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: Trump wants to dump the Paris climate deal, but 71 percent of Americans support it, survey finds – The Washington Post

One of the unforeseen benefits of the last election is the enormous favor conferred upon people by the outing of most of the popular media outlets. The already stretched credibility of the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, among others, visibly snapped as their blatantly partisan reportage blew up in their faces like a prank cigar.

The great favor to which I refer is the time that will be saved by the public totally ignoring any articles with their bylines.  When you visit the most popular news aggregator, Google News, the majority of the linked articles are from the above mentioned sources. Once you bypass all of the detritus, spurious spin and manufactured hysteria concocted by these media outlets, taking in the day’s real news should only take 5 minutes.

Now that the initial shell shock of the loss by their favored candidate has subsided, their focus is now on the devastating effect that an incoming Voldemort administration will have on a naïve public.  Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

The surprising shock (to them) of  electoral defeat is mainly attributed to favorable polls, which up until decision day, were convincingly pointing to a Clinton victory.  You can imagine the outraged customers of the pollsters demanding refunds as if they were at Macy’s on the day after Christmas.

Pollsters haven’t had a good time of it over the past while, with the failure to predict the Brexit vote another recent yuuge failure.  Legitimate sampling is an effective statistical analysis tool and properly employed is the basis for many decisions in all industries.  In the case of recent political polling, I suspect that samples were taken from homogenous groups which were likely skewed towards a given response.   I also suspect that the same people were tired of the same pollsters asking the same questions.  After the 10th time, none of your damn business would be the box ticked.

It’s amusing then that in the linked story, a survey of 2000 people, from Chicago, was offered as proof that Americans ‘favored’ the Paris climate deal even as Trump was skeptical of it.

Chicago.  To ask a question of that type to that pool of respondents is like asking frat boys on their opinion of bikinis vs burkas.  The article is essentially worthless.  But rather than having to read the entire story, people can make more efficient use of their time by noticing the source of the story, which in this case is, surprise, The Washington Post.  As noted earlier, they can simply ignore the story and go directly to the football scores.