Fighting food facism

Glenn Reynolds quotes James Lileks on Michael "Mikey Donuts" Bloomberg:

A culture that redefines food choices as moral issues will demonize the people who don’t share the tastes of the priest class. A culture that elevates eating to some holistic act of ethical self-definition - localvore, low-carbon-impact food, fair trade, artisanal cheese - will find the casual carefree choices of the less-enlightened as an affront to their belief system. Leave it to Americans to invent a Puritan strain of Epicurianism.

We've had enough of the food fascists ourselves, and so has Professor Reynolds:

Let me be clear. These people are not well-meaning do-gooders who have just gone a bit too far. They don’t actually “mean well” at all. They don’t mean well, they mean to be in control. They are power-fetishists, drunk on the joys of bossing the little people around. They are not good people. They are evil. They should be ashamed of themselves, but shame — like taxes — is for the little people.

They don't like you.

Eating judgmentally

"Food you feel good about"

Finger Lakes residents, perhaps more than any other Americans, are constantly harassed by our elites:  "spend three times as much to buy organic food, or you're no better than Bush!"   While we're usually too polite to question our neighbors' religious beliefs, Diane Mapes has the cojones to ask the question:  "Does organic food turn people into jerks?"

Renate Raymond has encountered her fair share of organic food snobs, but a recent trip to a Seattle market left her feeling like she'd stumbled onto the set of "Portlandia."

"I stopped at a market to get a fruit platter for a movie night with friends but I couldn't find one so I asked the produce guy," says the 40-year-old arts administrator from Seattle. "And he was like, 'If you want fruit platters, go to Safeway. We're organic.' I finally bought a small cake and some strawberries and then at the check stand, the guy was like 'You didn't bring your own bag? I need to charge you if you didn't bring your own bag.' It was like a 'Portlandia skit.' They were so snotty and arrogant."

To see if Raymond is just a crank, or might be on to something, Mapes asked a scientist.

"There's a line of research showing that when people can pat themselves on the back for their moral behavior, they can become self-righteous," says author Kendall Eskine, assistant professor of  the department of psychological sciences at Loyola University in New Orleans. "I've noticed a lot of organic foods are marketed with moral terminology, like Honest Tea, and wondered if you exposed people to organic food, if it would make them pat themselves on the back for their moral and environmental choices. I wondered if  they would be more altruistic or not."

If you're not already singing harmony, and we suspect you are, read the whole thing.

h/t Museum Guy.

5/21 update -  Rush Limbaugh piles on: 

 Which Came First, the Jerk or the Diet?

Tax the rich!

What a great country!  A man of limited talent, who grew up in a third world country, who's never worked a day in a real job, can still, somehow, become a multimillionaire.

Three things are apparent from President Obama's annual financial disclosure statement, released today:

He is a wealthy man, with assets of as much as $10 million.

He has a hefty stake in JPMorgan Chase, the megabank that just made a bad $2 billion bet. Obama has an account worth between $500,000 and $1 million.

JPMorgan Chase, where, surprisingly, taxpayers may be on the hook for two billion.

Hollywood swell wants to keep you poor

Wealthy actor Matt Damon has enlisted in the war against abundant energy.

MATT DAMON is making the dreams of environmentalists come true. The Cambridge-native-turned-Hollywood-heavyweight will star in an anti-fracking film, his reps confirm to Politico.com. “The Promised Land,” which Matt also co-wrote, is about hydraulic fracturing, the practice of extracting natural gas from shale rock.

Be sure to check out the comments on the above-linked Boston Herald piece.  Rick Moore tweets:

The "China Syndrome" of fracking?  

 h/t: BH

Schumer pops a cold one

Schumer with his former intern

With a no end for our national depression in sight, a real unemployment rate around 16%, our yet-unborn grandchildren facing a life of crippling debt, and the Middle East being overrun with US taxpayer-supported Islamist regimes, what's on New York's senior senator's to-do list?  Beer.

Sen. Chuck Schumer wants his constituents to drink more beer this holiday season — as long as it's brewed in New York.

Schumer unveiled a campaign on Wednesday to sell more New York beers in restaurants, bars and convenience stores throughout the state. He said the initiative will boost the growing micro-brew industry in New York, which supported nearly 60,000 jobs and produced more than a million barrels of beer last year.

New York already produces some classic brews - we're enjoying one as we write this.  In our experience, Upstaters are actually capable of producing and consuming beer without federal assistance.  None the less, every minute this putz spends bothering brewers is another minute he's not driving our country further down the road to serfdom.

If you did it, you'd go to jail

Gillibrand and Clinton, new faces of Tammany Hall?

