Olympic protests begin on opening day

The Beijing 2008 Olympic Games promises to be one of the most controversial of all time. We are in for a wild ride.

As expected, the protests against China’s treatment of Tibetan protesters began in earnest at the Olympic torch lighting ceremony in Greece, despite heightened security, with three separate incidents.

Moments before the torch was lit, Chinese Party Secretary Liu Qi spoke unfazed to the audience while, immediately behind him, security apprehended a lone protestor attempting to display a banner depicting the Olympic Rings as handcuffs.

China state television cut away from the scene in an attempt to keep the Chinese people ignorant of what the rest of the world thinks and, over fear of losing their jobs or worse, Chinese television commentators did not mention the demonstration.

Also, during Liu Qi’s speech, two men carrying black flags ran onto the field of the stadium. And three men in the audience, representatives of Reporters without Borders, an advocacy group for press freedom everywhere in the world, unfurled the ‘new’ Olympic banner.

In a separate incident, while the torch was being carried on its 85,000 mile journey from Olympia to Beijing, a Tibetan woman covered herself in red paint and lay in front of the runner while other protesters chanted "Free Tibet" and "Shame on China”.

The focus of the demonstrations is China’s latest human rights violations centering around a demonstration that turned violent on March 14 in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. The resultant heavy-handed crackdown by Chinese military and heavily armed police have lead to a disputed number of dead. China claims 22 while Tibet says 80 Tibetans and another 19 in subsequent violence in Gansu province were killed.

More protests are expected and planned when the Olympic torch is carried through Tibet and to the top of Mount Everest leading up to the August 8 opening ceremony.

China is a house of cards and it is only a matter of time before the Chinese people rise up against the picture of ‘false harmony’ the Chinese government wishes the world to see. The Chinese government has been at this game for a very long time and it won’t end soon. Perhaps the Beijing 2008 Olympics is just what is needed to get this house to fall.

Many people consider a sporting event as off limits to political protests but when world leaders do nothing to bring action against such a ‘bully’ for its treatment of its citizens except to sit on the sidelines talking about how terrible it is then it is up to the world’s citizens to stand up and do something. I back these protests one hundred percent.

Let the games begin!

Sources: CNN, Newsvine, Reporters Without Borders

Grow up and help us

This is appalling! I am against the war too, but you should be ashamed of yourselves for calling on our fellow Americans to kill themselves for doing the bidding of a misguided, underhanded, illegal, self-serving federal administration.

Put the blame where it is due. Not on the common foot soldier who most likely joined the military because they couldn’t find a decent paying job in this dysfunctional economy that is in the toilet due to the greed and misguided policies of those buffoons in Washington.

Turn your protests around onto the self-indulgent fossil-sucking fools who covet the wasteful oversized SUV’s and monster trucks, the Ford Excursions, the Chevrolet Suburbans, the Hummers, the Cadillac Escalades, etc that are driving gas prices up and destroying the very environment we all live in while the rest of the country tries to actually do something to help save it from ourselves.

Focus on the greedy home lenders who allowed vulnerable under-qualified home buyers into the housing market that inevitably fell on its face due to their reckless search for more financial profit and then walked away with wads of cash and not one bit of culpability for the damage they did.

Put your energies on ferreting out the many low-life scum bag child molesters, rapists, and drunken drivers that live amongst us masquerading as polite good-guy friends and neighbors. Turn these people in and demand they get treatment so they stop preying on the innocents among us.

Expose the self-serving politicians and bureaucrats who think taxpayers are their personal ATM machines.

Lets keep our priorities straight people. A bunch of bong smoking hippies do not speak for the majority of this country. Now go run back into your parents basements into your shallow little world of self-piety and try to concentrate hard enough, between bong hits, on how your next little laughable anarchistic foray out into the real world is going to insult the rest of us.

We tried protesting in the 60’s, before you were born. It didn’t work. Come out of your drug addled minds and do something positive. Help the world fight corruption and greed, don’t just throw tantrums and expect the world to wake up and suddenly ‘do the right thing’.

Short attention span society

Wait. What? A post on Daily Writing Tips called Web Usability Revisited says that I have to resort to trickery to get you to read past this first paragraph. The inference is that a large segment of our society is too busy, or too jaded, to read more than the first paragraph of anything written. And that in order for me to get you to move on to the second and subsequent paragraphs I should use crutches like bolding, sub-headings and bulleted lists. And that I should place the conclusion of my post here in this first paragraph.

I believe the problem is that we have been conditioned to have short attention spans and that since we are inundated and bombarded with so much information at such a tremendous rate, most of it remarkably inane, from the moment we climb out of bed until we fall asleep again, we don’t know where to spend our time. And our ability to learn new things is suffering.

