Swine Poo and Assorted Mules
Filed Under Environment, Media | Leave a Comment
Toxic Hog Dump
(h/t to tristero at Hullabaloo).
From December 2006 rollingstone.com:
Smithfield Foods actually faces a more difficult task than transmogrifying the populations of America’s thirty-two largest cities into edible packages of meat.
Hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do.
The 500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal matter each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan.
And hence to the current swine flu problem.
Health officials have been seeking the source of the outbreak — 236 confirmed cases worldwide by Thursday afternoon, up 89 in 24 hours — and investigators might have discovered a good starting point:
A report in the Guardian links La Gloria, a small town in eastern Mexico 12 miles from the Smithfield plant, as the possible epicenter of the recent outbreak.
The article cites that “60% of the town’s population…has been affected.”
Dr. Hansen weighs in:
“If 60% of the population of a town near a huge swine facility got sick with this flu and those are among the first cases seen (e.g. close to ground zero), then that really does point a strong finger that something in that area could be the problem.
At the very least, there should be a very specific investigation of the Smithfield facility that involves significant testing of those pigs for swine flu.”
Read the whole Rolling Stone piece and you’ll never eat mass-produced animal parts ever again.
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Mule Sex
Via Raw Story:
A longshot Georgia candidate for governor who’s already admitted having sex with a mule before finding God says he’s ready to sacrifice his own son in an effort to get his state to secede from the union.
…
Asked if he was ready to sacrifice his own son in a national insurrection, Horsley recounts a fight with his son where he almost killed him.
“I was one foot from killing my own son, or hurting him really, really bad,” Horsley told Krider. “If he would have attacked me again, I would have stuck him. Or cut him or sliced him or done something to stop him. That’s the point, you hypothetical has literally already been worked out with me, and that’s what makes me different from the other candidates for Governor.
…
“When you grow up on a farm in Georgia, your first girlfriend is a mule,” he said, adding, “You experiment with anything that moves when you are growing up sexually.”
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Mule Ass
Is it cruel to say Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota appears to have the face of some Dreamworks-inspired-surrealistic mule?
Yes, the observation is way-too racial.
One can, however, state with near factual grace, she’s a mule’s asshole.
This today from the Daily Globe in Worthington, southwest of St. Paul:
Congresswoman looks more and more like a politician with permanent foot-in-mouth disease.
Yes, the 6th District Republican representative is opened her mouth again and, surprise, says something — either outrageous or wrong.
…
This month Bachmann claimed the six Muslim men removed from a plane at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport in 2006 had come to the Twin Cities just to attend Rep. Keith Ellison’s election celebration.
She was wrong. The Muslims were in Minnesota to attend a national conference of imams.
Bachmann has become the poster child for bizarre politicians.
She apparently doesn’t give a “Hoot” about facts, any kind of facts.
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Film at the Bijou
Kevin Spacey is about to portray DC crook, Jack Abramoff, with a movie about the bitter, lying, corrupt years of GOP power.
Spacey, always the consumate actor, has done some prep work, visiting the most-high lobbyist of lobbyists in a Maryland federal pen:
Spacey and director George Hickenlooper (“Factory Girl”) met with Abramoff to discuss plans for a film based loosely on Abramoff’s career in Washington, said Richard Rionda Del Castro, chairman of Hannibal Pictures.
Apparently, Spacey’s the only one signed so far for the project and TalkingPointsMemo has a neat slide show on the possible candidates to play figures in the sprawling, multi-character scandal.
Beware truth-seeking consumers, however, with anything carrying the phrase, ‘based loosely.’
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Doobie Brothers — Chrysler Goes Bankrupt
We should have known at the very-exact moment Chrysler/business icon Lee Iacocca tooled around the golf course with Snoop Dog — an image which seen the first time created a WTF sense of disbelief as in: What are they doing? Burning a fattie? — that some strange shit would come of it all.
And today it arrived with Chrysler’s official notice of bankruptcy as peoples worldwide took Iacocca’s well-known 1980s phrase to heart: “If you can find a better car, buy it.”
Apparently, Iacocca was pulled out of mothballs in 2005 (he retired in 1993) to help rescue a carmaker already a dead-men walking.
But the TV ads were just too peculiar:
“He’s just a good kid,” Iacocca told USA Today about his co-star. “I didn’t understand half the things he was telling me, but it was fun.”
The spot ends with Snoop Dog giving his own version of Iacocca’s famous pitchline…
“If the ride is more fly, then you must buy,” Snoop Dog says.
Snoop, dude, that dog didn’t hunt or fly.
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A Couple Of Quickies
Acts of sex from A to Z:
Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.) read a very long list of sex acts not covered by the hate crimes bill on the House floor Wednesday.
One observer speculated that he “likely set a congressional record” for citing the most sex acts of any speech in Congress.
