iPandora

Do you want an example of an ideologue attempting to justify his existence at the government trough?

Imagine the tragedy if every day for years on end a crowded jetliner crashed. Then imagine the outrage when the public learned that those tragedies had been preventable, but that the airlines and government had done nothing. Fortunately, jetliners rarely crash. But excessive salt in our food is causing several hundred preventable deaths every day—100,000 deaths each and every year. And the food industry and government have done virtually nothing.

Sorry, this doesn’t pass the sniff test.

Writer Michael Jacobson would have to add a lot of qualifiers to the statement before it made it past the sniff test.

First off, salt is not killing several hundred people a day. Accurately interpreting the words Michael has chosen leads to only one conclusion, salt kills several hundred people a day. And hundreds of thousands of people who drink water die every day. A more accurate statement would be “medical conditions related to high-sodium diets are factors in several hundred deaths each day.”

Salt doesn’t kill. In fact, salt is a necessary part of our bodies ability to regulate its water levels. High levels of sodium in our bodies alerts us with the sensation of thirst. And without sodium, the water would not travel into the necessary cells. It works in much the same way a good sauce flavors meat, by passing liquids back and forth across the various membranes until the saline (salt) levels equalize on both sides.

The second problem with Michael Jacobson’s arguments are his assumption that government regulation is the best source of a solution to the problem of high-sodium diets.

First off, any such regulation is flatly contradictory to the stipulations of the Constitution of the United States of America. The amount of salt a person consumes is completely within their rights to self-determination.

Not to say there isn’t an issue with the overall health of our nation. However, such issues illustrate the inappropriateness of government involvement in health and other private decisions and responsibilities. If the government wants to require that food stamps and WIC and other welfare assistance programs only be used on low-sodium foods, that’s OK. That particular cat is already out of that particular bag. And if you live on the government dole you live at their behest.

I don’t live at the government’s behest. I live in spite of the government.

Secondly, there are those who still live a healthy and active lifestyle whose bodies use and process higher levels of sodium effectively.

According to an evolutionary understanding, due to the necessity of hard labor to survival, our bodies evolved to prefer high-fat, high-starch, high-salt foods because they stored much higher levels of energy necessary for the long days in the fields and on the hunt.

According to a creationary understanding, God designed our bodies to prefer the foods that conveyed most effectively the elements essential to our carrying out the stipulations of the curse.

Either way, we’re tuned to want this stuff even if we don’t need it. But some do, and that is the inherent failure of each and every government regulation. There is simply no way a blanket rule can be applied without it causing harm to some without a corresponding benefit.

John Tate counters Michael Jacobson:

Supporters of intervention are focusing on the overconsumption of salt. Point taken. However, the problem of overconsumption derives more from personal choice than from sodium intake under circumstances beyond one’s control, such as when large amounts of sodium were added to food products without information to consumers.

People are presented with all the data needed to make an informed decision. Warnings about excessive sodium abound. Product labels list the amount of sodium each serving contains. Restaurants are increasingly supplying nutritional guides. The responsibility lies with the consumer on how to act on this knowledge.

Most Americans do not seem to be choosing to restrict their own salt intake, and the FDA is looking to use this outcome to justify intervening in everyone’s food choices “for our own good.” But no amount of such intervention will ever force people to make good choices. What will regulators do if this idea doesn’t work? Resort to policing salt intake within people’s own homes? Where does dictating the actions of others “for their own good” end?

As Tate mentions, the argument that many people are unwise in their decisions regarding nutrition is valid. But when it comes to the government of the United States of America, there is this niggling detail. All arguments regarding the role and responsibility of the government must begin with the Constitution. And only if they pass that muster may they proceed to whether they are logical, practical, necessary, or wise. If there is truly compelling reasons, the Constitution may be amended, as it has in the past. But the failure of Constitutional amendments today serves to highlight the paucity of truly revolutionary ideas in government.

