Good news for fatsos – big fat myths!

Had a bit to do with fatsos and longevity this week.  I found this Spectator article especially informative.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9548142/the-big-fat-myths-of-our-obesity-epidemic/

Dad’s Diaries – 1993

Friday, 1 January, 1993.   The day for our return to Brisbane.  Spent the morning with the Bones.  Fine and hot.  Emily and Annabel spent most of their time in the pool.  After lunch we put our things in the car and set off about 1.40 arriving at just after 4.  There wasn’t much traffic on the road so I drove to the Pacific Hwy at Crow’s Nest and followed it to Wahroonga where we drove on to the freeway.  It was just 200 km to Singleton.  We were expected at the Charbonnier Motel and after leaving our things in our room went to see Dave and Marney.  The Bennetts were there.  Peter and Helen – Helen with quite a bad cold.  Sebastian was very good.  Played happily with his books and toys and went to sleep while we had dinner in the back yard – steak cooked on the barbecue by David.  He is on a diet to reduce weight and no longer drinks beer only champagne.  E was happy – her favourite drink.  It turned out a very pleasant occasion and it was not until after 10 that we returned to the Motel.  Dave was looking rather tired.

2 Saturday

Paid our bill at the Charbonnier $97 and then called on Dave and Marney to say goodbye.  Had some conversation with them and the Bennetts before setting out at 8 am (EST) on a fine, sunny morning.  We made stops at Uralla to do some shopping – I bought a belt and small booklet on the history of the district and E a small stool and one or two other things.  On arriving at Armidale we had lunch (sandwiches) in a café before completing the rest of our journey reaching Brisbane just after 7 as the dusk was falling.  Time taken 11 hours.  Bronwyn’s friend Lyndall was staying with her and we all had dinner together.  Lyndall told of her experiences when living abroad – Sweden, Switzerland and Egypt.  She is quite a level and cheerful person.  Bill gave me his Xmas present – a computerised chess game – a great advance on all the older ones.  He is on speaking terms with Bronwyn but told E and me when Bronwyn and her friend had gone downstairs that when he brought up the incident involving the calling of the police she became very annoyed.  She considers the incident belongs to the past and should be forgotten.

Sunday 3

A quiet day at home.  Weather fine and hot.  Bill got ready for his return to Roma, leaving at 2 pm.  He had acquired one or two things to take with him – a golf trolley, a couple of bicycle tyres (he has bought a bicycle from one of the hospital domestic staff- and of course he took his golf clubs.  He had no room for the TV set but says he really doesn’t need us (sic).  Before departing we called on Eve and gave her her presents – a bug destroyer and a diary (illustrated with country matters -called a Country Diary).  Later in the afternoon Caroline and Susan came for a swim.  Lyndall (Bron’s friend) was picked up by her cousin Clive to spend the night at his place.  E says Bronwyn has been complaining about Lyndall to her so we hope no unpleasantness will result.  Lyndall who is 41 is a cheerful agreeable person whom E and I both like.  I did the surgery books and found I had earned $35535 over the last 6 months.  We had a ring from Bill shortly after 8 to notify us of his safe arrival.  Then Eve arrived with the children and watched the end of House of Elliott instalment before departing with Caroline – leaving Susan to spend the night with us.

4 Monday

Back at work again.  A fine hot day.  Not very busy in the surgery but had 4 house calls.  Talked with Gifford about exchanging our beepers for mobile phones.  We are going to get some estimates of how much it will cost.  Bev’s Jim is back at work but still gets asthmatic attacks.  Bron’s friend Lyndall arrived back in the evening brought by her cousin Clive – he lives at Joyner and they went downstairs to talk for a while before he left.  Bronwyn and Lyndall are leaving for Sydney together on Friday.  Eve came in the evening and left Caroline and Susan who wanted to spend the night with us.  They were very little trouble and were soon in bed and asleep.  There is plenty of colour about just now – our crepe myrtle is in full bloom and so are all the others in the neighbourhood along with Oleanders, Cascara (sic) and Bougainvillea.

Overseas fighting continues in Yugoslavia principally Bosnia Herzegovnia.  In Somalia troop contingents from other nations have been arriving to maintain law and order.  A British aid worker was shot and killed last week.

Tuesday 5

Huntingtower this morning.  I now have 8 patients and saw them all at once so I will make my visits monthly.  Not many surgery patients during the morning and only two in the afternoon.  A hot humid day with a storm in the evening.  It broke just as I arrived home and soon heavy rain was falling.  Lyndall cooked the evening meal – a chicken dish (cold) with grapes, lettuce, celery in a mayonnaise type dressing which we all agreed was delicious.

