When food becomes fuel instead of fun

I have a confession to make. For the first time in several years – at least five and maybe more – I weigh less than 200 pounds.  OK, so it’s only 199, but hey, one step at a time, right?

I started gaining weight about the same time I decided to make and consume at least one root beer float with chocolate ice cream virtually every day of my life. And I didn’t just put in two scoops of ice cream and cover it with a little root beer. I half-filled the biggest glass I could find with the soda and crammed in as much ice cream as I could fit, then ate a little bit off the top and crammed in some more. Then I added more root beer and more ice cream.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

I also liked to eat peanut butter on Chips Ahoy cookies late at night and wash it down with one or two glasses of milk. I have been known to eat not one, but three, Krispy Kreme chocolate covered cream-filled donuts at a time. You get the idea.

That was bad enough, but three-and-a-half years ago, I quit smoking and turned into an eating machine. I started living on hot dogs from Woody’s, steak hoagies from the Derby and pizza from Cantoni’s and Colasessanos. Late at night, I’ve been known to drive over to McDonalds for two double cheeseburgers and a basket of fries. And don’t even get me started on chocolate milk shakes or Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Nuggets.

(I’m so ashamed.)

The point is, I love to eat. I love to eat stuff that’s not good for me and I love to eat it in great quantities at all hours of the day and night. You can therefore imagine the shock to my system when I started Weight Watchers in January after the guy who was so skinny he used to buy his blue jeans in the boys department tipped the scale at 227.5 pounds. (I weighed roughly 145 when I started college.)  I looked in the mirror on my way to the shower and saw Jabba the Hutt looking back at me.

So now I weigh 199, at least for one day, and I’m no longer eating for enjoyment. Today I consume food as fuel to keep me alive, and nothing more. Coffee for breakfast, eggs and plain toast for lunch, baked chicken tenders, applesauce and vegetables for dinner and, if I’m good, a 4-point Fiber One brownie for dessert.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

This is what happens when you get old, your metabolism slows down and your body won’t allow you to exercise enough to keep off the weight from all that junk food you like to eat. Now I lie in bed at night watching TV with my stomach growling while commercials for the Super Baconater, the XXL Grilled Stuft Burrito, the Quarter-Pound Thickburger and the Bourbon BBQ Triple Stack sandwich pass in front of my eyes.

My stomach might be screaming “want, need” but my brain keeps saying “don’t you dare.”

It’s no surprise to me that the World Health Organization ranks the United States as one of the most obese nations on the planet. When you kick out tiny third-world nations like Tonga, Tokelau, Samoa, Palau, Kiribati and the Marshall Islands, the U.S. easily makes the Top 5. (For the record, countries at the thinner end of the scale include Japan, China, Switzerland, France, Denmark and Sweden.) The U.S. is first among the world’s largest trading economies.

According to Wikipedia, obesity contributes to approximately 100,000 to 400,000 deaths in the United States per year and health care costs of around $117 billion when you include preventive and diagnostic care, treatment services related to weight and indirect costs such as absenteeism and premature death. One report says this exceeds health care costs associated with smoking and accounts for 6% to 12% of all national health care expenditures in the United States.

So there’s that. As far as I’m concerned, eating smaller quantities of better food at more appropriate times of the day is simply the right thing to do. When I finally got the will to give up cigarettes after 50 years, I simply told myself I could do it…and I did. I had the same conversation with myself about my weight.

As for the “food is only fuel” theory, I intend to see how far this takes me before I eventually hit a wall and stop losing weight altogether. I’ll decide what to do when that time comes, but here is one thing I know for sure: If I am ever diagnosed with a fatal, incurable disease and given a few weeks to live, I’m heading straight to Woody’s for lunch and the Derby for dinner, ordering a pizza to snack on and building the largest root beer float ever created by man.

I mean, at that point, what else would I have to lose?  

Hiding behind Scott Pruitt’s scandals is the real damage he has caused

[Click the highlighted links for source information.]

