I'm a pretty liberal person. For the most part, I agree with Obama and what he's doing, and I'm a registered Democrat.
My high school had a lot of like-minded people, or least the like-minded people were more vocal than the un-like-minded people, so I always forget that most people in Nebraska are conservative. I mean, I know a lot of older people are, but it always surprises me when I find out people my age are.
But, I realized that I really am a part of the minority in my poli sci recitation. There's always a lot of good discussion and such, but god, that class makes me crazy.
Actually, I love that class. Just some of the people make me crazy.
People were actually arguing that global warming is not real, and that climate change is not a big deal.
Read a freaking science book people. How does it make sense that emitting thousands of tons of crap into the atmosphere would not have some degree of a negative effect on the Earth??
And yes, we might have had cooler than usual temperatures in the past few years, but you have to look at the big picture. Temperature cycles fluctuate from year to year, but if you look at the average yearly temperatures over the past few hundred thousand years, you will see that the Earth's average temperature has been steadily zig-zagging upward, and is much higher that it used to be.
And if the Earth is not warming, how do you explain the melting ice caps? The rising ocean levels? The reduced precipitation, especially snow? (Which, incidentally, results in reduced snowpack runoff, which is what fills most rivers and supplies A LOT of the Earth's water. Less snow in the mountains=water shortages. A problem? I think so.)
They were saying that instead of spending money on reducing carbon emissions and pollution, we should be focusing on the economy. These are the same people who said we should be spending more money on defense, but that we shouldn't be doing anything to help out war-stricken, starving, under-resourced countries in Africa and Asia. Developing corporations is apparently more important.
Oh, and also according to them, health care reform will make it so that the government decides who gets health care and it will just be terrible for everyone because it will reduce the quality of medical care. This is apparently because Europe is socialist and it has a terrible economy and terrible health care.
The health care reform is focusing on health insurance. It would offer government-sponsored insurance at affordable rates to people who can't currently afford health care. How is this terrible? It's making health care available to more people, not less. It's not going to reduce the quality of health care because our medical system will be exactly the same, just more widely available. The government is not becoming socialist or subsidizing hospitals or anything like that. Health INSURANCE reform. Not health "let's-overhaul-everything-and-make-everything-terrible" reform. Not quite the crisis situation.
And Europe? Germany is one of the leading exporters in the world and has one of the strongest economies. I can't think of a single country in Europe that is as far in debt as the U.S. and the Euro is one of the strongest currencies. Doesn't seem like a terrible economy to me.
And their healthcare? How often do you hear about European countries having problems with their healthcare? That's what I thought...
I really do not understand people sometimes.
That's my rant.
