Wednesday, March 15, 2023



Mediterranean diet rich in nuts, oils and leafy veg slashes risk of an early death in women by a QUARTER, study suggests

This study is greatly over-hyped. For a start it is about WOMEN ONLY. Applicability of the findings to men is unknown.

Secondly, only extreme groups were studied. I cannot see whether they used quartiles or quintiles, but, either way, they threw out at least half of their data BEFORE analysing it. What the relationships in the whole data body were is unknown -- almost certainly no significant correlations

Even after that surgery on the data, the hazard ratios were still very low -- less than 1.0 -- meaning that the relationships were not strong enough to support policy recommendations. In a word,the conclusions below are rubbish

The original journal article is here


Following the Mediterranean diet can slash a woman's chance of an early death by nearly a quarter, a study suggests.

In the study of more than 700,000 women, the famed diet decreases a woman's chances of dying from any cause by 23 percent. Australian researchers also highlighted similar drops in deaths from heart disease and stroke.

Rich in whole grains, vegetables, fruit, legumes, nuts, fish and olive oil — the diet has been lauded in recent years for its brain-boosting and heart-helping effects.

A study just last week found it could even drop a person's risk of suffering dementia.

The Mediterranean diet has been described as a 'gold standard' by experts. Some have even declared it as a form of preventative medicine.

It appeared on the radar of American doctors in the 1950s, when reports of low rates of chronic diseases such as Alzheimer's and hear disease began to arise.

Further exploration found that the typical diets of people in the region were playing a role in their great health.

In the time since, a growing body of research has continued to confirm the benefits of the diet rich in vegetables and healthy fats.

Whether one gender may benefit from the diet more than the other has not been explored much, though.

For their research, published in the journal Heart, a team from the University of Sydney combined data from 16 studies published between 2003 and 2021.

The studies, mainly from the US and Europe, included data from hundreds of thousands of women aged 18 and above.

Their cardiovascular health was monitored for an average of 12.5 years.

Sticking closely to a Mediterranean diet lowered the risk of cardiovascular disease by 24 percent, researchers found.

It also dropped the likelihood of death from any cause by 23 percent. The risk of coronary heart disease was 25 percent lower and they were less likely to suffer from stroke.

However, the reason why this diet is particularly beneficial for women is unknown.

The study author, Dr Sarah Zaman, of of the study's authors, said: 'Mechanisms explaining the sex-specific effect of the Mediterranean diet on cardiovascular disease and death remain unclear.

'Female-specific cardiovascular risk factors, including premature menopause, pre-eclampsia and gestational diabetes, or female predominant risk factors, such as systemic lupus, can all independently increase cardiovascular disease risk.

'It is possible that preventative measures, such as a Mediterranean diet, that targets inflammation and cardiovascular disease risk factors, impose differing effects in women compared with men.'

Cardiovascular disease accounts for more than a third of all deaths in women around the world.

However, many clinical trials and research include relatively few women and do not often report results by sex.

The current guidelines on how to best lower cardiovascular disease also do not differentiate by gender.

This latest study calls for more sex-specific research to help guide clinical practice in heart health.

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Orthodox Rabbi Debunks Left’s Claim That Conservatives Want to Force ‘Christian Values’ Down Americans’ Throats

Rabbi Yaakov Menken, whose organization represents more than 2,000 Orthodox Jewish rabbis on public policy, told The Daily Signal that his group constitutes living proof that social conservatives aren’t trying to force “Christian values” down Americans’ throats, as many on the Left claim.

When conservatives speak up, “the Left will immediately claim that only Christians believe this; therefore, you’re trying to shove Christian values down America’s throat; therefore, it’s a violation of [the separation of] church and state to be pro-life, or to be pro-family, or any of these things,” Menken, managing director of the Baltimore-based Coalition for Jewish Values, said in an interview at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC.

He recalled that “the Jewish Left” attacked his organization early on by describing it as “espousing positions more often associated with evangelical Christians. To which our unwritten response was, ‘Well, yeah, where do you think the evangelicals got them from?'”

