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(09/09/10 4:34am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>One year ago today, one of my closest friends, Peter Duong, stepped in front of a car, was struck and died. After his funeral days later, I wrote my very first column for the Indiana Daily Student arguing for several methods to prevent other students from having their lives cut tragically short by the lack of a safe pedestrian environment on campus. It was my hope then that the tragic and preventable death of Peter and the pain that the campus, his family, his friends and I were all feeling would at least serve as a catalyst for changing our campus’s attitudes and practices toward pedestrian safety.It is now my hope that the anniversary of his death can do the same for us again.Since that day one year ago, the University and the City of Bloomington have worked to create safer environment for the tens of thousands of pedestrians on campus. The Bloomington Campus Traffic Safety Task Force was established by Provost and Executive Vice President Karen Hanson to evaluate our campus’s pedestrian safety situation, and it came up with several potentially beneficial recommendations, including the installation of several crosswalks at locations where there are frequent pedestrian crossings.Enhanced crosswalks have been installed in three of these locations on campus, including the exact site where Peter was killed, which I argued for in my first column. Enhanced crosswalks include features that force drivers to slow down and provide a safe spot in the center of the street for pedestrians to stand while waiting for traffic to slow. UNFINISHED WORKAlthough these crosswalks are a good thing, IU should not consider their work done. There is too much left incomplete. Less than a week after Peter’s death, three other pedestrian-vehicle incidents were reported on campus. I bet this wasn’t just a freakish week to cross the street; the coverage was simply higher because one of our students was killed earlier that same week. How many unreported accidents have happened this week?IU has a pedestrian safety problem, a problem that a few new crosswalks is not going to fix. We need more changes, now. There are a number of ways that the University could reduce the potential for more deaths on campus beyond simply adding three new crosswalks. REDUCING CONGESTIONThe most effective way to reduce the risk of pedestrian deaths is simply by reducing the number of cars that are on campus at any given time. In the early 1990s, a transportation plan was proposed that would increase the transportation fee charged to every student. This fee would fund an increase in the number and frequency of buses and increase the number of bike racks on campus. I strongly suggest that the University reevaluate that proposal. Another way to reduce vehicle congestion would be based on a proposal by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg: charging people to drive. I propose that the University and the City of Bloomington charge everyone driving immediately next to or through campus on 10th Street, Third Street, Jordan Avenue, Fee Lane and Seventh Street a small fee to access these roads during peak pedestrian hours. Charging an amount as small as $.25 or $1 would be effective at increasing safety and could raise significant revenues for the University that could be used for increasing public transportation opportunities. Congestion pricing would push a significant percentage of the traffic in and around campus onto roads further away from the pedestrians and would dramatically increase the safety of students and professors when they cross the street on campus. CROSSWALK SAFETY Increasing the safety of the crosswalks that we have and redesigning them to prevent future tragedies should be a top priority. Pedestrian-activated stop lights, for example, are a highly effective way to reduce the risk of future student deaths. Close to my high school there was a light that was activated only by pedestrians that required all traffic to stop to allow individuals to cross. We found it to be highly useful. Raised crosswalks — which are basically large speed bumps that double as a crosswalk — are also excellent because they force vehicles to slow down whenever they enter a pedestrian crossing zone. A SYSTEM OF SAFETYThe first week of school, police officers were stationed at crosswalks around campus to pass out flyers about how to cross the street. Frankly, I find that a bit insulting. Almost all students know exactly how to cross the street safely; that isn’t the problem.The average pedestrian or driver crosses the street or drives through a crosswalk in a perfectly rational and safe way. The problem is not individualized; the problem with campus safety is that the system of safety that we have does not give individual drivers or pedestrians incentive to walk or drive in the safest way possible. We need to redesign the way we cross the street. Remodeling a few crosswalks is not enough. By looking forward to new possibilities, we can help to nurture an environment of safety that could have prevented the death of one of my closest friends.E-mail: zammerma@indiana.edu
(09/01/10 4:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>College textbooks are expensive. University students are a captive market for textbooks. At a regular bookstore, if a book is too expensive, it likely won’t be bought. At a college bookstore, however, students are required by their professors to purchase books for their classes regardless of the exorbitant price tag that may be printed on the back of the book. They either have to dig into their wallets and pay an inflated price for a book that isn’t worth half of what it costs or not buy the book and suffer educationally.Students don’t have a choice but to be ripped off. Students need protection from textbook companies taking advantage of them. Unnecessary textbook industry practices are designed precisely to make them pay more than they need to for books that they are required to purchase.In short, we’re all being scammed. On average, textbook companies come out with a new edition for every textbook they offer every three years. Many of these revisions are entirely unnecessary, adding no new information to textbooks in fields like geography or mathematics that have had few or no developments since the last edition. It is highly doubtful Antarctica has moved too much since the last edition of an atlas came out, and yet atlases are updated about once every three years along with other college educational materials. With every new edition of a textbook, publishing companies increase the cost of the book by an average of 45 percent over the cost of the older version of the same textbook, even if no new information has been added. If these revisions were actually adding information from new developments in the fields these textbooks address, these expensive revisions might at least have some benefit. But more than 75 percent of university faculty surveyed nation-wide in 2004 indicated that they found these revisions unjustified and unnecessary