That I totes fancy Chef Tom Colicchio is, of course, not news, not even close, and not a secret, not even a little. As if there's still any wonder why, he continued his crusade against hunger this morning on CNN, and, despite the fact that this interview is part of a week-long focus on the "childhood obesity crisis," note that Chef Colicchio doesn't mention obesity once during this interview, nor does he even obliquely equate weight with health. He simply makes the point that fresh food with meaningful calories nourishes children's minds and bodies, making them better able to learn. And he doesn't put that responsibility on "moms," or "parents," casually ignoring the profound structural flaws that contribute to kids eating processed food at school and home. He flatly explains why a fast food hamburger costs less than a peach, and lays out why it's a social issue, a collective responsibility for the richest nation on the planet to nourish its children.
No shaming, no alarmism, no hyperbole. Just facts and compassion.
This is how it's done, right here.
[The transcript will be posted here when available.]
What are your favorite and least favorite fast food restaurants?
Generally, the question is about the food, but please feel free, especially if you don't eat fast food, to use some other criteria, like advertising or sheer ubiquity.
I don't know if it's technically fast food (there is some specific criteria to warrant that designation and render a place distinct from casual dining, e.g. Applebee's, though I don't remember what it is), but my favorite place that I consider fast food is Panera Bread. Worst has got to be Hardee's; its food sucks and its advertising sucks. Blech.
There is a downside to making a pit stop. As much is I love the proverbial Slim Jim and Fanta, slowing down means you get to your destination later. And as fun as the last post was, I still have to actually slog through chapter eleven properly.
If you didn't get enough speechifying in chapter ten, well, hold on, chapter eleven is the headline act. Danny Bailey, Youtube sensation and mavericky straight-talker!
Before he hits the stage, Noah is getting the metaphoric tear in his beer on (is that metaphoric or proverbial? Nevermind) at his otherwise empty table by the stage. "He'd briefly considered playing a drinking game with himself, wherein he would pound one back each time he heard one of the dirty words progressive, socialist, or globalism, but by those rules he'd have drunk himself under the table within a few minutes." It's actually an interesting observation, as if Beck is acknowledging just how ridiculous the movement is.
I mean, Socialism? Really? Does anyone truly believe we, as a country, are on the verge of, heading toward, or anywhere remotely near Socialism? Because, let me tell you: We're not. And if you think we are, you have no idea what Socialism is.
Hollis sits down with Noah, because he looked kind of sad, according to the big man. How nice of him. Or maybe Hollis is just keeping an eye on Noah. Nah, if that were the case, Noah would have noticed, what with his "almost supernatural ability to tell when a person is hiding something."
Noah's night goes from bad to worse:
Tonight's headliner, the illustrious Danny Bailey, now took to the stage in a swell of heavy-metal music and an ovation that rattled every shelf of glassware behind the bar.
"Hello, New York!" Bailey shouted, like an aging rock star kicking off his annual farewell tour. He held out the microphone to pump up the roar of the answering crowd and made no move to settle them down. On the contrary, the clamor continued until he produced a piece of paper and took back the mike almost a full deafening minute later.
God damn if people just don't love Youtube stars! Anyway. If you listened to the audio of the speech, you'll already know something about Bailey's speech: It reads better than it it sounds out loud. Which is really saying something. This only goes on for a few pages, and I am going to spoil the end here, because Bailey is interrupted before he can finish. Oh, what thrilling thing happens, you ask? Does Blackwater storm the place? Does the fire marshal shut down the bar? Does America's crumbling infrastructure lead to a sudden power outage? Oh, just you wait. It's even better than all of those ideas!
Bailey continues:
Watch what they name things. If they call something the Patriot Act, you can bet it won't be long before they're using it to hunt down us patriots. If it's called Net Neutrality, it's going to be used to neutralize their enemies. If it's called the Fairness Doctrine, it's meant to un fairly put free speech under government control and create a chilling effect on your First Amendment rights.
That's right, kids, in an Orwellian twist, those bills are all named the opposite of what they really are! The Patriot Act is for rounding up patriots! Net Neutrality is for neutralizing dissenters. (Okay, that's not really an opposite.) The Fairness Doctrine is to unfairly do something to the First Amendment. God damn if Danny Bailey isn't a genius.
Plus, he has lots of paper. Like Beverly before him, Bailey makes his point by dangling papers in front of his audience. He's sort of a patirotic prop comic, but not funny. Like Carrottop.
Blah blah blah... Bailey goes on about unemployment ("almost forty percent if you're a young black man") and prisons ("of all the world's prisoners, we've got twenty-five percent of them right here in this country"), yet fails to make the connection between poverty and crime.
