Friday, March 02, 2012



New York City hates food. That's the only conclusion you can draw from attempts to reduce salt by law, ban cooking with certain fats that enhance flavor, and health grading systems that demolish proper food preparation:
Certain foods, like terrines and cheese, should be served at room temperature for the best flavor. But this is either prohibited or, in the case of cheese, subject to onerous requirements.
Cheese isn’t the only problem area. Pork is supposed to be cooked to 165 degrees (twenty degrees higher than the USDA guideline!) unless the customer specifically requests otherwise. I’ll save you the trouble of investigating: a 165 degree pork chop is terrible. It will be dried out and unpleasant. At home, I cook mine to 140.

Restaurants also aren’t allowed to let steaks come up to room temperature before cooking them—which leads to them cooking too heavily on the outside before reaching the desired internal temperature.
The truth is, food is about flavor, quality, texture, and presentation as well as nutrition and if you destroy those previous elements, you're basically forcing people to eat dry bread and stale water for meals. All because some bureaucrat or lawyer thinks they know better than a chef about cooking. For the good of us all.

Nevaeh Sansone drew a picture of a man holding a gun in her kindergarden class in Kitchener, Ontario. The four-year-old said the picture was of her father defeating monsters and bad guys. Instead of being proud of a girl who loves and respects her father so much, the school called the police. The police arrested the father and strip searched him. He was charged with possession of a firearm which even in Canada isn't actually illegal. His kids were taken to Family Services and interrogated about dad. The family is looking for a new school to put their kids into, and should be looking for a good lawyer.

Andrew Breitbart's death has stirred up the hateful filth on the left to shower spite and glee at his family. To them he's just an enemy who died, whether he was right or not simply is irrelevant. Others are examining his life and influence, such as Nick Gillespie at CNN who admits that Breitbart changed news through Drudge and his other work. Byron York notes that Breitbart took the fight to the culture and won over and over again, changing the entire perception of the right and of legacy news media. Jonah Goldberg wrote about how Andrew Breitbart treated the usual attacks on the right (homophobia, racist, sexist, etc) with contempt and destroyed their claims. Glenn Reynolds notes that he peeled the mask back on the left and showed their utter lack of moral authority - and the left responded by proving him correct. And Joshua Treviño says "You wish to honor the man? Very well, take up his sword and fight like he did." Nobody but Andrew Breitbart can fight like he did, but we can each fight his fight in our own way.

Meanwhile Breitbart's target - the legacy media - has been suffering deeply in recent years. They did it largely to themselves through arrogance, greed, bias, and sloth, but the fact is, the newspaper is 19th century technology and eventually it was always going to diminish. Its just happening this fast:

Newspaper ad revenue
Which has taken a lot of people in the business by surprise. Mark Perry at Carpe Diem writes:
Ads were great when Clinton left office. Now they can barely sell enough to print.
Inflation is officially just over 3% but the truth is, prices are going up significantly more than that. Its not at the double digit level like it was in the great depression and Carter recession, but its close in a lot of areas. The "Everyday Price Index" looks not at the overall economic picture and wholesale, but at the kinds of goods ordinary people buy on a regular basis. And that index is around 8% inflation. That's why you've noticed a lot more inflation than the government admits to. Why the discrepancy? Energy and food prices are specifically excluded from the official inflation numbers. What are two of your biggest budget outlays? Energy and food.

Meanwhile, only 54% of young adults in America are at work. It doesn't matter how many drop off the official work numbers, producing promising seeming data, when 46% of your 18-26 year olds cannot find work, that bodes incredibly ill for your future.

Ten years ago we were told ANWR wouldn't produce fuel for 10 years, so congress blocked it and pundits mocked the idea. Well here we are ten years later with $4 a gallon gas, and it probably would help us to have that fuel. This is something so bitterly funny that even Jay Leno picked it up on the Tonight Show.

Michael Barone found a hilarious correction at the New York Times today; here's the full correction:
In other words: we weren't just wrong, but told the opposite of the truth, and knew it. But people read headlines, they almost never read corrections.

When those kids show up asking you to buy candy bars, magazine subscriptions, and so on, have you ever wondered where the money goes? Well at Elgin Middle School it went into a fund used to buy food and throw parties for the faculty.
According to a KXAN investigation, thousands of dollars from the fund were spent by Middle School Principal Riza Cooper on her staff for breakfast tacos, doughnuts, barbecue lunches and other meals. KXAN examined volumes of documents obtained though an Open Records Request, and interviews with school district officials and parents in the course of the investigation.

“It was constant food, food, food,” said parent Kim Henze, who reviewed some of the expenses. “And when you looked at the receipts, it was almost all food.”
And a lot of the stuff that wasn't food went to things like charcoal briquettes to grill food. Why the fundraisers to begin with, don't they get millions of dollars a year in tax money?

Another bureaucratic nightmare has risen at British public services. I've written about how firemen couldn't put out a fire due to rules in the past, well this time its about the police and how rules stopped them. Ian Gallagher and Matt sandy Write at the Daily Mail:

And, even worse, it turns out they misinterpreted the rules, meant for fast moving water and floods. When the cops and rescue workers won't do the job because of rules, what do you do? Handle it yourself. Unless you've grown up generation after generation in a society which has been carefully trained to abandon personal responsibility and ambition, handing it all over to the state.

