The humans, they are getting really large. And all over the world. One in eight of them, it is now Measured, are obese. And it is expected that, by 2025, one in five, they will be officially mammoth. At that rate, before the end of the century, every human in the world, they will need to wheel around in a fat-cart, when they shop in the supermarket.

I always figured obesity, this was mostly a problem with the Americans. But I was wrong. Because while it is true that the US is home to the most "super obese" among the humans, there are many, many "regular obese" people waddling around nations like, for instance, China, and the UK; in a decade, 40% of British adults will be severely roly-poly, while the fattest humans today, they shake the ground not only in the US, but also in China.

There are currently 640 million obese people on the planet. There are some Math and Astronomy people who have determined that, if all of these obese humans were to gather tightly together, in one place, they would pitch the earth out of its orbit, and it would go streaming wildly out into space.

The basic problem here is that evolution designed the human body to run on what the taste buds find most appealing: meat, and fruit. This was not an issue when it took some fairly serious effort to secure meat, and fruit was varied, and seasonal.

But all that is over now.

Today, an increasing mumber of the humans are increasingly able to chow down on a cheap burger (meat) and a cheap candy bar (fruit), pretty much anytime they feel like it. The body, it doesn't know the candy bar isn't fruit; in fact, it likes it better than fruit, because the sucrose is so much more intense than the fructose. The body loves this bounty. And so stores the excess away as fat. Because evolution programmed the human body to store fat, for the lean times. But now, for an increasing number of the humans, there are no lean times. Just stored fat.

For so many of the humans, they have passed from scarcity, to surfeit, in less than 100 years. Evolution, it just doesn't work that fast. It has not caught up, to McDonalds, and Hersheys. And so, this is rapidly becoming, The Planet Of The Fat-Carts.

Meanwhile, of course, there exists a serious "food inequality" problem: for while there are 640 million obese people, there are also 795 million people who do not get enough food each day, to lead a healthy, active life.

So what, as Lenin (who was not obese), famously asked, is to be done?

Beats me. It would be nice if Michael Rennie, he would fly over the planet, with some sort of giant food-distribution magnet, that would rejigger all the food, and the weight, so that every human has enough, but not too much.

But every night, when I go out there, and look up in the sky, I do not see him coming. Yet.

In the meantime, the Science Men, we know they are currently fiddling, with every available body portion and part. And so, no doubt, some are earnestly attempting to achieve, there in their Labs, this tweak, and that, so that a human can mainline burgers and shakes, 24/7, and yet remain lean and mean.

While awaiting such wonderments, we shall, like David Lindley, need to reach into the spirit world, and there call on John Lee Hooker.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Qzv3Rz30Tw]

I have never really understood bridge. And I understand it even less now, after reading this article.

When I was a kid, I found it odd, that all the newspapers daily published these fussy, gnomic little bridge columns. (Today I find it odd there are no newspapers.) I didn't know anyone who actually played bridge. Not my parents, not their friends and associates. Since these were all working-class people, I naturally concluded bridge was something indulged in by the rich people, the Republicans. The men, they would be a little chunky, and the women, they would have blue hair, and they would all drink martinis, while they played the game. Whatever it was. Bridge, I figured, it was just another one of those strange and inexplicable things, that the rich Republican people would do. Like vote for Nixon. And not let me date their daughters.

I have no idea if any of my then-assumptions were true. What I do know, now, to be true, is that, at the tournament level at least, bridge, it is crawling with Cheaters.

The Great Bridge Cheater Expose began with this one obsessed bridge-devotee, who got suspicioned of a pair of Israeli twenty-somethings, who were beating the other players like gongs. Because, apparently, in bridge, one has to play it, really an awful lot, before one can get really good at it. Thus, the best players, they are not young people. They are, instead, like 93-years-old. So this obsessed devotee, he figured the young Israelis, they had to be Cheating.

And because everything everywhere is now filmed, there existed much video footage, of the suspected cheaters, doing the bridge thing. The obsessed devotee, he placed this footage in a tube, and then invited other bridge-obsessives to view it, to try to determine how the Cheating was occurring. And, yea, verily, eventually, this was accomplished.

Then more footage, of more players, went into the tube. And it soon became clear, that tournament bridge, it is a roiling snake's-nest, of Cheaters. There were the sneaks who passed forbidden signals with their feet, known as the Italian Foot Soldiers. There were the two German physicians, who used an auditory signaling system, and are now monikered the Coughing Doctors. And so on.

It is now pretty much accepted, among those in the game, that tournament bridge, it has been totally ruint. One bridge person grouses, of a pair of now-notorious bridge miscreants: "the thing about Fantoni and Nunes that's so upsetting, is that they fucked up the game since 2002, when they won the World Open Pairs, so for a decade and a half, almost, they have ruined the records of bridge."

