Bahahahahaha....mann?

While I would like to say that I am long since removed from the American Political arena, I still find it interesting that there are speeches given at events that have little to do with policy and substantial information regarding how to move America in the right direction, but there is plenty of room for humour.  I like jokes, roasts, laughing...when appropriate.  As I watched clips from recent events over the past few months, I find it hard to laugh (seriously).  I expect more from civil servants, I expect them to act as a respectful and intelligent representative of the country, not the friends I go to pubs with.

Michele Bachmann, while I understand that hanging onto the ol' wise Palin's coattails must be challenging, the comments made were inappropriate to the actual context of the debt crisis in the US.  The debt is not cumulative to just democrats in office, it is from years of mismanagement of finances and budgets, taking on such things as wars, natural disasters and market failures, all of which are very hard to predict and to plan accordingly.  And to be completely honest, it's not even a good joke to begin with.

To me this is a global issue, if we make policy a joke and politicians characters from bad comedy movies how are other countries going to respect the American government when dealing with international affairs?

Danke Deutschland

Nuclear or....

Thank you Germany, hopefully your country's step in the right direction will encourage other nations to follow suit. Their initial reaction was due to Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, having had observed (as we all have) the crisis Japan is facing with the recent natural disaster and the nuclear threats. It is refreshening to see a country look at the implications faced by countries with nuclear power and initiating serious changes in policy to create clean and renewable energy.

wind turbines?

Germany to go nuclear-free - Inside Story - Al Jazeera English

Orwell you read so well

I love George Orwell's literary works, two pieces that stand out are Nineteen Eighty-Four and Down and Out in Paris and London.  His writings were meaningful and he urged the reader to interpret their surroundings and challenge the status quo.  He wrote an essay that I red in undergrad around the politics of language and how it can be used as a powerful tool for political manipulation.  In Nineteen Eighty-Four there are political language themes that dance around statesmen and controlling of thoughts and generation of misinformation to influence society, yet it is very much the theme that we see every day in America.  The State may not be in control of political language (Murdoch) as much as the various news stations (Murdoch), and more often than not give misinformation that can vastly influence society (Murdoch).
If you haven't experienced the Orwell world yet give it a go, it's easy to relate to modern times.

Shh..la vie privée

France is an amazingly tempting location.  The pure beauty of the country is truly astonishing, then you look around and the people take on the luminous traits of their location.  With such beauty comes a certain amount of temptation, which is perhaps the main reason that the sexual revolution in the 19th Century was centered in Europe.  How those temptations are expressed can be public or private and there are certain individual freedoms and rights to privacy that one should have, what you do in your own time (consensual) is absolutely your business and you have the right to keep it private.  There are many laws and regulations in most countries that protect these privacies, some are right some are wrong, some focus on individual privacy and some concentrate on restricting freedom of expression.

In Dominique Strauss-Kahn's case, France developed his wild sexual habits and for years he blurred the lines of interoffice relationships and inappropriate professional conduct, but with old age comes a certain lack of power or his habits are not as appealing as they once were.  His recent charges (there were a few in the past in France) were done on American soil, where privacy laws are not the same and apprehension of the accused are typcially publicized. Recent debate has been centered on how the American judicial system differs from the French, one that is deeply rooted in Napoleonic Code, a code that conducts many legal practices behind closed doors.

While I believe that a certain amount of privacy is only right in cases such as this to protect everyone involved, I think that it is not a matter of the American judicial system, it is more of a matter of the culture and what people in the press choose to publicise.  The press generally publishes pieces of interest to increase attention, the general interests of those in France and those in America are pretty different.  French tend to operate in a 'down-low' fashion, which reminds me of a few years ago when President Clinton was facing impeachment for his sexual habits and the French amasement that a country would take steps to discredit a sitting president and publicise sexual affairs.  In the Strauss-Kahn case, the American public does find it interesting and feel that the public has a right to know who the potential criminals so that they can individually protect themselves.  If he has a problem with the fact that such things are publicised, it is a problem that comes with the territory and Strauss-Kahn is a pretty smart man and knew this.

As for the French thinking that the American judicial system is a circus compared to their own they may be right, but privacy and the publicity around this case are not exclusive to the judicial system.  Culture and behaviours in France and America are different, with different beliefs and interests of what to publicise and the restrictions of individual privacy to protect the public.  Americans are a little more in your face, and for cases such as this one, I find it more appealing than closed doors.

I think I'm in love...

with Woody Allen, well maybe just his movies. I may also love Scarlett Johansson more than Natalie Portman now.  Over the past month or so I have watched Annie Hall, Scoop, Match Point, and Vicky Christina Barcelona, all of which I have seen, all of which I love.

