It’s official. Although I grew up in an era where CNN was the one-stop go-to place to get real news (remember the last days of the USSR?), I’ve been getting more and more fed up with them over the past few years. I went onto their website today to get info on the California wildfires, and am greeted not with any mention of the fires on CNN’s homepage, but instead with this totally important news item.

Reuters, a foreign news source, has a headline on their front page about the fires.

But, CNN, you’ve lost my respect. At this point I just wish you’d be honest and quit calling yourself a “news network.” Better to assume a more befitting title, such as “Items of Medium to Low Interest, as Digestible as Jaffa Cakes.”

Neil Postman was right.

[EDIT: In an attempt not to be such a cranky ol' grandpa, I in fact sent an e-mail to CNN via their feedback form. Heaven knows if anyone reads it, but if they do, this is what they'll see:

I am very concerned about what I have been seeing lately on CNN. I grew up in an era when CNN (as a TV station) was the go-to network for global news, even before the internet was a common-place media format. Remember the last days of the USSR? You guys were amazing during that.

~ Sarah McMenomy

Most of which I already said in the blog post. I guess we'll see if they respond... The thing is, I'm not kidding, I'd love to have an American news network that I felt like I could trust, something that was keeping me informed about the rest of the world. But maybe that's just a pipe dream at this point. The last one I might trust is ABC, although their homepage is structured so as to make it maximally impossible to sort out what the heck is going on on it...]

I don’t understand why pundits criticize “salad bar” conservatism or “salad bar” liberalism. Why should we be carbon copies of one another? It widens the divide more to say, “You have to do this because you are one of Us, and this is what We do,” than it does to ignore the views of the opposition because that is Them and that is just what Someone Like That would do. In either case, though, you wind up pigeonholing someone — but in only one case does that stereotype self-fulfill and limit the actions of what you and your own party can accomplish.

Any teenager who’s been warned off drugs and sex knows the overplayed theme of peer pressure; it’s only natural to trust someone that you identify with more than someone you don’t. Unfortunately, it’s a heuristically obtained ad hominem fallacy: someone can agree with you in nearly every respect but one, and on that they can be right, and you can be wrong. I fear that the prevalence of Jungian archetypes in our collective consciousness has undermined our ability to view people as individuals rather than as just another copy of Personality A, or B, and so on. Speaking only of our two largest political parties, I suspect that if you could boil away the unconsidered dogma and spectrally analyze what’s left, you’d find a wider range of difference within each individual party than you would between them.

One hears this sort of rhetoric in a religious context as well, although my argument with that is different than it is with politics — one of my main concerns there is that this sort of dogmatism discourages religion as a living tradition at all, or as any kind of journey for human souls beyond the individual one which has been set as a precise path, like the labyrinth. I like labyrinths, by the way. It’s very peaceful to walk them. There’s a lot to be gained, and there are times when you need to find that kind of calm. But if you have questions and are not satisfied by the answers, then I am not really sure that you should be calm. Without some sort of spiritual unrest, you will not be driven to learn, explore, change, or grow. Perhaps more importantly, though, if you do not question what you are told, you will likely end up doing something that is simply wrong, but you won’t take proper responsibility for your own actions, because you have taken someone else’s word for it (cf. the Milgram experiment).

Still, inasmuch as any religion has an internal consistency as a system of beliefs, you may or may not be able to pick and choose without contradicting yourself; you can’t believe that Jesus was God but simultaneously disbelieve it because another religion has said that. But you can pick and choose certain practices, devotions, writings, and lines of argument that make the most sense to you, and they can compliment each other, even if they’re in the tradition of a religion that you do not wholly embrace.

In both the political and the religious spheres, there is more sawdust blown around than meat served. Instead of discussion, we have reaction, and then reaction to the reaction, until it all becomes either a ridiculous shouting match or a refusal to even pretend to listen (cf. Judge Sotomayor not even being granted an audience with Senator Inhofe). I find myself hungry, and wish that someone would step up to the plate and indulge our country now and then in a little intelligent discourse. A little goes a long way.

Inasmuch as authors are, by the act of creation, images of God, the idea of making a Buffy movie without Joss Whedon is blasphemy. Buffy was a character that sprang from the brain of Joss (rather like Athena from the side of Zeus) and into boot-kickin’ television glory only after she had been bought from Joss and mostly ruined by Hollywood in the original ‘92 feature film.

Even if you were to leave Joss, Buffy, and the idiot Hollywoodians out of it entirely, I can’t think of a much worse thing you could do to the show’s extremely loyal fans. Buffy has a still-growing fan base, years after its cancellation. A fan base which organizes Meetup groups, holds Buffy-watching marathons, or swamps theaters with hundreds of people descending for a showing of the musical episode, Once More, With Feeling. The fans dress up for cons, dish out for DVDs, and run exhaustive blogs documenting Joss’ every move. Yes, maybe you could draw new fans with a new Joss-less vision — but not without alienating the existing ones, and why on earth would you want to do that?

