blue musings

Internet Addiction and Young Men

Well, at least South Korea is trying to find a way to deal with online addiction--something you can be sure won't happen here in the US.

It seems like an awful lot of young men these days are becoming addicted to online role-playing games--to the point that they will throw away their real world responsibilities in order to sit around and play games.

On a personal note, my ex-husband's online gaming addiction was one of the major things that led to our divorce. He used to sit on the internet for as long as 18 hours a day playing City of Heroes. It got so bad that he could no longer keep a job, would not help care for our kids while I worked to support us, and basically didn't care about anything except playing that damned game. Even now, he is still addictively playing online games--it has been seven months since he has even called the kids, and as far as I know, he still doesn't have a job. He lives with whatever friend will put him up and allow him to use their internet connection. When they get tired of seeing him sit around on his ass, they throw him out and he moves on.

I have yet to understand it. I know that he is not the only man whose addiction has led to a divorce--but how could anyone just throw their kids away for a stupid computer game?

$20,200

$20,200--that's what the Iraq war is currently costing an average family of four, according to a report in the Washington Post. Enough money to buy a new car, or make a very nice down payment on a house. Three or four years worth of groceries. Health insurance premiums for two or three years. More money than many low-wage workers will earn in an entire year.

This is what the Bush administration's war based on a lie is costing me and you. Why can't the fools in Congress--of both parties--see that it's time to get out?

Police Brutality and the War Against America's Poor

Here's a really good video on YouTube about police brutality:

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Police brutality has been on the rise for many years in America, and it is yet another symptom of the creeping fascism that is overtaking this country. It has to do with the widespread notion that wealth=morality--and that if you are poor, it is because you are immoral and therefore inferior to those who have money.

We have a government that has been overtaken by those with the most money--who buy our representatives' votes with promises of special favors and campaign contributions. It is in the interests of the rich to see to it that the poor and middle class are divided against each other and kept afraid--in this way, they manage to maintain control. The French Revolution taught them what happens when the poor unite against them--and that is the thing they fear the most.

The predations of the rich are what is behind the disaster that is "free trade", the shrinking middle class in America, the war for oil in Iraq, the deep poverty in Africa and Latin America, the sweatshop labor in China. It is the rich who benefit from illegal immigration. It is the rich who are behind he pollution of the earth and the rape of the environment which has resulted in global warming. It is the rich who have bankrupted the American people--and when we are a third world country, they will pull up stakes and leave all of us holding the bag.

Corporatism--another term for fascism--is a disease which must be eradicated from America and the world if civilization is to survive.

The Power of Blogs

The fact that Hillary Clinton has had to put up a web site for rebuttals of stories that are unflattering to her on the internet speaks of the power of blogs. For good or ill, we bloggers can now have a very real influence on the news that Americans read.

In a positive light, it means that stories that might otherwise get buried are now being brought into the spotlight. As the last few years have shown, it is much harder for politicians and other public figures to engage in corrupt activities or take sides with extremists or special interest groups. Not a lot of room for wiggle when millions of people watch your every move 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

But in a more negative light, it also means that those who are dishonest--like the waitress who lied and claimed that Hillary did not tip her--can also have an impact on the news. This is the Achilles heel of the blogs--and why those who are serious about providing their readers with good, factual, honest opinion and content need to be wary of these sorts of people--and why we should make a point of exposing them at every turn--even if what they have to say jibes with our own opinions and viewpoints on a given issue or public figure.

If the public starts seeing the blogosphere in the same way they see supermarket tabloids like The National Enquirer, then our ability to effect political change will be nullified.  At best, we will be seen as a bunch of entertaining blowhards. At worst, people will stop reading blogs altogether if they feel they can't trust what we have to say.

Poisonous Toys

Well, here we go again. according to CNN and Fox News, yet more Chinese toys are being recalled for being unsafe--this time, three children, two in the US and one in Australia, have been hospitalized.

When are people going to get it? The truth of the matter is that since much of what we buy these days is imported, we really have no way of knowing whether it is safe or not. And the tide of corporate deregultion under the Bush administration has only made the problem worse. Corporations, folks, don't care about whether or not the products they sell are making people sick, or likely to malfunction and cause accidents, or shoddily made and likely to break after a few uses. Corporations care about making a profit--and that's all.

So this is what "free trade" gets us--an economy that is spiralling downward, a severe loss of jobs, and now, exposure to potentially unsafe products every time we go to the store.

Isn't it time we started holding corporations and the government accountable?

A Little Video About Mountaintop Removal

Okay, so I've gone and tried out YouTube. Here is my first ever video. The music is by my uncle, Dave Parker.

Support the Clean Water Protection Act

And now, a word about mountaintop removal. Here's a video clip from I Love Mountains:

For over a hundred years, the people of the coal fields of Appalachia have had to endure economic, environmental, and human rights abuses at the hands of Big Coal. Mountaintop removal is the worst of these abuses, and yet President Bush continues to turn a blind eye to the evils being perpetrated on this region in the name of satisying the coal lobby and providing the country with cheap electricity.

