The Plane Truth

For my outside reading I choose to read the book The Plane Truth: airline crashes, the media and the transportation policy.  The book gives the truth about airline safety and how our media portrays these crashes. 

The book looks at three crashes that had large investgations that where key to flaws in the aviation world.  The book also looks at September 11 and the impact it had on the security we have know at all airports.  The book also looks at where we stand know in aviation.  The book also talks about the fAA and the NTSbs roles in accidents and should their be more done by the FAA to make airlines safer.  The book also reveals what happens when changes are not made to the industry.  

Airline Saftey 2

In order to get more information on my topic i asked my dad if he knew anyone that i could interview.  He told me that he knew the vice president of safety at his company.   so i sent him my questions and he responded with some great answers.  He gave me exactly what i was looking for in depth answers that answered my questions.  I really felt a lot better about my topic after getting some professional feedback. 

Issues Project Airline Saftey Blog 1

For my topic I am covering airline safety and how it is becoming the safest way to travel.  Plane crashes tend to get more media attention then other types of accidents because of how many people die at once.  In the year 1996 TWA flight 800 exploded after takeoff  killing 230 people yet that same week 842 people died in motor accidents and the aircraft was the years top press story.  If you think about that 842 people compared to 230 people that is a big difference.   The new media likes to take things out of proportion because that is just how the media works.

Mock Trial Recap and Response

In the first case between Elyse Roberts and the District of Columbia the case was about sexual harassment.  In the case defendant was found guilty of sexual harassment.  I thought the right verdict was reached by the jury.  The facts of the case lead more to the plaintiff side and could not have been more clear cut.  A key fact in the case was the fact that when Elyse Roberts told Kevin Murphy to stop he did not and when she went to her supervisor she ignored Elyse.  All she did was talk to Kevin she did not really take action.  There were a lot of other things to consider like the comments that were made by Kevin about Elyse making her very uncomfortable.  The other side did to much on the bureaus created equal, they did not focus on other parts of the case.  The closing statement the other side repeated to many things and should have turned the jury's attention to other parts of the case. 
In the second case United States vs David Jones this case was a rape case.  The defendant David Jones was accused of raping Susan Williams.  The court ultimately ruled that he did not rape Susan Williams and he was innocent. The Courts made a  unanimous decision I agreed with the ruling and thought it was fair because I thought the case was just a misunderstanding and a form of jealousy.  Some of the facts that stood out to me were that Susan said no but continued to kiss in a playful way and was not aggressive in her decision to walk away.  Susan only left the apartment after she found a note that was from Davids partner in one of his classes.  She was clearly jealous and wanted to take revenge by accusing David of rape. the facts were more leading toward the side of David Jones.  In order for the other side to have won it would have taken more evidence.
Sexual Harassment and rape are too very serious topics.  These topics can never be taken lightly because of the side effects of these topics.  People should do research on these issues and learn ways to protect themselves from these issues.  I do not think these issues happen at Deerfield High school.  I have never heard of  anyone getting raped at school or being sexually harassed.  I think sexual harassment happens at school, but i never see it so I would not know.  I believe it does not happen that much only once in a while because there are always people who will do bad things and its hard to stop that.  For one thing they are not significant problems at Deerfield High School and they never have been.  They do not need to be addressed because we are well educated and smart about what we do.

What's Going on in the World?

There are many events going on in the world right know.  There are issues in the countries of Libya and Egypt that involve the government.  One issue i want to focus on is the Wisconsin union fights.  This issue is a major issues for the state of Wisconsin.  The Governor wants to strip strip public employee unions of most of their bargaining rights.Some of the major public unions said they compromise and let more money go to pensions and benefits.  I think that they need to settle this because who knows what will happen if this does not get passed soon. 