Menken noted that conservative values “need a Jewish voice,” and his organization emerged because a group of Orthodox rabbis realized that “there was nobody speaking out on behalf of Jewish tradition.”

“All you were hearing was partisan leftism disguised as if it were Jewish values,” he recalled. The rabbi noted that many on the Jewish Left cite the notion of Tikkun Olam, or “Repairing the World,” as an excuse to advocate for whatever political goals they espouse and claim it is a part of their faith.

“Anything I want to do is ‘repairing the world’; so, my own personal ideology is therefore Judaism, which means you can be on two sides of an issue and both claim to be representing Jewish values,” Menken said. “It doesn’t work that way, obviously, and the whole point of the Bible is there is a moral standard that everybody’s supposed to follow, and you don’t get to remake it on the fly.”

The rabbi noted that on “certain issues,” in order to be “a traditional rabbi, you have to come out a certain way, and people don’t realize that the overwhelming majority of rabbis in America are on the right wing, very conservative in their values, as compared to the average Jew.”

Menken explained that, while Christians who reject Christianity are no longer referred to as Christian, but make up the atheist Left, “you could be a Jew and not believe in Judaism.” This leads to the phenomenon where “you have this image of the Jews as being all on the Left, whereas the involved Jews and the rabbis, those who actually know Judaism and those who let Judaism drive their values, are on the Right, and they needed to have a voice.”

The rabbi also countered what he called the “asinine” idea that abortion is a religious freedom issue for Jews.

“The idea that an elective abortion is a religious obligation is obviously asinine,” Menken said. “It doesn’t begin to make logical sense.”

He mocked the idea of “Jews for feticide” and warned that weaponizing religious liberty in this way is “profoundly dangerous” because “if everything becomes a religious liberty issue, then nothing is a religious liberty issue.”

The Coalition for Jewish Values claimed credit when House Republicans, led by Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., booted Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., from the Foreign Affairs Committee earlier this year.

The coalition had sent letters to then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., but she never acted on them. “This is tolerating antisemitism in Congress,” Menken argued. He recalled that when he sent a similar letter to McCarthy, “the [House majority] whip’s office sent it out to every legislative director on the Republican side, who had a copy of our letter.”

“It looked like Speaker McCarthy did not have the votes, and then it turned out that he did, after our letter,” Menken said. “So, at least according to others, we were somehow responsible, or partially responsible, for that happening.”

The Coalition for Jewish Values also sent a letter to Amazon, urging the Big Tech company to stop relying on the left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center for its Amazon Smile program. The SPLC routinely brands mainstream conservative and Christian organizations “hate groups,” putting them on a map alongside chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. A terrorist used the SPLC map to target the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian nonprofit, in 2012.

Menken recalled that someone referred to him as the “Jewish Tony Perkins,” referring to the Family Research Council’s president.

“Well, I take that as a compliment,” Menken said. “I mean, he’s out there fearlessly espousing basic traditional values, and he does it on the Christian side, and I’m doing it on the Jewish side.”

“We are Orthodox Jews. Anything the woke left calls ‘hateful,’ ‘bigoted’ and ‘racist,’ we do,” he added.

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Bye, Democrats: I’m leaving party that disgracefully supports censorship

By Maud Maron (Maud Maron is an education advocate and a former Democratic congressional candidate)

I can no longer be a Democrat after watching my party of three decades ignore the serious implications of vast governmental censorship and desperately, sometimes comically, try to shoot the messengers.

Last week’s hearing was meant to take testimony on the implications of government censorship reported in the Twitter Files — a series of articles, released on social-media platform Twitter, outlining the “censorship-industrial complex.”

But what it actually did was draw an astonishingly clear distinction between today’s Democrats and Republicans when it comes to our most fundamental and important right: freedom of speech.

After Elon Musk purchased Twitter, he gave several journalists an open invitation to look at the company’s internal emails.

