Douchebag of the Day

Today the douche-o-meter goes bust on John Sununu.

Recently Mr. Sununu said:

I'm a giant weiner. Wah wah wah. The president's black and that makes me want to support Hitler. White Power. I John Sununu am definately saying this. Wah.

Sorry I was going to copy and paste the actual quote, but hey I'm drunk and pissed at his actual bullshit comments. It's funny how a communist born in the People's Republic of Cuba can lecture a red blooded American on what it means to be a "real" American. Fuck off! But seriously John Sununu was born in Havana, Cuba, I'm guessing only a crib away from Castro. Why does John Sununu hate America so much that he was born in the terrorist state of Cuba? Because he hates America.

But any way John Sununu definately knows how to be a real American. Listen to his sage like advice:

I'm a giant weiner. Wah wah wah. The president's black and that makes me want to support Hitler. White Power. I John Sununu am definately saying this.Wah.

 Shit. I'm sorry, I did it again. Ok Sununununu nunu nu said:

"I wish this president would learn how to be an American" 

Are you going to teach him how to be a real 'm'rican, eh comrade?

Anyone living in the United States is a real American. They cannot be taught how to be an American. A racist douchebag like John Sununu is just as American as is the president, as is the homelessman begging on the street, as is the banker, as are my grandparents who got off the boat from Latveria or anyone else living in the US. New York, Illinois, California, and Hawaii are just as much a part of America as is Wisconsin, Oklahoma, or Mississippi. So stop it with this shit. We have a vast range of ideas; many horrible, a few great, and we try to wrestle them out through debate and the political process. We get nowhere by trying to disqualify competing ideas by labeling them as anti-American.

Liam '12

Freedom Just For Me

Top 50 Novels

While working on the list I realized several telling things about life, literature, and myself.  Perhaps most telling about this list is it is almost all men, all western hemisphere, mostly hetero.  It's my belief that this list will look vastly different in 200 years, if people still write that is. Society has been dominated by men, more men have been writers, and men have dominated literary criticism, ensuring that male writers would gain fame and prestige.

So much of the literature that I have read over the years has been in the form of poetry, short stories, or drama.  The novel as a western form is new. Poetry has been around since writing (the bible, the Odyssey, and practically everything pre-antiquity), and Drama has existed since the Classical Greece. The novel as we know it, has been around only for about 400 years. The Mahabharata, the bible, the Volsunga saga, the Avesta, the Bacchae, Antigone, the Odyssey, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Canterbury Tales, etc are all disqualified from this list.  So that pushes my list to being mostly (straight) white men in the last 400 years from Western Europe.

Here is the list of top 50 Novels that I have read: 

1.         The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum/ Heinrich Boll

This is one of my favorite Novels. Well actually, according to this list it is my favorite novel.  It has every thing: Action, adventure, terrorism, social political strife, and awesome puns. Here is how Wikipedia  describes the book:

The story deals with the sensationalism of tabloid news and the political climate of panic over Red Army Faction terrorism in the 1970s Federal Republic of Germany. The main character, Katharina Blum, is an innocent housekeeper whose life is ruined by an invasive tabloid reporter and a police investigation when the man with whom she has just fallen in love turns out to be wanted by the police because of a bank robbery. Later it turns out that he is not a bank robber: he is a deserter from the Army who had stolen money from his camp before deserting. Ultimately she shoots the reporter, after he arrives at her house for an interview that she requested. The book's fictional tabloid paper, Die Zeitung (The Newspaper), is modelled on the actual German Bild-Zeitung.

Awesome.

2.         Night/ Elie Wiesel

Night is perhaps the most awful novel in history. No other novel have I ever read that goes into stronger details of human suffering. If there is only one novel every person should read, I would say it has to Night.

With the events of Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur, the message is still one that needs to be learned.

3.          Candide/ Voltaire

A brutal satire that could have been written in a more contemporary era.  It preserved the atrocities of its day from the auto-da-fe (in 1755 Portugal burnt the heretics because apparently the all loving all merciful all powerful god sent a tsunami (after a quick bit of research there may not have been an actual auto da fe after the Lisbon Quake, but they still were using the auto da fe during this time) to the horrors of colonialism/imperialism/slavery.

