I’ve read a lot about Alice Waters, the doyenne of California cuisine. I’d never discount her accomplishments, which are considerable. If you cook with any sort of adventure in your soul, if you can tell a shiitake mushroom from a morel, if you consider seasonality and sustainability when choosing produce and meat and fish, you have Alice Waters to thank, for leading a food revolution, starting in the 1970s and still continuing.
However. I also concede she’s a bit of a nut on this subject. Her Marie Antoinette attitudes about how poor people should spend their food dollars are daft and condescending, and I’m sorry, but I’m not forgoing leafy greens through a long Michigan winter, as she has suggested we do. (“There are so many turnips and potatoes to enjoy!”) But I don’t want to get into that now. I’m thinking of the passage in a particular story, in which the writer playfully asked her how she’d feel if she knew her daughter, then a teenager, was sneaking McDonald’s. He described Waters as being genuinely saddened and distressed by the very idea of her child consuming a Big Mac. That’s how awful McDonald’s is, or was. (Psst, Alice: It’s worse now.)
I know Waters is a committed lefty, but I can’t help but wonder what she’s thinking about the Washington crew these days. She and Croaky and Casey Means, his nominee for surgeon general, seem to have a lot in common. I thought of this on a dog walk after reading this excellent essay by Talia Lavin, about Means and her ideas about eating and health:
Casey Means, the Trump administration’s new nominee for Surgeon General of the United States, has a prescription for America. You can find it in her 2024 book, “Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health.” In Means’ vision, “Good Energy” is a holistic approach to health, one predicated on the idea that “everything is connected.” The text strikes a tone that mirrors Means’ own career path, from training to be an ENT surgeon to life as a wellness influencer whose Instagram, @drcaseyskitchen, boasts nearly a million followers: there’s a sprinkling of grounded research that cites reputable medical journals, and a blizzard of plausible-sounding nonsense. (Means dropped out of her surgical residency and is not currently a licensed doctor.) Either way, what she offers is a kind of earthly paradise, one in which “you can enjoy balanced weight, a pain-free body, healthy skin, and a stable mood… the natural state of fertility that is your birthright.”
But like many other visions of paradise, to attain Means’ state of Good Energy, you have to obey the rules. And there are a lot of them.
According to her dubious statistics, only 6.8% of Americans are “optimizing energy production in their cells,” which is the prerequisite for the aforementioned earthly Eden of the body. For the other 93.2 percent, Means lays out a checklist of all that you must do to become one of the corporal elite. The section of her book on “Food” includes a daunting 23 items, starting with “I currently use a food journal or food tracker consistently to monitor what foods and beverages I’m consuming” and continues with eating three cups of leafy greens a day, plus avoiding foods with “refined seed oils,” all pastries, all sweetened drinks, all white flour, all artificial sweeteners, and—for a bonus—having the ability to not eat for longer than four hours without feeling “excess hunger or cravings.” There are further sections on “Toxins” (don’t store your food in plastic containers or eat high-mercury fish or use plastic water bottles or eat anything with artificial food dyes) and “Meal Timing and Habits.” Altogether, the material on food dwarfs the rest of the (very long) checklist, which includes sleep and the mind-body connection.
What it all amounts to is that Means’ “bold vision for health” in America involves an incredibly stressful, highly involved method of examining absolutely everything that goes into your body. It entails researching whatever you may consider eating, and avoiding oral contraceptives, antibiotics, and over-the-counter pain medications like ibuprofen, plus plastic water bottles and unfiltered water.
As I read on, I realized what Means’ affliction is, about a paragraph before Lavin revealed the same conclusion: Orthorexia nervosa. As the National Institutes of Health defines it (for now; I’m sure this web page is marked for death), orthorexia is an eating disorder “perhaps best summarized as an obsession with healthy eating with associated restrictive behaviors.”
I first read about it when I was clipping health news for Big Pharma, and it’s funny how so many MAGA people have some form of it, from Jordan Peterson and his crackbrain carnivore diet (beef, salt, water – and nothing else) to the various Paleo/caveman/low-carb regimes practiced in the manosphere to the organic vegan menus followed by women like Means.
