Papamama

Fast Food Nation

2005-03-24T19:58:00.000-08:00

"Fast Food Nation" by Eric Schlosser is a very realistic book that reveal the negative truths about our most famous fast food businesses - McDonald, Burger King, KFC, and others. It really showed me how the dominant food corporations can influence the politics, and make their own rules in order to maximize their profits and be successful, while taking advantage of the middle and lower class work force. On the other hand, we, the customers, are lured to consume their products by using artificial food flavorings and using our children as targets. We are also threaten to eat contaminated meat due to unhealthy conditions in large slaughterhouse and meatpacking companies. The most serious problem is that fast food is an unhealthy diet created by our society, and is spreading worldwide, making the entire Earth population fatter and unhealthy.

Global warning

2005-03-23T18:51:00.000-08:00

It has been a global issue regarding the fast warming of our planet Earth by the greenhouse effect in the current decade. Although the United States has taken the leadership for the global awareness, and signed the Kyoto protocol in 1997 in a global effort for the world’s industrialized nations to reduce the pollution and the mass greenhouse effect on Earth, it has stepped down its support for the protocol in March 2001 by President George Bush, stating that it affects the U.S. economy in the long range. I think this decision has been badly viewed in the international community. Since U.S. produces 25 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases, it should be heavily involved in the utilization of all the existing fuel alternatives rather than researching for new ones that take years to develop. For example, in Brazil, the methanol has been used as a clean and renewable fuel in cars for over 20 years. The engine technology for this alternative fuel is far advanced; there are now 40 percent of the new cars using flex fuel technology, i.e., engines running with either pure gasoline, pure methanol, or a mixture of both in any proportion. Why doesn't U.S. adopt such technology quickly and efficiently? The problem is that the large auto manufacturers in U.S. don’t want to make the change, although they already have the technology manufacturing flex fuel cars in Brazil, such as GMC and Ford.

School shooting

2005-03-23T18:47:00.000-08:00

The latest news in the media has been the shooting spree in the Indian reservation Red Lake High School, Minnesota, where Jeff Weise, a 16-year-old American Indian boy, killed 7 people at the school, plus his grandfather and his grandfather’s girlfriend at home before killing himself. The news said that he got hook up with a Neo-Nazi Internet site, where he admired Hitler’s ideology for the world’s racial issue. I think the technology of Internet in today’s world has global impact in the culture and the life of people around the world, regardless of age. There are many people in this world with psychological problem, and when deviant resources, such as the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party, display their information in the Internet they can really cause change in the mind of many, and make them react differently in the society. The contents in the Internet sites should be better controlled to avoid this kind of problem.

Health care

2005-03-20T16:40:00.000-08:00

Health care is the upmost concern of elderly people in the United States. Most of them have at least one serious illness that affect their life quality and requires constant doctor visit. The increasing cost of health care in U.S. forbids them from getting adequate medical care. The Medicare does not provide enough coverage for all illnesses and hospitalization, requiring the elderlies to acquire supplemental medical insurance. In the worst case, if an elderly becomes sick and requires hospitalization, and he/she does not have health insurance the hospital may deny treatment or save his/her life at all, unless there's someone in the family who can be responsible for the elderly's medical charges.
As I know, this kind of situation does not happen in other developed countries. For example, all Canadian elder citizens are fully covered by Federal health care system. They need only to pay a small co-pay for every doctor visit. It does not matter whether or not they have health insurance as long as they are canadian citizens. Even in Brazil, which is a developing country, countless poor citizens, young or old, are treated in govenment funded 24 hours health care clinics and hospitals. I don't understand how in U.S., a well known developed country, the health care system is still a menace to elder citizens. It needs an urgent reform to fix it, so it can be 100 percent accessible to all citizens, young or old.

Scandals

2005-03-15T19:05:00.000-08:00

Our textbook showed me a lot of reality views about today's society. There are many good and bad things happening everyday. The good thing about living in a capitalist society is that we have the freedom of expression, and can live and do the way we want based on our own potential. The bad thing that make me wonder why those people who are fortunate to rise to the top of fortune 500 companies, especially the CEOs, such as Martha Stewart and Bernard Ebbers, who already make fortunes with their salary, yet are not happy and still try to plot accounting scandals against their own company. Why can't they be honest and fair to others and to his company? As said in the textbook, the capitalist system makes people want more and more, even being evil, against the society. Poor are those who are honest and work hard the entire life to make enough for their survival.

Religion & Constitution

2005-03-03T20:21:00.000-08:00

The hot topic of this week's news was the controversy about whether the religion's Ten Commandments can be display in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. Will that violates our constitution? In my opinion the Ten Commandments are valid norms for our society, they reflect the good manners all individuals in our society should follow so we can all live in peace and harmony. Therefore, these commandments may be displayed in public places, but in order to avoid conflicts among religious groups and the politicians the commandments should be rewritten to express the same ideas without using the same wording in the Bible.

