Quotulatiousness

January 15, 2022

Merely to be accused of transphobia is enough proof for condemnation

Filed under: Britain, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jean Hatchet on the plight of Staffordshire University professor James Treadwell, who has been anonymously accused of “transphobia” … and therefore must be punished:

Yesterday evening Professor James Treadwell, a criminologist at Staffordshire University, announced his dismay on Twitter at being accused of “transphobia”. The details are vague, even to him. He has not been presented with evidence and he doesn’t and may never know who has accused him.

He wrote: “Ok to hell with it. I have been told by my employer @StaffsUni albeit only verbally that I am being investigated for Transphobia after formal and official complaints about my Twitter conduct. Read my tweets. Go figure.”

Go figure indeed. It is completely baffling. The issue is Professor Treadwell’s tweeting in favour of the right of female inmates to a single-sex prison estate. In a series of tweets on 27 December 2021, Professor Treadwell outlined his experience of the manipulative behaviour of violent sex offenders who will use loopholes to “game” the criminal justice system. He was clear that his tweets were not directed at the transgender community. He wrote:

“The idea that sex offenders are manipulative individuals who would exploit systems and laws could only be unreal to those who do not know how manipulative sexual offenders can be. All groom, seek to exploit and control.”

And he made very clear that his tweets weren’t attacking the transgender community:

“It isn’t about trans people, it’s about bad people who will exploit the law from self interest and work within a legal framework (that could protect women’s spaces) to do as they want and get what they want. You think that won’t happen, you don’t know how many sex offenders act.”

Who would be better placed to discuss this issue than a leading criminologist who has worked with some of the worst sex offenders in the country? The polite and well-informed tweets hit the nerve of public opinion on the topic of trans-identified men incarcerated in the female prison estate and were widely, mostly supportively, distributed.

Today, Professor Treadwell is in the awful position of fearing for his job; for a few tweets about a subject that he is specifically qualified to speak on. Meanwhile an effective message is simultaneously sent to his academic colleagues nationwide, that they could be targeted next. He is not the first and he won’t be the last. Many criminologists are choosing to look the other way. Professor Treadwell felt that he could no longer do so. His professional integrity appears to be exactly what he is being persecuted for.

QotD: “Jack Ketch as Eugenist”

Filed under: Britain, History, Law, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Has any historian ever noticed the salubrious effect, on the English character, of the frenzy for hanging that went on in England during the Eighteenth Century? When I say salubrious, of course, I mean in the purely social sense. At the end of the Seventeenth Century the Englishman was still one of the most turbulent and lawless of civilized men; at the beginning of the Ninteenth he was the most law-abiding; i.e., the most docile. What worked the change in him? I believe that it was worked by the rope of Jack Ketch. During the Eighteenth Century the lawless strain was simply choked out of the race. Perhaps a third of those in whose veins it ran were actually hanged; the rest were chased out of the British Isles, never to return. Some fled to Ireland, and revivified the decaying Irish race: in practically all the Irish rebels of the past century there have been plain traces of English blood. Others went to the Dominions. Yet others came to the United States, and after helping to conquer the Western wilderness, begat the yeggman, Prohibition agents, footpads and hijackers of to-day.

The murder rate is very low in England, perhaps the lowest in the world. It is low because nearly all the potential ancestors of murderers were hanged or exiled in the Eighteenth Century. Why is it so high in the United States? Because most of the potential ancestors of murderers, in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries were not hanged. And why did they escape? For two plain reasons. First, the existing government was too weak to track them down and execute them, especially in the West. Second, the qualities of daring and enterprise that went with their murderousness were so valuable that it was socially profitable to overlook their homicides. In other words the job of occupying and organizing the vast domain of the new Republic was one that demanded the aid of men who, among other things, occasionally butchered their fellow men. The butchering had to be winked at in order to get their help. Thus the murder rate, on the frontier, rose to unprecedented heights, while the execution rate remained very low. Probably 100,000 men altogether were murdered in the territory west of the Ohio between 1776 and 1865; probably not 100 murderers were formally executed. When they were punished at all, it was by other murderers — and this left the strain unimpaired.

