Ben & Shae Cecka's family in Gilbert, AZ

I read a review this week for a cheap music service called alltunes. It is based off of another website at allofmp3. They hail no monthly fees and just .02 per megabyte! This equates to about an entire album of music for between $1 or $2, depending on the quality you want. You just have to plug in a few bucks for their credit style system. I also heard that after purchasing a few credits you could preview entire songs at a lower bitrate… so far I don’t believe that to be true. However, the preview goes on for quite some time so I don’t mind it too much.

With that said though, others have raised questions about the legality of this service since they are based in Russia and thus circumvent US laws. I’m not sure who I believe but they’ve been around for a few years so anyones guess is as good as mine. As a result, I’m not sure if when my $10 credit runs out I’ll ditch them or stick with it. It is nice to see a more competitive pricing model than iTunes though! Just maybe a little too competitive!

n.

1. A feeling of contentment or self-satisfaction, especially when coupled with an unawareness of danger, trouble, or controversy.

2. An instance of contented self-satisfaction.

This is our enemy. You see. The opposite of “Courage” is not fear. It is complacency. I heard a great analogy on the radio today that inspired part of these thoughts: “A dead fish can still float along with the stream.”

Don’t be that dead fish. Don’t sit on the sidelines. Let your voice be heard because it may be all that you have. When speaking in unison, we create songs of change. And there is always a need for change.

Today, while on the bus reading Thomas Friedman’s, From Beirut to Jerusalem, I came to really appreciate what freedom we truly have as Americans. In the late 1980′s in Syria (yeah, not long ago), if you so much as looked at the government wrong it was enough to get you put on their “list”. Not like in our country though. In Hama, for example, it became so dire that the military performed raids in the night and took entire families out into the street and killed them. During an uprising from the Muslim Brotherhood they literally ended up running tanks through a few neighborhoods, followed by steamrollers. It wasn’t over differences of wealth, or differences of nation, or even major differences of belief.

I’m happy that I can open the paper and see open and willful dissent, several times with my own name at the bottom. It is this which our country is founded on, and these values that we should hold dearly. I just hope that we can all consider this the next time something our government does something that upsets us. Say something. It won’t hurt. Somebody might just listen. (please refrain from NSA jokes here )

I sympathise with both sides of this debate on whether or not your life should have been spared. The epitome of a polarizing issue. I’ve read the court cases against you, and read about the acts of goodness that you’ve started in the last decade.

In light of reading the above court documents I’ve removed several portions of this post.

But, I ultimately believe that this shows our “Culture of Life” as a complete farce. (That’s a Bush jab folks)