Universities Limit Free Speech to Avoid Hurt Feelings

Universities in the U.S. are so outraged by speech that may offend, that many of them have instituted speech codes outlawing speech that "hurts people's feelings." FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, strangely enough, is fighting battles all over the U.S. to remove isolated little dog pens where students may enjoy freedom of speech as guaranteed by the Constitution. These so-called "Free Speech Zones" are an attempt by university administrations to limit conflict, and while perhaps motivated by concerns that minorities are not subject to racial, religious or other harrassment, many are simply attempts to move intense dialog off the campus proper. However, the campus proper is actually a good place for intense dialog. But Americans raised on violent television may stupidly equate harsh rhetoric or disagreeable discourse to physical assault and sue for emotional distress, post-talking stress syndrome, or hit somebody in the face, depending on which channels they most frequently watch. For a good lesson in intense debate, check out the British Parliament debates on YouTube where good humor seems to alleviate some of the rough edges.

Stupid Drivers, Smart Cars

The stupider drivers get, the smarter cars must become, if one subscribes to the EU version of our transportation future. Its Smart Vehicle Technology Quiz takes the driver through a series of 11 transportation technologies that attempt to compensate for bad driving. If you start to go to sleep while driving, the "Driver Drowsiness Monitoring and Warning System" will wake you up. It checks your heartbeat, eyelids and head position and sounds an alarm if you doze off. Drive too fast at night? Instead of the old idea of not overdriving your headlights, smart vehicle technology would equip you with a night vision system so you can see far off in the distance, travel at blinding speed without blinding oncoming drivers in your high beams. Drive too fast most of the time? Electronic obstacle and collision avoidance systems are for you. ABS, Electronic Brake Assist, Electronic Stability Control and Adaptive Cruise Control will keep the stupid driver out of trouble. And if all else fails, stupid's accident will be called in by his car -- using the EU's mandated eCall system -- along with his GPS coordinates.

These systems will save lives, because there are stupid drivers behind the wheel. Drivers who drink, text message, watch videos, drive too fast for conditions, tailgate, swerve in and out of lanes and so forth. But I don't like driving a car that's smarter than I am and that makes it OK to drive badly. We already have cars that park themselves because drivers are too lazy to learn to parallel park. The state protects us with mandatory seat-belt laws, mandatory motorcycle helmet laws, mandatory insurance etc.

The "freedom of the open road" may soon become just another train trip -- the car is in charge, and the former drivers are just along for the ride.

Who Lives in a Pineapple Under the Sea?

In the trailer for the new Jay Leno show, Jay is doing his "Jaywalk" asking people questions. "Who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?" he asked a woman. She didn't know. "Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?" he asked. "Spongebob Squarepants," she said, with a big smile. A nice woman, cheerful, pleasant but ignorant, like a lot of us.

Spongebob, Jimmy Neutron and Futurama are creative and funny. Stewart and Colbert aren't. But a democracy of nice, cheerful, pleasant but ignorant people isn't a democracy at all. It's a made-to-order consumer society attracted and repelled at will by media, politicians, public relations and propaganda. The more pushed and pulled we are, the more cynical we get, the more appealing Stewart and Colbert become, and the less creative and cheerful things seem.

At the bottom of the pile are the "Oh just screw it" druggies, using everything from pot to Prozac, totally the effect of their environment and the chemicals in their pill bottles and crack pipes. As the society rattles down the tubes and flops into the basement you get California's bill to legalize marijuana, you get an avalanche of ads for anti-depressants, "male enhancement" products, etc. And like Spongebob -- "absorbent and yellow and porus are we."

The Stupid Person's Guide to Life: Shopping

If you feel powerful and wealthy carrying around a credit card with plenty of room for charges – get over it! Your financial health is determined by your income, expenditures and assets, not by a card. Credit cards do give a margin of security in an emergency, but they pull the rug out from such common-sense security measures as saving money, following a budget, living within one’s means, etc. Those things are hard to do, especially when one is living in a dream world of making minimum monthly credit card payments while purchasing more and more luxury items.

Luxuries

Luxury items are things that aren’t basic to your survival. Food, shelter, exercise, reliable transportation, a rainy day fund, insurance, ability to communicate to friends and family, being productive and having goals -- those are basic to survival. An exercise machine, bottled water, specialty ice cream, mochas and lattes are luxuries. Delusion enters in when luxuries – the exercise machine and bottled water – are justified because, “I’ll be healthier.” If the water in your town is suspect, get a faucet filter. If you want to run, run on the sidewalk.

