An Escape From Reality...

Tuesday Jan 26, 2010

2010-01-26T08:23:00.000-08:00

Today I created a new introduction to my essay. I started out by describing and narrating how Fidel got into power and then I did the same with Chavez. This is so the reader will get a general idea and can start comparing adn contrasting both revolutions. Today I also wrote the simimilaritesd- of Fidel and Chavez more into detail.

Monday Jan 25, 2010

2010-01-25T10:20:00.000-08:00

Today I worked on reasearching information about Chavez to compare him to Fidel. I focused mainly on his revolution. I found many interesting quotes to incorporate in my reasearch paper. I also added new entries to my works cited page since I found new resources and new information. Now that I have all the information, I need to find a way to organize my reasearch paper.

Works Cited

2010-01-17T19:19:00.000-08:00

Ali, Tariq. The Declarations of Havana (Revolutions). New York: Verso, 2008. Print.
Fawthrop, Tom . " Student Research Center - powered by EBSCOhost: Cuba seeks 'sustainable socialism'." EBSCOhost. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Jan. 2010. .
"Fidel Castro Biography ." Biography.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Jan. 2010. .
Leonard, Thomas M., Greenwood Press, 1999, and ISBN 031329979X. "Cuban Revolution." Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Jan. 2010. .
Lotta, Raymond. "U.S. Imperialism, the Cuban Revolution, and Fidel Castro." U.S. Imperialism, the Cuban Revolution, and Fidel Castro. N.p., 13 Aug. 2006. Web. 15 Jan. 2010. .
Rayne, Trevor. "History of the Cuban Revolution." Untitled Document. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Jan. 2010. .
Sill, Igor. " Student Research Center - powered by EBSCOhost: OPINION: The US-Cuban Relation, what next!." EBSCOhost. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Jan. 2010. .
Suchlicki, Jaime. " Student Research Center - powered by EBSCOhost: Cuba After Castro." EBSCOhost. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Jan. 2010. .
Sweig, Julia. " Student Research Center - powered by EBSCOhost: Fidel's Final Victory." EBSCOhost. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Jan. 2010. .

What My Drawing Looked like

2009-12-17T16:31:00.000-08:00

Evil-Cruel

Innocent-Good

Mask to hide behind

Ending-Candide

2009-12-17T16:29:00.000-08:00

As I finished reading Candide, I found Voltaire a very effective writer. At first I didn´t understand his satire, but as the book went on I adapted. I found it a very creative and entertaing way to portray his message about optimism and passim. His common place of using human natures typical behaviors helped me connect with the book. I found it very interesting how he compared society and its ideals throughout the book.

In the last chapters after all the suffering Candide has gone through, he finally has an optimistic life after all. Voltaire’s use of vividness really helped me out when reading. I could imagine every scene, since he used appropriate descriptive words for each scene.

I found the final passage of the book a very good one to end it. It was a very strong ending, with a very true message.

¨You are perfectly right, said Pangloss; for when man was put into the Garden of Eden, he was put there to dress it and to keep it, to work in fact which proves that man was not born to an easy life. ….Let’s work without speculating, said Martin; it’s the only way to make life bearable. The entire household agreed to this admirable plan, and each began to exercise his talents. That is very well put, said Candide, but we must go and work our garden.¨ (Candide pg.143-144)

The message I got from Voltaire was that being rich doesn’t symbolize happiness. As we saw in chapter 30 it mentions all those noble men, who had it all and ended up getting killed. I love the ending how Candide finally teaches Pangloss something. Candide teaches Pangloss that in order to have a better world each must do it´s own contribution and work for it, because improvement only comes from work, not from doing nothing like all those noble men. They really didn´t accomplish much, because since they had it all they didn´t work to improve.

Drawing

2009-12-17T15:30:00.000-08:00

As I read Chapter 20-25 I found the end of chapter 21 very impacting. It is a conversation between Candide and Martin, where Candide asks Martin, ¨ Do you think, said Candide that men have always massacred each other, as they do today, that they have always been false, cozening, faithless, ungrateful, thieving, weak, inconstant , mean-spirited, envious, greedy, drunken, miserly, ambitious, bloody, slanderous, debauched, fanatic, hypocritical and stupid?”And Martin replies, “Do you think said Martin, that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they could find them?”(Candide 96) When Candide responds ¨Of course I do¨ Martin then proves his point by saying that if the rest of the animals’ don´t change why men would be any different and actually change. Candide then defends his point of view by saying that humans have free will.

I believe humans do have free will, yet, humans are very evil. I have found that many people who appear to be your best friends actually backstab you and betray you. I do agree that we have free will, yet many don´t use it how it´s supposed to be.

Therefore, for my drawing I drew a Mardi gras mask over a baby face and another image which is a face of a witch behind the mask as well. The mask and the baby represents ¨good¨ and innocence for it has a smile on it and the witch is a symbol of evil. Depending on the situation in our daily life we change the face, yet we always have the mask on. For our environment makes us act differently accordingly.

I think my drawing perfectly describes society and human nature, because sometime in our life we have backstabbed or been backstabbed by someone you cared about and never expected. Many times in society we act as someone we are not either if it is to fit in, harm someone, or reach a goal. That is why there is a saying that says trust no one but yourself. We live in a very dangerous evil world full of hypocrisy and two faced people. Danger surrounds us, even though it sometimes looks pretty harmless. It´s reality and something we face in our daily lives and through time learn how to handle it.

I liked how Voltaire made fun of this cruel human behavior, because it alerts the reader to be aware of hurting others and of being hurt. It also makes the reader reflect upon own personal experiences and analyze them.

* DRAWNG IS IN MY NOTEBOOK-I Don´t have a scanner sorry.

Satirical Essay

2009-12-17T15:26:00.000-08:00

The Greatest Sport Created

Are you tired of feeling ugly? Not having enough money? Simply being fat? Are you tired of eating your money and flushing it down the toilet? The solution is all in the new sport created: Anorexia. It is proven that food is the cause of world poverty. With the money you waste on food yearly, you could buy 100 Mercedes. So, do you prefer to have 100 Mercedes parked in your garage or have a big fat belly and no money in your wallet? By playing a sport, never before could you help fight world poverty, yet now you can!

This sport has become so popular in such a short period of time that it is now being considered to be played in the next Olympics. It’s an easy sport, which only requires one skill, to follow directions. Playing it is as easy as it sounds: No Eating. That is it, one rule. It can’t get any simpler.

There has now been an anorexic association league created not too long ago, devoted into helping others. If you want to improve your life tremendously, call them NOW! They will give you tips to improve your life 100% guaranteed. Call 1800-Anorexics. They will give you all the information needed to join the team, free of charge. This Anorexic league will promise you drastic changes very rapidly. You may ask yourself why they don’t charge. It’s simple, their passion is to help others making the world a happier and better place.

This sport will only improve your life. It will make you skinnier, prettier, happier and will teach you skills essential to your daily life: following directions. Ever since it was created millions of athletes are in the constant race of fighting to always become better. They do whatever it takes, to reach “success”.

Psychologists have even rated this sport as the drug they had never before found. This is because it not only improves your physical and emotional health, but it triggers motivation. So, if you find life boring and need that inspiration you once had, call them now.

On the other hand do you suffer from not enough attention? Are you depressed and feel useless? This sport will give you the attention you had always dreamed of. The changes will be so noticeable, that people with no doubt, will look at you in surprise, talk about you and even point at you. Who would ever think shutting your mouth was the answer for the attention you were looking for all these years.

Is your name hideous? Are you embarrassed to meet people because of your name? People who practice this sport can refer to themselves as Ana. Playing Anorexia will abolish your worst nightmare. People will now refer to you as Ana instead of your embarrassing name. This is the same case as people who practice syphilis are called Philly. Yet, Ana is a prettier than any other name. It’s short easy and unisex. No need to be ashamed, now you will be part of this proud, prestigious elite team.

What sport can be better than one that is affordable, gains the attention you always wanted, gives life a meaning and motivates you, no need to go the gym or time required to practice and it even saves you money, makes you pretty and happy.

Join the never ending race of being the scrawniest and boniest or simply the prettiest person alive. Being gorgeous is not that difficult. So it’s time for the life you always wanted. Start practicing only practice makes better. The more you practice the better the results.

This new trendy, effective, no time consuming sport has been the solution to millions of problems. No more working out, no more hassles, no more being unhappy or ugly. Start playing and you will become amazed by the feedback. Have a problem? There is an answer: Anorexia.

Connection With N.Y.T Article

2009-12-17T15:21:00.000-08:00

When poverty exists it brings many other problems, making society very chaotic. Some consequences of poverty are crime, violence, disease among may others. It is the responsibility of the more privileged to help others in any way possible.

In these chapters we can see how perfect Eldorado is. How the children were playing with gold nuggets, emeralds and rubies. Eldorado is a Utopian world, meaning it doesn´t exists. I can relate this to the real world by dividing the poor and the rich. There are many people specially celebrities who have so much money, that they don´t know what to do with it, yet, it never crosses their mind to help the most needy. Maybe they are greedy or maybe they simply don´t want anything to do with people from other social classes because they could be affected. Just as in Eldorado there was enough money to end world poverty, ¨ (pg.75)As they approached they noticed some children, covered with tattered gold brocade, playing at nine pins.¨ In Eldorado there was so much wealth that they didn´t know what to do with it, so it became the children’s toys. Instead of helping the poor these people were in denial of having any contact with the outside world because they thought they would be at risk of destroying their perfect country.

The fortune that Candide takes from Eldorado brings him more problems than advantages. Therefore, I can connect this with an article in The New York Times, which talks about how giving money to the needy can cause more problems than benefits. You may ask yourself why helping others would fail, it never has before yet the truth is as said in the article ¨Failures are buried so as not to discourage donors and evaluations are often done by the organizations themselves.¨

When Candide gives away some money for a few people to accompany him in his voyage, he realizes There are so many miserable people in the world that giving away a little bit of money does nothing to reduce this overall misery. Is this maybe why people are discourage to help out? In the article the same idea is mentioned, ¨Economists find no correlation between countries that received aid and those that grew quickly. This may be true but I find it, true to an extent, because we all have to help out to see the difference. As an old saying goes one person can´t do everything, but we all do something. If only a few help out the change isn´t going to be so noticeable.

I find that in today’s society people are very selfish and greedy and only care about themselves. They don’t want to talk to someone who is no of their same class, and discriminate others because of the money. As seen with Eldorado. I find this totally unacceptable, for it is not a persons fault to be in the conditions they are in. For, instead of setting them apart from us, we should try to help them, because I find helping others brings at least to me gives me great satisfaction.
If we don´t all work together, we are never going to reach that Utopian world we all want. It obvious we are never going to have a perfect world, but if we work hard it could be close to perfect.

Riches enough to end world poverty lie untouched on the ground. Its residents refuse to initiate any contact with the outside world because they know that such contact would destroy their perfect country. After some time there, even Candide wants to return immediately to the deeply flawed world outside. The Eldorado “pebbles” will only be of value to him in the outside world. The jewels that make Eldorado beautiful serve to inspire greed and ambition in Candide, whose only previous interests have been survival and his love for Cunégonde.

N.Y.T Article

Crossroads
How Can We Help the World’s Poor?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
The number of bleeding hearts has soared exponentially over the last decade. Celebrities embraced Africa, while conservatives went from showing disdain for humanitarian aid (“money down a rat hole”) to displaying leadership in the fight against AIDS and malaria. Compassion became contagious and then it became consensus.

Yet all the wringing hands never quite clasped. Just as the bleeding hearts seemed victorious, they divided in a ferocious intellectual debate about how best to help poor people around the world. One group, led by Bono and the indefatigable Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, argues that the crucial need is for more money. After all, aid for development is quite modest: for every $100 in national income, we Americans donate just 18 cents in “official development assistance” to poor countries. Sweden donates five times as much. Sachs’s book “The End of Poverty” is the bible of this camp.

The rival camp, led by William Easterly of New York University, argues that more money doesn’t necessarily help, and may hurt. Easterly, whose powerful and provocative book “The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good” appeared in 2006, is still rocking the world of do-gooders. His book was a direct assault on Sachs’s, and it has been influential because, frankly, much of his critique rings true, even among aid workers.

Easterly has been joined this year by Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian economist who wrote “Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa.” Moyo attracted attention in part because of the novelty of an African denouncing aid to Africa, and her book has set off another wave of bitter, personal feuding between the two camps. Few people fight as savagely as humanitarians.

The Easterly/Moyo camp notes that anybody who has traveled in Africa has seen aid projects that have failed, undermined self-reliance and entrepreneurship, even harmed people. Economists find no correlation between countries that received aid and those that grew quickly. Indeed, the great economic successes in modern times (mostly in Asia) often received little aid.

It’s also clear that doing good is harder than it looks. For example, abundant evidence suggests that education can be transformative in a poor country, so donors often pay for schools. But building a school is expensive and can line the pockets of corrupt officials. And in my reporting I’ve found that the big truancy problem in poor countries typically involves not students but teachers: I remember one rural Indian school where the teachers appeared only once or twice a year to administer standardized tests. To make sure that the students didn’t do embarrassingly badly on those exams, the teachers wrote all the answers on the blackboard. The critics can cite similar unexpected difficulties in almost every nook of the aid universe.

If Sachs represents the Hegelian thesis and Easterly the antithesis, we now have hope of seeing an emerging synthesis. It would acknowledge the shortcomings of aid, but also note some grand successes. For example, the number of children dying each year before the age of 5 has dropped by three million worldwide since 1990, largely because of foreign aid. Yes, aid often fails — but more than balancing the failures is quite a triumph: one child’s life saved every 11 seconds (according to my calculations from United Nations statistics).

Moreover, pragmatic donors are figuring out creative ways to overcome the obstacles. Take education. Given the problems with school-building programs, donors have turned to other strategies to increase the number of students, and these are often much more cost-effective: (1) Deworm children. This costs about 50 cents per child per year and reduces absenteeism from anemia, sickness and malnutrition. A Kenya study found, in effect, that it is only one twenty-fifth as expensive to increase school attendance by deworming students as by constructing schools. (2) Bribe parents. One of the most successful antipoverty initiatives is Oportunidades in Mexico, which pays impoverished mothers a monthly stipend if their kids attend school regularly. Oportunidades has raised high school enrollment in some rural areas by 85 percent.

I don’t mean to imply that building brick-and-mortar schools is an outmoded idea. My wife and I built a school in Cambodia, through American Assistance for Cambodia, because we were able to establish that teachers do show up there, that the bottleneck in rural Cambodia is school construction, and that our donation would be highly leveraged. Likewise, Greg Mortenson’s famous school-building efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan, described in his superb book, “Three Cups of Tea” (written with David Oliver Relin), makes a huge difference on the ground. The point is to be relentlessly empirical.

One of the challenges with the empirical approach is that aid organizations typically claim that every project succeeds. Failures are buried so as not to discourage donors, and evaluations are often done by the organizations themselves — ensuring that every intervention is above average. Yet recently there has been a revolution in evaluation, led by economists at the Poverty Action Lab at M.I.T. They have designed rigorous studies to see what actually works. The idea is to introduce new aid initiatives randomly in some areas and not in others, and to measure how much change occurred and at what cost. This approach is expensive but gives a much clearer sense of which interventions are most cost-effective.

The upshot is that we can now see that there are many aid programs that work very well. We don’t need to distract ourselves with theoretical questions about aid, so long as we can focus on deworming children and bribing parents. The new synthesis should embrace specific interventions that all sides agree have merit, while also borrowing from an important insight of the aid critics: trade is usually preferable to aid.

I was recently in Liberia, a fragile African democracy struggling to rebuild. It is chock-full of aid groups rushing around in white S.U.V.’s doing wonderful work. But it also needs factories to employ people, build skills and pay salaries and taxes. Americans are horrified by sweatshops, but nothing would help Liberia more than if China moved some of its sweatshops there, so that Liberians could make sandals and T-shirts.

Paul Collier, an Oxford University economist who exemplifies the emerging synthesis in his brilliant book “The Bottom Billion,” has lately argued that the best way to rescue Haiti is for America to encourage a local textile manufacturing industry, which could export to the United States, creating jobs and a larger tax base.

As these ideas spread, we’re seeing more aid organizations that blur the boundary with business, pursuing what’s called a double bottom line: profits but also a social return. For example, the New York-based Acumen Fund is a cross between a venture capital operation and an aid group: it invests “patient capital,” accepting below-market returns and offering management help in a Tanzanian company that makes antimalaria bed nets, for instance, and in a hospital company in India that offers a for-profit model to fight maternal mortality. The founder of Acumen Fund, Jacqueline Novogratz, recently published a memoir, “The Blue Sweater,” that argues for this kind of approach.

In the 1960s, there were grand intellectual debates about whether capitalism was heroic or evil; today we simply worry about how to make it work. At last, we may be doing the same with foreign aid.

Nicholas D. Kristof is an Op-Ed columnist at The Times and the author, with Sheryl WuDunn, of “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.”

Writing A Research Paper

2009-12-11T08:25:00.000-08:00

The main elements for writing a research paper are, “research, critical thinking, source evaluation, organization, and composition.” A research paper includes many sources, it is choosing a topic to investigate and learn more about. Yet, it is not an informative paper,” The goal of a research paper is not to inform the reader what others have to say about a topic, but to draw on what others have to say about a topic and engage the sources in order to thoughtfully offer a unique perspective on the issue at hand.”It requires you to analyze the information found and interpret it in a unique way. There are two types of research papers: analytical and argumentative. In an argumentative research paper the topic must be controversial, having two different points of views. In an analytical research paper, is a question in which the researcher has taken no side-objective.

When you choosing a topic, one should begging brainstorming ideas down. This is a helpful way which =exposes patterns and main ideas, to help you conclude your topic. Yet, you must also take into account what audience you are going to write about. This will help you determine the tone and diction you will use in your research paper. Yet, the writing standards are not all to it, “one must not only pay particular attention to the genre, topic, and audience, but must also become skilled in researching, outlining, drafting, and revising.” These are skills many don’t take into consideration, but are very important and useful when writing a research paper.

Writing a research paper is not impossible or hard, it just takes time practice and basic skills.

Wikipedia

2009-12-10T08:33:00.000-08:00

When I searched love in Wikipedia a very complete definition and description of love showed up. I never thought I would find so much on love. Yet, I found many different topics all related to love. I liked how Wikipedia divided love into these sections. I found the information very well organized, but I believe in some areas there was not enough information. It lacked information in some of the cultural love views and in some of the religious views. I would add more information and be more specific, so it would be easier to understand and more useful.

While searching volleyball in Wikipedia I found it clearly explains the game very clearly. It also focuses on indoor volleyball, yet does metions other types of volleyball and has links to find more information about that topic. I found this links very useful and very helpful, for you don’t have to do another search, but while reading you can open another window directly. It is very well divided into sections covering everything in volleyball from techniques to rules to the history of volleyball.

When I searched Facebook I found a lot of information on it, yet Facebook I believe is such a huge site, that I felt like there was information missing. Also I thought it should have a quick friendly user explanation of how to use Facebook. I found it great how they at least warn you the information may not e up to date, “This article may need to be updated. Please update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information, and remove this template when finished. Please see the talk page for more information. (November 2009)”

Interpreting, Conecting, Analyzing

2009-12-09T20:13:00.000-08:00

While reading I did some investigation and found out that Voltaire’s uses the Oreillons as a criticism towards Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s philosophy. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s was another French Enlightment thinker who believed, that humans were naturally good and that institutions of human civilization like property, business and so forth corrupt this goodness. He came to call man “noble savage”. Yet, Voltaire’s thought all the opposite, he refers to the Oreillons as men filled with prejudice and brutality as the people from the Old World. They killed people on their religious beliefs, “He’s a Jesuit! He’s a Jesuit. We shall have our revenge and enjoy a good meal. We’ll have Jesuit for dinner!” not to mention the practice of cannibalism. I agree more with Voltaire’s view point, for to me it is more realistic. We have to accept human nature, and deal with reality evilness does exist.

Cacambo saves Candide from being eaten. He speaks with the Oreillons and tells him he is not a Jesuit. Cacambo represents a balance of a man who is neither from the Old or the New world. As everything in excess is bad he is the perfect combination who thinks thoroughly and uses his understanding and experience of both worlds to create his wonderful personality. We can see this, “The Oreillons were impressed by Cacambo’s reasoning.” He eloquently and very diplomatically talked to the Oreillons and saved his friend from being eaten.

LIFE

2009-12-09T19:36:00.000-08:00

While reading I came across, “I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life.” This quote really surprised me because being the daughter of the Pope, she shouldn’t say such things, for suicide is a terrible sin for the Catholic Church. It is also very ironic how this old lady refers to people not killing themselves because they “love life”, not because they are resigned or scared of eternal punishment (hell). I think maybe because of all the terrible events that have happened to her, maybe she doesn’t believe in god anymore or in the afterlife. I would completely understand her, for if god is so great, was he in all her suffering. Why didn’t he help her out? What did she do to have to go through all that? These are questions I often ask myself, for If god is so great why does he allow so much suffering and hurt to be caused. If he is so powerful, why doesn’t he help the one who really need it?

The old lady also says, “I should have never of my misfortunes if you had not provoked me a little, and if it were not the custom to pass the time on board ship by telling stories.” Even though the old lady is very pessimistic due to all the events in her life, she does not want anybody to feel sorry for her. By telling her stories she is not looking for sympathy, it is only to cope with the boredom. Yet, her sufferings have influenced greatly who she is. She now sees life as being misery, yet forced to love it.

Dual Message

2009-12-06T20:35:00.000-08:00

As I read I found more elements of satire. You would never imagine how the old woman, now a servant, was once a princess. It was very surprising and unexpected to hear her, “My eyes were not always sore and bloodshot, my nose did not always touch my chin, and I have not always been a servant. I am the daughter of Pope Urban X and the Princess of Palestrina.” This case is very ironic to me, I asked myself how someone with so much power and so much wealth can end up being a servant? I also wonder what it feels like for her from being admired by many, respected, and praised to now being a servant: treated harshly and given orders. She says one of her dresses was worth more than all of the magnificence of Westphalia, by using this hyperbole the author emphasizes this old woman’s drastic change. Life is pretty unexpected therefore you must live life fully and not underestimate it, I bet this old lady never ever imagined herself as something less than a princess.

This old woman’s story can be interpreted in two ways. All these events and suffering she has gone through contradict Pangloss optimism. She has lived through the worst of the worst: rape, war, being a servant, being back stabbed and so on. Simply life can't be viewed in an optimistic way, after all.

It can also be viewed as criticism against religion. For, she is the daughter of the Pope, the highest member of the Catholic Church. How in the world does he not protect her and help her when she is suffering? It’s ironic how his wants to help people, and its his job, but when it comes to his own daughter he does nothing about it.

Chapters 6 & 7

2009-12-06T17:35:00.000-08:00

While reading chapter six, I found it very ridiculous how, “The University of Coimbra had pronounced that the sight of a few people ceremoniously burned alive before a slow fire was an infallible prescription for preventing earthquakes.” How in the world is burning a person going to stop earthquakes from occurring? Obviously it did not work and towards the end of the chapter, another earthquake occurs.

While reading I detected a false choice fallacy- “The authorities of that country could find no surer means avoiding total ruin than by giving people a magnificent auto-da-fe.” It is saying the government had no other option than to kill these people. This is a complete fallacy and the government didn’t have to kill them, for he killed them and still the problem consisted.

In chapter seven Candide is take care of by an old lady. The strange thing about it is that he doesn’t know her. He keeps asking her, “Who are you?... and what makes you so kind to me?” Yet, she doesn’t reply. If I was Candide, I would start thinking something weird is going on, even more when she says, “Come with me and don’t speak a word.” Candide follows her, not even taking into account she is a stranger and could put in a risk full situation.

MLA

2009-12-03T10:55:00.000-08:00

MLA stands for Moder Language Association. It is a standard of used while writing, using English language. It has specific text ciatations, work cited pages, first page format, and section headings. MLA has become very popular used by most people and institutions, it has become a standard for writing in many places.

General Guidelines
Type your paper on a computer and print it out on standard, white 8.5 x 11-inch paper.
Double-space the text of your paper, and use a legible font (e.g. Times New Roman). Whatever font you choose, MLA recommends that the regular and italics type styles contrast enough that they are recognizable one from another. The font size should be 12 pt.
Leave only one space after periods or other punctuation marks (unless otherwise instructed by your instructor).
Set the margins of your document to 1 inch on all sides.
Indent the first line of paragraphs one half-inch from the left margin. MLA recommends that you use the Tab key as opposed to pushing the Space Bar five times.
Create a header that numbers all pages consecutively in the upper right-hand corner, one-half inch from the top and flush with the right margin. (Note: Your instructor may ask that you omit the number on your first page. Always follow your instructor's guidelines.)
Use italics throughout your essay for the titles of longer works and, only when absolutely necessary, providing emphasis.
If you have any endnotes, include them on a separate page before your Works Cited page. Entitle the section Notes (centered, unformatted).
Formatting the First

Vocab Candide

2009-12-02T02:41:00.000-08:00

I found it very funny when Pangloss gives his explanation of why syphilis is a positive thing, “It is indispensable in this best of worlds. It is a necessary ingredient. For if Columbus, when visiting the West Indies, had not caught this disease, which poisons the source of generation, which frequently even hinders generation, and is clearly opposed to the great end of Nature, we should have neither chocolate nor cochineal.” I found it very humorous how Pangloss priorities are very ironic. He doesn’t care about this harsh contagious disease, for it weren’t because if it we wouldn’t have chocolate or cochineal. For Pangloss having the disease spreading around is worth it, because now we have chocolate and cochineal. As a saying goes, you don’t miss what you have never had. Pangloss loses and eye and an ear due to syphilis, yet he still believes the disease is important. Can he say anything more ironic?

VOCAB
“She was disemboweled by Burglar soldiers after being ravished as much as a poor woman could bear.”
Disemboweled: remove the entrails of

Ravished: to seize and carry away by force

“This sovereign of hearts and quintessence of our souls.”
Quintessence: the pure, highly concentrated essence of a thing

“They produced these hellish torments by which you see me devoured.”
Hellish: highly unpleasant

“Who was indebted for it to a marchioness.”
Marchioness: A noblewoman ranking above a countess and below a duchess. Also called marquise

“Clearly opposed to the great end of Nature, we should have neither chocolate nor cochineal.”
Cochineal: vivid red

“The sailor rushed straight into the midst of the debris and risked his life searching for money.”
Debris: the scattered remains of something broken or destroyed; rubble or wreckage

One Question: No Answer.

2009-12-02T02:13:00.001-08:00

As I began reading “Candide”, as early as the introduction I could connect with Voltaire. In the introduction he uses the rhetorical questions technique. For, with me at least as a reader it was very effective. The question which most impacted me, and I always ask myself he addressed as, “If the creator is good and all-powerful, as we are told he is, could he not have made a better world?” This question will never have an answer for we believe what we are told, yet what if it was all made up like some myths and legends from different cultures.

Even though I do think about this question constantly, never do I need a more urgent answer than when something bad happens. As Voltaire said, “In times of widespread disasters such questioning becomes more general and more urgent.” This is due to the fact that in a moment of desperation, you can’t seem to understand, how someone who supposedly is so good can’t prevent so much harm. I had this feeling Voltaire describes exactly with the September 11 attacks. Millions of questions like his kept draining in my head. How can such good creator, create such harmful beasts? Why do innocent people have to pay the consequences, for what some bastards decided to do? Why does evil exist if we were created by such good creator? I keep repeating the word good to emphasize that apparently he is not that good after all.

I find it really amazing and brilliant how Voltaire came up with these ideas all the way back in 1758, when there was a diminutive portion of the knowledge there is today. I admire him. I nowhere find him tragic, he is just a person who is not scared to face reality, like most are.

Yet, this is a topic that has gone on for centuries with many different opinions and perspectives. The point is no one will ever know the truth of our creator if there is any, but we are left with this uncertainty we must live on with.

SATIRE

2009-11-14T14:32:00.000-08:00

Op-Ed Columnist
Once Again, Into the Apocalypse
By GAIL COLLINS
A lot of people are worrying about the world coming to an end in 2012.

Bummer. I thought we’d gotten over all that in 2000.

The question of whether the End of Time will arrive during the holiday shopping season three years hence is already the subject of a veritable library of books. We also have what “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to 2012” claims are almost 600,000 Web sites devoted to worrying about it.

This seems to be the fault of Nostradamus, the Mayan calendar, angst on the left about global warming and angst on the right about the election of Barack Obama. Or the health care bill. Or government bailouts. Or the repositioning of “In God We Trust” on the nation’s coinage.

Really, for ultraconservatives, the last year has been one sign of the apocalypse after the other. Soon, the rivers will run red with Starbucks Raspberry-Flavored Tazo Passion Shaken Iced Tea. Owls will give birth to two-headed frogs who shriek the lyrics to Lady Gaga songs.

Hollywood is unleashing a raft of movies about humanity tottering on the edge of extinction. In “2012,” a G-8 summit convenes to discuss the fact that “the world as we know it will soon come to an end.” Actually, I would not be surprised if the participants found this preferable to another round of the Doha trade talks.

The film characters who are best prepared for the planetary calamity had been consulting the ancient Mayan calendar, which runs through more than five millennia and then comes screeching to a halt on Dec. 21, 2012. Some say that for the Mayans, this was just the end of a cycle, like completing a really long year, and that if they’d been able to hang around for a few more centuries they’d simply have issued a new, post-2012 calendar, this time perhaps including some nice pictures of puppies.

Others see more dire forces at work. In “2012,” the crust of the earth starts bouncing around like Tom DeLay in that cha-cha competition. No one can save us, not the black president or the governor of California with an Austrian accent. Certainly the Europeans can’t help, since not even the collapse of every tall building on the planet can get Americans to pay attention to non-American ideas.

Also coming soon to a theater near you are: “The Road” (Viggo Mortensen struggles across a barren landscape after a mysterious cataclysm) and “The Book of Eli” (Denzel Washington guards a book that could save post-apocalypse humanity from Gary Oldman). Obviously, Hollywood has determined that the reason all those Iraq-war-themed movies failed was that the moviegoers felt the scenery wasn’t bleak enough.

I’ve been disappointed that, so far, almost no one has noticed that St. Malachy’s List of the Last Popes has been running out of gas almost as fast as the Mayan calendar. Malachy was an Irish bishop who died in 1148, after allegedly having seen a vision of the future 112 popes who would reign until the end of the world. By this count, the current Benedict XVI would be 111.

Each of the popes gets a little hint as to his identity. For the most part, Malachy cannily chose to keep them general enough (“angelic shepherd”) that it was hard not to hit a lot of home runs. But good luck in figuring out how Benedict is “glory of the olives.”

Keeping things vague, or subject to multiple interpretations, is the real key to apocalyptic predictions. It’s what made Nostradamus a household name. He’d stare at a bowl of water for hours on end, and then come up with something like:

For the merry maid the bright splendor

Will shine no longer, for long will she be without salt.

With merchants, bullies, wolves odious,

All confusion universal monster.

Which is obviously a foretelling of the Sarah Palin book tour.

My own favorite prognosticator, The Amazing Criswell, always got into trouble with specificity, including his prediction that a black rainbow would circle the earth in 1999 and suck out all the oxygen. He lost a lot of credibility even earlier, after he announced that the United States would move its capital to Wichita and that pressures from outer space would turn Denver into jelly. Really, people tend to remember stuff like that.

I’m predicting that by the time we reach 2011, the 2012 Web sites will hit the million mark, not to mention the Twitters of Terror. But we’ve survived end-of-the-world panic many times before.

When I was a kid, the nuns at my school filled us with stories about prophecies of doom, frequently from Our Lady of Fatima. They always revolved around the Communist menace, and we were occasionally sent home on Friday with assurances that the End was coming by Sunday. We were credulous enough not to question why, in that case, there were homework assignments.

