Category: Media and Culture,

High heels row: MPs ‘shocked’ by women’s dress code stories 

On By peanutgallerynhIn Chick Stuff,, Europe,Leave a comment

A petition that calls for a ban on forcing women to wear high heels at work is debated by MPs.

…MPs said they were “shocked” by stories submitted as part of the inquiry, which included one case of a woman who had been told to dye her hair blonde.

The government has said no employer should discriminate on gender grounds.

…Helen Jones, who chairs the Petitions Committee, said : “It is fair to say that what we found shocked us.

“We found attitudes that belonged more [to the] – I was going to say 1950s but probably the 1850s might be more accurate – than the 21st Century.

…Women should not be expected to wear things that caused discomfort or expense that a male colleague would not, she added.

“I must reiterate that the government utterly condemns such dress requirements where their effects are discriminatory.”

High heels row: MPs ‘shocked’ by women’s dress code stories – BBC News

hmmmm

This Sportscaster Roasting Transphobic Bigots Is Truly Glorious To Watch. 

On By peanutgallerynhIn Media and Culture,Leave a comment

Texas sportscaster Dale Hansen came to the defense of a transgender teen during a segment on WFAA-TV, and totally shut down transphobic bigots in the process. 

In the video, Hansen spoke specifically of Mack Beggs, a 17-year-old athlete who is forced to wrestle against girls although he is a transgender boy. Beggs takes testosterone as part of the gender confirmation process, which changes his body to be more typically masculine. Hansen argues that this is not only unfair to the girls Beggs is wrestling, but to Beggs himself who clarified that he would feel more comfortable wrestling other boys.

…Hansen is sending the message that you don’t have to fully understand or agree with someone in order to be decent toward them.

“He’s a child, simply looking for his place in the world and a chance to compete in the world.”

This Sportscaster Roasting Transphobic Bigots Is Truly Glorious To Watch. | Someecards LGBT

How can you not love Dale Hansen?

Samuel L. Jackson uses one tweet to crush Ben Carson and his slaves as ‘immigrants’ comment

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,, Race,Leave a comment

Today, like most days, Samuel L. Jackson is the voice of reason.

While making his debut as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development on Monday afternoon, Ben Carson said that America’s “can-do” value system was best exemplified by slaves — who he audaciously referred to as “immigrants.”

…

Twitter immediately blew the f*ck up over Carson’s impudent comments — but the outrage was perhaps best articulated in one vivacious tweet by America’s foul-mouthed sweetheart Samuel L. Jackson.

Samuel L. Jackson uses one tweet to crush Ben Carson and his slaves as ‘immigrants’ comment

Gawd love you, Samuel L!!!

Mem Fox, Australian author, gets apology after being wrongfully detained at LA airport 

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,, Money, Class, and Poverty,, Pacific Basin,, Race,Leave a comment

Mem Fox says she doubts she will visit the US again after she was wrongly detained by immigration officials.

Mem Fox, Australian author, gets apology after being wrongfully detained at LA airport – Donald Trump’s America – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

She got an apology and only spent two hours in detention because she is rich, famous, and white.

Farming Behind Barbed Wire: Japanese-Americans Remember WWII Incarceration 

On By peanutgallerynhIn American Injustice System,, Domestic Affairs,, Race,Leave a comment

Jim Tanimoto and many other once-successful farm owners were about to become field workers for the U.S. government.

The guard towers and rows of barracks have long since been torn down or moved. Our guide on the pilgrimage points out the few remaining buildings, and the huge swaths of farmland once worked by Tule Lake prisoners. Over 1,000 Japanese-Americans worked in the fields, most earning just $12 a month, a quarter of what farmworkers made at the time.

…The stated purpose of these farms was to feed the incarcerated, but camp administrators took produce, grain and hay grown by these imprisoned Japanese American workers, and sold it on the open market – over 2 million pounds of it from Tule Lake alone.

…By 1960, the number of Japanese-American farmers dropped to a quarter of their prewar presence. With lost farms, homes and businesses, it’s estimated that wartime incarceration cost Japanese-Americans up to $4 billion in today’s values. Some of those losses were compensated in 1988, when President Ronald Reagan signed redress legislation offering a formal apology and giving $20,000 to each survivor.

The non-economic losses – to Japanese-Americans, to California, to the whole country – are impossible to measure. Especially now, Takei said, we must remember “how easily people — because of fear and anger — lose sight of our important national values of justice and rule of law.” She drew parallels with Muslim Americans, refugees and immigrants, “as though demonizing other people is going to solve our problems.”

