Bradley's Old Fashioned Weblog

Category: General Updates

Commentary on people, places, things, the news, current events, etc.

  • Alabama Attempts to Usher in a New Dark Age

    Officials in Bay Minette, Alabama delayed a new program that would allow some nonviolent offenders to choose church over jail after a civil liberties group objected.

    The “Operation Restore Our Community” initiative was slated to begin this week, but the southwest Alabama city’s legal team will take another look after the American Civil Liberties Union sent a cease-and-desist letter Monday.

    via Reuters

    What were they thinking?  The officials in Bay Minette, I mean.

    I saw a small article about this tucked into a corner of an issue of the NY Daily News a few days ago and decided to look up more information about it online.  The Daily article didn’t mention anything about the ACLU or a protest; it was just all glowing and positive, and I couldn’t help but wonder if the reporter had suddenly forgotten about the separation of church and state provision in the US Constitution.

    Reading the Daily article, I was mentally transported back to a time (a.k.a. the Dark Ages) when the Church presided over the sentencing and punishment/rehabilitation of criminals.  I thought we’d covered this ground already and gotten past it with that whole Enlightenment thing that happened in Europe.  The founding fathers of this country didn’t introduce the separation of church and state into the Constitution on a whim.

    The officials mentioned in the article are trying to hide the obvious, that this is a drive to get criminals on the ‘right path’ by converting them to Christianity through extended exposure.  They’re instead claiming the weekly ‘check-ins’ are just for the purpose of accountability, and to access community based resources to help them fix their lives.

    I wonder if such a thinly veiled excuse to get people into local churches will stand up in court?  I wouldn’t be surprised, since people can win lawsuits over spilled hot coffee, but I can’t believe that anyone would have thought that this would be OK, or that it would be true to the principles that this country stands for.  I’m not against churches.  I’m not against Christians practicing religion, but when you give someone an option of going to jail or going to church for a year, it’s not really a choice at all.  It’s more like a European telling natives in a newly ‘discovered’ land that they can either convert or be sold into slavery, or perhaps killed.  Freedom under a new religion will be preferable to a loss of liberty for most people.

    There are reasons why church and state are separated in this country.  The US is diverse.  There are people of all faiths here and people who choose not to have any faith at all.  It’s one of our freedoms, and we should never be forced to choose between going to church or going to jail, even if the person in question is guilty of a crime.  A secular law system requires secular consequences.

  • New Semester, New Books

    A stack of some of my college books for Fall Semester.

    Fall Semester started yesterday.  I didn’t have much of a break, since I took courses over the Summer, but two and a half weeks off seemed long enough to me.  I spent most of that time rotting my brain with video games.  I haven’t sat around playing video games for hours on end in years and it was great!  Besides a game called Vindictus (by Nexon) that I’ve been playing casually since around March, I started using ‘Steam’ (My Profile) and played Team Fortress 2, Left For Dead 2, and Borderlands, among others.  Hopefully I’ll still have a little time to hack up zombies and make bandits’ heads explode with a shotgun, but considering how thick some of the books are, I’m glad I have one of those nifty book lights that clips on, because I foresee a lot of late night reading.

    Some good news is, I finally decided what I want to do and declared my major as History.  I still have to figure out what particular area of history I want to focus on, though I’m leaning towards Islamic or Medieval History.  I’m also considering doing a double major since a history major only requires 11 courses (33 credit hours) out of the total of 120 credit hours required to get a BA. 

    This semester I’m going to be taking two history courses that will count towards my major:  Middle East Under Islam and Traditional Civilizations of India.  The books in the picture above are for those two courses.

    I’m also taking a 6 credit course involving English and Writing.  It’s called ‘Our City’ and focuses on literary perspectives on New York City.  I live here, so why not?  It might help me discover some of the history behind New York City.  Also, it fills a requirement.  I’d rather have taken a course that covers dystopian literature, but it wasn’t available and I want to get that requirement out of the way.

    I also wanted to mention that Hurricane Irene is affecting the school systems here in NYC, obviously.  I got an SMS, an email and three phone calls from the CUNY alert system letting me know that CCNY will be closed today, tomorrow, and possibly Monday.  I don’t really care that the school is closed today or tomorrow.  In fact, it might not even be bad if it’s closed on Monday, since the first day of a class is usually a ‘get to know each other’ kind of thing.

    Hurricane Irene has New Yorkers panicking.  By now, all mass transit will have shut down, including the airports and Amtrak.  There are mandatory evacuation zones and they may even cut power to prevent the power grid from being annihilated by salt water inundation.  I also looked at a map and discovered that the block my apartment building is on is just inside an evacuation zone.  The evacuation zone area cuts inland only for my block.  I don’t know how to feel about that, but if the block south of me and the one north of me aren’t in an evacuation zone, then WTF?  I can see them from the window and could hit them if I threw a stone.  They’re also on the same level as this building, altitude-wise.  I think I’ll stay put.

