Search Results for: cancer

A buddy of mine is going to die. To be blunt, by the time you read this he may already be dead. Anyway, I went to go see him yesterday. Before I got there I asked if there was anything he wanted and there was. So I stopped on the way and got a six pack of beer, a pizza (supreme, extra crispy) and some ice. They have plenty of buckets in the hospital. A nurse saw me and started to say something until I mentioned who I was visiting. She knew as well as any of us that this stuff stood no chance of doing my buddy any harm. And it might do him some psychological good. She shrugged and found us some plates. The three of us sat watching the Sox game for a bit and then she had work to do. He and I talked between innings, etiquette before eternity, and had some good laughs. We joked about how I’d once lost control of a motorcycle I was having sex on and ended up in a laundromat. That required both bail and stitches. We laughed about the time he entered a talent contest and got booed by the MC.

We missed talking about how his wife left him, and took the kids, when he was diagnosed with prostrate cancer. We also forgot to mention how his mother blames him for getting sick in the first place and hasn’t talked to him in over a year. It’s funny how some things can skip your mind when you’re watching baseball. Neither he nor I blame his family for their reactions. There is no “how to” book for times like this. At least not one that isn’t full of treacle. He doesn’t need poems or cuddly kitties, he just needs a friend. And while my skill set may not be wide, I can handle this.

He fell asleep in the fifth inning, after his second beer, and so was spared the Sox melting down in the 6th. The nurse helped me wrap the remaining pizza and put it in a mini-fridge along side the two beers. I sat with him a while more making sure he was just sleeping and then headed off into the night.

Aside from the reaction of his family my buddy has been treated extremely well by the hospital staff. Above and beyond the physical care they make sure to talk to him every day. Even if it’s only for a minute or two it helps him feel like a human being.

I contrasted that with a time, about 25 years ago when another buddy of mine was dying. He had AIDS. His family shunned him, his lover abandoned him and the doctors avoided him except to provide the mandatory, minimum, care. This was years before the Magic Johnson “HIV Positive = buy a baseball team” therapy was introduced. That friend too wanted pizza and beer but there was no way I could get that into the hospital. Hell, I was lucky they let me see him at all.

But, with the clever use of a lab coat and some rubber gloves, we were able to sneak him out to a prearranged bar. There was pizza and beer waiting for us in the back corner. This was out of respect for him, he was covered in last stage lesions, and out of respect for the customers. I believe I mentioned that he was covered in last stage lesions. We laughed, we joked, we played the jukebox. And then we took him back to the hospital. He died about an hour later.

Smiling.

I was there holding his hand.

After that his mother decided his death was all my fault. Because, after all, the one straight friend he had was the obvious choice.

But I was there when he died and she wasn’t. That was by choice for both of us.

Nevertheless, death is an odd subject. Everyone of us will face it. There is absolutely no way around it. And, yet, people do everything in their power to avoid dealing with it. I don’t get that mentality. I’d rather admit the obvious and then enjoy the time I have with those I love. You’d be surprised how funny the terminally ill can be if you give them a chance.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

First off, for all of our male readers, Happy Man Day! You’ve earned it so don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Anyway, today we are going to take a look at the sensitive world around us. For example, we would never sell John Wilkes-Booth bobblehead bdolls at a Lincoln museum. Oh wait. Well, never mind, they’ve been removed.

In other sensitive news, a cop filed charges against his girlfriend for beating him with a Justin Bieber doll. No steak for him.

Speaking of cops, as you all know it is our ability to deal with others in an amicable and equitable way that sets us apart from the lower life forms. It is also our ability to see reason in chaos that allows us to progress. So, when we see a city finally cracking down on illegal drug sales we applaud their attempt to right a serious wrong.

Who am I kidding? We protest our inability to sell crack.

In most cities, residents would be happy if 30 people were arrested for selling crack, cocaine, marijuana and firearms in their neighborhood.

But not in Ferriday, La.

Instead, some residents in the neighborhood are livid, saying the arrests are making it harder for them to sell their own drugs.

“You have to realize, we don’t have no jobs around here or nothing,” Derrick Brown told KALB.com. “Every time we try to make a little something to get on our feet or try to feed our family they come kicking the doors in and knocking us back down again.”

All 30 arrests came Friday in Ferriday — a town of 3,723 people most famous for being the birthplace of rocker Jerry Lee Lewis — after a yearlong joint investigation called Delta Blues involving federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.

The investigation, which targeted a local gang called the Sixth Street Boys, led to the seizure of 8 oz. of crack cocaine, a half kilo of powdered cocaine, 20 lbs. of marijuana, as well as firearms, currency and three vehicles, according to the Natchez Democrat.