All we have to do, she said, is look at the World War II incarceration of Japanese -Americans to see that’s not true.

Farming Behind Barbed Wire: Japanese-Americans Remember WWII Incarceration : The Salt : NPR

hmmmmmmmm

Let’s stop demonizing “filler words” 

On By peanutgallerynhIn Media and Culture,3 Comments

A few days ago, the New York Times published an article by Christopher Mele about so-called “filler words”, telling people to stop using them. Reporting on language often frustrates me,…

…This article and others like it get the cause-and-effect wrong. Women and young people don’t “sound stupid” because they say like too much. We associate like with “sounding stupid” because we think women and young people sound stupid in general. So let’s address the real problem — our systematic devaluation of women and young people — rather than blaming it on their behavior.

Let’s stop demonizing “filler words” | Jena Barchas-Lichtenstein

hmmm

How Doctors Take Women’s Pain Less Seriously – The Atlantic

On By peanutgallerynhIn Chick Stuff,, Science and Stuff,Leave a comment

As we loaded into the ambulance, here’s what we didn’t know: Rachel had an ovarian cyst, a fairly common thing. But it had grown, undetected, until it was so large that it finally weighed her ovary down, twisting the fallopian tube like you’d wring out a sponge. This is called ovarian torsion, and it creates the kind of organ-failure pain few people experience and live to tell about.

…Other nurses’ reactions ranged from dismissive to condescending. “You’re just feeling a little pain, honey,” one of them told Rachel, all but patting her head.

…The average emergency-room patient in the U.S. waits 28 minutes before seeing a doctor. I later learned that at Brooklyn Hospital Center, where we were, the average wait was nearly three times as long, an hour and 49 minutes. Our wait would be much, much longer.

…The diagnosis of kidney stones—repeated by the nurses and confirmed by the attending physician’s prescribed course of treatment—was a denial of the specifically female nature of Rachel’s pain. A more careful examiner would have seen the need for gynecological evaluation; later, doctors told us that Rachel’s swollen ovary was likely palpable through the surface of her skin.  ….And every nurse’s shrug seemed to say, “Women cry—what can you do?”

Nationwide, men wait an average of 49 minutes before receiving an analgesic for acute abdominal pain. Women wait an average of 65 minutes for the same thing. Rachel waited somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours.

…Later, she’d tell me that the hydromorphone didn’t really stop the pain—just numbed it slightly. Mostly, it made her feel sedated, too tired to fight.

…If Rachel had been alone, with no one to agitate for her care, there’s no telling how long she might have waited.

It was almost another hour before we got the CT results. But when they came, they changed everything.

…That’s when we lost it. Not just because our minds filled then with words like tumor and cancer and malignant. Not just because Rachel had gone half crazy with the waiting and the pain. It was because we’d asked to wait our turn all through the day—longer than a standard office shift—only to find out we’d been an emergency all along.

…Rachel’s physical scars are healing, and she can go on the long runs she loves, but she’s still grappling with the psychic toll—what she calls “the trauma of not being seen.”

How Doctors Take Women’s Pain Less Seriously – The Atlantic

My gawd….

Chris Wallace To Reince Priebus: ‘You Don’t Get To Tell’ The Press What To Do

On By peanutgallerynhIn Media and Culture,Leave a comment

“He said that the fake media, not certain stories, the fake media are an enemy to the country. We don’t have a state-run media in this country. That’s what they have in dictatorships,” Wallace told Priebus on “Fox News Sunday.”

…”We covered all of that,” Wallace interjected. “Here’s the problem. When the President says that we’re the enemy of the American people, it makes it sound like if you’re going against him, you’re going against the country.”

Chris Wallace To Reince Priebus: ‘You Don’t Get To Tell’ The Press What To Do

We’ve all gone through the looking glass with Alice. Fox news defending the right to criticize a Republican President…. What’s next? They are going to start focusing on the inequalities facing women and people of color of non Christian religions in this country???

Congresswoman Grace Meng’s Menstrual Equity Bill to Make Tampons Accessible

On By peanutgallerynhIn American Injustice System,, Chick Stuff,, Domestic Affairs,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

An op-ed by Congresswoman Grace Meng.

