Shaw's Eco-Logic

This HND piece examines Forward Head Posture (FHP), a condition said to affect 90% of people in modern society.  Your first grade teacher always nagged you about your posture--and she was right!

FHP has been with us well before the tech age, but is now a serious public health issue.  You'll be amazed at all the problems--beyond being hunched over--that can be caused by FHP.  Fortunately, there are ways to remedy this condition, with the first one being to stand up straight!

Read the complete article.

This HND piece spotlights the exciting world of personal rapid transit--PRT for short.  The basic idea is to use computer controlled small vehicles, suitable for up to six passengers, that provide reliable mobility with minimal wait time.

It's much better, and much cheaper than light rail, so not surprisingly, the politics have been against it.  Fortunately, as they say, you can't stop progress, and there are now several successful installations, with more on the way.

Read the complete article.

I grew tired of ignorant blowhard Dennis Prager years ago.  However, I just had to answer his ridiculous column on Noah.  Over at the Mike's Comments.

What a maroon.

Here's the conclusion from an aritcle entitled "Association of Dietary, Circulating, and Supplement Fatty Acids With Coronary Risk: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis."  Ann Intern Med. 2014;160(6):398-406-406...

Current evidence does not clearly support cardiovascular guidelines that encourage high consumption of polyunsaturated fatty acids and low consumption of total saturated fats.

Note that this meta-analysis included 530,525 people.

Quoting our friend Malcolm Kendrick, MD...

Or to put it another way, there is no evidence that saturated fat consumption has anything, whatsoever, to do with causing heart disease, or strokes. Once again I get to say ‘I told you so.’ Ah, the four most satisfying words in the English language. That is, when arranged in that particular order.

So, eat butter, drink milk, and throw away the horrible sugar-loaded low fat yoghurt. Go to France and enjoy the highest saturated fat diet in Europe and you, too, can enjoy the French rate of heart disease. Yes, of course, the lowest in Europe.

But now what happens? You see, the entire edifice of the cholesterol hypothesis is held together by two links in a chain. Link one is that saturated fat consumption raises cholesterol levels. Link two is that raised cholesterol levels then cause heart disease.

Various ‘experts’ have simplified this to the very simple equation:

A (saturated fat in the diet) > B (high cholesterol levels) > C (heart disease)

This is the cholesterol hypothesis, or the lipid hypothesis, and it has driven medical thinking for the last sixty years.

I have had it painstakingly explained to me, by very clever people, exactly how saturated fat raises cholesterol levels. Indeed, you will find ‘evidence’ for this almost universally accepted fact in literally thousands of clinical studies. Here is what Wikipedia has to say on the matter

‘There are strong, consistent, and graded relationships between saturated fat intake, blood cholesterol levels, and the mass occurrence of cardiovascular disease. The relationships are accepted as causal.’

Okay, let us accept that eating saturated fat does raise cholesterol levels. However, if consumption of saturated fat does not increase the rate of heart disease then….. Then raised cholesterol levels can have nothing whatsoever to do with causing heart disease. Just keep chasing the implications of that statement around in your head for a while.

So what happens now? We now have a cholesterol/lipid hypothesis that just had its head blown off. Yet, it still continues to wander about, unaware that it is actually dead.

As everyone knows you can chop the head off a chicken and it can wander about for years. I was also informed, when I was an open-mouthed child, that you could shoot a dinosaur through the head and it would continue to blunder about for some time, the rest of its body blissfully unaware that it was actually dead.

Well, the cholesterol hypothesis has just been shot dead, but I suspect it will continue to rampage about, stomping on puny humans for many years, before it finally keels over and admits that it is dead.

Ding dong, the witch is dead!

DHS  says they can stay!

I guess this is one advantage of having a gigantic federal bureaucracy:  One agency can overrule the other, if needed for political effect.

If I had told you ten years ago that a family seeking asylum from religious persecution would be turned away from the US, you would have thought I was nuts. But, it's finally happened—and no surprise to a Christian family.

Uwe and Hannelore Romeike came to the United States in 2008 seeking political asylum. They fled their German homeland in the face of religious persecution for homeschooling their children. They wanted to live in a country where they could raise their children in accordance with their Christian beliefs. Too bad they picked the United States, huh?

I expected this sort of thing from Scumbag Eric Holder and his cohorts at Justice, but did not anticipate that the (increasingly pointless) Supreme Court would refuse to take this one up. Consider that our country was virtually founded on the notion of religious liberty. Oh yes, there were warnings more than 50 years ago, but people like Robert Welch were crazy, right? Just like Sarah Palin was stupid for saying that Russia would invade Ukraine.

Jesus spoke about the brood of vipers, only this time they are not hiding, like the Pharisees, under a cloak of religion. No, they are operating completely in the open as Commie atheists.

It is not depressing that scumbags will be scumbags. No, it is depressing how many useful idiots (as Stalin and Lenin called them) we have here today.