Eating your veggies does not stop cancer

My heading above is a bit overgeneralized in that there are some differences between prostate and other cancers but the study is nonetheless a big blow for the veggie evangelists.  It was precisely the veggies most recommended for prostates that failed to have any effect in this study.  So if you have prostate cancer (as I have) order a juicy steak with all the trimmings tonight

Effect of a Behavioral Intervention to Increase Vegetable Consumption on Cancer Progression Among Men With Early-Stage Prostate Cancer

J. Kellogg Parsons with Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all

Findings:  In this randomized clinical trial that included 478 patients, there was no significant difference in prostate cancer progression over 2 years among men who participated in a counseling program that encouraged consumption of leafy green, carotenoid, and cruciferous vegetables compared with controls (hazard ratio, 0.96).

Abstract

Importance:  Guidelines endorsing vegetable-enriched diets to improve outcomes for prostate cancer survivors are based on expert opinion, preclinical studies, and observational data.

Objective:  To determine the effect of a behavioral intervention that increased vegetable intake on cancer progression in men with early-stage prostate cancer.

Design, Setting, and Participants:  The Men’s Eating and Living (MEAL) Study (CALGB 70807 [Alliance]) was a randomized clinical trial conducted at 91 US urology and medical oncology clinics that enrolled 478 men aged 50 to 80 years with biopsy-proven prostate adenocarcinoma (International Society of Urological Pathology grade group = 1 in those <70 10="" 2011="" 2013="" 2015="" 2017.="" 24-month="" and="" antigen="" august="" br="" ct2a="" enrollment="" follow-up="" from="" in="" january="" less="" level="" ml.="" ng="" occurred="" or="" prostate-specific="" serum="" stage="" than="" those="" to="" years="">
Interventions:  Patients were randomized to a counseling behavioral intervention by telephone promoting consumption of 7 or more daily vegetable servings (MEAL intervention; n = 237) or a control group, which received written information about diet and prostate cancer (n = 241).

Main Outcomes and Measures:  The primary outcome was time to progression; progression was defined as PSA level of 10 ng/mL or greater, PSA doubling time of less than 3 years, or upgrading (defined as increase in tumor volume or grade) on follow-up prostate biopsy.

Results:  Among 478 patients randomized (mean [SD] age, 64 [7] years; mean [SD] PSA level, 4.9 [2.1] ng/mL), 443 eligible patients (93%) were included in the primary analysis. There were 245 progression events (intervention: 124; control: 121). There were no significant differences in time to progression (unadjusted hazards ratio, 0.96 [95% CI, 0.75 to 1.24]; adjusted hazard ratio, 0.97 [95% CI, 0.76 to 1.25]). The 24-month Kaplan-Meier progression-free percentages were 43.5% [95% CI, 36.5% to 50.6%] and 41.4% [95% CI, 34.3% to 48.7%] for the intervention and control groups, respectively (difference, 2.1% [95% CI, −8.1% to 12.2%]).

Conclusions and Relevance:  Among men with early-stage prostate cancer managed with active surveillance, a behavioral intervention that increased vegetable consumption did not significantly reduce the risk of prostate cancer progression. The findings do not support use of this intervention to decrease prostate cancer progression in this population, although the study may have been underpowered to identify a clinically important difference.

JAMA. 2020;323(2):140-148. doi:10.1001/jama.2019.20207





Islam teaches hate

During a New Year’s Eve Islamic terror attack that took place in Russia minutes before the clock struck midnight, two Muslim men—Akhmed Imagozhev, 22 and Mikail Miziyev, 18—drove their car into and stabbed to death two police officers, one a married father of four.  Other officers subsequently shot one of the jihadis dead, while hospitalizing the other.

An image of the two Muslim men posing with knives was later found on social media.  Beneath it appeared the words, “love and hatred based on Tawhid!”  This is hardly the first time this ostensibly oxymoronic phrase appears in connection with Islamic acts of terror.  After launching a successful terror attack that killed two policemen in the Kashmir Valley, the militant commander of Kashmir’s Hizb al-Mujahidin—“the Party of Jihadis”—justified the murders by saying,  “We love and hate for the sake of Allah.”

