Kaki King is the first woman on Rolling Stone's "guitar god" list. Using an astonishing, percussive technique, she rocks out in a full live set at TED2008, including her breakout single, "Playing with Pink Noise." ....
Also: read our exclusive Q&A with Kaki King on the TED Blog!
Matthew Alexander was the senior military interrogator for the task force that tracked down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq and, at the time, a higher priority target than Osama bin Laden. Mr. Alexander has personally conducted hundreds of interrogations and supervised over a thousand of them.
A rooster became quite dismayed,
With an orange in a nest, well displayed.
He called to his chicks,
"Mom's up to her tricks!
Look at the orange `marma-laid'."
Dune by Frank Herbert – 13 rejections
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – 14 rejections
Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis – 17 rejections
Jonathan Livingston Seagull – 18 rejections
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle – 29 rejections
Carrie by Stephen King – over 30 rejections
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell – 38 rejections
A Time to Kill by John Grisham – 45 rejections
Louis L’Amour, author of over 100 western novels – over 300 rejections before publishing his first book
John Creasy, author of 564 mystery novels – 743 rejections before publishing his first book
Ray Bradbury, author of over 100 science fiction novels and stories – around 800 rejections before selling his first story
The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter – rejected so universally the author decided to self-publish the book
From rejection slip for George Orwell's Animal Farm:
“It is impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A.”
From rejection slip for Norman MacLean’s A River Runs Through It:
“These stories have trees in them.”
From rejection slip for article sent to the San Francisco Examiner to Rudyard Kipling:
“I'm sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just don't know how to use the English language."
From rejection slip for The Diary of Anne Frank:
“The girl doesn't, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the curiosity level.”
Rejection slip for Dr. Seuss’s And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street:
“Too different from other juveniles on the market to warrant its selling.”
5 More Caregivers Arrested at Baucus Finance Committee on “Florence Nightingale Day Protests” for Guaranteed, Single-Payer Healthcare
Registered nurses, physicians and healthcare activists delivered an emphatic protest before the Senate Finance Committee for its failure to open discussion on healthcare reform to nurses, doctors and other advocates of single-payer, guaranteed healthcare for all, while continuing to provide a red carpet to big insurance companies and other healthcare industry interests.
Five were arrested -- two RNs, members of the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association, two physicians, members of Physicians for a National Health Program, and a patient activist with PNHP and Health Care Now – after vocally challenging the committee for what they called a stacked process against real debate.
Marking the anniversary of the birth of Florence Nightingale, some 40 other RNs staged a silent protest – standing before the committee in red nursing scrubs and turning their backs to show signs reading "Nurses Say: Patients First. Stop AHIP. Pass Single-Payer." AHIP, America's Health Insurance Plans, is the private insurance industry lobby arm that is given a regular voice by the Committee, chaired by Sen. Max Baucus, which is in the forefront of discussion on a health plan.
"What a disgrace that RNs and physicians are shut out and arrested while the insurance industry is given a seat at the table. We would expect that from the Bush administration, not in the time of the Obama administration," said NNOC/CNA Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro. "The Baucus Committee can arrest nurses, but they cannot silence the voices of RNs who will continue to speak from their hearts on behalf of their patients who want and deserve real reform."
Standing up in the audience and speaking before she was arrested, Sue Cannon, RN, said, "don't guarantee drug profits, guarantee healthcare. We're entrusted to care for our patients, and we can't do that without single-payer, guaranteed healthcare. We need no more Blue Crosses and double crosses."
"In honor of Florence Nightingale, patients need access to healthcare. We need to protect our patients, we need single-payer now," said NNOC/CNA Board member DeAnn McEwen, RN.
It was the second consecutive week of protests and arrests at the Finance Committee. Eight were arrested last week for speaking out on behalf of single-payer/guaranteed healthcare.
Couldn't the Post employ a fully self-identifying liberal like digby who both writes brilliantly AND understands that torture is a war crime?
Be the first on your block...
