Lose Weight on the McDiet

Subway has been doing those "Jared" commercials with the guy that lost weight eating their subs. Wienerschnitzel spoofed them with their "Chili-Dog Diet" promotion. And now a woman claims to have lost 33 pounds on two months of a McDonalds-only diet, in an experience obviously quite different from that of Morgan Spurlock of Super Size Me fame, who GAINED 25 pounds in a month of eating only McFood.


FoxNews: Losing Pounds Under the Golden Arches


So let's get this straight: You can lose weight at Subway; you can gain spectacular amounts of weight at McDonalds; now you can lose a ton at McDonalds as well. In fact, I'll bet you could actually gain weight eating at Subway!

I wish I knew what to believe. I wish there was a place where I could get all the correct information I want without having to worry about what I was actually learning. I've tried mass media, but I got confused by the unacknowledged liberal bias. I've tried talk radio and it's full of overt conservative editorializing and opinions. And new media sources are even less balanced.

It's like I have to actually think about everything now or risk coming to errant conclusions. Just like I have to think about what I eat.


filed: health; media

Non-Mexicans Hopping the Border

US Border Patrols agents are apparently catching a substantial number of illegal immigrants coming up through Mexico who are not Mexicans. Unlike Mexican citizens, who are normally returned to Mexico to try to come across again the next day, Mexico will not accept citizens of other countries. So, we check them against terror watch lists and what not, and if that doesn't raise any flags we apparently just let them go. INTO OUR COUNTRY. Unbelievable.

It's not that I have any problem with immigrants, what with the US being the land of opportunity, and it seems to me that we need more liberal immigration policies to allow more good folks from other lands to come here legally. However, with our urgent and well-founded concern with terrorism today, it is ludicrous to make it so easy for our enemies to sneak in and wreak whatever havoc enters their heads.

Tom Clancy wrote a book in which Islamic terrorists entered the US through Mexico and attacked shopping malls with machine guns in suicide missions. Fiction, yes. But another Clancy thriller (published in 1994, well before 9/11/2001) has a bad guy flying a fuel-laden airliner into a joint session of Congress. Chilling...


Yahoo: Non-Mexicans arrested at US Border nearly doubled


filed: politics.us

Whence Caffeine?

Many of us enjoy caffeine, some of us REALLY like it and could "quit any time", but few of us know much about it. Have you, for instance, thought about the history of caffeine, or asked some of the hard questions like "Does caffeine reduce the effects of alcohol?", "Is caffeine a diet requirement?", and "Is coffee really good for hyperactive children?" This is stuff you must know.


Caffeine: Any Health Risks?


filed: etcetera

A Plane in Every Garage?

60 Minutes ran a report today about NASA's Highway in the Sky program, which is supposed to open up airways for huge numbers of personal aircraft. The piece also profiled several inventors who are working on innovative machines that are gunning for a piece of this new market.

But if a jet is more your style, check out this little baby--it's a six-passenger jet that is supposed to be about 1/4 as expensive and 1/3 to 1/5 the cost to fly as the current smallest business jet. And hey, they're only 900,000 bucks so just pick one up for me while you're there. That would be great. Thanks.


CBS News: Flying Cars Ready to Take Off


P.S. Snowman, you wanted a plane article? This one's for you.


filed: technology

Weekend Fireworks

I like fireworks. I like weekends. I would like to present some fireworks for your weekend.

Homestarrunner.com is, quite simply...one of the harder things to explain that I have found on the crazy WWW of ours. It is a site that brings us the cartoon hijinks of an eclectic cast of characters, including Homestar Runner, who is not the star, and Strong Bad, a sarcastic little dude who does wear a mexican wrestling mask and boxing gloves but does not wear a shirt. Strong Bad is in charge of the sites' most popular feature, Strong Bad Email, in which he answers emails from viewers like you. Strong Bad Email has given us classic moments like the Guitar email, and later, an email called Dragon that spawned its own video game.

What would the world be like without people who walk that fine line between genius and insanity? Thanks to Homestarrunner.com, we may never need to know.

P.S. This one is for those who can't stop editing things. You know who you are.


filed: humor

London Bombings: Anti-Globalists or al Qaeda?

If you're like me you're a little unclear about the motivation behind all of the violence over the years at economic summits like the G8 meetings this week. Of course, the Live 8 concerts this past weekend were aimed at influencing the conference as well.

So who are these people who are so worked up about the G8? Short answer--Socialists, Marxists and anti-globalists. All are opposed to free trade and hold to the basic Marxist view that rich people are obviously hurting poor people because they are rich, so they owe it to the poor to help them escape poverty. (see this chatter for some representative Marxist thought.)

So, while we're all used to Islamic terrorism, maybe we'll learn that today's bombings are actually anti-globalist violence, given their timing and location in Britain during the G8 summit in Britain. However, anti-globalist extremist tactics have been more about rioting than coordinated mass-transit bombings, and authorities are already pointing toward al Qaeda. It seems much more likely that al Qaeda is trying to toy with the politics of Britain (where Tony Blair faces pressure to withdraw from Iraq), just as they did in Spain (attacking and successfully affecting an election whose winners immediately withdrew their troops from Iraq) and the US (bin Laden belittled Bush and threatened America days before the election, but Americans re-elected him).

Whoever the terrorists are, this American's deepest sympathies are with those who have been victimized in another yet another indefensible act of violence against innocents.


filed: politics:world

Steinem and 200 protesters

In a huge development yesterday, US feminist Gloria Steinem and the granddaughter of convicted communist spies Julius and Ethel Rosenburg were accompanied by 200 protesters as they demanded the shutdown of the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay. The AP story made the rounds in US news outlets and in the Middle East on Al Jazeera. (Al Jazeera's story is a clinic in western-style, state-the-facts-but-twist-the-meaning biased journalism. It also features a European government report absolving the US of torture allegations but recommending the base be closed because of its damage to the U.S. reputation and because it fosters hatred of the US in prisoners, some of whom aren't that bad.) In Cuba's version of the story there were "hundreds" of protesters in a "massive" demonstration.

This is why conservatives believe that liberals hate this country (that, and things like the protesters at the funerals of our soldiers). Gloria Steinem is only the latest in a long line of distinguished left-wing figures (like Sen. Dick Durbin, who likened Guantanamo "abuses" to those of the Nazis and Soviets) to tickle the ears of our enemies looking for anti-american propoganda. Am I overstating? She compared the radical Islamic inmates at Guantanamo to the Puritans, noting that "they came to escape the very things - detention without due process, bias, a religious government ... that we protest today." Memo to Ms. Steinem: prisoners of war are not afforded the same constitutional protections as US citizens, and they never have been. And neither are the citizens of Iran or Saudi Arabia, which are home to many of these prisoners and whose governments are far more "religious" than ours.

Why is this even news? 200 protesters in NYC? Please. And it isn't because they came up with any solutions. Now if Gloria had invited the terrorists over to her place so they could rest more comfortably, THAT would be news.

filed: politics.us