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Showing posts from January, 2007

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D'Souza D'Douchebag

Call: Liberals Caused 9/11 D'Souza makes his points carefully, and some of them are worth considering: What happens when, as in the case of Carter withdrawing his support for the Shah of Iran, a vacuum is left? Well, we know what happens -- the Iranian Revolution. That D'Souza fails to mention that the United States fomented the Revolution while propping up the Shah in the first place, and that Iran's relationship with the Soviet Union subsequent to 1978 and 1979 was likely closer than it would have been in the 1950s under the secular, democratically elected government the Shah userped. That the relationship with Iran probably enabled the Soviets to stay afloat during the escalate and prolong strategy of the 1980 Cold War (a $3 Trillion adventure for America) is worthy of note. D'Souza also notes that American liberal intervention in places like South America, in the form of contraceptive assistance in countries unfriendly to safe sex due to religious conservatism, is r

Children of the Corn

Michael Pollan's excellent Omnivore's Dilemma , ISBN-13 978-1594200823, features an anecdote about the Mayans early on in the first chapter. The Maya word that referred to themselves and their civilization was "corn walker," and often you hear Chicanos and other Mexican indigenous peoples using that term on themselves even today. But Pollan points out that in fact North Americans are truly corn, walking. The reason we know this is because corn is particularly greedy when it comes fixing carbon, especially carbon-13, from the atmosphere, which leaves a nice carbon trail throughout the food chain; to wit, our carbon-13 to carbon ratios in body mass often exceed persons with corn visibly more abundant in their diets (eg, the bulk of the average Mexican's diet consists of tortillas, tamales, things fried in corn batter, drinks made with corn, etc). But a more thorough look at the diet of a typical American reveals a food landscape overwhelmed with corn: high fructose