He does however note that the government is hiring Internment and Resettlement Specialists like nobody's business. There's more papers, more factoids, more statistics.
"And here"—he squinted as he read briefly from the document on top of his stack—"United States Air Force Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2 will authorize and direct the secretary of defense to use the U.S. armed forces to restore law and order in the event of a crisis. Under this umbrella plan they ran an exercise in 1984—so you see they do have a sense of humor—and that exercise was called Rex-84. The purpose was to see how efficiently they could pick up and corral all those disobedient Americans on their lists."
Bailey held up document after document as he continued. "What lists, you ask? All kinds of them. The FBI's ADEX list from the late 1960s—ADEX, that stands for Agitator Index—it was full of dangerous intellectuals, union organizers, and people who spoke out against the Vietnam War. Now there's almost a million and a half people on the DHS Terrorist Watch List, and it's growing by twenty thousand names every month.
"Have you registered a firearm? You're on a list! Have you made a political contribution to a third-party candidate? You're on a list! Have you visited my website? You're on a list! Have you given a speech about government lists to a rowdy group of patriots? You're on a list!
So, yeah. Big Brother is watching you, and making lists, and checking them twice (sorry) and you better be careful. They're hiring Internment Specialists to round everyone up. (Not really.) It would seem grim. If you lacked critical thinking skills.
It's interesting how Beck throws out all this random data, never really ties any of it together, not sufficiently anyway. Take that bit about the ADEX from the Sixties. What the fuck does that have to do with the DHS Terrorist Watch List? It is implied there is some connection between the two. But that's all it is. They are mentioned in the same paragraph, so I think we're to infer there is some credence to the plot fifty years in the making. But vague innuendoes aren't facts.
And this is when things start to get personal for Noah.
"Oh, and this just in, thanks to our friends on the Internet—a place where, at least for now, we can track them as easily as they can track us."
Noah felt his face getting hot. In Bailey's hand was a printout of the leaked government memorandum from that afternoon meeting at the office, the one he'd spent his entire morning trying to nullify. It was effectively harmless now, it was a nonissue, and he repeated that to himself, but the smug look coming from the guy onstage had already gotten under his skin.
"... if you speak out against abortion," Bailey continued, reading from the memo, "are a returning veteran, are a defender of the Second Amendment, oppose illegal immigration, are a homeschooler, if you've got a bumper sticker on your car that says 'Chuck Baldwin for President' or, heaven help us, if you're found to be in possession of a copy of the U.S. Constitution, then you good American patriots, you moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas, you guardians of liberty are to be approached with extreme caution and guns at the ready, because you may be a terrorist!"
Whoops! The leak that Doyle and Merchant thought they had fixed? Turns out: Not so much. They better check with HR, make sure no teabaggers are on the payroll. First place to look: The copy room. Or the mail room. Yeah, check the mail room! Also, see if anyone's been hanging up flyers aroung the office. Just a suggestion.
Oh, and about the line "heaven help us, if you're found to be in possession of a copy of the U.S. Constitution..." Wasn't Beverly jsut telling everyone to carry a copy with them at all times? But Bailey says that'll get you "on a list." Which is it? Maybe this is why I don't know what the teabaggers want: They don't know what they want.
There stuff about the Enduring Constitutional Government, Constitution Free Zones, a "continuous state of national emergency" blah blah blah.
"It looks bad, I know it does," Bailey began. "But do you know why we're going to beat them? We're going to beat them because once the truth gets out there'll be no stopping it. When enough people wake up they'll have no choice but to come out of the shadows and fight, and then we've got them. Remember what a great man once told us: First they ignore you—then they ridicule you—then they fight you—"
"And then they win," Noah said.
Uh oh! All eyes on Noah! Then the chapter wraps. Dang, what will happen next? Oh, the thrills! Chapter twelve, here I come!
Oh, and if anyone can guess what happens in chapter twelve, you get a prize.
Take us to your leader, or just lie there like an adorable single-celled organism, or whatever:
A team of astronomers from the University of California and the Carnegie Institute of Washington say they've found a planet like ours, 20 light years (120 trillion miles) from Earth, where the basic conditions for life are good.
...Dr. Elizabeth Cunningham, planetarium astronomer at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, says the discovery [of Gliese 581g] is a huge deal. "It could have liquid water on the surface," she said. "That's the first step to find life."
There are hundreds of known extrasolar planets that have been discovered in the Milky Way, but this is the first that could support life.
Earthlings won't be traveling to Gliese 581g any time soon unfortunately. Scientists say a spaceship traveling close to the speed of light would take 20 years to make this journey.
Does Richard Branson really have anything better to do? I think not.