... to wear a Single Payer T-Shirt From Corrente! "You may think you’re insured... but wait ‘til the insurance companies change your policy—or you change your job. Or lose it. Health care is a right. I support Single Payer."
[picture of attractive "I support Single Payer" tshirt]
Half our massive profits go to start our micro-lending project; half go to keep the hamsters in kibble! Don't delay, because this Corrente collectible won't be on sale long! MR SUBLIMINAL Until somebody with better design skills than lambert steps up!
It's time for Obama to listen to his mama
The president has promised to increase religion's influence on policymaking. He should honor the late Ann Dunham by strengthening the wall between church and state instead.
By Frances Kissling May. 10, 2009 |
I have a wish for Mother's Day: I'd like our president to listen to his mother and adopt a modicum of skepticism regarding the role of religion in government. Barack Obama's own religious background, as he noted at the annual National Prayer Breakfast in early February, includes a father who was a Muslim and became an atheist, "grandparents who were non-practicing Methodists and Baptists, and a mother who was skeptical of religion." But I've watched with some alarm as the president engages in a full-court press to prove that Democrats can use religion just as inappropriately as Republicans. He seems hellbent on establishing in the West Wing of the White House a religious intrusion into public policy that would make Karl Rove proud.
Yes, it was a Democrat, Bill Clinton, who started it all. In his welfare reform bill, Clinton included an expanded opportunity for religious groups to win federal funds for social services without meeting standards for not discriminating in employment and not proselytizing the people they served. A Republican, the second President Bush, opened the gate wider. He established the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives. It was controversial, and it was, transparently, an effort to steer money toward the GOP's religious base, but it had only one task, which it pursued aggressively. It guided religious groups through the federal funding process and ensured that they got a share of federal and state monies.
Obama has confirmed that the funding role of the faith-based office will continue; during the presidential campaign, he promised to increase funding. He has also renamed the office and greatly expanded its role. What is now called the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships will be led by a 27-year-old Pentecostal pastor, Josh DuBois, and it have a wide policy advisory role. Not only will it continue to guide religious groups through the grant-making process, but it has also assembled a 25-member Presidential Advisory Council to serve as a policy advisor to the president on some of the very issues where religion has been more of a problem than a solution: gender, sex and reproduction. The council is already busily working on the first four issues the president laid before it: supporting women and children, addressing teen pregnancy, reducing the need for abortion, and promoting peace in international relations. A new mandate has been added, and the council can now meddle in environmental policy as well. The executive order establishing the council permits it to "request and collect information, hold hearings, establish subcommittees and establish task forces" that include both its own members and others.
How did this happen? Well, think back to the Democratic defeats of 2004. Pundits and pollsters proposed that John Kerry lost, and the GOP gained in the House and Senate, because Democrats were seen as hostile to religion and "moral values." Big money supporters were up in arms and started meeting to plan the future of the party. It was decided that Democrats had to reach out to religion. The Democrats had to counter the Republican Party's religious right with their own army of God -- and that meant getting religion into electoral politics.
Mainstream religion, which was mostly allied with the Democratic Party on issues, demurred. The mainline Protestants -- Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, et al. -- had a role in promoting moral values through lobbying for social justice, but they had no stomach for becoming campaign workers in Ohio, Colorado, Pennsylvania and other battleground states. That slack was taken up by outliers in the world of religion: evangelicals who had broken ranks with the far right on poverty, the environment and war, but not on women, sex and reproduction. Led by Jim Wallis, this crowd started advising candidates on how to talk a language that would convince Christians that the Democrats believed in God.
Sure enough, we started to hear Democrats note that there were 3,000 verses in the Bible about poverty or that the budget was a moral document or that the number of abortions that occurred in the U.S. was a national tragedy that needed to be reduced.
A small slice of the Catholic community joined in -- again, the "peace and justice but no contraception or abortion" crowd, a group that had no clout with anyone. They didn't mirror the views of most Catholics, who are pro-choice and strongly pro-family planning, and they were not favored by the bishops, who were happy to sacrifice peace and justice for Republican anti-choice rhetoric.