“I apologize to our transcriber, but I want to put into the record what we have to put up with in the Rules Committee,” said Hastings. What followed was a very long and unusual list of sex acts not protected by the proposed bill.
Hasting was reading the list of sex acts with reference to an amendment introduced to the hate crimes bill that he asserted made a mockery of what was a determined effort by House Democrats to pass a federal hate crimes law.
Among the sex acts to be protected in the amendment included asphyxiphilia, necrophilia, toucherism and tranvestite fetishism.
“We can’t legislate love,” Hastings said. “But we can legislate against hate.”
The House passed the hate crimes bill Thursday.
While doing the nasty on the Queen’s lawn:
Ignoring signs asking visitors to Please Keep Off The Grass, the man and woman, said to be in their early 30s, selected a spot near the castle’s Garter Tower and stripped off in full view of hotels, pubs and shops.
An employee at the Harte and Garter Hotel, which overlooks the castle, said guests went out to observe the scene and could not believe their eyes.
The woman, who asked not to be named, said: “People were shouting things like ‘what are you doing?’ but the couple didn’t seem to care at all. It was going on for about 10 or 15 minutes, which is quite a long time, considering the location.”
Another witness, Mark Robinson, 44, said the couple carried on until police intervened.
He said: “The officers told them to stop and the sight of the uniforms seemed to snap them out of it. They were unsteady on their feet and the guy pulled his trousers up and helped the girl put hers back on.
“The Japanese tourists were comparing their videos.”
A spokesman from Thames Valley police confirmed that two people had been arrested and cautioned for outraging public decency.
It is not known whether the Queen was in residence at Windsor Castle at the time.
Unsteady as it goes.
Eco Samurai-Zombies
Filed Under Finance, Media, Orwellian | Leave a Comment
Interesting view of the worldwide financial meltdown.
The global economic crisis is like a Samurai movie, quips Dennis Meadows co-author of the 1970s eco-doom report, ‘Limits to Growth.’
In a Samurai film’s inevitable finale, sword wielding hero and villain clash in a flurry of steel.
The two halt and glower at each other before one, always the miscreant, collapses to the ground dead.
The baddy was “already dead, but didn’t know it,” Meadows explained …
The same is true in the current crisis for glowering corporate giants such as carmakers.
They “will take some time to fall over, but they are dead,” says the professor emeritus.
Pessimism for the future of mankind might be Meadows’ specialty.
(Illustration found here).
He headed a research team for the 1972 study, “Limits to Growth,” which forecast humanity was headed for doom by 2100, and although the work was a best-seller at the time critics claimed it was too much in the mode of scaremonger and didn’t give enough weight to technology.
Now 30-plus years later, Meadows and his crew probably hit the hard nail on the head.
The study said earth/humanity is in an “overshoot” situation — “human demand exceeds nature’s supply” – creating both an abundant oversupply of goods while sucking up all the planet’s resources — way more shit is produced than is consumed.
The current gorge is a hyped-up version of a supposedly 50-year glut cycle first identified by Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev, but this time around there’s more greed-fed market manipulation.
The last time this cycle bottomed out was the 1930s.
Last week, Meadows was awarded the Japan Prize, that nation’s top science award (also with $500,000 in cash) for “transformation towards a sustainable society in harmony with nature.”
During a press conference in Tokyo, however, Meadows, a professor at MIT, didn’t paint much of a harmonious picture for the near future.
From Agence France-Presse:
“In 1972, our projections suggested growth would end in this 21st century, and that still seems inevitable to me.
“If demand against the planet rises above its carrying capacity, the carrying capacity will decline,” he said.
“Growth will not end gradually and peacefully in the distant future. It will end soon and suddenly through overshoot and collapse.
…
Speaking in Japan, a country heavily impacted by the global economic crisis, Meadows said that “until recently, it seemed impossible that individual human action could damage the global economy.”
“Now the unfolding collapse of the global credit markets and the precipitous decline in production threaten all nations,” he said.
Yet Meadows argued that the key lessons have not been learned, and that the search for solutions to the crisis remain based on “trust in the markets and the current faith in technological advances.”
“Indeed, the most common policy for solving current economic problems is a desperate effort to get the growth of the physical economy back onto its historical, exponential track,” he said.
“I know this policy will not work.”
According to Meadows, the next twenty years will be a period of intense transformation.
The current crisis is just the start.
Make the wrong choices, he predicts, and we will wind up with a fortress society of small bands of wealthy people barricaded away from a world of miserable poverty.
Heads I win, tails you lose.
Shut The F*ck Up — And — WTF!
Filed Under Finance, Media, Politics | Leave a Comment
First — Shut the fuck up!
