The FBI was at the crash site within 90 minutes, indicating they’d left their Minneapolis office before the “accident” at about the same time Wellstone’s plane was just taking off that morning, indicating the possibility of pre-knowledge.
“If there are health benefits from eating less beef and pork, they are small, the researchers concluded. Indeed, the advantages are so faint that they can be discerned only when looking at large populations, the scientists said, and are not sufficient to tell individuals to change their meat-eating habits.”
Guest Essay by Kip Hansen ? 20 January 2020
Rita Rubin, Senior Writer, JAMA Medical News & Perspectives, has stirred the pot on the controversy surrounding a series of studies published last Fall in the Annals of Internal Medicine, ?one of the most widely cited and influential specialty medical journals in the world.? Her latest piece, titled ?Backlash Over Meat Dietary Recommendations Raises Questions About Corporate Ties to Nutrition Scientists?, appeared in JAMA online on 15 January 2020. It begins with this:
?It?s almost unheard of for medical journals to get blowback for studies before the data are published. But that?s what happened to the Annals of Internal Medicine last fall as editors were about to post several studies showing that the evidence linking red meat consumption with cardiovascular disease and cancer is too weak to recommend that adults eat less of it.
Annals Editor-in-Chief…
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From Russ Baker (WhoWhatWhy): “Imagine my fascination, then, to learn that John Hinckley Jr., the man who shot and nearly killed President Ronald Reagan in 1981 — an attempt which, if successful, would have resulted in then-Vice President George H.W. Bush moving up to the top spot — was none other than a friend of the Bush family. How strange is that? So strange that it literally caused NBC News’s anchor John Chancellor’s eyebrows to arch as he reported the curious connection. The story was broken by the now-defunct Houston Post, and then picked up briefly by the AP and UPI wire services, and some newspapers, plus Newsweek. Then it vanished without a trace or further inquiry or comment in the mainstream media.”
Source – therearenosunglasses.wordpress.com
– “…To sum up: John W. Hinckley’s brother attends a surprise birthday party at Neil Bush’s house in a period when John Hinckley was suffering serious mental problems. The government exerts financial pressure on the Hinckley family business. Hinckley shoots President Reagan, nearly making Neil Bush’s father the president. The financial pressure on the Hinckleys disappears, George H.W. Bush is in charge of the “investigation” of the shooting, the Hinckleys chalk it all up to their son’s demons, everyone focuses on Jodie Foster, and that’s the end of that”
Hinckley Walks–the Bush Connection
President Reagan with the Bush family. Left to right: Neil Bush, Marvin Bush, Reagan, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Jeb Bush. Photo credit: Reagan Library
Why did George H.W. Bush and his cabinet determine that John W. Hinckley Jr. — the man who in 1981 tried to kill the newly inaugurated President Ronald…
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The Undoing Project: The Friendship that Changed Our Minds
By Michael Lewis
WW Norton (2016)
Book Review
This is a book about the pioneers in the movement to improve human decision making with data collection and statistical methods. It focuses on the work of Daryl Morey, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Morey was a math nerd who taught the sports world to rely on data collected on prospective players to facilitate their selection by professional teams. Morey first brought this process to public attention in the late eighties as the general manager of the Houston Rockets baseball team. This approach would quickly be adopted to predict performance in basketball, football, banking, political campaigns, movie production, and farming. At present, the use of data-based “algorithms”* extends to nearly every area of human endeavor.
Most of the book focuses on the unique 15-year partnership between Israeli psychologist Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. As with most of his books, Lewis’s forte is unraveling the intricacy of interpersonal relationship. In The Undoing Project, his main focus is to explore the unique creative relationship behind their revolutionary work.
Tversky, a giant in the field of mathematical psychology, had a special interest in ascertaining how people make choices and decisions. In their initial work at Hebrew University, he and Kahneman assisted the Israeli Defense Force in identifying objective data to determine which troops would perform best in combat.
Their research probably had the most impact on so-called free market economics. Prior to their ground breaking work, most economists believed consumers had rational reasons for the purchases they make.
The work of Tversky and Kahneman also challenged the notion of “expert judgement” in many fields, eg the inability of psychologists/psychiatrists to predict dangerous in patients and of radiologists to accurately diagnose cancer from x-rays. In both areas, Tversky’s and Kahneman’s work facilitated the development of algorithms that were far more reliable than human experts, whose judgement is often impaired by boredom, fatigue, stress, and unconscious biases.
In addition to advising the National Basketball Association, NATO, and the US Secret Service on reducing the fallibility of human decision making, the pair also played a role in reducing pilot error on commercial aircraft.
Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics. Tversky was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 2996 but died of melanoma before it could be awarded.
