Monthly Archives: July 2015

Pao Goes Poof

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The conniving adventuress and grifter Ellen Pao has been sacked.

Reddit interim CEO Ellen Pao resigned today after facing an all-out revolt on the site in the wake of the firing of a popular employee. Steve Huffman, Reddit’s original CEO and co-founder of the site a decade ago, is taking over the job, effective immediately.

“Ellen Pao resigned from Reddit today by mutual agreement,” Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian wrote in a post on the site. He said Pao would remain an advisor to Reddit’s board through the end of the year. “She brought a face to Reddit that changed perceptions, and is a pioneer for women in the tech industry.”

I get why companies say nice things about the dirtball they just canned. There’s nothing to be gained by trashing the fired person and there’s no need to risk a lawsuit. Ellen Pao does have a habit of suing employers so it is best to leave sleeping dogs lie, I guess.

In this case, the tongue in cheek praise is probably better than speaking truthfully. They hired the dumb twat because she has a vagina and is Asian. That’s the new face they reference. She was laughably horrible at her job, thus changing the perception that Asians are hard working and smart.

On Monday, Pao took to Reddit to apologize for the incident, as well as years of mismanagement and poor communication between the company and the band of unpaid volunteer moderators who keep the site going.

As of Tuesday, a public petition on social justice platform Change.org demanding Pao’s resignation had garnered close to 200,000 signatures.

One of the unexpected consequences of social media is it fools people in leadership positions into thinking what is trendy with a handful of weirdos is a broad social movement. America is a country of 320 million. You can get 200,000 people to agree to drink Drano if just ask. But, 200,000 is a big number so it makes a big impact on the minds of people running a company like Reddit.

Of course, most of these social media protestors are robots and sock puppets. A deranged idiot with 85 twitter accounts spending all day messaging people looks like a mass movement. The crackpots harassing Rush Limbaugh last year turned out to be seven mental patients with thousands of e-mail accounts. Social media is a megaphone for maniacs.

As is always the case with the Cult, they turned Pao into a hero, not because they gave a crap about Pao, but because she was a convenient club to use in their fight against normal white people. Now that she is a two-time loser, I suspect she falls down the memory hole and goes back to selling knock-off handbags on-line.

 

Collapse of the Middle

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Every society is focused on four things: Security, Prosperity, Culture and Trust. Security is both external and internal. A primary duty of every society is to make sure it is defended from outsiders, but also from deviant insiders. Those who work against the internal order are just as much of a threat as the invader. It’s why traitors have always been held up for the worst punishments. They threaten the very existence of the society.

Prosperity is another focus of human society since settlement. Technology, after all, is all about increasing prosperity, which is why so much of our efforts are involved in advancing technology. Every society has its own take on what it considers prosperity, but the main reason for human society is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It is a part of our group evolutionary strategy. It is expressed differently across groups, but it is as much a part of humanity as left handedness.

Despite what the lunatics in charge claim, preservation and advancement of the culture is a priority of every society. Culture, after all, is just the rolled up preferences of the individuals in society, handed down from generation to generation. It is a collective identity. It is also how essential knowledge is passed from one generation to the next. A few hours reading the Bible teaches more about humanity than four years in a college.

These three distinct priorities are strung together with trust. Clannish societies will place a premium on culture and security, forgoing prosperity in order to maintain the clan. Altruistic societies will focus resources on prosperity as their cultures are dynamic and adaptive. Swedes spend much more time worrying about prosperity than defending Swedish culture, while Arabs invest all their time in culture and live in squalor.

That very broad outline is a useful way to view politics in western societies. The three main priorities shift up and down in the public’s hierarchy of importance. In times of plenty, the pubic will reward leaders promising to keep the party going. Alternatively, at the end of an up cycle, doubts about the impact on public morality may reward candidates that speak authoritatively to cultural traditions.