They discovered and exposed a truly shocking number of politicians’ and government agencies’ requests to censor, silence, de-platform and de-amplify everyday Americans who expressed ideas the government did not like.

It should be one of the biggest stories of a generation: uncovering the government’s coordinated efforts to violate the First Amendment rights of so many Americans.

But with a few exceptions, the mainstream media have ignored the reporting or ridiculed the factually undisputed reports of large-scale government censorship — the kind most Americans would have told you does not happen in our country.

Journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger were a credit to their profession and to all Americans who genuinely care about a free press and the First Amendment.

And Democrats — who questioned, mocked, belittled and scolded them for not meekly accepting government knows best and Americans should just unquestionably accept what the fearsome threesome of “security state-Big Tech-Democrat ruling elite” thinks we should be able to say, read and hear — were an embarrassment.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) decried the censorship for affecting his ability to have an honest conversation with his constituents about the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s inaccurate vaccine information.

Twitter — working “in partnership” with the CDC — flagged Massie’s factually correct tweets about the superiority of natural immunity to the available COVID vaccines as “misinformation” and, worse, disabled comments.

The congressman pointed out that this made it impossible for his constituents to engage with him on the topic — in effect silencing them as well.

Democrats uniformly disgraced themselves by refusing to acknowledge the significance and severity of the censorship but also by: shrilly belittling the legally protected right to not reveal sources; laughably asserting good journalism should not turn a profit (an assertion never leveled at The New York Times, MSNBC, CNN or other Democrat-friendly media outlets); and routinely insisting the censorship was actually for the best — because they know best.

New York’s newly elected Rep. Dan Goldman was the most insistent on this point.

He demanded Taibbi acknowledge the “evidence” in two federal indictments coming out of special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation. Goldman declared the FBI was right to try to prevent Russian election interference.

Taibbi correctly pointed out that indictments, like all charging documents, are governmental allegations — allegations that have not been proven. One of the indictments was in fact dropped — so not only was the “evidence” not proven, it was never even subjected to the adversarial process designed to uncover the truth.

Goldman doubled down on his authoritarian impulses in a subsequent Twitter exchange with Taibbi, petulantly proclaiming that those who do not agree with him and national-security agencies “don’t belong” in the conversation.

Goldman is wrong, of course. All Americans have the right to join the conversation about matters big and small in our democracy.

And agreeing with the congressman or the sprawling national-security apparatus is not a precondition to chiming in.

The hearing may not have changed anyone’s mind about whether the Twitter Files are a journalistic juggernaut or just another entry in the culture wars. But it did change my registration.

I am now, after 33 years as a registered Democrat, an independent. And I like it.

I can no longer vote in the primaries that usually send my representatives to City Hall, Albany and Washington, DC. But I can vote in the general elections, and I look forward to doing so.

I will not vote for representatives who make light of my First Amendment rights or demand obeisance to my betters in the censorship-industrial complex.

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NYPD rules crackdown on beard length, time sheets and more has cops crying foul: ‘Pathetic’

The Leftist elite WANT chaos in the streets

The NYPD has decided to crack down on its already-thinning, overworked ranks by rooting out cops who grow their beards too long, drink coffee on the job and don’t empty their garbage cans quickly enough, The Post has learned.

The burgeoning effort to police the police – ordered up by Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell – is being led by the Standards and Assessment section of the two-month old Professional Standards Bureau, according to the NYPD.

“If somebody is non-compliant with the beard procedure – they’ll look into that,” said Chief Kevin Maloney, commander of DCPI. “It’s really anything the cops are supposed to adhere to … their job is to make sure they’re doing that. It’s just enforcing the rules.”

In addition to making sure cops don’t grow their beards past the departmental limit of one-quarter of an inch, the section is tasked with investigating improprieties such as officers who keep inaccurate memo books, tint their windows too dark on their personal cars or fail to comb their hair properly.