at least half of the time. Basically, we’re paying more for the same old information in the last book. Another questionable tactic that publishing companies use to force college students to pay more for their required educational materials is the process of “bundling” expensive extras like DVDs and CDs with their textbooks. More than 50 percent of college textbooks in the United States are “bundled” in this manner. This allows the publishers to justify charging even more outrageous prices for books simply because it comes with something extra. Something extra that 65 percent of American collegiate faculty members indicate they find “rarely or never” useful in aiding education in their classrooms, according to a 2004 survey. Students, a market who are required to buy textbooks, need some sort of way to limit these unfair practices. Professors should not be forced by the publishing companies into requiring a new edition for their classes when the information presented in the older, less expensive version is equally applicable and educational. And students should not be forced into paying more for a book because it has extra materials “bundled” with it that they never use. There are multiple ways that universities, faculty, governments and individuals could avoid paying these inflated prices for their supplemental educational materials. Universities and their faculty could be pioneers in the use of E-books, which are a fraction of the cost of traditional textbooks and often come with more interactive educational features that are actually useful at no extra cost. E-reserves, a system that Indiana University already has in place, could be the perfect jumping board for a University-wide E-book program. IU could easily encourage its professors to use this program for sharing their chosen textbooks with their students and save individual students hundreds of dollars in the process. Governments could stipulate that textbook prices may not be unnaturally inflated and could encourage the use of used and unbundled textbooks. The governments in Canada and the United Kingdom have programs that limit the cost of college textbooks, and they’ve gotten significant results.A textbook that costs $100 in the United States costs less than $55 in the UK and Canada, despite being exactly the same except that they spell words like color “colour.” Individuals can also beat the system by buying old editions of used textbooks online. The vast majority of the time, old editions of textbooks have almost exactly the same information as the new editions except for perhaps a new preface or introduction and differing page numbers. Students, of course, should verify first that the old textbooks really do have the same information before purchasing old editions.But the inconveniences associated with older editions are minor compared to the potential benefits of saving literally hundreds of dollars per textbook. Old editions often cost less than $10, while the new editions can be more than $200.The savings are definitely worth the small inconvenience of having to figure out the page numbers on the syllabus correspond to those in your older edition of the book. A captive market should not be left exposed to the whims and fancies of a profit-seeking group. Publishing companies are understandably taking advantage of students — their goal is to make the maximum profit that the market will allow, and it makes sense for them to get us to pay hundreds of dollars for textbooks. But when students — the consumers of publishing companies’ products — are effectively obligated to pay whatever the companies charge, the market is not free and is not fair. E-mail: zammerma@indiana.edu
(08/27/10 12:57am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>DEFINITE NOUN is officially over, and the NOUN is officially here. This season of GERUND may be one of the best opportunities you will ever have to DRAMATIC VERB your family, friends and community as national hardship is upon us. While DEFINITE NOUN looks for answers to a multitude of problems, you will have a chance to plan your PLURAL NOUN this NOUN and perhaps in doing so realize a little something about yourself. Potential NOUN: On your way down the street, you hear the piercing ding of the PLURAL NOUN. Your hand digs into your CLOTHING ARTICLE for PLURAL NOUN and a few loose bucks — not because you are trained to respond this way but because you want to VERB people in need, no matter how they arrived in their terrible situations. Just giving is enough. You know that the GROUP OF PEOPLE is a credible organization that VERB. Potential NOUN: By giving PLURAL NOUN to a group who will use it for the greater good, without NOUN, you are creating a level playing field for those less ADJECTIVE than you. Giving the gift of NOUN to those in need could mean a/an ADJECTIVE life for the poor in a wealthy nation. You believe in NOUN PHRASE. Potential NOUN: You discover that a family friend has lost her or his NOUN. With the holidays -ING VERB and the threat of his or her heat being shut off, you decide to help by –ING VERB and offering whatever resources people can spare. This is a small but powerful NOUN for a family who is less fortunate, a small NOUN that you hope would be PAST TENSE VERB to you in the case of your own NOUN. Potential NOUN: It would be a powerful NOUN of solidarity if that company had taken a few PLURAL NOUN on the whole, instead of -ING VERB off its workers during the holiday season. You would have done it because you understand the NOUN OR ADJECTIVE of the dollar to keep a family ADJECTIVE. If only you and your NOUN owned that NOUN, there would not have been the wasteful GERUND that brought you to –ING VERB a needy family. You believe in public ownership of production. Potential NOUN: You decide to live in the NOUN this ADJECTIVE season, -ING VERB each second for all that it is worth and then some. Life is ADJECTIVE, and you are living in the NOUN. Potential NOUN: You see your life ADVERB rather than on a continuum. You ascribe to liberation theology. Final NOUN: You are a modern socialist. There it is, simple, ADJECTIVE and powerful. Go back and re-read; there is no tomfoolery here. Equal NOUN, public NOUN, liberation theology. Not so ADJECTIVE, now, is it? E-mail: Your e-mail could be here!
(08/25/10 1:41am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>All of us know someone who has been afflicted with a bad case of the Frightened Freshman. The list above is your first step to avoiding all the clichés, conundrums and calamities that tragically often come with the first year of college. Fortunately, this social disorder is one of the most easily avoidable diseases you can contract on campus (STIs are another story). There are numerous treatments to help alleviate the sickening symptoms of this unfortunate condition if you happen to accidentally contract it. Freshmen, don’t be a cliche. Take these tips to heart and avoid the classic slip-ups that often accompany your first year. If you have more ideas of things that freshmen should avoid being associated with during their first year on campus, comment here.
