The foods that lurk on grocery shelves have ingredient lists that often defy pronunciation. Those few words that can be pronounced are sometimes far too horrible to contemplate. I thought I’d peel back the greasy cellophane and get the skinny on what makes these processed “foods” tick. If you’re prone to abandoning food items when you learn their dark secrets, I suggest you stop reading now.
Here are but a few, in no particular order:
Mechanically Separated Chicken:
A primary ingredient in Slim Jims and many other food-flavored solids, the name conjures images of plucked chicken carcasses being tossed into a giant machine that rips the flesh from its bones, and grinds the remains into mush. And coincidentally, that’s EXACTLY what it is. It comes out the other end as a gooey paste. No doubt it will be the same consistency when the hospital’s stomach pump mechanically separates the chicken from me.
Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable/Soybean/Cottonseed Oil:
Refers to oils that have had hydrogen added, in the presence of small amounts of catalyst metals such as nickel, palladium, platinum or cobalt. This causes the oil harden to a desired level, but it creates trans fatty acids, which are very unfriendly to the heart. Found in Crisco, Oreos, and many other tasty, death-hastening foods.
Brominated Vegetable Oil (BVO):
Vegetable oil mixed with bromine. According to webelements.com, bromine is “a heavy, volatile, mobile, dangerous reddish-brown liquid. The red vapour has a strong unpleasant odour and the vapour irritates the eyes and throat. [...] When spilled on the skin it produces painful sores. It is a serious health hazard, and maximum safety precautions should be taken when handling it.” It is used in to allow artificial citrus flavoring to mix with oil, often in citrus-flavored sodas such as Mountain Dew.
Trace amounts of BVO are stored permanently in body fat when it is consumed. BVO is one of only four food additives the FDA considers “interim,” and it must be periodically re-approved for safety.
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Most of the internet savvy, it seems, are somewhat lacking in knowledge relating to the interesting topic of “bizarre domesticated animals that people breed for fun.” To help reduce this unfortunate trend, I introduce the fainting goat.
The three million unpaid volunteers for the Red Cross are an able, well-intentioned bunch… and they certainly do a lot of good. But recently the Red Cross organization itself has undergone some close scrutiny, and there are some troubling findings. 
September 26th, 1983 doesn’t stick out in the annals of history as a day to remember. It wasn’t the day of a great discovery. It wasn’t the beginning of a new era in science or art. For many years, the only thing of note that happened on this day was that the Australians beat the Americans in the Americas Cup. In reality, it became the day that the world was literally saved by the enemy.
On October 17, 1814, over 100 years before the Boston Molasses Flood, a very unfortunate beer-related incident occurred in London. A huge vat which held over 135,000 gallons of fermenting beer succumbed to the wounds of age, and let its bounty loose with explosive force. The impact caused several other vats in the same building to rupture, and almost instantly the combined 323,000+ gallons of ale crashed through the brick structure and poured into the London parish of St. Giles, a slum area.
Ask any astronomer if she’d like a perfectly parabolic six-meter-diameter mirror at one-fiftieth the price, and she’ll be unable to answer for all the drooling. Yet, according to the journal Science, the folks at the Alberta Canada Large Zenith Telescope (LZT) have accomplished exactly that. The secret? The mirror is 30 liters of rotating mercury.
There is no small number of unsettling parasites crawling, flying, and swimming about the Earth, the lucky ones hitching rides on hapless host organisms. And while many parasites are harmless, or even beneficial in their way, others can wreak havoc with their hosts’ existence. The worst of these offenders can actually force their host to do their will.
The US CIA and military is filled with a history of bad decisions, deceit, and in some cases what I would classify as pure evil. One such misguided and unethical program was an appendage of Project MKULTRA under the name of Operation Midnight Climax.