My belief system is in flames

For everyone who believes the media has a liberal bias, I’ve found irrefutable evidence. I rescind every previous statement I’ve made. This statement from the BusinessWeek story in my last post is all the proof I need. Consider:

More than 260 domain name suffixes exist, mostly country codes such as “.fr” for France. Recent additions include “.eu” for the European Union and “.mobi” for mobile services.

Dot F R. I’m shaking my head. How can I deny the bias any longer? And dot E U! BusinessWeek clearly hates George W. Bush and can’t even keep its bias out of a story about the Internets.

I can’t wait to read the new Google searches

Who knew America could offer such overwhelming concern for our culture? Consider:

The Internet’s key oversight agency agreed Tuesday to a one-month delay in approving a new “.xxx” domain name after the U.S. government cited “unprecedented” opposition to a virtual red-light district.

Michael D. Gallagher, assistant secretary for communications and information at the Commerce Department, had stopped short of urging its rejection, but he called on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers [ICANN] to “ensure the best interests of the Internet community as a whole are fully considered.”

The department received nearly 6,000 letters and e-mails expressing concerns about the impact of pornography on families and children and objecting to setting aside a domain suffix for it, he said.

Wow, 6,000 letters from 300 million Americans. That’s a lot. It’s good to know so many (probably) one group cares so much. And wants the rest of us to understand so little.

Oppose porn? Fine, oppose it. But answer this simple question: why would porn sites convert to ‘.xxx’? That would allow the porn filters to block them with one simple edit to the filter. Ah, but the 6,000 concerned Americans know this, I would think. Perhaps not.

“Pornographers will be given even more opportunities to flood our homes, libraries and society with pornography through the .xxx domain. The .xxx domain will increase, not decrease, porn on the internet,” [Family Research Council] said.

This is a blatant scare tactic. Hide the women and children, the porn is taking over. Except, as I’ve just stated, internet filters exist. Add ‘.xxx’ to the filter criteria and, although the porn has increased, the user’s exposure has not. This isn’t about families being exposed to more porn. If that were the case, the Family Research Council would have no opinion. Instead, it’s about access to porn by willing adults. The FRC essentially spelled this out in its press release.

“Selling hard core pornography on the internet is a violation of federal obscenity law so the Bush Administration is right to oppose the ‘.XXX’ domain. The Bush Administration should not, in any way, be seen to facilitate the porn industry which has been a plague on our society since the establishment of the internet. The ‘.XXX’ domain proposal is an effort to pander to the porn industry and offers nothing but false hope to an American public which wants illegal pornographers prosecuted, not rewarded.

“The ‘.XXX’ domain was never intended to force the porn industry to leave the ‘.com’ domain, which has been a cash cow for pornographers. Indeed, any law attempting to force pornographers to relocate to ‘.XXX’ would be constitutionally suspect and not likely to be effective. Instead, if the ‘.XXX’ domain were established pornographers would keep their lucrative ‘.com’ commercial sites and expand to even more sites on ‘.XXX,’ thus becoming even more of a menace to society. Pornography violates the dignity of the women and men involved, destroys marital bonds, and pollutes the minds of child and adult consumers.

“The Family Research Council supports Attorney General Gonzales’ major new prosecution initiative against the porn industry, announced in May. We are confident of his determination and of his ultimate success. The pornographers, instead of expanding their presence on the internet, would be well advised to get out of business all together right now before they are called to court to answer for their crimes.”

A few quick observations.

— I have no idea if selling hardcore pornography is illegal, but the claim seems dubious, at best. I suspect it has more to do with what the pornography depicts.

— The American public wants “illegal” pornographers prosecuted. What about the legal pornographers? And I suppose those 6,000 letters constitute the American public. And the billions of dollars spent on pornography are clearly stolen from customers.

— Why bother to (unconstitutionally) force pornographers to switch from ‘.com’ if their businesses are illegal? Wouldn’t it make more sense to shut them down and prosecute them? Or is that also constitutionally suspect?

