El Clasico

This weekend one of the biggest sports rivalries in the world happened, and almost no one in our school knew about it. Im talking about the long rivalry between F.C Barcelona and Real Madrid C.F, an always exciting game which this year was one by defending Spain champions, Barcelona 1-0. This game brings up the old argument of whether it is fair to buy all your players for millions of dollars, such as the case with Real Madrid. As many of you may know they spent a record amount of money this summer to buy the majority of their starting line up. Whereas Barcelona has developed many of their players since they were young in their youth systems. Players such as their captain Carles Puyol and others have been through their entire careers with Barcelona and have not costed them millions of dollars, but rather were completely developed by the Barcelona coaching staff. The idea of "buying" championships has been a controversy throughout sports with teams such as the New York Yankees spending obscene amounts of money to bring back a world series title to New York. But is this fair to everyone else who cannot pay that much money? Does that not ruin the fun of the game where developing your own players is better then going out and buying them for lots of money?

Black Friday, True chaos

This Friday for the first time in many years I was not a participant in the histeria of Black Friday. This is because for the first time in a while I did not visit my family who lives in southern Illinois. Every year they wake up at 4 in the morning already having plotted out which stores they will go to and what they are going to buy, to join the ranks of thousands of people out to save money on the appliances they need for Christmas. I always thought it was nuts the way that people fight and push over the savings they will perhaps receive but truly found out how horrifying it is last year when the man was killed in New York trying to contain the crowd. If this wasnt bad enough this year hundreds of articles like this have come out talking about the scams that places such as Walmart have come up with to attract customers to their stores on this day. This day perfectly reflects our society and how our consumer market works. We are gullible enough to buy into these companies pitches about savings and literally go crazy over them the day that they happen. This paints a sad picture for our country and how we are perceived by other nations. What do you think about black friday?

Right to bear arms

As many of us know, today is the day that the DC Sniper John Allen Muhammad faces the death penalty. With his death brings up a very interesting topic of the gun laws in the U.S.. Muhammed and his accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo terrorized the Washington DC area for almost a month with guns that they obtained illegally. With his sniper he effectively terrorized and shut down the DC area for almost the entire month of October. People were afraid to leave their houses and they did it all with only 2 people. This shows the power that an effective plot and a couple of guns can do to the nation. With our extremely relaxed gun laws making it easy to obtain not just one but multiple firemans we endanger ourselves greater than we do protect ourselves. We make it extremely easy for homicides to occur and they do extremly often. As opposed to the UK which has extremly strict gun laws. This shows in the stats where the UK had .1 illegal gun deaths per 100,000 people, whereas the U.S has 2.97 per 100,000 people. I understand the second amendement and the right to bear arms, but at what point are we also endangering ourselves? At what point do we need to make our laws to possess and use firearms stricter? What do you think?