Where’s the Lean, Finely Textured Beef?

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Like the estate tax , “lean, finely textured beef” has a marketing problem. The tax’s enemies have successfully hung the popular term “death tax” on it; similarly LFTB, as the meat product is referred to in the industry, has assumed the unappetizing moniker its enemies have given it: pink slime. Unlike “death tax,” which is actually assessed on the windfall some very much living heirs gross after an especially well-off loved one dies, “pink slime,” coined by a microbiologist and critic of the product, is an apt label. The stuff is pink and, before being mixed into ground beef as a cheap filler to reduce its fat content and cost per pound, slimy.

But is it bad for you?

“See Arr Oh,” a medicinal chemist and guest blogger at Scientific American, gives a level-headed report on Pink Slime, Deconstructed

Continue reading →

“Things You Should Know Before Trying to Run a Freakshow”

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Image

Do they have lectures like this in other cities? Or is this an “only in New York” thing?

 

A lecture by Dick Zigun founder of the Coney Island Circus Sideshow will reveal secret information gathered during 30 years of producing circus sideshows.

Cautionary information for those foolish enough to try and produce a freak show and humorous tales of triumph and horror learned from my three decades of attempting the same for those in the general public who have no intention of trying.

Topics to be covered include:
Tattooed Faced Junkies
Little People’s Big Egos
Dressing Room Excapades
Pickled Punks, Giant Killer Rats, Tattooed Dogs and The Law
Why you don’t want to own a big snakes but need one
Employees as slaves, rivals or thieves
Tents vs Buildings
Insurance and Payroll Taxes vs. Working Illegal
Burning Your Territory (not if you want to return the next season)
Good vs Bad Publicity
Etc etc etc

This is a 2 hour lecture followed by a one hour Q and A.

I wish I could go but I have a prior engagement. If anyone else wants to, tickets are $25-$50. Details are here. 

What We Talk About When We Talk About Jesus

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Does it feel good to think of this face as Jesus’s?

Bart D. Ehrman is a fairly liberal theologian, an ex-fundamentalist who calls himself agnostic, who hasn’t been afraid to ruffle some feathers among his fellow scholars of Christian texts, especially among those who used to think of him as of the same flock. For more on his background, read his wikipedia entry. I want to get to his newest book’s argument, which he summarizes on Huffington Post, and which seems designed to ruffle feathers of another of his former flocks, or a “small but growing cadre” of it,  “who call themselves mythicists,” he says.  Continue reading →

So What if Derrick Bell Visited the White House?

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I’ve just had a testy little exchange of tweets with Jake Tapper, White House Correspondent for ABC news. Tapper tweeted  this question this afternoon: “Did Professor Derrick Bell Visit the White House? http://abcn.ws/vZLFsU” To which I replied: “So what if he did?”

The occasion of these tweets was the late Andrew Breitbart’s last gasp attempt to smear Obama as a black separatist radical with a tiny snippet of video from a protest at Harvard Law School in 1990 for more diversity on the faculty. Taken from a WGBH news story that was quoted in a  Frontline episode that ran in 2008, Breitbart’s clip shows Obama introducing and then embracing the late Derrick Bell, Harvard’s first tenured African American law professor and one of the intellects behind “critical race theory.” (More about that in a bit.) Continue reading →

Ron Paul’s Racist Backers (and Backstory)

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Michael McAuliffe at Huffington Post reports on some sizable donations in Ron Paul’s campaign war chest from the sorts of racist fringe dwellers the notorious Ron Paul newsletters of the early 1990s were designed to appeal to:

Paul’s 2012 campaign has received more than $6,000 from people who have identified themselves as white separatists or supremacists, or who are listed on anti-hate group sites such as the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Two prominent donors are leaders in what may be the most ambitious white nationalist political movement in the U.S., American Third Position. One is William Johnson, the group’s chairman. Another is Virginia Abernethy, a former Vanderbilt professor who is listed as a director of the party.

Abernethy has given Paul at least $2,451 for this election. Johnson has donated at least $3.349.

…

Most presidential campaigns reject what they regard as money from tainted sources. Paul has not done that, even though Abernethy and Johnson are well known for their views and Paul has encountered Johnson before.

