Just recently, a friend of mine was stopped by the Michigan State Police for having committed the insidious crime of driving her vehicle that has tinted front windows. Tinted windows are regulated by individual states, and in the era of vehicle customizations for artistic purposes, they have become immensely popular, and thus they have also become a favorite target of the police harassment state. You can read an overview of the individual state laws here.

My friend was given a hefty ticket, and she could only avoid the monetary punishment by producing a prescription or a note from a doctor. She only recently bought the car, in used condition, with the windows already tinted. So she immediately reached out to two doctors she sees regularly, and she obtained, yes, a prescription from one doctor and a ‘doctor note’ from her second doctor. It’s easy to make crap up – these docs can spin it any way they want. She sent me copies of the doc note and the prescription, and I found both of them to be hilarious and heroic.

I have another friend who lives in the city of Detroit, where he has been ticketed numerous times for his window tint. He usually gets stopped by the same couple of cops. He is black, a large man, and he is a Muslim – and with his facial hair one can certainly tell that he is a Muslim. Each time he is stopped he is needlessly harassed, and still, he has refused to get rid of the tint. He is a very security-oriented person, and he likes his privacy, especially for his wife when she is driving alone.

On that note, I’ve always wanted a dark tint for both of my front windows, but I haven’t wanted to bring on the harassment that is sure to come with it. When I am stopped by bully cops for other reasons, the results have never been gainful. I have a Honda Element that has the rear windows tinted dark at 35% (legal in Michigan), with no significant tint on the front windows. Quite frankly, I am tired of being ‘checked out’ by strangers in vehicles next to me, especially at red lights.

I often have males – usually in work trucks or raggedy jalopies – making very blatant and unshakable visual contact with me. Even if I creep upward a few feet at the light to avoid their disturbing stare, they also creep up in order to roll right next to me. I’ll creep forward again, and they do the same…again. These are not rare occurrences. It’s gone so far as to have men (and cars full of male teenagers) roll down their windows and verbally harass me, even while I continue to look straight ahead and ignore them.

Dark tinted windows would help to solve some of these troubles I experience. Additionally, here in Detroit it is disturbingly common to have your windows punched out in order for thieves to steal the contents inside the vehicle, even when vehicles are parked in very public (busy) places. One bag or box in your vehicle is a huge enticement for the scavenger thieves to bust in. Dark windows are an impediment to theft because street criminals are more likely to take the risk of breaking into a vehicle when they can observe the vehicle’s contents.

The tale is that tinted windows became an enemy of the police state because of cops being shot while approaching vehicles with dark tinted windows. Dark windows do limit visibility, but if that were true, the same could happen with passengers behind the front seat in any car, or especially from the rear in an SUV. However, many states allow darker tinted (or unlimited tint) windows in the back of vehicles, as well as the rear of SUVs. Often, the allowance for tint on the front windows is dictated by how dark the back windows are tinted.

Read the rest of the article

Recently by Karen De Coster: Pork: The Government’s Other WhiteMeat

Just recently, a friend of mine was stopped by the Michigan State Police for having committed the insidious crime of driving her vehicle that has tinted front windows. Tinted windows are regulated by individual states, and in the era of vehicle customizations for artistic purposes, they have become immensely popular, and thus they have also become a favorite target of the police harassment state. You can read an overview of the individual state laws here.

My friend was given a hefty ticket, and she could only avoid the monetary punishment by producing a prescription or a note from a doctor. She only recently bought the car, in used condition, with the windows already tinted. So she immediately reached out to two doctors she sees regularly, and she obtained, yes, a prescription from one doctor and a ‘doctor note’ from her second doctor. It’s easy to make crap up — these docs can spin it any way they want. She sent me copies of the doc note and the prescription, and I found both of them to be hilarious and heroic.

I have another friend who lives in the city of Detroit, where he has been ticketed numerous times for his window tint. He usually gets stopped by the same couple of cops. He is black, a large man, and he is a Muslim — and with his facial hair one can certainly tell that he is a Muslim. Each time he is stopped he is needlessly harassed, and still, he has refused to get rid of the tint. He is a very security-oriented person, and he likes his privacy, especially for his wife when she is driving alone.

On that note, I’ve always wanted a dark tint for both of my front windows, but I haven’t wanted to bring on the harassment that is sure to come with it. When I am stopped by bully cops for other reasons, the results have never been gainful. I have a Honda Element that has the rear windows tinted dark at 35% (legal in Michigan), with no significant tint on the front windows. Quite frankly, I am tired of being ‘checked out’ by strangers in vehicles next to me, especially at red lights.

I often have males — usually in work trucks or raggedy jalopies — making very blatant and unshakable visual contact with me. Even if I creep upward a few feet at the light to avoid their disturbing stare, they also creep up in order to roll right next to me. I’ll creep forward again, and they do the same…again. These are not rare occurrences. It’s gone so far as to have men (and cars full of male teenagers) roll down their windows and verbally harass me, even while I continue to look straight ahead and ignore them.

Dark tinted windows would help to solve some of these troubles I experience. Additionally, here in Detroit it is disturbingly common to have your windows punched out in order for thieves to steal the contents inside the vehicle, even when vehicles are parked in very public (busy) places. One bag or box in your vehicle is a huge enticement for the scavenger thieves to bust in. Dark windows are an impediment to theft because street criminals are more likely to take the risk of breaking into a vehicle when they can observe the vehicle’s contents.

The tale is that tinted windows became an enemy of the police state because of cops being shot while approaching vehicles with dark tinted windows. Dark windows do limit visibility, but if that were true, the same could happen with passengers behind the front seat in any car, or especially from the rear in an SUV. However, many states allow darker tinted (or unlimited tint) windows in the back of vehicles, as well as the rear of SUVs. Often, the allowance for tint on the front windows is dictated by how dark the back windows are tinted.

Read the rest of the article

Karen De Coster, CPA [send her mail] is an accounting/finance professional in the healthcare industry and a freelance writer, blogger, speaker, and sometimes unpaid troublemaker. She writes about libertarian stuff, economics, financial markets, the medical establishment, the Corporate State, health totalitarianism, and other essentially, anything that encroaches upon the freedom of her fellow human beings. When she has a few moments of spare time she engages functional fitness, adventure cycling, photography, conversations with friends, and visiting wine regions. This is her LewRockwell.com archive and her Mises.org archive. Check out her website. Follow her on Twitter @karendecoster.

The Best of Karen De Coster

Recently by Karen De Coster: Chicago: America's Gun-Free Killing Field

Years ago I began to cease eating pork because I came to despise it, but at the time, I didn’t really know why that was the case.

I was turned off by the dry, white, crumbly texture and the inability to cook most pork cuts – with the exception of some ribs or roasts – in such a manner that I could retain the moisture and integrity of taste. The boneless, center-cut pork chops, that were considered to be prime cuts, had become unpalatable.

Most of us have grown up with the old adage, u201CYou have to cook your pork well done or it will make you sick.u201D Accordingly, growing up eating inherently dry, overcooked, rubberized, white pork brought me much agony as a child. It wasn't until I was well into my adult years that I discovered that pork was really red, and not white. It was then that I began to understand the depth of the political ploys that had turned traditional pork on its ear in favor of factory-farmed white meat. This u201Cwhiteu201D meat had become representative of Big Agriculture farming interests and the federalized dietary guidelines that are the result of the politicization of food and nutrition.

Pork, PACs, and Politics

The story of pork's decline involves the usual suspects: mounting government intervention, political mandates, special interest lobbying arms, redistribution of income, and the federal government's 30+ years of war on dietary fat.

The pork arm of the government, the National Pork Board, was established in 1985 under the terms of the Pork Act, with the fluff name being the Pork Promotion, Research and Consumer Information Act of 1985. The activities of this organization are funded by a mandatory u201Ccheckoffu201D program that forces pork farmers to pay into a fund each time an animal is sold.

The USDA maintains oversight for this program, as well as similar programs in other industries. And while the U.S. congressional body has permitted these forcibly applied taxes to fund mega-marketing budgets in the various food industries, there have been numerous legal challenges to mandatory checkoffs over the years, including within the mushroom, beef, grape, and pork industries.

The beef industry has witnessed varied legal rulings concerning the government tax levied on beef producers to pay for the epic u201CBeef: It's What's For Dinneru201D campaign that began in 1992. In 2003, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit upheld a South Dakota District Court decision that ruled that the mandatory beef checkoff program, like a similar program in the mushroom industry, was u201Ccompelled speechu201D and thus the program was declared unconstitutional. In 2005, this decision was overturned by the Supreme Court with Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, claiming that u201Cgovernment speechu201D was at issue in this case, and thus was not subject to challenge under the First Amendment.

Though nonconformist cattle ranchers wanted an opt-out for the tax, the Court ruled, with a 6-3 majority, that producers being forced to pay for the funding of government speech do not raise First Amendment concerns. According to the First Amendment Center, Scalia defended the forced levies by writing:

Citizens may challenge compelled support of private speech, but have no First Amendment right not to fund government speech. That is no less true when the funding is achieved through targeted assessments devoted exclusively to the program to which the assessed citizens object.[1]

Likewise, prior to the Supreme Court ruling on the beef checkoff, the pork checkoff had been declared unconstitutional in a federal district court with the decision being affirmed by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The propaganda supporting the levies puts on a spin to give the appearance of benefits for those who are fleeced in order to fund campaigns they don't want to support. In the fall 2012 issue of Pork Checkoff Report, an article reviewing an econometrics-based self-evaluation of the pork checkoff program claimed that producers u201Cget back $17.40 of value for every $1 they invest in the pork checkoff.u201D While these taxes on the pork producers produce in excess of $50 million in booty per year, the subsequent expenditures benefit the largest and most industrialized factory farm machinations, including the giants Smithfield and Tyson.

Back in 2000, the Agriculture Department held a referendum where pork producers voted to terminate the mandatory checkoff program, and this was in spite of millions being poured into the campaign by the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) to maintain the status quo. In mid-January 2001, Dan Glickman, who was the Secretary of Agriculture, released the voting results and he prepared the USDA to move forward with termination of the checkoff program. Immediately, the NPPC and large-industrial pork producers from Michigan successfully applied for a temporary restraining order to halt the USDA elimination of the plunder program.

Then came Ann Veneman, a Bush appointee from Big Agra with her feet firmly planted in the biotech corporatocracy, who took over as Secretary of Agriculture on January 20th 2001. Immediately, she overturned the results of the referendum, citing a voting technicality. And this is in spite of the fact that both the General Accounting Office and Office of Inspector General had already concluded that Dan Glickman had acted within his statutory authority for holding the referendum, and that the proper voting controls were in place for the referendum.

Most recently, Veneman trots the globe fighting the war on obesity for global organizations and big government while maintaining posts as a Nestle board member and a Director at Alexion Pharmaceuticals.

Additionally, the National Pork Board is supported by its underling and foremost political arm, the National Pork Producers Council. The NPPC has a very powerful political lobby, PorkPAC, that, according to its website, u201Ceducates and supports candidates at the state and federal levels who support the U.S. pork industry.u201D In other words, the NPPC uses its monetary influence to drive legislation, regulation, and other political initiatives through its system of buying the favors of politicians to empower and enrich its industry benefactors.

The CAFO Calamity

The CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Organization) concept is an industrial concept. During the 1970s and 1980s, cattle and pigs began to come predominantly from the CAFO system. That time period saw the shift from the family farm to large industrial factory farming.

The confinement model aims at economies of scale – that is, the highest output at the lowest cost. In the meat industry, this model sacrifices food quality and raises ethical concerns in order to maintain desired profit margins. Those who decline to explore the facts of food politics still believe that the mega-industrial food machine is the epitome of the free market. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the United States as well as Europe, there are billions of dollars spent per year in government subsidies to support this model of animal agriculture.

First, the government subsidies artificially lower the cost of feed that saves the industry billions per year. This allows for a large reduction in operating costs. The competitors of these industrial-factory farms are those farmers who choose to farm their animals in diversified, pasture-based systems where they produce their own forage, and without government subsidies.

Additionally, farm bills come with massive incentives to influence investment in the industrial-factory farming system, and this spurs artificial growth. The Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), a mandatory spending program, doles out financial and technical assistance for agriculture conservation. It's actually a welfare program for CAFOs because these large-scale operations leave behind a massive trail of environmental and biological destruction: soil erosion and sedimentation, polluted watersheds, and manure and wastewater issues. This impacts the air, water, and land quality. There are also public health consequences from the routine administration of antibiotics that is necessary to keep animals alive within an intensely confined area.

The government contributes to the cost of conservation practices to clean up the mess to sustain profit margins in the industry and keep the industrial farms operable. An EQIP contract can pay up to 90 percent of the costs for planning, design, capital, labor, maintenance, and training for conservation projects. This program was funded to the tune of $1.75 billion for fiscal year 2012. The subsidies are just one reason why this industrial agricultural model has been called unsustainable.

Government policy has created CAFOs, and many years of supplementary government policies serves to maintain their existence. If the industrial-factory model farmers were left to clean up their own mess to sustain operations and pay their own costs, the industry model would be unprofitable. Instead, these streams of subsidies enable low-cost industrial food and healthy profit margins, and this is what the pasture-based farmers are up against.

Why White?

While the CAFO system was up and running in high gear, the aggressive marketing campaign titled u201CPork. The Other White Meatu201D made its debut in 1987. This campaign focused on presenting pork as an alternative u201Clean proteinu201D to help eradicate the public perception of pork as a high-fat meat. Dietary fat had become synonymous with u201Cunhealthyu201D as varied pop studies were trotted out by the medical establishment linking dietary fat to cardiovascular disease. According to a page from the National Pork Board website, this campaign was aggressively aimed at consumers with the goal being u201Cto increase consumer demand for pork and to dispel pork's reputation as a fatty protein.u201D Accordingly, industrial pork became the politically correct alternative to chicken and turkey, neither of which were demonized by the government's intensifying war on fat.

However, the government's food pyramid was not founded on science, but rather, it was based in politics and serving special interests. The food pyramid is a purely political animal developed by politicians to serve political ends. It was Senator George McGovern and his Select Senate Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs that gave us these politicized and destructive federal dietary guidelines.

The food politics of the Committee were set in motion as McGovern's Dietary Goals for the United States were hammered out at the hands of federal politicians and a journalist who wrote the final draft. The guidelines were heavily influenced by lobbying from the food industry foot soldiers who vilified animal fat and won, in spite of the numerous, highly qualified scientists who debunked their political agenda with the power of science. The Dietary Goals for the United States (The McGovern Report) were issued in 1977, leading to the 1980 publication of Nutrition and Your Health: Dietary Guidelines for Americans, first edition.

Since that time, the government has had a non-scientific lock on dietary-nutritional central planning. The nutrition central planning model has held steadfast on the notion that dietary fat is the enemy, and thus planted the seeds for the low-fat revolution.

As a response to the low-fat craze, the pork industry began utilizing new feeding and breeding techniques. Essentially, the animals have been genetically altered to produce a white, lean, dry meat product to adapt to the political-nutritional health models that were sweeping the mainstream media and consumer consciousness. The pork industry's website admits to claims that:

Today’s pork has 16% less fat and 27% less saturated fat as compared to 1991. Many cuts of pork are now as lean as skinless chicken.

Additionally, the same website page notes that this new pork meets the government's u201Cguidelinesu201D to earn a declaration of u201Clean.u201D The new u201Cleanu201D meat is produced not only through the production of a leaner animal with reduced fat, but also a reduction of intramuscle fat that cannot be trimmed.

Consequently, modern pork is artificially pale and unexciting, hence the u201Cwhiteu201D designation. The use of the term u201Cwhite meatu201D is a misnomer, however, because the traditional definition of red meat is a meat product that is derived from a mammal, whereas white meat has been defined as being derived from a fowl. A pig is a mammal. Generally, pig meat does produce less saturated fat than that from ruminants such as cows, which have four-compartment stomachs as opposed to the one stomach of a pig.

Still, real pork – that which hasn't been modified by scientific modifications conforming to political dictates – is red, not white. When these animals are raised within the boundaries of natural farming practices that include rotational grazing, grass-based animal husbandry, and humane handling, the meat takes on a sharp, appealing, red color. The following is a snippet from the website of Melo Farms of Yale, Michigan, where the proprietors raise Berkshire heritage pigs in a natural environment as an alternative to the industrial CAFO system.

Our pigs are life-lived animals that enjoy pastured land every day. This gives our herd the luxury of playful socialization with each other rather than the isolation of the single-stall pen system favored by the pork industry. Our pigs roam our pasture, run and romp in the field, nestle with each other when sleeping, and move like an army of mini-hippos to play in favorite dig holes. They have a shaded nest in the pasture, free-running clean water, and protection from predators. Their bodies bear no signs of crowding stress such as ear or tail bites. What we don't have are wire floors, single occupancy stations, or a manure lagoon. Our Berkshire hogs are calm and playful and, of course, full of personality!

Amazingly, it wasn't until 2011 that the USDA revised its cooking guidelines for pork, bringing the guidelines more in line with beef and lamb. Prior to the guideline revisions, food scaremongering techniques had put medium or medium-rare pork in the u201Cunsafeu201D category, even though it was never disclosed that the hazards of the industrial feedlot system were behind the impetus to keep higher standards for cooking pork. However, chefs and knowledgeable layman who have been cooking and eating pasture-based pork have long been preparing safe pork dishes with the meat in a medium rare state. Meat produced from the pasture-based model is lacking many or all of the risks posed by the industrial model that is rife with safety concerns and is therefore heavily regulated.

Yet the USDA claims that the revision was due to improved methodology in animal feeding and housing, in spite of the fact that the industrial CAFO model is under more scrutiny than ever for its use of intense confinement, pesticides, steroids, hormones, antibiotics, and other unnatural agents.

In early 2011, the National Pork Board announced that it was replacing the u201COther White Meatu201D slogan with a new mantra to fit with the times: u201CPork: Be Inspired.u201D The pork central planners believe that after twenty-five years of white meat spin they have completed their mission of constructing the u201Cnew chickenu201D for the health conscious, and thus they will take the pork propaganda in a new direction in an attempt to increase consumer consumption of its product. In fact, it's the same old parched, industrial, white meat with a newfangled promotional spin.

Notes

[1] http://archive.firstamendmentcenter.org/analysis.aspx?id=15308

Karen De Coster, CPA [send her mail] is an accounting/finance professional in the healthcare industry and a freelance writer, blogger, speaker, and sometimes unpaid troublemaker. She writes about libertarian stuff, economics, financial markets, the medical establishment, the Corporate State, health totalitarianism, and other essentially, anything that encroaches upon the freedom of her fellow human beings. When she has a few moments of spare time she engages functional fitness, adventure cycling, photography, conversations with friends, and visiting wine regions. This is her LewRockwell.com archive and her Mises.org archive. Check out her website. Follow her on Twitter @karendecoster.

The Best of Karen De Coster

Recently by Karen De Coster: The Curse of Government WashingMachines

Chicago, one of America’s most anti-gun cities, has just recorded its 500th homicide. This is another banner year for Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s tightly controlled non-gun “paradise.” Breitbart recently reported that 440 school age children were shot in 2012 in Chicago’s paradise. Breitbart’s Awr Hawkins writes:

These numbers are well above those for the 2011-2012 school year, in which 319 Chicago students were wounded and another 24 were killed.

Nonetheless, it has been noted that the school where Rahm’s children attend to their education has an armed security guard. Additionally, his children also have the benefit of an armed escort to get them to and from school, just like those Hollywood celebrities who clamor for gun control for their admiring fans while they enjoy full-time, armed bodyguards. And yet, the citizen gun control puppets continue to lap up the “wisdom” of their Masters and spew their hyper-emotional pleas to be controlled and enslaved.

Oh – and what appeared in the Chicago Tribune just a few days prior to the Chicago murder report? An article by Laura Washington, written in the usual Oprahified manner, stating that gun control would be the best present ever for those of us who lack Chicago’s glorious standards for a peace paradise. In fact, Miss Laura openly calls for totalitarian decrees on the part of the Napoleonic branch of government:

Obama can do more. He can issue executive orders that will bypass the congressional sausage makers. He can deploy his White House bully pulpit to back similar state and local efforts.

If we don't take action for the little angels of Sandy Hook, now, America will be forever haunted by the demons of gun violence.

In addition, Miss Laura also states that:

During the 2012 campaign, he avoided confrontations on gun control. When Obama was asked about gun control at a presidential debate, he punted. He was terrified of the People of the Gun, particularly in election swing states like Pennsylvania and Virginia.

People of the Gun? How cutesy. Actually, Obama and Rahm Emanuel both quickly realized, upon Obamanuel’s first election victory, that they could not win the federal battle for gun control because so many states of free and law-abiding peoples are still heroically immersed in a gun culture, unlike their murder city. Like all of us, politicians pick their battles, and after Obamanuel realized this battle could not be won, Emanuel separated from Obama and took his schemes back to the city that gave us both of these megalomaniac buffoons. Sorry Chicago, better that you have Rahm all to yourselves rather than the rest of us.

Following the Connecticut school shooting, Emanuel has begged the media to listen to his appeals for nationwide gun control, in spite of the carnage in his own state. Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, the guy who resides over Rahm's killing fields, appeared on WGN News to tell the media lapdogs that the U.S. has an "overproduction" of guns, and that we [the collective people of the United States] are "the only economy on earth where supply outweighs legitimate demand." McCarthy, who wants stricter gun control for his killing fields, as well as an "assault weapon" and large ammunition clip ban, is fond of repeating his "legitimate demand" theory, as if subjective demand is somehow legitimately disqualified when the Masters have been empowered to determine what their serfs can legitimately demand.

In 2009, I reported this statistic about Chicago's stunning success with gun control:

While the median violent crime rate for the United States in 2008 — the last year for which statistics were released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation — was 4.7 percent, Chicago's median rate was 12.12 percent. In addition, the United States overall experienced 49.6 crimes per square mile, but Chicago witnessed 766 crimes per square mile.

Additionally, I wrote about the 2009 overall slaughter rates for the city of Chicago. The summer of 2009 was a bloodbath in the city, and that's not including the armed robberies, burglaries, and home invasions where the criminals carried out their crimes with guns they apparently have to access to in a gun-controlled city. As Alan Gottlieb of the 2nd Amendment Foundation reported back in 2004, when Chicago won the title of Murder City, the cities with the nation's strictest gun laws – New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles – continue to outpace all others in terms of their high crime numbers.

Throughout all of this official drama on the part of Chicago's uniformed officialdom, not once has any city bureaucrat linked Chicago's years of murder orgies to its gun control policy that puts so many guns into the hands of criminals while robbing law-abiding people of the ability to defend themselves in the city's gangland.

Chicago, feel free to revel in your gun control authoritarianism and ignore your city’s violence, murder, mayhem, and perpetual terror, but you aren’t going to import your political enslavement and perverted twist of logic to the rest of us anytime soon.

Karen De Coster, CPA [send her mail] is an accounting/finance professional in the healthcare industry and a freelance writer, blogger, speaker, and sometimes unpaid troublemaker. She writes about libertarian stuff, economics, financial markets, the medical establishment, the Corporate State, health totalitarianism, and other essentially, anything that encroaches upon the freedom of her fellow human beings. When she has a few moments of spare time she engages functional fitness, adventure cycling, photography, conversations with friends, and visiting wine regions. This is her LewRockwell.com archive and her Mises.org archive. Check out her website. Follow her on Twitter @karendecoster.

The Best of Karen De Coster

Recently by Karen De Coster: We Should Do What the Government Says Is Good for Us

Many folks never stop to think about the impact that government mandates have on every single facet of their daily lives. Take just one example, and that is the interminable string of decrees on the part of the governmental-environmental-green complex and the ensuing repercussions on the lives of individuals.

This interesting article on Epinions discusses the impact of federal energy efficiency standards for washing machines, including (1) the myths of energy savings (2) the long-term, negative environmental impacts of the high-efficiency machines, and (3) the cost to consumers of the government's high-efficiency, short-lived washers. The writer notes:

Too many large appliance products are now being engineered to meet priorities that do not include a reasonable interval between repairs and a service life commensurate with their initial cost. 

…All high efficiency, high-speed spin washers (both top and front-load) invariably possess a motherboard and a host of electronic parts, and according to those who repair them for a living, washers crammed with multiple electronic sensors, touchpads, digital displays, and miniaturized circuit boards tend to need more frequent repair — i.e. — replacement.  They must be kept on an electrical circuit with functioning surge protection, because their vulnerable and expensive solid-state components can easily degrade or burn out with electrical power surges. 

The writer points out that the federal government's 2007 Energy Star standards have, for the most part, eliminated the traditional design for washing machines because those machines cannot obtain the government's certifications, unlike the newer devices that manufacturers have turned out to specifically meet federal requirements.

I never bought into the high-efficiency (HE) concept, and in fact I have always despised the newfangled front-loader design. I was right when I assumed the opinion that those atrocities were nothing more than an environmental stunt and marketing scam, backed by the force of politics and special interests. Consumers have been sucked into buying these things because of their keen looks and pretty colors. Almost everyone I know has a front-loading machine.

Until November 2009, I still had my mother’s old machines that were 20-ish years old, and they worked great, for years, before they both began to slowly poop out. When the dryer ceased to dry in one cycle, and the agitator on my washing machine began to puncture numerous holes in my clothes, it was time to get new appliances. I bought a Kenmore HE washer and dryer combo, on Black Friday at Sears, at half-price. I did not seek, or want, HE appliances. But I did desire a washer without an agitator, and mostly because of my agonizing two-year battle with my old washer to keep my clothes free of holes. I was planted firmly in the anti-agitator camp. So I wanted an agitator-free top loader, but since those models were all HE, I walked away with the purchase of a new, top-loading HE washer and matching dryer. I should have listened to the appliance salesman at Sears who told me, "You really shouldn't blame the agitator." In retrospect, it is clear that I blew it on this purchase. And that agitates the heck out of me.

