On PHF's (Potentially Hazardous Foods)

I hope all of you had a great Thanksgiving! 
I know that I did....   6 parties/meals/events, and I gained about 5 pounds. 

Now it's time for a rant. 

My employer, Jukt Micronics, threw a Thanksgiving meal/party for the employees in each shop.  Several of the employees brought additional food from home. 

The main course was something called "Carnitas", which Bing defines as "a dish of Mexican cuisine. Carnitas are made by braising or simmering pork meat in oil or preferably lard until tender. The process takes three or four hours and the result is very tender and juicy pork meat, which is then typically served with chopped coriander leaves and diced onion, salsa, guacamole, tortillas, and refried beans."

Heck yes.  These were some authentic old-school Carnitas.  No one was injured. 

Later on in the week, we had a Supervisor's Lunch.  All food was brought from home by the Supervisors or their spouses. 
Everyone who brought something brought enough to feed about 5 other people. 
It was awesome. 
No one was injured. 

A few days later, I went to Gainesville TX, for the legit Thanksgiving meal with my youngest sister, her husband, and his extended family. 
They cooked almost all of the food.  My mother (that's her with the whitish hair and blue sweater in the Supervisor Lunch picture) did the rest.  That's her again, in the next pic, on the far left at my sister's house. 
She has taught me a deep and abiding love of food, groceries, meals, cooking, plants, animals, spices, and anything else that's edible. 
Once again, no one was harmed....

Thanksgiving night, some friends of mine from a local bar threw something that they call "Friendsgiving". 
It was awesome.  100% of the food was prepared by my friends and their families. 
No one was harmed, although I DID overindulge in bourbon, and have sworn off it for several weeks. 

There was one other event centered around a west-side bar....,
And then another friend of mine threw another party Saturday night. 
Both occasions featured plenty of food from homes. 
No one had his stomach pumped.  (That's a total of 6 Thanksgiving parties, in case you're keeping score....)

So what's my point in all this? 

Here's a letter that my shop received several months ago from the Consumer Health Division of the City of Fort Worth.  It's totally unrelated to Thanksgiving.  We got the letter back in April. 
I've hung onto it for occasions when I'm in a bad mood and want to make it worse.

To: The Woodshop Manager

"Spoke with production manager (Blank Blank) and he stated that female employees do sell sandwiches, Barbacoa (that's Messican BQ) and hot dogs."

"Complaint Confirmed.  Warning issued to all 3 employees.  There was no sign of any PHF's onsite (Potentially Hazardous Foods - prepared from home)."

"One employee admitted they sell about 5 burritos a day."

"Explained to each employee that it was illegal of prepare foods @ home and sell them to the public.  If another complaint happens, a citation will be issued to the individuals selling prepared foods."

Signed - Consumer Health Specialist 

Let me rewrite that letter for you, ok? 

To: The Woodshop Manager, who at this point is now my bitch,

It's painfully obvious to anyone who thinks about it for more than a few seconds that people are quite capable of making good choices about what to eat, what to buy, and whose cooking they trust.   

However, my job gives me the right, and the responsibility, to hassle people about what foods they sell. 

Tens of millions of people consume PHF's (Potentially Hazardous Foods) prepared from home without giving the City Of Fort Worth's Consumer Health Division a kickback money for a food-handler's permit or a license to sell burritos. 

The quality and safety of the food doesn't improve at all as a result of my job, or the kickbacks licenses and permits. 

But if you complain about this visit, my buddies in other City Hall departments will hassle you about your water runoff quality, your factory's air emissions, your habit of parking in the vacant lot next door that's not zoned for parking, or any of the thousands of other niggling little things we could use to make your life miserable. 

So get out of the burrito and barbacoa business, or give me some money. 

Signed - One Of Your Many Lords And Masters

I hope all of you had a great Thanksgiving!!
 

The chicken funeral

Here's an interesting protest video. 

These protesters are from Direct Action Everywhere.   In the video, they go into a supermarket, reverently and carefully select a (dead) processed chicken, put it in a little black coffin, and then harangue the other grocery shoppers with rants and speeches that their selections "are not food, they are violence". 

Or something. 

This is the Berkeley (California) wing of Direct Action Everywhere, which should surprise no one.

A quick look at the Direct Action Everywhere Meetup page leads me to believe that they're taking their identity politics too far.  Lordy....

Anyway, here's the video. 

Why am I posting this?  Because if you look in the background at the .15 mark, and again at the 1.49 mark, you can see some wooden orchard bin displays that were made at my shop in Texas !!

Heck YEAH!  We can now say that we built the backdrop for a chicken funeral !!!!

 

Yes, The Fighting Okra Do Exist, And They Dwell Among You

My co-workers get a kick out of my Fighting Okra shirt every time I wear it. 

I graduated from Delta State University in 1983.  At the time, our mascot was the DSU Statesman, quite possibly the most boring mascot in the nation.  Everyone else had Panthers, Rebels, Bulldogs, Vandals, Vikings, Tigers, Bears and Hawks. 
We had this thing that looked like a Leprechaun on steroids.  No connection to the Mississippi Delta region, no personality, and no defining character traits. 

The way I've heard it, several years after I graduated some guys in the athletic dorm got a bit tipsy and drew up the first ever picture of the Delta State University Fighting Okra.  Granted, the Mississippi Delta isn't particularly known for Okra, but at least the Delta is very green, we grew a lot of other plants there, and it was distinctive.  NOBODY else would have stadiums full of college kids chanting OKRA! OKRA! OKRA! after touchdowns. 
The idea took off from there. 

Here's the back of my DSU Fighting Okra T-Shirt, sent to me by former neighbor Alan LaMastus.

The Okra still isn't the official mascot of Delta State University.  The Stateman and The Okra have agreed to co-exist until enough elderly alumni pass away.  Then the Statesman costume can then be sent back to whichever Irish Pride Festival or St. Patrick's Day Parade it came from. 

Some radio station once published a listing of the Top 5 Bad College Mascots.  They declared the "Okra" the absolute worst. 

Here's a slice of what they had to say:

The pride of Cleveland, Mississippi - Delta State University and the feared "Fighting Okra". As you well know, there's nothing that can scare the bejeebers out of you like a ticked off vegetable. Remember those terrible nightmares you had as a child of that horrible "Fighting Okra" coming to drag you off into the garden? Course you don't. Nobody does. Fighting Okra? Sounds more like the college took a dare from several rednecks in Mississippi to brand themselves that way....

