By Eric Boehm / August 10, 2015 /
American businesses have been required to spend billions of dollars over the past few years to comply with federal regulations requiring calorie information on all menus.
Despite all that effort, Americans are still fat and getting fatter.
California, in 2008, became the first state to pass mandatory menu labeling laws. Like many nanny state ideas that begin on our left coast, other states began to follow the example. In 2010, as part of the Affordable Care Act, Congress made calorie labeling mandatory for all chain restaurants with at least 20 locations, though businesses were given until 2014 to comply with the new mandate.
HAVE YOU HAD YOUR 4,000 CALORIES TODAY? most people don’t really understand what a calorie actually is. For the record, it’s equal to 4.1814 joules – or the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius.
Health advocates and others who pushed for that provision’s inclusion in the ACA said it would help Americans to better understand what they are eating (and why we keep getting fatter).
But what if most Americans don’t care?
As FiveThirtyEight pointed out more than a year ago, people who dopay attention to calorie information tend to eat fewer calories.
Close Minded Professors Demanding That Their Students Keep An Open Mind.
Doubleplusungood "oppressive and hateful language" not allowed.
Professors at Washington State University are continuing higher education's fine Orwellian tradition of enforcing politically correct thought—or as one professor puts it, "keeping an open mind"—by threatening to punish students who write words they deem particularly "oppressive," including "illegal alien," "male," and "female," or not "deferring" to minority students.
Campus Reform's Peter Hasson reports that one WSU professor, Selena Lester Breikss, warns students in the syllabus for her "Women & Popular Culture" course that students could receive a filing grade for including anything she considers "oppressive and hateful language." The potential punishment Breikss outlines includes "removal from the class without attendance or participation points, failure of the assignment, and— in extreme cases— failure for the semester."
"Students will come to recognize how white privilege functions in everyday social structures and institutions," explains Breikss.
Like her colleague, Professor Rebecca Fowler warns students of her "Introduction to Comparative Ethnic Studies" class that if they will lose a point any time they use the word "illegal" to describe an immigrant; "undocumented," she makes clear, is the acceptable term. in their assigned writing.
Fowler also highlights the destructive nature of "white privilege" in her course, saying students will be taught to "recognize how white privilege functions in everyday social structures and institutions."
In an email to Campus Reform, Fowler explained "illegal alien" had "permeated dominant discourses" to such a degree that "our society has come to associate ALL unauthorized border crossings with those immigrants originating from countries south of our border." After noting that Asians also make up a "considerable portion of undocumented immigrants" in the country, Fowler decried the "socio-legal production of migrant illegality" which she says "systematically dehumanize[s] and exploit[s] these brown bodies for their labor."
Professor John Streamas likewise stresses the evils of white privilege, instructing students in his "Introduction to Multicultural Literature" that the only way students might expect to "do well" in the class is "by respecting shy and quiet classmates and by deferring to the experiences of people of color."
Hasson notes that Streamas was recently at the center of controversy when he called a student a "white shitbag" and called WSU "White Supremacist University."
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education Ari Cohn noted to Campus Reform the blatant self-contradiction of many of the professors' language censorship, citing one particular thought-control WSU syllabus which urges students to "Keep an open mind."
Source: Truth Revolt.