Imagine if, in a world with no existing Batman comics, Frank Miller had written Batman Begins,* and pitched it to the studios. They bought the idea, but then twisted his script and dumbed it down to campy Adam West Batman. Then they poured the shattered wreckage back into the original author’s hands and said, “Okay, I guess you can do a TV show with this, if you want.” With freedom, Frank had gone on to create his vision of the Dark Knight through seven glorious years of television. (Sure, some years of Buffy were more glorious than others… nonetheless, the show was, overall, great.)

Now it’s like those producers are saying, “Ooh, okay, we’re gonna make another Batman movie — but we don’t want Frank or his vision involved; we want Adam West back.”

We’ve had the Dark Knight for seven years. Adam West was fun, and we laugh at him… but why would we ever, ever want to regress there?

* Yeah, I know Miller didn’t write the movie, but he did write Year One, which is most of where the movie got its meat from the comic books.

Via Wessel and Liebermann (Seattle antiquarian and rare booksellers) comes the tale of how the CPSIA is resulting in a crackdown on old books. The long and short of the story is that because of the broadly sweeping (read: oceanic) terms of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, the government is now authorized to force booksellers and libraries to dispose of books — some of which may have been on shelves for the last century or more — if they test positively for containing lead in their inks.

I understand that they’re trying to make the world safe from lead poisoning, but I think it’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater. These books represent not just literary development for our children; they represent centuries worth of work, of authors’ lives and dreams and hard work. And even if they didn’t, they’d still be works of art and part of our history. Are we really going to let the idea that ravenous, bibliophagic infants may have a small chance of ingesting a tiny amount of lead into their systems lead us to burn or otherwise destroy 200+ years of children’s literature? What about books that had small runs, books that were never reprinted?

It’s just ridiculous. I’m not even sure I support the act at all (it crack downs on independent artists and craftspeople as well, and has slammed Etsy down already with a wave of legal headache), but even if I could buy into the idea that we need to protect ourselves from all the wicked chemicals of the earth, it seems like vast overkill to have this enacted retroactively.

After all, how much damage have these books actually caused? Don’t you think we’d have heard about it if this were a major cause of lead poisoning? If any harm had come from them, wouldn’t they have been pulled from the shelves long ago?

It just all feels like some bizarre back-door entry to Farenheit 451…

All this anti-homeschooling rot is depressing me. And it’s not just about the dissolution of educational freedoms, it’s also an example of religious oppression. “All sides agree the children have thrived with home school,” but “[the mother's] lessons also have a religious slant, which the judge said was the root of the problem.” Mainstream science has an atheistic slant (although it is entirely unnecessary). How is it the right of the courts, or the government, to dictate a child’s education?

Before you start blaming our new president for this trend on the basis of supposed socialist tendencies, consider that Obama has remained relatively silent on the issue of homeschooling, except in his book, “The Audacity of Hope,” where he acknowledges that the decision to homeschool should be left up to families, and should be honored.

Of course, this situation is more complicated than just The Courts vs. The Family: it is the father, during divorce proceedings, who is objecting to the children’s homeschooling. And I’m not saying that he should not have a say in his children’s education — but the judge should rule on the basis of what is best for the children, not on the basis of perceived religious slant. If the father wants them to be taught something else, he should homeschool the kids himself when he has them (if he has joint custody), or hire a tutor if he can’t do it. If the kids are really testing “two years above their grade levels,” then it seems clear that that is a system which is working better than the public schools would.

To those, in positions of authority, who are remaking educational policies in this country: flight from religious persecution is how this country got started in the first place. Now, with a failing economy, an overseas war, and a low-level civil war raging over the issue of abortion, we have enough challenges here already. We don’t need a Handicapper General.

Yes, I’m pro-life. It’s probably the issue that I feel most strongly about, in fact. But I didn’t vote on that basis at all. Why?

Because the current law is in place because of Roe v. Wade, which has been going strong for almost 40 years, and which was a fight in the first place. In order to reverse that decision, we’d have to legally overpower a very loud and very active group of people. While we’ve had a supposedly pro-life president in the White House for eight years, he hasn’t done squat to reverse it, and I’m not sure McCain would either. (And in the meantime, Bush has sent our citizens off to die in a foreign country without clearly giving us a reason, plan, or goal at all.) The problem with reversing abortion as a legal decision is that it’s really a problem of social attitude; if we do make it illegal (which, I agree, it ought to be), we will still have women performing dangerous abortions at home with coat hangers or Lysol, and they’ll continue to do an enormous amount of damage.

We should be educating people: about sexual activity (not just how to be abstinent) and how to prevent unwanted pregnancy; about exactly what abortion is, how it works and what the implications are socially, personally, emotionally, philosophically. Fighting the uphill battle against a law that was made mostly so that people would stop breaking the law and performing their own abortions may be a waste of energy in the end; who knows how it would actually affect the numbers of abortions performed in this country?

What we do need are people who are willing to provide support for pregnant mothers and to expedite the ease of adoption, so that mothers who feel that they are unable to raise children can have alternatives to abortion. We need support groups, charities, and foundations for mothers who keep their children but have no financial or personal assistance from the fathers of the children or from their own families; we need places where safe and free day care could be offered so that single women can work and be mothers, and not have to choose whether they or their children will be able to eat on any given day. And we desperately need changing attitudes about how we view sex so that women will not feel so overwhelmed with shame over having becoming pregnant. In “Mere Christianity,” C. S. Lewis states:

If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting, the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig, who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute.

