Monday, May 29, 2017



Top scientist says all you've been told about salt is WRONG: It won't give you a heart attack - while having too little will make you fat and ruin your sex life

For more than 40 years, we’ve been told eating too much salt is killing us. Doctors say it’s as bad for our health as smoking or not exercising, and government guidelines limit us to just under a teaspoon a day.

We’re told not to cook with it and not to sprinkle it on our meals. The white stuff is not just addictive, goes the message — it’s deadly. Too much of it causes high blood pressure, which in turn damages our hearts. We must learn to live — joylessly, flavourlessly but healthily — without it.

Well, I’m here to tell you that all of that is wrong. As a leading cardiovascular research scientist — based at Saint Luke’s Mid-America Heart Institute, Missouri — I’ve contributed extensively to health policy and medical literature.

I am associate editor of the British Medical Journal’s Open Heart, published in partnership with the British Cardiovascular Society, and I sit on the editorial advisory board of several other medical journals.

In my work, I’ve examined data from more than 500 medical papers and studies about salt. And this is what I’ve learned: there was never any sound scientific evidence to support this low salt idea. What’s more, as I explain in my new book, eating too little of it can cause insulin resistance, increased fat storage and may even increase the risk of diabetes — not to mention decreasing our sex drive.

Current daily guidelines limit you to 2.4g of sodium, which translates to 6g of salt (or sodium chloride) or slightly less than a teaspoonful.

If you have high blood pressure, or belong to a group considered to be at greater risk of developing it — such as being over 60 or Afro-Caribbean — doctors even advise you to cut your intake to two-thirds of a teaspoon of salt per day.

Yet salt is an essential nutrient that our bodies depend on to live. And those limits go against all our natural instincts. When people are allowed as much salt as they fancy, they tend to settle at about a teaspoon-and-a-half a day. This is true all over the world, across all cultures, climates and social backgrounds.

If you’ve been struggling to cut your intake, it may come as a relief to learn your salt cravings are normal, a biological need akin to our thirst for water.

We are essentially salty people. We cry salt, we sweat salt and the cells in our bodies are bathed in salty fluids. Without salt we’d not be able to live. And it’s not only our bodies that work this way.

A yen for salt drives the elephants of Kenya to walk into the pitch-black caves of Mount Elgon to lick sodium sulphate salt crystals off the walls. Gorillas have been known to follow elephants to eat the salt-rich droppings, while monkeys that groom one another don’t do so to eat fleas, but to enjoy their salty skin secretions.

Salt is so fundamental to life that a deficiency of it acts as a natural contraceptive in all sorts of animals, including us.

A diet low in salt reduces the sex-drive, inhibits the chances of getting pregnant and affects the birth weight of infants. Clinical studies show that low-salt diets can increase the risk of erectile dysfunction, fatigue and the age at which females become fertile.

Salt helps the body withstand accidents and other traumas. Besides excessive bleeding, we experience a loss of other fluids in states of shock — for example, from burns. As the injured areas soak up fluids to speed healing, the body needs its salt reserves to keep the blood circulating and fend off vascular collapse.

So why do almost all doctors tell us that salt is bad for us?

The orthodox medical view on salt is based on a straightforward hypothesis, which says eating higher levels of salt leads to higher levels of blood pressure — end of story.

Although this makes sense in theory, there’s a problem: the facts don’t back it up.

Evidence in medical literature suggests approximately 80 per cent of people with normal blood pressure (that is, a reading of below 120 over 80) do not suffer any signs of raised blood pressure — none at all — when they increase their salt intake.

Among those with prehypertension, or higher blood pressure, three quarters are not sensitive to salt. And even among those with full-blown high blood pressure, more than half — about 55 per cent — are totally immune to salt’s effects.

More HERE





Trump in Israel: An education in Islamic terror

Daniel Greenfield 


Nice smiles!

When President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu met on the tarmac, they and their spouses chatted easily. The two conservative leaders have much in common. They are political insurgents who draw their support from a rougher working class overlooked and despised by leftist elites.

The polls said that Netanyahu and Trump would lose their respective elections. Instead they won big. They prevailed despite accusations of bigotry, attacks by celebrities and a torrent of fake media scandals. The media decided that the big story of Trump’s arrival in Israel would be their claim that Melania Trump had swatted her husband’s hand away. A few months ago, Netanyahu was in court testifying against a lefty journalist for spreading fake news that his wife had kicked him out of the car.