See Deeky's archive of all previous Conniving & Sinister strips here.
[In which Liss reimagines the long-running comic "Frank & Ernest," about two old straight white guys "telling it like it is," as a fat feminist white woman (Liss) and a biracial queerbait (Deeky) telling it like it actually is from their perspectives. Hilarity ensues.]
"Democratic leaders must recognize that the nation's views on women and power are changing. They might also consider it a moral and social imperative for the party that relies on women, and to which women's progress has been historically tied, to treat its women as a fundamental asset rather than a vaguely irritating embarrassment."—Rebecca Traister, in "Democrats: Remember the Ladies!" for The Nation. A must-read.
Someone* in one of today's threads called for a double dose of cute today. So here's Swatch (canine mascot of Mood Fabrics in NYC) to the rescue:
Swatch says: "This day is pushing my buttons"
Image description: a small black-and-white dog with a bemused expression. Zie sits on a gray carpet in front of a display wall of sewing buttons on cards.
Data reported by the Population Reference Bureau, a Washington-based research organization that comes up with global demographic stats, show that the number of American young adults, aged 25-34, have dropped a dramatic 10 percentage points between 2000 and 2009 from 55.1% to 44.9%, citing the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey. Among the total population, aged 18 or older, marriage dropped from 57% in 2000 to 52% in 2009.
The numbers are the lowest since the Census Bureau began counting marriage a century ago.
I blame feminism!
You know, if the People Who Care About These Things want to bump up those marriage rates, they could try legalizing same-sex marriage.
But, of course, it's really not marriage over which they're wringing their beringed hands; it it were, the fact that "90% of adults will get married at some point in their lives," thus suggesting not fewer marriages but merely delayed marriages, would soothe their alarm. What it's really about is protecting the proud tradition of male supremacy, of which early marriage (and childbearing) has long been an integral part.
Ah well. Female equality's a bitch. *rimshot*
(Btw/TW: A million demerits for the image accompanying the article and the lede equating marriage to "clubbing someone over the head." Whoops you forgot to flip your calendar to the 21st century!)
There's a monster in the shower! Oh, nope -- it's just Sophie. Olivia and Matilda are the laziest playpals ever. Dudz couldn't be less interested. Zzzzz.
(I'll post some still pictures for those who can't view video later in the day.)
And that explains why women have one-night stands how...?
Wait wait—don't tell me! I bet it's because of our ancient evo-ova driving us to procure seed to make teh babies, amirite? HIGH FIVE, LADIES! (But only the cis ladies, obviously.)
You know, the really fun thing about evo-psych is how useful it has the potential to be for rape apologists, given its insistence on ripping apart our bodies from our minds and assigning them their own individual motivations. When scientists say that our sexual urges are "operating outside of conscious awareness," it's like getting a big fat stamp of institutional approval on that old "your mouth says no, but your body says yes" chestnut. Classic!
What the everloving fuck. Two Michigan State University basketball players are accused of taking turns "assaulting an unidentified woman for nearly an hour in their Wonders Hall dormitory room late on Aug. 29 and into Aug. 30," and one of the players "who volunteered a statement corroborated much of the victim's statement," including the fact that she did not consent, but prosecutors have nonetheless declined to pursue the case.
The victim, who was brought to tears by a prosecutor affecting "a defense approach" and "grill[ing] her about whether or not it was possible the perpetrators thought the activity was consensual, why she didn't yell and scream and why she didn't run or try and fight her way out of the room," is still willing to testify.
"I worry about what would happen if it didn't go through and having to deal with all the publicity and everything that goes with pursuing charges," she said. "But also I am angry. It's just that everybody looks at them as heroes and they're so excited for basketball season that [the players] get off without anybody caring. They haven't even been punished."
Asked what she would like to see, she tenses the muscles in her face, and chews nervously at her upper lip.
"Just some justice, because right now there's none," she says.
Leaving her rapists free to do it again, creating even more victims whose cases prosecutors can decline to pursue.
Unless the victim, having already survived a gang rape, goes back to the prosecutors who revictimized her and asks them to reconsider: Ingham County Prosecutor Stuart Dunnings III generously offers, "There is a reconsideration policy in our office. If a victim is not happy, they can come talk to me and I'll review everything personally."
[Trigger warning for sexual assault, homophobia, and suicide.]
By now, you've probably heard the details of the terrible incident at Rutgers University, in which 18-year-old freshman Tyler Clementi jumped to his death off the George Washington Bridge after his roommate and a friend secretly filmed and live-streamed Clementi making out with another young man.
