Visuacy? Visuacy? Idiotuacy, I say.

Where do teachers get off, making up words?
They'd mark students down for making up a word and yet here they are, introducing "visuacy" not only as a word, but as a whole educational concept.
It's a travesty, or should I say "travestuacy".

The teachers are reported in The Australian to be creating this word to encompass a broadening span of education in the arts. It opens students to further possibilities in visual arts education - the possibility that they should see fashion models as art. This, of course, may extend to seeing Paris Hilton as art, for she is her own work of art, as we all know. Next students will be able to do PhD theses on Paris Hilton as an art object. Why not?
Already they study Buffy, the Vampire Slayer as part of the university English curriculum.
She, apparently, is preferable to the onerous erudition of those hideous "dead white men" responsible for that vast body of English literature.

So, we have the dumbed-down contempory teachers adapting education to what interests them, what they are able to deal with without the requirements of too much education of their own.

Students can forgo art galleries and dead classic artists for the joy of gossip magazines and young celebrity adornments. I daresay the fashion accessory puppy-carrier will be provided extensive source of study.

An academic called Mr Strong (dare I laugh that his name sounds as if it came straight out of that high literature, the Mr Men books)
has "called for the visual arts to form the basis of the national curriculum alongside English, maths and science, arguing that it had more of a right to be among the first curriculum to be developed than history".

Huh?
Ditch history for visuacy?

Yes, siree. It's now and tomorrow, the great dumbed-down tomorrow shimmering with its indifference to the achievements and enlightenments of the past. The brave new world in which knowledge is excused by the fullstop statement "that was before my time".


Today's educationalists suggest that students should be able to look at Picasso's work alongside the pure and glorious art of lingerie ads like this one on WikiBuy. "Viewers can respond in different ways to each image in still enjoy both," says an arts professor, potentially relegating the great galleries of the world to dust-coated tombs.

As one commentator put it, this is like equating a ship's foghorn to a Beethoven symphony on the basis that they are both made of sound.

And who knows, "sounduacy" may indeed follow "visuacy" as the world steps backwards into a sea of trite - and idiotuacy becomes the outcome of an ever-declining education system.

...the China saga again

The perfidious China saga goes on and on. At least the Government is clamping down, albeit on what may be a bottomless pit of cynical corruption. The latest lethal scandal is of polluted drugs prescribed to children with leukemia. Injections of Chinese methotrexate have caused pain and difficulty in walking in young leukemia patients - as if they are not suffering enough already!
Meanwhile, there are more recalls of dangerous Chinese goods - jewellery which could cause lead poisoning, magnetic toys which are choking hazards...
The shock and resulting pressure emerging from the West would seem to have rattled Chinese authorities - so much so that they punished their bribe-taking food and drug safety chief by killing him.
Now the push is on to show the West that everything is just A-OK, fine and dandy for the Olympics. As AP's Audra Ang reports:

Confidence in the safety of Chinese exports has severely waned internationally, as the list of products found tainted with dangerous levels of toxins and chemicals grows longer by the day.

China has taken significant steps in recent days to clean up its dubious product safety record, including executing the former head of its drug regulation agency for taking bribes and banning the use of a chemical found in antifreeze in the production of toothpaste.

In a report aired Wednesday night, China Central Television showed how a bun maker in a district in Beijing used cardboard picked off the street as filling for his product.

The undercover investigation report showed how squares of cardboard were first soaked to a pulp in a plastic basin of caustic soda — a chemical base commonly used in manufacturing paper and soap — then chopped into tiny morsels with a cleaver. Fatty pork and powdered seasoning were stirred in and minutes later, steaming buns were shown on screen.

Yum. Won't the Olympic athletes love it.
Well, to its credit, the Chinese government has installed a panel to screen products and will ban offending manufacturers from production for three years. But is the problem already too big and out of control? This is more than a distinct possibility.

