Yesterday my tribe lost an old friend, Pez, a tuxedo cat, who had been with the family for 14 or fifteen years. Cat AIDS, a disease he survived for four years into a very old age finally won. The pharmacy of antibiotics couldn’t do the job anymore.
All my cats have been strays. In Pasadena they found their way into the backyard, liked what they saw when in trouble, and decided to make a bid for residence. Mostly that meant hanging around, taking the handouts gladly and being always happy to see us.
Pez was an unfixed tom at the end of his string when he showed up. He’d been in a lot of fights on the losing end.
As a result he hurt and had become emaciated. In fact, that’s how he got his name. He’d become so scrawny his head was bigger than what came behind, making him resemble a Pez candy dispenser a little bit.
While he fought other males who wandered into his territory all his lfe, Pez was very gentle from the start. I figured he’d been owned by some old person who’d died in the neighborhood and just been forgotten like so many pets when their masters either pass or fall on hard times.
It took nothing at all to restore him. In a family that had four cats he found a place as defender of the lone female, Lily. He was very tough on rodents (yes, Pasadena has a lot). And, of course, he always felt it was his duty to attack any toms from the neighborhood, attracted into the yard by the sight and smells of other animals.
He’d always get scratched or bitten when defending the perimeter. It would mean a trip to the vet for a shot and a week’s worth of antibiotic syrup. And that’s most probably how he got cat AIDS, from another stray during battle.
I moved out of the house about three years ago and the cats, including Pez, could not be separated from the yard they loved so much. But I wasn’t far away — in walking distance — and I continued to care for them whenever the house was left empty for a few days.
During the time, the cat family took losses — from four to two. Pez made the third casualty.
This year the disease had taken its final toll. Medicine after medicine had been used to their full potential. With each new prescription Pez would rally and then slowly backslide with another harsher infection.
On Easter he had one last fine weekend. He was clear for three days and did his favorite things, all revolving around disappearing into the backyard on a sunny day in Pasadena. He was big on looking for lizards along the stone wall and hiding/sleeping in the tall grass in the very back of the plot.
I went to Ralphs and bought an old favorite — the supermarket’s freshly made fried chicken. One breast for me and one for him. Which, for Pez, was about like eating a quantity of meat 2/3 the mass of his head.
Pez loved having his chin rubbed. If you stopped before he wanted you to, he’d let out a little growl. So there was a lot of chin stroking, given gladly and so appreciated.
It’s the last I saw of him before the call came yesterday.
Like people with a chronic and incurable condition, you can tell how well they’re doing by how they eat. If their appetite is great, they’re feeling pretty good. When they stop eating it’s very bad.
If they are engaged, the disease isn’t rolling them. When they hide in unusual places, death draws near.
And that’s how it went. One or two very bad days, medicine providing no relief from disease’s grip, and it was over.
Fourteen or fifteen years is a long time to have a cat. However, when they’re such good little fellows of gentle soul it seems they’re almost invulnerable, that they’ll be with you forever. But then it comes time to learn again that for everyone there’s a beginning and an end. As well as a long period in between in which fond and happy memories are forged.
“If we stopped it all right now we’d get rich a whole lot quicker.”
To preserve the gigantic Pentagon budget, House Republicans want to cut, cut, cut — anything that has to do with keeping the working poor afloat. This as part of the fight for the most important cause — easing the rich man’s burden.
From food stamps to child tax credits and Social Service block grants, House Republicans began rolling out a new wave of domestic budget cuts Monday but less for debt reduction — and more to sustain future Pentagon spending without relying on new taxes …
Nothing better illustrates this perhaps than the renewed focus on food stamps — now titled SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). And the estimated $33.2 billion in 10-year savings there could have an immediate impact on the farm bill debate and come November, the 2012 elections.
An average family of four would face an 11 percent cut in monthly benefits after Sept. 1 and, even more important, tighter enforcement of rules would require that households exhaust most of their liquid assets before qualifying for help. This hits hardest among the long-term unemployed, who would be forced off the rolls until they have spent down their savings to less than $2,000 in many cases.
Indeed, food stamp enrollment and costs have exploded since the financial collapse four years ago, making SNAP a target for the right — but also a far bigger political issue in swing states like Florida, Nevada and Ohio.
National enrollment reached 46.4 million people in January 2012, a nearly two-thirds increase from the average monthly participation in fiscal 2008. The annual costs — now running in excess of $80 billion — have more than doubled in the same period. And even the most ardent food stamp proponents will sometimes say SNAP is a program “asked to do too much.???
