Robert Paterson's Weblog

The US Govt Starting to Get behind Local food - School a target

Warriors in the battle for more local, sustainable food have long been suspicious of the Department of Agriculture and its relationship to large agricultural interests. But even the most dedicated political agrarian has to admit that the U.S.D.A is getting local food fever.

This week, the top people at the U.S.D.A. announced they would be handing out almost $65 million to help connect small farmers — especially those using sustainable practices — with people who want to eat local food.

The money is part of their new “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” campaign which includes a series of programs to help farmers better market their food and the people who run large institutions buy it.

“Americans are more interested in food and agriculture than at any other time since most families left the farm,” said Deputy Agriculture Secretary Kathleen Merrigan in a statement announcing the initiative.

One aspect of the initiative sounds particularly fierce: The Farm-To-School Tactical Teams. These agricultural versions of SWAT teams will tour America’s school cafeterias looking for ways to help administrators buy more locally grown food.

That’s much harder than it sounds. Supply chains, purchasing requirements, contract regulations and even a lack of the right processing equipment often stand in the way of getting a carrot grown in Upstate New York, for example, onto the lunch trays of New York City school children.

The school initiative, which aims to make some of those procurement hurdles easier, also provides $50 million to states with the strong suggestion that it be used to buy local food for schools.

via dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com

It was federal policy that drove many of the small farms out of business - I am encouraged to see that this is reversing. Also interesting that schools are being targeted as the leverage point.

What about PEI?

Posted via web from Rob's posterous

Shatner for GG - CBC - It's Building

via cbc.ca

Posted via web from Rob's posterous

"Papers Please" - #immigration

That phrase -- "papers please" - is something that the authorities asked you in the old Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. It has never been something we ever expected to hear uttered in the United States of America. It is as un-American as jack boots. Unless this law is stopped, thousands of people - many of them perfectly legal American citizens - will begin to hear it regularly in the state of Arizona.

Let's be clear. In a free society people should never have to worry that the plainclothes police officer around the next corner has the right - even the obligation - to demand to see their papers simply because they have brown skin or are chatting with their friends in Spanish, or Polish, or Italian.

This moral outrage will create an enormous backlash that will badly damage the reputation and economy of the state of Arizona. It will profoundly wound the state's massive convention and tourism business. It will make Arizona a symbol of racial profiling and conflict. As the controversy over the law explodes across the country, organizations of all types are already canceling conferences and meetings, and families are changing their vacation plans. Arizona will soon become the butt of jokes on late night TV, and its leaders will join the ranks of Bull Connor and George Wallace as symbols of what is not best in America.

The new law will not only cost the state in tourist dollars and reputation. Law enforcement officials consider it a danger to public safety. When this bill goes into effect, what family with an undocumented member will now call the police to report any ordinary crime?

But ironically, the passage of this law may also serve as a wakeup call to people around the country who believe in fundamental American values. In the same way the excesses of Alabama's leaders helped pass the civil rights laws, so this un-American law may spur Congress to fix our profoundly broken immigration system.

The fact of the matter is that there are only three realistic choices when it comes to immigration:

• The status quo, where 12 million people live in the shadows of our society, and can be easily exploited by unscrupulous employers and used to undercut wages for every American - where everyday families are broken apart by immigration raids and the children of immigrants are denied the opportunity to go to college and contribute to our society.
• Un-American measures such as the one just passed in Arizona that betray our values and will never actually solve the problem. Of course, the bottom line is that our government is not going to round up twelve million undocumented immigrants, put them on trains, buses and airplanes, and ship them back to their countries of origin. Mass deportation of millions of workers and their families is a phony non-solution that is both impractical and un-American. It is not a politically, morally or economically acceptable solution to the problem of illegal immigration. As a practical matter it will never happen - and if it ever did, economists have estimated it would cost our economy 2.6 trillion dollars in gross domestic product over the next ten years.
• Comprehensive immigration reform that will strengthen the rule of law, level the playing field in the workplace, reduce illegal immigration to a trickle, and reward those who play by the rules. It would do so through a combination of smart and effective border enforcement, a crackdown on illegal hiring and unfair labor practices, modernizing the legal immigration system, and requiring those here illegally to register with the government, pass background checks, study English, pay taxes, and get in line to work towards citizenship.

