Alec: In a state near YOU

From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes: A new version of Missouri SJR 22 has passed the Senate and is lumbering back to the House for another vote. With the weekend adjournment upon us, I decided to google some of the objectionable, vague language of the bill and see where it comes from. I chose “modern farming practices” which can take in anything from Confined Animal Feeding Operations to wacky new genetic alterations in seeds to robot tractors to unlimited spraying of Agent Orange on the land. I suspected that “modern farming practices” was dreamed up by Alec, the American Legislative Exchange Council, those apologists for big business opposed to individual rights. They are world-class bamboozlers. Couldn’t find “modern farming practices” in Alec’s model bills but there were a lot of interesting bits on the Alec site, where the far-right lawmakers can pick up language to introduce in their statehouses. Here’s a bit to guarantee antibiotic use in CAFOs: WHEREAS, the treatment, prevention and control of animal disease is critically important to the health and welfare of animals and the safety of the food produced; and WHEREAS, the availability of antibiotics is a critical tool for veterinarians, livestock and poultry producers to ensure animal health and the safety of the US food supply; and WHEREAS, the use of antibiotics both therapeutically and sub-therapeutically has a long history of success in improving animal health and welfare; and . . . (there are 8 more “whereas” clauses, each more misleading than the one before) . . . NOW THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that The American Legislative Exchange Council supports the use of science based data to assess whether sub-therapeutic antibiotics cause antibiotic resistance problems. BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the American Legislative Exchange Council opposes legislative or regulatory action that may result in unnecessary additional restrictions on the use of antibiotics in animal agriculture that are not based on sound science. Obviously, that resolution could guarantee full employment to a battery of lawyers for lifetime but it doesn’t help ensure public welfare at all. And that’s the point, dear reader. Tomorrow we'll look at the family tree and implications of SJR 22, which has appeared in other states besides Missouri, but that’s enough for today. April 13, 2013.

Only software that can write an essay should be allowed to grade them

By Marc Jampole

One of the many controversies roiling education at the moment is the argument over grading essays with software programs. A nonprofit organization that is a joint venture between Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently began making automated essay-grading software free to any educational institution that wants to use it.

Some think it’s a great idea and even postulate that it will help students improve their writing abilities, as they can retake the same essay test multiple times until the software gives them an A.  Opponents wonder if software could ever capture the nuances of good writing.

I’m tending to side with those opposed to machine grading of essays. I spend a lot of time in my job editing the copy of other professional writers. The difference between good and bad writing is often subtle. Sometimes merely placing the last sentence of a paragraph first creates the structure needed to understand the point.  Or breaking a grammatically correct complex sentence into several simpler sentences can create a process or chain of reasoning where only a simple list existed before.

Writing expository prose entails a complicated balancing of grammar, syntax, cultural allusions, context, subtext, rhythms and emotions. No one has yet produced software to check spelling that is without numerous, and sometimes notorious, glitches. For example, Word’s spell-checker insists that a company is a living and animate thing by correcting “the company that” to “the company who.” In the same wise, it also turns people into things, always automatically changing “the person who” into “the person that.”

There are literally hundreds of these simple syntactical and grammatical mistakes such as confusing “that” and “who” which people make in their writing all the time: “the company and their employees” instead of “the company and its employees;” “the animals comprise the zoo” instead of “the zoo comprises animals” (the famous example from Strunk &White); using “anxious” when you mean “eager” and “jealous” when you mean “envious.”  When I was a college instructor grading essays, these minor mistakes turned an A into a B. In the real world of an advertising and public relations firm, they are the difference between getting a promotion and getting fired.

But beyond the simple mechanics of proper English, there are many nuances that go into good writing. Let’s start with the issue of appropriate language, which essential explore when it’s okay to break the rules.  “Ain’t” ain’t good, but in some formal essays it works if it creates a moment of cleverness or allows the writer to allude to an idiomatic expression or famous quote.   

Will a machine understand a cultural reference, be it an allusion to a song, a novel, a quote or a famous person? What will software think of a reference to rap or a clever circumlocution lifted from an 18th century novel? Will the software know when the allusion is inaccurate?

And what of tone? Will a software program recognize sarcasm, irony, empathy, anger or other sub-textual emotions that propel the best essay writing? Will it notice when the author changes tone and will it recognize when the change is appropriate and when it is merely sloppy writing?

There is also the issue of the passive construction. The passive is grammatically correct, but it makes for uninteresting and dull writing, as it tends to turn everything into a state of being. Some examples:  The film was seen by the students. The building was destroyed by the earthquake. As I sometimes roar out when I see a lot of passives in a piece I’m editing, “Is, is is! Nothing but is!” Will the software know that writing in the passive makes for a much duller essay than speaking in the active voice:  The students saw the film. The earthquake destroyed the building. And just as important, will it recognize the relatively small number of occasions when the passive is appropriate, e.g., when the writer wants to avoid attribution or to describe an actual state of being?

Genre also is an issue in editing.  Each genre and subgenre has its own unique rules and formulae, some of which are hard and fast (a sonnet must have 14 lines) and some of which are quite flexible (the second or third paragraph of a news release should be a quote).  For example, when writing on legal on engineering issues for other lawyers or engineers, the use of the passive is not such a “no-no.” Will the software be able to distinguish between a news story, news feature, news release about news, news release about non-news, OpEd piece, legal précis, creative non-fiction, five-part essay and scientific paper?

Finally, there is the issue of logic. Often a sentence or paragraph looks reasonable enough until you read it a second time and see it is completely senseless.  Many sentences with if/then clauses look right because both clauses are true, but are illogical since there is no causal relationship between the two. One can’t go more than a few days reading the news media without seeing an opinion piece in which the author writes factually for many paragraphs and then draws a completely false conclusion. Will the computer pick up on logical flaws?

Years ago, Alan Turing proposed a test to know when a computer acquired the ability to think as humans do: when it is able to hold a conversation with someone and the person thinks he or she is speaking with another human being.

