Profiting Under Guise of Philanthropy - Another Entry

I couldn't decide if this qualifies exactly as PUGP, but it seem close enough...for me. Yet another example of how those of wealth create the rules to their liking, while appearing to be doing deeds for the "common good". This example comes from an article written by economist, businessman Gary North.

Mount Desert Island, Maine, is the prototype Establishment enclave in America. There are three of them, all islands: Mt. Desert, Jeckyl (Georgia), and Jupiter (Florida). Mt. Desert Island is where a major aspect of the modern environmental movement was created: the lock-out.

In 1910, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. bought a 104-room granite mansion there, importing tiles from the Great Wall of China. [Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976), p. 97.] Rockefeller then used Mount Desert Island as his first great experiment in permanently sequestering property away from the free market, which has an unappreciated tendency to develop properties aimed for sale to middle-class buyers.

Rockefeller and his elite neighbors – Edsel Ford was one of them – were concerned about "overdevelopment." [John Ensor Harr and Peter J. Johnson, The Rockefeller Century (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988), p. 199.] This is an elitist code word for "real estate sales to the upper middle class." They created an association and donated 5,000 acres to it; then they gave it to the Federal government. President Wilson used executive authority in 1916 to create a special monument; in 1919, Congress passed a law making it Lafayette National Park. Junior bought more land and donated it to the government; this is now Acadia National Park.

He and his peers repeatedly adopted the lock-out strategy, using tax-deductible money, to remove prime real estate from the market in wilderness areas surrounding elite enclaves. This raises the value of the remaining properties, and it secures an insulated social world for them. The area around Jackson Hole, Wyoming, is one of the prime areas where the Rockefellers own large tracts. This area has long been the focus of a Rockefeller-inspired lock-out, beginning in 1919. [Harr & Johnson, pp. 201-211.] Land values there reflect this: astronomical. But the original model was Mount Desert Island.

The Rockefeller family biographers say of Junior’s role: "Very shortly, he became a towering figure, the greatest ally the National Park Service ever had." [Ibid., p. 198.] The assistance was mutual. The National Park Service provides the authority to keep the rest of us out of these areas on a permanent basis.

This program to seal off prime wilderness areas from economic development had its origins in the special role of wilderness in the coming of age for the sons of the super-rich. It is one of the three ordeals of youth and early manhood: the wilderness summer (wealthy scion Teddy Roosevelt is the most famous exemplar); the academy (Exeter, Groton, etc.), and military service in wartime (again, Roosevelt the "Rough Rider" is most famous). [Nelson Aldrich, Jr., Old Money: The Mythology of Wealth in America (New York: Knopf, 1988), ch. 5: "Three Ordeals."] Mount Desert Island has been a big part of this. [Ibid., pp. 164, 166.] Nelson Aldrich, Jr., as part of the Old Money Establishment, is quite forthright about environmentalism’s social function for the Establishment: "The social religion of Nature, which began with rich kids going outdoors for their health, ends in political action against the condo developers, the shopping-mall impresarios, the army of entrepreneurs whom Old Money (and not Old Money alone) imagines despoiling Arcadia." [Ibid., p. 169.]

Well, they gave "us", the little people, a few National Parks, while they get to keep out "us", the little people, from having elbow room next door to them.

"Smart Choice" Program is a Joke

You may have seen a commercial on TV recently for some Kellogg's cereal including Fruit Loops and Cocoa Krispies...indicating that these cereals were "Smart Choices" for feeding your kids for breakfast. I guess the likes of John Stossels would say, "Give me a break". Labeling on these cereals indicate that they contain up to 41% sugar content per serving - the number one ingredient on the label...followed by corn flour - a high GI food. Talk about setting your kids up to become another member of the obese metabolic syndrome crowd. Pharmaceutical companies are probably wetting themselves watching these commercials in glee.

Here is a look at the head of the program and some "thought" behind the program

Eileen T. Kennedy, president of the Smart Choices board and the dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, said the program’s criteria were based on government dietary guidelines and widely accepted nutritional standards.

She said the program was also influenced by research into consumer behavior. That research showed that, while shoppers wanted more information, they did not want to hear negative messages or feel their choices were being dictated to them.

