Pepper spray as a vegetable product: fat-free or fact-free?

Time for a silly to serious rant.

First, from NMATV on YouTube comes this video on the modest proposition in the title.

Pepper spray is a yummy and delicious form of crowd control. Just ask Lt. John Pike or Anthony (Tony) Bologna! Old women (like Dorli Rainey) and pregnant ladies (like Jennifer Fox) LOVE pepper spray.

That's because pepper spray is essentially a food product. Megyn Kelly eats it every day. In China, pepper spray is used in Sichuan hot pot.

Therefore, it's not very effective as a form of crowd control and more traditional means are required.

But if pepper spray is a food product, how does it stand up to Tapatio? ... Tapatio is the bomb!

Speaking of Megyn Kelly, here's what the International Business Times has to say about her claim.

Kelly came on "The O'Reilly Factor" late Monday to discuss the Occupy Wall Street protest that broke out this weekend at UC Davis. Police Lt. John Pike sprayed pepper spray on non-violent protestors sitting on the ground in an act that has been called into question as "excessive force." Kelly has a slightly different opinion.

"First of all, pepper spray," O'Reilly said to Kelly. "That just burns your eyes, right?"

"Right," Kelly replied. "I mean it's like a derivative of actual pepper. It's a food product, essentially."

Kelly's comment that pepper spray is little more than "a food product" has sparked outrage from protestors and commentators online.

There is a Funny or Die video on the subject embedded at the IBT page, but you can also watch it here.

My friend nonnie9999 at Hysterical Raisins had her own take on Kelly's remarks.




About that "Freedom from Facts" line, David Frum had his own take on that at New York Magazine, one that was quoted by Paul Krugman at the New York Times.

Extremism and conflict make for bad politics but great TV. Over the past two decades, conservatism has evolved from a political philosophy into a market segment. An industry has grown up to serve that segment—and its stars have become the true thought leaders of the conservative world. The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel). As a commercial proposition, this model has worked brilliantly in the Obama era. As journalism, not so much. As a tool of political mobilization, it backfires, by inciting followers to the point at which they force leaders into confrontations where everybody loses, like the summertime showdown over the debt ceiling.

But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority. Outside the system, President Obama—whatever his policy ­errors—is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action ­phony doomed to inevitable defeat. Outside the system, social scientists worry that the U.S. is hardening into one of the most rigid class societies in the Western world, in which the children of the poor have less chance of escape than in France, Germany, or even England. Inside the system, the U.S. remains (to borrow the words of Senator Marco Rubio) “the only place in the world where it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you came from.”

We used to say “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.” Now we are all entitled to our own facts, and conservative media use this right to immerse their audience in a total environment of pseudo-facts and pretend information.

I told you this was a silly-to-serious rant. I've done that before, although I'm just as likely to do the reverse. In either event, enjoy the remainder of Buy Nothing Day, and be sure to read Frum's article in New York Magazine. It's well worth it.