Socialism

n: any of various social system based on shared or government ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Where in that definition does that mention "government take over" or "Nazis". Where in here does it mention that things such as roads and a police system are not?

I have been amazed with how many people (mostly on the right) have now decided to rail against "Pres. Obama's Socialism". These are the same people who were upset when he "cut" the military spending by raising it or paying for the wars, or giving money to Wall Street for the TAPP program.
Socialism is only "socialism" when money is giving to programs that these people disagree with.

Some people should be informed what they are talking about before they open their mouths.

Habitat for Humanity

I have just returned from a 2 week trip in Braga, Portugal where I participated in the Habitat for Humanity program.
A group of 15 of us traveled to a village outside of Braga and worked on the roof of a house which was being made for a Portugese family who was in need of a larger house. Before the trip I did not really know what to expect. I was pleasently suprised when we walked into the loby of one of the nicest hotels in the city. I thought that if we were lucky, we might have been staying in a hotel that had a bathroom in each room.
We had a private van that took us to and from the worksite each day. It picked us up at 8:30 each morning and took us back at 5:00 each evening. At the worksite we had two formen who only spoke Portugues and a team leader who spoke both Portuges and English. Our objective was to build the roof.
Most of the days that we were there we had lovely weather. It did however rain heavely for two of the days that we were supposed to work. One of those days were cut short because there was too much rain for us to work safely. The mother of the family that we were building the house for made us lunch everyday. She made more food then we could have possibly have eaten.
After working each day we would have the evenings to ourselves to do with what we wanted.
Our team leaders were very helpful. on our days off they showed us around Braga and one of them went with us to Porto for our last day. Everything went very well. We pretty much finished the roof (we finished everthing that they wanted us to do).
Portugal was amazing and everyone was great to us. I believe we all had a really good time working on the house and we are all happier for doing it.
For me, I will try to join Habitat again in the near futur.

Flight 447

I was shocked and surprised to hear about the crash of Air France flight 447 from Rio to Paris. I found it hard to believe that a plane could crash in today's world without anyone really knowing how it happened. Air France's spokesmen believe that lightning brought the plane down while flying over the Atlantic Ocean, however they did not know of any problems until about two hours after it happened.
What shocked me the most about the plane crash was the coverage that came after learning that the plane was lost. Shortly after it was learned that 228 people were lost at sea and most likely killed, CNN asked a question that I found very shocking. They asked if there were any important figures on the plane. They also said that they had believed that there was a statesman on the plane but it turned out that he was not.
The fallowing day The New York Times did a story about flight AF447 and put aside a paragraph talking about two of the passengers on the flight. These two were an American couple.
Are we lead to believe that the death of the other 226 people matters less because they were French, Brazilian, German, Chinese, or any other nationality besides American? Or the fact that they were neither Celebrities or Politicians?
I could not imagine being a family member of one of the victims and seeing how someone I loved is only being looked at as a number just because of where he/she was born and never held office or recorded a song.

In the news this week

Could the CIA have lied?

All that I’ve heard in the past week is; why is Pelosi lying? Could it be possible that the CIA might be lying or ‘misleading’?

Nancy Pelosi has come out publicly saying that the CIA lied and would like all the information to come out. The CIA came out straight away claiming that it is in fact Pelosi who is lying, yet does not want to release the information and has conflicting answers about what they told. It will be interesting to see if the will in face make everything public. From what I have heard the CIA might not be lying, but has no idea what they are talking about. In their own omission many of the dates that they had claimed where days that meetings took place were wrong.

The question is will either Pelosi or the CIA be help accountable for lying when one or the other is found to have been lying?

Me personally, I think not. I believe that the CIA will be found to have been lying, yet Obama will come out and claim that he wants to ‘look forward’ and doesn’t want to do anything that might lower the ‘moral’ of people working in the CIA.

What's on my mind?

The purpose of this blog is to give myself a place to express my fillings about being an American far away from home, living in a place that I do not fully understand. A place called Paris. I intend to write about being an American in Paris as well as being an American not in America