The song breakfast in America had a clue, he wanted to "take a jumbo across the water, like to see America, see the girls in California".

All British except for the drummer. But they recorded "Even in The Quietest Moments" in Colorado and "Breakfast In America" in Los Angeles so they bloody well stopped being British in the mid-70s.

@smr
Well, there was a fight over the definition of butter too, but not what you described.

I think the biggest difference is the possibility that the public could confuse one product for another.

The public uses nut milk as a substitute for animal milk, you put it on cereal, in shakes, dunk cookies in it, etc. It's a white liquid that differs in taste, but is made to be close to animal milk.

The fight over "butter" as a definition happened between butter and margerine. The butter people, at one point even lobbied for a law making it so magerine could not be sold in the color yellow. It makes sense to some degree. They are similar products. They are used in almost identical application.

It's probably the case that nothing like that happened with peanut butter because it's not close enough to regular butter to be confused as churned milk fat.

One could argue that people may put peanut butter on toast with jelly with their breakfast, possibly; but they'd know what product they are using. No one would try to put a dollop of apple or peanut butter in a pan to fry up some eggs. They are night and day different products and it's not as though one would be confused about what you were getting into with the purchase of apple butter instead of butter.

Whereas milk vs almond milk seem similar enough, and butter and margerine are similar enough and both used the same; the FDA then decided that a distinction should be made.

I don't disagree, and we have much the same thing in practice if not by law with our native people's, they even have their own separate tribal police, courts, and laws. They are in many ways a different country inside our borders.
I agree, removing the disparities in lower education is far more desirable....but at least here we're doing the opposite, defunding public schools and programs that offer assistance like breakfast and lunch while also making it easier for affluent people to use public funds to pay for private schools, effectively defunding the public schools even farther.
That leaves us trying things like affirmative action in admissions to try to mitigate the continuing unfair, unequal opportunities lower income students face. Far from ideal, but better than another poke in the eye with a sharp stick, as my wife used to say....and she ought to know! ;-)

They might put the argument in different terms. Which do you prefer....giving admission advantages to aboriginal students in recognition of the piss poor opportunities they've had educationally, or give sentencing advantages to aboriginal criminals in recognition of the across the board piss poor opportunities they've had, recognizing that neither approach addresses the underlying problems, only the results of those long standing issues that simply are not being addressed at all.
What doesn't work is ignoring their lack of opportunities and expecting them to perform on par with other, non disadvantaged kids. That just gets you uneducated, pissed off adults with a chip on their shoulder and no prospects for improvement.

So.....until we actually get to work improving their overall situation, easier said than done, it behooves us to give a leg up to those trying hard to do it for themselves....no? Otherwise we're likely just perpetuating a cycle of criminality that hurts us all.

I disagree. Pinpointing the problem isn't very hard if you have some idea of where to look.

As someone who was 'coming of age' in my profession when No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and its successor the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), I can provide some insight into how these policies have been enacted and how both have been detrimental to the public education system as a whole. The former is a GWBush policy, and the latter is an Obama policy meant to mend the original law, so both liberals and conservatives are to blame to some degree, but both are based on the same philosophy of education and teacher-accountability.

There are some other mitigating factors and outside influences at work that should be noted: gun violence, the rise & ubiquity of the internet, and universal cell phone availability, all mostly concentrated in the past 10 years that play a large role. Cell phones, for example, are probably the worst thing to happen to education ever. They distract, they assist in cheating, they perpetuate arguments which can lead to physical altercations, and parents themselves advocate for their use "what if there's an emergency?!?!"

The idea of "teacher accountability" is the biggest culprit though.

