The Scourge -- Or Not -- Of "Ultraprocessed Foods"

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  • “Ultraprocessed foods.” That sounds really bad. In fact, not just really bad, but really, really bad. Bad on a level with, maybe, “assault rifles” or “cis-heteronormativity.”

  • Definitely, with a condemnatory name like that, “ultraprocessed foods” would be something that no sensible person would ever eat, or at least certainly not in large quantities.

  • The term “ultraprocessed foods” has been in usage for a while, but the frequency seems to have exploded everywhere in the past few months. Perhaps that has resulted from the naming of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be the next Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has made a thing about proclaiming a health crisis in the U.S., which he asserts is substantially brought about by our “broken food system.” On November 15 — just after President-elect Trump tapped Kennedy to lead HHS in the new administration — The New York Times had a piece outlining Kennedy’s critiques of the “food system.” Number one on the list of Kennedy’s critiques identified by the NYT was “ultraprocessed food.”

  • After reading this, I thought it might be time for me to get on top of what this “ultraprocessed food” stuff might be. Is this something that you need to really be concerned about, or is it just another one of the usual scare tactics of the left to try to take more control of your life?

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How Will New York's Energy Madness End? The "Don't Do It!" Report

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  • I frequently write about how the mandates for energy transition that New York has adopted are impossible and irreconcilable in the real world; and therefore it is inevitable that they will have to be abandoned at some point when implementation of the project runs up against physical reality.

  • Probably the most frequent question that I get asked is, OK, how and when will that occur?

  • The question is important because for as long as the impossible mandates remain in place they are causing massive ongoing damage to our electricity system and to consumers.

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The Campus Kill-The-Jews Riots: Paid Professional Agitators Funded By Democratic Party Big Wigs, Or Well-Meaning Kids?

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The Campus Kill-The-Jews Riots: Paid Professional Agitators Funded By Democratic Party Big Wigs, Or Well-Meaning Kids?

  • Several days ago, after the New York police broke up the kill-the-Jews occupations at Columbia, NYU and other universities, it emerged that close to half of the arrestees were not students or otherwise affiliated with the schools in question.

  • At a news conference on April 30, Mayor Eric Adams adopted the term “professional outside agitators” to describe the main organizers of the protests (“What should have been a peaceful protest, it has basically been co-opted by professional outside agitators.").

  • The protests certainly give an appearance of being well-organized and equally well funded. For example, large numbers of identical newly-ordered tents seem to spring up on almost no notice. Did hundreds of young people on shoestring budgets just happen on their own initiative to place orders from the same website at the same time and all pay with their own money? That seems implausible.

  • But if there is professional organization, who are the organizers? And who is paying them? You would think that this is an issue where the public would have a huge interest in knowing the answer — particularly if the answer should turn out to be that the main sponsors of the protests are also big funders of one of the major political parties. But this is a subject where the sponsors have a strong interest in concealing their role as much as possible, and where uncovering and exposing that role takes some significant effort.

  • And then we have the beyond-ridiculous New York Times.

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New York Shows Off Its Expertise In Central Planning: The Buffalo Billion

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New York Shows Off Its Expertise In Central Planning: The Buffalo Billion

  • Let’s face it: Central planning of the economy hasn’t worked out so well in many places where it has been tried (e.g., Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, etc.).

  • But then, here in New York, we are so much smarter than the dolts who fell on their faces in those backwaters. With utter confidence in our genius, we have embarked upon the total centrally-directed transformation of the economy into “net zero” utopia, via the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019.

  • But that project is barely getting under way. It will be a few years before we have enough feedback to judge it a success or failure.

  • Meanwhile, is there any other significant central planning initiative here in New York that has gotten far enough so that we can judge whether it is succeeding? Yes! — It’s the “Buffalo Billion,” a massive state-subsidized industrial development project in the long-declining Great Lakes port in far Western New York. Let’s get an update.

  • The summary is, it’s hard to believe how badly wrong this has gone.

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The Latest On International Efforts To Save The Planet Through Climate Litigation

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  • When I first came upon it, I called it the “stupidest litigation in the country.”

  • In 2015 a group of adolescents, led on a leash by some activist environmental lawyers, had sued the federal government in the District Court for Oregon. The plaintiffs alleged violation of their fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthy environment, and sought as remedy a compulsory national plan to “phase out” the use of fossil fuels nationwide plus (why not?) “draw down excess atmospheric CO2 so as to stabilize the climate system and protect the vital resources on which Plaintiffs now and in the future will depend. . . .” I first covered this litigation in a post in December 2017 titled “The Stupidest Litigation In The Country Reaches The Ninth Circuit.”

  • Why “stupidest litigation”? Because this case seemed to represent the ultimate reductio ad absurdum of the entire idea of courts and of litigation, and indeed an attempt at complete subversion of our three-branch system of government. Just make up a new and sweeping “constitutional right,” find a friendly activist-minded judge, and you can get an order transferring all the significant operations of the legislative and executive branches of the government to a single unelected person operating out of a courthouse in Eugene, Oregon.

  • Surely, no court would take this seriously.

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Officialdom Responds To Doubts That A Renewables-Based Electricity System Will Work

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Officialdom Responds To Doubts That A Renewables-Based Electricity System Will Work

  • The single biggest problem with the Left’s “climate” agenda is that the proposed response to the alleged crisis — replacement of fossil fuels in the energy system with intermittent wind-and-sun-based electricity generation — is not going to work. This is obvious to anyone who considers the subject seriously for any amount of time.

  • Yet any mention of this issue has been almost completely banished from the mainstream media, from academia, from government, and from social media. It remains to a few lonely voices (such as, here in New York, myself, Roger Caiazza, and Ken Girardin of the Empire Center) to keep the subject in the public consciousness.

  • As small and lonely as our voices may be, somehow we must be getting under their skin. We know that because increasingly officialdom feels a need to respond publicly to our criticisms.

  • But how can they give a plausible response, given that we are absolutely right and a wind-and-sun-based electricity system is never going to work?

  • Easy! — Just treat the public like morons.

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