Tate ends thus:

Ultimately, the risk we take by trusting Americans to make their own decisions is significantly less than the sacrifice we make by continuing to excuse actions by a government that has repeatedly proven its total disregard for the limits imposed by the Constitution.

Wes from Reason To Stand shared this video on Facebook.

I completely agree that pornography is very drug-like in it’s effects. It’s addictive, it changes your body’s natural patterns and how your body expects to fulfill certain needs.

Check out FightTheNewDrug.com.

Epic Fail: For some things, there's just no excuse

Investors Business Daily reports the institute created by California Proposition 71 to research medical applications of Embryonic Stem Cells has quietly begun shifting it’s research focus to Adult Stem Cells.

Quick rehash: Embryonic Stem Cells are the result of abortions, the designer baby process, in vitro fertilization, and other procedures of a morally ambiguous to morally evil nature. Adult Stem Cells are derived from adult human adipose (fat) and other sources all given voluntarily, usually by the very person who will be benefiting directly from the treatment.

Embryonic Stem Cell Research (ESCR) = Morally murky, usually objectionable.

Adult Stem Cell Research (ASCR) = Morally good.

Now back to the story.

Five years later, ESCR has failed to deliver and backers of Prop 71 are admitting failure. The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the state agency created to, as some have put it, restore science to its rightful place, is diverting funds from ESCR to research that has produced actual therapies and treatments: adult stem cell research. It not only has treated real people with real results; it also does not come with the moral baggage ESCR does.

To us, this is a classic bait-and-switch, an attempt to snatch success from the jaws of failure and take credit for discoveries and advances achieved by research Prop. 71 supporters once cavalierly dismissed. We have noted how over the years that when funding was needed, the phrase “embryonic stem cells” was used. When actual progress was discussed, the word “embryonic” was dropped because ESCR never got out of the lab.

Alan Trounson, stem cell pioneer in Australia and director of the California institute says “If we went 10 years and had no clinical treatments, it would be a failure.”

In other words, as I’ve mentioned here before, Embryonic Stem Cell Research fails. Epicly. Again.

Abraham Lincon's deathbed

Just finished watching “My Sister’s Keeper” with my wife and promised her, if she ever became like the mom, Sara, I’d tell her a thing or two and not let her get away with it.

What I pondered most about the movie, though, was not the selfishness of the mother, the hole she was digging for herself primarily with her own inability to solve the problem she so desperately wanted to solve and the inevitable self-destruction that would escalate severely after her daughter died. It was the scene towards the end when all the family are hanging together around Kate’s bedside and they’re telling her to think about her body killing the cancer cells, think of getting strong and healthy again and picturing a happy, healthy, and long life alive on this earth. The family kept telling her to promise them she’d think about becoming healthy.

Being positive is a positive thing. But is being realistic, or even negative, a negative thing?

Oooh, a conundrum! And elitists the world over like to call Conservative Christians so very black and white in their small minds.

Well, this small mind is fairly crackling over the profundities of that conundrum.

Looking at Sara, the mother, we see an unhealthily positive woman. She was so very certain her daughter would live. She’d been driving her entire life and her family’s life, and anybody else she could get to orbit around her with this singular focus for 14 years. Her steadfast focus was a good thing in the beginning. It is important when beginning a fight to have hope and a high aim driving us. But as the fight wears on, even the wise become careful in their aims.

When Aragorn, after the battle of Pellenor Fields, considers the necessity of a distracting engagement at the very Black Gates of Mordor, he has no false hope of the potential success of this expedition. In a story characterized by great and lofty hope, the scene is singularly grim. Their doom is certain. The hearty heroes knew each of their own lives were secondary to the survival of the race of men free of Sauron’s bile, and then entertained no vain assumptions of their own longevity. In that last desperate moment the driving force was necessity and gritty determination rather hope for success.

Barbara Ehrenreich has a new book out about the perils of positive thinking. Emily Wilson, on AlterNet explains an important difference:

Positive thinking is different, she says, from being cheerful or good-natured — it’s believing that the world is shaped by our wants and desires and that by focusing on the good, the bad ceases to exist.

