As Published in The Swagger #5 — Tuesday Edition

Just a quick note before I dive in to today’s thoroughly fantastic edition of The Swagger.

Over at my day job, FreeTheAnimal.com, I’ve just wrapped up, in draft form (like an hour ago), the culmination of a solid 8 1/2 months of hands-on research and bust-ass testing. So thorough was I that the writing part required only a few days. And it’s tight.

If you’re an experienced gym practitioner and are interested in trying out this unique workout matrix I’ve spawned, pre-publication, details here.

In This Tuesday Issue of The Swagger:

1. Why We [Really] Get Fat (and What If Economists Wrote Diet Books?)
2. More Awful LC/Keto/Carne Messaging
3. Turns Out Judge Scott McAfee is a Good Guy and Republicans Get It [Stupidly] Wrong (Again)

(Background: WTF McAfee? You Just Managed to Piss Off Everybody)

1. Why We [Really] Get Fat (and What If Economists Wrote Diet Books?)

Later in this section, I’m going to show you what has long been my favorite “diet paper.” I say that with a hint of sarcasm, but bear with me, and you’ll understand why. We’re tackling the age-old question, or rather the blunt statement: why we get fat. Frankly, I don’t know if everyone’s ready for the answer because it’s painfully simple, downright obvious, and there’s absolutely no lucrative angle to it. The harsh truth? No one’s really interested in the actual solution because it would bankrupt the entire diet industry as we know it. Imagine a world where the only diet professionals left are personal trainers, life coaches, and maybe a few personal chefs to help you get your act together.

Selling the truth is like trying to sell ice to Eskimos—pointless and frustrating. People claim they want the truth, but when it’s staring them in the face, they’d rather pay top dollar for a comforting lie. Every diet under the sun, regardless of its theme, is essentially a beautifully packaged lie. And why are they all profitable? Because they work, to some extent. The minute someone switches up their routine, they see results, keeping these diet fads in business. It’s not rocket science; it’s just human nature to crave change.

Now, let’s entertain a hypothetical that might just blow your socks off: what if economists wrote diet books? Picture this: diet advice stripped of all the fluff, devoid of any allegiance to a particular “diet tribe.” Instead of diet gurus who see every problem through their narrow lens—be it carbs, fats, or the dreaded plant toxins—an economist would approach it with a sort of consequentialism or utility.

‘Yea, but is that actually useful?’

In the realm of economics, there’s no room for one-trick ponies. An economist would likely laugh at the oversimplified solutions peddled by so-called diet specialists. Imagine a diet book that doesn’t try to sell you on a magic bullet but instead gives you the unvarnished truth about why we get fat and how to address it without lining the pockets of the diet industry. It would be a refreshing change, wouldn’t it? But let’s not kid ourselves. In a world that thrives on complexity and quick fixes, the straightforward, economics approach to the question isn’t winning a Nobel Prize.

… Modern obesity research focuses a lot on food hyper palatability. In other words, people get fat because they eat too much, too often, and they do that because it tastes really good and you can’t eat just one.

No shit, Sherlock. At least they’re not saying it’s for sure too many carbohydrates, not enough fat, or THE CHEMICALS!!! I’ll give them that.

But it’s Incomplete (and here’s why).

First, it’s not saying anything. Unless they’re trying to say, ‘to solve the obesity epidemic, alls we need to do is make everything smell and taste like rotten shit.’

That isn’t going to happen, so there’s really no point to any studies or research seeking to explain from even more angles that people really like good tasting food and will overeat it.

Second, food engineering to make foods drug-like, addictive, and irresistible is a) nothing new and b) still not the main cause because c) that’s falsified for a thousand years (and longer).

What do I mean by falsified? I mean that hyper palatability, which as a contributor to obesity because of the drug-like deliciousness, is nothing new.

Ever since the dawn of agriculture and the development of combinations of crunchy and doughy grain concoctions, sugar, honey, and by-product (like caramel and nougat, etc.) concoctions, and butter and leaf lard…hyper palatability was on the menu. If you’ve ever been in a classic French pâtisserie, you’ve seen that scene.

Those have been around for perhaps hundreds of years in pretty much the form in the headline photo and more primitive versions a long time prior to that. Europeans are nothing if they aren’t quite creative and skillful about producing the highest quality, expensive, baked concoction goodies and high-end confections.

Seed oils have been around for over 100 years…and all the other stuff too. Sugar has been around for thousands. Bread, for thousands.

And yet, Europeans never suffered that much of a noticeable obesity problem because of it…surrounded by far and away the most hyper-palatable, delectable, enticing treats the human mind can imagine.