Well, yeah, that's kinda the way it happened. 

GO OKRA !!!!

The most destructive company in America is about to go bankrupt !!

Busybodies in the USA have spent the last 20 years weeping, wailing, and rending their garments because of the destructive impact of Wal-Mart.  Wal-Mart supposedly kills downtown areas, they don't pay people "enough", and they purchase their merchandise from people of the wrong racial makeup. 
Progressive city councils pass legislation almost every day, trying to force Wal-Mart (and no other company) to pay higher wages, build smaller stores, and basically, stay away. 
They almost always fail. 

(Full Disclosure: I work for a company that makes display fixtures for grocery stores.  All grocery stores, not just Wal-Mart.  I've shipped more fruitstands to more grocery stores than anyone who has ever lived.  Hell, somebody had to do it.) 

But if you think Wal-Mart is destructive, you shoulda seen Safeway.  Back in the day,   Safeway built massive (6,000 square feet in some cases) stores, stores that carried EVERYTHING you could ever want to eat.  Some of their stores even had their own parking lots!!  They didn't offer sales on credit to their customers!!  Safeway was a threat to the American way of life !!  The Mom 'n' Pop stores didn't stand a chance!! 

And before Safeway was A&P, a company that few people under 40 have ever heard of.  A&P's destructive tendencies gave it the reputation of "the most controversial company in the nation". 

Marc Levinson of the Wall Street Journal has written a great piece on the A&P controversy, and I'm scraping and posting it here before it disappears behind a paywall.  I've long known about the evolution of the grocery industry, and how government has fought progress every step of the way, but I've never seen this much online about what A&P went through. 

Every day that you don't have to make your own soap, mix your own toothpaste, or stop at four different places for meat, tomatoes, diapers and razors, you owe that unimaginable luxury to the visionary pioneers at The Great A&P Tea Company, Safeway, and Wal-Mart. 

Here's Mr. Levinson:

***********

A prosecutor in Franklin Roosevelt's administration called it a "giant blood sucker." A federal judge in Woodrow Wilson's day deemed it a "monopolist," and another, during Harry Truman's presidency, convicted it of violating antitrust law. The federal government investigated it almost continuously for a quarter-century, and more than half the states tried to tax it out of business. For its strategy of selling groceries cheaply, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company paid a very heavy price.

Now, more than a century and a half after its birth near the docks of lower Manhattan, the Great A&P is reaching the end. The company, with holdings that include East Coast grocery chains such as Food Emporium and Pathmark, filed for bankruptcy in December 2010 and emerged from Chapter 11 status as a private company. Over the summer, news emerged that A&P had hired Credit Suisse to review its options, with a sale—to either to another grocery company like Kroger Co., or an investment firm like Cerberus Capital Management—a strong likelihood.

So far, no deep-pocketed shopper has plucked A&P off the shelf. The watching and waiting continues. When the company with the familiar name finally fades from the American scene, few will recall what A&P once was: the most controversial company in the country, the center of a struggle over the very nature of American capitalism.

 

© Underwood & Underwood/Corbis
               

Price-cutting A&P stores like this one in 1934 angered competitors—and Washington.

A&P was Wal-Mart long before there was Wal-Mart. Founded around the start of the Civil War, it upset the tradition-encrusted tea trade by selling teas at discount prices by mail and developing the first brand-name tea. A few years later, its tea shops began to stock spices, baking powder and canned goods, making A&P one of the first chain grocers.

Then, in 1912, John A. Hartford, one of the two brothers who had taken over the company from their father, had one of those inspirations that change the course of business. He proposed that the company test a bare-bones format at a tiny store in Jersey City, offering short hours, limited selection and no home delivery, and that it use the cost savings to lower prices. The A&P Economy Store was an instant success. The Great A&P was soon opening one and then two and then three stores per day. By 1920, it had become the largest retailer in the world.

John Hartford and his brother, George, the firm's financial wizard, didn't stop there. In the 1920s, they integrated vertically. They opened a produce brokerage to supply their stores with fruits and vegetables, which many grocery chains didn't carry at the time. They acquired bakeries, canneries and bottling plants—and leveraged their ability to make everything from ketchup to chocolate bars to strike tougher bargains with suppliers. They refused to buy through wholesalers and demanded that suppliers pay A&P the standard wholesale commission. And they plowed A&P's cost savings back into lower prices, fueling relentless growth. In 1929, A&P became the first retailer ever to sell $1 billion of merchandise in a single year.

While shoppers flocked to A&P's 16,000 stores, small grocers and grocery wholesalers didn't share their enthusiasm. The anti-chain-store movement dates back at least to 1913, when the American Fair-Trade League pushed for laws against retail price-cutting. It grew through the 1920s, as groups such as the aptly named Association Opposed to Branch Stores in Missouri demanded action against the chains.

The U.S. Supreme Court lent its support to the movement in 1931, approving taxes based on the number of stores a retailer owned. No company suffered more than A&P, which operated several times more stores than any other retailer.

Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal piled on. The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, the centerpiece of Roosevelt's economic recovery program, tried to bolster profits by subjecting entire industries to "codes of conduct" created by industry committees. The code for food retailing imposed minimum price markups on almost every product, blocking more efficient retailers from offering lower prices than less efficient competitors. The business sector, led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, cheered such measures, as did many Republican politicians. When the head of a major trade organization complained that business was "being crucified on the cross of competition," no one thought it strange.

After the Supreme Court struck down Roosevelt's codes in 1935, Wright Patman, a populist congressman from Texas, took up the cause of the country's 600,000 or so mom-and-pop grocers. Restricting chains, Patman declared, would keep "Hitler's methods of government and business in Europe." The Robinson-Patman Act, passed in 1936, kept suppliers from selling more cheaply to large customers than to small ones, stripping A&P of its cost advantage. The law forced up grocery prices and devastated A&P's profits. Six years later, the Justice Department brought one of the most bizarre antitrust cases of all time, accusing A&P and its executives of illegally restraining trade by demanding lower prices from suppliers—and winning.

Thanks in good part to the Hartfords' tenacity, the restraints on discount retailing began to fade away in the 1950s. Chain-store taxes were gradually repealed, and state laws limiting price competition to protect mom and pop were taken off the books. By 1962, when Wal-Mart, Target, Kmart, and other modern discount formats were born, the pendulum had swung in consumers' favor.

