Fast-Food Moratorium in South L.A. (Part 2)

For those of you just joining, I highly recommend a visit to Part 1 of this article just to catch up: Fast-Food Moratorium in South L.A. (Part 1)

In this piece, I want to break down the law's language in traditional George Carlin format, pointing out that this law pretty much would ban ALL new restaurants and not just fast-food restaurants - except for a few choice words and I'll explain how any fast-food franchise can easily duck under the law because of them.

Just as a reminder, here what the law considers to be fast-food restaurants:

"any establishment which dispenses food for consumption on or off the premises, and which has the following characteristics: a limited menu, items prepared in advance or prepared or heated quickly, no table orders and food served in disposable wrapping or containers."

Well, let's start at the beginning...

"which dispenses food for consumption on or off the premises": Those are the only two places you CAN consume food! AT the place and NOT AT the place! I mean ANY food location nowadays, no matter how fancy and sit-down or greasy and take-it-and-leave, gives you the option to place an order for take-out. They understand you might not have the time to eat it THERE. Or you may just prefer to eat it NOT THERE, like at HOME. Also, you might as well just say "which dispenses food" - since food is generally dispensed for consumption. That's the general idea of food - that you consume it. I suppose this means a business that dispenses food for you to WEAR would be allowed to move in? So far, this ban applies to ALL FOOD BUSINESSES (except the food-as-clothing industry).

"and which has the following characteristics: a limited menu": ALL MENUS ARE LIMITED! You're not allowed to walk into a Burger King or a P.F. Chang's or a Fogo De Chao and order up a yak salad with ostrich chutney garnish. All menus are finite, limited by the abilities of the chef, the availability of ingredients, and the personal desire of the restaurant. They don't want to include endangered animals for you to eat - that's their prerogative. The McDonald's fry cook isn't skilled enough to POACH your eggs that go on your McMuffin - tough luck, pal. It's illegal to obtain and cook human flesh for consumption - don't expect to see the phone book as an addendum to your table's menu. So far, this ban still applies to ALL FOOD BUSINESSES (except for hypothetical hypno-restaurants that can put patrons in hypnotic trances and convince them they've eaten anything on an unlimited menu while serving them Kraft Mac & Cheese).

"items prepared in advance": Well of course they're prepared in advance - when did you plan on preparing it? In the guy's stomach? All restaurants have to prepare food before they serve it to you. If you wanted to add the stipulation "prepared in advance of ordering", there's still prep work. Any good restaurant has to save time by pre-assembling items, or even marinating meats in anticipation that someone will order it that night, or using bread that has already been baked or pre-mixed dough even. I'm incredibly skeptical that there exists a single restaurant that can make every item on its menu FROM SCRATCH and not until the order is placed and it can still be served fast enough that the customer doesn't leave, possibly mumbling, "if I wanted incredibly slow food made from scratch, I'd be at home with my wife instead of at a fancy restaurant with my mistress..." Fact of the matter is, this ban still applies to ALL FOOD BUSINESSES (unless all they do is raw, uncooked, unprocessed food, and at that point you might as well be foraging in the woods for sustenance and saving yourself $20 per person).

"prepared or heated quickly": I don't think there's much to say about this. If you're not preparing or heating your food at a decent pace, you shouldn't qualify as a business. It's called "the danger zone" and it's a temperature range at which bacteria can grow and multiply and infect your food. The longer food goes from storage to preparation to your mouth, the more likely you are to get sick and sue for food poisoning. ALL FOOD BUSINESSES know that and do those things in a timely fashion. Also, "quickly" is too subjective of a term - any cooking that takes shorter time to cook than "leaving it in the sun, possibly on a metal pan" can be deemed to have been cooked "quickly" by the Amish. This ban still applies to ALL FOOD BUSINESSES (except Brother Jebediah's Sun-Cooked Meat Emporium)

Now, we finally come to "no table orders and food served in disposable wrapping or containers", which technically seem to separate the actual restaurants from the "fast-food joints" that the law is trying to stop from opening new locations. But don't worry, McDonald's and Burger Kings, they're both easy to step around.

"no table orders": Okay, so you have to be able to take orders at a table in order to qualify as a true "restaurant"? Note that the law doesn't even say anyone has to be SITTING at a table. The table area is just the place where all orders have to be taken in order to qualify. Rather, at least ONE order has to be taken from a table to simply NOT fall into the category of "no table orders". So how do you side-step this one?

Put a table over the counters. It doesn't matter if there's one long table placed over the entire counter, or a cheap IKEA table draped right on top of each counter segment with the cash register placed on top and your McJob cashier/waitstaff standing at the "table". You can even place a small table in front of the drive-thru speaker and one in front of the pay window and pick-up window. "Thank you, please drive to the next TABLE." Voila - you're taking table orders and you can move right in with a new location!

