The more substantial issue is that it’s very hard to delete your facebook profile and nearly impossible to do permanently. On the group, “How to permanently delete your facebook account”, they recommend first deleting everything and then contacting facebook and requesting account removal. Of course, you can deactivate your account, but this is apparently not a preferred option. It’s not clear to me from any of this whether deactivation is dispreferred because (a) while no one can still see your data, it still exists on facebook, which is unsettling, or (b) deactivation doesn’t work as one would think, and some data are still viewable to other users.

I don’t see why no one has explored what is to me the obvious way of getting your account deleted: posting a lot of pornographic or hateful material. I’ve never encountered any on facebook, and so I assume that watchdogs exist, perhaps based on user complaints. I guess not everyone would want their account associated with hardcore pornography and racist treatises, however briefly, but it would no doubt be fun.

 I traveled to Myrtle Beach with a broad coalition of student leaders dedicated to propelling the message of a clean energy future to political leaders through their grassroots efforts. Many of these students dont recieve any type of monetary compensation for their work, but you wouldnt know this by their displays of dedication to the cause.The students made conference calls the entire drive en route to Myrtle Beach, honing their talking points and presentation. When we arrived they hit the ground running with media advisories, signs,petitions,polar bear suits,and an energy which cannot wholly be explained.  

I had the opportunity to document most of the experience with my hand held video camera. Perhaps one of the most intense moments of the day came when the group was met with direct resistance from the organization Clean Coal. Personally, I thought clean coal sounded legimate and right, I was quickly told that ,”there is not such thing as clean coal!”Several paid workers from that organization, armed..or rather backed…with these bilboard body hangings shouted out their positions, and the clean energy future students put up a fight. It was amazing to see people standing behind something so fervently. It was discouraging to me that this portion of the story will make it only onto the pages and screens of several media groups. Students fighting for clean energy initiatives and even those who say that coal is clean..dont make for sexy journalism. One of the students with the group approached a local television reporter  from the upstate and asked if they were interested in that angle of the story. The reporter replied that they were focusing more on the sand structures which stood in the same field where the rally was taking place. My heart dropped, reminded of the game they play for ratings.

While at the debates I also had the opportunity to speak with a guy who was passing out flyers for Clean Coal. He was able to talk a little about the message they were sending and why they thought that their position was the right one. You can hear this as soon as I find the time to edit and upload the video.

I also spoke with a group traveling from Washington, DC. They were here to demand healthcare for AIDS patients. They want the presidential candidates to come up with a specific plan and articulate it. They were chanting loud and clear in a call and response manner, “when people with aids are under attack what do we do? act up…fight back.” Again, you wont really see this on television..nothing more than some nat sound in between the reporter voice track…to help demonstrate the point of people were fired up! Yes, I had heard this message before..but was I listening to what they said. I interviewed two of the people there with the group to get a better understanding of their position.

The youthful energy in Myrtle Beach  yesterday was amazing. It was reassuring to see that while many have written off the future leaders of America as consumed by consumerism, there are still some fighting for change and awareness. Change has been the buzzword of the year for presidential campaigns, but it seemed only appropriate on the day we celebrated the life of  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, that we were in a place where the political landscape has changed(with the first woman and African American candidates)…and where there are young Americans who are out standing behind their beliefs. While it may not be a sit it or one which resulted in bloodshed, I think Dr. King would have been proud yesterday and for the direction that we are headed.

I understand this post is a collection of scattered thoughts..but hey it is a blog after all. In conclusion, I am also guilty of not looking deeper into the messages that are thrown my way each day. I take most of them as fact. Clean coal is clean…the end. It is not the end, we must care enough to look deeper, and we must look further than the news media to give us these details. Not all messages are easy enough to put into a 30 second clip with cool music and graphics. They take time, research, energy, and a body of people willing to work until the job is done.

There are many messages…but are we tuned out to the ones that matter?

What if there were a Facebook solely for right-wing presidential hopefuls? I’m not sure how I would react. This thought experiment helps us to imagine what that might look like. Check it out. http://www.rightwingfacebook.org/

Do we NEED invisible tanks? I really don’t think you can sneak up on someone in a tank.

NBC didn’t back down, and neither did the writer’s guild, so there will be no glitzy televised ceremony this year.The Screen Actors Guild promised the Writer’s Guild that its famous actor members won’t cross the picket line, so no stars would show up even if they had a normal Golden Globes ceremony this year.

Instead, they’ll just show a press conference.

“We are all very disappointed that our traditional awards ceremony will not take place this year and that millions of viewers worldwide will be deprived of seeing many of their favorite stars,” said Jorge Camara, president of the Hollywood Foreign Press.

Apparently, the Hollywood Foreign Press will lose millions from this deal, mainly because they usually make millions from selling tables and broadcast rights. There won’t be tables because there’s no people to sit in them. The Hollywood Foreign Press usually use the money to fund film education initiatives, but I guess this year the uneducated film viewers will remain uneducated.

Read more about this here

(via nytimes.com)

It’s times like this that I hate to say I’m from Tyler, TX. What kind of times am I talking about? Well, mainly just when we make national news.
Whenever Tyler makes national news, its rarely for anything worth celebrating. For instance, a few years ago a mother bludgeoned her child. That was a national news event. More recently, a man opened fire in front of the county court house on the square in downtown Tyler with some sort of heavy machine gun and killed a few people over a custody battle. Another national news event.
But this headline takes the cake: “Man kills, cooks and possibly eats girlfriend, police say.” That was a CNN headline from yesterday. Apparently, Mr. Christopher McCuin saw fit to kill his girlfriend then cook parts of her body before doing the responsible thing and calling the cops.

According to the original article, “When authorities arrived at the home, they found [the girlfriend's] mutilated body, one ear boiling in a pot of water on the stove and a fork sticking out of some human flesh sitting on a plate on the kitchen table.” Of course, the police cannot prove that McCuin actually ate the parts he cooked.

You can find the original article at http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/01/06/texas.slaying.ap/index.html

For 24.98, you can make your dog go from looking up (rather menacingly) to looking down! Silence is golden.