• Destroying Super Immunity & Getting Rid of That Annoying Cough
    Dr. Syed Haider

    I made it through multiple upper respiratory illnesses affecting my wife and kids over the last year without getting sick myself.

    The biggest difference maker seemed to be spending a lot of time outdoors in sunny Puerto Rico.

    It’s not just about the vitamin D that you get in the afternoons, it’s also about the lack of blue light toxicity you get the rest of the day from glass filtered indoor sunlight (or artificial lights).

    Blue light in the visible spectrum needs to be balanced by the naturally present infrared and UV spectrum in natural sunlight. Unfortunately both are blocked by typical window glass.


    Anyway, my long run of seemingly bulletproof immunity came to an inglorious end when I finally succumbed to what had been plaguing my nuclear family for a couple weeks: it began with a tickle in my throat, then progressed to a mild sore throat, stuffy and runny nose, bad a cough, and fatigue. It was rough going for a day or two. Hard to sleep with all the coughing.

    My post mortem analysis of what went wrong: I visited family overseas, where they live in an apartment full of artificial light and not much direct sun. I did my best to get outside, but couldnt do it anywhere near as much as I used to at home. Then (perhaps more or less important?) I started including once a week “stress test days” (nee cheat days) on my carnivore diet. That turned into a general laxity during my regular carnivore diet days, including eating out and being exposed to ubiquitous seed oils.

    Then one day I was enjoying my meat dish at a local restaurant and decided spur of the moment (always a mistake) to try the side dish I would have normally skipped. Unfortunately it was probably the worst possible side I could have indulged in: a nightshade veggie bomb comprising tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant and various kinds of peppers.

    Nightshade vegetables are notoriously toxic (despite mainstream claims that the toxins are neutralized by cooking), especially for those with a history of autoimmune disease, or leaky gut. They are also problematic for anyone with a history of allergic disorders or MCAS. It doesn’t help that traditional methods of picking and preparation that minimized the toxicity for otherwise healthy people are no longer followed.

    Pin on Hold the tomato
    Almost immediately after consuming this side dish I started to feel that first tickle in my throat and it was a slow downhill roll from there. Took 2-3 days, during which I had enough of a chance to head it off with some high dose vitamin C, but I’m one of those people who usually prefers to let nature take its course (maybe don’t do this in our current environment of repeated COVID infections, with all the problems they can bring).

    Once the illness got started I began to notice very clearly that what I ate had an almost immediate impact on how I felt. I think it probably required the sensitization of having been strictly carnivore for weeks beforehand.

    Thank you for reading Dr. Syed Haider. This post is public so feel free to share it.

    Share

    I could tell when I ate high histamine fruits or vegetables that my symptoms would worsen significantly, I might get an instant headache, stuffy nose, worsening cough, fatigue, dizziness, and even occasional anger outbursts that had plagued me before the carnivore experiment.

    All these can be due to histamine intolerance. When you’re sick or already exposed to something that lowers your histamine tolerance, adding histamine-containing foods or those that tend to liberate histamine is just added fuel for the fire.

    Histamine Intolerance Doctor Gilbert AZ
    Anyway this has been going around (not surprising since it is winter). Some people get bad diarrhea, for others it’s the cough that’s the worst.

    If you treat this early in the first day or two you can usually cut it short within the first week. If not then many people end up being somewhat under the weather for a couple weeks and the unlucky ones have lingering symptoms for many weeks. It’s not necessarily anything new, it happened before COVID too. Now people are hyperaware of it, and for good reason, because the current iterations are often due to the COVID bioweapon which damages every organ system.

    Whether or not COVID was diagnosed you can usually treat a cough heavy post viral syndrome with key lifestyle changes like avoiding airway irritants (eg use an air filter) low or even no carb (but first try a good quality medicinal honey 1-3 teaspoons dissolved in warm water 1-3 times a day), avoiding trigger foods, plenty of direct sunlight, good sleep; supplements from mygotostack.com like vitamin C, D, zinc, quercetin, turmeric, nigella sativa; and prescription meds from mygotodoc.com like: ivermectin and LDN (we can’t prescribe codeine for cough online since its a controlled substance).

    Other effective treatments include IV vitamin C, IV ozone, HBOT, or what’s easier and nearly as effective: a home oxygen concentrator a couple hours a day,

    However one of the best and most underappreciated ways to get rid of a lingering non productive (dry) cough is simple breathwork.

    That’s because it’s not always just a persistent infection or inflammation that leads to a persistent cough, it may be that, but it is also often a disordered breathing pattern that can develop after just a couple days of illness. This pattern becomes imprinted on the nervous system and can be hard to shake. The longer you leave it unaddressed the longer it may continue. The more you cough the more likely you are to keep coughing, and the less you cough the more likely you are to stop coughing.

    Now, when most people think of breathwork they think of deep breathing exercises. But deep breathing is usually a trigger for a coughing fit rather than any kind of solution (during my long COVID illness I also found it can also worsen anxiety).

    The real fix for a persistent cough (and anxiety) due to a disordered nervous system is often in breathing less, while becoming aware of the impending urge to cough and trying to head it off and suppress it.

    Practitioners of the Buteyko breathing method have a great exercise for stopping a persistent dry cough.

    Share

    When you feel the urge to cough you press your hand over your mouth, swallow and hold your breath for 5 seconds while telling yourself you don’t need to cough. Then start breathing slow and shallow through the nose, keeping your hand over your mouth. Imagine the air going in one nostril and out the other in a circle (obviously this is not actually happening it just helps keep the breathing light and not irritating to the throat, partly a psychological phenomenon).

    Do this whenever you feel the urge to cough during the day, and you’ll see that it often works rather well and makes you more aware of what triggers the coughing. Unless there is something more serious going on (don’t nocebo yourself, just assume there is not) it usually only takes 1-3 days of this to retrain your nervous system and end the cough for good.

    You can also check out other Buteyko and pranayama yoga breathing methods (like alternate nostril breathing) for stopping a cough on YouTube:


    If there is residual inflammation, often manifested by a post nasal drip irritating the throat leading to coughing fits (easy to test if you have this, just lie down flat and see if you start coughing, or get worse, within a minute or so), it’s also important to avoid trigger foods that raise histamine or lead your own body to release histamine.

    Some common ones include: the nightshades I mentioned (tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, all peppers), bananas, strawberries, mangoes, citrus fruits, avocado, chocolate, dairy, preserved or canned meats and fish, leftover meat and fish, lentils, beans, alcohol, tea, coffee and there may be some that are individual specific (think of any foods that in small or large quantities have caused you problems in the past).

    If you don’t go low or no carb, then also avoid grains until better as they tend to be pro inflammatory.

    Fish oil supplements have a short term anti-inflammatory effect that may lead to a longer term proinflammatory outcome. I’m not clear on all the science and implications here, but you can check out Chris Masterjohn’s work on the topic. Generally speaking it seems to be fine to eat fatty fish for the Omega 3s, but most people should probably avoid the high dose supplementation currently recommended by some groups.

    Another key lifestyle measure that works great for the post nasal drip is lifting your head at night using 2-3 pillows (or a wedge pillow - also helps with chronic reflux), and even propping yourself up against the headboard or wall behind your bed. Might be uncomfortable at first, but it’s better than a night of hacking up your lungs.

    Manage Acid Reflux & more: EZsleep Wedge| EQUANIMO
    I’ve also used pieces of chewed and softened licorice root to help cover up the irritating sensation of a post nasal drip while sleeping.

    Using a neti pot a few times a day may also help with this, and you can add things like turmeric, hydrogen peroxide, iodine, or just go with the usual salt water flush.

    If there is a persistent infection then more drastic measures will be needed including the IV methods mentioned above, and you can consider nebulization of peroxide.

    Promising studies have been done on more exotic methods of relieving a cough such as nebulizing honey, drinking a mixture of honey and coffee syrup dissolved in water, and inhaling a very dilute mixture of capsaicin (from cayenne peppers - which can help with both cough and post nasal drop, and other than snorting or otherwise breathing it in, you can also mix it with honey or water and take it orally as an antihistamine).

    Finally, the most powerful herb I know of for insomnia and anxiety is the sedative-hypnotic mulungu bark, and it is also effective in treating various kinds of coughs.

    Let me know below if you’ve gotten sick this winter, and what you swear by to get better, especially what works for a prolonged dry nagging cough.

