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Opinion
University Daily Kansan
Monday, April 7, 1986
Sorely missed
It hurt KU fans to watch it repeatedly on television and it will probably hurt next year's basketball team even more.
It most definitely hurt Archie Marshall.
Marshall's debilitating knee injury in KU's final game in the Final Four at Dallas apparently will keep him sidelined next year — just when he was really starting to shine.
Marshall was playing the game of his career and was keeping the Jayhawks within reach of Duke when he injured himself. His contribution throughout the tournament was exceptional.
Coming off the bench, Marshall scored 10 points against North Carolina A&T in the first-round game, 16 points
against Michigan State in the Midwest Regional semifinal and had scored 13 points in the game against Duke before he went out with 8:10 left in the second half. Two of his points in the Duke game came on an incredible reverse layup he performed without even looking at the basket.
Doctors say Marshall ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament and they predict it will take an entire year to rehabilitate the knee.
The Jayhawks can only hope that a shining replacement will appear to take Marshall's place and lead them to another stellar season, and KU fans can hope that Marshall will follow the doctors' orders and be missed for one year.
No need for 3-point shot
The National Collegiate Athletics Association seems to think that college basketball needs to be made more exciting. The NCAA decided last week to instate the 3-point shot rule into college basketball for next season.
Shots made from beyond a semi-circle 19 feet, 9 inches from the basket will now count for three points, instead of two.
The NCAA says it thinks the rule will open up the game because the three-point shot creates excitement by allowing higher scores and more opportunity for comebacks when a team is behind.
First, the NCAA's line makes the shot too close. It doesn't take an extraordinary amount of skill to make a basket from just over the 19 foot line. Most guards in college basketball have no trouble with this shot.
But the three-point play is unnecessary and unfair.
Besides, why should someone who can shoot from 19 feet get more points than those who make other shots?
This rule doesn't hold for
All this aside, it's time the NCAA quit messing with the game of college basketball. A set of national rules needs to be adopted and not changed unless a pressing reason arises. No pressing reason existed to install the three-point shot.
other sports. In football, a field goal counts the same whether it's from 23 or 63 yards. Goals in hockey and soccer are still worth only one point no matter where they're shot from, and a home run in baseball is just one run no matter how far it's hit.
If the difficulty of the shot makes it worth three points, then certain slam dunks by the likes of Michael Jordan should be worth 5 or 6 points. Basketball shots might as well be rated by a panel of judges, much the way divers are scored.
Last college basketball season and many before it were packed with plenty of thrills. Ask any fan.
The game doesn't need artificial attempts to pump excitement into it.
Weapons stockpiling
Last summer, two bodies were discovered on a farm near Rulo, Neb., just across the Kansas-Nebraska state line. On an earlier raid at the farm, police discovered a cache of more than 40 semiautomatic and fully automatic rifles.
What is certain though, is that conversion parts like those used by the Rulo group are freely available from gun
The Fedreal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms isn't sure whether the weapons were bought illegally or whether group members illegally used conversion parts to modify the weapons themselves.
Leaders of a religioussurvivalist group are standing trial for the murder of a five-year-old boy and a 26-year-old man. Federal authorities also are investigating whether any laws were broken in the stockpiling of the fully automatic rifles. The weapons were found stashed all over the farmhouse
dealers and in gun magazines and the sale of these kits is not illegal. But at the same time, it is, in most cases, illegal to use those conversion parts to make a weapon fully automatic.
The Rulo group is not the only group of survivalists stashing away large amounts of weapons, ammunition, homemade bombs, mines and hand grenades.
It is ludicrous that we tolerate a situation where these people can accumulate large amounts of weapons that have no legitimate use, and that they were able to buy the conversion kits for those weapons.
What possible objections could there be to outlawing parts that are used specifically to make illegal weapons? Such a law would not impinge at all on the law abiding citizen's right to bear arms. What it would do would be to make the illegal modification of weapons more difficult and go a little way toward preserving the peace for all citizens.
News staff
News staff
Michael Totty ... Editor
Lewis McMillen ... Managing editor
Chris Barber ... Editorial editor
Cindy McCurry ... Campus editor
David Giles ... Sports editor
Wilfred Lee ... Photo editor
Susanne Shaw ... General manager, news adviser
Business staff
Brent McCabe ... Business manager
David Nikon ... Retail sales manager
Jim Williamson ... Campus manager
Lori Eckart ... Classified manager
Caroline Innes ... Production manager
Pallen Lee ... National manager
John Oberzan ... Sales and marketing adviser
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TEST YOUR POWERS OF OBSERVATION
HOW MANY SANDINISTAS CAN YOU COUNT IN THIS PICTURE OF HONDURAS ?*
Trusting 'LaRouchies' can be costlv
I have little sympathy for Richard M. Preector. He's a grown man and should have known better. But the story of how he's been plucked for almost $100,000 by the Lydon LaRouche crowd is sort of educational.