(08/25/10 1:31am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>This weekend, on the 47th anniversary of his “I Have a Dream” speech, thousands of protesters are planning to rally on the hallowed ground where Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his most famous and historically significant speech, arguing for racial tolerance and inclusion.But they will not be there to celebrate his memory. They will not be there to celebrate his legacy. They will not be there to strive for the causes he championed or likely would have championed were he alive today. They will not be there for any reason even superficially relating to Martin Luther King, Jr., Apparently this makes sense to Glenn Beck and the Tea Party. They will be there because they have a very deep-seated but ill-defined feeling of anger. About what? That depends on who you ask. Taxes, the deficit, growing public debt, tyranny, a socialist agenda, banning fishing in America, an Islamic cultural center, immigration, a decidedly vague but equally emphatic concern for the Constitution (I wonder where that was when Bush was in office). The reasons that they list for their anger are rarely cohesive or consistent from person to person. In short, they are basically just a pile of P.O.O.P. (People Opposing Overspending Politicians). All of these reasons were actually given for why the POOPers were angry at a Tea Party Protest. Members of the rally will be there on this particular date purely because of “divine providence,” said Beck, the rally’s organizer. And to avoid any neighborhood that has more than a few token African Americans. That seems like a perfectly legitimate way to celebrate the legacy of ethnic tolerance and inclusion advocated for by MLK to me: avoid black people. They will be there, apparently, to avoid politics. But how can a rally with Glenn Beck and a large number of antagonized right-wingers that takes place at such an emotionally and politically charged date and location purport to be about anything but politics? When Beck originally envisioned the idea, he stated that he wanted to lay out a “100 year plan for America” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. How is it not incendiary to do that on the anniversary of “I Have a Dream”? Were there no other dates available? Beck and his minions have the constitutional right to have a rally at this time and place, but that doesn’t mean that they should. Beck has effectively turned a rally that would have been focused on being angry about everything and anything (apparently that was the goal) into a national controversy focused more on the time and location than the P.O.O.P.-ers’ highly unfocused rage. A word of advice to the P.O.O.P.-er-in-chief: Next time you plan a rally of thousands of angry black-person-avoidant protesters, don’t make it on a national civil rights anniversary on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
(08/23/10 11:53pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Timothy McVeigh was a radical Christian terrorist. The masterminds of the 9/11 attacks were radical Muslim terrorists. No God-fearing American would ever question the presence of a building affiliated with Christianity within blocks of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. And yet there is a veritable uproar over the planned building of the relatively innocuous Cordoba House , an Islamic community center near Ground Zero. This fracas can only be attributed to racially-tinged Islamophobia. Irrational American fear and loathing of “the other” is nothing new — every wave of immigrants to this country has faced discrimination and despicable public attacks. Opposition to the planned Islamic center at Ground Zero stems from the same repulsive vein of American history our immigrant ancestors faced. Critics argue this is not the case. It is merely the proximity to the site of the World Trade Center that incenses them. Where some would argue building the Islamic center “down the road” is acceptable, how far is far enough? What about Murfeesboro, Tenn., where the Islamic Center of Murfeesboro is being built in the face of public outcry and intolerance? Or perhaps Temecula, Calif., where protesting has occurred with signs reading “No more mosques in America.” Where were these protesters to defend the religious honor of those killed by a Christian in the Oklahoma City bombing? It is disgusting to see this irrational fear raging in the world of public debate today. It is disheartening to look to our past and see the acceptance of an idyllic American Christianity being unquestionably revered only blocks from the site where one of its own radical members murdered 168 people and wounded hundreds more. It is disconcerting to see self-righteous hypocrisy destroying the benefits of the First Amendment. E-mail: schammoo@indiana.edu, zammerma@indiana.edu
(04/30/10 1:56am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>In case you didn’t notice, our English-speaking friends across the pond are in the midst of one of their tightest national elections in half a century. For the first time in a long while, the two main political parties,the Labour (which most Americans will know as being the party of Tony Blair, although Gordon Brown is the current prime minister) and the Conservatives, are facing a serious challenge from the Liberal Democrats.In the United Kingdom, the two main political parties, the Labour and Conservative parties, are polling at 28 and 33 percent, respectively, about a week before their upcoming general election. The Liberal Democrats, usually a distant third, are polling at an impressive 30 percent. It may be surprising to know, however, that a party that is predicted to get at least 30 percent of the vote (the prediction keeps rising) will probably receive less than 13 percent of the seats. That’s simply unfair and undemocratic. The Liberal Democrats are projected to come in either first or second place, certainly ahead of the Labour party and possibly also in front of the Conservatives.Paradoxically, however, they are not likely to get more than 80 seats in the 650 member House of Commons. Why is this? Because the U.K., like the United States but unlike the rest of Europe, does not use proportional representation.It should be noted that almost everywhere except in the United States the word “liberal” simply means that one is in favor of classical ideas about the inherent freedoms and rights each individual is born with, and the term is not analogous with being left-wing — although the Liberal Democrats do happen to be slightly to the left of the other two parties. The Conservatives are slightly right-wing — although less so than the U.S. Republican Party — and Labour is fairly moderate, although it used to be quite leftist.In countries that use proportional representation, the total number of votes for each party in the nation directly corresponds to the number of seats that each party receives. Pretty straightforward.It makes perfect sense why countries that use proportional representation have consistently higher voter participation rates than countries like the U.S. and the U.K., who do not. When the results of an election do not at all reflect the way the voters actually voted, as is often the case in the U.S. (George W. Bush versus Al Gore, for example) and is almost always the case in the U.K., it makes sense why many eligible citizens would not even bother to vote.Proportional representation is simply more inherently democratic than systems like the one used in the U.S. and the U.K. E-mail: zammerman@indiana.edu
