eggs good,bad,good,bad?

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24332380-000-why-everything-you-know-about-nutrition-is-wrong

This piece was a welcome read. Written by a nutrition journalist. It states the reasoning for my objections to advice from nutritionists, in a more articulate form than “bloody epidemiology!”.
We have a growing obesity problem in this country and I have to admit to being part of it, taking a daily dose of about a dozen different medications, which may be related to diet, or old age, or an interaction of conflicting effects of the various drugs.
For me, the problem lies in there being no causal links between diet and health, except at a level of lack of certain minerals and vitamins cause all humans to suffer similar health issues. Eating too much makes you fat and starving makes you dead.
I’d like to see more research on how molecules in our bodies interact to do what they do.

Imagine being inside your own body, floating along with your blood cells and the multitude of molecules that also drift in the currents. There are bits of food, waste, plastic (or so, we’re told), enzymes, hormones, drugs etc., etc. They’re not on a mission to get anywhere; they’re just bumping into one another and, usually, just bouncing off again. Think of them like odd bits of jigsaw pieces, some huge and some tiny. Sometimes they’ll latch onto each other and something will happen. E.g. an enzyme will meet a starch molecule and stick to it in a couple of places, causing it to change shape. The change in shape of the enzyme causes it to break a bit off the Starch molecule, before releasing it again. It’s not an intentional act, anymore than litmus turning red in an acid environment, or turning blue, when it finds itself in an alkaline one. It’s just a mindless chemical reaction. All throughout your body, other reactions happen. Think of your cells as like a Death Star, with molecules bumping into them. Some molecules may bump into an access point and gain entry into the cell, if they have the right shape, size and identifying bits of molecular groups. They’ll float around inside the cell, where they may interact with its internal structures and provide energy, or nutrients or stimulate other molecules to form. They may just float out again. The processes are not predictable and will vary in each person, because of our DNA and maybe, even, the DNA of the plant, or animal, we’ve eaten. Infections enter our bodies and float around, inside, in the same haphazard way, as these other bits and pieces. As a group, we have a similar reaction to these invaders, which, in the case of viruses, are also mindless in how they interact with our bodies. Most of us react in the same way, to varying extents. Some die, some just become carriers of the disease. I’ve not become aware of any research on why this is so. It might help to kick epidemiology into the long grass and see, which genes are involved in combatting disease, controlling immune reactions, allowing hyperplasia and metastasis. When these are known, maybe we can develope treatments specific to an individual’s response to the same foods and diseases.

Wheels of State

I keep reading articles about protecting people and laws designed to help but they all hold one fatal flaw: they can only be implemented in retrospect.
Take the 20mph speed limit on suburban streets. A laudable idea but who will implement it? Even if we had an adequate sized police force and courts (we wouldn’t need a CPS, I guess)?

We’d also need monitored CCTV’s on every lamp post.
As it is we could only arrest and prosecute offenders, if they hit someone and there were witnesses and skid marks, or other evidence of speeds used. Unless there were a death, would we have the resources to pursue such cases?
The same reasoning applies to ABH, shop-lifting, armed robbery and even murder (unless an MP were the victim).
Our Civilisation is getting along on inertia, an inadequate judicial system)and the fact that the vast majority of people just want to be happy and obey these laws.
I’m reminded of an old tune “three wheels on my wagon” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsXoMS9-xxg).
Politicians have cause to worry, because they’re the ones in charge of the Wheels of State.

WW III

WW I began, when the despotic rulers of nations signed treaties with one another, effectively forming two factions.

One assassination triggered all those treaties and millions died, to achieve nothing but their economic collapses and lay the seeds of bitter resentment.
Again treaties were signed, by despotic rulers; not of mutual defence but of mutual aggression.
A grand bluff against an aggressor was called and WW II grew.
Again, millions died and economic collapse ensued, except for the USA.
The British Empire collapsed and the US empire grew. Broken nations relied on economics aid from the new Empire.

More treaties were signed; ostensibly for mutual defence but applied as if for mutual aggression.
The biggie is: NATO. Intended by the signatories to call all to the defence of any one of them, should they be attacked. But out of a sense of moral obligation and the weight of financial debt, it has morphed into an attack force to be wielded by the USA against its economic enemies, or anyone else it dislikes.

The USA saw a financial advantage in aligning with Israel and Saudi, against Iran.

Israel is threatening to “defend” itself against any attack by Iran and told USA of this intent. So, WW III has a second trigger (besides what’s happening in Ukraine, where the USA wants the EU and the UK etc. to handle matters), because if Iran is provoked into an attack on Israel, or beclaimed to have done so, then USA has to attack Iran, who will no doubt strike back and demand the whole of Europe to line up against Iran.

Will, Russia, China, Pakistan and various Middle and Far East countries just sit back and watch what many will see as an attack on Islam.
Small wonder US billionaires are investing in Space Travel and seeking hidey holes.

