Your Virgin Olive Oil is a Slut: Mislabeling Meat, Fish, Honey, Olive Oil, Wasabi and Kobe Beef

Posted on February 20, 2013 by Les Jones

So in Europe they’re discovering grocery store goods and cafeteria meals containing horsemeat instead of beef. Hey, that’s why school kids call it mystery meat, amirite? But horsemeat for meat isn’t the only thing being adulterated. It’s just the most disgusting thing.

Virtually all Kobe beef and wasabi in the United States are mislabeled. So is most parmesan cheese. The EVOO that Rachel Ray tells you to choose when buying olive oil almost certainly isn’t even a regular virgin. In fact, it’s probably pretty skanky:

With Italian extra-virgin olive oil in high demand with concomitant high prices, adulterated olive oil has become the biggest source of agricultural fraud problems in the European Union.[6] While less than 10% of world olive oil production meets the criteria for labeling as extra-virgin, it has been estimated that up to 50% of retail oil is labeled “extra-virgin”.[7] Some oil labeled “extra-virgin” is diluted with cheaper olive oils or other vegetable oils. In some cases, lampante, or “lamp oil,” which is made from spoiled olives fallen from trees, is used, even though it can’t legally be sold as food. One fraud ring is accused of coloring low-grade soy oil and canola oil with industrial chlorophyll, and flavoring it with beta-carotene.[6]

Then there’s honey-laundering – selling adulterated and sometimes contaminated honey imported from China with the DNA fingerprints sanded off:

It has been reported that about 75% of all honey in stores are labeled “ultra-filtrated”.   This process removes all impurities such as pollen and wax.   Most generic brands of honey are usually ultra-filtrated.  And this is our first tip.  Stay away from honey that is labeled ultra-filtrated.   Why?

Pollen, removed by the ultra-filtration process, is the only way to determine  the source of the honey.  So when the pollen is removed, it can be from the US, China or somewhere else.  No one knows. Some countries, especially China, have been known to smuggle honey into the United States.  What’s wrong with this smuggled honey from China?  This honey is tainted by illegal antibiotics and heavy metals.  Plus, some dishonest companies add corn syrup or some other type of sweetener to honey to increase the quantity.

And calling tuna the chicken of the sea was just the beginning of fish being mislabeled:

Tilapia for red snapper; catfish for grouper; oil fish standing in for cod; farm-raised shrimp and salmon in place of wild caught. These are just some of the common swaps that Will Gergits says his company, Therion International, sees when it conducts simple, inexpensive DNA testing on fish.

“It’s a real problem,” Gergits said. “We see substitution quite frequently. It makes me angry.”

A new report released this week says recent studies have found that seafood may be mislabeled as often as 25 percent to 70 percent of the time. According to Food and Drug Administration port inspections, a third of seafood sold in the U.S. is mislabeled as one type when it’s actually something else, even something cheaper.

As always, Cracked.com was there first.

Posted in Food & Drink | Tagged | 4 Comments

5 Depressing Realities Behind Popular Reality TV Shows

Posted on February 19, 2013 by Les Jones

At Cracked. The saddest one was that so many people on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition wind up losing their new homes:

One family, which had a new home specifically designed to help their developmentally challenged son, was forced to put the house on the market after just a little over a year because they simply couldn’t afford what it cost in both time and money to maintain a palatial four-bedroom estate while trying to raise three children, one of whom has special needs. That’s like Santa Claus bringing a lonely kid an awesome robot friend who, by the way, must be fueled by human blood.

Another couple fell behind on the $405,000 loan they had to take out just to keep their utilities connected in the million-dollar mansion built for them by the show (which inexplicably included a carousel and a movie theater, because those are things that a young husband and wife need to turn their luck around) and were forced to sell the house and auction off most of its contents.

I guess that’s why Habitat for Humanity doesn’t put carousels and movie theaters in the homes they build.

Another depressing reality: most of the restaurants on Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares go out of business. I find that a little sad. I don’t like seeing small businesses fail. Then again, it’s hard to feel too sad about a cockroach-infested restaurant going under.

