The Patriot and the Berkeley College Republicans are holding their first meetings of the year tomorrow (Thursday). Both meetings will be held in 122 Wheeler. The Patriot meeting will be from 6-7pm, and BCR will be from 7-8pm. Any writers or artists interested in contributing (new Freshmen especially welcome!), should attend this meeting. If you’re interested in graphic design/layout or websites/blogging, hit me up. And if you’re not interested, maybe you know someone who is… so let them know if they don’t already. Be there.

Patriot magazine and blog almnus, Kevin D. Dayaratna, has published his final article with us:

Before I say my formal goodbye, maybe I should tell you what I’m up to now that I’m done with my undergraduate degree at Cal. I’m beginning research, using lots of mathematics as that’s what I’m trained in, and still trying to learn lots of things about politics that I didn’t learn at Cal. This is the 17th article I’ve written and my last. And there are a few things I didn’t quite communicate in my articles.

I’ve spoken of “beating the left” during my tenure for the California Patriot, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I envisioned when I said it. I intended us to have a publication of articles of far higher quality than them, have more political events, and to consistently rip them apart in debates. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.

It’s been a pleasure to have had him on the team and we wish him well.

Yes, says CalStuff regular DTI, who is leading the movement to do exactly that. In the past week or so, discontent has been growing against UC Berkeley’s student government.

Calling all Cal students. The ASUC has sold us out to various special interest groups. Over 100 years of “tradition” have led to student government corruption. Many will tell you that the ASUC is the “best thing for students, even if it’s flawed”…

The ASUC belongs to you, you paid $55 dollars for it, and the senators spend your money on ideological issues and whatever suits their interests. How have you benefitted from the ASUC? […]

I could go on for hours, but the important point is change needs to start and it needs to start soon. We’re at the center of social change and we’re letting a $2 million gorilla take advantage of us.

Could this be the beginning of the end for the ASUC? Let’s see how far this goes. Check out the Abolish the ASUC campaign blog to learn more. For the record, I’ve already chosen sides.

In today’s Daily Planet, John Murcko complains:

I believe that the right wing in Berkeley, including three members of the Berkeley Peace and Justice Commission, have launched a campaign to discredit the commission…

The attack on the commission is an attack on our First Amendment right to free speech and a free press. It wants to stop Berkeley from speaking out on the violence and terrorism of the U.S., Israel, and other right-wing governments and the rule of the corporations and neo-liberals. We must work to stop this trend in Berkeley. Support the commission and call a city councilmember to support the commission members for the commission.

For those not in the know, the Berkeley Peace and Justice Commission is kind of like a high school Model United Nations team, but less effective. I wonder why Murcko thinks that he needs a commission to exercise his free speech rights. Since when do cities speak out on anything? If you want to speak out, speak out on your own time and money. This is not a proper function of government.

Though that final sentence made me smile…

A new school year, a new “College Conservatives!?” article. This time from Randi Powell in the Boston Globe:

DURING THE 1980s, Ronald Reagan ushered in a new era of American conservatism that few can forget. But I don’t remember one thing about it. Honestly, the first president who actually meant anything to me, besides being a fact in a book, was Bill Clinton. Like most of today’s college students who were born during the Reagan administration, I grew up with the liberalism of the 1990s. So it only makes sense that those liberal values and ideas are considered ”normal” for most of my generation…

Conservative student-run newspapers are becoming an alternative information source on campus. Even UC Berkeley, historically considered left wing, today has a prominent conservative student newspaper, The California Patriot, that was founded in 2000.

Note that our reference was sans-”glossy” for those of you playing along.

Some Berkeley student protesters have won an award from Mother Jones, a leftist magazine:

Invisible Freshmen Last November, 250 African American UC Berkeley students staged a daylong “Blackout” to protest the precipitous decline in black student enrollment since Cal banned affirmative action a decade ago. Out of last fall’s 3,600 incoming freshmen, only 3 percent were African American. Dressed in black, the protesters silently interrupted classes to distribute fliers demanding the school step up its efforts to recruit black students. “It’s hard being the only black person in the class,” said senior Raniyah Abdus-Samad. “It’s not a good feeling.”

Fortunately, our admissions policies aren’t based on how Raniyah feels or the attention a protest gets from leftist magazines.

I need to set something straight:

The Cato Institute would, in reality, not be arguing for more racially representative porn collections. And we can only dream for Tucker Carlson to be even half as cool in real life.

I wish Berkeley’s Heuristic Squelch magazine would update its website so you could read “Minorities Underrepresented in Area Porn Collection” by Toby Muresianu and actually know what I’m talking about.

