iowa underground blog

S-L-E-E-P-I-N-G

Plundering foreign countries is hard work for chickenhawks…

More here.

• pdx

Sousy started an interesting post on the forums called “Big Corn” – which takes as its jumping off point a work by Michael Pollan called “The Omnivore’s Dilemna”. You can read the first chapter of Pollan’s book here (PDF). As Sousy observes, Pollan sees the root of this country’s national eating disorder in the ‘mountains of corn we see piled up outside of elevators every fall.’

Here’s an excerpt taken from The Energy Bulletin discussing Pollan’s book:

To simplify Pollan’s intricate, mesmerizing history drastically, the boom in synthetic fertilizer enabled farmers to grow vast quantities of corn without bankrupting their soil. Corn pushed out pasture-raised cattle and pigs and chickens, as it became more economical to warehouse them together in “Confined Animal Feeding Operations,” or CAFOs, and stuff them full of corn. One hitch: the stomachs of cows, one of the few mammals evolutionarily designed to be able to eat grass, can’t digest corn. It turns their stomachs acidic and makes them sick. No problem, says the machine: Just pump the cows full of antibiotics, which has the added benefit of making them grow bigger and fatter faster, so they can be slaughtered younger. At least most cattle still live outdoors, Pollan writes, albeit standing ankle-deep in their own excrement. Pigs and chickens, which can digest corn, suffer even more squalid existences, as he describes in the lone section of the book in which outrage can be detected beneath his even-handed tone.

The Industrial machine has been fine-tuned to produce vast quantities of processed cheap food. But its cheapness is deceptive. Corn, a farmer tells Pollan disdainfully, is the “welfare queen of crops.” Every bushel of corn currently enjoys a 50-cent subsidy from the U.S. government, the result of a spike in food prices in the early 1970s that caused the Nixon administration to switch free-market tactics. “We’ve been supporting agriculture since the Depression, but we’ve changed the way you do it — from essentially supporting the farmers to supporting the crop,” says Pollan.

Supporting the crop means supporting agribusiness, which leverages cheap ingredients into high profits. Corn is cheaper than sugar, so high fructose corn syrup replaced it as sweetener in sodas in the 1980s, and in just about everything else ever since. Corn stripped to its building blocks and reassembled is now the source for most food additives, from sweeteners to stabilizers to artificial colors and preservatives. In one of the book’s most jaw-dropping statistics, Pollan writes that more than a quarter of the 45,000 items in an Average American supermarket contain corn. “Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes…everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn,” he writes. “Indeed, even the supermarket itself — the wallboard and joint compound, the petroleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built — is in no small measure a manifestation of corn. And us?”

Yup — we’re corn chips in clothes.

Pollan was on NPR’s Talk of the Nation last week as well.
You can listen to that interview here.

Update: 5/5/06 Non-Fructose soft drinks?

• pdx

There once was a president who made a decision
That was met with almost universal derision
“I may not be a law-abider
But, by God, I am the decider
And I want Rummy to keep fucking up this mission!”

• loquacious

If, in some bizarre parallel universe, you happen to find yourself in a situation where Bush is saying you’re doing a ‘fine job’...run, do not walk, the other way.

koo-koo ka-choo

From The Huffington Post. Related metafilter thread here.

• pdx

Ever since Karaoke Sinatra (aka Brian) of Iowa Voice (aka Voice-Mart) posted an opening salvo calling posters on Iowa Underground ‘whackjobs’, we’ve had occasion to poke fun at this sad-sack conservative – if only because he’s such a terrifically easy target.

Take, for example, the following excerpt from one of his recent posts:

As anyone could expect, I’m a person who values my privacy and my personal info. I’ve actually had this issue come up before earlier this year, with a liberal blog that posted my personal info (along with other stuff they weren’t allowed to publish) and I had to threaten legal action and contact their host to get it all removed.

To say I’m against such postings is an understatement. I’ve said it before, we live in a crazy world these days, and with the political atmosphere as divided as it is these days, it’s quite a risk to have that stuff out there for anyone to read. Who knows WHAT anyone is capable of these days?

As those who pay attention to what’s going on in Washington already know, cons frequently exhibit a tendency towards being rather thick in the head – and Karaoke Sinatra is certainly no exception. For example, would anyone that really values their privacy and personal information openly advertise their full name, address and side career on the internet in the first place? When one uses their own first and last name for a domain name and repeatedly links to it on their blog, precisely what claim to privacy are they making? Hi, my name is John Dough, I live at 123 Apple Tree Lane and graduated from Wappelo County Highschool in 1985 and oh by the way here’s my phone number, too. Now forget I told you that or I’ll send my make believe lawyers after you!