Anecdotally, I've caught people cheating on papers. A girl in my honors English class basically plagiarised her entire final paper that we worked on for close to a month. The zero tanked her grade, which was already floundering, and the parent wanted to meet. I'd rather not go into detail to protect both the girl and my own anonymity, but suffice to say, all of the blame for this was aimed directly at me. How? Well I (apparently) "should have caught this sooner and intervened." Now, the final in that class is 8 pages long, I have ~125 students all working on it at the same time. but my ability to check something like that and my workload are beside the point. I'M NOT THE ONE WHO COPY PASTED A WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE AND DOCTORED IT UP SO IT COULD SQUEAK BY THE PLAGIARISM DETECTOR (shows she knew what she was doing, IMHO). Yet, I'm still the one being told that I was responsible for what happened.

Teacher-accountability SOUNDS like the right thing to do, but consider the following analogies

--Students are earning poor grades, therefore teachers should be demoted; put on probationary programs; lose some of their salaries; and if they do not improve their test scores, grades, and attendance; be terminated from their positions.

as to

--Impoverished people have poor oral hygiene/health, therefore their dentists should be forced to take pay cuts from insurance companies. If the patients continue to develop cavities and the like, the dentist should be forced to go for further training, and possibly lose his practice.

I have no control over attendance.
I have no control over their home life.
I have no control over children coming to school with holes in their shoes, having not eaten breakfast.

@Mordhaus the part about money grubbing could not be further from the truth.

I'll be brief b/c I know this is already too long for this forum, but Houton Mifflin, McGraw Hill, Etc. Book Company is facing a shortfall of sales in light of the digital age. It may be difficult to blame one entity, but that's a good place to start. They don't sell as many books, but guess who produces and distributes the standardized tests and practice materials? Those same companies who used to sell textbooks by the boatload.

When a student does poorly, they have to retest in order to recieve a diploma. $$$ if they fail again, they retest again and again there is a charge for taking the test and accompanying pretest materials. Each of which has its own fees that go straight to the former textbook companies. See: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/schools/testing/companies.html

In short, there is an incentive for these companies to lobby for an environment where tests are taken and retaken as much as possible. Each time a student has to retest that's more $ in their pocket.

How can they create an enviorment that faccilitates more testing? Put all the blame on the educators rather than the students.

That sounds a little tin-foil-hat conspiracy theory-ish, but the lobbying they do is very real: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/03/30/report-big-education-firms-spend-millions-lobbying-for-pro-testing-policies/?utm_term=.
9af18f0d2064

That, combined with exceptions for charter/private schools where students have the option to opt-out of said testing is skewing the numbers in favor of all of these for-profit companies: http://sanchezcharter.org/state-testing-parent-opt-out/ << one example (you can't opt-out in a public school, at least in my state)

@bobknight33 idk if i'd call business-minded for-profit policies "liberal"

What the fuck is this? An interview with Burr sponsored by Kellogg's, and General Mills, and Pepsi? (Yes, Pepsi owns Quaker Oats.)

Was Bill told that he was going to be in a Big Sugar ad for breakfast cereal masquerading as an interview?

I hope he was paid for appearing in that *commercial.

Reminds me of this old nursery rhyme we used to sing as kids...

Mary had a little lamb, she also had a duck
She took 'em round the corner and taught them how to...
Fried eggs for breakfast, fried eggs for tea
The more you eat, the more you drink, the more you want to...
Peter had a boat, the boat began to rock
Up jumped Jaws and bit off his...
Cocktails and ginger ale, forty cents a glass
If you don't like 'it, you can shove it up your...
Ask no questions, tell no lies
I saw two men doing up their...
Flies are bad, mosquitoes are worse
And this is the end of my dirty, rotten verse

And quote from The Breakfast Club.

I saw them play this when they opened for Simple Minds in San Antone back in 1986. They sounded great but most of the crowd was teenagers who were only there to hear Simple Minds play that Breakfast Club song.

Many years ago, I worked at a 24 hour Arby's that was located in a truck stop. We served breakfast with grilled eggs sandwiches. Our grill was about 1/2 the size, but we had one guy who had his two hand/two egg cracking routine down.

He was like a machine, just grab two eggs and crack, toss the shells, and then repeat. He said he learned it while working at a diner, only way he could keep up with the orders. His eggs were on point too; I always begged him to make me a ham, egg, and cheese on a bun as I was leaving my graveyard shift. Twenty four years later and I still haven't tasted eggs that good.

