If you are a minority in America this morning...

I’m sorry.

Like most people I know, I went to bed last night and woke up this morning sick and frightened. There have been many political candidates I disagreed with and even believed destructive over the years, but this is not that. I woke up to discover that I’d been crying in my sleep, something that has happened only a few times in my life and not for many years.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next, or how I’m supposed to interact with the people around me. My concern isn’t just the chaos and violence that is surely right around the corner, but also this horrible thing I have learned about the people I encounter in daily life.

But, I am a white professional. If I choose to, I can simply shut up and I will be safe and accepted among the people who voted to microchip you, deport you, bar you from an entire country based on the color of your skin or where you were born or the religion you practice.

I know my fear and uncertainty can’t possibly scratch the surface of yours.

I also know I can’t eliminate your fear and uncertainty. It’s well-founded. It may keep you alive. But, I do want to say two things that I hope you will hear and believe in.

The first is that you are not alone. For every person standing behind you in the grocery line who believes that Donald Trump said what we were all thinking, there is at least one who clearly sees that you’re a valuable human being who, in the most fundamental ways, is just like us. There are millions of people of all races and religions and ages and educational levels and shoe sizes who are prepared to fight for you.

The second is please, please don’t lash out. I understand the inclination, if you’re experiencing it. I think I might want to smash some things myself, if I didn’t feel so completely depleted. You will undoubtedly be provoked in a thousand ways in the days to come. But, those who provoke you know exactly what they’re doing. They want you arrested. They want viral videos that are edited to cut out the provocation and show only your angry response. They know there are millions of people in the neutral zone right now who can be turned against you.

Don’t let them frame the discussion. Don’t let them manipulate you into becoming the poster child for their campaign to amp up the hate, to mischaracterize everyone whose skin color matches yours or who wears the same type of clothing you do.

Watch your back, but do it with your head held high, and never forget that no matter how it looks right now, there are more of us than there are of them.

Frontier Internet: Incompetence or Fraud?

ISP options are limited in my rural neck of the woods, and I was delighted when I learned, back in February, that high speed service was now available through Frontier Communications. Unlike many people I've seen complaining in social media, I've had zero problems with the service itself--my connection is quick and consistent.

Unfortunately, that's the only thing that's going smoothly in my relationship with Frontier.

Trying to Get Frontier Internet Service

I nearly gave up before I ever signed up for service, because the first person I got on the telephone when I called the sales number declined to give me information about available packages. Instead, she asked me a few questions about my needs and then told me she would put in an order for the best package for me. After explaining three times that I wanted to know what my options were and make a decision, I'd still only heard about two packages, but she'd said, "So, I'll process this order for you.." at least four times.

One of the questions I couldn't get answered during that call was whether there would be an installation charge. The rep told me that information wouldn't be available to her until she processed the order. She was a little surprised and more than a little annoyed that I wasn't willing to order service before hearing the costs associated with the order, and eventually I told her that it didn't seem that Frontier was the right company for me and got off the phone.

My options are limited, though, and a friend had recently ordered service from Frontier and encountered no such problems, so I thought maybe I'd just had bad luck with the person who answered my call.

I went online, where information about the various packages was available, and chose the one I wanted. When I got to the end of my order, a message popped up telling me that I had to call Frontier to complete my order.

I called, and the guy on the phone promptly started in again with trying to push me into the package the initial rep had been pushing--even though I'd already put in an order for a different package. Finally, we resolved that and this rep confirmed that there was no installation charge and gave me an installation date ten days hence.

Installation Charge Fraud

A day or two after the call, I received an email confirmation from Frontier. I almost missed it, because at that point I had received approximately half a dozen "action required" emails from Frontier that all said the same thing--that I needed to call them to schedule an installation date and should ignore the email if I'd already done so.

This email, though, contained a breakdown of my order...including a $99.99 installation charge.

I called and the representative said it was an error and claimed to remove the charge.

My friend who'd ordered service just before me said he wasn't having any problems with customer service, but warned me to watch out for an installation charge--they'd told him there wouldn't be one, but billed him for one anyway.

Despite their representations, I knew there was a chance that $99.99 charge was going to show up on my first bill. It didn't, though: the installation charge on my first bill was $149.99.

Again, I called. Again, I was told that the installation charge had been posted in error and would be removed. This time, though, there was a twist: the company's computers were down, and the correction couldn't be made that day. The representative promised to call me back as soon as she'd accessed my account and made the correction, probably the next day.

Eight days later, when I hadn't heard anything, I followed up with another call. The rep on that call told me he'd reversed the charge, but when I got off the phone I realized that he hadn't given me a new balance.

I called back to get my new balance and the new rep was quite confused. He wasn't showing the charge reversed, and said that the credit was too large to have been processed without supervisor approval. Thus, he was able to submit a request for the credit, but couldn't actually give me a new balance.

We agreed on an estimate that I'd pay for the first bill, and he said that he was noting the account so that if I received a late charge based on any discrepancy, it would be removed.

Today, I received my second bill...along with a disconnect notice based on the unpaid installation charge.

Missed Installation Appointments and Poor Communication

The ten days passed and I stayed home all day and the installer never came. When I called, it took quite a bit of research on Frontier's end to uncover the fact that they'd discovered that I couldn't get the speed I'd ordered in my area. So, rather than calling to tell me that and offer alternative options, they'd just cancelled the installation appointment (and not notified me).

They offered me a much lower speed (down from 24 mbps to 6 mbps) and a lot of confusion ensued when I asked about the 12 mbps option on their website. Finally, they decided they could offer me 12 and scheduled another installation date...another ten days out.

Nearly a week later, I received a call from Frontier letting me know that the service I'd originally ordered wasn't available and asking whether I'd like the 6 mbps option--it was as if the whole conversation in which my new installation date had been scheduled had never happened.

