Designation Form - Northwestern University: Fill & Download for Free

Sorry on this first day of the new year to be a party pooper but the US,on the national level, is not and was not designed to be a democracy. This can be explained in two ways:The Framers, who were half slave owners, feared and despised democracy, tho our Founding Fathers (Jefferson, Paine, et al ) had founded the nation on democratic principles (equality and consent of the governed), But the Framers were a very different group and even included some who had opposed independence.The slave owners (like Madison, who owned 100 slaves) who wrote the Constitution, created an electoral scheme, which was justified on specious grounds) which allowed the Electoral College to overturn the public vote and a Senate voting scheme which has allowed, as of TODAY, rural/conservative states like Montana and Wyoming to have twice the Senators and votes as a state like like California, which has 97% more actual citizens. Fearing the People, the authors crafted a document that allowed the minority of slave owners to control the new nation, with 10 of the first 12 Presidents having owned slaves and coming from the slave states, which had far fewer citizens.A good source for this is the classic Merrill Jensens’s New Nation, which fully documents the way in which the Constitution was a slaveowners counter-revolution against the democratic origins of our nation.Let’s now fast-forward to our new Century, where, of the last 3 Presidents, only one actually won the public vote (ie consent of the governed, which our founding document makes the essential justification for legitimate rule), with two (Bush and Trump) gaining power (as Hitler and Mussolini did) after losing the popular vote.So we today have a President who has never had consent (which Jefferson insisted was based on the “sacred” and” essential” principle of majority rule) and thus, according to our founding document, tho not the Constitution which enabled such a result, is unjust and illegitimate.Let’s turn to the Senate, now controlled by Republicans and prepared to exonerate the President on impeachment charges. The current Senate has a minority party (the Democrats) who actually received 15 million more votes than the Republicans.And so the Supreme Court is controlled by conservatives who gained their appointments through the power of a party that itself came to power in violation of the founding principle of consent, having been chosen by a party that year in and year out loses the popular vote but ascends to control.This is not a Democracy. Democracy is based on equality (at a minimum of votes) and the consent of the governed, which means the actual citizens and voters. And where a majority is not attained (Lincoln, Clinton, et al), the winner, in a democracy, is the candidate with the most votes, not the loser.One more caution: due to gerrymandering, the House at times, supposedly the bulwark of democracy, has been ruled by the party with the fewest votes. This happened in 2012, when Democrats had 1,400,000 more votes but Republicans ruled with 234 seats to 201 for the Democrats. Where the minority gains power, only a deceiver will call it democracy.The oldest democracy may be Switzerland which had direct democracy as far back as the 1200s, but the US has yet to complete the American Revolution and join the ranks of democratic republics.Lack of majority rule also happens frequently at the state level: “November 13, 2018Majorities of voters in at least three battleground states — Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina — chose a Democrat to represent them in the state’s House of Representatives. Yet in all three states, Republicans maintained majority control over the chamber despite winning only a minority of votes.For that, you can thank gerrymandering — the process by which partisan lawmakers draw legislative districts in a way to disadvantage their opponents. Its effects are well-documented at the federal level: In states like North Carolina, U.S. House delegations feature huge Republican majorities, even when the majority of voters choose a Democratic representative.”In at least three states, including Pa., Republicans won House while losing popular vote | AnalysisAnd so, we are not a democracy but rather, based on an objective study by Northwestern/Princeton an oligarchy, where the will of ordinary people, which theoretically is the foundation of legitimate rule, is ignored and the will of the wealthy and the corporations dominates: thus we are an oligarchy (or plutocracy, or in terms of modern history, a corporatocracy (Mussolini's term for fascism) pretending to be a democracy and often engaging in wars abroad on behalf of a democracy we only pretend exists at home.“The U.S. government does not represent the interests of the majority of the country's citizens, but is instead ruled by those of the rich and powerful, a new study from Princeton and Northwestern universities has concluded.The report, "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" (PDF), used extensive policy data collected between 1981 and 2002 to empirically determine the state of the U.S. political system.After sifting through nearly 1,800 U.S. policies enacted in that period and comparing them to the expressed preferences of average Americans (50th percentile of income), affluent Americans (90th percentile), and large special interest groups, researchers concluded that the U.S. is dominated by its economic elite.The peer-reviewed study, which will be taught at these universities in September, says: "The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence."Researchers concluded that U.S. government policies rarely align with the preferences of the majority of Americans, but do favour special interests and lobbying organizations: "When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it."Major Study Finds The US Is An OligarchyCONCLUSION: we must stop trying to “protect” the illusion of American democracy, admit the truth, and create it. It is time to complete the American Revolution, overthrowing a hereditary aristocracy only to see it replaced by an enslavers aristocracy and then after the Civil War, a plutocracy of the corporations. It is time to fulfill our birthrights of equality and consent of the governed and a democratic republic representing not the 1% or special interests but rather “We the People.”We can advance this cause by supporting the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC), which currently has 196 electors and needs only 74 more to make the Electoral College representative. Then we must fight to make gerrymandering illegal and create a Senate which is ruled not by 15% of the population in small/conservative states but by the majority, with the minority having inviolable rights that enable them to become the majority, thus creating a genuine democracy “of, for, and by the people” instead of a sham operation designed to fool the people into supporting the rule of the wealthy. This is our birthright, and it is time to take it back!

