Impressive cover:
Time for some resistant starch?
All you dieters out there might take heed:
In a new study, published in Nature Metabolism, researchers modified the gut microbiota of human participants by increasing dietary fibre to investigate how it might help manage insulin resistance while also reducing weight.
Researchers conducted a randomised, crossover clinical trial to assess the impact of resistant starch, sourced from high-amylose maize, on obesity and metabolic health. …
The trial involved consuming the assigned starch in powdered form twice daily before meals over two eight-week phases, allowing for direct comparison between the effects of resistant starch and the control.
The research also investigated how gut microbiota, modified by resistant starch supplementation. affect glucose metabolism and fat accumulation to understand the metabolic benefits.
The findings indicated that adding resistant starch to the diet resulted in an average weight reduction of approximately 2.8 kilograms (kg) and enhanced insulin sensitivity among individuals with overweight.
Researchers observed that the positive effects of resistant starch on health were primarily due to alterations in the composition of the gut microbiota.
The weight loss was modest, but it’s still interesting. What foods contain resistant starch, according to a dietician?:
“Resistant starch occurs naturally in many foods like oats, cooked and cooled rice, grains like sorghum and barley, beans and legumes like black beans, peas, pinto beans, etc, raw potato starch or cooked and cooled potatoes, green bananas, and more,” she explained. …
“When adding in more resistant starch, I usually advise people to start slow and allow the gut microbiota to adapt to changes if they aren’t used to eating much fiber or resistant starch to avoid any unpleasant side effects,” she said.
Translation: watch out for flatulence and – well, I’m sure you can figure it out.
Speaking of cooled potatoes, maybe I’ll go make some potato salad.
Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon
An Israeli airstrike in Beirut killed at least 14 people and wounded dozens more, Lebanese health officials said. It was the first such Israeli attack on Lebanon’s capital in months and came shortly after Hezbollah pounded northern Israel with 140 rockets.
The Israeli military said its airstrike killed Ibrahim Akil, a senior Hezbollah military official. There was no immediate confirmation of his death from Hezbollah.
Akil (often spelled “Aqil”) wasn’t just a top Hezbollah officer – although he was indeed that – he was also wanted for this:
Israel killed a top Hezbollah figure who was wanted by the U.S. for his role in the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy and a Marine Corps barracks that killed 300 people, the Israeli military confirmed Friday.
Hezbollah’s operations commander, Ibrahim Aqil, was the subject of a $7 million State Department reward for information leading to his arrest.
The Israeli military said it had killed Aqil and as many as 10 other senior commanders of the movement’s Radwan special forces unit. Twelve people were reported dead and 66 injured in the attack, Lebanese officials said.
“The Hezbollah commanders we eliminated today had been planning their ‘October 7th’ on the Northern border for years,” Israeli army chief General Herzi Halevi said in a reference to the 2023 Hamas rampage that killed 1,200 Israelis.
“We reached them, and we will reach anyone who threatens the security of Israel’s citizens,” Halevi said.
Seems they mean what they say. Then again, it’s probably more difficult to deter Islamic terrorists – who strongly believe they’ll go immediately to paradise – with fear of death than it is to deter those who don’t have that belief system.
More:
Aqil also oversaw the abductions of American and German hostages in Lebanon, the State Department said last year. The department named Aqil a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” in 2019.
That’s back when Trump was president. But I doubt the Biden administration – whoever’s in charge these days – would be particularly interested in saving Aqil’s life, either.
There’s also the fact that US negotiators may have finally caught on to something that’s been apparent for a long time, which is that a ceasefire is a pipe dream:
After months of public optimism about the prospects of a ceasefire, Biden administration officials have soured on the prospects of an end to the war between Israel and Hamas.
“We aren’t any closer to that now than we were even a week ago,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby admitted to reporters on Wednesday. He called the prospects of a completed deal “daunting.” …
For Biden, a former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who ran on his diplomacy chops, failure to secure a deal would be a blow to his legacy. It would mean a presidency bookended by a chaotic pullout from Afghanistan at the start and the false hope that peace — and the return of some 250 hostages taken by Hamas on Oct. 7 — was just around the corner after the outbreak of war in the Middle East.
Biden’s pre-presidency “diplomacy chops” consisted of lots of experience and mostly bad decisions over many years prior to his bad decisions as president. At least you can say that he’s been consistent in that. Then again, we really don’t know how much he was involved in the foreign policy of his own administration, but I think that until recently he was at least somewhat involved.
