When Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his Permanent Representative to the UN Palitha Kohona left their encounter with Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Saturday night, they paused at the elevator speaking to and about Mr. Ban.
As caught on television by Inner City Campaign and put online here, Kohona told Rajapaksa, about Ban, "He has already seen the picture we sent him.
In brightness of the tragical events in Oslo and Utya, information was observed that Anders Behring Breivik, the man responsible for the shootings in Utya,used both Creation of Warcraft and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 as a "breeding base" of sorts. Whether this did lead to Breivik`s violent tendencies is nevertheless under review, but according to clinical psychologist Christopher Ferguson, a specialist on videogame violence at Texas A&M University, it`s not the media that`s the cause. "I know it`s a little controversial to say, but there`s a certain character of racism in set with these killings," he said in an audience with Forbes.
"When shootings happen in an interior city in minority-populated schools, video games are never brought up. But when these things pass in white majority schools and in the suburbs, people start to freak out and video games are inevitably blamed.I mean that theres a certain factor of racism or ignorance here."
We can`t look to recall when was the final time Grand Theft Auto was blamed for a car-robbery-gone-wrong in the poorer districts of cities. It was only just another crime in the poor neighborhood. Ferguson continued on that killings of Oslo`s scale are passing to keep occuring, and there`s nothing anyone can do to keep them. They strike randomly, they strike powerfully, but they don`t move very often. When they do happen though, the price is high. "People actually need to live what sort of boogeyman can we hang this on and video games are nevertheless the top choice when it comes to any case of tragedy," said Ferguson.
It`s all a count of reality: when do we get the argument between reality, and virtual reality? The model of your character killing somebody in a game can well be misinterpreted (or correctly interpreted?) as an interior need for dispatch and violence. However, even the U.S. Supreme Court has found that there is no scientific ground for such an argument. Surely this means the harassment will stop, right?
Wrong, says Ferguson. There`s always passing to be somebody willing to pin-the-tail-on-the-videogame. "There are groups out there who are leaving to blame video games on everything," he said. "Theyre like ambulance chasers, really. I believe its irresponsible and thoughtless to try to produce political gain off of somebody elses tragedy, but theyre leaving to do it. Thats what they do. But even those groups have been much quieter with the Oslo tragedy."
Another big shooting that has oft been affiliated with video games is the Columbine tragedy of 1999. On April 20th, two high school students killed 12 students and one faculty member in their school in Colorado state before committing suicide. Later reports declared that both students were fans of Doom and Wolfenstein 3D, which were popular FPS games back in the day.
While people were ready to condemn both games at the time, Ferguson states that this was simply because people wanted something to blame. "What was so scary about Columbine was that it could happen anywhere, even in a seemingly safe suburban high school," he explained. "People wanted something to pick and video games became the target. And they wanted to just regulate games away."
It`s almost like to people`s "You can`t see me, I can`t see you" or "Out of view out of mind" mentality. Making games go away makes the origin of many of these problems go away. Therefore, they won`t happen anymore. The Virginia Tech tragedy of 2007 proved all of this wrong. On April 16th, one lone gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, killed 32 people and wounded 25 others before turning the gun on himself.
Strangely enough, Cho was no fan of video games. Where does that allow all the thumb pointing? Ferguson said that this was a suit to shew that these shootings happen randomly and that games are not the culprit. "One thing weve learned from research is that around 95 percent of young boys have played a violent tv game," said Ferguson. "That becomes a crafty thing when these mass homicides occur and the shot is a new male. The odds are hes played violent video games.
"Linking the acting of violent video games to a mass homicide when the culprit is a new male is like blaming the kill on the fact that he was wearing sneakers. The basal value of that behavior is so green that it has no predictive value whatsoever."
The argument will yet remain. Do video games cause violence, or do they not? Do we need to secretly pull the spark on a gun, or do we only go out our fantasies in a virtual environment? One thing is certain: we all accept the power to get a choice, and we all must have for the consequences of that choice.
Read the entire interview at Forbes.
Via Destructoid.
That UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon runs scared, as one of his staffers puts it, more on Sri Lanka than other countries was again on display, but not to be photographed, on July 5. Ban was to meet with Ranil Wickremesinghe, described in Ban`s schedule as Leader of the Opposition.
But when Inner City Press asked to see the photo opportunity at the first of Ban`s meeting with Ranil, the double standards began.
