End of the semester thoughts

I am so totally ready for summer. Currently, trying to study for my calculus exam...nothing is getting done!

The Role of Hope

In my experiences the role of hope changes all the time, depending on the situation.
I can hope to make a good grade on a paper or a test.
I can hope to stay in contact with every single one of my friends.
The list just goes on and on. In our book Sanders talks about the different kinds of hope, and then he starts to talk about the dog that he had as a child. Doby was a very happy-go-lucky dog who was constantly on the move, hoping for the best. This for me in the best kind of hope, the positive, glass half full attitude. The ability to love everything unconditionally also involves hope. No matter what happens to me good, bad, exciting, terrifying I always have hope that it is going to work out for the best not only for me but also everyone that it could possibly involve.
This aspect about me goes back to the first entry that I made about hope when I talked about being a little girl on Halloween just about dripping with hope that I would be able to have the carrot cake. This is an example of how I love when hope is positive.
All in all I feel that the role of hope is to offer positive influence to different situations, no matter what.

Dior, Bitch Mag, American Apparel

 Dior Website:

1. The audience for this website is women in their late 20’s to early 30’s in my opinion. Girl couldn’t make an entrance with out her lipstick.
2. When I first come to this page the colors are what first strike my attention. There is a lot of black and neutral colors used, except for the new lip stick that’s being advertised is a pale, hot pink. Other words that come to mind are, fashionable, sleek, sensual, mysterious, dark and clean.
3. Because the page uses very little color in the ads it allows for the products they are trying to sell to me a major focal point of the ad. For the Miss Dior ad Natalie Portman is looking at the camera straight on and is holding her self in the nude. She has a black bow in her hair and a very minimal amount of makeup on. I feel like with this they are trying to show the innocence of not only Natalie Portman, but how innocence is able to be captured in their perfume. The font of this page is very plain and simple which shows just show simple the product actually is.
4. The information that comes up in these four slides is, how important lipstick is, the newest model for the Miss Dior perfume and the newest anti-aging creme. The major theme that comes up in each slide is the importance of makeup and looking/smelling flawless everyday. 
5. The goal of this page is to get women interested in buying Dior products from lipstick to fragrance to facial cleanser. Christain Dior uses the slogan through Kate Moss “girl couldn’t make an entrance without her lipstick”, implying that women are socially accepted unless she is wearing her makeup. 
6. I feel that the women in these ads on the Dior website are totally doing their job, selling make up, making women feel like they have to have make up to be able to be a part of society. If a man were trying to sell anti-aging creme or pink lipstick he would not have the same results as Kate Moss or Natalie Portman do, simply because in our culture it isn’t normal for men to wear makeup. 

Bitchmagazine.org:

1. This is a very different blog website. I feel like the audience is woman who are all about woman power, you could say feminist. 
2. The words that first come to mind are powerful, political, strong, independent. The background color to this website is two different shades of purple; purple is the color of power and royalty. 
3. Color on this page is very eye catching even though there are a lot of lighter purples and light greens, it makes the main messages that are in black pop even more. The font of this page is very simple and plain, there are not a lot of curls and rounded edges; this shows that the authors want their information to be taken seriously and show that the information should get your attention, not the stuff around the worlds.
4. There are several articles on the first page, some of these articles include, gay music, abortion billboards, music of Grey’s Anatomy, voting in Australia, top five best screen plays of heroines in literature. The main focal point is with out a doubt the importance of being a woman and standing up for your rights as a woman. 
5. The goal of this website is to allow for women to voice their opinions and be able to read the opinions of fellow women around the world. With each article becoming more and more sure of the importance of being a spirited, self-determined woman. 
6. I think it is extremely important for women to have a place where they are able to freely state their opinions with out having someone tell them they are wrong or silly for thinking progressively. I strongly feel that if men were able to freely write in this blog it would not be as popular and successful as it is now. 

American Apparel

1. This is one of my favorite clothing websites to look at I’ve never never really understood why I can honestly say that I don’t own any American Apparel clothing, but I have spent quite a bit of time on this site. The audience for this website again is women who are into different patterns and textures in clothing. 
2. Upon coming to this website the words that first come to mind are eclectic, worldly, slightly simple and indie. 
3. The main color of this website is white. White is a rather pure color and allows for things to be seen/stand out extremely well. This allows for the clothing to become the focal point of the website. Even the models are extremely simple and are not sporting loads and loads of make up like the models of the Dior website for example. 
4. Information on this website is very straight forward. The first aspect to this website is it gives web page visitors ideas for potential outfits that could be put together with their clothing. The other part of this page that is very different is it shows pictures of the factory where the clothes are made, this is very abnormal for clothing websites to broadcast. The emphasis is most significantly placed on the clothing. 
5. Selling clothing is the prime goal of the American Apparel website.
6. The women featured on this website are what I like to call simply pretty, they are not “drop dead gorgeous” and they intelligibly model the clothing. American Apparel makes male clothing as well and so they have male models who fit the same basic role as the women in this website. 

Argument Analysis Assignment

      The claim or thesis for this argument is that citizens of the United stated should in fact resist school prayer because it in the end supports violence. 

The premises behind this statement are; one: prayer is a rather large aspect to religion; two: school prayer would be supporting religion; three: that religion has across the world caused turmoil and destruction.

Is this argument valid or invalid? The first reason is valid, prayer is a large part of what religion and having a belief in a higher power is all about. The second reason is valid, school prayer would show that the school system and those whom are head of the school systems support religion and all the aspects to it; especially praying. The third reason is also valid, more or less every week (even day) there is a new news story about some kind of religious fight happening between towns, states, countries. Everyone is always going to fight about religion. It has and always will be a part of the world and the basis for many of the trails and heart ache. Over all the reasons behind this argument are all valid. 

However, I think that this argument is not sound. I’m sure that there are tons of articles about school violence and bullying being caused by religious differences but, I don’t feel that this implies that school prayer would be the equivalent to supporting violence, because not everyone is going to understand that perspective.  

Wisconsin!

Basically, as an overview of whats going on in Wisconsin; The labor unions are loosing all their collective bargaining powers over health care and benefits however they are able to keep wages. The state is trying to shrink their powers because the state is more or less broke and needs to make cuts some where. The democrats are protesting this bill and the democratic senators have left the state because the House of Representatives is unable to vote if half of the house is missing. On Friday morning the republican party was able to sway enough republicans to vote for the bill that they were able to vote and pass the bill. The vote was taken at 4 o’clock in the morning in order to avoid protestors whom have been camping out in the courthouse trying everything they can to stop this bill from being passed. Now let’s take a deeper look into what several parties are thinking and standing up for starting out with the governor of Wisconsin. 

Governor Walker decided to take a different approach to helping out and fixing the finical crisis that is currently happening every where, but especially in Wisconsin. Instead of raising taxes (which as we all know hardly ever works) Governor Walker choose to take work rulings away from the unions leaving them with only wages. Also, he is preventing the government unions from making the tax payers pay for all the extra benefits they are currently receiving by making them pay not only half of their pension costs but also about twelve percent of their health care. I really do feel like this is a justifiable way of going about stitching up the rather large financial plan margin. Not everything in life can be free and it really just makes sense that you have to pay for health care in some way, shape or form. 

The protesters of this plan are going crazy trying to stop it from going through. Why? Because many people feel that they have worked really hard and are therefore feel like they are owed compensation for all their hard work especially after retirement. Protesters have raised to almost 40,000 and have basically taken over the State Capital in Madison, Wisconsin. People are literally sleeping in the building to stop the senators from being able to vote for this bill some people have even brought their children with them to camp out. I can see where they are coming from they feel like they are having rights taken from them. Okay yes, they are going to have to be paying a little more for their health care and so on, but shouldn’t you have to pay for what you get? I just feel like they are taking a look at what their tax dollars are going for...which is to the government officials to have even more benefits than the ‘average Joe’ state employees. 

  The media is playing a huge roll in this debacle and even though the media is suppose to remain neutral it has definitely taken one side or the other.  MSNBC’s news section brought to the public by Rachel Maddow and FOXNews’s Glenn Beck are both interesting people to look at in this controversy.  First let’s take a look into The Rachel Maddow show; obviously this show is very much a democrat based program. I felt like in watching clips from the show on what’s going on in the state of Wisconsin the news aspect was really focused on getting the message of both sides out to the public. On the other hand she only had democratic senators come to speak out on what’s going on and why they feel like it is important for them as a group of like senator to leave the state until what they feel as been enough time for Governor Walker to allow for some negotiating on this particular bill. She then goes to to a segment called “The End is Neigh”. This sect was a complete bash at Glenn Beck and his ideas that the end is coming and everyone needs to stock up on food and basically guard their loins. I felt like this little news story on Glenn Beck was slightly unprofessional and unnecessary. Over all I felt that it was a very educational program and informative to both sides of the controversy. Now on to the Glenn Beck show which aires on FOXNews. Honestly I was shocked at the things he was ranting and raving about. It was extremely hard to follow because I couldn’t distinguish the stories from the crisis in Egypt, to Obama being the antichrist, to the actual problem in Wisconsin, to the end of the world closing in on us faster than we had expected. I’m still not sure as to what the stand point is on the bill which has now been passed in Wisconsin; but it is probably safe to say that they are for this bill and getting rid of unions in this highly talked about sate. Overall I felt like he was really just trying to scare the public into thinking what he thought and just going on that alone, although it was difficult to understand anything the was saying because of all the emphasis on frighting the public. Both news stations would of course prefer for the public to stand with them on their views and thoughts of what’s going on in politics, but I continue to feel that as far as telling people what is going on Rachel Maddows did a fairly superior job.  

