Don Gorske, a Wisconsin corrections officer, is in “good shape” after eating 23,000 Big Macs.  He has, however, cut down on his consumption of french fries, which have a higher fat ratio than hamburgers.  I lost ten pounds while working at McDonald’s, and eating lots of Big Macs and Quarter Pounders.  A Richmond man lost 86 pounds.  Soso Whaley also lost weight on a McDonalds’ diet.  McDonald’s food is no fattier than many more expensive restaurants’.   But that hasn’t stopped trial lawyers from suing McDonalds and blaming it for…

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The UK has quietly become one of the most-surveilled societies on earth. The isle sports an eye-popping one surveillance camera for every fourteen people.

The town of Swindon is finally pushing back — if for the wrong reasons — by opting out of a traffic camera program. The town council accurately claims that the cameras generate money, but not safety. The real objection, of course, is that the money raised goes to London, not Swindon.

So their motives may not be pure, but at…

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Right now South Korea is working toward a free trade agreement with the U.S. It could increase trade between the two nations by $20 billion. Unfortunately, a mad cow disease scare could prevent that from happening.

The hysteria started when the first U.S. case of mad cow disease was detected in 2003. To put it in context, mad cow afflicted a single cow out of the more than 35 million slaughtered that year. That 1-in-35-million ratio has roughly held since then. U.S. beef…

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This year’s corn crop is being planted much later than normal because of cool, wet weather in the Corn Belt and other production areas, according to a Reuter’s story today.   The slow planting has caused a jump in corn futures:

Corn futures at the Chicago Board of Trade surged as much as 4 percent on Tuesday, with an all-time high of $6.60-3/4 a bushel set by the July 2009 contract.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s weekly agriculture summary, the pace of…

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Cellulosic ethanol—derived from wood scraps and other forms of inedible plant mass– may or may not turn out to be a real technological breakthrough.  On the one hand, it could reduce the ruinous impacts of grain-based ethanol on food prices.  On the other hand, the extensive set of federal mandates and subsidies for cellulosic ethanol is not a good omen—good technologies rarely need federal help, and the existence of federal aid is often a tip-off that a new technology is…

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