Author Archives: VRBSanorabni

We Are Programmed to Receive

by VRBSanorabni Posted on September 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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It’s Saturday, and I am oh-so-tired of Donald Trump. (The latest: he finally coughed up his favorite Bible verse, but it doesn’t actually appear anywhere in the Bible. Since this was an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, he knew this had to be coming but still didn’t bother to look up a genuine verse. I swear, he’s just taunting us. He’s actually a Democrat with an IQ of 300 and he’s running a test to see just how far you can bamboozle the press corps and the conservative base and still lead the Republican primary race. Judging by Wednesday’s debate performance, he’s finally tiring of the gag because it appears you simply can’t go too far.)

So: no more Donald. Instead, prepare yourself for a ridiculous topic explored at ridiculous length. Here’s the background: the iPod in my car is set to permanent shuffle play, and yesterday the Eagles’ “Hotel California” came up. I’ve heard this song hundreds of times, I suppose, but this time one word in the final famous lines suddenly struck me as odd:

“Relax,” said the night man,
“We are programmed to receive.
You can check out any time you like,
But you can never leave.”

Programmed? This song was written in 1976, before the PC revolution and the rise of Silicon Valley conspired to make programming into a common word. See update below. Even cheap programmable calculators had just barely started to hit the market. It was certainly a common word among techie types, which is probably why it never seemed odd to me before, but was it common among shaggy rock musicians? It doesn’t seem like it would be. Did Don Henley take an intro CS course at North Texas State? Or is the word being used in a different sense?

Naturally, I went to my favorite source for word usage over time, the Google Ngram Viewer. Here’s what it shows:

There are two notable things here. First, the use of programmed peaks in 1984. That’s odd. You’d think it would have kept on rising into the stratosphere. It’s in common use today for everything from building a space shuttle to setting up your toaster oven. UPDATE: In comments, weirdnoise suggests that this is because coding is used rather than programming these days. Could be.

More germane to my question, however, is the fact that its use starts to rise around 1940. What’s up with that? This is obviously a non-computer usage, since digital computers hadn’t been invented at that point. So let’s go to Google Books and check things out. Programmed appears to have been commonly used in four basic senses. Here are examples of each:

War Housing: Hearings Before the Committee on Public Buildings and Grounds, 1942: “The 20,000 units in item 5b and the 100,000 additional Government dormitories yet to be programmed and financed, as shown in item 5c….”

Variety Radio Directory, 1940: “National Broadcasting Co. Owned and/or Managed and/or Programmed Stations—474….”

Health and Its Maintenance: A Hygiene Text for Women, 1931: “She has always programmed her work. She never undertook more than she could do and do well….”

Life magazine ad, 1949: “IBM products using electronic principles: Card-programmed Calculator….”

In order, the four senses in which programmed was used are: (1) in construction and engineering scheduling, (2) in radio scheduling, (3) as a generic synonym for scheduled, and (4) the IBM sense, which is a precursor to the common computer programming sense of today.

The first three of these are all variants of scheduled, or else used in the similar sense of verbing the noun program. The final one is the source of the contemporary usage of the word in the software biz.

So what were the Eagles thinking of? It doesn’t make sense that it was used as a synonym for scheduled. That doesn’t read right, and anyway, why not just use the word scheduled instead? The computer sense works in context, but somehow seems unlikely. That leaves us with the radio programming sense, and I suppose that’s the right one. Musicians would obviously be familiar with this usage, and so would their audience.

I warned you that this was a ridiculously long post about a ridiculous topic. Don’t blame me if you read all the way to the end. But now that you have, feel free to comment if you think there’s a possibility I’ve left out.

UPDATE: Via Twitter, Dan Perkins (aka Tom Tomorrow) reminds me that programmed—in the computer programming sense—was fairly commonly used in science fiction TV and movies in the 60s and 70s. For example, here it is from 1965 in the first episode of Lost in Space:

DR. SMITH: I have reprogrammed the robot. His power has been activated. Exactly eight hours after launch the robot will destroy the spaceship with all hands aboard.

Here it is from 1967 in I, Mudd, an episode in the original Star Trek series:

KIRK: Who sent you?
NORMAN (an android): I am not programmed to respond in that area.

Here it is from 1968 in 2001: A Space Odyssey:

INTERVIEWER: Do you believe that Hal has genuine emotions?
POOLE: Well, he acts like he has genuine emotions. He’s programmed that way to make it easier for us to talk to him.

And from 1972 in Silent Running:

LOWELL: Hey, that’s really excellent. Now, um…you see, what I’ve done is…I’ve reprogrammed both of you so that now you’ll respond directly to me.

And of course, from 1977 in Star Wars:

OWEN: You, I suppose you’re programmed for etiquette and protocol.
THREEPIO: Protocol? Why, its my primary function, sir. I am well-versed in all the customs—
OWEN: I have no need for a protocol droid.
THREEPIO: Of course you haven’t, sir. Not in an environment such as this. That is why I have been programmed—

OK, I’ll stop now. The point is that perhaps the computer programming sense of the word was actually pretty common in popular culture by 1976. So I guess there was no real mystery to be solved after all.

UPDATE: Or maybe it’s being used in the new-agey sense of cult programming. That would make sense on multiple levels.

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We Are Programmed to Receive

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"Hurt That Bitch": What Undercover Investigators Saw Inside a Factory Farm

by VRBSanorabni Posted on October 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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This is an excerpt from Mother Jones contributing writer Ted Genoways’ new book The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food.

On September 15, 2008, Lynn Becker got the phone call every hog farmer fears.

For months on end, pork producers across the Midwest had been struggling against record-low prices per head, but Becker had taken steps to protect his family’s farm against contractions of the market. He had signed a producer agreement with Hormel Foods, maybe the one company with a recession-proof demand for pork, and he had planted enough of his own corn to sustain his herd for the next year, insulating his operation from skyrocketing feed prices. With another Minnesota winter already in the air, Becker was out walking his fields one last time before starting the harvest. “When I got in and checked the answering machine,” he told me later, “there was a message from Matt Prescott with PETA.” Becker was soft-spoken but bristled with nervous energy. His jitters, together with his work-honed physique and fair hair, made him seem much younger than forty. But he insisted that the four years since receiving the call from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals had aged him by more than a decade. “They had ‘damning evidence,'” he said haltingly. “Undercover. Of animal abuse. On a farm that we own.”

Becker described his hog operation outside Fairmont, Minnesota, a little more than an hour due west of Austin on Interstate 90, as a “good old-fashioned, American family farm”—and it might appear that way at first. Everything about the old homestead suggests its age, from the weathered, brick-red Dutch Gambrel barn emblazoned with the name, lb pork, to the simple farmhouse that Becker’s grandfather built in the 1940s—the house where all big decisions are still made on Sundays around the dinner table. But in truth, Becker was already a major supplier, providing more than fifty thousand pigs to Hormel each year, and he was making a bid to double that number by bringing the whole supply chain, from seed to slaughter, under his control. He owned 1,500 acres of prime farmland, where he raised corn and soybeans, which he put up in a colossal grain bin and ground at his own feed mill and then trucked to more than a dozen sites in Minnesota and Iowa to feed to thousands of pregnant sows in his breeding barns and tens of thousands of weaned piglets at separate finishing facilities. The company was sprawling and complex, employing dozens of full-time and part-time workers, and it was only getting bigger. Still, Becker insists that he always personally monitored every phase of his business. And as the voice message claiming animal abuse started to sink in, his shock and disbelief quickly turned to indignation.

“Wait a second,” he remembered thinking. “Not on any farm I own.”

Then it dawned on him. The farm in question wasn’t LB Pork or even his breeding facility, Camalot, about ten miles away outside the town of Welcome. The farm that PETA had investigated was a large barn complex, housing some six thousand sows and tens of thousands of newborn piglets, that Becker had acquired less than a month before in Iowa, an operation he had purchased from Natural Pork Production II and renamed MowMar Farms but had only ever seen a few times. Becker phoned his day-to-day management company, Suidae Health & Production, based in Algona, Iowa, and asked them to reach out to Prescott and see if they could get their hands on this “damning evidence”; maybe the video they claimed to have in their possession had all been shot before the facility was under his ownership.

Everything You Didn’t Want to Know About Hormel, Bacon, and Amputated Limbs:

Meanwhile, Becker worked his connections. He was the president of the Minnesota Pork Board, and his wife, Julie, had been the Minnesota Pork Promoter of the Year in 2007. In fact, she was, at that very moment, on Capitol Hill with the Minnesota Pork Producers Association, the lobbying arm of the Pork Board, meeting with members of Congress. Becker called his wife so she could alert her fellow lobbyists. Then he placed another call to Cindy Cunningham, the assistant vice president for communications at the National Pork Board in Des Moines, Iowa.

