-         The US holds a census every year ending in a 0.

-         The south and the west are the two regions in the US that are growing the fastest, population wise.

-         The Americas were named after Amerigo Vespucci because he was the first to realize that this new land, the Americas, was a new continent.

-         New Spain existed in the western hemisphere from 1492-1848.

-         Spain had land in the Americas in Cuba, Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. They also had Mexico until the Mexican Revolution.

-         America got land from Mexico after the Spanish American war in 1898 and we got land from Spain after the Spanish American war, which was from 1846-1848.

-             Manifest destiny, endless possibilities, a new beginning, and overcrowding made Americans want to move west.

-         New France existed from 1521-1763.

-         France possessed land between the Mississippi and Appalachian Mountains and up to Quebec.

-         The French lost the French-Indian War and lost all their land in North America.

-         Quebec was allowed to keep their French culture.

-         The English were in the US from 1607-1783.

-         The English lost the Revolutionary War where they lost all their land in North America.

-         Provinces (Canada)

-         Aztecs (Mexico)

-         42,59’ (USA)

-         1776 (USA)

-         49,15’ (Canada)

-         1821 (Mexico)

-         19,26’ (Mexico)

-         1867 (Canada)

-         Parliament (Canada)

-         Tenochtitlan (Mexico)

-         The Queen of Canada is Queen Elizabeth, the Queen of England. She doesn’t act as queen in Canada, but is on their money.

-           Oil sands is a term used for oil that can be removed from the sand. It is up in Canada and causes a lot of pollution to get the oil out of the sand. It helps out many countries.

-         The Aztecs ruled Mexico until Cortez came and took it over. Montozumo ruled the Aztecs and Montozumo’s Revenge is that the water in Mexico is unsafe to drink.

-          36,30’ is the southern boarder of Mississippi, and anything above it could not have slavery and everything below it could have slavery.

-         Jamestown is the first English settlement in North America. Known for producing tobacco, and is in Virginia. At first people there struggled to survive but then were able to adjust to the conditions.

-         The Mexican American War took place from 1846-1848 and got America the land of California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, and part of Colorado and New Mexico.

-         Quebec is a major area of French influence in Canada. Most still speak French up there, and keep many French culture things.  

The Crab Fisherman and the Spirit

Once upon a time, there was a crab fisherman named Phil Harris. He was out fishing with his crew in the waters off of Alaska when they pulled up something strange. It was a little wooden box. It looked ancient, and the crew decided to bring it to Phil. He looked at it and, with curiosity, opened it, and out poured a green misty smoke. The smoke then took the shape of an Eskimo.

“You have freed me from this wretched box I’ve been in for a thousand years. I was put in it by my tribe’s leader. I tried overthrowing him, but failed and was cursed to live in this box for the rest of my life. He used the magic he had learned from the elders to take away my physical body and then turned my soul to smoke so I could never die, which meant I could never go to the after life. To make it worse he trapped me in this box and threw me into the sea. I’ve waited many years for the person who would have saved me, but they never came. I lost faith in mankind and decided that instead of giving them wishes, I would kill the man who freed me.”

Phil pleaded with the spirit to have mercy on them, for they did nothing. The spirit would not listen to him, so Phil said that the spirit can do what he pleases with them, but then asked if he could have a cigarette. The spirit said yes, but said that was all he could have. Phil then asked, “So spirit, you’re made of smoke? How are you going to control where you go?”

“I will let the wind carry me where it wants.” At this Phil pointed the cigarette he was smoking at the spirit and took a deep breath in, and the spirit got sucked through the cigarette into Phil’s lungs. Phil then blew the smoke of the spirit back into the box and shut it quickly. 

“You devilish man! You tricked me! You lied! You had not given up, and I am the creator of my demise by letting you smoke that cigarette. If you let me go I will not harm you in any way and will go on my way and leave you alone! I swear to it!”

