Scalia-noia, Sanders, and Windows 10 spyware. Plus: I hereby ORDER you to eat your garlic!

The Guardian used to be one of the world's great progressive journals. So why do they want us to stop worrying and love Al Qaeda?

Scalia death theories.  Even Red State has taken note of the absurdity:

I guess the story is supposed to go that the pillow is evidence that Scalia might have been suffocated, as opposed to the fact that he just sleeps with his head under a pillow, as tons of people do. How, pray tell, is that supposed to have worked? Scalia’s body was not found until Scalia the person had been missing for quite some time, so his would-be assassin was clearly not in a hurry.

One would think that a would-be assassin of an aged and ailing Supreme Court Justice who wanted to make his death look like an accident by smothering him with a pillow might have, you know, bothered to remove the pillow from Scalia’s head so as not to arouse suspicion after he was done with the act, but apparently reasonable thinking is not the currency anyone is trading in today.

My ladyfriend sleeps with a pillow over her head. Sometimes it covers her entire face; sometimes, I can see her open, drooling mouth. It's adorable. I'm sure that Justice Scalia looked adorable as well.

This latest conservative meltdown makes me giggle. To paraphrase a line from It's a Wonderful Life: "Look, Daddy! Teacher says that every time a conservative says something moronic, a Democrat gets a vote."

The Difference. Krugman takes a look various forms of madness aroused by Scalia's demise -- and then he zooms out to take in a wider view:

But simply pointing to rising partisanship as the source of our crisis, while not exactly wrong, can be deeply misleading. First, decrying partisanship can make it seem as if we’re just talking about bad manners, when we’re really looking at huge differences on substance. Second, it’s really important not to engage in false symmetry: only one of our two major political parties has gone off the deep end.

On the substantive divide between the parties: I still encounter people on the left (although never on the right) who claim that there’s no big difference between Republicans and Democrats, or at any rate “establishment” Democrats. But that’s nonsense. Even if you’re disappointed in what President Obama accomplished, he substantially raised taxes on the rich and dramatically expanded the social safety net; significantly tightened financial regulation; encouraged and oversaw a surge in renewable energy; moved forward on diplomacy with Iran.

Any Republican would undo all of that, and move sharply in the opposite direction. If anything, the consensus among the presidential candidates seems to be that George W. Bush didn’t cut taxes on the rich nearly enough, and should have made more use of torture.

Beyond that, there are huge differences in tactics and attitudes. Democrats never tried to extort concessions by threatening to cut off U.S. borrowing and create a financial crisis; Republicans did. Democrats don’t routinely deny the legitimacy of presidents from the other party; Republicans did it to both Bill Clinton and Mr. Obama. The G.O.P.’s new Supreme Court blockade is, fundamentally, in a direct line of descent from the days when Republicans used to call Mr. Clinton “your president.”

I'll say it again: A vote for Bernie is a vote for the whackadoodle Republican party. A socialist cannot win the general election, because 69 percent of the public has told pollsters that Big Gummint is our biggest problem.

The Republicans know this. They want to run against Bernie. That is why they are sending false pro-Bernie trolls throughout Blogistan Left.

You say Hillary is rotten on foreign policy? I freely admit it. I've been making that very point for years now. But Bernie is no better:

For a person to say they are opposed to U.S. wars while supporting and voting for a candidate who is not 100% opposed to all wars is straight-up hypocrisy. And Sanders doesn’t come anywhere close to 100%. Indeed, he’s closer to 0%: Sanders supports current US engagements in Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya and Ukraine.

Sanders also participates in the dangerous provocation of Russia and Iran, and is vague, at best, on the Israel Palestine issue (he typically votes for funding to Israel and supported their 2014 war on Gaza).

To make matters worse, Sanders has said he would continue Barack Obama’s deadly drone program, which is to say he supports the way wars will be waged in the future. This is the same drone program that results in the killing of innocent people.

Windows 10: Is this true? I don't seem to be able to embed this Russian video (with subtitles), so I'll link to it. You can get the details quickest if you pause the video, turn off the audio, and scroll from one subtitle to the next.

Basically, this video says that Windows 10 takes a screenshot of your desktop at regular intervals and sends the results off to Microsoft. If this is true, then every measure you've taken to insure your privacy -- such as the use of Tor or a VPN -- is useless.

I had 10 on my system for about twenty minutes. Hated it. (The flat "modern" look is just plain ugly.) So I wiped the C drive and went back to 7. By this point, any dangers associated with 7 are well-known. (My advice: Never update. Updates are simply Microsoft's way of jacking into your system. Microsoft updates don't protect you from spyware -- the updates inject spyware.)

Health matters. In the past month-and-a-half, I've had a heart attack, an excruciating dental abscess, and a seriously twisted ankle. Throughout it all, the thing that bothered me most was Donald Trump.

The abscess caused my face to redden and swell like -- well, like Donald Trump's face. About 800 milligrams of Advil dampened the pain -- and then I read that heart patients who take too much Ibuprofen tend to (yikes!) die. You'd think that my doctor would have mentioned that little fact.

Why didn't I go to the dentist? Because I hadn't the money for a root canal, and an extraction would have left me bereft of a necessary tooth.

What I needed was amoxicillin, so I ordered some online. By a wild coincidence, my pet barracuda also had a toothache.

Well, that was nearly two weeks ago: The antibiotic pills never showed up. There was nothing for it but to find a natural remedy. Y'know what?

GARLIC WORKS.

Raw, uncooked, fresh garlic. Not powdered, not minced, not bottled, not pills, not cooked in a delicious Eye-talian sauce. You can chomp on the cloves directly, or put thin slices (not cooked) on buttered toast. Eat lots and lots and LOTS of garlic.

Sweartagod: I could feel my swollen face deflate like a punctured tire. This wasn't the placebo effect -- it was quite real. Within a day and a half, the abscess was entirely gone. Your experience may vary (and I'm certainly not telling you to ignore the advice of your doctor) -- but for me, garlic proved itself to be the superior antibiotic.

Moreover, garlic seems to be something close to a cure-all for my heart issues. To be honest, I had not felt very good since returning from the hospital -- in fact, there were days when I came that close to going to the emergency room. But now, after popping garlic in mega-doses, all of the lingering symptoms have disappeared. Extreme fatigue, extreme shortness of breath, light-headedness, chronic sore throat, palpitations, weird little pains: All gone. Gone.

I feel years younger.

That's why I've been gobbling up massive amounts of garlic every day. Of all the supplements which various people have recommended, nothing has worked like garlic. The effects were immediate and undeniable.

But there's one problem -- the usual garlic problem, the inescapable garlic problem: Nobody can stand to be around me.

(Or rather: People have an additional reason not to want to be around me).

If I open the bedroom window, families living two streets away know about it. Pretty soon, they will take up pitchforks, as in the finale of a Frankenstein movie. Even the dog doesn't want me to open my yap.

There seems to be no solution to this problem: Even the constant use of mouth rinses does little more than perfume the garlic.

Others in my position have come up with a novel idea: If everyone used garlic for health reasons, then nobody would mind the smell.

Thus, I hereby order everyone reading these words to eat lots of garlic, every day. Your lives will be longer and you will experience less pain.

No arguments. Rome has spoken. Eat your garlic.