Monday, January 29, 2007

UPDATE

You can view an archived stream of the Carter speech mentioned below by clicking the title of this post or by clicking HERE. Worth a look.

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Jimmy Carter spoke at Brandeis today

Former President Carter came and spoke today at Brandeis, giving a much-hyped speech about his new much-hyped book. His book is about the Arab-Israeli conflict and is seen by many as being decidedly anti-Israeli. I thought up a witty headline to sum up the matter: "Carter Takes Unorthodox View of Arab-Israeli Conflict." Tickets to the speech took hours to get and the line to get in was long as well. They had metal detectors and x-rays. You weren't even allowed to have a cell phone with you. His speech was actually pretty good although I agree with some people who said that parts of his speech were playing to the Brandeis crowd. I felt his introduction was particularly defensive and also brought up all of his achievements to win people over. He made some good points in favor of the Palestinians and fielded questions very well though. After Carter spoke, Professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School gave a sort of rebuttal, which I didn't stay for. The whole event was streamed to multiple locations on campus and some news crews from major stations were there. I'll bet you can find the speech, or at least clips online if you're interested.

Thursday, January 18, 2007

If that last post wasn't profound enough for you...

I'm a meat eater. I don't really discriminate when it comes to the type of meat. I feel that all animals should have equal chance to be consumed by me. Some just stay better hidden from me than others (kudos to them). I've eaten a pretty wide variety of animals though, from cows to ducks to rabbits to quails. A favorite delicacy is the ever-popular bacon. Unfortunately, this tasty morsel is unavailable at Brandeis, where eating pigs is considered heinous and wrong. Until recently, I have objected to their objection to pork. Then, I read a reference to a Rolling Stone article on pork farms. I read the article, and as a result, I've decided to give up pork or at least make sure I know where it comes from. Call it a late new years resolution, if you will. I invite you all to hopefully share the same reaction to the article as I did:

Read the article

For those of you who are too lazy or stupid to care about what goes on in our country and what goes into the production of your food, I'll simply present this picture from Google Maps:

What you see here is a pork farm. What you see above the farm is a giant pit of toxic pig shit.


Hey! Sorry about the delay in posting.

I've been otherwise occupied by the more pressing matter of skiing. Snow out west has been abundant. Skiing has been great. Snow in the East has been little to non-existent. Skiing has been shitty. That just about sums it up. I'm getting back into race season, but it seems like it will become more like party in Vermont/New Hampshire season if the weather keeps up the way it has been. Classes have started. One of my classes, History of Photography, seemed cool when I signed up for it, seemed crappy when I had to spend $100 on books for it, but now doesn't seem that bad. I'm excited to be back, I guess. Break seemed so long. Seeing old friends is nice. Seeing new friends is nice.

I leave you with this. I simply googled "profound" and this is one of the results. I'd say that's pretty profound, man.