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Wednesday, June 29, 1988 / University Daily Kansan
Opinion
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
The greenhouse effect needs attention now
Many people in the United States are asking why. Why the drought? Why is it lasting so long? Many more are wondering when it will end and whether it will happen again.
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last week heard the answers to those questions. James Hansen, a climatologist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, told the committee that the "greenhouse effect" was here and here to stay.
Gases such as methane and chlorofluorocarbons and, more importantly, carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels trap heat that normally would radiate out to space, just as the glass over a greenhouse keeps the sun's heat inside.
Records show that the earth has been getting warmer for more than 100 years. Analysts predict that 1988 will be the hottest year on record and that soon that record will be broken. Then, those high temperatures will be topped by others, which will be topped by others, and so on.
Where does it stop? It doesn't.
Where does it stop? It does. Scientists say that this warming will continue as long as those gases are in the earth's atmosphere, keeping the sun's heat down here. So, the earth will continue to get hotter and drier and subsequent droughts will be longer and longer. Rainfall will be more at high and low latitudes, and less in places in between. And those suffering through the drought of 1988 will be hit even harder in the droughts of the future.
Representatives from more than 40 countries are meeting in Canada this week to discuss environmental problems. On the first day of the conference, Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney urged participants to start work on an international "law of the air" discouraging air pollution similar to the International Law of the Sea. And Norwegian prime minister Brundland said, "For too long we have used the atmosphere, soil and water as the ultimate sink of our industrial excesses."
We have indeed dumped pollutants into the atmosphere, and we must now fix the problem that we ourselves have created. The U.S. government, and indeed all governments, need to do something about this near-constant global warming. The burning of fossil fuels needs to be regulated. Some analysts have even suggested finding alternative energy sources. Many nations have already signed a pact to regulate the emission of CFCs, but that does not remove the waste already in the atmosphere. That must be accounted for, too.
This is not a problem that can be brushed aside with a disclaimer such as, "We have plenty of time before it gets serious."
It already is.
David White, managing editor
Salute the Soviet Party conference
Managing Editor
By David White
Yesterday marked the beginning of the Soviet Party conference in Moscow. More than 5,000 delegates from all over the Soviet Union came to Moscow for a multi-day event that some have billed as the long-awaited full embracement of glasnost and perestroika.
Big deal? Sure it is. It's the first Party conference in 47 years. Not since the reign of Stalin has the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics seen a Party conference. Every five years, government leaders meet for a Party congress, but that is a Party affair in which they名 members to the Central Committee and make policy and things like that. This is a conference. Actual Soviets, people from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and other republics are in Moscow to speak their minds on Gorbachev's new ideas.
Party conferences don't happen every five years. They have to be called. And call Gorbachev did. On the agenda of this all-important conference are discussion and, Gorbachev hopes, adoption of the Theses, a set of proposals for radical reform given the go-ahead by the more-than-300-member Central Committee on May 23. Reformists are tossing around concepts like greater economic
competition, multi-candidate elections and limiting terms of elected party officials.
terms of elected party officials.
But does anyone on this side of the Iron Curtain think that the results of this conference will contain anything extremely extraordinary? Analysts say that conservative Party members, headed by the Union's No. 2, Yeger Ligachev, are pressing hard to slow reform. The Theses are reported to be vaguely worded as a result of a compromise between reformers and conservatives.
And the Central Committee still has many deposed officeholders who are, in effect "lame ducks" who will hold on to their seats until the next Party congress, in 1991, or longer if they can.
However, it is not yet clear whether any rules adopted at this conference will go into effect or will be merely suggestions to be further discussed at the 1991 congress.
It is also not clear why many in the Soviet Union, the United States and elsewhere are interested in this conference. It is a big event in terms of tradition. It is an unusual event. It also coincides with the 40th anniversary of Yugoslavia's being publicly condemned and expelled from the Cominform, then the official group of communist countries.
But will anything big come of it?
Gorbachev has labeled the conference as an
opportunity to move ahead with his reforms. He has called for more than 5,000 Soviets to show up. And yet, a list of the delegates is not available. Party officials examined 3,000 people in order to nominate 319 delegates from Moscow, and most of those selected are those that the Party wanted to go.
A proposal from the Estonian public asks for complete control over prices, wages and investment policy, a sort of "home rule." Latvia wants its own representation in the Olympics. Lithuanians want to speak only in Lithuanian. But those are proposals radical even for the reformer Gorbachev. He is not about to do away with the one-party system or the socialist economy, and he is certainly not going to grant the silly requests of small republics.
Reprenders have demanded live television coverage of the entire conference to make the Party accountable to the Soviets. But only certain speeches will be televised and even then, only briefly.
And what speeches. The agenda calls for 70-10 minute speeches. Will they do nothing but hear each other talk? The conference lasts for only four days, after all.
In the end, the Moscow gathering called monumental in scope and intent will probably end up being one big debate.
MR. BADGER by A.D. long GREENHOUSE EFFECT
---
Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, we now enjoy a higher standard of living than our ancestors did...
...which has increased atmospheric carbon dioxide, which increased worldwide temperatures, and will cause partial melting of the polar ice caps ...
Other Voices
TAs' broken English doesn't have to be problem
The problem of broken English versus university comprehension isn't easily solved, but it doesn't have to cause major strife on campus.
Complaints about incomprehensible foreign teaching assistants are common, coming from both sides of the issue. TAs might be extremely qualified to teach their subjects, but they face the frustration of students who don't have the patience to work through the language barriers. Students counter that they pay for classes they can understand.
Test of English as a Foreign Language.
The university also must address the formation of an English language class for TAs to prepare them for classroom experience. The University offers one course, GSC 777, but it's more for teacher training language instruction. The Georgia Center for Continuing Education's non-credit course is too expensive for many foreign students at a stiff $1,075.
With increased enrollment in and demand for already crowded courses. TAs are a necessity.
The university has regulations protecting students, requiring that every foreign instructor pass an English "speak test" with a score of 250 or more in order to teach a course. All graduate students must have a score of 500 or more on the
TAs are an asset to the university, not a liability. The TA system gives the university the extra teaching staff it needs for crowded beginning courses, especially in math and science, where there is a nationwide teacher shortage. With the TAs' expert knowledge and some reasonably priced English instruction from the university, this system can work.
The Red and Black
Kansas City council made correct decision on Klan
By Kathleen Faddis
Staff Columnist
After weeks of heated debate, the Kansas City, Mo., City Council voted last week to eliminate the public access channel of a local cable television company rather than allow the Ku Klux Klan to use it as a forum to promote its racist ideology.
The council made the wisest decision possible under the circumstances, although one not popular with civil libertarians. In fact, the American Civil Liberties Union has agreed to represent Klan members from the Kansas City area in a lawsuit charging that the city violated their constitutional right of freedom of speech.
The case in Kansas City, Mo., is similar to a controversy that divided the KU campus last spring when the same Klan members were invited to the campus to speak. In spite of the bitterness and hurt feelings it caused, the Klan eventually was allowed a forum at Hoch Auditorium.
In both situations, I found myself, a 1960s liberal who was actively involved in the civil rights movement, in a dilemma about the right thing to do. Making a decision meant deciding which was the more important right — freedom of expression, which civil rights activists depended on to preserve their right to demonstrate, or the right of people of all races and religions to exist without fear of the violent acts of those who hate them.
In theory, our Constitution is supposed to protect the right to express even the most repugnant views. But other considerations need to be weighed in this case, one being the nature of the Klan itself.
The Klan, founded in 1866 by a handful of Confederate veterans, quickly grew in the post-Civil War North and South. Within a few years, it began a reign of terror against blacks, Jews and Roman Catholics. In the 1920s, what is considered its heyday, the Klan had about 5 million members and reportedly lynched as many as 900 blacks in that decade.
Admittedly, today's Klan is much less organized and has fewer members (about 5,000 to 7,000 nationwide). But even though it is a much weaker and smaller organization, I think it would be foolhardy to be bulled into thinking it is no longer dangerous.
March 21, 1881, the day in Mobile, Ala., that Beulah Mae Donald's 19-year-old son Michael was found beaten to death and hanging from a tree just for being black, was not really that long ago. Eventually, local members of the Klan were convicted for killing Donald.
In recent years, the Klan has been making itself more visible and vocal, and not only in places like Mobile, Ala. It is operating in an atmosphere that is becoming more receptive to its message of hate. Some think that in spite of civil rights laws passed in the 1960s, antagonism between the races is growing and the class gap is widening.
A group of scholars met last spring in Racine, Wis., to study conditions of blacks in the United States 20 years
after the Kerner Report was issued. The report, written by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, studied the violence and rioting in the black ghetto in the 1960s. The latest study found that the living conditions for inner-city blacks were worse than in the 1960s and that the races were growing further apart socially and economically.
Another study, conducted last spring by the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations, found that in 1987, hate crimes directed against blacks and Jews had risen in that city to an eight-year record, with 184 recorded incidents of racially or religiously motivated vandalism or violence.
Incidents of racism and violence have sprung up at colleges and universities across the country in the last year. It is said there is a new openness to racism.
It doesn't come as any surprise then, that in the national atmosphere of racial tension and antagonism, the ugly specter of the Ku Klux Klan should be rising again.
