How’s your quality of life these days here in Deregulation Nation? This post is about pigs and about gas, although it absolutely has nothing to do with today’s doings in Washington. For example, if I were you, I might leave the pork sausage out of the Christmas stuffing for a few years. From The Hill:

Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) inspectors Anthony Vallone and Jill Mauer told NBC News that they filed whistleblower disclosure forms with the Office of Special Counsel about their concerns with the reduction of the required number of federal inspectors at plants. "The consumer's being duped," Mauer said, adding that the meat may be more likely to contain feces, sex organs, toenails, bladders and unwanted hair.

(Question: in this context, is it possible to have “wanted” hair? We continue.)

NBC News notes that none of the inspectors it talked to say they themselves allowed unsafe meat to pass inspection. "If this continues across the nation, when you open your package of meat, what you're gonna get for a pathogen is gonna be a mystery," Mauer added. Typically, seven federal inspectors check the meat for defects, but under the new rules, the required number would drop to two or three with more experience but less hands-on time with the meat. The plants’ own employees would be instructed to check the meat directly without any required federal training. The rules would also eliminate the maximum speed of the meat lines, giving less time for inspections.

None of this sounds good. I’m not sure when we decided that the public health was some kind of nanny-state extravagance, but I can guarantee you from personal experience that whoever it was never has experienced the joys of food poisoning. But there’s always hope, I guess.

Meanwhile, way up above the nation’s pig-shit lagoons in outer space, there’s a new satellite tasked only with monitoring methane leaks all over the planet. Good thing, too, because people lie about them all the time. From The New York Times:

A little known gas-well accident at an Ohio fracking site was in fact one of the largest methane leaks ever recorded in the United States...

The blowout, in February 2018 at a natural gas well run by an Exxon Mobil subsidiary in Belmont County, Ohio, released more methane than the entire oil and gas industries of many nations do in a year, the research team found. The Ohio episode triggered about 100 residents within a one-mile radius to evacuate their homes while workers scrambled to plug the well...

The satellite’s measurements showed that, in Ohio in the 20 days it took for Exxon to plug the well, about 120 metric tons of methane an hour were released. That amounted to twice the rate of the largest known methane leak in the United States, from an oil and gas storage facility in Aliso Canyon, Calif., in 2015, though that event lasted longer and had higher emissions overall.

Things are getting missed, either deliberately or because the government is run by people who don’t give a rat’s ass that there might be a rat’s ass in your breakfast sausage. Somebody’s going to die behind this.

Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page here.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io