Pumpkin Skies

For so long, zoos have been a popular attraction to tourists and locals around the world, as well as a crucial contributor to endangered species conservation. They have taken in animals from their habitats where they are at risk and are slowly starting to recover some species from an almost-extinction. Lately though, some zoos have decided to prioritize some species that are more loved by the public, and that some lesser known species should be left to die out for the sake of the others. It has come to their conclusion some species will have to be sacrificed for the greater good.

If you are not aware, I am currently in the midst of a Humanities project centered around Human Rights. We were allowed to make our project about  a human right of our choice. I gladly signed up for the Environmental Issues group, but more specifically, I chose to base my porject around the conservation of Endangered Species. With that in mind, you’ll probably know what my attitude towards this article  will be.

I am deeply appalled by the fact that zoos are suddenly giving up their duty to help conserve the animal kingdom. No, not just the fan-favorite, public-preferred species, but all the endangered ones that the zoo holds and is responsible for. If they had committed to the plan of recovering species that are on the brink of extinction, then they should stay to it, not just for a while until they suddenly decide it is necessary to dump a species into the reject bin. Oh, I’m sure if most zoos were doing this for a noble cause, I would agree that this path would be the most sensible to take. In the article though, it stated clearly that some zoos were merely doing this for profit. They spend eighteen million US dollars in order to build a new, shiny pool for the sea lions, and then they claim that they did not have enough money to fund their endangered species conservation plans? Sea lions aren’t even in risk of endangerment, why should they be held in the spotlight when there are more pressing issues to attend to? Because the sea lions are the zoo’s most popular exhibit and attraction, they spend money on them so that customers will arrive in larger and larger amounts.

Absolutely horrendous. Despicable.

I know I tend to make my article reviews overly dramatic and critical, but I think this one calls for a little more drama than most other previous posts. A small summary to get us started off: While on a trip in the Cardamom Mountains in Cambodia, Chut Wutty, a local photographer and activist was shot by a military official while on an expedition to reveal suspicious activity of illegal logging in the forest area. For some time now, Wutty had been devoted to exposing companies that were responsible for some pretty huge logging activities. While reading this article, I took some pretty emotional notes on Diigolet and am required by the Humanities 8 law to provide a link to it. Oops, can’t forget the article link now, can I?

So let’s get something straight here. This entire time, the government has been secretly involved and completely aware of the illegal wrong-doings that these companies have been doing? I can’t be the only one who sees what’s wrong about this statement, right? Of course. Why would the government choose to form a partnership with the very people they are supposed to oppose? Was it for money? Power? Something else? It wasn’t very clear in my readings, so I am forced to take a guess. I wonder if other governments around the world are similar in this way, in that case, it would be the very epitome of hypocrisy itself. What has become of our modern society that our government, our very protectors would end up contributing to major acts of deforestation and invasion of the local’s privacy? Hrm, now that I look back on the last few sentences, I may have overdone it again. I’m just trying to give my passionate opinion here.

I admire Chut Wutty. I really do. According to Young’s statements, he seemed like a courageous and noble guy. I mean, he would go to great lengths to collect some evidence against the government, and man, that is pretty bold. For that he has gained my strong respect. These are the type of people who truly stand up for what they believe in, the type to change the world no matter how small they may seem up against huge corporate companies (wow that sounded pretty stupid). I hope this article doesn’t discourage people from standing up to the government like he did. If anything, this should be another red flag to be held high above our heads, one that states clearly “You are not alone.”

And with that, I conclude my AOW.

Tags: aow, aow8, appino, hum8, humanities

Years after the disastrous spill created by the famous oil company BP, scientists have discovered the true effect the dangerous chemicals have wreaked damage throughout the Gulf of Mexico. Fisherman who have caught seafood in the gulf have noticed a very strange oddity lately, gross mutations that have formed on shrimp, crabs, fish, and other shellfish because of the horrible living conditions in the sea water. An article has been released by Casey Chan, titled “BP Oil Spill Aftermath: Eyeless Shrimp, Clawless Crabs and Fish with Oozing Sores”, explaining what exactly has happened to these sea creatures during the course of a few years in chemical waste.

