Saturday, February 29, 2020

A Rekindled Hatred for Muslims in American Sniper, a Movie by Clint Eastwood

A Rekindled Hatred for Muslims in American Sniper, a Movie by Clint Eastwood In December, 2014, American Sniper did phenomenally well in the box office. Critics hailed it for its strong, sympathetic message for our nation’s finest. The story followed Chris Kyle, in a biographical depiction of a real soldier who served in Iraq. Kyle had done well for himself, coming home a decorated veteran with a kill count innumerably high for his line of work, and even writing a successful novel that would be later adapted to the film. It did well in the box office with 547 million dollars, and it consistently took home a 7.2 with most reviews. The film received one oscar and 17 other awards. The American public, for the most part, took the movie as a brave depiction of an American hero, a man who had saved countless American lives, and inspired respect for our nation’s military in a new way. There was another interesting effect that came out of American Sniper as well: A refreshing hatred for Muslims in America. American Sniper did do it’s best to inspire faith in our military. Truly, it did, and that’s best exemplified by the fact that they portray Chris Kyle as a respectable human being, and not just some freak who took honest pleasure in killing human beings and beating animals. If you’d like a source for some of those wild claims I just made, you needn’t look further than his own book. In it, Kyle relays some wonderful anecdotes about how he harassed Iraqi civilians, or how giddy and ecstatic he was for ending two human being’s lives with the same shot. If it sounds like I’m passionate about the subject, it’s because I am. I don’t believe that Chris Kyle’s job was to kill good men, truly I don’t, but I also understand that war and conflict of that nature has a very clear duality to it. The reason children run into crowds with bombs strapped to their chests, or men fly planes into buildings and take 3,000 lives in the process, is because they were raised out of fear and hatred by those who wished for them to be pawns in a greater cause. The people who fought back in Iraq were in many cases terrorist forces backed by Al Queda, but in others they could have just been the Iraqi military defending their country after US forces invaded on the premise of WMDs that never existed all of which was just a front for the obvious siege of their oil. Kyle’s book glorifies the death and destruction of all Iraqi way of life, and that message managed to seep its way into the film adaptation with no problem. It spread this irrational fear of Islam as a religion that has no other forms but radicalized. It tainted the already damaged image of Muslims in America by painting them to be as untrustworthy as the Muslims portrayed in American Sniper which, by the way, there were no trustworthy Muslims in American Sniper. The film is deliberately set up to make them all conniving backstabbers whose purpose is to de stroy the American way of life, hamburgers and all. It’s a disgusting, vile portrayal of the Iraq War and Chris Kyle’s persona but America loved it. They ate up that war propaganda and spawned a few like-minded individuals to presumably follow in Kyle’s footsteps.

Thursday, February 13, 2020

Econometrics Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Econometrics - Assignment Example Frequently Box and Jenkin’s is an iterative method and there may be competing candidates to describe a series. To achieve stationarity or remove trend two techniques are usually applied. The first one involves fitting either a parametric model or a spline function. In this case the ARMA model is applied to the residuals. Alternatively, Box and Jenkins recommended taking suitable differences of the process to achieve stationarity. Here the assumption is that the original series is ARIMA and the difference gives rise to the ARMA series. To determine whether the series has been reduced to a stationary series, one may look at the autocorrelations. For a stationary series, the autocorrelation sequence would converge to 0 quickly as lag increases. The time plot given in Figure 2 is already a stationary series as there is no evidence of any trend. Both autocorrelation plot and partial autocorrelation plot need to be looked at simultaneously. The partial autocorrelation become 0 at lag p+1 or greater when the process is AR(p). Strictly speaking the largest PAC is at lag 2 and the second largest at lag 24. These are the only two significant partial autocorrelations. When consider the ACF at lag 24, no significance is noted. However at lag 16 ACF is significant, but no corresponding significance is noted in PACF. The two components of the observation vector y, the predicted part X ÃŽ ²-hat, and the residual y - X ÃŽ ²-hat are orthogonal. They are uncorrelated and since they follow multivariate normal distribution, they are also independent. Any function of the predicted random vector and any function of the residual vector will also be independently distributed. Using (9) and (12) given in Lecture 5 and using the result that ratio of two independent chi-square variables divided by their respective degrees of freedom, follows an F distribution with proper d.f. the F-statistic for testing parameter of linear regression

Saturday, February 1, 2020

Fair Work Act 2009 based on the pluralist frame of reference Essay

Fair Work Act 2009 based on the pluralist frame of reference - Essay Example Firms have also faced with a growing need for emphasizing more on the alignment between commercial objectives and employment practices in the organization. The research identifies the logics of managerial authority and also its legitimacy; and the way value systems and personal assumptions held by managers can predispose them to perceive workplace relations and characteristics of work in particular ways. The paper researches on some of the contemporary theories within the domain of such systems. It analyzes the way judgments made about the worth of these theories are shaped by the value systems and the set of assumptions that people hold towards the workplaces. The analysis works as a guide towards evaluating one’s own value systems and assumptions by application of practical theories to the real world concepts. The discussion revolves around the concepts identified by Alan Fox (1966, 1974) as a means of classifying the various assumptions that people hold towards workplaces. The three frames of references which he refers to in his arguments are the unitarist, pluralist and radical (Marxist) assumptions. The project brings forth arguments for the Fair Works Act 2009 being significantly grounded on the pluralist frame of reference. The specific clauses within the act which supports the argument are identified and put forth (Abbott, p.187-189). Frames of Reference Every individual have different manners of opinions regarding the events that they witness in their day to day lives. These opinions are largely shaped by their families, friends and also circumstances such as the jobs they carry out in their respective fields, churches and clubs that they patronize, the communities they belong to etc. Because of the fact that that works is an essential part of people’s lives, its characteristics and nature is regarded as an important social phenomenon which evokes passionate debates. These debates are popularly framed in terms of the values and assumption s that individuals use as reference points while perceiving their governance and nature of works. This has generated the term ‘frame of reference’ by Alan Fox (1966, 1974) as a way of categorizing the various opinions and propositions put forth by people towards these issues (Abbott, p.191). Fox has claimed that these frames of references capture the recent opinions which he defined with regards to the credentials of the unitarist, pluralist and Marxist approaches. The idea is to understand that two different interpret two different situations differently and arise at two different conclusions from the very same phenomenon. The meaning that Fox applied to his frames of references is that differences in values and assumptions about workplace relations, nature of works and conflicts at the workplace generate differing theoretical explanations and conclusions about the matter. The popular theories which have generated out of these are unitarist, pluralist and Marxist conce pts (Abbott, p.191). The unitarist views begin from the values and assumptions which say that conflicts are not considered an inevitable characteristic of relationships between employees and managers. It is possible for conflicts to arise on periodic basis. However, such occurrences are regarded to be aberrations in relationships which are inherently tended to be cooperative. People with this perspective perceive managers and employees as having the same interests in the