Leave it to the religious right to take complete opposites and equate them with each other. Faith prevails in the face of reason, I suppose.

The front page story on the ODE yesterday, which almost turned me on with its Xs and silhouetted man and woman, continues the long debate about pornography. Featured in the article was Pastor Sean McCartin. Regardless of his opinions, I must say that his name is quite excellent.

However, that’s where my praise for him ends. Sean starts off with bullshit: “Pornography offers sex without commitment.” Uhh…what? If porn is sex without commitment, then instead of going out to parties and looking for ‘drunk bitches’ I would be at home watching porn every Friday night.
Sure, you could consider masturbation sex without commitment, but commitment means having expectations of each other in a relationship. I definitely have expectations for Jin Junior, and he definitely has some for me (i.e. keep pumping blood into me).
If I was able to get sex without commitment, I wouldn’t be watching porn, now would I?

McCartin then goes on to talk about a ‘person’s risk-free relationship with porn”. Sure, it’s risk-free. So is my relationship with my backpack and my keyboard. What does he even hope to point out by this?

As a final note (I didn’t finish reading the article because Frathouse Fuckfest 2 was on HBO) I had a thought. With two incidents of public masturbation being reported in the library in the last few months, I know for a fact that Library Admin has been discussing the issue of allowing porn to be viewed in the library. On one hand, porn is legal. On another, it has been causing unrest and disgust in the library.
The thought of jacking off in the library is gross and embarassing. The only people that would be willing to do such a thing either have no sense of shame and embarassment, or have an ulterior motive and are truly focused on such. What if these library wankers are not perverts and horny hobos, but actually agents of the religious right? It makes complete sense! In their war against porn, they have repeatedly lost to the power of our great nation’s freedoms. Their traditional tactics and strategies have failed, and so they are resorting to new gimmicks to shock the American public into rejecting and restricting porn.

Well, I was looking at our website stats and we’re still doing pretty well, roughly 10,000 unique visitors per month, and reasonable numbers of hits. The not so good news is that about 25% of the total bandwidth was being eaten by Yahoo’s search robot. I’ve added a robots.txt file to the public_html directory and disallowed that robot indexing any file that might be kind of large (.pdfs and common web graphics files). Let me know if this does anything wonky.

Also, we continue to get searches for fake cocks and Rebecca Newell vagina. We know less about the latter than we might like, to be honest.

Bill Harbaugh is at it again. Having already filed ethics complaints against President Frohnmayer, to protest Johnson Hall’s unwillingness to release (public) Affirmative Action plan documents, the maverick economics professor is now questioning the legality of the UO’s “Underrepresented Minority Recruitment Program,” according to this story in the ODE today.

At question this time around is a recruitment program, which is described by the ODE as follows:

The UMRP is a $500,000-a-year program University administrators implemented in hopes of recruiting top-tier minority faculty to campus. It encourages departments to hire underrepresented minority faculty in tenure-related faculty positions by reimbursing the department for recruitment expenses. These perks, meant to draw potential faculty members, can amount to as much as $90,000 during a minimum of three years.

Harbaugh’s claim is that this compensation is a violation of the 14th Ammendment, and the Civil Rights Act, because it compensates faculty recruits solely based on their self identification as one of the federally listed, underrepresented classes. Frohnmayer is defending the programs legality, on the basis that it gives the money to departments, who then give it to the recruits, effectively bypassing Administration agency, and because the money becomes available only after the candidate is hired.

To further defend the program, the ODE trots out a few quotes from MCC advisor Steve Morozumi, to the effect that Harbaugh is an inveterate racist who is afraid of a diverse campus. Claiming that Harbaugh “holds a grudge about last year’s passage of the Diversity Plan,” Morozumi continued,

“I don’t think he has any understanding of history and the actual conditions that exist for people in the real world. There’s more of a good faith effort developing as a result of persistent efforts to get the University to recognize that we are behind the times in keeping pace with the rest of the world. Now we’re just beginning to move and so there’s some reason for hope, and that’s what’s alarming him.”

I don’t know Harbaugh that well, but I did interview him about his issues with the diversity building process on campus in this years Don’t Drink The Kool Aid Issue, available here, and Morozumi’s analysis seems waaay off. Then again, Morozumi is of the “not being a racist costs money” school of thought, while Harbaughs approach to diversity is considerably more nuanced. Harbaugh has real, credible critiques of the diversity-building process on this campus, as well as an alternative diversity plan, which can be accessed at oregondiversityplan.com. What makes Harbaugh take on the sacred cow of diversity, when everyone else is happy to just give or receive money and pretend like it solves the problem? I honestly have no idea, but this is certainly one of the most important debates we can have, and I’m glad that someone is asking questions.