Voltaire even refutes Leibniz (Pangloss von Thunder-ten-Tronckh). Yay.

4.         The Metamorphosis/ Franz Kafka

While it is technically a novella I have included it on the list because it surpasses the form of a short story and is more similar in style to the fragment novels Kafka left.What other novel opens with a brief description of Venus in Furs only to spin deeper into an Existential Crisis. I also like to think whether or not it was intended, Kafka's Metamorphosis is a corruption of Nietzsche's 3 metamorphoses. Instead of the Camel (Altruism), Lion (Nihilism), and Child (Positivism) Kafka's are Altruist (Masochism), Cockroach (Nihilism), and Dead Cockroach (umm dead?).

5.         Slaughterhouse-Five/ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The only American to round out the top 5. Slaughterhouse-Five has one devastating quote in it. I will not reveal which one.  Here is how wikipedia describes it:

Chaplain's Assistant Billy Pilgrim is a disoriented, fatalistic, and ill-trained American soldier. He does not like wars and he is captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. The Germans put Billy and his fellow prisoners in a disused slaughterhouse (although there are animal carcasses hanging in the underground shelter) in Dresden. Their building is known as "Slaughterhouse number 5". The POWs and German guards alike hide in a deep cellar; because of their safe hiding place, they are some of the few survivors of the city-destroying firestorm during the Bombing of Dresden in World War II.

Billy has come "unstuck in time" and experiences past and future events out of sequence and repetitively, following a nonlinear narrative. He is kidnapped by extraterrestrial aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. They exhibit him in a zoo with B-movie starlet Montana Wildhack as his mate. The Tralfamadorians, who can see in four dimensions, have already seen every instant of their lives. They say they cannot choose to change anything about their fates, but can choose to concentrate upon any moment in their lives, and Billy becomes convinced of the veracity of their theories.

As Billy travels—or believes he travels—forward and backward in time, he relives occasions of his life, real and fantasy. He spends time on Tralfamadore, in Dresden, in the War, walking in deep snow before his German capture, in his mundane post-war married life in the U.S.A. of the 1950s and early 1960s, and in the moment of his murder by a petty thief named Paul Lazzaro.

A+ Mr Vonnegut.

6.         The Great Gatsby/ F. Scott Fitzgerald

7.         Steppenwolf/ Hermann Hesse

8.         The Stranger/ Albert Camus

9.         Huckleberry Finn/ Mark Twain

10.       The Lord of the Flies/ William Golding

11.       The Invisible Man/ Ralph Ellison

12.       Tess D’Urbervilles/ Thomas Hardy

13.       The Trial/ Franz Kafka

14.       The Portrait of Dorian Gray/ Oscar Wilde

15.       Catcher in the Rye/ J.D. Salinger

16.       Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland/ Lewis Carroll

