One of the most charming things I’ve ever heard about Prince Charles is his interest in the local food movement. I haven’t thought much of it myself. In general, as long as my food doesn’t have a bunch of pesticides in it, I’m pretty happy. But a lot of recent reporting about food has made me wonder. Maybe it would be best if I knew where my food was coming from.

Last month, there was all the reporting that indicated that fish sold in markets was as likely as not to be mislabeled. That didn’t freak me out all that much because other than shrimp, I don’t much like seafood. But then, last week, Andrea sent me an article from Buzz Feed, 11 Horrifying Facts About Your Fresh Groceries. Many of these too were about seafood—but not all. And one that was, bothered me quite a lot, “Shrimp and tilapia are often fed untreated animal feces in China, Thailand, and Vietnam.” Maybe it’s time to find a local supply of shellfish.

“A quarter of U.S. raw meats test positive for flesh-eating MRSA bacteria.” Well, you know what they say about that which doesn’t kill you: it makes you weaker so that you are easier to kill next time. “Apples, celery, and bell peppers are the most pesticide-contaminated produce.” Well, I don’t really like apples. And I’ll squint when I’m working with celery and bell peppers. Bqhatevwr! “Chickens are fed arsenic to make their flesh pink.” Well, all the better to kill you with, my deary!

“Most of the honey you buy isn’t real.” Now hold on right there. Them’s fightin’ words! Most honey I buy isn’t real?! I suppose that’s especially true of the “honey” that comes in those cute plastic bear containers. Damn it!

According to an article in Mother Nature Network, ‘Honey Laundering’ an International Scandal. Here’s what’s going on:

The honey is not just fake; it is also poisonous. It “has been found to contain toxins like lead and other heavy metals, as well as drugs like chloramphenicol, an antibiotic, according to a Department of Justice news release.” Fun times!

Most of this honey is coming from China. But because of heightened duty charges, Chinese manufacturers are shipping the honey to other countries and relabeling it as though it were from there. And that gets us to what we should generally be doing a lot more of: buying locally. You could just buy honey that is “Made in the USA” but I’m not sure that would necessarily solve the problem. The thing to do is to find the local beekeepers and buy your honey from them.

I don’t expect my hot dogs to be pure (not that I’m sure what that even means). But at least we can have real and safe honey.

You probably don’t know who Horatio Nelson Jackson was, unless you watched the Ken Burns documentary Horatio’s Drive. He was the first person (with his driver Sewall K. Crocker) to cross the United States by car, which he did in 1903. He was born on this day in 1872. The great Hungarian composer Bela Bartok was born in 1881. Ed “Juror #10” Begley was born in 1901. One of the members of the failed 20 July Plot to kill Hitler, Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim, was born in 1905 (and was killed as a result in 1944). The great British director David Lean was born in 1908. In 1911, Lee Harvey Oswald killer Jack Ruby was born. And seven years later Howard Cosell was born.

Lots of birthdays today as well. The wonderful Japanese actress who starred in Rashomon, Machiko Kyo, is 89 today. Gloria Steinem is 79. Anita Bryant, probably as bigoted as ever in the name of God, is 73. A woman for whom I have a great deal of respect, Aretha Franklin is 71. So is The Rocky Horror Picture Show creator Richard O’Brien. Elton John is 66. Bonnie Bedelia is 65. And overrated and thoroughly dislikeable actress Sarah Jessica Parker is 48.

Lots of birthdays, not a lot of great artists or thinkers or whatnot. But there is one: Flannery O’Connor was born on this day in 1925. I can’t say that I enjoy reading her, but I am constantly blown away at just what a great writer she is. I know a lot of people just brush her off as the female William Faulkner, but I really think she was better. This is amazing when you consider how young she was. She was only 39 years old when she died of Lupus. Anyway, if you want to learn to write, read Flannery O’Connor.

Thanks for all your stories and a very happy birthday!

As I’ve reported, Chris Hayes is leaving his show that will become Up with Steve Kornacki. Below is his farewell address to the Up viewers. It is well done. He even goes out of his way to highlight all of his staff, which he is correct to note that the show simply would not exist without them. But hey, Chris Hayes is quite open about the fact that he is an egalitarian. It ends with a long fade out during which he hugs most of the crew. Below the clip is a list of articles I’ve written about the show over the last year and a half.

I am pleased that I was wrong about one thing. I thought I saw the show on a conservative trend. I wrote at the time in Up with Chris Hayes Goes Down, “But I fear that is just a matter of time. Up with Chris Hayes in 2014 might well have a panel of Charles Krauthammer, George Will, David Brooks, and Leslie Sanchez. Sanchez is the liberal.” Of course, we never made it to 2014, but I think everything was well under control with Mr. Hayes. I look forward to what his new show brings and what Kornacki does with Up.