  • Three Years Further On – An Anniversary Dedication

    Three Year Anniversary Card
    Three Year Anniversary Card

    Today is kind of a tough day for me.  Three years ago, my wife and I got married in Singapore.  I still remember walking down the street, holding her hand for the first time as husband and wife.  I loved her then, with all of my heart, and now, after three years, I love her even more.

    The reason today is tough, though, is because we aren’t together on our anniversary for the first time.  A year ago, we celebrated this special day in Manila in the Philippines.  The year before that, we celebrated in Singapore.  This year, we’re separated by thousands of miles, and it really just sucks the joy out of the occasion.  That’s not to say I’m not thankful for another anniversary, another year of having my wife in my life.

    She’s an amazing woman. She’s my source of inspiration, my constant companion, and a source of motivation.  She’s dedicated, passionate, sweet and kind.  She’s a great cook.  She’s full of great ideas and fun to talk to.  She’s patient.  She’s practical.  She’s damn good looking too!  She’s really the best I could have hoped for and everything I need.

    I won’t try to sum up everything she means to me in a blog post, but I want to say that I love her more and more with each passing day.  I can’t imagine life without her, and nothing brings me greater joy than knowing that soon we’ll be having coffee and sharing stories, going out and living our lives, together again.

  • Speech Foundations Is Pretty Cool After All

    When I signed up for the Speech Foundations class I’m taking right now, I assumed it would be lame.  It’s a whole semester worth of one class packed into one month.  I thought there would be a lot of work, a lot of speaking, and… I mean just what can you really do in a speech class that’s interesting?

    Well, thankfully I was wrong.  The way the Professor runs the class, with multiple group and class activities, seeing each other for 2.5 hours a day, we all got to know each other pretty quickly and I find myself looking forward to going.  Every day the professor has a different set of activities for us, which often call on individuals in the class to put forward personal opinions which in turn stimulates a debate.  Thankfully it’s all polite debate.  Thankfully the class has a wide range of opinions, which keeps things interesting.  The time goes by pretty quickly.

    Somehow, we seem to find ourselves discussing religion quite a bit.  I think it’s because we have Christians, Jews and Muslims all in the class together.  It’s turning into a real learning opportunity.  I learned from a Jewish girl that it’s not kosher to eat a cheeseburger, because it’s like bathing a dead baby cow (the meat) in the mother’s milk (the cheese), which, when you think about it, is pretty gruesome.  I got to tell a guy from Turkey that the US wasn’t the first nation to import slaves.  I met a guy whose grandmother escaped from the Nazis during WWII.  I met a guy from Morocco.  I met a girl that sings Jazz and is studying music.

    I think what I like most about the class, though, is that it’s turning out to be a great place where we can all get together and bounce ideas around, from the history of Jazz to the treatment of women in Islam, and it’s all cool.  No one freaks out.  Not yet at least.  I think I’ll actually be sad when this class ends, the same way I was a little disappointed when my World Humanities and Art History classes ended last semester.  I’m looking forward to taking World Civ next month though.  That should be pretty cool.

    Anyway, expect a nifty update about how Jazz influenced the civil rights movement in the US in the next few days.  It’s part of a group presentation project I’m working on for my ‘informative’ speech.  For my ‘ceremonial’ speech, I wrote a fictional speech by Creon, celebrating the 5th anniversary of Thebes being liberated from the Sphinx.  I’m considering posting that too.

  • A Shift in Self-Identified Important Virtues, In-Class Project

    In my Speech Foundations class today we did an interesting class project.  We were put into groups and we had to come up with a list of what we thought were common virtues that we thought were important as a group.  When all of the groups were done, the lists were put on the board.  Then the professor circled all of the themes, the virtues that showed up in most of the lists.  What stood out was that people in the class value family, friends, religious tolerance, honesty and loyalty (to friends and family).

    The professor said that this simple class project is an interesting way for her to judge society as a whole, since the things that are listed change over time.  She said she’s been doing this same class project every semester since she started teaching, and she looks like she’s in her early 60s, so I imagine that goes back quite a ways.

    She said that when she first started teaching, money was at the top of every list.  Students were very concerned with money, both having it and making lots of it.  Interestingly enough, the only list on the board that contained ‘money’ was from a group of people who were all first generation immigrants.  I imagine it has to do with perceived financial capacity.  Our economy may be faltering, but people are still generally taken care of, whereas people from other countries might not have those same safety nets, or might have family back home that they’re concerned about.

    The next thing she pointed out was that most groups didn’t place family and friends on the list prior to September 11th, 2001.  She said that ‘religious tolerance’ and similar ideas started showing up shortly after that.  Her theory on the addition of family and friends is that after people died in an attack here in the US, it made people realize that they might not actually see their family or friends later.  Something could happen, so people started to value those ideas more, and perhaps their friends and families too.

