food

While tens of thousands of angry Venezuelans turned out for the 'mother of all protests' yesterday, facing an increasingly hostile military/police state, the numbers could have been significantly larger but for the fact that legions of poor Venezuelans are simply too frail from starvation to protest.

Some say they are intimidated by armed pro-government militias who scour the slums for signs of dissent. Others say they are afraid to lose the few food handouts the cash-strapped government still provides.

Via Walter Block of The Mises Institute,

The Creation of Jobs

If the media tell us that "the opening of XYZ mill has created 1,000 new jobs," we give a cheer. When the ABC company closes and 500 jobs are lost, we're sad. The politician who can provide a subsidy to save ABC is almost assured of wide spread public support for his work in preserving jobs.

Via Jeff Thomas of InternationalMan.com,

Recently, I was in a pharmacy and overheard the pharmacist say to someone, “There’s so much unpleasantness on the news these days, I’ve stopped watching.” The pharmacist has my sympathy. I’d love to be able to ignore the deterioration of the First World. It is, at turns, tedious, depressing, disturbing, and infuriating.

From zoning to labor to food safety to insurance, local food systems daily face a phalanx of regulatory hurdles designed and implemented to police industrial food models but which prejudicially wipe out the antidote: appropriate scaled local food systems.

-Joel Salatin

President Trump has promised to reduce government regulations...for businesses.

Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump

Earlier today, the world's biggest fast food retailer spooked its investors when it briefly halted trading in its stock ahead of its annual investor day. However, instead of some dramatic M&A deal revelation, McDonalds had a far less exciting announcement: it had decided to go back to basis in an attempt to recover some 500 million U.S. orders it had lost over the past five years to competition as a result of failed attempts to widen its customer base.