So here’s the question: Does this matter? Should we care if a few sea creatures become horribly mutated? My answer is yes, of course we should be concerned. Not only do we destroy forests and natural habitats to further expand our population and ruin the air with our noxious gases, we are also dumping chemical waste into the oceans, and at whose expense? The sea creatures that have done nothing will die because of humanity’s mistake, and for that I felt really sad. The mutations are unearthly, unnatural. Crabs with holes in their shells, shrimp without eyes, fish with babies still attached to them. What is the point, anyhow? BP is a major oil company known all around the world, infamous because of the oil spill that occurred in 2010. Did you know that the dispersants used by BP to clean up the oil spill actually contains chemicals that are poisonous to humans? And where do you think seafood goes once they are caught and brought to shore? That’s right, to restaurants and then to your plate. The residents of the nearby towns and cities now know to avoid eating seafood that comes from those waters, which is the smart thing to do.

Tags: aow, aow8, hum8

We’ve all seen it, whether on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or Youtube, the KONY 2012 video is causing a major chain reaction throughout the Internet. That is its sole purpose, after all, to spread the word about the war criminal Joseph Kony, who has done plenty of repulsive crimes against children in Uganda. The video was really put together well, I must admit, the music, graphics, and sequencing were all used appropriately and it frankly blew me away. The way it pulled at our heartstrings in the beginning, and then later brought up our hopes in the end was ingenious. It really stood out in the way that we thought it would be impossible to catch Kony, but then at the end it presents the idea of how we (as a community) could join forces and defeat him. It didn’t end abruptly like so many other charity campaigns had, but tell you how you could make a difference in the world in such small and simple ways. But in the end, it all ties back to you. The video focuses on you because you are the one that will make the difference, whether it is clicking that “Share” button or donating to the Invisible Children charity, the video is putting the spotlight on what you can do to stop Kony. The fact that the director is talking to you makes you feel sort of important, that if you spread the world you would be doing the world a favor. One of the many reasons why this video has gone viral so quickly is, to me, I think it gives us a sense of purpose in life to try to help others in dire times of need. It makes us feel like we are doing something good, and that makes us feel good. We’ve always wanted to play the hero ever since we were young, and as soon as we saw this video, that old spark had been reignited and the urge to help others pushed forward.

Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time is now.

This is their campaign. We only have a year to achieve one common goal: to capture and ensure the imprisonment of Joseph Kony.

Tags: aow, aow8, hum8

Annotated Link: http://diigo.com/0o78a

The small town of Chardon, Ohio had only recently been traumatized by a shooting that had occurred at the local high school. The person who had wielded the gun was none other than a 17- year-old student, T.J. Lane that had pulled it out and shot three random students during lunch. A close friend of his who had witnessed the tragic event had later posted a message on Facebook saying:

“I wanted so bad to try and help you but i could see in your eyes you didn’t care anymore. I’m sorry buddy.”

Some rights reserved by Za3tOoOr!

What does this mean? To me, this message obviously points out that T.J Lane had not been a perfectly normal kid before the incident. In the article, it is also  mentioned that his family had been dysfunctional, to say the very least. His father had served time in jail, and had also tried to strangle his own wife, also T.J. Lane’s mother, to death. No child could live in that household without being negatively affected, mentally and emotionally. His father might be the reason why T.J. Lane had tipped over the edge and couldn’t control himself anymore.

For the most part, this went unnoticed. Some of his classmates described him as “a quiet kid” and that “he just went about his own business”. Some claimed that he was an outcast and was constantly bullied. Many could not remember him ever being bullied, saying that he had also had many friends. The only thing that disturbs me is the face that they didn’t suspect a single thing when he posted a rather morbid poem on Facebook that went along the lines of “Die, all of you.” Yeah, that should have been the tie-breaker right there, but people tend not to take death threats very seriously, especially on Facebook. Around middle school and high school, there are breakouts of goths and emos, or just wannabe goths and emos, ranting on about how difficult their lives are and that all they want to do is see the world burn and die. I guess, they couldn’t have possibly guessed that T.J. Lane actually had had a terrible childhood, and actually did have the capacity to kill.