    I think the appearance of religious tolerance on these lists comes from the deluge of information people are exposed to now, in light of the war with Middle Eastern countries.  This conflict has been portrayed as a clash of civilizations and more often as a clash between religions.  To combat rampant fear of every ‘other’, ideas of religious tolerance, especially towards Muslims, has become prominent in everything from TV to classrooms.

    The point of the exercise was to demonstrate what type of audience the class is.  It’s a Speech class, and the most important part of writing a speech is knowing who your speech is intended for.

  • Bad News For New York City Smokers Tomorrow

    Notice stating that there is no smoking allowed in NYC parks after May 23rd.

    The acceptable areas for smoking just got a lot narrow, but I can’t really argue with this.  I mean, I still smoke, though I’m planning on getting around to quitting sometime soon, but even so, I can’t be upset about this.  People that don’t smoke have a right to not inhale second hand smoke.  That’s the whole point of not smoking right?  Still, it’s gonna be kind of sad that I can’t lean back on a park bench and enjoy a cigarette while watching all the people pass by anymore.

    This reminds me of something I was told by a guy in Japan.  I don’t remember who it was now, but he was saying that in Japan, they banned smoking outdoors, but not indoors.  He said the reasoning is that it’s all about choice.  If you’re a non-smoker, you can choose to not go into a smoking establishment, but you can’t choose to not walk outside.  So, you ban smoking outdoors, but leave smoking indoors up to the establishment owner.  To me, that makes a lot more sense.

    Given the Japanese stance on smoking, it makes me wonder how much freedom and choice we really have in this country.  Smoking isn’t illegal, but pretty soon it might be illegal to smoke anywhere.  I remember hearing a story a few months ago about a housing development where people were complaining that they could smell the smoke from neighboring units.  Would it be fair to ban smoking in an entire apartment building?  I can imagine a no smoking policy for new tenants, but could you really ask people to move out if they don’t stop smoking?

  • Please, Put Crappy Writing Here

    Please, put crappy writing here.

    This sign, above this trashcan, is located in the Compton-Goethals hall at City College of New York.  I’m not sure who put it up, but it’s a good reminder that if you’re not going to write well, you shouldn’t even bother to turn your paper in.  With the end of the semester upon us, and many papers due, this sign has a lot more meaning than usual.  I’m doing pretty good.  I only have one more to write and then I can completely focus on studying for finals.

    My wife tells me all the time that I write well.  I figure she’s biased, but I did always get good grades on writing assignments in high school and in the college level courses I took online.  Now that I’m physically attending classes, I thought maybe the ‘truth’ about my writing ability would come out.  I guess I just underestimate myself, because the papers I turn in always come back with good grades.

    I’ll try to not let my ego blow up too big, but I’ve even had people come to me for help with their papers, and after guiding them through revisions I’ve been thanked profusely.  I was even told I should be a teacher.  That’s kind of funny, because another guy at the school mistook me for a teacher.  That could just be because I’m older than most students and have a beard though.  Ha!  If you’re wondering, I was in the Army for nearly a decade and now I’m using the Post 9/11 GI Bill to complete my tertiary education.  That bill is a godsend.  I’m really enjoying the whole college experience, and it’s only possible because of that bill.

    Anyhow, summer’s coming.  I thought about taking a break, but I just don’t think I want one, so I signed up for summer courses.  For the first session, I’m just going  to fill a graduation requirement, Speech Foundations.  I hear it’s a fun and worthwhile class, though.  For the second session I’m going to take World Civilizations: Pre-History to 1500 AD.  I’m pretty sure I’m going to wind up majoring in History, so that should help me out.  I haven’t officially matriculated yet, so I don’t know exactly what the degree requirements are.  I’ll find out when Fall semester starts.

  • Fight Spills Into 14th Street, Causes Traffic Jam

    Yesterday, I was coming back into the city from New Jersey on the PATH train and got off at 14th street.  My plan was to hop on the bus and then go back into the subway at Union Square to head uptown to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  I wound up having to get back off the bus and walk, though, because punks don’t know how to behave in public.  One kid jumped another kid and the result was a big traffic disaster on 14th street between 6th and 5th avenues.

    Cops on the street after a fight broke out on 14th street between 5th and 6th Ave.

    As soon as I got seated on the bus I started seeing flashing lights and the bus just sat there, so I took a look out the window and saw that the street was jammed with police cars.  There was a tour bus going the opposite way, but stopped in the road with all the tourists on the open upper deck leaning over the rail and gawking.  I saw a black guy being led away in cuffs.  I waited a while and then got off the bus to take a few pictures and then walk to Union Square.

    Cops on the street after a fight broke out on 14th street between 5th and 6th Ave.

