Tag: culture

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You know it's bad when…

So, Dr. Macarthur sent me this link from Washington Monthly titled “Time For Us To Go.” In light of the Rep. Mark Foley scandal, amongst other things, even die-hard conservatives are saying that it’s time to give up congress and get some more liberals in there. It is interesting to hear their perspectives, especially pointing out the benefits of having some checks and balances between the White House and Capitol Hill. There’s also quite a bit of historical perspective, comparing Republicans of today with those of yesterday.

Either way, here are some of the blurbs…they’re worth a skim. At the very least, the conservative voices writing these articles are “fiscal” or “economic conservatives,” i.e. ones I can respect…so they aren’t messing with the “church and state” border very much.

Let’s quit while we’re behind
By Christopher Buckley

Bring on Pelosi
By Bruce Bartlett

And we thought Clinton had no self-control
By Joe Scarborough

Give divided government a chance
By William A. Niskanen

Restrain this White House
By Bruce Fein

Ideologie has taken over
By Jeffrey Hart

The show must not go on
By Richard A. Viguerie

P.S. If you don’t vote in November, I may have to hunt you down…

Posted on

You know it’s bad when…

So, Dr. Macarthur sent me this link from Washington Monthly titled “Time For Us To Go.” In light of the Rep. Mark Foley scandal, amongst other things, even die-hard conservatives are saying that it’s time to give up congress and get some more liberals in there. It is interesting to hear their perspectives, especially pointing out the benefits of having some checks and balances between the White House and Capitol Hill. There’s also quite a bit of historical perspective, comparing Republicans of today with those of yesterday.

Either way, here are some of the blurbs…they’re worth a skim. At the very least, the conservative voices writing these articles are “fiscal” or “economic conservatives,” i.e. ones I can respect…so they aren’t messing with the “church and state” border very much.

Let’s quit while we’re behind
By Christopher Buckley

Bring on Pelosi
By Bruce Bartlett

And we thought Clinton had no self-control
By Joe Scarborough

Give divided government a chance
By William A. Niskanen

Restrain this White House
By Bruce Fein

Ideologie has taken over
By Jeffrey Hart

The show must not go on
By Richard A. Viguerie

P.S. If you don’t vote in November, I may have to hunt you down…

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Net Neutrality

So, I was flipping through ArsTechnica yesterday and saw their article about a survey being run around the Senate Commerce Committee regarding Net Neutrality. From the article:

The poll also found that many Americans have no idea what net neutrality is, or why they should care; only 7 percent said that they had even heard or seen anything about net neutrality. When pollsters introduced the concept to poll takers, they described it solely as “enhancing Internet neutrality by barring high speed internet providers from offering specialized services like faster speed and increased security for a fee.” When presented this way, 19 percent of respondents said that net neutrality was more important to them than “delivering the benefits of new TV and video choice,” which received a 66 percent backing.

Now, since I know the majority of you don’t know what Net Neutrality is, let me give you the Wikipedia definition:

The phrase Network Neutrality was coined by Columbia University law professor Tim Wu to describe networks that don’t favor some classes of application (for example the World Wide Web) over others (such as online gaming or Voice over IP).

You can read the full article for further information, and there are plenty of news articles around, but here’s the key: Net Neutrality is essential for keeping the internet as it stands today. The legislation is built to allow internet providers to allot certain speeds to certain services.

Let me explain this as simply as I can. The internet is finite: there’s only so much of it. Right now, if I want, I’ve got access to 100% of the internet. If the internet was not “neutral,” as it is now, then companies like AT&T and Verizon could say: “hmmmm…let’s just allow Andy to use 20% of the internet and use the other 80% for whatever we want, like telephone and television services.” Or even better, “hey, why don’t we have Amazon and eBay pay extra so they can each have 10% of the internet, while forcing everyone else to use and share 20% between themselves.” Why is this bad? Well, because my internet will be slower, and any new companies would be forced to use that limited amount of it until they could afford the premium to venture into the rest of the ‘Net.

Essentially, using the “Information Superhighway” metaphor, it’s like letting big companies with their semis full of products drive across the country on I-70 with no speed limit, but forcing the entire US population to drive along Route 66 (including all the stoplights).

Net neutrality is an important issue. Perhaps not as important as gay rights and an illegitimate war, but important just the same. You need to vote in November so that the internet stays the way it is, rather than favoring the large corporations, thus stifling any and all creativity and competition.

I leave you with a quote from the guy running the Senate Commerce Committee, Ted Stevens:

“They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck. It’s a series of tubes.”

Seriously…this is they guy “leading the charge,” so to speak.

