After a long day at the office (my couch), I can’t think of a better way to unwind than with my favorite caffeinated malt liquor beverage: Four Loko. You can see why, then, I was so shocked to hear that my beloved Loko was being pulled from shelves. What’s the matter, Uncle Sam? Scared of a good time? Afraid you might have too much fun? I didn’t realize our government was run by a bunch of grandmas.

Upon hearing the dreadful news, I decided there was only one reasonable way to make the case against the banning of caffeine in these beverages. I was going to buy a case of Four Loko, share it with my friends, and record everything in my journal. Here’s what happened:

I got back to my apartment with my new case of Four Loko (I decided on Four MaXed Gold flavor. I normally think of myself as more of a regular plain Four Loko drinker, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to really pull out all the stops on this one.  It’s like picking Mountain Dew over Pepsi.  You’re still getting the kick, but you look cooler) and threw it down on the coffee table. Next, I was going to call up all of my friends.  They would love this idea.

“Hey _____, it’s Matt!”

“Oh hey Matt.  I’m so glad you called. You’re a great friend.”

“Thanks, I know. Hey, here’s a question. Would you like to drink a case of Four Loko with me to show everyone how it’s NBD?”

“Wow, Matt. That sounds great. I’d love to help. Be right over.”

I decided to crack my first Loko in the process and got to the calling.

Unfortunately, all of my friends were busy. But hey, that’s what happens with these real life experiments. Some people just can’t hang. You can’t plan this sort of thing! This is life on the edge. Guerilla Journalism.  That’s quite alright, I thought. I’ll just do it myself.

I figured I should try and accomplish something practical while drinking my Lokos so as to prove that they did not hinder my judgement any more than any other beverage would. A quick look in my day planner revealed I had nothing planned.

Oh, I actually forgot to mention this, but it’s probably important. I’m not really a drinker. Meaning, I’ve never drank before. I figured that would make me an even better test subject for my experiment. I’m pure.  It’s like drawing a picture on a fresh piece of paper. It’s the best. I’m the best.

Cut to a few hours later. Six Lokos deep and wandering around my local pharmacy. It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you have a few liters of Loko in you. Before I knew it I was getting all my daily errands done in record time, and making a lot of new friends along the way. I couldn’t believe anyone would rally against this. Especially the government! What better way to stimulate the economy than to give your citizens a drink that not only makes them forget all their troubles, but also gives them the energy to accomplish everything they’ve become too depressed to do?

Turns out, I was never at the pharmacy. Apparently, Four Lokos can make you black out when you drink eight of them. I woke up the next morning in the dumpster of my local Panera Bread covered in sourdough bread bowls. I was also covered in vomit.

Well, wait a minute. What can we take away from all of this? Is Four Loko bad? The short answer is, I have no idea. In fact, none of this really happened. I made it up. This was a fiction piece. Thank you. Have a great weekend!

In Portland, Oregon, health inspectors shut down a 7-year-old girl’s lemonade stand at a street fair because she didn’t have a $120 temporary restaurant license.

“I understand the reason behind what they’re doing and it’s a neighborhood event, and they’re trying to generate revenue,” said Jon Kawaguchi, environmental health supervisor for the Multnomah County Health Department. “But we still need to put the public’s health first.”

OregonLive.com reports that “the girl worked on a sign, coloring in the letters and decorating it with a drawing of a person saying ‘Yummy.’” Perhaps city inspectors could have also cited the girl, Julie Murphy, for false advertising or at least for making an unsubstantiated claim, since it is unlikely that an independent panel of experts was commissioned to establish that the lemonade was indeed “yummy.” Some customers could have bought the lemonade, thinking it was yummy, and then discovered that it was just packets of Kool Aid mixed with water and not really that yummy after all. Someone needs to protect them from this possibility.

Julie’s mother said, “It’s gotten to the point where they need to be in all of our decisions. They don’t trust us to make good choices on our own.” But before you join the Lemonade Revolt movement supporting Julie and before you cheer the mother on, remember that this statement is coming from a woman who allowed her daughter to illegally sell lemonade and produce possibly fraudulent advertising materials. As someone encouraging her own daughter to endanger the public and engage in criminal activity, maybe she isn’t the best person to be lecturing us about trust and good choices.

