Ron Put

This might give a clue as to some of the correlations often sited. It makes sense to me at first listen:

I mean that if a major democracy opens a reasonably fair investigation of how all this happened, there will be pressure on other democracies to do so. Italy was the first Western democracy to follow China's example, after Tedros called on Western governments to lock their populations down, because the virus is NOT easily transmissible like the flu, and therefore it can be contained by such measures. After Italy, there was a domino effect, with the opposition in other democracies, mostly from the Left, joined by the media, going after leaders for "doing nothing" and demanding lockdowns. In the US, the Left was already apoplectic about Trump and started blaming him for every death, quickly proclaiming Cuomo and Newsom as the "true leaders" for locking up the population of their states and crashing the two of the largest economies in the world. Then every democratically elected world politician fell in line, because who wants to be blamed for every uptick on the death ticketapes the mainstream media was running 24/7, driving the population into panic. Except in Sweden, which was relentlessly vilified. And then they redefined what is a "Covid death," what is a pandemic, changed long-standing mask policies based on laughable evidence, imposed censorship and threatened the livelihood of experts who objected, mandated what were in effect experimental vaccines (including for children, who are not even at risk), and implemented vaccine passports to enter public spaces. Yep, we do need a fair, proper and transparent investigation, because it will happen again if we don't do it.

And as platform censorship i slightly relaxing, we are starting to see some of the much needed discussion about the vaccines that were rushed through: And while I don't necessarily agree with the call to suspend mRNA vaccines at this point (or with call for changing corporate standing), there really should be an open, and robust discussion about the technology, the approval process and any possible wrongdoing by the likes of Pfizer and the nature of their relationship with governments.

I kind of agree with Todd. Some of the references are wonky, but many are not. And frankly, much of the avalanche of politically-driven Covid papers that turned established epidemiological practices on their heads were as bad, or worse. Like the shouting through a funnel study used to support the U-turn on masks. And in fairness, with the unprecedented censorship imposed by the Left, it was impossible to publish anything in a mainstream journal, and if one did, it was career-ending and the Twitter mobs would get it retracted in days. But the main points remain valid, as Todd noted, at least IMO. There should be investigations of how this happened, and those who are proven to have knowingly implemented measures for political reasons (like Cuomo?) should face consequences. Not as retributions, but so it never happens again. Italy led the wave of lockdowns, maybe it leads the way again.

I found this interesting, DNA does help us understand our origins a bit better. Maybe Covid killed off the Neanderthals 😄

Yep. That. For what it's worth, I've had several root canals (many years ago, long story) and my current CRP is 0.02 (basically unmeasurable by LabCorp). In other words, Matt, take care of it and all will be fine again.

We don't know that and it seems unlikely from an evolutionary standpoint. Some pathogens cause long-term issues in some humans, such as cancers, cardio-vascular damage, etc.. Virtually all of the "long-Covid" scaremongering studies are mirrored by older flu common cold studies, yet most of those hiding under their beds because of Covid shrug off the flu and don't get their flu shot. BTW, the flu kill far more kids than Covid, yet somehow we don't mandate flu shots, but mandate Covid shots even though we have no knowledge of its long term effects on kids. Fear drives mass stupidity, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Funny enough, I just listened to this somewhat rambling video, but it makes the point well enough:

Thanks, KHashmi317. I downloaded the episodes and watched them while on a flight. I was prepared to take this with a barrel of salt, given my past experience with InfoWars, and did not expect to finish it. But I did. I found it to be largely factual. There is heavy spin, but it pales compared to the spin that the media, academia and the political establishment heaped on us over the last two and a half years. The end of the third part kind of went off the rails, and the religious references sound nutty. Stuff like this preaches to the faithful, but it detracts from the message and makes the otherwise valid core easy to attack. I find it deeply troubling that this is banned on YouTube. There is nothing in there to warrant such censorship. Even if one completely disagrees with the message, the ease and the breadth of suppression of debate should be disturbing to anyone who understands and values what democracy is, and what it needs to survive.