Galactic domains

@TheTelegraphUK

Earth’s original shape revealed by scientists

Story by @sarahknapton

Basically the article stated that all planets start off looking like Smarties.

I considered that this might be that as Space debris coalesced under the influence of Gravity, their angular Momenta would add vectorially, with the more massive  body taking dominance, so all would take the same axis of rotation. The edge of the disc so-forming would be nearer any approaching masses, so they would ten to be more strongly attracted to the edge of the disc, increasing the disc shape. As the mass increased, impact energies would make the planet more plastic, allowing Gravity to make the disc more spherical.

My next query was would all planetary bodies then, being isolated systems, have different axes of rotation. Obviously the planets in our Solar System all have/had the same axes but pictures of galaxies show they do not. Why?

I posited that, like the Earth they all carry a Static charge and as they rotate they’ll have an associated magnetic field, which I then likened to the atoms in a piece of Iron.

In unmagnetised Iron, the atoms in the crystals are aligned but the crystals, or domains, move to a low energy configuration,  so there is no outward sign of magnetisation but internally the domains are locked in position.

I really don’t get dark matter, or dark Energy, but I wonder if this Galactic domain idea might play a role.

life is a soap

Now I’m older, I wonder if God created The World as some sort of entertainment device and gave us lifespans such that by the time we might begin to catch on, we’d “pass on”.
For the first twenty years of our lives, we are sponges, soaking up the milieu in which we exist. we enter the stage as adults at 21 years of age.
From then on we stop growing and begin ageing.
We are programmed with whatever mores our generation has formulated, along with the hard wired imperatives of our hormones to fornicate and populate.
We play out our soap opera lives within the constraints set but we gain experience.
We learn and we remember.
We make mistakes and we recognise those same mistakes, as we see our children and then our grandchildren make them.
Unfortunately, by this stage we are already reaching the end of our functionality.
Our muscles and joints are insufficient to allow us to be as active as we’d need to be to get involved in those activities necessary to be considered as an active adult member of Society.
Our place in Society is relegated to that of teenagers and as our mental faculties gradually erode, our status reduces further along the path to infantilism.

Our opinions are accorded the same low level of respect as those of children. The difference is that children have insufficient experience of The World to form valid opinions, whilst we have a surfeit.
Nevertheless, we are ignored and God gets to see a neverending soap opera, with us as witnesses to succeeding generations acting out the same follies. with variations on a theme.

maggie’s doom

@Telegraph
Private equity binge threatens to trigger financial crisis, warns Bank of England

With interest rates having gone up since Truss’s brilliant leadership, a lot of home owners are finding themselves facing larger repayments in a market where fewer can buy their own homes. This means that house prices are dropping, so the home-owners are not only making bigger repayments but their house are worth less.
This only becomes a problem when they can no longer afford the repayments and owe more on their home than they can sell it for. Government says it’s not their problem; “them’s the breaks in a capitalist system”.

It’s what happened back when Gordon Brown was Chancellor, except the problem was mainly in the southern states of the USA, where a lot of sub-prime mortgages where issued. I.e. mortgages were extended to people who would never be able to keep up repayments but then these sub-prime (i.e. not worth the paper they’re written on but looked good; like Confederate dollars) were sold on at face value to our City spivs (or entrepreneurs as Maggie titled them) and they used the mortgaged property deeds as collateral to borrow money to buy other more valuable assets.

This is known as leveraging and it’s what Gilet and Hicks did with LFC. I.e. you buy something of low value and borrow money from suckers.

In both cases the suckers were British Banks, whose CEO’s salaries and bonuses were based on how much the bank collected in interest from loans. CEO’S don’t care if the securities are duff, so long as they can claim to shareholders that they had good(?) reason to believe the assets were of value. Then something happens; a bit of a recession, wages are cut, or there’s redundancies. Suddenly there are pictures of whole families living on the front lawn of their boarded up houses, or towns flattened by tornadoes and Hurricanes. Then, these Assets show their true worth. Loans are called in but the loanees are flat broke, or they’ve sold on the good assets and disappeared.

Bank CEO’s inform share holders that they’ve lost a lot of money, share prices nosedive and shareholders tell the Government to make good their losses, or they’ll crash the Economy (thanks to Maggie this is a real threat). So, the British workers and small business men suffer austeriy i.e. make good the losses.

O.K., that’s History. But it’s History which looks like being repeated; Not with the Banks, who’ve had some restraints put on them, but with Private Equity firms. These are businesses, who act like Gillet and Hicks but handle the money of the very wealthy, who’ve moved their money away from bankers and left it in the hands of more professional speculators.
These men are gamblers, who own mos of the Nation’s assets and are too rich to be controlled by most Nations.
The only way to regain control, for us, is to reverse Maggie Thatcher’s disastrous reliance on unrestrained capitalism. She got rid of the unions by privatising or selling off the heavy industries and relying on her “invisible exports”. I.e. insuring property in Tornado alley, credit cards, money transfers, commodity trading, bonds and anything else that involved spivs in The City, sitting in their offices, clicking boxes on their computers and licking their “sticky fingers”. e.g. UK Government lends £6 Bn to Greece. it’s handled by an employee in Goldman Sachs with a few key swipes and an enter button. Their fee is 0.1% of the transaction. I.e. £6Mn., which “sticks to their fingers”.
We need to re-nationalise and buy British rolling stock, ships, steel, concrete, wind turbines etc.