The White House deliberately increased monthly benefits in 2009 by about $20 per person as a way to pump stimulus dollars into the economy. And in this post welfare-reform crisis, strapped governors have sought to maximize food stamp dollars as a cheap way to help families without tapping state funds.
No surprise. Republicans have always hated food stamps and fighting hunger.
A week ago or so ago, the New York Times ran a front page story on how food stamp usage had surged in the response to the poor being tossed out of social welfare programs during the economic collapse.
Sadly, yes, poor people must eat. It’s a damn nuisance. We need to pay for more Predator drones and things.
The US national security machine and its army of private sector warning robots disguised as human beings whirs and buzzes, scanning the world for menaces as the country rots from the inside out. Triumphant that it’s greased some fleabags in Yemen or added another one hundred unmanned flying or crawling machines to its mighty arsenal, it’s missed all the serious indicators of danger, those nasty internal signs, like the 44-45 million people on food stamps …
Food stamp usage in the US is a symbol of national economic failure so systemic it takes your breath away. It is rock solid proof the US economy does not provide jobs which earn a fair living for a polyglot cohort that dwarfs entire western nations.
And the great and powerful Oz’s of our national defense structure are really on the stick, aren’t they? While they were getting the lion’s share of national swag during the last decade, a Biblical mass of their countrymen were applying for food assistance.
If you add up the populations of the 50 states, starting with the least, the number of people on food stamps in the US is a number that roughly includes the summed populations of:
Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Idaho, Nebraska, West Virginia, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Arkansas, Kansas, Mississippi, Iowa, Connecticut, Oregon, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Kentucky.
This shows a country where the economy and business have so depressed wages the US government must take up the slack so hunger doesn’t stalk the land.
The proposed House Republican budget cuts, which probably have no hope of passing (although one cannot always be certain) seek to preserve defense spending.
But that means mostly money for arms manufacturing.
Lately a lot of complaints have been made about the food stamp program. Let’s take a look a one group that gets food stamps — 14,000 military families were on food stamps in 2000.
The Pentagon does not keep track of any military families that are on food stamps. President Bush in 2001 decided to authorize a $500 subsistence pay increase that was taxable in order to help military families get off food stamps. It did not work. Military families increased on food stamps because food stamps are non-taxable.
From 2008 to 2009 military families were using food stamps at twice the rate as civilians, 25 percent to 13 percent. About $31 million of food stamps were used in nationwide commissaries.
From July 2009 to March 2011 in Oklahoma, where there are four military bases — Fort Sill, Tinker AFB, Vance AFB, Altus AFB — $1.8 million in food stamps was spent.
There’s a deep national immorality entrenched here. And you’re not a decent human being if you can’t see it. What does that make those who would slash money for food so the Pentagon gets to keep everything it’s grown comfortable with in the last decade?
Good news, lads! Good news! Of course this isn’t a current photo of Howard. Nugent’s new look scares children.
It took about 24 hours for the fountain of angry crazy Ted delivered at the the NRA convention in St. Louis to flow outward and soak the news agencies. Here at DD blog, I figure it’s because most of the journalists at the dailies were way too lazy and above-it-all to consider immediately listening to the horrid 25 minute interview I embedded yesterday.
Been there, done that, they all think. Yeah, Ted, he once threatened Obama onstage and added Hillary should suck on his machine gun. Boring.
Ted’s been that way for a long time. And he counts on being ignored by the people who could do him the most harm, those who write news articles which could land, via the wires, in the small dailies of the dump towns he’s getting ready to tour this summer.
If what Ted said, in its entirety, were printed in the papers, he’d lose some business.
And that’s because Ted’s mindset and jabber are almost exactly like that of the old coots in the Georgia Ricin Beans Gang, destined to be banged up for years as domestic terrorists.
The main difference between Ted and the cranks in the Georgia Ricin Beans Gang: Ted’s famous, they’re not. And Ted doesn’t have an FBI informant hanging around him undercover, seeing if he can be egged into getting into something he shouldn’t.
“If you can’t galvanize and promote and recruit people to vote for Mitt Romney, we’re done,” Nugent said. “We’ll be a suburb of Indonesia next year. Our president, attorney general, our vice president, Hillary Clinton — they’re criminals, they’re criminals.”
New York magazine’s Daily Intel blog reports that a Secret Service spokesman told them, “We are aware of it and we’ll conduct an appropriate follow up” regarding Nugent’s comments.
Nugent also ripped into four of the Supreme Court justices for what he says is their stance against Americans’ “right to keep and bear arms.” He concluded with a call to cut off the heads of Democrats in November: “We need to ride into that battlefield and chop their heads off in November. Any questions?”
