Jim Jones was a charismatic man who held loyalty and sacrifice close to his heart. He created The Peoples Temple as a church to help the elderly, homeless, addicts, foster children and those of the like. He believed that a capitalist America caused an unhealthy balance in the world (rich people are too rich, a.k.a communist) and established The Peoples Temple to alleviate as much unfairness from the world as possible. The Peoples Temple seemed like an amazing feat from the outside but on the inside, it was transforming into a cult centralised around Jones himself. As the number of his followers increased, he became infatuated with power and forced everyone to call him "Father" or "Dad" and soon believed himself to be Christ and later proclaimed himself God.
He convinced his followers to move into the remote jungles of Guyana where his "temple" became a place of politics rather than religion. His control became extreme, the living conditions horrible and the people forced to work long hours. The rumours of these conditions reached home and the public rallied for the government to investigate Jones. The government body took a trip into the jungles of Guyana where Jones, heavily induced by drugs which caused paranoia, saw as his demise. He launched an attack against the government and influenced all of his followers to commit "revolutionary suicide" by drinking cyanide-laced grape juice. He died from a shot to the head, but people aren't sure if it was his own doing or a murder. But this travesty was the largest massacre in American history (not due to natural disasters) until the events of September 11 unraveled.
It really puts power into perspective, huh?
Wednesday 22 February 2012
Monday 20 February 2012
Onions make me cry
You will never know how I feel. How I've been feeling for the past few weeks. I feel like I have to put on a facade of happiness at school just to show you up. I'm repeatedly forced to adopt a "mask" and my identity is in a constant state of flux. Obviously you in conjunction with Ms Tishler have gotten the better of me.
Saturday 18 February 2012
Perspective
A foggy Dubai taken from the top of the Burj Dubai 829.84m from the ground. It really puts things into retrospect. Individually, it may seem that humans are irrelevant and insignificant bodies of life but collectively, humans are able to build magnificent structures such as the Burj Dubai and even create man made islands. What the actual hell?!
Friday 17 February 2012
Year 11
This post is long overdue but because I refuse to do any homework tonight due to the fact that I am completely buggered to hell, I shall blog about how the "business end" of our high school life has been for me these first few weeks.
Wow. I did not expect Year 11 to take me off guard the way it did (or has?), I don't even know how to speak English anymore. I received an insurmountable amount of lectures from my teachers and parents ever since I finished SC about how Year 11 would be super hard work, but little did I know that these lectures (for once) contained a large percentage of truth. Day one and we were exposed to the notion of identity, expressive realism and traditional criticism (still don't know what the freak Catherine Belsey was on about but that's another matter) and all this other crap. We were given homework from the get go. And it wasn't even a mere few questions from the textbook. It was "do this whole exercise from what you remember from Year 10 and if you don't remember, too bad, I'll pick on you the next day to answer the question in front of the whole class and if you can't, I'll give you detention." I don't know about everybody else but I remember jack from Year 10 after almost 8 weeks of frolicking around in freedom, NOT thinking about maths. Sorry, Ms Chand. Allocating whole exercises to be completed for the next day is a bit extreme. But that's how every single day of my life has been this school year :( And that's just maths.
Music, SAC, Earth and Env. Science are less intense but still lots of work nonetheless. People think that subjects such as these do not require "hard work" but every single subject in the HSC is equal in worth. I may not be balancing covalent compounds or some shit because I'm practically incapable of doing maths outside of maths class but that doesn't mean that my HSC will be a breeze. I just don't like the connotations that they bring to the table, that is all. But I don't really care.
Everyone's staying up into the wee hours of the night to do homework (not to skype and msn and facebook stalk like the old junior days, sadly) and coming to school, completely drained of life and energy. And it's only the end of week four. Maybe it's just my inability to cope with stress and pressure, but I don't see these years as being very enjoyable. My migraines and all the physical shit I had last year are already beginning to resurface if I don't change something. I think it's time for all of us to grow up and realise that our future is completely and entirely dependent upon our decisions of the now. You will not pass anything if you don't study and work really hard for it. I'm already fretting for the upcoming trigonometry TOPIC test. I never studied for topic tests last year, they were the last thing (if ever) on my mind at all.
The gulf between junior and senior school is incomprehensible, but my friends tend to tell me that I make everything into a melodrama.
Wow. I did not expect Year 11 to take me off guard the way it did (or has?), I don't even know how to speak English anymore. I received an insurmountable amount of lectures from my teachers and parents ever since I finished SC about how Year 11 would be super hard work, but little did I know that these lectures (for once) contained a large percentage of truth. Day one and we were exposed to the notion of identity, expressive realism and traditional criticism (still don't know what the freak Catherine Belsey was on about but that's another matter) and all this other crap. We were given homework from the get go. And it wasn't even a mere few questions from the textbook. It was "do this whole exercise from what you remember from Year 10 and if you don't remember, too bad, I'll pick on you the next day to answer the question in front of the whole class and if you can't, I'll give you detention." I don't know about everybody else but I remember jack from Year 10 after almost 8 weeks of frolicking around in freedom, NOT thinking about maths. Sorry, Ms Chand. Allocating whole exercises to be completed for the next day is a bit extreme. But that's how every single day of my life has been this school year :( And that's just maths.
