I need to share this with you.

For it is much less depressing than the anti-war lyrics I posted earlier today...

"...Because the keys to the kingdom got locked inside the kingdom
And the angels fly around in there, but we can't see them
And I gotta girl in the war, Paul I know that they can hear me yell
If they can't find a way to help, they can go to Hell
If they can't find a way to help her, they can go to Hell..."

Legislation that doesn't look cute in a onesie

So, as you all probably know, the Supreme Court chose to ban partial-birth abortion today in a close and disappointing vote of 5-4. Ruth is crying, Sandra is kicking herself, and I'm cringing at Bush's praise of the majority as he speaks of "...protecting human dignity and upholding the sanctity of life." I suppose no one informed him that an unnecessary war is a bit of a snub to the sanctity of life, and that we as a nation seem to be in more danger from disgruntled college students than terrorists from afar.

Oh well. As long as Bush pays attention to abortion, maybe he'll stay away from the gay community...and I'll refrain from tacky comments about unborn gay fetuses.

On another note, China, having successfully learned to control the Internet, is moving onto bigger better things...China Attempts to Control the Weather. That's hot....

I am, for the most part, going to ignore the comments to my latest post, because they were, for the most part, harmless and ill worded (it's your, not you're, and "grammar" is spelled with an "a", not an "e"), but I would like to provide this helpful bit of advice:That being said, I'd like to speak on something that is very important to me: House, M.D. Specifically, House, M.D., and its lack of appearance on youtube. Look, I can only take so many House/Wilson slash videos before my head just spins in circles.

I don't quite understand the copyright issue with taking House off youtube. No, I don't want anyone making money off posting the latest episode the minute it's done airing; (dammit, if I can't make money that way, no one will!) but is it really all that different if I tape it on VHS and hold it to my bosom in a decidedly-greedy fashion? Or what if I was really rich (and geeky) and TiVo'd it, and then took that TiVo and copied the hard drive? Either way, I would still have my very own copy of Gregory House being snarky, and I wouldn't have to pay a cent...kinda like I don't now when I watch it on my six-inch TV screen.

I think that Clear Channel needs to get with the time. Fox, Time Warner, every dinosaur company is fighting tooth and nail to keep their footage in the reels, and that's not how people are watching TV anymore. Very rarely do I make time to watch an entire TV show; I catch it on the run in five minute increments like everyone else. That's why independent stations like CurrentTV are such a blessing. (Thank you, Lord Al Gore. I will spread your Good Message...)

Wired Magazine (the know-all-be-all, in my book) had this to say:

Until about five minutes ago, remember, almost all video-entertainment content was produced and distributed by Hollywood. Period. That time is over. There was a time when advertisers could count on mass audiences for what Hollywood thought we should be watching on TV. That time is all but over. There was a time when broadband penetration was too slight and bandwidth costs too prohibitive for video to be watched online. That time is sooooo over. "The era of the creepy blue light leaking out of every living room window on the block is now officially at an end," says my pal and occasional colleague Steve Rosenbaum, founder of video-sharing startup Magnify.net and one of the inventors a decade ago of citizen video. "The simple, wonderful, delirious fact is that people like you and me can now make and share content."

Without being overly simplistic or melodramatic, the state of the Old Commercial Broadcasting Model can be summarized like this: a spiraling vortex of ruin. Fragmentation has decimated audiences, viewers who do watch are skipping commercials, advertisers are therefore fleeing, the revenue for underwriting new content is therefore flatlining, program quality is therefore suffering (Dancing With the Stars. QED), which will lead to ever more viewer defection, which will lead to ever more advertiser defection, and so on.

Well, that settles it.

Also, a question. Was an actual order put out to fly flags at half-mast? I'm getting mixed signals from my people...

Break the Silence

I've heard a lot of people talk today about "prevention". How do we prevent something like this? How do we go about protecting our institutions of learning from harm with the jealously of a lover?

Silence is perhaps, the most insidious murderer, for it kills with none of us the more aware. Silence leads to ignorance, and ignorance leads to hatred, which can often times lead to disasters like what we as a nation have witnessed.

The boy who did this did a bad thing. It was an unforgivable thing, with consequences he hoped would be long lasting, and will...but can we truly be surprised?

If we aren't careful with our freshmen, we can easily push them off the edge. We can literally break them, and once we do, we will have no way of knowing that they even need to be fixed. In my opinion, classes like Odyssey are, in the long run, beneficial, because while I found them to be a source of nuisance and a waste of time, I sat in them and met fellow freshmen and laughed and joked and mocked the teachers and because of that, I became involved in the rest of the student body. From there, over the years, my affection for the UST student body grew as a whole.

This student, Cho Seung-Hui, was not connected in any way, good or bad, with the rest of his student body. Had he been, I believe that he would never have had the ability to do what he did. He wouldn't have been able to look fellow students in the eye before shooting them down. Yet he never made an effort to reach out to his peers and and now he's dead, and so are some of them.

UST--care for your own! Talk to the one you would usually avoid! Find some common ground, even if it's not necessarily something that interests you. Talk to the freshmen! I've had so many conversations with friends about how much freshman year sucked. We made it through, though, barely, so let's guarantee that we insure other freshmen do the same.

Also, this is sick: GodHatesAmerica

These people can seriously go fuck themselves.