H.L. Mencken, “Miscellaneous Notes: Jack Ketch as Eugenist”, Prejudices: Fifth Series, 1926.

January 14, 2022

People who tell “noble lies” are still liars who should not be trusted

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, China, Government, Health, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Spiked, Matt Ridley considers why so many scientists went along with the disinformation campaign to obscure or discredit the lab-leak theory on the origins of the Wuhan Coronavirus:

Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wikimedia Commons.

In August 2007 there was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth virus on a farm in Surrey. It was a few miles from the world’s leading reference laboratory for identifying outbreaks of foot and mouth. Nobody thought this was a coincidence and sure enough a leaking pipe at the laboratory was soon found to be the source: a drainage contractor had worked at the lab and then at the farm.
In December 2019 there was an outbreak in China of a novel bat-borne SARS-like coronavirus a few miles from the world’s leading laboratory for collecting, studying and manipulating novel bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses. We were assured by leading scientists in China, the US and the UK that this really was a coincidence, even when the nine closest relatives of the new virus turned up in the freezer of the laboratory in question, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Now we know what those leading scientists really thought. Emails exchanged between them after a conference call on 1 February 2020, and only now forced into the public domain by Republicans in the US Congress, show that they not only thought the virus might have leaked from a lab, but they also went much further in private. They thought the genome sequence of the new virus showed a strong likelihood of having been deliberately manipulated or accidentally mutated in the lab. Yet later they drafted an article for a scientific journal arguing that the suggestion not just of a manipulated virus, but even of an accidental spill, could be confidently dismissed and was a crackpot conspiracy theory.

Jeremy Farrar – who organised the call on 1 February with Patrick Vallance, Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci and a Who’s Who of virology – had already spilled a few of the beans in his book, Spike, published last year. He wrote that at the start of February 2020 he thought there was a 50 per cent chance the virus was engineered, while Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute was at 60-70 per cent and Eddie Holmes of Sydney University put it at 80 per cent. But some time after the call they all changed their mind. Why? They have never troubled us with an answer.

Now, however, we have an email from Farrar, sent on Sunday 2 February to Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, and Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. It recounts the overnight thoughts of two other virologists Farrar had consulted, Robert Garry of Tulane University and Michael Farzan of the Scripps Research Institute, as well as Farrar’s own thoughts. Even after the call, their concern centred on a feature of the SARS-CoV-2 genome that had never been seen in any other SARS-like coronavirus before: the insertion (compared with the closest related virus in bats) of a 12-letter genetic sequence that creates a thing called a furin cleavage site, which makes the virus much more infectious.

The Revenge Bombing of Germany – WAH 050 – January 1943, Pt. 1

Filed under: Britain, China, Europe, Germany, History, India, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 13 Jan 2022

While Nazi Germany keeps on escalating its War Against Humanity, the United Nations alliance decides that they will escalate their war on Germany.
(more…)

January 11, 2022

Camden Town Marmite Ale – Weird Stuff In A Can #156

Filed under: Britain, Food — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Atomic Shrimp
Published 25 Sep 2021

Beer, made with Marmite, which itself is made from the yeast left over when beer was made. Marmite is savoury; beer usually isn’t. This is a weird idea whichever way you look at it, but how does it taste?

From the comments:

Atomic Shrimp
8 hours ago
Afterthoughts & Addenda
uR pOuRiNg iT aLl wRoNg!!! – really? Fine – this might not be a professional perfect pour, but this is *not my first ever beer*. I don’t claim to have any kind of professional technique, but this amount of head is not normal for this method of pouring. Note the copious foam emitting from the can when it is first opened.

QotD: The decline of the “Blimp class” in the British empire

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The stagnation of the Empire in the between-war years affected everyone in England, but it had an especially direct effect upon two important sub-sections of the middle class. One was the military and imperialist middle class, generally nicknamed the Blimps, and the other the left-wing intelligentsia. These two seemingly hostile types, symbolic opposites – the halfpay colonel with his bull neck and diminutive brain, like a dinosaur, the highbrow with his domed forehead and stalk-like neck – are mentally linked together and constantly interact upon one another; in any case they are born to a considerable extent into the same families.

