08:01 – Speaking of the adorable Amber Marshall, I just noticed yesterday that she’d been in a movie that was released last November, so I grabbed a copy with BitTorrent. When Barbara got home yesterday, I told her about it and she said we could watch it this weekend.
What I didn’t tell her was the name of the movie. It’s called Mutant World, and it has a 3.6 rating on IMDB. It’s about a bunch of Doomsday Preppers that go into a bunker and come out 10 years after an asteroid impact to find the world populated by mutant zombies. When I brought up the file to make sure it was readable, I clicked at various random locations on the timeline. One of those was a scene with Amber using her assault rifle to fire on a mob. I’m in love all over again. I just hope she doesn’t get eaten.
During my dad’s final illness in 1990, he was suffering from congestive heart failure. I remember a discussion I had at the hospital with a dietitian or nutritionist or whatever they call the people who pretend to understand the effects of diet on human health. They had my dad on what amounted to a no-salt diet, and she was going on and on about the evils of salt in general and the sodium ion in particular. I asked her what evidence she had for her assertions, and told her that I suspected that the sodium ion was good for you and that most people consumed too little salt rather than too much. She looked at me as if I were from Mars. So, fast-forward 25 years. I was reading a study yesterday that finds pretty definitively that low-salt diets are killers.
As I’ve been saying for at least 40 years, “nutritionists” and “dietitians” know nothing. They have no data upon which to base their recommendations. Fortunately, a couple million years of evolution has provided us with a pretty good way of determining which foods are good for us. It it tastes good, it’s probably good for you; if it doesn’t, it’s probably not. That’s why these low-sugar, low-fat, low-salt “healthy” foods are very bad for you. They taste like crap, which tells me they are crap.
From what I have read, about half of all people who have high blood pressure experience higher levels of salt causing higher blood pressure. This is repeated in a lot of places, but explained in very few. I finally found someone who stated a theory as to why this is the case. If you have healthy kidneys and high blood pressure, additional salt intake causes saltier urine. If you have kidney problems and high blood pressure, your kidneys can’t remove enough salt from your urine and your blood pressure goes up.
WRT “tastes good is good” I’m right with you, with the caveat that we need to consider the availability of the taste in our evolutionary environment.
IE, salt and sugar were not real plentiful, so we gorge when it is available. In our modern world it’s available all the time, so the urge to gorge is counter-productive.
Applying our ability to reason and defer pleasure helps there, and those were great adaptations too.
nick
Based on another paper I read recently, it seems that our remote ancestors, particularly men (hunters) may have had very high-fat diets, which contributes to endurance. Some Marathon runners are now on diets that have as much as 80% of their calories coming from fats. I have always been in favor of high-fat diets. I really regret the shift in the beef industry toward low-fat beef. I loved beef back 40 and 50 years ago that had that nice marbling and each cut surrounded by fat.
The authors of Life Extension would probably agree with you on salt. The book is now very dated, but points out how little we know about nutrition and other issues that affect health. Many of the ideas raised in the book still have not been studied some 35 years later. There is no financial incentive.
From what I have read, about half of all people who have high blood pressure experience higher levels of salt causing higher blood pressure.
Salt-sensitive high blood pressure is mostly clustered in those of African ancestry. This has been known for years. But rather than try to explain this to everyone, they just decided to keep on with the advice for high blood pressure from the 50s: cut salt. Probably they figured it wouldn’t hurt. Given the cheap and effective BP meds that are around now, it’s a guideline ripe for revision. And since we have computers that can munch on big datasets, it’s now coming out that their salt advice is bogus.
Another area that’s being debunked: dietary cholesterol. In most people, even those with high cholesterol, diet has only a small impact on serum cholesterol levels. You make most of it in your liver. You can only cut your levels a few points by diet.
Fortunately, biological research is getting to the point where physics was 50 years ago in maturity, and this stuff is getting studied. Rather than looking at simple causes, they can probe deeper and with greater insight. It’s all a matter of tools and techniques being developed to support the R&D types.
But rather than
try to explain this to everyonebe called racists, they just decided to keep on with the advice for high blood pressure from the 50s: cut salt.Fixed it for you.
Yeah, Mr. Ray, I thought of that immediately, too; we must not be thinking right and need more re-education in the new camps.
I’m on blood pressure meds, and they made a big difference; the doc told me most of us as we age have issues with this and he’s on them himself.
I pretty much agree with Dr. Bob, et. al.; if it tastes good, it’s probably OK, within reason; everything to moderation. After all, vodka and fruit juice tasted good to me for a while. But most folks are not self-destructive idiots like I was.
