has some meaning. How bizarre and distressing.
http://www.centralvalleybusinesstimes.com/stories/001/?id=6794
A Southern California couple is facing criminal charges after
allegedly being caught with 375 pounds of "bathtub" cheese at an
open-air market in San Bernardino County, the California Department of
Food and Agriculture says.
The illegal soft cheese products are known to cause serious illness
such as listeria, salmonella or E. coli.
Floribel Hernandez Cuenca, 29, and Manuel Martin Sanchez Garrido, 44,
of Montclair, were arrested for selling a variety of unlicensed
cheeses to the public. Ms. Cuenca was also arrested on felony cheese
making charges.
Also see the hatchet-job at this place (notice the cat-and-tub, when this cheese had NOTHING to do with bathtubs of any sort):
http://consumerist.com/consumer/cheese/california-police-seize-375-pounds-of-bathtub-cheese-315849.php
The comments in both places are pretty incredible; both on the bad and
good side. My favorite:
Is there any evidence that the cheese was ACTUALLY produced in a
bathtub? Or is that simply a nickname that implies it's disgusting?
How do you know they didn't actually make it in sterilized food-grade
5 gallon jugs? (And they probably did, actually, you don't want to
lose a batch of cheese to the bad bugs). It's all about trust -- do
you trust a huge megacorporation with bought-off FDA inspectors (e.g.
look at how many recalls of factory meat there have been in the last
couple years). Or do you trust a local producer who you see every week
at the market, and whose family may have been making cheese for
generations in Mexico? I have no idea about the specific details of
this case, but it's a judgment call you make every time you buy food.
Factory food isn't necessarily any safer than homemade food.
Someone else notes the connection between brown skin and the charges,
and wonders whether maple syrup or apple cider vendors in Connecticut
would receive the same treatment.
¶ 10:05 AM 1 Comments Links to this post
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/hogarth5.html
A selection:
Is it just me, or is true that there really is less talk of disarmament now than there was during the hottest days of the so-called Cold War? If no option is truly off the table, the presidential candidates should be rethinking the disarmament option. Imagine the world's utter astonishment if an American president or candidate for the presidency stood up and said loudly and clearly "Slaughtering innocents is off the table as an option as of now," and proceeded to dismantle the stockpiles of bombs and other weapons targeted primarily at civilians and their property.
¶ 6:37 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Shane K., will you be there?
At any rate, I thought I'd pass along a recent video, which, if not entirely libertarian, certainly has some lib elements. Well, it starts off with "Driving home from my meth lab..." and the money line is "Where's the Shadow Government when you nee-eed it?" so you can see where that might be headed...
Here's a link to the vid.
¶ 12:05 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
If you want to build a ship
don't herd people together to collect wood
and don't assign them tasks and work,
but rather teach them to long for the
endless immensity of the sea.
- Antoine-Marie-Roger de Saint-Exupery ¶ 3:32 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
phone camera makes low-light pics look like paint-by-number numbers. I
snapped this one of myself while grabbing lunch and enjoying the rain
in my car. ¶ 1:55 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/world/asia/23kyrgyzstan.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=world&pagewanted=print
What I found interesting was this bit about legislature-rigging which, after the past three weeks and two Fairs' worth of begging for 1-2 per cent of the number of signatures needed to get the LP on the ballot in NC, struck me as very applicable to our own state:
"If you take every individual factor separately, you can say that the jury is still out," said one Western political observer who was not authorized to speak publicly. "But take them all as a whole, the jury is in fact not out — the fix is in."
¶ 5:51 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
A selection from a recent letter to THE FREEMAN :
Thanks to Milton Friedman's brilliance, charisma and diplomacy he became an ardent spokesman for many free market reforms in this country. And now Ivan Pongracic, Jr. ("The Great Depression According to Milton Friedman," September 2007) gives him credit for convincing Fed officials that the Fed itself was responsible for precipitating the crash and the 1929-1933 monetary contractions that followed. But the contractions were only the spark that brought the boom to an end; the seeds of the depression itself were sown in the preceding boom.
Pongracic says Keynes had "rejected the view that the boom-bust cycle was due to over-expansive government monetary policy.... Keynes claimed that private investment is inherently unstable due to what he called the 'animal spirits' of businessmen/capitalists.... Like sheep that blindly follow other sheep in the herd, it is easy for businessmen to become 'irrationally exuberant." Friedman and Schwartz in their massive history of money apparently accepted that Keynesian explanation, at least in part -- attributing the stock-market crash of October 1929 to a "speculative investment bubble," the cause of which was "a somewhat controversial topic." But the cause of that "bubble," the seeds of the crisis, were actually inherent in the very principles on which the Fed was founded. ¶ 12:24 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
I worked remarkably few shifts at the state Fair LPNC Booth this year (3 shifts and a few drop-ins). And so far, no cold!!! w00t!!1! Great fireworks; eggplants less exciting than I expected, and the hay-judging much more so. LP-wise, met the same 'interesting' folks; the white supremicist, the guy from VA running as a write-in candidate for president (again; I met him in 04), the guy with the 'freeborn' children.... And plenty of more-or-less interesting 'normal' folks.
Here's a few of the 'poultries' (as we call them) hanging out in and around a holly in front of our house. And, yes, the porch pillar does need painting, thankyouvery much.
Labels: chickens
¶ 12:24 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
¶ 2:56 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Picture from Saturday's Baltimore Sun. It's part of an article on the farm she works for.
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/stories/2007/10/09/barred_1010.html
Good: He says that the U.S. government should "quell the simplistic
blustering by the White House and by many presidential candidates
designed to prove each will be tougher on Iran than the others."
Bad: He seems to be supporting interventionism and even economic
sanctions. "Should Washington simply sit back and leave Iran alone —
free to support terrorist groups and regimes in other countries,
including Iraq, and to develop a nuclear capability? Of course not."
and "Positive steps could include strengthening economic and political
pressure on Iran..."
Unfortunate that a high-profile Party member would actively advocate a
policy of political and economic interventionism.
"Whenever something passes that seems controversial, usually a few
years later even the people who were against it end up being proud of
it."
Doesn't that sum up the problem perfectly? If only a law - which is an
imposition on individual freedom - can once be passed, people will
just *get used to it* and even *enjoy it*. How to reverse that
process?
me that my 'participation' in such a primitive looting system implies
my acceptance of it is going to get a virtual bloody nose.
Odd thing: there were three signs for Raleigh City Council hopefuls
outside my polling place. That wouldn't be odd except that I am not IN
Raleigh, nor was the polling place. I guess those guys just had too
many signs and wanted to junk up my polling place.
As I drove through Cary on my way home, I saw signs saying "Tired of
Cary City Council? VOTE NOBODY" - that was cool.
As I left my polling place, I swiped the nauseating vote-yes-on-bonds
sign decorating the polling place, which might sound daring for such a
straight-lace suburban neighborhood, but in fact the polling place was
closing anyway, so I just saved someone else the effort of throwing it
away. But the reason I wanted it - besides the ritualistic torment I
mean to inflict upon it - is that I wanted to know who paid for them.
Interesting, there doesn't seem to be that information on the signs.
Not even a printer's mark, at least not from a casual inspection.
I suppose Wake County taxes paid for them, but I guess I'll have to go
to the tedious business of tracking that info down. Should have done
so before the election, I guess.
No child left without a deficit ¶ 2:27 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
