The Mirage of Economic Recovery, Revisited

One of the pleasures of keeping a thought diary (h/t: George Orwell) is that you can observe your own ideational evolution. You can see where your grasp of things has been, where you went wrong, where you overstated the case, where you had it about right, even where you were correct to maintain a particular position in the face of conventional wisdom to the contrary.

I was reading, for example, a post I wrote in July, 2009, on the "the mirage of economic recovery." One of the subjects I tried to describe was the notion, popular at the time, that the Federal Reserve was funding banks on Wall Street in order to allow them to play the stock market so that at least one economic parameter (the American stock exchanges) would appear positive in the face of consistently downbeat econ stats from other quarters, such as high unemployment, declining house prices, exploding federal deficits, increasing use of food stamps, and rising gasoline prices. In this one narrow sphere, the Federal Reserve appeared to succeed, although my description of how it was being done was vague and uninformed. I still don't know exactly how the secretive Fed funnels money to its cabal of Primary Dealers, domestic and foreign, but it's become more apparent that the Fed is also desperately determined to create money through variously numbered Quantitative Easing episodes so that Treasury auctions proceed smoothly and give the government the patina of solvency. In the process, the Fed has increased its balance sheet from about $800 billion in 2008 to the $2.8 trillion we see today.

So what has been accomplished through this massive increase in the monetary base? And if the national debt has gone from about $9 trillion to $14.3 trillion (actually in excess of the statutory debt ceiling) since November, 2008, as it has, do we have a lot to show for that either? As someone whose natural instincts are more along the lines of social satire, what interests me most is the mindset that produces these anomalies. I'm not surprised that no national politician of prominence ever comes out and says that America simply lived on borrowed money for too long and attempted to sustain a standard of living incongruent with the underlying economic reality. The political classes are just incapable of that kind of realism; it doesn't "play." It doesn't sound "exceptional" enough. Unicorns and rainbows work better on the public airwaves, such as the "wealth effect" of bubbling house prices from 1998 to 2008. These provided the mirage of general prosperity, and since 2/3rds of Americans claim their house as the most important financial asset, it's obvious that the illusion was maintained for as long as it was because of debt-fueled unreality. The estimates of lost wealth in the residential real estate market, so far, run to about $6 trillion, and if Deutsche Bank is right about its forecast (made about two years ago) that housing prices will continue to slump until 50% of homeowners have no equity at all, then this downward trajectory is far from over.

The re-fi, line-of-credit game of fueling consumer spending has ended, replaced for a while by the Squatter's Rent game, where people spend into the general economy with money "saved" by not paying their mortgages as they await foreclosure. That game has a certain end point, and then what? I think the federal government is nearing the end of its borrowing capacity, no matter what Paul Krugman says, and then how do we keep the game going?

If you measure this decline from the summer of 2007, when George W. Bush emerged from his emergency meeting with Hank Paulson and Bernanke and other tribal chiefs of High Finance with W's unadulterated look of sheer panic on his face, having been presented with the inevitable result of his indifference and neglect, then we're coming up on four full years of getting nowhere. There's still no talk of anything fundamentally different, no recognition of a paradigm shift. Everything is still directed toward restoring the status quo ante. Water up those camels at the next oasis; we've still got a long caravan ahead of us.

Multiplying Errors in the End Times

It's a slight play on words, natch. But I have become curious regarding Harold Camping's miscalculation of The Rapture. When the trap door in the sky failed to open last Saturday, Camping, understandably nonplussed, went back to the blackboard and redoubled his efforts, to understand how he could have been so terribly wrong. First, however, he repaired with his wife to a motel to think things through, and, even at the age of 89, maybe to engage in still other things. That is not for me to know, anymore than it is for me to know the hour that the Lord returneth, other than as revealed by Harold Camping. Hats off to this eschatological expert, whatever his motivations.

I feel remorseful that some of my comments last week, before Rapture Saturday, were intemperate re: Mr. Camping. I suppose in part, as I mentioned, that I just think Saturday is a terrible time to schedule the end of the world. There are plenty of other days (six, I guess) to choose from, and I'll confess to you that there have been days (the reelection of George W. Bush in November, 2004, comes immediately to mind) when hearing a voice like a trumpet out of the clear blue sky would have been fine with me. But Saturday? Eggs, bacon, coffee, NY Times crossword Saturday? Gimme a break. So I developed a 'tude about The End. I objected mainly to its calendaring, that's all. We all gotta go sometime. Let us recall Shakespeare: "By my troth, I care not. A man can die but once. We owe God a death, so let it go which way it will: he that dies this year is quit for the next." Henry IV, I believe. Those who escape death altogether because of The Rapture can avoid unpleasantries like Medicare Death Panels and suddenly attentive heirs-at-law.