“I will not let you out spirit, for you would show no mercy on us. You deserve to stay in that box for the rest of eternity! You deserve the fate Tiger Woods and the caddy.”

Trying to delay Phil, the spirit asked, “What is this story you speak of?”

Tiger Woods and the Caddy

Tiger Woods was a great golfer, actually the greatest golfer. He lived a lavish life, but went into a slump. He couldn’t win any competitions. All his caddies and trainers tried helping him, but none could seem to get him out of this slump. A caddy named Leo from upstate New York went and visited Tiger at his house; he said he could cure Tiger.

“I have these clubs. They were forged in a volcano by Arnold Palmer himself. If you use them, you will become the greatest golfer to ever live.” Tiger tried them and it worked. He started winning every competition he entered.

“I will give you half of every winning, Leo! You are my greatest help and friend!” Soon, Leo and Tiger became richer and richer. They drove the finest cars and lived in the most extravagant houses. They also partied a lot, and Leo began to notice that Tiger would go to private rooms with many different women. Leo knew that Tiger was married but didn’t want to think about him cheating because Tiger was his idol. Tiger’s old caddy became jealous of Leo. He told Tiger that Leo was just using him to get money and that soon he would take the clubs back and use them to become better than Tiger at golfing. Tiger thought this idea was ridiculous and asked his old caddy, “Do you want me to end up like Billy the Man and his trusty horse Betsey?”

 

Billy the Man and his Trusty Horse Betsey

Billy the Man was a wild and crazy gunslinger back in the 1800s. He lived in California. He was hunting down Johnny G and found him sitting in bar. He kept trying to get his horse Betsey, who he had ridden all his life, to go towards the bar, but she kept turning away. He finally got tired of the horse’s games and got off her and, thinking that she had gone crazy, shot her. He then walked with swagger into the bar and shouted, “Johnny G! Your time has come.”

“No, I think yours has,” said Johnny G as he walked up from behind Billy. The man at the bar was just a look-a-like of Johnny G. Billy tried turning around and pulled his Smith and Western a few inches out of its holster when Johnny G blasted 3 shots into Billy’s back. As Billy lay there bleeding out all over the floor of the bar, Johnny G walked out and said, “You should’ve trusted your horse.” 

Now, the old caddy had to try harder to convince Tiger that he was going to betray him. So, the caddy started telling a story he had just made up about Leo being with Tiger’s wife. Tiger’s ego had gotten so big that, even though he cheated on his wife, he didn’t want anyone to be with her, because she was his. All the women were his in his mind.

The next day Leo was called over to Tiger’s party house. He was then ushered into Tiger’s personal ‘man-cave’.

“I hear you have something going on with my wife,” said Tiger and Leo tried talking, but Tiger shushed him. “Now, there’s only one thing that I can do now. I must kill you, for I also fear that you want to steal my clubs. You want my fame don’t you Leo? You want to be me.”

“No! No! I just want to help you! I don’t want the clubs or your wife, and I’ve never been with her, I swear!”

“I don’t want to hear anything from you. You have one day. Make your will. And be back here by dawn.” At this Leo left and went back to his house, followed by two of Tiger’s bodyguards to keep watch on Leo. Leo made out his will and emailed a copy of it to Tiger’s wife. The next day at noon, Leo showed up at Tiger’s and was met by a man with a Cadillac Escalade. He told Leo to get in, and when Leo got in, he put a brick on the gas pedal, and the Escalade drove straight into a pond and Leo drowned.

 The man then had a diver go down and retrieve the brick, and he then had Tiger call the cops and say that Leo just drove into a pond. They made it look like an accident. The SUV was laid out with stuff to make it look like it was Leo’s, and a CD was put under the passenger’s seat to make it look like Leo had gone to reach for it and wasn’t looking when he drove into the pond. They used latex gloves with Leo’s fingerprints on them.

Tiger spent the day at that house with a few women and then left to go back to his regular house. He got in and his wife started yelling at him.

