Week in ReviewSmarter Dartmouth Former Review Editor in Chief J. Lawrence Scholer recently debuted his weblog: http://smarterdartmouth.blogspot.com.Inspired by Ira Stoll's SmarterTimes, The Smarter Dartmouth providesdaily critique and analysis of Dartmouth campus media, focusing primarily on the oft-maligned Daily Dartmouth. In addition, The Smarter Dartmouth, which claims to be Dartmouth's "one-man campus content provider," will feature original coverage of campus events and book and cinema reviews.Scholer will continue to contribute to the Review.
Your local Zionists at The Dartmouth Review would like to extend wishes for a happy and New Year to all of our readers.As of the evening of Friday, September 26th, we moved into the year 5764.The Hebrew calendar is based on the moon and computes years by calculating biblical dates to determine when Creation occurred.It has thus now been 5,764 years since the Earth was created by biblical standards.Rosh Hashanah, the holiday marking the new year, is traditionally celebrated by eating apples and bread dipped in honey, to symbolize a sweet new year.
The "godmother" of 1970s feminism, Germaine Greer, has taken on a more potent adversary this time. Greer's upcoming book, entitled The Beautiful Boy, features glossy photos of "pre-adult" boys sporting hairless chests, wide-spread legs, and slim waists. Greer, 64, calls it an "art book," refusing to reveal the details of exactly how the boys came to be in her book, admitting cheerfully that it will get her into a lot of trouble. "I'd like to reclaim for women the right to appreciate the short lived beauty of boys," she wrote last year in London's Daily Telegraph. Truly revolutionary...and set to hit stores October 22, 2003.
Former Marine George Andres is at risk of losing his home. His infraction: flag flying. Andres was in violation of his West Palm Beach homeowners association's regulations by flying an American flag from a pole in his yard. Circuit Judge Edward Fine has delayed the forclosure on Andres's home until after his appeal is heard.The foreclosure sale originally was set for October 9 and would allow the association to collect more than $20,000 in legal fees. For now, Andres is allowed to keep his home.
Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that race may be used as a factor in college admissions, many have wondered how this decision will apply to the legally tricky field of bake sales. On Wednesday, school officials atSouthern Methodist University, a private university in Dallas, Texas, shut down the Young Conservatives of Texas bake sale, in which cookies were priced according to the gender and sex of the buyer. White males were hit hardest paying $1 per cookie; while white women paid $0.75, Hispanics paid $0.50 and blacks paid $0.25. "This was not an issue about free speech," said Tim Moore, director of the SMU student center. "It was really an issue where we had a hostile environment being created." Similar bake sales protesting affirmative action were held at numerous colleges around the country, including Illinois State University, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of California Los Angeles, where bake sale vendors had name-tags labeled as "Uncle Tom," "The White Oppressor" and "Self-Hating Hispanic Race Traitor." Unfortunately, even with past events serving as a precedent for the sale, and a little thing called the First Amendment behind them, the Young Conservatives were forced to end the sale, having sold only $1.50 worth of cookies.
The College announced last week that students who use Windows computers can now take advantage of "softphones"—software with a headset that turns a computer into a telephone—allowing them to place calls to anywhere in the United States or Canada using their internet connection.At the behest of the administrators who own their facility, Epsilon Kappa Theta sorority introduced similar internet phone technology in their house in the summer of 2002, though the reception on those devices has been notoriously bad. To use the new system, students would have to purchase a special headset from the College; the prices were not immediately available.The reliability of the new system is also dubious, since an electrical or network outage might disable the softphone system—or at the very least a student's access to it—while the standard telephones would continue to work.Furthermore, Dartmouth over the summer scrapped the old DarTalk system, partly in response to increased competition from cellular telephone companies, removing long-distance fees for domestic calls on all of its campus telephones, even those in dormitories.Given these shortcomings, it may be wiser to wait before switching to the softphones. Dartmouth's contract with its telephone service provider expires in three years; the College remained vague about the future of the phone connections in rooms, saying in a press release that there are "as yet" no plans to force students to use the new technology by removing the old wiring.
The Environmental Conservation Organization and the Office of Residential Life have established a "model" dormitory room in 103 Lord Hall, College President James Wright announced on September 23 at the All-Campus Community Picnic. The room, which lacks a refrigerator and printer and features a prominent clothes-drying rack in the common area, is filled with energy-efficient appliances and lights and is decorated with a series of informational posters describing the benefits of living without modern conveniences. Brent Reidy '05, student coordinator of ECO, cited the room's lack of a printer as a benefit. By not using their own printer, he said at the picnic, student occupants Anne Raymond '06 and Vicki Allen '06 must use GreenPrint, the College's "energy-efficient" but paper-wasteful central printing system. The two student occupants applied outside the normal room-draw process to live in the room, which had been set aside for ECO use. Allen said the two roommates sought toset up a compost bin in the hallway and to purchase energy-efficient curtains—on ECO's tab— to conserve heat in the winter. She also said it would be impossible to determine the actual energy savings of living a "sustainable" lifestyle. Made entirely of wood logged from the Second College Grant, the furniture in the room was constructed locally, "sustaining local employment," Dean of the College James Larimore said. By using Dartmouth wood and labor, he explained, Dartmouth has "made a commitment to this campus and in the community." He did not explain why it is Dartmouth's role to provide jobs for locals, although, in typical fashion, he related his environmental consciousness to his Indian heritage.
