Gender roles effect Valentine's Day

So I came across this article today and was confused. The article itself is a mix of feminism while at the same time claiming that feminism is wrong. Don't believe me read this:

But for good or for bad, it presents a new challenge to the enduring American way of romance -- the one that no matter how evolved we think we've become, keeps turning up in song and story.

(Really, can it get any harder for those breadwinning women -- working long hours to help support their stay-at-home or less-moneymaking men -- to find the energy for a candlelit dinner, a quick change to a lacy negligee and an evening of unbridled romance?)

Yes that's right she claims in two paragraphs that the feminist movement has done great things for women while insisting that women must retain the classic role in relationships. She continues on later saying this:

If you caught any of this year's Super Bowl commercials, you saw a surprising representation of how conflicted men are (at least TV-commercial men) between feeling like traditional car-loving, pants-wearing tough guys and emasculated, moisturizing purse holders for their ladies.

Um, I don't know where she has been but for as long as I can remember Super Bowl commercials, and men all over the US, have been making similar jokes. When I first started dating my now fiance my friends gave me crap for not spending as much time with them as I used to. Would they do the same thing if they were in my position, sure, but that isn't going to keep them from giving me a hard time about it.

I love my fiance but she is very much her own woman and I would have no problem with her being the money maker in the family. I think that Miss Spencer is trying to force us into gender roles that are no longer a necessity. What is wrong with a woman treating her man to a fancy dinner? How about while the woman is at work all day the man is at home preparing dinner for the family so it is on the table when she gets home. Romance goes both ways and most of today's relationships were built on the idea that both parties are equal and bring different things to the table in the relationship.

No Miss Spencer romance is not dead or dying, as you seem to be implying, in fact it is still going strong. All that has happened is that the roles in the relationship are not the same that they were in the '60s and '70s and may in fact be stronger!

What to do?

So we all know that this time of year, aka the holidays, bring families together. It has been nice being home and getting to see my family. Over the last few days I have my parent's have had one of my aunts and her son over to visit. And it is nice to see them since I haven't seen them in at least 2 years. My aunt is for the most part conservative but then again so is most of my family but at the same time we are far from religious, although apparently my grandfather is very liberal which made for an interesting situation yesterday when we went to go visit him but that is another story all together. I love my aunt I think she is funny but tonight she said something that disappointed me.

We were watching the TV show The Big Bang Theory, Monday's at 9:30 on CBS, and the intro song mentions human evolution. My aunt said, "I don't believe in human evolution." There was the silence where no one knew what to say or do. One thing is for certain as much as my parent's might not completely understand science they have at least tried and they tend to accept most of the theories, sometimes a little too much against my advising but it has never hurt them. That maybe why both my sister and I have always been interested in science. Anyway this silence lasted for what seems like a couple of minutes but was probably only a few seconds until the next cheesy commercial came on. I will admit I didn't say anything and I probably should have but I tried to make my annoyance known.

So now my question is this: If you were put in the same situation what would you have done? Would you have sat their quietly like my whole family did or would you have said something challenged her or heck maybe you have some sort of middle ground. I just didn't know what to do at the time and just let it slide, since for most things we have very similar thought processes and I don't get to see her very often. I don't know how many people follow this blog but I figured I would ask that question to see if anyone who does read has any suggestions for next time.

The difference between going to Grad school and going to work right out of school

So this may seem really random but where I am currently in both life and in location I really got to thinking about this today. At 23 years old I am in a unique position in life most of my really good friends from both high school and college have a job now but there is a good number, myself included, who decided to continue going to school and are now in grad school. I also am not quite in the position where I know a lot of people who are working and in grad school at the same time so I won't really be discussing that here. But tonight I was hanging out with a bunch of friends from high school we are all really close and it was good to finally see them all again. As I was leaving my one friend's house (yes he owns a house) he jokingly said to me something along the lines of it must me nice to have 3 weeks off but I guess you do kind of work for it. He has next week off and I told him well I can only imagine what it is like in your position.

So what is the point? Well once you get through your undergrad education your life very quickly evolves out of the large amounts of fun it was as an undergrad. I'm not saying life isn't fun but no matter what path you take you will be in working to be where you are. So for example there is no question my friends who have jobs work harder than me when you average it out. They will work 48-50 (5 day) weeks a year I however will get a month off from winter break and 3 months off for the summer. But what do you get for that? One of my friends is working but owns a house and has a kid, my fiance and I couldn't afford to do that if we pooled all of what we make a year, we would still make less than all of my friends except the ones who are teachers (which says something about our society). They tend to get up and are at work by 7-9 in the morning where as I tend not to get up that early but I will be up working on homework or something till 2.