Yet still...I'm perplexed, especially now that Harold is back with a new date: October 21, 2011. Only a five month reprieve. It's like a call from the governor at the 11th hour, except instead of a commutation of sentence, we now have to go through the death watch all over again. (By "death watch," of course, I'm referring to the dead rising from their graves, all as foretold. Something you'd definitely want to watch out for.) It's not a Saturday, at least, but it's a Friday, offering further proof that Harold Camping is a major buzzkill.

The actual calculations are in the picture up above. Obviously, the words "atonement, completeness and heaven" play a major role. Atonement, which has 9 letters, is assigned a value of 5. Completeness, which has 12 letters, is assigned a value of 10. And heaven, which has 6 letters, is assigned a value of 17. All of this is straightforward so far. These are also the values I would have assigned to these words, if I had arbitrarily chosen these words and then arbitrarily assigned values to them. I don't see how anyone can doubt that Camping is correct about April 1, 33, unless you're Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, pagan, existentialist, or some other damned soul, in which case who really cares what you think? We then add 1,978 years since the Crucifixion to bring us to our current, End Times.. We then calculate the days from the Crucifixion to April 1, 2011, using (in a neat bit of astronomical precision!) solar years instead of just the sloppy calendar years, because Camping is an engineer. Naturally, we then would add 51 days; I see this addition as akin to the Cosmological Constant or other fixes necessary to make arcane calculations work, and there is nothing extraordinary about that. Einstein did the same kind of thing. Without Camping's Constant, the multiplications described below...okay, I'm getting lost.

We then take our words, chosen at random, and multiply them by the randomly chosen values chosen for each, then square the products of these multiplications (of course) and find that the number of days since the Crucifixion to April 1, 1978 + 51 just happens to equal exactly the square of the multiplied word-value factors chosen by Camping on the basis of deep study. That gave us May 21, 2011. Quod erat demonstrandum. I think what Camping has demonstrated, besides a marked paranoid-schizophrenic tendency, is that The Rapture is calculated more or less along the lines of Easter, which if I remember right is the first Sunday after the first full moon which occurs after the vernal equinox. The good pastor is thus arguing that The Rapture occurs on the first day which occurs after the 1,978th anniversary of the Crucifixion where the date corresponds to the number of days reached by multiplying Camping's word values to reach a product which is then squared. Nothing could be more obvious.

Why 1,978? you may ask. You're suspicious, aren't you, thinking that Camping just wanted The Rapture to occur on his own Watch, so he made sure it would happen, oh, around Now. Well, nice try, but you obviously are not a Biblical scholar or you would realize that May 21, 2011, is in fact the date which corresponds to the multiplication of atonement, completeness and heaven squared + 51 and I thought we already covered that. I can hear you begin to argue that this whole line of reasoning is circular, but I'm not buying it. Camping was spot on. His error is not in his calculations, which were pristine and elegant. He had it nailed. He shouldn't panic and "recalculate." It looks sketchy to grab another date which lacks the rigor of the first. The Rapture was just very subtle. Small trap door, toy bugle, quiet voice, and The Good Book may not have meant "all" the Dead will rise from their graves. The Dead could be just one, and I hope it's Jerry Garcia.

Abba Comes to Congress

Not the Swedish pop group, cool as they were, but the Hebrew word for Papa. As in Abba Eban. 'Twas something to behold, to watch Bibi Netanyahu hold the joint session of Congress in the palm of his hand yesterday. Leaving aside the content for a moment, which is fractious and controversial as ever (but see: John M.'s comment to my recent post on Palestine and the pre-1967 borders. I think his historical reconstruction is exactly right, and as often the case, his comments are better than my blogs. But thinking about this history, you can see why Sirhan Sirhan was called a "Jordanian" in 1968 and a Palestinian later.), it was amazing to see Congress respond to an actual, true-to-life, citizen-soldier, alpha male leader.

