some websites I like.

• My friend’s blog.
• My dad’s blog.
• AP.net
• The Oatmeal

(I know they don’t look like links, but they are.)

My brain…it hurts…

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Paranormal Activity

I’ve never done a movie review before, so this is all a bit new to me. Hopefully it’s not too bad.

Filmed in 2007 for $15,000 at the home of Israeli-born director/writer Oren Peli, Paranormal Activity has made more than $100 million at the international box office and  Bloody-Disgusting called it “one of the scariest movies of all time.” Now I have to say, I watched The Blair Witch Project last Friday and I still have to sleep with the lights on, so that’s probably a bit of an exaggeration. Blair Witch is a movie that follows you after you watch it; Paranormal Activity is the exact opposite: scary while you’re seeing it, afterwards a little bit ridiculous.

The movie follows a few weeks in the lives of young couple Micah and Katie in their San Diego home while they experience weird, scary, downright disturbing things at night. Micah decides to buy a camera so they have proof of what’s happening. It was clear at this point that Micah isn’t taking this whole thing too seriously. He acknowledges what’s happening, and he’s very protective of Katie throughout the  movie, but he doesn’t see it as necessarily dangerous.

Like I said before, the movie is terrifying while you watch it. It’s not even that you see whatever is causing this freaky stuff to happen, and at the beginning it’s not really the scariest stuff going on: one night, the door to their bedroom opens and shuts one its own. Things soon begin to escalate, though, when on a later night an unhuman scream is heard, accompanied by a huge crash.

However scary the movie is, the ending just kills it. I won’t spoil it, but I will say that it’s not the best way the movie could end. Shocking? Yes. Scary? Indeed. Creative? I didn’t think so. Perhaps worst of all, the ending is the reason that it’s not scary when you leave the theatre.

Despite the lack of originality I felt with the ending, the rest of the movie does exactly what it’s supposed to: scare you. You’re not supposed to feel enlightened or morally enhanced when you walk out of the theatre.  You’re supposed to be terrified; to be clutching the person next to you, to refuse to switch the lights off. And maybe for the first 15 minutes of the car ride home, you will be. But that’s about it.

 

8/10

polar bears, Bush, and Obama

I just read an article on TIME’s website that talked about how, after a study in 2007 by the U.S. Geological Survey said that two-thirds of polar bears would die out by the 2050s if Arctic ice kept melting, the Bush Administration finally agreed to list the bears as a threatened species, in accordance with the Endangered Species Act. This should have been great, a huge victory for environmentalists- because the ESA says the government has to protect any animals on the list from hazards, which would seemingly mean that the government would finally put in efforts to reduce carbon emissions, which of course is what is causing the Arctic ice to melt in the first place.

But, of course, the Bush Administration, ignoring global warming yet again, decided that the ESA could only have so much influence over the control of carbon emissions, and decided to implement a rule that says as much.

When the Obama Administration decided to look back at all the last-minute changes the previous Administration made to the ESA, they decided to keep the rule in place, because, as Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said, “When the ESA was passed, it was not contemplated it would be a tool to address the issue of climate change.”

And that actually makes sense. Salazar’s point is that even though, yes, climate change is causing the ice to melt, which is exactly what is killing the polar bears (since they do their hunting on the ice, when there is none they starve), the ESA doesn’t have the right to cap carbon emissions, even though that needs to be done. When the ESA was passed, in 1973, I don’t even know that the average person knew anything about depletion of the ozone layer, and now every lesson in my science class goes right back to the effect humans have had on the environment. Hopefully Obama and Salazar, and everyone else in the Administration can work something out that will have a positive impact on the polar bears, and finally start to tackle the issue of global climate change.

gay/lesbian marriage

I think it’s kind of weird that I haven’t written officially about this yet. This is also my first post in a terribly long time, so I’m probably kind of shaky. Give me a bit to get used to this (again) =]

Anyway.

This is something that has never made sense to me, or at least when I actually began thinking about it. Why wouldn’t you let two people get married? I mean, for one, it’s hardly the government’s business except for tax purposes and what not. I have read the Bible verses that say being gay is wrong (several times actually, trying to make sense of it all) but despite that, and I know this is something that gets ignored a lot, but there actually  is such a thing as separation of church and state- and I take it to mean that just because the Bible or the Koran or whatnot says something is wrong, that doesn’t mean it’s illegal. Or vice-versa.

Another (kind of odd) argument that opponents of gay marriage throw out is “protecting the American family” like being gay is some kind of disease (and until 1973, the American Psychiatric Association said it was) and it will ruin your own marriage. But – shocker – Massachusetts, the only state to allow gay marriage (though, because of DOMA, it’s not recognized federally) had one of the lowest divorce rates in the country.

“As researchers have noted, the areas of the country where divorce rates are highest are also often the areas where many conservative Christians live.

“Kentucky, Mississippi and Arkansas, for example, voted overwhelmingly for constitutional amendments to ban same-sex marriage. But they had three of the highest divorce rates in 2003, according to figures from the Census Bureau and the National Center for Health Statistics.

“The lowest divorce rates are largely in the blue states: the Northeast and the upper Midwest. And the state with the lowest divorce rate was Massachusetts, home to John Kerry, the Kennedys and same-sex marriage.”

— Pam Belluck, NY Times News Service, November 14, 2004

So if legally you can’t – or shouldn’t – use the Bible as a basis for a law, and if it’s been determined at least once that the allowance of gay marriage has no effect on everyone else, then why would you say no?

I wrote this for my English class on Wednesday. Hope you like.

All of my statistics for America came from the CDC’s website and here. The numbers for Great Britain came from here.

I am here to talk with you today about the drinking age in America. As I’m sure all of you know, a great deal of people die from alcohol-attributed deaths in the United States- as many as 75,766 in 2001. Compare that number to the amount of alcohol-attributed deaths in 2001 in Great Britain- 22,000. That’s a 53,766-person difference. What is the drinking age in Great Britain?  16-17 with an adult and in a restaurant; 18 without.

The 21 drinking age is the highest in the world. Only nine other countries in the world have 21 as their legal drinking age, and in many cases – such as that of Saudi Arabia and India – this is because of religious beliefs. While Japan and Iceland, along with several other countries, have drinking ages of 20, the United States has one of the highest number of alcohol-related deaths in the world. Our drinking laws are also the strictest in the Western world.

Even when it comes to traffic fatalities, the 21 drinking age hasn’t really solved our problem. Researchers at the Center of Alcohol Studies at Rutgers University found that raising the drinking age to 21 simply decreased the number of deaths between people ages 18-20, and increased them exponentially for people ages 21-24. They concluded, on the basis of their exhaustive federally-funded study, that drinking experience, not drinking age, is the most important factor.

When a person turns 18, they can vote. An 18-year-old is legally an adult. Someone who is 18 can legally smoke, a habit that kills 438,000 people a year (this number includes the 38,000 people who die from secondhand-smoke exposure). If a person is old enough to decide to join the military and die for their country at 18, then they are old enough to drink.

just a thought.

Let me try to get to the point: I keep hearing people say,”If [insert Obama/McCain here] wins I’m moving/flyving/nuking my house.”

What on Earth?

That’s why we get into big huge messes like this- something we don’t like happens, so instead of trying to fix it, or make it better, we just sit back and complain. That doesn’t make any sense.

OMG, LIKE, SARAH PALIN!

I’m back! And a bit weirded out by the new look of the typing box. It’s cool though. So far. (Everything quoted is taken from OnTheIssues.org unless I say differently.)
Anyway.

Sarah Palin. Did anyone know who she was before McCain chose her for VP? Did all of these women support John McCain before he picked her? (Actually, the answer to that one is no! Several TIME Magazine polls say that before VPs were announced, John McCain was 10% behind Obama in the number of female voters. Now it’s only 1%.) Did anyone care? I don’t think so. A lot of people forget that Alaska is part of the United States. I don’t remember hearing anything about the Last Frontier on the news until the entire Palin family was catupulted into celebrity. I think the only other time the nation might have heard her name or seen her picture was the contreversy with the whole Bride To Nowhere thing.

I don’t want to get into the experience thing, because I believe it’s kind of irrelevant. If someone without a medical degree discovered the cure for cancer, would we ignore them because of “lack of experience”? I doubt it. But Sarah Palin has a lot of ideas I don’t agree with at all.

For on thing- abortion.

She is opposed to abortion except to save the life of the mother. When she learned that her infant son would be born with Down’s Syndrome, she said she never considered ending the pregnancy. When Trig was born in April, she penned a note to loved ones in the voice of “Trig’s creator, Your Heavenly Father,” rejecting sympathy for her son.

