I Don't Care If You're Fat

By Alan Caruba

I don’t care if you’re fat. I don’t care if your kids are fat. It’s none of my business. If you want to lose some weight, be my guest. Or, like Michelle Obama, if you just want to have a juicy hamburger, some fries, and a chocolate shake, that’s fine, too. Who wants to spend their life eating broccoli and bean sprouts?

My late Mother, Rebecca, taught a generation the joys of haute cuisine in the adult schools of my hometown and nearby communities. Thousands of soldiers who had fought in Europe had returned from the war with a taste of French and Italian cuisine, and Mother was the master of both, including just about any other you could name. She had an encyclopedic knowledge of wines and believed no meal was complete without them.

Mother became the first woman to serve on the board of directors of the Sommelier Society of America in recognition of her encyclopedic knowledge of wines and spirits, and was honored in 1984 for her service to the organization. She was also the first woman to be accepted in both the British and French Sommelier Societies. She received numerous awards and was the first American woman to receive the Agricultural Medal of the Comite National des Vins de France.

Mother was not fat. In her senior years—she lived to age 98—I often feared that a strong breeze might whisk her away. Dad, who lived to age 93, developed the typical older man’s paunch, but never lacked for energy.

I got to thinking about this when I read an article about Dr. David Ludwig’s opinion piece in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Dr. Ludwig is a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. He and a co-author, Lindsey Murtagh, a lawyer and researcher at the Harvard’s School, put forth the notion that the state intervention might be a good thing to take obese children away from their parents.

The next logical step is to begin rounding up obese—fat—people and putting them in concentration camps where they will be forced to lose weight thanks to a restrictive diet and a regimen of labor. When they achieve the approved body mass index (BMI) they might then be released back into society. One can imagine caravans of buses lined up outside the camps to take the formerly fat people and kids back home.

This is going to work an special hardship on black people and Hispanics because, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in studies conducted from 2006 to 2008, “Blacks had 51% higher prevalence of obesity and Hispanics had 21% higher obesity prevalence compared with whites.”

All this snooping into people’s lives and lifestyles is justified by the CDC because being fat is “a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease, certain types of cancer, and type 2 diabetes.”

I have a friend who has diabetes and, for as long as I have known him, has always been a big, beefy guy. In recent years he has given up smoking, endeavors to exercise more, and one of our constant topics of conversation is—you guessed it—FOOD. We enjoy comparing notes.

It is impossible to get through a single day in America without constantly being implored to eat something, whether at home, a restaurant, or fast-food franchise. I haven’t kept score, but it often seems to me that much of the advertising on television that I see is devoted to food in some fashion, when not insisting that you should buy gold, get a reverse mortgage, or join some class action law suit against a pharmaceutical company.

Whole channels on cable television are devoted 24/7 to food. Every morning TV show has food segments and, as far back as I can recall, always did. Articles, if not entire sections of newspapers and magazines, are devoted to food. As a book reviewer for the past fifty years, I have seen more cookbooks and diet books than anyone should be expected to read.

Here’s how to lose weight. Eat smaller portions. If you're still hungry, have a healthy snack during the day.

There are entire subsets of food obsessions from vegan to foods grown “organically” which is to say without chemical fertilizers to enhance crop yield, herbicides to restrict weeds that compete with crops, and pesticides to knock down the many insect predators that destroy crops. It is estimated that rodent infestations destroy a third of all food grown around the world every year.

Give me food that comes from a modern farm anytime because those e-coli outbreaks always seem to track back to some organic farm.

It’s purely an observation of mine, but it seems to me that a lot of fat people come from families that have a history of being fat. To put it another way, they have a genetic disposition to being large. Others like myself enjoy “comfort foods.” And some people are just pigs.

I don’t care. It is none of my business if you’re fat. It is surely not the government’s business if you’re fat. This is America, the home of the brave and the free…and a lot of fat people, most of whom are not morbidly obese, and should be left alone.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The True State of the Economy

By Alan Caruba

The mainstream media will fall all over itself to put a good face on the President’s State of the Union speech. Time was when Presidents simply sent a written message to the Congress (Article II, Section 3) to be read in chambers, but we must now suffer through an hour and a half of madcap Democrat applause and frozen Republican silence.

Great television, it isn’t. The worst part, even before the speech, is that everyone knows it will be filled with boldfaced lies about “investments”, i.e., more spending, and other fictions. Thank goodness that all spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives (Article I, Section 7). Since Republicans now control the house those “investments” are not likely to be approved or authorized.

In recent days, AmericanThinker.com, has posted excellent articles that provide the cold hard numbers regarding the first two years of the Obama administration and past four years of Democrat rule. A sampling tells the truth.

The prices of selected commodities, all of which translate to what you pay at the gas pump or in the supermarket, have all risen in the past two years.

#Crude Oil, European Brent (barrel) was selling for $43.49 in January 2009. It now sells for $99.02, an increase of 127.7%

#Corn, No. 2 yellow was selling for $3.56 a bushel in January 2009. It now sells for $6.33, an increase of 60.5%. Corn is an important indicator because much of it, by government mandate, must be turned into a gasoline additive called ethanol. The result is that the cost of food is increased as corn which is widely used to feed livestock and in countless other ways in the food chain is diverted to make fuel.

#Sugar, cane, raw, world price per pound was $13.37 in January 2009. It now sells for $35.39, an increase of 164%,

# Unemployment, non-farm, overall was at 7.6% and is now at 9.4%, an increase of 23.7%. The number of unemployed in January 2009 was 11,616.000 and has since risen to 14,485,000, an increase of 24.7% despite the promise of “shovel ready” and “Green” jobs. The number of people on food stamps increased 35.1%. The number of people receiving unemployment benefits increased 22.2%

# The national debt in trillions was $10.627 in January 2009 and now stands at $14.052, an increase of 32.2%.

Do you see a pattern here?