This inefficient, high-efficiency thing has done nothing but break down since I bought it. It once ate, and I mean shredded to bits, an entire blanket, causing the washer to jam up, and the dang water could not empty out of the washer. Service call. The water sat there for two days and stunk up the basement after I gave up on bailing it out. The appliance repairman told me that high-efficiency washers tend to eat delicate stuff because of the high spin speed. Also, I was told, ”Oh, you can’t wash rugs. These things spin too fast and the weight of rugs will break the drums and other parts. You need to take your rugs to the laundromat.” I had been washing my rugs due to hosting a perpetual dog hair festival in my house, and I’ll be darn if I will own a washing machine that insists that I go to a laundromat to wash them.

So this piece of junk breaks all the time (I have the 5-year, extended warranty), it eats delicate things, it can’t spin rugs, you have to use special HE soap, and it has so many computer boards and electronic parts that it breaks down more quickly than you can say, “my computer is hour-glassing again…” Also, I’ve had to spin and re-spin clothes many times because the washer doesn’t spin the clothes dry enough, thus leading to throwing eighty pounds of water-logged clothes in the dryer, therefore sucking up even more energy from dryer use and repeating drying cycles, and potentially breaking my dryer from the excess weight load. I've set my dryer on back-to-back 70-minute cycles in order to dry saturated clothes. Energy savings indeed! Just like the government-mandated, low-flow toilets where the flow is so low that they don’t move molehills, let alone mountains.

Well, my washing machine broke again two weeks ago, and if I could lift it like I can lift a laptop, I'm sure I would have hurled it across the basement. Eventually, the machine started working again when I fussed with it a bit, and that lasted a couple of washes while I held my breath waiting for the machine to spite me once and for all. So indeed, it broke again last week, and it took forever for me to get the lid lock to unlock (!) so I could get my clothes out and take them to the laundromat. I had to invent a hatful of magician's tricks just to get the jaws open to get at my clothes. Then it brazenly hissed at me, followed by the beeping and flashing of numbers and letters in the display in an obsessive-compulsive rage. What a useless piece of crap.

For the most part, we shall not put the blame the manufacturer — instead, blame the government and the politicization of every aspect of our lives. Here's another passage from the writer of the article.

The government assumes that all high-efficiency, high-speed-spin washer owners — regardless of brand/model - are satisfied with the cleanliness of their clothes and aren’t fudging with extra wash or rinse cycles, nor using more hot water in order to increase cleaning power (or to reduce widely-reported high-efficiency front-load washer odors).  For those of you who don’t precisely match the assumptions in the government model (washing mostly in cold water, using an indoor/outdoor clothesline or drying rack, using a high efficiency solar water heater or heat pump, or washing fewer than eight family-size loads of laundry per week), don't count on saving much money before you pay to replace that washer again!

I'm tired of being without a washer and waiting for a Saturday repair appointment or taking time off during the week to meet the repairman. And while I wait for the appointment, I drag my clothes to the laundromat, burning $4/gallon petroleum to get there and back, and when I get there I use age-old, 1980s-style, "inefficient" machines to waste the water I was supposedly saving with my new machine that wastes energy, time, money, parts, landfill space, and human energy.

The Sears repairman came by, and I noted he loves to talk. He cornered me in the kitchen with a long conversation following his news, "Sorry, I don't carry the part you need. It's going to be several days before we can get the part." I asked him why these newer things were such pieces of crapola, hoping to engage him in one of my dissident discussions.

This man needed no impetus from me — he went on and on about how the government has created these malfunctioning monstrosities, why he will never buy a modern washing machine, and why everyone should look for the more reliable fix-up relics from the past. He fessed up that everyone in the industry — manufacturers, retailers, repairmen, etc. — know that these government-inefficient contraptions are no good, and the challenges of high-efficiency design means they can never be built to last without triggering significant cost increases to the consumer. Thus, in order to manufacture and sell washing appliances at an affordable price, the producers are squeezed to design and build malfunctioning junk that "saves the planet" while the consumers of these products are saddled with green-induced landfill paraphernalia.

In summary, the government's green totalitarianism has created a massive economic inefficiency with its energy-and-money-wasting, "high efficiency" washing machines.

• On a macro level, there exists a diversion of resources due to manufacturers rushing to meet government "voluntary compliance" standards and mandates. Manufacturers are forced to rush shoddy designs to market to meet mandates instead of strategically directing long-term resources toward research and design implementation as desired by consumers in the marketplace.
• Wasted energy resources through repeated cycles (spin, wash, extra drying, or otherwise) on the part of users to maintain previous standards for the cleanliness, dryness, and wrinkle effect of clothes.
• Increased maintenance and repair cost to consumers over the life of the machine due to the mandates forcing manufacturers to implement substandard product design.
• Economic inefficiency to consumers due to the shorter life span of the machine.
• Huge landfill graveyards of non-repairable machines that are discarded because they are too costly to be fixed.

When my warranty runs out in 2014, this puppy is going on Craigslist as a “cheap, damaged good,” and if that doesn’t get any takers, out to the curb she goes, for the garbage pickers. I’ll buy a used, old-fashioned, ugly, water-hogging, rebuilt, grandma washer, as sold by many local fellas who make a living fixing up and selling used appliances. Until then, I’ll keep washing my rugs and keep breaking this thing, and Sears will keep fixing it, on their dime.

Karen De Coster, CPA [send her mail] is an accounting/finance professional in the healthcare industry and a freelance writer, blogger, speaker, and sometimes unpaid troublemaker. She writes about libertarian stuff, economics, financial markets, the medical establishment, the Corporate State, health totalitarianism, and other essentially, anything that encroaches upon the freedom of her fellow human beings. When she has a few moments of spare time she engages functional fitness, adventure cycling, photography, conversations with friends, and visiting wine regions. This is her LewRockwell.com archive and her Mises.org archive. Check out her website. Follow her on Twitter @karendecoster.

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Recently by Karen De Coster: We Should Do What the Government Says Is Good for Us

I must reveal my newest math: The Idiocracy + Phone Devices = Dysfunctional Texting Idiocracy.

First, I want to express a few thoughts before I explain my equation. As folks may or may not know, I am no Luddite. I am a technology aficionado. I really do love portable computing devices, and that includes the use of text as a method of messaging. I use texting with friends because it can be a very convenient and useful tool. Most of my friends – but not all – are intelligent enough to understand the limitations of the tool. Text, in my world, is used as an instant-o-gram, a quickie message service, a "hello" tool, or even for winging fun and unusual sightings and/or comments every now and then. It's a great way of staying in touch with the right thoughts or pictures, and at a time that is convenient for both the sender and receiver.

Most of my friends, however, understand that texting does not replace face time and real conversation. Texting negates eye contact, body language, and voice expression, which makes it far worse than the cell phone. Person-to-person contact, of course, is the ideal, even if it is extremely old-fashioned. A lot can be said about a conversation by looking at a person's body language and eye contact. Where the phone loses that capacity, at least it offers the voice connection. With a phone call there is voice inflection allowing you to gauge the other person's mood, sincerity, and tone. In comparison, texting is the wood outhouse of civilization and has become the building block of the Dysfunctional Idiocracy.

The misguided libertarians often get angry with me for criticizing that which deserves my wrath because they think that no free, independent act should ever be criticized. They confuse criticism with coercion. In knee jerk fashion, they mistake my cultural criticism of certain human actions for government laws that makes said acts illegal and therefore subject to criminal punishment. I don't want to pass laws disallowing or punishing human folly; I just want the freedom to make fun of it all.

The members of the Dysfunctional Idiocracy have their cell phones stuck in their face 24/7. It doesn't matter if they are on the elliptical at the gym, in the middle of dinner, in line at a retail store, in a meeting at work, or crossing busy, 4-lane road. Ask me how many times I have almost run over some nitwit crossing the road in front of me, looking down at his phone, while forgetting he is crossing a 4-lane, 45 mph road. It's happened too many times to count. Furthermore, while driving, I always watch people driving around me and I see them, yes, texting, texting, texting.

The Dysfunctional Texting Idiocracy is expressed via the extreme use of texting that goes beyond basic Idiocracy behaviors. One of the most notable of all Texting Idiocracy behaviors is the notion that many relationships are now fully carried out via text messaging. Dates are arranged by text, and they are also broken by text under the assumption that the other person also has their muzzle buried in their phone and will therefore get the text timely. The meat of relationships is carried out by texting — long conversations in broken English are somehow endearing in the land of the Texting Idiocracy.

Remarkably, relationship break-ups also occur by text. That eliminates any need for honesty, closure, explanation, or courtesy. In fact, my favorite text act of all time is the "because I didn't return your text for many days [or weeks?], that means I have broken up with you" act. Oh yes — the act of not texting back is the grandest break-up of all. If you dare to not get the hint that the no-text non-message was actually a message to you that "we are done," then you have just failed Text Communications 101. You are a boob.

The ultimate break-up fallout by text is when the text ignorer continues to ignore the texter in order to express that a break-up has occurred, but the party being broken up with continues to text in anticipation that a response will ultimately come forth, thus ending any perception of a break-up. This can go on for months.

Do I see people doing this? Yes. And sadly, they are not teenagers. It boggles my mind.

The "I Text, Therefore I Am" generation is not just the young people who have grown up with electronic devices and social media. Oh no, no, no — let's not blame this one on the young folks. It's the aging bar crowd and old fogeys, the Baby Boomers and older Gen X'ers (40 and 50-somethings), who are the worst offenders. You people are the grand bozos of the Boobus Textus Society. You are the great offenders, not the kids. In fact, you are teaching your kids that it is okay to be a committed Boobus Textus. Monkey see, monkey do is in your court. And your younger monkeys are watching you and learning from the elder Idiocracy.

And you oldsters are the folks who should know better because you grew up in households where telephone calls were not allowed for just any old blab-a-thon; you actually needed a reason to call a friend on your parents' dime. Remember when you had to wait two hours to make a phone call because your household had a shared party line? Most of the time you went to your friend's house and knocked on the door. You rode a bike or walked several blocks to earn a conversation with another human being who had a face.

The curious term I keep hearing in the adult Text World is "she's [or he's] a texter." This is what people say about their friends or significant other. Apparently, this is what defines people nowadays. A texter is defined as the understanding that the person in question, the "texter," carries out all important communications by text, so the whole world waits on the texter to, well, text. A no-text is a sign the texter is either dead or an idiot. If the texter is known to be alive and therefore deemed an idiot, the person expecting a text sends angry texts to the texter expressing rage over not receiving the expected text. Ultimately, either text rage or text silence will commence, and proper meaning must be drawn from either possible scenario so that all is understood by both parties to the text-o-rama. Note that text silence can be interpreted in various ways, by both parties to the silence, so communication chaos generally ensues.

Indeed, this is the Retardocracy around us.

I love it when private businesses post signs restricting cell phone use, such as “Don’t talk or text on your cell phone while in line.” Three cheers, especially if they enforce their rules. You think you wouldn’t have to tell people that with huge black-and-white signs blaring at them, but no, you do have to tell them. And tell them again and again and again. And still, they text.

I despise it when people are in my presence and they can't stop texting. And I am not talking about urgent work or family stuff — it's the ludicrous, irrelevant hacking away at one's phone just because their brain is wired to execute meaningless exploits at all times of the day. It's rude and I have no patience for it.

My least favorite act is when others try to carry out important — and long! — conversations via texting. They actually expect me to write a 500-word essay back to them via the slow act of typing away on a virtual keyboard with my index finger. I don't think so. I ignore the texts or I say, "call me." But experience shows that eventually, not only do texters cease to have a face, but they also become non-callers. As they devolve from face to phone to text, they lose touch with real people and real relationships. They no longer have the ability to interact directly with flesh and bones. They are living life in a cartoon.

Now this is not just one person's cantankerous view. I have this conversation with many of my text tool-loving friends who have had the same experiences as I have had with the culture of over-text. I know of many friendships that have either turned into a barely-a-friendship, or, they have ended due to one person's consistent reliance on texting as a means of communication and association.

Again, I shall express the view that I love portable computing devices, but I don't allow them to meddle in my human relationships. Humans, to me, have faces and voices, and those unique characteristics are at the core of their expressive personality and personal character. Not their index fingers.

Karen De Coster, CPA [send her mail] is an accounting/finance professional in the healthcare industry and a freelance writer, blogger, speaker, and sometimes unpaid troublemaker. She writes about libertarian stuff, economics, financial markets, the medical establishment, the Corporate State, health totalitarianism, and other essentially, anything that encroaches upon the freedom of her fellow human beings. When she has a few moments of spare time she engages functional fitness, adventure cycling, photography, conversations with friends, and visiting wine regions. This is her LewRockwell.com archive and her Mises.org archive. Check out her website. Follow her on Twitter @karendecoster.

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This article from Gawker media, which is centered on my opinions and writings about the incandescent light bulb banishment, appeared on Gizmodo on Thursday, September 20, 2012, complete with compare-and-contrast photos. Gizmodo is one of many weblogs of the parent company, Gawker media. I took no issue with doing the interview with this particular website on why the government’s ban on incandescent light bulbs is totalitarian, even though I had a gut feeling — very early on — that the author and/or editor would attempt to slam dunk me. And the author indeed attempted to do this, and only lightly so, but the straw man argument was not very successful.

In fact, the author and story editor had googled me and they came across what they thought to be an interesting pro-gun photo of me that was in contrast to the photo — me with some light bulbs — that I had supplied to them. I had no problem with them running the other photo, knowing that the slam dunk and photo reveal on their part would actually backfire very much in my favor.

First of all — to correct a few items from the article: the shorts I am wearing are not “daisy dukes,” as several observant folks pointed out on my Facebook page. They are 1970s-style, cut-off Levi shorts. Big difference. Additionally, the rifle I am holding is a BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle), not an “assault rifle.” My friend who owns the rifle notes that the BAR would not be considered an assault rifle because it fires a full-size .30-06 cartridge. The “assault rifle” designation, which is always used as a pejorative remark, is merely an old ploy to paint one as a lunatic who is doing something that is in opposition to the uninformed opinions of the compliant masses (gasp!) that prefer following the sheep over the cliff in order to be good little citizens of the state. Since my blog clearly sates, “eccentric in demeanor and opinion,” one can expect that I may have a hobby or two, along with a thought or two, which are not approved by the masses who worship the purveyors of conventional wisdom from their dutiful fiefdoms.

Also, I am not an “unofficial leader” of any movement to hoard incandescent light bulbs. I am a lone writer, with almost no “official” associations, who has stood as an independent writer/blogger/researcher for fourteen years. I write what I see, and that includes both research and facts, and my ensuing opinions and/or conclusions are presented in various formats — serious, critical, humorous, and/or satire.

The interesting tack of this Gizmodo story is that very little of what I actually said was quoted, and my thesis — on why the government’s ban is pro-special/corporate interests and anti-freedom — was never brought out, even though I spelled it out clearly in the email interview. Thus I am reprinting the questions and my responses below, in full, as I sent them off to the author of the piece.

The gist of the Gizmodo story, in fact, is kind of amusing: I am a “right-leaning” anti-Democrat in the same vein as Rush Limbaugh(!) and Michelle Bachman? Anyone who did any research, at all, in my fourteen years of archives, outside of “daisy duke” photos, would have immediately seized upon the fact that I am an anarcho-libertarian (a market anarchist) who has absolutely no allegiance to any political party, let alone the modern “conservative,” social democrat-fascist party. Here is my interview as I completed it.

1. How many bulbs have you stockpiled thus far, and how many more do you plan on getting before you’re through?

I have about 400-500 bulbs at this point. I have 60 watt, 75 watt, 100 watt, 3-way, and many of those are daylight and/or GE Reveal bulbs. I don't know if I will get a whole lot more for my own use, but if I do, it'll be because I see favorable resale prices and/or a good market for them after they become difficult for the public to find.

2. How much have you spent stockpiling these bulbs?

Many of these bulbs come at the cost of $1.25 per 4-pack for the generic brands, and .60 — .70 per bulb for some of the name brands, so they are not expensive to hoard. My favorite standard incandescent bulb, the GE Reveal, costs about $1.30 per bulb. Accordingly, I've spent less about $250 or so on my entire stockpile.

3. Why are you doing this?

This is a totalitarian green scheme on the part of massively powerful special interests that have banded together to serve their own political agendas.

It's yet another government attack on civilization. It's a condemnation of our standard of living and an attack on human comfort with the ban of one of civilization's stellar inventions.

Those who seek to deny the rights of others to choose their own light bulbs stress the notion that incandescent bulbs haven't been "banned." The law, indeed, is "technology neutral" in that it sets particular standards for bulbs that cannot be met with traditional incandescent technology. But the efficiency standards were set arbitrarily high so that the traditional bulbs could no longer meet the new requirements.

Is it so difficult to see that when government sets impossible standards to meet that will result in the phase-out (manufacturing and importing) of current products in favor of newer products that benefit certain manufacturers, industries, and special interests, this is a totalitarian, lifestyle decree in the same vein as a full-force, explicit ban on the product? Why is implicitly peddled "soft fascism" somehow kindler and gentler than explicit, acknowledged totalitarian decrees?

Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who holds a Nobel Prize in physics, was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying "We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money." So once again, our lofty rulers treat their lowly subjects as morons and are thus compelled to direct our private lives for us in the name of saving us from our own stupidity. Why, then, don't they force us take their compulsory "advice" on buying MP3 players, toilet paper, or computer software? Perhaps because there are not enough empowered political and special interests in these hotly contested markets?

So yes, this is partly a freedom issue. We have come to a point in America where we are under a consistent barrage of attacks on our lifestyles and our choices, and always, there is some warm-and-fuzzy scheme being peddled to the citizens (in this case, saving the planet) that makes them feel guilt-ridden if they don't buy into the blarney.

But there are other, more important reasons for my objection to this ban that are based on personal preferences. I'm an artist at my root, and I see light as something that shapes my atmosphere and influences my mood. I did much of my home interior design around my lighting, with strategic placement of lights, as well as dimmers on most of my switch plates.

Personally, I despise fluorescents lighting because they are too bright and too obnoxious. I don't want to relax in my home, reading a book on the couch, and look around and see my rooms lit up like my office environment with lights blaring at me.

CFLs just don't have the same warm glow as incandescent bulbs. CFLs also can't be dimmed as low as an incandescent light bulb, which makes them unfriendly to people who value a quality ambiance. LEDs can dim lower than CFLs, but the cost of LEDs may be high for some time. I value natural sunlight during the daytime, and very low, strategically placed lighting in the evening and at night. This helps me to shut down, unwind, and prepare for a good night of sleep. I sleep so well that if it takes me more than five minutes to fall asleep, that is akin to insomnia for me. On the contrary, sleeping problems and sleeping pill use is almost epidemic in America.

In fact, some researchers interested in the topic of how light affects human moods have noted that the bluer light from CFLs closely resembles daylight, and this will suppress our body's ability to produce required melatonin, therefore causing mood and sleep issues.

The filament bulbs emit a more pleasing yellow light that sets the tone for rest and relaxation, and your body responds positively, thus allowing for more consistent sleeping patterns.

Some recent research from scientists shows that compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs are bad for your health. They noted that CFLs release carcinogenic chemicals and toxins in addition to frying your skin and potentially causing migraine headaches.

Additionally, CFLs contain mercury, and it's drama time whenever you bust one inside the house. There's a reason that the EPA website contains three pages of consumer directions about what to do if you break a CFL bulb in your home: "Open a window and leave the room for 15 minutes or more. Shut off the central heating and air conditioning system. Carefully scoop up glass fragments and powder using stiff paper or cardboard and place them in a glass jar with a metal lid." To me, this sounds like an environmental and human hazard.

Where is the FTC's consumer protection division when it comes to protecting people from government-approved household hazards that we are forced to buy?

Lastly, there's the issue of resale value when the popularity of incandescent bulbs exceeds the available supply. Due to the quality of incandescent lighting, there will always be a market for incandescent bulbs, even if the price structure of the new-age replacements eventually drops to current norms.

Reading my interview responses after reading the Gizmodo piece will give the reader a good indication of how deliberately the story was skewed to ignore the fact that I am an intelligent, articulate writer with facts to back up my writings and views, and instead, the story wanted to present me as one of those few nutcases in existence, hiding in the woods and wearing “daisy dukes,” shooting guns, and dissenting against the government’s superior wisdom and the good sense of the well-meaning collective establishment who need to “nudge” us toward better decisions because we are too stupid to understand how ignorant we are as individuals.

I find it funny that the author actually writes this in his piece:

Some people simply don’t want to be told what to do, regardless of how good it is for them or the world. They’d rather just hoard the outlawed bulbs.

For her part, De Coster had a lot of the same complaints as others in favor of keeping conventional incandescent bulbs around.

Can you say eyes-roll-back-into-head? Who would actually put it in writing that we should allow governments, elites, corporate interests, human-hating environmental special interests, or even our best friends “tell us what to do?” And all for a fluffy-and-warm notion such as “good for the world?” By whose definition is anything “good for the world?” General Electric’s definition? Or the definition of government cabinet appointees and czars? Or the definition of all the little generals among the masses who desire to enforce government dictates with their own opinions and chorus of agreement with their rulers? Or does my own definition suffice in terms of making my own decisions about what to do with my body, property, lifestyle, or otherwise? Who are the “victims” when I make the choice to use an incandescent bulb that I favor over other choices forced upon me?

Worse yet, the author has declared that the conventional wisdom of the politicized special interests is “good for me.” Really? Indeed, there really are people who believe that deciding what is “good for” individuals is not subjective to each individual, but rather it is up for vote amongst the masses, including strangers who have no knowledge of or relation to the individuals in question.

Lastly, the author ends with this:

But when I email her to ask her why she won’t simply buy the new, more efficient incandescent bulbs, she says she shouldn’t have to. “It is like saying that I love to eat beef, and I occasionally like to eat chicken, but prefer beef,” she writes. “Should the government ban me from eating beef — on the basis of political-special interest hogwash — and ask me if replacing all of my beef with chicken is acceptable, because government has deemed that chicken is more efficient, or politically palatable? Of course, I desire both, and banning beef and telling me that chicken should be an acceptable 100 percent replacement is still totalitarianism, and so, no, it is not acceptable.”

It is a strange world. And some people like to be kept in the dark.

If not becoming a slave to the opinions and demands of my fellow citizens based on what they think is “good for me” or “good for the world” is being “kept in the dark,” then I suppose only the yellow brick road to the government’s good-for-me gulag is well-lit with the establishment’s preferred CFLs. I’ll take the dark way that offers up bits of freedom any day, as opposed to the lighted approach that is bound in chains but paved with “good intentions” to save the planet while also saving us evil renegades from our derelict decisions.

Indeed, it is a strange world where the statist mentality of the masses has become so deeply embedded that a person cannot comprehend that unique individuals have unique preferences, and therefore, their choices are distinct. How is it possible that Americans — who are so blessed to have once been given a shot at bona fide freedom — have become so uniquely adapted to being unconditionally compliant and living in chains as slaves, while being ungrudgingly subservient to a massive government-corporatocracy-special interest complex that erodes their freedoms almost daily, while enabling the elite overlords who control and rule over them for power and profit?" Perhaps that is a question that would befuddle our author and provoke an entire new article.

Some folks wondered why I agreed to do this interview with Gawker media, knowing the potential for a sensationalist pummeling. However, I really don’t mind, and in fact, I think that good things almost always come from incidents such as this one. I received many media requests immediately after this story ran, and almost all were from media people who are sympathetic to libertarian principles, and who noted the drubbing and want to present the depth of my side in the matter. All to the good.

That said, on Wednesday, September 26th, I will do an interview with Doc Thompson on WXYT AM in Detroit, and I am also doing an interview with a journalist from the Sun Media Corporation of Canada.

I am a big believer in putting one’s thoughts out there, and learning to deal with the straw man hit-and-runs, as well as criticism and disagreement from outside of the choir. It’s a part of being a visible dissenter with unconventional ideas trying to persuade the masses. When the heat in the kitchen is cranked up, I’d like to think I can flourish because I become more focused and I channel my energies more efficiently. And that’s without the government’s “efficient” CFLs, and without my fellow citizens telling me what is good for me.

Karen De Coster, CPA [send her mail] is an accounting/finance professional in the healthcare industry and a freelance writer, blogger, speaker, and sometimes unpaid troublemaker. She writes about libertarian stuff, economics, financial markets, the medical establishment, the Corporate State, health totalitarianism, and other essentially, anything that encroaches upon the freedom of her fellow human beings. When she has a few moments of spare time she engages functional fitness, adventure cycling, photography, conversations with friends, and visiting wine regions. This is her LewRockwell.com archive and her Mises.org archive. Check out her website. Follow her on Twitter @karendecoster.

The Best of Karen De Coster

This is a short story of real vs. imitation, free market vs. the corporate state, tradition vs. political pandering, and good vs. evil. First, I’ll start off with the imitation/corporate state/political/evil. A reader sent me a commercial from YouTube, which brings up an interesting comparison that started my wheels turning. Back in the 1980s, or thereabouts, a product emerged in the market called Molly McButter, a processed powder butter replacement. Products like this (replacing real food with fake, fat-free non-food) were a response to the government’s low-fat agenda and the industrial food machine’s food pyramid coup. People fell into the marketing trap and lapped up products like this in the hope that they would get thin, stay healthy, and look like all of the beautiful people in the TV ads who were hawking the products of the mega-food complex. Nowadays, in an eerily similar manner, all of the beautiful people are running down beaches, holding hands, and smelling daisies in the pharmaceutical ads. According to FoodFacts.com, these are the ingredients in Molly McButter:

Ingredients:

Maltodextrin corn derived, Salt, Flavor(s) Natural Butter, Contains 100% of Other Flavor(s) Natural, Butter, Corn Starch, Buttermilk Solids, Tricalcium Phosphate, Soybean(s) Oil Partially Hydrogenated, Annatto Extracts, Paprika and, Turmeric (Color(s))

Warning(s): Soybean(s) Oil Partially Hydrogenated is exempt from being labeled as a soy allergen according to U.S. labeling laws. There are only slight traces of the soy protein present to trigger a reaction, however people who are allergic to soy should use caution and check with their allergist before consuming this product.