It hit minus 4 overnight here, and is 10 now, with sun and blue skies again; we may see the temps gradually rising through the 20s, 30s and into the mid-40s by Tuesday.
Mrs. OFD got up at 03:45 this morning in Charlotte, NC, to make her O-Dark-Thirty flight back up; loaded up all her chit, drove to the airport, turned in the rental, humped it all to the ticket counter and looked up and saw it cancelled. Had to go back to her accommodations for another night and now will do tomorrow’s O-Dark-Thirty flight, to Newark, and then have a 15-hour layover in NJ/NY, before taking a later flight at 9 PM tomorrow night and getting back up to VT around midnight instead. She said ‘sometimes you just have to laugh.’
So she’s gonna take the train into Babylon-on-the-Hudson tomorrow and hang out there for a few hours. I’d rather hang myself.
Her upcoming gigs are in San Antonio, TX; Harrisburg, PA; and NYC.
I’ll do a bunch of stuff around the house today, continue online course work, and then on to another couple of episodes of “Marco Polo” on Netflix. Shows like this make me look up the historical facts and biographies, so there’s that, in addition to just droves of naked Asian women.
What’s wrong with the Capitol Police? Have they no batons? No handcuffs? No tear gas or MACE? Were tasers not issued to them? Have they no guns? This rampant mass disorder must be nipped in the bud! Forthwith!
http://thehill.com/regulation/234799-children-protest-sledding-ban-on-capitol-lawn
“Hard Reboot”
http://xkcd.com/1495/
I would have used a cron job.
I thought marbeling was *still* a characteristic of American beef. I don’t particularly like it, I prefer beef and lamb to be fairly lean. One of the best dinners I’ve ever been to was at a conference in Adelaide, where they had all-you-can-eat kangaroo, emu and crocodile. 20 years on I remember it vividly.
“Robbing Peter, paying Paul: Streaming costs can add up”
http://blog.chron.com/techblog/2015/03/robbing-peter-paying-paul-streaming-costs-can-add-up/
I’ve been wondering about adding up all these streaming services.
Well, some fat is inevitable, but US beef has much, much less fat than it did in the fast. They’ve bred cows specifically to minimize fat and also feed them to produce as little fat as possible.
I don’t even like white-meat chicken because it’s so dry and tasteless. The dark meat is much better, moist, fatty, and tasty.
They’ve bred all the fat out of pigs too. The pig of the 18 and 1900’s was a fat factory, and fat was vital resource for the household. They were about 1/2 fat by volume from what I see online. I can barely eat modern pork as it is too dry even when just barely cooked enough.
I do like my lamb less fatty, as the characteristic mutton taste comes mostly in the fat.
As nearly any chef will tell you “fat adds flavor,” and as many including Dr Atkins will tell you, fat is necessary to feel sated.
nick
I’m on blood pressure meds, and they made a big difference; the doc told me most of us as we age have issues with this and he’s on them himself.
Me too. I take 25 mg of metaprolol (beta blocker) extended release per day. Drops my bp about 30 to 40 points to 110 / 70. A heavy salt intake will push my bp up 10 to 20 points the next day. I check my bp each morning and log it now (engineer!).
My heart attack was not due to artery blockage. They actually do not know what happened that day but my bp was 210 / 110 when I went to the ER. My theory is that since I effectively do not have a right coronary artery, the left coronary artery started spasming on me (opening and closing rapidly). My real question is did my bp get high before or after the left coronary artery spasming? I think that I got into a bp feedback loop but it hard to tell. None of my cardiologists like to talk about it other than the one who hopes that I die before him so he can do an exploratory on me and write a paper. He is now teaching cardiology at Baylor med school in the med center.
“I would have used a cron job.”
Assuming your server was Linux. Either that or research what’s happening to the swap space.
As for fat in meat, I remember the late, great Julia Child actually threading a roast with darning needles and lard to add fat and juiciness to it. And a lotta recipes will tell you to brown it on all sides in butter or bacon fat prior to roasting in the oven. Wild game recipes call for similar fat additions.
Assuming your server was Linux. Either that or research what’s happening to the swap space.
Huh. I have crashed many Unix boxen over the years due to lack of swap space. I understand why they created the /tmp partition but it is ALWAYS undersized.
That /tmp partition can always be set to a larger size:
http://blog.shineservers.com/how-to-increase-size-of-vartmp-and-tmp-centos/
Boy, some days it seems like I’m being pushed headlong into a gig helping vets and other damaged peeps with PTSD issues; I’d been to the “combat group” thang yesterday and today I hiked over to the post office to get our mail. Mentioned the group again to the postmistress (can I say that?) who is a VT Army Guard SFC with multiple Suck and Sandbox tours and she started crying. She’d had a triggering episode and breakdown during her lunch break. Later, I ran into a guy outside a store, another vet, who was still struggling with the PTSD and nearly 40 years of boozing.