Concordia Parish Sheriff Randy Maxwell told the Natchez Democrat that the operation was a huge success and that he was glad to see longtime dealers off the streets.

“It was a great success and the reason was because of the great cooperation with all of the agencies,” Maxwell said. “We got a lot of the big time players and longtime dealers in the parish.”

KALB.com reporter Brooke Buford said on air that she was surprised by Brown’s reaction to the bust, but former narcotics cop Neill Franklin, the executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition said this is old news to anyone familiar with the drug war.

“[Brown] made so much sense,” Franklin told the Huffington Post. “This is an economic issue. In communities like these, there is no opportunity for employment or education. These people have to make money to buy food and pay bills. If there are no jobs, what do you expect they’ll do?” The LEAP organization works to advocate for effective drug policies.

Ferriday Mayor Glen McGlothin told The Huffington Post that Buford’s piece didn’t tell the full story, but adds, “I would like to think that’s because she is young.”

“There are lots of people who are happy about the drug bust, but they are people who believe in law and order and were scared because of all the drugs.”

He said that the people who are complaining that the only jobs available involve selling drugs don’t see that they are part of the problem. “I assume people would rather start businesses in areas where drugs aren’t being sold,” he said.

Robert Housman, who was assistant director for strategic planning in the White House drug czar’s office during the Clinton Administration, said the notion that selling drugs is the only option for Ferriday residents is “nonsense.”

“There have been studies on the economics of drug-buying,” Housman told The Huffington Post. “When you consider things like the risk and the costs of the drugs, you don’t make a lot of money. Most people who sell are not eking out a living, they’re merely supporting their own drug habit.”

Franklin said he believes that providing economic and education opportunities to people in poor neighborhoods is the key to reducing the drug trade, but Housman said drug-buying habits are the reasons there are fewer opportunities.

“People don’t want to open up businesses in neighborhoods like this,” he said. “But many of these people selling drugs do have good business minds and could succeed if they applied themselves.”

Amway anyone? Before they try and turn those nice people into sales reps they really need to help alleviate the many other problems that are besieging their city. If almost all your residents are dealing drugs that means the customers are coming from somewhere else.

Of course, while we claim that we want to be tough on crime we still cringe when we read about 9 year old kids who got tasered for ditching school.

An Ohio police officer says he used a stun gun twice on a 9-year-old who skipped school because the child refused to cooperate with his commands.

Details of the incident, which resulted in the shutdown of a village police force, were released Monday, The Columbus Dispatch reported. The Mount Sterling officer went to the boy’s home on a truancy complaint last week. He says the child’s mother warned the boy, who weighs between 200 and 250 pounds, to obey the officer or he’d be shocked.

According to a copy of the police report provided by the mayor’s office to msnbc.com, the officer wrote that the boy “dropped to the floor and became dead weight” and lay on his hands to prevent being handcuffed.

Wait? This kid weighs as much as me? At freaking 9? Didn’t his mom get the memo? Hot dogs cause butt cancer.

A billboard is bluntly telling Chicagoans that hot dogs cause “butt cancer” — and the hot dog industry is not amused.

The billboard is one of a series of ads being put up in major cities by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, or PCRM, urging people to stop eating hot dogs, which it says are a leading cause of colon and other cancers.

The National Hot Dog & Sausage Council — which you can find at the wonderful URL hot-dog.org — reacted immediately to the billboard, which went up recently on the Eisenhower Expressway.

Calling the ad “outrageous” and “inflammatory,” the trade group dismissed the PCRM as a “pseudo-medical animal rights group” bent on turning all Americans into vegans.

I guess the one thing we can do is thank God that racism is finally dead.

Oh hell, never mind. A clerk working at a Radio Shack issued a receipt for a refund to an African-American woman claiming she lived in Ghettohood USA.

That’s just outside of Dayton.

Receipts are supposed to prove that a customer bought an item at a store.

However, one Radio Shack employee allegedly gave a woman an additional message on her receipt: One calling her an “ugly itch” from “Ghettohood, USA.”

Shanae Lewis of Baltimore got the disturbing message on Monday when she went to a Radio Shack in nearby Montgomery County, Md., to buy a $20 cassette adapter for her car.

The county has a five-cent bag tax on top of sales tax that Lewis was unaware of, so, according to WUSA-TV, she went back and forth with the clerk before deciding not to buy the adapter at all.

She said what happened next is one of the worst examples of bad customer service anyone has ever seen, according to Consumerist.

