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?
Alex Baer: Casual Snapshots of Life on Two Planets
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.
Alex Baer: Lemmings in Free Fall
Two billion more people will be added to the planet in the next 38 years. Food prices will edge up sharply as larders empty. The next wars will be fought over clean drinking water -- even as we now foul clean supplies and threaten aquifers with fracking and pipelines.
We're suffocating ourselves with CO2 from our ravenous use of energy too dirty to burn anymore. As tundras warm and thaw, methane is released, too -- many factors more dangerous than killing CO2.
Yes, and sea ice will calve, collapse, and melt. Oceans will rise. The lost reflectivity of snow and ice spirals up our heat, too. Rising CO2 poisons the seas, whose creatures provide half the air we breathe. Droughts march and wildly imperil anything green -- food stocks, plants and forests trying to trade us poison for fresh air.
Alex Baer: 70 Million Psychopaths and Other Delights
It's an old story, one that keeps poking back into view this election cycle: How to reach people with your particular message? Most of the time, we're stuck in our own channels and ruts, either stuck preaching to the choir or unable to usher new people into the tent.
This trend of stuck messaging, to pick a phrase, is clearly present in politics today, with each so-called "side" aghast at the clearly observable insanity of their opposites, everyone's listening skills turned off at the source.
Two camps have been routinely described by the Occupy movement: the elite 1%, and all the rest of us rabble in the remaining 99%. As it turns out in real life, 1% of the population are also likely psychopaths.
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