blogging from Powell

I'm blogging from Night Powell, aka, a room where a bunch of student who don't really know each other fall asleep inches from each other and are occasionally tasered for being too racially sensitive about presenting student ID. I'm sitting about 6 inches from a guy who has a very serious dedication to volcom clothing - bag, sandals, shorts, sweater. And he snores.

In anthro section today we talked about a headless chicken that lived for 3 years. The owner was going to have it dinner, took it out back, sliced off its head but apparently, didn't do a good job, because it's "OH MY FUCKING GOD YOU CUT OFF MY HEAD" running around session lasted a lot longer than he expected. It lived until the next morning, so he started feeding it through its exposed esophagus with a syringe, then taking it on tours; hence, this website - and festival - actually exists. I bet they really had to scramble for that domain name.



This is Mike the Headless Chicken - the topic of our anthropology discussion today. UCLA Out of state tuition is approximately $25000.

Also, today I'm kind of proud of the American legal system. A bill that gives a large healthy sum of money to the UCLA Institute for Stem Cell Research has been challenged by 'moral activists' at every level of the court system. They just weren't convinced by the 20% margin of majority in a state-wide referendum. Their moral code simply prevents them from allowing the vote to go through, aka, aknowleding legitimacy of democracy? This argument has slightly less weight in the judicial system, which has rejected them as inappropriate at every level. There's a difference between the a democratic minority standing up for themselves in the courts, and idiots using the legal system to mire an issue when democracy has failed to go their way. So hurrah for America. Maybe this shit actually works.

Also, people on both sides of an issue seem to be totally unaware of the possibility that the other side's argument may be the truth. So their arguments for the validity of their own opinion are formulated by taking their own opinion on the issue as truth. One quote I read in the Bruin really stages the situation perfectly. Dana Cody of the life legal defense foundation says, "I don't think people realize that...You're creating life to experiment with..."

Isn't one of the major debates over whether stem cells are human life? Is Dana Cody really asking why people can't realize that his opinion is the truth? Why doesn't anybody listen to each other?