According to Congressman Frank Pallone, the sponsor of the bill, in a diary he posted at Daily Kos:

Mountaintop removal coal-mining is one of the most outrageous assaults on our environment you can imagine. The tops of mountains are literally removed using heavy explosives, turning an incredibly diverse hardwood forest into a moonscape. The toxic rubble is then dumped into the river valleys below, burying and polluting headwater streams, which feed into most of the major rivers of the east.

Earlier this year in Congress, I re-introduced H.R. 2169, the Clean Water Protection Act (CWPA).  The CWPA is a simple bill which reverses the Bush Administration’s 2002 decision that the toxic rubble created by mountaintop removal coal-mining can be defined as “fill material,” and dumped into the headwater streams of Appalachia.

For communities in Appalachia, this waste has the horrible effect of poisoning water supplies, often turning tap water orange and even black. While the solid waste is dumped into “valley-fills”, liquid waste containing heavy metals like arsenic, lead and selenium is dumped into “slurry impoundments.” These ponds are known to leak and even break, most tragically at Buffalo Creek, when an impoundment break killed 125 people and displaced another 4,000. In 2000, in Martin County Kentucky, another slurry pond broke, leaking roughly 250 million gallons of toxic sludge into the Big Sandy River watershed. For those of us that remember the Exxon Valdez disaster, this spill was 30 times larger!

Mountaintop removal waste not only affects the health and water quality of the Appalachian region, but also pollutes American waters from the Mississippi River to the Chesapeake Bay to the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.

Once a mountain has been destroyed, it is nearly impossible to reclaim it. The land is worthless for anything else. As you drive down highway 80 in eastern Kentucky heading towards Hazard, there is an area that was mined in this way. For almost as far as you can see, the land is completely barren--not even a blade of grass will grow there. A real estate developer recently took a look at the site with an interest in building a housing subdivision, but the land is so unstable it would be impossible to build anything there.

The blasting from mountaintop removal operations very often takes place within a few hundred feet of places where people live and shop--in fact, several people have already been injured or killed as a result, including a 3 year old boy.

Contact your representative and tell them to support the Clean Water Protection Act. It's the right, moral thing to do.

Conservative Authors Get Cheated By Their Publisher

Well...talk about having your bad karma come back to haunt you...

Five conservative authors have sued their publisher, Regnery Publishing for cheating them out of their fair share of royalties, claiming that they were selling their books at a steep discount to other companies owned by the publisher.

The authors argue that in reducing royalty payments, the publisher is maximizing its profits and the profits of its parent company at their expense.

“They’ve structured their business essentially as a scam and are defrauding their writers,” Mr. Miniter said in an interview, “causing a tremendous rift inside the conservative community.”

Well, I hate to say it, but isn't running a fraudulent, shady sort of business whose main goal is to maximize its profits--even at the expense of customers, employees, contractors, and whatever else stands in the way of a dollar what the Republicans' vision of unregulated capitalism all about?

But here was the bit that stood out for me:

Joel Mowbray, author of “Dangerous Diplomacy: How the State Department Threatens America’s Security,” said he was particularly disappointed in Regnery and Eagle because they had so championed conservative authors. “These guys created the conservative book market,” Mr. Mowbray said. “Before them, conservatives were having to fight, generally unsuccessfully, to get books published.”

Does this mean the end of the Right Wing Noise Machine's portal into the book market? That we'll see fewer books glorifying the neocon brand of protofascism?

"Roe vs. Wade For Men" Thrown Out Of Court

A lawsuit filed by the National Center For Men on behalf of a Michigan man who did not want to pay child support on a baby he fathered was thrown out of court today, with the judge calling the suit frivolous. As he well should have.

Judging from the stuff on the National Center For Men's website (I won't honor them by giving them a link), it seems that these guys are a bunch of pedantic whiners who seem to think they should not have to take any responsibility for their own actions. Their site is full of blatant lies--like claiming that women's households are generally worth more than men's,and that women are more violent than men.

Common sense dictates that if you drop your drawers, you are always taking a risk of catching a disease or getting pregnant. If you can't deal with the responsibility that goes along with it, keep your pants on.

What a bunch of losers.

19 Florida Schools Locked Down After Deputy Was Shot

This just in from MSNBC:

A Broward County Sheriff's deputy was shot, critically wounded and left on the roadside Wednesday by a robbery defendant he was transporting to court for trial, officials said.

Traffic was backed up for miles around the scene of the shooting as investigators and deputies flooded area roads and highways, searching for the suspect. School officials said 19 schools were locked down as a precaution.

It seems like crime is getting worse and worse everywhere. I can remember sleeping with my doors unlocked just a few years ago in the small town in Kentucky where I lived--now, a body needs a concealed carry permit and a firearm to run to the store in the middle of the night. I don't have an answer for this...it seems like policies that promise to get tough on crime just result in more abuses being heaped upon the poor and minorities, which in turn, makes people hate cops--and therefore be more likely to shoot them. But on the other hand, you can't just let criminals roam free and make society hell for everybody.