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.”

Thanks to Oliver’s celebrity status and ability to draw the media, McDonald’s announced it has discontinued the use of the repurposed slime in its “100% ground beef.” Here is McDonald’s slick attempt at explaining why it abandoned a practice that was perfectly “safe.”

Burgers are at the heart of the Golden Arches, and the fact is, McDonald’s USA serves 100% USDA-inspected beef- no preservatives, no fillers, no extenders- period.

For a number of years prior to 2011, to assist with supply, McDonald’s USA used some lean beef trimmings treated with ammonia in our burgers. We were among other food retailers who used this safe product.

At the beginning of last year, we made a decision to stop using this ingredient. It has been out of the McDonald’s USA supply chain since last August.  We wanted to be consistent with our global beef supply chain and we’re always evolving our practices.

The chain takes to calling this repurposed scrap “lean beef trimmings.” As the company’s statement implies, everyone else was doing it so they did it. In fact, using these “lean beef trimmings” is so “safe” that when Oliver began to gain a lot of publicity with his anti-slime campaign, McDonald’s immediately ditched its practice that was formerly unknown to most people. In this MSNBC article, McDonald’s claims, of course, that Oliver’s exposure of the meat industry’s use of pink slime had nothing to do with the chain discontinuing its practice of selling lean garbage trimmings to its customers. Here’s a quote from the article:

 Besides being used as a household cleaner and in fertilizers, the compound releases flammable vapors, and with the addition of certain acids, it can be turned into ammonium nitrate, a common component in homemade bombs. It’s also widely used in the food industry as an anti-microbial agent in meats and as a leavener in bread and cake products. It’s regulated by the U.S. Agriculture Department, which classifies it as “generally recognized as safe.”

The USDA, indeed, does not require labeling for the use of ammonia in your food. Instead, the government opts to spend its time and our money destroying the commerce efforts of entrepreneurs like small farmers and artisanal food makers. See the video below for Oliver’s demonstration of how the pink slime is made.

You can’t make this stuff up. Be very prepared….

From an article in USA Today:

I was thinking about the Super Bowl. What goes with the Super Bowl but chicken wings? And I said, ‘Oh, a chicken wing cupcake, Rachel?’ And I tried five or six recipes and the last recipe when I was ready to call it quits I think we kinda nailed it on it.

I take you back in time to my classic blog post: “Sautéed Raccoon’s Funnel Cake Ass on a Cheesecake Caramel Deep-Fried Stick.”

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.

My later article is up at LewRockwell.com: “How the Public Schools Keep Your Child a Prisoner of the State.” I had blogged on this previously, and Lew Rockwell asked me to dress it up into a longer article to run on his site. His words to me were, “Everyone needs to watch the film you linked to in your blog.” The film is called “The War on Kids,” and as Lew agrees, it must be seen to be believed.

Cost of this meal is as follows:

- $2 for a bunch of broccoli crowns, and I used half. That = $1.

- A dozen free-range eggs = $3, and I used two, so that’s .50.

- Butter with garlic and herbs is about .30.

That’s $1.80 per serving and $7.20 for a family of four. Increasing the meal size to four eggs would be $2.30 per serving, and $9.20 for a family of four. One Arby’s roast beef ‘n cheddar that fits in the palm of a child’s hand = $3.50. Family of four = $14 for an anemic sandwich with no side dish, no vegetable, and little to no nutrition. Four Lean Cuisine microwave meals would be approximately $12, and a Lean Cuisine would provide a shriveled, 3 oz. processed patty of whatever kind of meat is being imitated, plus a microscopic serving of a pseudo-vegetable, and then a smattering of fake mashed potatoes. No nutrition, plenty of chemicals.

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.

Taco Bell wants its “fair share” of causing autoimmune disorders, cancer, cardiovascular disease, gluten attacks, diabetes, and other fun stuff. Looking at this thing makes me queasy. That stuff on the bottom is supposed to be sausage. The stuff on top is supposed to be eggs. People actually eat this stuff, and they claim to like it. I guess because it’s the free market I should cheer, except the company uses the government’s dietary guidelines to peddle its food as “healthy.” Here is my previous post on the Taco Hell deception.

Reader Charles Everett sent this article to me, knowing my dislike for America’s favorite slob shoe: Crocs. The shoemaker, Crocs Inc., is being sued because the shoes are “dangerous” for kids.

The Motzney lawsuit said that the daughter received her pink child’s-sized Crocs as a gift from a relative, who bought them in December 2010. She was wearing the Crocs, which were caught in the side of the escalator in the JCPenney department store on Aug. 13, 2011, the lawsuit said.

Laskin said the girl lost the little toe on her left foot and the skin off the bottom of that foot.

The lawsuit claims that Crocs has known since 2005 that children have been injured while wearing Crocs that “were sucked into the side skirts of moving escalators.” The suit cites a June 2008 letter from Crocs to the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission acknowledging that Crocs had received 186 claims of escalator injuries.

I know this is not meant to be funny so I’ll skip the snide comments. Perhaps the problem is that folks wear these things three sizes too big, with two inches between their heel and the rear of the shoe, and another inch or two of space forward of the toes, with the shoes flapping about like a child playing dress-up in Mommy’s shoes? What about saggy pants? Do those get caught in escalators, too? Will Wolverine Boot find it profitable to make a pair-of “safe” steel-toe, work-worthy Crocs for the lumberjacks, machinists, and construction workers? Even without the macho Croc model, George Bush once chose to wear this fashion atrocity.

It turns out that hospitals are banning Crocs because the shoes … don’t protect the Croc owner’s feet from sharp objects. This story in the Mail Online notes that “hospitals in the U.S., Canada, Sweden and Austria recently introduced bans on staff wearing Croc-style shoes because of safety concerns.” Can’t we just declare Crocs a negative externality and thereby tax folks who wear them to appropriately compensate the rest of us for our pain of having to look at them? (Libertarianoids: I am joking.)

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.”

Along the way, Amy makes the case that rudeness is a voluntary choice and the use of the seven dirty words is not necessarily rude (instead, it is often appropriate and necessary). She is also not shy about explaining why she never travels without noise-canceling headphones and Hearos Xtreme Super Soft earplugs with noise reduction. Her take on Internet rudeness, along with being the recipient of attacks from infuriated infantile readers is priceless. She describes herself this way:

I am not writing this book from on high, as some shiny emissary of politeness. I do not have perfect manners. In fact, I have rather imperfect manners. I’m a swearer, a honker, and my hand has, on occasion, detached itself from the steering wheel and gestured to other drivers in a less-than-genteel way.

Amy is very libertarian-ish and interested in the primal-paleo lifestyle. She is quick-witted, delightfully insulting, saucy, entertaining, and far more gifted as a writer than she is at hoisting her middle finger on her way to anger management classes. I recommend this book to anyone who can appreciate Amy’s intelligence and educated humor. I do not recommend the book for two types of folks: (1) Those who have committed themselves to the new American religion known as “I’m Offended.” If you are a part of that sect of people who are perpetually offended, this book is not the best match for you. (2) Those libertarianoids who think it is “unlibertarian” to criticize and offend The Idiocracy because being an idiot is a voluntary choice.