Does this mean that since we don’t read past the first paragraph we are forming opinions on that post based on just those first few words and accepting it as fact? Does it mean that we are absent mindedly surfing the information super highway without any thought process at all, stopping only on flashy graphics?

If so, why am I continuing to write this post since the majority of web surfers have already moved on either with or without the possibility or learning some new insight into our society? Indeed, what is the point of ever writing anything longer than one sentence if it doesn’t describe some awesome photograph or scream out some supermarket-rag headline like Brittney and Paris are having my alien babies?

Information overload is affecting us in ways that we are not even conscious of yet. Our brains absorb what is thrown before us and because of the amount of information we are exposed to, we expect it to be as condensed as possible, and presented as efficiently as possible, in order to take in the maximum amount of data in the shortest amount of time.

Television delivers short programming segments interrupted by a series of shorter segments during commercial breaks, and I believe that this constant barrage of short segments from the time we are infants is conditioning us to have short attention spans. As a result, we expect every bit of data to be delivered in short bursts, and if it isn’t able to grab our attention quickly then the chance of receiving it is lost.

Thanks to StumbleUpon, those short bursts can be delivered even quicker than ever before. We can sit in front of our computer monitors for hours and have access to millions of websites just for the pure joy of accessing as many as we can. If our attention is so short then this type of browsing experience would serve no other useful purpose than to add quantity to our web experience. The sites that get the most thumbs up are the most graphically intense.

As a result of our short attention span, reading rates are falling along with reading comprehension. The National Endowment for the Arts recently published findings that show the literacy rate for the general public was less than 50%. Reading books for entertainment or as a source of information is becoming a thing of the past. And I cannot imagine that reading on the internet is taking up the slack. As a result of less reading our language and writing skills are abysmal.

Articulation is suffering and therefore the ability to communicate in an ever more complex and technologically advanced world is suffering. The English language is butchered on a daily basis and this new hybrid is being accepted as the norm. There simply is no desire to be articulate. This is why so many mediocre authors are able to get their books published. Without good writing to stimulate people into becoming educated, adaptive, logical thinkers our future is looking very dim.

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

- Ray Bradbury

Certainly, we have some great authors writing some fantastic prose today, but the big money is in motion pictures. Why? Because the majority of people would rather watch the movie than read the book. How much crap do you suppose is accepted as entertainment because it is flashy and graphic?

Our libraries are becoming little more than museums to books that get read by an ever decreasing number of our society. Who checks out books from libraries? Students for class assignments, mostly. And a handful of people who still want to experience the richness of the written word, but the body of that satisfying richness is dwindling. A best-selling author can only hope to sell a mere 135,000 copies to a public of 300 million!

We buy magazines loaded with pretty pictures and after viewing them the magazine is tossed onto a pile and collects dust without the articles being read.

The relationship between the internet and the media is a perfect match for our attention-depleted public because we only have to read one line in the highlights section to get ‘up to speed’ on current events. Try talking to someone about any news topic, they will probably say “yeah, I heard about that but I didn’t get the details”. You know why they only ‘heard’ about it but didn’t get any ‘details’? Because they skimmed the headlines without clicking to the story. This has become the new ‘USA Today’ approach to getting the news. Remember when USA Today first began publishing? Their novel approach to getting the news out was to put as many headlines and pictures on the front page as they could because most people did not want the details. They could just skim over the front page on the way to their jobs.

While we allow ourselves to be dumbed-down by not taking the time to read the rest of the world is surpassing us in education, technology and industry. American eighth graders rank ninth worldwide in science scores--and 15th in math, behind students in Estonia, Hungary, and Malaysia. And for years, U.S. students have been migrating away from hard sciences--which tends to be the source of cutting-edge new products and other innovations.

We are just not hungry enough anymore. We have grown complacent with being number one for so long that we have taken this fatal attitude that we can sit back and watch the number two’s grovel to keep up. I’ve got news for all of you. Number two is getting smarter and hungrier by educating themselves, by reading. And they are not doing it by watching television or surfing the internet for cool pictures.

We need to get our children motivated enough to get our education level back up in order to compete with the world again. We need to reopen our minds and get those creative and innovated juices flowing again. We need to get our stagnated free-thinking logic working on technology that will allow us to survive the major problems facing us today and in the future.

The best way to do all of this is to read everything we can get our hands on. Effective communication with the rest of the world depends entirely on literacy. We cannot afford the luxury of watching life go by without finding and celebrating the intelligence that we could find if we would only take the time to read it.

What is the price for friendly relations with China?

Chinese troops and police in riot gear are roving the Tibetan countryside in an attempt to squelch protest against their authority. Tourists are forced out so there will be no witness to the brutal response that China bears on anyone who dares protest against her. Accounts of deaths differ widely between Chinese officials and civilians living in the area. China disables internet access to the rest of the world.

This is the reality of China. This is the private face their leaders try not to show the world. The ugly face that emerges whenever the inconvenience of human rights flares up.

