Egypt

Some people - or just one person - have/has kind of recently razzed me about never posting on here, and I'll totally admit - I haven't written anything recently. It's kind of obvious.
DESPITE all the fantastic topics worth talking about (that I swear, I'll end up covering);
Wikileaks
DADT
Anonymous as a "vigilante group"
Pressure the school system puts you under
North Korea in general
Obama's State of the Union
The common man's opinion
and MOST recently:
EGYPT.

It's a crazy story to tell! I won't really forget me going onto my Facebook and reading my friend's post on "holy shit, check out this news," which led me to Al Jazeera news. Sitting on the school media lab (watching video render) I left it on in the background. British reporters essentially WTF'ing over what's going on in Egypt.
I'll give some slight insight as to what's going on over there, in case you're unaware.

Egypt is a joke of a "Republic," it's got one major person in power that was "elected" by the people of Egypt. Problem?
It's been the same dude for the past 30 years.

Maybe I forgot to mention.
(Oh it's been so long since I've typed that)

Before the rioting officially started, the "vigilante group" known as "anonymous" (rule no. 1) began to cause some relative unrest within the people. A few denial of service attacks on the Egyptian gov't website later, our favourite leader, Muhammad Hosani Mumbarak decided that ya know what, I've had enough of this interenet stuff and cut off every single Egyptian from the internet. So what happened?
You must have seen it on the news. Riots galore. Hundreds of thousands of people rioting against the same common enemy - the many they thought was the best choice. They went so far as to near;y burn down the most important museum in human history; the Museum in Cairo. You know, what the King Tutankhamen guy? People were flooding the streets, lighting everything they could on fire, knowing out buildings, flipping cars (and when that didn't work, they just lit the car on fire instead) and just causing a shitstorm.
So what does out favourite leader do?

Well shit, if that's what the people want...
I'll just elect people I would chose!

This is all ignoring the fact that the Egyptian military, though while officially on Mumbarak's side, never once made an aggressive move towards the people. In fact, for three tanks to move across a .5 kilometre square, it took them 45 minutes due to the fact they had to get out of their tanks to shake peoples' hands. The people were chanting "long live Egypt," while essentially parading the military.

So we have the immediate problem - a ruler who has overstayed his welcome. We have the cause of the rioting - shutting down internet and making matters essentially worse. But what's the real issue?
Leadership.
Egypt lacked true leadership.

Follow along with me on this one, because I'm gonna back-track a bit here.

I was going for one of my routinely night strolls and decided I'd stop in at the corner store, down the street. It's jokingly known as the Arab store, since everyone that works there is, though incredibly nice, middle-eastern. While I was buying my Doritos - of the Cool Ranch variety -I couldn't help but ask;
"So what do you think of all this stuff goin' on in Egypt?"
The old man scoffed, he brought his thin-wire glasses a bit lower down his nose. "People doing what they need to do!" As if I asked the dumbest question in the world. "People are rebelling against the people that held them accountable for things they didn't do, and refused to give them what they deserved."
"What about the government?"
He scoffed again. "Government? What government? Over there? There is no democracy, no real voting. In the middle-east, I bet you couldn't find one single 'democracy' that works."

And you know what? He's right. He's totally right. There is no government, there is no leader, there is no power to each citizen. There are laws, laws that are enforced - in many cases unfairly.

Egypt lacks a true leadership. That's the problem here. That's the real root of the issue. Egypt has had a fake, untrue and flat-out wrong form of "government" for too long, and they snapped. This is something that anyone could have seen coming, but no one wanted to.

If he was a real leader, then two things would have happened:
1) He would have left office long ago
2) There never would have been rebelling.

They lost sight of what true leadership is. Leadership is making the tough choices that sometimes the consensus cannot agree on, good leadership is looking out for the well-being of the people you're leading.
Leadership is, and will never stop being, in the eye of the follower.

Until Egypt finds a real leader, until Egypt has someone true, right, and looks out for the people, then these riots?
They're only the beginning.

I'm Stalling

I can't think of anything to write about that's decent and has any shred of quality to it, so until then,

please check this out!

Christmas Cleaning

'Tis the season, my ever-slowly-growing-number-of-frequent-readers! Time for the HOLID-
Fuck you, it's time for Christmas. Feel free to call me an unfeeling zealot who ignores other religions, but I'm Catholic, therefore, it's Christmas season. Call it whatever you want to call it, I'll call it whatever I want to call it. The world will still rotate at a solid 30'000+ miles per hour.
ANYWAYS!

