Say Anything Blog

http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20090322/NEWS01/903220312/-1/TODAY

Jessica Logan’s nude cell-phone photo - meant for her boyfriend’s eyes only - was sent to hundreds of teenagers last year in at least seven Greater Cincinnati high schools.

The 18-year-old Sycamore High School senior was then bombarded with taunts: slut, porn queen, whore.

On July 3, Jessie hanged herself in her bedroom.

She was Albert and Cynthia Logan’s only child.

“My only baby that I will never be able to touch again,” Cynthia Logan said through tears. “I will never have grandchildren. I will never be able to hand down my heirlooms. I’m just devastated by these parents that allow their children to do and say anything they want.”

Now, Jessie’s parents are attempting to launch a national campaign seeking laws to address “sexting” - the practice of forwarding and posting sexually explicit cell-phone photos online. The Logans also want to warn teens of the harassment, humiliation and bullying that can occur when that photo gets forwarded.

Cynthia Logan and Parry Aftab, an attorney and one of the leading authorities on Internet security and cyberbullying, plan to attach Jessie’s name to a national campaign to educate teens about the dangers of sexting.

Aftab, based in New York, is the catalyst for a network of volunteers working to stop cyberbullying. She operates two Web sites: wiredsafety.org, the world’s largest and oldest cyber safety organization, and stopcyberbullying.org.

“Schools need to understand our kids are targeting each other and how technology is being used as a weapon,” Aftab said. “None of them (the schools) know what to do. Many of them ... think it’s not their problem. They want to close their eyes and put fingers in their ears, saying it’s a home issue.”

Compassionate and carefree
Jessie’s friends and family described her as an artistic, bubbly, compassionate carefree spirit who had many friends in several schools. She was also a “tiger,” who would relentlessly stand up for someone.

“But she couldn’t stand up for herself,” Albert Logan said.

“I think when you’re constantly knocked down, you lose your self-esteem,” his wife added.

Read the rest here:
http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20090322/NEWS01/903220312/-1/TODAY

I get tired of these emotional outbursts by people who dont want to take responsibility for things they are primarily responsible for.
No one wants thier children to engage in this stuff before they are ready, but is it the governments job to do what the parents should be doing? Are more laws the answer?
I think not.
Parents should either do the job they committed to when they had chidren, or live the with the consequences of neglecting that job. More nannystate/anti-responsibility/emotionallly based laws are not the answer. Letting parents do their job is the answer, and if they dont, well, some children will expose themselves and their families to ridicule or worse. So be it.
The suicide thing is a canard. Ozzy isnt to blame for those boys who killed themselves way back when, and technology is not to blame for this tragedy. Lack of supervision and bad parenting is the problem, and suicide is responsibity of the person committing it, or in somr cases those charged with preventing it. The rest is emotionalism at the cost of personal responsibility.

The American Conservative
By John Derbyshire
How Radio Wrecks the Right    

Limbaugh and company certainly entertain. But a steady diet of ideological comfort food is no substitute for hearty intellectual fare.
You can’t help but admire Rush Limbaugh’s talent for publicity. His radio talk show is probably—reliable figures only go back to 1991—in its third decade as the number-one rated radio show in the country. And here he is in the news again, trading verbal punches with the president of the United States.

Limbaugh remarked on Jan. 16 that to the degree that Obama’s program is one of state socialism, he hopes it will fail. (If only he had said the same about George W. Bush.) The president riposted at a session with congressional leaders a week later, telling them, “You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done.” Outsiders weighed in: Limbaugh should not have wished failure on a president trying to cope with a national crisis; Obama should not have stooped to insult a mere media artiste, the kind of task traditionally delegated to presidential subordinates while the chief stands loftily mute. Citizens picked sides and sat back to enjoy the circus.

For Limbaugh to remain a player at this level after 20-odd years bespeaks powers far beyond the ordinary. Most conservatives—even those who do not listen to his show—regard him as a good thing. His 14 million listeners are a key component of the conservative base. When he first emerged nationally, soon after the FCC dropped the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, conservatives for the first time in decades had something worth listening to on their radios other than country music and bland news programs read off the AP wire. In the early Clinton years, when Republicans were regrouping, Limbaugh was perhaps the most prominent conservative in the United States. National Review ran a cover story on him as “The Leader of the Opposition.”

Limbaugh has a similarly high opinion of himself: “I know I have become the intellectual engine of the conservative movement,” he told the New York Times. This doesn’t sit well with all conservatives. Fred Barnes grumbled, “When the GOP rose in the late 1970s, it had Ronald Reagan. Now the loudest Republican voice belongs to Rush Limbaugh.” Upon discovering that Limbaugh had anointed himself the successor to William F. Buckley Jr., WFB’s son Christopher retorted, “Rush, I knew William F. Buckley, Jr. William F. Buckley, Jr. was a father of mine. Rush, you’re no William F. Buckley, Jr.”

The more po-faced conservative intellectuals have long winced at Limbaugh’s quips, parodies, slogans, and impatience with the starched-collar respectability of the official Right. American conservatism had been a pretty staid and erudite affair pre-Limbaugh, occasional lapses into jollification on “Firing Line” being the main public expression of conservatism’s lighter side.

Now the airwaves are full of conservative chat. Talkers magazine’s list of the top ten radio talk shows by number of weekly listeners also features Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Laura Ingraham, and Mark Levin. Agony aunt Laura Schlessinger and financial adviser Dave Ramsey are both in the top ten too, though their conservatism is more incidental to the content of their shows.

Liberal attempts to duplicate the successes of Limbaugh and his imitators have fallen flat. Alan Colmes’s late-evening radio show can be heard in most cities, and Air America is still alive somewhere—the Aleutians, perhaps—but colorful, populist, political talk radio seems to be a thing that liberals can’t do.
Read the rest here:
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2009/feb/23/00006/

Huntsman takes aim at GOP
By JONATHAN MARTIN | 3/1/09 6:59 AM EST

There was at least one 2012 presidential contender missing from the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington this weekend, traditionally a testing ground for any Republican even remotely considering a White House bid.

That could be in part because Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. risked getting booed off the stage for some of his views.

Largely under the radar of the national media and even out of sight of many in his own party, Huntsman, 48, is emerging as an articulate, unapologetic and unlikely spokesman for a new brand of Republicanism, one that seems out of vogue at a time when many in the GOP attribute their fall from power to a deviation from right-wing orthodoxy.

Huntsman thinks the party’s challenge is more profound, owing less to its excessive spending practices during the Bush era than to sweeping demographic and political changes that threaten to consign
Republicans to a long-term minority status and confine their appeal to narrow sections of the country.

The party needs to be more intellectually rigorous, and to compete for the votes of the young, the elites and minorities, he said in an interview with POLITICO. To do so, the GOP needs to tack toward the middle on environment, gay rights and immigration. And, yes, Ronald Reagan is to be admired – but as much for his oft-overlooked pragmatism as for his conservative principles.

It’s a view that places him out of step with the prevailing conservative sentiment among most members of the GOP base, but it’s also one that makes Huntsman, a wealthy Mormon scion, the first 2012 Republican primary prospect to unabashedly embrace a middle ground somewhere between moderate Northeastern Republicanism and Sun Belt conservatism.

“We need to pull up the stakes of the tent and draw them out a little bit,” he told POLITICO, while in town for the National Governors Associaton meeting.

Huntsman’s model comes not from the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions, but instead resembles a Republican brand of Clintonism: practical solutions, softened rhetorical edges aimed to appeal to the center and an overall modernization of a party badly in need of a new image.

Read the rest here:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/19455.html

It will be your responsibility to keep your kids from doing this. Please make sure that when you teach your kids right from wrong, you let them know that a roach isnt always smokable.

(02-26) 20:00 PST San Francisco—U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is sending strong signals that President Obama - who as a candidate said states should be allowed to make their own rules on medical marijuana - will end raids on pot dispensaries in California.
Asked at a Washington news conference Wednesday about Drug Enforcement Administration raids in California since Obama took office last month, Holder said the administration has changed its policy.

“What the president said during the campaign, you’ll be surprised to know, will be consistent with what we’ll be doing here in law enforcement,” he said. “What he said during the campaign is now American policy.”

Bill Piper, national affairs director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a marijuana advocacy group, said the statement is encouraging.


Read the rest here:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2009/02/27/MN2016651R.DTL

Finally Obama does something I can wholeheartedly applaude him for.
He leaves it up to the state legislatures as it should have always been. 
The end is near for the anti-freedom prohibitionist policies of the Federal Government.
All freedom loving conservatives should applaude this. Even if you dislike Obama(and I do), this makes alot of sense and any truly conservative person should understand this is a fairly signifigant drawback in federal power/control. Let the states decide these issues.
My only regret is that this was not spurred by a conservative administration, as should have been the case. Just another example of how the GOP has lost its way.
  Now when this all plays out, the Dems will get the credit and the respect for changing this horrible, wasteful national policy we have been laboring under for so many decades.

The Rocky Mountain News, founded in 1859, and the traditional voice of conservative thought in Colorado will close it’s doors Friday.

While I understand technology and economic concerns are at the heart of this, as well as an inability of certain industries to adjust to the changing media environment, I am sad to see another credible local news source go by the wayside.
Read the article here:
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2009/feb/26/rocky-mountain-news-closes-friday-final-edition/

Domino’s Pizza tests the limits of what human beings will eat

Domino’s Scientists Test Limits Of What Humans Will Eat

Are violent video games adequetely preparing children for the apocalypse?

Are Violent Video Games Adequately Preparing Children For The Apocalypse?