    https://blog.mygotodoc.com/p/destroying-super-immunity-and-getting

    👉https://telegra.ph/Destroying-Super-Immunity--Getting-Rid-of-That-Annoying-Cough-03-20
    Destroying Super Immunity & Getting Rid of That Annoying Cough Dr. Syed Haider I made it through multiple upper respiratory illnesses affecting my wife and kids over the last year without getting sick myself. The biggest difference maker seemed to be spending a lot of time outdoors in sunny Puerto Rico. It’s not just about the vitamin D that you get in the afternoons, it’s also about the lack of blue light toxicity you get the rest of the day from glass filtered indoor sunlight (or artificial lights). Blue light in the visible spectrum needs to be balanced by the naturally present infrared and UV spectrum in natural sunlight. Unfortunately both are blocked by typical window glass. Anyway, my long run of seemingly bulletproof immunity came to an inglorious end when I finally succumbed to what had been plaguing my nuclear family for a couple weeks: it began with a tickle in my throat, then progressed to a mild sore throat, stuffy and runny nose, bad a cough, and fatigue. It was rough going for a day or two. Hard to sleep with all the coughing. My post mortem analysis of what went wrong: I visited family overseas, where they live in an apartment full of artificial light and not much direct sun. I did my best to get outside, but couldnt do it anywhere near as much as I used to at home. Then (perhaps more or less important?) I started including once a week “stress test days” (nee cheat days) on my carnivore diet. That turned into a general laxity during my regular carnivore diet days, including eating out and being exposed to ubiquitous seed oils. Then one day I was enjoying my meat dish at a local restaurant and decided spur of the moment (always a mistake) to try the side dish I would have normally skipped. Unfortunately it was probably the worst possible side I could have indulged in: a nightshade veggie bomb comprising tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant and various kinds of peppers. Nightshade vegetables are notoriously toxic (despite mainstream claims that the toxins are neutralized by cooking), especially for those with a history of autoimmune disease, or leaky gut. They are also problematic for anyone with a history of allergic disorders or MCAS. It doesn’t help that traditional methods of picking and preparation that minimized the toxicity for otherwise healthy people are no longer followed. Pin on Hold the tomato Almost immediately after consuming this side dish I started to feel that first tickle in my throat and it was a slow downhill roll from there. Took 2-3 days, during which I had enough of a chance to head it off with some high dose vitamin C, but I’m one of those people who usually prefers to let nature take its course (maybe don’t do this in our current environment of repeated COVID infections, with all the problems they can bring). Once the illness got started I began to notice very clearly that what I ate had an almost immediate impact on how I felt. I think it probably required the sensitization of having been strictly carnivore for weeks beforehand. Thank you for reading Dr. Syed Haider. This post is public so feel free to share it. Share I could tell when I ate high histamine fruits or vegetables that my symptoms would worsen significantly, I might get an instant headache, stuffy nose, worsening cough, fatigue, dizziness, and even occasional anger outbursts that had plagued me before the carnivore experiment. All these can be due to histamine intolerance. When you’re sick or already exposed to something that lowers your histamine tolerance, adding histamine-containing foods or those that tend to liberate histamine is just added fuel for the fire. Histamine Intolerance Doctor Gilbert AZ Anyway this has been going around (not surprising since it is winter). Some people get bad diarrhea, for others it’s the cough that’s the worst. If you treat this early in the first day or two you can usually cut it short within the first week. If not then many people end up being somewhat under the weather for a couple weeks and the unlucky ones have lingering symptoms for many weeks. It’s not necessarily anything new, it happened before COVID too. Now people are hyperaware of it, and for good reason, because the current iterations are often due to the COVID bioweapon which damages every organ system. Whether or not COVID was diagnosed you can usually treat a cough heavy post viral syndrome with key lifestyle changes like avoiding airway irritants (eg use an air filter) low or even no carb (but first try a good quality medicinal honey 1-3 teaspoons dissolved in warm water 1-3 times a day), avoiding trigger foods, plenty of direct sunlight, good sleep; supplements from mygotostack.com like vitamin C, D, zinc, quercetin, turmeric, nigella sativa; and prescription meds from mygotodoc.com like: ivermectin and LDN (we can’t prescribe codeine for cough online since its a controlled substance). Other effective treatments include IV vitamin C, IV ozone, HBOT, or what’s easier and nearly as effective: a home oxygen concentrator a couple hours a day, However one of the best and most underappreciated ways to get rid of a lingering non productive (dry) cough is simple breathwork. That’s because it’s not always just a persistent infection or inflammation that leads to a persistent cough, it may be that, but it is also often a disordered breathing pattern that can develop after just a couple days of illness. This pattern becomes imprinted on the nervous system and can be hard to shake. The longer you leave it unaddressed the longer it may continue. The more you cough the more likely you are to keep coughing, and the less you cough the more likely you are to stop coughing. Now, when most people think of breathwork they think of deep breathing exercises. But deep breathing is usually a trigger for a coughing fit rather than any kind of solution (during my long COVID illness I also found it can also worsen anxiety). The real fix for a persistent cough (and anxiety) due to a disordered nervous system is often in breathing less, while becoming aware of the impending urge to cough and trying to head it off and suppress it. Practitioners of the Buteyko breathing method have a great exercise for stopping a persistent dry cough. Share When you feel the urge to cough you press your hand over your mouth, swallow and hold your breath for 5 seconds while telling yourself you don’t need to cough. Then start breathing slow and shallow through the nose, keeping your hand over your mouth. Imagine the air going in one nostril and out the other in a circle (obviously this is not actually happening it just helps keep the breathing light and not irritating to the throat, partly a psychological phenomenon). Do this whenever you feel the urge to cough during the day, and you’ll see that it often works rather well and makes you more aware of what triggers the coughing. Unless there is something more serious going on (don’t nocebo yourself, just assume there is not) it usually only takes 1-3 days of this to retrain your nervous system and end the cough for good. You can also check out other Buteyko and pranayama yoga breathing methods (like alternate nostril breathing) for stopping a cough on YouTube: If there is residual inflammation, often manifested by a post nasal drip irritating the throat leading to coughing fits (easy to test if you have this, just lie down flat and see if you start coughing, or get worse, within a minute or so), it’s also important to avoid trigger foods that raise histamine or lead your own body to release histamine. Some common ones include: the nightshades I mentioned (tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, all peppers), bananas, strawberries, mangoes, citrus fruits, avocado, chocolate, dairy, preserved or canned meats and fish, leftover meat and fish, lentils, beans, alcohol, tea, coffee and there may be some that are individual specific (think of any foods that in small or large quantities have caused you problems in the past). If you don’t go low or no carb, then also avoid grains until better as they tend to be pro inflammatory. Fish oil supplements have a short term anti-inflammatory effect that may lead to a longer term proinflammatory outcome. I’m not clear on all the science and implications here, but you can check out Chris Masterjohn’s work on the topic. Generally speaking it seems to be fine to eat fatty fish for the Omega 3s, but most people should probably avoid the high dose supplementation currently recommended by some groups. Another key lifestyle measure that works great for the post nasal drip is lifting your head at night using 2-3 pillows (or a wedge pillow - also helps with chronic reflux), and even propping yourself up against the headboard or wall behind your bed. Might be uncomfortable at first, but it’s better than a night of hacking up your lungs. Manage Acid Reflux & more: EZsleep Wedge| EQUANIMO I’ve also used pieces of chewed and softened licorice root to help cover up the irritating sensation of a post nasal drip while sleeping. Using a neti pot a few times a day may also help with this, and you can add things like turmeric, hydrogen peroxide, iodine, or just go with the usual salt water flush. If there is a persistent infection then more drastic measures will be needed including the IV methods mentioned above, and you can consider nebulization of peroxide. Promising studies have been done on more exotic methods of relieving a cough such as nebulizing honey, drinking a mixture of honey and coffee syrup dissolved in water, and inhaling a very dilute mixture of capsaicin (from cayenne peppers - which can help with both cough and post nasal drop, and other than snorting or otherwise breathing it in, you can also mix it with honey or water and take it orally as an antihistamine). Finally, the most powerful herb I know of for insomnia and anxiety is the sedative-hypnotic mulungu bark, and it is also effective in treating various kinds of coughs. Let me know below if you’ve gotten sick this winter, and what you swear by to get better, especially what works for a prolonged dry nagging cough. https://blog.mygotodoc.com/p/destroying-super-immunity-and-getting 👉https://telegra.ph/Destroying-Super-Immunity--Getting-Rid-of-That-Annoying-Cough-03-20
    BLOG.MYGOTODOC.COM
    Destroying Super Immunity & Getting Rid of That Annoying Cough
    I made it through multiple upper respiratory illnesses affecting my wife and kids over the last year without getting sick myself. The biggest difference maker seemed to be spending a lot of time outdoors in sunny Puerto Rico. It’s not just about the vitamin D that you get in the afternoons, it’s also about the lack of blue light toxicity you get the rest of the day from glass filtered indoor sunlight (or artificial lights).
    1 Reacties 0 aandelen 6684 Views
  • Soccer legend Matt Le Tissier tells how he stopped the UK killing program in his sport. Where are the other athletes doing the same?
    Is NO ONE trying likewise to save his/her fellow players in football (American), baseball, basketball, tennis, rugby, golf, weightlifting....? (And what about the footballers outside the UK?)

    Mark Crispin Miller
    Here’s the tweet Le Tissier posted well over two years ago:


    Here he tells of his eventually successful effort to get the Professional Footballers Association to take action—which they did, although without announcing it!

    Click on the link, not the screenshot:

    https://rumble.com/v49rjh3-thank-you-to-the-brave-former-professional-soccer-player-danke-an-den-mutig.html


    https://rumble.com/v49rjh3-thank-you-to-the-brave-former-professional-soccer-player-danke-an-den-mutig.html

    Here is how the PFA identifies itself as terribly concerned about its members’ welfare:

    THE PLAYERS' UNION

    The Professional Footballers' Association (PFA) is the union for all current and former footballers and scholars in the Premier League, the FA Women’s Super League and the English Football Leagues.

    We are committed to helping you understand your purpose as both a player and a person. We provide the information, advice and support you need to help maximise the opportunities that come with playing professional football.

    We’re the only football organisation that solely prioritises players’ needs, and we offer a variety of educational, financial and wellbeing support services.

    Throughout our history, the PFA has been instrumental in supporting the women’s game, decreasing mental health stigma across the sport, leading the fight against racist abuse of players and pushing for research into the links between neurodegenerative conditions and playing football.

    We proudly amplify your voice as a player to ensure your views are properly represented to the game’s stakeholders and governing bodies. We also protect and enhance your rights and working conditions by holding stakeholders and governing bodies to account.

    Our team are passionate about helping footballers navigate personal or professional challenges, and we use our own experiences to relate to players and help prepare you for the future.

    We are here to protect and support you, for football and for life.

    https://www.thepfa.com/about-us

    Note the “woke” touch of that photo on the right:



    https://open.substack.com/pub/markcrispinmiller/p/soccer-legend-matt-le-tissier-tells?r=1tqe1i&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
    Soccer legend Matt Le Tissier tells how he stopped the UK killing program in his sport. Where are the other athletes doing the same? Is NO ONE trying likewise to save his/her fellow players in football (American), baseball, basketball, tennis, rugby, golf, weightlifting....? (And what about the footballers outside the UK?) Mark Crispin Miller Here’s the tweet Le Tissier posted well over two years ago: Here he tells of his eventually successful effort to get the Professional Footballers Association to take action—which they did, although without announcing it! Click on the link, not the screenshot: https://rumble.com/v49rjh3-thank-you-to-the-brave-former-professional-soccer-player-danke-an-den-mutig.html https://rumble.com/v49rjh3-thank-you-to-the-brave-former-professional-soccer-player-danke-an-den-mutig.html Here is how the PFA identifies itself as terribly concerned about its members’ welfare: THE PLAYERS' UNION The Professional Footballers' Association (PFA) is the union for all current and former footballers and scholars in the Premier League, the FA Women’s Super League and the English Football Leagues. We are committed to helping you understand your purpose as both a player and a person. We provide the information, advice and support you need to help maximise the opportunities that come with playing professional football. We’re the only football organisation that solely prioritises players’ needs, and we offer a variety of educational, financial and wellbeing support services. Throughout our history, the PFA has been instrumental in supporting the women’s game, decreasing mental health stigma across the sport, leading the fight against racist abuse of players and pushing for research into the links between neurodegenerative conditions and playing football. We proudly amplify your voice as a player to ensure your views are properly represented to the game’s stakeholders and governing bodies. We also protect and enhance your rights and working conditions by holding stakeholders and governing bodies to account. Our team are passionate about helping footballers navigate personal or professional challenges, and we use our own experiences to relate to players and help prepare you for the future. We are here to protect and support you, for football and for life. https://www.thepfa.com/about-us Note the “woke” touch of that photo on the right: https://open.substack.com/pub/markcrispinmiller/p/soccer-legend-matt-le-tissier-tells?r=1tqe1i&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
    OPEN.SUBSTACK.COM
    Soccer legend Matt Le Tissier tells how he stopped the UK killing program in his sport. Where are the other athletes doing the same?
    Is NO ONE trying likewise to save his/her fellow players in football (American), baseball, basketball, tennis, rugby, golf, weightlifting....? (And what about the footballers outside the UK?)
    Like
    1
    0 Reacties 0 aandelen 6604 Views
  • After having COVID, Christy lost hearing in her right ear. However, after taking ivermectin for three days, her hearing began to return. Watch this uplifting MyStory now.

    Join🔹@Covid19_Critical
    After having COVID, Christy lost hearing in her right ear. However, after taking ivermectin for three days, her hearing began to return. Watch this uplifting MyStory now. Join🔹@Covid19_Critical
    0 Reacties 0 aandelen 823 Views 1
  • The Year that Expertise Collapsed
    Jeffrey A. Tucker
    Getting sick and getting well is part of the human experience at all times in all places. As with other phenomena of human existence, that suggests there is a great deal of embedded knowledge on the topic woven into the fabric of our lives. We aren’t born knowing but we come to know: from our moms and dads, experience of siblings and others, from our own experience, and from medical professionals who deal with the problem daily.

    In a healthy and functioning society, the path toward maintaining personal and public health becomes embedded in the cultural firmament, just like manners, belief systems, and value preferences. It’s not necessary that we think about it constantly; instead it becomes a habit, with much of the knowledge tacit; that is, deployed daily but rarely with full cognizance.

    We could know for certain that there had been a change in the matrix in March 2020 because, seemingly out of nowhere, all of this knowledge was deemed wrong. A new gaggle of experts was in charge, one day to the next. Suddenly, they were everywhere. They were on TV, quoted by all the newspapers, amplified on social media, and on the phone constantly with local officials instructing them on how they must shut down the schools, businesses, playgrounds, churches, and civic gatherings.

    The message was always the same. This time is completely different from anything in our experience or in any previous experience. This time we must adopt a totally new and completely untested paradigm. It comes from models that high-level scientists have deemed correct. It comes from labs. It comes from “germ games” of which none of us are part. If we dare to reject the new teachings for the old, we are doing it wrong. We are the malicious ones. We deserve ridicule, cancellation, silencing, exclusion, and worse.

    It felt like a coup d’etat of sorts. It certainly was an intellectual coup. All wisdom of the past, even that known by public health only months earlier, was deleted from public spaces. Dissent was silenced. Corporate media was absolutely united in celebrating the greatness of people like Fauci, who spoke in strangely circuitous ways that contradicted everything we thought we knew.

    It was exceedingly strange because the people we thought might have stood up to the flash imposition of tyranny somehow vanished. We could hardly meet with others at all, if only to share intuitions that something was wrong. “Social distancing” was more than a method to “slow the spread;” it amounted to comprehensive control of the public mind too.

    The experts instructing us spoke with astonishing certainty about precisely how society should be managed in a pandemic. There were scientific papers, tens of thousands of them, and the storm of credentials was everywhere and out of control. Unless you had a university or lab affiliation and unless you had multiple high-level degrees attached to your name, you could not get a hearing. Folk wisdom was out of the question, even basic things like “sun and outdoors are good for respiratory infections.” Even popular understanding of natural immunity came in for hard ridicule.

    Later it turned out that even top credentialed experts would not be taken seriously if they had the wrong views. This is when the racket became incredibly obvious. It was never really about genuine knowledge. It was about compliance and echoing the approved line. It’s astonishing how many people went along, even with the stupidest of the mandates, such as the distancing stickers everywhere, the ubiquity of Plexiglas, and the dirty masks on every face which were somehow believed to keep people healthy.

    Once the contrary studies started coming out, we would share them and get shouted down. The comment sections of the studies started to be raided by partisan experts who would hone in on small issues and problems and demand and obtain takedowns. Then the contrarian expert would get doxxed, his dean notified, and the faculty turned against the person, lest the department risk funding from Big Pharma or Fauci in the future.

    All the while, we kept thinking that there must be some rationale behind all this madness. It never emerged. It was all intimidation and belligerence and nothing more – arbitrary diktat by big shots who were pretending the entire time.

    The lockdowners and shot mandators were never intellectually serious people. They never much thought about the implications or ramifications of what they were doing. They were just wrecking things mostly for pecuniary gain, job protection, and career advancement, plus it was fun to be in charge. It’s not much more complicated than that.

    In other words, we’ve gradually come to realize that our worst fears were true. All these experts were and are fakes. There have been some hints along the way, such as when North Carolina Health Director Mandy Cohen (now head of the CDC) reported that she and her colleagues were burning up the phone lines to decide whether people should be allowed to participate in sports.

    “She was like, are you gonna let them have professional football?” she said. “And I was like, no. And she’s like, OK neither are we.”

    Another candid moment came five months ago, only recently unearthed by X, when NIH head Francis Collins admitted that he and his colleagues attached “zero value” to whether and to what extent they were disrupting lives, wrecking the economy, and destroying education for kids. He actually said this.

    As it turns out, these experts who ruled our lives, and still do to a great extent, were never what they claimed to be, and never actually possessed knowledge that was superior to what existed within the cultural firmament of society. Instead, all they really had was power and a grand opportunity to play dictator.

    It’s astonishing, truly, and worthy of deep study, when you consider the extent to which and for how long this class of people were able to maintain the illusion of consensus within their ranks. They bamboozled the media all over the world. They tricked vast swaths of the population. They bent all social media algorithms to reflect their views and priorities.

    One explanation comes down to the money trail. That’s a powerful explanation. But it is not the whole of it. Behind the illusion was a terrifying intellectual isolation in which all these people found themselves. They never really encountered people who disagreed. Indeed, part of the way these people had come to conceive of their jobs was to master the art of knowing what to think and when and how. It’s part of the job training to enter the class of experts: mastering the skill of echoing the opinions of others.

    Discovering this to be true is alarming for anyone who holds to older ideals of how intellectual society should conduct itself. We like to imagine that there is a constant clash of ideas, a burning desire to get to the truth, a love of knowledge and data, a passion for gaining a better understanding. That requires, above all else, an openness of mind and a willingness to listen. All of this was overtly and explicitly shut down in March 2020 but it was made easier because all the mechanisms were already in place.

    One of the best books of our time is Tom Harrington’s The Treason of the Experts, published by Brownstone. There is simply not in the present era a more insightful investigation and deconstruction of the sociological sickness of the expert class. Every page is on fire with insight and observation about the intellectual juntas that attempt to rule the public mind in today’s world. It’s a terrifying look at how wildly wrong everything has gone in the world of ideas. A great followup volume is Ramesh Thakur’s Our Enemy, the Government, which reveals all the ways in which the new scientists who were ruling the world weren’t scientific at all.

    Brownstone was born in the midst of the worst of this world. We set out to create something different, not a bubble of ideological/partisan attachment or an enforcement organ of the proper way to think about all issues. Instead, we sought to become a genuine society of thinkers united in a principled attachment to freedom but hugely diverse in specialization and philosophical outlook. It’s one of the few centers where there is genuine interdisciplinary engagement and openness to new perspectives and outlook. All of this is essential to the life of the mind and yet nearly absent in academia, media, and government today.

    We’ve put together a fascinating model for retreats. We choose a comfortable venue where the food and drink are provided and the living quarters are excellent, and bring together 40 or so top experts to present a set of ideas to the whole group. Each speaker gets 15 minutes and that is followed by 15 minutes of engagement from everyone present. Then we go to the next speaker. This goes on all day and the evenings are spent in casual conversation. As the organizer, Brownstone does not pick topics or speakers but rather allows the flow of ideas to emerge organically. This goes on for two and a half days. There is no set agenda, no mandated takeaways, no required action items. There is only unconstrained idea generation and sharing.

    There is a reason why there is such a clamor to attend. It’s the creation of something that all these wonderful people – each person a dissident in his own field – had hoped to encounter in professional life but the reality was always elusive. It’s only three days so hardly Ancient Greece or Vienna in the interwar years but it is an excellent start, and hugely productive and uplifting. It’s amazing what can happen when you combine intelligence, erudition, open minds, and sincere sharing of ideas. From the point of view of government, huge corporations, academia, and all the architects of today’s world of ideas, this is precisely what they do not want.

    The difference between 2023 and, say, five years ago, is that the expertise racket is now out in the open. Vast swaths of society decided to trust the experts for a time. They deployed every power of the state, along with all affiliated institutions in the pseudo-private sector, to browbeat and manipulate the people into panicked compliance with preposterous antics that never had any hope of mitigating disease.

    Look where that got us. The experts have been fully discredited. Is it any wonder that ever more people are skeptical of the same gang’s claims about climate change, diversity, immigration, inflation, education, gender transitions, or anything else pushed today by elite minds? Mass compliance has been replaced by mass incredulity. Trust will not likely return in our lifetimes.

    There is, further, a reason why hardly anyone is surprised that the president of Harvard stands accused of rampant plagiarism or that election officials are deploying sneaky forms of lawfare to keep political renegades off the ballot or that money launderers for the administrative state are getting away with rampant fraud. Graft, kickbacks, bribery, misappropriation, nepotism, favoritism, and outright corruption rule the day in all elite circles.

    In a few weeks, we are going to hear from Anthony Fauci, who will be grilled by a House of Representatives committee on exactly how he claimed to be so sure that there was no lab leak stemming from gain-of-function research being done at a US-baked lab in Wuhan. We’ll see how much attention this testimony gets but, truly, does anyone really believe that he is going to be honest and forthcoming? It is pretty much a consensus these days that he has been up to no good. If he is “the science,” science itself is in grave trouble.

    What a contrast to just a few years ago when Fauci-themed shirts and coffee mugs were big-selling items. He claimed to be the science, and science did rally behind him as if he had all the answers, even though what he advocated contradicted every bit of common wisdom that has always been practiced in every civilized society.

    Three years ago, the expert class went out on the farthest limb one can imagine, daring to replace all social knowledge and embedded cultural experience with their off-the-cuff rationalism and scientistic razzmatazz that ended up serving the industrial interests of large-scale exploiters in tech, media, and pharma. We live in the midst of the rubble they created. It’s no wonder they have been completely discredited.

    To replace them – and this is a long-term strategy and one that unfolds gradually with bold efforts such as that undertaken by Brownstone Institute – we need a new and serious effort to rebuild serious thought based on honesty, sincere engagement across ideological lines, and a genuine commitment to truth and freedom. We have that opportunity right now, and we dare not decline to take up the task with every sense of urgency and passion. As always, your support of our work is greatly appreciated.

    Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
    For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author.

    Author

    Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

    View all posts
    Your financial backing of Brownstone Institute goes to support writers, lawyers, scientists, economists, and other people of courage who have been professionally purged and displaced during the upheaval of our times. You can help get the truth out through their ongoing work.

    https://brownstone.org/articles/the-year-that-expertise-collapsed/
    The Year that Expertise Collapsed Jeffrey A. Tucker Getting sick and getting well is part of the human experience at all times in all places. As with other phenomena of human existence, that suggests there is a great deal of embedded knowledge on the topic woven into the fabric of our lives. We aren’t born knowing but we come to know: from our moms and dads, experience of siblings and others, from our own experience, and from medical professionals who deal with the problem daily. In a healthy and functioning society, the path toward maintaining personal and public health becomes embedded in the cultural firmament, just like manners, belief systems, and value preferences. It’s not necessary that we think about it constantly; instead it becomes a habit, with much of the knowledge tacit; that is, deployed daily but rarely with full cognizance. We could know for certain that there had been a change in the matrix in March 2020 because, seemingly out of nowhere, all of this knowledge was deemed wrong. A new gaggle of experts was in charge, one day to the next. Suddenly, they were everywhere. They were on TV, quoted by all the newspapers, amplified on social media, and on the phone constantly with local officials instructing them on how they must shut down the schools, businesses, playgrounds, churches, and civic gatherings. The message was always the same. This time is completely different from anything in our experience or in any previous experience. This time we must adopt a totally new and completely untested paradigm. It comes from models that high-level scientists have deemed correct. It comes from labs. It comes from “germ games” of which none of us are part. If we dare to reject the new teachings for the old, we are doing it wrong. We are the malicious ones. We deserve ridicule, cancellation, silencing, exclusion, and worse. It felt like a coup d’etat of sorts. It certainly was an intellectual coup. All wisdom of the past, even that known by public health only months earlier, was deleted from public spaces. Dissent was silenced. Corporate media was absolutely united in celebrating the greatness of people like Fauci, who spoke in strangely circuitous ways that contradicted everything we thought we knew. It was exceedingly strange because the people we thought might have stood up to the flash imposition of tyranny somehow vanished. We could hardly meet with others at all, if only to share intuitions that something was wrong. “Social distancing” was more than a method to “slow the spread;” it amounted to comprehensive control of the public mind too. The experts instructing us spoke with astonishing certainty about precisely how society should be managed in a pandemic. There were scientific papers, tens of thousands of them, and the storm of credentials was everywhere and out of control. Unless you had a university or lab affiliation and unless you had multiple high-level degrees attached to your name, you could not get a hearing. Folk wisdom was out of the question, even basic things like “sun and outdoors are good for respiratory infections.” Even popular understanding of natural immunity came in for hard ridicule. Later it turned out that even top credentialed experts would not be taken seriously if they had the wrong views. This is when the racket became incredibly obvious. It was never really about genuine knowledge. It was about compliance and echoing the approved line. It’s astonishing how many people went along, even with the stupidest of the mandates, such as the distancing stickers everywhere, the ubiquity of Plexiglas, and the dirty masks on every face which were somehow believed to keep people healthy. Once the contrary studies started coming out, we would share them and get shouted down. The comment sections of the studies started to be raided by partisan experts who would hone in on small issues and problems and demand and obtain takedowns. Then the contrarian expert would get doxxed, his dean notified, and the faculty turned against the person, lest the department risk funding from Big Pharma or Fauci in the future. All the while, we kept thinking that there must be some rationale behind all this madness. It never emerged. It was all intimidation and belligerence and nothing more – arbitrary diktat by big shots who were pretending the entire time. The lockdowners and shot mandators were never intellectually serious people. They never much thought about the implications or ramifications of what they were doing. They were just wrecking things mostly for pecuniary gain, job protection, and career advancement, plus it was fun to be in charge. It’s not much more complicated than that. In other words, we’ve gradually come to realize that our worst fears were true. All these experts were and are fakes. There have been some hints along the way, such as when North Carolina Health Director Mandy Cohen (now head of the CDC) reported that she and her colleagues were burning up the phone lines to decide whether people should be allowed to participate in sports. “She was like, are you gonna let them have professional football?” she said. “And I was like, no. And she’s like, OK neither are we.” Another candid moment came five months ago, only recently unearthed by X, when NIH head Francis Collins admitted that he and his colleagues attached “zero value” to whether and to what extent they were disrupting lives, wrecking the economy, and destroying education for kids. He actually said this. As it turns out, these experts who ruled our lives, and still do to a great extent, were never what they claimed to be, and never actually possessed knowledge that was superior to what existed within the cultural firmament of society. Instead, all they really had was power and a grand opportunity to play dictator. It’s astonishing, truly, and worthy of deep study, when you consider the extent to which and for how long this class of people were able to maintain the illusion of consensus within their ranks. They bamboozled the media all over the world. They tricked vast swaths of the population. They bent all social media algorithms to reflect their views and priorities. One explanation comes down to the money trail. That’s a powerful explanation. But it is not the whole of it. Behind the illusion was a terrifying intellectual isolation in which all these people found themselves. They never really encountered people who disagreed. Indeed, part of the way these people had come to conceive of their jobs was to master the art of knowing what to think and when and how. It’s part of the job training to enter the class of experts: mastering the skill of echoing the opinions of others. Discovering this to be true is alarming for anyone who holds to older ideals of how intellectual society should conduct itself. We like to imagine that there is a constant clash of ideas, a burning desire to get to the truth, a love of knowledge and data, a passion for gaining a better understanding. That requires, above all else, an openness of mind and a willingness to listen. All of this was overtly and explicitly shut down in March 2020 but it was made easier because all the mechanisms were already in place. One of the best books of our time is Tom Harrington’s The Treason of the Experts, published by Brownstone. There is simply not in the present era a more insightful investigation and deconstruction of the sociological sickness of the expert class. Every page is on fire with insight and observation about the intellectual juntas that attempt to rule the public mind in today’s world. It’s a terrifying look at how wildly wrong everything has gone in the world of ideas. A great followup volume is Ramesh Thakur’s Our Enemy, the Government, which reveals all the ways in which the new scientists who were ruling the world weren’t scientific at all. Brownstone was born in the midst of the worst of this world. We set out to create something different, not a bubble of ideological/partisan attachment or an enforcement organ of the proper way to think about all issues. Instead, we sought to become a genuine society of thinkers united in a principled attachment to freedom but hugely diverse in specialization and philosophical outlook. It’s one of the few centers where there is genuine interdisciplinary engagement and openness to new perspectives and outlook. All of this is essential to the life of the mind and yet nearly absent in academia, media, and government today. We’ve put together a fascinating model for retreats. We choose a comfortable venue where the food and drink are provided and the living quarters are excellent, and bring together 40 or so top experts to present a set of ideas to the whole group. Each speaker gets 15 minutes and that is followed by 15 minutes of engagement from everyone present. Then we go to the next speaker. This goes on all day and the evenings are spent in casual conversation. As the organizer, Brownstone does not pick topics or speakers but rather allows the flow of ideas to emerge organically. This goes on for two and a half days. There is no set agenda, no mandated takeaways, no required action items. There is only unconstrained idea generation and sharing. There is a reason why there is such a clamor to attend. It’s the creation of something that all these wonderful people – each person a dissident in his own field – had hoped to encounter in professional life but the reality was always elusive. It’s only three days so hardly Ancient Greece or Vienna in the interwar years but it is an excellent start, and hugely productive and uplifting. It’s amazing what can happen when you combine intelligence, erudition, open minds, and sincere sharing of ideas. From the point of view of government, huge corporations, academia, and all the architects of today’s world of ideas, this is precisely what they do not want. The difference between 2023 and, say, five years ago, is that the expertise racket is now out in the open. Vast swaths of society decided to trust the experts for a time. They deployed every power of the state, along with all affiliated institutions in the pseudo-private sector, to browbeat and manipulate the people into panicked compliance with preposterous antics that never had any hope of mitigating disease. Look where that got us. The experts have been fully discredited. Is it any wonder that ever more people are skeptical of the same gang’s claims about climate change, diversity, immigration, inflation, education, gender transitions, or anything else pushed today by elite minds? Mass compliance has been replaced by mass incredulity. Trust will not likely return in our lifetimes. There is, further, a reason why hardly anyone is surprised that the president of Harvard stands accused of rampant plagiarism or that election officials are deploying sneaky forms of lawfare to keep political renegades off the ballot or that money launderers for the administrative state are getting away with rampant fraud. Graft, kickbacks, bribery, misappropriation, nepotism, favoritism, and outright corruption rule the day in all elite circles. In a few weeks, we are going to hear from Anthony Fauci, who will be grilled by a House of Representatives committee on exactly how he claimed to be so sure that there was no lab leak stemming from gain-of-function research being done at a US-baked lab in Wuhan. We’ll see how much attention this testimony gets but, truly, does anyone really believe that he is going to be honest and forthcoming? It is pretty much a consensus these days that he has been up to no good. If he is “the science,” science itself is in grave trouble. What a contrast to just a few years ago when Fauci-themed shirts and coffee mugs were big-selling items. He claimed to be the science, and science did rally behind him as if he had all the answers, even though what he advocated contradicted every bit of common wisdom that has always been practiced in every civilized society. Three years ago, the expert class went out on the farthest limb one can imagine, daring to replace all social knowledge and embedded cultural experience with their off-the-cuff rationalism and scientistic razzmatazz that ended up serving the industrial interests of large-scale exploiters in tech, media, and pharma. We live in the midst of the rubble they created. It’s no wonder they have been completely discredited. To replace them – and this is a long-term strategy and one that unfolds gradually with bold efforts such as that undertaken by Brownstone Institute – we need a new and serious effort to rebuild serious thought based on honesty, sincere engagement across ideological lines, and a genuine commitment to truth and freedom. We have that opportunity right now, and we dare not decline to take up the task with every sense of urgency and passion. As always, your support of our work is greatly appreciated. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author. Author Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. View all posts Your financial backing of Brownstone Institute goes to support writers, lawyers, scientists, economists, and other people of courage who have been professionally purged and displaced during the upheaval of our times. You can help get the truth out through their ongoing work. https://brownstone.org/articles/the-year-that-expertise-collapsed/
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    The Year that Expertise Collapsed ⋆ Brownstone Institute
    To replace the expert class, we need a new and serious effort to rebuild serious thought based on honesty, sincere engagement across ideological lines, and a genuine commitment to truth and freedom. We have that opportunity right now, and we dare not decline to take up the task with every sense of urgency and passion. As always, your support of our work is greatly appreciated.
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  • Israel’s Genocide Betrays the Holocaust
    By obscuring and falsifying the lessons of the Holocaust we perpetuate the evil that defined it.

    Chris Hedges

    Never Again and Again and Again - by Mr. Fish

    Israel’s lebensraum master plan for Gaza, borrowed from the Nazi’s depopulation of Jewish ghettos, is clear. Destroy infrastrutrue, medical facilities and sanitation, including access to clean water. Block shipments of food and fuel. Unleash indiscriminate industrial violence to kill and wound hundreds a day. Let starvation — the U.N. estimates that more than half a million people are already starving — and epidemics of infectious diseases, along with the daily massacres and the displacement of Palestinians from their homes, turn Gaza into a mortuary. The Palestinians are being forced to choose between death from bombs, disease, exposure or starvation or being driven from their homeland.

    There will soon reach a point where death will be so ubiquitous that deportation - for those who want to live - will be the only option.

    Danny Danon, Israel's former Ambassador to the U.N. and a close ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told Israel’s Kan Bet radio that he has been contacted by “countries in Latin America and Africa that are willing to absorb refugees from the Gaza Strip.” “We have to make it easier for Gazans to leave for other countries,” he said. “I'm talking about voluntary migration by Palestinians who want to leave.”

