News for Mormons

From TownHall.com:

It’s exciting that the world is so excited about Barack Obama. I’m excited, too. That he achieved the presidency says something good about America.

But the excitement also frightens me. It reinforces the worst impulse of the media and political class: the assumption that all progress comes from Washington. In a free society, with constitutionally limited government, the president would be a mere executive who sees to it that predictable and understandable laws are enforced. But sadly, the prestige and power of the presidency have grown, and liberty has contracted. That is not something to celebrate.

The infatuated chattering classes now demand “action” on the economy. They use positive words like “bold steps.” The insufferable New York Times suggests the choice is “between a big-bang strategy of pressing aggressively on multiple fronts versus a more pragmatic, step-by-step approach …. ” There is endless talk about how FDR ended the Great Depression and how Obama will apply similar “stimulus.”

Please. FDR’s “bold” moves didn’t end the Depression. They prolonged it by discouraging capital investment. Hoover and Roosevelt turned what might have been a brief downturn into 10 years of double-digit unemployment.

Now Obama says, “we don’t have a moment to lose,” and he and the Democrats insist that government must unionize most of America by passing “card check” and taxpayers must throw even more money at American automakers.

This is the conceit of what Thomas Sowell calls “the anointed” (http://tinyurl.com/6me8d4). The politicians know best how our money should be spent. The “road to serfdom” is paved with such good intentions.

Obama promises:

“We will change the world … There is nothing we can’t do, nothing we can’t accomplish if we are unified.”

Who is this “we” politicians always cite?

We can change the world for the better if “we” means hundreds of millions of free people pursuing their interests, inventing, building, parenting, helping.

But the politicians’ “we” is different. It means government. “We” will take your money by force and order you about. A democracy can become the tyranny of the majority. That’s no way to create prosperity.

Obama is an extraordinarily talented man. But there is one thing he can’t successfully do: ignore the laws of economics. No one can do that. That’s why we call them “laws.”

Ludwig von Mises wrote that once the science of economics emerged in the late Eighteenth Century, people began to realize “there is something operative which power and force are unable to alter and to which they must adjust themselves if they hope to achieve success, in precisely the same way as they must take into account the laws of nature. This realization … led to the program and policies of [classical] liberalism and thus unleashed human powers that, under capitalism, have transformed the world.”

The resulting abundance, which so many people take for granted without understanding its source, allows them to believe that a new president can “stimulate” us out of recession.

But we cannot raise wages or create jobs or eliminate poverty by executive order. We can do so by freeing people to save and invest and accumulate capital. We can’t make medical care universal and inexpensive by legislative fiat. But we can approach that goal by permitting a free market in medicine to work.

Government is force, not eloquence. And force is an attempt to defy economic logic. The consequences are often opposite of those intended. “A subsidy for medical insurance increases the demand for services and raises prices. A price ceiling makes those services less available. A floor under wages makes jobs for unskilled workers more scarce, as employers find it a losing proposition to hire them. A subsidy to production means too much produced relative to something else consumers want. A trade restriction lowers living standards at home and abroad,” writes Sheldon Richman on the Foundation for Economic Education website.

What will happen when the unintended consequences hit? F.A. Hayek warned that a government serious about enacting its economic plan must be prepared to use heavy-handed measures. Is that what we want?

I fear that today’s “forceful actions” will not only be a painful assault on our freedom, they will exacerbate whatever economic troubles we face.

Link to article

From HeraldNet.com:

With soaring food prices, it’s critical to know how to manage the shelf life of your food.

It’s a lot more painful these days to toss a limp head of broccoli or dump a tub of fresh salsa.

These guidelines aren’t just relevant when you’re cleaning out your fridge. Consider them when shopping and cooking so that less food winds up in the garbage.

THE REFRIGERATOR

The door is is the warmest place in the fridge, so keep items here that are less at risk for spoilage.

Best in the door:

Condiments such as mustard, soy sauce, ketchup and salad dressings.

Salsa, tomato sauce, once opened, finish within a week.

DON’T STORE IN THE DOOR:

Milk

Cheese

Cold cuts

BEST FOR THE TOP SHELF

This is the spot for prepared foods.

Chicken salad, egg salad, use within a day.

Soups, casseroles, use within a week or freeze.

Cooked meat and poultry, use within three days.

Best in crisper drawers:

This is the best place for vegetables and fruits that should be refrigerated, such as apples. Line drawers with paper towels to absorb condensation. Fruits and vegetables that don’t fit or are too delicate can be placed in plastic bags or in covered containers inside the fridge for the same effect.

BEST ON BOTTOM, IN THE BACK:

Keep foods that need to stay the coldest in the back, such as raw meat, seafood and milk. Fish and shellfish should always be used within a day. Meat and poultry should be used within two days or placed in the freezer.

Cold cuts: If open, use within four days. Discard at “use by” date.