By December 2010, more than fifty percent of Americans said they were worse off than they were two years earlier when President Obama took office. The Bloomberg National Poll showed that two-thirds of Americans believed the nation was headed in the wrong direction.

None of this is surprising, given that the nation is struggling to recover from the longest recession since the Great Depression. There is no indication that Obama can, will, or even wants to correct the current recession. Recessions are cyclical and most presidents have encountered one while in office.

No amount of speeches, State of the Union or otherwise, will improve the economy if the past policies of the Obama administration continue. The nation has suffered unemployment at more than 9% for the twentieth month in a row as of January. That is a post-World War II record!

The Obama administration has done nothing useful to turn the recession around. Instead it has wasted billions bailing out General Motors to save the auto union, followed by an idiotic “Cash for Clunkers” program. At the same time, it has insisted that GM turn out $41,000 electric cars while raising the mandate for ethanol levels in gasoline, thus reducing the mileage per gallon while increasing its cost to consumers.

The housing market, brought to its knees by two horrid government entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is still in the basement. The government had to seize both of them and is billions in debt as a result. “Social justice” was the excuse given for the government’s intervention in the mortgage loan marketplace instead of leaving it to the normal prudence of lending institutions.

Instead of focusing on ways to encourage the growth of small businesses, the administration spent its time and energy on passing Obamacare, taking trillions out of Medicare while at the same time adding more people to its rolls. This is the Obama definition of “saving” Medicare. More than half of the States have joined a suit to abrogate Obamacare as unconstitutional.

Obama’s is an utterly failed administration. In an effort to be reelected, Obama will apply a Clintonian approach, appearing to move to the middle, be more fiscally prudent, et cetera, but this is one leopard that will not change his spots. He is a committed Marxist and one who gives every indication of deliberately crashing the economy. In that respect, he is succeeding.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Obsessed with Food

By Alan Caruba

“If people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.” -- Thomas Jefferson

My late Mother, Rebecca, taught the art of gourmet cooking in New Jersey adult schools for over thirty years. When the troops came back from the war in Europe, they had been introduced to its cuisine and they encouraged their wives to prepare it.

Mother studied cookbooks like scholars study ancient manuscripts. She would author two cookbooks and the title of one perfectly captured her outlook, ‘Cooking with Wine and High Spirits.’ “There are people who just eat to live,” she would say, “and those who live to eat”, meaning people who loved good food, lovingly prepared.

Neither I, nor my Father or Mother ever got fat. We ate well and enjoyed wine with our meals, but we were never over-weight in any fashion although, as we got passed our fifties, both my Dad and I did acquire the paunch typical of older men.

In the best book ever written on the subject, “Fat: It’s Not What You Think”, by Connie Leas (Prometheus Books, 2008), she noted that ”It’s the male sex hormone, testosterone, that’s responsible for this selected buildup of fat in (men’s) abdominal region.” And, listen up girls, “An adult woman has about twice as much body fat as the average man” and this is likely due to natural selection over the millennia.

“The fat you carry around has useful functions,” wrote Leas. “It stores energy for future use, produces important chemicals, builds cell membranes and neural structures, provides padding, insulates against cold, supplies fuel, and supports your immune system. Fat can be your friend!”

I’m not talking about obesity here. I am talking about carrying a comfortable amount of weight that is not dictated by self-appointed arbiters. Your body size is determined by your DNA, your genes, your inheritance from prior generations. After that, it’s up to you to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Something is very wrong when the government, local, country, state or federal, passes laws regarding what you can and cannot eat, whether dining out or at home.

Perhaps, because we live in a society that provides an abundance of foods and an abundance of choices among foods, that accounts for why our society is so obsessed with eating and obsessed with weight.

Just count how many food-related or diet-related commercials you watch on television every day. Consider, too, the many channels and programs devoted to the topics of food and dieting. Then add in all the magazines, food columns, and blogs devoted to cooking.

Lynne Finnerty, the editor of the American Farm Bureau Federation newspaper, recently took note of “Health officials (that) are sounding alarms about our obesity epidemic. Maybe the issue isn’t the food itself,” said Finnerty, “but our preoccupation with it. Maybe it’s just up to us, as it’s always been, to decide how much is enough.” I agree!

It should come as no surprise that the same scoundrels who propagated the global warming hoax in order to get rich selling “carbon credits” and mandating that utilities use wind and solar energy, are also involved in trying to determine everyone’s dietary choices.

Tom DeWeese, founder of the American Policy Center, recently connected the dots of the United Nations’ Agenda 21 “sustainable development” hogwash with its endless efforts to control every aspect of the Earth’s population. Noting its emphasis on vegetarianism, DeWeese cited research by Dr. William Campbell Douglas who writes a blog called the Daily Dose.

Douglas wrote, “When researchers studied 300 vegetarian patients at Hiranandani Hospital (India) for a year, they were stunned to find that 70% of them were either suffering from heart disease or were at high risk of heart attacks.” Nearly all were badly deficient in vitamin B12, an essential nutrient found in meat.

DeWeese warned against Wal-Mart’s aggressive goals for allegedly improving ways that food is grown and transported across the globe. “In other words, Wal-Mart is now going to enforce sustainable farm policy on all of the suppliers and customers, just as Whole Foods. This is not free markets, it is huge global corporations playing footsy with radical environmental groups and pretending it’s for the common good.”