The unit — led by Inspector Robert O’Hare — will also make sure cops wear their body cameras on the right piece of clothing, update roll calls promptly, show up on time and don’t leave their posts early.

Officers who cross the sergeants and lieutenants assigned as monitors will be hit with command disciplines, or internal write-ups that could lead to lost vacation time, usually five to 10 days depending on the infraction.

And that’s been happening at precinct roll calls throughout the city — though the NYPD declined to say how many command disciplines it had issued so far.

One example would be a cop showing up for a detail without their hat, an NYPD spokesman said. “Everybody should look professional,” Maloney told The Post.

Cops said the new initiative, which was made official on Jan. 17, has left them stuck somewhere between an eye roll and an outright rebellion.

“It’s pathetic – everybody’s talking about it,” said one Brooklyn cop, a 20-year veteran. “Guys are saying they’ve never seen morale so bad. The attitude is [the bosses] want to get you for something … Why would you go above and beyond to do anything at this point?”

According to another officer, some of New York’s Finest have been taking it with a dose of dark humor, dubbing the new unit the “suicide squad” because it is “the type of s–t” that pushes cops to the brink.

“Like we don’t have enough stress,” the officer said. “I’m already never seeing my family and you’re taking more time away from me? It’s a very stressful situation.”

Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch said the new inspections will only worsen “the NYPD’s historic staffing crisis. “It is absolutely mindboggling that monitoring beard length and sock color are the NYPD’s top priorities right now,” said Lynch.

“New York City police officers can’t pay their bills. They never get to see their families. They are battling every day against perps who have no fear and a justice system that delivers no consequences,” he added.

The department has remained unapologetic. “Follow the rules, you have no problems,” a police spokesman said. “It seems simple enough … We can’t have a double standard.”

The brass’s decision to drop the hammer on the rank-and-file comes at a particularly fraught time – the NYPD is facing a historic shortage of officers as cops continue to turn in their badges at an alarming rate.

The NYPD roster of 33,822 uniformed cops is already 1,208 below the budgeted headcount, The Post reported last week.

During January and February of this year, 239 officers resigned – a 36% spike from the 176 who left during the same span in 2022. And it’s a shocking 117% higher than 2021’s numbers, according to NYPD pension data.

But the numbers track with last year’s mass exodus: New York’s finest lost 3,701 cops to retirement or resignation in 2022, the most since 3,846 left the year after 9/11.

Cops say it’s not just the light paychecks or department politics that are to blame. One source previously told The Post that cops are being forced to work an “inhumane amount of overtime,” which includes sacrificing their days off.

The standards bureau’s crackdown is unlikely to help stem the tide.

Precinct supervisors were sent a memo by higher ups in recent weeks alerting them of the new unit, according to police sources.

The memo warned that cops working Friday’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade should be particularly fastidious — because O’Hare’s eagle-eyed teams will be watching to ensure they’re “properly uniformed, with presentable shoes, clothing and properly groomed including hair and facial hair.”

They’ll also be scouring waste baskets — the memo states “teams will check to ensure there isn’t garbage overflowing and littered about on all levels of the command.”

Especially vulnerable will be late tours and weekends, which are “more likely to be unkempt,” according to the memo, obtained by The Post.

The monitors will also review bodycam footage from 311 calls, as well as overtime requests for crime reduction posts and individual officer’s memo books documenting their break times and location.

“This is the supervisor’s responsibility to inspect the cop’s memo books for these details, and they will be held responsible along with the cops if deficiencies are found,” the memo said.

Officers say this will only force more burned-out officers to drop from the ranks.

“They’re just adding on the stress, so people are saying f–k it and leaving,” one source said.

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Democrats Are Clearly Terrified Of An Educated And Informed Public

It’s a strange time in the United States, where one political party is actively engaged in a series of actions to keep as many people as possible ignorant. Ignorant not of one particular event, study, or story, but of so many topics that reality itself” is what they’re ultimately attempting to obscure. It’s evil, honestly, and it begs the question "What are Democrats so afraid of?” The only answer is simple: an informed public.

