If you are old enough to remember the vacuum cleaner salesmen coming to your door (I am), remember that as fondly as you can, because that has been replaced with the door-to-door vaccination indoctrination. The vaccination Nazis travel door-to-door where they seek out "truant children" and also target children who are engaged in independent study. Kids who don't get their government shots are said to be "falling through the cracks." It is said that kids won't be allowed back to school without their Big Pharma-Big Government tattoos. Of course, there is always an opt-out for folks who would prefer to skip the vaccination festivities, no matter where they live, but the media story neglects to mention this fact.

The heroic Abbey Watson holds eight world powerlifting records, including the world record for squats in her weight class. She also deadlifts 176 pounds. Note that her socks spell B-A-C-O-N.

According to the Libertarianoids, I guess I am supposed to hail this effort because it is an attempt from a private company to inform and persuade consumers. From an article on MSNBC:

Wal-Mart is unveiling a simple icon that it says will help consumers make a snap decision about whether a food is healthy, without delving into the nitty-gritty of the nutrition label.

The retailer plans to label certain foods "Great For You," meaning it is "healthy" - an abused word that long ago lost any meaning. In fact, low-fat items will be "Great for You" while items with natural, healthy fats (such as whole milk) will not receive the same tribute. The FDA has been working on adopting similar standards for labeling food with cutesy lyrics meant to endorse the propaganda of its government food pyramid. Then comes the real kicker from the article:

Wal-Mart announced plans to develop the icon last year, as part of a heavily promoted initiative endorsed by first lady Michelle Obama as part of her push to fight obesity.

A Wal-Mart spokesperson said the company looked closely at the FDA's developing standards to make sure they would not be in conflict with the government's health and wellness paradigm that has made Americans fat and sick for 40+ years. Nice. Yep, free market. Thanks to James Nellis for the heads-up.

According to this ditz on Human Events, Mitt Romney is good for gun owners. He's so good, in fact, it's worth writing about. My eyes immediately dropped from the headline to the bottom of the column where I read this statement from the writer: "As we say in the conservative, internet realm – ABO – Anybody but Obama." At that point, I almost predicted the entire article in between.

Ahh, yes, I keep forgetting that there is supposed to be a difference between the Republicrats and the Demopublicans, especially on stuff like guns and welfare. Here is a quote from the writer, Raquel Okyay (please resist laughing and give the lady some pity for her ignorance):

Republican nominee hopeful, Mitt Romney, may very well be the next President of the United States. If so, gun rights advocates can relax a sigh of relief.

Miss Okyay goes on and on to supposedly cite Romney's heroic, pro-gun record over the years. She even dares to cite a Romney campaign speech(!) as "proof" of his pro-gun stance.

Then there's David Codrea, a guy who spends a lot of time exposing the lies of politicians who try to pull the "pro-gun" scam in public when the facts show otherwise. Codrea, in his latest column, "Romney SHOULD Make Conservatives Squirm," reminds us of the real Mitt Romney who signed into law a weapons ban in 2004.

We are pleased to mark an important victory in the fight against crime, said Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey. The most important job of state government is ensuring public safety. Governor Romney and I are determined to do whatever it takes to stop the flood of dangerous weapons into our cities and towns and to make Massachusetts safer for law-abiding citizens.

And then there's the Mitt Romney of 2002 who bragged about tough gun laws in Massachusetts. Watch for yourself.

Here is the next public health crisis that will demand bureaucratic solutions, government intervention, and the federalization of Child Protective Services: child abuse. This article on MSN Health presents some statistics from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control that appears to set the pace for federal oversight of snatching children from homes to force them into government custody.

"No child should ever be the victim of abuse or neglect -- nor do they have to be. The human and financial costs can be prevented through prevention of child maltreatment," Linda Degutis, director of the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, said in an agency news release.

..."Federal, state and local public health agencies, as well as policymakers, must advance the awareness of the lifetime economic impact of child maltreatment and take immediate action with the same momentum and intensity dedicated to other high profile public health problems -- in order to save lives, protect the public's health, and save money," Degutis said.

Since child abuse is now a public health crisis, and since a farcical government study has shown that this crisis is just as costly as other "public health problems," the federal government, while acting in the interest of public health, surely will have to declare a war on child abuse and ramp up its efforts to remove these abused children from their beastly homes. Here is the CDC press release. Thanks to Greg Privette for the link.

So often, we read stories in the media about the state threatening to remove a child from his or her home because of parental decisions to not put their child through invasive, health-destroying medical treatment - especially cancer treatments - while the parents pursue other alternatives. At times, we read about children who are removed from their home and placed into state custody.

Last year, Kenneth and Erin Steiler from Marquette, Michigan, were petitioned by the state of Michigan (Department of Human Services), and the purpose of the petition was to force the parents to have them resume the chemotherapy for their son Jacob. Jacob was diagnosed with Ewing Sarcoma, and he initially went through chemotherapy treatment. The chemo made Jacob want to die. At a later point in time, PET scans were showing that he was clear of the cancer. Thus the parents made the decision to discontinue the poisonous treatments. The state of Michigan had other plans for Jacob. The state petitioned the court to force the child to receive the toxic treatments. This is from an article in a local, upper Michigan newspaper:

Jacob has been diagnosed with Ewing Sarcoma, but recent PET scans came back clear. His parents, Erin and Kenneth Stieler, insist that he doesn't need further chemotherapy for now, but the boy's primary pediatric oncologist, Dr. Beth Kurt, testified that Jacob still has cancer cells.

"There is a very big potential for relapse," testified Dr. Kurt. "And if he relapses in another bone, in his lungs, in someplace else, this survival is dismal. It's abysmal."

In December 2011, Judge Thomas Solka dismissed the state's petition and wrote, "Jacob's parents have not been negligent in making decisions about his (Jacob's) course of treatment."

This article on FOX News is not news for a lot of folks, but it's a nice update even for those who are aware that the Feds are attempting to thwart the freedom of choice concerning supplements with its New Dietary Ingredient (NDI) regulations.

