Slashdot Mirror

The Turkey Sandwich story is a bunch of hysterical bunk that was rapidly picked up by Fox News and Huffington Post. It was a bunch of poorly worded reporting by the original source, Carolina Journal.

Please read: http://www.carolinajournal.com/jhdailyjournal/display_jhdailyjournal.html?id=8780 for the real deal.

FTFA:
"After the meeting he handed out a couple of business cards pointing people to his website.

Three days later, he got a call from the director of the nutrition board."

once you go into the real world and hand out business cards you are operating a business, it's no longer free speech. Title is misleading.

The real story is at Carolina Journal

And I can't see how this storm is a teacup is news for anyone, let alone "News for nerds".

I just read through all the comments scored 3 or higher. Several of you said, sometimes in exactly these words, "Nothing to see here, move along."

Shame on you!

You are prepared to dismiss this story as being lies made up by a 4-year-old, or lies made up by crazy right-wing biased news sources? You can't be bothered to research it a little bit?

Put the words "West Hoke Elementary School" into Google News. Ignore Fox et. al. and look for local sources. Oh wow, looks like Google has started categorizing the links, and there is a link labelled "Local:" right near the top:

http://www.wcti12.com/news/30472198/detail.html

Or, if you can disdainfully read that horribly biased right-wing nutty web site The Blaze for a little bit, you can find their own link to the local newspaper story on the incident:

http://www.carolinajournal.com/exclusives/homemade-lunch-replaced-with-cafeteria-nuggets.html

So unless you are now going to tell me that the local news outlets are part of a vast right-wing conspiracy, I think it's clear there is indeed something to see here.

Now it does look like there is some backpedaling going on. This has embarrassed the authorities and they are downplaying it. But here are the facts as I understand them:

• The girl's lunch was inspected by someone.
• The lunch failed the check because it did not include a vegetable. (It did include a fruit.)
• Due to the failure, the girl was given additional food, which did include both chicken nuggets and some kind of vegetable.
• The 4-year-old girl, very upset, at three chicken nuggets and nothing else put before her. She then took her uneaten lunch back home.
• The school did send a note home to the mother, chiding her for not packing a vegetable in the lunch, and warning (threatening?) her that in future the school might start charging if they felt the need to stage such an intervention again.
• The girl's mother said that the 4-year-old girl will not eat vegetables at lunch. Quote: "She eats vegetables at home because I have to watch her because she doesn't really care for vegetables."

Now, as it happens, I heard the mother being interviewed on the radio yesterday. Her comment was that she can't afford to buy vegetables that won't be eaten and will be thrown away, and she can't afford to have the school charging her extra if the school doesn't like a lunch brought by the child.

She was also furious that the state officials implied that she is doing a poor job of looking after her child, and extra furious that they are confusing her 4-year-old daughter into thinking she packed bad food: "You're telling a 4-year-old. 'Oh, your lunch isn't right,' and she's thinking there's something wrong with her food."

Tell me, honestly. If you saw a news story on the Huffington Post that some right-wing outrage had been perpetrated in Alabama or something (I don't know, maybe paddling a child for not reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or something) would you immediately assume it was all lies because Huffington Post is a biased left-wing site? "Nothing to see here, move along"?

Don't blindly accept or blindly reject any news based on where you saw it. It has never been easier to check for alternative sources to corroborate a news story.

steveha

It's bad enough that a demagoging article like this would be posted in the first place, but that can be written off as the editors making a mistake and being tricked.

But you... either you lied about reading the article or you lied about its contents. From the first article:

'She came home with her whole sandwich I had packed, because she chose to eat the nuggets on the lunch tray, because they put it in front of her,' her mother said.

the other article:

While the four-year-old was still allowed to eat her home lunch, the girl was forced to take a helping of chicken nuggets, milk, a fruit and a vegetable to supplement her sack lunch. The mother says the girl was so intimidated by the inspection process that she was too scared to eat all of her homemade lunch.

And yet you claim that "The School Person REPLACED the whole lunch with an ALTERNATE version, not just 'supplemented'," and then go off on a rant about the evil leftwing nanny state. You should be ashamed of spreading these hateful lies.

Ok then....

http://www.carolinajournal.com/exclusives/homemade-lunch-replaced-with-cafeteria-nuggets.html

Their source.

NOT surprised that happened in NC. They consistently rank in the lowest scores in the nation. There is a reason for that... The teachers do not care. The administration punishes those who do care. They also consistently pay the least in the nation for teachers (15-25k is typical). My guess some TA screwed up. The school backed them up. Now they are trying to save face... I have seen many examples of this sort of thing here.

You mean like this:

http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/09/telco-to-town-were-suing-you-because-we-care.ars

or this:

http://www.carolinajournal.com/exclusives/display_exclusive.html?id=2400

or this:

http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/22/time-warner-and-embarq-cant-compete-with-city-owned-isp-trying/

As a parent who recently bought a home deliberately OUTSIDE the Charlotte-Mecklenburg system, let me assure you, these people don't have any idea what they're doing. This school district has been in the crapper for years and years. No small part of my wife's and my decision to move OUT of Charlotte was the schools. You can check CMS's test results or you can find lots of interesting facts, not to mention things like this or this. The list goes on and on.

Influential? Maybe to clueless reporters in desperate need to fill airtime or page space. Second Life has maybe 650,000 real people logging in and tuning out of First Life. I can't think of one concept, product, idea or candidate the Second Life community has successfully promoted to myself, friends or coworkers (a fairly "wired" bunch). If internet savvy Edwards supporters want to assist his campaign, maybe they suggest that John paint a giant campaign sign on his 28,200 sq foot new home on 102 acres in North Carolina so it can be photographed for Google Earth. I am sure one of the two Americas will appreciate that...

So someone sets up a political site on second life, quotes himself and gets slashdot to advertise it for him.
It is not like this is the first time a political party or politician has setup a place on second life, and hey this is not even official.
Now it would be neat if he duplicated edwards new house