"food served in disposable wrapping or containers": Okay, I have to start off with the obvious jab that everything used to serve food is disposable (in the definition that everything is "able to be disposed of"). A restaurant can give you your burger on a plate, but a plate is just as disposable as a paper lining you'd find wrapped around a McDonald's cheeseburger. For the sake of argument, I will admit that one definition of "disposable" means "INTENDED to be disposed of". I guess McDonald's could just print pictures on all wrappers and containers and call them "collectible" and you can complete the set - that would insinuate that they should NOT be disposed of, but rather collected for some reason. You'd think that the real clencher here is that McDonald's food is wrapped or put into containers (while a restaurant will not wrap food it's serving to you), which means it's just fast-food that this clause affects. To be fair, any legit restaurant will let you place a to-go order and all of that food will be in disposable wrapping or containers! It doesn't say that food is ONLY served in disposable wrapping/containers, right? Which means that any restaurant willing to place a to-go order or let you take food home in a doggy-bag is going to be banned. Once more, this clause of the ban would apply to ALL FOOD BUSINESSES (except those snooty enough to deny you eating their food anywhere other than their restaurant).

So really, all it comes down to is whether or not you'll ever take a food order from a table. All other pieces of this "law" boil down to no food businesses at all being allowed to set up shop in South L.A. (other than those wacky/insane exceptions). Any fast-food place would be able to open up shop as long as they stick a table somewhere and let someone order from it, as I've suggested above. Frankly, the law suggests that you must hit ALL of those marks to qualify not being able to open a new location - which means that once you miss the mark on ANY (like taking orders from a table), you've got free reign in South L.A.!

Take that, Los Angeles City Council! Your law is useless and a waste of taxpayer money for all the debate and insanity that must have transpired before you foolishly signed this moratorium into effect.

Don't you agree? Have I missed anything? Can you understand how each piece of this law is vague and moronic? Was my homage to George Carlin acceptable?

Please Digg this article and join me in mocking the L.A. City Council!

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Fast-Food Moratorium in South L.A. (Part 1)

If you were to ask me to provide an honest answer regarding the question of our youth (and our populous in general) getting obese - I'd completely agree. The data doesn't lie, and neither do my eyeballs. People are getting fatter - and more people are getting fat. I would never, though, say it was an "epidemic", since that's supposed to be a word meaning a rapidly-spreading disease. Despite some crappy article I read once about how if you have several obese friends then you're more likely to become obese, weight problems are not a disease (social or otherwise). You can't "catch obesity" - not even from toilet seats.

But it's our right to be fat.

It's our freedom of choice to choose sedentary lifestyles or picking up a bucket of KFC instead of lifting weights or even ordering too much healthy food which in turn isn't healthy. You can't blame the gyms for being too expensive (though they are expensive indeed). You can't blame the video game industry for getting you addicted to sitting and button-mashing (thanks to DDR and WiiFit "games"). You can't blame the food places for letting you order too much (I mourn the loss of the "Supersize"). You can't blame the fast food industry for "being there" (unless you're a moron).

So the Los Angeles City Council must therefore be a bunch of morons.

They voted unanimously to approve a law banning new fast-food restaurants from opening in South Los Angeles for at least a year.

Why in the name of all that is good and holy and deep-fried would they do such an idiotic thing?

Because 30% of the kids in South L.A. are obese, compared to the L.A. average of 25% of obesity in children.

That's it. A 5% difference - one extra kid out of twenty happens to be obese in South Los Angeles, so let's ban all new fast-food locations from opening. That sixth kid to tip the scales in every 20-child South L.A. classroom best get ready for an ass-kicking from the other five obese kids for crushing their dream of a new place to gorge on greasy delights! Oh, and by the way, THIS DOES NOTHING! At best, you're forcing people to waddle a little further to get their fix rather than letting a closer location get built. At worst, you're raping the sanctity of the free market. This little charade doesn't change the goddamned MARKET OPPORTUNITY!

Do you know why fast-food locations are doing well in that area and more want to open up? Because that's what the market demands. We just had a Dunkin Donuts / Baskin Robbins open in our building a month ago - even though one exists less than one block southeast from our building. And a few weeks ago, yet another one opened a block northeast of our building. Do you know WHY they're opening up three Dunkin Donuts locations within a block of each other?

BECAUSE THEY CAN. BECAUSE THEY STILL MAKE MONEY. BECAUSE PEOPLE WANT MORE LOCATIONS TO GET CHEAP DONUTS AND COFFEE.