More to fear from China

"Under Agriculture Department rules, countries cannot export meat and poultry products to the United States unless the USDA certifies that the slaughterhouses and processing plants have food-safety systems equivalent to those here. Much to its frustration, China is not certified to sell any meat to the United States because it has not met that requirement.

But that has not stopped Chinese meat exporters. In the past year, USDA teams have seized hundreds of thousands of pounds of prohibited poultry products from China and other Asian countries, Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns announced in March. Some were shipped in crates labeled "dried lily flower," "prune slices" and "vegetables," according to news reports. It is unclear how much of the illegal meat slipped in undetected.

Despite those violations, the Chinese government is on track to get permission to legally export its chickens to the United States -- a prospect that has raised concern not only because of fears of bacteria such as salmonella but also because Chinese chickens, if not properly processed, could be a source of avian flu, which public-health authorities fear may be poised to trigger a human pandemic."

Does this make your blood run cold? It does mine.

These words have been lifted from the very trusted source of the Washington Post, a Sunday, May 21 article by Rick Weiss, headed "Tainted Chinese imports common".
This is a deeply alarming piece which describes some of the 289 shipments the FDA has refused entry into the US because of contamination, toxic ingredients and pure fakery. As Weiss points out, the Chinese don't give up when refused entry for their goods. They try again and then again.

This is an epidemic.

Bravo to the Washington Post for running this deeply alarming piece. But the story needs more, more and more exposure than this. We face a dangerous scandal and it is going to take a massive public outrage to make governments confront the issue. They have to see it as an insidious form of terrorism. An attack on what we eat.

I am sure the Chinese people would be devastated to know what some of their manufacturers are doing. I am sure they don't know.
I am sure the Chinese Government will be embarrassed to realise how these exporters are shaming their country.

But the word needs to be spread. Chinese foods must be avoided and, as I have said before, countries affected by this sinister mode of attack should boycott the Olympics.

Not just a petfood scandal

Rat poison in wheat from China! This turns out to be behind the renal failure death of dogs throughout America.
How the wheat became contaminated is anyone's guess. A rat plague in the wheat storage facilities? Misuse of agricultural chemicals?
China has quite a history of the latter. It remains a very disturbing problem as Dune Lawrence points out in Bloomberg.
"Pesticide poisoning affects half a million Chinese a year, causing more than 500 fatalities"

For a long time Western bio-tech companies were dumping into the Third World markets products no longer saleable in their own arenas. This, notoriously, resulted in some serious pollution of food sources, especially in China, where farmers were making almost random chemical mixtures because they were unable to read the labels on the products. There was a time that Hong Kong put a ban on fresh foods from mainland China because of the toxic levels of pesticides etc.

My suspicion, therefore, is that we have here a tale of greed from two directions. Firstly, there are the agri-chem corporations which sacrifice ethics for profit in dumping discredited product on hapless poor countries. Secondly, we have the petfood people buying the cheapest ingredients to keep their shareholders' pockets lined. And, in a class of their own, there are the pet-owners who choose expediency as a way of nourishing their animals. Theirs is the crime of laziness.

It astonishes me that people who purport to love animals don't think about giving them more pleasure and better nutrition in their meals. Food is not only necessary, it is one of the fundamental sensual experiences of life. And yet, people who are prepared often to pay thousands for a pedigree animal will blithely fill its bowl with tinned or pellet food.

It truly is not hard to cook for the dog. We cook in three-day batches - ground chicken stewed with carrots, chard and parsley, bulked with pasta or rice and sprinkled with vitamins (plus, for our elderly doberman, Glucosomine). There are variations on this theme, of course. The dog loves the whole ritual of his food preparation, as he loves his food. He drools for handouts of carrot as the chopping goes on - his favourite treat, apart from blueberries. Cooking the petfood is as economic as it is wholesome - and it has provided a dividend of eliminating dog farts capable of asphyxiating a small nation.