Get green people!

As someone who enjoys shopping, I inevitably buy things (mostly over the internet) and lately I have become disgusted by the amount of packaging that is so unnecessary. For example, I bought a jar of cream for my face and the amount of packaging would have kept it in tact if it was shipped from frickin' Mars. Do we really need all this packaging? I have tried to limit the amount of packaging I get by recycling plastic bags, using cloth bags and asking for as much stuff as possible to be put in one bag. But I have little impact over products I buy that are packaged. Is anyone out there trying to inform businesses about how to go green?

No shirt, no shoes, no conviction, no service

So the owner of a restaurant refused to serve O.J. Simpson because of his convictions that Simpson is guilty of murdering his ex-wife and friend. I see a few problems with this scenario. In a society where people are innocent until proven guilty, we tend to forget this. Whether we believe Simpson is guilty is not the point. A jury of his peers said he was not. End of story. Can we then refuse to serve someone because we believe the jury made the wrong decision? We put a lot of faith in our jury system and we believe this is the best way to determine inncence or guilt. There are plenty of problems with the judicial system, but it is the best system we have and hopefully those who are wrongly convicted will get some form of justice. Until we can know for sure that soemone is inncent or guilty, we have to keep our faith in the system. Otherwise, we are inviting chaos into our society and there already is enough of that.

Protecting Obama?

CBS News has decided to not allow posts anymore in response to stories about Barack Obama because of the racial slurs that seem to be following. It's really quite sad that the media needs to censor parts of it because of the comments that some people make. But once again we get into First Amendment rights. Blogs, wikis and such allow people an outlet for speech. Perhaps it is the anonymity that makes blogs so troubling to people. So where do we draw the line? Do we allow hate speech? This country was supposedly founded on the right of free speech, but what happens when we don't like what that speech is saying? Most people agree that hate is a negative, unproductive emotion, but since we are all different human beings and have differing views, it becomes difficult to limit certain types of speech and not others. Blogs are open forums and although they are limited in certain ways structurally, the ideology behind them is free flowing information. If we curb that information, aren't we altering the structure of blogs, the very thing that makes them unique?

The cicadas are coming!

So we are supposed to be inundated with cicadas soon. For those who get all squelchy from bugs, you have my sympathy. If this happened with snakes I wouldn't leave my house for the six weeks. (Thank goodness for technology, I really wouldn't have to). I don't remember the last time the cicadas came which means it either wasn't that big of a deal or I blocked it out. I do the latter often, but I don;t think so for this. I'm going to take our buggy friends in stride and just be amazed at the whole event. And if it really sucks, well, you won't have to deal with it for another 17 years!