The Gary Null Show - 02.14.22

Study: Coconut oil-enriched Mediterranean diet found to improve brain function in Alzheimer’s patients University of Valencia (Spain), February 6, 2022 Spanish researchers believe that a Mediterranean diet enriched with coconut oil can help improve cognitive function in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients. Researchers from the University of Valencia and the Catholic University of Valencia looked to diet as a means of addressing AD. Specifically, they looked at whether a coconut oil-enriched Mediterranean diet would be beneficial for AD patients. The researchers chose coconut oil due to the fact that the medium-chain triglycerides (MCT) in it can be converted into ketones, which brain cells then use as fuel. Previous research had already identified ketone bodies as a possible therapeutic for AD. Following the study, the researchers found that those in the experimental group displayed improvements in temporal orientation as well as their episodic and semantic memory. (NEXT) Calorie restriction rewires metabolism, immunity for longer health span Pennington Biomedical Research Center, February 11, 2022  Calorie restriction improves metabolic and immune responses that help determine both how long a person lives and how many years of good health they enjoy, a new study shows. Two years of modest calorie restriction reprogrammed the pathways in fat cells that help regulate the way mitochondria generate energy, the body’s anti-inflammatory responses, and potentially longevity,. In other words, calorie restriction rewires many of the metabolic and immune responses that boost lifespan and health span. The study found that people who cut their calorie intake by about 14 percent over two years generated more T cells, which play a key role in immune function and slow the aging process. (NEXT) Evidence points to fish oil to fight asthma University of Rochester, February 9, 2022 University of Rochester Medical Center scientists have discovered new essential information about omega 3 fatty acids contained in fish oil and how they could be used for asthma patients. In a paper published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation–Insight, researchers using cell cultures from local asthma patients, found that: Omega-3 fatty acid products can reduce the production of IgE, the antibodies that cause allergic reactions and asthma symptoms in people with milder cases of asthma; But in patients with severe asthma who use high doses of oral steroids, the omega-3 fatty acids are less effective because the corticosteroids block the beneficial effects. (NEXT) Study: Mindful adults age with better mental health University of Maine, February 11, 2022 Aging happens to all of us. If you are a mindful person, though, you may be better equipped to handle the effects of growing older. According to a University of Maine study led by associate professor of psychology Rebecca MacAulay, published in the journal Aging & Mental Health, aging adults with high levels of “trait mindfulness,” or a person’s innate ability to pay attention to the present moment without judgment, showed measures of greater well-being and mental health. Mindful adults also demonstrated more mental resilience to stressful situations. (NEXT) Plant extract fights brain tumor Max Planck Institute (Germany), February 11, 2022 Cushing Disease, not to be confused with Cushing’s Syndrome, is caused by a tumour in the pituitary gland in the brain. The tumour secrets increased amounts of the stress hormone adrenocorticotropin (ACTH) followed by cortisol release from the adrenal glands leading to rapid weight gain, elevated blood pressure and muscular weakness. Patients are prone to osteoporosis, infections and may show cognitive dysfunction or even depression. In 80 to 85 % of the patients the tumour can be removed by uncomfortable brain surgery. For inoperable cases, there is currently only one targeted therapy approved which unfortunately causes intense side effects such as hyperglycemia in more than 20 % of the patients. (NEXT) Daily dose of beetroot juice improved endurance and blood pressure Wake Forest Medical Center,  February 11, 2022  Scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have found that a daily dose of beetroot juice significantly improved exercise endurance and blood pressure in elderly patients with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFPEF). The study is published in the current online edition of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology-Heart Failure. Exercise intolerance – shortness of breath and fatigue with normal amounts of exertion — is the primary symptom of HFPEF and is due partly to non-cardiac factors that reduce oxygen delivery to active skeletal muscles. HFPEF is a recently recognized disease that reflects how the left ventricle of the heart pumps with each beat. It occurs primarily in older women and is the dominant form of heart failure, as well as the most rapidly increasing cardiovascular disorder in this country. (VIDEOS) Tricia Lindsay “We have a right to resist, and we have an obligation and duty to do so”  (10:40 minutes) Borad Of Education Meeting RAIR Foundatin: Vaccine is Worse than We Feared, Could be Looking at Hundreds of Thousands More Dead’ (4:52 minutes) (OTHER NEWS) Late-night reports suggest CIA collecting more data on Americans CHRIS MILLS RODRIGO – THE HILL. 02/11/22 A late-night release of government reports on two Central Intelligence Agency programs has revealed that the organization is most likely collecting more data on American citizens than previously known. Both reports conducted by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), a watchdog created after 9/11 to ensure counter-terror investigations did not jeopardize privacy or civil liberties, looked into two programs conducted under Executive Order 12333 authority. The Reagan-era presidential directive established a framework for data collection by the intelligence community during foreign missions. When Edward Snowden almost a decade ago revealed the extent of warrantless bulk data collection by the government, Congress responded by banning collection under a separate statute focused on domestic activities, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). (NEXT) How the Left betrayed the Truckers MALCOM KYEYUNE. — UNHERD, FEBRUARY 9 2022 They call it “The Honkening”. Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, is currently being besieged by a novel kind of protest. Honkening is a fairly appropriate name for what’s going on. Thousands of truckers have driven to the capital, and barraged the city with the noise of truck horns creating a cacophony of sound. Elsewhere, on the border between the United States and Canada, truckers, farmers and cowboys have blockaded traffic. As the protests enter another week, Ottawa’s mayor has declared a state of emergency. Jim Watson described the truckers — ostensibly protesting against Canada’s harsh Covid mandates — as “out of control”. Watson sees anarchy; the truckers fulminate against Covid authoritarianism. But this battle is really about working-class discontent. The naive among us could be forgiven for thinking that this protest signalled something auspicious about “late capitalist” society. For decades, the common folk wisdom for both the Left and the Right was that the West’s working classes had been completely neutralised as a political force, and that class conflict itself was a relic of the past. This idea took hold in the Sixties, when Herbert Marcuse theorised that Western workers had been subjected to a “socially engineered arrest of consciousness”. Their vested interest in the existing capitalist order made them impossible to radicalise. Ever since, finding new theoretical models to explain the unreliability (and stodgy conservatism) of workers has been a recurring activity on parts of the Left. Marxists had made a horrific discovery: the working class were not their foot soldiers. As Joan Didion once put it: “The have-nots, it turned out, mainly aspired to having.” Many on the Left came to believe that without their corporatist union structures, and without their shop stewards and political organisers, the working classes were done for. They were little better, to paraphrase Marx, than a “sack of potatoes”. Without proper leadership, the workers would be too inert and stupid to do anything about their plight. As such, the decades after the fall of the Soviet Union (and the defeat of the strike waves of the Eighties) saw many Leftists indulge a wistful nostalgia for a time when the workers stuck it to the powers that be. Celebration of the good old days of the Left, and of “working-class power” in general, was thus central to the aesthetics of the now completely defunct wave of Left populism in the 2010s. With that backdrop in mind, the explosion of worker militancy over vaccine mandates — and, on a related note, high fuel taxes in Europe — ought to have been greeted by enthusiasm by the Leftist activist and organiser set. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. The truckers in Canada have instead triggered a primordial sense of dread in the hearts of the urban classes, in the people who Canadian trucker Gord Magill has dubbed “the email job caste”. This sense of fear and dread at the machinations of the proles is hardly something unique to Canada. Indeed, even the United States saw a large increase of worker militancy and wildcat strikes over oppressive vaccine mandates. Like their compatriots in Canada, America’s various professional friends of the working class responded with horror and scorn. The well-known Marxist economist, Richard Wolff, was mobbedon Twitter for suggesting that workers striking over mandates were actually part of something called “class struggle”, rather than merely an expression of “fascism”. Ottawa’s truckers are a symptom of the massive class divide that is opening up across the West. Marxists are sticking their heads in the sand about this generational moment, or papering it over with absurd topsy-turvy leaps. In one recent display of moon logic, the Canadian activist, writer and self-described socialist Nora Loreto complained that “labour” was invisible in the resistance to the “fascist” truckers that had occupied Ottawa. An exasperated comrade chimed in with a story of being a shop steward for a teamster (truck driver) union, and — horror of horrors — the painful truth was that many teamsters were more likely to be in the protest themselves than protesting against it. The exchange is modern Western Leftism in a nutshell. Is there a single better illustration of the contradictions of the moment? An “activist” and organiser” recoiling in horror at a bunch of truckers — people who work in the real, material economy, ferrying the foodstuffs and goods we all depend on to survive — staging a political protest, only to then ask “but where is the organised working class in all of this?”. Isn’t it obvious to the point of parody that the workers are the people inside the trucks? It’s easy to laugh at this sort of absurdity, but the lesson here is anything but a joke. The divorce between “the Left” and “the workers” is now complete and irrevocable. Nora Loreto may not be a person with calloused hands, and she may very well belong to Gord Magill’s “email jobs caste”. But for the longest time, the political rhetoric and worldview of the Left depended on the idea that the trucker and the activist were merely two sides of the same coin. Without the activist and the “organiser”, the trucker would never be able to know how to organise himself and his fellows politically; without the trucker, the activist and the organiser would not have a cause for which to organise. Now it seems that the trucker — and by extension, the pilot, the garbage collector, and the bus driver — does not need or want this caste of self-appointed leaders. This divorce has happened all over the world in recent years. After the massive rejection by Red Wall voters of Jeremy Corbyn and his activist base in the smart, urban, and highly credentialed parts of Britain, one started to see a rhetoric of open loathing for the dumb, uneducated gammons and proles. In Germany, the Left party Die Linke has endured several rounds of severe internal fighting and strife. As in the UK, the younger, more urban, more credentialed parts of the Left have fought a running battle — and thrown pies — against pro-worker “racists” such as Sahra Wagenknecht. In Canada, that loathing has now turned into fear — and into outright hatred. The problem of the truckers is not really the honking (which the Guardian sniffily calls “crude behaviour“), because sooner or later, that honking will stop. The state of emergency will end. But the protests, significantly, have shown how confused and weak the opponents of the working classes are today. During the pandemic lockdowns, the email jobs caste loved to talk about essential workers, and luxuriated in public displays of gratitude for them. But this caste of genteel urbanites never realised that this choice of nomenclature was in fact much more meaningful — and ominous – than they understood. Some people, it seems, simply are critical to the functioning of the economy, pandemic or no pandemic. Once those people — and truck drivers are perhaps the most critical of them all — start to demand to be listened to, they have ways to make those demands felt. For the Left, the problem of the truckers is their newfound political independence. Nostalgia really is a thing of the past now; the dinosaurs that were thought long extinct are back now, and they are hungry. Gone are the halcyon days of dreaming about halcyon days – where serious working class militancy was just a distant myth. The real danger of any trucker’s strike, or any pilot’s walkout, or any fuel tax protest in Europe, is that every new confrontation sets a precedent: a precedent that says that the Gord Magills are done taking orders from the Nora Letos of the world.