Tag: Strong Opinionation

I often wonder just what it would take to get Americans to rise up and storm the gates of their corporate masters. Maybe…the threat to chocolate could do it!

The federal Food and Drug Administration is proposing to redefine the very essence of chocolate and to allow big manufacturers such as Hershey to sell a bar devoid of a key ingredient — cocoa butter. The butter’s natural texture could be replaced with inferior alternatives, such as vegetable fats. And consumers would never know.

Chocolatier Gary Guittard said it best: “No one can afford to sit back and eat bonbons while America’s great passion for chocolate is threatened.”

For every defender of traditional chocolate, there are powerful proponents who want to replace cocoa butter with vegetable oil: the Chocolate Manufacturers Association, the Grocery Manufacturers Association and the Snack Food Association. These industry titans have filed a “citizens petition” to the FDA, as the Los Angeles Times recently reported, as if there were some groundswell in society to water down chocolate.

At the moment, chocolate requires two basic ingredients — cocoa and cocoa butter. Cocoa provides much of the flavor; cocoa butter, the texture. So if, say, Hershey wanted to make a chocolate bar without cocoa butter, it can under today’s rules. The product has to be labeled “chocolate flavored” (for it still has the cocoa in it) rather than “chocolate.” That gives the consumer a signal that something less than chocolate lies beneath the wrapping. To help defend chocolate, visit www.dontmesswithourchocolate.com and learn how to submit feedback to the FDA.

Well, of course it’s a done deal, because we’re in an era in which whatever Giant Company A asks the government to do, the government does.

But dammit, leave chocolate alone!

(via)

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I hope Teresa Nielsen Hayden doesn’t mind, but this comment that was put into a thread at Making Light, and was then posted in full to her own front page, is sufficiently sobering and well-considered that I’m quoting it in full here. (Let me know, TNH, if you want me to remove it.)

UPDATE: TNH requests that I credit the comment’s author, who goes by the handle “Old Jarhead”. While he doesn’t seem to have a blog or site of his own, his entire commenting history at Making Light (a short history thus far, but insightful) can be perused here.

If you intend to get a carry permit and pack heat for self protection, you should keep several things close to mind:

1. Unless you have invested the time and money to be well trained in the defensive use of a handgun, don’t carry one.

2. Unless you are willing to spend the money and time to go to the range and fire your weapon at least monthly and at least a box of ammo at that time, don’t carry one.

3. Unless you are certain that you have the emotional and psychological ability to shoot another human being dead, don’t carry one. Do not count on “brandishing” the weapon to frighten the other party into submission – it is far more likely to dramatically increase the level of violence. Do not even consider “shooting to injure”. Unless you are willing to put two rounds, center of mass, into the other person and kill him (usually) dead, you are far more likely to end up the dead or grievously injured one.

4. A handgun is not a magic wand. Displaying it will not cast a spell of caution or calmness on the various parties. A loaded weapon makes people crazy – the person at which it is aimed, the persons who are witnesses, and often the person who is holding it.

5. Unless you are willing to purchase and practice with a handgun that is large enough and packs a sufficient punch to put an attacker down and down now, don’t carry one. In the early 70s a female student at [University] was in her apartment with her daughter when an attacker burst through the door. She had a .22 pistol and shot him 4 or 5 times. He had a .45 and shot her once. He was arrested at the hospital. She was dead.

There are lots of sources of good advice on combination of caliber, proper ammo, and frame size for control.

What it comes down to is that there is no way to prepare for the first time you point a loaded weapon at an identifiable human being and have to pull the trigger. The reason the military does repetitive, mind-numbing training is to try and ingrain the muscle memory and develop the reflexes so that brain does NOT interfere, because if you give it a vote it will pause and then it is too late. Soldiers call the enemy by racial or ethnic names to depersonalize them so that they don’t have to think about the fact that they are killing other people with mothers, fathers, kids, wives, and families. Troops assigned to Special Operations forces or Delta Force fire hundreds of rounds a month because in their job they have to be able to make a split second decision on whether the human in their sights is a target or a hostage or innocent.