I did not know that I had written so much about Up. In the following list, I’ve included articles in which the show was an important part of the story I was telling, not just stories about the show. Just the same, I’ve left out a number of articles where the show was just mentioned. I’m shocked there are so many articles:

1. Up with Chris Hayes (21/11/12)
2. Up with Chris Hayes Goes Down (11/12/11)
3. Post-Truth Politics (24/06/12)
4. Chris Hayes’ Pen (14/07/12)
5. My Boy Chris Hayes (18/08/12)
6. We’re Not Screwing You (19/08/12)
7. Sam Seder Ups Reputation (16/09/12)
8. Avik Roy: Charlatan (06/10/12)
9. Political Harassment in the Workplace (15/10/12)[1]
10. Sunday Politics Shows Designed to Suck (16/10/12)
11. Defense Spending Projection (21/10/12)
12. Poor Minorities Must Wait to Vote (10/11/12)
13. Jerry Nadler Pushes Tired Gaza Narrative (17/11/12)
14. Filibuster Reform (02/12/12)
15. Smart Ignorant Conservative (02/12/12)
16. Avik Roy is Trying to Kill Me! (09/12/12)
17. Conservative Answers for Shootings (15/12/12)
18. Christian Nationalism and School Shootings (22/12/12)
19. Tea Party Idiot (30/12/12)
20. Aaron Swartz (13/01/13)
21. Banking Crises Soaring (10/02/13)
22. Avik Roy: Healthcare Apologist (23/02/13)
23. Repeal Sequestration (25/02/13)
24. Speculations on MSNBC Shake Up (15/03/13)
25. Naive Democrats Make it Easy for Republicans (18/03/13)
26. Farewell Gay Liberals (25/03/13)

[1] I am very proud of this article. It never got much traction, but I’m the only one I know of who pushes this idea. What I’ve suggested that we can treat political coercion on the job the same way we treat to sexual harassment. This is a simple and well thought out approach.

As much as I may complain about Matt Yglesais, I never question that he is a brilliant young man. Now, brilliant can mean a lot of different things. When I use the term, I normally mean: thinks what I do. This afternoon, he wrote a very interesting article, Meritocracy Should Lead to Massive Entrenched Inequality. In it, he gets to the heart of what I’ve been writing about for years: meritocracy is not that great a thing.

This goes along with my resistance to the idea of free will. We are what we are. People do what comes naturally to themselves. If it is true that the smoker who manages to quit has more will power than the one who doesn’t, that just means that he was born with more will power. He isn’t a better person, or at least, there isn’t anything he is actively doing that the first guy isn’t. Think of two people who go to the hospital with gunshot wounds. One needs 10 mg of morphine for the pain, but the other needs only 5 mg. Does that make the second guy better? Of course not! They both took the amount that they needed to deal reasonably with the pain.

Yglesias puts it directly in how it effects social policy. He talks about golf and how it is an egalitarian system, but not a fair one. Some people just aren’t good at golf. The truth is that some people just aren’t good at anything and they are no more responsible for that than they would be if a meteor fell on their heads:

I would like to see us get past this. The truth is that such understanding should cause our society to create some kind of base level of safety net: support for those who can’t work and guaranteed work for those who can. The problem is that those who have done well in our system want to continue to feel not only that they are smarter and more capable than their poor brothers; they want to think that they are better because they did so much more with what they were given. To me, it is ridiculous to make so many people suffer so that a relatively few who already have excellent lives can feel even better by accepting the myth of moral superiority.

Unfortunately, as we saw in the 2016 presidential race, both parties claim to want to work toward “equality of opportunity.” We know that even if such a goal were possible (and it isn’t), it would not lead us to the promised land of relative equality and prosperity. Instead, it would lead us to a proto-feudal state and would quickly devolve into aristocracy. I’m afraid that’s where we’re headed, and the embrace of “meritocracy” is a big part of what’s pushing us there.

The correct word choice around unauthorized immigration to the United States is, of course, politically contested in the United States. I like to refer to unauthorized immigration or migration because I think it’s correct. Talk about undocumented immigrants seems euphemistic, like they just lost their paperwork. Talk of illegal immigrants carries with it inaccurate implication about the actual legal framework of immigration. But referring to human beings as illegals is just plain offensive. Legally speaking, you’re only allowed to drive so fast. Lots of people nonetheless regularly drive faster than that. Referring to such people as illegals as if their proclivity for violating vehicle speed ordinances is a good way of capturing their essential nature would be absurd. Nonetheless, the fact of the matter is that speeding kills innocent people regularly while the only lives risked in unauthorized border crossings are those of the migrants themselves.

—Matt Yglesias
Do Local Newspaper Owners Want to Succeed?

Kos provided the following graph of party identification over the past four years. (It’s from the Huffington Post, but he doesn’t provide a link and I’m kind of mad about what they are becoming, so I’m none too interested in looking for it.) It’s remarkable. I was expecting a peak around last November that would fade afterward. This is what happened with the Republicans, if by “dip” you mean “entered an abyss with no end in sight.” The Democrats had a peak in November, but have grown steadily since then.

