How Much Power do Voters Really Have?

I read an article in the New York Times today that made me question the legitimacy of our political system even on a local level. You can find the article here. The article says that Mayor Rahm Emanuel used his political power to get Peter Coffey elected as ward committeeman in Chicago's 47th ward.

Alderman Ameya Pawar did not support the mayor's choice for ward committeeman saying that "it would have been nice to let the voters decide who would have been the best committeeman." Isn't the whole point of an election to let the voters decide who to elect? The article is titled Neophyte Runs Into Realities of Politics but why is this a reality of politics? Does it have to be a reality of politics? This seems to be another example of the shady politics that have gone on in Illinois. After reading this article, the Blagojevich scandal starts to make more sense. If these politicians can get away with things like choosing who the next candidate is going to be, why can't they take it a little farther by making people pay to play?

Hanukkah Harry Saves Christmas!

In the spirit of the holidays, I thought I'd share this video that was shown to me a couple of years back. The video is an SNL skit called Hanukkah Harry. I think that it really exemplifies the spirit of working together, helping out the less fortunate, and also forgiveness.

World Wide Terror Networks

Yesterday I saw an article in The New York Times that gave me a glimpse of the power that some of the major terror groups now have because they are now going international. The article is called "Beirut Bank Seen as a Hub of Hezbollah's Financing" and it reports on a bank that has been found to be laundering money for an international cocaine ring connected to the terrorist group Hezbollah.

Working on an international level has allowed Hezbollah to become Lebanon's major military and political power. Hezbollah is using the Lebanese Canadian Bank as a hub to move large sums of money into the legitimate financial system even though there are sanctions in place to try to cut off Hezbollah's economic lifeblood.

According to the article, some senior bank managers had assisted some account holders in washing drug money by mixing it with the proceeds of used cars bought in the United States and then sold in Africa. It is scary to think that even with all of the anti-terrorist measures that the U.S has taken, terrorist operations still go on in the U.S.

The most terrifying thing however, is that the scheme was only discovered by accident when the banks untainted assets were being sold, "with American blessings", to the French banking giant Societe Generale. If auditors had not been called in to scrub the banks books, this scheme would be going on today and no one would have any idea.

Improving Your Focus

Today I came across a new camera called the LYTRO camera. Basically it allows you to take a picture and then choose what you focus on later. The LYTRO website shows some of the amazing reviews that the camera has recieved. Popular Science said that "digital cameras have consistently and dramatically improved... but those changes have been incremental compared with the leap taken in Lytro's light-field camera." Popular Science even gave the LYTRO camera the 2011 innovation of the year. 

All of this high praise made me think that this was photography's liberator of the people. Helping normal people to create more professional looking pictures. This was until I looked around a little more and found a blog post by Chase Jarvis, a professional photographer, who said in his blog that LYTRO's technology combined with other technologies that are being developed could truly lead to something amazing.

The part that I found interesting was when Jarvis backtracked a little, saying that the LYTRO technology could create amazing pictures "Unless… your pictures have no focus." He says in order to make your pictures stand out from the crowd, you need to focus on subject, content, meaning, and artistic vision. This LYTRO is a photographic tool. It does not manufacture amazing pictures for you.  Below is a video by another pro photographer Jared Polin. In this video, he points out some flaws of the camera. Just like Chase Jarvis, he talks about how people take photos with bad composition but overlook it because they can choose what to focus on. 

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It's interesting that the professionals just view the camera as another trend and that it won't improve the quality of images people take, but on the other hand non-professionals are singing the cameras praises and saying that it improves their photography. After seeing the video, I have to side with the professionals. Just because new soccer cleats come out that are 50% lighter doesn't mean that wearing them will make you a better player. Pros are pros for a reason. Instead of trying to find a shortcut to the professional level, you have to find a way to separate yourself from the rest because if the camera had the possibility of turning you into a professional, you have to think everyone would have one.

Is This Really in the Christmas Spirit?