Thirty years ago the Blimp class was already losing its vitality. The middle-class families celebrated by Kipling, the prolific lowbrow families whose sons officered the army and navy and swarmed over all the waste places of the earth from the Yukon to the Irrawaddy, were dwindling before 1914. The thing that had killed them was the telegraph. In a narrowing world, more and more governed from Whitehall, there was every year less room for individual initiative. Men like Clive, Nelson, Nicholson, Gordon would find no place for themselves in the modern British Empire. By 1920 nearly every inch of the colonial empire was in the grip of Whitehall. Well-meaning, over-civilized men, in dark suits and black felt hats, with neatly rolled umbrellas crooked over the left forearm, were imposing their constipated view of life on Malaya and Nigeria, Mombasa and Mandalay. The one-time empire builders were reduced to the status of clerks, buried deeper and deeper under mounds of paper and red tape. In the early ‘twenties one could see, all over the Empire, the older officials, who had known more spacious days, writhing impotently under the changes that were happening. From that time onwards it has been next door to impossible to induce young men of spirit to take any part in imperial administration. And what was true of the official world was true also of the commercial. The great monopoly companies swallowed up hosts of petty traders. Instead of going out to trade adventurously in the Indies one went to an office stool in Bombay or Singapore. And life in Bombay or Singapore was actually duller and safer than life in London. Imperialist sentiment remained strong in the middle class, chiefly owing to family tradition, but the job of administering the Empire had ceased to appeal. Few able men went east of Suez if there was any way of avoiding it.

George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.

January 10, 2022

English counties explained

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, History, Humour — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Jay Foreman
Published 13 Sep 2021

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https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
Maximilian Dörrbecker (Chumwa), CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…, via Wikimedia Commons

I wouldn’t say it explains why my home town seemed to move from county to county every few years since my family emigrated, but at least it provides a few clues about the changes.

January 9, 2022

A century of William Brown books

Filed under: Books, Britain — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Alexander Larman celebrates the centenary of Richmal Compton’s William Brown books:

Growing up in suburban Bristol in the Eighties and Nineties, my reading matter was of a suitably timeless disposition, even if it seldom, if ever, included any Enid Blyton. Amidst the colonial and deeply un-PC likes of Biggles and Rider Haggard, my trio of preferred characters never really changed: Jennings, Billy Bunter and William Brown. Of the three, Jennings was probably my favourite, being closest to my own life as a prep school boy of a vaguely similar appearance and age, and also because the situations were the most recognisable. Bunter I found uproarious but also rather tasteless and absurd, for reasons that have now, alas, become much clearer. And then there was William Brown: would-be outlaw, committed dog owner and perpetual enemy of soap-and-water, to say nothing of his perpetual nemeses, Hubert Lane and Violet Elizabeth Bott.

I enjoyed the books as picaresque stories of bad behaviour without seeing much of myself in William, or indeed his friends. Their author Richmal Crompton’s evocation of invincible pre-war suburbia — not so very far from a benign version of the half-idylls, half-nightmares portrayed by Orwell in Coming Up For Air and Patrick Hamilton in Hangover Square — was certainly compelling, but I was too young to appreciate Crompton’s social satire, itself considerably more piquant than anything that could be found in Jennings and Bunter, let alone the stiff-upper-lip fantasias of English manhood peddled by WE Johns with Biggles, Gimlet and the rest. All of them now sound to me like nothing so much as industrial-strength cocktails. Drink a couple, and you too will want to revive the Empire.

Yet now, a century after the first appearance of Just William, I reassess Crompton’s universe afresh, and so I respond far more warmly to her characters and creations. William Brown himself is an entertaining if undeniably two-dimensional figure, at his most amusing when he is required to fit into the adult world temporarily, as in the story William’s Truthful Christmas, when he causes social outrage and misery by offering an honest opinion of the gifts that he has received. But it is the rich panoply of figures around William who give the stories their interest and colour, and which make them as entertaining for adults to read today as they ever might be for their children. If, of course, eleven-year olds can be distracted from their iPads and Netflix and nefarious online activities long enough to enjoy the William books.

Leaving aside the children for a moment, the adult supporting characters in the unnamed village provide endless humour and intrigue. There is William’s neurotic mother, desperately saying of her son that “he means well” even as he is involved in yet another humiliating scrape. His father, meanwhile, is a hard-drinking Conservative whose cynicism at the world sees him reward his errant son with extra pocket money for his more outrageous actions, as long as he is not bedbound with “his liver”. Not for nothing is this stalwart representative of middle England named John Brown.

Then there is William’s would-be romantic elder brother Robert, desperately professing each of his girlfriends “the most beautiful girl in the world” until his eye is taken by another. Mr and Mrs Bott are a pair of arriviste millionaires who have made their money via “Bott’s Digestive Sauce”, a substance that William contends, probably accurately, has been constructed from squashed beetles. Needless to say, they take up residence in the nouveau riche establishment Bott Hall, where their social status irks them. (“We ought to have some ancestors, Botty,” said Mrs Bott. “We’ve got ’em, dear,” said Mr Bott after a moment’s thought. “We must have. Come to think of it, we shouldn’t be here now if we’d not.”) Floating around the periphery is Robert’s friend, the splendidly named Jameson Jameson, of whom Crompton writes, with caustic humour, “[his] parents had perpetrated on him the supreme practical joke of giving him his surname for a Christian name, so that people who addressed him by his full name seemed always to be indulging in some witticism.”

The Korsac EM1 – a British/Polish Bullpup FG-42

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 26 Jun 2017

Armament Research Services (ARES) is a specialist technical intelligence consultancy, offering expertise and analysis to a range of government and non-government entities in the arms and munitions field. For detailed photos of the guns in this video, don’t miss the ARES companion blog post:

http://armamentresearch.com/british-k…

The Korsac EM-1 (not to be confused with the Thorpe EM-1, which is a completely different rifle) was a bullpup light machine gun based on captured examples of the German FG-42 paratroop rifle. It was developed between 1945 and 1947 by a team led by a Polish refugee designer named Korsac.

It was chambered for the 8mm Mauser cartridge, and used an 18 round magazine adapted from the ZB-26. The operating mechanism was closely copied from the FG-42, as were many elements of the rifle’s controls, including the capability for firing from an open bolt in fully automatic and from a closed bolt in semi-automatic. Unlike the FG-42, it used a short stroke tappet type gas piston, and had a detachable barrel. Ultimately only two examples were built, and only one of those (the one in this video) was completed to firing condition. It suffered from reliability problems in semi-automatic mode, and was quickly sidelined in favor of the other development projects ongoing by 1947. However, many lessons from its development would be put into the EM-2 rifle.

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If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow

January 8, 2022

The Board of Green Cloth — the original “we investigated ourselves and found us innocent” organization

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes explains how England managed to avoid the first attempt by King James I to impose absolute monarchy — that is, putting the Stuart notions of the “divine right of kings” in place of royal powers limited by the Parliamentary control of the royal income:

King James I (of England) and VI (of Scotland)
Portrait by Daniel Myrtens, 1621 from the National Portrait Gallery via Wikimedia Commons.

The year 1610 might by the most under-rated year in British history. It was the year in which England almost became a more permanent absolutist monarchy. Had things gone only a little differently, King James I might have obtained a substantial annual income — enough to pay off his debts within just a few years, to run a substantial surplus, and perhaps even to never have to summon a Parliament ever again. Over the course of a few decades, so long as they didn’t require too many extraordinary taxes to pay for one-off wars, the Stuart kings could have ruled without challenge, issuing proclamations that would have gradually taken on the force of laws.

[…]

As we saw in the last instalment of this series, James I’s finances were desperate. His predecessor had left him substantial war debts, and he was running a large deficit, so the chances of repaying them anytime soon were slim. So in 1604 he had summoned a Parliament with the aim of making a financial deal. Parliaments were typically called in order for the monarch to raise one-off, extraordinary taxes, usually in times of rebellion or war. Rather confusingly from today’s perspective, these taxes were known as “subsidies”, because they were a subsidy to the Crown. Yet James and his ministers wanted Parliament to instead establish peacetime taxes that would be both ongoing and ordinary — what came to be known as “support”. The deal was that he would give up some of his least popular feudal prerogative rights in return.

