Or Maybe, You Know, Stop Eating So Much

27 Sunday Oct 2019

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Maybe exercise? Cutting the kids to fight fat.

Even some severely obese preteens should be considered for weight loss surgery, according to new recommendations.

The guidance issued Sunday by the American Academy of Pediatrics is based on a review of medical evidence, including several studies showing that surgery in teens can result in marked weight loss lasting at least several years, with few complications. In many cases, related health problems including diabetes and high blood pressure vanished after surgery.

While most of those studies involved teens, one included children younger than 12 and found no ill effects on growth, the policy says.

“Safe and effective is the message here,” said Dr. Sarah Armstrong, a Duke University pediatrics professor and the policy’s lead author.

Armstrong said children who have not gone through puberty may not be mature enough to understand the life-changing implications of surgery but that age alone shouldn’t rule it out. She doesn’t do surgery but works at a center that offers it; the youngest patient was 14.

It’s not a quick fix, she said. “It’s a lifelong decision with implications every single day for the rest of your life.”

Nearly 5 million U.S. children and teens are severely obese, a near doubling over 20 years. Many have already developed related health problems including diabetes, high blood pressure, sleep apnea and liver disease. But most kids don’t get obesity surgery, mainly because most public and private health insurance doesn’t cover it or they live far from surgery centers, Armstrong said. Costs can total at least $20,000.

Again, living healthy is a lifelong decision, that involves no additional costs, no surgeries, and no risks. But, will Americans go for the obvious in the current year? Fat chance.

Running Out of Time

26 Saturday Oct 2019

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cross country, mental illness, NCAA, society, sports, trans "rights"

In times gone by, the mentally ill were at best, cared for and, at worst, they were maligned. Today, they are allowed to run wild, literally governing the asylum. At best, this makes a mockery of our culture and society; at worst, it destroys the culture and society. Sports! News!: NCAA Says Man is Woman of the Week:

The Big Sky Conference named University of Montana runner June Eastwood, a biological male who identifies as a transgender woman, the cross-country female athlete of the week.

“June Eastwood finished second in a field of 204 runners at the Santa Clara Bronco Invitational,” helping “Montana place seventh as a team,” the conference noted in its announcement Tuesday. Eastwood previously competed on the University of Montana’s men’s team.

Conservatives out in conservative, cowboy-land Montana couldn’t even conserve the girls’ track team. Mr. Eastwood may use athletic tape and take hormones. Those measures partially address two of the 6,000 differences between male and female. Many of the rest reside in the brain. I wonder what a scan of Eastwood’s would show us? If you happen to have a daughter who competes in a sport(s), then this might be of slight interest to you. No, I’m not talking to you, Cleetus, on the couch in a drunken stupor before your TeeVee god. Sane people of the West, do you want your daughter’s placed at an “intolerable” disadvantage on the track or the field?

That’s the muddled conclusion of a paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics.

The inclusion of elite transwomen athletes in sport is controversial. The recent International Olympic Committee (IOC) (2015) guidelines allow transwomen to compete in the women’s division if (amongst other things) their testosterone is held below 10 nmol/L. This is significantly higher than that of cis-women. Science demonstrates that high testosterone and other male physiology provides a performance advantage in sport suggesting that transwomen retain some of that advantage. To determine whether the advantage is unfair necessitates an ethical analysis of the principles of inclusion and fairness. Particularly important is whether the advantage held by transwomen is a tolerable or intolerable unfairness. We conclude that the advantage to transwomen afforded by the IOC guidelines is an intolerable unfairness. This does not mean transwomen should be excluded from elite sport but that the existing male/female categories in sport should be abandoned in favour of a more nuanced approach satisfying both inclusion and fairness.

More “conservatives,” surely. They see the problem, plain as day. But, they just can’t help but trip over all the PC bullshit. Nuances, inclusion, fairness, diversity, and equality do not work. Yet and still, I assume that just about everyone will quietly tolerate the intolerable. It’s our greatest strength.

So, congratulations to Mr. Eastwood! And to the University of Montana, which I identify as a failed school.

Dysgenic Amerika

06 Friday Sep 2019

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Amerika, collapse, culture, deep decline, marriage, society

Nothing to see here, comrades.

The shrinkage in the marriage market is but a symptom.

“Most American women hope to marry but current shortages of marriageable men–men with a stable job and a good income–make this increasingly difficult, especially in the current gig economy of unstable low-paying service jobs,” explains lead author Dr. Daniel T. Lichter of Cornell University, in a media release. “Marriage is still based on love, but it also is fundamentally an economic transaction. Many young men today have little to bring to the marriage bargain, especially as young women’s educational levels on average now exceed their male suitors.”

It’s like there’s a dire shortage of adults. Oh yeah, there is.

