Be A Good American: Issue 1

"Be A Good American" is going to be a collection of items that I... Collect that I think every American should know, or learn, or at the very least be acquainted with. You should be able to get some honest self-improvement value out of these things if you give them a whack, but at the very least they'll be interesting and fun. If they're not, you're probably not cut out for this whole "land of the free" thing. I hear Russia needs voters that Politburo can intimidate; you might find a home there.

Learn Middle Eastern Geography!
Everybody has seen those statistics about how whatever percent of Americans can't find whatever country on a map. Firstly, I'd like to say that there are a great many countries out there that are so small and pointless that they deserve to be forgotten until they come up with a new umbrella drink. However, there's not much excuse to not be familiar with Middle Eastern and Central European geography, so the above game is here to teach you.

Get Familiar with the NATO Phonetic Alphabet!
Sure, you could use names or common objects to spell out words that phones can't seem to pick up correctly. But everyone uses different names and objects, and some people clearly don't get the point of it at all. I had a bilingual operator tell a caller that a letter was "C like 'cat'", but she was speaking spanish so it came out "C de 'gato'". As you may have noticed, there is no "C" in "gato". If nothing useful ever comes out of NATO again, this will. This is what you learn in flight school and in the military. It's used there because it works so well, and everyone's playing from the same sheet of ridiculous words.

Understand The Russian Public: Learned Helplessness!
Yes, you're going to have to read some psychology. Learned Helplessness is a relatively new psychological principle that has some serious predictive value. Understand learned despair, and you'll have some real insight into the Central European condition.

Help The Third World: Private Micro Loans!
A Micro Loan might be anywhere from $50 USD to $1000 USD, and while that amount might not do much to start a business in the US, it can do some serious economy-stimulating in a third-world country. Kiva grants these loans to individual third-world entrepreneurs so they can build a business on their own. It's a charity effort that promotes self-reliance and ingenuity, which is really quite a thing. The Cracked.com forum, of all places, has already embraced the hell out of this.

If none of these things make you a better American, you may be hopeless. I'll leave you with this music video of Joe Satriani. He's an American, it's cool.

Satch Boogie - Joe Satriani