In this article the author uses a satire by satirizing the idea that the world is going to end in 2012. While reading this quote, I found it very humorous and vivid, “Really, for ultraconservatives, the last year has been one sign of the apocalypse after the other. Soon, the rivers will run red with Starbucks Raspberry-Flavored Tazo Passion Shaken Iced Tea. Owls will give birth to two-headed frogs who shriek the lyrics to Lady Gaga songs.” By the use of absurdness and hyperbole the authors achieves the satirical tone. Gail Collins used formal register for his article, he uses words such as, disappointed, noticed, multiple, vague and so forth.

I found this article very effective, for it uses evidence to prove his point. I do agree with him, why in the world do people still panic that the world is going to end when it has been said many times before? , “But we’ve survived end-of-the-world panic many times before.” It’s a very funny article, I loved the way it makes fun of those who do believe the world is going to end in 2012.

Being Stuck Between Two Cultures

2009-11-14T13:53:00.000-08:00

This memoir can be targeted mainly for Chinese-Americans, who can empathize with it. Those who can share those feelings and emotions of frustration. It is hard to continue following those restrictive traditions while living in The United States Of America, the land of the free. Being Chinese- American must not be easy. They are two extreme cultures, so different that being part of both must be like feeling you don’t belong in either. The sense of lost of identity. We can see these in the book when Kingston feels different from her American classmates and also from her own relatives. She can’t seem to find a place where she belongs, this causes frustration. The crush of cultures and traditions is the main reason. For there are many things which have different meaning depending on the culture. Also since Kingston has never been to China, she doesn’t seem to be able to sort out fiction and nonfiction stories she is told. She is expected to believe what she is told. It must be very frustrating.

I can relate to her a little, but not quite as much for my mom is American and my dad is Colombian. I have a multicultural background, and I have lived in both countries. Yet, I found these two cultures to be quite similar or at least my family’s traditions and I do feel a sense of belonging, for they are not so different.

Women Oppresion In Chinese Culture

2009-11-14T13:03:00.000-08:00

In “The Woman Warrior” we can see how each chapter and each story is mainly about a woman that affects Kingston’s life. The whole book depicts the male-dominated society she lives in. This is done through the use of only women in the book, men are intentionally not included. This book shows the power full Chinese traditions. They are educated to and raised to believe they are worthless. As I read a women saying, "Better to have geese than girls". Kingston’s mother is a successful doctor, and yet she can’t stress more the fact that girls are disappointments to their parents, no matter what they accomplish. Kingston’s feels haunted by ghosts of Chinese girls whose parents abandoned them because they wanted sons. We can see it is a very masculine culture, were women and girls are oppressed but they learn to live with it, making it a part of their daily lives. To them it is the right thing to do, for many of us it’s simply absurd. You may ask yourself why they don’t stand up for what they believe, but the truth is most of them believe and practice their culture with no exceptions. This is why Kingston’s fantasy story includes all these admired humans roles, that depict women as very successful and a key tool. In her story women are given the value they deserve nowhere are they undermined. I think she does this because she is not in accordance with her culture, yet she has to follow it unless she leaves home.

"Justice"

2009-11-09T18:37:00.000-08:00

November 9, 2009
Editorial
Imprisoning a Child for Life
The United States could be the only nation in the world where a 13-year-old child can be sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole, even for crimes that do not include murder. This grim distinction should trouble Americans deeply, as should all of the barbaric sentencing policies for children that this country embraces but that most of the world has abandoned.

The Supreme Court must keep the international standard in mind when it hears arguments on Monday in Graham v. Florida and Sullivan v. Florida. The petitioners in both argue that sentencing children to life without the possibility of parole for a nonhomicide violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

The court came down on the right side of this issue in 2005 when it ruled that children who commit crimes before the age of 18 should not be subject to the death penalty. The decision correctly pointed out that juveniles were less culpable because they lacked maturity, were vulnerable to peer pressure and had personalities that were still being formed.

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy said the practice of executing 16- and 17-year-olds violated the Eighth Amendment, conflicted with “evolving standards of decency” and isolated the United States from the rest of the world.

The Roper decision took scores of juveniles off death row. It also threw a spotlight onto state policies under which young juveniles were increasingly being tried in adult courts and sentenced to adult jails, often for nonviolent crimes.

The practice is even more troubling because it is arbitrary. Children who commit nonviolent crimes like theft and burglary are just as likely to be shipped off to adult courts as children who commit serious violent crimes. And the process is racially freighted, with black and Latino children more likely to be sent to adult courts than white children who commit comparable crimes.

The rush to try more and more children as adults began in the 1980s when the country was gripped by hysteria about an adolescent crime wave that never materialized. Joe Sullivan, the petitioner in Sullivan v. Florida, was sentenced to life without parole in 1989 — when he was just 13 — after a questionable sexual battery conviction. His two older accomplices testified against the younger, mentally impaired boy. They received short sentences, one of them as a juvenile.

The case of Terrance Graham has similar contours. A learning disabled child — born to crack-addicted parents — Mr. Graham was on probation in connection with a burglary committed when he was 16 when he participated in a home invasion. He, too, had older accomplices. He was never convicted of the actual crime but was given life without parole for violating the conditions of his probation.

These were two very troubled children in need of adult supervision and perhaps even time behind bars. But it is insupportable to conclude, as the courts did, that children who committed crimes when they were so young were beyond rehabilitation. The laws under which they were convicted violate current human rights standards and the Constitution.

How can the land of the free, violate an amendment? Ho w can in the land of opportunities be cruel punishment? The opening sentence says it all, “The United States could be the only nation in the world where a 13-year-old child can be sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole, even for crimes that do not include murder.” I actually believed the U.S actually gave chance to children under 18, apparently not.

I do believe it violates the Eighteenth Amendment, because sentencing a kid even more when he hasn’t killed anyone is simply cruel. As the article says there are many factors why a kid should not be life sentenced, “they lacked maturity, were vulnerable to peer pressure and had personalities that were still being formed.” Children don’t have enough experience to punish them with such drastic measures. They are in the process of making errors and learning from them, children do have the capability of learning.

Also we can see racism through the article when the author states, “And the process is racially freighted, with black and Latino children more likely to be sent to adult courts than white children who commit comparable crimes.” Isn’t this an equal nation for all? Where is the so called justice? The U.S believes to have the best justice system, but when it comes to applying it, it is the only country that does such inhumane acts.

Time Literary Supplement

2009-11-08T20:50:00.000-08:00

While reading Factory Girls TLS book review, I found it very well organized. The author starts off by giving background information of life in China. The author uses a lot of vividness, so it truly impacts the reader, “They live in factory compounds, sleep in crowded dormitories and eat canteen food.” This is just one example of imagery. The author uses a common place when he talks about Addidas, Nike, and Rebook, for they are very popular brands many people buy from. The reader even though it is talking about a foreign country can have a sense of identity and belonging with the article.

While giving a brief taste of what the book is about, the author does very well again using vividness, “She skipped meals in order to take computer classes.” When I read this I could picture how hard life had to be for them, it truly impacted me. Even though the author wrote in formal register, his word choice was very adequate, it was eloquent but easy to understand. The author reveals the perfect amount of information to give the reader a perspective of what the book is generally about.

By the use of real life events, the author gives surprising facts, “The ideal man must be at least 1.7 meters. In China height is often a proxy for status or even class.” Also the author says that some jobs require a minimum height for applicants. When learning about a culture you find many things which seem very “weird”, but they all have a meaning behind it. I wonder what the meaning behind height is. The author uses specific details like this one, which makes the reader live this foreign culture and learn from its diversities.

Ghosts?

2009-11-08T20:49:00.000-08:00

Personally, I do believe in ghosts, I have never witnessed to see one, but I’d rather not. I am very scared of that topic and rather not talk about it. While reading this book I could connect with it by how the author describes both perspectives of ghosts. One of them exactly describes me and the other my twin sister.

In the example of the book when the girls were all together and they heard a thump and a creak, “The girls would jump closer together giggling.” I felt a sense of connection with the narrator because I have been there. I reacted exactly the same way.

On the other hand, my twin sister is very “brave” as she thinks of herself that way. She doesn’t really believe in them, just like the mother. As the mother said, “That was somebody who fell asleep reading in bed and dropped her book.” I wish I could think like this, but I can’t I am a very nervous person and thinking it was just a coincidence, simply doesn’t go with my brain.

At the end we will never know if ghosts really do exist. It is a complex topic with millions of unanswered questions and I believe this is what gives me the uncertainty when they are talked about. I rather believe than not believe because what if they do exist? Some people say if you don’t believe they appear to show you they do exist, so I might as well believe for the mean time!

A Collision Of Two Cultures

2009-11-08T20:47:00.000-08:00

As we collide with different cultures we think we are normal and the other culture is not, yet they think the same as you do. So in the end what really is normal? I found it very interesting how in this book the mother doesn’t understand why Americans smile in the pictures she says, “What are you laughing at?” In her culture there is no point in smiling for a picture.

Another example of culture and customs is about putting away the straw hat before fall began, “If you want to save your hat for next year, you have to put it away early or else when you’re riding the subway or walking along Fifth Avenue, any stranger can snatch it off your head and put his foot through it.” Someone who doesn’t know about this tradition might become very angry and scared, yet people do it as a tradition, it’s not evil intentions. It is their way of celebrating the change of season.

This is why when you move it is so difficult to adapt. All the customs you were used to have become new ones, and some of which may seem ridiculous to you. There many different cultures, traditions, and customs all over the world this is due to the fact that people believe different things according to the environment that surrounds them and their ancestors.

Imagination: No Limits!

2009-11-06T03:19:00.000-08:00

November 3, 2009, 9:30 pm

License to Wonder
In the wake of my column last week about how the faces you make when speaking different languages might affect your mood, several people wrote and accused me of speculating. I admit it! Indeed, I said as much in the piece.

One of my favorite things to do is to take a set of facts and use them to imagine how the world might work. In writing about some of these ideas, my aim is not to be correct — how can I be, when the answer isn’t known? — but to be thought-provoking, to ask questions, to make people wonder.

I mention this because science is usually presented as a body of knowledge — facts to be memorized, equations to be solved, concepts to be understood, discoveries to be applauded. But this approach can give students two misleading impressions.

One is that science is about what we know. One colleague told me that when he was studying science at school, the relentless focus on the known gave him the impression that almost everything had already been discovered. But in fact, science — as the physicist Richard Feynman once wrote — creates an “expanding frontier of ignorance,” where most discoveries lead to more questions. (This frontier — this peering into the unknown — is what I especially like to write about.) Moreover, insofar as science is a body of knowledge, that body is provisional: much of what we thought we knew in the past has turned out to be incomplete, or plain wrong.

The second misconception that comes from this “facts, facts, facts” method of teaching science is the impression that scientific discovery progresses as an orderly, logical “creep”; that each new discovery points more or less unambiguously to the next. But in reality, while some scientific work does involve the plodding, brick-by-brick accumulation of evidence, much of it requires leaps of imagination and daring speculation. (This raises the interesting question of when speculation is more likely to generate productive lines of enquiry than deductive creep. I don’t know the answer — I’d have to speculate.)

Vittorio Luzzati/National Portrait Gallery in London Rosalind Franklin in 1950.
There are plenty of (probably) apocryphal tales about what inspired a great discovery, from Archimedes in his bathtub, to Newton and his apple. But there are also many well-documented accounts of inspiration — or lack of it — in the history of science. Among the most famous is the story of Rosalind Franklin and her non-discovery of the structure of DNA.

Franklin was an expert at getting x-ray diagrams from crystals of molecules. The idea is that the array of spots in the diagram will reveal how the atoms in the crystal are arranged. When Franklin started working on DNA, she obtained superb x-ray diagrams; one of her contemporaries described them as among the most beautiful of any substance ever taken. Indeed, it was from one of her diagrams that James Watson and Francis Crick deduced what the correct structure of DNA must be. (The picture was shown to Watson without Franklin’s knowledge.)

She had the data. Why didn’t she reach the solution? There are several answers to this; but one is that she had a fixed idea about how the problem should be solved. Namely, she wanted to work out the structure using the methods she had been taught. These methods are intricate, abstract, and mathematical, and difficult to use on a molecule as complex as DNA. Watson and Crick, meanwhile, were building physical models of what the diagram suggested the structure should be like — an approach that Franklin scorned. What’s more, their first model was ludicrously wrong, something that Franklin spotted immediately. But they were willing to play; she wasn’t. In other words, she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, adopt a more intuitive, speculative approach.

Our ability to make scientific discoveries is limited in a number of fundamental ways. One is time: it’s hard to do good experiments that last for more than a few weeks. Experiments that run for years are rare; as a result, we know relatively little about long, slow processes. Another constraint is money (no surprise there); a third is ethics (some experiments that would be interesting to do are ethically impossible). Some questions remain uninvestigated because no one stands to profit from the answers. Still others are neglected because they have no obvious bearing on human health or welfare, the areas of research are unfashionable, or the appropriate tools haven’t been invented yet. Some problems are just overwhelmingly complex.

But there’s one way in which we should not be limited: imagination. As Einstein put it, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”

This op-ed is written by Olivia Judson, I found it quite interesting because it is a response to many comments people wrote on her op-ed about smiles and language, which I also wrote on. (See blogs below.)

Many readers accuse her of speculating, without any facts. Therefore, she defends herself with a great deal of examples and famous people. She also goes further in to explaining, why science wouldn’t work without speculation. I couldn’t agree more with her, point of view.

Olivia has a great way of putting her thoughts into writing. When I read her articles, I can sympathize very much with her. By making me link with her, she has done the hardest thing a writer must do.

In the world we live in almost everything is a mystery, and as the years go on by all this errors other people obtain questions, until one day someone gets the answer. As Olivia said, “While some scientific work does involve the plodding, brick-by-brick accumulation of evidence, much of it requires leaps of imagination and daring speculation.” There is nothing wrong with speculating, because as a banner in my classroom says success is getting up when you fall. Cowards don’t speculate because they are afraid of being wrong, but the truth is we are all humans and we learn from making mistakes.

In the society we live in mistakes are seen as something negative, but in reality they are positive, for they teach us more than anything can. As long as we learn from our mistakes and don’t repeat them, a mistake is a positive thing.
I loved how Olivia ended her article with a strong quote from Einstein, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” personally I am addicted to quotes. Therefore without speculation, there would be no discoveries!

Subliminal Message, Behind Elections?

2009-11-06T03:15:00.000-08:00

November 4, 2009, 3:41 pm

Reading the Election Tea Leaves
By David Brooks and Gail Collins
Steve Helber/The Associated Press Voters at a polling place in Glen Allen, Va., on Tuesday.
David Brooks: Gail, I love elections generally and this one was perfect. It cut through the great illusion of political life. The great illusion is that American politics is divided between people who read The Huffington Post on the one hand and people who listen to Rush and Glenn Beck on the other. We all know intellectually that this is not the case but it’s hard to keep it in mind day to day.

Related
Room for Debate: What Did the Election Mean?

Gail Collins: I don’t actually think the election tells us much of anything except that New Jersey is a mess, the Republican Party in New York is a mess and the Democrats in Virginia picked a terrible candidate.

But I love the fact that two people can draw entirely different conclusions from them.

David Brooks: I’m sticking to my guns. This election reminded us of a couple truths. One, that there are twice as many conservatives in this country as liberals, and only one-fifth of the people in the country considers themselves liberal. This means that 80 percent of the people are inclined to be skeptical of government and worried by federal haste and exploding debt.

People who are center-right do well when a Democratic president is raising fears and anxieties.
It also reminded us that there are more independents than Democrats or Republicans, and that these independents have been shifting slightly rightward over the past year. They are more skeptical of government than they were when Barack Obama took office. They are more hostile to unions and other interest groups. They are more opposed to greater regulation.

The election reminded us that 2008 has not turned into a realignment. The country is still a bell curve. Moderate Republicans that run calm campaigns can do well, even in Democratic areas like northern Virginia and New Jersey.

It reminded us most satisfyingly that reckless “tea-bag” conservatives, fueled by Sarah Palin types, cannot easily win, even in conservative parts of the country, like upstate New York. Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty made a horrible decision in throwing himself in with that lot by endorsing the Conservative candidate in that House race.

All in all, politics is not brain science. The country is center-right. People who are center-right do well when a Democratic president is raising all sorts of fears and anxieties.

Gail Collins: David, you look at the results from Tuesday and deduce that they show Americans are, in general, thoughtful folks who are concerned for their fellow men but suspicious of big government and a bit right of center. In short, you look at the country and see many variations on you.

I would be extremely happy if I thought that the Republican Party would be fielding a large number of David Brookses in different shapes and sizes and genders. So would most American women since as voters they hate nothing more than guys who yell a lot.

New Jersey is a mess, the Republican Party in New York is a mess and the Democrats in Virginia picked a terrible candidate.
The tea-party folks have more yelling guys than any group of Americans this side of professional football fans. You are heartened by their defeat in that upstate Congressional race. Did you know that the last time a Democrat won up there, Ulysses Grant was president? (Have you noticed how many loser presidents we elected before and after Abraham Lincoln? I like to contemplate that every once in a while when I begin to get gloomy about the current state of the electorate. We might have gone for George W. Bush twice, but when it comes to failing upward, even W. can’t hold a candle to Franklin Pierce.)

I digress. While the loonies did not manage to win the actual race, they still feel totally empowered by their ability to destroy a moderate non-yelling Republican woman with a Conservative candidate whose defects included the fact that he did not live in the district and seemed to lack an ability to blink.

They will be back, and their craziness will turn the Democrats crazy, too. While Democrats would not like to lose to a bunch of David Brooks clones, they are totally terrified of letting Congress fall into the hands of a mass of Michele Bachmanns. I can’t totally blame them for feeling that they have the right to do anything, no matter how duplicitous, to fend off that terrible fate.

So the 2010 campaigns are not going to make you happy, and I want you to bask in the glow while you can.

David Brooks: Have I mentioned that I love elections?

After reading this op-ed article, I found it very interesting how the authors’ because there are two, ask each other questions to give us their point of view. It is another creative way to write an op-ed article.

Even though it was an op-ed article it was also a bit informative. It gave the reader information of what happened in the elections and who won, recently.

I was really surprised about how many states, who were always either republican or democrat, have now switched sides. How can we interpret this, are they trying to send us a message? Why this drastic change? For example how it happened in New Jersey. Is there something hidden behind these elections?

As Gail Collins says, “ you look at the results from Tuesday and deduce that they show Americans are, in general, thoughtful folks who are concerned for their fellow men but suspicious of big government and a bit right of center.” Is this a protest against president Obama? From my view point I believe he hasn’t been as successful as how everyone thought he would be, and many Americans are mad, they are waiting for these promises to be made, yet they continue waiting. As stated by David Brooks, “All in all, politics is not brain science. The country is center-right. People who are center-right do well when a Democratic president is raising all sorts of fears and anxieties.” Americans will do something about it if Obama doesn’t get his act together. Americans are so concerned many will even sacrifice their vote, in order to get themselves heard. Obama has had plenty of time, what really is going on? Can he not handle being the president of the United States of America, many ask themselves.

The Woman Warrior

2009-11-04T20:02:00.000-08:00

“Vegetables burst out and mixed in acrid torrents.”
Acrid: Unpleasantly sharp, pungent, or bitter to the taste or smell.

“Whenever we did frivolous things, we used up energy; we flew kites.”
Frivolous: not serious in content or attitude or behavior;

“Could such people engender a prodigal aunt?”
Prodigal: a recklessly extravagant consumer

“She stood tractably beside the best rooster.”
Tractably: Easily managed or controlled.

“The fear did not stop but permeated everywhere.”
Permeated: To spread or flow throughout.

"Sinatra With A Cold Is Picasso Without Paint"

2009-11-04T03:15:00.000-08:00

This I found this feature article,http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ1003-OCT_SINATRA_rev_#ixzz0Vt9ZMLMl very well written. It amazed me how the author uses very simple events and makes them in a fascinating story. He used specific details and events of Frank Sinatra at the time. This article was written more than 30 years ago (1966), yet it still is read by many. I think this is because the structure the author uses telling what happened. You can hear the same story a million times, but what makes one different from the other is by how it is told. He uses one main tool: vividness.

This article not only gained worldwide recognition, but also created a new way to journalism, “New Journalism -- a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction.” Instead of restating the big highlights of Frank Sinatra’s life, which most of us are familiar with and wouldn’t bother reading. He took something as simple as Frank Sinatra’s cold and developed it into, “one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published.”

In the part where frank is having a conversation with Vincenzo , “Sinatra was silent for a moment, then said, "Yes, but it's very good for her to get her education first, Vicenzo." Shows he is a well rounded man, even though he lives for his music and lives of his music he believes that education comes first no matter what. Education is essential to life. It is pieces as simple as a conversation like this, which build Frank for us.

The author portrays Frank as more than just his songs. His songs have a meaning and were inspired by some outsource in his life. The author analyzes Frank’s life more than just a famous singer. My question is how can this journalist tell Frank Sinatra’s life through something as simple as a cold?

2009-11-04T02:54:00.000-08:00

A Language of Smiles
Say “eeee.” Say it again. Go on: “eeee.”

Maybe I’m easy to please, but doing this a few times makes me giggle. “Eeee.”

Actually, I suspect it’s not just me. Saying “eeee” pulls up the corners of the mouth and makes you start to smile. That’s why we say “cheese” to the camera, not “choose” or “chose.” And, I think, it’s why I don’t get the giggles from “aaaa” or “oooo.”

The mere act of smiling is often enough to lift your mood; conversely, the act of frowning can lower it; scowling can make you feel fed up. In other words, the gestures you make with your face can — at least to some extent — influence your emotional state.

(The notion that facial expressions affect mood isn’t new. Edgar Allan Poe used it in his story “The Purloined Letter”: one character reports that when he wishes to know someone’s mind, he attempts to compose his face to mimic the expression of that someone — then waits to see which emotions arise. And the idea was developed, in different ways, by both Charles Darwin and William James. But telling stories and developing arguments is one thing. Showing, experimentally, that making a face can make a mood is harder; it’s only in the past 30 years or so that data have started to accumulate.)

Exactly how frowns and smiles influence mood is a matter of debate. One possibility is classical conditioning. Just as Ivan Pavlov conditioned a dog to associate the sound of a bell with the expectation of food, the argument goes, so humans quickly come to associate smiling with feeling happy. Once the association has been established, smiling is, by itself, enough to generate happy feelings. Another possibility is that different facial gestures have intrinsic properties that make them more or less pleasant, perhaps by altering the way that blood flows to the brain.

But here’s what interests me. As anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language will know, different languages make you move your face in different ways. For instance, some languages contain many sounds that are forward in the mouth; others take place more in the throat. What’s more, the effects that different languages have on the movements of the face are substantial. Babies can tell the difference among languages based on the speaker’s mouth movements alone. So can computers.

Which made me wonder: do some languages contain an intrinsic bias towards pulling happy faces? In other words, do some languages predispose — in a subtle way — their speakers to be merrier than the speakers of other languages?

As far as I can tell, no one has looked at this. (It doesn’t mean no one has; it just means I haven’t been able to find it.) But I did find a smidgen of evidence to suggest the idea’s not crazy. A set of experiments investigating the effects of facial movements on mood used different vowel sounds as a stealthy way to get people to pull different faces. (The idea was to avoid people realizing they were being made to scowl or smile.) The results showed that if you read aloud a passage full of vowels that make you scowl — the German vowel sound ü, for example — you’re likely to find yourself in a worse mood than if you read a story similar in content but without any instances of ü. Similarly, saying ü over and over again generates more feelings of ill will than repeating a or o.

Of course, facial gestures aren’t the whole story of emotions; moreover, languages can potentially influence emotions in many other ways. Different languages have different music — sounds and rhythms — that could also have an emotional impact. The meanings of words may influence moods more than the gestures used to make them. And just as the words a language uses to describe colors affects how speakers of that language perceive those colors, different languages might allow speakers to process particular emotions differently; this, in turn, could feed into a culture, perhaps contributing to a general tendency towards gloom or laughter.

Separating these various factors will be difficult, and the overall impact on mood through the facial gestures of a language may well be small, if indeed it exists at all. Nevertheless, I’d love to know whether some languages, by the contortions they give the mouth, really do have an impact on their speakers’ happiness. If it turns out that there is a language of smiles, I’d like to learn it. In the meantime: have a giggle with “meeeeeee.”

I found this article very interactive, the author created a way so you not only read it, but put yourself in their shoes to better understand his point, “do some languages contain an intrinsic bias towards pulling happy faces? In other words, do some languages predispose — in a subtle way — their speakers to be merrier than the speakers of other languages?” I had never thought about this, yet as he begins his article she says, “Say “eeee.” Say it again. Go on: “eeee.” I automatically did it, and made the connection that by saying “eee” unconsciously you were smiling.
She mainly talks about how, “the gestures you make with your face can — at least to some extent — influence your emotional state.” Since humans in all over the world smile in the same language as they say. We have ever since linked a smile with happiness, it’s a universal symbol.

The author argues that since the different languages, have different vowels and pronunciation, which makes us smile, frown or scowl therefore being part of creating our mood.

Yet, mood has so many factors that it hasn’t been scientifically proven. I find this idea very interesting and valid. Hopefully it can be proven, I would love to know if this really happens! I love how I think so similarly to the author, “I’d love to know whether some languages, by the contortions they give the mouth, really do have an impact on their speakers’ happiness. If it turns out that there is a language of smiles, I’d like to learn it.” I love smiling!

Death

2009-11-04T02:35:00.000-08:00

November 2, 2009, 8:25 pm

Happy Ending
By Todd May
In the spring of 2004 I took a flight from my home near Greenville, S.C., to New York to visit my dying step-grandmother. We had been close, and it would be one of the last times I would get to see her. As the flight was about to land, it abruptly ascended and headed toward the Empire State Building. The passengers on the plane became quiet; the aura of 9/11 was hanging in the air.

We flew over the Empire State Building (but too close to the antenna for my comfort) and circled back to La Guardia. As it turned out, a small commuter plane had decided to land without taking account of our aircraft, so the pilot had had to make a quick move. But in those moments when it seemed I was aboard another human missile, I revisited my life. I realized, almost to my surprise, that I would not have traded it in for another life. There had been disappointments, to be sure, but my life appeared to me to have been a meaningful one, a life I did not regret. This is not to say that I was not nearly paralyzed with fear. I was. At the same time, strangely, my life appeared to me as worth having lived.

There are two lessons here. The first, and most obvious one, is that death is terrifying. Here in the United States, we have the technology to defer death, so we often pretend it will never really happen to us. There is always another procedure, always a cure in sight if not in hand. But in our sober moments we recognize that we will indeed die, and that we have precious little control over when it will happen.

The harm of death goes to the heart of who we are as human beings. We are, in essence, forward-looking creatures. We create our lives prospectively. We build relationships, careers, and projects that are not solely of the moment but that have a future in our vision of them. One of the reasons Eastern philosophies have developed techniques to train us to be in the moment is that that is not our natural state. We are pulled toward the future, and see the meaning of what we do now in its light.

Death extinguishes that light. And because we know that we will die, and yet we don’t know when, the darkness that is ultimately ahead of each of us is with us at every moment. There is, we might say, a tunnel at the end of this light. And since we are creatures of the future, the darkness of death offends us in our very being. We may come to terms with it when we grow old, but unless our lives have become a burden to us coming to terms is the best we can hope for.

The second, less obvious lesson of this moment of facing death is that in order for our lives to have a shape, in order that they not become formless, we need to die. This will strike some as counterintuitive, even a little ridiculous. But in order to recognize its truth, we should reflect a bit on what immortality might mean.

Immortality lasts a long time. It is not for nothing that in his story “The Immortal” Jorge Luis Borges pictures the immortal characters as unconcerned with their lives or their surroundings. Once you’ve followed your passion — playing the saxophone, loving men or women, traveling, writing poetry — for, say, 10,000 years, it will likely begin to lose its grip. There may be more to say or to do than anyone can ever accomplish. But each of us develops particular interests, engages in particular pursuits. When we have been at them long enough, we are likely to find ourselves just filling time. In the case of immortality, an inexhaustible period of time.

And when there is always time for everything, there is no urgency for anything. It may well be that life is not long enough. But it is equally true that a life without limits would lose the beauty of its moments. It would become boring, but more deeply it would become shapeless. Just one damn thing after another.

This is the paradox death imposes upon us: it grants us the possibility of a meaningful life even as it takes it away. It gives us the promise of each moment, even as it threatens to steal that moment, or at least reminds us that some time our moments will be gone. It allows each moment to insist upon itself, because there are only a limited number of them. And none of us knows how many.

I prefer to think that the paradox of death is the source not of despair but instead of the limited hope that is allotted to us as human beings. We cannot live forever, to be sure, but neither would we want to. We ought not to mind the fact that we will die, although we really would rather that it not be today. Probably not tomorrow either. But it is precisely because we cannot control when we will die, and know only that we will, that we can look upon our lives with the seriousness they merit. Death takes away from us no more than it has conferred: lives whose significance lies in the fact they are not always with us.

Our happiness lies in being able to inhabit that fact.

Todd May is a professor of philosophy at Clemson University. He is the author 10 books, including “The Philosophy of Foucault” and “Death.”

This essay is the last in the 2009 incarnation of Happy Days. The editors would like to thank the diverse group of contributors and the readers of Happy Days for their many thoughtful, incisive, funny and often moving comments. We hope to resume the project in the future.

This article talks about death. This is a topic which really freaks me out. I try not to think about it, for as stated in the article, “There is always another procedure, always a cure in sight if not in hand.” Many of us suppress this thought by thinking this isn’t going to happen to me, but the truth of the matter is you can die in a matter of seconds. This uncertainty of not knowing when you are going to die is what scares me mostly. I often ask myself, if I die today will I ever see my mom or my dad again? What if the last thing I told a person I love, was not nice? What if they died now and that was the last thing I told them?

Death is a reality someday we all need to face because as said in the article, “It may well be that life is not long enough. But it is equally true that a life without limits would lose the beauty of its moments.” If we knew we weren’t going to die, we wouldn’t do many things. Death is an inspiration in our daily lives. If we had no time limit of being on this earth, we would have enough time to do everything over and over again.

The author ends his article by saying “It gives us the promise of each moment, even as it threatens to steal that moment, or at least reminds us that some time our moments will be gone. It allows each moment to insist upon itself, because there are only a limited number of them. And none of us knows how many.” This is what really scares us, he couldn’t have said it in any other way. I thought I was the only one who felt this way, apparently not.

Even though death is terrifying, this article approaches dying in a positive way. It talks about the cruel reality of dying but gives reasons why we need to die. I found the author had a very interesting angle, while talking about death.

A Child-Birth Book Review

2009-10-28T18:30:00.000-07:00

Beth Harrington
features
Child Birthing and the Parental Experience
As someone whose reaction to the idea of having a child is a tepid "maybe I could adopt or become a foster parent -- that way if they turn out bad I can blame it on the biological parents," I approach literature on childbirth and maternity with a blend of skepticism and curiosity. I am eager to find my choice not to reproduce vindicated and yet wonder what it might mean to be converted. Truth be told, consciously choosing not to have a child can leave one feeling excluded, like an outlaw even in contemporary society. How do you get your boyfriend to propose if you can’t use your biological clock as an excuse? What to say to those nagging relatives? Such was the mindset that informed me as I began reading Labor Pains and Birth Stories: Essays on Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Becoming a Parent, an anthology of stories written mostly by moms, but including a few dads, about the process of giving birth. According to editor Jessica Powers, it is the first anthology of its type, which is rather surprising given the prevalence of birth and parenting literature. What transpires is a journey that aims to invite the reader into one of the most crucial experiences of human life, yet at its conclusion leaves the disbelieving reader with more questions and reservations than answers about the passage to parenthood.

In terms of its structure, the book contains twenty-nine stories, plus a brief introduction and conclusion, at a mere two hundred twenty-eight pages long. Thus, these personal accounts average less than eight pages per story. Length does not necessarily correlate with quality and some of the shortest pieces in this collection are striking, while some of the longer pieces seem unfocused. They simply tell the story of a pregnancy and birth and lack a specific perspective or argument needed to distinguish themselves. Reading this collection is oddly similar to the experience of working as staff on a maternity ward. The reader is taken along for birth after birth yet the stories usually end when the infant is taken home from the hospital.