Of course, there’s still no mention of Ted’s nut rant about the government preventing him from mercy killing his “three-legged oryx” and how that was like Nazi Germany putting the Jews onto trains. And that it was time for us to take the gun off “the brown shirt” and shoot it up his ass.
Words have consequences, particularly here where there’s a good history of presidents and politicians being shot by the unhinged.
Most sensible people with critical facilities have a good idea what Nugent is playing with. His is the language of the white extreme right-wing armed radical, the kind — a few of which, the FBI and ATF jail every year. To emphasize again: The main difference is Ted’s famous as an inflammatory celebrity entertainer and in that role he views himself as a leader for crystallizing thought and inspiration.
Skim through it again, if you will. You tell me if the NRA host looks real pleased with the direction it took.
Many in the hall are filing by, ignoring Nugent.
At one point, the host puts a little girl on stage next to the Nuge to ask him who’s his favorite president. Nugent is so nuts he can’t even act appropriately around a very small, very young child. Instead of giving a straight answer, he says “Charlton Heston.”
If enough people saw these vignettes even the majority of the hardcore right fools would want to have nothing to do with Ted Nugent. There is something profoundly wrong with him and it is only a symptom of the dark times in which we live that he wields it as a career asset.
Nevertheless, most of Ted’s audience at the NRA interview — which isn’t big — did not give him any serious huzzahs. They saw inappropriate behavior too unhooked even for them.
A couple weeks ago Nugent endorsed Mitt Romney. Romney, who is totally without principles, a person who will seemingly do anything convenient to be President, made a noise about talking to Ted and accepting that endorsement.
Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s campaign called for civility on Tuesday after aging rock star Ted Nugent made an apparent threat against President Barack Obama before an audience of U.S. gun lobbyists …
Andrea Saul, Romney’s spokeswoman, did not condemn Nugent in an email on Tuesday but said Romney wants to promote civility.
“Divisive language is offensive no matter what side of the political aisle it comes from. Mitt Romney believes everyone needs to be civil,” she said.
For many many reasons, this being yet another, Mitt Romney will never be president of the United States. Mitt Romney, the epitome of the 1 percenter, and Ted Nugent, the Motor City Madman now more well known as a true blue reactionary Texas wacko — it’s to laugh. It was just another clueless Romney gaffe, similar to accepting an endorsement from something like flesh-eating bacteria or a deer tick.
It was never going to be an asset. And his staff must be incompetent if they didn’t tell him.
Woe, the rich man’s burden to pay too much tax. Gonna leave to Grand Cayman unless he gets it back. Woe, the rich man’s burden to carry all the poor. An endless trail of sorrow he cannot tread no more.
The poor don’t pay enuff. They spend it all on liquor! If we stopped it all right now we’d get rich a whole lot quicker.
I’ve slowed the pace of posting on Howard, not because he’s not around but because it’s all the same now. Ted Nugent is nuts and repellent but repetitive. His shtick is a shallow one and for a man enamored of using insults as weapons he has very little in the armory. All his enemies are are either subhuman, punks or hippies — sometimes all three at the same time.
He was a guest at the NRA Convention in St. Louis this weekend. I’ve embedded a video of him being interviewed. While the hall is filled with gun owners walking by, the response to Ted is tepid.
Ted bores young people who don’t know him. And for people not out on the most extreme edge with those musing daily about going to Washington to shoot people, Ted is just too unpalatable. However, there’s always value in showing readers overseas just how throwback and extreme some of us are in the declining superpower.
Here, in the big convention for gun promotion, even the NRA’s host is taken a little aback by Ted’s fountain of virulent angry crazy. He notices it’s killing most of the interest, at one point remarking: “What a silent crowd.”
But I listened to the entire thing so you don’t have to.
Here are Ted’s high moments. He’s always at his “best” when coming off like some paranoid old white guy from the country in the Sixties, the air whistling between his teeth while he rants about fluoride in the water as government tyranny:
If Barack Obama becomes the President in November again I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year. [A couple of nervous laughs from the crowd. Is Ted joking? They can’t tell.] Why are you laughing? You think that’s funny!? That’s not funny at all! I’m serious as a heart attack!
If you can’t galvanize … people to vote for Mitt Romney, we’re done. We’ll be a suburb of Indonesia next year. Our president, attorney journal, our vice president, Hillary Clinton — they’re criminals.
This is a Ted riff on the current administration, now couched as a fable on what should be done about the “coyote” …
If the coyote’s in your living room pissing on your couch, it’s not the coyote’s fault, it’s your fault for not shooting him.