“What are these pictures? Huh?!” She was holding up pictures of Tiger and other women. “Your buddy Leo sent these to me! He said I needed to know what my husband had turned into!” At this she took Tiger’s special clubs he had gotten from Leo, and she started throwing them around and snapping them. She then chased down Tiger with one and he hopped into his Escalade and tried driving away but crashed.

The whole world knew about this, and now Tiger couldn’t get any women, and his special clubs were all broken. He again went into a slump, but this time, there was no one to save him.

“Now you know what will happen to you, spirit.” Phil took a big puff from his cigarette and then threw the box way out into the ocean. “Drinks are on me boys,” Phil said to his crew as they went into the cabin to warm up.

“We don’t have to pay for drinks on this ship!” yelled back a crewmember. At this, Phil went into a fit of laughter, which turned into a fit of coughing.  

   

 

-         Saudi Arabia and Yemen are on the Arabian Peninsula.

-         Israel and Turkey are on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea.

-         The Gaza Strip and the West Bank are two territories inside the boarders of Israel.

-         Abraham is the father of monotheism.

-         Jews, Muslims, and Christians all worship the same God, they are monotheistic.

-         In 1000 BC Israel splits in two, Israel and Judah.

-         In 722 BC Israel was taken over by the Assyrians.

-         In 587 BC Judah was taken over by the Babylonians.

-         In WWI Britain and France got “mandates” in the Mid East.

-         Britain got a Mandate for Palestine.

-         Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948.

-         The Palestinians is Israel were taken out and put into their own little societies, away from the Jews.

-         Israel took the Sinai Desert, Gaza Strip, West Bank, and Golden Heights in the 1967 war.

-         Egypt was the first Middle Eastern country to make peace with Israel.

-         Israel still controls Golden Heights.

-         The president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, was assassinated right after he made the peace accords with Israel.

-         The Two-State solution is to make the Gaza Strip a country again and to make sure it is okay with Israel.

-         The West Bank cannot survive as a country without Israel because it does not have the needed resources.

-         Mahmoud Abbas is the president of the PLO or PA.

-         The Right of Return is the right for Palestinians to return to Israel and live there.

-         Cyrus the Great was the Persian Emperor who allowed the Israelites to go back home in 537 BC.

-         The USSR and Britain invaded Iran in 1941 because they were afraid that Iran would supply oil to Hitler. They took control of Iran and put the Shah’s son in charge.

-         Ayatollah Khomeini was sent into exile because he was criticizing and preaching against the Shah.

-         Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran in 1979 because that was when the Shah fled the country. The Shah fled the country because he was afraid of a rebellion.

-         The Ayatollah set up a theocracy when he went back to Iran. A theocracy is a government based off of religion. The laws are taken from laws and teachings of God/Allah.

-         52 American workers at the American Embassy in Iran were taken hostage for 444 days. (November 4, 1979 to January 20, 1981). They were given back once Jimmy Carter was not president any more.

-         Sharia Law is a strict form of laws for criminals in Indonesia, it is a form of Muslim law that did not come from Indonesia.

-         Mohammed is the prophet of Islam. He started the religion and helped to spread it around the known world. He is said to have been visited by an angel.

-         The Islamic Revolution was started by CIA agents to get the people to go against their Shah because he nationalized oil.

-         The Promised Land is Israel. Supposedly Israel was promised to the Jews by God, but the Muslims claim it was promised to them by God.

-         During the 600s and 700s AD, Islam spread throughout the known world. Went from Africa all the way out to the boarder of India.

-         Mecca (Saudi Arabia)

-         Canaan (Israel)

-         Largest Muslim Nation population wise (Indonesia)

-         Persia (Iran)

-         Babylon (Iraq)

-         Sinai (Egypt)

-         Taliban (Afghanistan)  

-         Bethlehem (West Bank)

-         Saddam Hussein (Iraq)

-         Jerusalem (Israel)

It is hard to decide which season I love best. I like all the seasons, but I like winter and summer better than fall and spring. Mainly because in fall we start school again, and because spring and fall seem like transition seasons. The beginning of spring is like winter and the end of spring is like summer. Fall is like the end of summer and the beginning of winter. So as I said before they are basically transition seasons.

