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Medicine’s another thing he doesn’t know about then

The two between them reveal a truth that is almost wholly unspoken and little appreciated. This truth is that type 2 diabetes is a disease largely created by the consumption of too much sugar in the form of fructose and that the disease can be reversed by largely eliminating fructose from the diet of those suffering from that disease.

Don’t eat pears and your diabetes will be cured.

Sigh.

We know this is wrong from a very simple test. The Americans eat far more HFCS (“high fructose corn syrup”) than Europeans. This is a result of US tariffs on global sugar production, fanned by the corn farmers of Iowa and the Fanjuls, the cane sugar producers in Florida. As cane sugar is therefore twice the world price therefore American food manufacturers use corn derived sugar – HFCS. To the point that there’s a kosher Coke that arrives around passover each year, made from cane sugar. Also, Lifesavers are made in Canada.

But that diabetes incidence isn’t changed by that change in fructose consumption across the two populations. Weight, wealth, exercise and so on do explain hte differences. That is, it’s not fructose. QED.

But, you know, Spud. He’s about to insist that we ban fresh fruit to stop diabetes.

The guidelines on treating diabetes in the USA (and so elsewhere) are created by big pharma to suit the need of big pharma to sell a lot of drugs and not to cure people of type 2 diabetes in months, which could be done by prescribing proper diets that would cost considerably less than that diabetes drugs.

I am not a fan of conspiracy theories. Far too many are just crackpot. But an open mind is also required in a case like this.

Snigger.

There is no VAT on most food in the UK. I seriously wonder whether that should be changed now. Should the exemption just be available on non or low-processed foods? Wouldn’t that make as much sense as taxes on tobacco?

Yes, a tax on apples. That’s just what we need, right?

Well, no, not really

Lloyds Banking Group has scooped an estimated £700 million profit after unexpectedly getting back the entire £1.2 billion it lent to the Barclay family.

Being paid back what you’re owed is not, not really, a profit.

Now, if you’d written the loan down as lost, get repaid and therefore you reverse the provision, OK, we can “book that as a profit” but it’s not, not really, a profit.

Ouch

The US government charged a former diplomat who served on the national security council in the 1990s with secretly serving as an agent of Cuba’s government for more than 40 years.

Victor Manuel Rocha was arrested on Friday, following a long-running FBI counterintelligence investigation. The US ambassador to Bolivia from 2000 to 2002, Rocha also worked on the national security council from 1994 to 1995. He is charged with committing multiple federal crimes.

Not wholly sure it’s that important. There’s little Cuba would find out this way that they didn;t already know. The US doesn;t like the commies. And?

#Anyway, we’ve the David Sirota piece to look forward to. How “internal diplomacy” or some such on behalf of peace loving socialists is a really good thing to be doing or some such.

Interesting

The Barclay family has regained ownership of The Telegraph after paying £1.2bn in debts owed to Lloyds Banking Group.

The high street lender said repayment had been made in full, meaning both The Telegraph and The Spectator magazine have been released from receivership.

Court proceedings brought on behalf of Lloyds against the Barclay family in the British Virgin Islands, which would have liquidated one of their key holding companies, have also now been called off. A hearing had been scheduled for Monday.

The move effectively ends Lloyds’ involvement in the complex sale of The Telegraph and The Spectator, with ownership of both titles spinning back to the Barclay family.

Wonder if that means they’re to start paying invoices again? Wouldn’t mind getting my last £250.

Repeal the Climate Change Act

Chris Packham files legal challenge against Rishi Sunak’s ‘reckless’ net zero policies
Environmental campaigner argues PM does not have the right to change the timeline of carbon budget pledges at will

It’s those basic laws themselves which give every whinger with a grievance the ability to sue. Therefore repeal the laws which give them the chance. The entire point of them has been to try to bind future Parliaments. So, let’s not do that.

This is simple enough then

Israeli authorities are investigating claims by US researchers that some investors may have known in advance about the Hamas plan to attack Israel on 7 October and used that information to earn millions of dollars by short-selling Israeli shares.

Research by law professors Robert Jackson Jr from New York University and Joshua Mitts of Columbia University found significant short-selling of shares leading up to the attacks that triggered the war.

It is known who the short sellers are. Call ’em in for an interview. Have a chat.

It’s an Israeli paper that gets this right – I think:

Hamas may have profited from Oct. 7 assault with informed trading — study

Do I think that Hamas might contain financial sophisticates able to work this out? Do this? Sure. Waste a thousand of our fighters but we get to make a profit on the markets? Sure.

The difficulty will be keeping the money, or keeping it and out of jail at the same time. Because surveillance of financial markets does tend to be of sufficient detail to know who is doing what trade if anyone wants to really find out.

“Although we see no aggregate increase in shorting of Israeli companies on U.S. exchanges, we do identify a sharp and unusual increase, just before the attacks, in trading in risky short-dated options on these companies expiring just after the attacks,” they said.

Short dated options. Folks with inside information just love them. So do the authorities – they’re even easier to track. And I’d not really want to be the compliance officer who can’t tell the Israeli authorities, or the SEC, who was behind those trades.

Lordy be

Just spent an hour trying to make Substack speak to Stripe.

Nope, can’t do it. Stripe seems to want to know the owner of an LLC, also my social security number, plus my Portuguese NIF. Also, there is no way to reach a human at either company.

Have to go with an unpaid Substack then, I guess.

Trivial perhaps and yet…..

