Americans sure do love their fucking GUNS! No doubt about it. The gun nuts in Oregon were out in force last week to protest president Obama’s visit to meet with families of the dead students from Umpqua Community College. It was the 45th school shooting of the year. “Prayers not politics” proclaimed one of the […]
I never understood the arguments against gay marriage. What’s the big deal? My wife and I will be married thirty-two years in October and we both agree that anyone crazy enough to want to get married in this day and age should be allowed to do so. Why should gays be denied the misery of […]
King Henry VIII was the first Monarch to take legal action to control the press in pre-Enlightenment England. His methods were simple enough: he required all printers to pay licensing fees in order to be allowed to print anything. This concept became known as ‘prior restraint’: preventing the distribution of controversial materials before they are even […]
Mad Men is a perfect example of a serialized historical melodrama that permits viewers to re-evaluate the past. The show was created by Matthew Weiner, a co-writer and producer of The Sopranos, in 1999. Mad Men arguably tells us less about the 1960s than it does about the current desire for collective nostalgia for the […]
Effective celebrity activists use their fame and fortune to bring attention to important issues and to give credibility to legitimate representatives of social movements. Internationally-known celebrities can help expose and highlight problems which would normally get little or no news coverage without their involvement. But does celebrity involvement really make any difference in what people […]
Recreational drug use is a part of life. Experimentation with illicit substances can be very enlightening or it can be incredibly destructive, depending on the circumstances – and the individual. Like most things, moderation is a key component to leading a healthy, normal life. Adults should be able to make their own decisions regarding what […]
Recent studies confirm that a growing number of college students are losing empathy for their fellow human beings. In a world that clearly needs more compassion, this is a shocking trend. Studies conducted between 1979 and 2009 found that college students have less empathy toward their peers than previous generations. The findings come from the study, Changes […]
The final innovation which profoundly affected my personal sense of identity was the advent of the Internet. By the time my wife and I broke down and bought our first PC in the early 90s, the World Wide Web was already a full-blown global phenomenon. The Internet opened up entirely new vistas of research and […]
“Congratulations, America! We spent 40 million dollars surveying Bud Light® drinkers all over the country and the results from two years of consumer focus groups have shown that for some reason the words ‘mix’ and ‘tail’ scored highly with our target audience: people with an IQ below 80 and the tastes and desires of the average 10-year old child. Adding […]
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s heartbreaking 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail is a classic rhetorical response to social injustice and to those who seek to perpetuate injustice either by ignorance, complacency, or tacit approval. MLK eloquently calls out the clergymen in Alabama who condemned him as an “extremist” for his very reasonable and honorable – […]
Jason Darensburg's Blog-o-rama 