One of Nine is reading Peter Schweizer's new book, Throw Them All Out, and reminds us that...

"Lyndon Johnson was born into absolute poverty, spent a lifetime in public service and died a multimlllionaire."

Schweizer's book is causing our rulers to run around like cockroaches caught in a flashlight's beam.  Read the entire post to learn how our junior senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, wants you to think she's fighting congressional corruption, while offering a bill that ensures the well-connected swells of our ruling class, like Kirsten, will continue to rake in the swag at your expense.

For more on Harry Reid's "hottest senator," check out our previous coverage:

Who is Kirsten Gillibrand?

On the wrong track and headed for you 

Amity Shlaes for US Senate 

New York's senators: on the job 

Amity Shlaes: Repeating 1937?

Obamamobiles selling like cold cakes

Fired exec Laura Soave with slow selling Fiat 500

As part of Obama's plan to fundamentally restructure American society, bankrupt Detroit automaker Chrysler Corporation's remaining equity was confiscated and given to Italy's Fiat SpA.  The Italian industrial giant was supposed to teach us to love European-style mini cars.

Fiat/Chrysler/Obama's plan to get the masses to embrace the adorable but tiny Fiat 500 is floundering.  Sales are so bad that 29 of Fiat's 130 US dealerships did not sell a single car in October.  As a result, Fiat has fired Laura Soave, head if its US team, and laid off production workers in its unionized Michigan engine plant.

If that's depressing, just wait until  they take over our healthcare system.....  oh, yeah, they already did.

Finger Lakes wineries' success due to global warming

Bill Wagner at the Winery, 1979

After passage of New York's "Farm Winery Act" back in 1976, a few hard working entrpeneurs and visionaries got started building what is now the Finger Lakes' booming wine industry.  Today, wine tourism is a rare success story in Central New York's otherwise depressed economic landscape.

Our readers may have been under the impression that the wineries' current good fortune is the result of decades of hard work.  We might recall our neighbors risking their life savings, freezing in the mud while they fought our notorious weather to plant and establish those fussy grape vines. 

Come to find out, we were wrong.  In this morning's USA Today, Elizabeth Weise explains the real reason for the region's climb to prominence - global warming.

Warming overall has meant that areas not generally associated with wine are becoming bigger players in the industry. Among them...

•The Finger Lakes wine country in Upstate New York, where the wine industry has taken off since the 1970s, says David Wolfe, a specialist in agricultural climate change at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

We'd like to invite Ms. Weise to visit our area this February.  That's the best time to don snowshoes, trudge out into the vineyards, and tell the bundled-up locals trimming and tying the vines how the credit for the FL wine industry taking off belongs, not to them, but to global warming.

PA booms, NY suffers

The New York Post discovers that New York City's Upstate neighbors could benefit from increased economic activity.  What took them so long?

‘If it wasn’t for the gas business, none of these people would be working right now,” David Dalrymple said, pointing to one of his crews building a road in Athens Township, Pa.

By “gas business,” he meant drilling made possible by “fracking” -- a process for extracting natural gas that’s legal in Pennsylvania but not yet in New York.

The Post catches up with Upstate bloggers in getting to the heart of the matter.

Then there’s Jennifer Huntington, who operates a 1,000-acre dairy farm with 500 cows in Middlefield, NY.

She has a lease with a gas company for a vertical well on her farm. The well could produce enough gas to service the municipal buildings and hospital nearby -- and give her the much-needed capital to make improvements on the farm. Work there wouldn’t even require fracking.

But a movement led by academics and part-time residents -- people wealthy enough to enjoy the country life without worrying about making a living -- got the town to ban drilling altogether. She has sued the town to get the ban lifted.

The war against fracking is a class war.  Our elites don't want truck drivers, waitresses, building contractors, furniture salesmen, hair dressers, satellite TV installers, or any other of Upstate's non-anointed masses to be able to upset the status quo.  To the swells, their neighbors' financial struggles are nothing more than necessary collateral damage.

Protestors fight to keep Finger Lakes propane prices high

None of these folks use any fossil fuel

Overshadowed by the Finger Lakes elite's war against shale gas, those of us who heat our modest homes, or lakefront mansions, with costly propane, are also under attack.

Inergy Midstream, a Kansas City based gas distribution company, proposes to store the popular fuel in the former International Salt caverns, 2600 feet under under Seneca Lake  An existing propane terminal in the Town of Reading, north of Watkins Glen, would be expanded, serving both truck and rail transportation.  Of course, the prospect of increased economic activity, jobs, and lower heating bills for the common folk has drawn the attention of the "no fracking" crowd.

