matt

i am disgusted to find out that racism still exists in the US.  And there is still slavery in some parts of the world. Children are taken from their homes to be exploited for labor or sex.  This happends mostly in third world contries and a lot is happening in Darfur.  I think that the government should stop worrying about our situation in Iraq, which is not going to inprove any time soon if we keep going like we are going now, and focus our concentration on the areas of the world that need our help right now.  Kids are enslaved right now and it is time for our contry to do somthing about it.

The short story we read in class was not as insulting as wasserman said it would be.  Instead of being angry I felt confused, mark twaine made some good points about how our heaven is nothing like what we would think true paradise is although each and every person would agree that heaven is the ideal place.  Also the idea of having a protaganist in the story (satan) who came from the “real Heaven” and proves how what we percive as heaven to be nothing like what it really is. 

i would have to strongly disagree with you olmstead, although i do not like the bush administration, i did some reaserch on this topic and i found that Cheney has not worked for the oil company in over 10 years and John Kerry is ownes the stocks now and making a ton of money, at least Cheney is working for his. So to say that the vice president is getting rich off ruining america would be a false claim.

I went to Cnn.com and found this

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/12/12/racism.poll/index.html

The poll taken here was shocking. It was taken by hispanic americans and african americans and it shows how many stereotypes that whites have towards blacks and hispanics. 

This relates to huck Finn because Huck lives in a time period were no one thinks twice about being racist or discrimination towards blacks. 

To us satire is hilarious Carlos Mencia and Dave Chappelle use satire to make fun of thier own race and other people. Also the movie Borat was another example of satire, in the movie the main character goes to america and asks them questions about america’s traditions.  In a funny way it exposes americas flaws and stereotypes we have towards our minorities. 

today in class we wrote out reactions to the reading on the life of the slaves.  I was horrified at how badly they were treated.  They were made to work hard manual labor in the worst conditions.  They had little food to eat, they didnt sleep in beds.  They were only given corse burlap blankets to sleep on the floor.  They only recived one pair of cloths a year and were whipped if they did not work to the level that the masters wanted them to.  There was one quote in the reading that said “Ive seen him whip a woman until the blood ran for half an hour” i dont understand how one person could treat another this way.

The only place to ecsape the White prejedice against blacks is to go up north. Jefferson is a black man that many of the white people take advantage of. Grant is well educated and the school we works at is very poorly funded.  They have to get hand me downs from all of the White schools and the Board of Education told him to get the kids to start working and to earn money working in the fields.  Basicly he told them to stop worring about education and start working on labor and hygine because that is all they are going to be good at. 

The movie i watched on shakespere was a theactrical performance on midsummers nights dream.  The actors did a very good job, i thought.  They did a very good job on the props, to make the affect of a forest they wheeled in many trees to make it actually look like a forest.  The plot of the play was a  little confusing, there was a fairie named puck or somthing like that and him and the king of the forest planned to make the queen fall in love with a donkey by eating some special flowers. Also there was 4 lovers in the forest and a group making a play.  Shakespere is hard to understand and hard to act out so i think this acting group did a very good job acting it out.

The war in iraq has been pointless, we have lost over 2000 men.  If we stuck to the original plan we would have only lost 50 but we kept going and trying to take over iraq.  One of the main reasons why we are losing so many men is because when we secure an area we have to leave some men behind to made sure it stays secure but since we dont have enough people to leave behind, when we attack another place the previous place becomes overrun again.  To fully achive our goal we are going to need to add to the number of soldiers that are currently fighting.  If you ask me i think that we should have just taken our soldiers out of iraq along time ago and focused on more important things such as the killings in Darfur where many more people are being killed and abused. 

So far our group has been doing very well. Everyday we get down to buisness and we assign goals for ourselves.  Everyday we have compleated all of our goals and more. We have worked out almost all of our stage directions and we have most of our lines memorized we also have the costume design all worked out.  We havd made good progress every day.  If we can keep this up will wil do great when we finnaly perform this play.