So, what about cellphones on airplanes?
Here are some questions from commenter “Brian Turner” about the effect the pager and walkie-talkie explosions will have on flight security:
While I admire Israel’s audacity, it raises two questions:
1. When will TSA ban laptops, tablets and mobile phones from commercial flights? and
2. How long before our three-letter agencies use this tactic against the deplorables?
I’ve seen that sort of question all around the blogosphere, so although I’m no tech person, I thought I’d attempt an answer – particularly to the first question – and also throw open the topics to my intrepid readers.
First of all, you may or may not know that it’s already the case that cellphone batteries sometimes catch fire, on planes or otherwise. There are many stories of examples such as this:
When a battery is damaged, overheated, exposed to water, overcharged or has manufacturing defects, it can combust without warning. Either the smoke or fire can put passengers and crew on a flight in danger.
Signs that the battery is damaged include bulging or cracking, hissing, leaking, rising temperature and smoke.
The number of times lithium batteries on airplanes nationwide have overheated, smoked or exploded nearly doubled between 2020 and 2023, FAA data shows. The federal agency confirmed 77 such incidents in 2023, up from 39 in 2020.
In several incidents, the devices were put in a fireproof bag and the flight could continue.
Don’t we all need something new to worry about? These fires tend to be relatively easy to contain, however, and I don’t think there’s ever been a case of a cellphone battery fire bringing a plane down. Nor have their been any new regulations concerning these devices, as far as I know.
No matter what, I can’t imagine flights banning cellphones for the simple reason that most people these days wouldn’t be willing to travel without them. And even requiring them to be in checked luggage wouldn’t help that much if at all, because many people don’t check their luggage. And wouldn’t an explosion in the baggage hold would be especially dangerous, more difficult to detect and also more difficult to control? The surprising answer (surprising to me, anyway) to that question is “no,” because it turns out that cargo holds are designed to be so airtight that fires (smaller ones, anyway, as opposed to a huge explosion) would be likely to lack the oxygen to really get going, plus there are other protections:
A number of uncontrolled fires have occurred in cargo compartments, which contributed to an evolution of airworthiness regulations. The FAA’s ‘Lessons Learnt from Civil Aviation’ website identifies two tragic fatal accidents which were pivotal in driving this evolution.
In 1980 in Riyadh, shortly after take-off of a second generation wide-body aircraft, an uncontrollable fire occurred in the rear cargo hold. Tragically, all 301 passengers and crew died in the event. …
In 1996 in the Everglades near Miami, a second generation single-aisle aircraft experienced an uncontrolled fire in its forward cargo compartment shortly after takeoff, leading to the death of all 110 passengers and crew. …
The NTSB determined that just before takeoff, 144 expired chemical oxygen generators … had been placed in the cargo compartment in five boxes marked COMAT (company material) by ValuJet’s maintenance contractor SabreTech. This violated Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations forbidding the transport of hazardous materials in passenger-aircraft cargo holds. Failure to cover the generators’ firing pins with the prescribed plastic caps made accidental activation much more likely. The investigation revealed that rather than covering the pins, maintenance personnel simply cut the cords attached to the pins or applied duct tape around the cans, and consumer-grade adhesive tape was also used to secure the ends. SabreTech employees indicated on the cargo manifest that the “oxy canisters”, which were loosely packed in boxes that were each sealed with tape and bubble wrap, were “empty.” ValuJet workers then loaded the boxes in the cargo hold in the mistaken belief that the devices were simply empty canisters that would be safe and legal to transport on a passenger aircraft. …
It was subsequent to the Everglades accident in 1996 that the limitations of the principle of relying purely on containment by oxygen starvation were acknowledged. …
… [In 1998) all new designs of aircraft, as well as existing aircraft in-service, were to be equipped … [with] fire detection system capable of alerting the flight crew within 1 minute of the fire starting became necessary, together with Halon gas fire suppression systems.
There’s a lot more information at that link for anyone interested, but the gist of the cargo hold situation today is that there are three levels of protection: airtight and fireproof cargo holds, cargo fire detection systems, and cargo fire suppression systems.
So, although the potential problem with phones or other devices could probably be handled by requiring them all to be stored in cargo holds, I still don’t think that will ever happen for the aformentioned reasons: all luggage would have to be checked (is there even room for that?), and passengers would be exceedingly angry.