By then, John and George Hartford were dead, and their company, after passing into the hands of less competent managers and going public, had entered a death spiral that appears to be in its final stages. A&P, once the country's best-known brand, is by now so tarnished it probably has negative value, and any buyer will likely retire it. But even if the Great Atlantic & Pacific doesn't live on in name, it will leave an important legacy: the idea that capitalism can benefit consumers, if only capitalists will allow it to do so.

***************

The luxuries that A&P brought us are now so commonplace that our miraculous abundance now seems almost normal. 

And somewhere this morning, working in the back room of a Wal-Mart, a stockboy (or girl) has come up with the idea that will destroy Wal-Mart.  Wal-Mart won't stand a chance
 
Progressives and other busybodies will try to stop him, and call him "a giant blood sucker", a vulture, or just a greedy bastard. 
 
He will be accused of cutthroat competition, monopolistic behavior, and being un-American, all for trying to improve on Wal-Mart's methods.
 
I wish I could figure out who he is, and start buying stock early. 


 

Tarrant County Libertarian Meetup, Thursday Night at Fort Worth Food Truck Park !!

Food Trucks. The police harass them. Brick and mortar stores don't like them. Tax collectors are frustrated by them. And consumers LOVE them!

An entrepreneur has found a compromise by creating the Fort Worth Food Park, a small enclave that holds about a dozen of these rolling restaurants until they're finally free to drive at will about the city, committing acts of agricultural capitalism.

 So is this not the perfect spot for an Libertarian Party Meetup??? ...

The Tarrant County Libertarian Meetup is going to get together at the Fort Worth Food Park, 2509 Weisenberger Street (behind the Target Shopping center near Montgomery Ward Plaza and West 7th Street) on September 19th at 7:00 p.m.

In addition to eating some great food with great people, we'll have Robert Harris, who is running for the State House nomination for District 94 give us a quick talk about his campaign, why he's running, and how you can help.

Stay tuned to this page (or the Tarrant LP Facebook page) if we have bad weather. The Fort Worth Food Park is near the 7th Street development, and we'll go somewhere in that area if it rains.

The trucks scheduled to be there on the 19th are: Holy Frijole, Life is Sweet, Sauzy, The Que, Three Lions, and What's Cook-N Chef. Good food. Good people. Good Libertarian Party politics !! Hope to see you there.

 

 

In Praise Of Planet-Warming, Highway-Congesting, Port-Clogging Shipping And Freight !!

I might stop putting original content on this site, and start scraping Don Boudreaux's and Russ Roberts' Café Hayek posts every day.  Just out of awe.  And maybe laziness. 
As long as those two are alive, I really don't have much to say about anything but dachshunds. 

Here's a recent post that Boudreaux put together about shipping and freight:

The Quotation Of The Day is from page 2 of Rose George’s 2013 Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, The Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes On Your Back, Gas In Your Car, and Food On Your Plate:

But who looks behind a television now and sees the ship that brought it?  Who cares about the man who steered your breakfast cereal through winter storms?  How ironic that the more ships have grown in size, the less space they now take up in our imagination.

It is one of the most historically unique and amazing features of life in modern market economies: almost everything that each of us daily consumes – stuff mundane to us, such as toothpaste, laundry detergent, underwear, houses with solid floors, walls, and roofs, motor transportation, blueberries and pineapple year-round in Boston and Berlin – is stuff that no one person knows how to make.  It’s not just that you didn’t make and don’t know how to make, say, the drip-coffee maker that you used this morning to brew your cup of coffee.  No one knows how to make that coffee maker.  And nor is all of the knowledge necessary to make that coffee maker, and to get it at reasonably cost into your kitchen, available in any one place or to any one self-consciously cooperating group of minds.

Of course, there is an organization of people – working, say, for a company called Krups – in which there exists the knowledge of how to assemble various component parts – wires, metal, glass carafes, heating elements, and so on – into a coffee maker.  But Krups (as is the case with the likes of Braun, and Cuisinart, and Black & Decker) only does the final assembly (and, perhaps, had a creative idea or two for just how to assemble component parts together into an unusually good coffee maker).

But tap into all of the knowledge in all of the brains of all of the people who have ever worked for Krups and you’ll not get one one-billionth of all the knowledge that is necessary to transforms all of the materials that are ‘in’ your coffee maker from their raw stage and into the machine that now sits patiently on your kitchen counter, ready to allow you to brew more delicious coffee within minutes, with no sweat or danger, and with just a few small and minor muscle movements on your part.

     ****************************************

One day I'm going to write an illustrated post about how my employer makes products as fundamentally ridiculous as fruitstands, but showing how the process now involves people in four continents. 

I've been wanting to write this "I, Fruitstand" post for years. 

But, to Dr. Boudreaux's point, I'm around them every day. 

It doesn't fascinate me that the metal comes from Mexico just how we want it, and that the wood comes from the Appalachians and the casters from China and the plastic bumper from the Philippines, or wherever.  We take this process for granted, simply because it works. 

 

The Odious Chinese Nachos Story

I’m not a picky eater. My father was a big advocate of “Eat what they set before you”, and my mother likes to try different recipes, mostly Southern Living Magazine’s fried salad/fried watermelon offerings. Good stuff.

When I cook, recipes are nothing but points of departure – a suggestion on how the other person once did it. If you’ve never run short on ingredients and hollowed out a Pop-Tart and used the crust in place of bread crumbs, you have no business calling yourself a cook.

But creativity has limits….

One of my China trips was supposed to last only 3 weeks (typically I’m gone for 5). Problems had erupted, solutions were rejected, and the bosses asked me to stay for another week. I failed in that week’s missions, so they asked me to stay yet another week.

After week four in the land of Mandarin Chinese, I was ready to speak some English. I can usually entertain myself with the contents of my head (one of the many, many advantages of an old-school Liberal Arts education) but I found myself bothering Texas co-workers on Skype more than necessary, and called home too many times at odd hours only to learn that the grass was still growing and that no dachshunds had died.

I started lurking in the lobby of the Xiamen Princess Hotel, hoping to catch other manufacturing exiles who could talk football, food, politics or even American Idol. After several nights of reading downstairs, advertising my availability like a Shanghai harbor whore, I saw someone going through the buffet line, a guy that looked like an American. He had on a John Deere Tractor T-shirt!

