Presentation Video

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Exploring Sex in Dystopian Fiction

The goal of my research paper is to look at the portrayal of sex across multiple dystopian novels and then to understand if they are portrayed similarly, and if so why is sex portrayed in this way. I am interested in comparing some of the books we have already read in class, as well as reading more and conducting my own analysis. I then think it would be interesting to combine my analysis with others to preform both a first hand and a Meta analysis of the literature. I am interested in the portrayal of sex because I see it as something critical to the human experience, and I am not sure if I am doing it the “right way”, or if there is a right way, but I think a lot of people are doing it in a way that produces negative consequences. Through literature I believe that I can better understand how sex, and by extension intimacy, fits into the human experience.

Before starting my preliminary research, I figured that sex in dystopian novels would be portrayed as either negative or a form of rebellion depending on the context of the novel. If the character is using sex as tool to fight against whatever force is responsible for their dystopia then it would be portrayed as positive, such as in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eight Four. Likewise, when sex is used as a tool to control, as seen in Margret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, it would be seen as negative. Doing a preliminary Google Scholar search yielded some interesting results. Many of the papers published centered around a feminist interpretation of popular dystopian novels, such as the Handmaid’s Tale. I should have expected such results and I might have to reorient my question to look at dystopian novels through a feminist perspective. Another common result was the portrayal of leisure, or more accurately the lack of leisure, in dystopian novels. This might also provide an interesting thesis, however I feel as though this would be getting to far away from my interests. These results have also led me to consider possibly evaluating how gender as whole is perceived instead of just sex, but here again I feel as though my interest in the subject, though great, is not as high as the portrayal of sex.

I think the area that the college databases could help me with is finding both more papers that deal with the portrayal of sex in dystopian novels and more dystopian stories that portray sex in any light. I have read few dystopian novels in my life and by reading more I think I could gain better insight of the role of sex in them. More papers on sex in dystopian novels would also be very helpful because they would help me with preforming my meta-analysis and give me a better understanding of how other is in the field have understood the role of sex in such novels. 

Bank of America

Underneath all the recent outrage of Bank of America's (BoA) newest debit card fees an even more serious problem has been brewing. Unbeknownst to the American public, Bank of America has been moving its riskiest assest from its recent Merrill Lynch acquisition to subsidiary consumer banks. By moving their toxic assets into consumer banks BoA is putting the Federal Deposit Insurance Company (FDIC) on the hook for when they all go bad. If the derivatives start to go bad, the banks will have to use their consumer deposits, the money you and I put in the bank, as collateral for the 70+ billion dollars worth of damages. Since the FDIC insures all deposits 500,000 dollars and under, they could potentially have to give BoA's subsidiary banks billions of dollars, bankrupting the FDIC. However, if this weren't bad enough because the FDIC cannot go bankrupt, it is backed by the full faith and credit of the US government, taxpayers will wind up paying yet another bailout.

Now this isn't necessarily going to happen, this is just the worst case scenario. BoA is doing this as a hedge against the European debt crises imploding. We also have no idea how exposed BoA is to direct or indirect catastrophic failure of the European banking system due to the opaque and unregulated nature of the derivatives market. However, because BoA is doing something so damn drastic and politically risky, it leading me to think that their exposure is bad.

This is exactly the kind of stuff the Glass-Steagall Act was created to prevent. This only reinforces my opinion that the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act is the worst decision congress has made in the past 15 years. To matters even worse though, the Federal Reserve has recently come out in favor of the derivatives transfers, leaving the FDIC the only sane looking one in the room. In a world governed by more competent people, BoA would never be able to even think of doing this and then when their bets were called they would go into receivership and have their assets wound down by the FDIC. Thankfully, the FDIC has some power to stop this, and if they do they can take control and BoA and resolve the bank. BoA has been on a nasty downward spiral for a long time now, lets just hope we let it die without it taking us all with it.

Commodities and Mega Banks

Foreign Policy came out with a spectacular article last spring and with wheat dropping and the arab spring entering into the winter I feel its more relevant than ever. This article not only highlights the dangers present in a financial industry that is too powerful, but also the role modern multinational corporations play in the world at large.

As some of you may or may not know, the revolts in Egypt this past spring were largely caused by the skyrocketing price of bread. In the Middle East bread is considered a sign of status and wealth; to feed your family and guests bread is a sign that you are a powerful person in the community. People in the region also tend to buy bags of wheat, unlike Americans who tend to buy bread. This makes the cooks of the Middle East countries particularly sensitive to price fluctuations. So, when the price of bread went up and lot of people no longer could afford to feed their families, they revolted.

Now the reason this is important to Americans, aside from the foreign policy implications, is that Goldman Sachs (GS) also uses the same process the do with wheat with something that is very important to America: oil. The very cyclical nature of crude oil prices is due to large mega banks, such as GS and Morgan Stanley, continually betting the price will go up, and since they are so powerful in the market they can then influence the price and push it higher.

I think what Gs is doing is brilliant. Evil but brilliant. Companies should not be able to say they are immune from the rules surrounding commodity trading just because they are the biggest and the most powerful. On the contrary, we should treat them with suspicion because of it.

First as a Tragedy

I found this video to be really interesting and thought maybe someone else might feel the same way. 

Occupy Wall St. Presentation

Here is the video link for the tumblr and the video I will show in class today.

Advertising in a Post Modern World

Advertising, as we know it today, is a smarter, stronger, and considerably subtler breed than what our grandparents knew. Advertising pre 1980s was a rather straightforward occupation; here is our product, and this is why it’s better than the other guys. Advertisers were in the business of selling products, concrete things that could make your life better in some measurable way. However, advertising today has left its materialistic bonds of metal and plastic for more intellectual ones. Now days when we buy a product, we are not only buying a material object, but also an idea.

            Consumers and advertisers have played a cat and mouse game as long as advertising has existed. Public Relations firms will create an ad campaign and consumers will grow resistant to it because they know someone is trying to sell them something, and so the ad agencies had to create new ways of marketing that consumers wouldn’t be resistant to. This cycle played out for a while until advertisers realized that the best way to sell a product is to not appear that they’re selling it at all. Thus Video News Reports, or VNRs, were born. VNRs were created when marketers combined selective exposer, selective perception, peripheral processing, and the hostile media phenomenon to lure consumers into trusting their local broadcasting networks. They do away with the premise of an ad entirely and so create a new reality of what the viewer sees. Not only do marketers create products such as VNRs, but they also use the same techniques to infiltrate both the government and social media. Social media is increasingly taking up more and more of the average American’s life. People trust their friends’ opinions, and advertisers realize that so they create blogs and false social media to mislead people. By giving the illusion that something is popular it instantly becomes more valuable, and social media has created a venue for companies to shout to the world that what they are hocking is indeed popular. By creating fake blog and social media profiles companies can create the false sense that what they are doing is “trending”. By creating fake grassroots campaigns, or astroturfing, large corporations can create the image in the public mind, and thus the social reality, that the policy decisions that they want are supported and fought for by the American people. This seriously impacts the way a democratic government is meant to function because it intentionally obscures the will of the people. Knowledge of the human mind is a dangerous thing when wielded improperly.

            American’s lives have become filled with advertising. We live in a world where fake news, fake friends, and fake movements tell us how to be safe, what’s cool, and what we should believe in. Its almost as if the world were becoming interconnected for a person to live their own lives anymore.