Free The Animal

I had a curiosity yesterday. What are the correlations between obesity and religiosity, and if they exist, are some denominations more at risk than others? I did a little Googling this morning and found that indeed, it has been studied.

But if you dig deeper, it becomes quite a mess, because it’s difficult to separate science from dogma, which is not ironic, in this case. You’ve got apparent atheists on the one hand using any statistical tidbit to show that “religion makes you fat;” while on the other, fundamentalist Baptists put up pics of fat atheists. The only thing you end up learning is that it’s funny to watch groups with no disciplined sense of science, statistical relevance, or basic logic combat each other…reminiscent of midgets wrestling in slippery mud, or something.

Nonetheless, growing up in a deeply religious, fundamentalist Baptist household from the age of 10, during the 1970s, I did notice the disproportionate level of portliness compared with observing everyone else around me, as a scrawny teenager. Sometimes, I thought church might be a veiled excuse to get together for potlucks. There were hundreds of them, and quite good I might add. Mind you: this was the 70s, where obesity was still a rather outlier phenomenon and not at the top of the distribution as it is now—with skinny and morbid taking up the extremes to the left and the right.

The aforelinked study did proffer that fundamentalist Baptists are the fattest. One Fox News article that popped up stated it thusly:

A 2006 Purdue study found that the fundamental Christians are by far the heaviest of all religious groups led by the Baptists with a 30% obesity rate compared with Jews at 1%, Buddhists and Hindus at 0.7%.

Still, one must be cautious of correlation as causation. On the other hand, the general association is pretty clear. More religious prevalence in American abundance, more obesity.

But what if people of lower than average discipline, in this world of increasingly cheap abundance, seek absolution (or perhaps miracles), and the distributions and correlations are more a measure of the level of absolution they receive, but better correlated by denomination?

Fundamental Christianity in Practice

Generally, Christianity calls for some worldly work on the part of its faithful. You are to emotionally revere the accepted narrative of Christ’s life as example, and to the extent you emulate it, your daily fuckups might be excused. Of course, it’s fantasy. But it’s also a simple formula to understand—replete with thousands of word-bite memes—and does make some sense on logical grounds, considering there are easier ways to influence a population of billions with words than with guns. That ideal—manifest only in most modern religion—is noteworthy and of some utility. Islam need not apply. Your house is completely fucked up. Shut the fuck up and fix it, Muslims. …I digress.

Fundamentalist Christianity explicitly rejects any works, deeds, actions—good or bad—as having anything to do with salvation. It is by faith alone, because you are guilty at birth by means of the doctrine of Original Sin (best critique, here). Period. Nothing good you do helps, and nothing bad you do hurts, so long as you just trust in Jesus exclusively. It’s a critically important distinction in itself, since the sins you did, do, and will do, have all been paid for already by the crucifixion of a sinless person; so it’s a sacrifice, thereby unifying the Old Testament with the New.

In practice, it goes like this: “I accept Jesus Christ into my heart as my personal lord and savior.” It’s literally as simple as that, verbalizing those magic words, so long as you truly mean them and “put all of your trust in him.” Then and henceforth, you’re “saved.” You’ve received absolution and are redeemed—not only for what you may have done, no matter what, but what you may still do, no matter what. It is truly that explicit. Once “saved,” always saved, even if you later reject it. I have family that believe I’m still “saved,” that even after 25 years of vile pronouncements of anything religious I can get my mind on, I still uttered those magic words when I was 10 or so, and so they’ll see me in heaven—in spite of the fact that I’d prefer hell, where all the cool people are.

Seriously folks, this sort of language was my whole life (church 3x per week, church-school every day through 12th) between the ages of 10 and 18, when I then went off to “Bible College” at Tennessee Temple University. Being on my own, I finally began to set it aside after the first year and live a more normal life, eventually dumping it entirely by 30; and since, writing now & then to explain it. It’s only the young people of my age then, now, that drives me to do it.