I ran over and introduced myself. (I may have offered to buy him a drink, given him my phone number, my room number, and told him how fit and manly he looked in his John Deer T-shirt.) He sensed my desperation level, and asked if I wanted to hang out with him and a buddy the next night. I’ve forgotten the guy’s name (Jason?), but he turned out to be from Memphis, Tennessee, and he and I had actually deer hunted on the same land in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. His family had a successful business manufacturing high-end dresses in a factory two hours from Xiamen.

One night later, I met Jason and his friend Jeremy (?) in the lobby. We were going to go to Xiamen, China’s first Mexican restaurant. Let me be clear: we were going to go to Xiamen, China’s first Mexican restaurant.

I’m an optimist. Having already experienced Cleveland, Mississippi’s first Chinese restaurant, Jackson, Mississippi’s first Thai restaurant, and Merigold, Mississippi’s first ever restaurant, I didn’t think things could go too wrong in Xiamen’s first Mexican restaurant.

Jeremy, who was somewhat fluent in Mandarin, explained the sign over the front door – “Xiamen’s House Of Mexico”. The place had a ragged tourist-trap sombrero hung on one wall, and a map of Texas and Mexico painted on another. (Chinese people generally don’t know the shape of Mexico, but everyone knows the shape of Texas, and perhaps the Lone Star State was included as a point of reference. You are about to eat food from the little country south of the nation of Texas. Canadian singer/songwriter Fred Eaglsmith likes to talk about how proud Texas is of its shape. We’ll put that shape on anything.) If not for the mariachi hat and the Texican wall map, the place could’ve been any other noodle shop.

Well, except for the menu….

Veteran China travelers often collect examples of bad “Chinglish”. The menus at this place were in Spanese. Or Chinish. Whatever you call it when you cross Manchu Wok with Taco Bell. After we ordered our beers, Jeremy determined that the menu item “Chips Beef Medley Layer Family” was probably nachos. You can’t go wrong with nachos.

Here’s how they went wrong with nachos:

These restauranteurs had never seen, smelled, tasted, eaten, chewed or shat Mexican food in their lives.

My theory was that everything on the menu was created from photographs, with no other guidance.

Let’s start at the bottom of the “Chips Beef Medley Layer Family”, shall we? Where god-fearing Mexicans would put some corn tortilla chips as a foundation, Xiamen’s House Of Mexico had a layer of rice chips. Not a problem. They don’t grow much corn in China. When in Rome, etc., etc., etc.

Most nachos continue upward with a layer of sliced and spiced chicken or beef. The Chips Beef Medley Layer Family nachos got by with a thin layer of shaved pork. I’ve never seen this stuff outside of Asia, but it’s pretty good. Take some pig meat and repeatedly run it across a cheese grater for a couple of years. It has a good taste with almost no texture. Dust it on the rice chips of your Chips Beef Medley Layer Family, shortly before adding your….cheese.

Asians (stereotype alert!) generally don’t like cheese or dairy. They think that cheese tastes and smells like baby vomit, which, when you come to think of it….it does. That’s why one cheese is as good as another to them. Take some leftover Limburger and Munster, or any combo that smells worse, throw them in your Crock Pot and melt it until it can be smelled throughout the Middle Kingdom, from Beijing to Hong Kong. Apply liberally to the pulverized pork, and you have the stinky middle child of your Medley Layer Family in place.

I know for a fact that the Master Chef at Xiamen’s House Of Mexico had never been exposed to salsa. Or Picante, Pico De Gallo, Ranchero, Guacamole, Chimichurri Sauce, Habaneros, or Chipotle. This guy had never even seen a bottle of Wal-Mart’s Old El Paso Picante Sauce from New Jersey. So he improvised. The upper stuff in his nacho photos was red. Tomatoes are red. He needed red stuff.  So he took a large can of Campbell’s Tomato Paste and put three thick slices of it on top of the Limburgermunster cheese. We could still see the ring marks from the Campbell’s can.

Remember my Chinese stereotype, the one where they don’t like cheese or dairy? The chef's photo of nachos probably showed a dollop of sour cream on top of the Chips Beef Medley Layer Family. Native Chinese can’t imagine eating sour cream.

What to do, what to do?

Instead of sour cream, they topped off the rice chips, the shaved pork, the Dr. Scholl’s Shoe Insert Cheese, and the slices of tomato paste with…. A big ol’ scoop of Kool Whip.

I’ve probably spent six months in China, and have had only four or five bad meals. Of the bad meals, this was the one I enjoyed the most. Jason, Jeremy and I didn’t act like The Ugly Americans. We were polite. We used the rice chips to dig out the shredded pork. We drank. We bonded. We drank some more. 

Having learned our lesson, we decided to stop experimenting with Asian/Mexican Fusion Food. We vowed to eat the next night where the Chinese eat, to experience what the locals were eating. The next night, we ate at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Milton Friedman Was Wrong

Milton Friedman once divided all spending into four basic categories, claiming that government spending would always be inefficient because it all fit into his fourth category.

Here's his breakdown:

There are four ways to spend money. 

1. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why you really watch out for what you're doing, and you try to get the most for your money. 

2. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well then, I'm not so careful about the content of the present, but I'm very careful about the cost. 

3. Then, I can spend somebody else's money on myself. And if I spend somebody else's money on myself, then I'm going to have a good lunch!
 
4. Finally, I can spend somebody else's money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else's money on somebody else, I'm not concerned about how much it costs, and I'm not concerned about what I get. And that's government. And that's close to 40 percent of our national income.

His point, of course, is well-taken, but incomplete.  Government spending isn't restricted to Category #4.  But I think the good Dr. Friedman should have anticipated the amount of government spending devoted to Category #3 (spending someone else's money on myself.) 

Consider this:

Poor oversight at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs allowed agency officials to waste as much as $762,000 at a pair of multimillion-dollar conferences that took place last year in Orlando, according to an investigative report released Monday.The report, released by the VA's independent watchdog, estimated that the agency spent about $6.1 million on the two conferences, including $762,000 that was identified as unauthorized or unnecessary. Among the wasteful expenses: $97,906 worth of promotional gifts for the federal workers attending the training sessions; $154,000 for contractor travel; $16,500 to produce daily "Happy Face" videos of those in attendance; and nearly $2,300 for beverages, such as soda and juice, consumed by conference officials and speakers.

