Bruce and Fourcrows: some excellent discussion points. Yes,there is waste in government spending, highly orchestrated waste is the province of the lobbyist. What used to be a few is now a mob, hundreds, literally, for every member of Congress. The Republican version of immigration reform for example not only defines what contractors must be used, but specific machines like helicopter models!! That is NOT after analysis or sound judgement, it’s pure lobbying power, millions spent to make billions, over $40 billion in spending in this one bill- 99% of it is WASTE! because the junk, and fence, DON’T WORK! Doubling the number of Border Patrol agents sounds good on the surface, but doesn’t actually work either as “cost benefit”.
The TEA party view of “no spending” actually is an “us vs. them” argument, as proven by the Agriculture bill, and the immigration legislation. It’s feeding obesity from bad diets, and senseless spending, on “foods” that are bad for us.
‘There is a lot of waste in the program. People are using their food stamps to buy cigarettes and beer, for Heaven’s sake. Not what was intended!’-When I worked in a store, admittedly a while ago, tobacco and alcohol could not be purchased with food stamps. It was a rule strictly enforced by management in every store I knew about.-And the people with food stamps knew that and did not even try it, except very rarely and they found out in a hurry.
“When liberals can’t refute a point, they turn to insults and/or name-calling.”You and onguard regularly use phrases like “low information voters” and accuse “Dem Libs” of lies & delusion. Onguard is actually agreeing with the tune about the Tea Party opposing the GOP establishment, but the GOP would control the House regardless. Are they saving the country through gridlock? Not many think that’s working.
“In other words, we must clean our own homes, and then work on business and government.”
No.
We’ve been doing that for decades, and where has it got us? It’s got us more plastic trash, the pharmaceutical industry has made it clear they will not take their drugs back for any reason, Industrial Agriculture and industry go on merrily dumping toxic waste into the environment, unchecked.
There are limits to what we can do. I use no chemicals on the property. I use white vinegar and soda for most cleaning projects. I buy as little plastic and other synthetics as is possible, but those things are unavoidable in practical terms, even if you have an unlimited budget, which few of us do.
It’s the government’s job to regulate industry. They are not supposed to be regulating us, beyond maintaining social order.
The people are not responsible for the toxic waste in the environment. Yes, the mindless consumer training has gone very well, as has the disposable goods market. Those are not market driven in the sense they are ‘in demand’. The demand is created by aggressive marketing techniques, which we could learn to resist to some degree, if we were willing, yes. But unless industry is forced to clean up their act, our true choices will continue to be limited to their toxic products, and those natural and biodegradable products (which are mostly cleaner to manufacture as well), become obsolete or impossible to afford for the general population.
Time to call the government out on their red herring policies. Cleaning up our individual lives is just another distraction from what they are really doing.
“That means no fresh foods, only cheap, processed crap.This may tie in with the Farm Bill issues – why is fresh food so much more expensive? Why are food stamps not given a discount for vegetables and meat? You are completely right – fix the problem.”
The real problem is that no one wants to acknowledge any of that, so they just deny the truth of it. It’s not only true in New England, it’s true pretty much all over the country, though the direct reasons differ.
Other factors in that problem is that so many of the poor are multigenerational that they not only have little education, but very often don’t know how to cook.
It took me a while to discover this, because when someone says they don’t know how to cook, I assume they mean at professional level – I assume they can cook meat and make gravy, scald veg, make mashed potatoes – but it turns out that even those very basic cooking tasks are beyond many food stamp recipients.
Its also true that however good your cooking skills are, if all your time is being used with patchwork part time jobs, mandated government programs and so on, finding the time to cook can be a challenge.
The WIC program (if it still survives) was a sound program; it vouchered various ‘nutritional’ foods, and all one had to do was select the best choice in the category. It didn’t prevent your eating white rice, commercial peanut butter or sweetened fruit juice, but if you had any food sense at all, you could opt for the real food.
People learn about nutrition from TV ads. For far too many of them, that is all the food education they get. Worse, ‘nutritional expertise’ in this country is driven by the food industries. The grain lobby is biggest, so we are encouraged to eat a very substantial portion of grain in our diets. In the last couple of decades, the produce and fruit lobbies have overtaken the dairy and meat lobbies, so we are being told we need 12 ‘portions’ of vegetables and fruit per day. Meat and dairy lobbies are now trailing, and increasingly we are told that animal protein is bad for us. The monstrous AR lobby is helping the grain and produce lobbies out by pretending that livestock agriculture is ‘cruel’ by definition.