A history professor of mine used to say, “No government is more than two weeks away from being brought down if it cannot feed its citizens.” In the last century, however, both the Russian and the Chinese communists were responsible for the deaths of millions from famines, some deliberate, some avoidable.

On January 5, Bloomberg News, citing the United Nations reported that “World food prices rose to a record in December on higher sugar, grain and oilseed costs… exceeding levels reached in 2008 that sparked deadly riots from Haiti to Egypt.” Some of those riots were the direct result of redirecting massive amounts of corn from livestock feed and in food production to the mandated production of ethanol to be mixed with gas.

The global cycle of colder weather that began in the late 1990s will account for fewer crops just as it did during the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850. It had profound affects on history over the course of five hundred years, bringing down monarchies and ending serfdom in Europe.

Modern farming technologies, genetically modified crops, and other advances such as fertilization and the proper application of pesticides and herbicides ensures that a mere two percent of the U.S. population feeds the rest of us and still has plenty for export. Food exports in 2011 are expected to generate $113 billion.

The Greens and their counterparts who pretend to represent consumers spread endless lies about agricultural methods, chemicals used to safeguard and preserve the shelf-life of foods, as well as the foods we choose to eat. They destroy production by getting water shut off to farming areas by claiming some specie is endangered. They threaten the freedom we savor along with a delicious meal.

Everywhere petty politicians seek to pass laws regarding where one can dine, what can be on the menu, and how it must be prepared. Those who dine at home find packaging loaded with food warnings. It is deliberate and it is baseless.

These busybodies, nags and harridans should be driven from the marketplace with torches and pitchforks.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Government List of Things that Could Kill You

By Alan Caruba

With the presidential announcement that H1N1, the “swine” flu, is now officially a national emergency, plus reports out of the CDC that not enough vaccine is available, I thought it might be helpful to provide a list of things that the government says could kill you.

Right up there at the top is, of course, (1) global warming. President Obama and Al Gore says the entire planet is going to resemble a toasted marshmallow at a Boy Scout jamboree if we all don’t stop driving cars, manufacturing things, generating and using electricity, et cetera. And that goes for you, too, China and India!

Next is (2) smoking. It is an incontrovertible fact that everyone in the graveyard nearest to you who ever smoked is dead. The government, which used to make a lot of money from tobacco taxes, is dead set—no pun intended—against anyone smoking. This used to be a matter of personal choice, but now it will get you thrown out of arenas, restaurants, offices of all descriptions, and just about every other public place. Those who insist on still smoking are going to die. At some point.

Another thing that will kill you is (3) guns. It is a matter of complete consternation that the 90 million or so gun-owners in America are not all dead! The government wants to take away their guns in order to protect them from shooting themselves, their family members, and possibly someone trying to break into their home or apartment. Apparently criminals have not paid sufficient attention to government warnings and insist on using guns, whenever possible, in robberies and drug deals gone bad.

May I digress briefly to note what almost any homicide detective in America will tell you; on entering the murder scene, the first question they ask is where’s the husband or wife of the victim? Then they go down a list of nearest relatives and friends; most of the time this produces the perpetrator. Here’s a tip. If you kill someone, your family and friends will be the first to turn you in because they don’t want you killing them, too. So, essentially, if someone does end up murdering you, it’s someone you know and, if you kill someone, your mom will send you up the river faster than drinking the water in Mexico will give you the runs.

Before I go further, I need to also list (4) eating to the list of lethal activities in which you may be engaging. Eating, as is statistically demonstrated, can lead to obesity, defined as the inability to see your shoes or put them on without help. Or you may just get “fat.” And we all know that fat people are (a) jolly and (b) doomed to any early death. The food groups you are not supposed to eat are cookies, candy, and ice cream. If you eat any of these, you’re doomed, but frankly life without cookies, candy, and ice cream life is probably not worth living anyway.

A little known fact that the government is trying to suppress is that being a Republican or a conservative will, in fact, add years to your life. That’s because most of these folks have guns. Also, they have a very low level of gullibility so they are less prone to things like panic-inducing Swine flu announcements. They just deal with stress better. A lot of them love to hunt and fish. You know, clinging to their guns, et cetera.

The government really doesn’t want you to know this because it will cut into General Motors and Chrysler sales, but (5) driving a car can kill you a lot faster than most other activities. On the average, it kills about 40,000 people every year. So buckle up. Obey the traffic signals. Drive at a safe speed, and hope that the other people on the highway or street aren’t pumped full of “meth” or “coke”, so spaced out of their minds they think they’re in a space ship on the way to Planet Zeno. And, of course, there are all those drunken drivers out there, too.

I should also point out that ordinary flu kills about 36,000 people a year no matter what name it has. They are frequently the very young who lack sufficient immunity or old people with other life-threatening ailments. The H1N1, in terms of fatalities, does not appear to be anything other than a variation of ordinary flu.

There are, in truth, so many things the government thinks can or will kill you, legislators and bureaucrats are exhausted from passing laws against them, regulating them, and generally getting between you and them.

For the record, I think global warming is pure crappola; I have smoked cigars since my late teens and am now in my seventh decade of life averaging two a day; I own several guns; I eat and drive a car every day. I have an occasional drink, mostly wine. I get a “regular” flu shot every year and I get most of my exercise as a pall-bearer for friends who watched their diet, didn’t smoke, or had much fun when they were alive.

United (Nations) Deceptions

By Alan Caruba

The British newspaper, The Observer, had an article about the views of Dr. Rajendra Patchauri, the chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “UN says eat less meat to curb global warming” was the headline.

