The clerk at the… shop called it a “slow night” Thursday but a steady stream of customer filed in to purchase [it]…. During one hour, 16 people purchased [it].

and

One of the customers Thursday night was Jeff Jacobs, a 50-year-old former Chrysler worker from Afton.

and

[Tom Neer, St. Charles County Sheriff,] said some people report it gives them a high, while others say it makes them dizzy or gives them a headache. “I have a concern about the product if it is determined that it can alter a person’s senses,” Neer said. “You get someone using it behind the wheel and it impairs their driving. Certainly, I’m concerned about it.”

Sounds like alcohol, no?

The article continues:

State Rep. Ward Frans, R-151st District, sponsored a bill that would place [it] on the state’s list of controlled substances. Possession would become a felony, Franz said.

Well it sure can’t be alcohol if the state is about to outlaw it.

But what’s going on here? Someone comes up with a new intoxicant and our government’s response is to make it illegal. The effects sound just like alcohol, which is legal. Is our government protecting us from a dangerous drug or from the need to take personal responsibility for what we put into our bodies? Is our government shielding us from the responsibility for our actions, regardless of what we put into our bodies?

What are the criteria for deciding to create another law? When was the last time that anyone, anywhere examined those criteria and held a frank discussion on whether or not our society is well served by them?

My friend Jimbo sent me the following exercise program. I’m well along with it and, so far, it has been pretty do-able, even for a greybeard like me.

This seems a little daunting to start with but if you apply yourself you may find that it’s not as difficult as you think.

EXERCISE FOR PEOPLE OVER 50

Begin by standing on a comfortable surface, where you have plenty of room at each side.

With a 5-Lbs potato sack in each hand, extend your arms straight out from your sides and hold them there as long as you can. Try to reach a full minute, and then relax.

Each day you’ll find that you can hold this position for just a bit longer.

After a couple of weeks, move up to 10-Lbs potato sacks.

Then try 25-Lbs potato sacks and then eventually try to get to where you can lift a 50-Lbs potato sack in each hand and hold your arms straight for more than a full minute. (I’m at this level.)

After you feel confident at that level, put a potato in each sack.

Remember, nothing is more valuable than your health. Get the best quality potato sacks that you can!

One hundred ninety nine pounds. Yipee!

Next goal, which should be pretty quick if the gods of metabolism cooperate: Weigh less than 200 pounds. I cannot remember the last time I weighed less than 200 pounds.

After that, I think I’ll head for 180 pounds. (There! I’ve put it in writing.)

To mark this momentous occasion, I return briefly to that briefest of all genres, the six word story.

Five months. 20 pounds. Woo hoo!!

and

Help me celebrate. Eat some chocolate.

and

Should I replace my website photo?

From LiveScience.com, U.S. Life Expectancy May Have Peaked:

A team led by Harvard’s Majid Ezzati published these findings today in the online medical journal PLoS Medicine. The analysis — the first to look at mortality trends county by county — is based on mortality data from the National Center for Health Statistics and population data from the U.S. Census Bureau between 1959 and 2001.

…

[The team found that] life expectancy rates rose for most of Americans over the last four decades by about six years, from an average of about age 71 to age 77. Yet a sizeable portion of the population, mostly in rural regions, saw those modest gains level off and even reverse starting in the 1980s. This is in contrast to all other industrialized nations.

It is disturbing that our government has assured that all Americans have access to electricity and telephones and we are working hard on getting broadband internet access into every home but we do not assure that everybody gets good health care.

If you are a member of a grocery insurance program, you will show your membership card at the cash register and will pay a fixed amount of money for your week’s groceries, regardless of how much you need that particular week. Based on some research that I have been doing, I believe that through careful negotiation and the buying power amassed by a large membership, the grocery insurance programs ought to be able to obtain groceries from local supermarkets for as little as 35-45% of “list prices.” These savings will be passed on to members through lower membership fees and lower weekly at-the-cash-register fixed payments.

Membership in the grocery insurance programs will be a neat perk which businesses can offer to their employees. I know that, as a business owner, I am always looking for ways to compensate my employees which do not impose additional income tax burdens on them. The grocery insurance program membership fees would be deductible expenses for the business and, I hope, would be “carved out” by the IRS and not considered taxable income to the employees.

All in all, I think that this will be a tremdously adventageous program which will help Americans.

I can only think of a couple of small problems but I’m sure that we will quickly get them straightened out.

1. About 46 milliion Americans, about 18% of us, will not be able to join a grocery insurance program, primarily for one of three reasons: 1) they are unemployed, 2) they have jobs but their employers do not choose to offer this perk to them, or 3) they have reputations for eating too much food and are ineligible.
2. Grocery list prices, the prices marked on the shelves and actually paid by the 46 million people who are not grocery insurance program members, will be 2-3x higher than today’s prices.
3. Individuals who want to join a program on their own (not through an employer) will need to pay significantly higher membership fees and won’t receive the tax benefits.

Let me reiterate that these are tiny problems. About 82% of us will be unaffected by them and will actually see our grocery bills go down so, in the balance, this is all for the good.

Does this sound ridiculous? Why? We Americans buy health care exactly as described here.

A significant majority of Americans… list terrorism as one of their greatest fears. Like most of our media-inspired interests and worries, however, this one has little basis in reality. In actual fact, unless you’re serving in a war zone, the most dangerous person you’re ever likely to encounter – by several orders of magnitude – is the one you see in the mirror every morning.

and

The single greatest killer of Americans is the so-called “lifestyle disease”. Somewhere between half a million and a million of us get a short ride in a long hearse every year because of smoking, lousy diets, parking our bodies in front of the TV instead of operating them, and downing yet another six pack and / or tequila popper.

According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, between 310,000 and 580,000 of us will commit suicide by cigarette this year. Another 260,000 to 470,000 will go in the ground due to poor diet and sedentary lifestyle. And some 85,000 of us will drink to our own departure.

After the person in the mirror, the next most dangerous individual we’re ever likely to encounter is one in a white coat. Something like 200,000 of us will experience “cessation of life” due to medical errors – botched procedures, mis-prescribed drugs and “nosocomial infections”. (The really nasty ones you get from treatment in a hospital or healthcare service unit.)

Goekler’s article is a delight to read but if you are impatient or like numbers (like me), here are the Cliff’s notes:

None of us want to die prematurely and all of us want to spend our money wisely. Given what you just read, how much sense does it make to walk though an airport in your socks?

In a study of 1,063 adults, 97.2% of the “night people” had been fed in the evening as newborns. Furthermore, 97.6% of the “morning people” had been fed in the morning as newborns. The remaining approximately 2.5% may have been fed during those periods but conclusive evidence was not available due to failing memories on the parts of the only living adult relatives and a lack of timestamped photographic records.

Dr. Erudita has announced her imminent departure from the Hatch Institute and will be founding a company to provide infant betrothal services, guaranteeing that no married couple need ever be mismatched again.

The world’s second biggest pharmaceutical company is to radically shift its attitude to providing cheap drugs to millions of people in the developing world.

In a major change of strategy, the new head of GlaxoSmithKline, Andrew Witty, has told the Guardian he will slash prices on all medicines in the poorest countries, give back profits to be spent on hospitals and clinics and – most ground-breaking of all – share knowledge about potential drugs that are currently protected by patents.

My hat’s off to you, Mr. Witty. This is a great step and I thank you. One more thing, though: what about the poor people right here in the US and the UK and the other “developed” countries? Will we soon live in a world where high quality medical care is more affordable in Africa than in America?