I am proposing a similar test: let’s allow software to grade student essays only when it can write an essay itself. I even have the topic about which the software must be able to write. I take it from an example of the nuances in language that the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein gives in his theoretical essay, “Through Theatre to Cinema,” as translated by Jay Leyda. In Leyda’s translation, Eisenstein writes (and note the passive construction), “How easily three shades of meaning can be distinguished in writing—for example: ‘a window without light,’ ‘a dark window,” and ‘an unlit window.’”

When a software program can write an essay that explains the distinction between these three descriptions, I will be willing to let it grade essays.

CAFO Far From the Farm

From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes: Cafo Far From The Farm, arranged by Daria Kerridge in Columbia, was a huge success, according to friends who were able to attend. The 3-day event drew speakers from all over the United States, addressing problems like government financing of CAFOs, environmental degradation, corruption of the food supply and animal cruelty. All the events were held during my busy times—teaching and radio hosting—but I know plenty of folks who went. In fact, that’s the only complaint I’ve heard: Everyone there knew everyone else. It was the same group that shows up for all the foodie programs. My New Year’s Resolution for 2013 was to drag someone younger than myself to any presentation, lobby day, food meal, event, anything I go to. So far, the resolution has been good and I’ve had a great time with my young guests, neighbors or students. We usually go to a meal before or after and I drive so that they don’t have to buy gasoline. We talk about what we’ve seen or done, what we learned, what was good or bad about the presentation. It’s always worthwhile. If we don’t take the kids along, they can’t go. They’re so busy with school, work, dating, figuring out their futures…remember how you were at their age? They aren’t getting the same notices that we’re getting, so they don’t know about the events. And we need them to understand the food system. Every generation gets farther away from the farm, and the industrial system becomes normalized, they don’t know how to do things for themselves from raising food to foraging to cooking. They’re used to getting food wrapped in cellophane, poor dears. At the event last night, a panel discussion, John Ikerd told folks that farmers and consumers need to work together to solve the problems of industrial agriculture in the animal business. Folks who want good meat have to learn about the business and ask the farmers how they manage their animals. Farmers who want to work with the public have to listen to what they want. We can work it out, but we need to listen to each other, in an open and curious way. And that’s all for today. April 11, 2013.

Missouri lawmakers are getting a clue!

From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes: Apparently, lawmakers are realizing how stupid it would be to change the state constitution to “forever guarantee” “modern farming practices,” and I’m getting more and more feedback about the subject. Tonight there was an anti-CAFO (confined animal feeding operation) meeting in Columbia and I’m not sure if folks there had called their reps, but it would have been a good opportunity to get them to complain about the fact that CAFOs are supported by policy. Young farmers can get loans to start CAFOs because the loans are guaranteed by the U.S. government. Can’t get a guarantee to start a vegetable farm or to buy equipment for a grain mill. When I got home another friend on the phone was complaining about the Missouri legislature and their new ideas about how to ensure that “modern farming practices” are “forever guaranteed” under the constitution. “Whatever they want, I’m against it,” said my friend. He was talking about HJR 7&11 and SJR 22. “Modern farming practices” are not defined in these bills. This is a major problem because these “future” practices could be anything (from corporate controlled CAFOs, to cloned animals, to robot tractors, to complete control of the seed supply…). And this is the Constitution we're talking about.

A proposal to make solar-powered electricity more feasible

By Marc Jampole

 

In a co-op apartment, each tenant owns his or her own unit and has shares in a corporation that owns the apartment. Joining together collectively as a mini-government or a semi-socialist enterprise, the corporation (or a management company it hires) employs a superintendent and a number of doormen and porters. These people are kept busy—they open the doors, sort the mail, accept the delivery of packages, help carry groceries, clean the shared areas of the building, keep the boiler and washer-dryers operational, do minor repairs, enforce building rules (of which there are always many), hail taxis and keep track of the various workers hired by tenants to work in their individual apartments.  To get these services, the apartment owners all pay a monthly fee—more for larger apartments or those on higher floors (which require more time for the building personnel to serve).  Most owners also give the staff seasonal bonuses at the end of the calendar year.

The other day I was thinking about how convenient it would be to apply the co-op/doorman model to blocks of single-family dwellings. Someone to keep the street safe, accept packages, clean snow and ice off the sidewalks, help carry the groceries in and maybe even serve as the block handyperson for simple faucet leaks and picture-hanging. Having the block equivalent of a doorman would certainly make life easier for everyone who owns a single family home in a city and many suburban neighborhoods.

But then I started thinking about the major impediment to such a plan working—the selfishness of Americans. After three decades of the politics of selfishness, wouldn’t many if not most homeowners worry that someone else on the block was using too many of the services offered by the staff? Wouldn’t some people try to “get the most” out of their monthly fees and try to use the staff all the time?  Wouldn’t most Americans reject the block staff concept outright because of the same shortsighted, I’ve-got-mine selfishness that makes people vote to cut support of public schools and mass transit?

While selfishness and other human foibles can muck up the management of a co-op apartment building, the owners are united in one way that forces them to become part of the social compact that generates all the benefits provided by the building’s staff: They all live together in the same building with the same roof, the same elevator and stairs, the same lobby and most important, the same source of hot water, heat and electricity. The only choice anyone has is to be a responsible co-op citizen interested in the overall welfare of the apartment.

And then the big idea hit me: Doesn’t the co-op model have a place in solving our energy crisis?  Specifically, we already have the technology to build small solar-powered electrical generating plants that can provide the electricity for a few city blocks. Many theorists of solar power have often conceived of a situation in which instead of one central power plant that serves large metropolitan areas, there are many smaller plants throughout a region, each of which produces electricity for its neighborhood and all of which are connected to the national grid.  Utilities and politicians don’t like the individual solar plant model, because they lose control of the power source and the ability to make money from it. But for the public, why should it matter if the power comes from a behemoth plant miles away or from a modest unit tucked out of the way around the corner?  If I may speak for most—what we want is a steady source of electricity that doesn’t pollute the planet and is not threatened by energy scarcity.

The co-op model can make the neighborhood solar plant work. Every house on the block must own a share of the power plant, just as every owner of an apartment must have shares in the building. The building hires the staff to take care of the plant. The natural extension would be for the staff to provide many of the services that make co-op living so pleasant.

