Now, I ask you, serious business:

 "Is Gluten the Cause of Your Health Problems?" 

Or is it something else?

"Your choices are limited by who you are."

I love the ring of that phrase - and it's ring of truth - like a kick in the gut. So, since that seems to be the case (and since I'm *kinda safe* for the moment) excuse me as I jump in the fray, because culture is wailing on politics with a vengeance:

McAllister, running as an outsider, lined up an endorsement from "Duck Dynasty" star Phil Robertson, the patriarch in the popular reality show, and cast member Willie Robertson appeared in a commercial for the candidate. The program is shot in the northeast part of Louisiana that McAllister will represent.

Unlike McAllister, Riser had the backing of a number of prominent Republicans including U.S. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

Riser agreed with the governor's stance to reject the Medicaid expansion.

…The funeral home owner was the contest's early favorite with backing from the conservative Tea Party of Louisiana and the national group FreedomWorks, which is aligned with the Tea Party movement.

The Right is so out of sync now, it's pitiful. Everyday is the day before the last election - and then the "unexpected" happens. Again. GlennBoy's even already back to warning Republicans not to get cocky. Why? What are they going to do? Keep coming on like The Party That Doesn't Give A Shit? We've seen that. "Maybe get a black point-man."

"Man Has Magnetic Powers, Can Make Objects Stick To Body"

New Headline:

You Are A Fucking Idiot, Go Back To School - Retake Science

Unoriginal second thought - do we even need another metal attracting guy? Bending spoons? Wow.

Do something useful.

 Now here's a something that gets my attention:

"Since Christianity has produced a lot of dysfunctional people, suicides will more than likely increase among Christians in the very near future."

So it's a self-correcting system - cool. Kinda like this:

"Lady Gaga's 'ARTPOP' Flop Expected to Lose Label Reported $25M in Marketing Costs"

Word is people will be fired - at Christmas. Perfect. Contrast and compare with the netherworld:

 "Michael Jackson Tops List of Highest-Earning Dead Celebrities of 2013"

He's dead, and still a better entertainer than we've got now. What a wasteland. No, really, a wasteland. And nobody knows the difference, either, so far as I can tell. Everything just slips by.

"The Jamaican Maroons were runaway slaves who fought the British during the 18th century. When the British invaded Jamaica in 1655 the Spanish colonists fled leaving a large number of Africans who they had enslaved."

I'm beginning to think they're all a little insane. 

But probably not without good reason,...

"In the world of dieting, many promises are made and broken. But author Kevin Trudeau's is an extreme case: He had been warned by no less than the Federal Communications Commission not to make false claims about his diet book in advertisements.

Nevertheless, he appeared in a recent set of infomercials for his book "The Weight Loss Cure 'They' Don't Want You To Know About" saying that it revealed a miracle substance that would allow people following his diet plan to eat all they wanted and still lose weight. The infomercials aired 32,000 times.

A federal jury in Chicago found Trudeau guilty of criminal contempt Tuesday and he was taken into custody, Reuters reports. He faces potential federal prison time."

"Dragging a piece of rotting meat through the jungle right next to your vulnerable young is actually a really great way to attract predators,…"

"We Americans are surrounded by food. We have food on a scale that the rest of the world is just sort of staggered by. And it’s real easy to take it for granted, and I think that’s what critics and the public in general do. Why should they stop and think about the whole picture? All they care about is getting dinner on the table. But if you stand back and look at the whole picture and take a bunch of factors into account, the whole pink slime thing, in my opinion, was misguided. And frankly, it was a bit tragic for Roth, a guy who’s a self-taught mechanical genius, who built a business, and who was providing a service. All it took was one celebrity chef, on one TV program, and that was the end of that. What a shame."

Not good - when the more you talk to your friend, the darker his mind grows:

I think conservative media creates an echo chamber, which allows a lot of these elected officials to believe incorrectly that they have majority support behind them, and that strategies like defunding are going to work.

Because of the media bubble, they didn’t realize it wasn’t true. Some of them still don’t understand.

After the 2012 election, I thought it was going to teach them a lesson: that when you close yourselves out from the outside world, you start distrusting all outside sources, you can get misled. You had a little bit of soul-searching … That seems to have lasted a couple of months. [Recently] you had Ted Cruz on TV saying about the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, “There were too many government employees in the sample, I don’t believe the poll.” So there is still interest in staying in the bubble.

But I think it’s simplistic to blame specific media figures for keeping them within the bubble. And the reason for that is this: There’s always somebody out there who’s going to write whatever stupid shit. And so if you don’t indulge the conservative bubble, you’re going to lose the audience and they’re going to go to somebody else. So it’s structurally inevitable that this happens on the right. The only way that it can stop is if the audience stops demanding it, because they realize they’ve been misleading them. But I don’t know how long it’s going to take to beat that into their heads. Loss of the House in 2014, which I think is a very real possibility now – if that happens, I think that might beat some sense into the party. Maybe. But you know, 2012 losses didn’t do it. So I don’t know how many times they need to get burned before they realize the stove is hot.

"So if you don’t indulge the conservative bubble, you’re going to lose the audience and they’re going to go to somebody else," huh? Story of my blogging life. Which makes the problem easy to dissect:

First, we have to calibrate if anyone really cares,..