    The problem for now “is countries that are willing to absorb them, and we're working on this,” Netanyahu told Likud Knesset members.

    In the Warsaw Ghetto, the Germans handed out three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to anyone who “voluntarily” registered for deportation. “There were times when hundreds of people had to wait in line for several hours to be ‘deported,’” Marek Edelman, one of the commanders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, writes in “The Ghetto Fights.” “The number of people anxious to obtain three kilograms of bread was such that the transports, now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people, could not accommodate them all.”

    The Nazis shipped their victims to death camps. The Israelis will ship their victims to squalid refugee camps in countries outside of Israel. Israeli leaders are also cynically advertising the proposed ethnic cleansing as voluntary and a humanitarian gesture to solve the catastrophe they created.

    This is the plan. No one, especially the Biden administration, intends to stop it.

    The most disturbing lesson I learned while covering armed conflicts for two decades is that we all have the capacity, with little prodding, to become willing executioners. The line between the victim and the victimizer is razor thin. The dark lusts of racial and ethnic supremacy, of vengeance and hate, of the eradication of those we condemn as embodying evil, are poisons that are not circumscribed by race, nationality, ethnicity or religion. We can all become Nazis. It takes very little. And if we do not stand in eternal vigilance over evil — our evil — we become, like those carrying out the mass killing in Gaza, monsters.

    The cries of those expiring under the rubble in Gaza are the cries of the boys and men executed by the Bosnian Serbs at Srebrenica, the over 1.5 million Cambodians killed by the Khmer Rouge, the thousands of Tutsi families burned alive in churches and the tens of thousands of Jews executed by the Einsatzgruppen at Babi Yar in Ukraine. The Holocaust is not an historical relic. It lives, lurking in the shadows, waiting to ignite its vicious contagion.

    We were warned. Raul Hilberg. Primo Levi. Bruno Bettelheim. Hannah Arendt. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. They understood the dark recesses of the human spirit. But this truth is bitter and hard to confront. We prefer the myth. We prefer to see in our own kind, our own race, our own ethnicity, our own nation, our own religion, superior virtues. We prefer to sanctify our hatred. Some of those who bore witness to this awful truth, including Levi, Bettelheim, Jean Améry, the author of “At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities,” and Tadeusz Borowski, who wrote “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” committed suicide. The German playwright and revolutionary Ernst Toller, unable to rouse an indifferent world to assist victims and refugees from the Spanish Civil War, hanged himself in 1939 in a room at the Mayflower Hotel in New York City. On his hotel desk were photos of dead Spanish children.

    “Most people have no imagination,” Toller writes. “If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother? Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth.”

    Primo Levi railed against the false, morally uplifting narrative of the Holocaust that culminates in the creation of the state of Israel — a narrative embraced by the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. The contemporary history of the Third Reich, he writes, could be “reread as a war against memory, an Orwellian falsification of memory, falsification of reality, negation of reality.” He wonders if “we who have returned” have “been able to understand and make others understand our experience.”

    Levi saw us reflected in Chaim Rumkowski, the Nazi collaborator and tyrannical leader of the Łódź Ghetto. Rumkowski sold out his fellow Jews for privilege and power, although he was sent to Auschwitz on the final transport where Jewish Sonderkommando — prisoners forced to help herd victims into the gas chambers and dispose of their bodies — in an act of vengeance reportedly beat him to death outside a crematorium.

    “We are all mirrored in Rumkowski,” Levi reminds us. “His ambiguity is ours, it is our second nature, we hybrids molded from clay and spirit. His fever is ours, the fever of Western civilization, that ‘descends into hell with trumpets and drums,’ and its miserable adornments are the distorting image of our symbols of social prestige.” We, like Rumkowski, “are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our essential fragility. Willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting.”

    Levi insists that the camps “could not be reduced to the two blocks of victims and persecutors.” He argues, “It is naive, absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal system such as National Socialism sanctifies its victims; on the contrary; it degrades them, it makes them resemble itself.” He chronicles what he called the “gray zone” between corruption and collaboration. The world, he writes, is not black and white, “but a vast zone of gray consciences that stands between the great men of evil and the pure victims.” We all inhabit this gray zone. We all can be induced to become part of the apparatus of death for trivial reasons and paltry rewards. This is the terrifying truth of the Holocaust.

    It is hard not to be cynical about the plethora of university courses about the Holocaust given the censorship and banning of groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace, imposed by university administrations. What is the point of studying the Holocaust if not to understand its fundamental lesson — when you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable? It is hard not to be cynical about the “humanitarian interventionists” — Barack Obama, Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Samantha Power — who talk in sanctimonious rhymes about the “Responsibility to Protect” but are silent about war crimes when speaking out would threaten their status and careers. None of the “humanitarian interventions” they championed, from Bosnia to Libya, come close to replicating the suffering and slaughter in Gaza. But there is a cost to defending Palestinians, a cost they do not intend to pay. There is nothing moral about denouncing slavery, the Holocaust or dictatorial regimes that oppose the United States. All it means is you champion the dominant narrative.

    The moral universe has been turned upside down. Those who oppose genocide are accused of advocating it. Those who carry out genocide are said to have the right to “defend” themselves. Vetoing ceasefires and providing 2,000-pound bombs to Israel that throw out metal fragments for thousands of feet is the road to peace. Refusing to negotiate with Hamas will free the hostages. Bombing hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, ambulances and refugee camps, along with killing three former Israeli hostages, stripped to the waist, waving an improvised white flag and calling out for help in Hebrew, are routine acts of war. Killing over 21,300 people, including more than 7,700 children, injuring over 55,000 and rendering nearly all of the 2.3 million people in Gaza homeless, is a way to “deradicalize” Palestinians. None of this makes sense, as protesters around the world realize.

    A new world is being born. It is a world where the old rules, more often honored in the breach than the observance, no longer matter. It is a world where vast bureaucratic structures and technologically advanced systems carry out in public view vast killing projects. The industrialized nations, weakened, fearful of global chaos, are sending an ominous message to the Global South and anyone who might think of revolt — we will kill you without restraint.

    One day, we will all be Palestinians.

    “I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization, and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms,” Christopher R. Browning writes in Ordinary Men, about a German reserve police battalion in World War Two that was ultimately responsible for the murder of 83,000 Jews. “In such a world, I fear, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce ‘ordinary men’ to become their ‘willing executioners.’”

    Evil is protean. It mutates. It finds new forms and new expressions. Germany orchestrated the murder of six million Jews, as well as over six million Gypsies, Poles, homosexuals, communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasons, artists, journalists, Soviet prisoners of war, people with physical and intellectual disabilities and political opponents. It immediately set out after the war to expiate itself for its crimes. It deftly transferred its racism and demonization to Muslims, with racial supremacy remaining firmly rooted in the German psyche. At the same time, Germany and the U.S. rehabilitated thousands of former Nazis, especially from the intelligence services and the scientific community, and did little to prosecute those who directed Nazi war crimes. Germany today is Israel’s second largest arms supplier following the U.S.

    The supposed campaign against anti-Semitism, interpreted as any statement that is critical of the State of Israel or denounces the genocide, is in fact the championing of White Power. It is why the German state, which has effectively criminalized support for the Palestinians, and the most retrograde white supremists in the United States, justify the carnage. Germany’s long relationship with Israel, including paying over $90 billion since 1945 in reparations to Holocaust survivors and their heirs, is not about atonement, as the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé writes, but blackmail.

    “The argument for a Jewish state as compensation for the Holocaust was a powerful argument, so powerful that nobody listened to the outright rejection of the U.N. solution by the overwhelming majority of the people of Palestine,” Pappé writes. “What comes out clearly is a European wish to atone. The basic and natural rights of the Palestinians should be sidelined, dwarfed and forgotten altogether for the sake of the forgiveness that Europe was seeking from the newly formed Jewish state. It was much easier to rectify the Nazi evil vis-à -vis a Zionist movement than facing the Jews of the world in general. It was less complex and, more importantly, it did not involve facing the victims of the Holocaust themselves, but rather a state that claimed to represent them. The price for this more convenient atonement was robbing the Palestinians of every basic and natural right they had and allowing the Zionist movement to ethnically cleanse them without fear of any rebuke or condemnation.”

    The Holocaust was weaponized from almost the moment Israel was founded. It was bastardized to serve the apartheid state. If we forget the lessons of the Holocaust, we forget who we are and what we are capable of becoming. We seek our moral worth in the past, rather than the present. We condemn others, including the Palestinians, to an endless cycle of slaughter. We become the evil we abhor. We consecrate the horror.