The usual suspects turned out by the Prius load to express their outrage at last night's DEC hearing on the project.  As is usually the case at these affairs, the only pro-storage speaker was from the energy company.  None the less, Inergy president Bill Moller made his case.

Bill Moller, president of Kansas City-based Inergy Midstream, the company proposing the project, was surrounded by project opponents and peppered with questions during an informational session before the hearing began.

“I don’t know when home heating became the enemy of this community,” he told them. “We’re providing a cheaper, reliable, cleaner-burning source of energy. That’s what we’re doing here....”

There’s a high demand for propane in the region, Moller said, and that’s because it’s currently shipped by truck from other parts of the U.S.

“New Yorkers are paying the highest propane prices in the country,” Moller said.

Around 800 opponents, none of whom apparently heat their homes with propane, use a barbeque grill, or have ever visited a propane-powered winery, heard Moller explain:

...that propane has been stored in the town for about 50 years, and that from 1964 to 1984, about 4 million barrels were stored in the same salt caverns, and said propane accounts for 25 percent of Schuyler County's energy use.

"We're not storing fuel oil," Moller said. "We're not storing crude oil. We're not storing coal. We're storing clean energy. Clean fossil fuels."

Bold added.  Word on the street is that the anti-energy mob was rude, or downright hostile, to anyone who was not opposed to the project.  

After Moller spoke, however, the 800 or so energy opponents who made the trip to Watkins lined up to discard their smart phones and give up the keys to their cars, then walked home silently in the dark.

Soros cashing in on fracking...

San Leon drilling rig in Nebraska, USA

  ... in Poland.

San Leon Energy Plc, the natural- gas explorer backed by billionaire George Soros and Blackrock Inc., expects its Polish shale licenses to be more profitable than U.S. deposits, the company’s exploration director said.

San Leon, which became one of the leading shale gas explorers in Poland after buying Realm Energy International Corp. for $142 million last month, seeks to profit either through so-called farm-outs with a cash component or asset sales once it develops its fields and proves they can produce gas, John Buggenhagen said in an interview in Warsaw.

Its should be easy to understand that if billionaire financier George Soros is invested in natural gas in Poland, he can make more money by obstructing natural gas production in the US.  That would explain the George Soros/Sundance Festival/Josh Fox connection, might it not? 

San Leon Energy is just the kind of huge, multinational exploiter of the earth's resources that have New York's anti-energy true believers' panties in wad.   Rather that targeting Soros, however, these zombies would rather burn gasoline driving all over the Finger Lakes, fighting to raise the cost of their neighbor's heating fuel. The real class war is taking place right under our noses.

And don't forget that your tax dollars are being used to support the Polish fracking boom!

Last Crown Victoria rolls off the line

January Jones with Crown Victoria

Federal government fuel economy standards have succeed in killing off Ford's long running fleet workhorse.

The last Ford Crown Victoria rolled off a Canadian assembly line Thursday, marking the end of the big, heavy Ford cars that have been popular with taxi fleets and police departments for decades.

Since 1979, almost 10 million Crown Victoria, Mercury Grand Marquis and Lincoln Town Cars -- so-called Panther Platform vehicles -- have been sold.

Crown Vics at work in NYC

The crude but rugged Crown Victoria, also sold as the Lincoln Town Car, has for years been widely used by fleet operators such as limo services, taxi companies, and police departments.  Fleet operators have not continued to purchased the Crown Vic because they're idiots who want to waste fuel.  These managers need to meet customer demands, pay their bills, and stay in business.  Balancing all the conflicting variables has resulted in rational a business decision to go with Ford's land yacht.

“The [ Lincoln ]  Town Car has traditionally been an easy-to-fix vehicle,“ said Tarek Mallah, general manager Dial 7 car service, a so-called “black car“ service in New York City. “It's got legroom. It was designed as a livery vehicle to start with. It's passenger-centric.“

Mallah said he still isn't sure what he'll use to eventually replace the Town Car.

Now that their betters have decided the Vic has got to go, here's what future taxi passengers will be twisting themselves into.  New York City's ruling elite has decided that all future cabs will be built by Nissan.

Capbusters!

Should two percent appear too high, be thankful we don't hit the sky....

With apologies to George Harrison, Finger Lakes politicians appear to be in a frantic race to see who will be the first to bust New York governor Andy Cuomo's phony "tax cap."  

Next in line: the trendy Town of Ithaca, a Cornell University bedroom suburb ruled by lockstep leftists.

The town of Ithaca is joining other municipalities in considering an override to the state's new two percent property tax cap as it looks to formulate a 2012 budget.

The Town Board set a public hearing for next month on a local law to override the tax levy limit.

