How do you solve the problem of too many Boomers vs. not enough Social Security? Make sure they die early!

Fast food has been doing their part for decades, making their cheap food as unhealthy as possible. And now the health care industry wants to get involved in pushing burgers.

Now Burger King wants to export the U.S.A.'s health care/retirement plan to the world!

After the guinea pig villagers decided (of course!) that the Whopper tasted better than the Big Mac, Burger King sent a production crew out to the villages to cook burgers. Under the guise of "sharing things about both our cultures (Gee, where have we heard that before in sanitized colonial history?), shots of a burger broiler being airlifted and sledded in by dog are shown. The villagers, of course, like the burger, with the narrator saying, "They told us yesterday, 'No, we want to experience other things in this world, too. We want to taste other foods. We want to see other people. We want to see other things.'"

Right out of the most banal of Thanksgiving scripts, the narrator says, as one of the crew receives a coat, "And they've been extraordinarily gracious to us." Burger King defends the ads, saying it worked hard to respect cultural sensitivities.

All this, to spread disease to developing peoples. And Burger King knows it. The Westernization of the global diet, led by America's fast-food giants, is helping spread obesity and diabetes as it has never been seen before. It's not enough that those diseases are off the charts with Native Americans here at home. Now we want to seduce Inuits abroad. Even if levels of obesity stay what they are now, the number of people around the world with diabetes will explode from the 171 million people of 2000 to 366 million by 2030.

Maybe this suggestion that Obama select a "bold reformer" as Ag Secretary isn't such a good one. If the Ag Dept. is truly reformed, the companies that can push $1 burgers because of all the farm subsidies may not be able to kill enough Americans.

(You did watch Supersize Me, right?)

Nerdy theologians or ostriches?

When self-described "nerdy theologians" laugh at the foibles of religous types, that's okay, but they don't laugh at the same "nerdy theologian antics" the rest of us laugh at. Are they using humor as a way to deflect self-examination?

A Global Recession? Who could have possibly foreseen?

A pair of British experts have counted up the top 20 signs and portents for how recession happened. Would the world's top 20 list look the same? You betcha!

1. China. Did the post-Reaganomic scheme to bust American unions by letting the Chinese manufacture goods cheaper than the U.S. ever could (meanwhile ensuring that American minimum-wage workers could continue to buy their Walmart trinkets) implode?


2. The liquidity bubble. All that 401(k) money found a home on Wall Street. But where did it go?


3. Search for yield. The Reagan Revolution rewrote the book on what made a business profitable - high CEO salaries, lots of worker layoffs, and debt, debt, debt! Who are we to question the financial wisdom of Saint Ronald?


4. Sub-prime lending. Didn't poor people spend every evening of the last decade hounding bankers with phone calls begging for mortgages to houses they couldn't afford?


5. Leverage. And didn't those same poor people convince the banks the mortgages could pay for themselves when the house rose in value?


6. Originate and distribute. And didn't those same poor people force the mortgage houses to offload the mortgages onto overseas investors?


7. Alan Greenspan. His job was to instill public confidence in an economy based on lies. He did his job well.


8. The Democrats. Specifically, one Democrat: Bill Clinton, who thought "centrist" meant toady to the right so conservatives like him.


9. The Republicans. Specifically, all Republicans, who put the "con" in "conservative."


10. Regulators. People paid a lot of money to look the other way. 'Nuff said.


11. Credit rating agencies. People paid considerably less money to spread the "look the other way" message.


12. Financial Services Authority. Again -- people paid to look the other way. Why so many layers of pseudo-oversight?


13. Greedy bankers. They were the guys the regulators, credit rating agencies, and financial service authorities worked for.


14. Consumers/housebuyers. They are the ones who must be punished for believing what Alan Greenspan, the Democrats, the Republicans, the regulators, the credit rating agencies, the financial services authorities, and the greedy bankers told them.


15. Margaret Thatcher. Ronald Reagan, in Brit-speak.


16. Moral hazard. Keep the system going until you retire to some nice, warm country with no extradition. Something Alan Greenspan achieved but Henry Paulson didn't.


17. Gordon Brown. Britain's Henry Paulson -- except he gets to run the U.K. now.


18. Mark-to-market accounting. Supposed to pass for transparency.


19. Basel 2. No American equivalent, because we don't even pretend to regulate like those socialist countries do.


20. Estate agents. We call them real estate agents. They've all gone back to the jobs they left when they were going to get rich selling houses.