    Share

    https://open.substack.com/pub/chrishedges/p/israels-genocide-betrays-the-holocaust?r=29hg4d&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
    Israel’s Genocide Betrays the Holocaust By obscuring and falsifying the lessons of the Holocaust we perpetuate the evil that defined it. Chris Hedges Never Again and Again and Again - by Mr. Fish Israel’s lebensraum master plan for Gaza, borrowed from the Nazi’s depopulation of Jewish ghettos, is clear. Destroy infrastrutrue, medical facilities and sanitation, including access to clean water. Block shipments of food and fuel. Unleash indiscriminate industrial violence to kill and wound hundreds a day. Let starvation — the U.N. estimates that more than half a million people are already starving — and epidemics of infectious diseases, along with the daily massacres and the displacement of Palestinians from their homes, turn Gaza into a mortuary. The Palestinians are being forced to choose between death from bombs, disease, exposure or starvation or being driven from their homeland. There will soon reach a point where death will be so ubiquitous that deportation - for those who want to live - will be the only option. Danny Danon, Israel's former Ambassador to the U.N. and a close ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told Israel’s Kan Bet radio that he has been contacted by “countries in Latin America and Africa that are willing to absorb refugees from the Gaza Strip.” “We have to make it easier for Gazans to leave for other countries,” he said. “I'm talking about voluntary migration by Palestinians who want to leave.” The problem for now “is countries that are willing to absorb them, and we're working on this,” Netanyahu told Likud Knesset members. In the Warsaw Ghetto, the Germans handed out three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to anyone who “voluntarily” registered for deportation. “There were times when hundreds of people had to wait in line for several hours to be ‘deported,’” Marek Edelman, one of the commanders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, writes in “The Ghetto Fights.” “The number of people anxious to obtain three kilograms of bread was such that the transports, now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people, could not accommodate them all.” The Nazis shipped their victims to death camps. The Israelis will ship their victims to squalid refugee camps in countries outside of Israel. Israeli leaders are also cynically advertising the proposed ethnic cleansing as voluntary and a humanitarian gesture to solve the catastrophe they created. This is the plan. No one, especially the Biden administration, intends to stop it. The most disturbing lesson I learned while covering armed conflicts for two decades is that we all have the capacity, with little prodding, to become willing executioners. The line between the victim and the victimizer is razor thin. The dark lusts of racial and ethnic supremacy, of vengeance and hate, of the eradication of those we condemn as embodying evil, are poisons that are not circumscribed by race, nationality, ethnicity or religion. We can all become Nazis. It takes very little. And if we do not stand in eternal vigilance over evil — our evil — we become, like those carrying out the mass killing in Gaza, monsters. The cries of those expiring under the rubble in Gaza are the cries of the boys and men executed by the Bosnian Serbs at Srebrenica, the over 1.5 million Cambodians killed by the Khmer Rouge, the thousands of Tutsi families burned alive in churches and the tens of thousands of Jews executed by the Einsatzgruppen at Babi Yar in Ukraine. The Holocaust is not an historical relic. It lives, lurking in the shadows, waiting to ignite its vicious contagion. We were warned. Raul Hilberg. Primo Levi. Bruno Bettelheim. Hannah Arendt. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. They understood the dark recesses of the human spirit. But this truth is bitter and hard to confront. We prefer the myth. We prefer to see in our own kind, our own race, our own ethnicity, our own nation, our own religion, superior virtues. We prefer to sanctify our hatred. Some of those who bore witness to this awful truth, including Levi, Bettelheim, Jean Améry, the author of “At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities,” and Tadeusz Borowski, who wrote “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” committed suicide. The German playwright and revolutionary Ernst Toller, unable to rouse an indifferent world to assist victims and refugees from the Spanish Civil War, hanged himself in 1939 in a room at the Mayflower Hotel in New York City. On his hotel desk were photos of dead Spanish children. “Most people have no imagination,” Toller writes. “If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother? Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth.” Primo Levi railed against the false, morally uplifting narrative of the Holocaust that culminates in the creation of the state of Israel — a narrative embraced by the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. The contemporary history of the Third Reich, he writes, could be “reread as a war against memory, an Orwellian falsification of memory, falsification of reality, negation of reality.” He wonders if “we who have returned” have “been able to understand and make others understand our experience.” Levi saw us reflected in Chaim Rumkowski, the Nazi collaborator and tyrannical leader of the Łódź Ghetto. Rumkowski sold out his fellow Jews for privilege and power, although he was sent to Auschwitz on the final transport where Jewish Sonderkommando — prisoners forced to help herd victims into the gas chambers and dispose of their bodies — in an act of vengeance reportedly beat him to death outside a crematorium. “We are all mirrored in Rumkowski,” Levi reminds us. “His ambiguity is ours, it is our second nature, we hybrids molded from clay and spirit. His fever is ours, the fever of Western civilization, that ‘descends into hell with trumpets and drums,’ and its miserable adornments are the distorting image of our symbols of social prestige.” We, like Rumkowski, “are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our essential fragility. Willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting.” Levi insists that the camps “could not be reduced to the two blocks of victims and persecutors.” He argues, “It is naive, absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal system such as National Socialism sanctifies its victims; on the contrary; it degrades them, it makes them resemble itself.” He chronicles what he called the “gray zone” between corruption and collaboration. The world, he writes, is not black and white, “but a vast zone of gray consciences that stands between the great men of evil and the pure victims.” We all inhabit this gray zone. We all can be induced to become part of the apparatus of death for trivial reasons and paltry rewards. This is the terrifying truth of the Holocaust. It is hard not to be cynical about the plethora of university courses about the Holocaust given the censorship and banning of groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace, imposed by university administrations. What is the point of studying the Holocaust if not to understand its fundamental lesson — when you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable? It is hard not to be cynical about the “humanitarian interventionists” — Barack Obama, Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Samantha Power — who talk in sanctimonious rhymes about the “Responsibility to Protect” but are silent about war crimes when speaking out would threaten their status and careers. None of the “humanitarian interventions” they championed, from Bosnia to Libya, come close to replicating the suffering and slaughter in Gaza. But there is a cost to defending Palestinians, a cost they do not intend to pay. There is nothing moral about denouncing slavery, the Holocaust or dictatorial regimes that oppose the United States. All it means is you champion the dominant narrative. The moral universe has been turned upside down. Those who oppose genocide are accused of advocating it. Those who carry out genocide are said to have the right to “defend” themselves. Vetoing ceasefires and providing 2,000-pound bombs to Israel that throw out metal fragments for thousands of feet is the road to peace. Refusing to negotiate with Hamas will free the hostages. Bombing hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, ambulances and refugee camps, along with killing three former Israeli hostages, stripped to the waist, waving an improvised white flag and calling out for help in Hebrew, are routine acts of war. Killing over 21,300 people, including more than 7,700 children, injuring over 55,000 and rendering nearly all of the 2.3 million people in Gaza homeless, is a way to “deradicalize” Palestinians. None of this makes sense, as protesters around the world realize. A new world is being born. It is a world where the old rules, more often honored in the breach than the observance, no longer matter. It is a world where vast bureaucratic structures and technologically advanced systems carry out in public view vast killing projects. The industrialized nations, weakened, fearful of global chaos, are sending an ominous message to the Global South and anyone who might think of revolt — we will kill you without restraint. One day, we will all be Palestinians. “I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization, and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms,” Christopher R. Browning writes in Ordinary Men, about a German reserve police battalion in World War Two that was ultimately responsible for the murder of 83,000 Jews. “In such a world, I fear, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce ‘ordinary men’ to become their ‘willing executioners.’” Evil is protean. It mutates. It finds new forms and new expressions. Germany orchestrated the murder of six million Jews, as well as over six million Gypsies, Poles, homosexuals, communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasons, artists, journalists, Soviet prisoners of war, people with physical and intellectual disabilities and political opponents. It immediately set out after the war to expiate itself for its crimes. It deftly transferred its racism and demonization to Muslims, with racial supremacy remaining firmly rooted in the German psyche. At the same time, Germany and the U.S. rehabilitated thousands of former Nazis, especially from the intelligence services and the scientific community, and did little to prosecute those who directed Nazi war crimes. Germany today is Israel’s second largest arms supplier following the U.S. The supposed campaign against anti-Semitism, interpreted as any statement that is critical of the State of Israel or denounces the genocide, is in fact the championing of White Power. It is why the German state, which has effectively criminalized support for the Palestinians, and the most retrograde white supremists in the United States, justify the carnage. Germany’s long relationship with Israel, including paying over $90 billion since 1945 in reparations to Holocaust survivors and their heirs, is not about atonement, as the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé writes, but blackmail. “The argument for a Jewish state as compensation for the Holocaust was a powerful argument, so powerful that nobody listened to the outright rejection of the U.N. solution by the overwhelming majority of the people of Palestine,” Pappé writes. “What comes out clearly is a European wish to atone. The basic and natural rights of the Palestinians should be sidelined, dwarfed and forgotten altogether for the sake of the forgiveness that Europe was seeking from the newly formed Jewish state. It was much easier to rectify the Nazi evil vis-à -vis a Zionist movement than facing the Jews of the world in general. It was less complex and, more importantly, it did not involve facing the victims of the Holocaust themselves, but rather a state that claimed to represent them. The price for this more convenient atonement was robbing the Palestinians of every basic and natural right they had and allowing the Zionist movement to ethnically cleanse them without fear of any rebuke or condemnation.” The Holocaust was weaponized from almost the moment Israel was founded. It was bastardized to serve the apartheid state. If we forget the lessons of the Holocaust, we forget who we are and what we are capable of becoming. We seek our moral worth in the past, rather than the present. We condemn others, including the Palestinians, to an endless cycle of slaughter. We become the evil we abhor. We consecrate the horror. Share https://open.substack.com/pub/chrishedges/p/israels-genocide-betrays-the-holocaust?r=29hg4d&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
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    Israel’s Genocide Betrays the Holocaust
    By obscuring and falsifying the lessons of the Holocaust we perpetuate the evil that defined it.
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  • The U.S. government is poised to withdraw longstanding warnings about cholesterol
    Peter Whoriskey

    Time to put eggs back on the menu? (Deb Lindsey for The Washington Post)
    The nation’s top nutrition advisory panel has decided to drop its caution about eating cholesterol-laden food, a move that could undo almost 40 years of government warnings about its consumption.

    The group’s finding that cholesterol in the diet need no longer be considered a “nutrient of concern” stands in contrast to the committee’s findings five years ago, the last time it convened. During those proceedings, as in previous years, the panel deemed the issue of excess cholesterol in the American diet a public health concern.

    The finding follows an evolution of thinking among many nutritionists who now believe that, for healthy adults, eating foods high in cholesterol may not significantly affect the level of cholesterol in the blood or increase the risk of heart disease.

    Story continues below advertisement

    The greater danger in this regard, these experts believe, lies not in products such as eggs, shrimp or lobster, which are high in cholesterol, but in too many servings of foods heavy with saturated fats, such as fatty meats, whole milk, and butter.

    [Scientists have figured out what makes Indian food so delicious]

    The new view on cholesterol in food does not reverse warnings about high levels of “bad” cholesterol in the blood, which have been linked to heart disease. Moreover, some experts warned that people with particular health problems, such as diabetes, should continue to avoid cholesterol-rich diets.

    While Americans may be accustomed to conflicting dietary advice, the change on cholesterol comes from the influential Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, the group that provides the scientific basis for the “Dietary Guidelines.” That federal publication has broad effects on the American diet, helping to determine the content of school lunches, affecting how food manufacturers advertise their wares, and serving as the foundation for reams of diet advice.

    Story continues below advertisement

    The panel laid out the cholesterol decision in December, at its last meeting before it writes a report that will serve as the basis for the next version of the guidelines. A video of the meeting was later posted online and a person with direct knowledge of the proceedings said the cholesterol finding would make it to the group’s final report, which is due within weeks.

    After Marian Neuhouser, chair of the relevant subcommittee, announced the decision to the panel at the December meeting, one panelist appeared to bridle.

    “So we’re not making a [cholesterol] recommendation?” panel member Miriam Nelson, a Tufts University professor, said at the meeting as if trying to absorb the thought. “Okay ... Bummer.”

    Story continues below advertisement

    Members of the panel, called the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, said they would not comment until the publication of their report, which will be filed with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture.

    [Here’s what the government’s dietary guidelines should really say]

    While those agencies could ignore the committee’s recommendations, major deviations are not common, experts said.

    Five years ago, “I don’t think the Dietary Guidelines diverged from the committee’s report,” said Naomi K. Fukagawa, a University of Vermont professor who served as the committee’s vice chair in 2010. Fukagawa said she supports the change on cholesterol.

    Story continues below advertisement

    Walter Willett, chair of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health, also called the turnaround on cholesterol a “reasonable move.”

    “There’s been a shift of thinking,” he said.

    But the change on dietary cholesterol also shows how the complexity of nutrition science and the lack of definitive research can contribute to confusion for Americans who, while seeking guidance on what to eat, often find themselves afloat in conflicting advice.

    Cholesterol has been a fixture in dietary warnings in the United States at least since 1961, when it appeared in guidelines developed by the American Heart Association. Later adopted by the federal government, such warnings helped shift eating habits -- per capita egg consumption dropped about 30 percent -- and harmed egg farmers.

