It’s on the internet, so it has to be true!
The latest article flying around Facebook claims that scientists have found that bacon is good for you, just like eating your fruits and vegetables (but with more grease).
Of course, if you read the article a bit, you’ll notice it says no such thing. The article points to research done by Professor Michael Ristow that indicates that niacin (vitamin B3) will help you live longer.
Aha, says the interwebs. Look, there’s lots of B3 in bacon; therefore, logically, bacon must be good for you! If you eat lots of bacon, you’ll live forever!
Or at least until all the fat in bacon clogs your arteries and gives you a heart attack when you’re fifty.
Basically, this guy fed worms niacin and found that they lived a tenth longer than the control worms. (“Control Worms” would be a good name for a band.) Worms. Not humans. Professor Ristow hopes to test this on rats next, but even then — and here’s the point — he’s not feeding them bacon. The word “bacon” is not found in his study anywhere.
Yeah, I know. All you bacon-lovers out there are saying, “Why rain on our parade?” I’m not telling you to stop eating bacon if that is what you really want. I’m just pointing out that too often, we read something on the internet that we want to believe so much that we accept it without question. This is especially true in politics, where Republicans gladly seize upon every lie about Obama floating around and Democrats do the same with articles that make Republicans look bad.
Just be smart about the internet. There is no Nigerian Prince giving you money (in fact, there are no princes in Nigeria), Obama isn’t an atheist Muslim (which logically cannot exist), and bacon doesn’t help you live longer.
With the official view of the Republican party that providing health care for people is a Terrible Thing That Must Be Stopped, it’s nice to see that there are some Republican politicians who are saying that there may be some good things in the law.
Jack Kingston, A Republican politician running for the Senate from Georgia, stated recently that he believes in working with the other party, compromising, and recognizing that there are good and bad parts of Obamacare.
In other words, he just killed his chance of getting the nomination from the GOP, where you must oppose Obama even if he speaks out for puppies, sunshine, and apple pie.
“A lot of conservatives say, ‘Nah, let’s just step back and let this thing fall to pieces on its own.’ But I don’t think that’s always the responsible thing to do,” he said. “I think we need to be looking for things that improve healthcare overall for all of us. And if there is something in Obamacare, we need to know about it.”
He pointed out that he had received letters from people telling him about how Obamacare helped them keep their special needs children on insurance, and he said this is something we should be encouraging. We can fix the law without getting rid of it completely.
Mind you, this guy had consistently voted to repeal Obamacare and thoroughly supported the government cry-baby shutdown over it, so why is he now saying these things? Did he see the light?
I think he was visited by three ghosts one night …
American conservative leaders have often argued that greed is good, and controls on capitalism are ungodly. The logic is thus: Stalin was an atheist. Stalin liked socialist policies. Ergo, socialism is against religion.
This, of course, makes no logical sense whatsoever but the Powers That Be in the economic world gladly used it in the same way Stalin used communist promises to keep the people in their place. The right used religion to further its aims. People who believed that abortion and gay rights were against God could easily be swayed to also believe that welfare and controls on capitalism were also evil, since look, the same people who are on God’s side are also on the side of the bankers and billionaires. 
Clearly, therefore, all bankers and billionaires were Godlike.
Well, this new Pope is throwing all that out the window, and boy, is the right wing up in arms. Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh are now attacking religion with a fervor never before seen, and are apparently claiming that they have more authority than the Pope about what Jesus would want. (You remember Jesus — that guy who threw the moneylenders out of the temple and said that the rich could not get into heaven?)
For years, the right has proclaimed that we are a “Christian nation” (despite all evidence to the contrary) and yet now, when the leader of the largest Christian organization in the world tells us what we should be doing, suddenly Christian values are not important to us.
“As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems,” the Pope said. He’s talking about uncontrolled capitalism, about markets that crash and hurt the poor because the rich are gambling with our future, about the ridiculous idea that money “trickles down” to improve everyone’s lot.
Maybe it’s time that the Christian right started acting like Christians.
“I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land.” – Jon Stewart
“Thanksgiving is America’s national chow-down feast, the one occasion each year when gluttony becomes a patriotic duty.” – Michael Dresser
“Proper turkey preparation is critical. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, more Americans die every year from eating improperly cooked turkey than were killed in the entire Peloponnesian War. This is because turkey can contain salmonella, which are tiny bacteria that, if they get in your bloodstream, develop into full-grown salmon, which could come leaping out of your mouth during an important business presentation.” – Dave Berry
“Thanksgiving is an emotional holiday. People travel thousands of miles to be with people they only see once a year. And then discover once a year is way too often.” – Johnny Carson
“Thanksgiving is a magical time of year when families across the country join together to raise America’s obesity statistics.” – Stephen Colbert
“Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.” – Erma Bombeck
“My cooking is so bad my kids thought Thanksgiving was to commemorate Pearl Harbor.” – Phyllis Diller
“My mother won’t celebrate Thanksgiving. She says it represents the white man stealing our land. But she’s not angry, she figures, ‘What the hell, we’re taking it back one casino at a time.” – Larry Omaha
“Thanksgiving. It’s like we didn’t even try to come up with a tradition. The tradition is, we overeat. ‘Hey, how about at Thanksgiving we just eat a lot?’ ‘But we do that every day!’ ‘Oh. What if we eat a lot with people that annoy the hell out of us?'” – Jim Gaiffigan
“Thanksgiving, man. Not a good day to be my pants.” – Kevin James
“Here I am 5 o’clock in the morning stuffing bread crumbs up a dead bird’s butt.” – Roseanne Barr
Most Americans aren’t dumb, despite what certain news organizations and political parties want to believe.
For instance, most Americans understand that the problems with a website don’t have anything to do with the program the website was set up for, and they realize that the website problems are not permanent.
Just about the same amount of people support Obamacare from a month ago as do now. The website fiasco has hurt Obama in the polls — because it makes him look incompetent — but it hasn’t hurt Obamacare. (Obama is still ranked much higher in the polls than Congress, but that’s not saying a lot.)
A new CBS poll shows that 58% of Americans say they oppose Obamacare, which is about what it was before. As has been pointed out many many times (but which Republicans never seem to tell you), that 58% includes 14% who oppose Obamacare because it doesn’t go far enough. People like me, who think we need a medicare-for-all plan and that the problems with Obamacare are directly related to the fact that we’re still treating health care as a profit-making product in America instead of as a service.
That means 54% — a majority — think Obamacare is fine or want it expanded even further. A majority has consistently wanted some sort of national health care policy. That has never changed.
So when Republicans scream that most Americans don’t like Obamacare, they are fooling themselves, because that 14% will never support them no matter what. A majority support it. A majority voted against their candidate who ran against it. And that hasn’t changed in three years.
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