Children under 18 need not apply

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Just chalk up the following to a solution in search of a problem.


From the Daily Caller:

A proposal from the Obama administration to prevent children from doing farm chores has drawn plenty of criticism from rural-district members of Congress. But now it’s attracting barbs from farm kids themselves.

The Department of Labor is poised to put the finishing touches on a rule that would apply child-labor laws to children working on family farms, prohibiting them from performing a list of jobs on their own families’ land.

Under the rules, children under 18 could no longer work “in the storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials.”

“Prohibited places of employment,” a Department press release read, “would include country grain elevators, grain bins, silos, feed lots, stockyards, livestock exchanges and livestock auctions.”

And the busy-bodying doesn't stop there.

The new regulations, first proposed August 31 by Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, would also revoke the government’s approval of safety training and certification taught by independent groups like 4-H and FFA, replacing them instead with a 90-hour federal government training course.

Rossie Blinson, a 21-year-old college student from Buis Creek, N.C., told The Daily Caller that the federal government’s plan will do far more harm than good.

“The main concern I have is that it would prevent kids from doing 4-H and FFA projects if they’re not at their parents’ house,” said Blinson.

“I started showing sheep when I was four years old. I started with cattle around 8. It’s been very important. I learned a lot of responsibility being a farm kid.”

You would not be mistaken if you thought these new regs were put forth by a set of people who have not done an honest day's work, let alone, any strenuous physical labor in their lives.



More from linked article:

In Kansas, Cherokee County Farm Bureau president Jeff Clark was out in the field — literally on a tractor — when TheDC reached him. He said if Solis’s regulations are implemented, farming families’ labor losses from their children will only be part of the problem.

“What would be more of a blow,” he said, “is not teaching our kids the values of working on a farm.”

The Environmental Protection Agency reports that the average age of the American farmer is now over 50.

“Losing that work-ethic — it’s so hard to pick this up later in life,” Clark said. “There’s other ways to learn how to farm, but it’s so hard. You can learn so much more working on the farm when you’re 12, 13, 14 years old.”

John Weber, 19, understands this. The Minneapolis native grew up in suburbia and learned the livestock business working summers on his relatives’ farm.

He’s now a college Agriculture major.

“I started working on my grandparent’s and uncle’s farms for a couple of weeks in the summer when I was 12,” Weber told TheDC. “I started spending full summers there when I was 13.”

“The work ethic is a huge part of it. It gave me a lot of direction and opportunity in my life. If they do this it will prevent a lot of interest in agriculture. It’s harder to get a 16 year-old interested in farming than a 12 year old.”

From a psychological standpoint, allow us to take a somewhat converse tack: through junior high, high school and one year out of high school before going off to Seminary, we held all manner of manual labor jobs in the janitorial, painting and construction fields. And if there was one thing that experience taught us it is that is not what we wanted to do for a living.

We're glad we had those jobs growing up. It was a valuable life experience in that we got a taste of precisely what we did not want to do with our life and career. We didn't shy away from contact but we also resolved that "mixing mud", building scaffolding, and hauling around bricks in 98 degree heat in the San Gabriel Valley was not a desireable career option.

As for these Department of Labor proposals, we have not a clue as to what the motivation is. One can only wonder if this is not an extension of the statist utopian dream of eliminating all hardship, struggle and physical pain from the human experience.

This nation is experiencing persistent record unemployment yet these people are hacking away at career opportunities in the field of basic human sustenance.



Honest to god, just what is it that these people are thinking?


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Biggest boondoggle ever update

Alternate post title: When you lose the Washington Post

Each year, the world demands more grain, and this year the world's farms will not produce it. World food prices have surged above the food crisis levels of 2008. Millions more people will be malnourished, and hundreds of millions who are already hungry will eat less or give up other necessities. Food riots have started again.

Nearly all assessments of the 2008 food crisis assigned biofuels a meaningful role, but much of academia and the media ultimately agreed that the scale of the crisis resulted from a "perfect storm" of causes. Yet this "perfect storm" has re-formed not three years later. We should recognize the ways in which biofuels are driving it.

Yes, things are tough all over so please note it's "contributes" and not "causes". "Contributes" on your tax dime and by legislative fiat, we might add.

And then they came for the whole-fooders...

Lefty granola-eaters shocked... shocked to find out Congress is using some backdoor manuevers to slip items into the Wall St. reform bill.

Of all the sneaky tactics practiced in Washington D.C., this recent action by Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) is one of the most insidious: While no one was looking, he injected amendment language into the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009 (H.R. 4173) that would expand the powers of the FTC (not the FDA, but the FTC) to terrorize nutritional supplement companies by greatly expanding the power of the FTC to make its own laws that target dietary supplement companies.