Interestingly, in this otherwise cryptic motto lie the roots of Islam’s conflict with the rest of the world.  “Loving and hating” is one of several translations of the Islamic doctrine of al-wala’ wa’l-bara’ (which since 2006 I have generally translated as “Loyalty and Enmity”).

The wala’ portion—“love,” “loyalty,” etc.—requires Muslims always to aid and support fellow Muslims (including jihadis, for example through funds or zakat).  As one medieval Muslim authority explained, the believer “is obligated to befriend a believer—even if he is oppressive and violent toward you — while he must be hostile to the infidel—even if he is liberal and kind to you” (The Al Qaeda Reader, p. 64 ).   This is a clear reflection of Koran 48:29: “Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah; and those with him are forceful against the disbelievers, merciful among themselves.”

But it is the bara’—the “hate,” the “enmity”—that manifests itself so regularly that even those in the West who are not necessarily acquainted with the particulars of Muslim doctrine sense it.  For instance, in November 2015, after a series of deadly Islamic terror strikes in the West, then presidential candidate Donald Trump said, “I think Islam hates us.  There’s something there that — there’s a tremendous hatred there. There’s a tremendous hatred. We have to get to the bottom of it. There’s an unbelievable hatred of us.”

This “tremendous” and “unbelievable hatred” is not a product of grievances, political factors, or even an “extremist” interpretation of Islam; rather, it is a direct byproduct of mainstream Islamic teaching.  Koran 60:4 is the cornerstone verse of this doctrine and speaks for itself.  As Osama bin Laden once wrote:

As to the relationship between Muslims and infidels, this is summarized by the Most High’s Word: “We renounce you. Enmity and hate shall forever reign between us—till you believe in Allah alone” [Koran 60:4]. So there is an enmity, evidenced by fierce hostility from the heart. And this fierce hostility—that is, battle—ceases only if the infidel submits to the authority of Islam, or if his blood is forbidden from being shed [i.e., a dhimmi], or if Muslims are at that point in time weak and incapable. But if the hate at any time extinguishes from the heart, this is great apostasy!… Such, then, is the basis and foundation of the relationship between the infidel and the Muslim. Battle, animosity, and hatred—directed from the Muslim to the infidel—is the foundation of our religion.  (The Al Qaeda Reader, p. 43).

Similarly, the Islamic State confessed to the West in the context of Koran 60: 4 that “We hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbelievers.”  As for any and all political “grievances,” these are “secondary” reasons for the jihad, ISIS said:

The fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam. Even if you were to pay jizyah and live under the authority of Islam in humiliation, we would continue to hate you.

Koran 58:22 goes as far as to praise Muslims who kill their own non-Muslim family members: “You shall find none who believe in Allah and the Last Day on friendly terms with those who oppose Allah and His Messenger—even if they be their fathers, their sons, their brothers, or their nearest kindred.”

According to Ibn Kathir’s mainstream commentary on the Koran, this verse refers to a number of Muslims who slaughtered their own non-Muslim kin (one slew his non-Muslim father, another his non-Muslim brother, a third—Abu Bakr, the first revered caliph of Islamic history—tried to slay his non-Muslim son, and Omar, the second righteous caliph, slaughtered his relatives).   Ibn Kathir adds that Allah was immensely pleased by their unwavering zeal for his cause and rewarded them with paradise. (The Al Qaeda Reader, 75-76).

In fact, verses that support the divisive doctrine of al-wala’ wa’l-bara’ permeate the Koran (see also 4:89, 4:144, 5:51, 5:54, 6:40, 9:23, and 60:1).  There is one caveat, captured by Koran 3:28: when Muslims are in a position of weakness, they may pretend to befriend non-Muslims, as long as the hate carries on in their hearts (such is taqiyya; see here, here, and here for examples; for other Islamic sanctioned forms of deception, read about tawriya, and taysir).

Little wonder, then, that America’s supposed best Muslim friends and allies—such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar—are on record calling on all Muslims to hate.  According to a Saudi governmental run website,  Muslims must “oppose and hate whomever Allah commands us to oppose and hate, including the Jews, the Christians, and other mushrikin [non-Muslims], until they believe in Allah alone and abide by his laws, which he sent down to his Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings upon him.”