This is the China the world helps support via hundreds of billions of dollars in trade for her products, some tainted with toxins, some produced by child labor, many manufactured under horrendous working conditions.

This is the China that the United States trade deficit displaced production that could have supported 2,166,000 U.S. jobs.

This is the China that the International Olympic Committee chose to expose the world’s most beloved amateur athletes to.

Why did they do that? Why do we support China?

They are a part of the family of man. They are part of the fabric that makes this world complete. Altruistic reasons. But so too are terrorists, racists, bigots, authoritarians, murderers, rapists, and the list goes on, all members of our family. We shun these characters. We lock them up and execute them for their deeds. But an entire government, that is a different matter. Iran is boycotted for refusal to submit to U.S. requests to stop developing nuclear power. North Korea is ostracized for wanting to keep to themselves and developing nuclear power and a missile delivery system. We declared war on a sovereign nation under false suspicion of weapons of mass destruction. But when it comes to a country who already has nuclear power AND floods our shores with cheaply made products, we ignore their suppression of human rights and send our athletes and money to them.

It is better to have them as a friend than a foe. They outnumber us 4 to 1.

So, how do we tolerate a family relative who beats and kills his family members and sends us gifts? We pretend to not see through their veiled attempts at human rights while they imprison and kill monks demanding freedom for themselves and we increase our trade deficit with them.

When is the price of human rights high enough to stop trading with China? Are we willing to continue to support policies that kill protestors?

For the answer go to your neighborhood Wal-Mart and try to find a product not made in China. They are in every neighborhood now, right? Oh look, a cute little toy for junior and it’s only 99 cents! What a bargain!

Gun control vs. Privacy Rights

The government gave us the right to bear arms. There are people living amongst us that should never have access to arms. The system has failed us by allowing these persons access to arms. Criminals will always find a way to get arms. We need the right to bear arms because the government cannot protect us. This collection of true statements best sums up the thorny issue put before our Supreme Court.

Regardless of our forefathers intentions when wording the Second Amendment, today’s society, being as violent prone as it is, should hold greater sway over our right to bear arms.

Our police force is not of a sufficient size to protect the citizenry. Therefore we need to do it ourselves.

In the absence of verifiable training and competency in handling a weapon capable of dealing out death, no one should have access to any handgun. In an ideal world, no mentally unstable person would have access to a handgun. But that is not our currently reality. We have to be able to protect ourselves. If a person chooses to own a handgun they should be allowed to but only after extensive education, training and background checks.

The need for background checks is not debatable. The requirement for more stringent and reliable screening, along with even tougher penalties for anyone selling a handgun used in a crime by a person determined to have been a high risk, is not debatable. The base issue for achieving more stringent and reliable screening revolves around the ability to collect all pertinent information on every individual living in this country and the ability to share data between states. Without the ability to collect and share this data you cannot expect a thorough and complete examination of an individuals past history.

Americans value their privacy and laws have been enacted to ensure that they continue to have their privacy protected. So, just how far are the citizens of this country willing to go to keep handguns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill?

Criminals, of course, will always find a way to get a handgun. The mentally ill has in far too many cases bought handguns legally. The everyday law-abiding citizen, who is most at risk from the other two groups, is more often refused a handgun permit due to lack of proof of the need for one.

The majority of citizens are law abiding, good people and permitting them to carry a handgun is not going to instantly turn them into criminals or embolden them to the point that they will resort to using it. The real test comes when faced with road rage or some other heated moment of passion that could lead to a greater chance of serious injury or death, to their intended victim and/or innocent bystanders, if a handgun is at the ready. These situations are the most worrisome and illustrate the paramount importance of the utmost care in determining a persons mental, moral and ethical health before being given a gun. But even careful scrutiny will not guarantee public safety.

An extreme but very real example: a jittery, nervous single mother expecting retaliation from someone she is protecting her neighborhood and home from expecting someone to break into her home could possibly be more likely to shoot at anything that moves and ask questions later. This makes this type of person a serious threat to the public.

Another very real example: the misinterpretation of the motives of someone trying to get your attention to save you from some other threat that you may not be aware of could be shot as an intruder or antagonist.

The right to bear arms should definitely be given in times of national emergency so we can assist the police and military, granted not a likely scenario but possible. The right to bear arms otherwise should also be allowed but only after thorough background checks and training. We have a long way to go in balancing privacy rights with the rights to bear arms before we can prove we will not become an even greater threat to ourselves by giving everyone handguns.

The bottom line is we have allowed the worst common denominator among us to dictate the need to carry a weapon. And in this undeniably violent society we are not addressing the very real need for anger management to help us control our violent urges. Nor are we addressing the moral and ethical issues needed to respect one another. Until we address these issues none of us is safe from ourselves, whether we carry a gun or not.