Tumgik
#is this why i gained like an absurd amount of followers over the last 24 hours
beacon-lamp · 3 years
Note
i don’t know if you know yet but @/KINGBL4DE on twitter posted a picture of you transcribing technos speech and people are freaking out about it over there !!
Tumblr media
*technoblade’s voice* brruhhhhhhhhh~
oh it’s so Strange to be Perceived outside the navy blue confines of this Hellsite lol
Tumblr media
69 notes · View notes
edfvwadfadwas · 3 years
Text
“We shall deal with your uncle and mickey egeres babakocsi his feigned boy in due time
So while you can definitely mount an ATX motherboard in the Node 605, the heatsink on our ATX/MicroATX testbed nike black tn 001 wouldn fit, so as with the SilverStone Grandia GD07 I elected to go with the mITX testbed. They both testified before council. “Stop,” Roose Bolton shouted. It would be difficult for him to forget an insult and to let pass any chance of avenging it. It was the hour of the wolf. There’s no telling how it will be done; but the victory is yours! Alyosha! Don’t blame me, my dear! Don’t say that I don’t understand your love and don’t appreciate it. Also it cannot but be a fact that the various circumstances which from infancy conspire to degrade and depress the negro in jeans moda 2015 donna amazon the eyes of a Southern-born man,—the constant habit of speaking of them, and hearing them spoken of, and seeing them advertised, as mere articles of property, often in connection with horses, mules, fodder, swine, &c., as they are almost daily in every Southern paper,—must tend, nike pegasus 34 hombre sprinter even in the best-constituted minds, to produce a certain obtuseness with regard to the interests, sufferings and affections, of such as do not particularly belong to himself, 134which will peculiarly unfit him for estimating their condition. That’s so, isn’t it?. What men? Does he mean wildlings? Why won’t he say?”. “We shall deal with your uncle and mickey egeres babakocsi his feigned boy in due time.” The new King’s Hand was seated on an oaken throne carved in the shape of a hand, an absurd vanity his lordship had produced the day Ser Kevan agreed to grant him the office he coveted. These salad greens can last 21 days.. Not so the whole men. First Healthcare Corp., 58 Cal. There’s a hundred mothers never will, I know.”. Lt. The woman bared the queen’s head first. But what then? It follows that the law is a direct permission, letting loose upon the defenceless slave that class of men who exist in every community, who have no conscience, no honor, no shame,—who are too far below public opinion to be restrained by that, and from whom accordingly this provision of the law takes away the only available restraint of their fiendish natures. I have never heard of using jock itch cream to treat a chronic leg ulcer, but that doesn't mean that it isn't beneficial. Nine. Co organizer Tenesha Taylor, people development manager for the Singing River Health System, said the group plans to make the race an annual, growing fundraising event and, yes, it would be nice if some men would step up to make it a co ed experience.. I will give the above reward if he should be taken in the State of Virginia, or $30 if taken in either of the adjoining States, but in either case he must be so secured that I get him again.. 2. By Natasha Baker TORONTO, July 2 (Reuters) Worried about breathing polluted air? A new app shows users the air quality in their area and lets them know when it might be best to stay indoors. But I was just very overwhelmed, I was very appreciative, I was very humbled.. He created an 8 inch well for the sink by removing the bottoms and sides of adjacent drawers and building a new shelf deeper into the cavity. I puma avid fusefit mid sat still and listened, not knowing how I could quickly secure a tete-a-tete interview with Katerina nike pegasus 34 hombre sprinter Fyodorovna. Ask Mahela Jayawardene and Kumar Sangakkara. The fighter who bought her raped her and if she tried to resist, he would beat her with his shoes.She said: "I used to hear a lot of cries and screaming from the other girl in the house, as God knows what the man was doing to her. Her most recent album, "The Weather Inside," features a number of notable musicians from Austin, Texas, and her current project is a digital "song of the month club" that rewards fans with an original tune in their email inbox each month.. That’s better than going on as other people do. “Without offering any resistance, or saying a word, I knelt down outside the stand, on the ground, and prayed to my ‘Father;’ plead His promises, such as, ‘When the enemy comes in like a flood, I will rear up a standard against him’; ‘I am a present help in trouble;’ ‘I will fight all your battles for you;’ prayed for grace, victory, my enemies, &c. Lion Air plans to pay for the planes over 12 years with bank financing. You gain a sense of stability and control beyond your wildest dreams. “I know, I know what you’ll say,” Alyosha interrupted. The pyramid of Hazkar has collapsed into a smoking ruin, and many of that ancient line lie dead beneath its blackened stones. He spoke to them about what it meant to be a knight. Two days after, Azorka was brought reebok reverse jam lowback. It us just that NZ have a sub standard bowling attack, suitable for their own tracks but below par anywhere else. This would make my board equal in amount to the board of forty-six slaves! This is all that good or bad masters allow their slaves, round about Savannah, on the plantations. The fact is there is no proof in either direction (yet).. The great gates were closed and barred, as he had anticipated. Neuropathy, lack of sensation in the feet, is another complication that patients with diabetes can suffer from. They are made with 100% organic filling and are designed for both hot and
cazadora vaquera tommy hilfiger
cold foot relief with aromatherapy blends and have 24 reviews with a 4 star rating.Dream Time offers their Pampered Sole Foot Cozy's as well as other Dream Time blankets, throws and wraps to keep you warm in winter. She remarked that it was not on account
chanel ágynemű
of the value of the cake that she felt annoyed, but that they must be sensible that it would not be pleasant for her to have it
catalog cercei aur turcia
indiscriminately fingered and handled, and that, therefore, she should set some cake out upon a table, or some convenient place, and beg that all those who were disposed to take it would go there and help themselves, and allow the rest to remain undisturbed in the closet. In future years, this information will automatically populate into the appropriate personal details fields as before so it is only the first year that you will need to spend time entering all of this information.You can access your historic appraisal records on the new Toolkit by following the below steps:1. For 32 years, the charity has helped millions of kids, adults and families affected by poverty and disaster resulting in over $1.6 billion of donated product that has been distributed through a network of community partners. Wirelessly identifies tags attached to items. Upgrading is easy when you choose Kingston system specific memory. Daemon Blackfyre had perished on the Redgrass Field, however, and his rebellion with him. It also said it has the largest backlog of any Boeing customer, with 180 planes.. “The Kingsguard stood by useless as his brother Joffrey died, murdered at his own wedding feast. Shields they bore as well, but so obscured by snow and ice that the arms upon them could not be read. “Look at this one,” a whore called from a brothel window, lifting her skirts to the men below, “it’s not had half as many cocks up it as hers.” Bells were ringing, ringing, ringing. A few months back, we rounded up a half dozen SATA III solid state drives in this article.
1 note · View note
paleorecipecookbook · 6 years
Text
Why You Should Be Skeptical of the Latest Nutrition Headlines: Part 1
This article is Part 1 of a two-part series about the problems with nutrition research. For more on why you should be skeptical of the latest nutrition headlines, check out Part 2 of this series.
Nutritional epidemiology is basically the board game equivalent of a Ouija board—whatever you want it to say, it will say. – Dr. Peter Attia
Every week, we’re bombarded with splashy headlines in the media about the latest nutrition research. Here’s a sampling from the last few weeks alone:
“Low-carb diets could shorten life, study suggests” (BBC News)
“Eating cheese and butter every day linked to living longer” (Newsweek)
“A New Study Says Any Amount of Drinking Is Bad for You. Here's What Experts Say” (Time)
“Whole grains one of the most important food groups for preventing type 2 diabetes” (Science Daily)
“Low carb diet ‘should be first line of approach to tackle type 2 diabetes’ and prolong lifespan” (iNews)
Within a six-week period, we learned that low-carb diets will make you live longer and shorten your lifespan and that they’re both good and bad for diabetes. We also learned that consuming even small amounts of alcohol, which has long been regarded as health promoting, is now unhealthy.
For decades, we were told to limit dietary fat and cholesterol because they would clog our arteries, give us heart attacks, and send us to an early grave. Yet in 2010, the federal government removed its restriction on total fat from the U.S. Dietary Guidelines, and in 2015, they did the same thing for cholesterol, remarking that it is “not a nutrient of concern for overconsumption.” (1)
If you’re confused by this, or you’ve just stopped listening altogether, you’re not alone. And who could blame you? In a recent, scathing critique of nutrition research in JAMA, Dr. John Ioannidis, a professor at the Stanford School of Medicine, said:
Nutritional research may have adversely affected the public perception of science.
… the emerging picture of nutritional epidemiology is difficult to reconcile with good scientific principles. The field needs radical reform. (2)
In other words, you’re not crazy for doubting the latest media headlines or just throwing up your hands in frustration! In this article, I’m going to explore the reasons why skepticism is an appropriate response when it comes to most nutrition studies. Armed with this information, you’ll be better able to protect yourself and your family from the latest media hype and focus on what really matters when it comes to diet and nutrition.
Why You Can’t Trust Observational Studies as “Proof”
An observational study is one that draws inferences about the effect of an exposure or intervention on subjects where the researcher or investigator has no control over the subject. It’s not an experiment where researchers are directing a specific intervention (like a low-carb diet) and making things happen. Instead, they are just looking at populations of people and making guesses about the effects of a diet or lifestyle variable.
Observational studies are good for generating hypotheses, but they can’t prove that a specific variable causes a specific outcome.
That is the domain of a randomized controlled trial (RCT), which randomly assigns participants to two groups—a treatment group that receives the intervention being studied and a control group that does not—and then observes them for a specific period of time.
We’ve all seen nutrition headlines promising groundbreaking information that will change the way we view our health. But how many news stories are based on studies with faulty methods, uncontrolled biases, and other major problems? Check out this article to find out.
Every scientist knows this, and most journalists should as well. Yet today, it’s not uncommon to see headlines like “Low-carb diet shortens your lifespan” and “Eating processed meat increases your risk of cancer,” which imply that the studies proved a causal relationship when, in fact, all they did is establish a correlation.
Correlation Is Not Causation
The problem is that two variables that are correlated, or associated together, do not always have a causal relationship. Consider the following examples, from Tyler Vigen’s excellent webpage called Spurious Correlations:
S. spending on space, science, and technology is 99.8 percent correlated with suicides by hanging, strangulation, and suffocation.
Per capita consumption of margarine in the United States and the divorce rate in the state of Maine are correlated at 99.3 percent.
Total revenue generated by arcades is 5 percent correlated with computer science doctorates awarded in the United States.
Those are incredibly strong correlations, but I think it’s fairly obvious that consumption of margarine in the United States has absolutely no impact on the divorce rate in Maine … right?
Another great example of how easy it is to derive spurious correlations—especially when you set out with an agenda—comes from a large study of the most common diagnoses for hospitalization in 10.6 million Canadians. The researchers found that 24 diagnoses were significantly associated with the participants’ astrological signs: (3)
People born under Leo had a 15 percent higher risk of hospitalization due to gastrointestinal hemorrhage compared to other residents of Ontario.
People born under Sagittarius had a 38 percent higher risk of hospitalization for arm fractures compared to people with other signs.
In Dr. Ioannidis’s editorial in JAMA, he notes:
Almost all nutritional variables are correlated with one another; thus, if one variable is causally related to health outcomes, many other variables will also yield significant associations in large enough data sets.
As an example of just how absurd this can become, he notes that, if taken at face value, observational studies have inferred that:
… eating 12 hazelnuts daily (1 oz) would prolong life by 12 years (ie, 1 year per hazelnut), drinking 3 cups of coffee daily would achieve a similar gain of 12 extra years, and eating a single mandarin orange daily (80g) would add 5 years of life. Conversely, consuming 1 egg daily would reduce life expectancy by 6 years, and eating 2 slices of bacon (30g) daily would shorten life by a decade, an effect worse than smoking.
Are these relationships truly causal? Of course not, Ioannidis says. Yet study authors often use causal language when reporting the findings from these studies.
In fact, according to an analysis in 2013, authors of observational studies made medical or nutritional recommendations (suggesting their data showed a causal relationship) in 56 percent of cases. (4) The study authors summed up their findings as follows:
In conclusion, our empirical evaluation shows that linking observational results to recommendations regarding medical practice is currently very common in highly influential journals. Such recommendations frequently represent logical leaps. As such, if they are correct, they may accelerate the translation of research but, if they are wrong, they may cause considerable harm. [emphasis added]
I should note that it’s at least possible to become reasonably confident of a causal association between variables in an observational study using what is known as the Bradford Hill criteria:
Strength of the association
Consistency
Specificity
Temporality
Biological gradient
Plausibility
Coherence
Experiment
Analogy
The more of these criteria that are met, the more likely causation is present.
However, observational nutrition studies rarely satisfy these criteria, which makes the frequent claims of causality even more dubious.
There Are Problems with Data Collection Methods Too
There’s a saying in science: “Data are only as good as the instrument used to collect them.”
Way back in the 13th century, the English philosopher and Franciscan friar Roger Bacon said that scientific data must be: (5)
Independently observable
Measurable
Falsifiable
Valid
Reliable
To use a simple example, if someone is eating an apple right in front of you, you can observe, measure, and either verify or repute that they’re doing that. But if they simply tell you that they ate an apple at some time in the past, you can neither observe, measure, verify, nor refute their story. You just have to take their word for it—and that is not science.
The term “observational nutrition study” is a misnomer because it suggests that researchers are actually observing what participants eat. But of course that’s not true; researchers aren’t standing around in people’s kitchens and going out to restaurants with them.
Instead, they are collecting data on what people eat by giving them questionnaires to fill out. There are different versions of these used in research, from food frequency questionnaires (FFQs), which may ask people to recall what they ate months or even years prior, to 24-hour recall surveys where people are asked what they ate over the past 24 hours.
These “memory-based assessments,” or “M-BMs,” bear little relation to actual calorie or nutrient consumption. Why? Because memory is not a literal, accurate, or even precise reproduction of past events. (6)
In a paper criticizing the validity of M-BMs for data collection, Edward Archer pointed out:
When a person provides a dietary report, the data collected are not actual food or beverage consumption but rather an error-prone and highly edited anecdote regarding memories of food and beverage consumption. (7)
Going back to the apple example above, researchers aren’t watching participants eat an apple. They’re relying on the participants’ reports of eating apples—sometimes several years prior!
We Can’t Rely on Memory When It Comes to Nutrition Research
But just how inaccurate are M-BMs? To find out, Archer analyzed questionnaires from participants in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which is a long-running series of studies on the health and nutritional status of the American public. NHANES has served as the basis of dietary guidelines and public health recommendations.
Archer found that, over the 39-year history (at the time of his study) of NHANES, the self-reported calorie intake on the majority of respondents (67 percent of women and 59 percent of men) was not physiologically plausible, and the average calorie intake levels reported by overweight and obese people (i.e., the majority of Americans) were incompatible with life.
In other words, a bedridden, frail, elderly woman (i.e., a person with the lowest possible calorie requirements) could not survive on the number of calories reported by the average person in the NHANES survey!
And this isn’t just a problem in the United States. The inaccuracy of M-BMs has been replicated consistently over three decades and in multiple countries around the world. (8)
Can you see why this would be a problem?
All macronutrients (protein, fat, and carbohydrate) and micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, and trace minerals) are consumed as calories, so when calories are misreported, all nutrients will also be misreported.
What’s more, certain subgroups are more prone to underreporting, including people who are obese or have a high calorie intake. Obese subjects have been found to underreport up to half of their calorie intake, and in particular, they underreport fat and carbs. (9)
One consequence of this is that the health risks associated with a high fat (or carb) intake would be overestimated. Imagine that someone reports a saturated fat intake of 50 grams, and they have a total cholesterol of 200 mg/dL. But say they underreported their saturated fat intake by 40 percent, and their actual intake was 80 grams. This would overestimate the effect of saturated fat intake on total cholesterol because it assumed that eating 50 grams—rather than 80 grams—led to a total cholesterol of 200 mg/dL.
Where does that leave us? Archer doesn’t pull any punches:
Data collected from M-BM are pseudoscientific and inadmissible in scientific research and the formulation of national dietary guidelines. (10)
… the uncritical faith in the validity and value of M-BM has wasted significant resources and continues the single greatest impediment to actual scientific progress in the fields of obesity and nutrition research. (11)
Most people have no idea that the entire field of observational nutrition research—and all of the media headlines that come out of it—is based on questionnaires about what people eat. Now that you know, will you ever look at nutrition headlines in the same way again?