Supervisor Herb Engman believes it is essential the Town overrides the cap to keep key services intact and to take advantage of opportunities they have with bond interest rates historically low.

We predict the shattered "tax cap" will be quickly become a distant memory, not even mentioned by the sacrificial Republican unlucky enough to run against Cuomo in New York's next gubernatorial election.

Jedi knights to ban fracking

Late to the party, academic theme park City of Ithaca, NY is fixin' to ban fracking, too.  Getting right to the point, the liberal city's Ithaca's board of chosen leftists wants to make sure no shale gas is extracted within the city limits.  But how to ban the evil practice?

Alderman Eric Rosario, I-2nd, said that recently retired alderwoman Maria Coles, D-1st, had done much of research into municipal responses to "hydro-fracking," before she left office. Rosario has taken over as the point person. His first action was to bring Tompkins County planner Darby Kiley before the planning committee on July 20 to give them an overview of the issue.

"I went to the TANG [Tompkins Addresses Natural Gas] meeting recently, this is a task force of the Tompkins County Council of Governments, which is kind of like the local Jedi knights," said Rosario. "We should be a part of response to the second draft of the supplemental generic environmental impact statement [SGEIS]. Gaps have already been identified, and the community impact portion has not been released yet."

Bold added.  While the alderpersyn Rosario diddles with the "response to the second draft of the supplemental generic environmental impact statement,"  we'll point out that almost all the residents of fair Ithaca survive its notorious arctic winters by heating with, yes, clean burning natural gas.  Community impact?  Is it cold in here?

Janis Kelly: "politically correct corruption"

Kelly

From the deep within Groves of Academe, the only Republican candidate for Mayor of Ithaca, NY, fires a fastball.

We must stop using public money for favored private groups. At the first Common Council meeting I attended, the council (including both J.R. Clairborne and Svante Myrick) used $50,000 in "low-income housing" funds to guarantee a loan for the State Theatre. This is wrong. A private car rental company (whose executive director, Jennifer Dotson, is on Common Council) has been redefined as "public transportation" and given reserved parking spaces all over the city, apparently at no cost. This is low-grade, politically correct corruption, and it is wrong.

Corruption, indeed.

Its about time someone exposed this scam .  Overtaxed Finger Lakes families are being forced to subsidize short-term rental cars for Ivy League swells.  Were we Ithacans (not likely! - ed), we'd support Kelly against her numerous lefty opponents.

A local speaks out

In a letter to Dryden, NY's town board, resident Ron Szymanski puts Dryden's me-too fracking ban  in perspective.  Syzmanski lists the logical problems raised by such a ban, and hits what we think could be the result most harmful to the ordinary Finger Lakes citizen.

ANTI-BUSINESS.  The natural gas drilling ban limits opportunities for local businesses, from trucking to restaurants.  The County recently dropped a road ordinance because of its unintended consequences on local businesses.  In addition, it denies Dryden residents access to jobs and further compromises our tax base.

We suspect that prohibiting the growth of easy entry jobs, and the prosperity those jobs might bring to locals, is one of the unstated goals of the organized defenders of the region's status quo.

Jet Set update

Glenn Reynolds says it again:

I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ONE GODDAMNED THING ABOUT MY CARBON FOOTPRINT: Michelle Obama Flies To Aspen and Back For Fundraiser Tuesday. “But those with Aspen ties aren’t done giving. First Lady Michelle Obama will arrive in our fair city a week from today, on Tuesday, July 26, for a luncheon to benefit her husband’s bid for a second term, according to the Chicago Sun Times. The first lady will be hitting up two ski resorts in one day, first stopping in Park City, Utah, for a breakfast before hopping a flight to Aspen. It will be a quick fundraising trip. She will promptly return to Washington, D.C.”

And until until they get rid of all their smart phones, iPads, laptops, websites, antibiotics, Saabs, plastic kayaks, Kubotas, led flashlights, cordless drills...

New media hurting TV sales?

The number of US households owning a TV set has declined for the first time in twenty years.  The NZ Herald reports:

Ownership of television sets by US households has fallen for the first time in two decades.

Granted, the decline - 96.7 per cent of American households now own sets, down from 98.9 per cent previously - may not seem like much, but there will be many in the industry who will wonder if it's the faint tremor that presages an earthquake.

While you're reading this blog, you're probably not watching network TV.   Electronics manufacturers should not be concerned because the world's growing economies (China, India, Canada... ) will devour as many new technologies as Asian factories can churn out.  The Herald points out that its our ruling elites who should be worried.

If that's changing, then it's big news and not just for the industry concerned: politics in most western countries is largely driven and dominated by broadcast TV.