Communists in the old Soviet Union were terrified that their citizens would discover how well people in the free west were living. There were no bread lines, there were options – lots of options, for everything. This reality worried the communist leadership and would have confused their subjects, much like Bernie Sanders in 2015 lamented the idea that there were too many choices for deodorant and shoes. “You don't necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country,” he famously said.

The great thing about capitalism is you can have both choices and charity. Options matter, and an educated public, free from government tyranny, make choices about those options that is best for them rather than a faceless bureaucrat thousands of miles away imposing what they think is best for you.

The only way that second prospect gains any traction is ignorance. Ignorance of history and how that model has failed every time it’s been tried, and ignorance of information where people are kept in the dark about reality and, therefore, draw manipulated and pre-selected conclusions and act accordingly. This is where Democrats live.

I’ve known Tucker Carlson since we met back in 2008, and I never noticed the horns. Granted, I’ve never touched his head, but next time I see him I will pat it down since I need to know if I’m hanging out with the Devil, as I’ve been told by Democrats, and, while it would be awkward to run my hands through his hair, it beats patting his ass to check for a tail.

What was his sin? Providing more information to the American public on something Democrats do not want us to have more information on: January 6th. He played more video, un-Democrat-approved video, of people in the Capitol building. He exposed truth that contradicted what Democrats have gotten so much political mileage out of, thereby exposing them as liars, both by commission and omission.

You’d think this would be a big story – Nancy Pelosi’s January 6th committee manipulated the public, weaponizing Congress and its subpoena power to influence an election. The Democrats were Putin without invading Ukraine.

Nope. The media – the people who throw out their shoulders patting themselves on the back over their “speaking ‘truth’ to power” tramp-stamp tattoo – had no interest.

Rather than demanding answers from Democrats, who so obviously lied that even Stevie Wonder could see it, the press-credentialed class were incredulous toward Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy for releasing the footage. Journalists upset over the public gaining access to more information, which used to be what they lived for. No questions for any member of the committee, Pelosi, or prosecutors who put a guy away for 4 years claiming he was some sort of violent ringleader, when new footage proved he was escorted by police alone and confronted exactly no one. Cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal is a figure worthy of sympathy and support – hell, he’d have a show on MSNBC right now if he were out of prison – but Jacob Chansley needs to spend every second of his sentence in prison because he dressed weird and upset Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff and Jamie Raskin.

To call the press the flying monkey army of the DNC is to insult fictional flying monkeys.

But it’s not just January 6th the left is circling the wagons to keep people ignorant of, it’s everything. Not a single Democrat asked any serious questions designed to gain information about the origins of COVID at a hearing this week. Those who bothered to show up did all they could to protect Tony Fauci’s reputation. Not a single Democrat expressed any concern for government bureaucrats pressuring social media companies to censor American citizens because they found what they were saying to be inconvenient or wrong. None gave a damn about the express violations of the First Amendment, not one.

It’s not that they do not care – indifference isn’t nefarious, and what Democrats are doing is evil – it’s that they benefit from the lies and ignorance. Most of the left-wing attacks on Tucker and conservative media aren’t on substance – Democrats don’t engage in substantive arguments, they simply dismiss with contempt and move on, preaching only their ignorant choir – they are designed to prevent people from consuming unapproved information. They couch it as “We watch conservative media so you don’t have to” but it’s really “We watch conservative media and lie about it in the hope you never do it yourself.”

Make up your own damn mind. I encourage you to flip on MSNBC every once in a while, if only to keep up with what the enemy is doing. Like visiting a zoo when you’re likely never going to run the risk of being trampled by an elephant, you should at least know what one looks like and is capable of. And when it comes to politics, Democrats are capable of anything. There is no bottom for them, no line they won’t cross. And the only way that works is with an ignorant public. Explains the schools in every left-wing stronghold in the country, doesn’t it?

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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