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.