I think I've posted this before, but now I am reevaluating my supplementation with vitamin D based on it: Low levels of vitamin D are also linked to longevity: Levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D in familial longevity: the Leiden Longevity Study See also this: https://www.snpedia.com/index.php/rs2060793

Thanks. I watched the video and I believe that I identified the article he uses as the basis for his claim and below are some relevant bits of it: Why do older patients die in a heatwave? "A diagnosis of heat stroke requires a core body temperature of >40°C and central nervous system dysfunction to be present. Symptoms of altered consciousness and disseminated intravascular coagulopathy are frequently profound in the setting of hyperthermia. Subsequent multi-organ dysfunction and failure contributes to mortality in heat stroke.. .. Older subjects have a lower threshold for the development of renal failure, and diminished renal tubular conservation of sodium and water during periods of dehydration. ... Thus, we postulate that many of the older patients who succumbed in the recent heatwave were dehydrated, hypernatraemic and hyperkalaemic, with evidence of renal failure. Resultant thrombo-embolic disease and malignant cardiac arrhythmias, as well as the consequences of heat-induced sepsis-like shock, would be the most probable causes of death in this scenario. ..." IMO, his claim, at least as is applies to most of us, is grossly misleading, as is much of the rest of the video. There is quite a lot of accumulated evidence that high salt intake causes numerous issues in the majority of people. Here is a recent study: https://www.foodnavigator-asia.com/Article/2020/01/29/High-salt-intake-linked-to-increased-mortality-rate-in-new-Japanese-study

Fear is the most powerful tool in politics. It trumps everything else. When fear is instilled in a large part of the population, they will seek (and demand) protection in the form of a "do something" leader or state apparatus. No rational arguments can counter fear and if such arguments are painted as dangerous, those who advance them are burned at the public square. Demagog and populists have always used fear to maintain power and achieve their goals. The posters in the Sunak article above illustrate this well. As to deaths, long-established medical practices were turned on their head, supported by rapidly politicised "Science" and criteria was was surreptitiously changed to serve political purposes, only to be changed again (quietly) when Biden came into office in the US. But the mythology will persist, and the heretics who challenge it will be ignored and "cancelled": "Though excess-mortality data should still be treated with caution, they do show that the few places that rejected draconian Covid restrictions did not see the catastrophic death counts that some had predicted. The pandemic is not over, and with different seasonal patterns in different regions and different levels of population immunity, some countries have not yet seen the worst. For example, 40 per cent of all reported Covid deaths in Denmark occurred during the first 80 days of 2022. Denmark is not as extreme a case as Hong Kong, where 97 per cent of all reported Covid deaths have been in 2022. The biggest weakness of excess-mortality statistics is that while they count Covid deaths, they do not fully capture the deaths, not to mention the collateral public-health damage, that come from Covid restrictions themselves. Missed cancer screenings and treatments do not lead to immediate deaths, but a woman who missed her cervical cancer screening may now die three or four years from now instead of living another 15 or 20 years. The mortality statistics do not reflect non-fatal collateral damage such as increasing mental-health problems or missed educational opportunities, either. Those harms need to be tallied and addressed in the years to come. Politicians argued that the draconian lockdowns were needed to protect lives. From the excess-mortality data, we now know they were not. Instead, they have contributed to the enormous collateral damage that we will have to live with for many years to come. It is tragic."

I've been debating is I should get it, mostly on basis of accuracy and wearing another device. I think I might get it 🙂 My BP is normal at an average of 110/65 and often less, at least based on my Qardio device measurements. But I am curious about BP during sleep, etc.. Thank you.

Do you have any support for this statement? For most of human history, low salt was the norm, and there is considerable evidence that high salt intake is detrimental for most people.

