Low Fat is Out -- Government Study

In the largest study ever conducted into the efficacy of low-fat
dieting the result is finally out. No difference. As Gina Kolata writes in The New York Times:

The largest study ever to ask whether a low-fat diet reduces the risk of getting cancer or heart disease has found that the diet has no effect.

The Washington Post agrees.

Low-fat diets do not protect women against heart attacks, strokes, breast cancer or colon cancer, a major study has found, contradicting what had once been promoted as one of the cornerstones of a healthy lifestyle.

OK. So now what? Do we shut down the whole government enterprise that advises us about our eating? Do we stop the legal assault on fast food?
The biggest question of all is, do women now obsess about something else? For over a generation we have encouraged women to think that they can control their weight (i.e., attractiveness) by fiddling with the foods that they eat. Now we learn that the big deal, the low-fat diet, does not have any effect on health. Not really. Not so it would make a significant difference to a woman’s life.

In fact, the likelihood is that low-fat dieting actually has a negative effect on a woman’s life and her family’s life.

Women obsess about health issues for a very good reason. Health is related to survival and women are interested in anything that improves survival for their loved ones. That is why, if you listen to the conversation of two women friends out for a walk, the chances are that they are talking about health issues.

But if women have been putting energy into low-fat dieting and low-fat dieting has no effect on health then they have been wasting their energy. They have been doing the familial equivalent of leaf raking.

The New York Times is not yet ready to throw in the towel on dieting.

The results, the study investigators agreed, do not justify recommending low-fat diets to the public to reduce their heart disease and cancer risk. Given the lack of benefit found in the study, many medical researchers said that the best dietary advice, for now, was to follow federal guidelines for healthy eating, with less saturated and trans fats, more grains, and more fruits and vegetables.

And the editorialists at the Times agree:

Meanwhile, experts in nutrition and chronic diseases have moved on to a new consensus: it is not the total fat but the kind of fat you eat that is important. Many groups recommend that people cut their intake of "bad" fats, like saturated fats and trans fats, and increase their intake of "good" fats, like those found in vegetable and fish oils.

But before we give such unsubstantiated advice, and encourage women to put enormous energy into feeding their families “less saturated and trans fats, more grains, and more fruits and vegetables,” shouldn’t we do a study?

Could it be that food is food and that, if we just relax and enjoy it, we’ll live just as long as the obsessive dieter next door? As the Times says, by the time any long-term study on “good” and “bad” fats gets done, the “nutrition experts might have moved on to yet another approach.”

Go Ahead Democrats. Insult the President Why Don't You

Here’s how the Washington Post covered the insults to President Bush at the Coretta Scott King funeral.

At one point, the Rev. Joseph E. Lowery, a former head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the group Martin Luther King Jr. helped found, made a reference to not finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The well-heeled, mostly black crowd erupted in a standing ovation.

But at the conservative Washington Times things looked a little different. Of President Carter, not mentioned in the Washington Post article, reporter Joseph Curl wrote:

Halfway through the service, former President Jimmy Carter scolded Mr. Bush for his terror-surveillance program... Mr. Carter later said Hurricane Katrina was a clear sign that racism is still alive in America. Several black leaders have blamed the president for what they consider an insufficient federal response.

And about Joseph Lowery, he wrote:

The Rev. Joseph Lowery, co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and an outspoken civil rights leader, during his speech about Mrs. King ripped into Mr. Bush... “We know now that there were no weapons of mass destruction over there... [T]here are weapons of misdirection right down here.”

Real nice, isn’t it, to insult the President of the United States right to his face.

And you wonder: Did the Washington Post’s light touch on the insults issue from embarrassment over the graceless behavior of Democratic speakers, or did they not even notice the outrage?

This sort of behavior puts the lie to the gospel of political correctness, the doctrine that we should not use speech that hurts, that we should be sanctioned for using “hate speech.”

If we didn’t already know, we ought to know by now. It’s all a political ploy, a trick to deny conservatives their constitutional right to speech. It is all about licensing left-wing speech, however racist, however sexist, however it plays the class warfare card.

What Democrats don’t seem to understand, living as they do in their liberal bubble, is just how clear a message this sort of thing sends to people who aren’t fully committed liberal blue-state Democrats.

The first rule of politics is: Don’t make unnecessary enemies. Especially don’t make enemies of decent middle-class Americans.

Global Cooling on the Way

Russian scientist Khabibullo Abdusamatov says forget about global warming. He predicts global cooling by the middle of the 21st century.

Khabibullo Abdusamatov of the Pulkovo Astronomic Observatory said temperatures would begin falling six or seven years from now, when global warming caused by increased solar activity in the 20th century reached its peak, and that the coldest period would occur 15-20 years after a major solar output decline in 2035-2045.

