Eating the right foods, that is, and in moderation, etc.:

Close to 107 million U.S. adults have cholesterol levels of 200 mg/dL or higher, a level that the American Heart Association says increases the risk of heart disease and stroke. At least 12 million of these people are taking statin drugs to lower their cholesterol levels, but there are more natural options out there.

According to the American Heart Association, “You can reduce cholesterol in your blood by eating healthful foods, losing weight if you need to and exercising.” What follows is a listing of the most potent foods to add to your diet if you want to fight high cholesterol and drive your levels down using your diet as a primary tool.

1. Shiitake Mushrooms: The active component in shiitake mushrooms—eritadenine—has been found to lower cholesterol levels in animal studies. The more eritadenine the animals received, the more their cholesterol levels dropped.

2. Walnuts: A study in the April 2004 issue of Circulation found that when walnuts were substituted for about one-third of the calories supplied by olives and other monounsaturated fats in the Mediterranean diet, total cholesterol and LDL (bad) cholesterol were reduced. Walnuts contain the beneficial omega-3 fatty acids, which are known to be excellent for the heart.

3. Uncooked Soy: A new study found that eating two servings of soy protein a day can lower cholesterol by up to 9 percent—but it must be uncooked to have benefit. “Soy protein increases the activity of low-density lipoprotein receptors primarily on the liver that clears it from the body. Eating soy protein increases the activity of these enzymes that break down the cholesterol,” said study author James Anderson, a scientist at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

Good soy sources would be edamame or soy nuts. “Soy-fortified muffins, cereals or nutritional bars in which the soy protein was baked at high temperatures do not provide the benefit,” Anderson said.

4. Blueberries: Researchers with the U.S. Department of Agriculture have identified an antioxidant in blueberries called pterostilbene (it’s similar to resveratrol, the antioxidant found in grapes and red wine). This compound has effectively lowered cholesterol levels in animal studies.

5. Salmon: This fish is a particularly good source of omega-3 fatty acids, which are known to lower LDL cholesterol while raising the good (HDL) kind.

6. Garlic: Numerous studies have demonstrated that eating garlic regularly reduces LDL cholesterol and raises HDL levels.

7. Avocado: Avocados are rich in oleic acid, a monounsaturated fat known to help lower cholesterol. In fact, one study found that people with moderately high cholesterol levels who ate a diet high in avocados for one week had significant drops in total and LDL cholesterol levels, and an 11 percent increase in the good HDL cholesterol.

8. Black Beans: Black beans and other legumes are high in dietary fiber, which is an excellent cholesterol fighter.

9. Apples: Rich in both pectin and fiber, along with powerful antioxidants, including quercetin, catechin, phloridzin, and chlorogenic acid, apples help lower bad cholesterol while raising the good kind.

10. Dark Green, Leafy Vegetables: According to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute’s Family Heart Study, participants who ate four or more servings of fruits and vegetables a day had significantly lower levels of LDL cholesterol than those who ate fewer servings. Among the most powerful veggies are the dark green, leafy variety, such as spinach, kale, collard greens and Swiss chard.

A beautiful photograph of the comet over Krakow. And just using that phrase reminded me of the thoroughly enjoyable fable, The Trumpeter of Krakow, by Eric Kelly—a book worth reading.

First to go was brains. Then mountain oysters (testicles). Then sweetbreads became hard to find. And now, in talking to the butcher today: no spleen. Used to get, doesn’t any more.

Jerralyn Merritt has a good post on Stimson, and one of the commenters notes:

This Stimson is a lawyer? Where do these “lawyers” … come from? Did they get their law degrees by sending in matchbook covers? Because they certainly don’t seem to know much law.

As an example, in a first year class called “torts,” everyone with whom I went to law school learned about intentional interference with monetary advantage, a civil wrong just like assault or fraud. Its essence is, in the words of the old Chinese proverb, in trying to break someone else’s rice bowl.

When he named the firms in public discourse, in the context in which it was done, Mr. Stimson went as far as he needed to; all that is necessary now is for one of the law firms he named to lose one client because of Stimson’s statement.

Then he will be liable, and given the kind of clients at whom the remarks were aimed, he will be liable for quite a lot of money.

If the depositions reveal actual malice, which I think is likely, he could be on the hook for punitive damages as well.

That should be kind of fun to watch.