Dr. Patchauri—surprise, surprise—is a vegetarian. He also heads a UN agency whose “science” has been completely discredited, based as it is on computer models that conveniently massage their data to arrive at predetermined conclusions. That same data in the hands of other scientists tends to produce the opposite conclusion.

The IPCC, along with Al Gore, won a Nobel Prize for Peace and, if anyone can tell me what lying about the Earth’s climate has to do with peace, please let me know. When scientists from around the world, some of whom were IPCC contributors, denounce the IPCC, you need to be a tad suspicious.

The UN is one huge propaganda machine. When it was brought into existence just after the end of World War Two the objective was to defuse situations that would lead to military conflicts. It has failed spectacularly in that regard and its so-called peace-keeping efforts have often devolved into scandal.

Its various agencies have colluded to advance the greatest hoax of the twentieth century, “global warming”, and they continue despite the widespread perception that there is no excessive warming and, indeed, the world is now a decade into a perceptible cooling.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has done its bit to advance the global warming hoax by demonizing beef production and consumption, claiming that the emissions of cattle and other livestock contribute to warming.

Attributing “nearly a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions” to the raising of a favorite food for much of mankind is absurd because (a) there is no global warming, (b) those “emissions” constitute a minor element of the Earth’s atmosphere and (c) they don’t influence climate change in any significant way.

So we have the IPCC and the FAO working together to spread lies about global warming and, in the process, doing their best to harm a global agricultural activity that feeds millions every day.

Apparently the only thing the United Nations is united upon is becoming the world’s Big Brother determining everything about our lives including what we eat.

Incongruities

By Alan Caruba

A new supermarket opened in my town. The Garden of Eden is part of a chain that specializes in providing every kind of fresh and exotic food one could want to satisfy a discriminating palate.

On opening day shoppers were wandering from aisle to aisle examining all manner of spices, mustards, vegetables, fruits, breads, and selections of prepared foods from all around the Earth. I came upon a canister of Café du Monde, a special blend of coffee that I formerly could not purchase except from New Orleans, its home.

I stopped in front of a display of freshly cooked brisket; its red center suggesting it had been done to perfection. Would I like a taste? Yes, indeed! And then I ordered two slices, cut to just the width I wanted. The display of cheeses was dazzling. I bought a wedge of Jarlsberg and made a mental note to get some brie the next time. In the end I just wandered around the place in a happy daze.

My late Mother, Rebecca, was a famed teacher of haute cuisine, a gourmet who authored several cookbooks. Every night my late Father, Robert, and I would sit down to meals that rivaled the best restaurants in the world. An expert on wines, she was the first woman to become a member of the board of the Sommelier Society of America. We drank wine like most Americans drink soda. When she passed away, those freshly baked breads and other gastronomic delights passed with her.

Here then is the incongruity.

In the midst of this splendorous, ostentatious display of foods of every description, I had a thought about the one billion people who share this planet with me who live on a dollar a day. Then I thought about the speculation concerning wheat, soy, rice and other grains that has caused prices, from 2005 to today, to rise 80% according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

To date, at least fourteen nations have had food-related riots and violence.

Now, weather has had, as always, some role in shortages, but all this is happening mostly because some idiots decided to require that billions of gallons of ethanol be added to gasoline.

Since ethanol is made from corn, soy and other food products, it started a cascade of shortages. Even wheat farmers planted less in order to grow corn to cash in on the subsidized bonanza of ethanol. Without this legislated environmental “solution” to the reduction of “greenhouse gases” there would not be rising food prices worldwide.

The irony is that the Earth is cooling these days, not warming. It has warmed quite naturally from the end of the last mini-ice age around 1850 to the tune of one degree Fahrenheit. Since 1998, scientists say there is a perceptible cooling occurring worldwide, including the oceans that trap and hold 80-90% of the world’s heat.

What kind of idiots would buy into the junk-science of global warming? The answer is almost the entire Congress of the U.S. with the exception of a few who have courageously and vociferously spoken against it, the House and Senate Majority leaders, all three of the candidates currently hoping to be the next President, and the idiot we have currently in the Oval Office.

A lot of people colluded to create this mess. Beyond Congress and the White House has been an international and national grotesquery of environmental organizations that have fought against the introduction and use of genetically modified food crops to feed the six billion-plus people of the world. They continue to do everything they can to thwart the access and use of all manner of energy sources from coal to natural gas and oil.

Population and consumption are the targets of the Green movement. The odds are that a large part of the world’s population will be victimized and die from their efforts to bring about these imbalances and shortages of food. The speculators are no less to blame.

A classroom of fifth graders could have told you that burning food crops to make a useless fuel additive was a stupid thing to do.

Meanwhile, I will wander the aisles of the Garden of Eden and, because I can afford to, ask myself if I want to purchase that tray of pork tenderloin in a rice wrap? Yes, I think I do.

Earth Day 2008. Get Over It!

By Alan Caruba

Of the many things most people do not know about Earth Day is that it is also the anniversary of the birthday of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union. Coincidence? I doubt it.

These days most people know little of history. We are witnessing a new generation who know little or nothing about the Soviet Union and the Cold War it waged against America and the world for the supremacy of Communism in the latter half of the last century. These are kids who don't even known when we fought our Civil War and for whom Korea and Vietnam are just names of places where there were wars, the latter of which we lost.

When we finally left Vietnam, we lost something else too. We lost the willingness to wage war the only way it can be waged, by killing as many of the enemy as possible to make them lose the will to continue. That includes destroying as much of the enemy’s homeland too. It involves overwhelming force and that involves a massive military presence. You can't do that with just volunteers.

