Thoughts on a Paper, Episode V

Hey, Everybody!

Sorry I've been so far behind on my posts, but the week before finals has been brutal. I'm totally finished with my inquiry contract paper, all I have left is to fix something in the bibliography. I think it turned out pretty well, especially given the amount of time I had to spend on it. It's a full seven pages long, and one of the densest things I've ever written. You know those really boring research papers that no one really wants to read? It's one of those. Wahoo.

Something interesting that was pointed out to me but I didn't have the sources to put it into the paper:

1980. The majority of televisions in the US have about four channels.
2008. The majority have on the scale of seventy. If you have cable or satellite you might have a few hundred.

Kinda scary, huh? Originally, when the World Wide Web first spawned off of the ARPAnet, there were a couple hundred websites. People could buy pamphlets of IP addresses (the behind-the-scenes numbers that URLs translate into. EG, Google.com = 209.85.171.100). URLs, or the text you put into the address bar of Safari or Firefox (please, not Internet Explorer), were only made popular when the number of websites got so big that it was impossible to memorize IP addresses the way you memorize phone numbers.

Today there are significantly more websites on the World Wide Web than there are human beings on earth. Makes this blog seem kind of insignificant, huh?

Thoughts on a Paper, Episode IV

More and More Sources!

Greetings, user! I come to you today with a plethora, no, a glut of exciting and stimulating information to feed your gray matter!

…Not really. But I do have a lot of interesting stuff.

First of all, in this article, the author mentioned a reoccurring motif that I've found. Goldfish's attention span. Apparently it is 10 seconds long. Not so exciting. But what is exciting is that American children (12 and under) see more than 40,000 TV commercials per year! That's crazy, man! Ten years ago advertising agencies spent about 6 billion dollars advertising to children. Today they spend over twice that. That's a lotta ads. This article was the first to suggest major changes to solve this problem. It mentioned how a lot of european countries have created legislature about advertising to children. "Greece bans toy advertisements on TV between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m.; Sweden bans all TV advertising aimed at children under 12; and Denmark, Finland, and Norway don’t allow sponsorship of any children’s programs. Canada’s Broadcasting Code, which severely restricts children’s advertising, bans ads implying that a product will make a child happier or more popular." How awesome is that? I think that the US should try this out. Cooper raised an interesting point in this article as well. Adults understand what a commercial is: a sales pitch. Children don't. The APA (American Psychological Association) reports that "children under the age of 8 can't grasp the notion that commercials have a purpose other than entertainment, and they completely believe what they see and hear."

Dude? Are you still paying attention to me? This article gives a really good definition of "Attention Span", and raises the point that perhaps TV and the web aren't the cause of our inattentiveness, but rather, the result. He points out that TVs and movies use multiple angles because we'd get bored if they didn't.

Hey… I think I've heard that somewhere before. Where...?

Ah, here. This book , which has been sitting on my shelf for the past two years not only conveniently solves my lack of a non--electronic source, but also gives some interesting history to modern cinema editing. On page 121, it talks about how…

Wait. First you need to know a little something about editing.

Editing 101

Wide shot: feet to above head

Medium Shot: waist to top of head

Close up: Collar bone to forehead

Ok. So when editing first became a profession and stopped being a chore, directors (and studios, by proxy) had very little confidence in their audience. They believed that if the film cut from a wide shot to a close up, audiences would get confused. They wouldn't spatially understand what just happened. Take, for instance, this hypothetical scene pitch.

Shot 1: Show a helicopter shot of downtown Chicago
Shot 2: Show the exterior of a busy office high rise
Shot 3: Show the busy lobby
Shot 4: We see people entering the elevator
Shot 5: Close up of a woman wearing a powersuit, checking her watch.

OK? Now take out shots 2-4. Doesn't quite make so much sense, does it? But this is changing. Movies now switch from shot 1 to shot 3, or shot 2 to shot 5. The last movie I saw in theaters (HSM3), began with an extreme close up (chin to eyebrows), and ended the scene with an extremely wide shot (an entire set or location) of the gym.

If you were to watch a film that didn't cut from angle to angle much, you'd get bored. But would you get bored if you watched a film without the mandatory explosions or car chase sequences?

Lastly, a final fact.

"In a study of 2,600 children ages 1 to 3, researchers found that the more television the little people watch the more likely they are to suffer from attention-span deficit by the age of 7."

Thoughts on a Paper, Episode III

Hello, Slaves to the Internet!

First of all, a couple of house cleaning things. One, I apologize for not posting the last couple of days. I've been really busy. Hopefully I'll have less homework this week. Secondly, I realize now (a week too late) that I neglected to provide a link in Episode I. Here's the link:

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

OK. Now to business.

I've spent the last two and a half hours doing research for this paper. I'll give you a quick run-down of the sources and what I've learned.

First of all, the article that rox my sox. Is Google Making Us Stupid, by Nicholas Carr. Carr wrote this article for The Atlantic when he realized that his attention span-- especially when he's reading a long book or poem-- is totally shot. He blames it on the Internet. Carr raises some interesting questions, ones that I hope to answer over the next... good gosh, two months!

• Do hyperlinks drive us to other sites, keeping us from finishing the current thought?
• Do students go online to avoid having to "read in the traditional sense" for research projects? (I know I do!)
• Maryanne Wolf says "We are how we read". If we are what we eat, have we become consumers of knowledge? Is information now a commodity?
• When Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter because he was going blind his writing changed. His writing style changed dramatically, and he stated that "our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts". Do we think in txt mssge and iChat speak?
• Lastly, Carr points out that data mining companies like Google and Yahoo! benefit from our jumping from site to site (it's how they make money. The longer we read one article, the more money they loose). Does that mean that our decrease in attention span is intentional?

In an article called Appetite for Distraction, Angelica Candelaria pointed out that the change in the way we think is reflected in modern cinema (something I'm very interested in). Movies no longer have in-depth character development, instead focusing on pretty visual effects and complex action sequences. American Theaters no longer host foreign films, because we don't have the patience to read subtitles.

Candelaria is the first so far to give possible solutions. She mentions that you should decrease your overall time on the internet, and when you are doing research, you should print out lengthy articles and read them off-line (something I'm doing with this project). She also gives some rather odd solutions, such as improving your diet and practice memory games to increase your memory, but she does raise some good points.

Turning into Digital Goldfish, from BBC News Online, doesn't have a whole lot, but it does have an interesting factoid: You spend an average of less than 60 seconds per website when you're browsing. Scary, huh?

Is TV Evil?, by Kevin Drum, is more of a rant than anything else, does have an interesting anecdote. The author's mother was a fourth grade teacher, and she found that when she first started teaching in the 1970s, the average attention span for a 4th grader was about 30 minutes. Any longer and the kids would get distracted. When the article was published, the average attention span had dropped to under 15 minutes.

Lastly, Informing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman, the same dude who came up with the concept of Future Schlack, has some really interesting facts in it. Did you know that in America there are...

• 2.6 x 10⁵ billboards
• 11,520 newspapers
• 11,556 periodicals
• 27 x 10⁴ video stores
• 3.62 x 10⁸ TV sets
• 4 x 10⁸ radios
• 4 x 10⁴ books published every year (3 x 10⁵ world-wide)
• 6 x 10¹⁰ pieces of advertising-oriented junk mail sent per day?(just for reference, that's almost ten times the population of Earth!)