The House of Commons did not go for the deal in 1604, as we saw. They may have hated feudal obligations like purveyance or wardship — the requisitioning of goods for the court, and the Crown’s control of noble heirs whose fathers had died before they came of age — but they also saw some major risks in trying to make a deal with the king.

When it came to the matter of purveyance, for example, many members of Parliament wanted to stamp out the abuses rather than see the institution abolished. They thought it perfectly legal for the Crown to compulsorily purchase goods, and even to requisition the carts to carry them. What they complained of was that many purveyors were failing to give compensation immediately, and that corrupt purveyors were sometimes taking more than was required, pocketing the difference for themselves. Many MPs also argued that there was no legal basis for purveyors to determine their own prices for the provisions that they seized — a privilege that the Crown adamantly insisted upon.

James’s predecessor Queen Elizabeth I had granted a concession over patent disputes — “patents” at that time were a rather different and much wider legal notion than our more product-oriented modern patents: the monarch granted patents to assign lands and titles, appoint officials, create cities or guilds, or to allow monopoly privileges over an economic resource among other purposes. The concession was that patent disputes would be litigated in common-law courts rather than by royally appointed judges.

Yet by extending the jurisdiction of the common-law courts to monopolies, Elizabeth opened the floodgates of complaints against all prerogative courts — especially against the court of royal household officials responsible for commissioning the purveyors, known as the Board of Green Cloth.

To Hyde and his followers, this court was especially corrupt. Whereas the trying of monopoly patents had at least been done in the more general prerogative courts, anyone hauled before the Green Cloth for denying the purveyors was effectively being tried, judged, fined, and even imprisoned, by the very organisation that was accusing them. Even if purveyors really were acting illegally by naming their own prices, as opponents maintained, there would be no justice so long as the purveyors effectively judged themselves. For Hyde and his allies then, they wished to do to purveyance what they had done to monopolies — to subject them to the common law.

Battle of the River Plate 1939: Minute-by-Minute

Filed under: Americas, Britain, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Historigraph
Published 24 Jul 2018

The Battle of the River Plate took place in December 1939, and featured the Royal Navy cruisers Exeter, Achilles and Ajax, against the German Panzerschiffe, Graf Spee.

–

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Sources:
Richard Petrow, The Bitter Years: The invasion and Occupation of Denmark and Norway April 1940-May 1945 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1974). — The first chapter of the book includes a brief description of the hunt for the Graf Spee

Corelli Barnett, Engage The Enemy More Closely: The Royal Navy in the Second World War (London: Penguin, 1991)

Commodore Harwood’s own account of the battle, made available here: http://naval-history.net/WW2LGGrafSpe…

Graf Spee‘s voyage described here: https://www.deutschland-class.dk/admi…

Video clips from World of Warships gameplay and the Battle of the River Plate film, 1958

Music:

“Crypto” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

“Division” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

“Crossing the Chasm” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Sound Effects:
Gunshots and so on are recordings from World of Warships, where the gameplay footage of the ships hails from.

January 7, 2022

Desert War – Dysentery, Disease, and Dehydration – WW2 Special

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Environment, Germany, Health, History, Italy, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

World War Two
Published 6 Jan 2022

North Africa. The Axis and Allies are fighting each other but even more, they’re fighting the desert itself. The men of the desert burn during the day and freeze at night. They do most of their fighting on a litre of water and a packet of army biscuits. What is life in such a hostile environment?
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QotD: British intelligentsia and imperial decline

Filed under: Britain, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the general weakening of imperialism, and to some extent of the whole British morale, that took place during the nineteen-thirties, was partly the work of the left-wing intelligentsia, itself a kind of growth that had sprouted from the stagnation of the Empire.