And it’s not as though such devices are the only way explosives could enter a plane. If I’m not mistaken, the main reason for requiring that we remove shoes and only have little bottles in our carry-ons has to do with the possibility of explosives. What’s more, I’ve encountered plenty of airports where passengers have to walk past explosive-sniffing dogs; haven’t you? Here’s an informative article about those dogs; explosives are not the only thing they can detect, of course.
Lastly, it turns out the modern cellphones are not a particularly good receptacle for explosives compared to older devices:
University of Surrey’s Woodward, who regularly takes apart consumer devices, points out that within modern smartphones there is very limited space to insert anything extra, and the manufacturing process can involve robots precisely placing components on top of each other. X-rays show how tightly packed modern phones are.
“When you open up a smartphone, I think the only way to get any sort of meaningful amount of high explosive in there would be to do something like replace one of the components,” he says, such as modifying a battery to be half battery, half explosives. But “replacing a component in a smartphone would compromise its functionality,” he says, which could lead a user to investigate the malfunction.
In contrast, the model of pager linked to the explosions — a “rugged” device with 85 days of battery life — included multiple replaceable parts. Ang Cui, founder of the embedded device security firm Red Balloon Security, examined the schematics of the pager model apparently used in the attacks and told WIRED that there would be free space inside to plant explosives. The walkie-talkies that exploded, according to the manufacturer, were discontinued a decade ago. Woodward says that when opening up redesigned, current versions of older technologies, such as pagers, many internal electronic components have been “compressed” down as manufacturing methods and processor efficiency have improved.
… In countries like China, where many devices are manufactured, there is always the possibility of a domestic operation to plant backdoors, but such a scheme would need to be elaborate to skirt international scrutiny of the devices …
To find exploding cell phones, you have to go back to 20th century tech.
For all these reasons, I don’t think we’ll be losing our inflight cellphones any time soon. However, there’s that China thing …
Open thread 9/20/2024
More fallout from the pager/walkie-talkie attacks
The more I think about it, the more audacious and astounding Israel’s recent attack on Hezbollah operatives seems. There’s little doubt this has been the largest and most precisely targeted attack on a terrorist group in history. Brilliantly planned and executed, the modus operandi ensures that there was very little collateral damage. It’s almost impossible to imagine a more targeted attack on terrorists.
And yet it’s drawing criticism from those who already hate Israel. Ironically, the same people who think Israel’s more conventional military efforts in Gaza have too high a ratio of citizens to terrorists also can’t stand this ratio which is extremely small. For example:
“This attack clearly and unequivocally violates international humanitarian law and undermines U.S. efforts to prevent a wider conflict,” Ocasio-Cortez stated. “Congress needs a full accounting of the attack, including an answer from the State Department as to whether any U.S. assistance went into the development or deployment of this technology.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, which was among the organizations that blamed Israel for being attacked on October 7, called for the Biden administration “to condemn the Israeli government for killing children and maiming numerous civilians in Lebanon by detonating bombs reportedly placed in pagers without any regard for innocent life.”
Hezbollah has been lobbing rockets into Israel for years and has stepped it up post-10/7 to the point where many thousands of Israelis have had to flee their homes in the north for nearly a year, with no end in sight. The attacks by Hezbollah are terrorism, and have no military targets. They recently killed 12 children on a soccer field.
From Israel’s defenders:
“If Israel was responsible, then on available information these seem to be incredibly precise. Rules on targeting are principally necessity, distinction and proportionality,” Natasha Hausdorff, a barrister in the United Kingdom and legal director of UK Lawyers for Israel, told JNS.
“It is hard to imagine a better means of targeting Hezbollah operatives, whoever is behind the exploding devices,” Hausdorff said. “I would ask these individuals which international law they claim was violated.”
There is no such claim that is valid, but that doesn’t matter to Israel-haters.
I have some theories, though, about why this particular attack makes a lot of people uneasy, even those who acknowledge that it isn’t a violation of the laws of war, and that Hezbollah operatives are terrorists. The first involves its newness; there is something frightening about an attack that seems like something out of a science fiction action film. The second involves the obviously grisly aspect of the maiming that is involved, in which terrorists lost hands, eyes, and genitalia. The third involves the mechanism of delivery: communication devices. We can identify, because even though most of us don’t have pagers or walkie-talkies, we have cellphones that we carry around on our persons, especially in pockets. There’s been a lot of speculation on whether this could be done by China with cellphones, for example. Lastly, there’s a way in which it feeds into classic anti-Semitic memes of Jews as being diabolically clever and capable of nefarious action at a distance.