Focusing on the unattainable, when we know it is unattainable, is unhealthy. Focusing on the realistic future and making the best of it is very healthy. If that future is dire, go to it with a song and a good friend.

But I don’t want to just critique the destructive and desperate mother and her dangerous desires, I want to talk about those awkward relatives in the hospital room trying to make light of these few fleeting and final hours.

I have not expertise in this matter. Only a few close friends of mine have died, but I was not at any of their bedsides. Grandparents have passed on, but, unfortunately, in each case I wasn’t really close to them at the time of death and I was not at any of their bedsides either.

But it seems to me that, were I dying and it was obvious the end was soon, I’d prefer people to be honest about it, not dwelling on that fact, but not avoiding it awkwardly.

Obviously, the religious beliefs of the involved people would have a significant impact on the available subjects. If I were the one dying, I’d appreciate people being hopeful in the Christian sense. Appreciating a life lived for God and speculating on what I’d see after I’d shuffled off this mortal coil. If at the bedside of a dying Christian, I’d want to exude that hope as an encouragement to others in the room.

If I were at the bedside of an unsaved person dying, I’d want to capitalize on those last few moments to ensure they were aware, so far as I was able, of the true nature of life, it’s purpose, and the true God.

In all cases I’d want to make memories and recall old memories. The dying do not need new memories, they are for the living. There will be plenty of time for crying after the dying are gone, they’ve probably already shed their tears and would probably be happy for a pleasant escape. Save the funeral until after they’re gone.

As a Christian I have a powerful hope that carries me through (not above) any struggle. I know the worst that can occur is that I lose this paltry, meager, and short life here on this earth. Once it’s gone, it’s gone, and good riddance. I want heaven and real, true, immediate fellowship with my God and Savior and all those who have gone before. Matt Kelly still has to teach me how to shave with a straight blade.

So death for me is just a doorway, a passage. Like the passage around Cape Horn it is difficult and often fraught with pain and heartache. And like the passage around Cape Horn it is soon over.

So what would I say to a dying person?

I don’t know. I feel all I have here is a list of do’s and don’ts. Guidelines, more like.

One thing’s for sure, I won’t be talking about how the human mind can will the body to health. Medicine does that, and God does.

So what would you say to a dying person? Or even better, what have you said to a dying person?

The Swine Flu Virus

The internet is a great enemy of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt), and there have been many things this year about which there is great FUD.

FUD is the friend of people who would abuse their power, because there is nothing quite like a good catastrophe to rationalize sweeping change. People who live in FUD are enablers and empower the abuses of those who lead by them.

One of the great fears this year is Swine Flu. It was the end of civilization, the plague that would wreak havoc on our society and it’s systems.

There was breathless analysis of how our society would plug the gaping holes left by the multitudes of sick and dead from this beastly flu.

And now we’re quite sure it’s not really all that bad.

When the fall/winter wave of H1N1 swine flu is over, it will have been no more severe than an average flu season, predict Harvard researcher Marc Lipsitch, DPhil, and colleagues from the U.K. Medical Research Council and the CDC. (from WebMD)

Why were we afraid?

Sure, H1N1, the “swine flu”, tends to affect people traditionally considered low risk for such illnesses. But it’s fatality rate wasn’t anything worrisome once it came down to it.

We were afraid because we didn’t have all the information, and the information we did have told us we ought to be afraid. The media and faux-news outlets so many of us go to for information had bought into the hysteria and spread it as only they can.

WebMD goes on:

Even so, the new numbers are cause for relief if not for celebration. Before the 2009 H1N1 swine flu came along, planners were preparing for a pandemic with a case/fatality ratio of 0.1% — that is, for one death in every 1,000 symptomatic infections.

The Lipsitch team now calculates that the H1N1 swine flu has a case/fatality ratio no higher than 0.048% — and maybe seven to nine times lower, depending on the methods used for calculation.

They are careful to note, though, that should any number of various circumstances occur, the fatality rate will shoot skyward and civilization will be, once again, toast.