It seems when the salesman gave Lewis back her money, he also gave her a receipt for the refund, at the bottom of which he apparently typed in “ugly itch, ghettohood, usa, tattoville, Maryland.”

The salesman reportedly claimed he was only kidding, but Lewis was, and remains, unamused.

“I was shocked more so than anything, and then I became angry,” she told WUSA-TV.

At first, she tried to complain to the store manager, who reportedly wanted nothing to do with her complaint, so Lewis contacted Radio Shack’s corporate office about the ordeal hopes the associate will be fired, WTVR reported.

A RadioShack official told WUSA that after seeing the story, it took “the strongest possible disciplinary actions,” but did not specify what they were.

In an email response to the station, RadioShack wrote: “Based on descriptions we’ve seen in the media, this incident obviously does not meet RadioShack’s expectations for customer service.”

It added, “The Company has made several attempts to contact the customer involved and offer her a personal apology. So far we’ve been unable to connect, although we have conveyed our regrets to another person in her household.”

Lewis may be able to forgive, but not forget. She said Radio Shack has lost a customer.

“I want nothing to do with Radio Shack ever again,” Shanae said.

Radio Shack continues to win friends the world over, just like on this site dedicated to people who will never set foot in one again.

They need a new PR company. Maybe the same one who works for the Jet Strip Strip Club which saved youth baseball in Los Angeles.

Little League baseball players from an unincorporated area of Los Angeles will reportedly get to play ball this season thanks to a charitable donation from the unlikeliest of donors.

Jet Strip, a gentlemen’s club in Lennox, has donated $1,200 to the Lennox Little League, which has been strapped for cash after the Lennox School District imposed some new regulations, according to the Daily Breeze.

A call to the district was not immediately returned.

The donation, along with those from other businesses, will allow 300 little leaguers to play at least one more season, but the league’s president, Roberto Aguirre, still isn’t optimistic about the long-term future of the league.

“It feels good to be from Lennox when people do stuff like that,” Aguirre said to the paper. “At the same time, the future is very scary for us, because [the donation] is a one-time deal.”

James Wallace, Jet Strip’s general manager, is also a 15-year member of the Lennox Coordinating Council, comparable to an unofficial city council of the community.

Wallace told the paper that he likes to keep the gentlemen’s club’s donations quiet.

“We don’t really like to brag about it,” he said.

The school board has also received donations of $1,000 and $600 from the little league in Westchester and the council, respectively.

But Aguirre told the paper that the bigger problem facing the league is the inability to sell food at games.

Citing health concerns, the K-8 district stopped the league from selling grilled foods, like hamburgers and hot dogs, though it has installed a drain, and a local non-profit, YouthBuild, has promised to build a snack bar for free.

“People don’t want candy, candy, candy – chips, chips, chips,” Aguirre said. “They want hamburgers, hot dogs and french fries.”

But raising the $65,000 necessary for materials to build a snack bar will be tough for a community that is economically depressed.

Lennox is a small, mile-by-mile community adjacent to Los Angeles International Airport that is so impoverished, the league offers families a payment plan so that some can afford the annual $85 it costs to play in the league.

“We’re looking up in the sky and hoping for something great,” Aguirre told the paper. “If this snack stand happens, it’s going to be the best thing that could happen for our league.”

You hear that Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine? People want freaking hot dogs. And they’ll gladly put up with a little butt cancer to save a little league team or two.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

Lots of people have hobbies. Some play guitar, some knit, others learn a new language or try their hands at culinary concoctions. You may have noticed that I like to write. Not only here but I actually write fiction that three people have read. Not all at once, I’m not that famous, but they’re still out there. Very “out there” if they’ve read my stuff. That being said, I have a buddy who collects dragon figurines. In all other aspects of life he is a perfectly normal man. A wonderful father to his three children and doting husband to his glorious wife. He is active in his church and has been loyal to the company he works for over the last few decades. Until he sees a dragon figurine. Then he becomes a squealing little girl who must, MUST I TELL YOU – RIGHT FREAKING NOW, purchase said figurine. You would see more self control, and hear less squealing, at an all girl-school concert featuring Justin Bieber. When he was young his friends and family thought it was cute and harmless. They even encouraged it since, after all, he wasn’t out drinking or whoring with me. But now that the collection actually has its own storage facility as well as an entire wall in the basement, people are growing concerned. His children are at that age where they are looking at colleges and they want to know that dad didn’t flush their futures away on a bunch of figurines. I’m sure that everything is fine, he’s a pretty responsible guy when push comes to shove. But when you see 23 variations on the Luck Dragon from the Never Ending Story all in one display case, it’s easy to share their concerns.