(04/21/10 12:26am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>If there’s one lesson I’ve learned about managing my money (which I’m notoriously bad at), it’s that banks are out to get me.Banks have set up a system designed to trap people into paying ridiculous amounts of money to them either for making what seem to be minuscule mistakes in managing their money or for doing absolutely nothing at all.Take the practice of automatic overdraft “protection” that many banks implement as an example.The bank that I use (although I’m planning on switching soon), JPMorgan Chase, takes each day’s purchases out of chronological order and instead ranks them from most to least expensive.This makes it possible for the bank to charge multiple overdraft fees at ridiculous rates for multiple purchases instead of just one if I happen to overspend by a few dollars.For example, let’s say that on Monday I had $100 in my bank account and made five small purchases of $2 each and bought lunch for $10, equaling $20 in purchases, but forgot that I had an automatic utility bill payment of $90 that was paid later on the same day, which would put my account in the red by $10.Under existing banking rules, Chase would reorder my transactions so that the bill payment came out of my account first, then the lunch for $10, putting my bank account balance at $0, then each of the five $2 purchases would put me in the red and allow Chase to charge me $35 for each of them.This would put me $185 in the red in my bank account, as opposed to what would have only been -$45 had they taken the transactions in chronological order, something that would have been much easier for a broke college student to fix.This is usurious and should be illegal. By taking my transactions out of chronological order and instead ordering them by how large each transaction is, the bank is effectively charging me a 1750 percent interest rate for $10 worth of small purchases. It is estimated that the banking industry collected more than $38.5 billion dollars from overdraft “protection” plans during 2009, so it makes sense why they do it considering that they make so much money by simply ripping consumers off.But any banking reform bill that comes before Congress should include a blanket ban on unsolicited enrollment in overdraft “protection plans,” something most banks automatically enroll their customers in without telling them how to get out of it. These practices are unethical and unfair to consumers.E-mail: zammerma@indiana.edu
(04/06/10 10:36pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The United States has been monetarily supporting the autocratic leadership of Egypt, under President Hosni Mubarak, for more than 30 years, giving more than $50 billion in military and development aid.It is a telling fact that Mr. Mubarak has been continuously president for the past 29 years. Political freedoms in Egypt are limited, with Freedom House, an international agency that ranks countries according to their levels of human rights, political freedoms and social opportunities, classifying the state of Egypt as “Not Free.”The Egyptian public is given no real opportunity to choose their leaders as enormous barriers exist to preclude any candidate who is not at least nominally loyal to Mubarak from running for office, and in presidential elections, only one name appears on the ballot: Hosni Mubarak.It is into this situation that an inspiring man has stepped and declared he’s interested in replacing the ailing, autocratic Egyptian president. Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and the former Director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, should receive the support of all people who are concerned about democracy, social justice and political freedom.ElBaradei has active public support, with over 60,000 followers on his Facebook page. He is waging a positive but low key (as is necessary in Egyptian politics under the current state of affairs) campaign that deserves the support of the international community.Needless to say, the United States should not be providing military aid to a regime whose president imprisons political opponents and critics and neither allows its people to freely criticize their government nor to freely choose their political representatives. Egypt is at an important crossroads. It is widely known that Mubarak is grooming his son to take over in his place after he either retires or dies, and the Egyptian public and the global community of aid donors to Egypt have an important choice to make.I cannot speak for the Egyptian people, but with an enormously intelligent and inspiring democrat — ElBaradei — actively campaigning for the presidency, the Western world — in particular, the United States — should strongly reconsider its aid commitments to Egypt (especially its military aid, which could be used to suppress dissent).If successful, ElBaradei could easily represent the future of democracy in the Middle East, one of the least politically free regions on Earth. Rather than supporting and financing costly and artificial regime change in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States could actually save money by ceasing to prop up autocratic governments such as Egypt’s and support a home-grown and publicly supported movement for democratic change in Egypt.If U.S. foreign policy leaders truly placed democracy as a value that should be held above all others when making decisions about aid and to whom they lend their support, they would end financial support of regimes like Egypt’s.E-mail: zammerma@indiana.edu
(03/24/10 12:47am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>According to the Book of Genesis and my delusional Christian relatives, the birth of linguistic diversity occurred after God punished hubristic humanity, speaking one language and being of one people, for building a tower in order “to make a name for (them)selves” (Gen. 11:4). In order to do this, the passage reads that God caused the people to speak more than one language (Gen. 11:7), giving birth to variation in language.I say, let the Tower of Babel fall.English is becoming increasingly dominant on the international scene, rendering the study of other languages unappealing to the vast majority of native English speakers. At the same time, the study of English becomes even more important to native speakers of other languages in search of career advancement and other social or economic benefits. This has created a modern situation analogous to the Tower of Babel.This is an error in judgement and represents a startlingly real risk to linguistic diversity, the significant loss of which would be a veritable tragedy for humanity.There exist ways of expressing oneself in French or Arabic which are impossible to state in English and vice versa. The loss of such an ability (or the fact that so many millions of people have never even gained it) is truly sad.While it is certainly true that the need to learn other languages to communicate with people who do not speak English is lessened by the growing prevalence of English, there nonetheless exists a number of excellent reasons to become a speaker of more than one language. First of all, the belief among many native English speakers that they currently gain nothing from learning other languages is a delusion. Simply because English has become such a dominant language does not mean one gains nothing from learning non-native languages. When you study a completely different method of expression, you learn quite a lot about your own language and how you communicate, enhancing your self-understanding.Additionally, the study of a language serves as an excellent gateway to different cultural ideas from varying regions of the world, something to which many Americans could use quite a bit more exposure.Also, native speakers of languages other than English shouldn’t feel pressured to specifically learn English in order to advance in their careers.Language is one of the most intimate and important aspects of any society’s culture, and when a culture’s language seems threatened by an invasion of foreign languages, that culture might (and often does) seem threatened to the society’s members.There is nothing wrong with speaking English or even with the fact that it has become the lingua franca of the international community.But there is something wrong when that one language has such a dominant role in global society that it pushes the role and use of other widely-spoken languages to the side.E-mail: zammerma@indiana.edu
(03/09/10 12:54am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>IUSA has moderate issues with mismanaging its funds.To start, IUSA manages a budget of around half a million dollars (more than many small companies), although traditionally about 80 percent of that is given to on-campus organizations or pays for the Student Newspaper Readership Program (the program that provides free copies of the New York Times and the USA Today each weekday).Because of this worthy tradition of funding our student organizations, IUSA effectively exerts direct control over just $80,000 to $100,000 of its overall budget each year. This segment of IUSA’s budget is called the “Operating Budget.”This is where the potentially wasteful spending is occurring. Of the roughly $97,000 allocated to the Operating Budget this year, 49.1 percent is immediately allocated to IUSA itself. Some of this money is spent on reasonable things like the meager salary of Executive Board members, office supplies, photocopies, etc.Other parts are a bit more iffy. For example, roughly $2,000 is set aside to buy parking passes for IUSA members, and a whopping 10 percent of the Operating Budget is spent on expensive advertising costs. During a 90-minute interview about IUSA with current Executive Board members, Student Body President Peter SerVaas said when there is not enough advertising, “it’s hard for students to know who we are and what we’re doing.” Wouldn’t they know what IUSA was if its members were doing a better job?Overall, though, the current IUSA Administration has dramatically improved the budget situation.While it did raise the overall Operating Budget by 15 percent, it has reduced a lot of the areas where spending was wasteful in previous administrations. (SerVaas falsely claimed in the debate last week that they lowered it by 40 percent. This is not quite a lie, but it’s not quite true either. The current administration eliminated about 40 percent of last year’s budget in wasteful spending and moved it to other more useful projects.)For example, in the previous administration a single administrative assistant’s salary made up more than 30 percent of the total Operating Budget for all of IUSA. This year, the current administration eliminated that position and moved the money to places where it could be used more effectively, such as the campus Zipcar program. E-mail: zammerma@indiana.edu
(03/03/10 1:33am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>For centuries, our neighbor to the north has been grappling with an intense, often caustic and even violent debate about whether the province of Quebec should remain a part of Canada.It shouldn’t, both for the interests of the people of Quebec and the people of the rest of Canada.Quebec has never had a particularly good relationship with English Canada, dating from when England conquered New France (present-day Quebec) in the 1700s to October of 1970, when the Canadian Army occupied Quebec, arrested hundreds of pro-independence individuals without trying them and suspended all civil rights in Quebec.There is some residual persecution of Quebeckers by Anglophone Canadians (a cursory glance at a Facebook page discussing Quebec’s independence reveals an awful lot of Quebec-bashing: “Out of my country,” “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out,” etc.), and institutionalized discrimination against Francophones persists to this day. While all that is certainly true, the principal reason why Quebec should be independent is that the province — which is officially recognized as a nation by the Canadian Parliament (albeit as a “nation within Canada”) and as having a “distinct society” — deserves the right to self-determination and full sovereignty over its own national decisions.The Quebec sovereignty movement is not so much about separation as it is about self-determination, something largely denied to Quebeckers for about 400 years.While Quebec does have some limited self-determination as a Canadian province, its position is inferior to that of Canada as a whole, a nation from which it has a completely separate and distinct culture, language, political system and society. It also has a relationship that makes it a coequal of the other Canadian provinces (all of which are culturally and linguistically English and Canadian), which are just subunits of Canada’s culture and society as a whole.An analogous situation would be if Canada somehow came to own the United States and declared it would value the entire United States politically and culturally as a single Canadian province. A similar thing has happened to Quebec, and it’s more than somewhat insulting. Canada would end what has become a half-century long political struggle between Quebec and the rest of Canada by allowing Quebec to become independent. The bitter rhetoric between federalist and separatist politicians would finally be put to an end, and Canada and Quebec could move past this long and bloody debacle. Quebec believes itself to be — and, in fact, is — a culturally and societally equal partner to Canada and not merely an inferior subunit of it. It is time that Canada and the international community started treating the province like one. E-mail: zammerma@indiana.edu
