March 22 - Wave Of The Future? -  The Senate gave tentative approval Wednesday to Gov. Bob Ehrlich's $23.6 billion budget and two accompanying bills that would raise fees and taxes - including a tax on snack foods - intended to keep next year's budget in the black.  Most debate revolved around the committee's decision to impose the 5 percent sales tax on snack items such as chips, pretzels and nuts. The "snack tax" would bring in about $16 million a year.

Although Maryland is not the first state to have passed a tax on food that falls into the "snack" category, having itself passed and repealed one such tax years ago,  As the war on fat heats up, it certainly won't be the last state to pick the pockets of their citizens in the name of healthy eating. 

March 16 - Addicted To Law Suits -  Frankly, it is ludicrous that our federal legislators are spending time debating and voting on a bill to prevent lawsuits. But that's not to say it is unnecessary.  John Banzhaf, a professor of legal activism at George Washington University Law School who was instrumental in the successful class-action lawsuits against the tobacco companies, has said he believes fast food has "addictive-like" properties.

John Banzhaf Society's Leech

But the fact is that some public-health advocates are deep in the planning process of suing the fast-food industry. In June 2003, the Public Health Advocacy Institute (PHAI), a nonprofit organization founded by faculty members of the Northeastern University School of Law and the Tufts School of Medicine, held its Conference on Legal Approaches to the Obesity Epidemic. 

The event's Legal Strategies Workshop required participants to sign an affidavit stating that the seminar was intended to "encourage and support litigation against the food industry" and swore the participants to secrecy about the workshop's discussions, but the public-health advocates and trial lawyers involved with the PHAI strongly advocated suing fast-food companies.

"A fast-food company like McDonald's may not be responsible for the entire obesity epidemic," says George Washington University Law School Professor John Banzhaf, "but let's say they're 5 percent responsible. Five percent of $117 billion is still an enormous amount of money."

Parasites live off a host, sucking it dry, until it drops dead.  The parasites then scurry about looking for new victims.  The only difference between John Banzhaf and a leach is that his host won't die.  Every man, woman and child in this country provides Banzhaf an unlimited opportunity to grow rich.  He and his cronies made billions of dollars suing the tobacco industry although it is the 60 million smokers whose bones are being sucked dry by the rapacious gang of trial lawyers who corrupt the legal system.

Left to their own devices the Banzhafs of the world would soon find themselves tarred, feathered, ridden out of town on a rail.  Instead they find themselves protected and encouraged by so-call civil servants who supposedly work for the people.  Last Week's huge PR stunt announcing that the U.S.A. is in the grip of an obesity epidemic, hosted by Tommy Thompson, head of the federal Health and Human Services and Julie Gerberding, director of the CDC,  was nothing more than government opening the floodgates of litigation.  Banzhaf gets fatter, we get poorer and the government still collects its taxes.

March 16 - Fat Cheerleaders In The Media - The House of Representatives is expected to vote this week to bar consumers from suing fast-food outlets for contributing to obesity. But local school districts face a much more direct challenge: How to teach children the benefits of eating healthier foods.

Thus begins one of the San Francisco Chronicle's ponderous editorials in favor of mindless conformity.  Needless to say the "Voice of the West" was mighty opposed to Congress crafting legislation that could curb law suits but its more immediate task was to wax choleric over some scrappy entrepreneurs who are cashing in serving up tasty eats to the inmates of the San Francisco Unified School District.  It seems that the new, healthy food regimen imposed by the progressive school administrators has not gone over well with the students who are voting with their feet, abandoning the lunchroom in search of better fare, provided by catering trucks who sell their wares while parked in front of the schools.  The Chronicle deplores that the captive audience wasn't so captive after all.  In response the school district has asked the city attorney to draft legislation to bar the catering services parking rights on public streets near schools.

Hint to the Chronicle:  Parents would be overjoyed if the school district could teach the children to read, write and compute.  Since the district fails in that task, it's a bit presumptuous of these losers to imagine that they competently take of the role of raising children. 

March 15 - Statistical Malpractice - While it’s not disputed that severe obesity may shorten life, the real killer in this case seems to be the CDC’s statistical malpractice.

