Category: Uncategorized

Commentary: Banning Plastic Straws Could Make Pollution Worse?

On By peanutgallerynhIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Commentary: Banning Plastic Straws Could Make Pollution Worse | Fortune

1.) Conflates the issue of the preponderance of plastic packaging and one-time use restaurant-ware with the question of the environmental impact of styrofoam vs. other traditional packaging alternatives.

2.) Who pitched this? The Styrofoam/similar materials and plastic packaging and single use items lobby?

3.) Further conflates the issue of plastic packaging and single use products by minimizing how much plastic is used by countries outside of Asia and Africa

4.) Sidesteps around question of whether packaging and single use items being made of alternative materials would lessen the negative impact of these materials on the environment as if the potential didn’t even exist.

5.) Trots out the sly “conventional wisdom” that reducing the use of plastic would lessen negative impact on the environment. Of course it would but in a day and age when plastic isn’t steadily replacing or being added to every other container used to package goods it doesn’t seem very likely. More importantly though, reducing the use of plastic does not mean that replacing plastic with other materials wouldn’t lessen negative impact on the environment as well. It’s not very likely and it’s certainly not an either or. Logic would even suggest both using more biodegradable materials and reducing packing and single use product waste would be the best approach.

Fane Lozman wins First Amendment Supreme Court case

On By peanutgallerynhIn American Injustice System,, Domestic Affairs,, Gulf Coast Region,, Media and Culture,, UncategorizedLeave a comment

The nation’s highest court ruled in favor of political gadfly Fane Lozman on Monday in a 8-1 decision, the culmination of more than a decade of work for Lozman after he was dragged out of a Riviera Beach city council meeting and arrested after speaking about the allegedly corrupt dealings of a Palm Beach County commissioner.

The court’s decision on Monday affects citizens who show up to public meetings to vent and question the actions of elected officials. If one official orders the arrest of someone speaking at a public meeting and the rest of the elected body doesn’t object, the person arrested can now have a cause of action against the municipality if he or she can prove animosity.

That means it’s harder for angry elected officials to use their power to arrest people they simply don’t like.

…The ruling in Lozman’s favor was narrow in the sense that it applied to elected boards and municipalities who boot speakers from their meetings. There were also questions within the lawsuit about people arrested by police during events like protests who are not engaged in the act itself, such as journalists and bystanders. Those questions weren’t part of the Supreme Court’s decision.

…Lozman was already victorious in his fight against Riviera Beach that led to his arrest in the first place. He saved other people’s homes from being taken via eminent domain for a new private marina in Riviera Beach, and he was able to keep the public marina out of private hands.

…The semi-retired South Florida stock trader-turned First Amendment crusader also won a Supreme Court case in 2012, when justices ruled 7-2 that Lozman’s floating home was not a “vessel” and therefore not subject to the federal maritime jurisdiction that eventually led local officials to seize and destroy it.

Fane Lozman wins First Amendment Supreme Court case | Bradenton Herald

hmmm

Rohingya girls face ‘prison-like’ conditions in refugee camps

On By peanutgallerynhIn Southern Central Asia,, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Adolescent Rohingya girls are being kept in stifling conditions in refugee camps in Bangladesh, unable to go out, deprived of education and facing prospects of early marriage whether they want it or not, according to a report by the charity Plan International launched on World Refugee Day.

…”Many of them have witnessed horrific violence and are in urgent need of assistance, but they cannot access any of the services on offer to help them cope with what they’ve been through. Instead, they spend almost every hour of every day inside their sweltering tents, where the only activities they have to keep themselves occupied are cooking and cleaning. They long to go to school, to go outside, to make new friends, and to rebuild their lives, but none of these things are possible for them under the current conditions in which they live.”

Plan International wants the aid agencies and governments helping the refugees to “urgently address the needs of safety, education, sanitation, food security and healthcare — including mental health services — that Rohingya girls currently lack and have themselves spoken strongly about in the research report.”

…It said girls repeatedly reported that access to clean water was one of the major challenges that they faced in the camps and warned that “as the monsoon season approaches, the temporary shelters will become untenable and the likely destruction of the makeshift sanitation facilities threatens to contaminate water and spread disease.”

Most of the girls interviewed said they still didn’t have enough to eat.

Rohingya girls face ‘prison-like’ conditions in refugee camps – CNN

Sigh….

Op-Ed: Every Culture Appropriates

On By peanutgallerynhIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

There is something wrong and oppressive about people of one background adopting and adapting the artifacts of another. 

…The cultural appropriation police answer the yoga and banh mi objections with a familiar counter-argument: it’s about power. It’s fine for colonized Indians to incorporate European fitness regimes into their yoga; wrong for Canadians of European origin to incorporate yoga into their fitness regimes.

But the trouble with that argument is that—like culture—power also ebbs and flows. Customs we may think of as immemorially inherent in one culture very often originated in that culture’s own history of empire and domination. The Han Chinese learned to drink tea for pleasure from peoples to their south. The green flag of Islam was adapted from the pre-Islamic religions of Iran. The great west African kingdom of Benin acquired the metal for some of its famous bronze artworks by selling thousands of people as slaves to Portuguese traders.

…The Chinese dress young Kezia Daum wanted to wear to prom originated in a brutal act of imperialism, but not by any western people. It originated in the Manchurian conquest of China in 1648, an event comparable to Europe’s Thirty Years War in its society-shattering murderousness. Millions of people, perhaps tens of millions, lost their lives in the upheaval.

…The new garment was a fusion of old and new, east and west. Manchurian-style fabrics were tailored to a European-style pattern. In the past, upper-class women’s clothing had conveyed status and restricted movement. The cheongsam was equally available to women from a wide range of statuses—and enabled Chinese women to move as their western counterparts did.

…In order to tell that story, the policemen of cultural appropriation must crush and deform much of the truth of cultural history—and in the process demean and infantilize the people they supposedly champion.

…To the extent that the cultural-appropriation police are urging their targets to respect others who are different, they are saying something that everyone needs to hear. But beyond that, they can plunge into doomed tangles. American popular culture is a mishmash of influences: British Isles, Eastern European, West African, and who knows what else. Cole Porter committed no wrong by borrowing from Jewish music; Elvis Presley enriched the world when he fused country-and-western with rhythm-and-blues.

How to draw the line between that and America’s ugly tradition of minstrelsy, in which subordinated peoples are both mimicked and mocked—as Al Jolson mimicked and mocked black music in his notorious blackface career? There is no clear rule, but there is an open way: the values of respect and tolerance that draw precisely on the rationalist Enlightenment traditions both rejected and relied upon by the cultural-appropriation police.

Every Culture Appropriates – The Atlantic

hmmmmm