E went to see the house in Oriel Rd.  No sign of Lyndall or Nick but the cleaners have been and it looks much better now – the grass, or rather weeds have been mowed so it looks considerably tidier on the outside.  E is rather sad that she has been unable to see Nick and we have no idea where they have moved to.

Wednesday 6

Another hot humid day with a thunderstorm in the late afternoon.  Fairly busy in the surgery.  Gina Hoare not well and blood tests suggest infection somewhere so arranged with Jim Anthony to admit her to the Mater Private.  Bron and Lyndall had dinner with us in the evening and later we watched TV – at least they did but I slept most of the time.  Gifford and I arranged to lease a couple of mobile phones – the saleswoman came to the surgery at 1 pm so now we have the phones which should be ready to use tomorrow.

Thursday 7

Plenty of clouds about and weather hot and humid.  Rain expected later in the day but didn’t eventuate.  Busy today.  Couldn’t get the mobile phone to work until I rang Bill Davies at Hutchison Telecom.   There had been a mix up over the number given with the phone but now it is working well and should be very helpful.  Lyndall prepared dinner – garfish with vegetables and salad which we all enjoyed.  She is leaving tomorrow for Sydney along with Bronwyn.  Josie finally got in touch with her mother.  She wants to set up a stall in the Paddington markets in Sydney and sell clothes as she has been doing in Brisbane.  The woman she has been working for will supply her with clothing at wholesale prices and Josie wants Eve to assist her with money to buy them.  Eve was annoyed that Josie had completely ignored her over the holiday period and had reappeared when in need of money.  We have heard nothing from our Lyndall and E misses seeing Nick.

Friday 8

A fairly busy morning in the surgery but managed to get away just after 1.  Bronwyn and Lyndall left for Sydney today so that when I arrived home they had already left for the airport.  I left for Southport shortly before 3 arriving at SL before 4.  The road was fairly crowded but no holdups.  Found my mother quite cheerful and looking much better.  The hearing aid is working well but she doesn’t like the “hollow sound” that it has.  I brought her some chocolates and fruit which she accepted without demur in not complaining that there was too much fruit as she has done in the past.  There were grapes, plums, nectarines and bananas.  She said she felt better and praised her present doctor.  I noticed that her pulse is now quite regular.  On the way home I encountered 2 thunderstorms with quite heavy rain but they didn’t last for long and I arrived home about 6.

Saturday 9

Gifford working this Saturday as he is to move next weekend.  Weather continues hot and humid but no rain.  I did some shopping during the morning – bought accumulated copies of Gioia in the Valley then went to Myer Coorparoo to buy some clothing.  Spent the afternoon at home doing the surgery books.  Lyndall is still working for the Estate Agent.  We saw an advertisement in the paper which gave her name and telephone number for interested persons to ring.  The telephone number is her old one so she must have had it transferred to where she is now living which must be somewhere nearabouts.  Eve and Doug went to Coolum today.  Rachel is looking after the children being unable to go as she is suffering from an attack of Chicken Pox.  E called on her during the afternoon.  Now that only E and I are in the house it is very quiet and peaceful.

To be continued.

LAME DUCKS AND FPA’s – Chapter 1

If you wish to contest a family will, it will help enormously if you can claim to be a “Lame Duck”.  The legal profession is very sympathetic to such types even where the Lame Duck status has been self inflicted by a lifetime of idleness, overeating, drug abuse and smoking heavily.

It is well nigh impossible for other beneficiaries to contest your claim for extra funds under the will because the Lame Duck status will give you a certain immunity.  Unless they are prepared to spend the bulk of the estate by going to trial, most will end up coughing up the extra hundreds of thousands of dollars you are asking for.  Think of it as “go-away” money.  The lawyers and barristers all get richer, as does the Lame Duck, but the rest of you go away shaking your heads and trying to recall what it was Shakespeare said about the law all those centuries ago.  Nothing has really changed.

So, has does one go about achieving this Lame Duck status?

1.  RUIN ONE’S HEALTH

This is achieved by a lifetime of being bone idle, overeating (easily achieved if one has a Maccas or Kentucky Fried Chicken nearby), drug abuse and smoking.

By the time one’s “rich” elderly parent reaches croaking age, you should, at the very least, be obese, diabetic and able to lay claim to a long string of illnesses.  I should add that it helps to have a friendly doctor on side, preferably an old school friend.

