Yay, classes started today. Being on campus when there’s no class is just boring, plus its freezing and no one wants to leave their overheated dorm rooms.
But before work picks up and I actually have to do a lot of work, here, as promised (albeit delayed) are

“Conclusions from Model EU Plenary Sessions

1) Blue whale beaching themselves is really funny, according to my LS1 professor (and Model EU faculty advisor)

2) Josh is Jewish, because he gets Chanukah cards
2a) How this conclusion was reached
Josh: (telling a story) …and when I get Chanukah cards…
Me: (2 minutes later) Wait, Josh, are you Jewish?
Josh: No, I just get Chanukah cards for no reason…
2b) And use the “Hanukkah” spelling, because its less retarded

3) Adam is Jewish too!

4) Josh asks dumb questions

5) Group dynamics suck

6) Rachel (me) has really nice handwriting
(commentary: I’ve always been told I have bad handwriting so go figure)

7) Today’s plenary session has 3 parts!

This guy has an ungood fake Italian accent.
(but he’s kind of cute) ((he is???))

9) You can time travel!

10) Josh needs new ties and not “awful gay liberal” ones

11) Shut up Turkey, no one cares about your country, go home to your prostitutes

12) Corruption is not neccesarily a bad thing

13) De-facto is a cool word (re: Interior Minister meeting)

14) “Unanimously” is a difficult word to say

15) Portugal and Hungary should form an alliance and bomb Slovakia! (also re: Interior Minister meeting)

16) Men can be sexually exploited too!

17) Interior Ministers are unimportant
17a) Yeah, but that means we have to do less work                                                          17b) And it lends itself to the joke “Hey baby, can I be Minister of your Interior?”

18) We are all losers, so there can be other excuses or explanations

19)The Dutch drink a lot, because it is always damp and chilly in the Netherlands, and they need alcohol to a) keep them warm and b) keep them sane because its always raining!

20) Why aren’t these meetings over yet? (every day…)

In my IA class we had an assignment, similar to the one I recieved in Mr. Englebart’s class in 9th grade. We were given a blank map. For homework we had to fill in the countries. We have a book for class called “The Student Atlas of World Politics” IN this book there are maps of Europe and Asia (the two continents we had to label). When I got my map back my professor said “Good job, you got an A” and I asked “Didn’t everybody?” She told me that a bunch of people got ‘F’s”
How.
How can people get an F on what is basically a copying assignment?
If you are stupid enough to fail that assignment than you deserve to fail. Instead, however, we are having a ‘do over’

Yes. A do over.

“The wreckage will not become a funeral mount for me, but will serve as a height I have clibed to attain a wider feild of vision. My pride and my power of vision were all I owned when I starter-and whatever I achieved, was achieved by means of them. Both are greater now. Now I have the knowledge of the superlative value I had missed: of my right to be proud of my vision. The rest is mine to reach” -Hank Rearden, Atlas Shrugged

So I’m finished with my Atlas Shrugged Essay, its been submitted and I never want to look at it again. I know I won’t win, because a) its not my best work, by any means and b) its like decathlon. the winning essay never makes any sense and usually sucks. Mine doesn’t suck enough and makes too much sense. If you read the winning essay from 2001 you’ll understand…

I’d post the essay here, but I don’t want to obsess over it. After November 23, when I find out that I didn’t win and can get a free book (!!!) I’ll post it.

Writing this essay only got me more obsessed with the book, but I have to put it away for a few months, because I don’t want to read it and obsess about things I should have put in my essay. I was really limited (only 1000 words) so I had to be concise to a fault. I know some people who read this are currently reading Atlas Shrugged so I won’t go on my other rant about this essay and the part of the book it’s based on, because I don’t want to spoil anything.

In other news:
I am going to kill whoever keeps changing the requirements for an IA minor/major.

Now I have to go to Feminist Political Thought & watch the Lib Fems get upset by the professor’s comments.

So my feminist political class is going to be interesting, as once again, I’m probably the most “conservative” female in the room, and it’s a lot of the same people from my Public Policy class last semester. There are lots of people to argue with, I just have to get over my inability to speak up in political theory classes. Yes, its a very specific defiency, I have done extensive studies on it, etc.

Classes like this are always fun, because you inevitably get someone bitching that Locke (it IS all about John Locke, thanks for the advice Jimmy K….) doesn’t include his thoughts/opinions/etc about women.

Which…ok…yes…what?

Women weren’t respected as part of intellectual society, and thats the entire point. I know we’re all blah blah blah equalitycakes here, but one has to accept that women WERE left out of almost everything, and when you read a dead-white-male writer, you need to understand that he wasn’t neccesarily a horrible person who ate babies (though that would be pretty cool), he was just a slightly more intelligent than normal, typical guy writing some stuff down.

Hm

I need coffee.

And I need to finish my Atlas Shrugged essay and think about my literary crushes

Me: pity me and my american political thought stuff
YoungerWiserSibling: I have no pity for someone who takes a class because of a crush on an elitist libertarian

The end of a school year is always so weird. It is such a nostalgic time for remembering past end of school years and such, and expressing disbelief that the year is over.

Sociology today was so sad. It’s without a doubt the best class I’ve taken in my college career. Everyone else in the class is intelligent, well spoken, and fun — we have had amazing discussions, and a great dynamic. It’s very rare to find a ‘perfect college class’ but this was about as close as you could come. Mike, who did my Weber critique and is probably one of the nicest people I’ve ever met is a senior and graduating, and even though I really don’t know him personally, just from class, it made me kind of sad that I’ll never have the opportunity to talk to him again.

