Australia should heed Robert F Kennedy’s health policy deal with Trump
There is good evidence that ultra processed foods are NOT bad for you:
https://pcwatch.blogspot.com/2024/05/fresh-health-warning-over-ultra.html
But RFK's view is popularly accepted so should win votesWhen Robert F. Kennedy Jr decided to pull out of the US presidential race he approached the Democrats to do a deal. The backing of the great Kennedy name would have probably locked in a Kamala Harris victory.
But the Democrats rejected Kennedy so he turned to Donald Trump and they made an incredible deal that means that if Trump wins, the global food industry and US health will be transformed. Australia will follow.
Kennedy was called a traitor by the Democrats but, according to the opinion polls, the Kennedy support has put Trump back in the presidential race although, as Paul Kelly points, out he has been campaigning badly.
The presidential race in the US is too close for an Australian business commentator to fpredict the outcome. But Down Under we can pick up potentially world changing events in the campaign that get missed in the frenzy of US political reporting.
The Kennedy-Trump deal is one such event.
The Kennedy campaign received high levels of support in some states because he was backed by a massive team of volunteers. Kennedy has agreed to use that team to campaign for Trump in the five key US swing states led by Pennsylvania.
And what makes Kennedy so dangerous to Harris is that his team will concentrate on one issue – the food processing deal Kennedy secured with Trump.
Kennedy has a passion about the health of Americans and believes his Trump deal, if implemented, is a key to improving US health. To illustrate the passion he will take to the electorates I will use his words to describe what is happening on the US health scene and what he will do about it.
Australia has similar problems.
Kennedy: “Today, two-thirds of American adults and half of children suffer chronic health issues. Fifty years ago, the number for children was less than one per cent.
“In America, 74 per cent of adults are now overweight or obese, and close to 50 per cent of children. In Japan, the childhood obesity rate is three per cent.
“Half of Americans now have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes.
“There’s been an explosion of neurological diseases that I never saw as a child. ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, Tourette’s, narcolepsy, ASD, and Asperger’s.
“In the year 2000, the autism rate was one in 1,500. Now, autism rates in kids are one in 36 nationally, and 1 in 22 in California. The screening has not changed. Nor has the definition. The incidence has changed.
“About 18 per cent of teens have fatty liver disease, a disease that primarily used to be found only in late-stage alcoholics. Cancer rates are skyrocketing in the young and the old. Young adult cancers are up 79 per cent.
“One in four American women is on an antidepressant medication: 40 per cent of teens have a mental health diagnosis. Today, 15 per cent of high schoolers are on Adderall and half a million children are on SSRIs.
“So what’s causing all this suffering? I’ll name two culprits. First is ultra-processed foods. About 70 per cent of American children’s diet is ultra-processed – industrially manufactured in a factory. These foods consist primarily of processed sugar, ultra-processed grains, and seed oils.
“Lab scientists concoct thousands of other ingredients to make these foods more palatable, more addictive. These ingredients didn’t exist 100 years ago, and humans aren’t biologically adapted to eat them. Hundreds of these chemicals are banned in Europe, but ubiquitous in America’s processed foods.
“The second culprit is toxic chemicals in our food, medicine, and environment. Pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs, and toxic waste permeate every cell of our bodies. The assault on a child’s cells and hormones is unrelenting.
“It is crippling our nation’s finances. When my uncle was president, our country spent zero dollars on chronic disease. Today, government healthcare spending is mostly for chronic disease, and it is double the military budget. And it is the fastest-growing cost.
“The good news is that we can change all of this, and change it quickly. America can get healthy again. To do that we need to do three things. First, root out the corruption in our health agencies, all of them are controlled by huge for-profit corporations.
“Second, change the incentives of the healthcare system. And third, inspire Americans to get healthy again.
“With President Trump’s backing, I am going to change that. We are going to staff these agencies with honest scientists and doctors free from industry funding. We will make sure that the decisions of consumers, doctors, and patients are informed by unbiased science.”
Back to my words.
If Trump wins and honours the deal (highly likely) allowing Kennedy to transform US food products we will also change because most of the food processors in Australia are foreign owned and follow US patterns.
Like most Australians I am greatly concerned at the health issues that are emerging in our youth. I don’t know whether the Kennedy remedy is the answer but he may be right.
Meanwhile Kennedy will also use his heritage and words skill to add power to his health campaign.