Ultimately, the service did get installed and it works fine; I haven't had a single problem with Internet access or speed.

However, in the two months since I started trying to get the service hooked up, I've had to make more than ten telephone calls totaling more than three hours of my time to resolve two issues--and one of them has still not been resolved. And, according to the latest billing, they're going to disconnect my service on April 30 for not having paid the installation charge four different representatives have assured me I didn't owe...plus a $7.50 late charge on that balance.

With the exception of the early sales people, everyone I've talked to has been helpful and pleasant. But, that's as far as it goes. They smile, apologize, make promises and then hang up the phone and absolutely nothing changes.

Screw "It Gets Better"

Don’t get me wrong. I respect the “It Gets Better” movement. I love some of the videos. And although I know that they were born as a means of support for gay teenagers, I think they have much broader applications…because middle school and high school suck for a lot of kids.

But, why do we accept that?

Long before there was an “It Gets Better” campaign, parents were commiserating with their kids that middle school was horrible for everyone, but it ended and before long it would be a fading memory. Teachers and administrators rolled their eyes and talked about how “difficult” adolescents were, feeling more sorry for themselves than for the 13-year-old girls contemplating suicide in the back of their classrooms.

I heard those platitudes when I was in middle school in the late 70s, and I was still hearing them when I rescued my youngest child from 8^th grade in 2009.  In thirty years, the best we’ve come up with is a video series that reassures our kids that the hell we’re forcing them through won’t last forever.

If you lived in an apartment building where your twelve-year-old was routinely bullied in the hallways, to the point that he was depressed and his whole personality was changing, would you give him a hug and remind him that in six short years he could move out on his own and get away from this? If you worked in an environment that made you physically ill every morning, if you stepped off of the commuter train each day kind of hoping you’d be hit by a car so you didn’t actually have to enter that building, would you keep that job for three or five or six years?

I suspect not—at least, not if there were any way possible for you to change it. Yet, we accept the high-stress, abusive, soul-destroying environment that is public school for adolescents and teenagers without a blink.  We agree that it’s horrible, nod sympathetically, and tell our kids to hurry up and get in the car so that we can deliver them to its doors once again. And, we’re thankful when something like the “It Gets Better” series appears to give them hope for the future.

That’s our job.

And we don’t show them that there’s hope for the future by encouraging them to quietly serve their time in purgatory, to curl in on themselves and learn to protect themselves from the world and hide who they are until they can escape that environment. We don’t show them hope by telling them they’ll be happy when they’re twenty-five and expecting that to be enough, expecting them to even know what that means. We show them that the future can be better by showing them how to change it, by working our asses off to make the school environment better or by removing them from it and showing them that better world instead of just promising that it will come along one day.

According to the Centers for Disease Control’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, 15.8% of teens had seriously considered suicide in the 12 months preceding the survey. In fact, 5,400 7^th to 12^th graders in the United States attempt suicide every single day. And we wait for it to pass? Hope they’re not successful, or that our kids are the ones who escape (and the hell with the ones who don’t make it)? Because, you know, that’s just how the teen years are.

Title notwithstanding, I mean no disrespect to the folks behind “It Gets Better.”  I think it’s fantastic that successful people from many walks of life have invested the time and emotional energy to share their personal stories and give our kids enough hope to get them through the worst years of their lives. Now, it’s time that parents, teachers, school administrators and everyone else who controls our children’s destinies get to work making that unnecessary.

The Wal-Mart Parking Lot Scandal from a Very Different Perspective

Recently, a white guy took his mixed-race children to Wal-Mart and all hell broke loose.  Someone--stories seem to vary on whether it was a customer or Wal-Mart security--saw the guy with kids who "didn't seem to fit" and called the police. The police went by his house (immediately) to check it out, determined that everything was okay and went on their way...and then roughly 276,383 bloggers and minor news sources got involved.

If you've ever read this blog before, you probably know that I'm not a racist.  My daughter literally didn't know that there were different races until she went to school and someone else filled her in, despite regularly interacting with people from at least a dozen different countries.  She viewed the differences in the color of their skin no differently than differences in hair color or height.  Probably, had she been in that parking lot, it wouldn't have registered with her that those little girls didn't look like the biological children of the man they were with.  And that's a lovely society to look forward to.  But it's also beside the point.

Discrimination sucks, and I'll be the first to admit that I don't really know what it's like. I've seen it, but as a middle-aged white chick, I haven't felt it.  But it, too, seems to me to be rather beside the point in this case.

What happened is that someone saw very young children with a man they thought perhaps shouldn't have them and acted.  Then, the police immediately followed up to make sure those children were safe.

Yes, it was an inconvenience and probably very stressful for the parents, and I'm not minimizing that.  But look at the bottom line: it's not that a stranger at Wal-Mart was racist because he or she recognized that it's very rare in our society for a white man to have children who appear to be African American.  It's that a stranger at Wal-Mart went out on a limb to make sure that a stranger's children were safe.

Just recently, we saw the escape of three women who had been held captive in Ohio for years.  After the escape, neighbors told us that they'd called the police on more than one occasion, but the investigation was half-hearted at best and those girls grew into women as captive victims.  Not these cops.  They followed up so quickly that they reached the guy's house before he got home himself.

I'm a mother and a grandmother, and I can tell you without reservation that if some stranger had ever called the police because of something out of the ordinary they thought they'd witnessed, and the police ran right over to my house and asked me to prove that those kids were mine or that their mommy knew I had them, I'd offer a sincere thank you.  No, it wouldn't be any fun, but I WANT to live in a society where strangers care about children they think may be in danger and police follow up quickly.