And it made me reflect on this propensity of the American electorate always to elect a vaguely epicene, wan, anemic, glad-hander in the mold of Reagan-Bush I-Clinton-Bush II-Obama, guys who are as uneasy in their role as President as they are in their own skin, who "fake" leadership with a lot of pomp and circumstance but lack the essential innards to pull the role off. I think of all this nonsense which has surrounded Obama's fearless leadership in the whacking of bin Laden - look, this was a plan developed by the CIA and the Department of Defense, start to finish. I've always thought the CIA (and FBI) do very good work; it's simply a question of whether anyone wants to listen to them or not. If Bush had listened to the FBI, or to the suspicions of George Tenet at the CIA, then 9/11 would not have occurred. (At breakfast the morning of the attacks, Tenet said to the person across the table from him, "I hope this wasn't the guys who were taking the flying lessons.") Obama's role was to say, "Go," pose for a picture in the Situation Room where he looked engaged, and then deliver a fictional account of the raid on national television.

Netanyahu's brother was killed at Entebbe in an Israeli commando raid where the degree of difficulty was about 4 to 5 times higher than the bin Laden hit. Netanyahu himself fought in the 1973 war in the Middle East. Thus, he brings a heavy dose of gravitas to his presence, the real thing, a real leader leading a country forcefully, powerfully. He does it all: he shmoozes, he kvells, he kvetches, he lightens it up, he gets menacing. He draws clear lines and he lets you know where he stands. None of this leadership by committee bullshit, this constant appointment of commissions to study issues the President wants to dodge, the fear of hard consequences implied in the decision always To Look Forward, Not Backward.

As I say, leave aside the content for a moment, since the question of Israel seems to deprive otherwise sane people of the ability to see straight. Netanyahu brings back memories of the American Dad of yesteryear, the strong patriarch, the protector, the I Like Ike type, where we equated leadership with strength of character and deeply-held principle, instead of electing technocratic dime-a-dance men who serve a corporate agenda first and America second, if at all.

It's nice to see something a little different, something even the nerds and twerps in Congress could grow faint over as they recognized the difference. Not that it will actually change anything; we're just as likely now to wind up with an exciting contest between the red-blooded he-man Tim Pawlenty and Mr. Cool next fall. But for nostalgic purposes, it was nice.

Something else we have to import these days if we want to see the real thing.

Tying up a few loose ends before the Rapture

It's all over tomorrow, in case you haven't heard. It's a mathematical certainty, and I take a certain pride in emphasizing that it's a Bay Area man, Harold Camping, 88, of Oakland who made the gutsy call that The Rapture will happen tomorrow, May 21, 2011. He's run the numbers:

Camping, 88, has scrutinized the Bible for almost 70 years and says he has developed a mathematical system to interpret prophecies hidden within the Good Book. One night a few years ago, Camping, a civil engineer by trade, crunched the numbers and was stunned at what he'd found: The world will end May 21, 2011.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/12/31/BA8V1AV589.DTL#ixzz1MuU3aBGe

To give you a clearer idea what to look for tomorrow, let's go to the source: Revelation 4: 1.

"After this I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, Come up hither, and I will shew thee things which must be hereafter."

That doesn't sound like something you'd want to miss. A door in the sky, a talking trumpet, a guided tour. This is why, as a kid lolling my way through endless, thrice-weekly sessions at our windowless church, I would thumb my way through Revelation as distraction. Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Seven Seals, behold a pale horse, serpents, monsters, magic numbers of the Beast, phantasmagorical, hallucinogenic imagery on nearly every page. Cool stuff. Some have speculated that John, who wrote this William Burroughs-like story (I should say, rather, that William Burroughs obviously took his cue from John), was shroomed up or otherwise consciously altered when he penned Revelation. I don't know. I think he was just on a roll, invited to write what was obviously going to be the final book in the Good Book, and he let it all hang out.

He finished by daring anyone to change a single word. More than once, during those endless Sunday mornings, I wondered whether John hadn't written a satire. There's really nothing else like Revelation in the Bible. It was rarely mentioned in Sunday school or in sermons (and believe you me, there were a lot of sermons). You might say that if Revelation was quoted at all, it was quoted out of context, as if going into the whole story was a little embarrassing. It didn't really fit with the basic Christian message. What's all this stuff, suddenly, about the anti-Christ, and 666, and horses of four different colors, and seven seals, and on and on?