It doesn’t look as though Paul will be gaining any more traction as a Republican. He’s got his solid fan base in the party, which doesn’t seem able to grow or shrink or bear any sign of sensitivity to the currents of the primary race. So, unless the anti-Romney contingent decides to throw over Santorum and Gingrich finally, this news is likely to have zero impact either way. And the way things are in the GOP, it would likely be more of a reason to move toward Paul than away from him, if only because Republican rank-and-filers love to side with anyone under attack from the “liberal media” for being too outrageously right-wing.

We have a hint as to how Paul intends to handle this, according to McAuliffe. Continue reading →

Graeber: Why Austerity Reflects a Sham Morality

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In an interview with David Johnson of Boston Review, anarchist/activist/anthropologist and author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years David Graeber makes a key point about the “morality” behind austerity movements that is destined to be missed by all influential economists, bankers, presidential candidates and media pundits, but which no one interested in ethics , politics, or economics should miss (my emphasis):

David Johnson: What inspired you to write the book?

David Graeber: It came out of the strange moral power that debt has over people. So many times you’re talking to people about the depredations of the International Monetary Fund in the third world, telling these horrible stories about the thousands of babies dying of preventable diseases because people aren’t allowed to maintain malaria-eradication campaigns or basic health services due to austerity measures and debt servicing, and people respond, “Well, yeah, but you can’t say they don’t owe the money. People have got to pay their debts, come on!” That common-sensical notion not only that it’s moral to pay one’s debt, but also that morality essentially is a matter of paying one’s debts can bring people to justify things that they would never think to justify in any other circumstance. For the most part, decent people tend not to think killing lots of babies is justifiable under any circumstances. But debt somehow changes all that. Why is that?

Let’s try to really pay attention to that question, because as citizens of the modern democratic-capitalist world, we are very well-educated to gloss over it. Continue reading →

My Random International Film Festival

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I went international with my movie-viewing this weekend. I viewed films, all made between 2001 and 2010, from Iran, France, Thailand and Korea. All of these are available to stream instantly on Netflix, and though, I have reservations about two of them, I recommend them all anyway.  Following are my caspule reviews: Continue reading →

While I Get Back Up to Speed… Greenwald and Robin on Paul

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Hi, everyone. Happy New Year. If it’s not obvious by now, let me say it explicitly: I’m alive.

I’ll be returning to my history of DemocraticUnderground and other original writing shortly, but in the meantime, here’s a very interesting read, in my opinion, from the always interesting Glenn Greenwald, citing a supporting opinion from Corey Robin, on the merits of Ron Paul, which has earned Greenwald, at least, some opprobrium from his peers in the Left media (all emphasis in the original) Continue reading →

Life in Iraq Under the US Occupation

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The occupation of Iraq in our name is over, officially. Here’s what “we” achieved:

Dr. Dahlia Wasfi
Socialism 2007 conference
Chicago, June 16, 2007
http://www.socialistworker.org
Filmed by Paul Hubbard

Fractured Dems, Part 4: The Rightward Drift of DemocraticUnderground

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Before the changeover to DU3, which I wrote about in my last post, Democratic Underground’s rules for posting in its forums were last modified in August of this year, about a month before the #OWS movement was front-page news. “Failure to abide by these rules,” the introduction to them warned, “may result in your post being removed, your thread locked, or your posting privileges revoked without warning.” A sampling demonstrates the administration’s bare tolerance for politics left of the Democratic center:

  • This is a website for Democrats and other progressives [sic].
  • Do not personally attack any individual DU member in any way. Do not post broad-brush attacks, rude nicknames, or crude insults toward a group of DU members.

…

  • Do not post support for non-viable or third-party spoiler candidates in any general election.
  • Do not post disrespectful nicknames, crude insults, or right-wing smears against Democrats.

On the face of it, the second bullet point, adapted from many previous iterations, looks like a fair (and balanced) warning to both sides of the primary wars of 2008–team Obama and team HRC–not to attack each other. Not being inside the administrators’ heads, I won’t presume that they didn’t intend it to be taken that way. The effect, however, was that by the time those revised rules were posted, most of team HRC had long before either been driven underground or “tombstoned”–as a ban from DU was called because of the image of a tombstone (with the epitaph “Here lies a disruptor. He disrupted badly.”) that replaced the offender’s avatar on their member profile page. But those primary wars had continued by proxy, it seemed to me, in battles with moderators and more and more with a stable of Obama faithfuls who were quick to gang up on anyone who made the slightest criticism of the president’s performance. Continue reading →