We both played the clarinet...it's meant to be...

However, I do have my doubts about the casting in the upcoming Woody movie, Midnight in Paris.  I love him in Royal Tennenbaums and Bottle Rockets, but I am having a hard time placing Owen Wilson with the Woody humour.  I mean Royal Tenenbaums (my all-time favorite movie) is dark humour as is Bottle Rockets, but Own has long since distanced himself from respectable dark humour and moved onto slap the knee chic flicks.  Can you go from Royal Tenenbaums to Drillbit Taylor to Midnight in Paris...we will see...

If you asked me in 2003 if I would ever see this day....

I sat at the Democratic convention back in 2003 listening to then Senator Barack Obama give an amazing speech but at no time during that speech did I actually think that this day would ever come.  As I sit watching the President pass by my apartment in a Benz, giving speeches and drinking a Dublin brewed Guinness in Ireland...I think this day is magical and delightfully unexpected.  

Globalization Ignorantia

Globalization...oy...it makes my brain hurt...
With the world-wide-webs and communication systems, we are extraordinarily connected to humans any where on the planet in some way, shape or form. It is only right...nay...vital...to recognize that globalization is happening and that we are all part of a global community.  We must not leave our familial, cultural, religious, or nationality, behind, but we must build a greater capacity to understand that we are all connected, regardless of family, culture, religion, or nationality...we are all humans.  The ability to learn and to motivate in building a world that has put equality above independence, equality above profits and equality above hate is a global community that I would like to grow old in.
I digress.

I bring this up because of my ignorance...yes...I have faults...ignorance can at one time instill stupidity  and within seconds...embarrassment.  In Social Epidemiology class the other month we were talking about human rights, social behaviour, etc...and the subject of de facto segregation came up.   Americans can talk for days about the injustices faced by minorities and the road that was taken from slavery to Brown v. Board of Education to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s non-violent protests to affirmative action.  But very few Americans could give a comparative analysis of the American struggle of human injustices with those faced by the South African population well into the 1990s, and that includes myself.  I never really thought about the fact that we knew the American de facto segregation and its effects well before the de jure segregation ended in South Africa, and with more knowledge and advocacy, could have changed the injustices and inequalities faced by the South African populations.


I have much to learn, but I think that it would have helped if it was presented during my early childhood, because now I am going to read about 50 books and become obsessed with this...mainly out of the fact that my education was a product of the 1980s and 1990s, when the apartheid was still happening and there was not enough emphasis placed on how other countries experienced or were experiencing the same injustices and the fact that I am a bit of a dork. I can admit, a little part of me wants to blame the American education system, I have done it in the past, but the reality is that I would not be writing this right now if I didn't have some kind of education, an education that is hardly offered to enough people on this planet of ours.  So I am either ignorant or ungrateful...or (greatest possibility) both.
I digress yet again.

People should start thinking, including myself, about globalization and this whole 'we are all connected' because we are, it's a bit freaky and it's more complex than ever...but oh how it is fascinating. And keep in mind that mentoring the youth regarding these issues is the most effective path, they hold the most power/the most energy to learn from history and go forward to live with love for human beings and know that on earth we must be the guide to equality.

I leave you with a significantly large passage from Robert Kennedy's 1966 speech to South African citizens:

For two centuries, my own country has struggled to overcome the self-imposed handicap of prejudice and discrimination based on nationality, on social class or race — discrimination profoundly repugnant to the theory and to the command of our Constitution. Even as my father grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, signs told him: "No Irish Need Apply." Two generations later President Kennedy became the first Irish Catholic, and the first Catholic, to head the nation; but how many men of ability had, before 1961, been denied the opportunity to contribute to the nation’s progress because they were Catholic or because they were of Irish extraction? How many sons of Italian or Jewish or Polish parents slumbered in the slums — untaught, unlearned, their potential lost forever to our nation and to the human race? Even today, what price will we pay before we have assured full opportunity to millions of Negro Americans?

In the last five years we have done more to assure equality to our Negro citizens, and to help the deprived both white and black, than in the hundred years before that time. But much, much more remains to be done. For there are millions of Negroes untrained for the simplest of jobs, and thousands every day denied their full and equal rights under the law; and the violence of the disinherited, the insulted, the injured, looms over the streets of Harlem and of Watts and of the South Side Chicago.