It should be noted that there is now no intelligentsia that is not in some sense “Left”. Perhaps the last right-wing intellectual was T.E. Lawrence. Since about 1930 everyone describable as an “intellectual” has lived in a state of chronic discontent with the existing order. Necessarily so, because society as it was constituted had no room for him. In an Empire that was simply stagnant, neither being developed nor falling to pieces, and in an England ruled by people whose chief asset was their stupidity, to be “clever” was to be suspect. If you had the kind of brain that could understand the poems of T.S. Eliot or the theories of Karl Marx, the higher-ups would see to it that you were kept out of any important job. The intellectuals could find a function for themselves only in the literary reviews and the left-wing political parties.

The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in half a dozen weekly and monthly papers. The immediately striking thing about all these papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion. There is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be in a position of power. Another marked characteristic is the emotional shallowness of people who live in a world of ideas and have little contact with physical reality. Many intellectuals of the Left were flabbily pacifist up to 1935, shrieked for war against Germany in the years 1935-9, and then promptly cooled off when the war started. It is broadly though not precisely true that the people who were most “anti-Fascist” during the Spanish civil war are most defeatist now. And underlying this is the really important fact about so many of the English intelligentsia – their severance from the common culture of the country.

George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.

January 6, 2022

The war on “ultra-processed food”

Filed under: Britain, Business, Food, Health, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Our self-imagined “elites” have a new crusade to prosecute — the crusade against “ultra-processed food”:

In “public health”, the name of the game is to interfere with people’s lives without having your own choices meddled with. This is straightforward with smoking since the philosopher kings of the nanny state don’t smoke. Alcohol is more tricky since most of them drink, but minimum pricing — which was introduced in Ireland yesterday — offers the perfect way to penalise ordinary people while leaving fine wine and craft beer unaffected.

The war on food poses the trickiest problem since its pretext — obesity — is the result of over-consumption and physical inactivity rather than the consumption of any specific type of food. “Junk food” is too narrow since most people interpret it to mean “fast food” from a handful of restaurant chains. And so, in the absence of an obvious dietary culprit, the “public health” lobby is shifting towards a crusade against “ultra-processed food”.

Most people don’t know what this means, but it sounds bad if you have an instinctive objection to industry and modernity. Perhaps it evokes thoughts of “chemicals” and “E numbers”. Certainly, it sounds like the opposite of the “natural”, “organic” and “home made” food so beloved of those who think they are superior to other people. It is, however, a classic “public health” bait and switch. Just as people didn’t realise that a ban on “junk food” advertising would result in adverts for cheese and butter being banned, people won’t realise what a war on ultra-processed food means for them until it is too late.

In a deranged op-ed in BMJ Global Health, some of Mike Bloomberg’s minions from Vital Strategies call for tobacco-style regulation of “ultra-processed food”, starting with warning labels.

    Simply put, ultra-processed foods are foods that can’t be made in your home kitchen because they have been chemically or physically transformed using industrial processes. They are recognisable on the supermarket shelf as packaged foods that are ready-to-eat, contain more than five ingredients and have a long shelf-life. The industrial processing, as well as the cocktail of additives, flavours, emulsifiers and colours they contain to give flavour and texture, make the final product hyper-palatable or more appealing and potentially addictive, which in turn leads to poor dietary patterns.

    With more than half the total calories consumed in high-income countries coming from ultra-processed foods and rapid increases in low- and middle-income countries, these products are exposing billions of people to a higher risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, depression and death.

Scary stuff, eh? Alas, they don’t give any examples of ultra-processed foods so let us instead turn to a recently published study about them …

    Baked goods, including cakes, pastries, industrial breads, and soft drinks ranked among the top contributors to sales of UPFDs [ultra-processed food and drinks]

According to the the British Heart Foundation, ultra-processed foods include …

    Ice cream, ham, sausages, crisps, mass-produced bread, breakfast cereals, biscuits, carbonated drinks, fruit-flavoured yogurts, instant soups, and some alcoholic drinks including whisky, gin, and rum.

I’m not sure how hard liquor made the cut, but I suppose if you’re going be a fun sponge you might as well go all the way.

Chinese Spymasters – The New Warlords? – WW2 – Spies & Ties 12

Filed under: Britain, China, History, Japan, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 5 Jan 2022

During World War Two, China was ripped up by many different warring parties, all of which were also playing spy games with crosses, double-crosses and triple-crosses.
(more…)

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