How the “Healthy-User” Bias Impacts Findings
The “healthy-user” bias refers to the observation that people who engage in a behavior perceived as healthy are more likely to engage in other behaviors that are also perceived as healthy and vice versa.
For example, because red meat has been perceived as “unhealthy” for so many years, on average, people that eat more red meat are more likely to: (12)
Smoke
Be physically inactive
Eat fewer fruits and vegetables
Be less educated
Of course, most researchers are well aware of the influence of confounding factors and the healthy-user bias, and good ones do their best to control for as many of these factors as they can. But even in the best studies, researchers can’t control for all possible confounding factors because our lives are simply too complex. As Norman Breslow, a former biostatistician at the University of Washington, once said:
People think they may have been able to control for things that aren’t inherently controllable.
One of the inevitable results of the healthy-user bias is that many observational studies end up comparing two groups of people that are not at all similar, and this casts doubt on the findings.
For example, early studies suggested that vegetarians live longer than omnivores. However, these studies compared Seventh Day Adventists—a religious group that advocates a vegetarian diet and a healthy lifestyle as part of their belief system—with the general population.
That introduces serious potential for healthy-user bias because the members of the SDA church engage in lifestyle behaviors—like not smoking or drinking alcohol, eating more fresh fruits and vegetables, and getting more exercise—that have been shown to reduce the risk of death from cardiovascular disease and all causes. So, we can’t possibly know whether the reduction in deaths observed in these studies was related to the vegetarian diet or these other causes, and thus the findings are not generalizable to the wider population.
(As a side note, four later studies that compared vegetarians with a more health-conscious population of omnivores found that both groups lived longer than the general population, but there was no difference in lifespan between the vegetarians and healthy omnivores. You can read more about this in my article “Do Vegetarians and Vegans Really Live Longer than Meat Eaters?”)
The healthy-user bias plagues most observational nutrition studies, and yet we hardly ever hear it mentioned when these studies are reported in the media. Now that you know about it, how might you respond differently to some of the headlines I shared at the beginning of the article?
“Low-carb diets could shorten life, study suggests”
“Eating cheese and butter every day linked to living longer”
“Whole grains one of the most important food groups for preventing type 2 diabetes”
Would you ask questions like:
Since fat has been perceived as unhealthy and low-carb diets are high in fat, were the people eating low-carb diets also engaging in other behaviors perceived as unhealthy?
Were the people eating more cheese and butter doing anything else that might have contributed to a longer lifespan?
Were the people who were eating more whole grains exercising more or engaging in other behaviors perceived as healthy (since eating whole grains is perceived as healthy)?
The “Risks” Are Often Pure Chance
In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) issued a report suggesting that for every 50 grams of processed meat consumed, the relative risk of cancer was increased by 18 percent compared to those who ate the least processed meat. (13)
How confident can we be of that claim? In epidemiology outside the field of nutrition (and even within the nutrition field until recently), the threshold for confidence in relative risk is between 100 and 300 percent. In other words, we’d need to see an increase or decrease of risk of between 100 and 300 percent for a given intervention before we could be confident that the change observed was due to the intervention and not simply to chance.
According to the late epidemiologist Syd Shapiro, cofounder of the Slone Epidemiology Center, at the higher end of this range, one can be guardedly confident, but “we can hardly ever be confident about estimates of less than 100 percent, and when estimates are much below 100 percent, we are simply out of business.” (14)
Marcia Angell, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, said much the same thing in a 1995 article in Science called “Epidemiology Faces Its Limits”:
As a general rule of thumb, we are looking for a relative risk of three or more [before accepting a paper for publication], particularly if it is biologically implausible or if it’s a brand-new finding.
And Robert Temple, who was the director of drug evaluation at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) at the time, put it even more bluntly in the same Science article:
My basic rule is if the relative risk isn’t at least three or four, forget it.
Most epidemiologists that were interviewed for the Science article said they would not take seriously a single study reporting a new potential cause of cancer unless the increase in risk was at least three-fold.
This is bad news for observational nutrition studies since the vast majority of relative risks reported fall well below this threshold. Most are well below 100 percent, and many—like the IARC finding on processed meat and cancer—are below 25 percent.
To put this in perspective, the increased relative risk of lung cancer from smoking cigarettes is between 1,000 and 3,000 percent. The increased relative risk of liver cancer from eating grains contaminated with aflatoxin is 600 percent.
It’s also important to consider the difference between absolute and relative risk reduction. Researchers often use relative risk statistics to report the results of nutrition studies. For example, in the IARC report, they said that every 50 grams of processed meat consumed increased the risk of cancer by 18 percent. But when that increase in relative risk is stated in absolute terms, it doesn’t sound quite as impressive. The lifetime absolute risk of colon cancer in vegetarians is 4.5 out of 100; in people eating 50 grams of processed meat every day for a lifetime, the risk is 5.3 out of 100. (15)
All of this suggests that most findings in observational nutrition studies are indistinguishable from chance and are unlikely to be validated by RCTs (which is exactly what has happened in most cases, as I’ll explain shortly). Yet despite this, many of these studies are highly publicized in the media and often reported as if they conclusively discovered a causal relationship.
The current climate in both academia and the media, unfortunately, contributes to this. Null results—when researchers don’t find a positive or negative association—are significantly less likely to be published, and without publication, researchers are out of a job. (16, 17) And the pressure to get clicks and generate advertising revenue in the digital media world leads to splashy headlines that overstate or distort what the study actually found. One study found that 43 percent of front-page stories reporting on medical research are based on research with mostly preliminary findings (i.e., they were observational studies that didn’t prove causality). (18)
“The sin,” Dr. Sander Greenland, an epidemiologist at UCLA, has said, “comes from believing a causal hypothesis is true because your study came up with a positive result.” (19)
Sadly, this is more the rule than the exception today.
I hope this article has given you some reasons to remain skeptical about nutrition research. For more information on this topic, check out Part 2 of this article series—and let me know what you think in the comments below!
The post Why You Should Be Skeptical of the Latest Nutrition Headlines: Part 1 appeared first on Chris Kresser.
Source: http://chriskresser.com September 27, 2018 at 12:07AM
4 notes · View notes
thechasefiles · 5 years
Text
The Chase Files Daily Newscap
Good MORNING  #realdreamchasers! Here is The Chase Files Daily News Cap for Tuesday 5th March 2019. Remember you can read full articles for FREE via Barbados Today (BT) or Barbados Government Information Services (BGIS) OR by purchasing by purchasing a Daily Nation Newspaper (DN).
Tumblr media
POLICE FUNDING INTACT, SAYS PM – There have been no cuts to funding for the Royal Barbados Police Force, the Prime Minister has assured, as she pledged Government’s continued support of the force’s fight against crime. Mottley made the comments before the House Standing Committee following accusations by Opposition Leader Reverend Joseph Atherley that Government had reduced the money to be allocated to the police at a time when it should be increased. She said: “I give him [Atherley] the assurance, as I do the country that believe you me, we have not only put the money on the police force, we’ve put it under the law courts . . . , It is not a reduction whatsoever,” Mottley further insisted.  Atherley had based his assertion on the $81 million allocation to police services this year - $7 million less than last year’s allocation of $88 million. He said when the current crime situation was taken into consideration, there should have been a substantial increase in this year’s Estimates of Expenditure. Atherley declared: “I do not know how you can tell Barbadians that there is some just cause, reason, explanation, why you’re providing for police services in the year ahead, less than you did for last year, simply because in the prior year the former administration failed adequately to provide.”  But Prime Minister Mottley warned the Opposition Leader that there was a “danger in looking at just absolute figures and nothing more”. She said the difference between the money granted in the closing fiscal year and the upcoming fiscal year was due to a freeze in filling established posts in the police service. The Prime Minister said a decision had been taken that those posts that could not be filled would be frozen until Barbados was able to get out of its economic crisis. Revealing that those statutory posts had been vacant for over 15 years, she told the House: “The bottom line is that if you look at all of the other amounts; the operating expenses of the police has gone from $3.145 million to $3.32 million; the maintenance of property remains the same at $3.853 million; the subsidies are flat at $160 000; supplies and materials have gone up in fact by more than 15 per cent from $748 000 to $839 000. What has gone down?”  She also reveled a decision had been taken to buy $5.8 million in equipment for police services. The Prime Minister said the Port Authority is seeking to borrow $41 million to purchase scanners to prevent the importation of drugs and arms at the lone national seaport. She maintained that all of the money spent on law enforcement and policing services would not be found under policing services alone, but said the amounts being spent under police services had significantly increased. The Prime Minister said: “Persons may have forgotten that Parliament finished at one o’clock on Friday night and what we did was to take the deliberate decision a few months ago, to upfront in this financial year capital purchases that are critical to the police. The police have not functioned in this country with any kind of relevant technology and software for years. “We are now trying to get the cameras going again on the main highways that allow the police particularly on the main highways and in St Lawrence Gap and hopefully on the West Coast to be able to deal with finding people when crimes are committed.”  New tools, including crime mapping software and drone technology, are also to be added to the Government’s crime-fighting arsenal.  (BT)
‘FIGHT ON’  - A three-year plan to tackle rampant crime, targetting crime-ridden communities, is currently being drafted by the Government’s Criminal Research and Planning Unit, Attorney General Dale Marshall disclosed in Parliament today. Speaking as a House select commitee began hearings on the law and justice headings in the appropriations and estimates bill for the new financial year, the Justice Minister revealed the crime strategy is to cover 2019 to 2022.  Marshall told fellow lawmakers: “The whole idea behind it is that it will try to bring together all of the elements that go into strengthening our society . . . . We have to look at reform strategies, we have to look at intervention strategies and we also have to look at what long term things support those strategies. “Unless we work on all of those things that feed into what can create a block culture then we will be  challenged.”  Marshall expressed the hope that the 2019 to 2022 proposal would be the “golden thread” to arrest and “hopefully minimize criminal activity”.  Also appearing before lawmakers, the Government’s chief criminologist Cheryl Willoughby revealed that the research and planning unit and community officers from the Division of Youth Affairs will be going into at-risk communities from March 20.  She also said that the department was researching the levels of fear among the residents in at-risk communities.  The Attorney General who is responsible for the Royal Barbados Police Force, the preservation of public order, the Forensic Sciences Centre, the Police Complaints Authority and the Criminal Justice Research Unit indicated that the “levels of paralysis” linked to the recent spike in violent attacks were alarming and unacceptable.  He told the House committee: “Every Barbadian community knows what it is like for people to have a corner where they can hang out on... but when we have an environment, not of our own making where individuals feel that they have to stay in the house because that is the only way to be safe we are really having an environment that is suffocating our communities. “Whether we have a high level of fear or not the fact is that many communities in those high at risk area feel that way.”  Marshall went on to say that the police will assure people in high-crime areas that they were closely monitoring the situation.  The Attorney General said: “One of the first things we must do is reassure those communities that we are on the job . . . . Then those communities will not have a chance to breathe – increasing police presence via mobile patrols or community policing.  “This is not just about stamping out crime it is also and must also be about giving our communities a chance to breathe again so the average Barbadian can experience life living in fellowship and harmony as we know it used to be.” (BT)
‘SECOND WHISTLEBLOWER LAW COMING’ - More legal protections for whistleblowers are to be brought to lawmakers in the next four to six months, according to Attorney General Dale Marshall.  During the Estimates hearings in the House of Assembly, Marshall declared that the Integrity In Public Life Bill alone was inadequate to stem police corruption and crime.  He noted that the bill did not target public sector entities or corporations that were susceptible to corruption.  He told the House select committee on appropriations: “This piece of legislation [Integrity Bill] cannot stand alone, this piece of legislation has its own whistleblower provisions in it but if you are going to seriously stamp out corruption then we need to build up the other legislation that is going to build that structure.”  He went on to reveal that a second piece of whistleblower legislation would ensure that “individuals who give public interest declarations” do not fear or suffer from retaliation for coming forward to the authorities.  Declaring that the Prevention of Corruption Act of 1929 was an “absurd” piece of archaic legislation in urgent need of updating, Marshall said: “its fine structure needs to be updated; even the very language that it uses and the constructs that it enshrines”. Touching on the Money Laundering and Instrumentalities of Crime Act that was brought before the House last Friday, the Attorney General pointed out that the police force and other departments will reap financial benefits from the introduction of the law intended to funnel the seized assets of crime to law enforcement agencies.  Marshall told the House select committee: “If you are engaged in drugs and money laundering and you have five and six high-end vehicles but no job that nobody can point, you have an obligation to say to the state where did you get these assets from... When it comes to the modern approach to law enforcement we simply cannot allow people to engage in criminal conduct to be able to hold on to their ill-gotten gains. “Where assets are seized from, the large percentage of those assets are made available to law enforcement agencies to further carry out their work so it would be beneficial for us, in a situation where we would be effectively able to seize assets and then those assets are under our law ... are able to be distributed across agencies.” (BT)
POLICE MAKE BREAKTHROUGH IN TWO MURDERS -  Police have made a major breakthrough in investigations relating to the fatal shootings of Daryl Harris, who was fatally shot at Barbarees Gardens, St Michael on Tuesday, January 15, 2019 and Corey Parris, who was fatally shot at Baxters Road, St Michael on Thursday, January 24th 2019. A number of persons are assisting Police at the Major Crime Investigations Unit and charges are expected to follow shortly. (DN)
THREE MURDER ACCUSED TO APPEAR IN COURT TOMORROW -  Three murder accused are set to appear at the District ‘A’ Magistrates’ Court tomorrow. Lamar Alex Hewitt, 27, of 7th Avenue, New Orleans has been charged with the January 23 murder of Corrie Parris. Parris, 47, of Shop Hill, St Thomas was shot multiple times while sitting in a car on Baxter’s Road in the vicinity of Jordan’s Supermarket. He was taken to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital ( QEH) but succumbed to his injuries. Jaleel Kadeem Callender and Jalen Trimal Jones-Cox will also face the court charged with the murder of Daryll Harris on January 15. Harris of Barbarees Gardens, St Michael was shot nine times by a gunman. He died at the QEH. Hewitt faces an additional charge of supplying a firearm to Rio Benn between February 1 and 18. Meanwhile, Shamar Recardo James, of Murphy’s Pasture, Chapman Lane, St Michael has been charged with supplying a firearm to murder accused Jaleel Kadeem Callender sometime between January 1 and February 18. That firearm has been recovered by police. (DN)
 FIVE GRANTED BAIL - Five aggravated burglary accused were granted bail in a District ‘A’ Magistrates’ Court today but only four got to go home as one was unable to get a suitable surety before the end of the day’s sitting. They are: 23-year-olds Kemaro O’Neil Harris and Jabarry Stafan Roach both of Block 4H, Rock Close, Wildey, St Michael; 24-year-old Kimberley Ashleigh Ellis, of Block 6F Field Road, Wildey, St Michael; 22-year-old Damion Ramon Whittaker, of Bay Street, St Michael and 27-year-old Pierre Ramon Belle of Block 6G, Field Road, Wildey, St Michael. Harris, Roach and Ellis are jointly charged with entering R.B Rotisserie as trespassers on November 9, 2018 and stealing a cellular phone worth $600 belonging to D’Andrea Burrowes and $3,043.78 cash belonging to ESC Inc. It is also alleged that they had a knife during the commission of the crime. Roach, Harris and Belle are accused of entering Chutneys and R.B Rostisserie as trespassers on July 20, 2018 and stealing $4,942.10 belonging to ESC Inc, a cellular phone and case worth $2,030 as well as $20 cash belonging to Persuadia Powlett and a $1,200 cellular phone belonging to D’Andrea Burrowes. It is further alleged that they had a knife, box cutter and scissors at the time. None of the accused was required to plead to the indictable charges. Station Sergeant Cameron Gibbons did not renew objections to their bail when they appeared before Magistate Kristie Cuffy-Sargeant today. Whittaker who is represented by attorney-at-law Angella Mitchell-Gittens was granted $4,000 bail as well as Ellis who had Bobby Clarke as her legal counsel while Belle secured $8,000 bail and Roach $12,000. However, Harris who was also offered $12,000 bail was not able to present a suitable surety to the magistrate. He will return before the court tomorrow for another chance. All the accused were given an August 27 date to return to court. In the meantime they all have to report to Central Police Station every Wednesday before noon with valid identification and also adhere to a daily 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew. (BT)
YARDE REMANDED FOR 28 DAYS - Fifty-year-old Junior Anderson Grafton Yarde has a place to lay his head at least for the next 28-days. This after he admitted before Magistrate Douglas Frederick today to having no fixed place abode. It was on that basis and his criminal record that prosecutor Sergeant St Clair Phillips objected to bail saying that the police prosecutor’s office would be hardpressed to locate the accused if he chose to abscond. Grafton is charged with stealing two pairs of goggles worth $800 and $15 cash belonging to Abdullah Manjra between February 27 and 28. He pleaded not guilty to the charge and will reappear before the District ‘A’ Magistrates’ Court on April 1, 2019. (BT)
