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THURSDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2012
So first contact with Vulcans is supposedly in 2063. Better get working on that warp drive, aerospace engineers!
Text your FFA submissions to 785-289-8351 or at kansan.com
Or that awkward moment when you and your husband get mistaken for brother and sister.
I wish you could submit pictures to the FFA... Life would be so much more visually stimulating.
Victoria Secret Fashion Show.
My boyfriend is way too good for me Don't tell him.
Jeff Withey tweeted that he wants to marry a Victoria's Secret model. The hopes and dreams of all the girls on campus have been crushed.
I'm now convinced the FFA editor hates engineering students...
Editor's Note: Actually, it's the people that send in the FFAs. Good thing this is the last FFA until January.
Obviously the FFAs that don't make it in live forever in a land of nothing and nonexistence.
Hey music school students, last time I checked playing the clarinet doesn't either. Sincerely, everyone else.
Babysitting my neighbor's snake over break: trying my hand at Parceltongue.
POLITICS
My spirit animal is Kerry Benson.
Finals week drinking game: every time you get a question wrong, take a shot of coffee.
I have big news! I am not going to be a father! HUZZAH!
The only reason that I'm showing up on the last day is to give my teacher the worst evaluation ever
The FFA editor is having a lot to say lately. I like that. I like everything about you! Love me! *Editor's Note: I love you too?*
Watching people Snapchat in public is my newest form of entertainment.
Hahahahahahahaha New Orleans Pelicans.
So far all I've done to prep for finals is play my guitar and get stoned. I am the ultimate procrastinator.
^^ I agree with him.
My roommate asked me if you had to be Greek to be in a sorority or fraternity. SMH
To the to-be-father, congrats or my condolences.
Some ramifications of re-electing Obama
With little over a month since the presidential election, analyzing what went wrong with the Romney campaign is a moot point. Three million registered republican voters stayed home while President Obama was able to capture enough votes in several swing counties within Virginia, Ohio and Florida to win his second term. To attempt to go over exit polls – which by their nature are inexact surveys – would be to lose focus on the current direction of the country.
In order to analyze the immediate and long term ramifications of Nov. 6, it is appropriate and beneficial to analyze the past 30 days, the next 60 days and what we've elected for ourselves. The president got what he wanted, his second term. If we take what we told the former Russian President Medvedev in March 2012, the president feels he'll have more flexibility to really do what he wants this term.
But what does that mean? Does that mean that the entire U.S. economy will be boosted by more part-time employment figures? It most likely means we're all going to feel a rush of patriotism and
adrenaline as we collectively fall off the fiscal cliff.
That's because the president has been on a month-long victory lap since his reelection. Forget the fact that the country is doing its best rendition of the Titanic and heading straight for the iceberg of government spending. But lets give the President a break, he hasn't passed a budget in years, so we'll understand if he doesn't quite know how to handle a fiscal debt crisis.
At least the president was honest about who he wanted to tax. And is it any surprise that polling showed the biggest issue for democratic voters on election day was taxing the rich? They want to spend the money, as long as someone else – one of those "fat cats" – foots the bill. Just last week, the President insisted that Congress not only agree to raise taxes on the "rich", but also to adopt his previously ignored full budget. Obama demands a $1.6 trillion tax increase over the next decade. He is firm in his stance that higher revenues – a fancy political way to say taxes – must come from marginal-rate increases and yet, he offers no policy rationale. He even wants to treat
$900 billion in spending cuts he agreed to in 2011 as if they count as new cuts. On top of that, the President wants to take the power of raising the debt ceiling away from Congress and place, yes you guessed it, in his hands. Well that makes sense; let's give the power to raise our debt ceiling to the person who blatantly wants to raise national debt. At this point, I'm assuming that the president wants to go for a record; the President who blew the most cash during an administration.
But at least we're all going to keep our insurance. As long as you ignore the fact that in response to Obamacare's provisions and business-killing agenda, more and more companies are cutting insurance for newly hired employees. Maybe the president should finally look into that Supply & Demand 101 course. Raise demand for health insurance, lower supply - since doctors can't justify the personal investment of medical school if they won't be able to make enough to even pay back student loans (see Bloomberg Aug. 29, article about how the doctor shortage may swell to 130,000 due to Affordable Healthcare Act cap) - and what do you get? Companies opting out of employee insurance and higher prices for health care.
And what about the great leaps in oil and natural gas production? The president sat down and lied to all of our faces when he talked about how he was the reason why gas and oil production has risen during his administration. How many times did we hear the President talk about his part in the growth in our nation's oil and natural gas production? Yet, with the election not a week old, the Department of the Interior issued a final plan to close 1.6 million acres of federal land originally slated for oil shale development. That's exactly what Mitt Romney attacked the President on during the debates. This administration has
played no real part in the growth of oil and natural gas production; the country's production has risen in spite of the President's actions. But we've seen this kind of behavior before; "you didn't build this" could easily have been "you didn't drill this."
So lets analyze what we've got here. A nation headed to fiscal disaster, higher health insurance costs and fewer people under coverage thanks to the worst domestic agenda in decades and an administration that is actively hampering domestic oil production. At least we've got a strong Commander-in-Chief who does all he can to protect the lives of American ambassadors and CIA operatives. This is the president that 65 million Americans thought would be a good guy, as long as we ignored everything he said in his first term. Maybe if we stick our heads in the sand for the next four years, it'll all be better. I'll be waiting for the punch line to this joke of an administration.
McCroy is a senior majoring in economics from Des Moines, Iowa.
Reflecting on the semester
We've almost completed another semester, my fellow Jayhawks. Projects are almost done and exams loom in the back of our minds. As we finish strong and reflect on information we we've learned for classes, let us also look at the big picture and things we can all take away from this semester.