These ingredients, as you may have guessed, provide no nutritional value whatsoever. Well, except this product does have 1% of your government-recommended, daily iron intake. Here is the caloric breakdown of Molly McButter: 2% fat, 95% carbs, 3% protein. It is low fat, therefore it must be healthy! Molly McButter is also a very American product: it is a quick-to-use and seemingly cheap alternative that requires nothing more than dropping it into a shopping cart, and when the shopper gets home, he or she can just take off a lid and shake it, and … finished! However, in reality, not only is it very costly in terms of its price per pound, but the costs to your health down the road are immense, and likely immeasurable.

[Molly McButter Commercial]

Staying on the evil side, there are many industrial fake-a-roos that are created to appeal to the low-fat, food pyramid-worshipping crowd, so mention of all of them here is impossible. On that note, one other product that deserves attention is an early challenger to butter, pre-Molly McButter days. Many of us remember growing up with this commercial about margarine and fooling Mother Nature.

[Margarine Commercial]

Margarine, along with all of the industrial seed oils, is one of the greatest disasters of the industrial food complex. Here is a typical margarine ingredient list:

Liquid Canola Oil, Water, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Plant Stanol Esters, Salt, Emulsifiers, (Vegetable Mono- and Diglycerides, Soy Lecithin), Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Potassium Sorbate, Citric Acid and Calcium Disodium EDTA to Preserve Freshness, Artificial Flavor, DL-alpha-Tocopheryl Acetate, Vitamin A Palmitate, Colored with Beta Carotene.

Butter – even an industrial butter – would typically contain only cream and salt. Partially hydrogenated soybean oil, as people may or may not know, is trans fats. Everyone now agrees that trans fats wreak havoc on your health, as described by Mark Sisson.

"Shape shifters" is incidentally an apt way to describe trans fats. That's exactly what the hydrogenation process involves. From a chemical standpoint, you take a decent enough unsaturated oil and add some hydrogen atoms. The process undoes the existing double carbon bonds of the unsaturated oil. By "saturating" the bonds with additional hydrogen, you saturate the oil. The result is a solid (at room temperature) but meltable, more stable fat. Seems simple enough, but all of a sudden the body doesn't know what to make of the end product. The trans fats go on to incite havoc in cell metabolism. Research indicates trans fats cause comparatively more weight gain than the same diet with monounsaturated fats and a redistribution of body fat tissue to the abdominal area, the riskiest place to carry extra padding. Additionally, they're associated with inflammation and atherosclerosis.

Systemic inflammation is the root of all chronic disease such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disorders, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, arthritis, etc. Here, Mark Sisson describes the difference between acute inflammation that promotes healing and chronic, low-level inflammation that becomes a part of your physiology “that's always on and always engaged,” thus continually attacking healthy tissues in your body. “You can’t fool Mother Nature” is correct. But that is exactly what these highly processed, industrial food products attempt to do in order to conform to the government nutrition malarkey that has fattened and sickened Americans for over four decades. But, once inside your body, these products don’t fool your innards. Read this serious – but sort of funny – article by Stephan Guyenet, a PhD in neurobiology and a researcher, on margarine. Here’s a snippet:

Despite the snappy-looking tub, margarine is just another industrial food-like substance that will help you get underground in a hurry. In the U.S., manufacturers can put the statement “no trans fat” on a product’s label, and “0 g trans fat” on the nutrition label, if it contains less than 0.5 grams of trans fat per serving. A serving of Benecol is 14 grams. That means it could be up to 3.5 percent trans fat and still labeled “no trans fat”. That’s a crime. This stuff is being recommended to cardiac patients.

Stephan is spot on when he says it is a crime. The federalized dietary guidelines are not, and have never been, a result of science. They are the result of a politicized and purposeful coup on the part of powerful special corporate interests and their enabling politicians in Congress and the USDA/FDA to subsidize the food machine corporatocracy and institutionalize the belief in the supremacy of artificial foods produced cheaply by the mega food giants. It is intentional, on the part of the enablers, that people get sick, stay sick, and therefore swell the sickness economy.

Then, over in the other corner stands Ghee, weighing in with traditional (South Asian) roots, high in nutrition, with a high smoking point, and, yes, it has fat — including saturated fat (gasp!) and essential fattyy acids. Ghee is essentially a clarified butter, with the milk solids and water removed. However, ghee is cooked longer than clarified butter to remove all moisture and milk solids. Ghee may also be a good choice for those who are lactose intolerant. According to Livestrong, ghee has the following nutritional value:

The protein content of ghee is .04 g per tbsp., which includes 17 amino acids, essential for good health. Ghee contains 3 percent linoleic acid, an antioxidant. Ghee provides 393 IU of vitamin A per tbsp., including 105 mcg of retinal and 25 mcg of beta-carotene. Other vitamins include .36 mg vitamin E per tbsp., 1.1 mcg of vitamin K, and small amounts of riboflavin and pantothenic acid. Minerals in ghee include 1 mg of calcium and potassium per tbsp.

Ghee has a long shelf life, and it can sit around without turning rancid, unlike industrial seed oils, which are rancid from the get-go. Historically, ghee has both sacred and medicinal roles in other cultures.

Still, Americans are terrified of politically-demonized real foods that are rich in tradition with proven health benefits while they eagerly embrace any and all promises from the industrial arm of the state to “keep them healthy” with substitute products to which their natural systems cannot adapt. While Americans are indeed “getting it” better than ever before in terms of understanding the myths and lies of the government-pharmaceutical-medical-industrial food complex that has destroyed their health and quality of life, they have become willing prisoners of the medical-pharmaceutical establishment, and emerging from that lifestyle is still a challenge for many folks who have spent their whole lives absorbing the conventional wisdom passed down to them through the various channels and agents of the state.

We all have our own experiences that finally cause us to engage our thoughts and reflect on what we think we know, and then we ask ourselves, is it really the truth? Admittedly, until the mid-1990s, I had margarine and Molly McButter in my kitchen, and butter or ghee were nowhere to be found. Butter had become a substance I could not trust. Our household also embraced all of the “heart healthy” trans-fat loaded, refined industrial oils. This was passed on to me from childhood. I was a part of the baby boomer generation that grew up on the industrial food supply while “family, sit-down dinners” and cooking fresh food slowly escaped our culture.

This, along with my incessant carb-loading to fuel my weekend warrior adventures, finally landed me in a hospital, where infectious disease Docs and rheumatologists were dumbfounded by my sleek physical appearance vs. my autoimmune rampage. Finally, I was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disorder. I was sentenced to a life of low-fat food and pharmaceuticals and low-impact exercise, as well as a progressive loss of quality of life. I thought, “nah,” and thus I exited the conventional medical establishment. I had already flirted with Atkins, so I went back to it and then customized the Atkins way, which eventually became paleo-primal, which is nothing more than Eat Real Food. I cured myself of all symptoms with my food changes, and since then, I have never looked back. While I bemoan the loss of time and money, the pay off in terms of wisdom and experience has been a huge positive in my life.

Indeed, little things like the quality of your “butter” and the elimination of its evil imitators can be the beginning of some major changes in your life and health. It’s a worthwhile start along a very informative journey.

Karen De Coster, CPA [send her mail] is an accounting/finance professional in the healthcare industry and a freelance writer, blogger, speaker, and sometimes unpaid troublemaker. She writes about libertarian stuff, economics, financial markets, the medical establishment, the Corporate State, health totalitarianism, and other essentially, anything that encroaches upon the freedom of her fellow human beings. When she has a few moments of spare time she prefers to do functional fitness, kayak the Detroit River, and drink hot toddies. This is her LewRockwell.com archive and her Mises.org archive. Check out her website. Follow her on Twitter @karendecoster.

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I despise the Safety Nazis and the culture of fear they have created. Wear a helmet. Don’t go out when it’s too hot. Don’t leave your home when it’s too cold, and if you do, heed the 1,001 warnings. Be afraid at all times. Run for cover. Lock your children in enormous safety devices called car seats. Buy a stroller built like an armored Volvo, complete with side air bags and ironclad sun protection. Stay inside if the wind blows or a snowflake falls. Is there a dark cloud or two in the sky? Close the schools. Call your doctor if you sneeze, and call your lawyer if you trip. Don’t ever do anything that has the potential to cause injury. Red alerts, orange alerts, and now text alerts — they are all imbecile alerts that are geared toward emotionally crippling the masses.

The save-you-from-yourself nannies are an intrusive and irritating bunch. “Safety” has become a sick obsession in the modern American culture, and this fear mongering has long been promoted by an overreaching, paternal state that has churned out a nation of helpless idiots through the revolving doors of government schools and a politicized nanny state that holds people captive to their own bogus fears. I have at least one archive dedicated to this topic on my website.

One of the most fashionable forms of lifestyle fascism in the American Folly Safety Parade is the sustained push for mandatory helmet laws and the crush of propaganda asserting that certified, bulletproof, and government-approved helmets are necessary for every activity from the baby crawling to biking along your neighborhood sidewalk.

As an avid cyclist, the folks I ride with are a mixed bunch. Very few are helmetless, many are helmet Nazis (they love preaching safety and the wearing of helmets to others while they wear shorts in 20-degree weather on their 50-lbs overweight, heart-attack-ready bodies), and some are helmet neutral – they don’t think too much about your choices and why you make them. Most recently, I received the standard summary lecture from a very overweight, helmeted cyclist whose belly hung halfway between his seat and the ground, yet he gave me the snide lecture on no-helmet riding by summing it up as, “it’s your noggin.” Apparently, being without helmet for two hours is undertaking a risk while carrying around an obese, disease-ridden body for twenty years is no risk at all. It is astounding how folks will perceive peril and create their own twisted reality to suit their inclinations.

When I do the group rides, I usually wear a helmet unless it is so cold that I need to wear my warm, hippie beanie. Then I may go no-helmet, and immediately, the Nazis begin to buzz and give rise to the predictable comments. On Saturday, March 24th, 2012, I rode with a group of cyclists, most of who are very recreational riders. I wore my helmet as our group of 70+ folks left Grand Circus Park in downtown Detroit for our first 2012 group ride. No big deal – I just felt like wearing a helmet, as I usually do in these rides. These folks were mostly recreational cyclists, with only a few of them being experienced cyclists or skilled riders. A few of the riders, like me, used to be dedicated lycra jockeys but gave that up for adventure riding and fun exploration. The problem with these rides is that most folks don’t hold a steady line and are predictably unsteady on their bicycles. That kind if riding can wreak havoc on a pack.

A little over an hour after we started, I ended up in what was the most violent bike crash I have had in 27 years of serious cycling, mountain bike racing, track riding, and high-speed training pacelines. As we approached a median with two routes around it (on the right and the left) most of us were on the left side of the landscaped median. A few cyclists on the far right side of pack went around the right side of the median, and a guy from the far left side of the pack saw those few folks going right, and so he decided to veer on a strict right line across the front of the pack, from left to right, to catch the turnoff and follow them. No experienced pack rider would ever do such a thing knowing that seventy bikers were right on his tail. It is hard to believe that anyone with any common sense could be so careless. But this stuff happens.

He blind-sided me from my left side, and I t-boned the rear of his bike. All I knew was that it felt like I was shot from a cannon as I flew up and then landed on my left side, on the cement, with my hip and shoulder taking the entire hit as my bike slammed my body to the ground, and then my neck whiplashed, causing my head to slam the pavement with ferocious force. Since this was a purely recreational ride, our speed was a very slow 12-13 mph. And still, it was a violent meeting between the pavement and me. This collision came just six days prior to a scheduled hip surgery, so immediately post-crash, I was concerned about the damage.

The fallout was a brutal headache and perhaps a slight concussion, neck whiplash that my chiropractor has mostly fixed, a bruising where the helmet dug into my head, a black-and-blue hip, and a shoulder that was mostly frozen. I still have a very swollen anterior rotator cuff in that shoulder four weeks later. That means another trip to my shoulder orthopaedic surgeon for a check on a joint that has already endured two surgeries. But mostly, it was the fierce head slam that left me in goose bumps. I remember thinking "I'm done" just as my head was smashing the cement, and then I felt the most meaty part of my helmet take the hit, causing my head to bounce, and then the helmet seemed to absorb the cement like a sponge. Immediately, I felt perfectly alive, and I was stunned that I was still conscious.

I could not have survived the force of that blow, intact, without that helmet. I would have been another closed head injury casualty on a ventilator, with my family and friends stopping by the hospital to help me with basic life functions. I keep thinking what if that had been one of those days where I didn't wear my helmet. I had nightmares for several days, repeating that incident in my head without the helmet. Bizarre but true. These types of events can often be life changing.

This story, however, is more about the risk and how we each subjectively perceive it, and not the accident itself. Some folks believe that not wearing a helmet while cycling or motorcycling is “stupid,” though this comment is actually pretty dumb on its own. The lack of a helmet is not a result, at all, of lacking intelligence, or even common sense. The wearing or non-wearing of a helmet reflects how you comprehend and rate risk.

There is a website called Helmet Freedom: Risk in Perspective, and its motto is “Cycling without helmet laws is safe. Fear is unhealthy.” I like that motto because as much as the fear mongering and obsession with safety is worldwide, in America, the totalitarians-at-large have turned safety fixation into a national pastime.

On TedX Copenhagen, bicycle advocate Mikael Colville-Andersen gave a talk, "Why We Shouldn't Bike With a Helmet." In his talk, he discusses the culture of fear that controls the public. He calls it a "pornographic obsession with safety equipment" in a "bubble society." While the culture of fear ignores facts and science, the fear mongering is big business, and it is lucrative.

Folks are well aware that I spend a lot of time, and words, hawking the paleo-primal lifestyle and its numerous benefits, especially for libertarian audiences. According to Mark Sisson, this lifestyle is “a broad, holistic approach to living and not simply a list for eating.” To me, living primally means I have adapted to the modern world by making certain changes in my lifestyle — in terms of food and fitness — to minimize premature aging, prevent modern disease, and stave off the all-too-common problem of physical and mental lethargy. Since going primal I have experienced a quality of life I never had before, and that includes life in my 20s and 30s. I am 49.

Since exploring the paleo-primal concepts beginning in the late 80 and early 90s, via the Dr. Atkins program, and moving to a more robust and dedicated lifestyle in about 2003 following an illness, I have settled into a very self-regulated yet spontaneous way of life that fits neatly into the framework of Mark Sisson’s Primal Blueprint. Essentially, here are some very high-level, self-imposed commandments that I live by:

• Avoid all sweeteners, most sugar (unless it is cane sugar in the occasional homemade good), and even minimize natural fructose. I’ve never been much of a fruit eater.
• Avoid all industrial oils because of their rancidity, poor fatty acids profile, and hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated properties.
• Use lard (home rendered or bought from those who render it and sell at the market); raw butter; Kerrygold Irish butter; olive oils; sesame oil; macadamia oil; coconut oil; tallow (beef and lamb).
• Avoid grains, except for occasional rice and, yes, beer in the warm months.
• Eat quality meat: pastured or grass-fed (lamb, pork, beef, chicken, turkey) stored in my large freezer, and eat only wild caught fish. See a photo of my freezer. I deal directly with all of my farmers via email and do pickups at their farms.
• Eat a high-fat diet with moderate protein.
• Don’t focus on the macronutrient content (fats, protein, carbs). I keep it simple and eat real food and don’t turn eating into rocket science. I don’t have time for the tracking or logistics. By way of my real-food principles, my diet is naturally low in carbs.
• Utilize farmer’s markets for obtaining the majority of my food (farmers and artisanal makers). I live right by the largest and most glorious market in North America, so I am fortunate: Detroit Eastern Market. During the off-season, I buy from Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and local specialty/produce markets. The Detroit metro area has a gazillion of these wonderful markets.

In terms of fitness and conditioning, one thing I took from Mark Sisson when I began reading him in about 2006, that I have never let go of, is the following: more is not necessarily better. It took a while for me to process that notion through a brain that is wired to be ambitious and hardcore. My fitness patterns, though still intense, take up a whole lot less time in my life. I am able to spend more time on relaxing, fun, and/or adventurous outdoor activities as opposed to “conditioning.” My intense-but-short functional workouts allow me to stay in first-rate condition without having to spend too much time “getting there.” I don’t count calories, miles, speed, or minutes; I don’t set goals; I don’t plan workout routines (I spontaneously move through them); and I rarely think about PRs (personal records). Employing primal concepts has meant that staying in shape has become easy and rather effortless for me.

For instance, this past summer, I spent very little time in the gym doing intense training (2 days per week, tops) and instead, I spent that time kayaking, hiking, doing cycling rides (destination rides and mountain biking), hiking, canoeing, playing frisbee, golfing, and tooling around on the big lake in a friend’s dinghy with a cooler loaded with microbrews and beef jerky.

That said, I no longer kill myself to stay in great condition. I often get letters from folks telling me, “I used to look like that, too, when I was younger and worked out 3 hours almost every day.” Three hours! I do perhaps that many hours per week these days, unless I engage a long cycling adventure or other functional escapade. It is a big, fat lie to say that you need to drive yourself into the ground to get fit. People seem to think I work out endlessly to get fit and stay fit, but that is a myth that needs to go away. Ignorance drives these thoughts. I used to work out a ton, but because I love to do it, not because I needed to do it. Now I don’t have the time to do that anymore, which is a good thing. I divorced myself from endurance addiction and chronic cardio. This is the kind of functional workout I enjoy now – in the outdoor, natural gym.

Recently, my ability to adapt and recover was tested when I went through my fourth orthopedic surgery — though it was my first surgery in eleven years. I loathe surgery because I have no patience for the recovery period. After almost sixteen months of injuries culminating in a torn hip labrum, I was looking forward to this surgery and the end of the pain and physical limitations. The string of injuries started with a really bad collision between my pelvis and a wood floor while playing walleyball in November 2010.

A lot of folks asked me about this surgery, and their enquiring minds wanted to know why I would go that route, considering my views on the conventional wisdom of the medical establishment. I write often about how the western medical establishment largely ignores integrative and functional medicine and does not view individuals as holistic beings who have underlying causes of their health problems, especially chronic diseases. Instead, western doctors treat the symptoms, with drugs, while the drugs mask the symptoms and the underlying health issues. Thus the chronic problems, and disease, fester and grow over time, leading to more drugs and a lesser quality of life.

For the most part, there are two types of Docs I really like — chiropractors and orthopaedic surgeons. My chiropractor keeps my neck issues in check, and orthopaedic surgeons are really good at fixing stuff when it breaks. And that’s what they are supposed to do: look at the symptoms and determine the cause of those symptoms (what’s broke?), and fix it. That may seem simplistic, but my injury seemed to be pretty cut-and-dry.

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Karen De Coster, CPA [send her mail] is an accounting/finance professional in the healthcare industry and a freelance writer, blogger, speaker, and sometimes unpaid troublemaker. She writes about libertarian stuff, economics, financial markets, the medical establishment, the Corporate State, health totalitarianism, and other essentially, anything that encroaches upon the freedom of her fellow human beings. When she has a few moments of spare time she prefers to do functional fitness, kayak the Detroit River, and drink hot toddies. This is her LewRockwell.com archive and her Mises.org archive. Check out her website. Follow her on Twitter @karendecoster.

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Public education, in its current state, is based on the idea that government is the “parent” best equipped to provide children with the values and wisdom required to grow into intelligent, functional adults. To echo what former first lady Hillary Clinton professed, these public school champions believe “it takes a village” to cultivate a society of competent human beings.

As Hebrew University historian Martin van Crevald points out in his book, The Rise and Decline of the State, nineteenth-century state worshippers who wanted to impose a love of big government ideals upon the youth popularized the archetype for state-directed education. Additionally, there was an overall appetite for discipline of the "unruly" masses that reinforced the campaign to take education out of the hands of individuals. After all, the self-educated masses might resist government decrees, and this kind of disarray would be undesirable in the move toward building a powerful, controlling state apparatus. Prussia’s Frederick William I and France’s Napoleon discerned this, as did a legion of other despotic rulers throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. In a recent article published on the American Daily Herald "Dumberer and Dumberest," Glenn Horowitz writes:

If you’re not familiar with it, the Prussian system was a teaching methodology designed to stamp out good little worker bees assembly-line fashion, trained to be complacent with their station in life and compliant with every demand of the State. An elite of those better educated but still proven unquestioningly loyal to the State were promoted to lead the proletariat, rewarded with elevated status and material success commensurate with their skills and the zeal they demonstrate in supporting the system. It specifically avoided developing creativity and independent thought, reasoning these were skills the worker classes didn’t need in their roles as mass produced labor.

Modern education is built upon a foundation set forth by tyrants. What is most disquieting about the public education mindset is that those who believe most strongly in it are convinced that there are no other suitable alternatives to the compulsory schooling provided via the public domain. The egalitarian core belief of these public education proponents is that society is responsible for obtaining, maintaining, and paying for the process of equally developing young minds.

Since the laws of the modern state that control the educational system lean heavily toward equality, federal compulsory schooling is necessarily a bias against the best and brightest of America's children. Federalized education sustains the philosophy that schools have the obligation to treat all students as pure equals — equal in intelligence, work ethic, performance, and desire.

Such nonsense is refuted by H. George Resch in his article “Equality vs. Equity” on the Separation of School and State website. Mr. Resch contends that compulsory, government-controlled education is trying to achieve ends that are not possible due to the fact that general equality is not only impossible to define, but that biological, environmental, and cultural differences among us are so vast that a compulsory, standardized public education poses difficulties that cannot be overcome, and certainly not by a government-run school system.

It’s obvious that public schooling is neither beneficial to most students, nor is it efficient. Education is an acquired good, a good that has to meet the needs of the consumers or else face rejection in the free market. Accordingly, there is a necessity for unique, private educational institutions that cater to the urgencies of the marketplace, or home schools that provide a quality environment for each student’s direct needs.

In a blog titled "Farmville USA," writer Skip Oliva presents the idea that public schooling is organized along the same principles as factory farming.

Public schooling is based on the same organizational principles as factory farming. They are both modern procedures designed to replace ancient methods of child-rearing and rural farming, respectively. Both rely on a core principle of confinement. In factory farming, animals are generally kept indoors in confined pens for duration of their lives. If we're talking about male cattle raised for veal, they are literally confined to a small box and denied any exercise whatsoever. With public schooling, children are confined indoors for the majority of daylight hours and, in lower grades, generally restricted to a single classroom. They are expected to sit quietly at desks — analogous to a factory animal cage — with only limited exercise approved for limited, scheduled intervals. Animals and children alike are deprived of the ability to fulfill their natural desire to exercise and explore their outdoor environments.

The confinement of children on the part of authoritarian figures who demand mandatory attendance illustrates how the federal public school system has become a security garrison with satellite detainment facilities. Moreover, yanking children from their parents and assimilating them into dumbed-down, draconian learning pools based on age and collectivizing their learning experience in a quasi-prison environment hasn’t worked, and it will never be ideal for the vast majority of the children. Skip Oliva continues:

There is also the issue of socialization. Many farmed animals, including cows, pigs and rabbits, are naturally sociable and psychologically require healthy contact with other members of their species, particularly with their mothers during adolescence. Factory farming largely ignores those relationships. Young cattle are often denied any maternal contact, in order to preserve the mother's milk for human consumption. Animals are often caged or together in inadequate indoor facilities which promote the spread of disease, aggressive fighting and even cannibalism. Similarly, when children are confined in large classrooms, they are more exposed to communicable diseases and subject to anti-social behaviors such as bullying.

Of course, proponents of schooling claim socialization is a primary benefit, especially compared with continued instruction from a parent (aka "homeschooling"). Yet as is true with most high-order mammals, human children require an extended period of exclusive access to a parent, ideally the mother, who serves as a model for proper social behavior. Children of the same age are inadequate substitutes. They cannot model behaviors that they themselves have not learned. Nor is a teacher in a position to do so, as one person is incapable of developing the necessary relationship of trust with several dozen children during normal "business" hours.

The reality of public schools in America is that they resemble prisons, holding children captive and subjecting them to monitoring, authoritarian supervision, arbitrary rules, prescribed conformity, coerced abstinence, zero tolerance insanity, irrational fears, invasion of privacy, prison-like security, unlawful searches, mind-controlling drugs, and the police state. John Taylor Gatto, in his essay, "Some Reflections on the Equivalencies Between Forced Schooling and Prison," noted that America's public schools and its penal system are alike because within each environment an individual's movements, thoughts, and associations are regarded with great suspicion and are therefore controlled. Gatto explains:

Almost all Americans have had an intense school experience which occupied their entire youth, an experience during which they were drilled thoroughly in the culture and economy of the well-schooled greater society, in which individuals have been rendered helpless to do much of anything except watch television or punch buttons on a keypad.

Before you begin to blame the childish for being that way and join the chorus of those defending the general imprisonment of adults and the schooling by force of children because there isn’t any other way to handle the mob, you want to at least consider the possibility that we’ve been trained in childishness and helplessness for a reason. And that reason is that helpless people are easy to manage. Helpless people can be counted upon to act as their own jailers because they are so inadequate to complex reality they are afraid of new experience. They’re like animals whose spirits have been broken. Helpless people take orders well, they don’t have minds of their own, they are predictable, they won’t surprise corporations or governments with resistance to the newest product craze, the newest genetic patent – or by armed revolution. Helpless people can be counted on to despise independent citizens and hence they act as a fifth column in opposition to social change in the direction of personal sovereignty.

In 2009, a compelling documentary was produced that focuses on the control and containment that is the government's compulsory school system: The War on Kids. This documentary has not received the attention it deserves, but every parent who has a child that has received a sentence of thirteen (or more) years in the compulsory schooling environment should watch this film.

Note in Part 2 where the filmmaker visually shows how so many of the public schools look exactly like prisons. Some of the footage you will see throughout the film is staggering, and some of the interviews with public school bureaucrats are remarkably creepy. Here is the website for the movie, and this is the general information presented for the film (it is shown in six parts on TagTélé).