Congresswoman Grace Meng’s Menstrual Equity Bill to Make Tampons Accessible

Wow. The fact that some women could have this problem never occurred to me. I’m not sure how any society could call itself civilized when half its members are in danger of being subjected to this type of humiliation.

Good on you, Congresswoman Meng, good on you.

Growing Up Jehovah’s Witness: ‘Higher Education Is Spiritually Dangerous’ 

On By peanutgallerynhIn Education,, Religion,Leave a comment

….a Jehovah’s Witness, and like many others in the faith, he was homeschooled his whole life.

…My dad told me that he knew people who were into science, and it dragged them right out of the organization, right out of the truth.”

…The view that higher education is spiritually dangerous is very common among Witnesses, and for Linderer, it meant that his parents wouldn’t support him going to college.

…Research shows that only 9 percent of Witnesses get undergraduate degrees. That’s well below the national average of 30.4 percent and the lowest of any faith group. The likely reason for this trend is the religion’s official warnings against college.

…continual association with non-believers in an academic setting can “erode thinking and convictions.”

Witness leadership also discourages higher education because they believe it’s a waste of time. Jehovah’s Witnesses have been predicting the end of the world since the religion’s founding at the end of the 19th century. 

…Pew research also shows that Jehovah’s Witnesses are among the lowest earners of any religious group.

Source: Growing Up Jehovah’s Witness: ‘Higher Education Is Spiritually Dangerous’ : NPR

Keep them dumb because stupid people are more subservient?

For decades they hid Jefferson’s relationship with her. Now Monticello is making room for Sally Hemings. 

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“If you are going to get people to come to historic sites, you should show them what it was really like,” said Rubenstein, who has also underwritten renovations to the slave quarters at Arlington House and James Madison’s Montpelier. “The good and bad of history.”

For decades they hid Jefferson’s relationship with her. Now Monticello is making room for Sally Hemings. – The Washington Post

hmmmm

Trump family’s elaborate lifestyle is a ‘logistical nightmare’ — at taxpayer expense

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

Barely a month into the Trump presidency, the unusually elaborate lifestyle of America’s new first family is straining the Secret Service and security officials, stirring financial and logistical concerns in several local communities, and costing far beyond what has been typical for past presidents — a price tag that, based on past assessments of presidential travel and security costs, could balloon into the hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of a four-year term.

…Trump’s three Mar-a-Lago trips since the inauguration have probably cost the federal treasury about $10 million, based on figures used in an October government report analyzing White House travel, including money for Coast Guard units to patrol the exposed shoreline and other military, security and staffing expenses associated with moving the apparatus of the presidency.

…In New York, the city is paying $500,000 a day to guard Trump Tower, according to police officials’ estimates, an amount that could reach $183 million a year.

This month, The Post reported that Secret Service and U.S. Embassy staffers paid nearly $100,000 in hotel-room bills to support Eric Trump’s trip to promote a Trump-brand condo tower in Uruguay.

…For Trump, the costs come with an additional perk: Some of the money flows into his own pocket. While Trump has removed himself from managing his company, he has refused to divest his ownership, meaning that he benefits from corporate successes such as government contracts.

…Trump’s frequent travel belies his repeated criticism of Obama as a “habitual vacationer” enjoying taxpayer-funded golf getaways. It also comes after his own promises: He told the Hill newspaper in 2015, “I would rarely leave the White House because there’s so much work to be done.”

…Trump’s frequent travel belies his repeated criticism of Obama as a “habitual vacationer” enjoying taxpayer-funded golf getaways. It also comes after his own promises: He told the Hill newspaper in 2015, “I would rarely leave the White House because there’s so much work to be done.”

Trump family’s elaborate lifestyle is a ‘logistical nightmare’ — at taxpayer expense

hmmm

Mar-a-Lago Neighbors Discover Costs of Trump’s Visits 

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,, Local Interest,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

■ $200,000 in lost fuel sales at a large local airport in a single four-day visit this month.
■ 75 no-shows at a new restaurant in just one night.
■ $60,000 a day to pay overtime to sheriff’s deputies who guard the many closed roads, a tab that is about $1.5 million over all since the election.
■ 250 private flights grounded every day.

A month into his presidency, Mr. Trump arrived at Mar-a-Lago, his private club here, for a third weekend in a row this Presidents’ Day weekend. For the locals, that’s at least three days of clogged roads and strict security protocols that hurt local businesses and frustrate residents.

 

hmmm