The actual financial cost of the war in Iraq has been small compared to the size of our gross domestic product that is measured in trillions of dollars. It’s small, too, in terms of the casualties of the war. In World War Two, we lost more than 4,000 men taking a single Pacific island. Truman dropped two atom bombs on Japan because it was estimated we’d lose a million men to take the main island. He was right to do it.

Americans have grown soft. That’s one of the reasons Osama bin Laden thought he could destroy the Twin Towers, drain a trillion dollars out of our economy, and disappear into the hills of the border country between Afghanistan and Pakistan. He expected the U.S. to respond, but he also knew he had time on his side. We would grow tired of chasing Taliban around. Our allies would grow tired, too.

So we come to Earth Day 2008 and, despite the many good things to be said of America, we have let ourselves be trapped by the many lies of the Greens, incrementally allowing them to decide everything from how much water we can have in our toilet tanks to whether we can buy an incandescent light bulb. Like bin Laden, they knew they could wait us out.

They also know how pliable our politicians are. All three of the candidates for president believe global warming is happening even though a kid in Meteorology 101 can cite the data since 1998 that documents a cooling trend. It’s going to get a lot colder because we are all on the forward edge of a new Ice Age. We’re due one. Any climatologist will tell you that.

So Americans will blindly go along, not understanding why the food costs more and the cost of gasoline and other energy like natural gas keep climbing even though common sense says that if the government does not permit access to our own reserves—for all the blather about energy independence—the price will go up in ways beyond our control.

Americans will blame Big Oil whose combined ownership of worldwide oil reserves represents a scant 4% of the world’s known reserves. That’s right, ExxonMobil, Shell, Conoco Phillips, BP and the rest own very little of the world’s oil.

One of the many nations who does own oil is Russia, our former adversary in the Cold War. Now they have so many oil billions they want to buy American businesses with the surplus. There's something very wrong with that! Under Putin, they have returned to a dictatorship. The Russians seem to prefer that.

Americans will blame our farmers—the 2% of the population that feeds the rest of us and whose exports represent a significant part of economy—but why blame people who the government literally pays to not plant crops? Why blame people whose own costs of planting, fertilizing, harvesting, and transporting their crops to the market cost more thanks to a crazed government mandate to turn 40% to 60% of the corn crop into moonshine and then requires oil refineries to add that moonshine to every gallon of gasoline you buy? And then taxes us for every gallon of that inefficient blend!

Earth Day. What an absolutely idiotic notion.

Anyone who has ever traveled around the planet will tell you that it’s filled with forests, jungles, deserts, mountains,and mostly oceans. We have pretty much used every bit of arable land we can to feed the population. Only the Green Revolution of genetically modified seeds has made it possible to get greater yields per acre of farmland. Otherwise people would have died off in the millions in recent times.

They are likely to do so now if this artificial food shortage created by an idiotic “biofuels” program isn’t junked as fast as possible.

The Greens will just have to be content with killing millions of Africans by denying them DDT to protect against malaria or millions more around the world from dengue fever. Add to that the third of the world’s food supplies that are lost every year to insect and rodent predation because the Greens cannot ban pesticides fast enough.

Then there's that problem of refrigeration to preserve foodstuffs since the Greens got Freon, the cheapest and best refrigerant every invented, banned.

Earth Day makes me want to puke.

Everyone who runs around complaining about plastic supermarket bags makes me want to puke.

Everyone who thinks we should all crowd onto trains and buses and not drive when we want and where we want makes me want to puke.

Everyone who cries about endangered species when 95% of all the species that ever existed on Earth are extinct make me want to puke.

People who don’t care that a billion people on Earth live on about $1 a day or that a billion people do not have electricity make me want to puke.

People that won’t let Americans build more coal-fired or nuclear plants to generate the electricity we need make me want to puke.

A government that throws billions at studies of climate change makes me want to puke.

The climate is changing. The climate has always changed. The climate will continue to change. Get over it!

Running Out of Food and Time

By Alan Caruba

In my weekly commentary on The National Anxiety Center’s website, “Global Food Fights”, I take a look at the reasons why U.S. prices of food are rising and why there are food riots breaking out around the world. The world’s news media are taking notice as well.

Articles are flooding news outlets such as The New York Times “news analysis” that “Fuel Choices, Food Crises and Finger-Pointing” and the Associated Press report that “Food Costs Rising Fastest in 17 Years.”

Meanwhile, over at Canada Free Press, Dr. Tim Ball, a noted meteorologist, had the temerity of saying that, “Commitment of 40% of U.S. agriculture to biofuels has created a crisis in world food supplies and increasing costs for poor people everywhere”, adding that, “Environmental extremists and alarmists have exploited people’s fears and lack of knowledge about climate and climate change.” Simply stated, the Earth is cooling, not warming.

We are living in an era defined by an avalanche of lies by environmentalists whose agenda has always been a reduction of the world’s population and a crippling of the economies of industrialized nations in order to rid the world of capitalism and its benefits.

The food shortages, other than those resulting from drought or other weather conditions, are wholly man-made and deliberate. They are the result of ignorant politicians passing laws based on the lies the Greens have been telling for decades.

Ironically, the very same nexus for these lies, the United Nations, whose Environmental Program includes the duplicitous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and which has been responsible for the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change demanding a reduction in “greenhouse gas” (carbon dioxide) reductions, as well as bans on Freon, a refrigerant, and on DDT, a pesticide that used to protection millions from Malarial death, is calling for $500 million in aid to feed the hungry.

The World Bank president, Robert Zoellick, urged immediate action, calling on governments to provide the U.N. World Food Program with emergency aid for places like Haiti where recent food riots forced its prime minister out of his job.