Lewis is scripturally supported in this: in all four Gospels, for all that Jesus preached about how we should behave and treat each other, he said little or nothing about our sexual behavior (save to condemn divorce because he stated that it would force a woman to adultery), and is recorded to have spent quite a bit of time in the company of prostitutes. So can we please get over it already and tackle the large problems at hand?

For all the many, many things that are wrong with the pro-choice movement, they seem to have found the correct tools at their disposal: vocal organizations such as Vox exist in colleges and other organizations countrywide, and Planned Parenthood centers are in most major cities. Meanwhile the pro-life movement claims abstinence-only sexual education activists who are almost certainly causing more harm to their own cause than good. And of course we can’t organize into a cohesive force; who wants to be associated with violent and scary fundamentalists who assault and kill doctors and bomb abortion clinics? We’re desperate for our voices to be heard over this din, but the answer isn’t civil war, it’s citizenship in action. If we want every child to have a life, we need to be prepared to provide for those lives, with health care and education and safe homes. So what are we waiting for?

My current favorite thing is Spud.com. They deliver fresh, organically grown, local produce (and any other local/organic foods I request) to me weekly, and at a rate that is pretty much on par or cheaper than local grocers.

Why do I love it? Well, it’s a great idea. Local growers (whom I’d love to support) get my money without me actually having to go to farmers’ markets (which are usually open at times I can’t go). This keeps small businesses alive, and reduces my gas consumption for food transportation to a third of what it is when I shop at regular grocers.

All idealism aside, it’s also just a good deal. I don’t have a car, so the delivery (which is free) is very convenient. I can order a couple of things that I want to receive weekly (currently that’s bread, eggs, and cans of tuna), and they deliver that along with a “Fresh Harvest Box,” which contains their selection of the best seasonal fruits and vegetables in the area. I’m cooking more than I used to (which is good for my budget), and eating more fruits and vegetables than I used to (which is good for me).

It’s also easy to set up, and maybe I’m silly, but grocery shopping online is frankly kind of fun. If you live in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Portland, the same joy can be yours! For more info, check them out at www.spud.com.

I don’t know how many of you out-there reading this blog will even care about this, but I feel that it is necessary nonetheless to bring it to anyone’s attention who hasn’t already seen it. I urge you please, please, to go sign the Petition to Request Depublishing of California Court Case In Re Rachel L.

From Wikipedia’s lovely article on the Legality of homeschooling:

“In California, homeschoolers must either a) be part of a public homeschooling program through independent study or a charter school, b) use a credentialed tutor, or c) enroll their children in a qualified private school (Such private schools may be formed by the parents in their own home, or parents may utilize a number of private schools which offer some kind of independent study or distance learning options). All persons who operate private schools in California, including parents forming schools just for their own children, must file an annual affidavit with the Department of Education. They must offer certain courses of study (generally similar to the content required in public schools, but described in one page rather than the hundreds of pages of scope and sequence requirements that public schools must follow) and must keep attendance records, but are otherwise not subject to any state oversight. There is no requirement in California that any private school teachers, whether the school is large or small, must have state credentials, although all teachers must be “capable of teaching”. On Feb. 28, 2008, the California Court of Appeals issued a ruling that effectively makes homeschooling (except for tutoring by certified teachers) illegal in the state of California. The ruling is being appealed to the Supreme Court of California, and the Home School Legal Defense Association is seeking to have the decision depublished.”

As both an ex-Californian and also someone who was home-schooled my entire life (’cept college, duhrrr), I’m taking this one pretty personally. I’d be the first to admit that home-schooling has serious challenges, but then, so does public schooling.

The driving force behind the case concerns a family where allegations of physical abuse of children was somehow linked to home-schooling. Because, as we all know, physical abuse can’t happen to children who attend public school. It certainly couldn’t affect children *at* public school. There are just drugs, gangs, shootings…

I’m not making the case that one option’s better than the other, because I’ve seen some bad effects of homeschooling, too. Criticism about religious indoctrination, poor socialization, and unbalanced emphasis on various subjects are not totally off the mark — but there are a lot of parents who are doing a bang-up job, and they shouldn’t be punished, and have their children’s education jeopardized or hindered by short-sighted legislation.

So please check out the info, sign the petition. If you have more questions, ask me. Objections? Let’s argue! But please, let people know that this is going on, because it is going to have a serious impact on thousands of parents and children in the state of California, and I think that this particular bit of legislation is trending in a dangerous, Brave New World kind of direction..

Vicarious Traveler has just made a fabulous post detailing the differences between various carbon offsets programs. The idea of carbon offsets is an idea that is difficult enough to grasp superficially, and Vicarious Traveler has managed to strip off the layers to make it easy to understand what you’re actually paying for when you send $100 off into the blue of the internet, in the hopes that it’s somehow affecting the environment for good instead of ill.