In relation to content, first and foremost, it becomes clear that the contributors to Labor Pains and Birth Stories are a fairly homogeneous group. They are middleclass and in stable relationships; for the most part, their pregnancies appear to be expected (according to the American Pregnancy Association nearly half of all pregnancies are unplanned*). Granted, there is one story written by a single mother who is expecting her second child while trying to disentangle herself from an abusive relationship. Another is about a mother living in the Upper East Side struggling to support her daughter whose biracial father is reluctant to contribute to the child’s upbringing while he attempts to pursue an art career. However, descriptions of shelling out twenty thousand for medical treatments for a birth mother in the event of a possible adoption and a couple who spend the days leading up to their child’s birth strolling the beach and watching movies evidence that these authors live in relative economic comfort and privilege.

The contributors are even more drawn together by their preference for alternative, New Age birthing methods. This in itself seems indicative of their socioeconomic status. (One has to wonder how many welfare mothers have access to such diverse treatments or even the resources to gain education about them.) Deliveries are frequently presided over by midwives as opposed to obstetricians at birthing centers or even at home instead of hospitals. The mothers use guided meditation, relaxation tapes, and “hypnobirthing” to help them through labors. There is even one case in which nipple stimulation (known to release the labor-inducing hormone oxytocin) is enlisted to bring on contractions.

Mothers who do not partake of alternative medicine during labor seem to feel compelled to justify their need for modern-day medical care. In her essay, "Don’t Even Bother: The Case Against Childbirth Preparation," Kelly Cunningham-Cousineau responds with nothing but insults to women who claim that childbirth was easy for them: “You are so full of shit. I don’t like you, I don’t trust you, and my kid is not going to play with your kids, you evil, Stepford-wife pods!” She qualifies her difficult labor and reliance on an epidural by informing the reader of her typically high levels of endurance: “I skied in minus-fifteen-degree weather until my nose was frostbitten. I drank a frat boy under the table in a shot contest. I am total chick macho.” She later informs us that “some of the women I know who have had the easiest labors are the biggest wusses with anything else.” Is childbirth the female equivalent of the military service? The long and short of it all is that I am dubious that Labor Pains and Birth Stories depicts the average birth experience of the ordinary woman -- at least in an industrialized nation. What is more, if you are a mother who wants to have an epidural in the event that you go into labor before your elective Caesarean-section is performed at a teaching hospital, this is probably not the book for you.

Caesarian-sections in particular are frowned upon in this book. They are generally reserved only for extreme situations such as that of twins born to a surrogate mother twelve weeks premature and a woman with a malformed uterus. One father goes so far as to label the elective Caesarian “a distortion for the self-pampering many.” Putting aside whether major abdominal surgery can actually be qualified as a self-indulgence, his viewpoint serves as a springboard for some of the controversies that reading this book may trigger. To start with, why are so many of these women determined to give birth sans medical intervention, forsaking in particular the relief of modern-day pain medication?

Natural childbirth instructor Frederica Mathewes-Green addresses the issue in her essay "Granddaddy’s Obstetrics," coincidentally in relation to the high rate of Caesarean deliveries, saying “the female body is designed to give birth, and we all are descended from a long line of birthgiving women.” Fair enough, but we are also descended from a long line of cave dwellers and that does not stop most people, mothers or not, from appreciating the comforts of a house inlaid with bricks or a stucco apartment complex. Additionally, the women who give birth in their homes or in birthing centers staffed by midwives are fully aware that should complications arise they are a mere ambulance ride away from an emergency Caesarean section or induced labor. Such is a far cry from the African mothers referenced in "The Zooming Birth of Jett" who may give birth a dozen times and hope only to live through the experience and for their babies to survive.

There is also the question of whether infants who are the product of natural childbirths actually fare better in the long-term as children and adults than babies born under more standard conditions. If the answer is yes (and even if it is, there is always the possibility that mothers who elect such methods may be more invested in becoming parents and feel more positively about motherhood in general -- causation is not correlation as the old adage states) then the issue of childbirth practices becomes akin to the debate that surrounds abortion rights. To what extent should a mother be expected to sacrifice of her own body for the good of her unborn (or being born) child? While it seems reasonable to expect that parents will make sacrifices for their children and that for women, whose bodies produce these babies, the sacrifices may be physiological, should a woman be expected to endure any amount of discomfort to ensure the most optimal experience for her infant, even if they occur at great cost to her? Can a mother who chooses to "self-indulge" during the birthing process recoup whatever losses her decision about birth incurs with the ones that she makes after the birth? Looking at it from a different view, if an infant’s first moments do majorly impact his or her life development, then what of infant who -- for all their parents’ efforts -- is born blue with the umbilical cord around its neck and must be rushed to another room for oxygen, or premature babies who must spend weeks in neonatal care separated from their mothers? Are we to assume that these children will suffer from some degree of post-traumatic distress or interpersonal difficulty that will follow them throughout their lives?

The women in the book do not ever cite definitive scientific studies showing that birthing outside of the standard hospital-setting ultimately leads to happier, more successful children in the long run. In fact, the reasons most women give for selecting a midwife over an obstetrician have to do with their expectations that the former will give them more individual attention than the latter and focus on their needs as a whole rather than simply their pregnancy. The women who opt for homebirths, in particular, do so because it feels more comfortable for them and thus they believe newborns will benefit in turn. Given the rationale that these birthing experiences are for the benefit of the mothers who request them, is it fair for society (and the contributors of this anthology) to judge these women more favorably than a woman who utilizes the various medical technologies for her own comfort?

It would be easy to conclude an investigation of such topics with a cliché about how women should not judge other women’s choices regarding motherhood or that ultimately a woman should obey her doctor’s counsel. However, I wonder if there is something else going on in all of this meticulous planning and determination to endure that has to do with what the writers of these compositions mostly gloss over. In the era of Dr. Phil and a few decades after John Bradshaw’s books about Toxic Parents, none of these expectant mothers and fathers expresses any notable doubts or misgivings about their ability to care for and nurture a child into adulthood. Occasionally, a contributor will make reference to the knowledge that the anxiety over keeping a child safe is no less immediate after they are born. “We are not out of the woods yet,” Pierre Laroche’s wife remarks in an essay titled, incidentally, "Out of the Woods," but on the whole there is very little discussion of “becoming a parent” -- as the subtitle states -- beyond caring for the needs of an infant. At no point is there any discussion of how these families will juggle raising their children with career responsibilities -- though again, this could be a class issue on the part of the authors. None of these contributors explore grievances with their own parents in juxtaposition to how they shape their confidence in and ability to be a good mother or father. The assumption seems to be that once the baby comes out, as long as it is properly bonded with in the postpartum stages, everything will be okay.

Thus, one cannot help but wonder if the determination of these parents to craft the optimal birth plan represents a test of metaphysical proportions for them. Namely, it is a way to prove to themselves that if they are capable of making the most excruciating sacrifices for their children when they are at their most vulnerable and dependent, then they will continue to do so even as their children grow up and individuate from them. The alternative to a happy, healthy childhood for their posterity is more unbearable for parents than even the longest, most difficult labor without analgesics. Yet the skeptic in me still finds myself wondering if these parents are not focusing too much of their attention on the wrong moments. Whatever experiential gifts these parents have the capacity to give their children at birth represent only the beginning of their life stories.

After reading this book review, I found it very interesting to find a book review about child birth because it’s a topic that interests me. Even though I am only seventeen and I don’t plan to have kids until I’m about twenty seven or older, once I have my life settled down, I am scared of giving birth. All the pain and complications a mother has to go through really freak me out. I love kids and want to have at least two when I grow up, but I just wish I could skip the giving birth scene. I may sound like a coward by saying this but really it scares me. Maybe as I grow up and learn about it by reading books like this one, which gives advice and answer many questions, I can look at giving birth from another perspective, “Labor Pains and Birth Stories: Essays on Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Becoming a Parent, an anthology of stories written mostly by moms, but including a few dads, about the process of giving birth.” I often do ask myself is it easier to be a man or a women? “Is childbirth the female equivalent of the military service?”

I didn’t like the fact that, “Caesarian-sections in particular are frowned upon in this book.” I was born through caesarian section. It wasn’t because I had to but my mom chose to. As the book says the mother should sacrifice, “Namely, it is a way to prove to themselves that if they are capable of making the most excruciating sacrifices for their children when they are at their most vulnerable and dependent, then they will continue to do so even as their children grow up and individuate from them.” I find this statement incorrect, for having a child through natural birth is not a sacrifice it is just complicating yourself and putting your child at risk when you don’t have to. My mom had her first child through natural birth and her arm got stuck coming out and now she can’t turn her wrist. I was born through the c-section and I came out perfectly, my mother didn’t have to go through any pain and now days she does sacrifices for me and a lot. Why put your child at risk and complicate yourself when we have the advances in technology to make everything so much easier. Choosing to suffer doesn’t show your braveness, but the ignorance of the people.
Towards the end of the book review I wasnt to pleased with the book as I started out, while reading the first paragraphs.

Slideshow Article

2009-10-28T17:47:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/10/25/travel/20091025-villa-slideshow_index.html

This feature article is based on travel. It picks a a town in Colombia, Villa de Leyva and exposes it to the public. Since it is a feature article and not and informative article it doesn’t use the inverted pyrymid, for all the information is as important. There is no highlight or important point. I find the organization in this article scattered around, there is no specific order. There is an opening statement but no ending statement, “A carriage takes tourists across the plaza of Villa de Leyva.” I think the author should end with a stronger statement, that concludes the article.

This article is very creative. I like the way the author uses the slides with pictures and some text. It really caught my attention and I found it less boring , than regular articles. Eventhough it was entertaining, I felt the author didn’t get his point across. First of all what was his purpose? He talked about Villa de Leyva and things that you can do and go on in that town, but what does he want us to do with this information? I feel like the author throws out information, without connecting it or explaining it. After reading the article I was like and so what?

The idea of the pictures and slideshow is great, but I feel he has to further develop his ideas. If he wants to talk about colonial Colombia then be more specific and give more information so the reader can infer his point.

Editing Blog-Passive To Active

2009-10-28T11:52:00.000-07:00

Reading my blog I found some examples of passive voice.
Examples:
1. The author began off by talking about public Libraries and their importance, then he introduced the La Loma Library which is the one who was robbed.

Active: The author begins by talking about public Libraries and their importance, next he introduces the La Loma Library, the Library who is now suffering from the robbery.

2. As you watch it, you think the helmets and pads are enough protection but they aren’t.

Active: While watching football, one thinks that helmets and pads are enough protection, but they aren’t.

3. It continues with text from another blog thanking all the people who supported the victims.

Active: It continues with text from another blog, that thanks all the people who support the victims.

4. Those who committed the crime are plain stupid.

Active: Committing this crime takes someone plain stupid.

Passive Voice Exercises

2009-10-28T11:38:00.000-07:00

1. - Fill the blanks with the appropriate form f the verb
Example:
Swedish __________ in Sweden
(Speak)
Swedish is spoken in Sweden
• A coat was left in this classroom day before yesterday
(Leave)
• More than 2000 certificates ___were given_____ by the school last December
(Give)
• The house we used to live in ___was bought______ by our aunt last month.
(Buy)
• America _was discovered__________ by Christopher Columbus in 1492
(Discover)
• The southern Plaza Hotel ___is owned_____ by the same family since 1950
(Own)
• Several people at my office _were fired_______ since I started working here
(Fire)
• Most of Mr. Morgan’s best books __were translated_______ into Spanish.
(Translate)
• A lot of old buildings in the city ____are torn down_____ these days, aren’t they?
(Tear down)
• Mail ______is delivered_____ tomorrow, will it?
(Deliver)
• Most letters ____are typed_____ these days.
(Type)

No Word Other Than Evil To Explain This...

2009-10-27T18:55:00.000-07:00

Colombia: Solidarity With Hiperbarrio After Library Robbery
Saturday, October 24th, 2009 @ 18:54 UTC
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After a robbery of the La Loma Library in Medellín, Colombia, the home of the Hiperbarrio citizen media project, an outpouring of support and solidarity was sent from around the world.
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Français: Colombie: solidarité avec Hiperbarrio après le cambriolage de la bibliothèque
Español: Solidaridad con Hiperbarrio tras el hurto en la biblioteca

Historically, libraries have been characterized as spaces for the free access to knowledge in the fields of literature, art, and culture, as well as becoming gathering places for the community. In this spirit, two years ago the Public Pilot Library of Medellín, Colombia at the La Loma site welcomed the participants of Hiperbarrio [es], one of the initial Rising Voices projects, where citizen journalism workshops have been taking place.

Photo of La Loma Library by Convergentes and used with permission. Click on photo to see a larger version of photo.

It is noteworthy that this library was created more than 50 years ago, as an initiative of the residents of La Loma, and throughout its service to the community it has offered classes in literature, painting, and music. The importance of its social role was described by Rezwan at the Rising Voices blog, who notes that that librarian's responsibility goes beyond the simple lending of books.

It is with those reasons that there were united voices of indignation surrounding the events that took place on October 13, which is described by @blueandtanit:

Ladrones robaron el equipo administrativo con información de La Loma, caja menor y El nica de Hiperbarrio en un asalto a la bpp de La Loma.

Thieves stole the administrative equipment with information of the La Loma library, petty cash, and the Nica (prize) during a robbery of the bpp (public library) of La Loma.
The director of Hiperbarrio, Álvaro Ramírez described his reaction upon hearing the news. He writes about the consequences of the robbery in his blog Ojo al Texto [es]:

Estoy un poco aturdido. Me concentro y trato de visualizar la modesta y hermosa Biblioteca de La Loma, sus estantes, las mesas y las sillas donde niños y grandes se sientan a diario a leer, a consultar libros, y a conversar.

Alcanzo a imaginar los computadores apagados y en la noche. Un par de intrusos llegan y logran penetrar por el techo. Entran con linternas y comienzan a sacar cosas

(…)

A la mañana siguiente llegan Gabriel Jaime y los otros empleados y encuentran el desastre. Un robo consumado. Un asalto a la comunidad de La Loma y un golpe duro para la Biblioteca Pública Piloto que ha venido dotando, con gran voluntad y paciencia a la filial más antigua de su extendida red de bibliotecas públicas: es decir gratuitas y abiertas para que todos podamos acceder a sus servicios.

(…)

Pienso en el daño que eso representa. En las personas que se van a perjudicar por no poder acceder gratis a los computadores.

I am a bit stunned. I concentrate and try to visualize the modest and beautiful La Loma Library, its shelves, the tables and chairs where children and adults sit to read on a daily basis, to read books, and to talk.

I am able to imagine the computers turned off at night. A couple of intruders arrive and are able to enter through the roof. They enter with flashlights and start to take things.

(…)

The next morning, (the library's coordinator) Gabriel Jaime and other employees arrive and find the disaster. A completed robbery. An assault on the community of La Loma and a hard blow for the Public Pilot Library, which has been providing, with a strong will and patience to the oldest branch in the extended network of public libraries: free and open services so that everyone can access its services.

(…)

I think about the damage that this represents. In the people that will be hurt and will not be able to have free access to computers.

Photo of La Loma library by blueandtanit and used under a Creative Commons license. Click on photo to see a larger version of the photo.

News of the robbery soon spread throughout different online networks, and the community also received notes from those who expressed their solidarity during the incident, showing that there is a strong network across the internet. For example, from Chile, Enzo Abbagliati sent a message of support on his blog Cadaunadas [es] after reading the post written by Ramírez:

Cadaunadas varias veces ha sido espacio para la alegría que desde una barriada de Medellín hemos recibido cotidianamente quienes creemos en las bibliotecas públicas como espacio de equidad y construcción de sociedades más democráticas. Reproduzco ahora una triste nota publicada por Álvaro Ramírez en ConVerGentes, quien desde el aturdimiento inicial nos avisa que han robado en la Biblioteca de La Loma. En Chile, en nuestras bibliotecas públicas, a veces sufrimos la misma suerte, la misma frustrante suerte.

¡Animo, amigos de La Loma! Sé que la comunidad estará con ustedes.

On many occasions, (the blog) Cadaunadas has been a space for daily joy received from a neighborhood in Medellín for those of us who believe in public libraries as a place for equality and the building of more democratic societies. I am now republishing the sad news written by Álvaro Ramírez from ConVerGentes, who tells us of the stunning news about the robbery of the La Loma Library. In Chile, our public libraries sometimes suffers the same luck, the same frustrating luck.

Cheer up, friends from La Loma! Know that the community stands with you.

Locally, the Colombian digital magazine Equinoxio [es] became one of the first sites to publish news about the acts of vandalism and wrote about the efforts to investigate the crime:

El director de la biblioteca se reunió con las autoridades y con efectivos de la Policía Nacional a fin de coordinar esfuerzos para recuperar los bienes que se llevaron los asaltantes y capturar a los responsables.

The library's director met with authorities and officers from the National Police to coordinate efforts to recuperate the items taken by the burglars and to capture those responsible.

Fortunately, the Golden Nicca prize was recovered, as it was found nearby, but the other objects remain missing. A member of Hiperbarrio, Catalina Urquijo of the blog $ujetate (Unknown II) [es] thanked those who sent messages through the different social networking sites:

Ofrecemos nuestros más sinceros agradecimientos a todos aquellos que nos acompañaron por diversos sitios de la red dándonos su apoyo tanto cuando creímos que nos habían robado el nica como ahora.

We would like to offer our most sincere gratitude to all those who have accompanied us through various online sites giving us their support, especially when we thought that they had stolen the Nicca (prize).
Finally, Libary Coordinator Gabriel Vanegas of the blog Esas Voces que Nos Llegan [es] summarizes the shock in which, as a public employee, he had to find out about the incident:

Duele ver la ignorancia de quienes perpetúan este delito contra el patrimonio de la comunidad, pero preocupa pensar en quienes dieron la orden de hacerlo y quienes sabiendo y viendo que se hacia no procedieron de manera correcta y oportuna ante las autoridades.

It hurts to see the ignorance from those that committed this crime against the community's patrimony, and it also is worrisome to think about those who gave the order to do it and those who knew about it, who did not do the right thing and go to the authorities.

I found this Feature Article very interesting and creative. It uses many references and quoted information from many sources. The author began off by talking about public Libraries and their importance, then he introduced the La Loma Library which is the one who was robbed. Instead of retelling what happened he used an outside source to quote what had happened, “Thieves stole the administrative equipment with information of the La Loma library, petty cash, and the Nica (prize) during a robbery of the bpp (public library) of La Loma.” Then he uses Alvaro Ramirez to talk about the consequences of this robbery and how the users where going to suffer. The author continues even exposing information written from Chile, “Cheer up, friends from La Loma! Know that the community stands with you.” This is from a blog who wants to cheer the La Loma community. Then he cites the magazine Equinox, which wrote on article about this event in their magazine. It continues with text from another blog thanking all the people who supported the victims. Finally the author ends his article with the opinion of a public employee who was really hurt by this, “It hurts to see the ignorance from those that committed this crime against the community's patrimony, and it also is worrisome to think about those who gave the order to do it and those who knew about it, who did not do the right thing and go to the authorities.”

I couldn’t agree more with this employer. Those who committed the crime are plain stupid. Why would they rob a place where people are educated and helped out, so they can succeed. My only thought I have is evilness because those thief’s if they wanted could have gotten so much resources to improve their education and succeed. Those who knew about it and did nothing, will be paying for the consequences because now there are not enough supplies for them to take advantage of. They were robbed the tools to succeed and the one who knew didn’t fight for them, they just gave to the thief’s in their hands. How can someone be so wicked to do such act?

"Every play: collision, collision, collision"

2009-10-27T18:31:00.000-07:00

One evening in August, Kyle Turley was at a bar in Nashville with his wife and some friends. It was one of the countless little places in the city that play live music. He’d ordered a beer, but was just sipping it, because he was driving home. He had eaten an hour and a half earlier. Suddenly, he felt a sensation of heat. He was light-headed, and began to sweat. He had been having episodes like that with increasing frequency during the past year—headaches, nausea. One month, he had vertigo every day, bouts in which he felt as if he were stuck to a wall. But this was worse. He asked his wife if he could sit on her stool for a moment. The warmup band was still playing, and he remembers saying, “I’m just going to take a nap right here until the next band comes on.” Then he was lying on the floor, and someone was standing over him. “The guy was freaking out,” Turley recalled. “He was saying, ‘Damn, man, I couldn’t find a pulse,’ and my wife said, ‘No, no. You were breathing.’ I’m, like, ‘What? What?’ ”

They picked him up. “We went out in the parking lot, and I just lost it,” Turley went on. “I started puking everywhere. I couldn’t stop. I got in the car, still puking. My wife, she was really scared, because I had never passed out like that before, and I started becoming really paranoid. I went into a panic. We get to the emergency room. I started to lose control. My limbs were shaking, and I couldn’t speak. I was conscious, but I couldn’t speak the words I wanted to say.”

Turley is six feet five. He is thirty-four years old, with a square jaw and blue eyes. For nine years, before he retired, in 2007, he was an offensive lineman in the National Football League. He knew all the stories about former football players. Mike Webster, the longtime Pittsburgh Steeler and one of the greatest players in N.F.L. history, ended his life a recluse, sleeping on the floor of the Pittsburgh Amtrak station. Another former Pittsburgh Steeler, Terry Long, drifted into chaos and killed himself four years ago by drinking antifreeze. Andre Waters, a former defensive back for the Philadelphia Eagles, sank into depression and pleaded with his girlfriend—“I need help, somebody help me”—before shooting himself in the head. There were men with aching knees and backs and hands, from all those years of playing football. But their real problem was with their heads, the one part of their body that got hit over and over again.

“Lately, I’ve tried to break it down,” Turley said. “I remember, every season, multiple occasions where I’d hit someone so hard that my eyes went cross-eyed, and they wouldn’t come uncrossed for a full series of plays. You are just out there, trying to hit the guy in the middle, because there are three of them. You don’t remember much. There are the cases where you hit a guy and you’d get into a collision where everything goes off. You’re dazed. And there are the others where you are involved in a big, long drive. You start on your own five-yard line, and drive all the way down the field—fifteen, eighteen plays in a row sometimes. Every play: collision, collision, collision. By the time you get to the other end of the field, you’re seeing spots. You feel like you are going to black out. Literally, these white explosions—boom, boom, boom—lights getting dimmer and brighter, dimmer and brighter.

from the issuecartoon banke-mail this“Then, there was the time when I got knocked unconscious. That was in St. Louis, in 2003. My wife said that I was out a minute or two on the field. But I was gone for about four hours after that. It was the last play of the third quarter. We were playing the Packers. I got hit in the back of the head. I saw it on film a little while afterward. I was running downfield, made a block on a guy. We fell to the ground. A guy was chasing the play, a little guy, a defensive back, and he jumped over me as I was coming up, and he kneed me right in the back of the head. Boom!

“They sat me down on the bench. I remember Marshall Faulk coming up and joking with me, because he knew that I was messed up. That’s what happens in the N.F.L: ‘Oooh. You got effed up. Oooh.’ The trainer came up to me and said, ‘Kyle, let’s take you to the locker room.’ I remember looking up at a clock, and there was only a minute and a half left in the game—and I had no idea that much time had elapsed. I showered and took all my gear off. I was sitting at my locker. I don’t remember anything. When I came back, after being hospitalized, the guys were joking with me because Georgia Frontiere”—then the team’s owner—“came in the locker room, and they said I was butt-ass naked and I gave her a big hug. They were dying laughing, and I was, like, ‘Are you serious? I did that?’

“They cleared me for practice that Thursday. I probably shouldn’t have. I don’t know what damage I did from that, because my head was really hurting. But when you’re coming off an injury you’re frustrated. I wanted to play the next game. I was just so mad that this happened to me that I’m overdoing it. I was just going after guys in practice. I was really trying to use my head more, because I was so frustrated, and the coaches on the sidelines are, like, ‘Yeah. We’re going to win this game. He’s going to lead the team.’ That’s football. You’re told either that you’re hurt or that you’re injured. There is no middle ground. If you are hurt, you can play. If you are injured, you can’t, and the line is whether you can walk and if you can put on a helmet and pads.”

After reading this article, I was surprised how much physical damage football can cause. As you watch it, you think the helmets and pads are enough protection but they aren’t. In this article it gives examples of football players who done crazy things like kill themselves, because they have gone crazy after hitting themselves so many times in the head blocking their opponent. Here are some examples, “Mike Webster, the longtime Pittsburgh Steeler and one of the greatest players in N.F.L. history, ended his life a recluse, sleeping on the floor of the Pittsburgh Amtrak station. Another former Pittsburgh Steeler, Terry Long, drifted into chaos and killed himself four years ago by drinking antifreeze. Andre Waters, a former defensive back for the Philadelphia Eagles, sank into depression and pleaded with his girlfriend—“I need help, somebody help me”—before shooting himself in the head.” How hard have they been hit in the head? Apparently way to hard!

What would make them do such insane act? They have literary lost their mind, “But their real problem was with their heads, the one part of their body that got hit over and over again.” What I ask myself is how can you have so much fun hurting yourself? Then knowing you are hurt want to continue playing? Toward the end of this article it talks about how greedy the coaches are. They just want to win no matter what. It seems like they have no heart. After having a serious head injury this is what happened due to the coaches desire to win, putting winning as a priority before health, “I was really trying to use my head more, because I was so frustrated, and the coaches on the sidelines are, like, ‘Yeah. We’re going to win this game. He’s going to lead the team.’ That’s football. You’re told either that you’re hurt or that you’re injured. There is no middle ground. If you are hurt, you can play. If you are injured, you can’t, and the line is whether you can walk and if you can put on a helmet and pads.”

Dream Pattern And Cathexis

2009-10-27T04:28:00.000-07:00

As I read in Chapter Five about typical dreams, my dream pattern is not that of a typical dream. Through typical dreams you can interpret somewhat of someone dream, but you always need the background information about this person in order to fully interpret the dream. Typical dreams as said by Freud , “A peculiar interest attaches to these typical dreams, because, no matter who dreams them, they presumably all derive from the same sources, so that they would seem to be particularly fitted to provide us with information as to the sources of dreams.” These typical dreams have general meanings coming from a common place, therefore making it easier to interpret the dream. My dream pattern is far more complex, if you didnt have my background information you wouldnt be able to interpret it correctly.

Lately, I have dreamed of events that I wish for to happen. Since I lived all my life with my mom and in 9th grade I came to live in another country with my dad, I usually tend to dream of my mom a lot. She has become a symbol in my dreams constantly coming up. I have dreamed of her dying but expressed no sorrow, as Freud says this is because, “This is the case in the dream of the aunt who sees the only son of her sister lying on a bier (chapter IV). The dream does not mean that she desires the death of her little nephew; as we have learned, it merely conceals the wish to see a certain beloved person again after a long separation.” Along with this I have dreamed of getting accepted into University of Miami. In my fifteen list University choices there are many who are better than University of Miami. I have Princeton and Stanford, so why am I not dreaming of getting accepted into those? I believe it all has to do with my mom. Since my mom lives in Miami, University of Miami is the only University that if I get accepted I can once again live with her. I am in my dream fulfilling my dream of living with her, due to the fact I had so many great memories with her and I truly miss her. I look forward to someday living with her again and my best option is by getting accepted to UM.

This pattern is a great example of cathexis. Cathexis is , “the libidinal energy invested in some idea or person or object) Freud thought of cathexis as a psychic analog of an electrical charge." Dreaming of events related to my mom, means most of my energy is put in to these dreams, which are wishes. These dreams help me fulfill the idea of being with my mom instead of repressing them, yet I hope one day they become reality.

Interpreting My Dream

2009-10-27T04:26:00.000-07:00

When interpreting a dream we have to take into consideration as Freud states,
“If the day has brought us two or more experiences which are worthy to evoke a dream, the dream will blend the allusion of both into a single whole: it obeys a compulsion to make them into a single whole
The source of a dream may be:
(a) A recent and psychologically significant event which is directly represented in the dream. *
(b) Several recent and significant events, which are combined by the dream in a single whole. *(2)
(c) One or more recent and significant events, which are represented in the dream-content by allusion to a contemporary but indifferent event. *(3)
(d) A subjectively significant experience (recollection, train of thought), which is constantly represented in the dream by allusion to a recent but indifferent impression. *(4)”

Recently I had a dream that I was walking to school. As I walked to guys approached me and tried to steal my money and my iphone. I entered a panic scene, but I wasn’t going to let them rob me. So I ran as fast as I could into the street and almost got hit by a car, but in my dream my point was not to get robbed. As I ran through the puddles, because it was raining I got all soaked up, I felt my feet were damp and cold. It was an uncomfortable feeling, and then I woke up.

This dream can be interpreted as, since I always walk to school and never before have I gotten robbed, I have a big fear of getting rob. Every day as I walk to school I always look around me and walk really fast. Also it has wish fulfillment in it because, since I have never gotten robbed and I don’t ever want to, running away and getting away with not getting rob is a wish fulfilled in my dream. When I woke up I realized, I had forgotten to wear socks therefore my feet were cold and I had an uncomfortable feeling. This stimulus made me dream that I was running through rain and my feet were damp and cold. This stimulus which made me feel uncomfortable was also the reason, why I woke up.

New Words

2009-10-25T20:45:00.000-07:00

“The cinerary urn is appropriate also in connection with the sensation of an increasingly salty taste, which I know will compel me to wake.”
Compel: force somebody to do something

“The manner in which the dream represents the act of quenching the thirst is manifold, and is specified in accordance with some recent recollection.”
Quenching: to suppress or calm
Manifold: Many and varied; of many kinds; multiple

“The same sort of lethargy-dream was dreamed by a young colleague of mine, who appears to share my propensity for sleep.”
Lethargy: deficient in alertness or activity, abnormal drowsiness
Propensity: tendency

“On the way back they passed a signpost which pointed to the Hameau.”
Hameau: village

The Magic In A Baby

2009-10-25T20:08:00.000-07:00

Baby Faces
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
It is the No. 1 train, late-morning rush. We are all wearing our subway masks, everything from studied fatigue to careful blankness. A well-dressed woman enters the car at 72nd Street and sits on the bench across from where I’m standing. Her mask is particularly guarded, utilitarian. A minute passes. I look down, and she’s ecstatic, puffing her cheeks, smiling riotously, squeezing her eyes shut and opening them wide. She would be gurgling and cooing if she could. There is a baby crinkling with pleasure in a stroller across the aisle.

This is the magical thing about babies on the subway. They carry the antidote to adulthood. The careful decorum we construct for ourselves — grown-up civilian riders of the underground train — simply dissolves. Very few people are immune to the power, the openness of a baby’s unconstructed glance. It stares without rudeness, smiles without solicitation, and somehow it reaches the unconstructed human that remains inside most of us. We get to step outside all the workaday rules of human contact. We get to make faces in public.

The woman got off the train at 42nd Street. As she stood up, I watched her face close like the shutting of a pocketbook. She had been googling the baby — it seems like the only right word — but she had been doing so in a private, shared eye-space, just the two of them. Never mind that we were all watching. That’s another magic in a baby’s glance. It’s so exclusive, and yet so open. You feel thoroughly regarded, utterly looked at and enclosed. In a very short time, that baby would begin finding the constraints, the natural shuttering, that mean growing up. But that morning, it was that woman’s job to keep the lines of communication open.

I caught her glance while she was making baby faces. It was unintentional. It caught me smack in the head, as if I were the baby. I almost made a baby face back at her. And what if I had? What if it had spread down the car, all the adults making baby faces at one another? I think about that whenever I take the subway now, inwardly, behind my 1-train mask.