Men vs. Women

2005-02-24T19:43:00.000-08:00

The topic about inequality of genders discussed in chapter 7 really reflect the reality of our daily life. I can presence these inequalities among men and women everyday and wherever I go - school, home, public place, and workplace. I think that the differences between men and women, such as career, job pay, and family chores are all parts of how our culture has molded in our mind. And also it's because of the industrialization of our society. Today, there are still underdeveloped cultures in our world where men and women have the same share of duties in the society.

Discrimination

2005-02-17T19:11:00.000-08:00

I find myself in a discriminating situation in my office one day when my coworker was talking with me in chinese about family matters. Suddenly, the marketing director walked by and told us to use English only in the office, despite the subject was not business related. I know that he wasn't happy because he could not understand what we were talking about, although my coworker feels more comfortable using our tongue language. This showed me a real case as highlighted in the chapter 6 of our textbook about institutional discrimination in the U.S.

Chapter 5

2005-02-10T18:09:00.000-08:00

The social stratification chapter in the textbook showed us a lot of realities that has been happening since the industrialization of our world. All the comments made by the experts and sociologists are all true. There has been and there will always be stratification in our society differentiating the wealthy from the poor, because there are always people who are fortunate and smarter, and will take advantage of those who are less fortunate and intelligent. Although many methods have been employed by humankind to change this social stratification, especially the communist nation leaders, who had used strick rules and punishment to those individuals who are wealthy and smarter, none of them have proved to work. This happened with the former Soviet Union imposed by the communist leader Joseph Stalin and the Chinese Cultural Revolution by Mao-Tse Tung. Only a few nations in the world are still under the strick communist system, such as North Korea. Even the communist system has its own social stratification, the leaders enjoy the power and wealth while its people live in misery conditions.

It is true that no matter how people try to change the world social system stratification within social classes continues to exist.

Family cases

2005-02-09T20:38:00.000-08:00

I have been astonished by the latest daily news about family member killings. It has happened in a daily basis, either the children have killed their parents or the parents have killed their own children.
1. Monday was the case of a well reputated school teacher who had killed her own 89 year-old mom because of child abuse when she was young.
2. Yesterday was the case of the mother who had killed her own 14 year-old daughter, and then tried to commit suicide.
3. There were 2 cases that happpened today. First, a brother and sister had killed their mom and the grandparents, and even buried their bodies under the grandparents' house concrete slab. Second, a mom had starved her 3 children to death, and even stayed with their bodies for a week in her house.

After reading all these unbelievable incidents, I keep asking myself, what is going on in this society today? It seems that our family members are going out of control, they must be influenced by some kind of hate that changed their personality
completely, at a point they lost the love for their own family, and wanted to eliminate them all. I can understand when a killing happen to a stranger, but not within family members, especially among parents and children. I know that it is not easy to explain the reasons that made these family members to kill, but it is certainly sociology studies for the experts.

Child Education

2005-02-03T18:45:00.000-08:00

After reading the chapter 4 of our text book, I recalled the case last year about the teacher in Georgia who had used an old way to control her elementary school student from being naughty at the classroom. She had taken the student to the washroom, and had him put some hand soap on his tongue, and then rinsed it right away. She told the student the intend was to wash away the bad words from his mouth. The student then became a quiet student after he returned to the classroom. Later, the student's mom sued the teacher after she knew what had happened to their son at school. The teacher was then suspended by the school board for her action. I did not know what happened to her later on, but many parents had supported and considered her action as properly.

In my opinion, I think the teacher's action was right. When a student's parent does not educate his/her child at home to behavior properly in public, the teacher at school has the right to control the student with her method as long as it does not harm the student physically. The student's mom claimed that the teacher had hurt her son emotionally. I think that some emotional sense must be touched in order for a child to learn. The way that teacher used to control the student had made him feel sorry and learn to behave apropriately.

Our text also mentioned that 59 percent of pediatricians of the American Academy of Pediatrics support the use of some type of child punishment in certain situations, such as the case described above.

The third age

2005-01-29T11:32:00.000-08:00

I noticed that there's a big socio-cultural conflict between my cultural background and the modern one in this country. Most of the third age people, seniors, in America are either independent or abandoned. Most of their children, if they have, leave their house early in life, in the teens, and becomes independent. Many of these seniors live in their own house if they are fortunate to purchase one before their retirement, or abandoned in senior residences provided by the government welfare. Their children rarely support or visit them. I was raised in a culture where children have the responsibility to take care of their parents after their retirement. This doesn't happen only in chinese culture, but also in brazilian culture. All my brazilian friends live with their parents until they get married, and after that they still keep close contact with their parents until the end of the life.

Test

2005-01-21T19:18:00.000-08:00

test