Soon Becker heard back that PETA wanted to meet with him one-on-one and then stage a joint press conference. Everyone advised against it. Instead, with the assistance of Himle Horner, a public relations firm in the Twin Cities, he decided to issue a written statement, and Cunningham mobilized several agribusiness organizations to help answer press inquiries. But nothing could have prepared them for the onslaught of negative attention. The next day, when the Associated Press released the video online along with a wire report describing its contents, the story became worldwide news almost instantly. The video’s camerawork was shaky and low-definition, captured with recorders hidden in the hat brims of undercover workers, but it had been cut together into a concise and harrowing five minutes.

In one shot, a supervisor was shown beating a sow relentlessly on the back. In another, workers turned electric prods on a crippled sow and kicked pregnant sows repeatedly in the belly. A close-up showed a distressed sow knocked out, her face royal blue from the Prima Tech marking dye sprayed into her nostrils by a worker who said he was trying “to get her high.” In one of the most disturbing sequences, a worker demonstrated the method for euthanizing underweight piglets: taking them by the hind legs and smashing their skulls against the concrete floor. Fellow workers whooped and laughed as he tossed the bloodied and twitching bodies into a giant bin. The AP story revealed that PETA had already met with Tom Heater, the sheriff of Greene County, Iowa, and he had agreed to open a criminal investigation.


Gagged by Big Ag


You Won’t Believe What Pork Producers Do to Pregnant Pigs


Has Your State Outlawed Blowing the Whistle on Factory Farm Abuses?


Timeline: Big Ag’s Campaign to Shut Up Its Critics


The Cruelest Show on Earth

That night, Becker played the PETA video again and again on his iPad. He told me he felt numb as he watched his inbox fill with more than a thousand angry emails. He was starting to see what an ordeal the release of this video was going to be. But worse, he feared that Hormel would terminate its production contract with him—the contract he had used to secure a loan of more than $1 million to mortgage the breed barns in Iowa, with his family’s homestead in Minnesota as collateral. If Hormel decided that Becker had become a liability, he and his family could lose everything.

A couple of miles north of Bayard, Iowa, at the crossroads of two wide gravel tracks, there are three enormous sow barns: the site of Lynn Becker’s MowMar Farms. It’s now operated under the name Fair Creek, though you’d never know it; there are no company signs, no indication at all of what’s going on inside. The barns gleam white in the sun and seem, by all appearances, to be well ventilated, well supplied with water from giant external holding tanks, and generally well turned-out, right down to their square corners and tightly tacked aluminum siding. Gary Weihs (pronounced WISE), the site’s original developer, saw to it that the facility was clean, inconspicuous, and odor-free. It took him two years of disputes and disagreements to get a permit recommendation from the board of supervisors for Greene County, so he wanted to be sure there were no complaints once the facility was built.

After spending years working with large corporations like Pepsi, Procter & Gamble, and Monsanto in operational management, Weihs had decided to return to his native Iowa. He planned to combine the experience he had gained growing up on his father’s hog farm outside of Harlan with the statistical analysis of three decades of corn pricing and hog yields he had performed to complete his MBA at Harvard Business School. “We flat price everything,” Weihs told the National Hog Farmer, “so that we make a little bit per head and base our profits on quantity.” Under the name Natural Pork Production II (NPPII), he lined up investors and, when he had the start-up money in place, began building facilities, about one per year. The three-barn complex in Bayard was the fifth unit—a 6,000-sow farrow-to-wean operation, where returns would be generated for investors by selling roughly 130,000 weaned pigs each year to finishing operations at $36 apiece. All told, NPPII facilities were supplying about fifteen different hog farmers with close to 800,000 weaned pigs, for gross annual earnings of nearly $29 million—but all while carrying precarious overheard, including roughly $5 million in construction costs per site and millions more invested in the breeding sows housed inside.

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"Hurt That Bitch": What Undercover Investigators Saw Inside a Factory Farm

Posted in alo, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on "Hurt That Bitch": What Undercover Investigators Saw Inside a Factory Farm