October 7, 2012 archive

Pork Bellies ‘R’ Us

Adapted from The Rant of the Week at The Stars Hollow Gazette

Yom Kippur & Aporkalypse

Yom Kippur comes to a close, and bacon lovers will die much later than they thought thanks to reduced salt and nitrates in their diets.

Pork and bacon shortage ‘unavoidable’ as record drought raises feed costs

Record droughts in the US and Russia are threatening to curtail the world’s bacon supply, farmers in the US and Europe are warning.

So dire is the situation that a world shortage of pork and bacon is “unavoidable” next year, according to Britain’s National Pig Association. And in the US farmers predict pork prices will hit new highs in 2013 as farmers cut back on production due to soaring feed costs.

Across Europe swine herds are shrinking. Ireland’s farmers cut their herd 6.6% in the 12 months to June 2012, Denmark’s fell 2.3%, Germany, Europe’s largest pork producer, cut back 1.3% and there were cuts in countries including Spain, France, Italy, Hungary and Poland.

In the US the cost of bringing home the bacon has almost doubled since 2006, according to economist Steve Meyer at Paragon Economics, and an adviser to the National Pork Producers Council. Consumption is falling as less pork is produced and prices rise, down from 50.8lbs per person per year in 2007 to a predicted 44.16lbs in 2013.

Opiate of the Masses

Romney captures the God vote at first debate

By Sally Quinn, Washington Post

Published: October 4

This is a religious country. Part of claiming your citizenship is claiming a belief in God, even if you are not Christian.. We’ve got the Creator in our Declaration of Independence. We’ve got “In God We Trust” on our coins. We’ve got “one nation under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance. And we say prayers in the Senate and the House of Representatives to God.

An atheist could never get elected dog catcher, much less president.



Up until now, the idea of being American and believing in God were synonymous.



The Republicans have claimed God as their own this entire campaign, each candidate trying to out-Christian the other. Even Obama, though 17 percent of registered voters think he is a Muslim, has talked about being a Christian as often as he can.



If Obama wants to win the next debate, he needs to wear God, as much as it offends him to do so, the same way he captured the flag for this one.

Pulpit Freedom Sunday

Jim Garlow

My God is better than yours!

Buddhism

Scientology

Catholicism

Judaism

Islam

Cartnoon

Mabel NormandRaggedy Rose (1926) (:54)

Say anything you like, but don’t say I love to work. That sounds like Mary Pickford, the prissy bitch.

Normand was one of the early female greats.  In addition to acting she wrote and directed too.  When she died at 37 in 1930 her popularity was on the decline due to her association with Fatty Arbuckle and scandals of her own related to her cocaine addiction.

Raggedy Rose was co-written by Stan Laurel.

On This Day In History October 7

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

October 7 is the 280th day of the year (281st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 85 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1955, Beat poet, Allen Ginsberg reads his poem “Howl” at a poetry reading at Six Gallery in San Francisco.

Irwin Allen Ginsberg (June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet who vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression. In the 1950s, Ginsberg was a leading figure of the Beat Generation, an anarchic group of young men and women who joined poetry, song, sex, wine and illicit drugs with passionate political ideas that championed personal freedoms. Ginsberg’s epic poem Howl, in which he celebrates his fellow “angel-headed hipsters” and excoriates what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States, is one of the classic poems of the Beat Generation  The poem, dedicated to writer Carl Solomon, has a memorable opening:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by

madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn

looking for an angry fix…

In October 1955, Ginsberg and five other unknown poets gave a free reading at an experimental art gallery in San Francisco. Ginsberg’s Howl electrified the audience. According to fellow poet Michael McClure, it was clear “that a barrier had been broken, that a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America and its supporting armies and navies and academies and institutions and ownership systems and power support bases.” In 1957, Howl attracted widespread publicity when it became the subject of an obscenity trial in which a San Francisco prosecutor argued it contained “filthy, vulgar, obscene, and disgusting language.” The poem seemed especially outrageous in 1950s America because it depicted both heterosexual and homosexual sex at a time when sodomy laws made homosexual acts a crime in every U.S. state. Howl reflected Ginsberg’s own bisexuality and his homosexual relationships with a number of men, including Peter Orlovsky, his lifelong partner. Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that Howl was not obscene, adding, “Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?”

In Howl and in his other poetry, Ginsberg drew inspiration from the epic, free verse style of the 19th century American poet Walt Whitman. Both wrote passionately about the promise (and betrayal) of American democracy; the central importance of erotic experience; and the spiritual quest for the truth of everyday existence. J. D. McClatchy, editor of the Yale Review called Ginsberg “the best-known American poet of his generation, as much a social force as a literary phenomenon.” McClatchy added that Ginsberg, like Whitman, “was a bard in the old manner – outsized, darkly prophetic, part exuberance, part prayer, part rant. His work is finally a history of our era’s psyche, with all its contradictory urges.”

Ginsberg was a practicing Buddhist who studied Eastern religious disciplines extensively. One of his most influential teachers was the Tibetan Buddhist, the Venerable Chögyam Trungpa, founder of the Naropa Institute, now Naropa University at Boulder, Colorado. At Trungpa’s urging, Ginsberg and poet Anne Waldman started a poetry school there in 1974 which they called the “Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics”. In spite of his attraction to Eastern religions, the journalist Jane Kramer argues that Ginsberg, like Whitman, adhered to an “American brand of mysticism” that was, in her words, “rooted in humanism and in a romantic and visionary ideal of harmony among men.” Ginsberg’s political activism was consistent with his religious beliefs. He took part in decades of non-violent political protest against everything from the Vietnam War to the War on Drugs. The literary critic, Helen Vendler, described Ginsberg as “tirelessly persistent in protesting censorship, imperial politics, and persecution of the powerless.” His achievements as a writer as well as his notoriety as an activist gained him honors from established institutions. Ginsberg’s book of poems, The Fall of America, won the National Book Award for poetry in 1974. Other honors included the National Arts Club gold medal and his induction into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, both in 1979. In 1995, Ginsberg won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986-1992.

What We Now Know

Saturday on Up with Chris Hayes, Up host Chris Hayes (@chrishayes) followed up on the”contentious exchange” he had with former New York City Mayor Rudolph Guiliani during this week’s presidential debate. After he joins panels Alexis Goldstein, (@alexisgoldstein) a former vice president at Merill Lynch and now an Occupy Wall Street activist; Dedrick Muhammad,Senior Economic Director at the NAACP; Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winning economist, a professor at Columbia University, and author of the book “The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future;” and Avik Roy, (@aviksaroy) a member of Mitt Romney’s Health Care Policy Advisory Group, Senior Fellow at The Manhattan Institute and author of “The Apothecary”, the Forbes blog on health care and social insurance reform; discussing what they have learned this week.

Tweet along with Up with Chris (@upwithchris) during the show by following #Uppers

Tell us what you have learned this week.

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