If you read or hear much news, you probably know that Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, is embroiled in a basketful of scandals ranging from his sweetheart lease on a pricey Washington condominium to his bullet-proof phone booth and his frequent, taxpayer-funded use of military and charter aircraft for routine travel.

According to The New York Times, Pruitt is the target of at least 10 separate investigations by the Government Accountability Office, the EPA inspector general, the White House Office of Management and Budget and two House committees over his spending habits, conflicts of interests and management practices.

“Pruitt made frequent use of first class travel, as well as frequent charter and military flights,” his Wikipedia profile reports. “As EPA administrator, Pruitt leased a condo in Washington D.C. at a deeply discounted rate from a lobbyist whose clients were regulated by the EPA. Pruitt further caused ethics concerns by circumventing the White House and using a narrow provision of the Safe Drinking Water Act to autonomously give raises to his two closest aides … which were substantially higher than salaries paid to those in similar positions in the Obama administration, and which allowed both to avoid signing conflicts of interest pledges.”

Click here for another brief summary of the scandals.

The problem is, with all of these investigations into Pruitt’s deplorable and unethical behavior, it’s easy to forget the actual damage this man has caused – and continues to cause – to the environment and the health and welfare of American citizens. Need a refresher?

* Let’s start back when he was Oklahoma's attorney general, when Pruitt sued the EPA at least 14 times because of policies and procedures the agency had put in place to protect our air, water and land. He did this after accepting major campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry, even though he once ran for the office unopposed.

* After winning election in 2010, Pruitt dissolved the Environmental Protection Unit in the attorney general's office under the guise of “operational efficiency” and shifted the attorneys responsible for environmental protection to other branches of his office.

* He created what he called a “Federalism Unit” to fight President Barack Obama's regulatory agenda and sued the Obama administration over its immigration policy, the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

* Pruitt's office sued the EPA to block its “Clean Power Plan” that aimed to regulate carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, and the “Waters of the United States” rule that defined the scope of federal water protection efforts.

* Pruitt also sued the EPA on behalf of Oklahoma utilities that opposed additional regulation of their coal-fired power plants, and criticized the agency in a congressional hearing. As of June 2014, however, all of Pruitt's lawsuits against the EPA had failed.

* In a broader context, Pruitt rejects the scientific consensus that carbon dioxide emissions from human activity are a primary contributor to global climate change, and has falsely claimed there is no scientific consensus on the issue. He also told a radio interviewer that there are not “sufficient scientific facts to establish the theory of evolution.”

*     *     *

Pruitt was confirmed as EPA administrator on February 17, 2017, over the objections of scientific and environmental organizations. Gene Karpinski, president of the League of Conservation Voters, said Pruitt's record in Oklahoma made his nomination “like the fox guarding the hen house,” adding, “Time and again, he has fought to pad the profits of Big Polluters at the expense of public health.”

Ken Kimmell, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said, “Pruitt's record gives us no reason to believe that he will vigorously hold polluters accountable or enforce the law.... Everything we do know makes it clear that he can't and won't do the job.”

Also, Pruitt is accused of lying to Senators during his confirmation hearing concerning his position on the regulation of mercury emissions, according to a spokesperson from the Natural Resources Defense Council. What’s more, 447 former EPA employees signed a letter opposing Pruitt's nomination, arguing that his lawsuits against the EPA “strongly suggest that he does not share the vision or agree with the underlying principles of our environmental laws” and “did not put the public’s welfare ahead of private interests.”

He was narrowly confirmed by a 52-46 vote with Democrats Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and (wait for it) Joe Manchin of West Virginia voting with the Republicans in favor of confirmation.

Now, in just 14 months since taking office, he has reversed, delayed or relaxed enforcement of so many environmental rules that no one can be sure if the air is still safe to breathe and the water safe to drink. For an exclamation point, he has also halted the agency’s efforts to combat climate change.

