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

Obama's Golf Game

Where's My Pony?

National Debt is now $14 Trillion, the Highest Ever!

By Alan Caruba

On Monday, January 3, 2011 the national debt, as calculated by the U.S. Treasury, topped $14 trillion for the first time. Ever!

In 2010, the Financial Forecast Center, an independent entity, predicted that the Gross Domestic Product, the value of goods and services, would reach $14.834.1 trillion by October of last year and predicted the GDP would reach $14.952 trillion by January 2011.

I’m no mathematical whiz, but it would appear that the U.S. is just barely managing to produce enough income to cover the amount of its National Debt.

A percentage point more or less means nothing as the 112th Congress convenes to tackle the problem of the nation’s debt. It is being discussed in terms of how high to raise the “debt ceiling” so the current administration can borrow and presumably spend more.

In 2008 when Obama was elected, the national debt was about $9 trillion. When the Obama administration began in 2009, it had rocketed passed $10 trillion, then $11 trillion, and, by the time 2010 began, it stood at $12 trillion! A year later, it stands at $14 trillion.

Based on official debt figures published by the U.S. Treasury, on December 27, Terence P. Jeffrey reported on CNSnews.com that “The federal government has accumulated more new debt--$3.22 trillion—during the tenure of the 111th Congress than it did during the first 100 Congresses combined...”

That is terrifying.

It also accounts for the midterm election’s massive transfer of power to Republicans in the House of Representatives as the 112th Congress begins on January 5. Since all spending bills must be initiated in the House, the presumption is that the new Congress is going to get a grip on this nation-killing situation.

That’s not, however, what a January 4 Rasmussen Reports survey suggests. “The new Congress, with Republicans in control of the House, isn’t even seated yet, and voters are already expressing more likely disappointment than they did around Election Day.”

A Rasmussen telephone survey found that “67% of likely U.S. voters—two out of three—think it is at least somewhat likely that most voters will be disappointed with Republicans in Congress before the 2012 elections. This includes 32% who say it is Very Likely.”

That is terrifying.

Bear in mind that there is still no National Budget. The government is operating under what are called continuing resolutions. Not only did the Obama administration run up the national debt to historic heights, but it just could not find time last year to structure a budget to guide the nation through its remaining two years in office.

In the same fashion former Speaker Nancy Pelosi managed to oversee and implement that crazed spending while she held power, incoming Speaker John Boehner is going to be expected to somehow reverse that madness at the same time Obama administration policies keep pushing the nation over the edge of financial disaster.

What policies you ask? Having failed to get the Cap-and-Trade bill enacted, a huge tax on all energy use, the administration’s Environmental Protection Agency is hell-bent on ignoring the will of Congress with an end-run of regulatory insanity. It has announced it will regulate carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gas” emission to avoid a “global warming” that is not happening.

China is not doing this. India is not doing this. Japan withdrew last year from the UN Kyoto Protocols setting emissions limits. Europe is likely to follow. But! The EPA insists that the USA, virtually alone in the world, must save it from “global warming.”

On virtually the same day it is asserting this totally unauthorized power, The New York Times announced that the Chicago Climate Exchange, “the nation’s first experiment in carbon emissions cap and trade has come to an end…” Created to buy and sell “Carbon Financial Instruments”, the collapse reflected “the legitimacy of the system itself.”

It’s about as legitimate as the “clean coal” scam in which companies sequester carbon dioxide, burying it, to save the world from “global warming” which, I repeat myself, is not happening.

At the same time oil and gas prices are inching upward, the Obama administration has virtually shut down any further exploration or extraction of the USA’s own vast reserves of oil. Since oil is a global commodity whose price is set by the marketplace, the rule of supply and demand will drive up the price still further as China continues to buy more for its fast-growing economy.

In the interest of length, I will not enumerate other nation-killing Obama policies.

Pay no attention to Obama’s claims that he will focus on creating jobs. We are deep in historic debt from the first two year’s of such alleged efforts. If the new Congress can find a way to get out of the way, we might survive.

Will the Republicans find a backbone? A lot of likely voters have their doubts. Stay tuned.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

How Are the Jews Doing?

By Alan Caruba

Wondering how the world’s Jews are doing may seem a trivial question, but I have long thought of Jews as the proverbial canary in the coal mine. When events turn nasty in the world, it is the Jews who are most often its first victims.