You are consuming a higher fat diet than the Inuits did in the 1930s, if I recall correctly. Unless you have the Arctic gene mutation, which is found in almost 100% of the Inuit, a bit less than in 15% of the Hun Chinese and less than 2% of Europeans, it's unlikely that your diet promotes longevity. In fact, even with the mitigating mutation, Inuit mummies show that they had a fairly high percent of CVD and had a relatively short life expectancy. But we each make individual dietary decisions and while based on my knowledge I am fairly certain that whole plant-based high carb diet is optimum for longevity, I may be also wrong. Time will tell, I guess. For reference, my own intake over the last year is: Carbs (whole): 60% Protein: 15% Fat: 25% My carb intake is mostly sweet potatoes, tomatoes and squash, and about equally divided between fiber, starches and sugars, with virtually no added sugars. My fat mostly from walnuts and almonds, with flax, avocado and chia as the top five sources. I wish I could bring it down to the teens, bt it's proving harder than I thought. I am curious how long have you been on such high fat diet and how does your blood work look, and how is your insulin resistance?

mccoy, did your wife find it useful? Accurate? Is there a subscription fee? I am in Europe quite often and thinking I might order it.

Well, if cells are returned to a "primordial state" and then "re-specialise" once the new organism is built, it's not really immortality in the sense that most of us think of, or wish for.

Well, it varies significantly by race: Asians predictably do way better at 81.2, and Hispanics also do better than the rest at 74.4. The Hispanics may have the slight genetic advantage supposedly responsible for the Hispanic Paradox, but my guess is the differences are mostly due to diet and lifestyle choices. But whatever the media blames it on, it's unlikely to include the lockdowns...

Longlo freely admits that he doesn't follow everything he preaches as optimal, if I recall. As to red wine, the asian populations that live the longest generally do not drink any red wine, so I'd take some of the longevity benefits claims with a grain of salt. We all grasp at straws to justify even our bad habits 🙂

Hm, I think Lahav and Neemeh are arguing precisely that consciousness is produced within the brain. They simply posit that the reason a specific area has not been identified so far is because of the employed methods of measurement.