Karl Rove is not only a nasty-faced, political-turd-slinging asshole, but also a true indicator how this country has been crippled by GOP bullshit interference, which this time around could be costly and maybe fatal.
Via Raw Story:
Writing in a column in the Wall Street Journal in February, Rove attacked Democrats for what he dubbed as reckless spending — stimulus money being doled out to industries “that added jobs last year.”
Among them? Education and healthcare.
“There’s also $4 billion for health programs like obesity control and smoking cessation, $2 billion for the National Institutes of Health, $462 million for the Centers for Disease Control, and $900 million for pandemic flu preparations,” Rove wrote.
…
The $900 million Rove rebuked was killed when House and Senate negotiators met to iron out differences of the stimulus package between the two chambers. The Senate nixed the provision, while the House had voted for it
And what now, Uncle Karl, with a flu shitstorm hitting the globe?
As this medical emergency gains foothold, the US Health and Human Services is leaderless, the very government department in charge of such operations — why is this so?
GOP bullshit interference:
The Service Employees International Union has launched an online petition criticizing Republicans for delaying the confirmation of a Health and Human Services secretary in the face of a swine flu outbreak.
The union accuses Senate Republicans of delaying the confirmation of nominee Kathleen Sebelius to “curry favor with extremist outside groups” and depriving the department of leadership as the nation confronts a potential flu pandemic.
“This is simply unacceptable,” the union says on its website.
“This disease is spreading as we speak, but right now, a Bush-appointed accountant is running the department. We need an HHS secretary NOW. Sign the petition telling the Senate to vote immediately to confirm Gov. Kathleen Sebelius.
If we don’t act, the swine flu might just turn into another Hurricane Katrina.”
And some GOP peoples listened to Uncle Karl and cut, cut, cut.
From this morning’s Washington Post‘s political blog:
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee announced today it will hold a hearing this Wednesday on the federal government’s response to the swine flu outbreak, even as a controversy is brewing over the role a senior member of the panel played in blocking funds for just this kind of public health emergency.
The liberal blogosphere has been percolating this morning with criticism of Sen. Susan Collins (Maine), the top Republican on HSGAC, for having helped to strip close to $900 million for pandemic influenza preparedness from the economic stimulus package back in February.
That bill passed with the crucial support of Collins and just two other Republicans after a handful of controversial or arguably non-stimulative items were removed, including the pandemic funding.
“Everybody in the room is concerned about a pandemic flu,” Collins said at the time, referring to the stimulus negotiations. “But does it belong in this bill? Should we have $870 million in this bill? No, we should not.”
Now that the swine flu outbreak has precipitated an official public health emergency, critics are piling on. John Nichols writes in The Nation that Collins and her fellow flu funding opponents — including Karl Rove — “were just playing politics, in the exceptionally narrow and irresponsible manner that characterized the Republican response to the stimulus debate.”
Another blogger put it more simply: “Way to have foresight, Susan.”
So if the GOP could just frickin’ go away — Harken to the Ting Tings: “Shut Up And Let Me Go!”
And now — onto WTF!
The rest of the nation may be getting back to basics, but on Wall Street, paychecks still come with a golden promise.
Workers at the largest financial institutions are on track to earn as much money this year as they did before the financial crisis began, because of the strong start of the year for bank profits.
Even as the industry’s compensation has been put in the spotlight for being so high at a time when many banks have received taxpayer help, six of the biggest banks set aside over $36 billion in the first quarter to pay their employees, according to a review of financial statements.
However, Paul Krugman sets it straight, fairly straight away in a blog post on the above story:
First, there’s no longer any reason to believe that the wizards of Wall Street actually contribute anything positive to society, let alone enough to justify those humongous paychecks.
…
So what’s going on here?
Why are paychecks heading for the stratosphere again?
Claims that firms have to pay these salaries to retain their best people aren’t plausible: with employment in the financial sector plunging, where are those people going to go?
No, the real reason financial firms are paying big again is simply because they can.
They’re making money again (although not as much as they claim), and why not?
After all, they can borrow cheaply, thanks to all those federal guarantees, and lend at much higher rates. So it’s eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you may be regulated.
Or maybe not.
There’s a palpable sense in the financial press that the storm has passed: stocks are up, the economy’s nose-dive may be leveling off, and the Obama administration will probably let the bankers off with nothing more than a few stern speeches.
Rightly or wrongly, the bankers seem to believe that a return to business as usual is just around the corner.
Krugman’s fairly cool most of the time.
America’s Affliction
Filed Under Media, Musings, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
“Just as you [Eichmann] supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations — as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world — we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.”
– Hannah Arendt
(Illustration found here).
Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” in 1963 based on the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem and is very up-to-date to describe the current chaos of US torture.