‘ADDICTED TO DRUGS’ – “He will kill himself before his time and I want him to get detox!” The mother of an 18-year-old made this plea today in the No. 1 District ‘A’ Magistrates’ Court after the teenager admitted to smoking up to 64 packets of marijuana on a daily basis. The teen who lives in the Bayville, St Michael area was stopped while driving a hired car on Black Rock Main Road, St Michael on March 1 around 11:10 a.m. On the dashboard, according to prosecutor sergeant St Clair Phillips, were the packets and a grease-proof wrapping of vegetable matter suspected to be cannabis weighing 32.25 grammes and worth approximately $322.50. A search warrant was later executed at his house and more of the illegal substance was found on his bedside table. He was charged and pleaded guilty to two counts of possession, possession with intent to supply and trafficking of the drug. “I have a bad problem with marijuana. It was for myself. I would smoke all of them in an hour’s time,” the photography student told Magistrate Douglas Frederick today. His attorney Harry Husbands in mitigating on his behalf also admitted to a serious drug problem adding that the young man was self medicating as he was battling a number of health issues including asthma, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and a mitral valve prolapse. He asked that the magistrate show leniency so that the teen, who he said was a first-time offender and had not wasted the court’s time, could get help. However, the young man’s mother gave an even more candid explanation of her son’s problems. She told the court that she only recently found out about her only child’s addiction to the drug as he was not using it home. “Friends told him that weed is a natural thing and is good for him. So he takes it because he is terrified of the pain and smokes to stop it. However, the doctor told him he cannot smoke and take the medication,” the mother stated. She added: “He is going to die. I want him to go and get detox and go to Verdun House. He is not a doctor and he will die before his time. He is killing himself slowly but surely. His condition is such that he needs a doctor to deal with him.” The teen also admitted that he needed the help to address his drug addiction. He was therefore remanded to the custody of doctors at the Psychiatric Hospital for assessment to determine his suitability for the programme offered at Verdun House. However his legal troubles did not end there as he had to appear before Magistrate Graveney Bannister to answer the charge of driving a hired car when he was not the holder of a valid driver’s licence. “I have a permit to learn for the past three months,” he revealed adding: “I get anxiety a lot. I actually told myself I am going to learn to drive today . . . so I took the car for a spin,” he said moments before his attorney asked the court to be lenient given his health issues. Magistrate Bannister then reprimanded and discharged him saying that he was “penitent enough”. The teenager will make his next appearance before the District ‘A’ Magistrates’ Court on March 25. (BT)
ROAD FATALITY - Police have reported a road fatality on Government Hill, St Michael. The accident occurred around 1:15 am. (more details as they come to hand.) (BT)
Tumblr media
POLICE STILL WORKING IN COMMUNITIES - The island’s top cop has lauded the Royal Barbados Police Force for its community policing efforts. Commissioner of Police Tyrone Griffith today told the Standing Finance Committee of Parliament that the initiative had significantly helped the police in the fight against crime, especially in areas regarded as hotspots. Griffith strongly refuted accusations that community policing was dead. “Recently some of the comments that you would hear in the mainstream media would make you think that community policing is no longer with us. I would like to allay all fears in that regard. “If you just look at the project in the Chapman Street, New Orleans area [and the] community policing efforts there, anybody there who would have interfaced with the officers who man that post would tell you that community policing is alive and kicking. Those officers are totally embraced by those communities and do a fantastic job day out and day in,” Griffith said. “Had not for that intervention I can assure you that that community is so volatile that we would not know how to manage the affairs there . . . I am sure that what they do on a daily basis is outstanding,” he maintained. Earlier this year in an interview with Barbados TODAY former Commissioner of Police Orville Durant and Oral Reid, chairman of the Caribbean Association of Security Professionals called for an urgent return to full-fledged community policing. They claimed that a lack of attention to community policing, as well as a breakdown in social structures was to blame for the ongoing wave of violence in Barbados. The commissioner said through the force’s community policing efforts programmes had also been established to assist at-risk youth. One such programme, the Prince’s Trust International Team Building programme, had already produced excellent results, Griffith said.  Following a successful pilot project in 2016, the Prince’s Trust International teamed with the RBPF to offer a 12-week personal development programme aimed at helping disengaged and unemployed young people between the ages of 16 and 25 years old. The programme helps to build confidence, motivation and skills, while allowing participants to take part in a series of outdoor activities, community challenges and classroom-based learning. “We continue to work with the youth. We also have engaged in the Prince’s Trust International Team Building programme which has seen in excess of 80 persons to date graduate from the programme and who have made a turnaround in their lives. We are satisfied that programmes like that coming out of the community policing effort will indeed ensure that our youth will have some support in order to eradicate some of the scourge of crime that we are seeing,” Griffith said. (BT)
PSV OWNERS BACKING UNIFORMS FOR WORKERS - Even as some Public Service Vehicle (PSV) operators and conductors continue to celebrate the suspended rollout of the controversial uniform code, one owners’ organisation is not so happy. As a matter of fact, the Alliance Owners of Public Transport (AOPT) is suggesting that the move could be a setback to efforts to bring discipline to the sector. The owners’ group is hoping that the Transport Authority has not abandoned the idea of the proposed mandated logo-bearing uniforms. This morning, AOPT Public Relations Officer, Mark Haynes, told Barbados TODAY that his organisation is sticking to its position, articulated when the controversial issue first reared its head two months ago.“We maintain that this would have helped to bring discipline to the sector, which we are seeking to do. Now that is off the table, may be for a number of reasons which we are not privy to, that does not mean that we don’t still support discipline and order. I think that the wearing of uniforms will seek to legitimize the industry and bring order to it because we believe that it urgently needs to be regulated,” said Haynes. In a joint statement released last Friday by the PSV Workers’ Association and the Transport Authority, it was agreed that the introduction of the mandatory uniform, which was to be implemented on March 1, has been put on hold until further notice. The decision came after five hours of talks last Tuesday between the Transport Authority under the chairmanship of Ian Estwick, and members of the PSV Workers’ Association, including President Shawn Best, PRO Fabian Wharton and Director Rodney Bellamy. It was further agreed that on weekends and bank holidays, drivers and conductors will be allowed to wear polo shirts, providing that they are in the legally allowed colours of grey for drivers and yellow or cream for conductors. Two Fridays ago, PSV operators said that they were blindsided by the authority’s notice of the new dress code, which had resulted in a two-day bus strike in January when attempts were first made to introduce it. The workers claimed at the time that negotiations were ongoing and that the matter was far from resolved. The following Monday, the Association of Public Transport Operators (APTO) threw their support behind the drivers and conductors, revealing that their attorney-at-law, Michael Lashley QC, had written a legal challenge to the Transport Authority. However, this morning the AOPT spokesman suggested that as soon as the Transport Authority is able to work out all of the kinks in the proposed legislation, a third attempt should be made to re-introduce it. “I believe that there were some legal issues on the table. I do not know what is the up-to-date status as it relates to a legal opinion on the issue, but once the law provides for it and supports it, we do not see any reason why it should not be done,” said Haynes. He noted, “If the Transport Authority intends to get back to it, then that would be a matter for them to decide but as far as we are concerned, there is no effort on our part to make things difficult for the workers. We are just saying that we want discipline and order in the sector, and I think that if we are a serious people, then behaviour and dress are important to ensure that the public has a better perception of the PSV sector.” (BT)
Tumblr media
WRONG WAY - Government appears to be looking to change the existing sick leave policy in the public service says the National Union of Public Workers (NUPW). But the administration is going about it the wrong way, bypassing the established process which requires discussions with the union and the Ministry of the Civil Service, charges a senior member of the island’s largest public sector bargaining body. Acting Assistant General Secretary of the NUPW, Wayne Waldron said his union is concerned by this unilateral attempt by Government to change sick leave criteria for workers in the public service. The NUPW suggested that Government has turned to the social partnership to come up with a replacement policy. This afternoon Waldron told Barbados TODAY that Government has asked the social partnership to draft a new sick leave policy, a move that the union sees as a circumvention of the NUPW’s collective bargaining jurisdiction. The National Union of Public Workers is cautiously watching a development, where certain matters relating to public officers’ terms and conditions of service, are being placed before the social partnership to formulate policies to review those terms and conditions of work.“For example, we are aware that the sick leave policy has been placed before the social partnership for revision. The appropriate way to deal with any variations of these contractual arrangements, should be through discussions between the NUPW and Ministry of the Civil Service,” Waldron said. He argued that any decisions coming out of the social partnership will not be legally binding, while expressing fear that the private sector component of the tripartite committee, would not be able to relate to the concerns of public officers. “When you put this before a social partnership rather than properly putting it before the civil service, that policy is not legally binding. You can’t just unilaterally vary these terms and conditions just like that, this is not how we do industrial relations in Barbados,” he lamented. The trade unionist questioned the need for a revised policy in the first place, when in his estimation there were adequate measures within the current policy to deal with persons who abuse the system. “Even if there is some discussion about the level of sick leave, there are mechanisms within the public service to deal with this. So, for example, after three to six months an officer can be asked, depending on the ailment and prognosis, to be subject to a medical examination. In addition, sick leave can be extended with or without pay. This is at the discretion of the department. In cases where persons go over their sick leave provision, they are asked to refund the salary or it is taken from their pension or gratuity,” he explained, revealing that as a result of the latter provision, some public servants have found themselves having to repay one year’s salary. Waldron further argued that if Government wanted to revise the sick leave policy, they first needed to look at the issues making workers sick in the first place. The NUPW official contended, “We need to look at the cause and effect of sick leave in the first place. We have to look at our sick building syndrome. We have to also look at workers’ mental health because there are many who are discontented by unfair practices. There are many senior competent officers who have not been promoted or appointed and therefore feel disillusioned. There has to be comprehensive data analysis to be properly informed about the impact of these underlying factors.” According to the 2018 Public Sector Report, there were over 8000 applications for sick leave from public servants, permanent and temporary, during 2017. And in total, the service recorded a whopping 61288 days in days lost to work because of illness.  (BT)
EYE ON PRESIDENCY - Akanni McDowall is seeking a third term at the helm of Barbados’ largest public sector union even amidst recent publicized clashes with his administration and widespread criticism for his handling of ongoing Government retrenchment of public workers. In fact, the head of the National Union of Public Workers, (NUPW) said it would be a irresponsible and a dereliction of duty if he did not throw his hat into the ring for the April 3 elections. “I would think that it would be irresponsible of me to leave the presidency or to leave the union during a retrenchment programme. I would really think so. I would want to see my members through this phase and through this programme before I give up on the leadership position. I really would not feel good leaving just like that because I stand by public servants in their time of need,” said McDowall, who is confident that he still enjoys majority support of the membership. McDowall told Barbados TODAY it is important he stands by his constituents who are still navigating an austerity programme. In June 2016, McDowall convincingly overcame a no-confidence motion 168-45 during his first tenure as president. A year later he easily brushed aside a challenge for the presidency from immigration officer, Roy Greenidge. But with critics such as Opposition Senator Caswell Franklyn, describing the NUPW under McDowall’s stewardship as “political prostitutes”, it is left for the membership to decide who will lead them.  Senator Franklyn had also accused the union of playing politics when shortly after the Barbados Labour Party’s emphatic win in the May 24 polls (BLP), the union reached agreement on salary increases for public servants at 4.5 per cent after insisting on 23 per cent from the previous administration. “To come down from 23 per cent to 4.5 per cent is like dropping off a cliff,” Franklyn said then. “Everybody knew that the [previous] Government was mismanaging the economy and that the whole country was going to hell in a handcart, yet they [NUPW] insisted on 23 per cent. I can’t say if this Government is being reasonable, but you can’t just settle in one meeting after elections. It smells like a bag of rotten shrimp,” the outspoken senator said at the time. However, McDowall told Barbados TODAY that he is fully aware of the criticisms of his leadership and that he is prepared to defend his record, even though he believes that “it speaks for itself”. He also revealed that he has heard rumors regarding persons wishing to challenge him but so far no one has officially indicated their intention to do so. “I have heard people say that I am in bed with the current Government, but I would encourage them to bring the proof of this. My record shows that even after the Government was changed, I have continued to fight for the workers. I would like people to judge me based on what I have been able to achieve rather than accusing me whimsically of being associated with one administration or another. “I have not shown preference for one administration over another in my capacity as president of the NUPW, and if people have proof to the contrary, then I suggest they bring it,” saidMcDowall, who pointed to the recent relocation of the Immigration Department as one example of the NUPW’s continued push for workers’ rights in recent months. (BT)
EARLY REAPERS – At least two private sugar cane planters started reaping canes yesterday at the official start of the harvest season. Farm manager at Drax Hall Plantation, Phillip Whitehead, said he started harvesting around 10 a.m. in St George and had reaped about 20 tonnes of cane, which were delivered to the Bulkeley trans-loading station also in St George, and eventually to Portvale Factory in St James. He said while he lost six acres of cane to fire, 311 acres were in production and he anticipated reaping 7 000 tonnes, a slight increase from last year’s yield of 6 884 from 288 acres. Richard Armstrong, of Armag Farms Ltd, was the other planter harvesting canes. From 35 acres in Colleton, St John, and a few in Hampton, St Philip, he expects to reap about 50 tonnes. However, this will be his last time harvesting cane for sugar production as he is planning to fully utilise the 600 acres he has responsibility for to plant a high-fibre cane for a special biomass project.  (DN)
AMBASSADOR SUPPORTS BEACH VENDOR - Cultural Ambassador Anthony The Mighty Gabby Carter is still not convinced that Barbadians are being granted free and fair access to the country’s beaches. The outspoken ambassador was weighing in on recent complaints levelled by a beach chair vendor at Alleyne’s Beach St James that his access to the beach had been restricted by the National Conservation Commission (NCC) at the request of the Fairmont Royal Pavilion Resort. While efforts to reach the NCC’s General Manager, Keith Neblett continue to be unsuccessful, Cultural Ambassador Gabby voiced his support for 31-year-old Derry Bayley, a registered beach chair vendor, who last week accused NCC workers of unfairly restricting his access by drawing a black mark on the beach and insisting that if he operated south of the line, his licence would be revoked. The young man also charged that staff of the nearby hotel was harassing his clients for placing his beach chairs on “their side” of the beach. “He needs to get something and spray it on the beach too, to tell them that they can’t pass there and show Royal Pavilion where they can’t pass. That is what I believe. It can’t be a one-way street there,” Mighty Gabby told Barbados TODAY. He added: “Nobody owns the beach. The law needs changing as it pertains to the beach, because that foolishness about the high water mark needs to be changed so that we can get more justice in situations like these. That should never be and I hope that the young man will get some relief in terms of being able to put his chairs on the beach, because nobody should own the beach. It is ridiculous. I don’t agree with it at all.” By law, local beaches are considered public spaces, defined under the NCC cap 393 as “the land adjoining the foreshore of Barbados and extending not 33 metres beyond the landward limit of the foreshore.” More specifically, the NCC Act defined 100 feet from the high water mark as beach. However these public spaces become bigger and smaller based on the weather, resulting in changes to the high water mark and a lack of clarity about the ownership of some portions of the beach and its immediate environs. The Mighty Gabby took aim at the over 35-year-old legislation arguing that it still did not provide enough clarity. “Anything past your fence should belong to the public and if you use the beach, you use it at the public’s discretion. You should be paying taxes for the land up to your fence,” said Gabby, who added that he was also concerned about access to some beaches which had gradually been blocked. “All of the windows to the beach also need reopening. Historically you can tell where they are and so you should go and reopen all of them. I don’t care whose property is there.” He also urged Government to better regulate the growing occupation of beach chair vending in a way that was equitable for small entrepreneurs and large hotel owners, warning that beaches like Browne’s Beach, a popular spot for locals, were restricting access to Barbadians who frequent the beach from the neighbouring communities. “We need to take those chairs on Browne’s Beach and send them back where they came from. Sometimes when we go down there to bathe, we end up having to beg the tourists for a break. That shouldn’t be so. That beach especially is one which should not be used like that. It is ridiculous. “It needs to be regulated better because it is restricting free access to the beaches. There are some beaches which are accessed by tourists and we cannot get to freely access some of their beaches, so you cannot allow the tourists to come down there [Browne’s Beach] and take over where the locals bathe. It is ridiculous and needs to be stopped so that we could at least have that part of the beach to ourselves. We don’t mind sharing, but ordinary Barbadians cannot be placed on the back burner,” said Gabby. (BT)
UPSET PARENTS PLAN PROTEST – Parents of Milton Lynch Primary students plan to protest today against what they describe as the deplorable conditions at the school. They made this decision yesterday evening at the Water Street, Christ Church school, saying they were frustrated that the health and safety of students and teachers were not being taken seriously. They said they were dissatisfied with some industrial cleaning done over the weekend. A fiery Katelyn Bourne told the DAILY NATION: “My son was home for four days and then I had to carry him to more than one doctor. “The bathrooms smell terrible, the hallways are atrocious. There are hardly any toilet bowl covers; the smell alone is making the children sick. And If I was to leave my child at home I would get the Child Care Board call on me. But this is nowhere to send [a] child,” Bourne complained. (DN)
ST JAMES PRIMARY SCHOOL CLOSED TODAY FOR CLEANING – The St James Primary School at Trents, St James, will be closed today, Tuesday, March 5, for industrial cleaning.  It will reopen on Wednesday, March 6. The Ministry of Education, Technological and Vocational Training regrets any inconvenience this closure may cause. (BGIS)
ANN HILL SCHOOL CLOSED TODAY FOR CLEANING – The Ministry of Education, Technological and Vocational Training has advised that the Ann Hill School, at Pine Plantation Road, St Michael, will be closed today, Tuesday, March 5. This is to allow for the completion of industrial cleaning at the school, which will reopen on Wednesday, March 6. The Ministry thanks parents and guardians for their cooperation and understanding in this matter. (BGIS)
For daily or breaking news reports follow us on Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter & Facebook. That’s all for today folks. There are 302 days left in the year. Shalom! #thechasefilesdailynewscap #thechasefiles# dailynewscapsbythechasefiles
0 notes
denisalvney · 6 years
Text
Why You Should Be Skeptical of the Latest Nutrition Headlines: Part 1
This article is Part 1 of a two-part series about the problems with nutrition research. For more on why you should be skeptical of the latest nutrition headlines, check out Part 2 of this series.