I’ve pretty much described a utopian dream which combines some of the best elements of socialism and capitalism to give people more control over their lives in some ways in return for certain restrictions, all of which are for the common good.

Of course, as long as world governments are more interest in solutions that require large organizations, it is nothing more than a dream.

Professional white males of ’50s & ’60s may not have been “Mad Men,” but did better than most

By Marc Jampole

OpEdge logs a lot of keystrokes analyzing logical mistakes that appear to be made to advance a cause or an idea:  Surveys which use criteria that ensure the conclusions will support the beliefs of the survey takers. Articles that give facts but then end with a false conclusion. Mislabeling to make an ideological point, e.g., calling Obama a socialist or Eadweard Muybridge a super-genius. Conflating two acts, so that the more heinous or odd one appears in a better light.

This past week’s New York Times “Sunday Review” gives a maddening example of one of the subtlest of propaganda techniques: a half comparison, which is what occurs when a writer or speaker compares the apples of one group to the oranges of another group, even though both groups have both apples and oranges. The logical mistake comes in the suppression of inconvenient facts related to one or both sides of the comparison.

The article in question titled “Pity The Men On Top” by Susan Jacoby compares the glamorous life portrayed on the chattering class’s current favorite TV show, “Mad Men” to the drudgery that most professionals experienced during the 1950s and early 1960s.

Here’s the passage in question, and it’s the opening of the article:

“WHEN I dream about my father, as I do even though he has been dead for more than a quarter of a century, I always wake up when I hear the crunch of tires rolling over rock salt — an unmistakable sound evoking the winters of my Michigan childhood in the 1950s and early ’60s. Dad, an accountant, would pull his car out of our icy driveway and head for his office long before first light. This was tax season, and he could keep his business and our family financially afloat only by working 80-hour weeks.

You won’t find Bob Jacoby or his unglamorous middle-class, middle-income contemporaries in “Mad Men,” the AMC series beginning its sixth season on Sunday. If we are to believe the message of popular culture, the last men on top — who came of age during World War II or in the decade after it — ran the show at work, at home and in bed.”

Let’s take a look at the comparison between the glorified fictional image and reality, which is represented by the single anecdote of a single real white male.  What we read about in the real example are the facts of work: getting up early, working overtime, worrying about finances. In contrast, all we read about in the details of the “Mad Men” myth is status related: “ran the show at work, at home and in bed.” It’s a false comparison, because the author tells us her dad ran the business, so he was just as much in charge as the Mad Men, and more in charge than those in the TV series who don’t have ownership interests in the fictional ad agency at the center of the action. We can only imagine that he was also in charge at home, at least when it came to finances.

Later on, Jacoby writes that most blue or white collar jobs didn’t provide the income or freedom to allow for “hotel rooms for trysts with girlfriends.” Her example, though, is not a blue collar or white collar working male, but her father (again), a business owner of a professional service firm. She claims that he didn’t have time for an affair, he worked so hard. Let’s give her and her dad the benefit of the doubt and merely point out that he doesn’t represent the entire class of upper middle class professional white males in the post-World War II era.

I’m not saying that “Mad Men” is a realistic depiction; in fact it is not. Nor am I saying that the life of most upper middle class white professional males in the '50s and early '60s was not drudgery, although I suspect it had more joy in it than was in the lives of repressed and suppressed educated upper-middle class women, poor minorities or unskilled nonunionized laborers of that period.

What I’m saying is that to advance her argument—whatever merit it has—author Susan Jacoby makes a false comparison as a means to argue by anecdote. The polite term for this kind of illogical reasoning is to call it propaganda.

The FDA is a Sham

From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes: Sunday always seems like a catch-up day and I had a pile of newspapers to read, going back a couple of weeks. And I had two lambs abandoned by their mom to nurse. They had kept me up all night and needed to be fed every 3-4 hours, the male taking longer than the female, like maybe an hour. So the day went like this: Warm bottle for the lambs and feed. Glance through 4 or 5 sections of newspaper, fold for recycling, take a nap, wake up and warm bottle for the lambs, and so forth. So it went along well, until I stumbled on an Op-Ed in the New York Times March 28, 2013. David A. Kessler, commissioner of the FDA from 1990 to 1997, a time of huge expansion in the Confined Animal Feeding Operation era, wrote “Antibiotics and the Meat We Eat.” Too little too late, David. You shoulda checked it out when you were in power. As he said, “It was not until 2008 . . . that Congress required companies to tell the F.D.A. the quantity of antibiotics they sold for use in agriculture . . .” Why didn’t he ask? It’s not a secret that low doses of antibiotics are fed to increase fast weight gain in meat animals. That was one of the first tricks the big corporations used. They followed it by such strategies as feeding arsenic to poultry to compromise the liver and increase blood flow, thus increasing gain. The antibiotic usage in CAFOs accounts for about 80% of all antibiotic sales nowadays and that is causing antibiotic-resistant bugs that flow into the creeks, the rivers, the ocean. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria is a major problem in hospitals and one doctor has told me he gets a memo every week about what drugs no longer work on what bacteria. Kessler’s last line exempts FDA, the organization that we thought was the watchdog, from responsibility, and sums the problem up: “Lawmakers must let the public know how the drugs they need to stay well are being used to produce cheaper meat.” The industrial system knows that the government system is a sham. After all, industry designed it. But, now, consumers need to demand answers.

FAbulous chickweed potato salad!