Anything to deflect from the elephant in the room, which is that the lockdowns and the scare tactics caused massive deferment of necessary healthcare. Remember the barely reported stories of ERs seeing dramatically lower rates of CV events close to 50% of what was normally expected. Those who predicted the consequences we are seeing now were cancelled and censored. Here is a glimpse of how it all happened in the UK: The lockdown files: Rishi Sunak on what we weren’t told When Britain was being locked down, the country was assured that all risks had been properly and robustly considered. Yes, schools would close and education would suffer. Normal healthcare would take a hit and people would die as a result. But the government repeatedly said the experts had looked at all this. After all, it wasn’t as if they would lock us down without seriously weighing up the consequences, was it? Those consequences are still making themselves known: exams madness, the NHS waiting list surge, thousands of unexplained ‘excess deaths’, judicial backlogs and economic chaos. Was all that expected, factored in, and thought by leaders to be a price worth paying? Right at the start of lockdown, ministers had already started to worry that the policy was being recklessly implemented without anyone thinking about the side-effects. Only a handful of key players at the very top made the decisions: among them Rishi Sunak, the chancellor. He has now decided to go public on what happened. When we meet at the office he has rented for his leadership campaign, soon to enter its final week, he says at the outset that he’s not interested in pointing the finger at the fiercest proponents of lockdown. No one knew anything at the start, he says: lockdown was, by necessity, a gamble. Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, the chief medical officer and chief scientific adviser, would openly admit that lockdown could do more harm than good. As evidence started to roll in, a strange silence grew in government: dissenting voices were filtered out and a see-no-evil policy was applied. Sunak’s story starts with the first Covid meeting, where ministers were shown an A3 poster from scientific advisers explaining the options. ‘I wish I’d kept it because it listed things that had no impact: banning live events and all that,’ he says. ‘It was saying: you should be careful not to do this stuff too early, because being able to sustain it is very hard in a modern society.’ So the scientific advice was, initially, to reject or at least delay lockdown. This all changed when Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College published their famous ‘Report 9’, which argued that Covid casualties could hit 500,000 if no action was taken – but the figure could be below 20,000 if Britain locked down. That, of course, turned out to be a vast exaggeration of lockdown’s ability to curb Covid deaths. Imperial stressed it did ‘not consider the wider social and economic costs of suppression, which will be high’. But surely someone involved in making the policy would figure it out. This was the crux: no one really did. A cost-benefit calculation – a basic requirement for pretty much every public health intervention – was never made. ‘I wasn’t allowed to talk about the trade-off,’ says Sunak. Ministers were briefed by No. 10 on how to handle questions about the side-effects of lockdown. ‘The script was not to ever acknowledge them. The script was: oh, there’s no trade-off, because doing this for our health is good for the economy.’ If frank discussion was being suppressed externally, Sunak thought it all the more important that it took place internally. But that was not his experience. ‘I felt like no one talked,’ he says. ‘We didn’t talk at all about missed [doctor’s] appointments, or the backlog building in the NHS in a massive way. That was never part of it.’ When he did try to raise concerns, he met a brick wall. ‘Those meetings were literally me around that table, just fighting. It was incredibly uncomfortable every single time.’ He recalls one meeting where he raised education. ‘I was very emotional about it. I was like: “Forget about the economy. Surely we can all agree that kids not being in school is a major nightmare” or something like that. There was a big silence afterwards. It was the first time someone had said it. I was so furious.’ One of Sunak’s big concerns was about the fear messaging, which his Treasury team worried could have long-lasting effects. ‘In every brief, we tried to say: let’s stop the “fear” narrative. It was always wrong from the beginning. I constantly said it was wrong.’ The posters showing Covid patients on ventilators, he said, were the worst. ‘It was wrong to scare people like that.’ The closest he came to defying this was in a September 2020 speech saying that it was time to learn to ‘live without fear’ – a direct response to the Cabinet Office’s messaging. ‘They were very upset about that.’ ‘It was wrong to scare people like thatʼ: the posters that Sunak tried to stop His Eat Out to Help Out campaign was designed to be an optimistic counter-narrative. ‘The survey data across Europe showed that our country was far and away the least likely to get back to normal. All the evidence was that everyone was too scared to go and do things again. We have a consumption-driven economy, so that would be very bad.’ As indeed it was. The UK ended up with the worst economic downturn in Europe. Lockdown – closing schools and much of the economy while sending the police after people who sat on park benches – was the most draconian policy introduced in peacetime. No. 10 wanted to present it as ‘following the science’ rather than a political decision, and this had implications for the wiring of government decision-making. It meant elevating Sage, a sprawling group of scientific advisers, into a committee that had the power to decide whether the country would lock down or not. There was no socioeconomic equivalent to Sage; no forum where other questions would be asked. So whoever wrote the minutes for the Sage meetings – condensing its discussions into guidance for government – would set the policy of the nation. No one, not even cabinet members, would know how these decisions were reached. In the early days, Sunak had an advantage. ‘The Sage people didn’t realise for a very long time that there was a Treasury person on all sitting there, listening to their discussions.’ It meant he was alerted early to the fact that these all-important minutes of Sage meetings often edited out dissenting voices. His mole, he says, would tell him: ‘“Well, actually, it turns out that lots of people disagreed with that conclusion”, or “Here are the reasons that they were not sure about it.” So at least I would be able to go into these meetings better armed.’ But his victories were few and far between. One, he says, came in May 2020 when the first plans were being drawn to move out of lockdown in summer. ‘There’s some language in there that you will see because I fought for it,’ he says. ‘It talked about non-Covid health impact.’ Just a few sentences, he says, but he views the fact that lockdown side-effects were recognised at all at that point as a triumph. He doesn’t name Matt Hancock, who presided over all of this as health secretary, or Liz Truss, who was silent throughout. As he said at the outset, he doesn’t want to name names but rather to speak plainly about what the public was not told – and the process that led to this. Typically, he said, ministers would be shown Sage analysis pointing to horrifying ‘scenarios’ that would come to pass if Britain did not impose or extend lockdown. But even he, as chancellor, could not find out how these all-important scenarios had been calculated. ‘I was like: “Summarise for me the key assumptions, on one page, with a bunch of sensitivities and rationale for each one”,’ Sunak says. ‘In the first year I could never get this’ The Treasury he says would have regarded this as a matter of basic competence. But for a year, UK government policy – and the fate of millions –was being decided by half-explained graphs cooked up by outside academics. ‘This is the problem,’ he says. ‘If you empower all these independent people, you’re screwed.’ Sir Gus O’Donnell, the former cabinet secretary, has suggested that Sage should have been asked to report to a higher committee, which would have considered the social and economic aspects of locking down. Sunak agrees. But having been anointed from the start, Sage retained its power until the rebellion that came last Christmas. Then the Omicron variant started to rise last December, the dance began again. A Sage analysis claimed that without a fourth lockdown, Covid deaths could hit 6,000 a day. That was out by a factor of 20. But we only know this because, for once, the government rejected Sage’s advice. This time, Sunak was taking soundings of his own – including academics at Stanford University, where he went to business school, and his former colleagues in the world of finance who had started to do some Covid modelling. Crucially, JP Morgan used South African data on Omicron to suggest that UK hospitals would not be overrun – contrary to Sage’s predictions. ‘I’m still on the JP Morgan research [email] list,’ he says. ‘It gives me a bit of a different perspective.’ In the case of Omicron, if that very different perspective was right, then every single one of the 12 Sage scenarios provided to ministers was a vast exaggeration and Britain would be locked down needlessly Yet the wheels were already in motion, says Sunak. ‘They had briefed already that there was going to be a press conference. The system just kind of geared up.’ He flew back early from a trip to California. By this time JP Morgan’s lockdown analysis was being emailed around among cabinet ministers like a samizdat paper, and they were ready to rebel. Sunak met Johnson. ‘I just told him it’s not right: we shouldn’t do this.’ He did not threaten to resign if there was another lockdown, ‘but I used the closest formulation of words that I could’ to imply that threat. Sunak then rang around other ministers and compared notes. Normally, cabinet members were not kept in the loop as Covid- related decisions were being made – Johnson’s No. 10 informed them after the event, rather than consulting them. Sunak says he urged the PM to pass the decision to cabinet so that his colleagues could give him political cover for rejecting the advice of Sage. ‘I remember telling him: have the cabinet meeting. You’ll see. Every-one will be completely behind you… You don’t have to worry. I will be standing next to you, as will every other member of the cabinet, bar probably Michael [Gove] and Saj [Javid].’ As it was to prove. Is Sunak exaggerating his own role? For what it’s worth, his account squares with what I picked up from his critics in government: that the money-obsessed Sunak was on a one-man mission to torpedo lockdown. And perhaps the Prime Minister as well. ‘Everything I did was seen through the prism of: “You’re trying to be difficult, trying to be leader,”’ he says. He tried not to challenge the Prime Minister in public, or leave a paper trail. ‘I’d say a lot of stuff to him in private,’ he says. ‘There’s some written record of every- thing. In general, people leak it – and it causes problems.’ At any point, Sunak could have gone public – or even resigned. I ask him if he should have done. To quit in that way during a pandemic, he says, would have been irresponsible. And to go public, or let his misgivings become known, would have been seen as a direct attack on the PM. At the time, No. 10’s strategy was to create the impression that lockdown was a scientifically created policy which only crackpots dared question. If word leaked that the chancellor had grave reservations, or that a basic cost-benefit analysis had never been applied, it would have been politically unhelpful for No. 10. Only now can Sunak speak freely. He is opening up not just because he is running to be prime minister, he says, but because there are important lessons in all of this. Not who did what wrong, but how it came to pass that such important questions about lockdown’s profound knock-on effects – issues that will probably dominate politics for years to come – were never properly explored. ‘All this blaming civil servants – I hate it,’ he says, ‘We are elected to run the country, not to blame someone else. If the apparatus is not there, then we change it.’ When things go well, he says, ‘it comes from the person at the top being able to make decisions properly – and understanding how to make good decisions’. Which is, of course, his ultimate point: ‘The leader matters. It matters who the person at the top is.’ It’s the reason he resigned, finally, and part of his pitch to be leader of the Conservative party. He says ministers need to be honest about the flip-side of any policy (including tax cuts), and that denial always makes things worse. And the other lessons of lockdown? ‘We shouldn’t have empowered the scientists in the way we did,’ he says. ‘And you have to acknowledge trade-offs from the beginning. If we’d done all of that, we could be in a very different place.’ How different? ‘We’d probably have made different decisions on things like schools, for example.’ Could a more frank discussion have helped Britain avoid lockdown entirely, as Sweden did? ‘I don’t know, but it could have been shorter. Different. Quicker.’ There’s one major factor he doesn’t raise: the opinion polls. Lockdowns were being imposed all over a terrified world in March 2020 and the Prime Minister was already being accused of having blood on his hands by failing to act earlier. Surely whoever was in No. 10 would have been forced to lock down by public opinion? But the public, Sunak says, was being scared witless, while being kept in the dark about lockdown’s -likely effects. ‘We helped shape that: with the fear messaging, empowering the scientists and not talking about the trade-offs.’ Those trade-offs are apparent. At first, no one asked what all those cancelled NHS appointments would mean. When the answer came, it was devastating: a waiting list that is projected to grow from six million now to nine million by 2024. Avoidable cancer deaths due to late diagnosis will run into the thousands. Then there’s the economic impact. ‘We are short of 300,000 to 400,000 [workers],’ he says. ‘That is a problem.’ Some 5.3 million are on out-of-work benefits, with Even now, Sunak doesn’t argue that lockdown was a mistake – just that the many downsides in health, the economy and society in general could have been mitigated if they had been openly discussed. An official inquiry has begun, but Sunak says there are lessons to learn now. The emergence of another Covid variant (or another new pathogen) may lead to demands for another lockdown someday. One of the questions will be how to protect democratic scrutiny in a future crisis – how to ensure that robust questioning and testing of policy continues, even when it is expedient for the government to suppress the debate. To Sunak, this was the problem at the heart of the government’s Covid response: a lack of candour. There was a failure to raise difficult questions about where all this might lead – and a tendency to use fear messaging to stifle debate, instead of encouraging discussion. So in a sentence, how would he have handled the pandemic differently? ‘I would just have had a more grown-up conversation with the country.’

