If you've not noticed in this enchanting election cycle -- now heading into its eternal, unending, 19th year -- reality as we once knew it has dived into a hole somewhere, hiding out, on hiatus, with a shakily-lettered sign hung out that reads, "Go Away!"
While grim political candidates and their even-grimmer supporters are taking major psychotic breaks from reality, facts, and the truth, I'm content taking much smaller time-outs from this bat-guano-crazed world.
Alex Baer: The Craziness of Keeping Sane
Alex Baer: Blue Honey and Blown Money
Since when do bees make honey in various shades of blue and green?
Beekeepers in northeastern France were posing that most reasonable question lately, until they suspected their bees were eating the sugary waste from M&Ms -- those brightly colored, candy-shelled chocolates.
A biogas plant in Alsace is thought to be the culprit. It deals with waste from a Mars chocolate factory. Combine a harsh winter with a rainy summer, and the bees have had less time than usual for foraging, forcing beekeepers to set out sugar syrup for the bees.
Alex Baer: Casual Snapshots of Life on Two Planets
Just when you think you've got the hang of things, the solar system or universe will show you something you've never seen before. Case in point: What are those little black things on Mars -- where do they come from each spring, and where do they go when winter approaches?
Now, I know I've been running a fever -- it's early-voting-and-flu season here -- and been having trouble with gravity thanks to inner-ear plumbing, but black, spidery things on Mars?
Prairie2: Obama and your Grandma
More of that big government interference with your doctor and hospital is now taking effect. Medicare will start levying fine on hospitals that have excessive re-admissions within 30 days for certain complications from treatment (or lack of, or shoddy care).
It will be based on statistical analysis of patient records, and to begin with it will only apply to heart attack, heart failure and pneumonia.
Alex Baer: Just Because It's Satire, Doesn't Make It False
Satirical website The Onion has completely owned an Iran news agency. The Iran news outlet published as true a story from The Onion saying rural white Americans would rather vote for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than Barack Obama.
Just because it's satire doesn't mean it isn't true.
You probably remember the steady stream of various hangings of effigies around the nation since Obama took office, many of them done on or near Christian churches.
Prairie2: He can fix the Navy too
I thought it was an Onion story that Mitt Romney thinks airplanes should have roll down windows in the passenger cabin. Screen doors in the submarine, moon landings were faked and that sort of thing, but it's true.
His remarks were prompted by the dancing horse lady's scary experience on a campaign flight last week when the cabin filled with smoke briefly.
Prairie2: Ding Ding Ding
The corporate media has been trying really hard to minimize the revelation that rice has dangerous levels of arsenic contamination. They sort of talk around it as if it were natural, and of course the 'organic' brown rice is far worse than the good polished 'white' rice.
In case you were wondering why all of a sudden the rice has arsenic in it even though arsenic poisoning has been known for hundreds of years, the problem is corporate agri-business. They've been shifting huge amounts of irrigated cotton land into rice production. Never mind that a hundred plus years of using arsenic as a pesticide on the cotton has contaminated the soil beyond redemption.
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