Nice, this was a great video to watch while eating breakfast, lol

The way some people have written about "destroying" North Korea, it would make you think that we haven't been talking about a weapon of mass destruction which would indiscriminately incinerate women, children, pets, and leave swathes of radioactive land uninhabitable which would then leak mutation/radioactivity into the rest of the world's ecosystem.

Western civilisation has surely succumbed to some kind of mental sickness, turning us all into mindless clones repeating "the greater good" when we get promised large, colourful explosions. When war after war ends in disaster and further misery, we continue to talk about "bringing an end to suffering" everywhere in the world as though it's both a duty, and something we haven't catastrophically screwed up time after time. Worse is the underlying pride in that perceived duty; "We're gonna make their lives better whether they want it or not! OORAHH!"

The moralising about whether or not they deserve it is an exercise in narcissistic god complexes, covered with a veneer of regret, "oh no, we should have gone to war years ago, now it's too late, should we? shouldn't we?" Like it's great fun to discuss whether or not people should burn and rot to death over the course of weeks, from the comfort of your breakfast table back in good ole metropolis.

And if you decide to bomb? Ah well, it had to be done. Yes, it's a terrible burden, the kind of pain that people burning to death will never understand or thank us for. But we'll continue, because we're the hero they need not the one they want.

Trump's handling of the NK situation is a perfect marriage of the worst elements of the usual neoliberal approach (pro- profit & power orientated) and the thuggish exaggerated threat approach favoured by teenagers in playgrounds.

Our own countries are in an absolute SHIT state. With our indifference towards global warming, the developed nations are the most dangerous threat to life on Earth for *every* country. Why do we still have the arrogance to go around discussing how to improve countries that we've never even fucking been to?

Thanks. I thought it was about time to make a push, what with Trump and all the low hanging fruit to be sifted. Now that I'm gold star does that mean I'm entitled to the French Breakfast Puffs?

I'll throw my vote in for American Cheese on burgers.

I make cheese at home and every once in a while one comes out with too soft and sticky a texture. The flavor usually isn't what I want either because the moisture content is too high during aging.

I started making pub-cheese with these failures and enjoyed the results. Then I threw some on a breakfast egg and sausage sandwich and it was better than cheddar but the consistency wasn't quite right once it got hot. So I experimented with other ingredients until I had something that melts well and is flavorful enough to stand up to breakfast sausage or bacon or jalapenos on a burger...whatever. It finally occurred to me the first time I made a grilled cheese sandwich with it that I've been making American cheese.

I love cheese, that's why I have a notebook full of my cheese making notes and a full-size stand-up freezer converted to a cheese cave. But damned if my homemade American cheese isn't the best thing to put on a burger.

Good one there! "I know you are but what am I?!"

Trump is not afraid to lead? What's he leading in exactly?

An idiotic, poorly thought out travel ban that won't help anything?

Mouthing off to our allies, making us look like idiots? (Mexico will pay for the wall... wait, maybe not, but they'll pay 20% tariffs.... well actually the Americans will be the ones paying... sounds like a solid plan everyone!)

Appointing unqualified cabinet members? Rick Perry for energy secretary.... the department he wanted to destroy... the department that he had no idea manages our nuclear stockpiles... the department whose previous leader under Obama was a nuclear physicist. It's now Rick fucking Perry.

The only thing he's leading in is in being the most embarrassing statesman this country has ever seen, arguing with celebrities on Twitter like a child. This moron was actually ranting about Schwarzenegger and The Apprentice ratings in his National Prayer Breakfast speech. All he had to do was just recite a short passage from the bible or something. But nope, not him. He needs to ask like a 12 year old.

We have a 70-year-old man, who also happens to be THE PRESIDENT, who can't control himself and act the part. He really has a few screws loose. There's no other explanation. But we did give him the nuclear codes! Yaay!

Leader - my ass. (Besides, it's Bannon leading him anyway.)