tdog

We’ll start this Sunday with this happy sorta op-ed by Nick Kristoff in the Grey Lady on… wait for it… organic dairy farming. Yup: good food makes us happier not to mention, the cows are happier. I say this all the time: our grandparents and great grandparents had many more stresses in their lives than we do– but crappy, health-destroying pseudo-food produced in the most heinous industrial conditions and traveling thousands of miles to get to them wasn’t one of them. Exhibit A as to why we spend one in six dollars of our GDP on “health care” (we almost...

We give you an encore link to our friends at The Onion, for their hilarious parody of the President’s convention speech [“Obama: Help us destroy Jesus and start a new age of liberal darkness”] (more because it’s funny not so much because of the send-up of “the culture wars,” but because of the implied proposition that Barack Obama actually feels that strongly about anything besides his own prospects for that corner office at Goldman or Morgan.)

Our friends at The Onion nail it as usual, and tell us about Bill Clinton’s rather demonstrative speech, Michelle Obama’s thoughts on her role in the campaign, Joe Biden’s long road to Charlotte, a candid shot of a delegate, a discussion of DNC programming, a profile of keynote speaker Julian “Not Fidel” Castro, and, of course, news from the Romney/Ryan camp. Finally, “America’s Finest News Source” laments that this year’s DNC just lacks the delusional magic that marked the ’08 convention. We are not worthy. Anecdotally, there are still millions of people paying attention to this crap… for real. Good...

Item: Pakistani authorities arrest an eleven year old girl for the “blasphemy” of burning the pages of a Koran. Seems that the girl was not only a Christian, but also had Downs syndrome; the “blasphemy” thing sparks controversy Pakistan-way, some politicians calling for its repeal have been gunned down. This sort of thing makes us look at how children are treated in the United States, where we see children arrested for, inter alia, spraying perfume on themselves, burping, doodling or throwing paper airplanes. Item: George Will tells us “why doom hasn’t materialized.” You have to hand it to George Will:...

Here’s the thing: Barack Obama may be my classmate, and nominally the candidate of the party in which I’m (nominally) registered, but I don’t see how any self-respecting progressive (or for that matter, human being) can support a President– ANY President– who holds meetings every Tuesday to decide which human beings the United States government should murder. Sorry. So… imagine my disappointment when the possibility of voting for the (not so paradoxically) more liberal Mitt Romney evaporated in a heartbeat today, as old Thurston Howell III Romney (Willard to his friends) picked Paul Ryan for his running mate, not a...

Brother Dmitry lays out the various current conditions (particularly, widespread drought and crop loss), and diagnoses conditions of general unpleasantness (including food riots) in many parts of the planet. While the United States is by no means on top of “the vulnerable” list, it is certainly not on the bottom. Particularly critical is the 50-million strong food stamp population (whether his fault or not, in sheer numbers, my classmate Barack really is the food stamp president), the irony is that the cost for the “SNAP” program was a comedically low $76 billion– a preposterously low figure to keep the rubes...

I believe the joke was, “they can put a man on the moon… so why can’t we send all of them there?” It IS cool to see that the “Curiosity Rover” has evidently landed on the surface of Mars without crashing and burning (assuming we accept the NASA propaganda that it didn’t– or that the project even exists). Thing is, I’m delighted to see the government spend money on anything that isn’t either homicide, or a gratuitous subsidy to rich people who bribed members of Congress… so, a cool science project like this that would make any high school robotics...

Another day, another psychotic bastard opens fire on innocent people in America, today, in Wisconsin, where six Sikh worshipers were killed at a temple near Milwaukee, the gunman later killed by a police officer who was wounded in the shootout. Gun control, bla bla bla. We are so far past the point where gun control will do any good [outside the few pockets of sanity that already have it] that I’m almost disgusted to have to utter those two words. Of course, life as we know it in New York City would actually be impossible without our city’s quite strict...

It seems London-based HSBC, one of the world’s largest banks, helped launder, inter alia, Mexican drug lord money and… money for OBL and the 9-11 highjackers. And while a bunch of largely innocent schmucks will presumably spend the rest of their rather unpleasant lives at Guantanamo or Bagram and untold thousands of Afghans, Pakistanis, Yemenis, Somalis, Iraqis, Bahrainis, Syrians and God knows who else will be maimed, tortured, or killed by the American war machine, supposedly to “protect us from the terrorists”… that our largest financial institutions [and recipients of billions of taxpayer funded bailouts]… are funding… well, just another...

This, from Think Progress, nails it: private prisons spent just $45 million in bribes lobbying expenses, and netted over $5 billion just for detaining immigrants alone. Short answer to “what are WE all doing wrong?” is quite simple: playing by an outdated set of rules called “fairness” and what used to be known as “the rules” or “the law.” Fuck that. Among the bribes lobbying are efforts to have legislatures pass harsher sentences to increase private prison profits. Ain’t America grand? America is now a simple game: unless you want to be left behind with the rubes and suckers of...