Boy Scouts and food policy - yikes!

/

They're not related in any way that I know except that both subjects are on my mind today, and neither, as discussed here, will bring you cheer. Growing up, so many boys I knew were Boy Scouts, earnestly earning badges and working towards Eagle rank. It always seemed such a wholesome, practical organization. Cue the dread music...

The release of the Boy Scout's "perversion files" -formally known as the Ineligible Volunteer Files- last October shed light on twenty years of grotesque sexual abuse of scouts by their scoutmasters and other adult volunteers. As the formerly secret papers show, predatory adults were rarely exposed or punished but were instead relocated or quietly pushed out of the organization. How eerily, horribly similar is this to the seemingly endless number of sexual abuse cases spewing from the Catholic church's secret stash?

If that weren't awful enough, which it is, the Boy Scouts (BSA), who've long banned openly gay boys from joining its ranks finally appeared willing to get with the times and overturn their homophobic policy. Yet, just before announcing a decision, BSA leadership retreated yesterday, saying it needed more time to decide. It is hard to see how the Scouts can reconcile the refusal to accept one aspect of an individual's being with their professed goal of providing American youth "character development and values-based leadership training." What character are you building if you teach kids that their peers who have a different sexual orientation are lesser people who just can't be welcomed into your group? Values of inequity and disdain? Or worse, hate? Disgust?

How can you tell a young boy that he can't join your organization simply because he's gay? What injury to his psyche must such discrimination cause!

I'll be damned if those seem like good values to me, and you can bet I wouldn't consider letting my sons participate in Boy Scouts right now.

````````` And now to food policy. Week 3 of my U.S. Food Systems class has begun and just today I managed to complete everything from Week 1; yes, I'm a little behind. I've been familiar with much of the information presented so far but was stunned anew by many of the sobering statistics and wanted to share a few with you here.

 

As of October, 2011, the world's population was roughly 7 billion; of those, nearly 2 B were overweight or obese and about 1 B were undernourished. Since 1980, obesity rates have more than doubled. In 1985, there were roughly 30 million cases of diabetes globally; in 2010, that number had jumped to 285 million!

75% of the global population live in countries where resource extraction and depletion has exceeded resource capital. Put another way, consumption of earth's resources exceeds its ability to regenerate by 30%.

It takes 1,000 kg of water to produce 1 kg of grain, and 700 kg of grain to produce 100 kg of beef. Meanwhile, from 1961 -2000, meat consumption per capita increased 82%.       Do the math on the water we're using just to feed the animals we'll then eat. Scary!

Globally, agriculture accounts for 70% of total water use and 93% of water depletion (extraction from deep aquifers). Some countries are literally running out of water.

Between 1995 -2005, the U.S. meat and dairy industries received 73.8% of all federal agricultural subsidies while just 0.37% went to fruit and vegetable growers. This breakdown does not map at all with USDA nutrition guidelines.

In 1960, the U.S. applied 27 million metric tons (mmt) of chemical fertilizers; the estimate for 2020 is ~220 mmt. Crops absorb just ⅓ - ½ of the nitrogen applied via these fertilizers; the rest washes into the water cycle, contaminating and polluting it and doing the same or worse to the animals and plants reliant on it.

~1600 chemicals are used in the pesticides we apply, and only a handful have been tested for safety. It is a wildly unregulated industry.

 

Fairly random assessment of pols

/

Friends, per the ridiculous pace of my schedule as of late, I'm not as attuned to current affairs as I like to be. In fact, that's an understatement. I read about 15% of the paper each day which is hardly satisfactory, but it is what it is. And I'm pretty tired. Disclaimers noted, I still find the Republican party to be such a silly, out of touch, cynical group. They are less popular than head lice, Fox News has its lowest ratings in ten years (does this mean sense has filtered back into some majority of the American populace?), the gun violence and homicide rates are horrific (Chicago? AZ during Giffords' testimony?) and still, the discussions on immigration reform are pie-in-the-sky to say the very least, there was that whole idiotic "retreat" thing, Wayne LaPierre is actually insane, and Paul Ryan and Rand Paul are still being taken seriously, for reasons I fail to understand. What the eff is up with Rand Paul's wiry hair? Jesus man. Is government against a brush? Some product? This immigration shit really makes me mad. Certainly there are folks taking advantage of the maze that is the INS path to citizenship. Yet for every one of the dishonest, I bet there are 10 non-citizens living here as legally as they can, paying what they can, staying in the system missing family/funerals/friends as they must, working their asses off as many of us should. I have a housekeeper come twice a month. She's a Mexican citizen with a legal work visa which she renews faithfully each year. She's been in the INS system for eight years, missing her father's funeral and her sister's many surgeries because she's been warned that if she returns home to Mexico, she can't come back without having to start all over in the citizenship process.

She's given thousands of her hard-earned dollars to lawyers and "lawyers" who seem to do nothing but file her papers in a horrible purgatory drawer of "maybe she'll just stop trying." This woman is incredibly kind and hard-working. She takes pride in what she does in a way I hope my children ultimately do. She is generous even when she can't be. She lives on the edge all the time, never complaining, never asking but, the edge looms, way too close for anyone's comfort.

No wall should have impeded her path, that offensive, ugly, hate-built wall on our Southern border. If we're too lazy to enact any substantive legislation to assist people who want to come here legally -turning away those who refuse to follow fair rules- work hard and contribute to our country, how on earth can we justify some horrible concrete barrier? What is this? Post-war Germany? I think not. I should hope not.

All this BS niggling in Congress about small-scale stuff, it's sickening. Guns. Education. Environment. Jobs: let's grow a pair and take care of this stuff. Who really gives a crap about the penny (worthless)? We're a great country but weak in many ways. Proud but scared, strong but shaky. When I hear Glenn Beck talk about his ludicrous idea for a new city based on "patterns," I am disgusted. Man, you grossed $80 mill last year; do something positive with it. Don't draw up blueprints for some phony-ass town that bans the GAP and Ann Taylor so as to support the community-based groups and call yourself "American." That's Brooklyn, peeps. It's been done. By liberals.

Catholic church, seriously. Sooner or later you're going to have to face the music in a real Biblical way, and it's not gonna be pretty for you. How do you think you can keep records of all this grotesque covering up of years and years of abuse, of children, of your power, of your position and not ultimately be brought, rightfully, to your knees? You should feel such shame that you crumble under its weight. And since you don't seem to be, wow, how damning and troubling. What's next? You offer to take in Jerry Sandusky as a lay-priest in charge of outreach?

I'm a pretty positive person, and I try to live each day hoping that the next will be better, wiser; that our little mistakes won't snowball into something irreparable and Sisyphean. But good lord is it disheartening sometimes, to watch the news, to see what's highlighted, to see what's not.

Meanwhile, did you see that Germany just ruled against bestiality but not, primarily, for anything dealing with sexual mores? We would just be ALL UP IN ARMS about the sex component but no, the Germans, so pragmatic, considered this issue in terms of animal welfare. Now, this is definitely an odd'ish sort of issue, rather fringe. But I do admire the remove here. What's the crux of the issue -the animal- and how can we manage this fairly -no sex with them-,  judgments against people not relevant.