Do you see any true nutritional interest in any of this?
If any of it is not sufficient to convince you, have you seen what the hospitals serve sick people? On the say so of their professional nutritionists, and in conjunction (or you’d hope so) with your doctor,?
When my husband died on me in the dining room a few years ago, I spent quite a lot of time in the hospital. The only real food I saw on any of his trays was 2 oz of real orange juice. The rest was pure, unadulterated refined and synthetic non-food.
But somehow, it is our responsibility not only to figure out how on earth to pay for real food, we also have to figure out what is real food.
“Nice small foot print philosophy Hawthorne. I try to buy local produce, and I almost never use factory meat/red meat. Mostly vegetables with a little fish/ free range poultry.”
Thank you. I do try to do what I can – and I can personally testify as to the destructive potential of the food supply. In the early nineties, I had to move in with my parents, whose health was failing. They didn’t much want to convert from their ‘conventional’ diet to what I preferred, and my daughter was growing out of her sugar intolerances. So for those few years, and a couple that followed, we ate a conventional diet. The couple that followed were particularly bad, because I was doing temp work and out of the house 11 hours a day, so we actually reverted to freezer fodder and other unacceptable choices, just for lack of time and exhaustion.
In addition to that, I had no idea that glyphosate (now implicated in a number of cancers, breast cancer in particular, check), was any worse than any other agricultural chemicals, nor did I understand in the mid nineties that our food now incorporated GMO grain, and that it was all being drenched in glyphosate, at volumes much greater than natural crops.
The result of all that was that my body weight doubled within a year’s time, due to Obstructive Sleep Apnea.
There is a lot of screaming about the obesity epidemic in this country, but it is not sloth that produces that effect, it is bad food coupled with exhaustion.
OSA is actually a worse health problem than either ‘obesity’ or ‘Type II Diabetes’, which has also escalated to epidemic proportions. OSA reliably produces obesity (via corticosteroidal stress to the adrenals), which leads eventually but irrevocably in most cases to insulin resistance, usually misnamed type II diabetes. OSA also produces HBP, heart disease, with all the inherent risks and expenses associated with same. Many OSA sufferers have fibromyalgia, too, another ‘mystery’ disease that is essentially untreatable.
Considering that our medical system is so advanced and sophisticated, doesn’t it seem odd to you that we have so many of these ‘mystery’ diseases? The only thing you can’t blame them on is the food. It’s much more satisfying in any case to blame the victims, since that relieves you of any necessity to look further for causes.
Since my health tanked, (I was very fit, up to the mid nineties), I have made a lot of interesting discoveries, and I am about 99% sure the food is at the bottom of most of our chronic diseases. The food, aggravated by stress, which is overwhelmingly caused by economic distress.
I don’t doubt there are deadbeats among us. I just think the majority of them are greedy paper pushers who never did an honest day’s work in their lives. That’s the only way this contempt of working people could get this kind of strangle hold.
In my observation, people aren’t the lazy deadbeats the GOP wants to believe they are. Mostly, the working class and the poor have just been systematically deprived of the basics we all need, by government policy, and the food is compromising their health on top of it. The ‘middle class’ such as it is is dying fast.
“You are correct, Hawthorne. I was only addressing the beer and cigarettes but should have included things like are in your post.”
Yes, but really, is this such an egregious offense? Why is it different when a poor man says ‘man, I need a beer’, from a rich man saying ‘I need a drink’.
And don’t tell me that you aren’t subsidizing that rich man’s napoleon brandy or forty year old scotch. The chances are excellent that your tax dollar is actually subsidizing his business, and at much loftier levels than the poor sod who can’t afford to buy a beer.