The passive defensive measures discussed herein are excellent approaches and will be far more effective in providing security than a sign that says “This family law attorney is protected by Smith & Wesson”.

When I was a young Marine we lived in southern Cal, and one night about 2 am my wife said that she had heard a sound in the garage. I scoffed of course (husbandly response #1), but then I heard the sliding door of the VW van. There WAS someone in the garage. I got up and sneaked to the garage door and peeked – the dome light was on. Heart beat at 120, adrenaline everywhere. As I whispered for my wife to call the cops I saw an arm – a little arm. A 5 y/o girl’s arm! I stormed out into the garage to confront my little daughter and as I demanded an explanation she sobbed that she couldn’t find her bunny rabbit and was looking in the car.

I had numerous weapons in the house – all locked up. After that I asked myself – “If I had had a weapon quickly available would I have gotten it and had it ready?” My answer was “yes”. And then I realized that if I had, I would have been confronting my little girl with a .357 in my hand. Accordingly I have never kept a weapon out of the safe in the house.

Given my background I obviously am not an anti-gun crusader. I believe, however, that the decision to carry a weapon in the office or on the street places an enormous responsibility upon the bearer to obtain excellent training, to commit to frequent practice and refresher training, to choose a weapon ideally suited for you and the purpose, and to stare into the mirror and ask yourself if you could really use it – and if you would make its use a truly last resort.

If you shoot and kill someone in the office you are not going to be celebrated as “Annie Oakley” and carried around the Family Law convention on a sedan chair. You are going to go to a private place and vomit until you don’t think you will ever be able to stand up straight again.

I have never had any problem with gun ownership, but I do have a problem with the idea that the more people are packing heat, the safer we’ll all be. I personally do not own a gun, nor do I have any desire to own one. Guns give me the willies.

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If I were banished to a deserted island, and if I were given an iPod with an unlimited amount of power but which would only come with a single item on it and that item was the video of a single dance number from a movie, and I had to pick before my marooning the one and only one dance number which I would ever again be able to watch, and my choices came down to this number or this one…I’d just wait for the tide to go out and then swim out to let myself be taken with it.

Seriously, I couldn’t do without either one.

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Yesterday The Wife and I spent a bit of time at the mall (the Galleria, for you Buffalo readers). Not much excitement there — my days of happy mall-shopping are now long over, and I’m content to visit the mall two or three times a year just to see what’s up — but I did note at one point, while we were standing in line at Sears (The Wife was buying a new spring jacket), a family behind us was conversing away in a language other than English.

I notice this more and more these days around the area, and I’m wondering if the Buffalo region is becoming more international in character or if it’s mainly people from other cultures living in Canada and then coming over here to do some shopping.

But I thought back to conversations I’ve had with people who are insistent that “If you’re gonna live here, you’d better speak English”, and frankly, I’ve heard nothing to change my opinion that it’s a free country and that means you should be able to conduct your lives in whatever damn language you want.

One guy I knew once insisted that it’s rude to converse in another language — Spanish, say — when you’re in a primarily English-speaking country, and I always wondered, “Why?” Of what possible use is it to me that some family of complete strangers speak English as opposed to Arabic or Italian or Hindi or whatever? What they’re talking about is still none of my business.

It seems to me that the “They should speak English!” impulse springs from one of two mindsets: either “Everybody’s conversations are my business and I should be able to listen to them”, or “I don’t trust those swarthy people to have their own conversations”. I find either mindset ugly and disrespectful.

So, as far as I’m concerned, go ahead and speak whatever language you want. It’s all part of the price of maintaining a free country: we don’t get to assume any longer that the people around us are all white, English-speaking Christians. And personally, I think we’re all the better for that.

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