Cost of foods, stupid government and EBT

I have been doing a lot of reading about Food Security and Food Resource Management and the USDA Food plans.

For the most part, everything I have found is pretty useless. For example, the "Thrifty Food Plan" from the 2007USDA Food Plans report tells us that a male between 50 and 71 years old needs 38.88 pounds of food per week.

Alrighty then!

When I was a poverty level single father with three kids I had to do food management.  The first step was to find a suitable number of recipes for about a two week period that; I could cook, could be ready about a half hour after getting home from work, that my kids liked and that I could make changes to so that things would not get too monotonous.

Meal planning was important, I focused on nutrition and prices.  How many calories, how much fat, protein and carbohydrates per meal.  How much did the meal cost?  Usually protein was low, fats and carbs high.  

Once I had two weeks of meal planning done, 14 breakfast, lunches and dinners, I made shopping lists.

Once I knew what I was going to purchase, I collected coupons and reviewed sales papers for grocery stores in my area.   I reviewed what foods I already had in stock. This allowed me to make up store specific shopping lists so I could minimize my costs.  This part took a few hours every week, but, was worth it because it paid me more than I made at an hourly wage.

Next, transportation to stores.  Usually I had a car, if not, I had to call friends to take me shopping or I had to walk with my kids.  I worked very hard at keeping a car running, insured and licensed.

I used to write a date on everything I purchased.  I used a black magic marker and wrote the month and year.  Generally, anything over a year old I threw out.  Not always though, it depended on what it was.  Cans I kept longer, up to several years.  Boxes less time.  I bought bulk beans and rice and then stored it in metal "popcorn" cans.  I made a lot of my own spaghetti sauce from either canned tomato sauce or fresh tomatoes, depending on what was cheaper and what I had a taste for.

I cooked a lot of stir fries, stir fried kielbasa with celery, carrots, and any other vegetables I had.   Stir fried chicken, stir fried pork, whatever was on sale.  I used a lot of different sauces, terriyaki, curry, salad dressings, marinades, anything I could buy on sale and some turned out better than others.

The problem I see with modern food resource management is that these things are not taught in a holistic, all encompassing, sense.

If the USDA would like to really help, create a bunch of real meal plans that fit within their "Thrifty Food Plans".

Build an entire month, thirty days, of meal plans, recipes, shopping lists, that working parents can use.  Cost out the shopping lists.  Figure out a criteria the way I did.

Meals have to be balanced (use Food Plate recommendations).  Meals have to be cooked within 30-45 minutes of a cold start or slow cooked with the same total prep time.  Total shopping list costs have to fit within the budget of local food stamp amounts.  No fresh food can be kept in house for more than a week, and less is better since a lot of "fresh food" does not last that long.  Shopping has to be done primarily on weekends.

Amounts purchased and used in recipes and meal planning have to coincide with amounts available.  People can't purchase 6 hot dog buns, so no shopping lists with "6 hot dog buns". 

Yeah, such a project is fricking overwhelming.  If the fricking government can't do this, why would anyone assume that anyone else can?

How are the recipes managed?  Essentially on a per calorie cost.  Suppose lettuce is a component in a meal for four people which should total about 2400 calories total, or about 600 calories per person.  The average amount of per person food stamps per month is $143 bucks.  People need about 60k calories per month, (2,000 per day).  That translates into around $0.0024 per calorie.  For a meal of 2400 calories, about $5.76 total can be spent on the meal.

Bet your mouth just dropped open.  Welcome to the reality of Federal Government food budgets and why such plans do not exist in reality.

Because our Federal Government is living in LaLa Land, and the suggestions for healthy food can't be met with the current budgets, people are going to eat cheaper calories like Little Debbie snack cakes, which run about $0.0013 per calorie and sugary drinks which can be even cheaper per calorie.

Until the government can provide realistic menu plans and shopping lists which can be used with their budget process there isn't any reality in any plans to restrict EBT food purchases

Fascism, censorship and intolerance

This last term at school I dealt with some seriously fascist teachers.  Fascists never self-identify as fascists, they self-identify as "guardians of right" and they bully, censor, intimidate, extort and even kill people whose opinions, ideologies, comments, expressions, disagree with "what is right".

Throughout history Fascists have always failed, because they never know when to stop.  Some fascist hacker takes offense at some celebrity mouthing off about another celebrity and the hacker extorts behavior the hacker believes is "right".  Doesn't care about civil rights, freedom of speech, freedom of anything.  After all whatever the fascist believes is "right" and anything contradicting or disagreeing with the fascist is Hate Speak!

"You have a borderline offensive opinion!"

I have no clue what that means.  Fascists can't define what is right, they can only define what is wrong.  For example, a fascist might say, "you have to treat people with respect", while they are invading people's privacy and extorting behaviors from them, but, only from the "bad people".  What the fascist really means is, "You have to treat the people I respect with respect".