17.       Pride and Prejudice/ Jane Austin

18.       Demian/ Hermann Hesse

19.       Gulliver’s Travel/ Jonathan Swift

20.       The Watchmen/ Alan Moore

21.       D’alembert’s Dream/ Denis Diderot

22.       To Kill a Mockingbird/ Harper Lee

23.       All Quiet on the Western Front/ Erich Maria Remarque

24.       Notes from the Underground/ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

25.       The Crying of Lot 49/ Thomas Pynchon

26.       The Hunchback of Notre Dame/ Victor Hugo

27.       Madam Bovary/ Gustave Flaubert

28.       One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest/ Ken Kesey

29.       High Fidelity/Nick Hornby

30.       The Hobbit/ J.R.R. Tolkien

31.       A Clockwork Orange/ Anthony Burgess

32.       Montauk/ Max Frisch

33.       Middlesex/ Jeffery Eugenides

34.       Letters from an Unknown Woman/ Stefan Zweig

35.       The Scarlet Letter/ Nathaniel Hawthorne

36.       The Old Man and the Sea/ Ernest Hemmingway

37.       Thus Spoke Zarthustra/ Friedrich Nietzsche

38.       1984/ George Orwell

39.       The Sound and the Fury/ William Faulkner

40.       The Tin Drum/ Gunter Grass

41.       Comet in Moominland/ Tove Jansson

42.       The Hounds of Baskerville/ Arthur Conan Doyle

43.       Venus in Furs/ Leopold Sacher-Von Masoch

44.       Siddhartha/ Hermann Hesse

45.       Of Mice and Men/ John Steinbeck

46.       Cat’s Cradle/ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

47.       V for Vendetta/ Alan Moore

48.       The Harry Potter Series/ J.K. Rowling

49.       The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe/ CS Lewis

50.       Animal Farm/ George Orwell

Obviously this list is entirely shit.  Well the notion of ranking literature is shit, but I was still wanting to make my own list based on the literature that I have read in order to see what it say about myself.  Most of my favorite literature is not on this list as I absolutely love reading poetry and drama.  Also at this point in my life I prefer a short story or a collection of short stories to a full novel. And let's not forget the volumes of critical theory and philosophy that are absent from the list.

The big exceptions to the Straight White Men Rule are as follows:

 11.       The Invisible Man/ Ralph Ellison
14.       The Portrait of Dorian Gray/ Oscar Wilde
17.       Pride and Prejudice/ Jane Austin
22.       To Kill a Mockingbird/ Harper Lee
41.       Comet in Moominland/ Tove Jansson
48.       The Harry Potter Series/ J.K. Rowling

I haven't read Wuthering Heights, I dislike Silas Mariner, My Antonia is so pedestrian... so lay off. And next on my Docket:

Billy Budd/ Herman Melville
Rereading Danton's Death/ Georg Buchner
The Temptation of Saint Anthony/ Gustave Flaubert
Swann's Way/ Marcel Proust

Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Rachel Maddow

For months I have been following the Court Room Epic known as Dean v. Maddow  (Dean v. NBC Universal would be its hypothetical case name), where Axel Rose (not really) gains 50 pounds and goes on homophobic tirades and then sues Rachel Maddow for quoting him. I have read all the available documents from the original Complaint issued by Bradlee Dean, to the Special Motion to Dismiss Pursuant to DC Anti-SLAPP Act, and now the Certification for Recusal or Disqualification of Judge.

I read the other day that the Judge in the case had docketed a judgment in favor of NBC Universal, awarding them attorneys fees. Subsequently the Plaintiffs are now quixotically pursuing a recusal. So in their honor I have gone through the main documents in the case to explain and critic them.  Hopefully the case will make a little bit more sense now.


The Complaint:

Don't Put in a Dollar Amount.

In many jurisdiction putting in an actual dollar amount in a complaint is unprofessional. Secondly 50 Million Dollars is ridiculous and makes you seem without creditability. If you are suing for 50 Million dollars, that is saying, Maddow ruined your reputation to the point where you expected to earn 1 Million dollars per year for the next 50 years. Dean is not Axel Rose so... yeah...

Side Bar Time

If you are suing someone for defamation, you should be mindful of the elements of a Tort. DBCD.  If you are claiming damages to your reputation and business, then making headlines (especially if it's the La Crosse Tribune):

DUNKERTON, Iowa — Administrators, teachers and students did not get what they expected Thursday during an extended school program.

Everyone anticipated the message from Junkyard Prophet, a traveling band based in Minnesota, to be about bullying and making good choices. Instead, junior and senior high students at Dunkerton High School and faculty members said they were assaulted by the group's extreme opinions on homosexuality and images of aborted fetuses.

"They told my daughter, the girls, that they were going to have mud on their wedding dresses if they weren't virgins," said Jennifer Littlefield, a parent upset with the band's performance..

... Littlefield also did not appreciate what she described as gay bashing.

"They told these kids that anyone who was gay was going to die at the age of 42," she said. "It just blows me away that no one stopped this."

