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News Briefs 09-08-2010

By Katon

A fresh news brief is a beautiful sight to behold. And, no, it doesn’t smell anything like memeograph ink.

Quote of the Day:

If death by inaction [in the US House of Representatives] was the sentence intended for the pure food and drug bill by its enemies, fate entered in to reverse the judgment. The circumstances had nothing to do with patent medicines, but they certainly helped to achieve tighter drug provisions in the final bill. A book was published by an obscure Socialist writer named Upton Sinclair. He had gone to Chicago to write a tract in fictional form about the miserable life of immigrants who labored in the packing houses. He had aimed at people’s hearts, as he said, but he had hit their stomachs. For ‘The Jungle’ incidentally described the filthy conditions under which America’s meat was processed, how inspectors blinked while tubercular carcasses were brought back into the line, how rats and the poisoned bread put out to catch them were ground up with meat for public consumption, how employees now and then slipped into steamy vats and next went forth into the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard. The public was staggered, and the sale of meat fell by half. Roosevelt was angry. When an investigation revealed that Sinclair had not overdrawn the case, the President insisted that Congress act to insure clean meat and pure food for the American people.

A pivotal event in 1906, Chapter 14, The Toadstool Millionaires. And if you enjoy that one-page chapter, try Chapter 10: Quackery and the germ theory.

Kat
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12 Comments

  1. A footnote, courtesy of Mark Twain
    Via today’s Quote of the Day, we just learned that, up until at least 1906, unfortunate meat-packing employees “now and then slipped into steamy vats and next went forth into the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard.”

    With that image still vividly in my mind, I noticed a telling detail whilst reading the second book review, of Twain’s Feast, at this link:

    This is a culinary stunt book fixated on the nostalgic list of American foods Twain included in his 1880 travel memoir, “A Tramp Abroad.” Homesick, hungry and appalled by European food, Twain hankered after “a mighty porterhouse steak an inch and a half thick, hot and sputtering from the griddle; dusted with fragrant pepper; enriched with little melting bits of butter of the most unimpeachable freshness and genuineness.” …

    A Tramp Abroad was published in 1880 – long before the US’s pure food and drugs act of 1906 – which explains why Twain felt it necessary to specify that the butter must be both unspoiled and genuine.

    There’s no telling how many disgustingly-adulterated concoctions Twain had seen passed off as butter by the time he wrote this. Considering how much he traveled, it’s easy to imagine how frequently he must have been bitterly disappointed by what passed for food and drink in the public eating establishments of his era. No doubt, in most of the private homes he visited, as well.

    This 2007 New Scientist article – The mutual poisoning society – is about Britain’s first food and drug reformer, Frederick Accum.

    Accum, a chemist, wrote a wildly popular book which was an expose’ of what his chemical analyses showed to be adulterating practically all British food and drink – and who was responsible! As the article says, he didn’t just describe the nature of the frauds, he named the fraudsters.

    Here’s what he had to say about what was being passed off as coffee, according to the New Scientist article:

    … in 1798 he examined the adulteration of coffee. Merchants bolstered their profits by selling cheap percolations of chicory, scorched black peas and broad beans, roasted rye, burnt carrots and parsnips, powdered bark, acorns [not to mention, roasted horse liver and sawdust, which the reader learns about later in the article] – in short, almost anything but actual coffee. In the words of one retired grocer: “Never, my good fellow, purchase from a grocer any thing which passes through his mill.”

    That last is probably still sound advice.

  2. A society of skeptics
    Re: Why is society not acting on climate change?

    One part of the equation of doubt here may be in the fact that our society has been weened off of taking things at face value and believing everything it is told… even by the most sincere among us.

    *Our government refuses to investigate the aerial phenomenon in the skies otherwise known as UFOs, even though they are seen and reported by millions of their own citizens.

    *The NDE is a common, shared experience of people all across the world but, mainstream science refuses to do more than dismiss the subject out of hand.

    *Evidence of humanity’s presence on this planet seems to indicate that we have been around a lot longer than the official timeline and in possession of technologies that were far more advanced than the hunter/gatherer theories allow. But mainstream archeology pretends like it does not exist.

    *We are hammered everyday by debunkers and skeptics that scoff at things that do not meet the most narrow minded of definitions.

    We have forgotten how to accept something as being possible, even if it is not yet proven to be fact.

    So too, it seems, goes the case for global warming.