The second article of Kerry Eskenas’ two-part series is now available:

I noticed how careful Israeli soldiers are during their anti-terror operations. Israeli soldiers will risk their own lives to avoid killing even one civilian. Mistakes do happen when defending Israel, but innocent people are never deliberately targeted. Israel is—and must be, because of the scrutiny of the world community—more careful than any other country to gather accurate intelligence and to clear out the area of civilians using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). These UAVs spot terrorists from miles above before any attack commences. The Jerusalem Undercover Unit is highly trained to kill only the terrorist—and only out of defense would they shoot anyone else on the scene.

Colleges are finally jumping into the blogging scene, according to this article from eSchool News [BugMeNot]:

In the never-ending drive to attract new students to their institutions, some college and university officials now look to student blogs as a fresh addition to the recruiter’s toolbox…

Given all the administrative functions a university’s web site must fulfill, school marketers and other campus officials are realizing that prospective students have few ways to learn what it feels like to be a student at the institution. And that’s where blogs can help, they say.

Yup, school-sanctioned blogs are going to give you the straight-up truth about real college life…

“Second, they had to be good kids,” he said. “They were students referred to us by faculty [and other trusted university officials]. We picked the good ones, had the dean of students approve them, et cetera.”

After the students were chosen, Chisholm said, his staff “put the fear of God into them.”

“We reminded them that everyone they know–faculty, boyfriend or girlfriend, your mother, your RA, the rest of your family, too–is going to read it. Then we let them know that we’re never going to take [the blogs] down,” he said. “If you’re doing tequila night, getting blitzed, we don’t want to hear about it. And you don’t [want to write about it,] either, because one day, when you’re applying for a job, your boss is going to read about it.”

So basically, you get to read about what college life is actually like; minus the “life” part, of course. It’ll be like the official college brochure, except with more spelling and grammar errors.

A lot of Berkeley students have their own blogs/journals hosted on sites like LiveJournal and Xanga. If you really want to know what college kids do and think (at least Asian females), then I suggest that you check these blogs out. Let me excerpt from some random Cal blogs, with names omitted to protect the guilty.

19 Aug 2005

i really want to cheat on alcoholedu, but i dont know how… at this point, im just letting the video run by itself while i surf the net

this is really not the way i want to spend my last nights at home…serves me right, i guess

Heh, I’d like to see that get on an official Cal blog. Let’s move on:

Friday, August 26, 2005

i walked alot today.. finally didn’t eat with [excised] coz the canteen was closed for the function thing i guess? (shitzzzz, i was starving), i went to the calapalooza with [excised], woot a sunny weather, but poor since we had salad for lunch, i was reli reli hungry..there were clubs, association n such.. i signed up for a few, i wish to join the hiphop one,.. n i guess im gona go to the orientation of HKSA, wondering how it will be like~!..honkies…, [excised] brought me to ikea since i need a bin for trash (like me..jk), nice friend.. im telling here.. shopped around with [excised] afterwards.. shit.. i guess i’ve spent much these days, i reli reli love the two caps that i bought!! kinda cheap.. CHEERSSSSSS

Hmm, there were some less readable posts out there, but I’ll spare you guys… On to our final subject:

Sunday, August 28, 2005

Getting mugged is such a bitch. Glad I at least socked that mother fucker in the face before he made off with my wallet and cellphone.

Thursday, August 25, 2005

I really need to stop making promises when I’m drunk.
…I think I promised [excised] I’d let her top me.

Thursday, August 18, 2005

Wow, I found really really REALLY good porn today. I’m watching it with my breakfast this morning.

College life.

Now here’s a strange and interesting story:

The owner of a Hayward pizza parlor will serve four months of home detention and pay a five-thousand-dollar fine, after pleading guilty to illegally transferring money to a bounty hunter out to kill Osama bin Ladin.

Forty-one-year-old Noor Alocozy also was sentenced to three years of probation today in federal court.

Authorities say Alocozy transferred one (m) million dollars out of the country between 2002 and 2003. They say some of that money reached Jonathan “Jack” Idema, a jailed American mercenary who claimed he was on a counterterrorism mission with the U-S government.

Authorities say Idema — a former Green Beret — was a client of Alocozy’s money-transfer business, which operated out of his Liberty Pizza restaurant. Idema is now serving time in an Afghan prison after being convicted of running a private torture camp.

In a follow-up article:

A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security’s Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in June indicated some money that passed through Alocozy’s business had gone to Jonathan “Jack” Idema, an American mercenary accused of abducting and interrogating Afghani citizens in his own personal quest to capture al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. But Shaiken said Friday there was little evidence to support that connection, hence prosecutors’ decision not to pursue it. Alocozy “certainly didn’t intend to assist anybody in breaking the law.

