grandstanding idiot ignores grassroots, pays no attention to systemic issues, and does stupidness.

[the_future_modernes]

How TV Superchef Jamie Oliver's 'Food Revolution' Flunked Out:After two months, kids hated the new meals, milk consumption plummeted, and many students dropped out of the school lunch program altogether.

Jamie landed on America's shores with the self-anointed mission to remake our eating habits for the better. Ground zero is Huntington, West Virginia. In an opening montage we are told the city of 50,000 "was recently named the unhealthiest city in America ... where nearly half of the adults are considered obese" as we see lardy folk shuffle through the frame.

While Jamie's efforts touch on many problems of school food -- from overuse of processed foods to lack of funding to French fries being considered a vegetable -- the "Food Revolution" is a failure because the entertainment narrative is unable to deal with complexities or systemic issues. Instead, all problems are reduced to individual stories and choices. The series may sprinkle some facts and hot-button issues into the mix, but what keeps the viewer hungering for more is the personal dramas, conflicts and weepy moments that are the staples of reality TV.

Because Jamie is packaged as a one-man whirlwind, tangling with "lunch lady Alice" while "Stirn' things oop," there is no mention of the existing, deep-rooted movement for local, healthy food from the farm to the market to the table, as well as schools. It's also more fun and shocking to "slag off" a poor school district in Appalachia for serving pizza and flavored milk for breakfast than to examine how West Virginia has imposed some of the strictest school nutritional standards in the nation. But that's entertainment.

The reality behind "Food Revolution" is that after the first two months of the new meals, children were overwhelmingly unhappy with the food, milk consumption plummeted and many students dropped out of the school lunch program, which one school official called "staggering." On top of that food costs were way over budget, the school district was saddled with other unmanageable expenses, and Jamie's failure to meet nutritional guidelines had school officials worried they would lose federal funding and the state department of education would intervene.

( Read more... )

(no subject)

[la_vie_noire]

This post, I think, is one of the most important that has been written lately.

C. L. Minou writes We Are the Dead: Sex, Assault, and Trans Women. Trigger warning, descriptions of sexual abuse.

But as the Kimberly Nixon case showed, even woman-positive organizations can be no haven for trans women, since those groups can, in Canada at least, refuse to hire a qualified rape counselor simply because she looked like a man in their eyes. Presumably they would do the same thing to a trans woman who had been the victim of rape or sexual assault (or domestic violence, as Nixon herself had been.) Even though a trans woman, like many other women who have been assaulted, might long for an all-female environment to aid her recovery, there is no guarantee that she’ll be accepted there. And often no guarantee that anyone else will have her. Even in large cities, finding a trans-positive or even trans-accepting victim center is likely to be impossible. There is nowhere to turn for many trans victims of rape or assault, which is why the sexual assault numbers for trans women–high though they may be–are almost certainly drastically underreported.

Also, something to say is how, even in the bloggosphere, the reactions to abuse of cis women by authorities is so very different to the reactions from outsiders to abuse of trans women by authorities. Compare this case to any case of trans women being victims of police harassment when reporting their rape and how the public responded. (Not to say Hannah's case didn't have their dose of misogynist bastards commenting, of course, but Hannah didn't even experience what Josephine Perez experienced. Had Perez been cis, people would be outraged all over the blogosphere.)

It's just collateral damage though, aint it?

[the_future_modernes]

Gods and Monsters

 
( Greek gods analogy to explain American military's murder of civilians )

 

Ceremonial Evisceration

Both incidents elicited shock and anger from critics of American war policies. And both incidents are shocking. Probably the most shocking aspect of them, however, is just how humdrum they actually are, even if the public release of video of such events isn't. Start with one detail in those Afghan murders, reported in most accounts but little emphasized: what the Americans descended on was a traditional family ceremony. More than 25 guests had gathered for the naming of a newborn child.
In fact, over these last nine-plus years, Afghan (and Iraqi) ceremonies of all sorts have regularly been blasted away. Keeping a partial tally of wedding parties eradicated by American air power at TomDispatch.com, I had counted [13] five such "incidents" between December 2001 and July 2008. (A sixth in July 2002 [14] in which possibly 40 Afghan wedding celebrants died and many more were wounded has since come to my attention, as has a seventh [15] in August 2008.) Nor have other kinds of rites where significant numbers of Afghans gather been immune from attack, including funerals [16], and now, naming ceremonies. And keep in mind that these are only the reported incidents in a rural land where much undoubtedly goes unreported.

Similarly, General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, recently expressed surprise at a tally since last summer of at least 30 Afghans killed and 80 wounded at checkpoints when US soldiers opened fire [17] on cars. He said [18]: "We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat." Or consider 36-year-old Mohammed Yonus, a popular imam of a mosque on the outskirts of Kabul, who was killed in his car [19] this January by fire from a passing NATO convoy, which considered his vehicle "threatening." His seven-year-old son was in the back seat.