According to those opposing the NDI guidelines, once certain supplements are banned, Big Pharma would likely begin developing and eventually patenting the formulas for those items. Since they, unlike independent manufacturers, are more than capable of footing the hefty bill associated with the regulatory testing process, soon enough the companies bringing you conventional medications would be the same ones offering alternative treatments. Consumers’ money would be going into one big pocket.

This is an article from the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics: "Should Participation in Vaccine Clinical Trials Be Mandated?". Excuse the long quote from the journal article, but in this case it is necessary to the impact of this blog post:

In recent decades there has been a distressing decline in the numbers of healthy volunteers who participate in clinical trials [7], a decline that has the potential to become a key rate-limiting factor in vaccine development. Reasons for this decline are unclear but are likely to be multifaceted. One familiar problem is the payment of volunteers [8]. To date, the relatively meagre compensation that participants often receive could be seen to belittle and undervalue the contribution of these individuals to global health. The modest financial remuneration commonly provided often means that students and the unemployed make up the bulk of volunteers [6, 8, 9]. As a result, the risks of developing a health intervention that would benefit the whole population are carried disproportionately by some of society’s most poor and vulnerable. This is a situation few would judge to be fair or ethical. However it is hard to increase volunteer payment without creating financial incentives. “Danger money” is frowned upon as an inducement that inevitably clouds an individual’s appreciation of risk, limiting the likelihood that consent is informed [6, 7]. As a result, consensus has generally dictated that payment for volunteers’ trial involvement be modest and limited to compensation for travel, time, and inconvenience only.

If progression of promising vaccines from the lab to the clinic is to remain unaffected and financial inducement is an ethically unacceptable solution to the recruitment shortage, other strategies need to be considered. Compulsory involvement in vaccine studies is one alternative solution that is not as outlandish as it might seem on first consideration. Many societies already mandate that citizens undertake activities for the good of society; in several European countries registration for organ-donation has switched from “opt-in” (the current U.S. system) to “opt-out” systems (in which those who do not specifically register as nondonors are presumed to consent to donation) [10], and most societies expect citizens to undertake jury service when called upon. In these examples, the risks or inconvenience to an individual are usually limited and minor. Mandatory involvement in vaccine trials is therefore perhaps more akin to military conscription, a policy operating today in 66 countries. In both conscription and obligatory trial participation, individuals have little or no choice regarding involvement and face inherent risks over which they have no control, all for the greater good of society.

The article goes on to say that if the severity of a disease is increased (meaning state propaganda and lies exaggerating or inventing crises), the forcing of human beings to become test monkeys "becomes a more palatable option." Accordingly, there is a huge motivation to lie, spread myths, distort studies, and clamp down on dissenters from the conventional wisdom.

The authors also state that "sensationalist and unfounded stories" have been the root cause of more and more people fearing and thus denying the government's vaccination indoctrination. The two authors of this piece are truly evil and perverted individuals. Thanks to Travis Holte for the link.

A middle school in Pennsylvania has banned open-top boots because they can hide contraband too easily. The contraband? Personal electronic devices. The policy sounds more like prison rules. The texting is said to be disruptive to a "positive education atmosphere." A quote from the article:

The school district does have a mandatory uniform for the middle school students. The school handbook devotes a section to proper attire that states shoes, boots and sneakers with matching-colored laces are permitted. It also says if clothing disrupts learning, the administration has the right to set rules about questionable attire.

If a student does not comply, discipline can range from a reminder sent home to parents on the first offense to possible detention or suspensions at the principal's discretion for repeated offenses.

A reader, Barbara, writes me to say: "I was in Whole Foods today and picked up a brochure titled "Healthy Heart." Was shocked to read that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children should get blood pressure screenings - starting at age 3! American medicine is truly a racket!"

It's true.

In my home state, the government's prison masters are trying to stop the spread of charter virtual schools (cyber schooling) because such freedom of education would not allow the state to gather up your children in big, yellow bully houses on wheels, and take them to near-windowless buildings to physically detain them and indoctrinate them for nine months out of the year, 6-8 hours per day.

Virtual charter schools allow students in grades kindergarten through 12 to take classes at home with a computer and the help of a parent or guardian serving as a "learning coach."

Students interact with a teacher through email, telephone and interactive software, including video conferencing.

Two schools in the state opened last year -- one based in Grand Rapids with about 800 students and the other in Okemos with more than 500 students.

Educators, including the state Board of Education, have asked that lawmakers not allow more of the schools to open until several years of academic data is accumulated to determine if the schools are effective.

Cyber learning means that the parent makes the decision about what the child does "at school" and the child has flexibility in determining what he wants to learn and/or not learn. Individuality and creativity is not a part of the plan. Thanks to James Nellis for the link.

The politicization of breast cancer is quite an amazing thing to behold. This article in the Wall Street Journal on the Susan G. Komen nonprofit organization touches on only one small slice of a very rotten pie. This organization is a huge player in what I refer to as the Big Cancer industry - an industry where every patient is a vital profit center.

The charity had been funding Planned Parenthood so it could influence women on the conventional wisdom surrounding breast cancer - breast cancer education, exams, and of course, the highly profitable mammogram that is pushed on every woman in America who is 40 or older (and often, women in their thirties). A lot of folks believe the decision was made because of pressure from anti-abortion groups. From the article:

Komen founder Nancy Brinker said Thursday her group's decision wasn't based on "emotions or politics" and wasn't tied to abortion. Komen officials said they had changed their standards for grants in several ways, including not funding organizations under government investigation.

However, this quote from the article is more what I would expect to see as a driver in the funding cut.

The Komen group also said it preferred to give grants to groups that perform mammograms themselves, rather than "pass-through" funding. Planned Parenthood does clinical breast exams but typically refers mammogram patients elsewhere.

The Susan G. Komen organization would like to be able to manage the number of mammograms that will occur, and how and where they will occur. The mammogram scheme has been exposed by many, including William Campbell Douglass, MD. [See his article for the Weston A. Price Foundation. Also see an article by Barbara Minton, "Mammograms: Fat Profits at High Cost to Women."]

