Wednesday, February 05, 2014

"Nailed It."





 ""The anecdotes and testimonials of people who've embraced some form of low-carb dieting and experienced dramatic improvements in health and weight are legion.

 BUT....there also exist a wide number of similarly dramatic turnarounds from people who also embrace diets from the opposite end of the carnivore - herbivore spectrum of conflicting dietary paradigms. I know of folks who experienced some life and death diagnosis like cancer, who then embraced a raw food, vegan diet and find themselves in miraculous remission, improved health and weight loss. 

According to the more dogmatic of the ketogenic-embracing factions, this simply does not compute. What's the one thing the carnivorous ketogenic low carbers and raw food vegans have in common when they embrace these so-called fad diets and experience near-miracle changes in health? I've recently come to the conclusion that it really does come down to two rather simple concepts: cellular inflammation and the health of your gut bacteria.

In either case of the extreme dietary interventionist, they stop eating the largest source of inflammation-promoting foods: foods made from grain flours that compromise gut permeability and prevent absorption of critical nutrients, foods sweetened excessively with various forms of sugars, and the inflammatory lipids of Big Agriculture: Round-up Ready Soybean "vegetable oil," partially hydrogenated Round-up ready Soybean oil, rancid Rapeseed oil (aka "Canola"), cotton seed oil, sunflower seed and corn oil.

And yet, on both ends of the spectrum, if you read enough anecdotes and observe people long enough, the one thing you see on either end, is that long term, once the stored fats are used up for energy and bodily functions, other health problems can develop if they rigidly adhere to the extreme interventionist diet (everyone's situation and baseline health, as well as other lifestyle factors undoubtedly play a role.) For the ketogenic, zero and very-low carbers, some have reported experiencing insomnia and adrenal fatigue; while for the long term, raw food vegan, the lack of protein and essential fatty acids as well as deficiencies in micro nutrients that are mostly found only in animal foods lead to health problems of their own."




"I can describe no better example of this than a recent hearing by President Obama’s selection of three candidates as ambassadors to China, Hungary and Norway, a country where I served at the U.S. Embassy during the late 1980s. (The Washington Post, Federal Page, Jan. 31, 2014.) Starting with retiring Sen. Max Baucus, the candidate for U.S. Ambassador to China, who began with answering his first question with the response, “I’m no real expert on China,” the mood was set. Colleen Bell, a Hollywood producer who “bundled” $800,000 to the Obama campaign, was clueless about our strategic objectives in Hungary, and George Tsunis, a CEO of  a hotel chain, who “bundled 1.3 million to the Obama campaign in 2012, responded to his questions in a way, described by the Norwegian news outlet, NRK, as “faltering, incoherent and displayed a “total ignorance” of the country.” Does this matter?

I spent nearly 30 years in six embassies in Latin America and Europe, and during that time no ambassador designate, from the career service to political appointees, ever showed up as totally unprepared before the Senate Committee as these three. These candidates are there for their own personal reasons, mainly a pay back to Baucus, and prestige for their C.V.s for the others, but it is hard to believe that they are equipped to carry out their assignments and do what is in the best interests of the U.S."





 "When critics (like me) warn about the dangers of police militarization, this is what we’re talking about. You’ll see the raid team, dressed in battle-dress uniforms, helmets and face-covering balaclava hoods take down the family’s door with a battering ram. You’ll see them storm the home with ballistics shields, guns at the ready. More troubling still, you’ll see not one but two officers attempt to prevent the family from having an independent record of the raid, one by destroying a surveillance camera, another by blocking another camera’s lens.

From the images in the video, you’d think they were looking for an escaped murderer or a house full of hit men. No, none of that. They were looking for a few people suspected of credit card fraud. None of the people they were looking for were inside of the house, nor was any of the stolen property they were looking for. "








"New leaked slides show how the Drug Enforcement Administration uses national security information to launch drug investigations, then hides the origin of the information from judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys. Within the agency, the process is known as “parallel construction,” a wonderfully bureaucratic euphemism for lying. You didn’t really think this information would be limited to terrorist investigations, did you?"

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