Be Less Boring

Those of you who know me may be quite surprised at the title quote (from Bruce Bartlett) of this post. It is the truth, however.

I've found myself becoming increasingly disturbed over the past several years by the behavior of the Republican party. They once had great leaders like Ronald Reagan, John Sununu, and Mel Thompson, now they've got the bad joke that is Sarah Palin.

Republicans today are hypocrites condemning Democrats for passing fully funded health care reform while conveniently forgetting their own massive and unfunded expansion of Medicare. They're anti-anything suggested by a Democrat and are unwilling to compromise in any meaningful way.

What's worse, the Democrats, even with their majority, don't have the balls to fight the good fight to make the big, meaningful changes they needed to while they have the power-play. Obama was elected with a mandate that will largely go unfulfilled unless the Democrats grow a pair.

Ah, but I'll let Bruce Bartlett tell you about it. He was senior policy analyst in the Reagan White House and deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department during the first Bush administration. In other words, he was in tight with the real Republicans when they were doing things like bringing the Cold War to an abrupt end.

I don't at all agree with him that a VAT tax is inevitable or even desirable, but most everything else he says is spot-on.

In short, the Republicans have turned into a party of asshats and the Democrats are too afraid of taking on big business to do anything at all. As a result, we, the People, are getting screwed. The Middle Class is well on its way to extinction.

If they don't get their acts together soon, they may find themselves facing the fate of King Louis XVI and Czar Nicholas II.

This just in: Rocks are dangerous! They are too dangerous for school-kids to handle, so now children will have to learn all about rocks from a poster. One wonders if the Home-Ec students will have to learn about sewing and cooking from posters, too, because those needles are sharp and you could smash someone's lights out with a frying pan. I know this because I saw it on TV. You can't be too safe with America's youth!

Given that I grew up in New Hampshire, the Granite State, where I climbed over stone walls, crawled under, over, and around glacial erratics, and hiked some of the rockiest trails in the world, I'm lucky to be alive. If only I'd known how dangerous all those rocks were, I'd have stayed home. In front of the TV. Where it's safe. And probably vented my excess energy, assuming I had any after living such a sedentary existence, by playing violent video games. In the womb-like safety of my living room.

There's a small breath of common sense in this Forbes article by Lenore Skenazy that points out the ridiculous lengths we've gone in the name of safety and the depths of paranoia we've sunk to.

Ah, but clearly Skenazy is one crazy woman. After all, her blog is called Free Range Kids and she--get this--lets her kids walk to school. By themselves! Without an armed escort!

Clearly someone should lock her up for child abuse! Right after they pin a medal on her for being brave enough to let her kids be kids. They'll get hurt. They'll learn. They'll be better citizens, better parents, and better workers, as a result.

Heck, I'm so concerned about the danger of rocks that I think I'll go home and burn all of my Rolling Stones CDs tonight. Toxic fumes be damned, those things are an accident waiting to happen!

If this is true, I need to give up writing because Dan Brown is a horrible writer.

There's an awful lot of talk about the Gulf Oil spill and plenty of people running around like chickens with their heads cut off shouting about how this will destroy the environment of the Gulf for generations to come. Well, maybe, but history suggests not.

The fact that most people have completely forgotten there was a nearly identical disaster in the gulf back in 1979 suggests that the long-term effects will be pretty minimal. Granted, Wikipedia isn't always the most reliable of sources, but in this case, it cites several sources regarding the results of the 1979 Ixtoc oil spill that dumped 3.3 million gallons of oil into the gulf. Regarding the long-term effects, Wikipedia says, "...After the cleanup, the beach fauna or beach populations were back to where they were before the spill within two to three years. After 6 years, it was difficult to find any evidence of oil." That bodes well for the likely outcome of this spill.

What doesn't sit well, however, is that after 31 years, the technology to contain, manage, and stop a spill hasn't improved one iota. This MSNBC story points out the almost comical similarities between the methods they tried to stop the spill in 1979 and 2010. The TV news agencies could save a lot of money this time around by simply re-broadcasting their reports from 31 years ago.

If offshore drilling is to continue, the government needs to mandate that new, effective methods of containment, prevention, and control be implemented. Otherwise we might as well go back to harpooning whales for oil because they're all going to die anyway.

Yeah, that low-fat, high-carb diet you've been following for oh, thirty years or so... Well, it's killing you.

This two-part video presentation explains in fairly simple terms how the modern food pyramid is horribly wrong, how there's absolutely no correlation between high-cholesterol and heart disease, and how more traditional diets full of fat are better for you than the high-carb nonsense that's been foisted on us for the past few decades.

I have high cholesterol and I don't care (Part I)
I have high cholesterol and I don't care (Part II)

Go find your grandmother or great grendmother's recipe box and learn to cook what she did. It'll be much better for you than the modern concoctions your mother fed you. It wasn't her fault, she was doing what the government recommended, she just didn't realize the government has been corrupted by big business and bad science.

While we're on the topic of local food and local farmers, you can help support local food and your right to choose between big agribusiness and small neighborhood farms by signing this petition.

