There is a new online article by a new contributor, Jessica Vu. In the article she describes what happened in Vietnam after the United States completely pulled itself out.

In the days that followed, a new era of totalitarian rule was unleashed upon the Vietnamese people. The world could only watch and cringe as the newly reinstated Socialist government began its systematic persecution of opposition political leaders and their followers. Thousands of innocents were tortured and executed in “work” camps, mere euphemisms for concentration death camps. In this society, where any deviation from the party line had severe consequences, few dared to protest.

I hope you check it out.

Here we have an article from The Sun online saying that European MP’s want to change livestock diets so that their farts won’t be as great an impact to global warming.

Thanks to the UN, who is focusing all their time and energy on such grave world crises, we can now pinpoint global warming on “livestock emissions”. Can you make hybrid livestock? ones that plug into the wall?

Give me back my SUV, this is all Bessie’s fault!

The challenge: find a news article from today that is more ridiculous/funny than this one. I won’t give you a cookie, but maybe someone else will.

I received a tip from a fellow Cal Patriot blogger that an error in Tele-BEARS has caused people to be dropped from waitlists for classes for next semester. I checked and the class I was on the waitlist for no longer appears on my Fall 08 schedule. There are also people having issues with this on livejournal so be sure to check your courses for next semester.

Ignacio De la Fuente has reaffirmed Oakland as a “city of refuge”, meaning they accept and welcome illegal immigrants and will “discourage” federal immigration raids. Law-breaking? check. Obstructing the government’s job? check. Stupid economic move? Check. Here’s what I mean.

First, it’s illegal. The immigrants are here illegally or have stayed longer than legally allowed, and the companies that hire them (occasionally) get punished, meaning it’s not ok to hire them. (Caveat: companies that hire illegals need to be punished much more severely and consistently or else no message is sent and bad behavior is condoned. Fines won’t hurt big companies too much, but enough to actually get them to comply). So it seems to me that all the folks who support this are accessories to a crime, or crimes. You can spin it however you want, but it is STILL ILLEGAL. Yes, they are people, yes they are looking for a better life, yes we need to change the system, but it’s still illegal.

Also, preventing (although the media uses the much more vague term “discourage” or “not co-operate) the federal agents from conducting raids is an obstruction of justice. If you are preventing justice from being served by refusing to co-operate with those searching for illegals, it is no different than destroying or withholding evidence in a murder case. How can these things be different? They aren’t. The difference is that these leftist areas don’t like to obey laws that don’t suit them.

I will of course recognize the economic benefit of those who will work for less than native born Americans. (Although I also take issue with it, see the Swift meat-packing plant example in Chicago, can’t find the link at the moment, but the story went: after the raid, there were lines around the block of the area’s low income blacks and whites looking for jobs that supposedly Americans “won’t do”). So, we gain cheap labor, but we also gain higher health care costs from emergency room visits, etc.

How will this affect Oakland? And how will it affect Berkeley, considering the proximity?

Tony Blair said this week that the world’s greatest threat was bar driving. Car accidents kill “on the scale of malaria or tuberculosis”. While bad driving is a huge killer of people, it seems absurd to call it a “threat”. It would be like saying our greatest threat is obesity. Semantics aside, this bothers me on two levels.

First, ignoring other rather large global “threats” like the spread of terrorism, AIDS, pandemic diseases in general, or global warming, if that is your preference. Some people would list it, I ordinarly wouldn’t. Ignoring these things that are much more sinister (possibly because we have less control over them) seems negligent and kind of stupid, given the current world situation. It would be like saying, during World War II, that the greatest threat was the rubber shortage.

Second, why do car accidents occur? Lots of reasons, traffic, road rage, negligence/lack of paying attention, bad weather, intoxication of varying sorts, etc. Some of these things we can’t change, like weather and traffic, but some we CAN. Drivers are responsible for driving and dealing with things they can’t change. Just like with obesity, people are responsible for their eating and life choices while dealing with the genetic obstacles they might have. These things are individual decisions, not “threats”. Let’s stop fueling the culture of victimhood by giving people the message that these health hazards are faceless threats rather than choices we can make.

The Berkeley College Republicans elections were tonight. While the mood in the room was tense like most elections, it was better then the last two years. The board for 07-08 is:

President: Ross Lingenfelder

Internal Vice President: Shir Skolnik

External Vice President: Kyle Tibbitts

Treasurer: Ann-Marie Jelacich

Sectary: Danielle Mahan

Congratulations to everyone who won and also everyone else who ran. With the talent and dedication I saw tonight next year will be awesome if everyone works together.

Justice Stephanie Lam resigned tonight. Thanks for all your time, it was a pleasure working with you.

Guess Van’s gonna be pretty busy early next semester filling in the three open spots.

Last night was Raw Food night at Crossroads. I don’t mean sushi and raw meat (which would be awesome), but something else. I will point you to the website by Cal Dining.

I was eating there and I had to try this raw food they were advertising.

From the Cal Dining website:

Why Eat Raw Food?
People get into raw food for a number of reasons, and here are some of the many and varied reasons:

Ethics:
Some arrive by a path that involves a search for more natural, ethical and sustainable ways of living; a more compassionate way of life, as a natural extension of vegetarianism or veganism, or being ‘green’.

