Dentist's face ruin due to Obama policies

The Wall Street Journal reported alarming news today:

"Some of America's biggest food companies say the U.S. could "virtually run out of sugar" if the Obama administration doesn't ease import restrictions amid soaring prices for the key commodity.

In a letter to Agriculture Secretary Thomas Vilsack, the big brands -- including Kraft Foods Inc., General Mills Inc., Hershey Co. and Mars Inc. -- bluntly raised the prospect of a severe shortage of sugar used in chocolate bars, breakfast cereal, cookies, chewing gum and thousands of other products.

The companies threatened to jack up consumer prices and lay off workers if the Agriculture Department doesn't allow them to import ..."

Oh, the humanity!!! Crazed chocoholics running wild in the streets because they can't get their fix. Dentists selling apples on the streets because of lack of teeth to drill and fill.

Actually I have to apologize here. The sugar import quotas are not just President Obama's fault. They're the fault of every president and every congress since the 1930's. Sugar farmers here in the U.S. have effectively been on welfare since then. Sugar import quotas are a nifty little hidden tax on everybody who eats or drinks junk food and beverages. The rich sugar growers live high on the hog as a result of that hidden tax, and they naturally share some of their wealth with the politicians who make sure the trough stays full. In this case Uncle Sam really is Uncle Sugar.

Sam may be in a position to be THE guru on the economy

Sam may be in a better position to know the real state of the economy than the government's economists. This article in the Wall Street Journal says that waste disposal volume is a better measure of consumption, and therefore economic activity, than the government's statistics.

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2009/07/17/using-garbage-to-measure-consumption/

And, in other news, congress and President Obama want to have the government take over the whole health care system. They're going to recruit really competent career bureaucrats to decide what doctor you go to, and what drugs he's allowed to prescribe for you, and whether you are worthy of getting a new hip, and what drugs the pharmaceutical companies are allowed to produce and what research into drugs is permitted and how many nurses to hire for each ward of each hospitals all over the country, and how many minutes of break time those nurses get. . . and, and, and. . . everything to do with health care, including who lives and who is unworthy to live.

Perhaps President Obama and his pals will be able to find bureaucrats as smart as the government rocket scientists who taped over the original pictures of the first landing on the moon.

http://webmail.aol.com/43792/aol/en-us/Suite.aspx

We grew up gourmets and never knew it

The yuppies have discovered weeds as gourmet fare. Nine bucks a pound for dandelion! By that measure there's at least ten thousand bucks worth of valuable gourmet salad out there in the lawn right now.

It's hard to believe the author of this article in The Wall Street Journal missed Chima de Rabe. I remedied that with a comment to the article. As I write this I still have two containers of this Spring's rabes in the freezer. And, I happen to be eating a sandwich of boiled ham, rabes that I thawed the other day and a little mayonnaise on slices of Corropolese split loaf. I generally prefer this particular sandwich on a seeded football roll; but we're out of them right now. It used to make Pop crazy when he would see me putting mayonnaise on a sandwich of rabes and ham; but that's not why I still invariably do it.

Also, she specifies two changes of water for boiling Pokes. I can't imagine that Mom or Aunt Mary R did two changes of water, and I certainly never have; which may explain why there have been incidents of rapid necessary movement to the necessaries room related to the consumption of Poke Salad over the years. It's very difficult to resist the temptation to pick larger and larger and leafier and leafier shoots as one gets tired when picking Polks, which also may explain the incidents.

And, she mentions Burdock but doesn't mention that the leaves are poisonous, or at least that's what Mom believed, although the internet seems not to think so. Mom and Grandmom L only used the thick stems of the leaves which they called Cardunes and prepared by battering and deep frying. Next Spring I'm going to pick Cardunes and try to recreate that recipe. As I recall they had a unique flavor somewhat like, but only somewhat like, the battered and fried celery we do at Christmas.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124338226000356493.html#articleTabs%3Darticle

And, since I'm on the subject of food, I should mention that Linda and I ate our first Swiss Chard from the garden on Tuesday, probably the earliest that it's ever been ready for picking. We've been eating lettuce for a couple of weeks; but slugs are multiplying and ravaging it now, probably due to the very rainy weather we've been having for the past week or so.

Finally, if you are one of the few people who still actually, you know, like, read, like, books, you may find this article by Ann Kirshner in The Chronicle Review interesting. She tried out all the current modes of reading and listening to Charles Dickens' novel Little Dorrit to see which she liked better. I can only wish she had gone further into the issue of the differences between sight reading and audio since I find them such distinctly different experiences.

Most interesting paragraph - "Readers are passionate and opinionated advocates for their preferred formats. Flip announced that she reads only hardcovers; end of conversation. "I get it," said Bill, watching me read on the iPhone: "You like your books little." Bob is no Luddite, but he insists that Steve Jobs has bribed me, since the Kindle is so obviously superior. Just wait for the Apple tablet," advises techno-sage Joe. And Judith derides my affection for audiobooks as "not really reading.""