This is a recent Best Buy commercial that completely goes against the spirit of Christmas. In the video the women beats Santa at present buying and hasn't left any room for Santa to leave his presents. In a way this goes represent the American value of competitiveness. Santa was too slow so a faster better gifted person took up his spot. The Christmas industry had evolved and Santa couldn't keep up, what a shame. We are surrounded by so many advertisements for all of the latest electronics that represent a fast paced world where things are only new for a few days because there is always something better. It's sad that the spirit of Christmas seems to be fading away as the magic of Santa is being bested by low-price electronics. Unfortunately, the Christmas magic has been fading for some time. It is now thought that children aren't learning the Christmas music that used to a staple of the holidays. This has got me thinking, why have larger corporations been able to commercialize cornerstones of society like Christmas? Is this commercialization unavoidable? Also are there other traditions that have started to lose their true meaning as corporations look for new ways to expand their business?

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Modern Civil Liberties Violations

We have been talking a lot in class about civil liberties that have been violated in the past. How do those civil liberties violations from the past compare to civil liberties violations from the 21st century?

In the past we have seen many civil liberties violationed. This includes the Sedition Act, which stopped anybody from writing anything that opposed the government, and the Japanese Internment during World War II.

Today we are still experiencing civil liberties violations. Guantanamo Bay is an ever-present example of civil liberties being violated. The Justice Department decided that the camp was outside of U.S. legal jurisdiction. Then the Bush administration said that the detainees were not entitled to any of the protections of the Geneva Convention.

Any prisoner that is held in Guantanamo Bay is denied the right of habeas corpus as it states in this article. The Geneva Convention also protects the detainees from torture which has occurred in Guantanamo Bay. Finally people have been held in Guantanamo Bay for over two years without trial.

This leads to the questions, why are civil liberties constantly violated during wartime?  Are the civil liberties that are being violated today more or less justified than the civil liberties that were violated in the past?

Connections to the Past

I recently traveled with my american studies class to Lincoln Park to see the play "Clybourne Park." Walking around Lincoln Park I was struck by the apartments that seemed to have their front doors below street level. It appeared that the new Lincoln Park had covered up the Lincoln Park of the past.

After doing some research on the Lincoln Park neighborhood, I came across this article. It seems that residents of the area originally ranged from very affluent people focused on the park and the loop, to German farmers and shopkeepers in the North, and to industrial workers living close to the factories along the North section of the Chicago River.

The area ran into hard times during the Great Depression. Owners who had fallen on hard times neglected their properties. After World War II, residents of the southeastern section of Lincoln Park worried that their neighborhood would soon become a slum. This led to the Lincoln Park Conservation Association being created in 1954. This led to an urban-renewal program that encouraged private restoration of properties.

This led to a stark resistance from the poorer residents of Lincoln Park who resided in the southwestern area   of Lincoln Park. They complained that they were being priced out of their homes. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the land values have increased dramatically and pretty much all of the poor have left. Lincoln Park is now one of the highest-status neighborhoods in the city.

Taking all of this into account, I still wonder about the raised street. The reason for not completely filling in everything could be completely monetary. By not filling in an apartment there is another place for someone to live and pay rent. After considering what I saw in the play "Clybourne Park," I think the reason for not filling in everything goes deeper than that.

In the play "Clybourne Park," the father of a Korean War veteran wants to bury the belongings of his son who committed suicide. The wife of the father however, keeps telling her husband to wait until tomorrow to bury her sons possessions. Why have her husband wait? Why not get those bad memories out of her life?

No one wants to completely erase events in their lives. They like to hold on to memories that remind them of the past. No one ever completely forgets and are always affected by their past. We see this in the second act of "Clybourne Park." The family moving in to the house where the son committed suicide rethinks buying the house as soon as they learn of the suicide. Why should it matter if a person committed suicide in your house 50 years ago? It had no bearing on their life and they weren't connected to the son at all. But the fact that it happened affects their view on the house.