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Joe from Australia writes to say that his government is following in the footsteps of the TSA, only he thinks that the folks in his country are far less prone to dissent than Americans. That's hard to believe, I know, but I have a couple of Australian friends, and they reinforce that notion. All aviation passengers in Australia may soon lose the ability to choose the option of a cop-a-feel pat down in place of a radiation porn scan because government officials think the porn scanners give the sheeple "peace of mind." From the article in the Herald Sun:

The proposed Aviation Security Amendment (Screening) Bill 2012 will make it mandatory for any passenger selected to participate to have a body scan.

The "no scan, no fly" amendment closes a loophole in the legislation that lets passengers request a pat-down instead of passing through a metal detector.

Transport Minister Anthony Albanese said mandatory body scans were necessary to ensure the safety of airports.

Not everything Jamie Oliver does has a libertarian touch, however, I like a lot of what his "Food Revolution" is doing to educate and empower individuals in terms of eating real food and ditching the chemical slop being turned out by the corporate-socialist food machine.

Although Oliver often appeals to government to help drive the change in food habits, his campaign to educate people about the beef turned out by the industrial food supply is a good example of using facts and persuasion to educate people on the reality of industrial-processed food. Oliver has been hard at work exposing the methods that are used to repurpose formerly discarded beef cuts - throwaway scrap - as edible food. Oliver refers to the process wherein ammonium hydroxide is used to treat the beef scrap to kill the pathogens. The ammonia-treated beef scrap is minced and mixed with the ground beef to (1) produce more meat and (2) save the costs of discarding the scrap. Oliver calls this repurposed scrap "pink slime."

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A short while ago, I wrote about the government's decision to categorize pizza as a "vegetable" so that it could stay on track to enable the profits of the Industrial Food Machine. Now comes this article from the Wall Street Journal: "Schools Told to Lighten Up Lunches: New Rules for Federally Subsidized Meals Set Limits on Calories, Saturated Fat; Pizza, Fries Survive." A quote from the article:

...And for the first time, the Department of Agriculture is setting calorie limits on school-cafeteria meals.

A lunch for students in kindergarten through fifth grade must contain no more than 650 calories on average. The limit goes up to 700 calories for grades six through eight, and 850 calories for grades nine through 12. That requirement begins next school year.

Federal officials had initially sought to reduce the amount pizza counts toward students' vegetable allotment and to put limits on french fries and other forms of white potatoes. But those changes were abandoned after drawing criticism from lawmakers and the food industry.

Government rules also prohibit schools from serving whole milk; instead, non-fat milk must be served. This is in spite of the fact that the dangers of drinking the government's politically correct milk are well known. The USDA rules do not allow subsidized lunches to contain more than 10% of calories saturated fat. The same old low-fat paradigm that has been a failure for four decades is being reinstated as the "new" paradigm, and all for the purpose of propping up the corporate-socialist Industrial Food Machine that reaps huge margins on its highly processed foods.

Here is another great "follow the money" quote from the article:

One source of saturated fat the agency wasn't able to cut down on is the french fry. The agency initially proposed to sharply limit starchy vegetables like potatoes on school menus, but lawmakers and farm lobbyists killed the effort last year. Do most folks ever stop to consider the insanity of government bureaucrat rats centrally planning the lunches of millions of American children?

Consequently, this is a frightening - but hardly surprising - statistic from the article that answers the question of why the industrial food machine spends so much time and money buying politicians votes in Washington D.C : "About 32 million children are served every school day in the federal school lunch or breakfast programs, according to the Agriculture Department."

Meanwhile, Food Czar Michele Obama continues her campaign to centrally plan American eating habits, one plate at a time. In this recent article in the Washington Post, Mrs. Obama again made the claim, "That’s how we solve this problem," meaning government and its centrally planning mechanisms. She states, “We’re not just making this generation healthy. We’re making the next, and the next and the next.” In fact, that's the same thing the Food Czars said back in 1977 when they established the dietary goals for the United States, and thirty-five years later, Americans are fatter and sicker and more dependent upon their masters than any generation before them.

Here is an interesting article on Yahoo about the new pricing strategy of J.C. Penney.

The plan, the first major move by Apple executive Ron Johnson since he became Penney's CEO in November, is different from Wal-Mart's iconic everyday low pricing. Unlike Wal-Mart, Penney's goal isn't to undercut competitors, but rather to offer customers more predictable pricing.

"Pricing is actually a pretty simple and straightforward thing," Johnson told the Associated Press during an interview ahead of the announcement at the company's Plano, Tex. headquarters. "Customers will not pay literally a penny more than the true value of the product."

These quotes from the story are rather interesting:

Perhaps the biggest challenge for Penney is to sell shoppers on its new pricing. For years, Penney, like many other stores, has propped up price. The intent: to make it look like shoppers are getting great discounts when items go on sale.

The increased discounting has been a vicious cycle that only feeds into shoppers' insatiable appetite for bigger and better discounts. In fact, whereas it took 38 percent off to get shoppers to buy 10 years ago, it now takes discounts of 60 percent, Johnson says.

Kohl's is perhaps the worst at carrying out this pricing strategy. Kohl's shoppers think that an item marked $45 (that is worth $20) and on sale for $25 is a great deal. So many items at Kohl's are not priced appropriately until the items are marked 60% off - household items, kitchen items, shoes, bedding items, etc. The average shopper has been trained to see sales, not the real value of the products they buy. The cheap-and-easy credit era helped to fuel that ignorance because the abuse of credit has been justified by folks who believe that there is an upside to all the debt: they are buying value because goods appear to be listed at bargain prices. In reality, they are overpaying for products and getting sucked into buying things they didn't plan on buying, and the end result is more stuff, more debt, and a skewed perception of value.

Occasionally, a book comes along that so extraordinary that it deserves a quickie book review even when I don't have time to do a book review. I just finished reading Amy Alkon's I See Rude People: one woman's battle to beat some manners into an impolite society. For those who are not familiar with her, Amy is a columnist, journalist, author, and blogger who is known around the Internet as the Advice Goddess. This book, from 2009, is an absolute joy to read - her razor wit and knack for insulting Homo Barbarus is reminiscent of a 21st century H.L. Mencken. She is the anti-Boobus.

