Here’s a tip:

Exercise is the best stress reliever in the world. Whenever you feel shitty, your first step should be to work out. This will always make you feel better.

Another Damn Good Book

Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen exposes the blatant inaccuracies and pervasive Eurocentrism in high school US History textbooks. I’ll leave my recommendation to a famous historian and author:

Every teacher, every student of history, every citizen should read this book.

—Howard Zinn

However, my favorite testimonial, perhaps of any book ever written, comes from a worker at a pharmaceutical company in Berkeley, California:

I was expecting some liberal bullshit, but I thought it was right on.

View high resolution

The total cost of the items in this photo: $21. I love Goodwill.

These Books Changed My Life

Last summer, I read a book that changed the way I view capitalism and myself as a consumer. This summer, I read a book that deepened my opposition to the death penalty by an order of magnitude. 

A year ago I read The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard. You may have watched her 20 minute video about how “stuff” is extracted, sold, used, and disposed of, and the environmental damage caused by each step. (If you haven’t, please go watch it. It’s fast-paced, easy to understand, and not too preachy.) Her book expands what is covered in her video and offers solutions and hope for the future.

What stuck with me the most was the cost of low cost. Sure, it’s great that we can go to the store and buy a product we want for a low price. The true cost of an item you don’t pay much for is in the poor working conditions in the factory that made it and the environmental cost of toxic waste. Neither I nor Leonard tries to argue that we shouldn’t buy cheap things. It is merely a fact that profit-hungry corporations take as many shortcuts as possible to maximize their intake of money, a fact with widespread environmental and social consequences.

* * *

My assigned summer reading for the University of Oregon Honors College was Sister Helen Prejean’s The Death of Innocents. I went into this book with a passive opposition to the death penalty on moral grounds. Now, I vehemently believe it should be abolished. 

The book, as you can tell by its title, is about government killing of innocent people. The two stories Sister Helen tells reveal the fundamental prejudice against minorities and the poor in our criminal justice system, particularly against black men in the South—and the Supreme Court’s validation of such discrimination as “inevitable.” Whether you support the death penalty or not, you cannot finish this book without at least questioning your beliefs. 

* * *

I draw two conclusions from my literary journeys. The first one is difficult for me to fully articulate, but it can be summed up in one word: read. My father said it best: “Saying ‘I don’t like to read’ is like saying ‘I don’t like to think.’”

I am also intrigued by the fact that the three authors who have most changed my life are women. (I include J.K. Rowling because I cannot imagine my life without Harry Potter. Rowling is also an incredibly inspiring and humble person and is perhaps my greatest hero.) I hope to continue to discover and explore by reading great books written by great people, whatever their gender.

Priorities

If the federal government of the United States paid for an entire year’s worth of college (tuition plus room and board) for every single student in the country, it would cost about $328.5 billion according to 2009 estimates. If the Department of Education then quadrupled its current budget ($69.9 billion) in addition to giving Americans free college education, it would cost $607.1 billion. 

In 2009 the Department of Defense spent $636.5 billion. 

Our federal government spends almost 10 times as much money on killing people as it does on educating people. Do we, the American people, really believe this is right?

* * *

To calculate the cost of sending every student to college for a year, I used the “Fast Facts” page on the National Center for Education Statistics website. I multiplied the number of students attending public schools by the average public school tuition for the 2008 to 2009 school year, repeated this process for private schools, and then added the totals. The education budget is listed on the Department of Education website.

For comparison’s sake, I used the actual federal spending during fiscal year 2009 (October 2008 to September 2009) which is listed on page 58 of the Budget of the U.S. Government for 2011. (The Government Printing Office website has every budget since 1996 right here if you’re interested.)

When in doubt, I quote Harry Potter.

Like rain on a cold window, these thoughts pattered against the hard surface of the incontrovertible truth…

—J.K. Rowling

It’s his last day before he moves over 1000 miles away. Words escape me, save for this quote.

“Why had he never appreciated what a miracle he was, brain and nerve and bounding heart?”

—J.K. Rowling

I changed the meaning of those words, but their spirit is the same. I love you.

Something I’m Excited About

I think my excitement is best explained by this image:

I got the 13” MacBook Pro with the 2.3 GHz Core i5 (the lowest-end model) custom ordered with 8GB of RAM and a 128GB solid-state disk. As a soon-to-be college student, everything including custom parts were discounted, plus there’s the $100 iTunes card promotion, plus there’s a $100 rebate which I’m applying to a $99.95 printer, plus it’s late enough that Apple will give me Lion for free when it comes out. Needless to say, I am pumped.

A Puzzle

I want to be able to browse the Internet under two conditions:

1. No Flash ads. (Non-animated ads are fine.)
2. No constant crashing.

I’m running Mac OS X 10.6 on my original MacBook (early-2006 Core Duo). I prefer Safari but am willing to use Chrome or Firefox.

What I’d love to do is run Safari with both Flash and Adblock installed. However, both cause constant crashing. I tried uninstalling Flash and using the YouTube5 extension, but to no avail. Uninstalling Adblock had no effect either, as apparently Safari becomes unstable with any number of extensions installed.

I decided to try John Gruber’s setup, which involves enabling the Develop menu in Safari and setting up a keyboard shortcut to open the current page in Chrome.* Due to a Safari update, however, it no longer works. Gruber posted an update with a link to TJ Luoma’s solution that involves using an AppleScript and a third-party menu bar program to set a keyboard shortcut. This feels far too “hacky” to be a real solution.

I could use Chrome or Firefox as my main browser, with both Flash and Adblock installed. Although I haven’t used either as extensively as Safari, both seem to end up crashing just as often. Chrome does have the benefit of tabs running in separate processes, so when one page crashes the entire browser doesn’t go down. Unfortunately, when Flash crashes, it usually ends up crashing every tab with a Flash element; at that point, it might as well just crash the whole browser.

The most sane assumption I can make is that it gets better on modern hardware. I’ve never had this problem on our family’s recent generation iMac. In fact, the first time I ever saw the infamous “Safari has unexpectedly quit” dialog was after I bought this laptop. However, if you can figure out a browser, plugin, and extension combination that successfully solves my puzzle, I’m all ears. Somehow, though, I bet the real answer will come in a shiny, aluminum package.

---

*As Gruber says, “Chrome includes its own self-contained Flash Player plugin. Removing Flash Player … prevents [other browsers] from loading Flash content, but not Chrome.”