For the record I will only read a hardback if I can't get a paperback. Something about a hardback book intimidates me and causes me to treat it too carefully. I can dog-ear the pages to mark my place or break the binding of a paperback by bending it back to hold in one hand; but I can rarely bring myself to treat a hardback book so cavalierly no matter how cheaply I bought it. And, I find listening to an audio book so different from reading the same book that I will often read an especially good novel immediately after listening to it and vice versa. Also, she doesn't mention the obvious next step, which is to combine audio with a video formatted somewhat like the succession of still pictures that Ken Burns used in his Civil War series on PBS. Soon technology should allow relatively easy mating of period pictures with text. So you could see a street scene related to a passage of audio or a picture of an animal mentioned in an audio passage as you listened, for instance.

http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i39/39b01601.htm

And, really, really, finally, since I've been on the subjects of yuppies, books, reading and cooking; here's an interesting article by Jennifer Reese on Slate about a book about a whole different way to think about cooking. One suspects that Linda will come home to find something really new and different on the table one of these days; but not 'til after she has endured Lobscouse, which I still haven't gotten around to making even though Alex tried it and praised it pretty highly.

http://www.slate.com/id/2219243/pagenum/all

A trillion here a trillion there

First a warning. The five minute video at the post below is about a very boring subject and your share of the loot they're talking about is only $30,000, so it may not be worth your time.

I'm not the most careful person in the world about balancing our checkbook; and I'm even less careful about doing anything that can be called budgeting; but it's just a little shocking to find out the the Federal Reserve doesn't regularly balance its multi-trillion dollar checkbook. And it's even more shocking that the Federal Reserve doesn't keep track on who it sends the trillions to and how much it gets paid back.

http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/05/federal-reserve-can-not-account-for-9.html

And, in lighter news: The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about Italian bicycle racing, which, unsurprisingly, is far more manly and authentic than the sissified French variety.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124209602462609577.html#mod%3Darticle-outset-box%26articleTabs%3Dcomments

Meanwhile, it appears we're not doomed to freeze in the dark

Quietly and stealthily the drilling companies have been finding ways to produce potentially enormous amounts of natural gas right here in the U.S. And the politicians have started to list natural gas along with wind and solar when they talk about "alternative" sources of energy.

Laissez les bon temps roulez.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124104549891270585.html#mod%3Darticle-outset-box%26articleTabs%3Dcomments

As is usual on the Wall Street Journal site the comments on the article are well worth skimming if you're interested in the topic. The WSJ limits comments to subscribers who provide their full name with the comment so there are fewer annoying trolls, and the commenters generally know a bit about economics, unlike politicians and many so called environmentalists.

The party of Joe Sixpack raises the tax on beer to $1.25 a glass

Put the spend like drunken sailors Democrats together with the "tax fairness" Democrats and then splice them with the bend over and let me put this proctoscope up your butt nanny state Democrats and you get a $52 per barrel tax on beer in Oregon. There's change we can believe in. And now they're going to tax Joe Sixpack to cry in his beer about it.

Coming soon to a state near you.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123976316293519743.html

A tip of the hat to Veronique de Rugy, who linked to this post at National Review's blog The Corner

Bernie Madoff did some good

As usual most people are talking only about the negative vibes; but Bernie Madoff did this architect and his wife a big favor. These lunatics believe living uncomfortably can help people live longer and better and they designed houses to keep life annoying; so Bernie probably prolonged their life by stealing all their money.

Priceless.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123785033607519075.html

This post is only for diehard Scrabble players

Za is now a valid word according to this article that's in The Wall Street Journal today. So is Qi, which is already in Jas and Kathy's well thumbed Scrabble dictionary. ZZZ is also now a valid word, although you would need to have both blanks to make that word so I don't see much use for it.

Clearly we need to get a new Scrabble dictionary.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123731266862258869.html?mod=article-outset-box

Many people believe in many strange things

This article in the Wall Street Journal by Mollie Ziegler Hemingway discusses an interesting paradox. It turns out that religious people are actually somewhat more more likely to be rational than non-religious people when it comes to things like Atlantis, bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, ghosts, etc.

The author points out that Bill Maher, for example, who often mocks people who believe in a "sky god" as he puts it, turns out not to believe in scientific medicine. This in the face of a hundred years of evidence, a good bit of which evidence he surely saw with his own eyes in the simple fact that we and our children are far healthier over all than the average of our grandparents and their children. He doesn't believe that vaccination is what wiped out polio, for instance, even though he actually lived through the time when the disease was eliminated. Sheer bloodyminded idiocy. Bill Maher is a short slim strunze.

The Baylor University study that the author refers to got results exactly opposite to what I would have expected. At any rate I found this to be an interesting article.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178219865054585.html