Politics makes strange bedfellows, and the Democratic Party and these evangelicals and Catholics teamed up to elect Democrats. The faith-based folks went to Ohio, Colorado, Pennsylvania and Kansas in 2006 and 2008 and knocked on doors. They put their antiabortion credibility on the line, noting that it was pretty impossible to make abortion illegal and that therefore Obama was a better choice to make it rare. Obama started to talk about reducing the need for abortion by making adoption more palatable and supporting women who are pregnant and want to continue the pregnancy. He promised to work for common ground on abortion.
The fact is that like it or not, common ground on abortion has already been achieved. Abortion will be legal, but it will be restricted. Both sides of the debate are pretty well shut out of political discourse. Heard NARAL or Planned Parenthood quoted in the media recently? The National Right to Life Committee of Operation Rescue?
Designing a faith-based office that focuses on these kinds of issues, which rightly belong in the Department of Health and Human Services and in the White House Office on Women and Girls, makes no sense. It is wrong to cede issues related to sexuality, gender and reproduction to religious leaders who have been afraid to utter the word "sex" from their pulpits and who continue to discriminate against women within their denominations. It is frankly bizarre to turn to religions that have been fighting each other for centuries over which is the true faith and ask these ancient foes to mediate large-scale issues of ethical conflict.
Bill Clinton misread the American public on religion. So did George W. Bush, who never convinced anyone that he was a man of faith, but did eventually manage to convince everyone except evangelical Christians that they should leave the GOP. Obama is making the same kind of miscalculation. Find a church to worship in on Sundays, Mr. President, but get sectarian religious values out of the White House.
Friday May 8, 2009 06:08 EDT
Puzzle: to whom might the NYT be referring in its Editorial?
(Updated below - Update II )
In an Editorial today on Obama's selection to replace David Souter on the Supreme Court, The New York Times writes:
It’s never too early, it appears, to start the character assassination, especially against one possible candidate, Judge Sonia Sotomayor. . . .
Supreme Court vacancies have long been political fights, sometimes intense ones, but generally, they begin when a candidate is picked. This time, the attacks have already begun, many aimed at Judge Sotomayor and beyond the pale of reasonable debate. She is being called insufficiently intellectual despite her stellar academic credentials. Her temperament is being assailed, generally by anonymous detractors. . . .
When President Obama makes his decision, he should ignore the uninformed and mean-spirited chattering and select the best person for the job.
Congratulations to Jeffrey Rosen, TNR and Rosen's Eminent Legal Scholar friends for their uncredited appearance in today's NYT Editorial. The mini-scandal over the Rosen/TNR assault on Sotomayor is packed with ironies, most prominently the fact that Rosen's criticisms of her work were characterized by extreme intellectual sloth and even deep confusion over simple legal issues (as even his own fellow law professors pointed out in unusually stinging critiques), all as Rosen proudly held himself out as the crusader on behalf of so-called "concerns" over Sotomayer's intellectual abilities.
But today's NYT Editorial underscores another glaring and significant irony. Consider one of the prime complaints from people who snidely dismiss online commentary, as Rosen obviously does (as I noted yesterday, he can't deign to name any critics to whom he's responding; he strangely refers to those who wrote criticisms of his article as "readers"; he subtly mocks the criticisms which he provoked as "an enthusiastic response in the blogosphere"). From that condescending circle, it is frequently heard that online and blog commentary is "unreliable" and even harmful because it has no standards, because the online rabble can say anything they want, because anonymity permits reckless attacks and breeds mean-spirited gossip. Apparently, though, if that exact same anonymous, standards-less, malicious, fact-free chatter is placed under the banner of The New Republic (or the NYT or The Washington Post or NBC News) and endowed with the byline of a Serious journalist, then it's magically transformed into "reporting."