I think you have a decent shot. Even though NU is turning down more kids than ever these days, I think if you’re strategic in how you apply you have a better shot than most.How I got into U of I was by applying to the Art and Design college, who’s acceptance criteria was lower than that of Engineering or Business schools. Once you are in, you can transfer to whatever school you want usually.My advice, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, so I say go for it if you love the school and think it’s a good fit. Show the passion for wanting to be there, and a door will open for you in some form.

This must have been debunked before on this site. In case it hasn’t, the short answer is that the brain is not designed to work with processing and chemistry levels beyond what it currently does naturally.As far as I can remember, the way the drug works in the film is not actually making the brain’s activity ‘limitless’, it is acting as an enhancer for the memory neuronal network.“NZT” is presented as a hypothetical stimulant upon the brain’s neurotransmitters that connect, from the lobe-storage of “engrammed” impulse-patterns (stored memories), to the prefrontal cortex where memory is applied to perceptive data. He can effectively reconcile perceived data with memory at superhuman speeds, allowing for fast analysis, completion of thought-processes, and re-storage.It is also — based on the movie depiction of Brad remembering something he read years ago in a paper, word-for-word — acting as a signal-enhancer; allowing consistent prefrontal access to all memory-data, so all he has ever perceived is now accessible, regardless of the strength or detail of the memory as it was originally stored. This seems ridiculous, obviously, but lets assume it is true…Now, the brain’s storage is pretty big:…neurons combine so that each one helps with many memories at a time, exponentially increasing the brain’s memory storage capacity to something around 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes). - Paul Reber, Professor at Northwestern UniversityThe brain stores a lot of what it perceives passively, without us even realising. Data we weren’t aware was stored pops up in dreams, triggers deja vu, and contributes to future understanding and cognition in subtle neuronic ways.If we had the brain on overdrive, all the time, to access and process all that data, plus new data, we would need an immense amount of energy: more than our body is designed to cope with. The level of activity required in the brain could simply not afford to reach those levels, let alone sustain it. We already burn a significant amount of calories from using our brains on a daily basis, so it is not doable metabolically. The brain is a greedy organ.The brain damage would occur on a material level not that dis-analogously from a computer burning out its core from excess power input, except ours happens in the form of hormonal levels rising to scale with brain-processing increase. If you doubt it, just look at our brain on speed: This Is Your Brain on Speed. Note the metabolic changes and chemical damage.So no, its not possible. Sorry. Not until we find a way to enhance neurons and linked tissue through some futuristic biomechanical augmentation. Until then its just fantasy.