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4cPU9blsfE]

I guess all the sports and the games, they are riven with Cheaters. Now. And probably forever, all the way back. I don't know why this is. I suppose it has to do with the "winning." Because when once that becomes the goal, anything, then, can be excused, in order to get there.

And then there is the strangeness—to me, at any rate—that so many of the humans, who are already so good, at the sport, or the game, are so often those, who so much, cheat. Whether s/he be a one-balled bicycle man, like Lance Armstrong; a handegg-heaver, like Tom Brady; or a baseball-basher, like Barry Bonds.

Bonds, for instance: he was already so good. He did not need to go into a Lab, and there transform into a farm animal. But he did. And then he set all the Records. Though nobody much acknowledges that, now. Because he was a Cheater.

Of course, the Cheaters in the sports and the games, they are pikers, compared to the rich people Cheaters in business, and in that business subsidiary known as politics.

For those people, they cheat with every breath. They have to. It is all of what they are. For it is not possible to obtain wealth, without cheating and robbing.

Because obtaining wealth, that necessitates profit. And, as Lew Welch, correctly, observed: "'Profit motive' means very simply: you give less than you take. If you give less than you take, you grow mean and stingy. Everybody suffers. Morality is totally impossible."

Today, there are many rich people Cheaters, all around the world, who are not at all Happy. Because a really Mean Man, who apparently used to work for the Panamanian "law firm" Mossack Fonseca, went and released 2.6 terabytes, to the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung, regarding thousands of rich business/political humans, from all over the world, who got funny with their money, in hundreds of thousands of offshore "tax haven" companies. Because, once you've accumulated more money, as all these people have, than any decent person could ever spend in a lifetime, why wouldn't you want to hide, and shield it, so as not to pay tax, and meanwhile get into the, multinational, fiscal, Great Game, of Lawyers, Guns, and Money?

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGhd53hV0Z0]

This material, which is being called the Panama Papers, it, like the Edward Snowden documents, will be coming through in waves. And the first wave, which washed out across the tubes Sunday, it is already imperilling the governments of the rightbent Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, and Russian bete noire Petro Poroshenko, president of Ukraine.

There are additionally "several hundred" French citizens, roughly 1000 Italians, and more than 1000 Germans, in the Papers, and the latter, it has been confessed, "used all the major German banks." The Australian tax office is investigating some 800 wealthy Fonseca clients for tax evasion.

A FIFA judge, who piously helped ban former soccer czar Seep Bladder, is now to be investigated by his own "ethics committee" colleagues, after having washed up in the Papers. Norwegian bank DNB says it "regrets" having helped about 40 customers open offshore companies in the Seychelles with the help of Mossack Fonseca; that while "it was legal to set up this type of companies that doesn't mean that it was correct for us to do it for these customers." India's Finance Minister, Arun Jaitley, says that those who did not take advantage of a government compliance window last year to declare their illegal assets stashed abroad, would now find "such adventurism extremely costly." The family of UK Prime Minister David Cameron has been exposed getting funny with the money, and the British people seem to not want to hear him snooting that it's "a private matter."

Time magazine, of all "people," observes:

[People] know at a gut level that our system of global capitalism is working mainly for the 1%, not the 99%. The Panama Papers illuminate a key aspect of why the system isn’t working—because globalization has allowed the capital and assets of the 1% (be they individuals or corporations) to travel freely, while those of the 99% cannot. Globalization is supposed to be about the free movement of people, goods, and capital. But in fact, the system is set up to enable that mobility mainly for the rich (or for large corporations). The result is global tax evasion, the offshoring of labor, and an elite that flies 35,000 feet over the problems of nation states and the taxpayers within them.

And there's an interesting piece in The Herald Scotland, in which Iain Machwirter observes:

The British banks, RBS included, used tax havens to create the shadow banking system in the pre-crash years. These are no-rules, off-shore casinos where banks could circumvent financial regulation and avoid national taxation. It didn't end well. But even following the financial crash, the shadow banking system still dwarfs the legitimate, regulated one. According to City University's Economy Research Centre, half the global stock of money passes through offshore jurisdictions.

Another benefit to Britain was selling arms. We're one of the world's great weapons manufacturers and much of the arms trade is conducted via offshore accounts. The destination of arms is obviously highly sensitive. As The Night Manager depicted, secrecy can breed corruption.

Machwirter's Night Manager reference here is to ex-British spook John le Carre's 1993 novel, which, in the guise of "fiction," offers an extremely detailed account of how such "law firms," and offshore companies work, in re the modern "triangle trade," of guns, drugs, and money.

There is currently, in some quarters, something of a frenzy, because no prominent Americans were named, in the first wave, to wash from the Papers. To which the editor of Süddeutsche Zeitung has replied: "Just wait for what is coming next."

