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I haven’t talked to you guys yet about a “conspiracy theory” but I’d love to.  I’ve been getting interested in these lately and I want to get your thoughts.  It’s interesting to talk about, get international opinions about, and also great for teaching new and useful English.

First of all, here is the correct pronunciation of the word “conspiracy”.  It’s pronounced like this:  ”conspeerasee”.

A “conspiracy theory” is basically a theory that is a complete contradiction to whatever the government and the media want the “stupid people” to believe.  There are many conspiracy theories, some are true, some are not true, but many are interesting to at least think about.  It’s always better to hear both sides of an argument and think for yourself.  It’s terrible to “take anyone’s word” for something.  If you “take someone’s word” for something, it just means you believe them without questioning them.

One example of a conspiracy theory is the many people wondering if astronauts from the USA “REALLY” landed on the moon in the 1960′s OR if they just “faked it”.  Some people believe it was definitely true, some people are suspicious and believe it was fake.  That type of thing gives you an idea of what a conspiracy theory means.

Any time you hear “911″ or “9 eleven” you are either hearing about the emergency police and fire phone number in the US and in Canada, OR you are hearing about what happened on September 11th, 2001.  That was a day that changed history.  I personally HATE the way the US reacted to this tragedy when the airplanes flew into the buildings in New York city.  I think they over reacted and made the world LESS safe, not more safe.  What do you think?

There are many conspiracy theories about what exactly happened on that day.  Many people believe it was a huge “cover up” by the government, which means that the government wanted to hide the truth and the real facts from the people.  No one really knows exactly what happened on that day or why it happened, but it’s important that people ask questions.  I’m not sure if the government is lying or not, but I do know that there are a lot of “unanswered questions”.

One of the unusual things that happened was the fact that the government claimed that they couldn’t find the black boxes in the airplanes.  In case you didn’t know, there is a “black box” in every major airplane.  This is basically a super protected box that has the audio or “sound recordings” of what happened during a flight.  These are important to investigate any plane crash to see EXACTLY what happened.  They make these “black boxes” almost “indestructible”, which means that they can not be destroyed.  They ALWAYS find the black boxes after a plane crash, but this time, they said they couldn’t find either of them.  That is TOO WEIRD to believe.  It certainly seems possible that there was something that happened on those flights that the government doesn’t want the public to know about.  Are they hiding them?  Why?  What exactly happened?

Also, there are stories of another building called “building 7″ that fell down with no plane hitting it.  Why did it fall down?  There are no good answers from this.  The government calls all this stuff “top secret”.  Also, on August 6th 2001, the government was warned that there would be attacks from airplanes, but they did nothing with this information to protect anyone.

It’s possible the government totally messed up and are super embarrassed so they want to hide the truth.  Some people believe that they even allowed these attacks to happen to have an ‘excuse’ to go to war with Iraq.  That was a TERRIBLE idea to go to another war, but with no 911 attacks, the government couldn’t get the public to agree with war.  If they used these attacks for an excuse to go to war and simply pretended that these attacks were done by “the bad guys” to convince the public, this is called a “false flag operation”.  That is when the government does something terrible to it’s own people while pretending it was an enemy who did it.  The reason to do a horrible ‘false flag operation’ is so that they can make more people believe that a war or some other retaliation is a good or sensible idea.

The truth is that I don’t really know what happened on that day; obviously.  But, I do know that there are some serious unanswered questions and it bothers me that the US government is hiding this info.  I’d love to know what happened.

I watched a very interesting documentary about this.  I think you’ll really like it and also learn some good information from it.

I got a free copy of it and I will include it for free in our awesome private community.  You can watch it there and discuss it with us in the private group.  It’s fun to watch, interesting, and great for learning English.  Looking forward to discussing it with you guys here.

Love to hear your comments.  What have you heard about this in your own country?  What do you think happened?  Do you have any questions about the vocab that I was explaining in the blog?  Is there any other English words you’d like to know that I didn’t explain?

Please feel free to write whatever you want.  I love reading what you guys have to say.  Please let me know any blog topic suggestions you might have…

Again, watch and discuss the 45 minute conspiracy documentary with us here.

I was watching a “light news” video today on Youtube. “Light news” or “Soft news” is the type of news story that is talked about when nothing really serious or major happens in the world.

