Okay: chocolate is one thing. It's not just sugar; it's fat, too, and if it's milk chocolate it even includes some protein. (I know, I know, "not a significant source of protein", but come on--milk has protein in it.)
Jelly beans? The ingredients start with "sugar, corn syrup, modified food starch"--all three of which are carbohydrates, and in the case of the first two items they are simple carbohydrates.
I really don't need that.
I bought them with the expectation that I would be able to take or leave them. Over the past few years my sweet tooth has become less powerful, to the point that I've still got chocolate covered cherries left over from Christmas. I just don't crave a lot of sweet stuff any more, mainly because of my chronic hypoglycemia.
...except, apparently, for jelly beans. *sigh* Well, once this bag is gone there won't be any more in this house for at least a year.
* * *
Karl Denninger has not been on my blogroll for very long, which is probably why I didn't know about his prediction regarding the TSA.
...but it makes sense, doesn't it? If TSA personnel can steal stuff from peoples' luggage and get it out of the airport without being detected, then they could just as easily smuggle something into peoples' luggage.
With the right preparation and networking, they could easily move contraband all over the country right under everyone's nose.
Have a guy in Los Angeles slip bags of cocaine into luggage bound for Chicago and identify the bags by slapping some kind of distinctive sticker on them. At Chicago, have another TSA guy intercept the luggage and pull the coke out (and the stickers off) before the bags are put on the carousel.
...the only bar to this is that there'd have to be someone in charge of the TSA guys at the receiving end, so that the TSA guys could be "ordered" to retrieve the shipment. But most people can be bought, and there's enough money in drugs that just about everyone that isn't Jesus Christ Himself could be.
But Denninger mentions a far more insidious thing: putting a bomb in someone's luggage.
Obviously the TSA guys can move contraband in and out of the airport; that's been proven all too many times. So if a muslim terrorist joined the TSA, it would be a trivial exercise for him to get a bomb (or the parts thereof, for on-site assembly) into the airport and tuck the thing into an unsuspecting person's checked luggage.
A few hours later, bang, the airplane blows up and domestic air travel takes another massive hit. Orchestrated properly, a bunch of airplanes blow up at about the same time, all over the country.
TSA isn't about travel safety; it's all about training Americans to waive their civil rights without complaint.
* * *
EPA and its jackbooted thugs.
* * *
This link came from AoSHQ and it's a lib complaining that "John Edwards Makes Rush Limbaugh Look Like a Feminist".
What led me to post about this crud was this:
[John Edwards] put himself at the center when his girlfriend got pregnant with their child (which raises another question in the area of self-centeredness: Has the man never heard of wearing a condom?)See, I don't think John Edwards was in the right in any of this. The guy was cheating on his wife, hospitalized with cancer; he's a skunk, and nothing but.
...but how do we know what John Edwards did or didn't do with regards to birth control?
If Rielle Hunter told him she was on birth control--and if she rejected condom use, evincing anger ("You don't trust me! Why don't you trust me??") it's easy to see how the guy could figure, "Well, she's on the Pill, and it's easier just to go along with her than argue about this bullshit.")
Only she ends up pregnant because she's not on the Pill.
Look: it's not a secret among people how you make babies. It's one thing for young teenagers to think sex is just about feeling good, not making babies (after all, that's what the media and their sex education courses are teaching them) but after you've graduated from college you're supposed to know better: sex is for making babies and you've got a good chance of making one every time you have unprotected sex.
Birth control pills cost around $10 per month (Sandra Fluke notwithstanding) and the sexually active womam who does not use the Pill is trying to get pregnant, whether she admits it to anyone--herself included--or not.
Sorry: I don't buy the idea that John Edwards was "selfish" for not wearing a condom. This isn't the 1950s and there's no social stigma attached to women being on the Pill. Especially since some women use it for other medical reasons, not just for contraception. Okay, the woman who sleeps around and ends up pregnant because she won't take the pill? She's stupid--if she did not want to get pregnant--but it does not make the man "selfish" because he didn't wear a condom.
There's plenty of evidence in this story for John Edwards to be selfish, but continuing his campaign and not wearing a condom are not it. The former could have been a decision made between him and his wife. The latter could have been due to any number of reasons, from the simple to the idiotic. But there is no obvious reduction of the latter to "John Edwards is selfish".
To be honest, I think Rielle Hunter's plan was to get John Edwards to knock her up so that she could be his wife after Edwards' wife died. I think this because she obviously was not using any birth control herself. Whatever failings John Edwards may have as a person, I sincerely doubt he's stupid enough to have completely unprotected sex with a woman who is not his wife when he's running for President and his wife's in the hospital with cancer. I'd bet my bottom dollar he thought she was taking the pill.
Point is, no one in this sordid, stupid tale is blameless. They're all a bunch of shitheads who need to be whacked repeatedly with the 400 pound grouper of common sense.
* * *
Guess what? Svensmark Hypothesis also explains the mass extinctions in Earth's history.
An amusing point is that Svensmark stands the currently popular carbon dioxide story on its head. Some geoscientists want to blame the drastic alternations of hot and icy conditions during the past 500 million years on increases and decreases in carbon dioxide, which they explain in intricate ways. For Svensmark, the changes driven by the stars govern the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. Climate and life control CO2, not the other way around....which explains why the ice core data shows CO2 concentrations lagging global temperature, not leading it.
Via Borepatch, who says, "Rather than the rococo climate models, brimming with epicyclic escape clauses, "gridding", "adjusting", and "smoothing", you have a simple hypothesis that maps very, very closely to a data set that stretches back a half billion years."
Human carbon emissions cause climate change: myth busted, bitches!