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Pork’s Dirty Secret: The nation’s top hog producer is also one of America’s worst polluters
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Smithfield’s pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs — anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.
The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety degrees. The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day. The ventilation systems function like the ventilators of terminal patients: If they break down for any length of time, pigs start dying.
Cartoons
Security update: air cargo won’t be screened, “for your safety?
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Hawley also came out in opposition to the bill approved by the House of Representatives which would mandate inspection of airplane cargo. As it stands now, your suitcases are screened, but other cargo isn’t.
Hawley commented: “If you spend all your resources opening boxes and not applying your resources more generally, that opens up another vulnerability,? Hawley told the Senate Aviation Subcommittee. “The adaptive terrorist will go there.?
The “thudding? sound you may hear in the background is me hitting my head against my desk. If cargo isn’t being screened at all NOW, isn’t THAT where “the adaptive terrorist? will try to stash the bad stuff? Why would the head of the TSA effectively declare that cargo is something the TSA does not intend to screen? It’s an invitation, nay, a dare, to potential terrorists seeking to actually smuggle a bomb (or even themselves) on board.
In the meantime, the TSA is thankfully searching passengers for contraband pies.
Do you feel safer yet?
No right to copy the copy.
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Has Paul Allen finally lost his mind, or are we going downtown?
Went to the TSA website and TSA is screening air cargo. Hawley’s quote implies that they can’t physically open every box to look inside, not that they don’s screen it.
http://www.tsa.gov/what_we_do/tsnm/air_cargo.shtm
“As with all of our elements of transportation security, TSA employs a multi-layered system in air cargo. By not relying on any single security initiative, we strengthen the entire system and introduce unpredictability that can’t be manipulated. The layers TSA employs in air cargo include;
Allowing only known shippers to offer cargo for passenger-carrying aircraft.
Using canine teams throughout the cargo system.
Screening the most high-risk cargo with electronic explosive detection systems.
Deploying hundreds of dedicated cargo-only aviation security inspectors to conduct scheduled and unscheduled compliance inspections in cargo facilities.
Requiring air carriers to physically inspect some cargo.
Utilizing transportation security officers at over 250 small airports to screen all cargo at these airports and requiring random screening in addition to the above measures.
Rules changes made in November 2006 require high risk cargo to be 100 percent screened just like checked baggage before being places on passenger aircraft. This includes packages presented to air carriers at the airport or other facilities and packages requested to be placed on a specific flight. Additionally, TSA removed all exceptions for screening air cargo on passenger planes. For the first time, absolutely all cargo is eligible for screening without exception.”