Like so much of the fake media news aimed at Trump, it was sourced from an anonymous source through another anonymous source who knew someone’s dog.

And, sure enough, Sara Netanyahu and Melania Trump bonded on the tarmac over the media’s hatred.

Trump and Netanyahu are political pragmatists with a strong economic focus who run to the right. Trump is a developer. Netanyahu has a degree in architecture. Trump has a Queens accent and Netanyahu still has his Philly accent.  And they prevail despite the opposition of leftist elites.

Subtract the geography and this news story from Netanyahu’s victory would sound familiar to Trump. “Leftist, secular Tel Aviv went to sleep last night cautiously optimistic only to wake up this morning in a state of utter and absolute devastation.”

But there is one difference between the two men.

An hour before President Trump landed in Israel, a car struck people in Tel Aviv. Usually when a car hits people, it’s an accident. But in Israeli and in European cities, car ramming has become a terrorist tactic.

And so the incident was one of the first things that Trump heard about when he landed.

Police decided that it was an accident, but as the presidential visit got underway, there was the usual litany of violence; stonings, a fatality and a stabbing. And the question that so many of us now ponder across the civilized world rose unspoken each time blood was shed. Was it Islamic terrorism?

The efforts of conservative Israeli prime ministers to contain the fallout of a disastrous peace process with terrorists set into motion by leftist prime ministers have reduced the violence so that it no longer touches the lives of most Israelis on a regular basis. But it is always there. And it never truly goes away.

That is what must be understood when we talk about “peace”.

No amount of outreach to Muslim terrorists ends the violence. Not in Europe or America. And not in Israel; the country that has become the test case for whether Muslims and non-Muslims can coexist.

President Trump’s itinerary of Saudi Arabia, Israel and Rome is a gamble that “the three Abrahamic Faiths” will join in a coalition to take on Iran and ISIS. It’s a better plan than Bush’s push for regional democracy or Obama’s violently destructive backing for Islamist political takeovers in the Arab Spring. A common enemy is more likely to get different groups behind the same cause. But having a common enemy should not be confused with having peace. At best it means a very temporary truce.

Netanyahu understands this because he has far more experience with Islamic terrorism. When it comes to Islamic terrorism, there are few countries that have faced it as consistently and constantly as Israel.

Muslim terrorists have struck America before. But only in the last decade were the Islamic colonies in the United States large enough and young enough to mount a constant drumbeat of attack plots.

Thousands of terrorism investigations are still new to America. They’re a way of life in Israel.

Terrorism is a bloody education. Trump knows far more about Islamic terrorism than Bush did. And Bush knew far more than his father. Most Americans still can’t conceive of the idea that peace is impossible. It’s too grim and hopeless. We’ve come a long way since the Obama years. But we aren’t there yet.

In the spring of his first year, Obama traveled to the Middle East to seek a “new beginning” with the Muslim world. He stopped off first in Saudi Arabia, but saved his speech calling for political change until his arrival in Egypt. Trump delivered his key speech in Saudi Arabia disavowing calls for political change. Instead America’s relationship with the Muslim world would be defined by its national security needs.

Obama blamed colonialism for the poor relations between the West and the Muslim world. His solution was to dismantle Western power. Trump defined Islamic terrorism as the problem and unity against it as the solution. Obama had bypassed Israel and traveled on to Germany making a heavily publicized visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Trump continued on to Israel instead.

The difference was profound.

Obama was more comfortable engaging with Jews as victims and, in a typically egotistical manner, envisioning what the victims of the Holocaust might have made of his visit. “They could not have known that one day an American President would visit this place and speak of them.” His Cairo speech reduced Israel to a byproduct of the Holocaust. If so, Israel’s capital might as well be in Buchenwald.

Trump however is ready to interact with the living Jewish present in Israel. His trip to the Western Wall, the first by a sitting president, and a cancelled visit to Masada, sought to engage with Israel’s national and religious identity. They signify a recognition that Obama never offered to Israel.

In Saudi Arabia, President Trump rolled out a vision of relationships based on national interest. And no such relationship can be built without recognizing national identity. Trump’s recognition of Israel’s national identity adds a note of respect. But Israel is one of the few nations in the region.