And earlier I’d had another phone call with Mrs. OFD, who thinks I’d be just swell doing this gig; veterans peer counselor at the VA. My own counselor is looking into the info for me. Not sure how this will all pan out, as I juggle the usual job search and IT retraining capers, but let the chips fall where they may.
Yikes.
National Guard units should not be deployed outside the USA. They are the National Guard and responsible for our defense.
One of the young men at my church (he is 31 so still young to me) just came back from the Suck for the 5th? time. He is a Lt in a Guard MP unit. They did pay for him to go to College and get his degree in criminal justice. Going to Iraq and Afghanistan for five years total really lengthened his college years though.
And earlier I’d had another phone call with Mrs. OFD, who thinks I’d be just swell doing this gig; veterans peer counselor at the VA.
I had not figured on you going back to work for Uncle.
Go for it!
re the XKCD strip, I agree with Randall. Even if in the reboot scenario a cron job would have been more elegant, the general point remains. In my professional work, I don’t exactly argue in favor of heinous kludges, but I use them all the time, telling managers and purists that the important word in “working kludge” is “working”. Sure, I’d rather do it “right”, but there are only so many hours in the day and much too much work to spend the hours investigating problem and crafting the “right” solution.
(That’s especially the case for those of us able and willing to be anything but a load on the job. On my current gig, there are four business analysts, five quality assurance people, five (supposed to be six) database developers, six programmers, and two project managers. One BA, one DBD, and two programmers are carrying everyone else. Most of the rest come in late, take long breaks, surf the internet, and sit around talking and laughing, or in the case of the PMs run around making unmeetable promises to the clients, put together more useless reports for us to fill out, and otherwise interfere with getting anything done. The four of us who are carrying the rest are getting pretty tired of it, and especially of being leaned on to do the others’ work … while the slackers are sitting right there goofing around. Yes, we’re looking for new gigs. The slackers, by the way, apparently “can’t” be sacked even though they’re contractors because the management did such a bad job of bringing on contractors and then sacking dozens — 120% turnover in seven months — that they can’t get rid of any more lest they look bad. The slackers know this and have given up even the pretense of working except when an outside manager is watching. Good thing it’s only tax dollars they’re wasting. A company that worked that way would be in trouble.)
“National Guard units should not be deployed outside the USA. They are the National Guard and responsible for our defense.”
Absolutely, Mr. Lynn; agreed 200%. And we have fifty (50) gutless, ball-less state governors who let this slide and kow-towed to DOD and the Feds.
“Going to Iraq and Afghanistan for five years total really lengthened his college years though.”
I’m quite sure it had more of an effect than just that. My guess is that he was often assigned to escort guard duties on top of the usual stuff back on the bases, and that would have meant humping into front-line areas, such as they are, and retrieving enemy prisoners and suchlike. Not fun. Plus he may have been on training gigs, with what passes for the local constabulary in those places. In any case, five years of combat tours is insane.
“I had not figured on you going back to work for Uncle.”
I haven’t yet. Not likely, but stranger things have happened. If it meant really helping fellow combat vets and making a real difference and it was the best way I could do that, I’d have to give it some serious thought. But like I say, kinda doubtful.
Then there’s the little mantra that gets recited all the time now: “20 suicides a day.”
If that works out as a paying gig, I’d go for it. (That is, you should go for it. I’d be terrible at it.) Keep looking for either a regular job or, better, keep working on the gunsmithing and term paper writing and whatever else. Ideally, you could look at the VA work as a paying hobby — it’s obviously something that moves you and that you’re interested in.
“The four of us who are carrying the rest are getting pretty tired of it, and especially of being leaned on to do the others’ work … while the slackers are sitting right there goofing around.”
Yeah, sounds familiar; wow, four peeps carrying the other eighteen, pretty bad. Figures it’s gummint, too; saw it for four years in state gummint up here and wife for ten years. At one private family-owned place I worked, we had a kid hired for Winblows support chit, and within days, if there was not much going on, he’d surf the net, watch movies, and take naps right there at his desk; a fellow worker who sat near us, also a ‘Nam vet, got pissed off, saying ‘hey, if I gotta work, he’s gotta work’ and dimed his ass out. They fired him immediately, the kid, not the “rat.” Man, I’d be tempted to drop a dime on those bastards to the right set of ears and have them see what’s going on; on the other hand, ya’ll are planning to bail anyway.
