Charles Wilson's war

Charles Wilson was a U.S Congressman, born in 1933 and died in 2010. In the Movie Charles Wilson is portrayed as a man with a lot of friends. He is a free spirit, and it don’t seems like he is that interested in what other thinks about him. He loves drinking and women. He also tried drugs, but this was discovered. I don’t know what consequences this had for him. He does not quite understand what is going on down in Iraq, until he visit a refugee camp down there and can see for him self. After this he is much more understanding and wants to do everything to help them.

I am not that into the details of this Cold War, but I think that I understood a little bit more after watching the movie. The movie is about Charles Wilson and it is based on a true story. We follow the war in Afghanistan which was fought between them and Russia. Russia had there helicopters and Afghanistan had nothing. They had just old weapons and no money to develop the military. Wilson wanted to send money and weapons down to them, but it could not come out that they had got the weapons from the United States.

I think the movie was good, but it was kind of hard to follow everything that happened. This war in Afghanistan was terrible and many people lost their lives. The Soviet wanted to support the Marxist government that the ex-prime minister in Afghanistan started. The problem is that the Superpowers go into a country and they help them and everything, but then they leave. Afghanistan had nothing to build the country up with. Wilson wanted to give them 1 million dollars to build a school, but no others wanted this. They said that they had helped and now they had to take care of them selves. When the Cold war ended, the world could let the air out and sit down. Everyone where afraid of a third world war, but it did not happen. Yet.

The Road

For some weeks we are going to read ”The Road” in my English class. It is a book written by Cormack McCarthy, a movie based on the book has been released in the US and will probably some to Norway soon. I haven’t read that much, but I’m going to The Canary Island next week, so I will read the book on the plane or on the beach.

The first pages I have read are about a man and his son. Something terrible has happened to the world and all life seems to be destroyed. In the book we get a pretty grim picture of the world and here is ash all the place, and all the houses are abandoned. It is cold, but we don’t know which month it is. They boy and his father are walking endlessly on the road. I don’t know where they are going, but it seems like they might be headed towards a place where the father has been before and maybe a place where they will find other people.

They have to set camp far away from the road since they are scared to be seen. This I don’t understand, who are they frightened of? I think it is other people or animals, but I don’t know. There are some dialogs in between, but they don’t talk a lot. It is mostly the father’s thoughts that are revealed to us. Many say that they think it was a really boring and less interesting beginning, but I actually think it is ok. There are a lot of descriptions and the whole scene is just scary. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the book, and maybe watch the movie in class someday!

In class, February 2.

Today we did something different in class. We were divided in 5 groups. We were divided in; journalists, researchers, designers, dividing materials, and teachers. Everyone had different tasks. The topic was American politics, which we are going to have a test about next week. I don’t think everyone learned that much, because someone were not supposed to write anything, just guide the other groups. So those who wrote texts were teachers, and made tests, they learned the most.

Regine and I were designers and we made a glogster on the internet. I think that it was fun, because it was so different from what we have done before. I don’t know how much I learned, but I learned at least to make a glogster. I think we made a nice glogster that is easy to look at and learn the main topics. Here is the link for what we made:

http://hilasp.glogster.com/american-politics/