Jan 28, 2010

Ah... Fox News.

I have a lot of friends and know a lot of people outside of my country, mostly from online communities like OCRemix, and most of them coincide that Fox News sucks. Now I don't watch TV and only read local online newspapers and seldom check CNN and BBC for international news, but I happened to stumble on this particular article and.. wow. Mind = Blown.


The ignorance and incompetence, not to mention the lack of fact checking and familiarity with context of the topic is mind-blowing. Seriously? a merge of the dominican republic and haiti? how would that solve anything? Let's think about this for a second:

First, although the island was indeed, one whole country for some part of the 19th century, it was always divided by different cultures and origins. The part of the island that is now Haiti was conquered by the French, and overpopulated by African slaves, while the other part was conquered by the Spanish, whom had a bigger representation of their government, culture and people than what the French had in their side of the island. Also there were the original habitants of the island before the colonization, the "aborigenes" and also like in the French side but at a much smaller scale, there were African slaves in the Spanish side.

Over the years the difference in culture, form of government, religion, and language only grew stronger until it ended with what we have now, two completely different countries that happen to share the same island. Stating that they should be merged is like stating that Spain and Portugal should be merged, or that the USA and Mexico should be merged.

But even putting aside these facts, what good would this fusion do? we're already a poor country, not nearly as poor as haiti but still we're not even in the top 15 most developed of latin america, so attaching the poorest country to our economy would drive it to bankruptcy. Not to mention the problems of adapting the Haitian people to our laws, culture, etc. It's a logistics nightmare that a 3rd world country definitively can't achieve.

0ur country is sending truckloads of help, raising money, our government is hosting all the international meetings and doing everything they can to get help from other countries and international organizations for Haiti, our hospitals are already overloaded with people from Haiti that needed treatment after the disaster, what else can people want? we even were helping probably more than anyone else before this tragedy happened, because before this disaster Haiti wasn't in the headlines of CNN or Fox and all they had for support were their closest neighbors.

So yeah pretty dumb and ignorant article. I bet some nations would be happy if this were to happen as they can leave all the responsibility to us, but helping Haiti or any other overly poor nation isn't the duty of just their closest neighbors, its the duty of the entire world.

So.. I watched the MST3K episode featuring Manos: The Hands of Fate.


And... well, yeah, Manos, the hands of fate... yeeeeah.

Manos! the hands of fate... what else can be said. It's the worst movie ever made without a doubt. Its just... you'll never expect... I mean, you can never be prepared to how bad it really is. And then when it's over you realize that, yes it was THAT bad.

Manos, the hands of fate. It has changed my life. I think it should be one of the best MST3K episodes ever because it was so damn hilarious, and I think I can't possibly go through the entire movie without the riffs delivered by the MST3K cast.

So, if you have 2 hours of your life to spare, and be warned that these are 2 hours that you'll forever want back, you should give manos a try. It's on google video, so go watch it!

The master will probably not approve though...

Jan 19, 2010

Earthquake in Haiti

So, as most of the world knows by now, Haiti has experienced one of the worst disasters of the century, a 7.3 earthquake. As I live in the Dominican Republic, we felt it very hard too, but luckily we only experienced some minor damage to some structures and well, it was kind of a big scare.


The situation in Haiti, however, couldn't be worse. The Capital of the country, Port-au Prince, was completely destroyed and people are in need for help there. As a Dominican we have witnessed the poverty and calamities that the Haitian people had to go through, and now after the earthquake, well it's unimaginable how these people will get through.

If you are reading this and want to lend a hand, I suggest the american red cross, the situation is of a catastrophe and it's only getting worse, so even a little help goes a long way.