Category Archives: Articles and Essays

Articles and Essays, Works in Progress

‘Oink, Oink’ becomes ‘Oink, oink, oink, oink, oink, oink, oink, oink, oink…’

Let's bring it home.

Let’s bring it home.

I am not a vegetarian, and I believe humans are mostly ultimately biologic omnivores. I have anemia and have a difficult time not eating any meat. Also, I love bacon, despite my half Hebrew heritage. I respect matanza tradition that feeds a whole community with the slaughter of a pig.

I live where many of the nation’s pigs are raised. You can smell the difference. There is a smell of rot, feces, and death when near the factory farms so pervasive in the air it makes most people gag, so thick it can make your eyes sting. Near small family-owned farms, there are just the normal smells of animals and manure. When IBP and [Tyson, &, &, &] Big Pork industrialized meat animal companies moved in to the state, they bought up family farms when the public and family farmers were not knowledgeable of their practices, until they had enough to affect the market price of pork or meat*, so that more and more small farms or family farms could not afford to keep their operations running. But the way they did that was to put TEN TIMES as many pigs into an area as was usual and considered necessary for the health and safety of the pigs. And you could smell the difference.

Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, incrementally increasingly, the farm-smell out in the country went from an organic manure smell (or an “eww! man-oo-er!” smell if your family is from the city like mine) to a suffocating chemical-y smell that leaves a person feeling sick. This is partly because there is so much more feces in the same amount of space. Well, pee-yew! But besides simple city-slicker nose wrinkling, there is more sulfur, and the waste cannot be treated the same way. These companies use unsafe methods of dealing with the magnitude of animal waste to turn it into manure or dealing with what cannot be turned into manure: see the viral FactoryFarmDrones.com.

Even in relatively smaller family farm operations, because they must buy in to the pork industry methods to make a living, and they use hog confinement to raise pigs for meat, the danger is fatal. Hog confinement is deadly to humans. It has killed four farmers in one month alone in the hog livestock states.

These companies often purposely ignore the rules of pigs allowed per square foot, because the fine or citation or cost of sanction is affordable to them. Additionally, the rules grew more lax on allowances for treatment of animals and health, safety, and sanitation measures for sickness or deaths per capita, dealing with feces, disposing of dead animals, etc. because these companies intensely and forcefully lobby congress–whereas family farmers did not have such political power, but struggled until in order to continue farming or {continue} making a living, each farmer or family would be econmically forced to either sell the land and lease it back to continue running it–under the new rules of meat industry’s company in the area, just like Big Ag and sharecroppers. Nowadays, often the company fully owns the animals and the farmer raises them or “leases” the animals from the company, originally often involving selling the family’s livestock to the company and “leasing” them back to raise them.

*Industrial livestock animal companies also alter the price in behind-the-scenes stock market and finance industry deals or political negotiations. They use other political tactics, too**, muddying the environmental cause with corruption and essentially not just victim-blaming but economically crushing the family farm, yet again.

Meat is infused with the anti-bacterials the livestock animals must be given just to survive in such close quarters and uncomfortable [worse than] sparse [worse than] cold metal pens. Meat is infused with Red #40 that causes sterility. Brits in the U.S. can taste the formaldehyde in the ground beef.

Last but not least, pigs are as smart or smarter than dogs.

Oh, wait, they’re *&%$ing delicious. Then use a local/family hog-raising farm. Save up for eating it if that’s what it takes. Hey, even if you love swine or meat, there’s no need to eat meat for every meal. In fact, eating less of it from having to buy the expensive local, well-fed, humanely treated meat actually means your meat tastes better because less fear and less infection and not living in your own feces your whole life gives that more satisfied pig better meat, for a more satisfied human.


Some o' my sources:
**Here's a poultry example.
Iowa farm independent film from 2011 (on Big Ag corn?) screened in conjunction with local sustainably-sourced food organization
Applied Animal Behaviour journal's article on cows
"Inside a pig farm" video by Animal Equality, via their Facebook page

PIC: http://www.freeimages.com/photo/1381013
Updated 07/28/2015

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Articles and Essays, Ruffled Draft, Works in Progress

Oh the Joys of (Obesity and) Poverty

A Brief Encounter with Obesity, Poverty, and Entitlement

In the U.S. there is so much poison crap in the food, especially if you are poor, you can’t help poisoning yourself into near obesity.