From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes: Jerry the horse shoer called and postponed again. It’s been one thing after another. The weather. Somebody’s health. His health. He asked if it messed up my schedule to keep moving our appointment. Mess up my schedule? No way. A good horseshoer is worth his weight in gold. He can make or break a horse. Jerry saved one valuable horse we had here and the latest unhealthy one, a white pony, galloped up to the fence when I went out to feed this morning. So I guess I can say he saved one valuable one and one other. I can wait a long time for Jerry to get here, believe me. In the meantime, we had a wonderful group of college students visit the farm to tour and talk about sustainability, food sovereignty, food security, that kind of thing. The meal was perfect, and all from Missouri. Kobe beef, gnocchis, spinach salad, pasta salad with pasta from Excelsior Springs, all prepared by a chef from Broadway Brewery, potato chips from the Backers, our neighbors, and a lettuce salad harvested at the last minute by Walker from our greenhouse. Oh, yes, and I made a berry cobbler. I’ll give you the cobbler recipe during berry season. In the meantime, here’s how to make a wonderful chickweed salad, as prepared by fiddler Sarah. Cut into chunks, potato salad size, and boil until just softened, 1 pound potatoes. Arrange them in a layer on the bottom of a baking dish. Then, pick and break up 8 oz fresh chickweed. Finally, pour over the whole thing ½ cup of vinagrette, recipe follows. To serve, spoon up the potatoes at the bottom, the chickweed at the top, the vinagrette throughout. This is the best spring salad ever! Vinagrette: • ½ cup honey OR 1 cup sugar • 1 tablespoon ground mustard • 1 teaspoon salt • 1/2 teaspoon pepper • 1/2 cup hot water • 1/4 cup balsamic vinegar • 2 garlic cloves, halved • 1/4 cup really good olive oil In a 1-qt jar with a tight lid, combine the first five indredients. Add the next three and shake until the sugar is dissolved. Then add the oil and shake well. Store it in the refrigerator. You can use this on any green salad, but it’s amazing on chickweed and potatoes. Yield: 2 cups.

Jon Stewart v. Monsanto

From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes: The sustainable agriculture breakfast group was all a-twitter this morning because Jon Stewart had actually mentioned the Monsanto Protection Act rider that passed with the continuing resolution to keep the government in business, as he put it, until September. Stewart didn’t get the rider just right, confusing the issue and saying it had to do with GMO food rather than GMO crops, but for a city boy he did all right. He had a nice clip of Jon Tester trying to get Congress to pay attention and compared Congress to a farty old grandpa. You can google “The Daily Show” and play the clip. The breakfast group seemed to think it would be on-line for about a week. Truthfully, there has been a lot in the news about the riders. Not only was there the rider that gives corporations the right to plant any kind of biotech crops that they want, no matter if they’re poisonous to the environment or people, never mind the issues of cross-pollination or other dangers, but there’s one that prevents anyone from making regulations on gun purchases. One has to wonder what else is in there for the President to sign. That's all for today.

Missouri Senators Schafer and Munzlinger--BFFs?

From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes: In 2012, we had an early spring. So early that I was in the throes of the worst part of the legislative session, with my fellow citizens battling the bad policies that Missouri lawmakers can dream up. The session always begins with five or six really bad bills that need shooting down. With so much money coming from Monsanto, a Missouri corporation, it’s hardly surprising that a good many representatives and senators are in Monsanto’s genetically-altered, chemically-enhanced, robo-tractor pockets. That means, of course, that they’re working against family farmers. So this year, the spring is a little later and I was determined to enjoy the daffodils and the redbuds, but today we were back at the capitol. Family farmers from all over Missouri were in the Senate talking to Missouri senators about HJR 11 and 7 and SJR 22, Monsanto Protection Acts that will also work in favor of the giant meat packers like Tyson and Smithfield who have put farmers out of business. It was wonderful that so many of the senators are seeing the light and planning to vote against these bills that will defile our state constitution. Several of the senators, both Democrats and Republicans, can see that HJR 11 and 7 and SJR 22 take local control away from counties and townships. They see that if these bills pass, it will change our state constitution forever. A funny thing, though, and surprising how many of the senators we talked to made a link between Brian Munzlinger, a longtime supporter of Farm Bureau initiatives and Kurt Schafer, the Senator from Columbia who is a lawyer representing Smithfield, a giant pork producer that sells to Wal-Mart. Munzlinger and Shafer don’t really have much in common except their ties to big transnational corporations, one’s sharp as a tack and the other’s dumber than a hammer, but I guess they’ve been BFFs during this session because the other senators linked them together, like, “you need to go talk to Munzlinger and Schafer.” Maybe it’s because they both want to run for statewide office, I don’t know, maybe they’re cooking up some kind of teamwork initiative. With politics like this going on, who could be bored? That’s all for today. April 4, 2013.

A Clear Path for More GMOs

From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes: Today, one of the leading food policy nonprofits issued a lengthy statement by Frederick Ravid, with this naive centerpiece: "First of all, you need to realize the Continuing Resolution is only a six month law. No part of this law lives beyond September 2013, no matter what it provides . . . Section 735 "Monsanto Rider" is reported by NY Daily News to have been written in concert with Mosanto by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO), perhaps Monsanto’s biggest Senate contribution beneficiary. Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) allowed the language to stand without consultation with the Agriculture Subcommittee, or any others, for that matter. This infamous action has been widely criticized in the strongest terms, even within the Senate. Here’s the thing: It’s springtime. The CR gives cover to Monsanto and other planters to put any kind of wacky poisonous plant in the ground right now, grow it and harvest it in the fall. They only need six months. Then, with lots of seeds in their bins, they only need to go to USDA and whine, “but we have all this seed, and we need to plant it now. You need to approve our insanely dangerous plants or some family farmers with seed in their bins will suffer…” This is how GMO alfalfa was approved despite 200,000 objections from citizens. A USDA panel voted to approve GMO alfalfa, with a patented gene to resist Monsanto’s Roundup.That was back in February 2011. I blogged about it then and here’s what I said: “USDA chief Tom Vilsack had expressed doubts about the approval. Vilsack, an Iowa agriculturalist in his pre-Beltway life, has seen enough failure in the biotech sector to question another crop engineered to resist Roundup, the most powerful weed killer on earth. After a tank of Roundup is sprayed on a field, the alfalfa pops up green and sprightly, ready to grow without competition. But the gene has moved to weeds, so there are now ragweeds, water hemp and many other weeds that can’t be killed by this herbicide. Vilsack, who wrote that cross-pollination poses "a significant concern for farmers who produce for non-GE markets at home and abroad," was ignored. So were the comments of 200,000 consumers that wrote against approval during the comment period. Many of these were organic consumers who realize that organic production will be under threat from the new alfalfa. A few minutes after I posted my blog about the hearing, I got an e-mail with a snippet of conversation between Kathleen Merrigan, who made the decision, and Mark McCaslin of Forage Genetics. And here’s the kicker: The approval was granted not because the doubts had been settled but because an ag industry company had a bunch of the seed in a warehouse and were afraid they were going to lose money without the approval. Land O’ Lakes, now part of Purina, had raised GMO alfalfa and harvested seed for 3 years. A federal judge had ordered them to put it in a warehouse rather than use it, since it was an illegal crop. The damning Environmental Impact Study (EIS) and the anti-GMO comments of more than 200,000 consumers--stood in the way. But Land O’ Lakes was determined. In the words of Mark McCaslin of Forage Genetics: So based on USDA's estimate of a two-year turnaround on an EIS, rather than pay our seed growers to take out those Roundup-ready acres, we left those in. We honored those contracts. And we harvested that seed that we had paid the growers for. So that seed that was produced in 2007, 2008, 2009, according to Judge Breyer's ruling, is in storage. It has been in storage since that time. So the owners of that seed are the 350,000 farmer members of Land O' Lakes. So this -- is the Land O' Lakes cooperative made the decision to pursue Roundup ready alfalfa. We produce the seed. We own the seed, and it's stored in our warehouses. When I read that the investment of a seed company clinched the approval, I felt sad and betrayed. Washington’s in the hands of corporate agbusiness for sure. You would expect a furious outcry from every pet owner, organic consumer, and livestock raiser. The Roundup-Ready genes have never been tested on eaters, including horses, rabbits, hamsters, parakeets—anything that eats those greenish-brown pellets. But, no. Consumers are almost silent. A true measure of our national disconnect from the food system.” That’s all for today. It’s April 1, 2013.

