Anti-Food Safety

 Regulation  No Responses »
Apr 022009
 

I just now decided that I’m 100 percent opposed to Food Safety. Safe, healthy food I like. I even think there is a role for government in food safety. Having such a thing as a Food Safety Institute at the W.K. Kellogg Company in Battle Creek could be a good thing, too. But not when the organization that’s directing it is “an international, non-profit organization that works to develop uniform laws, regulations, and guidelines in the food safety industry.”

It’s that part about uniform laws and regulations that gets me. Uniform laws and regulations are a time-honored method to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Uniform bank regulations across state lines are what enabled a few big banks to gobble up the smaller ones and become too big to fail, leading to financial meltdown and the destruction of our political system.

Uniform laws and regulations are going to kill local food markets and producers in favor of big ones who will be able to maneuver the political and technical intricacies of compliance. The giant conglomerates tend to be annoyed by the fact that Minnesota has different regulations than Kansas. But local regulations mean there are local openings for local food-competitors in Minnesota and Kansas that the big guys would like to eliminate. Under uniform regulations, on the other hand, those who can achieve economies of scale will be the winners who take all.

Maybe Round One of new regulations isn’t going to outlaw the Amish roadside baked-goods sellers that I occasionally patronize on my bike rides in Indiana and Ohio. But eventually they will. It’s a process that has already started.

I suppose the big guys will want to act quickly on this, before too many people catch on to what’s happening to us. And there is a growing awareness. Note the article by Caleb Stegal titled “I Did Taste” at Front Porch Republic:

A few weeks ago I attended a meeting of Kansas secessionists. The participants were rowdy, complaining of economic gigantism squashing them flat and bureaucratic thugs hounding their every move. They were all sick and tired of worker-ant existence in the hive-mind of American groupthink and they wanted out. Despite the quintessentially political nature of the gathering, politics proper never came up. Conservative and liberal meant nothing in that room, and party affiliation even less.

Kansas patriots fomenting disunion? No, though there are a few of those kicking around these parts. These were local farmers organizing a farmer’s market.

It’s people like this that uniform laws and regulations will squash like a bug. And it’s not a bug that would theaten your food safety.

BTW, here’s the best one-liner from the Caleb Stegal article: “Food rots. If it doesn’t rot, it’s not food.”

Place. Limits. Liberty.

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Apr 022009
 

Wow! This may be the best blog discovery of the year: Front Porch Republic. I found it while looking for articles about NCAA basketball and Tom Izzo, of all things.

The subheadline of this blog is “Place. Limits. Liberty.” Where else do you go to find those three words linked together like that? The “About” page has this paragraph to explain itself:

The economic crisis that emerged in late 2008 and the predictable responses it elicited from those in power has served to highlight the extent to which concepts such as human scale, the distribution of power, and our responsibility to the future have been eliminated from the public conversation. It also threatens to worsen the political and economic centralization and atomization that have accompanied the century-long unholy marriage between consumer capitalism and the modern bureaucratic state. We live in a world characterized by a flattened culture and increasingly meaningless freedoms. Little regard is paid to the necessity for those overlapping local and regional groups, communities, and associations that provide a matrix for human flourishing. We’re in a bad way, and the spokesmen and spokeswomen of both our Left and our Right are, for the most part, seriously misguided in their attempts to provide diagnoses, let alone solutions.

I was tempted to highlight the words and phrases in that paragraph that push all the right buttons for me, but that would be most of them. I especially like that it links social and political issues to “Place.” That emphasis tempted me to rave about it over at The Spokesrider instead of here.

The only name I recognize in the list of contributing editors and editors-at-large is Rod Dreher — and that’s not someone I’ve paid much attention to.

An article by James Matthew Wilson titled, “Sex, Technocrats, and Technobrats,” suggests that maybe somebody besides myself has actually read Pope Benedict’s Regensburg address. I don’t ordinarily pay much attention to pope-talk, but I’ve read that speech in translation, and have since been amazed at all of the pope’s supporters and enemies who talk as though they’ve read it or heard it but have not. They may have read about it in the newspapers, but they haven’t read what he had to say.

According to this article, the pope has gotten a lot better reception in Africa than on Facebook.

Well, there are probably a lot of other blogs where I can read about pope-things. But this blog ties all these issues to place. If it continues to do that, it’s going to be a keeper.

The NYT on Goran Suton

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Apr 012009
 

It’s good to see that there is still some redeeming social value to the New York Times. Lots of newspapers and lots of bloggers have written lots of words about Goran Suton after he was named the Midwest Regional’s Most Outstanding Player in leading the MSU Spartans to the Final Four. Many of them have told how his family came to Lansing from war-torn Bosnia. But none of them except the NYT snagged a photo of Goran and his brother playing basketball outside their home near Sarajevo, and none of them told how their grandfather chased errant balls for them so they wouldn’t be the ones to risk getting blown up by land mines.

The article is written by Joe Lapointe and is titled, “A game of survival.”

