We are all obese now

The New Neo Posted on by

Or at least, the vast majority of us are, according to a recent re-definition:

Obesity rates in the United States may increase dramatically under a new definition introduced earlier this year by the Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology Commission.

Researchers at Mass General Brigham discovered that applying the updated criteria—which expands beyond the traditional body mass index (BMI) to include measurements of body fat distribution—raised obesity prevalence from around 40 percent to approximately 70 percent among more than 300,000 participants. The increase was especially notable among older adults. The study also revealed that many of the newly classified individuals faced a greater likelihood of negative health outcomes.

Who’s celebrating? The makers of diet drugs and the purveyors of diet programs.

It’s all very odd – particularly since there’s also been evidence that being somewhat overweight – even by the old definition – is somewhat beneficial for the elderly:

In fact, the nationwide study found that people who were slightly overweight in their 50s but kept their weight relatively stable were the most likely to survive over the next 16 years.

They had better survival rates than even normal-weight individuals whose weight increased slightly, but stayed within the normal range.

There are other studies that say something similar:

… [N]umerous studies suggest that carrying some extra weight can sometimes be protective in later life. For people who fall, fat can serve as padding, guarding against fractures. And for people who become seriously ill with conditions such as cancer or advanced kidney disease, that padding can be a source of energy, helping them tolerate demanding therapies. …

Experts are more concerned about a lack of activity in older adults who are overweight or mildly obese (a body mass index in the low 30s) than about weight loss. With minimal or no activity, muscle mass deteriorates and strength decreases, which “raises the risk of developing a disability or a functional impairment” that can interfere with independence, said John Batsis, an obesity researcher and associate professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill.

Weight loss contributes to inadequate muscle mass insofar as muscle is lost along with fat. For every pound shed, 25% comes from muscle and 75% from fat, on average.

Since older adults have less muscle to begin with, “if they want to lose weight, they need to be willing at the same time to increase physical activity.” said Anne Newman, director of the Center for Aging and Population Health at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health.

Ideal body weight may be higher. Epidemiologic research suggests that the ideal body mass index (BMI) might be higher for older adults than younger adults. (BMI is a measure of a person’s weight, in kilograms or pounds, divided by the square of their height, in meters or feet.)

One large, well-regarded study found that older adults at either end of the BMI spectrum — those with low BMIs (under 22) and those with high BMIs (over 33) — were at greater risk of dying earlier than those with BMIs in the middle range (22 to 32.9).

Older adults with the lowest risk of earlier deaths had BMIs of 27 to 27.9. According to World Health Organization standards, this falls in the “overweight” range …

And then, to top it all off, there’s this seeming paradox:

Deficiency of the gene melanocortin 4 receptor (MC4R) is linked with obesity among adults. A recent study has found that the same deficiency also leads to surprising outcomes such as reduced risk of heart disease, lower cholesterol, and triglycerides. These results contradict the well-established correlation between obesity and cardiovascular diseases.

The researchers scanned the genetic profiles of 7,719 children from the Genetics of Obesity Study (GOOS) cohort. They identified 316 probands—first person in a family to draw medical attention to a genetic disorder—and 144 adult family members with obesity due to loss-of-function (LoF) MC4R mutations.

Even after adjusting for weight, these individuals showed better blood pressure profiles and cardiovascular health when compared to 336,728 controls from the UK Biobank.

The gene defect ordinarily causes severe obesity, and I don’t think it’s all that common even in that population. So unless you’re very obese I don’t think there’s any chance you have it.

I think the issue of weight and health is quite poorly understood – and that includes why some people can eat a lot and be thin, and vice versa. Except for the new weight-loss drugs – and who knows how they affect health long-term – it’s very hard for most people to lose weight and keep it off.

Democrats stand by their man Jay Jones

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s too late for Democrats in Virginia to get a replacement, and so they’re sticking with the deathwish-on-opponents-fantasizing Jay Jones, their candidate for AG. They idea is that the “D” after his name will be enough, and perhaps it will.