Yes! That time of year when the snow falls perfectly on to your well trimmed, well-cut lawn and your perfectly painted white porch and excellently crafted window sills attached to a house that was seemingly built for perfection! Time for every window to have a pretty little candle along with fantastically prepared food with all the trimmings and family! Oh, family! This year it'll be perfect, right? No arguments, no decisions that cause trouble, just a picture-perfect, model Christmas that's so awesome it might as well have it's own CBC Primetime television coverage.

Perfect, right?

Don't you see what's so wrong with that?
Don't you see that you're ruining yourself because of it?

I'll back track a bit.

We, as North Americans, have this concept of perfect aesthetics. That everything and everyone should, at the least bit, have some good looks and look well done. It's why there's this idea behind a "perfect Christmas" that entails pretty well exactly what I mentioned earlier. Nice little house, white picket fence, good food and a perfect family.

I'll back track a bit more.

You know that magic closet you have in your house? Maybe your magic drawer, or desk. It's got dates of things that have already passed or maybe dates for things that won't happen for a few years now - but it doesn't actually have any words on it, just the date. Or maybe the phone book that's a few years old that no one ever uses but it might serve some kinda purpose in the future. School assignments that you decide are worth keeping but you never look at until you have to.
One of those places?

Oddly enough, it's the same place that you utilize when you try to create the perfect Christmas. You toss everything in there and say "now, it's clean."
But it's not really, is it?

Maybe I forgot to mention.

You see, we as a society seem to have this collective idea that if we look good, if we look like we've got it together and neat and packed nicely, then everything is. We try to placebo ourselves into a good relationship, a good lifestyle, a good set of morals and beliefs. If it looks perfect, then it just must be, by definition, perfect.

That kind of thinking, it's poison. We're lying to ourselves, and isn't it funny that the last person to find out that you don't have it together is yourself? While you were busy building walls and creating a super structure to keep your life in packed nicely, everyone else was watching the you build it around yourself.

We don't want to be accountable.
That's the long and short of it.

If we're accountable, we don't have to admit to imperfections. Without personal accountability, we can ignore the fact that maybe we don't measure up to the fast-paced, ridiculously high standards that society and everyone has set for us. No one likes to admit they don't have it all together, because everyone, deep down, wants to be able to measure up, to meet the standards and beat them. But why? Life isn't about meeting everyone elses' standards, it's about meeting your own.

It's easy to hide things away in the magic closet. It's easy to keep people out and put a smile on.

Life isn't about what's easy.

Life is about what's right.

School System Part 2

So, before I mentioned on the things school DOESN'T teach you. Life, necessary social skills (effectively, at least), how to deal in social situations, that sort of thing.

Now, I'll be covering what they DO mark you on.
And how dumb that really is.

I recently received my semester 1 mid-term report card. As expected, I did horribly - as much as I'd like to blame other people, I know that it's really my fault. I have a problem applying myself (doesn't everyone?) and I barely focus. And I have 0 initiative. I like to say I'm an extrovert taking introvert courses, being physics and chem. At least, that personal partial justification worked until I realized I had a low mark in English as well - arguably a course that takes both paths, introvert and extrovert.

Taking into the fact that I did... "okay" on my report, I realized that a lot of students have been given the short end of the stick in terms of marks. What I'll be talking about definitely isn't NEW, and by all means, it's definitely not an original thought, but it deserves to be mentioned.

School doesn't grade you on your EQ.

By definition, IQ is the "intelligence quotient", the measure of intelligence for everyone based on a standardized test that is not at all related to mathematics or sciences, but logic and reasoning skills. For a very long time, it's been known as the method to judging a person's intelligence. Every American President, at one point or another, has been criticized for their "low IQ", such as Obama... Who allegedly has an IQ of 90, but that's not very believable.

So we know there's IQ standard of measuring intelligence, but how about it's partially lesser known cousin EQ? I see how EQ can be infinitely harder to grade on, but-
EQ is your level of social intelligence. EQ - "social quotient," the "an ability or capacity to perceive, assess, and manage the emotions of one's self, and of others."
Essentially;
a fancy way to say you can deal with groups of people and be empathetic.

I know, I know, it's harder to the nth degree to grade a person on EQ in comparison to IQ. IQ has very few answers in a lot of occasions, whereas EQ can have hundreds of options and solutions to problems, and all of them change depending on the person.

