Farmers to Face Fines or Jail Time for Dealing Directly with Customers

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This would seem to embody the USDA’s advisory, “Know your farmer, know your food,” right?
Not exactly.

For the USDA and its sister food regulator, the FDA, there’s a problem: many of the farmers are distributing the food via private contracts like herd shares and leasing arrangements, which fall outside the regulatory system of state and local retail licenses and inspections that govern public food sales.

In response, federal and state regulators are seeking legal sanctions against farmers in Maine, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and California, among others. These sanctions include injunctions, fines, and even prison sentences. Food sold by unlicensed and uninspected farmers is potentially dangerous say the regulators, since it can carry pathogens like salmonella, campylobacter, and E.coli O157:H7, leading to mild or even serious illness.

Most recently, Wisconsin’s attorney general appointed a special prosecutor to file criminal misdemeanor charges against an Amish farmer for alleged failure to have retail and dairy licenses, and the proceedings turned into a high-profile jury trial in late May that highlighted the depth of conflict: following five days of intense proceedings, the 12-person jury acquitted the farmer, Vernon Hershberger, on all the licensing charges, while convicting him of violating a 2010 holding order on his food, which he had publicly admitted.

Why are hard-working normally law-abiding farmers aligning with urban and suburban consumers to flaunt well-established food safety regulations and statutes?

 Why are parents, who want only the best for their children, seeking out food that regulators say could be dangerous?

And, why are regulators and prosecutors feeling so threatened by this trend?

We're Being Forced Out Of Rural America

Joel Kotkin
New Geography
March 15, 2010

California is in trouble: Unemployment is over 13%, the state is broke and hundreds of thousands of people, many of them middle-class families, are streaming for the exits. But to some politicians, like Sen. Alan Lowenthal, the real challenge for California "progressives" is not to fix the economy but to reengineer the way people live.

In Lowenthal's case the clarion call is to take steps to ban free parking. This way, the Long Beach Democrat reasons, Californians would have to give up their cars and either take the bus or walk to their local shops. "Free parking has significant social, economic and environmental costs," Lowenthal told the Los Angeles Times. "It increases congestion and greenhouse gas emissions."

Scarily, his proposal actually passed the State Senate.

One would hope that the mania for changing how people live and work could be dismissed as just local Californian lunacy. Yet across the country, and within the Obama Administration, there is a growing predilection to endorse policies that steer the bulk of new development into our already most-crowded urban areas.

One influential document called "Moving Cooler", cooked up by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Urban Land Institute, the Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Protection Agency and others, lays out a strategy that would essentially force the vast majority of new development into dense city cores.

Over the next 40 years this could result in something like 60 million to 80 million people being crammed into existing central cities. These policies work hard to make suburban life as miserable as possible by shifting infrastructure spending to dense areas. One proposal, "Moving Cooler," outdoes even Lowenthal by calling for charges of upwards of $400 for people to park in front of their own houses.

The ostensible justification for this policy lies in the dynamics of slowing climate change. Forcing people to live in dense cities, the reasoning goes, would make people give up all those free parking opportunities and and even their private vehicles, which would reduce their dreaded "carbon imprint."

Yet there are a few little problems with this "cramming" policy. Its environmental implications are far from assured. According to some recent studies in Australia, the carbon footprint of high-rise urban residents is higher than that of medium- and low-density suburban homes, due to such things as the cost of heating common areas, including parking garages, and the highly consumptive lifestyles of more affluent urbanites.

Moreover, it appears that even those who live in dense places may be loath to give up their cars. Over 90% of all jobs in American metropolitan regions are located outside the central business districts, which tend to be the only places well suited for mass transit.

Indeed, despite the massive expansion of transit systems in the past 30 years, the percentage of people taking public transportation in major metropolitan regions has dropped from roughly 8% to closer to 5%. Even in Portland, Ore.--the mecca for new wave transit consciousness--the share of people using transit to get to work is now considerably less than it was in 1980. In recent months overall transit ridership nationwide has actually dropped.

These realities suggest that densification of most cities--with the exceptions of New York, Washington and perhaps a few others--cannot be supported by transit. Furthermore, drivers in dense cities will be confronted with not less congestion, but more, which will likely also boost pollution. The most congested cities in the country tend to be the densest, such as Los Angeles, Sen. Lowenthal's bailiwick, which is in an unenviable first place.

Then there is the little issue of people's preferences. Urban boosters have been correct in saying that until recently there have been too few opportunities for middle-class residents to live in and around city cores. But over the past decade many cities have gone for broke with dense condo and rental housing and have produced far more product, often at very high cost, than the market can reasonably bear.

Initially, when the mortgage crisis broke, the density advocates built much of their case on the fact that the biggest hits took place in suburban areas, particularly on the fringe. Yet as suburban construction ended, cities continued building high-density urban housing--sometimes encouraged by city subsidies. As a result, in the last two years massive foreclosures have plagued many cities, and many condominiums have been converted to rentals. This is true in bubble towns like Las Vegas and Miami; "smart-growth" bastions like Portland and Seattle; and even relatively sane places such as Kansas City, Mo. All these places have a massive amount of high-density condos that are either vacant or converted into lower-cost rentals.