What’s good for Obamamobiles is good for America

 Bailouts  No Responses »
Apr 012009
 

It has been a couple hundred years since we last had a Renaissance man as president. But now we have someone who not only can run a successful election campaign, but whose uncanny eye for tax evaders to run his administration is not in the least diminished by his ability to simultaneously run a multinational manufacturing conglomerate and fill out his NCAA men’s basketball bracket.

It’s not all roses and sunshine, of course. There is a lot of whining about the way he’s taken over an automotive manufacturing company. But the chronic naysayers overlook the fact that this isn’t the first time a government has run a car company. Think of vehicles like the Lada Oka for the proletariat and the Volga GAZ for the nomenklatura. Those were not the products of free-market capitalism.

And despite their occasional defects those vehicles had a huge social benefit: No TV advertising. No Howie Long interrupting the NCAA basketball games to make fun of Ford’s “man-step” and of truck owners who wear dorky clothes.

True, when you see Howie Long doing his sales pitches, you now are watching your tax dollars at work. But certainly the same president who decided the bailout recipients should give back their bonuses is going to make sure that government-subsidized shills on TV should give back, too, won’t he? Why should that money go to celebrities and advertising executivies, when it could instead go straight into UAW wages and UAW campaign contributions? The same president who decided Rick Wagoner needed to step down will certainly be able to get Howie to shut up before the Final Four starts this weekend. Like I said, a huge social benefit.

Regime change at GM

 Bailouts, Health care reform  No Responses »
Mar 302009
 

I see that President Obama has decided to impose regime change on General Motors. He is overthrowing the government of GM and is going to replace it, with, well, who knows?

I hope he is better at picking people to head a giant multinational corporation than he is at picking people to run the Treasury Department. Like maybe he’ll be able to find somebody who can at least do TurboTax.

Unless he proves to be very good at running an auto company, I presume this move will cool the ardor of people for a bailout of our health care system. (It’s the concept usually referred to as universal health care.) Our President seems to take the position that providing money means he gets to call the shots. Actually, most people who provide money in any context will take that position, but he’s considerably less subtle about it than most. Will he insist on regime change in unhealthy households. Will he pick replacement spouses where needed? Will he insist on picking the fetuses that are allowed to come off the production line?

I presume he’s not going to be a completely hands-on executive at GM, and that he will let others call the day-to-day shots except in cases where there is some political advantage to be had by intervening directly. But how is he going to decide who gets to make these day-to-day decisions. Aside from TurboTax skills, what will he look for in a job applicant? Is he likely to allow a critic of the administration to run the company? Will loyalty to the administration be a factor?

There are the same dangers as when the United States helped overthrow the governments of Vietnam, or Iran, or any other country. The guys he puts in place are then his responsibility. If he allows a tinhorn dictator to come to power, that person becomes Obama’s tinhorn dictator.

And what are the other auto companies going to do now that one of their main competitors is now the United States government? Where do they go to find a government that will ensure that they all play by the same rules, now that Obama administration has a vested interest in the success of its protege?

[Now posted at the Conservative community on LiveJournal, too.]

A larger customer base for Camp Guantanamo

 Abuse of power  No Responses »
Mar 252009
 

This is ominous news for The Reticulator, who predicts he’ll end up in one of Hillary’s internment camps but hopes he’s wrong.

George W. Bush asserted the right to put “enemy combatants” in detention camps without even charging them with a crime.

That was quite a power grab on his part, but now Barak Obama has gone him one step better. He asserts the right to put people in camps even if they aren’t enemy combatants. A lot more people will fit his definition of who can be locked up than fit GWB’s definition.

From the World Socialist Web Site:

Importantly, the filing asserts that the president has the right to continue to seize individuals it deems to be members or “substantial” supporters of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. It does not define what is meant by “substantial,” but suggests that the executive branch alone will determine what constitutes membership in, or support of, these organizations. The New York Times called this definition “not significantly different from the one used by the Bush administration.”

The administration asserts its right to interpret ambiguously even its own vague description of those to be seized. According to the Justice Department, “the particular facts and circumstances justifying detention will vary from case to case.” US Attorney General Eric Holder indicated that the legal status of the inmates will remain in limbo, referring in a statement to “developing a new policy to govern detainees.”

Fact-checking the White House

 Health care reform  No Responses »
Mar 252009
 

While looking for something else on the White House web site, I found the following:

On health care reform, the American people are too often offered two extremes — government-run health care with higher taxes or letting the insurance companies operate without rules.

Part of that is true. I’ve heard many people propose higher taxes for government-run health care. But I’ve never, ever heard anyone, not even the laissez-faire libertarians, suggest that we allow insurance companies to operate without rules. Maybe someone, somewhere, in a dorm room littered with pizza and beer bottles, has come up with that idea. But it’s simply not true that this is one of the extremes that are offered to the American people.

