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The War on Halloween

Oct 252011

October 25, 2011 Posted by Entropy Echo at 12:01 am October Tagged with: altar, ban, bogus, Buckman elementary, candy, candy corn, carol dawson, carol smith, cheap, children, compassion, conservative, controversy, culture, dia de los muertos, disrupt, edgewood elementary, elementary school, exclusion, fake, food, Fox, fox and friends, fox news, freedom, ghost, halloween, hispanic, holton elementary, how to summon, immigrant, kids, liberal, marigold, mexican, minority, Nick ceglarek, no costume, party, poor, portland public schools, principal, religious, student, superintendant, tolerance, war on halloween, white No Responses »

Yeah, that's me in Joker make-up. I made the paper, too! For non-criminal reasons!

October 25, 2011

As if the stupid War on Christmas wasn’t enough, Fox now thinks there’s a War against Halloween. I guess pulling out of Iraq left them wanting combat of some sort, so let me indulge them.

The Fox story goes something like this. Schools are banning Halloween celebrations because they don’t want kids eating candy and they want to not exclude anyone who doesn’t believe in the celebration, i.e. immigrants. But allow me to let Ren and Stimpy here to say it far more stupidly than I ever could.

This, of course, ignores various points. Let me go over them rapid-fire style.

The schools are banning candy to help kids eat healthier.

The celebrations are not being banned. They’re being moved to after-school so the parties won’t disrupt classes.

Likewise, kids can still wear costumes, but so as not to distract from valuable class time, the kids may wear the costumes after school.

Some of the kids cannot afford costumes because of tough economic situations, and this led to hurt feelings and isolation. Worrying about other people’s feelings is NOT a liberal conspiracy. It’s called basic human decency.

Now let me get to the one major point of contention for me.

Dia De Los Muertos by ~Mastowka on deviantART

Immigrants are offended by Halloween? If anything, I think Halloween is TAME by the standards of most immigrants. Take me for instance. I come from a culture that doesn’t celebrate Halloween, but instead has a holiday where we lay out altars dressed in food, flowers, and booze so the spirits of our dead relatives can visit us. We INVITE the ghosts in. Little Timmy in his Situation costume? Lame. We deal with real ghosts.

Represent!

The only reason I can assume an immigrant would be offended or feel left out by Halloween is if he or she did not know what it was. Seeing things like spirits and magic treated like a kid’s game might be offensive to some who hold on to beliefs that treat them as real, and I’m sure a lot of pagans and Wiccans take offense to things like the portrayal of witches. The celebration’s spread around the world, though it’s only here in the States that it seems to have attained the kind of holy reverence once reserved for Christmas. Halloween is not some sacred rite here. It’s a fully commercialized day where kids get hopped up on sugar, get to play dress-up, and women are made to dress like pseudo-hookers.

cute halloween by *pronouncedyou on deviantART

War on Halloween? Please. If we immigrants are somehow tainting the purity of this Americanized pagan harvest observance, it’s only because we know what the season is really about.

And now, in an effort to make you think nothing but good thoughts, here’s Michael Winslow doing Led Zeppelin with only his sound effects and a guitar. This is the sound of pure, distilled awesome.

The Tax on Good Grades

Aug 192011

August 19, 2011 Posted by Entropy Echo at 12:01 am August Tagged with: carlson, college, dumb, earn, education, exposingleftists.com, fallacy, false, federal, fox and friends, gpa, grade, interview, learning, lesson., logic, lower class, middle class, oliver darcy, school, sting, sucks, tax, tax structure, upper class, video No Responses »

Back in my day, we didn't tax the high GPA makers! That creates more students!

August 19, 2011

Well, it’s back to school again, and, as most of you know, those with the highest grades will be asked to give away some of those GPA points to students who didn’t try as hard so everyone can have a chance at a better education and job later on.

Oh, that’s not how that happens?

Fox sent out a camera crew and recent college graduate to a few campuses to ask students how they would feel if they were asked to give some of their GPA to lower students so the people with lower grades could have higher GPAs. Obviously, this did not sit well with ANY student. How then, Fox asks, do we justify taking MORE money away from the wealthy in the form of increased taxes and giving it to the lower and middle class? Isn’t that the same thing? Taking away from the people who worked for their money and giving it to people who don’t work hard so they don’t get as much?

I think you can already see the problem here.

Students by ~dpoephoto on deviant ART

A student earns a GPA over a long period of time. It takes years. To get that grade, you have to study hard, do your work, and if you want to bulk up with transcript, you have to take AP classes that sometimes don’t even give you extra points or anything like that. They didn’t for me, and while part of the Honor Scholars Program at DePauw University, I had to take classes that were an order of magnitude harder than any other class I’ve ever taken, and said classes didn’t even count for extra points. And I still made the Dean’s List several times.

That’s not how taxes and economics work.

