Your cholesterol has a long list of things that will bring it down, and only one of them gets you congratulated.
Starving lowers your cholesterol.
Liver failure lowers your cholesterol.
Sepsis lowers your cholesterol.
An overactive thyroid lowers your cholesterol.
A severe burn lowers your cholesterol.
Cancer lowers your cholesterol, often years before anybody finds the cancer.
A statin lowers your cholesterol.
Every one of them moves the number the surgery wants moved.
Framingham followed 4,374 men and women free of heart disease for 30 years. Past 50, a high cholesterol did not predict death. A falling one did, and for every point it dropped each year, deaths rose 11%.
The number was going down because the person was.
Six of those get you a hospital bed. The seventh gets you a text from the surgery saying well done.
Eight people sealed themselves in a glass dome to prove humanity could feed itself on plants, and spent two years starving in front of the world's press.
Biosphere 2 cost a hundred and fifty million dollars. Three acres of Arizona desert under sealed glass, eight crew, door shut on 26 September 1991, nothing in or out for two years. The farm inside was worked intensively and by any agronomic measure it was superb, out-producing the most efficient smallholder farming on earth by a wide margin.
It produced 83 per cent of what they needed.
Which left Roy Walford, the crew doctor, in a sealed box with seven hungry colleagues and his own life's work. Walford was a UCLA pathologist who had spent thirty years arguing that severe calorie restriction extends lifespan. He had doubled it in mice. And here was reality handing him his own hypothesis with the door welded shut.
So he called it a health programme.
The menu became vegetables, half a glass of goat's milk a day, and meat or fish about once a week. The men lost close to a fifth of their body weight, the women about a tenth. And the markers Walford cared about behaved impeccably: blood pressure, glucose, cholesterol and triglycerides all down at least twenty per cent, into ranges any doctor would frame. He published it in PNAS in 1992.
The bloodwork was magnificent. The people were falling apart.
Jane Poynter wrote the book afterwards. Fatigue, depression, mental fog, and a preoccupation with food that ate the entire interior life of the crew. They stole from each other. They split into two factions that stopped speaking. The ecological research the building had been constructed for was largely abandoned by people who no longer had the headroom for anything past the next meal. The ants and cockroaches, by contrast, were thriving.
The air was leaving too. Oxygen started at 20.9 per cent and kept dropping and nobody knew where it was going. Columbia eventually worked it out: the concrete was quietly eating it. So oxygen had to be pumped in from outside, which is an interesting result for a sealed world.
Walford's verdict on the mutiny is the whole thing in one sentence. He said afterwards that any other physician aboard would have panicked and declared they were starving, but that he knew they were on a programme of health enhancement.
He knew. Seven other people, visibly wasting, were simply mistaken.
He came out in 1993, developed ALS, blamed the conditions inside, and died in 2004 aged 79 after years on 1,600 calories a day in pursuit of a longer life. The mice got double. He did not make it to average for an American professor.
Every argument you have heard this decade was already in that building. Grow it locally. Take the animals out. Eat less. Watch the numbers improve.
Eight of the most motivated humans alive, handed three acres of the best-managed farmland on the planet and no meat, could not feed themselves.
The press reported the fighting as a personality clash.
Someone explain this to me slowly, because I'm clearly the idiot here.
We plant a Mediterranean nut in a Californian desert. It doesn't rain there, so we drain a ten-thousand-year-old aquifer until the ground itself sinks a foot a year and whole towns get shorter. The trees can't fight off fungus, so we spray the lot. They can't pollinate themselves, so every February we truck thirty billion bees across a continent and let a fair share of them die in the crush. Then we chill the harvest and sail it six thousand miles to Britain, where it rains constantly and always has, to be blitzed with water and gums and sold to you at £2.40 a carton with a green leaf on the side.
That is the environmentally friendly option.
Twelve miles down the road there's a bloke with cattle in a field. Rain falls on the hill. Grass drinks it. Cow eats grass. Nothing pumped, sprayed, chilled or shipped. No bees died. Her entire supply chain is weather.
That is the planetary emergency.
And it'll be explained to you by someone holding a carton of desert water, wearing a fleece made of crude oil.
Asking for the cow. She's been very patient about it.
Look at the human body as a weapon. It is embarrassing.
No claws. Fingernails that lose a fight with cardboard.
No fangs. Flat little teeth that struggle with a tough steak.
No armour. Skin a bramble can open.
No fur. Cold kills us in a night.
No speed. A squirrel outruns us. A toddler loses to a goose.
No strength. A chimp half our weight could take us apart.
No venom. No shell. No horns. No wings.
Pound for pound, we are the softest large animal in the field.
And we hunted every one of them to the edge.
Because everything went into one organ instead.
The human brain. Twenty percent of your energy, run by a body that skipped every other upgrade.
And it is built from fat and animal food. DHA from fish and meat. B12 found in no plant alive. Cholesterol, the scaffolding of every brain cell you own.
The ape that started eating meat grew the brain. The brain built the spear. The spear ended the argument with every animal that had the claws and the fangs and the speed.
A soft, slow, clawless creature became the apex predator of the entire planet, on the strength of one organ made of the exact food we are now told to cut out for our health.
We ate our way to the top of the food chain.
Now they want us to eat our way back down.