In 1999 (the last year studied), 797,000 children were reported missing.  33,000 of those are believed to be non-family abductions--you know, people like those girls in Ohio or Elizabeth Smart or, worse, young children who are molested, terrorized and then killed.  When those children survive, it's often because something out of the ordinary caught the eye of a stranger, who had the courage to act...and then the police took that person seriously enough to investigate quickly and thoroughly.  Amber Alert reports alone have saved 642 children since the program was implemented.

Our ridiculous knee-jerk reaction to the fact that racial disparity was an element that caught the eye of the reporter in this case has sent a powerful message to society that if you're uncertain, you should keep your damned mouth shut.  It's just not worth the risk to make that call and have the press ranting about what a horrible person you are for weeks on end because you wanted to make sure that kid was okay.  You were probably wrong anyway.

So...mission accomplished.  Society has learned its lesson about getting involved and children may die, but better that than having them saved because someone recognized a racial disparity and wasn't quite sure about it, right?

Visiondecor Customer Service Debacle Continues

A few days ago, I posted about my experience ordering furniture from Visiondecor. In a nutshell, 11 days after I'd paid for the item and 8 days after I'd received an email saying the item had been shipped, I hadn't received the item and no tracking information was showing.  I emailed the company inquiring about the status of the order and received no response for five days.  On the fifth day, three things happened:

• The shipping company advised me that it had received the item on the 8th day after I received the "your item has been shipped" email...coincidentally, the day I sent my follow-up email;
• I posted negative feedback on Amazon; and
• Visiondecor suddenly became interested in talking to me.

I chose not to accept the 50% refund Visiondecor offered me in exchange for removing the negative review on Amazon, and that apparently is outside their usual experience. (No wonder a company with arguably the worst customer service in North America has mostly positive reviews.)  

The same company that couldn't respond to a simple inquiry about order status in a five-day period has contacted me FIVE TIMES to offer a discount in exchange for immediate removal of the review.  I ignored the first two telephone messages and the first email, but after the second email I responded that I was troubled by the fact that the company had been so disinterested in actually solving my problem but was now so actively engaged in getting me to remove the negative feedback.  

Unbelievably, the response (email # 3, included below in its entirety) from Visiondecor consisted almost entirely of detailed instructions for removing my negative feedback from Amazon.

Nadine Alvarado, Oct 10 11:09 (PDT):Hello, I am very sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused. If you do decide to remvoe the feedback below are the instructions to remove the feedback: You will need to log into your Amazon account. Once you are logged in, please click on the "Your Account" tab on the top right hand corner. Once that has loaded to the next page please scroll to the bottom of the page where it shows the "Personalization" section In this section you will see another tab that says "View seller feedback submitted by you" and click on it. On this screen it will show you all feedback submitted for any order by you, and locate the feedback for this specific order and on the right side of that feedback will show a button that says "remove" and you will need to click on that. Once you click on remove, it will ask you the reason for removing and you can choose seller resolved problem and then click remove seller feedback. Once that is done, please let me know right away so that I can issue your refund. Thank you, Nadine

Visiondecor Furniture Offers Payoff to Alter Amazon Review

Bad customer service experiences are hardly rare these days; in fact, most of the time they're not even worth mentioning.  Last month, though, I had one bad enough that it seemed worth taking a few minutes to leave seller feedback at Amazon.com, and what happened next left me feeling worse about Visiondecor Furniture than I had when they'd simply been ignoring me and failing to fill my order.

Here's the backstory, condensed:

On September 11, I ordered a bed frame from Visiondecore through Amazon.com.  I ordered a few other items from other sellers at the same time, including a loft bed/futon combo.  On September 14, I received an email from Visiondecor saying that the item had been shipped and would arrive between September 19 and 21.  By September 17, all of my other items had been delivered.  No tracking information ever appeared on Amazon for the Visiondecor order, and when the item hadn't appeared by September 22, I sent a message to the company inquiring.

I received no response.  However, on Monday the 24th, I received a call from a logistics company wanting to schedule a delivery.  I returned their call on Tuesday morning but didn't get a call back until Wednesday.  When I got that call back on Wednesday, I was advised that they only delivered to my area on Wednesdays, and since they hadn't put the item on the truck that morning (because they hadn't returned my call the day before), I wouldn't be able to get the item until October 10.

When I protested that it had already been ten days since I'd received the "your item has been shipped" email from the seller, the shipper said, "We only received this item on the 22nd."  Prompted by my email, perhaps?

I told the shipper that wasn't acceptable and suggested that she get in touch with her customer and find out what they would like to do to get the item to me sooner, since I had been unable to contact them directly.  Then I went to Amazon and left 1 Star feedback with this comment:

"Worst online ordering experience ever. Seller misrepresented that item had been shipped, it still hasn't arrived 13 days after "has been shipped" email, no tracking information ever appeared. Delivery estimated 9/18-21; it is now 9/27 and no delivery or information. Email to seller has gone unanswered for 5 days."

Within hours I'd received a call back from the shipper saying that the item would be delivered the next day and one from Visiondecor apologizing and offering a discount.  I decided not to return the call to the company until I received the item.  Then, when I did call, it was early afternoon on a weekday and I received a message asking me to call back during regular business hours.  I decided it wasn't worth pursuing further; I had the item, didn't care much about receiving a discount and couldn't imagine what Visiondecor could do to change my impression of the company at that point.

I was wrong, though.  

About a week after the initial call, I received an email from Visiondecor.  The company lost points right away because the email was a reply to the one they'd never bothered to respond to back on the 22nd.  As I read further, I was totally dumbfounded: the purpose of the email was to let me know that IF I removed my negative review from Amazon within 24 hours, they could offer me a 50% discount to "change my customer experience".  My customer experience was NOT improved by being offered a bribe to remove my entirely accurate description of my experience with the company--especially since I had myself relied on customer feedback when deciding which seller to purchase the item from and now think it's likely that the feedback was positive only because the company has purchased that result.

