Today, Business Insider's sad junior writer covering the Dartmouth beat stumbled across another gem:

In short, a group of disgruntled Dartmouth College employees are "blowing the whistle" on what they allege to be a compromised College Endowment investment process. In particular, they released an open letter to the New Hampshire Attorney General detailing their accusations—conflicts of interest arising from the presence of a number of asset managers on the Board of Trustees, and a disproportionate allocation of endowment money to their funds. The implication  that board members are funneling assets into their stewardship - is by no means trivial.

I hope he packed his SNAP Card.

To the interminable list of things that government does not do well, we can now safely add another item: irony.

Writing in Friday’s issue of The New York Times, columnist Maureen Dowd revealed some interesting statistics about the nature of New York State’s food stamp program. While criticizing Governor Andrew Cuomo for his support of regulations that require recipients of New York State food stamps to submit fingerprints as part of a reformed application process, Ms. Dowd lamented that such an onerous requirement inhibits American families from “getting the help they truly need.” Citing the Governor’s own report, she noted that more than 1.4 million or 30 percent of families in the state fail to receive the benefits for which they are eligible. Rather than explaining how the fingerprinting policy was responsible the lack of participation, however, Ms. Dowd became far too preoccupied with pedantic bouts of asinine moralizing to make the connection apparent. Nonetheless, an implicit association emerged: by making the application more-fraud resistant, Cuomo and his allies in the Statehouse are working ceaselessly to withhold food subsidies from their constituents. 

With one hand, the scientists used a computer program to create 20 faces of potential investment managers which were then shown to the participants in the study. Some were designed to seem more trustworthy than others, according to past research of human instinctual responses to the shapes and features of faces. With the other, the researchers provided information about the reputations of each of the possible investment managers. Some were given good reputations, others bad.

 But he seemed like such a nice guy...

--Sterling C. Beard

I know that the Occupy Wall Street issue is about as relevant to the country as President Kim’s presence on campus is relative to student life, but this video sheds light on an Occupier’s thinking. Despite the fact that “those at the 34th percentile of income in the United States are at the 90th percentile globally,” Occupy members ignore this reasoning and instead behave like these monkeys. Although this clip helps practical people understand the thought process of typical Occupy hipster, it certainly does not justify their actions. Fortunately, the Occupy movement, along with the shanty next to Collis, seem to be in steep decline.

-Will Duncan

A few days ago, President Obama visited the troops in Afghanistan on the anniversary of Osama bin Laden's death. Such photo-ops aren't unusual in and of themselves. I remember being in middle school when President Bush visited troops in Iraq. If nothing else, it's in good taste for a Commander-in-Chief to go and tour the front lines.

All fine and good. Basking in the limelight of a good move is something everyone is willing to put up with, at least for a while. What was wasn't in good taste, however, was that the President turned it into an early campaign stop by later suggesting that Mitt Romney wouldn't have had the stones to order the raid that killed the deceased head of Al-Qaeda. A subsequent TV ad continued that line of attack.

Image courtesy of CBS News

It's the end of the line for Republican presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich, who officially announced Wednesday that he would be dropping out of the race for the GOP nomination.

Frankly, not a big shocker. Gingrich's march for the presidency has been losing a considerable amount of steam since he came up big in South Carolina and in his own state of Georgia. After those victories, Santorum pulled off a number of wins in the South, which propelled the Pennsylvania senator into contention with Romney and left Newt far behind.

But Newt slugged it out for another month in the hopes that things might turn around for him. Alas, this turned out not to be the best move, considering he was having a considerable amount of trouble rallying funds for himself n the first place. With his campaign suspended, he's now sitting on $4 million worth of debt.

“Around 100 Dartmouth students have cut alcohol consumption by almost half after taking part in a pilot program run by the Learning Collaborative on High-Risk Drinking,” says the article.

“Dartmouth began requiring BASICS (Brief Alcohol Screening and Intervention for College Students) last September for students cited for an alcohol-related offense,” states Dartmouth Now. “Data from intervention work with about 100 students who violated the College alcohol policy last fall—many of them needing medical assistance—show that their alcohol consumption has been cut almost in half within 90 days.”

Wow! Isn’t this news so heartwarming? Given Dartmouth’s reputation for raging, it is encouraging to know that President Kim, Dean Johnson, and Brian Bowden, coordinator of Alcohol and Other Drug Education Programs, have found a way to change the culture that many thought impossible to improve! Right?

Not Exactly.

Today, The D carried a verbatim ultamatim that...criticized the "persistence of negative stereotypes and disrespectful attitudes toward women among certain members of the Dartmouth community." In addition, The D's editorial board "[feared] that inaction on the part of the Dartmouth community in light of this event and others like it will give a free pass to those who continuously perpetuate a culture of disrespect on campus and allow this type of objectionable behavior to continue."

Eh? That's the point they're taking from all this? 

Big Green Baseball faces off against Harvard this weekend, with two games in Cambridge tomorrow and a double-header at home on Sunday, with games at 1:00 and 3:30 PM.  With a ten-game winning streak, the team is 19-15 (11-5 Ivy League) for the season.  This ten-game streak is no rare occurrence; just last year the Big Green won eleven games in a row, and three of the ten 10-game streaks happened in the past four seasons alone.  

Just one win this weekend will give Dartmouth Baseball their fifth consecutive Rolfe Division title.  Dartmouth's baseball team has been blessed with many strong players this season, with '15 Thomas Olson winning Rookie of the Week and '13 Kyle Hunter earning co-Pitcher of the Week in the Ivy League, and Joe Sclafani '12 among the Ivy League's top twelve in several categories and looking at a career with the Major Leagues.

 I have high hopes for Dartmouth Baseball's 2012 Season, with impressive stats on the individual and team levels.  Sunday should be a beautiful day for some great ballplaying.

--Meghan Hassett