The truth is, people who run around invading the privacy of other individuals have no respect for other individuals.

There is a lot of chatter these days about invading peoples privacy.  We aren't talking about institutional privacy, like the secrets governments keep from their citizens.  We are talking about personal privacy.  We are not talking about working to effect cultural change, we are talking about deliberately damaging people.

Not only people.  Suppose Anonymous had been around during the 1950s and found the radical ideas of revolutionaries like Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X offensive?  People claim, "of course that wouldn't happen, anonymous supports revolutionaries".  No, they don't.  They support those with whom they agree and they damage those with whom they disagree.

We are not talking about rocket scientists here.  They adopted the image of a religious fanatic who was attempting to destroy religious revolutionaries.  Probably because the image was used in a popular cult film about a guy who tortures a woman so she can learn from the same perspective he had when he learned.

I mean, really, do you think there is enough torture in the universe for two people of different genders, raised in totally different backgrounds, totally different experiences, totally different world views, to achieve the same perspective?

The thing is, fascism is always blind to its own evil because they always believe they are "right", no matter how many individual civil rights they trample on and no matter how many damaged people they leave behind.

Hitler convinced the German people that they had to fight against their oppressors.  France in particular had treated Germany very severely after WW1.  Hitler convinced the German people to believe in their own "rightness" and to rise up against oppression.

That is fascism.  Doing horrible things in order to damage the people who have wronged the fascist or the allies of the fascist.  Narcissists who feel they are hurt beyond what is "fair" become vindictive fascists.  In the mind of the fascist there is no "damage", they are just making things equal, fair.  Of course, the concept of "fair" is based on their own ideology.

It isn't fair for people with different ideas to express them.  Different ideas must be stamped out!  The world must be turned into some kind of robots, always behaving in the way that the fascist believes is "right".

And the chatter is not becoming more tolerant or more focused on the abuses of corporations.  The rich just pay off the fascists as a cost of doing business and the fascists take their money and focus on taking out their petty vindictiveness on people.

It sucks, but, people haven't changed over thousands of years and nothing is going to change.  There are networks of people today that could help change the world and they are focusing on petty and vindictive stupidity.

String Theory, Statistics, Wormholes and Acceleration

The more fiction I read the more amazed I am at the lack of understanding of authors.

The movie Interstellar was fun, but, the science pretty much sucked.  Why would a wormhole orbit anything?  Why would gravity influence it at all?  How would gravity influence it except to collapse it?

Suppose for a moment that we could figure out a way to create a wormhole within the influence of gravity and we could stabilize it so that it remained in a constant relative position and velocity to a planet.  Big assumption, when was the last time someone saw a photon in orbit?

Suppose for a minute that we figured out how to link the wormhole to another solar system.

Suppose we overcame the variations in velocity between the two solar systems and moving from this solar system, which is moving at a velocity relative to the center of the universe, into a different solar system moving at a different velocity relative to the same center of the universe.  The energy required to accelerate or decelerate to match velocity and orbits would be enormous.

Suppose we overcame the gazillion to one odds and actually found a planet on which life could exist, but, had not developed or had developed in such a way that we decided we had authority over it as Europeans decided they had authority over the Americas.  Assuming we believe we are intelligent enough to identify intelligent life, which I believe many incorrectly assume already.

Even if we can get past all of these hurdles, my question is, should we?

Anonymous and Sony

http://www.showbiz411.com/2014/12/21/sony-gets-a-new-threat-anonymous-says-hackers-arent-korean-release-film-or-more-hacks-coming

Okay, this isn't exactly a Times article.  I don't trust even the major newspapers or media outlets, so trusting this outlet to be accurate is a stretch.  Still, pretty cool.

But why would anonymous do this?  What does it accomplish?  Nothing much, except, hopefully, the release of what looks like a pretty funny movie.

I'm glad to know that anonymous, at least some of them, and I agree, it wasn't North Korea behind this hack.

The Freedom of Information act does not give the public the right to the work product of corporations, the act gives individuals the right to view government records which are not confidential.  The act is specifically a U.S. thing, Sony is a Japanese company.

Not sure discussing the Freedom of Information act makes a lot of sense.  I'm also sure anonymous knows that 100K for a 43M dollar movie is chump change.

Sony should have dumped "The Interview" to PirateBay back around December 4th or 5th when they understood this mess was real.  No one would have believed Sony corporate had done it.  Now, if the movie hits bittorrent everyone knows it will have happened because Sony corporate made it happen.

Anonymous isn't exactly an advocate of Free Speech, they tend to quash the speech of those they disagree with.  In some cases, such as child pornography, I agree with them.  In other cases, I disagree.