    Story continues below advertisement

    Yet even today, after more than a century of scientific inquiry, scientists are divided.

    Some nutritionists said lifting the cholesterol warning is long overdue, noting that the United States is out-of-step with other countries, where diet guidelines do not single out cholesterol. Others support maintaining a warning.

    The forthcoming version of the Dietary Guidelines -- the document is revised every five years -- is expected to navigate myriad similar controversies. Among them: salt, red meat, sugar, saturated fats and the latest darling of food-makers, Omega-3s.

    As with cholesterol, the dietary panel’s advice on these issues will be used by the federal bureaucrats to draft the new guidelines, which offer Americans clear instructions -- and sometimes very specific, down-to-the-milligram prescriptions. But such precision can mask sometimes tumultuous debates about nutrition.

    Story continues below advertisement

    “Almost every single nutrient imaginable has peer reviewed publications associating it with almost any outcome,” John P.A. Ioannidis, a professor of medicine and statistics at Stanford and one of the harshest critics of nutritional science, has written. “In this literature of epidemic proportions, how many results are correct?”

    Now comes the shift on cholesterol.

    Even as contrary evidence has emerged over the years, the campaign against dietary cholesterol has continued. In 1994, food-makers were required to report cholesterol values on the nutrition label. In 2010, with the publication of the most recent “Dietary Guidelines,” the experts again focused on the problem of "excess dietary cholesterol."

    Story continues below advertisement

    Yet many have viewed the evidence against cholesterol as weak, at best. As late as 2013, a task force arranged by the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association looked at the dietary cholesterol studies. The group found that there was “insufficient evidence” to make a recommendation. Many of the studies that had been done, the task force said, were too broad to single out cholesterol.

    “Looking back at the literature, we just couldn’t see the kind of science that would support dietary restrictions,” said Robert Eckel, the co-chair of the task force and a medical professor at the University of Colorado.

    The current U.S. guidelines call for restricting cholesterol intake to 300 milligrams daily. American adult men on average ingest about 340 milligrams of cholesterol a day, according to federal figures. That recommended figure of 300 milligrams, Eckel said, is " just one of those things that gets carried forward and carried forward even though the evidence is minimal.”

    Story continues below advertisement

    "We just don't know," he said.

    Other major studies have indicated that eating an egg a day does not raise a healthy person’s risk of heart disease, though diabetic patients may be at more risk.

    “The U.S. is the last country in the world to set a specific limit on dietary cholesterol,” said David Klurfeld, a nutrition scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “Some of it is scientific inertia.”

    The persistence of the cholesterol fear may arise, in part, from the plausibility of its danger.

    As far back as the 19th century, scientists recognized that the plaque that clogged arteries consisted, in part, of cholesterol, according to historians.

    It would have seemed logical, then, that a diet that is high in cholesterol would wind up clogging arteries.

    In 1913, Niokolai Anitschkov and his colleagues at the Czar’s Military Medicine Institute in St. Petersburg, decided to try it out in rabbits. The group fed cholesterol to rabbits for about four to eight weeks and saw that the cholesterol diet harmed them. They figured they were on to something big.

    “It often happens in the history of science that researchers ... obtain results which require us to view scientific questions in a new light,” he and a colleague wrote in their 1913 paper.

    But it wasn’t until the 1940s, when heart disease was rising in the United States, that the dangers of a cholesterol diet for humans would come more sharply into focus.

    Experiments in biology, as well as other studies that followed the diets of large populations, seemed to link high cholesterol diets to heart disease.

    Public warnings soon followed. In 1961, the American Heart Association recommended that people reduce cholesterol consumption and eventually set a limit of 300 milligrams a day. (For comparison, the yolk of a single egg has about 200 milligrams.)

    Eventually, the idea that cholesterol is harmful so permeated the country's consciousness that marketers advertised their foods on the basis of "no cholesterol."

    What Anitschkov and the other early scientists may not have foreseen is how complicated the science of cholesterol and heart disease could turn out: that the body creates cholesterol in amounts much larger than their diet provides, that the body regulates how much is in the blood and that there is both “good” and “bad” cholesterol.

    Adding to the complexity, the way people process cholesterol differs. Scientists say some people -- about 25 percent -- appear to be more vulnerable to cholesterol-rich diets.

    “It’s turned out to be more complicated than anyone could have known,” said Lawrence Rudel, a professor at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

    As a graduate student at the University of Arkansas in the late 1960s, Rudel came across Anitschkov’s paper and decided to focus on understanding one of its curiosities. In passing, the paper noted that while the cholesterol diet harmed rabbits, it had no effect on white rats. In fact, if Anitschkov had focused on any other animal besides the rabbit, the effects wouldn't have been so clear -- rabbits are unusually vulnerable to the high-cholesterol diet.

    “The reason for the difference -- why does one animal fall apart on the cholesterol diet -- seemed like something that could be figured out,” Rudel said. “That was 40 or so years ago. We still don’t know what explains the difference.”

    In truth, scientists have made some progress. Rudel and his colleagues have been able to breed squirrel monkeys that are more vulnerable to the cholesterol diet. That and other evidence leads to their belief that for some people -- as for the squirrel monkeys -- genetics are to blame.

    Rudel said that Americans should still be warned about cholesterol.

    “Eggs are a nearly perfect food, but cholesterol is a potential bad guy,” he said. “Eating too much a day won’t harm everyone, but it will harm some people.”

    Scientists have estimated that, even without counting the toll from obesity, disease related to poor eating habits kills more than half a million people every year. That toll is often used as an argument for more research in nutrition.

    Currently, the National Institutes of Health spends about $1.5 billion annually on nutrition research, an amount that represents about 5 percent of its total budget.

    The turnaround on cholesterol, some critics say, is just more evidence that nutrition science needs more investment.

    Others, however, say the reversal might be seen as a sign of progress.

    “These reversals in the field do make us wonder and scratch our heads,” said David Allison, a public health professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “But in science, change is normal and expected.”

    When our view of the cosmos shifted from Ptolemy to Copernicus to Newton and Einstein, Allison said, “the reaction was not to say, ‘Oh my gosh, something is wrong with physics!’ We say, ‘Oh my gosh, isn’t this cool?’ ”

    Allison said the problem in nutrition stems from the arrogance that sometimes accompanies dietary advice. A little humility could go a long way.

    “Where nutrition has some trouble,” he said, “is all the confidence and vitriol and moralism that goes along with our recommendations.”

    Did the government’s dietary guidelines help make us fat?

