Because the importance of cholesterol as a risk factor for heart disease had been accepted as dogma, it was pretty well impossible to challenge it. For example, one of the outstanding nutrition scientists, David Kritchevsky, suggested in the 1980s that there should be a weakening of the recommendation on dietary fat and encountered hysterical opposition. Here is what he told the author:
“People would spit on us! It’s hard to imagine now, the heat of the passion. It was just like we had desecrated the American flag. They were so angry that we were going against the suggestions of the American Heart Association and the National Institutes of Health.”
This meant that anyone who had the temerity to challenge the official line was committing professional suicide. Applications for funds to support research, which might question the prevailing views on fat, were unlikely to be supported. Even if funds were obtained (eg from independent foundations) the researchers would find difficulty in publishing their results in scientific journals and they were rarely invited to serve on expert panels. By stifling opposition, the public was presented with what appeared to be a uniform scientific consensus.
Brutally put, it makes little philosophical sense for the elected representatives of a government that is subordinate to the people to be able to disarm those people. As an enlightened state may by no means act as the arbiter of its critics’ words, it may not remove from the people the basic rights that are recognized in the very document to which it owes its existence. “Shall not be infringed” and “shall make no law” are clear enough even for the postmodern age. To ask, “Why do you need an AR-15?” is to invert the relationship. A better question: “Why don’t you want me to have one?” And far from being the preserve of two-bit reactionaries, this, I discovered to my consternation, is a deeply — nay, radically — liberal principle, and one of the most beautiful ideas in the history of beautiful ideas. It changed my politics forever.
It is not, and has never been, about hunting.
[Update a few minutes later]
And then there’s this:
These ideas had a profound effect on me, ushering in the startling realization that, far from merely being a larger England, the United States had become something quite different: an incubator of lost or diluted British freedoms. As the Liberty Bell was originally cast in England but rang out in America, so those guarantees of the “rights, liberties, and immunities of free and natural-born subjects” have found their truest expression across the Atlantic. “That rifle on the wall of the labourer’s cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy,” wrote George Orwell in 1941. “It is our job to see that it stays there.” In Britain and beyond, that rifle has long been taken away. England’s bell has fallen silent. Americans would do well to ensure that the crack in theirs grows no larger.
Kyle Smith asked today on Twitter, if you put a check for a hundred bucks in the middle of Hillary’s new book, how many of them would get cashed? I’d say the same thing about Piketty’s book. It’s a “classic.” That is, a book that everyone wants to display and have read, but no one wants to actually read. Fortunately, some people who understand math did slog through it.
Now we know at least one of the things that she took the Fifth about (and lied about when she said she’d done nothing illegal):
The IRS apparently considered political speech by nonprofit groups to be so troublesome that it illegally assisted federal law-enforcement officials in assembling a massive database of the lawful political speech of thousands of American citizens, weeks before the 2010 midterm elections, using confidential taxpayer information.
Nixon would only dream of doing what Obama has gotten away with. But remember, there’s not a smidgen of corruption, and it’s a “phony scandal.”
I know you’ll be as shocked as I am to learn that she lied about Benghazi in it.
Of course, in the nineties, she had an aide who testified to Congress that he lied to his own diary. It’s almost like this gang (as well as the Obama people, and there’s a great deal of overlap, notably Eric Holder) are congenital liars.
She’s really a fish in a barrel. She just isn’t generally an attractive target to people like Diane Sawyer. I wonder if the media is finally getting tired of her, and looking for another Obama?