This video was an American news video. It was talking about a story that apparently happened in China. I say “apparently” because, as you guys know, I live here and I didn’t hear about it. Anyway, I do believe it happened.

Apparently some woman in China was working in some kind of “divorce office”. I suppose she was one person in charge of allowing people to get divorced (I’m not sure which city) but it doesn’t really matter for this story. Anyway, when a husband and wife walk into the office to get a divorce, this woman is supposed to do the paperwork to make it official.

Well, I guess this Chinese woman didn’t like to see so many divorces, so she would pretend that the printer wasn’t working or she would make up some story that would make the couple “think twice” about getting the divorce. Her purpose of making the excuse was to try to save marriages and only give them to couples who are super serious about getting a divorce, and not just in a silly argument. Because of what this lady was doing, the couple would have to go home while still married because the divorce couldn’t happen that day, and if they still wanted a divorce later, they would have to go back to the office and get one.

According to this woman, many couples never returned. I guess they didn’t REALLY want one. I think many young couples don’t treat marriage seriously like they did in the past, and they get divorced for a silly reason like a dumb argument.

Divorces are getting more common all over the world. Some people think this is a horrible and sad thing for obvious reasons. Some people actually think its a good thing because they believe that people shouldn’t be married if they don’t want to be. They believe that if a couple says they want a divorce, just let them, what’s the big deal? It’s their choice right? They also believe that the reason there are more divorces now than in the past is because people in the past who were in terrible marriages (maybe where the husband was hitting his wife or in a marriage where one of them were cheating) would just stay married, even though the marriage was TERRIBLE. It’s definitely much easier to get a divorce now, and more people are getting them.

For me, I’m personally a little bit more traditional. I do believe that more divorces are a bad thing for society in general. I don’t think marriage should be treated lightly or like a total joke. It’s more than just a piece of paper in my mind. I do believe that couples who are truly in a horrible marriage should be able to get divorced, but I don’t think it should be so easy that all you have to do is get in a little argument and say “I want a divorce”.

If it’s so easy to get divorces, why even have marriage? If it’s JUST a piece of paper, then what is the point of that paper? I think we need to be somewhere in middle.

Anyway, the Americans in the video were saying it was WRONG of the Chinese woman to be doing this. They thought that the government should totally stay out of this business of divorce. I think the Americans who made this video were wrong. They were too simple minded and they treated marriage like it had too little meaning in my opinion.

The American woman in the video has especially ridiculous views on this (in my opinion again). I don’t like her thinking at all. I would love to hear what you guys think on this topic! I know some people can watch Youtube and some can’t because of the country you are in, but anyway, for those who can watch it, here it is.

Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section!   I am fine if you disagree with me on this.  It’s just opinions.  I’d love to hear where you are from, why you think what you do, and how old you are and what you do.  (Or anything you’d like to share with us)

By the way, the new SUPER VIP monthly membership is coming VERY SOON!!  It’s going to be amazing so get ready…

Also, remember to watch my daily free English learning videos here.

When I was a kid, I always wondered why rich people would pay SO MUCH money to play golf at a private golf course.  It didn’t seem to make any sense to me.  Ok, sure, they are rich, I know that.  But even most rich people don’t like throwing money into the garbage for no reason at all.  A lot of them are surprisingly careful with their money.

In Canada, you can play golf at a VERY nice golf course for under $200 per time.  Sometimes it’s much less than $100.  And I’m talking about really beautiful golf courses, not just average ones.

So why then, would any reasonable person pay $100 000 per year for a membership?  It made no sense to me before.  Now it makes perfect sense.

These guys aren’t paying for how nice the golf course is.  That is only part of it.  It’s a small part actually.  What they are really paying for is the community.  Think about the other people who go to those courses.  Most of them are also successful business people.  They pay for status and ability to meet these people.  They talk and do business together.  They make friends and get their children in this rich group of successful people.  In some ways, the whole thing makes me sick.  I wish the world were a more fair place.  But the reality is that it’s not.  It does make sense for these people to stay together, meet each other, and network together.

It’s MUCH more likely that you will meet someone worth doing business with on one of these super expensive golf courses than if you were to try to meet these types of people at other places where “regular” people can go.

