Month: October 2019

Say No More

Food & Drink, Good Stuff, Lies and Untruths

Now this is what I call Good News:

“High cholesterol, particularly LDL cholesterol, has been demonized for allegedly bringing on heart attack deaths. But an intriguing analysis of data published at Medium.com seems to show that total mortality risk is reduced by high cholesterol levels, even LDL cholesterol.”
The point Medium.com’s P.D. Mangan makes is that even if lower cholesterol is associated with reduced heart-disease incidence, this is more than offset by an increase in low-cholesterol-associated health risks.
As Mangan puts it, from “a public health standpoint, it seems a mistake to focus on changing something that lowers the risk of death from one cause only to raise that risk from another.”

Now as we all know, next week will see the publication of yet another  study which completely contradicts this wonderful news.

In the meantime (via C.W., thankee):

In Texas, that combination of the four major meat groups (ribs, pulled pork, sausage and brisket) is known as the “Four Riders Of The Apocalypse”.

Actually, that’s not true.  In Texas, that’s either regarded as a well-balanced meal, or else as “Git outta mah way, Elmer!”

See y’all later.

Enough Already

Bad News, Business

Oh, happy happy joy joy.

JPMorgan Weighs Shifting Thousands of Jobs Out of New York Area

If the transplantees don’t want to leave their extended families in Noo Yawk, you folks at JPMorgan can just move them a little further down the BoWash corridor — like, say, to Baltimore.  Should feel quite at home there, what with a Democrat government and all, and it’s only a short train ride back up the coast.

I think I can safely speak for all of us Texans down here in the DFW Metroplex:  we’re full of New Yorkers.

Instead of infesting filling the rest of America with your liberal asshole cosmopolitan employees, why not open up a new office in Los Angeles?  Gawd knows, they need an infusion of business in the Golden Shower State, and the transplanted Noo Yawkers will be quite at home with things like sky-high taxes, sky-high real estate prices, onerous licensing fees and feral anti-gun laws.  And the climate is better in SoCal than it is here.  Also, in Texas we have scorpions, snakes, poisonous spiders, scary-looking pickup trucks and sometimes, all of them combined:

  

Let’s not even talk about assault rifles, which can be bought just like candy, by grade-school kids at any corner-store 7-11:

The pastrami is lousy, and the bagels are made by Sarah Lee.  There was a vegan store around here someplace (Austin, maybe?) but it closed because they wouldn’t serve chicken-fried okra.  And people here think that “lox” is what y’all put on a truck’s toolbox.

And speaking of that kinda thing:  Ted Nugent has a ranch just south of here.


(As an aside, we Texans actually think ol’ Ted’s kinda soft when it comes to guns — I mean, he’s even on the board of the NRA, that bunch of compromising pussies.)

One last thought:  if you do send people down here, they’re gonna see an awful lot of these:

…all filled like this:

And when your folks converse with the locals, Question #3 will invariably be:  “And where do y’all go to church?”

Better have an answer.

Just sayin’.

Halloween Diversity

Africa, Mocking Furriners

From the annals of “countries whose policies we should emulate” (say the socialists), let’s take Sweden.

Or maybe not.

Police fear that Black Ax, an international criminal organization based out of Nigeria, is beginning to gain a foothold in Uppsala after already establishing itself in cities like Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö, SVT Nyheter reports.
“They are mainly involved in human trafficking,” says Uppsala police spokesperson, Jale Poljarevius.
“They are holding women hostage, and through voodoo, they are tricking them into believing they will end up badly if they leave the job. But they are also involved in selling cocaine and heroin,” Poljarevius added.

Maybe I missed something, but before Sweden started importing people and their cultures from other countries, was this kind of stuff a problem for them?

Asking for a friend.

One-Track Mind

Deep Thoughts, The Gun Thing

Over at The Daily Timewaster, C.W. often posts scenic pics like this in his “Open Road” series (click to embiggen):

See, others are going to go into raptures over Nature’s Incredible Beauty etc. etc.  Me, I look at it and say:

“Yeah, beautiful.  I bet that little ridge on the extreme right would make a great backstop if one were to set up some targets and steel plates so that one could blast away in relative comfort from the truck (or next to it), without causing any damage or noise issues (it being somewhat Remote & Desolate).”

Am I the only one who thinks like this?

And a tangential thought:  does anyone know where that pic was taken?  I’m guessing Utah or maybe Arizona…

Update:  Reader RichK emails:

The location is in the Alabama Hills, part of the Owens valley of California, and is looking at the Sierras.
The high peak left of the road is Mt. Langley. The far one is Mt. Whitney. I have climbed both multiple times. Stunningly beautiful country. Sad to think it is part of California.

Strangely Satisfying

Eco-Crap, Gummint

You know, if an Alpine mountain community lived in constant fear of avalanches, one could feel a certain sympathy if said avalanches caused severe damage to the place each year and some loss of life among its inhabitants.

I suspect, however, that one would feel somewhat less sympathetic if the community refused to deploy snowplows and rescue helicopters purely because of the emissions from those vehicles.  Indeed, one might even get unworthy feelings of smug satisfaction and even Schadenfreude  from the annual, tearful news reports of death and destruction.

How then, are we expected to feel when California gets plunged into darkness and suffers loss of property and life through the regular occurrence of wildfires?

Fire conditions statewide made California “a tinderbox,” said Jonathan Cox, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Of the state’s 58 counties, 43 were under red flag warnings for high fire danger Sunday.

And just so we know exactly why these conditions have reached the point to where they have:  despite the fact that hot Santa Ana winds create an annual risk of deadly wildfires, California continues to ban the clear-cutting and controlled burning of deadwood and -brush in wilderness areas as well as in areas close to suburban development because of supposed-ecological concerns.  That’s the “tinderbox” referred to above.

Moreover, it’s hard for the rest of us to feel pity for Californians when it’s clearly the fault of their own elected officials and legislature who continue to force their wrongheaded Gaia-worship on the Golden Shower State, with consequences that have become not only annual, but predictably horrible.  (And which some, equally-predictably, somehow manage to escape.)

I should feel guilty about my Schadenfreude, but I really don’t — just as I don’t feel sorry for Californians who complain about high taxes, iniquitous government interference in their lives, high real-estate prices and the whole dreadful litany of self-inflicted ills, all without exception imposed on them by, once again, their stupid, venal and self-serving elected politicians.

Let ’em burn.  Maybe at some point they may even be forced to try and get some change enacted through the ballot box, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

Update:  unusually, I seem to have understated California’s problems.