Stopping by a drive-through Starbuck’s is a luxury. If you like to drink hot stimulants, make your own coffee or tea and buy it in large enough quantities so the unit price is low. Still a luxury, but don’t delude yourself that “If I stop for a triple-shot mocha, I’ll be more alert and get that promotion.” Hard work gets promotions, not caffeine and delusions.

Oral Entertainment

Food is necessary for the body’s health and energy. You could live quite well on rice, a little fish or meat, and soy sauce. Millions of people do it. Some foods are more properly classified as oral entertainment. Coffee, tea, sugar, spices, alcoholic drinks, desserts, are all entertainment, most of which have an adverse effect on the body’s health and energy level. There’s nothing wrong with a bowl of ice cream or a cup of coffee – just don’t delude yourself into thinking that you are partaking of nutrition. You are entertaining the body and yourself. That’s all. And if you have a fat bottom and pant going up stairs, don’t blame Ben and Jerry.

Three Thousand Chinese Kids Get Electroshock for “Internet Addiction”

More than 3,000 Chinese kids who spent too much time on the Internet -- defined by the Chinese government as more than six hours per day -- have been forced into a mental hospital and treated with electric shock and psychotropic drugs by a psychiatrist known as “Uncle Yang,” according to media reports in the Beijing News and UK’s Guardian. But Dr. Yang Yongxin – who runs an Internet addiction treatment center in a Chinese mental hospital – can no longer continue the practice under an order from the Chinese Ministry of Health which said that electro convulsive therapy has no foundation in research.

Adopt a Toilet

This morning's news was grim: budget cuts have forced the closure of city Parks Department restrooms. A 35 percent budget cut this year following a 15 percent cut last year means layoffs and not enough staff to clean restrooms. The "people who are against everything," in their infinite wisdom, advocate urinating in the bushes and on people's lawns. This could be hazardous to health in more ways than one.

Instead, I suggest the neighbors get together and "adopt a toilet" in their neighborhood. One neighbor gets the keys, and a page of cleaning instructions and signs up other neighbors on a schedule. It's not a new idea -- citizens have been "adopting a highway" for some time, cleaning up trash along roadways. So instead of chasing a urinator off the lawn with a nine iron, a resident can pitch in on a rotation with other neighbors and keep the toilets open and the neighborhood clean.

Culture Wars: On June 12 Pull the Plug on Television for Good!

If you want to check out American civilization at its worst, then watch television. Flip through the channels to see the stupid, degraded, petty, dull, ugly, perverted violent chaos of crassness and morbidity that passes for programming, punctuated constantly by advertising for drugs, food, weight loss drugs, sex drugs or magical household implements that make everything fun -- even appearing on the screen during the program. It’s only by carefully following the program guides does one encounter the creative, witty, bright and uplifting. And in each and every basic cable or dish package you are forced to get the obesity channel, the sex channel, and the buy-some-crap channel. There’s no café plan. It’s so bad that even hard-bitten right-wing crustaceans are reluctantly donating to public television.

“Civilization,” said Timothy Leary “is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.” Leary -- the Harvard professor who brought a CIA-sponsored LSD test into the mainstream and helped an entire generation go psychotic -- should certainly know. It was he who suggested we “turn on, tune in and drop out.” Leary had his head frozen at death and -- like one of the long-dead presidents in “Futurama” -- awaits a neck-up resurrection. But I digress. And I do like Futurama.

So what to do? Britain makes the taxpayers pay for uplifting programs whether they watch them or not, and the EU now limits television advertising to 12 minutes per hour of content. The U.S. lets the market run things downhill as far as the market will bear. North Korean TV is all about “Dear What’s His Name.” And so it goes.

Why do we put up with it? Well, for one thing, kids have to watch television because they can’t read. Once schools dropped the pretense of education, they were free to move directly into counseling and dispensing antidepressants to kids who can’t read, spell or do math. Now that schools have dropped physical education, they can use all those gymnasiums to conduct obesity clinics, teach political correctness and work on a positive self image.

If I hate television so much, why not just turn it off? Good idea! I think I will. I’m taking advantage of television’s digital makeover to pull the plug for good on June 12. If you find yourself yelling at the television, just reach around and pull the plug from the wall. Come on, you can do it! As Timothy Leary didn’t say: “Turn off, tune out, drop in.”