The BBC is reporting that Germany is exiting the recession that has affected the entire world for the past couple of years. Germany, along with France, is one of the first countries to emerge from this economic downturn and yet the German government did next to nothing to try to pull the country out of the recession.

An article in the Wall Street Journal states the German stance on it:

“Germany has the most capacity in Europe to increase spending, but Berlin has argued against running up big deficits…”

“Last year, according to the IMF, the U.S. pumped an extra 1.1% of GDP into the economy. Germany did next to nothing.”

I think the American government needs to take a page out of Germany’s book. For being a socialist country, Germany seems to have less government intervention in the economy than we do.

Apparently the Federal Government now allows itself to legally steal your computer and make it its own property for the use of domestic or foreign interests. This is all sorts of messed up. I found the video at another blog called Tom’s Place.

Time Magazine Online is running an interesting article about America’s recent obsession with allergies to peanuts and peanut products. Being a relatively recent high school graduate (2006), I can safely say that I remember when my school started implementing precautions against peanuts. It seems like such a ridiculous thing. I understand that there are people who are severely allergic to peanuts and should not come into contact with them, but as the article points out, more people die from bee stings a year and yet we still plant flowers and other plants that attract bees in public places. There are so few people who are actually deathly allergic to peanuts that to be so concerned and obsessed with them seems really pointless. As the article points out:

As more and more schools set up peanut-free zones and as food manufacturers add warning labels that their products might contain particles of peanuts, soy or other allergens, the abundance of caution is starting to trigger a backlash. Given all the attention paid in recent years to food allergies, the number of people in the U.S. who die from them–15 to 20 a year–is relatively small. More people die each year from bee stings. “But we don’t remove flowers from schools or playgrounds,” Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a professor of medical sociology at Harvard Medical School, commented recently in the British Medical Journal. When asked about his editorial, which he wrote after his son’s school bus had to be evacuated because someone spotted a peanut on board, he said, “We should be having a sober-minded, public-health debate, and instead the overresponse to food allergies is preposterous.”

An entire bus had to be evacuated because there was a single peanut on board. That is incredibly ridiculous. The article is definitely worth a read though because it really points out some of the absurdity of our unhealthy obsession with peanuts and allergies to peanut products.

For anyone who is going to be working with the memoirs of Reinhard Gehlen, do not use David Irving’s translation of it, entitled: The Service: The Memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen. For a project I am working on, I have been dealing with both Irving’s translation as well as the original book in German written by Gehlen himself (Der Dienst: Erinnerungen 1942-1971). I read the German version cover to cover for this project and have been attempting to use Irving’s translation as a quick reference to check for facts, however, as I have been using the translation, not only is information missing from the original in his translation (I’ve had to check the original multiple times to verify it was actually there), but there are actually pages and pages of accounts and “memories” that don’t exist anywhere in the original!

The accounts may be true for all I know, but they are presented as though Gehlen told them (though he did not in his memoirs) and there are no references cited. It has been most frustrating and I do intend to report this inaccuracy to the university. Perhaps they will dispose of the book as anyone who is unable to read the German version would have no idea otherwise, possibly leading to inaccuracy.

The past couple of days have been agony and torment for me to some degree with my head spinning around contradictions, frustrations and the overall irony of the present situation I find myself in. About a year ago when I was spending my year abroad in Germany, I met this Dutch girl whom I fell head over heals for. We had an amazing amount in common, she was bright and beautiful and we never tired of each other’s company. The biggest problem though is that she is insanely religious. I don’t mean to the point that she goes around praying all the time or trying to convert other people to her religion (to her religion is a deeply personal thing), but I mean it in the sense that she is vocal about it in private and that when we talk, she will occasionally go off on these religious tangents that drive me nuts.

Anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis or has read a number of my previous posts can tell right away that I am a stark Atheist. I can’t buy into the belief in some sort of supreme being who has unlimited powers and controls us all through blackmail. I just can’t do it. Before I go on, however, I would like to make it clear that I am not so dense as to not understand or even respect other people’s beliefs. I am simply stating my view point on this situation.

To get back to the story, since I have been back in the US, we have consistently been talking on instant messenger — usually several times a week. A couple of days ago I was talking to her when she mentioned that she was watching a documentary on TV about the evolution of bears. I knew things were going to get bad from this point because whenever some who is religious brings up evolution, you’re bound for an argument. Well, we did have a pretty big discussion about it because she started going into this crazy creationist stupor condemning the theory of evolution as an unprovable dogma which people blindly buy into. Do you already see the irony in this argument?

I suppose it really wasn’t much of a discussion since, because I care for her quite a bit, I didn’t really say much. I did what I usually do and passively let her rant until she gets bored and drops it. Then I take the pent up frustration and spill it out here or to friends who have the same viewpoints as me. It’s not that I’m afraid she’ll hate me for it — in fact, I don’t think she would mind the debate at all and might even enjoy it — it’s that I know how she strongly she feels about the whole thing and I want to respect that. Besides, that’s what blogs are for. I can take it out here without running the real risk of hurting anyone’s feelings personally since it’s written for a general audience.

In this modern world of electronics and gadgets that watch you, individual privacy is increasingly being violated and molested. There used to be a time where companies had a very difficult time of obtaining information about individual people unless the people voluntarily provided their personal information. Not so anymore.

The latest of these privacy violations comes in the form of “smart” advertising. Essentially, ads are put up that have small cameras embedded into them to watch which people pay attention to them. These ads can for the most part identify gender, age group, race and ethnicity. They can then use that information to target specific advertisements to passer-byers.