Those of us derided as “skeptics”, “deniers”, or paid lackeys of energy or chemical industries whose products provide electricity, fuel for transportation, and other life-enhancing benefits, have had to struggle to get our message before the public that the Greens are their enemies and not, as one group calls itself, “Friends of the Earth.”

Next week the entire world will be assaulted by messages about Earth Day and the need to conserve, to change our driving habits, to save endangered species, to switch to solar and wind energy, and all because of “global warming” when there is NO global warming.

There is, however, plenty of oil. A huge new reserve of oil was found off the coast of San Paulo, Brazil, as much as 33 billion barrels. Another oil pool in North Dakota, the Bakken Formation, is estimated to have up 4 billion barrels of light, sweet crude. In Alaska, ANWR has millions of untapped barrels of oil.

So who shall we blame for the food shortages and the high price of oil? The politicians who have banned access to our own national resources. The politicians who keep introducing legislation based on a global warming that is not happening. The politicians who have banned the purchase of incandescent light bulbs by 2014. The politicians who mandated that thousands of bushels of corn be turned into ethanol.

All three of the candidates in the running for the U.S. presidency believe the global warming lies and are ready to impose still more idiotic legislation, including an utterly bogus “cap-and-trade” scheme for the sale of “carbon credits” based wholly on the lies about greenhouse gas emissions.

We are running out of time before the politicians bring about utter ruin.

We need to yell loudly at Congress and the candidates to stop this madness before more Americans go broke trying to feed their families and still more around the world die of starvation because of the Greens.

Predictions for the Hell of It

By Alan Caruba

Everybody makes predictions. They’re fun. Or they’re scary. They are based on fact or fantasy. I usually avoid making them, but every so often I just can’t resist. Here are a few.

1. John McCain will be elected to be the next President. It won’t even be close.

2. The Democrat Party convention will take the nomination from Barack Obama and hand it to Hillary Clinton via the super-delegates, almost all of whom will have concluded that a Black man cannot win and that Hillary is the “brand” in which the party is too heavily invested at this point to abandon. (Bill Clinton is the only Democrat to have been elected President since Jimmy Carter.)

3. By this time next year experts on solar radiation and the continued global cooling trend will bury the global warming hoax under a lot of snow. More people will learn that solar activity, i.e., radiation, has stayed flat for yet another year.

4. At least one major daily newspaper will fold as a print operation and try to continue exclusively on the Internet.

5. A major shortfall in domestic wheat and flour, due primarily to increased exports, will send prices of all bakery products soaring by this time next year. The cost of meat and poultry will continue to rise as well due to a growing ethanol debacle.

6. Oil will reach $120.00 per barrel and the price of an ounce of gold will reach $1,250.00 by the end of the year.

7. American cities and towns will begin to experience rolling brownouts and blackouts due to insufficient electricity generation capacity in five years or less. The problem will first occur in the summer months.

8. The current Recession will be a slow process (thanks to the strength of exports) and take a longer time than usual for a turnaround and recovery. Expect it to continue through 2009.

9. The Al Qaeda of 2001 will, by 2010, have been for all intents and purposes destroyed, existing only as spin-off, self-declared terror cells using the name.

10. It will be revealed that Osama bin Laden was given sanctuary in Iran and has been there for several years.

America's Bakers March on Washington

By Alan Caruba

On March 12, the American Baking Association, representing 85% of the total baking industry, will lead a “Band of Bakers March on Washington.” Representatives from more than 50% of the nation’s largest baking companies will call on Congress to correct the policies it has created over the years that have led to soaring food and oil prices.

Not since the days of the Depression when World War I veterans marched on Washington to get their overdue benefits have we seen such an event. At stake is the ability of all Americans to afford to put food on the table.

Everyone knows that food prices have increased along with oil prices, but few people know that it is government policies that have brought the nation to a point where we are facing a wheat shortage.

Despite record-breaking wheat prices, the devaluation of the U.S. dollar has made the import of wheat extremely attractive to foreign nations. Wheat exports are up more than 60% over last year. The result is creating a very tight supply situation at home and that, in turn, is driving up the cost of flour and wheat to American consumers.

The owner of a local pizzeria recently lamented to me about the cost of this staple of American fast food. From the flour to make the crust to the cost of the cheese, prices are requiring him to charge more and more. Now multiply his problem by every food product producer that uses wheat, starting with bread.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the price of a bushel of wheat went from $4.71 in February 2007 to $10.40 this year. That’s a 220% increase. Your pasta dishes will cost more too. Made from durum wheat, prices went from $5.16 per bushel to $16.40 by February 2008, a 317% increase. The nation’s supply of rye is exhausted and bakers are importing it from Germany and the Netherlands.

Around the world, global demand for wheat is outpacing global production. The bakers will demand a policy that balances domestic supplies of wheat with export demands. They will call for a “rethink” of ethanol policies involving corn because wheat farmers, seeing the price of corn rise, are tempted to plant corn, rather than wheat.

Ethanol is the single greatest scam perpetrated on Americans in modern memory. It literally burns food to provide a gasoline additive that drives up the cost of a gallon while reducing its mileage. The consumer is robbed in two ways at the pump. The energy bill recently passed by Congress increased the amount of ethanol to be used.

The bakers want the USDA to take some acres out of the Conservation Reserve Program, one that pays farmers to leave idle some 35 million acres at a time when they are needed for the production of wheat to meet domestic needs.

When it comes to food and oil prices, Americans are looking at a perfect storm created by those in Congress who keep telling us that global warming is the threat, when the real threat is the bankrupting of American consumers with policies totally unconnected to real science.

We have arrived at this point thanks to the alarmism of the environmental movement, led by people like Al Gore, and perpetrated in Congress by the global warming cabal that includes Pelosi, Reid, Boxer, Lieberman, Warner, and even McCain.

The likelihood is that the nation’s bakers are going to be joined by many more marchers in the weeks and months to come if this economic horror story is not put right.

Two Weeks Away from a Revolution

By Alan Caruba

A history professor of mine once said that, “No nation is more than two weeks away from a revolution if it cannot provide food to its citizens.”

During the mini-ice age between 1300 and 1850, the weather was so awful that it killed off food crops and, in particular, wheat, a staple of the diet of the poor in France and elsewhere. Lack of bread was enough to trigger the French Revolution and the end of the monarchy. Ironically, it put Napoleon in power and it was the same mini-ice age that decimated his troops when he invaded Russia. Most froze to death on the trek back to La Belle France.

The word in America these days is that food prices are soaring with increases at double-digit rates. There are two places where people notice a rise in costs. One is food. The other is at the gas pump. The average household spends three times as much for food as for gasoline. It accounts for 13 percent of household spending as compared with about 4 percent for gas.

Pay no attention to the folks telling you that Big Oil is making unconscionable profits. ExxonMobil’s profits, despite its earnings, have remained around 10 percent for years. It’s a very expensive business, finding, extracting, refining, and transporting oil and gas.

The price of oil is being bid up beyond all reason by the speculators in the commodities markets. It has nothing to do with the availability of oil. The oil producing countries that control over 70 percent of the known reserves are telling you the truth when they say there’s enough. If you were them, would you go out of your way to drive the price down? I didn’t think so.

The other component of high food prices is also related to the pain at the pump. It’s ethanol, a gasoline additive made primarily from corn and soy. The government passed a law that it must be part of every gallon of gas you buy in order to reduce so-called greenhouse gas emissions in order to save the Earth from global warming.

Only there isn’t any global warming except for the one degree Fahrenheit the Earth has warmed since the end of the last mini-ice age. No dramatically rising ocean levels. No massive melting of glaciers and ice shelves. In fact, if you’ve been paying any attention to the news lately, the United States and the rest of the world have been encountering some horrendous blizzards. There’s been more snow in more places than in the memory of many people.

When the government creates a subsidized market, farmers take note. Even wheat farmers decide to plant corn instead. That means less wheat and that increases the cost of bread and other wheat products. Since the corn is being burned for fuel instead of used as food, that drives of the cost of some 3,000 uses that are derived from corn.

Oil has hit $107 per barrel. Food prices have jumped from 25 to 40 percent. All of this is the result of artificial actions that have nothing to do with supply and demand, and everything to do with greedy Wall Street behavior (now there’s a surprise) and astonishingly stupid legislative policies based on bad and false science.

Americans are being screwed by their own government. It’s being led by a President who insists we are “addicted” to oil and a Congress that will not permit the exploration or extraction of the oil we have, so we have to import most of it.

It is a Congress whose leadership such as Rep. Pelosi, Sen. Reid, Sen. Lieberman, and others keep lying about global warming. Sen. Hillary Clinton wants to seize oil company profits and spend it in some fashion, presumably not to find any new oil. Sen. McCain is a global warming believer, too. All of these people are a danger to the future of this nation and there doesn’t appear to be a damn thing we can do about it.

Thanks to them, life for Americans is going to get more expensive.

One wonders when the revolution will begin?

Hating Progress with a Passion

By Alan Caruba

The same day, January 15th, that the Food and Drug Administration announced its finding that food derived from cloned cattle, pigs and goats is safe to consume, Friends of the Earth issued a statement that it would gather signatures on a petition to put a stop to it.

“Tell grocers you aren’t buying it! Tell them you’ll stop shopping at stores that can’t promise not to sell such products.” Since food labels will not identify meat from a cloned animal, this is simply an impossible request. There simply is no need to do so.

It is also typical of the scare mongering that is the bread and butter (no pun intended) of groups like FOA. The Consumer Federation of America opposed it as did the Humane Society of the United States.

“We found nothing in the food that could potentially be hazardous. The food in every respect is indistinguishable from food from any other animal,” said FDA food safety chief, Dr. Stephen Sundlof. “It is beyond our imagination to even find a theory that would cause the food to be unsafe.”

The FDA spent six years tracking the safety of cloning. European regulators issued a draft report the previous week that reached the same conclusion. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences found no cause for concern.

This did not deter the FOA from claiming that “Cloned animals have a much higher rate of genetic abnormalities than animals that reproduce naturally.” If this was true it is doubtful the FDA would have issued its statement. An international group of scientists will issue guidelines later this year on how to clone safely and with minimal risk to the animals.

This is not about science, however. It is about the relentless war on progress that is common to environmental groups and others seeking to fatten their coffers by scaring people who will not take the time to learn the facts.

As the Associated Press story on the FDA announcement noted, “By its very definition, a successfully cloned animal should be no different from the original animal whose DNA was used to create it.” Indeed, the FDA concluded that cloned animals that are born healthy are no different than their non-cloned counterparts and go on to reproduce normally as well.

The same motivation that drives this latest opposition to cloned food stocks was seen earlier in the opposition to irradiation, probably the best way to kill any bacteria in meat products ever invented. The term may scare some people, but the process protects them.

The FDA and international approval means future generations will have sufficient meat products to eat thanks to the remarkable technology of cloning. After the mysteries of DNA were ultimately decoded, it was a natural next step to take.

Americans have to literally train themselves to resist the claims of environmental groups and, of course, those made by animal rights loonies. According to the Center for Consumer Freedom, the Virginia-based People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals recently disclosed that its employees killed more than 97 percent of the dogs, cats, and other pets they took in during 2006. The Center has asked the State of Virginia to declare PETA to be a slaughterhouse.

