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Monday, February 19, 1990 / University Daily Kansan
Opinion
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
New powers
Reunification of Germany raises the specter of economics determining superpower status
T the reunion of Germany raises the same concerns as a corporate merger; nobody knows what the result will be until it's finished.
Undoubtedly, Germany will be reunited. The foreign ministers of the United States, United Kingdom, France, the Soviet Union and the two Germans agreed Wednesday to a two-stage framework to erase the border between the Germans. The two countries already have begun plans for currency and economic union. After domestic unification, the country would meet with the foreign ministers to discuss Germany's role in NATO and other security issues.
This is as it should be. The two countries share a common language, a common past and want to share a common future. The German people constitute a nation and could not be constrained by the arbitrary division imposed by the United States and the Soviet Union.
The reunification, however, marks the waning of the military superpower. The next era will be one of the economic superpower, and the United States must take care that it is not relegated to second-class status. Japan already is a superpower in the economic arena. West Germany, the pre-eminent economic power in Europe, will expand its dominance only after it consolidates its natural and human resources
with East Germany.
Economic competition, not military prowess, will determine the United States' international role in the 21st century. If it wishes to stay a world leader, it must compete with those countries that strive for innovation and efficiency. The United States no longer needs to look over its shoulder for the Soviet Union. Japan and Germany will be the countries staking claim to global leadership by producing the highest standards of living and levels of economic productivity.
The United States must respond to the new international order by concentrating on ways to improve the economy. To stockpile weapons will not contribute to economic competitiveness. Updating obsolete technology and encouraging research and development will be the hallmarks of the next generation of global leaders. Hiding behind protectionist measures will ensure that the country struggles to keep up with the rest of the world.
The reunification of Germany must be celebrated as an end to the Cold War, the easing of international tensions and the triumph of a people. However, it also launches a new economic rivalry. The United States must recognize its new competitor and seize every opportunity to remain competitive.
Daniel Niemi for the editorial board
Capital punishment
40-year sentence would be penalty enough
The majority of Kansans favor the death penalty. Gov. Mike Hayden supports it, so it must be politically popular. Fortunately, the Legislature is not bending to popular sentiment and understands the complications and drawbacks to state-sanctioned killing.
The Legislature cannot be accused of being soft on crime. The House has approved a bill that would impose a mandatory 40-year prison sentence without parole for persons convicted of premeditated murder.
As an alternative to capital punishment, the bill calling for the 40-year sentence makes the best argument for justice. Depriving a person of 40 years of life is a sufficiently harsh penalty for all but the most heinous crimes.
Supporters of capital punishment can point to crimes of such flagrant disregard for human life and decency that the death penalty seems justified. The problems with the death penalty, however, far outweigh its use an instrument of justice.
First, the death penalty does not deter crime, as its supporters would have people
think. Numerous studies have shown that murderers have given little thought to possible punishment before killing.
Second, juries have never imposed the death penalty with any kind of equity. The majority of convicts on death rows are poor, members of minorities or both. Wealthy white people who commit murder are rarely at risk of receiving the death penalty. At present, capital punishment is unfeasible.
Most important, innocent people can be convicted of murders they did not commit. Death, obviously, is an irrevocable sentence. Unjust incarceration cannot be forgiven, but killing a person for a crime he did not commit makes the state as guilty as the most barbaric murderer. One accidental killing is too many.
Capital punishment logically cannot be accepted as a punishment for crime. Capital crimes, especially murder, nevertheless must be met with swift and appropriate action. In Kansas, a mandatory 40-year sentence without parole would best serve justice.
Daniel Niemi for the editorial board
Readers want sensationalism
Hovering like a vulture over the smoking remains of a man and his family, an avoid journalist hungrily takes notes on the scene, jotting down as many harrowing details as his stomach can stand. After taking careful notes describing the scene, he hustles out to wrench an interview out of the stunned neighbors, asking them how they feel after witnessing such horror. With his notebook dripping re-created blood, he scurrises off to file his story.
The next morning, a weary businessman scans the day's paper, hoping to find a digest of the day's stock tips. Suddenly, he comes upon the headline, "Family burned beyond recognition," with a carefully fleshed-out story beneath. After gasping and spitting out his coffee, he reads hungrily, gulping down the horrid story as quickly as he was drinking his coffee.