This is a little-known secret about the FTC and the nutritional supplements business: The FTC routinely targets nutritional supplement companies that are merely telling the truth about their products. Some companies are threatened by merely linking to published scientific studies about their products.

Welcome to the struggle, gang.

So, about that 'critical health priority' setting on your dinner table?...(UPDATED)

(Please scroll to bottom for update. Thanks.)

File this one under: Is there anything in life that these people do not wish to regulate?

The Food and Drug Administration should regulate the amount of salt added to foods to help Americans cut their high sodium intake, which can lead to high blood pressure, kidney failure and strokes, an influential federal panel said on Tuesday.

The Institute of Medicine said this was needed because Americans get most of their salt from processed and restaurant food, and merely telling them to eat less salt has not worked.

Meghan Scott, a spokeswoman for the FDA, which sponsored the IOM report, said the agency has not yet decided whether to regulate salt in U.S. foods. "We are not right now working on regulations," she said, but the agency is considering the panel's recommendations.

(italics, ours)

So when the incessant nagging and caterwauling doesn't work, you break out the big regulatory guns of compulsion.

And dig this Meghan Scott character: she wants us all to believe that they are merely considering regulation after a study they sponsored recommend that they do so. Don't you think that if you commission a study that concludes the FDA should regulate salt, the FDA will most likely regulate salt? Folks, the FDA is going to regulate salt.

"For 40 years we have known about the relationship between sodium and the development of hypertension and other life threatening diseases, but we have had virtually no success in cutting back the salt in our diets," Jane Henney of the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine in Ohio, who chaired the Institute of Medicine panel, said in a statement.

"The best way to accomplish this is to provide companies the level playing field they need so they are able to work across the board to reduce salt in the food supply."

For those of you scoring at home, "Level playing field" is statist lingo for mandatory rules and regulations

"There is now overwhelming evidence that we must treat sodium reduction as a critical public health priority," said Dr. Walter Willett of Harvard School of Public Health and a member of the Institute of Medicine.

The panel said companies should be allowed to reduce sodium on a step-by-step basis so that they do not lose customers due to sudden changes in flavor, the panel of experts said.

That companies would be graced by this leniency is proof of the ultimate benevolence of this panel. All hail the Institute of Medicine!

U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Senator Tom Harkin said on a conference call they would pressure the FDA to regulate salt intake in the U.S. food supply.

"My view of self regulation is that it has not worked in the past," DeLauro said. "We need to move this along."

This quote was given after the article noted that food giants like Pepsico, General Mills, Kraft Foods, and Campbell Soups Inc., all had stated goals to reduce the sodium content in their products across the board.





(UPDATE #1): A funny thing happened on the way to the Institute of Medicine...

High-salt diets may not increase the risk of death, contrary to long-held medical beliefs, according to investigators from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University.

They reached their conclusion after examining dietary intake among a nationally representative sample of adults in the U.S. The Einstein researchers actually observed a significantly increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease (CVD) associated with lower sodium diets.

The researchers analyzed data from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III), which was conducted by the federal government among a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults. These data were then compared against death records that had been collected by the government through the year 2000. The sample of approximately 8,700 represented American adults who were over 30 years of age at the time of the baseline survey (1988-1994) and were not on a special low-salt diet.

After adjusting for known CVD risk factors, such as smoking, diabetes and blood pressure, the one-fourth of the sample who reported consuming the lowest amount of sodium were found to be 80% more likely to die from CVD compared to the one-fourth of the sample consuming the highest level of sodium. The risk for death from any cause appeared 24% greater for those consuming lower salt, but this latter difference was not quite large enough to dismiss the role of chance.

“Our findings suggest that for the general adult population, higher sodium is very unlikely to be independently associated with higher risk of death from CVD or all other causes of death,” says Dr. Hillel W. Cohen, associate professor of epidemiology and population health at Einstein.

(italics, totally ours)

Color us unsurprised. ObamaCare is not about better healthcare and neither is this pending regulation of salt. It's about control. It's about a fundamental distrust of individual freedoms and liberty.

They may try to dress it up in the fineries of doing what's best for the greater good of individuals in society but at the end of the day the compelling logic is that you cannot be trusted to make healthcare decisions or dietary decisions on your own.

Looking at the way Obamacare was fashioned and looking at what is actually in the bill as we have been doing in our Nancy's Nuances: a journey of discovery and now looking at the statements, motives and facts regarding salt regulation, how can it be anything but?

Soft tyranny and Tony the Tiger

*

Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Kathleen Sebelius said today that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is developing a new regulation that would require food manufacturers to display nutritional information on the front of packages.

