The Oblivion Annual Meeting will be held online on Monday January 29th, at 10pm Eastern, 7pm Pacific. Elections for the 2007 Board of Directors will top the agenda.

Meeting will be held using the NYRA chat interface. Find it here:

http://www.youthrights.org/forums/chat/

As all meetings of the BoD, it will be open to the public. These things usually wrap up pretty quickly, so plan to be there on time. If you blink you might miss it.

Hmm… A new design? How’d this get here…

Ah Vanilla, I think I’m in love. The add-ons for this thing are just amazing. We’ve got most recent tracks a user has listened to on Last.fm, most recent photos they’ve uploaded to their Flickr account, most recent posts they’ve dugg on Digg, and… just too many for me to keep track.

Sunrise has caught up with me, so more extension hunting will have to wait for another long late dark night this week. In the meantime, go sign up for the new and improved Oblivion forums. Enjoy!

We’ve finally switched to new forum software. It’s very plain for now, but there are plenty of toppings to add. Check it out by going to oblivion.net/forum/.

The old forums will still exist as a locked archive. That is of course, as soon as we sweep out the massive amounts of spam they are filled with. So, I’d give it an ETA of somewhere between never and infinity… unless some brave volunteer wants to wade through post after post and fake member after fake member peddling amazing new web 2.0 search engines designed specifically to find grandpa some cheap viagra.

We are testing out a new way of tracking, displaying, and distributing youth rights news. To join in, first sign up for a Del.icio.us account. Then just install the bookmarking thingie, add Obvdotnet to your network, and tag any youth rights news you find as ‘for:Obvdotnet’.

It won’t automatically show up on our sidebar, or on the newly revamped news page we are working on… No, no, that would be far too easy to abuse. We get enough spam as is, thank you… But it will be sent directly to us for our review and approval.

The steps are easy enough for any aspiring news hawk, and the system is a big upgrade over our old one. Now we just need to work on making it look pretty…

These pages will be moving to a new home. In a few days you will be able to find them under Notes. The active blogging experiment is over for now. Instead it’s back to basics. We are working to bring you a new issue of the zine. That’s right, for the first time in what must seem like decades Oblivion will be found in print form, whispering rebellious propaganda in the halls of schools… raising the blood pressure of misguided parents and teachers everywhere.

A stepping stone design will grace most of our pages, simply to unify under a single style all of the disparate parts which have been so neglected these long cold years.

And to give you each a way to help us out, we are using a widget called ChipIn that lets you send us a few bucks to cover printing costs and get real time updates on how generous others are being. It can be found at the top of the sidebar for now.

Update: Doing a design contest ChipIn first. Zine printing when it’s all written up.

Submitted by SoulRiser

This article is aimed at young people who hate school and would rather be somewhere else. These young people often actually love to learn - the problem is that few subjects offered at school are interesting to them, or the way in which it is presented is just horribly boring.

Before I go on, it is possible to legally get out of school, and get your education in other ways, through homeschooling or unschooling (if your parents will let you). Since this article is more focused on how to survive school if you can’t get out, more information about those options will be listed at the bottom of this article.

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Wai, this is my first post here! This is cross-posted from my personal blog, Change and Exchange, and the Youth Rights blog, Age of Reason.

I had the opportunity to see this post on youth culture on the National Youth Rights Association’s forums:
(emphasis mine)

Firstly, let me make clear that I am a 17 year old Greek Cypriot, I live in London and I am not an ‘old man’, but I believe youth culture is disgusting and yet another angle of Anti-Intellectualism, encouraging children to make idols of Musical Stars, drug abusers, single mothers and other dregs of society. This MUST be dealt with sooner or later, why cant youths have people like Cicero as their role models?

Youth culture is basically a sort of mash of these key points, resulting in one of the greatest disasters in History, and the gradual erosion of High Culture:

- Tendency to listen to Modern Music and despise the greats of Music like Wagner, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Mozart and Strauss.

- Teenage Pregnancy.

- Explosion in crime, especially street crime such as pickpocketting. Liberals accuse those who cite Crime statistics showing this as ‘Ageist’, and ‘Against Popular Culture’.

- The gradual explosion of ‘pop culture’ leading to incredibly disgusting activities in Society.

- Lack of Classical Education in Greek Philosophy, The Roman Empire, The Renaissance, The Age of Reason e.t.c.

- Tendency to go to nightclubs and start fights.

- Have a larger Marginal Propensity to commit violence against others because of Alcohol of Marijuana fueled highs. Though it must be noted expensive alcohol such as a good Malt Whisky is a good thing, we are talking about cheap alcohol here.

- Use of inexpensive drugs.

- Lack of monetary assets, resulting in anger at ‘The System’.

- Campaigning for things such as the Legalisation of Rape and Paedophilia, and the introduction of free social housing for any youths that decide to have children at the age of 12.