Good golly, Miss Molly!

Thoughts on a Paper, Episode II

Welcome back, Faithful Internet fiends!

     > I'm pleased to announce to y'all that I believe that I'm finished with my proposal. Feel free to read it here.

     > So what topic did I choose? I chose to talk about how the media and the ease of access to information is shortening the attention span of youth in America, and decreasing their intelligence.

     > Sound exciting? Oh yeah! I can't wait to start researching.

     > Over and out.

Thoughts on a Paper, Episode I

Hello, Internet!

      > Tonight's assignment is all about my up coming Inquiry Contract paper, and my progress on it for the day. This is episode one, season one of said posts. This Thursday I have to turn in a two page proposal for a topic. So tonight, sit back and relax, as I tell you my thoughts on THE TOPIC TO END ALL TOPICS.

      > So my first thought is my old crutch. Gay Marriage. But common, that's been said and done way too many times. So therefore, I'm going to choose a totally divergent topic. Now, what shall that be...?

      > Aha! I have an idea. So I was reading this fascinating article a while ago about how Google is taking away our ability to concentrate for a long period of time. Go ahead. Click on the link. I'll bet that your attention span has already been decreased long enough to keep you from reading the entire article. Scary, huh?

      > In fact, come to think of it, I was reading an article a while ago (I have no memory of where, what, or when) that was about a study conducted a number of years ago. In 1990, a bunch of kids were asked to sit still and do nothing for as long as they could. If I remember correctly, the 7 year olds could sit still for 7 to 10 minutes, at which point they would become distracted or give up. The same experiment was conducted again in 2000, and the results were rather depressing. Only a few of the 7 year olds were able to make it past two minutes.

      > Why does this happen? Well, I can't say for certain yet, because I haven't actually done any research yet, but I'm pretty sure it has something to do with TV, videogames, and the immediate access to just about everything that the average American child has today. How do we fix it? Not a clue. But that's where the controversy comes in.

      > LaMags gave me an interesting article to look at. I haven't looked at it yet, but here's the link to it. Go read it, and I'll read it with you.

      > Ok, read and done. So now I have a choice to make. I have come up with two topics:

• How the media and technology is decreasing the attention span of youth in America, and what can be done to prevent it?
• How America is suffering from "Future Schlock", and what can be done to prevent it?

     > Sound good? With any luck, I'll be able to make a decision by tomorrow. Will I? Find out in Episode II of "THOUGHTS ON A PAPER", tomorrow at six.

Re-Evolution

Good Day, World Wide Web!

Sorry if last night's post was a little too abstract. I'll try to make this post a bit less wishy-washy.

Out of all the stories that I've written about up to this point, this one was the most emotionally affecting to me. I like to believe that people can change, especially for the better, and this piece really affirmed that in my mind.

Misunderstanding is a beast of a problem. Despite the fact that I can talk to someone on the other side of the world for fifty cents a minute, I don't really communicate that much. I've never been to a board meeting. I don't participate in panel discussions. I don't go to conventions, and I'm virtually clueless when it comes to local politics. The purpose of communication is so that I can convey some concept to you, and you will receive it, process it, and comprehend it.

Imagine working in a factory. Your job is to pick up a piece of cardboard as it comes down the conveyor belt (the cardboard being the analogy--vocab word--to the concept that is being communicated), fold it in half, and put it on a different conveyor belt, which carries it to another part of the factory. Simple communication. Receive, process, and reciprocate. Nothing too new.

But when there's a kerfuffle in some point of this process, communication fails. You don't get what I'm talking about. You're missing the point. You're not seeing my side of the problem. You just don't understand. That, my digital followers, is why Misunderstanding is such a beast. You don't understand me.

What happens in C. P. Ellis's life is that he is raised much as I am. No real local communication. Exclusion (His case is exponentially more extreme than mine, however), and eventually, desperation. When Ellis gets involved locally, he begins to communicate. He goes to board meetings. He goes to panel discussions. He makes himself heard, and he listens to other people. He hobnobs.

What he experiences is that the people who don't get around much, the people who are disgusted by shaking his hands, are the very people who are against making the community a better place for low-wage people. Those whose causes are parallel to his are the people that are honored to shake his hand. The people he speaks out against, hates, are some of the people who appreciate him the most. Because he gives his opinion. He isn't so incredibly ingrained in his views that he won't leave room for differences. And this is, in the end, what changes him.

Can we take this solution to a grand scale? Yes... and no. If every single person in America suddenly became as pro-active about co-mingling and being pro-active in bettering the groups they belong to (in this case, Ellis is pro-active for low-income citizens), then I believe that people would be forced to be more open minded. They'd meed people they never would have met. They would encounter viewpoints different from their own. They'd be forced to re-evaluate their own beliefs. Which is good.

The no part is in the practicality of this. First of all, there's no way to get three hundred million people to do this, at least, not all at once. And second, if everyone spoke out, no one would be able to hear each other. Some sort of middle ground would be nice, but I'm too tired to take the mental leap to figure out what that'd be.

Good night.

The Stereotype Highway

Greetings, Internet!

I'm pleased to say that I haven't completely drowned in homework. At least, not yet. I'm also somewhat pleased to say that I've given up trying to fix my font problems and I'm just going to go with the default font.

Tonight's post is in response to this article that was written by Kenji Yoshino, and originally appeared in the NY Times in January, 2006.

By the way, I'm skipping about 98% of the content of the article because this post is in response to a prompt based on this essay.

In this article, Yoshino talks about covering. Covering is when someone doesn't necessarily hide the fact that they are different, or part of some minority group, but changes the way they act to better assimilate into the mainstream of their society. However, Yoshino points out that the phrase "Mainstream" is rather vague, and, while it may be usable when talking about large groups of people and society as a whole, it is almost never applicable to individuals.

According to Yoshino, the phrase mainstream doesn't work because it isn't specific enough. Each person has so many adjectives associated with her or him that there is no way to discern whether or not each and every one of those adjectives is "standard", or the norm. Yoshino says that "It's not normal to be completely normal."

The essay only devotes one small paragraph to this, but I would like to pontificate further. What image do you see in your head when you hear "mainstream"? I think of an image kind of like this one, or, actually, more like this one. Interestingly, the second image looks startlingly like what a shattered LCD display looks like. But that's beside the point. Take a look at that second image. Now, imagine that you are a member of some group. For the moment, let's call that group Yellow. Notice that, in the picture, yellow is definitly more concentrated in the upper left hand side of the image. But there's yellow scattered all around the image, just in smaller quantities. And what's more, there's yellow in green, and yellow in orange, and many other colors as well. If mainstream is yellow, you can say that there is a certain area of the image that is mainstream (the area of the highest concentration of yellow). But looking at individual colors, you can't say where "yellow" is, because it's all over the place.

Apply the same lesson to "groups", and there you have Yoshino's point.

Flackle.

Playing with your mind?

"The graveyard was in the woods and twilight was coming on. Nothing broke the death like stillness except the occasional twitter of a bird. My spirit was overawed by the solemnity of the scene. For more than ten years I had frequented this spot, but never had it seemed to me so sacred as now. A black stump, at the head of my mother's grave, was all that remained of a tree my father had planted. His grave was marked by a small wooden board, bearing his name, the letters of which were nearly obliterated. I knelt down and kissed them, and poured forth a prayer to God for guidance and support in the perilous step I was about to take. As I passed the wreck of the old meeting house, where, before Nat Turner's time, the slaves had been allowed to meet for worship, I seemed to hear my father's voice come from it, bidding me not to tarry till I reached freedom or the grave. I rushed on with renovated hopes. My trust in God had been strengthened by that prayer among the graves."

-Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

As I've said before, the mind is very pliable. And, as I've said before, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is all the more emotionally affecting because it's non-fiction. It actually happened. So why is this passage worth my special attention? Stick around after the break, and you'll find out.

---

Welcome back. So what's going on in this little excerpt (reproduced from here)? Well, the first sixty or so pages of this book are devoted to painting the picture of the bear-trap slavery is. Linda is so totally stuck in slavery that there is no out. We even see her trying, piece by piece, to get out, and we see the evil Dr. Flint cut each and every one of those attempts out from under her. It's like the child-on-an-electric-carpet experiment (don't try this at home), when you put a four or five year old on an electric carpet. Obviously, the child will jump off. Now, put the child + carpet in a class cage, so the child can't jump off. Inevitably, the kid will give up, and lay on the carpet, being shocked.

The same thing happens to Linda. She is laying on the floor of slavery, loosing her will to carry on, and can't find a way out. For me, at least, this moment at the graveyard is when she figures out that, whether or not there is a way out, she's going to keep on fighting to get out. She's going to either win or die.

But that doesn't really answer the question of why I like this piece so much. Or does it? Good writing does three things.

1. It convinces the reader that what they are reading is reality.
2. It creates an emotional connection between the reader and the object of the story, most often referred to as the main character.
3. It moves the story forward.

I would make the argument that this paragraph fulfills all three of those requirements. Moreover, it does them with raw elegance. Keep on reading.

1.
Reality check. When you read, your eye moves across the page, and interprets individual glyphs as phonetic sounds. Somehow, all those sounds get put together to form something extremely close to reality. For example, I'll bet that while you read these very words you're not totally aware of your surroundings, because your reality has become the reality of someone explaining to you why he liked a paragraph in a book. Not the reality of you sitting at your desk looking at a LCD display while someone in the other room is making a racket. In significantly less words, good writing pulls you in. This piece did a fantastic job at that for me. I could see this scene as I was reading it.

2.
Go back and re-read the excerpt at the beginning of this post. Doesn't it make you sad, yet hopeful? Like I said before, this is a major turning point in the evolution of the main character. I don't think I need to go much further into this one, or

3.
this one, because I've already explained how this moves the story forward.

Hopefully you got a little insight into how I read. I'm sorry if this post seemed discordant or discon junctant, but I'm a wee bit frazzled. Keep your head in the game!

Incidents in the Life of a Blogger

Hello, Internet!

Please take a moment to locate the exit nearest your seat, keeping in mind the nearest exit may be behind you, and take note of your emotions as you read the following two quibs. (Quib: noun a short vignette intended to convey a fact or lesson)

A hypothetical situation: A made up man named Henson V. Benson is hatching chickens for his science class. While Mr. Benson is getting ice cream out of the refridgerator, the chickens escape, and he has to run all over his appartment to find them. He hears a peeping coming out of the sink, but he can't see anything, so he hits the switch for the light above the sink. Except he hits the wrong switch, and activates the garbage disposal. Chicken smoothie, anyone?

Pretty sad, huh? OK, here's another one. This one really happened to me, though.

I was in fourth grade, and we had "class hamsters". There were two of them, Susie and Buckster. Each weekend, one student would have the responsibility of taking the two hamsters home and taking care of them. I was so excited, as any fourth-grader would be, when my turn came around. That weekend, a big storm blew through. I
used to
still love big storms, and this one was a monster. So I'm laying in bed, 9:30-ish, and I hear this completely helpless squealing coming from the cage laying at the foot of the bed. Thunder claps, and I hear some more desperate squeals. So, of course, I get out of bed, and find the two hamsters huddling together in the corner of the cage, scared out of their wits. What did I do? I took them out of their cage, and cuddled them until they both fell asleep in my lap.

So now you've heard both stories. Which one affected you more? The second one? How come?

If you're at a loss for words, I'll tell you why. Because it actually happened. No matter how good of a writer I am, something that actually happened will always sound more realistic and touching if it's something I can write from memory. The reader knowing that it actually happened makes it that much better.

When you watch a science-fiction movie, you're looking for flaws. Imperfections. Implausibilities (it's a real word-- look it up!). You've been raised (hopefully) to take nothing at face value, and question everything you see and hear. So knowing that what you are seeing was really a bunch of press-board on a sound stage in Century City takes away the impact of the movie. The same goes for written literature. Knowing that a book was written by some British woman sitting in a coffee shop pounding away on MS Word removes some of the emotional energy from the reader. Because it didn't actually happen, and no one is trying to convince you of anything otherwise. When a book/movie/photograph/whathaveyou is something real-- it actually happened-- you stop looking for the inconsistencies and simply believe. Therefore, when something stupendous happens, like, say, a main character dies, you feel sadder if it's non-fiction, because someone, somewhere, actually died. And that was eight commas in one sentence. Boo-ya!

The question for this evening was why is it important that the book we're reading, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, is non-fiction. Each and every event in this book really happened, exactly as it is written. There's no room for debate about details. It happened that way. The fact that it wasn't cleaned up or heavily edited drives that point home. Nothing was passed through a filter.

I'm out of time again. Thank you for reading "The Words of Magic". Please collect your personal belongings and exit to your left.

Gobama!

Wahoo! Obama won!

OK, enough of that. Let’s get down to some analytical stuff.

I watched the election results on CNN. No particular reason why, apart from the fact that when I turned the TV on, it was already tuned to CNN, and I was too lazy to change the channel.

In general, I thought CNN did a fairly good job being neutral. They weren’t overtly conservative nor were they overtly liberal. They did always list the republicans before the democrats, but may have just been coincidence.

They had a new toy, too. Twice durning the coverage they had a “holographic host”, someone on the other side of the country that was being “projected” on the set. Now, I know enough about video and broadcast to know that they weren’t actually holograms, nor were they actually being projected. The news anchor was just talking to an empty space on stage, and the person was being added in after the fact. Gratuitous use of “holographic interference” was used as well (ie, they were slightly blue, slightly transparent, flickered a lot, and had a strange glowey halo around them). Nonetheless, it was a very interesting effect, and means that news casters no longer have to be standing on the CNN set in their studio. Also, CNN had a nifty little CGI model of the white house that they used in the same manor. I’m not sure what the benefit of the 3D model is, but it was cool eye candy.

Back to the election. The “mug shot” of McCain that they used wasn’t the most becoming, compared to the equivalent shot of Obama. They also seemed to digitally lighten Obama’s skin tone in the picture, making him seem more white. I’m not sure what the purpose of that was, or if it was simply an artifact of the giant display they were using, but it drew my attention.

Something interesting that I thought about during the race:

I watched the election with Elmo, from Elmo’s World, and I cheered when the Democrats took control of the senate. Elmo didn’t look to happy about it, and when I asked, she pointed out that it’s good to have a president from one party and a congressional majority from the other. Interesting. In the movie “Meet The Robinsons”, the Robinsons all cheer when Lewis fails at his invention. They say that the only way to improve something is to keep running into conflicts, because conflicts allow for improvement. You don’t learn anything from succeeding all the time. By the same token, I agree with Elmo in that the US can only be drastically improved when the improvement comes about through a discussion from TWO parties.

