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This Week’s Cartoon: “Let Them Eat Slime”

I spent way too much time last weekend reading about pink slime. I really wanted to get to the bottom of the slimebucket, if you will. This particular controversy has been burbling (and oozing and gurgling) ever since celebrity chef Jamie Oliver did a segment trashing the stuff last year (it’s a little melodramatic, but the basic sentiment is sound). McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and Burger King proceeded to drop it from their beef. More recently, a couple microbiologists condemned the goop as nutritionally-deficient, woefully-unlabeled Not Meat.

Now, I’ve traveled enough and watched enough cable-network food shows to know that gross-seeming animal parts are edible, and possibly even a delicacy, depending on the palate of the beholder. So I wanted to mentally separate the unappetizing aspect of pink slime from the food safety/nutrition issues. Here’s what I’ve discerned:

There’s a case to be made that ammoniated meat is safer because pathogens are reduced. But at the high levels of ammonia that may be required to effectively kill bacteria, the meat starts to reek of ammonia. The Times has a lengthy report on the iffy history of this particular technology.  This Prevention article also raises some good questions about what we don’t know.

Personally, I don’t want to be a human guinea pig for ammonia ingestion. It seems intuitive that schoolkids shouldn’t be, either. The fact that they have to use ammonia in the first place is a symptom of the larger problem of industrial meat production. That these scraps are teeming with deadly bacteria in the first place is a result of the appalling conditions in feedlots (or CAFOs). The meat industry, in defense of pink slime, laughably touts the “sustainability” of using all parts of the cow, as though these people give one whit about environmentally-friendly farming practices. And then there’s the fact that the stuff is just low-quality, non-nutritious crap, the logical endpoint of a system built on layers and layers of crap. Is this really the best we can do for our kids?

Daily Kos Interview

Daily Kos blogger Bill in Portland, Maine asks me some interesting questions for his “Cheers and Jeers” column.

I.T.C.H. Interview

There’s a nice interview with me up on the International Team of Comic Historians blog. The interviewer did a particularly good job of asking not-the-standard questions.

Fear of a Female Wonk

Let me say up front that I’d be fine with Warren or Sanders as the Democratic nominee, or even some of the other candidates who are polling behind them. As American democracy collapses, I’m not that into splitting hairs beyond wanting a leader who understands what’s happening and is willing to make some bold moves to stop it. And while there’s certainly nothing wrong with asking critical questions of presidential contenders, it does strike me as absurd how Warren is spun as some kind of scary “radical leftist” by mainstream wags, and “mainstream corporate lady” by some leftist wags. I don’t have the energy to elaborate on all the things Warren has done for working people. Perhaps America is too anti-intellectual and sexist to vote for someone like her. But it depresses me to hear this stuff.

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Last Week’s Cartoon: “A Volatile Situation”

I’m playing catch-up here, as I had to go back to Virginia last week to get my stuff out of storage. If any of you are thinking about doing a cross-country move, let me advise you not to do it in fourteen different stages as I’ve done.

It’s been a while since I did an autobiographical comic, but it felt appropriate for this one. In the process of furnishing my apartment, I have been sucked into a vortex of competing scientific claims. For example, this Planet Green article, ominously titled “Five Ways Your Bedroom is Killing You,” insists that conventional carpeting, paint, mattresses, pillows, and furniture are all pretty much deadly. In other words, your entire bedroom! I’ve become a master of indoor-pollution vocabulary, from “bioaccumulation” to “PDBEs” (flame retardants) to”off-gassing” (probably my new favorite word).

It’s hard to say where to draw the line — how much is cause for concern, and how much is marketing hype. I actually like the idea of nontoxic mattresses made by local hipsters, but the prices will kill a hipster budget. One starts to sense an eco-class system at work, with people making products they couldn’t afford to buy themselves, at least not without an employee discount.