It is hard to choose between winter and summer. They are total opposites, especially up here in New England. Summer can get really hot and dry, like last summer where we got like two rainstorms. Winter can get very cold, or like this winter it can snow like two feet a week. They are such opposites that it is hard to compare them.

What I like about summer is that there is no school, so I can sleep until 10am, and go to bed at 1am. I can also go skateboarding, ride my bike, play basketball, swim, and do all sorts of outdoors stuff. What I like about winter is that I can dig tunnels through snow banks, go snowboarding, shovel, cross-country ski, and I have an excuse to stay in doors and play PS3. The snow also makes all the trees look very beautiful. I can also sleep better in the cold. We also get snow days, which I love.

I guess I’m going to have to choose though. So I choose summer because I have no school, I get to mow my lawn (which I love doing), I get to skateboard, and during winter I don’t go snowboarding as much as I wish I could. Last winter I think I only went snowboarding like three or four times. I haven’t gone once yet this year either. So I think summer just a little bit better. 

Gnarled, ugly trees are the trees that you need to analyze to find climate trends. Complacent trees are not good for finding about history because they pack on think rings of wood even in dry years. In 2002 the flow of the Colorado River fell to a quarter of its long-term average. This got people attention, which helped raise funds for tree-ring fieldwork. The Colorado River supplies seven states and Mexico with water so this was a very big deal; the west was in a major drought.

The 20^th century has bin the wettest in the pat millennium. In July of 2007 it got extremely dry and there were several wild fires burning all over Nevada. From stumps found in the Sierra Nevada they found out that the stumps were from a drought that lasted from 900 to around 1100. Then another starting up around 1200 and ending in 1350. Most droughts in the southwest follow the pattern of La Niña, which is a periodic cooling of the eastern equatorial Pacific.

Climate theorist Isaac Held, from NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, says that global warming will most likely make the dry lands even dryer. People are not yet suffering because of this, but the trees are. By studying sections cut from extremely old trees, Tom Swetnam found that fires used to burn often in the Sierra Nevada, but the fires would never reach very large in size. Now the fires reach gigantic proportions because we try to put them out leaving small trees up, which serve as a ladder for the fire to reach the tops of the trees.

Dark beetles can almost smell that some of the trees are dying from the drought, so they come and finish them off basically. Allen predicts that people in the southwest will be seeing a lot of death in the trees and not a lot of new life. Ever since the Hoover Dam was built there has never been not enough water to supply to the areas that are needed. Now as the weather is getting dryer people are looking for other ways to get water. Some people even are thinking about the Pacific as a place to get water. The west was built by dreamers and it seems that the people who will try to keep the west the same, are also dreamers.

Capitalism, according to Dictionary.com, is “an economic system in which investment in and ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange of wealth is made and maintained chiefly by private individuals or corporations, especially as contrasted to cooperatively or state-owned means of wealth.” Communism, according to Dictionary.com, is “a theory or system of social organization based on the holding of all property in common, actual ownership being ascribed to the community as a whole or to the state” or “a system of social organization in which all economic and social activity is controlled by a totalitarian state dominated by a single and self-perpetuating political party.” These are basically two different systems. Capitalism is specifically against state owned things that make money, like a business. Communism is all for that, all economic activity is run by the state. Capitalism is basically freedom, and communism is basically slavery, so how can China be both?

China is both capitalist and communist, but it is starting to become less communist, in turn becoming more capitalist. There are a lot more privately owned businesses in China than there used to be. There still are state owned businesses, and they are very strict, as I found out reading the last article. China’s economy has boomed ever since it became more capitalist, which is probably why they have kept it like that and why it seems to be ever more growing. But is there still communism?

