Manifesto

In my 14 years as a student of Colegio Panamericano I’ve learned many things from my teachers, classmates and directors. I consider school as the best period in a person´s life because it is where you grow up and learn many important things for the future. In this moment I’m writing this manifesto to express my gratitude towards my school and also to let people know what experiences I’ve had to face throughout these years as a student. I will set many goals and work hard to achieve them all. I will do many things in life.

Now that I am in 12^th grade, what I can only think of is about College. College has been one of my great concerns throughout my senior year. I am now anxious to see what many things I will learn from this new grownup experience. College is an opportunity of becoming a more independent person in the way that if you chose to study in another country, you will have to live alone and solve the problems by yourself. One of the experiences that will shape my life and the way I see things is the one-year exchange to Germany this summer. I will have to live in a foreign country with a strange family that will “adopt me” for a long year. Here is where I will show what my parents have teach me and the principles I’ve learned from them like respect, charity, cooperation, generosity, humility and others. In Germany I know I will have to face many difficulties that I have never faced before, but with the help of God I will be able to find a way out from them. I consider myself as a spoiled boy that depends mainly on his parents, but I believe that after this trip many things will change in my life. Many people say that school is the most relaxing period in life, but I say that it only depends in you. It depends in how you want to live your life; stressed or relaxed, you have two options.

According to Soren Kierkegaard, “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” What this author meant with this quote was that many people see life as a problem without a solution, but they need to know that life is not a problem; instead, it is a reality that needs to be experienced. From the experiences that I have gathered throughout these years, I’ve proposed many goals that I believe are easy to achieve if I work arduously. One of the goals I’ve proposed to change the world is to make campaigns or commercials that emphasize males to behave like gentlemen and changing the way men treat women in this generation. This goal is sort of weird but at the same time I believe is being needed in this generation. I decided to work hard and make an impact in the lives of my classmates and friends to start this change that I hope will work in a future.

Lightbulb Conspiracy

The Lightbulb Conspiracy documentary that we watch this week was mainly about how the Lightbulb companies used to create Lightbulbs that lasted 1000 hours, but throughout the years these companies developed something called planned obsolesence. This tecnique was used by the Lightbulb companies many years ago and now days is being used by nos of the companies around the world. It also showed an example of a Lightbulb that was in a fire station that had lasted 100 years. 

    Photo credit: WWW.therferralauthority.com

The Four Horsemen

Today I will talk about a short documentary watched in my social studies class called The Four Horsemen. This documentary mainly talks about how the United States is cataloged as an empire and how this empire will fall as time passes. It takes as title The Four Horsemen because it describes the four things found in an empire that are: War, Conquest, Famine, and Death. The documentary also criticizes and questions the system that we have created in the way that it shows and explains the huge division between the rich and the poor. To complement the title, the documentary expresses the idea that the American empire will fall and gives some reason to support this idea. Some of the reasons that will make the US empire fall according to the documentary are: The luxury, the spending in the military, the years of decay, and lastly, as I just said, the really huge gap or division between the rich and the poor which forms a visible economic inequality.

An interesting quote I heard in the documentary was: "To understand something is to be liberated from it." Seeing how the things are in the US and how this would affects us terrifies me. The United States now-days is like a world power, they have military, relationships and the US interests. Many of the things we have or the clothe we buy comes from the US, so it would impact our lives way more than we imagine. Food companies and clothe companies that were created in the US and that have been globalizing, will in some way decrease but not fall because of their expansion throughout the world. We have to accept the reality that without the US, many of the world´s countries would be left without an important ally like in the case of Colombia and other countries.

Photo credit: www.documentarystream.com

How the Fractional Reserve Banking System works

The Fractional Reserve Banking System is mainly known as the system were banks lend more money than they really have. According to the movie, this system is the one in charged of creating money by charging the people with interest in the loans they gave. Banks get the 10% of the money invested in it and they really have small quantities in it, so that is why all the people cannot take all their out of the bank at the same time; if they do it, it will created the famous bank runs of the 1930´s. Some of the advantages of the Fractional Reserve System are is that it allows banks to generate income on the funds deposited. Every time your bank borrows from you to make a loan to another bank customer, it gets to charge interest on the loan, pocketing the interest.