I would never expect our city to decide "the downtown area is overcaffeinated and obese and caffeine is a drug and donuts are fattening, so let's ban new donut/coffee locations so that other businesses can move in." Okay, Chicago is the Nanny City, so I might expect it - but it's still a ridiculous idea. If the people wanted a new sit-down food location with healthy choices, then one of those businesses would move in and would prosper. FORCING one of those to open up INSTEAD of what the market wants will result in poor sales and the inevitable closing and moving out of that business. In my neighborhood, we mostly have greasy spoons and take-out Chinese and Mexican places. And some Italian-esque fancy/expensive bistro tried opening up. And nobody came. So they've closed. Twice. Maybe if another burger joint moved in there, business would be booming for them. It's called the FREE MARKET.

Councilwoman Jan Perry, who has pushed for a moratorium for six years, said the initiative would give the city time to craft measures to lure sit-down restaurants serving healthier food to a part of the city that desperately wants more of them.

"I believe this is a victory for the people of South and southeast Los Angeles, for them to have greater food options," she said.

You moron! If that part of the city "desperately" wanted more sit-down healthy restaurants, then one would be opening in one of the available spaces. You can't just BAN certain types of businesses from renting that space just because you're "holding out" for one you like. If a business moves in and you don't like it and don't want it, you don't go. And if enough people do that, it goes out of business and closes and some other business can try it out. And if NOT enough people refuse to go - that means that people DO want that service/product and YOU'RE the idiot for thinking that YOUR opinion represents your entire area's opinion.

That's how it's supposed to work - and you shouldn't be allowed to pass an idiotic law to tell people what they supposedly want but obviously don't.

The law defines fast-food restaurants as "any establishment which dispenses food for consumption on or off the premises, and which has the following characteristics: a limited menu, items prepared in advance or prepared or heated quickly, no table orders and food served in disposable wrapping or containers."

My full rant on this law's language will be found in Part 2... In traditional George Carlin format...

Please Digg this article and join the debate regarding this bill!

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Plastic Bag Bans

This has got to be one of the most horrid trends contributing to the combined laziness and incompetent nature of our current legal system: a ban on plastic bags. That's right, ever since Hippie Central (AKA San Francisco) decided in 2007 to place a ban on the use of plastic bags by supermarkets and chain pharmacies, other locations have been balancing their brains between the notion that it might be an environmentally-friendly idea and the warnings of sane people that it's a moronic idea and following suit would be sheer lunacy.

This week, the Los Angeles City Council teetered over the precipice of lunacy and has voted to ban all plastic bags in the city's supermarkets and stores by 2010.

I'll start this off by actually agreeing that some of the bleeding-heart liberals almost have a valid point when they talk about the evils of the plastic bags. They normally take between 100 and 1,000 years to biodegrade. (More on that later.) And yes, they tend to get caught in trees because of their lightweight nature and they wind up in streams and such and marine animals can eat them and die. While it's easy to say that "the kid who swallows too many marbles shouldn't grow up to have kids of his own" - I'll agree that it's a stretch to apply that logic to the turtles. I don't know how easy it is for a turtle to tell the difference between a fish and a freakin' plastic bag, but let's just pretend that somehow they look the same and it's not very nice to be killing off those poor confused sea creatures. And perhaps we use too many of them - we produce an estimated 500 billion of them a year, worldwide.

Okay, back to calling San Francisco and Los Angeles a bunch of idiots for imposing such ridiculous laws.

First of all, plastic bags were what we'd like to call a scientific and technological breakthrough. The ability to mass-produce a strong yet lightweight product that allows consumers to carry their items while also letting producers/manufacturers package their items was a proud day, in my opinion. Paper bags are often ineffective and unreliable, not to mention bulky and THEY CUT DOWN TREES. That was like one of the best reasons to make an alternative to paper bags in the first place! Doesn't anyone recall that little tree-hugging mantra? I mean there's no reason in arguing over the plastic bags that don't decompose fast enough to create mulch so new trees can grow and prosper is the alternative is just destroying the trees in the first place, right? The only alternative alternative is reusable material bags, which are costly, even bulkier, and require too much forethought to be effective. The likelihood of someone saying "it's time to make a grocery run - I'd better collect up my reusable bags so that I may use them once more at the grocery store" is minimal when compared to "oh dang I need milk right now and I'm passing by a store with milk so let me go and get milk and oh darn I don't have my reusable bag with me so just gimme something for free to carry it in so I'm not paying for another reusable bag that I'll never remember to use."

Secondly, we need to stop creating laws to claim things as obsolete. Remember when cassette tapes were popular and it was the most advanced way to listen to your favorite songs before this new-fangled "compact disc" came into existence? Well once we created the CD, it's not like we decided to ban the use/production of cassette tapes because we have better things now and cassettes are flooding the landfills and don't biodegrade and we need to pass laws to hold the recording industry responsible for this garbage and ban their production of cassettes! If you want to really call the plastic bag obsolete, you need to create something BETTER to REPLACE it. Once we came out with the CD and they were priced competitively and made available in mass amounts - we stopped using cassettes (for the most part). Just like the creation of cheap and effective plastic bags made the paper ones practically obsolete (there were very few paper-bag-choosers during the heyday of plastic baggery), if you want the plastic bag to be gone - a better choice has to come out. It has to fill the SAME NICHE (lightweight, strong, disposable, cheap) though. Reusable bags aren't meant to be cheap or disposable, so it's not a replacement. It's merely an alternative.