The email I received from Visiondecor is below; the moral of the story is that apparently customer feedback isn't a reliable way to determine whether or not you want to deal with a seller.  When (after the fact) I checked sites like TrustLink, I found reports much more in line with my experience.

Nadine Alvarado, Oct 04 15:41 (PDT):

Hi there!

My name is Nadine. I’m the customer care manager here at Visiondecor. I’m writing to personally apologize for the inconveniences you suffered due to your negative experience shopping with us on Amazon. I would like to do something to help change your customer experience into, at least, a more satisfactory outlook. I see that you’ve been offered a discount for the inconvenience already. But, if you would be willing to reconsider the negative review you left within the next 24 hours I can get a refund of half your entire order approved.

Please respond as soon as possible and let me know if you would like this. I can get it for you right away if you do that.

If you have any questions, concerns or aren’t sure how to remove it please let me know and I will be more than happy to help you out.

Thank you so much!
Nadine
1-877-683-3267 ext.118


Update: Since this post, Visiondecor has continued to contact me to repeatedly request that I remove the negative review.

Looking for a Spammer with an Ounce of Creativity...

Unlike most bloggers, I don't really mind when other bloggers (and even businesses) try to piggyback on my posts to gain some traffic for their own sites or draw attention to their services. That's just good marketing strategy, and I'm all about a collaborative environment where potential customers know what their options are and make informed choices. I don't want my law school admissions consulting business to be the only one a prospective student finds online--I want it to be the one they choose after they read the information on my site or talk with me on the telephone. And I certainly don't want my posts on topics I consider to be socially significant to be the only opinion someone sees. So post away--comment, disagree, add supporting points and feel free to include your link.

But add something of value.

I have a lot of blogs, but the two that draw the most targeted spam are my relationship blog and my LSAT / law school admissions blog. That makes sense--one is a competitive area and the other is a money-making venture. That being the case, I'd expect the people who drop spam comments on those blogs to be good at it. I'd expect them to be thinking in terms of marketing their sites or their services when they commented.

If they were, and they made intelligent comments, I'd leave their links alone. Even direct competitors are welcome to add valuable insights and information in my space, and when they do, they should take credit for it.

It's when they show themselves up as lazy and incompetent that I get annoyed. If my subject matter is also your subject matter and you have something related of value that you're trying to draw readers back to, shouldn't you have the ability to craft a sentence or two reasonably related to my content? And if you want someone to trust you with their hard-earned dollars in return for a service, shouldn't you show that you have the capacity to perform that service well?

I'm always torn in this situation. This morning, for example, I found a spam comment on my law school admissions blog from an LSAT tutor. As I said, if he'd added anything at all of value to the conversation, I'd have left his link. In fact, I'm only tutoring a very few students at the moment under pretty narrow conditions, so if he'd impressed me I'd have checked out his site to see whether he might warrant adding to my list of referrals.

If he'd just dropped a link, I'd have deleted it and moved on.

But no--he left a "comment". His comment was that he was glad I'd posted this LSAT information because he had been looking for it for a long time.

And then he left his link. As an LSAT tutor.

Can't you just feel the confidence bubbling over?

I deleted the comment, but I had to think twice about it. Part of me wanted to promote that post all over the place and let his prospective market see that either he was too stupid and lazy to formulate an intelligent sentence to post or that he was reliant for his "expertise" on information found on a stranger's blog.

Inside Information About the Dashing Cody Rhodes and His Disfiguring Injury

This is the first post from my new co-blogger (and long-time daughter), Tori.

When I was a little girl my daddy loved the WWE. He would watch it all the time and he had all the video games and the t-shirts, so I loved it too. His favorite was always Undertaker. I know all about Undertaker now of course. I had his poster on my wall as a child; I even have an Undertaker teddy bear on my bed. Then, Undertaker brought another wrestler into my life: his brother Kane. Nowadays Kane is the extremely large, half naked, bald man who teams with the Big Show, but when I was a kid he was the menacing, stringy haired, evil masked brother of Undertaker. I remember staring at my television screen in horror as superstars stole Kane's mask from the locker room. I remember the towel he wore on his head until he got it back. I remember him losing to Triple H and taking his mask off. Then his career went on. He wasn't the prettiest wrestler out there, but he got one of the prettiest divas, then he lost her to my favorite wrestler Edge, crashed their wedding, Edge stole his father and tied him to a wheelchair and so on. Everyone seemed to forget about the mask AND the reason he wore it. Supposedly he had been so badly scarred by a fire set by the Undertaker he couldn't show his face, but then he did.

Eight years go by. Enter Cody Rhodes, son of "The American Dream" Dusty Rhodes, brother of Golddust. He could have gone in any direction with his WWE career he wanted to. He chose to focus on his looks. He became known as "The Dashing Cody Rhodes" and had video segments on Smackdown sharing his beauty tips for being dashing. His titan-tron featured mirrors and his perfect white teeth. Then it happened. He was in a match with Rey Mysterio when Mysterio, who's had surgery on his knee five times, hit Cody Rhodes in the nose with his knee brace. Cody Rhodes then disappeared to have facial reconstructive surgery. The show's outraged announcer Michael Cole went on and on about how terrible it was and the shame Rey Mysterio should feel (Is it just me or does Michael seem to have a bit of a crush on Cody?) until Cody returned. Suddenly his titan-tron was a mess of newspaper articles about his accident. He started being referred to as "The Formerly Dashing Cody Rhodes". The beauty segments stopped. Then he came out to the ring for the first time since the accident and I saw what was coming; he was wearing a large black cloth over his head and pushing cameras away. "Don't look at me!" he screamed at them. He climbed in the ring and let the cloth fall, revealing a mask.

