Christmas

Christmas, a time of joy, love, friendship, family and presents. People all around the world celebrate this wonderful holiday. Some just want presents, some want to celebrate Christ, some like the Christmas spirit and some like to get off for a week from school. During December, students are counting the days until break almost bursting from the intensity. Music on the radio about Santa and the Christmas toons are heard all throughout the day. In the night, you can see Christmas lights and decorations all around you as if you were in some other world.
People go crazy a week before, shopping and looking for gifts for everyone. Kids sit home, doing nothing but thinking about christmas break and not wanting to do homework or blogs ever again. Everyone is supposed to get along and be nice to eachother because thats the Christmas spirit. Everyone should love eachother or DIEEEE.

Obesity

Obesity is a major and growing problem in the United States. There are many reasons and causes for a person to become obese. Many people have no choice and its there only option, while others have the option but choose to not do anything about it. In a study, which was published in the journal Nature on Dec. 6, the researchers checked the DNA of 300 severely obese children for mutations in copy number variants (CNVs), large segments of DNA that are either copied or missing in our genes, and which scientists suggest play a vital role in the development of genetic diseases. They found evidence that several rare deletions may promote obesity. "That deletion, on chromosome 16, apparently causes trouble because it removes a gene that the brain needs to respond to the appetite-controlling hormone leptin", said Dr. Sadaf Farooqi of Cambridge University. This is one of the causes for the obese people that have no choice. Another way people can be forced to be obese, is by their family members who encourage them to do this.
All of the fast food places in the United States enable obesity to thrive. In many countries, there are no fast food places, and thus eliminating or at least controlling obesity. When ever I go somewhere, I see obesity happening all around me. I do not understand how people get to the point to where they can barely walk. Obesity is the ultimate disease. I have seen documentaries on obesity, and all of the people are addicted to food. You need it to survive, but you can also die from it when you eat to much. There are surgeries such as Adjustable Gastric Band, Gastric Bypass, and Sleeve Gastrectomy. But many fail because once they lose the weight and get off the treatment, they just gain back the weight. It is an endless battle.

Fires in the bathroom?

I am a student at Calhoun High School, in Merrick New York. This past few weeks, there have been several fires in the girls bathroom and the school is on high alert to weed out the supposed "arsonist." Though the fire poses a serious threat to the safety of the school , its the administration and faculty that are the biggest threat to the students survival.
According to News 12 broadcast on the situation, there have been at least 6 fires in our school so far and we were only evacuated for two of the six. Even though the fires have been nothing but a "smokey paper incident", according to Mr. Seinfeld, principle of Calhoun High School. However, if some kind of catastrophic incident happened, many students could be injured or dead because of the inadequacy of Calhoun's evacuation procedures.
Even during fire drills, the school has failed to meet the criteria to pull off a safe and successful procedure. I wouldn't be surprised of the Board of Education forces Calhoun to go through fire safety training and procedures.
Another concern is how the situation is being handled. The first announcement about the fire was made to put fear into the arsonists eyes to try to scare he or she from making anymore fires. The second announcement entailed force, anger and dictatorship over the girls bathrooms. They would be supervised at all times and girls have to sign in every time they use the bathroom. Obviously the third time the person set the fire, supervision was not being used on the bathrooms in the B wing. The third announcement was a plead, and a sort of beg to stop the fires. I think Mr.Seinfeld was trying to go for the guilt aspect. I find it interesting that since it is a girl who is thought to be lighting the fires, the administration is going crazy. If it was a boy, things would be taken more lightly and they would have thought, "Oh its just boys being boys." But since its a girl, they think she is a deranged and dangerous arsonist. It just goes to show how differently and unequally women are treated in our fucked up society.