P.S. I always wondered about whether the publicity really helped the businesses. If I find out that a restaurant had cockroaches and dead rats in the kitchen I wouldn’t eat there even after they cleaned it up. If they let it get that bad once, they’ll do it again.

Posted in A&E | Tagged | 1 Comment

So that’s why there was all that footage of the surprise Russian meteor

Posted on February 17, 2013 by Les Jones

Wired – Why Almost Everyone in Russia Has a Dash Cam:

The sheer size of the country, combined with lax — and often corrupt — law enforcement, and a legal system that rarely favors first-hand accounts of traffic collisions has made dash cams all but a requirement for motorists.

“You can get into your car without your pants on, but never get into a car without a dash cam,” Aleksei Dozorov, a motorists’ rights activist in Russia told Radio Free Europe last year.

Posted in Nifty, Photography | 2 Comments

Central Banks Buy Most Gold Since 1964

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Les Jones

But remember, gold is a barbarous relic with no function in the modern world of finance:

Worldwide gold demand in 2012 was another record high of $236.4 billion in the World Gold Council’s latest report. This was up 6% in value terms in the fourth quarter to $66.2 billion, the highest fourth quarter on record. Global gold demand in the fourth quarter of 2012 was up 4% to 1,195.9 tonnes.

Central bank buying for 2012 rose by 17% over 2011 to some 534.6 tonnes. As far as central bank gold buying, this was the highest level since 1964. Central bank purchases stood at 145 tonnes in the fourth quarter. That is up 9% from the fourth quarter of 2011, and the eighth consecutive quarter in which central banks were net purchasers of gold.

Posted in Economics | Tagged | Comments Off

Quote of the Day

Posted on February 14, 2013 by Les Jones

“Preposterous Keynesian fallacy at work. It presupposes that money allocated to some project via the political process is more likely to create a ‘multiplier’ than market driven uses of that money… and it assumes that the money taken by the state by force would not have been invested in something more worthwhile in aggregate if the decisions were left to its original owners before it was confiscated by the state.”
–  Perry De Havilland

Posted in Economics, Political Survival Kit, Quotes | Comments Off

65.4 Million Gun Purchases Since Obama Took Office, 91% More Than Bush’s First-Term Total

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Les Jones

Hey, give Obama credit where credit’s due. Even if he doesn’t want it.

And the gods of irony laughed and laughed.

Posted in Guns | 1 Comment

Justified Tuesday – Gangstagrass

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Les Jones

Long Hard Times to Come (used as Justified’s theme):

I’m Gonna Put You Down:

Nobody Gonna Miss Me:

Long Hard Times to Come lyrics

Continue reading →

Posted in A&E | Tagged , , | Comments Off

“Lenses: Don’t Collect the Whole Set”

Posted on February 11, 2013 by Les Jones

LensRental.com Blog – Lenses: Don’t Collect the Whole Set. Good stuff.

Here’s what I’ll add.

Buy one or two consumer zoom lenses and no more
By consumer zoom I mean a zoom lens with a variable aperture and a maximum aperture of F5.6 at the long end. If your camera came bundled with a zoom it probably falls into this category. Pro zooms are typically a constant F2.8 or F4 (smaller numbers are better). You need a zoom or two to take care of day to day stuff. Birthday parties, vacation shots, that sort of thing. I think of my 18-105mm as the family lens.

Consumer zooms are limited because of their small aperture and moderate picture quality, which isn’t as good as prime lenses or pro zooms. Some people keep buying them and then wonder why their picture quality never improves. Once you get a couple of consumer lenses you need to invest in primes, pro zooms, or some other aspect of photography.

Buy a prime lens in a useful focal length
A prime lens doesn’t zoom. You zoom with your feet, walking closer or farther away. That can be a disadvantage, though lots of people find that a prime lens improves their skills. They learn to compose instead of just turning a zoom ring. The reasons you’d give up the convenience of a zoom are image quality, small size, light weight, ruggedness, and big apertures.