Take Portland. The city's condo prices are down 30% from their original list price. The 177-unit Encore, one of the fanciest new towers, has closed sales on 12 of its units as of March, while another goes to auction. Meanwhile in New York half-completed structures dot Brooklyn's once-thriving Williamsburg neighborhood, while the massive Stuyvesant Town apartment complex in Manhattan teeters at the edge of bankruptcy.

Finally, it is unlikely that cities would be able to accommodate the massive growth promoted by urban boosters, land speculators and policy mavens. Aaron Renn, who writes the influential Urbanophile blog, says that most American cities today struggle to maintain their current infrastructure. They also have limited options to zone land for high-density construction, due in part to grassroots opposition to existing residential neighborhoods. Overall they would be hard-pressed to accommodate much more than 10% of their region's growth, much less 50% or 60%.

Given these realities, and the depth of the current recession, one might think that governments would focus more on basics like jobs and fixing the infrastructure--in suburbs as well as cities--than reengineering how people live. Yet it is increasingly clear that for many "progressives" the real agenda is not enabling people to achieve their dreams--especially in the form of a suburban single-family house. It is, instead, forcing them to live in what is viewed as more ecologically and socially preferable density.

In the next few months we may see more of the kind of hyperregulation proposed by the likes of Sen. Lowenthal. It is entirely possible that a hoary coalition of HUD, Department of Transportation and EPA bureaucrats could start trying to restrict future housing development along the lines suggested in "Moving Cooler."

Yet over time one has to wonder about the political efficacy of this approach. Right now Americans are focused primarily on simply economic growth--and perhaps a touch less on the intellectual niceties of the "smart" form. In addition they are increasingly skeptical about climate change, which serves as the primary raison d'etre behind the new regulatory schema.

Given the zealousness of the density advocates, perhaps the only thing that will slow, and even reverse, this process will be the political equivalent of a sharp slap across the face. Unless the ruling party begins to reacquaint itself with the preferences and aspirations of the vast majority of Americans, they may find themselves experiencing repeats of their recent humiliating defeat--manufactured largely in the Boston suburbs--in true-blue Massachusetts.

Americans--suburban or urban--may resist a return to unbridled and extreme Republicanism, whether on social issues or in economic policy. But forced to choose between Neanderthals, who at least might leave them alone in their daily lives, and higher-order intellects determined to reengineer their lives, they might end up supporting bipeds lower down the evolutionary chain, at least until the progressive vanguard regains a grip on common sense.

Snowden Isn't the Story, It's the Internet

The press has lost the plot over the Snowden revelations. The fact is that the net is finished as a global network and that US firms' cloud services cannot be trusted


 While the press concentrates on the furore surrounding Edward Snowden's search for political asylum, it has forgotten the importance of his revelations. Photograph: Tatyana Lokshina/AP

Repeat after me: Edward Snowden is not the story.

The story is what he has revealed about the hidden wiring of our networked world. This insight seems to have escaped most of the world's mainstream media, for reasons that escape me but would not have surprised Evelyn Waugh, whose contempt for journalists was one of his few endearing characteristics. The obvious explanations are: incorrigible ignorance; the imperative to personalise stories; or gullibility in swallowing US government spin, which brands Snowden as a spy rather than a whistleblower.

In a way, it doesn't matter why the media lost the scent. What matters is that they did. So as a public service, let us summarise what Snowden has achieved thus far.

Without him, we would not know how the National Security Agency (NSA) had been able to access the emails, Facebook accounts and videos of citizens across the world; or how it had secretly acquired the phone records of millions of Americans; or how, through a secret court, it has been able to bend nine US internet companies to its demands for access to their users' data.

Similarly, without Snowden, we would not be debating whether the US government should have turned surveillance into a huge, privatised business, offering data-mining contracts to private contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton and, in the process, high-level security clearance to thousands of people who shouldn't have it. Nor would there be – finally – a serious debate between Europe (excluding the UK, which in these matters is just an overseas franchise of the US) and the United States about where the proper balance between freedom and security lies.

These are pretty significant outcomes and they're just the first-order consequences of Snowden's activities. As far as most of our mass media are concerned, though, they have gone largely unremarked. Instead, we have been fed a constant stream of journalistic pap – speculation about Snowden's travel plans, asylum requests, state of mind, physical appearance, etc. The "human interest" angle has trumped the real story, which is what the NSA revelations tell us about how our networked world actually works and the direction in which it is heading.

As an antidote, here are some of the things we should be thinking about as a result of what we have learned so far.