This is clear in the recent American elections. Barak Obama won in 2008 largely due to the other side getting blamed for the financial collapse and the bungling of the Muslim problem. Prosperity and security. In 2012, however, the public was uneasy about the deranged assault on the culture by Obama and went looking for an alternative. While Romney said all the right things on the culture, no one believed him. Trust is the shadow that hangs over everything.

Shifting over to Greece, we saw promises of prosperity trump all else in the rush to join Europe and the single currency. The public put aside cultural concerns, expecting the trade-offs to be economically beneficial and they were initially. When things went sour, the public switched from one main party to the next and then finally a coalition of main parties, all in an attempt to restore prosperity. When that failed, the middle collapsed and the fringe parties moved to the center.

Syriza, for all its blather about socialism and Marxism, is a populist party making a cultural appeal to patriotic Greeks. They have no plan for solving the debt crisis. There is no solution. What they have is a cultural appeal, which folds in neatly to an appeal to security. Greeks think Syriza is best to guard the culture and keep Greece safe from the financial vultures. Most of all, Syrza is trusted. They are what they say they are and that means a lot.

In the rest of Europe, security and prosperity trumped all else for forty years after World War II. Our betters like to say this was due to people recalling the horrors of fascism, but that’s not true. Fear of Soviet aggression (and nukes) was the top security concern. It trumped all else. Economic integration was, in part, a component of the security issues. It was only after the wall came down that economics become the top priority.

Ignoring the culture has worked in Europe for a long time, but that time is quickly passing as people begin to realize that Greeks are not Fins and Spaniards are not Brits. Just because everyone uses the same money and flies the same flag does not mean they are the same. Those differences will be expressed through culture, which inevitably shapes economics and politics.

In America culture is always in the discussion due to the Cult making war on traditional America, but it is a one-way discussion. The Progressives form up and start to pull down some important cultural institution and the Right tries to stop them. The only thing keeping the Right in business is as a fire department, called into to try and save what’s left of America. There’s not a lot left these days.

Of course, good times economically and no fear of invasion make sacking the culture possible. Cultural Marxism is a luxury good affordable in rich societies with loads of free time. China and Indian have made great strides economically, but they are still too poor to indulge in ethnomasochism. Like throwing away food, only rich societies in the West can afford to throw away their patrimony.

At least for now. Europe is seeing a collapse of its political middle as the cultural vacuum underneath the political parties grows. Across the Continent, mainstream parties treat their citizens as enemies, standing aside as invaders from the south flood into Europe. They heap private debts onto public balance sheet all in the name of a prosperity that is just over the next hill.

In the US, one party is racing toward a weird techno-fascism while the other party pads along behind them like a slow-witted little brother. Issues of paramount concern to the public are ignored in favor of the ridiculous and absurd.The full force of the state is brought to bear on behalf of homosexuals playing house, while no one can be bothered to halt the invasion from the south. For close to half the country, the political parties have nothing to offer, other than the satisfaction of voting against one of them.

It’s why Donald Trump is getting so much attention. Outsiders have always popped up in party primaries only to fade from the scene. Usually they have a novel idea or represent a narrow constituency. Trump would have been laughed off if he had not had the good sense to say what the public is thinking about taboos subjects like immigration. He’s an American Beppe Grillo.

The other side is not immune. American progressives may have been motivated by a hatred of core Americans, but they always thought of themselves as the righteous defenders of fairness and morality. Bernie Sanders is having success pointing out that the modern Progressive movement has more in common with Italian fascism than old school liberalism.  He does not say it that way, but he is tapping into the growing doubts on the Left over the direction of their movement.

At the start of this long-winded post I said that trust is what strings the three key social categories together. The people will naturally trust leaders with whom that naturally identify. It’s why colonialism ultimately failed. The foreign rulers may have done a better job bring peaces and prosperity, but they could never be trusted because they were foreign. People will take one their own, even if he is a screw up, over a foreigner, even if he is brilliant.