CSPI has threatened to sue McDonald’s if it doesn’t stop offering toys with its Happy Meals. According to CNN:

“McDonald’s is the stranger in the playground handing out candy to children,” CSPI’s litigation director, Stephen Gardner, said in a prepared statement. “It’s a creepy and predatory practice that warrants an injunction.”

That CSPI has a “litigation director” tells you most of what you need to know about the organization. That it compares a business to a child molester — for offering a free toy with its chicken nuggets — tells you the rest.

CSPI stands for Center for Science in the Public Interest, though we might take issue with some of that. Its “science” is often weak and since the “public” — the children part of the public — seems very “interested” in eating Happy Meals and playing with toys, it is hard to agree that CSPI represents their interests by trying to ban the toys. So, “science” is mostly out and “public interest” is definitely out. What we’re left with is “center.” No objection there. It is a center. Mainly it is a center of meddling and hyperbole and being annoying.

I want my son to be able to eat a Happy Meal and get the latest crappy toy promoting some dumb movie. It’s his birthright as an American. And I don’t worry about the group’s claim that “using toys to entice children instills bad eating habits and puts kids at higher risk of developing obesity, diabetes, or other diet-related diseases over the course of their lifetime.”

Our son is thin, because he has good genes — his mother and father are thin — and plays outside all day long and has good eating habits, because Happy Meal toys once in a while can’t override the lessons and habits instilled at home. Our son doesn’t watch hours of TV or play video games all day, though he watches and plays sometimes. He doesn’t drink soda. We don’t choose to eat at McDonald’s five days a week. These are decisions we make every day as his parents. He’s not on a health-food diet — he has his share of ice cream, cookies, pizza, all the rest of the delicious food you can eat when you’re an active kid.

Eventually, if they want to be reasonably thin, most people have to cut back on eating what they ate when they were kids or they will gain weight and have high cholesterol. But part of the joy of childhood is being able to eat some sweets and burgers and Yodels without worrying about your waistline or cholesterol.

When I was a kid — through my 20s, even — I could eat anything I wanted. I was so active, playing sports and running around, I simply didn’t have to think about calories (except maybe getting enough of them to make up for all the calories I was burning). Not every kid was like that, but many were. I don’t remember my friends having to worry about calories or fat content. Maybe it was different with the girls back then — I don’t know if girls played sports as much then as they do now. But the boys were outside playing sports all the time, getting into pick-up games, riding bikes, just running around.

It isn’t like we didn’t have TV or video games when we were kids. I am part of the Atari/Star Wars generation. We went to the arcade to play Donkey Kong Junior and Joust and Robotron. At home, we played Atari and then Intellivision (the latter at a friend’s house). We had a fun baseball game on our Commodore 64. We played board games. We played Dungeons & Dragons. We watched cartoons. We played with action figures. We went to the movies. We didn’t have as many video game and TV options as kids have today, but we had lots of them, and we still managed to run around outside, because our parents told us to get the hell out of the house, and because we wanted to. Even in the house, we ran around.

Maybe the block we live on now is in a time-warp. Maybe it’s because we live in the suburbs. Whatever the reason, all day long, as soon as the weather isn’t freezing cold, the kids in our neighborhood play outside. Yes, they have video games, but even in the snow, they’re out there running, sledding, throwing snowballs. There is, out of 20 or so kids at my son’s morning school bus stop, only one child who is clearly overweight. Most of the rest are see-their-ribs thin. Maybe by middle school that will change and they’ll all be fat. I don’t think it will be because of Happy Meals.

The Happy Meal was born in 1979. We kids liked it. It didn’t make us obese. When the toy broke five minutes after getting it home, we went back to running around and playing and being thin. And it isn’t that our parents cooked us low-fat meals compared to parents today. My mother worked, so we ate plenty of take-out and TV dinners. There were home-cooked meals, but none of them were low-carb or low-fat. Lots of macaroni and cheese. Eggs and red meat and fried foods were common. We drank soda. Kids and teens drank fattening whole milk back then, unlike today, when many kids drink low-fat milk. Calorie counts were not posted next to fast-food menus like they are today.

