THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
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opinion
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Saw a Magnum wrapper walking to class. At least you know we do it big at KU
Kansas weather: You're bringing me down. Get it together.
Aaron Carter is supposed to be staying in Lawrence for a few weeks. As if there weren't enough drugs in Lawrence
Nothing makes me feel more like an alcoholic than drinking mass amounts while watching "Intervention."
Drugs make me feel closer to God.
I started my period, my dog died and I have two tests this week. Yep, it's time to pray.
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2011
Why is it that whenever you're walking, some people driving cars act like they're really cool when they pass by? It's as if they're participating in some exclusive activity and want you to be jealous.
Dear roomie, I get it. You are having the best day of your life. Every freaking day. Enough already! Be normal and have a bad day for once
I try to walk through doors as fast as I can just so I don't have to hold it open for anyone behind me. Does that make me a bad person?
If my roommate yells "F'in Noobtubers" one more time, I'm going to Noobtube him.
Smelly people: Please shower, wear deodorant or go back to Missouri.
"I'm about to pee my pants!" "No...
You're about to pee your leggings."
Wakin'... bakin'. Coffee cakin'... Biscuit with bacon... Slim Jim jerk style, it's Jamaican.
Is it really necessary to have the compulsive urge to fake text on an elevator? Elevator rides really aren't that awkward, people.
I sold my soul to KU in exchange for an education.
I hope you enjoy failing all of your classes. You do it so effortlessly.
I decided to stay home and bake cupcakes instead of going to the game. I'm a man. Haters gonna hate.
My guess is KU got the short end of the deal with your soul.
While sitting on the toilet, I discovered the inspiration behind "Black and Yellow."
I don't have any Ramen or Spaghetti
O's left... What the hell am I
supposed to eat!?!?
Smang it = smash it + bang it
How is it that i get to the Underground and have to sit in the frigid cold but as soon as the basketball players come in, five tables clear up? I'm killin'.
Know yourself and faith will come
I was listening to a sermon the other day where the pastor was talking about sowing seeds in your personal faith. But before we can sow seeds in other people, we have to know where we are. So many times in my college career I have stopped and wondered, where am I going? Now I'm not talking about getting lost on campus (although sometimes that still happens). I am talking about finding direction in my life.
RELIGION
People come to college knowing they want to do something they love, but they haven't figured out what that is yet. Deepak Chopra, author of more than 50 books on health, success, relationships and spirituality, says it is normal to have an identity crisis during college. College students are stuck
between late adolescence and fully fledged adulthood. Now is the best time to figure out the direction of your life and religion is the best atmosphere to do it in.
Chopra states that the early 20s "is a time for love, ideals, a career, growing confidence and the excitement of taking flight." I have found that I can feel
these things when I am surrounded by my faith community. Through the support of my religious family, I can explore where my direction in life is headed.
Finding direction is about exploring. Career choices, love, different faiths and what it means to live a religious life are just some of the things I have dealt with in college. However, there are several other issues that people are exploring as well. Everyone's direction in life is different, just as everyone's faith walk is different. I believe these two concepts go hand in hand.
So I challenge you to ask yourself this week: What are you exploring right now? Where is your direction headed? And how is your faith and community helping you get there?
feel lost is necessary to help find your way again. It allows you to turn to someone else and tell them you're lost and they will understand. This may seem little, but having someone who just understands what you are going through can be a big comfort. And having that faith background can help you get to where you want to be. Both community and personal faith help people explore.
Having an active faith can help you deal with life's big decisions. It helps put things in perspective. Having that community you can turn to when you
Allison Bond is a junior from Andover studying journalism and religious studies.
CARTOON
POLITICS
GOP seeks austerity for posterity purposes
For emotionally fragile House Speaker John Boehner, classroom visits are iust too much.
"Family - kids - I can't go to a school anymore. I used to go to a lot of schools. And you see all these little kids running around. Can't talk about it," the Crying One explained to "60 Minutes."
Adorable children may start the waterworks for Boehner, but don't expect a similar reaction if budget cuts force their teachers to lose their jobs.
Lambasting the Obama administration for adding workers to the government payroll, Boehner said last week that if Republican cuts prompt layoffs, he won't be losing much sleep over it.
"If some of those jobs are lost, so be it," Boehner said. "We're broke." So much for the jobs, jobs, jobs mantra.
As a nifty tool from the Center for American Progress shows, cutting the GOP's promised $100 billion from the budget within that narrow category means slashing overwhelmingly popular programs - law enforcement, medical research, health care, student aid and so on. And as the protests in Wisconsin last week demonstrate, the public won't countenance cuts for the sake of cuts.