In the West, the ruling elite no longer identifies with their host countries. They see themselves as having evolved beyond national identity. Their actions over the last few decades has made them foreigners to the people over whom they seek to rule. When times are good and the world is at peace, people can overlook the culture gap. When peace and prosperity fade, that gap becomes a maw, collapsing the center.

Then They Came For The Trolls

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Way back in the olden thymes when everyone thought buffalo was food, not a crappy sports town, men hunted the mammoth and said horrible things to one another on dial-up bulletin boards. This was not only before the iPhone (Gasp!), but before Windows, when computing required more than a third grade education. In those days, arguments were settled by using outlandish insults.

I wish I had a nickel for every time I told some douche-bag to chug down a frothy glass of Drano. The acronym DIAF was created because it was so commonly used. If someone really pissed you off, you would tell them to go home, shoot their family and then shoot themselves, in order to clean up the gene pool. Now, you can go to jail in New Zealand for that sort of thing.

Internet trolls face up to two years’ jail in New Zealand under a controversial new law which bans “harmful digital communications”.

And under a parallel amendment to New Zealand’s Crimes Act, a person who tells another to kill themselves faces up to three years in prison.

The law will help mitigate the harm caused by cyber-bulling and give victims a quick and effective means of redress, supporters said.

But critics said the law harms free speech and its fine print could threaten public interest journalism in the country.

Under the Harmful Digital Communications Act in effect from this week, anyone convicted of “causing harm by posting digital communication” faces two years in prison and a $50,000 (NZ) (£6,500) fine, while businesses face fines of up to $200,000 (NZ).

Harmful communications can include truthful as well as false information, and “intimate visual recordings” such as nude or seminude pictures or video shared without permission.

One of the consequences of being ruled by stupid people is they get pretty much everything wrong. The term “troll” does not mean a supernatural beings that dwell in isolated rocks, mountains and caves. It means people who posted things to get attention, as in “trolling for attention.”

Putting that aside, this is insane and the people who came up with it should die in a fire. Imagine the court hearing for some one accused of being a troll. It’s the sort of thing you would expect to see in the day room of the asylum. You get sent to prison and instantly become the baddest guy on the yard because you told some douche to drink poison.

We’re so doomed.

Weight Training

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I saw this posted on Maggie’s Farm today.

The deadlift may be the simplest and easiest exercise to learn in all of barbell training. You pick up a loaded barbell and set it back down, keeping the bar in contact with your legs the whole way. There are a few subtle complications — the bar should move up and down the legs in a vertical line over the middle of the foot, the bar should start from a position directly over the mid-foot, and you should keep your back flat when you pull. But that’s really about all there is to it. The deadlift is one of the basic movements of which strength training is composed.

Pulling things off the ground is a part of your human heritage, and bending down to pick them up is what your knees and hips are for. With the bar in your hands and your feet against the floor, your whole body is completely involved in the exercise, which means the deadlift makes the whole body strong. It would be very difficult to invent a more natural exercise for the body than picking up a progressively heavier barbell.

In America, a lot of time and energy is spent lecturing people about their weight, their diet and their lack of exercise. Health clubs, it seems to me, largely exist on people who feel guilty about not exercising. Around the holidays they resolve to get in better shape and join a gym. By March they have stopped going.

The thing that has always puzzled me is why weight training is not offered up as the low-cost and sensible way for people to stay in shape. It’s cheap. A decent setup for at home is a few hundred bucks if you’re sensible. For the typical person, an hour, three nights per week, is enough to stay fit, as long as you’re sensible about the diet.

Instead, it is one exotic exercise regime and fad after another. Weight training, in the minds of most people, is for steroidal meathheads with the IQ of a goldfish. At least that’s how it is presented. The truth is most of those meatheads are pretty smart. They’ve spent years learning biochemistry and physiology. The public perception, however, is that weight training is for morons.