Source: Boston Globe, “A valentine to evangelical base”, p. A12 Aug 30, 2008

Anyone who is a regular reader (hi!) knows my stance on abortion. But,for those of you who are not- not after the second trimester, people. 6 months is enough time to decide whether or not you want a baby. Because it is a woman’s right to decide whether or not to have a child, not the government’s.

Also, gay rights.

Ms. Palin said she supported Alaska’s decision to amend its Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. But she used her first veto as governor to block a bill that would have prohibited the state from granting health benefits to same-sex partners of public employees. Ms. Palin said she vetoed the bill because it was unconstitutional, but raised the possibility of amending the state Constitution so the ban could pass muster.

Source: New York Times, pp. A1 & A10, “An Outsider Who Charms” Aug 29, 2008

Why oh why? I just don’t understand why anyone would do that! Why would you deny someone the right to get married? Why would you deny someone health benefits based on orientation? I don’t care if God says it’s wrong. I wouldn’t care if Jesus walked up to me and said, “If a person is gay, they can’t get married.” Seperation of Church and State, Sarah. There is such a thing.

Crime-

Q: Will you support an effort to expand hate-crime laws?

A: No, as I believe all heinous crime is based on hate.

Source: Eagle Forum 2006 Gubernatorial Candidate Questionnaire Jul 31, 2006

This one took me a bit of thinking; I knew I didn’t like that statement when I read it but I wasn’t sure why. Now I do, because I do not believe every heinous crime is based on hate. What about, like, a woman kills her daughter because she has a disease that will without a doubt give her a slow and painful death? That’s not a hate crime.

Q: Would you introduce–or, if introduced by a legislator, would you support–a bill to adopt the death penalty in Alaska? If yes, which crimes should it apply to?

A: If the Legislature were to pass a bill that established a death penalty on adults who murder children, I would sign it.

Source: Anchorage Daily News: 2006 gubernatorial candidate profile Oct 22, 2006

The death penalty just cause you killed a kid. I can’t believe someone would say that. What about killing a 20 year old? Or a 90 year old? Is someone not as good just because they’re older than others?

Education-

I read through the quotes OnTheIssues has for her, and I am tired and I think my finger is broken so I guess I really just skimmed, but I think I agree with her for the most part. Especially with the teaching evolution alongside intelligent design in public schools thing.

Earlier this year, she told the Anchorage Daily News that schools should not fear teaching creationism alongside evolution. “Teach both. You know, don’t be afraid of information…. Healthy debate is so important and it’s so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both. And you know, I say this too as a daughter of a science teacher.”

Source: Boston Globe, “A valentine to evangelical base”, p. A12 Aug 30, 2008

I understand that Science class is Science class and intelligent design is not really Science…but Science is about taking a hypothesis and eliminating all of the would-be answers until you find the answer. Right? So why not expose students to a debate? These children are only the future.

Energy-

The stakes for our nation could not be higher. When a hurricane strikes in the Gulf of Mexico, this country should not be so dependent on imported oil that we are forced to draw from our Strategic Petroleum Reserve. And families cannot throw away more an[d] more of their paychecks on gas and heating oil.

With Russia wanting to control a vital pipeline in the Caucasus, and to divide and intimidate our European allies by using energy as a weapon, we cannot leave ourselves at the mercy of foreign suppliers.

To confront the threat that Iran might seek to cut off nearly a fifth of world energy supplies … or that terrorists might strike again at the Abqaiq facility in Saudi Arabia … or that Venezuela might shut off its oil deliveries … we Americans need to produce more of our own oil and gas.

And take it from a gal who knows the North Slope of Alaska: We’ve got lots of both.

Source: Speech at 2008 Republican National Convention Sep 3, 2008

I guess I sort of agree. It’d be nice to know that, like, if these Middle Eastern countries decide they really don’t like us and want to cut off our oil supply we won’t all die. But I think America should put its energy and money into finding alternative energy sources.

Okay, so, this is the end. All good luck to Sarah Palin and John McCain. (But she still bothers me.)

another thing about the polygamist’s sect

(I refuse to call it a “cult”. I think that’s more offensive than what these people actually did.)

This has been in the media a lot, but I will explain what’s going on. Basically,

“In 2008, starting on April 4, Texas State officials took 436 children into temporary legal custody after someone claiming to be a 16-year-old girl made a series of phone calls to authorities in late March, claiming she had been beaten and forced to become a “spiritual” wife to an adult man. Acting on her calls, authorities raided the ranch in Eldorado, about 40 miles south of San Angelo. The YFZ ranch is owned by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), a Mormon offshoot that practices polygamy. Two men were arrested for obstructing the raid, and it remained unclear whether the person who made the initial call has been located by authorities. The children ranged in age from infants to teenagers, including teenage mothers and pregnant teens.”