The Lipsitch team has reason to want as much FUD surrounding this subject as possible. If the situation is dire and they can convince those who control the purse strings their research is integral to the salvation of humanity, they get more money.

Once the numbers could no longer be inflated, they had to retain their credibility and so gave this nice update. But see how throughout the story they always match the good news with a “but” to keep us ever aware of the necessity for remaining ready for panic.

I’m glad that, even if the swine flu begins to fulfill all the awful claims made of it, I still don’t have to fear.

Because while the internet is a great enemy of FUD, God’s faithfulness is the greatest enemy of FUD. Trust in God does not defeat FUD by simply informing us of the truth of the matter. If that were the case then in times of truly realized terror, Christians would have just as much reason to be terrified as anyone else.

Trust in God defeats FUD because we who trust in Him know there is only so much that can be taken away from us. This world and all it contains can only harm our bodies, these mortal coils. And if the worst were to occur and we were to lose our lives, we would be alive, truly, in heaven with God.

If you believe this, there is truly nothing that can shake us or cause us to fear.

Where’re the headlines?

Interesting

Reason.org reports on a study published in October 2008 in the Journal of the American Medical Association which busts the balloon of “common knowledge” regarding who clogs emergency rooms and doesn’t pay.

Show of hands: who believes it is the uninsured who use a disproportionately high amount of medical care in US emergency rooms while paying a disproportionately low amount of their bills?

I did. In the face of a lack of public evidence to the contrary and because it sounds plausible. It passed the “stink” test.

Well, it’s deodorant is wearing out and the reek of the rotted corpse is becoming harder and harder to conceal.

(R)esearchers at the University of Michigan … concluded that “available data do not support assumptions that uninsured patients are a primary cause of overcrowding, present with less acute conditions than insured patients, or seek [emergency room] care primarily for convenience.”

(P)atients with public insurance, such as Medicaid and Medicare, are more likely to crowd into emergency rooms for minor complaints than are the uninsured. Only about 17 percent of E.R. visits in the United States in the last year studied were by uninsured patients, about the same as their share of the population.

Additionally:

A 2007 study in the Annals of Emergency Medicine looked at charges and payments for 43,128 emergency department visits between 1996 and 2004. “What surprised us was that uninsured patients actually pay a higher proportion of their emergency department charges than Medicaid does,” reported co-author Reneé Hsia, a specialist in emergency medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. “In fact, 35 percent of charges for uninsured visits were paid in 2004, compared with 33 percent for Medicaid visits.”

Read the whole story here.

In other words, it’s the people already on that paradigm of balanced care, the public option, that are the dead weight on the system. They are leeches. They suck eagerly at the public teat like so many thirty-year-old, basement dwelling, XBox playing nerds living off their own mother’s inability to to force their children to grow up.

In nature the parent birds push their own children out of their nest in a fly or fall choice.

We humans have compassion and a sign of a healthy society is more likely found in their care for their poor rather than the lack of the poor. But to forcibly take from the productive members of society and play the enabler to the myriad sponges found around every willing and leaky faucet is not to help but to kill.

“Where are the headlines?”  a friend asked.

With the wonder of the internet and the example of Big Government and the slaying of the beast ACORN in recent weeks, we must embrace this truth about a fundamental change in our society: we are the 4th estate.

Each and every one of us have the power, through viral spreading of messages through the networks of facebook and youtube and twitter, myspace and orkut, blogs and the wider web, to build a story, however under-reported in the mainstream media, into a tsunami which cannot be ignored by those we’ve sent to do our bidding in DC and statehouses across this nation.

Are you doing your part in this brave new world?

Government Is Big

Bringing home the glory in the Duh! category today, the Washington Post, reporting on Obama’s Executive Order mandating federal agencies monitor and decrease their greenhouse emissions and environmental footprint, noted the government is big.

Administration officials said they could not estimate the federal government’s carbon footprint, since it has never been measured before, but the government ranks as the nation’s largest energy consumer. It occupies nearly 500,000 buildings, operates more than 600,000 vehicles and employs more than 1.8 million civilian workers.

