Your “BFC Has Things to Say” Monday Night Open Thread

Scotchnaut is off tonight and the next few weeks. Something about all work and no play making his flensing knife dull or something. He should be back before you can say “The New York Giants still suck.” In the meantime, you’re stuck with me for two (2) Mondays and two (2) Thursdays. Unless I tag in help because I can’t handle the emotional burden. So why not take a minute to follow up on an empty threat a comment I made in an open thread weeks-to-months ago?

At some point, I mused about how the old school philosophers could just write entire treatises with unassuming names like “On Human Nature” or On Just About Anything, and I wanted to write one called “On Morality.” Consider this the first of one to more than one installments of the ramblings of an unqualified philosopher sharing his thoughts On Morality.

Let’s start, perhaps with a tip of the hat to recency bias, with poop lettuce, aka Trumporrhea, aka the reason health experts have finally aligned with toddlers on their near term outlooks on eating salads. And that’s the same view as Hippo’s WASP-y reaction to tossing salad: yucky.

I’m talking of course about the US’s cyclospora outbreak, which has now surpassed 12,000 cases in 41 states since May (no idea why the headline figures don’t match the numbers in the body of the article, but we can leave shitty journalism to a future rant). Fortunately (knock on wood) our household hasn’t experienced this parasite first hand, but all reports are that it is constant diarrhea beyond even your worst nightmares, with some sufferers saying they wouldn’t wish it on their worst enemy. Guess the wusses don’t believe in biological warfare, but I digress. We now live in a world where lettuce can really fuck you up, and that washing produce can’t scrub off this particular parasite, which doesn’t even present for a week or two until after you eat whatever it is that could get you sick in the first place. At the beginning, the CDC’s advice was basically “rip off the outer 3 layers of onions and heads of lettuce, and cook the shit out of anything without a hard peel (e.g. bananas and oranges). And now we’ve basically gone through a cycle of “oh, we know what it is, avoid bagged iceberg lettuce” to “nevermind, keep washing and cooking shit and pray it’s not literal.”

How did this happen?

The CDC, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services and run by Secretary Robert “Yes, I Circumcized a Wild Raccoon” Kennedy Jr, no longer tracks cyclospora and six other foodborne pathogens as of /checks watch, notes, and underwear 2026.  As with the screw worm, whose memory may be longer than that of the American voting public, DOGE slashed and burned the federal budget for anything that seemed woke or hit an LLM buzzword filter set up by 20 something tech bros whose mission was less “eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse” and more “give Elon talking points on ending DEI as air cover for him enriching his companies“. No matter the massive impacts to farmers, families, and plumbers.

“But BFC,” you ask plaintively and annoyingly, “what does this have to do with morality?  Isn’t this about political and bureaucratic failures?” To which I would respond, are you fucking serious, did you not see any issues with the previous paragraph and prioritization of financial and other self interests ahead of mission and collective well being?  But let’s go beyond the points we’ve already covered.

If you’ve been living under a rock, what we know so far is that the culprit for the outbreak was identified as iceberg lettuce grown in Mexico and sold by Taylor Farms to Taco Bell…until Taylor Farms’ SuperPAC allegedly donated $1M to Trump world on top of a history of contributions to Republican Campaigns and then personally reached out to President Trump a LO AND BEHOLD, suddenly that was a false positive test. Plainly, this is not normal, though this kind of blatant corruption has become more normalized under the Trump Administration.  All of us should be outraged by this, but the collective response, other than for true Taco Bell loyalists/stans, seems to be a collective shrug.

But guess what? We haven’t come close to the biggest moral failing uncovered by this whole, ahem, shitshow. How does cyclospora get in our salads in the first place? From humans pooping. And since farmworkers are a whole category of people we as a society tend to undervalue and underprotect, it shouldn’t be shocking that farmworkers often don’t have access to proper facilities or bathroom breaks, so they end up shitting where they work / where you eat. Even in the long Snopes article saying there isn’t definitive evidence that Taylor Farms denies its employees bathroom breaks, it makes it clear they don’t provide facilities, oh, and Taylor Farms has been the source of several previous e. coli, listeria, and yes, cylcosporiasis outbreaks. And if you want to just not buy Taylor Foods salads, you can, but it’s not as easy as you think given that they control 40+% of the bagged salads market in the US and white label everywhere from Costco to Whole Foods under different names.

To recap, we’re all at risk of shitting ourselves from eating “healthy” because of corporate greed, political incompetence/malice, and an absolute disregard for the wellbeing of the laborers who grow and pick the food we eat. That’s the turducken of moral failing, and it is what, to me, perfectly encapsulates modern morality.  People flatly do not care about all of these links in the chain, especially the other humans, because all they care about is “am I going to shit myself?” Only looking out for yourself is the moral disease of modern America, and it continues to corrode our society virtually unabated day after day.

Saw something new last week while walking to footy practice–a grown man wearing gloves in the summer for a game of ultimate Frisbee. Guess he took it literally when someone told him to “get a grip.” Possibly good advice for us all.

In the meantime, I can’t quibble much with the other DFO clubhouse denizens complaining about the paucity of sportsball offerings while we await football’s return from hibernation. But it’s only partially desolate, let’s see what we’ve got.

Any sports on TV tonight?

Béisbol

Guardians at Reds, 6pm DFO time on ESPN

LOTS of other offerings at MLB.tv but I ain’t paying for that shit.

Fútbol

CONCACAF U-20 action on FS2, Antigua and Barbuda contra Guatemala a las 5:50pm y Costa Rica contra México a las 8:50pm (todos los tiempos son DFO)

Baloncesto

The Basketball Tournament, Red Rose War Ready vs. Gotham City Bockers at 6pm DFO  time on FS1, Kansas Alumni vs Wichita Alumni at 8pm DFO time on FS1.  I tried to understand what this was and gave up quickly, but if you’re super desperate for sports, it’s there.

Alright, if you made it this far, congrats, reward yourself with a drink (try not to use a fresh vegetable garnish), and until next time, remember that moral philosophy is generally a bummer, but if we don’t engage with the thorny issues, we are doomed to be vapid assholes like Musk and your next door neighbor.