Sometimes a product tells you everything you need to know about its purchaser. This one, for instance, tells you people who buy it care so much about their temporary happiness that they give no thought to the garbage they leave behind for their and our children.
And by no thought, I mean ZERO.
After the blog moved to this location, 900-1000 unique visitors per day disappeared. I don’t mind as much as you’d think. It was like attending a party every day in a ballroom full of H.G. Wells characters and wondering if there was spinach between my teeth, but things change, you know? It was a total blast to fictionalize myself and everyone around me while I was single, miserable and uninspired. Once I lived with an actual human being who kept trying to talk to me while I was writing, blogging became a fight one word at a time. But you know what? I love a good fight – especially a food fight.
If you peek at the food sections of New York Times or the Huffington Post, you find them packed with the thoughts of foodies of above-average income and often odd concerns. Scan for yourself, you’ll get a certain funny feeling like you simply must and add this to your list and top ten wines beneath notice. You don’t need to be a trendmeister to see which way the aroma’s wafting. That kind of food writing may be socially useful – or not.
While Warning About Fat, U.S. Pushes Sales of Cheese
Domino’s Pizza was hurting early last year. Domestic sales had fallen, and a survey of big pizza chain customers left the company tied for the worst tasting pies.
Then help arrived from an organization called Dairy Management. It teamed up with Domino’s to develop a new line of pizzas with 40 percent more cheese, and proceeded to devise and pay for a $12 million marketing campaign.
Consumers devoured the cheesier pizza, and sales soared by double digits. “This partnership is clearly working,” Brandon Solano, the Domino’s vice president for brand innovation, said in a statement to The New York Times.
But as healthy as this pizza has been for Domino’s, one slice contains as much as two-thirds of a day’s maximum recommended amount of saturated fat, which has been linked to heart disease and is high in calories.
Tom Monaghan, Domino’s founder, financially supports Operation Rescue and built his own fundamentalist Catholic town in Florida. For me to spend money in a Domino’s Pizza, I would have to be on the verge of starvation in a town without a single culinarily capable entrepeneur and absolutely nothing else separating me, my flimsy morals and sauteing someone else’s house pets. I absolutely do not care if Domino’s sells its customers a hunk of watery casein and a Ritz and calls it “pizza” for all the sustenance their products offer. Let me offer some excellent advice: DON’T EAT THAT. Problem: solved!
Lately, I want homemade, substantial, really real food. Last week, I noticed 100% of the oatmeal cookies in the whole world were at other people’s houses; today, I decided to fix their wagons by making some kickass whole wheat oatmeal cookies.
What? Pete's grandmother bought china!
Humble oatmeal cookies get the Lenox treatment.
What’s not to love? These cookies are so good you’d eat them off a hair brush and so good for you you wouldn’t mind the extra floss. Okay, don’t eat that, but make these cookies for yourself and write me a letter that doesn’t include pretentious wine pairings.
1776 tells you everything you need to know about 2010.
Last night, I saw about half an hour of this, though not the whole thing, because I saw a shiny object and chased it and I don’t drink bottled water.
This morning, I looked at the ancient plastic cups from which I drink water-cooler-water coffee and water-cooler water and realized I drink so much bottled water out of plastic my innards are probably a Superfund site. Tonight, I washed out old ceramic mugs for coffee and a quart Ball Jar to minimize trips to the water fountain.
May 11th would have been Dad’s 69th birthday. A few weeks ago, Dad’s third wife Darla agreed to take her camera and wander the shores of Lake Ontario where she lives. She has a keen eye for the absurd and often sends pictures of her cats on safari and houses losing their land masses. Yesterday, Darla sent pictures of her floral friends, and the timing couldn’t have been better for me, since this week only foliage has seemed sane.
Via Rikyrah at Jack & Jill Politics, we find a statement wrong on so many – oh, just read it already:
Marco Rubio says deport all the immigrants
That’s child of Cuban immigrants Marco Rubio, and he kept talking.
Rubio explained that he is against letting illegals become legal:
Rubio also rejected the notion of a “path to citizenship” or “amnesty,” despite “the human stories.”
“There are going to be stories of very young kids that were brought to this country at a very young age who don’t even speak Spanish that are going to be sent back to Nicaragua or some other place. And it’s gonna feel weird and I understand that,” he said, suggesting that those hardships would be a price worth paying.
Hah! That’s a quote from Marco Rubio, son of Cuban refugees. Cubans were, for decades, welcome to settle in America without visas or papers or anything, and they are still allowed to enter the the U.S. via Mexico without fear of being deported.