They claim that the information is not recorded, however in the same breath, they claim that they can use this information to see which advertisements work for which group. To me it seems to do any sort of research of that type, you would have to record the data.

Anyway, here is a part of the article:

Watch an advertisement on a video screen in a mall, health club or grocery store and there’s a slim — but growing — chance the ad is watching you too.

Small cameras can now be embedded in the screen or hidden around it, tracking who looks at the screen and for how long. The makers of the tracking systems say the software can determine the viewer’s gender, approximate age range and, in some cases, ethnicity — and can change the ads accordingly.

You can find the full article here.

Today I gave a presentation on the Rise of Democracy in England. I was to present the research I’ve done all semester long accumulated into a research paper. The presentation was to be less than 10 minutes because between two class periods of 75 minutes each, 7 people had to present. Well, most of the presentations were under 10 minutes, but what took most of the time was getting the equipment setup to do what the presenters wanted. The problem wasn’t that the equipment (a computer hooked up to a projector) was incapable, it was that the students were incompetent. Most of the students presenting were unable to even open their PowerPoint presentations on the computer to which the projector was connected! These are people my age! All of them are in the 18-24 age range. They’ve grown up with computers!

While I don’t expect that everyone know how to operate a computer with grace and sophistication, I do expect that people my age should at least know how to open a file! And maybe, just maybe — this might be pushing it a bit — even be able to go into slideshow mode in PowerPoint. I know that it might be kind of difficult for some people, but frankly, I’ve been able to do it since I was about 8 when PowerPoint itself wasn’t very mature yet. I could also open a file by then! I don’t know how these people made it through high school — or even middle school. I firmly recall having to do many PowerPoint presentations during my years in middle school and high school. Come to think of it, I remember one I did in elementary school as well! (Although it was in our computer class…)

Today’s class was pushed to almost 3 hours (from the original 75 minutes) and most of it was spent trying to explain to the technologically handicapped presenting how to get their PowerPoint presentations open and in presentation mode. I might be a bit bitter. It was quite frustrating.

I have studied abroad twice in my life. Once in high school and again at the university. In high school, I spent a year at a Japanese high school in a very rural part of the country and at the university, I spent a year in Germany. After having spent time in two different education systems, it has dawned on my just how completely flawed our education system really is.

While I don’t want to delve into the specifics as to why the other education systems are better (in some cases, they aren’t any better), I do want to point out some of the things that I find truly ridiculous about our own education system. I will start with elementary and middle schools.

My mother teaches the fourth grade at a public elementary school. I have heard all sorts of horror stories from her about school bureaucracy and politics. When she first began teaching several years ago at the fifth grade level, concerns about things such as state-backed standardized testing were negligible. As time has progressed, however, these state-backed tests are all the children are taught to. In fact, the teachers themselves are practically told to teach directly to the tests so that the school can get maximum funding. If the kids do not do well on the tests, then the schools do not well, and since state-funding is directly connected with the results of these tests, the schools that need the money the most are unable to get it. The government’s idea behind this is the encourage both schools and children to do better, but in reality, they are severely hurting the children. Some children will not do well because they can’t, others will not do well because they simply do not test well, and yet others will not do well because they don’t see a reason to and just don’t care. Standardized testing doesn’t take this into account.

Another problem with these standardized tests is when they are to be given. In Colorado, we were always tested in March. The problem about giving the test in March is that students are expected to know the entire year’s worth of content by March. That means teachers have to cram ten months’ worth of content into eight. The time after the tests is then practically useless as the teachers have already taught everything they needed to teach for the year before the tests.

It seems that every year after these tests are finished, there are mass protests against them among teachers and parents alike. They don’t necessarily get out their pickets and demonstrate in front of the capitol, but there are always petitions to dispose of the tests and some of them gain quite a respectable amount of signatures. You would think that these arrogant politicians who owe their positions in the government to us in the first place would take that as a huge sign that the standardized tested is most unwelcome.

Part 2 is coming soon and will address some of the major problems with high schools in the US.

Well, my Powerbook G4 is dead. It died two days ago as I was trying to work on another song. I’m pretty sure the harddrive is dead as right before it kicked the bucket, it was making strange noises coming from where the harddrive is located inside the computer. Then the computer locked up entirely as the harddrive continued to make clicking noises. I had to hard reboot it and it no longer found the harddrive when trying to boot.

Fortunately I just bought one of the second generation iPod Touches so I am still able to do Internet and e-mail. In fact I’m writing this entry on it and it seems to be doing fine.

But alas, I now have to go buy a new laptop because I don’t really think it’s worth fixing the old Powerbook. I was going to buy a new laptop soon anyway, but now I’m going to have to buy a new one much sooner than I was hoping to.

I’ve been living in Germany for almost a year now and with the exception of the internet at the university library, not once have I encountered fast internet here. The speed of the internet in the place where I live is dreadfully slow. It is supposed to be broadband, but behaves as though it was trying to be dial-up. And that’s when it works!

The way they’ve got their system setup is such that everyone is routed through a proxy server. While this may be common and isn’t that big of a deal, the fact that the proxy server is constantly refusing connections is a big deal. During this time I can access secure sites that bypass the proxy server, but the rest of the internet is unaccessible. That means that not only is the internet slow, but half the time browsing the internet is impossible which is extremely annoying.

I suppose it’s not really fair to say that every connection in Germany is this horrible, but as of yet I have to see a connection that isn’t horrible — broadband or otherwise.