"Inspired loosely by John Sayles 'Brother From Another Planet', Adventures in Lo-Fi asks its listeners to look around their immediate community critically and to do the same musically."
"Put simply, I want to teach people in this country to tell lies from the truth and to tell bad from good. This is what our people still cannot do."
Last summer, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration instituted a new set of guidelines for city hospitals, which were aimed at encouraging women to breastfeed.
If Bloomberg’s policy wonks expected warm, fuzzy accolades for their efforts, they were wrong. What they got was white-hot rage from women fed up with hearing that their decision to feed their babies with infant formula was ‘second best’.
The interesting point here is not the relentless obnoxiousness of the Bloomberg administration in its quest to transform New Yorkers from their sassy food-loving selves into svelte, cycling locavores. No, it’s the reaction to a policy intended to promote breastfeeding,…
It,...created a great deal of righteous indignation among women, both because they had been treated like failures by healthcare workers, other mothers and even nosey strangers simply because they decided to formula feed, and because - this is where the rage became visceral – most had bought into it themselves. They had blamed themselves and felt frightened for their children and often gone through a sort of living hell, for essentially no real reason at all.
So, now that they think oral sex may be a bigger cause of throat cancer than tobacco, is New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg going to issue another one of his nanny state decrees to stop it?
Is cutting down on junk food a good thing? Sure. Labeling junk food as "bad for you"? That's nuts. 
It's so weird how we here at TMR know this stuff, instinctively, while the rest - consummately cultish "followers" all - will defend doing the wrong thing, just because it's popular, until the day they die:We all know the type. They never let wheat, yeast or dairy pass their lips. They’ve cut out alcohol and caffeine. They’re obsessed with healthy eating — yet every day, they look more unwell and unhappier.
These are the symptoms of a condition called ‘orthorexia’ by dieticians. It is, apparently, on the increase — particularly in professional women in their 30s.
Orthorexia was coined in 1997 by Californian doctor Steven Bratman in his book Health Food Junkies, and means ‘correct appetite’ (from the Greek orthos for right and orexis for appetite). It is a fixation with eating ‘pure’ food that, far from doing you good, can become so extreme that it leads to malnutrition, chronic ill health and depression.
Plenty of celebrities are secret long-term orthorexics, passing off their limited diet of sashimi or steamed broccoli as ‘getting in shape for a part’.
But they’re not the only ones. Many of us have fallen into the same trap, believing that the more ‘bad’ foods we cut out, the healthier we’ll be. But it’s the start of a slippery slope.
And it doesn’t just stop at food — orthorexics are often gym bunnies, who’ll work out for two hours and then go for a ten-mile run.
The grim truth is that this level of health obsession is a potentially dangerous form of self-control. And it’s increasingly prevalent.
Not only that, but they force it on others (Yes, we're talking to you, Michelle Obama and NY Mayor Mike Bloomberg) and they're arrogant about it - a character flaw they never view as a problem - as they're defending whatever insane regime they've gotten themselves into without investigating it thoroughly. Investigating anything thoroughly means looking at both it's positives and negatives, something these "followers' have no interest in, as they go about demanding others do as they say. 
So what's the answer to orthorexia? For that you'll have to consult a psychiatrist (a suggestion we'd offer for a lot of the topics we cover - sorry, Scientologists) but we can tell you what the short-term solution is, especially when you're around us:
Shut the fuck up and eat.
In his new "Don't touch my junk" column, Charles Krauthammer says this mini TSA revolt is Americans finally standing up to "idiocy". Americans being forced to live with idiocy is a constant theme of this blog (our "stupidity" tag is almost as well-used as our "New Age" tag) and a look at a few recent stories raises the question of why Americans have had to endure this weirdness - for instance:
Why are journalists consulting psychics about whether or not Kate What's-her-face and England's Prince William can look forward to a happy marriage? (Let's forget for the moment the royals are weird and, after what happened to Diana, probably shouldn't marry.) Don't journalists, at least, know psychics are bunk? So why are they talking to them? Even worse, why are they telling us what they say? Don't journalists have more important things to do? More importantly (Ha!) don't they know we have more important things to do than read what some con man (or con woman) says? 
Why do we celebrate patriotism when an immigrant becomes a new American citizen, but fear that same flavor of patriotism when a native born American exhibits it? Oh, those Americans who want to protect the borders from illegal aliens are racist and nuts, aren't they? And that Sarah Palin, or George W. Bush, going on and on about how much they love America - they're both comical and crude, right? But let somebody from anywhere else take a test to prove they know George Washington was the first president of the United States and the South lost the Civil War and - WHAM! - they can wave the American flag all day, unmolested by liberals and even cheered by them, anywhere in the country. Which seems like it's upside-down and completely insane.