“My uncles and my father both relished debate and prided themselves on their capacity to go toe-to-toe with any opponent in the battle over ideas. They would be astonished to learn of a Democratic Party presidential nominee who, like Vice President Harris, has not appeared for a single interview or unscripted encounter with voters in 35 days,” he said.
“This is profoundly undemocratic. How are people to choose, when they don’t know whom they are choosing? And how can this look to the rest of the world?
“My father and uncle were always conscious of America’s image because of our nation’s role as the template of democracy and the leader of the free world,” Kennedy concludes.
There is lots more to come in this US election campaign.
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Death of the Instagram face: Gen Z embracing unique over perfection
It’s a face that’s become ubiquitous. And it’s at the edge of our fingertips. A quick scroll of social media shows a constant stream of the same face. High cheek bones. Pillowy lips. A dainty nose. A youthful complexion with not a pore, wrinkle or imperfection in sight.
What was once the privilege of an elite few, either by pure luck of the genetic lottery or the financial means to pay for it, is now commonplace. So much so, that it even has a name: Instagram face.
“People don’t even know what a normal person looks like anymore,” says 24-year-old Sydney-based influencer Tilly Whitfeld.
Changing how you look, or age, used to be reserved for celebrities. Getting work done was serious business. It often involved surgery for procedures like breast implants, face lifts or nose jobs. It cost tens of thousands of dollars.
And then came the advent of injectables: anti-wrinkle products can reduce muscle movement, while dermal filler adds volume and can change the shape of facial features.
Kylie Jenner and the power of social media – so those in the industry say – are responsible for popularising such treatments. In 2015 Jenner had her lips injected with dermal filler, aged 17.
It filtered down from celebrity to influencer. And we were taken along for the ride, with our favourite social media stars broadcasting cosmetic injection appointments to their thousands of followers.
Jenner’s famous new features, with the influencers who copied, created a seismic shift, sending droves of young women to their nearest clinic, trying to emulate Instagram face.
It now takes just a lunch break to plump a perfect pout and erase any semblance of the passage of time, sans the price tag or recovery. And without us realising, many women started to resemble each other, asking for the same “work” to be done.
Cosmetic Physicians College of Australasia president Dr David Kosenko says what was once spoken about in whispers has become far more widely accepted thanks to social media.
“There was a trend where people would come in and get their lips done every six months, whether they needed it or not,” Kosenko says.
“And there has certainly been major growth in the younger age groups.”
How many young women are following the trend is unclear, as it’s not a requirement in Australia for clinics to keep a record of demographics.
However, a study conducted last year reports 70 per cent of women aged 18-29 would consider or have had cosmetic treatments.
Whitfeld was one of them. After she appeared as a contestant on Big Brother in 2021, she found herself part of the influencer social scene.
“All of a sudden, the people on my social media were now in my friendship circle. I saw so many people around me doing it (injectables) so I thought I’d do it,” she says.
“I had every second filler company in Sydney sending me messages. To be transparent, I didn’t pay for anything,” Whitfeld reveals.
Instagram was the wild west. Young women, most under 30, were offered hundreds, if not thousands of dollars of work for free. All they needed to do was share their experience.
Nina Vecchio believes she was easily influenced by social media when she started getting anti-wrinkle injections over a decade ago, aged 26. The Sunshine Coast resident estimates she’s spent more than $10,000.
“As soon as I saw a wrinkle, I was straight in getting dermal filler. Not being able to frown was my thing, I didn’t want to frown, “she says. “Social media was just getting big at the time.”
“What I’ve seen mainly over the last 10 years is (social media promotion) gone from information to an entertainment type of advertising,” Kosenko says.
Until now, with the industry in the midst of a shake-up.
Earlier this year, the Therapeutic Goods Administration updated its guidelines so clinics are no longer allowed to use the words dermal filler and anti wrinkle fillers.
In fact, practitioners aren’t even allowed to mention the words “anti-wrinkle” or “dermal filler” without the risk of being fined.
It also means clinics and influencers sharing popular “before and after” photos of their face is a thing of the past. It’s going further with a growing number of young people sharing their journeys of reversing said features on social media.
The #dissolvingfiller has more than 80 million views on TikTok. None of the faces look over 40 and most are women.
Medical professionals are also sharing anecdotes on the rising number of people coming in to have cosmetic treatments reversed as the trend of “cheeks and lips feels mundane”.
I reached out to an influencer who’s shared several videos on TikTok which illustrates her lips shrinking. She didn’t want her name included in this piece, but told me “we are witnessing the death of Instagram face”.
