The conclusions from the study below are borderline insane

Orthodoxy  must be defended by hook or crook, I guess.  The study below not only showed tiny effects but achieved those effects only by throwing out four fifths of the data.  Using extreme quintiles for your analyis is a confession that there are no actual effects in the data as a whole.  The only statistically defensible conclusion from the results below is  to eat as much fatty food as you like, because it will have no effect on your health either way

Association of Specific Dietary Fats With Total and Cause-Specific Mortality

Dong D. Wang et al.

ABSTRACT

Importance

Previous studies have shown distinct associations between specific dietary fat and cardiovascular disease. However, evidence on specific dietary fat and mortality remains limited and inconsistent.

Objective

To examine the associations of specific dietary fats with total and cause-specific mortality in 2 large ongoing cohort studies.

Design, Setting, and Participants

This cohort study investigated 83?349 women from the Nurses' Health Study (July 1, 1980, to June 30, 2012) and 42?884 men from the Health Professionals Follow-up Study (February 1, 1986, to January 31, 2012) who were free of cardiovascular disease, cancer, and types 1 and 2 diabetes at baseline. Dietary fat intake was assessed at baseline and updated every 2 to 4 years. Information on mortality was obtained from systematic searches of the vital records of states and the National Death Index, supplemented by reports from family members or postal authorities. Data were analyzed from September 18, 2014, to March 27, 2016.

Main Outcomes and Measures

Total and cause-specific mortality.

Results

During 3?439?954 person-years of follow-up, 33?304 deaths were documented. After adjustment for known and suspected risk factors, dietary total fat compared with total carbohydrates was inversely associated with total mortality (hazard ratio [HR] comparing extreme quintiles, 0.84; 95% CI, 0.81-0.88; P?
Conclusions and Relevance

Different types of dietary fats have divergent associations with total and cause-specific mortality. These findings support current dietary recommendations to replace saturated fat and trans-fat with unsaturated fats.

JAMA Intern Med. Published online July 05, 2016. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.2417

****************************

Recent shootings: Donald Trump blames Barack Obama for race divide

Obama has repeatedly taken the side of black criminals and blamed the police.  No wonder blacks are angry.  They have no reason to doubt him. Obama and his ilk PROVOKE black anger.



Donald Trump attacked President Obama yesterday, saying that America's first black president had only worsened racial tensions.  "Our nation has become too divided," the presumptive Republican presidential nominee said after five white police officers were shot dead by a black gunman in Dallas.

Mr Trump, who has repeatedly been accused of "dog-whistle" politics, added: "Crime is harming too many citizens. Racial tensions have gotten worse, not better. This isn't the American Dream we all want for our children."

As the presidential campaign was interrupted by a mass shooting for the second time in less than a month, Mr Obama called for calm after a three-day spasm of racial violence.

The president had reprimanded police on Thursday after video footage emerged of the deaths of Philando Castile, who was shot by an officer in Minnesota on Wednesday, and Alton Sterling, a black man who was shot dead by police in Louisiana on Tuesday.

Mr Obama said: "There's a big chunk of our citizenry that feels as if, because of the colour of their skin, they are not being treated the same, and that hurts."

Even as the president was speaking, Micah Xavier Johnson, a 25-year-old black man, was preparing to unleash hell on the streets of Dallas.

Johnson shot a dozen police on Thursday night, five fatally, at what had been a peaceful protest march against the deaths of Mr Castile and Mr Sterling. Hours later Mr Obama found himself making yet another set of remarks after a mass shooting. At a Nato summit in Warsaw, he said that all Americans "stand united with Dallas".

Both Mr Trump and Hillary Clinton called off campaign events yesterday. Mr Trump had planned to address Hispanics in Florida but instead issued a statement calling the Dallas shootings "a co-ordinated, premeditated assault on the men and women who keep us safe".

He said that the deaths of Mr Castile and Mr Sterling were a reminder of "how much more needs to be done" to restore public confidence in the police.

After a mass shooting claimed 49 lives at an Orlando nightclub last month Mrs Clinton put calls for controls on assault rifles at the heart of her campaign. Mr Trump retaliated by alleging that she would scrap the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms.

The likelihood of progress on gun control is small. A tweet sent by Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman, signalled how charged the atmosphere has become.

"This is now war. Watch out Obama. Watch out black lives matter punks. Real America is coming after you," he wrote after the Dallas attack.

Mr Walsh deleted the post but stood by the sentiment. "There's a war against our cops in this country, and I think Obama has fed that war and Black Lives Matter has fed that war," he said.