If you look at the Independents, you can kind of see what has happened. More and more of them are saying, “Let’s get real: I’m never going to vote for the Republican Party the way it is; I’m really a Democrat.” Similarly, a lot of Republicans are saying, “Let’s get real: I’m conservative but it’s embarrassing to associate with the Republican Party.” That pretty much summarizes this chart:

According to Kos, if the Democrats are going to retake the house in 2014, they need to win the popular vote by 7 percentage points. Let’s take a moment to think about that. In order for the United States to be an actual democracy, we first have to win the White House. Republicans are doing everything they can to make this ridiculously undemocratic, but for the time it is only moderately undemocratic because of the Electoral College system. Then, in order to have control the house, we need to have a 7 point advantage. And to control the Senate, we have to have a 20 point advantage. (Actually, it is even worse than that, because the Senate is a highly undemocratic institution and Republicans tend to dominate in low population states like Wyoming.)

That was the bad news. The good news is that if this trend holds, we will be able to retake the House. And if that happens, we ought to hold the Senate as well. And if that happens, maybe we can get get real filibuster reform. And if that happens, we might get some real moderate policies enacted. And let’s face it: I’ve been so disappointed that even that would be a major accomplishment.

Not being one to even balance his checkbook, I was completely at a loss when I read Jonathan Martin’s article this morning, Paul Ryan’s Disappearing Act. In it, he writes, “Ryan’s admirers say it’s unfair to suggest he’s merely a green eyeshade Republican.” What the hell is a green eyeshade?

Wikipedia to the rescue. According to it, “Green eyeshades are a type of visor that were worn most often from the late 19th century to the middle 20th century by accountants, telegraphers, copy editors and others engaged in vision-intensive, detail-oriented occupations.” Ah, I see now! This has to do with all the people who claim that Ryan is some kind of uber-wonk: just a man who wants to balance our budget.

I’ve written endlessly about the fact that Paul Ryan is no budget wonk. He isn’t, in fact, even interested in balancing the budget. Here’s a good rule of thumb to determine if a proposal is really about balancing the budget:

1. Is a big part of the proposal lowering income tax rates?
2. If you answered “yes” then the proposal is not about balancing the budget.

Not only are all of Ryan’s proposals not about balancing the budget, neither are Simpson-Bowles or any of the “Fix the Debt” proposals. This should not come as a shock. For the last three decades, conservatives have been using the big bad budget deficit to justify doing what they wanted to do anyway. Remember Ronald Reagan getting into office by screaming about budget deficits? Remember how he went on to explode those deficits, even during a booming economy? It’s the Republican way!

Jonathan Chait has a nice bit of history about Paul Ryan this morning. He demonstrates that all of Paul Ryan’s recent branding was just a show. He has always been a supply-sider. He even quotes Paul Ryan during his years in Congress during Bush’s terms, complaining that Bush wasn’t busting the deficit more:

In other words, “I am a hardcore supply-sider!”

But this all raises an important question: why did anyone ever thing Paul Ryan was a budget wonk? He didn’t put together actual budgets as it was. He just claimed that somehow we would cut X% out of spending without ever saying what. What’s more, it should have been clear from the start (and it was to many of us), that all his pretend budget wonkery was only about cutting taxes. It leaves me only with the Brad DeLong lament, “Why, oh why, can’t we have a better press corpse?”

According to The Hill, a number of large corporations—most notably Hallmark, the greeting card company—are trying to push back against the shameless Republican attack on the United States Postal Service. It seems that the Postal Service’s decision to end Saturday delivery has caught the attention of companies who will be hurt by the move. Until now, it has all been a big win for companies like FedEx and UPS who have been salivating for the USPS’s most profitable routes.

Of course, helping out our corporate overlords is only part of what is driving Republicans. Even bigger is the idea of destroying one of the most visible examples of effective government. It all shows just how devoid of principles the conservative movement is. They make a big show for their love of the Constitution. But when it comes to parts of it that they don’t like, they just ignore it. The Postal Service, after all, is in the Constitution. (Article I, Section 8, Clause 7: empowers Congress “To establish Post Offices and post Roads.”)

All of this comes down to a vile law passed by the lame duck Congress in 2006. They knew that the Democrats were going to have big majorities in both houses of Congress the next year. So why not take the opportunity to destroy a popular government agency? They required that the USPS pre-fund their retirement account 75 years into the future—within ten years. Of course, Republicans won’t admit that they are doing this. Just like with their programs to destroy Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, it is all to save the program. And when the media manage to cover the issue at all, they cover the Republican talking points as though they were real.

I was very disappointed to see that FARK offered the article in The Hill with the snarky headline, “Hallmark cards would very much like the taxpayer to subsidize Saturday mail delivery for its $3 pieces of paper.” While I don’t doubt that Hallmark’s interest in this issue is entirely self-serving, so is the lobbying of FedEx and UPS. Yet we don’t see headlines like, “FedEx lobbies Congress to destroy USPS and give it most profitable routes while millions of Americans in rural areas go without service.” Nor do we see any headlines about the evil and corrupt Republican Party’s assault on a constitutionally mandated public service.

(1) If God is unable to prevent evil, he is not omnipotent.

(3) If God is willing and able to prevent evil, then why is there evil?

—Epicurus Trilemma
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion