You Are Going to Hell

During my first year of Law School, Tom Griffith, now a federal judge, spoke to the first year students and told us, "You will probably make a lot of money when you graduate. If you spend it on yourself, you will definitely go to hell. Letting the young men and young women in your ward swim in your indoor pool once a year will not save you."

Not one to leave us depressed and miserable, he went on to give us the key to salvation. He said that you have to spend your time and your money "clothing the naked and feeding the hungry" if you want to save your soul.

I was a little bit dumbfounded by Griffith's speech. He couldn't really mean that a BMW 3-series was going to get me kicked out of heaven, could he?

I might be one of the few people who went to law school with the idea of making tons of money and, because of people like Tom Griffith, now plans on doing something else with his life.

But here's the problem: If I had $4 billion, I don't think I would be terribly optimistic about my ability to solve any of the world's problems. And believe me, the world has big problems. I don't want to get into all of them right now because it will give me a headache, and you will get so depressed that you will never read this blog again, but there are problems.

My wife doesn't spend much time thinking about big global problems. Her plan is to help the people around her as much as she can and let the rest of the world take care of itself. My wife is going to change the world for those people. Maybe I should be like her.

But, does anyone have any ideas?

I Am Time's Person of the Year

Thank you, thank you. Thank you for naming me the Person of the Year. I appreciate this great honor and I would like to thank everyone who made this possible. No seriously. Time says that "You," as in you, and I and all the other bloggers, YouTubers, and MySpacers in the world, are the person of the year. What an honor.

According to Time, this year has seen a revolution in the dissemination of information. "The 'Great Man' theory . . . took a beating this year" because homemade journalism made such an impact.

Already, bloggers are falling all over themselves declaring a victory for the popular distribution of media. There's a catch, though. As Dan Gilmore points out, the editors of Time chose to name "You" the person of the year rather than "We" including the writers, reporters, and editors of major media outlets.

ClickZ Stats Demographics reports that 50 million Americans visited blogs during the first quarter of 2005, and there are encouraging statistics that suggest that blogs could be used to market goods to wealthy households. However, during the week of December 4, the top five network programs (CSI, NBC Sunday Night Football, 60 Minutes, Deal or No Deal, and Survivor: Cook Island) had 91 million viewers.

Blogs and MySpace are starting to compete with the major media outlets, but they don't have the branding to reach large audiences yet. We've got our Time cover for now, but to get major audiences the revolution has a long way to go.

As if that's not enough, here's what happens when you don't tell your advertisers your plan in advance.

Computers and Credit in Africa

I just came across the blog of a guy named Aaron Childs who is working with the Peace Corps in Togo. He is raising money to build a community computer center where people will be able to use computers for free (or very cheaply) and where classes will be provided for people to learn things like web design and programming. He is partnering with a local private school that has agreed to maintain the center once he gets it built and he is applying for a grant from the Peace Corps and using his blog to raise the money he needs to build the place initially. He says it will cost about $10,000 to build. I'm very impressed with the idea.

Aaron is not alone in his efforts to help the poor in Africa. Accion Internationl offers micro credit loans in The Republic of Benin, a country that borders Togo. According to its website, Accion currently has 36,758 clients in Benin and the average loan balance is of $1,007. Muhammad Yunus, one of the great pioneers of micro credit, is quoted as saying "The poor themselves can create a poverty-free world . . . all we have to do is free them from the chains that we have put around them." Micro credit could be one way to remove those chains.

The problems of the world's poor can leave us disheartened. NPR recently ran a discouraging series on Africa's developmental problems which reminded me how many times I've asked my friends the, admittedly, impossible question "What the heck are we going to do for Africa?"

I sure don't know what the answer is, but it is encouraging that people like Aaron Childs and Accion International are working for solutions.

Check your symptoms

Last night, as I was going to bed, I noticed that my throat was hurting. At 3 a.m. I couldn't sleep it hurt so bad and my nasal passages were cemented shut.

My wife made me take these stupid Ricola cough drops (which couldn't possibly help my throat, right?) They must put crack cocaine in those things because I was popping them like an addict every two hours.

Anyway, I got some sleep, but I have to format the citations for all 190 footnotes in my stupid feminism paper this morning. I decided to ask WebMD what's wrong with me.

Apparently, my sore throat could be caused by any one of several varieties of viral infections like the common cold, mononucleosis (mono, the kissing disease - but I'm married), and more rarely mumps, herpangina, or influenza.

Disgustingly, they can also be caused by bacterial infections like strep or even certain STDs. Yuck.

WebMD has a cool "Check Your Symptoms" page where if you answer yes to any of their questions you have to go to the emergency room. I'm so sick of my paper that I kind of wish that I could answer yes, but it looks like I'm okay.

Well, I'd better pop some more of these curiously addictive cough drops and finish my paper. Chao.

Femi-what?

Feminists have been called some pretty nasty things. Rush Limbaugh is quoted as saying, "Feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society" and with popularizing the term "feminazi." Pat Robertson is quoted as saying at the Republican National Convention in 1992, "The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians."

I'm finishing a paper for my class at Brigham Young University on feminist legal theory and I don't see the witchcraft. I agree that there are some extremists who call themselves feminists, but I don't think all feminists should be tainted by the extremists any more than I would want all Christians to be stereotyped by Warren Jeffs.

Christina Sommers wrote, in 1994, Who Stole Feminism? Originally, and maybe more authentically, feminism meant the right of women to participate fully in society and has stood for such noble causes as women's right to vote, the abolition of slavery, and women's access to education. I'm in favor of those things.