More on Shills

The term shill is defined by Wikipedia as:

A shill is a person who is paid to help another person or organization to sell goods or services. The shill pretends to have no association with the seller/group and gives onlookers the impression that he or she is an enthusiastic customer.

 The classic example is in con games, such as three card monte, which I watched once on a Manhattan street. Vaccination opponents and alternative medicine supporter love to proclaim, without evidence, that those who support the use of prescription drugs or vaccines are shills for the drug and vaccine industry.   I think it is time they got specific.
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Adapted from a recent posting of mine at Huffington-Post.

Specify the Reason for Alleging Shilldom

In future, when someone complains that those they disagree with are shills for Big Pharma, could they please specify the reason for making that claim. Please choose the numbers that are appropriate and provide evidence to back the claim.

For example:  sheldon101 is a shill because of 1 and 7. The evidence is as follows:

Here are the choices. For drug companies, substitute Big Pharma, Big Vaccine, Big Pharma (Canada), Big Vaccine (Canada), Big Placebo or Big Placebo (Canada) as desired.

x is a shill because
1) x disagrees with me
2) x's arguments are similar to what you think drug companies would make
3) x is associated with drug companies
5) x works for drug companies
6) x works in PR for drug companies
7) x is assigned to post here for drug companies
8) x works for companies that are contracted by drug companies to have them post here
9) x ...
10) x ...

For more details on the conspiracy see http://www.whale.to/p/quacks.html

Rawsome and Public Safety

It's A Fair Cop

There's a store in California, next door to a huge Whole Foods store that sells food without the usual permits issued by the local public health department. I'm sure that Whole Foods has the necessary permits.  Now Rawsome is crying because they got raided for operating without a food facilities permit.  Not surprisingly, there are people who are defending them --- without asking, what's the logical reason that they should be able to operate without proving that they're meeting public health standards.

Typically, the only problematic issue is the sale/distribution/cow-sharing/herd-sharing of raw milk and raw milk products. But that shouldn't be an issue in California as long as the raw milk is produced and passes the necessary tests. Organic Pastures sells its raw milk through retail stores in California. 

They got raided by a group of local, state and federal authorities. Under California law, the locals have primary responsibility for enforcing the law, but the state can step in when it chooses to do so.

The only unusual group are the Feds. They're probably there because the store was selling raw milk or raw milk products from outside of California.  And that the Feds won't allow.

This story got picked up by Huffington-Post under the title What's the FBI Doing in My Milk?  What's sad, but not surprising, is that very little was said about the reason for the raid.  Instead, we get the usual diatribes.  

A lot of the comments were from Rawsome customers who felt that they should be able to opt out of public health measures by signing a piece of paper. To me, that sounded ridiculous.

I got lazy in posting comments.  My usual policy is to properly research before commenting. I didn't do that here. Instead, I just stated what should have been obvious to anyone who thought about it for a minute --- that it isn't very likely that you can avoid public health regulation of a business that sells food, just by organizing your business in an unusual way. 

The operator of the store is a bit of nut as can be seen if you read what he has to say  He also thinks there were Canadian government officials in on the raid.

I'm Canadian. I'm certainly not an expert on California public health law. There's a chance I'm wrong. But I think Rawsome is caught, as it should be.

Public health laws are written very broadly to prevent organizations like Rawsome from thumbing their noses at the law, which everybody else has to follow. If you're distributing food to people outside of your family, you're almost certainly going to have to prove that you can do so safely.

It is all a matter of definitions. I've picked out the relevant sections of  the California retail code. You can also download it is a pdf file, courtesy of Sonoma County.