This exchange over at Rabid Sanity just keeps getting better. Last night Dave Budge chimed in, and said as he exited that he was “not returning to this”. In other words, he was doing a hit and run.

That’s cool. Dave’s a busy guy – far too busy to blog. But pardon me for a minute while I bloviate – I only have a fleeting image of what Budge looks like. He used to post his picture on his web site. But as I imparted my closing words on Budge, it occurred to me that he wanted to do a hit and run because he likes pulpits more than forums. And an image from the 1990’s struck me – one, like the man-against tank in Tiananmen Square that day – is frozen in time. It was this:

It was Boris Yeltsin preaching from atop a tank as the Russian military surrounded parliament. Later on, Yeltsin needed tanks to enforce his philosophy.

I shall forever think of Budge now as a man who preaches from atop a tank, because tanks and rifles, ala Pinochet and Yeltsin, are what it takes for his philosophy to take hold.

I won’t be returning to this.

No – I’m not talking about Prince. This has to do with a real fruit. There’s an interview over at Democracy Now! between Amy Goodman and Adam Leith Gollner that includes a discussion of a fruit imported from Africa and grown in Florida called … well, he only calls it the “miracle berry”. It’s got some remarkable properties – if you put it in your mouth and swish it around, sour things that you eat afterwards taste very sweet.

During the interview, Goodman used the miracle berry and then ate a lime as she talked. She gushed about the sweetness of the lime. She couldn’t get enough. It was “ecstatically sweet”, she said, like a very sweet orange.

The miracle berry has been around for quite a while, and its properties are well known, but it has suffered from a problem associated with many fruits we don’t see – it has a short shelf life. So during the 1970’s, an inventor named Robert Harvey came up with a way to encapsulate the berry’s properties in a pill. The potential was enormous – it would have replaced artificial sweeteners.

OK, so here is what happened. He started making miracle fruit tablets, because these fruits don’t have a very long shelf life, and that’s another reason that many of these fruits from the tropics don’t make it here, is that they just have no shelf life whatsoever. But he put them in tablet form. Diabetics were going crazy for them. Kids were choosing miracle fruit popsicles over regular popsicles by this enormous margin. And companies, other corporations started getting interested. And Harvey was turning down offers in the billions for control—billions of dollars were being offered to him for this, because it looked like it was poised to become an all-natural alternative to sugar. And even the artificial sweetening industry was very concerned about this threat of this small red berry.

But what happened was, that just as it was about to launch, Harvey’s company, his office was raided by industrial spies. His files were stolen. He got into high-speed car chases in the middle of the night. People were following him.

That all sounds unreal, so skepticism is in order, but this is real: The FDA banned his pill, which it regulated as a food additive. Maybe there’s a reason other than the ones intimated here.

But the berry itself is not subject to FDA regulation, and it is possible now to ship it overnight all over the country, so its potential is slowly being untapped. It is not metabolized as glucose, so diabetics can freely use it and taste the wonders of sweetness again. Chemotherapy patients lose their ability to taste sweet food, and it all tastes rubbery and metallic to them, and the miracle berry helps them too. Then there is just the obesity problem in general.

I just had a nice go-round with Steve over at Rabid Sanity and defended market regulation. That’s a polarized position, as I know as well as anyone that the problem with regulation is the those whom we seek to regulate usually wind up running the regulatory agencies. It’s a huge problem, and possibly the reason why the pill based on the miracle berry was taken off the market. Substitute sweeteners are a huge market.

Read more about the magic fruit here.

I have watched with interest the reactions of rank and file Democrats as Obama reversed course on FISA and NAFTA – in fact, stuck it to them. They’ve been had, and on some level, they must know it. But the human mind is a remarkable engine, and denial a powerful ally in coping with reality. Read below, from Sara Haile-Mariam at Huffington Post, about how Obama is no longer a vehicle for specific aspirations, but rather one of “empowerment”. Note how Obama’s reversals on critical issues are not so important as the fact that we must elect Obama. Note how, even though Obama is obviously not a vehicle for achievement of current aspirations, he will be a vehicle for future ones. We must only close our eyes and click our heels …

That’s what Democrats do. They rationalize reality into an amorphous gel and ply it to any issue.

Below is my entry in the contest for the dumbest paragraph ever written:

I don’t agree with Senator Obama’s vote on the FISA Bill, and yet, I’m thankful. A year ago I wouldn’t have understood the ramifications and so his ability to draw me into the process, empowering me to have an opinion, is something to be celebrated. I think it’s extraordinary that thousands of others felt empowered enough to confront him on it, on his website no less. Americans are starting to see the power of organizing on behalf of causes that we believe in. We’ve been empowered by his words, and that power has enabled us to insist on better. Still, the debacle over the Fisa controversy frustrated me. Placing so much of our hope on the candidate is crippling, where were the groups lobbying to other members of the Senate that voted for the bill? We can’t assume that one man will agree with all of his supporters on everything. WE are the change we’ve been waiting for… remember? So before we stalk off yard signs in hand and insist upon keeping our donations and our time hostage, remember that he isn’t the answer to all of our problems. He is the vehicle of the solution. He will be a President who will enlist the American people into a mission to change our country for the better. He will be a President who compels us to ask more of our leadership, understanding that we can disagree without being disagreeable.

