Monday, December 12, 2016

Tuesday, December 13. 2016

Today's schedule is C-D-A-B

C & B Block Social Studies 11 - I have an extra day booked in the library for you to work on your "Complete Idiot's Guide to Fascist Dictatorship" project (due this Thursday). I really don't want you to get caught up in the minutia of details. The important thing here is to see the big picture and understand how the dictators in the 30's came to power and then held on to power. Look at yesterday's blog entry for help or see me too. I'll have a few previous examples in the library for you to peruse. Good luck.

D Block Crime, Media and Society 12 - Today we'll examine the role that socioeconomic structures within a society affect criminality. Specifically, we'll examine the Social Structure view of criminology that examines the impact of poverty on an individual’s chance of committing crimes. There are three major branches of social structure theories that include social disorganization theory, strain theory, and cultural deviance theory and we'll look at the connection between social disorganization, strain and deviance. A great TV show to look at that would help in order to understand this is the Wire that ran on HBO from 2002-2008. In the show institutional dysfunction and the decay of social structures cause urban Baltimore to become "gritty" and crime is one result.
From IMDb...

Set in Baltimore, this show centers around the city's inner-city drug scene. It starts as mid-level drug dealer, D'Angelo Barksdale beats a murder rap. After a conversation with a judge, Det. James McNulty has been assigned to lead a joint homicide and narcotics team, in order to bring down drug kingpin Avon Barksdale. Avon Barksdale, accompanied by his right-hand man Stringer Bell, enforcer Wee-Bey and many lieutenants (including his own nephew, D'Angelo Barksdale), has to deal with law enforcement, informants in his own camp, and competition with a local rival, Omar, who's been robbing Barksdale's dealers and reselling the drugs. The supervisor of the investigation, Lt. Cedric Daniels, has to deal with his own problems, such as a corrupt bureaucracy, some of his detectives beating suspects, hard-headed but determined Det. McNulty, and a blackmailing deputy. The show depicts the lives of every part of the drug "food chain", from junkies to dealers, and from cops to politicians

Alas district rules preclude me from showing you this (you really should watch it) so we'll instead focus on the Bloods and Crips in South Central LA.


Scott Kody joined the Crips in South Central Los Angeles in 1975 when he was in grade 6. He was released from Folsom Prison on parole in 1988, at the age of 24. Kody was one of the most ruthless gang leaders in Los Angeles and the California prison system but in 1985 he decided to reform. He adopted the name of Sanyika Shakur, became a black nationalist, and began a crusade against gangs. In Kody’s heyday, about 30,000 gang members roamed Los Angeles County. Today there are more than 150,000. It is estimated that in 2002 there were 21,500 youth gangs in the United States with 731,500 members. So social disorganization and strain can combine to develop a culturally deviant subculture that can grow exponentially in size.

At the end of the video I have a big question for you...and the question I'll have you work on for me is: Have you ever perceived anomie if so what and why? What causes anomie? Is there more than one cause of strain?

A Block Geography 12 -Today we look at mesoscale convective complexes and tornadoes. I'll show you some footage of a tornado captured on video by a Kansas television crew. This footage was actually detrimental to tornado safety as most people who saw it assumed that a highway overpass provides shelter and safety.

This proved deadly with the May 3, 1999 Moore Oklahoma F5 tornado. We'll also watch footage of the Moore tornado and see the damage it wrought. We'll watch a bit of the wind episode from the BBC Series "The Weather" and hear from a man that survived a direct strike from an EF5 tornado.Then we'll watch the Raging planet video on Tornadoes and while it is on you can work on questions 15 and 16 from page 248 of your Geosystems textbook.


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