Banning Cigarettes

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I remember the first time I noticed the anti-smoking Nazis. It was in Cambridge and I saw a sign not only stating it was a no smoking area, but it was a city ordinance. Lots of businesses at that point were putting up no smoking signs. Restaurants had no smoking sections. It was the first time I had heard of a law against smoking.

My thought at the time was that it was doomed to failure. Only a nut would care so much about smoking to demand the proliferation of these laws. It seemed like the wacko fad you’d find in Cambridge or Boulder, but nowhere else.

A good rule of life is to always remember that the Left is crazier and more committed than you can imagine. There’s always an “11” on their crazy meter. In this case, anti-smoking laws spread like wildfire to the point where some jurisdictions ban smoking in your own home. Now Seattle is banning smoking outside in public areas.

Smoking cigarettes and other tobacco products in Seattle’s parks became illegal on Monday, as the U.S. Pacific Northwest’s largest city joined other American metropolises in restricting puffing in public.

Seattle’s Parks and Recreation officials voted in May to ban smoking in all of its 465 parks. It had previously required smokers to maintain 25-feet minimum distances from other visitors in any publicly accessible park land, the city said.

On Monday, the city, on its website, encouraged park goers to “smell flowers, not smoke.”

The ban follows similar restrictions in more than 1,000 other U.S. cities and communities across the nation, including New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Portland, the city said.

Cities have pursued the ban as the dangers of cigarette smoking became more widely accepted, and because of cigarette butt litter.

“Tobacco use is the leading preventable cause of death and disease both locally and in the United States, so it makes sense to take actions that promote health and healthy environments in our public spaces,” Jeff Duchin, Interim Health Officer for Public Health in Seattle and King County, said in a statement after the May vote.

In Seattle, park rangers and police officers enforce the ban. A verbal warning follows a first offense, followed by a written trespass warning. Repeat offenders are subject to arrest.

Imagine lockup in Seattle.

Thug: What you here for?

Hipster: Smoking, sir!

Of course, this move is due to the fact that smoking is just about gone from American society. Smoking rates are at all-time lows and it is now rare to smell cigarettes in public. Smokers, yielding to constant harassment, go away to smoke. Office buildings now make smokers stand away from the door so you don’t even smell smoke there anymore.

The bigger issue is the rise of vaping. The electronic cigarette has turned out to be the greatest smoking cessation aid ever. I know plenty of people who quit by using one of those things. I see people puffing on those things more than I see smoking. The health effects are trivial and the cost is far less than smoking so I don’t see why anyone would not go this route.

You have to wonder if it is not getting close to the point where it would be a good idea to ban cigarettes entirely. Smoking cigarettes is mostly a habit of the poor so the lunatics can pretend they are doing justice. They can get one last shot at the evil tobacco firms. Enforcement would not be difficult as many retailers are getting out of the cigarette business anyway. The black market would be trivial.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not in favor of it. I was never in favor of banning smoking in public. I spent many a night in a smoky bar either screwing up my courage to talk to the pretty girl or commiserating with the boys about the lack of women. If the bar wants to allow smoking that’s their business. These small decisions must be left to the people. It’s the natural order.

That said, if public health is your goal, banning cigarettes now makes a lot of sense. Unlike narcotics, smoking is not a thing you do on your free time by yourself or with a few addicts in a flophouse. Unlike alcohol, smoking is not a social elixir. Ban cigarettes and most will quit and the rest take up cigars or e-cigarettes.

Thousands Stealing Anything They Can

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The TSA was started by the execrable George Bush in response to the 9/11 terrorist attack. The theory behind hiring low-IQ dimwits to stand around the nation’s airports was that, by sheer numbers, they would root out and expose terror attacks. It is the Infinite Monkey Theorem applied to national security.  So we now have a million monkeys in blue shirts hassling everyone at the airport.

The result has been what you expect when you take people choosing between a life of low-level crime and life on the dole and give them access to private property. They are stealing everything they can carry. Just the other day they robbed the widow of loveable baseball icon Don Zimmer.

