Monday, February 06, 2006

Why I turned off the Super Bowl after 10 minutes

Two years ago there was outrage (by whom? Who is orchestrating this?) over the exposing of a nipple during the Super Bowl half time. Oh my god, there was a portion of a woman’s anatomy on television!

After that low point in Western Civilization there was talk of bringing the family atmosphere back to football and the Super Bowl. (Family atmosphere? Football?) But OK, let’s sit down and watch this family Super Bowl. Unfortunately, after viewing the first 7 minutes of play (about 15 to 25 minutes of actual time) we had to turn-off the game because of the violence. Not the violence of the game, though it does have large bodies crashing into each other, it also shows teamwork, inter-team sportsmanship, and the joy of play. No we had to turn off the game for the level of violence in the advertisements.

There were two particularly violent ads that stood out from the rest. There was one for a movie that showed guns, shooting and very dark imagery and there was another that showed cave men kicking, and getting squashed by, dinosaurs (never mind that cave men and dinosaurs never co-existed and were separated in time by 65 million years.) Though there was no actual dinosaurs injured in the ad the visual language and visual impact said that it was OK to kick small animals that happened to be passing by. Couple that with the image of a man being squashed by a dinosaur and you had an extremely violent ad.

Now I know that many on the so called religious right see the human body and sex as the worst possible subjects for children (why they may even ask you a question right there and then about sex if you don’t “protect” them.) and have no problem with violence (they hold a violent world view after all) but for me and MY family, violence is evil.

It is evil because I believe that televised violence promotes fear, that it promotes violence, and that it promotes disengagement from society. These three sins are running at an all time high and that can be traced right back to the images we allow into our heads and thus into our psyches.

Now I do not want government regulation. I happen to believe in and respect freedom of speech and that can mean freedom to make me turn the channel too. Thus I will make my request not to government but to the networks who claim to want to present a “family Super Bowl”, please turn off the violence. Turn-off the violence for OUR families. Turn-off the violence for our mental health. Turn-off the violence for the future of our nation. Then maybe we can have a family Super Bowl, one that we won’t turn-off.

Friday, January 27, 2006

Hoshi Motors Honda Acura and Volvo Repair Boulder Colorado

***** (5 stars)

The best place in Boulder CO hands down to bring your Honda.

Read more at www.hoshimotors.net/

Coyote Motors (*****)

***** (5 stars)

The best place to take your Subaru in Boulder (the second best place being Hoshi Motors)  Avoid Suparupair.  And Independent Motors I'm not a big fan of either.

Read more at www.coyotemotors.biz/

Thursday, January 26, 2006

AxisofLogic/ United States

Right on! A must read this one.

Read more at www.axisoflogic.com/art...

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Stanford on iTunes

The future of education

Read more at itunes.stanford.edu/

Thursday, January 19, 2006

I'm Chinian, not Chinese

What a load of crap. Do you know ANYONE who thinks that the "ese" ending with regard to Chinese, Japanese, etc. is derogatory? Of course not. This sort of blatant victimhood stoking is sadly not uncommon in the PRC.

Read more at news.xinhuanet.com/engl...

Friday, January 13, 2006

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | China map lays claim to Americas

Hate to break this to you guys but it wasn't Columbus, the Chinese, or Eriksson that "discovered" American.  There were about 80 million or so people living on the two continents in 1492 whose ancestors had been here for about 12,000 years.

Read more at news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asi...

Good News--and Bad -- Kennedy 311 (5758): 145 -- Science

Sorry Donald,In reference to the Hwang affair. I agree that this was not a rebuke of the peer review system. I agree that the system is basically sound. But you toss off the damage this has done to the basic trust the public and many scientist have in your journal. Just last week I was reading an interesting article in your journal about depression. I found the article to be very convincing and exciting. But at the end I realized that my first thought was "I wonder if it's true?" This question shocked me. We need the highest level of trust in our leading journals, and though I also agree that we cannot enter the labs and notebooks of every researcher, the tenor of your article was sort of flippant to the degree that, sadly, I still feel that I'll wind up asking the question, "Is it true?" So what we might need here is a serious approach to how things at our leading journals will improve so that we can trust our science (and your Science) again.

Read more at www.sciencemag.org/cgi/...

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Hitler's prediction

Hitler's prediction, that "Even though the facts ... may be brought clearly to their minds, they [the public] will continue to think that there may be some other explanation." As Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, is reported to have proposed, "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually believe it."

Monday, August 22, 2005

Why is it that all Republican critics of the administration are pariahs?