Then we have this whole concept of there not even being just EQ and IQ in forms of intelligence, but instead 6 different measures of specific forms of intelligence.

Maybe I forgot to mention.

Remember in grade 9, when you had geography, or english, or any course where you filled out a questionnaire, and you found what "kind of learner you were"? Same deal. We are all smart in different ways, period. Again, I know, I know. Schools are made to make you to be a well-rounded student. I understand that concept, but at the same time, it's not fair that you can possibly ruin someone's life by failing them in math when they can play 6 different parallel form scales on the piano in less than 30 seconds.

I don't have a solution to this issue, but I know we have a problem. There's dozens of important people regulating what we learn in the school year, why can't they focus on things that will matter for the rest of your life?

School System Part 1

This is going to be a very, very long journey of a blog series on my opinion on the North American schooling system. I dunno how many there will be, but they're going to be... interesting. I can't even wait to start going at it - even though I never try to blog more than once a day for the sake of always having topics to write about, I can't help myself.

FIRST TOPIC,
"education."

Who was your favourite teacher in grade school?
That cool, 20-something year old dude who swore in class?
How about that one girl STRAIGHT outta' teacher's college that you can bend to your every whim? Or maybe it's the old teacher with the "fuck it I've got a year left before I retire," attitude.

Personally, it was Mr. Chisholm for me. He seemed like a nice guy - some times hard yet fair. He would move back due dates if the class was falling behind, swear on occasion, laugh at jokes and poke fun at students that could take it, not to mention class discussions were THE SHIT.

But why was he really one of my favourite teachers?
He taught me LIFE lessons - something schools seem to completely ignore and figure "eh your parents can get that covered."

Life needs a course. It's something that not nearly enough teachers have the capacity or ability to teach. It's something that cannot be taught by everyone, but it's something everyone needs to be educated on.

Class discussions on recent events, talking about basic politics, human rights, those are things students of today need to learn, without question.

Wanna know why you really have 8 years of grade school?
When you think of it from an educational standpoint, we don't need nearly 8 years to learn the information we do in grade school - the projected amount of years necessary is only like, 3 (I can't find the source I read that from, my bad). It takes that long because for those 8 years, you're learning social skills.

Social skills.

You're learning, since SK, that it's good to share, that you let other people talk when it's their turn to talk and you be sure to say 'please' and 'thank you.' For those 8 years, you're learning how to deal with basic life and social skills. You cannot learn social skills in 3 years, which is why the topics you learn are so stretched out.

Intelligence is a common misconception of the usefulness of a student in the workforce. I really, really, seriously, do not give two shits if you can square root a 6-digit figure with only odd numbers if you can't deal in a group environment. Nowadays, it's sink or swim.

If you cannot deal with people, your IQ is null. Only until you can learn those social skills can you really be a value to a business - unless you want to work in a cubicle for the rest of your life. If so, ball's in your court, have fun.

Until the "education" system realizes that "education" has changed, we aren't going to change the way we need to. Period.

Feel-Good Policies

I'm holding off on my blog on China/North Korea and the North American educational system because I believe it's time I jump over the line. I've waited far too long to directly comment on this because the problem is too taboo, too personal for people to want to read.

It's suicide.

Maybe you know someone who has been there, contemplated it. Maybe you know someone who is no longer living because of it. Friends, family, co-workers, peers. Maybe you were there yourself. Contemplating it, losing options.

Options.

I'm sick and tired of hearing of these schools having these student assemblies and seminars for bullying, drugs or suicide. I'm so sick and tired of them saying that "bullying has been reduced by 'x%' over the past 'x years'.

Look, don't get me wrong, I see the purpose to them.

--Before I continue, a side note. I do feel absolute sympathy for those in situations where sucide is an option they consider with looking at. Without a doubt, I understand that they need people, a person, anyone to talk to, and I hope that if you're in that situation you have the will to do so.

The part I cannot fathom, the concept that always blows my mind is the idea that they have this suspicion they can solve the problem. That by making policies and rules and regulations and seminars and assemblies, that we can write it off as some sort of issue that we as modern society have solved.

It just doesn't work that way.

Maybe I forgot to mention.