Still, his fascination with dragons makes more sense to me than the group of North Koreans who spent years learning the accordion so they could do a rousing rendition of A-Ha’s 80’s hit, Take on Me. Allegedly they are celebrating multiculturalism. More proof that North Koreans haven’t got a clue what the world is like outside of Pyongyang.

Of course, if you’re looking for clueless you need not travel all the way to Asia. The Komen Foundation, famous for its Planned Parenthood flap, is now selling handguns.

It’s okay, they’re pink.

Yesterday, the Susan B. Komen Foundation made national headlines with its controversial decision to pull funding for Planned Parenthood. And now, the foundation has just announced it is reversing its decision and will continue to fund breast cancer screenings with the group.

To a lot of people this back and forth seems a little random and strange. But there’s a clear paper trail you can follow of the increasing political pressures on Komen and the rightward shift the organization has been taking.

Another, lesser-known aspect of Komen’s outreach to the political right can be found here, in their promotion of a pink handgun to promote breast cancer awareness month.

Komen’s pink pistol is not to be confused with the organization the Pink Pistols, a gay-rights organization that supports Second Amendment rights.

Komen has partnered up with Discount Gun Sales to offer a pink version of its P-22 pistol. An undisclosed portion of each sales will go toward the Seattle branch of Komen. The pistol retails for $429.99.

The “Hope Edition” pistol is promoted as having “an exclusive DuraCoat Pink slide in recognition of Breast Cancer Awareness month. Utilizing the same reliable controls and firing mechanism that has made the Walther P-22 America’s top selling handgun, the Hope Edition will be a limited production pistol offered exclusively through Discount Gun Sales.”

Yes, nothing says “We care about your health” like a 22 caliber pink pocket protector. Obviously, the Komen Foundation is insane.

Not as insane as the people who like pterodactyl porn, but they’re running neck and neck these days.

Then again, are they any nuttier than John C. Hughes? He wrote up his “bucket list” and then started checking them off one by one. Drink tequila in a biker bar? Check. Get into a high speed chase with cops?

Believe it or not, check.

We all have our dreams.

John C. Hughes of Butte, Mont., said he started a car chase with police because he “just always wanted to do that,” according to a police report obtained by the Montana Standard.

Hughes, 55, led police on a chase at speeds of more than 100 mph before police used “stop sticks” to deflate his tires and arrest the speed demon. He now faces a misdemeanor count of reckless driving while eluding police.

Police said Hughes was not intoxicated and they found no evidence of drugs or alcohol in the car, according to the Standard.

“That’s the first time I’ve ever heard of anything like that,” Sheriff John Walsh told the Standard.

Hughes should perhaps consider himself lucky. Just this Wednesday, a man in Salinas, Ca., crashed his car in a high-speed chase with police, causing his car to roll over multiple times, according to The Californian.

Then again, Hughes didn’t make out nearly as well as a British man who sued police after they pursued him for 17 minutes for not wearing his seat belt. The man later settled with police for the equivalent of about $31,000, the BBC reported Thursday.

Mr. Hughes needs a hobby.

Maybe he can take up eel porn. That sounds safer.

It also sounds more rational than anything you’ll hear from Jemima Packington who predicts the future through the clever use of asparagus.

Meet Jemima Packington, a woman who divines the future using asparagus. The world’s only “Asparamancer” (as she calls herself), she casts the spears in the air and reads the shapes they form when they land. She been reading asparagus since she was a little girl and claims to have been making accurate predictions about such things as the royal family and politics. “It might sound silly to some people but my readings are very accurate. I have been doing readings using asparagus since I was eight years old. My great aunt read tea leaves and I have inherited her gift,” Jemima says. Sure, why not? If you can do it with tea leaves, you can do it with vegetables. I want to believe in her powers, really I do, but she predicts that Europe will not have a hard time with frost and snow, just a windy time. Last time I checked, Europe was going through a deep freeze. Alas, the asparagus spears have failed her this time. But fret not, the Asparamancer will have a chance to redeem herself when she appears at the British Asparagus Festival in April, where she’s bound to predict that all attendees will have strange smelling pee.

HEY LOOK! ARMPIT PORN!!!

Yeah, we’re moving on.

This just in, the people whose hobby is to know stuff like this just ranked Miami as the worst city in America. Miami won hands down thanks to its lovely mix of high crime, rampant poverty and the happy bonus of widespread political corruption.

Miami is also rumored to be the international capital of clown porn.

And if that’s the kind of stuff that revs your motor then you’re going to love our next story about Trent Arsenault, the verified virgin who’s fathered 14 kids.