Health insurance is already highly regulated. That doesn’t mean improvements couldn’t be made in the regulatory system. But it’s hard to have a good national discussion about this when the discussion leader starts off with nonsense.

Medical TV

 Health care reform, NOTVIPP  1 Response »
Mar 242009
 

gruztv

My crusade to outlaw television in public places is not going very well — certainly not as well as other crusaders’ measures to outlaw smoking.

I figured it would probably be an issue when I took my wife in for outpatient surgery this morning. But I’ve been able to deal with it in the past. I usually complain politely, or just find a place where I can turn off an offending television and wait in relative quiet. Last time I was hospitalized myself I made my opinions known, and got paired with a roommate who was willing to leave the thing off. A big HMO-type dentist place I used to go to wasn’t so bad — the large waiting room was divided into two parts, TV and non-TV. It was somewhat like restaurants that have both non-smoking and smoking sections; some noise still ended up in the non-TV section. But it was tolerable.

Last time my wife was hospitalized, she was paired with a roommate who refused to turn the thing off. My wife couldn’t get any rest. The thing was so loud her physician couldn’t talk to her. The roommate refused the physician’s requests to turn the thing down; which led to my wife getting moved to a private room.

Anyhow, this morning we ended up in a new, improved waiting room. But now there are even more televisions, not fewer. Big, flat-screen television screens were everywhere. There was no getting away from them. After my wife was taken to surgery prep, I tried all corners of the room, but couldn’t get away from the sounds of idiocy coming from CNN or whatever was on. Finally I found a chair in a location that was a little less bad. I sat and held my hands over my ears while I read Anna Lawton’s book, “Kinoglasnost”. Just cupping the hands over the ears doesn’t quite work, but I can block out the sounds well enough by pushing on the tragus (I think that’s the term) — not just holding it still but pressing on it repeatedly and continuously. I had to take my hands off to turn the pages, but occasional blasts of noise like that are tolerable.

I tried to resume that routine after my wife went to surgery, but finally my arms got tired, and I asked the person at the desk if there was any place to get away from the televisions. I didn’t want to get so far away that I wouldn’t be around when the surgeon came out to talk to me; finally, I decided to just stand in the hallway outside the waiting room and read. If I can walk around a little, and if I stand straight, I can stand up and read for long periods, like I did once outside a jury assembly room. That worked OK, and a person at the desk came and got me when the surgeon came. (My wife’s surgery went very well — we are thankful for that. Maybe they don’t have television blaring in the operating room.)

I suppose a person could get used to the television noise, but I don’t care to. I’m not sure, but I think the purpose of all that television is to turn peoples’ brains to jelly so they’ll vote Democratic. In looking around the waiting room to see if it made anyone else unconfortable, all I saw was people — even elderly people — looking at the idiots on the screen. Maybe it was because I was reading about Russian movies, but at one point while looking at the people I was reminded of a scene from Gruz 200. It’s pretty close to the one in the above screenshot.

The old woman spends her time watching the TV and drinking vodka. Some reviewers say she’s senile; but really, she’s worse than that. The movie is one of the filthiest, most disgusting I’ve ever seen — but there is an important point to it, which I won’t go into here. The son is a police chief, and is also a crook and rapist. He discusses the rapings with his mother, who has a perverted solicitude for her son. She tries to convince the girl to like it. But mostly, she just watches the television, oblivious to the evil and violence going on in her house except for those times when she is facilitating it.

I wondered if that’s what all the television would do to us someday. It also occurred to me that we’re coming to be more like North Korea, where it is said radios in public places are constantly blaring at people. You can’t get away from them there, either.

My kids give me a bit of a hard time about my inability to stand radio or TV noise, because when I watch Russian movies I tend to crank the volume up. It’s true — I do — mostly because I can make out unfamiliar sounds better that way.

And I do watch some television. Some years I watch the baseball playoffs and World Series, though maybe the last time was 4-5 years ago. And I watch the NCAA basketball tournament with my wife. When we do this I want to listen, not just watch. But even so, it is a blessed relief when the games are over and we turn the TV off. It’s as if a oppressive weight is lifted off my head, and I can breath free again. I wish more people would find out how wonderful the sounds of silence can be.

But it doesn’t have to be silence. While my wife was recovering after surgery, a one-year-old baby nearby was bawling its head off. Some people seemed to be bothered by it, but to me that sound is almost like music in comparison to television. Crying is not as good as laughter, but either way, it was the sound of a real person, not a TV idiot. I hope we don’t create a TV-drenched world for that baby — like that apartment in Gruz 200.

How to preserve, protect, and defend

 Legislative process, Limits on government power  No Responses »
Mar 232009
 

Back in 2002 George W. Bush signed the McCain-Feingold bill, despite having said that parts of it violated the First Amendment. (So much for his oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.)

Now in 2009 Barak Obama is telling us that the ex post facto tax on AIG bonuses is of doubtful constitutionality. That’s true and it’s good of him to point it out. But is he going to pull a George W. Bush and sign it anyway?

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