(02/22/10 11:37pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Despite what you may have been taught, the Civil War’s causes were almost entirely unrelated to the issue of slavery. Slavery wasn’t an issue until the end of the war, when using the North used it to its advantage.The war was fought primarily over whether states have a right to secede from the Union.The inclusion of a right to secede in our constitution, which would lay out specific situations in which a state or states had the right to leave and what specific steps and benchmarks have to be met to go about doing so, might have helped us avoid one of our nation’s most tragic armed conflicts.This issue is not merely an academic one. Multiple nations are grappling with the issue of secession today.This, notably, includes our neighbor to the north. Canada has been mired in a half-century-long political conflict over whether the French-speaking province of Quebec has a constitutional right to secede from the federation.If Canada and other nations that have had conflicts with separatist groups had the foresight to embed a conditional right of secession in their constitutions it is much less likely the issue of secession would have had such an enormous impact on the political environment and culture of nations like Canada and others (many of which have experienced severe violence in attempting to decide whether this right exists). Perhaps most importantly, if the United States and other nations would willingly choose to embed a constitutional right to secede within their legal frameworks, the potential millions of people who may die in future conflicts regarding this fundamental legal question may be spared.Email: zammerma@indiana.edu
(02/17/10 2:29am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Don’t let France’s obsession with such stereotypical “feminine” things as cuisine and fashion fool you; France is no wimp. Despite the fact that France hilariously once had a national war flag that was entirely white and that they opposed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, France is not at all a nation of effete wimps, as the commonly held American stereotype loves to remind us. Rather, France has had an extremely long and intimate relationship with violence, even rivaling that of the United States.From the French Revolution of 1789 (at the height of which 50 people were being executed each day), Napoleon’s conquest of all of Europe and the brutal occupation of dozens of colonial territories, France has shown that it does not merit being considered among the most violence-fearing states in history. Considering France as such shows a startling lack of knowledge of world history and a short-sighted and politically convenient view of France, one of our nation’s most loyal allies. France has a long history of violence. For example, during the war over the French occupation of Algeria in the 1950s and ’60s under Charles de Gaulle, France lost around 30,000 troops and killed as many as one million Algerians, mostly civilians.And during the French occupation of Indochina, France lost almost 100,000 troops and killed more than 750,000 Vietnamese.Perhaps the example most frequently given that supposedly links France to military cowardice is World War II, in which it was occupied by Germany. In fact, during the entire period of the German occupation, France had one of history’s most active and successful resistance movements, which arguably helped lead to Germany’s eventual defeat in the war. And the apparent capitulation of France to the demands of German occupation is more accurately classified as a fairly wise (but difficult) decision by one man (Marshal Philippe Pétain) to save his country from what was likely to be total annihilation at the hands of Germany.And when people make fun of France’s apparent lack of military prowess, they conveniently overlook that slightly short man named Napoleon who dominated and conquered the entire continent of Europe. The point of all of this is not that violence is at all a good thing or even that modern France is a particularly violent society in comparison to the United States or other countries, but merely that the modern American stereotyped views of France as a cowardly and quickly capitulating state are inaccurate and entirely irreconcilable with France’s history of conquest, aggression and domination. Many Americans have simply fallen for the war-mongering and drum-beating used by the previous administration to ostracize anyone who opposes America’s bull-headed determination to go to war at any cost, and France is simply an undeserving victim of this unfortunate indoctrination.E-mail: zammerma@indiana.edu
(02/02/10 11:51pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>In 1932, right in the middle of the Great Depression, the tiny hamlet of Wörgl, Austria, was having a relative economic boom that one observer declared “borders on the miraculous,” while the rest of Austria was hemorrhaging jobs. In under one year, Wörgl actually saw employment increase and allowed for the successful construction of a bridge, new housing, a ski jump and a reservoir. How’d they manage to be so successful during the middle of the Great Depression? Through the use of a local currency.Local currency is exactly what it sounds like – currency that is produced and circulated by citizens in one small locale for use exclusively in that same locale – and has been used in cities in the United States (like Ithaca, New York) and around the world for many years, including one experiment in local currency in Bloomington called the BloomingHOUR. Bloomington should restart this experiment in local currency.The benefits of local currencies are many, perhaps most obviously because local currencies are limited to exclusive use within the community in which they are issued, keeping money in the local economy instead of sending it many miles away.Local currencies also have less obvious benefits, such as the way they help reduce carbon dioxide emissions by encouraging the purchase of goods produced locally rather than those shipped from far-flung locales.Additionally, local currency use can help to negate the disadvantageous effects of a larger-scale economic downturn because they insulate smaller communities from such downturns. Because local currencies create a network of inter-supporting businesses and consumers that are more independent of the larger economy, communities that use local currencies are less likely to be as negatively affected by recessions.Purchasing power is also increased through the use of local currencies because of the increased amount of money, which in turn increases the demand for local goods and services.Because local currencies are limited to use within a smaller area, the velocity with which they circulate is much faster than that of regular currency, which results in increased economic activity in the local community. Because local currencies use their value more quickly than normal currencies, they circulate much faster, generating as much as 12 to 14 times more employment than that of traditional currencies.One of the lessons of the Great Recession should be that excessive economic globalization can have extreme negative consequences. When one area of the world faces an economic downturn, the rest of the world is inevitably affected as well. Through the use of local currencies, some of the more negative potential implications of financial globalization can be limited.E-mail: zammerma@indiana.edu
