Everyone's winking at Drudge right now.

Here's the archived page, so you can click all the links. Here's Drudge itself.

Now, let's analyze the winkage. The main headline is Hillary, acknowledging her recent dissembling about Libya. She was just bullshitting before. Meanwhile, Obama's "GETTING SERIOUS," planning a 3-day debate prep. And Putin wants Obama to win. What's Michelle winking about? If the kids feel hungry after the lunches she's skimpified, let them eat cake snack.

"It's not surprising that some youngsters will in the middle of the day be hungry," [Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said]... "We understand that change is difficult... Some folks love it, some folks have had questions about it, but that's to be expected..."

Under the new regulations, cafeterias are required to serve twice as many fruits and vegetables while limiting proteins and carbohydrates. For an average high school student, that means two baked fish nuggets, a cup of vegetables, half a cup of mashed potatoes, one whole grain roll and 8 ounces of fat free milk is the fuel that served to get them through their last four hours of classes.

Regardless of how tall you are, whether you're in a growth spurt, and whether you're active and athletic. Everyone must pay — with their own bodies, as they are trapped in compulsory schooling — for the subset of kids who eat more than their bodies need. One size fits all. Uniformity. 

Anyway, I'm getting off topic. The main topic is: Everyone's winking. That means: It's all bullshit now, don't you know?

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 is leaving kids hungry.

Or so they sing:



Link to video via Drudge, who also links to:

'WE ARE HUNGRY'...
WASTED FOOD...
COMPLAINTS MOUNT AGAINST MICHELLE O'S NEW LUNCH MENU

That semi-starvation diet that was supposed to make you live longer — based on monkey experiments?

After 25 years, the results are in: The starved monkeys didn't live any longer than the unstarved monkeys. Cancer, heart disease — again, no difference. So if you've been straining toward semi-immortality by counting grains of brown rice or whatever... have a sandwich and a good cry.

Then there is Mark Mattson, chief of the laboratory of neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging, who was not part of the monkey study. He believes there is merit to caloric restriction, but his routine is to do it intermittently, eating much less, but not every day. It can help the brain, he says, as well as make people healthier and probably make them live longer.

Dr. Mattson, who is 5 foot 9 and weighs 130 pounds, skips breakfast and lunch on weekdays and skips breakfast on weekends.

“I get a little hungry,” he acknowledged. “But we think being hungry is actually good.”

It can help the brain, he says... demonstrating not the most impressive brain.

"Being hungry is wonderful. The opposite of hungry, which is not hungry, is the opposite of wonderful, which is terrible."

Dr. Andrew Chung's hunger cult.

"This week saw the announcement of the latest conclusions of the Copenhagen Consensus..."

"... a project founded by Bjørn Lomborg in which expert economists write detailed papers every four years and then gather to vote on the answer to a simple question: Imagine you had $75 billion to donate to worthwhile causes. What would you do, and where should we start?"

The consensus...

"The smartest way to benefit the most disadvantaged people is to get them vitamins and minerals."

Isn't it time to release the "golden rice"?

Tages-Anzeiger "starved to death after embarking on a spiritual diet that required her to stop eating or drinking and live off sunlight alone."

Another saint, gone.

Having gotten that far drafting this post, I went looking for saints who have starved to death. I found the story of Maximilian Kolbe. Now, I'm ashamed to have begun this post so sarcastically, but I'll leave it the way it is and invite you to contemplate the extent of the contrast between these 2 stories.

The new diet idea: breakfast with dessert.

"During an initial 16-week period, the average weight loss in each group was identical — about 32 pounds. But over a 16-week follow-up, people on the dessert-with-breakfast diet lost an additional 13 pounds on average, while the others gained back all but 3.5 of the pounds they had lost."

Ah! It's about ghrelin. How strange to run into that immediately after getting my attention directed, once again, to the subject of first sleep, second sleep, which I originally captivated me in 2006. I had just read this other blog post of mine from the last day of 2006, "The two most useful health stories of the year." The second one was first sleep, second sleep, and the first one was ghrelin:

This one, explaining why your brain will be sharper if you stay a bit hungry. Maybe you've been trying to lose weight, but feeling that it's always important to stave off any feeling of hunger, for fear you might become weak or dim-witted. No! The opposite is true. We evolved to perform especially well when we feel the need for food. Sate yourself, and you'll be duller. Using this information, invent a better weight-loss diet.

Now, that's the diet idea of staying hungry, not topping off breakfast with cookies or ice cream. But I like the freaky coincidence of 2 old topics popping up today in succession, like twin comets on a 6 year orbit.