It began when Proctor was walking through the airport in San Francisco in 1844 and somebody at a table called out to him: "Do you believe in nuclear energy?"
As it happens, Proctor, 56, a Canadian lawyer, does believe strongly in nuclear energy. So he stopped and listened to the people behind the desk.
Because he's quite conservative,
he found some of their views interesting.
They believe in a Star Wars defense and so does he. He is against the Russians and so are they. Very profound stuff.
Before he left, he had given them his name, address and telephone number so they could send him their newspaper.
Not long after he returned home to Calgary, he began getting telephone calls from some LaRouches in Chicago. They would get him on the phone and talk and talk and talk.
That's part of their routine — the hard sell. They're like a long, recorded message or the Chinese water torture. You can interrupt them, argue with them, tell them that you don't
Mike Royko Chicago Tribune
want to be bothered. But they just pause and wade right back with their zany theories.
In Proctor's case, they had a willing ear. And after numerous calls, they knew quite a bit about him. They knew he was a successful real estate lawyer and was no longer married.
So they brought up the subject of money. They were in desperate need, with all the terrible dangers facing the free world. Would he be willing to make them a loan?
They would pay it back, of course, with handsome interest. But they needed it immediately.
"They were very friendly to me," Proctor remembers, "and very persuasive."
So he made them a series of loans. By the end of 1984, they had about $110,000 of his savings.
The money went to Caucus Distributors Inc., in Chicago, which publishes LaRouche's propaganda publications.
It's also the outfit that employs Mark Fairchild and Janice Hart, the two oddities who won in the recent Illinois Democratic primary.
The terms of the loan were on paper, all nice and legal. They included precise interest rates and a schedule of payments.
In the meantime, Proctor's health began falling apart. He had heart attacks. He lost a leg to diabetes. He needed the money, but he realized he'd been had.
But almost from the start, they fell behind in the payments. Out of $110,000 that was supposed to be repaid over one year, they came up with only $20,000.
A Canadian law firm wrote and demanded immediate payment. It got a series of promises, but no money.
Almost as a footnote, Bettag proposed that a new payment schedule
In reply, the lawyer received a delightfully wacky letter from one Ronald Bettag that went on and on about the need to defeat the Gramm-Rudman bill, the dangers posed by the Soviets, the Syrians and international terrorism and the urgent need of Lyndon LaRouche to awaken America.
So it was turned over to a Chicago lawyer, who wrote a letter saying that if the money wasn't paid, a law suit would be filed.
"This decision," said Bettag about welching on a $90,000 debt, "is not primarily financial or legal, but
rather political in nature."
That's one of the best deadbeat excuses I've ever heard.
Bettag, incidentally, is the guy who was arrested last year with Janice Hart, who won the Democratic nomination for secretary of state, when they decided to harass the archbishop of Milwaukee by handing him some raw liver while he was making a speech in Chicago.
Proctor, deciding that LaRouche would have to fight the evils of the world without his money, recently filled suit in Cook County Circuit Court to get his dough back.
It isn't easy suing these people. After several weeks of trying, Proctor's lawyers haven't even been able to serve them with official notice of the suit. They aren't much for answering knocks on their office doors.
Why, right after they won their daf y victory in the Illinois primary they phoned him.
But I'll say one thing for the LaRouchies — they don't hold a grudge against Proctor for suing them.
"They were all excited about winning and they wanted to tell me about it." he said.
Did they mention your money?
Did they mention your money?
"Yes. They asked me if I wanted to give more."
U.S. can't rely on computers for defense
Toward the end of World War II, radar was being developed as a great defensive breakthrough in aerial warfare. Few if any of the best theoretical minds of the time argued that there might be a danger of radar being used against its own forces.
The Navy made the Libyans think our aircraft were north when they were south. The Libyan radar beams guided U.S. missiles to the shore batteries they supposedly were protecting. When Libyan radar locked on to a U.S. fighter the computer alerted the pilots immediately to take
Such a possibility awaited the development of computer applications not even thought of a half-century ago. Now that the computer has entered the war game, old weapon technology is displaying fascinating new vulnerabilities.
