Here's a death calculator site that will give you a rough idea of when you're checking out. When you enter your basic information, you will also be given a bit of code to proudly display your expected date of death.
Cool. Now that I know when I'm going to die, I can plan the remainder of my life. In my case, though, 20 years doesn't sound to be much time remaining.
We buried my best friend yesterday. I had known Joe since first grade. He was a believer. I am not. We've had many lively debates over the years and our differences of opinion never affected our friendship. Joe died from neglect. He neglected his own health in favor of taking care of his family which consisted of an aging father, a somewhat schizophrenic brother and his ten year old niece who he had adopted after his sister died of cancer while the child's father was in prison. Six years ago I warned Joe, who was overweight, that in order to take care of his family he must first take care of himself. He needed to start to eat right and exercise. I did this for selfish reasons, I told him. I didn't want to lose my best friend. Selfless as he was, he didn't take my advice. A few years later he developed diabetes and eventually lost a leg. This was his wake-up call, he told me. Everything is going to change, he said, for the sake of the people that were in his care, especially the little girl with no mother. [More . . . ]
Just when I thought that the streets were getting safe, I spotted this ominous-looking van in front of the office building where I work:
Talk about attractive nuisance! Notice the growing line of docile people above, each of them helpless to resist the temptation of the active ingredient one finds in cupcakes, C12H22O11. Check out the mountain of icing towering over the cupcake pictured on the side of the van. Talk about superstimulus! "Three dollars per cupcake," said the cheerful woman working in the back of the truck. She insisted that her cupcakes were "made with love."
Maybe so, but this is a product that will make a lot of people fat. 65% of Americans are overweight as it is. These cupcake trucks, if allowed to roam freely, would probably kick that percentage up to 95%. We just can't allow that to happen, but how could one stop it?
My first reaction was that these cupcake trucks should be made illegal. But then I took a deep breath and pondered the long-term situation. If we made cupcakes illegal, then people would start selling them in 
dark alleys, and even in the proximity of schools. And then gangs would spring up to defend their respective turfs in the cupcake street wars. Teenagers would start running cupcakes for the young adult pushers. Police would be chasing cupcake dealers from one end of the city to the other. Families would be broken up as parents were caught dealing in cake. People would be hurt. Some people would die ignominious street deaths, shot to pieces by cupcake gang members bearing AK-47s. Prisons would become crammed even more than they currently are. New social programs would need to be created to deal with the cupcake eating underclass. Some kids would see their schoolwork suffer as they abandoned their homework, their shopping malls and their Wii's and, instead, sat around and obsessed about their next hit of cupcake.
The attempt to enforce new anti-cupcake laws would jack up the cost of the cupcakes, and the quality of the product would diminish--disreputable dealers would cheat customers by putting less icing on top. Innocent obese people would suffer withdrawal symptoms. Cops would increasingly crack down on peddlers, and the local news would feature pallets full of seized cupcakes that would start disappearing as soon as the hit the "safe" confines of the police evidence lockers.
As much as I'd like to put a stop to this new temptation, the best way to deal with these cupcake pushers is public education. We need billboards, Internet ads and television spots informing people that cupcakes do not taste good. We need to educate people that if they see one of these vans along the street, that they need to keep looking straight forward and walk on by, paying no heed to the amoral peddler within.
I saw a very brief and hurried post from ERV on ScienceBlogs. In it, she noted that organic farmers let their animals die from treatable diseases, because to do otherwise would deny them the valuable 'organic' label. WTF? In Europe, organic livestock MUST be treated humanely, and may receive therapeutic medication (including antibiotics) - to do otherwise is a complete denial of everything science and medicine has learned in the past three hundred years. But, apparently, that's what Organic means in the US! As ERV says
'Organic' farmers? All concerned about their free-range, cage-free, at harmony with the Mother Goddess animals? They let their fucking animals die from treatable diseases, because if they treat them with even one dose of antibiotics, the animals are no longer 'organic'.She quotes Ronnie Cummins, National Director of the Organic Consumers Association
Allowing one-time therapeutic antibiotics is "a slippery slope", and would "undermine consumer confidence in organics. It's the same position [I have] as on human vaccines. They are dangerous, and that's why I didn't vaccinate my kid."Never mind the epic FAIL in Ronnie Cummin's statement about the dangers of vaccines - that woo is worthy of a post all by itself! The issue is that animals are allowed to die, often painfully, from completely preventable and treatable diseases. Why is this so? ERV linked to her source (this article at the blog "In These Times"). According to that article,
Department of Agriculture (USDA) regulations defining organic standards mandate that if [a] calf had gotten one dose of antibiotics, even to save her life, she could never give organic milk—even after the two years it takes for her to become a milker, and even though neither she nor her milk would retain any trace of antibiotics.So why would the USDA have such nonsensical standards for 'organic'?
How many times will it take for the consumer to wake up? Back in May, I wrote a post about the generally dismal state of regulation in matters of food safety, which allows large producers all the slack in the world at the expense of the consumer. I wish I could say that the state of affairs had changed dramatically in the meantime, but the current recall of over half a billion eggs reveals that nothing has changed.
