Educating the good citizen

This article was by Joel Westheimer and Joseph Kaphne. In the article there are many aspect of perspective about education of making civics become good. In the beginning they give out three characteristic of a good civic be. These three kinds are personally responsible, participatory, and Justice –oriented citizens. Then, the author is writing analysis of conflict situation. For example, citizen with no politics. At the End it talks about the solution of the problem.

In the community there are many kinds of good citizens and they have different characteristic. The Article analyzed into three basic character. First characteristic is personally responsible citizen. It is basically mean community contributor. The second one is Participatory citizen and it means people that participate and care about local event. And the last one, Justice- oriented citizens. They are people who think beyond the community and determine whether things are right or ethical.

After all the explanations, the author is analyzing the extreme situations. In the article, the author talks about the situation that when people do not have democracy. In that paragraph, he talks about the situation when good citizens do not have democracy. The conclusion that he made was that people will not have democracy but still being good. The reason is that in some circumstance democracy do not apply to being good citizen.

In last paragraph the author telling the solution. His solution of solving problem is forming education politics and community service organization.

In conclusion, I think the idea of organize more community service. If school and government do not emphasize it and be serious about it. No one will really care or know. I feel that we should make community service be similar to military obligation or count as a grade.

The Stimulus Plan: $787

After I looking all the thing in the list of the stimulus plan: how to spent $787 billion, I think all of them are important. they are really important that none of it can be deleted. looking from beginning to the end of list, I have found some really crucial ones that are the parts that I think can really make difference. These are Education and Job training, Tax cut For individuals, and Health. The reason why these were more crucial is because these things are decreasing the financial pressure of man and protect the industries.
For the first one aid for Education. I think this one is really helpful. Due to the fiancial crisis a lot of people lose their job. In order to decrease the amount of people with no job, we should let them learn more so they can have another method to survive and contribute to the society. My second point from top three choice is Tax cut for individual. From my perspective, since financial crisis, people already have less money. Therefore, logically, government should reduce the tax. My last point is health.
In conclusion, I think that every point that government listed and passed are really really important. Nothing can be deleted. although I choose 3 that I think it is important but I think every point on the list is really good.

How to Less carbon footprint? I'm not sure !???

After reading the article about an article Yes, They Could. So They Did. by Thomas Friedman, I feel really guilty that I did not do things like that. However, another feeling I have is do not know what to do to contribute thing like that to community.
After thinking this for a class, I think I should think out of box and with some crazy ideas not conventional ideas. From this semester's global ethics class topic "can a individual make difference", I think that I can do it and with weird and new ways. Although, trying to find a weird and new ways is hard, when new crazy idea come up it will "crazy" the people.
In conclusion, I think that in order to lose carbon footprint we should meet like our grad trip meeting and think critically.

Gender social experiment.

Binary
Gender

Today, we have "cross dressing" day. In Global Ethics class, we have discussions about gender and sex culture and we come up a inquiry : Could playing cross-dressing be healthy? Is cross-dressing for one gender over the other ?
For the first inquiry, I think that cross dressing is healthy because I believed that man do have a soft side. Often the stereotype of culture are man should be tough and always being confident and positive. Girls should be really caring and fragile. I think the culture are restricting us. We do not born to be binary. In biological view, male have XY chromosomes and Female have XX Chromosomes but it 's actually not that binary. Recent years, sciencist found out from statistic that the Y chromosome from male usually are not perfect and have a trend of become X. From my persepective I think that if there is no restriction naturally, why do we have to restrict our self.

Ideas for innovation

From my opinion, some of ideas of innovation are not that good. However, I can sum up some similar idea that I think is crucial.
One of them is to offer more educational activity such as internship and community service for civics. This is important for education; Young people can learn more from doing educational activities than from the textbook. The reason that for educational activities are more crucial is that people go to education for learning technique living on this planet. However, in school, classes do not teach people techniques for some specific technique for certain fields. For example, many company in science park have education program to educate the people in the company but somehow I think that if there are opportunities to have internship and community service companies can save more money for education.
Another one is set small school in each committee. I agree with what the article Ideas For Innovation said. In local schools there are too much students for good education. If we want a better education then we needed more concentrated classes. I think that in a big class students will not be as active as small classes but less resources and less attention from teacher.
In conclusion, generally I agreed what the article Idea For Innovation about. From all of the points in the article, I think that the most important and effective idea was to offer more educational activities in school and committees and decrease the size of a class and set a school in each committee. Furthermore, I think in order to make our world become better we need more resources for education because resource is the thing that make people become educated.