It’s rare – rare indeed – to see a mixed race couple pictured in US advertising. Or even as illustrations to media pieces – unless the news is actually about a mixed race couple. Just one of those things. I know we mutter about how much is done in the UK but the historical experiences really are very, very, different.

So a fun question here. Business Insider is definitely writing about the US. But has the picture editor (presumably a European) just not grasped that American experience? Picked something from Getty Images and thought no more about it? Or is there actually a change going on?

Because it is my idea, mine I tell ‘ee

Many organisations on the left of UK politics are now calling for wealth taxes. The Taxing Wealth Report 2024 does not do so. It is appropriate to explain why that is the case.

There’s really no other explanation. Spud has decided. Without bothering to read the literature – lots of bright people have devoted time and effort to understanding this area over the decades and centuries – and without bothering to bounce his conclusions off anyone else. But Spud has decided. Therefore his decisions is correct. And that’s just the way it is. And should be – according to Spud.

To suggest that he’s got to say something different in order to justify spending the Popham Trust’s money would be scurrilous. So, we won’t do that.

Not something I would advertise, really

“A proud democratic socialist, she campaigned, in Britain and internationally, for justice and against poverty all her life.”

About Glenys.

A social democrat is a Polly, wanting us to be more like Sweden. A democratic socialist is a Leninist, running along Soviet or N Korean lines. I don;t make the rules here, that’s just what the phrases mean in English.

This is hardly news

Arthur Conan Doyle secretly resented his Sherlock Holmes creation, says historian

He killed him off so that he could stop writing about him after all.

Author blamed literary success of the fictional detective for his highbrow historical novels ‘lying unread’

Then brought him back as no one read his other guff anyway…..

Hark at the bastards

The Resolution Foundation. Blairite to Fabian-style regulators to a man:

The Foundation also called for a major planning shake-up, with the cost of planning applications now five times higher than in 1990.

“The outcomes are far too unpredictable, also holding back housing and badly needed energy infrastructure. In future, businesses submitting applications consistent with local plans should be automatically approved.”

They’ve cheered on, argued for, approved, every barnacle encrusting the economic ship of state. Now they think there should be a detailed plan for all building everywhere? And that only that which the concillors have already thought of may be built?

There is an alternative explanation possible here

France’s parliament is awash with drugs and alcohol as politicians struggle to cope with public life, an MP has revealed.

Caroline Janvier, MP for French president Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, said the pressures of political life have led to a spike in the consumption of drugs and alcohol among some of her colleagues.

“There are evenings where drugs are circulated, just as there are dinners at the end of parliamentary sessions where alcohol is consumed excessively,” Ms Janvier said in an interview with Paris Match.

“Politics produces deviant behaviour.”

Which is that deviants go into politics. Or evem that normal people go into politicsi in order to have those late nights at the office where they can be deviant away from the wife.

After all, that intense insistence upon telling everyone else how to live their lives is pretty deviant, no?

Willy’s Hand Jive

The substance behind No 10’s inevitable refutation was so threadbare that it bordered on the comic. But then there is no better defence to hand. The prime minister, intoned his spokesman, did not think Brexit was in danger, trying to reinforce the point by declaring: “It’s through our Brexit freedoms that we are, right now, considering how to further strengthen our migration system. It is through our Brexit freedoms we are ensuring patients in the UK can get access to medicines faster, that there is improved animal welfare. That is very much what we are focused on.”

Is that it? Apart from the fact the claims are at best half-truths, at worst palpable falsehoods, as a muster of Brexit “freedoms” they fall devastatingly short of the promises made during the referendum campaign. Recall the economic and trade boom, a reinvigorated NHS, cheap food, controlled immigration and a reborn “global” Britain strutting the world. It’s all ashes – and had today’s realities been known in 2016, we would still be EU members.

The immediate collapse of Britain’s economy if we did leave also didn;t happen. Major proponent of disaster being Willy Hutton.

So, you know….

Those socialists do get all national, don’t they?

It is South America’s only English-speaking nation, home to the fastest-growing economy in the world. But now, just as vast oil discoveries are set to transform Guyana, a threat to its very existence looms from its troubled neighbour.

On Sunday, Venezuela is holding a national referendum calling on the population to declare support for a claim, going back more than a century, that two thirds of the landmass of modern Guyana should be absorbed by Venezuela.

The problem with socialism is that you always do run out of country to impose it upon…..

But net zero’s so cheap, save us all fortunes

Hundreds of thousands of homes across Britain will be in view of electricity pylons under a massive net zero expansion of the energy grid.

Three hundred towns and villages across rural England and Wales could be impacted by the thousands of electricity pylons needed to expand the National Grid to meet net zero targets, a government report has warned.

Oh Aye?

This is perfectly true

The world’s first tampons for men have been criticised by feminist campaigners as an “insult” to women who suffer period discrimination.

On another side of the packet it is stated that “periods are not a gender issue”.
Vuokkoset, a Finnish company released the controversial new sanitary product earlier this month to coincide with Transgender Awareness week and International Men’s day.

The product comes in a dark blue box which bears the words “For Men” on one side, but then extends this phrase around the packaging so it eventually reads “For Menstruation”.

Periods are not a gender issue, they’re a sex issue. As Transmen are in fact women then yes, menstruation – pace the drugs – is a possibility and so tampons, why not?

The nutters would be the ones marketing tampons to transwomen – and yes, those nutters do indeed exist. There’s even a brand which leaks fake blood to be really inclusive (no, really!).

Snigger

End of second para – we should do what we want and damn the money.

End of final para – everyone else should work out how to find the money so we can continue to do what we want.

Not the way things work in a capitalist world really.