Lavin, who grew up in a strictly kosher home, goes on to tie it to the dietary laws followed in her family:
I’m intimately familiar with systems of eating that involve a lot of label-gazing, head-scratching, and consideration of ingredients. The irony is that, even though I lived through two decades of religious dietary strictures of byzantine complexity, it never felt half as much like a story about sin as Casey Means’ book does. In Leviticus, God never promises a longer, healthier, pain-free life if you avoid breaking any of the dietary laws. He never promises anything, except avoiding becoming ritually unclean.
By contrast, the Instagram orthorexics explicitly declare that you’re broken unless you keep up with an ever-shifting codex of purity that, incidentally, involves quite a bit of discretionary spending. Sure, two sets of cutlery and kitchenware is a big outlay. But Means wants you to buy, at minimum, wearable activity trackers for your movement and sleep; a food journal; blue-light-blocking glasses; access to a sauna; charcoal and reverse-osmosis water filters; a glucometer; and a whole new set of pantry staples (she even specifies a seed-oil-free hummus brand.)
And of course, there’s cruelty involved. Fall away from the kosher path, and you’re a bad Jew. Eat Nacho Cheese Doritos? Then you richly deserve any illness that befalls you. All of this is backed up by ridiculous overstatement; note how Croaky talks about food dyes or processed foods or seed oils “poisoning” children. I will grant you, it’s probably not a great idea to drink a gallon of Red 40 every day, but most of us can survive our bad breakfast cereal or red licorice indulgences just fine. But if you consume these things after you’re told you shouldn’t? Then it’s so much easier to take away your Medicaid, you fat p.o.s. with no self-discipline.
In this, they are marching happily next to the more garden-variety cruelty practiced by the rest of the administration. And they feel fine about it, because they’re only trying to Make America Healthy Again. IS THAT SO WRONG?
I’m so mad at Croaky these days, I can’t even. And now they’ve cancelled the Moderna contract for a bird-flu vaccine.
There is joy in the land, however. Stephen Miller’s wife is leaving the White House to follow Elon Musk to wherever he’s going, and there’s a hot rumor the three of them were in a shall-we-say throuple type of relationship. Our breakfast conversation Thursday was not about eggs, coffee or what we each had planned for the day.
Me: “God, I can’t imagine being railed by both those guys. Literally a fate worse than death.”
Alan: “Nah, that’s not how it went. Elon railed her while Stephen watched, jerking off.”
It’s enough to make you want to splash Red 40 right in your eyes, isn’t it?
Have a great weekend, all.
alex said on May 29, 2025 at 3:54 pm
Anyone who would willingly marry Stephen Miller is probably used to being passed by, so getting passed around might just put a little spring into her step.
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Julie Robinson said on May 29, 2025 at 3:57 pm
Ooh, is she going to take the kids and live in Elon’s special compound?
I’m so over the MAHA people. Because of food restrictions, we make almost all our own meals, and they’re pretty healthy. But today I’ve spent every minute up until now navigating health appointments/financial arrangements/another HVAC repair for three eldsters, and I’ll be damned if anyone gets in the way of my dish of ice cream tonight. Full fat.
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jcburns said on May 29, 2025 at 4:44 pm
Yeegads, now I have Nancy and Alan’s breakfast conversation—a detailed analysis of Republicans’ bed habits and choices—in my brain. We’re living in painful times.
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Deborah said on May 29, 2025 at 5:12 pm
A thruple including Steven Miller is disgusting to think about.
Getting healthier via diet isn’t wrong obviously, it’s something to keep in mind, just not get obsessed with. I can’t imagine keeping a food intake diary but I suppose if you’re inspired to do it, it can’t hurt. I have never been one to have a hard time going four or more hours without eating something, I go through phases but sometimes I have to remind myself to eat. We usually eat 2 meals a day, breakfast and dinner, I only eat lunch if I’m invited out.
But I will say lately I’ve been unable to resist those buckets of caramels they have at some checkout counters, I can’t not purchase 2 or 3 pieces whenever I see them at Walgreens or where ever, and I start eating them before I get out of the store.
The farmers market in Santa Fe offers double for people with SNAP. They can buy produce etc that costs half as much the regular price, which I think is a really good deal. The farmers market here is fantastic, beats other ones I’ve been to by a mile.