And this one:

Where does a muffin cost more than $16?At a government conference, it turns out.They may run just over $2 at your average coffee shop, but the Justice Department paid seven to eight times as much at a gathering it held at the Capital Hilton in Washington. And on Tuesday, the muffins seemed well on their way to joining the Pentagon’s $600 toilet seat as symbols of wasteful spending.Justice Department auditors also criticized a $76-per-person lunch at a conference at a Hilton in San Francisco, featuring slow-cooked Berkshire pork carnitas, hearts-of-romaine salad — and coffee at $8.24 a cup.A report released Tuesday by the department’s acting inspector general,Cynthia A. Schnedar, is full of what she called “wasteful or extravagant spending” at 10 law enforcement conferences spanning the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. Descriptions of cookies and brownies costing the government nearly $10 each and beef Wellington hors d’oeuvres at $7.32 per serving struck a nerve in Washington, where austerity and belt-tightening are the watchwords at a time of economic hardship.

And there are the recent GSA scandals:

At least 77 General Services Administration employee conferences that totaled more than $6.7 million in costs are under review by the agency’s inspector general, the watchdog said at a hearing before a House panel Wednesday.


The conferences, which cost at least $10,000 each and were attended by 25 employees or more, were held between October 2010, when the agency held an $823,000 employee conference in Las Vegas, and April 2012, when that conference became public.

The conferences were the focus of a hearing before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. GSA acts as the realtor and purchasing officer of the federal government.

The conferences ranged from a a five-day regional marketing managers meeting that cost $10,920, to the 2011 GSA Training Conference and Expo that cost $1.2 million.

According to GSA preliminary findings obtained by The Washington Post, the Federal Acquisition Service held 30 conferences costing more than $3.5 million, the Public Buildings Service held 38 conferences costing more than $2.5 million, the Office of Governmentwide Policy held one conference costing $136,495, the Office of the Chief Information held two conferences costing $177,960, the PBS and FAS held a single joint conference costing $112,131, the Chief People Officer held three conferences costing $60,588; and one for Intergovernmental Relations, costing $15,922.

While the list gave numbers of people who attended, it did not break down the number of employees.

Since the 77 conferences are currently under investigation, the agency’s inspector general could not give examples of which conferences had problems or red flags.

The committee also reviewed a one-day $270,000 awards ceremony in Arlington County for employees of the Federal Acquisition Service.

The one-day conference was held four weeks after the Las Vegas event with a more than $140,000 tab for coordination and logistical costs, $34,000 for the venue, $28,000 on picture frames and $20,579 for drum sticks, Brian Miller, GSA’s inspector general, testified.

So, yeah, Government spending my neighbor's money on me isn't very efficient. 
But I bet spending my neighbor's money on $20,579.00 worth of drumsticks is a lot more fun! 

If you've ever wondered how the Federal Poverty programs can spend over $61,000.00 per family in poverty and still have families in poverty?  Look no further.  Milton Friedman's category #3

3. Then, I can spend somebody else's money on myself. And if I spend somebody else's money on myself, then I'm going to have a good lunch!

On Chick-Fil-A and chickens

It seems like the internet, the Tweetosphere, Facebook, and the pitiful remnants of the print media are all a-clucking about Chick-Fil-A. 
Dan Cathy, Chick-Fil-A's CEO, in addition to supporting some anti-gay and lesbian organizations, made the following comments to the Baptist Press: 

Some have opposed the company's support of the traditional family. "Well, guilty as charged," said Cathy when asked about the company's position.


"We are very much supportive of the family -- the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that.

"We operate as a family business ... our restaurants are typically led by families; some are single. We want to do anything we possibly can to strengthen families. We are very much committed to that," Cathy emphasized.

Blah, Blah, Blah, blah, and blah.  If Dan Cathy wants to give money to a group called Gods And Ghosts and Goblins Against Gays, that's his business. If customers want to avoid his business because of it, more power to them.  That's their business, right? 

Here's what I don't understand.....How is it that the Leftosphere is going totally batshit against a Chicken Restaurant for their anti-gay stance WHEN THAT IS THE EXACT SAME POLICY HELD BY BARACK FREAKIN' OBAMA TWO MONTHS AGO ?????

Where was the outrage?  Why didn't lefties, liberals and the rest of the Great Herd Of Independent Minds decide to boycott the Democrat Party?  Why were the Libertarians the only ones standing up for Gay/Lesbian equality??? 

Hell's Bells, I'm a freakin' Shipping Manager and Freight Broker.  But I had balls enough to publish this in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram back when Barack Obama was still "evolving". 
Was it easy? No. 
Did I take a lot of crap because of it?  Yes. 
So why couldn't The Teleprompter Jesus do the same thing until the day after North Carolina voted on their anti-gay/lesbian marriage referendum? 

It's because he's a physical and moral coward.  (Hit that link.  He flip-flops around like a catfish on the lake bank.) 

Barack Obama is a chicken. 

Here's the LP candidate for President, Gary Johnson:

"I think I do better than Obama on civil liberties, I think I crush him when it comes to dollars and cents," Johnson said. "I think I do a lot bettrer than Romney on dollars and cents but I think I crush him on civil liberties."


Asked if he was the best candidate on gay marriage, Johnson said "There's no question unabashedly let's have marriage equality now, gay rights are constitutionally guaranteed."

A Johnson presidency would ensure a "libertarian president who's going to challenge Democrats to fix things when it comes to civil liberties and then get a libertarian president who's going to challenge the Republicans on dollars and cents, something they're horrible on."

End of rant. 
The picture of our president in a chicken suit came from here. 

Tarrant County Libertarian Meetup - BJ's Restaurant and Brewhouse !!

The Tarrant County Libertarian Meetup has rolled around again !!

Come hang out with us at BJ's Restaurant and Brewhouse, sample their homebrews, eat some good pizza, and help us solve the world's problems. BJ's is at 952 Northeast Loop 820, just outside Northeast Mall in Hurst/Northeast Fort Worth.


We'll be getting together on Tuesday night, July 24th from 7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. (or later). And we have a lot to talk about.....

We have a Gary Johnson event coming up in August, plus a "2nd Amendment/Gun Rights" Speakers Series with the NRA and the Texas State Rifle Association coming up on August 2nd. Plus, there's an election coming up in November, right?

The Libertarian Party - Fiscally conservative, Socially liberal, Pizza tolerant, and Brewpub extremist. Show up and make your voice heard!!

Which candidate would never eat your dog?