In my own experience, these family doctors will even suggest that obesity does not affect one’s life expectancy.  This must be good news to any overweight readers out there.

2.  DEVELOP A STRING OF PSYCHIATRIC ILLNESSES

This, too, is easy.  A simple Google search today will reveal all you need to know to fool any sympathetic psychiatrist.  One look at you, the Lame Duck, one of life’s losers hobbling in, bringing your old lap dog along for mental support, in need of a hip or knee replacement, will get their sympathy immediately.  You don’t have to be truthful in any of this.  In fact, it will help if you leave out any successes you have had in life and concentrate instead on lying about your family for the sad picture you now present.  PTSD and ADHD seem to be special favourites at the moment and many weekly women’s magazines and the Internet can provide you with all the necessary symptoms.

Even if the said family can prove your life story and family beatings is a web of lies, it is never going to be tested unless your rellos are prepared to risk all with a trial.  Most aren’t.  Thus, you are safe from any hard evidence they can dig up such as independent medical evidence to the contrary, diaries, letters, newspaper articles and so-on.

Don’t worry, you will have the legal system working for you at every step encouraging pre-trial Settlement and Mediation to ensure that by the time they go through these two MANDATORY steps they and you will have spent so much on legal fees that your outrageous claim will never be challenged in a court – unless there is a Gina Rheinhart sized estate involved, of course.

3.  TO BE CONTINUED

Lame Ducks and Wills or How to Prevent Your Last Will and Testament being Contested

You may think when you write your Last Will and Testament that your wishes will be respected by the courts and the judicial system. Wrong!  Lawyers, judges and barristers are all busily re-writing these last wills and testaments on behalf of what they call the “lame ducks” of society blithely ignoring the wishes of the deceased.

Furthermore, there is no such thing as an untouchable Will.  Don’t comfort yourself that you may have appointed the best intentioned and qualified executors.  Your Will can still be challenged by a brigade of “ambulance chasers” acting on a “no win, no fee” basis for every Lame Duck and dishonest crook out there.

Don’t kid yourself that because you have left equal shares to everyone, including your Lame Duck, that the Last Will and Testament won’t be challenged.  Don’t kid yourself that because you have decades of diaries, letters and other evidence, heaps of relevant precedents and authorities such as no case has ever had before, expert legal and other professional advice, you will have a good case. You may be able to prove that the Lame Duck has been adequately provided for and that their claim falls at the first hurdle, however, absolutely NO ONE is interested in this defence.  We are living in a society that believes in the adage “every child deserves a prize”, no matter how unworthy their claim may be.

Dont think you can fight this in court either.  Unless the estate concerned is worth many millions, legal costs will very quickly eat up the bulk of any estate under $2 million.  This then means one is forced to hold one’s nose, “settle” some agreed extra sum on these Lame Ducks who have gamed the welfare system almost their entire lives while lawyers celebrate and one’s last will and testament actually gets rewritten with a wording which would make any testatrix turn in her grave.

In my experience, through 8 hours of litigation, not once did anyone among this glitterati of the legal profession use the words, “uphold the wishes of the testatrix”!  Nor were they interested in relevant authorities, especially if from an interstate court.  Sorry, one is stuck with the judgements from the system in one’s own bogan state.

Finally, how to defeat such a system?  Well, one of my siblings jointly owned a house with our mother so at death, her share passed automatically to this fortunate sibling.  This cannot be challenged.

So, dear readers and I hope at least one person will benefit from this advice, if you think you are of croaking age make sure you convert your assets to property jointly owned with your chosen beneficiaries, or alternately do try to spend it before you go.

Now, there’s a good idea.

Green Zealots Oppose Transatlantic Trade Investment Partnership

Tory Aardvark

Green groups are opposing a trade deal that would improve commerce between the US and the EU which would cut tariffs and make doing business easier.

There is no doubt the entire global Green movement, sometimes called, no make that frequently called the Church of Climatology, are anti progess, anti prosperity and above all anti people. In the words of one their leading experts, Canadian environmentalists David Suzuki humans are merely maggots infesting the planet. Then there are those Greens that want to exterminate 80% – 90% of the human race to save the planet.

