I recently returned from a summer studying Chinese in Beijing. It was an intense summer, to say the least, in a war zone of culture fought in the urban jungle that is Beijing. The language barrier was daunting, the food hard to digest and the cabbies had a death wish that Charles Bronson couldn't deliver on.
Unity is the talk of the town in Denver this week. The Democrats have gone out of their way to try to demonstrate that their party has healed its rift in the months following the grueling primary battle between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
A musician may win an award, an academic receives a grant and an athlete finds him or herself glorified by fans and the media. Jericho Scott, undoubtedly the best pitcher in his New Haven, Conn., league, received his accolades in the form of banishment from the sport of baseball for being "too good."
Our "nation of whiners" has evolved a novel way to express its discontent with what it already has. It incorporates a concept as hip with the young generation as live DJing: passive aggression.
For years, I have encouraged others my age to participate in the unfolding, unique experience of a government by the people.
Despite what some scientists claim is the next great mass extinction, a new species has emerged after Sen. Barack Obama was named the presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party. This fierce, new species, called the PUMA, is a mammal in the Hillary Clintonae family and is native to the Americas.
After months of speculating, waiting and politicking, Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama has finally selected his running mate. Now that Sen. Joe Biden has completed the Democratic presidential ticket, the question is rapidly turning toward the Delaware senator's ability to serve Obama on the ticket. Without a doubt, Biden was the most complimentary choice Obama could have made given his available options.
During my two years at the Alligator, I've heard all the criticism UF students and Gainesville residents have to offer.
Oh, to be young again, when I thought homework was for pansies, a fake ID was golden, withdrawing from a class would never come back to haunt me and hangovers only lasted an hour, if at all. Just as I did, all you incoming freshmen will have ample opportunities to make mistakes (and hopefully learn from them). And as someone who has been at UF for six years, at the very least I can pass on a little wisdom to all you whippersnappers to help you get the most out of your undergraduate experience.
There's a lot of advice I could give you about the next four years of your life. There's a ton of stuff I could tell you that you should or shouldn't do and a mass of truisms I could throw at you about how important education is or whatever. I'm sure you've heard it all before.
Given their Nixon-esque polling numbers, it's safe to say that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are not exactly the most popular pair to grace 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. In fact, only about 25 percent of people think our feckless leader is doing a good job. Incidentally, the same percentage of people predicted that the second coming of Jesus would occur in 2007. I've got a hunch that there's a lot of overlap in those two groups.
About a month ago, Florida's new "guns-at-work" law went into effect. The law allows employees with valid concealed weapons licenses to keep their guns in their cars while at work.
There are 3.7 million Floridians without health insurance. That means if you are under the age of 65, there's about a 1 in 4 chance that a serious illness would drive you into bankruptcy. But fear not - Gov. Charlie Crist has a plan. He calls it Cover Florida, and with it, he hopes to reduce the number of uninsured by offering them affordable premiums.
If your experience has been anything like mine, you've been surrounded by Obamamania for the better part of the past several months. It's not related, as much as you might expect, to spending most of the day on a college campus, where support for the master orator is pervasive and contagious. Rather, like most Americans, I've been bombarded with thinly veiled propaganda from the mainstream media in support of the hope-monger for longer than I care to remember.
The fact that most of us don't hold a mortgage, work a full-time job or have kids to support makes it pretty easy to ignore the current economic crisis. It doesn't help that for all but a few of us, economics is more boring than an episode of "Book TV" on C-SPAN 3 featuring an interview with Alan Greenspan.
s long as they avoid the monument to capitalism that is Butler Plaza, many denizens of Alachua County are able to convince themselves that the county is their own little bohemian paradise, an enlightened splotch of blue in an otherwise hopelessly red part of the state. Along with the ivory-tower idealism leaching out from UF, this attitude has resulted in a certain political party controlling local government practically unopposed for decades. Throw in a huge tax base that doesn't vote and doesn't care (that's you, students), and you have a recipe for disaster.
If you're a UF student, there's a good chance you support the formation of a committee to advise Bernie and Co. on how to invest our $1.2 billion endowment in a socially responsible manner.
Even if you're the consummate hippie, walking or biking everywhere, you've probably felt the squeeze of skyrocketing oil prices. The price of electricity, food and practically every consumer product imaginable has increased due to the historic spike in oil prices.
Late last week, The Guardian newspaper of London reported a leaked study from the World Bank that concluded that biofuels are responsible for driving up worldwide food costs by 75 percent â€" just a smidgen higher than the Bush administration's figure of 2 percent to 3 percent.
As the state of Florida and America move past the presidential election in November, beyond an ailing economy on the brink of a recession and headlong into the future, the country lies on the cusp of a crisis garnering little attention.
Solutions by The State News