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Sherri said on May 29, 2025 at 6:37 pm
Looks like that big MAHA report may have been generated with ChatGPT or the like, complete with fake citations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/well/maha-report-citations.html?unlocked_article_code=1.K08.3AVh.kAxjOLpGrB2e&smid=url-share
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David C said on May 29, 2025 at 6:42 pm
Isn’t Miller part Jewish? I understand the Mrs. is just as much a piece of work as he is, so finding someone “whiter” would probably add up.
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Sherri said on May 29, 2025 at 7:02 pm
Imagine all the horrors that would have ensued had a member of a Democratic cabinet said “We want America to be more like New York than Florida.” You know, prosperous, lower crime, more people insured, healthier, diverse. We would hear endlessly about how Democrats look down on “normal Americans” and hate the working class.
But Scott Bessent, the current Treasury Secretary, can go on Fox News and say “We want American to be more like Florida than New York,” and nobody bats an eye. Florida has a lower per capita income, higher murder rate, fewer people with health insurance, forced birth, unfriendly to LGBTQ+, unfriendly to education, and I’m hard pressed to think of any way in which I’d prefer Florida to New York.
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susan said on May 29, 2025 at 8:12 pm
David C — Stephen “PeeWee Goering” Miller’s own family has renounced him and his fascist ways. His uncle called him an immigration hypocrite, and doesn’t understand how he became so radicalized in that direction. And well, yeah, he certainly knows from his ancestry of Jewish “shtetl of subsistence farmers” in Belarus.
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ROGirl said on May 30, 2025 at 6:04 am
I don’t eat pork products any more because of the commercial industry practices, not out of religious beliefs. I probably shouldn’t eat chicken or turkey for the same reasons, but I haven’t eliminated meat completely.
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Jeff Gill said on May 30, 2025 at 7:52 am
Because of my peculiar research interests, I’ve spent a great deal of time reading the work of Dr. James H. Salisbury, who once lived here in my neck of the woods, and who developed the basis of what is now known as Salisbury steak. There’s both a touching side & a wackadoodle side to this story, just with his predecessor Rev. Sylvester Graham. Graham and his crackers and dietary prescriptions just before the Civil War, and Salisbury’s diet of “scraped beef patties” & hot water (in quantity) in the decades after it were all examples of the profitability of scrupulosity in the Nineteenth Century, and I do mean profitable.
All of which is to say none of this is new, and even the ascendancy of it isn’t unprecedented. It’s just a question of how long it will take for the reaction to set in, and where the pendulum will swing back to.
And while I’m less than a year out of the attendance game with the juvenile court, I have the perspective of pre-smartphone life for school age kids, and the whole journey to and through COVID, and I’ll still say the biggest change for youth mental & social development is the wreckage of their sleep schedules, and the general state of sleep deprivation most of them stagger through the day in. Sugar? Yeah, I guess it’s a problem; lack of soluble fiber? Okay, more wouldn’t hurt. Processed food? I’ll listen, up to a point. But the underlying issue in whatever symptom you’re talking about is getting no more than six hours of sleep more nights than not for most middle & high school kids. That’s my issue, based on wide experience over three decades, and I don’t hear MAHA talking about it hardly at all.
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Dexter Friend said on May 30, 2025 at 8:00 am
Deborah’s comment made me grin, as I recalled my nights as a young man panning hot caramel from giant hoppers into long pans and stacking the pans onto pallets and then into tempering ovens. This was at Kraft Foods in Kendallville, Indiana in 1968.
Nobody cared if we pinched off a plug of this delicious candy once in a while. It was so good I had no appetite for baloney or burgers for lunch break that I lost 30 pounds over the winter and was fit to quit the factory to venture out to play baseball full time. Another perk: we could fill our little white hats with chocolate covered almonds every night. That was my weight-loss diet. Breakfast, two eggs fried in a shot of Pam spray, one cuppa joe. Then a little caramel hunk in the afternoon at work. A few choco-almonds after work. 30 pounds fell off my frame quickly.
Now I eat a little better. Last night, burnt ends , butter-garlic seasoned rice, double serving of fresh steamed broccoli. And a diet root beer.
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nancy said on May 30, 2025 at 8:36 am
Jeff, that’s a good observation that honestly hadn’t occurred to me. Our smartphone rule for Kate was: Off and on the kitchen table by 10 p.m. People have told me horror stories about kids who secretly play video games well into the night, and for that reason alone I’m glad we had a girl and not a boy. I can’t imagine.