Simply musing to myself, I would wonder whether John wasn't putting people on. Hey, you believed everything else: people rising from the dead, water into wine, walking on water, virgin birth. Let's finish up with this. Let's go to a different level. And I dare you to change a word!

Oh well, I'm playing with fire (see: fire, lake of). A few minor cavils with the timing, of course. Why wait till after April 15? After both property tax bills are due? Just before summer? That's the thing that used to really get me down about organized religion and its mythology. The casual toss-off of this life in favor of the next one, and the next one was full of burning lakes, trap doors in the sky, bugles talking like people, and horses named Conquest, Famine, War & Pestilence.

I'm going on record right now. I'm going to make my call. The Rapture will not happen tomorrow. Harold Camping is full of shit. He couldn't calculate the End Times if his after life depended on it.

There Goes Florida

That soft thudding noise you hear in the background is the sound of a million bagels hitting television screens all along South Florida's Jewish Riviera. (I have special dispensation to make such ethnically-stereotypical remarks, the provenance of which I am not at liberty to divulge.) In one of his less meaningful of a whole series of utterly meaningless speeches, President Obama has told the world that in exchange for Arab recognition of Israel's right to exist (plus a voucher good for dinner for two at one of Tel Aviv's nicest restaurants), Israel will agree to the creation of a Palestinian state based on "pre-1967 borders."

I have found it useful to employ the Bush Decoder Ring when analyzing an Obama speech these days. I'm a little rusty in its application, but the essential idea is that the actual position taken by Bush/Obama does not relate to the "merits" of an issue (if any), but can be understood only in terms of domestic politics. President Obama, like Ol' W before him, does not have any actual principles, which is why the many, many differences between his campaign rhetoric and his actual policies in office afford Glenn Greenwald a daily opportunity to catalogue the 180 degree reversals on virtually every campaign promise that Barack Obama ever made. (I saw a good bumper sticker the other day: "Change It Back.") It's simply too much work at this point to keep reciting the flip-flops. It isn't so much that Obama "tacks to the right," seeks common ground, splits the difference, or anything else. It's that he doesn't really take a position on anything. He sort of does stuff that he thinks might look pretty good. If that can be called a "governing principle," then I guess that's it.

That's what is so mysterious about this "pre-1967" stuff. To which domestic constituency is Obama playing? Clearly it cannot be the Jewish voters of South Florida, that perennial swing area in national politics. The Arabs of Dearborn, Michigan? Not enough voters to make a difference. Does Obama realize that Jewish settlements have been built in areas that would be affected by a reversion to pre-1967 borders? Does he know about Israeli missile complexes in that area, or the effect on water rights that occurs when land around the Jordan River is converted to new ownership?

I suppose the key caveat is the phrase "based on" pre-1967 borders. In 1998 in the Wye River Memorandum, a different Barak (Ehud, this time, the Israeli Prime Minister) agreed to cede about 95% of the West Bank to Palestine, with East Jerusalem remaining with Israel and the "right of return" of displaced Palestinians settled by reparations. Yasser Arafat appeared to go along with the deal, then realized it was a deal, and the Intifada of 2000 followed. A post-Deal Yasser would have no fun at all. So the ever-original Obama may be thinking that he can follow the Bubba-Hillary script and get Bibi Netanyahu to agree to the same deal, based on the pre-1967 borders, in exchange for a "recognition" of legitimacy, which worked out so well in 2000.

I think I'm getting closer to the answer to the riddle. This is Obama's Conciliation Disorder in florid manifestation - he's thinking that he can get the hardliner Netanyahu to come around to his way of thinking in much the same way that he thinks he can get the Republicans to support his domestic policy initiatives. If he can pull off that miracle, then he can add Settlement of the Israel-Palestine Issue to the impressive achievements of his first term, none of the others of which immediately leap to mind. In other words, this is another example of President Barack Obama really having absolutely no idea why he's doing what he's doing, other than trying to curry favor on all sides while he fails.

I don't suppose they're going to televise the meeting between Netanyahu and Obama tomorrow. That's a crying shame. One culinary note: don't serve bagels.

Caveman diaries, Part 2

Accustomed as I am to writing about the General Theory of Everything, I probably need some sort of transition to the self-indulgence (or -denial) of writing about a diet. So I'll fall back on Voltaire's useful admonition: "Cultivate your own garden." Covered that.

