July 21

Watching the events in Portland and wondering: "When does #45's Sturmabteilung become his Schutzstaffel?" I saw a comment yesterday in a post that said #45 has Pinochet'ed America. I have seen that in a couple of blog posts also. I won't link because you can google it yourself. 

I remember reading about the FDA relaxing the food labeling rules because companies were having trouble with their supply chains thanks to the pandemic. This is a bit of an update and provided me with a couple of surprises. I never knew that adults could develop food allergies. And I didn't know that some peppercorns are related to cashews and can trigger tree nut allergic reactions.  We read labels because we don't want certain ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup, or a lot of preservatives. We also choose items that are least processed. We have also gone back to cooking most of our food at home from scratch. But we have to recognize that we are probably not getting all of the information we thought we were getting or that it isn't reliable when so much are covered by the innocuous designation "natural flavorings".

A longish story with a very sharp barb from Cassandra's Legacy.

Some hard, straight talk about the pandemic both on the medical and the economic front from Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism. We said back in January that this mess wasn't going away any time soon and it would not be any fun at all.