“Keep looking for either a regular job or, better, keep working on the gunsmithing and term paper writing and whatever else. Ideally, you could look at the VA work as a paying hobby — it’s obviously something that moves you and that you’re interested in.”
That’s pretty much the plan here. We shall see how it all pans out this year. As the country slides further into the toilet, despite the latest Rosy Scenario findings in the media on jobs and the economy, and maybe one or another of the maniacs running some of those other countries will light off a nuke or sumthin. It will then be interesting to see how our own war criminal maniacs then deal with it.
I’ve had about 40 vultures eating a deer or something large on the property today. I’m not sure what it is since there are so many of them and do not want to get close. I am wondering if one can eat vulture if desperate?
nick flandry wrote:
“They’ve bred all the fat out of pigs too. The pig of the 18 and 1900’s was a fat factory, and fat was vital resource for the household. They were about 1/2 fat by volume from what I see online. I can barely eat modern pork as it is too dry even when just barely cooked enough.”
Modern pork, at least here in Australia, has plenty of fat. Well, at least the pork belly I had yesterday at one of my favourite Chinese places. Any more fat and I wouldn’t be able to keep it down. The plate has a residue of fat on it when I finish, which, combined with the taste, lets me know I’ve eaten something I shouldn’t have. I know it’s said that fat adds flavour, but I just don’t need it. I can really enjoy Bob’s least favourite meat even with its low fat content. Same goes for fish.
“I’m not sure what it is since there are so many of them and do not want to get close. I am wondering if one can eat vulture if desperate?”
1.) Good policy. Seen the beaks and talons on those buggers? Don’t interrupt their lunch. But, on the other hand, you may not find out what that lunch was.
2.) Not recommended. Unless one is really, truly desperate and probably gonna croak anyway. Be a nice joke to play on them when they come, then, to eat you.
They’ve bred all the fat out of pigs too.
Where oh where is Mr. Chuck. I can hear him talking about the German bacon as if it was yesterday. Only two drips of fat per slice. It must be worse than white meat chicken. Not like that super fatty Murkan bacon.
You can make Chuck appear by standing in front of a mirror in an almost dark room and saying his name three times in a row. Except his real name isn’t Chuck, it’s Candyman.
I bet I’m with Mr. Chuck on the meat vs. fat thang; I cook bacon until it’s nearly charred and don’t dig the taste or texture of fat and gristle with my meat.
MrAtoz wrote:
“Not like that super fatty Murkan bacon.”
There’s no such thing as super fatty Murkan bacon, once it’s been grilled to a crisp so that every molecule of fat and mosture is in the fat trap. I’d rather eat boot leather. Give me Aussie/Pommie bacon every time.
OFD wrote:
“I bet I’m with Mr. Chuck on the meat vs. fat thang; I cook bacon until it’s nearly charred and don’t dig the taste or texture of fat and gristle with my meat.”
You’re half right. Fat and gristle is grotesque (except the fat on pork and lamb chops) but grilling bacon ’till it’s rock solid is a cullinary crime against humanity. Give me soft, flexible bacon every time!
“I’d rather eat boot leather.”
Really? Come on up here and live in a few more years and our legions of jackbooted blueshirt thugs will give you their castoffs when they wear out from stomping on our faces.
“Give me soft, flexible bacon every time!”
You and Ozzy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnLKgTyqup0
Soft enough for ya?
More on how we got dragooned into the Good War:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/03/bionic-mosquito/the-pearl-harbor-myth/
I looked at the Amazon reviews of the book that OFD linked to above. From reading many of the more analytic reviews, the author has been pretty selective in quoting from his sources. In several cases, he is said to have only quoted items that support his hypothesis and not those that don’t. He is said to have mentioned a secondary source for a German intercept of a UK to US cable warning of the attack, without mentioning that his source said the story of the intercept is a fake. One reviewer summed it up as: the government knew the Japanese were going to attack. They didn’t know where or when. There were a number of low level pieces of intel that when put together might have revealed Japanese war plans, but it appears that nobody had the whole plan. Heck, 52% of the American people knew we would be at war with Japan soon, according to a Gallup poll. And certainly, Roosevelt wanted into WWII.
Also, while Pearl Harbor gets all the attention, there were quite a few other attacks on that day – Philippines, Thailand, Hong Kong, Malaya, Wake, Guam, Singapore, etc.
This study seems to be one of the few nutrition studies with a connection to actual science? Or here is an article that actually seems to be a decent write up of the same scientific study. I think it’s time someone tried a similar study to see if the results are comparable.