Blog

Blogging has and still is becoming a major sensation around the world for expressing ideas, thoughts, feelings, and information. The modern blog evolved from the online diary, where people would keep a running account of their personal lives. Most such writers called themselves diarists, or journalists. Justin Hall, who began personal blogging in 1994 while a student at Swarthmore College, is recognized as one of the earliest bloggers. Early blogs were manually updated components of common Web sites. However, the evolution of tools to facilitate the production and maintenance of Web articles posted in reverse chronological order made the publishing process feasible to a much larger, less technical, population. Ultimately, this resulted in the distinct class of online publishing that produces blogs we recognize today.
After a slow start, blogging rapidly gained in popularity. Blog usage spread during 1999 and the years following, being further popularized by the arrival of the first hosted blog tools. Such hosted tools consist of Open Diary, created in October 1998, which soon grew to thousands of online diaries. Open Diary innovated the reader comment, becoming the first blog community where readers could add comments to other writers' blog entries. Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal in March 1999. Andrew Smales created Pitas.com in July 1999 as an easier alternative to maintaining a news page on a Web site, followed by Diaryland in September 1999, focusing more on a personal diary community. Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan made blogger.com in August 1999.
Since 2002, blogs have gained increasing notice and coverage shaping news stories. For the first time in modern journalism, the financial and political goals of U.S. Israeli relations are being analyzed in depth. The Iraq war saw bloggers taking measured and intense points of view that go beyond the traditional left-right divide of the political spectrum.
Blogging might become even more popular then facebook and myspace in upcomming years.

The swine flu vaccine

Many people are concerned about whether to get the swine flu vaccine. This vaccine is said to prevent the H1N1 virus from infecting the people who take it. There's two kinds of H1N1 vaccines, the nasal and the shot form. However, many side effects of the vaccine have been all over the news, such as 25 year old Deseray Jennings, who has a serious side effect known as Dystonia which is a neurological movement disorder in which sustained muscle contractions cause twisting and repetitive movements or abnormal postures. The poor girl can only walk backwards normally and when she runs forward, she can speak normally and run normally.
I honestly think it might be a load of bullshit, but who knows. I refused to get the vaccine because of the side effects it might bring. I would rather get the swine flu and be sick for a week, then have a rare neurological disorder for the rest of my life. A bunch of kids started getting the swine flu or the regular flu on my track team. So my mom was all worries and paranoid that I might get the flu, so I ended up getting the regular flu shot which wasn't too bad. I just have a little pain in my shoulder.
I feel like if people stop worrying about it so much, peoples lives would be a lot easier. In most of my classes we are forced to use Hand Sanitizer every day. Which in theory is good because it kills germs. But it also kills 99.8 % of germs which means a lot of good germs are killed thus making you less immune to getting sickness. Also, people may ingest it to get intoxicated.

Civil Liberties extra credit

Our civil liberties are becoming more and more pressured every day. Hundreds of people every day are subjected to civil liberty abuse. Our government always thinks of bullshit excuses to why they would ever need to violate peoples civil liberties and many people do not really understand or believe that the government is doing this.
Programs such as ACLU (American Civil Liberty Union), try to protect and expose the government for what they are doing. The ACLU's National Security Project (NSP) is for national security policies that are consistent with the Constitution, the rule of law, and fundamental human rights. "The Project litigates cases relating to detention, torture, discrimination, surveillance, censorship, and secrecy". They have been part of many major cases that opposed the governments security policies that violated civil liberties. Such cases were the AAR v. Chertoff and ASA v. Chertoff, ACLU v. DOD (Torture FOIA), Al-Marri v. Pucciarelli, Amnesty v. McConnell, and Doe v. Ashcroft.
Many people are taken for years and tortured for being false accused of being a terrorist or being a threat to national security. Such as Zacarias Moussaoui who was almost given the death penalty for being falsely accused of being the 20th hijacker of 9/11. Also, after the terrible terrorist attacks of 9/11 the government authorized for many people to have their phones, computers and pretty much all of their civil liberties violated because they were "suspicious". Still after the authorization happened not a single on of those persons were proven as terrorists.
People need to realize that their government might not always be the protector of the people. They need to start to question the intense amount of secrecy and censorship that the government has kept over the people. Its important to question the reasons and drastic moves that the government makes and to not always trust in everything the government does. Even if they say that their intentions were "for the national security of the people."