“The checkmark means the food item is a ‘better for you’ product, as opposed to having an x on it saying ‘Don’t eat this,’ ” Dr. Kennedy said. “Consumers are smart enough to deduce that if it doesn’t have the checkmark, by implication it’s not a ‘better for you’ product. They want to have a choice. They don’t want to be told ‘You must do this.’ ”

Dr. Kennedy, who is not paid for her work on the program, defended the products endorsed by the program, including sweet cereals. She said Froot Loops was better than other things parents could choose for their children.

“You’re rushing around, you’re trying to think about healthy eating for your kids and you have a choice between a doughnut and a cereal,” Dr. Kennedy said, evoking a hypothetical parent in the supermarket. “So Froot Loops is a better choice.”

Wow...so it ranks as better than a donut...so let it have the appearance of being good for you? That is some sound logic? Huh?

I was watching a show on UCTV recently (University of California), a show they put on called Mini Medical School for the Public, a great show for the crowd that cares about things like their own health and well-being in a world run by idiots. Anyway, this particular show had a nutritional componenet to it, as many of them do. The lecturer showed a series of charts on some research done on kids blood glucose levels...and how they were affected by what they ate for breakfast. Kids that ate a high sugar breakfast, like Fruit Loops, had a significant spike intheir serum glucose levels as compared to kids that ate "other" foods lower in sugar. The elevated glucose continued for a few hours...but out at around 5 hours, or lunchtime, their glucose dropped to slightly below baseline, or becoming slightly hypoglycemic.

So, the kids were then offered free choice lunches. The kids that ate the sugary breakfast cereal, and became slightly hypoglycemic, ate 81% more calories at lunch than the other group....EIGHTY ONE PERCENT!! But Fruit Loops are a "Smart Choice"!!! Good Grief.

Maybe you guys on this Smart Choices Board need to get a second opinion...and get the conflicts of interest off of the board as well.

Oh, and just for your info, Smart Choices Board, since you obviously don't follow the news...in the last week or two here are a couple of things you might have missed:

A spoonful of sugar? Americans are swallowing 22 teaspoons of sugar each day, and it's time to cut way back, the American Heart Association says. link

and from the same article

Sandon said that parents can help lower that sugar intake by getting soda out of the house, looking at how much sugar is in their kids' cereal and substituting snacks like cookies with popcorn.

and Obama and friends are considering a sugary drink tax. So, why not tax sugary cereals as well?

Why we become Libertarians

Saying it succinctly

I became a conservative by being around liberals and I became a libertarian by being around conservatives. You realize that there’s something distinctly in common between the two groups, the left and the right; the worst part of each of them is the moralizing. On the left, you have people who want to dictate your behavior under the guise of tolerance. Unless you disagree with them. Then the tolerance goes out the window. Which kind of negates the whole idea of tolerance. That’s the politically correct moralizing. Then when you become a conservative, the other kind of moralizing comes from religion. But if you remove both of those from the equation, what you’re left with is libertarianism.

From the right, you’ve got free markets. From the left, you have free minds. To me, that’s the only sensible direction. As you grow older, you kind of end up there. Especially if you drink and do a lot of drugs. link

Yeah, I guess that sums it up....

A Medical Skeptic Am I

Voltaire said, "the art of medicine is to amuse the patient while nature cures the disease", and that was said hundreds of years ago. What has changed?

If you are in a car wreck and have bones poking out or some other acute trauma then medical doctors are a top choice, but for anything chronic...uh-uh, they haven't that much to offer as far as cures anyway.

And, an admission of the lack of power of medical "gods" to cure us, from Dr. D. M. Hegsted's and Dr. Beverly Winikof's statement presenting the "Dietary Goals for the US" in February, 1977:

There is a widespread and unfounded confidence in the ability of medical to cure or mitigate the effects of such diseases [heart disease, diabetes, etc] once they occur. Appropriate public education must emphasize the unfortunate but clear limitations of current medical practice in curing the common killing diseases. Once hypertension, diabetes, arteriosclerosis or heart disease are manifest, there is, in reality, very little that medical science can do to return a patient to normal physiological function. As awareness of this limitation increases, the importance of prevention will become all the more obvious.

...oh, and their low fat dietary guidelines were probably the root of our increasing obesity/diabetes problem, but that is the subject fro another post.

And some lighter weight stuff...a doctor joke..."the flu lasts 7 days with treatment, and one week without it".

The Spanish Minister of Health said of the H1N1 flu scare...it's "an epidemic of fear caused by a ghost illness being fought by exaggerated response".