But there’s also this [emphasis mine]:

A random person gets popped in the face at a Trump rally for any number of reasons that might arise at a close gathering of thousands of people, and for days we’re treated to a national lecture from the media about the rise of right-wing violence. But a Democrat’s text messages are made public and in them he suggests he’d rather shoot a Republican than Hitler, and, well, the race is roiled! And those messages are a few years old, anyway, so what does it matter?

Like the Post, the nerdy Politico also ran a headline portraying Jones’ sadistic deliberations as though they were merely a bad poll for Democrats rather than a depraved and disqualifying revelation. “Democratic candidate’s ‘abhorrent’ texts threaten to shake up bellwether Virginia elections,” it said. The word “abhorrent” was apparently something that had to be attributed to someone in quotes — in this case, Jones himself — rather than standing on its own as an objective fact. And my, oh, didn’t the messages shake up the campaign in a bellwether state. We’ve got a nail-biter!

It’s simple. The media react one way when it’s political violence they can attribute to Republicans and a different way when it’s demonstrably coming from Democrats. They do that because they sincerely believe one form of political violence is justifiable. We know which one it is.

In other words, they agree with Jones and they’re not the bit scandalized or even offended by what he wrote. I’ve discussed this violent deathwish prevalence among Democrats before. I’ve seen it shared – quite casually – by people I know, and that’s been true for about a decade. Usually it has been about Trump, but it seems to have broadened in recent years to include the GOP in general. The Overton Window has moved considerably:

The political commentator Joshua Treviño has postulated six degrees of acceptance of public ideas: “roughly”

unthinkable
radical
acceptable
sensible
popular
policy

Among Democrats, I’d say that the idea of the assassination of opponents has reached the “popular” phase. It’s not official policy yet, but it has a great deal of approval.

It’s one of those roundup days again

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) As Comey and Bolton go, so goes Brennan, if the DOJ chooses to act:

Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee on Oct. 21 referred former CIA Director John Brennan to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution, alleging Brennan made false statements in his 2023 testimony before Congress about the Trump-Russia investigation.

“John Brennan lied to Congress,” Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said in a post on X in reference to the President Barack Obama appointee. “Today, we referred him to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution.”

Specifically, Jordan said in his letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi that evidence newly declassified by appointees of Trump at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirms Brennan falsely testified on May 11, 2023, when he said “the CIA was not involved at all with the (Steele) dossier.” …

“As the newly declassified documents demonstrate, Brennan eagerly wanted to include information from the Steele dossier in the (Intelligence Community Assessment), a fact Brennan himself documented in writing,” Jordan wrote, in reference to a classified CIA intelligence assessment about Russian interference in the election.

No one is above the law – except when their friends are in power.

(2) Graham Platner, a Democrat of Maine trying to defeat Susan Collins, has a Nazi tattoo (SS death’s head) that he claims he got twenty years ago in Croatia when he was in the US military on leave – and drunk. Mary Chastain, author of the post I just linked, writes:

I call absolute BS, and if it is true, then you’d better get tested for diseases because no legitimate tattoo artist in the world would ever tattoo a “very inebriated” person.

She seems to know a lot about tattoos, having seven of them. I’ll defer to her greater knowledge, since I have none. But one thing I do know is that you can get tattoos removed, and twenty years is a long time.

(3) Japan’s new prime minister is female, conservative, and an admirer of Thatcher:

The country’s parliament elected veteran ultraconservative lawmaker Sanae Takaichi to serve as the next prime minister on Tuesday, making her the first woman to take Japan’s highest public office.

Takaichi is an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first female prime minister who was nicknamed the “Iron Lady.”

She favors a strong economy and a strong military, and, according to interviews with Japanese media, a strong drum riff.

… Speaking on Japanese radio station Tokyo FM’s “BABYMETAL” podcast in August, Takaichi confirmed a longtime affinity for the iconic British heavy metal band Iron Maiden, but said her favorite artist was Japanese drummer Yoshiki, of the X JAPAN rock band from Chiba.