When I was a kid, my crazy great-grandmother used to yell at the kids — really scream — if we didn’t finish the food on our plates. She was so worried because, as she saw it, all of the kids were too thin, practically starving. She used to force us to drink milkshakes — we’re talking whole milk, big scoops of ice cream, and eggs — raw eggs, like Rocky drank — that she made in the blender.

Our son eats healthy food generally at home — fruit, wheat bread — but we’re not on an anti-processed kick. Frozen waffles are fine for breakfast, though he often eats cereal, and in our house that means Cheerios with just a bit of a sweet cereal (Honey Nut Cheerios) mixed in (plus an entire sliced banana), not a whole bowl of Frosted Flakes like I ate when I was a kid.

When our family does go to McDonald’s or other fast food restaurants — which we don’t do often — we’re delighted if our son eats a fattening burger. As my mother-in-law says, he could use some meat on his bones. But still, though he eats ice cream and plenty of fun foods, we do tend to make some healthy choices as well. In recent years, Burger King has offered apple slices as an optional replacement for french fries. When my son has a Happy Meal, he has the apples. McDonald’s points out that it offers similar options:

McDonald’s disagreed with the CSPI’s criticism, saying that its U.S. advertising campaign is focused on low-calorie Happy Meals.

“We couldn’t disagree more with the misrepresentation of our food and marketing practices,” McDonald’s spokesman William Whitman said in a prepared statement.

“McDonald’s is committed to a responsible approach to our menu, and our Happy Meal offerings,” he said. “We have added more choice and variety than ever before, a fact that has been widely reported and recognized.”

CSPI director Michael Jacobson acknowledged that parents bear much of the responsibility for children’s eating habit — a criticism industry defenders often levy.

“But multi-billion-dollar corporations make parents’ job nearly impossible by giving away toys and bombarding kids with slick advertising,” he said.

It is CSPI’s last point that is most troubling. Parents around the world and throughout history have had to face war, famine, smallpox, losing several children to one disease or another — they have had to make terribly difficult decisions and be strong in harrowing circumstances to do what is right for their children. Over the last few centuries, millions of them have left their homelands and brought their small children to a new country with a strange culture and foreign language for a chance at a better life. Parents have faced what we today might see as impossible challenges, but they did it.

Even parents today face tough challenges, and part of being a parent might include having to tell the kids that the dog died, at some point that grandma died, and, all too often, that mommy and daddy are getting divorced. Those are difficult things to do. They are, perhaps, just a little bit harder than telling your kid he can’t have the Happy Meal.

Parents have done all of these difficult things, but we’re supposed to accept that “multi-billion-dollar corporations make parents’ jobs nearly impossible by giving away toys and bombarding children with slick advertising.” Really? Impossible? Wow. Parents sure do have it tough today.

Saying “no” to your kid who wants a third cookie is easy. Telling your kid that you’re not getting him the Happy Meal is easy. Parents have choices to make, but they aren’t impossible choices. Choosing to get your fat child the apples and not the french fries is easy. Choosing to get him low-fat milk instead of soda is easy. Choosing not to go to McDonald’s in the first place is easy. These are the easy parts of being a parent — making these choices is a parent’s job.

If parents don’t do it, don’t make excuses for them by saying they had an impossible choice. Sophie had an impossible choice. Parents at the fast-food counter don’t.

Lincoln University has dropped its required fitness class for obese students that was the subject of much discussion and derision, including from me and our Joseph Anderson.

As a follow-up to my previous post, I wanted to add a few thoughts about creeping nannyism.

Privacy experts are concerned that new smart grid technology, meant to give consumers greater control over their energy usage, might be used to reveal more about your life than you’d intend.  Turns out that, even if individual electronic devices don’t have communications capabilities, their unique load patterns can be picked up on usage reports.  Refrigerators, toasters, gaming consoles, etc, all generate unique patterns that can be detected on meters.  It would be possible for the curious to know when you’re home, how long you use a hair dryer in the morning, and whether you should spend less time on the xBox.  And, if your devices have roaming capabilities (electric vehicles, for example), more patterns can be created and detected.

Privacy experts are concerned that utility companies may share this information with third-party marketing firms, and you could inundated with junk solicitations as a result.

I, however, am far more concerned about the political use of this information.

