The video “World Battleground” starts out slow with very few explosions and unreadable small words. Starting during the high middle ages, this would have been the time when the world’s first empires were forming. France and England would be rallying strength and expanding throughout Western Europe. While time moves on we see larger and more frequent explosions representing vigorous battle in the region. As empires expand they will undoubtedly rub into each other. They will have their disagreements and fight for land, influence, or the areas resources. For instance, one of the most valuable resources at the time was not oil wells, but vineyards. In a time before Brita Filters and water purification plants, alcohol was safer to drink than water making it an extremely valuable resource. Large battles were often fought for the rich, fertile land of these vineyards and would explain some of the tensions in that region. However, as focus turns away from grapes, and onto fossil fuels we see an increasing amount of explosions in the Middle East. There are frequent battles in the region of varying size all the way up through the current day. This area is not known for having vast empires so I imagine that other world powers are asserting their influence on the region. The early twentieth century sees the largest amount of explosions to date paralleling the first and second world wars. In these wars many of the world’s empires show off their power on a global landscape. Technological advances in transportation and communication over the years have allowed people to spread out and battle over larger pieces of ground. Nations are at size inconceivable at the start of the video and have a man power and killing power exponentially higher.
Throughout the video I couldn’t help but notice the lack of battles on US soil. We have taken part in numerous battles across the globe but rarely have we seen an actual battle on our shores. When I think back, aside from the civil war, the only aggressions that come to mind are Pearl Harbor and 9/11. These were more isolated events then any type of foreign campaign against our country, and each led to a war with heavy destruction on the aggressor nation. I think this must be the basis of the American, military ego and possibly explains why people aren’t more against war. When you haven’t seen it with your own eyes, it’s hard to truly understand what the pains of war are.

It’s so hard to trust anyone in the oil and fuel industry. Their product is just so profitable that they seem to get whatever they want. The government is practically funded with oil profits. If everyone running for office had to wear their sponsors on their jacket like they do in a NASCAR event, there would be an Exxon Mobil or Chevron Corporation patch on every arm. Oil companies fund both sides of the isle so that they can get favors from whoever is in power. Once in power, elected officials feel a debt to these companies for giving them so much campaign money. In fact, if the officials want to get that money again for reelection, they will have to play by the oil companies rules. This is exactly what the article is referencing about President Barack Obama. He is in his first term of office and to be reelected he will need a large amount of funding, much of which will come from the oil industry. His policies reflect this as he supports the large scale drilling of natural gas reserves. Hydraulic Fracturing for this gas can be very detrimental to the environment and hurt local water sources. These water sources can become undrinkable for nearby families and animals. One has to wonder if Obama has considered the people he will be displacing with his support of large scale fracking. These are the Americans he was elected to protect and yet they are the ones who will suffer from the imposing fuel industry. The government can call it a matter of national security but I think that term lost meaning a long time ago. By decreasing our dependence on foreign oil we will be giving less money to the terrorists, or something like that. I don’t think this will even occur because according to the article most of this home grown gas will then be sold abroad. If this is true we will still rely heavily on foreign oil while the fuel companies pocket the extra cash they sucked out right out from underneath you. All in all, the average American will see few if any benefits from the large natural gas resources of the United States.