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Of Facebook and Big Brother…

So, Slashdot had a posting discussing the new changes on Facebook, which many of you use frequently… As many of you noticed this morning when you logged on to change your status, there’s a new “feeds” feature that really ramps up the stalking factor to a whole new level… Personally, I didn’t really care that much, besides the fact that I can’t seem to find a way to disable it.

Well…apparently more than a few people are rather annoyed about it, pointing out a variety of privacy issues…according to Slashdot, though, many “protest groups” have formed, the largest of which has 10,000 members… I link to CampusProgress.org and a student homepage at some university I’ve never heard of (University of Mary Washington, anybody?) as examples of just how irate some people are over the changes. A few quotes from the latter link were kinda amusing, regardless:

“When we join facebook, we automatically give up a little bit of our privacy. To use Facebook has always been ‘socially-acceptable stalking.’ Now, though, they’ve just gone too damned far. No one wants their girlfriend or boyfriend knowing when they’ve commented on a photo, written on a wall, or anything else. No one wants people to see that they’ve left a group; it could offend someone. No one really wants to see the change in status of someone’s love life.”

And from the CollegeProgress article:

“A Facebook profile now displays your online social exploits since mid- August. It notes when you wrote on someone?s wall, and when you commented on a photo, along with other new details such as your responses to event invitations, your new friends, and what groups you join. Before, as many of us know, you could write on a wall in relative privacy. It could be a sneaky affair. And commenting on someone else?s photo was something that few would notice. Wall and comment communications, while public, were not advertised.

Now, every time you do anything on Facebook, you issue a bulletin for all of your friends. Now no one will miss the fact that you think you look horrible in a picture, or that you didn’t accept an invitation to someone’s event, or that you wrote what you considered to be a funny item for your list of activities (‘Trying not to incriminate myself on facebook to all my future employers’) and then thought better of it ten minutes later and took it down.”

I dunno…personally, I figure that if you’re posting this kind of information on Facebook in the first place, you’re just asking for trouble…but at the same time, I can understand where problems can and will arise. Needless to say, I’m a). glad I’m not in college anymore, and b). glad I’m married.

Any thoughts?

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30-sec skip

So, I was reading on ArsTechnica that TV ads are losing their relevance. More specifically:

“McKinsey makes a number of assumptions about consumer behavior such as projecting ‘a 15 percent decrease in buying power driving by cost-per-thousand rate increases, a 23 percent decline in ads viewed due to switching off, a 9 percent loss of attention to ads due to increased multitasking and a 37 percent decrease in message impact due to saturation,’ all by the year 2010 and in comparison to the year 1990. Those numbers are then synthesized into TV-based marketing becoming one-third as effective in 2010 as it was in 1990.”

Now, I can’t say that I find this to be terribly surprising… As the article points out, more people are using DVR/TiVO services, as well as on-demand services, than there were in 1990 (oh yeah…that stuff didn’t exist back then…), but at the same time, realize that these percentages are calculated from data spanning nearly 20 years. Wouldn’t you think that people’s tastes in television and advertising would change anyway, without any help from DVR or TiVO? Personally, I tend to watch shows when they’re premiering, so I can’t skip forward. On the other hand, Brooke’s sister (Rachel) will wait ’til her show starts, pause it, and then go take care of the dog just so she can come back a little later and skip the commercials.

On another note, last month, execs from the ABC network decided to start investigating ways to prevent DVR owners from skipping commercials (apparently thinking we wouldn’t mind). Obviously, the networks are starting to “get wise” to the situation and make adjustments as soon as they can, ’cause as the article points out, “TV advertisers today are paying more for access to a smaller audience, which makes that medium an expensive way to attract new customers.”
Regardless, the model’s going to have to change and we aren’t going to have commercials as we know them for much longer…

…except during the Super Bowl, of course…

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Kinda sad…

Some statistics from the May 2006 issue of Popular Science:

  • 68% of American fourth-graders perform below math-proficiency levels for their grade
  • American 15-year-olds rank 21st out of 30 industrialized countries in math
  • American 15-year-olds rank 19th out of 29 industrialized countries in science
  • 42% of American middle school science teachers lack certification in their field
  • 23% of undergraduate degrees are awarded in science, technology and engineering in the United States
  • 64% of undergraduate degrees are awarded in science, technology and engineering in Japan

It’s stuff like this that makes me consider teaching high school instead of going into industry, etc…or at the very least, teaching high school around retirement time rather than at a college somewhere…

Brooke and I are both reading a book now titled “The World is Flat,” by Thomas Friedman, which is about rapid globalization in the 21st century…how the U.S. is quickly falling behind other countries like India and China in technology, etc…? He points out how it can be a good thing for the U.S., since we as Americans tend to do well when we’re challenged (i.e. World War II, the Space Race, etc.), but we’ve gotta start getting in gear unless we want to be left behind.