Trent Arsenault may be the most controversial father in America right now. Not only has he fathered 14 kids, but he’s also a 36-year-old virgin.

By day, Arsenault is a Silicon Valley computer security specialist, but on the side he is perhaps the world’s first “donorsexual,” a term he coined to describe his passion of supplying sperm to childless couples free-of-charge.

Arsenault claims he’s never had a sex partner and feels it’s his duty to the couples who use his sperm not to deplete the supply.

“I’ve committed 100 percent of my sexual energy for producing sperm for childless couples to have babies. So I don’t have other activity outside of that,” Arsenault told Anderson Cooper in January.

Arsenault doesn’t charge for his baby batter, but his unconventional methods have spurred the Food and Drug Administration to issue a cease-and-desist order, the San Jose Mercury News reported. The FDA alleges that Arsenault did not take the legally required precautions to prevent the spread of communicable diseases.

Although Arsenault has attracted sympathy from various people who believe the FDA’s allegations set a dangerous precedent, other activities of his have aroused controversy, such as the 100-plus videos he has posted online showing him masturbating with unusual aids such as a water polo ball and frozen packs of organic blueberries.

He likes to put what where? I told you there should be a procreation license. No one listens to me.

Of course he’s got nothing on Masanobu from Japan. He holds the world’s record for masturbating for 9 hours straight. He has a girlfriend but she doesn’t have sex with him. I can see why. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing and 9 hours of the non-stop mattress mambo seems to fit that description.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UccqyBp946A&w=420&h=315]

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, every Friday morning around 9:10!

Regular readers of this blog know that I am not the poster child for a healthy lifestyle. I maintain an “in office” stripper pole and think that bourbon and beer should be a food group. Until about a month and a half ago I was a pack and a half smoker. The menthol kind that doctors completely lose their minds over too, not just regular old smokey-poos. My idea of healthy exercise consisted of walking to and from the fridge. That being said, I have made some changes in my life recently. Besides quitting smoking I now walk three miles a day and no longer wash down breakfast with a beer. A late lunch, certainly, but not breakfast. But, despite all the years of self abuse, and fun – let’s be honest about that, it turns out that I’m in better shape than a 17 year old girl.

MSN Today is reporting about a young lady who collapsed, and nearly died, due to eating McDonald’s food.

Even if you’ve never had a McNugget, you could be guilty of eating a high sodium diet.

Imagine eating nothing but salt-filled McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets. For 15 years. That’s exactly what Stacey Irvine, a 17-year-old factory worker from England did—and it just may kill her. But before you write this story off as just plain crazy, do you know how much salt you’re taking in? And what it’s doing to your health?

As reported by the Daily Mail, when Stacey Irvine’s mother first took her to a McDonald’s restaurant 15 years ago and bought her some Chicken McNuggets, it was love at first bite. Since then, the British teen has eaten almost nothing but Chicken McNuggets. A diet like this not only lacks vital nutrients, it also serves up a dangerous amount of salt. A 10-piece order of Chicken McNuggets packs in 900 milligrams (mg) of sodium, more than half the sodium you should have in a single day.

A McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets every now and then won’t hurt you. But a 10-piece order packs in more than half the sodium you should have in a single day.

Irvine recently collapsed at work, and was rushed to the hospital struggling to breathe. She’s home now, but the amount of salt she’s been eating means she’ll need to clean up her diet faster than a McDonald’s employee turns around an order at the drive thru window. All that salt can lead to an increased risk of heart attack or stroke, particularly as she ages.

“The food industry creates a preference for very salty foods with the high salt content of their products, then creates products to satisfy that preference, and it becomes a feedback loop,” says David Katz, MD, founding director of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center.

While most people aren’t surprised to hear that a high-sodium diet raises blood pressure, most Americans would be downright shocked if they knew how much salt they really eat. The US government recommends that adults should consume no more than 1,500 mg of sodium a day, about two-thirds of a teaspoon. The average American really takes in 3,436 mg a day—more than double the recommendation.

