics as a requisite for contact.  To imagine that there would ever be a spokesman for the planet is science fiction.  To require that such a person would be chosen with political consideration is outright fantasy.