These scenes take place every day in every paper, whether a staid paper like The New York Times or a blood-and-guts paper like the National Enquirer. The Times, of course, indignantly denies that it would ever
Eric Swanson
Guest columnist
scrape from the bottom of the news barrel, while the Enquirer shamelessly flaunts its goods like an aging whore in a sequined red dress — a difference that is reflected in the papers' respective leadership. When The Times prints a story dripping with gore, no matter how discreetly disguised, its readers protest with righteous rhetoric denouncing such sensationalism. The Enquirer's readers, on the other hand, eagerly devour every false word and cry for more, never realizing that they are ample justification of the Enquirer's existence.
Those who disdain such sensationalism and cry that the papers ought to print more good news and less gore fail to acknowledge their own prurience. The desire to know more about man's darker deeds is antique and
can, if properly handled, lead to a greater understanding of these illus, if not attempts at reform. Unfortunately, our desire to help the victims is often short-circuited by a mixture of less fashionable emotions; instead of feeling the tug of humanity's bond, we are prey to voyeurism, blended with a guilty relief that we escaped this time. After all, it's far easier to gulr our hunger for bizarreness and squalor than to clean up that squalor.
The media do sensationalize often, generally in an attempt to spice up a dull story. Certainly, no respectable paper would ever admit that it was trying to hook readers with witnessed blood for bait. Readers, on the other hand, rabidly devour sensationalism and pay for the privilege, steadily deploring the media's depravity all the while.
The press is often compared to flies on a dead body, seeking to sip every drop of blood from the carrion. The next time this comparison arises, perhaps we ought to remember that we are both the carrion and the flies. Eric Swanson is an Arvada, Colo. junior majoring in English.
LETTERS to the EDITOR
Strip tasteless
I feel that the "Gamp Unheely" comic in the Feb. 14 Kansan was tasteless and irresponsible, especially when viewed in context of the momentous release of Nelson
Mandela' from prison in South Africa earlier in the week. Your comic depicts two "Jayhawks" who cannot find a product to make sexual innuendoes about which is not on a list of products manufactured by companies who still do business in racially-segregated South Africa.
In the United States, economic sanctions are our best way of showing the oppressed of South Africa that we stand with them in solidarity. Companies who do business in South Africa should be vigorously boycotted as to send
a firm message to South Africa and the business world that discrimination of all forms, which is so well embodied in apartheid, is unacceptable in the 1990s.
It is little wonder that "Packard" and his sweetheart are noticeably fair-skinned. I wonder if the joke would be funny at all if you had chosen more African-looking Jayhawks. I think not. Oh, but let me guess: some of your best friends are Black.
George P. Frazier
Graduate teaching assistant, com-
puter science
puter science
Other Voices
The seriousness of the oil spill off Huntington Beach, Calif., cannot be measured only in volume or its impact on the coastal environment. The nearly 300,000 gallons of light Alaskan crude that fanned out to a slick of more than 20 square miles is another blot on the nation's energy policies and the wasteful ways of Americans.
As long as we continue to rely heavily on fossil fuels, coal and oil and use them up nearly as fast as they can be extracted from the ground, we are courting disaster. Our fossil-fuel foolishness demonstrates the need for alternative sources of energy, such as safe and reliable nuclear plants.
It is argued that nuclear power is an idea whose time never arrived. Once nuclear power was towed as
me answer to our energy problems. A combination of troublesome accidents at nuclear plants and concern about the storage of nuclear waste showed the idea to the back burner.
Talk has not yet turned toward windmills, solar power or more hydroelectric plants as sources of energy. As a practical matter, Americans have no immediate choice other than fossil fuels to power their cars and illuminate, cool and heat their homes.
Even so, experience suggests that we should devote more energy to planning for the widespread development of nuclear power as an alternative to environmentally harmful fossil fuels, even as we conserve the energy at hand.
> From The Arizona Republic, Phoenix,
Feb. 10.
