The Dead Sea is... dying!

Israel's Dead Sea is, ironically, as old as life itself, is in a serious danger of drying. Hidden in the world's deepest valley and protected by majestic desert mountains, the Dead Sea is one important feature in a land of mysteries, miracles and biblical legends that we must see before it's too late. In another three decades, the evaporating Dead Sea could possibly become the dry sea.

The pier which used to lead directly to water, today it’s ending in the air. On the desert there are boards marking bathing beaches, although there isn’t a liter of water around . It is the lowest place on Earth- 1,300 feet below sea level -- it's closest to all the deep Earth's minerals and, most visibly, the Earth's salt and it still continues to shrink more each year, dropping a meter every century. Scientists are desperately looking for a solution to save it.

Scientists agreed that the reasons for drying of The Dead Sea are climatic changes and global warming as well as the use of Jordan waters for agricultural purposes.

One of the most seriously considered ideas for saving The Dead Sea concerns a construction of the canal that joins The Red Sea and The Dead Sea. Therefore, waters from the Red Sea would fill the drying surface of the dying sea. It’s hard to estimate whether it’s a good solution, however. Taking into account only goal is to raise the water level in the Dead Sea, the idea is certainly good. But no one knows how the investment would affect the surrounding ecosystem. Mixing the waters of two seas is spectacular, but the chemical composition of water in the Red Sea is quite different from the more saline one. Also, plenty of living beings would come with waters- although the vast majority of them wouldn’t live for long in a specific environment of the Dead Sea, but it’s really hard to tell how this experiment could be completed.

The end of the world in 2012?

Everything that has its beginning is most likely to also have an end. That's the rule. Life begins, lasts a while and then ends leaving memories behind. The world started billion years ago and it eventually will have to come to an end, like everything else. Is this a statemant we should believe in?

Scientific experts from around the world are predicting that 2.5 years from now, all life on Earth will end. There are a lot of websites with a variety of December 21 2012 predictions about the end of the world and information about how it will happen.
Some are saying it will be humans that would set it off. Others believe that a natural phenomenon will be the cause. And the religious folks are saying it will be God himself who would press the stop button. The following are some likely arguments as to why the world would end by the year 2012.

There are experts that say that on an ancient Mayan calendar 2012 points to the end of the world: they pick December 21 2012 as the exact day as that is when the calender ends. Others speak of a Nostradamus 2012 doomsday prediction.

The most realistic one I have read is about the Solar Storm. Our sun is in a bit of strife. The energy output of the sun is, like most things in nature, cyclic and it’s supposed to be in the middle of a period of relative stability. However, recent solar storms have been bombarding the earth with lot of radiation energy. It’s been knocking out power grids and destroying satellites. This activity is predicted to get worse and calculations suggest it’ll reach its deadly peak sometime in 2012. -read from http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/2012storms/ Scary.

Some 2012 end of the world predictions are connected to each other, some are not. It has got to the point where the thought of a 2012 end of the world doomsday is freaking some people out. Should you be freaked? NOT in my opinion. For starters, given past doomsday predictions and prophecies about the end of the world, earth should have ended by now! It was the 2000 prediction when the time was supposed to reset and the world explode. Since the earth is still here, it would be fair to say then that, to date, all doomsday prophecies and predictions about the end of the world (before 2012) have failed!

In my opinion, NO ONE knows the date, the day, the hour or minute when everything will disappear. We shouldn't predict or think about it. If it is to happen-it will happen. Why should we put this into the list of our worries? It's easier to seize the day and live life to the extreme.

CARPE DIEM!

A little internationally- Poland in a fight against flood.

Summer holidays are usually treated as the main period for people to go away for a well-deserved break. They save up money all year to enjoy their sweet rest somewhere exotic. Poland is well known for nice, sunny and hot summers. The hottest months- July and August when the temperature gets up to 40 degrees satisfy many tourists that come from all over the world. Unfortunately, the summer in Poland has been cancelled this year.

