Just when I was beginning to think that nature was all Texas screwworms and chuckling cyclosporiasis, Sweet Science goes and finds sugar, smack dab in the middle of the Milky Way.
Read more Social media influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate arrested in Miami, US Marshals Service tells AP
The new findings confirm that sugar can form even without life. I go further. I say that without sugar, life isn’t going to bother. Without sugar, life would look out at fields of brussels sprouts stretching to the event horizon and go right back to bed.
Also? Sugars are forming in interstellar ice. Yes. Space Icee.
It’s proof that life isn’t a cabaret after all. It’s a patisserie, tucked into comets, meteoroids, rando rocky space debris. It’s quite possible that Milk Bar pie and Ladurée macarons alike owe their existence to a sugar speck on a long-ago earthbound asteroid.
And this is not even the sweetest news America got this week. That would be the court filing showing that a certain president forked over $5.6 million to E. Jean Carroll; not for the sex assaulting, but for all the libeling and the lying about the sex assaulting.
I was going to clip and frame the court docket entry, but then I thought; no, it works better as an embroidered couch cushion. Or an ankle tattoo. Or a national holiday.
Or on a cake!
We should bake one for Ms. Shiela Boyd, 81, of New York, who up until recently was receiving $298 in federal food benefits. The sex offender in chief who just wrote the $5.6 million check decided that was $274 too much. Her food benefits are now $24.
That will get you one hamburger ($17) and most — though not all — of one bread pudding in the U.S. Senate dining room. Alas, Ms. Boyd, all 102 demanding pounds of her, seeks more than one meal and two tablespoons of treacle every four weeks.
Read more Orlando City SC signs Daryl Dike in forward’s return to Central Florida
She should be counting her blessings. It’s $24 more than Mr. $5.6 Million Check Guy has approved for hungry Palm Beach County School kids.
For a while, the Washington crew found a way to pay for free school meals. But you can’t have your trillion-dollar broligarch-buddy tax cuts and keep the kids fed, too. Why, it would take a global economic powerhouse to pull off universal school meals. Like Latvia. And Argentina. And Finland. And Estonia, among the others that found couch pennies in the budget to put meals on the table, gratis.
Not America. As Palm Beach County’s school district ramps up for the new academic year, students in about 55 schools will face a version of the crackdown Ms. Boyd did, and for the same reason: The Big Beautiful Broligarch Tax Relief Act.
Kids can still apply for free or low-cost meals, and I could explain in detail why that won’t help much, but I missed breakfast and now I can’t concentrate on my math. I will just note that the U.S. Senate dining room is taxpayer-subsidized to keep prices low for struggling senators, and no one is making Rick Scott pony up financial statements to get his discounted raspberry coulis ($9).
Friends, we can have the biggest baddest battleships and true-blue reflecting pools. We can have leaders who huff and puff and make tax-happy broligarchs kiss their ring even as the broligarchs smirk, knowing it’s actually the leader kissing theirs. We can have the best history. The noblest intentions. But a country that does not prioritize feeding its own children is not a great country. It may not even be an especially good one.
Oh, I know. The little ones need to be protected from the creeping ghost of Karl Marx, so that’s why we are going to throw the peanut butter and jelly money at a golden fleet of Trumpy battleships. Let them eat pencil shavings! Maybe sweeten with a little sugar. Maybe, too, think on the elected chefs who served up this sour supper and ponder why, if this is a truly sweet universe, there are not just desserts for all.
Read more Taylor Farms recalls lettuce shipped to 27 states including Florida over cyclospora risk
Pat Beall is a Sun Sentinel columnist and editorial writer.