Author: tristero

Rotten Science 

by tristero

When I was a little kid, my sister and I would put our baby teeth in a glass filled Coca-Cola and wait a week. The results – throughly rotten molars – were thrillingly disgusting to our pre-teen sensibiilites. But this is just disgusting:

Coca-Cola, the world’s largest producer of sugary beverages, is backing a new “science-based” solution to the obesity crisis: To maintain a healthy weight, get more exercise and worry less about cutting calories. 

The beverage giant has teamed up with influential scientists who are advancing this message in medical journals, at conferences and through social media. To help the scientists get the word out, Coke has provided financial and logistical support to a new nonprofit organization called the Global Energy Balance Network, which promotes the argument that weight-conscious Americans are overly fixated on how much they eat and drink while not paying enough attention to exercise. 

“Most of the focus in the popular media and in the scientific press is, ‘Oh they’re eating too much, eating too much, eating too much’ — blaming fast food, blaming sugary drinks and so on,” the group’s vice president, Steven N. Blair, an exercise scientist, says in a recent video announcing the new organization. “And there’s really virtually no compelling evidence that that, in fact, is the cause.” 

Health experts say this message is misleading and part of an effort by Coke to deflect criticism about the role sugary drinks have played in the spread of obesity and Type 2 diabetes. They contend that the company is using the new group to convince the public that physical activity can offset a bad diet despite evidence that exercise has only minimal impact on weight compared with what people consume.

Riiight.

Dr. Blair and other scientists affiliated with the group said that Coke had no control over its work or message and that they saw no problem with the company’s support because they had been transparent about it 

But as of last week, the group’s Twitter and Facebook pages, which promote physical activity as a solution to chronic disease and obesity while remaining largely silent on the role of food and nutrition, made no mention of Coca-Cola’s financial support.. 

The group’s website also omitted mention of Coke’s backing until Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, an obesity expert at the University of Ottawa, wrote to the organization to inquire about its funding. Dr. Blair said this was an oversight that had been quickly corrected. 

“As soon as we discovered that we didn’t have not only Coca-Cola but other funding sources on the website, we put it on there,” Dr. Blair said. “Does that make us totally corrupt in everything we do?”

 Actually, in this case, yes:

Marion Nestle, the author of the book “Soda Politics” and a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, was especially blunt: “The Global Energy Balance Network is nothing but a front group for Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola’s agenda here is very clear: Get these researchers to confuse the science and deflect attention from dietary intake.”

Exactly. Bottom line: don’t drink Coke, or any other liquid sugar delivery system, except as a once in a blue moon special treat. Better yet, train yourself to get your jollies from real food – e.g., veggies, fruits, grains – and not garbage offered for sale for no other purpose than to make someone filthy rich at the expense of you and your family’s health.

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Dear Maureen Dowd 

by tristero

Dear Maureen Dowd,

You write:

And Trump is, as always, the gleefully offensive and immensely entertaining high-chair king in the Great American Food Fight. 

There is absolutely nothing entertaining about Donald Trump when you consider that if he won, he would have the codes to more nuclear missiles than anyone else in the world.

By that standard – and it is the only standard that matters because, you know, existential – there is nothing remotely entertaining or even clownish about any of the Republican candidates. Nor is it entertaining that there are millions of Americans who seriously think any one of these pack of fools could be trusted with nuclear arms.

The only word that properly describes Trump and his clones is”appalling.”

Love,

tristero

George Packer Strikes Again 

by tristero

There’s bullshit, and then there’s Packershit, defined as the pompous and knowingly phony assertion of false equivalence:

But the collective discontent hasn’t gone away — far from it. It’s still with us like a chronic disease: the sense that the country has fundamentally betrayed its promise (freedom, equality, a fair chance, the American dream) and that the political system is too broken to offer hope. Some political careers — Elizabeth Warren’s, Rand Paul’s — have been made from the disease, while others have succumbed to it. Next year’s election will be won by the nominee who can speak most convincingly to this public unhappiness while preventing his or her party from being torn apart by its extremists.