We need to nationalise any industries, which can export goods, or don’t require importing goods.

We need to grow our own food E.g. we could nationalise the grouse moors and build a greenhouse agriculture. We need to stop worrying about our miniscule contribution to global warming and adapt to any changes that may come. We need to train our own nerds to compete with those, foreign and domestic, exploiting our reliance on City Spivs.

It’d help if we got rid of the nepotism, created by Public Schools, hired professional interviewers to fill top posts, evaluated the roles of banks and their CEO’s etc.

political representation in a dense population

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Once upon a time, people lived in small communities of a few thousand. In Today’s communities, we’re talking in terms of hundreds of thousands, maybe million, all identifying as one community, needing political representation.
The old system of voting for someone, known to most of the community, doesn’t really work, anymore.
When I go to vote, I no longer know any of the candidates and they rarely try to make themselves known to me. I read election leaflets and see election posters but they’re meaningless to me. I see a face and I’m invited to vote for the most photogenic. I read promises and I know, from past experience, that they are lies.
MP’s no longer pretend to represent the wishes and concerns of their constituencies, claiming merely to be representative of them and so vote their own interests.
Because of party politics, their self interest lies in staying in a large party, which can attract the funding needed to advertise their “promises”. The Party can attract donations (bribes) from businesses, who expect to gain an advantage.

Independent candidates are unlikely to help change government policy, so are unlikely to attract donations to advertise themselves.

In addition, candidates are limited in how much they can spend on advertising themselves but those in a party benefit from their party’s unlimited spending.

My solution: get rid of voting and pick candidates, by lot, from those registered voters, who are prepared to serve as MP’s.

This way a constituency gets someone from their area, likely to have similar concerns.
There would be no wasted time and money advertising themselves and no boring Party political broadcasts.
There’d be no whipping MP’s to vote for policies they don’t support.
Admittedly, MP’s can become corrupted in office but many won’t and lobbying groups would find it harder to gain advantages.
MP’s would have real life experience and a wealth of varied expertise.

Nepotism and cronyism would be limited, by their limited time in office.

MP’s could vote PM’s and Ministers in and out of office, by a simple majority. They’d all be judged on merit and unlikely to try to dominate, so likely last longer in a post than under the present system.

Of course, the present lot would oppose such changes… if allowed to.

schooldays

When I was a kid, teachers were respected and treated as professionals, even though they took a wage. They could charge extra for services such as a requested parents’ interview, or extra homework/tuition. They were under direction of a headteacher but what went on in a classroom was (subject to the Law) entirely at their discretion, including punishment. Parent’s tended to the view that “you must have done something”. They were only required to teach their subject up to a standard, measured by external exam. There were internal exams, at the end of a school year and report cards, bearing an exam mark, a school placing (220/221), a class placing(29/30) and a comment; which might simply be “Fair”. I, personally, found these a lot more helpful than some waffle about “enjoying socialising”, “trying hard to grasp key elements of the topic”.

It’s not as if the kids were too stupid to know it, especially as their mates knew it and could be persuaded to help them.
Teachers were judged by the Governors, on anticipated exam pass rates.
Poked and prodded by polticians, inspectors, parents and pressure groups, I’m not surprised so many leave teaching, nowadays.

“shoplifters and scammers”

@HouseofCommons

I’ve just watched a TV Prog “shoplifters and scammers”, where thieves are released without recrimination.
Police are expensive, courts are expensive and prisons are expensive.

The Neolib answer has been to introduce private police forces (Blunkett), seen here as “Security Guards”. They also introduced the CPS to block prosecutions, to avoid needing more prison provision.

We have council funded magistrates but they are limited and underfunded.
Why not extend the shopkeepers responsibility to control shoplifters and allow them to hold their own courts under hired, legally qualified staff. They’d be self-controlled by present civil law, on wrongful arrest. Their powers could extend to right of search and even imprisonment in their own gaols (subject to official oversight and their own cost-benefit judgement).

It wouldn’t be as good as a proper State run system but it might make businesses begin thinking it’d be better paying taxes to have one.

Spin-offs could be less crime, lower prices, lower inflation

epidemiology, a Science?

I was thinking about AI and how it could put a lot of epidemiologists out of a job. Epidemiologists sift through data to find associations between two factors. For instance a recent associative link was announced between eating red meat and getting diabetes 2. No causative link between them was proposed.
With AI, you feed it everything you know about lots of people and it’d come up with loads of associative links. For instance it might link eating red meat with red wine (a social custom). It’d probably come up with drinking rcould ed wine (lots of sugar) with diabetes 2. The last is a known causative link and is worth taking notice of.