Now this wasn't just any mask. It wasn't a red and black mask like Kane's. It wasn't star embroidered like CM Punk's. It was a clear, plastic mask with eye holes and a good inch of space around his nose. Everyone gasped. He covered his face with one hand while speaking into a microphone about how ugly he looked. Michael Cole jumped in with him talking about how "disfigured" he was. I laughed. I thought out loud, as I usually do, "That mask is clear." and my mother looked up from her computer. "Yeah?" she said sounding a little confused. I explained to her all about the accident and the knee brace he had taken to the face. I told her how he had called himself dashing and now he called himself disfigured.

My mother had never seen Cody Rhodes. She is NOT a WWE fan, but I went searching for a picture to show her. She looked at it and then the T.V. and she laughed too. Months passed; Cody's gimmick spread to insulting other people's looks and making them wear plastic bags on their heads. I was watching Smackdown last night when they began talking about him again. "I had a long conversation with Cody's doctor yesterday" one of the announcers was saying. He explained that Cody didn't have to wear his mask anymore unless he was competing, but he still wore it everywhere. "Wouldn't you?" Michael Cole asked. He began his usual routine of comments about Cody's ugliness. They zoomed in on him again, showing his mask. I laughed again, because I know something that no one else in the WWE universe seem to have realized: Cody Rhodes hasn't changed a bit.

Week after week since he first came back from his surgery I find myself yelling at my T.V. "I CAN SEE YOUR FACE CODY! YOU LOOK JUST LIKE YOU ALWAYS DID! That mask is CLEAR!!" He can't hear me of course, nor can his millions of fans, but I have to wonder: Why they haven't noticed for themselves that the "Formerly Dashing" Cody Rhodes is just the Dashing Cody Rhodes with a see through mask on?

Headlines

Complaining about the media is nothing new--for decades we've heard that reporters or publications or the news media as a whole were biased in one direction or another, that they slanted information, withheld details that might have harmed the case they wanted to make and generally acted more as advocates than reporters.

Then, in the past 10 years or so, something even more sinister started to unfold. The news media gradually ceased to be "the news media" at all. Once a supported branch of a major news station, "news" was quietly folded in under the general income-generating umbrella of a television station or publication. While we might have argued for years that the media had an agenda, now it was clear--the mission of a news program was no longer to inform, but to earn its keep at the station. In days gone by, a news program might have earned its keep simply by lending credibility to the station, by providing a source of reliable information for viewers who might then stick around to watch the income-generating programming, but no more. Today, a news show has to pull its own advertising dollars.

That means, in short, that providing accurate, useful information is no longer the job. Getting people to turn on the news program, regardless of how misleading your headlines and teasers have to be to get them there, is job one.

Of course, people have a threshold for drama; after eagerly tuning in to see a story time after time and discovering that it wasn't as compelling as they'd been led to believe, the sense of urgency wears off. The same is true when the target audience is being asked to click through to a website rather than tune in to a news show. And so the media has to up the game. The result is teasers and headlines that have little relationship to the actual news being conveyed. And that's more than just dishonest: it's dangerous and destructive.

News producers know it can be dangerous and take steps to protect themselves from liability, but those steps don't reach so far as to actually protect those who happened to catch the headlines or teasers.

Recently, for instance, it was widely reported in network teasers that a "popular" blood pressure medication might cause cancer. The actual report referred to a narrow category of blood pressure medications, stated that the increase in rates of cancer as compared to the control group had been very small and no causal relationship had yet been identified, and emphasized that people shouldn't stop taking their medication.

Sometimes, the misipressions formed by those sound bites aren't actually dangerous, but simply inflammatory. This morning, for example, an MSN news station ran the headline "Mum aborts baby to end morning sickness". Naturally, the story was reposted in many forums (probably often by people who hadn't actually clicked through and read the story) and outrage abounded...but in fact the woman in question had aborted to put an end to Hyperemesis Gravidarum, a serious side effect suffered by some pregnant women which involves near-constant vomiting, extreme weight loss, strain on the heart and dangerous dehydration.

Of course, it's still open to debate whether or not abortion was the right answer, but that, at least, is the right question. The woman interviewed for the article appears to be telling her story because she was no offered counseling or other options for dealing with the condition and wants to help get the word out to others facing the same difficult situation. The content of the article itself makes that clear. But the overwhelming impact of her choosing to speak out is that her face is now associated in the minds of hundreds of thousands--perhaps millions--of people as the "mum" who killed her baby because she didn't like feeling queasy in the morning.

We complain that journalists "aren't doing their jobs", but in fact we simply misunderstand what a journalists job today looks like. The person who wrote this particular misleading headline created a page that's already drawn thousands of inbound links and been reposted in forums, across Facebook, Tweeted and otherwise disseminated to people who might otherwise not have visited that site. He or she has helped the station's search rankings and spiked traffic in a way that raises advertising revenues. That journalist, in short, has done a GREAT job of what he or she was hired to do. It just happens that "what he was hired to do" was not "report the news".

She Looks Like a "Susie" to Me...

I just learned that you can hire an expert to help you name your baby: The Science Behind Being a Baby Namer

No, this doesn't rise to the level of many of the topics I cover here, but I do think it's a sign of the deteriorating times. Are we that detached from our own children and how we see them that we need outsiders to come up with the trendiest name for them? (and the pros say it IS trendy we're looking for, not unique) Do people who have the talent and creativity to compile all that data and discern trends really have nothing more beneficial to do with their time? Is this really the kind of thing we, as a society, want to put a monetary value on?

Yes, it's a trivial complaint...but the trivial adds up. Anyone remember Brave New World?

So It Begins

This American-born truck driver was handcuffed and detained after weigh-station officials decided that his commercial driver's license and social security number weren't adequate proof of citizenship. Only after his wife left work, picked up his birth certificate and delivered it to officials was he released to go on about doing his job. Good thing he had someone at home to call, and that he knew exactly where his paperwork was. If you don't, maybe you'd better get a copy to start carrying with you now.