Indeed, because enmity for non-Muslims is so ironclad in the Koran, mainstream Islamic teaching holds that Muslim men must even hate—and show that they hate—their non-Muslim wives, for no other reason than that they are “infidels.”

If Muslims must hate those closest to them—including fathers, sons, brothers, and wives—simply because they are non-Muslims, is there any surprise that so many Muslims hate foreign “infidels” who live oceans away—such as Americans, who are further portrayed throughout the Islamic world as trying to undermine Islam?

In short, jihad—or terrorism, war on non-Muslims for no less a reason than that they are non-Muslims—is simply the physical realization of an overlooked concept that precedes it: Islam’s unequivocal command for Muslims to hate non-Muslims.

SOURCE 
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/hating-and-loving-islam-raymond-ibrahim/?utm_campaign=981570&utm_content=1374688





America is always wrong -- to the Left

After Iran shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, Iranian protesters filled the streets condemning their own government’s war crime while the Democrats and their media blamed Trump.

"This is yet another example of collateral damage from the actions that have been taken in a provocative way by the president of the United States," Rep. Jackie Speier told CNN.

“This is one of these consequences of this escalation and this state of war that we are in. Having foresight and being able to look at what the consequences are of going to war with Iran, I think, is a serious thing and a responsibility of the present commander-in-chief,” Rep. Tulsi Gabbard insisted.

In the worldview of lefties like Speier and Gabbard, Iran isn’t really responsible for anything. The Islamic terrorist state doesn’t initiate anything, it reacts to our provocative actions. When Iran shoots down a Ukrainian plane, that means that America must have done something wrong to cause the attack.

The Left spent the last 40 years insisting that Iran can’t be blamed for any of its crimes because they all originated from America’s support for the Shah. This isn’t just hyperbole. It’s government policy.

Obama told Iran Deal negotiators that, “part of the psychology of Iran is rooted in the sense that their country was undermined, that the United States or the West meddled in first their democracy and then in supporting the Shah.” He urged them to be sensitive to the “defensive Iran that feels vulnerable”.

According to Obama, Iran was developing nukes, not to destroy Israel or create a Shiite empire in the region, but because it was emotionally scarred by the policies of the Carter administration.

Third world foreign policy applied the moral condescension of liberals toward minorities on a global scale. The same social justice mindset that freed underclass criminals from responsibility for their crimes, blaming them on an oppressive society, liberated entire nations of moral accountability.

Iran’s theocracts, like the street corner mugger, are victims of oppression, instead of their agents.

The same simplistic mathematics of social justice divides the world into the oppressors and the oppressed. The oppressors are the strongest and the most capable, the capitalist pigs and the flag wavers of western nations, while the oppressed are anyone who opposes them by any means.

Only the oppressors have moral agency, while the oppressed are reacting to their oppression.

When the Iranian regime shot down a Ukrainian passenger jet, it was responding to President Trump’s oppression, and the entire history of American oppression of Iran going back to the seventies.

Iran didn’t shoot the plane down. 40 years of American oppression did. Just as the homeless guy punching an elderly woman in the face didn’t do it. Gentrification and our class system did.

The Iranian regime didn’t do anything on its own initiative. Just as the guy breaking into your car didn’t do anything. He’s a victim of society. So was General Soleimani. And the guy firing those missiles. Oppressed people don’t have any moral agency. Their only moral activity is resistance. And if the resistance kills a whole bunch of Iranian students in the sky and on the streets, that’s understandable.

As a certain Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter once said of Communist mass murders, “To put it brutally – you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Just think of all those folks flying to Canada as more eggs and the IRGC and Soleimani’s old gang as the makers of the omelets of utopia.

The Left responds to an MS-13 beheading in a D.C. suburb or Iran’s missile attacks on a Ukrainian passenger plane with the traditional retort of moral idiots, “What do you expect of oppressed people?”

Oppressed people have no moral agency. They can’t be expected not to hijack planes, murder millions of Cambodian peasants, rape a girl coming home from work in Queens, or knock over a Korean grocery.

They’re oppressed.

Traditional religion believed that we all, barons and serfs, the rich and the poor, the high and the low, have a moral relationship with G-d. The church of social justice rejected this divine relationship, and instead defined morality by our fixed power relationships with one another. And these relationships were defined by group identities, first along the lines of class, then race, gender, religion, sexuality, and an incoming mass of new identities mediated by the evolving system of intersectional victimhood.