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Julie Robinson said on May 30, 2025 at 8:51 am
Yup. Pre-smart phone, we’d wake up to our son playing on the computer in the middle of the night. Passwords, removing the keyboard, even unplugging wifi router; he found ways around them all. Those games are like crack. I do not want to relive his high school years.
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SusanG said on May 30, 2025 at 9:43 am
When Musk burst onto the scene, my first thought was he’s the new Rudy Giuliani. Sure enough, he’s heading into a downward spiral of broke-ass. In a few years, he’ll be spotted buying hair dye at Walmart. Trump knows how to pick ‘em.
I have mixed feelings about Alice. Saw her speak at Indianapolis Museum of Art. She started out singing/songey, hippy/dippy, but about half way through the lecture, she stood at the podium with ram-rod posture and looked at her audience steely-eyed and said “I didn’t create a restaurant, I created an industry.” I’m hoping she, and Mark Bitman will use their influence and moral superiority to support vaccines and debunk RFK Jr.s belief in the miasma theory.
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Jeff Gill said on May 30, 2025 at 9:50 am
For years, with male students called in to talk to me about attendance issues, as they sat down I’d reach out, shake their hand, and as we did ask “Call of Duty or World or Warcraft?” Rarely did I get anything other than “uh, [one or the other].” Our conversations were constructive from there.
Since 2015 or so that stopped working, darn it. Too many options to stay online and chatting/killing with your friends from Singapore or Assam. It’s broadening, in a weird way. The kids would often admit they’d checked out the geography just to see where their friends were playing from (and what time zone they were in).
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Mark P said on May 30, 2025 at 10:28 am
All the dietary hooraw is one of our modern versions of snake oil. One of the physicians I occasionally run across and listen to because of his anti-RFK rants supported the Mediterranean diet to help prevent dementia. He gave an impressive percent reduction in risk. That sounds great, but when you actually look it up, there are studies that support the proposition, and studies that show no effect. So, who the hell knows. My guess is that there are confounding factors that haven’t been identified, or a mild effect. You have probably seen, or I might have mentioned, that the “blue zones” where people live extraordinarily long lives, almost certainly don’t exist. It turns out some of the very old people either lied about their ages, or don’t really even know how old they are. But some people tried to make an industry out of the stories.
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Heather said on May 30, 2025 at 11:19 am
As I recall, one common characteristic about those blue zones is that the people there enjoyed very strong social safety nets—not just affordable health care and the ability to not work a demanding job in their old age, but strong communities that provided comfort and camaraderie. That’s just as important to staying healthy as good food.
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MarkH said on May 30, 2025 at 11:51 am
David C. and Susan — It’s not Goering as the correct comparison. It’s Goebbels. The social sites (X, threads, Blue Sky) are ripe with memes of photo comparisons that prove Miller is a direct descendant, as if his character wouldn’t be a clue. I tried to post a link here yesterday of the sample pics, but something sent it into moderation oblivion. The physical resemblance is downright spooky/scary.
Also – what Jeff Gill said @10.
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susan said on May 30, 2025 at 12:44 pm
ooph, you’re right. It IS Goebbels! I get those names mixed up, but the images are stark.
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Jeff Borden said on May 30, 2025 at 1:35 pm
While I generally eat healthy –I try to eat fruit at every meal and enjoy unsalted nuts as a snack– I much prefer the philosophy of Anthony Bourbain, who declared, “Your body isn’t a temple. It’s an amusement park.” Damn, I wish he were still around. He’d have a field day with Brain Worm Bobby and his fellow goofball.
It’s hard to worry about shit like a food intake diary when our HHS is canceling bird flu vaccine development and attacking coronavirus vaccines for anyone under 65. These fuckers are going to get a lot of people killed.
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Sherri said on May 30, 2025 at 1:45 pm
Brain Worm Bobby and Dr Oz don’t want a bird flu vaccine, but they want to “save” a bunch of ostriches in Canada from being killed because they’re part of a flock exposed to bird flu. They think they should be kept safe and studied.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/28/world/canada/ostriches-avian-flu-rfk-jr-dr-oz.html?unlocked_article_code=1.LE8.8AJh.BjdJyCmeCso7&smid=url-share
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Dexter Friend said on May 30, 2025 at 3:44 pm
In the Bush wars, soldiers, anybody, could FaceTime family at will.