*By definition an “algorithm” is a set of mathematical instructions that are followed in precise order to solve a problem.
Iran is investigating how a cyberattack by the US may have been the reason why the Iranian weapon system operator confused the passenger aircraft for a cruise missile.
The Iranians believe that the Americans disabled their radar system after Iran fired missiles at US troops housed in Iraqi bases in Anbar and Erbil.
Iran Guardian Council chairman Ahmad Jannati stated Wednesday that “enemy sabotage” cannot be ruled out, while Brigadier General Ali Abdollahi directly suggested that US military forces hacked Iran’s radar systems to make it appear that the airliner, containing 176 people, was an incoming missile. Abdollahi claimed that the operator of the missile fired at the plane had difficulty in receiving the message of the command center when the alert about cruise missiles was removed and mistook the plane for an incoming American missile […]
The junk food revolution, ‘free’ trade and poor health
In Manhattan, the homeless shelters are full, and the luxury skyscrapers are vacant.
Such is the tale of two cities within America’s largest metro. Even as 80,000 people sleep in New York City’s shelters or on its streets, Manhattan residents have watched skinny condominium skyscrapers rise across the island. These colossal stalagmites initially transformed not only the city’s skyline but also the real-estate market for new homes. From 2011 to 2019, the average price of a newly listed condo in New York soared from $1.15 million to $3.77 million.
But the bust is upon us. Today, nearly half of the Manhattan luxury-condo units that have come onto the market in the past five years are still unsold, according to The New York Times.
What happened? While real estate might seem like the world’s most local industry, these luxury condos weren’t exclusively built for locals. They were also made for foreigners with tens of millions of dollars to spare. Developers bet huge on foreign plutocrats—Russian oligarchs, Chinese moguls, Saudi royalty—looking to buy second (or seventh) homes.
But the Chinese economy slowed, while declining oil prices dampened the demand for pieds-à-terre among Russian and Middle Eastern zillionaires. It didn’t help that the Treasury Department cracked down on attempts to launder money through fancy real estate. Despite pressure from nervous lenders, developers have been reluctant to slash prices too suddenly or dramatically, lest the market suddenly clear and they leave millions on the table.
The confluence of cosmopolitan capital and terrible timing has done the impossible: It’s created a vacancy problem in a city where thousands of people are desperate to find places to live.
From any rational perspective, what New York needs isn’t glistening three-bedroom units, but more simple one- and two-bedroom apartments for New York’s many singles, roommates, and small families. Mayor Bill De Blasio made affordable housing a centerpiece of his administration. But progress here has been stalled by onerous zoning regulations, limited federal subsidies, construction delays, and blocked pro-tenant bills.
In the past decade, New York City real-estate prices have gone from merely obscene to downright macabre. From 2010 to 2019, the average sale price of homes doubled in many Brooklyn neighborhoods, including Prospect Heights and Williamsburg, according to the Times. Buyers there could consider themselves lucky: In Cobble Hill, the typical sales price tripled to $2.5 million in nine years […]
If Scotland accomplishes their goals, beginning next year, they won’t be using any fossil fuels to generate electricity.
China has the world’s largest GDP in PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) terms and this has been true since November, 2014.
Source – unz.com
– “…Here the conventional wisdom views China’s as the number two GDP – but the surprise to most people is that in fact it is number one. China now has the largest GDP in the world in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms, a metric used by the IMF, World Bank and even the CIA for comparing GDPs of different countries”
China, Number One Economic Power for Half Decade, Dashes On – By John V. Walsh
Ignorance or Denial by the U.S. Poses Grave Dangers
The recent China International Import Expo (CIIE) in Shanghai attracted little attention in the Western press but it is one more reminder that China is an economic and trading powerhouse that has surpassed the US. That is right, the word is “surpassed.” The CIIE also serves to remind us that China’s economic power now stands on four mighty pillars.
Americans must understand this…
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Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
By Yuval Noah Harari
Kinnneret, Zmora-Bitan, Dvir (Hebrew edition) 2011
McLelland & Stewart (English paperback) 2016
Book Review
I picked up this book believing Harari was an anthropologist. He’s actually an Israeli historian and professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His area of of specialty is medieval and military history.*
The book is aimed at a sixth grade reading level and and displays a disappointing lack of scholarship (Harari has mentioned in several interviews that “meditation” is a primary tool he uses in research). Largely based on popular pseudo-scientific mythology, it seems aimed at promoting Harari’s pet theories linking history and biology to conclude humans have no serious alternative to the pro-corporate political/economic regime we currently live under.
Many of his assertions blatantly contradict existing research evidence:
Some of his claims are just plain ludicrous (even for 2011):
*See How Yuval Harari Became the Pet Ideologist of the Liberal Elites
The Most Revolutionary Act 