For Whitfeld, the decision to reverse her treatments came after she went under the knife for breast augmentation surgery in August last year.
She says she started to experience side effects immediately. “It was like my body was rejecting the implant,” she recalls.
Whitfeld had explant surgery last month and, despite not having any issues with her other cosmetic work, she’s made the decision to stop all injectables.
“It’s not just me. Five years ago the trend was getting filler in your lips and cheeks. I feel like that’s all changing. Although I do think people are still getting stuff done, they’re just going for a more natural look now,” she says.
She’s in the process of dissolving her filler.
“I’m on my fifth session of trying to remove the filler. And I still have to go back. People don’t realise, you get told it will last six months but it really lasts years and years,” she says. Kosenko agrees, “There have been studies now that show you can see dermal filler still several years later. And it can move, it can migrate.”
Is that why the face we literally saw everywhere is disappearing?
Another theory is it’s generation Z defying the beauty industry.
While gen X and millennials desired and chased perfection, gen Z is destroying it and embracing being unique. And in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis, who can afford to display their wealth on their face anymore?
Vecchio, now 37, says she became more confident in her own skin as she aged.
“I look back at photos from when I was younger and I look ridiculous, what was I thinking? I don’t know where my head was at. I am happy with what I see in the mirror now,” she says.
She’ll never get injectables again because, “I worry about the image I’m setting for my son. I want him to see women who look normal. So, I am trying to be more natural now.”
While some say Instagram face is dead, the allure of anti-wrinkle and dermal filler injections remains strong.
The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency estimates the non-surgical cosmetic industry was worth $1bn in 2023, and it’s increasing.
People are still using injectables, they’re just making it less noticeable.
“Previously, the most common requests centred around more invasive procedures known for their dramatic results,” a doctor working in the field says.
“However, there has been a significant transition towards more subtle enhancements.”
Whitfeld says she’s getting “so many more compliments now I don’t have anything done. My engagement (on social media) has been far higher now I’m posting the health side of things.
“That’s because you can tell when someone is happy inside, they have a glow about them.’’
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Dark Night of Tyranny Descends on Europe. Could We Be Next?
“The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States, and yet lands only in Europe.”
That was author Tom Wolfe way back in the 1970s. He was talking about this curious dynamic in which we hear repeatedly from left-wing commentators and media that America is on the precipice of fascism—but tyranny ends up coming to Europe instead.
Tyranny appears to be again descending on Europe. Unfortunately, in the globalized, interconnected world of the 21st century, I wouldn’t be quite as sure that it won’t land here, too.
Social media have become a “third wave of journalism” as Titus Techera, the executive director of the American Cinema Foundation, wrote Friday in Law & Liberty. The technology has allowed the average citizen and nontraditional journalists to step around institutions and cover stories that might be buried because they didn’t fit a favored narrative.
But our various, interconnected institutions are fighting back and increasingly using government power in coordination with private sector and nonprofit organizations to crack down on unapproved news and opinions.
That appeared to be the case over the weekend when French authorities arrested Pavel Durov, CEO of the messaging app Telegram, outside a Paris airport on Saturday.
According to NBC News, French prosecutors cited “complicity” in facilitating a whole host of illegal activities. The charges included soliciting fraud and illicit drug sales plus 11 other charges that seem like they could be aimed at most other social media platforms, as well.
French President Emmanuel Macron insisted that there had been a lot of false information spread about Durov’s arrest and that France was still “deeply committed” to freedom of expression, despite the appearance of a political motivation.
“The arrest of the president of Telegram on French soil took place as part of an ongoing judicial investigation,” Macron said in a statement posted on X—ironically, another social media platform. “It is in no way a political decision. It is up to the judges to rule on the matter.”
Frankly, when any European leader hollers that they are for free speech it’s about as believable as when Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who prosecuted former President Donald Trump for obviously political reasons (while letting all kinds of criminals walk free), claims nobody is “above the law.”
Maybe there is something to the charges against Telegram. Certainly, there have been serious issues with child pornography and other horrible things being facilitated by social media. But it’s hard not to see this as simply an escalation of what we’ve seen from European governments in recent months, in which free speech has been relentlessly attacked in one nation after another.
Earlier this month, the U.K. government began arresting citizens for posting memes on social media.
That was in response to protests and riots that erupted in Southport, Merseyside, after an 17-year-old son of Rwanda immigrants allegedly stabbed and killed three girls and wounded 10 others at a Taylor Swift-themed yoga and dance workshop on July 29.