Just 20 years earlier, I got to speak to family from Nha Trang one time, as a COMM soldier from MAC-V HQ nearby ran into our Quonset hut with a portable set saying he had set up a HAM radio relay to CONUS and did any of us want to call home. We did. We had to say “over” as well as they did. I got 90 seconds on the rig.
Then just a half-generation later, cell phones, bag phones were the first I remember. Then in 2006, iPhones, FaceTime, everything.
As a young boy, my mother had to cross a busy state highway to use the neighbor’s telephone in emergencies, always waiting for her turn on the party line.
Per a story in The New Yorker, maybe 25 years ago, Finland’s educational people mandated every child over 6 years to have a Nokia cell phone in their lunch bag or book bag for emergencies. Maybe Nokia was behind this, but hell, it was in The New Yorker.
There’s a constantly-repeating advertisement on TV now that says soon American kids will also be told they must have a phone on them with a number that the school has on record. I approve.
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Brandon said on May 30, 2025 at 4:04 pm
Chase Chrisley Details Todd and Julie’s EMOTIONAL Reunion (Exclusive)
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Sherri said on May 30, 2025 at 4:23 pm
No wonder we live in an age of conspiracy theories. It’s so difficult to find solid information anywhere.
I spent some time yesterday trying to understand why some people believe that undocumented immigrants are not entitled to due process, despite the Constitution clearly stating that no person, not no citizen, or even no resident, shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without the due process of law. I did find some small thread of a situation, expedited deportation, which has been around since 1995 or so, whereby the Border Patrol can essentially turn around someone they find crossing the border other than at a legal border crossing. The person still has the right to claim asylum and enter that process.
That’s not the same as snatching random people off the street, without even giving them the chance to verify their identity or immigration status, and shipping them off to a foreign prison. The Trump Administration sleight of hand is that they just deported the people to El Salvador, and what happened then is up to El Salvador, but that fig leaf isn’t covering very much. Like with so much, the Trump Administration is taking the slightest thread of plausibility and trying to make it into a steel beam of new law, and the Supreme Court is cooperating with a lot of it.
Anyway, my point is, nobody is doing a very good job of explaining what due process is, what due process looks like with regards to immigration, and what the administration is doing.
If a bunch of men in masks snatched you off the street, what would protect you from being sent to a foreign prison, other than your white skin? That’s not being explained.
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Sherri said on May 30, 2025 at 5:10 pm
Another rabbit hole I’ve been falling down is trying to understand what’s really going on with SpaceX. So much reporting on SpaceX (and on other Musk companies, and tech in general) is overly credulous, taking what Musk says as truth and reality without examining it.
The Falcon program has been a success. SpaceX can reliably deliver payloads to Low Earth Orbit. Falcon Heavy can deliver a payload about equivalent to what the space shuttle could, from what I can find (remarkably hard to find these numbers.) Cost per launch is cheaper for Falcon Heavy, but I’m not sure that takes into account that without early NASA funding, SpaceX wouldn’t exist.
Starship, on the other hand, has launched 9 times, and has yet to even make an orbit around the earth. Rapid unscheduled disassembly is the term SpaceX uses for “oops, it blew up again,” but to hear them, it’s all part of the process. Fail fast, learn, iterate.
Maybe, but the laws of physics don’t care about your design process. The original claim was that the Starship would carry 100t of payload, but now Elon is talking half that, apparently because they overestimated the thrust of the engines (again, hard to find details on this). So, they’ve had to cut weight on the rocket and push the engines harder, and vibrations are resulting in fuel leaks everywhere.
The plan to go to the Moon is to launch Starship into LEO, then have multiple additional launches to refuel. This approach was considered and rejected in the Apollo program, and the Saturn V launched from Earth with enough fuel to make it to the Moon and back. The first launch of a Saturn V was in 1967, and we landed on the Moon in 1969.