So what should you do? Sometimes you don't have a choice. There are certain fields, and all of academia is included in that, in which you need at least some post-graduate education so you are stuck. But is it worth going to grad school right away or to enter the work force. That I cannot answer for you, and to be honest it took me time to answer it for myself. And that is just it if you can make enough to afford to own a house and have a kid at 23 then I say go for it but if you don't want to leave school right away and are willing to work hard in the academic world go for that too. In the end it comes down to the individual and nothing else!

Why we must tread carefully with climate refrom

So I just finished up my work for the semester and made it home yesterday so I might have some free time over the next few weeks to put some posts together, assuming I can come up with some topics.

This week wrapped up the Copenhagen climate conference in which only very little was accomplished. But I don't really want to discuss what happened there to be honest you will never get most of the developing countries to support something like that until you make it cheaper than just dumping the trash in the ocean, so to speak, and for this reason I think the US needs to take the lead in this attempt to clean up our actions. We have done this before when polluting of water was a major problem and now most countries realize it is wrong it just isn't something they can easily change. We need to set the example!

But, you might be saying that is not what you have as your title to this post. You would be correct and that is because of the economic problems we will face with a sudden drastic change in the way we produce power/drive/etc. The US transport and power industry is currently based on oil/gas and coal if we all of a sudden said no you can't use those any more because it is destroying the world well we will destroy our economy in the process it is currently too expensive to buy the alternative energy sources. I often think that many scientist forget about this cost and that is really too bad but I think most humans tend not to care as much about those who aren't us, so I don't think it is just a scientist thing but I know we do it and think that it should be easy to change things.

So what do I suggest we do, since it is one thing to say something is wrong but we should always be able to provide solutions to the problems we point out? Well we should start by funding alternative energy solutions. The current government subsidies go almost exclusively to oil/gas and coal. Why not scale back a little on that funding, thereby increasing cost and making it less desirable to the average person, and send that change towards alternative options. The strides that have been made in solar and tidal etc have been slowed by lack of money but yet they have occurred.

But the government shouldn't be the only one we as consumer's should demand cleaner resources etc. Vote with your wallet, drive less and walk more, turn off lights when you leave a room, (in honor of the massive snow storm on the east coast) shovel your own snow you don't need a snow blower, all of those things that we have been preached at to do we should. Yes it won't always be easy but it can be done but I do realize that you can never please everyone:

Human's the social species.

So anyone who tells you that the final stretch of a semester in graduate school is easy, well that person is lying to you I should be working now but I am taking a break between projects so you get a blog post.

Tonight's post I actually got the idea from the 7/6c episode of Bones on TNT, and yes I am not making any money off of this. Anyway toward the end of the Episode Bones and Booth are talking about the human condition and about how we are in fact always alone as a species. I disagree with this as we will see in a few minutes but I also want to credit another source of the idea for this it is this post by a friend of mine's blog, the main blog can be found here. Toward the end of the post he says this:

Maybe I'm crazy for thinking everyone just wants you to step in line and shut up.

[...]

Meanwhile, I'm going to make this world better than the way it was when I was born. You can either stand up and follow me, or you can stay in line. Your call.

Now most of the rest of his post has nothing really to do with what I want to say here. They question I want to ask is why do humans seem to care so much about what other people think? Why do we care about fashion and other aspects that cause us to "fit in"?

This is where I want to refer back to the Bones episode. Yes each of us is our own person but we are shaped by those around us in fact we care more about their opinion than we do what we think of ourselves most of the time. When my friend argues that he wants people to follow him he is, probably unknowingly, saying that he does not want to be alone. None of us do! We are a social species we evolved that necessity. When we were evolving and living in the wild we did not have the physical ability to defend for ourselves we are very vulnerable. Look at yourself in the mirror sometime you don't have any killer claws, no extremely sharp teeth and for our size we are extremely weak.

So what does all this have to do with fashion? Well if in the wild everyone was moving out to a new location to look for food you would probably follow because everyone else was going not knowing that you are really going to use them as a form of protection. So the extension to fashion is that since everyone else is doing it we don't want to be left out from what the masses are doing in order to allow for "protection" of ourselves, after all we wouldn't want to be "eaten".

So next time someone tells you that each person is an individual think long and hard. Do you think the way you think because it just popped in there or did what people say/teach you cause you to think the way you did. All of our experiences change the way we think and our actions. And every person is effected by everyone they meet whether it is for good or for bad.