Oops, I went over my word limit again. Flackle.

Dermis Chroma Quandary

So my assignment tonight is to write about an encounter I’ve witnessed that had to do with race. First, I need to say that I really really really liked this article, despite the fact that it was kinda long. So, an encounter...?

I have an idea, but it’s actually two different events, totally unrelated. First one follows. The names have been changed, BTW.

So I’m in Underwater Basket Weaving 101, and I’m sitting between Gary, a tall, gangly WASP-ish guy, and Lawrence, a stocky African-American. Gary is wearing stone-washed Calvin Klein jeans and a golf shirt with the collar “popped”. Lawrence is wearing torn-up jeans with some sort of design on the left butt-pocket, and a brown tee shirt with something written on the front-- I don’t remember what, though. Gary is sitting on my left, and Lawrence is on my right.

Lawrence is listening to rap on his iPod, through headphones, although everyone at the table can hear it.

“Lawrence, dude, turn that down. No one wants to listen to your trash,” Gary says, reaching across me and yanking one of Lawrence’s earbuds out.

“Whatchya doin’, bro? My ‘buds are broken, they sound like that no matter how loud I have it set to. And it’s not trash, y’know what I’m sayin’, Aladdin?” Lawrence asks me.

“Umm... I don’t really care for..." I say, getting cut off.

“Lawrence, you’re only living up to your stereotype. Stop acting black, and turn that $%#@ down.” Gary gets up and walks to a different table to learn how to weave patterns.

OK, second story.

So I’m in down-town LA with my mom. We’re walking from our hotel to dinner, about a five mile walk. We come to an intersection that we have to cross, and there’s a man standing by the crosswalk, swaying back and forth. It’s not obvious what color he is, because he’s covered with all grime and filth imaginable. He has about a dozen shopping bags sitting at his feet, and he is wearing three or four different coats and jackets.

My mom sees him, and immediately turns around, so she’s not facing him.

“Aladdin! We’ve got to find a different way to get there. Don’t look, but there’s a homeless man at the light, and he looks dangerous.”

“Mom, he’s just an old man. Why would he hurt us? It’s not like we have anything valuable on us, we’re just tourists.”

The man begins to pick up his bags, one by one, look through them briefly, then move them about ten feet down the sidewalk.

“Common, mom, he’s not going to do anything.”

We end up crossing at a different intersection just to avoid the man, but as we pass him on the other side of the street, it becomes apparent that he was moving his bags so we could pass by him and his stuff without getting too close to him. I felt really bad, since he had spent maybe ten or fifteen minutes moving his bags, and now he had to move them all back, but when your mom is paying for dinner, you do what she says.

Sorry, y’all, this is turning out to be a long post. I guess what I’ve realized, after reading this article, is that discrimination is blind. It doesn’t matter who the person is, so long as they fit into some sort of pre-concieved notion of what they are. Racism is a glutton of a word, but it’s also a very specific word. Racism implies discrimination against someone or a group of people because they’re black. What about Asians? What about people who are Muslim, or look like they haven’t had a bath in two weeks? What about people who are the exact same race as me, but have somehow ended up at the sewer of the social system? We discriminate blindly, and this isn’t something that people like to face. But no matter what we call it, racism, stereotyping, etc., it’s all the same, and needs to be addressed.

The end. Hammer Time!

Like Putty In My Hands!

I went out and bought some clay last night from Michaels. It’s green clay. I wasn’t really sure what to make it into, so I just played with it to get some inspiration. I ended up making it into a little blob-man with big eyebrows. I set him out on the porch, and went to bed. This morning, I got up, and realized that I really didn’t like his eyebrows. They need to be much smaller. Oh, and I think I’m going to give him some sort of hat. But when I went out to the porch to pick him up, I found that he’d become rock solid. Oh well, no hat for Mr. Blobman.

You are a lump of clay. I don’t mean that you’re unshapely; I mean that your mind acts like clay. Stick with me, and I’ll explain my metaphor.

When you are really young, you are very impressionable. As a kid, hopefully, you had a fair bit of interaction with the outside world, and the way you think today is shaped by your interactions when you were much younger. Now, that’s not to say that you’re totally rock solid (in your mind, once again, I’m not describing your physique), but you are probably a bit less impressionable than you were when you were five.

The question that I’m trying to answer here is... what? Oh, yeah, it’s about the socialization process, and whether or not I agree with it. Well, what I just described to you above is part of the socialization process. The process is when the society you live in—say, Carmel¬—instills in you certain beliefs—say, houses or buildings made out of brick mean that the inhabitants are higher class than people who live or work in wood or metal buildings.

This process is a big factor in our prejudices against certain people or groups. I was raised in California, so I probably have more of a prejudice against Mexicans than someone who was raised in Indiana, who probably has more of a prejudice against African-Americans. I remember quite distinctly certain events of discrimination from my childhood, such as the teacher kicking the Chinese girl out of the class more often, much better than I remember something that happened a year or so ago.

That raises the question that I’ll leave you with as I go to eat a waffle: When you have kids, or nieces or nephews, and they’re still in their goey clay form, what are you going to shape them into?

Waffle Time!

It's Payback Time!

The United States is a young country. Compared to the rest of the world, especially Europe, the US is infantile. So it’s not surprising that we are still working out the kinks in our government and society. This is exactly why Cose suggests that we have reparations for slavery.

The Constitution was written with the idea that it would be improved, in the hopes of refining this nation’s government. Much like Open-Source software (yes, I know I’m a geek), our government was to be continuously updating and re-evaluating itself. This process happens when a group of people get together, figure out if something is wrong, what is wrong with it, then how to fix it. Then the adjustments are made, and everyone is hunky-dory.

Here’s why Cose wants Reparations: Because it admits that we have faults, and tries to correct for them in a constructive way. The reason that people are against it is because it reveals a deep fissure in the “Perfect America” people kid themselves into believing we live in. America is not perfect. The reason that I (occasionally) am proud OK living here is that the system is built for those kinds of imperfections. That’s why the Supreme Court exists. It’s the idiots that are afraid of change and the difficulties that come with it that oppose the reparations.

Case Closed.

The Society Computing Machine

Cora Tucker and Willy Loman couldn’t be more different. They both are “heroes” in some respect, they both strive for “success,” but they’re different types of heroes and they work for different types of success.

In the way that many say middle schoolers are “plugged in” to the internet, Willy is “plugged in” to society, at least society as it used to be. He created himself to fit nicely into the little niche that society led him to believe he belonged in. He was the perfect sales man. He was “well-liked,” as he said, he was a smooth talker, and, at least in his mind, he was rather good as a salesman. I kind of visualize him as a number, specially picked, that is to be fed into a giant computer, and hopefully a wad of cash will pop out the other end. You see, for Willy Loman, success is having what society told him to have. Success is having moolah, having a nice house, a nice set of clothes, and, most of all, being well liked.

Now let’s look at Cora Tucker.

