"Detroit Auto Show: Automakers push weight loss to promote fuel efficiency."

Yeah, lose some weight so cars don't need to burn so much fuel carrying you around.

No, they're not saying that. (They're just trying to make the vehicles weigh less.) But wouldn't it be funny if they did?

Maria Conchita Alonso booted out of a San Francisco production of "The Vagina Monologues" after appearing in an ad for a Tea Party candidate.

In the ad — which we talked about here — she said, expressing antagonism toward big government — "We’re screwed." She said it in Spanish. "The Vagina Monologues" production was also to be in Spanish. I don't know how to say "screwed" or "vagina" in Spanish, but the producer of the show, Eliana Lopez, wife of San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, said: "We really cannot have her in the show, unfortunately."

And Jim Salinas, "a long time Mission resident and former president of the San Francisco Latino Democratic Club," noting the sexual language in the ad, the chihuahua named "Tequila," and predicting boycotts if Alonso remained in the cast, said:

“We don’t act like that. First of all, that is not a typical Latina... First Amendment rights, we all have the right to say something. But it’s also our right to say we object to that.”

If you're a member of a minority group and you speak in a setting that seems to be conveying the message — politically leveraging the message — that you are a typical member of that group, you will attract criticism, and that criticism can also be criticized.

And criticize that play too. It sucks.

What is the origin of the idea of the "scorched earth" policy?

How far back does it go?

The tactic goes back to ancient times.

The term "scorched earth," according to the (unlinkable) OED is a translation of Chinese phrase jiāotŭ (zhèngcè), with the earliest use in English traced to 1937:

1937 C. McDonald in Times 6 Dec. 12/2 The populace..are still disturbed, in spite of official denials, by wild rumours of a ‘scorched earth policy’ of burning the city before the Japanese enter....

One OED example is comic:

1963 P. G. Wodehouse Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves xvii. 135 The kitchen maid..always adopts the scorched earth policy when preparing a meal.

If you've read the history at the first link, you might think that comic usage is in bad taste, but then you must never speak of "nuking" things in the microwave.

"His 'Bone-Dry' Martini features a tincture made from chicken bones that are roasted and dissolved in phosphoric acid..."

"... his Sazerac contains a touch of ambergris, the whale secretion used in perfume production..."

There's some weirdness going on these days in the segment of commerce that goes under the rubric "cocktails."

The report of the death of the death spiral...

 ... was an exaggeration.

Twilight catch.

Last night, in the blue hour.

It was a Lab fest:

Flesh! and calenture.

In the comments to that first post of the day today, the one about the caveman diet, St. George said:

Interesting how "trash" is used to make food and how it is marketed.

Would you eat a Chapul bar?

Dates, chocolate, walnuts, flax, peanuts, and protein flour..i.e. ground processed cricket flesh.

The smaller the animals people eat, the poorer the civilization.

The scam here is that it's being marketed to appeal to people as a politically-conscious "revolutionary" food choice that benefits the environment...and your body!

I said:

"Claim: Photograph shows a man eating a dead baby served at an Asian restaurant."

"The photographs" — shown here —  "were taken seriously by a number of law enforcement agencies who viewed them, and both Scotland Yard and the FBI investigated this matter, trying to determine when and where the pictures were taken and the identities of those appearing in them."

The origins of the images were quickly uncovered: The man in the photographs is Chinese performance artist Zhu Yu, who staged a conceptual shock piece called "Eating People" at a Shanghai arts festival in 2000. Maintaining that "No religion forbids cannibalism, nor can I find any law which prevents us from eating people," Zhu Yu acted out a performance in which he appeared to eat a stillborn or aborted child (likely constructed by placing a doll's head on a duck's carcass) and said that he "took advantage of the space between morality and the law and based my work on it."

The controversial photographs have since been part of a number of art exhibits and caused another stir in 2003 when they were aired on television in the UK as part of the Beijing Swings documentary...

"You can't forget that pigs are smart, social animals that experience a wide range of emotions."

"In such austere isolated conditions, they'll be suffering for much of their lives. For sure, it would get a lot of attention from animal rights groups."

Yes, but do you want your inside-a-pig-grown organs-for-humans or not?

This post needs a final line based on the old Groucho Marx joke: "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."

Outside of a pig, medical technology is man's best friend. Inside of a pig it's too dark to read about ethics.

"For those many, many people who were raised on processed cheese, there is a memory connected with it that can’t be discounted in terms of its importance..."

"It’s a bite of the past, and that trumps flavor every time."

A quote from an article at Smithsonian.com on the history of Velveeta. That's just the next thing that interested me on line, not something I went looking for after that last post, which had food writer Michael Pollan giving us reason to enjoy some of the products of civilization (bread and other cooked foods), absolving us of the sense of obligation to return to whatever it is we imagine nourished the caveman, but not touching upon the mystic chords of memory of the more recent past, the days of mothers in aprons and the things that yielded so willingly to melting in that vividly golden childhood of yore.