It was a dark and stormy night in New Hampshire. Ten Republican candidates for president took the stage, apparently with the intention of “debating.” And so began two hours of pandering and expounding – the sound and the fury, all that jazz. I’ve pored over extensive highlight clips and pull quotes from the debate, and what follows is my astute political analysis. (more…)

Okay boys and girls, it’s history time!

Forty years ago, the Israeli Air Force launched Operation Focus, a massive airstrike that destroyed more than 450 Russian-built warplanes belonging to Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Nearly 200 Israeli aircraft participated in the strike, which allowed the Israelis to claim air superiority and permitted their jets to effectively support ground units. Egypt’s air force, which had been the largest and most modern air force in the Arab world at the time, was demolished and rendered nearly useless, while the Israelis lost only 19 planes.

The Israeli victory is one of the most astonishing in modern military history, with Israel tripling the area of its territory, humiliating the Arab community and stunning the international community. However, the victory was bittersweet as it led to the growing perception of Israel as a neo-colonial power rather than a scrappy underdog. More importantly, it dragged Israel into the never-ending conflict in the now occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Anyway, if you have the time, it’s interesting to take a look at a historical moment that has lasting repercussions to this day.

It’s finally here. The moment you’ve all been waiting for.

In the left corner we have safety, the ASUO, sissies and the crosswalk on Franklin. *boo, hiss*

And, in the right corner, it’s the issue with issues, the magazineosaurus, the champ, THE HATE ISSUE! *crowd goes nuts*

Y’all ready for this? *cue music*

L-uh-HET’S GET REEAADY TO RUUUUUUMBLE!!!!!!!!!!

*House comes down, pandemonium erupts. Read the fucking issue.*

It has come to our attention that the University of Oregon is now growing opium poppies on campus. Two specimens of Papaver Somniforum have been spotted behind the Knight Library. Clearly someone sees some value in these plants, which look for all the world like large weeds, because there is now a sign requesting that these “flowering plants” not be removed. The questions arising from this situation are endless… are these Afghan beauties for Das Frohn’s personal stash, or is the U of O going to ditch the education game entirely to concentrate on the more profitable pursuits of football and heroin production?

This story will almost certainly culminate in an unhappy ending. These beautiful and potent plants want only to live, survive, and someday create delicious poppy seeds, but as wikipedia notes “Possession of any part of non-‘low morphine’ Papaver somniferum other than the seed is outlawed in the United States and is listed as a Schedule II controlled substance by the Drug Enforcement Administration.”Unless we truly are on the cusp of becoming a narco-University, these beautiful specimens will probably be destroyed by some University maintenance worker.

We believe in the right of these entities to live full life-cycles, free from violence and the persecution of the DEA. We have named the larger of these two poppies “Dopey, the friendly campus opium poppy,” and we will keep our readership abreast of all developments in this story. Please, President Frohnmayer, prove your commitment to botanical diversity and save these oppressed and marginalized species.

In a move to push reform to the forefront of the upcoming 2007-2008 Senate agenda, the freshly elected batch of Campaign for Change politicians (as well as returning senators Kyle McKenzie and Athan Papailiou) have submitted their expectations of the new executive in the following letter to Emily McLain and San SunOwen: (more…)

A few names you should know next year …

Chief of Staff – Jen Lleras

Campus Outreach Coordinator – Monica Cho

Public Relations Coordinator – Man-Ying Fong

International Student Advocate – Agnes Yuen

Gender and Sexual Diverstiy Advocate – Zach Wagner

Legislative Coordinator – Mike Filipelli

Universtiy Liaison – Alison Fox

Graduate/Law Student Advocate – Jumane Redway

Elections Coordinator – Kendall Tylee

Programs Administrator – Emma Kallaway

The new executive has yet to make their appointments to the new senate, but we’ll keep you posted.

So, two days behind the curve is pretty untimely by blogosphere standards, but I just had to blog this. CNN anchor, xenophobe and sensationalist, Lou Dobbs is under fire this week for, get this,  exaggerating leprosy statistics and blaming his reported increases on illegal immigrants. The whole story is here, including a comprehensive debunking of Mr. Dobbs’ fearmongering bridge too far. You know you’ve entered a dark age in politics, when the old “fear the lepers” chestnut makes a comeback. Oh, and is it surprising that Pat Buchanan has Dobbs’ back on this? Maybe it’s time to consider opening “populist pundit colonies” to cleanse our society of this uncleanliness. (Hat Tip: Hit & Run)