I found this article ver fascinating. The author analyzes something as simple as a baby in a subway. He points out facts we don’t take the time to look at. For example he explains the contrast between a baby and an ordinary adult riding the subway. He starts of by saying, “This is the magical thing about babies on the subway. They carry the antidote to adulthood. The careful decorum we construct for ourselves — grown-up civilian riders of the underground train — simply dissolves.” A baby transforms us and makes us loose sens of reality. WE do things we wouldn’t do if it wasn’t for that baby, “I look down, and she’s ecstatic, puffing her cheeks, smiling riotously, squeezing her eyes shut and opening them wide. She would be gurgling and cooing if she could.” Here he describes the moms actions toward the baby, just because it is a baby it is acceptable but what if it weren’t, would she be socially allowed to behave that way? A baby justifies many behaviors, which would seem ridiculous if there was no baby on the scene. We can truly be ourselves when we use a baby as an excuse. It also exposes natural behaviors many hide because of what others might think or do, “I almost made a baby face back at her. And what if I had? What if it had spread down the car, all the adults making baby faces at one another?”

The News

2009-10-25T19:51:00.000-07:00

October 25, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
In Defense of the ‘Balloon Boy’ Dad
By FRANK RICH
FOR a country desperate for good news, the now-deflated “balloon boy” spectacle would seem to be the perfect tonic. As Wolf Blitzer of CNN summed up the nation’s unrestrained joy upon learning that the imperiled boy had never been in any peril whatsoever: “All of us are so excited that little Falcon is fine.”

Then came even better news. After little Falcon revealed to Blitzer that his family “did this for the show,” we could all luxuriate in a warm bath of moral superiority. No matter what our own faults as parents, we could never top Richard Heene, who mercilessly exploited his child for fame and profit. Nor could we ever be as craven as the news media, especially cable television, which dumped a live broadcast of President Obama in New Orleans to track the supersized Jiffy Pop bag floating over Colorado.

Or such are the received lessons of this tale.

Certainly the “balloon boy” incident is a reflection of our time — much as the radio-induced “War of the Worlds” panic dramatized America’s jitters on the eve of World War II, or the national preoccupation with the now-forgotten Congressman Gary Condit signaled America’s pre-9/11 drift into escapism and complacency in the summer of 2001. But to see what “balloon boy” says about 2009, you have to look past the sentimental moral absolutes. You have to muster some sympathy for the devil of the piece, the Bad Dad. And you can’t grant blanket absolution to those in the American audience who smugly blame Heene and television exclusively for the entire embarrassing episode.

It would be lovely, for instance, to believe that cable audiences doubled in size that afternoon because they were rooting for little Falcon’s welfare. But as Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler would say on Weekend Update at “Saturday Night Live,” “Really?!?” Many of those viewers were driven by the same bloodlust that spawns rubberneckers at every highway accident: the hope of witnessing the graphic remains of a crash, not a soft landing.

It would also be nice to think that the “balloon boy” viewers were the innocent victims of a dazzling Houdini-class feat of wizardry — a “massive fraud,” as Bill O’Reilly thundered. But even slightly jaundiced onlookers might have questioned how a balloon could waft buoyantly through the skies for hours with a 6-year-old boy hidden within its contours. That so few did is an indication of how practiced we are at suspending disbelief when watching anything labeled news, whether the subject is W.M.D.’s in Iraq or celebrity gossip in Hollywood.

“They put on a very good show for us, and we bought it,” the local sheriff, Jim Alderden, said last weekend, when he alleged that “balloon boy” was a hoax. His words could stand as the epitaph for an era.

In this case, the show wasn’t even that good. But, as usual, the news media nursed it along, enlisting as sales reps for the smoke and mirrors. While the incident unfolded, most TV anchors hyped rather than questioned the aeronautical viability of a vehicle resembling the flying saucers in Ed Wood’s camp 1950s sci-fi potboiler, “Plan 9 From Outer Space.” But no sooner had the balloon been punctured than the press was caught in another flimflam. Reuters and CNBC delivered the bombshell that the United States Chamber of Commerce had abruptly reversed its intransigent opposition to climate-change legislation. The “spokesperson” source turned out to be the invention of liberal activists who had attempted to stage a prank press conference at Washington’s National Press Club.

Next to the other hoaxes and fantasies that have been abetted by the news media in recent years, both the “balloon boy” and Chamber of Commerce ruses are benign. The Colorado balloon may have led to the rerouting of flights and the wasteful deployment of law enforcement resources. But at least it didn’t lead the country into fiasco the way George W. Bush’s flyboy spectacle on an aircraft carrier helped beguile most of the Beltway press and too much of the public into believing that the mission had been accomplished in Iraq. The Chamber of Commerce stunt was a blip of a business news hoax next to the constant parade of carnival barkers who flogged empty stocks on cable during the speculative Wall Street orgies of the dot-com and housing booms.

As “balloon boy” played out, the White House opened fire on one purveyor of fictional news, Fox News, where “tea party” protests are inflated into a national rebellion rivaling the Civil War and where Glenn Beck routinely claims Obama is perpetrating a conspiracy to bring fascism to America. But the White House’s argument is diluted by the different, if less malevolently partisan, fictions that turn up on Fox’s competitors. On CNN, for instance, Lou Dobbs provided a platform for the nuts questioning Obama’s citizenship. When an ABC News correspondent insisted that Fox was “one of our sister organizations” in an exchange with the president’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, last week, he wasn’t joking.

Richard Heene is the inevitable product of this reigning culture, where “news,” “reality” television and reality itself are hopelessly scrambled and the warp-speed imperatives of cable-Internet competition allow no time for fact checking. Norman Lear, about the only prominent American to express any empathy for little Falcon’s father, vented on The Huffington Post, calling out CNN, MSNBC, Fox, NBC, ABC and CBS alike for their role in “creating a climate that mistakes entertainment for news.” This climate, he argued, “all but seduces a Richard and Mayumi Heene into believing they are — even if what they dream up to qualify is a hoax — entitled to their 15 minutes.”

None of this absolves Heene of blame for the damage he may have inflicted on the children he grotesquely used as a supporting cast in his schemes. But stupid he’s not. He knew how easy it would be to float “balloon boy” when the demarcation between truth and fiction has been obliterated.

There’s also some poignancy in his determination to grab what he and many others see as among the last accessible scraps of the American dream. As a freelance construction worker and handyman, he couldn’t find much employment in an economy where construction is frozen and homeowners are more worried about losing their homes than fixing them. Once his appetite had been whetted by two histrionic appearances on “Wife Swap,” an ABC reality program, it’s easy to see why Heene would turn his life and that of his family into a nonstop audition for more turns in the big tent of the reality media circus.

That circus is among the country’s last dependable job engines. More than a quarter of prime-time broadcast television is devoted to reality programs. And so, with only a high-school education, Heene tried to reinvent himself as a cable-ready tornado-chasing scientist. Robert Thomas, a Web entrepreneur who collaborated with Heene on a pitch to ABC for a science-based reality show, saw the “balloon boy” stunt as a sad response to his economic plight. “I think in this case the desperation was too much for Richard to bear,” Thomas said in an interview with Gawker.com. (It’s no less desperate a sign of the times that Thomas insisted on being paid for his interview.)

Heene is a direct descendant of those Americans of the Great Depression who fantasized, usually in vain, that they might find financial salvation if only they could grab a spotlight in show business. Some aspired to the “American Idol” of the day — “Major Bowes Amateur Hour,” a hugely popular weekly talent contest on network radio. Others traveled the seedy dance marathon circuit, entering 24/7 endurance contests that promised food and prize money in exchange for freak-show degradation and physical punishment. Horace McCoy’s 1935 novel memorializing this Depression milieu was aptly titled “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”

In 1939, the year that John Steinbeck published “The Grapes of Wrath,” his Depression classic about dispossessed Dust Bowl sharecroppers migrating to California’s Salinas Valley in search of work, Nathanael West published “The Day of the Locust,” about those equally destitute Americans who traveled to Hollywood hoping to land in the movies. “They have been cheated and betrayed,” West wrote. “They have slaved and saved for nothing.” He could have been describing Americans who lost their jobs, homes and 401(k)’s in our own Great Recession.

The role models for today’s desperate fame seekers are “Jon & Kate Plus 8,” not Gable and Lombard. But even if they catch a break, as Heene did on “Wife Swap,” they still may end up betrayed by a stacked system. As The Times reported in August, many reality shows are as cruel as the old dance marathons. The usual Hollywood workplace rules allowing breaks for rest or meals often don’t apply. Nor, sometimes, does the minimum wage. Let ’em eat fame.

If Heene’s balloon was empty, so were the toxic financial instruments, inflated by the thin air of unsupported debt, that cratered the economy he inhabits. The press hyped both scams, and the public eagerly bought both. But between the bogus balloon and the banks’ bubble, there’s no contest as to which did the most damage to the country. The ultimate joke is that Heene, unlike the reckless gamblers at the top of Citigroup and A.I.G., may be the one with a serious shot at ending up behind bars.

This article talks about how we believe everything we see on the news, without questioning anything. It is true many of us just believe it just because it is in CNN or Fox and so on. But have you ever stopped to think these companies have bias and not everything this say may be true. Just because they are news companies doesn’t mean they give us accurate information.

The example of the boy who the parents used to make a espactacle. This sent a hot air ballon and said their 6 year old boy was in it, “But even slightly jaundiced onlookers might have questioned how a balloon could waft buoyantly through the skies for hours with a 6-year-old boy hidden within its contours. That so few did is an indication of how practiced we are at suspending disbelief when watching anything labeled news, whether the subject is W.M.D.’s in Iraq or celebrity gossip in Hollywood.” The news basically make up the story some facts may be correct. But in order to make it interesting and attention dragging they might trow some misleading information.

As the local sheriff explained, no one stopped to ask themselves how this ballon could carry a six year old boy. “They put on a very good show for us, and we bought it,” the local sheriff, Jim Alderden, said last weekend, when he alleged that “balloon boy” was a hoax.” For the ballon to be floating with this kid inside is impossible for the weight of the boy would drag it down, but since the news said it many thought omg hes in there! “The Colorado balloon may have led to the rerouting of flights and the wasteful deployment of law enforcement resources.” Due to the lack of individualism and thinking for onesslef there were thousands of dollars wasted on this scene. The sad part is someone may have not been saved who really needed all this crew, because of all the attention this scene acquired.

Therefore instead of believing the twisted reality with it touches of fiction one must evaluate the situation for one self, not let others think for you. Not everything you hear is true,“Richard Heene is the inevitable product of this reigning culture, where “news,” “reality” television and reality itself are hopelessly scrambled and the warp-speed imperatives of cable-Internet competition allow no time for fact checking.” We have a huge misconception about the news. WE give them more credebility than they deserve.

Giving Meaning To Your Dreams: Interpreting.

2009-10-21T04:45:00.000-07:00

In Chapter Two Freud talks about interpreting dreams. When we try and interpret our own dreams, it is like trying to give the dream a meaning,“for to interpret a dream is to specify its meaning, to replace it by something which takes its position in the concatenation of our psychic activities as a link of definite importance and value.” We connect it to our daily life and try to give that dream an important role. Interpreting dreams depend on us, on how much farther we want to interpret the dream or not. As Freud states, “I could still spend much time upon it; I could draw further explanations from it, and discuss further problems which it seems to propound. I can even perceive the points from which further mental associations might be traced; but such considerations as are always involved in every dream of one's own prevent me from interpreting it farther.” Interpreting ones dream is like interpreting a quote, one chooses to go as far as he or she wants.

Once my mom had a dream that me and my sister were in a forest and that my sister got kidnapped. Two weeks later it was the trip to the Amazon, so my mom interpreted the dream as a warning that something bad was going to happen. She really didn’t want us to go, but she let us go and told us over and over again to be careful. Nothing bad happened to my sister, yet she did get home sick and cried the night we slept out in the forest. As Freud says, “they are intended as a substitute for some other thought-process, and that we have only to disclose this substitute correctly in order to discover the hidden meaning of the dream.” So what was the meaning of that dream? Was my mom’s interpretation good enough? Could she have gone farther? What was that “thought-process”?

All dreams have a meaning and we are in charge of giving them one. Dreams are very important and deserve to be looked at, “If the method of dream- interpretation here indicated is followed, it will be found that dreams do really possess a meaning, and are by no means the expression of a disintegrated cerebral activity, as the writers on the subject would have us believe.” Dreams are far more complex than as Freud says “a disintegrated cerebral activity. Dreaming is a “psychic” activity.

A Story That Truly Touched My Heart!

2009-10-20T20:03:00.000-07:00

October 13, 2009, 9:00 pm

The Distance Between
By Lee Kelley

Courtesy of Lee Kelley The author in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2006.In retrospect, my 11 months and two weeks in Ramadi, Iraq, felt stretched to their absolute fullest length across the continuum of time. Now I recall them in thousands of digital photographs or by the folded flag in a wooden case here, in my living room, some three years later. I have made major changes both personally and professionally since getting home, and it is kind of strange now to look at that person in the photos. Hard to think about what was really going on behind my own eyes, my phony smile.

Looking back, I still I cannot explain why my experience of war did not include being physically injured, or taking another human life. I also cannot explain why my year in Iraq brought the deepest anguish and loss I had experienced so far in my 35 years. Why was it so bad? Suffice it to say that halfway through my tour, I lost my mom to breast cancer and my seven-year marriage absolutely fell apart.

I didn’t allow myself to grieve or complain at the time. I had work to do, soldiers that depended on me, and I guess I was afraid to let those flood gates loose. Instead, I inventoried all of those swirling emotions, performed an internal recon and secured them in a mental footlocker to be dealt with at a later date. For the rest of my tour, the footlocker strained to hold it all in. I made it home in the summer of 2006 and the life I came home to felt utterly different than the one I had left. I was granted full custody of my two young children, and I was also promoted to captain and given a company command. I opened up the footlocker and started to rebuild.

Courtesy of Lee Kelley On vacation in Tybee Island, Ga.Because I am unwilling to leave the kids again, I ended a promising military career and created a new path for myself. Specifically, I started my own writing company, and I’ve been going strong for two years now (more about that in a later post). I won’t say it’s all been easy or that I liked having to wake the kids up at 5 a.m. for almost two years so that I could get them ready and off to day care before my morning commute, not picking them back up until after 6 p.m. And I won’t say that I enjoyed the transition back into “normal” life, working through grief, anger, frustration, resentment, loneliness and confusion while still getting used to being a single parent. I won’t say that it was easy for my kids to adjust to the divorce and all the changes associated with it. Finally, I won’t say that it was easy to leave the medical benefits and predictable paychecks of being an Army captain behind, especially in this economy.

But I will say this: In the last couple of years, so much has changed and healed. No regrets. Joy has manifested in every aspect of my life, and I have never felt more content and grateful towards life, love, parenting, and the pursuit of financial freedom. I’m not sure what I would have done without the unconditional love and support of my family and friends. That, truly, has made all the difference.

Now my days are filled with the unending complexity and welcome challenge of raising two creative, energetic, and intelligent kids who know of no other way to live than to rise each day with the subconscious desire to find the boundaries of their little worlds and lean up against them. O.K. … they find the boundaries and then jump back and forth across them whenever I’m not watching!

Not long ago a recruiter for an overseas contracting company called me. He found an old resume of mine on Monster.com and offered me $165,000 to go to Baghdad for one year as a civilian public affairs representative working alongside Army personnel. I know that my kids feel safe and protected and free to just enjoy the variety of their lives without fear of abandonment. They know I won’t leave them again. I can see it in their eyes, feel it in their hugs, and hear it in their uncontrollable laughter. I’ve been to Iraq, and for my little family once will just have to be enough. I called the recruiter back and graciously told him no thank you.

First and Fourth grade just started. I’m not going anywhere.

This op-ed really touched me. It was full of pathos. I could tell the author wrote it straight from his heart, “I know that my kids feel safe and protected and free to just enjoy the variety of their lives without fear of abandonment. They know I won’t leave them again. I can see it in their eyes, feel it in their hugs, and hear it in their uncontrollable laughter.” I can just picture this scene and it makes me smile. The tone I would say is caring. He talks about how important his kids are for him and how he wouldn’t trade anything for them, “Not long ago a recruiter for an overseas contracting company called me. He found an old resume of mine on Monster.com and offered me $165,000 to go to Baghdad for one year as a civilian public affairs representative working alongside Army personnel. I called the recruiter back and graciously told him no thank you. First and Fourth grade just started. I’m not going anywhere.” Throughout the article he shows all the love he has for his kids and what a great parent he is. He portrays himself as a responsible and great dad.

The way he narrates the story is very attention dragging. He uses tautology to emphasize all the hardships he had to overcome, “I won’t say it’s all been easy or that I liked having to wake the kids up at 5 a.m. for almost two years so that I could get them ready and off to day care before my morning commute, not picking them back up until after 6 p.m. And I won’t say that I enjoyed the transition back into “normal” life, working through grief, anger, frustration, resentment, loneliness and confusion while still getting used to being a single parent. I won’t say that it was easy for my kids to adjust to the divorce and all the changes associated with it. Finally, I won’t say that it was easy to leave the medical benefits and predictable paychecks of being an Army captain behind, especially in this economy.”

I love the way he gives such a positive optimistic mood even though he starts of talking about war and death. He then goes on saying, “But I will say this: In the last couple of years, so much has changed and healed. No regrets. Joy has manifested in every aspect of my life, and I have never felt more content and grateful towards life, love, parenting, and the pursuit of financial freedom.” He faces change as an obstacle that helped him and shaped who he is today. If I was him I wouldn’t have done a single thing differently. He set his priorities balanced them out and combined it appropriately with time. This is not an easy task to do.

Final Destination

2009-10-20T19:30:00.000-07:00

Towards the end of the book Parsell falls in love for the first time with this “boy”. His name is Paul. While reading I asked myself if Parsell became gay because of all the rape he had gone through did it really affect him?

I find it ironic how towards the end of the book he is separated from Paul because they fall in love. Why do they separate boyfriends and not gang member who sexually abuse other criminals, “You mean because we spend a lot of time together, but don’t get into trouble-that were a problem” Maybe this is where the problem comes in they don’t want to see anybody happy, for they enjoy seeing others suffering.

At the very end we can see how Parsell has been dramatically changed. He is a total different person and this experience in jail, really affected him in an optimistic way. In one of the last pages Parsell states, “I didn’t want to mess up again, like I had before.” Now he recognizes his mistake and shows he has learned from them, he doesn’t want to repeat it again. Also I was amazed when he said, “I thought about the old timers I met at Riverside, the ones who were doing life on the installment plan, and drinking paint thinner and Mountain Dew. I was not going to become one of them.” He has it clear he is much better than that, and I going to do whatever it takes to not fall into that world again.

This is a very interesting memoir at first I was bored reading it, but as I continued I realized it wasn’t the same old jail story. Parsell has a way of making it unique, by sharing every single experience he had to go through, you almost feel like you are living it. In some parts I even got goose bumps. Yet, Parsell did more than just writing this book I researched his biography and it’s quite interesting take a look…

“T.J. Parsell is a writer and human rights activist dedicated to ending sexual abuse against men, women, and children in all forms of detention. He is currently President-elect of Stop Prisoner Rape and serves as a consultant to the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission. Parsell has testified before numerous government bodies and was instrumental in passage of the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, the first ever federal legislation to address this issue. He lives in Sag Harbor, NY.”

Why Fish?

2009-10-19T20:23:00.001-07:00

Have you ever wondered why the book is called fish? Is it because he is trapped in prison like a fish in an aquarium or maybe is it because he is different from the rest? Finally I could answer this question, “You motherfuckers are going to get the floor wet, I must have looked puzzled. He means you are dripping wet, fresh out of the tank.” Here we can infer that “fish” is a synonym of a first-timer or new arrival in prison slang. This is shown through various scenes of the book, “I responded, smiling like a fish.”

It is shocking to read about all the sexual abuse going on in the prison. Specially the fish which are the easiest targets. I would have never imagined that in such a controlled, full of guards prison there can be such crimes going on. I mean crimes going on in a jail, how ironic.

As I read the book I could conclude that in prisons, the boundaries between gay and straight men disappear, they begin to see sex as a necessity. They don’t consider having sex with another man gay, but a simple need. The question is how can these sexual offenders not be prosecuted? How can such behavior be allowed? Why is it punished outside of a jail, yet permitted once in jail?

I was stunned by when they describe his first night, “four older inmates drugged Parsell and took turns raping him. When they were through, they flipped a coin to decide who would “own” him. Forced to remain silent about his rape by a convict code among inmates (one in which informers are murdered).” How can a human being watch another do this and not do anything about it? What are the guards there for? Isnt it their job to have everything under control.

Vocabulary

2009-10-19T19:32:00.000-07:00

“What did you rob?” A fotomat I said.
Fotomat: was a once widespread retail chain of photo development drive-thru kiosks located in shopping center parking lots.

“He opened the dayroom door and once more bellowed, Scandalous!”
Bellowed: a very loud utterance (like the sound of an animal)

“That boy is half a bug, and his thorazine must be running low.”
Thorazine: a drug (trade name Thorazine) derived from phenothiazine that has antipsychotic effects and is used as a sedative and tranquilizer.

“She worked the streets for me, Chet Bosted.”
Boasted: To speak of with excessive pride

“His walk was what inmates called cattin”
Cattin: short for catwalk

“Even if a cop or a shop owner shoots one of the criminals, the other guys involved are charged with murder, the rationale being that if you weren’t committing the felony, no one would have died.”
Felony: One of several grave crimes, such as murder, rape, or burglary, punishable by a more stringent sentence than that given for a misdemeanor

"Await Your Reply"

2009-10-15T19:50:00.000-07:00

October 2009
Michael Schaub
fiction
Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
“An invader arrives in your computer and begins to glean the little diatoms of your identity,” writes Dan Chaon in his new novel.

Your name, your address, and so on; the various websites you visit as you wander through the Internet, your user names and passwords, your birth date, your mother’s maiden name, favorite color, the blogs and news sites you read, the items you shop for, the credit card numbers you enter into the databases -- Which isn’t necessarily you, of course.

But maybe it is. “Identity” is a tricky word, with different connotations, different levels of meaning, but in the age of the Internet, these details -- user names, search histories, social networking profiles -- might as well be you. Maybe we give up more than we know; maybe we’re less now than we used to think we are. Maybe not. But when we talk about “identity theft,” we might be talking about more than we know. It’s hard to speak or write about how the Internet has changed art, has changed culture, the way we define identity. And when someone tries to talk about it, you should, generally speaking, run.

But there are exceptions, and one of them is this: Await Your Reply, Dan Chaon’s novel about identity in every sense of the word. It’s the first great novel about the Internet; it’s one of the best books of any kind I’ve ever read about identity on any level. It is brilliant and it is essential; it should be required reading not only for anyone who uses the Internet, but for anyone who cares about contemporary American fiction.

Chaon’s novel follows three people, all Midwesterners, all, at first, unrelated. Ryan Schuyler is a Northwestern University dropout who is terrified of failure and disappointment, and tired of himself, tired of his family. Lucy Lattimore is an Ohio teenager who just graduated high school and ran away with her former history teacher; they have fallen in love, and left Ohio behind. Miles Cheshire is a Cleveland magic store employee who’s been searching, on and off, for his missing twin brother, a brilliant schizophrenic obsessed with geodesy, symbology and cartography. Schuyler and Lattimore are running away; Cheshire is running toward something he knows he might never find.

All of them become embroiled in issues of identity. Schuyler goes to work with his biological father, an identity thief in rural Michigan. Lattimore’s lover is engaged in a vague moneymaking scheme that she knows little about, but suspects it involves fraud. Schuyler goes to Canada to try to find his brother, who has changed his name and his appearance a number of times, sometimes even using his brother’s identity.

Await Your Reply starts off with incredible tension -- the first pages describe Schuyler being driven to a hospital, his severed hand on ice in a cooler -- and it increases from there. There are close calls, bad omens, frightening encounters with strangers, suspicious instant messages. But for all the suspense, the characters in this novel -- lovingly, accurately, realistically rendered -- are at the forefront. This is a suspense novel in the same sense that Lolita is a romance novel; it’s brilliant in the terms of the genre, but the description is insufficient to describe how breathtaking it is on its own. It’s not a book that’s easy to put down -- I finished reading it, perhaps unwisely, late at night, looking up only to suspiciously glance at the monitor of my computer, glowing ominously on my desk. When I reached the last page, I checked my bank account online. I changed the passwords on my email accounts. I burned my bank and insurance statements, and I priced paper shredders on office supply websites. It’s that kind of suspense novel. Every single part of it works.

Chaon is one of the best writers of fiction in America, and this is, by far, his best work yet. No living American author is as good at describing the Midwest and the people who call it their home -- which isn’t to say that this is a Midwestern novel, necessarily; it’s an absolutely universal work. But Chaon, a Nebraska native who now lives in Ohio, understands the landscape and the people of the American Midwest more than any author I can remember. Even when Await Your Reply takes two characters to Africa, the Midwest is still a major character; we see and consider the country through the eyes of a small-town Ohioan, and we feel for her, and we experience what she does.

Chaon also does an amazing job with writing about the Internet itself, particularly in one tense scene where a young man logging on to his computer gets an unintelligible, ominous instant message from a stranger. It’s one of the most frightening moments of the novel, though there’s no explicit threat, no danger immediately spelled out. There’s only the sense of danger, but it’s hard to imagine any other author setting the mood as effectively and perfectly as Chaon does.

As flawlessly as Chaon renders the characters in this novel, you end up with a sense of unknowing, of wondering whether you know these people at all. And that is, perhaps, the point. The epigraph of the first part of the novel comes from Anna Akhmatova:

“I myself, from the very beginning,
Seemed to myself like someone’s dream or delirium
Or a reflection in someone else’s mirror,
Without flesh, without meaning, without a name.
Already I knew the list of crimes
That I was destined to commit.”

Maybe we already know our potential for good and for evil, and maybe we are capable of seeing our own reflections, in mirrors, sure, but in other people as well. Chaon seems to suggest we might not have earned that kind of certainty about or identities. We sometimes say, when sick or confused or depressed, that we don’t feel like ourselves. The characters in this book don’t feel like themselves, or they do, but they don’t know what to do with that feeling. They don’t know who they are. Maybe none of us does.

I can’t think of very many contemporary American authors who have tackled as ambitious concepts as Chaon does in this book, and who have done so without making a single false step. The spare brilliance of Chaon’s prose, and his uncanny skill at creating unique and uniquely American characters, calls to mind writers like Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, and Mary Robison. But with this novel, Chaon has surpassed them all. Await Your Reply is a perfect novel, and it is an American masterpiece. We needed this book.

In this book review the author talks about mostly the common place of the book. The common place is internet users, having so many advances in technology most of the world uses the internet daily, “When I reached the last page, I checked my bank account online. I changed the passwords on my email accounts. I burned my bank and insurance statements, and I priced paper shredders on office supply websites.” If you are an internet user you are exposed to all this dangers, the internet is full of thieves and strangers. You can be in touch with the world, just a click away. By using this commonplace the reader might become more intrigued, because it has to deal with his daily life and could help him out. The author uses sympathy to gain readers attention.

This is a very well written book review for it is clear. It uses proper vocabulary making it easy and enjoyable to read. It uses a lot of vividness while describing sections of the book, “Chaon’s novel follows three people, all Midwesterners, all, at first, unrelated. Ryan Schuyler is a Northwestern University dropout who is terrified of failure and disappointment, and tired of himself, tired of his family. Lucy Lattimore is an Ohio teenager who just graduated high school and ran away with her former history teacher; they have fallen in love, and left Ohio behind. Miles Cheshire is a Cleveland magic store employee who’s been searching, on and off, for his missing twin brother, a brilliant schizophrenic obsessed with geodesy, symbology and cartography. Schuyler and Lattimore are running away; Cheshire is running toward something he knows he might never find.” From just reading this quote the reader can decide if they will like the book. It gives straitghout information, not hiding anything and giving the reader a taste of what the book will be like.

The Midwest is very important symbol for the author so much that the author of the book review uses personification to emphasize this significance, “Even when Await Your Reply takes two characters to Africa, the Midwest is still a major character; we see and consider the country through the eyes of a small-town Ohioan, and we feel for her, and we experience what she does.” By simply inductive logic, we can infer that the book is going to talk about all the dangers of the internet.

The author does a great job with rhetoric, making this book review reflect captivating interesting book it is. I even got the urge to read it, for I am an internet maniac and I live on the internet. I should be aware of all the dangers out there before it’s too late.

“The Art Of Defying Death”

2009-10-15T18:35:00.000-07:00

October 14, 2009, 9:25 pm

The Art of Defying Death
By Elizabeth Kadetsky
On a misty spring night in 2005, I approached my apartment, on a tony block on the Upper West Side facing the Hudson. I felt relaxed and calm. Earlier that day I had attended a yoga workshop with a guru from India, then completed a writing assignment for a health and spirituality magazine about, as it happened, instinct — or antar-jñana, inner knowledge. I opened the outer door to my vestibule, then crossed through its inner door and into my lobby, leaving my back to the entrance. I got a prickly feeling, I don’t know why. I turned. There I saw, pushing open the inner door, an ink-black, gloved hand, exaggeratedly large, controlled and deliberate. It charged toward me. It was trailed by a body, the picture of death.

It is difficult for me to render the horror of the image of that man entering my building lobby that night, so great is the disparity between its emotional charge for me now and the stereotypical, almost comical picture he presented. He was a figment from a nightmare. I guessed his height and weight at 6’3” and 230 pounds, with the physicality of a boxer. The cops later told me that was right. His clothes were dark and innocuous — clean black jeans, black sneakers, a midnight-blue hoodie — as if chosen to leave no

When I was attacked, I seemed to recall everything important I had learned in 20 years of practicing yoga.
impression whatsoever. In contrast, on his face was a neoprene thermal ski mask, the type that tents in front to create a ridge and thus evokes to most anyone who’s heard of him Darth Vader. I later discovered while searching on Google that this type of mask is favored by shoppers also enamored of vigilante-style military clothing and toy AK-47s — in other words it is meant to provoke a reaction. Of the figure’s actual face I saw only slit-shaped, yellowed eyes and a broad, acned, coal-black forehead.

This image seared in my mind, and somehow, thinking without thinking, I reminded myself to keep hold of it. Yoga’s mental training, it is said, enables the yogi to “act at once… not stopping to think.” I felt superhuman, unburdened by the back-and-forth of everyday deliberation, in possession of ekagra — single-pointed — concentration.

In a half-second, I seemed to recall everything important I had learned in 20 years of practicing yoga. I remembered the feeling of command — of flexibility and control. I remembered the words of a writer on instinct I’d cited in the article I’d just written, Malcolm Gladwell: “Take charge of the first two seconds.” And I remembered a women’s self-defense course I took in college 20 years before, and practice we’d done screaming with every bit of might in our bodies. This was a physical scream, performed with the same degree of exertion that, as it happened, we held our yoga poses.

But in truth, unfortunately, I was not so formidable as I’d have liked. The man’s weight was more than twice mine. My heightened awareness, my attuned and trained amanaskata — intellectual clarity — was sufficiently developed to give me merely the certainty that this man could, and would, kill me. Alas, I had not yet acquired those other metaphysical powers supposedly at ready call to the ancient yogi, or siddhis — to make myself minute as an atom, or bulky as an elephant, or isatva: supreme over all. I knew only, with crystalline sureness, that I had to marshal every bit of force in my body and spirit if I wished to survive.

Then, that palm became a fist, and met my face. I heard a loud crack. I was unconscious.

I came to consciousness on the ground. The man was lunging toward me with fists. None of my knowledge left me. He intended to kill me. I remembered a dream I’d had once in which I’d been in an elevator that was plunging to the ground, its cable severed. In the dream, I held my breath and clenched everywhere, and then stared, hard, at the ceiling. I willed the elevator to stop plummeting, and it did. The dream felt mystical, more like a vision — a premonition, perhaps. Now, I created the same sensation in my body as when I stopped the elevator. And I executed the scream.

What happened to me next in that lobby seemed no less numinous an experience than the single pointed mind-state described by the adepts as Samadhi. This is sometimes characterized as “pure awareness.” The thrill of it is said to be a manifestation of spiritual, mental and physical harmony — which may be why the medievals called yoga “the art of defying death.” Tennyson described Samadhi as “the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words.” I was in possession of no less miraculous a power than what stopped the elevator in that dream. The man paused, mid-punch. As if in reverse motion, he then coiled backwards, slowly, his center of gravity solid and low. Assured, with graceful footsteps, he loped back out that door, and then disappeared into the black night.