I don’t know about you guys, but I totally expect a movie to come out of all this.

Kerry Eskenas has a two-part follow-up to her article on the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in this month’s Patriot. The first half is already up. Look for the second half tomorrow.

I think it’s important to define terrorism before describing my experience in Israel learning about counter-terrorism with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD). Boaz Ganor, the Director of the Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Israel, told my group that terrorism is “the intentional use of violence aimed against civilians in order to attain political goals.” In an action-packed two weeks, I traveled around Israel to gain an understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as to learn how the United States might succeed in its War Against Terror. Israel has been under attack since it was established in 1948, and it has survived because of rigorous counter-terror measures that curb some civil liberties but which are necessary to save lives. Israel’s experience in dealing with terrorism makes it a relevant case study for the United States after 9/11.

I’m about to leave OC and drive back up to Berkeley. I’ll be back online later tonight, or maybe tomorrow. In the meantime, feel free talk amongst yourselves. There’s some lonely posts below waiting to be discussed.

Also, check out this post on CalJunket about global warming and South Park Republicans. I posted the first comment, so you might want to see where that discussion goes.

Alright then.

I was reading Inside Higher Ed and learned that the University of West Georgia is starting a program “For Black Men Only“:

At West Georgia, the community for black men is an outgrowth of a professor’s vision for helping black male students improve academically while challenging the negative images of black men that pervade society…

All black men who were admitted as freshmen were given information about the program and invited to apply. The 25 students will live in the same dormitory as other students in freshman learning communities and will take the same five courses: Introduction to Communications, Critical Thinking, U.S. History 1865-present, Freshman English, and a special interdisciplinary course to be taught by Sewell on “What Do You Know About Manhood?”

Now the first thing that I thought of when I read this was Berkeley’s African American Theme Program. This is a program offered by the university that let’s black students live with each other in the same dorm. Similar programs are offered for Asians, Latinos, LGBT, etc.

This new West Georgia program, however, takes the concept even further. Not only will you live with your own “kind,” you’ll take the same courses. This will obviously raise a few eyebrows, and the article briefly touches on this controversial aspect:

Asked if he worries that the program could be considered segregationist because it is only for black men, Sewell says that while he does not know of any colleges taking this approach, he has watched the success of some public schools that have focused on the separate needs of black male students. Without a special focus, Sewell says, “African-American males frequently do not utilize resources to help them succeed academically.”

Good news for college students everywhere: a new drug! Cortex Pharmaceuticals has developed something called CX717 that reverses the effects of sleep deprivation and then some (Hat tip to Slashdot):

To test this possibility, they taught monkeys to perform a “delayed-match-to-sample task,” in which they were presented with a single image on a computer screen, then would use a cursor to identify that image in a group of several different images.

During normal alert conditions, performance accuracy of the animals was improved from an average of 75 percent to 90 percent after an injection of CX717. The drug also shortened response times, suggesting that “CX717 also facilitated attentional processes related to speed of responding on successful trials.”

When the monkeys were subjected 30-36 hours of sleep deprivation, average performance accuracy dropped to 63 percent, which was restored to 84 percent after CX717 treatment.

For their next set of test subjects, I suggest college students. Take it during finals, and after hours of sleep deprived studying, you still come out better than the kid who got his sleep! There’s no way that students aren’t going to use and abuse this.

It’s my belief that students make up most of the drug using population (besides senior citizens, of course). I’m not talking about the stoners or boozers on campus; that’s a given. On the other extreme are those in cutthroat majors, looking for any way to get ahead (up to and including cheating). First they start off with good old caffeine… that’s Starbucks and Mountain Dew for you non-science types. But drinking a liquid takes too much time away from studying, so we graduate to caffeine pills (I personally endorse Vivarin). Still not enough time in the day to catch up? The more adventurous scholars enter a legal gray area when they move on to Adderall and Ritalin. This article from the Indiana University student newspaper says that more than 25% of college students have used these drugs as performance enhancers. I wonder how prevalent use is at Berkeley?

It will not surprise me to see CX717 become the next drug of choice for high achievers. Stay awake with coffee, stay focused with Adderall, and top it off with some CX717 right before the test. Give it a couple of years and you’ll start seeing news stories about a CX717 epidemic in colleges and the need for a crackdown. Who knew that wanting to learn more would be controversial?

So what do you guys think? Are these drugs good or bad? Should they be legal for the general public or what? Any experiences you care to share? I think this is an important and interesting topic to discuss.