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 was released November 9th, the day before veterans day. As an avid "COD 4" user, I was skeptical about the game at first because Call of Duty 4 was one of the greatest games of all time and it would be very hard to top. However, after playing it after I got home from school, I couldn't help but tear from the eyes. It was honestly the most epic and fantastic game I had ever played.
They enable you to choose from tons of new and futuristic guns. There are hundreds of challenges and achievements you can do making the game a challenge. You can't beat the game in a day. It had more than $310 million of sell-through sales in North America and the UK, or about 4.7 million units. And that’s just within the first 24 hours. In comparison, Halo 3’s launch scored $170 million in its first 24 hours back in 2007. (That was just in the U.S., and it was only available for one console.) Grand Theft Auto 4 sold about 6 million copies worldwide in its first week in 2008, with sales topping more than $500 million. Those sales make it the biggest launch of any form of entertainment since the dawn of mankind.
The online and campaign are out of this world, the graphics and the cutting edge tech involved in this game was out of this world. The game utilizes the in-house IW 4.0 game engine, which is claimed to be a generation beyond the capabilities of the engine used in Call of Duty 4.
Aside from new weapons, equipment, and perks that are now able to be upgraded to pro versions , 15 different kill streak rewards can be unlocked and selected by the player. Among these is the ability to receive a supply drop after achieving four kills in a row, order a predator missile strike after five kills, and call in an AC-130 gunship to strike from the sky after 11 kills. Another new feature is the in-game host migration. If a match host leaves the game, the current game no longer ends as a host migration delay allows a new host to be selected and the game to continue on. These are only a few of the many changes and advancements that Modernwarfare 2 has accomplished.

What should you do if an apocalyptic zombie invasion plagued the world?

What should you do if an apocalyptic zombie invasion plagued the world?

"The Zombie Survival Guide", by Max Brooks is the only real guide to protecting yourself from the undead. I have read this book several times and feel that it is an adequate book. But, it lacks the direct step by step instruction that is necessary to fight and survive the hoard. The fools and the bigots could not possibly be able to navigate and understand Max Brooks nifty changes throughout the guide. However, I have a basic strategy guide that can lead people through the threat of the undead.

Zombies are a supernatural power or spell that according to voodoo belief can enter into and reanimate a corpse. Though the definition seems nonthreatening, zombies also contain the characteristic, the need for the consumption of human flesh. Though they can not run fast, the immense population that will be created will be able to over power the fact that they walk slow.

The threat of a zombie attack is high because we are approaching 2012 and who knows what that year will have in store. Due to the amount of new and foreign diseases such as the H1N1 virus and traces of new forms of other diseases all around the world present the possibility of a possible zombie invasion.

The Will Fugina Survival guide:

1. Make sure that your home is prepared for a Zombie Invasion. Food, supplies, and weapons are necessities for survival.

2.Wait out the initial wave of zombies, especially if you live on a place like Long Island. You will perish if you try to leave during the anarchic, dead zone. Barricade your home, you should hide on your highest floor and then destroy the stairs.

3.Once there a really only the walking dead left, travel at night in silence and speed. Move with only a small group of 5 to 8 people. Used silenced guns, blades or anything you can get.

4. Use bikes, or small maneuverable vehicles just in case of a car pile up.

5. Leave the urban areas and try to get as isolated as possible. The wilderness is the best place to go or even a secluded island.

6.Make sure to make a supply bag for hunting and camping out. During the day lay low and during the night move. Never stay in one place for too long.

7.The city is a death trap. Go in groups to get supplies and always check for infection among the group. If any one group member has the infection they can bring down the whole system. Kill anyone who is infected.
8. The last step is to survive and to wait out the invasion. It could take years.

Are aliens real?

Are aliens real? This is a question that everyone has thought about and even considered. Hundreds of shows and television programs are made every year dealing with aliens or beings that exist somewhere throughout space other then earth.
Some are documentaries on UFOs or alien abductions, however, many of these videos are flawed in many ways. The supposedly alien traveling crafts or commonly known UFOs are usually a photoshoped image, a bird, a plane or a camera lens malfunction. Also, most of the alien abduction programs are of people who are mentally insane, unstable or just feel the need to get attention. For example, such cases like "Couple Claims Aliens Abducted, Probed Them" are obviously flawed in their arguments.
Another flaw is that, if aliens did exist, and they abducted people, and placed anal probes in people, wouldn't this be a concern to the nations and the worlds national security. Such places like area 51, which is said the have highly classified information and supposed preserved bodies of outside beings stored away somewhere. I don't think that the world would hide this information from us. Given that the government and secret organizations do keep classified information from the public for the most part, but if an "alien invasion" happened in the world the government would have definitely told the public.
I do believe that it is possible for another world to exist and that life outside the earth on another planet could exist. But, the odds of these so called "aliens" having the technology to come to earth and travel at speeds faster then light is absurd.

