I've crossed paths a few times with families who for one reason or another raise their children according to their own family values as opposed to television, or popular culture. And, I applaud those families wholeheartedly.

I find it odd that families like the Duggars, and other Christian families, are met with so much hate and criticism, and often from the do-not-judge-me crowd.

I see online moms seeming so proud that their offspring are so disobedient that they won't clean their own rooms, let alone the bathroom or the kitchen. What kind of loser parent can't assign a simple chore to a pre-teen or teen and follow through enough to get it done? It seems like a lot of parents are retarded, and are voluntarily creating retarded children. Sorry, the truth hurts at times!

Then again, we have the Duggars. Oh, look, they have 13 kids and no paid help. I guess that could be classified as child abuse, having children perform family duties, etc. Or perhaps that is just what smart parents do, have their kids become able-bodied contributors, rather than helpless lazy slobs.

Let's compare the happiness quotient of the Duggars (or insert the surname of a Fundamentalist Christian family near you) to the average subject on "My Super Sweet 16". Who would seem most happy? Do we even have to talk about this?

I've already addressed how gratitude creates happy people.

So today, we went to the McKinney Farmers' Market, and we bought a few dozen eggs and some ground beef from the local farmer. He has about a dozen kids, and most of them live at home and help on the farm.

The youngest kids, according to the website, collect the eggs from the laying chickens, washing those eggs that need washing, put the eggs in the carton and then label the carton.

Looking at the pictures, all the kids look so damned happy. Yes, call me simple, but those kids with chores and responsibility look happy. And, like one of the other ladies at the farmers' market noticed, those kids have a sense of accomplishment and -gasp- know how to talk to people.

You can actually talk to these kids about normal stuff and they understand English. They are nice kids.

Don't expect that from the average school aged kids these days. But expect them to be able to talk about the cell phone they want, and expect them to be able to ask you for money and things. They can't carry a conversation, but they can request stuff.

Sickening but true.

Above is one of my favorite recent pictures.

Whoa, chickens! How cool!

Those are laying hens, and those chickens are laying eggs, eating a natural diet, and clawing about for bugs. They live out on a farm northeast of Dallas.

I am really sick of reading, or watching television programs, about how bad the animals who produce our food are treated. I am not an animal activist, or a vegan, or a die-hard vegetarian, but I am sickened by cruelty and laziness, and I now believe that is the norm in our meat processing plants.

We are so far removed from our food sources. Do we even care that living beings are beaten and mutilated? I do.

Can you ignore the stories of cruelty and torture? I can't.

I was in tears for two days after reading a story on MSNBC. com about the mistreatment of pigs destined for a Hormel meat plant. My God, how do we raise people who can be so mean to an animal who has done nothing to them? These aren't wild children pulling the legs off grasshoppers or the wings off butterflies. These are adults who thrive on being cruel.

Click if you even dare to read about the PETA report on pig abuse.

We have been buying eggs from the pictured chickens that range freely and we will be from now on. We need to research the meat options, but it looks like we can get free range meat from the same farm. Yes it costs a lot more, but we can do this. Maybe we need to eat a little less meat, but we sure as hell don't need to buy food from plants that employ disgusting so-called "people" who get a rise out of torturing living beings.

While browsing the higher channels on our cable system in search of HDTV opportunities, I rediscovered BBC America.

It has been a long time since I ventured away from my little TV neighborhood of Court/TruTV, HGTV, Food Network, and A&E. So I was pleasantly surprised to see several shows of interest on BBC America.

I thought it would be sort of like the olden days. Specifically, my olden days of visiting Scotland and enjoying the four or six available telly channels, which made up for the lack of variety through supreme quality programming (plus a nice dose of my departed and decidedly clean Papa picking non-existent lint from the carpet in front of the coal fireplace, West Highland Terrier lazing nearby, and Gran making some tea with some lovely bread and jam, or biscuits).

Instead, BBC America is overrun with the same sort of pseudo-reality drivel that American television has to offer. In fact, some of BBC America's programming is the original version of some American television programs.

And, I'm hooked!

I've got our DVR set up to record two shows that air multiple times per day: How Clean Is Your House, and You Are What You Eat.

I was really missing the American version of How Clean Is Your House, which features two animated British ladies, Kim and Aggie, helping out of control slobs clean their filthy homes. I am convinced that people who have homes as filthy as these are mentally ill and need more than a good scrubbing to return them to the world of the straight and narrow, but the show makes for good telly.

So imagine my joy to see the original British version, featuring Kim and Aggie scraping their fingernails through the loo-grime of British mentally ill people with their delightfully old fashioned, non-updated filthy homes! What a departure from HGTV's world of snotty house flippers, quarter-million dollar (plus!) renovation budgets and serial relocators. After all, who can move when their government-owned (council) home is not only not staged, but is by all accounts uninhabitable due to sanitation issues? And who can upgrade to granite or hardwoods when the counters and floors are caked in grime and animal dung and three year old sodden putrefied fruit and maggots?

Yes, that is good telly right there.

As if that isn't good enough, I discovered You Are What You Eat, which is a sort of Intervention for the British obese person. To my knowledge, the show has not come to America yet.

The shows hostess, Gillian McKeith, erupts weekly into the life of a morbidly obese junk food eater, solving all problems by springing upon them an immediate vegan lifestyle accompanied by insults and stints on a mini trampoline.

Never mind the psychological reasons for turning to alcohol and bad food for comfort, or the reasons why a person would choose the sedentary life of a ridiculed and hated fat person. The underlying issues do not seem to be addressed.

Gillian isn't a bad person though. She is a no excuses kind of gal and I like that. After all, excuses and reasons don't solve problems. And she gets people to eat fruits and vegetables, even those people unfortunate enough to have been born to idiot parents who never fed their kids vegetables. I am sorry but it is annoying to see adults say, "I don't eat vegetables." Why not let stupid people like that just perish?

One of the best parts of the show is when the obese person is shown a table crammed full of food they have eaten in the past week. The tables seem to be full of beige foods, such as chips (fries), nuggets, chocolate, and booze, soda and coffee. Mostly this is the diet of the uneducated and poor.

Also, this is the diet of the two-income family who eats drive-through food and of the family that doesn't sit down at the table together for meals.

One of the things I pointed out recently on a popular message board is that people who eat like this and reject vegetables and fruits are often referred to as "picky eaters" and this behavior is often supported by parents. We are even on the second generation of people who only eat macaroni and cheese, white meat chicken, and pasta and nuggets.

To me, this is not "picky eating" but rather "garbage eating".

We really need to bring Gillian McKeith to America to kick our garbage-eating asses. I hope it doesn't take two or three generations to remove us from the junk it took two generations to get us into.