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Cultural Outrage
Get Rich Blogging (and Destroy the Economy) Print E-mail
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Written by Tiffany Sanders   
Monday, 04 August 2008 16:46

get rich quickMake Six Figures Next Year…in Just Five Hours a Week!

Blogs and websites seem to split about evenly on this issue. Half want to sell you a program by which you can earn a living beyond your wildest dreams while working just an hour a day, usually from the deck of a cruise ship or your own hilltop mansion. Just sent $79.95 now—most major credit cards and Paypal accepted; instant transfers from bank accounts accepted if you don’t have a credit card.

The other half exhort you to wake up. If you want to get rich blogging, you have to work your backside off, and probably a few other body parts, too. There’s money to be made on the Internet, sure, but you have to make the same kind of investment you would in any other money-making venture if you expect to get anywhere.

I’m not so concerned, though, with whether or not you can make a fortune by setting up an RSS feed from a bunch of other blogs, slapping up some ads and sitting back to collect your check. I’m much more interested in why you think you should be able to, and even a little bit in why you want to.

There’s been some comparison between the hoards of people flocking to the Internet in hopes of striking it rich and the Gold Rush mentality, but I think the analogy is flawed. It’s true that during the Gold Rush many people optimistically (read: foolishly) believed that they could change their lives simply by hopping on a bandwagon that was already a ways down the road. But there were some important differences. People hoping to cash in on the Gold Rush sold their possessions; some made long hard treks across the country. And when they arrived, they didn’t walk down to the creek bed, glance around, and expect lumps of gold to jump into their pockets. They put in long hours knee-deep in cold water, panning and sifting and working at finding the payoff.

That’s right. I said “working”. Bad word, I know—but since when? And why?

Once upon a time, there was a rather simple system. If you wanted to make money, you provided something that was of value to other people or businesses. The beauty of it was that so many different things were of value to people and businesses that the field was wide open: You could entertain, create beauty, make someone else’s job easier, perform a necessary service, produce a good that someone else needed, move a good that someone else needed from the person who produced it to a retail location or directly to the consumer…and so on, and so on, and so on. An option for everyone.

Everyone, that is, who was willing to work for a living.

This whole “money for nothing” thing raises some problems, though. Or rather, it raises one fairly serious problem: who, exactly, do we expect to keep coughing up money without receiving anything of value in return? And again, why do we think that SHOULD be possible, let alone that it IS?

I’m no economist, but it seems to me that a system in which people get paid without actually producing anything of value or performing any service is a system that’s bound to crash.

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When Tweens Dress Like Tramps, Who's To Blame? Print E-mail
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Written by Gerri L Elder   
Thursday, 15 May 2008 03:42


Are we really all that concerned about teenage pregnancy and the fact that at least 1 out of four teen girls in the U.S. has a sexually transmitted disease?  Perhaps it's time to examine the root causes of this epidemic and make a commitment to actually DO something about it instead of sitting back and saying, "Oh my, that is terrible" while we hope it doesn't happen to our kids - because it will.  It's time for parents to take charge and start acting like parents for a change.

It is absolutely sickening to see little girls dressed like sluts.  With their middles exposed, high heels on their feet and more eye makeup than any adult should wear, we constantly see them and wonder why their parents would allow them out in public in such wildly inappropriate attire. 

The thing is that the parents of these girls are simply choosing not to fight this battle.  It is a lot easier on the eardrums and door hinges to spoil a child than to make and enforce unpopular rules.  When clothing manufacturers deliberately market garments that look like clubwear in sizes to fit tweens and these clothing choices are allowed by some parents, an epic battle begins.  Many parents find it hard to say no to their little snowflakes, and there it starts.  When the "cool kids" are wearing inappropriate clothing, it doesn't take long for all the kids to want to also wear trashy clothes.  No one wants their kid to be an outcast, so the pressure is definitely on.

Kids grow up too fast all on their own.  Now with the clothing, underwear, shoes and makeup options available to tweens, the process is accelerated to almost comical proportions.  It would be funny, except that it's so troubling.