This would mean that the front of a Wheaties box, for example, would display not only the smiling face of a famous athlete but also declare how many calories from fat are in each serving.

“Busy shoppers will be able to go into grocery stores and have some easy to understand information on the front of packages giving them quick data on what is a healthier choice,” said Sebelius at the U.S. Capitol.

“The Food and Drug Administration right now is working with food manufacturers to not only update the nutritional labeling on the back of packages, which right now is written in small bar codes and pretty indecipherable and hasn’t been updated in 20 years, but to move to a front-of-package labeling strategy,” said Sebelius.

To prove just how completely ridiculous this all is, do a quick survey of the food packaging in your kitchen or pantry. Where's the nutritional labeling? Our survey revealed that fully 2/3rds to 3/4ths of the labeling was on the side panels.

And written in small bar codes? That's the price code, Sebelius, you idiot.

And indecipherable? Maybe that's the key. The ratio of ingredients in a product that cannot be pronounced is inversely proportionate to the healthiness of that product.

Monosodiumglu... eh, pass.

Water, Yeast, Hops, Malt, Barley... now, we're talking.

But all this speaks to the dangers of letting people, particularly the government, act on your behalf because they claim it's good for you.

Sebelius, in one paragraph, proved she doesn't have a stinking clue as to what she's talking about. Yet, she is going to subject food manufacturers, grocery stores and other retailers to the added expense and inconvenience of these new completely unnecessary rules.


* See. 10 vitamins and minerals right on the front panel.





You want these cute kids crowded out by labeling?

Coming to a dinner table near you

Whether you like it or not.

That Caesar salad you're about to eat? It's 800 calories, and that's without the croutons. The fettuccine Alfredo? A whopping 1,220 calories. You may choose to ignore the numbers, but soon it's going to be tough to deny you saw them.

A requirement tucked into the nation's massive health-care bill will make calorie counts impossible for thousands of restaurants to hide and difficult for consumers to ignore.

More than 200,000 fast-food and other chain restaurants will have to include calorie counts on menus, menu boards, and even drive-through eateries.

The new law, which applies to any restaurant with 20 or more locations, directs the Food and Drug Administration to create a new national standard for menu labeling. The FDA has one year to draw up regulations, which would likely take effect a year or two after that.

What a ridiculous provision in a completely non-sensical law. Seriously, if you are ordering up the rib-eye and the baked potato (loaded) and washing that back with a couple-three Stone IPAs at the Riviera Club are you doing any calorie counting? Probably not.

It just speaks to the awfulness of ObamaCare that there is not a single part of your life that, if they cannot control, will certainly aspire to nagging you into submission.

But do you know what would look better here, instead? Fir. Douglas Fir.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has ordered his staff to revise a computerized forecasting model that showed that climate legislation supported by President Obama would make planting trees more lucrative than producing food.

The latest Agriculture Department economic-impact study of the climate bill, which passed the House this summer, found that the legislation would profit farmers in the long term. But those profits would come mostly from higher crop prices as a result of the legislation's incentives to plant more forests and thus reduce the amount of land devoted to food-producing agriculture.

According to the economic model used by the department and the Environmental Protection Agency, the legislation would give landowners incentives to convert up to 59 million acres of farmland into forests over the next 40 years. The reason: Trees clean the air of heat-trapping gases better than farming does.

Mr. Vilsack, in a little-noticed statement issued with the report earlier this month, said the department's forecasts "have caused considerable concern" among farmers and ranchers.

(italics... all of them, ours)

This is just insanity.

And haven’t we been down this road of “altering” data to “hide the decline” to fit snugly into a political agenda just recently?

The article goes on to say that Vilsack wants his chief economist to work with the EPA to "undertake a review of the assumptions in the FASOM model, to update the model and to develop options on how best to avoid unintended consequences for agriculture that might result from climate change legislation."

Well, we certainly know what some of the intended consequences of agriculture are: abundant and cheap food that will feed this country’s and the world’s growing population. Unfortunately, we are not really concerned with that. Radically altering the business model of our agrigulture sector based upon junk science is apparently trumping starving ourselves.

The dairy industry is already heavily subsidized in order to prop up prices, so we guess this is just the Obama administration’s way of extending a cash for conifers program to the rest of the agriculture industry.

We’re beginning to wonder: are they really that incompetent or do they sit around and make-up the most blatantly retarded crap just to make blogging easy?

P.S. Looking forward to more green on green violence as the ethanol industry clashes with the Cash for Conifers lobby.

Unheeded Lessons of History: South of the Border style

Mexico puts a price freeze on 150 pantry staples.

Guess what Mexico will soon be running low on?