Opinion The University Daily Kansan
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FRIDAY, AUGUST 27, 2010
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PAGE 5A
--shows held every year. In each, dealers notorious for easy-sells stand behind makeshift tables. Even less documented than dealers are the individual sellers, who walk around with assault rifles slouched over their shoulders, a price tag usually sticking out of the barrel.
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All I feel like doing today is playing Mabinogi...
--shows held every year. In each, dealers notorious for easy-sells stand behind makeshift tables. Even less documented than dealers are the individual sellers, who walk around with assault rifles slouched over their shoulders, a price tag usually sticking out of the barrel.
--shows held every year. In each, dealers notorious for easy-sells stand behind makeshift tables. Even less documented than dealers are the individual sellers, who walk around with assault rifles slouched over their shoulders, a price tag usually sticking out of the barrel.
I feel like I've signed my life away to Wescoe Hall.
--shows held every year. In each, dealers notorious for easy-sells stand behind makeshift tables. Even less documented than dealers are the individual sellers, who walk around with assault rifles slouched over their shoulders, a price tag usually sticking out of the barrel.
You have been MONGOOSED!!
--shows held every year. In each, dealers notorious for easy-sells stand behind makeshift tables. Even less documented than dealers are the individual sellers, who walk around with assault rifles slouched over their shoulders, a price tag usually sticking out of the barrel.
We stole your sign. You got a new one. We brought your sign back. And then ding dong ditched you. Winner.
Nothing like beating Pokemon Yellow instead of doing anything remotely school- related
--shows held every year. In each, dealers notorious for easy-sells stand behind makeshift tables. Even less documented than dealers are the individual sellers, who walk around with assault rifles slouched over their shoulders, a price tag usually sticking out of the barrel.
I just found out my girlfriend farts in her sleep ...
--shows held every year. In each, dealers notorious for easy-sells stand behind makeshift tables. Even less documented than dealers are the individual sellers, who walk around with assault rifles slouched over their shoulders, a price tag usually sticking out of the barrel.
When can the month of August seriously just be over?
--shows held every year. In each, dealers notorious for easy-sells stand behind makeshift tables. Even less documented than dealers are the individual sellers, who walk around with assault rifles slouched over their shoulders, a price tag usually sticking out of the barrel.
The best part about the start of the semester? Walking to class accompanied by the great Lady Gaga.
--shows held every year. In each, dealers notorious for easy-sells stand behind makeshift tables. Even less documented than dealers are the individual sellers, who walk around with assault rifles slouched over their shoulders, a price tag usually sticking out of the barrel.
--shows held every year. In each, dealers notorious for easy-sells stand behind makeshift tables. Even less documented than dealers are the individual sellers, who walk around with assault rifles slouched over their shoulders, a price tag usually sticking out of the barrel.
To the guy wearing glasses with no lens, you just look dumb
To bathe or not to bathe, that is the question.
--shows held every year. In each, dealers notorious for easy-sells stand behind makeshift tables. Even less documented than dealers are the individual sellers, who walk around with assault rifles slouched over their shoulders, a price tag usually sticking out of the barrel.
Like oh em jee i am sure your conversation is way stimulating but I like paid 750 dollars for this class and you need to be QUIET.
--shows held every year. In each, dealers notorious for easy-sells stand behind makeshift tables. Even less documented than dealers are the individual sellers, who walk around with assault rifles slouched over their shoulders, a price tag usually sticking out of the barrel.
I seriously thought about deleting my facebook this summer... until I remembered the FFA app.
- shows held every year. In each, dealers notorious for easy-sells stand behind makeshift tables. Even less documented than dealers are the individual sellers, who walk around with assault rifles slouched over their shoulders, a price tag usually sticking out of the barrel.
Crab cakes and football, that's how we do it.
--shows held every year. In each, dealers notorious for easy-sells stand behind makeshift tables. Even less documented than dealers are the individual sellers, who walk around with assault rifles slouched over their shoulders, a price tag usually sticking out of the barrel.
To the guy on the park & ride bus this morning taking pictures of girls feet. I saw you, you creep. Eww.
--shows held every year. In each, dealers notorious for easy-sells stand behind makeshift tables. Even less documented than dealers are the individual sellers, who walk around with assault rifles slouched over their shoulders, a price tag usually sticking out of the barrel.
Gotta love when the boyfriend comes home for lunch. Enjoy your sandwich on your way back to work babel! The sex was amazing :)
Baby, you smell like tuna.
I'm Pretty Boy Swagin!
--shows held every year. In each, dealers notorious for easy-sells stand behind makeshift tables. Even less documented than dealers are the individual sellers, who walk around with assault rifles slouched over their shoulders, a price tag usually sticking out of the barrel.
I just spilled my weed. Must be bad karma.