The excuse for the desperate health warning is a study in the March 10 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association in which the CDC claims that poor diet and physical inactivity caused 400,000 deaths in 2000. That estimate supposedly represents a 33 percent increase from the 1990 estimate and approaches the 435,000 deaths in 2000 supposedly attributable to smoking.

Now it’s been said that there are two types of statistics ― the kind you look up and the kind you make up. CDC’s body counts are definitely the latter.

For those of a statistical bent Steve Milloy's post mortem on the Center for Disease Control's latest foray into behavior modification is a delightful experience.  For the rest of us he provides common sense evidence that the anti-fat shakedown crowd is full of hot air.  The grifters shriek that we are smack dab in the middle of an epidemic that will decimate the population yet, as Milloy points out, that the U.S. life expectancy gained two years in the past dozen years even though smoking rates remained the same and obesity bloomed.

Read the quote from former President Dwight D. Eisenhower and marvel at that man's perspicacity.  Beware the public health-industrial complex. 

March 12 - House Of Representatives Passes Fat Suit Ban - Americans who order fast food would have to hold the lawsuits under a bill passed by the House Wednesday.  The "cheeseburger bill," approved 276 to 139, would prohibit people who are battling the bulge from going to court in an attempt to finger the food industry for their weight problems. Proponents of the measure said the fed-up well-fed would do better to look in the mirror for the cause of their trouble.

"The gist of this legislation is there should be common sense in the food court, not blaming other people in the legal court," said Rep. Ric Keller, R- Fla., the bill's chief sponsor.

Let's give medical science its due regard. In the past century or so, it conquered several infectious diseases, developed penicillin, started practicing basic hygiene, and stopped bleeding half its patients to death with leeches. Those were steps in the right direction.

Practitioners still manage to kill plenty of healthy patients, but since we're not yet among those dead, we won't quibble the point. Of course, within quite recent memory, the medical community also promoted Eugenics (for which one American researcher got a letter of appreciation from Adolph Hitler) and the fork-up-the-nose method of behavior modification, via brain destruction, affectionately known as lobotomy.

Lobotomy became a tough sell after a while, but then medicos discovered the brain-killing, grant-generating powers of epidemiology, and ludicrous statistical analysis. Thus, in the past decade or two, medicine seemed also to have conquered the ancient plague of sanity, regarding such subjects as what free people choose to smoke, drink, and eat.

So what's going on in the United States House of Representatives? A majority of Congressmen want to ban "fat" lawsuits. They're claiming fat people (and their individual genes) are responsible for their own weight. They're saying the chubbies can't blame the butcher and the baker anymore, but only themselves, when they gorge on burgers or cupcakes.

Now, if that's not sanity, we don't know what is. That kind of thinking could undo the Tobacco Master Settlement, and the general vilification of Big Tobacco, if it's allowed to spread. Congressmen, beware, next time your doctor enters your examining room. Make sure he hasn't got a fork in his hand.

March 11 - An Epidemic Of Hysteria Engulfs The Country  - Poor diet and physical inactivity are overtaking smoking as the No. 1 cause of preventable deaths in the United States, federal officials reported Tuesday.  The study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that about 400,000 deaths in the United States in 2000 could be attributed to poor eating and exercise habits, coming close to tying tobacco as the leading cause of avoidable deaths.

"This is tragic," Dr. Julie Gerberding, CDC's director and an author of the study, told reporters. "Our worst fears were confirmed." She was joined by Tommy Thompson, secretary of health and human services, at a Washington, D.C., news briefing to call attention to the new cause-of-death study.

Right on cue the Greek chorus running the federal health departments donned sack cloth and ashes as they shrieked the dire message that the United States is sinking under a debilitating layer of ugly, unhealthy fat.  We knew this was coming.  Today's news briefing in Washington capped years of work by special interests who are building on their success at targeting smokers for plundering by lassoing in a much more numerous group of victims with even more money to steal.  The War on Fat has been declared.