The environmental and animal rights groups routinely engage in misinformation and disinformation.

Their ultimate motivation is a hatred for humanity and for any progress that serves it.

Trouble, Trouble, Trouble

By Alan Caruba

I never fail to be amazed by all the problems there are in the world and the fact that we now learn about them instantly, no matter that they are occurring on the other side of the planet.

One problem is “wheat rust Ug99”. In times past, we would not have been asked to know or learn a thing about this fungus, but a story about it moved on one of the news sites and it turns out that it is now threatening wheat crops in Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India. It is a form of black stem rust, first discovered in Uganda in 1999. Now think about it. It has gone from Africa to the Middle East and Asia in just under a decade!

It is killing wheat harvests and it is impervious to the usual fungicides or other chemicals applied. It is a variant of Puccinia graminis fungus and that is what Mother Nature does. Just when you get the handle on one threat to the crops, she comes up with a new twist. Famed scientist and father of the Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug, says there are only three weapons available; fungicides, wheat breeding to create a resistant strain, and luck. Yes, luck! How’s that for bad news?

Translation: the cost of all food products that involve wheat is going to rise, perhaps dramatically, if a solution to this new crop threat is not found and soon. Every current strain of wheat around the world is susceptible to this fungus.

Americans have not been spared bad news this past week in the form of tornadoes showing up in places where they have been considered rare events. The weather got very nasty.

I tell people that Mother Nature has a message for mankind. It’s “Get out of the way! Here comes a tornado, a flood, a wildfire, a blizzard, a tsunami, an earthquake.”

There’s even a volcano in Ecuador threatening to erupt. It’s called Tungurahua and that just sounds like a volcano’s name! It’s 80 miles southeast of Quito and, if it goes off like Pinatubo did in the Philippines, it could change the weather of the planet for a couple of years. It would cool the planet, not warm it.

What is amazing is that there are people who actually claim that they or anyone else can “control” the weather and, thinking long term, the climate. They run around wailing about “climate change” hoping no one will say, “But the climate and the weather changes all the time.”

That's the pitch, however, that the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and all the rest of the fear-mongers who keep telling everyone. They keep saying that if we just “conserve” energy or switch to some “alternative” form of energy, we will “save” the Earth. Oh yeah?

You can’t really “conserve” energy. You either use it or you don’t. Try getting through the day without using it. Imagine being dependent on whether the wind is blowing for a couple of watts from a windmill or the sun is shining so a solar panel can churn out a watt or two?

These planet-savers can’t do diddly when it comes to wheat rust Ug99. They can’t control a hurricane. They can’t stop a blizzard. What they can do is get lots of money from suckers who think they can.

These same suckers don’t have any idea how these environmental groups are working day-in and day-out to impede progress for real farmers, real ranchers, real people who risk their lives to find new sources of oil and natural gas, real people who are trying to build a new nuclear or coal-fired plant. In short, the people that feed us and make sure there’s gas for your car and heat for your home or apartment.

Electricity? Try running your computer without it.

There will always be plenty of bad news and it won’t just be thanks to Mother Nature. Mankind has a pure genius for making trouble. When it comes in the form of a big state government, it comes with a guarantee that individual freedoms will be lost and lots of people will be killed.

An Avalanche of Nonsense

By Alan Caruba

I have to remind myself that I may well be in the minority whenever I protest the lies and nonsense that assail me daily regarding “global warming” or just about anything that issues forth, flatulently, from the United Nations.

An Agence France Press story on Monday is a splendid example. Some moronic scribe labored to produce “Global warming may soon see Santa don shorts.” It began with the assertion that Europe’s far north was “already feeling the effects of global warming” and proceeded from there with the usual assurance that “global warming” is actually happening.

This is such a commonplace journalistic device and deception as to drive better-informed people crazy. However, on Breitbart.com where I found the story, more than thirty seriously annoyed people weighed in with their comments and all of them derided the fatuous piece of idiocy. In fact, some of Europe’s glaciers have been growing and a quick check of recent winters will reveal the continent has had some major cold spells.

Similarly, the International Herald Tribune, owned I believe by The New York Times, spewed forth a story, “Global food supply is dwindling rapidly, UN agency warns.” Having just gone through two weeks of stories out of Bali, filled with dire predictions that we’re all just toast, thanks to the latest vacation-cum-conference on global warming, it totally escapes me why anyone believes anything this bloated, corrupt, and ineffectual international excuse for bad information, bad ideas, and bad performance has to say on any subject.

A teacher of mine long ago said that, “No nation is more than two weeks away from a revolution if it runs out of food.” There’s some truth to that. The French Revolution that devolved into a bloodbath began when the price of bread and other staples rose to a point that it emboldened the peasants to go looking for the king and his family with a view to beheading them. The reason for the problem was that Europe (and North America) was in the grip of a mini-ice age that had begun around 1300 and would not abate until around 1850.

But! The UN says we are in the midst of a “global warming” and from this one might conclude that the growing season for crops is longer and therefore more productive. Silly you. Applying any kind of logic to “global warming” is a fool’s game.

The price of basic food crops is going up. Why? Because geniuses like those in our Congress keep mandating that useless fuel additives such as ethanol drain off vast quantities of corn for its production. Elsewhere in the effort to insure crop failure, everything that could be done to thwart the introduction of genetically modified crops—crops that are resistant to drought or various forms of predation—has been one of the environmental movement’s rallying cries for a very long time.

It’s all part of the avalanche of nonsense the citizens of the world must suffer thanks to those who, in their hearts, would prefer to return the earth to penguins, polar bears, pandas, and weeds.