GOOD! I thought this pink slime debate was so dumb (by which i mean I felt it benefited The Vegans, at least rhetorically).
As someone who identifies as slime, can I get some of that 177 million?
BPI’s signature product, commonly mixed into ground beef, is made from beef chunks, including trimmings, and exposed to bursts of ammonium hydroxide to kill E. coli bacteria and other contaminants.
A microbiologist formerly with the U.S. Department of Agriculture is credited with having coined the term “pink slime.”
After ABC was sued for 5.7 BILLION DOLLARS by Beef Products, Inc. for dysphemizing their “lean finely textured beef” into “pink slime,” the Walt Disney Company has paid $177 million to settle the case. Here is a good paragraph from a 2012 Slate article that clarifies the distinction somewhat, but I’d still argue that “trimmings paste” isn’t much better:
Leaving aside the question of what ABC really knew, it does seem clear that the network’s branding blitz did a lot to promote the panic. The word slime suggests bacterial contamination; it even has a meaning in the lab, referring to a subset of gooey polysaccharides secreted by many microorganisms. The pink part only makes the phrase sound more fleshy and disgusting—like human genitals painted with a film of protozoa. But the labels tell a story that doesn’t match the facts. In truth, the trimmings paste is not particularly unhealthy. Consumer watchdog groups seem to agree that ammoniated, processed beef is no more unsanitary or unappetizing than the other minced and remixed concoctions that emerge from the nation’s meat factories. (It might even be the better choice.) Even Jim Avila of ABC News has conceded, “We’ve never said ‘pink slime’ is unsafe.”
The lesson here is if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, you should still call it “a subfamily of mostly aquatic waterfowl in the Anatidae family, found in both fresh and seawater.”
Starting with an overhead shot of people sitting out in the sun in NYC’s Bryant Park, Rod Bogart laid what’s called a Voronoi diagram on top of it. A Voronoi diagram is a way of mapping out areas where any point in a given area is closer to a seed point than it is to any other seed point. You can think of it as a sphere of influence…and in this case, you can see how the park-goers have organized themselves into having their own personal space. As Bogart says:
It’s fascinating to see the real world optimization problem of wanting to get a nice large patch of grass.
I stand alone in the elevator, right in the middle, equidistant from the four walls. Before the doors close, a woman enters. Unconsciously, I move over to make room for her. We stand side by side with equal amounts of space between the two of us and between each of us and the walls of the elevator. On the 12th floor, a man gets on and the woman and I slide slightly to the side and to the back, maximizing the space that each of us occupies in the elevator. At the 14th floor, another man gets on. The man in front steps to the back center and the woman and I move slightly toward the front, forming a diamond shape that again maximizes each person’s distance from the elevator walls and the people next to them.
Back in graduate school, I knew a few people at a couple different institutions who were kind of trapped, who had trapped themselves. They were people who were formally enrolled in graduate programs, and seemingly doing the necessary steps. But they could never mentally commit. In fact, they would frequently denigrate the idea of going to grad school while in grad school. They would make constant “grad students, am I right?” jokes. They would disdain dissertations and seminars. They would attend departmental functions but would never stop making self-consciously ironic comments. They were in these programs but never wanted people to forget that they found the whole thing laughable.
The psychological reasons are obvious; grad school is long, the work is hard, the lifestyle is often isolating and lonely, the employment prospects in many fields are dubious, and there’s an ambient cultural disdain for grad students. Holding the experience at arm’s length, to some small degree, inoculates you from those fears and indignities. The problem is that you’re still there, doing it, and it still takes a hell of a lot of work if you’re ironizing the experience or not, and in the face of that kind of slog, a simple and uncomplicated self-belief in what you’re doing is a far better emotional tool than irony and detachment. The people in grad school who were just enthusiastically engaged thrived. The people who were in-but-out suffered through the program; they had to contend not only with the toil and low pay but with their own constant insistence that it was all a joke.
They were, it seemed to me, in a truly miserable position entirely of their own making.
In life in general, I find, one of the easiest types of self-injury to inflict is to refuse to mentally and emotionally commit to that which you are formally or practically committed. It’s a growing problem in a society that has fundamentally misunderstood what irony is and what it’s for. You get people who don’t know how to function without putting everything they’re doing in scare quotes. And that just kills your ability to deal with the daily indignities of life. You’re obligated to go through with what you’ve committed yourself to, but you can’t really commit. It leaves you with the burden of the work but without the emotional support of genuine resolve. There has to be a space between living like you actually take inspirational Instagram memes seriously and living in a state of constantly mocking the conditions of your own existence.