— Who’s to say porn violates the dignity of the women and men involved? I tend to agree, but I acknowledge that as opinion, not fact. If you make a statement like that, prove it.

— If the pornographers are committing crimes right now, how will getting out of the business prevent them from being “called to court to answer for their crimes”? If I embezzle money, but stop before being caught, am I no longer eligible for prosecution?

Technology is robust enough to block the overwhelming majority of porn from Generic Internet User’s computer. Install a firewall and anti-spyware software and, with minimum diligence, porn will not sneak up and expose itself to Generic Internet User. It really is that simple. If Generic Internet User is an ignorant Ludditte, learning how to protect his computer is the solution.

But groups like Family Research Council aren’t interested in that. Without pretending that the threat is scary, overwhelming, and pervasive, they wouldn’t gain sufficient political clout to pursue their true objective of Puritan nanny-statism. Instead of working to show porn consumers how it’s a detriment to a happy, productive life, groups like the FRC seek governmental control over the actions of all. We can have any freedom we want, as long as no one is against it.

Is the idea of freedom and personal responsibility really as dead as it seems?

Aren’t we a fine pair of misfits?

Everyone has probably seen this already, but I’ve never been prouder of the fine residents of the county where I grew up. Behold:

What do you get when you mix record heat, $50 4-year-old iBooks, and a burgeoning back-to-school season? Riot! Folks in Richmond, Virginia piled up at the doors of the Richmond International Raceway to get their hands on one of about 1,000 laptops.

There really isn’t anything to add that this picture. Ok, maybe I can add one thought. These computers were pounded on for four years by middle-schoolers. Like my brother, who sliced a scratch into the monitor because he was bored. But those people should have great luck with their bargains.

What aisle did you find that in?

Yesterday Wil Wheaton posted this when referring to Sun Volt:

Heh. If the 1990 me ever met the 2005 me and discovered that I’d become a fan of alt.country, I think I’d kick me in the nuts. Goddamn know-it-all 18 year-olds.

The 1990 1991 version of me would do the same to the 2005 me because I love alternative country. With so many over-produced, talentless hacks on the airwaves today, it’s hard to believe anyone is still producing good music, but it’s true with alternative country. I find myself listening to Outlaw Country on Sirius more than other stations, including the Big ’80s. Specifically, artists like Kasey Chambers, Maria McKee, Kasey Chambers, Kim Richey, Kasey Chambers, Josh Ritter, and Kasey Chambers. Oh, and Kasey Chambers.

I’m shocked by this evolvement (or is it Intelligent Design?) of my musical tastes, but I’m prepared for whatever the 1991 me can dish out, should we ever meet. I like the music so much, I’m not even scared. That may have more to do with his weight of 135 pounds than any virtue of my current self, of course, but I’m still not scared.

Trapped in the amber of the moment

Today is the perfect day for me to accidentally discover that Kurt Vonnegut has another book, A Man Without a Country, due in September. (Pre-order it here.) Here is the publisher’s marketing description of A Man Without a Country:

Based on short essays and speeches composed over the last five years and plentifully illustrated with artwork by the author throughout, A Man Without a Country gives us Vonnegut both speaking out with indignation and writing tenderly to his fellow Americans, sometimes joking, at other times hopeless, always searching.

As much as I’d love to read a new Kurt Vonnegut novel, this will suffice. His opinions tend to veer more pessimistic, further left-wing than mine, but he can write a scintillating phrase like no one else I’ve ever read. His works occupy my bookshelves and even provided the inspiration for the name of this site. Is it September 15th yet?

— This news is perfect because today is RollingDoughnut.com’s second anniversary (blogiversary?).

Will it perform a lobotomy on you?

Overheard in PETsMART last night:

Woman: Did you buy the equipment?

Man: Yes.

Woman: But it cost like $450. You paid for it?

Man: I didn’t pay for it; the U.S. government paid for it.