I was bloodied, my cheekbone was broken, and I was in a state of shock. Eventually the cops, and a friend, came, and I learned that an attacker by this same description had sent another woman for an extended hospital stay, with multiple broken ribs and other injuries. She’d taken longer before she screamed, they said. The cops not-so-helpfully also explained that the man was “an animal,” his motive violence. He’d been stalking women of a certain physical type.

They never caught him. I moved out from that apartment, and moved on, but suffered significant emotional trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder.

I do believe that yoga, and other things, gave me the mental clarity that saved my life in that moment. And I also believe that my training helped me survive in other ways, in the aftermath.

That night, I finally got to bed around 5 a.m., my friend bunkered on my sofa. I survived, I thought, over and over, lying in bed. But when I closed my eyes, I saw three things in succession that drove home to me how nearly I hadn’t: the ink-black hand on the door, the neoprene ski mask, and my face in the mirror bruised, cut and bloodied. I opened my eyes and watched the sky turn rosy pink. I closed them, and saw the same three images.

This pattern continued, with lessening frequency, for month upon month. They were a natural, limbic response, I learned later: flashbacks. Flashbacks, like the Samadhi described by Tennyson, exist outside the realm of language and cognition. This, say trauma therapists, explains why survivors often manifest unresolved memories of trauma in non-verbal ways — for instance as inexplicable pains in the body or through a dissociative escape reflex. Samadhi is mimicked in “moments of spiritual or material emergency,” wrote Geraldine Coster, an influential British yogi and psychotherapist, in 1944. Contemporary therapists have noted a tendency for survivors to enter that state of “pure awareness” so celebrated by the yogis during, and then repeatedly after, a trauma. This, they say, can become a bad habit. I learned this when, eventually, I did go in for counseling for P.T.S.D.

This paradox has been acknowledged elsewhere. A “survivor who used dissociation to cope with terror” may eventually learn to use a “trance capability” towards otherwise enriching ends, allows Judith Herman, a pioneer psychologist in the study of trauma, in her seminal book “Trauma and Recovery.”

Before I sought the wisdom of the professionals, though, I did jury-rig my own program for managing those flashbacks, using techniques of “mental mastery,” as it were, that I’d learned in yoga. For instance, I tried to recast the images playing in my head, sometimes imagining they were moving around physically to different parts of my brain. I also inserted into the sequence of flashbacks the image of the man’s miraculous turning and fleeing, and my mystical feeling of omnipotence in that moment.

My therapist later gave these methods a stamp of approval. Being able to re-conceive the meaning of an assault to one of empowerment versus self-blame proves a deciding factor in overcoming trauma. “You didn’t almost get yourself killed,” she said to me. “You saved your life.” Recreating a narrative also helps a survivor overcome a fragmenting of memory that is typical in trauma. “It is difficult to see more than a few fragments of the picture at one time,” writes Herman, “to retain all the pieces and to fit them together.” The sufferer struggles to reconnect disjointed visceral and rational memories of the trauma. Healing, writes Herman, “involves the active exercise of imagination and fantasy.” The psychologist Mary Harvey includes in her seven-point checklist for the resolution of trauma simply to gain “authority” over the memories.

Perhaps every survivor overcomes trauma differently, and at a different speed. My flashbacks continued. Nightmares catapulting me directly back to that horrific episode lasted for years. The dreams were often a feeling, of prickly dread, or they were more literal, about being trailed on a dark street or ambushed in an enclosed space.

I charted my recovery through the evolution of those dreams. Eventually that feeling of palpable terror subsided. Once, around the time it did, the black figure appeared as a comical-looking, blob-like character in a black body-costume; he was like one of those actors dressed as a piece of licorice in a movie trailer. I told him he could remain in my dream as long as he stayed in the background and didn’t hurt me. He agreed.

In a dream several months later, the man with the mask was sitting in my hallway waiting for me to come home, holding the mask in his hand. At first when I saw him, I was scared, but when I saw his face I also saw that he was human. He told me he was struggling with guilt over having hurt someone. I tried to imagine if I could forgive him.

The author of this article, used a dramatic tone throughout his article, “Alas, I had not yet acquired those other metaphysical powers supposedly at ready call to the ancient yogi, or siddhis — to make myself minute as an atom, or bulky as an elephant, or isatva: supreme over all. I knew only, with crystalline sureness, that I had to marshal every bit of force in my body and spirit if I wished to survive.” We can see how he uses tone, to make the story so interesting. It is a story full of suspense and emotions. As I read it I even got goose bumps, I was truly dragged in the story, and felt like if I was living it.

The author’s purpose is to tell a story about a girl who saved her own life, with the use of yoga. You may ask yourself how can yoga save someone’s life? Yet it did, “I was in possession of no less miraculous a power than what stopped the elevator in that dream. The man paused, mid-punch. As if in reverse motion, he then coiled backwards, slowly, his center of gravity solid and low. Assured, with graceful footsteps, he loped back out that door, and then disappeared into the black night.” Through her control of mental power she was her own savoir. When she talks about a dream, it was basically the same situation of saving her own life, yet in a dream. The elevator was falling straight towards the ground, for the cords loosened, and with her metal power she stopped it from falling. It sounds too magical to but true, yet there is no fiction to it, it happened to her in a dream and then in real life.

I do believe in metal power, and am aware that very few people can attain this level of superiority. I admire them for that. She used this powerful tool for something positive, which saved her own life, “You didn’t almost get yourself killed, she said to me. You saved your life.”

Who Would Have Thought...

2009-10-15T17:09:00.000-07:00

October 13, 2009, 9:30 pm

A Long, Melancholy Roar
(Being the third and final piece in a series about predators.)

On a recent evening at twilight, I was sitting on the grass in Regent’s Park — one of London’s most manicured public spaces — when I heard the fierce, melancholy sound of a lion’s roar.

I wasn’t dreaming: it was coming from the zoo. Listening to it, I began to reflect on predators — and us.

On returning home, I did some reading. I discovered that between 1990 and 2004, lions attacked 815 people in Tanzania, killing 563. Some of the victims were pulled out of bed during the night after lions forced their way inside huts. Between January 2000 and March 2004, crocodiles in Namibia attacked 35 people, killing 23. In the 34 months from January 2005 to October 2007, leopards in the Indian state of Kashmir attacked 18 people, killing 16. In the Sundarban swamps of Bangladesh, tigers killed at least 20 people last year. Dig around, and you can also find records of deaths from attacks by bears, cougars, sharks and a number of other wild beasts.

It’s hard to imagine how terrifying such a death must be. To be asleep in bed and to wake to hear a rustling sound, to see an animal leaping, to feel its breath on your face — think of the sweat, the panic, the contraction of your gut, the pounding of your heart, the gasping screams.

For many of our fellow creatures, such terrors are part of daily life: other animals exist in a world of threat that humans today rarely glimpse. These days, thankfully, we are not used to being hunted. Most of us are more likely to be struck by lightning than we are to die at the paws of a bear or the teeth of a shark. And so we spend little time in that dark, primeval place of alarm, fear, adrenaline and (perhaps) gory death. For us, death usually comes in other forms.

Riccardo Gangale/The Associated Press; Gianluigi Guercia/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images; Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times Are modern human fears misplaced?

Of our ancient enemies, microbes are now the most fearsome. Indeed, next to the figures for viruses and other infectious agents, deaths caused by predators are barely worth mentioning.

Just think: HIV/AIDS chalked up 2 million deaths across the planet in 2007 alone; tuberculosis was close behind, with more than 1,700,000. The year before, malaria escorted almost a million people to their graves. We should be far more scared of mosquitoes than we are of bears; but we’re not.

Why not? It’s hard to be sure, but my guess is that it has to do with the way our brains are wired up. Just as the moose fears the wolf and the chickadee the owl, we easily fear lions and bears because the connection between danger and the animal is clear and immediate. It is harder, I suspect, to evolve fear of a mosquito because the deadly fever it brings does not happen straight after the bite. Instead, there is a time delay of days, weeks or years. In fact, the connection between mosquito bites and malarial fever is so obscure that we weren’t sure of it until 1897. But our forebears have been making connections between predators and death for ages.

Although predators are not an important problem for most of us today, they surely were for our ancestors. Indeed, millions of years ago, fear of predators would have been one of the forces that caused our ancestors to evolve to live in groups. The seeds of our social lives were watered with blood and nurtured by the roar of the lion and the claw of the leopard.

More recently, however, it’s been the case that the mammal most likely to kill a human is: a human. Murder and war have long been more important causes of death for us than predatory wild animals.

You can see it in the landscape. In northern Romania, monasteries were fortified against marauding armies, and painted inside and out with scenes of martyrs being massacred. Further south, in Transylvania, the churches were fortified to withstand siege. In northern India, almost every town has a fort. Southern France is littered with the ruins of fortified castles and towns. In English forests, you can often find the remnants of iron-age defenses. All traces of peoples defending themselves from attack. We are our own most fearsome predator, and have been so for thousands of years.

Some other animals are also important predators of themselves. A lion has more to fear from another lion than it does from any other animal but us. Males taking over a pride routinely kill all the cubs they can find, and lions from neighboring territories sometimes kill each other. Chimpanzees kill each other at an alarming rate; and they are far more aggressive towards each other on a daily basis than we humans are.

But here’s the thing. Today, in many parts of the world, the human being most likely to cause your violent death is: you.

Yes. You are the person most likely to kill yourself violently and on purpose. Suicide rates have risen dramatically over the past 50 years. Worldwide, deaths from suicide now outnumber deaths from war and homicide together: the World Health Organization estimates that each year around one million people — predominantly men — kill themselves. The true number is probably higher, because for many countries there is no data. In some countries, suicide is now among the top ten causes of death. For the young, worldwide, it’s in the top five.

A huge effort has rightly been devoted to trying to understand the particular causes of suicide in different places — unemployment, drug addiction, relationship breakdown, intelligence, predisposing genes, what your mother ate while you were in the womb and so on.

But here’s another way to look at it. No other animal does this. Chimpanzees don’t hang themselves from trees, slit their wrists, set themselves alight, or otherwise destroy themselves. Suicide is an essentially human behavior. And it has reached unprecedented levels, especially among the young.

I’m not sure what this means. But it has made me think. We live in a way that no other animal has ever lived: our lifestyle is unprecedented in the history of the planet. Often, we like to congratulate ourselves on the cities we have built, the gadgets we can buy, the rockets we send to the moon. But perhaps we should not be so proud. Something about the way we live means that, for many of us, life comes to seem unbearable, a long, melancholy ache of despair.

This article was shocking. It gave a great amount of very interesting information. It talked about humans’ behavior and thinking. I was amazed by, “We should be far more scared of mosquitoes than we are of bears; but we’re not.” Honestly I am more afraid of a bear than a mosquito, yet as the article states that mosquito transmitted diseases are more likely to happen than a predator attack. So why are we so scared of these huge yet, not so harmful animals, “we easily fear lions and bears because the connection between danger and the animal is clear and immediate. It is harder, I suspect, to evolve fear of a mosquito because the deadly fever it brings does not happen straight after the bite.” It is funny how illogical our brain works.

Then it goes on talking about the human’s most dangerous enemy. Take a wild guess… believe it or not it is a human. “More recently, however, it’s been the case that the mammal most likely to kill a human is: a human.” Yet, even more fascinating it says that the human who is most likely to cause your violent death is: you. You would never imagine it but apparently there is something wrong with humans, because suicide rates have skies rocketed and keep increasing. Humans are supposed to be the most intelligent of all, yet No animal has ever killed himself, “Chimpanzees don’t hang themselves from trees, slit their wrists, set themselves alight, or otherwise destroy themselves. Suicide is an essentially human behavior. And it has reached unprecedented levels, especially among the young.”

There is no such thing as suicide for an animal, so why do we the “smart” creatures of earth take our own life away? The data is just unexplainable, “In some countries, suicide is now among the top ten causes of death. For the young, worldwide, it’s in the top five.” There is no justification for taking your life away, yet it is in the top causes of death. This is just plane ridiculous. The author closed his article with a very strong and true quote, which really got me thinking, “Often, we like to congratulate ourselves on the cities we have built, the gadgets we can buy, the rockets we send to the moon. But perhaps we should not be so proud. Something about the way we live means that, for many of us, life comes to seem unbearable, a long, melancholy ache of despair.” How come all animals seem to handle their problems and some of us are cowards who run away? Aren’t we supposed to be superior and brighter, yet we can’t handle everyday situations? How ironic…

Freud: Interpretations Of Dreams.

2009-10-13T19:57:00.000-07:00

For many years people have tried to understand dreams. Why do we dream? What causes dreams? What does each dream mean? Dreams are really unexplainable, “In spite of thousands of years of endeavor, little progress has been made in the scientific understanding of dreams.” It is such a broad topic that many scientist come up with different believes. As stated by Freud, “No real progress in a definite direction is as yet discernible. No real foundation of verified results has hitherto been established on which future investigators might continue to build. Every new author approaches the same problems afresh, and from the very beginning.” To make a definite conclusion is as impossible as understanding dreams.

While reading Chapter One, I became very interested in section C. It talks mainly about how dreams are caused by discomfort in our sleep. I would think nightmares are caused by a discomfort, but in general all dreams are.

As I read about dreams, it is like discussing about a religion. Everybody has different opinions and believes different things. Since dreams curiosity draggers, “Opinions differ widely in preferring this or the other factor as the cause of dreams, and in classifying them in the order of importance.”

I find it very interesting how we are sleeping, therefore the unconscious mind takes over yet, “the mind remains in constant communication with the external world.” We basically shut off everything, but are woken up by a sound or a touch. Can we be awake and asleep at the same time? How can sounds affect our dreams? For example Freud while describing dreams talks about how if you are sleeping and a door stretches, you might dream of burglars breaking in. “The argument that there is a resemblance between the dream-stimulus and the dream-content would be confirmed if, by a systematic induction of stimuli, we should succeed in producing dreams corresponding to these stimuli.”, as it was proved by Giron de Buzareingues running several experiments.

Dreams are really amazing, yet very confusing to understand. I enjoy dreaming, but wish I could understand it. In Dreams we see and experience things we wouldn’t in real life, it is an exaggerated reality, yet is it really a reality? Are dreams warnings for the futures? Is dreaming necessary? Do dreams mean something? Are the important? I just wish I could answer this questions that give me such an uncomfortable uncertainty. Are dreams our imagination just running wild?

The King of Sweden by Norman Lock

2009-10-12T20:06:00.000-07:00

October 2009
Jesse Tangen-Mills
fiction
The King of Sweden by Norman Lock
Just as short stories came with the advent of the newspaper, so comes flash fiction, with what appears to be the permanence of internet publications. As in the past, this new genre comes with its stars, among them is Norman Lock. His oeuvre includes a series of imaginary operas written in prose, as they might have been composed by eccentric American composer Joseph Cornell, a book of metaphysical calculations that in a few sentences try to capture the universe’s totality, even a minimalist rendering of the Grimm Tales, each tale condensed to just a few sentences (available for free download as an eBook).

His most recent novel, The King of Sweden, however, relies on a much simpler plot. Somewhere in the rural United States a young girl, traumatized by the death of her mother, confused with the abandonment of her father, shortly thereafter, and is sent to an insane asylum thanks to her boyfriend, Jake, who she lovingly calls the King of Sweden. The female protagonist, a rustic with a peculiar innocence, could easily fall into the Faulknerian idiot man-child mould, but doesn’t. Rather than being dumbfounded, she’s invigorated by the natural world around her. And thanks to Lock’s poetry, so are we. Snow is “peppered” in sewers. The sun is only a “nickel in the sky.” The protagonist’s breasts are little birds. Lamps “wiggle like water when the sun is standing straight in the sky.” Lock demonstrates a keenness for bringing the inanimate to life, that can be, at its best, reminiscent of Rilke. The fresh language that Lock employs makes reading it more akin to lyric poetry than novel.

Although the plights of American rural poor have been described a thousand times over again, the cadences and descriptions of this rural America feel new. Her lover, Jake, the “King of Sweden,” tells her that her naked back “is like a river.” Even the title’s obscure allusion to a Cab Calloway’s song, that should place us somewhere in the forties, instead denies us any real certainty. We wonder, is Jake really from Sweden? He knows things about Sweden that someone from the rural poor in the 1940s wouldn’t. He has blonde hair. Like a tempered Beckett, Lock avoids the usual markers of time and place, while concentrating on the universality of detail: “crickets make a rusty noise in the grass” or “the sun is white and small in their empty branches.” Only towards the end of the novel does the story reveal the protagonists’ age and the year. She’s thirty-six and it’s 1958 when the story ends. Six of her last years have been spent in an insane asylum, after she murdered her baby, and there are few signs of the once charming “King of Sweden.” It seems that the displacement of time and place keeps the novel from petering off into melodrama.

Unfortunately, as with many of the minimalist pioneers like Amy Hepel, Gordon Lish, and Diane Williams, Lock’s prose occasionally stifles the reader with intended monotony (as is life, we’re to think). Lock writes: “Whiskey’s pretty when the light shines through. I slosh it round inside the bottle and see the yard flood beneath a golden wave. I twist the cork out and swallow some. It burns.” This sort of stop and go can be tiring, but the idiosyncratic narration gives the novel enough dynamic momentum to avoid dullness.

In many ways, this is a bildungsroman. The dovish country bumpkin, that had imagined her fling a king, kills her baby, becomes the murderer of her own child. Despite her naïve natural observations, reality infects her, perhaps starting with her mother who ambiguously tells her “It wasn’t to be,” just before dying. Then she paints the pain and frustration onto her own child, wondering, “Does he see God burnt black as mud in a singed coat?” before performing infanticide. Once in the insane asylum her delightful observations, her dark musing and post coitus cozies are traded for “the man with the crooked teeth” who brutally bathes her, and optimistic fantasies filtered through a cell window.

As with his other works, Lock’s delivers flashy slices of thought that one can scroll through. His poetic punch line-narratives read perfectly on screen. This could in part due to the author’s playwright background (he had a play in the Edinburgh Theater Festival in 1996). Words move action and vice versa, while still maintaining enough stillness to do nothing, to use Auden’s famous description of poetry. However, unlike Lock’s other works this novel is being sold only in paperback version. This may have to do with the writer’s distaste for electronic publishing, having once said, “Electricity is evanescent; paper and ink give to the thing made permanence, which is, I am aware, illusory." Still, one wonders given recent trends, how permanent paper will really be, even more so with the presence of brilliant miniaturist authors, like this one.

The King of Sweden by Norman Lock
Ravenna Press
ISBN: 098221152X
154 Pages

This is a great book review, mainly because it uses a great sense of style. The author uses proper language to describe briefly, but to the point the plot of this book. We can see this in the first lines, “Somewhere in the rural United States a young girl, traumatized by the death of her mother, confused with the abandonment of her father, shortly thereafter, and is sent to an insane asylum thanks to her boyfriend, Jake, who she lovingly calls the King of Sweden.” He does not write in any ordinary way, he engages the reader to create curiosity to find out what happens. While describing the book the author is very clear stating each idea thoroughly, clearing any doubts. As he uses parts of the book and quotes he uses a great amount of vividness, therefore making a mental image in the readers mind. I could picture this crazy insane girl and then killing her own baby. “Despite her naïve natural observations, reality infects her, perhaps starting with her mother who ambiguously tells her “It wasn’t to be,” just before dying. Then she paints the pain and frustration onto her own child, wondering, “Does he see God burnt black as mud in a singed coat?” before performing infanticide.” The author of this review uses decorum throughout, he “fits in” with the reader. He doesn’t use exotic vocabulary but uses very eloquent words to express his point.

The author goes beyond just telling the plot, he shows his analytical side and opinion, when he talks about Lock and how the poetry helps develop the book. This quote really got me thinking, “And thanks to Lock’s poetry, so are we. Snow is “peppered” in sewers. The sun is only a “nickel in the sky.” The protagonist’s breasts are little birds. Lamps “wiggle like water when the sun is standing straight in the sky.” Lock demonstrates a keenness for bringing the inanimate to life, that can be, at its best, reminiscent of Rilke. The fresh language that Lock employs makes reading it more akin to lyric poetry than novel.”

Words To Know

2009-10-12T16:28:00.000-07:00

“A terrorist group had kidnapped Patty Hearst, a young newspaper heiress.”
Heiress: Female heir. Female who is entitled by law or by the terms of a will to inherit the estate of another.

“Their twelve-gauge shotguns served as a good deterrent.”
Deterrent: To prevent or discourage from acting, as by means of fear or doubt.

“The inmate would be granted a onetime only conjugal visit.”
Conjugal: of or relating to marriage or to the relationship between a wife and husband.

“When I was called from the bullpen the second time, I was handed a document tittled Inmate Outdates.”
Inmate Outdates: earliest release days granted by a parole.

"And the girls didnt mind all the foreplay they were getting in the visiting room."
Foreplay:mutual sexual fondling prior to sexual intercourse

Unexpected Racism: Blacks Take Control

2009-10-12T16:13:00.000-07:00

As I proceed into reading this book, I have found a pattern of racism. Not only do we see, the usual black discrimination, but white as well. In fact since in the jails of Detroit there is a greater black population, the author is treated, looked at, and humiliated among many other racist acts, because he is white. Here we can see how a black guy refers to him when he gets in the prison, “Stupid ass white boy. Ain’t you seen a cockroach before?” He probably wouldn’t have said this to another black person but since he was one of the very few whites, he decided to pick on him no matter what. He found any little excuse to show his hatred and anger. Yet, the author was also racist maybe not directly, but as the book displays his thoughts are racist, “He was enormous in size, well over six feet six, and his skin was so dark it almost looked purple.” He is too scared to say any racist comment back to this guy, but He would if he could, yet he is intimidated by him.

There is a scene where they are all in prison and the author describes a fight a white man has with some blacks. Here we can see all the racism and what divides the black from whites and the majority from the minority. I have not read something with so much hate packed together, “It was used like nigger or coon, pock monkeys, and spooks, except peckerwood was blacks called whites, along with honky and rednecks, crackers and ghosts. But on that side of the bars, only blacks spoke those words aloud.” This not only shows discrimination between the two groups, but how the majority has the power and the minority the white are afraid of the blacks.

Six Word Memoir

2009-10-09T06:03:00.000-07:00

Extremely stressed out: not enough time!

The Truth Behind Standarized Tests

2009-10-08T22:32:00.000-07:00

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

September 28, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Reading Incomprehension
By TODD FARLEY
LAST week, Education Secretary Arne Duncan acknowledged standardized tests are flawed measures of student progress. But the problem is not so much the tests themselves — it’s the people scoring them.

Many people remember those tests as lots of multiple-choice questions answered by marking bubbles with a No. 2 pencil, but today’s exams nearly always include the sort of “open ended” items where students fill up the blank pages of a test booklet with their own thoughts and words. On many tests today, a good number of points come from such open-ended items, and that’s where the real trouble begins.

Multiple-choice items are scored by machines, but open-ended items are scored by subjective humans who are prone to errors. I know because I was one of them. In 1994, I was a graduate student looking for part-time work. After a five-minute interview I got the job of scoring fourth-grade, state-wide reading comprehension tests. The for-profit testing company that hired me paid almost $8 an hour, not bad money for me at the time.

One of the tests I scored had students read a passage about bicycle safety. They were then instructed to draw a poster that illustrated a rule that was indicated in the text. We would award one point for a poster that included a correct rule and zero for a drawing that did not.

The first poster I saw was a drawing of a young cyclist, a helmet tightly attached to his head, flying his bike over a canal filled with flaming oil, his two arms waving wildly in the air. I stared at the response for minutes. Was this a picture of a helmet-wearing child who understood the basic rules of bike safety? Or was it meant to portray a youngster killing himself on two wheels?

I was not the only one who was confused. Soon several of my fellow scorers — pretty much people off the street, like me — were debating my poster, some positing that it clearly showed an understanding of bike safety while others argued that it most certainly did not. I realized then — an epiphany confirmed over a decade and a half of experience in the testing industry — that the score any student would earn mostly depended on which temporary employee viewed his response.

A few years later, still a part-time worker, I had a similar experience. For one project our huge group spent weeks scoring ninth-grade movie reviews, each of us reading approximately 30 essays an hour (yes, one every two minutes), for eight hours a day, five days a week. At one point the woman beside me asked my opinion about the essay she was reading, a review of the X-rated movie “Debbie Does Dallas.” The woman thought it deserved a 3 (on a 6-point scale), but she settled on that only after weighing the student’s strong writing skills against the “inappropriate” subject matter. I argued the essay should be given a 6, as the comprehensive analysis of the movie was artfully written and also made me laugh my head off.

All of the 100 or so scorers in the room soon became embroiled in the debate. Eventually we came to the “consensus” that the essay deserved a 6 (“genius”), or 4 (well-written but “naughty”), or a zero (“filth”). The essay was ultimately given a zero.

This kind of arbitrary decision is the rule, not the exception. The years I spent assessing open-ended questions convinced me that large-scale assessment was mostly a mad scramble to score tests, meet deadlines and rake in cash.

The cash, though, wasn’t bad. It was largely for this reason that I eventually became a project director for a private testing company. The scoring standards were still bleak. A couple of years ago I supervised a statewide reading assessment test. My colleague and I were relaxing at a pool because we believed we’d already finished scoring all of the tens of thousands of student responses. Then a call from the home office informed us that a couple of dozen unscored tests had been discovered.

Because our company’s deadline for returning the tests was that day, my colleague and I had to score them even though we were already well into happy hour. We spent the evening listening to a squeaky-voiced secretary read student answers to us over a scratchy speakerphone line, while we made decisions that could affect somebody’s future.

These are the kinds of tests, after all, that can help determine government financing for schools. There is already much debate over whether the progress that Secretary Duncan hopes to measure can be determined by standardized testing at all. But in the meantime, we can give more thought to who scores these tests. We could start by requiring that scoring be done only by professionals who have made a commitment to education — rather than by people like me.

Todd Farley is the author of the forthcoming “Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry.”

As I am getting ready to apply to universities, I was shocked after reading this op-ed. I always thought that short response and essay questions weren’t that accurate, but I never thought they would be so of. After thinking about it I can believe it, I mean we are all different and as the article says “the problem is not so much the tests themselves — it’s the people scoring them.” After all standardized multiple choice questions, are scored by a machine and there is a right or wrong answer, writing is according to the person who reads your paper. This statement says it all, “but open-ended items are scored by subjective humans who are prone to errors.”

It is their opinion and that is the problem. In the article they cite a perfect example to show the ineffectiveness of this. An essay is like a piece of art, it may appeal many and many may dislike it. So really the grade is subjective to the graders point of view and interests. In other words, “that the score any student would earn mostly depended on which temporary employee viewed his response.”

Here is a specific example that happened, “At one point the woman beside me asked my opinion about the essay she was reading, a review of the X-rated movie “Debbie Does Dallas.” The woman thought it deserved a 3 (on a 6-point scale), but she settled on that only after weighing the student’s strong writing skills against the “inappropriate” subject matter. I argued the essay should be given a 6, as the comprehensive analysis of the movie was artfully written and also made me laugh my head off.” The essay was finally given a zero. There were opinions giving the essay each a different grade, so the question was which grade was the one that essay deserved?

I believe something must be done, either more specific benchmarks should be made so everyone is graded equally or simply a replacement of this written parts. For, they are decisions that could affect someone future. This is a serious issue which should be handled sincerely. The test takers deserve to be taken into account and with this measure, we can infer they are not taken seriously. As the op-ed ends with a strong statement many of us don’t know, “We could start by requiring that scoring be done only by professionals who have made a commitment to education — rather than by people like me.” I could have sworn professionals checked these tests, apparently it could be any one, so what criteria will be used to judge your writing is a mystery.

Behavioral Psychology

2009-10-07T20:49:00.000-07:00

While reading Fish, I began to see a pattern, I am learning right now in my Ap psychology class. It has to do with Jane Elliot’s classroom experiment “A Class Divided”. The main idea of this experiment was concluded to be, that we begin to adapt and take the role we are put in. For example in this book the prison guards, loose sense of humanity and treat the prisoners extremely bad. They leave aside all their principles and values, because they feel it is their role to act that way. You begin to believe, what you are told. This is experimentally tested with Stanleys Stanford Prison experiment. The experiment had to last at least a week and after two days the experiment had to be called of, because the people were taking their roles too seriously.

Throughout the book there are many examples, one is when the stepmom thinks she is responsible for the children. She beats them up, because she feels it’s her duty. The stepmom adapts to the situation and forgets she is not the mom, she has no reason to hit them. The narrator says, “My momma says she don’t want some old broad hitting me! She said she’s my momma, and if there’s any spanking to be done, shell do it- NOT YOU.”

In jail usually guards become very aggressive and offensive, because they feel superior. This superiority takes them to behave inappropriately, because no matter the crime we are all human beings and deserve to be treated with respect. Many guards turn out to be this way because of the environment they live in, and they justify their behavior with the phrase, “It’s my job.” In Fish we can see how the guards treat the narrator and the rest of the criminals. “Ok, maggots, let’s go.” There is no need to call them maggots, yet since the guard has lost sense of reality he finds nothing wrong with this, he comes to believe they deserve to be called maggots. The criminals, being treated in such manner begin to think themselves as useless garbage, therefore expecting this treatment, which after a while becomes normal to them, making the believe they don’t deserve any better. In Fish the narrator says, “I flinched, half expecting him to hit me.” He thinks he is going to get hit, because of the guard’s attitude towards him, and how the guard makes him feel.

Another great example is when they are playing Barnaby West, it all started as a game but since humans forget it is just a game, they took it to seriously and instead of becoming a game they were really hurting others. They came to believe it was their duty to torture the scouts. This key phrase sums up everything, “The older cousins like being the Indians, but we had to stop playing because they started taking the game too seriously.” This is also proven by many other psychologists’ experiments like the Stanley Milgram experiment, and the Stanford Prison experiment among many others.

Therefore, humans adapt to the role they are put in. The role you are given becomes who you are without taking into account other factors. Humans will do anything to excel and fulfill their role. Sometimes covering up reality, and not making us realize the truth of the matter. Also superiority is not handled well, and minorities are suppressed inhumanly: with no reason.

It's A Matter Of Your Safety...

2009-10-05T19:41:00.000-07:00

October 5, 2009
Op-Ed Contributors
Thumbs on the Wheel
By MARK A. SHIFFRIN and AVI SILBERSCHATZ
PRESIDENT Obama has forbidden federal employees from texting while driving. The federal Transportation Department plans to do the same for commercial-truck and Interstate-bus drivers. And support is building in Congress for legislation that would require states to outlaw texting or e-mailing while driving. Such distractions cause tens of thousands of deaths each year.

But the way to stop people from using cellphones while driving is not to make it a crime. Too many drivers value convenience more than safety and would assume they wouldn’t get caught. A more effective approach is to get telecommunications companies to tweak technology to make it difficult or impossible to text and drive.

When a cellphone is used in a moving car, its signal must be handed off from one cell tower to the next along the route. This process tells the service provider that the phone is in motion. Cellphone towers could be engineered to not transmit while a phone is traveling. After a phone had stopped moving for a certain amount of time — three minutes, maybe — it would be able to transmit again.

Another solution would be to install hardware in cars and software in cellphones that would disable some phone functions when cars are moving. It would be the electronics equivalent of putting a guard on a knife handle or a grill over the blades of a fan.

This would, of course, affect passengers in moving cars as well as drivers. The inconvenience would arguably be worth it. But it is also easy to imagine technology that would allow only passengers to use their phones — by tethering them to devices, placed on the passenger side of the car, that would override the system.

Just as the text function could be disabled from a moving vehicle, so could the talk function be limited — at least when used without hands-free operating technology like Bluetooth. Given the evidence suggesting that even hands-free operation is dangerously distracting to drivers, we may need to ask whether all cellphone use should be technologically impeded in moving cars. There is nothing unreasonable in expecting drivers to park before making calls.

