Al Franken - Prophet?

[OHDEM]

I happened to read (again) Al Franken's "Lies and the Lying Liars That Tell Them" a few months ago. When this "Swine Flu" came up it made me think of a particular chapter so I pulled out the book and found that Senator Franken saw this coming way back in 2003!

Chapter 39: Vast Lagoons of Pig Feces: The Bush Environmental Record

I want to draw you a word picture of a lagoon you may remember from Gilligan's Is­land, where a caged lion or an Indian in a canoe might wash up just to get that week's episode rolling. This lagoon is a rectangle the size of three football fields, lined with 40-mil high-density polyethyl­ene and filled, to a depth of thirty feet, with pig shit.

Now imagine that, at the bottom of the lagoon, pebbles have punctured the liner, allowing the liquefied pig shit to seep under and ferment. A bubble is growing. The polyethylene liner rises like a creature from the brown lagoon. It breaks the surface, spilling a pungent stew of untreated feces and urine into a nearby creek. An undocumented Guatemalan worker is ordered to puncture the liner with a shotgun blast. Retching, he fires. The swollen liner re­treats into the fetid depths. Mission accomplished.

The next day, however, one of the most magnificent sights in all of nature, a shit geyser, explodes into the afternoon sky. Those working nearby watch the pillar rise ten, then twenty, then thirty feet above the lagoon. It is as though the Earth itself is afflicted with a virulent case of projectile diarrhea.

Hold that image in your mind.George W. Bush is the worst environmental president in our nation's history. As you read this, his self-interested coterie of in­dustry shills are dismantling the protections that you and I take for granted.

http://skeptically.org/gov/id11.html

Okay, Senator Franken didn't see exactly this happening, but he did bring up these disgusting corporate Big Meat Farms. And the company he mentions...

Today, a single company named Smithfield owns more than 70 percent of the state's hogs. Small farmers are learning that you can't beat Big Meat.

Yeah, it's the same company that owns THAT pig farm in Mexico.

[sam sarrha]

1. people get decades for puppy mills, when Farm factories are much much worse..

[OHDEM]

2. It's like the line from Pulp Fiction

"A pig is a filthy animal". Dogs/Puppies are cute so people care more. Clearly we should care more about what happens to our FOOD.

Oh...and YES WE CAN blame the GOP and their pandering to big business for this crisis as well as for failing to fund pandemic planing. LOSERS!

[glinda]

3. Puppy Mills are bad for a multitude of reasons.

[nutsnberries]

4. YES. and if you need more evidence >

read the Epilogue to "The Truth (with Jokes)" entitled The Resurrection of Hope.
Set in 2015, he explains to his (future) grandchildren, Barack, Hillary, and Joe Jr., how democrats took the country back, beginning in 2006. I don't have a copy handy in order to quote from it but I remember that he speaks of the eloquent new leader and all that was accomplished in the first 100 days of the new administration in 2009. He also speaks about his own victorious run for the Senate..... I read it earlier in the year and couldn't help but laugh at how accurate his predictions were.

[OHDEM]

9. I never read that one...

might have to pick it up used tomorrow! I happen to love Al and can't wait for him to be seated. If only I lived in Minnesota so I could have voted for him!

[glitch]

5. Excellent post K & R nt

[undergroundpanther]

6. Pink Lagoons

Those pig shit lagoons are not brown but actually bright fucking PINK.

Smithfield's pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs -- anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.

*snip*

The lagoons themselves are so viscous and venomous that if someone falls in it is foolish to try to save him. A few years ago, a truck driver in Oklahoma was transferring pig shit to a lagoon when he and his truck went over the side. It took almost three weeks to recover his body. In 1992, when a worker making repairs to a lagoon in Minnesota began to choke to death on the fumes, another worker dived in after him, and they died the same death. In another instance, a worker who was repairing a lagoon in Michigan was overcome by the fumes and fell in. His fifteen-year-old nephew dived in to save him but was overcome, the worker's cousin went in to save the teenager but was overcome, the worker's older brother dived in to save them but was overcome, and then the worker's father dived in. They all died in pig shit.

Good article here.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12840743/porks_dirty_secret_the_nations_top_hog_producer_is_also_one_of_americas_worst_polluters/1



Here's the real color of a pig shit lagoon.

Here's the same one one flooded out during floods.

[Muttocracy]

8. and that can lead to lovely toxic dinoflagellate blooms and fishkills - further yum! nt

[alfredo]

7. If you've never been down wind from a pig farm, you need to experience

it once in your life. It's much worse than a feedlot for cattle.