Amy is Revengerella, and she defines the "new rudeness" as "people wildly indifferent to other people." She writes,"There's a meanness, a hostile self-centeredness, that's overtaken our society since around the turn of the millennium, and nobody's safe from all the pushing, shoving, and shouting." One of of my favorite Alkon moments is when the plucky author pummels "all the asshats yukking it up on their cells" and refers to cell phone rudeness as "the most prevalent form of modern mannerlessness." Another cornerstone topic of the book is one of my favorite incivilities to pick apart - the underparented child. One of her greatest hits from the book is this sublime quote:

In case this isn't apparent, this chapter isn't about bad children, it's about bad parents. The children, like cell phones in the hands of loud narcissists, are merely a medium through which self-involved so-called adults inflict themselves on the rest of us. Unfortunately, while you need a license to cut hair, you only need working ovaries to have a child.

She continues on about the age of adolescent parents:

A few decades later, the adult-child line is no longer blurred; it's snarled. We've got eight-year-old girls dressing like hookers while their mothers dress like eight-year-old girls. Last week, I stood in line behind a big white vinyl Hello Kitty purse - on the arm of a 40-something mother of two. Forty-something dads bicker with their kids over whose turn it is on the Nintendo, and sociologist Frank Furedi, who wrote on Spiked.com about trying to wean his two-year-old son off "Teletubbies," and realizing the futility of it after spotting a bunch of undergraduates glued to an episode of the show in a bar.

Amy makes the point about the unfortunate lack of separate kid spaces and adult spaces, and so she declares, "In fact, I thought I had a deal: I'd stay out of Chuck E. Cheese if they stayed out of the martini lounge."

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I recently came across a one-of-a-kind book that skillfully challenges the standard conventions. It is called The Flinch, and it is written by Julian Smith. It is free on Amazon and you can download it here. If you don't have an eReader, you can register, for free, to have an Amazon cloud. You can download the eBook and read it online. It is around 100 pages - a very quick read.

In short, the book is about transformative impact and making yourself physically and psychologically more resistant. People stop doing anything difficult because they fear pain and physical stress, and especially, change. They not only become sedentary to avoid physical challenges, but they are moved to fit in with the consensus - intellectually - and thus they make many bad decisions in order to hang with the collective. The book encourages you to expose yourself to difficult stuff to create psychological toughness/breakthroughs and achieve greater things in life. Though the book is about overcoming emotional resistance to change, it is not written from the usual self-help perspective (it is non-Oprah-ish). Smith's book is the exact opposite of those namby-pamby corporate "change" books like this:  "In the Long Run We're All Mice."

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The Paula Deen story has taken several twists, and I have been patient in waiting to comment. Deen shocked the media with her announcement that (1) she had diabetes (is that really a surprise?) (2) she hid that fact from the public, and, (3) she has become a spokeswoman for Novo Nordisk and its diabetes drug, Victoza. Shocking - supposedly.

The media is far too fond of reporting that Paula Deen's condition was caused by eating too much fat - the same old story. Her love of such food items as butter and heavy whipping cream are "the problem," according to the ignorant media bobble heads. Yet I find these quotes from an article in the Wall Street Journal quite telling [bold emphasis mine].

Among her recipes: deep-fried cheesecake covered in chocolate and powdered sugar, and a quiche that calls for a pound of bacon.

...Turn to Deen's collection of recipes on The Food Network's site and find Grandmother Paul's fried chicken, with Crisco shortening for frying, or baked French Toast casserole, with two cups of half-and-half and a half-pound of butter. No calorie counts are estimated.

The sugars and breads and fried foods (fried in trans fat-loaded, chemically engineered, hydrogenated vegetable oils) are supposed to represent "fat" to the uneducated reader, however, these items are indicative of carbs and industrial-processed oils, not healthy and natural fat. Even Dr. Oz has helped to promote the Paula Deen pro-diabetes diet so that he could call fat as the scoundrel. This is from his website:

Dr. Oz challenged celebrity chef Paula Deen to transform her favorite dishes by cutting the calories and fat in half. By using low-fat cheese and milk, Paula Deen’s Healthier Mac and Cheese keeps all the cheesy flavor of the original recipe without destroying your diet.

So the message is that pasta and processed cheese doesn't destroy your diet, unlike the dairy fat. Stating that there is a "healthier mac and cheese" is like saying there is a "healthier rattlesnake poison." Paula Deen also advocated such bizarre non-foods as deep-fried macaroni cheese bacon bites, where the bacon - not the pasta deep fried in man-made trans fast - became the mortal enemy according to the media and medical establishment.

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Finally, a bottom for home prices. This paragraph made my brain hurt:

A key signal that the bottom is near is a change in the ratio of average homes prices to personal income — houses are affordable again. After soaring to 4 to 1 during the housing boom, the ratio is now well below the long-term average of 3 to 1.

I have absolutely no clue how that is a "key signal" (it sounds more like something made up from a random word generator), but, here's a better snippet:

By 2014, the housing market should start to look more like its old self, with housing starts near the long-term average of 1.5 million a year, sales of about 6 million and price gains of more than 4% a year.

Its old self? You mean this?

Surprise, surprise - a license plate database free-for-all. The government is photographing license plates and matching the scans up to massive databases. But it is to protect us from ... bank robbers and kidnappers. Thanks to Michael Ostrolenk for the tip.

I would love to have a laminated poster of this: The Periodic Table of Meat. This is not USDA approved.

There have been numerous articles, lately, about the bankruptcy of Kodak Eastman Co. All the attention on the financial condition of Kodak has been focused on its patent portfolio, and then to some degree, its legacy costs.

The key question now is whether Kodak will be able to squeeze the billions of dollars out of its patents that it thinks they are worth. By suing companies for alleged patent infringement and then striking license deals to settle the cases, Kodak says it raised $3 billion between 2003 and 2010.

Imagine a company that is over 130 years old claiming that it needed more and better patent protection to survive in the digital age? The New York Times wrote, "Eastman Kodak, the 131-year-old film pioneer that has been struggling for years to adapt to an increasingly digital world." USA Today ran a nice timeline of quarterly stock prices that describes the plunge. But still, the real story escapes the media. Stock buybacks.