While texting behind the wheel is a problem today, innovations may give rise to other risky behaviors within a few years, if not months. The best solutions will come not from lawmakers plugging holes in the dike, but from the engineers finding ways to make products safer.

I can’t believe we have gotten to the point, where using cell phones is such a great danger to our lives, so much which they are considering in making using a cell phone while driving: a crime. It is amazing how people know tens of thousands of people are killed due to lack of attention, for using cell phones, yet it is more important for them to send the text message, which will only take 5 seconds. Yet, have they realized your life can be gone in less than 5 seconds? As said in this article “Too many drivers value convenience more than safety and would assume they wouldn’t get caught.” It is not a matter of getting caught or not, it’s a matter of safety. Now with blackberry’s and all the smart phones, people give texting or bbm a priority. Many think it’s so cool to text and drive and many find it a necessity. Their lives almost depend on it.

This is a very serious problem who affects all of us, not only those ignorant beasts. Telecommunication companies have now taken action and are trying to make texting and driving almost impossible. For, making it a crime is not very effective people will do it anyways just like speeding and so on. It may decrease the problem, but we need to eradicate it. This is how they are planning for it to work, Plan A-

“When a cellphone is used in a moving car, its signal must be handed off from one cell tower to the next along the route. This process tells the service provider that the phone is in motion. Cellphone towers could be engineered to not transmit while a phone is traveling. After a phone had stopped moving for a certain amount of time — three minutes, maybe — it would be able to transmit again.”

Plan B-
Another solution would be to install hardware in cars and software in cell phones that would disable some phone functions when cars are moving. I find this solution more effective, for cell phones are necessary in emergency situations, say you go on a taxi and he is not taking you where intended, you might have to make a call for help. By turning off only some functions you can still be inc ontact with someone if you need help.

These two options will affect not only the driver but also the passengers. Many may say it is ridiculous, but it’s the only way for now to combat this problem. It is more ridiculous the amount of deaths caused by distracted drivers. Therefore, as said in the articles, “The inconvenience would arguably be worth it.”

I think this is a reasonable measure, now we just have to wait and see, “The best solutions will come not from lawmakers plugging holes in the dike, but from the engineers finding ways to make products safer.”

Unfairness Is Not Fair!

2009-10-04T20:42:00.000-07:00

Friday as usual we had volleyball practice, yet we didn’t have the gym. Why I really don’t know, all I knew was it was unfair the basketball players had the gym all week. WE had the gym once out of all the five days. I was fed up with this, my face was red and burnt from the sunshine, and practice wasn’t as effective. The balls would go everywhere making us have to chase them more than half of the practice.

The basketball coaches always made up an excuse to take the gym away from us. Why can’t they be just, and give us the gym some days? Why are they so greedy? It’s not fair they get the gym the whole week, and act like if nothing happened. Do they have any manners? This is why society doesn’t work out because people only think about themselves and not about others. The mentality of many I was what I want, what I need and I what I… and so on.

If the coaches set this example of injustice, how are the players not going to become unjust. Yes, it’s true we have to face it, the world we live in is no always fair, but there is a limit of walking over someone, like they do to us. So much for our rights and liberties. Why do we get treated like if they were superior to us, as far as I know basket is not much worst or much better than volleyball: they are sports! Fairness is the element to life.

Scared For Life!

2009-10-01T21:19:00.000-07:00

Today was the worst day of my life. Everything went wrong. Since the moment I woke up late, I didn’t have time to get ready till the afternon.

My day started off, by us getting divided into groups, I didn’t like this how in the world was I going to be separated from my friends? This was already like living in hell, next we had to go on a fricken 10 hour drive until we got to our final destination.

Once there we played with the kids, I picked the volleyball activity. I imagined it so differently, as we played the guys weren’t aware there were girls playing or at least it didn’t seem like they cared, for they smashed a ball right in my nose. I felt my nose break, I thought omg my beautiful nose is now destroyed. As I uncovered my face I looked for the blood. This was the worst pain I had ever felt in my whole entire life!

Next we did sac racing. I was up first, as I started to go really fast, I couldn’t control myself and I fell face first to the ground. It was so embarrassing, the whole world was watching me, I didn’t feel the pain until I was up. I looked down and my pants were all covered in disgusting dirt, so were my hands. I couldn’t feel my knee, yet I was afraid to look at it, what if something strange happened to it and it wasn’t there? I was really scared, my school pants had a puddle of blood on them, I thought I was going to faint. Why did this only have to happen to me?

For the rest of the day, I felt my knee really awkward, I became scared, what if I broke it? I am not used to pain, this feeling is so weird! When we got to the school, I immediately went to the nurse, she said it might just be a bruise but if it hurt that bad to get it looked by a doctor. A doctor!! Omg no way, a doctor is some serious stuff. Was my knee going to fall off or bend backwards and do something really weird, at least it felt like it.

Afterschool I had a volleyball game, I didn’t know if to play or not. I really wanted to play, but my knee really hurt and what if I seriously injured it more. Wait can it get any more injured? As I walked up the hill from my house to the school, I whinnied ever second, I just couldn’t handle it. My knee was killing me! Then I had to walk up the millions of stairs to the gym. Every stair I went up, I almost cried and looked like a retard who didn’t know how to walk, more like an alien. I looked like a wired species, between my cries and my faces and my way of walking.

Obviously, I got there late, the coach bitched at me without even asking what had happened to me. I was heartbroken all the effort I did for her to come and scream at me that way. I felt useless and like a piece of shit. I wanted to be anywhere but there. Then she made me play, I really didn’t want to play my knee hurt like hell, but I was scared of her yelling at me that I just ignored the pain. Even if my knee was hanging I wasn’t going to say anything, I had enough of her and I knew she wouldn’t care. MY knee keeps getting worst and worst, what if they have to amputate it or something? I have a huge ball, which looks like its going to explode of my knee anytime soon. My knee looks really deformed and it probably going to turn black, it already purple and really infected! Will I have to get operated, it hurts that bad! OUCH!

This only happens to me! Why does life have to be so unfair?

SIMPLY SUPERIOR

2009-09-30T20:42:00.001-07:00

Today In human sex I finished my collage first, because I’m am faster than the rest. My collage was the best, it was colorful and called the attention. The teacher used it as an example as I am an example of perfection. Second hour I had a French test, I wasn’t worried at all because I am smart and know it all. Obviously, I did great on it and I think I was one of the few, because that class is full of retards and slow pokes. Math, came next I am in Ap calculus because I am simply very intelligent. I had a test today, which I finished very quickly because as usual I knew all the stuff on it. Everybody whined because it was so hard, but nothing is hard for me, I can master anything, you set me up. Many of my classmates also did the questions the teacher said not to do, so they where whining because they didn’t have enough time, tough luck if they don’t know how to follow instructions. Is listening to the teacher that complex? Afterschool I had volleyball, and we played winner, a game you play by two on the court and the one who loses go to the end of the line. Obviously my team always won because they had me in it. I do it all, since the rest can’t do it, I handle any situation. I spike, I receive, I serve. I’m the best multitasker ever to exist. I am superior to the rest, I have traits enviable and desired by many, too bad there mine and I don’t share. I’m simply naturally talented: unique. I don’t care if you say im annoying, I am happy to be the way I am!

Tipical, Boring, Bold Day

2009-09-29T20:19:00.000-07:00

Today was a weird day, we had a weird schedule, and a weird career thing. We had to do this stupid test to see what career was good for us. I found it really retarded. They basically asked you what you wanted to be in order to tell you what you would most likely like to be. Then we had like one hour classes, same old same old special schedule thingy, no one seems to understand. In lunch I played volleyball, it was fun but we lost so whatever. Afterschool I had MUN, the topic was so cliché I wasn’t interested. Then everybody started arguing and fighting over I don’t even know what, I wasn’t really paying attention. After that I had volleyball, we didn’t have the gym today, so we had to play outside with the sun in our eyes, and chasing the balls everywhere. I wasn’t in a good mood.

Later I had a power nap, I was really tired. Then a friend came to help me study for my ap calculus chapter test, I finally understood limits: it was about time. Now as always I get distracted by Facebook and can’t seem to start my homework, it sucks I have to have some more self control. I feel like I am wasting my time, yet I can’t do anything about it, oh well the day will come when I learn to handle my time.

Now I am sitting here writing my blog, really tired and with a lot of homework to do. So, I guess this was my day, nothing really out of the norm or interesting as usual. Nothing new: monotonous as always. I’m off to finish my homework now…

Not An Ordinary Volleyball Game

2009-09-28T17:49:00.000-07:00

Today after school I got on the bus to go to a volleyball game. Since the moment I got on the bus I was anxious to play. I never had this feeling, before. I was thinking about how good I was going to play. When we arrived we started warming up, I was on fire. I would throw myself to floor no matter what, to save the ball. I was spiking really hard and with direction. I hit a ball so hard and so steep nailing it right down to the ground, as the boys did. I felt really proud of myself, after spiking it, I covered my mouth in disbelief, I couldn’t believe it was me doing that. Next we continued the warm up serving, I hit the balls straight and hard: I felt so powerful.

Finally the game began, we gathered around the coach and I knew she was going to put me in to start the game. I mean after all that amazing warm up, I wouldn’t understand if she didn’t. Usually I got really nervous in the games and sometimes even shy if I made a mistake. Due to this, I would always do half the swing when I spiked, hitting the ball softly to make sure it went in, but today I said no more. I want to make a difference: I want to make a point. So, I decided I was going to hit the ball hard and give it my best no matter what. No more this mediocrity, when I was so much better than that, it was time for me to show others and myself I was capable. That is when I asked the setter to set me the ball, she set it and bang I smashed that ball right into the ground. It was so fast and such at the perfect angle, no one in the other team had a chance to even touch it. It fell right in the cort at the blink of an eye.

Next came time for me to serve, usually in games I would get so nervous, my hand would shake and the ball would fall right in front of me, but not this time. I served five times straight, my serves were going perfectly knocking the other players one by one. Then I hit couple more balls with all my strength, making me realize I could handle my strength and put it to good use. I was hitting as good and hard as the boys, I had taken out the masculine part of me.

At the end of the game, the coach was shocked, she congratulated me and told me she knew I was that good all along, all I needed to do is risk and shake off that insercureness I once had. I felt really proud of myself, like never before. All my teammates came up to me and said wow! Great job, your hitting incredible. It felt so good, after all my confidence was worth it. I had proven myself I was capable: I was the best.

Slow Effective Poggress... Oh What A Surprise!

2009-09-27T19:33:00.000-07:00

In these pages Brent meets all the other kids, who really have problems. He realizes he is very lucky. He says “So, between the cripples on the one side and the idiots on the other, I feel like I’m the only normal person in this place”. All the others actually have had accidents and situations they didn’t not wish for, instead Brent wanted to die. All this people struggling to survive and Brent once wanted to take his life away. How ironic?

While surrounded by all the others with problems, he realizes and values how lucky he is to be recovering so quickly. As the quote above says he feels like he is the only normal person. This Helps him realize he has to be grateful and not take things for granted.

I also believe all the support his family is giving him has helped him move on so quickly. Hi family is always there for him including his grandparents as we see here, “Hello, sweetheart. Just wanted to say a quick hello and that we miss you down here. Were just so pleased you are doing so well and can’t wait till we see you again”. By his grandma telling him this it gives him hope and strength to continue fighting his recovery. It is an inspiration for him to keep on striving to get better. Brent needs all the support he can get, so he can think better about himself and get out of this chaotic situation. His recovery is half medical and the other half his own mentality.

This quote really impacted me: it has shown that all the process he has gone through has worked. “You only get to live for such a short time anyway. It doesn’t make sense to kill yourself”. He has finally found the meaning and value of life. He a total different person he has matured so much!

Horny Fourteen Year Old

2009-09-27T18:42:00.000-07:00

As I continue to read, it always keep popping up the fact that Brent can’t control his hormones. I understand his fourteen and he is in the process of puberty, but he’s just so horny I would say. Every girl he meets he has a sexual comment about he can’t keep to himself. Through the book we can see how much he is in love with his nurses especially Tina.

Why does the author show this side of Brent over and over again? I really don’t know, but it funny how he is worried about how he looks, because maybe Tina might think he is ugly. He isn’t worried about his health, but his looks and getting girls to like him.

I think there is much more to looks. Many of us when picking a boyfriend or a girlfriend focus mainly on looks, yet that is totally acceptable because if you don’t know the person the only impression you have is their looks, but you have to go further in and look at their heart and heir personality.

It tends to happen to me that when I meet a hot guy, he is usually an ass. It nice to be good looking, but it’s not that easy to handle. Many guys who think they are hot simply can’t handle it and think they have to be complete ass wholes in order for girls to like them. Yet not me, I can’t stand a guy who is an ass to the girls, he may be the best looking guy, but if he doesn’t know how to treat a girl, I’m not interested. There are many girls who like to be treated like shit, but not me. Therefore I believe that looks do count but it’s a mix of looks heart and personality that make a person. You have to go beyond the superficial world we live in and really value all the traits.

In the book we can see how Brent is very superficial and has the thinking of an immature horny boy. When he goes with Tina to buy ice cream he says, “Tina’s talking to the guy behind the counter. He’s older than me. I bet his thinking about her breasts. He’s probably going to ask her out, and she’ll probably say yes”. He not only shoes what dirty mind he has, but also his low self esteem.

TLS

2009-09-27T18:14:00.000-07:00

In the book review from TLS “Mother Shudder”, Roz Kaveney talks about a very important point. As I read the first lines this quote caught my attention, “Chesterton reminds that the point of fairy tales is to show us that fears can be overcome; those critics who have attacked the book, or Henrys Selick’s new film based on it, as too terrifying for the young seem to forget that fears are phenomena from which children cannot be protected”. This is so true, and not only do children have fears but also adults. Fear is a feeling you cannot control or evade as stated in the article you can only be given tools to overcome them. He uses a common place while explaining what fear is and so on. This creates sympathy with the reader making the reader relive situations of fear, therefore connecting with the reader and gaining its interest to read the book.

In this TLS the author has a great use of style. He gives examples of stories that happen in the book, while using a lot of vividness. He narrates parts of the book, using proper language, easy to comprehend. He explains well his ideas and point of view, therefore using excellent clarity. The author really has a great sense of rhetoric making me want to read this book, maybe it’s not really good, or maybe it is, no matter the case, he does a magnificent job presenting it.

Perserverance Throughout

2009-09-24T21:04:00.000-07:00

I was really amazed by the conversation Brent had with his mother about killing himself. Dr. Rubenstein had always told him he had to tell her. I never thought he would do it he was very assertive: No. As he speaks with his mom, he transmits to us the sadness and depressing mood.

This conversation really touched me, and made me sympathize with the scenario. I felt my heart crumble when I read, “Yes, honey, I’m sorry I didn’t know you were so sad”. She uses tautology to emphasize it isn’t his fault and she didn’t know he was so sad.

Depressing yet shocking scene shows the progress Brent has gone though. He is much more mature and can analyze things better. It has shown how he has grown, I never thought he was going to have the guts to confess to his mom it wasn’t the first time he tried to kill himself.

What he did takes real courage. To accept you did a mistake and talk about it is not easy. Being hospitalized really did help him think thoroughly the situation. I admire Brent for this. He really did change and used the tools life threw at him, to pave the way in the right direction.

He also has all the support he needs especially from his mother. She never gets tired of telling him how much she loves him. I believe this is very important in his recovery. She has been there for him throughout the whole procedure. This is really meaningful, and is what is getting Brent out of the whole he got himself into. She is his right hand helping him dig his way out. She is always telling him the importance of him in everyone life, “And know that we love you so much, and we never want to lose you”.

One More Lesson Learned

2009-09-24T20:38:00.000-07:00

As this journal develops we can see how Brent learns the meaning to life. At the beginning he tries to kill himself in many different ways. Now at the hospital he realizes the stupidity he did. All the pain and suffering he has gone through I believe has taught him a lesson.

We can see here all he has to go through, “they’re going to cover the holes on my back and butt with skin from my hips and stomach.” Then he continues on saying, “The bad things is that they’re going to have to keep me on my stomach for ten days afterward so that I don’t screw up the new skin by lying on it”.

In the hospital I think he has discovered the meaning and the value of life. Also he has seen how much hurt he would have done to his parents, family, and friends, by taking away his life. Many depended on him to be happy, even if he doesn’t think so. He wasn’t only going to hurt himself, but many others. Life was too precious to just dispose.

It is sad that he had to learn in such a harsh way, but some of us just learn in different ways. Unfortunately Brent had to learn the hard way, but at least he learned. He should take this experience of just a lesson learned and move on with his life.

I also believe, this experience was very important for him, because it made him who he is. Without this experience he would be someone totally different, it changed his way of thinking and of looking at things in an optimistic way.

The Importance Of Connecting

2009-09-24T20:20:00.000-07:00

While continuing to read “Burn Journals”, I came across a situation where Brent is simply tired of his psychologist. I can relate to this because personally I have felt this way. I think he feels this way because Dr. Rubenstein, his psychologist doesn’t do any effort to connect with him. This is when we go back to rhetoric and audience. She doesn’t know how to adapt to the situation, so she can't gain Brent’s trust, therefore she is unable, to obtain important information to help him.

Throughout the book he keeps on stating how much he hates her, and how she has nothing to do with him or his life. How he has no problems and she should simply back off. In this quote we can se how much he really dislikes her, “Dr.Rubenstein is here again with her annoying voice. I really don’t like her. I really don’t.” He really emphasizes how much he hates her. Therefore, she cant do her work and is being ineffective, for anything she tells Brent is going to go in from one ear and out through the other.

In order to connect with him she should have acted like his friend. As soon as she met him, all she did was question him. Sometimes even making him feel bad. She needed to create a bond, like if they were friends so he would tell her the truth and let her help him out.

Even if she is determined to help him, she can’t anymore. Brent is simply not going to cooperate with her, and for him to move on he has to help himself as well. Here we can see how Brent is simply not going to work with her, “I see how it works. If I don’t answer, shell be stuck on the first question and she won’t be able to work up on the more complicated ones”. Now using the ignoring technique, which isn’t going to take him anywhere, but he thinks it’s actually very effective. He is harming his own self!

Tax To Emphasize Obesity

2009-09-22T18:39:00.000-07:00

September 21, 2009, 11:59 pm

An Anti-Tax Argument That’s Hard to Swallow
By Randy Cohen
The Issue
Akira Sakamoto/Gallery StockProposals to tax sugary drinks as a way to fight obesity and finance health care reform have found support from medical experts and some interest from President Obama while meeting resistance from the beverage industry in general and the Coca-Cola C.E.O. Muhtar Kent in particular. “I have never seen it work where a government tells people what to eat and what to drink,” he told the Rotary Club of Atlanta last month. “If it worked, the Soviet Union would still be around.” Is this sort of argument so dubious, and does it come from the maker of products so damaging, that Muhtar Kent should be dragged off in handcuffs — or worse?

The Argument
I am an expert on neither tax policy nor nutrition, but it is worth examining a few of the arguments against taxing sugary drinks as examples of the reasoning all of us can encounter when making moral choices or weighing the issues of the day or confronting a bumptious uncle at Thanksgiving.

Muhtar Kent’s assertion is fishy because it confuses a positive and a negative. The various plans under consideration do not tell us what we should drink; they are concerned with what we should not drink — sugary beverages, what critics call “liquid candy.” Urging people not to drive short distances is different from saying they should reach the corner store by hopping. Urging people not to drink cola is different from pressuring them to drink cat pee.

And of course our government does tell people what to eat and has for years. Perhaps “tell” is too coercive a term — no federal food police pound on your door at dinnertime demanding to see your broccoli. But “strongly recommend” is apt. Kent should check out the Department of Agriculture’s food pyramid at the delightfully titled MyPyramid.gov or visit nutrition.gov where jackbooted thugs engage in tyrannical meal planning — O.K., there are no jackboots and no thuggery, but there are some tasty menus. (The recipe for cranberry-nut muffins looks delish.)

Our government, as many a nation does, also tells people what to eat in other ways, both directly, by creating menus for public-school cafeterias and military mess halls, and indirectly, influencing our diets through farm policies, tariffs, trade agreements and food regulation.

(Kent’s further assertion, his evocation of the Soviets, is entirely meretricious, deploying the familiar debater’s tactic of deprecating something by linking it to what is widely reviled. The Beatles are bad because Pol Pot liked “Hey, Jude.” Bowling is evil because Satan plays — he’s on a team with John and George.)

It is commonplace for a democracy to concern itself with the nutrition of its citizens. What is rightly and vigorously debated — by, for example, the writer Michael Pollan, the documentary film “Food, Inc.,” the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association or the American Academy Of Pediatrics — is not if government should involve itself in such things, but how. That’s politics in the best sense.

Kevin W. Keane, senior vice president for public affairs of the American Beverage Association, says it is wrongheaded to single out soda: “When it comes to losing weight, all calories count, regardless of the food source.” This is specious, akin to saying that when I have only partial responsibility, I have no responsibility. If I was the triggerman on that bank job, I couldn’t beg for a break because I wasn’t also the lookout and the getaway driver and the caterer. (Are bank robberies catered? Must you pack a lunch? A very healthful lunch?)

Assuredly, many factors affect our weight. But it doesn’t follow that because a policy fails to address all of them, it should not address any. That the feds devote few resources to going after counterfeiters who mint fake quarters doesn’t mean they should decline to pursue those who run off $20 bills.

What’s more, the multiple causes of a problem need not share equal significance. Studies suggest that sugary beverages are a key contributor to obesity. In its analysis, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes that “Americans consume about 250-300 more daily calories today than they did several decades ago, and nearly half of this increase reflects greater consumption of high-sugar soft drinks.” So there’s a case to be made for giving serious consideration to a soda tax even if other steps are not taken.

Such errors of reasoning might be seen as intellectual, not moral, failings, but it is difficult to extend that benefit of the doubt to Americans Against Food Taxes, which describes itself as “a coalition of concerned citizens — responsible individuals, financially strapped families, small and large businesses in communities across the country.” As was reported in The Times, A.A.F.T. looks like a veiled industry organization; calls to a media contact listed on the group’s Web site go to the American Beverage Association. This smells like Astroturf, or corporate lobbyists posing as a grass-roots organization. It is entirely suitable for interested parties to participate in public debate; it is not suitable to conceal who’s doing the debating.

Now, I, too, engaged in some forensic high jinks, I’ll admit. There are no actual proposals out there that call for a guillotine to be erected on the Washington Mall and for Muhtar Kent’s head to be separated from his. But to pose the question as I did is not deceit but a rhetorical device: I assume that readers recognize hyperbole. Of course Kent should not be executed. Most moralists agree that a punishment must be proportional to the transgression (although it’s often hard to agree on the terms). Nor should Kent even be imprisoned. I’d reserve that penalty for those who produce inarguably toxic products — the senior executives of tobacco companies, for instance. But it would be a fine thing if Kent and his cohort were ordered into a class on critical thinking, much as a traffic-court judge can send recalcitrant speeders to driver-improvement school.

This article talks about whether or not the government should place taxes on sugary drinks, to reduce obesity. Some believe it might actually work yet others believe the government shouldn’t tell them what to drink or not.
I believe this is a very effective method. We have to face it more than half the people in the U.S.A suffer from overweight. It is not only their problem, but it also becomes the government’s issue, when they have to cover all the problems due to obesity.

Nowhere are they forcing you or telling you what you should drink, it is just a method to make you take into account how sodas are simply really bad for your health. You still have the option to buy it or not, therefore it doesn’t go against any right or moral.

People are arguing mainly because the government is telling them what to do, yet the truth is it has done so for years. They do it in a way where it doesn’t violate any rights, yet influence you and your thinking. This quote explains it very well, “Our government, as many a nation does, also tells people what to eat in other ways, both directly, by creating menus for public-school cafeterias and military mess halls, and indirectly, influencing our diets through farm policies, tariffs, trade agreements and food regulation.”

I don’t see anything bad with taxing sugary drinks, the government is helping Americans, who simply don’t have the self will and can’t take care of themselves alone. They shouldn’t take this against the government because the only thing the government is trying to do is help them. Soda is actually really bad, and by placing a tax on it many might think twice before buying it, and if they buy it they will be aware it is not good for them. This causing them a guilty sensation.

In this quote we can see how bad soda really is, “Americans consume about 250-300 more daily calories today than they did several decades ago, and nearly half of this increase reflects greater consumption of high-sugar soft drinks.” Many aren’t aware if this, and it is time to be concerned about your health: it is what we all depend on to live.

Failed Failure

2009-09-20T20:41:00.000-07:00

In “The Burn Journals” first fifty pages we are driven into the life of an eighth grader. H e is not a common eight grader, yet a rebel with many problems. He steals, begins to fail all his classes, does arson attacks, and tries to kill himself in various ways.

The style Brent Runyon uses makes the book very interesting to read. It is written in familiar diction, therefore using language similar to the one teens use in their daily lives. By using this language with words such as what sup? Fuck, dude and so on the writer reaches a common place. While reading this book I got very intrigued and wanted to continue reading, for it uses proper language making it very easy to understand, while using a lot of vividness to describe the situations. For example, when he is in the hospital he describes every single detail, creating a mental picture for the reader and making you feel like you are part of what is happening. This book really stirred up my emotions.

The main topic is basically suicide. We can see Brent has a lot of problems, he doesn’t know how to deal with so he turns out and tries to run away from them by committing suicide. He tries several different ways and doesn’t achieve it. It isn’t until the day he is all burnt in the hospital with his family and letters and cards from his friends that he realizes life is very valuable and there is a meaning to life. There is no point in committing suicide. Life is precious and we shouldn’t take it for granted.

His reasons for killing himself are very stupid from my point of view. Here we can see when Brent is talking to his psychologist and she asks him, what were the reasons for his attempt to commit suicide, he replies, “Once was before they caught me for stealing school supplies in algebra. And another time when my parents were about to find out about me failing science.” This we can infer is a kid who lives his life scared. Is it really worth it dying to no get punished are the consequences of this actions worst than it can be taking you life away? I believe taking your life away is not the answer to any problem no matter how big or small!

"All the Nice Girls"

2009-09-17T20:59:00.000-07:00

This TLS book review Current affairs by Sarah Curtis is very well written. She has a lot of sense of style. It is a short but concise summary about the book "All the Nice Girls". It is written for a broad range of audiences, one for students like me. She uses proper language, for she uses formal words but not to eloquent. The word choice is challenging, but readable with context clues. It’s not easy or hard: it’s just right. She does use clarity as she narrates the story, she clears up any doubts the uses good sentence structure with a combination of straightforward rhetoric. Vividness or visibility is also used by the author as she narrates parts of the book. She does this with many details creating an image of the situation. For example “She evokes the bleak landscapes scarred by bombing and the great orange glow of Manchester burning in the distance.” Another example where the author uses vividness is “She sympathetically portrays the situation of women of the era, especially the dedicated spinster teachers, dressed in hand-knitted jumpers and sensible skirts, except for the elegant headmistress, Cynthia Maitland. Both of these situations are well described making it easy for me to picture the scene. This examples show a good use of vividness. Decorum which is the act of fitting in with your audience is also applied in this article. As she is formal enough but, not too sophisticated for me to say: Boring…Next! In other words, it gives you information about a book, yet keeping in mind the use of decorum to sympathize with the reader. The only element of style the author doesn’t use is ornament. She doesn’t use any cleverness, she is more in the norm.

This looks like an interesting book to read. The author makes it seem very attractive and it gives me the feeling of I want to read it. Great use of rhetoric there Sarah!

Our Right

2009-09-17T20:01:00.000-07:00

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

September 17, 2009
Editorial
Freedom of the Press
Congress and President Obama face a test Thursday of their commitment to freedom of the press and to holding government accountable. The Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to consider a proposed federal shield law that would protect the public’s right to learn vital information about the workings of its government. But some senators are trying to weaken the bill, and the White House has sent mixed signals.

It is critical that the committee approves a strong version of the law to ensure that the news media are free to report news obtained from confidential sources.

Without the ability of reporters and news organizations to protect confidential sources, many important reports about illegal, incompetent or embarrassing behavior that the government is determined to conceal would never see the light of day. In recent years, the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the secret C.I.A. prisons in Eastern Europe for terrorists and warrantless wiretapping all came to light through the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.

If reporters can be hauled into court and forced to reveal their sources, it makes it hard for them to gain the trust of people who have information that the public needs to know, and it makes it hard for their news organizations to publish or broadcast those reports.

The bipartisan bill is backed by Senators Arlen Specter, Democrat of Pennsylvania; Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York; Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina; and others. It would establish a calibrated right of reporters not to reveal the name of confidential sources. It already contains many conditions and qualifications to protect national security. For example, it expressly does not cover information gained from terrorists and agents of foreign powers.

A question for the senators in committee is whether to retain a balancing test on national security. A draft version of the bill provides that in leaks of information related to national security, a judge must weigh the security interest against the public’s interest in learning the information. The news media would not always prevail, but it would give them a chance to make the case before a judge that their sources should be protected.

As a senator, Mr. Obama was an outspoken supporter of a federal shield law, and he co-sponsored a strong bill. On the campaign trail, he said a shield law was important to ensure that there is appropriate oversight over the government. Judges, he said, are generally pretty good at weighing the competing interests.

As president, Mr. Obama’s position has been harder to discern. He has been disappointingly protective of executive branch prerogatives on issues like detainee policies and the state secrets doctrine. The administration has been sending mixed signals on the shield law, but there have been recent indications that it may yet weigh in with senators in favor of a good bill.

We hope it does. Many believe that the First Amendment and the right to free speech are all that are necessary to ensure a robust press and the free exchange of ideas. But the right to collect important information, and to protect the sources who provide it, is also vital.

This op-ed is mainly about passing a bill dealing with the first amendment: freedom of speech. It is a Bill protecting the press, for information they expose to the public, which is confidential. As stated in the article, “It is critical that the committee approves a strong version of the law to ensure that the news media are free to report news obtained from confidential sources.” I agree with this law 100 percent, for we should not be kept from knowing the truth. Many times the government lies to us, and twists information to make us believe something else. The press usually reveals this information, for it is shocking and gains an enormous amount of attention. As it is clearly explained in this quote, “many important reports about illegal, incompetent or embarrassing behavior that the government is determined to conceal would never see the light of day.” If they aren’t going to tell us the truth, we somebody else needs to do this job, in this case the press.

As stated in the article a great example is the one about the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the secret C.I.A. prisons in Eastern Europe for terrorists and warrantless wiretapping. All this cases were revealed through unauthorized sources. The question is why do they want to hide anything from us? We need to know the truth for we trust these sources and we expect them to be loyal to us. Why we are not allowed to know about, what deals with our daily lives? Why should we be kept living in a bubble? Is our government that corrupt and terrible that we can’t know what is going on?

This bill would also “It would establish a calibrated right of reporters not to reveal the name of confidential sources”. This is done in order for reporters to obtain the trust needed to gain the information and also so they can’t be taken to court and forced to reveal their sources, which is very important to keep that trust with the sources.

I do agree we should know the truth as explained here, “Many believe that the First Amendment and the right to free speech are all that are necessary to ensure a robust press and the free exchange of ideas”.

A Bussinesman Beaten Up By His Collegues: Numbers.

2009-09-16T20:28:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, 28 April 2009
On giving 100 percent

This week my phone has been overworked because apparently Alan Sugar fires people who say they are giving a job '110 percent'. He's evidently got the impression that the English language only allows people to get up to 100, in terms of percentages.

I was surprised to hear that, coming from a businessman, who is presumably used to seeing shares going up by 200 percent, and such like. There's nothing mathematically wrong with going over 100. But of course what he's getting at (and failing to recognize) is a recent change in usage. It's a kind of semantic inflation, which (it occurs to me) is a bit like the discussion on this blog a while back about '1000 apologies'.