Thus we have The New York Times today condemning "character assassinations beyond the pale of reasonable debate" and "uninformed and mean-spirited chattering" by "anonymous detractors," and they're not referring to anything coming from blogs. Instead, all of that came from one of the leading lights of the Respectable Intellectual Center, in an establishment journal, purporting to carry out the dirty work of Eminent Legal Scholars while calling it "journalism." Note, by meaningful contrast, that those who generated the so-called "enthusiastic response in the blogosphere" to Rosen's smears actually attached their names to what they said -- and used verifiable facts and documented evidence when doing so. For all the hand-wringing about the harmful effects of anonymity and fact-free, unaccountable gossip from blogs, such things are actually found far more often in the very establishment venues where those complaints are so self-righteously voiced, decorated with the label of "reporting."
* * * * *
On a related note: I received the following email last night from Berkeley Law Professor Melissa Murray:
Dear Glenn,
As a former Sotomayor clerk, I just wanted to thank you for your responses to Jeffrey Rosen's recent "article" about the judge. My year clerking for her was one of the most challenging and exhilarating experiences of my career. Her intellect, professionalism, and diligence were remarkable and inspiring. In researching a case, she never left a stone unturned, nor did she allow us to take shortcuts in our work. It's too bad Jeffrey Rosen never benefited from her example.
*Jimmy Feeney, SHS '54
This is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina, Kansas, USA. It was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina, and reprinted by the Salina Journal.
*_8th Grade Final Exam: Salina, KS - 1895_*
*Grammar (Time, one hour)
**1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.
**2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications.**
**3. Define verse, stanza and paragraph.**
**4. What are the principal parts of a verb? Give principal parts of "lie,""play," and "run."**
**5. Define case; illustrate each case.**
**6 What is punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of punctuation.**
**7 - 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.***
*Arithmetic (Time,1 hour 15 minutes)*
**1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.***
**2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?**
**3. If a load of wheat weighs 3,942 lbs., what is it worth at 50cts/bushel, deducting 1,050 lbs. for tare?**
**4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?**
**5. Find the cost of 6,720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.**
**6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.**
**7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20 per meter?**
**8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.**
**9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance of which is 640 rods?**
**10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt***
*U.S.** History (Time, 45 minutes)*
**1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.***
**2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.**
**3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.**
**4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.**
**5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.**
**6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.**
**7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?**
**8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, 1865.***
*Orthography (Time, one hour)*
*[Do we even know what this is??]*
**1. What is meant by the following: alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication?***
**2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?**
**3. What are the following, and give examples of each: trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals.**
**4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u.'**
**5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e.' Name two exceptions under each rule.**
**6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.**
**7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, sup.***
**8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that
indicates the sound: card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.**
**9. Use the following correctly in sentences: cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.**
**10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.***
*Geography (Time, one hour)*
**1 What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?***
**2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas ?**
**3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?**
**4. Describe the mountains of North America.**
**5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall, and Orinoco.**
**6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.**
**7. Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each.**
**8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?**
**9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.**
**10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give the inclination of the earth.**
*Notice that the exam took FIVE HOURS to complete.*
*Gives the saying "she only had an 8th grade education" a whole new meaning, doesn't it?!*
Gustavo Dudamel, himself a… Full bio and more links
I hope you will explore all the links and learn everything you can about this fabulous program and its founder, Dr. Jose Abreu. Here's a quote from the El Sistema link:
33 years ago in a parking garage in Caracas, Dr. José Antonio Abreu gathered together 11 children to play music. El Sistema was born. It now teaches music to 300,000 of Venezuela’s poorest children, demonstrating the power of ensemble music to dramatically change the life trajectory of hundreds of thousands of a nation’s youth while transforming the communities around them.
The Words Of Poems
The words of poems are nails which tack the wind to a page, so that the gone hour when your kite pulled you over the field blows in your hair.
They're hand-mirrors, a poem's words, holding the wept tears on your face, like a purse holds small change, or the breath that said things.