^that would be from the wikipedia page on polygamy in the United States, found in the “Recent Polygamy Cases” section.

You know, I’m all for freedom of religion. Totally. The first amendment is probably my favorite. That being said, I’m also all for children’s rights and obeying the law.

Firs things first: Just because you are part of a specific group of a specific religion does not mean that the bill of rights gives you the right to do whatever you want.

Secondly: This is a whole ‘nother topic, but I do not believe that God wants old men to impregnate younger women (excuse me, girls) and then avoid punishment. Whether or not polygamy and statutory rape should be illegal is not the question here. Right now, they are, and anyone who breaks those laws should be punished as such.

My apologies to everyone who lost a child in the chaos, or who was separated from a loved one. I can’t empathize with that at all, and I’m sure it was hard to deal with (and I’m sure it still is). However…by bringing this upon yourselves, by knowingly breaking a law-what did they expect? It’s not like the extremely brave individuals who broke Jim Crow laws. I think this just goes back to the whole separation of Church and State thing- religion isn’t an excuse for breaking a law, nor is it a reason to create one.

gun control laws

I’m back! 😀

Between having the flu (D:) and Spring Break and just plain being busy, I haven’t really had a lot of time to write.

Which sucked.

But anyway, I’m here now =D!!

Okay. Well, a week or 2 (or 3) ago for my English project, we were asked to pick topics and debate on them. My topic was gun control laws should be tightened and I was on the yes side. Here’s my paper:

Every year 3600 children go to the hospital for unintentional gunshot wounds. 200 of them will die.

It’s no mistake that buying a gun is easy- here in Virginia anyone over the age of 17 can purchase a rifle or shotgun and anyone over 18 can purchase a handgun, all without a permit or sate waiting period. The question at hand today is how easy is too easy?

One of the reasons these laws should be tightened is because it is fairly easy – too easy – for children to get a hold of firearms. Currently there are an estimated 223 million guns in American homes- 70 million of those are handguns. Of those handguns, 30% are stored loaded, 51% are stored unlocked, and 13% are stored both unlocked and loaded. One study found that as many as 80% of young children knew where the guns in their homes were kept. 75-80% of first- and second-graders knew where their parents’ guns were kept (these are 6, 7, and 8 year olds). 50% of all childhood unintentional shootings occur in their home from their parents’ guns and 40% occur in that of a friend.

The second reason is that gun control isn’t something recently thought up. Other countries, particularly countries such as Japan and New Zealand, have stricter gun control laws than the United States. According to the Center for Disease Control, the number of people in the United States killed by firearms is five times higher than that of Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, England and Wales, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Netherlands, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Norway, Scotland, Singapore, Sweden, Spain, Switzerland, and Taiwan. All of these countries have stricter gun control laws than the US. In Canada, gun-related violent crimes went down 8% in one year.

Another reason is that when they are in the home, guns are rarely used for self-defense. A firearm in the home is 43 times more likely to be used in the killing of a family member of friend than it is to defend oneself. Why? The sole purpose of a gun is TO KILL, which means the purpose is to shoot it, not whack someone over the head with it. In addition, if the gun is stored unloaded and in a locked container, like it should be, then why take the time to unlock the container and load the gun when you could be running away or calling the police? There are other options besides firearms.

Our final reason is that the very few of both state and federal gun laws we have are loose ones- they have loopholes or they just aren’t enforced. Only 20 of the 22 federal gun laws are actively enforced, and only 2% of gun crimes ever make it to trial.

223 million firearms and we have 200 child deaths a year. Our government spends 3.7 billion dollars a year on locking away the criminals who commit gun law crimes, money that could be spent on the educational system or alternative energy research. Letters should be written to the different people in our government explaining to them our viewpoint and why laws should be enacted that make it harder for someone to buy a firearm.

Stepping away from that, let me add some more thoughts (if I can). One thing I did not put in the paper was the fact that one study found that every single shooting in which a child 5 or under shot and killed themselves or others could have been prevented by a trigger lock. Also, most children 3 and older have the strength to pull the trigger on most handguns. THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH THAT. No, not saying our children should be weak…but why does someone have a gun where their 3 year old can get it? Seriously. Just think, people.