Cora Tucker is the exact opposite. Cora’s goal isn’t to be a number that gets plugged into the giant machine of society. She is trying to take that machine apart and re-build it to suite  the needs of the have-nots. For her, success isn’t having, it’s being. Being noticed, being employed, being treated like everyone else. That’s the big difference between Willy and Cora. Willy is lying to the world to find something that is worthless. Cora is challenging the world’s lies to make something worthwhile. It may not be tangible, like the diamond Willy thinks he needs to make his mark on the world, but it is something that will influence each and every person in Halifax County. Success for Cora is making a difference. And by that definition, she’s succeeded beyond anything she could have dreamed of, and she doesn’t seem to be stopping any time soon. 

Question of the Day

Why is it that Willy is the only "proactive" person in the family? The wife, Linda, seems to support him, but not really do anything to help him when he starts to slip off the rocker. The kids, while Happy is having some success, never really seem to be able to pull themselves off of their feet. I know that they are imprinted with this notion that your success rides on a smile and a polished pair of shoes, but at the end they seem to realize that this is wrong, and they still don't do anything about it. Why is this?

Filet of Salesman with Béarnaise Sauce and Green Beans

Willy Loman is an idiot. Not in the literal sense, he’s very smart, but he doesn’t understand the world around him. It changes, and he’s living in the past.

But that’s not the assignment. What does Willy think of individual opportunity? Well, he believes in “the american dream”. The literal sense of it. He believes that your life is what you make out of it. He’s free to make his name, his wealth, and his family the way he wants. The problem arises because he has a flawed idea about how to shape his life. His job is a traveling salesman, and the author makes it quite obvious that Loman is a “traditional” salesman. He relies almost completely on first impressions, appearance, and personal image. Thus, he raises his children to reflect that idea, and the conflict arises when he and his kids realize that the way they’ve been thinking and acting doesn’t get them by anymore. 

Arthur, the Author, Miller believes quite the opposite. In the book, Willy and his two sons, Happy and Biff, try to make their way through the world by using their “attractive appearance”, and fail miserably. In the end, it drives Willy to death, and breaks up the family because they’re all living lies. The two kids convince themselves they are worth something, and the dad is, to use the medical term, “off in La-La-Land”. The author is trying to tell us that to succeed, we need to be more than a facade. We need to be substance, have knowledge, make our selves useful, and be proactive in securing our future. 

Speeches Pt. 2

So now I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the speeches that were oh so many days ago...........

OK, done. I think that I’m going to break my thoughts down into three sections to better explain myself, and so I don’t start hudge-dubbing around.

Public Speaking:

I have to say that I was stunned at how scared people are of public speaking. Especially since our class is a very argumentative class, which means that every day we’re having loud discussions where we’re speaking to all members of the class. I don’t quite understand why talking behind a lectern is any different than talking behind a desk. Additionally, I noticed that, while we were all given the freedom of mobility, I noticed that only once person actually wandered around the class (I found the wandering to actually help the presentation, but I’m not sure if it would have worked for other people’s presentation). 

Rhetoric:

People in general did a good job following the logos/pathos/ethos system, and using the Toulmin system in their arguments. Occasionally, I found that some people wouldn’t have enough data/statistics, or too much appeal to logic, in their argument, but for the most part the amount of appeal to logos, ethos, and pathos fit the arguments presented. I noticed that one person, Mr. Dobbs, used “props”, which I wasn’t sure if we were allowed to do, but in his case I think, while it didn’t necessarily help tremendously, it didn’t subtract from his presentation at all.

Content:

Lastly, I was kind of surprised by what people chose to argue for, and how they did it. Erin Bortz had something similar to an epiphany in the middle of her presentation, where you could tell that she was deviating from what was written down on her outline and speaking straight from what she truly believed. JD Hoover argued for another high school. And I’ve never heard of some of the organizations argued for, such as Dress for Success, or the VH1 program.

Speeches, Pt. 1

The first half of the speeches are over. And I have to say, for the most part I’m very impressed. I don’t like going first, which is why I didn’t, but something that I’ve always found interesting is that most people tend to model their presentation on whoever goes first. I was actually very impressed with the content of the speeches. Even the people who “can’t write” had very appealing speeches. I was surprised at how... traumatic the whole experience seemed to be. I really didn’t have that much trouble with my speech. Here was my experience:

I got up, behind the lectern, and organized my outline so I could see it.

I said my speech, almost verbatim from what I’d been rehearsing.

I saw the 3:00 mark, and kept on going.

I ended.

Not really that big a deal, was it? Nonetheless, I didn’t really feel like I did that great of a job. I wish I could have had more time to prepare for the speech, and definitely more time to give it. Like all my writing, and, for that matter, most of the video projects I’ve worked on in the past, I go wayyyy over time. I would have liked to have had at least five minutes, possibly ten, to give my speech, because I found, when researching and writing my speech, it would have taken about three minutes to tell the story of the family, three minutes to explain what HFHGI is, and an additional three minutes to list out all of the statistics about homeless and productivity based on environment. 

SPEECH!!!

Hello, Internet! I come to you not from the cozy comfort of my bedroom this time, but from a plush Panera patio. I'm not going to make this post all fixed width, even though it really is an academic post, because I plan on making this a little more informal than usual.

Speech time has rolled around, and my topic is this: convince the audience to donate their MoleBucks at the charity of my choice. So now I have to choose the charity of my choice.

Thoughts:

• MoveOn.org
• Amnesty International
• Habitat for Humanity

I have a few other ideas, but I think that those are really the best ones.  Now I get to eliminate all but one.

First of all, MoveOn.org doesn't really actively work to make people's lives better. Not directly, at least. So lets strike that one off of the list.

Amnesty International, thanks to a quick Google search, doesn't actually have a local chapter. So it looks like I'm going to be working with Habitat for Humanity.

For those of you who don't know, Habitat for Humanity is an organization that builds cheap, inexpensive housing for those who have a steady source of income, but don't have a house and are not eligible for a housing loan. The family works with local volunteers to build the house, and over the period of the next twenty or thirty years, the family pays off the cost of building the house.

So that's my cause. Now I need to figure out my action.

As I see it, I'm going to have two (II) (2) main challenges. One, I need to really make people feel what it's like to be on the street with no money. Everyone that I'm presenting to will have read Nickel and Dimed by Barbera Ehrenreich, which explores life as a minimum wage hourly worker, so maybe I'll be able to play off of that. Also, many people have told me that I'm fairly good at telling narrative stories, so maybe I'll be able to create some sort of hypothetical situation in which the audience is the homeless family. Actually, you know what would be just awesometastic? I wonder if I could find an actual story of one of the families that moved into a habitat home. That would be great. I doubt that I'll be able to do that. I think I'll also try to stun the audience with an overload of data and statistics. People like numbers.

My second challenge will be trying to overcome some of the more… erm, stubborn members of the audience. There are a few people out there who will simply not want to listen to me. How am I going to be able to overcome that? I'm not sure yet. I think that is going to rely on my appeal to logos and ethos, not so much pathos. Emotions are easily disputable. 

I don't really know where this is going to go. I guess we'll all see.

Literary Vomit

Hello, Internet!

I just want to say that I hate this piece. This is maybe the worst jumble of synonyms I've ever had the displeasure of staring at for the past two hours. I am reminded of another work that I've read. This one. Go ahead. Click on it. Read it. Just the first few paragraphs will do. I'll wait......................................................................................................................

OK. That essay that you just read was randomly generated through a computer algorithm that takes a bunch of dictionaries and smooches them all together in a way that makes grammatical sense. It was diarrhea of the pen. That being said, my analysis follows.