They're fishing-nets, scooping sprats and tiddlers out of a stream or the gleaming trout that startled the air when you threw it back. The words of poems are stars, dot-to-dots of the Great Bear, the Milky Way your telescope caught; or breves filled with the light of the full moon you saw from your bedroom window; or little flames like the tongues of Hallowe'en candles.
The words of poems are spells, dropping like pennies into a wishing-well, remember the far splash? They're sparklers, scrawling their silver loops and hoops on the night, again in your gloved fist on November the Fifth.
They're goldfish in their sad plastic bags at the fair, you stood there. The words of poems are coins in a poor man's hat; the claws of a lost cat.
The words of poems are who you were.
If you haven't read it yet, and I apologize for repeating this link but it really is that good, go now and read Boss Hog. You will never eat Smithfield products again:
A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig shit is another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: On a continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste than to organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield's efficiency. The company produces 6 billion pounds of packaged pork each year. That's a remarkable achievement, a prolificacy unimagined only two decades ago, and the only way to do it is to raise pigs in astonishing, unprecedented concentrations.
Smithfield's pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs -- anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.
The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety degrees. The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day. The ventilation systems function like the ventilators of terminal patients: If they break down for any length of time, pigs start dying.
From Smithfield's point of view, the problem with this lifestyle is immunological. Taken together, the immobility, poisonous air and terror of confinement badly damage the pigs' immune systems. They become susceptible to infection, and in such dense quarters microbes or parasites or fungi, once established in one pig, will rush spritelike through the whole population. [Emphasis added.] Accordingly, factory pigs are infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and are doused with insecticides. Without these compounds -- oxytetracycline, draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin -- diseases would likely kill them. Thus factory-farm pigs remain in a state of dying until they're slaughtered. When a pig nearly ready to be slaughtered grows ill, workers sometimes shoot it up with as many drugs as necessary to get it to the slaughterhouse under its own power. As long as the pig remains ambulatory, it can be legally killed and sold as meat.
The drugs Smithfield administers to its pigs, of course, exit its hog houses in pig shit. Industrial pig waste also contains a host of other toxic substances: ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, cyanide, phosphorous, nitrates and heavy metals. In addition, the waste nurses more than 100 microbial pathogens that can cause illness in humans [Emphasis added], including salmonella, cryptosporidium, streptocolli and girardia. Each gram of hog shit can contain as much as 100 million fecal coliform bacteria.
Smithfield's holding ponds -- the company calls them lagoons -- cover as much as 120,000 square feet. The area around a single slaughterhouse can contain hundreds of lagoons, some of which run thirty feet deep. The liquid in them is not brown. The interactions between the bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs turn the lagoons pink.
Even light rains can cause lagoons to overflow; major floods have transformed entire counties into pig-shit bayous. To alleviate swelling lagoons, workers sometimes pump the shit out of them and spray the waste on surrounding fields, which results in what the industry daintily refers to as "overapplication." This can turn hundreds of acres -- thousands of football fields -- into shallow mud puddles of pig shit. Tree branches drip with pig shit.
Some pig-farm lagoons have polyethylene liners, which can be punctured by rocks in the ground, allowing shit to seep beneath the liners and spread and ferment. Gases from the fermentation can inflate the liner like a hot-air balloon and rise in an expanding, accelerating bubble, forcing thousands of tons of feces out of the lagoon in all directions.
The lagoons themselves are so viscous and venomous that if someone falls in it is foolish to try to save him. A few years ago, a truck driver in Oklahoma was transferring pig shit to a lagoon when he and his truck went over the side. It took almost three weeks to recover his body. In 1992, when a worker making repairs to a lagoon in Minnesota began to choke to death on the fumes, another worker dived in after him, and they died the same death. In another instance, a worker who was repairing a lagoon in Michigan was overcome by the fumes and fell in. His fifteen-year-old nephew dived in to save him but was overcome, the worker's cousin went in to save the teenager but was overcome, the worker's older brother dived in to save them but was overcome, and then the worker's father dived in. They all died in pig shit.*
Smithfield has a long history of spectacular pollution. Here's an article from 1997:
One of the largest pork companies on the East Coast was fined $12.6 million - the largest water pollution fine ever- for dumping hog waste into a Chesapeake Bay tributary.