In the meantime: why should people, who are funny with their money, get a pass, because they are not Americans? That seems, to me, as odd, as giving a pass to people who are funny with their money, because they are, Americans.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8P80A8vy9I]

I do surely hope, that there will be something, in some wave, of the Papers, that is sufficiently Bad about The Mad Bomber, so that she will have to stop trying to be the president.

Because I am tired of her. And I want her to go away.

The Cranky Brooklyn Deli Man, he will beat her today in Wisconsin. But she won't care, she will just go right on to the next contest.

But why? She has never really articulated just why it is that she even wants to be the president. She just does. Because, long ago, she and her husband, The Clenis, they decided on it—"eight years of Bill, eight years of Hill." And now it's her turn. But she has no vision. And thus I have no vision of her, there in the office.

She is irritating, yes; maddening, yes; but mostly, she is just boring. Her show, it has been on longer than even Gunsmoke, and it is time to pull the plug. She is fucked-out, worse than ever were Chester, or Miss Kitty. She is like a Wrong refrigerator, old and rundown, that remains there in the kitchen, just out of sloth. It is time she was junked. But first take the doors off. So no children can crawl in there, and suffocate.

And The Mad Bomber, you know, no one really likes her. No. I take that back. There is, indeed, one person, who really does like the Bomber. And, a lot. And that is Huma Abedin. Who recently gushed, of the first time she laid eyes on The Bomber:

You know these things that happen in your life that just stick? She walked by and she shook my hand and our eyes connected and I just remember having this moment where I thought, "Wow, this is amazing." And it just inspired me.

You know, I still remember the look on her face. And I remember thinking, "Oh my God, she's so beautiful, and she's so little!"

Well, you gotta admit: that's kinda sweet.

And so, I think the two of them, they should go off together, and spend a lifetime, with one another, sharing special moments. And meanwhile leave the rest of us. Be.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id_UYLPSn6U]

The Hairball, last week he announced that he has decided that all the states where, in the Republican primaries and caucuses, the voters cast more ballots for someone other than him, they shall be expelled from the nation, once he becomes the president.

So, as Zed Crud is expected today to be the Winner in Wisconsin, that state will soon rank, among the Fallen.

Hoping to improve his chances, there in Wisconsin, The Hairball, on Sunday, he unveiled a new policy position. And that is that he has decided he is going to "leave it to the states," to determine whether women are human beings.

Attempting to repair some of the fallout from his recent remarks about women, Donald Trump said on Sunday that the decision of whether women should be considered humans should be left to the states.

"I wouldn't want to tell Texas whether women are humans, for example," he said on CBS's Face the Nation. "They obviously have some very strong opinions about that."

When asked point-blank whether he considered women humans, the billionaire responded, "It should be a case-by-case thing."

I guess the thing to do now, when you become a billionaire, and after you have bought all the cars, and the houses, and the planes, and the people, is to strive to make yourself immortal.

At first I thought this was just a thing with the Americans. But no. Because now there is this Russian media moneybags, Dmitry Itskov, who has decided to plow money into a robot capable of storing his personality.

Mr Itskov, who at 35 has amassed a fortune from his internet media firm New Media Stars, says he is "100 percent sure it will happen."

He told BBC Horizon in a documentary that airs Wednesday: "If there is no immortality technology, I'll be dead in the next 35 years."

"The ultimate goal of my plan is to transfer someone's personality into the new artificial carrier," Mr. Itskov told the Horizon documentary.

But we have already been through all this. In the true-life non-fiction essay "For A Breath I Tarry," Roger Zelazny relates how, when, through "the normal course of human politics extended into atomic physics," all living human beings are extinguished from the earth. Left behind, are the immortal machines, that the humans created, to serve them. And, one such machine, millennnia on, decides, in the course of things, to become a human. And does so. And starts the whole cycle anew. Because, the machine comes to realize, there are certain, and many, things, that a machine, even one immortal, just cannot Know, and do. As, but one, to wit:

"Man," said Mordel, "possessed a basically incomprehensible nature. I can illustrate it, though: he did not know measurement."

"Of course he knew measurement," said Frost, “or he could never have built machines."

"I did not say that he could not measure," said Mordel, "but that he did not know measurement, which is a different thing altogether."

"Clarify."

Mordel drove a shaft of metal downward into the snow.

He retracted it, raised it, held up a piece of ice.

"Regard this piece of ice, mighty Frost. You can tell me its composition, dimensions, weight, temperature. A man could not look at it and do that. A man could make tools which would tell him these things, but he still would not know measurement as you know it. What he would know of it, though, is a thing that you cannot know."

"What is that?"

"That it is cold," said Mordel, and tossed it away.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZK8UmvTocQ]