The widow of a baseball icon was heartbroken Friday night over a missing jersey that she believes was stolen.

Last month, the Yankees gave Soot Zimmer a jersey in honor of her late husband, Don Zimmer, who served as bench coach for the team for several years.

But the jersey never made it back to Florida with Soot Zimmer, and she thinks a Transportation Security Administration agent stole it from her luggage .

“When it was missing out of the luggage when we got home , it wasn’t the monetary value, it was the sentimental,” she said. “You know, they gave me that to represent Don, and now I didn’t have it.”

Luckily for Soot, her husband’s original jersey is framed in her home.

Every year the TSA settles tens of thousands of cases where employees have stolen property from bags or damaged property trying to steal it. Millions of dollars in claims are settled each year. If the TSA were run by Italians, the Feds would hit them with a RICO charge.

But, this is government and as Reagan said, the closest thing to immortality is a government program. The TSA is a great example of the ratchet effect at work. It will never go away. It will only grow every year. The theft of private good will eventually be viewed as a cost of travel. After the next terror attack, a new department will be created on top of the TSA and it will grow like a fungus too.

At some point, the whole thing grinds to a halt.

Death by Peonage

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The greatest threat to the people in charge has always been the property holder. Before human settlement, the strongest or oldest were the tribal leaders. Once humans began to settle into an agricultural life, it got a lot harder to boss people around. In the tribal days, exile was the way to keep people in line. If the tribe got too big, then they just split into two tribes so the malcontents could go off on their own, thus preserving the authority of the chief.

Once people started to settle into agricultural life, exile was not so easy. The chief could be angry, but as long as you could feed yourself and your family, you had no reason to leave, and he had only one way to make you leave. That was to take your property. The trouble with that is he had to have hired men willing to kill and that meant the boss had to have a surplus of property to hire them.

It’s not an accident that for most of our time as settled creatures controlling the land was of paramount importance to the rulers. The Romans, upon the defeat of Carthage and Corinth, used the proceeds to throw the small farmers off their land, by use of slave labor. In short order Rome went from a Republic of free men to an empire run by powerful land holders.

In medieval times, feudalism put control of land in the hands of the crown and by extension, the nobles, who held these lands in exchange for service to the crown. In turn, vassals and peasants worked the land for the nobles. It was not until the rise of global trade that one could challenge the power of the king without taking his lands.

Trade created capital that was mobile and therefore hard to steal. Stealing a man’s land is just a matter of killing his soldiers and forcing him off the land. When a man’s wealth is distributed all over and is highly portable, stealing his capital is not so easy. This required more complex schemes and more complex defenses.

The other day in my Greek post I pointed out that sovereign debt is mostly a way to rob the property holders of countries. No one really thinks about it like that as the people in charge prefer, we think of it in other ways. They like to talk about government investment in the safety net, as if it were a real physical net underneath all of us, magically held up by fairies and magic dust.

That’s the sales pitch. Most sensible people like the folks reading this blog see past it and understand that it is just a way to pay for an ever expanding government. As we’re fond of saying on the Dissident Right, no tree grows to the sky. Eventually the government can borrow no more because no one will lend. That’s not just a Greek problem. The public debt of the West is at level unimaginable just a generation ago.

That’s where the credit currency comes into the mix. By artificially lowering the cost of borrowing, governments are allowed to shift more debt onto their taxpayers. Eventually, the debts must be paid thus creating the transfer of property through the state to friends of the state. Public debt is just organized looting of the middle-class.

This is a little more obvious when we look at it in small scale. That is the assault on small business by the financial sector. When talking about the banksters and their cronies in politics, everyone just assumes they spend their time on complex deals involving leverage, derivatives, and special favors in the tax code.

Much of that is true, but unlimited cheap credit has had another terrible consequence that is a microcosm of what we are seeing with Greece. That is, insiders using zero cost debt to undermine the middle-class business owners. While Warren Buffet uses the tax code to raid mid-sized business, venture capital often uses cheap money to sack small business.