Are you starting to see that the shootout was not random and spontaneous, and was not a complete accident? The boy had had some serious problems at home with his parents, and that had started to affect his mental health. I don’t think that bullying was what drove T.J. Lane to handle the gun, I doubt that he had let the bullying bother him more than his father’s attempted murder on his mother. This is just my theory of course, feel free to share any of your theories in the comments section below.

Tags: aow, aow8, appino, gr8, hum8

Ok, seriously, who saw this coming, huh? *raises both hands*

Didn’t we learn about this from ICT already? And if not, weren’t we warned? Weren’t we aware that Facebook used our own information against us? It was bound to happen, and we were bound to find out sooner or later. According to Lori Andrews, the author of this

by The Idea Desk

article, Facebook was making a whopping amount of money (3.2 billion dollars to be exact) for what? Advertising. That’s a whole 85 percent of their profit right there. Companies would pay huge amounts just for your own personal information. They use that information to track down your personal interests, your location in the world, and even your status updates so that they can target the right people to advertise their product to. For example, if I were to indicate an interest in frogs in several of my statuses, and also taking a liking to reading, Facebook will try to advertise a bookstore that has books on frogs. Or maybe the directions to a nearby pet store would be shown in the bottom right hand sidebar, which is usually reserved for ads such as these.

It gets worse. A lot of companies are now looking at your online profiles to see if you are eligible enough to join their workforce. Imagine if you wanted a job at a newspaper company, and you were having your job interview today. The interviewer might look up all of your online information, and discover that you favorite hobby is to “procrastinate” and “spend nights at the local bar with your friends”. Didn’t think that would be on your resume, now did you? Well on to another subject, credit card companies may decide to lower your maximum credit on your card judging on your Internet history, age, sex, and much more. It’s kind of horrifying to think about, but now we know, the Internet could possibly be one of the biggest threats to privacy.

Tags: aow, aow8, appino, reading8, writing8

…Which I never knew before. Our class recently read an informational website on the topic of slavery that has happened in the past and in many diverse countries. Although many countries have gone about slavery in similar ways, many do not have the same reason to enslave human beings like others, and it has happened to all different kinds of people, ranging from prisoners of war to a whole race of people. Which brings me to the main reason I wrote this post, to compare and contrast slavery in different parts of the world.

Let’s start with the Spanish Main. They had started out with enslaving the Native Americans because they needed people to work on their plantations and mines, but it turns out that many of the Native Americans were catching diseases that the Europeans had carried over the sea with them and were dying from them. They soon had a shortage of human labor, so they decided to copy the British and capture and enslave African from Africa. It worked out because the Africans were immune to many of the European diseases, so they were sent to be workers in the mines and plantations instead.

In 1942, the Nazi enslaved millions of people in Germany in an attempt to eventually exterminate all communists, socialists, Jews, Gypsies, gays, prostitutes, Soviet prisoners of war, and other foreigners that were living in Germany at the moment. They sent them to concentration camps, and then to work to death at rocket and chemical factories. Those who were too weak to work were killed off, and by the end of World War 2 there were only over 700,000 people still left enslaved.

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“…A lot more that we had before, So take me to the nearest store. Can you hear it ring? The happiness it brings! It’s such a beautiful thing…Ka-ching~! -”Ka-Ching” by Shania Twain

Here’s the article and the annotated link.

If you haven’t noticed, us children are the worst when it comes to handling money, because we are not the ones who spend every day at work earning it. We don’t know the value of it that much, and so, when a new game, article of clothing, or object of desire shows itself in the stores and malls, we gripe and plead to our parents that they should buy it for us…at least I admit that I do so. Why? Because we know that all of our friends and classmates will soon end up buying them and we’ll be left behind. Of course the same goes for all age groups, and this is article expands more on that.

Some rights reserved by chensformers

I have had the experience of walking into mall on a Black Friday, but it wasn’t that crowded because my town wasn’t that populated. There were no shoving crowds like they said in the article, but very long lines of people that stretched into the hall. But I guess a lot has changed ever since 2004, so I don’t find it hard to believe that there have been some casualties even in shopping.

There is one connection I can make on how materialism can change people and their decisions. On Christmas, I received a brand new tablet. When I brought it to school and showed it to my friends they wanted one too, and so about a month later my friend Giang requested for one and obtained a tablet from her father’s co-worker. And about a week after that my friend Abby bought one, and even later would be Marina.