Thanks, I’ll pay for the beer. My budget doesn’t run to Mercedes, Lear Jets, and forty year old scotch.
the ag bill has several parts and should be done separately with farm subsidy part separate an income cap or amount cap has a chance [note it will attacked by demo because the largest are demo supporters ____ tyson,union pacific rr]
Thanks, Churchill.You sound like you’re cooking for one, not four. In any case, your Dinty Moore recipe is not a good idea. The amount of carbs, sugars, calories, and sodium is a surefire way to give yourself type II diabetes. The cheapest meats are also the fattiest. Canned or frozen vegetables are also less nutritious than fresh, due to the oils, preservatives, and sodium added. Also, I will assume you are older, and therefore your metabolism has slowed to the point where you can monitor portions and not grow hungry even if you are eating less than you perhaps did 10-20 years ago. If you are retired, even more so, since a sedentary lifestyle requires less high energy foods to maintain itself. Imagine trying to use your same budget to feed a few kids, adding $2 a day per dependent (the average food stamp payout) You will find the kids not getting the nutrition they need from the fresh food section, and instead being hungry all the time. This is where the poor resort to junk food (although your Dinty Moore recipe is filling, I can’t stress how unhealthy it is). Too many people make an assumption that just because they are able to do something, everybody else can. You can live within a specific budget, but that won’t work on a young family. Someone may know how to cook anything and make it good (my wife), while others can make sandwiches, but otherwise find a way to burn water (me). Everything comes down to what choices they make in life, but unfortunately not everyone has as much freedom in the choices they CAN make. I can’t look down on the single mother who buys a $1 bag of candy for her kids because she is using the last few dollars on their EBT card and that candy is replacing a meal. She does not have the option of going back to school, learning a new trade, or moving somewhere else because it would mean the kids would have even less food if she did that. Our country constantly belittles teachers and complains about our schools, but if more money went towards education, and people took it seriously, you would have less hungry and less poor because more people could advance through the workforce instead of having to settle for minimum wage careers.
Dtroutma almost 11 years ago
Shows what happens when they don’t get their rabies vaccinations.
braindead Premium Member almost 11 years ago
The Tea Party is demanding that farm price supports be increased.
Bandusia15 almost 11 years ago
That is one sick comment.
Dtroutma almost 11 years ago
Bruce and Fourcrows: some excellent discussion points. Yes,there is waste in government spending, highly orchestrated waste is the province of the lobbyist. What used to be a few is now a mob, hundreds, literally, for every member of Congress. The Republican version of immigration reform for example not only defines what contractors must be used, but specific machines like helicopter models!! That is NOT after analysis or sound judgement, it’s pure lobbying power, millions spent to make billions, over $40 billion in spending in this one bill- 99% of it is WASTE! because the junk, and fence, DON’T WORK! Doubling the number of Border Patrol agents sounds good on the surface, but doesn’t actually work either as “cost benefit”.
The TEA party view of “no spending” actually is an “us vs. them” argument, as proven by the Agriculture bill, and the immigration legislation. It’s feeding obesity from bad diets, and senseless spending, on “foods” that are bad for us.
braindead Premium Member almost 11 years ago
Did they tell you why you were banned, ZIT?
braindead Premium Member almost 11 years ago
‘There is a lot of waste in the program. People are using their food stamps to buy cigarettes and beer, for Heaven’s sake. Not what was intended!’-When I worked in a store, admittedly a while ago, tobacco and alcohol could not be purchased with food stamps. It was a rule strictly enforced by management in every store I knew about.-And the people with food stamps knew that and did not even try it, except very rarely and they found out in a hurry.
Uncle Joe Premium Member almost 11 years ago
“When liberals can’t refute a point, they turn to insults and/or name-calling.”You and onguard regularly use phrases like “low information voters” and accuse “Dem Libs” of lies & delusion. Onguard is actually agreeing with the tune about the Tea Party opposing the GOP establishment, but the GOP would control the House regardless. Are they saving the country through gridlock? Not many think that’s working.
Hawthorne almost 11 years ago
“In other words, we must clean our own homes, and then work on business and government.”
No.
We’ve been doing that for decades, and where has it got us? It’s got us more plastic trash, the pharmaceutical industry has made it clear they will not take their drugs back for any reason, Industrial Agriculture and industry go on merrily dumping toxic waste into the environment, unchecked.
There are limits to what we can do. I use no chemicals on the property. I use white vinegar and soda for most cleaning projects. I buy as little plastic and other synthetics as is possible, but those things are unavoidable in practical terms, even if you have an unlimited budget, which few of us do.
It’s the government’s job to regulate industry. They are not supposed to be regulating us, beyond maintaining social order.