Elizabeth Warren is an extremist? The way Rand Paul is, with his proclivity for white supremacists?

And Packer surely knows that what he wrote is complete and utter nonsense. The problem with his  ambition to be known as a “Very Serious Person” who is above the fray and prepared to find a middle ground is that it fails to take into account how majorly bonkers national Republicans are today. Thus, Packer can, and does, privilege incredibly bad ideas, providing them a status of intellectual probity they don’t deserve. Disagree with Warren all you like, but her ideas nevertheless remain entirely within the realm of reasonable discourse. Paul doesn’t, nor do his associations.

Proof once again that being able to sling sentences together with skill – which Packer can undeniably do – does not a responsible commentator make.

Seriously, What is Wrong With This Country?

by tristero

Rick Santorum held a campaign rally and someone actually showed up. This is a very strange country.

AMONG liberals, it’s almost universally assumed that of the two major parties, it’s the Republicans who have become more extreme over the years. That’s a self-flattering but false narrative.

No, it’s not.

Not a single elected Democrat has called for secession, as Rick Perry did. Not a single elected Democrat defied the Supreme Court to the extent of sending in the National Guard and provoking an insane confrontation with the local police, as Jeb Bush did during Schiavo. Not a single elected Democrat is so anti-reality and anti-science that they believe that if women are “legitimately raped,” they will be protected from pregnancy as Todd Akin did.

Oh, sure there are leftwing extremists. Somewhere. But in the Democratic Party? Holding office or positions of power? Puhleeeze.

Adding: An unspoken assumption in this article is that there is a dichotomy between right and left viewpoints. In US politics today, that is an absurdly false dichotomy. The actual dichotomy is between the crazies (i.e. national Republicans and their rich enablers) and the reality-based rest.

Oh do I ever have my disagreements with Democrats (I’m an Independent), but I never doubt their grip on reality. I cannot say the same about Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Michael Huckabee, and the rest of the clown club. It truly is hard to take seriously someone who doubts evolution, human-based climate change, elementary economic theory, or basic civil rights.<br>

Squaring The Circular Firing Squad 

by tristero

After 2000, many folks learned the obvious, that a country headed by Gore would be vastly preferable than one led by Bush, i.e., that maybe the perfect really is the enemy of the good. But even today,   liberals and the left are still quite adept at the circular firing squad (see Hebdo, Charlie, and PEN). So it makes sense for the Kochians to bait us with anti-Clinton stuff.

Here’s one liberal’s attitude towards 2016, in three easy steps:

1. I took a solemn vow not to vote for anyone who voted for Bush’s Iraq war resolution. I have every intention of keeping that vow.

2. Therefore, if Hillary Clinton wins the nomination and it looks very, very likely she will win the presidency, I will not vote for her.

3. BUT, if it looks like the election’s going to be close and a member of the clown club stands a good chance of winning, then I will enthusiastically vote for Hillary Clinton and actively encourage everyone I know to do so.

After all, I’m not crazy. This world simply can’t afford a Bush, or Rubio, or Santorum, or Huckabee, or Paul, or, or, or…

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Welcome to the Clown Bus! 

by tristero

Republicans sure have interesting ideas of what qualifies folks to be president. I suppose if you are beholden to an ideology that government is always awful, why not elect the a truly awful person to head it?

Fiorina drove HP into the ground, and is considered one of the worst tech CEO’s ever.

Sonnenfeld labels her “the worst because of her ruthless attack on the essence of this great company,” noting that “she destroyed half the wealth of her investors and yet still earned almost $100 million in total payments for this destructive reign of terror.”

As governor,  Huckabee released a murderer and serial rapist who became a right wing cause celebre, and he raped and murdered again. More here. And more.

Well, one positive way of looking at this is that the GOP believes that anyone can be president. Absolutely anyone.