The Fundamentalist Sales Pitch and Obesity

The point is, if you’ve followed the implications of such a sales pitch, it’s that it essentially gives you license to do whatever. No effect on “salvation,” and if you talk to someone who’s been “born again,” they use the phrase “when I got saved,” all the time, as though it’s normal conversation. It’s how they talk to each other.

There’s an underlying perniciousness to it. And it sets up all sorts of troubles. There’s the fairly typical pastor adulterer, sleeping with wives in the congregation and church staff. There’s the “youth pastor,” often enough a sociopath who uses his position of both god & church authority to influence the teen, high school girls. Mostly, there’s making everyone a little or a lot poorer, and crippling their drive by limiting their opportunities. Fundamentalists churches know their marks well. They can’t do anything about the already well-to-do, so they make them confidants and highly respected. Everyone else gets bled slowly. The most successful pastors are masterful at influencing people to do well enough to keep “tithing,” not so well that they no longer need the church.

So given all the foregoing, do you see how this is a recipe for being glutenous and getting fat?

When I saw the data, it being essentially the more religiously fundamental, i.e., the least questioning and most accepting, the more obese, it made complete sense to me.

Not because religion causes obesity, per se, but that people of chronically weak minds seek religion disproportionately, such that they can be assured they’re OK. This is fine, normal even, and such can be had in a lot of places like just mundane counseling or having a chat with a close confidant.

Fundamentalism is a pernicious virus of the mind, particularly the total absolution variety of the fundamentalist Baptists, where no sin really matters. You still go to heaven. Being disproportionately fat is just one manifestation of a religious doctrine that’s very bad for people here on earth. It’s perhaps not as bad as promising young virgin men prevented from any sexual exploration total absolution and 72 virgins in heaven if only they blow themselves up and take Jews with them, but it’s fundamentally the same thing at work in terms of exploiting minds for the sake of authority, influence, and gain.

The political landscape meanders through our lives often enough by means of presenting a collection of false alternatives in order to promote binary thinking, analogous to our predominately right vs. left political system.

“You’re either for us or you’re against us.”

In the context of energy production—as the narrative of the left goes—you need to embrace “clean” energy (e.g., blighting the landscape with bird killers wind turbines), while opposing oil and gas exploration, drilling, production and distribution generally—all while engineering schemes that subsidize the former while penalizing the latter. What this means in practice is that the government throws your tax money at “alternative,” or “clean,” or “renewable” energy in the belief that if you throw enough (which is never enough), often enough, you’ll “achieve” some breakthrough “windfall” that will make it all worth it…just like in the movies (and just as “real”).

On the other side of the equation, you penalize evil fossil fuels at every turn—from restrictions on exploration, drilling, and production, to onerous emission standards, to punitive fees, penalties, and taxes—and the list goes on and on.

In economic terms, this serves to artificially lower the price-to-consumer of rainbow-farting, flying unicorn energy, while artificially raising  the price-to-consumer of devil’s spawn energy. In other terms, it’s yet another social engineering project of the left designed to modify your behavior; because you’re too bad, too stupid, too shortsighted, too selfish, and not altruistic enough to be trusted with true free-market price signals for anything actually essential to your modern pursuit of happiness and well being. You’ll ruin everything. You’re not sufficiently “enlightened.”

It goes without saying that both the right and the left use demagogic, Chicken-Little tactics to justify much of what they seek to advance, such that they craft the world in their image, never having to face the discomfort of someone else thinking they’re a moron (another manifestation of their inherent binary way of “thinking”). But, for me at least, going berserk because your teen might masturbate to dirty pictures on the Internet—and The Wages of Sin is Death—it being just one of their many “family values” catechisms based on ancient texts written by sheepherders…and going berserk because we’re despoiling Gaia; we hate Gaia, are distinctly different. The former is ignorant superstition that’s entirely dismissible, while the latter materially fracks with your life and livelihood. It makes everyone poorer and worse off.