At a certain point, musn’t one accept atleast some responsibility for one’s own actions? Karaoke has made each bit of information publically available himself, that he’s now complaining others have somehow unearthed with the help of a secret cabal of private investigators and internet forensic specialists – when all it took was following a hyperlink. It’s this same hypocrisy and tone deafness that allows him to insist he’s above invective in one breath, and in another throw out ‘whackjobs, moonbats, nutcases’ to those he happens to disagree with. It’s this same hypocrisy that allows him to preach the propaganda of conservative, rugged individualism in one post, and in the next openly beg for money to pay household bills. It’s very much the mentality of someone that dines on a daily dosage of Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin – the mendacity, hubris and underlying tone of victimhood simply knows no bounds.

Having said that, there’s a few corrections in order. A poster on Iowa Underground’s forums happened upon Karaoke’s highschool alma-matter personal contact info. – information openly provided by Mr. Sinatra in the first place – and re-posted it on the forum. Since the information contained an address and home phone number and wasn’t germane to the thread, it was removed. This had absolutely nothing to do with lawyers or host providers. It had to do with the standards that have been in place on Iowa Underground since day one. I also removed a song of his I had uploaded to Iowa Underground’s server space after he reminded me it was copyrighted. Hey, if someone can yell COPYRIGHT VIOLATION! while mimicking the songs someone else created in the first place, more power to them. Of course these are all distinctions Karaoke Sinatra isn’t interested in you knowing about. Much better to smear several people at once and allude to the possibility of his family coming into harm’s way by those whackjob, moonbats that haunt Iowa Underground.

You’re a sad man, Karaoke. Using Karl Rove as your spiritual guide will probably not prove to be one of your more fruitful decisions in life. Here’s hoping you get an actual job again one day so you can find better ways of spending your time other than stewing in your own paranoia.

• pdx

Please, book Michael Pollan to give a lecture. His most recent book, after all, contains a very large section devoted to farm policy and the culture of farming in Iowa.

A teaser: according to spectrographic analysis, we Americans are “corn chips with legs”.

• Sousy

As has been the lead national story on NPR this morning, tornadoes ripped through Iowa City. Some of our “locals” on the forums have contributed news and pictures.

I’m a bit torn that the Dairy Queen on Riverside drive – the last “walk up” location that I knew of – is now probably 30 miles downstream on the Iowa River.

• Sousy

Michael, of the exceptional Iowa Liberal blog, was kind enough to provide the following audio of Noam Chomsky’s lecture in Iowa City. The event was held at The Englert to a capacity crowd – and then some.

Also, noneed4theneed has a recap of Chomsky’s Ames appearance at Century of the Common Iowan blog.

• pdx

Our higher education institutions have become a debt for diploma sytem. The DM Register has a story today about how Iowa St. students average over $29,000 in debt.

The consequence of the debt is that fewer students are choosing lower-paying public interest careers, as they seek higher-paying jobs to pay off loans, said Chris Lindstrom, higher education program director for the Public Interest Research Group, which manages the student debt campaign.

She blames the debt on less federal and state aid, which results in higher tuition and fees. “Debt limits opportunity, which is counter to what higher education and affordable and accessible higher education is supposed to be about,” she said.

I just finished reading a book on this subject called Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30-somethings Can’t Get Ahead. I heard the author on Al Franken and decided to pick the book up since I am a 20-something and just graduated.

The theme of the book is the debt for diploma system that getting a degree has become. In the 1960’s and 1970’s college was affordable because of financial aid (which is not student loans) and if you did not want to go to college you were able to get a decent job with just a high school degree. Now, the financial aid is mainly in student loans, tuition has skyrocketed and students who do graduate from college have dug themselves such a deep hole already. They then put off traditional markers of adulthood such as buying a house and having children until later in life. Worse, is that many students see the high tution costs and don’t want loans, so they attend community colleges or don’t go to school at all. The author calls this “downsizing your dreams.”

Here in Iowa, tutition at our state universities have gone up something like 55% in the past five years. I applaud the current Governor for talking about the importance of pre-Kindergarten for our children. However, I feel instead of a K-12 education system, we need a K-12+ system that provides affordable community colleges and universities.

• noneed4thneed
  Century of the Common Iowan