In the piece mentioned so eloquently above, the author makes a rather revolutionary claim. He says that in order to be successful, and beyond that, a good person, is to be headstrong and opinionated. All I have to do to make a fortune is to have my own belief, let no one else tell me otherwise, and base my entire life off of it. He even goes so far as to say that once you come up with your set of beliefs (ie I think that potato pancakes are all that people should ever eat), all of your actions must be consistent with that belief. The author gives the example of charity. He thinks that it is stupid to donate money to the poor because, in this example, the poor have nothing to do with eating potato pancakes.

Furthermore, the author also states that it is OK to change your opinions, sets of beliefs, etc., as long as you truely believe it. Today I could think that we should drill for oil in Alaska, spend 28 billion dollars on making that happen, and then tomorrow totally change my mind and use that money to campaign against oil drilling. And I would be a better person because of it, as long as today I am as convinced of my opinions as I will be tomorrow. What?!?!

I rather disagree with that. The author says that you need to be a dissenter. Thats OK, I guess, but what if the "norm" is really what you think too? I agree that it's good to have a personal set of beliefs, but if they keep you from living your life to the best and fullest it can be, then are they really good beliefs? I am reminded of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Crack-Up" when he becomes a writer, and nothing else. He wouldn't even feed someone who was dying from starvation unless it helped his writing. Phs, I say. 

The end.

Express Lane: 12 Items or Less!

Welcome to America!¹ The land of Opportunity!² Here, you have the freedom to make yourself whatever you want to be.³

Except for a few things.

---

1. By the way, you must be an American citizen and be Anglo-Saxon to be applicable.

2. Oh, and by 'opportunity', we mean the freedom to try as hard as you can, not the freedom to actually succeed.

3. As long as you conform to the structure and hierarchy of our society.

---

Mantsios makes the case that there IS in fact a major, major class separation between the upper-class, the middle-class, and the lower-class. He doesn't expressly say that the rich are responsible for the plight of the poor, nor does he say that the rich exploit the poor. But he implies it.

The wealthiest 20% of Americans hold over four fifths of the moolah in America. This is a fact, you can find it on page 310 RA. If the rich hold all of the money, then, obviously, the poor don't have access to it. Because the rich have so much money, the big businesses cater to the rich. We see this in the comic strip. Because all the big businesses care about is the rich people, the poor are neglected. It's all really about focus. Those who want money, usually the businesses and services (i.e. police, education, grocery, etc), focus on the people who "matter" most, those with the most money. In fact, in the Tenderloin (a poor neighborhood in San Francisco) the police don't actually respond to a 911 call. I once talked to a man who had stories of family members walking across town to get to a phone that police care about just to report a gunshot wound or something of the sort.

So, to  be a little more brief about it, the upper class doesn't necessarily exploit the poor per se, but it is mostly due to the rich that the poor in America are so poor.

The American Nightmare

Greetings, Internet!

First of all, I need to say that I'm sorry for posting this a little late. Second, my right hand is asleep, so forgive me for any typ[s in the post.

Terkel VS Alger. Wow. What a difference. At first glance, both seem to be stories of individuals rising up from the lowly roots of their existence to the pinnacle of American capitalism. But there is a major difference.

In Alger's work, Ragged Dick, the main character, Dick, has a lucky break and gets a nice, fluffy job in an accounting office. He makes a big point of helping others get to their future fluffy job, and is very careful not to step on anyone on his way to the top. He is, in a nutshell, that unbearably perfect person who won't let anyone fail.

But that is where the day/night difference comes from. In Terkel's work, the biography of Stephen Cruz, Cruz works his way to the top as well. He does it through elbow grease rather than pot-luck, but he makes it. He's also the (not quite as perfect) kind of person who wants to help others get to the top. What he finds, though, is that "the man", management, keeps the people he's trying to help (i.e. other Mexicans, African-Americans, Chinese, etc.)from getting to the top. In other words, the system for everyone to succeed simply doesn't exist, so Cruz can't help, say, the bootblack with slow business.

In Ragged Dick, the main character lives in a cartoon world where disconformity (leaping into the river) is rewarded with promotions. In the reality that I hope we all live in, disconformity is rewarded with pink slips. Conformity is rewarded with promotions and advancement. The kinds of people who wind up as CEOs, it turns out, are almost all tall, white, protestant males. And so they want the same kinds of people to serve under them.

When we begin to get so caught up in the PC world of today (thats politically correct, not Personal Computer), we start to loose some of the liberty we think we enjoy in America in return for not offending anyone. I can't publish just anything, if its offensive to some people.

I'm going to stop now. Good bye!

Aladdin --> Prince Ali

In Ragged Dick by Horatio Alger, the main character, Dick, saves the life of a wealthy businessman's son, and is rewarded with a comfortable job that pays $10.00 a week, the equivalent of $154.00 per week in 2007.

Alger is clearly making a statement about what you have to do in America to become rich. He's saying that you need two things. First, you need to be a pro-actively nice person. When the kid falls into the river, Dick risks his own life to save the child. Most people today are nice, but they aren't the kind of person who would go out and try to make the world a better place without being asked. Dick saves the kid without hearing that the father would offer a fortune to the person who saves his son.

The other thing that Alger is saying is that as you work your way to the top, don't step on other people to get there. Dick pays the entire rent for his room, even though he has a room mate. When he and his room mate, Fosdick, decide to move to a better room in a better neighborhood, Dick says that he is going to refer all of his shoe-shining customers to Johnny Nolan, another shoe-shiner who is having trouble keeping business up.

Don't you wish this text moved?

I was going to be all cool and actually make a video for this post, and simply post the link to it, but I ran out of time. So here's my post. Whoo.

I am a video boy. Video is my thing. It's what I do. So please excuse me if I ramble about the awesomeness of video.

We live in a visual culture. With phrases like "seeing is believing", "show me the proof", and "I don't see any difference" running rampant, I don't think I need to take the time to elaborate on the visuality of the US.

What I will talk about is why. Right now, there are ways to fool the ears. We do this all the time. Ventriloquists. Synthesizers. Celebrity Impersonators. Hearing isn't believing. I can talk about whatever I want, and you can argue with me. You might even win (although I doubt it. :P ).

Smelling and tasting isn't believing either. In the book "Fast Food Nation", Eric Schlosser describes a lab where the tastes and smells of McDonalds, Burger Queen, and all of the other restaurants are grown in test-tubes. If you're interested, check out page 124 by clicking on the link above. Heck, think about scratch-and-sniff stickers. I guess we can't ever say "the nose knows" ever again.

So, baring touch (A nobel prize to the person who can effectively and repeatedly argue through the sense of touch), all that's left to be reliable is Sight. Sight is our main source of input from the world. If we see something, we believe it. That's why special effects in movies are so exciting and attractive. Because we believe they're real. So if I were to tell you all about how PCs crash every two minutes, you might believe me. But if I were to sit you down in front of my PC and let you watch it crash every two minutes, my case would be a lot more solid. So, to answer the prompt for this post, yes, I believe that a visual argument is more persuasive than an aural argument. 

Hurry! Hurry! Read all about it!

When you pick up the newspaper, tune into NPR, or watch the 6 o'clock news, you expect to hear certain things. Strife. Hunger. Pain. Disaster. Politics. Weather. Sometimes, there's a feature about someone who's done good for the community, but they're usually included because they recently died. This is (mostly) why I don't listen to the news any more.

