{"id":3365,"date":"2011-03-11T02:33:40","date_gmt":"2011-03-11T02:33:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/?p=3365"},"modified":"2011-03-11T02:33:40","modified_gmt":"2011-03-11T02:33:40","slug":"status-quo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2011\/03\/11\/status-quo\/","title":{"rendered":"Status Quo"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s really exciting to see protests going on across the world. Not because of the unrest or the violence &#8212; that&#8217;s scary &#8212; but there&#8217;s this awe-inspiring wave of people who are starting to take a stand for freedom, security, and their rights. But &#8212; and I know this is a ridiculous leap &#8212; it reminds me of a revelation I had one day listening to Pandora: I&#8217;m sick of putting up with things that merely OK. There are lots of songs that are OK. If I&#8217;m busy, I&#8217;ll let them play because they&#8217;re not horrible, but if I had the time, I&#8217;d skip them. So one day I vowed to aggressively thumbs-down any song that was mediocre, and, very quickly, I started hearing only good songs. I decided to expand this concept from Pandora to the rest of my life.<\/p>\n<p>And now I&#8217;d like to expand it a bit further. I feel like the society I&#8217;m living in is kind of like my Pandora music stream before my micro-revolution: full of potential, but a blend of good and bad things that averages out to something that&#8217;s merely OK. I would like to thumbs-down the following:<\/p>\n<ul>\n    <li>The continuation of <a title=\"DOMA\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Defense_of_Marriage_Act\">DOMA<\/a>, or any other laws which discriminate against same-sex couples.<\/li>\n    <li>Donald Trump <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/8301-31749_162-20041036-10391698.html\">running for President<\/a>.<\/li>\n    <li>Mike Huckabee running for President. Actually, just <a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/2011\/03\/10\/mike-huckabee-death-panels_n_833845.html\">Mike Huckabee<\/a> in general.<\/li>\n    <li>The entire situation in Wisconsin, including the entirety of everything both sides have done.<\/li>\n    <li>People who drive slow in the left lane and won&#8217;t get over.<\/li>\n    <li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.csmonitor.com\/USA\/Politics\/2011\/0310\/Who-s-testifying-at-controversial-House-hearing-on-radical-Islam-in-US\/%28page%29\/2\">Twenty-first century McCarthyism<\/a><\/li>\n    <li>Stricter prohibitions on marijuana than on alcohol, despite the latter being much more dangerous. (Sidenote: I feel oddly compelled to disclaim that I&#8217;m not a pot user. It just makes absolutely no sense to me to arrest people who are.)<\/li>\n    <li>The piles of junk mail I get every day and am obliged to dispose of.<\/li>\n    <li>How messed up the main page of the blogs is.<\/li>\n    <li>Having to care and feed for the server hosting the blogs and such.<\/li>\n    <li>No one caring about the deficit until Obama was elected, when suddenly it was a crisis.<\/li>\n    <li>Politicians who won&#8217;t work with each other to compromise. (Which is to say, all of them.)<\/li>\n    <li>People who have decided that global warming is a myth.<\/li>\n    <li>Cold weather.<\/li>\n    <li>The stupid stiff-plastic bubblewrap that everything you buy is encased in, rendering it an enormous headache to open.<\/li>\n    <li>ISPs that don&#8217;t provide IPv6 by now. (Which is to say, pretty much all of them.)<\/li>\n    <li>That my car is entirely dependent on gasoline to function.<\/li>\n    <li>People who think God&#8217;s message was one of hate or favoritism towards a select group. (This goes a lot of ways.)<\/li>\n    <li>Hearing about Charlie Sheen on the news.<\/li>\n    <li>Hearing about Lindsay Lohan on the news.<\/li>\n    <li>The condition of the economy and my investments.<\/li>\n    <li>The amount of work I have to exert to do my taxes when the government has already taken my money.<\/li>\n    <li>Blog posts that are long lists of things people dislike.<\/li>\n<\/ul>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s really exciting to see protests going on across the world. Not because of the unrest or the violence &#8212; that&#8217;s scary &#8212; but there&#8217;s this awe-inspiring wave of people who are starting to take a stand for freedom, security, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2011\/03\/11\/status-quo\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3365"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3365\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}