George Mason picks drag queen as homecoming queen
1 hour ago

FAIRFAX, Va. (AP) — George Mason University senior Ryan Allen dresses in drag and doesn’t mind being called a queen — homecoming queen, to be exact. Allen, who is gay and performs in drag at nightclubs in the region, said he entered the homecoming contest as a joke, competing as Reann Ballslee, his drag queen persona.

But he considers the victory one of his happiest moments and proof that the suburban Washington, D.C., school famous for its run to the Final Four a few years back celebrates its diverse student body.

“I was very touched by how Mason was so supportive through the whole process of allowing a boy in a dress to run for homecoming queen,” Allen said in a phone interview. “It says a lot about the campus that not only do we have diversity but we celebrate it.”

The senior from Virginia’s Goochland County won the pageant Saturday at a sold-out Homecoming basketball game against Northeastern University.

Large portions of the crowd cheered as Allen, wearing a gold-sequined top, accepted the tiara and the Ms. Mason 2009 sash.

The school, known for racial diversity and a basketball team that pulled off a string of upsets to advance to the Final Four in 2006, was selected the nation’s top “school to watch” in the most recent U.S. News and World Report rankings.

Allen’s selection does not appear to have caused much consternation among the school’s 30,000 undergraduate and graduate students. An online article in the student newspaper prompted only two comments, both positive.

Read the rest here…if you dare:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jxU3fLHivgSqzF5NdHkOdsNYq6dQD96FIRGO0

Times of London
February 16, 2009

Military’s killer robots must learn warrior code

Read the US Navy’s high-tech and secretive Office of Naval Research report here:
http://ethics.calpoly.edu/ONR_report.pdf

Autonomous military robots that will fight future wars must be programmed to live by a strict warrior code or the world risks untold atrocities at their steely hands.

The stark warning – which includes discussion of a Terminator-style scenario in which robots turn on their human masters – is issued in a hefty report funded by and prepared for the US Navy’s high-tech and secretive Office of Naval Research .

The report, the first serious work of its kind on military robot ethics, envisages a fast-approaching era where robots are smart enough to make battlefield decisions that are at present the preserve of humans. Eventually, it notes, robots could come to display significant cognitive advantages over Homo sapiens soldiers.
“There is a common misconception that robots will do only what we have programmed them to do,” Patrick Lin, the chief compiler of the report, said. “Unfortunately, such a belief is sorely outdated, harking back to a time when . . . programs could be written and understood by a single person.” The reality, Dr Lin said, was that modern programs included millions of lines of code and were written by teams of programmers, none of whom knew the entire program: accordingly, no individual could accurately predict how the various portions of large programs would interact without extensive testing in the field – an option that may either be unavailable or deliberately sidestepped by the designers of fighting robots.

Read the rest here:
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5741334.ece

The Audacity of Dope Could legal marijuana save California’s economy?
By Jeff Segal
Posted Wednesday, February 11, 2009 - 10:36am


Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps has made marijuana a popular topic. He was photographed smoking from a bong, lost corporate sponsorships, and was suspended from the sport as a result. But celebrities aren’t the only ones thinking about dope.

Some legislators in California have pot on their minds, too. That’s because the government of the biggest economy in the United States is facing a massive budget deficit whose pain would be alleviated by decriminalizing marijuana.

California’s current deficit stands at a whopping $15 billion and is expected to reach $42 billion next year. And the state run by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has virtually run out of cash. It recently delayed $3.5 billion of payments to taxpayers and counties.
While nearly all U.S. states currently face budget shortfalls, California’s deficit is more than one-third of its general fund. That’s largely due to its dependence on income taxes, which slide during a recession. And the state can’t easily borrow due to the government bond-market freeze. Moody’s even warned it may downgrade the state’s rating.

There’s no easy fix to the problem, as any solution likely requires cutting benefits and social services—tough political choices for Schwarzenegger. But the state does have an abundant natural resource it may be able to draw on for help.

Marijuana is California’s largest cash crop. It’s valued at $14 billion annually, or nearly twice the value of the state’s grape and vegetable crops combined, according to government statistics. Indeed, a recent report pegged marijuana as two-thirds of the economy of Mendocino County, a ganja hotbed north of San Francisco. That’s not surprising—it costs $400 to grow a pound of pot that can sell for $6,000 on the street.

read the rest here:
http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/judgments/2009/02/11/audacity-dope

As was the case during the Great Depression, people will realize that prohibition is a waste of money we dont have. The upside to legalization far outweighs the downside. The feds will lift its draconian tactics that keep states and other countries in this prohibition farce. The natural result will be states deciding that legalization and taxation is smart and pragmatic. Like alcohol before it, pot will become mainstream(like its not now..ha!!) and generate billions for the states that choose sanity and the AMERICAN VALUES OF SELF DETERMINATION and PERSONAL FREEDOM over misplaced moral outrage and hypocrisy.
It sounds very nobel. It isnt. They really dont care if it is moral to throw folks in jail, disrupt lives, and ruin carreers for nothing. The truth is it will happen because it must happen. We cannot afford the drug war and pot is the biggest cash crop in the nation.