Lets connect.....

After watching the Hanes commercial and the clip from "Just Add Water", there are some similar pieces that we could connect to each other. In the Hanes commercial we witnessed the man in the mustard yellow shirt going on a down escalator and watching around him as all of the little kids gave him dirty looks. Showing that he i effecting their future by not being environmentally friendly. As for the clip from "Just Add Water" Danny Devito is one who is doing almost the same thing in that he is constantly looking around while talking to Ray, where he is going to get his morning coffee from. Not thinking about the future. However, I also feel that his character is of course one which over all looks to the future. He is bringing in a gas station and perhaps some thing to bolster the town into a place where there is little hope left. Is this a sign of change for Trona or just another failed business venture. The other friend in the Hanes commercial is one which is looking to the future, with his straight ahead gaze, not thinking about what is going on around him. This is kind of like Ray because he wants a future for Trona, that is why he picks up the trash on the side of the road everyday. He has his straight forward glance at Danny Devito throughout most of the conversation and stares at Devito before the conversation until Ray gets his attention. Ray is always looking to the future un everything that he does.
What I found to be dominant in the commercial at first was how Danny Devito was looking up in a gaze to his newly built station, almost in awe of it it all, directing the man with the crane as to where to place his crown jewel. Yet once we see the Chevron sign the arrows are pointing down, foreshadowing the terrible future which s about to pursue. Once he opens his gas station, Dirk and his boys ransack the place because they feel pressed upon. Dirk wants to make it known that this is his town and that he will not have anyone trying to change it. Kind of reminds me of the ending of Home Alone 3 when the song plays and goes "This is my town.....". I don't remember the rest of the lyrics but the kid defends his home just as Dirk is defending "his" town.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcUGR955n-E

Why is every article I read always about global warming.....

Shockingly the article by John Broome "The Ethics of Climate Change" is about global warming and climate change. What I did not expect to see in this article was the use of ethics to describe how to tackle this issue. The last thing I wanted to read about was utilitarianism again this semester. Anyway, this article uses the idea of how compensating someone for the terrible things that we are doing to the environment. I do not see how this is even a logical thought, are we supposed to send checks or trees to people in the future. This is our problem right now and is up to us to handle it. I think John Broome would be better off writing about ays to fix the environment instead of using ethics to think up creative ways. This article in my opinion is terrible. It is a waste of time and paper (resources). The article does not tell us anything but philosophical nonsense. The real way to fix this problem is the environmentalist way. STOP BURNING FOSSIL FUELS. Right before I read this article I read one fo rmy economics class about how to reduce the ppm number of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. That article had positive and realistic ideas as to fix this problem.
One other thing which I found to be interesting in here is that the idea of fixing society's well being through production. THat is the problem with our society today, we need to stop producing as much waste and start producing more environmentally efficient means of production. Things that in the long run will help us. Fixing our infrastructure is one, not giving someone an extra bathroom as mentioned in the article. He needs to use examples that mean something and actually have to do with global warming.

"Just Add Water"

Recalls to our readings, from the movie "Just Add Water":
The idea of greed from our reading of "Faustian Economics" is one which may not seem to be the most obvious in this movie but certainly is. We see this through Dirk and how he basically runs the entire town. He makes people pay tolls just to get onto their own streets. This is the epitome of greed because Dirk only does this because he can; he has the power to do it in that town. Also, the fact that him and his friends rob the new Chevron station and delivery trucks just shows how greedy he is. The rest of the town is suffering and barely getting by while he has control over everything in Trona, California.
The idea of “Do we create what we observe through the act of our observations?” (230) from "The Reality Tests" is evident in this movie through everyone's actions. In a sense the general meaning of this quote is strongly conveyed to us. Through the lines when Danny Devito character asks Ray if he ever had any dreams and if he was ever going to follow them. Ray is able to begin to create some change in this town when he realizes exactly how bad things are getting. The last scene that we saw was when he was breaking into Dirk's house looking at the boxes that he had just received. Also, going in the opposite direction of this, the people in Trona create their own crappy world by not having any hope or even thinking about a better future. They merely sit by and allow Dirk to run the entire town. Dirk is able to see his "dreams" through this because he takes over a weak town and does whatever he wants there.
The idea of "an era of creative destruction” (292) is one from the article "Big Foot" yet this idea is also shown in the movie "Just Add Water". We see how dirk is taking over the town, however it is not through force or violence for the most part. He is doing all of this through business, most of it is illegitimate however. Ray tells Danny Devito's character that Dirk bought up everything in the town a while back when the government declared the place a toxic waste site and most people had moved out. That was a business venture for him. Now he has his own Meth Lab and has his friends keep as toll booth attendants in a way for whoever wants to get onto their streets. This is where the destructiveness of his creativity comes into play, yes he is creating new business ventures for himself in the town but he is also ruining the lives of almost everyone that lives in the town. Most of the adults are drunks or are on drugs. He is destroying the town for his own benefit and is doing it in a number of ways.

