“High-fructose corn syrup first started trickling into our food supply about 40 years ago; by 1984, it was flowing from just about every soda fountain in the country. These days HFCS accounts for almost half of all the added sugars in the U.S. diet, but the corn Niagara may soon be over. Last week, PepsiCo became the latest manufacturer to turn its back on America’s sweetener, introducing three new soft drinks—Pepsi Natural, Pepsi Throwback, and Mountain Dew Throwback—sweetened with a “natural” blend of cane and beet sugars. Next week, Snapple will roll out its most expensive advertising campaign ever to promote a “natural” line of tea drinks brewed with “real” cane sugar. Pizza Hut, Kraft Foods, and ConAgra have also made the switch in recent months. Not even a $30 million multimedia campaign from the Corn Refiners Association has done much to reverse the trend.” — Daniel Engber(Slate)
“Mike Davis, whose 2006 book The Monster at Our Door warned of the threat of a global bird flu pandemic, explains how globalized agribusiness set the stage for a frightening outbreak of the swine flu in Mexico:
‘The Spring Break hordes returned from Cancún this year with an invisible but sinister souvenir.
The Mexican swine flu, a genetic chimera probably conceived in the fecal mire of an industrial pigsty, suddenly threatens to give the whole world a fever. Initial outbreaks across North America reveal an infection rate already traveling at higher velocity than the last official pandemic strain, the 1968 Hong Kong flu.’ ” (SocialistWorker.org).
“…[I]ndustrial livestock production is a powerful driver of viral (and bacterial) evolution. [...In an article published yesterday at Socialist Worker.org, Mike Davis] emphasizes that the transition “from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hell, unprecedented in nature, containing tens, even hundreds of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems, suffocating in heat and manure, while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates and pathetic progenies” creates a perfect storm for evolving pathogens likely to establish resistance to antivirals and antibiotics. This is not just the case in China (everyone’s favorite target for allocating bird flu blame) or Mexico (everyone’s new favorite target for allocating swine flu blame). To quote Davis, anyone “who has ever driven through Tar Heel, N.C. or Milford, Utah–where Smithfield Foods subsidiaries each annually produce more than 1 million pigs as well as hundreds of lagoons full of toxic shit–will intuitively understand how profoundly agribusiness has meddled with the laws of nature.” In short, in addition to animals raised for slaughter in cruel conditions, chemically enhanced and/or genetically altered meat products, environmental degradation, and unjust toxic factory work conditions, the global industrial food complex is producing some really scary microbes as well.” (Somatosphere).
Twitter Search To Become Real Search: “The fact that Twitter’s search is now often faster and more relevant than any other search engine out there is not a secret anymore. It is, however, a very limited search engine: it merely indexes a bunch of tweets. In its current state, it’s great for tracking conversations, but it will never be a competitor to Google.
This is about to change. According to CNET, Twitter’s new VP of Operations, Santosh Jayaram, said that Twitter search will soon start crawling the links included in tweets. There’s a lot of links there, and given Twitter’s huge growth, soon these links might comprise a hefty portion of the overall web, making it a much more complete search engine that it currently is. It’s a big technical leap, but it shows that the folks at Twitter are serious about search.
Jayaram gave another very interesting hint at where they’re going: Twitter Search will also get a reputation ranking system. That means that not all tweets will be equal; rank will be calculated for each twitterer, probably based on several criteria such as number of followers, number of retweets and so forth.” (Mashable ).