Nations can make peace. They can put aside their bloody past and at least learn to ignore each other. And in the West, religion has come to act as a moral operating system within the infrastructure of nations. Religion provides guidelines that transcend the law. The legal system can only tell us what we must do or may not do to each other. Religion tells us what we ought to do or not do to each other. It is a personal conscience and a relationship to a higher authority than mere government.

Saudi Arabia isn’t a nation. Neither is “Palestine”. They’re powerful extended families whose form of worship is terrorism. Islamic terrorism isn’t a perversion of Islam. It’s the implementation of Islam.

Islam provides the morale and motive for the conquest. And once the conquest is complete, it provides the framework for the kingdom. Islam’s message is the inferiority of Muslims to non-Muslims. War affirms the message. Oppression internalizes it. Islam is meaningful only when it is killing and oppressing infidels. It is not a religion of the persecuted, but the persecutors. Its theology is violent supremacism.

President Trump deserves credit for refusing to let the Saudis pretend that some Islamic terror groups are more legitimate than others by classing together ISIS with Hamas. But the only Islamic terrorism that the Saudis will reject is that which does not serve their interests. And even if they wanted to, they could no more end popular support for Islamic terrorism than Iraq could become a multicultural utopia through the magic of democracy.

Nor can Israel make peace with Islamic terrorists no matter how many more concessions Prime Minister Netanyahu offers them. President Trump calls it a tough deal. But you can only make a deal with someone who follows some of the same rules you do. You can’t make a deal with Islamic terrorists whose only rules are that the Koran lets them say anything they want to you.

President Trump called Islamic terrorism evil. And it is. But it’s not just evil. Its codes and ethics are utterly incompatible with our own. The only way to negotiate is through threats. And even threats only go so far with fanatics who believe that if they die, they will earn 72 virgins in paradise.

Islamic entities will tell any lie and commit any crime to accelerate their objective of conquering us. Whether they tell a lie or commit a crime depends on whether they’re moderates or extremists.

Yesterday, I heard Geert Wilders speak. And I recognized a leader who understands this grim reality. Few of his fellow Europeans do. Even fewer American politicians share that understanding. Europe is facing a deeper threat than America. And Israel has been confronting a bigger threat than Europe.

Every act of Islamic terror educates us. It is a difficult and bloody education. We graduate when we realize who our enemies are and how impossible it is to achieve any peace with them.

President Trump's walk to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre required thousands of police officers, closed stores and houses filled with snipers while their residents were evacuated.

That is life under the shadow of terrorism.

It’s not only presidents who have to live this way. It’s all of us in Jerusalem and Paris, in Manchester and in Rome where there are soldiers in the street and cries of “Allah Akbar” in the air. And then a car speeds up, a knife slashes, a plane crashes or a bomb goes off.

And the education continues.

SOURCE





Media protecting Muslim terrorism again
   
Ann Coulter

The latest Muslim terrorist attack ripped apart little girls at a concert in Manchester, England, on Monday, killing 22. The death and body-part count is still rising.

This is not a game. When young British girls are the targets of a suicide bombing, can we take a short break from the posturing, political correctness and Russia conspiracy theorizing? Won’t the hatred of Trump keep for a few weeks?

Channel-surfing on Monday night was like watching broadcasts from different countries. While Fox News and CNN covered the terrorist attack, MSNBC concentrated on the real news of the night — TRUMP’S COLLUSION WITH RUSSIA — as children screamed in the background in footage from Manchester.

It was a big enough step for MSNBC to stop claiming that the “explosion” was just popping balloons. The hosts reasoned, We know that Islam is a religion of peace, so what else could it be?

CBS and NBC News finally produced the name of the suicide bomber — the next day. (After any terrorist attack, the media like to keep us in suspense for as long as possible about whether it was a Muslim or a Christian.)

Even then, the answer was difficult to find on either network’s Twitter feeds, which were bristling with minute-by-minute updates on former CIA Director John Brennan’s congressional testimony about Russia and Trump: Yes, collusion was investigated. No, Brennan is not aware of any evidence to support the theory. BREAKING NEWS!

The media didn’t gaudily broadcast the bomber’s name, religion or ethnicity in their headlines, but at least they finally coughed up the information. He was Salman Abedi, son of Libyan “refugees.”

Apparently, the media think you can’t be trusted with that information. You might notice that the West is deliberately importing people who enjoy killing kids.