Yes, I know. You young pups who have been raised on global warming scares feel like you just took a blow to the solar plexus.

But before the global warming fad it was generally accepted that the “Little Ice Age” at the middle of the last millennium may have had something to do with very low sunspot activity.

Abdusamatov said dramatic changes in the earth’s surface temperatures were an ordinary phenomenon, not an anomaly, and resulted from variations in the Sun’s energy output and ultraviolet radiation.


The Northern Hemisphere’s most recent cool-down period of 1645-1705, known as the Little Ice Age, left canals in Holland frozen solid and forced people in Greenland to abandon their houses to glaciers, the scientist said.

The mid-millennium decline in sunspot activity was called the Maunder Minimum. Of course, up until recently we had no way of reliably measuring fluctuations in “insolation,” the solar energy reaching the earth. But now we do, and scientists generally accept that the sun emits more radiation when it has a lot of sunspots and emits less radiation when it has few sunspots.

But what about the “hockey stick,” the graph in the UN’s report on global warming that shows surface temperatures pretty well flat during the last millennium up until the sudden increase in temperatures starting in 1850?

I’m glad you asked that. The hockey stick assumption seems odd, considering that in Britain, for instance, it was warm enough in the year 1000 to grow grapes, yet by the seventeenth century the River Thames regularly froze over in winter. How could global temperatures have been flat when reports so clearly indicate significant fluctuation? For a discussion of problems with the hockey stick graph, disussed here.

Maybe there is nothing to it. Maybe there won’t be any global cooling, and we can keep religiously worrying about global warming and spending big research bucks to study it. After all, the Russians would naturally prefer continued global warming to reduce the chill of those notorious Siberian winters. Maybe their forecast of global cooling is just wishful thinking.

Ask a Tough Question of a Senator...

As we all know, it is the objective news journalists who ask the tough questions. We know that because the journalists keep telling us that the whole point of the First Amendment and the special position given to the press is to allow them to ask the tough questions that others may not have the courage to put to powerful politicians and officeholders.

So when blogger Paul Mirengoff asked Senator Dick Durbin a searching question about the constitutionality of the president’s electronics surveillance operations the Senator responded with... a question about who Mirengoff represented. Oh really. Now that tells us a lot about the media business. Ask a politician a tough question and he asks: Who is your boss?

But here is the “dog that didn’t bark” moment, from Mark Tapscott, quoting an unnamed “veteran Senate GOP staffer:”

"The mainstream news media that covers Congress is tightly controlled by the House and Senate press galleries and they would never be so aggressive in pressing a Member of Congress. So this was big, it was unprecedented to have a blogger asking such questions. We need more bloggers up here asking questions because they aren’t controlled by the galleries."

Oh really. Do you mean to say, as veteran CBS 60 Minutes talent Mike Wallace used to say, that our tough questioning MSM reporters really aren’t? Never have been? Never will be?

So what’s the point? What’s the point of the First Amendment? What’s the point of these sacred “shield” laws to protect journalists from retribution?

We always wondered why the MSM is so gentle with the Democrats. Apparently it is not just that they are all liberals together. There is an unseen doggie leash restraining the reporters, the doggie leash held by their own colleagues in the press gallery, the ones that control the press credentials, the essential access to Congress.

If you want corroboration about the power of the press gallery and its credentialing of reporters to the US Congress, you could start with Joseph Farah’s fight to get WorldNetDaily.com accredited to report on our public servants on Capitol Hill.

Don't Be Victims, Muslims!

It is dispiriting to see how weak-kneed the liberals are about the Muslim rioting. Let a Christian conservative complain about the anti-Christian work of a gay artist and the 16-inch editorial guns of the MSM thunder with booming retorts. But apparently it is different when Muslims riot in the streets about blasphemy againt the prophet.

Instapundit Glenn Reynolds has a telling post from a Muslim emailer:

Coming from an all Muslim family, I’m forced to listen to the sense of perceived injustice of Muslims concerning the depiction of their revered prophet. It’s quite sickening.


I tell my family that that’s just how things work in a free society: while I don’t agree that the newspaper should have done something so culturally insensitive, they do have the right to do that, and attempting to make Danish society pay as a whole for it is utterly ridiculous.


It doesn’t matter, I’m told. It literally means nothing to them, because in their world, everything should revolve around them and their culture, and God made the world for Muslim Arabs to control.