Water everywhere. 15 dead. Impassable streets, in fact there are no street. Just rapid streams. It looks like the flood from 1997 came back with stronger forces. Heavy rain has caused damage estimated at more than 266 mln zł, forcing the evacuation of thousands and thousands of people from their homes along the Vistula River, which flows from the southern Tatra Mountains into the Baltic. Emergency services do their best to help Poland not to get covered by flood completely. They have been blowing up the river embankment below the hole to help the water return to the river bed. Even strong and huge flood barriers don’t help anymore in many parts of Poland as they are in a very poor condition now after so many days of flood.

What’s happening to Poland? It seems like someone put a curse on it. It’s incredibly sad watching my own country being in such tragedies. Water gets higher day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute. No one knows when it will stop raining, or when everything will go back to normal- it will take a long time.

Element doesn’t always strike with the force. Sometimes it sneaks into our villages and cities slowly destroying property and human life. This year it just fell from the sky. You can’t predict when big waters will come, you can’t stop them either. Seeing the images of devastation and the enormity of human despair, we can ask ourselves: Can such disasters not be avoided or at least can their imapact not be minimized?









Pictures taken from:
http://wiadomosci.wp.pl/gid,12306641,title,Polska-pod-woda---zdjecia,galeria.html
and
http://galerie.money.pl/powodz;zalane;tereny;w;zachodniopomorskim,galeria,3786,9.html

Citizen Kane and Tabloid Nation

CITIZEN KANE

The classic masterpiece, Citizen Kane (1941), is probably the world's most famous and highly rated film, with its many remarkable scenes, cinematic and narrative techniques and innovations. Within the maze of its own aesthetic, Citizen Kane develops two interesting themes. The first concerns the debasement of the private personality of the public figure, and the second deals with the crushing weight of materialism or an idea of American Dream. Taken together, these two themes comprise the bitter irony of an American success story that ends in futile nostalgia, loneliness, and death.

Citizen Kane was one of the first movies to portray the American Dream as anything less than desirable. As a child, Kane is fully happy as he plays in the snow outside the family’s home, even though his parents own a boarding house and are quite poor. He has no playmates but is content to be alone because peace and security are just inside the house’s walls. When Thatcher removes Kane from this place, he’s given what seems like the American dream—financial affluence and material luxury. However, Kane finds that those things don’t make him happy, and the exchange of emotional security for financial security is ultimately unfulfilling. The American dream is hollow for Kane. As an adult, Kane uses his money and power not to build his own happiness but to either buy love or make others as miserable as he is. Kane's wealth isolates him from others throughout the years, and his life ends in loneliness at Xanadu. He dies surrounded only by his possessions, poor substitutions for true companions.

The movie also demonstrates social values and beliefs. Charles Foster Kane is shown in his three major stages of life as which show a significance transformation in his beliefs. As a young, energetic man, he believes in changing things his way for the better of the society. However, all of this changed though during time. Comparing the young Charles Foster Kane to the old is a remarkable one. Not only did his system of value change but also so did his whirlwind of energy that followed him. He bought into the newspaper business, and claimed to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Which he even claimed and wrote on the first page of his newspaper the "Inquirer". This is just an example of how his values changed over time because as he got older and one of his employers who was a great friend of Charles wrote the truth about a play that he had saw staring Charles's wife at the time. Charles fired him because what he had said was the truth although, harsh, was fired. Surprisingly was that his friend wrote a letter back with the original copy of the letter Charles had printed in the newspaper. Almost to bring it back in his face to show how he has change and his system of values have decreased terribly. Beside the idea of age, Charles was a man who never showed compassion towards something and surrounded himself with "yes men" that would agree and do anything for Charles on a super fiscal note. Charles on the other hand blamed all of these upon the money he inherited. Even his dying words "Rosebud", demonstrates what he had, and lost, which was his childhood innocents. From that day forward he shielded himself away from people as he had with the slay from Mr. Thatcher. This is seen in the movie through its editing techniques. For example Charles and his wife Emily seen eating breakfast together. As time goes on they have grown farther and farther apart from each other which usually happened to Charles because of his inability to present emotion. The scene says it all by placing Charles and his wife at either end of the table so far apart to demonstrate their inability to communicate and Charles inability to care for something which he was unable to purchase.

