Beef Jerky Action Cam??

I am not making this up. Here I am, watching the big college football game of the week on tv — LSU v Alabama — suddenly wondering how I can be so riveted by any meme that involves a “beef jerky action cam!”

Pure Dead Brilliant — Jon Stewart Channels Glenn Beck

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Rice Krispies No Health Food, Much Less Medicine Magic

And that goes for Cocoa Krispies too, no matter what outrageous corporate “colors” the First Amendment might hold its nose and permit to be inflicted upon our evermore-poorly educated populace.

Rice Krispies Are No Substitute For Swine Flu Vaccine:

Cereal giant Kellogg said it’s dropping the eyebrow-raising claim that a box of Rice Krispies or Cocoa Krispies, “Now helps support your child’s IMMUNITY.”

. . .health guru Marion Nestle of New York University: “Yes, these nutrients are involved in immunity, but I can’t think of a nutrient that isn’t involved in the immune system,” she told USA Today. “. . . it’s cases like this that prove ‘in the absence of FDA action, food marketing is allowed to run rampant.’

Over the years, food makers complained that if supplements could use such claims, they could too. At first, the FDA issued warning letters to food companies using structure-function claims. It stopped after the courts ruled that food companies could make claims for the health benefits of their products on First Amendment grounds.

Now FDA says

Capitol Hill Mad Hatters Show Up for More Tea Partying

Tea Partiers Hit Capitol:

They arrived as early as 8:30 a.m., by bus, car and plane — from Bluffton, S.C., Des Moines and Dorris, Calif. — to rally with conservative lawmakers and possibly roam the halls of Congress.

“Can you hear us now!” they chanted from the foot of the Capitol, as they awaited the arrival of their heroine — [Michele] Bachmann.

“She’s very brave,” said Nancy Holmberg of Dorris.

“Palin/Bachmann 2012,” came a shout from the crowd. The crowd is also chanting Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s name and demanding that she come address them on the steps of the Capitol.

. . . Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) shook hands at a wall line like a presidential contender.

“This is too great,” he said.

Btw I heard this fellow Rep. King, on MSNBC this morning hyping the event. He specifically said it was a show of force meant to make moderate Democratic reps “more afraid of their constituents than they were afraid of Nancy Pelosi.”

Well, okay. At least we’ve now clearly established in your own words that the Republican goal is not good governance but FEAR. Now we’re just haggling over the price . . .

Maine Repeals Gays as Human; Public School Parent Protests Gays as Animals

Dan Delong of Carlinville, Ill., at teacher at Southwestern High School in the nearby town of Piasa, will face a school board hearing November 2, after being suspended from teaching. A parent of one unidentified student thought the optional reading assignment was inappropriate for her child . . .

When this and this coincide in the same week, what are kids actually learning do you think, about the values woven into America’s power of story?

The teacher’s disciplinary hearing was Monday night, and perhaps there’s a better lesson in how it ended than in how it started, a fitting lesson of today’s American president as true to yesterday’s American precedent:

Young Son the Political and Cultural Cynic

So you know he’s been reading Les Miserables, all 1,400 pages.

I guess it makes sense he would relate the author’s social themes to his own present reality as synched up with his own favorite social commentary artists by night, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and as opposed to the years of rantings and vitriol he’s heard by day from Limbaugh, Beck and Hannity on the car radio.

He chortled over a narrative passage (I think describing the Thenardier family) last night, reading it aloud to the whole family and marveling that Hugo had somehow anticipated the third-millennium GOP!

I probably wouldn’t have blogged it except then this morning, I saw he had posted it to FaceBook:

“There are souls which, crablike, crawl continually toward darkness, going back in life, rather than advancing in it;
using what experience they have to increase their deformity; growing worse without ceasing, and becoming steeped more and more thoroughly in an intensifying wickedness.”

– Victor Hugo, sound like anybody you know of?

War, War, War Revisited

See Because Liz Cheney is a War Criminal too in the rogues’ gallery detailed, then proceed:

Liz Cheney, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter, is founding a new group called “Keep America Safe” that will coordinate a campaign of fear intended to paint the President as an appeaser disinterested in protecting America.

The Cheneys have never been shy when criticizing President Obama or his foreign policy. Soon after Obama was elected, former Vice President Dick Cheney took to the airwaves to warn the country of the dire risk faced by ending the internationally-condemned practice of torture. Now, his eldest daughter Liz is creating a nonprofit aimed at making such scare tactics into a permanent campaign.

Conservative partisan and failed Iraq war prognosticator William Kristol is one of the founding members. Kristol has also called for an invasion of Iran, suggesting that perhaps this time, we will, in fact, be “greeted as liberators.”

Keep America Safe’s mission statement parrots some of Kristol’s paranoid and dubious claims. . . To Keep America Safe, apparently, requires not one or two but three simultaneous wars.

Because Dick Cheney and his spawn can’t or won’t shut up and slink off the national stage in shame, I am reposting this from April, just as urgent as ever:

War war war, fiddle-dee-dee!

Is this the only power of story conservatives get, war?
All they can talk about, the only way they can make a case for their “freedom” values and respect for “life”? WMD as WWJD?

Not just fighting with each other over literal fights in the Middle East, which you’d think would be plenty of real war and then some. But no-oo-o. We also have to re-fight themes of:

JJ’s Reading Serious Stuff About Vaccine and Public Health Foolishness

Science doesn’t kill people, people kill people. With politics and mind games.
And “fear spreads as rapidly as any virus . . .”

David Shenk is the author of five books; his next book, The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told about Genetics, Talent and IQ is Wrong, will be published by Doubleday in March 2010.