--shows held every year. In each, dealers notorious for easy-sells stand behind makeshift tables. Even less documented than dealers are the individual sellers, who walk around with assault rifles slouched over their shoulders, a price tag usually sticking out of the barrel.
Strong 330: KU's very own hot
--shows held every year. In each, dealers notorious for easy-sells stand behind makeshift tables. Even less documented than dealers are the individual sellers, who walk around with assault rifles slouched over their shoulders, a price tag usually sticking out of the barrel.
SECOND AMENDMENT
Violence occurs everywhere but guns make it much worse - temporary moments of rage become permanent acts, as individuals wield an object that can instantly destroy life. Unfortunately for Americans, there are plenty of guns to go around.
Tighter restrictions would cut gun violence
In 2007, 29.645 Americans died from gunshot wounds according to a study in Newsweek, a staggering number in comparison to other industrialized countries like Britain, which had only 176.
With a disparity of this size, one wonders if Americans are simply more violent than, say, the British, Spanish, French, and Japanese combined, as the statistics suggest. That is until you compare our gun policies.
With nearly as many guns as there are people and very few restrictions, you can legally acquire just about anything in America. Walk into your nearest gun shop and you'll find wall upon wall of high powered assault rifles, semi-automatic pistols and extended magazines for those needing to fire more than 20 rounds without reloading. Though this image closely resembles a military weapons cache, it is all legally attainable.
What's worse is many guns are purchased without any documentation in what gun control advocates call the "gun show loophole." There are around five thousand gun
Side Tracks
BY BRADEN KATZ bkatz@kansan.com
Regardless of whether you are mentally ill, a convicted felon, or a supplier for Mexican drug lords, if you look older than eighteen and have the cash, you can walk out of a gun show heavily armed.
But acquiring assault rifles like America's two best sellers, the Russian Kalashnikov or the American M16, would be unthinkable in other industrialized countries. In Japan, where only 96 gun deaths were recorded in 2007, handguns are illegal and shotguns can only be purchased with strict documentation.
2007, it recorded less than one death for every 100,000 citizens compared to Americas 10. Consequently, London police rarely carry pistols.
In Britain, semiautomatic and pump-action rifles were banned followed by handguns in 1997. In
While handguns are completely banned in Japan and Britain, the United States allows citizens to carry loaded ones. Since 2008, two landmark Supreme Court cases financed by the National Rifles Association (NRA) ruled that all states must respect "individuals" right to bear arms. With these cases under its belt, the NRA is successfully dismantling virtually all gun laws. Forty-eight states, including Kansas, have concealed-carry laws and the University of Kansas is next.
Republican Forrest Knox and the Kansas House of Representatives passed a bill that allows students to carry concealed weapons on campus. Knox's justification for the bill could not better represent the warped nature of American gun policy. In an interview with the Lawrence Journal-World, he said the bill would help improve students' safety.
As for the KU students he addresses, ask yourself if you will feel safer when armed classmates come into your life.
Braden Katz is a senior from Overland Park in political science and English
CARTOON
PEOPLE NEVER SEEM TO TAKE FREE ADVICE.
YET FOLKS NEVER TIRE OF HUNTING FOR A FREE LUNCH.
NICK SAMBALUK
NATIONAL CHOICES
Athletic drama continues to haunt University's reputation
Don't be fooled by the recent abundance of bright, sun-soaked days. Ominous clouds are on the horizon.
Such is the sense of malaise plaguing many in the University community. A school whose indomitable hoopsters were unexpectedly vanquished by Northern Iowa earlier this year has slipped into something of a funk. Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in two seemingly unconnected stories.
Questions concerning the leadership of the lavishly compensated Athletic Director Lew Perkins continue to dominate the headlines. Perkins's impending departure has done little to mollify his critics, who assert that ethics transgressions under his watch have done permanent damage to the school's reputation.
Meanwhile, lest we forget that the University was not, in fact, established in 1865 as an institution of higher athletics, US News and World Report has released its much-anticipated annual college rankings. The high priests of US News — which has struggled to stay afloat in recent years — were not exactly effusive 'in their evaluation of the University. Where the University had been ranked 89th nationally as recently as two years ago, it is now tied with the University of Nebraska for the 104th spot.
The saga persists, with charges of improper expenditures by Perkins himself surfacing earlier this month.
BY LUKE BRINKER
Politics on Campus
To be sure, there are plenty of valid criticisms of university rankings. US News, which considers such factors as faculty quality, alumni donations, student aptitude, and academic reputation, sends universities a survey to compile such information. Some first-rate schools, like New York's Sarah Lawrence College, protesting US News' controversial reliance upon test score data, end up unranked. The bottom line? While the list is unveiled each year to much fanfare, it doesn't represent the apogee of higher learning.