It wasn’t enough for the U.K. to repress its own citizens, it tried to reach out “across the pond” and silence Americans, too.
London’s Metropolitan Police chief issued a threat to those posting memes abroad.
“We will throw the full force of the law at people. And whether you’re in this country committing crimes on the streets or committing crimes from further afield online, we will come after you,” Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said in an interview with Sky News.
Thank God for George Washington and the Continental Army, and for the framers of the Constitution, who included the First Amendment to explicitly protect our free speech rights.
While we should be thankful for the patriots of 1776, the European Union and European censorship regimes are nevertheless trying to reach into our country and chill speech anyway.
During the U.K. protests, a former Twitter executive argued in the Guardian that X CEO Elon Musk should be threatened with arrest if he doesn’t control speech on his platform.
EU authorities seemed eager to oblige.
French politician and EU official Thierry Breton—from that land so “deeply committed” to free expression—threatened Musk with siccing the EU Commission on him using the Digital Services Act.
Musk essentially told Breton to get bent. Various free speech groups rebuked Breton, and even other EU officials said that he never received approval to send the letter. Even Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who represents parts of Silicon Valley in California, came out in support of Musk and free speech. Good for him.
But that doesn’t mean the threat wasn’t real.
European countries don’t have the First Amendment, and clearly don’t have much interest in defending free speech. The shallow rhetoric of their politicians means little in the face of authoritarian actions by their governments that increasingly resemble the purer tyrannies of Russia and China.
Unfortunately, many people who hold power in our increasingly ideologically captured American institutions clearly find these European methods of threatening speech in the name of “tolerance” quite appealing.
Retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who was a witness at the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, also seemed gleeful at the thought of Musk being persecuted.
After Durov was arrested, he warned Musk that he could be next.
“While Durov holds French citizenship, is arrested for violating French law, this has broader implications for other social media, including Twitter,” Vindman wrote on X. “There’s a growing intolerance for platforming disinfo & malign influence & a growing appetite for accountability. Musk should be nervous.”
Ah, yes, “accountability.”
When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was thrown into a gulag for questioning the Soviet regime, that was just appeasing the appetite for accountability, right?
Keep in mind that the bureaucratic agencies that represent the real power in Washington are filled with people like Vindman. You don’t think that if they could use the government to stomp on speech they dislike that they would restrain themselves?
If you think it’s improbable that our federal government wouldn’t arrest and imprison someone for posting memes, well, it’s already happened.
Would a Biden-Harris administration use diplomatic pressure to prevent their domestic political opponents from being threatened by censorship from abroad? They seem to be quite happy to use it here.
Western Europe is fast headed toward tyranny and that certainly serves as a dire warning. As thankful as I am for the First Amendment, it remains what founder James Madison called a “parchment barrier” to repression only as strong as the people and institutions willing to defend and maintain it.
The Constitution may buy us time, but the ultimate marriage of American-style wokeness with European-style censorship would mean the end of liberty in the West if it isn’t derailed
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/08/27/how-european-censorship-regime-threatens-american-liberty/
*****************************************************‘Dreams Are Being Crushed’: Gen Z Voter Explains How Biden-Harris Admin Policies Have Caused Young Men To Back Trump
Twenty-two-year-old Gen Z voter Jahmiel Jackson explained Tuesday on Fox News that due to Biden-Harris policies affecting issues like wages and housing, young male voters are shifting toward supporting former President Donald Trump for the November election.
A New York Times/Siena College poll released on Saturday shows men aged 18 to 29 strongly favor Trump over both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. On “The Story With Martha MacCallum,” Jackson, who is a Trump supporter, stated Biden had “crushed one of his biggest dreams” with the botched Afghanistan withdrawal and noted how his friends now struggle to find jobs, earn more money and afford a family and a home.
“My reaction is — well first, when I think about that, I think of when President Biden was first in office when there was a honeymoon period until he tried to pull out of Afghanistan. That’s when he crushed one of my biggest dreams, which was serving in the military right after I graduated college,” Jackson said.
“So then I look at a lot of the friends that I have who are males around my age — they want to have homes, they want to start families, they want to make a lot of money,” Jackson continued. “We all have these individual dreams, and then we start to see that it’s becoming less and less possible. I have guy friends who have finance degrees who are now baristas because they can’t find a job.”
Jackson continued, stating that compared to Trump’s administration, Biden and Harris’ policies have “crushed or hindered” the dreams of many young male voters.
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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