But a Negro American trains now as an astronaut, one of mankind’s first explorers into outer space; another is the chief barrister of the United States government, and dozens sit on the benches of our court; and another, Dr. Martin Luther King, is the second man of African descent to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent efforts for social justice between all of the races.

We have passed laws prohibiting — We have passed laws prohibiting discrimination in education, in employment, in housing, but these laws alone cannot overcome the heritage of centuries — of broken families and stunted children, and poverty and degradation and pain.

So the road toward equality of freedom is not easy, and great cost and danger march alongside all of us. We are committed to peaceful and nonviolent change, and that is important to all to understand — though change is unsettling. Still, even in the turbulence of protest and struggle is greater hope for the future, as men learn to claim and achieve for themselves the rights formerly petitioned from others.

And most important of all, all of the panoply of government power has been committed to the goal of equality before the law, as we are now committing ourselves to the achievement of equal opportunity in fact. We must recognize the full human equality of all of our people before God, before the law, and in the councils of government. We must do this, not because it is economically advantageous, although it is; not because the laws of God command it, although they do; not because people in other lands wish it so. We must do it for the single and fundamental reason that it is the right thing to do.

We recognize that there are problems and obstacles before the fulfillment of these ideals in the United States, as we recognize that other nations, in Latin America and in Asia and in Africa, have their own political, economic, and social problems, their unique barriers to the elimination of injustices.

In some, there is concern that change will submerge the rights of a minority, particularly where that minority is of a different race than that of the majority. We in the United States believe in the protection of minorities; we recognize the contributions that they can make and the leadership that they can provide; and we do not believe that any people — whether majority or minority, or individual human beings — are "expendable" in the cause of theory or of policy. We recognize also that justice between men and nations is imperfect, and the humanity sometimes progresses very slowly indeed.

I cried a little.
Source:
http://www.southafrica.to/history/Apartheid/Robert_Kennedy/Kennedy_Cape_Town.htm

Ceol!

Ceol is a Gaelic word for music, and since living here in the land of the leprechauns I have been exposed to a good amount of both music and the gaelic language, but rarely at the same time. For some reason moving to Ireland made me get into groups from California and other west coast based bands (love fleet foxes). This guy, let's call him biscuit for the sake of privacy, has similar tastes when it comes to the ol' ceol...he introduced me to the guys below and a few more.

Young the Giant 'Strings' was playing when I first started this blog and I thought I would share it on here, not that it instilled greatness in me or this site, but I think it's nice and you might take a liking to their swag as well.

Veiled Consequences?

Last month France became the first country in Europe to ban the wearing of the facial veil in public, including in shops and on the street.

Personally I have no problem talking and interacting with someone who has their face covered. The only thing that bothers me is when you can't see their eyes, but then I think about how it doesn't bother me when I talk to someone that wears sunglasses, I suppose it really doesn't matter if anything or everything is covered when someone is talking to me.

Human rights are obviously in question here, but I think the basic question of how people feel about faces being covered up regardless of the reason should be looked at...

1. Women who wear veils over their faces for religious reasons

2. Some women/men cover their face with botox, plastic surgery, tattoos, piercings, etc. still covering part of their natural faces.

3. People with deformities often have prosthetics to cover the entire or parts of the face.

4. People wear surgical masks to avoid sickness

5. People who wear ridiculously large brimmed hats and sunglasses, blocking a good percentage of their face.

6-100. There are so many more examples (like mimes)....



There are so many more examples out there but it comes down to freedom of expression, freedom to live within a culture and still be an individual. Regardless of the reason, be it medicinal, social, religious, or cultural, I don't think that the government should have the right to tell someone to take off whatever is covering their face while walking down the street...well unless it is someone like leatherface, which I would be more than happy if the police arrested leatherface-like-people.

To the Culicidae Family: A plague on all your houses!

Serious movements should be made to bring down the house of Culicidae, little gnats, annoying, destroying and wreaking havoc on innocent lives...shameless, absolutely shameless.

If they wonder why there is so much hate, they should look to the evil sister 'the mosquito'.  Excuse my language, but 'the mosquito' is a little prick in my opinion.  I spent days of my life putting on ointment to mend bite marks, avoiding the strong urge to scratch, and trying different methods of prevention from their annoying bites (lights, sticky things, spray, nets, etc.).  I now look at them with a whole new level of distaste, which is shocking because I truly did at one point in my life admire their work in bringing on the possibility of Jurassic Park to my childhood imagination...DINO DNA!  But those childhood dreams have long since been crushed by the cruel reality of their impact on human health...(though I still have a love for Jurassic Park, it's just not the same).  

