Every generation of American children seems to be more guarded carefully than the last, and it is not ultimately beneficial to the children. The end result, I believe, is that the signal is sent out to the children that the world is a scary place of which they need to be fearful, and it is up to Big Brother to ban or outlaw anything that may hurt them.
Intellectual theft has come far in the last century. I can imagine that the idea of taking an article from a newspaper and passing it off as ones own must have been daunting in the late nineteenth century — and surely something that people would not have been so eager to do given the lack of incentive. Now, however, it is too easy to select an entire article with your mouse, copy it, and paste it into your blog — and throw your name on top of it.
Tynt helps you control the copy thieves.
Last week, three of the top ten sellers on Amazon.com were surgical masks. People were buying the masks in a feint effort to protect themselves from the onslaught of the Swine Flu pandemic. This week, we are brought into the realm of the ridiculously sublime in the fashionable, yet tasteless, animal face surgical mask:
New York State is in budgetary trouble. New York City is in a financial crisis.
Is protecting the citizenry one of the first fatalities of fiscal decay as the NYPD slows the addition of 800 officers and 3,000 security cameras downtown in the Wall Street area surrounding Ground Zero?
Continue reading → NYPD Artificial Eyes and Human Perception
With the Governor of New York spending $80,000 on hookers — should we be surprised to learn 25% of teenage American girls are infected with human papillomavirus (HPV), chlamydia, genital herpes and trichomoniasis? If you’re a Black female teenager, your infection rate is 50%.
Continue reading → A Meme of Belonging: The Twenty-Five Percenters
Do you protect your good name and your credit from criminal elements?
Do you believe when you use a search engine online your privacy should be protected when it comes to knowing what you wanted to know?
Do you own your search results or does the search engine “own” your thoughts typed as characters on a screen?
There’s an interesting move afoot to federally regulate and control search engine privacy:
Should search engines be subject to the types of regulation now applied to personal data collectors, cable networks, or phone books? In this article, we make the case for some regulation of the ability of search engines to manipulate and structure their results. We demonstrate that the First Amendment, properly understood, does not prohibit such regulation. Nor will such interventions inevitably lead to the disclosure of important trade secrets.
Now the question becomes: “Who do you trust more to protect your private search queries?”
Google? Microsoft? Ask? Yahoo!?
Or the federal government?
In a recent article — Rise of Radical Religiosity in Representative Democracies — I argued that the purpose of the religious right and conservative politicians is to punish the humble majority by provocatively creating false fears:
Protecting Children and Fighting Evil — those are two topics where we are forced to surrender our civil liberties in the grand stretch of being good citizens — and governmental powers know this and exploit those two ideals for their own darker demands. If you stand up and say, “Waitaminute!” you are branded a pornographer and an infidel.
Children should not be imaged on the internet or allowed to surf without direct parental control until the age of majority. What’s the rush? Make friends in person first. Practice your social skills with your family. Create a place in reality for yourself first before going virtual. Then, once you’ve learned to read people in person you can work on the harder task of “reading” them on the web.
The web has become a series of insane cul-de-sacs where those with vested interests create their own truths outside of an unbended reality and they claw and scratch each other trying to prove they are right and the rest of the world is mad. This is the path of the familiar the hate mongers with political ties.
Kids are too set on growing up too fast and the parents let them grow up and shoot away because it is the easier, selfish, path where they no longer wish to be bothered with a life that is not their own even though they, The Parents — in one of the original and native acts of “power labeling” — named their kids but failed to provide expectation.
Good people need to stand up against bad intentions and truly evil ideas that are conceived and bred in the fallow minority.
If we fail to fight unfair persecution in every instance, our morality is made shallow and our meekness in the face of The Wrong Thing begins to tragically define us, our neighbors, and our nation.
Today is Earth Day! How do you celebrate?
Is the earth better off today than it was when the first Earth Day was proclaimed in 1970 — have we made progress together in helping cure the earth or have we only made things worse?
Here’s the official word from the administration concerning Earth Day’s federal “Environmental Highlights:”
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