So Thursday on the Twittersphere, some pro-choice ladies had a big internet event, telling their own stories of having had abortions, with the goal of reducing the stigma of talking about a legal medical procedure that one in three women have had. The 1 in 3 Campaign featured a hundred people telling their stories and tweeting about them.
This did not sit well with Fetus Fetishist Jill Stanek, an anti-abortion activist who was briefly notorious in 2007 for passing on rumors (horrifying if true, you know) that people in China frequently eat "sweet and sour fetus" -- a claim she's never backed away from, as far as we can tell. Hey, she was just reporting.
When Stanek saw this "one in three women have an abortion" nonsense, she knew she had to correct it, and she went right to a pro-choice organization, the Guttmacher Institute, to blow that claim right out of the amniotic fluid. Here's her devastating YOU LIE! tweet, as captured by Guardian columnist Jessica Valenti*:
Stupid twitter babby-killers, it's 30%, not 33.3333%, and so you are all liars and abortion still needs to be stigmatized. Stanek followed up with another tweet noting that the 3 in 10 statistic was from 2008, and that abortions have declined some since then -- thanks in part to the relentless growth of laws against clinics -- so stop with the filthy lies, you 3-or-4 percentage point liars! Nobody wants abortions anymore, absolutely nobody, or maybe almost a third of women, but definitely not a full third.
Also, we're pretty sure that since these ladies can't get simple math right -- one in three, three in ten, seven of nine, WHATEVS! -- probably because of all those hormones, Larry Summers is completely vindicated.
*Valenti also told her own story as part of the 1 in 3 campaign herself, so maybe she's just biased against good math.
Most of the dishes that are served in US-based Chinese restaurants were developed by Asian chefs working in restaurants on the West Coast using locally-available ingredients. Reproducing dishes that were identical to those served in China would be difficult due to the unavailability of many key ingredients on this side of the ocean and having them be accepted and popular on this continent would be hampered by the differences in the palate preferences of the two cultures. An individual's taste palate preferences develop out of a complex combination of personal experience, cultural traditions, local food availability and probably many other things. They are acquired early in life and are very resistant to change once they have become established. This is true for people all over the world. The chefs realized that even with the right ingredients they still could not serve the same dishes in America that they prepared in China because American customers would not find them to be agreeable to their North American palates, and so they created new North America-specific dishes using foods that they could readily obtain over here.
1 in 3??? Nuh-uh, not even close. More like 4 out of 12, probs.