Before you reassure yourself that you’re fine—after all, you banned the salt shaker from your table long ago—it turns out the biggest culprits are processed and packaged foods. “The vast majority of salt, 80% or more, is already in processed and pre-prepared foods,” says Marion Nestle, PhD, professor of nutrition at New York University.
Here’s just how fast the salt can add up on a typical day:

Breakfast: 1 whole grain bagel (490 mg) with 2 Tbsp fat-free cream cheese (211 mg) and 6 oz yogurt (95 mg)

Snack: 2 Tbsp peanut butter (147 mg) on 6 wheat crackers (194 mg)

Lunch: Sandwich with 2 slices low-salt turkey (432 mg), 1 slice American cheese (266 mg), and 2 tsp mustard (114 mg) in a flour tortilla (490 mg) with 1 dill pickle spear (306 mg) and 1c vegetable soup (960 mg)

Snack: 1 wheat pita (340 mg) with 2 Tbsp hummus (114 mg)

Dinner: ½ c pasta (4 mg) with ½ c jarred tomato sauce (480 mg) and 2 meatballs (232 mg), 1 slice garlic bread (400 mg), and salad with reduced fat ranch dressing (336 mg)

Dessert: Homemade apple crisp (495 mg) with ½ c vanilla ice cream (53 mg) and 2 Tbsp caramel sauce (60 mg)

The grand total: 6,219 mg, more than quadruple the daily recommended amount.

So even if you’ve never touched a McNugget, you can still quickly eat more sodium than you should. And all that salt doesn’t only hurt your heart and your waistline. An emerging body of research has also linked excessive sodium intake to cancer, osteoporosis, diabetes, dementia, sleep apnea, and kidney disease.

Scary stuff. But what’s even scarier is that it’s not easy to kick the salt habit: Chances are, you’re addicted to the stuff. Your body only needs about 500 mg of sodium a day to maintain the right balance of fluids, transmit nerve impulses, and move your muscles. When you eat far more than that—as most of us clearly do—your brain chemistry is altered. Research shows that salt actually triggers the release of the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine, which makes salty foods as addictive as nicotine and alcohol.

And just like with any addiction, eating salty foods makes your body crave more. In other words, the more Chicken McNuggets you have, the more you crave them. No matter what the cost.

Okay, let’s back things up here a little bit. Her mother took a two year old child to the junk food capital of the world and let her choose what she was going to eat? Not just once or twice but for the rest of her life? Which, as noted above, may not be for that much longer.

I’ll put this into a little perspective for you. If you sat down and ate an entire can of Pringles you would have ingested less salt than that single order of McNuggets. Pringles clocks in right around 36% of your suggested daily salt intake.

That’s right, potato chips lathered in salt are healthier than McNuggets.

“But they’re made from chicken,” the woefully ignorant among you whine. Fifty percent of a McNugget is chicken. The other fifty percent involves ingredients other people use to make bath mats and bombs.

And it is that other fifty percent that McDonald’s is finally putting to an end. MSNBC reports that the stuff of food nightmares has finally been laid to rest.

McDonald’s confirmed that it has eliminated the use of ammonium hydroxide — an ingredient in fertilizers, household cleaners and some roll-your-own explosives — in its hamburger meat.

The company denied that its decision was influenced by a months-long campaign by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver to get ammonium-hydroxide-treated meats like chicken and beef out of the U.S. food supply. But it acknowledged this week that it had stopped using the unappetizing pink goo — made from treating otherwise inedible scrap meat with the chemical — several months ago.

Besides being used as a household cleaner and in fertilizers, the compound releases flammable vapors, and with the addition of certain acids, it can be turned into ammonium nitrate, a common component in homemade bombs. It’s also widely used in the food industry as an anti-microbial agent in meats and as a leavener in bread and cake products. It’s regulated by the U.S. Agriculture Department, which classifies it as “generally recognized as safe.”

McDonald’s decision was first reported this week by the Daily Mail, a blaring British tabloid, which trumpeted it as a victory for fellow Brit Oliver against the monolithic U.S. food industry.

Oliver’s campaign began in April, when he included a segment on what he called “pink slime” on his TV show, “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution” (warning: some readers may find this video distasteful):

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wshlnRWnf30&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3]

The use of treated scrap meat “to me as a chef and a food lover is shocking,” Oliver said. “… Basically we’re taking a product that would be sold in the cheapest form for dogs and making it ‘fit’ for humans.”

Todd Bacon, McDonald’s senior supply chain officer, told the Daily Mail that the decision “was not related to any particular event, but rather to support our effort to align our global beef raw material standards.”

In a statement, McDonald’s clarified that it stopped using “select lean beef trimmings” — its preferred term for scrap meat soaked in ammonium hydroxide and ground into a pink meatlike paste — at the beginning of last year.

“This product has been out of our supply chain since August of last year,” it said.

Sarah Prochaska, a registered dietitian at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, said that ammonium hydroxide is widely used in the U.S. food industry but that consumers may not be able to know what products include it because the USDA considers it a component in a production procedure — separating scrap meat — and not an ingredient that must be listed on food labels.