[20]Or while on the subject of Reuters employees, recall [21] reporter Mazen Tomeizi, a Palestinian producer for the al-Arabiya satellite network of Dubai, who was killed on Haifa Street in central Baghdad in September 2004 by a US helicopter attack. He was on camera at the time and his blood spattered the lens. Seif Fouad, a Reuters cameraman, was wounded in the same incident, while a number of bystanders, including a girl, were killed. Or remember the 17 Iraqi civilians infamously murdered [22] when Blackwater employees in a convoy began firing in Nissour Square in Baghdad on September 16, 2007. Or the missiles regularly shot from US helicopters and unmanned aerial drones into the heavily populated Shiite slum of Sadr City back in 2007-08. Or the Iraqis regularly killed at checkpoints [23] in the years since the invasion of 2003. Or, for that matter, the first moments of that invasion on March 20, 2003, when, according to [24] Human Rights Watch, "dozens" of ordinary Iraqi civilians were killed by the 50 aerial "decapitation strikes" the Bush administration launched against Saddam Hussein and the rest of the Iraqi leadership, missing every one [25] of them.
 
( There's so much that it makes no sense to bold. )

Its a convincing analogy I must say, and dear GOD I had NO idea that so many people had been killed like this. I am feeling extremely sick at the moment and the fact that this is what my tax dollars are paying for, and all that the news is reporting on is PUBLIC EMPLOYEES ARE GETTING GOOD WAGES OMG OMG ALERT ALERT HOW DARE THEY NOT TAKE STARVATION WAGES OUR TAX DOLLARS!!!!!! But then as that asshole that Diane Sawyer put on to justify the Wikileaks video said, its just the Fog of War. eh? ANd aren't we Americans lucky that we are the ones creating that Fog from afar, instead of living smackdab in teh middle of it.

JK Rowling on the British elections

[the_future_modernes]

DO NOT READ THE COMMENTS JESUS CHRIST.

The single mother's manifesto:David Cameron says the ‘nasty party’ that castigated people like me has changed. I’m not buying it

I had become a single mother when my first marriage split up in 1993. In one devastating stroke, I became a hate figure to a certain section of the press, and a bogeyman to the Tory Government. Peter Lilley, then Secretary of State at the DSS, had recently entertained the Conservative Party conference with a spoof Gilbert and Sullivan number, in which he decried “young ladies who get pregnant just to jump the housing list”. The Secretary of State for Wales, John Redwood, castigated single-parent families from St Mellons, Cardiff, as “one of the biggest social problems of our day”. (John Redwood has since divorced the mother of his children.) Women like me (for it is a curious fact that lone male parents are generally portrayed as heroes, whereas women left holding the baby are vilified) were, according to popular myth, a prime cause of social breakdown, and in it for all we could get: free money, state-funded accommodation, an easy life.

An easy life. Between 1993 and 1997 I did the job of two parents, qualified and then worked as a secondary school teacher, wrote one and a half novels and did the planning for a further five. For a while, I was clinically depressed. To be told, over and over again, that I was feckless, lazy — even immoral — did not help.


...


Yesterday’s Conservative manifesto makes it clear that the Tories aim for less governmental support for the needy, and more input from the “third sector”: charity. It also reiterates the flagship policy so proudly defended by David Cameron last weekend, that of “sticking up for marriage”. To this end, they promise a half-a-billion pound tax break for lower-income married couples, working out at £150 per annum.

I accept that my friends and I might be atypical. Maybe you know people who would legally bind themselves to another human being, for life, for an extra £150 a year? Perhaps you were contemplating leaving a loveless or abusive marriage, but underwent a change of heart on hearing about a possible £150 tax break? Anything is possible; but somehow, I doubt it. Even Mr Cameron seems to admit that he is offering nothing more than a token gesture when he tells us “it’s not the money, it’s the message”.



Nobody who has ever experienced the reality of poverty could say “it’s not the money, it’s the message”. When your flat has been broken into, and you cannot afford a locksmith, it is the money. When you are two pence short of a tin of baked beans, and your child is hungry, it is the money. When you find yourself contemplating shoplifting to get nappies, it is the money. If Mr Cameron’s only practical advice to women living in poverty, the sole carers of their children, is “get married, and we’ll give you £150”, he reveals himself to be completely ignorant of their true situation.

How many prospective husbands did I ever meet, when I was the single mother of a baby, unable to work, stuck inside my flat, night after night, with barely enough money for life’s necessities? Should I have proposed to the youth who broke in through my kitchen window at 3am? Half a billion pounds, to send a message — would it not be more cost-effective, more personal, to send all the lower-income married people flowers?
MORE

Oh dear: This won't end well

[the_future_modernes]

Mexico drug war cartels join forces

The Mexican government says nearly 23,000 people have died in drug-related violence since a military crackdown on cartels began in 2006.

That announcement comes as officials face a new front in their war against the drug gangs.

Two of Mexico's most powerful cartels have joined forces to battle government security forces as well as a third cartel seeking its own slice of the cross-border drug trade.

Al Jazeera's Mariana Sanchez reports from Mexico City (14 April 2010).

Drug wars haunt Colombian city Medellin

The Colombian city of Medellin has seen a resurgence of deadly violence that has brought back memories of its notorious drug kingpin, Pablo Escobar.

Since the beginning of last year, more than a thousand people have been killed in confrontations between street gangs working for rival drug cartels.

Sadly, most of the victims fit the same profile - young men between the ages of 18 and 26.

From Medellin, Al Jazeera's Teresa Bo has this report.