Tags: aow, aow8, gr8, hum8, middleschool

Welcome back to another round of Article of the Week, starring an article about the possibility of colonizing other planets. Also featuring notes that I took during my reading, because, hey, it’s required. Recently, two possibilities have been brought to light, one of which I will be discussing in this first paragraph. It has been known that many asteroids that pass by Earth usually contain about a billion metric tons of iron, and if we were to mine that and sell it, it would leave us a very, very heavy profit. The main issue was that asteroid mining would lower the prices of metals immensely because there was so much ready to harvest, which would wreak havoc for the mining businesses and would eventually shut most of them down. Miners would be dismissed from their jobs because there would be so much iron harvested from asteroids that mining the little amounts of iron on Earth would result in very little profit. Although this solution might solve the problem of our slowly declining resources, I think that the mining industry wouldn’t want to give up their job so easily.

Some rights reserved by .sanden.

Another topic discussed was terraforming (a word deemed incorrectly spelled by the automatic spell check). As our teacher explained to us in class, terraforming is the act of changing the environment of a place, which is in this case, Mars. Apparently if we took the material of an asteroid or a local Martian moon and spread it over Mars’ polar caps, the heat from the sun would be absorbed into the dust, releasing carbon dioxide and therefore creating an atmosphere where plant life, oxygen, and water could be present on the red planet. As I read this, I was wondering what life could be like on Mars. First of all, Mars is nowhere near as bis as Earth, so we couldn’t possibly fit the entire Earth population on Mars without it being too crowded. I don’t know, I guess we could build tons of residential towers and that wouldn’t be so much of a problem, but I wouldn’t want to live on Mars until a much bigger situation presents itself. Such as, if some major global warming issue on Earth causes coastal cities around the world to flood, or a huge natural disaster occurs, then I wouldn’t think twice about moving to another planet. As observed by astronomers and scientists alike, Mars is the prime candidate of a planet that we could inhabit. Who knows, maybe life on our neighboring planet could turn out to be more similar to our life right now than we would think.

Cassie, signing off.

Tags: aow, aow8, hum8, middle school

…nah I got nothing. Hey, creative titles are hard to think of sometimes!

I used diigo to take notes on the article.

WELL ANYWAY, the focus of this week’s post is an article about the recent massive floods in Thailand, the aftermath of three months of heavy rain and the cause of over 500 deaths.  Families and locals have been relocated and forced to move out of their house temporarily in order to escape the rising water level. Store-owners have been advised to shut down their shops for the time being, because, as the authorities have said,

“There will be no-one able to come around to sell and to buy. So, doesn’t make sense to keep the market open.”

 But what if there are locals who depend on their stores in order to bring food onto their table every night? What will become of those who make a living off of tourists willing to buy their goods? I think that it is wiser to keep their stores open, even if there are barely

Some rights reserved by Hanoi Mark

customers, it is better than closing their shop and spending hungry days and restless nights trying to ask their neighbors to spare some food for them. Some shop keepers can afford to close their shop for a while because they have saved up money or have another business somewhere, but that sometimes isn’t the case.

“When tourists come here to find this place closed down for too long, they will not come back again. And it will take a long time to bring the market back to booming again,” said one food stall trader.

I also know this statement is true, because once when I took a trip back to Australia, there was a shop that I had wanted to go to because I could see on the posters on the window that it sold my favorite game of all time. To my disappointment, the toy store was closed for an extended period of time (due to the owner being away on a business trip), so I soon forgot about the shop because I was caught up with other plans and I didn’t have the time to go back to check if it was open. Tourists only buy trinkets or memorabilia that catches their eye, and how could they buy things from stores that aren’t even open?

Apparently the government has not been handling the disaster very well, spurning the anger of the locals who lived there. Well, maybe they should try handling this major issue. Floods are not very easy to control, due to it being an almost unstoppable, massive wall of water moving and rising at alarming rates. That was my first reaction while reading the article, but thinking it through, it is part of the government’s responsibility to take care of  problems such as these. They should have taken necessary action when the flood began, but I guess they thought it was a minor flood, not unlike the ones that appear in the downtown areas in Ho Chi Minh City.

Tags: aow, aow8, gr8, hum8, middle school