Happy 2006!!!

2005 hasn't been a great year. It started with a devastating tsunami, several people died in the London bombings, hurricanes killed hundreds and shamed the entire nation. Problems in Iraq worsened. On a personal level, I left Washington D.C.--a place I love--at the end of 2004 and have spent 2005 mainly in Kansas. I ran into several problems trying to finish up grad school and had a couple mental break downs. But I'm confident 2006 is going to be better. As I sit surrounded by boxes in my apartment, all I can think of are all the great people I've met in the past 2 1/2 years. I'm going to miss my friends in Kansas (I'm getting ready to move to Wyoming.) And I've come to this grand life conclusion: No matter where you are or what you're doing, it's the people who matter. I'm so grateful for everyone in my life. No matter how bad or good things get, we (as human beings) have to remember to always look out for each other. Kindness is what matters.

I love puppies

Aren't these little guys cute? They're from a NYTimes story about dog products.

Kansas is not crazy...

...But these people are.

They'll be voted out soon and then we'll go back to the old standards. It's just this stupid back-and-forth that makes the state look moronic.

People in Lawrence don't seem to be like the rest of Kansas. At least the educated crowd are pissed off by this. That's good.

I love when this happens.

Thesis in!

I turned the final draft of my thesis in on Friday! I still have to go through the defense and I'm sure I'll have to make some changes, but it's still a great feeling. I think it turned out OK. I've lost a lot of the excitement I first had for the project, but hopefully I did well enough to get the heck out of here!!

Yeah!!!!

Scalito

I haven't had a chance to read everything about Alito, but I am really disappointed Bush nominated another white man. How disappointing. And, of course, he's Princeton/Yale. What an old boys club. How annoying it is to us who are "out of the club."

I think I would have been happier with a more conservative woman or minority. Maybe that's superficial and wrong, but that's the way I feel.

"We have lost hope"

I'm watching C-SPAN and David Gergen is chairing a panel on "Leadership in America." It's based on research done by U.S. News and World Reports. Howard Schultz, the chairman of Starbucks, just said the "chasm" between the haves and have-nots is so large in this country that most of the have nots "have lost hope." Jeff Canada mentioned that the government is spending $29,000 (I think a year, I could be wrong though...) to keep people in jail. But if he went and asked for $29,000 a year to help poor children, people looked at him like he's crazy. He cited a studying about how scientists used to drop rats in water to study their resiliency. Wanting to find what characteristics the rats that fought to survive had. His reaction was, "why are we dropping rats in water." That's the same thing we're doing with poor children. Dropping them in water and making it very hard for them to survive.

A lot of this panel echoed a lot of what Richard Harwood is looking at. The panel started by giving results of a survey that said most Americans do not trust leaders in general. It's scary. I don't think things are hopeless, but things need to change. But I guess this is what democracy is all about--discussing things and trying to make the world better.

Howard Schultz in interesting. He grew up very poor and is new chairman of one of the largest companies in the world. Read more about him here.

Naples Web site

Rob Curley left the Lawrence Journal-World and has taken over at the Naples (Fla.) newspaper. I think the Hurricane Wilma coverage shows the willingness of the newspaper to move to convergence. I think this is the future of journalism. But, more importantly, it is just pretty cool to look at. I love well put together news Web sites. They make me happy.

This makes me furious

According to this article, the only abortion clinic in my hometown, Springfield (Mo.), has shut down. This makes me very, very angry. I don't "endorse" abortions, but a woman should be able to get one if she so chooses. I just don't like people imposing their opinions on others this way. The doctors who perform them in Springfield are scared. And scaring doctors is just plain stupid.

The Right to Life guy said, "demand obviously is not enough for them to weather the storm." But the clinic did 1,500 procedures a year. I'd call that demand.

This type of thing is making it really easy for me to make the decision to never move home. I basically want to move as far from the Bible Belt as I possibly can. I can't believe it. What's wrong with these people? The last time I checked, abortion was still legal in this country.

You know, with education and birth control we probably wouldn't even need abortions. But these religious people are so nutty they don't support either of those options either. People are going to have sex. If they don't use birth control, the woman may get pregnant. The woman may not want to be pregnant. Nobody should decide what happens with that woman's body other than that woman. I don't like abortions. I would probably never have one. But they need to be an option. Now, the crazies in SW Missouri are going to require scared, young women to drive at least four hours to do something that is every bit their right. This is a bad topic. I don't usually like to write or talk about it. But this story made me mad.

DeLay's mug shot

Is it just me, or does Tom DeLay look way too happy in this mug shot?

I guess he's trying to look defiant and confident in his innocence, but do you really want to flash a 100-watt smile at a booking?