Let me use an example. I have known a local businessman for twenty years. I’m not sure how much of the details of his dealings I am free to reveal so I will be deliberately vague on some points. His business was a family business started by his father and another man in the 50’s. They distributed niche products in the Mid-Atlantic.

My acquaintance was never going to get rich running the business, but it afforded him a nice middle-class life. He was also able to hire a few a key people and pay them well, along with a staff of entry level people. Some of his employees had been in the business since he could walk. In other words, it was a typical middle-class small business.

About ten years ago his suppliers began to consolidate. One after another was bought up by some global player. He went from have a dozen suppliers vying for his business to just three. At the time, he thought it may be better for him as it was much simpler to do business with three suppliers.

Then one supplier bought one of his competitors and made them the exclusive distributor. All of a sudden, a sizable chunk of the market was walled off to him because he could not carry the products certain customers preferred. At this point he knew he was in trouble, but the options were limited. Profits started to get trimmed and he prepared for a reduced lifestyle in order to keep the business running.

Keep in mind that all of the consolidation was made possible by abnormally low interest rates. When money cost ten points, buying a competitor meant having a big chunk of cash in the deal. When money is three points most M&A deals can be done with no cash whatsoever.

A few years ago, some VC boys bought his biggest competitor. They brought in new technology, and they made a deal with one of the big suppliers. Because it was all debt driven, they could drop prices putting even more pressure on the remaining independents. Quickly they went about offering buyouts to the little guys. My acquaintance sold out for what he could get.

This is a common theme in wholesale distribution around the country. The little guys are hoovered up by big players using borrowed money. Is it better for consumers? Maybe, but prices are not dropping so it is not a good deal from that regard. It’s not better for employees as small business hiring has never been lower.

The skillful use of debt has always been the hallmark of shrewd businessmen. That’s not what’s going on here anymore than the use of slaves by wealthy Roman landowners was a skillful use of labor. My acquaintance could not go to his bank and get the same deals as the VC boys raiding his industry. They had special access to cheap money and informational asymmetry let them exploit the tax law in ways the little guy could never match.

I pointed out the other day that it is easy to blame the Greek people and write them off as dead beats. It’s easy to blame the small businessman who goes bust. That way we can pretend it is still an even playing field and everyone is playing by the rules. That’s not what’s happening in America, Greece or anywhere else in the West.

Artificially low borrowing rates are warping reality and blocking the normal signals within society citizens use to make decisions. It’s also rearranging the social order in ways that are incompatible with liberal democracy. My acquaintance who lost his business is no different than the farmer thrown off his land. He loses his stake in the current order and goes from being a citizen to being a subject.

I need to wrap this up as it is already too long, but in another age, men on horseback flying the flag of their lord would raid towns and villages, hauling off what they could. The only recourse of the village was to submit to a lord promising protection. They got to choose their master.

Today, global finance is the tool to break the spine of the middle, making them dependent on the ruling elite. The systematic looting of Western economies through central banks is sucking the life out of the citizens. The Greeks are finally fighting back, but until they start hanging the people responsible, the tide will never turn.

Never Hire a Mentally Disturbed Grifter to Run Your Company

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One of my rules of life is to never put a bitter weirdo in charge of anything. People on the fringes usually have a lot of strange new ideas, but they are just as likely to secretly harbor a lot of deep resentments about the core. Barak Obama is the most obvious example. He was a fringe weirdo growing up in elite private schools and that festered into a deep hatred of typical white people.

A corollary to that rule is to never hire a mentally disturbed grifter to run your company.

