I don't usually post headlines from the news here because it's, well, kind of lame. I mean, I assume that most of the people who visit this humble little page can read, and therefore possess the facalties needed to get something out of a newspaper or ticker tape at the bottem of a football game, so posting articles seems kind of redundant, like spoon feeding. If you want that, go to CNN. But, as the world would have it, I saw today the most attractive and irresistable headline I have ever seen.

It reads: "Toys linked to date-rape drug recalled"

Now, I ask you: how could you NOT read that. I certainly couldn't resist. There's just something about the John Watersesque combination of the words "toys" and "date rape" that keeps me turning the page, if only to find out exactly how toys and date rape connect that doesn't involve a 35 mm camera and a smokey basement. Well, appartently the beads from this certain toy, the now defaced toy of the year, contains a chemical that "converts into a powerful 'date rape' drug when ingested." I, like you, was surprised to find that the chemical used by basement-dwelling frat boys to warm their lonely nights with a blanket of drug induced hedonism had multiple uses. Who, I ask, looks at a chemical just a few changes away from a date rape cocktail and says "hey, we could make toys out of that?" A Chinese toy company.

Yes, that's right, the country that has given the mouldering remains of America's Robber Barons something to chortle over has stuck a chord of debauched Capitalism that Upton Sinclair could only dream of. Standing up to your ankles in cows' blood or having your feet burned off in vats of pickling solution? Please, that is so last century. Chemicals are the wave of the future, man. Shit or get off the pot. The trail that began with forcing children into coal mines and indebting factory workers at the company store has surpassed poising rivers with mercury and lead, or even desolving your retirement pension in the time it takes to regret eating all that Chicken Vindaloo. No, now it uses your body's chemical processes against you, changing the toys you buy your children into Chad Q. Peadhead's idea of a bitching mixer party.

I was disinclined to believe it, but this latest news leads me to believe that American has, indeed, lost it's leadership place in the world. It used to be, that when you thought of exploitative economic practices inflicted on a public that had little or no recourse against them, no one could rival Uncle Sam. Now, it seems, those days are gone. The mantel has passed to another, far more skillful student. Soon it will be their rivers that burn with an unnatural chemical brightness, and we, forgotten and bereft of our crown, will look eastward in envy.

Link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21678196/