New study reports that diet cola could increase your risk of heart disease
Nonsense. This study had NO CONTROL GROUP. The authors did not have data on people who drink sugar-sweetened drinks. So there is no way of knowing that the disease noted was due to the sweetener
The reason why big drinkers of diet Coke had more heart disease could be because of the caffeine in the drink, and probably was. Caffeine is a stimulant that can overwork hearts. And the fact that different sweeteners were involved makes it unlikely that the sweeteners were at fault. The various sweeteners are quite different chemically
The academic article is here
Supermarket shelves are lined with ‘diet’ and ‘lite’ options of our favourite beverages – but are we really making the right choice by opting for the seemingly “healthier” option?
A new study claims that diet cola drinks may actually be just as bad – if not worse – for you than a good old fashioned “normal” cola.
Scientists at the French National Institute for Health say consumers should not assume that drinks with artificial sweeteners are a safe swap for sugar.
In a trial published in the British Medical Journal, which spanned 12 years and involved 103,000 people, researchers found that total artificial sweetener intake was associated with increased risk of fatal conditions such as heart disease and stroke.
According to the study, less than a can a day could be enough to cause serious health damage.
“The findings from this large scale prospective cohort study suggest a potential direct association between higher artificial sweetener consumption (especially aspartame, acesulfame potassium and sucralose) and increased cardiovascular disease risk,” wrote Dr Mathilde Touvier, lead author on the study.
“Artificial sweeteners are present in thousands of food and beverage brands worldwide.
“However, they remain a controversial topic and are currently being re-evaluated by the European Food Safety Authority, the World Health Organisation and other health agencies,” she wrote.
The study reported that 77.6mg of sweetener per day was the average for a “high consumer” and 7.5mg per day was low.
This would mean that as little as half a can of diet cola could have negative effects on health.
The data collected from 130,000 French citizens found that a third of people consume sugar-free alternatives – which contain aspartame, sucralose and acesulfame potassium – regularly.
“The harmful effects of added sugars have been established for several chronic diseases, leading food industries to use artificial sweeteners as alternatives in a wide range of foods and beverages,” Dr Touvier said.
“These food additives, consumed daily by millions of people, should not be considered a healthy and safe alternative to sugar.”
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Google, IBM Quietly Backtrack on Race-Conscious Fellowships
Google and IBM are quietly backtracking in the wake of Washington Free Beacon reports about the companies capping the number of white and Asian students whom universities can nominate for prestigious research fellowships, which required that half of each school’s nominees be underrepresented minorities.
Both companies dropped the caps after lawyers told the Free Beacon that they likely violated civil rights laws. The fellowships, which provide graduate students with generous stipends and mentorship opportunities, still ask schools to nominate a diverse pool of candidates, but no longer limit how many whites and Asians can apply.
Just two weeks ago, Google insisted its nominating criteria for the Google Ph.D. Fellowship were legal, describing them as "extremely common" and maintaining that they followed "all relevant laws." Since then, however, the tech giant has replaced its diversity mandates with suggestions. "If more than two students are nominated," the new nominating criteria state, "we strongly encourage additional nominees who self-identify as a woman, Black / African descent, Hispanic / Latino / Latinx, Indigenous, and/or a person with a disability."
The original language stipulated that if a university "chooses to nominate more than two students … the third and fourth nominees must self-identify as a woman, Black / African descent, Hispanic / Latino / Latinx, Indigenous, and/or a person with a disability."
IBM, meanwhile, quietly dropped a requirement that half of the nominees for its Ph.D. fellowship program be "diversity candidates"—after the Free Beacon contacted IBM for comment—and replaced it with a request that schools "consider a diverse slate of candidates."
The original criteria posed legal problems for Google, IBM, and participating universities. Civil rights lawyers told the Free Beacon that the fellowships likely ran afoul of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which bans race discrimination in contracting, and Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bans race discrimination at federally funded schools.
Asked whether the company had scrapped its diversity requirement over legal concerns, a Google spokesperson, Courtenay Mencini, attributed the change to a desire to "clarify our nomination criteria," adding that the company stands by its original statement.