The wider aperture is a big selling point. Consumer zooms are typically F5.6. Even slow primes are two stops faster at F2.8. It isn’t uncommon for even affordable primes to be as fast as 2.0 or 1.4, which gives another stop or stop of light.

That big aperture will let you get pictures in conditions that are too dark for an F5.6 zoom, It let you shoot at a much faster shutter speed, which helps freeze motion and get sharp pictures. It also lets you set a shallow depth of field when you want. Shallow DoF lets you get artsy-looking photos or throw the background out of focus to isolate the subject, turning a snapshot into something greater.

Focal lengths of 35mm to 60mm (in 35mm equivalent) are a good bet. Those are useful focal lengths that you’re probably using a lot now. They’re also at a very human scale – for people pictures you can zoom with your feet by moving forward or backwards a few steps. Primes in that focal range can be had for very little money (in DSLR terms, at least). Nikon and Canon make primes in this range for $100 to $300 that make much better pictures than consumer zooms that cost three or four times as much.

Editing software
Editing software is a way better bang for your buck than hardware. Taking the picture is part of the process. Post-processing is the other part. If you aren’t doing any editing of your photos at all, then any editing software (even free stuff) will massively improve your photos. At some point you’ll need something better than the software that came with your camera or free tools like Google’s Picasa (which I like and still use often for everyday photos).

Adobe Photoshop is the best known image editor. It has a million features, though that means the interface isn’t optimized for photography. Photoshop is great for getting an image to look its absolute best, but it isn’t oriented towards quickly reviewing and processing a large number of images. Intuitive it ain’t – you’ll need to take classes (Lynda.com is supposed to have good ones online) or do some serious reading to get the full use out of it. I use it at work, but can’t justify the $500 pricetag for my home PC. There’s a cheaper version called Photoshop Elements for $75 that’s supposed to have many of the same features, but I haven’t tried it.

A few years ago I finally switched to Adobe Lightroom and took a class to learn how to use it. Lightroom is sort of a cross between Picasa in terms of workflow and Photoshop in terms of photographic tools and quality. I still use Picasa for routine photos. If I want them to really look good I edit them in Lightroom. It was $200 when I bought it, but Adobe has cut the price to $115.

Buy a flash
Built-in camera flashes are weak. You can get much more light out of a hotshoe flashes, AKA speedlights or strobes or flash guns. I use a hotshoe flash all the time and not just for indoors or at night. Even in daylight you need a flash when you get under a tree or on the north side of a building. Even in full sun the flash helps fill in shadows or expose the subject when the background is bright. For walking around I carry a Nikon SB400. The Canon equivalent is the 270EX.

The other immediate benefit of a hotshoe flash is being able to bounce. The built-in flash tends to make ugly, deer-in-the headlights pictures where the subject is too bright and the background is too dark. Almost any hotshoe flash will let you aim the head up and bounce the light off the ceiling, which instantly makes flash photos look a hundred times better. The subject will be lit softly and the area around them will be lit up evenly.

If you want to go beyond bouncing, a flash will let you get into off-camera lighting with lightstands, umbrellas, and lightboxes. If that’s what you want to do, get at least a medium-priced flash like the Canon 430EX or Nikon SB700. The flash heads on those bounce and swivel, they have manual controls that are easier to adjust, and they have features that make them more useful off-camera.

Buy a tripod, maybe
You may find a tripod useful or not, depending on what kind of photography you do. I’m still using the cheapy $70 tripod I bought years ago because I just don’t use a tripod that often. It’s more useful if you do landscape, long exposure, or macro photography, or carefully posed portraits where you want sharp images.

I really started using the tripod when I started shooting video. You may not be able to tell whether a photograph was taken with a tripod, but there’s a night and day difference between a steady tripod video and a jumpy handheld video.

Get training
People think that because they can press the shutter release and get a photo that they don’t need classes to learn how to use a DSLR. You can buy a guitar, but if you don’t know how to play it you’re a guitar owner and not a guitarist. Same thing with photography. Find classes, join a club, read books, watch YouTube videos, and read blogs. Digital Photography School has free how-tos and inspirational idea every day.