As the film Sri Lanka Killing Fields was screened Tuesday on the westward face of First Avenue in New York, across the street at the UN Inner City Press asked Secretary General Ban Ki-moon`s spokesman Martin Nesirky if Ban has yet seen the film, and for the UN`s response to its determination that Ban has not implemented the passport of his own Board of Experts on war crimes in the country.
An official in Inner Mongolia is disputing an Amnesty International report that parts of the area are under martial law.
"We did not enforce martial law. Everything is normal," said Chao Lumen, an official with the information department of Xilingol prefecture.
In the story released Friday, Amnesty International detailed protests in and about the metropolis of Xilinhot, the prefecture`s seat of government.
Sometimes, in the work of documenting and cover events for this blog, I have been witness to a bit of events that I live at the clock are passing to get a substantial affect on the future of the city, the State or the Country.
Such an event occurred in an interior city church called Mt. Olivet in downtown Richmond, Va. a few years ago.
Mt.
That began to shift by the end of the 1970s. The NFL had surpassed baseball in popularity, and the Larry Bird/Magic Johnson NCAA final in 1979 led to an explosion of popularity and financial strength for the NBA and for basketball in general. The back of Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays and Henry Aaron was seen by many inner-city youths as slow, boring and the plot of their parent`s generation. Some wondered if reviving baseball in inner-cities was still possible.
By the later 1970s, the dwindling amount of African Americans playing baseball was noticed by officials, as was the crowds that were often composed of all Whites at major and minor league games. Something was required to kick starting the so-called National Interest in urban areas. That something turned out to be a programme called Reviving Baseball in Inner-cities (RBI).
John Young, a former Major League Baseball player and scout, developed the conception of Reviving Baseball in Inner-cities to allow disadvantaged youth an opportunity to see and love the game of baseball. Young grew up in South Central Los Angeles at a sentence when the country developed many professional baseball players. However, by the later 1970s, Young-who was running as a Major League scout-noted a substantial reduction in the act of skilled athletes emerging from his childhood area.
After visiting inner-city schools and talk to members of the Los Angeles Department of Parks and Recreation, Young discovered that the bulk of kids stop playing baseball between the ages of 13 and 16. The drop off was due to many factors, including a deficiency of organization, funding, and community support for young baseball, as good as an overall deterioration of the social climate in many underserved areas. More frequently than not, kids quit after becoming demoralised by poorly organized baseball programs and enticed by the creation of other activities, including street gangs.
Since 1989, Reviving Baseball in Inner-Cities has grown from a local plan for boys in South Central Los Angeles to an international campaign encompassing more than 200 cities and as many as 120,000 male and female participants a year. Perhaps not coincidentally, Major League Baseball saw its first addition in Black players in 2008, to 10.2 percent from a low of 8.7 percent the year before. The final numbers for 2009 have not been released, but it is believed that African American agency in the Major Leagues will increase again.
Young intended to support the Reviving Baseball in Inner-cities program local for 5 days before launching it nationally. However, due to the winner of the platform in Los Angeles, the Mathews-Dickey Boys Club in St. Louis adopted RBI in 1990, and Kansas City and New York City followed with the constitution of RBI programs in 1992. In 1993, RBI programs were accomplished in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Miami and Philadelphia, while youth baseball programs in Atlanta, Richmond and San Juan also became connected with the program. In 1994, RBI expanded to 28 cities and introduced softball leagues. To date, more than 200 leagues in 203 cities worldwide support the program.
Major League Baseball, which has administered the Reviving Baseball in Inner-cities Program since 1991, serves as the key administrative agency for RBI and from 1993 to 1996, along with Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association (SGMA), provided start-up grants for programs demonstrating financial need. Since the origin of the program, Major League Baseball and its clubs have designated more thanmillion worth of resources to the RBI program.
"The RBI program has many benefits," said former New York Yankee and ESPN broadcaster Roberto Clemente, Jr. who founded the Pittsburgh RBI program and is involved with the San Juan program. "It keeps kids out of pain and off the streets, while at the same time teaching them to persist in school. They earn self-esteem and self-respect. The educational components help them realize their potency and turn toward receiving college scholarships based not merely on athletics, but academics."
RBI alumni currently acting in the Major Leagues include Carl Crawford (Tampa Bay Rays), Jimmy Rollins (Philadelphia Phillies), Coco Crisp (Kansas City Royals), and Dontrelle Willis (Detroit Tigers).
Meanwhile, Young - the "founder of RBI"- continues to be astounded by the success his plan has achieved in reviving baseball in inner-cities. "It`s like a baby to me," he said. "To see the magnitude of RBI - what it has grown into - is unbelievable. It`s like a dream come true."