Tabloid Nation

The book is based on the rise and fall of the Mirror newspaper, which remains such an integral part of 20th century British popular culture. Harold Harmsworth, who is the main character of the book, was born in Dublin 1865. He was an indifferent scholar he was educated at St John's Wood, a small, private day school in London. He developed an interest in journalism when he began editing the school magazine.
The book also mentions The Daily Mail which was the first newspaper in Britain that catered for a new reading public that needed something simpler, shorter and more readable than those that had previously been available. One new innovation was the banner headline that went right across the page. Considerable space was given to sport and human interest stories. It was also the first newspaper to include a woman's section that dealt with issues such as fashions and cookery.

Reformation of Daily Mail from ‘a newspaper written by and for gentle woman’ to a normal daily newspaper was needed. Harmsworth wanted a change because as he said ‘women can’t write and don’t want to read’. Instead of writing about society he rather wanted the newspaper to be about something interesting and sufficiently simple.

The Daily Mail started the publication of serials. Personally supervised by Harmsworth, the average length was 100,000 words. The opening episode was 5,000 words and had to have a dramatic impact on the readers. This was followed by episodes of 1,500 to 2,000 words every day.

The Daily Mail was an immediate success and circulation quickly achieved 500,000. With the strong interest in the Boer War in 1899 sales went to over a million. Harmsworth encouraged people to buy the Daily Mail for nationalistic reasons making it clear to his readers that his newspaper stood "for the power, the supremacy and the greatness of the British Empire".

In 1903 Harmsworth produced the first newspaper, The Daily Mirror, aimed at women. Kennedy Jones was put in charge of the project and spent £100,000 in publicity, including a gift scheme of gilt and enamel mirrors. On its first day, the circulation of the Daily Mirror was 276,000. However, sales dropped dramatically after the initial launch and by January, 1904, circulation was down to 24,000 and the newspaper was losing £3,000 a week.

William Randolph Hearst

William Randolph Hearst was born on April 29, 1863 in San Francisco, California. He was born into a family wealthy from his father's discovery of and involvement in some of the greatest mines in United States history (including the Anaconda mine, the Homestake mine, and the Comstock load). After attending primary schooling, young Hearst was off to Harvard, studying in journalism. He worked on the Harvard Lampoon and was even an apprentice under Joseph Pulitzer while there.

Due in no small part to his father's fortune, he soon was able to have a newspaper of his own to run. (The newspaper had been earlier won as repayment for a poker debt.) Still at Harvard, he wrote his father, demanding to take over the San Francisco Examiner. While his father wished William to work in managing the family's ranching and mining interests, he had very little interest in the newspaper himself, and allowed the young Hearst to do as he pleased. Soon after, on March 7, 1887, Hearst became the proud owner of The Examiner. From the very beginning, he was determined to make the paper a popular one.

He publicly nicknamed the small paper "The Monarch of the Dailies", and went about purchasing some of the best equipment money could buy. He also hired a talented and experienced staff, and soon, he was modeling his newspaper after the Pulitzer-style sensationalism, in a practice that would later condemn him in the eyes of the world.

In 1895, Hearst went for the "big cheese", and purchased The New York Morning Journal, becoming a direct competitor to his former mentor, Joseph Pulitzer. From the very beginning, Hearst would perform generally immoral acts such as hiring away staff from Pulitzer's paper, The World. Acts such as this ended up throwing the two into a bitter circulation war. The story that caught the attention of Hearst the most was the Cuban Revolution of 1895. He saw this as a key opportunity to promote his paper, and he spent a large amount of effort supporting Cuba Librè, the Cuban insurgent forces. In addition, he would try to disgrace Spain in whatever way he could, always making it as flashy as possible in nothing more than an effort to sell the most papers.