Posted in Photography | 3 Comments

Russia Biggest Gold Buyer in Past Decade, China #2

Posted on February 10, 2013 by Les Jones

Not only has Putin made Russia the world’s largest oil producer, he’s also made it the biggest gold buyer. His central bank has added 570 metric tons of the metal in the past decade, a quarter more than runner-up China, according to IMF data compiled by Bloomberg. The added gold is also almost triple the weight of the Statue of Liberty.

“The more gold a country has, the more sovereignty it will have if there’s a cataclysm with the dollar, the euro, the pound or any other reserve currency,” Evgeny Fedorov, a lawmaker for Putin’s United Russia party in the lower house of parliament, said in a telephone interview in Moscow.

In 1998, the year Russia defaulted on $40 billion of domestic debt, it took as many as 28 barrels of crude to buy an ounce of gold, Bloomberg data show. That ratio tumbled to 11.5 by the time Putin first came to power a year later and in 2005, after it touched 6.5 — less than half what it is now — the president told the central bank to buy.

Posted in Economics | Tagged | Comments Off

Floyd Corkins Inspired to Murder by SPLC “Hate Map”

Posted on February 8, 2013 by Les Jones

SPLC: Southern Poverty Law Center, or Sending People to Liquidate Conservatives?

As I noted yesterday, Floyd Corkins, the guy who planned to kill a bunch of people at the Family Research Council offices in Washington, DC and then rub Chick-fil-A sandwiches in their faces as they died, pleaded guilty yesterday. And he admitted that he picked the FRC and several other targets based on a “Hate Map” at the Southern Poverty Law Center website:

If this sounds familiar to you, it’s exactly what the left and the media (PTR) claimed was the cause behind Jared Lee Loughner’s shooting spree in Arizona two years ago, in which he killed six people and severely wounded Gabby Giffords. Within hours, our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters seized upon a map from Sarah Palin’s website as the cause.

According to leftist logic, this map made Jared Loughner shoot a bunch of people, whether he ever saw it or not. It didn’t matter whether he saw it. It didn’t matter that blaming Palin for it made no sense. It didn’t matter that it was insane. It felt right. So they went with it.

Now we have another maniac and another map. Except this time, the maniac is pointing directly at that map and saying, “That’s why I picked those people.” But since the targets of his thwarted rampage don’t hold the correct opinions, they don’t count.

Posted in Media Behaving Badly | Comments Off

Word of the Day – Sleeze

Posted on February 8, 2013 by Les Jones

Sleeze: to sneeze properly (into one’s sleeve) when a tissue isn’t handy. (Variation: sneeve.)

Previous WOTD – Justified Tuesday – What’s the Badger Game Lindsey Talked About?

Posted in Word of the Day | Comments Off

Survey: Public Confused About What Assault Weapons Really Are

Posted on February 7, 2013 by Les Jones

Reason – What’s an Assault Weapon?

A Reason-Rupe Public Opinion Survey conducted this month suggests such misconceptions are common. After asking the 1,000 respondents if they thought people should be “prohibited from owning assault weapons,” the survey (which is sponsored by my employer, the Reason Foundation) asked half of the sample to “describe an assault weapon.” The answers are illuminating.

About two-thirds of the respondents described “assault weapons” as guns that fire rapidly, guns that can fire a large number of rounds without reloading, guns with a lot of “power,” or guns used by the military. More than a quarter described them as “machine guns,” “automatics,” or the equivalent (e.g., “multiple rounds with just one pull of the trigger”).

That sounds right. I’ve had some discussions with friends on Facebook recently and several of them thought that the so-called assault rifles being talked about are full auto.

When debating an assault weapons ban, it’s worth mentioning that assault weapons being discussed are semi-automatic, not fully automatic. They fire one shot per trigger pull.