But hey, don’t take my word for it. Here’s how The Washington Post summarized Pruitt's leadership of the EPA during 2017:

“In legal maneuvers and executive actions, in public speeches and closed-door meetings with industry groups, he has moved to shrink the agency’s reach, alter its focus, and pause or reverse numerous environmental rules. The effect has been to steer the EPA in the direction sought by those being regulated. Along the way, Pruitt has begun to dismantle former president Barack Obama’s environmental legacy, halting the agency’s efforts to combat climate change and to shift the nation away from its reliance on fossil fuels."

Want more?

* On March 9, 2017, in an interview on CNBC's Squawk Box, Pruitt said he would not agree that carbon dioxide is a primary contributor to global warming.

* On March 28, 2017, President Trump signed an executive order directing Pruitt to rescind the Clean Power Plan.

* On April 28, 2017, Pruitt fired scientists from the EPA’s 18-member Board of Scientific Counselors, indicating he intended to replace them with industry representatives.

* On June 27, 2017, Pruitt released a proposal to rescind the Clean Water Rule which he had opposed during his tenure in Oklahoma because farmers and builders considered it to be a burden, and finalized the repeal on January 31, 2018.

* Since Pruitt took over, the EPA has scrubbed its website to remove detailed climate data and scientific information. Pruitt called that “undergoing changes” to better represent the new direction the agency is taking.

* Pruitt has been aggressively rolling back most of the rest of the Obama-era environmental rules, including a fuel economy standard meant to lower tailpipe emissions from motor vehicles.

* Just recently he proposed a new rule to limit the volume of research that EPA is allowed to consider in making its rules and regulations. In other words, "science be damned and full speed ahead." Scientists say the move will negatively affect policies regarding everything from air pollution to toxic wastes and pesticides.

* And if that’s not bad enough for you, Pruitt is now trying to kill off all the bees.

In a recent action, he announced a plan to promote and expand the use of neonicotinoids – a family of agricultural insecticides resembling nicotine that affect the central nervous systems of insects (including honey bees), causing paralysis and death. This is supposed to protect our crops, but Pruitt seems oblivious to the fact that humans need the bees to help produce our food supply, and that honey bee colonies in North America have already fallen by 59% because of a variety of other factors.

You see, bees pollinate the crops we eat as well as other plants that feed the animals that find their way to our dinner tables. About one-third of our global food supply is pollinated by bees, so without them, humans would have virtually nothing left to eat.

Of course, Scott Pruitt will probably be dead by the time this becomes a serious problem, so clearly he doesn’t worry about tomorrow when some of his donors can make big money from his rampant stupidity today.

In conclusion, this is what happens when you put an uninformed, childish, vindictive and self-consumed bag of ectoplasm like Donald Trump in charge of “draining the swamp” and using the creatures he dug out of it to run the country into the ground. Scott Pruitt is only one example. There are others I'll try to get to in the near future.

In the meantime, remember that there are elections on the horizon. Please educate yourself before it’s too late.

Cat Trump

One is a smug, arrogant, overweight orange pussy with long hair...
and the other one is a cat.

Turtle McConnell

One is a slow-moving, cold blooded reptile with a small, soft head
that hides inside its shell whenever it senses danger...
and the other one is a turtle.

Jellyfish Ryan

One is a gelatinous, soft-bodied invertebrate without a backbone...
and the other one is a jellyfish.

This is why we should all have ‘the conversation’

I just finished watching the latest installment of David Letterman’s Netflix series, “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction,” in which Dave spends an hour interviewing interesting people one-on-one. This month his guest was rapper and business mogul Jay-Z, and I was suitably impressed.

Before I watched this show, I didn’t know anything about Jay-Z except that he produced and performed hip-hop music and married one of the world’s most beautiful women, Beyoncé Knowles. I didn’t know anything else about him because I don’t listen to hip-hop music, and before you call me a racist, I also don’t like opera, sappy country music, polkas, show tunes and the majority of freeform jazz.

So anyway, I started watching the show to learn something about Jay-Z and hoping that he might say something interesting…and he did.  Jay-Z, whose real name is Shawn Carter, is a thoughtful, intelligent, articulate individual with great depth and a dubious history that he turned into a successful career by overcoming his environment and pushing ahead against the obstacles in his life until he moved them out of his way.

