This weekend

This weekend I’m going to my mom’s house for the weekend to babysit my two brothers while my mom is in Maryland. One is fifteen years old and autistic, and the other is seven years old and too smart for his own good. It’s going to be very hectic. However, I will have my car, so I won’t have to deal with children with cabin fever. A good friend of mine might be coming over at some point to keep me company, and keep the children in line. Keeping the children in line will be necessary, seeing as they sometimes bicker like two seven year olds. I love them both, but they can most certainly be a handful.

180

180 was an excellent movie. It was interesting, engaging and thought provoking. I particularly liked what he said towards the end that if open country dies, we die too. We need some time to get away from all the havoc that daily life brings, and going out to the middle of nowhere, where there isn't a sign of industrial movement in sight, is the perfect way to do it. Camping is a great way to do this. Hiking is another. Either way the outcome is the same. You have a sense of peace in the mountains, or wherever you consider your fortress of solitude to be. That's what I got out of this movie.

Old energy perspective of "free energy"

During the late 1800’s, many scientists talked about the idea of “free energy”, a utopian theory where electricity is cheap enough to produce that every citizen who owned property would have it in their homes for no cost to them. More than one hundred and twenty years later, this topic is still being researched. However, there is one problem with this theory. Taking away the electricity bills from our country would result in much less money flowing through our economy. Not only that, but it would result in hundreds of thousands of people without jobs. If the electricity is free, this means that there is no possible profit, and therefore, there would be no money to pay the workers, leading to layoffs all across the country. In these tough economic times, this would prove detrimental. Perhaps what the focus should be on, rather than “free energy”, is increasing the efficiency of the energy produced today, resulting in lower costs. We have the technology and the means to do just that.

Denial

To be in denial is to look toward other sources outside of yourself to blame for your problems. For instance, if you are trying to lose weight, and are unsuccessful, you blame the Cheetos or Doritos or Oreos or other foods like those for being so delicious when in reality, you are in control. You can decide whether or not to partake in the eating of sweets. You are the one who can control what you eat. The marketers of snack foods are just doing their jobs. They try and lure you in to buying and consuming their products. There is nothing that dictates that you buy them. That is what it means to be in denial.

In Class Writing: Luther Standing Bear and Chief Seattle's speech

In the Luther Standing Bear statement, he talks about the differences between “white man” and his tribe, the Lakotas. He explains that what “white man” sees as wild, like animals and wilderness, the Lakotas see as tame. They feel that the animals have just as many rights as they did, and they therefore never enslaved animals, and they only killed what they needed for food and clothing, a very different way of thinking than that of the Europeans. Chief Seattle’s speech covers the fact that his tribe’s relevance is significantly decreasing because of the Europeans bit by bit taking over their land. Also, he feels that the Europeans are not treating them as an equal but rather inferior.

Chief Seattle’s speech has long been controversial. Did he really speak these words? Or is it just a story that Dr. Smith made up? Several issues come out of this speech. For one, records of him giving this speech have been translated. There is no record of the speech in its original language. For another, it has been revised and retranslated so many times in the last century. There were even lines that were added. So how do we know for sure if these were the words he spoke, or were they just put in his mouth? This is one of the biggest mysteries, one that will more than likely never be solved.

Remembering Chief Seattle: Reversing Cultural Studies of a Vanishing Native American

Crisca Bierwert

American Indian Quarterly

Vol. 22, No. 3 (Summer, 1998), pp. 280-304

Published by: University of Nebraska Press

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/stable/1184814

Chief Seattle's speech: real or not?

As I was reading this speech, I found myself torn. Part of me thinks it's hard to make something like this up, and another thinks that it does sound awfully poetic. The person who supposedly translated it doesn't know the language that Seattle's people speak. Some of the things he said were a little strange too. He basically said that they were not worried about losing more of their homeland to the Europeans. I wouldn't think that that would be the case. However, I guess we will never really know whether it happened for real or not.

Controversy in China

While hydro power is one of the most productive forms of alternative energy, it does not come without controversy. It was first proposed over 90 years ago by Sun Yat Sen, but it wasn't until 1992 when Chinese premier Li Peng proposed the 3 Gorges Dam, set to be one of the largest dams in the world, that it was built. The project cost $180 billion. It was meant to control the flow of the Yangtze River, as well as provide electricity, ultimately to boost their economy. While it has done just that, it has also created a new range of problems. The dam is preventing the river from getting rid of pollutants, leading to a significant decrease in the quality of the water supply, causing soil erosion, which results in landslides, and forced more than 1.4 million citizens to move. This is causing much controversy, and will continue to do so until these problems are fixed.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1671000,00.html