Michael Bates: March 2020 Archives
"4 Cups a Day: 4 Surprising Health Benefits of Drinking That Much Coffee
Altschmied and Haendeler, both University of Dusseldorf biologists, say that four cups a day can actually help heart cells function more efficiently, as that amount of caffeine will 'push' a protein called p27 into the mitochondria of heart cells.
"It's not the only health benefit. 'It's known that four cups or more of coffee lowers the risk for heart attack, stroke, and diabetes,' says Altschmied....
"According to a study at the University of Southern California, coffee can reduce the odds of developing colorectal cancer by 26 percent. And that's just if you're the casual coffee drinker. For those who drink more than 2.5 servings of coffee a day, the risk of cancer decreases up to 50 percent. This was true even when participants drank decaf, meaning there's more goodness to coffee than just the caffeine."
Founder of Braum's Ice Cream and Dairy Stores passes away | 5newsonline.com
"William Henry (Bill) Braum, the founder of Braum's Ice Cream and Dairy Stores, passed away at his home in Tuttle, OK, on Monday, March 23 [,2020]. He was 92.
"Bill Braum was an innovator in the marketing of dairy products. He was a dairyman, farmer, processor, manufacturer, and retailer of dairy products....
"Early in his life, he began helping his father, Henry, in the family business - a small butter and milk processing plant in Emporia. In the 1930s, Henry added ice-cream processing to the operation.
"After graduating from the University of Kansas in 1949 with a B.S. in Business Administration, Bill went to work full time for his father...."
Braum and his father built the Peter Pan Ice Cream chain in Kansas, Braum sold the stores in 1967, and began building a new chain under his own name, based out of Oklahoma City. I can recall a Peter Pan store near my great-grandmother's house in Coffeyville, on the NE corner of 8th and Spruce (now the Natural Food Center), and one in Claremore, south of the park on the west side of town, where OK 20 turns south (now Francesco's Italian Restaurant). Interesting to learn that Braum's is vertically integrated -- still making ice cream and dairy products from Braum's own herds near Tuttle and Shattuck.
The Portly Victorian Undertaker Who Launched the World's First Low-Carb Craze
William Banting was so grateful for his gradual transformation that he published and distributed at his own expense at least three editions of a pamphlet describing the diet.
"By 1862, Banting was plainly in a bad way. He couldn't reach his own shoes to tie them in the morning. Prone to light-headedness, he would go down stairs backward -- wheezing and teetering slowly with each step -- in order to minimize stress on his ankles and knees. He held in a painful hernia with a tight truss, and his vision and hearing were starting to suffer....
"Dr. [William] Harvey urged his client to follow a new diet that de-emphasized starchy or sweet foods, which he believed tended to create fat. Banting, who was used to lavishly buttered toast, beer, meat and pastries on a regular daily rotation, grumbled that there would hardly be anything left in the world for him to eat, so the doctor drafted him a meal plan...."
You can read the Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public, by William Banting, 3rd edition (1864), on the Internet Archive.
Baseball, BBQ, and Dead Ponies--A History of Fat Men's Clubs in Texas
"In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries definitions of and attitudes about fat bodies were remarkably different than they are now. What qualified a man for a fraternal order of fat men in 1890, today, is now a mere four pounds over the average male size in America. But as fat men's clubs were at their peak, people positively associated men of a larger size with wealth and affability....
"A Brownsville paper reported one such road-trip on April 6, 1909: 'A report was brought in this afternoon that one of the horses that were hauling the Fat Men's team to the baseball park dropped dead on the way. How the team finally got to the park is not learned. The price of the horse will be charged to the Fat Men.'"
Proportional representation has trapped Israel in a ghost story - The Post
Chris Medlock used to make the point that in America, coalitions are formed before the election, while in countries with proportional representation, they happen after the voters have had their say. Giles Fraser considers the UK's December election and Israel's third election in a year and explains why the UK and US's approach produces more stable and decisive governments.
"The two main parties -- Blue and White and Likud -- are virtually equal, and not terribly different ideologically, with a whole host of smaller parties making up the difference. In Israel, and because of Proportional Representation, politics is all about the coalitions, with the smaller parties having a disproportionate influence on the makeup of any future government. The names of these parties may change a lot, but no amount of reincarnation can shift the underlying stalemate. And no one is confident that after another electoral cycle that things can change this time either.
"Back in the dark days of Autumn 2019, when Brexit was stuck, neither able to go forward or backwards, I flirted with proportional representation as a way to break the log jam. I should have known better. For it was First Past the Post that finally delivered a much needed verdict.
"For all its various faults, FPTP has the virtue of forcing different political temperaments to enter into coalitions with each other before elections rather than after them. And this means two things: 1) that we have a clearer view of the alliances we are voting for and 2) that the winning side is more likely to have the freedom to take politics forward. Stuck politics is a ghost story, unable to achieve anything, neither alive nor dead."
Elizabeth Babade, a Brexit Party candidate, said at the Change Politics for Good conference on Saturday that she no longer supports proportional representation
. She believes it produces weak parliamentary institutions that are dominated by the permanent bureaucracy. Instead, she says, "The focus should be replacing the present ineffective opposition with a more focused party that is ready to properly scrutinise the Tory government not spitefully, hatefully or maliciously but dispassionately & competently. @UKLabour is not up to the task at hand.
James Heartfield tweeted in reply: "Under FPTP parties have to convince a large body of voters their plan is good. Under PR they have to convince a minority to back them; and then they have to convince opponents to compromise. PR tends to encourage 1. Posturing in elections 2. Opportunism in coalitions."
