Netzingers -- Explicit coquina que est optima medicina.

Amazingly, someone is surprised by the fact that when you let animals roam around out, they tend to pick up diseases.  This may come as a shock to a history professor, but anyone who lives in a rural region can tell you that animal farms are hotbeds of micro-organisms.  Free-range animals let out to roam on the very farm where they are produced, next to the feed sheds, ponds, and sewage lagoons that are essential parts of any modern operation.

Furthermore, the idea that free-range meat production is made lucridous by the simple fact that the animal may have a different fence to look at for some part of the day, if at all.  Adding the stress of being herded back and forth to confinement with the increased risk of disease makes free range the more cruel option.

Michael Pollan fantasizes that a new Victory Garden campaign will do anything to curb global warming. While this is nice dream, and indeed a noble pursuit, it is yet another example of his flawed logic.

What would the average person do in response to Pollan's call for action? They will hop in their SUV and drive to the garden center. Once there, they will spend money on plants, seed, garden tools, top soil, and fertilizer. Trucking it all home, the new garden enthusiast will unload the truck, drop the stuff in the back yard, and then realize that it time for the game. A week later, the plants are dead, the seeds are soaked, and the back yard looks even more daunting. And, there is no time for puttering around in the middle of a recession.

Let's allow that the gardener actually gets to putting the plants in the ground. Let's even be generous enough to allow that they overcome the hurdles of site selection and preparation, transplanting and sowing, and maintaining a proper level of moisture for growth. So what is the final result?

Vegetables. Unfortumately, the average American, eating the Standard American Diet, eats only 1/6 of the recommended servings of vegetables. On the dish, you are more likely to encounter an expanse of flank steak or chicken leg than and pile of zucchini or spinach. Yes, Michael Pollan, you are suggesting that people devote time and energy to something they obviously have no use for. The existing supply of fresh vegetables already mostly goes to waste.

So the new Victory Gardener lets the zucchini turn into baseball-bat size gourds, and lets the spinach go to seed. The tomatoes fall from the vine while ground beef is eaten at more and more meals.

It's gotten so bad that folks think that farming is some kind of game, something you might want to play at on vacation.

At least the farmers are getting some income from this new trend in leisure activity.

So MSNBC puts up a new Flash video player that is seriously broken, then they go home for the weekend. Boy, that is dumb.

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