On the other hand, I’ve met people in the U.S. Midwest who really did epitomize the problem of entitled ignorant Americans expanding their couch potato-hood ass-first. This couple sat around playing video games/Candy Crush, one spouse’s mother doing her nails all day long, and the father exclaimed retorts like, “How could I take the bus? I have a BABY!!” …Whereas my own mother—and hundreds of thousands of people, especially single mothers—took and take the bus with several young children/babies, carrying one, another in the stroller, and keeping an eye on the toddler.

I know another person who, like my own mother did, works and homeschools her children. My friend has simultaneously been going to school, and now that one of her children is 11 years old, she can finally buy a house, maybe, sort-of—only because she is lucky enough that her new partner has a parent in realty who is helping them with a rent-to-own mortgage that includes the down payment. Unlike my own mother and this other young mother I know, the couch potatoes considered Taco Bell food, food fit for a baby of one year, no less.

The equation goes something like this: If 1) You have to exercise, say, double to get rid of all the crap in processed and pesticide-sprayed/GMO foods, and 2) These foods do not give you enough nutrients and enough of the right nutrients to expend a daily amount of energy needed for exercise, let alone the extra exercise required to flush out the so-called food’s excess and over-processed sugar, which turns to fat, mutagenic toxins, and synthetics that unbalance metabolism and destroy the gastric biome and enzyme development, all while 3) These foods are the most inexpensive and the primary foods available to poor people–then the American diet and poverty and poverty-diet causes obesity.

Our culture in most places perpetuates the idea that mobility should require spewing fossil fuel in a hunk of thousands of dollars of metal, individually, even the able-bodied, and that we are entitled to this cyborg transportation, and that believing so is the norm. If you prescribe to this belief, then you have no idea that getting around should be exercise unto itself.

Disavowal, however, is difficult or may operate with fervor in the mind, but to compete in the culture–well, a person cannot compete in the culture at such a disadvantage of distance, speed, and energy having to physically hustle to arrive and return amidst those entitledly consuming massive amounts of ecological energy in isolated transportation cyborg chambers or Shell exoskeletons…especially when that person is trying to rise up from a hungry poverty.

On top of this personal physical struggle and physical struggle to participate and compete is the knowledge that getting around is exercise (the “epistemic advantage”). The struggle to challenge the hegemonically pervasive oppressively predominant belief and privilege otherwise makes for a higher level of struggle, though maybe only accessible with a cheat-code: attempting, much less achieving any explanation toward achieving understanding by those who have enough moments of rest and strength of mind (to realize it) requires some moments of rest and strength of mind on the part of the struggler. And then, additionally, to believe in themselves–quite a feat when you’re lugging laundry on a cart down the sidewalk in the winter or on your back and on the bus on your only time off that’s not eaten up by a walking and/or biking (if you’re able-bodied) and/or mass transit (if you’re lucky and don’t live in the Midwest) commute to a job that doesn’t actually afford you to do your laundry as often as the cyborg wasting 3 or 4 seats in a pollution vomiting car to work and the store and Zumba and the bar once a month or every day and night. Maybe there is the underlying notion of the reversal of reality.

Challenge this belief within yourself. Consider also reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma.  The much greater dilemma of forced time constraints and food accessibility and insecurity and limitation means fast food and “cheese food” by necessity or as prize. And not enough nutrition, often plain not enough food, to perform the exercise of getting around.

Keep in mind the task is exacerbated when you need to get around to jobs farther away because of zoning, red-lining, or not being able to afford to live near a commerce district, or to make better money or work two jobs, the second either when you’re tired from full-time already or in order to try to get full-time hours, but both usually doing repetitive motions at a winding speed (fast food, all other food service, cashiering, factory production lines, janitorial work).