In 95 minutes, THE WAR ON KIDS exposes the many ways the public school system has failed children and our future by robbing students of all freedoms due largely to irrational fears. Children are subjected to endure prison-like security, arbitrary punishments, and pharmacological abuse through the forced prescription of dangerous drugs. Even with these measures, schools not only fail to educate students, but the drive to teach has become secondary to the need to control children. Not only do school fall short of their mission to educate, but they erode the country's democratic foundation and often resemble prisons.

School children are interviewed, as are high school teachers and administrators, and prison security guards, plus renowned educators and authors including:

Henry Giroux: Author of Stealing Innocence Corporate Culture’s War on Children

Mike A. Males: Sociologist, author of Scapegoat Generation

John Gatto: New York City and New York State Teacher of the Year

Judith Browne: Associate Director of the Advancement Project

Dan Losen: The Civil Liberties Project, Harvard University

My suggestion for undertaking this particular blog, written by Darrell Dawsey, is to read the title, scroll down to the very last sentence and read that morsel, and then scroll back up to the top to read the whole piece. Then carefully read a story about the carjacking in question on ClickonDetroit.

The author of this interesting Time piece muses on the thought of killing a “child” who threatens to kill you by showing that he, at 5’10″ (hardly childlike), is carrying a gun and means business. Two kids, who appeared to be about twelve years old,* decided to carjack a woman and her mother in their driveway at the point of a gun, in Harper Woods, Michigan, a suburb of Wayne County that borders Detroit. The punk with the gun threatened to kill the woman with the car keys. The author notes that he discussed the topic with an acquaintance who remarked, “The first thing I thought is, I would’ve shot ‘em.”

First, let me clarify some details about Harper Woods. This suburb sits between Eight Mile Road (the line of demarcation) and Seven Mile Road to the south. It borders both the ritzy Grosse Pointes (to the east) and Detroit (to the south and west). For many years it was a quasi-Grosse Pointe for those uppity wannabees who could not afford the luxury of the Grosse Pointes but could manage to mortgage their future for an overpriced, brick ranch with a Harper Woods address. I grew up about eight blocks to the north and I still live and play in the same area.

Harper Woods was once expensive, charming, and semi-exclusive, back in the days prior to the housing bubble burst. Now it’s become a foreclosure-ridden rat drop, thanks in part to the mortgage-o-rama social engineering trap that created endless housing opportunities for folks with no creditworthiness and no sense of ownership or obligation. I have a family member who has lived there since the late 1980s — his well-kept house is now worth next to nothing, and he is stuck in that home until the cows come home.

The city, in recent years, has been riddled with car thefts, carjackings, home burglaries, and home invasions. Empty homes are everywhere, littering what used to be, only 15—20 years ago, perfectly kept, brick neighborhoods. The suburb, like all other suburbs bordering Detroit, is a perfect crime stop for criminals from the city. The local shopping mall — Eastland — is a huge draw for dubious outsiders to come and hang out. I’m not sure there is a single suburb in the Detroit area where I have witnessed such an immediate and harsh ruination. Its numerous blemishes have overshadowed the old Grosse Pointe charm.

In getting back to the original theme of this story, you have a situation where some rather tall person — black or white, young or old — aggressively approaches you in your own driveway and reveals a gun, vocalizing his intent to kill you. The Time author raises the questions:

How do you treat a child like an enemy combatant? How do you threaten violence, even in self-defense, against a little boy? How do you shoot a pistol-packing 12-year-old child so warped that he’s willing to blow you away just to steal a car whose dashboard he probably can’t even see over?

My response is clear-cut: in such a situation, you are looking at an immediate threat, an unfriendly, hostile foe, a gun-wielding wildman who is brazen enough to face off against you and dare you to lay down your cards. You are an individual who would never go on the offense against another person or their property. Yet here you are, facing a potential execution, and you cannot guess what form that action will take. If your mind starts flashing thoughts and images very quickly, you might think about the year before, when Matthew Landry was carjacked behind a Quiznos just two miles to the north, in Eastpointe, and taken to an abandoned home in Detroit where he was beaten, tortured, and shot in the back of the head. Mr. Landry’s abductors were eighteen and seventeen years old.

Unfortunately, so many people have been taught to always submit, submit, submit — to the government, to folks with badges, and to the criminals. It’s a part of the propaganda and conditioning process that is used to quell critical thinking and individual resistance. Folks have been brainwashed to believe that no property they own is worth taking the life of another. However, none of these reeducated citizens can explain exactly how it is you go about finding out what your aggressor wants from you. Kindly asking questions first with the intention of pondering over the answers will certainly get you a trip to the morgue.

In a car theft, the car thief wants your property — whether it’s for a joy ride or turning a profit. That is to say, he’s looking for and making off with an empty vehicle. By definition, a carjacking shows much more violent intentions. The carjacker knowingly and purposely confronts an individual (or individuals) in an aggressive manner and the end result for the victim is often violence or death. The aggressor may desire to take the victim along with the vehicle, or, as is often the case, the attack and ensuing response from the victim results in a panicked aggressor who reacts with brute force. If the carjack victim is a woman, there is the additional risk of enduring a brutal rape.

In the case of the carjacker, the terrorist who stands before you is a person with a gun. If he’s a man and you’re a woman, that’s even worse. You don’t want to guess his age, his game, his real intentions, what cards he holds, or his ability to follow through with his threats. So you do the only sane thing you can do — you shoot him. By definition, self-defense is a resistance to force, and using enough force to cause death is justified when such force is deemed necessary to prevent bodily harm or death. After all, speaking for myself, I don’t carry a .45 in my purse because my right shoulder rejoices over the added four pounds of gun-and-ammo weight.

Furthermore, I would think that no jury of my peers would convict me for defending myself from a menacing and armed potential killer who confronted me on my property and threatened to kill me. That’s another reason why I would not hesitate to shoot a 5’10″ man (“kid”) with a gun who is threatening my life.

*The gunman is in custody and is actually 15-years-old.

Karen De Coster, CPA [send her mail], has an MA in Economics and is a libertarian freelance writer/blogger and habitual rabble-rouser. By day, she is a docile accounting/finance professional who works in risk management in Detroit. She was born in Detroit and spent 10 years as a resident of the city, and still lives a few paces away. This is her LewRockwell.com archive, her Taki’s Magazine archive, and her Mises.org archive. Check out her website.

The Best of Karen De Coster

Just a couple of weeks ago, I did a magnificent bicycle ride after work as I often do during the warm months. Occasionally I’ll start from my employer’s parking garage in the heart of downtown Detroit, but that evening I scooted on over to Belle Isle, Detroit’s island park, for my starting point. The island was unexpectedly quiescent, even at 6:30 pm. I rode the outside loop, explored some of the inner veins of the island, headed off down Grand Boulevard for a spell, then back around to Jefferson Avenue and down to the Riverwalk. The air was warm-turning-to-chill, and the shadows were very Oktoberfest-y (oh so sexy). The traffic was barely noticeable, and I only passed a few other cyclists and the occasional runner.

Many of the folks who did see me waved, happy to see a warm body gracing the chilly city streets alone on a pink bike, I guess. (Pink helmet, too.) When I posted about my ride — along with a photo — on my Facebook page with a network of almost 5,000, I received a few comments and many private emails with folks essentially summing up the all-too-popular notion … “Detroit?! Huh? Who would’a thought?”

I started riding routes in the city in 1982, when I first moved into English Village on the East Side. But it’s really been the last 10 years or so that I finally recognized what great riding opportunities Detroit offers. I’m a realist and not a utopian, and I perceive things for what they are according to my experiences and knowledge. My reply to some of the Facebook folks was that even though I now live in the ‘burbs, my road riding experiences there are mostly the following: traffic zinging by me, intentionally taking a close run at me; small items flung at me; abusive comments (from men); a consistent chorus of “Get the F_ _ _ off the road!”; middle fingers being thrust out the window; and once, I even had two men in a pickup aggressively stop in front of me and back up toward me. Additionally, most suburban riding offers up mostly tediously conventional landscapes — strip malls, Home Depots, and McMansion communities. Boooring.

Of course I get the occasional idiot in the city, but the jackass experience isn’t as panoptic as it is in the hyperventilating suburbs. Heck, people wave, give me a thumbs up, say hi, … whatever. Especially in the poorer neighborhoods. They think it’s cool.

When people think of "cycling friendly" cities they tend to think of more sumptuous cities — such as Portland, Minneapolis, Seattle — where government planning and tax dollars have generated miles and miles of greenways, bike paths, and bike-friendly lanes on surface roads. They don’t tend to think of Detroit, which is just starting to accommodate the bicyclist attitude. For many years now, I have traveled to Minnesota and biked hundreds of miles in the Minneapolis-St. Paul twin cities, covering most of the greenways and bike paths. Clearly, those are some spectacular trails that provide riders with safe and feasible routes for transportation as well as pleasure riding.

Nonetheless, in Detroit we have a city that has lost over 1 million in population from its peak. We have more and bigger empty spaces than any other urban area in the country. We have room to ride. We have space. We have little traffic. We have homesteaded farms, industrial ruins, architecture, sadness, blight, undiscovered pearls, great churches, resplendent neighborhoods, amazing historical points, and much more. Endless eye candy, as I call it. And it seems to me that we members of the cycling culture may not be doing nearly enough to exploit our opportunities or advertise this unconventional gem. The city is really a cyclist’s jewel, and living in the D, or nearby, is certainly a bonus for any adventurous rider who rejects sanitized rides on suburban sidewalks. As Toby Barlow wrote in the New York Times piece,

While bike enthusiasts in most urban areas continue to have to fight for their place on the streets, Detroit has the potential to become a new bicycle utopia. It’s a town just waiting to be taken. With well less than half its peak population, and free of anything resembling a hill, the city and its miles and miles of streets lie open and empty, beckoning. And lately, whether it’s because of the economy or the price of gas or just because it’s a nice thing to do, there are a lot more bikers out riding.

Indeed, I can vouch for that last comment. This leads to a mention of my ride this past weekend: the annual Tour de Troit. I wait all year for this ride. 3,400 bicyclists registered for the ride, and even if all of them didn’t show up, it was a massive show. The starting point was the famed, old Michigan Central train station that sits in wretched ruins. We did a 30-mile route with police escort (blocked intersections) through some of the great, old historic areas of this city. Thousands of people: serious cyclists, racers, tourers, city bikers, kids on trick bikes, recumbent bikers, grandmas, families, locals, curious suburbanites, etc.

As we ride, people pop out of everywhere to watch. Businesses and shops empty out. Who can resist watching a line of 3,000 cyclists passing by? People hang out of apartment and residential home windows — waving, cheering, watching, and smiling. My friend’s 18-year-old daughter said she was quite taken by that whole experience. She had only seen and known about the warts of Detroit, with its all-too-obvious ramshackle topography. Yet there is another and more extraordinary side to the city, one that most people never experience because they only zing through Detroit on freeways or crawl along the surface streets behind glass.

Cycling activity in the city is on the rise, and not just for the benefit of transportation. There are organized bike clubs and informal bike groups that put together structured rides and tours. A group called Detroit Bikes does monthly rides with various "themed" routes in the 20—30 mile range. A week prior to the Tour de Troit, the group ran an "industrial ruins tour" and about 80 people showed up. Some of these folks come from the suburbs to experience something unconventional. The one common thrust among the various people I talk to, especially those who are newbies to riding in the city, is — "I never would have expected this." They have a blast and recognize that there is more to the city than its very public ruins.

Unfortunately, perceptions are often built on hearsay rather than concrete experience. It’s easy to sit around all day watching anemic television programming and news bites, yet pretend to know what’s going on outside of the uninspiring shelter so many people create for themselves. Criticism is an important outcome of critical thinking, but it should be the culmination of one’s own experience and taste, not the result of impetuous me-tooism. Accordingly, getting out and seizing the adventure firsthand is the only valid way to form judgments and gain knowledge of the orbit around you. So, even if Detroit is not exactly the traditional bicyclist’s paradise, spontaneously exploring the city and its history on two, non-motorized wheels is undeniably a memorable experience.

Along the way, I meet many unique and interesting and eclectic (thinking) people on these rides: Marxists, anarchists, left-wing do-gooders, card-carrying UAW’ers, Tea Party’ers, and yes, classical liberals and libertarians. As one downtown friend told me, "We’re not all left-wingers down here."

This afternoon, while musing on ideas for this article, I passed a small church with one of those signs out front that displays Christian phrases. Today the sign read, "Do you ever wake up wondering what you were born to do?" I thought to myself, never. Not a day goes by when I wonder what I should be doing, and that’s because I am either doing it or I have already done it. I am just fortunate that some of what I was "born to do" can be experienced from the seat of a bicycle that was born to roam.

Karen De Coster, CPA [send her mail], has an MA in Economics and is a libertarian freelance writer/blogger and habitual rabble-rouser. By day, she is a docile accounting/finance professional who works in risk management in the health care industry in Detroit. She loves the country and the urban environment, and generally hates the suburbs (except Apple stores), but she lives there to obtain easy access to both. She has been a serious cyclist since 1986, though she is no lycra junkie. She eats bacon instead of bread, drinks Badass American Lager, and doesn’t mind being a square peg in a round hole. This is her LewRockwell.com archive, her Taki’s Magazine archive, and her Mises.org archive. Check out her website.

The Best of Karen De Coster

However, Mark’s Daily Apple (also known as MDA) is not a conventional website about food and fitness — his expertise covers a wide range of lifestyle topics such as happiness, play, sleep, hormones, stress, interval training, mental conditioning, spontaneity, time management, toxic foods, primal recipes, and laying around the beach. The primal life, as Mark describes it, is made up of many factors that contribute to excellent health and overall quality of life, and Mark comments on all of it on a daily basis.

Mark has written what I consider to be the preeminent book on all such matters, The Primal Blueprint. He recently followed that up with The Primal Blueprint Cookbook, a high-quality effort full of convenient, intuitive recipes that offers many fabulous alternatives to restrictive, bland diets.

I have conducted a dialogue-type interview with Mark, asking him to share his commentary on a hodgepodge of topics related to primal (or paleo *) life. This is not your conventional interview, but then again, Mark Sisson is not a conventional man. Accordingly, he refers to conventional wisdom — on food, health, and fitness lifestyles — as cognitive dissonance. So I have embarked upon a conversational exchange for the purpose of bringing to light some interesting views on the kind of stuff that may not get on the radar map of most folks.

1. A trendy topic that is very misunderstood, as far as I am concerned, is the mainstream obsession with "calories in, calories out." The government’s lifestyle planners believe that posting calories on fast food menus is going to reduce obesity, and websites everywhere, like Livestrong.com, provide tools for tracking calories for every daily activity, including watching TV and washing the dishes. The positive energy balance hypothesis suggests that the problem is that people eat too much and exercise too little, and therefore, burning more calories than you take in is the key to maintaining a healthy weight and body fat percentage. Trying to live by that credo is, and has been, a recipe for failure for Americans whose health and weight issues are becoming more pronounced. Counting calories is not the answer, but the constant emphasis on this simplistic view keeps people from focusing on what’s really important — the quality of the calories. Gary Taubes, in his book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, did a good job of tackling this myth with the use of scientific evidence. What’s your take on this matter, and why does the medical establishment and fitness-nutrition industry continue to peddle this tripe?

It’s unfortunate that we as a society have bought into this notion that it’s a simple equation involving gross calorie differences that can be accounted for with exercise calculators and diet wheels. It’s a reason so many of us continue to get more obese, diabetic, and arthritic. Yes, to a certain extent, in order to lose weight you have to burn off more body fat than you store and some of that has to do with eating too much. But it’s more a factor of eating the wrong things. The answer is found in what I refer to as the "context of calories." Macronutrients are used for more than just energy. Protein is primarily a structural component and secondarily a fuel. Fats can be structural as well as a fuel source. Carbohydrates in excess can raise the storage hormone insulin, predisposing excess calories from any source to be stored as fat. Some people can gain weight (store fat) on a high carb 2,000 calorie per day diet and yet lose weight (burn fat) on a 2,000 calories per day low-carb diet, all other things being equal. Why is that? Every bite you take is a hormonal experience. Depending on what you eat, how much, what time of day, under what prior conditions, a number of different metabolic consequences can ensue. It annoys me that in the face of so much good science to this effect, the medical and fitness establishments stick to the old calories-in vs. calories-out mantra.

2. I despise rigid routines and tracking my food or workouts. In August 2009, I was featured in the Sunday Detroit Free Press lifestyle section for the lunchtime primal-urban workout I do on weekdays, in downtown Detroit. It consists of purely spontaneous functional fitness, using my available environment, without any specific goals or measurements. The reporter was bewildered because I don’t track "repetitions, miles, minutes spent, calories burned or any other outside indicator of success." The emphasis on such nonsense boggles my mind. The common belief is that goals, measurements, and routines are necessary to keep one on track toward personal fitness improvement. This idea has people wasting their time trying to adhere to schedules and keep meaningless records, both of which are a deterrent to a regular fitness program. I argue that most people — aside from professional or competitive athletes — don’t know how to interpret the results of the routines they spend so much time measuring. Can you talk about primal life and how it views rigid routines and exhaustive progress measurements?

Goals are nice to have once in a while, and I think the human brain is probably wired to check off a daily list of things accomplished (caught dinner — check; built a shelter — check; all family members safe — check. Grok feel good). But the danger is that we get more caught up in what will happen when we reach our goal (then, finally, I can feel better about my life) than we do in enjoying the experience or the process, which, after all, is what life is about. That’s the main reason I left the structured, stopwatch-and-mileage-oriented world of endurance training for my more sporadic and random exploits now. I remember often thinking during a 15-mile run how good it would feel when I stop. My epiphany came when I realized after several hundred endurance events in which I had competed, that at no point from the time the starter’s gun went off until the time I crossed the finish line, could I truly say "wow, isn’t this fun!"

Many people in gyms and on the roads have a similar Spartan approach, as if completing this onerous task or racking up x number of calories on the LED readout will somehow earn them the right to feel good about themselves for the rest of the day. Conversely, many people beat themselves up or feel guilty for skipping a workout or cutting their planned hour run back to 30 minutes. It’s crazy. I say life’s too short to struggle and suffer in the name of fitness and health. Why can’t this process be about joy, fun, pleasure, and satisfaction.

I reframed my exercise experience so that my only reason for actually "training" these days is so 1) I can play hard, and 2) so I can play hard uninjured. My bodyweight workouts in the gym once or twice a week are usually quick, intense, intermittent, and unplanned until the last second. They involve as much real-world functional movement as possible (pushups, pullups, dips, squats, lunges, sprints, etc.). My goal here is to do as little as possible while still getting the intended benefits. On the other hand, I do try to find play time wherever I can: Ultimate (Frisbee) with friends, stand-up-paddling, hiking, snowboarding, etc. And I only do this for the purpose of having fun. Playtime (Primal Law #7) still counts as exercise or movement, yet it’s where I can apply all the strength and stamina I built in my brief "training" sessions.

3. Expanding upon the above question, I want to ask you about the modern approach to playtime. Everywhere I go I see fabricated, structured amusements geared toward children, and they are often sold as "educational" or "mind-expanding." McDonald’s, Burger King, etc. use monstrous and ugly "gyms" to attract and retain their future clientele. Splash parks, water parks, plastic climbing "gyms" — these all strike me as bizarre forms of convenient and arranged activity, taking away any creative ability on the part of parents, and certainly, the kids themselves. Nowadays, huge malls have become centers of perpetual entertainment — much of which is sold as "educational" or "exercise" — where whole families hang out to find amusement and fend off boredom. I see kids becoming entertainment junkies who do not have the capacity for creative, spontaneous, healthy play using their natural surroundings and the things around them.

As a kid, all of my play was unstructured and instinctual, and we simply adapted to the available resources and environment, and we created impromptu activities. We built snow forts; played hide-and-seek at dusk in the woods; raced paddleboats on the lake; constructed skate boards from scratch; spent hours in the lagoon looking for turtles and snakes; and on and on. Even a schoolyard was a great place to hang out and play many games all summer long. What part of our culture has brought on this madness that stifles human individuality and pre-packages playtime as a one-size-fits-all experience? Do you think it is the desire for ultimate convenience that creates a market for dumbed-down play, or is laziness a big part of the problem?

Part of it is simply the paranoia that pervades society now as we overly protect our kids. Somehow we’ve come to see our world as more dangerous than it was when we were kids; that maybe there are more perverts or child abductors lurking in the bushes; that the potential for broken bones or bloody noses has increased. I’m not sure there is actually any more danger now — in fact there’s probably less — but I see how parents coddle their kids, driving them a half mile to school when riding a bike or walking would be better for everyone, or arranging "play dates" across town instead of encouraging kids to explore every nook and cranny of their own neighborhood. Meanwhile, schools have dropped PE programs partly because of budgets and partly because of fear of being sued over a dodge ball game getting out of hand or the notion that being picked last will permanently scar a child. In this case, "no child left behind" means every child gets left behind.

Of course, the advent of 500 TV channels and the video game has disincentivized kids to even want to venture outside at all. Who knows what the effects of these super-graphic fantasy worlds are on a young psyche. I think games like World of Warcraft are literally setting kids up for a lifetime of inactivity, lost sleep, and delusion about what’s real and what’s imaginary. Some gamers have made pathetic attempts to involve kids in activities (Wii comes to mind) but it’s still a far cry from the outdoor experience that kids’ genes crave. We even did a post recently on the effect that smells in the woods have on health and well-being. No amount of primary-color-infused playground equipment can possibly take the place of a natural setting.

The only answer is to get back to that concept of play that we lived by as kids. When the box that a refrigerator came in was more fun than any store-bought toy. It may even be too late for some kids today, but I see more and more adults embracing play and exercise creativity as a newfound freedom from the confines of the gym. A major focus of my Primal Blueprint program is to help people rediscover the positive hormonal experience that play and natural movement promote within.

4. Nowadays, there are dozens of articles appearing in the mainstream press on the benefits of high-intensity, short duration interval training for the average person looking to get fit. This is something that many athletes have practiced for years, but most average folks have never been introduced to the concept. They’ve been conditioned to churn away for hours a week on cardio equipment in the gym while the machine displays the number of calories they have "burned." This has turned people toward excessive cardio as opposed to quality cardio. Most folks burn out and get bored, and they eventually become disillusioned with fitness because of the lack of results. Others plateau and they never really gain from all those hours spent exercising. Yet most non-athletes can’t conceive of high-intensity workouts, even though it can drastically shorten their time spent working out. It seems that most people aren’t interested in that method because they’ve become a slave to the slow, lazy technique where the workout really doesn’t seem like work, and accordingly, the results equal the output. How do you convince the average person seeking health and fitness results that interval exercise is a win-win framework, and their old program is not a long-term keeper?

The first thing I do here is point to the science. Numerous studies going back a few decades consistently prove that high-intensity interval training once a week far outweighs traditional aerobic exercise in improving strength, speed, endurance, and other fitness measurements. Even if you discount the evolutionary evidence that we were born to sprint, why would you ignore science that shows you can get so much more benefit from so much less work?

I coined a phrase a few years ago called "chronic cardio" to describe the no-man’s-land where people become slaves to their endurance workout, thinking they’re doing the right thing. They burn up the calories hoping that’s how they’ll lose weight, but in fact most of what they’re burning in these high-heart-rate workouts is glycogen (the stored form of carbohydrate) and not very much fat. Having read the Conventional Wisdom that says that carbohydrates are the preferred cardio fuel, they then go home and load up on more carbs — just so they’ll be able to go back and do it all over again the next day. We know that excess carbs get converted quite easily to stored body fat and that the brain will cause most of us to slightly overeat to make up for the deficit on the treadmill. The end result, and you see it all the time in the gyms, is people grinding it out on the machines year-in and year-out but never really losing body fat. Meanwhile, they’re also depressed at the lack of results, the repetition causes severe wear and tear on joints that otherwise would prefer a wide range of motion, and the metronomic heart beat resulting from the steady pace can have negative consequences over time (ironic since often the reason people often take this up is for "their health"). Old habits are hard to break, which makes it difficult to take an ailing runner or triathlete and convince him or her that s/he can be faster, fitter and healthier if s/he just cuts back on the garbage miles and does a little resistance training.

5. Over the couple of decades, a lot of freedom-minded people were turned on to Dr. Atkins and his nutritional approach. From the beginning, Atkins was not afraid to dissent from orthodox thought, and this immediately made him an outcast within the medical establishment. In spite of what is wrong with the Atkins approach, he stressed the evils of carbohydrates and processed foods in the Western diet, and he condemned the low-fat craze that was initiated by the medical-governmental-corporatist complex that would profit from the deception. Do you think he established some important groundwork for rejecting the modern Western diet and embracing the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that emphasizes a return to eating real, whole foods?

Absolutely. Atkins was truly a pioneer, unafraid to state what was obvious to him from the research — that overconsumption of carbs was the primary driver of weight gain. He took a ton of grief for going against Conventional Wisdom despite a fair amount of success overall. All of us in the low-carb/primal/paleo world owe him a lot. In retrospect, I wonder what might have happened if, from the beginning, he had been a bit more lenient on the severe carb restriction in Phase 1 (which caused significant numbers to abandon the plan before they had adapted) and if had been slightly more restrictive on trans, hydrogenated, and O6 fats and processed foods.

6. One myth that keeps people making excuses for their bad food choices is that junk food is cheap and real food — like vegetables and meat — is expensive. As one who shops for food several days a week, at various markets, and maintains a cost-per-meal mentality (I’m an accountant), I know that is a fallacy. Sure, some organic or free-range/cage-free foods can be pricey, but generally, real food is far less expensive than any junk food. Ten dollars worth of "salad supplies" buys me several heaping salads, along with the dressing — whether homemade or bought. As a really simple example, a large spaghetti squash, along with a jar of junk-free, Trader Joe’s organic marinara sauce, will get three or four "spaghetti" meals at the cost of less than $5, in total, for both items, plus fresh spices and a cheese topping. And $4 of ground sirloin makes two heaping (bun-free) burgers. Yet a tiny Arby’s roast beef "super" sandwich that fits in the palm of my (tiny) hand is $4, and a chemical-loaded Lean Cuisine "meal" costs almost the same amount. This fallacy of "it’s too expensive to eat well" is always presented as the reason for obesity, especially among the lower income classes. How should we counter this misinformation?