But, of course, the goal of Starship is much more than the Moon, right? We’re going to Mars! This is another place where the credulity drives me nuts. We are not going to Mars. There are so many problems that have not even begun to be addressed about putting a person on Mars, but the biggest one is radiation. Remember I how mentioned the weight of the rocket? There will have to be a lot of shielding added to Starship to protect anybody from radiation while they spend months in space traveling to Mars. And, Mars has no magnetic field like Earth does, which protects us (and LEO) from the worst of cosmic radiation.
But Musk says we’re going to Mars by 2030, and it appears all over media, with little or no pushback.
It all makes me feel crazy.
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susan said on May 30, 2025 at 5:31 pm
Starship Was Doomed From The Beginning Elon, The Con.
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Jeff Borden said on May 30, 2025 at 6:05 pm
The NYT is breaking a big story online today that Elmo was hoovering up the drugs with wild abandon last fall. Ecstasy. Magic mushrooms. Adderall. And so much ketamine he damaged his bladder. Witnesses said he carried a box with his daily drug diet –some 20 in all– in a box.
Folks, this is who has been rampaging through our government. A drug-addled ketamine junkie with a messiah complex.
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David C said on May 30, 2025 at 6:27 pm
Starship reminds me of the Soviet N-1 rocket. It was their moon rocket. They’re both so complex and their leadership so slipshod that as soon as they fix one problem, many more become apparent. They only way to prove out a two year Mars mission is a two year low earth orbit mission with zero flaws that could potentially harm the crew, zero resupply missions, zero replacement part deliveries. They can’t even start that because they’re probably never going to get it crew rated unless Trump decided to look the other way and put astronauts in a killer machine. We’ve done it before, I guess, so why not again.
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Sherri said on May 30, 2025 at 7:02 pm
I read Will Lockett, who Susan linked to, but it would be nice to have more sources.
An example of extremely credulous reporting is space.com’s coverage of Musk’s latest presentation to SpaceX employees, laying out the Mars timeline, which features multiple launches to Mars in 2026 crewed by his Optimus robots (which have only been demonstrated being tele-operated!), the first humans by 2029 or 2030, and full scale colonization happening by 2033.
This is all based on the next generation of the Starship solving all the problems of the current generation, the new engines working flawlessly, and encountering absolutely no problems with refueling in LEO. And putting robots with no demonstrated utility on board, because you’re not going to remotely operate a robot from Mars with the latency of that time delay.
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/private-spaceflight/elon-musk-says-spacex-will-launch-its-biggest-starship-yet-this-year-but-mars-in-2026-is-50-50
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Mark P said on May 30, 2025 at 8:37 pm
Musk overpromising and underdelivering? No! Say it ain’t so!
We have plenty of experience seeing Musk lying about what he’s going to do with Tesla and self driving and whatever else he has done. Why should SpaceX be any different? In fact, how could it be any different? Maybe it’s pure con, or maybe he actually believes his own words. Who knows, and who cares?
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susan said on May 30, 2025 at 9:05 pm
It’s really too bad that Musk wasn’t the dummy in the driver’s seat of the Tesla Roadster the jerk launched into Solar orbit in 2018.
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Jakash said on May 30, 2025 at 9:14 pm
Check your climate change bingo card. 2 weeks after the dust bowl reenactment we experienced in Chicago on May 16, today features the return of the type of beautiful orange sunset provided by Canadian wildfire smoke.
“May you live in interesting times,” indeed… D’oh!
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FDChief said on May 30, 2025 at 9:54 pm
The big “tell” on Water’s foodie schtick is that to come anywhere CLOSE to making it work you have to be RICH. Not “ahead of the bills by a couple of weeks” flush, SERIOUSLY fuck-you-money rich.
Food journaling? Artisanal veggies? NO prepared foods? Hours a day “researching” your diet?
No working people have the spare time for that shit, or access to the sort of food resources (i.e. spendy Whole Paycheck-level grocery retailers). Waters gives it away just by insisting on that level of diet scrutiny. I had a damn good paying professional gig and I didn’t have the time for that nonsense.
Nope. It’s all a piece with Croaky’s nonsensical woo and the whole MAHA dodge. It’s “No, Mister Bond, I expect you to die” fucking movie villain assholery.
These fucking people.