They truly go out of their way and excel, and European Main Street storefronts, markets, and even supermarkets are to this day still chock full of such things. The ethic and tradition of high quality still persists, though they now have plenty of low-quality engineered stuff available, as does the whole getting fatter by the day world.

So, why didn’t they have the runaway obesity problem way back, when the treats were far more enticing to the eye and pleasurable to the palate?

Answer: they have always been relatively expensive.

That’s it.

In a sense, money makes you fat.

Well, that and food engineering, but not in the way you think. It has fuckall to do with THE CHEMICALS!!! or the SEED OILS!!!

It doesn’t even have as much to do with people making more money, it’s that the food engineering makes everything relatively less expensive. Cheaper. Why? To addict people? Again, the stuff isn’t nearly enticing as it was (see the photo again).

The purpose of the food engineering is to make the stuff relatively less expensive, so lots more people have regular access to it within their budgets AND, the food engineering is about mimicking the pleasure of all the good classic stuff as best as possible. In other words, they’re trying to get to that level of hyper palatability, but at a fraction of the cost.

… Quick anecdote. I visited Thailand, where I’ve lived the last 4 years, a number of times way back, from 1986 to 1990, 34–38 years ago.

I can’t recall ever seeing a fat person. I’m sure there were some, just not enough to take any notice. One of the first things I noticed upon arrival in 2020 is that now, obesity is a thing (probably close to 60s and 70s USA), mostly among women.

I thought a lot about what changed, and the thing that got me really thinking about it is that Thais are still downright crazy about their own traditional foods. Obsessive, actually. They prefer their foods to ANYTHING. Out in rural areas, they’d turn down any spread in favor of their own dishes they eat every day all their lives. I know hundreds of people in rural Isaan who have never had a bite of any “farang” (foreigner) food in their entire lives.

So what changed?

I’ll tell you what. In 1985, according to World Bank figures, 80-90% of Thai people were below the defined poverty line. By 2020, it had exactly inverted to only 10-20% being below the poverty line.

In short, 2/3rds and more of the country, over the space of 35 years, gradually gained the ability to eat pretty much as much they want, pretty much as often as they want.

There is zero mystery about what causes obesity, and it has never changed.

It is eating too much (of any sufficiently energy dense foods) too often.

And the economic ability to do so is the missing piece of this puzzle and is never acknowledged, so far as I can tell.

… It started with plain old economics. The industrial world got richer, and as it did, all food got less expensive as a percentage of income. This made for business opportunities in fast food and junk.

Previously, treats were treats because it was understood that they could not replace real food because 1) lack of nutrition and 2) it was expensive relatively. Pastry baking was a specialty because it was an expensive, luxury good and high-quality ingredients and special care was involved in preparation, which was very labor-intensive compared with butchering, supplying produce, or bread making.

As such, the cultural milieu adopted all the appropriate narratives (no eating between meals, you’ll spoil your dinner, on special occasions, just a little, it’s a treat, it’s dessert, and on and on) …these being accommodations with ourselves to negotiate away the real reason: too expensive to eat all the time.

But it took decades still for the overall food culture to change as industrial food engineering, processing, manufacture, and distribution made the junk similar enough in taste and texture to the real thing, but most importantly, orders of magnitude cheaper. If you didn’t replace your good food entirely with junk, well, you could still eat a hell of a lot of it, and you could do it regularly, daily.

It has been so successful and the food engineering so effective that now, they can actually raise prices on the cheap crap, people will still buy it in hordes, and the profits are obscene.

And now, the culture is such that people can stuff their faces at will, eating too much too often every day, and not only do so shamelessly, but double down with hubris and engage in “positivity” activism.

It has nothing to do with seed oils and condiments, you silly little keto and carnivore people.

… Oh, my favorite “diet” paper, written by economists: The Potato’s Contribution to Population and Urbanization: Evidence From A Historical Experiment, Journal of Economics; June, 2011.

Punchline: Many of you owe your very existence to that high-carb, high-glycemic ‘loaded’ “bag of glucose.”

2. More Awful LC/Keto/Carne Messaging

Another example of poor messaging by the LC/Keto/Carne crowds.

… I’ve been in this diet game since 2007, so 17 years now. Mostly, that was as a Paleo influencer, but always on the lowish carb, highish meat and animal side…not the sort of “Paleo” who preferred plants, or the real fakes: “Paleo” brownies, cookies, and treats (junk) of all sorts.