Please feel free to rip me a new one for my blindless conjecture, yes I have no supporting evidence and normally I am big on this but I will admit that I am just making conjecture here, or you can agree with me. I welcome all.

Obama shouldn’t be silencing opposition

I want to start by apologizing for not posting recently studying and writing has been getting in the way of that, I should be studying now but I don't want to so I'm not.

This post won't be about science like normal and while I said don't want to talk about politics in here well sometime you can't escape it. I came across this story while reading the paper this morning. Now maybe I am a masochist but whatever it I always read the opinion portion of the paper and that is when I came across this. So I read the headline and decided to go ahead and read it.

The article started to annoy me right from the start:

Among the many volatile threads common in the current administration, there is one that is especially troubling. That is the repetition of the attacks our president and his media representatives have repeatedly made against any voice that dares counter his own.

We saw this when they set up a White House Web site for citizens to report any suspicious or contrary information about health insurance during the summer. We saw it when they unleashed havoc on Fox News for daring to criticize President Barack Obama. And we saw it when the administration decided to let loose another attack. This time it battled Edmunds.com over its criticism of the cash for clunkers program.

Ok the White House did not set up a way to report people who were lying, and there were plenty of lies, during the summer they just wanted to know about misconceptions about the health debate so they could correct them in speeches etc. Next how did they unleash "havoc on Fox News"? All they did was refuse to be interviewed by Fox News I would too if they were calling me these type of things:



But you know what I'll give you a chance lets see how you summarize the Obama vs Edmunds argument:

To sum up the squabble quickly, Edmunds claims the administration failed to deliver the facts about each “clunker,” costing taxpayers $24,000, and although it boosted third-quarter sales, the fourth quarter, which is traditionally the worst season for car dealerships, will report abysmal numbers at best.

This administration reports, in contrast, the excitement of an inventive vehicle program drew in purchases that previously would not have happened. What they fail to say is this is highly unlikely for those who did not qualify, which is a greater percentage than one would initially think and during the CFC program, prices on vehicles actually rose.

Really that is it they disagree on what is going to happen in the future? And how is this silencing the opposition? Last time I checked we were allowed to say what we want and we were allowed to disagree in none of the things that you quoted did the Obama administration stop anyone from saying anything. You can speak your mind and guess what he is a citizen of the U.S. so he can...speak his mind too heaven forbid it disagrees with what you think.

I will let you read the rest of the article if you want but he pretty much goes on to say that Obama is wrong and that he doesn't let us use free speech but there is one last thing I want to discuss from the article:

The First Amendment states American citizens have liberty in the areas of the free exercise of religion, of speech, of the press, of assembly and to redress grievances before government. This is a statement that ought to take primacy in the lives of our leaders.

Guess what Obama is an American citizen and has the right to say what he thinks as well but even more so find me one instance where Obama has stopped any of these. Where the Tea party protesters allowed to protest? Yup. Are people still allowed to practice whatever religion they want? Sure. Do people call Obama a Nazi/Hitler? Yup. Has it ever been stopped? Nope. So you and he disagree on political issues, what did I expect living in West Texas, but that doesn't mean that you are being oppressed in what you can do/say.

Facts vs Politics

So some times I have to look for something to go off about and sometimes you just pick it up on the way to your office. Today it was the later when I came across this article in today's Daily Toreador, the school paper for Texas Tech.

So most of the article is not what I want to deal with it is kind of blah and not really something I care to make an statement on and there were somethings I actually agreed with while reading this. That was until I came to these next few statements:

The fact these individuals believe [...] or that we did not evolve from lower forms of life [...] does not make them evil people.

and then further on

However, if we turn off our minds to their reasoning([...] they do not bow to the supposed all-powerful altar of scientific theory, etc.) we only damage ourselves.

This pretty much pissed me off but what did I expect I am in West Texas. A scientific theory is not a matter of personal belief it is based on evidence, far too much to list right now. You are truing off your reasoning by accepting what has been told to you by church leaders for hundreds of years. Examine the evidence, all of it, with open eyes not with the idea that it is already wrong. The fact that they mix in evolution with Political ideals such as socialism etc is exactly what makes me mad it is not a political issue it is not an idea to be put up for debate by the common person the ideas are being refined and debated amongst scientist and trust me if someone disproves evolution it will very quickly be published in the popular media.