Hey, guy, guess what? You did pay for it. So did I, which is not cool. You may think that passing it onto the government is a convenient way to “avoid” the burden yourself, but if you haven’t noticed, there’s a rather ginormous national debt that’s going nowhere but up. That debt didn’t just appear because the U.S. government bought one too many bullets 75 years ago. So, on behalf of everyone who will never get to use your machine, allow me to tell you to stop being a leech.

P.S. You owe me $0.0000018. I accept PayPal. Thank you.

We painted our office orange and maroon

I found an interesting story concerning my alma mater, but first, some background about its collaboration with King Abdulaziz University:

Ongoing discussions linking the two universities in the areas of distance and distributed learning (eLearning) and engineering were established by Sedki Riad, professor of electrical engineering and director of International Programs in Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering, and Tom Wilkinson, director of Virginia Tech’s Institute for Distance and Distributed Learning (IDDL).
…
As a first step, 60 KAU faculty members will arrive in Blacksburg this summer for a series of professional development activities that will be developed and delivered by Virginia Tech’s English Department, Communications Department, Faculty Development Institute, the Institute for Distance and Distributed Learning, and the English Language Institute. KAU faculty will participate in two of four planned development programs: 1) English instruction, 2) communications instruction, 3) basic and intermediate computer and web skill development, and 4) designing, developing and delivering eLearning courses. Family members accompanying KAU faculty also will have an opportunity to participate in activities at the English Language Institute.

I hadn’t heard anything about this when it happened in March, but I wasn’t involved in any of those programs while in school, so I’m not shocked that this missed my radar. It does sound interesting, though. Any program that expands Virginia Tech’s influence further is probably a good endeavor. Sharing with a culture we don’t normally think of when discussing higher education should be a bonus.

I say “probably” and “should be” because, today, I came across this article. The summer classes mentioned in the original article are taking place in Blacksburg, which I would suspect would follow our ideas of educational instruction, more or less. That’s not occurring. Consider:

The courses include topics such as Web site development and online instruction, but in keeping with the preferences of the Saudi university, the university created separate classes for the approximately 30 male and 30 female faculty members.

Why would Virginia Tech segregate the male and female faculty? We don’t segregate classes like that in the United States, at least not public universities, which Virginia Tech is. I’m disappointed that Virginia Tech would do this. I’ve always believed that Virginia Tech is a wonderful institution. In six years spent in Blacksburg, I never witnessed any form of discrimination. I hope that the details aren’t as frustrating as they seem.

Of course there is backlash coming from some of the Virginia Tech faculty because of these classes.

Eloise Coupey, an associate professor of marketing at the Virginia Tech, filed a complaint with the school Tuesday alleging the single-sex classes created a hostile environment for women.

“The presence of these segregated classes on campus indicates to me that the university doesn’t place a strong enough value on women’s rights,” Coupey said Wednesday. “This makes me feel that the university holds me in less regard than my male counterparts.”

Wait, what? Why is that environment hostile only to women? What about the men? Viewed from the context of the Saudis, yes, it’s specifically aimed at women. But viewed from the context of us, I’d consider it discriminatory to both the men and women involved. Unless Prof. Coupey is implying that men can learn from women in an educational environment but that the reverse isn’t true. I wonder, but I would still expect her to defend against all discrimination, regardless of gender.

In response to complaints, Virginia Tech “has made the course segregation optional,” which is amusing because of this additional information, clarifying what was implied earlier:

While the program was designed by Tech staff, administrators with King Abdulaziz University separated the classes by gender.

Tech subsequently offered to make the classes co-ed, however the Saudi faculty said they preferred the current set-up because most of their classrooms at home are single-sex. Separate classes also allows them to tailor the content to their needs, several Saudi faculty have said.
…
Saudi faculty have repeatedly stressed that they had chosen to separate by gender. Many of the professors earned their advanced degrees at American and European institutions and are therefore comfortable in co-ed settings, faculty said.

There is this additional detail:

King Abdulaziz University paid Virginia Tech $246,000 to design and operate the faculty development program this summer.