Muslims need to understand that liberal “multiculturalism” in the west was designed by the left as a weapon with which to beat the bourgeoisie. But it has done nothing for its liberal clients, the “traditionally oppressed and marginalized,” except confirm them in a self-destructive culture of victimhood. You can see them everywhere in the cities of the welfare state, the impulsive, self-destructive underclass.

To make it in the global economy and global culture you need to offer yourself and your culture to the world in a spirit of humility and sacrifice. Demonstrating and posturing in rage and impotence will get you nowhere. That is what every group and every individual has to learn as they come to the city.

In the old tribal world, the people in the next village are your enemy. In the new global world everyone is your partner, perhaps your customer or your supplier.

That’s a very hard lesson to learn. And it looks like many Muslims are finding it impossible to get started.

Why The Economy is Doing Better Than You Think

Wonder why the US dollar manages to defy gravity with the twin deficits, the federal budget deficit and the merchandises trade deficit?

Maybe it’s because we aren’t counting our gross domestic product properly, according to staid Business Week.

Everyone knows the U.S. is well down the road to becoming a knowledge economy, one driven by ideas and innovation. What you may not realize is that the government’s decades-old system of number collection and crunching captures investments in equipment, buildings, and software, but for the most part misses the growing portion of GDP that is generating the cool, game-changing ideas. "As we’ve become a more knowledge-based economy," says University of Maryland economist Charles R. Hulten, "our statistics have not shifted to capture the effects."

The numbers used to generate GDP statistics were developed in the 1930s, and don’t really count many of today’s wealth building activities. For instance, your iPod reads “Designed by Apple in California Assembled in China.” So how do we count the value of the iPod?

Or look at Intel as it cranks up a fabrication plant in Israel. Intel doesn’t just build a new plant and hire a bunch of people.

To get its new plants running quickly, the chipmaker brings 800 or 900 employees from the new fab to spend a minimum of six months in Hillsboro, Ore., where Intel develops new production processes. By the time they return home, these people will have picked up not just the details of the process but also tribal knowledge -- the unwritten lore of how Intel works. With that info in their heads, they’re equipped to get the new factory up and running at high volume within a quarter, rather than taking a year or more. In economics speak, this is a classic transfer of human capital. So why isn’t it called an export?

Imagine this sort of thing happening all over the economy. Now you begin to understand why people are flocking to the United States from all over the world, why house prices are out of sight, and why investment money is pouring into US securities markets.

And don’t forget lowly Wal-Mart. It’s workers are the most productive retail workers in the world.

Go on, read the whole thing.

Ready for Polyamory Yet?

Same sex marriage, polygamy, polyamory. What are the liberals up to? For some time Stanley Kurtz has been following the movement to break up the traditional heterosexual monogamous marriage. In his latest article he focuses on a feminist activist law professor in Canada who is leading the fight to abolish marriage and replace it with

a modern, secular, “non-patriarchal” relationship system that would allow for marriage-like unions in any combination of number or gender.

The way that activists like Martha Bailey, Queens University law professor, propose to get to their non-patriarchal unions is by dismantling the exclusivity and privileged position of heterosexual monogamous marriage by advocating same-sex marriage and polyamorous relationships.

Well, you can read all about it in Kurtz’s article, but let us think about what these activists are missing.

Suppose they are wrong in supposing that monogamous marriage is “patriarchal,” that is, oppressive to women. The argument of conservative writers on marriage like George Gilder in his Men and Marriage is that the opposite is true. Far from oppressing women, monogamous marriage is a profoundly democratic institution that binds men to the mothers of their children and civilizes them out of the gang and into productive work. It is, of course, women that civilize these men, and the work of civilization is a hard and “oppressive” job. But without monogamous marriage, Gilder argues, boys mature into aggressive predators that do little work and prey on the flocks of single women that are created by the collapse of marriage.

The advocates of non-heterosexual marriage are high-status women who see a vision of a more relaxed, more creative world where people are free to pursue their personal vision of sexual relationship and experience. But suppose that the relaxed, creative world is instead a hell on earth? It is not as if we don’t have clear indications that it will, with the growth of violent underclasses throughout the western world where traditional marriage has broken down under the warped financial incentives of the welfare state.

And then there are the children. Children seem to want a mother and a father—their mother and their father—and they get pretty angry when they don’t get them.

And when women have less sexual security they have less children. We are finding out in the aftermath of the sexual revolution that the twenty years of female fecundity is not all that long. When a woman takes a couple of detours through graduate school or a live-in relationship or a failed marriage she ends up having less children than she might have instinctively preferred. When she gets to the other side of 50 she regrets that she didn’t have those children. But then it is too late.

It is easy to get angry with the same-sex marriage movement, their mendacity and the blindness of their cloying elitism. But things are really more serious than that. As we will shortly find out.