Harriet Miers Take 2

OK, last week I wrote that it was "intellectual snobbery" that was bashing Harriet Miers. I may have to take that back. She's not been very forthright. And this 'she'll vote the way the President wants her to' is really annoying.

She needs to talk a little bit more I think.

Loneliness

Rich Harwood come spoke to our class a couple of weeks ago. He said some very interesting things that I've been ruminating over.

We have built up barriers to other people and most of us are now very lonely.

I was just out walking/jogging near my apartment. While I was walking I noticed a couple of things. A) Even though it was an absolutely beautiful day, I was the only one out walking. B) In most of the cars that passed me, there was only one passenger. Other than the concern of mine about people wasting gas, I started to think about the barriers we have built. Nobody walks places in American suburbia. There's really not much to see. Cookie-cutter houses. Cars that smell bad. Safety issues. Cars will run you over because the drivers are not used to seeing people actually out walking.

I talked to a friend of mine last night. She grew up in a large European city. The first day she came to America (a mid-size Midwest town) she went for a walk wanting to explore her new home. In the process, she had two or three people ask her if she needed a ride and a lot of strange looks. People just don't walk in that town. They drive everywhere.

Not only do people drive around by themselves (adding to the isolation), the likelihood they would actually bump into someone and have a conversation with one of the fellow frantic drivers is very small. People are not longer people. They're a green Taurus. A red BMW. A smelly old Ford truck.

Maybe as more and more people populate this earth (last count was over six billion,) we will continue to find ways to isolate ourselves. But I don't know how good that is for our psyche.

Harwood spoke about Americans not trusting or knowing their neighbors. About watching television 14 hours a day. In our lives, it's normal not to actually talk with another person. But this lack of human interaction is not satisfying. They are unhappy. People don't trust other people. They don't trust media. They don't trust government. Maybe it's because we've grouped institutions of people together to make them larger than they actually are, and forgot that we're all just humans.

Harriet Miers

OK, I don't have a real strong opinion on whether Harriet Miers should be confirmed or not, but what I do see is intellectual snobbery running amuck. She didn't go to Harvard. OH NO!!! There's no way a person who worked hard, didn't have thousands of dollars to spend on an Ivy league education, and showed up for work every day could EVER become a Supreme Court justice. Ninety percent of this country did not go to an Ivy League school. Should people who didn't go to one of these schools not be represented in government? SMU is not that shabby of a place. She has done well. She is obviously smart. She wouldn't be in the position she is now in if she was not gifted. Yes, being a Supreme Court justice is one of the most intellectually-challenging positions in the country. But, why can't someone who's not part of the "Ivy League gang" be one? It might be good to have someone "normal" on the Supreme Court. The founders never said anything about going to a particular school in setting prerequisites for our leaders. Abraham Lincoln never even went to college.

I look forward to her confirmation hearings. I think she'll impress (and surprise) several of the intellectual snobs.

Only Anderson understands!!!

I have this really nasty habit of biting my fingernails. I've tried everything to stop. My new thing is getting acrylic nails put on. They're kind of annoying. I have to go get them "filled in" about every two weeks because my nails grow fast. While they're very strong, I still sometimes want to bite them right off!! There's just something powerful about it. While I've always been ashamed of this habit, this Anderson Cooper piece made me feel better.

Oh my...

"You walk around it and you can't help but smile."

Conservatives are corrupting this great movie...

I loved the "March of the Penguins" movie. But conservatives are now taking the movie and using it for their own agendas. It makes me sick.

Cool blog

The owners of the Moxie Cinema in my hometown (Springfield, Mo.) are keeping a blog that shows the progress of the theater. It's actually a pretty cool blog.

Bad Science writing

From The Guardian

"There is one university PR department in London that I know fairly well - it's a small middle-class world after all - and I know that until recently, they had never employed a single science graduate. This is not uncommon. Science is done by scientists, who write it up. Then a press release is written by a non-scientist, who runs it by their non-scientist boss, who then sends it to journalists without a science education who try to convey difficult new ideas to an audience of either lay people, or more likely - since they'll be the ones interested in reading the stuff - people who know their way around a t-test a lot better than any of these intermediaries. Finally, it's edited by a whole team of people who don't understand it. You can be sure that at least one person in any given "science communication" chain is just juggling words about on a page, without having the first clue what they mean, pretending they've got a proper job, their pens all lined up neatly on the desk.

Of course a system like that will cock up. The proof is in Bad Science, every week. See you in Berlin.

· Bad Science will be continuing in the Guardian next week"

Oh the problems hyphens cause!!

It's: The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Okay!?!?

Pictures from Australia

Here are some of my pictures from Australia! Take a look, let me know what you think!