If there is a rise in anti-Semitism worldwide it is, frankly, hard to detect from the constant, endless background noise from those who hate Jews full-time and would be utterly bereft of any purpose in life if there were no Jews.

Sadly, Christians in the Middle East are suffering attacks that have long been familiar to Jews throughout history and, these days, the Israelis. There is no room for live-and-let-live in that region of the world where the two Islamic sects, Sunni and Shia, do not hesitate to kill one another.

When one considers that the Iranian mullahs, desperately trying to construct their own nuclear weapons, have vowed to wipe Israel off the face of the map, inquiring as to the Jews’ welfare in general and Israelis in particular is not a trivial question. A nuclear attack could easily cascade into a general exchange of such weapons, a goal the mullahs actually want to trigger.

Thomas Cahill, an Irish author, said, "The Jew gave us the Outside and the Inside - our outlook and our inner life. We can hardly get up in the morning or cross the street without being Jewish. We dream Jewish dreams and hope Jewish hopes. Most of our best words, in fact - new, adventure, surprise, unique, individual, person, vocation, time, history, future, freedom, progress, spirit, faith, hope, justice - are the gifts of the Jews."

So, perhaps, in a way, we are all Jews.

In October 2010, my eye was caught by a speech by the press magnate, Rupert Murdoch, to the annual banquet of the Anti-Defamation League in New York. “We live in a world where there is an ongoing war against the Jews,” said Murdock.

This may be difficult for most Americans to comprehend because perhaps no where else in the world, other than Israel, have Jews not only prospered, but found a level of acceptance that is truly unique. In Israel, being a Jew is the ultimate definition of normality.

Murdoch, however, said that “conventional” anti-Semitism has largely failed, citing the wars against Israel since its founding in 1948. Now, said Murdock, Jews are the target of a “soft war that seeks to isolate Israel by delegitimizing it.”

This is going to be particularly evident when “Durban III”, a United Nations conference, takes place in September.

Originally called the “World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance” the UN conference name was shortened to the “World Conference Against Racism.” Suffice to say, as with most things involving the UN, the conferences have been the exact opposite of their announced purpose.

The previous Durban conference in Geneva caused European delegates to walk out when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, a keynote speaker, launched into a tirade against Israel and Jews. The Conference is recognized worldwide as a cesspool of anti-Semitism. In both conferences the hatred was directed against America as well as Israel.

Durban III will be held in New York!

It will be instructive to see if the U.S. government will send delegates to this hate fest or will officially and outspokenly protest and reject its message.

As Murdoch noted in October, there is a “curious situation we have today: Israel becomes increasingly ostracized, while Iran—a nation that makes no secret of wishing Israel’s destruction—pursues nuclear weapons loudly, proudly, and without apparent fear of rebuke.”

Murdoch said that anti-Semitism has found “a disturbing new home…in polite society, especially in Europe” and expressed concern that America was “distancing herself from the Jewish state.” He added that “the most virulent strains of anti-Semitism “come from the left”, often dressed up “as legitimate disagreement with Israel.”

He warned that Obama administration policies, generally called an outreach to the Muslim world, “Far from making peace more possible…are making hostilities more certain.”

The Iranian mullahs and their Syrian puppet have been supplying an enormous stash of rockets to Hezbollah, the Iranian's Palestinian entity in Lebanon, just as they fund and direct Hamas in Gaza. 2011 may well be a repeat of the 2006 hostilities and Israel will surely not repeat the mistakes that prolonged the last conflict.

So 2011 is yet another year in which to ask how are the Jews doing around the world.

The U.S. and its allies have been militarily engaging virulent Islamists since 9/11, but Islamist attacks predate that event by many years. The Islamist threat has spread to Europe and England, and remains active against America.

The Holocaust is a symbol and a warning of what happens when Jews or any other group is targeted for extermination. Death to America is chanted daily by some. Afterward, “genocide” entered the lexicon as the practice infected parts of Asia and Africa.

The Jews remain the most useful barometer to determine the advance or retreat of evil in the world.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Government as a Criminal Enterprise

By Alan Caruba

The Obama administration is “one of the most corrupt administrations in modern times” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) Sunday, January 2st. As the incoming chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, we can expect some explosive revelations.

