Page 2 of 4

Posted on

Felons, Fascists, Freeloaders and Fools: Not My Utopia!

Utopia is a new, $50 million, reality television series from Fox that is supposed to run for a year — but I don’t think the show will make it to the end of October because of horrible casting decisions and even more miserable ratings.  The producers get some things right and most everything else wrong.

The technical aspects of the show, the live feed, the landscape, and the idea, are all right — but the casting is completely and horrifyingly wrong — as is the creepy-pervy peeping-tom-ish host who ruins the television show with his “stalkeristic” vibe and prissy mustache and bizarro hat and glasses.

As well, when you choose a convicted felon to be the center of your show from the git-go, and he’s also the initial online presence for your show and live feeds portal, something terrible and awful has gone wrong on a deep DNA level that cannot be cured by God, a false baptism, or human infusion.

Continue reading → Felons, Fascists, Freeloaders and Fools: Not My Utopia!

Posted on

The Most Intelligent Alternative: In Defense of the Public Good

[Publisher’s Note: Boles Blogs author Howard Stein died on October 14, 2012 at 90 years of age.  In an ongoing effort to preserve his legacy and memory, David Boles is sharing articles and preserving other works from his private Prairie Voice archive. The following article was likely written by Dr. Stein in the early 1980’s — and his point still rings true, and still bites us with a bitter hardness of the flat truth — three decades later.]

Public education in the minds of the parents, schoolboards, teachers, and local politicians seems to have as its purpose either the preparing of the young for higher education (preferably private education), or the preparing of the young for a variety of jobs and trades.

Continue reading → The Most Intelligent Alternative: In Defense of the Public Good

Posted on

The Eggshell Generation: No Freedom for Danger Children

Life has changed for modern children.  When I was growing up in the Midwest, you sought freedom — and if it wasn’t granted with a bicycle, then you found other, more nefarious ways, to run away and play far away from your doorstep.

It isn’t that way any longer.  Today, kids are protected and driven and supervised in organized sports and cultural events.  There’s no spontaneity now because there’s fear of the unknown and danger in the creative.  No sandlot baseball.  No football games with self-set boundaries and special scoring.  Everything is regulation.  There can be no divergence from the norm.

We’re creating a society of young people who are risk-averse and too frightened to set their own agendas and follow their own, unblazed, pathway. Fun is the new mysterious stranger. “Do what you want” is the new monster under the bed.

Continue reading → The Eggshell Generation: No Freedom for Danger Children

Posted on

Why Taking Turns Creates a Strong Society

Taking turns is one of the most important — yet underused and underappreciated — totems of social living.  I’m not talking about, “It’s My Turn!” as in the clarion call of a self-centered existence when it comes to job promotion or marriage tying; I’m talking about public moments in society when we are confronted against each other and there’s a moment of wondering if I should go or if you should go — and it seems we have an ever-deepening problem with being strong enough, and confident enough, to let the other person go first and subsume our own personal entitlements for the goodness of making things actually work between people with warring wants.

Continue reading → Why Taking Turns Creates a Strong Society

Posted on

The Winnowing Man: Women in Combat

Now that women have finally, and officially, been approved for combat roles in the USA, the Winnowing of Modern Man is now complete — and the dissolution of that manly myth is long overdue.  The harsh and prosecutorial role of men in the history of the world has been to control and temper the overwhelming power of the female form using religion, laws and politics as cudgels for behavior correction.  The forever stain on humankind is the trans-vaginal wand, “clean” women, and forced separation during menses because a woman is considered too filthy to share a bed with her husband as she bleeds.

Continue reading → The Winnowing Man: Women in Combat

Posted on

When Prison is Preferable to the Streets

There are many things that children say when they are asked what they want to be when they grow up. Children will say that they want to be an astronaut, or that they want to be the president of the United States. (The fact that an over two hundred year life of the United States have yielded but 44 presidents does not seem to hinder teachers in grade school from telling large groups of children that they could be president if they wanted to be president.) No child, as far as I am aware, has ever said that they hope one day to live their life in prison.

Continue reading → When Prison is Preferable to the Streets

Posted on

The Brilliance of Repair Cafes

We live in a society in which it is almost always easier and cheaper to replace something than to get it fixed and in which we throw away our perfectly functioning devices with slightly newer devices because they happen to be just a little bit faster and have a bit more shine to them. (I am guilty of this, having bought an iPhone 4 even though my iPhone 3G was still more than adequate!) One of the big problems is that with so much manufacturing being outsourced to China, the devices on which we rely are far cheaper than if they were domestically produced by workers being paid a fair wage. If your $5 calculator breaks it would probably cost $20 to get it repaired anywhere, if you are lucky. Since you could get four calculators for that much money, it makes more sense financially to just throw your calculator in the bin and to get another.

Continue reading → The Brilliance of Repair Cafes