Accordingly, there’s an imbalance in the way the left and right behave on the energy issue. While the left seeks to heavily subsidize so-called clean energy and penalize so-called polluting energy, the right seeks to mildly subsidize the latter in ways many industries are already often subsidized (eminent domain, land grants, tax “breaks,” etc.) while generally denying subsidies to the former. In other terms, the left will not have fossil fuels if they can help it, while the right is OK with alternatives so long as they pay their own way.

I embrace both. I want to see them fracking drilling everywhere it can be done in a financially sound business way, so as to get fossil fuels as cheap and abundant as possible (preferably with no subsidies). Why? Because this will help those with a passion for research, development, production, and the bringing of cool new things to market like solar and battery technology. How will it help? They’ll be shooting at a target that moves in economic ways instead of political ways.

Let me illustrate. In spite of the left’s efforts to make oil & gas derived energy as expensive as possible to encourage you to buy an electric vehicle and do other arguably ill-advised things for the sake of Gaia, have you noticed the prices you’re paying at the pump, lately? I recently remarked that it’s costing me about $40 less to fill my tank from empty than it did last time I noticed how fracking high it’s getting. Thing is, it’ll probably go lower and stay a good while, thanks in part to technological innovations like fracking Fracking, fracking oil-sands extraction, and a host of other things whereby, prices are moving in a way where markets, economics, technology are trumping leftist politics designed to make you pay as much as possible. (Expect tax hikes on gasoline everywhere soon, as politicians find your “found money” too irresistible not to take. Don’t expect the new taxes to ever be repealed.)

By contrast, according to a CNBC industry analyst, “I think we’re going to test those break-evens at every play across the country.”

Perhaps the only fall in the energy complex as spectacular has been the break-even cost to U.S. drillers of producing a barrel of oil.

Those costs vary widely across the country’s shale fields—from Texas’ prolific Permian Basin to the Northeast’s gassy Marcellus Shale—but productivity gains have helped producers continue pumping. However, with many analysts now expecting U.S. crude to fall into the $30s, the question is how low can prices go before producers turn off the tap.

It’s still cost-effective down to prices of $10 per barrel to maintain many existing wells across the United States, which is why drillers have not shut in production. But producers face a significantly higher bar when it comes to authorizing new production, because the cost of drilling and finishing a well accounts for the lion’s share of lifetime costs.

In other words, U.S. efficiency is now so profound that its putting a crimp on new exploration and development. This, of course, has market repercussions as well, but for the time being, anyway, the consumer benefits; but that, in-turn, has market and economic repercussions as well, as consumers spend money on things other than a fill up. And man does this ever completely frack the fracking hell out of the left’s hopeful vision for Gaia.

And this is good for solar!

The shortsighted, however, who don’t understand markets, are ignorant of economics; and similar to fundamentalists of all religious stripes, can never conceive of behavior that’s not prescribed by doctrine, engineered interpreted by socialist-collectivists, and preached my ministers (with rewards and penalties met out according to solidarity to the cause).

In markets, rewards and penalties are met out according to how well or poorly individuals and enterprises predict, invest, divest, diversify, manage risk, develop, produce, and market stuff. This is an entirely foreign world to political junkies and the left are by far the chief sinners, in my view.

If you like alternatives such as solar and battery tech, don’t you think it would be wiser if the actors in those markets had market-based behavior and pricing signals in fossil-fuel markets to benchmark—rather than the changing and irrational tides of politics? I mean hell, you can’t even count on the Catholic Church to be as it always was, anymore. And if you can’t count on the Pope, who can you count on?

In my view, what’s going to make solar of far greater interest to far more people is not the silly, politically-left motivated electric car (that half-runs on the aforementioned rainbow farts of flying unicorns), but the combination of photovoltaic and battery tech, as is about to be released by Tesla, dubbed Power Wall. I’d have never understood this quite as I do now, had I not lived off-grid in Mexico for the summer, then immediately set up an off-grid living situation here in California upon my return. Almost 6 months now electricity-grid free, I’ve never had a power outage, and I’ve burned less than 3 gallons of generator fuel (and that was during my ramp up in equipment to where I am now, worry free, with abundant stored sun all night long).