In October 2008 I ran an article called, "Cash is Trash: The Sewage of Ivy League Management Philosophy and Other Thoughts." As I noted then, anyone who knows anything at all about finance understands that a robust balance sheet is a company’s sign of strength and longevity, its bulletproof vest, and it even provides a peek into the soul and ethos of its executives. Cash and equity are essential for a company’s survival, especially in bad times, which is why you see all of the devil-may-care financial institutions falling by the wayside. Cash and equity (I repeat: a healthy balance sheet) can also cover bad management decisions in regards to business operations. Guido Hulsmann, an economist, professor, and Mises Institute scholar, correctly referred to a healthy equity position as being similar to having a “shock absorber” to ride the company through rough times.

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This story in the Wall Street Journal barely made a splash last week - "FDA Panelists Had Ties to Bayer." Three advisors who had financial ties to Bayer AG were invited to serve on a "safety committee" for the FDA to assess the safety of four Bayer AG birth control drugs. All three individuals were either paid consultants, researchers, or speakers. Here's a paragraph from the article:

Jill Hartzler Warner, an FDA official who oversees advisory committees, said the agency is "prohibited from giving the public any information contained in a financial disclosure" from committee members. When picking committees, the FDA weighs "whether a meeting would affect the financial interest" of a panelist. The agency also does "look at whether past relationships would give the appearance of being a conflict," she said.

Apparently, having worked for Bayer and getting paid by the company does not qualify as a past relationship that would give the appearance of being a conflict. Business as usual at one of the government's largest and most invincible criminal organizations.

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Steven Yates has published a great piece on the American Daily Herald, "Who Was Leopold Kohr?" In his article, Yates writes:

Like Read [British existentialist and anarchist Herbert Read] he described himself as a “philosophical anarchist.” The thesis denies that there can ever be rational justification or moral legitimacy for a special institution (or set of institutions) called the state, or government. The philosophical anarchist combines this with a quietism, eschewing violent action as the appropriate response to the state both not simply because such action only leads to a more violent response but because violence is the way of the state, not a free people. Philosophical anarchists do not believe the state has any inherent right to command, or that any person has an obligation to obey, though of course it may be prudent to do so.

I came across Kohr several years ago when Butler Shaffer recommended his book to me - The Breakdown of Nations. I found that the book, for the most part, offers compelling insight on why bigness, and the ensuing abuse of power, has resulted in omnipotent states and quasi-governmental institutions. Rather than recreate the wheel, I'll link to the article that Mr. Yates refers to in his piece from The Guardian - "This economic collapse is a 'crisis of bigness.'" The author, Paul Kingsnorth, makes some excellent points drawing upon the thesis of Leopold Kohr's book. Butler told me that he once hosted Mr. Kohr in his home and found him to be "as delighteful and pleasant a soul as his writings."

Another book that has always seemed interesting, though I have not read it, is "A Pair of Cranks," which includes essays from Kohr and E.F. Schumacher, the author of Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.

Josh Noel, writing for the Chicago Tribune, has done an excellent job of getting it right on the philosophy of ancestral health.

Called Paleo, primal, caveman or — the umbrella term of the moment — ancestral, the regimen replaces contemporary "working out" with real-life movements that our Paleolithic ancestors used to survive: pushing, pulling, lifting, squatting, bending, walking and the occasional high-intensity sprint.

...Ancestral exercise also places emphasis on short bursts of weight-bearing intensity, however, such as pushing a weighted sled or pounding a tire with a sledgehammer. The most dedicated adherents create backyard gyms that can involve carrying rocks, lifting tree branches and using "adult monkey bars" for chin-ups, climbing and dips.

Certainly, libertarians and anarchists are drawn to this lifestyle because of our innate ability to see through the façade of conventional wisdom that is built by political interests and buttressed by an assortment of money trails. We do not deny conventional wisdom for the sake of being anti-mainstream, as some people opine; rather, we naturally tend toward the procurement of skepticism, critical thinking, and other skills that the rank and file just do not seem to possess. For instance, the average person reads a headline such as, "Fat makes you fat," and they will believe that it must be true because it was based on some "official" study that is misrepresented in the story.

Conversely, we libertarians tend to say, hey, wait a minute – how was the study interpreted by the media, who performed/funded the study, and how scientific was the study? Mark Sisson, perhaps the most visible person within the ancestral health community, calls this taking responsibility for your "own health and enjoyment of life by investigating, discussing, and critically rethinking everything we’ve assumed to be true about health and wellness."

Here is a brilliant documentary on the horrors of public school prisons in America, where children are subjected to monitoring, authoritarian supervision, arbitrary rules, conformity, coerced abstinence, zero tolerance insanity, irrational fears, invasion of privacy, prison-like security, mind-controlling drugs, and the police state. I highly recommend this - it is a stunning capture of how the federal public school system has become a security garrison with satellite detainment facilities. I especially like the part (in Part II) where the filmmaker visually shows how so many of the public schools look exactly like prisons. Some of the footage you will see is staggering, and some of the interviews with public school bureaucrats are remarkably creepy. Here is the information for the movie (it is shown in six parts):

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

In case you missed it a few months ago, this Time magazine piece on Joel Salatin is outstanding. I say that because the writer captures him perfectly, describing him not as a Locavore greenie, but rather, an "agrarian libertarian who wants both Food Inc. and Big Government out of his fields" and a guy who is calling for "a declaration of independence from corporations and bureaucracy."

I'm a Salatinite, except on the question of extreme decentralization of the food supply. Here I would disagree on some things with Joel and argue that global trade plays a remarkable role in bringing us unique food products that were formerly unavailable, or perhaps just unaffordable. I love Fiji water, Tahini from the Middle East, olive oil from Greece, and mesquite honey shipped from  Arizona. However, the majority of my food staples are bought locally because I know my supplier and I understand exactly how that food was produced.

Additionally, the photographer captured some beautiful images of Salatin and his farm, and those can be found here.

From U.S. News & World Report comes this article: "Universal Flu Vaccine Could Be Available by 2013."

Annual flu shots might soon become a thing of the past, and threats such as avian and swine flu might disappear with them as a vaccine touted as the "holy grail" of flu treatment could be ready for human trials next year.