Don't be in the news showing that the Maddow segment didn't affect your career. If you are still getting hired to preform at high schools, it is counter to your argument that you're damaged goods. Worse, if you are the one destroying your own reputation that undercuts the claim that Maddow is the causation. Worst, by saying sufficiently similar things to the alleged defamation, it shows the defamatory statements to be true, which is a defense against defamation.

Reduce the Pages

There are approximately 6 unnecessary pages out of 10. This is a court proceeding not the Newsroom at Fox. Slamming Maddow for being a gay leftist secular atheist will only anger the court because it has nothing to do with the case or the law.

State a Claim

Really why are you suing. If you can't state it in clear, concise words, then perhaps you shouldn't be suing.  Not everything requires a lawsuit.

Proof Read

Yes, hire a high school student if you need to. I'm dyslexic, and I would never, never submit anything without having 2 to 3 pair of eyes reading it, well except this blog because I'm lazy and cheap. Sentences like this should be edited "He is on information and belief a gay activist."  Once again I write a blog, I submit articles that I have proofread. They have spelling errors. If I were before a court I would pay someone to read it over. And get a style guide to learn how to comma properly. I suggest Eats, Shoots & Leaves.


The Special Motion to Dismiss Pursuant to DC Anti-SLAPP Act:

 Like her or hate her, Maddow has great lawyers. Really this motion is pure poetry. Well articulated, coherent and well reasoned. It is never abusive, but release on the law to make legal arguments.It is 51 pages, but if you ever get a chance to read the ant-slapp do it.  This is how a legal document should read.


The Recusal:


Good Faith vs. Bad Faith.

Because you are a Christian does not mean that you always have good faith. For example, if you move to dismiss your own action to bring the case to Federal Court to avoid Anti-SLAPP laws that is known as forum shopping. Forum Shopping is the antithesis of Good Faith. This motion clearly admits Forum Shopping, so it is doubly embarrassing.

While on the subject of good faith, NBC Universal could easily have filed a Motion for a change of venue. By getting a different venue Larry Klayman couldn't represent Dean, and let's face it DC is awkward in this case as Dean is primarily from Minnesota, Maddow Broadcasts from New York, and  NBC Universal is also out of New York.

It takes an Idiot...

When you are trying to get relief from judgment on the basis that the judge was prejudice it would behoove a litigant to do anything but call the judge a "woman scorned." It makes you seem like a jackass. Really why would you write that, all it can do is show that you were being unreasonable. Seriously, fuck, that's stupid.

!ekorts regna na dah tsuj I !ti nmaD

Ok. I'm better. When you are trying to claim prejudice, you yourself do not want to seem in the least bit prejudice. This is kindergarten shit.

It's a (Gay) Trap!

This is not Fox News. The Gay conspiracy doesn't exist. So stop it. It only hurts your argument as you seem unreasonable.


In the end it's real simple, the judge was in her right to order Attorneys' Fees. If you bring a suit forward only to drop it right before commencement you are wasting people's time and money.  What the Judge ordered was fair and reasonable. She could have gone a mile further and order deeper sanctions for wasting not only the defendants' money and time, but also the courts. She may also have been able to sanction Klayman (DC Bar Rule 3.2). This complaint is obviously frivolous because the plaintiff could barely state a claim. Dropping the case seconds before trial to pursue the same lousy case in a different court is a waste of time and money. Money the defendants should not pay.

All in all I am a little comfuzeded by this whole case.  I thought both Klayman and Dean were small government conservatives. So why do they need the Government to solve their problems? And why are they now seeking help from the largest, most gay loving intrusive level of government?

Homersexual Agenda

The Homosexual Agenda a brief history.

In the landmark case Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003), Antonin Scalia wrote:

Today’s opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.

The problem with relying solely on group morality in a constitutional democracy to dictate the laws is that the constitution often interferes with the group morality. When we have penumbras such as privacy and the equal protection clause discrimination based on morality will be . Another way to put it is that our morals are eclipsed by our laws. The large distinction between morality and law is the concept of harm. Many things that are immoral are harmful: murder, theft, breaking-people's-legs. Other things are "immoral" but are not harmful and not illegal: eating bacon, sloppy gay sex, being a douche, etc. There is also another category of harmful but not immoral: jaywalking, speeding, being too awesome.

