Hey buddy, wanna buy a broadband connection?

Today I was visited by someone trying to sell me RCN cable TV/phone/Internet. Yes, a real live door-to-door salesman! How quaint! Still, I kind of resent what is essentially face-to-face spam, and even if I wanted to switch from Comcast, I'm not sure I'd want to condone that kind of aggressive sales tactic. He actually wanted to come in and sit down with me to go over the various plans, and when I said I'd rather do the research on the web on my own, he emphasized that if I did decide to switch, I should call him because he gets commission that way, and he has a family to feed. Hey, nice guilt trip.

Anyway, before I completely discard the idea of switching, does anyone have particularly good or bad experiences with RCN to share? The upload speed of 800 Kbps (vs. 300 with Comcast) is attractive, and it would be nice to get a cable box that my Tivo can control without using infrared. But I'm not sure those are good enough reasons to switch, especially since the price seems about the same or maybe even slightly more expensive.

Colin Powell's resignation

Shortly after 9/11, Strauss & Howe posted to their Fourthturning.com forum about whether the Fourth Turning was starting early. In retrospect, it's clear that it was more of a "shift toward the nastier edge of a Third Turning mood", and that Bush's "easy deference to a Silent-dominated board of advisors" was an important restraint preventing a plunge into full-on Crisis Era. With Colin Powell's departure, the coolest head is gone, and I think the only Silent-generation advisors left are Rumsfeld and Cheney (who spent part of the weekend in the hospital). Bush's Cabinet re-org is acknowledged as an attempt to "'control the government, not just the White House' in the second term and to give the president 'an enhanced ability to control the broad sweep of policy undertaken in the second term.'" Together with his purging of the CIA, we're headed toward an ideologically—and, not a coincidence, generationally—pure administration. This seems like a recipe for the "Crisis of 2020" to arrive well ahead of schedule (much like the Civil War).

Staying skeptical of evolution

One more post for today. The Boston Globe has an article about the fight against teaching evolution in public schools (link from gibsonfeed). One thing mentioned is a label placed on the title page of a biology textbook: "Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered." I happen to agree strongly with these statements, but the point is that everything should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered. It's sort of redundant to put it on a textbook when this implicitly applies to all textbooks. Somehow I don't think putting the same label on bibles would be accepted by anyone, though.

Really, I'd be happy if human evolution were taken out of schools, as long as it's replaced by a greater emphasis on critical thinking, logic, and the scientific method. Teach a man to fish, etc. Of course schools should also continue to teach genetic reproduction and natural selection, since those theories are straightforward to test with experiments. Actually, natural selection isn't even a theory, it logically follows from genetic reproduction.

The article also quotes the 100-year-old Ernest Mayr: "What it really amounts to is a break with our Constitution, which tells you that you should keep religion out of public life." If only the Constitution actually said that!