Read the whole story here.

Very big.

500,000 buildings?

Five Hundred-Thousand buildings?

What in heaven’s name have we allowed the government to do in order to meet our needs for an accountable system of government?

I feel like Frankenstein’s creator: “It’s ALIIIIVE!”.

And well I should. After all, as an involved member of this greatest nation on God’s green earth I’m one who votes and talks, exercising the rights guaranteed by a Constitution won with the blood of thousands and defended by the blood of millions. And therefore I’m responsible, maybe not for the problem directly, but for the solution certainly.

I’m not one to get into the whole green thing. The clerk at Bed, Bath & Beyond said she wanted to use the bamboo kitchen utensils I was checking out because she’d heard they were more environmentally friendly. I told her I used them because they work better than regular wood utensils, nothing green about it.

But here’s something real greens and conservatives and concerned citizens across the country can all get behind: cut back on the footprint of the government by cutting back on the government.

In a galaxy far, far away…

…where President Obama lives. He was joined recently by the members of the Nobel Prize Committee.  It’s probably more true to say they’ve been there all along, considering who they like to reward.

But breaking information regarding the nature of that world has come to light courtesy of a small, fuzzy friend”

The Real Winner

Ironic Surrealism has the lowdown on the real winner of the Nobel Peace Prize:

The real Peace Prize winner.

In case you had trouble guessing: I like businesses.

If there weren’t business there wouldn’t be internet, iphones, cars, bicycles, buildings, tents, sleeping bags, fresh produce in the middle of winter, heat and A/C, in cars too, hospitals, medication, surgery…

You get the picture.

We’ve had government since the beginning of time, and it hasn’t done a thing directly to benefit or develop beneficent products and services (except nuclear energy and other war-related items).

We’ve also had businesses since the first person decided he’d rather spread and grow his wealth instead of laboring over the same rows in the same farm for his own families sustenance.

Chipotle is an excellent example of a good business.

Our wealth allows us to pay premium price for food raised and prepared in a reasonably environmentally conscious and sustainable manner.

And it tastes good, too.

Walmart is not too different from Chipotle.

The monstrous store chain that’s easy to hate until we need cheap razer blades and jeans and socks and hand towels and garbage can liners. Then everybody loves it.

Except the unions, who are never going to love Walmart until it caves to their regressive and stiflingly stupid and anti free market strong man tactics and effects.

I pray Walmart never does, and for good reason.

When Walmart enters an area, consumers win as the often cheaper prices at Walmart “encourage” the other stores to moderate their own prices.

The prices are not always better, but they are better enough of the time and for enough products to justify the crowds you normally find at these supercenters.

Does Walmart Save You Money? (read the comments, many people report savings in the $1000′s each year while others disagree with their perception of the business practices)

But enough about prices already, Walmart benefits your health!

Huh?

Indeed, studies are showing that people living near a Walmart or “club store” (Costco, Sam’s Club, etc) are lighter on average.

But don’t all the fat and ugly people shop at Walmart? No, it’s just the ugly people and me.

In an article published in Forbes Magazine, Art Carden, an Professor of Economics at Rhodes College in Memphis TN, reports on studies showing that the increased buying power people experience when benefiting from the Walmart effect has a direct and close correlation to the health of those people.

There are several reasons this may be, and the why or how is always a bit murkier than fact of correlation, but all of the possibilities enjoy sound economic sense.

Those benefiting most from the Walmart affect are…

…women, the poor, African-Americans and people who live in urban areas.

The arguments as to why and how and many, as I noted earlier, and some may find them difficult. Read it a few times if necessary.