The people are not responsible for the toxic waste in the environment. Yes, the mindless consumer training has gone very well, as has the disposable goods market. Those are not market driven in the sense they are ‘in demand’. The demand is created by aggressive marketing techniques, which we could learn to resist to some degree, if we were willing, yes. But unless industry is forced to clean up their act, our true choices will continue to be limited to their toxic products, and those natural and biodegradable products (which are mostly cleaner to manufacture as well), become obsolete or impossible to afford for the general population.
Time to call the government out on their red herring policies. Cleaning up our individual lives is just another distraction from what they are really doing.
Hawthorne almost 11 years ago
“There is a lot of waste in the program. People are using their food stamps to buy cigarettes and beer, for Heaven’s sake. Not what was intended!”
Where do you get this stuff?? You cannot buy: cigarettes, beer, pet food, soap, paper goods, feminine products with food stamps.
What country do you live in again ..?
Hawthorne almost 11 years ago
@Fourcrows
“That means no fresh foods, only cheap, processed crap.This may tie in with the Farm Bill issues – why is fresh food so much more expensive? Why are food stamps not given a discount for vegetables and meat? You are completely right – fix the problem.”
The real problem is that no one wants to acknowledge any of that, so they just deny the truth of it. It’s not only true in New England, it’s true pretty much all over the country, though the direct reasons differ.
Other factors in that problem is that so many of the poor are multigenerational that they not only have little education, but very often don’t know how to cook.
It took me a while to discover this, because when someone says they don’t know how to cook, I assume they mean at professional level – I assume they can cook meat and make gravy, scald veg, make mashed potatoes – but it turns out that even those very basic cooking tasks are beyond many food stamp recipients.
Its also true that however good your cooking skills are, if all your time is being used with patchwork part time jobs, mandated government programs and so on, finding the time to cook can be a challenge.
The WIC program (if it still survives) was a sound program; it vouchered various ‘nutritional’ foods, and all one had to do was select the best choice in the category. It didn’t prevent your eating white rice, commercial peanut butter or sweetened fruit juice, but if you had any food sense at all, you could opt for the real food.
People learn about nutrition from TV ads. For far too many of them, that is all the food education they get. Worse, ‘nutritional expertise’ in this country is driven by the food industries. The grain lobby is biggest, so we are encouraged to eat a very substantial portion of grain in our diets. In the last couple of decades, the produce and fruit lobbies have overtaken the dairy and meat lobbies, so we are being told we need 12 ‘portions’ of vegetables and fruit per day. Meat and dairy lobbies are now trailing, and increasingly we are told that animal protein is bad for us. The monstrous AR lobby is helping the grain and produce lobbies out by pretending that livestock agriculture is ‘cruel’ by definition.
Do you see any true nutritional interest in any of this?
If any of it is not sufficient to convince you, have you seen what the hospitals serve sick people? On the say so of their professional nutritionists, and in conjunction (or you’d hope so) with your doctor,?
When my husband died on me in the dining room a few years ago, I spent quite a lot of time in the hospital. The only real food I saw on any of his trays was 2 oz of real orange juice. The rest was pure, unadulterated refined and synthetic non-food.
But somehow, it is our responsibility not only to figure out how on earth to pay for real food, we also have to figure out what is real food.
For some, that really is a major challenge.
Hawthorne almost 11 years ago
@ahab
“Nice small foot print philosophy Hawthorne. I try to buy local produce, and I almost never use factory meat/red meat. Mostly vegetables with a little fish/ free range poultry.”
Thank you. I do try to do what I can – and I can personally testify as to the destructive potential of the food supply. In the early nineties, I had to move in with my parents, whose health was failing. They didn’t much want to convert from their ‘conventional’ diet to what I preferred, and my daughter was growing out of her sugar intolerances. So for those few years, and a couple that followed, we ate a conventional diet. The couple that followed were particularly bad, because I was doing temp work and out of the house 11 hours a day, so we actually reverted to freezer fodder and other unacceptable choices, just for lack of time and exhaustion.
In addition to that, I had no idea that glyphosate (now implicated in a number of cancers, breast cancer in particular, check), was any worse than any other agricultural chemicals, nor did I understand in the mid nineties that our food now incorporated GMO grain, and that it was all being drenched in glyphosate, at volumes much greater than natural crops.