Fascinating. I’m still disappointed (only a tiny bit), but I’m not offended. Should I be? Perhaps I’m reading too much into the $246,000 payment, but it seems to me that King Abdulaziz University paid for a product which Virginia Tech agreed to create. Within reason, of course, King Abdulaziz University gets to set the requirements for the course. And if the students self-select a segregation plan? I’m under-whelmed by the need for outrage, but that’s because I think the facts suggest a simple solution. This isn’t the standard to which Virginia Tech should hold itself, so it should not have set the classes up this way. But it did. I see no harm in finishing this program with the optional, self-segregating plan. Next time, think wiser and clearer before setting up a program like this. If a university such as King Abdulaziz University refuses, don’t do the deal. Two-hundred-forty-six thousand dollars isn’t that much money. Live happily ever after. Simple.

And yet, it’s never that simple, is it? In a scene straight out of PCU, the outgoing director of Tech’s Women’s Studies Program offered a gem quote detailing how every event can be used for petty political point-scoring. Enjoy.

“I would say this demonstrates the insensitivity of the university administration to the experience of the women on campus,” [Bernice] Hausman said.

It’s visiting Saudi women, are you paying attention? Not every slight to a small group is a global “screw you” from the world to the women on campus. I have little doubt that $246,000 will now have to be re-directed to sensitivity training classes on the Virginia Tech campus for all administrators involved. I’ll take Ms. Hausman in the office pool as to who will teach the classes as an independent consultant/qualified expert?

If I knew now only what I knew then

In a recent opinion column in The New York Times, David Brooks writes:

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the rate of family violence in this country has dropped by more than half since 1993. I’ve been trying to figure out why.

It’s an interesting topic, although I’m a little amused at one of his conclusions. Consider:

Third, many people in the younger generation, under age 30 or so, are reacting against the culture of divorce. They are trying to lead lives that are more stable than the ones their parents led. Post-boomers behave better than the baby boomers did.

At 32, I fall into the “or so” category of post-boomers, so I’ll respond with what “we” are actually doing. We are trying to lead more stable lives, but we’re not behaving better than our parents. Our world changed between our parents’ twenties and our twenties. Today’s generation of young adults understands that we have more opportunities and choices. Some are due to changing technology, some due to a more robust, international economy. And some are little more than a pursuit of self-gratification. That may come in the form of job-hopping until we find what we believe will be the perfect fit or traveling to engage the world in different adventures. We’re leading busy lives and we know that that’s not a stable life for a family, even if kids aren’t yet involved. Basically, we’re too busy, so we’re waiting longer to get married.

A fundamental shift in the culture occurred making this possible. Our parents dealt with a culture that frowned upon out-of-wedlock sex, so they felt inclined/conditioned to marry sooner so that they could enjoy (relatively) guilt-free sex. Today, young adults aren’t as constrained by the stigma of out-of-wedlock sex. Call the good or bad, but it’s the way it is. Essentially, we’re not rejecting the culture of divorce, just the culture of poorly-thought-out choices-with-long-term-consequences.

Also, thanks to advances in medical science, we understand that we’ll live productive, active lives longer than our parents could’ve imagined at our age. We know we’ll work later into our lives. We can have children later in our lives and still support them. There will be time for the traditional adult activities, so we set responsibility aside for a few extra years. We’re benefiting from the efforts of the past.

Whether that leads to the decline in family violence or not is questionable, but I’m sure it has as much impact as Mr. Brooks theorized with his original supposition. Yet, his conclusion is still interesting.

Obviously, we’re not living in a utopia, where all social problems have been solved. But these improvements across a whole range of behaviors are too significant to be dismissed. We in the media play up the negative, as we always do. The activist groups emphasize the work still to be done, because they want to keep people mobilized and financing their work.

But the good news is out there. You want to know what a society looks like when it is in the middle of moral self-repair? Look around.

I don’t know if we’re in the middle of moral self-repair, though, unless moral self-repair means setting aside conventional wisdom (imposition) about how everyone should live and adapting to some more-than-notional sense that individuals can choose how to spend their lives. And deal with the consequences. We’re still making mistakes, as our parents did, and we’re correcting our mistakes, like our parents did. We’re just making better choices through their experience, as our kids will likely do a generation from now.