He was using "garden" more generically, I presume, although who knows. The French have always delighted in gourmandish habits. Anyway, the idea behind the paleolithic diet is pretty simple once you think about it. Building on an idea first popularized by Desmond Morris in The Naked Ape, paleo-nutrition is premised on evolutionary theory, and I apologize immediately to any Red State readers who must now resume watching prosperity-televangelism, starring Joel Osteen as the toothy Charlatan of Christ. Anyway, the hominid known as homo sapiens has been in its present upright, too-smart-for-its-own-good form for about two million years; however, agriculture has only existed for about 12,000 years. The Paleo-advocates reason that insufficient time has elapsed during the age of agriculture for any serious genetic adaptation to the new farm diet to have evolved, much as Morris a generation ago mused about the difficulties of the inner primordial man trying to make his way in the age of television and nuclear families.

Here then is the controversial part: what did humans eat in the prior 1,988,000 years? Since I'm sitting before this iMac, I can logically deduce that they must have eaten something, and it wasn't Oscar Mayer baloney on Wonder Bread with a dab of Best Foods mayo. Also, if you subscribe to the ideas of natural selection, one would also conclude that homo sapiens thrived or died based on adaptations to the available sources of nutrition. Thus, the hunter-gatherers who preceded in world history Con-Agra and Archer Daniels Midland killed animals and gathered plant material as they could find in nature. The animals included big game, small game, fish, shell fish, but also insects, worms, and other things not ordinarily found in the aisles of Safeway. The plant material included fruit, leaves, berries and other edible stuff. Dietary anthropologists have also determined that pre-history Man ate the whole animal which he killed, including all of the organ meats and the bone marrow; thus, our ancestors were not grading meat based on its fat content. Indeed, the more the merrier (and greasier).

The healthiness and naturalness of such a diet have been considered many times in the confrontation between "advanced" Western culture and aboriginal tribes, such as Dr. Albert Schweitzer's and Sir Albert Cook's experiences with West African tribes, which spanned decades from the pre-World War I era to the 1950's. While the African natives suffered routinely from infectious diseases such as dysentary, malaria, leprosy and skin ulcers, the "Western diseases" of diabetes, obesity, cancers of the alimentary tract, Alzheimer's, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease were virtually unknown. Schweitzer was almost retired in Gabon before he saw his first case of diabetes or colon cancer in an African. The distinction between the diseases of Western man and aboriginal immunity to such ailments has been repeated many times when West meets the native, such as the natives of South Africa, Native Americans (including the Eskimo, who naturally did not acquire heart disease even on a diet of 90+% blubber, the high-fat diet non pareil), the South Sea islanders and the Australian and New Zealand aborigine.

Agriculture of wheat and other cereal grains, rice, corn, and cane & beet sugar, when coupled with modern means of milling away the bran made possible by the Industrial Revolution, gave rise to the Age of the Refined Carbohydrate of the Western diet. Refined flour and sugar had enormous advantages, since they were easily stored and shipped dry and would keep until ready to poison the innards of those eating them.

The question presented is whether the refined carbohydrate has given rise to the full range of Western diseases noted above. This, and other questions, are explored by Gary Taubes in Good Calories, Bad Calories. As I said before, the so-called Carbohydrate Hypothesis (which is further broken down into schools of thought which emphasize the role of fructose versus glucose) has a lot of research and good science behind it. The Saturated Fat chorus has a lot of Big Money, including Merck, General Mills, Big Ag, the AMA and American Heart Association, and the United States Congress behind it. The victory of Money over Science can be determined by the stark reality that the United States is now the fattest country on the face of the Earth.

Diet for a Sick Planet

Recently my tinfoil hat was having reception problems. Signal-to-noise ratio very low, static on the line, garbled transmission, et cetera. Thus, I twisted the top of the hat into a long, tight spiral and leaned out of an upper floor window, at night so as to lessen sunspot interference.

What I then heard was astonishing. While the messages arrived piecemeal, the gist of the communication took this form: Americans have been systematically deceived and defrauded into buying metric tons of statin drugs, blood pressure meds and a whole host of other worthless crap, all at tremendous cost, on the strength of a set of carefully controlled and protected lies. The central lie is as follows: Americans, 32% of whom are obese (body mass index greater than 30) and 64% of whom are overweight, have these problems because of an excess of dietary fat, particularly saturated fat, such as found in anything that tastes good. Thus, Americans have become mordibly rotund, with high cholesterol, high blood pressure and Type-II (adult onset) diabetes. The message concluded with a simple directive: Read Gary Taubes.