So it is no surprise, no make that boringly predictable that Gaia’s disciples are up in arms about the Transatlantic Trade Investment Partnership (TTIP), which is an agreement between the worlds two largest trading blocs, the US and the EU. Talks had stalled but recently have restarted and an agreement between the two trading…

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State of the blog discussion thread

Climate Etc.

by Judith Curry

After almost four years of blogging at Climate Etc., its time for some reflection

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End of climate exceptionalism

Climate Etc.

by Judith Curry

A new report from the IPCC implies that “climate exceptionalism”, the notion that global warming is a problem like no other, is coming to an end. – Economist

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Free Speech and Climate Change – Guest post by Douglas Spence

The issue of Free Speech has been much in the news in Australia with the Federal Government proposing amendments to the Racial Discrimination Act to give greater protection to the expression of views which some regard as “offensive” or ” insulting “.
It has correctly been said that free speech is the first and most important of our freedoms. Totalitarian regimes always muzzle the media and seek to control free expression of opinion.
But Free Speech is under attack in Climate Science, in a more subtle way than the introduction of laws restricting dissent from the “settled science”.
No claim has been more widely asserted in the hypothesis of Dangerous Man-made Global Warming than the mantra, “The debate is over. The science is settled.”.
That claim is totally false as anyone with a knowledge of science or history will attest.
On 23 February, Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, in evidence before the US Senate said:-
…..”There is no scientific proof that human emissions of Carbon Dioxide are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years. If there were such a proof it would be written down for all to see. No actual proof as it is understood in science exists.”
A significant number, albeit a minority, of dissenting scientists around the world share that view.
They may be wrong but the danger to free speech from suppressing their opposing views is malign and damaging to science.
Attempts to stop debates and the publication of the views of so called ” deniers” are apparent daily. In the UK, it was proposed that discussions on the BBC should not give “weight” to the statements of Lord Lawson on air. Today, a Chair of the parliamentary Science and Technology Committee has also sought to exclude the opinions of contrarians.
In March, 1939, a meeting was arranged in New York between Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller and Leo Szilard. There were 2 issues on the agenda of these nuclear scientists:-
1. Was a nuclear chain reaction (and an atomic bomb) possible from neutron induced fission, given recent experiments?
2. Should the Fermi/Szilard experiment results be published in the Journal, ” Physical Review”? -the risk was that it might alert the Nazis to the possibility of an atomic bomb.
The others had approached Niels Bohr because his prestige was sought to coax the US Government to pursue the bomb.
The meeting was inconclusive because Bohr was insistent that we would never succeed in producing nuclear energy. In this he was wrong as both Einstein and Rutherford had been before him.(Rutherford called it ” moonshine”). Einstein later saw the truth.
About secrecy in science, Bohr was monumentally right.
“He had worked for decades to shape physics into an international community, a model within its limited franchise of what a peaceful, politically united world might be. Openness was its fragile, essential character, an operational necessity, as freedom of speech is an operational necessity to a democracy. Complete openness enforced absolute honesty: the scientist reported all his results, favourable and unfavourable, where all could read them, making possible the ongoing correction of error. Secrecy would revoke that charter and subordinate science as a political system….” (Richard Rhodes, ” The Making of the Atomic Bomb”).
Niels Bohr insisted that secrecy must never be introduced into physics, although he hated and feared the Nazis to an obsessive degree.
Today, we have a political organisation the UN IPCC reviewing and censoring the drafts of scientists in climate science, a sub-set of Physics. The result is then presented to the world as the “overwhelming” opinion of the participating scientists, even when, as occurred last September, a draft stating that Climate Models had for the last 10-15 years failed to reflect the pause in atmospheric warming, was expunged.
As the Climategate e-mails showed, one prominent scientist said to Stephen McIntyre who was seeking his underlying data, and codes, “why should I give you my data, when you are trying to prove me wrong?”

The heartbreak of creativity: a public service announcement

I love this writer.

Drinking Tips for Teens

Hello, I’m Ross Murray, beloved columnist, salad dressing connoisseur and author of the best-selling self-help book Don’t Kid Yourself, Mister. Today, I’d like to talk about a condition that afflicts 2 out of 6 Canadians and in some areas as many as 1 in 3. I’m talking about… creativity.

Creativity can strike anyone, anytime, though probably not before 10 a.m. Creative people are just like you and me, except with weirder clothes and occasionally dubious hygiene. Creativity is a highly distracting affliction, but, with regular treatment and flattery, most creative people lead full, productive lives… Let me try that again: most creative people lead full lives.

There are two types of creativity. Some people are born creative, although early creativity remains difficult to diagnose. Many parents become convinced that their child is creative based on adorable fridge drawings and elaborate theatrical productions involving stuffed animals, but thankfully most children grow…

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Cee’s weekly photo challenge – perspective

Vieille ville, Antibes.  This is just one of many similar streets in the old part of Antibes.