OPINION
Coming Monday, October 8..
Minster The football team's cupcake pre-conference schedule doesn't inspire much confidence.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN WWW.KANSAN.COM FRIDAY OCTOBER 5,2007
Smith: Parents' attempts to turn their kids into miniature adults robs them of their childhood.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2007
PAGE 5A
DRAWING BOARD
MAX RINKEL
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Free for All callers have 20 seconds to speak about any topic they wish. Kansan editors reserve the right to omit comments. Slanderous and obscene statements will not be printed. Phone numbers of all incoming calls are recorded
They are going to announce the Nobel Prize for Medicine on Monday. I'm as excited as a kid on Christmas Day.
So I heard you like mudkipz.
It's a Jeep thing. Oh Blow Me!
I wouldn't be too pissed about that. Charmander is cute and cuddly, except for his tail. His tail is on fire.
I had a dream that somebody made me a quality fake I.D. and just to piss me off, they replaced my picture with Charmander.
My buddy said he had a dream that he was watching me have sex I'm scared.
But it's not the Philippines.
Hey, we are talking about Chicago here.
This guy was talking about a hoodie he bought and said, "If I wore it back in Chicago, I'd get laid every night!" Guys are messed up. A hoodie is not going to get you
Hey ladies, you know what would be a great way to celebrate a KU victory this weekend? You could come over to my place and we could have a sexy time. Though I would advise you to think about the game during, if not, you will
probably be disappointed
All guys in fraternities are true man whores...they just try to hide it with their pardners.
it with their nerdiness.
If you are going to the game
this weekend, wear Red! It will stand out more than the blue mixed with all the crappy K-State purple.
EDITORIAL BOARD
No no there is everything wrong with hippies...get a freaking job!
My best friend and I were one of the ten people Friday 3 p.m.at the crossing
My girlfriend wants to "tease and please me"
Free for all, how do I get my girlfriend to stop texting me constantly?
in the paper about high school visit days, so that one could avoid the mass crowds. Please and thanks.
Dear UDK, after waiting in line for a half hour yesterday at the Marketplace, we decided that there should be warnings posted
Hey, I slept with a fraternity person — he WANTED to be a slut, but really was more of a nerd.
Am I the only one who actually does NOT want a relationship? While you guys bitch and moan about being single. I'm going to make KU proud and keep drinking
till we make the list again!
Students share to clean up parking lots
Potential car-sharing program frees parking, cut down on individual costs
With increasingly squeezed parking becoming more of a hassle for students and faculty, companies are developing innovative car-sharing programs at other college campuses across the country. The success of these programs indicates a similar attempt would work here at KU.
Lawrence's layout makes a car a near-necessity for incoming students. Access from campus to all major retail areas is incredibly difficult without a car. But what do students do with those cars between the occasional trips down Iowa Street? They park them in KU's oversold residence parking lots or on Lawrence's crowded public streets.
Many universities, particularly in urban settings, are partnering with private businesses to provide car-sharing, a type of short-term car rental program. The largest car sharing companies charge an annual membership fee for participating students, and then charge an hourly rate for car usage. Members have cards which are scanned to unlock the cars' doors and track use.
This service allows students to share cars instead of each having his own. In addition to easing parking crunches, it can also encourage alternative transportation by putting an overt hourly price on car usage, and it can increase carpooling by making car usage less impulsive while still accessible.
KU needs a program like this. Currently the University's parking department estimates
it oversells commuter parking passes by 59%. While not every commuter is on campus at the same time, the dearth of evening and weekend classes ensures most are here during a limited window. More than half of commuting students, however, are so discouraged by the prospects of on-campus parking that they forego a parking pass entirely and jockey for limited street parking around campus. This negatively impacts surrounding residents and creates ill-will toward the University.
More critically, the University oversells the residence hall parking passes by 36%, meaning every night more than 1,000 students who paid for parking cannot park in a residence hall lot. Since 77% of residence hall students purchase parking passes, a car-sharing program like this could go a long way toward reducing the parking demands on campus.