All of which is to say, critics of the rankings have a point. Given that the same schools consistently earn top marks, it's hard to defend the US News system as one that allows for much upward mobility. But it's important to remember that former Chancellor Robert Hemenway made improvement in KU's ranking a top priority of his tenure. Hemenway hoped to see the University in the top 25 of public institutions. This year, the University is 47th in that category.
When the athletic ticket scandal first garnered media attention, discussion about "what's going on at KU" was omnipresent. A few months before, it was understood that if someone asked your stance on "what's happening up there," he or she was referring to the Mark Mangino departure.
strained resources amid an economic crisis have done a number on the University's ability to climb the rankings. But there are important cultural factors to consider, as well.
Abysmal retention rates and
As integral as our stellar athletic teams are to the University experience, it's disconcerting that, for the vast majority of the public, the University's reputation is pegged to the latest developments in athletics. Inquiring minds prying into "what's going on at KU" are likely unaware of the meaningful research being conducted by intellectually voracious undergraduates, the social contributions of the many students participating in Alternative Breaks, or the illuminating experiences of the many students who choose to study abroad.
This space will be devoted to issues of university governance this semester. If bodies like the Student Senate take substantive measures to accentuate the other happenings on the hill, above and beyond Perkins' shenanigans, we may yet have the makings of a turnaround.
Luke Brinker is a junior from Overland Park in journalism.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
A few weeks ago, while interning in Washington, D.C., I faxed an application for an apartment at the Stouffer Place Apartments at KU along with the $35.00 application fee. A few days later I noticed the $35.00 fee had been processed. I called the housing office and asked when I would be approved for an apartment.
Student Housing's frustrating policies need to be revamped
With nearly 30,000 students there were probably several hundred who applied from far away places each semester for housing only to be turned away. I called the housing office back and asked for a refund. A different gentleman answered the phone who said that it clearly says on the website that there are no refunds.
The gentlemen I spoke with chuckled a bit and said probably not until next summer, maybe in the spring, but certainly not this semester. I was very surprised since there was nothing on the website to indicate that Stouffer Place was booked for this semester. I spoke with two attornies in my office and they both agreed that it was very shady and unethical. I wanted my money back because it felt very close to a bait-and-switch scenario.
I then spoke with a supervisor
It seems that KU Housing is fleecing the student population.
— Ryan Rash is a third year law student from Tahlequah, California
Google has turned evil
Google is no longer the antithesis of evil. Instead, Google has matured into a proper American company — one whose shareholders hold more sway than inner morality.
The company once heralded for its mantra of "Don't be evil" recently tossed itself headfirst into the net neutrality war. A framework proposal written jointly with Verizon (an ultimate evil when it comes to net neutrality) was released on Aug. 9 and has caused a firestorm among net neutrality activists. Why? Google has turned evil; that's why.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is on the precipice of defining Internet service providers (ISPs) as telecommunication rather than information companies. This action would give the FCC much more power to regulate the actions of these ISPs. However, the FCC has lacked a clear framework to base regulations upon. Verizon and Google want
The idea behind net neutrality is to prevent ISPs from routing specific information based on price. An example of this routing would be Comcast signing a deal with Facebook to allow Facebook.com to load very quickly. As a part of the deal, Comcast would also purposefully delay NBC and YouTube to a slow crawl. The consumer would be choked by the big-money websites, leaving nonprofit and blogs to die from incredibly slow load times.
No longer is Google determined to fight for consumer rights. This is a company whose GMail allowed a gigabyte of
storage before competitors offered 10 megabytes. This is a company that allows employees to devote 20 percent of their time to whatever they desire. For years, Google has fought for net neutrality regulations. Now it has chosen to support corporate greed.
The Google-Verizon framework states that a company would be "prohibited from engaging in undue discrimination against any lawful Internet content." However, when it comes to wireless service where standard Internet is heading in the very near future this framework asserts that "[its] unique technical and operational characteristics" exempt wireless Internet providers from adhering to net neutrality regulations. Get ready to pay for premium content on the Internet. This unfortunate proposal allows "additional or differentiated services" to be hawked by ISPs. Rather than allowing the Internet to regulate its own content that can be sent, providers want to be able to charge consumers for the privilege of accessing currently free content.
Google has a new motto: Be relatively evil.
Google's framework would create a non-governmental body to oversee lawful adherence by the service providers — effectively giving the corporations the power to regulate themselves. The maximum penalty the FCC could charge a service provider would be $2 million — chump change for these companies.
-Christopher Jarrett for The Tartan at Carnegie Melon University
In Thursday's Kansan, the editorial on Page 5A, "Perkins" private plane use excessive, wasteful, "incorrectly stated that the university had suffered a 44 percent budget cut. The cut was actually $43 million, or about 13 percent. The Kansan regrets the error."
CORRECTION
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