In my mind, this is not so much a question of expense as it is of convenience. Most people are too caught up in the convenience of one-stop shopping at the big supermarkets. They see the prices in the organic or natural foods sections and are turned off because the stuff is twice what conventional foods are. As you have noted, however, when you have the time and inclination to shop farmers’ markets, CSAs, co-ops, and buy in bulk, real food can be cheaper than buying typical processed or supermarket fare. It becomes a simple issue of priority; if you have made the commitment to eat healthy and are willing to plan meals and do research on shopping, you can probably even save money eating Primally over what you’d spend eating the SAD.

I also love to use the Starbuck’s analogy. Anyone who pays three to five bucks for a daily cup of coffee or tea has no business arguing that Primal eating is expensive.

7. Let’s talk about the tendency to "over-carb" and overeat among weekend athletes and active sports/outdoor folks. I’ve done a lot of endurance sports — snowshoeing, xc skiing, and I’m an avid cyclist — and I’ll do these activities on low carb levels while eating fat, and also, I have no problems waking up to a 30+ mile cycling excursion on the weekend at the tail end of a 14- or 18-hour fast. Yet the endurance athlete’s handbook of conventional wisdom still stresses carb-loading and constant eating during activities. I’ll see people popping sugar-loaded gel shots during a one-hour bike ride or a short jog, and I’ll see folks in the gym eating trail mix and protein bars during short, moderate workouts, or worse yet, while walking on a treadmill or barely moving on an elliptical. Often, their personal trainers — most of whom are poorly informed on nutrition and performance — teach them these shoddy habits. Briefly tell us about primal concepts like going low-carb, eating fat, and engaging intermittent fasting, and how they can fuel an active, primal life.

A major premise of the Primal Blueprint is that we humans have become well-adapted over millions of years to derive most of our energy from stored body fat, but that we have unwisely chosen to program our genes to depend on a constant resupplying of sugar (in the form of carbs) to fuel activity and to keep blood sugar levels stable. The USDA food pyramid, the Standard American Diet (SAD), and even the AMA, AHA and ADA all continue to support this dangerous notion, so most people still stray down this path to obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and arthritis. A major goal of living Primally is to reprogram those genes to preferentially burn fats at rest and while exercising. The way we do that is to cut the carbs in our diet way back (easy to do if you eliminate most sugars and grain foods) and increase healthy fats. It takes about two to three weeks to transition for most non-athlete folks, during and after which they notice that they lose 2—3 pounds of body fat each week until they hit their ideal body composition. Most people find that energy levels increase and stabilize after that transition period, making it easier to be able to engage in low-level activity, but also to perform the occasional intense efforts like resistance training and sprinting. Once you realize that 80% of your body composition is determined by how you eat, you also get that you don’t need to do much exercise (timewise) to maximize your results. We are launching a new program soon called PBF (Primal Blueprint Fitness) in which we describe the few key workouts anyone can do to eventually achieve 95% of their genetic potential. And it’s not much: two bodyweight routines and one sprint session per week, interspersed with as much play and "moving around" as you can find time for.

I spent a great portion of my life pursuing the "chronic cardio" path, where I’d rack up huge training miles and then have to consume 1,000 grams of carbs every day to be able to recover and do it all again the next day. That’s what I thought I had to do to race faster. I was certainly "race fit," but was a wreck inside: arthritis, tendonitis, chronic upper respiratory infections six or eight times a year, IBS, and a host of injuries. I couldn’t keep muscle on either. Once I retired from racing and cut my training back, I was amazed at how few carbs it took to get me through the day. I had more muscle, more energy, and even dropped a few more percent body fat. That was a huge revelation: you just don’t need all those carbs unless you insist on being a world-class endurance athlete. Once you reprogram your genes to preferentially burn stored body fat, everything you do drives you towards health and leanness. Even endurance athletes can benefit from this style of eating. It takes longer to adapt and there are a number of additional compromises, but it’s possible to race as well or better on a lower carb program.

8. I am seeing a food revolution ahead of us, with you being among the leaders in supplying information and resources, and building a network of like-minded people. It seems that at least once a week, some mainstream publication or newspaper is publishing an article presenting ideas that are friendly to the paleo-primal lifestyle and question the old platitudes of the SAD (Standard American Diet). Little by little, people are catching on and learning the truth. Do you believe we are on the verge of a massive primal "revolution" where long-held myths and misinformation campaigns will be turned on their head?

Absolutely. The whole Primal/Paleo/Evo (and low-carb) movement has been gathering steam for a few years now. With all that’s going on — and the occasional colorful characters we offer up — it can’t help but attract the attention of mainstream media now and then. I think the coolest part of all this is the melding of 21st century information technology with our low-tech "back to basics" lifestyle approach. Prior to the Internet it was very difficult to amass enough of this primal "collective conscious" to legitimately take on the medical establishment or Big Pharma, or to convince people that government health programs are a joke and that we’re each on our own. I love the "wiki" nature of MDA and similar sites where a person can offer up a novel theory or write a post that prompts instant discussion on the merits, or requires one to critically rethink the position. We’ve built a huge community of true individuals who have decided that the only route to health and happiness is through taking full responsibility for what they eat and how they view fitness, health, and longevity. Hundreds of bloggers, tens of thousands of commenters, and hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of monthly readers have helped shape this life-way. We’ve brought in significant numbers of scientists, physicians, teachers, media, and other influential people who have embraced this direction and have begun endorsing it to the masses. I think we’ll see a major paradigm shift in the next few years.

* Mark Sisson describes The Primal Blueprint as a "set of simple instructions (the blueprint) that allows you to control how your genes express themselves in order to build the strongest, leanest, healthiest body possible, taking clues from evolutionary biology (that’s the primal part)." Sisson is consistent with his usage of "primal" while others often use the term "paleo" to mean essentially the same thing. Sisson points out some important differences between primal and paleo here.

Karen DeCoster, CPA, [send her mail] has a Master of Arts in Economics, and is an accounting/finance professional in the health care industry in Detroit. She recently wrote “Primal Life: A Journey of Diet and Health.” She is also starting up a new website/blog on “Real food, real fitness, real health …. Plus a lot of wine and dogs.” She has long been engaging many aspects of the paleo-primal lifestyle, including unconventional workouts, and she is also interested in natural health and holistic nutrition. She is eccentric in demeanor, opinion, and lifestyle. She plans on never getting a tattoo or making an appearance on the “People of Walmart” website. Her website is at Karendecoster.com.

The Best of Karen De Coster

The main thrust behind the paleo or primal lifestyle is that we humans are hunter-gatherers, and our genes are partial to real food just like our ancestors. We have not evolved to adapt to the heavily processed, sugary, high-carbohydrate, grain-loaded, corn oil-crazed garbage diet of the modern era. Oftentimes, those of us who reject this conventional diet negatively refer to it as the Standard American Diet (SAD). The effects of this food have been devastating on all of human health, and not only in America. Everywhere the SAD is embraced, people are suffering all of the same afflictions associated with modern western civilization: obesity, diabetes, inflammation, autoimmune disorders, gluten intolerance, heart disease, cancer, ambiguous mental disorders (such as depression and anxiety), and dubious behavioral disorders.

In 2009, Mark Sisson released his book that promotes his principles of food and diet, as well as all the aspects of living that make us whole, healthy, and happy. Sisson’s Primal Blueprint: Reprogram Your Genes for Effortless Weight Loss, Vibrant Health, and Boundless Energy, is based on the enormous amount of material Mark has made available on his superb and informing website, Mark’s Daily Apple, since 2006. His message, in short, is eat real food, move around a lot, don’t overtrain to gain, and get some sun without gobs of Coppertone SPF 85 covering your body and blocking that healthy — and necessary — Vitamin D.

Anti-State and Pro-Person

There are a few Kings of Paleo who have won international notoriety. Among the most well-know are Loren Cordain, PhD, founder of the Paleo Diet, and Dr. Michael R. Eades, MD, the prolific author of numerous books and proprietor of an outstanding website. Then there’s Mark Sisson. Mark Sisson is a lean, blonde surfer-looking guy who, at fifty-something years old, can turn conventional wisdom on its ear. He is unique in that he is not a doctor or a PhD, but rather a former world-class athlete who has lived, obsessed, and lost from his many years of following The Conventional Wisdom. As he puts it, his book:

Represents the culmination of my primal philosophy, which has taken shape over the past 20 years through extensive research and life experience. I am not a scientist or doctor; I’m an athlete, a coach, and a student on a lifelong quest for exceptional health, happiness, and peak performance. I have an insatiable curiosity about what we need to do to achieve such goals and a growing mistrust of the answers that have been heaped upon us by the traditional pillars of health "wisdom" (Big Pharma, Big Agra, the AMA, the FDA, and other government agencies), the health and fitness profiteers glorified by Madison Avenue, and even the know-it-all multilevel marketer next door.

That paragraph doesn’t need a MasterCard jingle alongside it to be
deemed priceless. In addition, Sisson clearly affirms his lack of
ties to any government agency or special interests that will force-feed
and filter his message. He’s just a regular guy who stands alone and
passes on his immense knowledge from his years of research, practical
application, and commitment to truth. In fact, the book’s premise
is to show you how to take control of your health and fitness
through food and activity by making educated decisions based on relevant
and clear-cut information. That’s what makes him so unique and special
in an industry — health and fitness — that misinforms, shills for
special interests, and consistently trots out one moneymaking gimmick
after another.

Mark Sisson is the first person that I am aware of who used and promoted the "primal" label. Primal and paleo are often used interchangeably by various whole food enthusiasts, but there are major differences between strict primal or strict paleo, or even general low-carb diets, such as diverging views on oils, grains, and saturated fat. Those are distinctions I don’t really care about for purposes of this review. Readers can do their own research to judge the merits of various food worldviews. What I care about is adopting — and teaching — the habit of learning about, selecting, and eating only natural, whole, real foods that we, as humans, were meant to consume.

If you are a person who desires to cut corners in the short-term, slim down for your sister’s wedding, or make a New Year’s or "Summer Beach" resolution, don’t read this book. It is not for you. This book is about lifestyle, not fad diet. The book recommends suitable activity that you can maintain without devoting tons of your free time or becoming an exercise addict. The book stresses the tenets of engaging life and health over time, not going from beer-and-bread gut to buff in sixty days, or looking thin for a one-night party or a series of wedding photographs.

What I like most about Sisson’s book is that he can engage the average, curious reader where other authors have been less successful. For those who are interested in the more complex science of food, Dr. Eades and others have written phenomenal books for food and nutrition hobbyists. I love to read all of those books, but I know that most of my non-hobbyist friends will not stay interested long enough for the information to be absorbed and the good habits integrated into their lives. That is why I recommend Primal Blueprint to everyone who wishes to engage my knowledge on the topic of food and diet. Mark’s style is for the layman. He takes science and pares it down to simple and intuitive principles for living. He offers no gimmicks, no promises, no regimens, and he doesn’t offer to provide you with expensive and ridiculous meal plans. Again, the premise of Primal Blueprint is putting the responsibility for your health into your hands, and teaching you how to win control over your life in spite of the numerous sources of conventional wisdom that are consistently shilling for big politics, special interests, and the establishment.

Practice, Not Perfection

A unique perspective from Sisson, that he advocates before his introduction, is his "80% Rule." I like this inclusion because I’ve always lived by a similar standard. This refers to his belief that you avoid failure by not striving for total perfection. In other words, forget the strict regimen, and instead, as he states, "build momentum toward becoming even more compliant, with less effort, as time proceeds." After all, can you think of anything that leads to more "failures" and discouragement in peoples’ lives than diet and/or exercise programs? Most people always fail at diet and exercise because they set painstaking regimens that can’t be easily adhered to, and this results in disillusionment, and eventually, the person walks away and often goes on a binge in the opposite direction.

Don’t get me wrong — Mark Sisson’s Primal Blueprint doesn’t allow for "occasionally" ingesting toxic foods, or being self-destructive twenty percent of the time. Instead, he tries to lure the reader into dropping the obsessive, regimented mentality of most short-term "diets" while making the best decisions possible within the constraints of your current conditions. In essence, the Sisson eating philosophy takes into account that people have "real-world concerns" and they need to strive for obtainable goals.

Challenging the Establishment

Early on in Primal Blueprint, Sisson sets the pace for his dissent when he introduces his framework for challenging the conventional wisdom. He attacks and counters the traditional folly on grains, cholesterol, fiber, saturated animal fat, cardio training, strength training, sunlight, Big Pharma’s poison, results-oriented goals, and most importantly, meal habits. He points out that the establishment view, which suggests that our genes determine our destiny and we just have to buy into the results, is pure fabrication. This perspective, in fact, supports the large and wealthy pharmaceutical and medical interests that claim you need its products/services to be healthy and whole. Thus the excuse mongering is a win-win for the powerful and wealthy establishment-based industries, and it is the equivalent of surrender for you, the individual.

The Sisson approach is that although some of us may have shortcomings or genetic tendencies, in the end it is we, as individuals, who make the lifestyle choices that determine our outcome. In a sense, he is staunchly denying the victimology that is promoted by the Conventional Wisdomists, and in its place he provides a program for what he calls "controlling how your genes express themselves in constantly rebuilding, repairing, and renewing your cells." In Sisson’s view, it is almost impossible, for most people, to be,

…lean, fit, energetic, and healthy following Conventional Wisdom." Instead, we succumb to the forces of consumerism designed to placate our pain with silly shortcuts, comforts, conveniences, and indulgences.

…A huge percentage of all doctor visits today are a direct consequence of lifestyle choices that are misaligned with the environmental and survival conditions that shaped our primal genetic makeup.

All of the erroneous information handed down by the Conventional Wisdomists over the years has led to, as Sisson describes it, "one giant step backward for mankind." Only lifestyle modifications at the individual level can turn the momentum around in your favor.

It’s the Insulin, Stupid

In the chapter "Primal Blueprint Eating Philosophy," Sisson gathers up quite a few stones and heaves them at the establishment’s hypotheses on some of the nagging issues of our time, like insulin, cholesterol, and macro nutrients. Here is where I come across one of the few quibbles I have with this book, and it’s a relatively minor one. I think he should have turned the "calories in, calories out" concept on its ear. The problem for most people is the regimen mentality, especially concerning calories. Since we already know that body composition is more sophisticated than "calories in, calories out" (see Gary Taubes’s Good Calories, Bad Calories), the system of counting calories — in meals, with pedometers, etc. — is, and has always been, a recipe for failure for almost everyone. This is one area I wish that Sisson would attack with more fervor. However, Sisson does emphasize that an eating program in the style of Primal Blueprint, with an 80% rule, will successfully optimize your end results.

The rest of the chapter is where Sisson really shines in his ability to make tedious biochemical particulars easily understood, and dare I say — exciting. Until people understand what it is that insulin does to their bodies, and how processed carbohydrates drive insulin production, they cannot possibly make informed decisions on food choices. Sisson does a marvelous job of simplifying some complicated concepts on the issue. Another big hitting point for Sisson is the vilification of cholesterol by the establishment hacks that do the bidding for Big Pharma and the medical establishment while they nurture your sickness to keep their industries in high demand.

He calls attention to one of the great scams of our lifetimes — the lipid hypothesis of heart disease. Along with that he discusses the irrelevance of total cholesterol numbers, and how the Lords of conventional wisdom have used that as a diagnostic tool for disease and, of course, the need for pharmaceutical drugs. Sisson includes several pages of important and easily understood material about cholesterol and its breakdown between HDL, LDL, and types of LDL. It’s important that people understand how the medical establishment has come to demonize cholesterol and categorize otherwise healthy Americans as "sick" based on a numbers game — a game where the acceptable cholesterol numbers keep being lowered in order to get more people in the "sick" category, and therefore produce new patients for Big Pharma’s very profitable statin drugs.

A Couple of Real Pyramids to Live By

The Primal Blueprint food pyramid, unlike the government’s fraudulent apparatus, is not influenced by food subsidies, profiteering politics, special interests, or payoffs from powerful players in the food industry. You won’t see a primal pyramid recommending 6—11 servings daily of bread, pasta, and cereal. Low-fat diets that emphasize grains have made people fat, and not just here in America. In Sisson’s view, vegetables, fruit, meat, fish, fowl, and eggs should sit at the bottom portion of the food pyramid. He includes a primer on fats and oils — I especially note his wicked defense of healthy-yet-demonized fats and oils (coconut oil, unprocessed palm oil, lard, tallow, butter, etc.) that became politically unpopular because of the drive to promote the subsidized oils (think corn and soybean) that are heavily refined and genetically engineered. In keeping with the 80% Rule, even dark chocolate — with 70% or more cocoa — and alcohol make the grade when consumed moderately, in Sisson’s primal world.

Sisson also gives his version of the primal fitness pyramid. Mark thinks people should spend most of their exercise time moving frequently, and at a slow pace. That is to be punctuated with moments of short intense efforts (intervals) and full-body functional strength sessions. Primal fitness has the goal of avoiding overtraining, or as Sisson often calls it, chronic cardio. This advice comes from a guy who was a pre-med student and a world-class endurance athlete. Sisson was a top five finisher in the 1980 US National Marathon Championships, and he won a qualifying spot for the 1980 US Olympic Trials, that is, until illness and injury took a toll on his athletic career.

Since he discovered that too much exercise is detrimental rather than beneficial, he has worked hard to convince others that chronic cardio or endurance sports lead to sickness, burnout, hormone problems, injuries, and the acceleration of aging and disease. I often note that professional endurance athletes often look like aging skeletons at a young age. Most triathletes and marathoners look aged beyond their years, and even my favorite athlete, Tour de France cycling champ Lance Armstrong, looked like an old man at the young age of thirty-four.

Your Doctor and Personal Trainer Are Making You Fat

Early in the book, Sisson states in his book that his goal is to "expose much of the lucrative health and fitness industry as ethically and scientifically bankrupt." He follows that with his sage advice on a non-gimmicky fitness approach and some intense coaching on how to take total control over the food choices you make. Mark Sisson calls himself "non-political," but his message is unmistakably libertarian.

Adding my own two cents, I’d prefer to get a bit nastier than Sisson and make the statement that the majority of the mainstream mob of medical doctors, so-called nutritionists, dieticians, health experts, and personal trainers are know-nothing, conventionalist hacks with a paper degree who lack any real passion or knowledge of the topics for which they claim expertise. My burning question has always been this: what makes a medical doctor — even if he is a great doctor — an automatic "expert" on food and nutrition, let alone exercise? Answer: nothing at all. People make the mistake of automatically granting expertise to their (often overweight) family medical doctor who had very little in the way of basic nutrition training way back in those medical school days. Unless an MD has a burning passion for deeper knowledge on food and nutrition science, or has actually gone into the field professionally, he’s not sitting around reading the food and nutrition science journals and following the hot and debated issues of the day. So, in my mind, you need to forget your family doctor’s uninformed, pharmaceutical-influenced advice and learn to control your own destiny through a process of self-education.

Burning question number two: look around you at any gym, and tell me about all of the overweight, pudgy, or big-gut personal trainers you see training other people at $60+ per hour? Every day I see "personal trainers" doing the following: 1) sitting at their laptop and shouting out to their clients as they do a routine 2) lazily plopping down on benches and drinking huge, sugar-loaded coffees while they yell out useless instructions to a paying client, and 3) having clients do a zillion sets and reps of deep-knee bends or working with sitting machine exercises like leg extensions or useless abductor/adductor movements. When you realize how easily and quickly one can get a paper certificate to "certify" himself/herself as a "trainer," then you realize why the industry is such a joke.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that most of the personal training industry exists to keep out potential competitors — who don’t have paper certificates — while it hoodwinks its uninformed subjects with lots of undelivered promises and ill-informed instruction at exorbitant prices.

On the Eve of Destruction?

To wrap up, Sisson makes some of his strongest — and best — statements in the book’s conclusion.

Stepping back for a moment to grab a wide-angle view of the wide angles in the buffet line at a Vegas casino, it’s evident how ridiculously out of control this situation has become. No offense, but Americans look like one giant yard of fattened cattle ready for slaughter, complete with a significant percentage of "downers" (a term for sick cattle that can’t stand up; they are dragged with forklifts to slaughter).

Sisson’s scrutiny is more than welcome here. He brings up one of my favorite topics, time preferences, which play a huge role in obesity, food choices, and selecting a fitness program. Of course, I have found that it is always very politically incorrect to associate time preferences with behavioral choices because people take those criticisms personally and tend to get defensive. Sisson points out:

Today, peak physical and intellectual performance and self-discipline are no longer requirements for survival. Man has become self-indulgent and has reverted to behaviors that provide short-term gratification.

Therefore, it follows that Sisson’s Primal Blueprint lays out a plan for humans who live in the modern world to revert to some of the habits and characteristics of our primal ancestors. Otherwise, the populace will become sicker and fatter, creating more permanent patients for Big Pharma and Big Medicine.

We know that bookstores are loaded with an abundance of "health" and "fitness" books that offer up one tediously conventional bit of useless wisdom after another. Just walk into a Borders or Barnes & Noble and look up front near the entrance doors. You’ll see piles of books, all with fluffy names and great covers plastered with beautiful people who call out to you as you walk by. These books sell, but they are rarely read. It’s just like the plethora of treadmills, Nordic Track skiers, Bowflex machines, and assorted home ellipticals that have come to make for handy clothes hangers in the home until they eventually sell for one-third price on Craigslist. Primal Blueprint won’t provide a convenient spot to hang yesterday’s sweater — it exists to be read. And then read again.

All said and done, I have not come across a single book that is so readable, so comprehensive, and so full of bona fide information, along with the presentation of an entire foundation for finally succeeding at food and fitness. Sisson is interesting, engaging, and fun. He plays Frisbee and runs the beach in five-fingered shoes. His writing pops out at the reader who needs a little coaxing, and it can hold the attention of the experienced primalist who needs a little brushing up or extra motivation. Compare that with the boring and unappealing Dean Ornish, with his fatty and inflamed face, who advocates a low-fat, vegetarian, pro-soy diet and sells the conventional lipid hypothesis of heart disease. Sisson’s book, because of its variety, exceptional detail, readability, unconventional writing, and irreverence, is the single best book available on the subject of changing your life and health through diet and exercise. As hard as I looked for faults, I found very few points to criticize. Well, I can think of one bone of contention — he emphasizes a few too many sentences with exclamation points (!), and that could be tamed a bit.

I like Sisson’s model primal human, Grok, and how he uses Grok as a symbol for model living. Grok lives in the modern world but reverts to the best habits of his ancestors in order that he may mimic some of those fight-or-flight survival tactics that made Grok so adaptive and healthy. I just don’t fancy the mainstream media and its fascination with the use of the "caveman" term when writing about the primal or paleo real-food, real-fitness lifestyle. It gets a bit tedious and obnoxious. Sisson wisely avoids that comparison.

Get primal, get paleo — or whatever you want to call it. Just start to critically assess the received opinion that has made you a pawn for large, wealthy food and medical interests that use government to keep you in their vicious circle of bad food and enduring illness. Sisson notes that his book can be "the centerpiece of a vibrant community of people connected by the Internet and committed to living their lives to the fullest potential, challenging the status quo, and trying something old." Amen.

If you finish Sisson’s book and are not completely motivated to have a "processed food throwing-out party" and hit the ground running toward a more vibrant life of real food and real fitness, then there’s probably not much in life that can motivate you.

Mark Sisson has a tremendous, limited-time offer for Karen DeCoster readers. Buy his book, The Primal Blueprint, on Amazon.com within the next 24 hours and you’ll get a ton of freebies. Read all the details here.

Karen DeCoster, CPA, [send her mail] has a Master of Arts in Economics, and is an accounting/finance professional in the health care industry in Detroit. She recently wrote "Primal Life: A Journey of Diet and Health." She is also starting up a new website/blog on "Real food, real fitness, real health …. Plus a lot of wine and dogs." She combines grazing and gorging with intermittent fasting, and her HDL is 115 on a high-fat diet. Where’s my coconut oil?, and don’t forget the bacon grease. Her weight is 110 with bodyfat under 15%. She loves to cook and create in the kitchen. She makes chips from Kale, thinks eggplant is dessert, and likes Buffalo jerky or rib steak for breakfast. She loves cross-fit, boxing, deadlifting, kettlebell training, cycling, and bodyweight fitness. She often overtrains because she foolishly ignores Sisson’s advice. People say she bounces off walls, and it must be true. Or is it ADHD? Where’s the meds? Her website is at Karendecoster.com.

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Many entities, from the White House to various mortgage banking leaders to self-professed pundits, are trying to put a shame element to borrowers who find themselves with acute negative equity in their homes. Is it possible to successfully shame these people into staying in their mortgage loans and not walk away from their homes?

DeCoster: Federal officials like former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, along with powerful special interests that profit from central planning policies, have an interest in keeping people hogtied to the sinking housing market. They are trying to depict struggling Americans as irresponsible scoundrels who are recklessly walking away from their commitments. In fact, the multi-millionaire Hank Paulson, who was one of the architects of the Wall Street bailout, told the Wall Street Journal that borrowers “have a responsibility to keep paying.” That’s a pretty broad statement to make that: 1) ignores the default option on the typical mortgage contract, and 2) disregards each homeowner’s unique options and financial situation.

The broad statement was intentional. The overall scheme calls for treating each individual debtor as one piece of a collective pool of citizens who shall be enslaved by the collapsing economy. The people who insisted, for years, that there was no housing bubble, no debt dilemma, and no recession on the horizon are the same people who are now telling us that everything is fixed, the recession is over, and therefore we should go back to our old habits — buy more stuff we don’t need, take out more loans, and buy houses and cars. The government has subsidized the purchase of both cars and houses, in spite of the fact that an abundance of Americans are still saddled with debt and holding underwater mortgages.

