Betrayal

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini: Amir betrays his friend and servant two times. Once he fails to save Hassan from Assef's brutal assault, and then he frames Hassan by placing a watch and money under Hassan's mattress in the servants' shack where Hassan lives with his father Ali. Explain why one of the betrayals is a greater betrayal of Hassan.

Self Regulation

Self Regulation is the latest buzzword being bandied about in educational seminars. Self regulation is best understood through a study that began over 30 years ago. Children (age 4)were given a marshmallow and told that if they could wait 20 minutes without eating the marshmallow they would be given a second marshmallow. Apparently 30 % of the children were able to withstand the urge to munch the tasty treat and were rewarded with a second marshmallow. What did thirty years of tracking these students provide the researchers? They discovered that the students who showed self regulation (or did not like marshmallows) had better grades, higher academic achievement, greater job satisfaction and lower rates of obesity. Self regulation, impulse control, deferred gratification, call it what you will, is a uniquely human behavior that apparently only some humans possess. The study, conducted by Walther Mischel in 1972 at Stanford University, determined that those who self regulate will fare better academically later in life. Self regulation, when appropriately measured, can predict, with a degree of certainty, future successes. The challenge for teachers now is to attempt to teach self regulation. It is apparently a learned rather than a natural trait. See a clip of a recent rendition of the Marshmallow Test: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EjJsPylEOY

Write a response to the "self Regulation" experiment after reading some reviews of the experiment.

A Billion Wicked Thoughts

A Billion Wicked Thoughts is a book based on the world's largest social experiment ever conducted - the internet and the searches that people make have provided the authors, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, with a wealth of information for studying human sexual desire. Now, any well read student of sociology or psychology will find familiar territory in their writing, but gems are found throughout the book. The idea that men desire women (mostly) but women desire being desired by men comes as a bit of a surprise. It tells us fellows why it's been so hard to pick up women by merely presenting a witty line or a flash of muscle. Women are not impressed, like men are, by simple visual cues. We men now have some ammunition for more successful date making! Let the woman know that she is desired and you're well on your way to successfully impressing her. Much of the writing is devoted to understanding the differences in male and female desires and how those differences explain the divergence in the things that we all search for in the world of internet titillation. Men, obviously, look for images. Women search for something more intellectually stimulating - erotic literature. The authors also do a fine job of explaining how gay men are still men. Their sexual preferences may be for men, but everything else about the way they think is identical to how all men think - simply and largely visually. The differences between what men write and what women write is barely distinguishable, until the writing of pornography is considered. Again, women focus on relationships and romance, men, on the physical attributes and the actions that accompany them. Brutes. Read the book. You will be pleasantly surprised by how the internet has enabled the authors to reveal stark differences in male and female sexual desire.

The Slippery Slope or Knee Jerk Reaction

Is the Jerk in this case our own federal liberal opposition leader, Michael Ignatieff? Will we continue to slide down the slippery slope of dependency on oil, acknowledge that oil is what makes the world go around, and pursue the policy of importing and exporting the stuff until we run out, or at least until we find alternative energy sources, or will we pretend to be appalled at the growing slick in the Gulf of Mexico and enact 1972 legislation that bans oil tankers from plying the treacherous yet sensitive Northwest Coast?
Mr. Ignatieff, recently announced brushing off an old Pierre Trudeau moratorium banning tanker traffic in and around BC's Dixon entrance. What I'm not sure of is whether his concern is feigned or genuine. Had the announcement been made 6 weeks ago, before the Deep-Water horizon explosion and the subsequent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, I might have believed sincerity rather than politics motivated the decision. But since he has chosen to make this announcement in light of the British Petroleum super-spill, I think he is making political mileage rather than reasoned policy.
What's at stake? A 5.5 billion project, continued oil exports and long term employment in both the production fields and in Kitimat, a far flung resource town hard hit by the recession and in need of employment and infrastructure development. Let's face it; oil as a commodity is not going to go away and transporting oil by pipeline is preferable to trucking it to the tune of approximately 500,000 barrels a day. Folks, oil is slippery stuff and we are addicted. We will wean ourselves one day, but until that begins to happen we will continue to develop the oil sands and to export our product to the highest bidder. To oppose this development now, in light of the current spill, is mere knee jerk politics than it is a sincere reaction to the proposed Enbridge pipeline and tanker facility in Kitimat. Let's not pretend in order to curry political points.

Mr. Slick has changed his stripes.... The Florida politician now believes, in light of a gushing Gulf of Mexico oil spill, that oil companies need to be regulated. When common sense is applied, regulation of industry is imperative. The whole economy could be privatized if the government would regulate appropriately! Obama's health care plan is a concession to private health insurance providers. There is no need for public health care if the government can legislate and regulate how industry works. In time we will see if America's 16 % of GDP spent on health care will sink to the 10% of GDP spent in Canada, where the health care providers bill the government sponsored health care plan. When more of the GOP incumbents, like Mr. Slick, trip over their own common sense to find that government has a role in governing and regulating, the USA will recoup it's status as an economic leader as well as a defender of the environment and a watchdog of investors.

I should change the name of this blog to Incumbent advice...

The Literary Journal

The book: Hot, Flat and Crowded, by Thomas Friedman. Here's the premise. The world is hot (global warming), flat (there is improved opportunity for greater numbers of people to do well, by virtue of a global economy and the Internet...) and crowded (the population is growing exponentially). In light of the premise, the message is to begin conserving our resources and changing the way we live and developing new "green" sources of energy. There are deniers of the global warming data and even more resistance to the concept that global warming is the result of human activity. The deniers tend to be conservatives, to the point that denial has even become a platform of the U.S. Republican party. Conservatives are hypocrites for denying global warming. They should be on the forefront of spreading the message that we need to conserve the non-renewable resources of our planet. The conservatives should be extolling the virtues of a conservative lifestyle that will herald in an era of reduced use of and reliance on energy.