Another funny thing is that, back when I first learned about first sleep, second sleep, I wrote a post at 2:27 a.m., talking about how I was between sleeps and worrying about raking my leaves before the snows came and ruined my lawn and imagining how if the lawn were ruined it would give me reason to hire people next year to "make it thickly plush, satisfyingly level, and shockingly green." And then there's Meade, in the first comment, at 3:32 a.m., also between sleeps, advising me about how to re-green the lawn. How nice that these days, when I'm caught between sleeps, Meade is here in the flesh.

The article I'd read back in 2006 said:

This time after the first sleep was praised as uniquely suited for sexual intimacy; rested couples have "more enjoyment" and "do it better," as one 16th-century French doctor wrote.

The time after second sleep is also good for many things, including breakfast alone or with your true love, with or without dessert.

Man survives, trapped in a snow-bound car, for 2 months.

This happened in Sweden, where the temperature was as low as -22°.

The man, who was too weak to utter more than a few words, said he had been inside since 19 December. He may have survived by drinking melted snow.

Police say they have no reason to doubt his story.

Hmmm. Isn't his survival, under those conditions, a reason?

One doctor told the newspaper that the man might have survived so long by going into a kind of hibernation.

Hibernation! Can human beings hibernate? That's a good question to ask Google. I came up with this:

A Practice closely akin to hibernation is said to be general among Russian peasants in the Pskov Government, where food is scanty to a degree almost equivalent to chronic famine. Not having provisions enough to carry them through the whole year, they adopt the economical expedient of spending one half of it in sleep. This custom has existed among them from time immemorial.

At the first fall of snow the whole family gathers round the stove, lies down, ceases to wrestle with the problems of human existence, and quietly goes to sleep. Once a day every one wakes up to eat a piece of hard bread, of which an amount sufficient to last six months has providently been baked in the previous autumn. When the bread has been washed down with a draught of water, everyone goes to sleep again. The members of the family take it in turn to watch and keep the fire alight.

After six months of this reposeful existence the family wakes up, shakes itself, goes out to see if the grass is growing, and by-and-by sets to work at summer tasks. The country remains comparatively lively till the following winter, when again all signs of life disappear and all is silent, except we presume for the snores of the sleepers.

This winter sleep is called 'lotska'. These simple folk evidently come within '0 fortunatos nimium sua si bona norint!'

In addition to the economic advantages of hibernation, the mere thought of a sleep which knits up the ravelled sleeve of care for half a year on end is calculated to fill our harassed souls with envy. We, doomed to dwell here where men sit and hear each other groan, can scarce imagine what it must be for six whole months out of the twelve to be in the state of Nirvana longed for by Eastern sages, free from the stress of life, from the need to labour, from the multitudinous burdens, anxieties, and vexations of existence.

Much more on human hibernation if you go to that link or Google as I did, but I'll stop there, because it's so cool. And cold.

"[D]uring the 1980s, the North Korean government embarked on a policy of radical self-sufficiency known as juche."

"Farmers were expected to overcome mother nature and grow enough crops to feed the entire population. To do it, they relied on heaps of chemical fertilizer. But that crutch was yanked away in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed."

"How Kim Jong Il Starved North Korea."

"When my mother-in-law was in the final, harrowing throes of pancreatic cancer, she had only one good day..."

"... and that was the day she smoked pot."

The anti-war march — today in Madison, Wisconsin.

"Hope is in the street not the White House."



"Who lied? Who died? Who pays? Who profits?"



"Birds not bombs."



"Corporations get handouts/We get shut out."



"Occupy the World."



"U.S. empire abroad requires austerity at home! Bring all troops & dollars home now."/"Still waiting to get trickled down on."



"Soon the poor will have nothing left to eat but the rich."



Following a man in a badger hat and rainbow fingerless gloves, a woman eats from a bag of popcorn:



"The world is a dangerous place to live... not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it."



"End the wars," a sign clothes-pinned onto a marijuana flag, held by a man wearing a "No more drug war" T-shirt.



"It's time for peace" (and also time for the Farmers' Market, which is going on at the Capitol Square at the same time the peace march arrives).

"Death from Dehydration Is Usually Serene."

An ABC News article, from 2005, back when people were agonizing over Terri Schiavo.

"The process of starving to death seems very barbaric but in actuality is very peaceful," said Dr. Fred Mirarchi, assistant clinical professor of emergency medicine at Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia.

"The patient's experience is really pretty benign," said Dr. Joanne Lynn, a hospice physician associated with Americans for Better Care of the Dying, a group working for improved end-of-life care. "Overwhelmingly, what will happen is nothing."...