Nutritional epidemiology is basically the board game equivalent of a Ouija board—whatever you want it to say, it will say. – Dr. Peter Attia
Every week, we’re bombarded with splashy headlines in the media about the latest nutrition research. Here’s a sampling from the last few weeks alone:
“Low-carb diets could shorten life, study suggests” (BBC News)
“Eating cheese and butter every day linked to living longer” (Newsweek)
“A New Study Says Any Amount of Drinking Is Bad for You. Here's What Experts Say” (Time)
“Whole grains one of the most important food groups for preventing type 2 diabetes” (Science Daily)
“Low carb diet ‘should be first line of approach to tackle type 2 diabetes’ and prolong lifespan” (iNews)
Within a six-week period, we learned that low-carb diets will make you live longer and shorten your lifespan and that they’re both good and bad for diabetes. We also learned that consuming even small amounts of alcohol, which has long been regarded as health promoting, is now unhealthy.
For decades, we were told to limit dietary fat and cholesterol because they would clog our arteries, give us heart attacks, and send us to an early grave. Yet in 2010, the federal government removed its restriction on total fat from the U.S. Dietary Guidelines, and in 2015, they did the same thing for cholesterol, remarking that it is “not a nutrient of concern for overconsumption.” (1)
If you’re confused by this, or you’ve just stopped listening altogether, you’re not alone. And who could blame you? In a recent, scathing critique of nutrition research in JAMA, Dr. John Ioannidis, a professor at the Stanford School of Medicine, said:
Nutritional research may have adversely affected the public perception of science.
… the emerging picture of nutritional epidemiology is difficult to reconcile with good scientific principles. The field needs radical reform. (2)
In other words, you’re not crazy for doubting the latest media headlines or just throwing up your hands in frustration! In this article, I’m going to explore the reasons why skepticism is an appropriate response when it comes to most nutrition studies. Armed with this information, you’ll be better able to protect yourself and your family from the latest media hype and focus on what really matters when it comes to diet and nutrition.
Why You Can’t Trust Observational Studies as “Proof”
An observational study is one that draws inferences about the effect of an exposure or intervention on subjects where the researcher or investigator has no control over the subject. It’s not an experiment where researchers are directing a specific intervention (like a low-carb diet) and making things happen. Instead, they are just looking at populations of people and making guesses about the effects of a diet or lifestyle variable.
Observational studies are good for generating hypotheses, but they can’t prove that a specific variable causes a specific outcome.
That is the domain of a randomized controlled trial (RCT), which randomly assigns participants to two groups—a treatment group that receives the intervention being studied and a control group that does not—and then observes them for a specific period of time.
We’ve all seen nutrition headlines promising groundbreaking information that will change the way we view our health. But how many news stories are based on studies with faulty methods, uncontrolled biases, and other major problems? Check out this article to find out.
Every scientist knows this, and most journalists should as well. Yet today, it’s not uncommon to see headlines like “Low-carb diet shortens your lifespan” and “Eating processed meat increases your risk of cancer,” which imply that the studies proved a causal relationship when, in fact, all they did is establish a correlation.
Correlation Is Not Causation
The problem is that two variables that are correlated, or associated together, do not always have a causal relationship. Consider the following examples, from Tyler Vigen’s excellent webpage called Spurious Correlations:
S. spending on space, science, and technology is 99.8 percent correlated with suicides by hanging, strangulation, and suffocation.
Per capita consumption of margarine in the United States and the divorce rate in the state of Maine are correlated at 99.3 percent.
Total revenue generated by arcades is 5 percent correlated with computer science doctorates awarded in the United States.
Those are incredibly strong correlations, but I think it’s fairly obvious that consumption of margarine in the United States has absolutely no impact on the divorce rate in Maine … right?
Another great example of how easy it is to derive spurious correlations—especially when you set out with an agenda—comes from a large study of the most common diagnoses for hospitalization in 10.6 million Canadians. The researchers found that 24 diagnoses were significantly associated with the participants’ astrological signs: (3)
People born under Leo had a 15 percent higher risk of hospitalization due to gastrointestinal hemorrhage compared to other residents of Ontario.
People born under Sagittarius had a 38 percent higher risk of hospitalization for arm fractures compared to people with other signs.
In Dr. Ioannidis’s editorial in JAMA, he notes:
Almost all nutritional variables are correlated with one another; thus, if one variable is causally related to health outcomes, many other variables will also yield significant associations in large enough data sets.
As an example of just how absurd this can become, he notes that, if taken at face value, observational studies have inferred that:
… eating 12 hazelnuts daily (1 oz) would prolong life by 12 years (ie, 1 year per hazelnut), drinking 3 cups of coffee daily would achieve a similar gain of 12 extra years, and eating a single mandarin orange daily (80g) would add 5 years of life. Conversely, consuming 1 egg daily would reduce life expectancy by 6 years, and eating 2 slices of bacon (30g) daily would shorten life by a decade, an effect worse than smoking.
Are these relationships truly causal? Of course not, Ioannidis says. Yet study authors often use causal language when reporting the findings from these studies.
In fact, according to an analysis in 2013, authors of observational studies made medical or nutritional recommendations (suggesting their data showed a causal relationship) in 56 percent of cases. (4) The study authors summed up their findings as follows:
In conclusion, our empirical evaluation shows that linking observational results to recommendations regarding medical practice is currently very common in highly influential journals. Such recommendations frequently represent logical leaps. As such, if they are correct, they may accelerate the translation of research but, if they are wrong, they may cause considerable harm. [emphasis added]
I should note that it’s at least possible to become reasonably confident of a causal association between variables in an observational study using what is known as the Bradford Hill criteria:
Strength of the association
Consistency
Specificity
Temporality
Biological gradient
Plausibility
Coherence
Experiment
Analogy
The more of these criteria that are met, the more likely causation is present.
However, observational nutrition studies rarely satisfy these criteria, which makes the frequent claims of causality even more dubious.
There Are Problems with Data Collection Methods Too
There’s a saying in science: “Data are only as good as the instrument used to collect them.”
Way back in the 13th century, the English philosopher and Franciscan friar Roger Bacon said that scientific data must be: (5)
Independently observable
Measurable
Falsifiable
Valid
Reliable
To use a simple example, if someone is eating an apple right in front of you, you can observe, measure, and either verify or repute that they’re doing that. But if they simply tell you that they ate an apple at some time in the past, you can neither observe, measure, verify, nor refute their story. You just have to take their word for it—and that is not science.
The term “observational nutrition study” is a misnomer because it suggests that researchers are actually observing what participants eat. But of course that’s not true; researchers aren’t standing around in people’s kitchens and going out to restaurants with them.
Instead, they are collecting data on what people eat by giving them questionnaires to fill out. There are different versions of these used in research, from food frequency questionnaires (FFQs), which may ask people to recall what they ate months or even years prior, to 24-hour recall surveys where people are asked what they ate over the past 24 hours.
These “memory-based assessments,” or “M-BMs,” bear little relation to actual calorie or nutrient consumption. Why? Because memory is not a literal, accurate, or even precise reproduction of past events. (6)
In a paper criticizing the validity of M-BMs for data collection, Edward Archer pointed out:
When a person provides a dietary report, the data collected are not actual food or beverage consumption but rather an error-prone and highly edited anecdote regarding memories of food and beverage consumption. (7)
Going back to the apple example above, researchers aren’t watching participants eat an apple. They’re relying on the participants’ reports of eating apples—sometimes several years prior!
We Can’t Rely on Memory When It Comes to Nutrition Research
But just how inaccurate are M-BMs? To find out, Archer analyzed questionnaires from participants in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which is a long-running series of studies on the health and nutritional status of the American public. NHANES has served as the basis of dietary guidelines and public health recommendations.
Archer found that, over the 39-year history (at the time of his study) of NHANES, the self-reported calorie intake on the majority of respondents (67 percent of women and 59 percent of men) was not physiologically plausible, and the average calorie intake levels reported by overweight and obese people (i.e., the majority of Americans) were incompatible with life.
In other words, a bedridden, frail, elderly woman (i.e., a person with the lowest possible calorie requirements) could not survive on the number of calories reported by the average person in the NHANES survey!
And this isn’t just a problem in the United States. The inaccuracy of M-BMs has been replicated consistently over three decades and in multiple countries around the world. (8)
Can you see why this would be a problem?
All macronutrients (protein, fat, and carbohydrate) and micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, and trace minerals) are consumed as calories, so when calories are misreported, all nutrients will also be misreported.
What’s more, certain subgroups are more prone to underreporting, including people who are obese or have a high calorie intake. Obese subjects have been found to underreport up to half of their calorie intake, and in particular, they underreport fat and carbs. (9)
One consequence of this is that the health risks associated with a high fat (or carb) intake would be overestimated. Imagine that someone reports a saturated fat intake of 50 grams, and they have a total cholesterol of 200 mg/dL. But say they underreported their saturated fat intake by 40 percent, and their actual intake was 80 grams. This would overestimate the effect of saturated fat intake on total cholesterol because it assumed that eating 50 grams—rather than 80 grams—led to a total cholesterol of 200 mg/dL.
Where does that leave us? Archer doesn’t pull any punches:
Data collected from M-BM are pseudoscientific and inadmissible in scientific research and the formulation of national dietary guidelines. (10)
… the uncritical faith in the validity and value of M-BM has wasted significant resources and continues the single greatest impediment to actual scientific progress in the fields of obesity and nutrition research. (11)
Most people have no idea that the entire field of observational nutrition research—and all of the media headlines that come out of it—is based on questionnaires about what people eat. Now that you know, will you ever look at nutrition headlines in the same way again?
How the “Healthy-User” Bias Impacts Findings
The “healthy-user” bias refers to the observation that people who engage in a behavior perceived as healthy are more likely to engage in other behaviors that are also perceived as healthy and vice versa.
For example, because red meat has been perceived as “unhealthy” for so many years, on average, people that eat more red meat are more likely to: (12)
Smoke
Be physically inactive
Eat fewer fruits and vegetables
Be less educated
Of course, most researchers are well aware of the influence of confounding factors and the healthy-user bias, and good ones do their best to control for as many of these factors as they can. But even in the best studies, researchers can’t control for all possible confounding factors because our lives are simply too complex. As Norman Breslow, a former biostatistician at the University of Washington, once said:
People think they may have been able to control for things that aren’t inherently controllable.
One of the inevitable results of the healthy-user bias is that many observational studies end up comparing two groups of people that are not at all similar, and this casts doubt on the findings.
For example, early studies suggested that vegetarians live longer than omnivores. However, these studies compared Seventh Day Adventists—a religious group that advocates a vegetarian diet and a healthy lifestyle as part of their belief system—with the general population.
That introduces serious potential for healthy-user bias because the members of the SDA church engage in lifestyle behaviors—like not smoking or drinking alcohol, eating more fresh fruits and vegetables, and getting more exercise—that have been shown to reduce the risk of death from cardiovascular disease and all causes. So, we can’t possibly know whether the reduction in deaths observed in these studies was related to the vegetarian diet or these other causes, and thus the findings are not generalizable to the wider population.
(As a side note, four later studies that compared vegetarians with a more health-conscious population of omnivores found that both groups lived longer than the general population, but there was no difference in lifespan between the vegetarians and healthy omnivores. You can read more about this in my article “Do Vegetarians and Vegans Really Live Longer than Meat Eaters?”)
The healthy-user bias plagues most observational nutrition studies, and yet we hardly ever hear it mentioned when these studies are reported in the media. Now that you know about it, how might you respond differently to some of the headlines I shared at the beginning of the article?
“Low-carb diets could shorten life, study suggests”
“Eating cheese and butter every day linked to living longer”
“Whole grains one of the most important food groups for preventing type 2 diabetes”
Would you ask questions like:
Since fat has been perceived as unhealthy and low-carb diets are high in fat, were the people eating low-carb diets also engaging in other behaviors perceived as unhealthy?
Were the people eating more cheese and butter doing anything else that might have contributed to a longer lifespan?
Were the people who were eating more whole grains exercising more or engaging in other behaviors perceived as healthy (since eating whole grains is perceived as healthy)?
The “Risks” Are Often Pure Chance
In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) issued a report suggesting that for every 50 grams of processed meat consumed, the relative risk of cancer was increased by 18 percent compared to those who ate the least processed meat. (13)
How confident can we be of that claim? In epidemiology outside the field of nutrition (and even within the nutrition field until recently), the threshold for confidence in relative risk is between 100 and 300 percent. In other words, we’d need to see an increase or decrease of risk of between 100 and 300 percent for a given intervention before we could be confident that the change observed was due to the intervention and not simply to chance.
According to the late epidemiologist Syd Shapiro, cofounder of the Slone Epidemiology Center, at the higher end of this range, one can be guardedly confident, but “we can hardly ever be confident about estimates of less than 100 percent, and when estimates are much below 100 percent, we are simply out of business.” (14)
Marcia Angell, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, said much the same thing in a 1995 article in Science called “Epidemiology Faces Its Limits”:
As a general rule of thumb, we are looking for a relative risk of three or more [before accepting a paper for publication], particularly if it is biologically implausible or if it’s a brand-new finding.
And Robert Temple, who was the director of drug evaluation at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) at the time, put it even more bluntly in the same Science article:
My basic rule is if the relative risk isn’t at least three or four, forget it.
Most epidemiologists that were interviewed for the Science article said they would not take seriously a single study reporting a new potential cause of cancer unless the increase in risk was at least three-fold.
This is bad news for observational nutrition studies since the vast majority of relative risks reported fall well below this threshold. Most are well below 100 percent, and many—like the IARC finding on processed meat and cancer—are below 25 percent.
To put this in perspective, the increased relative risk of lung cancer from smoking cigarettes is between 1,000 and 3,000 percent. The increased relative risk of liver cancer from eating grains contaminated with aflatoxin is 600 percent.