 

via huffingtonpost.com

Immigration is going to be the litmus test of America this year - KETC is working to make sure that the full picture is available. http://explorehomeland.org/blog/2010/04/25/immigration-more-questions-than-an...

Posted via web from Rob's posterous

What's wrong with cheap food

So what's wrong with cheap food and cheap meat — especially in a world in which more than 1 billion people go hungry? A lot. For one thing, not all food is equally inexpensive; fruits and vegetables don't receive the same price supports as grains. A study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of potato chips or 875 calories of soda but just 250 calories of vegetables or 170 calories of fresh fruit. With the backing of the government, farmers are producing more calories — some 500 more per person per day since the 1970s — but too many are unhealthy calories. Given that, it's no surprise we're so fat; it simply costs too much to be thin.

Our expanding girth is just one consequence of mainstream farming. Another is chemicals. No one doubts the power of chemical fertilizer to pull more crop from a field. American farmers now produce an astounding 153 bu. of corn per acre, up from 118 as recently as 1990. But the quantity of that fertilizer is flat-out scary: more than 10 million tons for corn alone — and nearly 23 million for all crops. When runoff from the fields of the Midwest reaches the Gulf of Mexico, it contributes to what's known as a dead zone, a seasonal, approximately 6,000-sq.-mi. area that has almost no oxygen and therefore almost no sea life. Because of the dead zone, the $2.8 billion Gulf of Mexico fishing industry loses 212,000 metric tons of seafood a year, and around the world, there are nearly 400 similar dead zones. Even as we produce more high-fat, high-calorie foods, we destroy one of our leanest and healthiest sources of protein. (See nine kid foods to avoid.)

The food industry's degradation of animal life, of course, isn't limited to fish. Though we might still like to imagine our food being raised by Old MacDonald, chances are your burger or your sausage came from what are called concentrated-animal feeding operations (CAFOs), which are every bit as industrial as they sound. In CAFOs, large numbers of animals — 1,000 or more in the case of cattle and tens of thousands for chicken and pigs — are kept in close, concentrated conditions and fattened up for slaughter as fast as possible, contributing to efficiencies of scale and thus lower prices. But animals aren't widgets with legs. They're living creatures, and there are consequences to packing them in prison-like conditions. For instance: Where does all that manure go?

Pound for pound, a pig produces approximately four times the amount of waste a human does, and what factory farms do with that mess gets comparatively little oversight. Most hog waste is disposed of in open-air lagoons, which can overflow in heavy rain and contaminate nearby streams and rivers. "This creek that we used to wade in, that creek that our parents could drink out of, our kids can't even play in anymore," says Jayne Clampitt, a farmer in Independence, Iowa, who lives near a number of hog farms.

To stay alive and grow in such conditions, farm animals need pharmaceutical help, which can have further damaging consequences for humans. Overuse of antibiotics on farm animals leads, inevitably, to antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and the same bugs that infect animals can infect us too. The UCS estimates that about 70% of antimicrobial drugs used in America are given not to people but to animals, which means we're breeding more of those deadly organisms every day. The Institute of Medicine estimated in 1998 that antibiotic resistance cost the public-health system $4 billion to $5 billion a year — a figure that's almost certainly higher now. "I don't think CAFOs would be able to function as they do now without the widespread use of antibiotics," says Robert Martin, who was the executive director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production.

via time.com

Cheap food is very expensive! Think of PEI. The health budget is now 500 million a years for a total population of 140,000. The biggest driver for this? Diabetes, heart disease and cancer - all chronic diseases related to lifestyle and diet. When I came here in 1995 the budget was 300 million. What will it be in 2015? At this rate a $billion! A major factor - cheap food.

What about PEI's rivers, water sheds etc - nitrates in our water, rivers silting up - what will our water system be like in 20 years at this rate?

What about our food system. Now we grow less than 10% of what we eat here. We have given up control of our food to people from far away. When peak oil comes what then?