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FDChief said on May 30, 2025 at 10:31 pm
It’s also worth noting; the hype around Elmo “stepping away” completely ignores that his fucking incel coders are NOT. “DOGE” is still barking away, cutting random federal positions and agencies. They still have no fucking idea what they’re doing. It’s just “taking a hammer to the control panel” and will end up about at well as you think.
Christ! How these people bring out the old GI in me! I want to wade into these MAGAts and Trumpkins with a bayonet and start killing people and breaking shit. That’s the only language they understand.
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Jeff Gill said on May 31, 2025 at 7:55 am
Our local food pantry director (who is retiring soon, curse his smiling face!) has a great five minute talk he does for skeptical pols and cranky farmers and other “conservative” groups who think they should worry about the choices working class patrons of the pantries make.
He explains all the things they do to make fresh vegetables available, including providing kitchenware and lessons and recipe guidance, and how that’s always going to be part of the plan. But then he walks them through how a mother with two or three kids comes to the store with $5 discretionary, and is faced with $5 worth of fresh fruit/veg, or pre-packaged processed snacks, and that there’s four times by weight the purchase option for healthy eating, right? It’s easy.
Except you have to break it down, prepare it, which reduces the mass by half, especially if you’re not good at the knife work; you have to cook it, which could go wrong, leaving you with nothing, or you could do it all right, but the kids — or one kid! — doesn’t like it. Plus it has to be eaten on schedule before it goes bad; if it goes bad, or if it isn’t eaten, you throw it out.
Pre-packed processed snacks? Your kids will eat 100% of what you bought, and if they don’t today, it is still edible in a week. That’s a guaranteed good purchase; healthy is a gamble on three or four levels. So you think “it would be good to pick up the apples and make applesauce or even a pie” but you grab the snack food. It’s a rational choice in a constrained universe of difficult choices, made every day.
I’ve seen pretty hardened audiences look very thoughtful when Chuck gets done walking them through his warehouse.
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Colleen said on May 31, 2025 at 11:35 am
FDChief, I was going to post the same thing…it’s the height of privilege to be able to devote that much thought and energy to what you eat. I have done various programs, from Weight Watchers to a hospital based bariatric program, where I was instructed to keep a food journal. All it did was take up time and mess up my relationship with food. I got tired of obsessively thinking about what I was eating, so I stopped the journaling.
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David C said on May 31, 2025 at 12:30 pm
Talking to a pantry director is always an eye opening experience. I was volunteering at ours and the director told us to spread this far an wide.
1. They have all the peanut butter they can use.
2. If your family won’t eat it, why would you expect their clients’ to.
3. They can do far more with cash than canned goods.
4. Most of us are a couple of paychecks from needing them, so cut the attitude.
5. Most of their clients are either disabled or work their asses off at more than one job, so cut the attitude.
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Dexter Friend said on May 31, 2025 at 1:30 pm
I learned 32 years I could not drink all I wanted, because then, every time I drank beverage alcohol I would be drunk.
When I quit, I was told to keep candy around to quell the urge to drink, and to have malts and milkshakes , and to keep ice cream around to have when I craved booze. In 14 years, I gained
151 pounds.
Then I got serious. I was determined not to die at 371 pounds, fer crissakes.
I do not harbor gallons of ice cream, I do not stash candy around the house. I severely limit baked goods.
I eat three meals, but when I have what I need, I stop eating. I may save food as leftovers or just take it to the bin.
Just an example: I eat one egg, not 2 or 3 as I used to. I alternate daily, grits and oatmeal.
If on the road, a sandwich gets at least the top bun/bread fed to the trash can. Fries, junior size, and I usually eat about 2/3 of those and trash the rest. No munching anything at night watching TV; I chew the hell out of those 35-stick packs of sugarless gum. And I always have at least 12 cold waters and diet sodas in the refrigerator.
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Brandon said on May 31, 2025 at 2:20 pm
When I quit, I was told to keep candy around to quell the urge to drink, and to have malts and milkshakes , and to keep ice cream around to have when I craved booze.
It’s interesting you say that.
https://winehistoryproject.org/temperance-and-prohibition-stimulated-new-beverages/
As an alternative to saloons, the creation of soda fountains at the local pharmacies became very popular. Local soda fountains used the “new” fizzy and sweet sodas as the mixer for ice cream sodas and milk shakes.