Among other things, he's a loving husband and father, a star in the music business and the owner of several successful business ventures. He also established a charitable foundation that helps underprivileged children from poor backgrounds attend college. I’d suggest you google him if you want to know more.

My point is this: I didn’t have to watch this show. It would have been much easier to write him off in my mind as “just some rich black guy" talking to the privileged white man David Letterman, which is probably what roughly one-third of the country would believe. You know which third I’m talking about, and that is really what inspired this essay.

I won’t recap the whole interview (you can watch for yourself if you subscribe to Netflix), but the underlying theme was the importance of having “the conversation.” In other words, instead of stereotyping them and walking away, white people like Dave (and me) should sit down more often and talk with people of other races and cultures to find out who they really are.

If you do that, most likely, you’ll learn that while people may have their own set of wants and needs, ambitions and desires, successes and failures and cultural norms, on balance those values tend to intersect at some point in time, and that’s when we find out we’re not that different from one another.

That can only happen if we have the conversation.  

At one point, discussing Donald Trump, Jay-Z said it might be good that Trump came to power when he did because it brought racism out of the woodwork and showed us that “something we thought was gone” is still around – and possibly in greater numbers than we had imagined. It got people talking about the issue once again. “What he’s forcing people to do is have the conversation, and people to band together and work together,” he said. “Like, you can’t really address something that’s not revealed.”

Letterman, for his part, pulled no punches when talking about Trump. “We don’t need any more evidence,” he said. “Is he a racist? Is he not a racist? (If) you’re having a debate over whether a guy is a racist, chances are that guy is a racist.”

Now I’m not delusional enough to think that a one-hour internet talk show featuring two multi-millionaire celebrities – one white and one black – will end racism in America, because clearly it won’t, but I know of at least one other multi-millionaire who could benefit greatly if he would only sit down and actually listen to someone who would tell it to him straight.

OK, so that’s not going to happen, but as for the rest of us, I can recommend having "the conversation" whenever the opportunity presents itself. I promise you it will reveal truths that tend to hide under the hood of racism and help us all understand each other. It’s a little like having a medical procedure that you don’t think you need but which your doctor recommends. I mean, at the end of the day, they do the test and you find out you’re okay. No harm has been done, and you feel better after the fact.

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“My Next Guest Needs No Introduction” is a web-based talk show that Letterman hosts once a month on Netflix. The six-episode series consists of interviews with one guest per episode both inside and outside a studio setting. His first guest was Barack Obama, followed by actor George Clooney, Pakistani activist and Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai and Jay-Z. Future guests during this first season will include Tina Fey and Howard Stern.

There’s a lot wrong with the Postal Service, but it isn’t Amazon.com

Click the highlighted links for source information.

I know a little bit about the United States Postal Service. You see, my father was a mailman. He worked for the USPS for 32 years before he retired, walking a mail route with a leather satchel full of letters, small packages and Montgomery Ward catalogs slung over his shoulder.

When he first started, he worked as a clerk inside the building, and at the end of his career he drove a vehicle, but most of the time he walked. He delivered mail to different parts of the city over that period of time, using his accrued seniority to bid into the better routes when they came available, but I seem to recall him telling me once that he walked 11 miles a day. I can’t begin to guess how many miles he walked during 32 years.

Today our mailman drives a Jeep. I see him nearly every day when I’m walking my dog. He drives up to a house, stops, turns off the motor and carries mail up to a mailbox on the front porch. He comes back, starts the vehicle, drives to the next house, stops, turns off the motor and carries mail up to that house.

He does that for every house on my street. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Now before you get the wrong idea, I don’t live up a holler or out in the sticks or down some winding country road. Houses in my neighborhood are fairly close together, like 50 to 100 feet or so…whatever the typical frontage would be. In the time it takes the mailman to stop and start and stop and start and deliver mail to a handful of houses, I can walk the dog to one end of the street and back, stopping for her to do what dogs do when they go for a walk.