If you look at Twitter, you’ll see a perfect example of an entire community defined by what I’m talking about. You have people who have tweeted literally hundreds of thousands of times who will then laugh off the importance of those tweets. They’ll say things like “imagine caring about online” when they are never not online. They will meticulously craft a persona that they then represent as meaningless to them. They’ll laugh at someone who brags about their follower numbers, but they’ll also laugh at someone who doesn’t get a lot of retweets or favs. They clearly care but are terrified of betraying that emotional commitment. And I think it plays a really big role in why that platform is such a font of abuse, unhappiness, and conflict. I really do.
I really messed up back in high school, and I’ve always regretted it, though I had some excuses. I wish I could go back and talk to myself. I’d say, look – I know you don’t want to be here. I know this all seems pointless. I know you’re enduring daily indignities. But look – you have to come to school. So why not try working the program a little? I can’t go back, but I can commit to just doing the things I’m doing, unironically and without apology.
Irony’s a vital tool for life, particularly when we are trapped in such terrible systems of inequality and authority. And I get why people find Dave Eggers-style “new sincerity” stuff so obnoxious. But irony has been applied both too liberally and with too little regard for its traditional uses and meaning, and the results inevitably hurt the very people who use irony to avoid hurt. I would counsel people to ask themselves directly: what are you getting out of this refusal to simply do what you’re doing when you’re doing it? What has all of this irony done for you, beyond left you unable to directly communicate what you’re feeling or to simply experience pride and satisfaction in the things you’re doing? You’re stuck here, with all of us, either way. Work the program, you guys. Try the curriculum.
Per Betteridge’s law of headlines and also the map above, my answer is clearly no. You can try it yourself here…you draw them one at a time and it adds them to the map automagically. I’m going to blame my trackpad use a little, but I’m not sure I would have done much better had I drawn with a pencil and looked a map beforehand.
Update: Your periodic reminder that Senator Al Franken can draw all 50 US states from memory with astonishing accuracy.
You want to be a citizen? Buy high-end NYC real estate.
So here’s a fun wrinkle on “Extreme Vetting” and the New Cruelty: The Pentagon recruited a whole bunch of foreign-born people to fill specialties that U.S.-born soldiers just aren’t prepared for. It would save time and money on training, and as an incentive, the recruits’ applications for citizenship would be fast-tracked. But then we all got terrified about terrorists, so the Pentagon decided it had to much more carefully screen all those recruits, many of whom hadn’t yet actually entered the military, to make sure the recruits weren’t terrorists. But the resulting backlog in screening led a lot of those recruits to overstay their visas while waiting to actually get a military assignment. So now that they’re illegal immigrants and there are so many people waiting for screening, the Pentagon may just call the whole program off and maybe even help Homeland Security deport the folks who are now in the country illegally. Because of the Pentagon’s delays.
Did we say “fun”? Sorry, sometimes we mix that up with “Kafkaesque.”
The SNAFU is detailed in an “undated action memo” sent to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, and kindly leaked to the Washington Post by someone who probably found this as insane and outrageous as we do. Then there’s this bit of additional crazy:
4,100 troops — most of whom are naturalized citizens — may face “enhanced screening,” though the Pentagon voiced concern on how to navigate “significant legal constraints” of “continuous monitoring” of citizens without cause, according to the memo.
You’re a citizen, but we need to monitor you constantly, although that’s illegal, because we don’t want another Maj. Nidal Hassan. Though he was born here. But you weren’t, so your citizenship is no shield from eternal suspicion.
The program, called “Military Accessions Vital to National Interest” (MAVNI) because acronyms are the only thing more inevitable in military bureaucracy than fuckups, was started in 2009 to recruit foreign-born folks for specialties — mostly in the Army — in medical and language fields, since few American-born recruits show up at boot camp already knowing Pashto, Mandarin, Russian, or how to do surgery. About 10,400 people have signed up under the program, some in exchange for a faster path to citizenship, but many who were already citizens and just wanted to help their adopted country as translators or in medical fields. But last year, the Pentagon decided it needed to more thoroughly vet the applicants, because they certainly didn’t want headlines about some foreign-born soldier running amok on a military base. Pentagon officials set about determining the “threat level” for all those recruits, both the ones already in the service and those who hadn’t yet been inducted.
Unfortunately, those enhanced background checks required the military to divert “already constrained Army fiscal and manpower resources” into the screenings, according to the memo, creating a backlog of about 1,800 recruits who haven’t even been to basic training. So because Times Are Tough, officials recommended to Mattis that those recruits have their enlistment canceled, and that MAVNI be discontinued. Ah, but of course there’s a catch, and it’s a beaut:
Those recruits are in what the military calls the delayed-entry program, a holding pool of recruits assigned training dates in the future. About 1,000 of them have seen their visas expire while waiting for travel orders, which would put them at risk of deportation if their contracts are canceled.