This is not really a diet that humans have eaten before, except in the Arctic. Methinks it may help with weight loss, at least in the short run, but long term it's likely to be rather detrimental to longevity. https://nutritionstudies.org/is-the-ketogenic-diet-natural-for-humans/ And don't mistake whole food carbs for carbs from cake and potato chips. https://www.sydney.edu.au/research/research-impact/the-secret-to-healthy-ageing-is-a-low-protein-high-carb-diet.html

One has to wonder where the screaming headlines and ticke-tapes counting deaths have gone, and why The NYT, The WAPO and MSNBC are barely mentioning the current excess deaths numbers:

Haha, we all need some gratification. But I have tried to cut out alcohol and deserts, and the longer I lest between lapsing, the less it feel like gratification. I haven't had cake in about two and a half month, basically since the CGM confirmed what I was seeing in the data from my watch. My body does not like cake. Nor alcohol. It has become much easier not to succumb to peer pressure at dinners, especially since where I live manyr estaurantss have started serving kombucha (and charging sometimes as much as a glass of wine), so the beer-looking drink in front of me makes it easy for me and everyone to forget that I am a "party-pooper." I travel a fair bit and nowadays AirBnB makes it far easier for me to prepare my "weird" plant-based whole food rather than have to eat at restaurants. Half of my suitcase is filled with baggies of stuff like amla, nattokinase and nutritional yeast 😄

And while based on what I have read I now do believe that lower fat is better, see my comment in bold in the post above:

To me, the above makes a lot of sense. Saul, I am genuinely curious why you think its "junk" and it'd be great if you could elaborate.