So I read Why We Get Fat and Good Calories, Bad Calories. The first book is the shorter version of the second, and was written by Mr. Taubes (a science writer, not a PhD or M.D., and thus is authoritative only in the sense that he's right and lacks the motivation to lie of Big Pharma or the American Heart Association) in response to the requests of sympathetic cardiologists, diabetologists and nutritionists who wanted something they could give their patients other than the encyclopedic history of metabolic research contained in Good Calories, Bad Calories, which is a fascinating exploration of how the American public has been bamboozled into becoming perfect subjects for massive, ruinous drug interventions.

To put it simply, the sickness in American society is caused by the over-consumption of refined carbohydrates, leading to too much insulin secretion, leading to too much implacable fat storage, leading to the insulin resistance of metabolic syndrome. The statement of the problem isn't really all that complicated, although the underlying metabolic science is very complicated indeed.
However, beginning in 1977 with the publication of Dietary Guidelines for America, a work primarily influenced by the anti-dietary fat crusader Ancel Keys (for whom K-rations were named), the U.S. has systematically emphasized that the problems of obesity and heart disease and diabetes (a disease of carbohydrate metabolism) were caused by excessive consumption of saturated fat. Thus, a diet should consist of about 60% carbohydrates with the balance of 40% as some mix of proteins and fats, the percentages varying depending on fads. Sometimes 20-20, sometimes 25-15, whatever.

Americans responded to this advice. It sounded right, as if, when one eats a Big Mac, the globules of saturated fat simply travel from the gut to the arterial wall, or to the belly, with the McDonald's logo still attached. The power of plausible imagery. Thus, during the period of roughly 1980 to the present Americans reduced their fat intake, both in terms of absolute calories and as a percentage of total intake, year after year. The result has been the American obesity epidemic. Obesity is now increasing at the rate of about 1% per year, or about 3 million people per year crossing the line into the danger zone of diabetes, high blood pressure, high triglyceride levels, high low-density ("bad") cholesterol, atherosclerosis and premature death.

Attempts to explain the obesity solely in terms of sedentary behavior or increases in total calories consumed do not hold up to detailed statistical analysis. Let us remember that the march toward Fat Land America was accompanied by the fitness crazes of jogging, aerobics, bicycling and many other activities, and that the concept of the exercise gym, which was pretty much Jack La Lanne and a couple of other guys in the 1960's, became a huge industry. Yet by keeping the problem complex, Big Pharma and the AMA could continue making billions selling Lipitor, Plavix, hypertension meds, and the rest of the obesity-related drugs, and doctors' offices could be kept full of patients seeking completely unnecessary treatment. What wasn't to like?

As an experiment of one, I tried what Mr. Taubes recommended. I was a fitting subject, bordering as I was on a number of the metabolic syndrome parameters. Borderline triglycerides, borderline Stage I hypertension, overweight, et cetera. I began eating the Flintstone diet. Protein with every meal, lots of leafy green vegetables, plenty of eggs, protein shakes (cavemen would make these in earthen jugs with sabre-toothed tiger's blood), a little fruit. Water and green tea to drink, mostly, after the morning cup of joe. What I gave up: bread, pasta, scones, Danish, bagels, bearclaws (the pastry, not the paleolithic kill), alcohol, potatoes (French fries, chips, any other way), and over-consumption of fruit. I never cared for dairy anyway, so you can add ice cream and sugared yogurt to the list, but I didn't really have to give them up. No soft drinks at all, including those laced with high fructose corn syrup.

The results have been dramatic. In slightly over 3 weeks, I have lost 10 pounds, two inches on my waist size, my BP is at 121/78, and I have far more energy, which I find I can only burn off through exercise. Therefore, it seems that diet and exercise are mutually reinforcing. If you eat poorly, you're lethargic and don't want to exercise. If you eat well, you're energetic and practically have to exercise.

There are about one billion obese people in the world. 100 million of them (10%) live in the United States. Thus, with 5% of the world's population, the U.S. is over-represented by a factor of two. Most of the health care debates regularly recite that America spends "twice" per capita what other industrialized countries spend with inferior results. Gee, any ideas how that might be the case? Maybe it's because American citizens just aren't taking enough Lipitor.