Where do I begin.....

Questions for "Just Add Water":

1. Why is it that everyone in the town is so disconnected from reality and family ties?

2. Is it normal in that town for a father to get his son a prostitute?

3. Why is Charlene afraid to go outside of the house?

4. Why in the world would Danny Devito open up a gas station in that town of all places? He doesnt seem like he needs the money.

5. Is it because Dent is just so burnt out from his high school years that he cannot move on and that is why he holds the football and and tries to reminisce with Ray every now and then?

6. How is Dirk able to turn off everyone's electricity? Isn't he only like 15?

Who's a writer?

A writer is anyone that is able to physically write or type and convey their ideas to someone else using written language. I am a writer, everyone in this class is a writer. What have we been doing in this class for the entire semester? Writing. What else could that possibly make us? It doesn't matter why we write, what we write about or who we write for, the fact is that we are writing.

Where's your food from?

"Food miles" I think is probably the most interesting idea in this article. The scary thing about it is that it is completely right. Every time that we buy something from far away we exert so many of our resources for something that can be grown a couple of towns over on a farm. Even inside of the U.S. it is very possible for us to get all of our foods from farms out east on Long Island, but most of us choose to buy them from companies which grow their products on farms in the Midwest. All this does is add more fuel costs to the actual product. Last year in my environmental science class we watched a video which spoke about this sort of thing. One of the examples used was the $200 hamburg from McDonalds. What the scientist in the video had proposed was that in order to truly balance out our ecological footprint, we should have to pay for all of the costs associated with making that one product. What he realized was that if we did McDonald's hamburger would roughly cost around $200 each. When John Elkington says that “We are in an era of creative destruction” (292) he is telling that everyone now had new ideas all of a sudden. Since people have gotten on the idea of "going green" every corporation, just as Tesco in the article, is now advertising itself as being more green than the next one. It's just a creative way to advertise themselves. What I first thought of when I read this and the three steps about fixing your home to be more green, was the clip from the Simpsons' movie where they are trapped inside of the giant dome and all of a sudden "Dome Depot" comes on tv with new products to use to clean the dome. People will try and make money off of everything and this is the prefect example. Now that we are facing the issue of global warming, everyone is trying to capitalize off our our destruction and be creative with it. We are now trapped in the dome.
Do I feel personally responsible for Global Warming? Yes, I can honestly say that I do. Every time that I go to a gas station to fill up my car I just watch the numbers go up on that little LED sign that tells me how fast I and everyone else is slowly killing the planet.....oops I meant to say filling up our gas tanks, but I guess it's just the same. Watching as I fill up my car I realize that we are trapped. There is no way out of the CO2 fix that we are in. Were all like druggies in a sense because we just keep wanting more, creating more of a problem for ourselves, knowing that we NEED to stop yet somehow cannot. We're all hooked on CO2. Everyone is responsible for global warming in some form or another. We all consumer more than we need o which leads to an exhaustion of our resources in production and an increase in the burning of fossil fuels which releases CO2 into the atmosphere, and the biggest problem which we all do everyday, is drive. Almost everyone drives everyday of their lives. I drive everyday back and forth to school, sometimes to work and then also sometimes just to get food off campus during the day or just any other simple errand that I do. It's impossible for me to get everywhere I need to without a car and of course he only way to power a car is with fossil fuels. Granted companies are coming up with ways to give us new electric cars, but in today's economy most people are not going to go out and just replace all of their present fossil fuel burning, global warming causing cars with new electric ones. Just because companies have ways to reduce our emissions, doesn't necessarily mean that they are going to fix everything.

What really exists?

“Do we create what we observe through the act of our observations?” This question asked by Joshua Roebke is probably one of the most complicated questions known to man. It is also highly philosophical. The idea that things do not exist without us has the possibly to shake the foundations o every piece of standing knowledge that we have. Quantum Mechanics is the subject which has the possibility to answer this question however. An Irish Clergyman by the name of George Berekely has his own take on it. From what I read about Quantum Mechanics in this article it would seem evident that he does agree with this subject. He was an idealist and believed heavily in the idea that things only existed if and when they passed through our senses, meaning if we were able to perceive them or not. Quantum Mechanics attempts to prove this idea correct because in order for it to exist we must prove that objects do not previously exist unless we perceive them. The ideas of Quantum Mechanics are derived from Berkeley's work and for the most part confuses me because it takes what George Berkeley had theorized and develops into far greater detail.
One strength that I find in Roebke's theory is the idea that every electron when affected will have an effect on another electron no matter how far away. This idea can be taken as a ripple effect. Think of throwing a rock into a pond and when it splashes it makes ripples in the water. These ripples do not stop, they just continue to get smaller and smaller until we can no longer see them. My guess is that eventually all of the water in the pond will be effected because atoms and electrons are constantly in motion and by affecting one we could inadvertently affect them all.