In its figurative usage, 100 percent always meant a notional maximum: one gave up to 100 percent of one's effort, and could give no more. Now the meaning has altered: 100 percent has come to mean 'the norm, the usual level'. 110 percent thus means, '10 percent more than what ordinary people do, or what has been someone's norm hitherto'. 200 percent means 'twice as much'. And so on. I'd expect Alan Sugar to be pleased that someone has expressed the desire to make that extra effort, not to dismiss it.

I've heard 500 percent, 1000 percent, and other values in recent times. Clearly the numbers are not important: it's the rhetoric that counts. And people seem to need the rhetoric. If a football team makes a greater effort than normal, managers routinely compliment them by raising the percentages. Of course, if such phrases become frequent, they turn into cliches, and lose their meaning. But that is precisely what Alan Sugar should have probed. Was his candidate thinking of what he was saying? If I'd been Sugar, I wouldn't have automatically dismissed the 10 percent as a 'waste', I'd have asked the candidate how exactly he would have improved on his previous performance by that amount, and judged him on the quality of his response.

David Crystals article above talks mainly about how this businessman fires his workers who say they give 110 percent. When I read this it really caught my attention for how more ironic can this get? Firing someone for exceeding the standards with no criteria what so ever. This is insane. Apparently, Alan Sugar being a businessman wasn’t to logical. Numbers chased him down.

David explains Alan’s point of view, Alan believes 100 percent is the maximum level, therefore he believed: one who said they did 110 percent was full of bs. Apparently he hasn’t analyzed the logic out of it, 110 percent means exceeding the normal. It is doing extra, yes I do agree with David Crystal he should have asked the worker to justify his answer and accordingly he would make the decision, whether or not to fire him. Yet, he immediately fired him. With no hesitation at all. I would have done exactly as David says “I wouldn't have automatically dismissed the 10 percent as a 'waste', I'd have asked the candidate how exactly he would have improved on his previous performance by that amount, and judged him on the quality of his response.”

As David says “ Now the meaning has altered: 100 percent has come to mean 'the norm, the usual level'. 110 percent thus means, '10 percent more than what ordinary people do, or what has been someone's norm hitherto'. 200 percent means 'twice as much'. And so on.” This explains clearly the logic of one saying, I did 110 percent, for to Alan it is not so clear.

Believe it or not numbers many times are meaningless, for if you don’t have a standard of comparison they are pointless. As David states in his blog “Clearly the numbers are not important: it's the rhetoric that counts. And people seem to need the rhetoric.” The question is what does ten percent extra mean to this worker? What are the benchmarks of that extra work? Do you consider 100 percent the same as I do? You have to look at the bigger picture, why ten percent more? That is what Alan should have asked instead of committing such psycho act.

Mutating And Adapting

2009-09-16T19:49:00.000-07:00

Out of all the various different techniques the one I consider the most important is style. Style is everything, it is what kind of words you use, what tone, and so on. Therefore, depending on the audience you have to be able to adapt for each circumstance. Doing so is not easy at all, but once you have master it, rhetoric becomes so much easier.

As Heinrich states “In the modern sense of style, we want to stand out from the crowd; in rhetorical sense, we want to fit in”. As we can infer, in order to gain credibility we must make the audience notice us, and also fit in with them, for if they empathize with you it becomes easier to persuade.

The first element in style is the use of proper language. According to your audience you must pick adequate words that suit the occasion. As Aristotle says this very true remark “which makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences.” What do you get by using sophisticated words, your audience doesn’t understand? Yes, you might show off your intelligence, but what is your goal to show off or persuade?

Next comes clarity. It is referred to as using concise and to the point information to get your point across. Say what you need to say and not bore the audience. The clearer you are the more credibility you gain, for no one can misunderstand your point.

Vividness or visibility is by the use of words paint the audience a picture of what you want them to see. By using anecdotes and details empathize with your audience and make them feel in their comfort zone.

Decorum is simply fitting in. Act according to your audience to gain points and make them feel like they are similar to you, therefore so can your view points.
Lastly, the use of ornament is mainly cleverness of your words. Saying information that will get the audience thinking, even if it means doubting. This is a step forward and little by little with a good combination of style , you can reach your final destination.

Style is essential for, it is like a prescription it might work for you but not for her. Some strategies work for certain groups, so according to your audience you have to mutate and adapt to your surrounding in order to survive!

The Right Time: At The Right Place: The Right Combination!

2009-09-14T20:56:00.000-07:00

“It must have been egregious; Mom was not the joking type.”
Egregious: Conspicuously bad or offensive

Chapter twenty one is all about patience and timing. It mentions Kairos all over the place. So, really what is kairos? This quote explains it very clearly,” A person with kairos knows how to spot when an audience is most vulnerable to her point of view, and then exploit the opportunity.” This is exactly the main point of this chapter, it is finding the audiences weak point and then using rhetoric to accomplish the goal. When is the time right? It is when there is a time of uncertainty, change or need. You can figure this out by the mood and when you challenge the audience beliefs making them doubt. This is when your time to shine comes in to brainwash them and make them believe your point of view.

“When the evidence challenges the commonplace, beliefs begin to migrate, and you have a persuadable moment.”

When, you can get your audience to doubt or to open themselves to other points of view you have done a huge step forward, now they are more vulnerable to what you are telling them. This is the time to persuade for, everything they gather is processed and analyzed not just ignored. It is the moment to take action.

The key of this technique is timing. For example it can get as obvious as when you want to ask you parents for money, you aren’t going to ask them while they are view your horrible report card. You might ask them after showing them an accomplishment you are really proud of, or even when they have a lot of money in their wallet. By doing this you increase the chances of them giving you or not giving you money.
To every occasion there is a time and place accordingly. By learning to identify the perfect timing we can reach immense desires.

In Chapter twenty two it talks mainly about medium. When Heinrich talks about medium he means mainly the appropriate for the situation. “The medium can make or break a persuasive moment.” This shows the importance of choosing the right medium.
In other words, you have to watch out for saying the right thing in the right time. This is the recipe to succeed while persuading someone.

Who Would Have Thought Being Locked Up Could Be The Only Way To Stay Alive...

2009-09-13T20:57:00.000-07:00

September 13, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Body Count at Home
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
In the debate over health care, here’s an inequity to ponder: Nikki White would have been far better off if only she had been a convicted bank robber.

Nikki was a slim and athletic college graduate who had health insurance, had worked in health care and knew the system. But she had systemic lupus erythematosus, a chronic inflammatory disease that was diagnosed when she was 21 and gradually left her too sick to work. And once she lost her job, she lost her health insurance.

In any other rich country, Nikki probably would have been fine, notes T. R. Reid in his important and powerful new book, “The Healing of America.” Some 80 percent of lupus patients in the United States live a normal life span. Under a doctor’s care, lupus should be manageable. Indeed, if Nikki had been a felon, the problem could have been averted, because courts have ruled that prisoners are entitled to medical care.

As Mr. Reid recounts, Nikki tried everything to get medical care, but no insurance company would accept someone with her pre-existing condition. She spent months painfully writing letters to anyone she thought might be able to help. She fought tenaciously for her life.

Finally, Nikki collapsed at her home in Tennessee and was rushed to a hospital emergency room, which was then required to treat her without payment until her condition stabilized. Since money was no longer an issue, the hospital performed 25 emergency surgeries on Nikki, and she spent six months in critical care.

“When Nikki showed up at the emergency room, she received the best of care, and the hospital spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on her,” her step-father, Tony Deal, told me. “But that’s not when she needed the care.”

By then it was too late. In 2006, Nikki White died at age 32. “Nikki didn’t die from lupus,” her doctor, Amylyn Crawford, told Mr. Reid. “Nikki died from complications of the failing American health care system.”

“She fell through the cracks,” Nikki’s mother, Gail Deal, told me grimly. “When you bury a child, it’s the worst thing in the world. You never recover.”

We now have a chance to reform this cruel and capricious system. If we let that chance slip away, there will be another Nikki dying every half-hour.

That’s how often someone dies in America because of a lack of insurance, according to a study by a branch of the National Academy of Sciences. Over a year, that amounts to 18,000 American deaths.

After Al Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 Americans, eight years ago on Friday, we went to war and spent hundreds of billions of dollars ensuring that this would not happen again. Yet every two months, that many people die because of our failure to provide universal insurance — and yet many members of Congress want us to do nothing?

Mr. Reid’s book is a rich tour of health care around the world. Because he has a bum shoulder, he asked doctors in many countries to examine it and make recommendations. His American orthopedist recommended a titanium shoulder replacement that would cost tens of thousands of dollars and might or might not help. Specialists in other countries warned that a sore shoulder didn’t justify the risks of such major surgery, although some said it would be available free if Mr. Reid insisted. Instead, they offered physical therapy, acupuncture and other cheap and noninvasive alternatives, some of which worked pretty well.

That’s a window into the flaws in our health care system: we offer titanium shoulder replacements for those who don’t really need them, but we let 32-year-old women die if they lose their health insurance. No wonder we spend so much on medical care, and yet have some health care statistics that are worse than Slovenia’s.

My suggestion for anyone in Nikki’s situation: commit a crime and get locked up. In Washington State, a 20-year-old inmate named Melissa Matthews chose to turn down parole and stay in prison because that was the only way she could get treatment for her cervical cancer. “If I’m out, I’m going to die from this cancer,” she told a television station.

Mr. and Mrs. Deal say they are speaking out because Nikki wouldn’t want anyone to endure what she did. “Nikki was a college-educated, middle-class woman, and if it could happen to her, it can happen to anyone,” Mr. Deal said. “This should not be happening in our country.”

Struggling to get out the words, Mrs. Deal added: “The loss of a child is the greatest hurt anyone will ever suffer. Because of the circumstances she endured with the health care system, I lost my daughter.”

Complex arguments are being batted around in this health care debate, but the central issue isn’t technical but moral. The first question is simply this: Do we wish to be the only rich nation in the world that lets a 32-year-old woman die because she can’t get health insurance? Is that really us?

“Nikki White would have been far better off if only she had been a convicted bank robber.”

This being the first sentence truly impacted me. How could you rather be convicted and be better off? I tried thinking about it, and there was really no answer logically I could think about.

This article talks about Nikky young women, with a chronic disease. For, this disease impared her to work. Therefore, she lost her job and her health insurance.
This is when it hit me, if she was a prisoner she would have been provided with the care needed, but since she wasn’t and lost her job she was screwed. She did everything she could to get help, yet no insurance would accept her with this condition. This sentence really shocked me

“She fought tenaciously for her life.”

Why did she have to suffer and go through all this, when a criminal who did have to pay the consequences for their action, didn’t? Was this really fair? Why would a criminal be treated better than an innocent hardworking person?

This just adds up to my theory of the illogical world we live in. It wasn’t until one day she collapsed in her house, and then she was immediately taken care of, without any hesitation.

My question is why do we have to wait for something serious to happen to take action? Why couldn’t they have done the same long before?
“and the hospital spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on her,” her step-father, Tony Deal, said, “But that’s not when she needed the care.”

Why did she have to suffer all along, why couldn’t they take action before it was too late? She died at the age of 32, therefore thousands of dollars just wasted away. If she was going to need them anyway, why didn’t they spend them when it was actually going to be worth it?

Amylyn Crawford, told Mr. Reid. “Nikki died from complications of the failing American health care system.”

How can we have such a horrifying health care system? We worry about all the deaths or at least we act like we are and then don’t do anything about it when we can save a life?

This quote speaks for itself,
“After Al Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 Americans, eight years ago on Friday, we went to war and spent hundreds of billions of dollars ensuring that this would not happen again. Yet every two months, that many people die because of our failure to provide universal insurance — and yet many members of Congress want us to do nothing?”

It is an ironic world we live in, there is just no justification for this happen. Doesn’t this tell us enough info to infer there is something wrong with the health care system? How can something so absurd happen in such a rich and powerful country?
This reflects the ineffective healthcare system we have, “That’s a window into the flaws in our health care system: we offer titanium shoulder replacements for those who don’t really need them, but we let 32-year-old women die if they lose their health insurance.”

Can we really be that ignorant to continue to let this happen? It is time to do something about it. For, from this we can infer that it is better to be a criminal get locked up and at least you will be taken care of. Committing a crime may not be so bad after all, it could actually save your life, so why not?

You might say to yourself,yeah right like if anybody would do that. Yet, it’s the reality of this absurd unpractical health care system. A clear example of this is Melissa Mathews, who was on parole, yet she insisted in going to jail for she would be treated her cervical cancer, outside of jail she would simply die.

Therefore, there is only one question to ask ourselves, “Do we wish to be the only rich nation in the world that lets a 32-year-old woman die because she can’t get health insurance? Is that really us?”

Life really isnt fair , but are we just gonna sit there and watch Nikkys die? Do we enjoy watching millions of people die right infront of us, knowing we could have save them? Do we love our people so much that watching them die doesnt bother us? What kind of heart do we obtain, if we have one at all?

It’s really up to us to continue to watch people die or keep them alive.

Equality According To Whom?

2009-09-13T20:05:00.000-07:00

September 13, 2009
Editorial
The Rights of Gay Employees
It is remarkable how little progress gay people have made in securing the basic protection against discrimination on the job. In 29 states, it is still legal to fire workers for being gay. But momentum is building in Congress for the first federal law banning such discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Federal law has lagged behind the reality of American life. There are now openly gay members of Congress from between-the-coasts states like Colorado and Wisconsin. And according to the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights advocacy group, 85 percent of Fortune 500 companies have policies protecting gay employees from discrimination.

But gay rights advocates have for years faced opposition to a federal civil rights law from the religious right, and from parts of the business community, who argue that it would lead to a flood of litigation.

Bipartisan bills have been introduced in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, modeled on existing civil rights laws that cover race, religion and sex. Unlike some past bills, these include gender identity, protecting transgender people from discrimination.

The bills were written to meet some of the concerns of opponents. The law would not apply to religious organizations, or to businesses with fewer than 15 employees. It would not allow for quotas or “disparate impact” lawsuits, which generally use statistical disparities to prove discrimination.

There is reason for cautious optimism. In 2007, the House passed a nondiscrimination law that did not cover transgender people. The current Congress is more Democratic, and even in the past two years, gay rights have made significant strides. As states and localities have passed antidiscrimination laws, it has been clear that they do not disrupt the workplace, and they have not resulted in an enormous number of lawsuits.

Supporters in the House think they have the votes. The biggest hurdle is likely to be winning the support of 60 senators, the de facto number now required for most legislation because of filibuster rules.

People who believe in workplace fairness should lobby senators to get on board. It is unacceptable that in a nation committed to equality people can still be fired in more than half the states for being gay. Congressional leaders should make passing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act a top priority.

After reading this article I was very puzzled. It talks mainly about how gay employees are being discriminated. I personally don’t like gay people, but I believe they shouldn’t be discriminated till a certain degree. When they start talking about a workplace and getting fired, there is a side of me that says its right but then another part of me makes me believe its wrong.

I do understand being gay is against nature, yet many people are, and some just can’t help it. I personally feel uncomfortable around them, yet if you were to put yourself in their shoes and understand their point of view, I believe there is no justification for being gay. Yet, by firing gay people it only creates chaos.

We have to face it, we live in a world full of hate and discrimation, where if you are not societies standard you are screwed. So, if we fire all the gay people what are they going to work in? We have to go further and analyze this scenario. If they don’t have a job, how are they going to react? We are all human and need certain resources to survive, so how will they obtain their necessities? Yes, I do agree they can be a distraction in the work place, but as long as their gay characteristics don’t affect their workplace they should not be fired.

If we fire all the gay people, in order to obtain their necessities they will start stealing or just relying on our government, when others who can’t work really need the money. Firing gay people doesn’t resolve the problem, it may momentarily but the consequences will be of greater effect.

When I read this “It is unacceptable that in a nation committed to equality people can still be fired in more than half the states for being gay.”I don’t understand how the United States Of America the country of the free there is discrimant act being tolerated and as stated not in some but more than half the country.

Therefore, I believe gay people like any other human being should be allowed to work, for at least they are working and not on the streets committing crimes. They should be fired if their gayness interferes with their job. For, the U.S is known for its freedom and equality, so much for that reputation, but really where did all those principles dissolve into? Do we want gays just wandering in the streets? Are we going to assume the consequences?

Sympathy

2009-09-13T19:12:00.000-07:00

As I read Chapters nineteen and twenty, many techniques were bombarded, yet the one that most called for my attention was the verbing method.

I believe this is the one that most caught my attention, for I can relate to it in my everyday life. This is a perfect example of what is talked in Chapter nineteen. As Heinrich states, “If they’re for it, there in. If they’re against it they’re out.” This is the identity strategy, which is the biggest tool of manipulation. We see it in our everyday lives. This is the strategy used by most advertisiers, politicians, and salespeople and so on. Society’s beliefs are what we live by, most of us are affected by the trends, the fashion, and the culture of our surroundings. Off course, everybody wants to be in and fit in, yet have you ever asked yourself who decides what is in or not? That is why this is such a great tool of manipulation, we are restrained to a certain standard of life, which is what it is believed by many to be normal.

Yet, what is normal? Normal to you may be different to him or her. It depends on the definition you give it and adapt to it. In many places around the world it is normal to eat insects and bugs, here it is normal to eat meat, which is sacred to many others. So, this proves Heinrichs theory when he says, “Ideas become beliefs when people identify with them.” This is when you can see the different cultures or groups and stick with the one you fit in, due to that emotional and physical stability. So, in order to help turn an idea into a belief you must connect with your audience, therefore creating an unbreakable bond.

Towards the end of Chapter twenty, when the author starts talking about verbing, the inventing of words by turning verbs into nouns or nouns into verbs, really caught my attention. I then asked myself, out of all the many techniques exposed, why did the last one really get me hooked? After analyzing the situation, it is a technique I see and use in my daily life. Therefore, it is easy to sympathize with and made me remember of funny situations with my friends. By using a commonplace the author persuades me to continue reading and agree with him.

Especially in my generation, verbing became a daily thing. Many may say it’s for lazy mediocre, but for me it just makes life easier, for it is just practical. For example with my friends we say “chilear” which comes from chilling out or “chilea” which come from chill out. They are very similar words yet, with different meanings according to the situation.

Verbing is strongly disliked by language conservatives, but as stated in this book “Verbing weirds language.” Shakespeare loved this technique: he exceeded more than 21,000 words by weirding language. For, I don’t see why not be creative if others can understand you and create a strong bond.

Also, Heinrich talks about the word “Like” I think it is the word most used by teens now days. I personally thought it was not eloquent to use, it sounds very informal, yet like everything you have to know how and when to use it. This quote explains very well how to use like, “It impacts language wellness. But we shouldn’t banish the place-filling like altogether.” So, depending on the purpose of the like it can benefit you. A simple word like “like” is a meaningless word you can give a meaning to. So, learn how to use, and when to use because it is this generations place filler.

Absurd

2009-09-09T20:22:00.000-07:00

September 8, 2009
Editorial
Vague Cyberbullying Law
Lori Drew acted grotesquely if, as prosecutors charged, she went online and bullied her daughter’s classmate, a 13-year-old girl who ended up committing suicide. A federal court was right, however, to throw out her misdemeanor convictions recently. The crimes she was found guilty of, essentially violating the MySpace Web site’s rules, are too vague to be constitutional.

Many people were understandably horrified at the story of Megan Meier’s death. The Drews and Meiers were neighbors in O’Fallon, Mo. Prosecutors charged that Ms. Drew was part of a conspiracy that set up a MySpace profile for a fictional 16-year-old named Josh Evans and posted a photograph of a boy without his knowledge. That violated MySpace’s terms of service.

“Josh” flirted with Megan, according to prosecutors, then said he was moving away. Finally, he told her he no longer liked her and that “the world would be a better place without [her] in it.” After Megan committed suicide, Ms. Drew allegedly had the account deleted.

The jury acquitted Ms. Drew of intentional infliction of emotional distress, but convicted her of accessing a computer without proper authorization in violation of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Her crime was, in essence, violating MySpace’s terms of service.

As Judge George H. Wu of the United States District Court for the Central District of California rightly held, a federal law that makes violating a Web site’s terms of service a crime is unconstitutionally vague. The Supreme Court has held that the Constitution requires laws to contain “relatively clear guidelines as to prohibited conduct.” Ms. Drew’s conviction fails this test. The average users of any Web site has no reason to believe they are breaking federal law by violating terms of service.

It is also unclear which violations will be prosecuted. MySpace prohibits many things, including knowingly providing false or misleading information. It is hard to believe that people who lie about their age, weight or physical appearance are guilty of a federal crime.

Lawmakers should enact laws that can withstand challenge to give prosecutors tools to go after bullying of all kinds. What prosecutors cannot do is stretch federal law to label run-of-the-mill Internet activity as criminal.

First of, why in the world would a mom cyber bully a thirteen year old? I really cant explain why , but the truth is it happened. Yet, this is not the worst part of the issue: the thirteen year old ended up committing suicide. You would think this mom would actually go to jail or pay the consequences, yet ironically with all the laws, there isn’t one to accuse her. How in the world is there no law of such shocking act?

“The crimes she was found guilty of, essentially violating the MySpace Web site’s rules are too vague to be constitutional.”
How can crimes of such intensity, not have consequences?
From this, we can conclude there is something going on with the penal system of the United States. This mother indirectly killed a child and nothing is going to be done about it. In other words it’s okay to cyber bully even to the extent of driving someone to commit suicide?How can there be a consequence for shoplifting, but not for conducing someone to commit suicide?

As Judge George H. Wu says“a federal law that makes violating a Web site’s terms of service a crime is unconstitutionally vague. The Supreme Court has held that the Constitution requires laws to contain “relatively clear guidelines as to prohibited conduct.”

If this is the case then why aren’t there any clear guidelines? What is this mediocre world we live in? We expect everything to work as desired, but don’t do anything about such great importance circumstances.
Now that it happened, I believe it’s time we take action. That child deserves protection and the right to life!

Drug Legalization

2009-09-08T20:23:00.000-07:00

http://web.ebscohost.com/src/detail?vid=5&hid=8&sid=0d6d2fa8-cb2a-49c9-acc9-e68854b4b866%40sessionmgr10&bdata=JnNpdGU9c3JjLWxpdmU%3d#db=mih&AN=33378528

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1918725,00.html?cnn=yes

From Winning A Meanigless Argument With Your Parents: To Becoming The President Of The United States.

2009-09-08T19:56:00.000-07:00

What really is the job of a seller? Have you ever asked yourself? Have you sorted out the situation when you are being offered a product? Many of us when offered a product believe everything we are told. We never actually stop and think what the person’s goal is. Many sellers if not all, will drown your brain with the art of putting words together, that sound too good to be true. Therefore, when encountered with these situations the sellers target is to find out “what the audience really needs, and what the issue really is.”

After having found that out, the seller will use the identity strategy discussed in Chapter 18. “It starts with getting the audience to bond with one another, and to see you as its ideal leader.” In this case, the audience is the client and the seller has to portray themselves as a leader to gain credibility. This special bond is what makes your client feel comfortable, and believe the product you are selling is not a spam. A great way of connecting with your audience is by code grooming. This is when you use a certain symbol or code to connect with you audience: identify with them.

When selling a product, it is very important to choose carefully which words to use where. This is due to the fact that certain words give the audience a certain impression. These words are the ones that stick in peoples mind, and they decide whether or not the product is sold. After all the babbling of a sales person these are the words that remain in the client’s brain. If these words are strong enough, you have accomplished your goal and most likely the person will buy the product.
Also, another strong key in rhetoric’s is repetition. Yes, it is plane boring, but the effectivity of it is enormous. Even though, we each are capable of believing what we want to believe, repetition drains information into our heads and slowly makes us believe what we are hearing. It is for example with subliminal messages they attack our unconscious brain, therefore making it inevitable to restrain from believing what we are told.

Lastly, we learned about reverse words. “Repeating the words that mean the opposite of what hurts your case.” This is when you play around with words to make your argument sound more pleasant. It is choosing words, which create a desired mood for your audience.

Heinrich gives a great example comparing Bush’s and John Kerry’s strategy to win the presidential elections. “John Kerry lost the election in part because he tried to win his arguments while Bush focused on identity.” Therefore, it’s not about proving yourself right: it’s about influencing others to believe you are right.

Hence, if the president of the United States got elected through the use of rhetoric and its techniques, it surely is an effective method! This book has proven, knowing how to argue and using the techniques to persuade your audience can help you on a daily basis, from convincing your parents, to convincing a whole nation and becoming the president of the United States Of America.

Vocabulary

"A far more sage person is my friend Dick."

Sage: Having or exhibiting wisdom and calm judgment.

Vocab

2009-09-07T20:37:00.000-07:00

“This is where the term sophistry comes from, and how rethoric got its less than stellar reputation.

Sophistry: the practice of using arguments which seem clever but are actually false and misleading.

Stellar: outstanding

In rethoric, its actually kosher to use many of them in your own arguments.

Kosher: allowed

“While it is important to know how to spot and answer a logical fallacy, if you limit yourself to simply pointing them out, your opponents will clobber you.”

Clobber: To defeat decisively

“ We had franks and beans, and you don’t see me clamoring for weenies during the holidays.”

Clamoring: a vehement expression of discontent or protest.

“ A more insidious kind of humiliation comes in the smiling guise of innuendo.”

Innuendo: an insulting hint

Fiding Our Identity

2009-09-06T21:26:00.000-07:00

When I look at this logo, which now identifies Colombia worldwide I get this positive vibe. As you can see the technique as using red which contrast great with white. Red is the color which most appeals and catches the attention of the human eye.

When sorting out this logo, I not only see a heart, for it’s no ordinary heart, it is a unique dancing heart. It transmits to me the happiness and the passion there is in Colombia. Also by using the word passion, which is a very strong word and is very similar in English and Spanish, people feel the strength of it, and stirs up emotions of happiness, passion, and excitement. It is slowly becoming a commonplace worldwide, therefore changing the reputation Colombia had for many years. As you can read in my Juan Valdez blog entry, it is fully explained.

This powerful symbol represents all the beauties and honors of Colombia. If you want to know more about Colombia and all its attributes, watch this short yet concise video about Colombia. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXtvGsYS0UM&feature=related)

This symbol, mainly uses the ethos technique, it is all about the reputation of Colombia and its Colombians. It is used to transfer the message of how Colombians are full of passion, for they are happy hardworking, honest people. Just by using the word passion in italics with the exclamation, it makes me feel the excitement and the optimistic view they want the world to see.

Also, pathos is used by displaying the heart. The heart is a worldwide symbol recognized everywhere as love. It portrays many different points, for example how Colombia is a country full of love and caring people, also how Colombia has many valuable resources and people that make others feel the love Colombia deserves amongst many others. It is a symbol you can deduce however you want, yet it holds only for positive interpretations. This symbol exposes the uniqueness of this country for, there are many amazing things you can’t imagine, you can’t find anywhere but in Colombia.

This campaign is a trademark, which is selling Colombia and its beauty worldwide. It has done an excellent job and slowly, but surely we will finally get the positive attention we deserved a while ago With the use of pathos and ethos Colombia is beginning to flourish, and swimming out of all the negative gossip Colombia was once talked about.

This logo is very optimistic, therefore transmitting only the positive vibe we want the world to see.

Combat and Defend...Husband And Wife!

2009-09-03T18:38:00.000-07:00

Moving on with more tips on arguing, we are introduced a new topic: different types of logic. When arguing we should use enthymemes, which transmits a subliminal message. The audience then can use inductive or deductive techniques to infer the message. “You believe this, so you should do that.” This is an explanation of what the enthymemes do to the audience. Using logos it makes them believe what you want them to believe.

“You can combine deduction and induction to make an especially strong argument.” So, what is deduction and induction? Deductive logic is when you start with something general like a commonplace and then switches it to specifics, to reach a conclusion. For example if I say all women are brave, then by deduction I can assume my mom is brave, for she is a woman. Inductive logic is the opposite when you start out specific and then go more general to prove a premise or conclusion. For example when you go to the doctor and he asks your symptoms, and then tells you have the swine flu. Depending on the situation you decide which one to use.

Yet, when deducting information you must be very careful not to collide with a fallacy. Fallacies are misleading information. They are everywhere, and that is why it is very important to identify them. “You can commit fallacies to your heart’s content, as long as you get away with them.” This quote explains the importance of identifying fallacies, and not falling for them. Yet, using them can get you to succeed in your argument.

Knowing how to identify them, not only helps you win an argument, but to defend yourself. For example, when your parents answer back with something that has nothing to do with the topic, in order to get away with whatever it is that they believe. This is called reduction ad absurdum. As you can see, it is self explanatory, instead of a valid argument they turn to total absurdity. When the little boy argues about how all the other parents drive their kids to school and she doesn’t, mom replies “What if all the other children’s parents told them to jump off a cliff? Would you follow?” As you can see one thing has nothing to do with the other and if the child is smart enough they can use this opportunity to make their parents look like fools.

Fallacies surround us, they are very dangerous, but when we know how to handle them they can work in our favor. So, learning to identify them, sort information out and use it, is the main key. Then we can use our inductive and deductive knowledge, to win an argument.

I believe, Chapters Thirteen and Fourteen were very interesting. They introduced us to a whole new different topic. Now, not only do they teach you how to combat your audience, but also how to defend yourself. Which, I believe is as equally as important, because if you can’t defend yourself, no matter how strong you are, you will get defeated. This is a new topic, which I appreciate because I was getting bored of the same repetition of how to win an argument. This is such a great book that when you are getting tired of it, it hooks you back on. So, far I have found this book very practical and pleasurable to read.

Killing People To Show People Killing Is Wrong?

2009-09-01T19:20:00.000-07:00

September 1, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Innocent but Dead
By BOB HERBERT
There is a long and remarkable article in the current New Yorker about a man who was executed in Texas in 2004 for deliberately setting a fire that killed his three small children. Rigorous scientific analysis has since shown that there was no evidence that the fire in a one-story, wood frame house in Corsicana was the result of arson, as the authorities had alleged.

In other words, it was an accident. No crime had occurred.

Cameron Todd Willingham, who refused to accept a guilty plea that would have spared his life, and who insisted until his last painful breath that he was innocent, had in fact been telling the truth all along.

It was inevitable that some case in which a clearly innocent person had been put to death would come to light. It was far from inevitable that this case would be the one. “I was extremely skeptical in the beginning,” said the New Yorker reporter, David Grann, who began investigating the case last December.

The fire broke out on the morning of Dec. 23, 1991. Willingham was awakened by the cries of his 2-year-old daughter, Amber. Also in the house were his year-old twin girls, Karmon and Kameron. The family was poor, and Willingham’s wife, Stacy, had gone out to pick up a Christmas present for the children from the Salvation Army.

Willingham said he tried to rescue the kids but was driven back by smoke and flames. At one point his hair caught fire. As the heat intensified, the windows of the children’s room exploded and flames leapt out. Willingham, who was 23 at the time, had to be restrained and eventually handcuffed as he tried again to get into the room.

There was no reason to believe at first that the fire was anything other than a horrible accident. But fire investigators, moving slowly through the ruined house, began seeing things (not unlike someone viewing a Rorschach pattern) that they interpreted as evidence of arson.

They noticed deep charring at the base of some of the walls and patterns of soot that made them suspicious. They noticed what they felt were ominous fracture patterns in pieces of broken window glass. They had no motive, but they were convinced the fire had been set. And if it had been set, who else but Willingham would have set it?

With no real motive in sight, the local district attorney, Pat Batchelor, was quoted as saying, “The children were interfering with his beer drinking and dart throwing.”

Willingham was arrested and charged with capital murder.

When official suspicion fell on Willingham, eyewitness testimony began to change. Whereas initially he was described by neighbors as screaming and hysterical — “My babies are burning up!” — and desperate to have the children saved, he now was described as behaving oddly, and not having made enough of an effort to get to the girls.

And you could almost have guaranteed that a jailhouse snitch would emerge. They almost always do. This time his name was Johnny Webb, a jumpy individual with a lengthy arrest record who would later admit to being “mentally impaired” and on medication, and who had started taking illegal drugs at the age of 9.

The jury took barely an hour to return a guilty verdict, and Willingham was sentenced to death.