Naturally, a lot of people have reasonably concluded that the "merry pranksters" who broadcast Clementi's private sexual acts, Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei, were homophobic. But a longtime friend of Ravi's says this is not true:
[Michael Zhuang told ABC News] the media portrayals of Ravi as possibly homophobic or a serious prankster are not true. "I'm in shock, I didn't expect this to happen and I am just speechless. He's normally very nice and I don't think that this is a representation of him," said Zhuang. "He's very very open minded and he, like if it had been a girl in the room it wouldn't have been any different," he said.
See that? Ravi isn't homophobic; he's an equal opportunity sexual assaulter.
Oh, pardon me: An equal opportunity privacy-invader. Ravi and Wei "have been charged with two counts each of invasion of privacy."
You know you're living in a rape culture when the proffered evidence of someone's decency and open-mindedness is that he'd have callously violated his roommate's privacy if he'd been intimate with a girl, too.
Naturally, the phrase "if it had been a girl in the room it wouldn't have been any different" is absurd for another reason: It might not have been any different for Ravi (a dubious claim in the first place, frankly), but it certainly made a world of difference to his victim, by virtue of the fact that we live in an institutionally homophobic culture where straight people generally needn't worry about violent retribution or familial ostracization or any of the other potential consequences many gay/bi men and women might face after evidence of their sexuality is broadcast to the world.
The things Clementi evidently feared enough to take his own life.
The Good News: Democratic Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey will reportedly introduce LGBTQI-inclusive immigration legislation today or tomorrow, at long last providing US citizens and permanent residents to sponsor same-sex partners for residency in the same way opposite-sex partners can. (For evident reasons, this is a particular legislative interest of Iain's and mine.) The legislation "would also provide a path to citizenship for the undocumented and would include the DREAM Act, which would give adolescents who came to the U.S. as children a chance to achieve citizenship through completing two years of college or spending two years in the military."
The Bad News: The Senate adjourns this week for the midterm recess. Senator Menendez's spokesperson "would not confirm the report but said details of the bill." And "the complicated legislation is not expected to move before the end of the year, but may just be laying the groundwork for next session.
Or, worse, may be a promise to mixed-nationality gay families and immigrant families before the midterm elections that the Democrats actually have no promise of keeping.
I don't like feeling that cynical, though, so I'm going to quote the optimistic Steve Ralls, director of communications for the pro-LGBT Immigration Equality: "Senator Menendez's bill will set the stage, in this Congress and the next, for a serious debate on fixing our broken immigration system."
Today might be a good day to contact your senators and ask them to support LGBTQI-inclusive immigration reform, which also includes the DREAM Act and offers undocumented workers a path to citizenship. Let them know there is a constituency who's eager to see such legislation passed, so when the legislation comes across their desks, they see it as an issue with broad support, not "special interest" legislation they can ignore as long as it got a press release.
I've written about the OH NOES MORE LADIES GETTING DEGREES! and BOY CRISIS! alarmism more times than I can count, so I'm not going to do it again. Just have at it in comments.
Instead, I'll share with you the email exchange in which Iain sent me this article.
Iain: Sends link under the deceptively innocuous subject line "Hi."
Liss: LOL. You could have warned me you were about to throw me into a pile of garbage. Now I smell like poo.
Adam Serwer on how radical the administration's internet surveillance proposal (about which I tweeted here) really is:
I don't think I adequately expressed how fundamentally radical it is that the administration is planning to propose legislation that would force Internet communications companies to build their systems in a way that allows the government to have a backdoor. Part of the problem, I think, is that we still think of privacy on the Internet as being somehow different from physical privacy. As in, I still have privacy if there isn't a camera in my home, but the government can read my e-mails. It should be immediately obvious, though, even in that example, how tapping the Internet is not like tapping a phone line.
"Telephone conversations are ephemeral, they go away after you're done," explains Christopher Calabrese, legislative counsel with the ACLU. "Internet communications leave a record; that record, while it seems just as private as the actual conversation, is protected at a much lower level." What that means is that unlike a phone tap, which tracks future communications from the point at which the eavesdropping begins, under this proposal, past records would be accessible too.
Last night I was thinking about an aside in a piece Julian Sanchez wrote about how we increasingly live our lives, and it's true. For a growing number of people, if the government has access to someone's Internet communications, you have access to just about everything. They know what food you like. They know who you're having sex with. You know who your friends are, and who your enemies are. They know your political views, your literary preferences, your sense of humor. They know how much money you make, what kinds of health problems you have, what neighborhood you live in.
Viewed in this context, forcing Internet communications companies to reverse engineer their systems for breach by the government is like forcing construction companies to build houses that have cameras in every room.
That's an enormous amount of information for the government to have access to. And even if one "doesn't have anything to hide" from a center-left administration, would the same be true under a far right administration...?
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