David Huckabee, son of Arkansas governor and former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, once hung a dog and then slit its throat.   The governor had to pull some strings to make the story go away. 

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney once put his dog in a carrier, strapped it to the roof of his car, and drove 12 hours to Canada. 

According to his book "Dreams From My Father", our current Commander-In-Chief, Democrat Barack Obama once ATE a dog.  (Hit the link.  Please.  Then imagine The Teleprompter Jesus sitting down to a meal of Fido and French Fries.) 

Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson, in his last debate appearance as a Republican, quipped that "My next-door neighbor’s two dogs have created more shovel-ready jobs than this president."

So let's be honest here....based on these anecdotes, which candidate would you trust with your dog? 

My vote goes to Gary Johnson !!

He would never, ever eat your dog. 

The picture of Obama's lunch came from here. 

The Trinity River Flood Control Wakeboard Park and Flood Control Bar-B-Que Joint

I've given up on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram for coverage of anything remotely controversial.  I don't think they want to irritate the one little old lady who still puts her garage sale notices in their classifieds.

Sports scores?  The betting line on the Super Bowl?  If my cell phone can't pick up Google, I'll buy a Star-Telegram for that info. 
Here's where I've been finding myself going for local news lately:  The Star-Telegraph. 

For instance....If you live in Fort Worth, you're probably aware that JD Granger and his Mama are trying to fleece the taxpayers via a multi-billion dollar "flood control" project. 

Here's what The Star-Telegraph had to say about the Flood Control Wakeboard Park after our recent heavy rains.  (And I can't find a word in the Star-Telegram about this):

The Cowtown Wakeboard park, part of the Trinity River Vision "flood" control project in Fort Worth, failed to save anyone from flooding today.  Apparently, it couldn't even save itself.

The Trinity River took back the wakeboard park.  And left a sign of just how clean the river is.  Remember that when they invite you to Tube the Trinity during the Rockin' the River events brought to you by the Trinity River Vision Authority and the Tarrant Regional Water District.

With all the flooding footage today, WHY did you not see any of the wakeboard park? 
Ask.
While you're at it, ask what it cost YOU and what it's going to cost YOU to repair it.  After all, it's YOUR money.

Here's another for instance.... We've also been burdened with a Flood Control Bar-B-Que Joint. 
Was there open bidding between restaurants for this prime real estate?  Did the city give notice that some Flood Control Restaurants could open on the banks of the Trinity? 
Hell to the No. 

Here's DFW.COM on the sweetheart deal that celebrity chef Tim Love got for his new restaurant, The Wood Shed:

Love and the Trinity River Vision Authority have taken some heat because the TRVA signed a 10-year lease with Love without open bidding. But Love says he hopes the restaurant, located just west of University Drive not far from Hoffbrau Steaks, will help open the door for other restaurants along the river.


"I've gotten beat up a little bit in the last couple of months," he continues. "But I'm trying to make [the river area] better. When I did the lease, I said, 'I want to do something for the river.' Somehow that backfired on me. I thought people would be excited about the fact that they could come here and drink a beer and 6 percent of it goes back to the [district]. I mean, that's pretty cool."

I could spend the rest of the morning dissecting that quote, but work beckons.  "I want to do something for the river????"  Good Lord in heaven, Tim, they spent $970,000.00 in public money to build your Bar-B-Que joint !!!!! 

"Ask not what you can do for your river.  Ask why I'm having to build your freakin' restaurant for you." - not John F. Kennedy 

Here's something from the Trinity River Partnership on the sweetheart deal:

After behind-the-scenes negotiations, without public input or competitive bidding, the Tarrant Regional Water District (TRWD) has spent $970,000 of public money to build a restaurant near a popular trail head along the Trinity River. Along the way, the Water District signed a 10-year lease with celebrity chef Tim Love to run it, without a competitive bidding process.....

Instead of paying rent on the building, the Woodshed will pay a percentage of its total sales to the TRVA. According to the lease, the Woodshed would pay the Water District 6 percent on its first $500,000 of sales, 5 percent on the next $500,000 and 4 percent on sales of more than $1,000,001. Love is also responsible for utilities, maintenance and upkeep of the building.


The lease was drafted and approved by Ken Brummett, the water district’s general counsel, but not voted on by the district’s board.....

Board member Jim Lane denies there’s anything untoward about the deal.


“People say there’s no transparency but there is plenty of transparency,” he said. “Other restaurateurs were contacted and no one had any interest until Tim Love stepped up. I’m sorry other restaurateurs feel, now, that they didn’t get a chance to be part of that. But we’ve been discussing this for a long time.”

Other restauranteurs were contacted?  Did Jim Lane decide which ones would be contacted?  The Massion on Turtle Creek?  Tavern on The Green?  Whose clientele is so high-toned that they would turn down something like this? 
That's not the way it is supposed to work.  Was there a public notice that a restaurant spot was going to be available?  Can you imagine the feeding frenzy that would have erupted with legit businesses competing for that site? 

The Fort Worth Stock show didn't produce this much bullshit. 

If you live in Fort Worth, you GAVE Tim Love a restaurant. 
If you live in Fort Worth, you're giving the Grangers a billion dollar boondoggle. 
It really is that simple. 

A blog and a freebie mag are the only ones to criticize the travesty. 

Fort Worth Star-Telegram - R.I.P. 

You got served !!

From the greatness of Reason magazine, on how to deal with Nanny State legislators who don't know how to find their way out of a sack, but who believe they know what's best for you to eat:

San Francisco's ban on giving away a free toy with a child's meal containing a certain number of calories, salt, and other particulars is set to kick in tomorrow. McDonald's, the clear target of the ban, had a year to figure out a way to change its business practices. Seems like they used the time wisely, reports the SF Examiner.

The San Francisco ban on providing free toys to entice children to eat unhealthy foods goes into effect Thursday, but McDonald’s plans to comply with the law by charging 10 cents a toy for their Happy Meals and donating the money to the nonprofit Ronald McDonald House.

(Catch that nice bit of editorializing about what's "unhealthy" there?)

And from the SF Weekly:

In any event, it appears the fast food chain's sharpie lawyers have McTopped San Francisco's legislators. Count this city's lawmakers as the latest among the billions and billions served.

Good for McDonald's.  They got around the toy ban by charging a dime for the toy. 