Time to think more about the cost of cheap food.

Posted via web from Rob's posterous

Labels - Who are you?

via explorehomeland.org

I'm British - my white Brit/Canadian son is married to Korean/Canadian woman. How will they label their children?

What about you?

Immigration - It's complicated!

Posted via web from Rob's posterous

"Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black" - Tim Wise

Let’s play a game, shall we? The name of the game is called “Imagine.” The way it’s played is simple: we’ll envision recent happenings in the news, but then change them up a bit. Instead of envisioning white people as the main actors in the scenes we’ll conjure - the ones who are driving the action - we’ll envision black folks or other people of color instead. The object of the game is to imagine the public reaction to the events or incidents, if the main actors were of color, rather than white. Whoever gains the most insight into the workings of race in America, at the end of the game, wins.

So let’s begin.

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protester — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.

via ephphatha-poetry.blogspot.com

This is just the opening of a powerful article - worth your attention

Posted via web from Rob's posterous

Can we get to a good place - Immigration - KETC is trying

The statue’s pedestal bears the words of poet Emma Lazarus, written in 1883:
Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

When the Ellis Island immigration center opened its doors on an island in New York Harbor near the Statue of Liberty in 1892, Lazarus’ words welcomed the 12 million immigrants who passed by “Lady Liberty” after trying trans-Atlantic journeys on their way to becoming Americans.(Daily Cufflinks)

Is this still true? Is America still the land of opportunity for those that seek it?

There is no doubt that in 2010, Immigration, will move to the top of the list of issues that Americans think about. But what will the debate be like? Send all the illegals away! Give amnesty to all! Will it pander to our worst fears? What is the truth?

Can we find a truth? Labeling people is so easy. We know “us” and we don’t know “them”, so it is easy to put our fears on “them”.

At KETC we are trying an experiment - we are going to do our best to help each other find more of the truth. For we know no more than you. We too only know what we know and that is not very much.

So here in this space we are going to do our best to make a place where we can discover more of the truth than we could know if we only bandied about soundbites. We plan to build a very complex web presence to handle a very complex issue. In addition we are planning a 4 hour TV series on Immigration today in America that I think we can use as a Social Object or Catalyst to focus attention.

There have been TV shows that have had a web add on before. There have been web series on issues. This is a first. The first time that a TV station has built a holistic whole of TV and Web. Where the broadcast has been wrapped in engagement from the first.

The TV series will be shot this summer and fall and we begin this week with the web. The engagement process, where we go out to the community and find out from them directly what is going on started 2 months ago.

Here is our design for how the web will role out over the nest few months.

News and Comment - We are getting ready to bring you the most interesting stories being written by anyone. We as a team are scanning the web and we ask you to help us here too. We are also experimenting with a brand new type of search tool, Darwin, that will look for how issues rise and fall on the web. (More on that later).  We are building human networks that will reach into the immigrants in St Louis – nurturing social bridges that we hope will enable people who today are only labels to others find their own voice and not only tell their own stories but also help each other find their way in the strange new land that is America. We hope that we can go back and forth between the web and the people and see how the truth emerges.

We will be adding a Twitter and Facebook stream to this soon and we hope that you can help us find material that will add more light to the entire topic. We hope that this space can become the best place to go to find out the wider truth. To discover an emergent picture of what is really going on.

Helping new Americans find their way - As we prepared for this project, we were stunned at how complex the journey is to become not only a legal American but also as important an assimilated American – a person who fits into the culture. We were stunned to find out how complex the legal issues are. We were stunned to find out how much conflict there is between cultures that see the extended family as the core of existence and the homeland culture that looks to the law. In this segment we plan to offer a number of views. First of all people need expert advice. Getting the system wrong is easy and has enormous consequences. We plan to find sources of expertise who can shed light – just as we did in our Facing the Mortgage Crisis project. We at KETC can never be the experts, but we can help you find ones that you can trust. But we have found that there are two kinds of experts. The technical experts and those who have lived and are living what you are going through. We plan to offer the second kind as well. We hope to have a panel of New Americans that have made it. Made it through all the system and also made the cultural adaptation. We hope to find a panel of  immigrants who too are finding their way. It is our hope that such a panel will have the practical expertise to ask and answer the best questions. For who will know more than they about how to make this journey?