That's earlier than the National Institutes of Health estimated in 2010, when they said a universal vaccine could be five years off. By targeting the parts of the virus that rarely mutate, researchers believe they can develop a vaccine similar to the mumps or measles shot—people will be vaccinated as children and then receive boosters later.

Inovio Pharmaceuticals received $3M+ in federal money to develop this holy grail, according to the story. Surprise, surprise - the company's stock price rallies with this kind of news.

Schools are tracking children under the guise of preventing obesity, encouraging academic achievement, and promoting fitness.Another creepy, Orwellian scheme:

In early 2012, wristwatch-like devices called Polar active monitors will be used by older students in PE classes at all 18 Parkway elementary schools. District officials say the devices should help improve the students' fitness and academic achievement.

Later this school year, the district plans to collect data about activity levels and even sleep patterns for a week at a time. It will have the students wear the devices round the clock.

...The monitors measure activity by tracking every movement of the person wearing them. They display steps taken, calories spent and time spent at various levels of activity. An animated figure on the monitor indicates the activity level. A bar shows the target time for doing moderate to vigorous activity and the amount of time achieved at that level.

The federal schools are taking Americas' children prisoner one step at a time under myriad federal "guidelines" designed to shape and mold them into propagandized, mindless, collectivist soldiers who will worship the conventional wisdom that will dictate every aspect of their lives. Nowadays, almost any act of tyranny in the schools can be justified by "concerns" about obesity and health (or now, bullying). In the modern American totalitarian tradition, serfdom is sold as the ideal freedom in order to "protect" the sheeple and keep them all safe and healthy.

Lew, regarding your post, you note the twist on the definition of terrorism: "Terrorism is a Muslim killing an Israeli, an American, or one of their allies."

But an American, Israeli, or one of their allies killing a "Terrorist" in his own homeland is a hero, a soldier of democracy, a protector of western civilization, a patriot, a freedom keeper, an honorable soldier, an anti-oppressor, and a guy who "serves us" and "keeps us free." After all, freedom isn't free, you know.

Now, if you want to spend a few moments chuckling your behind off, I suggest you go to SupportOurTroops.org and read this article, "America is Not an Empire," by the Chairman of Support Our Troops, Martin C. Boire. This is where the definition distraction gets pretty funny. The whole article is hysterically funny, and it is rooted in plastic patriot ignorance, but here's one funny snippet:

America is in truth the first altruistic force for good on planet Earth. A population which will defend people, set them free, and then come home.

...America does what it does to protect the freedom and the peace of the world against those who want to control everything and tell everyone what to do. We hold back the dark forces. Provide stability. Check chaos. We give the people of the world the opportunity to prosper.

Really ... please, please ... you need to read this piece and have some compassion for poor Martin. This is the most amateurish pro-war piece ever penned for the web.

This story is hardly surprising - it just repeats itself at a different school in a different state. In Covington, Kentucky:

A new city ordinance, enacted January 2, has police taking school truancy into their own hands. If kids are caught skipping school they could now be arrested on misdemeanor charges. If their parents are complicit in the hooky-playing, they too could be hauled into court. It's all part of a new crackdown led by Ken Kippenbrock, Director of Pupil Personnel for the Covington school district.

Yes, there really is a Director of Pupil Personnel. Here's more:

This week, local police were given a cheat sheet with times when kids should be in school (essentially 8am to 3pm) along with early dismissals, and procedures to follow when encountering a kid outside of school during those hours. If they come across a suspected skipper, officers have the option to bring the child back to school, return them to their parents' home, or if the child isn't allowed back in the school, and their parents can't be reached, booking them.

Kids can't skip their prison sentence because state funding is linked to attendance, and each unexcused absence reduces the booty that flows to the jackpot. Public school apparatchiks have no shame in publicly exclaiming that the lives of children are sacrificed for the collective benefits of a few. Children are imprisoned in their day pens for the purpose of bringing government money through the door to enable powerful government unions, create jobs for more union minions, and preserve hefty salaries for so-called administrators. On a similar note, in one county in Florida, school administrators want to ban ... hair. "Extreme" hair, that is.

According to a Fox 35 news report, the list of shunned style includes any "extreme" hairstyles, unnatural hair colors, and makeup that affects direct eye contact in the classroom. A school spokesperson named Chris Patton said these creative styles detract from learning. "When you have someone who has extreme hairstyles or different colors like pink or purple, it could be a disruption to the education happening in the classroom," Patton told Fox 35 News. "Kids start talking about it, they start teasing the kids with the different pink or purple color hair."

Here, eye shadow that looks too "rock star-ish" will be banned. Any hair color or style sweep can be subjectively deemed "extreme." But really, it's all in the name of safety because we want children to be safe. Here is a quote from a school spokesperson that goes into the "you can't make this ___ up" file: "Mascara, eyeshadow, and even the bangs if they are blocking the eyes-where you can't see a students eyeballs, that's even a safety thing."

Mark Sisson has featured a gentleman on his website, George Steffner, who has a wonderful story (and photos). George writes, "I had recently heard an interview about folks who followed a particular eating lifestyle. It wasn’t a diet." The show George is talking about is Lew Rockwell's podcast with me, "Government Hates Good Health." During a few correspondences with George, I could tell how happy and thankful he was that he was led to such a simple solution for changing his life - eating real food and eliminating those foods that are detrimental to human health. And George also learned that fat is healthy and a necessary component of his diet. George used Marksdailyapple as his guide and he went from paunchy to svelte in three-and-a-half months. The letters from George were inspiring.

I get so many of these letters each week/month from libertarians who latch on to the primal/paleo articles on LewRockwell.com and turn their lives around by vastly improving their weight and health. It is a joy to read every single one of those emails. I admire these folks because they step up and work hard to educate themselves, they reach out to folks for advice, and ultimately, they take accountability for their choices and actions to improve their quality of life. And then they pass on their knowledge and resources to those around them who want to do the same.

For more on this topic, also listen to Lew Rockwell's podcast with Mark Sisson, "Just Do the Opposite of What the Government Says."

Why do all the girls have to buy pink stuff while the boys are encouraged to buy all colors of stuff? Why do girls have to buy princesses when they want superheroes, just like the boys?