From Bloomberg. And notice how one incompetent will quickly bring in others so they won’t feel so alone?

World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz faces mounting criticism from directors of the international lending organization who say he relies on a coterie of political advisers with little expertise in development while driving away seasoned managers.

Half of the bank’s 29 highest-level executives have departed since Wolfowitz, the former U.S. deputy Defense secretary and an architect of President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, took office in June 2005. Among them is Christiaan Poortman, vice president for the Middle East and a 30-year World Bank veteran, who left in September after resisting pressure to speed up the pace of lending and adding staff in Iraq.

“It was very sad to see someone of Mr. Poortman’s caliber leaving,” Eckhard Deutscher, one of 24 executive directors who oversee the management of the Washington-based lender, said in an interview. “The bank needs to be very careful not to lose too much of its human capital.”

The exodus is damaging the world’s leading poverty-fighting institution, which provided $23.6 billion last year for projects such as schools and clinics, say directors and outside observers.

Three directors, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they are concerned governments might be less willing to contribute because of unhappiness with Wolfowitz.

The only other World Bank chief to sweep aside as many senior managers was Wolfowitz’s predecessor, James Wolfensohn, said Devesh Kapur, a former economist at the lender and author of The World Bank: Its First Half Century. The difference, he said, is that Wolfowitz’s appointees are short on expertise and long on political connections.

New faces include counselor to the president Robin Cleveland, who as associate director of the White House Office of Management and Budget helped secure congressional funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Kevin Kellems, a former spokesman for Vice President Dick Cheney, was named director of external strategy. Suzanne Rich Folsom, a lawyer who joined in 2003 and is the bank’s chief corruption-fighter, is married to George Folsom, who was principal deputy director of the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office and served as president of the International Republican Institute.

Wolfowitz, 62, “has placed considerably more trust in a small group of outsiders from the Republican Party than in the seasoned experts in the bank,” said Alison Cave, head of the World Bank staff association, which represents more than 13,000 employees.

“The changes under Wolfowitz are unprecedented in the calculated manner in which inexperienced or ideological replacements are being placed in senior positions,” said Kapur, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

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Read his post today—and follow the links, especially to the NPR piece. It’s particularly interesting because it’s about a true-believer Conservative having the scales fall from his eyes:

As President Bush marched the country to war with Iraq, even some voices on the Right warned that this was a fool’s errand. I dismissed them angrily. I thought them unpatriotic.

But almost four years later, I see that I was the fool.

In Iraq, this Republican President for whom I voted twice has shamed our country with weakness and incompetence, and the consequences of his failure will be far, far worse than anything Carter did.

The fraud, the mendacity, the utter haplessness of our government’s conduct of the Iraq war have been shattering to me.

It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. Not under a Republican President.

I turn 40 next month — middle aged at last — a time of discovering limits, finitude. I expected that. But what I did not expect was to see the limits of finitude of American power revealed so painfully.

I did not expect Vietnam.

As I sat in my office last night watching President Bush deliver his big speech, I seethed over the waste, the folly, the stupidity of this war.

I had a heretical thought for a conservative — that I have got to teach my kids that they must never, ever take Presidents and Generals at their word — that their government will send them to kill and die for noble-sounding rot — that they have to question authority.

On the walk to the parking garage, it hit me. Hadn’t the hippies tried to tell my generation that? Why had we scorned them so blithely?

Will my children, too small now to understand Iraq, take me seriously when I tell them one day what powerful men, whom their father once believed in, did to this country? Heavy thoughts for someone who is still a conservative despite it all. It was a long drive home.

Dahlia Lithwick makes a good case that the reason for many of Bush’s decisions is “expanding executive power, for its own sake.”

She quotes various reputable sources, giving details, and the overarching goal that drives the Bush Administration’s actions: “A single-minded devotion to something called the New Paradigm, a constitutional theory of virtually limitless executive power, wherein ‘the President, as Commander-in-Chief, has the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries, if national security demands it.’”

You better read this article. It describes a chilling future for the US.