The 20-year-old guy with Viking genetic ancestry might be able to lug laundry to the other dorm with the laundry room on a diet of Taco Bell and cafeteria genetically modified bleached flour and not even need the niacin enrichment. But the 45-year-old brown woman or black woman with osteoporosis, the 5-foot anemic, the pre-diabetic second-generation subsidized-housing renter and her daughter and secret undocumented niece cannot bike down the busy boulevard shoulder, across the bridge and the tracks every day to 6 to 16 working hours on a low-protein diet without developing fibromyalgia, or for 20 miles of highway to the next town where there’s work that might pay enough to get off food stamps or to grandma’s house for cooked farm food instead.

COMING SOON: more on zoning and red-lining, rural maps and NoLo geo-cash-ing (plus hobos in Boho), and response to your brain on sugar.

© Sabri Sky 2014, 2015

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Articles and Essays, Works in Progress

Facebook Satisfaction Survey Response: Dissatisfied with Privacy and Grieving over Social Experiments

Facebook Satisfaction Survey Response: Dissatisfied with Privacy and Social Experiments

I don’t like how difficult it is to figure out what can be seen by networks of people. I don’t like that even when a user sets something to only be seen by “Friends” network, for instance, or “Custom” select people, the post is not taken out of others’ NewsFeeds.

This is an issue in the “other” direction in a way, too–but primarily still an issue with the user not knowing how what is private or not works, and not having control or what is private or not private been set by or even *known* by the user:

I don’t like the algorithms where Facebook decides what a user sees of the user’s Friends or Networks, and of whom, in NewsFeed. Right while/after Facebook was “experimenting” with only showing people what some unknown person or group internally of Facebook (????kept undisclosed) were “happy” posts, I noticed that posts a young, troubled friend of mine were posting appeared on my friend’s profile page wall that I had not seen in my NewsFeed.  These were troubled posts…so I had not seen or known that my friend was having *so* much trouble. We use Facebook to keep in touch, to communicate, to know what’s going on with each other. When someone posts on Facebook with an open-privacy post, to Public, or sets the post to Friends or certain networks, the user–and the users friends and networks–are expecting it to be visible…available…in NewsFeed, and noticeable esp. when a person logs in or looks at Facebook at the time of or shortly thereafter a user posts. If I had seen these posts as they happened…as would be the case more so had they been in my NewsFeed as usual, and as expected, without those “experiments” on withholding posts that were deemed not “positive” or “happy” for a “happier” experience on Facebook…I would have interacted differently with my friend, and sooner, and responded to such posts, or contacted my friend some other way sooner. My young friend, troubled and posting about it to express herself, killed herself.  She expressed where she knew others could see, a form of reaching out, posting where she was under the impression others would see…her friends whom she was often too embarrassed to show weakness to in other ways or forms would see, her friends and mentors whom she expected to see these posts and to whom this was the most dignified way she could reach out…. But her posts did not reach our eyes as we expected, under and for the undisclosed purposes of purported and UNWITTING and NON-CONSENSUAL psychosocial experimenting by Facebook.

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Articles and Essays, Ruffled Draft, Works in Progress

What Does an Assault Victim Look Like? What Does Her Assailant Look Like?

“Cops Beat & Kidnap 12-yo Girl in Front of her Home, Claiming She was a Prostitute” (Story: http://bit.ly/1BE3j1F) Response

#doyougetityet  They always do this: Involved officers charge their victim with assault and/or interfering with official acts, in order to cover up their crime and violence and to make the person, or, here, her family, being that she is a young minor, go through and be stuck in a difficult, time-consuming, financially devastating, mentally and emotionally burdensome and even traumatic court case to “distract” her/them from being able to speak up about what was done to herself or themselves as victims (on top of, of course, going through the physical pain often to the point of medical injury, hospitalization, and/or continuous or permanent physical pain or limitation in the first place, and mental anguish also caused by the violence).  It deters focus, and legal focus, from and uses up resources needed for dealing with the actual victimhood, violence and/or injury, It is a COMMON LEGAL STRATEGY, initiated as protocol at the time of “incident,” i.e. victimization by officers or within the time frame of finishing and filing reports and charges.