If you take Boehner's let-them-eat-cake statement at face value, you'd conclude that the "adults" of the GOP have decided that the national debt demands immediate attention. How else can you explain the Republican fetish for austerity now, now, now?
Unfortunately for Boehner and crew, their deficit ploy is pitiful transparent. Witness their uncompromising demand to extend Bush-era tax cuts, which will add $4 trillion to deficits over the next decade.
And take a closer look at what the GOP proposes to cut. Their laser-intense focus is on non-defense discretionary spending - a category that comprises a whopping 12 percent of the overall federal budget.
The proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room is the defense budget,
BY LUKE BRINKER
lbrinker@kansan.com
Gates's unwillingness to budge is understandable. As Defense Chief, you'd expect him to guard his turf. But President Obama and Congress should heed the words of Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who calculates that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will likely wind up costing between $3 and $4 trillion. This empire cannot be sustained.
which accounts for $738 billion of the overall $3.7 trillion budget. Thus far, Defense Secretary Robert Gates calls for nothing more than cuts in the rate of growth of Pentagon spending.
Prospects for seriousness about defense cuts are grim. The House even beat back Rep. Betty McCollum's symbolic amendment to end $7 million of NASCAR sponsorships by the Pentagon. There's the Bubba vote to consider, after all.
While it should have been obvious before last November, it's now undeniable that the GOP's deficit canard is about nothing more than political posturing and implementing a radical vision of right-wing governance.
If Republicans and timid Democrats truly cared about maintaining U.S. influence abroad, they wouldn't support the GOP attempt to put foreign aid on the chopping block. The Gates Foundation reports that at a minuscule .19 percent of gross domestic product, U.S. foreign aid falls far behind that of other rich countries. It may be cliché, but "Food, Not Bombs" actually does win hearts and minds.
Brinker is a sophomore from Topeka majoring in history.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Facebook needs more changes in order to accept all lifestyles
I'm pretty butt-happy that Mark Zuckerburg and his Facebook family finally decided to add "domestic partnerships" and "civil unions" as relationship status options. It's almost as if he reads all the bitching and moaning about equality I do through statuses.
But I don't think Facebook's changes are stopping with just the addition of new forms of relationship-status options. The Facebook group, "The Trevor Project," the front-runner organization that reacted to the LGBTQ suicides several months ago, announced that an even "broader roll-out" is in the future.
It only makes sense that, if Zuckerburg and his team are responding to these groups and starting to take their diverse global demographic into consideration, they will continue to expand their breadth of inclusion. In fact, we may be witnessing the early stages of the queering of Facebook.
Yes, Facebook is being "queered." And, no, I don't mean the social network is getting "gayer." I mean it is likely going to expand categories that currently only fit mainstream societal norms, such as the gender and sex binaries and the reduction of sexuality to simply an attraction to either men or women or both.
Although it has never affected me directly, I have certainly noticed the categorical issues in creating a Facebook profile. We are all either "male" or "female," which is a problem for individuals who identify as intersex, transgender or gender queer; and our sexual "interests" are either "men" or "women," with the option of checking both, but we can't check a box for transgender (because many of them do not identify as man or woman) or any non-genital-related sexual interests, such as race, ethnicity, feet, brunettes, vegetarians, etc.
Some people are also in polygamous or polyamorous relationships, which are different from "open relationships" and a lot of people practice these different ways of companionship.
Obviously, it wouldn't be realistic
for Facebook designers to come up with a list of every single sexual interest that people in dozens of different countries could possibly have, though certainly it may be expanded past the grossly oversimplified binary of "men" and/or "women." More inclusion is never a bad thing.
This also leads me to wonder why Facebook allows users a blank box to type religious and political identities that aren't very salient but don't allow users the same blank slate on which to write their individuality in other categories, such as the ones just mentioned.
But it's not up to Facebook to make these changes. They rely on groups like The Trevor Project to voice their desires for change. Facebook just does the programming. It's up to Facebook users like you to make these changes happen, especially those directly affected by these narrow mainstream categories
While we are allowed to "choose" certain schools, hometowns, etc., there is also some level of restriction. For example, a person cannot list "Quahog, RI" as his or her home-town. Perhaps this reasonable liberty to choose from a more comprehensive selection will be extended to other categories.
At first, some people might see the extension of identity categories and lists of preferences as unnecessary. But what may seem so unnecessary and insignificant to them could mean a lot to someone who feels left out of the picture. Hopefully these progressive changes will continue to randomly pop up as we navigate through the social network.
Castle is a junior from Stilwell majoring in political science & human sexuality.
The Oscars are this weekend. What did you think the WORST movie of the last year was?
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THE EDITORIAL BOARD Members of the Kansan Editor Board are Nick Gerik, Michael Holtz, Kelly Stroda, D.M. Scott and Matt Maatyne.
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