Voices heard! Pipeline rejected.....

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: January 18, 2012 Contacts: Maggie Kao (202) 675-2384 Eddie Scher (415) 815-7027 Sierra Club Applauds President Obama for Rejecting the Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline State Dept. Determines Project is Not in the National Interest Washington, D.C. – Today, the Obama Administration determined that the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline is not in the national interest and announced that it will formally deny a federal permit for the proposed pipeline put forth by Canadian oil giant TransCanada. The 1,700-mile pipeline would run through six states, carrying toxic, highly corrosive tar sands crude from Alberta, Canada, to refineries and ports in Texas. In response, Michael Brune, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, issued the following statement: “The Sierra Club and our 1.4 million members and supporters applaud the President today for delivering a decisive victory to Americans who want clean air to breathe and safe water to drink.  Today’s decision represents another down payment on the Administration’s plan to move our country beyond oil.  To paraphrase Vice President Biden, today’s news is a Big…Deal.  “President Obama’s announcement is an outright rejection of Speaker Boehner’s cynical attempt to play political football with Americans’ health.  Unfortunately, we know that Big Oil and their cronies in Congress will not give up their endless pursuit of profits at the cost of Americans’ health and prosperity.  “We thank the President for listening to the concerns of American farmers, landowners and people who care about clean air, clean water and our climate future.” ### Sierra Club85 2nd St. San Francisco, CA 94105 sierra.news@sierraclub.org www.sierraclub.org/pressroom Update My Profile | Unsubscribe | Manage My Email Preferences Connect with the Sierra Club: Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter Sign up for the Insider Join Our Activist Network

Guess What’s in The Picture (Food?)

A) Strawberry ice cream

B) Chicken

C) Plastic foam

D) None of the above

Answer below

What you need to know:

You may want to rethink that McDonald's Chicken Nugget or Chicken Sandwich.  Folks, this is mechanically separated chicken, an invention of the late 20th century. Someone figured out in the 1960′s that meat processors can eke out a few more percent of profit from chickens, turkeys, pigs, and cows by scraping the bones 100% clean of meat. This is done by machines, not humans, by passing bones leftover after the initial cutting through a high pressure sieve. The paste you see in the picture above is the result.

What they do is take parts of a chicken and put it through this machine that mechanically separate the meat from the bone. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen.  What it does instead is smash EVERYTHING including the bones, eyes and guts making it come out looking like the picture above.

Since this meat is infested with bacteria, it will be soaked in ammonia in order to kill those little critters. But who wants ammonia nuggets?  Not I and I’m sure you don’t want any either. So in order to mask the ammonia taste, they season it with a ton of artificial flavors.

This paste goes on to become the main ingredient in many a hot dog, bologna, chicken nuggets, pepperoni, salami, jerky etc…

The industry calls this method AMR – Advanced Meat Recovery.

In 2004, as a result of  mad cow disease (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy), the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) ruled that beef could no longer be processed this way, because testing showed that parts of the bovine central nervous system ended up in the meat.

As for products using mechanically separated chicken and pork, FSIS ruled that they are safe to eat, but required them to be labeled as such.

Despite them being safe, FSIS states that no more than 20% of the meat in a hot dog come from mechanically separated pork.

What to do at the supermarket:

It’s always a better to choice to see a real cut of meat at the butcher counter in the supermarket and then decide what you want done with it. Buying something prepared in a factory, such as chicken nuggets, or hot dogs, you’ll always get the worst meat, and it will always be combined with additives and other sources of fat.

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Lazy People Rejoice: Burger King Starts Delivery Service

EVERYTHING ELSE    BY BEWARE ON JANUARY 17, 2012 AT 2:30 PM

Picture yourself on a Friday night, having your pals over for some brews, when somewhere amidst the two cases you’ve collectively put back and the game of dominoes you’ve been playing for hours, a craving for fast-food arrives. Why not just call up Burger King and have them deliver some Whoppers to your house. Believe it or not, the home of the flame-broiled stomachache has actually decided to test the waters with a home delivery service at participating locations throughout the country.