The members of the powerful groups were the oppressive sinners and the oppressed were the saints.

The only law was to challenge oppression. Every crime existed within this struggle, the class struggle, the race war, and all the other manifold conflicts against sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, and all the new isms and phobias, their obvious contradictions irrelevant within the greater context.

It doesn’t matter that Iran kills gay people because the real homophobes are white American Christians. Nor does it matter that a black nationalist attacked a synagogue with a machete because the real anti-Semites are white American Christians. It doesn’t matter that Iran shot down a passenger jet filled with its own people because the real ‘jet-shooter-downers’ are President Trump and his supporters.

The bad behavior of oppressed people is a reaction to our oppression. They internalized our homophobia, racism, mass murder of brown people, and when we’re destroyed, they will be purified.

If you understand, as every true lefty does, that America is the source of the world’s evil, then you understand, as House Speaker Pelosi does, that what Iran did to the jet or its protesters, doesn’t matter.

It also didn’t matter how many millions of people Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and the rest were killing.

The Left defended the architects of a Communist genocide in Cambodia that killed millions because they were only reacting to the crisis of American imperialism. Communist atrocities in China had likewise been a response to United States foreign policy. Stalin’s crimes, including his alliance with Hitler, were excused on the same grounds, as reactions to American and European policies toward the USSR.

Even Hitler was initially defended as reacting to the unfair burdens imposed by the end of WW1.

That is how we get to the notion that Iran can shoot down a passenger plane and it’s our fault.

The Democrats, the media, academia, and the rest of the train of moral defectives and perpetual resistance members building utopia a million regulations and corpses at a time, consider anyone who opposes America, especially President Trump, to be an ally of their righteous resistance.

In this backward calculus, Iran and China are members of the anti-Trump resistance, the vanguard of the oppressed peoples of the world, while the opponents of these totalitarian regimes, who risk their lives to condemn Xi and Khamenei, are running dogs of the capitalist order, and deserve to be shot.

The oppressors are the oppressed. And the oppressed are the oppressors. Freedom is slavery and slavery is freedom. It’s so simple that you don’t need a PhD level course in Orientalism to understand it.

Just spend a few weeks watching MSNBC until your brain melts.

A century of crimes was excused by progressives who saw a struggle between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. The ‘Them’ were flag-waving bourgeois capitalist scum dedicated to maintaining the existing order. The ‘Us’ was a motley crew that included everyone from western academics and reporters, to mass murdering Communists and, in the latter era, Islamic terrorists who toss gay people off buildings for Allah.

What united the ‘Us’ faction was its opposition to the oppressive order of the United States. The members of this ‘resistance’ might express that opposition by murdering millions of Cambodians, starving Russian peasants, shooting Jews, and shooting down Ukrainian passenger planes, but these are reactions to the oppression of the United States. Or, as Rep. Speier describes them, “collateral damage”.

The worldview that allows for the murder of Cambodians who wore glasses or Iranian students heading to Canada assumes that the only true moral end is a world revolution against the primal evil of capitalism, globalism, neo-liberalism or whatever the current term in vogue for the existing order is.

This new world order will be utopian. It will no longer need to massacre protesters in the streets, starve peasants, and lubricate the gears of revolution, socialist, Islamic, or otherwise, with human blood.

But, until that blessed day arrives, no one who works to overthrow the existing order and usher in the new order can be held accountable for their crimes no matter how many millions of people they kill.

The means of the new world order justify any and all of the murderous ends.

The media feels obligated to protect Iran as a member of the coalition of the resistance to America. And to America’s current reactionary incarnation in the form of President Trump, MAGA hats, and flag pins.

It colludes in mass murder by brutal tyrannies in the name of a better world.

This better world, we are told, will end racism. Yet robbing people of moral agency because they are different has always been the real racism. There is no worse crime than taking away a man’s morality.

When the Left decided to treat foreign countries the way that it related to domestic minorities, it signed off on mass murder, and became unable to offer a single intelligent opinion about the rest of the world. Adopting social justice as its foreign policy lens convinced it that other nations hate us not because they have their own motives and agendas rooted in over a thousand years of history, most of which predates our existence, but that they are reacting to us and that their lives revolve entirely around our actions.

