As IF Times

link Germany Considers Tax on the Obese.

An older article from this summer, which at the time seemed preposterous, but now with the passage of events is coming closer to reality.  The urge to eat is THE primal desire overcoming all others in the animal kingdom.   For most animals, every waking moment is spent in the pursuit of food, closely followed by the need to avoid being food. 

In the case of man, the need to eat is not as urgent in most industrialized nations these days.  With food readily available in copious amounts and selection, the need to get the latest I-Phone or grab the hottest pop star’s event tickets have supplanted the urgency for simple sustenance.  Nevertheless, there is a vocal segment of the population intent on prescribing to others just how and what to eat.  More annoyingly, this group of know it all busybodies have managed to infect governments with their zeal to control meals.  It’s widely known that campaigns against the food offerings of the likes of McDonalds, KFC, PF Chang’s, Cheesecake Factory etc. have employed hundreds of lawyers and consumed countless millions of dollars in bureaucratic maneuverings in the pursuit of villifying these businesses.  Even the Whitehouse is is pushing salad bars in the nation.  

What this amounts to is the state telling people not just what to eat, but how to eat and in what portions.  How did this happen?  Presumably, if laws are passed, they should reflect the will of the people in some way.  Are we to believe that fellow citizens really care to regulate the food intake of their neighbours and friends.  Should we care whether or not someone goes for thirds at the buffet table?  In the animal kingdom, they can eat what and when they want to the degree that food is available.  Why shouldn’t those occupying the top of the food chain be able to do the same?

The stated intent of the food police is to prevent people from harming themselves by their own uncontrolled self indulgence.  In addition, the side effect is supposed benefits to the collective health care systems.  I would argue the opposite.  If in fact the products targeted by the food police are as toxic as they claim, it would actually benefit the health care system because early deaths would be less of an encumbrance to everyone else.  And by the way, what exactly is the benefit of thousands of years of evolution if the prescribed diet is flavored cardboard and unsalted granola?  Who wants to live to be a hundred if you can’t even enjoy the simple prurient pleasures of eating what you want?  Ironically, there’s a ongoing push to legalize marijuana coincident with the equally vocal push to demonize food. 

I say someone should initiate an ‘Eat what you want day’, or week, or month.  Gourmets and gourmands of the world should make their voices heard and push back against the tide of food totalitarianism creeping into the State.  Events such as ‘take a Big Mac to lunch Day’ or ‘Bring your daughters to Cheesecake Factory Day’ should be instituted in the calendar.  We can name such a movement, FREE!, which stands for Forget Restraint, Eat Everything!   Sort of a Sadie Hawkins day for food.  And come on, who doesn’t want to be FREE?

link Taliban imposter: Senior Taliban leader was a fake, officials say – latimes.com.

Well duh! What was the first clue?  The guy was holding peace talks! Some may recall that the mission statement of the Taliban was to wipe out the Great Satan, kill all non believers etc etc.  The only logical reason to negotiate with the sworn enemy is either you’re out of bullets, out of suicide volunteers or in this case, if you were an impostor. It’s actually amazing no one else has gamed the system up to now, excluding Hamid Karzai of course.

If you are living in Afghanistan,  you likely spend your days watching the landscape transistion from one shade of khaki to another and nothing ever changes.  Why not pretend to represent the locals and get feted and fawned over by all the elite mucky mucks of the West?  It’s a fair bet the food is better and the beds they provide softer than the straw mat in a dusty corner of a cave that you’re accustomed to.  You get to shower and glad hand all the top officials sent to meet you.  It’s not as if it’s easy, even if you had a program, discerning the good guys from the bad over there; I mean come on, all bearded men look the same.  It could have been Cat Stevens for all anyone knew.   But you would think some cursory checks were made to verify that this guy was who he said he was. 

This has been a fairly dependable tactic on dealing with the West, supported by decades of precedence.  The root of this begins from early childhood.  As most public school teachers surely know, average decent and unassuming students don’t cause them any grief.  The really rotten kids, the misbehaving, class disrupting social misfits take up way more of the teacher’s time and attention than the well behaved kids.  It’s not lost on the little darlings that the more they misbehave, the more attention they get.

As they grow older and see that this tactic always brings about the desired response, they become even better at employing it.  In the West, they go on to Hollywood and become actors and entertainers, or they become lawyers, or they go into politics and become Democrats.  Recently there has been a new vocational direction for these folk, the area of environmental activism.  Whatever their chosen vocation, the common denominator is that the public is usually held ransom by their utterances and they themselves believe in the importance of their lives.  But I digress.

On a global scale, this tack is employed again and again by rogue nations looking for some kind of concession by the community at large, principally of course the West.  Think North Korea, think Iran, think Venezuela.  So in this particular case, the Akhtar Mohammad Mansourh impostor figures, why not dance with NATO a bit?  It’s likely that NATO was so keen on getting some discussions going, they didn’t even bother with the usual TSA style security groping.  The tip-off should have been that the impostor was sipping on a 12 year old Glenfiddich and watching Dancing With The Stars in his hotel room. This fiasco is a big red flag that the tactics being employed by our top people there mirrors the competence of  the idiotic TSA regime back here. But you cannot really blame the impostor for taking advantage of the red carpet being deployed for every nut who rattles sabres and wants attention.  The West calls it diplomacy.  The other side calls them Suckers.