Daily Archives: 07/28/2009

(Community Matters) Big surprise (not) – even in computing (Netflix)

(Community Matters) There has been a myth, I’d been taken in myself

The data suggest, for example, that children 13 and under who commit crimes like burglary and theft are just as likely to be sent to adult courts as children who commit serious acts of violence against people. As has been shown in previous studies, minority defendants are more likely to get adult treatment than their white counterparts who commit comparable offenses.

(Community Matters) This is so extraordinarily true, especially for Christians. Some cannot even hypothesize that there might not be an after-life or that Jesus may not be the “son of God” for fear of undermining their entire identities, life’s meaning & their lives’ work.

Believers’ lives have significance because they and their kind are part of this glorious unfolding. Their faith is suffused with expectation and hope. If they were to learn that they were simply a dead end, they would feel that God had forsaken them, that life was without meaning and purpose.

(Community Matters) I didn’t know Bruce Todd was working on this – one of my long term interests. I’d like to experiment, especially with Hispanic immigrant families, not only incentivizing student learning, but also parent participation, ESL and mastery of technology.

(Community Matters) I’m not thrilled with the compromise reportedly coming out of the Senate Finance committee – no public option. There’s talk of a nonprofit cooperative option. Not sure how that’s any different. For instance, I just enrolled a new enterprise into Blue Cross, Blue Shield. Evidently that’s a coop, though I was forced to sign a document stating that I wouldn’t ever try to vote my shares. hmm, I’d like to know where the dividends go and what their executive compensation looks like.

(Community Matters) Rupert Everett on gay adoption, Graydon Carter and . . .

Or am I slightly ahead of the curve? It has to change. These awful middle-class queens—which is what the gay movement has become—are so tiresome. It’s all Abercrombie & Fitch and strollers. Everybody has the right to do what they want to do, but still… .

The next day I went down to breakfast and Graydon came in and I thought to myself, well, now I understand why you are always acting so entitled and walking on air even though you’re rather fat. It’s because grazing the grass between your legs is this appendage of yours. I did rather politely tell him that morning that I thought he was a very good f . . . .

(Community Matters) The Beast suggests that the red-brick townhouse known as C Street and which housed John Ensign, Mark Sandford and Chip Pickering is a whole lot more than just religious cover for congressmen and their sexual hypocrisy.

Such obvious religion-and-sex hypocrisy, however, obscures the fact that C Street House is a whole lot more than a love shack. I’ve chronicled the Family over the past seven years, but it’s only in the past few weeks that I’ve seen how it acts like a lobby, even as it does not register as one. It reaches out to congressmen, providing below-market housing at the C Street House for half a dozen at a time and hosting many more for prayer and policy sessions. It also funds their travel around the world, makes matches with businessmen backers cont’d

(Community Matters) the Sustainable Food Center responding to an earlier posting

Price comparisons between conventional foods from supermarkets and locally and sustainably produced foods from farmers markets abound, with mixed results. Many have found that locally produced, direct marketed foods are the same price or cheaper. Other studies, of course, do indicate that fresh local foods may carry a bigger price tag. The comparisons are confounded when product quality, production methods, and externalized environmental and social costs are considered (factory farming versus small family farms, farm worker wages, etc). Plus there’s the broader issue of the prices of unhealthy foods compared to a nutritious diet, including the long- and short-term costs to individual, community, and public health.

I was amazed to read a previous blog post that cited three particular food items from a local farmers market which were found to be double the price when compared with the same or similar product at an independent food co-op. There was obviously no need to adjust for source, quality or growing method since the tomatoes, at least, were from the exact same farm. Having become familiar with other price comparison studies, I certainly had an interest in seeing a description of the methodology and the documentation of the research that yielded this “double the price” finding.

Upon reading this more recent post, my next and potentially more productive inclination, was to offer support from SFC to design a more scientific comparison study that can truly capture accurate data about pricing disparities between supermarkets and farmers markets, with multiple data samples gathered over a period of time. Further, SFC is willing to recruit and train community volunteers to assist with this study. SFC also encourages additional input from those familiar with farmers markets about pricing and, more importantly, about the real costs and value that they perceive in their choices to buy directly from local farmers at direct markets.

-Andrew W. Smiley
Farm Direct Projects Director
Sustainable Food Center

(Community Matters) David Barboza for the NYTimes writing about Apple and their Chinese manufacturer – the employment practices which allegedly included beating an employee accused of losing an iPhone prototype. The employee committing suicide, or did he?