“It’s a process, from what I understand, called ‘mechanically separated meat’ or ‘meat product,'” Prochaska told NBC station KSDK of St. Louis.

While the government considers it safe, it certainly “does not look anything like ground beef,” she said. And since it’s not on nutrition labels, the only way to avoid it “would be to choose fresher products, cook your meat at home, cook more meals at home,” she said.

Now some of you may have seen that email thread about how manually separated meats use beaks and snouts and stuff like that. They don’t now and never have. The truth is, in many ways, worse, since they specifically use the parts of the animal that butcher shops pay to have carted away as waste due to the fact that eating them is lethal.

That is until you mix them with bomb making materials. Then they’re fine.

Does that even remotely make sense to you?

Just FYI, we are the only industrialized country that allows this stuff to be fed to people and most schools are still using it in their lunches. In other words, learn to cook, get your kids bag lunches and quit feeding them poison.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoyvE19s2C0&w=420&h=315]

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, every Friday morning around 9:10!

You all know that one person who listens to the bunnies in their head before making any decision. You’ll find them in supermarkets carefully perusing the Weekly World News for facts as they check their horoscope before embarking on any errand. They will often, in that cute way they have that borders on – yet misses wildly – lucidity, make declarations that will flatly contradict anything they said seconds ago. And, should you be silly enough to point that out they will immediately proclaim “so you’re one of them too.” In the pantheon of disturbia they call minds, everything they say is a deft syllogism and everything they think makes sense. The fact they are wrong on all counts somehow manages to elude them. But, for the most part, these people are harmless. They just want to be left to their talking bunnies and live out their days in solitude. For the most part. However, every now and then one of them sneaks through and manages to ensconce themselves in some position of authority. Usually as a counter clerk at a video store but, sometimes, as head of the FDA. Or very close to head of the FDA.

For those of you new to this country the FDA is the Food and Drug Administration. It has wide powers and answers only to itself and, on occasion, the U.S. Congress. It’s job is to keep food safe for people to eat. As I noted yesterday, it does a lousy job of that. In fact, of all the industrialized nations, we rank near the bottom when it comes to food safety. At this point we may as well list uranium as a food group and be done with it.

However, not content to merely be the laughing stock of the world when it comes to health and safety, my buddy Mike Flores notes that the FDA kicked it up a notch by declaring that walnuts are an illegal drug.

No, I am not high. And neither are the people at The New American.

Seen any walnuts in your medicine cabinet lately? According to the Food and Drug Administration, that is precisely where you should find them. Because Diamond Foods made truthful claims about the health benefits of consuming walnuts that the FDA didn’t approve, it sent the company a letter declaring, “Your walnut products are drugs” — and “new drugs” at that — and, therefore, “they may not legally be marketed … in the United States without an approved new drug application.” The agency even threatened Diamond with “seizure” if it failed to comply.

Diamond’s transgression was to make “financial investments to educate the public and supply them with walnuts,” as William Faloon of Life Extension magazine put it. On its website and packaging, the company stated that the omega-3 fatty acids found in walnuts have been shown to have certain health benefits, including reduced risk of heart disease and some types of cancer. These claims, Faloon notes, are well supported by scientific research: “Life Extension has published 57 articles that describe the health benefits of walnuts”; and “The US National Library of Medicine database contains no fewer than 35 peer-reviewed published papers supporting a claim that ingesting walnuts improves vascular health and may reduce heart attack risk.”

This evidence was apparently not good enough for the FDA, which told Diamond that its walnuts were “misbranded” because the “product bears health claims that are not authorized by the FDA.”

The FDA’s letter continues: “We have determined that your walnut products are promoted for conditions that cause them to be drugs because these products are intended for use in the prevention, mitigation, and treatment of disease.” Furthermore, the products are also “misbranded” because they “are offered for conditions that are not amenable to self-diagnosis and treatment by individuals who are not medical practitioners; therefore, adequate directions for use cannot be written so that a layperson can use these drugs safely for their intended purposes.” Who knew you had to have directions to eat walnuts?

“The FDA’s language,” Faloon writes, “resembles that of an out-of-control police state where tyranny [reigns] over rationality.” He adds:

This kind of bureaucratic tyranny sends a strong signal to the food industry not to innovate in a way that informs the public about foods that protect against disease. While consumers increasingly reach for healthier dietary choices, the federal government wants to deny food companies the ability to convey findings from scientific studies about their products.

Walnuts aren’t the only food whose health benefits the FDA has tried to suppress. Producers of pomegranate juice and green tea, among others, have felt the bureaucrats’ wrath whenever they have suggested that their products are good for people.