But Nicaraguans? Ugh, no. Marco Rubio says GO HOME.
What the fuck does that mean? Those kids pay a price and it’s worth it – to whom?
Violets and forget-me-nots on a Canadian lawn contribute more to the world than selfish pricks like Marco Rubio. Here’s hoping Rubio finds himself asking for directions in Arizona, because in Maricopa County, Rubio’s just another brown man on the border. Those hardships would absolutely be a price worth paying.
Where's Panky? You cannot see him!
Understand what we have here. There’s a fiscal commission operating partially in secret, without transcripts or recordings, planning to drop recommendations on Congress in the middle of a lame-duck session, with each leader in the House and Senate promising a vote on the recommendations. Unlike the Conrad-Gregg commission upon which this was modeled, the executive order on the fiscal commission does not mandate a super-majority requirement in each chamber of Congress for passage. It does mandate the need for agreement from 14 of the 18 commission members for passage of any recommendation, but the commission is stacked with people who want to target entitlement spending rather than any balanced proposal.
Even those supposedly defending bedrock programs like Social Security and Medicare on the commission, like the SEIU’s Andy Stern, have expressed a desire to at least open the retirement program to add-on private stock accounts:
“I agree with many Commissioners who have said that all entitlement programs should be on the table. We should include tax entitlements in that conversation… This Commission should examine our country’s entire retirement security system, private and public. Taxpayer dollars are spent in a multitude of ways, not just on Social Security, with the aim of producing retirement security. Yet, many Americans retire with anything but security. We should include as part of our agenda ideas for strengthening the private parts of the retirement security system, reviewing both the adequacy and the solvency of the Social Security system, and the possibility of universal add-on retirement accounts.
Add-on private accounts are an idea direct from the DLC in the late 1990s, when Bruce Reed, who co-wrote a domestic policy book with Rahm Emanuel, was involved with the group.
We have a commission pre-disposed to those types of ideas, operating partially in secret, foisting recommendations on Congress in December, without a super-majority obstacle to overcome in the House or the Senate (although the filibuster would presumably still be in play should a Democrat actually want to protect people from safety net cuts).
An House aide told me that the commission is deliberately trying to “keep the public from weighing in until the last possible moment.” They aren’t delivering public hearings outside of Washington, claiming that they don’t have a budget, but that could be deliberate as well, because it allows them to have billionaire hedge fund manager Pete Peterson provide the commission with staff and fold the conversation into his deficit mania “America Speaks” tour. It’s quite a public/private partnership going on.
Privatization of Social Security and Medicare – or trusting Wall Street with healthcare and pensions -is as brilliant an idea as trusting Halliburton and BP with an entire coastline. How stupid do you have to be not to get that?
A very strange little article turned up in the Huffington Post today. It’s AP sourced, which is bad blog juju. Go ahead. Read the article. It’s ten sentences in six teeny paragraphs.
Let’s review. NYC is charging rent for space in homeless shelters. Advocates for the homeless say this is the craziest shit ever. NYC officials say giving poor people stuff sucks because they’re – like – icky. This sounds awfully familiar because it is. Remember last May?
The Bloomberg administration has quietly begun charging rent to homeless families who live in publicly run shelters but have income from jobs.
The new policy is based on a 1997 state law that was not enforced until last week, when shelter operators across the city began requiring residents to pay a certain portion of their income. The amount varies based on factors that include family size and what shelter is being used, but should not exceed 50 percent of a family’s income, a state official said.
…
Vanessa Dacosta, who earns $8.40 an hour as a cashier at Sbarro, received a notice under her door several weeks ago informing her that she had to give $336 of her approximately $800 per month in wages to the Clinton Family Inn, a shelter in Hell’s Kitchen where she has lived since March.
“It’s not right,” said Ms. Dacosta, a single mother of a 2-year-old who said she spends nearly $100 a week on child care. “I pay my baby sitter, I buy diapers, and I’m trying to save money so I can get out of here. I don’t want to be in the shelter forever.”
Still…speechless…
“I think it’s hard to argue that families that can contribute to their shelter cost shouldn’t,” Robert V. Hess, the city’s commissioner of homeless services, said in a telephone interview Friday. “I don’t see this playing out in an adverse way. Our objective is not for families to remain in shelter. Our objective is to move families back into their own homes and into the community.”
I think it would be hard to argue that there’s a bigger dick anywhere than Robert V. Hess, Commissioner of Homeless Services, who plainly has never missed an expensed meal in his life.