The New Hampshire primary is the first in the nation, following closely on the heels of the Iowa Caucus.As such, candidates swarm to the state in an effort to gain momentum and jumpstart faltering campaigns in a state notorious for its fickle electorate.In the recent past, New Hampshire has held surprises for top candidates.Bill Clinton used his surprising second-place finish to catapult himself from no-name governer to leader of the pack, and John McCain's defeat of George W. Bush showed that candidate Bush was—contrary to popular belief—not invincible.As the primary season begins in earnest, Democrats are making their way north to press the flesh at small venues across the Granite State. For most of the summer, the New Hampshire primary has been a close race between Senator John Kerry and former Vermont governor Howard Dean.In a Concord Monitor poll from 23 June, Kerry stood at 30 percent of likely primary voters.This put him well ahead of Howard Dean, who had 21 percent.This poll echoed the trend of others taken around the same time period, which showed Kerry widening his lead in New Hampshire. Dean Spilotes, a former Dartmouth government professor, said that the widening gap between Kerry and Dean was a result of "Kerry fine-tuning his campaign message while Dean's increased visibility in recent months has opened him up to more criticism, both inside and outside the party." Representative Dick Gephardt and Senator Joe Lieberman followed in third and fourth place with 11 and 10 percent of the vote, respectively. The Monitor poll also matched the four top Democrats against President George Bush.Republican, Democratic, and independent voters were asked to choose which candidate they would pick in a general election. Bush defeated each of the Democratic candidates by margins in the double-digits.In each race, Bush polled between 57 and 59 percent of the vote, while the Democratic candidate polled between 28 and 32 percent. Despite Kerry's nine point lead over Dean only a few weeks before, an 8 July poll by the University of New Hampshire showed that the margin had shrunk to two percentagepoints.Kerry received 18 percent of the Democratic vote while Dean received 16 percent. Lieberman came in third with 11 percent. Still, almost a third of Democrats remainedundecided. Fourteen percent said that they would vote for Senator Hillary Clinton if she were to run. Throughout the remainder of the summer, Dean continued his rise in the polls, and by 28 August he had grabbed a 21 point lead over Kerry.The Zogby International poll had Dean leading Kerry 38 percent to 17 percent.Lieberman once again came in third with 6 percent of the vote, and John Edwards followed with 4 percent. Voters stated that they preferred "a take-no-prisoners Democrat, even if that candidate seems unlikely to beat President Bush." Sixty-four percent of those thought President Bush would be re-elected.The August poll came at a time when Dean had recently drawn large crowds for his "Sleepless in Summer" tour and appeared in numerous TV advertisements. Kerry spokesman Robert Gibbs said, "Dean has spent considerable resources on TV, so it's not surprising that he's increased his numbers in a very fluid electorate.Kerry has long-term strengths that will stay with him throughout the winter when more voters are paying attention and making their final decision."Even so, the other candidates have thus far been unable to stem Dean's current surge in the polls.The primary will be held on January 27.
As if the RIAA's continuing crusade to persecute its own customers was not enough, it has set its sights on the guiltless elderly. Sara Ward, a 66-year-old Boston native, somehow found herself among the 261 defendants in the latest round of lawsuits leveled against those who download mp3s. Ms. Ward was alleged to have used Kazaa, a file-sharing program, to download thousands of songs, including the contemporary classic "I'm a Thug" by rapper Trick Daddy. Surprisingly, Ward is not an avid hip-hop fan. Nor, apparently, does she download large amounts of illicit music. In fact, her only computer is an Apple Macintosh, incapable of running Kazaa. When this information surfaced, the lawsuit was dropped. Still, the always-resilient RIAA made it clear that it "[reserves] the right to refile the complaint against Ms. Ward if and when circumstances warrant."
On Wednesday, September 24th, a Federal Judge crushed the hopes of every citizen who owns a telephone by declaring that the Federal Trade Commision could not legally establish a National Do Not Call Registry without specific Congressional approval. The list, which already had fifty million phone numbers, was slated to go into effect on October 1st—before the court decision. For once, the U.S. Congress responded quickly, and with the opposition of only eight Representatives, the final legislation passed on Thursday. Both Ted Strickland, an Ohio Democrat, and Lee Terry, a Nebraska Republican, voted no in an attempt to protect telemarketing jobs in their respective districts; others were simply opposed to any expansion of Federal power. Later Thursday, the tables again were turned, and another judge ruled that the registry violated the First Amendment. The FTC responded by filing for an emergency stay of said ruling, so that the registry can be implemented on schedule. Now, barring the unlikely action of an amendment to the Constitution, the eventual fate of the registry will be decided in federal courts. |
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