But just as Loran Cordain found very early on—and those of us who mostly touted a very flexible Paleo approach later on—people aren’t interested long term.

Either Paleo doesn’t have enough magic (poor messaging) or it requires some discipline (rather than incantations, spells, and rituals), or whatever, but the bottom line seems to be that when adopted correctly, and you make it part of you, you tend to stop obsessing, gain whatever levels of success you’re happy with, and you move on.

This isn’t good for business. What’s good for business is the same for vegans as it is for carnivores: keeping people constantly engaged (obsessing) about their diet.

One way to do that is the forever saw about anti-nutients, toxins, chemicals, trace this and that and if you follow their One. True. Diet. obtaining redemption and salvation, you too can enter the Pearly Gates!

It’s been so exhaustively studied in the only valid way to study the thing (metabolic wards). People get fat because they eat too much, too often. You don’t even need to use the c-word. Everybody knows what “too much” means.

Yes, the c-word is used as the preferred form of measurement in order to tabulate numbers in metabolic ward studies. Is it 100% accurate and representative of reality? Is Newtonian physics 100% accurate (the answer is no). Will Newtonian physics get a rocket ship to the moon and back (the answer is yes).

Go ahead and pay attention to the chemicals in the foods you eat. It can’t hurt.

But that does not preclude you from paying attention to the elephant in the room, and that’s how much you eat, and how often.

So, this is a false alternative.

Be one of the ones who does not succumb to being fan-boy stupid.

… So what I wish is that folks would adopt neither one extreme nor the other (plant-based/veg*n OR carnivore).

We’re omnivores with a preference for animal products, likely because they’re available to us and are very energy:time/effort/cost-efficient. We’ve developed the various tech of agriculture around eating animals (even much of agricultural produce goes toward feeding animals for eventual consumption).

Other apes are omnivores with a preference for vegetation, likely because it’s the most energy:time/effort/cost-efficient for them. They live in places where vegetation grows all around them naturally. They do eat meat and other animals opportunistically (and bugs and ground and tree crawling and burrowing things).

There is no Salvation through Jesus and there is no One. True. Diet. The mentality that believes the former (and similar religious faiths) is the same mentality that seeks the latter.

“THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!!!”

Understand that this is always what’s going on at root, even if the purveyors of various one-true-diet programs don’t believe it themselves. They understand full well that couching it in such quasi-religious terms and presenting it as redemptive, rejuvenating, saving, and atoning resonates with people looking for magic words, rituals, traditions, and learned practices—such that they don’t have to exercise any real thought or effort themselves, and have an excuse when it doesn’t work because they never change much.

That said, carnivore does indeed work marvelously for a lot of people and is a million times better than veg*n on so many levels (nutritional and energy density both).

But why?

Very simple. It has zero to do with plants being bad bad bad. It’s that by being so damn restrictive, you cut out all junk (even if processed meats are allowed, such as sausages and such…these are not junk and in fact, are often excellent because they employ more nose-to-tail, so a lot more of the more trace or nutritional density found in the parts of animals not normally eaten).

So where we REALLY are is this: carnivores want to couch their diet as the best, the One. True. Diet. because of their inferiority complex.

In reality, they are very weak-willed people, junk addicts, gluttons, and forever in pursuit of the lazy solution.

And by damn, carnivore is as absolutely close to that as you will ever find.

BUT, understand that’s what’s going on. They are not being honest about it:

“I’m a total fat-ass, lazy, gluttonous slob with zero discipline, who cannot keep off the junk so that I could eat a richly enjoyable omnivorous diet that includes wonders like potatoes, legumes, fruits, and some artisanal, traditionally prepared grains, such as fresh crusty bread. Nope, I’m totally pathetic. I’m so pathetic, in fact, that I have had to imply and even explicate that it is all you who are inferior and weak because you can eat omnivorously appropriate without becoming a lazy fat-ass.”

There, I fixed it.

3. Turns Out Judge Scott McAfee is a Good Guy and Republicans Get It [Stupidly] Wrong (Again)

Here we go again. How long has it been now? It’s been many years—two decades, three decades—that I’ve said, “Yeah, the Democrats are the evil party, but you know what? The Republicans, they’re the stupid party.” That’s evidenced by the simple observation that they just keep losing. They lose all the time, and it is unfortunate because many Republicans are of faith, and many people of faith, most would say, have their heart in the right place. But, you know, we live in a modern world that takes deliberate thought, action, and oftentimes a little bit of cunning. Praying doesn’t cut it; trusting in Jesus doesn’t cut it. I got news for you: He ain’t coming again. The reality is that to the extent that conservatives, Republicans, Christians, evangelicals—the hard-core—to the extent that they keep up their faith-based nonsense is the extent to which they will lose and lose and lose in perpetuity, and shit will just keep going downhill. Mark my words.

