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Just in case anyone else has those occasional niggling doubts that hm, maybe we are all “living beyond our means” after all and shouldn’t let hysteria over rich bankers etc. distract us from this reality…

Apparently GE paid zero federal taxes last year. Yes, that’s right, out of earnings of 14.2 BILLION dollars, and 5.1 billion officially “from U.S. operations,” they paid taxes amounting to:

$0.00

I think this should settle those doubts, then.

In fact, it might settle quite a lot of doubts, if this news were to get any kind of coverage outside of the Times and an NPR.org blog post which was buried beneath a flurry of subsequent posts within hours.

But, then, perhaps there’s a reason why a company named “General Electric” owns so many media organizations.

Warren Ellis’ iconic Spider Jerusalem character once opined that “journalism is just a gun. It’s only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right…  you can blow a kneecap off the world.”

Or, if you’re NPR, you can blow off half of your own foot.

In the latest twist in NPR’s ongoing self-flagellation psychodrama, “political activist [or, in English, reactionary fuckhead twit] James O’Keefe”  produced videotape of an outgoing NPR fundraiser “slamming conservatives and questioning whether NPR needs federal funding during a lunch with men posing as members of a Muslim organization.” Men actually employed in yet another of O’Keefe’s “stings.”

Not really sure where the “sting” is, here, mind you; O’Keefe’s earlier “sting” involving ACORN actually caught someone enabling unethical and illegal behavior. Here, he seems to have caught someone expressing opinions.

So apparently this self-appointed whatever-the-fuck has uncovered the startling information that people employed by NPR have opinions. And some of those opinions are hostile to “conservatives.” (Though how “questioning whether NPR needs federal funding” is offensive to America’s reactionaries must be one of those things which only makes sense to them, and if you find a faulty logic at work you must be an “elitist.”)

This, for some reason, has become a scandal. Mostly, so far as I know, due to the efforts of NPR itself. It may be plastered all over Fox news and right-wing blogs as well; I don’t know. If so, we obviously must respect Fox’s right to drive the nation’s media agenda, because, um, something.

Meanwhile, reactionaries are no doubt whooping, high-fiving and probably masturbating furiously with excitement over yet another “scalp” for their beloved champion O’Keefe.  I suppose that it would be the acme of foolishness to wonder how this squares with perennial conservative kvetching over the academic world’s “hostility” to reactionary faculty; presumably if any logic is needed the “eye for an eye” justification serves perfectly well.

No, I’m sure that on “their side,” logic and justice both seem to be glowing in triumph. On “our side,” though, I believe that there are a few unanswered questions about just what the fuck the people running NPR think is going on, and whether they’ll ever get a fucking clue.

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Salt is back in the news again. Perhaps the depths of winter have placed salt on many people’s minds; in much of the country, at least, it’s already on the road (and the sidewalk, and the hall carpet, and the car) after all. In any event, we’ve just had yet another blast of warnings about the dangers of salt on our plate, this time prompted by newly-updated federal dietary guidelines.

I plan to address the merits of the assault on salt, itself, in a future post. First, though, I want to raise a much more urgent concern about the directive to Americans “to drastically cut their daily salt intake.”

That being the appalling use of this atrocity of a word, “intake.”

For some time now, I’ve noticed that it seems impossible to publish an article about Americans’ diet and salt without repeatedly using this grotesque perversion of language. But I’m declaring “enough.” Finis, no mas. Banish the word “intake” from your vocabularies, writers, at least when talking about human beings.

For god’s sake, what an awful, awful word to apply to the activity of a living, thinking person. “Salt intake?” This sounds like part of a car engine; like some sort of purely impersonal, involuntary mechanized process, rather than what it’s actually referring to in these articles.
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