Zainab Salbi lived through quite a lot growing up in a war torn Iraq. She has seen the colors of war, which she describes with the orange of fire, the brown of dirt, and silver of missiles. She has heard the sounds of war, which are the cries of children, the sirens of emergency vehicles, but most of all the silence of humanity. Salbi illustrates a place she knows too well and it is a jarring perspective. It is much easier to go to war with a state than a people. By generalizing with terms like terrorists, or the enemy, and using tyrants like Saddam Hussein as the face of a nation we forget about the people we are really affecting. The Iraqi people are not the people we are warring against, most have no control over oil and no interest in strapping explosives to their bodies. However these people are just as affected by war as those we mean to target. Living in fear of losing family every day is a hard on the conscience especially for a mother like Zainab Salbi. Salbi says that not fearing death is a very Hollywood feeling; in reality she was very scared of dying. However the fear of losing loved ones was just as bad if not worse. She said it was like “losing the ‘I’ in ‘me’”. By this she means losing a loved one killed something inside of her, and it was like dying from the inside out, or more than one time in a day. Furthermore, these deaths become numbers; they lose meaning when you add them up into a statistic. The war sterilizes the reality of losing so many people and of displacing so many more. Salbi says that eighty percent of refugees are women and children. These women and children are so often abused and mistreated having lost their homes and family members to the war. It’s hard to imagine what this life must be like, to have to deal with such harsh realities on a regular basis. Salbi is all too familiar with the effects of war and is telling her story to bring an emotional reality to the statistics of death.

My roommates have hated our classes on inequality. I come home from class and just need to vent for a while, much to their dismay. The topic of wealth distribution rubs me the wrong way, not because it exists, but because people don’t seem to notice. Specifically, the bush tax cuts saved huge sums of money for the wealthiest portion of Americans. With our country now in huge amounts of debt, the end of the tax cuts would put money back into the country’s wallet. However there was a huge push to keep these tax cuts in effect, thus causing the government to look elsewhere for money. I was baffled that anyone outside of the upper class could support such a course of action and yet it passed. I couldn’t decide if the lower class had been bamboozled into believing that these cuts would somehow indirectly benefit them, or if the representatives voting just didn’t care about the populace they represent. Moments like these broaden the divide between classes. You can talk to me all day about trickledown economics, but it is generally proven that as income increases, a greater and greater portion of that income is then saved instead of spent. The lower classes will see a decreasing percentage of that freed cash from the tax cuts and thus separate further from the upper class.
There is a generally accepted idea that wealthy people earn their money, and I believe that this is true to some extent. I believe that by working hard or having original ideas one can improve their standing in society, however I don’t think there is a level playing field to do so. In this society, nepotism is frequently more important than education, it’s not what you know, but who you know. The upper class is generally going to more expensive schools, meeting more important people, and getting favors from other powerful upper class individuals. This keeps the cycle going in the favor of the rich and keeps it difficult for someone from a lower class to break into the elite. These favors even seem to leak into the legal system. A number of Wall Street somebodies get nailed with embezzlement and fraud charges and see relatively low amounts of jail time. If I walked into a bank and stole thousands if not millions of dollars would I get out of jail in under 5 years? No way.

The idea of managing large groups of people seems much easier than it is. One would think that with a thorough set of guidelines or instructions, they could effectively show an entire group how to complete a task, such as evacuating a city. However as shown with various evacuations such as the evacuation of Houston in Hurricane Rita, there needs to be a level of coordination between all the risk areas as well as a way to handle the mass chaos of moving thousands of people. This particular evacuation was a failure because the hoards of people didn’t have proper routing for leaving the populace areas. In addition, a lack of coordination with neighboring, high risk, areas were using the same routes and there simply wasn’t enough capacity. Managing a large group of people means taking all the variables into consideration. Every person is going to approach the situation differently and it is up to the figure in charge to make sure these various strategies are accounted for in their planning. By this I mean that overall people act surprisingly calm in the face of disaster but there are always some people who act more irrationally than the majority. One such variable would be causing an accident on the freeway that causes the mass slowing of outbound traffic from a densely populated risk area. The effects could be catastrophic unless there was a plan to get emergency personnel in to quickly clean up and move the wreckage. In the case of Japan, most people were hurt or killed in their attempt to escape the disaster than in the disaster itself. Since they are in a high risk area for earthquakes, they had above average earthquake plans already in place. Many of their buildings were made on a more strict building code than ours, and I would imagine they had an evacuation strategy for major coastal towns and populace areas. Either the plans in place weren’t communicated well enough to the populace or the variability of their efforts were unforeseen by the government. In either scenario there were a lot of arguably avoidable deaths that occurred and it is the responsibility of the government to minimize these casualties.