Too Stupid to Spam?

Comment spam is a given in the blogging world, but sometimes it's more blatant than others, and sometimes it's just so flat-out stupid that it's more entertaining than annoying.

About a month ago, a friend and I started a new dating and relationship blog. Of course, online dating is an area ripe for spam, and so we started getting hit almost immediately--so soon that I wasn't sure how they were finding us. One of the places we were getting consistent spam from was called University Love Connection, and it always said the same thing: "This is a great blog, we are going to add it to out free online dating internet and college information blog www.universityloveconnection.com/blog so our visitors can read your news, as you are a reputable source. Thanks online dating" (With a couple of live links, of course--I've stripped them out here not so much to discourage spam as to discourage stupidity)

I initially thought it was all coming from the same person, but I soon learned otherwise: apparently the Director of Comment Spam for the site sends out instructions. But apparently their hiring criteria are pretty lax, because yesterday we received this comment:

Here is the post to Make on every one : This is a great blog, we are going to add it to out free online dating internet and college information blog www.universityloveconnection.com/blog so our visitors can read your news, as you are a reputable source. Thanks online dating

Cutting and pasting, apparently, is an art too sophisticated for some.

Book Burning for the 21st Century (and beyond)

Book burning--book banning--is generally viewed as a harbinger of evil in our society, past and present. Whether it's an historical account or an imagined future world, most of us shudder at the thought of a society in which information and ideas are torn from our hands, in which the thoughts of the past or the facts of history or daring newborn ideas are concealed from us.

Even in the direst of futuristic visions, books were forcibly removed, destroyed, forbidden. In the real world, we're giving them away.

This thought has been playing in the back of my mind for some time, but it bubbled to the surface this past week when Amazon deleted copies of two George Orwell novels previously purchased by Kindle owners across the United States. Sure, Amazon had a reason for deleting the "books". Sure, Amazon said it would never do it again. But isn't the real issue that they were ABLE?

I've resisted the move toward readers like Kindle for a reason entirely unrelated to the future of our society: I love books. I like the look and feel of them. I like to hold them in my hands. I like the texture of paper and to watch the size of the chunk of pages behind the bookmark diminish as I work my way through a novel. I simply don't WANT to read a digital copy. But there's another, much more significant reason to resist that move--one that unfortunately seems not to have occurred to most of those on board with the "progress" that is a shift toward electronic books.

Imagine that today, some powerful entity decided to do away with the ideas set forth in George Orwell's 1984. Eradicating the novel would be a huge, probably insurmountable job. Physical copies exist in huge numbers, in multiple languages, in countries around the world. And, of course, no one really knows who has all those books...and if we did know, it wouldn't be especially useful information because a book can be easily hidden or handed off. Books are resold, donated, and recycled every day. Some are undoubtedly thrown away; others are destroyed inadvertantly. Even if we knew who had purchased every single copy of the book ever printed--which we don't--that wouldn't mean we knew where they were now, or even how many still existed.

In short, eradicating an existing book in print (particularly a popular one) would be virtually impossible.

Eradicating the Kindle copies of two well-known novels was apparently relatively quick and easy. Today, that's an inconvenience, an outrage to some, a bad move in customer relations terms. But today, Kindle is just beginning to take root. Today, most of us still have the books we treasure safe on our shelves at home, and it would be difficult for someone to make them disappear.

20 or 30 or 40 years from now, when we've all "caught up with the times" and there aren't any of those clunky, old-fashioned paper books lying around, will someone make all of our "books"--all of our history and information and ideas--disappear with the click of whatever has replaced the mouse in that future-world?

Should Satan Have a Gun License?

Women Scorned - Maybe It's Time We Started Showing Them Some Respect

Earlier this week, Eugene Robinson started out an Op-Ed piece by pointing out that "at least" Governor Mark Sanford faced the music alone--meaning that Sanford didn't drag his poor victimized wife out and force her to stand by his side while he came clean.

Where, oh where, is that "/sarcasm" tag when you really need it?

Others, including former President Bill Clinton and former New York Governer Eliot Spitzer, have been accompanied by their wives when they made public disclosures about their infidelities. Notice what I said there? Pay close attention now, because the language is important: have been accompanied by their wives.

What I didn't say, in case you missed the distinction, was "brought their wives along" or "dragged their wives with them" or any of the other things I've seen again and again in news reports, opinion pieces, and even heard in real life discussion. Here's why: I have enough respect for these women to believe that as adults who are often also educated women and parents, they have the power to make their own decisions.

Quick show of hands: Who sees Hillary Clinton as a victim type, easily manipulated by men into doing things she doesn't want to do?

That's what I thought.

Writer after writer has lamented the fact that these men "bring their wives" along with them to make these disclosures, exposing them to public humiliation and such. And every time, I'm struck by the same thought--as an educated, professional woman, I would be far more "humiliated" at thought that the entire country believed me incapable of making my own decision about whether or not to stand by my husband's side than by the fact that people knew he'd had an affair.

Yes, infidelity and dishonesty are wrong. Yes, it's unfortunate that these women are forced to make hard choices and endure tough circumstances based on situations that may not have been in any way of their own making. But are we really improving that situation by disrespecting the choices they do make, by suggesting that they're mindless puppets subjected to whatever course of action their cheating husbands choose?

I Just Don't Give a Crap About Marijuana Legalization

Really. Not one little bit. I'm not for it. I'm not against it. I'm not worried about it. It just doesn't have my attention. What does have my attention, though, is the level of attention it's getting from other people, and the apparent misconceptions that drive a lot of that attention.

First, let me say that what I'm about to say does not apply to medical marijuana issues. I get why that's an issue some people feel needs to be at the forefront of national attention--particularly with some states having legalized medical marijuana use, only to have their citizens arrested by federal authorities. But the medical marijuana issue is a much narrower one, and one that's fundamentally different from the larger issue.