What's most interesting in the Gerberding-Thompson tap dance is how even as they ratchet the obesity panic level to new heights they just can't keep the dancing statistics from stumbling to the ground.  They say that overeating kills 400,000 Americans per year, the exact number that was killed by tobacco 10 years ago.  Today, of course, tobacco kills 435,000 per year even though, according to them, smoking has declined dramatically during the past decade of anti-tobacco education.  Those of a historical bent will recall that in 1990 the government was telling us that smoking killed around 320,000 per year.  The bouncing numbers reflect the fungibles associated with behavior-related mortality rates.  Death rates rise when there is money to be made off any particular crisis and boy, there are fortunes to be made treating obesity and smoking.  It's likely that the smoking-related and weight-related death toll was chosen so that the hysterics can screech how bad behavior is killing 800,000 people per year.  It is very likely that by next year the grand total will have topped one million.

Gerberding-Thompson, of course, is just a Vegas lounge act fronting for big boys.  It's not often that the puppet masters behind the scenes haul themselves into the limelight but on such a momentous occasion the architects of the perpetual shakedowns speak:

"Sometime within the last 10 or 15 years the obesity epidemic has really started to take full flight," said Dr. J. Michael McGinnis of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, co-author of the commentary as well as the original 1990 analysis upon which the latest study was modeled.

"Our policies haven't caught up," he said. "It isn't enough anymore just to say, 'This is the problem. People need to eat better and exercise better.' We need to address the environmental influences and everything that goes into social behavior."

Gerberding-Thompson, civil servants both, know on what side their bread is buttered.  Big Pharma, and its premier front group the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation plans to cash in massively by curbing, altering and prohibiting the social behavior that doesn't deliver to their corporate bottom line.

March 11 - One Pill Fixes Two Socially Incorrect Behaviors - A new pill in the final stages of testing shows promise in attacking two of humanity's biggest killers by helping people quit smoking and lose weight at the same time. As government officials in Washington launched a campaign against obesity yesterday, doctors at a medical conference here described the new drug as provocative and perhaps ideal for some people. The drug, which could be available in a year or two, works by an entirely new approach — by blocking the same primeval circuitry in the brain that gives pot smokers the munchies. The development could offer a well-timed, one-two punch against Americans' gravest health concerns. Smoking is the country's top killer, but it is rapidly being overtaken by obesity and inactivity. The two problems combined kill more than 800,000 Americans a year. A similar pattern is occurring worldwide, even in developing countries."

The marketing ploys will be fast and thick after the announcement by the head of the nation's health department that Americans are dropping dead right and left due to their gluttony and smoking.  The citizens, strangely enough, hadn't noticed the massive death toll but now that Big Drug has all the pieces in place Americans will be under an onslaught of drug pushing the like they never have seen.

Norman Kjono discusses the implications of blocking brain circuitry for fun and profit.

March 11 - Lards And Stripes - "We've got so many people who are fat, so many people who are smoking, so many who are not active, and that is really contributing significantly to our health care costs, not only to Medicaid but to the private sector as well."

That's Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm talking at the annual meeting of the National Governors Association in Washington, DC. Granholm is doing her share to reduce the nation's need for relaxed-fit jeans by strapping on a pedometer and competing against 16 other pols to see who walks the most over a 16 week period. According to this account, additional fight-the-fat efforts by pols include South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford's 300-mile bike ride through the Palmetto State, Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue's banishing of Snickers bars from his diet, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry's "Texas Round-Up," in which taxpayers are exhorted to join a 10,000 meter walk and run to be held in Austin on April 17.

Sadly, there are no short piers from which these pols might begin their Long March to Muscle Beach.

Nick Gillespie takes a light-hearted look at the culture's obsession with curbing and eliminating a few select behaviors while preaching universal tolerance for everything else.  On a more serious note he notes that whatever actual problems are caused by over indulgence can easily be fixed without making society march to a single drummer. 

March 5 - Spineless Groveling - McDonald's is ditching its super-size portion of fries and soft drinks amid a backlash against firms blamed for a spiralling obesity epidemic.  Its 1,235 outlets in Britain will phase out the extra large portions by the end of the year.  Medical experts have drawn a direct link between increasing obesity and giant portions of everything from fast food to chocolate bars and crisps.