The Libyans, for example, discovered in the Gulf of Sidra the other day that their own radar was their worst enemy. Almost through the entire incident, the computers of the 6th Fleet took control of Libya's radar and did whatever our Navy pleased.
Robert C.
Maynard
Oakland Tribune
evasive action
For many years, it seemed that the awesome implications of nuclear holocaust made the idea of a nuclear exchange unthinkable. It has done nothing of the kind. The superpowers are enormously preoccupied with the mad permutations of nuclear annihilation.
The moral and strategic lessons of the Gulf of Sidra adventure will be slow in coming, but the technological lessons are writ large, and they are not favorable to the arguments for huge, computer-based weapons systems of the magnitude of Star Wars.
If the bomb did not cause the world to "think of war no more," as many had hoped, perhaps the computer will. Sooner or later the salespeople for Star Wars are going to have to level with Congress and the
American people.
When and if that day should come, the advocates of this trillion-dollar undertaking will have to acknowledge a fundamental fact about computers: Whatever computer offense or defense is designed, another computer will sooner or later replicate and counter it.
The single greatest folly our nation could commit would be to build this system in the belief that it is indeed an impenetrable laser shield. Not all its advocates think that to be possible, but some do, and they have voices in the administration and votes in Congress.
On the other hand, many of the scientists being asked to design the system say it suffers from "intractable" problems.
Those problems are legion, but the most compelling is the fact of the dynamism of technological change in the era of the microchip. In the current climate of weapons design, there is no longer a question called, what can we do? Rather, it is, what can't we do?
Time and money are the only
limitations on the imagination. The problem Star Wars faces, then, is not all that different from the problem radar faced 40 years ago. Radar seemed like the answer to a serious set of problems.
It was, in other words, a great idea at the time. When the Libyan ground crews saw missiles riding their beams toward their radar dish, they might have thought otherwise.
Computers are notoriously inadequate at making value judgments. That is why their escalating involvement in the life and death issues of warfare tells of future peril and unpredictability. The genie of technology guarantees no one a significant advantage for very long.
Whatever we base on computers and build is quite likely to be matched and countered in time. It is unrealistic to think otherwise.
inued, we run the risk that the more exotic the systems we put in place, the more exotic the design of the Russians to challenge them. That is the path to computer judgment overriding human judgment, just as in the movie "War Games."
Seduction might as well be banned
It was good to find the Supreme Court this week coming to grips with the question of whether the Bill of Rights extends into the bedroom.
Of all the liberties supposedly guaranteed by the Constitution, none has been more widely abused in recent years than privacy. In drafting the basic code by which we all live, our forefathers said nothing about freedom from prying eyes.
Yet, a Georgia resident had the audacity to attack that state's antisodomy law.
the police, as epitomized by your local sheriff, have a right to know what goes on behind closed doors and drawn blinds. I'm not sure the police are through in protecting the rest of us from unwarranted private exchanges.
It seems to me the court ought also do something about seduction. Certainly there has been plenty of that in modern times.
Dick West
United Press International
We all have heard stories about spouses who come home dead tired after working all day only to find their marital partners decked out in something seductive and obviously ready to go.
It usually does no good to say, "Not tonight. I have a headache." Or utter some other traditional excuse. Usually, one's marital partner simply will not be put off.
But if there were a cop at the bedroom door, or within hailing distance, one's marital partner might not be so persistent.
A wife or husband who is tuckered out from the workday world may be plied with flowers and bonbons until he or she yields to blandishments.
Sure, there will be concerted opposition from attorneys for merchants who sell firewood and clinging clothing, to say nothing of stereo equipment. But I trust the court will
According to sworn testimony, even some marital partners regard open fires as romantic, so I am hoping the Supreme Court will ban them outright. And this same thing goes for fetching garments and soft music.
All this nonsense about "consenting adults" is just that — nonsense. There have been plenty of instances in which the alleged seducers weren't even married — at least, not to the party of the second part.
be able to withstand such withering attacks.
Other enticements, including whispering sweet nothings in a loved one's ear, would be barred along with seduction, of course.
But that sort of allurement is difficult to prove unless the person wife calls the cops in the first place is willing to testify in open court.
It may be argued that some spouses would never get in the mood unless they were seduced. I say, such bosh shouldn't be considered by the highest judiciary tribunal in our land.
Would-be seducers richly deserve the electric chair, life imprisonment or any other sentence a judge might impose. Hanging's too good for them.
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