Fuck me, what about last July?
The new policy gives the city greater latitude to push families out of the shelter system, which had swelled to a near-high of 9,720 families as of Sunday. Families could always be evicted for illegal behavior like bringing in drugs or weapons, but they can now be ousted for any of 28 violations, including failing to sign in and out or not keeping an active case file with city welfare agencies.
The new policy is also meant to encourage families to more readily accept permanent housing, even if it is not to their liking.
“We would only expect to use this process in the most egregious of situations,” said Robert V. Hess, the commissioner for homeless services, in an interview on Monday. “We do have a small number of families where temporary emergency shelter is really being used as permanent housing.”
Evictions are for a 30-day period.
I’ve read those four paragraphs about ten times, and if those words make sense in that order I need a new native language. And watch this exhilarating turn of phrase:
Mr. Hess said it was not clear where families removed from shelter might turn. “The most likely outcome is that the family would demonstrate that they do have a place to go,” he said.
Or…they might be homeless and have nowhere but the sidewalk, which by this motherfucker’s definition is a place to go. But it’s only for 30 days, right?
The articles that repeatedly detonated my frontal lobe contained specifics: contact information, odious policies, affected people, statistics, some description of the projected outcomes, which distressed me. The AP write up in the Huffington Post is blessedly free of anything, really. It’s almost as if the article avoids using words. Have another look. NYC is charging rent for space in homeless shelters. Advocates for the homeless say this is the craziest shit ever. NYC officials say giving poor people stuff sucks because they’re – like – icky. This was moral horseshit a year ago; now it is merely manure. But why even mention it? Why did the AP publish this? Why did the HP make space for it now? Look for stories in the next few months in which NYC ups the heat on the homeless as the weather warms.
This is not hard to predict. It’s almost as if it’s happened before.
A passenger told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that she noticed Sicily was missing – while she was on a flight to the island. Smaller islands, such as Sardinia, were in the right place on the map.
Alitalia was re-launched earlier this year under private ownership. It had been a state-run company for more than 60 years before going bankrupt.
One Italian Senator, Riccardo Villari, said it was unfortunate the big advertising campaign surrounding the re-launch had been followed by “unpleasant” errors. The magazine editor, Aldo Canale, said: “We have run lots of editions on the beauty of Sicily and we would never dream of eliminating it from maps of Italy.”
This reminds me of that time on a genealogical bulletin board when someone said my great-grandfather never existed. I recall shouting a lot, “The proof that he lived is that I’M SITTING RIGHT HERE.” See, he married a divorced woman, which was cause for little old ladies to slather White Out all over the family records. Hope Sicily reappears or floating through baggage claim in the Mediterranean’s going to be VERY FREAKING TRICKY.
You’ve got to give it to Chris Dodd. He knows he’s about to fuck up so bad Connecticut’s voters might finally put him out of a job, and yet he sounds so calm about it.
On the one hand, Dodd expressed his strong support for a public health plan that would compete with private insurers and give Americans to buy into an insurance system that doesn’t fatten corporations’ bottom line. On the other, Dodd signaled his willingness to accept a “compromise.”
“We have the votes to pass a bill that expands coverage to millions of Americans, improves quality, protects patient choice, cuts costs, and averts disaster for our economy and our families,” Dodd wrote. “But, as frustrating as it is to you and to me, I don’t know if we have the votes to pass a strong public health care option. What I do know is that whether we can get there or not is still an open question. What I do know is that I plan to fight hard to convince my colleagues on the committee and in the full Senate that we need a public option. What I do know is that I’m going to need your help.”
I’d sound a little more nervous if I were saying to Americans, “Dudes – can I call you ‘Dudes?’ – Dudes, we’re going to expand coverage by forcing you to buy it, refuse to help pay for it and sit around with our collegial thumbs up our asses while the insurers refuse claims and make your lives an exorbitantly expensive living hell.” In fact, knowing that this plan will actually make the lives of Americans much worse would prevent me from saying it at all.
So who knew I had some dignity? Not Siobhan, who just sent an old picture of Ivan and me in Santa suits in a Tewksbury, MA hotel room where she, Ivan and I met up with Johnny and drank Boone’s Farm out of bowls. Apparently, paper cups were illegal within the city limits – but whatever: dignity, motherfuckers! Like the Portuguese, I guess:
Notably, decriminalization has become increasingly popular in Portugal since 2001. Except for some far-right politicians, very few domestic political factions are agitating for a repeal of the 2001 law. And while there is a widespread perception that bureaucratic changes need to be made to Portugal’s decriminalization framework to make it more efficient and effective, there is no real debate about whether drugs should once again be criminalized. More significantly, none of the nightmare scenarios touted by preenactment decriminalization opponents — from rampant increases in drug usage among the young to the transformation of Lisbon into a haven for “drug tourists” — has occurred.