According to a USA Today article, there will be an $8-10 minimum delivery charge and an extra $2 driving fee, as well as astronaut-tested “proprietary thermal packaging technology” to keep the food warm. On top of that, the article mentions that there are only four stores currently upholding this service, all in the DMV area, but a quick look at the BK website shows delivery is offered in South Beach, as well.

While this may seem like a great idea for the aforementioned party or just any ol’ stoner situation, the general consensus seems to think making it easier to eat unhealthy is counterproductive to a country already known as the fattest in the world. But, you can’t deny that in our current consumer-oriented society, this could actually succeed and possibly change the landscape of how all drive-through restaurants do business.

That said, would you restrict your diet to simply stopping for a Rodeo Cheeseburger when limited time calls for fast-food, or are you willing to be a BK test dummy?

[USA Today]

CATEGORY: EVERYTHING ELSE, GENERAL, SMOKE BREAK | TAGS: BURGER KING, NEWS

ALERT: Many Sites Blackout for January 18th: SOPA

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Major sites participating, is it the right move? 


Over the weekend, the Stop Online Piracy Act was dealt a major blow as the legislation was delayed until "outstanding concerns" have been addressed. SOPA will not move forward in the House as the official vote was been cancelled and the bill has been yanked from the floor. Representative and SOPA opponent Darrell Issa cheered this as a win for the internet community - but he warned that SOPA's Senate cousin PIPA is still a major concern. 


He's right, and SOPA is still a concern as well. While it has been delayed, SOPA is not dead. It is entirely possible that SOPA could resurrect once a "consensus is reached." SOPA must be destroyed while vulnerable. 


And presumably, that's why many sites will still participate in a scheduled blackout on Wednesday, January 18th to protest the legislation. 


Do you support sites like Wikipedia going dark in protest of SOPA and PIPA? Or do you feel that it's the wrong move? Let us know in the comments. 


Here are some of the bigger sites that will officially go dark on the 18th:

• reddit
• Wikipedia
• Mozilla
• Failblog, rest of the Cheezburger Network
• Boing Boing

Smaller sites can get in on the protest as well. A site,sopastrike.com, has been set up by the Fight for the Future non-profit. It allows anyone with a website to join the strike. The site's list of all registered blackout participants contains hundreds of small websites. 


If you want to participate in the blackout, you can use theSimple Stop SOPA Wordpress plugin. It will blackout your site and show the following message in white:

This site has been blocked in protest of the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) two bills which will allow the government to censor the internet. Find out more atamericancensorship.org or the video below. This website will return at 8pm.

It will also show this video about SOPA and PIPA. If you haven't already seen it, it's a nice video that explains the dangers of the legislation: 


 


If you want a little more control on your blackout, you can try this other Wordpress plugin. 


Googler Pierre Far made a timely Google+ post Monday evening, coyly referencing the fact that sometimes webmasters feel the need to take their site offline for a day because of "server maintenance or as political protest." He mentions this action as the most important one to take if you plan on having your site go dark for a day:

1. The most important point: Webmasters should return a 503 HTTP header for all the URLs participating in the blackout (parts of a site or the whole site). This helps in two ways:

a. It tells us it's not the "real" content on the site and won't be indexed.

b. Because of (a), even if we see the same content (e.g. the "site offline" message) on all the URLs, it won't cause duplicate content issues.

2. Googlebot's crawling rate will drop when it sees a spike in 503 headers. This is unavoidable but as long as the blackout is only a transient event, it shouldn't cause any long-term problems and the crawl rate will recover fairly quickly to the pre-blackout rate. How fast depends on the site and it should be on the order of a few days.

You can see the entire list of tips here. 


If you don't own a site and want to spread the word of the blackout via social media, you can use the hashtag #sopastrike or #stopsopa all day. BlackoutSopa.org also allows for you to change your Twitter pic to one of three images - either a smaller "Stop SOPA" banner under your pic, a total "STOP SOPA" image or a simple blackout. 


There is still a day until the SOPA blackout, which means the window is closing for other big-name sites to join in. Having Reddit and Wikipedia down is going to be a huge deal, and it would only get bigger if other social sites joined the blackout party. 


But it appears that not everybody is joining the party. In response to Radar correspondent Alex Howard asking him if he had the "cojones" to join Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia in the blackout, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo had this to say: