Each year, in the spring, we were inspected by active duty army types where they came in and did a complete look at the facilities, curriculum, and our overall military bearing and each year we achieved a ranking of “Honor MIlitary School.” At the time, because of the Honor ranking, we were authorized three direct appointments to each of the service academies. (I don’t know if this is still the case and der Google has failed my attempts to find out). Knowing that I would most likely flunk the physical, I accepted the appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy. I figured it wouldn’t look too bad on my record while also knowing there was no way I would actually attend a military college after spending four years at a military high school.

As it turned out, I had to go to Chicago in late October for the physical (Glenview Naval Air Station). I completed the physical and as expected was advised that due to my eyes, I had flunked (I was 20/400 corrected to 20/20 and the worst your eyes could be at the time was 20/100 corrected to 20/20).

My bus back to Kentucky was not going to leave until about 8PM, so there I was in downtown Chicago, in my JROTC uniform with about six hours to kill. I wandered around for a bit and found myself in front of a small theater showing Alice’s Restaurant. The movie had been out for a couple of months by this time but hadn’t quite made it to my neck of the woods so I decided what the hey and went in.

We’ll just call it one of my early steps on the path from potential war monger to DFH.

Happy Thanksgiving and enjoy the video. :

Four turkeys (photo: cobalt123 via Flickr)

[Ed. Note: We are republishing last Sunday's post by Jill Richardson on this most American of holiday feasts.]

These days, local food is so popular that even Lays potato chips are trying to pretend they are local. But how often do we actually sit down as a nation and enjoy a meal of local food? A meal that we cooked, that we eat with people we love, that we linger over instead of shoving down our throats while driving to work?

That day is supposed to be Thanksgiving. We don’t often think about our Thanksgiving dinner as “local, seasonal food” but it is. Or at least, it ought to be. Turkey, cranberries, sweet potatoes, potatoes, and pumpkins are all native to North America. In fact, Benjamin Franklin wanted the turkey as America’s national bird. Until recently, Massachusetts, home to the Pilgrims, was the nation’s number one cranberry producer (now it’s Wisconsin). And all of these foods are actually in season in late November.

However, a look at the mass production of our treasured Thanksgiving foods shows the dark side of the American food system. Perhaps the food provides an apt metaphor for the holiday itself, which is intended as a harvest festival but also marks the brutal and bloody conquest of this continent at the expense of the Native American people.

Let’s start with the turkey.

Last year, Bush pardoned two turkeys, Pumpkin and Pecan. The birds were among a select group of turkeys who were raised to tolerate human handling to prepare them to behave well in their photo op with the President. From there, Pumpkin and Pecan went to Disney World, where they lived out the remainder of their natural lives. Most likely, they are not alive to celebrate a 2nd Thanksgiving. (The “alternate” turkeys went to Subway, which proudly advertised that customers could eat the alternate turkeys in their sub sandwiches.)

There’s a reason why Pumpkin and Pecan (most likely) lived such short, sickly lives despite their first class care. They are Broad Breasted Whites, a type of turkey bred solely to cater to the American people’s appetite for cheap breast meat. Because the Broad Breasted White is bred only for the trait of large breasts and fast, efficient growth, several other traits have been sacrificed along the way. The birds have such large breasts that they are physically unable to mate, and in fact, they are barely able to live. Turkeys are notoriously sickly and few, if given the chance, would live long enough to see two Thanksgivings. In the eyes of industry, the Broad Breasted White is a machine that efficiently converts cheap corn into breast meat as quickly as possible. Period.

Traditionally, poultry – and turkeys – served a very different role on an American farm. They eat kitchen scraps and other food waste, grass, and even insects. Meanwhile, their droppings serve as valuable fertilizer. Turkeys could survive outdoors on pasture for many years and they could also naturally reproduce. A number of heritage turkey breeds still exist today, even though they make up only a very small percent of the market. In fact, the turkey industry is so consolidated among factory farm operations that in 2007, four companies (Butterball, Hormel Foods, Cargill, and Sara Lee) controlled 55% of the entire turkey market. Whereas turkeys raised on pasture in the traditional manner serve a valuable environmental role, turkeys raised in factory farms do not. Instead of including food waste, grass, and bugs among their diets, they eat grain, which requires oil to grow, harvest, process, and transport. The turkeys’ waste accumulates in quantities in which it can be more of a pollutant than a valuable fertilizer. And lord only knows what human rights violations occur in the slaughterhouses where the turkeys are processed. Yet, this is all a pretty accurate picture of America and its food system today.

How about the potatoes? Today, you can still find hundreds – even thousands – of varieties of potatoes growing in the Andes, where potatoes originated. Even in the US, you can find potatoes of all colors – blue, purple, red, and yellow, in addition to the usual brown. Yet the most popular variety – the Burbank Russet – accounted for 41% of potatoes grown by the top 8 potato producing states in 2008. The reason for such homogeneity among potatoes? Fast food restaurants and their demand for potatoes for their French fries. One reason why the percent of potatoes accounted for by Burbank Russets isn’t higher? Potato chips use a different variety of potato, the Maris Piper. Leave it to Americans to standardize a diverse, healthy food like a potato, farm it on an industrial scale as a monoculture, and then turn it into an iconic junk food like the French fry. For what it’s worth, my favorite type of potato is the German butterball.

As for the cranberries and the sweet potatoes, I have similar critiques of them. Cranberries are such a wonderfully American food and they are always a favorite of mine at Thanksgiving. They were initially called craneberries because their flowers resemble a sandhill crane. Yet what was once a local food to the Pilgrims is hardly so for most Americans – some 80% of cranberries come from Wisconsin and Massachusetts. And how many Americans only experience cranberries as a sugary juice or out of a can? As for the sweet potatoes, there’s nothing wrong with them, save for the marshmallows many put on them. While the original marshmallows were made with marsh mallow root and honey thousands of years ago, today’s marshmallows contain a mess of sugar, artificial ingredients, and gelatin. I doubt either variety was present at the first Thanksgiving.

In some cases, there’s no need for me to be so Scroogelike about our country’s traditions. Yes, it’s true that you can’t get local cranberries in San Diego (cranberries require freezing weather) but as a once a year commemoration of the Pilgrims first Thanksgiving, there’s nothing wrong with a little cranberry relish as a treat. And Thanksgiving dinner is really one of the healthiest meals you’ll see Americans ever sit down and eat, with a table full of lean meat, fruits, and vegetables. But a look at the system that produces the foods traditional on our Thanksgiving tables shows a rather accurate snapshot of our modern day, industrialized food system. It’s most defining feature is corporate control, which results in homogenization, exploitation, and environmental degradation.

Fortunately, today there are more and more opportunities to opt out of that corporate system. You can serve up a heritage breed turkey instead of a Broad Breasted White, skip the marshmallows on your sweet potatoes, and look for exciting alternatives to the boring old russet for your mashed potatoes. Better yet, get involved beyond the one day of Thanksgiving. Grow some herbs in a pot or start a worm bin. Lobby your city to legalize backyard chickens. Or get involved in food politics on a national level by writing your representatives to reform school lunch or by working to defeat Senate Ag Committee chair Blanche Lincoln in 2010!

There has been no shortage of harumphing right wingers willing to spread PR manufactured talking points about the stolen CRU emails, quickly leaping to the conclusion that global warming is a “hoax.”

Kevin Grandia at DeSmog Blog regularly debunks the well-funded PR campaigns that promote this kind of crap, and he did some actual reporting.  He contacted Dr. Michael Mann for clarification, whose name appears in some of the emails and whose graph was used in Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth.”  Mann’s quote was widely disseminated by wingnutia as proof that “truth doesn’t matter”:

“Perhaps we’ll do a simple update to the Yamal post. As we all know, this isn’t about truth at all, its about plausibly deniable accusations.”

Mann’s response:

This refers to a particular tree-ring reconstruction of Keith Briffa’s.

These tree-ring data are just one of numerous tree-ring records used to reconstruct past climate.  Briffa and collaborators were criticized (unfairly in the view of many of my colleagues and me) by a contrarian climate change website based on what we felt to be a misrepresentation of their work.

A further discussion can be found on the site “RealClimate.org” that I co-founded and help run. It is quite clear from the context of my comments that what I was saying was that the attacks against Briffa and colleagues were not about truth but instead about making plausibly deniable accusations against him and his colleagues.

We attempted to correct the misrepresentations of Keith’s work in the RealClimate article mentioned above, and we invited him and his co-author Tim Osborn to participate actively in responding to any issues raised in the comment thread of the article which he did.

We’re looking forward to having DeSmog Blog founder James Hoggan on with his book, The Great Climate Coverup on the December 6 book salon.  In the mean time, check out DeSmog Blog for more sanity in a world of Exxon-funded “expert” nonsense about the “climate change” emails.