NYT Book Review prints another false stereotype that supports an ideological assumption.

By Marc Jampole
Lately it appears that the New York Times Book Review is trading in stereotypes that support the basic ideological assumptions of American life. Or maybe, I’m just starting to notice it.

About two months ago, OpEdge analyzed a book review that used the not-really-a-super-genius biographical subject of the book under critique as proof that super geniuses are also madmen, a common stereotype that supports the ideological assumption that it’s bad to be smart and that smart people have social adjustment problems and are unhappier than the average person.  The stereotype is false and the ideological assumption—big-banged into us constantly by mass media and entertainment—is not only also false, but serves as a false model for our youth.

 

The NYT Book Review is at it again this week, publishing a review of a new biography of Karl Marx in which the reviewer presents another false stereotype as gospel: that political radicals are dirty, flighty, loud-mouthed moochers.

 

Let’s allow the reviewer, Jonathan Freedland, an editorial page columnist for The Guardian of London, to hang himself with his own words:

"The Karl Marx depicted in Jonathan Sperber’s absorbing, meticulously researched biography will be unnervingly familiar to anyone who has had even the most fleeting acquaintance with radical politics. Here is a man never more passionate than when attacking his own side, saddled with perennial money problems and still reliant on his parents for cash, constantly plotting new, world-changing ventures yet having trouble with both deadlines and personal hygiene, living in rooms that some might call bohemian, others plain ‘slummy’…”

The key words come at the beginning: The Karl Marx depicted…will be unnervingly familiar to anyone who has had even the most fleeting acquaintance with radical politics. That sets the scene for Freedland’s description of the hippy of hippies who, worst of all, is living off his folks.
 

Of course, Freedland is right that most radical political groups have some loud ne’er-do-wells who could bathe more often. In fact, I’ve seen them at every political demonstration that I have ever attended. They have certainly been part of the Occupy protests.

But I’ve also seen smelly wide-eyed hippies at adult chess tournaments.
 

I’ve seen them at churches and synagogues.
 

I’ve seen them on every college campus I have ever visited. I used to see one or two slip out of the offices of the Young Republicans when I was in college.
 

I’ve seen them at public meetings, ball games and parades.
 

But these other places, institutions and organizations where humans of all sorts collect and interact don’t get tarred with the label of producing people who "are saddled with perennial money problems and still reliant on his parents for cash, constantly plotting new, world-changing ventures yet having trouble with both deadlines and personal hygiene…” (well maybe chess, an intellectual game to which weirdness is also unfairly attached.)
 

The most subtle aspect of Freedland’s cheap shot at the left is that the smelly hippy in question is Karl Marx. First of all, placing the stereotype in the context of discussing the life of the leading theoretician of communism limits the definition of “radical” to the left.
 

Freedland expresses a coy shock at learning that Marx fits what he calls a “recognizable pattern.” By applying the pattern narrowly to left-wing radicals, Freedland tries to make the left less palatable, just as all the images of intellectuals as socially inept make cracking a book and learning something less palatable.
 

Freedland wraps a neat bow on his ideological package by declaring additional shock at learning that Marx is not some revolutionary icon, but a “genuine human being,” to use his words. Yes, I’m confident that Marx is presented as more human than symbol in the book under review, Karl Marx, a Nineteenth-Century Life by Jonathan Sperber.
 

But in Freedland’s review, Marx comes off as an unsavory but buffoonish cartoon character.
 

Of course, that’s the image that the mass media wants us to have of the left.

Green Revolution Tried to Solve Poverty

From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes: This morning I had the privilege of talking to a Forum, sort of a Sunday morning gathering of the Unitarians in Columbia. Some of the gatherers were emeritus professors from Mizzou that remembered the Green Revolution and Norman Borlaug with great fondness. Howard said I should have started the talk with a salute to those times because there’s no doubt that they were acting from the best parts of their hearts. They thought that by sharing American seeds and know-how with farmers all over the world they’d solve the problems of hunger and poverty. Now, of course, we know that the unexpected consequence was the unplanned change of all the crops raised around the world. Rather than solve poverty, we increased rural poverty by taking away the traditions of saving seeds that would have been free to farmers and adapted to their ecosystems. Unfortunately, I didn’t start the talk with the salute but with the U.S.D.A. statistic that Americans eat 12% more pounds of food today than in 1970. As I often say to my young friends, I hope you can solve the problems that we’ve created. When I got home another friend on the phone was complaining about the Missouri legislature and their new ideas about how to ensure that “modern farming practices” are “forever guaranteed” under the constitution. “Whatever they want, I’m against it,” said my friend. He was talking about HJR 7&11 and SJR 22. “Modern farming practices” are not defined in these bills. This is a major problem because these “future” practices could be anything (from corporate controlled CAFOs, to cloned animals, to robot tractors, to complete control of the seed supply…). Well, it’s Easter, and a bunch of neighbors were taking a trail ride but I got home too late to go along. Still, in a sidebar too long to start on, we found a home for an orphaned puppy, shepherd/lab/husky mix. So the day wasn’t a total bust.