It’s also important to consider the difference between absolute and relative risk reduction. Researchers often use relative risk statistics to report the results of nutrition studies. For example, in the IARC report, they said that every 50 grams of processed meat consumed increased the risk of cancer by 18 percent. But when that increase in relative risk is stated in absolute terms, it doesn’t sound quite as impressive. The lifetime absolute risk of colon cancer in vegetarians is 4.5 out of 100; in people eating 50 grams of processed meat every day for a lifetime, the risk is 5.3 out of 100. (15)
All of this suggests that most findings in observational nutrition studies are indistinguishable from chance and are unlikely to be validated by RCTs (which is exactly what has happened in most cases, as I’ll explain shortly). Yet despite this, many of these studies are highly publicized in the media and often reported as if they conclusively discovered a causal relationship.
The current climate in both academia and the media, unfortunately, contributes to this. Null results—when researchers don’t find a positive or negative association—are significantly less likely to be published, and without publication, researchers are out of a job. (16, 17) And the pressure to get clicks and generate advertising revenue in the digital media world leads to splashy headlines that overstate or distort what the study actually found. One study found that 43 percent of front-page stories reporting on medical research are based on research with mostly preliminary findings (i.e., they were observational studies that didn’t prove causality). (18)
“The sin,” Dr. Sander Greenland, an epidemiologist at UCLA, has said, “comes from believing a causal hypothesis is true because your study came up with a positive result.” (19)
Sadly, this is more the rule than the exception today.
I hope this article has given you some reasons to remain skeptical about nutrition research. For more information on this topic, check out Part 2 of this article series—and let me know what you think in the comments below!
The post Why You Should Be Skeptical of the Latest Nutrition Headlines: Part 1 appeared first on Chris Kresser.
Why You Should Be Skeptical of the Latest Nutrition Headlines: Part 1 published first on https://chriskresser.com
0 notes
thrashermaxey · 6 years
Text
20 Fantasy Hockey Thoughts
Every Sunday, we'll share 20 Fantasy Thoughts from our writers at DobberHockey. These thoughts are curated from the past week's "Daily Ramblings".
Writers: Michael Clifford, Ian Gooding, Cam Robinson, and Dobber
  1. It was just a year ago I was saying that Joe Pavelski was overvalued. Now, I think he’s undervalued. Crazy the difference a year can make. If Joe Thornton can be anywhere near as healthy and productive as he was a couple years ago before the knee injuries cropped up, Pavelski has 25 goals and 35 assists locked up. He probably does even if Thornton isn’t healthy thanks to the additions of Evander Kane and Erik Karlsson. Pavelski adds loads of hits and shots, which is why he’s valuable for me. (sep14)
  2. Check out Mike Clifford’s piece on the fantasy impact of the Erik Karlsson deal for both teams. From the Ottawa side, I’ll agree with Mike that I don’t think this deal itself helps anyone outside of Thomas Chabot, although another injury will help another player heading to Ottawa. More on that below.
Chabot might end up with a plus-minus of about minus-100 playing for a dreadful Ottawa team (yes, I’m exaggerating on that number but you get the idea). The Senators lack veteran d-men that can take on the tough minutes. But I believe the Karlsson trade adds about 5-10 points to his projected point total and 3-4 minutes of ice time per game while vaulting him onto the first power-play unit. Whether he’s ready or not, he’ll be jumping head first into the water this season. He should already be owned in keeper leagues, while he’s worth drafting in the later rounds in single-season leagues.
Meanwhile, the Jean-Gabriel Pageau injury (out six months with a torn Achilles) likely moves Chris Tierney up to the second line. Tierney was a bottom-six forward for the Sharks but he’ll be leaned on heavily and seems a good bet that he’ll start the season on the second line, although Colin White could work his way up into that role. Drake Batherson’s changes of making the Senators should also improve because of this injury. All three forwards’ fantasy values improve with the injury news, as Pageau could be out all season. (sep16)
  3. So, who gets the lion share of the goalie starts in Colorado this season? It’s a question every poolie with a pulse has been muttering to themselves this summer. After trading for long-time Caps’ backup, Philipp Grubauer, the Avalanche have put another question mark next to Semyon Varlamov’s name. The Russian netminder has refused to stay healthy and/or consistent. He’s a volatile fantasy asset that few chase.
At this point, they’ll probably give Varly the opening night gig if both play reasonably well in preseason. Then it’ll be all about the hot hand. If one goes on a long enough roll, they’ll build up some goodwill with the coaching staff and likely gain a longer leash. Grubauer is my pick to finish with more starts but nothing is certain in the world of goaltenders – especially ones who haven’t ever been given the ball on a long-term basis. (sep15)
  4. Mitch Marner is on the precipice of being an elite playmaker and a superstar in this league. The issue is that he doesn’t provide much in hits and isn’t a huge shot volume guy. He does shoot a fair amount but not to the level of guys like David Pastrnak or Rickard Rakell. I have him projected for 75 points but without huge shot volume or hits, he’ll be hard-pressed to return third-round value. (sep14)
  5. Let’s get this out of the way: Nikolaj Ehlers is truly one of my favourite players to watch in the league. If he picks up the puck in his zone and gets up to full speed, there’s almost no one more fun. That said, like Marner, he doesn’t hit much. He also doesn’t get top power play minutes, which caps his upside significantly. In order for a player who doesn’t post big hit totals to return near a top-75 pick, he needs either A) a healthy amount of PPPs, or B) a healthy plus/minus. I’m not relying on plus-minus to return value on an early-round pick. (sep14)
  6. All summer I’ve been saying that Vladimir Tarasenko will be undervalued going into 2018-19 and it appears this is the case. The underlying issue, of course, is whether his shoulder is completely healthy following surgery in April. Think of it this way: last year was a down year for Tarasenko, I think most people would agree on that. In standard Yahoo! setups, he was still a top-30 player. If you can draft him in the late second or early third round, do it. (sep14)
  7. I want to discuss this year’s rookie crop. I’m not going to discuss every rookie, or even most rookies; you should grab the Dobber Prospects Report if you want a more detailed look at hundreds of players. Instead, I want to look at a handful of players who will be considered in drafts.
Back in July, I wrote about why I won’t be drafting Rasmus Dahlin this year. Let’s get into that. The first question is, will Dahlin get top PP minutes? We can assume that Buffalo will be running a four-forward again this year, so the question is if he will push Rasmus Ristolainen out of the way. Ristolainen is fifth among all defensemen in power play points over the last three seasons, ahead of names like Torey Krug, PK Subban, Drew Doughty, John Klingberg, and John Carlson. Say what you will of Ristolainen as a player in every other facet, he’s been the go-to for years on the PP blue line for the Sabres, and he’s been effective at doing so – Buffalo is eighth in PP goals over those three seasons, two goals fewer than San Jose and three goals more than Dallas, and seventh in PP percentage. Does that suddenly change this year? Why would it?
I’m working with the assumption that Dahlin, barring injury, will not supplant Ristolainen on the power play this year. So, if he’s not on the top PP unit, maybe he’ll have a season like Mikhail Sergachev, right? Well, Tampa Bay scored 3.15 goals per 60 minutes at even strength last year. Buffalo scored 2.03. That’s 75 fewer goals. Sergachev registered a point on 11.1 percent of all of Tampa’s even-strength goals. If Buffalo’s scoring doesn’t improve, to get to 24 even-strength points like Sergachev, Dahlin would have to register a point on 17.1 percent of Buffalo’s even-strength goals. For reference, Victor Hedman registered a point on 16.3 percent of Tampa Bay’s even-strength goals. You see how silly this is getting.
So, what if Buffalo’s scoring does improve? If the team scored 25 percent more goals at even strength, which is a huge leap, they’d still be bottom-10 in scoring if the league’s scoring remains constant. *If* the scoring jumps 25 percent at even strength, do you really want to draft an 18-year old defenseman with limited PP minutes from a bottom-10 scoring team?
I’m sorry, I just don’t see it. He may be the next Erik Karlsson, but to pay off his average draft position (ADP) right now (106) in standard Yahoo! leagues, assuming he doesn’t put up triple-digit hits, he’ll need a season like Alex Pietrangelo had last year. If he does put up triple-digit hits, he’ll need a season like Kris Letang had last year. This is all absurd. More rookies here … (sep13)
  8. Elsewhere, a popular pick to be in the Calder contention as Rookie of the Year this season is Eeli Tolvanen. We’ve all heard about his exploits last season in the KHL. Hell, I dedicated a weekly space at the end of my DobberProspects’ Ramblings to shine a light on the bushel of goals he’d racked up over that stretch. However, his place in the Predators’ roster remains unclear.
No one is going to be pushing Filip Forsberg out of the top left-wing spot. He, Ryan Johansen and Viktor Arvidsson are a package until something fundamentally stops working. That leaves Tolvanen to battle it out with Kevin Fiala for the right to slide in beside Kyle Turris on the second line. Turris and Fiala formed a nice secondary wave of offense in Nashville last season. They both provide the strong two-way ability that Tolvanen still lacks. Fiala has been building the long way and his 23-goals a year ago could be just the tip of the iceberg.
If Tolvanen is unable to secure a spot in the top-six, his outlook from the third line and second power-play unit should be muted. As mentioned earlier, the Preds have enough talent to spread between two man-advantage units. The 2017 first rounder's release will be the focal point on the left circle, while Ryan Ellis’ blast will work the right side. That should be able to bump his numbers up but expecting much more than 40 points may be asking for trouble. (sep15)
  9. Connor Murphy’s injury (out eight weeks with a back injury) improves the chances that 2017 first-round pick Henri Jokiharju makes the Blackhawks defense corps out of training camp. Keep in mind that Gustav Forsling is also expected to miss the start of the season with a wrist injury. Jokiharju scored 71 points in 63 games last season for the Portland Winterhawks of the WHL. (sep16)
  10. We finally know more about Corey Crawford’s injury, and the news isn’t good. Crawford has been sidelined with a concussion and it doesn’t look like he’ll be ready for the start of the season. This isn’t good news for fantasy hockey owners who drafted him at a discount hoping that his ability would outperform his draft ranking, which had already fallen with the speculation that he still hadn’t recovered from a concussion. Crawford was having an impressive season (16-9-2, 2.27 GAA, .929 SV%), so this also isn’t good news for the Blackhawks’ playoff chances.
Cam Ward is worth taking a flier on in the later rounds of your draft but how effective will he be? Ward hasn’t had a save percentage above .910 over his past six seasons, so your expectations shouldn’t be high. This included a .906 save percentage in 43 games last season, which came in spite of the Canes allowing the fewest number of shots per game (28.9) of any team. The Hawks were a top-10 team in terms of shots allowed in 2017-18. With a defense that is led by the aging Duncan Keith and Brent Seabrook, Ward will be in tough for improved numbers with his new team. (sep16)
  11. The ‘Adam McQuaid to the Rangers for defenseman Steven Kampfer’ trade hurts Anthony DeAngelo’s fantasy value. I had traded DeAngelo away from my keeper team last season and that owner has since dropped him. It might still be too early to give up on him, since he’s only 23 as of next month and still possesses considerable upside from the blueline, but the former first-round pick is running the risk of disappearing down the same path as Derrick Pouliot. There’s considerable fantasy upside, but I can stand behind you replacing him if you can’t hold your breath much longer.
The Bruins are already used to life without McQuaid, as he missed half of last season. Considering that McQuaid didn’t play any kind of offensive role and neither should Kampfer, the move will probably only affect bottom-pairing defensemen. Jakub Zboril’s and Jeremy Lauzon’s chances of making the Bruins could improve slightly here, but without McQuaid the Bruins still have seven NHL-level defensemen on the roster (eight if you include depth defenseman Kampfer).
  12. Mathew Barzal finished 2017-18 as the 60th overall player. He did that with 85 points. He’s currently being drafted in Yahoo! pools inside the top-50. I think Barzal is a great player but banking on a 90-point season with at least a break-even plus-minus just to return value is a lot. (sep11)
  13. That Max Pacioretty would be traded was only a matter of if, not when, so the return was all that mattered. Pacioretty was shipped to Vegas for Tomas Tatar, a second-round pick, and prospect Nick Suzuki. Dobber had a pretty accurate take on the trade’s fantasy impact and most of his thoughts mirror my own.
I don’t have too much to add on top of what Dobber wrote other than this: Pacioretty was due to rebound regardless. For the last several years, Pacioretty was a top-end scorer and one of the most consistent ones at that; from 2011-17, Pacioretty and Alex Ovechkin were the only two players to score at least 30 goals in every 82-game season. The Habs’ captain had one bad season and now he’s gone. With the trade and subsequent extension (four years, $28-million), Pacioretty gets essentially a fresh start and a good situation in which to re-establish himself as one of the elite goal scorers in the league. (sep11)
  14. I think the Pacioretty trade helps Tatar. Vegas might have accomplished something in dumping his $4.8 million contract but he’s scored at least 20 goals in each of his last four seasons. He might have been a healthy scratch for a good portion of the playoffs but he easily fits on the second line in Montreal and could even move onto the first line. On a better team, Tatar won’t ever see the first line. But ,the Habs had the league’s 29th-ranked offense last season (2.52 goals per game) and just traded a consistent (until last season) 30-goal scorer. Simply put, they don’t have a whole ton of options. (sep12)
  15. Still with the Pacioretty trade, this does give the Habs the potential to run Jesperi Kotkaniemi-Suzuki-Ryan Poehling down the middle in the not-too-distant future, and that’s if Jonathan Drouin doesn’t work out as a center. This team went from desperately needing help down the middle to having three prospects that could all project as middle-six centers, plus Drouin (who should be on the wing anyway).
The issue here is that none of Kotkaniemi, Suzuki and Poehling are what we would deem as a generational center. A sure thing. A lock like Jack Eichel or Auston Matthews. Sure, Kotkaniemi could be the next Pierre-Luc Dubois, or he could be the next Tyson Jost. Suzuki could be the next Clayton Keller, or he could be the next Luke Kunin. Each of those four pivots mentioned were taken in the top half of the 2016 draft. Kunin was injured last year but the fact remains the same: the future is still uncertain for each of the next generation of Montreal centers. They’re lottery tickets, and for this team to be good in 2-3 years, they need at least 2-3 of them to pay off in a big way.
The trade should also lock Artturi Lehkonen to the top PP unit for Montreal. With the former captain around, Lehkonen looked to be on the outside looking in. But now, they can run the top unit with Brendan Gallagher in front, Max Domi in the bumper, Drouin on one half-wall and Lehkonen on the other, or something along those lines. The PP unit needs a trigger-man now and Lehkonen is best-suited for that role. They could also just replace Pacioretty with Tatar, in which case I will be one sad panda. (sep11)
  16. Reader Rocky asks: “What is justin faulks value going forward. Getting hamilton, still have slavin, fleury/pesce getting better, jake beans coming?”
I have never been a fan of Justin Faulk and was really turned off from him last year. Getting Dougie Hamilton makes it even worse. I wouldn’t touch him with a 10-foot pole right now. If he gets traded then, he may have a resurgence for a couple of years. But I don’t trust him long-term and I don’t trust him with Carolina.
As for Jake Bean, he concerns me. Not only because his production went backwards last year despite being a man playing against teens, but also because of what analyst Jeff Marek said a few months back on his podcast about a certain recent first-round pick in junior hockey who was so addicted to video games that his GM didn’t think he would ever be an NHLer. When you look at all the prospects and the given criteria, you come up with four names that fit that mysterious description and Bean is one of them. I am not saying he is the prospect who loves his video games, I am just stating that he is one of four or perhaps five candidates who fit the described player speculated by Marek. That alone isn't enough to sway me but his production going backwards a bit in conjunction with that risk and frankly I just won't bother. (sep10)
  17. Jack Eichel can be a 100-point player. He’s in that small club. And yes, the Sabres will get better, but he won’t even need them to as he can do it on his own. But what seem to potentially hold him down are all the injuries. If he can’t shake those he may never hit it. Not this year, though, let’s wait until he’s 24 or 25 and has a couple of 75- to 80-game seasons under his belt. (sep10)
  18. Reader Tyler Bryant asks: “Best goalie call-ups for coming season are?”
Goalies who won’t make the team as the backup but would get called up if the starter or possibly both NHL goalies get hurt. The best one – Ville Husso. He won't be the backup but if Jake Allen gets hurt or crashes and burns, I can see Husso saving the day. He's the guy I'm targeting in the minors over anyone I listed above. He's in a promising spot right now.