It's fundamentally different because people who are using marijuana for non-medical reasons are free to stop. Am I saying that they should stop? Nope. I couldn't care less, so long as they're not driving around impaired or operating machinery or any of the things that might be dangerous to the rest of us. Just don't care. But here's the thing--the right to use marijuana (non-medically) is just NOT IMPORTANT. The economy is collapsing. Millions of people are losing their homes. People are dying in Iraq. And somehow "But I really wanna get high NOW" just doesn't resonate with me.

Proponents of legalization will point out (and rightly so) that we waste a lot of money prosecuting and jailing people for marijuana crimes. That deserves a look, but it's hardly the most pressing issue on our plates. The other major argument is that lives are being destroyed over marijuana charges..and it's true. As a former criminal defense lawyer, I can definitely attest to the fact that jail time usually does more harm than good. It' s a tragedy, for sure, when a young man with a family and a good job ends up in prison because he had a small amount of marijuana in his care.

But he has a choice. Until this issue is resolved, every single American is absolutely free to just NOT POSSESS MARIJUANA. Should he have to make that choice? Well, that's up for debate. But as of today, the law is what it is, and everyone knows what it is. And so anyone who doesn't want to risk going to prison can decide not to take that chance. That sort of undermines the sense of urgency in my mind. No one is at risk who doesn't choose to take that risk.

But let's say for a moment that it is a pressing issue, that we should set aside foreclosures and the death count in Iraq and get focused on making America safe for people who opt to use marijuana. If that's the goal, then let's get sensible about it.

First, let's consider the fact that the federal law against possession of marijuana was enacted by Congress--it's not an executive order. The President could, of course, encourage Congress to pass such a bill, but that's it; it's their purview, not his. And then if Congress DID pass such a bill, and the President signed it, the problem would be all solved...except that there would still be dozens and dozens of state laws criminalizing marijuana use--laws the President is ABSOLUTELY POWERLESS to affect. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, state and local prosecutions make up 99% of all marijuana prosecutions.

So...let's recap. An apparently huge movement within the United States wants the President of the United States to make it his priority to tackle something that's Congress's job, in order to repeal a law that will impact 1% of marijuana prosecutions across the country.

I've been hearing a lot of buzz about how disappointed people are in Obama over this issue. Seems to me that if all of those people got out there and rallied and donated money and campaigned to get Obama elected so that he could get the federal prohibition on marijuana repealed, the disappointment should be running the other way.

Why I Wouldn’t Want My Son to Get Off on Watching Women Eat Feces

Last week, I wrote a blog post called “Two Girls, One Cup, and Your Kids”. In that post, I had the audacity to suggest that the Two Girls, One Cup video (and others like it) might not be the best possible material for our middle-schoolers to be viewing. I’d learned, quite by accident, that a lot of young kids in my area had been viewing this video, and was pretty sure that their parents had no idea. My primary concern was that these kids—some of them as young as 11—were as-yet unformed in their sexuality and just exploring and beginning to understand their own interests and inclinations.

The varied response was very interesting: a clinical psychologist talked about how early exposure to this kind of thing could have a lifelong impact on how a girl viewed her own sexuality and what she thought was expected of her; parents talked about the internet protections they had in place; and a surprising number of people suggested that I was a totalitarian right-wing lunatic who wanted to repress everyone’s sexuality and possibly kill them. One gentleman, whose knowledge of history is apparently a bit shaky, suggested that I probably thought homosexuals should be “gassed like the Jews”—I guess he wasn’t aware that homosexuals were also on Hitler’s hit list.

The general gist of the outraged comments I received was that a person’s sexuality was his own business and it said something negative about me if I didn’t think it was just fine if our kids were influenced by things like Two Girls, One Cup and grew up thinking that women eating feces and vomit was hot. Let me cop right off to the fact that I don’t think those particular “tastes” are “normal”. In no way shape or form am I going to try to tell you that I think that’s a choice that’s “just as valid as any other” or any such thing. I do, however, believe that what consenting adults do in private—assuming that it’s truly consensual—is their own business.

Apparently, some folks felt that my desire not to have our children’s sexual development influenced by this sort of material was inconsistent with the idea that what adults do in private is their business.

Children. Adults.

Get the difference?

Seems like not, so here’s the thing: you may find it hard to understand why, if I wouldn’t condemn an adult for doing something, I’d want to help a child avoid going down that same path. Frankly, that’s just stupid. It’s every adult’s own business, for instance, whether or not he smokes—but we don’t encourage our children to start smoking. And while those of you in the “you probably want to burn people with sex lives at stake” camp are probably fairly popping out of your chairs right now yelling that we ALL KNOW that smoking is bad for you, and you can’t compare that to someone’s sexual choices…

Nonsense.

Here are just a few of the reasons that I wouldn’t want my son (or anyone else’s) to be influenced by something like Two Girls, One Cup and decide that it was really hot when chicks ate feces and vomited:

1. Eating feces is a serious health hazard. I’d hate for my son (or anyone’s) to be in the position of needing to jeopardize someone else’s health and well-being to satisfy his sexual desires.

2. This kind of activity can be damaging to a woman’s self-esteem and even mental health. Argue away, but it’s a well-documented fact, and I would hate to see someone I loved responsible for that.

3. Most of the population doesn’t participate in this sort of activity; I’ve had at least one comment that suggested I should speak for myself and this was a puritanical view, but it’s a simple fact. Most people don’t eat shit for sexual gratification. That means that a boy who does develop these proclivities is limiting his relationship possibilities or setting himself up for conflict in his relationships, perhaps for the rest of his life.