You see, the news is almost like a five year old. If I (five year old) don't like Lucy–wait, no, that's a weird name. if I don't like Mrs. Hauffen-Pheffer, then I will probably not "report", or "tattle" in five year old speak, accurately. If the previous sentence didn't make any sense to you, lets try an example. I don't like Mrs. Hauffen-Pheffer, so when she accidentally gets some crumbs on my homework, I'm going to tell my teacher that she maniacally destroyed my homework, most likely in an attempt to take away my chance at getting an A+, and will almost certainly do it again. Inversely, if I was best friends with Buckley, and he knocked the cookie jar over and broke it, then I would probably say, in his defense, that someone, possibly Buckley (although unconfirmed), might have accidentally chipped the ceramic on the handle.

I believe that this is called "spin" or "editorializing", and is bad. It calls attention to the (vocab word) ethics of the writer.

Psh, you say, this doesn't actually happen in the news. CNN knows what they're doing. NPR is a professional organization. You're talking about tabloid stuff. Well, there you're wrong. I don't have enough time to actually put links into this post, but it happens quite a bit. Thank You, Rupert Murdoch.

Also, there's the issue of the appeal to pathos, or emotion. Emotion is something that news peoples like to play with. When we're sad or anrgy, we want to take action against something. When we're happy, we want to support something. When we feel uncomfortable, we want to change something. But there is an issue about the manipulation of people's emotions. Just in the way that some people have accused me of creating unfair arguments that loose the logic in the appeal to pathos, news services sometimes do this to make people see their "spin".

A Really Boring Post

Hello, Internet!

I must apologize, the following blog is going to be extremely boring. Please don't read it.

In his essay, ""Half Criminals" or Urban Athletes? A Plea for Fair Treatment of Skateboarders" by David Langley, the author uses some rather shaky evidence to support his thesis. While I agree totally with what he's advocating, and his essay was very well crafted, he uses evidence that is not as solid as it could be. He gives two examples of police officers making *unfair* judgement calls based off of their own interpretation of skateboarding law. However, these two incidents may unfairly represent the general consent of police officers across the US. He also mentions one of the skateparks in Seattle, although it turns out that  there are over 100 skateparks in and around Seattle. What about the other parks? He mentions that the park is dangerous due to its poor design, but he never cites any statistics or data that supports this. Langley also mentions how the skateboarders are good for the environment, but he doesn't give any data to back this up, either. Overall, this essay appears to be more of a transcription of a casual conversation between Langley and one of his friends than a persuasive essay. F+

Voices of Insanity

Greetings, Internet! Today I come to you with another scholarly post. Sorry.

My assignment for today is to talk about a pseudo-argument. Ridiculous Rhetoric? Preposterous Paralipsis? Outrageous Oratory?Fuzzy Fustian? Prolix Persuasion? Sounds like a simple enough assignment.

I have written a total of... three (I think) papers on gay marriage. Of course, in doing the research for these papers, I've had to look up all of the opposing arguments. Often, the opposition is a little more violent than the [pro] side. Actually, almost every article I read against gay marriage cited the bible as the main source of their argument. Now, I have no direct problem with calling religion into an argument. Heck, in one of my papers, I cited a press release from a religious organization as part of my argument for gay marriage.

My issue is when people start to believe that the bible is the "end all, be all" of opinions. If the bible says it, then it's true. This is not an argument. I could come up with all the possible persuasion that I need. Data, statistics, interviews, nice little pie charts, but if the bible says it, then it's true. In the play Inherit The Wind, the man being interviewed simply refuses to even listen to the scientific evidence because the bible says that god made man. Classical rhetoric simply stops, and all logic dies.

Good bye. :)

This is going to be a short(er) post than normal

Pathos, in addition to sounding a lot like one of the three musketeers, is an important aspect of rhetoric. What is rhetoric, you ask? Rhetoric is constructive arguing. There's no such thing, you may say. Have you ever heard of constructive criticism?

Pathos is pathetic. Not in the way the Bush administration is pathetic, but in the way sharing a warm cup of cocoa around a toasty fire one late frosty Thursday afternoon is pathetic. Pathetic comes from the Greek παθητικός, pronounced like 'pathetos'. It means an appeal to emotion.

Pathos comes into play in rhetoric when you want to go beyond informing the reader, and actually touch them. You see, I could tell you all about the history of censorship in America, about all of the lawsuits that have arisen from the issue, about who's who in the national debate, about the actual ethics of censorship, but it probably wouldn't be very interesting, and most definitely wouldn't reach you. You would probably respond with a big, fat "who cares?"

If I really wanted to tell you about censorship in America, I would probably try to bring some emotion into my argument. I might try to show you some of the things that the press has hushhushed in the past few years. Or I might present some sort of hypothetical situation in which a family member was killed when they were sent off to Iraq, and the news, instead of being nice and all, ignored the tragedy because it was "too graphic". All of these techniques are employed because I want to make you feel some sort of emotions. The phrase "putty in my hands" morbidly describes this quite well.

Pathos doesn't go alone. As I may (or may not) talk about in some later posts, Pathos goes hand in hand with Ethos and Logos to form a persuasive argument.

From the Border…

Hello, Internet! I'm writing this from an, erm, rather elderly computer, so there's no guaranteeing it will work. I finally have some time to relax and do some not-so-scholarly stuff, like writing, swimming, counting the number of SUVs with tinted windows we pass, etc. So now I get to rant.

First of all, I just want to say that if any of you reading this live in or around the Houston, Texas, good luck battling it out with Hurricane (now a tropical storm) Ike. Houston, you have a problem. I stayed up til 10 last night watching CNN's coverage of the hurricane. I will never forget the reporter who was standing 15 feet away from the retaining wall of the Galvaston bay, trying to stand up straight. He kept reading an anamometer, which was giving a reading of 120 mph winds, and telling the camera that it must be malfunctioning. It wasn't.

The first meeting of my high school's GSA club was two days ago. Some people complained that it was at the same time as the Republican club. That's almost as weird as the LOG CABIN organization. But I guess that, since something like one out of every ten people are gay, and one out of every two people are republican, I guess that it makes sense. It just seems strange.

Umm… Anything else I wanna talk about? I guess it doesn't really matter. No one really reads the posts they don't need to comment on. I wonder if there's anyone out there that is reading this that isn't in my high school. Comment if you don't know me, please.

Apple's new iPods are Nano-Chromatic! What that means, no one knows, but it sounds really cool. The new iTunes, like just about everything nowadays, lets you choose functionality OR privacy, but not both. Google Chrome is still discriminating against macs. Grrr.

My little brother has spent this entire weekend listening to his iPod. I can't believe how plugged in he is. There's a difference between using technology to your advantage, and technology using you to Bill Gate's advantage. I'm getting kinda worried that Pete Doctor's and Andrew Stanton's image of the future might not be that unrealistic–or that distant.

OK, I think I have nothing else to say. I left a soda in the oven, so I gotta run. See y'all later, and dream on…

SOS: Sink Or Swim?

Greetings, Program! Extra points if you know what movie that's from.

Here on THE WORDS OF MAGIC, we like to do a lot of theoretical stuff. So here's another one. By the way, this is mostly stolen borrowed adapted from Cory Doctorow's super-amazing book, "Little Brother". Passages in this funky font are verbatim passages, because he is such a good writer, I make it bad by paraphrasing. I don't know if I'll use any original passages yet, but we'll find out. The entire book is free and covered by the Creative Commons. For more info, go to CrapHound.Com, his website.