Also: Carter Hart, Ilya Samsonov and Tristan Jarry. Further down the line are Eric Comrie and Thatcher Demko. Dark horse is Callum Booth, who would of course require both Petr Mrazek and Scott Darling to get injured – don’t be swayed by Booth’s weak numbers last year. The goalies who need injuries to both the starter and backup in order to get a real shot though are Husso, Hart, Demko and Booth. The others I listed will get that opportunity with just the one injury to the main guy. (sep10)
  19. I have my Calder picks in the Fantasy Guide – the top 50. And if you look past the obvious ones in Rasmus Dahlin, Henrik Borgstrom, Casey Mittelstadt, Dylan Sikura, Andrei Svechnikov and Elias Pettersson, you have to rely on opportunity. If Player A gets hurt for 30 games, then Rookie B gets a shot and suddenly is in the Calder mix. I don’t think there will be any Yanni Gourdes this time around. I could list talented 19- and 20-year-olds all day long who ‘could’ make a splash, from Kailer Yamamoto to Eeli Tolvanen to Martin Necas. But, I think what you’re after are the older prospects. So for that I am eyeballing Valentin Zykov, Andreas Johnsson, Antti Suomela, Dominik Kahun (Chicago, a team desperate for wingers), and even Zach Aston-Reese. (sep10)
  20. Reader Jeff Libonati asks: “do you think ekblad will put together a season worthy of his pedigree? is he going to turn into the next Pietrangelo?”
Yes, Aaron Ekblad will eventually put together a monster two-way season. No, I don’t think he has Alex Pietrangelo potential. Ekblad is a lesser Pietrangelo. From a points standpoint, I would say subtract 10 from AP to get AE. In fact, in terms of pure offensive talent for points, I think Mike Matheson is the future in Florida. I say this even though Matheson is getting minimal PP time and is being held back. He’ll break through that, give him two or three years, the talent will win out. (sep10)  
Have a good week, folks!!
  from All About Sports https://dobberhockey.com/hockey-home/20-fantasy-hockey-thoughts/20-fantasy-hockey-thoughts-41/
0 notes
jakehglover · 6 years
Text
Why Did Ketogenic Meal Planning Finish Last for the Best Ways to Eat?
youtube
By Dr. Mercola
Some 45 million Americans make a pledge every year to improve the way they eat.1 While you may be among those who desire to change your eating habits for the better, how do you decide which type of diet is best for your body and lifestyle? In an effort to help you choose, the U.S. News & World Report2 annually releases its evaluation of what some consider to be the top 40 best diets. For the first time this year, the ketogenic diet3 was featured on that list.
The good news is this low-carb, high-fat diet, which I recommend for most people who would like to optimize their health, is being recognized among other popular programs such as the Mediterranean diet and DASH diet, which tied for first place. Some consider the bad news to be the fact the ketogenic diet tied for last place, alongside the relatively unknown Dukan diet. Keto was outpaced by other well-known low-carb diets such as the Paleo (32nd) and Atkins (36th).
While it's wonderful mainstream media is drawing attention to the ketogenic diet, it is also clear the diet, as I have promoted it for the past several years, is, as of yet, still somewhat misunderstood. Given the attachment most people have to processed food, starchy carbohydrates and sugar, it's no wonder a diet focused on attaining nutritional ketosis would receive a lower ranking. Once you reach nutritional ketosis your body is able to burn fat as its primary fuel.
To get there, you eat minimal carbohydrates, moderate amounts of protein and high quantities of healthy fats. Sadly, this approach was considered by some of the judges to be drastic, restrictive and unsustainable. I suppose it all depends on your perspective, your goals and any health issues you are attempting to resolve.
While it would have been nice had the ketogenic diet achieved a higher ranking, the fact it made the list at all is quite an accomplishment. To me, the real news is not its ranking as No. 40 out of 40 diets, but rather, that it made the list at all, and for the first time. Regardless of what the so-called experts say, this dietary approach is changing lives for the better and continues to be an important tool you can use to take control of your health.
Panel Assessing Top 40 Eating Programs Reflects Bias Against Alternative Health Practitioners
While the annual top diets report from U.S. News & World Report is well intentioned, the notion the assessment was generated by an "expert panel"4 billed as the country's top practitioners in nutrition, diet and weight-loss is absurd. Taking a closer look at the background of the 25 "experts" reveals an abundance of dietitians, but not a single naturopath or osteopath.
This is not surprising since registered dietary nutritionists and their trade group, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, function as a closed guild. One of their primary goals has been to exclude and marginalize competing voices.
In 2012, the North Carolina Board of Dietetics/Nutrition, a state chapter of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, threatened legal action against a blogger for writing about the Paleo diet without being a registered dietitian.5 They have also worked to gain legal control over the term "nutritionist" as a path to limit competition and suppress the views of anyone who has not been indoctrinated in their conventional views on health.
This fight has raged at the state level for years, and if the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics gets its way, other health experts such as your chiropractor, naturopath, personal trainer, myself and numerous others would not be allowed to share nutritional advice.6 Given the tremendous bias toward conventional approaches, anyone hoping for a science-based and nuanced view of the low-carb, high-fat diet was sorely disappointed by the panel's analysis of the ketogenic diet.
So-Called 'Health Experts' Criticize the Ketogenic Approach
With some matters of health and wellness, it often seems you may be better off doing the opposite of what conventional medicine suggests. As such, the 2018 Best Diets report may mark another occasion when taking the advice of so-called experts may not be in your best interest. Although the panel conceded the ketogenic diet is excellent for short term weight loss, they heavily discounted it for a number of myths and misconceptions that have already been debunked. Below are a few examples of this misguided advice:7
• A ketogenic diet will likely be a struggle for you if you “love morning toast, whole-wheat pasta, pizza and sugary desserts” — items I suggest you avoid regardless of the type of diet you follow. The exception is once you’ve achieved ketosis, as then you’ll want to cycle in higher amounts of carbs once or twice a week, ideally on strength training days. This feast-and-famine cycling will help you optimize the health benefits of the ketogenic diet.
• The need to eat more meat, including grass fed selections, and fresh vegetables will cost you more than processed or fast foods, but, “You can select less-expensive, leaner cuts of meat and fatten them up with some oil.” This is terrible advice. A better approach would be to simply moderate your protein intake and stick with high-quality grass fed or pastured meat products.
• Canola oil was listed among the healthy fats even though it is manufactured from genetically engineered rapeseed plants and is processed through several chemical baths before being bleached. Avoid this toxic oil at all costs.
• Take note that palm oil, also suggested as a healthy oil, is only beneficial in its unrefined form, whereas refined palm oil is toxic. Flax and olive oil, which were also noted, are healthy choices only when used cold.
• One expert said, “This diet is fundamentally at odds with everything we know about long-term health.” Another expert suggested that any weight loss comes at the expense of “giving up fruits, whole grains and starchy and nonstarchy vegetables … [which] … is the opposite of what we want for diabetes and heart disease prevention.”
The truth is that most of the conventional diet advice this panel espouses is at the root of the global obesity epidemic, and responsible for the surge in chronic disease we’ve seen during the past few decades.
Even though the panel suggested keto-friendly eating is too difficult and restrictive for the average dieter, with preparation and education anyone can successfully implement the ketogenic diet. Thankfully, many tools exist to help you get started, including my ultimate Ketogenic Diet beginners guide and "Fat for Fuel Ketogenic Cookbook." In addition, my Healthy Recipes website is loaded with delicious dishes. All of these tools will help ensure your success.
Benefits of Cyclical Nutritional Ketosis
While the "expert panel" ranking the Top 40 diets may disagree, with a few exceptions, I believe the ketogenic diet is healthy for most people, whether or not you are dealing with chronic disease. It will help you achieve optimal health by transitioning from burning carbohydrates for energy to burning fat as your primary fuel. You can learn more about this approach to boosting your mitochondrial function in my book "Fat for Fuel."
One of the most common side effects of being a sugar-burner is you typically end up with insulin and leptin resistance, which is at the root of most chronic disease. To further boost your results, you may want to pair the ketogenic diet with intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting is an effective strategy to shift your body from burning sugar to burning fat for energy. Some of the well-known benefits of a cyclical ketogenic diet are as follows:
Anti-inflammatory effects
While your body can use both sugar and fat as fuel sources, fat is preferred because it is a cleaner-burning, healthier fuel. Fat releases far fewer reactive oxygen species and secondary free radicals, thereby decreasing your risk of developing chronic inflammation throughout your body.
Appetite suppression
Constant hunger can cause you to consume more calories than your body can burn, which may lead to weight gain. By reducing carbohydrate consumption, the ketogenic diet can help suppress hunger symptoms. In one study, participants who were given a low-carb diet experienced reduced appetites, helping them more readily lose weight.8
Increased muscle mass
Ketones spare the oxidation and breakdown of leucine, which is a branched-chain amino acid used for building body mass. As a result, higher levels of leucine are left in your blood, ultimately improving muscle mass.
Lower risk of cancer
Unlike mitochondria that have the flexibility to burn either glucose or fat for energy, cancer cells thrive primarily on glucose. When you adopt a ketogenic diet and your body enters a state of nutritional ketosis, cancer cells are robbed of their primary source of fuel, eventually starving to death.
Reduced insulin levels
When your body burns glucose for fuel, it causes your blood sugar levels to rise, resulting in higher insulin levels. Over time, a constant spike in insulin levels may cause insulin resistance, consequentially increasing your risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. With a cyclical ketogenic diet, your body uses healthy fats for fuel instead of sugar, and fats do not negatively affect your blood sugar.
Weight loss
If you're trying to lose weight, a ketogenic diet is one of the best ways to do it, because it helps access your body fat so it can be shed. In one study, obese test subjects were given either a low-carb ketogenic diet or a low-fat diet. After 24 weeks, researchers noted the low-carb group lost more weight (9.4 kilograms) compared to the low-fat group (4.8 kilograms).9 In addition, HDL cholesterol was higher and triglycerides were lower in the low-carb group.
Getting Started With Ketogenic Meal Planning
youtube
As you will see below, the ketogenic diet is close to what could be considered an ideal way of eating for most people. In fact, I believe a cyclical ketogenic diet can be very beneficial for the vast majority of people, either alone or in combination with intermittent fasting and/or longer multiday water fasts.
The primary difference between someone struggling with a chronic disease such as cancer or epilepsy and people who have not yet been diagnosed with a chronic disease comes down to how strictly you must follow the diet and how long you have to maintain it.
As a general rule, if you are insulin resistant, I recommend intermittent fasting along with a ketogenic-type diet for as long as it takes to resolve your insulin resistance. At that point, you can increase your number of meals. Regardless of whether you're intermittently fasting or not, the following food guidelines can be beneficial for you — especially if you're trying to shed unwanted weight. Start by:
Avoiding processed foods, grains, refined sugar and processed fructose in excess of 15 grams per day
Eating whole foods, ideally organic, and minimizing or completely eliminating processed foods
Replacing grain carbohydrates with large amounts of organic vegetables, higher amounts of healthy fats and low-to-moderate amounts of high-quality protein
Consuming 75 to 85 percent of your total diet in high-quality, healthy fats — saturated and monounsaturated fats from animal and tropical oil sources — including the following:
Animal-based omega-3 fat such as krill oil, and small fatty fish like anchovies and sardines
Avocados
Butter made from raw grass fed organic milk
Cacao butter (raw)
Coconuts and coconut oil
Dairy (raw, grass fed)
Ghee, also known as clarified butter
Lard and tallow
Meat (grass fed, organic)
Nuts (raw), such as macadamia and pecans
Olives and olive oil (use cold)
Organic pastured egg yolks
Seeds like black sesame, cumin, hemp and pumpkin
Unheated organic nut oils
Wild Alaskan salmon
The Importance of Moderating Your Protein Intake
Most Americans eat far more protein than needed for optimal health. On average, your body requires about one-half gram of protein per pound of lean body mass, which translates to about 40 to 70 grams of protein a day for most people. If you aggressively exercise, are a competitive athlete or are pregnant, you may need up to 25 percent more protein than the average person.
The rationale behind limiting your protein is a significant consideration. When you consume excessive protein, it activates your mTOR (mammalian target of rapamycin) pathway, which can help you gain large muscle, but may also increase your risk of cancer. Furthermore, research suggests the mTOR gene is a significant regulator of aging,10 and suppressing this gene appears to be linked to longer life.
To determine whether you're getting too much protein, first calculate your lean body mass by subtracting your body fat percentage from 100. For example, if you have 20 percent body fat, you have 80 percent lean body mass. If you weigh 150 pounds, your lean mass would then be 120 pounds (150 X 0.8), and your protein requirement would be about 60 grams (120 X 0.5).
To calculate the amount of your daily protein from all sources, you might want to look at the USDA National Nutrient Database on each food to find out how much protein it contains. A 3- to 4-ounce serving of protein is about the size of a standard deck of playing cards.
Final Thoughts About the Top 40 and the Ketogenic Approach
Once again, the big news about this year's Top 40 Best Diets relates to the ketogenic diet being recognized for inclusion on the list. Considering there are literally hundreds of special diets and many fad diets, being noted among the Top 40 is a step in the right direction.
While certain characteristics can be universally ascribed to healthy eating — eliminating processed foods and sugar, for example — every diet will need to be adapted to your unique needs. In that sense, the "best" diet is one you can successfully adopt and sustain over time.
Despite its No. 40 ranking this year, based on my experience and the validation of numerous reputable health experts, I anticipate the ketogenic diet will continue to attract attention for years to come. There is no doubt in my mind that caring for your mitochondria and using fat as your primary fuel — two tenets of the ketogenic diet — will not only help you take control of your health, but also enable you to prevent and treat chronic illness and disease.
from HealthyLife via Jake Glover on Inoreader https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2018/01/29/why-did-ketogenic-meal-planning-finish-last.aspx
0 notes
makeitwithmike · 6 years
Text
I Tried Instagram Automation (So You Don’t Have To)
By Evan LePage
Type “How to get more Instagram followers” into Google search and you’ll find a lot of media and blogs, including our own, offering tips and tricks for how to grow your community. You’ll also probably find a lot of content about paying for new followers.
Most people see these as the only two options for succeeding at Instagram: figure it out, or shell out. The first one is for the ‘good guys,’ and the second is for spammers, or at least that’s how it’s generally perceived. In truth, there’s a third option: Instagram automation.
More and more people are turning to automation tools, or bots, in order to boost their Instagram followings. These bots work in several ways. They can Like photos on your behalf; they can follow people on your behalf; they can even comment on your behalf. These actions can be targeted based on specific hashtags or even specific users.
All of this engagement is intended to boost your following with real people, as opposed to the spam accounts you’re likely to get when you buy Instagram followers. It’s an appealing pitch: save time and avoid buying fake followers. But you know what they say about things that seem too good to be true.
That there’s a downside to this approach almost goes without saying. That’s why I tested two of these automation services, for three days each (we’ve also tried buying followers, which you can read about here). Using my personal Instagram account, I discovered the pitfalls of relying on bots, so you don’t have to. While they more-or-less live up to their promises, I wouldn’t recommend them for anyone, especially not brands. Here’s why.
What happened when I tried Instagram automation
A tale of awkward comments
My journey starts with about 338 followers. I followed about the same number of people at the time also. I didn’t set a goal for followers because I really had no basis on which to set one. I had no idea if this would work at all.
One of my colleagues put me onto the scent of Instagress, one of the most popular Instagram automation services. Instagress allows you to enter specific hashtags you want to be associated with and then automatically like photos or follow people based on those hashtags. The service allows allows you to enter preset comments which the bot will then post on photos on your behalf.
Instagress costs $2.00 for 3 days, $5.00 for 10 days or $10.00 for 30 days, so it is really affordable. The service also offered a 3-day free trial, which was perfect for this little experiment I was running.
I decided from the get-go that I wouldn’t use the “liking” features, since this was a fairly simple process and I felt it wouldn’t impact my following very much. I wanted immediate results, like most people who use these automation services.
Instead, I focused on the commenting functionality. I chose the hashtags that my bot would search through, a mix of geographic ties, my interests and generic ones (#Canada, #Montreal, #Vancouver, #PNW, #Fishing, #Water, #Awesome). Then I chose the comments that my bot would post. I tried to choose generic comments that would apply to any situation:
“Nice one!” (This works for about 90 percent of photos)
”Damn!” (same idea, but cooler?)
“I’m jealous!” (I thought this would apply to those beach sunsets and vacation pics)
and “your pics > my pics” (complementary, and encourages them to look at my pics for proof)
With all my targets set, I pushed start.
Within 12 hours, I only had 6 new followers, around 40 new likes on my photos and about 25 new comments. Not bad for literally zero work on my part, but fairly underwhelming.