Thirdly, this is a freakin' non-issue! Remember how we mentioned that plastic bags normally take between 100 and 1,000 years to biodegrade? Well the point is that they DO BIODEGRADE. There must exist living organisms that can biodegrade plastic bags into compost. Ergo, there must be a way to identify those living organisms and culture them and use them to speed up the process by increasing the amount of those organisms and figuring out optimum conditions necessary to speed the process up exponentially. Oh wait, some 16-year-old kid in Canada already figured that out!

Do you understand how messed up this is now? That instead of pumping a minimal amount of money into a research grant to allow REAL scientists to build upon what some Canadian kid managed to accomplish, thereby creating efficient ways to completely biodegrade TONS of plastic bag material in LITTLE TIME - California cities are working to abolish plastic bags? That doesn't solve the PROBLEM, morons! The PROBLEM is millions of tons of plastic bags that we'd like to biodegrade, not the flow of the plastic bags!

That's as ridiculous as people becoming vegetarians because cows producing methane are causing global warming. The problem is the COWS and the METHANE, not people EATING the cows! If you convince everyone to stop eating cows, then the cows get ignored and continue to screw up the planet with global warming flatulence and WE ALL DIE.

Eat a Steak - Save the World! Remember?

In conclusion, it's just plain and simple stupidity to ban something that's completely legal to purchase or sell. It was insane when Chicago banned foie gras and luckily that's over now. If the following scenario is true, then something has gone horribly wrong and needs to be fixed:

In 2010, you can walk into a Los Angeles supermarket and purchase a container of plastic bags, but you can't have that container of plastic bags put into a plastic bag because that would be against the law.

This is horribly wrong and it needs to be fixed.

What are your thoughts? Do you agree that scientists and entrepreneurs should be investing in the process that we know exists to speed up the biodegrading process of plastic bags? Or would you rather ban a legal product in an effort to ignore the real problem and boast that "at least WE'RE not making the problem worse" rather than work to solve the problem?

(Again, the article about the Canadian teenager who's apparently smarter than the Los Angeles City Council)
(The article about San Francisco being the first in the idiot-city parade)
(The article about Los Angeles joining the idiot-city parade)

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Elvira Arellano Finally Arrested!

That's right! Read 'em and weep, liberals and other amnesty-advocates! Your precious "famous face of the suffering" has been taken into custody and will hopefully be getting deported AGAIN. As for what's going to happen to her son, I still believe she has no right to custody of her son after what she's put him through. Take him back to Chicago and let him live with a foster family that will provide actual parenting that doesn't involve trips across the border to deal with government agencies and policies.

Here's how it went down:

After talking to news media inside the church, Arellano and her supporters got into their van to head north to San Jose, where she was scheduled to speak at another church, Lozano said. Moments after they got in the van, an unmarked vehicle stopped them.

The driver of Arellano's van, Roberto Lopez, poked his head out of the van because he wanted to see why they were being blocked. Several other unmarked vehicles surrounded their van.

Agents came out of all the cars screaming at the top of their lungs for her to get out, Lozano said. Her 8-year-old son, Saul, started to cry, and Arellano said to everyone in the car, "Calm down. Don't have any fear. They can't hurt me."

Then she turned to the people who were about to arrest her and she said, "You're going to have to give me a minute with my son," Lozano said. She spent time with her son in the car, and then surrendered.

It was over in less than two minutes. She was arrested Sunday on Main Street, near Our Lady Queen of Angels, where Arellano slept Saturday night and where she's held several press conferences Saturday and Sunday.

If you have any thought in your head, then you can't argue "how could this happen?" A known fugitive who's been in "hiding" for over a year decides to go in public and start holding press conferences - it's a matter of time before an arrest gets made. I would have preferred that this happen in Chicago, where she was captured and deported once before, to show that breaking the law is a crime and you WILL be brought to justice. Having this takedown finally occur over in Los Angeles worries me.

We all know how lenient Southern California tends to be with its illegals - letting them even take over the cities as "sanctuary cities" where they don't even HAVE to hide because they've abolished all law enforcement.

At least we can finally take solace in the fact that she's been captured again.

Now I'll just wait for news about her deportation - or mock the Chicagoans who will be holding vigils and protests here in Chicago to protest the ICE's decision to deport an illegal immigrant criminal.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION IS ILLEGAL.

(The story that tipped me off to this turn of events)







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