Suicide and bullying are things that will never, ever, in the future, ever, go away. I know, I can be called pessimistic, - I like to think I'm a realist - but it's true. Let's face it - tabooing a subject cannot, will not, and will never solve the issue. All it takes is one instance for schools to go nuts over it. One unfortunate teenager, with seemingly no options left, takes his or her own life because of the stress. Once that happens, the educational system is put under the spotlight, everything is examined meticulously until deemed "proper."

You know what they call bullying when you're older?
Business.

Feel-good policies make the politicians sleep better at night. They feel like they're doing their very best at "solving the issue," an issue that cannot be solved by seminars.

The only one, singular way to "solve" it as an issue is society. Society is the problem. I don't care how dumb that sounds - but society is and has always been the force driving the REASONS for the seminars and the assemblies and the policies and the rules.

Society isn't something you can fix, only change.

I hope you learn how to do your part in changing it.

More on this Later.

Everything you're reading is exactly how I remember it, second for second. Once it happened, I wrote it all down for specifically this reason.

I've only told this story to two other people before, but it's very closely related to another topic I'll be covering later on, maybe in a few days.

Bear with me, please.

I woke up late at night, sounds of massive crashes cut through my sleep like scissors through paper. In confusion, I ran downstairs to meet my mom in the living room, asking what was going on. I could see out the windows that there were bright yellow lights slicing through the sky - planes soaring over the house.
Crashes.
"Don't worry about it, Peter," she says as calm as ever, looking out into the black, chaotic sky. "It's probably some kind of aerial show."
"At night?"
"Who knows?" This question wasn't a question. This question was a statement. I accepted that what I was seeing could not be reality, and went back to bed, hoping when I awoke, I would actually wake up.

I woke up.
Bright morning light blinded me momentarily as I got out of bed and changed.
No crashes, no booms. No planes.
Thank God, no planes.

I walked downstairs, wiping the sleet out of my eyes and throwing a shirt on, and hobbled outside for the warm morning air. I paced down to the end of my lawn, and was suddenly at the Windsor riverfront. I can't explain what I felt, but I felt something coming.
An omen.

A ship.

An enormous ship was thundering under the Ambassador bridge, followed by planes over top. There were a squadron of what looked like cargo planes soaring above, and before I knew it, one landed next to me. An unmistakable symbol was on the side of it.
A red star.

Scores of army Jeeps flooded the streets in an instant, Chinese piling out of them with loaded, automatic rifles.
The sky was still bright and shining.

Screaming. So much screaming.
People running, gunfire was everywhere around me. People were getting shot without question.

I sprinted.
I ran down across my lawn that didn't seem to end, the only thing I could hear was my own breath, my footsteps, and the ratata tata tat of automatic guns.
My mother yelled for me, and she was next to me, running down the lawn.
Why didn't it end?
She wasn't fast enough.
"GO!" She yelled at me with power I've never heard in her voice before. I turned, only to see her grabbed by a military man.
She was shot in the head.
No questions, no yells, no cries for help. She was shot in the head without any other statements.

The sky was still bright and cloudless.

I ran.

The streets were familiar, but they felt sickly and viral. Jeeps came from left and right, army men pouring out of each and breaking into houses. So much gunfire. I kept running, running hard. My breath was laboured, my heart pounding. I kept running. I wasn't alone. After a few minutes, other stragglers had joined in me running - they had assumed I had known what I was doing. I wish I did.

I broke into my own house, feeling anxiety peak. Necessities. Necessities.
Taking my backpack, I took the essentials. Multi-tool, clothes, another multi-tool, jump drive, combination lock, camera.

Bursting down the stairs, I ordered the 4-5 other people, who I had never met, to grab as much non-perishable food I they could find, "there's some in the basement kitchen, go now." Calm, collected.
Controlled.

Two people went without question, and just as they left to the basement, I heard a screech of tires.

"No no no no no no no no," there was no way. Not yet, I wasn't ready!
A jeep had pulled up in front of my house, and the door was banging. I yelled at everyone to evacuate, that if they didn't leave they would die now. The garage's side door was the only option - the front door was glass and if you looked through it, they could see us escaping through the back door.
I had to act immediately.

I swung open the door into the garage and burst outside. I heard the front door break down with gunfire spraying. Only three people were behind me.
Then two.
Then one.

Then I was alone, running down the back alley alone. I had no where to run. I had only my back pack, clothes, two multi-tools and a camera with a jump drive. It was such a nice day out.

Running.
I kept running.
A Jeep pulled in front of me.

I woke up.


I have many lucid dreams, this is the result.