(01/26/10 12:40am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The Obama administration’s performance on health care reform has been abysmal. The bare minimum that was required to have my support for this reform package was the inclusion of a public option. Once that was out, so was I. Our economy is still in the crapper. While I understand that not all of the blame lies with Obama, he certainly could have done more. His economic policies are focused too much on helping the well-off and not enough on helping average working people. The banking and auto industry bailouts were expensive and it’s not even entirely clear to me that they were necessary.In addition, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s performance has been lackluster at best, and it is becoming increasingly evident that he should be sacked.This is the one area in which the Obama administration has made some real and significant improvements over the Bush administration. Obama’s Iran strategy really seemed to be making progress up until the June elections there, and the gradual thawing of relations with Cuba is a step in the right direction. I like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s newly head-on and surprisingly blunt approach to cyber security and Internet freedom in China and other authoritarian countries, and, overall, I think her straightforward and hard-working style is paying off. Also, despite some criticism from the international community, I think the U.S. reaction to the crisis in Haiti was well-managed and effective.The President campaigned on the idea of extending equality for all Americans. Some of his ideas were fundamentally flawed even then, such as refusal to support same-sex marriage. However, I am realistic enough to admit that no viable candidate for the presidency could be in favor of same-sex marriage and win. He did, however, pledge to end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act. Far from doing this, the President has actually instructed federal attorneys to support the Defense of Marriage Act in two court cases involving suits against the federal government over the act’s constitutionality and has refused to take the initiative to end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen delivered absolutely no concrete results, and the cap and trade bill appears likely to be killed by Congress.Grade: D
(01/20/10 4:28am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>In 29 states (including Indiana), it is completely legal to fire someone or deny them employment entirely because they are gay or transgendered.Your employer could literally say, “You are a great employee, but I am firing you anyway because I don’t like gay people,” and the employee could do absolutely nothing to fight the unfair termination of his or her employment.There is simply no reason or excuse for the Employee Non-Discrimination Act not to be passed at the national level.Is a country where it is completely legal for a bigoted boss to blatantly discriminate against an employee based on his or her sexual orientation really a country where you want to live and work? I certainly know how I answer that question, and U.S. employers risk losing talented employees if more people answer how I do.Congress, on the other hand, is having great difficulty deciding how it should answer that same question. For decades, gay rights advocates have been asking Congress to expand basic anti-discrimination protections for gays and lesbians – and it is something they have consistently failed to do.It’s already illegal to discriminate in employment based on gender, religion and ethnicity. Apparently gays don’t make the cut. It’s far past the time that this problem get fixed.While gay rights activists have been making the incredibly reasonable demand to be protected from being fired, the Republican Party has controlled one or both houses of Congress and/or the White House (and we all know how incredibly progressive and gay-friendly Republicans are). Now that Democrats control roughly 60 percent of both houses of Congress and the White House, there is no longer any legitimate excuse for not passing this common-sense legislation.Polls have consistently shown that a majority of Americans support these protections, and a large number of local and state initiatives to protect gays from workplace discrimination have passed at the ballot box. Congressional politicians have nothing to fear but the unrestrained bigotry of religious leaders like Pat Robertson.While our country is caught in the middle of one of the worst unemployment crises in nearly a century, every job lost unnecessarily to bigotry is one job too many. If President Obama and leaders in Congress truly care about decreasing unemployment and keeping their campaign promises to pass ENDA, they should pass ENDA now.Because it’s projected that Republicans are probably going to gain seats in the 2010 Congressional elections, it is imperative that this bill become law before members of Congress go back to their districts to campaign.Congress should pass ENDA now.Email: zammerma@indiana.edu
(01/15/10 3:14am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The trial to determine the legitimacy of Proposition 8 – the ballot initiative repealing same-sex marriage in California – is currently underway. The question is whether the measure violates the federal constitution’s protections of equality.While banning a specific group of people from participating in an aspect of civic life that is legal for everyone else clearly does violate the constitution in my (and a growing number of other Americans’) opinion, supporting the legal challenge to this ban is fool-hardy and naive.If you think same-sex marriage should be legal, you should not support challenging Prop 8 in federal court.The reason is really quite simple: We will almost certainly lose. It’s true that we may win small victories working our way through the lower federal courts, but these will be short-lived victories because the current U.S. Supreme Court is absolutely not going to side with us.While I assume their intentions are pure, the lawyers and groups suing to challenge Prop 8’s constitutionality need to take a closer look at their endgame – and it doesn’t look good.In the years since Bush’s appointments of Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court has taken a turn towards the right, with a solid 5-4 conservative majority. There is no way a Supreme Court composed as the current one is would side in favor of overturning marriage inequality.Overturning a law is one thing; overturning judicial precedent is quite another. All it would take to overturn marriage discrimination at the state or federal level would be legislative action – either Congress or a state general assembly voting to end the discriminatory practice of allowing only straights to marry. It would be better for the decision to come from the Supreme Court.However, supporters of ending unfair marriage inequality should not be happy about potentially seeing this case before a conservative-leaning court. Supreme Court cases are much less frequently overturned or even revisited than regular legislative issues or lower court rulings.Because of the high degree of likelihood that the Supreme Court will not rule in support of ending unequal marriage laws, this case could potentially set the gay rights movement back decades.A defeat before the Supreme Court would be devastating, potentially taking decades to be overturned or nullified by a constitutional amendment. Before we take a case to the highest court, we need to be absolutely sure that we have the numbers necessary to win; the stakes are just too high to risk it otherwise.If you, like me, are one of the 40 to 47 percent of Americans who support ending the unequal application of marriage laws, you should stick to supporting legislative and state court initiatives for now.We need to wait at least until we have one more solidly liberal member of the Supreme Court before we challenge marriage inequality. This challenge to Prop 8 is dangerous and foolish.E-mail: zammerma@indiana.edu