Just, please, don't make your comments as crazy as the questions themselves:
This isn't intentional, we're sure, but there are some days when we read Glenn Reynolds and all we can do is give him the Picard face palm. 
Like when, during the Tiger Woods fiasco, he posted Frisky articles by hookers (?) that were supposed to give us enlightenment on how to maintain relationships. WTF? 
Or like,...well, yesterday, when Reynolds put a Hot Air Reader Poll up, stating "Fiscal issues trump social issues by … quite a lot." right behind another Frisky article (?) by Susannah Breslin called "30 Things I Wish I’d Done Before I Turned 30."
So what's the problem? Well, from where we sit, it's pretty clear that what we, as a nation, have been doing and thinking socially obviously informs how disastrously we've behaved fiscally. Our financial house wouldn't be in this shambles if our politicians - and our people - weren't so fucking foolish with our beliefs, time, and money. Or, put another way:
It would've been impossible for Bernie Madoff to do what he did if all those people, (pretty much all Democrats) who started off in life so much richer than we did, were ever thinking clearly. (Isn't Reynolds practically bragging he put $100 down on a Nissan Leaf and ain't got shit to show for it? Real fucking smart,...)
Here's three things on Breslin's Frisky list that every reader of TMR knows gets our goat:18. Been More Spiritual.
22. Figured Out Who I Was.
23. Mastered Yoga.
Gawd. Every one of them an Extreme Time-Waster, a sign of a barren intellect, and a Guaranteed Money-Sucking Machine. 
Don't know who you are, Miss Breslin? Here, let us help:
Look at the name on the article - it says, "Susannah Breslin" - there, figured it out yet, you fucking dip?
Is it any wonder we can't get our economic house in order when the writers hired (or, in the case of Glenn Reynolds, self-elected) to inform us can't even make the simplest of connections and/or have such warped priorities? How are Americans supposed to get out of this recession when so many have got their heads stuck in their navels trying to be "More Spiritual"? What-in-the-fuck is being "More Spiritual" anyway? We'll tell you what it is, it's becoming this idiot:
And, as far as "Yoga" is concerned, Oh Susannah, find a fucking chair and bend yourself over it - Ta Da! - you've now entered the wonderful "spiritual" world of stretching, you fucking moron. You're welcome:
Now, we're sure, both Breslin and Reynolds (if they're bright enough to care) are asking themselves, "Well, who is this to be saying we don't know shit?" It's someone who had already accomplished 20 of the 30 things on that stupid fucking list you two find so ripping important in a recession - and did them by the age of 30 - that's who. 
Listen, telling our politicians to stay away from social issues is smart. The last thing we need is more San Francisco-style halting of Happy Meals or the Mayor of New York determining how much salt we eat or where we can play chess. The same goes even more for the dips in Washington - we can handle it, folks. 
But, by the same token, the last thing the rest of us need is to be engaging further in any more useless "spiritual" endeavors that bleed our wallets and do nothing for our national well-being. If you want to blow money and feel good about yourselves, then here's what you do:
Find someone less fortunate than yourself (and fuck this "volunteering" shit, like your punk asses don't know anyone, personally, who's not doing as well as you are) and GIVE THEM SOME FUCKING MONEY! HELL, DONATE TO THIS BLOG IF YOU FIND IT TOO DIFFICULT TO FIND A FRIEND IN NEED: THERE'S REAL PEOPLE - MINORITIES EVEN - ON THE OTHER END OF YOUR COMPUTER SCREEN, RIGHT NOW, ASSHOLES - GIVE US SOMETHING! WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU? ARE YOU FUCKING BRAIN DEAD? OR ARE YOU GOING TO KEEP HIDING BEHIND THAT "TALK NICE TO US WHILE WE WATCH YOU STARVE" BULLSHIT?
You wanna know what we wished we had figured out by the time we were 30? How many dumbshits there are in the world, who they are, and how much damage they'd have been able to cause by now, that's what. Because it certainly wasn't us who turned our economy or our society into a shambles; it was people who thought like these two self-satisfied back-scratchers, that's who. And now they want to give guidance to the rest of us on how to get out of it? Puh-leaze!
If you ask us, an apology - for ever getting the rest of us into this shit - would go a hell of a lot further, right now.