Now, I don’t think there’s a secret cabal of bureaucrats twirling their waxed mustaches, eagerly waiting for the day they will control our lives.  But I do know the government has a history of using what are supposed to be limited precedents in ever expanding ways.  RICO was designed to pursue organized crime.  Since its creation in the 1970′s, it has been used against tobacco companies, the Catholic Church, pro-life organizations, and Major League Baseball.  Whatever you might think of MLB, I don’t think it falls in the same category as the Gambino crime family.

Here’s a hypothetical:  The government currently requires financial institutions to create Suspicious Activity Reports whenever they suspect financial shenanigans.  Utility companies have a history of turning over usage information to local law enforcement to find domestic grow operations.  How long before someone at the DEA decides that a combination of smart grid technology and SAR-style account surveillance would be a great way to find drug houses?  Law enforcement has already tried to use thermal imaging equipment to surveil drug-suspects without a warrant (this was, thankfully, declared unconstitutional).  But if SAR’s are legal, then why must they be restricted to financial institutions?  An unusual usage pattern trips a report, and then a SWAT team shows up at your house (they’ve shown up for less).

Unlikely?  If someone can install a smart meter in his home, and he can tell that his hallway lights are on by looking at a report, what do you think a trained data-miner (or a complex algorithm) can come up with, especially when your energy usage is compared to everyone around you, or to your own established consumption history?

And if I’m supposed to be paranoid about the thought that the government might be listening in on my cell phone conversations or monitoring my library book selections, why aren’t you concerned that the government wants to control and monitor your electricity usage?

Plus, meddlesome busybodies have a habit of finding new and exciting ways to pester people.  If soda taxes are a great idea, what about taxing the use of gaming consoles?  We should feel guilty about using hot water, so why not an extra tax on that?  The Big Brother aspects strain the imagination.

When I was in college, I had an issue with my ID card, and I was sent a report showing my card use for a month.  Every building I entered, every meal I ate, every vending machine I used — all of that information was right there, complete with a time and date stamp.  I was a little creeped out.

Now, imagine the government getting a usage detail report showing everything you do that requires electricity.  That’s creepy.

A university in Pennsylvania has decided that students with a BMI of 30 or more must take physical education classes or they will not be allowed to graduate.  The motivation, of course, is to make sure that students are being the best selves they can be:

“We, as educators, must tell students when we believe, in our heart of hearts, when certain factors, certain behaviors, attitudes, whatever, are going to hinder that student from achieving and maximizing their life goals,” [James DeBoy, chairman of the school's Department of Health and Physical Education] said.

Further, the university wants to make sure that obesity doesn’t destroy us all:

“Obesity is going to rob you of your quality and quantity of life,” DeBoy said. “We believe that this is unconscionable.”

The problem, though, is that “obesity” robs you of nothing.  It’s the choices that you make that determine the size of your waist.  Choosing to eat too much of the wrong types of foods, and choosing not to exercise, lead to obesity.  It’s not something that just happens (and, I know, I’m excluding those who have medical conditions that cause obesity; most obese people, such as myself, are that way because of decisions they’ve made).  As long as people have choice, they will choose “incorrectly” in some aspect of their life.

And the use of the word “unconscionable” is an interesting choice.  The definition implies moral agency.  An unconscionable act isn’t a tragedy or an unfortunate event; it’s an act born of immoral intent.  Thus, saving me from my enjoyment of Haagen-Dazs isn’t merely an attempt to educate me about limiting my fat consumption, it’s a moral crusade.  One imagines Carrie Nation-style zealots taking axes to Baskin Robbins stores.

What gets me about all this is that it’s those on the left side of the aisle that promote this sort of food-moralism.  Proposals for fat taxes and soda taxes seem to originate from the left.  Some have even promoted out-and-out mockery of the obese as means to induce them to be thin.  I suppose it must be ideological leftovers from the Progressive Era, when social hygiene was all the rage, and people would engage in Fitter Family Contests.

My issue with the left’s support of this sort of nannyism is that liberals are supposed to be about liberty, about constraining state action and advancing civil rights (as a libertarian, I’m the fascist, for some reason).  But it’s exactly the sort of creeping, petty tyranny that fat taxes and anti-obesity crusades represent that should scare us the most.  Some of the most disgusting government actions (e.g, Buck v. Bell) were perpetrated because someone somewhere decided they knew better than others about how to properly order their lives.