A child contemplates the marketing environment.

Unfortunately, this bimbo is for real. And yes, she said this:

"Investors aren't comfortable with what gold is backed by, if it's backed by anything at all, as compared to something like the US dollar. Investors are comfortable that the US dollar is backed by the US government."

It is wonderful that certain cultures still stick with great, old food traditions while individuals refuse to sell themselves, and their health, to the Gods of Food Convenience. According to this article, faux food had a fail in Bolivia.

As the Hispanically Speaking News reports, for well over a decade McDonald's, with eight locations in the South American nation of 10 million people, worked to win over the Bolivian public with its Big Macs and McNuggets, but consistently found itself losing money. So, in light of the loss of revenue, McDonald's Corporation made an unprecedented announcement: that it would close its restaurants in Bolivia -- making it the only country in the Americas without a McDonald's.

This story is odd in that it is being presented all over the web as McDonald's closing all of its Bolivian locations in 2011, after 14 years of trying to win over customers. However, a deeper dive digs up the facts - that McDonald's closed these restaurants way back in 2002, and this has only become a news story - now - because of a new documentary that has been released that describes why adherence to food traditions didn't allow McDonald's to make profits from its Bolivian locations. Almost every story on the web has reported this story incorrectly. Here's a 2002 story on the McDonald's closings from BBC News.

I hesitated linking to this article from a left-wing site called "tree hugger," but the alternative was a strangely written piece in the Daily Kos that blames McDonald's and KFC for rain forest destruction and "ethnic extinction." The Daily Kos also gets the facts of the closings wrong, and as of yet, no correction. All of the confusion and misrepresentation of facts aside, I like this quote in the tree hugger article that talks about the documentary:

The documentary includes interviews with cooks, sociologists, nutritionists and educators who all seem to agree, Bolivians are not against hamburgers per sé, just against ‘fast food,’ a concept widely unaccepted in the Bolivian community.

Fast-food represents the complete opposite of what Bolivians consider a meal should be. To be a good meal, food has to have be prepared with love, dedication, certain hygiene standards and proper cook time.

Skip Oliva writes a fantastic piece on why the centrally planned state hates breastfeeding, co-sleeping (infant and parent), and when an untrained environment replaces state-sanctioned institutions: "The Broken Infant Fallacy."

Ideally, if you extend the “let’s put three-year-olds in school” argument to its logical conclusion, human children would be separated from their mothers soon after birth, much like dairy farmers do with goats. This way, their diet can be strictly monitored for compliance with federal guidelines, mothers could re-enter the workforce sooner (driving down employers’ labor costs), and children would learn from the age of three months or so that they can’t exist outside the central planners’ view of “society.” And hopefully, they’ll finally do well on those  standardized tests!

Some things are worth remembering, especially as we move into a New Year with the same old politicians repeating the same old myths about how fantastic the economy is, how rapidly markets are improving, and how prosperous things will be once the right people in government are given the right tools to fix the broken economy. I especially love the use of holiday spending reports to evaluate consumer "confidence" and economic trends.

So here is one of my favorite blasts from the past. This article is from the Washington Post from late 2007: "Bernanke: There's No Housing Bubble to Go Bust." A quote:

U.S. house prices have risen by nearly 25 percent over the past two years, noted Bernanke, currently chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, in testimony to Congress's Joint Economic Committee. But these increases, he said, "largely reflect strong economic fundamentals," such as strong growth in jobs, incomes and the number of new households.

Isn't that fun?

A "threatening" 10-year-old boy was disciplined for shooting a pizza gun in the school cafeteria. Bold emphasis mine.

For the rest of the semester, a Rutherford County elementary student has to eat lunch at the "silent table" for allegedly waving around a slice of pizza some say resembled a gun.

Nicholas Taylor attends David Youree Elementary School in Smyrna, about 30 miles southeast of Nashville.

School leaders say the 10-year-old threatened other students at his lunch table with a piece of pizza with bites out of it so it looked like a gun and when asked about it was initially not truthful.

Nicholas' mother LeAnn calls her son's punishment "absolutely ridiculous" saying he was just playing around and never said anything derogatory or anything about shooting anyone.

"The kid across the table from him said it looked like a gun so he picked it up and started shooting it in the air," she told Nashville's News 2 Investigates.

Taylor said she learned of the incident when the school sent her a note saying her son was threatening other students.

Did this gun not have a safety? What about a trigger lock? Why wasn't it unloaded and locked away in a cabinet where no child could reach it? Will the next social force for good be MABB (Mothers Against Barbaric Bites)?

I know Christmas is over, but it seems to me that a pizza gun - whether or not it shoots pepperoni - would be a good fit for the Island of Misfit Toys.

Except the Island of Misfit Toys already has a gun - a water pistol that shoots jelly.

This thing is so safe that I feel "safe" just looking at it. Butler Shaffer's daughter sent me the link, along with her delightful comments: "Sun-protection, five point seat belt, wrap-around roll bar... for a tricycle.  It might even have an air bag, I didn't check!"

Air bags, heck - but does it have side air bags, and can you use that cup holder to store a couple of flares if an emergency stop is deemed necessary? Or is that the holder for the SPF 50 sun block? This thing would pass any government safety check, except I wonder if all of that "stuff" would be distracting to the point of not making the grade with Ray LaHood's distracted driving paradigm? I can 't wait to see what the world's most insightful free-range mom, Lenore Skenazy, has to say about this one.

St. Louis Today has published an article about a renowned cheese master, Max McCalman, who - surprise, surprise - is an evangelist for raw (real) cheese. Here is a quote from the article [bold emphasis mine].

"I feel very passionate about them, and I've studied them extensively," McCalman says. "Raw-milk cheese has a great food-safety record. We can eat raw oysters and eat raw meat in this country if we want to, but not raw-milk cheese. There's something wrong with that, especially since cheese hasn't been implicated in as many food-poisoning issues as raw seafood, raw meat or even raw vegetables."

Federal regulations require raw-milk cheeses sold in the United States to be aged at least 60 days. As a result, what many cheese experts consider to be authentic versions of brie, Camembert and more great cheeses of the world cannot be purchased in America.