Far more concerning to me was that my comments had caused a string of awkward situations with random people who were now wondering what my problem was.
In one case I had commented “damn!” on a random bride’s wedding photo (she graciously said ‘thank you’ instead of calling me a creep). I had also written “I’m jealous!” on a photo of a man beside a very ugly painting that he was clearly ridiculing (What was I jealous of? Did I want the ugly painting? Did I want to be ridiculed?). And, the worst of the bunch, I commented “your pics > my pics” on a selfie of a boy who was clearly in middle school. In fact, his account was composed of only four pictures, three of them selfies. I felt uncomfortable. The teenage boy told me I was being modest.
Between these situations, a few question marks from people wondering why this random guy was commenting on their pictures, and comments on photos I generally would have avoided (religious quotes, Chris Brown songs), I quickly learned the risks of automated commenting. It was immediately clear to me that a business could not risk putting itself in these questionable situations.
Still, I was committed to my experiment. I changed a few of my comments, ditching “I’m jealous” altogether and replacing “Damn!” with “woah” and the complimentary one with “sweet.” Sophisticated stuff.
Then I turned on the automated follower. Six new followers in 12 hours just wasn’t cutting it.
So you want some new followers?
The follow functionality worked much better. Over the next 24 hours I gained just over 70 followers. In the last day and a half that I ran Instagress I gained another 170 followers or so, bringing my total following to 584.
Admittedly I was impressed. I went from 338 to 584 followers, almost a 250-follower increase in three days without really lifting a finger. After my trial ended I also waited a couple of days before continuing my experiment in order to see if my new followers would quickly drop off.
They didn’t.
I posted a photo that garnered about 70 likes within 12 hours, far more than it would have without my 250 new ‘friends’.
A #latergram from yesterdays hike in Lighthouse Park
A post shared by Evan LePage (@evlp) on Mar 9, 2015 at 5:42pm PDT
Still, the downsides were a little tough to deal with. In addition to the awkward, cringe-worthy comments, my actual Instagram feed was ruined.
To earn those 250 followers the bot followed over 1,400 people in less than three days. Following 1,740 people on Instagram makes your feed useless garbage. Mine was filled with accounts that shared terrible photos while my friends and the users I was actually interested in got buried. Unfortunately many of the accounts I auto-followed were also pure spam accounts that used generic hashtags in order to promote their spam services.
You might read this and think “who cares about the feed, I’m here to promote my own photos.” This is a fair argument.
If your goal is to have a large following with low engagement. Engagement is a big part of building an Instagram community that actually supports your content, and the feed usually helps facilitate this engagement. I couldn’t have found a really engaged follower in my feed even if I wanted to. How can I show my appreciation to my followers when they’re no where to be found? Individually clicking through my follower list and liking photos is a time-consuming and unrealistic alternative.
So yes, I gained a lot of followers. But I lost what I, as an individual, love about Instagram. And I lost one of the main tools a brand might use to engage followers.
Turn it up to 11
I wanted to try another Instagram automation service to see if the results were comparable. I settled on Instamacro, which was a bit more expensive at around $10.00 for three days.
This bot didn’t have commenting functionality, which was fine because we all saw how well that went. Instead, I focused it entirely on automatically following people. I chose the same hashtags as my previous experiment and decided to take this experiment up a notch. See, Instamacro lets you choose how many people you want to follow per minute. Your choices are slow (1-2 people/minute), normal (2-3 people/minute) or fast (3-5 people per minute). If you do the math, even at 3 people per minute that’s over 4,300 follows per day. That’s absurd, which is exactly why I chose fast.
The hashtags I chose narrowed the field so the bot couldn’t follow quite that many users. Instead, in the first 48 hours it followed about 2,600 people which is good since Instagram actually limits the amount of accounts you’re allowed to follow to 7,500 (Instamacro offers to unfollow accounts when you hit that limit so you can keep up a continuous follow/unfollow loop of nonsense).
If I thought my feed was garbage before, I had another thing coming. The amount of spam this excessive following brought into my feed was ridiculous. There were strings of 5, 10, even 15 of the same spam posts in a row. In between all that spam were countless NSFW photos and people selling clothing (body shaping garments are so in right now).
In the middle of my second day I counted the amount of photos posted in a 10 minute span. It was 78. How could you possibly enjoy that much traffic in your Instagram feed. It was terrible.
But I pressed on. By the end of my three days on Instamacro I had around 1050 followers and followed about 5,300 users. Oh, and I went from checking Instagram about 5 times a day to once, just to track these numbers. It wasn’t fun.
Lessons learned from using Instagram automation
There are a few clear lessons that stand out from this experiment.
First, if you want to use Instagram bots, be prepared to lose your home feed. I wasn’t, but if you don’t use your feed to learn about your followers you may be alright with this.
You can’t automate comments. The potential for awkward or damaging situations is just too great. You don’t want to be posting on teenager selfies. You just don’t.
Prepare to live in fear. Using these Instagram bots to comment or follow for you goes against Instagram’s terms of service. I was constantly worried they were going to suspend my account, which is really a photo collage of my life for the last four years. For a brand, losing an account is obviously an even bigger issue, one probably not worth the risk.
You will gain followers, but followers don’t equal engagement. You still have to put in work to earn engagement on your photos. You can’t automate the kind of human interaction users will expect from brands.
Luckily it is possible to get a large Instagram following honestly.
Grow and manage your Instagram presence using Hootsuite. From one dashboard you can easily publish and schedule posts, engage your community, and track the success of your efforts. Try it free today.
Learn More
The post I Tried Instagram Automation (So You Don’t Have To) appeared first on Hootsuite Social Media Management.
The post I Tried Instagram Automation (So You Don’t Have To) appeared first on Make It With Michael.
from I Tried Instagram Automation (So You Don’t Have To)
0 notes
unifiedsocialblog · 6 years
Text
I Tried Instagram Automation (So You Don’t Have To)
Type “How to get more Instagram followers” into Google search and you’ll find a lot of media and blogs, including our own, offering tips and tricks for how to grow your community. You’ll also probably find a lot of content about paying for new followers.
Most people see these as the only two options for succeeding at Instagram: figure it out, or shell out. The first one is for the ‘good guys,’ and the second is for spammers, or at least that’s how it’s generally perceived. In truth, there’s a third option: Instagram automation.
More and more people are turning to automation tools, or bots, in order to boost their Instagram followings. These bots work in several ways. They can Like photos on your behalf; they can follow people on your behalf; they can even comment on your behalf. These actions can be targeted based on specific hashtags or even specific users.
All of this engagement is intended to boost your following with real people, as opposed to the spam accounts you’re likely to get when you buy Instagram followers. It’s an appealing pitch: save time and avoid buying fake followers. But you know what they say about things that seem too good to be true.
That there’s a downside to this approach almost goes without saying. That’s why I tested two of these automation services, for three days each (we’ve also tried buying followers, which you can read about here). Using my personal Instagram account, I discovered the pitfalls of relying on bots, so you don’t have to. While they more-or-less live up to their promises, I wouldn’t recommend them for anyone, especially not brands. Here’s why.
What happened when I tried Instagram automation
A tale of awkward comments
My journey starts with about 338 followers. I followed about the same number of people at the time also. I didn’t set a goal for followers because I really had no basis on which to set one. I had no idea if this would work at all.
One of my colleagues put me onto the scent of Instagress, one of the most popular Instagram automation services. Instagress allows you to enter specific hashtags you want to be associated with and then automatically like photos or follow people based on those hashtags. The service allows allows you to enter preset comments which the bot will then post on photos on your behalf.
Instagress costs $2.00 for 3 days, $5.00 for 10 days or $10.00 for 30 days, so it is really affordable. The service also offered a 3-day free trial, which was perfect for this little experiment I was running.
I decided from the get-go that I wouldn’t use the “liking” features, since this was a fairly simple process and I felt it wouldn’t impact my following very much. I wanted immediate results, like most people who use these automation services.
Instead, I focused on the commenting functionality. I chose the hashtags that my bot would search through, a mix of geographic ties, my interests and generic ones (#Canada, #Montreal, #Vancouver, #PNW, #Fishing, #Water, #Awesome). Then I chose the comments that my bot would post. I tried to choose generic comments that would apply to any situation:
“Nice one!” (This works for about 90 percent of photos)
”Damn!” (same idea, but cooler?)
“I’m jealous!” (I thought this would apply to those beach sunsets and vacation pics)
and “your pics > my pics” (complementary, and encourages them to look at my pics for proof)
With all my targets set, I pushed start.
Within 12 hours, I only had 6 new followers, around 40 new likes on my photos and about 25 new comments. Not bad for literally zero work on my part, but fairly underwhelming.
Far more concerning to me was that my comments had caused a string of awkward situations with random people who were now wondering what my problem was.
In one case I had commented “damn!” on a random bride’s wedding photo (she graciously said ‘thank you’ instead of calling me a creep). I had also written “I’m jealous!” on a photo of a man beside a very ugly painting that he was clearly ridiculing (What was I jealous of? Did I want the ugly painting? Did I want to be ridiculed?). And, the worst of the bunch, I commented “your pics > my pics” on a selfie of a boy who was clearly in middle school. In fact, his account was composed of only four pictures, three of them selfies. I felt uncomfortable. The teenage boy told me I was being modest.
Between these situations, a few question marks from people wondering why this random guy was commenting on their pictures, and comments on photos I generally would have avoided (religious quotes, Chris Brown songs), I quickly learned the risks of automated commenting. It was immediately clear to me that a business could not risk putting itself in these questionable situations.
Still, I was committed to my experiment. I changed a few of my comments, ditching “I’m jealous” altogether and replacing “Damn!” with “woah” and the complimentary one with “sweet.” Sophisticated stuff.
Then I turned on the automated follower. Six new followers in 12 hours just wasn’t cutting it.
So you want some new followers?
The follow functionality worked much better. Over the next 24 hours I gained just over 70 followers. In the last day and a half that I ran Instagress I gained another 170 followers or so, bringing my total following to 584.
Admittedly I was impressed. I went from 338 to 584 followers, almost a 250-follower increase in three days without really lifting a finger. After my trial ended I also waited a couple of days before continuing my experiment in order to see if my new followers would quickly drop off.
They didn’t.
I posted a photo that garnered about 70 likes within 12 hours, far more than it would have without my 250 new ‘friends’.
A #latergram from yesterdays hike in Lighthouse Park 🌅
A post shared by Evan LePage (@evlp) on Mar 9, 2015 at 5:42pm PDT
Still, the downsides were a little tough to deal with. In addition to the awkward, cringe-worthy comments, my actual Instagram feed was ruined.
To earn those 250 followers the bot followed over 1,400 people in less than three days. Following 1,740 people on Instagram makes your feed useless garbage. Mine was filled with accounts that shared terrible photos while my friends and the users I was actually interested in got buried. Unfortunately many of the accounts I auto-followed were also pure spam accounts that used generic hashtags in order to promote their spam services.
You might read this and think “who cares about the feed, I’m here to promote my own photos.” This is a fair argument.
If your goal is to have a large following with low engagement. Engagement is a big part of building an Instagram community that actually supports your content, and the feed usually helps facilitate this engagement. I couldn’t have found a really engaged follower in my feed even if I wanted to. How can I show my appreciation to my followers when they’re no where to be found? Individually clicking through my follower list and liking photos is a time-consuming and unrealistic alternative.
So yes, I gained a lot of followers. But I lost what I, as an individual, love about Instagram. And I lost one of the main tools a brand might use to engage followers.
Turn it up to 11
I wanted to try another Instagram automation service to see if the results were comparable. I settled on Instamacro, which was a bit more expensive at around $10.00 for three days.
This bot didn’t have commenting functionality, which was fine because we all saw how well that went. Instead, I focused it entirely on automatically following people. I chose the same hashtags as my previous experiment and decided to take this experiment up a notch. See, Instamacro lets you choose how many people you want to follow per minute. Your choices are slow (1-2 people/minute), normal (2-3 people/minute) or fast (3-5 people per minute). If you do the math, even at 3 people per minute that’s over 4,300 follows per day. That’s absurd, which is exactly why I chose fast.
The hashtags I chose narrowed the field so the bot couldn’t follow quite that many users. Instead, in the first 48 hours it followed about 2,600 people which is good since Instagram actually limits the amount of accounts you’re allowed to follow to 7,500 (Instamacro offers to unfollow accounts when you hit that limit so you can keep up a continuous follow/unfollow loop of nonsense).
If I thought my feed was garbage before, I had another thing coming. The amount of spam this excessive following brought into my feed was ridiculous. There were strings of 5, 10, even 15 of the same spam posts in a row. In between all that spam were countless NSFW photos and people selling clothing (body shaping garments are so in right now).
In the middle of my second day I counted the amount of photos posted in a 10 minute span. It was 78. How could you possibly enjoy that much traffic in your Instagram feed. It was terrible.
But I pressed on. By the end of my three days on Instamacro I had around 1050 followers and followed about 5,300 users. Oh, and I went from checking Instagram about 5 times a day to once, just to track these numbers. It wasn’t fun.
Lessons learned from using Instagram automation
There are a few clear lessons that stand out from this experiment.
First, if you want to use Instagram bots, be prepared to lose your home feed. I wasn’t, but if you don’t use your feed to learn about your followers you may be alright with this.
You can’t automate comments. The potential for awkward or damaging situations is just too great. You don’t want to be posting on teenager selfies. You just don’t.
Prepare to live in fear. Using these Instagram bots to comment or follow for you goes against Instagram’s terms of service. I was constantly worried they were going to suspend my account, which is really a photo collage of my life for the last four years. For a brand, losing an account is obviously an even bigger issue, one probably not worth the risk.
You will gain followers, but followers don’t equal engagement. You still have to put in work to earn engagement on your photos. You can’t automate the kind of human interaction users will expect from brands.
Luckily it is possibly to get a large Instagram following honestly. Grow and manage your Instagram presence using Hootsuite. From one dashboard you can easily publish and schedule posts, engage your community, and track the success of your efforts. Try it free today.
Learn More
The post I Tried Instagram Automation (So You Don’t Have To) appeared first on Hootsuite Social Media Management.
I Tried Instagram Automation (So You Don’t Have To) published first on http://ift.tt/2rEvyAw
0 notes
bizmediaweb · 6 years
Text
I Tried Instagram Automation (So You Don’t Have To)
Type “How to get more Instagram followers” into Google search and you’ll find a lot of media and blogs, including our own, offering tips and tricks for how to grow your community. You’ll also probably find a lot of content about paying for new followers.
Most people see these as the only two options for succeeding at Instagram: figure it out, or shell out. The first one is for the ‘good guys,’ and the second is for spammers, or at least that’s how it’s generally perceived. In truth, there’s a third option: Instagram automation.
More and more people are turning to automation tools, or bots, in order to boost their Instagram followings. These bots work in several ways. They can Like photos on your behalf; they can follow people on your behalf; they can even comment on your behalf. These actions can be targeted based on specific hashtags or even specific users.
All of this engagement is intended to boost your following with real people, as opposed to the spam accounts you’re likely to get when you buy Instagram followers. It’s an appealing pitch: save time and avoid buying fake followers. But you know what they say about things that seem too good to be true.
That there’s a downside to this approach almost goes without saying. That’s why I tested two of these automation services, for three days each (we’ve also tried buying followers, which you can read about here). Using my personal Instagram account, I discovered the pitfalls of relying on bots, so you don’t have to. While they more-or-less live up to their promises, I wouldn’t recommend them for anyone, especially not brands. Here’s why.
What happened when I tried Instagram automation
A tale of awkward comments
My journey starts with about 338 followers. I followed about the same number of people at the time also. I didn’t set a goal for followers because I really had no basis on which to set one. I had no idea if this would work at all.
One of my colleagues put me onto the scent of Instagress, one of the most popular Instagram automation services. Instagress allows you to enter specific hashtags you want to be associated with and then automatically like photos or follow people based on those hashtags. The service allows allows you to enter preset comments which the bot will then post on photos on your behalf.
Instagress costs $2.00 for 3 days, $5.00 for 10 days or $10.00 for 30 days, so it is really affordable. The service also offered a 3-day free trial, which was perfect for this little experiment I was running.
I decided from the get-go that I wouldn’t use the “liking” features, since this was a fairly simple process and I felt it wouldn’t impact my following very much. I wanted immediate results, like most people who use these automation services.