The Obama administration, in its massive campaign to socially engineer America, is pressuring banks into renegotiating mortgage payments in order to keep people captive in their mortgages. The goal of the elites in power is to keep up the appearance of prosperity and keep folks in debt to the big banks. Mass defaults will injure Wall Street — Washington D.C’s favorite constituency. Additionally, there’s John Courson, an FOB (Friend of Banksters) who runs all over the country trying to spread the moral message to middle-class people who are pawns in this Bankster mess. Courson is the Chief Executive of the Mortgage Banker’s Association, so whose interests do you think he is representing? Courson advising homeowners on their moral and financial strategies is like a crocodile telling the neighborhood children they should take a shortcut home through the swamp. These so-called “leaders,” unfortunately, have the necessary wealth, political power, and media access that enable them to introduce their disingenuous platform and influence the masses. For those who aren’t empowered by the political establishment, there’s no equal opportunity for commanding the public stage.

The schemers know they don’t have to deal with a level playing field, so yes, it is possible to shame people into debt subservience. In fact, the masses are already succumbing to the morality message. The elites don’t give a damn about the plight of average people who have little to no financial knowledge, feel trapped, and have nowhere to turn. That’s why those folks need to reach out to a local CPA or other financial advisor they can trust. Furthermore, they need to tune out the moralizing that flows from the fat cats and special interests that get wealthy by keeping them equity deficient.

Why is it that strategic defaulting at a corporate level is not actively challenged, but it is being challenged at a consumer level?

DeCoster: The notion of approving business defaults while flogging one’s neighbor for walking away from his mortgage is entirely irrational. One snag is that the general masses have no understanding of financial matters. No matter how “educated” they may be in the college sense, they are financially ignorant and cannot conduct basic analyses of their own financial matters, let alone weigh the costs and benefits of a complicated situation that is unique to another individual. There are plenty of talented and smart people who don’t have the skills to sort out budgets, expenses, debt, and investments. That is not a criticism — it is just a fact.

The condemnation of homeowner defaults is brought on by a knee-jerk, emotive response. People feel — they don’t think. You can thank public schools for teaching self-esteem and groupthink as opposed to business and analytical/critical thinking skills. The public schools are churning out a nation of drones, or trained monkeys, as I like to say it. Welcome to the Oprahized nation where logic and reason are abandoned in favor of emotionalizing hot-button issues for the purpose of “feeling better.”

Challenging other people on this issue, when you know nothing about their state of affairs, is something that is fired off from the gut level. The morality element is a great focal point for drawing out emotional energy. Focusing on other peoples’ behavior that you deem evil, while you avoid the objective aspects of the issue, is pathetic.

An individual’s financial options can be objectively assessed and the most favorable course of action can generally be determined. Businesses entrepreneurs and managers are constatntly analyzing and estimating various strategies, and that is how businesses become enduring and profitable. Individuals and households are no different in terms of planning best course scenarios and minimizing waste and losses. Except individuals and households suffer personally and emotionally by bearing an unfavorable financial condition. For that reason, they must take actions to alleviate uncertainty and keep their financial house in order.

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Karen DeCoster, CPA [send her mail] has a Master of Arts in Economics, and is an accounting/finance professional in Detroit. She recently published "It May Be Financially Irresponsible to Pay Your Mortgage." Her website is at Karendecoster.com.

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People write me often and ask about resources, books, websites, etc. that point to the primal/paleo lifestyle and/or diet that I often refer to in my posts such as this one titled, “The Medical Establishment is Pathetic.” In that post, I point to one of the numerous articles that appear nowadays, in popular news sources, exclaiming some new scientific fact on food that is based on junk science supported by one man’s opinion or some flimsy “study.” This article in particular points to an establishment medical hack who makes the claim that replacing the saturated fat in your diet with industry’s toxic hydrogenated vegetable oils can make you healthy. Each time I read this simpleton trash I get a good chuckle, but then I ask — at what point does this tripe border on professional negligence? I can’t help but recall the words of Michael Pollan, who stated in his 2008 book, In Defense of Food:

…Most of the nutritional advice we’ve received over the last half-century (and in particular the advice to replace the fats in our diets with carbohydrates) has actually made us less healthy and considerably fatter.

As to the “considerably fatter” comment, one only needs to open his or her eyes in any public place to confirm that notion. Pollan goes on to say:

All of our uncertainties about nutrition should not obscure the plain fact that the chronic diseases that now kill most of us can be traced directly to the industrialization of our food: the rise of highly processed foods and refined grains; the use of chemicals to raise plants and animals in huge monocultures; the superabundance of cheap calories of sugar and fat produced by modern agriculture; and the narrowing of the biological diversity of the human diet to a tiny handful of staple crops, notably wheat, corn, and soy.

I’ve undergone a somewhat long and exploratory process to get to the point where I am now eating only fresh, whole, natural foods – real foods, such as meat, vegetables, animal fats, fruits, and nuts. And yes, plenty of saturated fats. My evolution to “things natural” started way before it was fashionable because I have never been a fad person or a follower. All my life I have never understood, or felt, this thing called “peer pressure.” Not as a teenager, not ever. In my opinion, that is a crock of you-know-what. In 1986 I was working in the printing industry — my starving artist days, as I like to call them. I was a keyliner (page designer), if you even remember that term. We printed up a quarterly newsletter for the local chiropractor, East Detroit Chiropractic. I would read the articles and ads as I worked on the layouts and I was eager to understand what chiropractic was all about. I had a horribly painful neck problem from bending over light tables and art tables all day, so I went to see Dr. Koukles, a chiropractor at the clinic. It turned out that he shared my passion and philosophy for athletics and conditioning, and he was firmly in the natural health camp, so twenty-four years later he is still my cherished chiropractor.

At the same time I started to scrutinize the food I was eating. I had pretty much always been thin — terrifyingly skinny as a kid — but I had put on some “soft” or what I call “inflammatory weight.” So I started eating more healthy, or at least what I thought was healthy at the time. I was a cyclist, occasionally racing mountain bikes and doing track and road training. And we were taught to, yes, carb load. Endurance athletes need tons of carbs, they say. Far more than the average person! So I raced, ate “healthy,” and loaded up on carbs before weekend rides or races. Eating healthy included cutting out the sugar (good), cutting down on meat (bad), and substituting those “healthy” Healthy Choice meals (real, real bad) for real food while at work each day. Also, I ditched sugar-loaded pop and I was drinking bottled water, Evian, as soon as it hit the shelves in the U.S. I did look pretty buff and everyone thought I was such a health nut. But not quite.

In 1996 I got very sick — an assortment of symptoms that I won’t get into here. How can a young, well-conditioned athlete get as sick as I did? The solution for me, from the medical specialists, was drugs and tests and more drugs and more tests. That lasted a very short while for two reasons: 1) the drugs made a nightmare of my metabolism and the side effects were not acceptable, and 2) I had no tolerance for short-term, easy solutions that glossed over the underlying issues. I wanted to know what was causing the problems, and then, what solutions were available to get rid of those problems.

I tossed the pharma garbage — never to return again — and explored other alternatives such as massage, chiropractic, holistic health, homeopathic remedies, more meat and …… still I carb-loaded. I was an endurance athlete so I had to eat lots of carbs, remember? Then I discovered Atkins and started to flirt with that philosophy. But that went against my endurance athlete philosophy. What to do? I began cycling my carbohydrates — in other words, I was being smarter and cutting back on them at times. I was eating carbs when I felt I needed them, but I often cut back drastically on them, hence the “carb cycling.” I eliminated most all processed foods. Since I had chucked pop (soda for some of you) back in 80s, I thought the good alternative was diet Coke. I didn’t drink a lot of pop, but sometimes one a day. All that aspartame must’ve done wonders.

Things seemed to get better, or maybe I just wasn’t tuned in to my body as well as I should have been. In 2003, I got really sick again — out of the blue, and this time much worse. This whole event — and it was an event — left me bouncing back and forth between the infectious disease and rheumatology Docs at the local hospital for 3—4 months while they all ran around trying to solve the perplexing puzzle.

My recovery from that situation found me revisiting Atkins, where I tweaked and modified that philosophy into what would essentially become something very similar to the Mark Sisson primal diet. I still did not give up wheat and grains 100%, but fat started to become a staple of my diet and processed foods were nixed entirely. About that time I started to do intermittent fasting (IF) without any such planning — it just happened because I was busy and running around all over the place.

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For instance, on Saturdays and/or Sundays, I’d jump from my morning gym workout to the Harley to meet up with friends to ride all day — and sometimes I was going between 18—24 hours without eating. And I discovered it made me feel great. The old bodybuilder ruse about “losing your muscle” if you didn’t eat gobs of protein post-workout had become a big joke in my mind. All the protein shakes and the constant assault of food is just not advantageous to one’s health. The more I incorporated intermittent fasting into my life, the leaner I became. On some days I’ll eat more, smaller meals, and on other days I’d eat maybe one big meal, and nothing else for 18—24 hours. I never plan anything; I just take it by the day or hour. I take advantage of my busy schedule to fast, and if I am home all day I may eat a lot. I like the “confusion” and change this offers my body. And again, just as with exercise, things never get boring.

I consider Mark Sisson to be the chief proponent of the “primal” lifestyle that is based on returning to our roots as hunter-gatherers and eating the (real) food that we were meant to eat. Mark’s Primal Blueprint (I will review the book soon) is the single best book available that discusses the various ways in which you can attend to your health through food, exercise, and clean living. Mark’s Daily Apple website is a magnificent source of information, and his passion and ideas have motivated me to experiment with my own food selections. And in spite of my continuous experimentation, I will never waver from my core philosophy on food — I feel and look too good to mess with the results.

Oh yeah — and my cycling? I don’t race anymore — not since 2003 and that illness — but I do occasional distance rides, and lots of medium-range rides. I have no stamina problems whatsoever. I pity those poor endurance athletes who think they need all of that nutritionally deficient pasta to keep riding. And so many cyclists I see out on the trails are 30—40 pounds overweight, or more. I’ll wake up on a weekend day, do a 20—40 mile road ride, get home at 1pm or so, and not eat anything until afternoon. On a longer ride I’ll stick some food in my bag — trail mix, fruit, or the occasional carb (Clif brand) bar.

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Karen DeCoster, CPA [send her mail] is a libertarian accounting/finance professional and writer. She was writing about rabid consumerism and debt, the housing bubble, corporate bankruptcies, boom-period business malinvestments, and the economic crack-up long before it was fashionable. She likes to occasionally look through the piles of hate mails from those times while sipping on an Oregon Pinot Noir. This is her LewRockwell.com archive, her Taki’s Magazine archive, and her Mises.org archive. Check out her website and blog.

The Best of Karen De Coster

One notable item appeared recently on Money & Markets, courtesy of Martin D. Weiss, Ph.D.: “200 Bank Failures Expected in 2010.” Some of the views of Martin Weiss are problematic in many ways, but he has been learning bits and pieces from the Austrian school of economics. For instance, in the span of a few months, he went from being a rabid deflationist to an overt inflationist. Gary North has written about this. Here’s Weiss in his latest piece on bank failures:

Washington has so thoroughly botched its supervision of the banking industry that 200 banks are likely to fail this year — easily surpassing last year’s 140 bank failures … inevitably involving the greatest bank losses in history … and already costing the FDIC ten times more than the great S&L and banking crisis of the 1980s did.

Weiss points to the recent testimony of FDIC Chairwoman Sheila Bair (he says “Blair,” but that’s an easy-to-make typo). Make no mistake — Bair is a raging statist and has been selling a pack of lies to the public since her appointment to the FDIC. Her solutions for current financial crises are always centered on the necessity of more federally mandated reforms. If you are an advocate of the free market, don’t read the portion of Bair’s testimony that attempts to explain, “Why market discipline failed” — it will make you bonkers. On the contrary, she did blast Greenspan for causing the housing bubble and she condemned Washington for enabling Wall Street’s shadow banking system. In his article, Weiss has this to say about the magnitude of the current banking meltdown:

Worse than the 1980s: If you’re among those who think today’s banking crisis isn’t nearly as bad as the great S&L and banking crisis of the 1980s, think again. The average bank failing today is six times larger than it was back then, producing far greater losses. Moreover, each bank failure is costing the FDIC about TEN times more than it did in the 1980s crisis, according to the Meridian Group of Seattle. As a result …

Worst FDIC losses of all time: The FDIC lost more money in bank failures ($36 billion) than it lost in the ENTIRE five-year banking crisis from 1987 through 1992 ($29.6 billion). And in 2010, with the number of failures likely to increase, the losses will be even larger.

The size of the banks that are blowing up is an important point to make — one that federal fibbers and media bobbleheads continuously brush aside. And while the mainstream business organs keep reminding us that the recession (Depression?) is over, and the banks are making profits again (yoo-hoo!), Weiss notes:

What most Wall Street bank analysts still don’t seem to recognize is that the giant trading profits they’ve been so enthusiastic about are generated by the same low-interest Fed policy that created the housing bubble — and is now in the process of creating MORE bubbles.

Even ex-Federal Reserve Governor Mark Olson spoke to FOX News about the doomsday, saying that 200 bank failures is a “reasonable number.” As of today, for the first eighteen days of 2010, there have been four bank failures. Here is the “official” FDIC “Bank Failures in Brief.”

Additionally, financial strategist Richard Suttmeier thinks that “500 to 800 banks will fail into 2012 and 2013.” The FDIC has required that banks prepay $45 billion in premiums for 2010 through 2012, but hold on — much of that is already spent, as Suttmeier notes:

The Deposit Insurance Fund will pick up $45 billion from members by year-end. This inflow is a pre-payment of regular fees for 2010 through 2012. FDIC Vice Chairman Martin Gruenberg says that this money will be enough to cover bank failures for the next three years, but I say, no way!

The FDIC Deposit Insurance Fund is $16.8 billion in arrears, so 37% of the $45 billion has already been pre-spent. With $5.3 trillion in insured deposits, the DIF needs to exceed $54 billion at the end of June 2013 to be above the 1.15% ratio required by law.

Since June 2008, insured deposits are up $168 billion per quarter. Given this growth rate, insured deposits could top $9 trillion in mid-2013, which requires the Deposit Insurance Fund to be above $100 billion, and is what the FDIC projects to be the total cost of failures. This money will have to come from the FDIC’s lines of credit from the US Treasury.

Remember that less than a year ago, Sheila Bair stated, “Without additional revenue beyond the regular assessments, current projections indicate that the fund balance will approach zero.” Is it possible that Bair was hinting that the FDIC was insolvent? Indeed, the FDIC levied the premium payment on banks in order to stave off a financial holocaust. This was a forced bailout from the banks that got bailed out from a government that stole the money from its captive taxpayers. Moreover, Bloomberg’s Jonathan Weil noted, a month ago, that the FDIC’s

insurance fund’s liabilities exceeded assets by $8.2 billion as of Sept. 30. That marked the first time since 1992 that the industry-financed fund had shown a deficit.” That’s because the FDIC has been underestimating its losses ever since the financial crisis began, which is another way of saying it has consistently overstated its insurance fund’s capital position. At the rate it’s going, the FDIC soon may have no choice but to borrow money from taxpayers by tapping its $500 billion credit line with the Treasury Department, an option it so far has avoided.

We are only in the initial stages of this crisis. The FDIC has been claiming that its Treasury credit line is for the purposes of a short-term, emergency cash flow; however, the scheme has the look and feel of a long-term lifeline that will snap when the weight of additional banking failures are added to a financial system that is already obese with failure and fraud.

Karen DeCoster, CPA [send her mail] is a libertarian accounting/finance professional and writer. She was writing about rabid consumerism and debt, the housing bubble, corporate bankruptcies, boom-period business malinvestments, and the economic crack-up long before it was fashionable. She likes to occasionally look through the piles of hate mails from those times while sipping on an Oregon Pinot Noir. This is her LewRockwell.com archive, her Taki’s Magazine archive, and her Mises.org archive. Check out her website and blog.

The Best of Karen De Coster

Lowenstein’s thesis is exactly what I have been preaching to family, friends, and acquaintances for some time now. Many Americans are, by nature, very meticulous about paying off their debts and honoring contracts. Nevertheless, when they are stuck with a home that is worth far less than what they owe, the home becomes a noose around their neck, a pecuniary black hole, and a drag on household cash flow. It becomes what I call exorbitant rent. If the difference between the mortgage balance and the current market value is substantial, the homeowner is throwing away money on a home when it may take him years of mortgage payments to recover enough value to revert to a state where equity crops up. Thus the homeowner is essentially throwing money into an unpredictable black hole. If the mortgage payment is higher than a rent payment would be on a similar home, that adds the burden of overpayment for the “privilege” of being a quasi-homeowner paying high rent on a house you may never own, unless you plan to stay put in the house for a long time. If the mortgage is lower than an equivalent rental, there may be some advantage to hanging on for the short term, but that would depend on the condition of the house and various maintenance factors, as well as the additional costs of ownership.

After all, ownership requires payment for taxes, higher insurance (higher than renter’s insurance), and maintenance/replacement costs. I have gone over household budget/cash flow analyses with a few friends and family, and I have shown them the astounding cost differential between ownership of their “underwater” mortgage and renting a similar home. Yet people still aren’t willing to give up the cash-eating arrangement. Though I can spot the financial detriment, as a Certified Public Accountant I am very wary about giving direct professional advice, except to family — they know, perhaps too well, that I am never short of “pointers” for their financial situations. I refrain from telling people they “should” do this or do that because I don’t want to be blamed for someone’s unhappiness or other quality of life issues that may be the result of complex decisions. But I do try to make clear the alternatives to standing on the deck of a sinking financial ship. As Lowenstein remarks:

And given that nearly a quarter of mortgages are underwater, and that 10 percent of mortgages are delinquent, White, of the University of Arizona, is surprised that more people haven’t walked. He thinks the desire to avoid shame is a factor, as are overblown fears of harm to credit ratings. Probably, homeowners also labor under a delusion that their homes will quickly return to value.

I agree on the second point — almost all people are delusional and think the post-bubble housing crash is the aberration, and that the housing market will return to normal one day in the (near) future. They do not understand that the bubble was the aberration, and those days are over and dead. They thought the bubble prices were the new norm. And the strange thing is that they liked it. They delighted in receiving a high price for their home, and never seemed to be able to factor in the reality that they would also pay a higher price for another home. Not understanding the bubble is a principal part of the problem in getting those people to understand the whole of their financial problem. Also, people do indeed desire to avoid default and they fear the effect that a poor credit rating will have on their future. I agree with Lowenstein that most credit rating fears are a bit overblown, and besides, it is far less problematic to absorb the short-term trauma from a shoddy credit rating and radically improve your long-term financial prospects while shedding the iron monkey on your back.

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The other snag is that most individuals, no matter how "educated" they may be in the college sense, are financially ignorant and cannot conduct basic analyses of their own financial matters, let alone weigh the costs and benefits of a complicated scenario. There are plenty of talented and smart people who don’t have the skills to sort out budgets, expenses, debt, and investments. That is not a criticism — it is just a fact. Furthermore, add to that the fact that the boom years produced rabid consumerism, and keeping up with the Joneses become a core family value for so many debt-worshipping Americans. The gotta-have mentality destroyed what common sense that would have otherwise emerged.

Enter the typical, boom-period mortgage representative, a guy who also knows nothing about business, finances, or accounting. He was most likely hired as a short-termer, with no experience in the business — he was hired for his sales ability and arm-twisting skills. Or he may have a college degree in finance, accounting, or economics, but washed out trying to make it those competitive fields. He was hired to help the mortgage company keep up with the demand generated by the housing bubble, and he knows nothing more than what he was taught in his introductory training that focused mostly on seduction skills and reaching sales goals. Those people sense the gotta-have desperation and they pounce on the vulnerable would-be borrower. ARMs and interest-only loans became a new middle-class norm, which amounted to certain disaster for the person who became a homeowner during the bubble. The natural human instinct for handling undesirable affliction is to get rid of the offending parasite and make things right as quickly as possible. This is your moral duty to yourself, your family, and your future. Moreover, Lowenstein makes this point:

Former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. declared that "any homeowner who can afford his mortgage payment but chooses to walk away from an underwater property is simply a speculator u2014 and one who is not honoring his obligation." (Paulson presumably was not so censorious of speculation during his 32-year career at Goldman Sachs.)

Federal officials like Paulson, along with others who have in interest in keeping you hogtied to the sinking housing market, are trying to depict struggling Americans as irresponsible scoundrels who are rashly walking away from their commitments. Various political special interest promoters and academics that pontificate from outside of the real world that the rest of us live in are reflecting that view. George Brenkert, a business ethics Professor at Georgetown on the Potomac, was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying "borrowers who can pay — and weren’t deceived by the lender about the nature of the loan — have a moral responsibility to keep paying." A follow-up quote from the article states this:

A standard mortgage-loan document reads, “I promise to pay” the amount borrowed plus interest, and some people say that promise should remain good even if it is no longer convenient.

But, like Lowenstein says, the borrower signs a promissory note and "the contract explicitly details the penalty for nonpayment u2014 surrender of the property. The borrower isn’t escaping the consequences; he is suffering them." Lowenstein also places some blame, as he should, on those folks in the mortgage industry who took full advantage when government-created bubbles made their businesses bloom, and now they are on the defensive when debtors are looking to escape the wrath of the bloody aftermath.

But to put the onus for restraint on ordinary homeowners seems rather strange. If the Mortgage Bankers Association is against defaults, its members, presumably the experts in such matters, might take better care not to lend people more than their homes are worth.

In the same Wall Street Journal article noted above, John Courson, Chief Executive of the Mortgage Banker’s Association, lowers the boom on the bogged-down buyer and asserts the guilt game:

But it isn’t just a matter of the borrower’s personal interest, says John Courson, chief executive of the Mortgage Bankers Association, a trade group. Defaults hurt neighborhoods by lowering property values, he says, adding: “What about the message they will send to their family and their kids and their friends?”

This is the same corporate state-special interest slimebag who lobbies feverishly for favors from the feds so his mortgage industry clientele can profit handsomely and the taxpayers can foot the bill by bailing out companies that fund his industry, such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Then there’s Megan McArdle over at The Atlantic — someone who has the financial wherewithal of a lobotomized cadaver. Megan rants about deadbeats who don’t pay their debts and instead choose bankruptcy as an easy way out of an accumulation of bad decisions. Indeed, my article and blog archives are loaded with invectives on this very same topic — few people have written as much criticism as I have about how hare-brained, high time preference Americans have gone wild on consumer spending and debt, thanks to the Federal Reserve’s funding of the credit bubble and other economic factors that all trace back to Big Government and its corporate state compadres. I have never absolved these impetuous debtors from their role in perpetuating their own problems because they could have chosen to abstain from the spending frenzy mentality.

However, Megan cites the same Wall Street Journal article, and she is confused because she doesn’t draw the distinction between those who go on a reckless debt-o-rama spree and walk away from the financial carnage, and mortgage debtors who are underwater due to the breakdown of a completely unsustainable economic system. If McArdle had any business sense, she would understand that strategic defaults are a conventional business practice. Throwing good money after bad just isn’t an option, either for a corporation trying to maintain a brisk bottom line or an individual who needs to keep his financial house in order. Daniel Gross recently wrote an article in Newsweek titled "Default Nation," where he discusses this very fact, including the mention of recent strategic defaults by Stanley Morgan, KKR, and Six Flags, a company where Bill Gates has 11% ownership. Mr. Gross writes that it is surprising that, given market conditions, there aren’t more consumer defaults.

Let’s return to Roger Lowenstein, where he reveals, "We are all economic pinballs, insensibly colliding for better or worse." What Lowenstein doesn’t say is that individual mortgagers are not responsible for the credit bubble, the housing bubble, or the unsustainable and corrupt federal policies that encouraged and fueled the speculative boom and bubbles. The economic meltdown and ensuing fallout in housing values has been a recipe for financial disaster for many households, and each individual or family must commence a course of action that is sensible, sustainable, and provides for long-term financial security and growth. It is not unethical or immoral to relinquish a strangling and injurious debt load on a house that ties you down in favor of mobility and a healthier household financial plan. In fact, it is state worship and economic ignorance that fuels the notion that you, as a victim of the state and its corporate state special interests, have some obligation to ruin your life and bend over to "take one for the team."

If all factors point to your best option being a default, then walk away guilt-free and boost your cash flow and future prospects, because ultimately, you are responsible for you, and none of these babbling naysayers are going to bail you out or come by to help clean up the mess. Walk away, free yourself from unnecessary bondage, and let the giant banks sort out the mess that they helped to perpetuate and swell.

Karen DeCoster, CPA [send her mail] is a libertarian accounting/finance professional and writer. She was writing about rabid consumerism and debt, the housing bubble, corporate bankruptcies, boom-period business malinvestments, and the economic crack-up long before it was fashionable. She likes to occasionally look through the piles of hate mails from those times while sipping on an Oregon Pinot Noir. This is her LewRockwell.com archive, her Taki’s Magazine archive, and her Mises.org archive. Check out her website and blog.

The Best of Karen De Coster

The war on the swine flu has been an ongoing affair for the government-media partnership that turned this issue into the most overrated story of 2009. Government officials, up to and including the president, have placed a disproportionate amount of emphasis on a barely notable strain of flu and have used it as justification for embarking on a health jihad that has come to dominate American society. Thanks to this latest offensive, America is chock-full of hallway hand sanitizers in corporate and public buildings; mini-hand sanitizers being passed around like a tin of mints; and posters stuck everywhere telling you how to sneeze, cough, breathe, and properly wash your hands. The Henson Company even produced a collectivist and creepy propaganda piece for children, urging them to get a flu shot for the good of the community.

Professor Paul Gottfried, who calls himself a “historically centered traditionalist who admires the bourgeois civilization that had dominated the West in the nineteenth century,” has written a first-rate memoir of some of his most cherished encounters with prominent politicians and intellectuals.

Gottfried shrewdly avoided taking the conventional autobiographical route through his life and has instead produced a series of narratives relating to his scores of fascinating friendships with those he calls professional nonconformists or “figures who have represented the true dissenting academy.” Thus, Gottfried’s latest book gives us a series of revelations of his spirited engagements with some of the intellectual community’s most engaging minds.