Reddit CEO Ellen Pao commented this morning about the firing of Reddit Director of Communications Victoria Taylor, a move that has resulted in a very public revolt from users of the site. Pao wrote that the site is working on better tools for its moderators, but it will be a while before those tools are made available. “The bigger problem is that we haven’t helped our moderators with better support after many years of promising to do so,” Pao wrote in a comment. She said that Reddit has hired new employees to help build these tools, as well as new employees to engage with the community and its moderators. “We are going to figure this out and fix it,” Pao wrote.Since she was hired in 2013, Victoria Taylor has worked on Reddit’s popular “Ask Me Anything” question-and-answer sessions. She served as the main contact for celebrities and other high-profile figures participating in the sessions, helping to transcribe their answers to users’ questions over the phone. In response to her firing, Reddit moderators have effectively shut down many of the site’s most popular sections.

What’s amazing to me is that anyone would hire this woman in the first place. Her resume screams incompetence and she has a history of suing her employers. The only thing she brings to the job is she is Asian and probably lacks a penis. But, inside the Cult, she must have a lot of piety points, despite being laughed out of court a few months back.

I’m not a Reddit user, but I have looked at it from time to time. It strikes me as another Silicon Valley scam where suckers do all the work and some rich people keep all the profits. The Huffington Post is the best example of how the scam works. They relied on bloggers to provide content while Arianna Huffington kept the proceeds.

That works as long as the people running the scam remember to keep the mark happy. Huffington, like the Gabor sisters, has a strange charm that is very effective at keeping the mark happy. Pao is just a stupid twat focused on small time hustles. Putting her in charge of a sophisticated grift like Reddit was never going to work.

Cholesterol Myths

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I saw this linked over at Maggie’s Farm.

Fats were singled out as the major enemy.

Research results published in the mid-1900s indicated that fats in our diets posed a health hazard.

Fats were not just full of calories that made us overweight. There were indications that fats were the main reason why a wave of cardiovascular diseases washed over the industrialised countries of the West starting in the early 20th century.

Research efforts and nutritional advice focused on how dangerous fats were and toward the end of the century a healthy diet consisted low-fat foods – a message heard at the doctor’s office and hyped by all the magazines.

Simultaneously, carbohydrates, including sugar, snuck below the radar, according to Birger Svihus, a professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU).

Why were carbs viewed so long as positive for health?

Svihus thinks he has found the answer in research:

Scientists in the 1970s concluded that the human body could not convert carbohydrates into fat.

That meant you couldn’t become overweight or clog your bloodstream with fats by eating carbohydrates, whether they came from sweets or whole grain bread.

I’m often amazed by how much of the past has been forgotten. It is not just the ancient times or even the medieval times. We cannot remember what happened last week. There’s no great mystery as why the governments got the diet recommendations all wrong and it was not an honest error.

The first thing to know is the Framingham Study. From Wikipedia:

The Framingham Heart Study is a long-term, ongoing cardiovascular study on residents of the town of Framingham, Massachusetts. The study began in 1948 with 5,209 adult subjects from Framingham, and is now on its third generation of participants.[1] Prior to it almost nothing was known about the “epidemiology of hypertensive or arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease”.[2] Much of the now-common knowledge concerning heart disease, such as the effects of diet, exercise, and common medications such as aspirin, is based on this longitudinal study. It is a project of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, in collaboration with (since 1971) Boston University.[1] Various health professionals from the hospitals and universities of Greater Boston staff the project.

Initial finding from that study suggested a link between dietary cholesterol and cardiovascular disease. Thus was born the low-fat craze that has been with us for decades. Industry quickly figured out how to capitalize on this and make enormous amounts of money.

The first way was to use a waste product from food production to make a substitute for butter. That’s right. Margarine is made from waste. Food companies quickly figured out that the stuff they were throwing away could be re-purposed into “low-fat” foods. The stunning success of margarine led to a flood of low-fat stuff that is still with us.

Of course you don’t sell product without advertising and advertising is mostly about convincing people that your product is better than the alternative. If you’re in the business of selling low-fat foods, what better way than to point to government science as the reason your stuff is better?