Obama is Spock: “Our president bears a striking resemblance to the rational “Star Trek” Vulcan whose mixed race made him cultural translator to the universe.” — Jeff Greenwald (Salon)
“On April 18th 2009, the New Scientist published an article on a remarkable project developed by researchers at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy, and the World Bank. The authors combined a series of maps to create a new map of connectedness showing the most interconnected and remote places on earth.” (Visual Complexity)
“Veterans of the original Woodstock festival, including Levon Helm, Paul Kantner and Country Joe McDonald, have organized a scheduled flashback of sorts: they and several other musicians who performed at that 1969 concert will play a new show on Aug. 15 to celebrate the festival’s 40th anniversary, The Associated Press reported. The new concert, whose lineup also includes the Woodstock alumni Big Brother and the Holding Company, Ten Years After, Canned Heat and Mountain, will be held at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts in upstate New York, where the first Woodstock festival took place. Mr. Helm, who played at Woodstock as a member of the Band, will be appearing with his Levon Helm Band, and Mr. Kantner, who performed at Woodstock with Jefferson Airplane, will appear at the anniversary concert with the upgraded Jefferson Starship.” (New York Times) I think I’ll skip it this time. Wonder how many in the audience will be veterans of the real thing? And does anyone know if Max Yasgur is still alive?
“The best way to track the spread of swine flu across the United States in the coming weeks may be to imagine it riding a dollar bill. The routes taken by millions of them are at the core of a computer model at Northwestern University that is predicting the epidemic’s future. Reassuringly, it foresees only about 2,000 cases by the end of this month, mostly in New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Houston.” (New York Times )
“The current issue of the New York Review of Books includes an article by Senator Arlen Specter, Republican Democrat of Pennsylvania, called “The Need to Roll Back Presidential Power Grabs,” which suggests that Mr. Specter has not switched parties with the intention of simply serving as a rubber stamp for President Barack Obama.
Finding Mr. Specter’s byline in the left-leaning Review would seem to underscore that, as he said in his official statement on Tuesday, his “political philosophy” is now “more in line with Democrats than Republicans.” But the article itself makes clear that the newest Democrat hopes to use his position to rein in the power of the presidency.
In it, Mr. Specter makes the case that “since September 11, the United States has witnessed one of the greatest expansions of executive authority in its history, at the expense of the constitutionally mandated separation of powers.”
He then lays out an ambitious effort to roll back those powers, in words that indeed seem more natural coming from a senator of the majority party, rather than one in the minority…” via The Lede Blog – NYTimes.
“Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al-Nahyan is now under investigation in the United Arab Emirates after the shocking tape showed him beating a man with a nailed plank, setting him on fire, attacking him with a cattle prod and running him over.
But now lawyers for American businessman Bassam Nabulsi, who smuggled the tape out of the UAE, have written to the justice minister of Abu Dhabi – the most powerful of the emirates that make up the UAE – claiming to have considerably more evidence against Issa.
“I have more than two hours of video footage showing Sheikh Issa’s involvement in the torture of more than 25 people,” wrote Texas-based lawyer Anthony Buzbee in a letter obtained by the Observer.” (The Observer [via boing boing]).
Springsteen leads Seeger 90th birthday tribute(Reuters). Elsewhere around the country, for example here in Cambridge, MA, people are coming together at folk clubs to sing out in celebration. Happy birthday and many happy returns, Pete, you are an American cultural treasure.
“It was snap, crackle and pop in the early days of the universe. You would not want to live there. Astronomers said Tuesday that they had smashed the long-distance record in astronomy when they recorded an explosion, probably a massive early star, that lived and died 13 billion years ago, only about 600 million years after the Big Bang. The explosion was detected on April 23 as a burst of gamma-rays by NASA’s Swift satellite, which has been patrolling the skies for these powerful explosions for the last five years.” (New York Times )
“While public health officials are still trying to determine where the outbreak of the swine flu started, there has been a lot of speculation online this week about a possible, though as yet unsubstantiated, link to an industrial hog farm in Veracruz, Mexico.
As my colleague in Mexico, Marc Lacey, reported on Wednesday, “state health authorities looking for the initial source of the outbreak,” toured the “million-pig hog farm in Perote, in Veracruz State.” Mr. Lacey explained:
The plant is half-owned by Smithfield Foods, an American company and the world’s largest pork producer. Mexico’s first known swine flu case, which was later confirmed, was from Perote, according to Health Minister José Ángel Córdova. The case involved a 5-year-old boy who recovered.
