But That's What I Think

While scrolling through Tumblr last night I found a Tweet by user @/BNeslob that reads "The fact that Malia Obama is trending higher for smoking weed than 200 people killed in #Egypt is one reason why the world is f***ing doomed". And I couldn't agree more. With attention spans as long as 280 characters there's little to be said about the amount people are willing to read about an evolving story. With every attack or resistance comes a media campaign, but these online movements don't always get seen because they are trumped by useless media that means next to nothing. If Malia Obama, an autonomous teenager in college decides to smoke weed people can judge all they want, but there are greater things at play in the world that require more attention. On October 10th, in the heart of London, there was Muslim march against ISIS and the rest of the world didn't see anything about it because worldwide trends don't actually hit worldwide. People don't want ...

“Our population is spiraling out of control. Inferno is the cure.” That is a quote from Dan Brown’s book Inferno . The character who says this intended to fix the world’s problems by shrinking the world population through infertility. While population isn’t the biggest problem in the world and rendering one third of the population infertile is a bad idea, population does make a significant impact in many societies. When we analyze GDP per person (PPP) in a country, then divide it by the population density, we see that countries with the lowest PPP and the highest population density have the most problems in their countries. This is due to low employment in areas where people are in close contact. Having lower economic opportunities along with challenges in daily life leads to conflicts between different religions and classes. Tensions like these lead to bigger problems, such as radicalism, and create opportunities for totalitarian governments to manipulate the population. Of cour...

Most people with access to a radio or the internet have heard the song Feel It Still by Portugal. The Man. It topped the Billboard Adult Alternative list, as well as the Billboard Alternative Chart in just six weeks. The song, while catchy and repetitive has a deeper meaning than most would think.  The band released an i nteractive video  to go along with the song an it reveals exactly what the song is actually about. 30 different "tools to resist" are featured, and in the interactive video the watcher is encouraged to find all of them, with a running count in the corner. Some of the "tools" include donating to the ACLU , standing up for equality , and combating climate change . And those are just the first few.  One of the most repetitive lyrics in the song is "I'm a rebel just for kicks", which can be taken to mean that, in the current time, rebellion against everything is common and it seems like it's just for fun. The band has clear...

All life evolves, it changes and engineers and then re-engineers until it has a completely new look that helps its function. Humans have been evolving since the beginning of the planet, from single cells, to bacteria, to fish, and so on. And while Earth has been evolving, for all we know, so have extraterrestrials. Maybe these aliens have been in the universe for less time than we have, or maybe they've been here much longer, but either way some day one of us will find the other. They will find us, or we will find them. And with the great danger humans have posed to our own survival on Earth, it is most likely that we will have to leave our planet and will run into some other living creature, maybe one that looks similar to us or one that looks nothing like anything we've ever seen before. Regardless of this, maybe we'll visit their planet and see it's the perfect habitat for them. They regularly make differences in their habits to keep their planet clean and safe fo...

Everything that has happened in the past dictates the future. That's basically what dictates everything people do. Everything that is happening now is a direct result of what has happened in the past and without knowing what happened in the past, it's impossible to know what will happen in the future. Learning about history can be the most boring thing in the world, but without that history a person wouldn't know that North Korea and all the problems associated with the country began, in part, because of the first World War, which wouldn't have started if Serbia hadn't tried to become it's own country. History is essential to reading a situation and knowing how to react to it, whether it was politically or militarily. When people find themselves without the knowledge of what happened in the past, they make the same mistakes that prompted the issues at hand. Without a history lesson, no good decisions can be made, not ones that will help for very long. As fo...

Humanity is unique. We have done great things for themselves, creating till we could touch the moon and talk over hundreds of miles. We’ve created so many things to make our societies and future generations as intelligent as us, from language to writing. Yet we’ve failed to address the fact that we can’t go on like this if we want everyone to live. The planet is overpopulated with humans, that is a fact. You can watch people be born and people die on the internet and just watching that clock move should scare you. Four children are born every second. Our population is growing  expoenetionally  and this planet can barely handle as many as we have now. There are simply too many people and too few resources. People are dying worldwide of hunger. The population of our species is out of control. It cannot be sustained on what we have on this planet.  There have been  five great extinctions , the most famous being the one of dinosaurs, which was the most...

A little bit of background on this essay:  Every year in whatever English you take in my school you have to write a research essay. Our topics are generally free range and all you have to do is run the thesis by your teacher. This year, when we were asked to pick our essays there had been a comparison of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to Adolf Hitler. While I in no way agreed with the comparison I started to see the similarities between the wars themselves. On Repeat - The Recurrence of War High school students drag their feet to history class, wondering why they have to learn about things that happened decades before they were born. “To learn what humanity did in the past,” a teacher will reply. That response should not only apply to students, but to all people. Reviewing the past is meant to remind students what humanity has done so it can be avoided in the future. Even so, history repeats itself, no matter how horrifying. Recent history has made it particularly easy ...

Originally posted on  The Odyssey Online Disney has been teaching little girls how they should be since 1938, when  Snow White and the Seven Dwarves  (the movie) was released. Since then Disney has been growing, filling every corner of this world. As society has changed, so have the princesses. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves  taught little girls that greed will lead to your downfall, as it was with the Evil Queen. Cinderella  taught them that no matter how other people treat you, it is always better to be kind and a dream big.  Sleeping Beauty  taught them that love is always better than hate. The Little Mermaid  taught them to follow their dreams. Beauty and the Beast  taught them that inner beauty is more important than what you look like and that you should always try to learn. Aladdin  taught them that it doesn’t matter where you come from, you can always strive for greatness. Pocahontas  taught them that p...