Friday, March 15. 2019

Today's schedule is CDAB

C Block Criminology - Okay, so we know where violence comes from. Today you'll need to finish up your work on terrorism. For terrorism consider the following:

By design, terrorist attacks are intended to have a psychological impact far outweighing the physical damage the attack causes. As their name suggests, they are meant to cause terror that amplifies the actual attack. A target population responding to a terrorist attack with panic and hysteria allows the perpetrators to obtain a maximum return on their physical effort. One way to mitigate the psychological impact of terrorism is to remove the mystique and hype associated with it. The first step in this demystification is recognizing that terrorism is a tactic used by a variety of actors and that it will not go away. Terrorism and, more broadly, violence are and will remain part of the human condition. The Chinese, for example, did not build the Great Wall to attract tourists, but to keep out marauding hordes. Fortunately, today's terrorists are far less dangerous to society than the Mongols were to Ming China.



For more on this read Keeping Terrorism in Perspective at Stratfor
For information on terrorism check out:
Terrorism Watch and Warning
DHS Preventing Terrorism
Global Terrorism Database
FBI Terrorism
Counter Terrorism Canada
2018 Public Report on the Terrorism Threat to Canada
National Counterterrorism Center

I'll have you work on the following questions:

1. Despite cultural awareness and various initiatives in schools and in the media, hate crimes continue to happen in significant numbers in Canada. Discuss the types of hate crimes most prevalent in Canada and the current responses to them. 
2. Governments have tried numerous responses to terrorism. Discuss some of these responses. 
3. It is unlikely that the threat of punishment can deter robbery; most robbers refuse to think about apprehension and punishment. Wright and Decker suggest that eliminating cash and relying on debit and credit cards may be the most productive method to reduce the incidence of robbery. Although this seems far-fetched, society is becoming progressively more cashless; it is now possible to buy both gas and groceries with credit cards. Would a cashless society end the threat of robbery, or would innovative robbers find new targets?
4. Based on what you know about how robbers target victims, how can you better protect yourself from robbery? 

D Block Law - Today you'll have time to work on your questions from the week (*cough cough* Check MyEdBC). After a bit we'll watch a Law & Order episode # 10 from season 10 called Loco Parentis. From tv.com...After sanitation workers find a teenage boy's body, the investigation leads to a school bully who displays an avid interest in martial-arts weapons, and whose father bought the murder weapon. The killer's father is found to have helped foster his son's violent behavior, so the DA's office charges him with murder on account of depraved indifference.

The legal definition of In Loco Parentis is: A person who, though not the natural parent, has acted as a parent to a child and may thus be liable to legal obligations as if he/she were a natural parent.

In United States law, depraved-heart murder, also known as depraved-indifference murder, is a type of murder where an individual acts with a "depraved indifference" to human life and where such act results in a death, despite that individual not explicitly intending to kill. To constitute depraved indifference, the defendant's conduct must be 'so wanton, so deficient in a moral sense of concern, so lacking in regard for the life or lives of others, and so blameworthy as to warrant the same criminal liability as that which the law imposes upon a person who intentionally causes a crime'. Depraved indifference focuses on the risk created by the defendant’s conduct, not the injuries actually resulting.

A Block Physical Geography - Finish your test. Then,we finish Dante's Peak and don't forget that you have a series of questions to answer about the volcanology of the movie (you got the hand out with the questions yesterday). Today we'll get to the main portion of the volcanic eruption and the effects that Dante's Peak takes on the small town that sits in a valley near its base. Dante's Peak produces a Plinian eruption (lots of material ejected and very active). The order of eruption at Dante's Peak is:

1. Tectonic Earthquakes 
2. Harmonic Tremors 
3. Vertical Eruptive Cloud 
4. Spreading of the Eruptive Cloud and Ash Fall
5. Lava Flow 
6. Relative Calm 
7. Lahars 
8. Pyroclastic Cloud 
9. End of Eruptive activity - relative calm
10. USGS Vulcanologist Harry Dalton hooks up with Mayor Rachel Wando and presumably live happily ever after

So it's bad...not as bad as the scientific premise behind Volcano (with Tommy Lee Jones) but bad. From Erik Klemetti at WIRED

Now, here is what I think: I hate Dante’s Peak. It isn’t really the lack of much scientific basics – sure, they mostly understand how volcanic monitoring works but they miss the boat on how volcanoes actually work. It isn’t the acting – Linda and Pierce are good and believable. It isn’t the coffee-loving USGS geolackeys (that is accurate). However, it is the combination of everything – the over-the-top response from Harry about the volcanic rumblings, the resistance from his boss, the recalcitrant grandmother, the deus ex machina mine shelter. The damn dog jumping in the truck as they drive over an ACTIVE LAVA FLOW. The film is, at the same time, trying to be realistic while being wildly unrealistic, and in most cases, there was no need to be unrealistic when it comes to an eruption in the Cascades threatening a town. But no, we can’t take the time to actually portray real events (“Dante’s Peak” lacked a scientific adviser). Sure, it can be exciting but, for me, it was so frustrating that I couldn’t get over it.

My friend I agree, wholeheartedly.

B Block Human Geography - Finish your test. Then, we'll try to answer the key question, "Why Do Folk and Popular Culture Face Sustainability Challenges?" The international diffusion of popular culture has led to two issues, both of which can be understood from geographic perspectives.

• First, the diffusion of popular culture may threaten the survival of traditional folk culture in many countries. 
• Second, popular culture may be less responsive to the diversity of local environments and consequently may generate adverse environmental impacts.

So we'll examine these two things today. We'll start with the potential loss of folk culture through assimilation which is a process of giving up cultural traditions and adopting social customs of the dominant culture of a place, acculturation which is a process of adjustment to the dominant culture of a place all while retaining features of a folk culture, and syncretism which is the creation of a new cultural feature through combining elements of two groups. To help think of:




Or the story of Chanie Wenjack set to the music of Gord Downie (the Tragically Hip singer who died of brain cancer last fall)

After we'll look at the creation of uniform landscapes, landscape pollution and resource depletion. We end with a big thinking question:

Placelessness and uniform landscapes …… With the spread of pop culture throughout Canada (specifically restaurants, gas stations, coffee shops, national chains), are cities throughout our country losing their local diversity?  Are we becoming a nation that looks the same no matter what city you are in?  Explain.

Consider this quote to help:

Stroll into your local Starbucks and you will find yourself part of a cultural experiment on a scale never seen before on this planet. In less than half a century, the coffee chain has grown from a single outlet in Seattle to nearly 20,000 shops in around 60 countries. Each year, its near identical stores serve cups of near identical coffee in near identical cups to hundreds of thousands of people. For the first time in history, your morning cappuccino is the same no matter whether you are sipping it in Tokyo, New York, Bangkok or Buenos Aires.

This is one example of many chains that populate many cities all across Canada...all where you can get the same product in a store that looks the same in a place that looks the same....same same same.