So, the other day, Scott McAfee made a decision on the motion to disqualify the DA in Georgia over a conflict of interest, impropriety, as the head prosecutor along with her team, so on and so forth. I’ve already blogged about all that, and everybody went apeshit on both sides. I blogged about that too. And, of course, for the left, they’re just liars because they’re lying; that’s what they do. “There’s no evidence, blah, blah, blah.” There’s shit tons of evidence. Now, Republicans and the religious, but I repeat myself: sex is involved, and it’s out-of-wedlock sex, so on, so forth, so then God must be invoked! So, Republicans are not happy with the decision handed down by the judge, even though it was fully in accordance with the law as he saw it. Upon analysis, it looks like he was amazingly astute, disciplined, careful, and adept, which is who he is as a man. And for that, I’m going to give you some information that was assembled by somebody else, another lawyer, and a conservative one. Jeff Childers of the Coffee & Covid Substack.

Over the weekend, commenters continued poking me about Judge McAfee’s connections to Fani Willis, implying they show some kind of secret bias that should change my mind about what’s really going on in the case. So I looked into the claims. The first claim is that McAfee and his wife each donated $150 ($300 total) to Fani Willis’ 2020 District Attorney campaign. The second claim is that McAfee once briefly worked for Fani Willis at the Fulton County DA’s office. Both claims are true.

For background, I relied on an article published last August in the New York Times under the headline, Judge on Trump Case Once Worked Under Fani Willis.

First, as to the donation. In 2020, Fulton County voters were forced to choose between two democrats running for District Attorney. Fani Willis ran against an ultra-liberal incumbent, democrat Paul Howard, and it was no secret that local conservatives supported Willis. Some of our own C&Cers from Atlanta even reported voting for her in the comments. Given that, plus the fact they briefly worked together (more on that in a minute), it’s unremarkable that McAfee made a relatively small donation to Fani’s campaign.

The rest of McAfee’s slim voting record appears to favor Republican candidates.

On the plus side, Judge McAfee’s resume offers plenty of encouraging conservative bona fides. McAfee, 35, graduated law school relatively recently in 2013. While attending the University of Georgia, he was vice president of the Federalist Society’s local chapter. The Federalist Society is a solidly conservative law group (I am also a member). McAfee also was the Law School Republicans’ treasurer.

McAfee’s career could be called meteoric, exactly what you’d hope to see from a skilled and intelligent jurist. Keep in mind, this part of his resume is all in his ten-years post-graduate. According to the Times, McAfee’s very first job out of law school was in the Fulton County DA’s office, where he was briefly assigned to Fani Willis’ felony team. But he was quickly promoted out of Willis’ office to the complex trial division. Then he was promoted again, to senior assistant district attorney, where he prosecuted murder cases in the major case division.

In 2019 — only six years out of law school — McAfee was appointed to assistant U.S. attorney for the entire Northern District of Georgia, and prosecuted federal cases like bank fraud and drug trafficking. In March 2021, Governor Kemp appointed McAfee to lead the state’s Office of the Inspector General, an internal watchdog agency investigating fraud, abuse and mismanagement in government. It’s likely he worked with the Governor in that politically-sensitive job.

He was Inspector General when was appointed last year to Fulton County judge, showing Governor Kemp must have liked the job McAfee did as IG. Kemp appointed him into an open judicial slot, making McAfee the youngest judge in Fulton County.

After all that, no, I do not think that Judge McAfee is secretly working for Fani Willis and playing 5-D chess instead of 4-D chess. His small $300 donation in an all-blue local election — to someone he knew — makes sense. True, McAfee’s very first job as a 24-year-old law school graduate was in Fani Willis’ office, but he shot right out of there to much more important, high-profile, and politically-sensitive positions.

The bottom line is: not only is Judge McAfee smart, experienced beyond his years, and well-connected, but from his resume he is not just conservative but also very politically savvy. It’s now even more clear why he was a great choice for Trump in this case, maybe the best possible choice among the Fulton County judges.

Remember, Trump could easily have drawn some all-in liberal judge instead. Sometimes, and I am not talking about anyone in particular, but sometimes some Republicans can be guilty of being impossible to satisfy and suspicious of everyone. I’m just saying.

INTERFERENCE ☙ Monday, March 18, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS

So Republicans? Just STFU, already. Jesus.

Until next Thursday…