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Reaching for his wallet, wounds four.
More guns. For safety.
Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
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Tuesday, July 24th, 2012Why the Obesity Epidemic? My 3-Part EXPRESS Explanation
Wednesday, July 11th, 2012Many have been puzzled over this. Well, it is becoming clear. Here is my express explanation, in three easy steps.
These three things came together:
- A guy at the University of Minnesota (the inventor of the K-Ration) made a persuasive–but incorrect!–argument: the cholesterol clogging our arteries is caused by eating cholesterol. Seems reasonable. Instead of meat–and particularly animal fats–he told us we should eat carbohydrates. If we must have butter, have margarine instead. If we want lard, have Crisco instead. Turns out this was all very wrong. Large quantities of refined starches, and particularly refined sugar, are very bad for us.
- President Nixon and Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz changed US agricultural policy to encourage grain production, particularly corn production.
- Industrialization reached its logical conclusion. This aspect is two part:
First, industrial food was invented. (“Industrial food”, isn’t that an oxymoron?) Clever people looked for something to do with all that cheap corn. We don’t prepare our own food anymore so we don’t what we are eating. Notably, high fructose corn sugar was invented, and was cheap.
Second, we don’t labor anymore, electric motors and internal combustion engines do our physical work, and most of us are now sedentary. But we are a species designed to move; getting a lot of exercise will forgive a lot of sins. For example, a bike messenger is not going to become obese and get type 2 diabetes, no matter what s/he eats. Heart disease, maybe, but not obese. Unfortunately very few of us are bike messengers. Some of us go to the gym, but we drive to the gym, when we get around to it.
That’s it. Yes, there are other factors (for example, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle set us up to want to believe the worst about meat, and particularly lard), but those three factors were sufficient. Don’t believe me (as you reach for your non-fat, fructose sweetened yogurt). Start investigating, maybe Google some of the tags attached to this post.
-kb, the Kent who resents that he was lied to when assured that a big plate of pasta is a healthful meal.
Nothing Wrong with Being Colored
Friday, June 22nd, 2012There is nothing wrong with being colored. I don’t think so at least, it was a polite term, but I guess I am wrong, because we had to change the name.
There is nothing wrong with bring Negro. Martin Luther King was a Negro. But what do I know? We had to change the name.
There is nothing wrong with being black. Right? But, again, I am just little me, and we seem to be suffering over changing the name again.
There is nothing wrong with being African American. Oh, but I might be mistaken here, too.
There is nothing wrong with being a person of color. Right? We’ll see.
Why the name changes?
Actually, there is something wrong with being in a group that has to keep changing its name. If merely using a name for a few years makes it tarnished, there is a problem.
Conversely, you can tell when a group has arrived and is comfortable with its circumstance: when it quits changing its name. The fact that we are being a bit sluggish in these last two name changes is a good sign. Maybe we are finally coming out from the shadow of that horrible crime of slavery. It clearly isn’t behind us, but maybe this is the beginning of the end of slavery.
I am an optimist.
Hollywood has the term “magic negro”, but how much magic do we expect from this mortal man Obama?
Thursday, May 3rd, 2012I heard on news this morning about reactionaries doing well in Greece, and I remember to note the general swing to the right in Europe: this is valuable perspective.
Obama has been very disappointing to those on the left, but remember the environment he is in. Who in the world has resisted swinging way right in this environment? Mostly everyone is charging right. At least Obama is resisting. And he is resisting.
While I am defending the man, remember another disadvantage he has. Not only did George II destroy both our government’s and our country’s finances, and not only did he try to make most of the world hate us…
He also did a damn good job of gutting the federal work force. Good people were driven out, quit, and retired. Rightist incompetents were hired at every opportunity. The people Obama has under his employ include a lot of terrible people who want to do bad things, people who are dolts and crooks. People who now have civil service protections.
When Obama’s history is written his work to rebuild the basic functioning of our government will be a big item.
I am looking forward to reading It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, just out by Thomas E. Mann (Brookings) and Norman J. Ornstein (American Enterprise Institute). There is an argument that Washington is not its most broken ever, that it was more broken just before the US civil war. Wow, what a low bar. Just before the war where we killed 700,000-plus fellow Americans, we were worse off than we are now. We are in a very bad place. My mother is right about that.
Hollywood has the term “magic negro” for a swath of characters with mystical powers, but how much magic do we expect from this mortal who is badly constrained by a reality that is trying to crush him and our country? He is doing one hell of a good job.
-kb
©2012 Kent Borg
Healthful Diet: A Too-Simple Summary
Monday, August 15th, 2011Everyone else pontificates on what we should eat, why can’t I?
Two big points, A and B.
A. Only eat food that is made of … food!
This means don’t eat junk food.
This also means don’t eat most convenience foods. If you look in the freezer case at the grocery store there will be frozen vegetables there and they are good for you. Nearly everything else in the freezer is bad for you. If the frozen broccoli is made of stuff that isn’t broccoli, don’t eat it. If you can’t pronounce the ingredients, don’t eat it. If the ingredients include a lot of salt or sugar or long words that you don’t know the meaning of, don’t eat it. If it even has a long list of ingredients, be suspicious. The word “hydrogenated” means don’t eat it.