What if everything you wanted to do was illegal?  I'm not talking about lighting cats on fire, selling heroin to six year olds, or bankrupting the country by leveraging your too-big-to-fail company with bad credit default swaps.  No, I'm talking about simple things like hiring your neighbor's teenager to mow your lawn or buying some sausage from the friendly farmer down the street that you've known for 20 years.   That's not illegal, right?  Well, you might be surprised.

If you've seen the documentary Food, Inc. or read Michael Pollan's excellent books, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, then you've no doubt heard of Virginia resident and self proclaimed "lunatic farmer," Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm.  He wrote his own book (one of many he's written) describing many of the run-ins he's had with state and federal beaurocrats who want to shut him down for selling healthy, grass-fed beef and pastured poultry to people who are willing to drive hundreds of miles to his farm to buy it.

The book is Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories From the Local Food Front and I personally think everyone should read it.

If Joel Salatin is a lunatic, then so am I.  I found myself agreeing with at least 95% of his ideas and I wish he lived around here because I want to be one of his customers. 

He has something to say about nearly everything from the USDA, the FSIS (Food Safety Inspection Service), Land Grant Colleges, CAFOs, child labor laws, drug laws, agribusiness and factory farms, liberals, conservatives, zoning restrictions, building codes, taxes, government subsidies to farmers, illegal immigrants desegregation, and avian flu, just to name a few.  He tells about how one government inspector wrote him a letter of commendation for running an outstanding operation, the next tried to shut him down for being "non-compliant."  The only difference between what Joel was doing between those two incidents was the inspector, himself.  After a year or so of legal wrangling and great expense on both sides, Salatin was allowed to keep doing what he's doing, raising pastured poultry and slaughtering and packaging the animals for sale himself.

The book is full of stories like that from his decades as a farmer.  Some of the incidents are so ridiculous they'll have you rolling on the floor laughing.  Others are so infuriating that your blood will no doubt boil at the arrogance, stupidity, and downright foolishness coming from Washington, D.C.  No, really, it's much worse than you think.

Salatin's book is very personal, folksy, but very well written.  He's ever the polite southern gentleman but he doesn't mince words.  There's no love lost between Salatin and the government inspectors he has to avoid, evade, outsmart, or cow to just to stay in business.  He repeatedly points out how the rules are stacked against the small farmer and small business in favor of large multinational corporations. Even in cases where the rules should control big corporations--such as with their flagrant hiring of illegal immigrants--they have so many lawyers and corporate lobbyists that they can keep the government tied up with lawsuits for years, if the inspectors even bother to make a case.

If you enjoyed the aforementioned Michael Pollan books, take the next step and read a book by someone who has been in the trenches of the Local Food movement for nearly 50 years.   Maybe it won't convince you, but it will certainly give you a lot to think about.  It's an eye-opener.

You may be familiar with the Twitter feed ShitMyDadSays, afterall, it's got 1.3 million followers, including me.  It's about things a 29 year old guy's 74 year old dad says to him.  It has been turned into a book and will soon be a sitcom staring William Shatner as the dad.  On CBS.  Um...

Right.  I could see it working on HBO or something where there are few restrictions on what one can say and do, but on regular network TV there are too many rules against profanity.  Without the profanity to punctuate the statements, it becomes little more than an Archie Bunker parody.  There was only room for one Archie Bunker in the world and his time came and went a long time ago.

For those of you with more of a sci-fi bent, there is ShitMyDarthSays, but I haven't heard of any plans to turn it into a book or TV show.

...and thanks for all the great songs!   New Hampshire born singer, Ronnie James Dio, is dead at age 67.  He was born in the old Portsmouth Hospital.

Let's just end the myth about saturated fats once and for all, shall we?  All that crap the government and the corn/canola/flaxseed/peanut oil lobbies have been spewing for years about how saturated fat is going to kill us all with heart disease is completely and totally WRONG!

The Independent as a nice summary article that quotes from a new scientific study published in the much heralded American Journal of Clinical Nutrition which concludes that Dr. Atkins was definitely on the right track.

That's right, the fat in your juicy steak and the lard that made the doughnuts I remember as a kid so much yummier than anything on the market today is not the enemy.   Quite the opposite, in fact, as the carbohydrates and sugars we've all be substituting for fat in our diets for the past 30 or so years does increase the risks of heart disease  and diabetes.  Oh, but why take my word for it:

The latest witness for the defence is a meta-analysis (a study combining the results of other studies) published in March that found: “There is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD or CVD.” It’s very legit, published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, and big – involving 21 studies and nearly 350,000 patients.

What’s more, the authors point out, replacing saturated fat in the diet with more carbohydrates, especially refined carbs, makes all the risk factors for heart disease and diabetes worse.

Start frying the doughnuts and french fries in lard again and let your kids taste how great food used to be.   Give me an extra slice or two of bacon and bring on the juicy steaks and ribs.   Hold the rolls, please.

I'm not saying you should give up your leafy greens or that apple-a-day that purports to keep the doctor away, but they sure would go good with a side of pork chops, wouldn't they?