A few schools have already been hit with civil rights complaints over their participation in the Google fellowship. On August 24, emails obtained by the Free Beacon show, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights received complaints against Harvard University, Princeton University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, Duke University, New York University, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Johns Hopkins University, and Carnegie Mellon University.
The complaints allege that these schools are discriminating based on race and sex by nominating students for the fellowship, and ask that each one apologize for the "sexism and racism it has engaged in."
Google and IBM’s reversals come as other corporations face blowback for their own discriminatory policies, some of which are now the subject of major lawsuits. In the past two months alone, Amazon and American Express have both been hit by class action complaints alleging anti-white discrimination. Other companies like Coca-Cola have scrapped race-conscious policies amid legal threats from shareholders.
Some Fortune 500 companies are nonetheless standing by programs that many lawyers say are illegal. The Free Beacon reported in August that Pfizer bars whites and Asians from applying for its prestigious "Breakthrough Fellowship," which Gail Heriot, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, called a "clear case of liability" under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. When more outlets picked up the story, Pfizer followed Google’s lead and insisted it hadn’t done anything wrong.
"All of our actions comply fully with all U.S. employment laws," the pharmaceutical giant told Fox Business. "We create opportunities for people without taking them away from others."
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Good news out of Canada!
James Allan
I’m a native-born Canadian. When it comes to politics I virtually never say, ‘Look at the good news coming out of Canada!’
The left-wing Liberal Party has dominated Canadian federal politics for most of the last century. Recent national Conservative (nickname ‘Tory’) party leaders have been inept; they’ve been afraid of being conservatives or of voicing any conservative policies; they have seemed to function without any value-based anchors (think Scott Morrison); they have regularly adopted the Textor approach to politics for conservatives, which is to park your party a centimetre to the right of the left-wing main party.
All up it has been a disaster electorally as the left side of politics in Canada wins and wins and wins again.
Last weekend, the Conservative party selected a new leader in Pierre Poilievre. This MP would have had zero chance of winning the leadership in Australia because many of his fellow MPs (mostly ‘moderates’) would rather have eaten broken glass than vote for him. But some time ago, the decision of who would be party leader was wholly taken out of the hands of the partyroom and given to the paid-up party membership.
On Saturday, the party membership decision was announced and Poilievre received over two-thirds of the vote. His nearest rival, the establishment ‘moderate’ aka ‘don’t rock the boat’ candidate won just 16 percent of cast ballots.
The first thing Poilievre made clear is that he will not now pivot to the centre.
He has said the Governor of the Bank of Canada will be fired on the first day after he wins an election because of his money printing incompetence these past three years.
Poilievre then repeated his attacks on the bias of the CBC (which is actually a tad more balanced than our ABC). The new Tory leader said he would significantly defund the national broadcaster and that it is not remotely balanced (which is a true statement). Poilievre even went down into the detail of the sort of commentators the CBC brings in and noted they almost all just parrot the left-wing Liberal worldview. Half of the country that disagrees should not have to pay for this.
After winning a few days ago, Poilievre stated that he expected the CBC to come after him – for marching with the truckers whose civil liberties were taken away; for articulating clear conservative policies; and for making clear that the national broadcaster will face financial repercussions from a Conservative government led by him. The strategy is perfect if you believe that the national broadcaster is going to attack any real conservative party and leader anyway.
To quote Shakespeare, Poilievre is making a virtue of necessity.
His other policies include a promise to wind back the regulatory state, to get oil and gas pipelines finished, and to take real steps against politically correct, Woke bureaucracies and even companies.
To say that he has painted the biggest target imaginable on his chest is no exaggeration. And isn’t this splendid… As it happens, the Liberal Party is petrified of Poilievre. He is an adopted baby who grew up with no wealthy parents or any noticeable life advantages. His wife is an immigrant from South America (who has the political advantage of being extremely pulchritudinous).
So, he hates Woke cancel culture. He dislikes the regulatory state. And he is prepared to engage in a front-on battle with the public broadcaster, making that plain before the next election.