Impact of Globalization

Looking back in history, there are many phenomena that reveal how much we have evolved, such as the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. Till now, due to our improvement of transportation and technology, we have a new phenomenon called Globalization. According to the definition posted by scholars in Wikipedia, “Globalization is the process of transformation of local phenomena into a global one. It can be described as a process by which the people of the world are united into a single society and function together.” Another definition from Merriam Webster dictionary: “the state of being globalized; especially the development of an increasingly integrated global economy marked especially by free trade, free flow of capital, and the tapping of cheaper foreign labor markets.” However, this newborn phenomenon is controversial in recent years arguing whether or not it is good or bad.
When globalization started, people thought it was good in a variety of ways. Yet, after several years, people found out that Globalization is not only good for a country’s development but also good for business development. In business, salesmen can sell things oveseas and without governmental blocks. Most importantly, corporations can separate work into different places, so they can reduce the cost. For example, according to Nike Asia Company, they built four main factories in Asia because of cheap labour and access to material producers. Another benefit was globalization could make countries loosen their trade laws and open up trade. That will tremendously encourage businesses to re-locate. For example, Taiwan Science Park companies tended to sell products to only US and Asian countries before Taiwan became a member of the WTO, the companies can sell things to other countries like Russia or EU (European Union).
However, in time, problems arose. In recent years, many researchers have given speeches forewarning us that we are in a difficult situation moving towards great disasters. Such as what Al Gore‘s documentary film An Inconvenient Truth showed and EO Wilson’s Ted-talk speeches tell us. We have many problems such as running out natural resources, global warming, and increased air and water pollution. According to EO Wilson’s Ted Talk, many creatures will become extinct and the collapse of the food chain will harm us immensely which will ultimately lead to our extinction as a species. A statistic recorded by EPAC (Environmental Protection administration Executive Yuan – which is the environmental protection department of the Taiwanese government) 31% of the air pollution was from transportation and 38% are from the factories in Taiwan. If we add those values up, it will go over 60% and eventually, it will be nearly70%.
Another problem we are facing now due to globalization are the disadvantages faced by some poorest nations in the world. Corporations exploit these fourth world countries. Globalization allows corporations to get material for products with less expense because the corporation can build several factories or plants in many places where labor and resources are cheaper. This is similar to imperialism but a gentler one. The problem is not mistreating cheap labour badly but that corporations usually take over most of the country’s economy by building factories in that country. The result is that people lose their original jobs and start work in factories. Then if the company collapses or moves, the countries’ economy collapses and people lose their livelihoods and suffer. This may cause a variety of other problems. One of the worst ones is cutting down forests. For example, according to Rainforest Action Network organization, Brazil has lost 58% of tropical rainforest. Losing this much of the forest is not a good thing. This is one of the main causes of Global warming.
Globalization has a big impact on our world and has created an unclear grey area for people to analyze and research. There are a lot of negative things and positive things about globalization. A positive occurs when countries’ ease trade regulations and invest money into cities to build industry parks for industry to grow. Another good thing is that countries in a big area form organizations to trade and one of the famous organizations is WTO (World Trade Organization). However, there is a blind spot. Although having WTO corporations can reduce the tax on import products and sell cheaper goods, that makes the country have to spent more money on protecting local industries in order to compete with import products. Therefore, I think that Globalization has become a controversial topic. A quote from a American linguist Dr, Avram Noam Chonsky: “ the term ‘Globalization’ has been appropriated by the powerful to refer to a specific form of international economic integration, one based on investor rights with the interests of people incidental.” From my opinion, Globalization is not a thing or idea that has a mono side. We should think be careful and set rules before we leap in.

Big Organic and Enron

After reading Big Organic and thinking the relationship between Enron and the reading, I found that it is interesting to think from Enron's Rise to the fall. This can related to many things from what we learned in Ishmael.
First connection is in Ishmael, we know about the mother culture, mother nature, takers, and leavers. I think Enron is like the takers. Enron started pretty normal. However, the leader of the company become more and more greedier, at the end Enron is billions in dept. At last it collapse. Looking from this big picture, Enron is takers. Takers have their own mother culture. the mother culture we have was to gain money so we can have great life and that is what our dream is. That become a motive for Enron to try to gain more money. At last Enron collapsed because it is like leaver fighting back.
From my perspective this is how quotes "everything eventually morphs into the way the world is." and ".....conform the irregularity of nature to the precision and control of a machine." fit in and connect with Enron.

Another point is about how organic foods became a business now. I think this relate this to Enron is that many things started with a normal, naive, good view but at the end it become blurred. Organic food was good but at last Organic food is more of business in it. This is same as Enron. Enron started normally, however at the end it collapse because of their greediness.

In conclusion, what I have pointed out the problem is not only pointing Enron. This is pointing how our mother culture is and how similar we are to Enron.