The author is a “conventionally observant” Jew whose father left Central Europe to escape the competing tyrannies that had begun to emerge prior to the Second World War. His flawed but courageous and rebellious father, born in Budapest, is a focus of the book early on. The elder Gottfried profoundly influenced his son’s perspective and opinionated demeanor, both of which have led Paul to resist the conformist pressures of his chosen career as historian and teacher. That resistance has cost him friends.

But Gottfried’s lack of popularity among his colleagues in academia has not prevented him from leading a life that, he says, “has gone nowhere in particular but has nonetheless been packed with fascinating encounters.” During his graduate stint at Yale, he met the German-Jewish scholar Herbert Marcuse, a theorist of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School. Marcuse’s Old World carriage and extraordinary lectures attracted the young Gottfried, who became enthralled with European intellectual history and German philosophy. (Marcuse, in fact, was admired by a diverse group of young scholars — the conservative philosopher and economist Hans-Herman Hoppe also studied under Marcuse at Goethe University in Frankfurt.) The significance of Marcuse as a scholarly influence in Gottfried’s life is summed up when the author concedes that he “learned true liberal intellectual exchange from a declared Marxist-Leninist.”

Perhaps the principal lesson contained within Encounters is that Gottfried’s enviable intellectual life has not been without its pitfalls. Early on, his frequent dissent on issues that were critical to the ambassadors of multiculturalism led to his marginalization by the liberal academic establishment.

Not surprisingly, Gottfried is among the most candid and gifted of the conservative historians who have challenged the notion that neoconservatives are a part of the Right. He condemns them as “paradigmatic leftists who are counterfactually identified as ‘conservatives.’” Three main problems that Gottfried sees with the neocon-dominated establishment conservatives is their desire to enforce democracy all over the world, their support of gender politics, and their politically correct position on immigration. His historic battles with neoconservative ringleaders ultimately led to him being denied a professorship at Catholic University, as well as the defeat of his potential chairmanship at the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1986. Hence his assertion, “The refusal to call neoconservatives what we are supposed to call them may be politically and professionally imprudent.” Still, he challenges the neoconservatives when they resort to employing the “conservative” moniker in their quest for social progress through an extensive welfare state and egalitarian agenda. He writes:

Both their enthusiasm for Third World immigration and their opposition to immigration restrictionists flow from their view that populations are interchangeable. All people are ‘individuals’ who can be socialized in the same way, providing they are molded by a suitable public administration and by a steady diet of human-rights talk. Because, like the earlier progressives, the neoconservatives associate public education with ‘democratic patriotism,’ and because they link morality to ‘democratic values,’ they have been allowed to appropriate for themselves the ‘conservative’ mantle. This, in my opinion, is a case of mistaken identity.

At the Tennessee farm, July 2009.

Furthermore, his scholarly work has outlined the proper distinctions between the post-war, socially progressive, neoconservative Right and their critics who are genuinely on the Right. Gottfried calls this the “airing of dirty linen.”

In his life, Gottfried has been inspired by a host of eccentrics who cannot easily be typecast along ideological lines, including the Communist-turned-religious-conservative Will Herberg, a Jewish theologian who once noted that “anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of secular Jewish intellectuals.” There was also Christopher Lasch, a social critic and communitarian who cast aspersions on the narcissistic culture of consumer capitalism and bemoaned much of contemporary political thought in America, infuriating intellectuals on both the Left and Right. Gottfried at first became an adversary of Lasch — lost out on a professorship at the University of Rochester due to “Lasch’s politicking” and Gottfried’s own reputation as a Nixon Republican. Twenty years later, however, the two were friends, though it’s not clear what transpired in the years in between.

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Karen DeCoster [send her mail] is a libertarian accounting/finance professional and writer. She rides a Harley, shoots lots of guns, and buys Boston Legal DVDs. She likes to put in long miles on her hybrid bicycle, lift heavy weights, use the crock-pot, overindulge on Gouda cheese, do primal workouts, play Frisbee, get lost in the woods, and hang out at Bass Pro Shops. She won’t trade in her clunker for cash and it is highly unlikely that she will become a Czar in the Obama administration. She openly advocates resistance to the current regime in power. This is her LewRockwell.com archive and her Mises.org archive. Check out her website.

The Best of Karen De Coster

The NIH, which administers more than $30 billion in taxpayer funds for medical research, defended the grants.

"Gun related violence is a public health problem – it diverts considerable health care resources away from other problems and, therefore, is of interest to NIH," Don Ralbovsky, NIH spokesman, wrote in an e-mail responding to questions about the grants.

Certainly, more liquor stores are operated in neighborhoods where residents are poor because they are consumers who tend to generate brisk business for the liquor industry — especially liquor convenience stores, since they desire easy access to cheap liquor and beer. These liquor stores are also magnets for armed robberies. So the NIH will attempt to discover whether or not more crimes are committed in these low-income neighborhoods that play host to liquor stores.

The American Journal of Public Health, in its November 2009 issue, will publish the results of a completed study, also funded by the NIH, which attempted to determine whether gun possession safeguards against harm or promotes a false sense of security. The media reports of the results of that study were predictable — people with a gun were 4.5 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those who were not in possession of a gun, and therefore, carrying a gun really doesn’t offer protection at all. After looking at the details of how the study was conducted, it is important to recall that correlation does not imply causation. Moreover, the correlation-and-effect approach to scientific inquiry is often used to yield biased results that politicize critical issues. The author of the study, Charles C. Branas, PhD, Associate Professor of Epidemiology, was quoted as saying:

Learning how to live healthy lives alongside guns will require more studies such as this one. This study should be the beginning of a better investment in gun injury research through various government and private agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control, which in the past have not been legally permitted to fund research ‘designed to affect the passage of specific Federal, State, or local legislation intended to restrict or control the purchase or use of firearms.’

Champions of the anti-gun movement, along with the anti-gun biased media, often use study results to plant fear and doubt among the uninformed masses on this particularly tempestuous issue. Notice the reference to more research being needed, with specific mention of a government — not private — agency. Yet Eugene Volokh, a prominent UCLA law professor and popular writer, promptly dissected the ScienceDaily.com headline, which had been repeated throughout the media.

At the Tennessee farm, July 2009.

In an October 5, 2009 post at the Volokh Conspiracy, Volokh notes the correlation/causation problem, and he also points out that the study left a wide range of factors uncontrolled. Additionally, he notes “the research model works only to the extent that you actually know who possesses guns and who doesn’t,” and he goes on to show how this could not be known in all cases utilized in the study. In terms of trying to determine whether gun possession leads to protection or peril, the study doesn’t clearly support either theory, but as Volokh observes, “yet it is publicized, and it’s reported, as if it did robustly show the causal relationship.” Certainly, the media has the ability to serve up foreboding headlines and hand-picked quotes that serve the larger agenda of influencing public opinion on the gun question.

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Karen DeCoster [send her mail] is a libertarian accounting/finance professional and writer. She rides a Harley, shoots lots of guns, and buys Boston Legal DVDs. She likes to put in long miles on her hybrid bicycle, lift heavy weights, use the crock-pot, overindulge on Gouda cheese, do primal workouts, play Frisbee, get lost in the woods, and hang out at Bass Pro Shops. She won’t trade in her clunker for cash and it is highly unlikely that she will become a Czar in the Obama administration. She openly advocates resistance to the current regime in power. This is her LewRockwell.com archive and her Mises.org archive. Check out her website.

The Best of Karen De Coster

Big Pharma is a monster that’s long been out of control, and that is due to its chief enabler, big government, whose bureaucrats profit immensely from promoting Big Pharma’s agenda to grow and protect its profits. In spite of what Michael Moore would say, this arrangement is not capitalism, or as he means it, the free market. It is state capitalism, or, as some may call it, socialist corporatism.

• Industry professionals discuss how Big Pharma normalizes obscure health problems, making them appear common in order to create a new market with a demand for prescription drugs. One Doc interviewed calls this “disease mongering.” For example, after the commercials appeared from GlaxoKlineSmith, suddenly everyone seemed to have Restless Leg Syndrome.

• Perhaps a most disturbing trend brought up in the film is the wacky, wild world of “things just ain’t right” disorders. Whether it’s “generalized anxiety disorder,” “major depressive disorder,” "panic disorder," “acute social phobia,” or finally, the celebrated “social anxiety disorder,” there’s a disorder to fit you and explain away your day-to-day problems. The film brings up the evil Paxil, which not only utilized direct-to-consumer marketing, but also, SmithKline Beecham took it to the print media to sell its virtues. Reporters lined up to give the drug gobs of attention as a solution for …. shyness. In 1999, US News & World Report ran a cover story, "How Shy is Too Shy?" The story referred to "debilitating shyness" and claimed that "roughly 1 out of every 8 people becomes so timid that encounters with others turn into a source of overwhelming dread." The commercial for Paxil, shown in the film, is akin to something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Also see this marvelously hilarious story by Seth Stevenson, "Extroverted Like Me: How a Month and a Half on Paxil Taught Me to Love Being Shy." Written in 2001, Seth is an introvert who experimented with Paxil for forty-five days so he could write a splendid story highlighting the ineffectiveness and life-changing aspects of a powerful, mind-altering drug.
• Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD) is a fabricated "disorder." Sarafem, the drug created to treat the non-condition, was nothing more than Prozac repackaged for a new disease. Eli Lilly was losing its exclusive patent to Prozac. Drug patents, as we know, bring drug companies billions in revenues. Sarafem was Prozac, except that it was colored a pretty pink — such a pretty and precious detail for a lady going on her monthly psychotic binge and emotional release. So, an old drug, a new disorder, and a new patent, and Eli Lilly could make a bundle, at least until (or if) the deception caught on with drug consumers. After Warner-Chilcott acquired the U.S. sales and marketing rights to Sarafem, it successfully fought off an attempt from Teva Pharmaceuticals to make a generic version. The film notes that when executives from Eli Lilly met with the FDA to discuss approval of the drug for its made-up disorder, one-third of the members of the FDA committee had ties to Eli Lilly. This is from the website of Warner-Chilcott:

PMDD is a distinct medical condition. Common symptoms include irritability, sadness, sudden mood changes, tension, bloating, and breast tenderness. The many symptoms of PMDD can markedly interfere with your daily activities and relationships and can make you feel out of control. Some women describe PMDD as frustrating, surprising, tiring, or even isolating. It can take away your enjoyment of family, friends, or work. Some think it’s part of being a woman or PMS (Premenstrual Syndrome). But for millions it is PMDD.

Also see Alice Rebensdorf’s 2001 superb article on Prozac-turned-Sarafem: Sarafem: The Pimping of Prozac for PMS.

• Then there’s Prilosec, developed by Astra-Merck (which became AstraZeneca), which was one of the best-selling prescription drugs of all time. In five years, revenues from the drug totaled $26 billion. The company went to court and won extra months of protection to sell Prilosec exclusively while it was working on its successor, Nexium. This drug was Prilosec repackaged in a pretty purple with yellow stripes, and it was marketed as the "purple pill." The two drugs had a different active ingredient that did the same thing. The price of Nexium was almost seven times that of Prilosec, and it came with a new patent. In one year, almost $500 million was spent on promoting its use. One commercial in the film shows a precious purple pill floating lazily above the earth, as if to hypnotize the sheeple viewer.

• Move on to Phizer’s Lipitor, which quickly became the best selling pharmaceutical drug in history. Lipitor is a me-too (copycat) drug which was preceded by Mevacor, Pravachol, and Zocor. The film makes the obvious connection between the statin drug explosion — especially the sales of Lipitor — and the changing of cholesterol guidelines recommending much lower target levels for LDL cholesterol. This, of course, would lead to the huge boost in statin drug use. Out of the nine cholesterol "experts" who worked on the new guidelines, it was reported that six of them had financial ties (speaking fees, research grants, etc.) to drug companies. Changing the guidelines redefines what it means to be sick. More "sick" people will allow for more drugs to be prescribed. Under the new guidelines, millions of people will be on statin drugs for the rest of their lives.

• The facts at the time of the film: at least one million children under the age of eighteen are taking anti-depressants. Normal teenage anxieties became a profitable "illness" for Big Pharma.

• Medical and pharmaceutical professionals talk about the massive and costly effort on the part of pharmaceutical companies to purchase doctor loyalty. They evade the rules by categorizing all activities as "education," and therefore all the shenanigans are legal, and that includes kickbacks to MDs. Big Pharma tracks these doctors and what they prescribe, so they know what to spend and where to spend it.

• Also brought up in the film is the Big Pharma president, George W. Bush. Appointed Bush cronies in the FDA assisted Bush in the interfering with FDA sanction letters for advertising infractions that were to be sent to pharmaceutical companies. Anything to fill the Republican campaign coffers.

• Congressional legislation — from those who purport to serve your interests in government — promotes and serves the pharmaceutical industry with its laws and agencies. The agents of government benefit financially from protecting Big Pharma and its profits though patents, agency rulemaking, and political pandering.

The day before I put this together, I was at my doctor’s office. He’s a D.O., and highly sympathetic to holistic health and homeopathic remedies, which is why I decided on him as my primary traditional MD. I had heard him appear often on a local AM radio morning show, and I liked his take on natural solutions and preventative health. This was about fifteen years ago when I was first starting to make major changes toward all things natural. While waiting in the room for the Doc, I couldn’t help but notice, more than ever, that every item in the room had a Big Pharma label on it. This includes the box of facial tissues, the wastebaskets, and the pens. The office area was also littered with Big Pharma’s gifts. Do people find this eerie, if not sinister?

• Here is the Media Education Foundation website where information about the film can be found.
• Here is Dr. Mercola’s link to the film, along with some additional info.

At the Tennessee farm, July 2009.

Karen DeCoster [send her mail] is a libertarian accounting/finance professional and writer. She rides a Harley, shoots lots of guns, and buys Boston Legal DVDs. She likes to put in long miles on her hybrid bicycle, lift heavy weights, use the crock-pot, overindulge on Gouda cheese, do primal workouts, play Frisbee, get lost in the woods, and hang out at Bass Pro Shops. She won’t trade in her clunker for cash and it is highly unlikely that she will become a Czar in the Obama administration. She openly advocates resistance to the current regime in power. This is her LewRockwell.com archive and her Mises.org archive. Check out her website.

The Best of Karen De Coster

On July 31, 2009, the Cash for Clunkers program went kaput when the cash tank ran dry only one week after it commenced. Media reports about the lack of funds available to continue the program dominated the morning news.

Just hours after these reports appeared in the press, the negative spin in the media came to a halt after embarrassed politicians huddled and plotted, and then they announced that Congress had just voted to refill the Cash for Clunkers trough by transferring $2 billion in emergency funds from a renewable energy loan guarantee included in the economic stimulus package. It is a classic example of the failure of centrally-planned government policy

Calculating Success

Yet despite running out of dough and leaving dealers high and dry with substantial backlogs in processing clunker rebates, the Cash for Clunkers program was consistently pronounced a success.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared success because it exceeded its environmental targets, even though her assertions were never quantified. The president’s administration proclaimed success because the car purchase incentives were improving overall vehicle mileage and giving a "timely, temporary and targeted jolt to the economy." Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood maintained that success was achieved because new vehicle sales increased.

AutoNation, Inc’s CEO and Chairman said the program was a "huge success" since it spurred sales for his chain of dealerships, the largest in the U.S. (His comment serves as a good reminder to be skeptical of corporate cheerleading for any government-subsidized programs.)

In short, it was typical political speak to intentionally obscure facts and definitions. Whereas businesses within the free market gauge success and failure through the unambiguous means of profit and loss, the government determined "success" for its clunkers program by way of undefined, arbitrary statements and a temporary increased consumer demand for government-subsidized goods.

At the same time bureaucrats were celebrating the success of Cash for Clunkers, the program’s head cheerleader, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, refused to release relevant data that would substantiate White House claims about the program’s accomplishments.

Destroying Property

In the process, the United States government undertook the destruction of property in the name of stimulating the economy. The politicians who created this mess for the benefit of their strategic political allies did not give a single consideration to the economic distortions this program would trigger.

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Karen DeCoster [send her mail] is a libertarian accounting/finance professional and writer. She rides a Harley, shoots lots of guns, and buys Boston Legal DVDs. She likes to put in long miles on her hybrid bicycle, lift heavy weights, use the crock-pot, overindulge on Gouda cheese, do primal workouts, play Frisbee, get lost in the woods, and hang out at Bass Pro Shops. She won’t trade in her clunker for cash and it is highly unlikely that she will become a Czar in the Obama administration. She openly advocates resistance to the current regime in power. This is her LewRockwell.com archive and her Mises.org archive. Check out her website.

The Best of Karen De Coster

At this point in my life, my computers, and any electronic device that has to sync to them, are my most valued means of productivity. My TV broke — it didn’t get fixed for months. Good riddance! My surround sound went on the fritz, but I still had two speakers out of five that were working, so who cares. But let a computer, BlackBerry, external hard drive, or other piece of prized gadgetry become inoperative, and panic ensues.

The impact of customer service on product choice has become less important as goods become cheaper and more disposable. Computers are certainly one of those items that can be easily and cheaply replaced. However, because of the nature of my data (photography, writing, and years of research data), migrating to a new computer is a burdensome process for me, so I tend to look at computers as long-term keepers. I’ve had the same custom-built, PC desktop for almost five years, along with two rebuilds to keep it up-to-date.

Then I had two very bad computer experiences almost back-to-back. The motherboard fried on both my custom-built ABS desktop and my HP laptop (it was the second time in six months for the HP laptop). ABS had contracted with an outside company to perform the warranty service for my 3-year warranty, and when I called them to get the computer fixed, I found out that company had just gone out of business the night before. Such is my good fortune! So on the day I called ABS, they were swamped with phone calls and complaints, and they offered no support to replace their dissolved service contractor. With my HP laptop, my Comp USA extended "gold" warranty went away when all Michigan Comp USA stores went out of business. So I had two dead computers and no warranty for either one, though I had paid for two extended warranties. No service whatsoever, and everything came to a halt. I found a local guy who does good work, and he now does all of my PC repairs and rebuilds.

I figured I had enough of the drama with PCs, and so I went out and bought a MacBook laptop in July 2008. I spent a considerable amount of money (about $2,000), after paying for the laptop, sales tax, Apple Extended Care, One-on-One training, some software, and a year of Mobile Me. I bought the Mac because I was tired of a lifetime of watching the Windows hourglass twirl before my eyes. In spite of taking good care of my computers, they always developed bizarre software problems after a short period of time that no one could figure out. And since the PC manufacturers — HP, Gateway, Toshiba, etc. — don’t support the software they don’t make, you’re out of luck. And of course, they buy all the parts from other manufacturers — motherboard, hard drive, RAM, video card, etc. — and can’t support those either. They’ll replace those parts when they are under warranty, or when you buy an extended warranty from a company that doesn’t go out of business. My AMD-equipped Hewlett-Packard laptop is the fastest computer I have ever owned, but the lack of reliability is not balanced by a satisfactory follow-up service plan.

So after about five months my MacBook developed the hourglass (or twirling, colorful ball) disease. It got worse and the computer got slower…and slower. I took it to the Genius Bar (Apple’s moniker for tech service) at Partridge Creek Mall, and the tech guy saw that Google Desktop was sucking up a bunch of memory. He thought that might be the problem. He noted that Google Desktop is often a culprit in slowing down computers. He got rid of the program and I took the computer home. No change. Still sloooow. I took it back to the Apple store. This time the tech thought it might be some updates/patches that hadn’t been installed. We installed them and I took the computer home. No change. The third time they kept the computer and replaced the hard drive (and that didn’t do it), and the fourth time the techie said that my running Firefox, with multiple open tabs, was a problem. I don’t remember the exact technical language for the issues with the Firefox browser, as opposed to Safari. But that’s the one explanation I had trouble dealing with. I know Firefox has its issues, but every MacHead I know runs Firefox, with multiple plug-ins, etc. It seemed to me that I should be able to run Firefox without my computer behaving like a Commodore 64. But I refrained from using my beloved Firefox to see if that would clear up the hiccups.

No change. So I took it back — again — and this time I had a Genius Bar techie, a nice, young kid, who had worked with me before on this problem, back when the hard drive was replaced. I gave an oral history of my issues, and he looked up the notes in their system. I simply said, “Do you think maybe it’s time to replace this computer?” I came to believe I had something that is unusual in Mac World — a lemon. A computer that refused to get out of 2nd gear. I was becoming sour on Mac, in general, after several months of non-performance from my pretty, white MacBook.

I love Mac, its software, its creative genius, and the fact that Apple supports everything from the hardware to the software. Any time you have any problem with a Mac, no matter how small or stupid, you can call someone at the store or bring your computer in to work with someone to get it solved. They support everything you left the store with, and they even assist you with any additional browsers or software that you have installed, if they have knowledge of it. They will help you with anything that is within their ability to understand. When you buy a Mac you are never left stranded. Now that’s service. That’s exactly the kind of service my busy and demanding life needs. That’s why I bought a Mac.

Look at Apple’s One-on-One, which costs only $99 per year. You can make appointments at the store to work with MacHeads on specifics that interest you, whether it be the browser, learning shortcuts/special techniques, email, iMovie, iPhoto, Bento database, etc., etc. Now some people, especially the youngsters, have plenty of time to play around all day and weave their way through each and every new program, etc., but I’m just not so fortunate. Now I’m really good at learning anything on my own, however, my overwhelmed schedule in recent years makes One-on-One an ideal, cut-to-the-chase timesaver for me. I got quick-hit tips on iMovie, Spaces, Bento, and other things I didn’t have familiarity with, and from some terrific kids who really know the software.

At the Tennessee farm, July 2009.

So getting back to the Genius Bar, I don’t think the young man took 60 seconds to say, “Is your computer backed up? If so, I can send you off with a new computer within 15 minutes.” Just like that. He knew the frustration I endured, and how long it went on, and he really felt, at that point, that they couldn’t nail down the problem with that computer. It was a mystery, and in the world of technology, I understand that not everything can be perfectly solved. I think they had to try what they thought would solve the problem — giving away new computers to curb customer frustration just cannot be a part of any successful business model. They tried, and appropriately so, and I think that he, as an Apple pro, knew when it was time to quit and make this customer whole again.

So he sent me off with a MacBook Pro to replace my MacBook. It has more memory, a backlit keyboard (which I love), bigger hard drive, better monitor, the new touch pad system, etc. They upgraded me to a better, faster computer, and also gave me Snow Leopard, too. That is how Apple stays so successful and grabs market share — it has unique products like no one else, along with services to offer that no other computer manufacturer can match. This is why I paid twice as much for the MacBook, as opposed to another PC that would bring with it the same troublesome hurdles for a demanding user like me.

Do you think Apple won over this customer with its commitment to first-class customer service? The MacBook Pro is humming along nicely, and I am getting my work done, so yes, Apple will benefit from my continued commitment, my referrals, and from the wide audience that will read this article.

Karen DeCoster [send her mail] is a libertarian accounting/finance professional and writer. She rides a Harley, shoots lots of guns, and buys Boston Legal DVDs. She likes to put in long miles on her hybrid bicycle, lift heavy weights, use the crock-pot, overindulge on Gouda cheese, do primal workouts, play Frisbee, get lost in the woods, and hang out at Bass Pro Shops. She won’t trade in her clunker for cash and it is highly unlikely that she will become a Czar in the Obama administration. She openly advocates resistance to the current regime in power. This is her LewRockwell.com archive and her Mises.org archive. Check out her website.

The Best of Karen De Coster

It’s hilarious to see that the Wall Street Journal reported it as such:

Van Jones, an administration official specializing in environmentally friendly “green jobs,” has been linked to efforts suggesting a government role in the Sept. 11 terror attacks and to derogatory comments about Republicans.

The Journal has, of course, censored the real reasons why Van Jones is gone. No one remembers a 9-11 truther moment from 5 years ago, or cares, and the part about “derogatory comments about Republicans” is a bit anemic, if not laughable. Van Jones was contributing immensely to King Obama’s declining Messiah worship, and so it’s time to clean up Obama’s Dream Team, and get rid of the most radical denizens who are doing his popularity great harm. Van Jones was ultra-controversial not because of Glenn Beck’s show, and not because of FOX news bobbing heads that relentlessly pounded on his tendentious past. Van Jones was compelled to depart because he is not representative of mainstream American.

Van Jones, in obtaining his White House post, received a payoff for his years of tireless efforts in the name of Communism, militant greenism, redistributionism, and yes, anti-white-ism. He came from a radical power structure that was bent on obtaining positions of political power in order to direct payoffs — power, wealth, jobs — to long-time, fanatical associates, and undertake a major campaign to redistribute wealth from the middle class to the minority poor. He was a supporter of the Jena Six — a gang of black boys who engaged in a brutal beating of a white schoolmate — and he co-founded Color of Change, a radical organization dedicated to political empowerment of specific classes of people.

Jones was not a scientist who was dedicated to cleaning up the environment. He, like all people who aspire to high-level political radicalism, had a law degree so that he could move up the ladder of political opportunity. It just so happens that using the cornerstone of environmentalism — a cause embraced and loved by a majority of Americans — was his single greatest launch pad into the political mainstream, which was necessary to give his radical, Communist agenda some political traction. In using the “green” cause to gain attention and influence, he moved quickly through the power ranks, won the adoration of the media, and got noticed for his good deeds by the Left establishment. Look at all of the bullshit “awards” he won, just last year, as he was being placed into position for a mainstream, political appointment. He won a “Paul Wellstone” award, a “creative citizenship” award, and an “eco-entrepreneur” award from Howard University. And his career was kick started twelve years ago by the Rockefeller Foundation — what a surprise! Apparently, in the world of feel-good “awards,” this qualifies as entrepreneurship.