In England, the Tesco stores now carry a padded plunge push-up bra for girls who are about 7 years old.  The cost of this highly offensive rag?  Only about 8 bucks.  A child who desperately wants cleavage at 7 is troubling, but if there were not a market for this type of thing it would not have been manufactured.  Tesco has marketed some equally offensive products in the past.  In 2006 the stores carried a pole dancing kit in the toy section of its website.  The pole dancing kit was removed after public outrage.  So where's the outrage about other "sexy" products marketed to children?

It's up to parents to take a stand.  Stores are going to carry products that sell.  If the slutty clothes for tween girls were not selling like hotcakes, they would no longer be manufactured.  It's purely and simply the principle of supply and demand economics.  Young girls don't have a paycheck, parents do.  Therefore parents must dig in their heels and stop this exploitation of their children.  Cool clothes don't have to expose skin and those little feet will develop much better in good, supportive shoes.  Style doesn't have to be sacrificed, but a message has got to be sent that it's not okay for little girls to look like tramps.

While we try to protect our children from predators in society, it hardly makes much sense to package them up and send them out dressed as a pedophile's wet dream.  Yet that's precisely what is happening.

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One Minute Outrage - Political

Issue: Nations around the world join forces to put an end to the use of cluster bombs because of the high incidence of civilian injury and death--sometimes long after the conflict is over. But the United States, like Russia, China and Israel, refuses to sign the treaty.

Impact: The United States further abdicates the role of world leader, while still clinging stubbornly to the title. The continued use of cluster bombs is bad enough, but far worse is the message to the world that force by any means necessary is the way to go--and the path to be chosen by the largest and most powerful nations on earth.

Read More: US Joins China and Russia in Rejecting Cluster Bomb Ban

One Minute Outrage - Earthly

Issue: A blind couple is prosecuted for employing a commonly accepted method of composting in their own garden.

Impact: Your tax dollars at work making life difficult for people with the audacity to grow vegetables--and an apparent legal preference for chemical fertilizers over organic matter that might actually help the environment.

Read More: Gardener Threatens Public Safety with Compost

One Minute Outrage - Legal

Issue: Police departments in major cities across the country aren't content to arrest self-made criminals, but have decided to hit the streets and see whether they can create some more.

Impact: Time and tax dollars poured into sting operations designed to test ordinary people and create crimes that would never have been; meanwhile, who's minding the store?  Hundreds of thousands of unserved felony warrants lie inactive across the country while police experiment in subways, department stores and on streetcorners.

Read More:  Make Your Own Criminal – It's So Much Easier than Chasing the Real Ones


One Minute Outrage - Cultural

Issue: A disabled child is left to die by a negligent mother, and the people charged with her protection stand by and let it happen; sadly, Danieal Kelly is only one example of the wide-ranging failure of the systems that are supposed to keep our children safe.

Impact: The impact on this particular child was a slow and painful death, and she is not alone. Right now, as you're reading this, other children are living in similar circumstances; other parents and caseworkers are ignoring their needs and waiting for someone else to do something. The most helpless among us will not survive unless we all step up and do our part--and insist that others do theirs.

Read More: Disabled Child Left to Die by Mother, Social Workers


Sex Offender Registration / Residency Restrictions Do More Harm than Good


sex offender registration

Fifteen years ago, the mother of a kidnapping victim had a good idea--an idea that made a lot of sense. That idea involved the creation of a registry for use by law enforcement to track child molesters. Soon other states got on the bandwagon, and the classes of crime included in the registries mushroomed. Then those registries were shared with the public, voluntarily or under legal mandate. And then the public found out that there were sex offenders down the block (never mind that those "sex offenders" might have urinated outdoors after too much to drink late one night or had sexual relationships with girlfriends just a few years younger than themselves after they'd crossed the line into adulthood), and we didn't like it. New state laws cropped up across the country restricting where convicted sex offenders could live, and now, we're finally seeing the fruits of those frantic efforts. States are spending tens of millions of dollars to attempt to keep convicted sex offenders in stable places where they can be tracked, and losing the battled. Homelessness has skyrocketed among convicted sex offenders, and with it, the rate of recidivism.

Read More: Sex Offender Registration is Stupid






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