Wool carpeting, VOC-free paint, solid hardwood furniture free of formaldehyde-leaking fiberboard — it’s all expensive stuff. So we have “green” products for the affluent, and for the masses? Let them be off-gassed! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to return to my bubble.

Capital Offense

This Citizens for Ethics site breaks down exactly which companies are giving to anti-democratic politicians. 

One of the great mistaken ideas of the Cold War era is that privatization and capitalism go hand in hand with the flourishing of democracy. That “free markets” (a gross misnomer if there ever was one) necessarily lead to “free people.” In the 21st century, it has become abundantly clear that an amoral system of incentives designed to maximize shareholder profits is not going to save us from authoritarianism.

This Week’s Cartoon: Olympic Memories

McDonald’s being the official restaurant of the Olympics is a bit like XBox being the official study aid of the National Spelling Bee. But, of course, the biggest crime of this year’s games coverage was the omission of Ray Davies from the U.S. broadcast of the closing ceremony.

AI Gone MAD

This was inspired by an article about the Rice University study comparing self-consuming AI to mad cow disease, a topic practically begging for a cartoon. To quote one researcher:

“The problems arise when this synthetic data training is, inevitably, repeated, forming a kind of a feedback loop — what we call an autophagous or ‘self-consuming’ loop,” said Richard Baraniuk, Rice’s C. Sidney Burrus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “Our group has worked extensively on such feedback loops, and the bad news is that even after a few generations of such training, the new models can become irreparably corrupted. This has been termed ‘model collapse’ by some — most recently by colleagues in the field in the context of large language models (LLMs). We, however, find the term ‘Model Autophagy Disorder’ (MAD) more apt, by analogy to mad cow disease.”

He added that “one doomsday scenario is that if left uncontrolled for many generations, MAD could poison the data quality and diversity of the entire internet.” 

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If the media covered climate change the way it covers Hillary’s email

As many have noted, not one question about climate change was asked by the moderators of the recent presidential debates, despite our passing a major climate milestone in September.

A fairly astonishing study of network news broadcasts in 2016 showed no (!) climate change coverage — and relatively little policy coverage, for that matter — yet ample reporting on Hillary Clinton’s email.

You know what’s “extremely careless” (to borrow a phrase from James Comey)? Ignoring the most important issue in the world.

Gas De-Rangement

For a decent summary on the risks of gas stoves, this Scientific American article is worth checking out. One recent study estimated that some 12.7 percent of childhood asthma cases were attributable to emissions from gas stoves. 

While bans on new construction are being considered in many places, and already exist in a few cities like Berkeley, no one is actually confiscating stoves. The right-wing freakout over “stove bans” is mostly hot air, serving the purpose of demonizing liberals and whipping up panic over imaginary “government overreach” when what we have here is a clear case of government underreach.

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This Week’s Cartoon: The Universal Laws of Ladies in Science

Inside Higher Ed has more on the Yale study:

Female scientists were as likely as male scientists to evaluate the students this way. For instance, the scientists were asked to rate the students’ competence on a 5-point scale. Male faculty rated the male student 4.01 and the female student 3.33. Female scientists rated the male student 4.10 and the female student 3.32.

Even I still catch myself thinking of a stereotypical doctor as a guy with a stethoscope, despite the fact that I’ve had female doctors for my entire adult life. It’s harder to get rid of these biases than we think.

The statistic about the decline of women studying computer science is taken from this NY Times op-ed by Stephanie Coontz.

Mandatory COVID Measures vs. Forced Birth

You would think that the Supreme Court seeming pretty much okay with state laws forcing girls to bear their rapists’ spawn would create a tidal wave of revulsion. But that would involve “norms,” which are apparently in short supply.

The data cited about maternal deaths among Black women comes from the CDC website. As many of you probably know already, the US has the highest rate of maternal death among developed nations. The $233,610 cost of raising a child is from a widely-cited USDA study announced in 2015. That figure does not account for inflation.

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