A WEIS COACH
OK, so maybe the football team didn't have a winning season, but we witnessed a shift in tone of the football team. Why? Coach Charlie Weis.
Weis spent the year building up a team. He gave him his support no matter what. Sometimes that involved tweeting about the Kansan, buying students' tickets and providing his players with new jerseys.
Likewise, in order for projects and people we care about to succeed, they need support. Maybe the first round doesn't go so great, maybe the second round will
FFA RELATIONSHIPS
Sometimes what started out as a good idea just doesn't work. In the beginning stages maybe it does, but eventually it hits a road block that you just can't overcome.
Earlier in the semester the Free For All played the elegant role of matchmaker. Cute. Poké-girl found Poké-boy. They got what they asked for. But it didn't work.
Although I don't know the Poké-couple, I know they'll both be fine. Some old saying about other fish in the sea told me so.
Similarly, when a concept doesn't work, find a different one. Somewhere there's an idea that works much better than you can imagine right now. Push past the writer's block or creative wall and find it.
HOW'S THE WEATHER
In Kansas we seem to think the weather changes faster than it does in other states. I doubt it, but it has changed quite a bit this autumn. Just when you're ready to bring out that winter coat, it's 60 degrees outside again.
College, like the weather, has many highs and lows. We must constantly adapt. So maybe you wear layers or bring a jacket just in case. As the situation changes, we create solutions that fit the problem.
Some days you won't know what's coming and even if you do, it'll change in a few minutes.
Be prepared for anything and everything to happen. Life, college, they're as unpredictable as the weather.
YOUR CONTRIBUTION TO
YOURSELF
As some of my instructors would put it, you get out what you put in. All of the hard work you put into this semester benefits you in some way. At least that's the theory. Some classes don't work that way. Sometimes you get a lot out of classes you hardly study for and nothing out of classes you spend the bulk of your time studying for. But as a whole, the concept makes sense.
Take a look at your habits and what you've learned this semester. Chances are you learned this through the class you under-studied, the one you over-studied and the one you always forgot but still have a decent grade in.
Hawkins is a junior majoring in journalism from Scranton.
We've reached the end of both this column and the semester. As always, more exciting adventures await you outside of these confines. Survive finals. Have a wonderful break and don't forget the most important lessons you've learned this semester when we return to campus in January.
CAMPUS CHIRPS BACK
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China's news source a great place to work
So, as soon as I graduate, I'm going to hop on a plane to Beijing and get a job as a writer for the totalitarian Times. I'm assuming this paper isn't too hot in the fact-checking department, so I'll be able to entertain myself by submitting copy about, say, Mitt Romney getting a divorce and buying out every binder company in America, complete with poorly Photoshopped pictures.
Unless you've been living under a rock (or under an east-Asian totalitarian regime) for the past couple weeks, you've heard about the People's Daily, the state-run Chinese newspaper, reprinting an article from The Onion naming North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un the "Sixiest Man Alive" after mistaking it for a legitimate news story. Now, you may look at this story and laugh, but I look at it and think, "That'd be a great place to work!"
The hardest part of this, of course, is that I'll have to learn to speak Chinese. Right now, I'm planning to sit in on a couple of Chinese lectures in Wescoe to get my conversation skills up to par. You might think that learning to write Chinese would be problematic, and I'll admit don't have time to memorize thousands of Chinese characters, but I don't think that you'll matter too much, as I plan to submit all of my articles to my editors at the People's Daily handwritten. My English handwriting is almost indecipherable as it is, so it's not too much of a stretch to think my Chinese handwriting would be even worse. I figure that, when I have to write an article, I'll just make a bunch of scribbly marks on the paper and let the copy-editors fill in the blanks themselves. If anybody asks about it, I'll just say, "It's in cursive. Deal with it."
But, unfortunately, I won't be able to keep these shenanigans
I think I'm going about this whole "career planning" thing the wrong way. Originally, I aspired to become a humor columnist in an American newspaper, thinking that, if I'm going to eke out a meager living as a journalist, I'd like to be able to make jokes about Hillary Clinton's appearance while I'm at it and not get called out for it. But now, I've got a new career aspiration: I'm going to China, and I advise anyone else going into journalism to do the same.
Even if I get kicked out of the People's Daily for my antics, I'll still be able to get the bad reporting out of my system, because I have it on good authority that smaller Chinese news outlets are even looser with their facts. According to ABC News, a small TV station reported on the discovery of a rare type of mushroom in the small Chinese village of Liucunbu last July—a "mushroom" that was later identified by several alert viewers as a used sex toy. So I won't despair if I get fired for trying to publish a 'shopped picture of Michelle Obama riding a great white shark; I'll surely be able to sucker someplace else into printing it, confident in the knowledge that there's a precedent for this kind of stuff.
HOW TO SUBMIT A LETTER TO THE EDITOR
The only way to make this plan any better would be to moonlight as a humor columnist for an American paper and make my living feeding myself funny headlines to rip apart in my job stateside. In fact, I'm gonna go ahead and make that my new career goal, and I would advise anyone going into journalism to go think up your own plan, you bunch of loaders.
up forever; it's hard to derive a whole news story from a page that looks like a patchwork quilt made entirely of doctors' handwritten prescriptions, and eventually my editors will get sick of it. So I'll start sneaking a couple of American names in Latin letters into my stories just to keep the ideas flowing at the copy desk. Eventually, my editors will get a page covered in serial-killer scribbles and the names "Hillary Clinton" and "George Lucas," and the next day's cover story will run with a headline that translates as, "U.S. Secretary of State to play Chewbacca in upcoming 'Star Wars' sequel!" You can't ask for more job satisfaction than seeing that on the front page of a communist rag.
May is a sophomore majoring in German and journalism from Derby.
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