The concept of juveniles getting a life sentence without parole is wholly unacceptable when you consider that there are 464 of them in Pennsylvania alone. This is more than any other state in the United States of America; in fact PA alone has more juvenile lifers than any other country in the world. It’s hard to understand how this could happen, why are the children in PA any worse than children all over the rest of the globe? If it isn’t the children than it must be the law, why does our law system force so many juveniles into life without parole? Simply put, there is no justifiable reason. The laws are on the books and are carried out accordingly, but no one has stopped to question the laws themselves. In the U.S. we believe juveniles can’t be held to the same standard as adults so they are given lesser penalties for similar crimes. This is because at such a young age they are still learning and may have received some bad advice. There is plenty of time for them to get back on the right track, but once you sentence them to life without parole that time is up. By sentencing a child you are saying that no matter how hard they try, that person will never be of any good to society. I find it unbelievable that you could put such a tag on a child who can’t even watch an R rated movie yet. By sentencing a child to life you are officially cutting them off from the real world, essentially ending their life as it was. This person will never finish school, never develop lifelong relationships, never even get the chance to go out on the town for their twenty first birthday. What right do we have to take away an entire life? Some argue that abortion is wrong because you are exterminating a human life, how is this any different? A person has barely had time to develop and now they are being given up on. There is no acceptable answer to why there are so many juveniles in the Pennsylvania jail system.

Sunlight has many effects on society both direct and indirect. Here at Penn State classes are all held during daylight hours, the commotion on campus subsides when the sun sets and a new commotion begins in the downtown area for the nightlife. What if nightlife became your whole day though? In the dead of winter in Helsinki, there are only a handful of daylight hours each day. When one stops to consider the effects this would have on the human psyche, it becomes hard to believe someone would want to live there. The long hours of darkness defiantly put a physical drain on the population, making them more tired and discouraging outdoor activity. All sports must be played on an illuminated field and going for a run could be dangerous due to reduced visibility of traffic. The invisible strings would seem to lead you towards a sedentary lifestyle. In addition, many people in the video said it can lead to a level of depression. The sun is uplifting to the human spirit and they are saying that the unending darkness makes them less upbeat and enthusiastic people. To combat this, local businesses and gathering locations have been outfitted with very bright lights. You are supposed to get about fifty minutes a day with one of these lights and it will be beneficial for your mood. It’s hard to believe that this is a necessity, but it makes sense to need some form of reminder of what sunlight was like. I imagine this also has strong financial impacts on the people of Helsinki. These people have no access to solar energy, and more importantly, they have several additional hours of energy consumption for the lights they use. The bright lights mentioned in the video would defiantly have a high level of energy consumption and thus a high cost. I would bet a large portion of the average person in Helsinki’s budget goes towards heat and lighting in the long winter months. This additional expenditure could either be compensated for by a lack of saving or by a reduced amount of commercial purchases. Either of these outcomes would have a dramatic effect on the economy of Helsinki and thus more invisible strings on the people within thateconomy.

I really enjoyed the video Challenging Educational Paradigms because I have often felt that standardized education alienates some students and makes them feel less educated than others. In today’s competitive college atmosphere there is a strong desire from administrative boards to compare apples to apples. By this I mean an objective way of ranking students applying to their schools. Educational standards fluctuate from school to school and tests such as the SAT and ACT help to make comparisons between potential students easier. These tests aren’t the most accurate gauge of human intelligence however; they test a limited number of subjects and have specific strategies associated with scoring well on them. These strategies can actually be taught to you in extracurricular courses, for a cost of course. Since those who are taking these courses are getting higher scores, the programs guarantee you’re a higher test score, an imbalance in scores of wealthier students occurs. The kids taking the classes are getting better scores even if they aren’t more intelligent and thus are getting picked for college opportunities first. This is just one way that standardized tests affect students. Another is simply the lack of consideration for students with diverse strengths. The SAT’s test ones math, reading, and as of recently, writing skills. There is nowhere on this test to express ones talents in science or various arts. The video even talks about divergent thinking, which is the ability of a student to think of alternative uses for a simple item. These are all very useful skills in modern society and yet are being pushed aside as second rate talents. In addition to all this, schools have become training grounds for college. Many non college bound students feel left out, like school isn’t meant for them, because the courses don’t reflect the next step in their lives. They are ignored or simply less valuable to schools who want to boast about their continuously high test scores and great college placement rates. Programs in vocational study or the arts are cut first because they don’t align with this college bound initiative and this helps no one. In my opinion these skills could benefit many students and expand the horizons of others. By working both sides of the brain in a variety of subjects, students will be most prepared for the real world.