For several decades, the upper class has received what can only be called “corporate welfare.” They actually get taxed less than people who make WAY less and can write off any number of expenses. For Fox’s analogy to make sense, students with higher GPA should have had to do less work to get better grades over time AND people with lower GPAs should have had to give up a portion of their grades to people who were already getting good grades.

Let me put it another way. Billy works hard but can only ever get a 2.5 GPA. Tommy lucked out nearly on his freshman year and got a 3.8 average. The school then took some of Billy’s points and gave them to Tommy to keep him in the highest percentile. Now, Billy has to work harder for his points, but Tommy can cruise along knowing the points he gets from the bottom of the ladder will offset his lack of work and keep him higher up.

Fox News by ~Darren-Kelly on deviant ART

Students with high GPAs generally work VERY hard to get those grades. I know I did. The upper class in this country gets a free pass and politicians in their corner to make sure they stay up there. There is an entire infrastructure just to keep the rich rich. There is no such system in place for students. Lower grades don’t always mean you’re not working hard. Most students give it their best. Job-wise, I work my butt off and make less per hour than the dean’s secretary. Stop pretending like people who are poor don’t work hard. Try teaching. Try being a sanitation worker. Try being a gardener, migrant worker, police officer, firefighter, or even a babysitter. That’s damn hard work.

People who rely on hedge funds to GIVE them money? Must be nice.

In short, Fox sucks, students rock, have fun on the first week of school, students and teachers, and I’ll see you Monday with the new Weekly Muse story. Keep voting!

first day blues by ~misternow on deviant ART

They Foxed Up

Jul 202011

July 20, 2011 Posted by Entropy Echo at 12:01 am July, Uncategorized Tagged with: bias, cell phone, controversy, coverage, dead, doocey, ethics, Fox, fox and friends, girl, hack, hacking, journalism, murdoch, News, news of the world, newscorp, right-wing, scandal No Responses »

He sees you when you're sleeping...

July 20, 2011

Journalism is hard.

Think about it. Have you ever had to tell a story to someone while remaining as objective as possible? Try telling ANY story without having your own bias influence it and you’ll see the challenge of trying to be a journalist.

That being said, it’s one of the reasons Fox News needs to drop “news” from its name.

As many of you have heard, Fox’s parent company, Newscorp, has a bit of a problem. They’ve been caught in various hacking scandals, everything from hacking a missing (later confirmed dead) girl’s phone to listen in to messages left behind by grieving relatives and friends, to hacking 9/11 families, celebrities, and everyone else under the sun. These hacks have become a federal case both here and in the UK. Needless to say, Rupert Murdoch’s days are numbered…

Except he still controls Fox News, and Fox is, by their own admission, fair and balanced, so they must be telling the truth, right?

The scandal has received little mention on the Little Network that Could, but one story in particular showed just how far the so-called “journalists” at Fox are willing to go to protect their parent company at the cost of journalism ethics. Check out the following clip and see if you can tell where they dropped the ball.

Give up?

They make a big point of the fact that there are other hacking cases out there, but we’re all focusing on Newscorp. The Pentago got hit too, they cry out! Why don’t we focus on THEM!? Why are we all gawking at poor Newscorp?!

Because, despite what the clip tried to insinuate, Newscorp is the one that did the hacking, not the one that got hacked. We’re watching the company because they are the accused party, not the victim. It’s like Herman Cain playing the victim because people call him out for his hatred of Islam. It’s like Bachmann supporters acting all butt-hurt because Michelle “Queen of Loony Land” keeps getting corrected for all her gaffes.

To Fox and everyone who supports them, you’re not the victims. You’re the ones who are accused. You’re like a robber than complains he had to get tackled by police after fleeing the scene of a crime. You’re like the high school hero who says he can’t be allowed to fail a class or he won’t be able to play on the team. You’re like the politician who pulls strings to hide an affair because he has too much power and too much to lose.

Rupert Murdoch says ‘sorry’ by *ssoosay on deviant ART

A few have suggested, however, that it’s hypocritical to go after Newscorp like this. They cry out that the Left cheered Wikileaks when they hacked the government and obtained thousands of files with sensitive information.

Okay, but there’s one HUGE difference between the Wikileaks incident and what News of the World did.

The paper was fishing. They were blackmailing. They did not use the hacking to uncover information about crimes. This information was used for sensationalism and self-service. Wikileaks, whatever the legality of their actions, exposed crimes.

Where is the need to hack a dead girl’s phone to listen to the anguished cries of her parents, friends, and family? What does the paper gain from violating the privacy of 9/11 families? Hacking celebrities?

What Newscorp did was illegal and morallity reprehensable. If Fox was a real news organization, if it had any integrity, it would report on the scandal instead of trying to cover for the boss.

But then again, Fox ISN’T a news organization, is it?

And now, to wash away images of bad, bad Murdoch, here is a tutorial on how to speak good like Kristen Stewart.