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: Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News

It’s incredibly ironic that at a time when communication to the larger world has never been more accessible, peoples’ exposure to it can actually be shrinking.  This doesn’t mean that people are unaware of things happening across the county or even across the globe.  Thanks to social media platforms such as the ubiquitous Facebook, people are able to snoop into the lives of people whom they would normally never hear from…and that includes relatives, from all over the world.

Now, you can be Facebook pals with any ‘celebrity’ who willingly leaves the door open for the public to ogle their lives.   This satisfies both the voyeur and exhibitionist elements of society.  Facebook has evolved from being a bulletin board of peoples’ actual activities, (essentially a year round Christmas letter), to one where people post cute cat and dog videos.  From this banal stage, Facebook is now moving to a more ambitious, possibly sinister stage, that of news dissemination.

Those of you who post or frequent Facebook regularly may have noticed the proliferation of ads and infomercials interspersed among the cat videos.  That is to be expected, since monetization of eyeballs is the raison d’etre of the company.  What is more subtle are the “trending” news stories that appear throughout the site which are then ‘liked’ and forwarded by your social network.  Since you are more likely to click on the referrals of your pals than to randomly read a story, the newsworthiness of the article gains exposure and by implication, veracity.

This is nothing different from the way that humans have long communicated: the tried and proven technique of gossip.  It’s the modern day equivalent of  “I heard from a reliable source that…”  This gets passed on throughout the community and the story becomes fact without regard to the validity of the story. Next thing you know, the neighbor is part of the JFK cover-up.

The problem is, as the linked story illustrates, the original sources of the story may have questionable facts and indeed may be promulgating a particular worldview.   If a story emerges about the plight of missing penguins caused by evil global warming (and especially if accompanied by doe eyed pictures of the little critters) is “liked” by Pamela Anderson, then every girl on that social net will ‘like’ and pass on that story on their sites and voila, global warming kills cute animals.  For some reason, they never use spiders or snakes.

It’s always good to be skeptical of the news stories foisted upon the public by the major commercial news outlets, but Facebook’s tack is much more powerful, because it creates a mechanism for people to get information from trusted sources, namely their friends, which may carry more weight than if they had read it from oh, let’s say, the unimpeachable Huffington Post.  People may appear to be more informed about things; until you find out that they are really just Facebook bots.  Deluding people with make believe friends is harmless: deluding them with make believe realities is not to like.