Editorial: Truth in a Time of B.S.

On the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, it’s easy to forget how uncritical the corporate media were of the Bush-Cheney administration’s claims during the runup to the war. There was plenty of evidence to contradict the claims that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted efforts to build weapons of mass destruction — starting with the UN weapons inspectors who were coming up empty on the ground in Iraq. Bush was warned by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak that invading Iraq would create a hundred bin Ladens. The French and Germans were vilified for pushing for more diplomacy and inspections on the ground in Iraq instead of resorting to force of arms.

As we observed from Austin in “Inspect, Don’t Invade,” our March 1, 2003 editorial: “We wish we could believe that invading Iraq would solve the problems. More likely the bombing of Baghdad and other parts of Iraq to clear the way for the invasion will kill tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi people, create hundreds of thousands of refugees, plunge the Middle East into chaos and expand the radical Islamic jihad against the western world.” But the swells in New York and Washington couldn’t see it.

MSNBC is now considered a liberal-leaning news channel, at least in its primetime lineup, but it was a struggling center-right news channel when it pulled Phil Donahue off the air Feb. 25, 2003, because of his opposition to the calls for war in Iraq, despite the fact that Donahue had the channel’s highest ratings. Chris Hedges, in a March 25 column at TruthDig.com, calls it “The day that TV news died.” An internal MSNBC memo that leaked to a website at that time argued that Donahue would be a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war ... He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.” In other words, Donahue had good instincts — and he was addressing the skepticism felt by a large number of potential viewers — but he never returned to the commercial airwaves.

Donahue recently told Hedges the pressure the network put on him near the end “evolved into absurdity. ... We were told we had to have two conservatives for every liberal on the show. I was considered a liberal. I could have Richard Perle on alone but not Dennis Kucinich. You felt the tremendous fear corporate media had for being on an unpopular side during the ramp-up for a war. And let’s not forget that General Electric’s biggest customer at the time was Donald Rumsfeld [then the secretary of defense]. Elite media features elite power. No other voices are heard.”

Hedges noted that Donahue spent four years after leaving MSNBC making the movie documentary Body of War with fellow director/producer Ellen Spiro, about the paralyzed Iraq War veteran Tomas Young [see his letter to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney on page 4]. The film received critical acclaim, but Donahue was unable to find commercial distributors to pick up the film. He managed to get openings in a few cities but the runs were painfully brief. (See BodyOfWar.com.)

Bill Moyers, who hosted the weekly NOW with Bill Moyers from January 2002 until December 2004, also came under pressure at PBS. Bush’s chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Kenneth Tomlinson, in 2005 accused Moyers and his show of “left-wing bias” and mounted an investigation. Moyers replied that his journalism showed “the actual experience of regular people is the missing link in a nation wired for everything but the truth.” In April 2007, he returned to PBS with Bill Moyers Journal, with the first episode, “Buying the War,” on the media’s shortcomings in the runup to the invasion of Iraq. He retired in April 2010, but came back in August 2011 as Moyers & Company, along with his new website, BillMoyers.com.

The New York Times and the Washington Post helped the Bush administration sell the war. The Times’ September 2002 report hyping Iraq’s aluminum tubes as evidence of a reconstituted nuclear program was used by the Bush administration to support the rush to war. The Post ran 27 editorials in support in the months leading up to the war, and had few regrets on the anniversary. Post editors spiked a column they had commissioned from Greg Mitchell, former editor of Editor & Publisher and author of "So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits — and the President — Failed on Iraq". Instead, the Post ran a column by its news media reporter, Paul Farhi, titled, “On Iraq, journalists didn’t fail They just didn’t succeed.”

The Times published a “mini-culpa,” as Jack Shafer called it, in May 2004, admitting that it has published a few “problematic articles” (it didn’t mention any names) on Iraqi WMD, but pointed out it was “taken in” like most of the Bush administration, Mitchell noted in the version of his column published at TheNation.com. The Post in August 2004 ran a longer critique by media reporter Howard Kurtz in which editors and reporters admitted that evidence supporting the war was played on page 1 while stories that challenged the administration were buried inside.

Hedges, who spent 15 years as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, has a jaded view of the corporate media. “The celebrity trolls who currently reign on commercial television, who bill themselves as liberal or conservative, read from the same corporate script,” he wrote. “They spin the same court gossip. They ignore what the corporate state wants ignored. They champion what the corporate state wants championed. They do not challenge or acknowledge the structures of corporate power. Their role is to funnel viewer energy back into our dead political system — to make us believe that Democrats or Republicans are not corporate pawns.”

We shouldn’t be surprised the corporate media is reluctant to publicize corporate wrongdoing. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t watch MSNBC, but there are gaps in their coverage. Rachel Maddow produced an excellent documentary, "Hubris: Selling the Iraq War", on the manufactured crisis that was the runup to the invasion, based on the 2007 book by Michael Issikoff and David Corn, but Maddow overlooked the role NBC and her own channel played in that coverup. I don’t think Maddow sold out. I think she has a good sense of how much truth she can get past the suits, and she packed a lot of truth in that hour.

Ed Schultz perhaps doesn’t have that sense — or maybe he just doesn’t care, which might be why he’s being shuffled off to the weekend. But he’s still on MSNBC, as well as his three-hour radio show on more than 100 radio stations and the Internet (see wegoted.com, and more on Schultz’s move on p. 22, Dispatches).