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Sherri said on May 31, 2025 at 5:34 pm
Every time I think I can’t be gobsmacked any more by the self-righteousness of GOP politicians who think kicking people off health insurance is the Christian thing to do, someone like Joni Ernst comes along.
In a recent town hall, when someone from the audience yelled that people would die because of Medicaid cuts, Ernst responded that everyone dies. Okay, not great, but at least she’s holding a town hall, so I’ll give her a break for not responding well in the moment.
But today she posted a video with her response to the uproar, and it’s smarmy and disgusting, and everything that is wrong with the heresy that is conservative white American Christianity.
https://bsky.app/profile/keithedwards.bsky.social/post/3lqimvunyb22n
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Mark P said on May 31, 2025 at 5:53 pm
Yes, praise the lord, die you motherfuckers, and the rest of us will have everlasting life because we believe in our lord and savior, who says we should all eat, drink, and be merry while the unbelievers perish in this world and the next. It’s your fault for not understanding that I don’t give a shit about you.
Sometimes I wish there was a god, and he would let me watch when those people come before him.
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Sherri said on May 31, 2025 at 7:08 pm
Of course, Sen Ernst probably thinks she’s owning the libs and being so clever, but seriously, isn’t there even a part of her left that has any feeling for the good churchgoer who is dependent on Medicaid? I mean, I know several people who would fit into their model of white conservative Christian who depend on Medicaid because they’ve spent their lives caring for severely disabled (now grown, but not able to care for themselves) children.
It’s the utter callousness and glee that they show regarding the suffering of others that just gets to me. It’s not, “we’ve got to make hard choices, but here’s what we’ll do to mitigate the suffering,” it’s “Die, motherfuckers!”
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Jakash said on May 31, 2025 at 8:48 pm
If people like Ms. Ernst were atheists, perhaps avid acolytes of Ayn Rand, one would still despise them, of course, but at least they wouldn’t be so unimaginably hypocritical.
But to conclude that smarmy, incredibly obnoxious message with a reference to her alleged Christianity is almost unbelievable. Or would be if they didn’t do stuff like that all the time.
Kudos to whoever commented immediately beneath the video with the Lucy from Peanuts “WHAT AN ASSHOLE” meme!
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Deborah said on May 31, 2025 at 9:08 pm
Oh Lordy, Ernst is Lutheran. Of course she is.
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Mark P said on May 31, 2025 at 9:49 pm
Jakash, I’m saving that Peanuts image. I think it will come in handy.
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ROGirl said on June 1, 2025 at 5:56 am
She just said out loud what I had pretty much concluded, that human lives are expendable to them.
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Jeff Gill said on June 1, 2025 at 8:13 am
David C., that’s gospel. Hat tip to your local director. They know.
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SusanG said on June 1, 2025 at 9:52 am
Years ago, I had a little food blog and this is what I wrote about diets… https://indieats.wordpress.com/2008/01/05/weight-watchers-made-me-fat/
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Dexter Friend said on June 1, 2025 at 12:17 pm
All aboaarrrdd! The CRAZY train.
Trump is fucking demented, not Joe: from: The Daily Beast:
“With one repost from President Donald Trump, former president Joe Biden has joined a storied pantheon: public figures believed to have died and been replaced by clones.
Not content with spreading conspiracy theories on Friday night, late on Saturday night, Trump shared a post by a supporter to his Truth Social page that claimed Biden was killed in 2020. The post reads, “There is no #JoeBiden – executed in 2020. #Biden clones doubles & robotic engineered soulless mindless entities are what you see. Democrats don’t know the difference.”-”
“What absolute twaddle”, as Withnail said in “Withnail & I”.
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alex said on June 1, 2025 at 5:44 pm
Our neighbors have a visitor, the wife’s dad. She’s cautioned us not to engage with him about politics. Regarding Kristi Noem’s definition of habeas corpus, he contends that it was the question and questioner that were defective, not her answer. This appears to be the new GOP deflection for any criticisms of Trump or his cabinet whenever they’re out of their depth.
The neighbors are leaving for Europe tomorrow for a couple of weeks and the old fella is house-sitting for them. He’s wanting to hang out socially like we do with his kids and, well, this should be interesting.
I may not be able to hold my tongue if he tries to convince me that Biden is a robot.
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