(01/13/10 12:33am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Last year Spain became the first country on Earth to extend legal rights to animals , granting the great apes (chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans) – humanity’s closest relatives – the right to life, individual freedom and prohibition of torture. The rest of the world should follow the lead of the Spanish but go a few steps further by including all highly intelligent animals, not just apes.Certain species of highly intelligent animals should be granted limited but basic legal rights normally applied exclusively to human beings, which would create a sort of expanded community of non-human persons. This expanded community would include humans, who would of course be granted the largest number of rights. In addition to humans, I propose that apes (gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees and bonobos), cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) and elephants be granted the rights of individual liberty, life and prohibition of torture.The reason behind this is simple: It’s morally intolerable to treat beings that are this intelligent with any degree of cruelty.All of these species possess intellectual capabilities at least comparable to those of a small child, if not more so in some respects.Scientists have established that dolphins have highly developed individual personalities, are fully conscious of their existence and capabilities, perform extremely well-coordinated group hunting activities and are capable of planning for the future.Chimpanzees – with whom we share around 98 percent of our genetic material – are capable of complicated interpersonal relationships, feeling intense emotions and communicating relatively complex thoughts and expressions. Elephants are capable of experiencing compassion and grief and are fully self-aware. All three species are capable of tool use and have been proven to have some components of culture, passing down certain area-specific behaviors from generation to generation.There is some debate as to whether or not it constitutes language, but each of these species also employs highly complex communications systems and can even be taught artificial human languages (chimpanzees and gorillas have even been taught sign language).When dealing with beings intelligent enough to engage in such advanced and human-like behaviors, I find it impossible not to see something at least somewhat human present behind their obviously sentient eyes. If it is wrong to detain, kill or torture a human for no reason, it should be wrong to do the same with these human-like animals as well.Members of these species that are already being detained should be released unless they cannot survive in the wild, and we should stop exploiting them for entertainment in film and tacky amusement parks.I understand that there is some educational value in keeping members of these species in zoos, but it is patently obvious that an even more educational and fulfilling experience would be to see these creatures in their natural habitats, where they are free to move where they wish and do as they please.E-mail: zammerma@indiana.edu
(01/11/10 3:11am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>We could do without the South. Let’s face it, they’re just holding us back.From outdated ideas on religion and politics to big cultural differences such as the overabundance of Southern adult bookstore billboards and the grave matter of what to call our bubbly beverages (that’d be soda), there are simply far too many differences between us and the South to make this strained relationship work.First and foremost, I have to address the pressing problem of that highly unfortunate accent. Whenever I hear the maddeningly slow drawl of an unrefined Southern accent, it’s as if a cheese grater is unrelentingly chafing against the innermost essence of my soul.While I am perfectly aware that the speakers of certain accents or dialects speak that way through no fault of their own, I’ve chosen to go ahead and ignore that (if Republicans can ignore facts like evolution, why can’t I?) and associate this accent with the retrograde philosophies that so often accompany it. And I feel only slightly ashamed to admit I have the sneaking suspicion that anyone with a Southern accent is at least a little bit sneaky. (WARNING: Republican logic follows!) Look at John Edwards: he cheated on his terminally-ill (and less-accented) wife with a girl who had an unrefined and southern name. See! All people with Southern accents aren’t to be trusted. Secondly, there’s the issue of the utterly titanic chasm separating the South from the rest of the country in terms of religion and politics. This is a region that still has states with elements of the Confederate flag prominently featured on some of their flags and in which all but two states have a constitutional ban on the recognition of any form of committed union outside the marriage of a man and a woman. And I have a strong hunch that the 43 to 47 percent of Americans that still persist in thinking the Earth was created less than 10,000 years ago by an aged bearded man in the sky, or the 41 percent of Americans who still think that global warming either isn’t happening or isn’t man-made, are largely concentrated in the South. If these facts are anything but disturbing to you, I strongly encourage you to immediately move to Mississippi.Another reason we’d be better off without the former Confederate States of America is because of the well-established fact that the South is home to most of the United States of America’s douchebags.And take a gander at this factoid: About half of the 20 worst-performing states in GDP per capita, the poverty rate, the Human Development Index, CO2 emissions, obesity rates and life expectancy are in the South. If the South were to rise again, we’d instantly become at least twice as awesome of a country. So I’ve come to the weighty conclusion that it might just be best to sequester this population with a high percentage of douchebag-ery away from the rest of us through the convenient use of an international border. I, for one, would sleep better at night knowing that all young American girls with stupid names like Rielle are safe from the sneaky, dirty paws of Southerners such as John Edwards.