The US is going crazy
It feels like the world is going crazy, with the locus of craziness currently hovering over the East coast of the U.S.A.
- Virginia Tech killing spree –good god! Hopefully the fact that the killer is getting more than his 15 minutes of fame by sending out a press packet in between killings won’t encourage other publicity-hungry violently-disturbed individuals to follow suit.
- Congress and Justice Department in standoff –the Justice Department appears to just be ignoring a subpoena for missing and redacted portions of documents issued by the House Judiciary Committee. I tend to think that a lack of accountability at high levels within the government is a bad thing.
- Supreme Court upholds Federal ban on an abortion procedure. A procedure that, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists includes no exceptions for the physical or mental health of the mother. According to the vast but fumbling-towards-accuracy online encyclopedia Wikipedia: “The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that bans must include exception for threats to the woman’s life, physical health, and mental health”. Guess it’s time to revise that entry.
- Chocolate under attack! This is an order of magnitude less crazy than the other items, but it bugs me nonetheless, and I need something of less earth-shattering important than the first 3 items to think about as a cool-down exercise: Hershey and other big choco manufacturers are asking the U.S. Food an Drug Administration to “permit them to replace cocoa butter, chocolate’s key ingredient, with vegetable oils and, in the case of milk chocolate, replace whole milk with milk protein concentrates“. If these companies are not going to continue to make chocolate out of the ingredients that define the essence of chocolate, they should come up with a new name and not try to legally redefine the word “chocolate” to mean any sweet bar of saturated fat that happens to be brown. One chocolatier has posted a more nuanced take on the issue.
