Facets of Our Lives

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I have been listening to interviews and reading articles about budget crisis. There is a lot of finger-pointing, but essentially, both parties are to blame if you look at the whole situation historically, especially over the last 30 years. So here's my analysis and thoughts on the whole thing. It is a foregone conclusion that the entire system of politics is broken. We are not governed by leaders but by financial interests on both sides of the aisle. Forget the so-called "hard" decisions, people can't or won't make the human decisions because humanity is out of the equation. First, the playing field is not level. Jobs are exported because the labor laws in other countries are weaker and salaries are cheaper. That's it. It's not rocket science. The answer is not dropping taxes in the US, because that just means these corporations pay less money here, not that they create more jobs. Why would they? If you can hire 10 Chinese for the cost of one Americ...

I mentioned in my last foodie post that I was going to avoid recipes that included dairy, so I thought I would go ahead and explain my reasoning. The agricultural industry, particularly in the United States, is broken. Thanks to political intervention, nutritionally questionable foods are significantly cheaper than foods that are just as easy or difficult to grow. There have been numerous articles published in recent years comparing the population to the walking dead and the diminishing quality of our food supply. While medical science has improved to extend our lives, we are seeing higher rates of preventable conditions because our priorities are so out of whack. Now, as for dairy, I'm not saying there is anything wrong with milk or cheese, however, despite the USDA pronouncements, dairy is NOT a necessary food group. Humans are the only species that drink milk from another animal, and the cow is not even a close relative. Dairy was included because dairy producers participate...

Given the current state of our economy and that the debt ceiling debate has dominated our news for the last week, I am doing my political post a day early and leaving food for Tuesday. But I am not actually going to talk about the "crisis". I am going to talk about how we got here. We can blame party politics, we can blame the patterns in place for the last 30 years of US governance, we can blame the Tea Party. But the blame really rests with ourselves. The table below compares the elections of 2008 and 2010. 1 2008 2010 Total Number of Voters 130 million 82.5 million Liberal 22% (28.6 million) 20% (16.5 million) Moderate 44% (57.2 million) 39% (32.175 million) Conservative 34% (44.2 million) 41% (33.825 million) Ages 18-29 18% (23.4 million) 11% (9.075 million) Ages 65 or older 16% (20.8 million) 23% (18.975 million) White 74% (96....