It must be worse than the London Plagues in the bygone days of Shakespeare! "For the first time in many years we now have a killer that is bigger than smoking," exclaims British health campaigner Nick Stace. The killer is the now-familiar statistically-contrived obesity epidemic. Fast-food giant McDonald's is quietly kowtowing to UK health cultists by discontinuing its popular "super-size" servings in Great Britain. If you're hungry, now you'll have to pay, for multiple small portions. Thus the customer's interest is sacrificed for a corporate image of political correctness. Philip Morris wrote that script, and played it, to a logical conclusion. As the theme from "The Magnificent Seven" dwindles into memory, and as once-mighty PM breathes feminized tones for its final televised line, "Please join our quitline and avoid the living Hell out of all our products," we bid you take heed, McDonald's. The rest is silence.

March 5 - We Don't Call Them Organized Rackets For Nothing - When every newspaper in the country from Atlanta, GA to Ft. Wayne, IN, every major network from CNN to MSNBC, and virtually every local television and radio station in between simultaneously deliver the same story about a new study, it's no accident. In fact, it's a stunning feat, especially when we realize there are tens of thousands of scientific studies released every year that we never hear about. It's also our clue that what we're hearing is the result of a carefully orchestrated marketing campaign and it might be wise to take it with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Last Tuesday, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) released a study of chain restaurants that claimed kids' menus offered few healthful choices and that without labeling parents were unaware that what they were ordering was high in calories, bad fats, and salt. It coincided with Sen. Tom Harkin's (D-Iowa) introduction of a bill requiring point-of-purchase labels for calories, fat and salt at all chain restaurants. He joined CSPI in its press release justifying government intervention because of the "obesity epidemic" and charging restaurants with a role, especially when it comes to our children, saying "kids get a third of their calories in restaurants."

Although Sandy Swarc dissects this so-called study with her usual dexterity, the most important points of her article deals with the concerted effort waged to enact an agenda that is designed to alter private behavior while massively enriching a few special interest groups.  She writes about the upcoming shakedown of the food industry but substitute that industry with tobacco industry and you have all the steps leading up to the tobacco settlement.

The shoddy science, the financially motivated do-gooders, the lethargic politicians and a passive press.  All were in place for the war on tobacco and all are active in the new campaign to extract dollars from consumers.  The war on fat includes the same people who demonize smokers, enact smoking bans, increase cigarette taxes and sue corporations all in the name of an artificially generated health hysteria.  The tobacco shakedown took place in plain sight as does the anti-fat schemes.  This time there are many keen observers, like Sandy Swarc, who know the conmen's game and are not afraid to take them on.

March 5 - Body Mass Index; A Tool To Bamboozle The Public - A World Health Organization panel recently concluded that a 5-foot-6 man or woman of Asian descent weighing 137 pounds should be considered "overweight." That would place the trim Hiroyuki Sanada, one of Tom Cruise's co-stars in "The Last Samurai," just a few pounds shy of this category.

March 5 - Texas Public Schools Go Low-Cal - Schools must combat rising childhood obesity by tossing out deep fryers, serving fresh vegetables and clamping down on snack foods under sweeping state guidelines unveiled Wednesday.  The new food rules limit everything from fund-raising bake sales to grams of fat and will have an impact on 93 percent of Texas public and charter schools, according to the Texas Department of Agriculture.

These two sentences lay out the typical response to any crisis, imaginary or real, in America.  Pass "sweeping" regulations to which everyone must mindlessly conform while obsessing on the smallest details.  Does anyone at the commission cranking out these rules really believe that Texas school children are little porkers as the result of fund-raising bake sales?  There is no doubt that we are in the midst of a terrible crisis according to the grant junkies toiling in the groves of an academia that no longer can teach but sure can order people about.

Children today have a shorter life expectancy than their parents for the first time in 100 years because of the epidemic of obesity, according to Dr. William Kish, head of pediatric gastroenterology at Baylor College of Medicine.

Digest this little factoid and marvel that Dr. Kish has the nerve to issue such a piece of patent absurdity.  Marvel further that the reporter treats this statement as an absolute fact.  She would be better informed by a tarot card reader or an astrologist who at least, unlike Dr. Kish, admit to themselves that they are working a con.

