"She could restore a little common sense into the vain old nuts of those baby boomers who think we don’t notice,…"

"At this writing, I have been coughing for 72 days. Not on and off coughing, but continuously, every day and every night, for two and a half months. And not just coughing, but whooping: doubled over, body clenched, sucking violently for air, my face reddening and my eyes watering. Sometimes, I cough so hard, I vomit. Other times, I pee myself. Both of these symptoms have become blessedly less frequent, and I have yet to break a rib coughing—also a common side effect. Nor do I still have the fatigue that felled me, often, at my desk and made me sleep for 16 hours a night on the weekends. Now I rarely choke on things like water, though it turns out laughing, which I do a lot of, is an easy trigger for a violent, paralyzing cough that doctors refer to not as a cough, but a paroxysm.

…Led by discredited doctors and, incredibly, a former Playmate, the movement has frightened new parents with claptrap about autism, Alzheimer’s, aluminum, and formaldehyde. The movement that was once a fringe freak show has become a menace, with foot soldiers whose main weapon is their self-righteousness. For them, vaccinating their children is merely a consumer choice, like joining an organic food co-op or sending their kids to a Montessori school or drinking coconut water.

Thanks a lot, anti-vaccine parents. You took an ethical stand against big pharma and the autism your baby was not going to get anyway, and, by doing so, killed some babies and gave me, an otherwise healthy 31-year-old woman, the whooping cough in the year 2013. I understand your wanting to raise your own children as you see fit, science be damned, but you're selfishly jeopardizing more than your own children. Carry your baby around in a sling, feed her organic banana mash while you drink your ethical coffee, fine, but what gives you denialists the right to put my health at risk—to cause me to catch a debilitating, humiliating, and frightening cough that, two months after I finished my last course of antibiotics (how’s that for supporting big pharma?), still makes me convulse several times a day like some kind of tragic nineteenth-century heroine? "

"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."

“The source of the pollution is not an external contaminant such as blood or dirt, but human interaction.

  The affected person develops strong feelings of contamination that are evoked by direct contact with the violator or indirect contacts such as memories, images or reminders of the violation.”

Of course, we've been over all this before,...

 

“France’s Socialist government reacted with fury to its credit rating being downgraded yet again because of high taxes, unemployment and public spending.

Standard & Poor (S&P) poured humiliation on President Francois Hollande and his ministers on Friday by cutting its AA+ to AA.

The move comes almost two years after the country lost its top-rated AAA status.

S&P said it was applying another cut because Socialist reforms showed no prospects of leading to economic growth.”

"There are reasons why films of this vein are more readily produced than others. Both economic and social values influence the resurrection of historical accounts like the Amistad while Gabriel Prosser, Harriet Tubman and Charles Deslondes suffocate in obscurity.

One thought is that white audiences should never be left feeling guilty about their ancestors’ sins. Many can walk out of the theater and say to themselves: 'I would’ve been more like Brad Pitt if I was alive during Slavery,' even though residue of the system still permeates around them today — and one could argue that there’s a shortage of mass white outrage over the fact.

In essence, the Prossers and Tubmans of our past deny Hollywood this safety net. They resisted oppression and sacrificed their lives to liberate others.

But more importantly, they don’t leave much room for white saviors. They are the black Bravehearts. And for many of us, we hope to see the day when they’re finally seen in full heroic form on the big screen."

"We are extraordinarily regretful and of course this was unintentional; believe us, we are quite ashamed about our mistake."