Thoughts and Ideas...

I had a chance to do a lot of reading while I was at Air Assault. I picked up the book The Best of Slate which had all sorts of interesting articles that made me think of all sorts of life altering things. In fact, if I'd been president while at Air Assault School, I'm pretty sure I could have solved all the worlds issues. Anyway, some of the things I thought about, in Alex's patented bullet form, are:

• Abortion--How can we approach it from a personal, legal and moral stance, in order to provide comfort and understanding to those who need to get one while doing all we can to eliminate the need.
• The end of the world--Will life forms change, and, if so, could that be "heaven"?
• Environmental Justice--So many thoughts about this one, I don't even know where to begin...other than to maybe tell you to go talk to Alex because she's a one woman library and able to tell me more about that issue than I could about everything I know combined.

I put them in bullet form because I'm hoping, in my infinate free time this summer, to post about each of those topics in depth once I get my thoughts all sorted out.

For now, however, I would like to get everyone to visit this website. It's from a conference in Monterey (yeah! Monterey!!) called TED:Technology, Entertainment, Design. I know, it sounds kind of like overly self-important nonsense doesn't it? But alas, they actually have really good speakers who talk about some amazing ideas. This last round had Al Gore, Hans Rosling, and a woman named Majora Carter.

Gore gave a follow up to his movie/powerpoint presentation about what we can do to help. I like when he says (and I believe it's in the movie too) that too often, "we go from disbelief to dejection." Which is something I am guilty of myself. Hans Rosling talks about Africa, and particularly how our misconceptions about Africa keep us from being able to tackle the vast issues facing many of the nations of Africa. There are some amazing demographics he shares and information presented in a way that makes population charts exciting! (no joke)

Lasly, Majora Carter. What an amazing speech. It's too long for YouTube, and I can't host it elsewhere, so I highly reccomend (ask?) everyone to watch it. The link above will take you to it.