Our evidence is indirect, but we think it shows that price changes can have subtle and sometimes hard-to-detect consequences. Any change in price results in two phenomena. The first is the substitution effect: a change in consumption mix due to a change in relative prices. If a bag of salad is $2 and a bag of potato chips is $1, then the price of salad in terms of chips is two bags and the price of a bag of chips is half a bag of salad. If a Wal-Mart opens and reduces the price of salad to $1 a bag and the price of chips to 75 cents a bag, the “salad price” of chips has risen (from 1TK2 bag to 3TK4 bag) and the “chip price” of salad has fallen from 2 bags to 4TK3 bags. In short, salad has become cheaper relative to chips.

This argument is based on basic price comparison. If the salad cost 2 times what chips cost before Walmart,  Jack and Jill are more likely to buy the salad now because it only costs 1.3 times more than the chips now.

Then there is the income effect:

If Wal-Mart sells food at lower prices–even if our incomes don’t change–every dollar can buy more. Therefore, we’re richer.

The crux of their findings is that people, when given a choice and a suitable price range, will purchase healthier foods.

Our data suggest that we buy healthier food when our purchasing power increases. There is a small increase in consumption of fruit and vegetables in places where Wal-Mart does a lot of business and a decrease–or smaller increase–in fatty food consumption relative to places where Wal-Mart doesn’t do business. That is, people might consume more fatty foods, but consumption of those unhealthy goods increases more slowly than it does for the rest of the population.

There are other facts, findings, and arguments in the article. I urge you to read the whole thing: Wal-Mart’s Weight Effect.

The point is, don’t be too quick to denigrate or disparage the current state of our free martket system.

It’s not always pretty, and it’s easy to find fault.

However, compared with any other system out there, capitalism and the free market are the best at providing escalating levels of service and product to the most people most equitably and with the least amount of downside.

It’s been proven time and again, yet we in America now are dangerously close to forgetting completely, if we haven’t already.

The free market and capitalism isn’t about the blind, mindless pursuit of money at all costs, that’s anarchy.

Free markets and capitalism are about working in tandem with those around us to maximize our return by providing the best service or product to others. It’s a mutually beneficial system.

And we’re in danger of throwing it away.

Add this to the heaping mountain of evidence against the Government controlling anything:

In Network World magazine issue May 4th, 2009 (hardly the political rag), Johna Till Johnson writes “Of subways, gov’t subsidies and broadband“. She begins with a question posed, by implication, from a friend of hers:

“Governments do a good job running subways — so why not the Internet”

Johna opens the pages of history showing that the New York City public transportation systems began as private enterprises operating for profit.

There were three independent companies competing for fares and riders.

Innovation and growth were paramount and service was excellent.

The entire system was flash-frozen, as it were, by the stock market crash of 1929. The for-profit systems went bankrupt and the city bought them all out.

The subway map circa 2009 is extremely similar to the subway map of 1924.

Since the government takeover, without competition, innovation and growth haven’t occured. At all.

(M)illions of folks who live and work in New York have had access to a more-or-less reliable, more-or-less affordable form of transportation for the past 80 years.

But prices have risen, ridership has stagnated, and there is no such thing as a realistic or even probable plan for further development.

Johna is talking about the government taking over the internet:

Sanford-Bernstein’s Craig Moffatt’s conclusion? “Broadband is today’s transportation grid. … The story of the subways highlights the fundamental trade-offs between competition – and its inherent sloppiness and redundancy – and nationalization (or, in this case, municipalization), with its inherent stagnation.”

But what about medicine and healthcare? With the government controlling all healthcare costs, it will control all medicine, period.

The greatest strength in American medicine is it’s relentless and constant innovation.

With government control we may have relatively reliable (or at least an expected level of non-service) medical care for existing conditions.

But what about future conditions?

What about the disease little Johnny is supposed to find the cure for in 50 years?

With government control the urge to control all but the corrupted costs will be as relentless as the innovation is today, and Johnny will be told his medical research isn’t cost-effective.

And the conditions we currently consider untreatable but with promising new developments may soon be, will be simply: untreatable.

Government does not fix things, it breaks things.

Government doesn’t innovate, it retrogrades.

Government doesn’t manage, it controls.

Nothing government controls ever flourishes, besides itself.