Featured on the front cover of First magazine as the “food switch” that “revs metabolism by 250 percent.”
Like I’ve written before, for some reason I seem to stumble upon alt health trends ahead of the curve. Iodine is a perfect example. You will start seeing lots of articles about it in the very near future.
A good portion of them, of course, are going to be Scary Warnings about how Dangerous it is. Navigating these things is tricky.
Threshold Guardians abound.
Paglia. We both lived, as children, in the same town. Not at the same time, but very nearly. My dad taught in the same school where her dad taught.
She mentions it in a Salon article [Update: link doesn’t work any more …]
Just so you know how unlikely a coincidence this is, the town numbered about 3000 when I was a kid.
Something else I have to wonder. Take a bright, observant, verbal post-WWII young girl with aspirations to be a writer and plunk her down in that setting and maybe some of what happens next is a bit inevitable. I mean, the passage where she mentions Oxford. This is exactly the kind of thing that I experienced as a kid, and I completely “get” how it shaped Paglia’s understanding of gender and feminism. I was shaped by the same sort of experiences.
Perhaps Palin seemed perfectly normal to me because she resembles so many women I grew up around in the snow belt of upstate New York. For example, there were the robust and hearty farm women of Oxford, a charming village where my father taught high school when I was a child. We first lived in an apartment on the top floor of a farmhouse on a working dairy farm. Our landlady, who was as physically imposing as her husband, was another version of the Italian immigrant women of my grandmother’s generation — agrarian powerhouses who could do anything and whose trumpetlike voices could pierce stone walls.
Here’s one episode. My father and his visiting brother, a dapper barber by trade, were standing outside having a smoke when a great noise came from the nearby barn. A calf had escaped. Our landlady yelled, “Stop her!” as the calf came careening at full speed toward my father and uncle, who both instinctively stepped back as the calf galloped through the mud between them. Irate, our landlady trudged past them to the upper pasture, cornered the calf, and carried that massive animal back to the barn in her arms. As she walked by my father and uncle, she exclaimed in amused disgust, “Men!”
I could Bideniarize that anecdote, use it in my own life story, and it wouldn’t even be a stretch.
Brilliant article, incidentally, a highly recommended read regardless of whether your initial impressions of Palin are from the right- or the left-hand side of the Proverbial Spectrum. Not that you’d expect less from Paglia. And I’m not just saying that because she’s my homey ;-)
Isn’t it nice to know that everything anyone pours down the drain — ya know, like Drane-O, and expired meds, and oh! don’t forget! Industrial waste! — can be captured, concentrated, BRANDED and sold as “fertilizer” to be spread on fields where our food is grown?
And who should we thank for this brilliant idea?
Why, our government, of course! Because forbidding meat packagers from testing for mad cow and saying “hell yeah!” to irradiating our food isn’t mischief enough!
Be sure to tell them how happy you are that they keep The Peoples’ best interests foremost in their pure little hearts. Here’s your chance:
The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (EPW), chaired by Senator Barbara Boxer, announced that EPW will have hearings on the disposal of sewage sludge on agricultural and other land. These hearings will be held on September 11, 2008, in Washington, D.C.
The September 11 hearing on sludge is currently scheduled for 10:30 AM.
The hearings are usually live streamed on the web. Check the EPW website the day of the hearing. Confirmation of the day and time are usually posted a few days beforehand on the EPW website.
That info comes courtesy of Sludge News. Because not everyone agrees it’s a good idea to eat our own waste. You go, Sludge News.
Who would DO such a thing?
Why, our very own United States Department of Agriculture, that’s who!
The Agriculture Department is within bounds to bar meatpackers from testing slaughter cattle for mad cow disease, a U.S. Court of Appeals panel said in a 2-1 ruling on Friday.
Creekstone Farms Premium Beef LLC, a small Arkansas packer, filed suit on March 23, 2006, to gain access to mad-cow test kits. It said it wanted to test every animal at its plant to assure foreign buyers that the meat was safe to eat . . .
In a 25-page ruling, Appellate Judges Karen Henderson and Judith Rogers said USDA has authority under the 1913 Virus-Serum-Toxin Act to prevent sale of mad-cow test kits to meatpackers. USDA interprets the law to control products for “prevention, diagnosis, management or care of diseases of animals.”
David Sentelle, chief judge of the District of Columbia appeals circuit, dissented from the decision. He said USDA “exceeds the bounds of reasonableness” for a law enacted to prevent the sale of ineffective animal medicine.
Because, you know, if any ol’ meatpacker had the capability to test for mad cow, it might, um. Mess things up. They might — horrors! — use the results to “market” their product as mad cow-tested.
USDA . . . says the tests should not be used as a marketing tool and the cattle that comprise the bulk of the meat supply are too young to be tested reliably.
And we can’t have that. The USDA has to be in CONTROL.
USDA allows the mad-cow test kits to be sold only to laboratories that it approves.
This is where our tax dollars go. This is how a federal agency established to serve this country’s interest is spending our freaking money. To protect ITSELF and its hold on power and the status quo IT has established.
Rather like the Food and Drug Administration, which thinks we should be irrradiating spinach to kill E. coli. Who cares that we’re adding one more item to our lengthening list of biologically altered foodstuffs, as meanwhile we’re already dropping dead from the crap we eat? Who cares if irradiation destroys folate and Vitamin A and who knows what other phytonutrients and might have other, poorly-understood effects on our food?
