The idle musings of a former military man, former computer geek, medically retired pastor and now full-time writer. Contents guaranteed to offend the politically correct and anal-retentive from time to time. My approach to life is that it should be taken with a large helping of laughter, and sufficient firepower to keep it tamed!
There's a video on X.com showing a Russian army officer opening some of the candies and chocolate that have been found in the battle zones in Ukraine. If you're logged into X, here's the link. If you aren't a member of X, here's an alternative link that will let you play the video. The candy is loaded with explosives and a detonator, proving that too many sweets really are bad for you!
There are plenty of comments following the video that are worth reading. My favorite is from user Bitcoin Wizard - mavensbot:
"I'm starting to think that these processed foods are not healthy."
I'm going to embed a video clip below. It shows Gina Plata-Nino, the Director of SNAP Policy and Advocacy at the Food Research and Action Center, being questioned by Rep. Brandon Gill. The topic of discussion is efforts to remove unhealthy food choices - in this particular case, sodas - from the list of items eligible to be bought using funds from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
Ms. Plata-Nino is clearly left-wing and populist in her approach, defending peoples' right to use SNAP benefits in any way they please. Notice how she avoids, evades and dodges any attempt to get her to admit that sugary sodas are in no way nutritional, and aren't really "food" as the SNAP program was originally intended to fund. She literally can't be persuaded to acknowledge facts. Instead, all she can do is repeat her pre-programmed talking points.
It's a bit like medical administrators and professionals who absolutely cannot admit that only biological women can become pregnant and give birth. They daren't acknowledge that fact, because in doing so they would be forced to acknowledge that "trans" women are not, in fact, women at all - merely cosmetically adapted males.
Here's the video. It's only about five minutes long, but I think it's worth watching.
That's what we're facing in every election in this country. Districts dominated by people who use government benefits will listen to advocates and politicians like Ms. Plata-Nino, and vote in lockstep with those who promise them more benefits without cost to themselves. Districts dominated by people whose taxes have to fund those benefits will be (legitimately) angry at how they're wasted, exploited and abused by the recipients.
Sadly, more and more districts are dominated by those who want something for nothing, and vote accordingly. Many of those votes are, of course, illegitimate, as the widespread investigations into voter fraud and electoral register mismanagement are demonstrating. Will that be enough to put things right? Your guess is as good as mine . . .
I've used literally all of them - they're more common in English-English than in American-English. To one, however, there hangs a tail (you should pardon the expression).
Shortly after I came to this country, thirty years ago, I noticed a number of references to berries that I hadn't encountered in South Africa. There were blueberries, and white mulberries, and more. However, although I occasionally heard the term "dingleberry", I never saw one. Intrigued, I asked a family one day (with whom I was staying for a few days) where I could find "dingleberries".
You can imagine my puzzlement when the father cracked up laughing, the mother had to leave the table with her hands clasped to her face and her shoulders shaking from suppressed merriment, and the two daughters blushed red as roses. When Dad stopped laughing, he explained the true meaning of the word ( for the benefit of non-American readers, it's the third meaning of the noun in the list provided).
My innocence shattered, I declined the opportunity to sample a dingleberry pie . . .
And now for something completely different, as they say in the classics! Ernest Tomlinson, who died in 2015 at the age of 91, was an English composer of light music. One of his better-known works was this "Fantasia on Auld Lang Syne", composed in 1976. The fun part about it is that it includes many very short excerpts from other classical pieces - more than 120 of them. (A list of included works may be found here.) For a piece that's less than 20 minutes long, that's going some!
A commenter on the video's YouTube page says, "Only an insane genius could have produced this." I'm not sure about the "insane" part, but it's certainly a remarkable piece of arrangement, if not entirely original composition.
I'm sure most of my readers have grown used to vegetariansvegans anti-meat activists trumpeting that it wastes far too much water to produce a pound, or a kilogram, of beef, compared to just eating vegetables and fruit. Turns out they've been fudging the numbers, to put it mildly.
The crime they see: 15,415 litres of water to produce one kilogram of beef. Every campaign, every documentary, every leaflet through the door since about 2012.
The crime they do: not reading the paper.
The figure is real. It comes from Mekonnen and Hoekstra at the University of Twente, and it is careful, peer-reviewed work. What the campaigns strip out is that the same authors split that number into three parts, because the three parts are not the same thing at all.
Green water is rain. It falls on the grass. The cow eats the grass. For beef, green water is about 94 per cent of that headline.
Blue water is the stuff that matters. Rivers, lakes, aquifers. The stuff that gets pumped, metered, fought over in court, and does not come back.
So here is the blue water, in litres per kilogram, from the same authors, same method, same units.
Pistachios: 7,602
Almonds: 3,816
Walnuts: 2,451
Dates: 1,250
Cashews: 921
Beef: 550
Read that last line again, then go and look at what is in your granola.
The 15,415 counts rain that fell on a Welsh hillside as a cost, against an animal that was standing in it, on land where nothing else grows, in a country where rain is the one thing we have never once been short of.
The pistachio is drinking fourteen times more of the water that actually runs out.
I've no doubt the "greenies" will object that most of the rainwater runs off and feeds their vegetables, so it's by definition "greener" than beef anyway: but that's splitting nutritional hairs, IMHO. I'll continue to favor a carnivore diet, thank you very much!
