Nanny of the Year steps up to do a 2010 REPEAT!

2009 Nanny of the Year steps up to do a 2010 REPEAT!



Not content with winning in 2009, NYC is up for taking care of its people again! What ever would New Yorkers do without the state???

Salt is evil and an enemy to the collective...ahem...I mean state.

I generally support freedom of information laws, such as food labeling, but give me a break. We do not need the state to read the label for us and then go about seeing that high salt food not even be offered to us...ever. What on earth does that say about us? Do we really need THIS MUCH OVERSIGHT!! Then they go on to give us this line:

"High blood pressure, heart attacks and stroke kill 23,000 New Yorkers and 800,000 Americans per year, costing untold billions in healthcare expenses, the Health Department said."

Well there you have it. We must FORCE "good health" upon people because we are all sharing the expense - really? Like in health insurance? Hey, here's a free market solution - allow insurance companies (if they so wish) to deny coverage to people who were not using reasonable safety devices. And besides, I'd like to know what untold billions of dollars is involved in funding public health policy bureaucrats. In my mind they are like the vast majority of human resources employees such as those who write the questions and tally results for things like "Diversity" quizzes. The other issue is the extent to which public health policy makers really know what is healthy for you. Remember kids, this is the government we are talking about and they are busily being lobbied by all manner of interests - whether corporate profiteers or non-profit ideologues.

I'm presently reading a book called "Good Calories / Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes (here's a NYT review) and in it the author presents extensive evidence to suggest that the whole government/science/media complex that brings to us public policy and "conventional wisdom" is as flawed as...well...as flawed as any of us...or a large crowd of us. In my experience, once they get it wrong, they largely expect/hope that by simply being more quiet about the issue people will forget the extent to which they trumpeted it in the beginning. After a decade or two we'll probably forget and while they'll call HUGE press conferences to tell us what we ought to eat when the "research is settled" (it often isn't), they don't do anything nearly as loud to say something like: "Well, gee, turns out eggs aren't so bad after all." (In point of fact it was egg farmer associations and corporate agribusinesses who made the announcement on the behalf...I still remember the TV commercial of the egg being freed from chains.)

Of course, we don't ever want people to lose faith in the government's ability to protect you, preserve you, and keep you. We've made gods of them with our expectations of safety and health...not stopping to think whether our faith is either well-placed or needed at all.

I say poo-poo to you Bloomberg. Public health science's job should be to educate us (which they have not done well - see Taubes' book), not shackle us. I say assert your freedom people and protest by eating a spoonful of salt and follow it with a McNugget fried in Transfats. Then have a beer and a nice bit of pipeweed in a church warden amidst a smoke-friendly pub, pausing to sing a few rousing choruses of freedom and death to tyrants.