Not addressed in the article is how much all these dietary changes demanded of the Texas public schools will cost the public.  Like all states, Texas' educational system is strapped for cash while the product they are delivering to the kids is second or even third rate.  Rather than dumping wads of cash into culinary matters, the educrats should direct their concerns to the matters important to parents rather than trying to be the parents for every kid in the state.

February 12 - Pseudoscience and Globesity - but we need to learn to think as our enemy thinks - This very nice article by Sandy Szwarc of Tech Central station analyses very well the junk science used by the World Heil (… sorry, Health) Organisation, and points out the contradictions of the very junk science used by the WHO as justification for promoting the biggest pharmaceutical marketing plan since the fraud on smoking: the anti-obesity crusade.  Szwarc correctly points out that '…the report asserts "breastfeeding as a protective factor against weight gain has been examined in at least 20 studies involving nearly 40,000 subjects" even as it admits most of the studies ‘found no relationship.’ In fact, no definitive link has been established. Researchers, including Tammy J Clifford, director of epidemiology Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute and editor of the British Medical Journal (BMJ), caution that the conflicting studies could be the result of confounding factors or associations. Two studies published in the October 2003 issue of BMJ provided further support to question the link. One of the studies was even funded by WHO…”, and continues on with a dazzling list of nonsensical anti-obesity “strategies'.

But we think that Sandy misses a most important point: The “public health” gangs do not care if they are pushing junk science – and they don’t even care if you know it. They could not care less if their own studies contradict themselves, as they have reached a position of total political domination: the largest study on passive smoke ever was funded by the WHO itself. It found no link whatsoever with disease. And yet the WHO - together with every single clown sitting on some ministry of health chair --  keeps lying that passive smoke kills, as if the study never existed!   What is important is that the masses are constantly blinded with a barrage of junk information and “alarms”, as to be constantly confused and agitated. It is a simple matter of force: "public health's" mighty machine of fraud and propaganda vs. little voices like Sandy's. If with the servitude of the mass media, the WHO hits one billion people a day – how many can you hit? Maybe a million if you are very, very lucky? Well, it is 999 million in their favour -- it's as simple as that. It is a mass-marketing technique just like selling a drug, or an election campaign where the opponent has been gagged and the promoters are the power-grabbing "public health" puppet masters.

That is why the only way to fight those bastards is for all the small, but numerous forces, across the globe to coalesce politically until enough people have been educated and numerous enough to squash them. Understanding how your enemy works is vital -- and the enemy certainly ain’t working with real science, or out of any concern for your health.

February 4 - Banning Potato Chips - “Get rid of potato chips and everything else with trans fats in it,” Cape Breton Nova MLA Gordie Gosse said in an interview yesterday.  “It is killing Canadians right now as we speak."

Winnipeg Centre NDP MP Pat Martin wants to go much further. He is circulating a petition that asks parliament to ban trans fats, which are found in fast food, crackers and even baby food.

Healy-Vihant [a dietitian and nutritionist] said government needs to take an advocacy role, the way it has in the fight against tobacco, an effort that has achieved a sharp decline in smoking rates.

“What we’ve done with Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man, can we not do with Ronald McDonald?” she said.

Let's clear a few things right off the bat.  First of all, the sharp decline in smoking rates occurred over 30 years ago when the government did not take an advocacy role.  The decline was already flattening when government did begin preaching against smoking and during the past decade of non-stop anti-smoking campaigns the smoking rate actually rose.

Secondly, the hysteria over trans fat is based upon nothing.  There is no evidence that trans fats are hazardous but there is plenty of evidence that the "researchers" who concocted studies saying so are pushing an agenda rather than inquiring into the truth.

Mr. Gordie Gosse, and others of his ilk, are bullies who are getting their jollies bossing people around and tearing down corporations.  The war on fat, as was the war on tobacco, is a carefully crafted plan to transfer money extracted from consumers into the pockets of special interest activists and the grant junkies who conjure the "evidence" from thin air.

