They could have just called one of us...

...and we would have told them. But instead, a study was conducted that found that "Organic Foods Reduce Prosocial Behavior and Harshen Moral Judgments" or as it is put in the connecting link on MSNBC (hat tip goes to reader Diane for emailing this to me) "organic food may just make people act a bit like jerks."

"I stopped at a market to get a fruit platter for a movie night with friends but I couldn't find one so I asked the produce guy," says the 40-year-old arts administrator from Seattle. "And he was like, 'If you want fruit platters, go to Safeway. We're organic.' I finally bought a small cake and some strawberries and then at the check stand, the guy was like 'You didn't bring your own bag? I need to charge you if you didn't bring your own bag.' It was like a 'Portlandia skit.' They were so snotty and arrogant."

As it turns out, new research has determined that a judgmental attitude may just go hand in hand with exposure to organic foods. In fact, a new study published this week in the journal of Social Psychological and Personality Science, has found that organic food may just make people act a bit like jerks.

I guess this makes it official. But to me it goes in the "no duh" category with established phenomena like divorce rates being higher among Hollywood stars and kids being more likely to drop out of high schools in the inner city.

"We found that the organic people judged much harder compared to the control or comfort food groups," says Eskine. "On a scale of 1 to 7, the organic people were like 5.5 while the controls were about a 5 and the comfort food people were like a 4.89."

When it came to helping out a needy stranger, the organic people also proved to be more selfish, volunteering only 13 minutes as compared to 19 minutes (for controls) and 24 minutes (for comfort food folks).

"There's something about being exposed to organic food that made them feel better about themselves," says Eskine. "And that made them kind of jerks a little bit, I guess."

A little bit? You guess?? Come on. These people will bring their own snacks to your party and put them front and center, and then they go around telling everyone to eat their stuff because its organic. No lie.

Oh, I loved the concluding quip:

"At my local grocery, I sometimes catch organic eyes gazing into my grocery cart and scowling," says Sue Frause, a 61-year-old freelance writer/photographer from Whidbey Island. "So I'll often toss in really bad foods just to get them even more riled up."

Woman after my own heart.

Jigsaw President

I really appreciated Matthew Continetti's piece in which he provides evidence that Obama has, with the cooperation of the media, entirely constructed the character which his adorers see when they look at him. Excerpt:

Obama was similarly meticulous in constructing his positions, attitudes, and demeanor when he became a professional politician. Here, too, his identity was hard to pin down. His alliance with Jeremiah Wright was necessary to gain credibility with Chicago’s African-American community. He frequently voted present in the Illinois state senate in order not to offend particular constituencies. He agonized over his decision to oppose the Iraq war because he was afraid he would be on the wrong side of the issue. His debut at the 2004 Democratic National Convention was a gauzy, abstract paean to national unity. He became, as he put it in The Audacity of Hope, “a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” He ran for president as a bipartisan ‘pragmatist’ who would bring us together.

The conclusion is good too.

The composite identity that took Obama 47 years to create has come undone in less than four years. It was just as faked as Julia. Behold the man as he is: A “New Politics” liberal whose idealism is dropped at the first sight of an FEC deadline. There’s nothing funny about it.

Continetti proves in this article that the most devastating exposés of this phony chief executive do not have to contain words like "socialist", "communist" or "Alinsky". In fact, they are much more powerful when they don't.

I wish they'd turn up the volume, but...

Dr. Jeff Mirus makes a good point about the disappointing silence of Donald Cardinal Wuerl with regard to the Sibelius/Georgetown scandal. Basically the silver lining is in the Washington diocesan newspaper. Excerpt:

Second, it is enormously telling that the editor of Cardinal Wuerl’s newspaper felt at liberty to write clearly on Georgetown’s decision. The editor made it crystal clear that the decision to invite Sebelius was not only wrong but very typically wrong. It stated point blank that Georgetown can be more relied on to attack the Faith than to defend it. This kind of frankness is rare in the diocesan press.

Now it would have been very foolish of the editor to publish this editorial without knowing that Cardinal Wuerl approved. And in the long run it will prove foolish of Georgetown to, in effect, deliberately and directly pick a fight with the bishops. This is not your father's Church. The Modernists are not as strong as they were forty years ago. Even if they still control many universities and religious orders, they no longer control the episcopate. By a direct onslaught, Georgetown has hastened the day when it will find this out.

I don’t know exactly what can be done about Georgetown at this juncture. Certainly if Cardinal Wuerl can do more, he should; and if he cannot do more, it would be better for him to square off against Georgetown on this issue both personally and publicly. But that he is willing to permit the battle lines to be hardened is not nothing. That the Archdiocesan newspaper should so clearly want the faithful to realize that Georgetown is both wrong and unCatholic is not nothing. Not so many years ago, this would have been unthinkable.

Even so, I wish people like Cardinal Wuerl would turn up the volume of disapproval of Sebelius. Really, what's the circulation of a diocesan newspaper? The Bishops really should take a page out of Bill Donohue's book and whip out the media megaphone machine.

Mother's Day with the Romneys

I don't know, these people seem to be in touch with my life experience. No patronage appointments here.