Eggs: If properly refrigerated can maintain quality up to five weeks past expiration date. But as they get older, the membranes thin and weaken, so they’re best used for cookies, cakes and scrambled eggs rather than souffles or poached eggs.  (cont.)

Link to article here

From The AZ Star:

Mormon Church members Donna and Aaron Bradshaw stock up jars of potatoes in the pantry of their Gilbert home, which contains a year’s supply of food. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has historically impressed on its members to build at least a three-month storehouse of food, store ample water and set aside money for a crisis.

MESA — Come what may, Donna and Aaron Bradshaw expect their spacious food pantry and emergency plan will carry them through.

Shelves and shelves of home-canned vegetables and meats, dried grains, an electric generator and stored water promise reasonable sustainability for the Mormon family in Gilbert in a world where food riots, starvation and disaster-related food shortages are becoming a kind of norm. There are threats of a U.S. trucking shutdown over high fuel costs that could lead to empty grocery-store shelves.

But the sharp spike in prices of staples such as bread, eggs, flour and milk at supermarkets has folks looking for options in food purchases and storage.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has historically impressed on its members to build at least a three-month storehouse of food, store ample water and set aside money for a crisis.

“We have had some relatively new instructions from Salt Lake (City),” the church headquarters, Aaron Bradshaw said. “It used to be we saved a year’s supply in an emergency kind of fashion where you would have a bunch of wheat, beans and rice, and maybe you knew how to use it.” But because no emergencies came along, people got lax, he said.

But now with so many forces fighting for the global food supplies, church members are being asked to take food storage more seriously, he said.

“The first stage is to have a three-month supply of stuff you are really going to eat,” said Bradshaw, a counselor in the Gilbert-Higley Stake. “Some of us are more comfortable with a year’s supply, rotating things in and out. We have always saved stuff we are going to eat.”  (cont.)

Entire article here

From KTAR.com:

Come what may, Donna and Aaron Bradshaw expect their spacious food pantry and emergency plan will carry them through. Shelves and shelves of home-canned vegetables and meats, dried grains, an electric generator and stored water promises reasonable sustainability for the Mormon family in Gilbert in a world where food riots, starvation and disaster-related food shortages are becoming a kind of norm. There are threats of a United States trucking shutdown over high fuel costs that could lead to empty store shelves.

But the sharp spike in prices of staples such as bread, eggs, flour and milk at supermarkets has folks looking for options in food purchases and storage.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has historically impressed on members to build at least a three-month storehouse of food, store ample water and set aside money for a crisis.

“We have had some relatively new instructions from Salt Lake (City),” the church headquarters, Aaron Bradshaw said. “It used to be we saved a year’s supply in an emergency kind of fashion where you would have a bunch of wheat, beans and rice, and maybe you knew how to use it.” But because no emergencies came along, people got lax, he said.

But now with so many forces fighting for the global food supplies, church members are being asked to take food storage more seriously, he said.

“The first stage is to have a three-month supply of stuff you are really going to eat,” said Bradshaw, a counselor in the Gilbert-Higley Stake. “Some of us are more comfortable with a year’s supply, rotating things in and out. We have always saved stuff we are going to eat.”

The church lays out detailed storage instructions (www.providentliving.org) and presents new Brigham Young University scientific research that “properly packaged, low-moisture foods, stored at room temperature or cooler (75 degrees or lower), remain nutritious and edible much longer than previously thought.”

“We are kind of specialists,” said Bradshaw, noting that he and Donna came from families that had big gardens. “We raised pigs and chickens all the time we were growing up. So we are comfortable with canning and picking your own stuff.”  (cont.)

Entire article here

From The Daily Mail Online:

Supermarkets are rationing rice in some stores after panic-buying by customers worried about a global shortage.

Retailers including Tesco, Asda, Morrisons and Lidl have introduced quotas for the staple food, which has increased in price worldwide by 70 per cent in a year.

It is believed to be the first time major stores have limited purchases of such foodstuffs since sugar and bread were restricted in the Seventies because of strikes by producers.

Netto, the Danish-owned chain with 184 UK stores, has limited its 10kg bags of rice to one per customer.

Lidl, the German-owned cut-price group with 380 British outlets, has restricted purchases to ‘family volumes’ to stop bulk-buying by traders.

Most of the limits have been introduced in areas of Leicester which have large Asian populations.

Tesco said that for two weeks its store in the Hamilton area of the city had limited customers to two packs of rice per person.

But a spokeswoman insisted: ‘There is no supply problem. Rice was restricted for a couple of weeks at one store only. No other Tesco stores have been affected.’

Customers at the Morrisons store at Freemans Park, Leicester, were being restricted to six packs of rice, regardless of size, per customer.

The Asda store at nearby Thurmaston imposed similar restrictions, but at a national level the company denied it had any rationing in place.

The run on rice supplies in the UK follows rationing imposed in the United States by Wal-Mart and its discount warehouse Sam’s Club.

