Chicago Vs. THE BID

So Obama's in Denmark right now attempting to woo the International Olympic Committee and land the games in his adopted hometown. Despite a little pressure from dark horse candidate Rio de Janeiro, Chicago (with the help of Obama) is slated to win. For the majority of Chicagoans however, this news comes with much trepidation.

With a burgeoning level of debt and already maxed out infrastructure, residents of the Windy City are more nervous than excited for this monumental decision. One of the more visible examples of the stance of local citizens occurred in a local Starbucks. A clever barista set out two tip jars one marked "yes" and one marked "no" and asked customers to weigh in with their tips in regards to the Olympic bid. By the end of the day the "no" jar was overflowing with one's and five's while the "yes" jar contained a mere handful of change.

When it comes to the question of the benefits of hosting the Olympic games, it all depends on the point of view of the one your asking. Is it good for Obama and America? Undoubtedly. An influx of attention and money would surely bolster the flagging American economy as well as give American citizens something to be excited about. Is it good for the Mayor Daley and the long term prospects for the city of Chicago? Probably. This would be Daley's crowning achievement and could cement Chicago's status as a truly international destination. Is it good for the average citizen of Chicago? No way. If Chicago wins the bid, large scale construction will have to begin within months and will not cease for the next SIX years. The loss in productivity will be extremely costly to local businesses and corporations alike.

Additionally, though proponents of the games state otherwise, landing the games has traditionally DECREASED tourism revenues on a whole because no one wants to visit a city that is in the midst of a half decade remodeling. Though tourism revenue spikes sharply around the actual playing of the games, this short lived boon is hardly enough to offset the losses accrued to during the years leading up to the event.

Bottom Line: If the news comes out tomorrow and Chicago wins, expect a good amount of Chicagoans to start thinking about a long term vacation.

Gomer Pyle vs. The Internet

So I was skimming the Internet and I came across this story I had to talk about. Cnet news.com posted an article entitled "Texas police take on blog commenter's" which details how a police chief in Austin Texas plans to pursue and file criminal charges against individuals who impersonate or slander Austin's finest on blogs and social networking sites on the world wide web.

An image of a Texas patrolman rolling down a dusty road in Dubai and busting into a dilapidated shack in order to bring in a teenager who has never stepped foot in America comes to mind....

Police Chief Joe Acevado who is valiantly leading the charge has this to say on the bloggers:

"A lot of my people feel it is time to take these people on," Acevedo told the Statesman. "They understand the damage to the organization, and quite frankly, when people are willfully misleading and lying, they are pretty much cowards anyway because they are doing so under the cloak of anonymity."

If I could take a guess, I would think that Mr. Acevado finally got around to using the Internet and found out that all the people he busted weren't too happy about it and were using the only (formally) legal means to get back at their persecutors. I would also guess that Chief Acevado doesn't fully understand the power of the Internet and bloggers like myself who seek to turn the tables and metaphorically bring about Justice by exposing the foolishness of people like Acevado.
The Internet for better or worse is unstoppable and any effort to reign it or its users in will end in complete and utter failure and embarrassment.

With that I'll leave you with a comment posted be Jaguar717 in regards to this story:

"As Acevedo's gay underage drug-dealing illegal alien lover, I can tell you first hand that he says this all in jest. He actually enjoys being impersonated, and encourages anyone with strong feelings about this article to assume his name and "malign him beyond the boundaries of legal tolerance" (that's a euphemism for sex)."

Keep it up world...

Everyone needs to think before they speak.

In the last three weeks there’s been a series of stupid things blurted out in public by various prominent Americans.

First, Joe Wilson yells “you lie” at President Obama during a joint session of Congress. Ridiculous, I know. Isn’t there some sort of procedure to verbally assault the president of The United States of America on live television?

Second, Kanye West drunkenly stumbles on stage during the presentation of “Best Music Video” award to Taylor Swift at the MTV movie awards and slurs out “I'm sorry, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time” C’mon Kanye, this isn’t one of your video girls, treat Taylor with at least a marginal amount of respect.

