Tuesday, September 5, 2017

September 5, 2017 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

The store clerk fully complied with the robbers, but was still shot in the head.


       Although the North Korean authorities have been emphasizing a "combat readiness" posture for "total war" with the US, the military instead appears far more focused on the acquisition of food.
           "Young soldiers tired of relentless hunger are frequently deserting the army to steal food. Even military officers are encouraging the practice," a source in North Hamgyong Province told Daily NK on August 23. 
              "The military officers are instructing their soldiers, exhausted after training, to eat corn in the fields because war is imminent. They are even threatening their soldiers, saying, 'If you become malnourished despite permission to eat the corn, you will face difficulties.'"
      It brings to mind the old maxim, "an army marches on its stomach."
      Federal authorities have been warning state and local officials since early 2016 that leftist extremists known as “antifa” had become increasingly confrontational and dangerous, so much so that the Department of Homeland Security formally classified their activities as “domestic terrorist violence,” according to interviews and confidential law enforcement documents obtained by POLITICO.
      Note that this means that officials in Berkeley and Charlottesville likely knew that Antifa was considered to be terrorist group at the time that they allowed Antifa to proceed, without interference, to beat up other protesters and rally attendees. That the declaration is now public probably explains why the media has suddenly stopped its praise of Antifa. But, buried deep in the article, is what should have been in the lead: 
      Some of the antifa activists have gone overseas to train and fight with fellow anarchist organizations, including two Turkey-based groups fighting the Islamic State, according to interviews and internet postings.
             The latest evidence comes from data released Tuesday by the international Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study. Its research team recorded the eating habits of 135,000 adults in 18 countries — including high-income, medium-income, and low-income nations — and followed the participants’ health for more than seven years on average.
               Among the PURE participants, those with the highest intake of dietary fat (35 percent of daily calories) were 23 percent less likely to have died during the study period than those with the lowest fat intake (10 percent of calories). The rates of various cardiovascular diseases were essentially the same across fat intake, while strokes were less common among those with a high fat intake.
                 Upending conventional wisdom, the findings for carbohydrate intake went in the opposite direction. PURE participants with the highest carbohydrate intake (77 percent of daily calories) were 28 percent more likely to have died than those with the lowest carbohydrate intake (46 percent of calories). The results were presented at the European Society of Cardiology meeting in Barcelona, and published in the Lancet.
                   “These results point to the fact that human biology is very similar across the globe,” said Dr. Eric Rimm, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “It’s not healthy to eat highly processed carbohydrates no matter where you live.”
                     In a related paper, the PURE results challenged two widely held beliefs about fruits and vegetables. While most dietary guidelines stress the importance of eating more vegetables, among the PURE participants, eating more fruits, and more seeds and beans, was associated with greater benefits than eating more vegetables. Guidelines also tend to stress that if eating some fruits and vegetables is good, more must be better. But among the study participants, those whose diets included three to four servings of fruits and vegetables a day were no more likely to have died as those whose diets included eight or more servings a day.
                       In a nutshell, a healthy diet based on the PURE results would be rich in fruits, beans, seeds, vegetables, and fats, include dollops of whole grains, and be low in refined carbohydrates and sugars.

                No comments:

                Post a Comment

                Weekend Reading -- A New Weekend Knowledge Dump

                Greg Ellifritz has posted a new Weekend Knowledge Dump at his Active Response Training blog . Before I discuss some of his links, I want to ...