January 23 - Fat chance for freedom with the obesity lobby in full cry – This interesting opinion piece published in the British Telegraph describes the latest Eurocratic, anti-American position of the World Health Organisation gangs use of statistical junk science trash on fat. Let’s never forget that the alarming figures about obesity, tobacco and much more are based on fraudulent and un-scientific statistical models designed and promoted by corrupt entities to advance political, social and pharmaceutical agendas. The intelligent article describes the absurd ideological finger behind which the “public health” gangsters hide: “Life, as someone must have said, is a bit of a crap shoot. We all have to die of something and we must be the first generation to want to die in perfect health. … Obesity is gearing up as the next great crusade following tobacco. It's a natural for the regulators of the world. Food habits are directly connected to the fertile area of "lifestyle", which lives near Regulatory Paradise.” Light one up, have a chocolate bar, and read this piece.

January 22 - Cranking Out The Economic Justification - Taxpayers foot the doctor's bill for more than half of obesity-related medical costs, which reached a total of $75 billion in 2003, according to a new study.  The public pays about $39 billion a year — or about $175 per person — for obesity through Medicare and Medicaid  programs, which cover sicknesses caused by obesity including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, several types of cancer and gallbladder disease.

We will be seeing many more stories such as this boilerplate regurgitated by the Associated Press.  A press release is issued by a do-gooder organization and the mainstream press copies it passing it off as news.  No hard questions are asked and, more importantly, the pressure group doing the "research" is identified, if at all, only by its anodyne name.  In this case the "non-profit" group is something called RTI International, described thusly on its web site:

"RTI offers innovative research and development and a full spectrum of multidisciplinary services in health and pharmaceuticals, advanced technology, survey and statistics, education and training, economic and social development, and the environment"

It's motto is "Turning Knowledge into Practice", whatever that means.  It appears that most of its income is derived from federal government contracts like this study of fat costs done at the behest of the Centers for Disease Control.  This is how the circle works.

A government agency, the CDC in this case, declares that there is an epidemic, obesity in this case.  It then bestows huge amounts of tax dollars on an "outside" entity to study particular aspects of the epidemic.  The outside entity then produces "independent" results that always support the government agency's agenda.  As with smoking-related costs, RIT's totals come from examining data that is produced by the same federal government that a mere few years ago discovered this new, out-of-control epidemic.  

We now have "evidence" from RTI International that obesity is costing society $39-billion per year.  That's a wad of cash which surely justifies government's intervention into people's eating habits.  The result would have been just the same as if the CDC had done this study itself.  The only thing that the public funds shuffled to RTI International bought was the unbiased respectability that enshrines non-profits organizations.

It's a great system.  It worked for anti-tobacco.  It is working for anti-fat.  It can be modified for any shakedown and behavior modification schemes the new rulers of this country wish to inflict.

January 19 - Smearing President Bush - The US was accused yesterday of trying to scupper the World Health Organisation's guidelines designed to curb the rising epidemic of obesity and disease, which could be damaging to its food and drink corporations.

The WHO's executive board is to approve a global strategy on health next week, which will spell out to all member governments the links between a bad diet and disease.  Among the recommendations are that governments should act on TV advertising to children and should urge people to cut down on fats and sugars in their diet.

In a confidential letter to Lee Jong-Wook, the director general of the WHO, which the Guardian has seen, the US department of health and human services makes it clear that it disputes some of the scientific evidence on which the proposals are based.

We certainly can't have the scientific "evidence" manufactured by the World Health Organization questioned.  After all these unelected, supra-national bureaucrats are the de facto rulers of the world whose whims must be obeyed without question.  We all must accept that the "rising epidemic of obesity" foretells a future most dire, even though the "epidemic" was non-existent until the World Health Organization invited the multi-national pharmaceutical industry in to set the agenda.

Good for the administration for finally casting doubt upon the WHO's "evidence".  Such skepticism is long over due and the administration should go further place the WHO's anti-tobacco agenda under a microscope.  There's no telling what ugly bugs will be revealed regarding the global jihad against smokers.

January 7 - Hauling Out The Heavy Artillery - All right, then. Meet your new weight-loss team: There's Deborah Ortiz, state senator; John D. Graham, federal regulator; Richard Banzhaf, attorney; Margo Wootan, nutritionist and government activist. There are more, too, but you probably don't know them. But they are on your case, filing briefs, drafting legislation, writing memos and holding news conferences. Determined to help you and your loved ones lose that weight and keep it off.  They are the new warriors in a national fight against fat, and they have decided that it takes a village to trim a waistline.