 The Aggie grew up eating McDonald's Happy Meals, and has now upgraded to McDonald's Value Meals (or the WhataBurger equivalent) and she now has the body fat of a mop handle and can do enough pull-ups to qualify for Navy Seal training.  Out of 120 people who tried to make it into the YMCA's lifeguard training program, she's one of 12 who qualified, and one of only 7 who finally passed the class.  (Not that I'm proud or anything....)

There's a lot that's unknown about proper diet and health, but this much is clear:

1) The San Francisco City Council doesn't know jack shit about this topic.  The Federal Government knows even less.  Go here for a personal testimony. 

2) Michelle Obama tried to hop on the Food Nazi Bandwagon last year, releasing some guidelines from her throne for all of us who truly love our children to follow.  Go here for the pics of Barack feeding a hot dog into The Teleprompter's orifice a few days later.

3) When I was in the Literary Retail business, I sold every diet and nutrition book that was brought to market.  The new ones couldn't be kept on the shelf, they sold so quickly.  They had totally different content than the old ones published the year before.  The old ones couldn't be given away, mostly because they were old and had different contents than the new ones that were recently featured and slobbered over by Oprah Winfrey.  The only things these books had in common were dietician authors and a short shelf life. 

4) I grew up being told to eat my fruit, eat my fruit, eat my fruit.  But that stuff turns to sugar as soon as it is digested.  I don't eat quite as much fruit now.  I feel better.
    
5) All laws, rules and regulations have unintended consequences and create different incentives from the ones intended by the prophets who bring them down from the mountain.  As an example, Happy Meal toys are now cloaked in the righteousness of the Ronald McDonald Houses.  Good work, guys !

Here's the great Jonathan Edwards, doing his 1971 mega-hit "Sunshine".  (I especially like the line "Some man's gone, he's tried to run my life, he don't know what he's askin'.  He can't even run his own life, I'll be damned if he'll run mine.") 

One last thing, totally off-topic....Edwards mentions performing this at an anti-war rally.  Are we going to have any more of those rallies, or do we have to elect a Republican president first????

The People Of Wal-Mart !!!!

In addition to working in freight and shipping, I also supervise an assembly line that produces DVD dump bins for Wal-Mart, probably because my current warehouse had room for the project and nobody else wanted it. 

These things have caused me to miss weekends, birthdays, funerals, dental appointments, and sleep. 
This one has candy signs; others are done for movies.

 
After I missed my 30-year high school reunion (because of dump bins) I asked everyone in my class to have their picture taken with the dump bin at the Wal-Mart nearest their current residence, post the pic on Facebook, and tag me.

I got a nice flurry of dump bin pics from everywhere.  It was funny for a couple of weeks. 

That was nothing.  My project is now famous all across the U.S.A.!!! 

There's a fun website called The People Of Wal-Mart.  The site celebrates the diversity of Rednecks Backward Americans in all their creative, uninhibited glory.  Hit the link. 

Here's the picture of my DVD bin that made it onto the site. 

I don't know what's so strange about it.  It looks like a perfectly constructed DVD display to me. 

Published !!!

Write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for. - Mark Twain

Mississippi Land And Lodges, an upscale hunting and fishing magazine, recently published this tale that I wrote about a year ago.  Hit the link if you have 10 minutes to kill. 
It's in the August/September/October issue, the one with the antler chandelier on the cover.
Check it out if you get a chance.  If you're a Mississippi hunter, you need this magazine on your coffee table, opened to page 20. 
They pay well, and I have a daughter at Texas A and M.  Let the editor know that you like my stuff.  That's all I'm saying.....

I want to sell muffins

I want to get out of shipping, warehousing and logistics. 
I want to get into muffins. 
Yes, muffins. 

Muffins create jobs.  They stimulate the economy.  I can dye them green in order to help fight Global Warming.  Whatever it takes, I want to sell muffins to those clowns. 
Yes, muffins. 

On having to ring up your own groceries but pay "full price"

I saw the following quote on Instapundit:

SEEN ON FACEBOOK: “I work all day, go to Kroger late night, stock up on groceries and then get to the checkout and have to scan and bag everything by myself and still pay full price while Kroger can eliminate a job. Hmmmmm. That’s the equivalent to you coming into my restaurant, cooking your own food and I still get to charge full price. Am I being unreasonable???”

I honestly don't know where to begin.  For lack of a better place, let's start with the history of grocery stores. 

If you ever find yourself in Memphis Tennessee with a couple of hours to kill, check out The Pink Palace museum.  They've got a beautifully reconstructed model of a Piggly Wiggly grocery store inside. 

Why? 

Piggly Wiggly (founded in Memphis) was the first self-serve grocery store in the U.S.  Instead of handing the clerk behind the counter your list of groceries, if you were a Piggly Wiggly shopper, you took a cart or a basket and got your groceries all by yourself. 

This move didn't save or create any jobs in the grocery industry.  In fact, it eliminated them.  But it saved a lot of money for consumers.  This allowed them to eventually purchase more of other things instead of food: iPods, flatscreen TV's, or laptop computers, creating jobs in the iPod, TV and laptop industries. 

Skip forward about a half century.  Someone came up with a pattern of lines called a "barcode" that could be read by another device called a "scanner". 

This move didn't create any jobs in the grocery industry.  It made checking out much, much faster, and eliminated a lot of inventory and supply chain jobs in the grocery distribution system.  But it saved a lot of money for consumers. This allowed them to eventually purchase more of other things instead of food: iPods, flatscreen TV's, or laptop computers, creating jobs in the iPod, TV and laptop industries.

By the time the scanners came along, the U.S. military had already been using a warehouse concept called "cross-docking" for quite some time.  This is a warehouse design where incoming shipments are received on one side, outgoing shipments are shipped on the other, with minimal storage space in between.  Minimal inventory is kept on hand in the warehouse at any given time. 

Sam Walton, of Wal-Mart fame, was the first to apply this concept to the grocery and retail industry. 

This move didn't create any jobs in the grocery industry. It made distribution much, much faster, and eliminated a lot of inventory and supply chain jobs in the grocery distribution system. But it saved a lot of money for consumers. This allowed them to eventually purchase more of other things instead of food: iPods, flatscreen TV's, or laptop computers, creating jobs in the iPod, TV and laptop industries.

Finally, someone invented the self-serve grocery checkout stand.  If you have a minimal amount of stuff to ring up, you can choose to do it yourself. 

As the Facebook commenter wrote, the customer is doing some of the work himself.  Kind of like the Piggly Wiggly customer started doing in the 1920's. 