State of the Union Adress

Obama's state of the union address addressed many things. He wants to cut the deficit, lower taxes, encourage innovation and entrepreneurship, become more energy efficient, and place more people in jobs. These ideas are certainly admirable and necessary for America’s growth.  One of his main topics was education and how we are falling behind the rest of the world.  He is right are scores keep getting lower and lower and that can't happen in a country that once had a outstanding education system.  This same issue was addressed in the movie waiting for superman. Another thing Obama stressed was the cutting of government spending and how we must cut things.  He gave a plan for what things needed to be cut and how they would help our country.  He wants to freeze government spending for the next few years hoping our economy will pick up. Of course, this will help America, but how does he plan to cut back on spending government money while supporting various costly projects? When you are doing something you always have to think about the downs to it to.  One thing that shocked me in Obamas speech was when he talked about gays being able to serve in the military.  The army generals were not happy about letting them serve in the military i remember looking at there faces and saying wow they are mad.  He did a good job not going into this too much because it was not as important as topics such as health care and education.  He gave the short and sweet version.  Obama also stressed the needs to create more jobs and the need to come together as one nation instead of fighting Democrats vs Republicans. I thought that was a good idea to make Democrats sit next to Republicans and Republicans sit next to Democrats.Obamas quote about the American dream really stood out to me.  “Sustaining the American dream has never been about standing in the past. It has required each generation to sacrifice, and struggle, and meet the demands of a new age.”  (Barak Obama)

Methland The Death And Life Of An American Small Town last post

Methland in my opinion was a great book which i recommended to any one looking for a good book.  Once i started reading the book i couldnt put it down it was really hard to.  Ultimately, reading Methland feels like a meth trip; It's fast paced, keeps you up at night, and leaves you wanting more. I thought some of the stories in the book were not true just because how crazy they were.  I really enjoyed reading this book because i had never read anything like this before. 

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Reding in the book goes back to Oelwin, Iowa many times in the book visiting the characters he meet the first time he went there.  It was very interesting to see how each of the characters changed and the experiences they went through each time.  The great part about the book is it focuses on other small towns around Oelwin Iowa.  He keeps the audience interested by using the towns around Oelwin to show the truth of what was really happening.  He was trying to show how meth was the worlds most dangerous drug and if done the consequences that can occur.  One story that really stood out was when he went to back to visit these guys major and buck.  Major was a heavy meth user and Buck his kid was exposed to the drug already having serious consequences.  Major was taking to Reding telling him that he couldn't live with buck alone fearing that he would abuse him or worse kill him.  One time Buck was almost killed when Major mistook baby food for a nickel and made Buck eat it causing serious problems and surgery having to be performed to remove the nickel.  This was the reason Major could not take of Buck so he lives with Majors parents until Major is able to take care of him. Major still lives with Buck but ,cant ever be alone with him so one of Majors parents have to be home at all times.  There are many more stories just like this were Reding would go back and interview the people he spoke with in 2005 when he was first just getting started.  Every time he seems to go back things are improving. When he went back in 2008 buck was allowed to be alone in the house with Major and the town of Oelwin was know slowly rebuilding moving away from the stages of methland.  It was amazing to see  the improvements of the town after what looked like a town that would never recover. 

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A central myth of our national culture is small-town residents, the story goes, are honest, hard-working, religiously observant and somehow just more American than the rest of America . . . Reding reveals the fallacies of this myth by showing how, over the past three decades, small-town America has been blighted by methamphetamine, which has taken root in--and taken hold of--its soul. Oelwein serves as a case study of the problems many small towns face today. Once a vibrant farming community where union work and small businesses were plentiful, Oelwein is now struggling through a transition to agribusiness and low-wage employment or, alternatively, unemployment. These conditions, Reding shows, have made the town susceptible to methamphetamine. He tracks the decline and, ultimately, the limited resurgence of Oelwein, while also examining the larger forces that have contributed to its problems. He links meth to the gathering power of unregulated capitalism beginning in the 1980's. It was then, he argues, that one-time union employees earning good wages and protected by solid benefits and begans to see their earnings cut and their benefits disappear. Undocumented migrants began taking jobs at extraordinarily low wages, thereby depressing the cost of labor. Meth, with its opportunity for quick profit and its power to make the most abject and despondent person feel suddenly alive and vibrant, found fertile ground. Meanwhile, in Washington, pharmaceutical lobbyists were working hard to keep DEA agents from attempting to limit access to the raw ingredients; ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, meth's core precursors, were simply too vital to the lucrative allergy-remedy market.  Reding positions the meth epidemic as the triumph of profits over the safety and prosperity of America's small-town inhabitants. But meth hasn't always been seen as a menace. In fact, Reding explains, 'methamphetamine was once heralded as the drug that would end the need for all others. He believed that this drug could replace all other drugs which meant a dangerous society. 

