Quick Hitts

The New York Legislature is considering a bill that would make it a criminal offense for restaurant chefs to add salt to food. Yes, you read that right.  Once again, the absurdity of real life makes satire obsolete.
This is exactly what happens when you let the nanny camel get its nose in the tent.
It started, [...]

I’ve watched a few CPAC speeches, and they reminded me of townhall.com: It was a combination of brilliant thinkers and mouth-breathing wing-nuts.
It was encouraging to see they invited a gay rights group, and even more encouraging when a wing-nut who condemned them for it was booed off the stage. But it would be better [...]

Throughout his campaign LMO promised he wouldn’t raise taxes on anyone making less than $250k/year.  The *first* thing he did in office was raise the tax on roll your own tobacco by an astounding 2,159%.  It’s a pretty safe bet RYO smokers are making a *bit* less than a quarter million bucks a year. (BTW, [...]

Back in 1978 F. Paul Wilson wrote Lippidleggin’, a short story about a farmer bootlegging butter and eggs, which had been banned to improve everyone’s health.  I’m guessing that back then most people thought it was entertaining, but silly.
Back in 2007, with the author’s permission, I did a reading of the story for an episode [...]

Just in time for Christmas, the British Medical Journal is featuring an article blaming Santa for obesity, speeding, drunk driving, extreme sports, smoking and reckless behavior.
Dr Nathan “Grinch” Grills wants to rework Santa into a politically correct image, right down to wearing a helmet and seat belt.
Using a variation of the nannies second favorite chant [...]

I recently received a link to the latest Nicotine Nazi handbook (PDF).  It provides detailed, step by step plan these spineless goobers can use to coerce Big Brother into to imposing their will on business owners.
I usually try to be witty and pithy in these columns, working in the clever metaphor or silly pun, but [...]

If you’re attacked in the UK and defend yourself with a gun you will spend more time in jail than your attacker.  As a result both criminals and decent people are arming themselves with the next best thing – knives.
Britain is even more of a nanny state than the US, so it’s not surprising that [...]

Lefties get very annoyed when their opponents refer to Universal Health Care as Socialized Medicine.  This is because it is socialized medicine and the word “socialism” carries a well deserved stigma.
In such discussions I like to ask the question: “Do you really want your health care to have the safety of Amtrack, the budgeting skills [...]

This just in – using thick toilet paper is worse than driving a hummer or living in a huge house.  According to this article:
Future generations are going to look at the way we make toilet paper as one of the greatest excesses of our age.
Yeah, no question.  When examining all the troubles and excess of [...]

We’ve seen kids kicked out of school for having a gun charm on a charm bracelet, for having a tiny bat that fell off a baseball trophy in their car, for having a butter knife in the trunk of their car, and for drawing pictures of guns in school.  But that’s not going far enough, [...]

For decades congress has been demanding that Detroit produce politically correct cars that no one wants.  But now Big Brother has the Big Three by the short and curlies, which gives them a dangerous amount of pull.  Be prepared for small, ugly, dangerous and uncomfortable vehicles that will solve the problem of automobile pollution becuase [...]

The war on smokers proves the axiom “The first casualty of war is the truth.” After the real dangers of primary smoking were publicized a lot of smokers quit, but not enough to satisfy the nicotine nannies, who concocted a new danger: second hand smoke.
Smartenized® people know that SHS is the biggest scam [...]

Urologists the UK are warning parents that young boys can’t be trusted to pee on their own.  “Crush Injuries” from falling toilet seats are on the rise.
They’re warning against wooden and ceramic toilet seats, and those stainless steal ones with the sharpened, perforated edges on the front are right out.  They’re advising that “soft fall” [...]

The Smoker’s Club has a great page that outlines exactly how nicotine nannies work. Check it out.

When Elvis was alive there were only a few professional Elvis impersonators. A few years after his death there were hundreds, then thousands. The old joke was that if the trend continued, by the turn of the century we would all be Elvis.
Old jokes never die. They often become reborn as [...]

The idea of letting your kids run around the neighborhood and be kids has fallen out of fashion. Parents are expected to helicopter over their larvae every waking minute. They’re expected to have them participate in games where no one keeps score and everyone gets a trophy.
Those kids are now coming [...]

Visitors to The Facts send a lot of e-mail. Half of the writers love the site and say thanks, the other half hates it, hates smokers, hates freedom of choice, and especially, hates me.
The fan mail is pretty varied. Some people like the stats pages, some like the study analysis, some like the list [...]

Dr. Shepard was one of the co-authors of the infamous Helena Study. The study made an astonishing claim: That in the six months Helena MT had a smoking ban in place heart attacks dropped by 60%. In order to fully appreciate this entry, I suggest you first read the details of the [...]

MADD is demanding that Grand Theft Auto be giving the rating of Adults Only because players can drive drunk in the game. Citing their tiresome ass numbers, they proceed to give us their standard lecture, and then “suggest” that Rockstar remove the game from the market.
Rockstar has spent an estimated $100 million developing the [...]

North Carolina police staged a military style raid to protect the pubic from….a poker game.
After wasting taxpayers’ money with a ten month investigation, they burst into a home poker game and arrested 27 people, including an assistant prosecutor.  They confiscated all the money they could find, including, according to one report, cash that people had [...]