Evil is not trivial, and Frank Rich, one of the most right-on pundits to depict the horrors of modern US life, uses Arendt’s words as the title for his commentary this morning in the New York Times:
We’ve learned much, much more about America and torture in the past five years.
But as Mark Danner recently wrote in The New York Review of Books, for all the revelations, one essential fact remains unchanged: “By no later than the summer of 2004, the American people had before them the basic narrative of how the elected and appointed officials of their government decided to torture prisoners and how they went about it.”
When the Obama administration said it declassified four new torture memos 10 days ago in part because their contents were already largely public, it was right.
Yet we still shrink from the hardest truths and the bigger picture: that torture was a premeditated policy approved at our government’s highest levels; that it was carried out in scenarios that had no resemblance to “24”; that psychologists and physicians were enlisted as collaborators in inflicting pain; and that, in the assessment of reliable sources like the F.B.I. director Robert Mueller, it did not help disrupt any terrorist attacks.
…
He (Jay Bybee) proposed using 10 such techniques “in some sort of escalating fashion, culminating with the waterboard, though not necessarily ending with this technique.”
Waterboarding, the near-drowning favored by Pol Pot and the Spanish Inquisition, was prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II. But Bybee concluded that it “does not, in our view, inflict ‘severe pain or suffering.’ ”
Still, it’s not Bybee’s perverted lawyering and pornographic amorality that make his memo worthy of special attention.
It merits a closer look because it actually does add something new — and, even after all we’ve heard, something shocking — to the five-year-old torture narrative.
When placed in full context, it’s the kind of smoking gun that might free us from the myths and denial that prevent us from reckoning with this ugly chapter in our history.
…
President Obama can talk all he wants about not looking back, but this grotesque past is bigger than even he is.
It won’t vanish into a memory hole any more than Andersonville, World War II internment camps or My Lai. The White House, Congress and politicians of both parties should get out of the way.
We don’t need another commission.
We don’t need any Capitol Hill witch hunts.
What we must have are fair trials that at long last uphold and reclaim our nation’s commitment to the rule of law.
Read Rich’s full piece here.
Oil Foil
Filed Under Environment, Finance | Leave a Comment
As all the world’s current problems and entanglements become more tightly bound together in a kind of Gordian knot, one item seems to be fading from any public discourse — the end of oil.
Although there’s a lot of deniers out there — especially the current GOP crowd of “Drill, drill, drill” — more than 95 percent of all recoverable oil has now been found.
Peak oil doesn’t mean the world is running out of oil, but producing high-quality cheap and economically extractable oil on demand is gone forever.
Oil production in 33 out of 48 out countries has now peaked, including Kuwait, Russia and Mexico.
As REM says: “It’s the end of the world as we know it (But I feel fine)”
(Illustration found here).
Oh, yeah.
Earlier this week, an interview was posted at The Oil Drum with Dr. Colin Campbell, founder and Honorary Chairman of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, and the gist of the message isn’t pretty:
Peak Oil is a turning point for mankind. It is a big subject.
In short, the population only doubled over the first 17 centuries of the last millennium.
But then came coal followed by oil and gas, and the population increased six-fold.
These new energy sources, especially oil, the easiest, allowed the rapid expansion of industry, transport, trade and agriculture allowing the economy to expand greatly.
It was accompanied by the growth of financial capital as banks lent more than they had on deposit, confident that Tomorrow’s Expansion was collateral for Today’s Debt.
But now we face the dawn of the Second Half of the Age of Oil when supply declines from natural depletion, meaning that debt goes bad (as is already happening) and the economy contracts.
Today’s oil supply support 6.7 billion people, but by 2050 the supply will be enough to support no more than about 2.5 billion in their present way of life.
So the challenges of using less and finding other energy sources is great.
But what about technology?
I don’t think new technologies will have any impact on the date of peak, which I estimate to have been passed in 2008 (“all liquids”), but they can of course ameliorate the subsequent decline.
I think most of the necessary technologies are already well known, so the issue is more about applying them than inventing a magic wand.
And the financial markets?
But perhaps more important was the flood of petrodollars that the high prices delivered to the governments and royal families of the Middle East, where it still costs $10-15 to produce oil.
They probably sent the surplus to western banks who promptly loaned it out on ever less sure collateral. The petrodollars were not really money in the sense of representing work or barter, but simply profiteering from shortage.
The whole flimsy financial edifice has now crashed, and some of the sillier governments are now pumping yet more fictional money into the system to encourage new consumption.
Such policies may briefly succeed, but will only make the subsequent crash worse.
We enter a new world, as the principal energy that drove the anomalous past two centuries heads into decline from natural depletion.
This is not necessarily a doomsday message.
I have known many simple people in different parts of the world who smiled and laughed not being part of the consumer society.
We can foil the oil problem by not consuming — Yeah, right!
And from REM: “It’s time I had some time alone.”