I was thinking about this because I was thinking about a social networking website for English learning.  These aren’t the exact same thing, but you’ll see what I mean in a minute…

People who speak English as a second language and are actually serious about improving their English, their business, their lives, etc, don’t have anywhere to go to meet each other online.  There are a lot of garbage websites that allow anyone on there.  If you want to speak with someone to “practice your English”, you can absolutely find a partner on a million free sites.

But the problem with this is HUGE.  These sites that allow anyone to join, attract people who aren’t really serious about learning English or really serious about anything at all.  Why?  Because most people in the world are not serious about anything they are doing.

If you want to meet a partner to speak English with, share ideas, share stories, share culture, you will want to meet someone who is at or above your level.  You want someone who can challenge you and you can learn from.  It’s not easy to find these people, but they exist.

Imagine for a second that you wrote on your Facebook page, “I am looking for someone to learn from, talk about business and life, and really challenge each other to improve our English skills”.  I can’t imagine you will find anyone.  Maybe, if you are lucky, someone will say “Yes” to your offer, but they probably won’t be the type of person you are hoping for.

As you probably know, Add and I have been making a new free video EVERY DAY at www.LearnEnglish232.com  

We are hoping to get people to get in the habit of going there every day for the new lessons.  We want to grow that site to 50 000 visitors per day.

But many of the people who find this site or that site aren’t super serious about learning English.  We also want to find the SUPER SERIOUS people and provide an opportunity for amazing English, business, and life learning that does not exist anywhere else on the internet.  That’s our goal.

The people who are not serious will not pay a small monthly fee to join the membership part.  And that’s great.  Our plan is to build a membership site for serious learners.  Everyone will have a great profile with an awesome photo, bio, linkedIn page, Skype number, where they are from…  A lot of stuff.  Then these people will be able to search through the other serious members and we can all have a really high level and private conversation.  Also, the members will be able to contact each other and set up high level language exchanges and other things.  It will be a real community.  I’ll be on there providing reading material, movie talk, technology stuff, and a bunch of interesting and high level topics for group discussion.  We’ll all push ourselves to get better and better in not only English, but in life too.

I want to have a lot of great free English learning content for everyone to enjoy, and a high level SUPER VIP program that is connected to this one and also adds a lot more.  We’re still talking about how we want the site to be.  And since some of you guys who are reading this right now will be interested in joining it, it would be great to hear your ideas now.  We are building it for you and other high level people like you.

What do you think of this idea?  What would you like to see in that program?

Help us design it with your ideas and then it will be much better that way!

And by the way, don’t worry, it won’t be expensive like an elite golf course!  It doesn’t need to be.  The only reason I used that example was to try to make a point.

Love to hear your thoughts guys.  By the way, does anyone here already have the great habit of going to www.LearnEnglish232.com everyday yet?  What do you think?  Have you shared it with your friends, students, or teachers?  What do they think?  We’re still in the beginning stages of developing this, and we’re sure this will be the best yet!

It will be connected in some way with China232.com VIP membership, so don’t worry about that.  We’ll take care of you guys and make it kick ass!  There will be tons of amazing free stuff for everyone and an insanely awesome high level private English learning VIP club.

Sounds like a win/win to me!  What are your thoughts on this whole topic?  Even the part about rich people paying so much for golf.  Does it make sense to you too?

Your comments are always appreciated.  You guys have been great lately with that.  Keep it up.  I read EVERY one!!

Here’s the video I made last night. It’s the one I promised to put up for the Facebook fans. I’m still playing around with the camera and the whole idea of making videos. I’m still experimenting and having fun. Let me know what you think in the comments. In this video, I actually respond to some of your comments from the previous blog. Good idea? Love to hear your thoughts boys and girls! Enjoy!

This video lesson talks about the term “….. like”

If we don’t know exactly how to describe something, we can say it’s “something like“.  That means, “similar to”.

If I’m trying to describe a food my friend has never tried before, I could say something like this:

“It’s got a banana like taste and a coffee like smell.”

I’m not really sure what kind of food that would be, but I think you get the idea.  It basically means it tastes a bit similar to a banana and smells kind of like coffee.

Now please watch the video below and see how Add is using this term

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Love to hear your comments!