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(02/13/02 11:00am)
So how about those Patriots? New Englandwins its first championship game in God knows how long and nobody comments on any aspect of our singular triumph. Not one glimmer of the interception touchdown in the second quarter or the resilience of the Patriot defensive line. Anyone who read the recent columns in The Dartmouth would think that the Op-Ed editor's body had been replaced with an alien pod person who was beaming "All Greenwood, All the Time" into the cranial antenna for some diabolical reason or other. It's like Fox News has taken over the Dartmouth newsroom, except that instead of "America Strikes Back " running 24/7 we've got "Spurned Sorority Sisters." I can almost hear the soundtrack in my head. What would the computer graphics look like? I wonder how Fox News would apply its limitless supply of retired generals to this tactical problem?
(01/22/02 11:00am)
Here are some media-sponsored tidbits to ponder:
(01/08/02 11:00am)
Being Catholic and having a birthday on Dec. 29 -- between Christmas and New Year's Eve -- has its drawbacks. For one thing, your birthday is never distinct. It's always Jesus Christ taking all the spotlight from you every December. Nobody will ever put a little ceramic Nativity set out for you. Year after year you feel like the forsaken son. Presents everywhere and all of them are going to someone else in recognition of someone else's birthday. When I was younger, I always wondered every holiday season, "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, why did You have to be born today? If Your dad created the universe, why not extend Mary's pregnancy so she could have her kid sometime like June. June would be great -- every kid gets presents right when school lets out. Much better than December. Heavenly Father, don't you know that there are other kids -- not just your kid -- being born this time of year?"
(11/14/01 11:00am)
Over the months I've been writing for "The D," my columns have leaned 90 degrees to the Right, the free market, and the relentless and unfettered pursuit of all the things that we conservatives love -- defense spending, oil drilling, and tax cuts. So it shouldn't surprise anyone that today I'm writing about how something invented since the Eisenhower Administration is weakening the moral fiber of America and undermining our ability to resist the insidious threat posed by foreign forces. It isn't the Education Department -- no, that bloated federal agency is beyond help. It isn't MTV or the National Organization of Women. All of these insult the Republican, but this threat cannot be avoided, tuned out, or exorcised away by a God-fearing minister.
(10/30/01 11:00am)
The past six weeks have been something out of the sort of book you find in an airport departure lounge. A horrible attack on America. An evil billionaire bad guy hiding out in an exotic foreign locale. Everybody except George W. Bush panicking at the sight of white powder. But we're at war now, and the media is all over comparing Sept. 11 to Pearl Harbor and the present to World War II. Our grandparents are sitting back in their armchairs overdosing on schadenfreude as they sit around and discuss how much better things were in the old times:
(10/16/01 9:00am)
In my ceaseless quest to avoid my internship debacle of last spring, I recently attended the Employer Information Fair hosted by our helpful Career Services office.
(10/02/01 9:00am)
Like many people, I have only experienced the disaster of Sept. 11 vicariously, through the electronic and paper media. It seems guilty to affirm that one of the images that went through my head as I saw the Trade Center burn was an image of my stock portfolio, gone in a microsecond as each tower collapsed into a heap of rubble and the human cost made itself horribly clear, live on CNN. Yet other people's pain would strike me in a very real way the following Monday.
(08/14/01 9:00am)
Last week, a USA Today reporter and an Israeli government official sought a place to hold an informal interview. Walking down Jaffa Street on a busy Thursday noontime, they looked at the Sbarro restaurant but rejected it, for it was too crowded, full of hungry tourists and families who had seen the green, white and red sign known the world round for quality Italian food. A man walked into the restaurant with a pouch at his waist, asked a clerk about how long a take-out order of spaghetti would take, then detonated a bomb that killed 15 people outright and wounded dozens more.
(08/06/01 9:00am)
The recent successful intercept by the ExoAtmospheric Kill Vehicle has again raised the profile of the United States' controversial national missile defense (NMD) system. It is deemed to undermine global stability by breaking the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. Its cost is derided by all those who feel that $100 billion could be better spent on social programs or other defense spending items. There are also constant claims that such a system would not work, or in any case is designed to face a threat that is obsolete. While all of these arguments make good sound bites for cost cutting politicians, the NMD system promises America a future that is morally superior to the past we will leave behind, less expensive (when put into perspective) than it might seem, and militarily aligned for a defensive peace rather than an offensive war.
(07/17/01 9:00am)
By about May of this year, there was little that could faze me about New Jersey drivers. Over the course of eleven weeks and 8,000 miles driven on behalf of my mortgage firm, I had been rear-ended twice, I had cursed and been cursed at for using a cell phone at 78 miles an hour and had my life threatened. That last was at the hands of a burly trucker who tried to push me into oncoming traffic, forcing me to zoom in front of him and give him the finger with both hands. He took the logical conflict-resolving step of waiting till we were both stuck in traffic again, then knocking on my window and threatening the lives of me and all who were dear to me.
(07/03/01 9:00am)
Should a moment of weakness cost a student $50?