I’ve known of photovoltaics and their advantages for on-grid homes for many years (saw a DIY installation by an electrician back in 2000). That lowers your electricity bill, which eventually pays for your equipment, plus the debt service if you finance it. Simple. It works. My brother has them and they perform great. But adding batteries to the equation is where it really gets interesting. Tesla’s $3,000 7 kWh Power Wall will power an entire average home all night long (you can hook them together for larger homes). This effectively reduces your electricity bill to $0, reducing your electricity-grid hookup to that of a backup generator.

Currently, I’m using four 100-watt PV panels and four 6v deep cycle lead-acid batteries (like they use in golf carts). They’re expensive…$720 for the four. For a bit more than four times that investment, a Power Wall could handle an entire house and last substantially longer than the 3 years or so these old-school batteries will last. It’s just downright kooky-cool to store the sun’s energy during the day and then power your lights, water pump, internet, WiFi, and a 32″ LED smart TV at night—where I pay a combined $40 per month for various streaming services, rather than a $150 cable bill for tons of shit I’d never watch.

So, what I’m saying is that batteries added to solar panels really kick it up in terms of utility and interest and this should, I predict, entice a lot more people to accept tradeoffs that might still be iffy. And more people = bigger market = more investment = more R&D = better products = cheaper products = fewer tradeoffs = rinse, wash, & repeat.

I’m a bit behind so far, though. Just now watched the Democrat Debate (no, I don’t use “Democratic” as adjective in that context…There are Democrats and Republicans…Democrat Debate and Republican Debate).

Still taking notes, but here’s the best assemblage of clips so far.

We need to get very serious about this election.

I should not have to explain the title, but let me give it a sentence. A killing isn’t necessarily a murder. Got it?

Here’s a murder, and apparently, Seneca Police Lt. Mark Tiller has a big enough license to murder as to make James Bond blush. Don’t recall seeing him killing young adolescents in any of the films. He only had a license to kill, just like you. The license to murder has been summarily granted by SC 10th Judicial Circuit Solicitor, Chrissy Adams, pending Fed stuff.

Here’s the murder of Zachary Hammond. His date, Tori Morton, was in the car and certainly far from being out of harm’s way. Apparently, this was some “sting” over buying a few grams of a dried plant(s). Maybe one had been refined into a white powder form, like sugar and flour.

So, there you just saw a 19-yr-old kid getting murdered for the crime of selling C. sativa, a wild growing plant and getting scared and trying to flee when caught ‘red handed.’ It should be clear to even any casual viewer that the kid was just scared and trying to run, not trying to harm his eventual murderer, Police Lt. Mark Tiller. I haven’t looked in detail, but the cop probably said what they all say: I feared for my life.

Judge for yourself if his life—and not his reputation or pride—was in any danger. Lots more details here.

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Ever had one of those cafe/diner patty melts that makes you wish you hadn’t?

First of all, it’s supposed to be—or should be—a modest marriage of ground meat and cheese on both sides. How do they always ruin it? With either butter or cooking oil, then they have it swim there, soaking up as much as possible while it oxidizes and rancidifies on a hot flat top.

Actually, my taste is now so reset I can’t even eat hash browns in a cafe anymore. Tastes completely rancid, and their bacon tastes like I’m eating a salt lick.

So let me show you. You need good whole gain real sourdough (i.e., actually fermented, not fraud-dough). One is with Swiss, the other Jack. If you don’t know why the dimple in the patties, you’re not qualified to grill ground meat.

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~ For nearly 25 years now I’ve loosely used human slavery as a reference or analogy to what exists now in terms of statism, because I would prefer that people get a brain and dump all allegiance to all states worldwide. But it’s imperfect, and I always use it tongue in cheek because I hate diluting the meaning of true slavery.

