Garrett M. Vonk

Ah, yes. Californians are voting on Prop 8 today, and I’m just going to post this entire quote, transcribed from Jon Stewart on my TiVo as he spoke it less than an hour ago:

Yes, traditional marriage. When your fief lord decides, for the purpose of increasing his workforce, that you, a pig farmer on his estate, will marry one of the slop women who cleans out the castle cesspit–doesn’t matter which one–so he bribes the archbishop to bind you in marriage and the king, who happens to be passing through the village on his way to a witch burning, takes advantage of the right of primae noctis to deflower your bride. Then, you have eleven children, three of whom survive before dying of the plague in 1826.

Tradition!

Hilarious and right on point. The burden is on anyone who would protect “traditional marriage” at all costs to defend arranged marriage, polygamy, and thousands of years of treating brides as chattel. All of which were at some point “traditional”. What, does the definition change?

If your kid has a cell phone, you need to crush it into a 2-inch cube as soon as you can, before it leads them into a life of evil.

Or at least that’s the gist of this CNN story. This type of article reminds me of Drew Curtis’s words as I’m slowly making my way through the Fark book that my sister-in-law got me for Christmas. There’s a whole section on this type of fear-mongering, alarmist, non-stories that are all too common in the current media landscape. This is the easy three-step process that most media outlets follow to create their own alarmist stories:

1. Find something that has been a legitimate danger to a very small number of people. Let’s say, the “choking game“.
2. Interview people who have suffered some personal harm or loss from this danger, and thus are likely to drum up as much emotion as possible in your readers/viewers.
3. Blow the idea completely out of proportion, preying on your audience’s fears that–gasp–it could happen to them!
4. Try to find some new material for another story on Natalee Holloway.

So, cell phones are evil. These one or two times, a teacher used a cell phone to build an inappropriate relationship their student. And you probably have one in your home!!!!! Film at 11. The story goes on to detail exactly how predators will “groom” your kids for an encounter via their cell phone, and even includes this chilling story:

A recent case involves Kelsey Peterson, a 25-year-old Nebraska teacher accused of having sex with a 13-year-old former student. She faces federal charges for allegedly kidnapping the teen and taking him to Mexico to have sex.

An Associated Press reporter, Elliott Spagat, interviewed the boy while he was in Mexico and told CNN about it. The boy recounted being groomed, telling Spagat that Peterson “was his best friend. He was having problems with gangs … and he said she would lend an ear whenever he needed it,” Spagat said.

That does sound like a pretty terrible situation, but why did CNN use it to demonize cell phones? In the Peterson case, this teacher used email messages and handwritten letters to build the relationship. Lock up your pencils and paper, parents, for they are the tools of predators.

Of course, buried in the article is the, you know, sensible advice that perhaps you should just be more involved with your kid and make sure you know where they are going and who they are talking to on the phone. I suppose that “Parents Who Are More Involved in their Kids’ Lives Better Able to Protect Them” would be a far more appropriate headline for the article, but that’s not threatening enough.

By the way, if you have kids, watch out; the internet is trying to MURDER THEIR TOYS.

Bill O’Reilly is awesome. Yes, the story is from earlier last year, but I still really enjoy reading his crazy rant against video games and iPods.

The have-nots are growing. Why are they growing? Because the skill set that is necessary to earn a decent living is being deemphasized in a fantasy world of football games and shooting zombies and all that…. Now you have the “knows” and the “know-nots”, because if you spend all your youth being prisoners of machines….. you’re not going to know anything…. You’re gonna fail.

It helps if you imagine an old man shaking his cane while you read his words. I hesitate to respond to his points at length as I have a gut feeling that he’s just trolling.

I don’t own an iPod. I would never wear an iPod… If this is your primary focus in life - the machines… it’s going to have a staggeringly negative effect, all of this, for America…

All this ranting about “the machines” and complaining that the youth are “prisoners” isn’t just paranoid rambling. It’s not that he’s a luddite; Bill O’Reilly can and will sensationalize anything. Still, with rants like this, he’s never going to attract any of the coveted stoned slacker demo. I just hope I can escape the machines in time to make a living for myself.

It made the rounds earlier this week, but in case you missed it, I recommend this piece in Radar online… Especially the anecdotes about Don Young and (of course) Cynthia McKinney.

