Grumpy Factor: Lately I've been really grumpy, without really knowing why. But the NYTimes explains that it may be the heat: "Call it the Grumpy Factor, a phenomenon tied to humidity. In a nursery-rhyme-science sort of a way, the Grumpy Factor explains how unpleasantness can shuffle across the city, lighting tempers and darkening moods... The sweating is a big part of the Grumpy Factor, making the whole city stick to itself, shirts to backs and socks to shoes and hair to necks and so on." Hey, if that's an excuse, I'll take it. And actually, I'm a lot less grumpy since I went swimming today and really cooled off.
And the Center for Consumer Freedom is making people besides me grumpy (I have mentioned more than once here, they are the ones with the deceiving "obesity is not really a problem" ads), as they put up billboards such as one in Times Square that says "PETA Kills Animals.com". Here's part of CCF's mission statement: "In addition to malicious animal-rights activists, we stand up to the 'food police,' environmental scaremongers, neo-prohibitionists, meddling bureaucrats and other self-anointed saints who claim to 'know what's best' for you."
The article rebuts CCFs claim: "In fact, the language of the Center for Consumer Freedom is as Orwellian as it is possible to get. Its basic linguistic strategy could have been taken directly from George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," still the most important single essay on how to lie without seeming to. It would hardly work for C.C.F. simply to tell the truth - to say to consumers, on behalf of the food and beverage industries, "Activists and watchdog groups are trying to stop us from selling you anything we want to sell you." Much better to say, "These groups are trying to prevent you from buying anything you want to buy." Then it becomes a matter of sustaining freedom, protecting individual rights and keeping the prairie of consumer choices unfenced. The blurring of the distinction between corporate interests and the individual and collective rights of humans is one of the central tropes of our time and the source of much purposeful confusion, of the kind that the Center for Consumer Freedom exploits." It's a nice read. One of my favorite lines from it: "When you hear someone howling about freedom, it is worth asking whose freedom he means."