Don't smoke? Don't care about the smoker pogrom? The Health Cult marches on, spreading paranoia, and groupthink, about one thing everybody partakes in. Food.

The Cult DEMANDS we all lose weight. Harold Goldstein, Executive Director of the California Center for Public Health Advocacy, says, "The question is, how can we as a community, society, country come together and say we all see the challenge and see that the individual cannot [do] this on their own?". 

Yikes! The days of adults making the very most basic decisions about their own behavior are numbered. Not just for smokers. Everybody.

January 6 - Who's fat? - The stupidity and dishonesty of international "public health", which bases "epidemics" on statistical junk science models and data manipulation/falsification is highlighted very well in this article by Dominic Standish from Tech Central Station -- another must-read.

"Most assume that the US leads the league tables in obesity. But other countries are vying for that top spot. One in five Australians was reported to be obese by Medicine Australia ... 'The rise [in obesity] in Britain is as fast or faster than anywhere else in the world,' claimed Professor Philip James, the chairman of the International Obesity Task Force (IOTF). In Italy children between the ages of 6 and 17 have been confirmed as the fattest in Europe in surveys since 1990 by the IOTF. ... Indeed, some say that 'the word 'epidemic' doesn't even do this justice. It is one of the most profound medical crises we've had in generations" said Eric Topol, chief of cardiology at a US clinic in Cleveland."

Is all of this credible? Certainly not -- especially when the threshold of obesity was quietly changed a few years ago just to create another health fraud. And as usual, the perpetrators are asking citizens and governments alike to forego personal liberties, constitutions and science, and entrust power to the hands of the pharmaceutical mafia -- ensuring more marketing for Big Pharma and an ever-growing cash flow into the pockets of health cons.

January 5 - Hobnobbing With The Control Freaks, Food Division - What would the world look like if decision-makers listened to these nannycrats? Public Health Institute lawyer Edward Bolen provided a glimpse of their Utopia, promoting very specific policy ideas. He called for tobacco-style restrictions on food, including price controls; minimum age requirements to buy certain foods (Does a bag of chips really need to be rated "R"?); zoning limits on the number, density, and location of fast-food restaurants and convenience stores; and even outright product bans. "Any sort of interaction you can put between [a] consumer and the product is going to cut the use," Bolen noted.

Driving extra miles for a burger, showing your license to buy a Snickers, paying $10 for a soda (outside the movie theater)—this still isn't enough. Public health activists are hinting at their preference for completely abolishing some distinctly American foods we all love. CSPI's Wootan noted—as if it were a bad thing—that "Eating out is more affordable; it's very convenient." Arguing that companies should be forced to stop marketing certain foods, Kelly Brownell added that the food industry "cannot be let off the hook for all the unhealthy products they're still promoting."

We begin the new year with a delightful yet bone chilling look at the next huge social engineering experiment.  Having failed at eliminating tobacco and in so doing becoming very, very rich, the pencil-necked elites who disapprove of enjoyment and pleasure are licking their chops at a new prospect of whipping people into shape.  Bossing around the lower orders is always such fun but far more fun are the plans to transfer enormous piles of money from the public into the bank accounts of so-called activists, the new euphemism for thief.  Late last year a bunch of quacks, snake-oil salesmen and confidence racketeers gathered together to set the course for the fat shakedown.  Although the media did not choose to cover this pep rally, perhaps because most reporters and editors strongly agree with the agenda, one intrepid reporter did get up close and personal until she was summarily booted out.

Kelly Jane Torrance manages to keep her sense of humor even while surrounded by glassy-eyed fanatics whom most of us, out of an innate fastidiousness, would refuse entry into our homes.  From them she learns what direction the "war on fat" is taking and by what methods the shakedown artists are planning to use.  It's no surprise that the blueprint they will use has been utilized with great success upon the 50 to 60 million Americans who smoke.  With close to 300 million Americans who eat, the flock to fleece is far bigger and the financial rewards are astronomical.  The tobacco shakedown took decades to effect.  With many government agencies, the courts and the media already on board for the food fight just a couple of years should suffice before we are all paying for the privilege undergoing severe abuse exacted by a tiny band of busybodies who love their work.