This is all over the internet, but it bears repeating: the Obama administration has no plan or interest in lower gas prices. This isn't my opinion, it is official policy, told to the United States Congress by the Secretary of Energy, Steven "gas needs to cost more" Chu. The scheme is to wean the US off oil, but there's nothing to replace it so all you do with this policy is make people miserable, reduce quality of life, and drive up prices. How much have you given up to make way for rising gas prices?

Anonymous is a band of hackers and perverts who hang out on 4chan and trade illegal files while calling each other fags. They dress up in Guy Fawkes' masks and protest groups they dislike, but mostly they commit internet crimes, like shutting down government offices in retaliation for the shutdown of one of their favorite file sharing sites, Megaupload. Well Interpol swept down and picked up 25 members of "Anonymous" suspected of hacking. Lets see how cool you feel in prison with Bruno and Bubba as cellmates.

Profiling is considered an evil thing by many people, despite its obvious and continually used crime fighting value. To not look more closely at people most associated with given criminal activity isn't fair or tolerant, its idiotic. And useful to the criminals. But profiling still happens. LinkTake pretty girls, for instance. In Dallas Texas, TSA workers pulled a "cute" mom out of line and body scanned her three times all the while complimenting her on her body while looking at the clothing-penetration image. Oh, but we're so much safer now that the government is on the job.

This image was all over the internet this week, and its kind of funny, but mostly its useful for the 1% evil banker narrative:

Turns out the image has been slightly modified. Not much, just the bill was for 33.71, not 133.71. Oh, and the tip was $7, not $1.33 (get it? 1%? oooh). Oh yeah, and there was no note pointing at the tip. And obviously the total was photoshopped to be $100 more than it really was. But other than that, its totally legit.

The last typewriter company in the world has shut down. I learned to type on an IBM Selectric, with the little ball that spun around cleverly. I got one as a graduation gift to use in college, but a roommate spilled a can of Mello Yello into it and it was destroyed. If you could type fast on one of those, you were an amazing typist, because there was no backspace. Millions of books, articles, letters, and documents were written on typewriters in the 20th century. Few people even know how to use one these days.

Gloria Allred is a leftist who does activist and legal work. She's the go-to girl when you want to destroy a Republican candidate with allegations but no evidence or case, because she's great at running to the press and getting their ear. Recently she accidentally sent an email out to all her media contacts, and forgot to use blind carbon copy (BCC). There are 380 journalists on this list, and you can tell who is working with her in her activist efforts by the list. If you see a news story by someone on that list, take it with a grain of salt unless it is politically neutral. And probably even then.

David Brock runs Media Matters and it has been recently revealed that he paid a blackmailer almost $400,000 to hush him up. That's not a gigantic sum, but its a rather huge amount for the editor of a web page. The blackmailer apparently threatened to tell folks like Matt Drudge about his financial situation and lack of taxpaying, and given the response (Brock had to scrape deep to find the cash), it must have been something really damaging.

Attorney General Eric Holder claimed America was cowardly about race and called for a national dialog on the topic, as if it hasn't been discussed and dealt with for the last forty years or more in every conceivable forum. Well, apparently President Obama isn't interested in any racial reconciliation, because he's appealing to racism to win reelection:
African-Americans for Obama are urged to volunteer their time, making callings, organizing event, and encouraging their church friends to do the same.
And he flew many black NBA stars (at taxpayer expense) to the White House to fundraise and get them to help him win as well. Well vote like Sam Jackson I guess: vote based on physical appearance of race.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton isn't quite clear on the principles of diplomacy. She's going around telling people that if they question Obama's apology tour for the Koran burning incident, then they are to blame for violence and deaths in Afghanistan. I guess the whole screaming "dissent is patriotic" bit went away when she got the White House job.

Over 200 representatives, including 15 Democrats, are calling on the White House to roll back climate rules to save industry and help the economy. As the evidence against human-caused global warming piles up and the science moves away from 1990s era atmospheric science, people are having a harder time justifying supporting the destruction of the economy on a guess.

Looking at a map of where the 1% richest people in America live and work reveals something significant. America has 3033 counties, and the richest 15 have 10 concentrated in one particular area:

Which, if you think about it, makes sense; Washington DC is one of the few places in the western world which has been gaining jobs and growing economically in the last four years. Funny how the Occupy movement wants to target Wall Street instead of the capitol.

Democratic Party chair Debbie Wasserman-Shultz is typical of that party's chairmen over the years: abusive, insulting, idiotic, and radical. She's also attending a fundraiser hosted by a terrorist supporter on the federal government's terrorist watch list. The guy is named Kuruum Wahid, and he's a lawyer who specializes in defending terrorist suspects and al`Qaeda helpers. Just today, however, her spokesman tried to back out of it saying "oh we never planned on that."

General Motors has halted production on the Chevy Volt, having sold a fraction of their expected number and after having to recall many models. They also have laid off 1300 workers temporarily at least. February saw almost a doubling of purchases of the Volt, but that wasn't saying much: they sold 500 more units. And since GM is selling units to their dealers rather than loaning them until sold, its difficult to know how many are actually on the road. Putting it mildly since fewer than 8,000 have sold, you aren't likely to see one.

Finally, one picture which pretty much says it all without needing analysis: a comparison of GDP with debt in America over the years.

And that's the Word Around the Net for March 2, 2012. I can still see November from here.

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