While the FDA and USDA have made real cheese - as enjoyed by people all over the world - illegal, Cheez Whiz, and similar processed-plasticized, chemical-based products that masquerade as cheese, gets a pass. However, unaged, raw cheeses, especially from France and Italy, can be found at some small retailers, if you look hard enough. That aside, we can all rest easily knowing that the agents of the United States Customs Service are trained to suspect that any cheese coming across the border is likely to be raw, and if found out, it will be confiscated.

They (foreigners) hate us because we're so safe.

There was a time when we thought that one could be safe while shopping at Safeway. Americans, in their ceaseless search of "safety," thanks to government propaganda and policy, and safety nazi fear mongering from the media and the masses, have come up with yet another way to spend money they don't have on safety they don't need. Here is The Wrap Strap, a shopping cart safety strap - just in case a high-speed cart collision might cause the little one to be launched from the cart and sent like a projectile through the produce section at Kroger, head first into a patch of barbed artichoke hearts.

If...

This little guy just found out that Ron Paul won in Iowa. The Romney and Gingrich backers aren't so elated.

Here is a story that was recently posted on Yahoo: "Ron Paul is a Dangerous Tin Man Who has No Heart." The article is so boring that it wouldn't be worth mentioning, except for this one quote:

As quoted by Real Clear Politics, Ron Paul believes that "all foreign aid is worthless."

And...am I missing something here? All foreign aid is either money taken from hard-working Americans at gunpoint or a monetary production of the Federal Reserve that makes people poorer (most of them, unknowingly) in order to fund the global largesse. So, Ron Paul sees no value in the end product of foreign "aid" - funding military machines, underwriting foreign dictators and emperors, perpetuating endless wars, promoting civil unrest and race or religious wars, and subsidizing and escalating a hugely profitable and invincible corporate state. And plus, he thinks it is unconstitutional for the government to conduct limitless theft via political policy in order to fund these atrocities. But he's heartless.

On the contrary, our dictators and armchair generals in Washington D.C. have heart. This is proof.

Folks may know how I like to pick on the cupcake craze because I see it as just one of many boom-bust absurdities that were born during the years of excess spawned by government monetary policy that encouraged and triggered credit addiction and high time preferences. During the boom years, we saw the rise of the cupcake craze, just one of many infantile fads that attract people driven to excess by cheap money and the have-pulse-will-loan mentality of the boom years.

In reaction to this story, "Security Theater" TSA Confiscates Woman's Frosted Cupcake," a reader shares his thoughts on my Facebook page: "KDC's worst nightmare--which enemy does she side with??!!!" While the story seems hilarious at first reading, it is indicative of the much larger problem of the government's $20 billion industry of terror that has spawned the TSA, Homeland Security, and the militarized police state.

A Massachusetts woman who flew home from Las Vegas this week says an airport security officer took her frosted cupcake because he thought its vanilla-bourbon icing could be a “security risk.”

...“The TSA supervisor, Robert Epps, was using really bad logic – he said it counted as a gel-like substance because it was conforming to the shape of its container.”

In this case, it is easy to side with the helpless and peaceful cupcake, as opposed to our enemies and oppressors in the government terror industry.

And less free. Charles C. Mann writes an excellent piece in Vanity Fair on Bruce Schneier, a security expert, and the security theatre of the United States government.

Two months after 9/11, the Bush administration created the Transportation Security Agency, ordering it to hire and train enough security officers to staff the nation’s 450 airports within a year. Six months after that, the government vastly expanded the federal sky-marshal program, sending thousands of armed lawmen to ride planes undercover. Meanwhile, the T.S.A. steadily ratcheted up the existing baggage-screening program, banning cigarette lighters from carry-on bags, then all liquids (even, briefly, breast milk from some nursing mothers). Signs were put up in airports warning passengers about specifically prohibited items: snow globes, printer cartridges. A color-coded alert system was devised; the nation was placed on “orange alert” for five consecutive years. Washington assembled a list of potential terror targets that soon swelled to 80,000 places, including local libraries and miniature-golf courses. Accompanying the target list was a watch list of potential suspects that had grown to 1.1 million names by 2008, the most recent date for which figures are available. Last year, the Department of Homeland Security, which absorbed the T.S.A. in 2003, began deploying full-body scanners, which peer through clothing to produce nearly nude images of air passengers.

...Not only has the actual threat from terror been exaggerated, they say, but the great bulk of the post-9/11 measures to contain it are little more than what Schneier mocks as “security theater”: actions that accomplish nothing but are designed to make the government look like it is on the job. In fact, the continuing expenditure on security may actually have made the United States less safe.

Thanks to the government's massive security state and its monopoly on force, a $20 billion industry thrives on theft and redistribution.

An article from the Billings Gazette reads:

The upstart entrepreneur had enlisted the help of more than 30 volunteers, including his extended family, to help make and deliver free meals to shut-ins on Christmas Day. His grandma made 11 types of cookies, Albertsons donated turkey, and Meadow Gold donated 75 cartons of milk.

Cody Walter owns a delivery business and he wanted to utilize his business to deliver free meals to shut-ins on Christmas day. You immediately know where this story is going: food cooked in a private (home) kitchen, not a commercial, government-approved kitchen; there is no government license; no ingredient labels are used; and plus, Mr. Walter has no business cooking for others without government advice, permission, and oversight. So yes, the public health department, according to Cody Walter, shut him down.

How is Cody delivering food to newfound friends any different than having folks over for grub? So when does the government start to shut down dinner parties and other food undertakings where guests - friends and strangers - are served food that was cooked in a home kitchen and people partake of the food with no knowledge whatsoever of where it was cooked, how it was stored, what the ingredients are, and ... the cook doesn't have a vending license and hasn't taken USDA-approved food safety classes?

The feds, the states, and the local "health" authorities are ramping up their power, all for the cause of "safety," and the result is that farmers markets, the artisanal food industry, food-related philanthropic endeavors, and even curbside lemonade stands are coming completely under the control of these totalitarians. Thanks to Dennis Peek for the link.

I wonder if Santa will go down the chimney with the flag in hand?