      Communism is still very evident in China, mainly the fact that the government still controls a lot of things, maybe not businesses, but they control people’s lives. Look at the 2008 Olympics; the Chinese had the best opening ceremony, in many people’s opinions. The reason why it was so good was because the government sent in the army to run everything and train the people. Also using subliminal messages the government can control what younger people, like kids, think, buy, and do. The government also controls how many children you have. I have heard that scouts for their Olympic team go around and see if young kids have the talent in any sports. If they do they take them away from their parents and family and train them for years.

Mainly China is communist in everything except their economy, probably because they are making more money with a capitalist economy. So how can they be both? Well it is easy, I’ll combine the two definitions of the words, to make what I call Communist-Capitalism: An economic system in which investment in and ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange of wealth is made and maintained chiefly by private individuals or corporations and is also a system of social organization in which all social activity is controlled by a totalitarian state dominated by a single and self-perpetuating political party.     

-         The nickname for the effort to colonize Africa by the Europeans was the “Scramble for Africa.”

-         The two countries that were never colonized were Ethiopia and Liberia.

-         Europe decolonized Africa after WWII because they had fought a war against a country that wanted to colonize Europe, so they would be hypocrites to keep their colonies.

-         The four main geographic areas of Africa are the south, north, east, and west.

-         Islam is so prevalent in Africa because the Muslims came over back in the 600-700s AD and conquered many places and spread Islam around. Now Islam is starting to slowly spread down Africa.

-         Many Europeans looked at Africans as being an underdeveloped people. They wanted to turn them into people like us, with modern clothes and technologies.

-         Three problems with colonization were that once gone the Africans did not know how to rule themselves. It put rival tribes together. There were language barriers.

-         The primary goal of the Communist Party in China is maintaining economic growth because getting more money will allow the government to become more powerful. This will be good for China because they want to become the world’s biggest super power. Also economic growth will divert the Chinese peoples’ attention from political freedom.

-         We owe China around $1.3 trillion and we have around $14 trillion, so they own 1/14 of our debt.

-         Pollution is such a major problem in China because China is the world biggest producer of carbon dioxide. Babies are being born with deformities, people put their trash in rivers and lakes, and there are so many factories that all the smoke just stays in the air. Many people are getting cancer from the pollution.

-         Tibetans and Uygurs are trying to gain their independence from China.

-         Notre Dame is an American university that refuses to allow any of their products to be made in China.

-         The richest city in China is Shanghai.

-         The Chinese people protested their government in the spring of 1989 because they wanted political freedoms and just more freedoms.

-         Everyone took part in these protests, not just students. This scared the government because they had always just let the students protest because they would never change anything, but now almost everyone in China is going against the government. The government was afraid of a revolution.

-         China gave the people two doors to choose from. Door A was political freedom and Door B was economic freedom. The people chose Door B, and the government said that now they could not in anyway go against the government or the Communist Party.

-         The result of this is that China’s economy has boomed. People have become richer, although there are still many poor people there. China has become paranoid about making sure no one goes against the government go.

-         China one is the rich, upper class, government, and college-educated people. China two is the factory worker, field worker, uneducated, and poor people.  

-         China has companies like Google and Yahoo censor many things that are on the search engines. China also gets the latest technology in spy ware and other things so that they can watch what people look up on the Internet. Lots of things are kept secret from the Chinese people.

-         The majority Ethnic group in China is the Han.

-         Hong Kong and Macao are two sections of China that have special status for 40 more years.

-         Western China used to be mostly just Uygurs but the resources and many other things have brought the Han there. Eastern China hates Muslim China and they get into brawls often. The area that the Uygurs live in used to be the center of the world.

-         The Dalai Lama is the spiritual leader who is exiled from Tibet.

-         China became Communist in 1949.

-         Mao was the leader of the Communists. The Nationalists were lead by Chiag Kai Shek.   

After the Nationalists lost the civil war they went to Taiwan and created the country, the Republic of China.