The larger question is how long can a nation survive when its east and west coasts are occupied by liberals who are so out of touch with reality they cannot understand why the rest of the nation would disagree with them about anything? Two States alone, California and New York, are so broke and so laden with red tape they exist by mercy alone.

Liberals are people who still think bigger government, more regulations and more spending is the answer to every problem and need.

These are people who still talk about “global warming”, often in the midst of a raging blizzard.

These are people who refuse to consider the daily headlines of Muslim bombings of Christians, often in their churches, poses a threat to Western civilization.

In the middle, in “fly over country”, the bulk of the population simply stares in disbelief at the White House and Congress and keeps asking, “What are those people thinking?”

Having sent a small army of new people, conservatives, to the House of Representatives and narrowed the Senate’s ability to do further damage, these are independents who now expect change of a different kind than Obama’s.

It’s not so much change as a “return” to smaller government, less borrowing and spending, and such, but those days essentially ended in the last century as progressives got an income tax written into the Constitution, took away the right of State legislatures to name Senators who would represent their State’s interests, and then went on a binge of “entitlement” programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

A century of liberal government has bankrupted the government.

Indeed, just about anything one wants to do, go to college, start a small business, begin raising alpacas, whatever, the government will provide a loan or a grant or a tax exemption. The federal government determines how much each State receives for road and bridge repair, for its school systems, for just about everything for which States were formerly responsible.

The so-called Stimulus Act was nothing more than Representatives and Senators throwing every state and local project into a huge spending bill and then claiming it would create jobs. As has been the case for decades, the only jobs that get created from such largess are government jobs, while businesses large and small are required to waste thousands of hours and thousands of dollars filling out government forms.

There’s a word for that. It’s called communism. To avoid the ugliness of that, it is also called socialism, but it is still communism when the government makes the most important decisions about virtually everything affecting one’s life.

The financial collapse of 2008 was the result of the utter failure of two “government entities”, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that so distorted the housing mortgage marketplace that it finally collapsed from an excess of incoherence. No one knew who owned the mortgage. Not Fannie or Freddie, not the banks, investment firms or AIG that used them as “bundled” assets.

The current bank failure rate is testimony to the need to shut down Fanny and Freddy.

Those mortgages were loans made to people that often didn’t have a job, bought homes so large they were beyond their ability to make the monthly payments, or just got fired and couldn’t pay. Whose fault was that? The lenders who knew they could turn around and sell the mortgage to Fannie and Freddie, and stick the American taxpayer with the cost to the tune of billions.

Beyond the mortgage fiasco, there is the government’s steady erosion of American’s vast energy industries. They cannot drill for oil anywhere. They cannot mine coal. If, however, you want to build a wind or solar farm, the government will give you millions to produce minimal amounts of electricity and require utilities to purchase it.

Or perhaps you want to be an ethanol producer? The government requires that all gasoline be mixed with ethanol, thus raising the cost per gallon for a chemical that actually reduces the mileage you’d get without it. In addition, since it’s mostly made from corn it forces up the cost of feed to livestock which in turns forces up the cost of meat at the supermarket and the countless other food products that utilize corn in some fashion.

In a free market ethanol would not exist. Even Al Gore has disowned it!

What kind of government would insist on regulating carbon dioxide, claiming it is causing “global warming” when it is obvious to everyone there is no “global warming” and CO2 is not causing anything except the growth of every form of vegetation on planet Earth.

When a government lies that much to everyone in an effort to control all energy use, it has become a criminal enterprise.

While all this is going on, that same government is borrowing and borrowing and borrowing, mostly from China, to keep the monstrosity it has created going. Our government is flat broke.

When you add in a President who thinks America is too arrogant and represents people who eat too much, drive too much, and need to expect less if they get sick, it is little wonder people are beginning to lose faith in him.

We need a lot of change in a big hurry or one day we will all wake up and there will be no United States of America because it had to default on nearly $14 trillion in present debt. That's equal to our current Gross Domestic Product. The U.S. dollar continues to lose its value and we have two more years of a President who cannot sign more spending bills fast enough.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Humans! Get Over Yourself!

By Alan Caruba

The greatest absurdity has been the belief that human beings have any influence over the planet on which they live.

The Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the fifth largest of the Solar System’s four terrestrial planets. It is the only planet that sustains life as we know it and humans came late to the party.

