Saturday, September 24, 2011

Never mind the bollocks


Because we Americans seem to be, at heart, a most unserious people, we have outraged national campaigns over this.

A naughtily named new flavor of Ben & Jerry's ice cream, "Schweddy Balls," has inspired a national boycott call and hungry curiosity in Omaha, as elsewhere.

Members of OneMillionMoms.com want the ice cream company to stop making the flavor.

The limited-edition flavor, launched this month, is a tribute to "Saturday Night Live." The name refers to a 1998 sketch in which Alec Baldwin played holiday goodie baker Pete Schweddy.

Monica Cole, director of the online activist campaign, said she's seen the skit, but she's not laughing at it or its namesake dairy treat.

"We find it vulgar, not what we would like our children to be seeing or asking for at the supermarket or a Ben & Jerry's outlet," Cole said from the group's headquarters in Tupelo, Miss.

-- Omaha World-Herald,
Sept. 24, 2011
But not this.
Black babies are dying in Omaha.

That's the simple, straightforward message the group of about 40 people — most of them black women — had to work with. Their assignment was to take 10 minutes to come up with a way of spreading that message to the people who need to hear it.

The fact that the infant mortality rate is high among blacks in Omaha was no surprise to many of those at a community forum earlier this week at the Turning Point campus in north Omaha. That for every 1,000 black babies born in Douglas County, more than 14 will die in their first 12 months.

Or that the rate is three times higher than the county's white infant mortality rate: 4.7 deaths per 1,000 babies.

But a Douglas County Health Department map showing that the highest concentration of baby deaths was near 33rd and Lake Streets, in the area around Salem Baptist Church, surprised Thelma Sims, director of the Salem Children's Center.

Sims first saw the map about a month and a half ago.

"I was really devastated and sad," she said.

She lives and works in the area but hadn't known that from 2005 through 2009 the neighborhood's infant mortality rate was 27 to 33 deaths per 1,000 births — in the range of the rates seen in Indonesia, Zimbabwe and Kyrgyzstan.

Rates are harder to grasp than actual numbers, so when looking at the state's vital statistics for 2005-2010, for example, you find that 113 black infants died in Douglas County during that period.

Of those, the leading causes of death were listed as sudden infant death syndrome, 21; maternal complications of pregnancy, 20; prematurity, 16; and birth defect, 14.
-- Omaha World-Herald,
Sept. 24, 2011
Really, America?

Really?


On this ship of fools, steerage is a dangerous place to book passage. Obviously.

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