SOURCE

****************************

The post-Brexit ugliness of the left:  Report from Britain

Money-obsessed and anti-working class – the liberal left has revealed its ugly side

Those on the liberal left have always prided themselves on being more caring and compassionate than conservatives. People on the right, they insist, are narrow-minded and selfish, beholden to vested interests. They only care about money and themselves. They are bad people.

This is one of the most persistent myths of modern times. I’ve never believed it. Selfishness transcends politics. Those on the left are just as given as conservatives to self-interest, bigotry and dislike of people different to themselves. And, my word, over the past couple of weeks, following Britain’s vote to leave the UK, haven’t we seen just how. The illusion of the liberal-left’s inherent and exclusive capacity for compassion has truly been exploded.

Consider the recent March for Europe in London, to demand that the will of the people be revoked and that corporate-backed oligarchy be restored. Rich, metropolitan types have shamelessly complained about the result because their holidays in Europe will henceforth become more expensive. They fear for their second homes in Tuscany and the south of France. People have been saying this openly. The burghers of north London fear they might no longer get dirt-cheap nannies and au pairs from Eastern Europe. They fret about the staff on the sainted NHS, staff trained at the expense of poorer countries who we in the UK have since hired on the cheap. Corporate types fear for the future of immigrant workers, those magnificently exploited souls who live six to a room on three-month contracts being paid a minimum wage or less. Such outrageous displays of greed haven’t been witnessed since the heady days of Thatcherism.

Consider, too, the ceaseless insults hurled at the stupid, poor white people who voted to leave the EU. These are folk who struggle to maintain a first home, let alone a second – people who can barely afford to go on holiday at all. These are the fishermen, from Aberdeen to Hull to Ramsgate to Hastings to Cornwall, whose livelihoods have been devastated by the EU – the same fishermen taunted by Bob Geldof and his champagne-swilling chums. These are the people living in Peterborough and Boston who can’t get doctor’s appointments or find school places for their children because hospitals and schools are overwhelmed.

These are people whose small businesses have been ruined by Operation Stack in Kent, whereby lorries clog up the roads for miles, the result of Schengen Area free movement that has led to the mayhem in Calais. Consider those people in Wales who faced the daily, humiliating reminder that their economy was dependent on hand-outs from the EU. Consider, too, all these English people in Dover and Folkestone who know Poles and Latvians, not as cheap domestic staff but as neighbours, parents of their children’s schoolfriends, as equals. All these people slandered as vermin and racists.

The metropolitan left sneered at them from their secluded London villages or their homes in rural Derbyshire. Cloistered writers and academics seem oblivious to the negative effects of the EU, not least because none has experienced first-hand the adverse effects of EU policy. No newspaper editor has opted for a cut-price, cutting-edge columnist from Romania. As for people working in the building trade, in decorating, in plumbing, I can introduce you to many who have been undercut or seen their businesses go under. There are countless here in Kent who have left costly and crowded London for that reason. If you have a house, a mortgage and children to look after, you simply can’t live as a footloose twentysomething singleton with no responsibilities.

I’m not sure how much the liberal-left realise just how repellent their brattish behaviour has been. But this has been coming for some time. Ever since the libertine cultural revolution of the 1960s, Labour and the orthodox left in the Western world have been in a long process of abandoning the working class, withdrawing into identity politics, rights for the self, for affirmation of the self. Hence, so-called progressives now care above all for their image as ‘good people’. Virtue signalling is the epitome of the new faux-compassionate, egocentric left.

Hence the needy rhetoric about ‘the world hating us’ for leaving the EU, the exhortations to ‘hug an immigrant’ or wear safety pins to boast of one’s non-racist credentials. Everything’s about ‘me’. The liberal-left couldn’t understand why people would vote in the name of abstract principles such as ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’ or ‘self-determination’, because they view everything in terms of their own money and their own public image.

There was a time when it was Tories who sneered at the poor, who deplored them as stupid and feckless. This was in the loadsamoney era of the 1980s, during which the market ruled and we were beholden to the whims of capitalists and the sainted market. There was even a time, many years ago, when the left spoke of principles, of democracy and liberty. How the roles have been reversed. How strange that it’s mostly conservatives who now talk in abstractions, and it’s the left that obsesses about the markets and worry about the FTSE 100, about their own money. They oppose democracy. They hate the poor and the old. They are despicable.

SOURCE

******************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

***************************