Sorry, we promised you a spot in the military because we really need you, but we screwed up the vetting process, slowed down your entry into the military, and now — oh, bother! — you’ve become an illegal alien, and we certainly don’t want no damned illegals in our beloved Army.
Let’s repeat that one more time before you hear Fox News lying about it: These are not people who illegally crossed the border and tried to sneak into the military to get citizenship. These are people who signed on the dotted line because the the Army said it needed their particular skills, but then overstayed their visas waiting for the military to get its shit together.
WaPo reporters talked to Margaret Stock, a retired Army officer who helped create the MAVNI program in 2009; she “called the decision a breach of contract made in bad faith”:
“It’s terrible. You trusted the Army, who delayed the process, and now they’re going to cancel your contract and have you deported,” Stock said.
So now the Pentagon has all these folks’ detailed information — addresses, phone numbers and their legal statuses — just ready to hand over to ICE so they can be deported for the offense of trusting the Greatest Military in the World. Hahaha, stupid foreigners! If you want a fast track to citizenship, you need to invest in a luxury apartment for half a million bucks!
The memo claims that about 30% of the recruits in MAVNI have “unmitigable derogatory information” in their background that could disqualify them from service. Stock said that “derogatory” stuff didn’t necessarily mean they’d been seen dancing in the streets of Jersey City on 9/11, but was almost certainly just life facts related to being an immigrant, like having foreigners in the family or even being related to someone in a foreign government. To make matters worse, the screening process doesn’t seem to allow any exceptions for such mundane details:
“It’s okay to investigate someone with a legitimate security threat,” Stock said. “But share a characteristic they don’t like, which is they’re foreigners. They’re going to be treated as second-class citizens for their entire career.”
Stock said the level of “extreme vetting” the MAVNI recruits were being subjected to was absurd, and might violate the Pentagon’s policies on equal opportunity: “You don’t do surveillance on everyone who is Irish-American because Mike Flynn broke the law when talking to the Russians.”
Yeah, well maybe that’s the problem. Just look at all the white people in the Trump administration and the madness they’ve gotten up to. Something needs to be done about these people.
How about screening recruits for connections with Goldman-Sachs?
Yr Wonkette is supported by reader donations. Please click the “Donate” clicky below so we won’t be thrown to the Cossacks.
What do Rosacea O’Donnell, Ross Perot No She Better Don’t, and Bob the Drag Queen have in common? They’re all members of the Trump administration.
Watch Ginger Minj, Alaska, and Katya anoint Ben Carson, Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, and Ted Cruz with their appropriate drag names on Comedy Central’s @Midnight with Chris Hardwick:
Robots fighting each other in arenas is a popular sporting event; see Robot Wars. In Japan, such competitions often take place in small sumo rings and the robots need to move incredibly fast to achieve victory. Robert McGregor compiled some of the fastest and most vicious footage in this video…and none of the footage is sped up in any way. Note the protective leg pads worn by the referee in many of the clips…there must have been an “incident”. (via @domyates)
1. NYC
2. LA
3. Chicago
4. Houston
5. Phoenix
6. Philadelphia
7. San Antonio
8. San Diego
9. Dallas
10. San Jose
I dunno, San Antonio at #7 really threw me for a loop. Bigger than Dallas? Bigger than San Francisco (by more than 600,000 people)? Of course, when metropolitan areas are taken into account, the picture changes. The San Antonio area drops to #30 while the Bay Area hits #5.
When I was a kid, the list looked a little different…LA had not yet passed Chicago for #2 and Texas had only two cities in the top 10 (and no Austin creepin’ in 11th place):
1. New York
2. Chicago
3. Los Angeles
4. Philadelphia
5. Houston
6. Detroit
7. Dallas
8. San Diego
9. Phoenix
10. Baltimore
That list still carries more weight in my brain than the current ranking. The facts you learn in school influence how you view your country. And some of those facts, dubbed mesofacts by Sam Arbesman, change slowly, so slowly that you’re tricked into thinking they haven’t changed at all. The average age of the US Senate right now is 62. The version of the population list that many Senators learned in school was probably from the 1950 census (or perhaps the 1960 one) and our current President, at 70 years of age, was possibly taught the list from the 1940 census. The entries on those older lists look much more like the industrial America celebrated by truck and beer commercials and represented by classic baseball and football teams — the America that is to be made great again: Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh.