After the mysterious explosion of the U.S.S. Maine, in Havana Harbor, Hearst's actions are thought by many to have seriously influenced the very existence of the state of war that existed afterwards. Hearst traveled to Cuba himself, working with his reporters in the field. One of his reporters, James Creelman, actually took charge of an assault on a Spanish blockhouse and was wounded. Reportedly, kneeling beside him, Hearst said, "I'm sorry you're hurt. But wasn't it a splendid fight? We beat every paper in the world!" Just this simple statement represents Hearst's personality and viewpoints on war and journalism very thoroughly.

Eventually, the war ended, and with it, the common use of such overtly biased practices in journalism slowly faded off, also. In 1903, during his European honeymoon with his new wife, Millicent Wilson, Hearst started his first magazine, Motor. After a brief stint in politics, he went on to become a more legitimate agent for news delivery. He later expanded his business operation into radio and produced movie newsreels, making what would become Hearst Corp. into one of the first real multimedia syndicates.

William Randolph Hearst died at the age of 88 in Beverly Hills, California on August 14, 1951, leaving behind a huge legacy. Today, the Hearst Corporation owns 12 newspaper and 25 magazines (including the popular Cosmopolitan), besides managing other media enterprises

Greg Lovell's Election Campaign- Labour Party

Finally, after months and weeks of waiting, the General Election Campaigns in the UK have started. People don’t seem to be surprised to see a Conservative candidate walking through Chippenham town centre on a black horse while telling them about intentions and changes he would do if he became an MP. This political theatre appears to be quite exciting to me.

Finding a General Election candidate I could observe in a considerable town like Chippenham doesn’t seem to be difficult. However, all the candidates I have contacted were too busy to email or ring me back. One of the secretaries thought I was joking when I asked to help in a campaign and told me not to bother them. I decided to have one more go and I emailed Greg Lovell- a Labour Party candidate.
On the next morning I checked my emails while having a cup of coffee to keep me going throughout the day at work. My heart started beating quicker filled with hope, excitement and relief. My eyes were staring at an email from Greg Lovell. ‘That was quick’, I thought and read it through quickly.
An email was slightly different to what I expected. Greg was delighted to see that a young person was interested to see how he promotes his views. He also said that they weren’t doing the traditional knocking-on-the-door campaign- simply because of financial reasons and limited time he had with a full time job and his family. He, however, decided to spend Saturdays getting out into the town centers and meeting as many people as possible, giving out leaflets and talking to them about their concerns. It sounded good to me.

He left his phone number and asked to call him so we can discuss all bits and pieces about it. All happy and excited I grabbed my phone and rang him. A male voice answered with a serious tone- ‘Greg Lovell’. His voice changed when I told him who I was. It became happier, more relaxed and warm. I felt like I was talking to an uncle who hadn’t seen me in a long while. He tried his best to be helpful on the phone. We arranged a meeting for the 17th of April in Corsham’s town centre.

The sun was shining and the birds were singing. It was a quiet Saturday morning- sunny but cold. Drops of frost on the grass and cars were shinning in the sunshine like little diamonds. There were no clouds on the sky. It looked like it was going to be a lovely day.

It was my first visit in Corsham. It seemed to be a little, old town. Some people say it is a ‘useless place’ just because the number of shops in town centre was very small. But personally- I loved it. ‘So this is where Greg Lovell spent his childhood. Interesting- write this down.’ I thought wandering about with a notepad and a pen as I was a little early. At least I had a chance to see an open-air Little Wiltshire Farmers market filled with a smell of village food such as cheese, bread, bread rolls.