Pesky, annoying, female mosquitoes are the ones that need to obtain nutrients from a blood supply before she produces more bastard children to cause pain and misery.    With 3,500 species of mosquitoes, I find it a badass idea to eradicate all of them (proven to have no serious consequences for any ecosystems), preventing a number of infectious diseases affecting millions of people a year.  The mosquito works as a vector agent, carrying the disease causing viruses and parasites from person to person without catching the disease themselves.  A few diseases that may pop to mind are yellow fever, dengue fever, Chikungunya and the big M word, Malaria.  Transmitting disease to hundreds of millions people annually in Africa, South America, Central America, Mexico, Russia, and much of Asia with millions of resulting mortality and morbidity cases.  

So I say just knock out the entire culicidae family, the insecta class won't miss them and mosquitoes have been giving them a bad rep for years, so it's probably more of a favor.

For more information please visit: Mosquito.org or the CDC website for Mosquito borne diseases.

Can we really end poverty in this generation?

This year's Forbe's World's Billionaires list broke records in number of billionaires (1,210 billionaires) and total net worth ($4.5 trillion), and includes only the individuals that make their money on a legal and public stage. While the extremely wealthy were breaking numbers during the economic crisis of the past three years, an estimated 64 million people were added to the 1.4 billion population of those living in extreme poverty, meaning in times of economic crisis, the wealth inequity gap gets wider. The rich get richer and the poorer get poorer.

Does this make sense? Is there not a human responsibility for just and equitable treatment of everyone, and closing the gap between extreme wealth and poverty? Can we realistically achieve an end to poverty by merely shifting around funds that address aspects of poverty but not poverty itself?

These astonishingly simple questions are faced with complex philosophies, are highly political and are definitely a taboo subject for anyone in public office. Questioning the ethical practices of unregulated market forces and unbridled capitalism is often accompanied with powerful objection and circular reasoning.

The word wealth itself, originated in the 13th century and modelled on the word health, gives power in the forms of monetary funds, social standing and capacity. Is it so unjust to expect that the wealthiest of individuals, having the most power, to heighten their responsibility and take on the burden of extreme poverty (a population with little or no power)?

The wealthiest no longer make their billions in their community or country alone, their net worth is derived from global dividends, the global community is therefore the focus of charity and humanitarian movements made because their society has been globalized. Globalization and technology have made it possible for more and more people to make personal commitments.

To explore this a bit more, a calculation of how redistribution would work in order to keep the billionaires billionaires and the extreme poor shift to moderately poor. If there are 1.4 billion people that should make $1.25 per day (365 days) for the next 5 years (as per the 2015 Millenium Development Goal, MDGs), the calculation is this: 1.4 Billion (($1.25 x 365 days (5 years))= $3.19 Trillion (USD)

If you take $3.19 trillion USD from the $4.5 trillion net worth, that leaves $1.31 Trillion to distribute to the 1,200 billionaires, which still qualify them for the list at $1.09 billion per individual. Essentially taking out the extremely wealthy and redistributing wealth to the extremely poor would encourage and support the eight millennium goals and accomplish the aim to end poverty by 2015.

It all comes back to us; we can make efforts to improve education, health and reach the other MDGs but individuals are the building blocks to the global society and it is about asking the wealthiest people to contribute their fair share to redress the wealth gap that exists. While this is political suicide, it is the right path to take as a global society.

So yes, WE can end poverty but it means advocating for the wealthiest to take a radical role in closing the gap of extreme economic inequity, will you ask them?

I am no Dickens...

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only." -Opening Paragraph to A Tale of Two Cities

When I go to write anything I always think about Charles Dickens. He made it seem so effortless, so admirable, so frustrating.
If I could have started this blog off with a literary bang such as the opening paragraph to A Tale of Two Cities (above), and end it with the final sentence to A Tale of Two Cities (below), I would have exceeded my own expectations and most likely would have questioned every grade I received in English and writing classes. In reality, I am an ok writer, and an ok thinker, but what I lack in those departments I hope to make up for with some wit and subject matter.

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known. ” -Final sentence in A Tale of Two Cities

YO...please come again...

Hola!

I was sitting around the other day complaining about Newt running for office in 2012 and the bologna that he put on the Clinton Administration, and I looked at my flatmate Chong, and realized three things:
1. we spend way too much time together, and oddly enough we don't want to kill each other (well on my part, I hope she feels the same)
2. she obviously does not seem to be amused with my comments, and
3. maybe I should find another outlet so I do not drive away Chong and have the possibility of living with five cats and one-sided conversations.

So here it is, my blog.