He remained on death row for 12 years, but it was only in the weeks leading up to his execution that convincing scientific evidence of his innocence began to emerge. A renowned scientist and arson investigator, Gerald Hurst, educated at Cambridge and widely recognized as a brilliant chemist, reviewed the evidence in the Willingham case and began systematically knocking down every indication of arson.

The authorities were unmoved. Willingham was executed by lethal injection on Feb. 17, 2004.

Now comes a report on the case from another noted scientist, Craig Beyler, who was hired by a special commission, established by the state of Texas to investigate errors and misconduct in the handling of forensic evidence.

The report is devastating, the kind of disclosure that should send a tremor through one’s conscience. There was absolutely no scientific basis for determining that the fire was arson, said Beyler. No basis at all. He added that the state fire marshal who investigated the case and testified against Willingham “seems to be wholly without any realistic understanding of fires.” He said the marshal’s approach seemed to lack “rational reasoning” and he likened it to the practices “of mystics or psychics.”

Grann told me on Monday that when he recently informed the jailhouse snitch, Johnny Webb, that new scientific evidence would show that the fire wasn’t arson and that an innocent man had been killed, Webb seemed taken aback. “Nothing can save me now,” he said.

In this article, we see the use of mainly ethos. Just by reading the title we can see the use of it. An innocent man is now dead. Morally this goes against any values or principles. The whole article talks about, how they kill an innocent man. He is accused and charged with capital murder. After, he is killed with the lethal injection, researchers find he was innocent all along.

This is just one, of the many cases, which kill innocent people. It is amazing, how we focus on saving so many unborn lives with antiabortion campaigns, yet we kill abundant people daily. It’s actually really ironic. Are we really teaching them by killing them?

I believe, not killing them is actually a worst punishment. Many of those people actually want to die, they are sick and tired of being incarcerated. So, why do them the favor, if they did something wrong they should pay for it, by suffering, not just taking their life away. It’s not only immoral, but whatever happened to the right of life? To me it’s inhumane, and there is no reason whatsoever that can justify taking someone’s life away. Life is something very valuable, which once gone you can never get back. There is no turning back and saying, o he’s innocent, so he can live again.

In this case, they took an innocent man’s life away. He’s dead now, there is nothing we can do about it. So, is the attorney accused with capital murder, apparently not. It’s ironic how he actually killed an innocent person, yet no one takes his life away, when he results to actually have killed someone. He committed the crime, the other was killed for. How ironic can we get?

Are we teaching killing is wrong by killing others? For, that is the message I get by such horrifying action. Instead of killing a person, why can’t we teach them and guide them through the right path, even if it means all their life in jail. At least they have a chance to learn from their mistakes and correct them. We all make mistakes, some worst than others. By killing we are only insinuating that killing is okay, and there is no justification to take someone’s existence away.

In this article, this innocent man is killed with no reason at all. If he was left in jail and then found innocent, yes he may have suffered unfairly, but trust me he would be thankful he still had life.

“The report is devastating, the kind of disclosure that should send a tremor through one’s conscience. There was absolutely no scientific basis for determining that the fire was arson, said Beyler. No basis at all. He added that the state fire marshal who investigated the case and testified against Willingham “seems to be wholly without any realistic understanding of fires.” He said the marshal’s approach seemed to lack “rational reasoning” and he likened it to the practices “of mystics or psychics.”

This is just one case out of millions of others, that have been killed due to lack of information. Put yourself in his shoes, knowing you are going to get killed for something you didn’t do, and yet there is nothing you can do about it. How would that feel? Yes, there are many who are killed, who are not innocent, but why not take other alternatives which are more effective and human.
Where did the “justice” part disappear, because his life was taken away from him and now what? Who will pay the consequences? Who will respond for this act? Even if there were consequences, like Webb said “Nothing can save him now.” He is dead and there is no turning back. This is a mistake, which has no solution.

Vocabulary

2009-08-31T20:49:00.000-07:00

“The Ancient Spartans, who practiced infanticide, may have objected to “No Child Left Behind.”

Infanticide: The act of killing an infant.

“Conservatives knew instinctively that “life” has more pathetic value than the murkier choice.”

Murkier: dark, dim or gloomy.

“You can almost set your epochal clock by this particular values pendulum.”

Epochal: highly significant or important especially bringing about or marking the beginning of a new development or era.

“If lazy means frantically shooting aliens on a computer, then he’s lazy.”

Frantically: Highly excited with strong emotion or frustration.

“More recently, President Bush promoted tort reform by referring over and over to frivolous lawsuits.”

Frivolous: not serious in content or attitude or behavior

You Have The Power... You Arrange The Words...The Art Of Arraging Words In A Sentence.

2009-08-30T22:05:00.000-07:00

In Chapters Nine and Ten, Heinrich talks mainly about controlling the mood and optimism. How in the world can you gain control of the mood? “A good persuader doesn’t merely express her own emotions; she manipulates the feelings of her audience.” By gaining control of your audience feelings or emotions, you have all the power to manipulate them.

How do you gain control of emotions? There is just one simple key word. A word has the power you want to give it. You determine the strength of a sentence. “Words can indeed act like a drug.” Meaning, depending on how you put words together and make something sound, is equivalent to the effect. Depending on the drug you take, you get different outcomes. The same thing happens with the combinations of words you put together. You can make a sentence as powerful as you want it.

“The more vividly you give the audience the sensations of an experience, the greater the emotion you can arouse.” The more you use words that identify the audience, the more susceptible they become feeling sympathy, therefore weakening their strength of standing up for what they believe. The stronger the drug, the greater the outcome. You decide which word, or drug you are going to feed the audience, to obtain your goal.

So, which way is the best to stir up emotions? As Aristotle says “One of the most effective mood changers is a detailed narrative.” Therefore, when you recreate a dramatic exaggerated scene, making the others see it through your shoes, they are being exposed to another point of view, which most likely they hadn’t thought about. This makes them doubt their opinion, making them more gullible to believe your point. I can agree totally with this technique, for I have used anecdotes or real life stories to impact others. The result is always positive.

An anecdote is so powerful, it drills the audience’s attention, and makes them empathize or sympathize with the situation. This being the key, to changing their point of view. I have used this tool, and I can say it has always worked, because you make your audience hear what you want them to hear, playing with their mind. Therefore, arranging certain words in the right order can give you amazing results. Know how to lay your words right and you are set to win.

Admired

2009-08-30T22:02:00.000-07:00

When I grow up, I aspire to be a successful person, in whatever it is that I do. I believe this is everyone’s desire, becoming a leader. Yet, it is very simple to say, but not easy to accomplish. A leader, is made up of many different components acquired through life. One of the most important one, is as they say turning heads, being looked up to.

Many believe leaders are all book smart nerds. Yet, actually most of the leaders in the world, are a more balanced formula. They also have what Heinrich talks about in Chapter Seven and Eight, as practical wisdom. “Practical Wisdom entails the sort of common sense that can get things done.” Meaning it’s not all about the books, common sense can be more important than book knowledge. It is a quality not many people have, for it is harder to acquire, than just same old book knowledge. You basically have it or you don’t , you cant work on getting better at it, therefore it is very unique and valuable trait.

“It’s an instinct for making the right decision on every occasion.” Have you heard when they say that moms have a sixth sense? It basically can be compared to that, it is a vibe you get which helps you make the right decision and almost never fails. This instinct usually doesn’t come with process people. It is more of a flexible people character trait.

“When he led by the following rules, he failed; when he applies his navigational skills to solve a practical problem, he became a hero.” Here is a proof that most leaders or heroes usually are known for practical wisdom, not just book smart. This is a great quality to have, and if you were given it, you should use it, for it is almost never wrong. It is like having a lucky star guiding you.

Yet, don’t get me wrong to be a successful person, you must have a balance of the practical wisdom and the book smart. The advantage of having the practical wisdom, is that the book smarts can be acquired, while practical wisdom is a lot harder to attain. “The practically wise rhetorician seems to have the right combination of book learning and practical experience, both knowledge and know-how.”

You might ask yourself what does a rhetorician and a leader have to with one another, and basically they are made, one for the other. A rhetorician is usually a leader and a leader can’t be a leader without the use of rhetoric. In order to become a leader, people must look up to you, or in other words agree with your point of view. As you gain followers or fans you do it by the art of persuasion.

Yet, when persuading someone it is like acting. You put up a scene in order to obtain your goal. For example, when Heinrich says “While your audience must think you have these noble attributes, that does not mean you must have them in reality.” …“Make it seem you have no tricks.” These two quotes clearly demonstrate that anything counts when you are in the field of persuasion.“Does this seem unethical? Not in the original sense of ethos.” This doesn’t sound to convincing, but it’s the truth. You got to do what you got to do. Life is a daily competition, we must fight in order to survive. So, in order for me to reach my goals, and become a successful leader, I must do everything necessary, yet under logical reasoning. Disinterest is a keyword in this “the appearance of having only the best interest of your audience of heart- even to the point of sacrificing, for the good of others.” Rhetoric’s is the art of playing your cards right. Using techniques, like the ones stated above, in order to reach your optimal goal. There’s more to persuasion than, just stating your point.

Hello Chaos...Goodbye Sanity!

2009-08-26T18:02:00.000-07:00

Mexico's New Drug Law May Set an Example
By Ioan Grillo / Mexico City

No dreadlocked revelers smoked celebratory reefers in the streets, no armies of conservatives protested, the Mexican media raised no hullabaloo. Quietly and with little ado, Mexico last week enacted a law to decriminalize possession of small amounts of all major narcotics, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin, ecstasy and crystal meth. Anyone caught in Mexico with two or three joints or about four lines of cocaine can no longer be arrested, fined or imprisoned. However, police will give them the address of the nearest rehab clinic and advise them to get clean.

Most surprising was how easily and painlessly the reform slipped into Mexican law. The bill was originally filed in October by President Felipe Calderón, a social conservative who is waging a bloody military crackdown on drug cartels. Congress then approved the bill in April — as Mexico's swine-flu outbreak dominated media attention. And finally the law went into the books without any major protests either in Mexico or north of the border. (See pictures of cannabis culture.)

Washington's silence on the issue is telling. In 2006, Mexico's Congress approved a bill with almost exactly the same provisions. However, the Administration of George W. Bush immediately complained about the measure and then President Vicente Fox refused to sign it into law. In contrast, officials of the Obama Administration have been decidedly guarded in commenting on the new legislation. When asked about it in his visit to Mexico last month, drug czar Gil Kerlikowske said he would "wait and see." Many view such a change as evidence that Washington is finally reconsidering its confrontational war on drugs, four decades after Richard Nixon declared it. "There is a growing opinion that the use of force has simply failed to destroy the drug trade and other measures are needed," says Mexican political analyst José Antonio Crespo. "It appears that the White House may be starting to adjust its approach." (See pictures of the great American pot smoke-out.)

Another reason for the ambivalence is that the new law is predicted to have little effect on the Mexican street. Police officers would rarely arrest people caught with small amounts of drugs anyway, although they would often use it as an opportunity to extract handsome bribes.

Mexican officials argue the legislation is designed less to change the situation than to clarify the law and go after the traffickers harder. Indeed, while using small amounts of drugs may now be fine, selling drugs is still illegal. The law clearly states any person dealing narcotics will be sent to prison. Any place that sells drugs will be liable for punishment, a provision that is likely to prevent the opening of any Amsterdam-style "coffee shops" in the country. The new law also empowers city and state police to investigate dealers, which was formerly the reserve of the federales. Street-corner pushers have exploded across Mexico in recent years while the number of hard-drug addicts has shot up to 460,000, according to a survey last year.

Still, groups pushing to legalize marijuana north of the Rio Grande see Mexico's change as an encouraging sign for their own struggle. Allen St. Pierre, head of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, says the Mexican law is part of changing global attitudes to the issue. "Cultural social norms are shifting around the world and in the United States. There will likely come a point when the majority see that prohibition is expensive and simply doesn't work," he says. St. Pierre points out that 13 U.S. states have already decriminalized marijuana and California has legalized it for limited medical use.

Mexico's example could also influence other developing countries in their drug policies, St. Pierre says. "Governments seeing that Washington did not condemn Mexico for its law may be bolder in their own legislation. Countries are becoming aware that the United States with its millions of drug users should not be judging them on their policies," he says. In February, the former presidents of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico signed a statement calling for decriminalization of several narcotics. "Current drug-repression policies are firmly rooted in prejudices, fears and ideological visions," it said. (On Aug. 25, the Argentine supreme court essentially legalized the private use of small amounts of marijuana.)

But some see the Mexican laws as a step back rather than forward. Critics in Mexico say that decriminalizing users but not sellers will only strengthen the trafficking mafias that are waging a bloody turf war in Mexico. More than 12,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence in the past three years. The cartels make an estimated $30 billion smuggling narcotics north to American users and some $5 billion more selling to the Mexican market. "It is illogical to have a law that allows drug consumption but does not control where it is coming from," says Representative Enrique Cardenas, who voted against the bill. "It will only fuel corruption and dealing."

After reading the article “Mexico's New Drug Law May Set an Example”, I was very confused. Making a decision, whether or not to legalize narcotics is a tough one. It can not only cost millions of dollars, but it can cause irreversible damage.

A Mexican law, was passed last week decriminalizing small amounts of narcotics. This was due to the fact that “the use of force has simply failed to destroy the drug trade and other measures are needed.” Said Mexican political analyst José Antonio Crespo. Another reason is that prohibition is more expensive. However, can it really be more expensive than the damages caused, by the legalization of narcotics? I guess Mexico will find out for us and other followers.

This may have happened in Mexico, yet it will have many impacts throughout the world. As I read, many other countries are following México, making some drugs legal in small amounts. Taking that into account, making it legal the economy throughout the world, will vary because either more or less narcotics will be sold, therefore varying the drug circulating money.

Even though, I am not very sure about this topic, I believe narcotics should not be legalized. Why give permission to destroy their body and society. Not only that, but I believe since it will be more accessible, people will buy more, for it will drop in price and the production will have to increase. Let’s face it, it has been illegal for many years and there are millions of people, who are hooked on this narcotic and can’t live without them. If they buy them when they are illegal, you think they will stop now that they are legal. The fact of the matter is that they are not doing it to be rebels, just because it is illegal, they do it because their body asks for it.

Eventually, it will be so common that it will be displayed in the streets, just like alcohol and tobacco. They were once illegal, and did people stop consuming them? In fact the rate of consumption increased rapidly, and now it is so common that we have lost the perception of what it really is and what it does to you.

So, why loose all the work we have done, just by giving up. Are we really going to let drug dealers and consumers manipulate us? By legalizing the drug we are giving them the right, to do what is wrong. We are basically contradicting ourselves and taking a step backwards. Are we really that coward, to think we are incapable of handling that waste of society?

I think this quote says it all “Critics in Mexico say that decriminalizing users but not sellers will only strengthen the trafficking mafias that are waging a bloody turf war in Mexico. More than 12,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence in the past three years. The cartels make an estimated $30 billion smuggling narcotics north to American users and some $5 billion more selling to the Mexican market. "It is illogical to have a law that allows drug consumption but does not control where it is coming from," says Representative Enrique Cardenas, who voted against the bill. "It will only fuel corruption and dealing."” I couldn’t agree more. After reading this quote theres no maybe's, but's, or if's. Narcotics should not be legalized.

Finally, I believe passing this law is a decision many are going to regret, and it’s going to hit them so hard it will never be forgotten. Some just have to learn the hard way. If right now, we have millions of drug dealers, imagine legalizing it, taking away the fear that many do evade. Now what are they going to fear of? Not selling enough? Why give them permission for such insanity? I really can’t get the logic out of it. Drugs, are synonyms for chaos, so why invite chaos to our society? What makes you think chaos is going to say no thanks, I’d rather not.

Do You Know Who I Am … Cause I Don’t Even Know Who Am I!

2009-08-25T22:27:00.000-07:00

In Chapter Five, everything revolves around decorum. What is really that strange word, decorum? Where does it come from? “The ancient Romans coined a word to describe this kind of character-based agreeability: decorum.” It is having the proper manners and conduct to fit in. According to Kenneth Burke, it is the simplest tool for persuasion. This is because, when you get your audience to identify with you, you gain credibility and the audience enters a comfort- trustworthy state.

Decorum is basically what we have to live by to survive. Even though, many people say they don’t care what people think about them, the truth is everyone does. Some show it more than others, but let’s face it we live in a disapproving society. A society was you can’t reveal your true self, for you are expected to behave a certain way, in order to succed and not be criticized. In the end, we do have feelings, which are what makes us be concerned about our reputation.

Many people think they are weak, because they care what people think, yet this is not a matter of weak and brave, it is a matter of doing whatever it is needed to succeed. Countless people, want to themselves as being brave, by saying they don’t care what others think about them, but at the end what are they gaining? Yes, there different, but being different isn’t always good. I mean yes, you have to have personality, but stay within the standards of society. Nevertheless, one out of many actually impose a change by being different. I’m not saying don’t risk it, for you could be that one, but balance your consequences, is it really worth it?

Therefore, what is the definition of right and wrong? There is none. Society and the environment you live in put up rules and traditions, which make you believe something is wrong or right. What wrong to you may seem right to me. Making right and wrong undefined. It is what others make you believe.

Living in this world, is not that easy, for people always criticize us for either not being ourselves or because the way we really are. It is crazy, if we act as ourselves people may dislike us, but if we don’t, then they tells us why do we always have to wear a mask to hide, who we really are. “When in Rome, do as the Romans do; but when you are not in Rome doing as the Romans do might get you into trouble.” This quote explains the confusing chaotic society we belong to. Here a right thing doesn’t even exist!

We are never going to please everybody, which is why most of us do what the majority has accepted. When they show the example of bumper sticker on the car “You own the car, but it owns your job.” Perfectly explains how we are free to de indecorous, but it will bring consequences. We can do whatever we want, but indirectly certain things restrain us from doing it, meaning the word “free” is just an illusion.

We live in such a superficial material world, that even what we wear affects how a person will treat you. This is best explained by, when Joe says “Look for the guy with the best shoes, but don’t buy the shoes. Buy the colors.” This basically means if you wear or follow what is the trend and stay in the range, you will be accepted in society. To me one word can describe it ridiculous. Yet, it’s cruel reality.

So, really who are we? That is a tough question most of us can’t answer because we have been so many different persons, we really don’t know which one is the real us. We have had to act accordingly and change depending to the public or situation for years. We have adapted to a fake us. We have lost our essence, just because we have to fit in.

“A good politician changes his language, behavior, and even his dress to suit the expectations of particular audiences.” Today we may vote for him, but maybe tomorrow he’s not the one we voted for. Think about it… our role model today may not be the same tomorrow.

In Chapter six, it also talks about more tools on becoming a credible leader. The author can not stress any more how appearance is so important. This is why I believe you should trust no one but yourself. There are some great actors out there.

In order to persuade someone, the most important points are to get your audience to like you and trust you. In order to get there, the author teaches us three techniques from Aristotle: virtue, practical wisdom, and selfness.

These three techniques basically boil to the same main point, of portraying yourself. How the audience wants you to be. “You don’t even have to do what your heart knows is right; you simply must be seen to have the “right” values- your audience values that is.” Since, values vary from person to person, nothing is ever right, it’s just a point of view. Therefore, to persuade someone you need to agree with them to make them feel comfortable. “You want to look like a good person- “good” that is in their eyes.” Persuading someone has a lot of appearance and fakeness to it, sadly but truly it is the most effective method.

So, next time someone tries to persuade you, really try to find out what is it that you want and who are you. Don’t let others play with your mind and make you believe, you want something you really don’t. Always remember “It can spring from a truly noble person or be faked by the skillful rhetorician. Rhetoric is an agnostic art; it requires more adaptation than righteous.” Arguing is the art of denigrating the facts and truly finding yourself. So, don’t let that temporary trustworthiness fool you. Yet, use it as a tool while persuading.

Persuading to me sounds like a terrible crime, but hey we live in this world and we all need to survive some way or another. I am not saying you should kill to get what you want, don’t get me wrong, but use other methods like the ones explained above. They are not morally correct. Yet, once again what really is morally correct? I guess there is only one theory to explain this: Survival of the Fittest. It’s human nature.

A Permanent Strategy

2009-08-24T19:45:00.000-07:00

When we look at the Juan Valdez logo, what do you see? All I see is a typical Colombian farmer and a mule in the mountains. Now who would ever think a farmer and a mule put together on mountains, would actually be chosen as the most important publicity icon in the United States. This wasn’t any contest, it was the famous Advertising Week contest in New York in the year 2005. He competed amongst many other well known logos worldwide, like Ronald McDonald, the Energizer bunny, the Nike check and so on. Subsequently, really how did this mule Conchita and this farmer Juan Valdez, get so much recognition?

“Now it is almost like a fashion icon, before going for coffee wasn’t a trend, now many teens grownups love going for a coffee, some even depend on it.”

I believe, it was all a strategic marketing technique. If you research the history of Juan Valdez, it didn’t just pop out of the blue, there were many years of planning and thinking ahead. Being a very successful logo, there must me a lot behind it, therefore what does this logo transmit us? What does each symbol mean? Me being a Colombian, I connect i with honor, for it is the best coffee in the world. It is simply unique.

That farmer you see is just one in a million, out in the Colombian mountains, who works hard producing the coffee, with love and passion, not only that but with premium quality. Everybody asks themselves what is it that Colombian coffee has, that no other coffee in the world has? What is that special ingredient? To me it is all in the hands of these Colombian farmers who handle each bean with love, passion, desire, and dedication. Every single coffee bean picked up manually by one of those humble , yet hard working Colombian Farmers, is then placed one by one into a bag and shipped all over the world. This is what makes Colombian coffee different, and more exclusive than any other. Therefore, we are not only just sending coffee, we are spreading affection and caringness so others can enjoy.

With this trademark, we as Colombians have taken a step forward, showing the world we not only have cocaine, kidnappers, and poverty. We are better than that, and just because some out of many decide to ruin our reputation, we just won’t give up, because we are more than that superficial image. We are surrounded by many positive prideful possessions like, having the best coffee in the world. Not only that, but being picked up by honest hard working families who strive to become better every day. Who prove the rest of the world wrong. As a result Juan Valdez is not only amazing coffee, but for me it also symbolizes dedication, perseverance, and values.

Therefore, our coffee has a lot of ingredients and its recipe isn’t that simple, making it the essence of Colombian coffee. This brand has become so big, that not only has its reputation to Colombian been reward full, but it is now capable of competing with Starbucks. That is a lot to say. So, I am really proud of these people, who stand up for us and show the world there is another side to Colombia and its people. We are more than what people portrays us like.

Hence, this is not only a great reward for Colombians, but also I believe it will help the economy. Not only by all the coffee exports, but many might get intrigued to come and visit Colombia. This will boost our economy, but most important of all show the real Colombia, not the gossip Colombia many people make up. It’s time for the world to see, the actual reality of Colombia. We worked for our reputation, we deserve getting the truth revealed!

Finding The Importance Of Arguing

2009-08-23T22:07:00.000-07:00

As I read Chapters Three and Four I could very well relate it with my life. In Chapter Three it basically revolves around the three main points when arguing. They are blame, values, and choice. I have personally experienced the three and after all my experiences I agree completely with the author. When I have used blame it really hasn’t gotten me anywhere, for blame is using guilt and conviction against someone, which isn’t going to make them agree with you. Obviously no one is going to accept a punishment. For example when he says “Who moved my cheese?” The person who moved it isn’t going to admit it without giving an excuse, which you may not care about, yet defends their position. When you use the value tactic, I believe its better, but not quite the best. This is because as he says “Morals are inarguable in deliberative rhetoric.” This is so true, changing a belief you were almost born with isn’t going to happen so easily. Since we were born, our parents started teaching us our values and morals. Consequently all those years learning them actually pay off, you are not going to in a short period of time change what you have been taught for, many many years. Yes, using morals may work, but why not just go with the easy uncomplicated choice tactic. When there is a choice that means there is an option or a door to solving the problem. When you talk about the past, it is gone there is nothing we can do about it, finito. As a result that is why blame isn’t very effective. Yet, when you leave it up to someone and you give them options, you still have a chance to win. By giving an option, you have a much higher chance of the other person agreeing with you, for you are taking them into account and showing them you care. You are not being self centered or stubborn, you actually want the best for both and transmit openness.

I loved the example of when the author tells us to give an extreme choice first so your opponent weakens and is more vulnerable. This takes place when the author and his wife are choosing their sons name. He first says this strange hideous name, yet he actually wants to name him George, but knows his wife doesn’t like it. So, after saying that horrendous name, when he says fine lets name him George his wife says “You know, George doesn’t really sound that bad.” I he would have said George from the start she probably would have said no, but since he is giving her choices and making her feel like she matters, makes her give in easily. Accordingly, in Chapter Three the lesson was focusing on the future, will get you farther than focusing in the past or the present. Since, the future hasn’t been decided, you still have control over it, meaning you’re a step ahead of the game and could win your battle.

In Chapter Four it elaborated those three topics a little bit more and linked with three different categories. These categories are argument by character, argument by logic, and argument by emotion. Depending on the situation you choose the tool you need. Unlike the ones in chapter three these are all as effective, if you know when and how to use them. I believe argument by character is very selfish and stubborn method, it is basically “it is because I said so.” Argument by logic is when you use facts or evidence, which makes your opponent think. Lastly argument by emotion, which I believe is the easiest to use, in short words it means when you play with others feelings. I personally like this tactic the best because once you encounter emotions, the heart takes over the mind and your opponent becomes weaker. This is because I believe most of us humans follow our heart before consulting with our brain. The heart simply takes over the brain. This is not a voluntarily action it just happens. When this happens your brain may say don’t do it, but your heart will make you do it. You lose total control. I can say this from personal experience, especially in the love department. I mean why do we keep going back to those who hurt us? The only explanation I can think about is, because our emotions won’t let us think logically. This is why even though everybody tells us over and over again, you deserve a lot better, and sometimes we even know it, yet we are incapable of deviating from what our heart really wants. So, by playing with words and sympathizing as the author states “Registering concern for your audiences emotions and then changing the mood to suite your argument. “ Which basically means gain control of the situation by making the other feel like you really took them into account, and their point is as important as yours. While listening to their point of view they are giving you tools “ one of the best resources comes straight from your opponents mouth.” So, after listening to them and making them feel important ,you have been given all the tools necessary , including their point, which you need to use against them.

Fundamentally, these two chapters did a very well job explaining the main points. I can say this because not only have I understood perfectly what the author is trying to say, but I have experienced each and every one in my daily life. For, next time I am in a situation like this one, I will stop think and then act putting to use these helpful hints.

To finalize, we have to face it our lives are filled with arguments, but can you imagine life without arguments it would be plane boring. Arguments are what keep us going and striving to reach that end point, our inspiration. “If life were free of contingencies, then we could live by a few rules written in stone that would apply to all our decisions. Every baby would come with an operating manual, the same guide that worked for her older brother. Every rule of thumb would apply to every situation. The early bird would always catch the worm, everything would be cheaper by the dozen, and the world would come in two colors: black and white.”

So, we don’t have to hate arguing, we have to learn how to argue and it may sound ironic, but actually enjoy it. Feel the satisfaction of getting your point across, being wise and knowing how to handle the situation. It’s all a matter of technique. So let’s become masters.

The Power Of Words...Fight Or Argue?...Lose Or Win?

2009-08-20T20:10:00.000-07:00

While reading chapter two of Heinrich's book Thank You For Arguing I found it very helpful and very interesting. This chapter mainly talked about achieving your goals. It starts off by discussing and emphasizing the difference between a fight and an argument. I personally believe differentiating the two is the key in understanding the authors point. He gives many different examples and situations, yet they all revolve around that main idea. So, what really is the difference between a fight and an argument?

Isn’t a fight an argument or an argument a fight? The answer is NO! They are two totally different things not even closely related to each other, yet many people tend to confuse them. “In a fight, each disputant tries to win. In an argument, they try to win over an audience-which can comprise the onlookers, television viewers, an electorate or each other.” Simply by reading this quote from our common sense we can infer that by arguing you can reach your goal better than by fighting. This is a logical topic for many of us, yet for many it isn’t. Being a logical topic for many of us it sounds simple yet, many don’t know how to apply it in their daily lives. That is why this chapter goes step by step with you, to help you reach your desired goal in a wise manner.

In this short but concise powerful quote “You succeed in an argument when you persuade your audience. You win a fight when you dominate the enemy.” Shows that if you are smart enough to use strong arguments and stir up people’s thoughts and emotions you can gain a whole lot, but just by putting up a fight you only gain the satisfaction of “winning”. Why do I put those quotations around winning? This is because when you win a fight it’s not really winning, you think you won but really has the other opponent changed his point of view? Maybe not, but because of the tools used in fighting such as fear and torture you say you won. A person who fights is a coward or an ignorant that has to rely on other sources because he can’t win on his own. This situation is explained in the book when George’s dad says “argument by the stick; when words failed him, he used his fists.” Meaning he has to rely un fighting because his words have no meaning what so ever.

We can make a connection comparing this lesson to sports. When you argue its fair play, and when you cheat and use fighting as your alternative you don’t go by the rules. You usually cheat when you are losing and have no other option. A great example of an argument in this chapter is Mariah Carey. Through the means of a song she tries to change her ex-boyfriends mind by giving him reason of why they belong together. She is giving him a valid argument which makes him think, yet she is not pressuring him by threatening him or begging him. The decision is his to make after all. This is one of the big differences between a fight and an argument. The difference is very well contrasted when it says “You can give the horse salt to stimulate its desire for water (arousing its emotions, if you will); you can persuade it to follow you to a stream (the choice part); but getting it to commit to drinking poses the toughest rhetorical problem.”

When you argue you can play with people’s emotions, yet you don’t force them to do anything, instead when you fight you are eliminating their free will making them give up, not necessarily changing their position voluntarily. So, the key is playing with others minds, yet keeping it low profile with strong points that will make the other person consciously want to change opinion. A great example of this as motioned in chapter two is the South Beach diet popularity. How did it become a best seller? The secret was given to us; it was all a game with the mind. It said and portrayed everything people wanted to hear and infer “no-big-deal tactic: The Delicious, Doctor Designed, Foolproof Plan for Fast and Healthy Weight Loss.” This immediately captivates the readers emotions and takes over the mind, making them want to buy this “to good to be true product. “

I want to share a story I can relate to this whole argument fight tactic. A couple years ago I believed that by fighting I was going to win all my battles. I was rude, disrespectful, loud, and wanted everything my way. At first I never lost or at least I thought I did. Looking back I realized I may have won those battles, but I didn’t gain anything from them but stress, rivals, enemies, and hatred. So, yeah I may have won the battle but what I lost was worth more than that insignificant battle. The hurt I caused others and I was more valuable than those meaningless battles. What I was doing was totally pointless.

One day someone told me you can’t win every single battle, you have to select the ones that are really worth it. So I sat down and started looking back and realized many battles I had fought were totally pointless, even some I even knew I had already lost before starting. That was when I realized why am I wasting my time? What am I gaining from this? The answer was absolutely nothing! I am in fact losing more than I originally had. That was the day I actually began analyzing the situations and using strong arguments to support my point.

Suddenly I started getting my point across easier and people would actually take me into account. I then began really winning the battles I had once thought I won. It felt great. There was no need for me to be rude or disrespectful. I solved all my problems with evidence and choosing words carefully.

I am glad it didn’t take me long to realize the wrong path I was taking. That is why when reading this chapter I could connect so much with the author. It was like if he knew me and had written this for me. I can share a bond with the author when he says “She has a biting tongue but knows how to restrain it to win an argument. “ Because I still get that urge to scream and misbehave, yet I know how to hide it in order to actually win.

Even if it takes agreeing with the other person when you don’t, you can’t let minor obstacles stop you from reaching your main goal. You can not deviate from you mission. So now I’m going to leave off with this quote that really impacted me “ While the rest of the world fights, we’ll argue. And argument gets you what you want more than fighting does.” So are you going to fight or argue? Win or Lose? It’s your decision!