Speier, Gabbard, and Pelosi have no notion of the history of Islam, or the historic impulses that drive the ambitions of a Khamenei, Erdogan, or Baghdadi. Instead, the idea that they are always reacting to the last thing we did becomes the explanation for everything. That is why every critique of Israel’s actions in Gaza ignores the Muslim Brotherhood’s legacy going back almost a century to focus on the blockade.

If you are going to build up America, Israel, or even Europe, into the villains of the world, it’s best not to have a sense of history, or any idea of what the world was like before the existence of the United States of America, the reborn nation of Israel, or, England and France, but to believe that there was a primeval world filled with wise Islamic astrologers, feminist Greek warriors, Native American shamans, and African dryads, who would have lived in peace, but for the coming of the Industrial Revolution.

This idiotic romanticism cultivated by dilettantes into good art and then bad politics and worse science has killed hundreds of millions of people in the faint hope of returning to a mystical feudalism where life expectancy peaked at forty and the average person couldn’t read or survive an infection. It’s bad enough to condemn the developed world to this madness, but attempts to implement these collective agricultural utopias left miles of bodies strewn across the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia.

The twisted road to the idyllic utopia also requires believing that the civilized are the oppressors and that the savages destroying civilization have no moral agency, but that their violence has a moral end.

And anyone who accepts that premise believes that terrorists can do no wrong.

SOURCE 






Women Win in Trump's Economy
  
“Women are winning in the Trump economy.” That’s a headline that should be emblazoned on the front pages of every major newspaper in America today and dominating TV newscasts from Boston to Seattle. Yet, isn’t, thanks to the impeachment circus Democrats are using to distract the nation’s attention.

Don’t let them. Employment records are being shattered in real time — elevating our mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts and neighbors with life-changing economic empowerment.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that for the first time in almost 10 years women, have overtaken men in the workforce.

“Women held more U.S. jobs than men in December for the first time in nearly a decade, a development that likely reflects the future of the American workforce,” Amara Omeokwe reported Jan. 10. “The share of women on payrolls, excluding farmworkers and the self-employed, exceeded the share of men in December for the first time since mid-2010, Labor Department data released Friday showed.‘ Adding, "Women held 50.04% of the jobs last month, surpassing men on payrolls by 109,000.”

Thanks to President Donald Trump’s leadership and smart moves with the economy — cutting taxes and job-killing regulations — in addition to other capitalist, free market principles long supported by the Republican party, millions of women across American have now been lifted out of poverty and are no longer reliant on government assistance.

Instead, these women are experiencing hope and the opportunity for brighter futures, a renaissance of the American dream.

Not surprisingly, this is one of the driving forces behind the Democrats hate-filled “resistance” and never-ending persecution of the president, saddling him and his administration with one partisan-fueled investigation after another including the latest impeachment charade. It’s because House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and her comrades at the Democratic National Committee know that without the powerful female electorate in their corner come November, Trump will be reelected.

Hence the radio silence on the campaign trail from Democratic presidential contenders, including candidates Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and their allies in media. You won’t hear any of them touting the record-breaking unemployment numbers for all Americans, especially the historic low of 3.2% for women.

Nor will they mention the 7 million jobs the Trump administration has created since his inauguration — including 500,000 manufacturing jobs –benefitting labor workers.

To the contrary, liberal lawmakers refuse to acknowledge the roaring economy benefitting their constituents or the significant trade deals the president and his administration are putting into place. This includes the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement the U.S. Senate voted 89-10 in favor of on Thursday and the Phase 1 trade deal with China the president succeeded in negotiating this week, benefitting the American worker.

The left’s playbook is to distract voters’ attention from Trump’s many achievements, both domestic and abroad, and flood the news cycle with impeachment talk and other manufactured crises in hopes that we don’t notice our fatter paychecks, blossoming pensions and 401(k)s.

Ludicrous, I know.

All the while, Democrats continue to pay lip service, saying they’re the party for “equal pay,” “child care” and “female empowerment” while the Trump administration is actually moving the needle on all these things.

Reminding us of Benjamin Franklin’s wise words, “Well done is better than well said.”

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.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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