substitute

I got a chain letter which I will not reproduce here about how the spinach is just fine and it's a big conspiracy and no one is really getting sick from the spinach and it's the evil spinach-hating anti-raw-food forces spreading the lies about the virtuous spinach because "they" don't want you to eat nice raw healthy spinach and live forever.

It was sent from a local raw food place which may well make very nice food themselves but will never get a goddamn dime from me after seeing this. Thanks for the dangerous tinfoil hat bullshit, goodmoodcafe.com

Please don't forward crap like this. It's not "just another side to the story." It's deadly paranoid garbage.

It's bad enough that this country is trashing its public health infrastructure and letting Big Agriculture "regulate" itself. Let's not make things worse. Hundreds of underpaid and underappreciated scientists and public health experts are working 24 hours a day to trace the source of this and every other food-borne disease outbreak and save lives. Calling them liars is nasty and irresponsible.

There is no anti-spinach conspiracy. If you want safer food, pay attention to things like this and why they happen. Super E. Coli bacteria exist because of brain-dead factory farming, and they get into the food because big food corporations wrote the laws that say they can wipe their asses on your food if they feel like it.

There's your conspiracy and it's right out in the open.

This will be uninteresting to you if you don't hang out locally, and possibly uninteresting anyway, but I finally emailed Kelly and told "Corporate" what I think of them lately.

( You blew it up! God damn you to hell! )

It's "Murray Week" here at the substitute Building. Next up is Charles. You remember, the Bell Curve guy? He's back with an editorial in the WSJ. He doesn't say much more than "I was too right" with a lot of excess verbiage.

The veneer of "science" over political polemic is pretty thin here. In the original ruckus neither the Bell Curve boys nor their outraged opponents did anything I'd call science. The "scientific debate" was about the political significance of race in the United States, and more particularly about the policy of affirmative action. The book and much of its associated research was paid for by political organizations, and the opposition to the book and its ideas was rooted in political ideas as well. There was no such thing as a disinterested third party evaluation of The Bell Curve's claims.

Once you step out of the little historical box of late 20th century U.S. race politics, the whole thing looks like a Laputan debate out of Gulliver's Travels. People were assigning the word "science" to discussions of concepts like race and intelligence that couldn't even be defined properly. IQ was treated as a fact like the speed of life, race was assumed to be innate and obvious and eternal, and asses were made of many.

It should be clear to anyone capable of critical thought that we don't understand the brain well at all. Concepts like IQ or g are almost medieval compared to our understanding of body processes like vision or digestion. Personally I think it will be a decade or more before we have a clear idea of the brain's real structure and function instead of just a list of what goes wrong when you whack certain parts of it. So forget about defining "intelligence" for now.

And the idea of defining race brings to mind a Spanish official trying to figure out if someone is a mestizo or an octaroon, or the South African government's detailed tests for negritude (hair kinkiness, skin albedo, etc.). Trying to describe "races" without making people laugh openly requires a tremendous amount of obfuscation.

Which brings me to the point I wanted to make all along. The social sciences just aren't. I just can't swallow this shit, and I never have. I look at "political scientists" like Murray or any number of other racist, Marxist, fascist, religious, or other -ist social theoreticians and I can detect little more than layers of unnecessary verbiage over prejudice. Some of these people I agree with, some I don't, and some I can't even penetrate, but it sure as hell isn't science. That's a method, not a form of magic invoked by excesses of vocabulary.

Dogma from me: The social sciences are a failed attempt to legitimize sociopolitical warfare with jargon.

http://orangecounty.craigslist.org/w4m/84361135.html

i am a single asian girl who is looking to meet a special gentleman in my area for friendship or more.. my expectation is high and i wont settle for less. i would like to meet someone who is smart, confident, strong and fun to hang out with.(loves travel and eat out is must) you need to be successful in business and personal life, able to manage your time and money. i do not want to hear your "i have this and that" "ive done this and that" stories. so please do not try to impress me with your story that i dont really believe anyways.

i am not looking for a sugar daddy or financial support from you so dont try to show off your $$$ either. but if youve never bought a car for your girlfriend, please dont bother. my guy should be capable of doing so whether youd do it for me or not. (if you thought that i am a gold digger or/and dont understand what i mean on here, obviously you do not have the same value or lifestyle as i do, so please dont bother.)

please, no players, one night stand seekers or cheaters.

She's right. I don't have the same lifestyle or "value" as she does! Anyway I can't afford more than a one night stand. Glad to hear she's not a gold digger, though. Gosh, that would be awful.

She'll end up with one of the guys who ends his ads "no fatties", and she'll get chlamydia. But it's all part of the career choice, I guess.

"Never trust a whore who says they don't want money. They're the most expensive kind." —William S. Burroughs