What could they be talking about? (photo: veni markovsky)

Reading the beginning of Mary Beth Sheridan’s article in the Washington Post Thanksgiving morning, one might think serious critics of Bill and Hillary Clinton have voiced serious questions about possible conflicts inherent in their roles as former President and Global Initiative Head versus Obama’s Secretary of State.

One would be wrong.

After discussing how Bill and Hillary have gone to great lengths to avoid any conflicts between their spheres, here’s how Mary Beth Sheridan ominously introduces the idea that such avoidance may not have been successful:

Yet the real story is more complicated because, 10 months into her tenure, it is clear that their worlds and their interests cannot avoid intersecting. Hillary Clinton has put problems such as Northern Ireland, Haiti and Third World development near the top of the agenda at the State Department, and they are also part of the former president’s charitable mission. Bill Clinton secretly helped push the administration’s — and his wife’s — agenda with North Korea on a trip officially called a humanitarian mission.

For a select group of issues, the combined energies of the Clintons can be potent. Just days after Hillary Clinton appointed Declan Kelly the economic envoy to Northern Ireland, for instance, he turned to her husband for help.

Bill Clinton agreed to include a session on Northern Ireland at his annual philanthropic mega-event, which coincides with the U.N. General Assembly in September. Hundreds of business executives packed a ballroom to hear Clinton and Kelly make their investment pitch. The gathering was, Kelly told the crowd, “a massive assistance to me in my role.” After the session, dozens of executives lined up to talk to Kelly, according to one official in attendance.

Read the next paragraph to find out who the author’s first source is about these complicating intersections:

The Clintons declined requests for interviews, but their aides emphasize that Secretary Clinton is carrying out the Obama administration’s foreign policy and say that their shared priorities are a coincidence. Some lawmakers, however, are wary of potential conflicts. Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation has received large contributions in recent years from governments such as Saudi Arabia’s, as well as Indian tycoons and prominent supporters of Israel — presenting what Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) called a “multimillion-dollar minefield of conflicts of interest.” In response, the former president agreed to release the foundation’s donor list and allow ethics officials to review some foreign pledges; the first annual disclosure of contributions since Hillary Clinton was confirmed is weeks away.

HAHAHAHAHAHA

Ms Sheridan, if you want your article to be taken seriously anywhere in America, if you want to pitch the idea that serious people think that Bill and Hillary Clinton have unresolved conflicts-of-interest between their two world-striding roles, you need to find someone other than diaper-wearing prostitute-frequenter and DC-Madame-phonebook-listee David Vitter.

No one’s gonna take your journamilism seriously, even if you do manage to squeeze in a hopeful quote from a spokesman for Senator Richard Lugar (who sounds like he thinks things between the couple are being handled just fine).

David Vitter doesn’t get to comment on ANYTHING without uproarious laughter. Mockery, pointing and laughing, even shunning.

Prostitutes, diapers, a madame’s little black book: If you’re trying to build a narrative about a serious story, look elsewhere for your hook.

Wenhai Lake and Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, Yunnan, China (photo: ChezShawna)

The biggest weakness of the Kyoto protocol for dealing with the human-created emissions that are causing the decades-long rise in global temperature is that the two biggest polluters, the US and China, refused to sign it. China wouldn’t sign it largely because the US under Bush wouldn’t sign it, and the US under Bush wouldn’t sign it because the Bush Administration wasn’t just merely in bed with big industrial polluters, but actively worked for them, being oil execs and all.

But now we have a new president, and the Waxman-Markey bill is on the verge of becoming law. Furthermore, Kyoto’s signatories are already on pace not just to meet, but to exceed by over 50%, the goals set for 2012 — and they’re doing so without a) hurting their economies or b) causing industries to flee en masse to places with no emissions standards.

Finally, the effects of pollution and human-caused climate change are being brought home to the Chinese in very real and undeniable ways. There was of course the fact that factories near Beijing had to be shut down just to get the air to the point where athletes could safely breathe it. And recently, the famed “third pole,” the Everest region of Tibet, has been found by a Chinese documentary team to be warming up so rapidly that its glaciers — the water supply for many Chinese, as they feed the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers — are rapidly disappearing.

In the meantime, the global recession has actually come to our aid, buying us an extra 21 months to get our respective acts in gear. This is in large part because China reacted to the economic slowdown by shutting down its least productive plants, which also happened to be its oldest and most polluting.