Mamet, the mensch

Wendell Berry's Imagined World

Here are some of my favorite paragraphs in the very good article by James Schall on Wendell Berry.

The stark localism of Berry is very attractive in many ways. He wants to get us out of the cities and back to the land, to know our neighbor. He wants us to preserve the land and in the process of preserving ourselves and our planet. It is a majestic vision, no doubt. Yet, man is a city living being. The exodus from the land was not merely a plot against mankind but rather a fulfillment of man and the city in which the higher things could take place. It is not that great and human things do not take place in the economic order, but that they are not enough, do not speak what man is. Berry himself, after all, is also a college professor. Scenes of him with his horses and plough are striking, but so are those of his being given a medal by the president. Without the city, he could not speak.

Yes: were the guys who invented your microphone and started your publishing company "boomers" or "stickers"?

The Jefferson lecture has many moving passages. But it somehow struck me as a kind of ecological utopianism. It promotes a world of villages. Berry wants to put us all to work. He seems to reverse Pieper’s notion that we work in order to have leisure. The lives of his characters are honorable and deeply sensitive, no doubt of it. His grandfather, he tells us, took but one trip in his life, to Tennessee, and didn’t see much there that would want to make him leave again. Ever since I read William Cobbett, I have realized that we can achieve our salvation even if we never leave home. If Berry does anything, he makes us nostalgic for our homes. To what extent we are also “restless” at home is not always clear. The Jefferson Lecture re-domesticates us. Still, it does not seem like a lasting city, let alone a lasting farm, even when we live there all our lives and care for the land and animals.

You thought the story of the city mouse and the country mouse was basically a parable about how there is no lasting city on earth, and although where you live may be bad, there are many other worse places. But you have no idea how fascistic a country mouse could be before you listen to Wendell Berry. In Berry's parable, the country mouse returns home, repents of his trip, then scolds the city mouse for preferring his urban residence.

“And so I am nominating economy for an equal sanding among the arts and humanities. I mean, not economics, but economy, the making of the human household upon the earth.” Berry, I am sure, would not disagree with the famous phrase, “We have here no lasting city.” But the Jefferson Lecture does leave me perplexed about the admonition “Increase, multiply, and subdue the earth.” I had always supposed that this passage encouraged us to use our minds and hands so that we could accomplish these purposes. The Jefferson Lecture seems to oppose our minds to our affections, the city to the economy. One suspects that we would be better off if we could harmonize the two instead of pitting them against each other.

Emphasis mine. The imagined world of Wendell Berry is no less silly than the one "imagined" by John Lennon, it just has more tillable land, furry animals, and maybe a few Indian tribes running around killing each other. Berry is a user of the land and a user of resources just like everybody else he criticizes. The fact that he may use a little bit less than others is ultimately a matter of taste and not morality. I don't care what he does with his life, but he seems to care a lot what others do with theirs and has developed his own Sharia-like law based on his preferences. Continuing to pay serious attention to him as a thinker because a few of his quips are quotable and insightful is a dubious practice which can be applied to moral idiots such as Mao Tse-Tung, Muhammad Ali and the aforementioned Mr. Lennon, although I am reminded that the line "I believe in yesterday" was penned solely by Mr. McCartney.

I'm smiling with you...

...and yes, I'm smiling at you.

Another example of a strange habit

A reader pointed out this post on Mark Shea's blog to me. I read through it, looked at the comments and sort of rolled my eyes. Then this comment by a commenter named Esther caught one of my eyes mid-roll:

Do you know that when you now google “Perry Lorenzo,” two of the top four results are blog posts speculating about his sex life and eternal destiny in relationship to that sex life?

I’m sure his family is thrilled.

Good job, Mark.

Mark, I really think you should do an examination of conscience about this whole series of posts. They weren’t about Mr. Lorenzo. They were about you, and some bizarre desire to present your views on another person’s private and spiritual life matter as if the world should care what you think. In matters like these, I try to put myself in another person’s place. If my Mom died tonight, what would I think of a popular blogger taking her life and death, making them the center of several posts without my permission, and inviting the world to contemplate her flaws and sins for days on end?

Finally: it is not a Catholic thing to do to speculate on a person’s eternal destiny. It strikes me, actually, as a very Protestant thing – “Are you saved?” “If you died tonight….” To focus in on the congregation in front of you, picking out the saints and the sinners. If you reflect on the witness of the saints and great spiritual teachers, you don’t see that happening. That is not the language, nor the discourse. After a person dies, in particular, it’s not the Catholic Way to speculate in anyway on a person’s eternal destiny – it is the Catholic Way to pray for them, in hope. Period.

I know you are being hailed for this post far and wide, but I think it was a terrible, puzzling and even scandalous mistake, and an invasion of a deceased man’s privacy – not to speak of the privacy of the living, including his partner.

This more or less nailed my biggest problem with all these recent posts. It seems like a strange habit which some writer's possess, this opportunistic culling of information about a recently deceased person, especially material of a primarily speculative nature. Maybe a writer has a desire to be a biographer, but not enough ambition to write about someone famous. So they opt to be a hagiographer of someone personally known by them. The facetious line "I’m sure his family is thrilled" sums up a good enough reason to stay out of this business.