Music, SAC, Earth and Env. Science are less intense but still lots of work nonetheless. People think that subjects such as these do not require "hard work" but every single subject in the HSC is equal in worth. I may not be balancing covalent compounds or some shit because I'm practically incapable of doing maths outside of maths class but that doesn't mean that my HSC will be a breeze. I just don't like the connotations that they bring to the table, that is all. But I don't really care.
Everyone's staying up into the wee hours of the night to do homework (not to skype and msn and facebook stalk like the old junior days, sadly) and coming to school, completely drained of life and energy. And it's only the end of week four. Maybe it's just my inability to cope with stress and pressure, but I don't see these years as being very enjoyable. My migraines and all the physical shit I had last year are already beginning to resurface if I don't change something. I think it's time for all of us to grow up and realise that our future is completely and entirely dependent upon our decisions of the now. You will not pass anything if you don't study and work really hard for it. I'm already fretting for the upcoming trigonometry TOPIC test. I never studied for topic tests last year, they were the last thing (if ever) on my mind at all.
The gulf between junior and senior school is incomprehensible, but my friends tend to tell me that I make everything into a melodrama.
Saturday 11 February 2012
Tribes and Traditions
Easter Island, Ahu Tongariki, Polynesia
It's amazing to think that an ancient civilisation built these totems and hoisted them into this upright position. A group of anthropologists and other people from Japan tried to manually lift these and it took them a few months before they gave up and just used a crane instead. We are such a technologically advanced society with a lot of tools and implements and yet we still couldn't do it. How the heck did ancient tribes build things like this and Machu Piccu? Mind-boggling. Just a fragment of the super interesting things I have been learning in Society and Culture, I'm so happy I chose this course, it is so bloody interesting. I literally learn something new every lesson (maybe I'm just stupid). But to learn about ancient tribes and even current tribes and their current practises is awesome. In some tribe (forgot their name) when the girl has her periods, she is forced to wear this thick ass potato sack over her whole body and stand in the middle of the bush with whoever else has their periods until they are finished. No food or water! I don't know how they do it...
Thursday 9 February 2012
Planet Earth
Today is swimming carnvial but most of the grade is probably at home sleeping, gaming, and doing other mindlessly, time wasting things. I woke up this morning and decided to watch a documentary series that my dad bought because it was cheap? It has around 10 or 11 episodes, each 40 minutes (give or take a few minutes) long. The series is called Planet Earth and it is absolutely amazing. It's different to other documentaries centralised around earth and it's environment because they use aerial shots for everything which means that the animals and ravishing landscapes can be seen in their natural context. The camera is attached to the bottom of the helicopter and it can zoom in from one kilometre away and it is truly amazing. It's the first time that this kind of technology has been used for a documentary. I can't even explain how mind-blowing the video capture is.
The content of the first episode is amazing. The first time that a mother polar bear has seen sun in four months in the arctic is so heart-warming (even though it is still -30 degrees). She is so happy that she just toboggans down the mountain side, absorbing the sun's rays for the first time after four months of total darkness. Following her are her two baby polar bear cubs which see the sun for the first time in their entire lives!! It's so cute and kejrhwkejhraksjra. That's just the first 5 minutes of the whole series. I'm so excited to watch the rest of it but it will probably take me ages with all the homework we have ):
It's funny also! There is a group of baboons in Africa and they have to tread through rivers and they walk like humans and they act exactly like prim, princesses that are scared of water, waving their hands around and everything. Their behaviours are almost identical to those of humans and it is super fascinating. UGH THE WHOLE EPISODE WAS AMAZING. I learnt so much!
It's funny how oceans touched by millions of animals remain so pristine and clear. They don't destroy the Earth like humans do and yet they are deemed inferior in terms of intelligence. I really don't believe so. They are much smarter than humans, they can hunt, keep themselves warm and they don't cause any damage to the physical state of the environment (not all that much anyways). But maybe they are just oblivious. Not knowing is better than knowing, right?
The content of the first episode is amazing. The first time that a mother polar bear has seen sun in four months in the arctic is so heart-warming (even though it is still -30 degrees). She is so happy that she just toboggans down the mountain side, absorbing the sun's rays for the first time after four months of total darkness. Following her are her two baby polar bear cubs which see the sun for the first time in their entire lives!! It's so cute and kejrhwkejhraksjra. That's just the first 5 minutes of the whole series. I'm so excited to watch the rest of it but it will probably take me ages with all the homework we have ):
It's funny also! There is a group of baboons in Africa and they have to tread through rivers and they walk like humans and they act exactly like prim, princesses that are scared of water, waving their hands around and everything. Their behaviours are almost identical to those of humans and it is super fascinating. UGH THE WHOLE EPISODE WAS AMAZING. I learnt so much!
It's funny how oceans touched by millions of animals remain so pristine and clear. They don't destroy the Earth like humans do and yet they are deemed inferior in terms of intelligence. I really don't believe so. They are much smarter than humans, they can hunt, keep themselves warm and they don't cause any damage to the physical state of the environment (not all that much anyways). But maybe they are just oblivious. Not knowing is better than knowing, right?
Sunday 5 February 2012
bye bye
not that anybody would notice. The workload of senior school is so hectic and it's only been the first week so I don't think I'll have the time to blog regularly anymore. I'm not gonna close it down because I might be super stressed out or really pissed off at a stupid bitch and might need this space on the internet to vent my feelings. But yeah, don't expect too much from me! And as for my 365 project... LULZ
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