🚨 MOTHER OF MURDER VICTIM TO DEMS: "THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE"
Jessica Gorman, mother of Sheridan Gorman, confronts Rep. Pramila Jayapal after Democrats balked at hearing from Angel Families: "I'm thankful my daughter wasn't ra*ped but just shot in the head... Then you want to dismiss angel families! This is unacceptable."
We are watching people call 6th, 7th, 8th, or even 10th generation Jews in Israel “settlers,” while insisting that if you arrived in the United States yesterday and had a child today, that child is unquestionably American.
I don’t believe that arriving yesterday and giving birth today automatically makes someone indigenous to the land. But for those who do believe that, why don’t they apply the same logic to Israelis whose families have lived there for decades or even centuries?
This isn’t simply a double standard. It’s a standard they made up and apply only to Jews in Israel.
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I am still seeing some insist, with an unwarranted air of sanctimony, that "the Court simply continued interpreting the citizenship clause as it has for 140 years." That is a lie.
Clarence Thomas notes in his dissent what the rest of us who've studied this have also known for decades: "The Citizenship Clause was consistently interpreted not to apply to the children of foreign temporary visitors, who were by definition not domiciled in the United States.” “Regardless of administration or party, the Federal Government for decades after ratification regularly denied claims to citizenship by children who were born in the United States but not domiciled here.” Roberts had to ignore this for to do otherwise would undermine his argument. But we don't have to play along.
Some are saying, relax, there are statutory fixes. There are no statutory fixes to birthright citizenship per se, certainly not now, since the Court just constitutionalized the practice. A statute cannot fundamentally cure this. And there will not be a constitutional amendment as long as there are Democrats in Congress and RINOs to support them.
Well, the issue was a close call, we are lectured. No, it was not. Not if you are thoroughly familiar with it. It was actually straightforward and relatively simply. Read Roberts's opinion. He mostly ignores the contemporary record at the time, which is loaded with statements by relevant congressmen and senators rejecting the entire notion of birthright citizenship, the context of the citizenship clause (even excluding Indians because of dual loyalty), and on and on. There is not a definitive piece of actual historical evidence of any kind supporting the interpretation Roberts and the Majority embrace. Hence, they go to 17th century Britain and power of Kings over servants. The irony is lost on the 250th anniversary of our independence.
We are told, look, the border is secure, the damage is limited, there are a number of executive and administrative decisions that can be made to help control this. Tell me, folks, when the Democrats are back in power, why wouldn't they undo every executive and administrative effort to limit the damage since they caused most of it in the first place, and why wouldn't they throw open the immigration doors even more enthusiastically knowing they've the birthright citizenship decision behind them.
It is one thing to say don't be hysterical and another to be damn near braindead to what just happened. There is cause for alarm. This isn't some manufactured concern. There's a revolution by immigration. It is swallowing Europe; it is swallowing parts of our country right now. That's precisely why President Trump acted. The Court's ruling has removed one of the most important constitutional and societal tools we have for fending off this crusade, and the Democrat Party's lawlessness in stoking it. The fact that the 14th amendment has been used to promote birthright citizenship for multiple decades is not a rational defense of its constitutionality. The fact that there are other ways to try to deal with this, with varying degrees of effectiveness, is not the point and not relevant to what the Court did. The Court has constitutionalized a policy without a real constitutional, factual, or historical basis. That is what Roberts's opinion demonstrates, and the dissent highlights. It was raised now because President Trump saw what had and was transpiring, including through the abuses of the amendment, took executive action to stop it, and lawsuits were brought to block his action. And what was and is happening is the abuse of birthright citizenship as never before.
Thomas and Alito went to great lengths to explain our history and that of the amendment, spending much time correcting Roberts's deceit. And they were blunt about their frustration. So, too, were they emphatic about the dire consequences of the decision.
Thomas and Alito are right. I have spent more than half-a-century studying, discussing, and writing about Supreme Court arguments and decisions, etc. I have also participated in several very big issues before the Court. I predict the dissenting opinions will be cited, studied, and praised by scholars and historians long after the Roberts Court is gone, whereas the Roberts opinion will be dismissed as a hodgepodge of mostly gibberish.
What was intended to be an amendment to the Constitution to protect the civil liberties and rights of newly freed Black slaves and their progeny, has been turned into a legal absurdity -- a spigot to justify granting citizenship to aliens who have entered our country in violation of federal law and, who in turn, are rewarded with American-citizen babies. The entire purpose of immigration laws used to destroy immigration laws, along with our national security, cultural and societal assimilation, economic determinations, electoral processes, etc. Who knew this was all intended when, in 1868, the 14th amendment was drafted, adopted by Congress, and ratified by the states? Certainly, its authors and the elected federal and state representatives who debated it and approved it had no idea. And I doubt the British monarchy in the 1600s would've approved, either.
🚨 WOW! STEPHEN MILLER GOES NUCLEAR ON THE SCOTUS BIRTHRIGHT DECISION 🔥
"Citizenship means NOTHING if it's OPEN to EVERYONE" 🤔
"They can vote in every election for the REST of their LIVES"
"They can be living in a foreign country and CASHING WELFARE CHECKS from American citizens" 🤯
DeWine doesn't understand the law. Shocking, I know.
Their immigration status is not changed.
Aliens subject to removal after ending TPS were always subject to removal -- they simply had immunity while TPS was in place.
TPS does not change status - either putting it in place or removing it.