I don't have much use for totalitarian groups of any kind.  I believe in minimal restrictions on freedom, however, I believe that some freedoms, such the the freedom to exploit children in sex for profit ventures, the freedom to enslave people, the freedom to force a person to do anything, need to be restricted.

I can argue against homosexuality from, probably, around 40 different view points.  The only viewpoint I can argue for homosexuality is that people have the right to do whatever they want with other consenting adults.  I don't believe I have the right to forbid anyone from doing anything with other people as long as no one is hurt.  So, as a Christian, while I think of homosexuality as a sin, and I can argue against it in many different ways, I also believe that people have the God given right to choose their own lives.  The only people who get into heaven are sinners.  Since no one is perfect, everyone ends up at the end times with unrepentant sin.  Those who have a personal relationship with Christ enter.  Those who don't will choose a different path, no matter how "holy" or "religious" they were believed to be on Earth.

Were I the kind of person who believed that what I believe is right and people who do not agree with me are wrong, I would want homosexuality outlawed since I believe it is "wrong".  Here is the problem with that for me, God created choice so if I make "bad" choices punishable I am placing myself in God's judgment seat.  I set myself up as equal in ability to judge with God.

That isn't a popular belief set, but, it is mine.

I do believe in taking action against those who are interfering with the rights of others to choose.  For example, Westboro Baptists are welcome to sit in their church and spew their garbage to each other.  They have the right to publish their sh*t to the web.  They have the right to protest.  They don't have the right to disrupt funerals and cause emotional damage to others, in my opinion.

I thought the actions of people who stood in front of the WBC protesters was great.  Even though I agree with anonymous about the WBC, I didn't think and don't think that attacking the free use of the Internet and disrupting the WBC's freedom of speech was a good idea.

No matter how much I hate a particular ideology, I have no right to stop someone from spewing it, unless, as in the case of a funeral, it causes deliberate emotional or physical damage.

That's my basic ideology though, what about anonymous.  Truthfully, I think anonymous uses a similar ideology, except, they have no problem attacking the things they hate, regardless of anyone's right to freedom of speech or net neutrality or Internet Freedom.  In addition, the individual members often jump to conclusions and strike without really understanding what it is they are doing.

That is not always a bad thing.  It is often better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission.  Still, anonymous, in many ways, becomes the very thing they hate when they suppress the net freedoms and the individual and collective freedom of speech.  Anonymous becomes the jack booted, totalitarian thug that they hate.

Is it possible to protest against a system willing to kill people without becoming that jack booted thug?  Truthfully, I doubt it.  There will be collateral damage in any war.  Soldiers will kill the wrong people.  Some will commit terrible crimes.  It becomes impossible to police every individual soldier in any war.  Anonymous is engaged in a war and they will screw up, they will commit war crimes.

Does that make them evil?  No more than it makes anyone else evil.  No one is perfect.  No one agrees with everyone about everything.  No one disagrees with everyone about everything.

So why the Sony thing?  What does it accomplish?

Truthfully, I'm not sure I care.  I hope anonymous manages to get the movie released so I can watch it on the big screen.  If not, I hope it is available on bittorrent so I can see it on my flat screen.

And I hope the GOP releases everything they have on Sony to Wikileaks.  That is where that information belongs anyway.  Maybe anonymous can hack GOP and make that happen.  Now, that would be cool :-)

Hackers, Sony and North Korea

I don't think North Korea had anything to do with the hack on Sony.  But so what.  Now that the President has identified North Korea as the source, The U.S. President being the leader of the Enforcement Branch of government and therefore the "top cop" and responsible for all federal law enforcement agencies (except of course when he pretends he isn't), we should just destroy North Korea.

I mean destroy.  I would literally level the crappy little rice paddy republic.  Scorched earth policy.  If China complains ask them if they want a nuclear war.  China will try and negotiate because China does not want a nuclear war.  The Chinese are all about "face saving" and that means having a world in which face can be saved.

Yeah, I'm not feeling very well today.  I have a cold and a "nuke em all" attitude.

Obama isn't going to do anything.  China kicked our assess in Vietnam and will kick our ass again if we go into North Korea.  The United States doesn't have the balls to deal with a long term war and China does.

I still think the attack on Sony was done specifically for financial reasons, manipulation of stock prices, and I believe the operation failed.

Still, this hack could have some serious unintended consequences.  Obama won't do anything, but, this mess is going to percolate over the next few years and when a new President comes in, circa 2017, that president might feel that they must act against North Korea.

By 2017 the U.S. government won't be able to keep interest rates and the deficit low by purchasing bonds.  Social Security will be spending more than they take in and the IOUs the government wrote itself will be due.  That will really screw up the budget. Might be the time for a war.