And let's remember the psychology of environmentalism. Weren't we just talking about the problem of the industrial byproduct of all that Greek-style yogurt we've been eating? From the Smithsonian article:

[Emil Frey, a Swiss cheesemaker who moved from Switzerland to upstate New York, where he worked in cheese factories in the late 1880s]... figured out how... to help recoup some of the [cheese] factory's waste. He learned that by adding a by-product of cheesemaking called whey, which is the liquid released from curds during the cheesemaking process, to the leftover Swiss bits, he could create a very cohesive end-product. Frey named the product Velveeta....

"Michael Pollan explains what’s wrong with the paleo diet."

What do you mean by "wrong"? All Michael Pollan is saying is that people doing the paleo diet don't know exactly what our ancestors in evolutionary times ate and in what proportions. 

But prehistorical inaccuracy only makes the diet "wrong" if: 1. You adhere to a philosophy or moral code that demands not only that you attempt to ape the apeman but also that doing the best you can yet falling short is a violation, or 2. There is no independent scientific support for the healthfulness of the collection of foods that have been identified under the label "paleo."

I'm not really criticizing Pollan here. He didn't write the headline. It's pointing out the obvious that we don't know that the paleo diet is correct, not that we know it's wrong. Here's his book "Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation," which is oriented around making us feel good about (some of) the food that civilization has made for us.

One problem with the paleo diet is that “they’re assuming that the options available to our caveman ancestors are still there,” he argues. But “unless you’re willing to hunt your food, they’re not.”

As Pollan explains, the animals bred by modern agriculture — which are fed artificial diets of corn and grains, and beefed up with hormones and antibiotics — have nutritional profiles far from wild game.

Can you "beef up" beef? It's already beef. You can "humanize" a human being. But you can't bird up a bird, porkify a pig, or enlambate a lamb.

Here's one of my favorite songs:

"The things I like about Walker (my front-runner so far) are his executive experience, his principles, and his guts and fighting spirit..."

"... as well as his success in a mostly-blue state such as Wisconsin countering whatever the left could throw at him. That is a formidable accomplishment," writes Neo-Neocon, comparing Scott Walker to Chris Christie. "His rhetoric and charisma, I suspect, leave quite a bit to be desired. But I don’t know how much they are lacking because I haven’t watched or listened to him speak all that much. I fear Walker will have too much of the blah-blah-blah factor, but I don’t know...."

Well, I sure have watched him and listened to him. A lot. I watched all the debates in the 2010 election and the 2011 recall election. He has a style that people outside of the Midwest might not get. But I'm thinking that we got such a rhetoric-and-charisma overload with Obama that people might find Walker's style refreshing and uplifting. Walker comes across as completely sincere and earnest. He's committed to his conservative principles, which is unnerving to those who'd like to shake him. He's unshakeable.

"The easiest way Hillary can be stopped is if she stops herself."

"There is a reasonable chance she’ll decide not to [run again]," writes Bill Kristol (reacting to TIME's question "Can Anyone Stop Hillary?") 

She’s an intelligent woman. She remembers that her last experience of running for president wasn’t fun and didn’t end well. She knows that winning the Democratic nomination won’t be as easy as the media now pretend and that the general election will be, at best, a 50-50 proposition....

Hillary has no agenda different from that of other generic Democratic candidates, or for that matter from Barack Obama, the man she would succeed. Hillary’s first term would in reality be Obama’s third. She’d be tinkering with his successes and trying to cope with his failures. Becoming president in 2009 after eight years of dastardly Republican rule, with a chance to make things anew, was an exciting prospect for a liberal. Succeeding the modern liberal president after two terms?

Not worth it... maybe. When's the last time we had a President who followed a 2-term President from his own party? It was when we had Bush I, the man Hillary's husband defeated. Basically, Americans don't want more than 2 terms of the same. The 22d Amendment, barring anyone from election to a 3d term, was our reaction to FDR's election to a 3d and a 4th term. Before him nearly everyone followed the principle demonstrated by George Washington, serving only, at most, 2 terms, and the few who tried for a 3d failed.

Since the ratification of the 22d Amendment (in 1951), not only has it been impossible for anyone to serve a 3d term as President, efforts by other members of the President's party to follow on, being — to use Kristol's phrase — "in reality" the "third" term have all but one have failed. The one exception, George H.W. Bush, not only had Reagan as his predecessor, but also had a weak opponent (Michael Dukakis).

"In the Civil War, Union balloons’ reconnaissance tracked the size of Confederate armies by counting the number of campfires."

My favorite sentence in the transcript of Obama's speech about reforming the NSA.

"The New York Times' Most Popular Story of 2013 Was Not an Article."

"A news app, a piece of software about the news made by in-house developers, generated more clicks than any article."

And it did this in a tiny amount of time: The app only came out on December 21, 2013. That means that in the 11 days it was online in 2013, it generated more visits than any other piece.

"We do not have a ban on nontraditional sexual relationships... We are not forbidding anything and nobody is being grabbed off the street...."

Said Putin.

"We have a ban on the propaganda of homosexuality and paedophilia. I want to underline this. Propaganda among children. These are absolutely different things — a ban on something or a ban on the propaganda of that thing.... You can feel relaxed and calm [in Russia], but leave children alone please."