The presidential candidates are catching flack for the cost of their proposed social programs.

But …

What would we have to show for the $5,900,000,000,000 we spent on the Global War on Terror if we had spent it on infrastructure and social programs instead of killing people and blowing holes in the dirt?

There are four times the number of militant Sunnis ("terrorists") in the world today than on 9/11/2001, clustered in Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan (60k -> 230k).

Afghanistan is selling record amounts of opium (9,000 metric tons annually) and the Taliban have reclaimed 50% of Afghanistan and 70% of their pre-war territory.

Biotech has been telling us for years that GMO are safe; apparently they have never checked their work.

The FDA has discovered foreign DNA in the genome of hornless Holstein's; a consequence of the gene editing process – DNA that just happens to convey antibiotic resistance.

The snake oil salesmen never went away; they just found investors.

It has long been known in some circles that the CIA appropriated the term Conspiracy Theory (if it did not, in fact, invent it) to disparage and marginalize the critics of the Warren Commission Report.

The document 'educated' CIA employees on the 'correct' responses to criticisms of the Warren Commission Report and was an unabashed attempt to manipulate public opinion via the press (the CIA doesn't hold 'pressers', thus their information channels are usually through front companies and anonymous sources).

Regardless of the veracity of the Warren Commission Report, the document is emblematic of the culture of presumed superiority present in the government and intelligence communities during that era – after all, this is the same CIA that was conducting uncontrolled experiments on unsuspecting human subjects at the same they were touting their infallibility (is there any reason to believe things have changed?) The language of the CIA Dispatch dated 1 April 1967 (FOIA Document #1035-960) is clinical and dispassionate, but that has the inverse effect of contributing to the smugness of its message.

Skepticism is a vital tenet of a republican government and the inability to question a government's actions, motives, and processes is the hallmark of monarchies and dictatorships.

As it did with Instagram, Facebook is planning to remove the number of Likes on a post. (The Like function will remain in place, but it won't count them for you).

There's an old saying in marketing, "If you take something away, you must replace it with something." Facebook doesn't seem to be doing that, so how will people get their validation and quantify their self–worth?

Some people are all aflutter (aTwitter?) because Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez called the detention centers at the southern border "concentration camps" and they automatically jumped from concentration camp to "Nazi Death Camp".

Brittanica's definition of concentration camp: "… internment centre for political prisoners and members of national or minority groups who are confined for reasons of state security, exploitation, or punishment, usually by executive decree or military order."

Gallup reports that 43% of Americans have a favorable view of socialism, with 58% affirmative for respondents aged eighteen to thirty-four.

Considering the outstanding models for socialism are human rights-challenged Saudi Arabia and civilization-challenged Venezuela, I would be curious to see the plans for a new and improved socialist model after centuries of failures.

Brazil's President Bolsonaro has become increasingly unpopular thus it appears that the powers that be have decided that he is responsible for the Amazon's annual fire cycle.

The fires have received excessive press coverage and even 'spurred' riots in London and even an agenda item at the G8 conference, but NASA reports the fires to be on par for the last fifteen years (Africa is also on fire, but nobody reports that), with above average activity in Amazonas and Rondônia.

Attorney General William Barr has accepted the finding of suicide as the manner of death for Jeffrey Epstein.

Henceforth, the inclination to accept a load of horse feathers as gospel truth shall be known as Epstein-Barr Syndrome.

If you're inclined to be optimistic about the future of humanity, consider that five million people per year spend their vacations looking at a hole in the ground.

Presidential candidate Marianne “Don’t call me Crystal Lady” Williamson has proposed the creation of a Secretary of Peace and a Department of Peace (not to be confused with 1984’s Ministry of Peace).

“Lasting peace requires its active and systematized cultivation at every level of government and society … Nothing short of broad-scale investment and government reorientation can truly turn things around.”

Ok, maybe it should be confused with 1984’s Ministry of Peace.

The Air Force's new billion-dollar Nuclear Command and Control Facility in Nebraska is being named after confessed war criminal Curtis LeMay.

In today's tight economy, businesses are finding ways to include durable, low-cost, value-added perks to their offerings

For example, this place offers a fingerprint-resistant blunt-force murder weapon.

If Congress or the President were truly concerned about the environment, there are several actions that can be taken immediately that are entirely within their purview.

One of the those actions is to prevent the ~490 ships in the U.S. Navy from dumping their waste and garbage into the ocean; something the Navy has been doing with impunity for 244 years.

Ever the real estate magnate, President Trump pondered purchasing Greenland from Denmark during a meeting of economic advisors.

The proposal may seem off the map, but Trump is actually the third president to broach the issue.

I think presidents get confused about what the island of 56,000 people actually has to offer when they see it on a Mercator projection.

The corn-derived sweetener known as High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is only (only!) 42% fructose. Big Food is putting a high octane version directly in food products that is 90% pure. Did Big Food name the new product Double Plus Good Corn Syrup? Extra Deadly Corn Syrup? Half the Cost and Twice the Margins Corn Syrup? No.

It’s called “Natural Sweetener”. How can something be natural when it’s the result of an industrial chemical process that includes fermented mold, you ask? Let’s see how natural HFCS-90 is:

To create HFCS-90, corn starch is converted into common corn syrup (glucose) via exposure to different enzymes, one being the product of fermented Aspergillus (mold). The second step converts the glucose into its kissing cousin (isomer) fructose by rearranging the atoms in the glucose molecules; this creates HFCS-42.

HFCS-90 is created by passing HFCS-42 through an ion exchange column whereby undesirable ions are sequestered by appropriately charged resin (small beads of crystalized alien sweat (or similar)).

This is your “Natural Sweetener”.

Burger King started selling the Impossible Whopper provided by Impossible Foods this month (but that’s not the whopper referenced by the title).

Glossing over the GMO Frankenfood that is the Impossible Burger (packaged as a Whopper), Impossible Foods insists that its food-like product “bleeds like real meat”. Meat does not bleed, because it does not contain blood (“I’ll take ginormous biohazards for one-thousand, Alex.”).

The reddish fluid in steaks and hamburgers is myoglobin – literally, muscle juice!

The most widely-predicted event in recorded history has transpired, with the discovery of the body of Jeffrey Epstein in his New York City jail cell this morning.

Epstein had two suicide attempts in as many weeks despite being on what NYC called 'suicide watch' - which apparently has nothing to do with suicide prevention.

The tragedy, of course, isn't the death of a predator, but the loss of the person who could expose the entire predator network, which some reports date back to the 1950's.