i had to double check the file, but it's really, actually ready to post.

but, the low tonight is 25 degrees celsius.

and, there's an outdoor party somewhere in michigan. for free.

i can't waste that. it's too perfect. so, i'll be back to work on monday.

this is where the actual meaningful data sits - the cause of pretty much all of the health problems we have is not what we eat but how much.

so, if you do a study on meat consumption and conclude that humans that eat a lot of meat are at a higher risk of cancer, you're developing a correlation without asserting a causal force. it may very well be true that people that eat a lot of meat are at a (relatively) higher risk of cancer, but that doesn't mean the cause is the meat - the cause could be the eating. you'd have to figure that out.

what the study i posted this morning, as well as a few others that have been referenced, have demonstrated is that the researchers making this claim haven't done that - they've simply found a correlation and run with it. now, that doesn't necessarily mean their correlation is wrong, it just means they haven't done a sufficient amount of study on it to determine if it's causal or not. it might be, it might not be, we don't know until we can do the proper studies (which are hard).

as it happens to be, it turns out that we have even more research telling us that the eating actually does have a cancer risk attached to it, which has the effect of minimizing the importance attached to eating any one specific thing. we can work this out with a basic syllogism.

1. obesity causes cancer. that is clear.
2. if you are obese, then you have a large amount of food in your diet.
3. meat is food.
4. so, if you are obese, you probably have a large amount of meat in your diet.
5. therefore, high meat consumption is correlated with cancer risk, even though the cause of the disease is over-eating, in general.

if you're concerned about your health, worry less about the what and more about the amount.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27909900

to clarify a point though.

i buy around 300 grams of salami/month, usually a little less. i get them cut very, very thin and slice them up in the spaghetti; i'll take 8 slices, microwave them to kill the listeria, and then cut them up and sprinkle them over it. but, i only eat half of the plate, then put it back for the next day. if each slice is 1-2 grams in weight, that's going to be around 4-8 grams a day, on average.

the studies put down 50 g a day as the point where a (questionable) risk develops, which i couldn't even fathom. with amounts that high, the problem is fundamentally over-eating, and you're going to get stuff like diabetes and heart disease simply from being overweight - which is the actual cause of virtually everything.

i wish that posting this was tearing down a strawman.

sadly, i suspect i'm more on point than i ought to be.

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/7/25/16018658/what-the-health-documentary-review-vegan-diet

do your own research.

don't let the government think for you.

it is true that you don't want to eat meat three times a day.

but, it's also true that you don't want to drink wine at every meal.

so, you want to tone it down a little, yes. but, there is really almost no actual evidence that moderate meat consumption is bad for you at all.

sorry.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25941850

the thing you need to be concerned about is total caloric intake, not the source of the calories.

it's not what you eat, it's how much you eat.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/healthbeat/whats-the-beef-with-red-meat

did you know that the average height in india is almost a foot shorter than the average height in most of europe?

do you know why that is?

it's not genetic. we know that.

it's because the culture creates systemic malnourishment: it's not merely poverty, it's a culture that creates an inadequate diet for people to develop properly.

if you're an adult, you can make your own choices, and nobody is going to care if you malnourish yourself.

but, make sure you get your kids milk.

and, make sure you get them meat, too.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/plant-based-milks-for-kids-pediatricians-dietitians-1.4392857

and, no, i'm not going to get into an argument with some anti-science hippie that thinks milk causes heart disease.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/dairy-health-food-or-health-risk-2019012515849

well, if 55% of the immigrants are economic migrants - meaning that 45% are refugees - and ~ half of them are dependents or spouses then it would actually follow that 45 + 55/2 = 72.5% are dependents or spouses.

one would expect that a dependent is either a child, a retired person or somebody that is otherwise unable to work, as that is what it would mean to be a dependent. and, while we consider it normal for spouses to work in canada, that is definitely not the assumption that a large percentage of immigrants are bringing in with them, and this is well understood by immigration authorities.

the article didn't present any data, and i can't be bothered to look for it. but, if we nonetheless allow for some level of two-income families in the immigrant population, what does that reduce the number to? 65%? 60%? does that change the point?

i'm not going to address the question of whether "immigrants" make more or less money than native-born canadians, as that is a policy question. that is, that is determined by the people crafting the policy, rather than something to be measured in the wild. we don't just randomly let people in, we have a very detailed screening process designed to create a certain outcome. direct empirical measurements of this question would have the effect of determining if the policy is working or not, granted, but it's not something we're trying to figure out from first principles by measuring a natural phenomenon in the environment. and, given that canada's immigration system does in fact prioritize people with higher levels of education, you would expect that recent "immigrants", as a broad category, would have higher levels of income, on average, once they've established themselves - because that's how we designed the system. if that was not the case, we'd have a serious policy failure on our hands. and, trump loves that, by the way, it's what he's trying to emulate. on the other hand, you would also expect that certain classes of unskilled labourers would have much lower incomes, as they were brought here for that reason. a serious and worthwhile discussion of the topic would need to be very specific about these kinds of things, and not just talk about "immigrants" as a monolith, but neither maxim bernier nor jonathan gatehouse want to have a serious or worthwhile discussion about the topic, they just want to sling nonsense back and forth at each other. the tldr is that there is no class analysis here, and that's what is really necessary to get to the point of the matter.

i just want to address another point, though:

Last winter, Statistics Canada published a detailed report on labour trends among immigrants that found immigrants were responsible for two-thirds of all national employment gains in 2016-17.

the labour market is going to consist, broadly, of three types of people: young people, immigrants and people that have been fired or laid off. when you have high immigration levels, they're going to become the dominant force in the labour market. so, to point out that they're responsible for most of the gains is a tautological truth - it's a consequence of the high immigration rate.

verdict: gatehouse's article is badly written and highly misleading.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/bernier-immigrants-fact-check-1.5225422

i'm more interested in the comments here than the article.

it seems like a few other people experienced something similar and have come here to relate it. there are commonalities, here: physical exertion, tiredness, not much to eat and in most cases a small amount of alcohol. without doing empirical tests, it's impossible to know what the actual triggers are in each scenario, or whether the triggers here are the same in all the circumstances. but, the basic lesson seems to be that some people can have some pretty violent reactions to pot if they take it when their body is tired or exhausted, for whatever reason.

i take yearly blood sugar tests and have never demonstrated any signs of diabetes. i eat a fair amount of fruit and carbs, but very little refined sugar. there's no evidence that this would be of any concern to me.

i have very low blood pressure, and think this might be more of the root cause of it, but, again, i didn't have any equipment to test me with at the time. my blood pressure was normal - low, but normal - when i went in for observation in the morning.

again: i hadn't eaten since the morning, i'd done a lot of bicycling and i had had one tall beer. the pot was the trigger, but the cause was some combination of those other three things, as it was with these other people.

https://sensiseeds.com/en/blog/what-happens-when-you-white-out-on-cannabis/