Part One: America and Unions

To begin, there are two terms that are essential to knowing before starting to look at what Unions have done in the history of the United States. First, collective bargaining is a process in which established unions and management negotiate in order to reach a consensus on working conditions as well as packages of compensation. Basically, negotiating issues with policies that have already been put into effect. Also, what a union actually is. A union is an organized group of people (workers) who work collectively to ensure peoples rights and benefits in the work environment. Typically these union workers work for large companies, representing thousands of employees. 

    History of labor unions:

The first child labor law (1836) said that any child under the age of fifteen would be allowed to be employed unless he or she attended school for 3 months prior to his or her fifteenth birthday. During this time the government was unable to intervene with poor working conditions due to Lassez Faire “hands off”. One of the first unions was The Order of the Knights of Labor, started by Terence V. Powderly in 1869. This union was formed to unionize all American workers. They were responsible for the Alien Contract Labor Law of 1885. This prohibited immigrant laborers to do contracted work. During the 1870’s and 80’s the working conditions were extremely poor and caused many strikes and battles. For example, in Pennsylvania a group called the Molly Maguires burned buildings murdered bosses and other people who they felt like had offended them. Then the Panic of 1873 happened due to a ten percent cut in pay for unorganized railroad workers which caused four eastern rail trunk lines to stop operating for some time. 

The Knights of Labor continued to grow even involving African Americans. In 1886 The Haymarket Square Riot went down where union workers came together to fight for an eight hour work day. Soon to follow in 1886 the AFL (American Federation of Labor) started up. They fought for higher wages and shorter work days. Between 1897and 1903 about half of American families didn’t own property and made below the average cost of living for a family of four. At the turn of the century union workers were low because of very few jobs and extremely low wages. In 1905 Mother Jones started the Industrial Workers Union of the World (IWW). In 1914, after the “Machine Gun Massacre” strikers got the attention of the House Mines and Mining Committee and especially President Woodrow Wilson, which created a truce with owners and to form a grievance committee place at each mine. Soon after tis an act was passed saying that unions were no longer against the law and that strikes, boycotting and picketing were no longer in violation of the federal law. Roosevelt set up the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933. This encouraged collective bargaining in unions, set up maximum work hours and minimum wage also, prohibited child labor. This act put almost four million people into industrial jobs. The Supreme Court soon deemed the act unconstitutional and was revised in the Wagner Act. In 1937, Congress of Industrial Organizations emerged led by John L. Lewis they started to unionize industries who were once against being unionized; steel, automobile, textile and public utilities were now unionized. The main goal was to represent workers with collective bargaining and they also introduced the sit-down strike tactic. By 1945 the maximum work week hours was set to forty and the minimum wage was set to forty cents per hour. After World War II wages declined by twelve percent. During the 1950’s people worked under forty hours a week, had an annual vacation of two weeks and had twice the income. After 1965 strong unions began to fragment political parties, embattle the congress and stymie congress’s efforts to heal the nation’s racial, ethnic and urban divisions. During the 1970’s and 80’s women really started to enter the work force and by 1987 almost fifty-five percent of women in the United States were working outside of the house. Today there are every few labor unions still working. In 2005, both the Teamsters and Service Employees union and the United food and Commercial Workers extracted from the union. 

I feel like unions are extremely helpful and necessary to the working world and people who are working normal jobs. I think that sometimes the government looses sight of the specific needs of the American working class. The unions are what bridges the two worlds and creates communication of needs and what is going on. Since the union numbers have drastically declined over the past few years that communication has almost ceased to exist and has caused many problems for the economy as well as the definition of the American middle class. Unions may sound “out-dated” however, sometimes even the oldest ways of doing things can continue to work.  

Something I Already Know.

While doing community service at the Good Will in my home town I learned the process of how clothing is sorted, organized, put out on to the floor and finally what happens to the clothing after being pulled.  Clothes start off in the bag hat donators bring them in. The bags are put immediately into large blue bins and placed at three work stations. Typically two people are at one station working as a team. One sorts through the bags putting non-clothing items into a grocery store buggy. When looking clothing you are searching for certain imperfections such as, extreme fading, holes, stains. If the article of clothing has any of these imperfections it is put into another bin which is considered ‘discard’. Clothing passing inspection is then given to the second person . The second person then sizes the piece of clothing according to a specific sizing chart. After the piece has it’s size label it is given a clothing hanger and put on a rack. The second person keeps up with how many pieces are on the portable clothing rack. When the number of pieces reaches fifty they roll the rack out onto the floor after marking it down in the record book. The people who are working on the floor then work together to get the pieces of clothing out on the racks to be sold. They have to work quickly, being mindful of the customers walking around.