The first is that the days of the internet as a truly global network are numbered. It was always a possibility that the system would eventually be Balkanised, ie divided into a number of geographical or jurisdiction-determined subnets as societies such as China, Russia, Iran and other Islamic states decided that they needed to control how their citizens communicated. Now, Balkanisation is a certainty.

Second, the issue of internet governance is about to become very contentious. Given what we now know about how the US and its satraps have been abusing their privileged position in the global infrastructure, the idea that the western powers can be allowed to continue to control it has become untenable.

Third, as Evgeny Morozov has pointed out, the Obama administration's "internet freedom agenda" has been exposed as patronising cant. "Today," he writes, "the rhetoric of the 'internet freedom agenda' looks as trustworthy as George Bush's 'freedom agenda' after Abu Ghraib."

That's all at nation-state level. But the Snowden revelations also have implications for you and me.

They tell us, for example, that no US-based internet company can be trusted to protect our privacy or data. The fact is that Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are all integral components of the US cyber-surveillance system. Nothing, but nothing, that is stored in their "cloud" services can be guaranteed to be safe from surveillance or from illicit downloading by employees of the consultancies employed by the NSA. That means that if you're thinking of outsourcing your troublesome IT operations to, say, Google or Microsoft, then think again.

And if you think that that sounds like the paranoid fantasising of a newspaper columnist, then consider what Neelie Kroes, vice-president of the European Commission, had to say on the matter recently. "If businesses or governments think they might be spied on," she said, "they will have less reason to trust the cloud, and it will be cloud providers who ultimately miss out. Why would you pay someone else to hold your commercial or other secrets, if you suspect or know they are being shared against your wishes?

 Front or back door – it doesn't matter – any smart person doesn't want the information shared at all. Customers will act rationally and providers will miss out on a great opportunity."

Spot on. So when your chief information officer proposes to use the Amazon or Google cloud as a data-store for your company's confidential documents, tell him where to file the proposal. In the shredder.

Nevada Prohibits BSL

Nevada will become the 14th state to preempt its towns and counties from discriminating against dogs on the basis of breed or appearance. Governor Brian Sandoval has signed Assembly Bill No. 110, which both describes the circumstances under which local authority can declare an individual dog to be dangerous or vicious, and prohibits a local authority from either a) deeming an individual dog dangerous or vicious on account of breed; or b)passing an ordinance declaring a breed of dogs, dangerous or vicious.

Assemblyman James Ohrenschall (D-Clark County) introduced the bill in February. The good sense of his proposal being apparent to both houses, Bill 110 moved quickly through the legislature. It was unanimously approved by the Assembly, then passed the Senate with only one dissenting vote.

Professionals who have studied dog bite incidents and published their findings in the professional literature oppose regulating dogs on the basis of breed. An analysis of that literature shows that there is no basis upon which to consider one or more breeds of dogs disproportionately dangerous.

Nor has regulating dogs on the basis of breed ever been shown to improve community safety, wherever it has been enacted. It has, however, wasted tax dollars..

Community safety benefits from a responsible pet ownership model.

Communities should adopt these clear principles, and apply them to all dog owners, whether their dogs are big or small, however many they have, and whatever kind they choose to keep.

Don't Let The Government Decide What Medicine You Take, URGENT Petition

Don't let the government decide what medicine you can take -  Speak Out to your legislator before  July 17th     We Need Your Help and Input!   Your right to personalized medication may be threatened. Personalized medication, also known as compounded medication, is an important alternative to many people as a treatment option when commercially available medication does not work. Compounded medications solve numerous specialized needs of patients who do not have a commercially available alternative.   Those who need compounded medications include: Autistic Children Children and elderly people with cancer People with chronic pain Women and Men in need of certain hormone treatments People with special dosage needs People sensitive to certain additives and glutens People who need an alternative form of a medication so it can be more easily administered. Forms such as: Liquids Topical gels or creams Lollipops Nasal sprays Animals including cats, dogs and horses Even changing the flavor or a medication must be compounded by a licensed pharmacy. The Senate HELP Committee proposed a bill called the "Pharmaceutical Compounding Quality and Accountability Act" or Senate Bill 959 (S.959), which has significant implications for those who depend on compounded medications and may restrict access to these medications. The bill is a reaction to the tragedy of the New England Compounding Center (NECC) who produced contaminated injectable medication which resulted in patient deaths and others contracting meningitis. Safety is of the utmost importance and the attempt to address this tragedy should be applauded.  However, S.959 has unintended consequences that may deny patient access to important medications. Under the provisions of S.959 could: Reduce access and increase costs by forcing Compounding Pharmacies to give up sterile compounding, or to limit sales within the states in which they are located making it much harder for your doctor prescribe medications to meet the specific needs of patients You may not be using compounded medications today but S.959 may limit your future options and your physician's ability to prescribe the best solution for you. Please join us and speak out to oppose bill S.959.  Go to the Speak Out website and voice you opinion before  July 17th: http://www.protectmycompounds.com     or  Please call Tim at   Montana Compounding Pharmacy  541-6820  for more information.