Although this Reserve Banking System has improved, it still has some disadvantages for the people. One disadvantage is that it puts banks in an awkward position when it comes to liquidity. "While banks aren't required to retain their deposits on hand, they have to be able to redeem deposits upon request." 





















Photo Credit: http://www.worldsocialism.org/


Citations: 

McMahon, Mary, and Bronwyn Harris. WiseGeek. Conjecture, 26 Feb. 2014. Web. 05 Apr. 2014. <http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-fractional-reserve-banking.htm>.

"Education Resources." Classroom Economist: Fractional Reserve Banking. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 Apr. 2014. <http://www.frbatlanta.org/edresources/classroomeconomist/11fr_banking_transcript.cfm>.

Colombia´s Monetary System

The Colombian financial system is a key pillar of economic activity that analyzes important resources to the different sectors within it. According to the official web page of the Banco de la República "Este régimen utilitario se caracteriza básicamente por el hecho de que los bienes producidos no son consumidos por sus propios productores, son intercambiados en el mercado mediante convenciones reguladoras que constituyen un sistema monetario." This means that the system is the one in charged of controlling the money of the country. 

Monetary policy in Colombia is governed by an inflation targeting scheme whose purpose is to maintain a low and stable rate of inflation, and achieve output growth. The Banco de la Republica is not part of the branches of government (Executive, Legislative, Judicial) of the control bodies or control or the electoral power, but it is an entity of the State. 

Photo credit: http://www.casasriegner.com/


Citations:

"Banco De La República (Banco Central De Colombia)." Banco De La República (Banco Central De Colombia). N.p., n.d. Web. 05 Apr. 2014. <http://www.banrep.gov.co/>.

"Economía Y Empresas. El Blog Salmón." ¿Cómo Funciona El Sistema Monetario?N.p., n.d. Web. 04 Apr. 2014. <http://www.elblogsalmon.com/conceptos-de-economia/como-funciona-el-sistema-monetario>.

Russian Troops in Ukraine

A day after Russia held talks with the U.S in Paris, it was ordered the withdraw of a military group from the Ukraine border. According to the German chancellor Angela Merkel, Russian president Vladimir Putin, told her that he had ordered a partial withdraw of Russian forces from the region. Earlier on monday the prime minister of Ukraine said there had been also a partial withdraw of Russian troops from their border.

"This could be linked to a regular rotation of soldiers," said Dmytrashkivskiy. "Or it may be linked to the Russian-US negotiations." But in Crimea, the Russian prime minister, Dimitry Medvedev, said that Moscow would declare the peninsula as a special economic zone with tax incentives to attract investors.Crimean officials said that their economy is facing a shortfall and it needs economic stimulus from Russia. Medvedev promised to raise the level of salaries for municipal employees and pensions to average Russian levels and to modernise the region's hospitals. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8NAN1kBeV8 

Video credit: Jewish News One

Citations: 

"Russia Pulls Some Troops from Ukraine Border." - Europe. N.p., n.d. Web. 31 Mar. 2014. <http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2014/03/russia-partly-withdraws-from-ukraine-border-2014331143547644198.html>.

FOOD INC

Food Inc is a movie that shows how the industry is creating cheaper, faster, and tasty food that is unhealthy for the people. It explains how companies are genetically modifying seeds and animals in order to sell more at a lower cost. One example of this issue is the creation of genetically modified beans from the company Monsanto. These beans have been altered genetically in order to never die from any plague or virus but at the same time they are not fertile; if you want to plant more of this bean, you need to buy them directly from the company. In relation with the book Confessions of an Economic Hitman, one related problem expressed by the company of monsanto is the economic or corporate control.

There are three different sources that we have seen in social studies class and they are: Race film, Food Inc movie, and the book Confessions of an Economic Hitman. These three sources have many things in common, for example improvement of people´s actions in our society. In the race film, scientist explained that even a person with different skin color than yours could be more genetically close to you than your own brother. The Food Inc documentary is so good and expresses a different point of view from the multinational corporations that run the economies of the world. According to the director of the documentary Robert Kenner: "It’s such a good case that you soon realize there are a dozen more documentaries tucked inside this one." 