Of course, you need to make sure the science does not change so lavishing the government and its scientists with money to keep proving the same point is a good investment. It’s not an accident that Big Food is an enthusiastic supporter of Big Government.

That may strike you as excessively cynical, but here is a long article from The Atlantic Monthly that is my source. You’ll not the date is 1989. That’s right, I recalled from memory an article from a quarter century ago and found it on-line.

The Greek Revolution

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The Greeks vote on something this weekend, but no one really knows whether it matters. The news indicates that the deal offered Greece is no longer on the table so the plebiscite on it would be moot. There’s also the fact that Greece appears to be in full blown financial collapse. The scenes on television remind me of the Argentine financial collapse of ’98. In fact, the comparisons are so close that the Argentinians of that era are advising the Greeks now.

Here’s an interesting documentary on the Argentine crisis.

The fascinating thing about this last phase of the now seven year crisis is that the enormity of Greek debt is finally being revealed. The IMF has released their analysis of Greek debt and there’s simply no way anyone can think the Greeks will ever pay their debts. It is a mathematical impossibility. Further, they will never be able to make their interest payments.

Greece has a €50 billion cash deficit through 2018, which means even under the bailout plan that was offered, Greece would be accumulating debt faster than it would be retiring debt. In theory, something magical could happen so that the economy would boom, but the debt burden makes that unlikely.

That means the people in charge of Europe have been lying to their public all this time. Default was an inevitability. That will then be followed by a restructuring of debt and debt forgiveness. Lying is no surprise as it was always assumed that the EU was buying time to transfer these debts from the private holders to the taxpayers.

The deliberate and seemingly pointless immiserating of Greece is what one would expect from a loan shark. It’s not the money, it’s the principle. The EU was supposed to make one big happy family of former countries. The trouble is one of the family members is a bit of a screw-up so the paterfamilias is teaching a lesson. It’s not so much for the one taking the beating, but for the rest. “Don’t be like Greece or we’ll break you like we broke them.”

That sounds good, but it remains to be seen if they will actually break Greece. The first hit is the worst hit and Greece is taking the first hit right now. By the time they vote, a fair number of Greeks will be ready to see it through. The next hit lands to the body of the EU financial system. No one knows what happens when the fallout from Greece starts washing up in the rest of Europe.

It’s easy to dismiss Greece as a dead beat country full of oily grifters. In theory, the Greek people have only themselves to blame for electing crooks and liars. That’s an argument against democracy, but the people never voted for bankruptcy. They were misled by their leaders, who got hooked on the heroin of global finance. They supported joining the Euro because they were told it would avoid these problems.

The problem at the core of global finance is that there’s no market mechanism to restrain public debt. The whole point of a floating currency regime is to disguise public debt in order to avoid making tough choices about the welfare state. It’s not an accident that since the Louvre Accords the size and scope of government has skyrocketed throughout the West.

In other words, a currency system based on credit has worked at hiding the cost of government. In fact, it has been so good at it no one noticed that Greece was running up debt at an alarming rate. In the old system, Greece would have been facing double digit borrowing rates long before they reached this point.

Sovereign debt is mostly a way to rob the property holders of countries. When the state borrows, there has to be someone on the other side of the transaction. If they borrow from their people then they are taking property with a promise to pay at a latter date. If they borrow from abroad, then they are promising their tax payers will pay at a later date.

The only people with the ability to pay sovereign debt are the tax payers.

In the old currency arrangements, this was understood. Lenders knew this. If you lent gold to the neighboring king, you did so knowing you may have to invade his lands to get it back. That made lenders more prudent, which made the crown more prudent. Credit currency makes it appear that default is impossible so no one considers the cost of collection.

Successive Greek governments have promised the property of Greek tax payers as collateral. The Greeks on the dole are demanding their checks and making a fuss about it on TV. The real revolt is the from the people with money. The Greek taxpayers are refusing to pay up. Unless the EU is ready to roll in the tanks, the debts will have to be forgiven.