Author: shacker

In an interview with UC Berkeley’s Public Affairs dept., J-School prof Michael Pollan throws water on McDonald’s announcement of intentions to cut back on antibiotics in beef. Pollan distinguishes between antibiotics used to spur growth and those given to fight disease. McDonald’s has only agreed to cut back on antibiotics for growth.

What McDonald’s has done is say that they will favor suppliers that are not using antibiotics for growth promotion. Now they didn’t say anything about the other use of antibiotics. “Prevent disease outbreaks” is key. In that sentence is the license to continue including antibiotics in the feed every day. The other question that comes to mind: If you’re using antibiotics both for growth promotion and to control disease, how do you know which is which?

Something I didn’t know before reading this: Cattle are now ready for slaughter in 14 months, rather than in three years. Good thing, too, because they couldn’t live much longer on account of their livers being shot full of holes by an acidic diet of corn, rather than the mellow grass they’ve evolved to eat. That’s why we don’t eat beef liver anymore – 40% – 60% of beef livers are full of abcesses by the time the cattle are 14 months old.

This just makes me so, so sad. I really do need to read Fast Food Nation.

Stirring piece at The Email Activist summarizing the story thus far re: absence of WMDs in Iraq, and the total public apathy about it. We bombed the hell out of a country and were wrong about the reasons why we did it. And no one seems to care. This is serious stuff, but you’d think from watching the news that Lacie Petersen was more important/interesting than 3,000 dead innocent Iraqis.

The piece goes on to connect our collective apathy to right-wing media control. A recent CNN piece on the absence of WMDs stepped through a long list of reasons why we haven’t found a smoking gun, but did not even mention the possiblity that there were no WMDS to begin with. Feed the public a steady diet of subtle manipulation and this is what you get:

A recent CNN-USA Today poll revealed that nearly 80% of Americans believe that the war was justified even in the absence of WMDs.

Sums up with an interesting example/argument showing why claims that the media is left-manipulated are false:

The Radical Right has been railing for over a decade against the biases of the “liberal media.”  But if they truly believed their own claims, then shouldn’t they be protesting with us against the loosening of media ownership regulations?  Shouldn’t they be shaking in their jackboots at the prospect of a monopolized liberal media?  Ah…but on this subject all is silent from the bad boys of talk radio and trash TV.  They seem to know the truth about who pays them and why.