News staff
Richard Brack. Editor
Daniel Niemi. Managing editor
Christopher R. Relaton. News editor
Martha Mote. Planning editor
John Milburn. Editorial editor
Candy Nieman. Campus editor
Nina Concordia. Books editor
E. Joseph Zurgu. Photo editor
Stephen Kline. Graphics editor
Kris Berguelt. Analytics editor
Elaine Duncan. General manager, news editor
Margaret Townsend ... Business manager
Tami Rank ... Retail sales manager
Misey Miller ... Campus sales manager
Kathy Globe ... Regional sales manager
 Mike Johnson ... National sales manager
Mindy Morrie ... Co-op sales manager
Nate Stamos ... Production manager
Mary Jones ... Assistant production manager
Carla Slaintec ... Marketing director
James Gleannapp ... Creative director
Janet Rorholm ... Campaigned
Wendy Starz ... Team sheets manager
Jamie Jones ... Sales and marketing adviser
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LSAT is easy just go to another bar
(1) To enter the bar, you need a blue ticket and a yellow card.
o you want to be a lawyer.
The LSAT tests your reading comprehension and analytical reasoning ability with questions like this one, taken from Barron's How to Prepare for the LSAT: (There are five state tests followed by a number of questions.)
Question: Which of the following will allow you to enter the bar?
When I think of lawyers I think of Perry Mason. I think of F. Lee Bailey. I think of Oliver North's defense counsel. I don't think of Abbot and Costello. But when I read sample questions for the Law School Admission Test, an Abbot and Costello routine is what comes to mind.
ticket and a yellow card.
(2) To get a blue ticket, you need an orange hat or a green bicycle.
(3) To get a yellow card, you need a blue card and a yellow hat.
(4) If you have a red ticket, you can get a green bicycle and a yellow hat.
(5) A blue hat will get you a red ticket.
Editor's - note; LSAT questions reprinted with permission from Barron's, "from How to Prepare for the LSAT, 4th edition by Jerry Bobrow, Copyright 1987, Barron's Educational Series, Inc., Hauptauge, N.Y.
Stan Dial is a Hutchinson senior majoring in journalism and economics.
(A) an orange hat and a blue card
(B) a red ticket and a green bicycle
(C) a green bicycle and a yellow hat
(D) a yellow hat and a blue card
(E) a blue card and a red ticket
The LSAT is a four-hour marathon of green hats and orange bicycles. It also includes questions which seem more appropriate, including a writing sample and problems where you decide how certain rules apply to a hypothetical dispute. You also must bring a photo ID and have a thumb print taken before you are allowed to take the test. I assume that this is to discourage the illicit hiring of
I think I'd just go to another bar. I guess that means I wouldn't be much of a lawyer.
According to Barron's, there also would be several other questions about the same five statements and your work would be timed. And it gets better. Sometimes the questions are followed up with potential answers like "(A) only," "(A) and "(C)," "(B)," "(C) and (E)" and "Not enough information to answer the question." You also have to answer questions about issues of burning social importance in what order
I suppose that all this analytical reasoning stuff helps law schools decide which applicants have the most potential. But it seems to skirt common sense. Would you rather be represented by an attorney who knows that, to quote Barron's again, "A red ticket will get you a green bicycle and a yellow hat. A green bicycle, a yellow hat, and a blue card will get you a yellow card and a blue ticket, and you may then enter the bar." Or would you rather go to another bar?
I don't get it. In Oliver North's trial, he wasn't asked: "Col. North, did Mr. Reagan (A) have knowledge of the arms shipments, (B) have knowledge of the arms shipments but forgot about them, (C) have no knowledge, (D) A and B, (E) all of the above, excluding C, and (F) not enough information to answer the question?" He certainly wasn't asked how to get into a bar. Although I suspect that he knows the answer
CAMP UHNEELY
to park cars, how to seat eight people, some of whom don't like each other, around a dinner table, and in what order a number of people must stand in line so that the tallest two won't be next to one another.
experts on how to get into bars that require articles of clothing and bicycles in lieu of a cover charge.
HEY, KIP,
I'VE GOT A
GRIPE ABOUT
THIS LIST OF
PROBLEM.
COMPANIES TO
R.J.?
BOYCOTT C Because
OF THEIR INVESTMENTS
IN SOUTH AFRICA.
BY SCOTT PATTY
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