In any case, it makes me wonder what everyone’s doing with their lives, then. If we’ve got so many people going to college nowadays, why aren’t more of them majoring in “pure” sciences or engineering? It’s not like getting degrees in physics or chemical engineering are going to leave you without a lucrative job when you get out… Maybe it’s because you really need a graduate education before you get a money-making job (not in all cases, of course)?

I dunno…I still find it sad, though…especially sad that the American public is more preoccupied with their own wealth and with Tom and Katie’s new baby rather than with trying to figure out how the world works and, therefore, how to fix its problems.

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Need I say more?

So, I was flipping through Daily Kos (who was interviewed on The Colbert Report a few weeks back, so I’ve been checking out the blog recently) and saw this posting referring to an article at Think Progress regarding a new policy by our friends in the government regarding funding for abstinence education. Think Progress made the following highlights:

“In addition to being costly, inaccurate, and ineffective, the programs must now operate under a strict new definition of abstinence:”

Abstinence curricula must have a clear definition of sexual abstinence which must be consistent with the following: ‘Abstinence means voluntarily choosing not to engage in sexual activity until marriage. Sexual activity refers to any type of genital contact or sexual stimulation between two persons including, but not limited to, sexual intercourse.’

Later, the guidelines explicitly define marriage:

Throughout the entire curriculum, the term ‘marriage’ must be defined as ‘only a legal union between one man and one woman as a husband and wife, and the word ?spouse? refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.’ (Consistent with Federal law)”

Seriously…can’t people simply stop persecuting the people who a). they don’t understand and b). they don’t agree with? What damage, exactly, would pre-marital sex and homosexual relations have to America (or the world)? Isn’t it worse to get married just to have sex, and then have a baby, and then get a divorce? Are they going to outlaw birth control next?

…there are times, yo…I swear…

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Oh, ignorance…

So, Slashdot has run a few stories in the past few days about global warming.?? According to a recent poll, 71% of Americans are now ready to believe that global warming is real and is a problem.? This is after researchers, for years, have said that it’s a problem.? Science Magazine, in Dec. 2004, reported that out of 928 scientific papers published in research periodicals, 75% accepted the “consensus view” that global warming is caused by humans, while the other 25% didn’t say either way; none of them said explicitly that humans are not the cause.

So, with overwhelming evidence, why is it that many people refuse to believe it? I mean, there’s a girl in my class that refuses to believe that global warming is caused by human involvement!? She admits that it’s happening, but says that it’s caused by the “natural cycle” that Earth goes through between ice ages. Perhaps most disturbing, researchers are finding it difficult to report their findings due to pressure from the Bush Administration, being told to remove references to global warming from web sites and their reports.

…so wtf?!? I mean, so far as the Bush Administration goes, they just want to keep us under an oil-based economy so they keep getting kickbacks from the Middle East, but why does the American public go along with it?!? Are the just stupid? What is with that remaining 29% that makes them not believe that humans are the primary cause of accelerating global warming?

…as with many social issues, I guess I just don’t get it…

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So, I was driving on I-64…

…and I saw a billboard.? I’ve actually seen a similar billboard somewhere else (I-44, I think), but it was this one that caused me to go by their website.

“Question homosexuality,” says their slogans.? “Freedom from homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ,” says their website title. Their website continues to explain their position as such:

“…Christ offers a healing alternative to those with homosexual tendencies. EXODUS upholds redemption for the homosexual person as the process whereby sin’s power is broken, and the individual is freed to know and experience true identity as discovered in Christ and His Church. That process entails the freedom to grow into heterosexuality.”

So, overall, what have we learned here?? This group, Exodus, says there’s a “cure” for homosexuality.? They say that homosexuality “is a choice” and that homosexuals can be “reoriented.”

Well, geez, while we’re at it, do you think Exodus could “cure” the Communists?? How about the Jews, or Muslims, or Hindi, or any other religion that isn’t Christian?? Why not Cubans, Iraqis, Chinese, Bosnians or Mexicans?? I mean, these are all “choices” that take them “further from Jesus Christ” and that “reorientation” toward Christianity will solve all our world’s problems.

…pity there isn’t a “cure” for so-called “Christians” that persecute people they don’t understand, rather than simply trying to promote Christianity as the loving and understanding religion it’s supposed to be…