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There’s Nothing Funnier Than Someone With No Sense of Humor 

by tristero

Whilst at Princeton – that traditional NJ breeding ground for populist defenders of the poor, tired, huddled masses, Ted Cruz was known as a highly skilled debater (I’ll forgo the obvious, over-used joke here to describe Teddy’s level of rhetorical mastery). Many spectacular examples of his utterly humorless personality are given, but this one got me rotflmao, as it so epitomizes not only Teds, but the rest of the extreme right’s troubled relationship with reality:

When an Amherst team argued at a tournament in 1989 that Ricky Ricardo should have let Lucy work, Mr. Cruz said, in an incensed voice: “Well, guess what, I’m Cuban! And no self-respecting Cuban man of the era would let his wife work.”

 For those younger readers who may not know, this refers to a famous TV comedy originally called I Love Lucy when it first aired in 1951. In the show, Ricky Ricardo is a charismatic, but somewhat stiff Cuban band leader living in New York. His red-headed wife Lucy (you could tell she had red hair even in black and white) was a force of nature, constantly at the center of hilarious mayhem. Sadly, I really can’t tell you much more about the show itself without ruining some of the most sublime moments in the history of American theater. Watch it. And watch it again.

Although Ted Cruz doesn’t seem to realize this, you probably guessed something rather important: Ricky and Lucy Ricardo never existed. That’s right: they are fictional characters. And Ted Cruz, defending the conservative adage that women shouldn’t work and belong at home defended an entirely bogus example with an entirely bogus assertion. Because what makes this genuinely hilarious is that there is actually some reality afoot.

“Ricky Ricardo” was played by none other than the very real Desi Arnaz, a famous Cuban bandleader – and, in fact, a brilliant musician (despite a lot of cheesy music he performed on the show). Lucy Ricardo was played by Lucille Ball, one of the greatest comedians – hell, actors –  of the 20th century.

And in real life, contra Ted Cruz, Desi and Lucy were a married working couple, working on the show together. In fact, Desi owed his job on the show to Lucy, who insisted that the network hire her husband. (Theirs was a troubled marriage, but that’s another story; suffice it say that Arnaz’s notion of a “self-respecting” Cuban man did not include faithfulness to his wife).

In other words, a very famous and accomplished Cuban man “of the era” and his wife worked very hard to create an indelible, immortal fictional relationship premised on the quite delible and dying fiction that wives of famous and accomplished men don’t work. And they succeeded so well that the hapless, humorless Ted Cruz mistook it for reality.

There’s more. By all means, read the whole article.

by tristero

A wonderful insight from John F. Burns, recapping his long career as a foreign correspondent for the NY Times:

In my case, poking from the very top of my traveler’s backpack is something you might expect of a reporter who spent long years in what were then some of the nastiest places in the world, each of them fraudulently dressed up, in their enveloping propaganda, as something entirely different, and benign. What those years bred in me, more than anything else, was an abiding revulsion for ideology, in all its guises.

Agreed, and Burns gives a great example of North Korea’s lunatic ideology in his article. But:

  …I, like other reporters, undoubtedly failed on occasions when my passions, and the passions of those around me, ran at their highest. 

Those moments, I fear, might have to include for me the hours after American troops overran Baghdad in April 2003. At the time, I witnessed and shared the wild public rapture at Saddam Hussein’s fall, which gave way almost overnight to grim forebodings about the murderous sectarian chaos that was to ensue, and which continues, with a redoubled vengeance, in Tikrit, Mosul, Ramadi and dozens of other Iraqi cities and towns where the Islamic State has held sway.

Wow

by tristero

Isn’t there a word for this that begins with “t?”

The fractious debate over a possible nuclear deal with Iran escalated on Monday as 47 Republican senators warned Iran against making an agreement with President Obama and the White House accused them of undercutting foreign policy.

In an exceedingly rare direct congressional intervention into diplomatic negotiations, the Republicans sent an open letter addressed to “leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran” declaring that any agreement could be reversed by the next president “with the stroke of a pen.”

The letter appeared aimed at unraveling an agreement even as negotiators grow close to reaching it. Mr. Obama, working with leaders of five other world powers, argues that the emerging agreement would be the best way to keep Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb, while critics from both parties contend that it would be a dangerous charade that would still leave Iran with the opportunity to eventually build weapons that could destroy Israel or other foes.

Indeed.

More here