2012 The Undead

The date of 12/21/12 is derived from the end of a 5,125 year cycle for the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, most notably used by the Maya civilization. The calendar completes its 13th cycle from its starting point. Correlating the Mayan date to our Gregorian calendar yields several different dates ranging from the 21st through the 23rd, but the 21st seems likely, as it coincides with the winter solstice, and though astrology has little to do with our daily affairs, astronomically the Earth is said to be aligned facing the center of the Milky Way behind the Sun on the 21st. This interesting termination of the calendar in our lifetimes makes many people believe that the date will bring about great global change.
Current scientific research into disease, reanimation and cellular re-genesis is progressing as rapidly as other scientific disciplines. Particularly terrifying is the reanimation of the 1918 Spanish influenza virus, responsible for a pandemic that killed an estimated 20 million people. Scientists have gathered important new clues to why the virus spread quickly and killed efficiently. And the virus is being harvested from corpses, notably the body of a women buried in Alaska.
Diseases may break out that cause zombie like qualities. Weakened immune systems will make humans more susceptible to the likes diseases such as Trypanosoma brucei, a parasite that carries nightmarish qualities, reducing many of its victims to a zombie like state before they slip into a coma and die. Toxoplasma gondii can alter brain functions in rats, leading them to the jaws of cats – and in humans can change brain patterns to induce neuroses, paranoia and schizophrenia. Left with a rotting brain and primitive instincts, an entire population can be reduced to weakened stumbling shadows of humans, looking for food. Even though these people are not undead, their bodies are a heap of rotting, infectious and highly contagious flesh.
However, the threat of the actual invasion of brain dead zombies is a real possibility. Restoring a human from a cryogenic stasis and reanimating their dying brain tissue creates the possibility that a human may not be the same as they were when they died. This leaves a lot of speculation to a reanimated form of a human being.

Does facebook quibble students?

Does facebook quibble students? Millions of people have facebook accounts around the world and use this website to communicate with other people, meet people, creep people and many more things. However, is facebook actually harmful to students.
4 years ago it was rare to see a 7th grader using facebook, however now an estimated 60 - 70% of all 7th graders have a facebook account, and the percentage is higher for 8th graders. Kids are obtaining accounts at lower and lower ages. At a camp I worked at over the summer, I looked after 3rd graders and half of them had facebook accounts. I was amazed.
Because so many kids and students use facebook, the effect it has on students lives are huge. Facebook helps people find people they know or find friends but it does not help you socially interact with people outside the Internet world. Many people who are avid facebook users are socially awkward and do not know how to interact with other people unless its behind a computer screen. Studies and procedures have been done that prove this valid.
I have even noticed in school that some of the most intense facebook users, such as the students who do all of the facebook surveys, quizs, and all of the other apps tend to be the ones who socially awkward.
People need to realize that facebook needs to be balanced between you day to day activities and that talking to people and being social is a lot more important. I have seen people who have asked people out online and it always ends in disaster.

Are all these crazy courses and school work putting too much stress on students?

Are all these crazy courses and school work putting too much stress on students?
Many students at Harvard Medical School say yes. In a New York Times article, Carey Goldberg wrote about how more and more students are committing suicide from the work load at Harvard. One person said that students at a graduate school having to deal with "apprenticeship-slash-employment-slash-academic financial pressures, significant research pressures, significant teaching obligations... familial issues'' which cause extreme amounts of stress on a student.
There are many stresses that one student goes through especially in college. The most strenuous stress is Academic Stress, which is since college work load is greatly more involved and time cumbersome then in High School. Scheduling issues, difficult tests and other academic obstacles, along with the more independent nature of the college learning structure, create an atmosphere of studying long, hard hours and thus stress. One of the most commonly felt consequences of college stress is a feeling of being overwhelmed. While trying to find a balance of hard work and play. Many college students struggle with perfectionism or unhealthy habits like heavy drinking. I am a high school student and feel like the work load is extremely ridiculous, especially in 11th grade. I have around 4 to 6 hours of homework and studying a night which I think is very stressful. I am also on a sport and in drama which takes up a majority of my free time to do homework. So I know what its like to be under a lot of stress. However instead of doing drugs, drinking or thinking of suicide, I relieve my stress by working out a lot.
School related suicide is becoming a very bad problem in the United States. However, many programs such as suicide hot lines, counseling and relief centers are being set up in colleges and around the communities to prevent these suicides from happening. Maby if schools also cut some of the work loads required, college suicide rates will decrease.

