Entry 5: Ducey's Deuce

I found this (http://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/2016/09/17/arizona-needs-more-college-grads-ducey/90363958/) article that basically doesn’t say much written by Gary Ducey. This article is a simple rallying cry for Arizonians that sort of informs us of the new policy Ducey is trying to enact. It talks all about the importance of education and the benefits the state will have from having a highly educated population. He talks about the economic benefits and increase tax revenue.

Ducey does not explain his plan in depth beyond increasing education spending. He does not specify where this money is going beyond what type of schools will be receiving this funding. He does not mention if it is going to teachers, to new books, nothing; no clue as to what the actual plan is in order to help students achieve this. He lists “better career readiness” as one of the goals but doesn’t define what this is or how this plan will achieve it.

As a student Ducey’s plan doesn’t really concern me unless it will somehow help me pay for college. Then yeah sounds good but otherwise I think it’s nice to try and get more people educated but Ducey’s article is more of a piece that says this should happen than anything about how. If it raises my taxes and doesn’t help me that is something I wouldn’t be a fan of but not try and repeal or anything since money going to school is good in general. 

Entry 6: Protesting the Protests

Blog 6
                I was going to avoid writing about the election, really I did not even want to bother with such a highly charged and emotionally raw topic for a lot of people. Personally I did not care which candidate won, I will start off by saying that to me really the “good” option didn’t exist there was the crook and the bigot and neither should be leading this country. That is just my opinion but it helps you to see my bias and opinions on the issue.

                For the last couple of days people have been protesting en masse about the election of Donald Trump. At first I thought they were protesting the results and I could not understand how they could be protesting the results of democracy, the system working as intended. That is until I actually listened to some protestors and learned they were protesting the things Trump stood for and that those values are not ones they agreed with, and I understood. For me this election doesn’t effect me or matter to me enough to make me want to protest, I think we can pull together as a country and get through whatever our new president has in store. But clearly some people believe this is the beginning of the end.

                Peaceful protest is a foundation of our society. It is important for people to be able to express themselves to the government and the rest of the country. Some of the protests have seemed silly to me, such as the students that walked out of school with signs saying “Education not deportation” … if you want education don’t walk out of school. Overall the protesting have been positive messages of peaceful protest. What detracts from the protests the most I believe is when people use them as way to riot and loot rather than get their peaceful message across. The rioters and looters destroy the message the rest of the protestors are trying to get across. There are several stories across the nation of supposedly peaceful people attacking Trump supporters, one story in particular that comes to mind is a group of Black Lives Matter protestors who beat up and 74 year old Trump supporter and stole their truck. That type of “protesting” only creates more divides in our country and has no place in this world. It is not getting a message across it is simply being a criminal.

                If the nation is going to come together and heal then peace and understanding need to be the resounding messages, not hate and violence. Those who spread hate and violence are simply turning people against whatever message they stand for hurting their cause and the cause of those around them. 

Entry 4: Quizzically Questioning

Blog 4

                Every week my friends and I get together and play trivia at a bar. It amazes me the number of people who do not know the activity exists and are surprised to learn about it. The way the game works is everyone at your table is your team. You create a team name and the organizer uses that name to keep track of your team’s points. The organizer will go around and hand your team a score sheet to keep track of your own points on and a pad of paper to write your team’s answers down on it. The game is organized into 6 rounds of 3 questions with a mid-game and end game special question. During each round the organizer will tell everyone the topics of the three questions in the round: History, politics, and religion for example. For the first 3 rounds each team will assign each of the questions in the round either 5, 3, or 1 point, using each value only once in a round. The assignment is chosen when the team answers a question and the questions are answered on at a time. Teams can use the topics of future rounds to gauge how easily they will be able to answer future questions to strategize which point values to assign. Should the team get the question right then they will receive however many points that they assigned to the question. The mid round question is usually a question that will have multiple correct answers and teams get 2 points for each correct answer they submit. An example of a midround question was “what are all of the elements that end in -on that are not noble gases”. The second 3 rounds continue like the first except the assigned point values are 6-4-2 rather than 5-3-1 making the second round even more important to answer correctly than the first. The final question is a hard question that will have a variable amount of answers but the question is always difficult. Each team will wager from 0-15 points on their answer. Should the team get the question correct then they get that many points, and if they get it wrong they lose that many points. The top 3 teams get a gift card reward at the end.

                Team Trivia is a fun activity that many more people should know about. My team has only gotten into the top 3 once yet we enjoy going all the same. A strong knowledge of presidents and 80’s pop culture as well as sports history would be the most successful subjects to study to insure success. 

Entry #3: Straightening a Slant

Blog 3:

                Slanted reporting always a problem but gets so much worse during this time of year- election time. When looking for an example of slanted reporting it wasn’t an issue of finding one but narrowing done which article I wanted to write about. So many people get their news from their friends through Facebook so that was where I wanted to get my article from-one my friends linked to on Facebook. After reading several I decided on one that several friends linked to from Occupy Democrats, Trump Said He’d “Get Rid” Of Lobbyists. He Just Hired Dozens For Top Roles” found at: http://occupydemocrats.com/2016/11/11/trump-said-hed-get-rid-lobbyists-just-hired-dozens-top-roles/ . Right away noticing from the source this article clearly is not going to be unbiased, it comes from a very liberal source referencing the Occupy Wall Street movement and is not shy about it. The website’s “About Us” Sections claims that the website is a “political organization and information website” yet those two things cannot truly exist together in harmony, political organizations have an agenda they are pushing while information websites attempt to present information with the least bias possible.

                Jumping into the article it is clear from the beginning that the author, Colin Taylor, would not be trying to present each side reasonably or to give a full picture of the issue. Taylor calls Trump’s voters “naïve” immediately insulting the intelligence oh around half the population of the country, the people who put Trump in power. I am sure there are naïve voters on both sides of the issue not all on one side. Taylor shows his own ignorance by claiming that “Drain the swamp!” was the “rallying cry” for Trump’s campaign. If anything “Make America Great Again” is by far the more popular and well known rallying. Clearly using mis-leading facts destroys an author’s authority and creates doubt in the reader’s eyes.

Taylor does use some concrete evidence by listing who Trump is considering using for his cabinet as well as their credentials. The ones listed are indeed lobbyists who Trump claimed would be kicked out of the Washington. These people however do have relevant experience to the position they are being assigned to. Taylor does not include a discussion of WHY these people were chosen or discuss what they could offer to the position, defaulting to assuming that there would be some corruption at work.

Another point Taylor uses to decry Trump is the fact that ““the president-elect’s spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, declined a request for comment, as did nearly a dozen corporate executives, consultants and lobbyists serving on his transition team” from the New York Times claiming that this would be a “Common theme in the Trump Administration”. It is highly probable that the Trump Administration is incredibly busy getting ready for the upcoming presidency and cannot possibly respond to all requests for comment. The Trump administration has already staged several press conferences and I am sure will continue to do more trying to keep the public informed on his policies.

Occupy Democrats does not feel like it needs to be an unbiased source of news. It’s audience is already people who by and large already agree with the liberal views expressed by the website and so will agree with the slanted view they present. The problem with this is that it creates world where people can exist in an echo chamber, only hearing their own opinions echoed back to them.