There is nothing much in the posts to Salon that leads me to believe that you urban-dwellers in the (maybe)last quarter of the Anthropocene age understand the source of your food.

When you get the pig's attention, and kneel down to the level of his uplifted snout, and draw on his brow, in your mind, the cross between his ears and those trusting brown eyes, the poison pill of the .22 short bullet will make mush out of that off-white, walnut-sized cerebral cortex that the elders of the community will show you after halving the honeycomb skull crosswise with a hand-saw to make head cheese.

The elders will thread a single-tree harness through his hocks, and elevate his carcass from the limb of a spreading American elm beneath the flat bed of the truck where he died. With their incredibly elaborately sharpened black-carbon-steel knives, they will flay his tan hide away from the snow-white fat, and let his blood the color of cardinal feathers flow away with a garden hose. The spilled guts of his belly will be the most ordinary explosion of pastels. Only the past-burgundy heart and liver will be saved.

There are some of us who remember the stories of a time when our grandfathers could raise a family with two mules and 80 acres of productive land. The wheat was sold for cash at the local railroad elevator, and the onions and potatoes and dried apples were stored over the winter in root cellars, after the hogs and beeves were slaughtered and smoked. The children survived.

The experience of your children may be different. And less colorful.

No problem, the Republicans would pay that in a minute.

Wait for the "chat show." Maybe they already have.

Attaching the qualifying label diminishes the comparison.

What was that old title? "Female writers are to writing as military justice is to justice." (?)

Maybe that was a different book.

in anything but his political orientation?

Aren't the lessons of the last quarter-century obvious?

1) Republicans can't be trusted to manage the economy.

2) Republicans can't be trusted to run their own businesses without regulation and supervision any more than football teams can be trusted to play without a rule book and referees.

3) There is no one so foolish about money as a rich man.

When it comes to foreign policy, it's obvious that McCain doesn't know Shiite from Shinola.

Once again, the basic Republican proposition is that we should elect a genial (at least that's how he's portrayed by his enablers in the MSM) dumbass to hold the most difficult job in the world. Look how well that's worked out this last quarter-century.

it's not because of my early attachment to the teat, but because of my genes.

But it's still Mom's fault, right?

Done that? Got the t-shirt?

There are many truths in this world that I would just rather not know.

the recent theft of used freedom-fry oil from, as memory serves, California.

Each society has its own sacred artifacts to be plundered.

What is it about being a fundamentalist Muslim male that makes the rest of the world have to accept that they are absolutely, positively unable to keep their fly zipped?

The administration of the Current Occupant makes a strong case that they still live among us.

But why pick on the poor Neanderthal?

Malthus and the Club of Rome weren't wrong, they were just premature, and they focused on food and oil instead of water.

When our little experiment with the technological/scientific/industrial revolution started just a couple of hundred years ago, it had taken since the retreat of the glaciers for H. sapiens to accumulate a billion souls on the planet.

Our response to prosperity seems to be to seek the human carrying capacity of the earth. We may well prove the limit by exceeding it.

Holtman and Wallace are the kind of true American heroes that all the blustering, blowhard chickenhawks can only pretend they would be in the extremely unlikely event that their character were ever put to the test.

These young athletes, together with their parents and their coaches, deserve all the credit that their instincts have earned.

Elephantman is right, to the extent that elephants are always way right. You little ladies don't need to worry your sweet heads about all this legal business, which is anyway probably way too complicated for anyone but right-thinkers.

After all, it's not as if some right-thinking religious fanatic would try to put you and your doctor in jail just because you failed to agree with his worship of the fetus, and insisted on controlling your own womb.

Wait a minute!

Isn't this the same Our Ann who suffered the exquisite frisson of blinking back tears of humiliation when she was the only one in the biker bar drinking wine?

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2006/10/11/motorcycle_marriage/index1.html

Can the fact that she mentions (once!) that she was touring Italy (!) on a Ducati (!) mean that passive-aggressive emasculation has not yet been effective? Can she not understand that the impediment to her touring pleasure is her use of the personal pronoun? (Someone want to count the I's?) Her John could have handled any of her problems, and it sounds like he would have paid for the solutions, as well he's paying for her kids.

John and I could have probably rattled fairings.

All that makes sense is to believe that Our Ann has curves like the rear quarter-panels of a Ferrari or the gas tank of a Ducati, and equipment that exceeds a Surge pneumatic milker.

We should all have respect for the fact that Salon pays Our Ann good money to describe her discomfort. We reply for free.

Note to Salon: Fire Ann, hire John, and make him explain himself.