We are losing crucial emotional and mental capacities for self-reflection, for wandering thought, for the ability to tolerate boredom. And that is the very definition of being a child — all id, out of control, demanding and needy and dependent. It’s poisoned our politics and our personhood, the terrible irony is this: Only we can fix it.

Correction: only the long, slow passage of time or war will fix this. Neither of these articles mentioned anything beyond the symptoms of the decline. The authors are likely incapable of understanding the root causes. They will fix nothing. Indeed, the fix is in. Like a plan or something.

PCR on the Matrix, the Hoaxes, the Hate

29 Thursday Aug 2019

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America, Paul Craig Roberts, society, stupid, War

He’s on to something.

Like Russiagate, Saddam Hussian’s weapons of mass destruction, Iranian nukes, Russian invasion of Ukraine, Gulf of Tonkin, 9/11, and so on, we live in an orchestrated world with controlled explanations designed to keep us adhering to the ruling agendas.

Americans, indeed the entirety of Europe, live in The Matrix. I am getting tired of trying to get you out of the controlled explanations that control your mind. I am no Morpheus, and I can’t find Neo. As far as I can tell, the Western world is lost. The place of understanding is taken by inchoate emotions that the Zionists call “self-hating.” How can a culture that hates itself—hate that will be reinforced by the New York Times 1619 Project—survive?

He’s done a heck of a job for many years. Europe, I think, is salvageable. Indeed, Eastern Europe never succumbed at all. America, is another story, one maybe nearing the end.

The 5G Continuum

02 Friday Aug 2019

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5G, control, society, Zombies

I fail to see how 5G will really be any different than the mass effect we already have.

These ideas are not fringe, and have been actively pursued in the past by the presidents of MIT, Stanford University, Cornell and Harvard, and courses on this subject have been taught at Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Wisconsin, Northwestern, Clark, and MIT. Today, much of this teaching is guised under the label of scientific genetics, and the grand scheme of a planned and controlled society is not dead, but is being pursued under the new language of human genetics.

With the rollout of 5G technologies, which are not any real improvements in communication, an ‘Internet of Things’ will be structured to tie everything together. This is the basis necessary for the physical takeover of all systems, which when implemented, will allow for a completely controlled society. Humans will become simply economic units, and therefore expendable. This dystopian nightmare is just around the corner, maybe only a few years away, and must be stopped before it is too late.

This is not “conspiracy theory” or science fiction. It is now a fact of life. It is being pursued aggressively, and is being accepted more and more by an ignorant and comatose public. If mass resistance is not soon forthcoming, we will risk being doomed to a life of total control in a society consumed by worthlessness.

What? More cancer? Obesity? Alrighty, back to your screens, Eloi.

Guns in School: a Mark of Civilized Society

18 Thursday Jul 2019

Posted by perrinlovett in Legal/Political Columns, Other Columns

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guns, schools, society, Walter Williams

Dr. Walter Williams and many others have written about this very subject before. It bears repeating.

Here’s a suggestion. How about setting up some high school rifle clubs? Students would bring their own rifles to school, store them with the team coach and, after classes, collect them for practice. You say: “Williams, you must be crazy! To prevent gun violence, we must do all we can to keep guns out of the hands of kids.”

There’s a problem with this reasoning. Prior to the 1960s, many public high schools had shooting clubs. In New York City, shooting clubs were started at Boys, Curtis, Commercial, Manual Training and Stuyvesant high schools. Students carried their rifles to school on the subway and turned them over to their homeroom or gym teacher. Rifles were retrieved after school for target practice. In some rural areas across the nation, there was a long tradition of high school students hunting before classes and storing their rifles in the trunks of their cars, parked on school grounds, during the school day.

High school rifles: more elegant weapons from a more civilized age. No changes whatsoever…

The “Persuasive Design” Against Children and Humanity

29 Saturday Jun 2019

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children, evil, society, technology

The screens are zombifying the people.

These parents have no idea that lurking behind their kids’ screens and phones are a multitude of psychologists, neuroscientists, and social science experts who use their knowledge of psychological vulnerabilities to devise products that capture kids’ attention for the sake of industry profit. What these parents and most of the world have yet to grasp is that psychology — a discipline that we associate with healing — is now being used as a weapon against children.

“Machines Designed to Change Humans”

Nestled in an unremarkable building on the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto, California, is the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, founded in 1998. The lab’s creator, Dr. B.J. Fogg, is a psychologist and the father of persuasive technology, a discipline in which digital machines and apps — including smartphones, social media, and video games — are configured to alter human thoughts and behaviors. As the lab’s website boldly proclaims: “Machines designed to change humans.”

Fogg speaks openly of the ability to use smartphones and other digital devices to change our ideas and actions: “We can now create machines that can change what people think and what people do, and the machines can do that autonomously.”