Imagine that you are walking around downtown on a weekend with your friends. You heard on the morning news that there was some sort of bomb threat on your city, but you didn't really pay all that much attention.

Suddenly, a large, un-marked van careens around a corner. People in blackout suits jump out, grab you and your friend, and throw you in the back. You are bound and gagged. As your captors tie you on to a rail in the back of the van, you see another hostage. She is crying. There are bruises all over her face, and her clothing is dirty and has been ripped in places. She has obviously been tortured. You are scared.

Suddenly, you hear voices. They are the voices of your captors. You can't make out entire sentences, but you pick up something about a bomb going off at noon, and strategic positioning of hostage vans. You hear that there is one "agent" missing, but he should turn up soon.

Pause the story for a second. Let's examine some of the logical assumptions you are probably making, and continue those lines of thought.

• I have been kidnapped by terrorists. They've planted a bomb somewhere, and they're planning on holding me hostage until their demands are met.
• One of the terrorists is missing. Maybe he's been picked up by the police or the FBI.
• My parents don't know where I am. My friends do, but they probably got picked up by one of the other hostage sites.
• The girl on my right has been tortured. She's probably going to be on the news in a demands video.

Now, lets assume that the missing man has gotten picked up by the US government. He has vital information relating to where you are. In this instance, if you had to choose between the police using torture to interrogate the missing man about your whereabouts, or have the police simply go on a wild goose chase, or worse yet, not know anything has happened, what would you choose? Torture? Hmmm...

Lets go on with our story. I think now would be a good time for a quote.

Who were these clowns? They weren't wearing insignia. Maybe they were terrorists! I'd never really believed in terrorists before -- I mean, I knew that in the abstract there were terrorists somewhere in the world, but they didn't really represent any risk to me. There were millions of ways that the world could kill me -- starting with getting run down by a drunk burning his way down Valencia -- that were infinitely more likely and immediate than terrorists. Terrorists killed a lot fewer people than bathroom falls and accidental electrocutions. Worrying about them always struck me as about as useful as worrying about getting hit by lightning.

Ignore the change from 3rd person to 1st person. Lets keep going.

If they were terrorists, I wanted to know. I didn't know what a terrorist looked like, though TV shows had done their best to convince me that they were brown Arabs with big beards and knit caps and loose cotton dresses that hung down to their ankles. Not so our captors. They could have been half-time-show cheerleaders on the Super Bowl. They looked American in a way I couldn't exactly define. Good jaw-lines, short, neat haircuts that weren't quite military. They came in white and brown, male and female, and smiled freely at one another as they sat down at the other end of the truck, joking and drinking coffees out of go-cups. These weren't Ay-rabs from Afghanistan: they looked like tourists from Nebraska.

You are forced to change from your day clothes into blue jumpsuits. Your phone was in your pocket. Now it is gone, and you loose hope for salvation. You are transferred into a large, white truck, and put into what looks like a cell in the back. A large, beefy man enters.

The man who came in was wearing a military uniform. A US military uniform. He saluted the people in the truck and they saluted him back and that's when I knew that I wasn't a prisoner of some terrorists -- I was a prisoner of the United States of America.

Now the tables are turned. It turns out that you are not a Terrorist hostage, but have been kidnapped by the Department of Defense.

You hear the large, beefy man talk to one of the people who nabbed you. He talks in curt, crisp tones.

"These are just children," He says. "They can't be the ones we're looking for."

The woman he's talking to replies, "They were all at the right location, wearing nondescript clothes, and had almost no identifying information in their wallets. No cash, no names on their clothing, and weren't with any adults. These could be our men."

"Right. Move them to the base, and process them. Interrogation will begin at oh' eight hundred tomorrow morning."

Pause again. The Department of Defense has taken hostage a bunch of teenagers, who are a dubious threat to national security, and is about to interrogate them through torture. Maybe one of the 40 or so in the back of the truck with you might know something. But it's doubtful. And at any case, is it worth pushing you to the edge of death to get that information?

Some of you out there might be crying "No Fair" at this. You might be saying that this is a fictional event. True, but something similar, although slightly different circumstances, has occurred. This even happened at the same prison as in "Little Brother".

Torture may indeed be a viable way of extracting information from those who we need information from. But there is also a host of other alternative, none of which are anywhere near as damaging or controversial as torture.

There is no value to a human life, as it is priceless. I am not a religious person, not by a long shot, but I am reminded of one of the many, many commandments: Thou Shalt Not Put A Stumbling Block Before The Blind (or something like that). This means that you should not make more difficult the lives of those who in difficulty. Actually, there is very little debate amongst the Jewish culture about the validity of torture. See here.

Long story short (too late), torture is simply out of the question. There is no instance in which torture is applicable where there is no other course of action that could be as productive or even more so than torture.

Big Business's Bastard Baby

Hello, Internet!
Sorry I haven't gotten much time to post non-academia stuff, but I've been kinda crazy lately. Whoo. So here, for your entertainment, is a little ranting and raving about genetically altered food:



I am a fairly liberal person. OK, maybe I'm a little more than fairly liberal. Maybe I border on socialist, I don't know. I've never thought too much about it.

I have pretty strong opinions about gay marriage, the war in Iraq, gun control, global warming, etc. So when it came time to plop down a few hundred words about Genetically Manipulated food (GM for short), I thought this would be a a walk in the park. Now I see I was wrong.

The reason for this is that I don't have "one" opinion on GM foods. I can't say I hate anything genetically altered and I can't say Let's all give our babies super-powers. Therefore, I can't say that GM foods are bad, and I can't say they're good. Let me explain...

I like to think of America as the land of notification. I get a text message when my car is low on gas. I get an email when my mortgage rates change. I get a phone call when my brother gets a good grade on his homework. Driving to school I get notified about how Subway has $5 Foot Longs, how I can get a vasectomy for less than a tank of gas, and how someone lost their labradoodle and misses him terribly. People who are against notifying consumers that they're eating Genetically Manipulated food argue that it would be too expensive to add a tiny ticker to the bottom of the box saying "May Contain Genetically Augmented Tofu". They usually cite some figure in the phone number regions as the cost. It's not that I disbelieve them, but that number really isn't all that huge. For instance, American Airlines saved around $40,000 in the eighties when they removed one olive from their In Flight Meal Salads. Don't believe me? Check it out.

But that's not the real reason why I have difficulty figuring out my opinion on GM food. Now, in America, I'm totally against it. I don't really care about all of the "this test showed this, that one was inconclusive" stuff that most people argue about. Let's worry about more pressing issues, like E. Coli in our happy meals. Or what about salmonella poisoning? Or obesity?... The list goes on and on.

I'm not justifying using GM foods, but I do think that it's kinda rediculous to be pushing for GM foods to be labeled when milk with added hormones isn't. (By the way, sorry for all the links. I'll try to back off)

I guess here's what I really think: We, here in america, are debating whether or not WE should be using GM foods. But countries in Africa are having the same debate. Zambia has outlawed drought resistant grain plants while in the middle of a famine. Starving children could be eating right now, but they can't, because their government would rather them die now than them die in 45 years from frog genes in their bread.

Food for thought. Ah, the irony.