Here is a place where you can play many nintendo ROMS online. Contra is one of them and I know it's your favorite.

Great job with the clone tool. What more can you say about this?

I have debated this very same issue in the context of soldier and their role as killers. So in this response I am going to be refering to soldiers and prison executioners collectively as the "killers." Terry often argues it is society that sets them up for their situation and that I cannot possibly understand the predicament that many of them are in in terms of growing up poor and not having any hope. I think that is not true.

There are plenty of students both at UB and Canisius that come from extremly poor families in the "ghettos" of America that are choosing not to be killers but rather to educate themselves out of the system.

Yes, they may have had encouragement from parents who were more caring then others. But I am sure not all of them, when it comes down to it, you (the individual) have a choice to pick up the gun or not. By picking it up the individual is making the choice to possibly play the role of the "killer" in return for weath, education, or increased class status.

In the end I can give a specific examples of another route. Through turning to a religious organization. While I am usually not a big supporter of religion, I definately see turning to god a better solution than killing people with guns or electric chairs. For this example, I would like to explain my friend Jacob's situation.

His mother was an extremly poor Najavo that lived on the reservation in the South west. At some point the mormons( who I typically do not like) came around and converted them. Evtually, she ended up at BU where she met Jacob' father, a mexican-indian who was also from a poor rural ancestry.

They eventually got married, Jacob's Dad became a bishop and started a business around their beliefs, helping kids with social problems like drug addiction in one of those desert outreach programs where the youths are subjected to living with nothing.

Jacob's family eventually became quite wealthy both monetarily and spiritually. Now I have to say I cannot support the Mormons and I am not giving any credence to their belief system. I am just saying their are alternative to killing and those who can't see this are purposely being blind.

There is nowhere in America where people do not have access to the teachings of any of the major religions which support the idea that killing is really wrong. I think the idea of not killing even transcends the moral and spiritual responsibilty of religious tenants and is actually a very humanistic construction.

In the end I am saying if you pick up the gun you are guilty. While society is at fault for making the decisions so tough and difficult for those that are less fortunate. We cannot dissolve everyone of personal moral responsibilty.

I have just taken all of my most favorite blogger posts and moved them here -see previous posts. It is an effort to move myself away from the corporate driven web publishing scheme and into the realm of local discourse. Respond to them if you wish. I figured they were better here where they were searchable.

I would encourage other people to do the same.

Kittler's discourse on the typewriter in his book "Gramophone Film Typewriter" is an informative piece concerning the development and influence of the typewriter. In “Typewriter”, Kittler discusses the many influences the typewriter has had on our society, from acting as an emancipating mechanism for women, to affording the blind the ability to write, to changing the way our entire global society conceptualizes and communicates. Seen as one of the of the major emancipating agents for women, the typewriter, a word meaning both the machine and the woman who operated it, aided in tearing down the "walls" of educational institutions that previously barred them from enrollment.

For the blind, the typewriter tore down the walls of silence in a world full of written expression. The most obvious example being Nietzsche, who suffered a form of blindness which ultimately forced him to give up his position as a professor at the university of Basal, as he no longer could control the medium of his creation, the written word. Nietzsche was one of the first adopters of the typewriter, as the typewriter bridged this gap, allowing the philosopher to literally feel the words come out of his hand and be pressed onto the paper. At the mercy of the machine as messenger for his word, Nietzsche was seriously set back when it malfunctioned only months after he first began to use it, thus destroying the fragile link between the author and the medium that the typewriter had offered. Because Nietzsche was wealthy enough to afford a subordinate to take his dictation, this may seem insignificant. However, this separation between author and work rendered allowed room for intellectual manipulation so extreme, by his sister and her pro-nazi agenda, that for the first half of the twentieth century Nietzsche was thought of as the primary philosopher of Nazism although it was well known that he had a
hatred for German Nationalism and antisemitism, as demonstrated in many of his earlier works.

While I agree that the typewriter was an emancipating force in many ways as demonstrated above, it cannot be overlooked that it also enslaved our society as a primary vehicle to the current state of technical dependence.

The typewriter was the first personal machine that began the trend toward our dependence on brain enhancing machinery, which has been nearly perfected with the advent of its evolutionary great grand child, the computer. This technological wonder, shooting forth from the military production facilities of the west, moved us toward our greater goal of increased efficiency and mass production. Once we reached this goal our society could not ever turn back without being completely destroyed, thus enslaving us in this cycle of endless technological innovation in terms of machines that allow us to rapidly disseminate information. From the brain of the master to the eyes of the subordinate in the shortest time possible, who ever gives up in this race loses all power.

The typewriter itself as a medium can also physically enslave the intellectual. As with the example of Henry James (Kittler, 216). The typewriter, a master product born out of a capitalist society, alters our ability to think by forcing a certain stimulus, in this case the typewriter clank, to be associated with intellectual production in a Pavlovian way. Kittler quotes James, “Soon a reflex loop was created: only the clanking of the typewriter induced sentences in the writer.” In this way the typewriter itself asserts a form of control over the user and demands to be purchased and worshiped.

While it is obvious that the typewriter has affected the way that we think and write, it must also be asserted that the typewriter itself is a product of the society through which it lives. A cycle which means that as far as technology can change us as a society it is ultimately only a reflection of our society's desire.
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Lastly, the typewriter has also be
en
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ajor source of governmental and religious propaganda, a theme which cannot be overlooked when speaking of it as an emancipating machine. Even more important than propaganda is the fact that the typewriter allowed, for the first time, true governmental efficiency; directly leading to the ultimate submission of the global masses to capitalist agencies. With both governmental and business issues, words became far more powerful than guns.