… She used to play the drums in a heavy metal band that did Black Sabbath and Deep Purple covers, and CBS News’ Japanese partner network TBS says there’s still an electronic drum kit in her parliamentary residence — though she plays with headphones to avoid interrupting her colleagues.

She’s pro-US:

Takaichi cited the Japan-U.S. alliance as a “cornerstone” of Japanese diplomacy and stressed that Japan is an indispensable partner for America in its strategy to provide counterweights to China in the Indo-Pacific region. Trump is scheduled to visit Japan next Monday to Wednesday.

While Takaichi made history by becoming the first female leader of a country where men still largely hold sway, she has not promoted gender equality or diversity.

(4) Republican John Sununu of New Hampshire says he’s running for the Senate:

Sununu announced his decision in a video in which he said that even he was surprised by his decision to seek the Republican nomination for the seat.

“Washington, as anyone who observes can see, is a little dysfunctional right now,” Sununu said in an exclusive interview with News 9. “There’s yelling, there’s inactivity. We’ve got a government shutdown. Friends, family, they always say, ‘Why would anyone want to work there?’ And the short answer is it’s important to New Hampshire. It’s important that we have someone who knows how to get things done.”

Sununu’s entry into the race sets up a Republican primary with another former U.S. senator, Scott Brown, and a competition for the support of President Donald Trump. Sununu’s past opposition to Trump is well-documented, and he said he’s not focused on seeking the president’s endorsement.

This may sound confusing, because there have been a lot of politicians named Sununu in NH. One is the father, John, who was governor of New Hampshire and quite conservative. His two sons, Chris and John, are more RINO-ish. John was a House member and then US senator, but hasn’t been since 2008. Chris was recently governor. And you may remember Scott Brown, Sununu’s Republican rival, as having been a senator from Massachusetts elected to stop Obamacare. He actually has NH roots and has lived primarily there for quite some time.

New Hampshire is now a purple state, but only because Republicans often win the governorship, as well as controlling the state legislature. They do not do well at the House or Senate level, and the Democrat frontrunner for 2026 is the popular Chris Pappas.

(5) There’s a drive in California to put an initiative about voter ID on the ballot:

DeMaio’s Reform California, the organization behind the initiative, points out recent polling indicating that 68 percent of Californians support requiring an ID to vote, while 73 percent support requiring verification of citizenship. These measures are broadly seen as essential to election security, meaning that elected Democrats won’t like the idea.

Should be interesting.

The Louvre heist

The New Neo Posted on by

I imagine many if not most of you have visited the Louvre, so I’m not telling you anything you don’t know when I say that the place is big. Really, really huge. So it must be quite difficult to secure.

That said, if it’s your job to prevent thefts there, you’ve got to be effective and to be effective you may need to be creative. The thieves certainly were:

In a minutes-long strike Sunday inside the world’s most-visited museum, thieves rode a basket lift up the Louvre ’s facade, forced a window, smashed display cases and fled with priceless Napoleonic jewels, officials said.

The daylight heist about 30 minutes after opening, with visitors already inside, was among the highest-profile museum thefts in living memory and comes as staff complained that crowding and thin staffing are straining security. …

Around 9:30 a.m., several intruders forced a window, cut panes with a disc cutter and went straight for the glass display cases, officials said. Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said the crew entered from outside using a basket lift via the riverfront facade to reach the hall with the 23-item royal collection.

Their target was the gilded Apollon Gallery, where the Crown Diamonds are displayed, including the Regent, the Sancy and the Hortensia.

The thieves smashed two display cases and fled on motorbikes, Nunez said. No one was hurt. Alarms brought Louvre agents to the room, forcing the intruders to bolt, but the theft was already done.