All of this taken together helps to explain why President Obama was able to get China to agree to come to Copenhagen and roll out its first-ever set of official emissions limits — an achievement that Scientific American’s David Biello suggested was as important, if not more so, than the Copenhagen summit itself.

So, what will China’s likely emissions cuts look like?   They could look like this:

In September, President Hu Jintao promised a reduction in the amount of emissions measured by unit of output, a concept known as “emission intensity,” by a “notable margin.”

And while the government hasn’t publicly elaborated on what a “notable margin” would boil down to, negotiations are under way and numbers on the table, according to Wu Changhua, greater China director for the Climate Group, a U.K.-based environmental organization.

Ms. Wu said she expects that the government likely to announce a domestic carbon-intensity target before long. Over the next five years, the carbon intensity reduction may be in the range of 60% to 70%, she said, with “a medium-level ambition” for reductions of around 40% by 2020.

“If announced, that would be a huge commitment from China,” said Ms. Wu. A firm target on emissions reductions from China’s leadership would not face the same type of political wrangling that Obama faces in Congress.

That’s similar to the long-range effects aimed at by Waxman-Markey. And with China in less than a decade coming from almost nowhere to becoming the second-biggest wind-energy producer in the world by this time next year, it’s a goal they are going to work very hard to meet. Now if we can get Congress to work to meet them halfway, that will be something for which we can all be thankful.

But let us pause to list those things we are not thankful for.

I’m not very thankful that several major news organizations are run by a gaggle of wankers, who will lie, smear, and deceive many people, including some of the ones I’ll be stuck with today.

I’m not very thankful the world has yet to recognize me for the tortured genius I am — though even angrier at me for not being a genius, though I’m okay with the not being tortured.

So tell us, this day of all days, those things you are not thankful for.

A couple of aspiring reality-TV stars from Northern Virginia appear to have crashed the White House’s state dinner Tuesday night, penetrating layers of security with no invitation to mingle with the likes of Vice President Biden and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

Tareq and Michaele Salahi — polo-playing socialites known for a bitter family feud over a Fauquier County winery and their possible roles in the forthcoming “The Real Housewives of Washington” — were seen arriving at the White House and later posted on Facebook photos of themselves with VIPs at the elite gathering.
…
While the White House offered no official explanation, it appears to be the first time in modern history that anyone has crashed a White House state dinner. The uninvited guests were in the same room as President Obama, first lady Michelle Obama and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, although it is unknown whether they met the Obamas and the guest of honor.

Here is the best part – they had their picture taken with the one and only Ron Emanuel:

But the best was yet to come: Once inside the dinner tent, they got pictures that appeared to show them with ABC’s Robin Roberts, Bollywood composer AR Rahman, PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, Obama Chief of Staff Emanuel (identified as “Ron” in the couple’s Facebook photo caption) and two with a grinning vice president. (Emphasis added)

So, that is a pretty good story; but here is an even better one. . .  of some punkin going on at the White House, courtesy of the inestimable Howie Klein.

Howie tells the story of how he arranged for Lou Reed to attend and perform for an official Clinton White House State Dinner for Vaclev Havel, President of the Czech Republic:

One of the “big” news stories yesterday was the State Dinner President Obama gave in honor of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who, like CNN’s Sanji Gupta– a guest– is a doctor. 400 people were invited– probably 200 + 1 each, but I’m not certain– and it was in a heated tent on the lawn. I have a half-baked reason for telling the story of the state dinner I went to in September, 1998
….
I understood exactly what President Clinton wanted– and delivered. Havel and Lou Reed, a Reprise artist and a friend of mine, had such a powerful bond that Havel actually credited him with being part of the inspiration for the Velvet Revolution that freed Czechoslovakia from Soviet domination.
….
Everyone was grooving out (Henry Kissinger, Ted Stevens, Eric Holder, Kurt Vonnegut, Jane Harman, Chuck Hagel and 2 generals, John Shalikashvili and my new pal, Henry Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff)– not just Lugar– and I kept wondering if anyone had any clue what the lyrics were. Clinton certainly didn’t. He got up onstage and played his sax.

Now that is some punkin the White House!