Oct 20 2009, 5:59PM
Health / Medicine:
The New Pandemic of Vaccine Phobia

We no longer believe that witches control the weather or inhabit the souls of adolescent girls. We no longer believe that the earth is flat, and we have even held our ground against the pseudoscience of “intelligent design.”

Now it is time for all who respect logic, rationality, and the scientific method to come together and say NO MORE to anti-vaccine demagoguery.

No one pretends that vaccines are perfect, or 100% risk-free. But approved vaccines work. They save lives. They do not cause mercury poisoning or autism. They carry very low risks — risks almost always worth taking. And, to top it off, vaccines have become something of a civic responsibility: they work best when everyone takes them.

Six recent helpful articles:
[see at story link]

Wired Magazine is out with its new cover story about a prominent vaccine scientist and historian/biographer, who is to vaccines what Richard Dawkins is to evolution — someone who gets death threats for his modern medicine the way doctors who courageously provide women’s family planning and reproductive health care do:
An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All

Then I came across a progressive Indiana pediatrician at HuffPo blogging health care and insurance reform in a way that appeals to my intelligence: RATIONAL ARGUMENTS: a blog mainly (but not entirely) about health policy. . .his radio talk about intelligently negotiating health insurance reform is here.

Smartest Two Percent Use It to Conclude Home Education is Smart

Spunky is blogging a Mensa study done by that organization’s foundation to research the nature of intelligence:

First-year college performance:
A study of home school graduates and traditional school graduates

The academic performance analyses indicate that home school graduates are as ready for college as traditional high school graduates and that they perform as well on national college assessment tests as traditional high school graduates.

The results of this study are also consistent with other studies on the academic performance of home school students compared to traditional high school graduates (Galloway 1995, Gray 1998, Jenkins 1998, Mexcur 1993). These results also suggest that a parent-guided K-12 education does not have a negative effect on a student’s college success.

For those of you needing traditional research to show an uneasy spouse, mother-in-law or the FSM forbid, a custody judge, keep this handy. I don’t need it though. I am my own case study, from a unique perspective as a school professional who unschools, also Mensa mom of Mensa kids including one proving the conclusion as we speak, on campus.

The conversation among Spunky readers is from a different angle than what I tend to see, so I thought I’d open it up here too. I’m not sure what any of this means (the study or the reactions to it) or what to think is smart or stupid or self-validating, except that being really intelligent is understanding that “what we know” — at any age — isn’t as important as “how we think.”

And that, as some of you already know, in 2000 when Favorite Daughter was nine-turning-ten, Mensa referred us to a mainstream but stupid “reality” show to find “the smartest kid in America.” (Since reality shows and kids are in the news this week, y’all might find it particularly interesting.)

Here’s the correspondence we had with the tv producer.

Social and Economic Change Spells School Problem

Even when the cultural change is the business of sports, it’s still a school problem, particularly in vocational education. (Does this make schooling and its related standards and certifications and enterprises, more conservative economic impediment in effect than progressive asset? )

Choosing to end the barbarism of Spanish bull-fighting for example:

Luis Alcántara is afraid that group will be large enough to undo 11 years of work. Since 1998, he has run a bullfighting school in Hospitalet, just outside Barcelona. His enrollments were hurt by the under-14 provision of the animal cruelty law passed in 2003, and these days, he has only nine students practicing their capework on an abandoned football field. He worries that the initiative will put him out of business altogether.

“Nobody here really hears about us,” he says. “We go to a corrida, and then go home until the following Sunday, and we don’t have any power. But there are plenty of Catalans who still love the bulls.”

Or major-league baseball umpiring in America:

From the beginning, umpiring has been seen by those who run baseball as a necessary but marginal aspect of the game. Major League Baseball does not train its own umpires, and therefore it has not established practices that would attract the best people.

Those who wish to enter the profession attend schools run by former umpires. But these are entirely private businesses; the commissioner of baseball doesn’t control the curriculum, manage the training or do anything to lure people of all races and ethnic groups to become umpires.

Everything is connected to everything, and especially School.

Kids Need Real Mom to Show Up, Not TV Reality Show

UPDATE 1:55 pm EDT – just heard the entire sheriff’s news conference on CNN live, extraordinary. All three boys are said to have had “100% involvement” in the hoax, and what the sheriff called “guilty knowledge” — so one of the felonies with which the the parent/s will be charged is “contributing to the delinquency of minors.”

_____________

Note to Balloon Boy’s Mom: Get a Clue, These are Your Real Kids, Not Some TV Show:

I don’t judge whether your sons swear, pick their noses, fart, burp or jump over banisters. I have two little boys. Glass houses. . .

That said, Mayumi, get a clue.

As of press time Saturday it seems you have either been dragged or agreed to participate in a stunt by a husband who is a child and a women- bashing gasbag. What’s more, he apparently wants your boys to be raging, women-hating gasbags. . .

These are your real live children with their own humiliations and their own storms to chase. Hold on tightly to them. They need at least one parent to keep them from flying too close to the sun.

“Most Inappropriate Halloween Costumes” Slide Show

(Strong warning to those offended by, well, things clearly meant to offend.
Like listening to Beck or Limbaugh.)

Just remember, no matter how bad you may feel about whatever you come up with, as long as you’re not dressed in one of the costumes below, you’re all set.

The show starts with “child pimp” just like the ACORN set-up. Most are not child costumes though. Lots of graphic genitalia. Some racial and religious offense intended.

There was one I didn’t get, try as I might and worldly as I think I am. See if you can tell which is the most obscure, maybe explain it to me. (No, it wasn’t the misspelled bestiality costume. That was obvious.)