Bonus: Reason magazine explains why libertarians just might like Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Heather and I enjoy the show, but I’m not sure I cared too much about the politics in the first place. The author of the piece is, I suppose, saying that in comparison to The West Wing, the politics of the show are more palatable.

Here’s me, 4 months ago today, predicting that New Orleans will use eminent domain to their benefit in the aftermath of Katrina:

I wonder if any of the governments in New Orleans will take it upon themselves to sieze the flooded homes, since the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Kelo v. New London gives them every legal justification to do so. They could bulldoze everyone’s homes and sell them to condo developers! Thanks, Supreme Court!

Here’s the Washington Post, today, in an article discussing the rebuilding plan in New Orleans:

Angry homeowners screamed and City Council members seethed Wednesday as this city’s recovery commission recommended imposing a four-month building moratorium on most of New Orleans and creating a powerful new authority that could use eminent domain to seize homes in neighborhoods that will not be rebuilt.

I Hate Bellsouth More Than Anything Else in the World - An Introduction

Let me start by saying this–I hate Bellsouth. I’ve never been so angry with a corporation as I’ve been at Bellsouth dozens of times over the years. I can’t think of a situation that proves a company as inept as the time that Bellsouth charged us for two separate DSL services, in one house that had one phone line. Between their glacial response time and the Indian call center reps who clearly hadn’t learned enough English to actually communicate with me–let alone help me– there isn’t much about Bellsouth that doesn’t frustrate me. Then, relief. We finally lived and worked in an area with five bars, and could ditch Bellsouth. I don’t think I’ve ever had a phone call as satisfying as the one where I called Bellsouth to cancel our phone service and DSL subscription. They saw that I had been a customer for several years and pulled out the stops. I politely listened to their offers of greatly discounted service and I suggested a few places where they could shove said offers. Years of bad service, incompetent CSRs, and predatory pricing had made me bitter and spiteful, and this was my only opportunity to really vote with my wallet, so made sure that the poor “retention specialist” felt my wrath. Yes, I’ll burn my bridges with a business that has acted unfavorably; I don’t care what they think of me.

Lest you confuse this space for some kind of Clark Howard-ian discussion of consumer gripes, I’ll get to my point, which is that…

I Lied–Actually, I Probably Hate Nationalization of Industries a Little More Than I Hate Bellsouth

Hours after New Orleans officials announced Tuesday that they would deploy a city-owned, wireless Internet network in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, regional phone giant BellSouth Corp. withdrew an offer to donate one of its damaged buildings that would have housed new police headquarters, city officials said yesterday.

According to the officials, the head of BellSouth’s Louisiana operations, Bill Oliver, angrily rescinded the offer of the building in a conversation with New Orleans homeland security director Terry Ebbert, who oversees the roughly 1,650-member police force.

City officials said BellSouth was upset about the plan to bring high-speed Internet access for free to homes and businesses to help stimulate resettlement and relocation to the devastated city. Around the country, large telephone companies have aggressively lobbied against localities launching their own Internet networks, arguing that they amount to taxpayer-funded competition. Some states have laws prohibiting them.

If your employer asked you to chip in, say, a third of your paycheck to build a robot that would completely replace you, with the knowledge that they wouldn’t need you anymore once the robot was complete, would you do it? What if your employer forced you to do it?

Nearly every business contributes to the communities in which it does business in the form of state and local taxes. For a giant such as Bellsouth, these taxes, in the form of income tax, payroll taxes, and others, must be enormous. For the local government to go and use that money to build a service that supplants one of Bellsouth’s most lucrative offerings is ridiculous and immoral. Bellsouth has the right to charge whatever crazy price they want for their services, and for the record, I think their pricing structures for both their internet offerings and their POTS services are crazy. But this annoying practice will change with increased competition from Cable Modem service and FTTH on the ISP side, and Vonage and cell phones on the POTS side. Even if it doesn’t, look at me– I am not a Bellsouth customer anymore, by choice. That’s how it should work.

So, we come back to the issue of the offer of the donated building, which Bellsouth has now rescinded. The indignant outrage that some are expressing over Bellsouth’s withdrawal is understandable. Corporate giving, they cry, should not be contingent on the recipient behaving in a manner pleasing to its benefactors. But such corporate giving is voluntary, and Bellsouth would have been foolish to not rescind it, virtually consenting to NOLA’s decision to use their own tax dollars to crowd them out of the market.