According to ABC News, the bomber’s father, Ramadan Abedi (not to be confused with Huma Abedin), was a member of an al-Qaida-linked Islamic group in Libya. For this, he was accepted as a “refugee” by the British government.

Liberals' main reaction to the attack was not to demand the toppling of the terrorist-friendly British government, but to worry about an upsurge in Islamophobia. They say there’s nothing we can do about terrorism and we probably shouldn’t do anything anyway, because we deserve it.

These were teen and preteen girls! Is there any fuel left in the gas tank of humanity, or are we just running on fumes now?

While liberals are impatient to get back to their murderous immigration policies, conservatives are pining for war. And really, who wouldn’t want to send ground troops to Syria after our tremendous successes in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Why do we need to fight ISIS in Syria again? I forget. How about we NOT send U.S. troops to some godforsaken nation of primitives?

My reasoning is: It will cost us trillions of dollars; we will sacrifice the lives of an untold number of our best young men in combat (and little girls — thanks, liberals!); and we will accomplish absolutely nothing, apart from creating a new stream of “refugees” and making the primitives even angrier with us, if that’s possible.

Historically, starting wars in the Third World has not proved salutary.

Trump was elected for one reason: Because he promised to put Americans' interests first. If only he’d stuck to his campaign promises, he’d be a hero right now.

The one promise Trump has kept is the so-called “Muslim ban” — and he’s looking prophetic on that. The Ninth Circuit was probably just about to release its opinion affirming a Hawaii judge’s revocation of Trump’s travel ban, but after Manchester, they’ll have to sit on it for a few weeks.

Wouldn’t you rather be defending Trump for imposing a travel ban, building a wall and deporting “Dreamers,” than for idiotic leaks about nothing? If Trump started removing undesirable foreigners, liberals would rush back to the airports, en masse, and forget all about Russia.

The most humane response to terrorist attacks in the West is to kill a bunch of them for revenge, and then concentrate on our own problems. Instead of sending ground troops to Syria, we should be sending them to San Diego.

Our policy following every Islamic terrorist attack anyplace in the West should be the following:

1) We drop a nuke on some majority-Muslim city involved in terrorism.

2) We add six months to the immigration moratorium (which Trump promised us in his Aug. 16, 2015, immigration policy paper, the greatest political document since the Magna Carta).

3) We deport one Ninth Circuit judge.

Since Trump, politics has become a game to liberals. The media is a game. Hollywood is a game. Islamic terrorists are killing little girls in England. This isn’t a game.

SOURCE





More Multiculturalism



A man is charged in the death of a mother of two and actress after surveillance video of him pawning pieces of her jewelry two hours after her murder surfaced.

Dominic Sanders, 30, of University Park, faces first-degree murder, home invasion and armed robbery charges in connection with the death of Andrea Urban, 51, according to CBS Chicago.

Urban was found by her son Sasha, 17, on the floor of her kitchen in her home on the 700 block of Town Place in the Hinsdale neighborhood of Chicago on May 4.

She'd had her neck and throat cut with a knife, according to police.

'This was a violent, horrific attack on a completely innocent victim who had every right to feel safe in her own home,' said DuPage County State's Attorney Robert Berlin.

Authorities say Sanders allegedly entered her home around 10am that morning and a struggle ensued and he stabbed her to death.

Sanders was seen on security cameras walking towards Urban's home with a reflective vest on and walking away around 11am. Urban had texted a friend about 10:00am but then failed to show up at a friend's house hours later, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Her body was found about 3:30pm by her teenage son. Her daughter, Daria, who also lived with her in the house, is in fifth grade. Both are reportedly being cared for by relatives.

About two hours after her death, Sanders was seen at a Melrose Park pawn shop selling rings that had inscriptions on them that Urban's family were able to identify.

At first, cops say Sanders told them he was not at the pawn shop, but later said he had stolen the rings by reaching into Urban's home through a front door and taking them from a shelf.

Police do not know if the pair knew each other somehow but have not yet been able to make a connection between them, reported the outlet.

Sanders reportedly had no fixed address and lived with various friends and relatives.

In the days following the murder, Sanders was active on Facebook, posting pictures of a car he called his 'baby' and making plans with friends and family.

Urban is described as an actress, leukemia survivor and medical marijuana advocate. She had lived in both New York and Russia before returning to her hometown of Hinsdale.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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