If you want progressive populist views, you can find our columnist Amy Goodman’s radio/TV news hour on 1,000 stations in North America — but you have to look for them (see DemocracyNow.org). Jim Hightower wore out his welcome on ABC Radio when he criticized its new corporate owner, Disney Inc., in 1995 and his national radio show was cancelled soon thereafter. But he still does radio commentaries as well as his columns, which appear in this paper, as well as his Hightower Lowdown newsletter (see jimhightower.com.) And Thom Hartmann is a tough critic of corporate plutocracy who has a three-hour weekday talk show that is simulcast on more than 80 radio stations as well as Free Speech TV on Dish Network and DirecTV. He also produces a one-hour daily TV show available on Free Speech TV (see ThomHartmann.com). (And if MSNBC producers are looking to expand their list of guests, those would be three good names to put on their Rolodexes.)

Then, of course, you still have the lefty press, whether The Progressive Populist, The Nation, Mother Jones or other worthy periodicals for readers who like their plutocrat-plucking on paper.

The truth is out there, as it was in 2003, but you can’t count on the corporate media to serve it up to you. Sometimes you have to sort through a lot of — shall we say manure? — to find it on the Internet or other news media. That could be our new motto: “Sorting through the B.S. since 1995.” — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2013

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Selections from the April 15, 2013 issue

COVER/David Dayen
Is JPMorgan a farmer?

EDITORIAL
Truth in a time of B.S.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
We’re losing dairy farmers to industrial combines

DISPATCHES
Obamacare at 3: Already helping real Americans
House OKs radical budget
Senate passes a budget!
Republicans would repeal student loan reforms
Schultz pushed to weekend, welcomes the change
Republican filibusters keep appeals court edge;
Sen. Johnson to retire;
Repub filibusters keep appeals court edge;
Bush library accomplished!
Tennessee's health care lottery
Big swing on drone attacksMich. Repubs cry foul on union deals
Cruz: Path to citizenship kills immigration reform ...
MARK ANDERSON
Bank critics urge repudiation of debt

BOB BURNETT
Searching for Republican soul

MARK ENGLER
The pope and the poor
WENONAH HAUTER
Smithfield on most admired companies list

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Homelessness: by-product of corporate capitalism

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
A fat state promotes obesity

SAM URETSKY
Not enough supplemental information

SETH SANDRONSKY
Virtual schools of the future

WAYNE O’LEARY
The symbolism gap in liberal politics

JOHN BUELL
Land and the bubble economy

MARK POTOK
Anti-government ‘Patriot’ groups ramp up again

ROB PATTERSON
NRBQ revival is worth cheering

POPULIST PICKS
‘Adam Clayton Powell’; ‘Argo’; ‘Sound City’

and more ...

Eat Here St. Louis

From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes: After so many recent failures in politics, where all they do is support the food giants, it’s great to hear a success story from the people. So here’s one about my friend Andy, who runs a business called Eat Here St. Louis. He brings high-quality fresh food from family farms to chefs in St. Louis. Andy had been working to get St. Louis University into his program for months. They had begun to get interested in local food and had even started a project in 2012 with Maplewood School system that involved the SLU culinary arts program, nutrition program and the school system. Last summer, when produce was plentiful, they were freezing fresh produce and keeping it in their freezers for the schools to use. How cool is that??? But something didn’t work out. We’re used to this in the local-foods world. The start-ups are always fragile but we keep trying. The schools couldn’t buy the produce—there might have been a grant involved or else it was a budget shortfall, I don’t know. But here’s why you need fearless people like Andy. He was able to buy a walk-in freezer from a franchise store that was going out of business. Now he’s buying the frozen food from SLU and selling it to chefs. It’s obviously better than they can get from other outlets. So, now SLU can continue their program, training their students, and they’re now even more committed to the local-foods idea. OK. So that’s the whole story and I think we’ll be hearing about more successes. Maybe we can even make it happen in Callaway and Boone Counties! Happy Spring, ya’all! March is going out like a lamb and it’s March 29, 2013.

Continuing Resolution Continues Bad Policy

From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes: Here in Missouri, the ice has melted and we’re waking to beautiful mornings with just a hint of crispness in the air. It feels like spring. But how can things seem so good here when they’re so bad in Washington DC? The continuing resolution passed with the Monsanto protection act in full bloom. Here’s the statement from Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of Food and Water Watch: Washington, D.C.—“Today, the Senate passed a continuing resolution that was laden with special interest policy riders. Senate Appropriations Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-Maryland) and Ranking Member Richard Shelby (R-Alabama) abdicated their responsibility by offering a stale spending bill from last year that is loaded with special legislative giveaways to big agribusiness companies. The heavy-handed and undemocratic process used to force the Senate to accept a deeply flawed proposal allowed votes on only nine amendments. “The Senate was not allowed to consider two amendments offered by Senator Tester (D-Montana) that would have removed policy riders that favored the largest seed companies and the largest meatpackers. Senator Tester rightly observed that these policy riders were worth millions of dollars to these companies. “One of Senator Tester’s amendments would have removed a provision that prevents the U.S. Department of Agriculture from implementing livestock marketing and contract fairness rules that were included in the 2008 Farm Bill. Food & Water Watch and hundreds of farm groups worked to include these vital livestock provisions in the 2008 Farm Bill to protect farmers from unfair and deceptive practices by meatpacking and poultry companies. “Another of Senator Tester’s amendments would have removed a giveaway to genetically engineered seed companies that would allow the continued planting of GE crops even when a court of law has found they were approved illegally. This provision undermines USDA’s oversight of GE crops and unnecessarily interferes with the judicial review process. This favor to the biotech industry was not included in the House-passed continuing resolution and should never have been included in the Senate version. “One thing that the Senate got right was finding a solution for funding meat and poultry inspection that would avoid USDA inspector furloughs. The funding cuts triggered by sequestration would have required USDA to furlough its meat and poultry inspectors for up to two weeks this summer, causing the plants they inspect to stop operating. The House should maintain this funding for USDA meat and poultry inspection to ensure that this critical consumer protection program can continue to operate.” Here’s my statement: Business as usual for agribusiness means dinner at risk for eaters.