Counterpoint

Here in Chapel Hill, NC fear of angering local businesses and large corporations is preventing a municipal network from being created by the Town. See how Bell South treats suffering New Orleans? Remember what Verizon did to Philadelphia? Imagine what big bad business will do to Chapel Hill if we dare give something to those in need!
- Angry BellSouth and Anti-Public Good Chapel Hill Business

“Helping those in need” is quite a different proposition from using your own tax dollars to put you out of business. The author of this piece likely wouldn’t cry a single tear for the people who would lose their jobs if nobody had to pay for internet service in this market. People who think this way value the needs of the underprivileged, but don’t seem to give a damn about the people who’ve worked to build a business. It reminds me of a discussion I had about mandating that power companies heat the homes of people who can’t pay. There are people on both ends–people with jobs at Bellsouth or Verizon or whoever, people investing in these companies, etc. and it’s as if you can just ignore these people because you think we should wield the government as a handout tool to give people what they want for free.

Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes

This article makes several fantastic points. One I had forgotten: Bellsouth and the other carriers built their infrastructure, and indeed their legacy, in a highly regulated, anti-market market. That’s why it’s such a beautiful thing to see Vonage, Skype, and the like rush into the market, swords drawn, and declare war on the dinosaurs. And on the broadband carrier side, as the article points out, we have Google. (If you haven’t read about the efforts the Big G is making in the nationwide wireless space, read all about it. )

In other words, these solutions are the panacea to any problems I might have with Bellsouth, and if they are successful enough, might make us forget that Bellsouth’s success was built on government regulation in the first place. But these alternatives will only thrive in an environment where they can compete. If the local government all of the sudden hands out internet access to everyone, free of charge, we’re back where we started– with a government-built monopoly that obviates any need for market competition.

This photo could not be any more staged

This 18-year-old kid was all over the news because he was elected mayor of his Michigan town, by a write-in vote, defeating the incumbent mayor. This was actually a political fantasy of mine when I was about 12. I daydreamed that I’d go door-to-door and solicit my whole town, and since I’d shake everyone’s hand, and my opponent probably wouldn’t, I’d have the edge. I imagined some bigwig incumbent reading the results and going “Whaaa???” over his morning coffee. Of course, I knew nothing about politics, but I was enamored with the idea nonetheless.

I’m probably overreacting, but I was encouraged, if only briefly, by a quote I read in a Washington Post article this afternoon. The article, The Army’s Musical Pitch: Download, Join Up is a simple, brief piece about a promotion the National Guard is doing– agree to be contacted by a recruiter, and you’ll get 3 free iTunes Music Store downloads.

It’s an inconsequential program, and I could care less about the promotion itself, but check out what the recruiter said: (emphasis mine)

In contrast, ads for the Guard’s iTunes promotion are less expensive and have run on hundreds of Web sites frequented by young people. (Music.com, Billboard.com and the Web site for Fry’s Electronics are examples.) Each download costs the government between 90 cents and a dollar, Jones said. That’s much cheaper than more traditional giveaways of hats and T-shirts, which can cost $3 per item plus delivery charges.

“My responsibility is to get the best bang for the buck out of what we are entrusted with,” Jones said.

What an important distinction…

How rare it is to see an official in any public agency stand up and recognize the nature of “their” money. We, the people, entrust an agent of force with the ability to sieze some of our cash, with the expectation that they will uphold their concomitant responsibility to use our collective earnings wisely.

It makes me think of the congressmen who approved $500k to paint a jet to look like a salmon, a $50 million indoor rainforest in Iowa, a $200 million bridge to nowhere, and other excessive, worthless projects. I’d like them to get on TV, announce what they’re spending our money on, and with a straight face, look right into the camera and say “This project is in keeping with my duty to responsibly spend your money, which you have entrusted to us, the congress.”

So, driving to work this morning, I heard a commercial for the Georgia Lottery’s latest game, and the announcer said “There’s no other game in Georgia like it!”

Really? There’s no other game like it? That’s shocking, considering the state government has a total monopoly on those games. So they created a type of game that is illegal for anyone else to offer, and then advertise that there’s “no other game like it”? Amazing!