Helping established Americans find a place for their concerns - Many people have deep fears. Fears of having their economic future threatened. Fears of losing their community. Fears of losing their culture. Many others merely dismiss these fears as being stupid and then wonder why people become angry. We plan to explore these fears. For a fear explored is then a fear that can be coped with. What is the impact on jobs? What is it like to have your community change around you – who gets to set the culture? Most of all “Who are these strangers” and “what do they want”?

Dealing with the “Other” - Nothing is more scary than the unknown. As we walk down the street and we see people who are unknown and unknowable to us. They look so different. We plan to explore the “different”. What it is to be Bosnian in St Louis. To be Liberian, to be Mexican, to be Chinese, to be Irish or Scots, to be different. We will explore food, music, religion, family life. What is their culture. We will explore what brought people here and what the journey has been like.

We hope to give people a chance to be themselves in public to show yes how different they are but also how much they are the same. How they too want the freedom that America represents. How they care about many of the same things. About what they face from the dominant culture. How surface similarities hide fears. Such as how a Liberian can be taken for an African American until he opens his mouth and how the same is true for a Bosnian being taken for a WASP. We will find out that many immigrant groups who believe that they are unique will find out that others share much of their story such as how both a Liberian and a Bosnian have both come from a war zone so horrific that we cannot imagine – how maybe both boys saw their father killed in front of them.

Established Americans are strangers too for many newcomers. Much about the established America is hard to understand. This is manifested not only in the streets, the schools and the workplace where we all meet but in the homes of many traditional immigrant families. As the youth adapt, as girls wear new clothes, as boys listen to new music and eat new food, the older generations become afraid. As the power to translate the new culture moves to the young the old power lines in the family are threatened.

Our hope is to give all a chance to celebrate who they are and so give us a glimpse of not of a stranger but of people that we get to know who too have fears, hopes, families and a deep desire to do well in life.

Video and Story - As you can see as this project evolves, we intend to give up most of this space to you. Much of it will involve video. So to enable you to tell your story well on video, we have set up a “school”. This “school” is here to help you learn how to master short form story telling for the web. We will teach editing, all the mechanics and how best to tell a story. To help in this, we also have more than 100 Flip cameras that we will be lending to those that wish to tell their story.

The Documentary - Currently we are in the development phase of the film making process. We are deciding on what 4 big stories we will tell and what each story needs to be made. As we get more defined, we will come back to you here and tell you what we are doing. You will see the documentaries being made – the “story of” will be made as we make the story. There will be times when we need your help and we will ask you here for it.

The Team - At the moment the team is all from KETC. It involves people from all disciplines. But in time, we will withdraw to the background. Most of whom you will see and hear from will be from the community of St Louis.

via explorehomeland.org

This weekend we launch a new project at KETC. We are taking a subject that is at the heart of the nation - its social, economic and cultural heart - and trying something never before attempted.

We are trying to get away from the "He said" - "She said" - "on the one hand" and "on the other" POV of how issues are traditionally covered by the media.

We hope to offer up the broad complexity of the issue.

We are creating a TV series that is surrounded and informed by social engagement and the web. No add on after the show but the Petri Dish in which the show is born.

We are creating a "Social Object".

Over the next year, I will do my best to tell you the story of this project.

This post is from our new website. It has just been launched. It's only a starting point right now.

We are at the day of birth today. Much has been happening in the womb before this day. Much of it messy and painful. We have had to go from let's put on a show to having a real plan based on real objectives. Later I will tell you about those struggles.

Our new child is as helpless and feeble as a new born is. But as the months go on, she will I hope, grow into a strong and capable person - capable of reaching the potential that her "parents" KETC hope for her.

My hope is that by November we can have expanded the debate beyond the demagoguery that I fear and that we with your help may shed light and hope into this so complex and taxing issue.