Even the name of my blog, Free The Animal, contemplates this in a way. The distinction is that these are cages of human, voluntary design and it doesn’t require much overt force when human beings will willingly walk in, close and lock the door, and toss the key out of reach.

They don’t know anything different and reminiscent of Stockholm Syndrome, they’ll keep their cages nice & tidy, and will jeer and laf at all who point out that they’re not only living in a cage, but are keeping it clean and tidy for their zoo masters and love compliments: Why We Couldn’t Abolish Slavery Then and Can’t Abolish Government Now.

Slavery existed for thousands of years, in all sorts of societies and all parts of the world. To imagine human social life without it required an extraordinary effort. Yet, from time to time, eccentrics emerged to oppose it, most of them arguing that slavery is a moral monstrosity and therefore people should get rid of it. Such advocates generally elicited reactions that ranged from gentle amusement to harsh scorn and violent assault.

When people bothered to give reasons for opposing the proposed abolition, they advanced many different ideas. In the first column of the accompanying table, I list ten such ideas that I have encountered in my reading. At one time, countless people found one or more of these reasons an adequate ground on which to oppose the abolition of slavery.

In retrospect, however, these reasons seem shabby—more rationalizations than reasons. They now appear to nearly everyone to be, if not utterly specious, then shaky or, at best, unpersuasive, notwithstanding an occasional grain of truth. No one now dredges up these ideas or their corollaries to support a proposal for reestablishing slavery. Although vestiges of slavery exist in northern Africa and a few other places, the idea that slavery is a defensible social institution is defunct. Reasons that once, not so long ago, seemed to provide compelling grounds for opposing the abolition of slavery now pack no intellectual punch.

…Except when precisely the exact same arguments are always used by 100% of people all the time to mock people like me who’ve been calling for the abolition of state “slavery” for 25 years, now.

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Paging Tim “Tatertot” Steele.

My what a ride it’s been. Remember, Nov, 2012? Actually, I’m quite sure it was in comments on previous posts where Tim—who now has his own Vegetable Pharm—introduced the idea of bouts of eating potatoes only in comments. …And since he was doing it only in comments, I took it to posts; and he figured, what if you eat only potatoes, too, and we write about it not only in comments?

Here was the first post, and if you look only at comments, Tim pretty much pushes everyone out of the way from there out, eventually introducing resistant starch. Rest is history.

There was some pretty cool work along the way if you care to peruse the posts; even a great collaboration Tim did with another commenter in terms of glucose regulation eating only potatoes. But there was always one problem for me, and it’s that I couldn’t find a way of eating potatoes almost exclusively that achieved staple status, while not blowing my brains out.

I stumbled onto it—for me—by needing to get a gas grill. We sold our rather medium sized, stainless steel a couple of years ago when deciding to move into an apartment near Bea’s work that didn’t allow grills on the patio. More recently, living off-grid in an RV in the east hills even closer to Bea’s work, we decided to get another. But I wanted small. It’s the whole off-grid conservationist thing: by choice—not ideology or force you. Having experience in living 100% on solar with no backup for 2 months in Mexico, I became interested in how much one can do with less; not from necessity, but love of the challenge. Now we’re nearing 3 months here and I’ve used 3 gallons of generator gas, and 3/4 of that was while waiting for my full solar system to arrive and get set up.

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The roughly 5-week Elixa Probiotic experiement (ElixaFTA.com) is complete and all that’s left now is to get the data from the nine separate gut-bug tests (stool samples), 6 of which we’re submitted to uBiome, and 3 to AmGut.

To recap, I first took a uBiome sample about a week before starting the course, then both a uBiome and AmGut from the same “location” on the morning right before commencing the 12-day course.

About halfway through, I took another uBiome and then right at the end, both a uBiome and AmGut. It actually turned out to be a 13-day course, since I was out of town for a day and forgot to bring it along. Coincidently, it was between doses 6 and 7.