It doesn’t even seem like there’s any debate over whether this is a proper function of government. Maybe there’s a section of the U.S. constitution that I missed, a part that says "And the States Shall Create a Game whereby Citizens can Pick their Favourite Numbers, but Make such games Illegal otherwise; These States Shall offer Worse Odds than any other Game, and Shall be Exempt from Fair Advertising Laws and Thus can Lie about where the Money Goes."

• Evolution
  Some Christians apparently see The March of the Penguins as good scientific support for Intelligent Design.

  Because obviously, the most contrived, mythical, unscientific explanation for something must be the correct one.
  

  “To think that natural selection or even the penguins themselves could come up with the idea to migrate miles and miles multiple times each year without their partner or their offspring is a bit insulting to my intellect. How great is our God!”

  Ignoring the ripped-straight-from-The-Onion flavor of that last interjection, pretending that natural selection is an entity that can “come up” with things sounds like a third grade science paper at best. It’s like saying “To think that gravity or even a rock could come up with the idea to fall to earth at a rate of 9.8m/s² is insulting to my intellect. Praise Jesus!”

  Oh, and I loved this bit earlier in the article:
  

  Due to harsh conditions, most of the young chicks do not survive.

  Hmm, yeah, I guess only the ‘fittest’ survive. I think I’ve heard of that before.

  So… Baby birds freezing to death in hellish antartic conditions over and over throughout the seasons is something you consider well-designed? And you wrote a press release to trumpet the fact that this icy death props up your pseudoscience so well? Now you’re insulting my intelligence.

• Abstinence:
  Hey, kids, you should try abstinence! In fact, let’s spend a billion dollars on teaching abstinence. Oh, we already did?
  

  “There’s a group of people who are using abstinence as a vehicle, pretending to be concerned about public health,” says Bearman. “But it’s really a vehicle to advance a program, a cultural program that doesn’t help public health.”

  This is a very good point. It’s similar to using Leviticus 18:22 to push an anti-gay agenda. None of the crusaders –who use this verse to condemn homosexuals– care the least bit about the other prohibitions in this chapter, which is rife with restrictions on all kinds of behavior. That same set of laws prohibits eating birds of prey, eating shellfish, cross breeding livestock, picking up sticks on a Saturday, planting a mixture of seeds in a field, and wearing clothing that is a blend of two textiles, but imagine that– nobody protests these activities whatsoever. Could it be that they are using the bible verse as a cover to try to restrict activities that might make them uncomfortable, conveniently choosing one restriction from the bible among literally hundreds that they ignore?

  Of course, it gets better. Later in the story, the good minister promoting these programs has the balls to throw his own daughter under the bus with this one:
  

  “A kid’s part of your program, and he comes to you and says, ‘You know, I’m going to have sex. I’ve reached a point and I’m going to do this. Should I use a condom?’ What do you say?” asks Bradley.

  “My own daughter, my 16-year-old daughter, tells me she’s going to be sexually active. I would not tell her to use a condom,” says Pattyn. “I don’t think it’ll protect her. It won’t protect her heart. It won’t protect her emotional life. And it’s not going to protect her. I don’t want her to get out there and think that she’s going to be protected using a condom.”

  But wouldn’t his daughter be more protected with a condom than without? “Not long term,” says Pattyn.

  Wow. CBS didn’t even bring up his daughter, but this minister wants you to know that he’s so committed to keeping kids ignorant about sex that he’d tell his own daughter, even if she’s going to have sex, not to use a condom. He’s an awesome dad, isn’t he? Combine that with the other statistics* on abstinence-only education that you can find in the article and I think he’s a good candidate for father of the year.

  [*Summary: Kids who try abstinence are A) one-third less likely to use condoms, B) more likely to try anal or oral sex, C) much less likely to get tested for STDs, and D) 88 percent likely to have sex before marriage anyway.]

• Eminent Domain
  I really can’t think of anything sadder than a private Catholic high school being allowed to annex a perfectly good bar through eminent domain.
  

  In Tan’s situation, Cotter said he would argue that the need for St. Peter’s Preparatory School to complete its athletic field outweighs the current use of the building as a tavern.

  And I think the need for me to have a ranch in Montana outweighs the current use of the land as Ted Turner’s playground. Damn, if only I were more politically connected, I could just steal whatever I wanted from its rightful owner!