Right-wingers turn gay marriage into sideshow keeping public from real problems

By Marc Jampole

 

Gay marriage should be a no-brainer. We live in a secular society in which people of diverse backgrounds and beliefs interact in the public realm according to rules that apply to all and then go home and do as they please. 

Our laws constrain behavior that can hurt others, such as killing people, taking what isn’t yours, adulterating food, poisoning water or refusing to hire or serve someone because of their skin color or religion.

But when two private citizens marry, it hurts no one.

Now “hurt” and “offend” are two different things. I understand that many people are offended by homosexuality—typically for religious reasons—and worry that seeing married gays might hurt them and their children. To these good if benighted people I answer with Lenny Bruce’s old sarcasm about not wanting to allow Christians to teach in public school because he was afraid his kids would come home with St. Christopher medals stuck in their palms. Those who feel uncomfortable around married gays should remember that there may be something about themselves that will offend other people, such as wearing a cross, quoting from the Bible or saying “Have a Merry Christmas.”

While our society has always been open and based on tolerance for all full citizens, unfortunately at the beginning only white males were considered full citizens. Thank goodness the suffrage, civil rights and other liberation movements have given full citizenship to just about everyone.  

Marriage is clearly not about having children the natural way (i.e., man and woman engage in sex and nine months later a baby pops out). Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan nailed it when she said that if the purpose of marriage were procreation, a state could deny marriage licenses to a heterosexual couple in which both spouses were more than 55 years old. 

But what about the children? Studies have exploded all the myths about gay marriage. The children of married gays behave no differently from the children of straights. The insertion of gays into social groups does not lead to an outbreak of crime, disease or a higher incidence of drinking, drug use, gambling problems or any other social problem. 

In short there is no overriding public interest that would require or allow the state to outlaw the marriage of two people of the same sex.

 

If gay marriage were legal throughout the country, it would not prevent any religion or religious leader from refusing to marry gays or accept them in the flock. But it would end the obnoxious hypocrisy of having our secular society imposing the religious views of many on the rest of us.

 

But the controversy over gay marriage serves a purpose for our politicians. It’s a sideshow that keeps our minds off the real problems, such as global warming, energy and other resource scarcity and the increasing inequitable distribution of wealth.  Moreover, elected officials and candidates opposed to gay marriage bundle it with a bunch of issues that hurt most Americans—like low taxes on the wealthy, privatization of basic government functions, union-busting policies and a low minimum wage.  The “social issues” of the right-wing trick the good people of the religious right into supporting its only-the-rich-matter stands on economic issues.

 

I have no idea what the Supreme Court will do.  But I do know that those who think Justice Kennedy is the swing vote on this issue have it wrong. The swing vote is Roberts, and here’s why.  Roberts has always voted the way that large corporations want him to vote. That’s why after years of votes that take rights from individuals and give them to corporations, he figured out a way to vote to uphold the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (AKA healthcare reform). Large corporations liked the new healthcare law because it will save them money, and once again, Roberts was their boy.

And large corporations for the most part have swung in favor of gay marriage, or at least no longer oppose it. My guess it that the court will favor gay marriage if Roberts can apply some twisted reason that enables him to affirm the overturning of the California anti-gay marriage law without offending his basic conservative principles and the consistency of his past votes. Otherwise, he’ll cut a deal with the four centrist members of the court to refuse to hear the appeal.

The same goes for the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).  If Roberts can construct an argument that tracks with his “principles” but still allows gay marriage, DOMA dies.  

Whatever happens, even more millions of dollars will be spent on both sides over the coming years, money that could be put to better use arguing about real issues or actually doing something to help the country.

The EEZ is ba-a-a-a-ck

From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes: My husband and I like to use old phrases, just to hear them and keep them going. So we might say “you’re closing the barn door after the horses are gone” when we mean “It’s just too late for that action” or “strike when the iron’s hot” when we mean “you can accomplish that goal if you do it right now.” Today the headline on the newspaper was “EEZ map abandoned: New map based on 2010 census.” The story explained that the Fulton Area Development Corporation needed to use the 2010 map to build their inventory of land where they could offer corporations special tax deals. The old map included our neighborhood, which is a quiet rural neighborhood with most people enjoying the green space around us—the cows, the corn, the ponds—and we don’t want to see it paved over. So we objected, and so did a lot of other people in the county, some in the EEZ and some out of it. The arguments generally went, “well, if part of the county is in the zone it will affect the rest. Property values will be all over the place, mostly in a bad way.” Now that FADC has abandoned the old map, my sweetie said, maybe they’ll abandon the plan. “No way.” I said, and this is the old-phrase part, “They’re like a dog with a bone.” He looked at me in a puzzled way. “You know,” I said, “It means they won’t give it up. They’ll keep it until it’s all gone. Like that.” “Oh,” he said, understanding, “You mean ‘like a cat with a rabbit.’”

Lost dog

From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes: At about 6:30 this morning, I was still in bed when I heard the thunder and saw lightning. Looked outside and saw… thunder snow. A snow storm with thunder in the background. I’ve only seen/heard this a couple of other times in my life, and all of the times this year. Watched a while, then back to sleep for an hour or so. The phone woke me up. It was Walker, calling from his spring break trip to Colorado. Back here in Missouri, Mazzie the farm dog had run off and a neighbor had trapped her in his garage. She’s really afraid of thunder and lightning. I imagined her, huddled in a strange garage. Could I go retrieve her? Stupid us! I could have brought her home with me so easily…yesterday. But the snow was now 6” deep. And my gravel road wouldn’t possibly be plowed. Who would get her? We brainstormed a few seconds. “Carl?” he said. “Carl!” I answered. Our young neighbor with cattle on half a dozen fields around here. He’s out and about in the worst weather, feeding cows or calves every which way. I called him and he jumped on it, said if he couldn’t get there by truck he’d take his tractor. I called him a couple of hours later and she was safe in his barn, close to his dogs but in a pen to keep her safe, with a bowl of water and a pan of food. He said she snuggled with him all the way home. That’s why we love our neighbors. It’s March 24, 2013, 3:28 p.m. and the snow still coming down.