Tom Vilsack: “I wish there were scientific facts.”
Pro tip to Vilsack. An “informed opinion” not based on scientific facts is an uninformed opinion.
And here’s a nice bit of illogic:
Lawmakers also noted that federal nutrition guidelines could be considered a failure because of the country’s high obesity rates. But Burwell fought back, arguing that obesity would be much worse had the guidelines not been in place.
“We are on the wrong trajectory, but would the trajectory have been worse?” Burwell said, acknowledging there was an obesity problem.
Since it was the original crap low-fat guidelines from the government that caused the problem, no, there’s no reason to consider them a success, or to not end the insanity.
So, am I the only one who remembers back about fifteen or twenty years ago when one or another government bureaucracy redefined obesity, making millions of people obese with the wave of a pen? Many of us at the time were saying that this “adjustment” would be forgotten over time and they would use the resulting figures to “prove” there was a growing epidemic of obesity.
I guess that’s what happened.
John.
I do remember that. It coincided with the AMA / insurance industry changing the lowest number for ‘potential’ high blood pressure.
I had a physical back then and at the end of it, my doctor LITERALLY said to me, “…if you’d had these same numbers 3 months ago, any doctor in America would have said you were perfectly healthy. But now, I think you need to start a low dose of blood pressure medication…”.
It’s insanity.
arguing that obesity would be much worse had the guidelines not been in place.
Expect to see a lot of arguments like this about Obamacare over the next few years.
The Post reports that the “government’s long-standing guidance about nutritional basics such as fat, salt and cholesterol have been undermined by recent research.”
Government should get out of the telling people what to eat business as it is none of their business. At least the climate flagellants weren’t able to impose their religion on the guidelines.
Sure there were Wodun.
The key surface temperature measuring sticks carry the imprimatur of NOAA/NASA and don’t reach “vaguely satisfactory” from the standpoint of measuring the actual average temperature of, say, the volume described by the first two meters of non-solid, non-liquid material enveloping the planet. The error bars are recognized as measures of internal consistency – not the needed true instrumental error. And precisely the very thing sought – climate shifts – would cause inhomogeneities … which the ‘homogenizing process’ appears to conveniently bury.
The tampering with the surface temperatures is clearly evident in comparing NH and SH temperatures
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4nh/plot/hadcrut4sh/plot/rss/plot/uah
SH agrees with satellite temps. For over 100 years, surface SH and NH are in lock step. Then, suddenly, they started infilling the North pole, and recalibrating the higher accuracy buoys with crappy bucket data and, Vroom!, off the NH went.
It is such a farce. We are watching the Emperor strut around starkers, and nobody dares point out that he is naked.
The old counterfactual ploy. Jobs created or saved.
I blame the cyclamate ban.
Prediction is hard, even about the past. This kind of thing happens all the time. I remember when the Stimulus Bill was being crafted, all 700 billion dollars worth, that Greg Mankiw issued a challenge: Can anyone step forward and offer a set of benchmarks that will determine whether this stimulus has been a tremendous success or a complete failure? How will we know if it helped unemployment, or there was just natural recovery from a dip? If unemployment stays high, how will we know if it would have been worse without the stimulus? etc.
As far as I know, no one responded, and everyone knew that no one could. Afterwards, there have been all sorts of claims, and some real attempts to figure it out by comparing various countries with different policies and their outcomes, but the issue remains completely unsettled.
Quite a few people measure the success of a government program by the amount of money spent, not the results. Spending money buys votes and enriches cronies. That’s the only metrics they care about. Measuring the actual success of a program is mean-spirited. It’s the feelings (and the money) that count.
Does anyone here recall when the government spending money to both discourage, and encourage, the consumption of cheese? As I recall, the FDA had cheese on the list of things to eat less of (and was spending our money to promote this agenda) while the department of agriculture was busily spending our money to subsidize cheese at places like Dominoes, to encourage more consumption of cheese.
I believe these two policies are still in effect. Therefor, to comply with government guidelines that we are paying to publicize and subsidize, we should eat both more, and less, cheese.
Last I checked the federal government is still paying to raise the supply of tobacco and decrease demand for it. And, of course, to treat tobacco-related illnesses.
Ah. So we can add tobacco to the list of things (which include cheese and butter) that the Feds are paying to get us to use both more, and less, of. And come to think of it, sugar is on that list as well.
Perhaps we need a new federal program to create and run an ad campaign explaining how to follow the other federal programs asking us to consume both more, and less, of these things?