"Patients [become] uremic -- filled with bodily toxins -- and are unaware of their surroundings," Mirarchi said. "They develop electrolyte imbalances that eventually cause an abnormal beating of the heart."...

"The heart will then stop and the patient will die," said Mirarchi....

"Going without water makes it more gentle," Lynn said. "Allowing chemicals [in the blood] to cause arrhythmia is more merciful."

That came up first when I Googled "patients die of dehydration," which I did because I was trying to find this news article I'd read yesterday. Here it is: "Elderly patients dying of thirst: Doctors forced to prescribe drinking water to keep the old alive, reveals devastating report on hospital care." That's in the Daily Mail, reporting on the situation in the UK:

The snapshot study, triggered by a Mail campaign, found staff routinely ignored patients’ calls for help and forgot to check that they had had enough to eat and drink.

Dehydration contributes to the death of more than 800 hospital patients every year.

Another 300 die malnourished.

Am I wrong to suspect there is a form of euthanasia going on?

Food price warning.

The severe drought in China:

"China’s grain situation is critical to the rest of the world — if they are forced to go out on the market to procure adequate supplies for their population, it could send huge shock waves through the world’s grain markets..."

"When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, the local boss, Xiong Dechang, forced his father to bury his son alive on the spot."

News from half a century ago trickles out. The boy was one of 45 million deaths in Mao's Great Leap Forward. Another death was the father himself, who died one week later — of grief, as people who lived through that time, perceived it.

Starvation was the punishment of first resort. As report after report shows, food was distributed by the spoonful according to merit and used to force people to obey the party...

As the catastrophe unfolded, people were forced to resort to previously unthinkable acts to survive. As the moral fabric of society unraveled, they abused one another, stole from one another and poisoned one another....

One police investigation from Feb. 25, 1960, details some 50 cases in Yaohejia village in Gansu: “Name of culprit: Yang Zhongsheng. Name of victim: Yang Ecshun. Relationship with Culprit: Younger Brother. Manner of Crime: Killed and Eaten. Reason: Livelihood Issues.”

The term “famine” tends to support the widespread view that the deaths were largely the result of half-baked and poorly executed economic programs. But the archives show that coercion, terror and violence were the foundation of the Great Leap Forward.

Via Instapundit, who writes:

Socialism starves. Capitalism enriches. It’s been proven over and over again. But remember: Communism is about “human dignity.”...

"Graphic designer will be 'Homeless for One Week' in Union Square Park to raise money, awareness."

I love the "money, awareness" form in that headline. It's so Onion-y.

Yusef Ramelize, a 33-year-old graphic designer, will leave his Ozone Park apartment Sunday and take up residence in Union Square Park. He won't shower and he won't have shelter during his "Homeless for One Week" project.

"My reasoning for doing this is to inspire people to make sacrifices within their own lives," Ramelize said of his project, now in its second year.

He raised $3,635 in March 2009 and donated it to the Coalition for the Homeless. This year's beneficiary will be the Food Bank of New York....

Ramelize chose Union Square to pay homage to his biggest inspiration, Mohandas Gandhi, who is immortalized with a statue on the west side of the park.

So you're walking through Union Square, and you see Ramelize and a homeless-year-'round person. You have a $1 bill that you want to hand out. Which man gets the dollar?

"He would lie till evening in the greyish, verminous sheets, smoking and reading old newspapers. Sometimes we played chess."

"We had no board, but we wrote down the moves on a piece of paper, and afterwards we made a board from the side of a packing-case, and a set of men from buttons, Belgian coins and the like. Boris, like many Russians, had a passion for chess. It was a saying of his that the rules of chess are the same as the rules of love and war, and that if you can win at one you can win at the others. But he also said that if you have a chessboard you do not mind being hungry, which was certainly not true in my case."

I'm reading George Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London."

The Amsterdam Notebooks—Page 21.

It's Day 21 of this 35 day project. (The set thus far.) This page, perhaps my favorite in the whole set, is strongly influenced by Mark Beyer's thoroughly brilliant comic "Amy & Jordan," which I'd just read.



(Enlarge.)

"Supersize Me."

Everybody seems to like "Supersize Me," that new comic documentary about a guy who eats (and overeats) every meal at McDonald's for a month and gains weight. Boring quip I heard on TV: "Everybody but McDonald's." Oh yeah? I bet McDonald's loves the movie. I'll bet plenty of people leave the movie and go straight to McDonald's. They are hungry and they could practically smell the french fries while they were sitting there watching the thing. They aren't planning to overeat and they aren't going to go more than once a day, so whatever comical, horrendous results are depicted in the film obviously don't apply to them. I say McDonald's is perfectly happy about this film.