Of course, if you don’t believe people can make smarter, more responsible choices through learning from the past, I guess moral self-repair could be the answer. America did vote for the Bible in 2004.

(Source: Instapundit)

He’s not a person, he’s a suit! You’re mailroom. No consorting.

I’ve written a little in the past on the liberal media and possible alternate explanations for the mass conspiracy that many conservatives want to see there. In the beginning I posited the idea that “bad news sells” is a better explanation. I’ve since refined it to include liberal bias, but only in the context of specific media outlets. Smear The New York Times with a liberal bias claim and I can accept that. But I’d same the reverse about Fox News. The back-and-forth could go on a long time. Information, with whatever desired slant, is available in a multitude of forms. The old, entrenched media is liberal? Fine, read, watch, or listen to something else. Changing technology has a way of flattening the market of competitive dinosaurs. It’s Capitalism 101. Accept it.

Because of that, whenever I hear or read “liberal MSM”, I suspect that the speaker/writer merely wants to spew an ideological point to score points. It’s little more than stereotyping to diminish. My idea of reporting, writing, and thinking is that facts win. If there’s a bias, I rely on my intellect to decipher truth. I don’t need a political party to filter my perception. Not to mention that the ideal world would have no bias, not a non-liberal-so-it-has-to-be-conservative bias. So I stand by my theory.

Luckily for me, the news media provided an example earlier this week. (I’m not happy that the actual events happened to prove my point. I wish it hadn’t happened and all that hippy blah, blah, blah.) So, consider this headline:

Marc Cohn shot in head during car jacking

I was horrified. I like Marc Cohn, so I clicked the link. This is what followed:

A Grammy-winning musician and husband of ABC news reporter Elizabeth Vargas was treated at a hospital and released Monday after being shot in the head during an attempted carjacking following a performance.

Right, so the headline gave no indication of that. Now, a few days later, the sub-headline does, but search the headlines and, even now, half still lead with only “Marc Cohn shot in head”. Is that liberal bias? Or is it “bad news sells” bias? I clicked. And that’s what the news media, whether MSM or not, want me to do. Again, it’s Capitalism 101. If people weren’t buying, the MSM wouldn’t be selling. More to the point, aren’t those people who link to and write about liberal bias in the MSM clicking and reading and discussing?

Solution? Keep questioning the “liberal” media. Technology makes that possible. But also question the people who bitch about the “liberal” media. Your brain makes that possible.

People can be so base

This story is “interesting”. Consider:

The science and business of sex identification took yet another quantum leap forward recently with the Pregnancystore.com’s release of the Baby Gender Mentor Home DNA Gender Testing Kit. Now, a pregnant woman can know her child’s sex shortly after she discovers her pregnancy. As soon as five weeks after conception, she can prick her finger, FedEx a blood sample to Acu-Gen Biolab in Lowell, and have the sex of her sprouting embryo e-mailed to her faster than Netflix can send her next movie.

Seems like a nice, harmless little bonus for horribly impatient people, right? That’s what I thought, until I read further, discovering one potential issue I hadn’t, and hopefully never would have, thought of. Consider:

Ultrasound and amniocentesis cannot accurately determine a fetus’s sex until at least four months into pregnancy and sometimes not until month five — a point at which virtually all expecting mothers have already chosen to continue their pregnancies to term. Since the state has no legal interest in a fetus before its viability (usually at 24 weeks), there has been a legal and technological gulf separating a woman’s choice to continue her pregnancy and any knowledge of its sex.

This is no longer the case. With the Gender Mentor Kit, a new issue enters many prospective parents’ minds: Do we want to have a child of this sex? Or should we try again?

Just what the hell is wrong with people? I understand that some cultures value male children more than female children, but, and this is an important point, we’re not supposed to be one of them. Any couples who want to choose the sex of their children should keep their zippers up and adopt.

Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhh… This topic is too disgusting; I have nothing more to say.

(Source)