This move toward self-checkout doesn't create any jobs in the grocery industry. It makes getting out of the store much, much faster, and it saves a lot of money for consumers. This allows them to eventually purchase more of other things instead of food: iPods, flatscreen TV's, or laptop computers, creating jobs in the iPod, TV and laptop industries.

I hope this has helped. 

We have not become a prosperous nation by "saving or creating jobs".  We have become a prosperous nation by constantly churning the process, always trying to come up with a better way to get things done. 

No one can predict what the next way will be.  No one knows which kid is working in the Produce Department of an Albertson's Grocery Store who has already come up with a better way to distribute and merchandise fruit and vegetables, and who just can't wait to open his own store and try out his idea.  No one knows which computer geek in his Mom's basement has already come up with a system to make distribution and logistics more efficient. 

These people are going to bring us improvements and levels of progress that we can't even imagine, here in the primitive year 2011. 

The only thing we do know is that there will always be someone complaining about the cost of progress and doing everything in his power to keep it from happening. 

Rupert Murdoch attacked by pie assassin - Who will be the next victim?

It looks like Rupert Murdoch's media empire is infested with reporters who illegally hack into phones and emails. 
Any reporter doing this in the U.S. should be locked up, and the key should be thrown away. 
Here's a video of a protester trying to hit Murdoch with a pie during some testimony before Parliament.  Murdoch's wife intervenes before the pie-chunker can get too close.


 
In the U.S., we're supposed to be protected from warrantless wiretaps by the Fourth Amendment:

The wording is straightfoward.  Unless George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Karl Rove have a warrant, they don't have any business going through your papers or "effects".  "Effects" would be your email or your cell phone. 

But during the Bush administration, we went into a blind panic and surrendered our rights to some people who wanted to go through our stuff without a warrant.  It was all for our own protection and safety. 

And it continues.  Here's the Wall Street Journal on Obama's "evolving" stance on listening to your conversations:

....we're beginning to wonder if the (Obama) White House has put David Addington, Mr. Cheney's chief legal aide, on retainer. The practical effect is to prevent the courts from reviewing the legality of the warrantless wiretapping program that Mr. Obama repeatedly claimed to find so heinous -- at least before taking office. Justice, by the way, is making the same state secrets argument in a separate lawsuit involving rendition and a Boeing subsidiary.

Hide the children, but we agree with Mr. Obama that the President has inherent Article II Constitutional powers that neither the judiciary nor statutes like FISA can impinge upon. The FISA appeals court said as much in a decision released in January, as did Attorney General Eric Holder during his confirmation hearings. It's reassuring to know the Administration is refusing to compromise core executive-branch prerogatives, especially on war powers.

....Then again, we are relearning that the "Imperial Presidency" is only imperial when the President is a Republican. Democrats who spent years denouncing George Bush for "spying on Americans" and "illegal wiretaps" are now conspicuously silent. Yet these same liberals are going ballistic about the Bush-era legal memos released this week. Cognitive dissonance is the polite explanation, and we wouldn't be surprised if Mr. Holder released them precisely to distract liberal attention from the Al-Haramain case.

Hit the link to read the whole thing. 

So....  who would you rather have illegally listening to your phone calls and reading your emails?  Rupert Murdoch or Barack Obama? 

And is Michelle Obama prepared to step between Barack and a pie? 

The pic of the Obama Pie came from here. 

The even newer Food Pyramid, no, Food Plate

Or, in the words of one commenter, let's call it a Boondoggle Pizza. 

Let me explain.....

I grew up looking at this pyramid on the back of my cereal boxes:

This dietary triangle was originally developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, at the behest of producers of wheat, bread, cereal, and rice.  Note that the government recommended between 6 and 11 servings of wheat, bread, cereal, and rice.  Funny how that works. 
If you followed the government's dietary advice, you got fat enough to have your own planets and gravitational system.  Go here to read an earlier rant about the battles fought between Dr. Robert Atkins and the USDA.  It features this glorious Atkins quote about the cause of American obesity:

There is no doubt in my mind that this increase in refined carbohydrates has been spurred by the media attention given to The Food Guide Pyramid, created by the U.S. Department Of Agriculture, which made 6-11 servings of wheat derivatives the basis of the pyramid. I believe that the Food Guide Pyramid's recommendations have directly contributed to the twin epidemics of diabetes and obesity we now face in this country.

(The food combinations that were recommended by the U.S.D.A.) are bad for your health, bad for your energy level, bad for your mental state, bad for your figure. Bad for your career prospects, bad for your sex life, bad for your digestion, bad for your blood chemistry, bad for your heart. What I'm saying is that they are bad.

Well said, Dr. Atkins.  Well said.  It was bad, bad, bad. 
Shortly thereafter, the USDA came up with a new food pyramid that looked like this:

This set of dietary guidelines didn't last very long, mostly because the illustration didn't make a lick of sense. 
The government obviously wanted to retain the "pyramid" concept, since they didn't want to back-pedal and admit killing so many Americans, but they needed something so vague that it would kill fewer people but still allow them to spend a lot of money on their pyramid scheme. 

(You'll have to trust me that this is what it looked like.  They've since scrubbed the site.)

Some of the accompanying propaganda still advocated a ridiculous amount of carbohydrates, but the percentage lowered considerably. 

For a couple of years, the USDA didn't stack any more food into triangles.
 
And then came....THE FOOD PLATE !!!

Yes, we now have a USDA Food Plate.  The pyramid has been leveled. 

Here's Ed Morrisey on the new place-setting:

Wow, what a breakthrough! And if the food pyramid had any relevance to diet selection for Americans, it might even have been worth the two million dollars the USDA spent just to design the logo.  Yes, that’s right, it cost taxpayers $2 million for someone to draw a circle, cut it into four quadrants, and then attach labels like FRUITS and VEGETABLES.  The $2 million didn’t just go into the logo design, though.  According to the New York Times, they spent part of that money doing focus-group testing on circles with two lines, and on a Web site, too — as if millions of people will thunder to it to plan their dinners.

And it's still waaaaaay heavy on the fruits and carbohydrates, but we have the Florida and Iowa primaries to consider. 
You would think that the simple matter of what to eat would be (ahem) "Settled Science" by now. 

They spent two million dollars designing a chart that looks like it was lifted from a Powerpoint slide. 
Two million dollars. 

Go here to read the USDA's bullshit about Climate Change.