    While I was standing there taking photos, I heard what happened from a woman that had been handing out sales fliers.  Apparently, a bunch of kids from a nearby school had just left class and one kid jumped on another kid and busted the side of his face up.  The kid that got attacked took off into the subway station I had just left. The guy I saw being handcuffed was the one that did the attacking.  While she was telling me this, the police were yelling at the crowd of kids, which I assume were classmates of the kids that were fighting, telling them to go home or at least leave the area.

    Girl crying because her boyfriend was arrested for fighting on his birthday.

    When I was walking away, a girl (brown coat in the above picture, surrounded by friends) started crying, saying it was “[her] man’s birthday.”  I can only assume that the guy that got arrested is, or was, her “man”, and they weren’t going to be doing much partying that night.  He must not have wanted to celebrate his birthday anyway or he wouldn’t have done something illegal in the middle of a crowded street.  People just don’t think anymore, do they?

    Cops on the street after a fight broke out on 14th street between 5th and 6th Ave.

    On the left, you can see the M14A Crosstown I got on, then got off, stuck on the side of the road because of all the police vehicles.

    Foremost taxi is an undercover New York City police car. Cool, right?

    The only redeeming factor in this whole fiasco, besides giving me something to blog about, is that I got to see an undercover NYC police car that looks like a taxi cab.  In the photo above, the foremost taxi (facing right, just behind the cop car) is an undercover vehicle.  You can see the red strobe light in the center of the dashboard.

  • Do You Have Your Life Vests And Boats Ready For May 21st?

    Lady in Union Square train station with a sign stating the world will end on May 21, 2011.

    This lady, or someone like her, has been in the Union Square train station fairly regularly over the last week or so.  When I first tried to take her picture, she was leaning against the side of the pole to the right.  She moved,  so I moved too.  I wonder if it’s because she has some doubts about what she’s promoting and is concerned about potential embarrassment when she wakes up on the morning of the 22nd to see clear skies and just another Sunday?

    I say clear skies because the reasoning behind this theory that the world will end on May 21st, 2011 is that God said that “Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature I have made” (Genesis 7:4) and He also said “that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Peter 3:8).  Apparently, May 21st, 2011 is the day God was talking about, and never mind that whole story that follows Genesis 7:4 about Noah in the ark.  That was just a prequel for the real event.  Or so they would have us believe, I guess.  There’s also some special numerology that they’re using to explain why they fixed on exactly May 21st that involves numbers with traditional symbolism and the number of days between the Crucifixion and that day.

    Sign saying the world will end on May 21st, 2011.

    I’m not going to hold my breath.  Like every other end-of-the-world theory that’s come before this one, this will end in disappointment and tears, and maybe even some embarrassment.  But, on the off chance that the world actually is flooded on the 21st, at least I won’t have to do finals for this semester.

  • Osama bin Laden’s Dead? So What?

    PD*26245836As much as I try, I just can’t seem to make the moment I saw the news about bin Laden being dead feel the same way it did when I saw the WTC collapsing on September 11th, back in 2001.  I think the reason is that it just doesn’t mean as much.  The collapse of the World Trade Centers and the resulting deaths, the toll of which is still climbing from inhalation of toxic materials by workers, was a momentous event that launched this country into what has become a decade of constant warfare, draining our economy and polarizing world opinions of Muslims and Americans.  What has Osama’s death accomplished now, so many years after the fact?  Just about nothing.

    You see, it’s too late.  The damage has already been done.  I saw a quote on a news site saying that killing Osama is like cutting the head off of a snake, but Al Qaeda isn’t a snake.  It’s a world-wide network of terrorist groups, like minded individuals in groups that can work independently of any leadership.  The death of Osama bin Laden is only a fire that will cause their feelings of hatred toward the United States, and other Western countries, burn that much brighter.  I don’t think they were doing what they’re doing just to get a pat on the back from big brother Osama after all.  This is a war of ideologies that won’t end until everyone who believes in radical Islam is killed.  I don’t think that’s likely to happen any time soon.  You might say that Osama was financially backing the terrorists, or at least some of them, but how expensive is a home made pipe bomb to make?  Not very.  How expensive is it to purchase a firearm and then shoot up a military base like that knucklehead at Fort Hood?  Not very.

    Without going down the road of questioning whether or not the story itself is even real, I just don’t see the point.  People are getting excited about Osama’s death, and I guess there is some relief or sense of justice for people who have had family members die in acts of terrorism that he claimed responsibility for, but in the grander scheme of things, this changes nothing.  Radical Islam still has a mission, and that mission is the destruction of Western Society, by any means necessary, to establish a global caliphate under Islamic rule.  Rather than going out and celebrating, we should be buckling down to make sure we’re ready for any backlash that this event may cause, especially now that we (the US) has further soured relations with Pakistan by operating behind the government’s back.  They are a nuclear power after all.