Creative and yet simple, exploiting what was probably a long-existent vulnerability. I have questions that I haven’t seen answered, such as: has anyone ever used this modus operandi before? What sort of alarm system does the museum have? Why is it short-staffed (I assume not enough money), and did this contribute to the time lag in “agents” arriving? Are the agents armed, and if not, how would they be stopping the thieves even had they arrived much earlier?

The head of the Louvre and the head of its security are both women. Are they incompetent DEI hires? Perhaps. But did they jettison previous security measures that would have prevented this theft? Did they fail to follow normal protective measures? I’ve not seen any indications of either, but it might come out with time. That certainly was true with our own Secret Service in Butler, Pennsylvania.

NOTE: This heist immediately made me think of this scene, which made a deep impression on me in 1964:

The COVID vaccine and cancer treatment

The New Neo Posted on by

Surprise! The COVID vaccine may enhance the effectiveness of certain cancer treatments; see this:

Cancer patients who received mRNA COVID vaccines within 100 days of starting immunotherapy were twice as likely to be alive three years after treatment as those who never received a vaccine

These findings have prompted a randomized Phase III trial to determine if mRNA COVID vaccines should be part of the standard of care for this type of therapy

If validated, findings could significantly increase the number of patients who benefit from immunotherapy.

There are plenty of people who cite the vaccine as having an enormous number of bad effects. I’ve written countless posts on this blog refuting the evidence against the research they cite to supposedly prove this. The exception is myocarditis – which I’ve also discussed at some length, and is a danger which has been known for a long time for young men who receive the shot. Every study I’ve found of other serious effects of the vaccine either does not say what anti-COVID-vaxxers purport it says, or has a research design so poor as to make it meaningless. I’m not going to go over this territory again right now, but it’s all on the blog, some of it here but much of it in the comments.

I’ve never advocated the vaccine for children or healthy young people, however. Nor have I ever felt it should be required. Each person should make his or her own decision about it, and I am fine with a decision either way.

Hunting Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

They won’t give up until they kill him, or die trying.

This is very disturbing:

The US Secret Service is investigating what could be a sniper’s nest or a hunting stand near an area where President Trump’s Air Force One has recently been kept at Palm Beach International Airport, according to sources.

The suspicious stand, found Thursday, is in a tree and within the line of sight of the section of the airport where Trump exits the presidential jet, and was described to The Post by law enforcement sources as an odd collection of pipes. …

Authorities do not know yet whether it is a hunting stand or merely junk in a tree — or has a more nefarious purpose, sources said.

The area could be used by hunters who go after invasive green iguanas, the sources added.

Let’s hope the latter.

But it doesn’t stop so many people from openly wishing him dead.

NOTE: When I was at the article I linked in the above post, I saw a link to an article about a Trump-menacing interview with Colombia’s president. Not noticing the spelling of the word “Colombia,” I assumed it referred to the president of the NY college. That seemed highly plausible to me. Of course, that’s spelled “Columbia.” This threat came from the president of the South American country:

“The easiest way [to change Trump] may be through Trump himself,” Petro [president of Colombia] added. “If not — get rid of Trump,” he continued, snapping his fingers dramatically.

Petro later denied he’d been threatening Trump; he was just saying the American people should get rid of him. He didn’t say how, of course; there’s no election in the future for Trump. The American people can’t impeach and convict him; that’s for Congress to do and it’s not going to be happening (the conviction part, that is; the impeachment part will definitely happen if the Democrats get control of the House. They will be going for the Trump-impeachment hat trick, but without an enormous majority in the Senate it won’t matter any more than the previous ones did, and probably even less.)

What Bolton is alleged to have done

The New Neo Posted on by

Query of the day: is it a revenge prosecution when the person indicted really does seem to be guilty of something that’s not utterly minor and meaningless?

For extra credit: If any prosecution of someone who is or was your enemy is automatically defined as revenge lawfare and prohibited, then wouldn’t these people be getting off scot-free for their previous abuse of power? Wouldn’t it be a get-out-of-jail-free card to have been the enemy of or the persecutor/prosecutor of a person who later comes to power? Wouldn’t it mean there would be no consequences for bad actors who try to engineer a lawfare coup on someone they consider an enemy, or break the law (such as by leaking classified information), because after that it’s hands-off those people if the power balance changes and goes against them?