So some of you might be wondering why I don't write a reply in the student paper. I am not because 1) my writing is pretty obviously crappy because I know what I think just not how to write it down and 2) That is not the main topic that they are talking about in their piece, although with the way these topics are included he kind of goes against the main point in his article. Anyway feel free to leave any comments if you think I am over reacting or under reacting here as well as state your opinion on the page for the article itself.

Randomness

I know I haven't posted in a while but as I said earlier I would probably be busy over the next few weeks and I have. This time is actually rare for at least another week so don't expect the posts to be rolling out anytime soon but anyway onto the post. This post is going to be pretty random I came across some things on conservapedia I want to address but it should still be a pretty short post.

The first one is this:

Homeschooling has
increased 74% from 1999 and 36% from 2003, according to a report recently
released by the U.S. Department of Education last month. Reasons cited include
"to provide religious or moral instruction" (36%), "concern about school
environment" (21%), and "dissatisfaction with academic instruction" (17%).

I do not like that people are shying away from schooling in general but I will agree there are areas in this country that need a serious overhaul in the education systme so that is a good enough reason to pull people out. I really don't have any problem with people being homeschooled for the most part but it was with the first reason that most people are homescooled, "to provide religious or moral instruction." While I have no problem with people believing in God it needs to be a clear destinction between what is faith and what is actually known and trying to teach both religion and science/history at home blurs the line but I guess that is why people do that because they don't think that science is right. The article they are talking about is: http://www.hslda.org/docs/link.asp?URL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ledger-enquirer.com%2Fnews%2Fstory%2F742241.html&

Next:

Another tragedy from unattended video game playing as a
11-year-old Mississippi boy accidentally
killed his 9-year-old brother with a shotgun blast Tuesday as the two
struggled over the gun after arguing about a video game, authorities said. "The
younger brother allegedly got mad because he got beat at some video games and
got the gun," Marshall County Sheriff Kenny Dickerson said. [28]

No this is not a tragedy from unattedned video game playing it is a tragedy caused by piss poor parenting. I have no people owning guns but if you are you need to teach your kids what they are used for and you also need to make sure that they are scured exceptionally well especially if you have children.

And finally:

The killer at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,
James von Brunn, was a white supremacist and also an evolutionary racist. James von
Brunn wrote that "Only the strong survive. Cross breeding whites with species on
the evolutionary scale diminishes the white gene-pool while increasing the
number of physiologically, psychologically, and behaviorally deprived
mongrels."[15] The evolutionist Charles Darwin was also an evolutionary racist. The shooter, James von Brunn, also
appears to have had close ties to neo-Nazis and his ex-wife said his
anti-semitism and racist hate "ate him alive like a cancer". [16][17] Adolf Hitler was also a
rabid evolutionary racist.[18][19]

This, the shooting, is a tragedy but what they are trying to do here is just sick. Racists use evolution to suit their views the same way that conservapedia is using this shooting to suit their's. Evolution does not support killing those of other "races" from your own. As a scientific theory evolution only states that this is what happens in nature what we do to ourselves is not what nature is doing to us. Nature did not act upon that gun a crazy person did that is what it comes down to. I am sure that this guy "believed" in gravity as well so should we say that all people who believe in gravity are racist? All of these arguments have been addressed much better than I can do it and will be many more times but I just wanted to point out what was going on.

As always leave any feedback you want.

Book Stores

Alright let me start off by saying never again am I going to put multiple pictures in a post, see previous post, and I apologize for all of the messed up formatting issues that it apparently caused.

So now on to what I really wanted to talk about and that is book stores. As those of you who have seen my youtube page know I currently reside in Baton Rouge, LA, and for those of you who don't know about Louisiana well lets just say it is one of the most conservative states in the US. So I went in a couple of book stores today just to window shop/look around and as always I check out the Biology/Evolution section. It normally down here is about 1-2 shelves of books on the two subjects, not counting animals/nature which is a completely separate section in most stores for some reason. Well as I walked through the rest of the store I came across the Christian section there were 2.5 rows of it, not counting the additional half row of bibles in one store, and there was also another section on the wall that consisted of about half the wall of the store that was also Christian books. There was also a Christian book section in the featured books in the center of the store.

Now I made sure that I pointed out where I am right now because I hope that book stores across the country/world are not in the same situation but it is bad when there are more Christian books than there are books on all of the sciences combined, in total no more than a row and a half. I understand that people believe in God but do you really have to go that far to prove the existence of your God to have that many books. Science should take up more space in the book stores seeing as how that is what keeps us alive and brings us all of the modern conveniences of the modern world.