The same ideas expressed in the play show up in the decision to not fill in the entire street. Lincoln Park strives to be a cultural mecca and showing some signs that the past still is present in the community help them achieve that. Successful neighborhoods usually have ties to the past and in turn the residents feel more connected to the community and each other. This want for a connection to the past is why I believe Lincoln Park chose not to fill in the entire street.

Why not Natural Gas?

Today I heard, for the first time, about cars running on natural gas. This seemed like a great idea. Natural gases are abundant, cheaper than fossil fuels, and they burn much cleaner. They are also a lot safer because the ignition temperature is about twice as high as fossil fuels. Why don't we use fossil fuels to power our cars?

After doing some research I found a couple of pages that gave me some interesting answers. This Wiki Answers page has some theories but I still think that natural gas is a viable way forward. One of the reasons was that the infrastructure for natural gas isn't in place. We don't have the filling stations to meet the demand. Also it costs around $2,000 to convert a car to run on natural gas. It seems to me both of these problems can be solved. Eventually we will run out of fossil fuels and will be forced to find an alternate fuel source. Why not start the conversion process now so that we can slowly make the change to natural gas instead of being forced to hurriedly make the conversion sometime in the future?

It seems to me that the thing that is standing in the way of natural gas right now is lobbying from the petroleum companies. They are incredibly wealthy and powerful so they can stifle any attempts to find an alternate fuel source. In my mind though, the smart play for them would be to embrace the switch early so they can be the leaders going into the future. Fossil fuels will run out so you might as well get ahead of the game. Already a lot of industrial vehicles such as forklifts run on propane. Also Honda has a natural gas powered Civic. The only problem is that there are only 800 natural gas filling stations in the U.S.

Sportsmanship= Humanity?

Last Wednesday we talked about competition and winning. We discussed sportsmanship compared to, "If you're not cheating then you're not trying!" Why do people in the midst of a battle, whether it be a sport or a real battle, show sportsmanship when at the same time they are trying to beat the other team?

From my experience playing soccer, sportsmanship has always been displayed on the field. If team A has the ball and someone from team B gets injured, team A will kick the ball out of bounds to the the injured player get off the field to receive treatment. When play resumes, team B will give the ball back to team A. This is not a written rule but one that is universally practiced because even though the teams are trying to beat each other, they want to do it in a fair way.

This idea has been present all throughout humanity. During World War I on Christmas day, German soldiers, who were fighting the British and French, put decorated Christmas Trees in front of their trenches. This led to a truce for the night. German, British, and French soldiers started singing carols together, exchanged gifts, and even started playing a game of soccer. This shows us that even in the trenches, one of the most inhumane environments, the soldiers still possessed the will to hang on the a little bit of humanity.

More evidence of this is found in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's book, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch." In this book, Solzhenitsyn writes about the terrible conditions in the Russian Gulag. The prisoners are in a constant battle with one another for survival. This survival of the fittest mentality would lead one to think that the prisoners would be turned into animals with no regards for human decencies, the opposite is true however. Solzhenitsyn writes that the only way for the prisoners to survive is to work together to maintain a degree of humanness. It is the ones that lose this degree of humanness that are the ones to die first. When eating dinner, the prisoners to not immediately devour their food and pick scraps off the ground, but instead take their time. This display of human behavior is what allows the prisoners to survive the Gulag.

We as people need a certain amount of discipline and order to maintain what makes us human. You see examples of this all around our communities and it is what makes us humans. It separates us from "animals" and it is what has allowed our species to thrive and grow.

Time Travel?

On Saturday my mom showed me an article that really caught my attention. It is a National Geographic article entitled "Particles Moved Faster Than Speed of Light?" The main idea of the article is that a scientific team called OPERA shot particles called Neutrinos from Geneva Switzerland and measured how long it took the particles to reach Gran Sasso Italy. The particles ended up getting to their destination so quickly that OPERA believes that the particles traveled faster than the speed of light which is approximately 186,000 miles a second.  If the particles did travel faster than light it would open up the possibility of time travel and traveling to alternate parallel universes. Before any conclusions are made, there are going to be many other tests to try to back up OPERA's findings.

Connectivity

In American Studies class on Friday, Mr. Bolos presented the question how connected do you feel to the other people in the classroom? On first thought I would like to say that I do feel somewhat of a connection. I see my classmates everyday and that creates a more relaxed atmosphere. The neat thing about being in a class that is mainly discussion based is that you get to know more about people based on their comments and views on certain subjects. In this way you get to know someone better then in a math class for example, where people really only raise their hands when they have an answer to a problem.

This same scenario applies to everyday situations in life as well. I see the same people in the morning everyday when I wait for the train. At first everybody was very standoffish and didn't acknowledge each other. Now though, after a couple of weeks of seeing each other everyday, the people give each other friendly nods and make conversation while waiting for the train.

Good Deeds Done Anonymously

Today in American Studies, the class was having a discussion about the advertisements pertaining to 9/11 on during the football game. The ad that was the most heavily discussed was the Verizon ad. The discussion generally revolved around the idea that Verizon was unfairly using a tragedy to make money. I feel though that this conclusion is not really fair. Why single out Verizon for this act? I feel that Americans as a whole demonstrate the idea of wanting everybody to know about the good deeds that they do anonymously. When someone donates money to build a building, he gets his name on a little plaque for all of the world to see. When someone wants to show how much they care about the environment, she buys a Prius instead of planting a tree or lowering their carbon output. Because of this I do not think that it is fair to single out Verizon for making a commercial when we ourselves are guilty of this very act. The only organization I know of that gives without expecting any return is Barcelona F.C. The club pays UNICEF to have the UNICEF sponsor on the fronts of their jerseys. In the end though, we have to expect this because of the type of society that we live in. One in which a company has to make money to stay afloat because the individual businesses are made up of shareholders that expect a profit to be turned.

Standardized tests

Today I was sitting in my SAT prep class which lasts for about 3.5 hours. As we were going over the proper strategies for the writing section, I couldn't help but think to myself that this was the most pointless activity. Why  do we need to take standardized tests in the first place? Why do colleges need one more thing to look at before they make their decision about who to except? At the beginning of the course, I was told that the SAT is more of an intelligence measure and the ACT measures what you have learned throughout school. I'm pretty sure that one could tell a lot about a persons intelligence from the levels of classes that they were taking and from the grades that they were receiving. Also don't the grades say a little bit about what on has learned in school? If a college wants to know how much you have learned throughout school, well it seems to me that the grades a student received would be a good indication of what a student has learned.

Why is there the need to standardize everything? Classes at different schools may not cover the exact same material so why does the go over the same material. It would seem to me that a test from a math class is a better indication of what a student has learned about geometry. That way the material on the test correlates to what has been going on inside of the classroom.

Finally I don't think that one test should be such a major factor in acceptance. Not everyone, including myself, tests very well and just because someone can't pick which sentence works the best in a paragraph, doesn't mean that they have no writing skills. As I was sitting in class I couldn't help but thinking that grades were the major deciding factor for colleges and the 3.5 hours sitting in a classroom going over grammar was really getting in the way of me doing homework.

The Price of Gas

I have heard people complaining about the prices of gas for a long time now. How gas is hovering around $4 a gallon and that is making it difficult for people to afford to drive their cars. I do agree that gas is expensive but it is a lot cheaper then other liquids that people spend their money on. Fiji water, for example, costs up to $4 a liter. Since there are over 3 liters in one gallon, you are paying triple the cost of gas. Then, of course, there is the ever-present Starbucks where one can easily spend $5 on a cup of coffee. Also when you consider that in the state of Illinois, there is a $0.57 tax on each gallon of gas, the gas companies are actually getting about $3.43 per gallon. I am not saying that gas is cheap, but I am saying that it is cheaper then a lot of things that Americans take for granted.