The Earth is dated to be 4.5 billion years old in a universe that is increasingly believed to have always existed, despite the Big Bang theory. Such evidence as exists suggests it is the only planet that has given rise to the evolution of life from self-replicating molecules, starting around 4 billion years ago.

Scientists have given names to the various periods of time of the Earth’s existence. These include the oldest, the Devonian, followed by the Silurian, Ordovician, Cambrian, Paleocene, Cretaceous, Jurassic, and Permian among others.

Robert W. Felix, in his book, “Magnetic Reversals and Evolutionary Leaps”, notes that “For all intents and purposes, though, life on Earth began about 580 million years ago at the beginning of the Cambrian Period, when new life suddenly exploded across the Earth.”

“A dizzying burst of shelled forms took place, and virtually all major forms of animal life.” This is known as the Cambrian explosion and Felix notes there was an “abrupt change from simple life forms to more advanced. No one knows how or why it happened. What we do know is that the pattern has always been the same—sudden—always sudden.”

What we do know is that mass extinctions have marked every period since the Earth’s beginning. Following the Cambrian explosion around 535 million years ago there have been at least five major mass extinctions, all pre-dated the existence of mankind. Indeed, mankind didn’t begin to gain traction as a species until the end of the last continental glaciation—ice age—about 10,000 years ago.

The Archaic Homo sapiens, anatomically human, date back about 500,000 years, but what we regard as modern humans did not make an appearance until 200,000 years ago and the earliest indicators of anything resembling Homo sapien sapiens, humanity, date back a mere 35,000 years ago.

Civilization is defined in a variety of ways, but is usually dated to the development of agriculture and the organization of human life around villages and cities. The Jews date their history back 3,500 years, but some date their arrival to 5,000 years ago. The last ice age ended about 10,000 years ago, so humans as we know ourselves didn’t begin until well after that event.

We are now 11,500 years since the last ice age and the next one is due any day now. The Earth has been in one of its cyclical cooling periods for a decade, the result of less solar activity, also a cyclical event.

Humans, you need to stop worrying about “controlling” carbon dioxide and stop passing laws to reduce its emissions. As far as the atmosphere  is concerned CO2 is 3.618% and man-made CO2 is even more miniscule, only 0.117%. Without CO2 we and everything else dies.

As the late Dixie Lee Ray, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, noted, “Such increases (of CO2) have occurred in the past without any help from us at all, and this time is probably no different. Most likely, the causes were and still are colossal cosmic forces quite outside human ability to control.”

The Earth’s atmosphere is composed primarily of 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen. Water vapor is being constantly recycled from the atmosphere to the Earth and absent the atmosphere no life would exist on Earth.

The other major factor affecting our lives is the Earth’s magnetic fields. The magnetic poles drift and periodically reverse. The magnetosphere deflects particles in the solar wind. The collision between the magnetic field and the solar winds forms the Van Allen radiation belts that protect the Earth.

The most recent magnetic reversal occurred approximately 700,000 years ago and reversals appear to occur in sync with ice ages and with the procession of the equinoxes.

We just experienced a winter solstice, one of the equinoxes marking the seasons as the Earth hurtles through space, circumnavigating the Sun, completely indifferent to human beings and all other life. In the southern hemisphere, they had a summer solstice.

As the human race continues to grow in numbers; it reached 6,803,000,000 by the end of 2007 and is projected to reach seven billion by 2013, it is worth keeping in mind that only 13.3% of the Earth surface is arable; which is to say is available for growing crops that in turn feed us and the livestock we grow.

Only about one-eighth of the Earth’s surface is suitable for humans to live on. Three-quarters is covered by oceans, while half of the land area is either desert (14%), high mountains (27%) or unsuitable unless you are an Eskimo or Bedouin. Most of us live in or near cities.

The relatively short history of humans demonstrates a capacity for violence documented in myths, the Bible, and recorded documentation of wars without end.

There is little evidence that murder, individual and organized, for any reason or no reason will end. The primary change of the last century was the development of nuclear weapons to destroy humans in numbers that defy the imagination.

So, humans, get over yourself!

You do not control the biosphere of life on Earth. You do not control its natural calamities. Your attempts at governance are fought with conflict, conquest, and oppression.

After the next magnetic reversal, the survivors—if there are any—will likely learn nothing from the experience.

© Alan Caruba, 2011