U.S. District Judge Rebecca B. Smith ruled Aug. 8 that Smithfield Foods Inc. was liable for nearly 7,000 violations of the Clean Water Act since 1991. She said she wanted at least a portion of the fine to be used for Chesapeake Bay restoration efforts. The ruling resulted from an EPA lawsuit that accused Smithfield of polluting the Pagan River and destroying documents to cover it up.
And here, my friend Maria Hinojosa (our children go to the same school) of NOW goes inside a Smithfield pig processing plant in North Carolina to examine efforts to establish a union at the plant. She reports, among other things, that the stench was so awful that a member of her production crew nearly vomited. And try to put yourself in the place of those workers, spending north of 6 hours a day in that nauseating environment, slicing fat off a never-ending supply of dead pig carcasses - extremely dangerous work.
Here's an article from E Magazine in May-June 2000 entitled Factory Pig Farms Spread Filth & Disease:
"Transmission of influenza viruses from birds to mammals has probably occurred for centuries," said Dr. Robert Webster of the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Memphis, Tennessee, speaking at the Second International Symposium on Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses. "However, increased opportunities for transmission, larger chicken and pig populations, and overall growth of human populations are associated with a higher risk of
interspecies reassortment. This situation is a possible start for a new pandemic."
While the timing of the next influenza pandemic cannot be predicted, experts agree it is inevitable. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) projects that the next pandemic could kill between 89,000 to 207,000 people, and result in 314,000 to 734,000 hospitalizations. Infectious disease specialists say health authorities are not prepared.*
Finally, here's a a pollution locator to help you locate factory farms in your community. Frankly, I'd think just a quick sniff of the air would be enough, but this could be helpful, I suppose...
That's enough for now. Every time I hear SWINE Flu described by euphemism, I'll post more and more descriptions, videos and photos of the industrial meat industry. I'd like to encourage other bloggers to do the same.
---
*Note:It is true that the crowded, filthy, conditions of Smithfield's industrial hog farms are a perfect breeding ground for disease and viruses, including ones that infect humans. It is also true that Smithfield is an unspeakably prolific polluter. From the Rolling Stone article above:
In 1999, Luter bought a state-owned company called Animex, one of Poland's biggest hog processors. Then he began doing business through a Polish subsidiary called Prima Farms, acquiring huge moribund Communist-era hog farms and converting them into concentrated feeding operations. Pork prices in Poland were low, so Smithfield's sweeping expansion didn't make strict economic sense, except that it had the virtue of pushing small hog farmers toward bankruptcy. By 2003, Animex was operating six subsidiary companies and seven processing plants, selling nine brands of meat and taking in $338 million annually.
The usual violations occurred. Near one of Smithfield's largest plants, in Byszkowo, an enormous pool of frozen pig shit, pumped into a lagoon in winter, melted and ran into two nearby lakes. The lake water turned brown; residents in local villages got skin rashes and eye infections; the stench made it impossible to eat. A recent report to the Helsinki Commission found that Smithfield's pollution throughout Poland was damaging the country's ecosystems. Overapplication was endemic. Farmers without permits were piping liquid pig shit directly into watersheds that fed into the Baltic Sea.
It is also true that a Smithfield subsidiary was about 12 miles from La Gloria, where the first cases of the latest SWINE Flu strain occurred: some 60% of the town was affected. And it is also true that the Smithfield subsidiary in Mexico is also an incredibly disgusting polluter.
However, there is, at present, no hard evidence yet linking Smithfield Foods' practices to this SWINE Flu virus. This is important to remember: whether or not Smithfield Foods eventually gets implicated in the SWINE Flu outbreak does not change the simple fact that their business practice is unhealthy, unsanitary, unspeakably cruel to both pigs and humans, and extremely dangerous to work in.
