Mom, you too?

Today during class as we listened to the "Giant Pool of Money" from NPR, and I could finally understand exactly what my mom was doing for a living. As a mortgage broker, she was giving loans to anybody who needed one. Before today, I had no clue what being a mortgage broker intailed other than loaning money to people, but I would have never guessed that anybody, yes, anybody could get a loan. How could you just loan somebody thousands of dollars without knowing anything about their background? It just makes no sense. But when it's not even your money that you're lending out, does it really matter to you who it's going to? I guess not. So all that time, my mom was making money off these loans, good and bad ones, just like all of the other mortgage brokers. So who is to blame for the economic downfall? Is the entire system just too messed up to fix? Once you've become so overwhelmed in debts from the loans you get, how do you get out of debt if you don't have the money?

Definitely not the whole story

Over the weekend I watched a movie online at a website called www.zeitgeistmovie.com. It's a four-part movie documentary, but I only had time to watch the first three parts. The main part of it that really caught my attention was part II, about the attacks on 9/11. I was only in fourth grade when it happened, and as I grew up it wasn't widely talked about in school, so I didn't know a whole lot about the topic, only what was said on the news. The theory in this movie is that the government planned everything and that there were explovsives in the buildings as well. They put interviews and speeches into the documentary so it seemed to me like it was a legitimate theory. What I noticed as I began to pay more attention to the clips, were that they were all cut really short and only gave a few sentances, at most. This made me wonder what parts they were leaving out. If their theory was in fact true, how could so many people not know what really happened? I think that the documentary brought up a really good point though. The WTC building 7 collapsed at 5:22 on 9/11, due to the "fire theory". If you were to compare the collapse of this building to a controlled demolition building collapse as they show in the movie, it's hard to know what to think. How could a building that had fires on maybe two floors completely collapse a 47-story building? I'm not trying to say that the government planned it, I just think that there is a lot about the collapse that is unexplained. What do you think?