Never give in...
never, never, never, never,
in nothing great or small,
large or petty,
never give in except to
convictions of honor and good sense.
Never yield to force...
never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.
Winston Churchill
I Probably Should Cover This In My Nutrition Blog
I'm somewhat amused by the kerfuffle over New Mexico Professor Miller's judgmental tweet. (Note: in fairness he has since apologized, even tried to suggest the tweet was part of a research project. I'm skeptical of the latter; the Twitter universe is self-selected.) As someone who took just over a year to research, write and defend his dissertation, setting a department record and leapfrogging a dozen preceding ABD's, I struggled with a weight problem (although I regularly jogged around campus and lifted weights). I want to point out at the time that the prevailing weight loss paradigm was not the low-carb diet, but the low-fat diet: people were encouraged to eat carb-heavy foods like pasta and yogurt; food manufacturers were adding sugar to their low-fat products. Now during that period, I was not eating sugary desserts or starches like chips and crackers. Also, writing a dissertation is a sedentary activity. But more to the point, I had a direct economic incentive to complete my dissertation: my income would go from hundreds of dollars to thousands of dollars a month. (Some of the other ABD's, many raising families, went back to their higher-paying private-sector day jobs after completing their residency requirement.) I became aware of the low-carb lifestyle on a Chicago public sector project in 2002; another contractor claimed that the Atkins diet had worked for him.
Miller's tweet, of course, is obnoxious; weight gain is a complex phenomenon. For example, I have a relative whom gained weight after taking prescribed meds. Metabolism can be affected by age or (in my case) a sluggish thyroid or even sudden changes in diet (i.e., the body's starvation defense). It's not merely a case of willpower.
Why discuss this topic in a political blog? One good example is the fact the preferred low-fat paradigm did not really alleviate a growing weight problem. We've seen attempts to impose national dietary standards in subsidized school lunch programs and various meddling with restaurants (labeling, salt content, portion sizes, trans fats, etc.) Do you think that legislators or bureaucrats, noting correlations of weight with certain health problems and an increasing government footprint in the health care sector, will not attempt to penalize obese people, especially if they believe like Miller that obesity is a serious cost driver to public expenditures and the obese are responsible for the condition and passing on their higher health costs onto other people? [The private sector already takes this into account; it is almost impossible to get an individual policy if you exceed a certain BMI threshold.]
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| Twitter Feed Capture from FNC Red Eye |
A Different, Heartless Segregation in a Public School
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| The mom of the 7-year-old boy suffering spinal muscular atrophy posted this school picture. |
From Bill Bonner:
Another guest at last night's dinner party was a [French] farmer:
"I went to a meeting hosted by our regional farm bureau last week. They were explaining to us all of the wonderful things they are doing for us. They had a PowerPoint presentation... with great photos of them at work... showing all of the resources we had to work with.
"What they didn't bother to talk about was how costly all of their 'help' has become. In Europe, there are now five bureaucrats working in some area of agricultural administration for every one farmer. And these people increase a farmer's workload. Now I spend half of my time filling out the forms that these people require... or being inspected... or complying with some new rule or regulation.
"So when they got to the end of the presentation, they asked if there were any questions. I stood up. I said, 'I'd like to make a proposal. Since there are now five administrative people in the agricultural sector for every farmer... and since every farmer must spend half of his time dealing with the admin people... I propose that each farmer be given one paper pusher to work for him exclusively. That paper pusher's job will be to push the papers back to the other paper pushers.
"'You can plainly see the advantage of such a system. It will cost nothing. No jobs will be lost. And it will free farmers from doing things that aren't productive. In theory, it should double a farmer's productivity. So everyone will be better off.'
"The guy from the farm bureau just muttered something, and then they closed the meeting."Reason Debunks the Loaded Question to Miss Utah
In Monday's post, I pointed out the loaded question and gave a compatible critique. I'm glad to see this tongue-in-cheek Reason video also takes on the clueless 77 centers, including one Barack Hussein Obama.
US Grade F Government Pork in Farm/Food Stamp Bill
The NSA Director's Bait and Switch Testimony
First, you have to criticize the Congressman whom in my judgment is serving up sympathetic softball questions with the obvious intent of trying to preempt civil libertarian criticisms. Whether or not the director misleadingly rephrased the question on the fly as the FNC interview suggests, I think the Congressman wasn't motivated to parse the response. The question should have been more precisely stated, e.g., is the infrastructure in place that would make it theoretically possible to listen to phone calls of American citizens taking place before specific warrants or court approvals? Judge Napolitano is correct: there's a difference between physical capability and authorization to access data from that capability.
Political Cartoon
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| "Too Much Information" Courtesy of Glenn Foden and Townhall |
The Beatles, "From Me to You'
