The human digestive system

Here’s the new cleanse I invented, in four easy steps:

1. Do yoga four days a week and eat mostly vegetables and whole grains for several months.
2. Stop all that and go to the airport Wolfgang Puck’s to eat macaroni and cheese originally prepared by Lady Bird Johnson.
3. Fly on a plane to Iowa and eat as much turkey as you can in one sitting two sittings.
4. Die.

I am currently between steps (3) and (4). Probably my cleanse will proceed as planned and finally remove all molecules from my body, but who knows? Today is Friday, and all systems are broken. Won’t you clench yourself with me?

I understand what I did wrong now. By visiting my family for Christmas, I foolishly put my stock in genes, when really I should have been thinking about bacteria. In this 2012 article that got me fixated on my poor, corroded gut in the first place, Michael Specter describes the Human Biome Project, an effort to map the bacterial content of our bodies. It’s modeled on the Human Genome Project, but it turns out our guts (and the various other systems that I, frankly, am beyond caring about) are much less standardized than our chromosomes. That’s partly because their bacterial compositions are changeable in ways that our genes are not. For example, all of my digestive bacteria have been replaced with that stuff you find in the finger holes of a bowling ball.

The lower orders, if you will, do not always do what’s in their best interests. Consider the odd case of anti-democracy protests in Thailand, where a sizable minority faction has taken to the streets to demand the suspension of elections. In part because the Pheu Thai Party has won every election there since 2001, a coalition of wealthy businesspeople, Bangkok residents and southern workers are demanding that Thailand disband its parliament and replace it with a “people’s council” composed of representatives from each profession. Then we get to the part about the king, and things really get weird.

The moral of the story is that democracy is incompatible with infallible, divinely-inspired leaders. Just ask Paul Ryan, who—in addition to his tireless work on behalf of the poor—now has Pope Francis to contend with. The congressman from Wisconsin, who is a devout Catholic, opined that the Pope only criticized supply-side economics and laissez-faire capitalism because he doesn’t understand them. Quote:

The guy is from Argentina; they haven’t had real capitalism in Argentina. They have crony capitalism in Argentina. They don’t have a true free enterprise system.

Take that, leader of the Catholic church who speaks for God and theoretically cannot be wrong. You just don’t understand the perfect love of a benevolent, all-powerful free enterprise system. Neither do you quietly love the poor, as Ryan does, nor advocate for their religious salvation.

Clearly, I am producing a lot of bile. But for Hayek’s sake, someone has to editorialize around here. After yesterday’s obsessive disquisition on Half the Kingdom, I’ve been trying to validate my opinion by scouring the internet for what book reviewers think. Book reviewers think that 80% of a review should be plot summary. The Times holds it down to 60% or so, while Benjamin Evans at the Telegraph manages a series of laudatory adjectives without further explanation. He also badly misplaces a modifier at the beginning of paragraph three. Four stars! No analysis. This is what happens when a good writer writes a problematic book.

Lucky for me that I revel in the mistakes of others. I kid myself that I’m a sophisticated consumer of culture, but all I really want is bloopers, bloopers bloopers. Behold the suffering of the news anchor:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OihpIHUYYU

Dear News Be Funny: what were the second-best news bloopers of 2013? And how did you select your judges? Also, did those dogs finish doing it or what? A responsible journalism would tell us, but ours is not that system.

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