The result of all that was that my body weight doubled within a year’s time, due to Obstructive Sleep Apnea.
There is a lot of screaming about the obesity epidemic in this country, but it is not sloth that produces that effect, it is bad food coupled with exhaustion.
OSA is actually a worse health problem than either ‘obesity’ or ‘Type II Diabetes’, which has also escalated to epidemic proportions. OSA reliably produces obesity (via corticosteroidal stress to the adrenals), which leads eventually but irrevocably in most cases to insulin resistance, usually misnamed type II diabetes. OSA also produces HBP, heart disease, with all the inherent risks and expenses associated with same. Many OSA sufferers have fibromyalgia, too, another ‘mystery’ disease that is essentially untreatable.
Considering that our medical system is so advanced and sophisticated, doesn’t it seem odd to you that we have so many of these ‘mystery’ diseases? The only thing you can’t blame them on is the food. It’s much more satisfying in any case to blame the victims, since that relieves you of any necessity to look further for causes.
Since my health tanked, (I was very fit, up to the mid nineties), I have made a lot of interesting discoveries, and I am about 99% sure the food is at the bottom of most of our chronic diseases. The food, aggravated by stress, which is overwhelmingly caused by economic distress.
I don’t doubt there are deadbeats among us. I just think the majority of them are greedy paper pushers who never did an honest day’s work in their lives. That’s the only way this contempt of working people could get this kind of strangle hold.
In my observation, people aren’t the lazy deadbeats the GOP wants to believe they are. Mostly, the working class and the poor have just been systematically deprived of the basics we all need, by government policy, and the food is compromising their health on top of it. The ‘middle class’ such as it is is dying fast.
pirate227 almost 11 years ago
Silly rabbit, subsidies are for corporations…
Hawthorne almost 11 years ago
@mikefive
“You are correct, Hawthorne. I was only addressing the beer and cigarettes but should have included things like are in your post.”
Yes, but really, is this such an egregious offense? Why is it different when a poor man says ‘man, I need a beer’, from a rich man saying ‘I need a drink’.
And don’t tell me that you aren’t subsidizing that rich man’s napoleon brandy or forty year old scotch. The chances are excellent that your tax dollar is actually subsidizing his business, and at much loftier levels than the poor sod who can’t afford to buy a beer.
Thanks, I’ll pay for the beer. My budget doesn’t run to Mercedes, Lear Jets, and forty year old scotch.
oneoldhat almost 11 years ago
the ag bill has several parts and should be done separately with farm subsidy part separate an income cap or amount cap has a chance [note it will attacked by demo because the largest are demo supporters ____ tyson,union pacific rr]
Fourcrows almost 11 years ago
Thanks, Churchill.You sound like you’re cooking for one, not four. In any case, your Dinty Moore recipe is not a good idea. The amount of carbs, sugars, calories, and sodium is a surefire way to give yourself type II diabetes. The cheapest meats are also the fattiest. Canned or frozen vegetables are also less nutritious than fresh, due to the oils, preservatives, and sodium added. Also, I will assume you are older, and therefore your metabolism has slowed to the point where you can monitor portions and not grow hungry even if you are eating less than you perhaps did 10-20 years ago. If you are retired, even more so, since a sedentary lifestyle requires less high energy foods to maintain itself. Imagine trying to use your same budget to feed a few kids, adding $2 a day per dependent (the average food stamp payout) You will find the kids not getting the nutrition they need from the fresh food section, and instead being hungry all the time. This is where the poor resort to junk food (although your Dinty Moore recipe is filling, I can’t stress how unhealthy it is). Too many people make an assumption that just because they are able to do something, everybody else can. You can live within a specific budget, but that won’t work on a young family. Someone may know how to cook anything and make it good (my wife), while others can make sandwiches, but otherwise find a way to burn water (me). Everything comes down to what choices they make in life, but unfortunately not everyone has as much freedom in the choices they CAN make. I can’t look down on the single mother who buys a $1 bag of candy for her kids because she is using the last few dollars on their EBT card and that candy is replacing a meal. She does not have the option of going back to school, learning a new trade, or moving somewhere else because it would mean the kids would have even less food if she did that. Our country constantly belittles teachers and complains about our schools, but if more money went towards education, and people took it seriously, you would have less hungry and less poor because more people could advance through the workforce instead of having to settle for minimum wage careers.