Tom Naughton goes to a doctor who trained with climate researchers on how to conduct medicine. “Man-made body enlarging. . . . If this keeps up, you’ll weigh 650 pounds by the year 2030. It’s a looming disaster.”
All posts by Phil
Climate Change as Religion
“The environment should compete with religion as the only compelling, value-based narrative available to humanity,” claims a paper on the United Nations Environmental Program and its need to be at the center of political and economic decisions at the U.N. and around the world. Reported in a Fox News exclusive, the author of the paper, Mark Halle believes:
there are signs that the hugely ambitious role he and his fellow-thinkers sketched for UNEP as religion’s main competitor are “beginning to happen.” Halle pointed to UNEP’s espousal this year of a so-called Green Economy Initiative, a proposal to radically redesign the global economy and transfer trillions of dollars in investment to the world’s poorest developing countries, but one that is couched in terms of providing new green jobs, an end to old, unfair carbon-based energy subsidies, and greater global fairness and opportunity. Halle called the development “quite exciting.”
I’m sure the U.N. will do its best to keep all of that money out of corrupt hands in various African governments, just like they did with the Iraq Oil for Food program.
Attention All Shoppers: Avoid the Dreadful Horror in Aisle 6
I hope your holiday shopping has not been as traumatic as this one recorded by Loren Eaton. And if it has, I hope the military or store owners picked up all of your bill–that’s the least they could do.
Best of the Year and More
Scott Lamb has started up conversation on the NY Times list of best book from 2009.
Also, in case you missed it, the winner of the Best of the National Book Award winners for fiction is The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor, as it should be.
Bold, the Young Viking Poets
Robert Ferguson, author of The Vikings: A History, claims “a mastery of poetry was a must for any young Viking who wanted to make a name for himself. . . . Young Icelandic warrior-poets (or ‘skalds,’ as they were known) such as Gunnlaug Snaketongue, Kormak Ogmundarson, and Hallfred the Troublesome Poet, were documenting the ecstasies and despairs of romantic love as early as the late 10th century, some 200 years before the medieval troubadours we typically credit as being the world’s first true Romantic poets.”
Untrustworthy Memory in Print
Jonathan Yardley writes about some of the great memoirs of the past and the dredge we have clogging the half-priced bookshelves today. He says, “On the one hand, we want ‘authenticity and credibility’ in autobiographical writing; on the other, we want to be entertained, which can sometimes lead writers to exaggeration or invention. . . . [But] what the memoir boom has in fact given us is too many dull or forgettable memoirs, precious few of which have enriched our literature but most of which have simply encouraged the narcissism of their authors.”
Can’t . . . Write . . . Another . . . Word . . . gasp!
Is America Becoming Undemocratic?
John Fund says voter fraud maybe be stealing your vote. It already has stolen others. Fund is the author of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy.
Aren’t Looking For Something Appealing
Our friend Jimmy Davis reviews Unfashionable: Making a Difference in the World by Being Different by Tullian Tchividjian.
Good Ingredients Make a Good Meal
You may still be thinking about food this holiday weekend (holiday, btw, comes from an older word, holy day, which in Old English read this way: háligdæg), so let me give you a food story.
Vinegar is good for dissolving hard water deposits. The manufacturer of my coffee maker instructs me to run a full pot of vinegar through the machine to clear it of calcium build-up which wear it down over time. I don’t think our water in North Georgia is very hard, but it’s hard enough to leave a residue behind which you can see after a while. Leaving water sitting in the kettle causes plates of calcium to form on the bottom.
So one time a while back, I filled the kettle half full of vinegar to clean off those plates. Heating the vinegar seems to work well, but I don’t know if it’s necessary for cleaning. After I let the vinegar work on the kettle (I think it was the next day), I made myself a cup of tea. I think I used a bag of herbal tea we had had for too long, and it must have gone bad because it had a strong acrid taste. It was the worst tea I’d ever made.
But you are likely way ahead of where I was at the time, and you already see that I had steep my tea leaves in boiled vinegar, which is why I entitled this post as I did. If you make your tea with vinegar, friends, you will cap off your beverage’s sweetness at the root. There’s probably an old Chinese proverb about that, maybe “Better to be deprived of food for three days than to drink tea steeped in vinegar.”
Or “As tea in vinegar sours the stomach, so does living with a contentious woman.”