I don’t want my life “ordered.”  And I am suspicious of government encroachment.  A government that puts sin taxes on fatty foods may well decide that fat people just don’t deserve medical treatment.

C.S. Lewis was right, and I’d rather my betters just left me the hell alone.

Lincoln University requires fat students to take a fitness class in order to graduate:

The mandate, which took effect for freshmen entering in fall 2006, requires students to get tested for their body mass index, a measure of weight to height.

A normal BMI is between 18.5 and 24.9. Students with one that’s 30 or above — considered obese — are required to take a class called “Fitness for Life,” which meets three hours a week.

The course involves walking, aerobics, weight training and other physical activities, as well as information on nutrition, stress and sleep…

“We know we’re in the midst of an obesity epidemic,” said James L. DeBoy, chairman of Lincoln’s department of health, physical education and recreation. “We have an obligation to address this head on, knowing full well there’s going to be some fallout.”

I realize that Lincoln University is not the government, but its actions here are in line with the direction of public health arguments. Some people have been warning about the totalitarian implications of using public health terms, like “epidemic,” to describe personal health issues, like obesity. Some have noted that once the government runs healthcare and taxes pay for every healthcare cost, the argument is easily made that there is no longer such a thing as a private health issue. Many will be prepared to argue that when your behavior imposes costs on the system, and we all pay for the system, you can hardly claim that that your fat ass is none of our business. Your personal health, your exercise and dietary habits, are not yours alone. That argument can seen in my novel Mean Martin Manning, as Dr. Kravis testifies at Martin’s trial. A taste:

Well, aside from the obvious — that I needed to be helped for my own sake — it seemed to him that my attitude and behavior placed an unfair burden on my fellow citizens. I couldn’t very well maintain that my decisions were a private matter. By eating poorly and avoiding regular medical care and appropriate screening, I was likely to experience more problems and need more advanced treatment in the future. This meant a greater cost, to be shouldered by taxpayers. It was no exaggeration to suggest that people like me were robbing our children of their future. Our self-negligence was draining money from other important uses, like literacy training and midnight piano lessons. Simply put, I was the reason kids didn’t have any books to read and were shooting each other in the streets. My choices had public costs and consequences, so the government had a right — an obligation — to step in to correct my behavior for the good of society. It was only fair.

I write satire. I exaggerate in order to mock, to explore themes, to poke fun, to advance my plot. Satire of this kind is all about examining the slippery slope. I see it everywhere. But I can’t be the only one who sees that this isn’t fiction any longer, that the slippery slope is real. Other people are reading the news, too, right? Almost every day there is some step, often by government or at least encouraged by government, to more tightly control private behavior — to tell people how to eat, that they have to exercise, and on and on.

I have a friend, a liberal-leaning but very nice and normal person, whom I don’t think of as radical in the least — this is not a frothing-at-the-mouth type. This friend is very smart, educated, accomplished, and reasonable even in disagreement. And this friend told me, over lunch one day, that my position, that we should not tax food in order to deter behavior that causes obesity, was extreme. I had mentioned something outrageous: I thought it was up to people to eat what they wanted. I was in polite company, so I agreed that doctors and friends might advise people to reduce consumption of fatty foods and said that I could even understand the desire for having more information about the food in restaurants (posting calories and fat content), though I didn’t think it would help reduce obesity and I understood the problems this posed to small businesses. The point is, I wasn’t taking the iconoclastic libertarian “let ‘em all do heroin” position. Yet I was called extreme — politely, because my friend is polite — for saying that it simply was not the government’s business what people ate.

My friend’s implication was clear, and wasn’t merely implied — not everyone was educated or responsible enough to make their own choices, and those of us who were educated and responsible enough shouldn’t mind paying a little more for our soda if it (a tax on unhealthy food) helped persuade those not educated or responsible enough (usually poor people, whose purchases would be most influenced by these taxes that they couldn’t afford as easily as we educated, not-poor people could) not to drink so much soda.

This policy at Lincoln University does not surprise me. And I might be accused of believing in slippery slopes or anti-government paranoia or believing my own fiction, but I think that this is only the beginning.