Let’s just say that if even half of this is true, the indictment of Bolton really doesn’t seem to me to be a revenge prosecution. Let’s see:

John Bolton launched a plan to document and transmit classified information before he even started his job as President Trump’s national security advisor, according to the federal indictment against him. …

Two weeks later, he made his first transmission using the encrypted messaging app to two people, a 25-page document “which described information” that Bolton learned in his first few days on the job, the indictment says. The indictment doesn’t identify those people, but the New York Times reports they were his wife and daughter.

For the next 17 months, Bolton regularly sent “diary-like” entries to them about what he saw and heard that included classified information.

So it was a plan from the very start to write a memoir. In connection with that, he sent highly classified information to his family, often through insecure and vulnerable methods. He also took some of this information home with him. As far as I know, he had no power to declassify these things, unlike a president.

More:

Some examples of that classified information, which was also found in his home:

Revelations of a “liaison partner sharing sensitive information with the U.S. intelligence Community

A foreign adversary’s plans for a missile launch and the sources and methods used to gain the intelligence.

Covert action planned by the U.S. and a covert action that was conducted by the U.S. and another country.

A foreign country’s intelligence describing an adversary’s planned attack on a facility.

On advice of counsel, he didn’t use this information in his book. But using it in his book isn’t what he’s been charged with.

You can also find Bolton opining on the classified information violations of others in a video at this link. I can’t seem to find a way to embed it, so you’ll have to watch it there. Needless to say, he thinks their violations are very serious.

Much needed rain

The New Neo Posted on by

It rained in New England today. Hard.

That’s not ordinarily news. But this summer there was a widespread drought in this area, which was unusual but made for a rather pleasant time in terms of planning outdoor activities.

But it also meant that rivers have been low, and many of the leaves this fall shriveled up prematurely, turned brown, and dropped rather than looking beautiful. It seemed to me that fall would be a total bust, but it wasn’t.

For example, I took this photo on Saturday:

Not too shabby, eh?

I don’t see any reduction in TDS (plus, MSNBC rebrands itself)

The New Neo Posted on by

Miranda Devine sees a reduction, though:

But as Trump chalks up wins against the odds, and as more people become aware of the Hillary-Obama origins of Russiagate and all the other attempts to sabotage his first term, bankrupt and jail him, character-assassinate him and then really kill him, irrational Trump hatred seems to be dissipating.

Liberal media outfits around the world have been doling out grudging praise to the president for his Middle East peace efforts.

Chris Cuomo and C-Span, to their own surprise, have been fielding calls from Democrats applauding Trump — not just for the Gaza deal but for his tough stance on immigration and the fact their 401(k)s haven’t collapsed like they feared. …

One sign was Brandi Kruse, a social media “citizen journalist” invited to the recent Antifa roundtable at the White House, who described herself as a recovered TDS sufferer.

Covering left-wing riots in Seattle the past five years had flipped her.

I see zero evidence of this change among people I know. A mind is not only a difficult thing to change, but it’s even more difficult on highly emotional issues such as TDS. What’s the different between someone who merely disagrees with Trump’s policies and someone who hates his guts and even might wish him dead, although not prepared to personally assassinate him? I submit that it’s the person’s degree of emotional involvement in politics.

Also, being an MSNBC watcher helps to foster the most intense TDS. By the way, did you hear that MSNBC is re-branding? They probably paid a pretty penny for this:

Later this year, MSNBC will take on a new name: My Source News Opinion World (MS NOW).

This name further underscores our mission: to serve as your destination for breaking news and thoughtful analysis and remain the home for the perspectives that you’ve relied on for nearly 30 years.

“MS NOW”? That conjures up the idea of promoting multiple sclerosis, or perhaps pushing the old feminist rag MS – and yes, that ancient periodical is still being published.