Finally, I did a uBiome a week after done, and then just a couple of days ago, both a uBiome and AmGut at 2-weeks after completion. So, if anyone from home has done a more thorough setup I sure don’t know about it. Apparently, these things take a while to process. Given it’s been near six weeks since submitting the first kit, we should begin to see these test results trickle in. I’m curious, though I really don’t know what it’s going to reveal that I don’t already know: I feel fine.

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Artificial borders, drawn with crayon or colored pencils on paper that serves as your meta-metaphor, making precisions beyond plain continental drift (we’re land animals) is really silly on Kindergarten proportions.

I won’t belabor how fucktarded you are. Thank me later.

Why does everyone agitate over borders?

No, REALLY, why does everyone agitate over borders?

Money.

And you call yourselves Democratic Socialists.

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Real women are the salivation of all men. The converse it true too, of course.

If it were not not for women and the children they bear for us dudes, “civilization” would amount to a global pub with comfy chairs for “gaming.”

Want to be warm? OK, I’ll be right there (creates a power plant for a woman—we. can. not. help. it.).

It’s very true that 100% of modern convenience has been exclusively created by men. What’s never recognized and is indeed spat upon with regularity, is the realization that we were completely fine and OK freezing and dirty in the pub with our mates. We’re plagued with a conscience. We…I…Can’t help our[my]sel[f/eves].

I love it and so embrace the animal antagonism that goes with it as m spice of life that nobody gets to account for but me. Don’t you? I adore loving my place, even though I can get uppity. Don’t you?

My woman gets on my ass regularly, and I don’t know what I’d do without it.

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I don’t think I’ve ever blogged about this explicitly in a single post, though I’ve been aware of it even before Radley Balko of The Agitator blog (now Washington Post) wrote this in 2006: They Always Shoot the Dog.

Apparently, people who think that perhaps the government acted properly in invading and burning down a house of largely innocent (but admidetly weird) people get really pissed off when they learn that the federal government also slaughtered the Branch Davidian dogs. Women and children? Meh. Weirdo cultists probably deserved it. But…

“They killed the dogs? Aw, man. That’s bullshit.”

Radly was a sort of blogger-investigative journalist—whose main credit is getting Cory Maye first, off death row, then released. It was all over an absolutely righteous—stand up and say yea—killing of an intruder in a uniform, who if I recall correctly, was the son of the police chief or some other person of law doesn’t apply privilege. He was afraid for a baby daughter, not a dog, so take it with a grain of salt. After all, there’s Original Sin to consider and I believe that pets are innocent at birth, unlike human infants.

Cory Jermaine Maye (born September 9, 1980), is a former prisoner in the U.S. state of Mississippi. He was originally convicted of murder in the 2001 death of a Prentiss, Mississippi police officer named, Ron W. Jones, during a drug raid on the other half of Maye’s duplex. Maye has said he thought that the intruders were burglars and did not realize they were police. He pleaded not guilty at his trial, citing self-defense. Nevertheless, Maye was convicted of murder and was sentenced to death. Maye’s case attracted little attention until late 2005, when Reason magazine senior editor and police misconduct researcher Radley Balko brought it to light on his blog The Agitator.^[1] Balko’s research raised several questions about Maye’s conviction and in particular about the reliability of medical examiner Steven Hayne, who performed the autopsy on Jones and testified at the trial. According to Maye’s supporters, his conviction also brought up issues such as the right to self-defense, police conduct in the War on Drugs, racial and social inequities in Mississippi and whether he received competent legal representation.

In case you think I just pulled this out of my ass, search the blog for ‘Cory Maye’. I was there the whole time.

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We’re up here at the vacation home in the pines for a long weekend with four dogs (yea, we brought Hunter the Beagle along). It’s been a blast. Breakfast pics at the end. We get everything we like off-grid TV-wise except live sports, so today is football day.

~ We’ll have another iron fortification update post soon. With further digging, it’s really remarkable the politics, money, and favor that went into the “anemia health crisis.”