Restrictions on full auto weapons

  • Full auto weapons have been heavily regulated since the National Firearms Act of 1934. You could still buy them, but there was a $200 tax stamp and lots of paperwork to buy and register them.
  • The National Firearms Act of 1968 prohibited the import of fully automatic weapons for civilian ownership.
  • In 1986 the Hughes Amendment closed the registry for fully automatic weapons. can still transfer pre-86 guns, but you can’t couldn’t order new ones from the factory.
  • Due to supply and demand the price of pre-1986 full auto weapons has gone through the roof. A cheap one is $6,000. More desirable ones like a full auto M16 are two are three times that or more.
  • Transferring a full auto – whether it’s being sold or given away, e.g., from a parent to child – requires paying the $200 transfer tax and processing ATF paperwork through a licensed gun dealer.
  • The person receiving the gun must submit their fingerprints and a photograph.
  • The ATF does an extensive background check on the applicant.
  • Paperwork processing by the ATF takes two or three months and sometimes more.
  • Not all gun dealers can do the transfer paperwork. They must be a Class III dealer.
  • Full auto weapons can’t be transported to another state without prior approval from the ATF.
  • About a dozen states prohibit the ownership of fully automatic weapons.
  • Last I heard, no legally-registered fully automatic weapon has ever been used to commit a crime.

Posted in Guns | 4 Comments

U.S. Only Country That Spends More on Prisons Than Policing

Posted on February 7, 2013 by Les Jones

NY Times – Prison Population Can Shrink When Police Crowd Streets:

“The United States today is the only country I know of that spends more on prisons than police,” said Lawrence W. Sherman, an American criminologist on the faculties of the University of Maryland and Cambridge University in Britain. “In England and Wales, the spending on police is twice as high as on corrections. In Australia it’s more than three times higher. In Japan it’s seven times higher. Only in the United States is it lower, and only in our recent history.”

Before the era of mass incarceration began in the 1980s, local policing accounted for more than 40 percent of spending for criminal justice, while 25 percent went to prisons and parole programs. But since 1990, nearly 35 percent has gone to the prison system, while the portion of criminal justice spending for local policing has fallen to slightly more than 30 percent.

Posted in Politics | Comments Off

The Top 3 Cracked Articles About Computer Security

Posted on February 7, 2013 by Les Jones

5 Clues Hidden in Computer Files That Can Get You Busted

6 Real Cyber Attacks Straight Out of a Bad Hacker Movie

5 Computer Hacks from Movies You Won’t Believe Are Possible

Posted in Tech | Tagged | Comments Off

Professor Selman A. Waksman, Bullshit Artist

Posted on February 6, 2013 by Les Jones

Or, how to cheat your pupil for fame and fortune.

NY Times – Notebooks Shed Light on an Antibiotic’s Contested Discovery:

As word of the discovery spread, reporters flocked to Rutgers to record the amazing event. But in telling and retelling the story, Dr. Waksman slowly began to drop Dr. Schatz’s name and claim sole credit. He also arranged with Rutgers to receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties from the patent that he and Dr. Schatz were awarded; Dr. Schatz received nothing.

Dr. Schatz became aware of the deal when Dr. Waksman started sending him $500 checks — $1,500 altogether — that he said came from funds he had been receiving for the sales of streptomycin. Dr. Schatz wanted to know more, but the professor wouldn’t tell him.

So he turned to an uncle, who found a sharp Newark lawyer willing to take on his nephew’s case. In 1950, Dr. Schatz, who had by then earned his Ph.D., sued Dr. Waksman and Rutgers, and after a year of legal back-and-forth, the professor and the university agreed to a settlement that recognized Dr. Schatz as “co-discoverer” of streptomycin and gave him a share of the royalties.

But the scientific establishment sided with Dr. Waksman, scolding Dr. Schatz for having the effrontery to challenge his professor. And two years later Dr. Waksman alone was awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery. Dr. Schatz protested, but the Nobel committee ruled that he was a mere lab assistant working under an eminent scientist. Dr. Schatz disappeared into academic obscurity and died with the full story still untold.

Some people want to pretend that scientists are dispassionately objective and don’t care about money, position, or seeing their name in print, but scientists are human just like everybody else.

Posted in Science | Tagged | 1 Comment