Poilievre, despite the name, grew up in Alberta (the most conservative of Canada’s provinces) and only learned French later in life. But his name and now excellent language skills make him a big threat to the Liberals in Quebec. His willingness to stand up against the lockdownistas is now starting to pay significant benefits – he does not concede that the welding people in their homes strategy was a good one.
Friends I know back in Canada who have despondently but correctly predicted a left-wing Liberal win, one after another after another, say that the Tories will win the next election. They are starting to make real inroads into the working class vote. This is the political realignment that benefited both Trump and Boris and that is happening throughout the anglosphere and democratic world.
Rich people now vote left, in general terms. The upper-middle-class, university graduate caste is about the most Woke and left-leaning part of the electorate there is. And another sign of how fighting on values works is that the Green party in Canada is now imploding. You can’t get better news than that.
Anyway, even though Justin Trudeau leads a minority government the other left-wing parties have pledged to prop him up so it could be over two years till the next election. No one knows what will be happening then or who will win. But the omens are good for Conservatives in Canada for seeing a real Conservative party led by a real Conservative win office at the next election. And I cannot remember when I last said that.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/09/good-news-out-of-canada/
******************************************************Another Leftist Attempt to Rewrite Election Rules Goes Down in Flames
Another left-wing attempt to rewrite election rules has gone down in flames. This time, liberals attempted to put a measure on the November ballot to gut election safeguards and skew voting rules in the influential swing state.
But if the left thought it could buy its way onto the ballot, it was wrong. In its rush to “save democracy,” the group pushing the measure—euphemistically named Arizonans for Free and Fair Elections—failed to follow state law.
That’s why a coalition of groups committed to preserving election integrity came together to challenge that effort in court. On Friday, the Arizona Supreme Court agreed: Proponents did not turn in enough legal signatures to qualify for the ballot.
Cue the predictable liberal anger. Almost immediately the left began lashing out at Arizona’s courts for “suppressing democracy.”
In reality, liberal anger is far less principled and far more partisan. The 26-page initiative was a left-wing wish list of loose voting laws. The proposal gutted voter ID and eliminated safeguards against noncitizen voting.
Key protections for mail ballots would have been eliminated, and vote trafficking by political operatives would have been given the green light. It would even have raised taxes to fund politicians’ campaigns.
The measure took all the worst parts of HR 1, Democrats’ failed legislation to launch a federal takeover of elections, and brought them to Arizona.
Arizonans can rest easier knowing they have avoided an election integrity nightmare, but all Americans should take notice. The left is desperate to stop election reform and to instead impose lax rules on the states. But Democrats in Congress failed to pass their partisan election power grab, and states like Georgia, Texas, and Florida have all enacted commonsense laws in the face of left-wing smear campaigns and corporate boycotts.
States are taking the slack out of elections through stronger voter ID laws, cleaner voter rolls, stiffer penalties for abusive vote trafficking, and greater transparency and accountability in elections.
Ballot measures are one of the few avenues open to advance the left’s goals, and it knows it. Already this year, Missouri saw a massive push to remake the state’s entire election system into a complex scheme known as ranked-choice voting that critics point out adds complexity and risks disenfranchising voters.
And in Michigan, a group called Promote the Vote is pushing, among other things, to permanently enshrine weak voter ID laws and mandate insecure drop boxes that can be used in the dead of night.
So far, these ballot measure fights have come to a quick end in Arizona and Missouri. The fate of the Michigan measure remains undecided. But even if all three fail to qualify, the left will keep trying in more states. There are simply so few other options to advance its agenda—particularly in conservative states.
And when a measure eventually does make the ballot, the campaign to pass it will not be a forthright attack on voting safeguards.
After all, polling plainly shows that laws like photo ID requirements are overwhelmingly popular—especially among black and Hispanic voters. They can’t win on the issues, so progressives will claim they are defending elections even as they sell the public on policies to weaken, undermine, or eliminate all the rules that stop fraud and prevent chaos.
The left will not stop, but neither will we. And as this victory in Arizona proves, those committed to preserving the rule of law and the integrity of our elections are winning the fight to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.
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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)
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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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