Photo credit: (www.jessainscough.com)


More information: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/movies/12food.html?_r=0

Citations:

Dargis, Manohla. "Meet Your New Farmer: Hungry Corporate Giant." The New York Times. The New York Times, 11 June 2009. Web. 31 Mar. 2014. <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/movies/12food.html?_r=0>. 

The World seen from the eyes of an Economic Hitman

The book Confessions of an Economic Hitman, writen by John Perkins, is mainly about the life of this author and how was his life like when he was an economic hitma. In the book he describes how as a highly paid professional, he helped the U.S. cheat poor countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars by lending them more money than they could possibly repay and then take over their economies. These economic hitmans were also send as part of their jobs to assassinate many important people such as the President of Panama Omar Torrijos, that was killed because some American business leaders and politicians strongly opposed the negotiations between Torrijos and a group of Japanese businessmen led by Shigeo Nagano, who were promoting the idea of a new, larger, sea-level canal for Panama. Media´s speculation about the death of Omar Torrijos was that the plane in which he was traveling had a mechanical error, but after this interesting book, many people began to change their minds. Another important figure assassinated by US agents was the president of Ecuador, Jaime Roldós who was assassinated for opposing the interests of the owners of their countries´ foreign debt. This president´s death was also shown by the media as a plane crash, the same way Omar Torrijos died. 

I recommend this book because of three reasons. The first reason is because it helps you to understand history from another point of view, showing the US as a villain and as the one responsible of the many events that happened around the world. The second reason is because this book helps people to know more about the events that happen all over the world and also learn some history from the countries described in the book. The last reason is because John Perkins, the author of this book, put in danger his life to tell us the reality of many events that changed the history of a country.

Here I leave a web page of some information about what I have just talked about and also a video to understand more the writing.
http://www.democracynow.org/2004/11/9/confessions_of_an_economic_hit_man 

Citations:
"Confessions of an Economic Hit Man: How the U.S. Uses Globalization to Cheat Poor Countries Out of Trillions." Democracy Now! N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Mar. 2014. <http://www.democracynow.org/2004/11/9/confessions_of_an_economic_hit_man>.

Malaysian Airlines plane mystery

As the research moves on, many people still ask how can a new modern plane disappear off the radars. There are many theories about the vanishing of this plane but they still remain not proven. Some people say it was a terrorist attempt of kidnaping all the flight and having permission of landing in a nearby airport. Others say that the flight had a technical problem and crashed into the ocean. The plane was going to start one of the common flights from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it disappeared from the radar. It carried 239 passengers and the plane´s communications with  civilian air controllers turned off at about 1.20am. The investigators believe that the aircraft and communications in the aircraft had been disabled even before it got to the east coast of Malaysia.

Photo credit: http://www.onsecrethunt.in/ 

Defining Race

Race is mainly defined by the dictionary as a group of people united or classified together on the basis of common history, nationality, or geographic distribution. In class I learned that race is taken as an excuse for inequality and that race actually doesn't exist, it was just invented by humans who determine what race do you belong to. Many of these people that determine a race are white skin colored and are still discriminating afro-American people because of their skin color.

In many parts of the world, the race is the one who determines who has power, privilege and perspective. According to the PBS webpage, "We all know that people look different", which meant that all the people differ from one another in many aspects like race in some cases. Most of the people could say that slavery was a consequence of defining race but it existed way before people could decide to which race did they identified with. It also says that most traits are inherited independently to one another and that the genes for skin color have nothing to do with other genes like the eye color, hair texture, or the blood type.

Photo credit: Yakko.cs.wmich.ed

Citations: 

"What Is Race?" PBS. PBS, n.d. Web. 18 Mar. 2014.

Lemon Tree; The Reality of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict

Lemon Tree is a movie based on the life of a palestinian woman who owns a lemon tree plantation in her backyard. Her husband passed away months ago but she decides to continue working on her plantation that was inherited by her father. Everything was fine until the Israeli Prime Minister of Defense becomes her neighbor. This event changes Salma´s life in a way she never imagined. The Secret Service declared the lemon tree plantation a threat to the security of the Prime Minister and his family soy they decide to uproot them all. Salma decided to fight against the decision made by the Secret Service and takes this unfortunate event first to the Military Court, and then to the Supreme Court. With the help of a lawyer that ends up getting in love with her, she was able to fight against this unfair decision. The Supreme Court arrives to an agreement and decides to cut off 50% of the lemon trees 30 cm from the root. Salma is happy and at the same time sad because a situation like this was always won by the political power and because she was able to stay with the other 50% of her plantation. 