The political consensus in favor of decriminalization is unsurprising in light of the relevant empirical data. Those data indicate that decriminalization has had no adverse effect on drug usage rates in Portugal, which, in numerous categories, are now among the lowest in the EU, particularly when compared with states with stringent criminalization regimes. Although postdecriminalization usage rates have remained roughly the same or even decreased slightly when compared with other EU states, drug-related pathologies — such as sexually transmitted diseases and deaths due to drug usage — have decreased dramatically. Drug policy experts attribute those positive trends to the enhanced ability of the Portuguese government to offer treatment programs to its citizens — enhancements made possible, for numerous reasons, by decriminalization.
You had me at postdecriminalization, Mr. Greenwald.
Why bother disguising your racism when you can parade is all over the front page?
“People here are afraid of the police,” said Terry Willis, vice president of the Homer branch of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People. “They harass black people, they stop people for no reason and rough them up without charging them with anything.”
That is how it should be, responded Homer Police Chief Russell Mills, who noted the high rates of gun and drug arrests in the neighborhood.
“If I see three or four young black men walking down the street, I have to stop them and check their names,” said Mills, who is white. “I want them to be afraid every time they see the police that they might get arrested.
“We’re not out there trying to abuse and harass people – we’re trying to protect the law-abiding citizens locked behind their doors in fear.”
This is bullshit cowardice, as everyone knows deep down, and it never, never ends well.
On the last afternoon of his life, Bernard Monroe was hosting a cookout for family and friends in front of his dilapidated home in this small northern Louisiana town.
Throat cancer had left the 73-year-old retired electric utility worker unable to talk, but family members said he clearly was enjoying the commotion of a dozen of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren cavorting in the grassless yard.
Then the Homer police showed up, two white officers whose arrival caused the participants at the black family’s gathering to fall silent.
This is pretty bad. The chief wants black people to be afraid when they see cops. Well, mission accomplished:
Four witnesses said he was sitting outside his home in the late afternoon on Feb. 20 — clutching a large sports-drink bottle — when two police officers pulled up and summoned over his son, Shawn.
Shawn Monroe, who has a long record of arrests and convictions on charges of assault and battery but was not wanted on any warrants, reportedly ran into the house.
One of the officers, who had been on Homer’s police force only a few weeks, chased after him and reappeared moments later in the doorway, the witnesses said.
Meanwhile, the elder Monroe had started walking toward the front door. When he got to the first step on the porch, the witnesses said, the rookie officer opened fire, striking Monroe several times.
“He just shot him through the screen door,” said Denise Nicholson, a family friend who said she was standing a few feet away. “After [Monroe] was on the ground, we kept asking the officer to call an ambulance, but all he did was get on his radio and say, ‘Officer in distress.’ “
The witnesses said the second officer picked up a handgun that Monroe, an avid hunter, always kept in plain sight on the porch for protection. Using a latex glove, the officer grasped the gun by its handle, the witnesses said, and ordered everyone to back away. The next thing they said they saw was the gun next to Monroe’s body.
“I saw him pick up the gun off the porch,” Marcus Frazier said. “I said, ‘What are you doing?’ The cop told me, ‘Shut the hell up, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’ “
Homer police maintain Monroe was holding a loaded gun when he was shot, but would not comment further.
Oh. My. God. These people aren’t even good at being bad. They’re just racist fucks. Fortunately, because they’ve attracted the attention of the Feds.
Now the Louisiana State Police, the FBI and the Justice Department are swarming over this impoverished lumber town of 3,800, drawn by allegations from numerous witnesses that police killed Monroe without justification – and then moved a gun to make it look like he had been holding it.
“We are closely monitoring the events in Homer,” said Donald Washington, the U.S. attorney for the western district of Louisiana. “I understand that a number of allegations are being made that, if true, would be serious enough for us to follow up on very quickly.”
You know where we might apply some stimulus funds? To hiring investigators and prosecutors to protect us from jackbooted thugs of all kinds, but especially from thugs passing for public servants. I can’t wait to watch the judicial system turn the incarceration industry inside out and put bad cops on the inside.
Poor Impulse Control 