College is kind of depressing like that. You make connections with people in class on an intellectual level and many times you don’t have the chance to ever talk to that person again besides a nodd when you see them walking across the Green…I’m ranting, and its not making any sense.

I can’t really be articulate about what I’m thinking about all this. Whats that literary term when one part symbolizes a whole? Because I think that is what I’m getting at, or something.

One more class today, N/W Lit, my least favorite class. I don’t want to go, but I do want to give the professor a scathing evaluation. Then I have a lecture tonight that my sadistic professor is requiring us to go to on the LAST DAY OF CLASSES. But I’m exhausted from not sleeping last night and after this weekend, I’m not eager to drink any time soon, so its not like its too big a deal. More a hassle than anything else. So yeah. These entries are getting more and more boring, but I swear they are all very political and sociological and libertarian. Yeah.

I can’t believe this year is over.

Hm. The espresso fumes have gotten to my brain and I have nothing to say about anything
Doing all this cafe/school stuff is turning me into an uber bitch, and a confused one at that. What day is it, where’d I put my keys, etc.

I’m going to attempt to quit my job due to the unhealthiness of it all. I’m also cheating on my live journals are whatstheword right now, but thats okay, because I also cheated on the away message rules. Hm. How incoherent.

Goal: Do less stuff next week.

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“What the US Does Wrong” is turning into a very good class and very timely.

Sum up of the night:

US Motivations for war in Iraq—many Europeans, and even some Americans think that Bush is in this for oil. There are so many logical reasons why that is false that were presented tonight.

First of all, we could get all the oil we wanted from Iraq if we would lift the goddamn economic sanctions. Basically, we’re just being stubborn. We want Iraq to do things our way, be democratic and humanitarian and stop building weapons that we ourselves possess. So it isn’t like Saddam Hussein is unwilling to sell us oil – we’re just being spiteful.
Cheaper oil prices aren’t what Bush is after either. If we won a war in Iraq, we would have to rebuild both the government and the oil industry at a huge, huge expense. (Besides, people say that Saddam would just torch the oil fields on the way out, Elias Wyatt style. And I wouldn’t blame him. Saddam is a dictator, but he runs an authoritarian, not a totalitarian regime. Basically, people there don’t hate him as much as the US wants you to think. And even if they did, it is not our right to intervene. It makes sense that he would torch his oil fields, if we won’t let him have them, why should he let us have them) Furthermore, those who say Bush is a player for the oil companies: this may be so, but Bush is invested in domestic oil companies. If prices fall low on the foreign market it negatively impacts the domestic market, ie causes Bush to lose money. Finally, the reason gas prices are so high now are not because of the possibility of war with Iraq, its because of the strike in Venezuela. If we were really after cheap oil prices we’d be sending troops to Caracaus.

On Inevitability
Many, including my professor feel war is inevitable. I thought it was until about a week ago. All this ‘duct tape and plastic sheets’ are just indications that maybe this is boiling down, and they just need something to say… Plus, the strategy of the US has been undermined by the UN calling for more time. Quite simply, you can’t fight a war in Iraq in the summer. That why the last war in the Persian Gulf took place in January. Basically, its already too late. If we want a war in Iraq that we can win, we may have to wait until next year.

Someone suggested today that we will look back at this period in history and say we waited too long. That war was necessary, and we waited too long. That may be true. I do not think we should be going to war in this situation, but the manner in which we have involved ourselves may make war the best option. We may have dug ourselves into a grave, and the only way out is combat. I’m sure that outrages a lot of people who vehemently dissent to the war, but it is only a logical consideration. Maybe people should start thinking “what are the consequences of NOT going to war”

America’s defense budget it higher than all the other countries in the world combined. Bush recently created the Dept of Homeland Security, an overinflated bureaucracy which is supposed to protect us from terroism. So why the increased terror alert? If Homeland Security was doing its job, the threat against America wouldn’t be going up.

The problem is that Homeland Security is your typical coping bureaucracy. You can’t measure outputs (day to day tasks) and you can’t measure outcomes. Basically, Homeland Security is a rhetorical institution — they have some vague, loosely defined goals, but there’s no way to measure if they’re really achieving them. They can increase defense spending and keep Arab immigrants out of the country all they want but they still cannot prevent terroism.

This increased alert is bullshit, its merely a way to convince the public that we are threatened. Of course we’re threatened–we’re threatened every day of our lives by various factors, but it doesn’t mean you can define how big a threat there is on any given day. Furthermore, if we’re supposed to protect ourselves with duct tape and plastic sheets (which, in a biological weapons attack would be completely ineffective), then maybe we should be cutting our defense budget, since it doesn’t seem to be making things any better.

While we’re at it, we can stop intervening in things that aren’t our business. Our witchhunt for weapons of mass destruction and terroists is just the latest in the history of the US hegemony. I don’t understand what makes us think we have the right to violate the sovereignty of any state and get involved in conflicts that aren’t ours to fight. Like Kosovo for instance. Milosevic was doing some pretty dreadful things. We let thousands of our own people starve while we go off and ‘liberate” others. People who speak of our humanitarian responsibility ought to take a look at the problems the US causes when acting in the name of human rights.