Called “the millionaire maker,” Fogg has groomed former students who have used his methods to develop technologies that now consume kids’ lives. As he recently touted on his personal website, “My students often do groundbreaking projects, and they continue having impact in the real world after they leave Stanford… For example, Instagram has influenced the behavior of over 800 million people. The co-founder was a student of mine.”

Intriguingly, there are signs that Fogg is feeling the heat from recent scrutiny of the use of digital devices to alter behavior. His boast about Instagram, which was present on his website as late as January of 2018, has been removed. Fogg’s website also has lately undergone a substantial makeover, as he now seems to go out of his way to suggest his work has benevolent aims, commenting, “I teach good people how behavior works so they can create products & services that benefit everyday people around the world.” Likewise, the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab website optimistically claims, “Persuasive technologies can bring about positive changes in many domains, including health, business, safety, and education. We also believe that new advances in technology can help promote world peace in 30 years.”

While Fogg emphasizes persuasive design’s sunny future, he is quite indifferent to the disturbing reality now: that hidden influence techniques are being used by the tech industry to hook and exploit users for profit. His enthusiastic vision also conveniently neglects to include how this generation of children and teens, with their highly malleable minds, is being manipulated and hurt by forces unseen.

Weaponizing Persuasion

If you haven’t heard of persuasive technology, that’s no accident — tech corporations would prefer it to remain in the shadows, as most of us don’t want to be controlled and have a special aversion to kids being manipulated for profit.

Read the whole article – one of the most damning I’ve read in a long time.

And, this is nothing new. Hellywood has used similar techniques for decades to manipulate the populace.

Try the following one weekend or a vacation day: Remove yourself from all screens for 24 hours. No TV, movies, phones, tablets, PCs (not even for this blog!), or car consoles. If you can do it, even just somewhat happily, then you are immune to the brainwashing. If you can’t, and I suspect that 90% can’t, then you are addicted. It’s a literal digital drug. Like heroin but worse.

The Effects of (Really) Counting the SAT and ACT

26 Wednesday Jun 2019

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Act, college, education, SAT, society, Steve Sailer, whites

Steve Sailer opts for a potential “take it if you can” approach towards the end of a very good article on some new (if unsurprising) research about elite college admissions.

We live in an era in which we are constantly lectured that white males are always ruining everything for everybody else by their feelings of entitlement and privilege. But when it comes to fancy colleges, the opposite is true. At any above-average test score, 18-year-old white guys are less likely to attend a prestige college and more likely to enlist in the military, enter a trade, or go to a local non-elite Directional State college.

And, there’s still the Asians v. Harvard case. Me, I’m not so sure about the idea of reclaiming the Ivy League. He’s probably right – for now. Whether it will matter in the future, as with all the rest of these thorny issues, remains to be seen.

Disposable People on Disposable Ships

23 Sunday Jun 2019

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future, Navy, society, The Atlantic, work

UPDATE: the following, original focuses on the “smart” littoral combat ships of the US Navy. An example of how well they work, with their smart new crews, was displayed Monday when one collided with a freighter parked in Montreal harbor. Why does the smart new Navy keep driving ships into freighters?

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The Atlantic examines the Navy’s “smart” ships, the LCSs and extrapolates to the wider, modern workforce.

And he discovered another correlation in his test: The people who did best tended to score high on “openness to new experience”—a personality trait that is normally not a major job-performance predictor and that, in certain contexts, roughly translates to “distractibility.” To borrow the management expert Peter Drucker’s formulation, people with this trait are less focused on doing things right, and more likely to wonder whether they’re doing the right things.

High in fluid intelligence, low in experience, not terribly conscientious, open to potential distraction—this is not the classic profile of a winning job candidate. But what if it is the profile of the winning job candidate of the future? If that’s the case, some important implications would arise.

One concerns “grit”—a mind-set, much vaunted these days in educational and professional circles, that allows people to commit tenaciously to doing one thing well. Angela Duckworth, a University of Pennsylvania psychology professor, has written powerfully about the value of grit—putting your head down, blocking out distractions, committing over a course of many years to a chosen path. Her writing traces an intellectual lineage that can also be found in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, which explains extraordinary success as a function of endless, dedicated practice—10,000 hours or more. These ideas are inherently appealing; they suggest that dedication can be more important than raw talent, that the dogged and conscientious will be rewarded in the end.

These trends are more prevalent in certain fields and in certain locations. I think they have the potential to change, for the better, how people are employed – giving more power to the employee. However, I don’t think that’s the future. Human (herd) nature will intervene, and there’s the robotic/AI/civilizational collapse think, proceeding unopposed. In the end, like the LCS sailors, most folks will have to abandon ship.

Lessons, if heeded, for far-distant generations.