Colloquial Diction, When is it Necessary?

When is colloquial diction acceptable? When can it be used to make sense? Colloquial diction is used every single day by almost everyone. I, myself have fallen accustom to using it at least 10 times a day and it is a very interesting phenomenon.
Colloquial diction has been used since the beginning of language. Different societies have used different slang terms to mean the same words. There are even dictionaries of slang terms.
But, in past years much of the colloquial diction has derived from racism, and I think that all of these racist slang words have derived from immigration. When the U.S. first started to get ship loads of immigrants from all over the world, cultural clashing began. The reason so many people came to the U.S. was because of the opportunity it offered. Documents such as The Declaration of Independence, The U.S. Constitution and The Bill of Rights offered freedoms and opportunities that many people have never dreamed of in other countries. But, there was a price to pay with all of the immigrants coming in, lack of living space, and this caused many different cultures to be very packed together. This in turn caused hate and racism between races thus creating racist slang.
Another argument over colloquial diction is that in schools, many slang words that are created are overused and idiotic. For example, in my school words such as dirt, scrub, grime, and lax are words used as completely different meanings then what they really mean. In my school dirt: is a verb that describes someone who is good or had done something extraordinary. Grime: is someone that steals or cheats off someone for their own benefit. Lax: is another word for Lacrosse, however words such as lax bro work hand in hand. Scrub: is someone who is bad at an activity, but tries to be good. All of these words can be rearranged or formed into sentences such as grime into grime-seed or grime-ski, or dirt into dirty scrub lax bro. All of these idiotic words mean nothing to other schools but to ours its a language and a native tongue to many people.

SWINE FLU

This is in response to "Understanding the Deadly Flu Virus". In the article, Katherarine Mieszkowski quotes the World Health Organization, "Countries should remain on high alert for unusual outbreaks of influenza-like illness and severe pneumonia." I think that the world took the H1N1 virus way to seriously. She stated how Egypt, which has had no cases of infection, took the extraordinary step of attempting to slaughter the country's 300,000 pigs. This honestly is a little extreme and concerning. Countries are going way over the extreme to try and beat the Swine Flu. Studies have shown that the virus killed so much less people then the yearly flu does. In Mexico the outbreak was much more "catastrophic" then in the U.S. However, that's because the living conditions are terrible compared to the U.S. In Mexico, a lot of the food and water, especially in the poorer regions contain a lot of bacteria and viruses such as H1N1. In the U.S., only around 5 people died from the H1N1 virus, and those people were all Senior Citizens or baby's. The Swine Flu is no more then the usual flu or pneumonia, its not an epidemic like Small Pox or Ebola, however the world made it out be like that.

I disagree with Glen Greenwald. I like his way of writing and the way he ranted about his ideas, but his beliefs, and views towards torturing the terrorists was dreadful. The word terrorist reminds me of 9/11, Al Qaeda and that bastard Osama Bin Laden. For all the terrible things he has done, he deserves to have a sword shoved up his rectum, and then get lit on fire.There’s always going to be those people who say that terrorists deserve a second chance and that they don’t deserve to be tortured. Well let’s see how they feel when their family is tortured and killed by a terrorist. I wonder if they would keep to there same viewpoint.The people who think that terrorists don’t deserve to be tortured, have not been directly effected by a disaster such as 9/11, where hundreds of families don’t have a dad, a son, a mom, or a sister because of some terrorist who thinks its cool to ruin hundreds of lives.People in the United States for some reason think that everyone should just get along and be nice to each other and love everyone. Well sorry to say, but most of the world hates us and maybe being nice is not the greatest approach. Studies show that in the world, George Bush was more feared and hated then Osama Bin Laden. People need to realize that some people just aren’t nice and then when the chance strikes, they will hurt you. So for all of the terrorists in Guantanamo Bay Prison, I hope they all get tortured and feel the pain that they have cause others.