“I know Mitt Romney has made terrible mistakes in the past up there in the Massachusetts zone…”
[Mitt Romney] vowed to me … he will help gut Fedzilla… if you haven’t got a job, how can there be unemployment benefits … We’ve got a bloodsucker nation, this President is buying their votes, Mitt Romney is going to attack all these violations…
At one point Ted launches into a personal tale about his “three-legged oryx” — a non-native antelope on his ranch in Texas — and not being able to mercy kill it, allegedly because of government regulation.
He rants, likening this, somehow, to Nazi Germany when “the Jews” were being herded onto trains by the SS. It’s an offensive comparison and Ted is oblivious to everything but his personal animus. He tells the crowd it’s time to take the gun off the “brown shirt” and shoot it up his ass. The crowd is quiet. Even the gun-owners are nervous about cheering him too much on it.
The first, an everyman’s adventure. The second about rent-seeking and corporate tax cheats/parasites. A year after Occupy Wall Street and growing knowledge of great inequality and national erosion due to 1 percent tax evasion, all still true.
The last post on ‘Old pink meat product‘ produced a comments section identifying the electrocuting hot dog cooker as the Presto Hot Dogger. YouTube had a few home videos devoted to the Presto as retro cooking equipment. Unbreakable and manufactured, originally, as early as the Fifties in Eau Claire, WI, here’s one amusing video.
With a touch of extra amusement provided by the Carolina Chocolate Drops singing “Short Life of Trouble.”
I used the Hot Dogger in the late Eighties and early Nineties. It was a thing that, fundamentally, always worked. Unlike the current service-centered economy, as you know if you have standard Internet connectivity through AT&T, or have recently dumped cable because having no tv other than DVD replay is actually better.
Presto made home appliances. And you know what happened. It was all moved to China.
Here’s a piece from the BBC on US manufacturing, from 2002:
Maryjo Cohen is shutting two factories.
Cheap, high quality goods from China have eaten away profit margins at National Presto industries, a Wisconsin-based firm which makes pressure cookers and electric frying pans.
“That’s going on all over the US, our entire industry has moved to China,” says Ms Cohen, National Presto’s president.
She is reluctant to say how many jobs will go at National Presto’s plants in New Mexico and Mississippi but it will be a “substantial number for a company our size” – at least half the workforce.
National Presto has an agent in Hong Kong who subcontracts work to plants in China’s neighbouring Guangdong province.
How did National Presto diversify and expand after outsourcing its small cooking appliance manufacturing? You read this blog, you already have a hunch.
Once again, a perfect example of national decline.
National Presto went into arms manufacturing, the only protected business and preserved-at-all-costs labor in the United States.
The company makes over 600 million a year in ammo and ordnance production through a subsidiary.
National Presto Industries Inc. said Monday its ammunition products unit has received an $81 million defense contract option from the U.S. Army.
The Eau Claire-based company said AMTEC Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary, received the option award under AMTEC’s five-year contract to produce 40 mm systems for the Army. It is the first award AMTEC has received during the government’s 2012 fiscal year, which ends in September, and additional awards are anticipated, the company said.
The option award brings the cumulative amount awarded under an ongoing 40 mm contract to $364.7 million, the company said.
A business profile at Seeking Alpha comments, “National Presto Industries (NPK) is an oddly diversified producer of military arms, adult diapers, and small cooking appliances with a market capitalization of well under $1 billion.”
Up until a few years ago the received wisdom, also delivered by economists, was that it was fine to deindustrialize and ship most domestic non-military manufacturing to China and other periperal nations with cheap labor markets.
You didn’t have to make things in America anymore. You could be good at other stuff — like financial products and software programming.
Add arms manufacturing.
Life ain’t fair. But even the bromide, the preservation of arms manufacturing and the consequent decade of continuous war has been profoundly unfair to the 99 percent in this country.
If arms manufacturing had been exposed to the same pressure as all other forms of domestic manufacturing, we wouldn’t have war.
A black comedy could be written around a script in which a national leader decides to enact policies that would mandate absolute lowest bid contracts on arms manufacturing to a global marketplace. Yes, I know it could never happen.
But a story revolving around the fear, loathing and comeuppance in the military defense industry complex upon dislocation into the Chinese manufacturing sector is enjoyable to consider. I’d buy that novel. I’d anticipate it being optioned to Hollywood. I’d be first in line for the the movie adaptation, too.
I’d love the parts where the dispirited newly fired workers of Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin were taught how to apply for food stamps at severance meetings. And, how, with a lot of extra free time on their hands they fruitlessly strived to make a go of things by fashioning their own personal brands, uploading homemade white rap and comedy videos to YouTube. Or making small business website pages advertising new artisan coffee or dog walking businesses. Logging on to Zaarly everyday to find new opportunities as personal assistants or gofers for the more fortunate, locally.