In partnering with these private companies, universities take on a financial obligation to ensure the businesses reach revenue goals. However, as Rutgers transportation director Jack Molenaar recently pointed out in a USA Today article, their financial obligation is far below the cost of adding just one parking spot.
If the University wishes to improve student welfare, reduce carbon emissions and improve town-gown relations by boosting the quality of life for everyone in Lawrence, a car-sharing program would go a long way towards those goals.
SENTIMENTAL HYGIENE
Prison libraries remove books in name of security
In an attempt to curb 'extremist radicalism', various religious texts are thrown out to assure continuing prison safety
Recently, the New York Times reported that the Federal Bureau of Prisons (a division of the Department of Justice), in June 2007, instituted a policy called the Standardized Chapel Library Project which restricted religious books available in prison libraries to a ridiculously small list of 150 approved titles for each of the Bureau's 20 recognized religions. What this amounted to was an illegal and immoral purge of sometimes thousands of accumulated religious books in federal prison libraries across
the country (including the Federal Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kan.). Chaplains of all creeds reported that their libraries were being decimated by this draconian policy. The official reason was curbing extremist religion (read: Islam) that could incite violence and threaten prison or national security. But chaplains already had the power to censor radical religious books, and they do. The Bureau's decision to reduce the number of available books to such a paltry number was irresponsible and indefensible.
Even more infuriating, the Bureau would not release the lists to the public (the Times had an anonymous source) nor identify these so-called "experts" whom they relied on to synthesize 20 religions with a near-infinite number of books to a meager 150 sources.
The lists themselves are laughable. I spoke to Professor Timothy Larsen of Wheaton College, who studied the Protestant book list and was interviewed for the Times article, and he told me that he was equally confused about the selections on the list.
"Despite the purpose ostensibly being to prevent violent tendencies, the list freezes out all the Christian voices who have been most against violence: the pacifists John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas (named by Time magazine as America's greatest theologian), Ron Sider, and Jim Wallis," he said. Even the popular "The Purpose Driven Life" by Rick Warren and "When Bad Things Happen to Good People" by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner also banned, according to a lawsuit filed in New York by two inmates challenging the ban. There are also
Major theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr and Karl Barth were shunned. Nearly all pacifist and left-wing Christian authors were left off the list. Left-wingers and pacifists banned in the name of national security? Does this sound familiar? I think Mussolini would approve.
several titles on the list by an author named Henri Nouwen "a great author," says Prof. Larsen, "but decidedly Roman Catholic - so, do they not know he is Roman Catholic or is he the only Roman Catholic author Protestants should read?"
Based on the evidence, Prof. Larsen guessed that an Evangelical Calvinist had probably written the Protestant list. While there is nothing wrong with being an Evangelical Calvinist, there is something very wrong with the fact that it represents only a small portion of the Protestant population, yet it was setting the standards for an entire religion. The 19 other lists had some of the same exclusive tendencies (80 of the 120 Judaism titles are from the same Orthodox publishing house), according to the Times article. You can see the lists for yourself at www.nytimes.com.
But there is good news at the end of this one. Last week the Times reported that, due to an overwhelming public protest from religious groups, civil activists, and members of Congress, the Bureau of Prisons has decided to rescind the policy for the present and put the banned books back on the shelves. Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, Muslims, Jews and Christians all took up the cause and inundated the Prison Bureau and Congress with thousands of letters and phone calls complaining about
this gross abuse of power. And it worked. The media did its job of exposing a major government screw-up and the citizenry responded by putting pressure on politicians to change the situation. This may seem like a small victory, and that there are other, bigger issues which merit our concern. That may be true (see Iraq and Darfur), but let us look to this event as a positive example of the way our system should work, and let us find hope in this seemingly insignificant thing that there are sound ways to right wrongs, and to put things in order that are vastly confused.
Petterson is a Prairie Village junior in English.
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