His name means "exhausted father." The guy is most well know, among other things, for breaking the bonds of fatherhood and familial love to demonstrate his faith in God. I don't think there's a bigger kahuna for specifically "worst father," 'cause it was the guy's prerogative was to show that God came before even his duties as a father.

What do you get the guy whose name forms the base of three of the most influential cultures on earth?

I'm not talking about urban horticulture either, about which Kwok doesn't mention anything either. I am thinking of what is at least at the moment a local phenomenon in Portland, but there's no reason why it should be. New Seasons Market is mainly a grocery-store with several locations around the Portland-metro area. Their central principle is buying local and regional foods, though that only accounts for about half of all the store's product. On their website anyone can learn how to sell food through them.

What I mean to point out is that Kwok assumes that the local-food movement is a kind of individualist endevour, which means that local-food means more or less farmers' markets. Farmers' markets not only put a limit to the eco-friendliness of local-food, but connected to those limits are the prices farmers' have to set in order to make their 100-200 mile drives at least break even. If local-food were to really become a major part of the American diet, the amount of famers' driving their relatively small truck-loads to all the famers' markets necessary to supply a given population would probably, from Kwok's findings and I think some common sense, be no less ecologically draining then the predominant system. Why can 1000 apples only come from 1000 miles away though? One reason is that farmers can't sell that much in a 6-hour stint at the Saturday farmers' market, and distributing the load between multiple vehicles and/or multiple markets only adds to the cost (economically and ecologically). However, it isn't because farmers can haul that much product.

Businesses like Portland's New Seasons are needed to deal in the numbers that actually show local-food's ecological, if not economic superiority. Getting your apples from the guy who made sure they grew is nice, and it's part of the nostalgia for community that the middle-class thinks they can buy (because you usually wouldn't know your "local farmer" were it not for the money you have for his time and product at the farmers' market). You're relationship with the cashiers at your neighborhood Safeway are more authentically local than at most farmers' markets. The thing is, a grocery-store can deal in the volume that a lone farmer cannot, and it shouldn't be a matter of controversy or damage to the appeal of the local-food movement if, as Kwok says, the biggest reason people cite for buying local is the environment.

I haven't read through the 40+ pages of comments, but I've surveyed a good chunk, and I'm reminded of a joke Slavoj Zizek likes to tell now and again.

Stalin is giving a speech to a crowded room, and someone stands up to criticize him. As soon as the critic is done saying what he has to say, someone else stands up and says to the critic, "What are you doing?!? Don't you know you're not allowed to criticize Stalin?" The second person, Zizek says, will be the first to disappear.

The second person disappears because they speak the unspoken rule, which is itself the lynchpin of the dictator's power. We live in something of the obverse of this joke's universe, because none of Glenn's critics are going to disappear for saying he shouldn't criticize Obama or his supporters. We are not there... yet. The joke is still instructive, I think, because of the spirit of Glenn's critics: we have no choice but to vote for Obama, so why are you criticizing him? Of course we have no choice---anyone who knows anything about our pluralist electoral system understand that third-parties are not allowed, much less desirable---so what does it matter if Glenn criticizes Obama and/or his uncritical supporters?

There is something beyond stupid in claiming critics, especially those who do not do all the work for their lazy readers and offer "solutions" too, do a service for the Republicans. I have a hard time believing there are that many undecideds out there, because I have a hard time believing Americans have wanted to seriously deliberate their choices. Christ, the Democratic field was practically decided within three fucking weeks. Our media's desire to tell us for whom to vote is a symptom of how ready Americans are to hand over their political responsibility. Whoever is going to defect from Obama did not need Glenn or anyone else's criticism to provoke them, and they are far more likely to go Green or Independent because they live under the delusion that our electoral system really has more than two parties. What is more dangerous to this country than McCain are the millions who would, like Obama, do anything for political victory. They are the ones who ensure us that Obama's victory will not be a watershed of political openness, but the ever closing of the American mind. Critics do not divide voting blocks---ideologues do.

Since when is consumption revolutionary? You want revolutionary: how about suggesting that, instead of buying a new internal-combustion car, however cheap it is compared to other cars, people drive less until electric cars come out in the next 2-3 years. Not consuming: now there's a revolutionary that doesn't really cost anything.