Follow-up to previous discussions

Let's update a few previous posts...

Bella: First, thanks for all the concern over my hell-hound Bella. She has finally begun to rally, although her tummy remains tender. Within a week, she should regain her ferocity of old.

At times like this, I'm glad I didn't reproduce. Friends have told me how anxious they feel when a kid is sick and nothing further can be done but to wait out the illness. If a dog had me frantic enough to claw the wallpaper -- well, I don't know how parents manage to keep their equilibrium.

The earlier post evinced an interesting debate over doggie diet. One reader stumps for BARF -- Bones And Raw Food -- while another insists that his pooch does fine on vegetarian cuisine. You can lose yourself for days researching pet food, as with just about any other topic. For now, I'm taking reader Lori's suggestion (seconded by the vet) that my dog should maintain a bland diet of (cooked) chicken and rice.

Zodiac: Another Zodiac candidate has come forth, and this one appears rather more interesting. In this case, we have actual evidence, in the form of old film showing an actual dead body -- which means that we do have a crime, even though it may not be a Zodiac crime.

Just as long as it's not Artie Allen. The evidence against him never added up to much (in my view) -- and Graysmith's second book was hardly as compelling as his first.

Twitter twits: That post was my way of addressing a larger question. Is privacy a thing of the past? Do the young care about it? Are such concerns only for us Ancient Ones?

My mind goes back to the opening of Juno -- a nearly perfect film, except for that first scene. It rankles me. As you may recall, the film begins with our 16 year-old heroine in a convenience store, taking a series of pregancy tests while the dweeb behind the counter offers caustic commentary on her condition. At one point, a similarly-aged customer asks Juno if her nipples hurt.

Even in the free-for-all '70s, even in Hollywood, young people did not discuss potential pregnancy with nameless dolts populating convenience stores. I do not advocate treating unwed motherhood as a shameful matter, but I do consider it a personal matter. Do you want to inhabit a world in which strangers feel free to ask about the state of your nipples?

Argyll and beyond: I'll return to this important matter in future articles, even though the original post attracted little attention.

I understand now that I wrote the preceding post backwards. The lede should have been "Prominent Mormon uses goat's blood to extend life." If that opener doesn't fetch attention from the more paranoid fundamentalist sites, I've lost my touch.

Seriously, I hold no animus toward Alan Osmond, and I hope that he will answer my emailed questions about his relationship with Immunosyn.

Now let's zoom out for a wider view.

In more general terms, I'm continually stunned to learn just how much money was siphoned from this economy by Ponzi schemes, pump-and-dump stock plots, and other forms of fraud. Indeed, the whole range of financial trickery that evolved out of the mortgage bubble constitutes a variant of pump-and-dump.

Americans don't make anything any more. That's the problem. We don't make TVs or drums or motherboards, and pretty soon we won't make cars.

So we sell each other our debts, because debt is the primary thing we have left. We sell each other our land, because India and China cannot make American property. We sell our religious faith every time we pay a preacher to tell us what we already believe. We sell our cheap little dreams of vengeance every time Hollywood makes an action movie. We even sell our genitalia -- or rather, our loneliness -- as evidenced by all those pathetic internet ads for dating sites.

The modern American economy depends on the commoditization of things -- sex, soil, psychoses, soteriology and scams -- that the original inhabitants of this land never would have considered items of commerce. Neither Adam Smith nor Karl Marx could have predicted this absurd form of capitalism.