Going back to school to learn how to be a chef at the Cordon Bleu school; taking two or three janitorial positions, any job that couldn’t be sent to hired hands overseas. Wait staff, not so favorable an outlook, because of something else, made by another in the army of pitiless trivial douchebags from the creative economic destruction industry, coincidentally called the Presto.
There would be growth in the cyberdefense subsidiary businesses of the big arms companies because, paradoxically, while all the manufacturing had been shipped to China, Chinese state-supported hackers were still penetrating US networks. However, growth would slow as even the Chinese began to realize there was little left to steal in the way of so-called intellectual property. And getting into the power grid just wasn’t important when you had that country’s
production completely by the balls.
Yes, there should be equalization and fair dinkum payback! And no, it won’t happen but that doesn’t mean you can’t savor the idea. China is getting into the aircraft carrier business, I hear. And certainly it has a military space program.
Think of all the money that could be saved on ammo and bombs.
If the Chinese can make electric guitars for Fender and Gibson, and all the digital underpinnings that go into the modern consumer electronics music industry, surely it can produce Joint Direct Attack Munitions and Predator drones through licensing agreements.
Shock! Horror!
It’s nice to dream about it all being gone. Like the Presto Hot Dogger.
My lunch, revolting to some. Two hot dogs — actually cheaper turkey franks — and one for late in the afternoon. Since I’ve been doing the slime thing I wanted to let readers know: Of course I’m a hypocrite on meat. You have to be in this country.
I’m 90 percent sure turkey franks are made in a way similar to pink slime, from the worst cuts of the bird, stuff that used to be thrown away. Then sanitized, perhaps with ammonia, to kill all the salmonella and listeria.
And while I’ve been known to eat a raw hot dog in a pinch, mostly I boil them thoroughly. Once I even had something called a “Hot Dogger” that cooked by electrocution, making the hot dog part of a completed circuit you ran off the wall. (Did you ever have something like it? I would like to know.)
However, I’m also completely encouraged by the idea that one day, maybe soon, someone like Jamie Oliver will do a number on this, too, just the way pink slime was treated.
It will be a good thing because it’s the television coverage, complete with producer’s eye for unforced footage of mothers and kids going “Yuck!” and shrinking back in revulsion that galvanized consumer choice.
And if something is tossed off the market and more people keep thinking about the US agri-meat system, one in which toxic microbial growth is guaranteed, that’s very good.
As posted yesterday, the meat industry produces incomprehensible amounts of manure. The shit not only contaminates the cows on the outside when they stand in it, but also on the inside, when they are fed from grains cultivated in fields fertilized or tainted by runoff from it.
While bad practice, maybe — and it’s a small maybe — this wouldn’t have mattered so much but for one thing, toxic E. coli. It was not native to the cow intestine but now finds a home there and the way the meat industry does things is responsible. That’s the science of it.
It came about because the mass of excrement in proximity to the animal and meat processing makes for an excellent mixing process. And it cannot be ameliorated, therefore Rube Goldberg sanitation processing of the meat has become a feasible profit source.
So the technologies invented to cope with it are all band-aids, lousy inventions and jerry-bilt methods to diminish the numbers of dangerous microbes in the product — after the fact.
That’s the long and short of it.
From a security standpoint a bioterrorist can’t do as effective job as centrally placed business malfeasance in the food industry. It’s a topic the blog has discussed in the past when mentioning mass food poisonings caused by widespread bacterial contaminations in the last ten years.
Invariably, we have made and allowed an infrastructure in food processing which allows for casualties, presently factored out as an acceptable minor cost of doing business if the human losses are not too bad. If the profit margin is great enough a certain level of collateral damage in the way of foodborne illness and resulting fines are acceptable.
De facto, that makes the businessmen and companies fingered in food poisoning outbreaks better incidental bioterrorists than anyone purposeful.
For instance, in a multi-mail from the DailyKos last week:
Here’s the story. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) currently inspects all chicken and turkey carcasses for things like bruises, bile and feces before they are sent to further processing. However, the UDSA [sic] is now considering a pilot program that would eliminate that inspection and allow poultry processing plants to do whatever they want.
From now until April 26, the USDA is holding a public comment period on whether to go forward with this pilot program. During this comment period, we plan to submit tens of thousands of comments in opposition. Already, over 40,000 members of the Daily Kos community have signed our petition to the USDA …
I’m not a big believer in on-line petitions.
It wasn’t social networking that knee-capped the makers of pink slime. It was television, specifically Jamie Oliver and 60 Minutes, and well-placed articles in the New York Times.