Man, the Bush Administration’s incompetence is astounding. Read this post. An excerpt:

FEMA was unable to fully support the accuracy and completeness of certain unpaid obligations, and accounts payable, and the related effects on net position, if any, prior to the completion of DHS’s 2006 PAR. These unpaid obligations, as reported in the accompanying DHS balance sheet as of September 30, 2006, were $22.3 Billion or 46% of DHS consolidated unexpended appropriations at September 30, 2006. [emphasis mine]

To give some idea of proportionality, in fiscal year 2005 the entire Grants and Training (formerly know as State and Local Government Preparedness, a/k/a grants to get working radios for NYC firemen and protection for bridges, tunnels, chemical plants and nuclear facilities) was only $171 million.

So, follow me here, FEMA has lost and/or failed to account for a sum of money that is almost half of DHS’s entire budget and 130 times greater than the amount of money that the Department of Homeland Security is willing to spend to secure the homeland. …

I heard a story once, that at the time of Katrina, representatives of AIPSIG, the association of independent counsels, auditors, and investigators (the folks who do monitorships and come in to augment IG offices) went to see Mike Chertoff and handed him information on how the services of such entities had been used so successfully at Ground Zero together with a plan for how they could be implemented in Katrina devastated areas. The story goes that he thanked them, said the decision would be made in the Counsel’s Office and directed them to the person in the counsel’s office who would be handling the matter, Dick Cheney’s son-in-law. Now there’s a guy with incentive to make sure Halliburton doesn’t overcharge us, yes sirree.

The condemnation for an action like the following will be swift and enduring, I suspect. President Bush is in the process of creating a monster: the US—the country that kills and lies.

The herdsmen had gathered with their animals around large fires at night to ward off mosquitoes. But lit up by the flames, they became latest victims of America’s war on terror.

It was their tragedy to be misidentified in a secret operation by special forces attempting to kill three top al-Qa’ida leaders in southern Somalia.

Oxfam yesterday confirmed at least 70 nomads in the Afmadow district near the border with Kenya had been killed. The nomads were bombed at night and during the day while searching for water sources. Meanwhile, the US ambassador to Kenya has acknowledged that the onslaught on Islamist fighters failed to kill any of the three prime targets wanted for their alleged role in the 1998 US embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.

The wanted men are Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan and Abu Taha al-Sudani, who were all supposedly sheltered by the Union of Islamic Courts during its short reign in Mogadishu.

The operation, which opened a new front in Washington’s anti-terror campaign, seems to have backfired spectacularly in the five days since it was launched. In addition to the scores of Somali civilians killed, the simmering civil war in the failed state has been rekindled.

Yesterday concern was mounting at the high number of civilian casualties, despite a claim by the US ambassador, Michael Ranneberger, that no civilians had been killed or injured and that only one attack had taken place. The UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, reported that an estimated 100 people were wounded in Monday’s air strikes on the small fishing village of Ras Kamboni launched from the US military base in Djibouti after a mobile phone intercept.

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The GOP lost. Enjoyable viewing.

Atkinson’s in Vancouver has a very nice line of Plisson brushes on sale, including the coveted High Mountain White. Prices shown are Canadian dollars. As a public service, here is a translation from the Plisson sizes to mm. My favored size these days is a 22mm knot with a loft of around 55 mm. So for me, the size 12 would be just right. YMMV.

Good article on one artist’s absorption with the tetrahedron, a form that he’s been using in various ways and shapes for 30 years. His tetrahedron-based sculptures survived Hurricane Katrinaa. Photos at the link.

All is well after the car accident. The Wife got to work, though late, and our having only one car is of no moment. $7200 to repair. Parts ordered.

Exceptionally pleasant shave: a previously unused Schick Injector Dial (i.e., adjustable) on its lowest setting, a new Ted Pella Teflon-coated blade, the QED shaving stick with the Blade and Badger fragrance, and the Plisson brush. Three passes, very clean shave, no nicks. Finished with alum bar and Pinaud’s Vanilla aftershave.

Weight is 226.6, bringing me to a total of 10 lbs lost and exactly on the money at 2 lbs/week. I want to keep it there, and the best way seems to be continue with the 1500-1600 calories per day with one day a week venturing into the 1700-1800 calorie range. Trying to titrate the calories to hit 2 lbs/week exactly is very like a game. The restriction is that I must still maintain the fat-carb-protein balance I selected and at least 35g of fiber daily.

Megs seems suddenly to have returned to sleeping on me at night. She still wants her 3:00 a.m. petting session with belly rub, but then she settles down and, if I move, simply adjusts to a new position.