- Inter-class breeding. Resulting in a problem for the gene pool.

Youth culture is a stain on Society, what would Aristotle, or Octavian, or Charlemagne, or Hitler say if he saw our society today?

Although I can understand this young man’s frustration at the vapidity of a lot of youth culture, I do not understand his desire to malign youth at large and blame popular culture for the decline of high culture. There is no real relation between age and interest in popular culture over high culture. Rather, the interest in high and popular culture has more to do with an individual’s interests and intelligence rather than said person’s age. There are older people who grew up in ‘better times’ who are quite content with watching shows like ‘Jenny Jones’ and keeping track of all the latest stars’ misdeeds. There is no need to mischaracterise all youth as being vapid because some of us want to enjoy popular culture.

Popular culture isn’t causing high culture to erode as the two forms of culture tend to exist in separate continua unless someone wants to bring the two together and manage to connect both the high-brow and the low-brow. Even in the writer’s romanticised Graeco-Roman era, there was still a distinction between high and popular culture and people enjoyed things that were in their social milieux. The artists (either verbal, music or pictorial) that seem to have the most timeless characteristics in either high or mass culture are not the ones who disdain popular culture, but the ones who attempt to transcend class boundaries and have their work be comprehensible to everyone, whether they be the hoi polloi or the intelligentsia.

There are some elements of his statement that are disturbing as well as just being flat-out wrong. He had said that interbreeding in classes was wrong because it corrupted the gene-pool. However, that is incorrect. He seemed to assume in another post that the upper classes were naturally more intelligent. That’s also wrong; there seems to be a normal distribution in intelligence no matter what social class you are in. In addition, lower intelligence scores amongst the poor can be attributed to malnutrition (which stunts cognitive development), a higher occurrence of fetal-alcohol syndrome and other health and environmental problems rather than an inherent lack of intelligence amongst the poor.

His statistics are also wrong. Teenage pregnancy is on the decline. There has been no youth movement to legalise rape and paedophilia. And what is the difference between cheap alcohol and drugs and expensive drugs and alcohol? This young man is apparently wealthy, so I imagine that these ’statistics’ are more snobbery than actual fact.

(And just for kicks, I wrote this post whilst listening to Aqua’s ‘Barbie Girl’.)

We have finally made the move from Movable Type to Wordpress. Moving the old theme over is a bit tricky though. The forums already have a new default theme, and you can expect a lot more to come soon.

I spent my day in the halls of power listening to and sharing cheese cubes with those who have run for President and those who aspire to. I heard friends, family, colleages and admirers of the late Robert Kennedy mark what would have been his 80th birthday with a day of events on Capitol Hill remembering this great man and his legacy. Important men and women from nearly every continent gathered to pay him tribute. Important figures of blue-state America such as Sen. Kerry, Sen. Clinton, Sen. Edward Kennedy, Sen. Obama, Rep. John Lewis, Rep. Kucinich, Tom Hayden, Harry Belafonte, and many, many more came out to speak to me and many others about the legacy of Robert Kennedy.

They spoke glowingly of this man’s short career of defending the powerless and speaking up for those without a voice and more importantly helping them find their own voice. I listened as many wondered out loud what Sen. Robert Kennedy would say about the world today had he not met his untimely death that night in Los Angeles.

I wonder that myself.

While I can’t claim to know the man personally as so many who rose today, I share their belief that Kennedy would be ashamed. Ashamed not just in this Administration as the speakers reminded us time and time again, but ashamed in his friends & supporters who claim to keep his legacy alive today.

While I risk never again receiving an invite to an elite gathering of this nature in the future, I think I do a greater honor to Robert Kennedy’s legacy by refusing to be silent in the face of injustice and speaking plainly by calling a wrong a wrong. To keep silent would add a further wrong to his memory, and there has been enough of that today.

Today in the US Capitol Building I listened with interest to a panel discussion on RFK and his legacy. The last speaker was Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel who, as chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee responsible for getting more Democrats elected to Congress in 2006, articulated his path for moving Kennedy’s vision forward into the future of America’s politics. He was a charming guy who spoke of many agreeable things until his final remark.

He brought up the need to articulate Democratic values (big D, mind you), like many pundits and politicians he no doubt feels there is a “values gap” between Republicans and Democrats and feels a need for the Democratic Party to better articulate its’ values to confront the Republican’s use of values to sweep elections.

No doubt envious of Republican’s success using anti-gay values to produce electoral victories, Rep. Emanuel has pinned his parties’ hopes purely on anti-youth values.

He outlined an agenda of school uniforms, curfews, and V-Chip powered censorship as examples of these new “values.” If these are the new values of the Democratic Party, then this is not Robert Kennedy’s party. Perhaps it never was.
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