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Through four years of reporting, Reding brings us into the heart of rural America through a cast of intimately drawn characters. "Methland "is a portrait not just of a town, but of small-town America on the brink. Centered on one community battling for a brighter future, it reveals the connections between the real-life people touched by the drug epidemic and the global forces behind it. "Methland" provides a vital perspective on a contemporary tragedy, ultimately offering the very thing that meth once took from Oelwein: hope. "This is a strong book, and it tells a complicated story in comprehensible, human dimensions. "Think globally, suffer locally. This could be the moral of "Methland," Nick Reding's unnerving investigative account of . . . Oelwein, Iowa, a railroad and meatpacking town of several thousand whipped by a methamphetamine-laced panic whose origins lie outside the place itself.  Details, with blunt statistics and apt anecdotes, the vanishing of educated young males from rural Iowa, as well as the butchering of middle-class jobs at the local packing plant. 'Vicious cycle' is not an adequate term. As Reding painstakingly presents it, the production, distribution and consumption of methamphetamine is a self-catalyzing catastrophe of Chernobylish dimensions. The rich, with their far-off, insulated lives, get richer and more detached, while the poor get high and, finally, waste.

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The Next part of the book we come across a very interesting character Ronald Jarvis.  Roland Jarvis, a former meatpacking worker who burned his house down in 2001. Jarvis, who had a methamphetamine lab inside, was hallucinating that he saw black helicopters hovering overhead and, in a panic, dumped chemicals down the drain. The home went up in flames, and Jarvis was burned so badly that he begged the police to shoot him. Jarvis had third-degree burns over 78 percent of his body and spent three months in the burn unit in Iowa City, Iowa.  Even though he burned his hands off he still found a way to smoke meth which is amazing.  He taught himself how to light a lighter with what was left of his hands and hold a pipe in his mouth.  When i read that i stopped and said holy shit this is the most addictive drug.  The guy fuckin almost killed himself and still couldn't stop smoking meth.  Jarvis' addiction encapsulates what has happened to many small towns in America. Meth is a drug of the American working class, because it gives people "inordinate amounts of energy."  The story's in this book were just incredible like this next one about Lori Arnold.  She is the sister of actor Tom Arnold.  Laurie Arnold, a woman in Oelwein who turned meth dealing into a highly profitable enterprise, capitalizing on what Reding referred to as a culture of "vocational" meth use. As Reding chronicled, Arnold dropped out of high school her freshman year and experienced her first divorce by the age of 16. She went back to high school after her divorce, but quickly dropped out and re-married by age 18. Her second husband was an alcoholic and cocaine user who beat her whenever he drank. Furthermore, Arnold's husband was unable to take care of their kids because of his alcohol and drug problem, leaving the responsibility solely with Arnold.With her marital troubles, Arnold turned to meth use, and later to selling meth. Originally, she began dealing meth in small quantities. Over time, she made much larger sums of money, eventually reaching thousands of dollars for her routine sales. Arnold hired a dozen "runners" who frequently traveled to Long Beach, Calif., to transport the drugs and then ended up buying a car dealership so she had access to a variety of cars and dealership tags, making it harder for the authorities to keep tabs on her operation. While Arnold's meth enterprise was going on, the Drug Enforcement Agency was primarily concerned with cocaine use, and was not rapidly investigating meth operations. This allowed Arnold to hide her meth operation for many years without people ever becoming aware of the situation.She was eventually arrested and sent to jail were she later got out and got back into the business.

Methland The Death And Life Of An American Small Town

For my project i chose the book Methland The Death And Life OF An American Small Town by Nick Reding. The book takes place in a small town in Iowa.  The name of this town is Oelwein, Iowa.  A town with only 6,159 people Oelwin Iowa is like thousands of other small towns across the country, has been left in the dust by the consolidation of the agricultural industry, a depressed local economy, and an out-migration of people. As if this weren't enough to deal with, an incredibly cheap, long lasting, and highly addictive drug has rolled into town.In the first part of the book we meet some characters one being Nathan Lein, the town prosecutor, whose caseload is filled almost exclusively with meth-related crime.  Most of the people in the city live in poverty due to the fact of very little jobs.  Many of the plants were closed down in the town causing people to turn to what some call the most dangerous drug in the world.  " Talk about a nightmare," said Nathan reflecting back. " We'd lost all the bases of civilized culture around here.  It was a third- world.  people began to referring to Olwein as Methlehem." Another Character we learn about is Larry Murphy who arguably has the tough fist job the mayor of the city.   Murphy is the one who hired Nathan to clean up the town. Its amazing to think how a town can go from a normal small town to a town were chaos is taking place.