Independent Blog Post #???

I am ashamed to admit that I have no idea what number blog post this is. The last week was quite hectic as we had mock Congress which took up a good amount of time. Anyways, on to the blog post.


Recently there has been quite a lot of noise about a possible Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip. In fact, Israel called up an additional 75,000 reservists on Friday, a move that indicated that they could be preparing for a ground war.

For years relations between the Gaza Strip and Israel have been tense. The situation has been exacerbated by both sides repeated escalations. If Israel bombs a rocket site in Gaza, then they are met with rockets landing in their major population centers, and so on and so forth. Both sides need to take a deep breath, and step back from the brink of war. Another war in the Middle East would benefit no one, especially as most of the region is currently on not so good terms with Israel, and with a current Civil War ongoing in nearby Syria.

Either Israel or Gaza needs to be the bigger person and stop retaliating and show the world that their side is the one being attacked, and so win international support. Recently on the site Reddit.com a video was posted of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking candidly, without realizing that the cameras were rolling. Now this footage must be taken with a grain of salt, seeing as it was posted to a part of reddit which is notoriously toxic, r/politics, a den of extreme liberalism which is often controversial, and partisan.

Independent Blog Post #5

So here's an independent blog post!

This weekend the government of China changed its leaders for the first time in a decade. The government of China is composed solely of members of the CCP or Chinese Communist Party. I expect that the next ten years will see no significant changes with regards to their foreign policy. There are no apparent reformers in what experts suggest will be the newest crop of Chinese officials.

The Chinese government shifts its most important members every decade, and historically different factions have cut deals and waged intricate inside warfare to finangle their way to the top, the office of the Premier.

It will be interesting to see what comes of this newer generation of leaders and how they will react to the current world. Most likely they will just toe the party line and continue on the same path the current leaders are on.

Capture The Fall

I made this video today for a class assignment. I used WeVideo to edit it and it was a fairly horrendous experience. The exporting process was incredibly vague and had no sort of progress bar and was really tedious. Additionally I couldn't add music to the video with WeVideo, but I was going to use http://freemusicarchive.org/music/nisei23/Soft_Shapes/03_-_nisei23_-_Fall_-_Soft_Shapes.

Filmed with the phone.

Independent Blog Post #4

This post is going to be about my Crystal Ball, which I had to do last week. So for NSL we had to predict the results of the elections in our assigned state. Some students had partners if they had larger states, but I was alone. I was alone because I had one of the smallest states in the country. I had North Dakota.

Now North Dakota is actually an interesting state. It's composed of 700,000 conservative Americans. Apparently, however, North Dakota is something of a swing state. Calling this election was kind of fun, and there was significant research required.

Because North Dakota is not exactly the most interesting state to most, there weren't a lot of resources available. The fact that the local political parties didn't have great websites didn't help. In fact, the local democratic party had to merge with the socialist party a ways back because the socialist party kept...winning.

Now North Dakota has one House, one Senate and the Governorship up for election this year. The House and Gubernatorial races were easy to call, as the Republican candidates had major leads already. The state was also guaranteed to go for Romney. The Senate seat was however hotly contested. In fact, I called the race for the Democrat.

The experience itself was interesting, and maybe I will do it again next year, on my own. It was fun finding out what the people in an area cared about, who would turn out to vote, and for whom they would vote.




PS. I am a bad person for not doing the last four independent blog posts :(