If eating out, don’t eat fast food. This doesn’t just mean don’t go to McDonalds, it means don’t go to restaurants that can’t convince you their food is made of food.
B. Eat stuff that is good for you. This second big point has three sub-points.
- Fundamentals, remember what your grandmother told you. Eat your vegetables, eat real fruit, don’t eat too much salt (okay to sprinkle on top at the table, not okay to spoon in during cooking). Deep fried foods should be eaten in moderation. Desserts and other “treats” should be eaten in moderation. Organic is good (one can tell how much someone eats organic food by measuring how much pesticide is in their blood). Maybe don’t eat animal products that are too industrial in how they are raised and processed.
- Don’t eat so much sugar. This includes not eating so much potatoes because they rapidly turn into sugar in your body. Same with white bread, white rice, and other refined starches. After too many years of eating too much pure starch and sugar one can easily end up with “adult onset diabetes”. Lately we have gotten so efficient at this that kids now get “adult onset diabetes”, so they had to change the name to “type 2 diabetes”. Refined carbohydrates are dangerous, go for hearty whole-grain. (If bread is colored brown but is still as soft as Wonderbread, don’t eat it.)
- Don’t eat so much corn. Back in the ’70s the US federal government changed agricultural policy to encourage lots of grain production (alas, not fruits and vegetables), and this has mainly meant every year we produce mountains of corn. And the food industry has been working hard to figure out how to get us to eat it ever since. The kind of corn we are talking about here is not sweet, but they have an industrial process to convert the corn starch to “high fructose corn syrup”: don’t eat it. Junk food is loaded with corn. Somewhat hidden is “corn fed beef”. Beef cattle have spent many thousands of years figuring out how to digest grass. It is an impressive feat, and they have done it! They will even wander around and harvest the grass they eat. So what do we do? We put then in packed corrals where they can’t much move, and we feed them trucked in corn. Then we slaughter them young, before their health gives out, because they are not designed to eat corn and it makes them sick. Eat local grass-fed beef, it tastes better, is safer, better for you, better for the planet, better for the cattle.
Unfortunately, if you put all this together, it means you that if you are stuck in an airport waiting for your next plane…there is little to eat. If you are at the mall…there is maybe nothing to eat. If you are at a convenience store…there is very little to eat.
Shop at real supermarkets, go to a local farmers’ market if there is one near you. Pack a lunch. Support restaurants that try to serve food that is made of … food.
-kb, the Kent who is eats better than he used to, and who even gets some exercise.
©2011 Kent Borg
Bitching about the Obama economy is like telling Captain Sully: “The Hudson was the wrong destination! And why am I all wet!?”
Friday, June 3rd, 2011Our economy nearly died, and you are griping about it being too sluggish?
We almost had to rename the Great Depression!
World War One got renamed. It started out as The Great War, the “war to end all wars”. But a few years later we had an even bigger war, and we had to rename it. It became “World War One”.
Well, we almost had to rename the “Great Depression” to the “First Great Depression”.
It was that bad. Instead we only call it the “Great Recession”.
Consider:
- The port of LA/Long Beach. It is the busiest port in the US, and it came to a near halt. Cars that were already on ships when the crash hit arrived, but had no place to go when dealerships couldn’t afford them, they accumulated. One of our biggest exports through that port also stopped: cardboard. Recycling was a problem when it backed up. (Did you know that recycled cardboard is a significant export from the US to China? They ship us TVs and we ship them the empty boxes.) Normally there have terrible air pollution there, with all the trucks moving freight back and forth, in and out. But the port mostly stopped. The air cleared. Prices to ship goods (such as Baltic Dry Index) plunged because nothing was moving.
- The “TED Spread” shot up to scary levels. That is, the difference between the interest the US government must pay to borrow money and what big banks charge each other. Normally, big banks get almost as good a deal as does the USA and the TED spread is well under a half percent. But in 2008 it shot up to over 4.5%. Banks were unwilling to lend each other money at a good rate because they knew the others were at risk of going out of business.
- The “commercial paper market” stopped. Much of the economy runs by big companies borrowing and lending money back and forth, for short periods of time, at low interest rates. That all stopped. You might remember GE (normally an extremely good credit risk) had to get a big loan from Warren Buffet because it couldn’t borrow money anywhere else. If GE can’t borrow money, the economy is badly broken.
That has all changed. All the “bailouts” that people complain about saved our sorry butts. Heck, the US auto industry is making a profit now. The maligned TARP program even made money for the US government! That’s right, TARP was profitable.
No one bitched that Sully didn’t get them there on time, so quit bitching that the recovery from this recession is too slow.
Our economy almost lost it. We are damn lucky we aren’t in breadlines still in 2011. Instead, our economy is growing. Painfully slowly, but it is growing. Be grateful.
-kb, the Kent who is glad he has a job when so many do not.
©2011 Kent Borg