5/1/06

Finals are all done for me and man, am I happy. I feel sort of bad because I know this hell goes on all week for most students. I hope all goes well. Good luck everyone.

4/25/06

I hope gas prices do not keep rising the way they are. This is ridiculous. Oil does not cost over $70 a barrel to drill out of the ground. And what pisses me off even more is the fact that Exxon, last year, posted the thrid highest net profits, in the history of this country. What the hell is wrong with this picture to where the public is gouged like this, and nothing is done!?

4/21/06

I just got back from the State Fire academy this week for a week-long class on fire behavior and such inside residential buildings. We had to identify the stage that the fire was in, etc, and eventually put the fires out. Let me tell you, watching the fire go over your head in a roll-over (the name of a stage in fire growth) is something that is amazing to watch; at least in a controlled enviroment.

automotive forum

4/16/06

Happy Easter! I am off to Lewistown for the week to become involved in a class about structural firefighting. I need this class as a prerequisite to become a fire suppression instructor. When I get that, it equals more money. Should be a good class.

4/13/05

Easter's coming up here pretty soon. I don't really have too much going on class-wise, which is a nice break for the semester. But of course, like everytime with me, there's always stuff that has to get done.

4/8/06

FinaleProposall

4/5/06

Ashley, my girlfriend, is here for the weekend. :-) She goes to Elizabethtown College near Harrisburg, and is a marketing major. She decided to come up this wednesday, and stay the rest of the week because my fire company is having a dinner, and I really wanted her to attend with me. I'm glad I have some company to stay with me this weekend.

4/3/06

ProposalArguement

4/1/06

The second set of midterms are coming up soon. Is it me, or is everyone pretty much stressed in these last couple of weeks?

3/20/06

CausalArguement

3/8/06

It's spring break. Who's having a good time? :-)

3/3/06

Proposal for Causal Arguements

The United States walked on the Moon on July 21st, 1969 with the landing of the Lunar Module in the Sea of Tranquility. The two men who later would later walk on the moon were Neil Armstrong and "Buzz" Aldrin. But how many people did it actually take in order to put these two, now infamous, men on the moon? We can assume that it took the work of hundreds of thousands of people and billions of dollars in order to accomplish this giant feat, but why would any country commit so many resources towards a project that would yield almost nothing that would contibute to society and industry relative to the amount of money spent? The reasons for this are two-fold.

First, the United States was involved in the Cold War with the United States. The Soviet Union was accomplishing more successful attempts at launching space vehicles into orbit. With their successful space missions, the reality presented itself to the United States that the Soviet Union could launch a nuclear bomb to anywhere in the United States. Along with the Cold War, national pride was a very large issue in the United States. Without national pride the solidity of capitalism could not be shown off to the world, and the defeat of the communist system could not assured.

Finally, the United States has always prided itself knowing that it was the was the technological capital of the world. Many leaps in technology are guarenteed when a country commits itself to goal as large as the one it challenged itself to, when President Kennedy announced at Rice University the goal of reaching the moon before the end of the decade. The technology to travel to the moon did not exist at the time, and many technologies would have to be developed. These technologies have echoed in the preceding decades.

2/27/05

EvidencePaper

2/17/06

Proposal for Evidence Paper

Today, the world is covered with newspapers covered with crimes that have been committed in our local neighborhoods and in throughout the nation, and sometimes even the world. How do we know that these crimes exist? How do we know that these crimes are not in fact fabrications of a political opponents belief that was designed to further your own interests? In my paper, I will show not only the statistics of what crime exists where, but why it exists at the root level.

Crimes that are committed today are, for the most part, petty crimes. These crimes are offenses that are very small in nature and harm only a few people. But specifically, how are these crimes able to flourish in a nation that looks at crime in such a distasteful manner? This nation has a very different and complex mixture of cultures and ethnicies that flourish in the same neighborhoods and districts. These different cultures cultivate many values. But at the root of all of these values, the ultimate incentive for crime in this day and age, is in fact, money.

2/15/06

Declaration of Independence

The declaration of Independence is simply an arguement for independence by the colonies to King George of England. Along with any arguement, there has to be evidence to support your claim. In the declaration, it is full of evidence of why the colonies were proclaiming their independence. One of the most famous line of the declaration was "We hold these truths, to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the persuit of happiness." This line is the backbone of the arguement that the king does not preserve these right and therefore, the colonies have the right to create their own entity that will. Then, a little later in the document, it states specific instances where the king has not ruled his people as though he should have. The beginning of the doucment lays out the necessary foundation for the facts and evidence that is later presented in the document. This is an excellent example of evidence used to support a claim.