So obviously there are somethings that are harmful and immoral and those definitively should be against the law. But it is sloppy to say that because something is immoral that it is also illegal. And for good reason. Who's morality are we going to use? And what principles are behind that chosen morality?

The legal approach has its goods and its bads; however, the concept of harm as the basis of all laws is rather non-arbitrary, when compared to morality.

The moral approach is highly arbitrary particularly among religious zealots and literalists. They probably claim that they are the ones who definitely are not arbitrary since they follow every word of the bible, rationality be damned. But that is the problem, what rational reason is there for something to be illegal or immoral without harm. In the bible it often justifies morality by saying it displeases God. Eating cilantro displeases me; however, I don't consider it to be a sin nor think it should be illegal.

Here are somethings that the bible says are immoral:

Shellfish
Pork
Peeing while standing up (seriously 1 Samuel 25:22)
Gay Sex
Wearing Boyfriend-Jeans
Girls wearing pants
Men wearing skirts (Sorry Scotland)
Adultery (Punishable by Stoning)
Sex for Pleasure
Hair cuts
Palm reading
Leather
Polyester
Mixed Fabrics
Having Acne
Not Washing your Shower
Tattoos
Worshiping the wrong god (funny how that's every religion)
Saying Abracadabra
Forgetting the Incense
Simply wanting new things

Arguing with your parents (death penalty)
Wear gold
Shaving
Marring Foreigners
Doing anything on Sunday (goodbye football) 

And here are somethings the bible conveniently forgets:


Slavery
War
Homelessness
Illiteracy
Outsourcing
Tax Evasion (well Jesus said not to evade them)
Land Annexation
Burning of Fossil Fuels
Genocide
Over Population
Pre E-ZPass Toll Booths (evilest of all things)



So why is homosexuality immoral to some, and what is this Scalia-called homosexual agenda?

Morality is arbitrary and often based on religious text or philosophical work based on religious tenants. (As Nietzsche would say in today's parlance "suck it Marx.") Some people guess that religious texts are ancient survival guides and nation building manuals. So in that context perhaps then there was some rationality, but it no longer is applicable.

The homosexual agenda is not some scary menace. There is no conspiracy to convert teens into gays. There is a legal defense fund called Lambda Legal, the Human Rights Campaign, and organizations like the SPLC.

These organizations promote issues that actually matter in the lives of gay people and have little impact on the rest of Americans.

The Real Homosexual Agenda's Issues:

1. The right to marry whomever a person chooses.
2. The right to stick it in any consenting hole.
3. The right to continue Health Insurance in cases of HIV.
4. To be protected from acts of physical violence and destruction of property.

Wie schrecklich! It is so menacing to want to marry a person and have legal rights, or to not be arrested for having consenting sex in your own house (or blackmailed for it), or not lose your health insurance from catching a communicable disease, or to ask the police to actually investigate and catch criminals.


Anyway, I was trying to think of how a hick would say homosexual, and I came up with the word homersexual. And then I thought of a gay Homer Simpson, so this is today's disturbing photoshop:

Liam '12

Freedom Just For Me

Newton After Einstein

Einstein did not disprove Newtonian Physics, rather he improved them. It is simplistic to think of Quantum Mechanics as a revolutionary force that disproved three hundred years of thought.  I have in the past indulged myself in this myth because of the glorious rush of the revolutionary feeling and the joy that concepts are not fixed and definite. It is as easy to say everyone in the past was wrong about practically everything, as it is easy to say that the past was far better than today.

To say Newton has been disproved or wrong is an error. For one thing in Newton's Principia he never claims to understand what gravity is or how it works.  He shows the mathematical principals behind gravity. Since he never claims to understand what gravity is there is nothing to disprove.  Einstein was only able to improve the equations, and through quantum mechanics physicists have been able to begin to understand what gravity is and how it works.