With this movie I learned more about the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict and the discrimination presented between these two groups. The wall is another important issue showed in the movie because is another example of apartheid and separation of races. This movie also depicts the palestinian people as inferior in comparison with the Israelis in many ways such as the neighborhood and the housing. By ending this post I would like to recommend this movie to all the people who are wanting to know more about the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict with a clear detail of the real things that are going on in Israel.   

Photo credit: www.orchalom.com 

The Palestinian Great Wall

I have took some of my time to look up a great video about the Palestinian wall. This video explains the story of the wall and shows the long route taken by it, to separate palestinian territory from israeli territory. Hope you like it!

Video credit: mrawerness 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0zNd87MCfM

The Palestinian - Israeli Conflict

Article: Obama: US won’t be able to defend Israel if peace talks fail
Link: http://www.timesofisrael.com/obama-us-wont-be-able-to-defend-israel-if-peace-talks-fail/ 

This article was written by Adiv Sterman, an author from the web magazine called Times of israel. 

The President of the United States: Barack Obama, stated that "Israel can expect to face international isolation and possible sanctions from countries and companies across the world if Benjamin Netanyahu fails to endorse a framework agreement with the Palestinians." (Times of Israel, 2014)

In this article, president Barack Obama gives his opinions to the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu about the peace deal he must do in order to get the help of the United States. In an interview with Bloomberg, a site for business and financial market news, Obama stressed that time was running out for Israel to achieve a peace deal, and added that he believed Netanyahu had the capacity to rally Israel’s citizens behind an agreement. According to Adiv Sterman, the writer of this article, "Netanyahu left for Washington Sunday for talks about the US-led peace process and nuclear negotiations between world powers and Iran. Although Netanyahu would like the conversation with Obama to focus primarily on Iran, the White House appears to have a different agenda." (Times of Israel, 2014) 

MLA Citation: 
From my point of view, this is a really good article for the people who want to know more about the decisions and actions taken by either side of the two groups. Specially, this article showed me that in all conflicts there are always allies and in this occasion the ally is the United States. It also gave me the idea that we can solve conflicts many times by talking and making and agreement between each other.

 Citations: 
"Obama: US Won’t Be Able to Defend Israel If Peace Talks Fail." The Times of Israel. N.p., 02 Mar. 2014. Web. 02 Mar. 2014.

One Second Every Country

One Second Every Country

This is an interesting video that I found out in youtube and wanted to share it with all of you. This guy called Graham Hughes videotapes himself in all the different countries of the world starting from South America and ending in South Sudan. If you want to watch more videos like this one, here I leave the link to his youtube page: https://www.youtube.com/user/thatgingerscouser?feature=watch

Video credit:Graham Hughes

Refugees

How the Refugee people live

       Have you ever just stopped for a second and though about the people who are being obligated to leave their country because of a conflict? There are many places in the world where this is happening and people are moving on with their lives like refugees in other countries. These types of events wake up a feeling of hate and anger in people for the loss of their houses and goods. 

      Refugees are defined as the people who have been forced to move form their living country because of persecution, war, or violence. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), "about 2.1 million have fled to Syria's immediate neighbors Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq"(Syrian Refugees).  At the beginning they are sustained by the government until the moment they obtain the permission of working. In some countries the refugees are not given enough money or food to sustain their family so they look for an illegal job they can do to get some money.

Photo Credit: abc news

Biography

My name is Camilo zuluaga, Im 17 years old and study at colegio Panamericano. I live in the beautiful city of Bucaramanga, Colombia. My hobbies are playing soccer, swimming, hanging out with my friends and my family. My dream in life is to become a professional soccer player, but if that doesn't work out I will manage my family´s company. Next year I am planing on going to Germany for a year to learn German and their culture.