The argument of those who press for unrestricted freedom of speech is that rational people will hear what the Klan has to say and discredit it for the ravings of small-minded bigots. And how could rational people take seriously grown men who call themselves cyclopses, klelegas, wizards and dragons? But we are living in a time when the acts of irrational people are increasing and many are looking for a scapegoat.
The uncomfortable implication of the decision in Kansas City, Mo., is that by taking away some of the Klan's freedoms, we lose some of those same freedoms ourselves. But the Klan doesn't just promote racism with words. The Klan advocates violence and acts on its bigtry in the beating, terrorizing and killing of blacks and Jews.
Early this year, Beulah Mae Donald won a civil suit against the Mobile, Ala., Klan. She charged that her son's killers were carrying out the group's organizational policy, passed down from Robert Shelton, its Imperial Wizard.
William Allen White, Emporia's great newspaper editor and publisher and the School of Journalism's namesake, changed a policy of avoiding public office in 1924 to run for governor His purpose was to throw the Ku Klux Klan out of Kansas. He lost his bid for governor, but his words are worth remembering:
"I call to my support all fair-minded citizens of every party, of every creed, to stop the oppression of this minority of our people. It is a national menace, this Klan. It knows no party. It knows no country. It knows only bigotry, malice and terror."
I don't think we can afford, even for the noble cause of free speech, to let the Klan increase its numbers and become strong again. The rights of all this country's citizens to live in peace without fear from hate has to prevail. The struggle for this freedom was too hard fought to give anything back now.
kathleen Faddis a Lawrence senior majoring in journalism.
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Syndicated
Syndicated
Nutty law forces woman to leave U.S.
Columnist
By any measure, Margarida Magalhaes, 33, is a useful朋. of our agency.
She's a physician, but not the sort who parks a Mercedes in the hospital lot.
Her specialty is blood diseases. She works at the University of Illinois Hospital in Chicago, where most of her patients are indigent, and she is paid about $28,000 a year.
But she's not going to be doing that much longer. She will soon be booted out of this country.
That's because she came here from Portugal seven years ago under an "exchange visitor's visa" to get advanced medical training.
Vale to this visa, she has to leave when her studies are finished or after seven years. Her seven years will end next month.
Why am I telling you about this? Just to show how nutty laws can be. I like telling nutty stories.
To begin, Dr. Magalhaes doesn't want to leave the United States. She has several reasons.
To begin, Dr. Magannas doesn't want to leave the United States. She has several reasons.
One is that while she was here, she met, fell in love with and married William Silverman, who is also a physician. He specializes in emergency medicine at a suburban hospital.
Because Dr. Silverman is a U.S. citizen and prefers to remain one, he would like to have his
wife live with him in his country.
Second reason: If Dr. Magalhares returns to Portugal, it's unlikely that she could practice medicine there. For some reason, Portugal has a glut of doctors.
So here we have someone who is doing valuable work here, but we're telling her that we want her to go where her skills really aren't needed.
naturally, she and her husband are trying to find a way for her to stay here. They've written to senators, talked to the immigration authorities and the State Department.
then apply to our business.
The problem with that is that she would then be separated from her husband, which is not a pleasant prospect.
She can go back to Portugal for two years and then apply for U.S. residency and probably return.
Another option: They can appeal, which will delay Da Mgalbaas' departure for a while.
And both would fall two years behind in their medical training and experience.
Of course, he could go to Portugal with her for the two years. But he wouldn't be able to practice medicine there. And he'd become a deadbeat on the student loans he's now paying back.
uley Dr. Magrani But while their appeal is being studied by the State Department, she will have to stop her medical work.
And it is likely that the appeal will be denied.
That's because the State Department has a limited
number of reasons for letting someone like Dr Magalabas stay in this country.
The reasons must be "catastrophic" by State Department standards.
Department sanitation. And what's "catastrophic?" The person has a disease that can be treated only in the United States. Or the person his homeland is having a civil war or some other dangerous upheaval. Or the person needs political asylum.
But what makes this even nutter is that this country has been engaged in a campaign to persuade illegal aliens to drop in at their local immigration office so that they can be declared legal under the new laws.
We've been practically begging illegals to come forward so that they don't have to worry about being shipped out anymore.
being shipped to us, we have someone who came here legally paid taxes every year, has a useful humanitarian profession, and she's being shown the door.
the door.
In many big cities, entire subcultures of foreign dope pushers have flourished. They commit gang murders, knock off cops and make millions of dollars. They come and go, and the law can't keep up with them.
But a physician who works with the poor and is married to a U.S. citizen is told to take a walk.
Mike Royko is a syndicated columnist for the Chicago Tribune.