Posted via web from Rob's posterous

First past the post no longer makes sense - Complex Times Demands Messy Parliament

The Political Forecasting Unit 'polling tracker' has the Conservatives on 34 per cent, the Liberal Democrats on 30 per cent and Labour on 27 per cent.

Assuming a uniform national swing, the Conservatives would win 262 seats in the House of Commons, Labour would win 256 seats, and the Liberal Democrats 101 seats.

This would leave the Conservatives 64 short of an overall majority. The markets agree that no one party is likely to win a majority in the House of Commons.

The polling tracker is based on recent surveys by different polling organisations, and is adjusted so that the more recent the survey the more weight is attached to the vote shares.

There is also some statistical smoothing which has the effect that outliers or vote shares that diverge most from the general consensus are allocated less weight.

Applying a more sophisticated seats projection methodology, termed ANS (Adjusted National Swing), which allows for the differential impact of swing on different seats, the Political Forecasting Unit projects the following scenario if the election were held today:

Conservatives: 275 seats;
Labour: 234 seats;
Liberal Democrat: 106 seats;
Others: 35 seats;

via channel4.com

Here are the current polling results for the UK election. Now look at the seats that such a result would drive. Doesn't make any sense does it?

In Canada we have the same situation with three parties and an emergent Green Party. But the system tends to give the party with a lead a majority when in fact most of the country wants something else.

The result is that I think we lose faith in the system. The irony for me is that when out of power all want PR but in power the party does not.

Maybe in the UK there will be enough "out" to vote PR in?

But that will lead to chaos, many say. What we need is decisive government!

I don't think so. The truth is that we live in a very complex time where the answers are not clear. Where in fact the questions are not even clear. Take immigration in the US as an example.

The simple answer is get rid of the illegals. OK so who is up for deporting 11 - 14 million people? What would that mean? Mean not only to those that are on the "Transport" but to the economy - who will pluck your chickens, make your hotel bed, drive your cab? But also to the ethos of America? To simply deport illegals will demand that the nation become like Germany in the Nazi regime where race will drove everything? But then what about the illegals - can they just stay? What does that mean too?

There is no simple answer. Certainly no answer that is like the one that the Governor of Arizona juist made into law - the Nazi/Race/ID Wear a Star solution.

These are tough calls where party discipline is in fact bad for all of us. Look at the issue of Financial Reform. It is being seen politically as have it or not. Look at health care. Our 2 party system is gridlocked allowing only simplistic questions and answers to complex problems.

Far from being chaotic - PR may allow us to finally have the quality of debate that is demanded by our times.

Posted via web from Rob's posterous

Banking? No A Casino!

As many have said — though not many politicians in either party — something is fundamentally amiss in a financial culture that thrives on “products” that create nothing and produce nothing except new ways to make bigger bets and stack the deck in favor of the house. “At least in an actual casino, the damage is contained to gamblers,” wrote the financial journalist Roger Lowenstein in The Times Magazine last month. This catastrophe cost the economy eight million jobs.

via nytimes.com

Wall Street describes itself as the centre for innovation that helps the economy. Yes it is indeed a centre for innovation but for practices that help only itself and that have taken the life blood out of the economy.

They have found a system that extracts value from the real economy and gives it to them.

 

This slide shows the scale of the skimming since the 1980's and the advent of proprietary trading and derivatives. All of this was made possible by the access by the banks to vast pools of capital. Caused in turn by the change in regulation.

The heart of the matter is capital allocation. No insurance for trading. This means that the trading and deposit taking have to be severed as they were before the change in the 1980's.

If this continues, they cannot help themselves but make a bad situation worse.

But the will is not there to do this - so, we wait for the next show to drop as it must.

Meanwhile the markets ramp up again. Will you profess to be surprised when it all crashes down again? Will you play the Casino once again, knowing that the game is rigged in the hope that you will be smart enough to get out in time? Will you get angry with the politicians then?

Posted via web from Rob's posterous

The Matrix - teaching program - Do you fight to stay inside the Matrix?

via youtube.com

The Gatekeepers/Agents are out in force right now - can you see them or do you see the woman in the red dress?

Posted via web from Rob's posterous