Third, upon hearing of Kanye’s tirade against Swift, President Barack Obama is heard by ABC news staffers calling Kanye a “Jackass”. Et tu Obama? Your better than that!

Besides being extremely entertaining, these events are all extremely indicative of the times we now live. With the proliferation of information technology and advancement of social networking we now live in a society where real time feedback dominates. Twitter: people transmit there thoughts and feelings on an hourly basis. Blogging: people get a thought in their heads and instantly jump on their computers to tell the world. Literally seconds elapse from thought formation to the proliferation of the information. There’s no second thoughts, no censorship, just information blurted out. Wilson, Kanye and Obama did not think before they spoke. People the world over do not think before they blog.

We as a society need to slow down and think before we say and write things. We cannot afford to blurt out everything that comes to our mind. With that, before I post this, I think I’m gonna sleep on it and make sure this is really what I want the world to read.

Jared Diamond: A Public Intellectual

Public Intellectual… This is a term that is not often bandied about amongst those whose surname is not predicated with “Professor” or “Doctor” and can have a plethora of meanings (or depending on who you ask, no meaning whatsoever). The focus of this post will be to provide insight into this ambiguous word to laymen like myself using a prominent public intellectual as an example to illustrate what exactly is meant by this term.

Jared Diamond at TED

The public intellectual I will be relying on for this post is named Jared Diamond. Known for being a champion of ecological studies of past and contemporary society, Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies chronicles the origins of Eurasia Anglo-Saxon hegemony arguing that the vast chasms in technology and power between various societies is not due to cultural or racial differences, but rather that a simple environmental luck-of-the-draw determined the winners and the losers in today’s society. (It turns out the that white man’s inability to dance was a small tradeoff for a complete monopoly on 13 of the 14 domesticate-able species, 32 of 56 cultivatable grasses, and a geographically East-West orientation allowing easy transfer of crops, animals and technology.)

As for his eligibility as a public intellectual he is certainly qualified. First and foremost, he is both educated and completely divorced from politics. Holding both a Harvard B.A. and a Cambridge Ph.D in physiology and membrane biophysics, he is certainly an academic heavyweight. Moreover, he is unaffiliated with any political party. This separation of academia and politics is crucial to maintaining the objectivity of the public intellectual’s work. As quoted in Stephen Mack’s essay “The Decline of Public intellectuals?” Jean Bethke Elshtain puts it perfectly.

A public intellectual is not a paid publicist, not a spinner, not in the pocket of a narrowly defined purpose. It is, of course the temptation, another one, of the public intellectual to cozy up to that which he or she should be evaluating critically. I think perhaps, too many White House dinners can blunt the edge of criticism. . . .

This brings me to the next characteristic of a true public intellectual. This attribute concerns the public intellectual’s function and sole reason for being. That is, to truly be a public intellectual, one must practice and wax all things critical. The public intellectual stands as a voice of criticism to keep in check all those with the power to make decisions that affect others (or at least keep them in the spotlight of the public eye). As Mack so succinctly puts it, “…if public intellectuals have any role to play in a democracy—and they do—it’s simply to keep the pot boiling.” In this regard Diamond is a critic whose to-the-point writings on the ecological collapse of society spare no one. In his most recent book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed he lambasts corporate fat cats, politicians and tree hugging organizations such as Green Peace alike. This seemingly indiscriminate criticism is quite refreshing, for a true public intellectual never picks favorites…

The final criterion for a public intellectual is that they are a truly PUBLIC intellectual. What I mean by this is that they not only have something important to say, they also have a voice loud enough to say it to many. On this point I differ from Mack who writes, “The measure of a public intellectual work is not whether the people are listening, but whether they’re hearing things worth talking about.” By no means do I want to downplay the importance of the quality of a public intellectual’s input and output, but if people are not listening, a public intellectual does no good for the world. It’s all well and good to write volumes and volumes of brilliant work, but if no one reads them the writer is rendered completely impotent. Without a readership a public intellectual’s power to change the world and his very purpose for being ceases to exist. Diamond’s work may never make it to a best seller list, but he has had a significant influence on others and he has a strong following. This following empowers his ideas making him an agent for change and a true public intellectual.