(02/20/01 11:00am)
A recently published book asserts that IBM's German subsidiary manufactured and designed the Hollerith punch-cards that assisted the Nazis in persecuting the Jews from 1939 to 1945. On the same day the book hit the shelves, a lawsuit was thrown against IBM for assisting in the Holocaust. An outcry comes from radical African American members of the National Reparations Convention for trillions of dollars in reparations for hundreds of years of slavery and discrimination. Smith & Wesson, a venerable handgun manufacturer, is forced by various city governments to bear total responsibility for the sale of all guns to criminals and sanction all the sales of S&W dealers.
(02/06/01 11:00am)
My father takes us on a LOT of vacations to exotic locales. He does this because he couldn't survive two weeks in a foreign country without somebody with a command of simple division to convert foreign prices into dollars, a memory for airlines, code-sharing agreements, flight numbers, and time zones. So I've become an expert at long distance travel. I can pack for any climate in less than 60 minutes and have only one light bag and a backpack. I never need to check luggage in and I never have anything to declare.
(01/23/01 11:00am)
On January 16th, I read off the CNN.com website that, amid hyped up reports of a cancer-like "Balkans syndrome" among some residents of Kosovo, Vojislav Kostunica accused the NATO alliance of having a "depleted conscience" for its use of depleted uranium weapons in its 1999 air offensive. And it turns out that there exists an international body which can find and prosecute the entities responsible for poisoning the Serbian heartland with terrible radioactive weapons with a half-life of 10,000 years. We all know that this entity is the International Criminal Court. If the ICC decides to inveigle itself in this case -- as it has authority to do, since its charter considers it a "war crime" to use "poison weapons" -- then the DU episode will have serious consequences for American national security. Now that there's an alleged international uproar about possible cancer risks from depleted uranium munitions, a biased ICC prosecutor might justifiably indict U.S. officers for using DU and force a moratorium on the usage of DU until they get their studies done. Thus the ICC's actions can open up windows of opportunity to handicap U.S. forces in times of crisis.
(01/08/01 11:00am)
On December 31st of last year, President Clinton signed off on the treaty forming the International Criminal Court. This Court seeks, in its charter, the laudable goals of "Affirming that the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole must not go unpunished and that their effective prosecution must be ensured by taking measures at the national level and by enhancing international cooperation". Essentially, this International Criminal Court exists as a permanent tribunal for war crimes, instead of the ad hoc tribunals convened, for instance, at Nuremberg after the Holocaust and in The Hague after the Bosnia-Herzegovinia war. The ICC exists to put the world on notice that those who commit "crimes against humanity" will be held responsible for their actions by an institution that will hunt them down not years after the fact but days and hours. It sounds like a great idea; yet, like most great ideas it does not withstand the tests of reality. The reality is that the court infringes on the sovereignty of the United States, opens doors to politically motivated prosecution of American citizens, and cannot enforce its decisions without the consent of all parties subject to it -- a rare circumstance indeed.
(11/03/00 11:00am)
It seems natural to college students to select their leaders based on the intelligence that they display. After all, we live in a world of tests and grades where the person who remembers the most or the person who interprets the most gets the grade. This seems to be the root of Vice President Gore's appeal. He got better grades at Harvard than the Governor of Texas did at Yale. He lived his life in government from the U.S. Army to the U.S. Senate, studying, analyzing and generally getting a better grip on the issues that face our world today. This man knows the best for America. He wrote big, thick policy books like "Earth in the Balance." Heck, he even knows why Governor Bush's tax cuts aren't a good idea. A person who knows more about his opponent's plans than his opponent has a natural right to be the president, right?
(10/19/00 9:00am)
Certain commentators in The Dartmouth seem to believe that vouchers for religiously based schools would introduce students to a reality that hadn't existed previously. Jared Alessandroni's point, if I'm not mistaken, was that religious schools by the very notion of being founded by Jesuits or Jews may indoctrinate a student into certain belief patterns. Yet any school that teaches well indoctrinates a student into certain belief patterns. Civic service, respect for authority, and mental discipline were all values which were unconsciously bestowed upon me by my private and secular high school. Honesty, discipline and respect for democracy are taught -- or should be taught -- by good public schools; shall we then say that schools ought not to focus on ANY value system and rather focus on strict learning? No, because if we did then kids could learn from correspondence courses. School imparts values to kids. And therefore we ought to allow parents to choose the values that the kids are taught.
(10/13/00 9:00am)
1His position on gun control. George W.Bush successfully interprets the second amendment and allows all citizens to have their firearms and use them safely while enforcing the ability of the government to prevent criminals from having them.
(10/11/00 9:00am)
Before leaping to condemn Israel for "unnecessary" force against the new Palestinian Intifada, one ought to put oneself in the position of a scared soldier ordered to stop a riot. Your platoon is outnumbered ten to one, 40 against 400 rock-throwing people filled with blood lust. It's a confined area, and there are a thousand places for a sniper to hide. Some members of the crowd are brandishing AK-47s and M-16 assault rifles whose bullets punch through flak vests and helmets.