The other argument I received was that kids just weren’t going to see this as sexual. Right. An adolescent boy watching two naked chicks make out—possibly seeing such a thing for the first time—would never associate that with sex, right? And the vulgarity of the feces consumption would ensure that he was far too grossed out to have any kind of physiological response to those naked chicks making out. Right. And sexuality isn’t influenced by our early sexual reactions AT ALL. Right?

Come on.

But What are You Going to DO With My Fingerprints?

There's been a lot of concern floating around the internet this morning about the new requirement that home sellers in Cook County, Illinois provide a thumbprint. There are, of course, the obvious concerns that always arise when some governmental agency or other starts collecting even more personal data about citizens. We all know about that comprehensive database the FBI is building, and some of us get a little nervous when we notice some new data collection method.

But that's not what bothers me about the thumbprint requirement. What bothers me about the thumbprint requirement is the extreme unlikelihood that it's going to serve any purpose whatsoever. You see, fingerprints are only useful when we have something to compare them with. In a criminal case, fingerprints help in two ways. If you have a suspect, you can match the fingerprints from the evidence to find out whether or not they match your suspect. And if you don't have a suspect, you can run the fingerprints through various databases to find out whether they match anyone whose fingerprints are already on file.

The latter can be a slow process, and it doesn't always bear fruit. After all, most of us don't have our fingerprints on file anywhere. If you've been arrested, applied for certain professional licenses, been in the military, etc., your fingerprints are in some database somewhere. Even finding those is dicey without a full-scale effort, because most searches don't include all of these databases. There's a hierarchy of priorities, and in some cases a backlog.

So, let's imagine that every home seller in Cook County provides a thumbprint. The vast majority of those thumbprints serve no immediate purpose, because there's nothing to match them against. If a problem arises--if it turns out that a home has been sold fraudulently--they may serve a couple of purposes. First, they could help the actual homeowner prove that he wasn't the one who sold the house. That's good...except that when a home has been fraudulently transferred by a third party, this usually isn't much of an issue. The second way it could help is that IF the actual seller's fingerprints were in some database somewhere, and IF the appropriate law enforcement agency ran the thumbprint against the right database, the perpetrator could be identified and prosecuted. The FBI currently has fingerprints on file for about 20% of the U.S. population.

So, the big question in my mind isn't "Is this too much of a burden?" or "Is this a civil rights issue?" or "What kind of liability issues does this raise?" or "Is it really fair to charge homeowners for this?", though those are all valid questions. My big question is this: What's the point?

I haven't seen any reporting thus far that sets forth any practical way in which this measure will help reduce fraudulent transfers.

Two Girls, One Cup, and Your Kids

Last week, I took a trip across the country with a great bunch of middle-class suburban kids ages 11-14. Over the course of four days, Two Girls, One Cup was mentioned more than once. There were, mercifully, some kids who didn’t know what it was—but there were others willing to fill them in. A troubling number seemed to have actually watched the video. (If you have the good fortune not to know what I’m talking about, follow the link above—or suffice to say that the video sexualizes both the consumption of solid human waste and vomit.)

If I’d overheard one of these conversations in a public place, I think I would have engaged in that kind of wishful distancing that many of us employ instinctively when a child disappears—blame the parents, and that will mean that as long as I do everything right, my child is safe. The thing is, I know these kids and I know their parents, and while none of us are perfect these aren’t disaffected rich kids raised by nannies or latchkey kids whose single moms are working two jobs and forced to leave them alone too much. This is the heartland: family vacations, volunteering at the schools, homework before dinner.

And somewhere in the mix, a little Internet porn.

Two Girls, One Cup (and its ilk), it seems, has become the new millennium equivalent of sneaking a peek at dad’s Playboy…except it isn’t equivalent at all. Playboy sexualized pretty women in various stages of undress—something we might not have wanted shared with our sons too early, but that largely represented what they would eventually discover and experience. Not so Two Girls, One Cup and the like, which sexualize things most people never do—or never did, in the era when getting risqué meant sneaking a peek at Playboy.

The associations formed in the early days of sexuality are powerful and lasting, and there is no question that our kids are getting very different messages about what is sexy and sexual than the ones we were exposed to in our youth. Adolescent boys are going to react to naked women kissing one another—and if those women happen to be incorporating feces and vomit into their make-out session, those images and associations are going to get confused. Sexual triggers will develop where they don’t for most people (or didn’t in the past).

I suspect that we can’t avoid this entirely, any more than parents 50 years ago could prevent their adolescents from spying on the neighbor lady when she bathed or looking at the pictures their older brothers hid under the mattress. But the risk is something entirely different today, and access is a thousand times easier than it was even ten or fifteen years ago.

We all need internet filters, no matter how good our kids are. They’re also curious and subject to the buzz that gets going about something like this. We all need to be aware; parents of today’s adolescents cover a large age-range and have different degrees of familiarity with the Internet. Know what’s out there, and how readily available it is. You can read all about Two Girls, One Cup on Wikipedia, for instance. And we need to talk to our kids about more than how to avoid pregnancy and STDs. Uncomfortable as it might be for everyone involved, they need to know that there’s a wide range of healthy, loving sexual activity that doesn’t involve the sorts of images they’re seeing: images that may, for some, be the first exposure to explicitly sexual material.

NOTE: For those in the "you're a neo-fascist totalitarian" camp, please see my follow-up post: Why I Wouldn't Want My Son to Get Off on Watching Women Eat Feces

Apparently, Barbie Isn't Our Biggest Problem

State Representative Jeff Eldridge has reportedly introduced legislation to ban Barbie dolls in West Virginia. The idea of zeroing in on Barbie in a time of economic distress, war, and rampant medical coverage issues is a bit absurd to begin with, but Eldridge's explanation as to why he's pushing for this measure is pure gold:

"Basically, I introduced legislation because the Barbie doll, I think, gives emphasis on if you're beautiful, you don't have to be smart."

I'm guessing Eldridge might have played with a few too many Barbie dolls in his youth.