My Favorite Map!

I found this map while taking the Geography 101 class and I fell in love with it.  I am a huge baseball fan, and for some reason I just really like this map that shows the territories/states of all the major league baseball teams.  To me, this map is pretty much right on with what fan base is like for each team.  I know from living in Iowa, that most people living there like the Chicago Cubs, and list goes on.  I think this map is really cool and has the correct territories for each team.

GO TWINS!

Foreign Aid to Africa

            

    I think the United States and other western countries need to continue giving aid to Sub-Saharan Africa, but in a totally different way.  In the article Economic Development about African aid, the author said it perfectly, " Instead of increasing development, aid has created dependence."  What the United States and other western countries are doing is completely wrong on how to help fix some poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa.  They need to help form better industry and infrastructure to places in need, so those countries can thrive.  It will help create more jobs for people, and boost the economy like never before.  

   The used clothing trade has turned into a disaster, and is not helping other textile companies in the the countries.  They cannot run their business without going bankrupt because everyone is buying used cheaper clothes giving away by western countries.  This is not going to help remove poverty, it is just stabilizing it.  The aid given needs to help with industry, and most importantly education.  By educating the population, the people will learn more about poverty, AIDS/HIV, malnutrition, and many other things that will only help them in every way possible.  Yes, what the western countries are doing is very nice, but they need to rethink what kind of aid they are giving to Sub-Saharan Africa.



used clothing being sent to Africa

Protests in Egypt

CNN- Thousands Protest In Egypt. January 15, 2011.

In January, people across Egypt went to the streets in demonstrations against corruption and failing econmic policies.  These protests rallies were partly inspired by similar protests that happened in Tunisia in Janurary also. There were thousands of people protesting in the capital of Cairo, an alliance of lawyers helped organize these events.  The police in Cairo were calm at first but later the police fired close to a dozen rounds of tear gas on the people protesting, whitnesses said the crowd threw the canisters back at the police.  There was about 200 protesters in the southern city of Aswan, 3,000 protesters in the northern city of Mahallah,  and 2,000 protesters in the eastern city of Ismailiya.  The people that organized this said they hope to capture the regional momentum for political change set by the Tunisians who earlier in the month forced the collapse of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's twenty-threee year rule.  These protesters on January 15 did not get permits by the Egyptian government for the planned protest.  Early Tuesday morning on January 15, more than 90,000 peopl throughout Egypt pledges to participate in the event in a Facebook group called "We Are All Khaled Said," named after an Alexandria activist who was beaten to death by police.  The Facebook group demands raising the minimum wage, sacking the interior minister, creating two term presidential term limits and scrapping existing emergency laws that the group says "resulted in police control" over the people and nation.  Some other human rights groups, such as the Arabic Network for Human Rights, have drawn a comparison between Egypt and Tunisia under Ben Ali, in terms of the level of government corruption and police brutality.  Protesters want Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak out.

Google Earth Image

        The Big Blue

This image really made me think how much of the earth we have not explored yet, and how much ocean there is, especially the Pacific Ocean.  It is the largest ocean in the world as you can see, and is also the deepest ocean in the world.  It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the North to the Southern Ocean in the south.  The Pacific Ocean covers an area of 65.3 MILLION square miles!  It makes up a third of the total surface, and half of the total water surface of the planet.  It is actually larger than all the continents of the world put together.  At the Equator, the Pacific Ocean stretches for a distance of 11,000 miles, which is almost half way around the planet.  This image also shows me how remote Hawaii and the French Polynesia islands are.  To think that people got out there thousands of years ago absolutely amazes me.  I did not realize how big this ocean is and how much of and area it covers.  It also makes me think about how much the human race has not discovered under those waters.

Opium

Opium in Afghanistan

It is hard to think that opium plays such a big role in Afghanistan's economy and almost nothing is being done to stop it.  About half of their profits come from making opium and selling it.  Afghanistan is the worlds leading maker of opium.  It makes me sick hearing and seeing little kids smoking opium, and how their parents are showing them how to do it.  It makes you think how are they ever going to fix this problem.  There are little to none places to get help with this drug addiction, and these people live in such harsh areas that it makes it very hard to get to them. 

Another thing that does not help is that the Taliban are the people in control, and it seems like no body can really defeat them, the United States is taking soldiers back home cause they can not help either.  Quite honestly, if the United States can not defeat them or get them to stop, then I do not see any country stopping them in a long time.  It is sad to think how bad the middle of this  country has gotten.  In north Afghanistan it has gotten a lot better because the people stopped making opium and started harvesting wheat.  If the rest of the country could see how bad opium has gotten, I think this country could thrive in the future.