I should note that Lincoln does not justify its policy by referring to public health costs. it justifies its policy by referring to the best interests of its students and the epidemic in general. Mostly, Lincoln is forcing fat people to exercise for their own good. Imposing self-improvement is precisely the focus of Martin Manning’s adversary, Caseworker Alice Pitney.

You can find out more about Mean Martin Manning here.

Jacob Sullum’s article “The Perils of Palatability” in Reason magazine is about the efforts of David A. Kessler to tell the rest of us how to eat and to define restaurants as malicious and deceitful because they make delicious food and then have the nerve to tell us about it. In 2007, Sullum interviewed me about my novel Mean Martin Manning, which has a character Kessler might admire: Caseworker Alice Pitney. In the interview, Sullum asked, “Is it hard to write satire in a world that gets sillier every day?” The answer is yes.

Federal tax hike on cigarettes? Smokers feeling abused? Didn’t anybody see it coming?

In my novel The Alphabet Challenge (ENC Press, 2003), I foresaw it years ago. I also foresaw it getting much worse:

From the parking lot, Howell followed Addison through the woods up a narrow path to a cement cube of a six-story building. Dozens of fire extinguishers hung on trees around the building. The sign at the tobacco kiosk by the entrance announced:

TOBACCO ROAD SMOKING AREA

PROUDLY SERVING NEW YORK AND NEW JERSEY SMOKERS SINCE 2014

BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE AMERICAN SPIRIT CIGARETTES

Despite Monday afternoon, the square room with concrete tables and benches on the first floor was crowded. Coming out here on a weekend would be suicide.

“I still can’t figure out who benefited from those stupid antismoking laws,” Howell shouted over the noise of powerful air cleaners, picking a cigarette out of a $50 pack, $40 of which was federal tax.

“People who didn’t want to breathe second-hand smoke?” Addison suggested. A blissful smile spread over his face as his lungs filled with smoke.

“Hardly. When millions quit smoking, everybody’s taxes went up to fill the gap in the economy, and they still breathe car fumes. Where’s the gain?”

I hear that many smokers are people of lesser education and lesser earning power (not the ones I know). Apparently, it’s the institutions of higher learning that teach non-smoking. God knows, they don’t teach much else. Like math. The ostensible reason behind the tax hike is, of course, the children. It’s always the children. The undereducated underachievers shall lay out more of their disposable income (what disposable income?) to indulge their vice for the most humane of all reasons: to finance an expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). The expansion, which will cost $35 million over five years, is expected to provide federally funded health care for an additional 4 million children.

Aww… What will happen to all these children when millions of smokers (a) die out; (b) quit; or (c) turn to black market? The new law signed by President Obama, a smoker who can afford his smokes and kind of belies the stereotype of an underachieving hick, doesn’t seem to make provisions for where the funds will come from in case we need Plan B to finance SCHIP. But then, “Where will the money come from in case there isn’t any coming from the source you currently have in mind?” doesn’t seem to be a burning — or even smoldering — question at the decision-making level.

I also foresaw a lot of other stuff getting out of hand as the government cares more and more. Like handicapped parking spaces might eventually take up 50% of all parking spaces, in the name of equality. (More math.) Or jail sentences for failure to recycle. But we’ll talk about that when it happens. Then I’ll be sure to remind you who called it first.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was bitten by a groundhog yesterday (it’s about as cheesy a local newscast as you’re likely to see). Note what an ass Bloomberg is on the video, trying to be funny as he threatens to cut zoo funding. And take some pleasure in how delightfully uncomfortable he seems when holding up the animal that has bitten him.

Sources close to the groundhog tell me it was no accident. It seems that this groundhog — Charles G. Hogg, affectionately known as ‘Staten Island Chuck’ — enjoys activities that Bloomberg has banned or plans to ban. Like smoking. And eating fatty foods. And putting a bit of salt in his soup. And touring the UN on a class trip. And bringing a bicycle on the subway (a little groundhog bike). And taking a photograph without a permit. It’s a long, growing list, but Chuck is a wild and crazy rodent with lots of ‘vices’ that Bloomberg will eventually get around to banning. So Chuck bit the meddling bastard. 

The below video is shorter. Sadly, neither video captured any blood or screams of pain, but if you watch carefully, you can see the bite (because you have that kind of time). A still picture is here.