Spiritual:
Some sense the spiritual benefits, cleansing mind and body, with the widespread tradition of eating only or mainly raw fruit amongst wise men and women.

The five things featured were:

Kale Salad
Pasta with Pesto
Spicy Carrot Soup
Brownies with Cashew Cream
Apple Cobbler

I tried all of them, and the brownies were the best, but they tasted like an Odwalla bar. The apple cobbler was not as good as it looked and neither was the “pasta” (actually zucchini). I took one sip of the carrot soup and was glad it was a small sip.

I also tried the Kale salad. It was made with dinasour kale. Since it is spelled like dinosaur, and dinosaurs are cool I figured it must taste good. When I put a piece in my mouth it was so bad it immediately went into my napkin.

From my experience last night I now know to avoid anything that claims to be “raw food.”

Does anyone else have an experience with this “Raw Food?”

• 1 censure to Student Life Referendum
• 3 censures to Shawn Jain

No surprises there…expect to see the same for most of the other cases.

Although the ones with Curtis Lee and Shams should be (hopefully more) interesting.

[Edit: 4/23/07]
I figured this isn’t worth a whole new post…

• 3 censures to Shams
• 1 censure to Parra-Fitch and Urena
• 1 censure to Kunert

Yesterday was April 20. It is a holiday celebrated by many Berkeley residents and students. For those of you not familiar with it, the idea is to smoke marijuana on that day.

I celebrated by going to the campus operated Golden Bear Café. When I was there I purchased what was called a Nestle THC Bar.

I enjoyed the TCH. It is great Golden Bear Café sells Nestle Tollhouse Cookie ice cream sandwiches. If I really wanted to smoke pot, I should have stopped by the dispensary on Telegraph when I was walking home.

Thanks to Beetle for pointing this out.

BCR and the Patriot’s annual end-of-the-year awards dinner was held this Thursday at the Bancroft Hotel. Republican Jewish Coalition leader Larry Greenfield was the keynote speaker, and he lectured about the demographics and politics of the growth of radical Islam in Europe and around the world. I had the privelidge of sitting between the two Rookies of the Year, Danielle Mahan and Annemarie Jelacich. Mike Calvo was awarded as well, but top honors of the night went to Mike Klein. Receiving the Patriot’s achievement award as well as BCR’s Ivan Jen award, Mike expressed his gratitude to those who were graduating with him. Congratulations to all seniors, and may next year be just as good.

the staff of The Patriot board

Myself and Mr Greenfield

myself with the rookies of the year and graduating senior, Andrea Rasmussen.

I picked up a Daily Cal this afternoon at the BCR table and read about some “tree sitters”. I figured, more crazies in the oak trees, no biggie. As I continued reading about people sitting in a redwood (we have those on campus?!) near Sather Gate, I happened to glance upwards. What to my wondering eyes did appear, but several hippies many feet up in the air. With signs.

The Daily Cal article said the tree-sitters were not prepared to discuss their motives just yet (could this be a consequence of today’s date being 4-20?), and their signs were equally vague. This one says “Activate your love force”

Also, the police are prepared to deal with them the same way they treated the other tree-dwellers up by Memorial Stadium, that is, to do nothing. If they are students they could face University sanctions, and if they are not, they could be arressted, but we’ll see if either of those two happen.

This year’s spring CCR was held in Santa Clara, hosted by the Santa Cruz College Republicans. Prominent speakers included Tony Strickland on behalf of Mitt Romney, Abel Maldonado, Larry Greenfield of the Republican Jewish Coalition, internet mogul Andrew Breitbart, a video appearance of filmmaker Evan Maloney, Shawn and Michelle Steel, and others. Voting for the new state chairman took place on Sunday, and resulted in a sweep of “Team Activate”, the slate headed by Ryan Clumpner, defeating the “Take Back CCR” slate, headed by BCR’s own Josiah Prendergast. Here’s some photographic evidence of the good times enjoyed by all!

Voting during the convention

Myself and Breitbart

My highlights: enjoying the Mr Maloney’s presentation-via-video regarding his upcoming movie “Indoctrinate U” that deals with censorship and discrimination of conservatives on college campuses. Also, the amusing albeit random/rambling speech given by Breitbart about meeting Matt Drudge and being a part of the internet’s early boom during the Lewinski era. And of course, the socializing. I enjoyed both’s slate’s hospitality suites. I didn’t know until that weekend that Bennigan’s was an actual restaurant!

Some of the men of BCR

Some of the women of BCR

The election results are out!

Senate:
10 SA/Greek/Apple
6 CalServe
2 Independents
1 Squelch
1 BCR

Execs:
Cal Serve sweep! =)
**Ok, I’m not sure where I was, but apparently Curtis Lee won AAVP. But other than that, it was CalServe.**

I was highly amused with Beetle coming in second and beating out SA for the Academic VP race.

The Senate results aren’t final yet - some candidates may still be DQed. But for those without the fear of five censures - relax, you’re in!

As for the fees…only the TGIF and constitutional amendment passed. Not perfect, but better than expected.

Oh, and Jessica has a really cute dog.