I finally got to meet the Labour Candidate for an MP of Chippenham. He was young- just approached his thirties- quite tall. He was wearing jeans, white shirt with black sweater and brown shoes, which I thought didn’t go with the entire outfit, but at the end of the day it wasn’t a fashion show.

His campaign was quite exciting. Besides it was the very first campaign I have ever attended, so no wonder why it was so fascinating. We were stood by Somerfield in the Corsham town centre. His friends- councilors- were helping Greg handing out leaflets. They were 7 people all together. They all had red badges with yellow writing ‘vote for labour’. There was a box full of posters, balloons, stickers, leaflets- 2 kinds. One kind for families and the other one for working mums. It looked like they were brilliantly prepared.

Many people were passing by, taking leaflets smiling or putting them right into their pockets as if they weren’t going to look at them again. Greg talked to them in a calm, respectful and convincing way.
A young lady with a baby seemed interested. Greg was telling her about his policy – protecting frontline services. The lady agreed that the NHS is a very important aspect in her and her baby’s life. Greg amused the lady with a little joke about the NHS. She has already agreed to vote Labour. They talked for a long time about the future and about how much needs to be improved. ‘Exactly’ nods the lady, says goodbye and rushes away.

A policeman came over to shake the Candidate’s hand and to ask about his campaign. Greg explained why it is easier and better to meet people on the street. He also explained to him the rules of the new constituency, why it changed and how it changed.

A man in shades came to say thank you for emails Greg sent to him. They then continued talking about other parties and their candidates. They exchanged opinions about a political debate they watched on TV on Thursday night. Greg declared that his opinions about it were biased. They were comparing what Cameron and Brown said that evening. The man also mentioned a problem he had by his house. It was a large number of lorries driving past his tiny road. He asked Greg to mention it during the next meeting.

The weather was getting hotter and hotter as the time was passing by. Still sunny, surprisingly wonderful compare to all the other days this week. Doves were walking on the pavement. It’s strange how I have never seen such white pigeons before.

When it got really busy just before lunchtime I thought I could help a little, as up to this point I was just observing, listening and writing things down. I grabbed a badge and a few leaflets and I started giving them away to people. A young man- early thirties- stopped for a chat after he took a leaflet. He was fascinated with Greg’s ideas and asked for ‘VOTE LABOUR’ posters to put upon his windows.

It’s interesting how many different people walked past in an hour time. Foreigners, teenagers, elderly people, young marriages with babies. Some of them looked happy but some of them were grumpy and unhappy about a Labour candidate campaigning in their town.

We all experienced an amusing moment when an elderly man wearing a beret came over to tell a story from his childhood when he was taught to vote ‘LABOUR ONLY’. He was a very confident, cheery man that made us all laugh.
It was an incredible experience to be able to help in such an important event. An unordinary day like this one doesn’t happen often. I was glad to be so closely involved with politics.

Life if Fragile. R.I.P

Poland is grieving the loss of a head of the country- President Lech Kaczyński, his wife and 94 other important political figures that died in a tragic plane crash in Smoleńsk, Russia, on Saturday morning. The Polish delegation was flying in from Warsaw to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Katyn mass execution of thousands of Poles by Soviet forces during the World War II. The machine crashed during terrible weather conditions- the fog limited sight to 500m. The plane broke into 2 pieces after its second try to landing. The body of president was found and returned to Warsaw.

What horrific news to hear at the beginning of a weekend while drinking a cup of coffee. I simply couldn’t believe what I was watching on TV. All the channels were talking about the same thing- crash of the president’s plane. How shocking. I think the whole world experienced the same feeling. This is the biggest loss that happened to Poland since the Katyn tragedy. It’s so difficult to believe that Poland lost so many incredible people who made the country better in the last 3 and half years.

Everybody unites in mourning in Poland.

We will all always remember every good thing that Lech Kaczyński and the rest of Polish political figures did for Poland.
This is so unbelievably sad :(

R.I.P