Keep in mind a pending case is limiting in itself to the point of functionally injurious, often with long-lasting or permanent effect.  While the case against the 12-year-old or any such victim is ongoing, her or her family’s or any victim’s legal record prominently reads “pending case” of “pending charge,” and no matter the circumstance or physical violence she or her family or someone is suffering as a victim, and no matter how obvious to the common person or professional those physical injuries, the victimization, the absurdity of the situation, socially, professionally, and legally one is with pox, rights nixed, opportunities beaten away too by the baton and legal follow-up. …Including for some representation: attorneys, firms, Bar Association referral program participants, some legal aid (including actual area Legal Aid organizations or free or reduced-cost lawyers [legal advice providers] or attorneys [who represent in court]), or that rarity, pro-bono retaining,…are no longer an option for the victim; all of the above professionals, type of organization/agency, and lawyers normally participating in such programs or retaining arrangements…often won’t touch such a case with a ten foot pole. #doyougetityet

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Articles and Essays, Ruffled Draft, Words & Works of Others, Works in Progress

Divide and Conquer; Divide and Conflate; Inflate the Power

“Not only is [there] an imbalanced concentration of power,
but cops aren’t actually experts at what the laws actually are.” —Jarien Sky

     So very, very much so–the goons don’t know the laws that they are gooning for, except in the moment in which they are suspending other laws guaranteed rights. The brutality arm =/= the courts and legal system. The false interchangeability of knowledge, function, and power has “crept” in (promoted from on high, purposely) to the point where though the distinctions are constantly plowed over, they are still used as an excuse for lack of actual helpful assistance or accomplishment, and because of their *de juris only* state of or enactment of their distinction, people, that is, lay people, including *employers* and people forcibly, both physically and otherwise, as it goes, involved in the one of the “branches” do not fully if at all know the distinctions and their differences, and namely, implications (charge constantly conflated with conviction), just as is clear from the  impossibility of checks-and-balances apparent in the way to describe this part of problem, as de juris only.
      The problem also extends to everyone who works with the cops: Look at New Mexico’s medical professionals, medical practitioners being in the caring, nurturing professions, participating in the excessive, unnecessary anal probing, under directives of the police force and a judge, of the person (indubitably representative) who sued over it; or the Albuquerque EMTs who violently dehumanize over the fact that a person takes a psychiatric medication that they have a prescription for, while on a call that APD cops are sent to, and sent to FIRST, who do the same–*and* accuse a person of not taking their “meds,” as excuse for dehumanizing degrading treatment and violence…in front of life-saving EMTs who either remain silent or participate in these contradictory and equally degrading manners. Unfortunately, I know a number of people who have been subjected to this experience.

#MARSHALLLAW #eminemstate #doyougetityet

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Articles and Essays, Ruffled Draft, Works in Progress

On Crack

“Boom, [Crack, / ya think you’re all that], / the Beat goes On / and on and on and on and on.”  I had this neighbor friend  in Albuquerque–yes, in the Bad-lands of Bryan Cranston and gang–whom I had to rescue from the throes of a seizure he was on from crack, and might have died from.  He lay there sprawled in the hall, a seemly smell escaping his apartment, and barely croaking my name out of his throat. He was wearing underwear; I think even tightey-whiteys just like in the show. His eyes were sunken in, and purple, and looked like a raccoon’s–I mean, literally, looked like a raccoon’s.  Glassy, beady, darting alllll crazy! Then I realized the smell was coming from him. He shook and convulsed, and tried to get up to step the one single step from his door that was perpendicular to mine to knock on my door. He couldn’t. He fell in jerky slow-mo half-in, half-out of his apartment, smacking himself against the door and the dirty hallway floor as he seized, straightening out–only his fucked up muscles and nervous system, mind you, not his life–in seizure after seizure that he was fully awake for, aware of losing control and his muscles tightening up so stiffly he smacked his body on whatever was available, and couldn’t stop it. He tried to look at me and talk to me through the seizures. Y’know, between when his eyes were rolling back up in his head so that I could only see the whites, like he were some evil zombie ghost from a movie.
Now, I had a friend who had epilepsy in college. She drank too much and that’s what gave her the seizures, nine times out of ten.  But this was different….
Since he didn’t have epilepsy, there wasn’t a somewhat predictable broken, sizzling neuropathway that the crack sent his body’s electricity on.
. . .