America’s largest warehouse group Costco, which has outlets in Britain, has been another chain to warn that customers are panicking about shortages of rice and flour and are buying up supplies to hoard.

The reasons for the soaring cost of rice include the rising demand in the Far East as living standards improve.

Less land is also now allocated to cultivating the crop – and there have been supply and distribution difficulties caused by bad weather.

The price of a 1kg bag of basmati rice – which is popular with curries – has risen 27 per cent at Tesco and Asda and 39 per cent at Sainsbury’s in the past year, according to comparison website MySupermarket.co.uk. (cont.)

Entire article here

From FoodinCrisis.com:

It’s not a good time to take up baking if you are Japanese. According to an article from Business Day (Australia), Noriko Wantanabe recently decided to bake a cake, and when she went to her local supermarket, she found the shelves bare. She continues:

“I went to another supermarket, and then another, and there was no butter at those either. Everywhere I went there were notices saying Japan has run out of butter. I couldn’t believe it — this is the first time in my life I’ve wanted to try baking cakes and I can’t get any butter,” said the frustrated cook.

Japan, along with many other less affluent countries, is facing the shocking possibility of a long-term reduction in the quality and quantity of its food supply. An article in Politicsweb from South Africa addresses the skyrocketing price of food around the world:

There are both supply and demand reasons for the present rise in food prices. The supply disruptions to global food supply include severe droughts in Australia and Central Asia (two prominent food exporting regions), declining water quality in China and variable rainfall in many other parts of the world, partly explained by global climate change. While the localised droughts may abate, the latter two factors are likely to persist and could even possibly worsen in the decades ahead. Agricultural supply is also impacted upon by rising input costs. In particular, rising fuel and fertiliser prices have increased the costs of farming. Since transport costs are now a significant portion of the input price of basic food stuffs, higher oil prices have fed directly into either reducing production or increasing prices at the shop level.

The food crisis has become more than just an annoyance for countries for whom having sufficient food for their people has been an ongoing problem. An article from The Daily Star (Bangladesh) states it this way:

All the evidence suggests that the food crisis now gripping the world will only aggravate over time, and may even trigger conflicts. Indeed, it has already rocked several countries, including Bangladesh, where simmering discontent over scarcity and spiraling prices of cereals has been becoming volatile, with the public ire targeted at the authorities unsuccessfully grappling with the issue.

While the government has been toppled over the chronic food shortage in Haiti, food riots are reported from Egypt and the Philippines. Elsewhere in the world the experience isn’t dissimilar.

Only a few days back, the United Nations said that the “silent tsunami unleashed by costlier food” threatened 100 million people. In London, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Britain would seek changes to EU bio-fuels plans if it was shown that planting crops for fuel was driving up food prices. The World Food Programme (WFP) chief Jossete Sheeran highlighted the critical situation caused by decline in food stocks and surge in prices that has hard hit the world’s hungry — the poor and the destitute.

Notwithstanding this widespread concern over the looming disaster, so multifaceted are its causes that it becomes difficult to see how the global food shortage can even begin to be tackled. As a matter of fact, the whole planet is involved in addressing this basic human problem. Yet, a beginning in the direction of saving the humanity from hunger has been long overdue.

At long last, a warning bell seems to have been rung. On April 13, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) along with the World Bank called for urgent action to attend not just the present crisis but also the need for medium term development in the region most vulnerable to falling food supply and spiraling prices.

Unfortunately, it seems that the US government does not yet hear the warning bell ringing. Let’s hope they do so before we have riots in the streets and have to call in the Canadian military to keep the peace.

Entire article here

From FoodinCrisis.com:

Jim Goodman, in a recent article in OpEd.com titled “Food Shortage Looming if Crop Focus Isn’t Altered”,  wrote the following:

An abundance of food is something we take for granted, but we have money. Collectively as a nation, food has always been there, and we could buy whatever we wanted. What if that changed? What if food became really scarce and really expensive? Could it happen? It has already started.

* Total world stocks of all grains are close to their lowest level in 30 years.
* USDA predicts wheat surpluses to be the smallest in 60 years.
* A virulent strain of wheat rust that can reduce yields to zero is spreading worldwide.
* Wheat prices have risen well over 50 percent from a year ago.
* The FAO cites 37 countries as facing a food crisis due to rising prices.

Executive director of the World Food Programme Josette Sheeran, in disucssing her agency’s ability to deal with the current food crisis, recently added the following:

Soaring food prices — up 55 per cent from June 2007 to February 2008, including an 87 per cent hike for rice in March — and dwindling global food stocks due to more world food consumption than production were seriously threatening the WFP’s ability to keep millions from starvation.

While the WPP’s focus is, understandably, on countries less affulent than the U.S., we should be careful to not be too smug about our current abundance–we are not immune to the vicissitudes of the global market.  This video from therealnews.com shows what is already starting to happen in the most prosperous country in the world.  (cont.)

Entire article here