Da3Bdefinition

2/7/05

Commented: DazedNConfuzed

TheKemBlog

2/5/06

Definition Proposal Paper: Gun Control

What exactly is gun control? What does gun control do and what is it designed to do? The gun control lobby can mostly be traced down to the attempted-assassination of President Reagan by would-be assassin John Hinkley. In the meantime, press secretary James Brady was shot in the meantime paralyzing him for the rest of his life. Brady's wife lobbied congress for restricted gun laws in this country, and eventually succeeded. This set into motion many congressional battles over who should own guns. Today, gun ownership responsibilities have wrongly been taken from legitimate gun owners and have made it very hard for law-abiding citizens to purchase firearms. At the same time, crime involving firearms have not decreased nor has the ability for felons to come in possession of firearms. Today, gun control has no effect on the crime level in this country and no matter what gun control laws are put into effect, and "gun control", as we know it, will never be effective.

I really like your idea for gun control. You look at the many different aspects of it, such as its effects on the crime levels and how the actual act was changed. I'm also sure you'll be able to find a lot of information to back up your proposal. Just make sure you find credible sources for your statistics if you decide to use them when comparing the actual crime levels, but I think your topic will be a great one to argue.

Commented by: DreamHopeImagine

1/18/06

Neural Marketing is pretty interesting. Things you never think about go on in your brain every day. It's obvious that some companies will take advantage of this tactic every day in order to captivate their target customers. Coca Cola is a worldwide representation of what america stands for in many contexts. I would really like to learn more about this subject, but I do not like going into the psychology of such a theory.

1/16/05

Sorry, I was having some trouble updating, but now I that I am up and running, I am going to be updating this several times a day to get things going.

Hello everyone! Just to tell you guys a little about myself, I am a pretty diverse person. I do a lot of things. First, as I said in class, I a state fire instructor. I went to school for a long time and put in a lot of hard work in order to achieve the necessary credentials in order to teach new firefighting recruits. Next, I work as a medic in an area close to Pittsburgh. On top of those two things, I also am a pilot. I enjoy flying very much and wish I could get a chance to do it more often. I used to fly to cities all over the place just for lunch, or dinner, and be back home for bed. I have to say, those experiences are some of the best of my life. Finally, another relaxing sport I enjoy immensely is scuba diving. Watching the fish under the water and seeing underwater caverns and other anomolies have been some of the most rewarding experiences I have ever had.

School related: I am a senior but have several more semesters to go because I have decided to switch completely what I was doing before. I am a transfer student from the University of Pittsburgh, where I wasn't very happy at. I was studying History, but I realized that I actually want to make money, so I decided to switch up to Engineering. It's going to take more time, but I have lots of time.

1/24/06

So I was reading the newspaper yesterday and I noticed a very small headline about 10 pages back. The headline was about Terri Shiavo's husband. Apparently the man decided to get married. How convenient? If anyone is not familiar with the case, the woman, Terri, went into cardiac arrest following an imbalance of her electrolytes, something that is very common, believe it or not. I have had two patients of my own that have had cardiac symtpoms related to electrolyte imbalances in their systems, one being a 28 year old male patient who eventually went into cardiac arrest in front of my very eyes. Anyhow, Terri was one of these individuals who went into cardiac arrest when she was in her early 20's (I think 24, to be exact) in 1990. She eventually was saved but remained very mentally damaged as a result of the starvation of oxygen to her brain when she went into cardiac arrest. In order to get the care she needed, Terri had to remain in a nursing home, being fed with a tube in order to get the nutrition she desperately needed in order for her life to continue. Court cases were filed by both sides of her family for many years. Her husband stated that she did not want to live that way and that the feeding tube should be removed and to let her pass away while Terri's direct family felt that there was still a chance of recovery on her part. Doctors agreed and disagreed on both sides. Eventually, the court ordered the tube be removed and Terri passed away early last year.

In the meantime, her husband never divorced Terri but instead, started dating a woman soon after Terri was placed in a nursing home. Altogether, Terri's husband and the woman had two children together and lived with one another. Why wouldn't Terri's husband be a man and just divorce her? Simple: Money. Terri was no use to him in a nursing home. He was barred from getting married again and would never recieve insurance money on behalf of Terri passing away. Eventually he fought and won to have her pass away. This made it easy for him because now he recieved life insurance money on behalf of her, and now he was a free man to marry whomever he want. And last week, he did.

1/31/06

Tonight I watched the state of the Union address by President Bush. I thought it was pretty interesting, touching on many points that seem to be a hotbed with many americans. One of the things I really liked was that he essentially declared war on radical islamists. He finally pointed the finger and was firm about the point that the United States would nt back down to extremists and would fight on to the end in order to preserve what is valuable to all americans: freedom. He also touched on why we are doing what we are doing in the world today. He stressed the fact that we are a beacon of freedom that rings out across the world and that we do not do it just because it is the right thing to do, but because it concretes the security of the United States. ONe of the biggest points Bush was trying to exhaust was the point that we, as americans, should steer away from the policy of isolationism. I think this is important also because, as Bush stated, that if this country started a policy of isolationism, the terrorists would continue to reign terror in the United States. I think Bush did a very good job with his speech this evening and the fact that he referred to Osama bin Laden as "bin Laden" showed defiance that Osama is sub-human.