~ Economic and plain business ignorance.

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You folks really need to try harder.

I do like Bill Davis and have had some nice exchanges with him going way back and most importantly, he was very friendly to the revolutionary work Tim Steele and I did here on Resistant Starch. I got notice of a post on a new study a couple of days ago that strikes me as a bit bright eyed.

Here’s the study. In fairness, it’s not yet published and so might be different in the final.

Wheat gluten intake increases weight gain and adiposity associated with reduced thermogenesis and energy expenditure in an animal model of obesity

Abstract

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES. The association between gluten and body weight is inconsistent. Previously, we showed that a gluten-free diet reduces weight gain without changing food intake in mice fed high-fat diets. In the present study, we investigated the effects of gluten intake on fat metabolism, thermogenesis and energy expenditure in mice fed a standard or high-fat diet.

METHODS. Mice were fed four different experimental diets during eight weeks: a control-standard diet (CD), a CD added with 4.5% of wheat gluten (CD-G), a high-fat diet (HFD) and a HFD added with 4.5% of wheat gluten (HFD-G). After the eight weeks, the mice received 99mTc-radiolabeled gluten orally to study gluten absorption and biodistribution or they underwent indirect calorimetry. After euthanasia, subcutaneous (SAT) and brown (BAT) adipose tissues were collected to assess thermogenesis-related protein expression. Lipid metabolism was studied in adipocyte cultures from the four groups.

RESULTS. Despite having had the same energy intake, CD-G and HFD-G mice exhibited increased body weight and fat deposits compared to their respective controls. 99mTc-GLU or its peptides were detected in the blood, liver and visceral adipose tissue (VAT), suggesting that gluten can even reach extra-intestinal organs. Uncoupling protein 1 (UCP1) expression was reduced in the BAT of HFD-G and in the SAT of CD-G and HFD-G mice. Indirect calorimetry showed lower oxygen volume consumption in CD-G and HFD-G groups compared with their controls. In HFD mice, daily energy expenditure was reduced with gluten intake. Gluten also reduced adiponectin, peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR) α and PPARγ and hormone-sensitive lipase in cultures of isolated adipocytes from HFD mice, while in the CD-G group, gluten intake increased IL-6 expression and tended to increase that of TNF.CONCLUSIONSWheat gluten promotes weight gain in animals on both HFD and CD, partly by reducing the thermogenic capacity of adipose tissues.

International Journal of Obesity accepted article preview online, 07 October 2015. doi:10.1038/ijo.2015.204.

OK, let’s take a look.

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Just quick and just for fun.

In the space of a couple of hours, doubled my power capacity just today, as the sun gets lower and the days grown shorter—even though, this is, after all, California.

The electricians, engineers, smart DIY folks, etc., will immediately recognize that as a 4, 6v deep cycle wet cell battery super-cell, wired in both series and parallel to produce 12 volts and also—most importantly—a doubling of capacity—from 230 amp hours to 460. …The rest are voting for Bernie Sanders—unless they’re union electricians who do know; in which case, free stuff is always the guiding principle because they work so hard and they deserve it.

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I don’t blog about this much and never did. Yet, my finger has always been on the pulse, periodically. I’ve alway checked in with these folks principally, going as far back as be be counted:

• Watts up With That
• Climate Audit
• Climate Skeptic
• Real Climate

That last one gets me all the choir music I need, just to know what the choir sings.

It all kinda reminds me of our iron fortification gig that’s just got to be ridiculous.

Do you remember the Ancel Keys deal, and how if you include way more data, there’s no obvious correlation?

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Well, it’s way less than 1,00 words, but it is a picture with words. Punchlines after.

(HT: Carey Wedler)

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Obviously, it didn’t work, since almost nobody can philosophically and consistent to principles, beat his or her way out of a paper sack.

Perhaps that’s why this level of discourse is never seen, anymore. It would be like casting pearls before swine.

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