Einstein's Field Equation states:






This formula solved Mercury's seemingly erratic trajectory, and changed forever the way humans understand the universe. On a solar eclipse we can see light from stars bends around the sun. Newton's theory doesn't give us that possibility.
   
In his Principia, Newton states:



Through a long series of equations involving scalar curvature and tensors, and other calculus based jargon Newton's formula exists in the Einstein Field Equation. I don't fully understand what the entirety of the mathematics; so showing the full math would be useless, but you can look it up for yourself.

The main practical problem with Newton's Theory is that it is not truly universal. In fact Newton's Laws can still be used today, for ordinary earth bound applications. However, the lack of universality does not make his work untrue, and thus it does not mean that the Quantum Mechanics revolution disproved Newton. Newton's universe is only a stock image or a subset of a greater universe.

A bit of the defrocking of Newton comes from the Historical concept of Newton the man. How history came to define Newton as a rationalist, the father of calculus, and a brilliant scientist is wrapped up in the French Revolution.   The man Isaac Newton was born 1643 and died in 1727.  He was an alchemist and an empiricist, and his Christian theology was centered around disproving the great scourge of Spinozaism (or that is my sense from reading the Clarke-Leibniz letters.) During the French Revolution Newton's biography was scrubbed clean of all things non-rational. During this time he transformed into something more French and more Post-Enlightenment-Era appropriate: a deist, a naturalist, and a rationalist. The somewhat modern invention of Newton created by the Sorbonne placed Newton on a pedestal.  No longer is Newton a fallible man but a romanticized scientist.

After Einstein came along this once inescapable force, was turned on its head.  Time and space are one phenomenon which can be bent by matter via gravity.  It must have seemed so alien compared to "shit falls to the ground when dropped." And with Einstein, another god was seemingly disproved. But once again these two theories are not contradictory, but fit together.

It will be interesting to see in one hundred years how Newton is viewed.  It will be more interesting to see how Einstein is view in light of String Theory and other advancements Einstein only could have wished to theorize. With the discovery of the Higgs-boson it would appear we have pushed the era of Einstein to its outer limits. (Well science still needs to find the graviton.) It will be interesting to see whether another god falls to the history of time or if humanity has finally accepted a constantly changing universe. It doesn't look good for Einstein, as his name is synonymous with genius, and people have already forgotten that Einstein did not stand alone (Heisenberg, Bohr, David Hilbert).


As a child I had a mantra:

All ideas are simply waiting to be proven false.

Now as a man I realize that all concepts which appear true are awaiting a deeper nuance.



Liam '12

Freedom Just For Me

Happy No Taxation without Representation Day

Too hot to eat; that phrase is not recognized by the American idiom. So go stuff your orifice of patriotism with all the meat products and potato salad you can find.

Heads up. Rumors started pouring out a few days ago that CERN discovered a new subatomic particle which may be the Higgs-Boson Particle.  If it is indeed a new particle either way it will change the notions the universe (if it’s the Higgs-Boson it comfirms many previously unconfirmed hypotheses and aspects of quantum mechanics will now be theory; if it is a new unpredicted particle then all bets are off.)  I think the next article I write will be on Newton after Einstein where I regurgitate a Hegelian Deconstruction of Newtonian Theory after the era of Quantum Mechanics.

Oh yeah, and remember Free DC.

Liam ‘12

A Tale of the Map

This is a post that I will probably repost about once a month from now until the subject matter is solved. America is a Federalist Society.  We have a large powerful Federal Government balance by individual state governments.  When working properly, Federalism has one massive advantage over other political systems: a system of trial and error.  States often share similar problems and common questions of governance. The strength of federalism comes when states with similar problems come up with different solutions.  After time passes, the nation as a whole can see how the two varying solutions have worked to solve the particular problem.

That's how federalism should work, anyway.  I have a feeling that it does not often happen. Stubbornness, pride, regionalism, and ignorance can prevent states from enacting proven measures. Furthermore, a practical solution to a perceived problem may interfere with a special interest. Vast amounts of wealth can be spent to change people's beliefs.