Israel is condemned by many people no matter what it does, but it’s in a fight for its very survival and it will do what it needs to do.
Until now it’s been assumed that the pagers were ordered through a foreign company – variously reported as having been in Taiwan and/or Hungary – and shipments were somehow intercepted and the explosives were added. But a competing explanation is that Hezbollah actually got pagers that were manufactured by Israelis, who set up a shell company for that purpose quite some time ago. From a story in the NY Times:
Even before Mr. Nasrallah decided to expand pager usage, Israel had put into motion a plan to establish a shell company that would pose as an international pager producer.
By all appearances, B.A.C. Consulting was a Hungary-based company that was under contract to produce the devices on behalf of a Taiwanese company, Gold Apollo. In fact, it was part of an Israeli front, according to three intelligence officers briefed on the operation. They said at least two other shell companies were created as well to mask the real identities of the people creating the pagers: Israeli intelligence officers.
B.A.C. did take on ordinary clients, for which it produced a range of ordinary pagers. But the only client that really mattered was Hezbollah, and its pagers were far from ordinary. Produced separately, they contained batteries laced with the explosive PETN, according to the three intelligence officers.
The pagers began shipping to Lebanon in the summer of 2022 in small numbers, but production was quickly ramped up after Mr. Nasrallah denounced cellphones.
Astounding. Israel has also said it has other tricks up its sleeve:
“We still have many capabilities that we have not yet activated,” Lt. Gen. Halevi assured Wednesday.
I have to imagine that this possibility strikes fear into not just Hezbollah, but terrorists all over the Arab world. It doesn’t seem like empty bragging at this point, does it?
The Sean Combs sex trafficking case
I have zero wish to dive too deeply into the details of the case against Sean “Diddy” Combs. The allegations are incredibly sordid, and similar to those against Epstein.
But Combs is an extremely famous, successful, and fabulously wealthy man. So here’s some of the story so far, if you’re interested:
Hip-hop’s “Bad Boy” billionaire Sean “Diddy” Combs is drawing comparisons to the late sex-trafficking financier Jeffrey Epstein, who used his power and connections to lure young women and girls to a private island, allegedly along with a network of wealthy friends.
Now Combs is facing federal sex trafficking charges himself along with racketeering and other counts.
His arrest at a New York City hotel came six months after Homeland Security agents raided his mansions in Miami and Los Angeles and nearly a year after a series of explosive lawsuits began naming him as an alleged sex trafficking and domestic abuser, claims apparently supported, in part, by the leak of security video showing an assault on his ex, Casandra “Cassie” Ventura, in a hotel hallway.
“This is like Epstein 2.0, if you think about it,” said David Gelman, a New Jersey-based defense attorney and former prosecutor. “You have a guy who is extremely rich and extremely powerful, just like Jeffrey Epstein was. You have him being charged with allegations that are inhumane and unheard of against women and potential minors for sex trafficking and sexually deviant acts, and the similarities are uncanny.”
Supposedly there are also videos.
Combs is being held without bail at the moment.
On “creating” stories: J. D. Vance
I was speaking recently to a Democrat I know who is angry about the “eating cats and dogs” remark of Trump’s for a number of reasons. One of those many reasons this person gave – and the one I’m going to focus on in this post – was that, in a later interview, J. D. Vance had actually admitted to lying about the story and not caring that it was a lie.
This was an accusation I hadn’t yet heard. The person to whom I was talking had an actual quote from Vance, though, which went like this: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do … ”
It seemed likely to me that what Vance meant there was “create a news story” by bringing it up in a way that would get more media attention. But I didn’t know, because I hadn’t listened to the quote. So I went looking for a clip. Coverage was mostly of the “see, Vance admits he’s lying!” variety (see this sort of thing, for example).
But Politico managed to show the quote in context. Here’s a transcript I made of the following video:
VANCE: The media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about the cat memes. If I have to …
BASH: [interrupts] But it wasn’t just a meme [unintelligible word] …
VANCE: … create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.
BASH: You just said that this is a story that you …
VANCE: [overtalks] Yes!
BASH: … created. So, so the [shakes head] eating dogs and cats thing is not [he starts overtalking] accurate.