    A local's guide to Mumbai, India

    5 simple Indian recipes to make at home

    Scientists have figured out what makes Indian food so delicious

    Ghee has been an Indian staple for millennia. Now the rest of the world is catching on.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/10/feds-poised-to-withdraw-longstanding-warnings-about-dietary-cholesterol/?utm_term=.1982832f86fa
    The U.S. government is poised to withdraw longstanding warnings about cholesterol Peter Whoriskey Time to put eggs back on the menu? (Deb Lindsey for The Washington Post) The nation’s top nutrition advisory panel has decided to drop its caution about eating cholesterol-laden food, a move that could undo almost 40 years of government warnings about its consumption. The group’s finding that cholesterol in the diet need no longer be considered a “nutrient of concern” stands in contrast to the committee’s findings five years ago, the last time it convened. During those proceedings, as in previous years, the panel deemed the issue of excess cholesterol in the American diet a public health concern. The finding follows an evolution of thinking among many nutritionists who now believe that, for healthy adults, eating foods high in cholesterol may not significantly affect the level of cholesterol in the blood or increase the risk of heart disease. Story continues below advertisement The greater danger in this regard, these experts believe, lies not in products such as eggs, shrimp or lobster, which are high in cholesterol, but in too many servings of foods heavy with saturated fats, such as fatty meats, whole milk, and butter. [Scientists have figured out what makes Indian food so delicious] The new view on cholesterol in food does not reverse warnings about high levels of “bad” cholesterol in the blood, which have been linked to heart disease. Moreover, some experts warned that people with particular health problems, such as diabetes, should continue to avoid cholesterol-rich diets. While Americans may be accustomed to conflicting dietary advice, the change on cholesterol comes from the influential Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, the group that provides the scientific basis for the “Dietary Guidelines.” That federal publication has broad effects on the American diet, helping to determine the content of school lunches, affecting how food manufacturers advertise their wares, and serving as the foundation for reams of diet advice. Story continues below advertisement The panel laid out the cholesterol decision in December, at its last meeting before it writes a report that will serve as the basis for the next version of the guidelines. A video of the meeting was later posted online and a person with direct knowledge of the proceedings said the cholesterol finding would make it to the group’s final report, which is due within weeks. After Marian Neuhouser, chair of the relevant subcommittee, announced the decision to the panel at the December meeting, one panelist appeared to bridle. “So we’re not making a [cholesterol] recommendation?” panel member Miriam Nelson, a Tufts University professor, said at the meeting as if trying to absorb the thought. “Okay ... Bummer.” Story continues below advertisement Members of the panel, called the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, said they would not comment until the publication of their report, which will be filed with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture. [Here’s what the government’s dietary guidelines should really say] While those agencies could ignore the committee’s recommendations, major deviations are not common, experts said. Five years ago, “I don’t think the Dietary Guidelines diverged from the committee’s report,” said Naomi K. Fukagawa, a University of Vermont professor who served as the committee’s vice chair in 2010. Fukagawa said she supports the change on cholesterol. Story continues below advertisement Walter Willett, chair of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health, also called the turnaround on cholesterol a “reasonable move.” “There’s been a shift of thinking,” he said. But the change on dietary cholesterol also shows how the complexity of nutrition science and the lack of definitive research can contribute to confusion for Americans who, while seeking guidance on what to eat, often find themselves afloat in conflicting advice. Cholesterol has been a fixture in dietary warnings in the United States at least since 1961, when it appeared in guidelines developed by the American Heart Association. Later adopted by the federal government, such warnings helped shift eating habits -- per capita egg consumption dropped about 30 percent -- and harmed egg farmers. Story continues below advertisement Yet even today, after more than a century of scientific inquiry, scientists are divided. Some nutritionists said lifting the cholesterol warning is long overdue, noting that the United States is out-of-step with other countries, where diet guidelines do not single out cholesterol. Others support maintaining a warning. The forthcoming version of the Dietary Guidelines -- the document is revised every five years -- is expected to navigate myriad similar controversies. Among them: salt, red meat, sugar, saturated fats and the latest darling of food-makers, Omega-3s. As with cholesterol, the dietary panel’s advice on these issues will be used by the federal bureaucrats to draft the new guidelines, which offer Americans clear instructions -- and sometimes very specific, down-to-the-milligram prescriptions. But such precision can mask sometimes tumultuous debates about nutrition. Story continues below advertisement “Almost every single nutrient imaginable has peer reviewed publications associating it with almost any outcome,” John P.A. Ioannidis, a professor of medicine and statistics at Stanford and one of the harshest critics of nutritional science, has written. “In this literature of epidemic proportions, how many results are correct?” Now comes the shift on cholesterol. Even as contrary evidence has emerged over the years, the campaign against dietary cholesterol has continued. In 1994, food-makers were required to report cholesterol values on the nutrition label. In 2010, with the publication of the most recent “Dietary Guidelines,” the experts again focused on the problem of "excess dietary cholesterol." Story continues below advertisement Yet many have viewed the evidence against cholesterol as weak, at best. As late as 2013, a task force arranged by the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association looked at the dietary cholesterol studies. The group found that there was “insufficient evidence” to make a recommendation. Many of the studies that had been done, the task force said, were too broad to single out cholesterol. “Looking back at the literature, we just couldn’t see the kind of science that would support dietary restrictions,” said Robert Eckel, the co-chair of the task force and a medical professor at the University of Colorado. The current U.S. guidelines call for restricting cholesterol intake to 300 milligrams daily. American adult men on average ingest about 340 milligrams of cholesterol a day, according to federal figures. That recommended figure of 300 milligrams, Eckel said, is " just one of those things that gets carried forward and carried forward even though the evidence is minimal.” Story continues below advertisement "We just don't know," he said. Other major studies have indicated that eating an egg a day does not raise a healthy person’s risk of heart disease, though diabetic patients may be at more risk. “The U.S. is the last country in the world to set a specific limit on dietary cholesterol,” said David Klurfeld, a nutrition scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “Some of it is scientific inertia.” The persistence of the cholesterol fear may arise, in part, from the plausibility of its danger. As far back as the 19th century, scientists recognized that the plaque that clogged arteries consisted, in part, of cholesterol, according to historians. It would have seemed logical, then, that a diet that is high in cholesterol would wind up clogging arteries. In 1913, Niokolai Anitschkov and his colleagues at the Czar’s Military Medicine Institute in St. Petersburg, decided to try it out in rabbits. The group fed cholesterol to rabbits for about four to eight weeks and saw that the cholesterol diet harmed them. They figured they were on to something big. “It often happens in the history of science that researchers ... obtain results which require us to view scientific questions in a new light,” he and a colleague wrote in their 1913 paper. But it wasn’t until the 1940s, when heart disease was rising in the United States, that the dangers of a cholesterol diet for humans would come more sharply into focus. Experiments in biology, as well as other studies that followed the diets of large populations, seemed to link high cholesterol diets to heart disease. Public warnings soon followed. In 1961, the American Heart Association recommended that people reduce cholesterol consumption and eventually set a limit of 300 milligrams a day. (For comparison, the yolk of a single egg has about 200 milligrams.) Eventually, the idea that cholesterol is harmful so permeated the country's consciousness that marketers advertised their foods on the basis of "no cholesterol." What Anitschkov and the other early scientists may not have foreseen is how complicated the science of cholesterol and heart disease could turn out: that the body creates cholesterol in amounts much larger than their diet provides, that the body regulates how much is in the blood and that there is both “good” and “bad” cholesterol. Adding to the complexity, the way people process cholesterol differs. Scientists say some people -- about 25 percent -- appear to be more vulnerable to cholesterol-rich diets. “It’s turned out to be more complicated than anyone could have known,” said Lawrence Rudel, a professor at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine. As a graduate student at the University of Arkansas in the late 1960s, Rudel came across Anitschkov’s paper and decided to focus on understanding one of its curiosities. In passing, the paper noted that while the cholesterol diet harmed rabbits, it had no effect on white rats. In fact, if Anitschkov had focused on any other animal besides the rabbit, the effects wouldn't have been so clear -- rabbits are unusually vulnerable to the high-cholesterol diet. “The reason for the difference -- why does one animal fall apart on the cholesterol diet -- seemed like something that could be figured out,” Rudel said. “That was 40 or so years ago. We still don’t know what explains the difference.” In truth, scientists have made some progress. Rudel and his colleagues have been able to breed squirrel monkeys that are more vulnerable to the cholesterol diet. That and other evidence leads to their belief that for some people -- as for the squirrel monkeys -- genetics are to blame. Rudel said that Americans should still be warned about cholesterol. “Eggs are a nearly perfect food, but cholesterol is a potential bad guy,” he said. “Eating too much a day won’t harm everyone, but it will harm some people.” Scientists have estimated that, even without counting the toll from obesity, disease related to poor eating habits kills more than half a million people every year. That toll is often used as an argument for more research in nutrition. Currently, the National Institutes of Health spends about $1.5 billion annually on nutrition research, an amount that represents about 5 percent of its total budget. The turnaround on cholesterol, some critics say, is just more evidence that nutrition science needs more investment. Others, however, say the reversal might be seen as a sign of progress. “These reversals in the field do make us wonder and scratch our heads,” said David Allison, a public health professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “But in science, change is normal and expected.” When our view of the cosmos shifted from Ptolemy to Copernicus to Newton and Einstein, Allison said, “the reaction was not to say, ‘Oh my gosh, something is wrong with physics!’ We say, ‘Oh my gosh, isn’t this cool?’ ” Allison said the problem in nutrition stems from the arrogance that sometimes accompanies dietary advice. A little humility could go a long way. “Where nutrition has some trouble,” he said, “is all the confidence and vitriol and moralism that goes along with our recommendations.” Did the government’s dietary guidelines help make us fat? A local's guide to Mumbai, India 5 simple Indian recipes to make at home Scientists have figured out what makes Indian food so delicious Ghee has been an Indian staple for millennia. Now the rest of the world is catching on. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/10/feds-poised-to-withdraw-longstanding-warnings-about-dietary-cholesterol/?utm_term=.1982832f86fa
    Like
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  • The UK has experienced a 25% spike in shoplifting across England and Wales over the past year, according to data released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on Thursday.
    The UK has experienced a 25% spike in shoplifting across England and Wales over the past year, according to data released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on Thursday.
    WWW.ACTIVISTPOST.COM
    UK Shoplifting Jumps 25% Over Past Year - Activist Post
    The data comes after major retailers have warned over the rising costs associated with theft from their stores.
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  • I wish I could replace the SoMee symbol in place of this penguin!!! SoMee ready to go to the Moon, Mars, and beyond!!! Let's Gooooooooooooo!!!

    Needed to post something uplifting after my last post! :)
    I wish I could replace the SoMee symbol in place of this penguin!!! SoMee ready to go to the Moon, Mars, and beyond!!! Let's Gooooooooooooo!!! Needed to post something uplifting after my last post! :)
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    3 Reacties 0 aandelen 1396 Views
  • Lockheed employees install a LASRE aerospike pod onto an SR-71 at the Lockheed Martin Skunkworks in California. The pod was used to test the accuracy and validity of Lockheed's tools to measure the performance of lifting bodies and aerospike engines.
    Lockheed employees install a LASRE aerospike pod onto an SR-71 at the Lockheed Martin Skunkworks in California. The pod was used to test the accuracy and validity of Lockheed's tools to measure the performance of lifting bodies and aerospike engines.
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    12
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  • Abolition of the Covid state of emergency, USA 05/11/2023. Good or bad?
    I don't know too much about the political situation in the USA, nor the situation in the USA health care, to be able to guess whether the lifting of all the restrictions that will be lifted by the Biden administration on 11.05 will have a positive or negative connotation, but the news made me happy because tourist entry will be enabled again in the USA for all those who did not accept vaccination.
    No more division and condemnation, no more conditioning. we can travel freely :-)
    The question is how the pharmaceutical companies will behave now that citizens will pay for their own doses of vaccines (those who support them), but I believe that it will not be free for them now.

    I know one thing for sure, at the next US Open I will be able to watch my favorite tennis player #NovakDjokovic again, who was very firm in his position not to receive the vaccine and thus was maximally limited in the number of tournaments in which he could play.
    Abolition of the Covid state of emergency, USA 05/11/2023. Good or bad? I don't know too much about the political situation in the USA, nor the situation in the USA health care, to be able to guess whether the lifting of all the restrictions that will be lifted by the Biden administration on 11.05 will have a positive or negative connotation, but the news made me happy because tourist entry will be enabled again in the USA for all those who did not accept vaccination. No more division and condemnation, no more conditioning. we can travel freely :-) The question is how the pharmaceutical companies will behave now that citizens will pay for their own doses of vaccines (those who support them), but I believe that it will not be free for them now. I know one thing for sure, at the next US Open I will be able to watch my favorite tennis player #NovakDjokovic again, who was very firm in his position not to receive the vaccine and thus was maximally limited in the number of tournaments in which he could play.
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    10
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  • 3 Steps to “Sharpen” Your Mind
    .
    Do this everyday and I promise you you will upgrade your thinking!
    .
    #1 - Do 45 minutes of movement per day while listening to an audiobook.
    .
    We all know exercise is important whether it be lifting weights or doing cardio.
    .
    But every scientific study has proven that 45 minutes is the optimal time to aid in your mental, physical and emotional health.
    .
    So not only am I working out but at the same time, I’m feeding my brain other people’s knowledge that will allow me to learn something new and elevate my identity to become who I was always meant to be.
    .
    #2 - Meditate
    .
    This will allow you to unlock new neural pathways in your mind as well as calm you down and create this inner peace that anything is possible for you.
    .
    #3 - Do one thing you don’t want to do every single day
    .
    For me, that’s creating one piece of content daily because usually the uncomfortable things you don’t want to do, is because your old identity wants you to stay in your comfort zone.
    .
    So if you want to discover more ways to “sharpen” or rewire your brain for massive success, then
    .
    #someepower
    #someemotivational
    #someeblog
    #someepromote
    3 Steps to “Sharpen” Your Mind . Do this everyday and I promise you you will upgrade your thinking! . #1 - Do 45 minutes of movement per day while listening to an audiobook. . We all know exercise is important whether it be lifting weights or doing cardio. . But every scientific study has proven that 45 minutes is the optimal time to aid in your mental, physical and emotional health. . So not only am I working out but at the same time, I’m feeding my brain other people’s knowledge that will allow me to learn something new and elevate my identity to become who I was always meant to be. . #2 - Meditate . This will allow you to unlock new neural pathways in your mind as well as calm you down and create this inner peace that anything is possible for you. . #3 - Do one thing you don’t want to do every single day . For me, that’s creating one piece of content daily because usually the uncomfortable things you don’t want to do, is because your old identity wants you to stay in your comfort zone. . So if you want to discover more ways to “sharpen” or rewire your brain for massive success, then . #someepower #someemotivational #someeblog #someepromote
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    4
    0 Reacties 0 aandelen 3001 Views
  • Spread love and kindness like confetti! ???? Let's make the world a brighter place by lifting each other up and celebrating our differences. Who's with me? ❤️
    Spread love and kindness like confetti! ???? Let's make the world a brighter place by lifting each other up and celebrating our differences. Who's with me? ❤️
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    14
    1 Reacties 0 aandelen 1009 Views