Remember is in indication of our imperfect prison system. Prison is meant to rehabilitate the imprisoned, its purpose is to correct behavior and adjust inmates to live with the rest of society. In reality there is very little rehabilitation that actually occurs. Inmates receive a minimal amount of counseling and often struggle in returning to society. In fact, many prisoners learn from more experienced criminals and come out more dangerous than they went in. The current prison system is very overcrowded and is doing a poor job of fixing the problem. In Remember, the author sounds like he is remorseful and regrets his crime. He has long since forgotten life on the outside of prison, but retains the memories of how he was imprisoned. By the sound of the poem, one might think he has learned his lesson and is prepared to leave prison. This however is a very difficult judgment to make. On one hand, one could certainly make a case that he wouldn’t make the same mistake again and deserves to see the outside world. This would also benefit the prison system by having one less inmate taking up space and using state funds. On the other hand, twenty six years is a long time to be in prison. The author has now been in prison longer than he has been out. His life has become prison, he is told when to bathe, when to eat, and how to dress. It would no doubt be a strain on him to adjust to modern society, to use a cell phone, computer, or find a job. Job hunting can be extremely difficult for convicts because they have acquired no skills in the time they are imprisoned and also have a disadvantage in the eyes of a potential employer. In the movie Shawshank Redemption when one of the long term inmates is released he can’t keep up with modern life and commits suicide. The lack of support of post jail inmates is what makes it hard to adjust and without learning the tools to survive in prison, convicts find themselves middle aged with social maturity of a child. Remember shows how broken our system is in that people who understand their crime still won’t have the opportunity to transition into the real world.

Is conformity a blessing or a curse? The majority of people have a natural desire to go with the flow and conform to the societal norm. On a subconscious level people tend to go along with the group even if it may not be the most rational thing for them to do. For example, my roommate and I took a road trip down to South Carolina one weekend in order to visit a friend at her college. Walking around campus we couldn’t help but notice what we referred to as the dress code. It seemed like ninety percent of the students were wearing bright polo’s, short shorts and boat shoes. We laughed for a moment at how ridiculous it was to all dress alike until we looked at each other. We were both wearing plaid flannel shirts, baggy jeans, and skate boarding sneakers. Suddenly I realized we were just wearing a different uniform, in just the span of a few states there were drastically different norms to conform to, but we conformed none the less. In class we spoke in class about the effects of conformity on the gay community. There is a general anti gay sentiment even in modern society which is what causes people to stay in the closet. Their desire to be accepted by others leads them to conceal their sexual identity and live a double life. On the other side of the table, many people who consider themselves straight may be more inclined to experiment with the other sex if it were the norm. If there was no stigma in having sexual relations with both genders, we would probably see a lot more bisexuality in society. It would seem that this idea applies to more than just homosexuals. Overwhelming conformity makes it difficult for the people, especially of low self esteem, to admit their dreams. It can be intimidating to go against the crowd, after all, how could all those people be wrong? Are social norms always negative though? Certainly not, we have a standard way of communicating with one another that relays the message to others. Body language and facial expressions, for instance, communicate social cues or feelings so that people can more easily interact with one another. Norms guide our interactions with one another, but sometimes they can be taken too seriously, at which point one has to ask what do I want.