    1. Yep, I follow the old adage…
      … Think for yourself, smuck!

      Being basically a tinfoiler at heart, I find that a crucial step in evaluating what’s what in any given situation, is to ‘follow the money.’

      In the case of climate change, the big oil companies admit they started, and continue to handsomely fund, the climate skeptic ‘movement.’ And it makes good business sense for them to do that, considering they’re currently raking in profits of $4-9 billion – each – every fiscal quarter.

      Since I’ve seen no convincing evidence that thousands of well-trained and dedicated scientists all over the world are deliberately, and in a coordinated manner, falsifying their research into climate change, following that huge pile of money back to big oil is just the icing on the cake for me — even though, I hafta admit, that’s one awesome pile of icing they’ve got going on, especially in the midst of a near-global ‘great recession.’

      1. control
        What pulls me more to the other side of the global warming issue is that governmental organizations, and the UN, are telling us that they know how to control the climate. We just have to give them enough resources, and accept the right regulations.

        Given that it is very difficult to even analyze the climate, the claim that these people can control it to our benefit is simply ridiculous.

        Aside from that, I strongly suspect, as a professional, that some of the work done by the climate scientists is sloppy. I am now guessing that it is sloppy because of profit driven propaganda by companies that have something to gain or lose. As a professional computer scientist (not as someone who has written a few programs), I have very good reasons to believe their work has big holes in it. I have seen some of their code, and it is not very impressive. They are hiding some other parts of their work, which is unprofessional on their part. They are hiding some of their data, which is really unprofessional. So no, I don’t consider the IPCC particularly trustworthy on the scientific front.

    2. Y’all really want to know why
      Y’all really want to know why? It’s obvious. Some of us may be using one finger to point at ourselves but there’s 9 others that can point and there’s a whoooooole lot of people, places, companies, governments, agencies, groups, and institutions to point at.

      Mankind: As disorderly as orderly can get.

  3. Babies with Breasts

    Local food safety authorities have refused one mother’s request to investigate the formula, made by the Synutra company, claiming they do not conduct tests when requested by consumers.

    Well ain’t that peachy?? I wonder what’s the Mandarin equivalent of pendejo 🙁

    1. You know what follows
      Lady GooGoo, an 8 year old pop star phenomenon, discovered by PharmaLogic’s record label Tunes ‘R’ Us. First album entitled “Love: Lost in Teddy’s Eyes” with the hit singles “Who needs a mother when you got another” and “I made it to 3rd base at 5, what have you done?”

  4. Pavlovsk

    In what appears Kafkaesque logic, the property developers argue that because the station contains a “priceless collection”, no monetary value can be assigned to it and so it is worthless. In another nod to Kafka, the government’s federal fund of residential real estate development has argued that the collection was never registered and thus does not officially exist.

    *Face-palm* >_<

    1. excellent
      Seeing as the documents of the foundation of countries like China, Russia, Italy, France, Greece, Germany do not now exist, we can also conclude that these states are not there in a legal framework.

        1. Jimi Hendrix
          We will never know what would have happened had he not died that young. He would probably still be a musician, that much we can be sure of. The new decade, the 70’s was if nothing else very visionary when it comes to music. Two new genres was born just before the dawn of the new decade, hard rock and progressive rock. Which path would he have taken? Perhaps both or none of them or mixture of both or he would have made something of his own of it. The early hard rock, before it turned to heavy metal was very bluesy. Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin where all blousy hard rock bands so he might have liked that. But he also obviously enjoyed to jam so he might also have liked progressive rock with their often long instrumental songs or parts. This path could also have lead him into fusion. As he matured he might as well have dabbled into classical music. Somewhere out there, there is a parallel time-line where he didn’t die in 1970. It certainly would have been interesting if we could have crossed over and back to such parallel worlds.

          The guessing of his possible paths musically is not only just guessing. While in Sweden he had a jam session which is pretty famous over here. I don’t know if it was recorded or not. Probably not or we would have heard more of it. One such musician was keyboardist Bo Hansson who in 1970 released his first solo album with music inspired by The Lord of The Rings. It was internationally released two years later and is kinda cult in prog-circles. He was an early pioneer in swedish prog. Drummer Janne Karlsson had a jazz-background so ir is fair to assume that he would be attracted to genres with lot of jamming and instrumental passages. We will never find out unless someone invents a time-line shifter device of some sort.

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