VANCE … [starts while Bash is still talking] We, we are creating … [closes eyes and shakes head “no” in some annoyance] Dana, it comes from first-hand accounts from my constituents. I say that we’re “creating a story” meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it. I didn’t create twenty thousand illegal migrants coming into Springfield, thanks to Kamala Harris’ policies. Her policies did that but yeah, we created the actual focus that allowed the American media to talk about this story and the suffering caused by Kamala Harris’ policies.
Here’s a longer clip of the interview, in case you’re interested:
I think this is a good illustration of how so many people come to hate Trump and Vance. The use of these truncated quotes, over and over, by the media as well as Democrat candidates and spokespeople, has created a very strong perception amounting almost to a certainly in many people’s minds that Trump and Vance and anyone who supports them are simply awful people – that the candidates are diabolical racists who lie and lie and lie and aren’t even ashamed of it.
This edifice of perception has been built, brick by brick by brick, over the course of many years. There are thousands of such bricks, and if you knock one down, there are plenty of others to shore up the building of belief. To argue in a manner that could make a dent in such beliefs, a person would have to knock down hundreds of such bricks, which would take an incredible amount of time and effort. And it would take remarkable and unusual patience in listening on the part of the Trump/Vance hater, as well. How many people are willing to go through that? Very very few.
Open thread 9/19/2024
Iran is playing the election interference game, big time
Iran seems to be really, really reluctant to allow Trump to win the election. Now the FBI has announced that one of Iran’s efforts to thwart him involved attempting to enlist Biden aides by enticing them with hacked information:
The hackers sent emails in late June and early July to people who were associated with Biden’s campaign before he dropped out. The emails “contained an excerpt taken from stolen, non-public material from former President Trump’s campaign as text in the emails,” according to a U.S. government statement.
The announcement is the latest effort to call out what officials say is Iran’s brazen, ongoing work to interfere in the 2024 election, including a hack-and-leak campaign that the FBI and other federal agencies linked last month to Tehran. The Justice Department has been preparing charges in that breach, The Associated Press has reported.
Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post were among the outlets who received the communications from Iran, but they’re not saying what was revealed.
Of course, we have no reason to trust the FBI on any of this, due to past performance regarding Trump, dossiers, foreign involvement, the FISA court, and the media. But in the case of Iran, there’s no need to imagine any convoluted motives: Iran has obvious and very strong reasons to do everything in its power to prevent Trump from ever being elected again.
Roundup
(1) In Montana, a court ruling that may help sink Tester’s re-election chances.
(2) NPR tries to claim that Rich Lowry used the n-word in an interview. Of course he did not, and they know it. Doesn’t mean they won’t claim it.
(3) As far as I know, there’s been no further word on the ABC whistleblower allegations. I wrote yesterday that the network hasn’t issued a very impressive rebuttal so far. Stay tuned.
(4) Teamster members heavily favor Trump, but the union has so far refused to endorse either candidate. I’m not so sure how much official endorsements matter anymore.
(5) For what it’s worth, a new Gallup poll indicates that Trump is a tiny bit more popular than Harris, 46% to 44%. His popularity has risen five points since last month. Interesting.
Kamala Harris wants to present herself as a defender of gun rights
However, this has now surfaced. It’s from 2007, when Harris was the DA in San Francisco:
“Just because you LEGALLY possess a gun in the sanctity of your locked home doesn't mean that we're not going to walk into that home and check to see if you're being responsible.”
This is rather consistent with how Harris viewed various rights as CA AG.
— AG (@AGHamilton29) September 18, 2024
And in fact, San Francisco did enact a gun law – and then-mayor Newsom signed it – that allowed city officials to do exactly that. I don’t know the current status of the law.
Which amendment does such a law violate more, the 2nd or the 4th? I suppose we don’t have to choose between them, but if pressed, I’d say it would be the 4th Amendment with its prohibition against unreasonable searches without probable cause to issue a warrant.
Harris’ instincts appear to be for government overreach and violation of rights. Earlier, I had posted another old video of Harris, this one from the 2020 Democrat debates, which illustrates Harris’ willingness to violate constitutional powers in order to ban guns. Here’s a memory refresher:
MUST WATCH: The last time Kamala ran for President, she told David Muir that she would use executive orders for gun control.
Even Biden was telling her that it wasn't constitutional. She just laughed at him. pic.twitter.com/k2whLMYHzq
— MAZE (@mazemoore) September 11, 2024