From the Wall Street Journal:

This Bud Might Not Be For Them

St. Louis — Jordon Moore took the news that his beloved Budweiser could soon fall into foreign hands very personally: He decided he would scrap his plan to get the logo of the King of Beers tattooed on his right rib cage.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” said the 21-year-old concrete worker during his luinch break at the Brick of St. Louis bar, in the city’s storied Anheuser-Busch Cos. brewery, “if Budweiser is made by a different country, I don’t drink Budweiser anymore. I’ll go back to Wild Turkey.” (Wild Turkey, a Kentucky bourbon, is owned by French drinks giant Pernod Ricard SA.)

British prime ministers have to appear once weekly before parliament for a grilling – an open Q&A where the questions are tough and where they are often subject to ridicule and jeering. Few American presidents would stand up under such questioning – Reagan never, the Bushes no way, maybe Bill Clinton, certainly JFK.

American presidents instead use a buffer to address the public – the press secretary. These are usually people who are quick-witted and deft at avoiding answering questions. Tony Snow was formidable in that role.

Snow worked for Fox News, that running gag on the American people masquerading as a serious news outlet. It was only natural that Bush look to Fox for a press secretary when Scott McClellen stepped down. And it was appropriate that Snow step out of the role as fake objective analyst and into that of frank apologist and protector of the president. There is no shame in that – he chose to make an open and honest living.

Mainstream American journalists are well-educated and often bring impressive credentials to their job. But if they are supposed to be attack dogs, well they’ve been trained on shock collars by political and corporate masters. They are indeed capable and dangerous, but present no threat to those in power. Most do well in servitude, and collect acclaim and sterling reputation for submissive behavior. But Snow was that odd duck – working for Fox News he could be openly ingratiating to the Bush Administration, and working directly for Bush, had no need to hide his political ideology. He had it good, and was likely the envy of his class.

He was quick and witty and formidable and a good and faithful servant to Bush, and deserves praise for all of that. He knew what his job was, and he did it well. He’ll be missed.

Before I forget, it’s time to say something nice about the late Jesse Helms, even though he was a dick. Isn’t that how we do things?

One guy didn’t get the message.

I had a somewhat interesting exchange at Carole Minjares’ Missoulapolis yesterday with a gentleman calling himself “Max Bucks”. It happens down in the comments. I note that

Minimum wage prevents sweatshops. Look down at your feet, check out the location of the manufacturer of your sneaker, and then check out Global Exchange to find out if that company uses sweatshops to produce the product. Usually they do.

That’s a result of free markets – that’s how they work. Slaves of old had food and shelter. That’s all sweatshop workers get. What’s different? A rose by any other name…

To which comes the reply:

…you say, “Minimum wage prevents sweatshops.” You have no proof of that. In fact, the term “sweatshop” has no absolute meaning whatsoever. It is just a buzzword you picked up somewhere.

It follows … if one believes that markets inevitably lead to better lives, one has to internalize contradictions when evidence doesn’t support the theory. Therefore it would make sense that a conservative would conclude either that sweatshops don’t exist, or that they lead to better lives. Max chooses the former route.

I didn’t have to look far to find the second assertion, that they actually make lives better. Here’s a piece, written by “Jimmie” at a blog called “The Sundries Shack” that spells it out pretty clearly:

The workers can actually sell their services, just like we do here all the time, to the companies that pay better and offer better conditions. Competition between companies is causing conditions to improve regularly. Without those sweatshops, workers have few other options.

Throw in a little garbled U.S. history, and the circle is complete:

Sweatshops exist in third-world countries just like they existed here. They will change just like they changed here, so long as we don’t interfere with the normal progress of the free market. We can help these countries a lot just by opening our markets to them.

The real world is a little uglier than that. If it were a perfect world (and it damn near is), manufacturers would be free to roam the globe looking for the ideal conditions in which to make their products. For instance, during the 1970’s, Nike had its shoes made in South Korea and Taiwan. But the climate changed, workers began to organize and wages began to go up. Nike moved on, to Indonesia, China, and Vietnam–countries where protective labor laws are poorly enforced and cheap labor is abundant. In China and Vietnam, trade unions are illegal.

Working conditions did not naturally improve in Taiwan and South Korea – workers rebelled, fought free market forces, and Nike fled – to places where government protects them from such natural uprisings. But hey – if labor organizing can be classified as a market force, then Jimmie has it right – things do get better. But conservatives uniformly hate unions, and support laws that make organization hard, if not impossible. They must hate market forces. They fight them in order to keep wages down.

Jimmie offers up more justification:

It’s not respectful to workers to force them into the streets as hookers or to take away the best and safest means they’ve ever seen seen to earn themselves a basic living.

This goes to the heart of right wing thought – people always pursue comparative advantage. They work in sweatshops because the alternatives are worse. Therefore, sweatshops offer a healthy comparative advantage. Therefore, sweatshops are a positive market force, and should be left alone.

Therefore, we progressives, in our efforts to curtail and eliminate sweatshops, are harming people.

Jimmie says that free markets in the U.S. eventually eliminated the sweatshop. Never mind that it still exists in our inner cities and produce fields, what progress we have had came about because people organized and fought for laws to curtail the free market and to protect workers.

The conundrum the right wing faces with sweatshops takes a fine lick of self-serving logic to overcome, but overcome it they do thanks to free market logic. Free markets are always good >> free markets give us sweatshops >> sweatshops are a good thing.

So we must live with sweatshops. End of right wing econ 101. Thanks for the lesson, Jimmie, and Max.

Craig, who writes mtpolitics.net, has always seemed to me to be in a perpetual bad mood. He makes light of things in a most offensive way, and reacts angrily when his bits of wisdom are not received well from his targets. He’s kind of tedious.

Anyway, he has shut off the comment section of his blog. One less source of tedium.