A few months ago, when the Republicans were in primary mode, a mini-controversy erupted around the issue of contraceptives. Primarily that they need to change the composition of the Supreme Court so that Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965) can be overturned. (Nothing says freedom quite like having your right to privacy utterly stripped away.) I was shock to hear this in the modern era, since I knew that Texas has both a high Teen Pregnancy rate and a poor sex education program.  It was even more disturbing to hear contraceptives being discussed, in general and not only for teens, because I'm an adult and I will place a piece of latex on my penis and have sex with whomever I want. It is insane to think otherwise, especially by people who claim to champion freedom.

While the Federal Government has a role in Sex Education, primarily through Federal funds distributed to states, the majority of the policies come from the state and local levels.A state can choose to implement comprehensive, abstinence only sex education, or leave it up to local school districts (Texas.)

The following is a series of maps, the majority created by the CDC, which shows  general trends in America based on Health, Education, and Socio-Economics.

The first set of four maps show the basic sexual health of the nation, at a state or county level.

Teen Pregnancy Rates:

Syphilis Rates:

Gonorrhea Map:

Speaking of Sex Education, here is what I think should be shown. It would defiantly help lower teen pregnancy, raise tolerance and awareness. And evangelical christian types really show love my method as it is a perverted version of abstinence only.

I'm joking of course. Obviously nobody should be pressured into being gay, just as nobody should be pressured into being straight.  Attraction is attraction: if you're gay you're gay, if you're bi you're bi, if you're straight then you won't have any fun you're straight. Oh yes, also always wear a condom, always! There is no acceptable reason to not wear one during recreational sex. And if you are having sloppy gay sex, use a non-oil based lube. I digress.

Moving on to something, much, much more serious, here is a map of America based on Heart Disease.
Heart Disease Map:

For shame America, for shame. How can Wisconsin, the land of beer and cheese, be one of the healthier states when it comes to heart disease.. For shame.

Here is what the up coming generation will look like.

High School Obesity:

Compared to heart disease and adult obesity, the government can play a much greater role, in a much simpler fashion in High Schools. From extended PhysEd to low calorie lunch options, home economics, and health courses, states can lower the obesity rate among teens.  Furthermore we can use federalism to find the best solution.

High School Graduation Rates:

Bachelors Degrees:

Prison Population:

Violent Crime Rate:

I was planning to show a Hate Crimes map; however, since it is up to the individual states to define what a hate crime is and to report them to the FBI, I decided to forgo a map. According to the FBI's data center in 2010, Mississippi had one agency  reporting hate crimes while Iowa had fourteen.  Mississippi claimed to have only 11 hate crimes (they claimed only 1 in 2009) while Iowa claimed 14 cases.  

I really have my doubts about the accuracy, since as I said before states define and report hate crimes. Mississippi and Alabama have a long history of hate crimes and a failure to prosecute them.  I question the accuracy for another anecdotal reason; I haven't ever heard of a movie called Iowa Burning. 

SPLC also claims  that there are currently 41 known active hate groups in Mississippi, while there are only 4 in Iowa. But unfortunately this methodology could easily be flawed, since Wyoming, the birth place of hate crime laws has only 2 reported hate groups.

And to be truthful I really am disappointed with the honesty of the numbers, because I wanted to use those statistics to take an honest look at hate crime policies in the US.  I am not fully convinced that the progressive is necessarily the best practical way to solve hate crimes.

For as much as I joke, name call, and argue there is one thing I will not belittle. Perhaps the most telling of all is this one map.

Poverty in America:

 

If there were an omniscient, omnipotent, and all loving god, I cannot think of any greater issue, any greater image that would disturb this god than the poverty map.

 

Maps 1-6, 11 come from the CDC; 7,8 come from the Census; 9,10 come from Wikipedia.

This country and our individual states can only improve when the American people educate themselves. Ask questions of politicians, ask question of journalist, just ask questions. People lie, statistics can be manipulate, and I could be entirely wrong on my assertions, but given what I have I believe we can find a solution to our greatest problems and move forward.

Liam '12

Freedom Just For Me