spinach chain letter stupidity kills

I got a chain letter which I will not reproduce here about how the spinach is just fine and it’s a big conspiracy and no one is really getting sick from the spinach and it’s the evil spinach-hating anti-raw-food forces spreading the lies about the virtuous spinach because “they” don’t want you to eat nice raw healthy spinach and live forever.

It was sent from a local raw food place which may well make very nice food themselves but will never get a goddamn dime from me after seeing this. Thanks for the dangerous tinfoil hat bullshit, goodmoodcafe.com

Please don’t forward crap like this. It’s not “just another side to the story.” It’s deadly paranoid garbage.

It’s bad enough that this country is trashing its public health infrastructure and letting Big Agriculture “regulate” itself. Let’s not make things worse. Hundreds of underpaid and underappreciated scientists and public health experts are working 24 hours a day to trace the source of this and every other food-borne disease outbreak and save lives. Calling them liars is nasty and irresponsible.

There is no anti-spinach conspiracy. If you want safer food, pay attention to things like this and why they happen. Super E. Coli bacteria exist because of brain-dead factory farming, and they get into the food because big food corporations wrote the laws that say they can wipe their asses on your food if they feel like it.

There’s your conspiracy and it’s right out in the open.

What Would Amos Say?

Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjacks’ wares. […] The essence of grace, we suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing. Since the cost was infinite, the possibilities of using and spending it are infinite. What would grace be if it were not cheap? — Diedrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

apostle to the dudes

From the Register article I cited yesterday about the “SWAT Team” kids preaching on the beach. Photo credit to Andy Templeton for this excellent piece of photojournalism. The other pics with the article are good also.

The perfectly scrubbed whiteness of these people — even when they’re not white — is alarming. They exist in a perfect bubble of privilege and cultural isolation. Their friends and family are all like them. Their ideal world is a kind of 1903 Tennesse where everyone is inexplicably 2006 “cool”: chastity, whiteness, conservative politics, extreme sports, rock ‘n’ roll music, TV, great new snacks, and women in their place, obediently following behind their husbands even while surfing some massive waves.

The place where dogmatic evangelical religion and cluelessly neotenized teenage privilege meet is the best-gilded turd you’ll ever see. But you’ll smell it, too. Smell is pretty strong around these parts.

Disinheriting the wind

From The American Scientist, here’s a concise and powerful statement of the reasons “Intelligent Design” is not science and why its presence in public schools should be opposed.

Allowing students to “opt out” of learning the basic facts and theories of biology is about as wise as allowing them to “opt out” of algebra or English: It constitutes malfeasance. […] The ID movement is more than an attack on biology because evolutionary theory unifies the life and earth sciences with physics and chemistry. If ID is accepted as a credible science, then the most basic definition of a scientific theory and the fundamental principles of the scientific method are not being taught. […] ID is an insidious attempt by a religious caucus to impose its views on the whole country. The avowed aim of ID advocates—to undermine science and replace it with their personal religious convictions—amounts to a form of prejudice that is both poisonous and horribly frightening.