I feel like this sometimes. Just so many things to get done, so many things to do, so many things to see and play and experience. You end up just hanging with the dog in the hammock for 2 hours instead. Oh, and by the way, Choice Paralysis is a real thing. Look it up! What do I look like, Google??

I have so much to say about it, but really, just watch this (note: lots of bleeped swearing for comedic effect, including from a kid, if that kind of thing offends you):

There are so many great lines in this segment, but I think my favorite is this:

You know how you know when climate change is real? When the hottest year on record is whatever year it currently is.

Yup. Well, that, plus when it keeps happening year after year. When we've had at least six months in a row of record-breaking heat, when the 16 hottest years since 1880 are all in the past last 17 years, when 97 percent of climate scientists agree, and heck, when Sarah Palin thinks it’s wrong, then yes, we’re in serious trouble.

And yet the networks and media still think giving air to a climate change denier is a good idea. Incidentally, as Media Matters points out, there are more climate scientists in that Jimmy Kimmel video than were interviewed on ABC’s top news shows in all of 2015.

And this is why I still focus on the reality of climate change. Because too many people in charge of you getting your information won’t.

We can’t work on solutions until we get our politicians to admit the problem even exists. Remember: November is coming.

As you'll probably recall, back in late 2011 a group of UC Davis students held a protest on campus as part of the Occupy movement. The lasting memory from that protest was one UC Davis police officer casually strolling past a line of students seated in a row and cavalierly spraying pepper spray directly into their faces. Even though this happened half a decade ago, let's all talk about it again now, because UC Davis recently revealed it spent $175,000 trying to make sure we wouldn't.

The payments were made as the university was trying to boost its image online and were among several contracts issued following the pepper-spray incident. Some payments were made in hopes of improving the results computer users obtained when searching for information about the university or Katehi, results that one consultant labeled “venomous rhetoric about UC Davis and the chancellor.”

Others sought to improve the school’s use of social media and to devise a new plan for the UC Davis strategic communications office, which has seen its budget rise substantially since Katehi took the chancellor’s post in 2009. Figures released by UC Davis show the strategic communications budget increased from $2.93 million in 2009 to $5.47 million in 2015.

Those funds, spent by a public university, mind you, were spent in the wake of the pepper spraying incident specifically to reformulate the image of UC Davis by obfuscating search results, web mentions of the incident, and by crafting a deluge of other UC Davis content that was decidedly more brand-friendly. But, hey, are you still confused as to what incident we're talking about here? Maybe this video of the incident will help jog your memory.



What should be readily apparent to you by now is that trying to bury factual if unfortunate history by hiring so-called brand reputation groups works about as well as trying to cover up your inability to cook a decent meal by dumping chocolate icing on everything you make. Sure, icing is good, but you still burnt that bone-in ribeye, you fool.

More importantly, in true Streisand Effect fashion, the attempted coverup of the incident now has us all discussing it again. And not only discussing the incident, but multiplying information about the incident, and footage of it, throughout the internet.

UC Davis spends $175,000 to remove pepper spray references from the internet.

Twitter and Facebook are replacing them at no charge. — Popehat (@Popehat) April 14, 2016

It's probably time for at least our institutions of higher learning to understand that using reputation management companies, paying them thousands of dollars, is the least effective way to respond to a bad PR incident. Even outside PR voices are shaking their heads at UC Davis' actions.

“I would say that it is common for an individual who might be applying for a job or an individual who has been wrongly maligned to go to a company like Reputation.com, but for a public university that is funded through taxpayer funds, who has repeatedly stepped into a vast hole, it is surprising that they thought this could be done without the light of day shining on the act,” said Doug Elmets, a Sacramento public affairs consultant. “It is one more example of how out of touch the leadership at UC Davis is when it comes to their public perspective.”

Interestingly, as a result of some actions taken by Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi, students are once again protesting, occupying the areas around her office and insisting they won't leave until she has resigned. It should be interesting to see if the school put as much money and effort into reforming campus policing as they did in trying to cleanse the internet of its history.

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We all know that society is going straight down a hellish toilet bowl. We know this mostly because everyone says so. Violence is rampant, sex is carried out with all the care of discussing the weather, and generally we're squashing morality like it was a bug walking across the concrete. And we all know who the real culprits of all this immorality are: teenagers.

Fucking teenagers, amirite? This shitty little demographic of our future adult class is basically torpedoing the American dream, with its drugs and sex and school violence. Except, of course, none of that is true. We've made it a point here to talk about how misguided people seem to generally be about how our children behave and to point out how every generation seems to think the next generation sucks at everything. But did you know we have actual data on this as well?

The federal government asks thousands of teenagers dozens of questions about whether they are all right. Since 1991, it has sent something called the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey to more than 10,000 high school students every other year, to inquire about all sorts of bad behaviors that range from drug use to unprotected sex to fighting at school.

The overarching question this survey asks is basically: How much trouble are you getting into?

The answer, lately, has been, “Not that much at all” — especially when you compare today’s teens with their parents, who came of age in the early 1990s.

Vox has a useful tool that allows you to input your year of birth and get some basic survey results as to how youth today compared to the youth of your time. I put in 1982, the year I graced this universe with my presence, and got the following results.

You were 15 years old in 1997 and we’re sorry to say, chances are relatively high that you and your friends were up to no good. Here’s how you stack up against today’s high school students:

-In 1997, 36.4 percent of teenagers smoked. Now, 15.7 percent do. That’s a 57 percent decline.

-Teenagers today are 38 percent less likely to binge drink than you and your classmates were. In fact, they’re 16 percent less likely to have ever tried alcohol at all.

-47 percent fewer teen girls have babies now compared to you and your high school classmates. Teens today are also 22 percent less likely to have had sex before they turned 13.

Huh. Turns out we were the little shits and today's kids are better on lots of moral questions. It's almost like societal progress produces tangible results. But the really interesting part is in the wider table that compares all kinds of questions and results for today's youth with the youth of yesteryear.

I'd like to focus for a moment on a couple of these categories: physical fighting, consideration of suicide, carried a weapon to school, and carried a gun in the past 30 days. Those would be all the questions that would have anything to do with violence. And, if you graphed each one of them over the period of time the questions were asked, each one of them is trending downward or showed no trend at all. Which brings up the obvious question: where are all the violent children that violent video games and media are supposedly creating?

All kinds of researchers, politicians, and television personalities have informed us of the horror that violent gaming is unleashing amongst our youth, and yet the data shows otherwise. To talk about curing an ill that doesn't actually exist isn't an exercise in morality; it's called snake-oil salesmanship. As the study says, the kids are alright, so we can finally stop the hand-wringing over entertainment now?

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Last month, we noted how entrenched broadband providers had found a new way to try and prevent Google Fiber from bringing much-needed competition into their markets: blocking access to carrier-owned utility poles. AT&T recently sued the city of Louisville for embracing so-called "one touch make ready" policies that dramatically streamline the pole-attachment process. The rule rewrites allow third-party contractors to move (often just a few inches) multiple companies' gear, dramatically reducing the cost and time frame for new deployment (in Louisville by an estimated five months or so):

In the case of one touch make-ready, companies that own poles agree on one or more common contractors that could move existing attachments on a pole (‘make ready’ work), allowing a single crew to move all attachments on a pole on a single visit, rather than sending in a unique crew to move each attachment sequentially. Sending in separate crews is time-consuming and disruptive to local communities and municipal governments. One-touch make-ready polices would ease this burden.

And while this is generally an idea that would benefit all broadband providers, it would benefit new providers like Google Fiber the most. That's why companies like AT&T, Comcast and Time Warner Cable have been blocking this pole-attachment reform, in some cases trying to claim such policies violate their Constitutional rights. The ISPs figure that if they can't block Google Fiber from coming to town, their lawyers can at least slow Google Fiber's progress while they try to lock customers down in long-term contracts.

In addition to skirmishes like this in Austin and Louisville, AT&T, Comcast and Time Warner Cable have been fighting pole-attachment reform across California, where Google Fiber is eyeing San Diego, Irvine, Los Angeles and portions of Silicon Valley as potential expansion markets:

Mountain View-based Google has been fighting before the California Public Utilities Commission for the right to use publicly and privately owned utility poles because burying fiber cables is expensive and in places impossible. AT&T and the cable TV association representing Comcast and Time Warner Cable have told state regulators that Google has no such right. And Google contends that a group that controls many Bay Area utility poles, and includes Google competitors as members, also has been blocking access to the poles.

...The Northern California Joint Pole Association has refused to grant membership to Google, according to (Google lawyers), and membership is required for access to the group's poles. Among the association's members are AT&T and Comcast, both expanding their own gigabit-speed Internet services.

In addition to thwarting streamlined pole attachment rules, both companies have played a starring role in crafting state level protectionist laws -- some of which hinder Google Fiber or other companies' ability to strike public/private partnerships. As such, it's worth remembering the next time you hear companies like AT&T or Comcast complaining about "onerous regulations" -- that they're consistently in favor of just such regulations -- if they protect them from having to actually compete.

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