So how much do you suppose it costs the Postal Service to buy, maintain and insure just one Jeep vehicle, fill it with gasoline every day or so and keep it supplied with oil, tires, tire chains for winter and everything else you need to run a car? Multiply that times the number of mail routes in the United States and the 227,896 vehicles the Postal Service says it operates and you have billions and billions of dollars. The cost of fuel alone is more than $1.1 billion a year.

Now compare that to what it used to cost to operate my father when he carried the mail. I think he got new shoes every year, a small uniform allowance and probably a rain poncho and a plastic cover for his hat.

Let’s recap…shoes, a couple pairs of pants, some shirts and a poncho versus specially-built vehicles with the steering wheel on the right-hand side, plus gasoline, oil, tires, insurance, maintenance, depreciation and replacement cost after a few years. The Postal Service could save billions of dollars if it would just put the mailman (or woman) back on his or her feet. Is it any wonder they’re losing money?  

And despite what you hear from our faux-president Donald Trump, none of that is caused by the Postal Service delivering packages for Amazon.com.

Here, courtesy of PolitiFact, are some actual facts, not the alternative facts that Trump and his mouthpiece Sarah Sanders like to throw around:

“The Postal Service reported a net loss of $2.7 billion for 2017. It has lost $65.1 billion since 2007. Much of the red ink is attributed to a 2006 law mandating that USPS pre-fund future retirees’ health benefits.

“First-class mail, the USPS’ biggest source of revenue, also continued to shrink, seeing a $1.87 billion revenue loss in fiscal year 2017.

“Package delivery, however, was one of the few bright spots in its latest financial statement. In 2017, parcels brought in $19.5 billion, or 28 percent of USPS’ annual revenue. At $2.1 billion, packages contributed the largest revenue increase. Deals with private shippers like Amazon accounted for $7 billion of the $19.5 billion in revenue.”

Here’s another fact from Wikipedia: The volume of first-class mail delivered by the Postal Service peaked in 2001 before it started to decline. Volume dropped by 29% from 1998 to 2008, primarily due to the increasing use of email and the internet for correspondence and business transactions. In addition, companies such as FedEx and United Parcel Service increasingly compete with the USPS by making nationwide deliveries of urgent letters and packages.

The lower volume of mail means the Postal Service takes in less revenue while still meeting its commitment to deliver every piece of mail to every single address in America once every day for six days every week.

Finally, there’s the quality of delivery services which in my mind has suffered in recent years. I’ve always found it funny that UPS can ship packages basically around the world overnight, but it can take from three to five days for a birthday card to reach me from my daughter who lives 40 minutes away, or that my mother’s mail routinely was delivered to the wrong street even though she reported this time and time again. The only thing the two streets had in common was that both names started with the same letter.  

Still, despite its troubles and faults, the Postal Service delivers more mail to more addresses in a larger geographical area than any other post in the world. Its web site says it delivers to more than 153 million addresses in every state, city and town in the country. "Everyone living in the United States and its territories has access to postal products and services and pays the same for a First-Class postage stamp regardless of where they live."

Considering that, I guess we should be happy we get any mail at all.

*     *     *

For what it’s worth, here are some other interesting statistics from the USPS web site:

* Operating revenue was $71.4 billion in 2016.

* 153.9 billion pieces of mail were processed and delivered.

* 47% of the world’s mail volume was handled by the Postal Service.

* The USPS has 508,908 career employees and operates 227,896 vehicles, making it one of the largest civilian fleets in the world.

* There are 156.1 million total delivery points nationwide.

* The total amount of tax dollars spent operating the Postal Service = $0.

If Sinclair doesn’t kill off local news, incompetent reporting will

Two things happened today that left me shaking my head. They may seem unrelated at first, but I’m going to tie them both together, so please read on.