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Articles and Essays

NYPL Library of the Lions

Love of Reading, Lore, and Research

Dear Mayor de Blasio,

I lived in New York in 2001, and had to leave when the Towers fell. I have always been looking forward to returning.  My family is also from New York.
One of my wonderful experiences while in school in the City was going to the NYPL.  I have always been looking forward to going back.

It gave me such peace and such a sense of the strength of knowledge and of connection to learning and history to be in that library.  It gave me a sense of action and I could feel my presence through its presence, with the hustle and bustle of searching and reading, a quietude and a reverence New York style.

The Mid-Manhattan NYPL branch fosters connection to history and to the power of the pursuit of knowledge for all. It was always my favorite place Midtown to spend time.  Amidst all the glitz and tourism and high-fallutin’ advertisement and money of Midtown, the Library with the lions stands for but more importantly IS, physically is, the people’s center of the strength of knowledge, particularly in tangible form. To be able to sit amongst the stacks in the middle of Manhattan gives a sense of solace, a respite, a reassurance of one’s equality and ability, necessary here more than anywhere.

For these reasons, it was always my favorite thing on 42nd Street, and I am even a theater person.

http://www.savenypl.org/email-the-mayor

Daily News suit by architect to stop renovations

https://www.facebook.com/humansofnewyork

Library not listening

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Articles and Essays, Kettle-Cooked Epaulets

Behavioral Health by Brainwashing and Horror [draft]

A Lit Review of the Exposing of the (For-Profit) Teen “Help” Programs

Concern from a friend over the shock tactic and lack of large study sources for this Cracked article on troubled teen treatment programs prompts me to surf from that starting point, with my magnifying glass out.

My summary response to statistics for sourcing is to put in a plug for Qualitative Analysis of Narratives and Interviews.  That covered, . . . .

It looks to me like that Cracked article is a personal experience account. Granted, it is an essay written with some emotional rhetoric including sarcasm and maybe some sensationalism, it is a “sensationalist” (horror) story she’s been through. Also, the links are more “legit” articles, like “causing . . . [teens’] . . .problems _TO_WORSEN_” leads to a Washington Post article (though hasn’t that top newspaper has had a few of its own issues?) by the author of the book “Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids,” journalist Maia Szalavitz.  Several of the articles linked to are stories based on the book or the findings of the book, including the Vice.com article the next link at “_MY_STORY_IS_NOT_UNIQUE_,” but this article also includes quotes from new interviews with not only author Maia Szalavitz, but also a former teen sufferer of one of the programs.

I followed a link from this article about the 6 deaths in the past 8 years ( D: ) at programs under Aspen Education, one of the main, for-profit companies behind many of these teen “rehabs.”   A Salon article “Dark Side of a Bain Success” proved very comprehensive–and the finding of the for-profit political torture goes all the way to the top. Beware, more information into these programs and their far- and high-reaching backing by former and candidate Republican presidents just makes the reader sicker.  TRIGGER WARNING if you’ve had a negative teen, or adult addiction, rehab program experience.

What’s even sadder, though, is that the Wikipedia article on Aspen Education DOES NOT CONTAIN MENTION OF THIS CRITICISM or even links to it, and only mentions ONE of the young people who died in their “care,” of those SIX teen deaths!  Let’s change that!
In fact, the “Criticism” section on the Wikipedia page is actually self-serving to Aspen Education and their programs, critiquing the fact that programs were closed and staff switched, without mentioning why, because of the consequence of interrupting the continuity of a treatment plan–in fact, therefore, promoting sub-textually that the centers not be investigated or shut down . . . when this is exactly what the real critics are calling for!
(c) Copyright Sabri Sky January 18, 2014

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