After Ron Paul what?

So what happens after the GOP convention in Tampa Bay? Who will carry Ron Paul's message into the future. Here are some thoughts from ReasonTV.

A libertarian diet: How the government makes you fat.

About 2 years ago, I discovered that I required hernia surgery, it's not uncommon at my age. I chose to go to one of the few private hospitals remaining in Canada (near my home). This hospital was a hold over from the time before socialized medicine, a centre of excellence for hernia surgery worldwide. Unfortunately (for me) they refused to do the surgery unless I lost some weight. According to the doctors in the private hospital, weight loss would make the surgery easier and the recovery quicker.

So, I had a dilemma, lose weight, endure the discomfort of the hernia, or go to a government run hospital and get the surgery done. Maybe the queue in the government hospital would be shorter than the time it would take to lose the weight, I needed to lose over 20 pounds.

I chose to lose the weight and go to the private hospital, and they were good enough to give me a diet they recommended to lose weight quickly and safely. I've posted a part of this diet here, and you can see from the "forbidden list" that this is a low carb diet. What you can't see on the other side, is that meats, fats, cheese, eggs, nuts and mostly vegetables, make up the greater portion of what I was allowed to eat.

This was definitely not a "fat free" diet, but it was virtually a "no carb diet".

The diet worked marvellously well, I was able to eat more often in some cases, but of smaller amounts of food. I learned to eat less and as I reached the goal set by the doctors, and had my surgery scheduled I was put on a "maintenance diet" that was very similar to the original, I was just allowed to eat a bit more. My weight levelled off as if by magic, I had the surgery and was out in two days. Recovery was pretty quick as predicted.

The best part of the story is most of the weight is still off, and I have good evidence that this diet really works. Emulating it, on a daily basis works to keep my weight down, and it's so simple.

The diet that I was on, is similar to diets advocated by Gary Taubes. The TIME cover (top) and the story that went with it, was one of the major impetuses that led to the "fat-free" craze that still grips our society. Listen to Gary Taubes as he was interviewed by ReasonTV and look at the notes I have appended below for more information, he thinks fat free diets are crazy:

From the YouTube video:

Reason.tv's Zach Weissmueller talked with Taubes about his controversial work in the world of nutrition and epidemiology, including Taubes' hypothesis that carbohydrates, not dietary fat, overeating, or lack of physcial activity, are the primary factor causing obesity. Other topics include the inability of governments and large informational institutions such as the American Heart Association to adapt to new information, the mess of bad legislation and bad science that Taubes believes led to America's obesity problem, and why many libertarians seem to love the Paleo Diet . 
Taubes' work has unsurprisingly invited criticism from scientists, government officials and journalists, even in the pages of Reason Magazine, where he went back and forth with Reason contributor Michael Fumento. Read below and decide for yourself who, if anyone, is right:
Fumento on Taubes - http://reason.com/archives/2003/03/01/big-fat-fake
Taubes' response - http://reason.com/archives/2003/03/01/an-exercise-in-vitriol-rather
Fumento's rebuttal - http://reason.com/archives/2003/03/01/gary-taubes-tries-to-overwhelm

The 100-mile-diet? - The Locavore's Dilemma

cabbage storage

Anyone that has grown up in the Toronto area knows that the city's nick name is Cabbagetown. Why? The name Cabbagetown comes from stories of Irish immigrants arriving during the Irish Potato Famine in the middle of the nineteenth century. They grew cabbages in front of their homes in an area that became part of Toronto. Why cabbage? Probably because potatoes, historically a food staple of the Irish, had become unreliable through successive crop failures due to the potato blight back home. Cabbage was reliable and could be stored through the harsh Canadian winter, and avoiding starvation is an excellent incentive.

"This standard winter vegetable (cabbage) may be stored either indoors or out. In the former case a good way is to put the trimmed heads in slotted or open vegetable barrels. Or the plants may be taken up roots and all, the loose outer leaves trimmed off, and three or four heads tied together by the roots and suspended from nails in the cellar rafters. In this way they will keep well without occupying any floor space, which is needed for other things, such as root crops and fruits. .......... It is well to store at least part of the crop out of doors, as this will keep in perfect condition until late spring, when it will be much more fresh and crisp than that which has been stored indoors."
"......Well matured cabbage can easily be kept through the winter in an outside trench or pit. The heads are packed as shown (see above right), covered with straw or marsh hay, and as freezing weather approaches, gradually cover with soil."

One of the most effective ways to avoid starvation is through trade. Even the Irish got tired of eating cabbage, not to mention the fact that growing anything in Canada, even relatively balmy Toronto in winter, is tricky. Trade, of course, reduces the risk that local food issues will impact local families with famines. The chances of widespread famine are remote especially if the trade areas are farther away. The greater the distance between traders, the more likely there will be food to trade.

But the anthropogenic global warming crowd has again bullied its way into an economic area blissfully unaware of the facts. They claim that to reduce one's carbon footprint its best to follow the dictates popularized in a book the100-Mile-Diet, eat locally to reduce transportation and thus CO2 emissions.

There is nothing wrong with eating local foods, its makes perfect sense when they are available. But is it wrong to source food from distant shores? Does it really help the environment to eat locally? Is the food more nutritious and safer if its local?

In a new book Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu dispel some of the myths around eating locally versus globally. Watch this lecture that Desrochers presented to CATO recently in Washington D.C.

Land of the free, home of the brave.....Canada

Recently I attended a meetup in Toronto. The host made some passing remarks about the upcoming Canada Day holiday and all the "benefits" that accrue from government. The last bit was more in jest. He spoke of how there were no roads, no laws, no rights, no freedoms BEFORE there was a Canada. Of course none of that is true, all of them existed before there was a Federal State or any state or colony.

We have just celebrated the birth of two nations the United States and Canada, in the 200th anniversary year of the last battles fought between the people of our two territories in the War of 1812.

So think about this: where does your freedom come from? Is it granted to you by government, by constitutions, by laws? Or does it exist from the moment of your birth, which is what I believe.

If you believe what I believe, then you must ask yourself what is the purpose of government? Make no mistake, I believe government is important and should have a defined and limited purpose and that is to make sure our freedoms are protected so that we may live our lives as best as we can. I know some who will say there is no need for government even to do those things, and I have great sympathy for that idea. But we're not there yet, and reigning in the excesses of governments today, will keep those of us in the freedom business busy for some time to come.

Our American cousins have for over 200 years celebrated their freedoms with such zeal and vigour, that peoples around the world think America invented liberty. Living here in Canada, often in the shadow of America, many Canadians dismiss our connections to freedom and the fights for liberty as being trivial and unimportant. Many will point to our allegiance to the British Crown as that which distinguishes us from our cousins to the South. They forget our two countries are both children of Great Britain, one older, one younger, but with the same heritage and it is NOT the British Crown, it is British liberty.

British liberty goes back to the days of Magna Carta, and the beginning of the end of the power of the British Crown. We cherish our British heritage, not because of the Crown, but because the Crown is irrelevant, powerless, and just fodder for the tabloids in the modern era.

Canada does not need to play second fiddle to America on liberty, on the contrary Canadians are more aware of it than ever. Need proof? The video below is from a radio program broadcast from Saskatchewan, the cradle of socialized medicine in Canada, listen to the zeal and vigour of Canadian liberty.