Our good friends at DeSmog Blog do incredible work exposing PR scam artists who have completely distorted the climate change debate. They are going to be here when James Hoggan is on Book Salon with his book The Great Climate Coverup on December 6. With an introduction by Leo DeCaprio, the book exposes the techniques used by paid lobbyists and PR flaks that have led us to this sorry state of affairs – and they’re not afraid to name names. I highly, highly recommend it.

Though they normally cover climate change, they recently weighed in on the 42 members of Congress who helpfully inserted lobbyist language into the Congressional Record in favor of endless patents on biologic drugs on behalf of the prescription drug industry. Said Brendan Demelle:

Big Pharma, just like the climate denial industry, is willing to sell future generations down the river in exchange for a few more years of blockbuster profits for entrenched corporate powers. (While the climate denial machine’s victims are mostly the unborn generations who will experience the worst effects of global warming, the pharmaceutical industry’s victims have names and faces today.)

Such grotesque lobbying tactics, coupled with huge cash outlays from industry to elected officials, are designed to protect short-term profits at the expense of human health and the planet.

Is this really the best we can do for our children and grandchildren?

No kidding. What happened to the First Hundred Hours? Hmmm. . . nice show for the 2006 rubes I guess.

Orszag's got it all figured out (photo: wasoxygen)

I was on a conference call with White House budget director Peter Orszag and Office of Health Reform chief Nancy-Ann DeParle today, and both of them were adamant that the health care reform moving through Congress would cut costs over the long term and “move us into the future of health care,” as Orszag put it.

There has been a lot of controversy over the health care bills, with Republicans making up numbers out of whole cloth and determining that the bills will not do anything to control costs. This was the foil for Orszag and DeParle’s remarks today. Both touted substantial delivery system reforms, primarily in the Senate bill, which would contain costs in a broader and deeper way than any health care policy over the last several decades. Orszag in particular cited a recent letter from economists that featured four “pillars” for reform:

• Deficit neutrality
• The excise tax on high-end insurance policies
• A beefed-up Medicare commission with the ability to make changes to the program
• Delivery system reforms aimed at efficiency

Orszag said that the Senate bill includes these four pillars, and he elaborated on the delivery system reforms, putting them in four categories:

• Digitization or health IT, putting everyone’s medical records in an electronic format
• Comparative effectiveness research, “so people know what works and what doesn’t”
• specific reforms like bundled payments, penalties to hospitals with high readmission rates, and accountable care organizations. All of these are pilot projects in the Senate bill, but Orszag said that more data is needed before scaling these ideas up, so this would be a time of “aggressive experimentation”
• the beefed-up MedPAC (now known as IMAB, the Independent Medicare Advisory Board), which is in the four pillars so I don’t know why he brought it up again, although DeParle, who served on MedPAC in the past, said that her commission’s recommendations didn’t happen, and that a more empowered commission would force real changes.

DeParle added that it had been twelve years since any real cost containment had been attempted in health care, and it was successful, and that the current reforms would bring back lots of these cost-containment items.

Orszag didn’t go so far as to say that the President wouldn’t embrace a bill without cost control like this (many of these items don’t appear in the House bill), but that “we’re in favor of a bill that include these four pillars.”

Orszag also cited that Ron Brownstein article about cost containment, as well as David Leonhardt’s piece today, as examples of “reporters who have read the bill” coming to positive conclusions about cost.  It should be noted that Leonhardt, while acknowledging that most of the cost containment ideas discussed in health policy circles over the past decade do appear in the Senate bill, it doesn’t go far enough:

But many of the ideas, like the rule on Medicare reimbursement, have been at least partly neutered. A provision to punish hospitals for infecting their patients, for example, would cut payments for the related treatments by a mere 1 percent. A provision meant to help people who don’t like the insurance options offered by their employer would apply to only a tiny fraction of them. A provision to encourage more cooperation among doctors would not apply to the areas where it is needed the most: chronic diseases like diabetes and congestive heart failure.

“There is a lot to like in the bill,” Dr. Alan Garber of the Stanford School of Medicine says, “but it needs to go further.”

Thus the opportunity for those centrist senators: to achieve their stated goal, they don’t suddenly need to turn themselves into health care wonks and rewrite the bill. They just need to improve what’s already there.

Left unexplained on the call is how the reduction in over-utilization and changes in delivery systems will deal with the plain fact that Americans pay up to 500% more for the exact same services as patients in other countries. While these reforms may end up lowering costs and scoring well, they seemingly don’t address those massive disparities in cost for individual treatments.

There’s more from the call, and the underlying issue, from The Associated Press.