amateur ramblings

“The U.S. has not made any declaration regarding the State of Israel and, therefore, we will not bring a recommendation before the Board to divest from companies doing business with the State of Israel.” – UC President Mark Yudof, UC Regents Chairman Russell Gould, and UC Regents Vice Chair Sherry Lansing UC President Mark Yudof [...]

Following the Supreme Court’s ruling overturning political speech restrictions on corporations and unions, a chorus of voices from the Democratic Party has attacked the decision. Notably, President Obama claimed in his State of the Union address that the ruling “will open the floodgates for special interests… to spend without limit in our elections.” I think [...]

There is no doubt that the families of CIA operatives killed in Afghanistan have personal tragedies to attend to. However, is it a public tragedy? For it is no less the case that those hundreds and thousands of civilians–indeed even combatants–killed by Americans in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and now all over the world, also have [...]

One need not agree with whatever happened at the Chancellor’s mansion to resist the administration’s attempt to co-opt independent student forces by soliciting their blanket condemnation of the incident. Governor Schwarzenegger finally took notice of public education after the incident, calling individuals who were allegedly involved “terrorists.” Earlier today the Chancellor and his PR spokesperson [...]

UC Berkeley administrators are still dodging responsibility for police brutality on Berkeley’s campus during the occupation of Wheeler Hall on November 20. Measures that have been announced are meant to distract the campus community from the crucial fact that the problem is not necessarily with policing policy, but rather with policing as a policy. Share

Please forward to UC faculty, grad students, and friends Dear UC Faculty and Friends, There are few words that can describe the horror of police violence against students on UC Berkeley’s campus Friday November 20. Chancellor Birgeneau’s dispatches to the campus community, most recently those today pre-empting a critical outrage to what transpired, are disgraceful [...]

In a conversation on the law student mailing list, one student, understandably upset about the loss of a favorite mug, shared a warning with others about thefts in the library. To the dismay of other students, however, the cautionary message also expressed frustration to the effect of “I hope to accomplish two things with this [...]

UC Berkeley student group Tikvah’s “Israeli Peace and Diversity Week” makes two claims about Israel that are simply not borne out by history. The first is that there is such a thing as Israeli peace, even in the wake of the recent Israeli massacres that killed over 1,300 people in Gaza and prompted Amnesty International [...]

I put this graph together to get a visual representation of how much an individual person’s vote is worth when translated into an electoral college vote. I did this by dividing the number of electoral votes per state, by the population of each state. According to these numbers, each citizen of Wyoming has four times [...]

The cartoon above by Gretchen Faust in the Daily Cal pretty much sums up what it means to have a Panda Express on campus. First, it literally doesn’t fit. Second, it’s an ominous threat to the independent small businesses in the space. And Third, despite the way some people have been waxing philosophical about free [...]