First, I saw a video clip concerning the Sinclair Broadcast Group – a well-known propaganda outlet for the extreme right – which showed dozens of local news anchors across the country reading a prepared script criticizing social media and mainstream reporters for biased or fake news reporting. The script said, in part:

“The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media. Some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.”

The irony, of course, is that Sinclair is using its own biased platform to push its pro-Trump agenda by accusing the “other” media of doing exactly what Sinclair does. It’s “pot meets kettle” on steroids.

It reminds me of a comment that former TV host Billy Bush recently made to Bill Maher on “Real Time.” After confronting Donald Trump for lying about his ratings on “The Apprentice,” Bush said Trump continued to push the false information, telling Bush, “Billy, look…you just tell them, and they believe it.” So using Trump logic, if Sinclair broadcasters say NBC is a threat to democracy, it must therefore be true.  

A little history about Sinclair from Wikipedia:

Sinclair Broadcast Group is owned by the family of company founder Julian Sinclair Smith. Headquartered in Hunt Valley, Maryland, the company is the largest television station operator in the United States by number of stations, and largest by total coverage, owning or operating a total of 193 stations in more than 100 markets across the country. That number will increase to 233 after all currently proposed sales are approved, and it’s estimated that soon, Sinclair will reach 72% of all American households in markets as large as Washington, D.C., and as small as Steubenville, Ohio.

Many stations are owned outright by the company, but others are affiliated with other companies through a local marketing agreement, a concept Sinclair pioneered in Pittsburgh in 1991. The stations involved in the initial deal, WPGH-TV and WPTT (now WPNT) are now both owned by Sinclair outright.

So getting back to the propaganda, Sinclair not only required its news anchors to read a prepared script charging a proliferation of "fake news" in the media, but it also suggested that attacking faux-president Trump's view of events was "extremely dangerous to our democracy." A video mash-up of dozens of news reporters reading the script word-for-word made the rounds on social media, network television and even “Last Week Tonight” with John Oliver, and was resoundingly criticized by both champions and practitioners of responsible journalism.

This wave of mockery from honest, respectable journalists apparently got under the thin skin of our Tweeter-in-Chief, who this morning wrote:   

“So funny to watch Fake News Networks, among the most dishonest groups of people I have ever dealt with, criticize Sinclair Broadcasting for being biased. Sinclair is far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke.”

Also this morning, my local newspaper ran a story about an alleged arson fire which followed a May 2017 break-in at a Fairmont residence. The story was so full of holes it was impossible to determine exactly what was stolen or whether the house actually burned down or what became of the owner or why it took 11 months to bring the charges against a woman and her former boyfriend who were arrested for the crime.

One of the items listed as stolen in the break-in was “a Gibson Fender stratocaster electric guitar” (I’ll let you figure that one out) which, the story said, was subsequently buried in the back yard of a neighboring house to hide evidence of the theft but was found by police in a closet in the alleged thief’s house, and a handgun which had been sold to a third party some time ago. How did all of this happen? Who the hell knows?

This isn’t the first time a local news story has raised more questions than it answered. In fact, that’s the rule rather than the exception in this area, and that’s my point in including it in a story about Sinclair media. Added together, the growing number of propaganda outlets and the basic incompetence of small-town news reporters leads me to the conclusion that if local news isn’t on the verge of death, it is at least severely wounded.

If the want ads soliciting “multi-media specialists” are to be believed, today’s “reporters” are hired based on two critical skills – the ability to shoot video with a cell phone camera and to post those clips to a web site. I don’t think that critical thinking, basic curiosity or the ability to do research, ask questions and write news stories are even considered by small town media.    

So where does that leave us? It seems we have two choices: We can get part of the story from a new wave of pseudo-journalists who lack basic reporting skills (we'll just have to guess the rest), or we can be brainwashed by a right-wing media conglomerate that gives the Russian Tass News Agency a run for its money.

Or there’s a third option, I guess. We can just ignore local news altogether and depend on Facebook and Twitter to tell us what’s going on in the world. (And yes, I hated myself for even typing those words the second they appeared on my screen.)