Meanwhile, Faloon points out, foods that have little to no redeeming value are advertised endlessly, often with dubious health claims attached. For example, Frito-Lay is permitted to make all kinds of claims about its fat-laden, fried products, including that Lay’s potato chips are “heart healthy.” Faloon concludes that “the FDA obviously does not want the public to discover that they can reduce their risk of age-related disease by consuming healthy foods. They prefer consumers only learn about mass-marketed garbage foods that shorten life span by increasing degenerative disease risk.”

Faloon thinks he knows why this is the case. First, by stifling competition from makers of more healthful alternatives, junk food manufacturers, who he says “heavily lobb[y]” the federal government for favorable treatment, will rake in ever greater profits. Second, by making it less likely that Americans will consume healthful foods, big pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers stand to gain by selling more “expensive cardiac drugs, stents, and coronary bypass procedures” to those made ill by their diets.

But people are starting to fight back against the FDA’s tactics. “The makers of pomegranate juice, for example, have sued the FTC for censoring their First Amendment right to communicate scientific information to the public,” Faloon reports. Congress is also getting into the act with a bill, the Free Speech About Science Act (H.R. 1364), that, Faloon writes, “protects basic free speech rights, ends censorship of science, and enables the natural health products community to share peer-reviewed scientific findings with the public.”

That sounds like it was written by the people who talk to their inner bunnies but it wasn’t. Walnuts are being threatened by the FDA. Your granny’s fruitcake could become contraband. Not to mention your favorite ice cream toppings could be listed as a toxic threat. You could do hard time for that pecan pie.

I know, I know, that sounds nuts – if you’ll pardon the phrase – but it is the sanest thing the FDA’s done recently.

No, I didn’t write that wrong. They recently raided an elderberry plant and seized its wanton elderberry juice.

Until just now you’d never given a second thought to elderberry juice. Now you have to have some.

Wyldewood Cellars, a Kansas-based producer and distributor of elderberry juice, is the latest raid target of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which recently sent US marshals to the company’s winery in Mulvane to confiscate the “unapproved drug.” According to the rogue agency, Wyldewood had violated provisions in the US Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FFDCA) that restrict health claims for food items, warranting the sudden invasion.

According to Barry Grissom, US Attorney for Kansas, the FDA sent a warning letter to Wyldewood in 2006 to remove or modify certain health claims that it said were in violation of federal law, but the company did not comply. FDA officials claim that Wyldewood continued to make unapproved claims, and that seizing the product was the next step.

However, John Brewer, co-founder of Wyldewood, says that after receiving the initial FDA warning letter, his company hired a consultant familiar with FDA regulations to help his company reword their product descriptions. After making the appropriate changes, and clarifying that the elderberry products in question were supplements, Brewer says his company had done what it needed to in order to be in compliance.

“We haven’t heard anything from (the FDA) since,” he told reporters, noting that following the changes up until the raid, the FDA had ceased communicating with Wyldewood. “They’ve been in our facility multiple times. It’s like, ‘C’mon guys, we changed our label, we changed everything we thought we were supposed to do.’ And then they show up and do this. (Supplements) seems to be one of their hot buttons these days.”

This tactic, of course, has become all too common in recent years. A company receives a warning letter from the FDA, makes the appropriate changes, never hears anything further from the FDA, and out of nowhere gets raided. Such actions on behalf of the FDA are ultimately unwarranted and illegal, and the offended parties have every right to sue the agency for damages.

“You think you are doing things correctly, and there hasn’t been any word, and all of a sudden you get this,” said Brewer to The Kansas City Star.

To learn more about the legitimate health benefits of elderberry, visit: http://www.naturalnews.com/elderberry.html

While they were at it they also seized about 14% of the nation’s orange juice and the okayed giving dangerous drugs to feed animals.

Don’t you feel safer already?

My personal favorite move by the FDA is their legalizing drugs for asthmatics that cause more fatalities than asthma alone.

Before you get all Obama this or Obama that or even Bush this or Bush that, the FDA has been like this since around 1985. That was when President Reagan greatly expanded their scope. I believe that he did it with the best of intentions. Advances in science were far outpacing the government’s ability to keep up with them and regulation was painfully spotty, if it existed at all.

But, clearly, all that power has gone to their head. That would be the same head that is obviously housing the aforementioned talking bunnies. I do not blame the president for this mess but I wouldn’t mind if he took a moment out of his busy day to walk down the hall and bitch-slap a few of these fools and then make them fix this mess.

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Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, every Friday morning around 9:10!