Instead, I focused on the commenting functionality. I chose the hashtags that my bot would search through, a mix of geographic ties, my interests and generic ones (#Canada, #Montreal, #Vancouver, #PNW, #Fishing, #Water, #Awesome). Then I chose the comments that my bot would post. I tried to choose generic comments that would apply to any situation:
“Nice one!” (This works for about 90 percent of photos)
”Damn!” (same idea, but cooler?)
“I’m jealous!” (I thought this would apply to those beach sunsets and vacation pics)
and “your pics > my pics” (complementary, and encourages them to look at my pics for proof)
With all my targets set, I pushed start.
Within 12 hours, I only had 6 new followers, around 40 new likes on my photos and about 25 new comments. Not bad for literally zero work on my part, but fairly underwhelming.
Far more concerning to me was that my comments had caused a string of awkward situations with random people who were now wondering what my problem was.
In one case I had commented “damn!” on a random bride’s wedding photo (she graciously said ‘thank you’ instead of calling me a creep). I had also written “I’m jealous!” on a photo of a man beside a very ugly painting that he was clearly ridiculing (What was I jealous of? Did I want the ugly painting? Did I want to be ridiculed?). And, the worst of the bunch, I commented “your pics > my pics” on a selfie of a boy who was clearly in middle school. In fact, his account was composed of only four pictures, three of them selfies. I felt uncomfortable. The teenage boy told me I was being modest.
Between these situations, a few question marks from people wondering why this random guy was commenting on their pictures, and comments on photos I generally would have avoided (religious quotes, Chris Brown songs), I quickly learned the risks of automated commenting. It was immediately clear to me that a business could not risk putting itself in these questionable situations.
Still, I was committed to my experiment. I changed a few of my comments, ditching “I’m jealous” altogether and replacing “Damn!” with “woah” and the complimentary one with “sweet.” Sophisticated stuff.
Then I turned on the automated follower. Six new followers in 12 hours just wasn’t cutting it.
So you want some new followers?
The follow functionality worked much better. Over the next 24 hours I gained just over 70 followers. In the last day and a half that I ran Instagress I gained another 170 followers or so, bringing my total following to 584.
Admittedly I was impressed. I went from 338 to 584 followers, almost a 250-follower increase in three days without really lifting a finger. After my trial ended I also waited a couple of days before continuing my experiment in order to see if my new followers would quickly drop off.
They didn’t.
I posted a photo that garnered about 70 likes within 12 hours, far more than it would have without my 250 new ‘friends’.
A #latergram from yesterdays hike in Lighthouse Park 🌅
A post shared by Evan LePage (@evlp) on Mar 9, 2015 at 5:42pm PDT
Still, the downsides were a little tough to deal with. In addition to the awkward, cringe-worthy comments, my actual Instagram feed was ruined.
To earn those 250 followers the bot followed over 1,400 people in less than three days. Following 1,740 people on Instagram makes your feed useless garbage. Mine was filled with accounts that shared terrible photos while my friends and the users I was actually interested in got buried. Unfortunately many of the accounts I auto-followed were also pure spam accounts that used generic hashtags in order to promote their spam services.
You might read this and think “who cares about the feed, I’m here to promote my own photos.” This is a fair argument.
If your goal is to have a large following with low engagement. Engagement is a big part of building an Instagram community that actually supports your content, and the feed usually helps facilitate this engagement. I couldn’t have found a really engaged follower in my feed even if I wanted to. How can I show my appreciation to my followers when they’re no where to be found? Individually clicking through my follower list and liking photos is a time-consuming and unrealistic alternative.
So yes, I gained a lot of followers. But I lost what I, as an individual, love about Instagram. And I lost one of the main tools a brand might use to engage followers.
Turn it up to 11
I wanted to try another Instagram automation service to see if the results were comparable. I settled on Instamacro, which was a bit more expensive at around $10.00 for three days.
This bot didn’t have commenting functionality, which was fine because we all saw how well that went. Instead, I focused it entirely on automatically following people. I chose the same hashtags as my previous experiment and decided to take this experiment up a notch. See, Instamacro lets you choose how many people you want to follow per minute. Your choices are slow (1-2 people/minute), normal (2-3 people/minute) or fast (3-5 people per minute). If you do the math, even at 3 people per minute that’s over 4,300 follows per day. That’s absurd, which is exactly why I chose fast.
The hashtags I chose narrowed the field so the bot couldn’t follow quite that many users. Instead, in the first 48 hours it followed about 2,600 people which is good since Instagram actually limits the amount of accounts you’re allowed to follow to 7,500 (Instamacro offers to unfollow accounts when you hit that limit so you can keep up a continuous follow/unfollow loop of nonsense).
If I thought my feed was garbage before, I had another thing coming. The amount of spam this excessive following brought into my feed was ridiculous. There were strings of 5, 10, even 15 of the same spam posts in a row. In between all that spam were countless NSFW photos and people selling clothing (body shaping garments are so in right now).
In the middle of my second day I counted the amount of photos posted in a 10 minute span. It was 78. How could you possibly enjoy that much traffic in your Instagram feed. It was terrible.
But I pressed on. By the end of my three days on Instamacro I had around 1050 followers and followed about 5,300 users. Oh, and I went from checking Instagram about 5 times a day to once, just to track these numbers. It wasn’t fun.
Lessons learned from using Instagram automation
There are a few clear lessons that stand out from this experiment.
First, if you want to use Instagram bots, be prepared to lose your home feed. I wasn’t, but if you don’t use your feed to learn about your followers you may be alright with this.
You can’t automate comments. The potential for awkward or damaging situations is just too great. You don’t want to be posting on teenager selfies. You just don’t.
Prepare to live in fear. Using these Instagram bots to comment or follow for you goes against Instagram’s terms of service. I was constantly worried they were going to suspend my account, which is really a photo collage of my life for the last four years. For a brand, losing an account is obviously an even bigger issue, one probably not worth the risk.
You will gain followers, but followers don’t equal engagement. You still have to put in work to earn engagement on your photos. You can’t automate the kind of human interaction users will expect from brands.
Luckily it is possibly to get a large Instagram following honestly. Grow and manage your Instagram presence using Hootsuite. From one dashboard you can easily publish and schedule posts, engage your community, and track the success of your efforts. Try it free today.
Learn More
The post I Tried Instagram Automation (So You Don’t Have To) appeared first on Hootsuite Social Media Management.
I Tried Instagram Automation (So You Don’t Have To) published first on http://ift.tt/2u73Z29
0 notes
thefabulousfulcrum · 7 years
Text
Someone needs to tell you.....
Wake Up, Liberals: There Will be No 2018 'Blue Wave,' No Democratic Majority and No Impeachment
via AlterNet
By Andrew O'Hehir / Salon
May 27, 2017
We received a message from the future this week, directed to the outraged liberals of the so-called anti-Trump resistance. It was delivered by an unlikely intermediary, Greg Gianforte, the Republican who won a special election on Thursday and will soon take his seat in Congress as Montana’s lone representative. (Here’s a trivia question to distract you from the doom and gloom: Without recourse to Google, how many other states can you name that have only one House seat?)
If you found yourself ashen-faced and dismayed on Friday morning, because you really believed the Montana election would bring a sign of hope and mark the beginning of a return to sanity in American politics, then the message encoded in Gianforte’s victory is for you. It goes something like this:
Get over Montana already—and stop trolling yourself with that stupid special election in Georgia too. They don’t mean anything, and anyway — that dude Jon Ossoff? He’s about the lamest excuse for a national progressive hero in the entire history of Democratic Party milquetoast triangulation. Oh, and since we’re on the subject: Forget about the “blue wave” of 2018. Forget about the Democratic majority of 2019. Forget about the impeachment of President Donald Trump. Have you even been paying attention? Because none of that stuff is happening and it’s all a massive distraction.
A distraction from what, you ask? Well, that’s a good question without a clear answer, and the message gets pretty fuzzy after that. I would suggest that rebuilding American politics and indeed all of American public discourse, now that they’ve been Trumpified, is not about the next electoral cycle or the one after that. It’s going to take a while, and I’m not sure how much the Democratic Party will have to do with it, or what it will look like.
No doubt the exaggerated media focus on Montana was inevitable, in the age of the voracious 24/7 news cycle: This was only the second vacant congressional seat to be filled since Trump took office, and the first where the Democratic candidate appeared to have a real shot. But the Big Sky frenzy also spoke to the way American politics has almost entirely become a symbolic rather than ideological struggle — a proxy war between competing signifiers whose actual social meaning is unclear.
Despite their abundant differences, Barack Obama and Donald Trump were both semiotic candidates, who appeared to represent specific worldviews or dispositions (the espresso cosmopolitan; the shameless vulgarian) but presented themselves as a disruption to “normal” politics and were difficult to nail down in left-right ideological terms. Understanding an off-year congressional election in an idiosyncratic and thinly populated Western state, where fewer than 400,000 voters cast ballots, as a referendum on the national mood or the GOP health care bill or much of anything else is patently absurd. But it’s a miniature example of the same reduction to symbolism, in which everything is said to stand for something else and democracy becomes pure spectacle.
As for Gianforte, the inadvertent vehicle for our message, nobody outside Montana had heard of him before this week, and we’re not likely to hear much from him in Washington either, where he will disappear into the chorus of fleshy, pickled-looking, age-indeterminate white millionaires who make up the House Republican caucus. Gianforte found his one moment of fame after allegedly assaulting Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs on the eve of the election, making the GOP candidate a focal point of widespread liberal wish-casting and concern-trolling. Surely the good people of Montana would see the light of reason now that the Republican candidate had been revealed — gasp! — as a thin-skinned, violent bully.
It’s almost hilarious — in the vein of that long-running “Peanuts” gag about Charlie Brown, Lucy and the football — that anyone managed to convince themselves that purportedly decking a representative of the “liberal media” would damage Gianforte. It probably didn’t make much difference; about 70 percent of the votes had already been cast before the Jacobs incident. But I think it’s safe to say that likely Republican voters in Montana, and damn near everywhere else, can be divided into two groups: those who didn’t much care or were inclined to look the other way, and those who were absolutely thrilled.
Gianforte’s decisive victory over Democrat Rob Quist on Thursday has provoked a fresh round of soul-searching from the same people who made too damn much of the Montana election in the first place. We have been told that Democrats must field stronger candidates and commit more resources, that Bernie Sanders does not possess some magic elixir that attracts disgruntled white people and that Donald Trump remains popular in places where people really like him. If that’s not quite enough Captain Obvious, Washington Post columnist Greg Hohmann devoted an impressive amount of research and reporting to the Montana aftermath before arriving at the diagnosis that there is “a growing tribalism that contributes to the polarization of our political system.” You don’t say!
Let me be clear that I’m indicting myself here as well: I edit political coverage at Salon, and I followed the Montana news closely. I knew perfectly well how it was likely to turn out, but one can always be wrong about that (as we discovered last November), and I shared some dim sense that it might be cathartic to experience an insignificant proxy victory in a state I have never even visited. But when I ask myself why I felt that way, even a little, the answers are not edifying.
For many people in, let’s say, the left-center quadrant of the American political spectrum — especially those who are not all that eager to confront the fractured and tormented state of the current Democratic Party — Montana and Georgia and 2018 seem(ed) to represent the opening chapters of a comeback narrative, the beginning of a happy ending. If what happened in 2016 was a nonsensical aberration, then maybe there’s a fix right around the corner, and normal, institutional politics can provide it.
First you chip away at Republican triumphalism, and the House majority, with a couple of special-election victories. Then it’s about organizing, recruiting the right candidates for the right seats, registering voters and ringing doorbells, right? Democrats picked up 31 seats in the George W. Bush midterms of 2006 — and will need 24 or so this time — so, hey, it could happen. For that matter, Republicans gained an astounding 63 seats in the Tea Party election of 2010, and many observers have speculated that Trump-revulsion might create that kind of cohesion on the left. So we sweep away Paul Ryan and his sneering goons, give Nancy Pelosi back her speaker’s gavel after eight long years, introduce the articles of impeachment and begin to set America back on the upward-trending path of political normalcy and niceness.
I suspect it’s pointless to list all the things that are wrong with that scenario, because either you agree with me that it’s a delusional fantasy built on seven different varieties of magical thinking or you don’t, and in the latter case I am not likely to convince you.
My position is that Donald Trump is a symptom of the fundamental brokenness of American politics, not the cause. Electing a Democratic House majority (which is 95 percent unlikely to happen) and impeaching Trump (which is 100 percent not going to happen) might feel good in the moment, but wouldn’t actually fix what is broken. Considered as a whole, the “blue wave” fantasy of November 2018 is a more elaborate and somewhat more realistic version of the “Hamilton elector” fantasy of December 2016: Something will happen soon to make this all go away.
(Let’s throw in the caveat that there are plausible universes in which the Republicans ultimately decide to force Trump out of office for their own reasons. Entirely different scenario.)
If you don’t want to believe me now, I get it. But take a good hard look at Rep.-elect Greg Gianforte, and go through all the excuses you have made to yourself about how and why that happened, and we’ll talk.
It’s worth making two salient structural points that I think are beyond dispute, and then a larger, more contentious one. As my former boss David Daley has documented extensively, both on Salon and in his book “Ratfucked,” the extreme and ingenious gerrymandering of congressional districts locked in by Republican state legislators after the 2010 census virtually guarantees a GOP House majority until the next census and at least the 2022 midterms. Yes, the widely-hated health care law might put a few Republican seats in play that weren’t before. But the number of genuine “swing” districts is vanishingly small, and it would require a Democratic wave of truly historic dimensions to overcome the baked-in GOP advantage.
As for the Senate — well, Democratic campaign strategists will mumble and look away if you bring that up, because the Senate majority is completely out of reach. Of the 33 Senate seats up for election next year, 25 are currently held by Democrats — and 10 of those are in states carried by Donald Trump last year. It’s far more likely that Republicans will gain seats in the Senate, perhaps by knocking off Joe Manchin in West Virginia or Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota, than lose any at all.
Those disadvantages could be overcome if we were looking at a major electoral shift, on the order of FDR in 1932 or the post-Watergate midterms of 1974, when Democrats won 49 seats in the House and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. I can only suppose that’s the sort of thing the blue-wave fantasists imagine. That brings us to the final and largest point: Exactly who is kidding themselves that the Democratic Party, in its 2017 state of disarray and dysfunction, is remotely capable of pulling off a history-shaping victory on that scale?
This is a paradoxical situation in many ways, one that reflects the larger decline of partisan politics in general. The Republican Party went through a spectacular meltdown in 2016, but wound up winning full control of the federal government, partly through luck and partly by default. Meanwhile, Democrats hold a demographic advantage that was supposed to guarantee them political hegemony into the indefinite future, and their positions on most social and economic issues are far more popular than Republican positions (except when you get to nebulous concepts like “national security”). Now they face an opposition president who is both widely despised and clownishly incompetent.
That sounds like a prescription for a major renaissance — but not for a party that is so listless, divided and ideologically adrift. Democrats have been virtually wiped out at the state and local level in non-coastal, non-metropolitan areas of the country: They had full control of 27 state legislatures in 2010, and partial control in five more; today they control 14 (with three splits). There was plenty of bad faith and unfair recrimination on both sides of the Bernie-Hillary split of 2016, which there’s no need to rehearse here. But the bitterness has lingered not just because each side blames the other for the election of Donald Trump (and they both could be right) but because it represents a profound underlying identity crisis that ultimately has little to do with Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. (Again, they are the symbols or signifiers.)
I have previously argued that the Democratic Party’s civil war was unavoidable and has been a long time coming. Like most people, I assumed it would play out under President Hillary Clinton, not with the party reeling in defeat and at a historic low ebb. In the face of a national emergency, maybe Democrats will find some medium-term way to bridge the gulf between pro-business liberal coalition politics and a social-democratic vision of major structural reform and economic justice. Whoever the hell they nominate for president in 2020 will have to pretend to do that, at any rate.
But right now the Democratic Party has no clear sense of mission and no coherent national message, except that it is not the party of Donald Trump. I can understand the appeal of that message, the longing for a return to normalcy, calm and order that it embodies. What we learned in Montana this week — and will likely learn in Georgia, and learn again in the 2018 midterms — is that that’s not enough. There is no “normal” state we can return to.
For the Trump resistance to have meaning, it must be more than the handmaiden or enabler of a political party that has lost its power, lost its voice and lost its way. Electoral victories will come (and go), but we should have learned by now that they are never sufficient in themselves. Rebuilding and redeeming American democracy — if that can still be accomplished — is a much bigger job, and there are no shortcuts.
0 notes