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Karen DeCoster [send her mail] is a libertarian accounting/finance professional and writer. She rides a Harley, shoots lots of guns, and buys Boston Legal DVDs. She likes to put in long miles on her hybrid bicycle, lift heavy weights, use the crock-pot, overindulge on Gouda cheese, do primal workouts, play Frisbee, get lost in the woods, and hang out at Bass Pro Shops. She won’t trade in her clunker for cash and it is highly unlikely that she will become a Czar in the Obama administration. She openly advocates resistance to the current regime in power. This is her LewRockwell.com archive and her Mises.org archive. Check out her website.

The Best of Karen De Coster

Traveling back in time, I remember all of the hysteria, started by one man, which led to the evil lawn dart ban. Playing Jarts was a favorite pastime in my family and neighborhood. Then, in 1987, a 7-year-old girl was killed by some careless boys (with one of them being the girl’s brother) who were slinging them around recklessly. The father’s reaction to this was to commence an effort to ban lawn darts, which was, of course, an act dedicated to his daughter who died. So David Snow, on the basis of his child’s unfortunate incident, raged through Washington D.C., produced scores of exaggerated statistics citing the danger of lawn darts, or Jarts, and lobbied against the “killer” game. Here’s a video on that story.

I remember shortly thereafter lawn darts were banned. Here’s the official government publication announcing the ban, effective December 19, 1988. Here’s a 1988 Consumer Product Safety Commission report on the recall of lawn darts, from Franklin Sports Industries, "because the blunt metal tips may pose a risk of injury." Consumers were offered a whopping $5 to send the contraband back to Franklin Sports. Mr. Snow then took his case to Canada, getting lawn darts banned there, too, even thought the Canadian government could not produce statistics — even exaggerated ones — showing that they were a recurrent problem. It’s unfortunate that Mr. Snow’s daughter was killed, and apparently his own 9-year-old son, Paul, along with other children, was involved in the careless game that went awry. How did Mr. Snow allow his young children to get access to a very adult game, and without supervision? Weren’t the pointed, metal tips a hint that the game could be dangerous in the hands of testosterone-charged boys? As the President of R.B. Jarts, Robert Barnett, told the Chicago Tribune, “It’s a game for adults, a family game if they want their older children to use under supervision.”

In 1970, the government had already prohibited the sale of lawn darts in toy stores or in toy sections of retailers as a compromise with the Food & Drug Administration (the FDA — you read that right), which wanted an outright ban. If I remember correctly, shortly thereafter the metal-tipped lawn darts became highly un-pc, and therefore manufacturers started selling plastic-tipped lawn darts. Those things did not stick in the grass unless ground conditions were perfect, rendering them useless. In 1997, another child was killed by a lawn dart. The CPSC immediately released this hysterical bulletin. Here’s a snippet:

CPSC banned lawn darts in 1988, but some of these dangerous products may still be in garages, basements, or second-hand stores,” said CPSC Chairman Ann Brown. “Parents should destroy these banned lawn darts immediately.

I remember my mother’s reaction was to find some used sets with steel tips and buy them before they became scarce.

At the Tennessee farm, July 2009.

At the time this was going on, in the 80s, most conservatives painted these senseless, knee-jerk, safety overkill bans as ridiculously stupid and busybody-like. This was in the days when conservatives still resisted, to some small degree, moronic American hysteria. However, columnist George Will chimed in, in a column titled “A Hazard of No Toy-Size Proportion,” and supported the ban on the basis that government regulations had not prevented injury and death. This is in spite of the fact that there were only three deaths in the U.S. during many years of many folks playing lawn darts prior to the ban. George Will, in fact, followed the government’s logic in determining that lawn darts should be banned because they were recreational, they were not “needed,” and “substitute recreational enjoyment can be obtained from other products.” Reading George Will’s rationale for why bicycles shouldn’t be banned — which caused 800 deaths annually — paints a silly circle that gets no logic points.

Lawn darts have since morphed into this silly impersonation of a lawn dart. The modern version has a “wobble” non-point, designed to satisfy even the most dedicated Safety Nazi. However, don’t look for the old-style lawn darts on eBay because they "strongly support the efforts of the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) to protect consumers" and they do not "permit the listing of items that have been identified by the CPSC as hazardous to consumers and therefore subject to a recall." The eBay website specifically mentions lawn darts!

I, however, have a few very illegal sets of these puppies, steel tips and all. One set is an original set my Mom bought when I was a kid, and the others were purchased on the sly at flea markets from evil sellers flying under the radar. I still love the game. There are very large-print warnings on the front of the boxes that state "Not a Toy for Children." But then again, most adults with even minimal common sense could figure that out without the dummy warning.

I’ll give you my metal-tipped lawn darts when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.

Karen DeCoster [send her mail] is a libertarian accounting/finance professional and writer. She rides a Harley, shoots lots of guns, and buys Boston Legal DVDs. She likes to put in long miles on her hybrid bicycle, lift heavy weights, use the crock-pot, overindulge on Gouda cheese, do primal workouts, play Frisbee, get lost in the woods, and hang out at Bass Pro Shops. She won’t trade in her clunker for cash and it is highly unlikely that she will become a Czar in the Obama administration. She openly advocates resistance to the current regime in power. This is her LewRockwell.com archive and her Mises.org archive. Check out her website.

The Best of Karen De Coster

Miss Parker hilariously hallucinates with politically correct fantasies that bring forth visuals of the glorious North still fighting the Civil War, still trying to end slavery in the South. Perhaps she is fantasizing about a contemporary version of Abraham Lincoln, a known racist, when she comments that the Republicans should collectively “drive a stake through the heart of Old Dixie.” According to Parker, her GOP — the GOP that gave us the Security State, the Patriot Act, myriad wars, a militarized police state, a corporatist Wall Street, and the worst budget snafus ever — is the good GOP. Yet it’s been co-opted by these roving bands of skeptical Southerners, fighting the mega-socialist state being put forth by Obama and his committed minions. How dare they! If only they could all just get along and play the partisan game, we could move forward swimmingly and enjoy our lives under tyranny in unity and peace.

As one who has grown up — and lives — in the land of the glorious, triumphant Union, and as one who has traveled extensively throughout the South since the early 1980s, learning about its people and its culture up close and personal, I have witnessed no greater polarization and racism than right here in the North. In fact, I invite Miss Parker (born in Florida, living in South Carolina) to come up here to Detroit if she wants to see hate, fear, and racism — of both the black and white variety.

Or perhaps, to save time, she can take the time to breeze through U.S. census data. It is well known that the most segregated cities in the U.S. are northern, and in fact, most data shows that they are midwestern industrial cities. Whether or not you use the 1990 census data or the 2000 data, the cities on the list remain consistent: Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Chicago, Buffalo, Gary, Newark, Cincinnati, etc. Yet since a few scattered Southern Republicans oppose the merging of the minds for a Republicrat-Demopublican joint force to subdue liberty once and for all, it must be that hate-racist thing rearing its reptilian head again.

I once considered Parker, who has written some wickedly fantastic social commentary, to be a constructive ally in the war against stupidity and political correctness. However, something called “9/11” happened that united the Republican party around the neocon party line, drumming up support for total state, total war, and the suppression of individual liberty through the Bush-Cheney faction’s “war on terrorism.” The you’re-either-with-us-or-against-us religion that materialized post-9/11 caused even the tongue-in-cheek conservatives, like Parker, to go bonkers with plastic patriot disease.

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Karen DeCoster [send her mail] is a libertarian accounting/finance professional and writer. She rides a Harley, shoots lots of guns, and buys Boston Legal DVDs. She likes to put in long miles on her hybrid bicycle, lift heavy weights, use the crock-pot, overindulge on Gouda cheese, do primal workouts, play Frisbee, get lost in the woods, and hang out at Bass Pro Shops. She won’t trade in her clunker for cash and it is highly unlikely that she will become a Czar in the Obama administration. She openly advocates resistance to the current regime in power. This is her LewRockwell.com archive and her Mises.org archive. Check out her website.

The Best of Karen De Coster

For instance, let’s say I want you to stop smoking. I don’t like cigarettes, and I personally believe that smoking is an unpleasant and injurious habit. As a non-coercive individual, I may sit with you and explain why I think you should not smoke, and hopefully, I will use facts, or even opinions, to try and persuade you toward my view. Whether I am critical, or gentle, or even unkind, I am peacefully trying to influence your judgment on the matter. I have not used threats of punishment under the force of law, nor have I assembled a gang of armed bandits behind me to impose my views on you. If, on the other hand, you ask me to leave you alone, I’ll abide and retreat from your presence because anything less would be harassment, or aggression against your person. Voluntary human interactions that entail persuasion are rather simple in structure and are subject to some very necessary rules that shun aggression or force.

Now let’s pretend I’m the government. As the declared ruler of the territory in which you live, I have a monopoly on power and force. I introduce the laws that rule the territorial nation, and then I vote on those laws or sign executive orders making them valid. I also interpret those same laws, and then I enforce them through my interconnected arms of law enforcement and agency regulation. Then I build multiple levels of authority that reside within various layers of my government structure to act as propaganda arms to disseminate the information that I want you to believe. I pay for this by taxing you by way of decrees passed by your elected representatives who have been influenced by powerful special interests that give them vast sums of cash to work in their best interests while they convince you that it is you who they are working to support.

By using my power to tax you, I can take as much money as I need to fund my racket that includes assorted Ponzi schemes disguised as benefits for citizens; valuable alliances with big businesses; redistributive "justice"; gender and racial equality; the funding of special interests that are supportive of my agenda, and all the usual machinations associated with government. In doing so, I employ many people who maintain a robust allegiance to me because I enable them to become more powerful, more entitled, and perhaps even more wealthy if they continue to stay on with me. The top people get to take away many of the best spoils while the rest of them are assured of dependable employment and cozy post-work arrangements for their service and dedication. Almost all of them are guaranteed lifetime employment somewhere within the public sector or with our most important business partners who have become an unofficial extension of my ruling entity.

Because taxation is directed at individuals who can readily observe the consequences of my policies, when my stifling tax policies become unpopular and engender hostility among the masses I turn to my monetary policy panacea because the effects of tampering with the money supply aren’t immediately visible to most of my citizens. Fortunately, I hold a monopoly on oversight for the nation’s money supply and I direct its monetary policy, thereby giving me the power to steer the economy in ways that will be beneficial to me, my executive authorities, and my cronies that are scattered throughout corporate America, state and local government, and citizen groups that support my regime. Furthermore, I have various tools at my disposal to stimulate the money supply, and this provides me with a bigger pot from which I can fund my various objectives.

I also tend to do things that take your mind off the really unpleasant stuff that’s going on, and some people refer to that as the "bread and circus" tactic. This refers to a practice whereby Roman political authorities bestowed free wheat, olive oil, and entertainment upon the citizens so that they could distract them from their civic duties, win their approval, and gain incremental control over them. In the modern era, having the Federal Reserve at my disposal allows me to create the illusion of wealth by manipulating the money supply through policies that corrupt the monetary system and misrepresent the markets. When you, along with the rest of the masses, are provided with supplementary prosperities with the aid of easy and unlimited credit, no matter how bogus or temporary, this enables all of you to binge on consumer goods and satisfy your demand for instant gratification. This promotes the illusion of widespread prosperity and enhanced personal wealth. Remember how happy you were to pay exorbitant prices for homes during the housing bubble because you believed it made you wealthier? Happy, enriched citizens are calm and submissive subjects, which is how I prefer things to be.

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You have heard about the so-called "liberal" media bias in this country? Perhaps there was a time when that rang partially true, but it hasn’t been that way in a long time. Fortunately, the media tends to hold an establishment bias, and they are all very good at straddling the line so as not to detract from the real mission of influencing the bulk of the masses to support my overall premise for good governance and central planning. Every time I exercise powers that go beyond my constitutional authority, the media that works in my favor refers to this as a "bold move" or a "sweeping measure." This makes me sound really courageous and thorough. It gives the appearance that I have gone above and beyond what’s considered sufficient so that you and your fellow citizens may experience some of the protection, relief, guidance, and expertise that I may provide for you. All of the suggestions, orders, rules, laws, and regulations that I bestow upon you are for your own good, though you might think otherwise. I have many experts working night and day to help you realize your full potential as a human being and a citizen of the United States.

Sometimes you may think you don’t need my help. In spite of that, I am committed to convincing you that my assistance is an essential ingredient for avoiding future crises. If you are not confident in my motives, I will just go ahead and get things done as quickly as possible so that I may avoid closer scrutiny from all the restless souls who might otherwise question my intentions. It is those insubordinate types who can really mess things up for honest Americans who just desire to be taken care of and provided for, and so it is my duty to do whatever it takes to prevail over these unruly detractors.

Let me get one thing clear — I don’t like confrontation and I am not used to resistance to my ideas. In fact, it is typically people from certain geographical areas or particular ideological groups who have a tendency to stir up trouble based on their own personal outrage and prejudices. Accordingly, these people are likely to oppose my policies to assist other unfortunate Americans in their efforts to gain equal access at all levels of society. They resist my attempts to make life better for all of us because their figureheads — the conservative media and so-called liberty organizations — have convinced their disciples that my plan to make America a better place is a threat to their way of life. They cling to things like guns and religion as symbols of freedom, and they invoke scare tactics and historical fabrications about their American ancestors in order to deter you from supporting me and my programs.

It is unfortunate, but these people do have a loud voice, and lately, they are able to grab a lot of the limelight with their numerous public remonstrations.

I am, however, working to get this situation under control so that the rest of you may be heard and have your say in such important matters as your health. I am working to suppress the combatants and their anger and make sure that the lies they are telling others about my strategies to re-shape America and bring forth change are properly diffused. I will do anything I can to insure that all of you, as Americans, get what you are entitled to receive in spite of the opposition that wants to keep you from your right to enjoy the same good fortune they possess. So please, count on me for I will triumph over the barricades that lie between you and a more affluent and freer America.

At this point, let’s get back to smoking cigarettes, and how much I dislike them. I tend to think that since people, as a rule, don’t know what is best for them, it is up to me to produce the statistics and information that explain the crisis, and then bring forth experts with solutions that will solve that crisis. Cigarettes, we know, kill people — at least 443,000 each year, with another 50,000 or more dying from secondhand smoke. People are dying because of smoke inhaled in restaurants, bars, and all other public places where smoking is still allowed. I, along with my fellow public servants who take responsibility for your welfare, have already taken steps to ban smoking in certain cities and businesses where citizens are at the greatest risk. But that’s not enough. We need to go a step further and make it illegal for others to endanger your health while they declare they are exercising their right to do with their bodies as they please.

Let me be clear in saying that you have a right to go into a restaurant, a bar, a pool hall, a small proprietor’s shop, or anywhere similar, without having to breathe in someone else’s toxin. Don’t let anyone think they can deny you that right by appealing to age-old contentions about property ownership, self-ownership, or any other ludicrous notions. Additionally, research from Stanford University has shown that exposure to toxic tobacco fumes outdoors is another gigantic killer. Your neighbors can die while you purportedly exercise your right to smoke in your own home or on your property.

At the Tennessee farm, July 2009.

Accordingly, there will be no more cover provided for negligent acts on the part of individuals who endanger their fellow Americans. This is why I am signing into law this historic and courageous federal legislation, assembled by the great men and women of Congress, which will ban smoking all across America, in every state, every town, in the outdoors, and in all homes, with no exceptions. This is a groundbreaking measure that will call tobacco what it is, a drug — one that is a Schedule I controlled substance under the Controlled Substances Act. Effectively, this legislation makes it illegal to endanger your fellow Americans under the pretense of exercising your rights to do what you want with your own body.

The penalties to lawbreakers will be immediate and harsh. We have an array of federal prosecutors who, along with their counterparts in law enforcement, will follow the letter of the law in apprehending violators, and they will pursue severe penalties for those who insist on breaking the law. We are not persuading you to cease bad habits; that’s been tried before and it doesn’t work. It is time to undertake a drastic initiative in order to help keep America healthy. I have dedicated my life to serving the public and this is just one of the many difficult challenges I have had to face as I juggle issues of freedom with the rights of individuals to be free of the potentially harmful acts of others. Freedom is something we all have a right to possess. Thus it is my obligation to step in and direct public policy when it is shown that allowing people to engage in unhealthy activities puts the health of the entire public at risk.

We, as Americans, must be steadfast in our effort to make America a better place for all who want to enjoy the fruits of all that America offers. This is the time and place to make momentous changes that will benefit all of us. This is an extraordinary crisis and it calls for extraordinary, or bold, measures.

Now aren’t you glad that I, the government, am here to help you?

This entire article was written with Barack Obama’s August 14th, 2009 Montana speech on health care as a backdrop and inspiration. The crisis used has been changed to protect the innocent.

Karen DeCoster [send her mail] is a libertarian accounting/finance professional and writer. She rides a Harley, shoots lots of guns, and buys Boston Legal DVDs. She likes to put in long miles on her hybrid bicycle, lift heavy weights, use the crock-pot, overindulge on Gouda cheese, do primal workouts, play Frisbee, get lost in the woods, and hang out at Bass Pro Shops. She won’t trade in her clunker for cash and it is highly unlikely that she will become a Czar in the Obama administration. She openly advocates resistance to the current regime in power. This is her LewRockwell.com archive and her Mises.org archive. Check out her website.

The Best of Karen De Coster

"Obesity and with it diabetes are the only major health problems that are getting worse in this country, and they’re getting worse rapidly," he said.

Change is needed on many fronts, he added. "Reversing obesity is not going to be done successfully with individual effort."

These words were verbalized by Thomas Friedan, the new director of the CDC (Center for Disease Control). Obesity and diabetes are two of the government’s favorite "wars," and this is because the epidemic of obesity, which tends to be a chief cause of diabetes in adults, can pave way for a series of centrally-planned food and prescription drug policies that can be passed off, with minimal effort, as a collective cure to the masses. In fact, solving America’s fat problem, on an aggregate scale, would provide government with wide-ranging powers over individuals and their day-to-day lifestyles. This has government officials — federal, state, and local — salivating over the prospect of such an enormous level of control through policy-wonking and special interest baiting.

Unfortunately for the wanna-bee CommuNannies in Washington, diabetes can only be approached on an individual basis. One person’s diabetes is not the other person’s diabetes. Lifestyles among individuals are drastically different and therefore each case requires unique approaches that get at the root of each diabetic’s problems. Mostly, Americans are becoming diabetic due to their diet — fast foods, sugar-laden foods, processed foods, and overindulgence in carbohydrates that continue to be dominant in the American diet.

Since we know that the modern explosion of diabetes is related to poor diet and inactivity, and each person’s diet and activity level is unique to him, how does diabetes become a problem to be collectively solved? By making such claims through their carefully-plotted propaganda, this is the only way that government autocrats can turn weak-minded Americans into jelly and have them begging for intervention, laws, Big Pharma’s pills — anything that promises to cure what ails them. Somewhere within this strategy I also smell the promise of scores of clients and big dollars for Big Pharma through the use of mandatory drugging for people who do not meet the government’s BMI standards, or some other politically influenced and capricious weight criteria.

FOX news recently covered a story that is monstrous on all counts. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) just concluded a three-day conference in Washington, D.C. called “Weight of the Nation,” which is described as an “inaugural conference on obesity and weight control.” According to the CDC’s website, the purpose of the conference was to “provide a forum to highlight progress in the prevention and control of obesity through policy and environmental strategies and is framed around four intervention settings: community, medical care, school, and workplace.” (Emphasis mine.) One of the conference objectives was to “discuss the use of law-based efforts to prevent and control obesity (e.g., legislation, regulation and policies).” From the FOX story:

But they also venture into suggestions for new restrictions. The recommendations call for communities to restrict the availability of unhealthy foods and beverages, institute smaller portion sizes, limit advertisements of unhealthy products and discourage consumption of sugary drinks.

The recommendations generally apply to public venues, with the possible goal of prompting more widespread restrictions elsewhere.

This article brings up one very important point that should make people pay attention: reducing obesity is at the heart of President Obama’s health care plan. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius stated this fact at the conference on Tuesday, July 28th. In effect, government officials are executing an agenda for enriching special interests and restricting free choice for individuals, in regards to food and beverages, as a part of the totalitarian nationalized health care plan. Other brilliant ideas offered up to collectively control the weight of millions of people are the usual: fat taxes, as well as food stamps to subsidize the purchase of “healthy” foods. Even known health expert Bill Clinton, a former presidential power broker who remains in elite company, spoke at the conference as a consultant to this national urgency (emphasis mine):

It is a public health issue that cannot be dealt with entirely within the confines of a medical office,” Clinton told the CDC conference Monday, talking about childhood obesity. “If we want to change this, we have to change what goes on at home and in the community and in the neighborhood and in the schools.

Such changes can only be accomplished when government takes bureaucratic control over individuals and uses force to alter their habits. Public schools are public tools for the government to move in and indoctrinate and control young children, thus this environment gives way to numerous possibilities for control policies within those boundaries. In fact, exercising weight control tyranny through the school systems will be a cinch. However, homes and neighborhoods and communities are private. A family makes a home, households make up a neighborhood, and neighborhoods are the foundations for communities. Yet we have ex-government officials, who are still kept in the power loop, declaring that individuals and families should be subject to coercive decrees that violate their ability to function as free individuals making free choices.

Furthermore, the government campaign attacking fatness has ramped up significantly as public health officials and assorted Czars start to smell blood in the battle to control consumer habits and behavioral outcomes. The propaganda campaign targeting obesity as a killer disease has built the foundation for the government’s declaration of war on weight. In fact, many people see nothing wrong with public awareness campaigns because they present information and advice as opposed to mandating particular behavior through forced policy. Only when these information campaigns turn into calls for government policies do some of them start voicing their concern for individual liberty. However, the government’s propaganda is paid for with stolen loot, and the funds are directed toward politically-favored schemes and allies that enrich and empower the very politicians who have the clout to put the propaganda in place. The public awareness campaign on obesity not only provides the opportunity for people-control via crisis, it is also an illegitimate use of power because government uses the very resources it controls (media, airwaves, schools, universities, etc.) to indoctrinate the masses toward its preferred views that it will later enforce through its laws.

To make matters worse, the government’s policies have promoted obesity in recent decades, as opposed to actually reducing the problem. This is because of the corporate state interests that have gained control of the politicians whose allegiance they purchase through campaign donations. This arrangement, that buys access for powerful special interests, keeps unhealthy, processed — but profitable — foods a part of the government’s food policy while demonizing foods, for years, that not only don’t pose the health risks claimed by food-Nazi bureaucrats and their paid researchers, but actually offer tremendous health benefits and maintain lean, healthy bodies. In terms of subsidized and harmful foods, think corn, and ask yourself why there is such a powerful corn lobby and why corn is found in so many highly-processed foods. In the other hand, healthy fats have been inaccurately portrayed as the villain in the American diet. In the end, the powerful corporate-state alliance will price you out of, or outright ban, healthy-but-unpopular foods while it forces unhealthy foodstuff produced within influential industries, such as refined, corn-based foods, into its centrally planned food policy.

If you want to see where this overall strategy is headed, read the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Here are some high-level snippets from the government’s plan:

• Establishment of the Common Community Measures for Obesity Prevention Project (the Measures Project), with a goal to "identify and recommend a set of obesity prevention strategies and corresponding suggested measurements that local governments and communities can use to plan, implement, and monitor initiatives to prevent obesity."
• The Measures Project will include a select Expert Panel of nationally recognized content-area experts in the areas of urban planning, built environment, obesity prevention, nutrition, and physical activity that will assist in the selection of the recommended strategies and measurements.
• Twenty local government representatives, including city managers, urban planners, and budget analysts, who participate in ICMA’s Center for Performance Measurement (CPM), have volunteered to pilot test the selected measurements. (My input: this means local government agents “volunteering” to force businesses and citizens within their community to adhere to laws deemed desirable by the feds.)
• Implementing a policy to affect the cost of healthier foods and beverages relative to the cost of less healthy foods and beverages sold within local government facilities in a local jurisdiction or on public school campuses during the school day within the largest school district in a local jurisdiction.
• Partnering with communities to restrict the availability of less healthy foods and beverages, institute smaller portion size options, and limit advertisement of less healthy foods and beverages in public service venues.
• Requiring licensed child care facilities within the local jurisdiction to limit screen-viewing time to no more than 2 hours per day for children aged ≥2 years.

At the Tennessee farm, July 2009.

If you breeze through these thirty-two painful pages you will observe a grotesque plan for micro-management of diet, nutrition, weight management, and activities of the U.S. population by utilizing a collective strategy for restriction and implementation, including the taxation of unfavorable foods and the subsidization of favored foods and industries dominated by powerful corporate giants. You will also note that the federal government plans to make extensive use of eager local officials in order to push its agenda down to the community level, as well as into the public schools. Along the way, the government will use “available evidence and expert opinion” to recommend strategies. Never mind the fact that 1) “evidence” is influenced and/or produced by special interests that wish to profit financially from government policy, and 2) “experts” are those whose judgment is deemed to take the correct position according to the desires of powerful and influential politicians, corporations, and special interests who will reap power and profit from a centrally-planned food policy.

Lastly, in staying with the usual course of dumbing down its propaganda to delightful, colorful pictures and graphs in order to appeal to the lowest common denominator in society, see the government’s cutesy little chart meant to inspire the masses to crave its invasive recommendations (on page 8 of this PDF):

Healthy policies = Healthy Environments = Healthy Behaviors = Healthy People

I can imagine this ridiculous motto drawn up in pretty colors on white paper, strung out on classroom walls and corporate cubicles all over America. For only when the majority of adults are reduced to hapless adolescents can the government work its parental magic on their teenage anxieties.

Karen DeCoster [send her mail] is an accounting/finance professional and writer. She rides a Harley, shoots lots of guns, and recently became a 1911 addict. She likes to put in long miles on her hybrid bicycle, lift heavy weights, use the crock pot, overindulge on Gouda cheese, do primal workouts, play Frisbee, get lost in the woods, and hang out at Bass Pro Shops. She won’t trade in her clunker for cash and it is highly unlikely that she will become a Czar in the Obama administration. This is her LewRockwell.com archive and her Mises.org archive. Check out her website.

The Best of Karen De Coster