Bar Hopping

The bar, a place of sorrow, sports and the place to forget your problems through drunkiness. Thats how I saw it, mostly thats how the show The Simpson portrayed it. I never though of it as a place of “social identity”.  The Idea of “class culture” in a tavern was alien to me untill I started to read the entire artical. Maybe in a Briitsh Pub you words class and culture in  the same sentance, but I never thought it would be at a bar in a suburb of Chicago.  In on instance the regular patron of the bar were in a heated discussion on a pice of artwork at the Chicago Art Institute. One of the regulars said that the author would agree with the artist conraversial pice.  I think they were trying to mock the author as an educated liberal and giving her no way to intervect her real opinion about the subject. So it seems that even though bars are suppost to be a public sancuary for people above the drinking age, the exact opposit is true.  So it seems that you never know where or when you can do a socologic study on people.

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Too Phat

French Anti-Obesity Drug Faces Obstacles

By JAMES KANTER International Herald Tribune

Published: October 31, 2006

PARIS, Oct. 31 — Sanofi-Aventis, the French pharmaceutical company, said today that it could not set a timetable for introducing its new anti-obesity
drug Acomplia in the United States and warned of regulatory obstacles
facing the drug in Germany. The announcement added to the uncertainty
over the drug, a potential blockbuster that analysts say is pivotal to
the company’s future.

Hanspeter Spek, Sanofi’s
executive vice president for pharmaceutical operations, said today that
the company had submitted new information about Acomplia to the United
States Food and Drug Administration
on Oct. 26. He said that though the agency had not called for new
clinical trials of the drug, it was not clear whether it would rule on
the drug soon.

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edumaction

Richard Rodriguez’s life from his youth to adulthood is one of struggle of trying to understand who he is and what education does to young people. I always thought that all parents would be 100% supportive of their  children, especially in poor blue collar working family’s. In my family my Uncle side of the family was just about all tradesman’s working with their hands, which their is absolutely  nothing wrong with  being a blue collar  worker.  However the entire family looked up to my Uncle as the pinnical of the American dream, being the first to go college.  It was noticeable in the amount of  income that my uncle made. But he never flaunted it.   Rodriguez piece opened my eyes to the idea that education can separate family . The idea that Richard read for pleasure instead out of necessity like his parents was  alien to be because my parents always encouraged me to read as much as I could.It never crossed my mind for parents to subconsciously put down the reading process
society. Although the latter seemed to be a negative aspect of his will
to succeed; Rodriguez’s parents wished him to achieve success better
than they did in America. In due time, Rodriguez’s ambition finally
pushed him as a . Rodriguez also worked hard to educate himself by reading an incredible
amount of books, while also being pushed by his parent’s lack of full
assimilation to Americanscholarship student to achieve the success of a controversial author on such provocative topics as Affirmative Action and Bilingual Education.

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MEAT

A growing number of retailers are
making animal-welfare claims on meat and egg packaging, including “free
farmed,” “certified humane,” “cage free” and “free range,” writes Andrew Martin.

The increase in the labels has been driven in part by animal-rights
organizations, but the labels also represent a way for food retailers
to diffentiate themselves from competitors.

Does this labeling trend represents a substantive shift in the food
industry’s treatment of farm animals, or is it a marketing gimmick?

If a consumer wants to be humane, he or she can buy soy-based meatless
burgers, ribs, bacon and other products that are just as tasty but made
without the blood and damage to the environment. How humane is it to
kill an animal when there are foods just as delicious, healthier, and
just as easy to buy and fix? Consumers are getting smarter about
choices, and the people who raise and kill animals are realizing they
are slowly going to lose their businesses to smarter choices.I will most definitely buy products that are labeled in such a manner
to indicate the animal was treated well during its life and was
humanely slaughtered. Enforcing those claims will be something else
entirely, but I would try to find a few select grocers that I have come
to more or less trust. I would pay more for meat and hopefully eat less
of it along the way.

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what I like and dislike

Person theam song: If you asked me 6 mounths ago It would have been Earth, wind and Fire’s song “I like the way you move”. but now that I got Becks new album The Information, it would have to be his song “Elevator Music”. The reason I chose this song is because song is an anigma with a good beat. And thats how I decribe myself, an enigma.

What makes me angry: I don’t get angry at too many  things but I get angry at people who only think about 3 things. Me, Myself and I. when people get older they should start thinking about other peoples fleeings, I thinks it is because are culture of high selfasteem.

Pet Peeves: Telomarketers. do I need to say more.

College experience: I am transfer student, so I’m ajusting to the St. Rose life as a commuter but I am having a better Time here than at the last school I went to.

MY Major: As of now I am a strait History major but I still don’t know what I want to do with my life. I just know I love history.

Favorite commercial: the tabasco sause commercial that shows a moquieto biting a man who conumed alot of tabasco sauce. the moquieto  upon leaving  is egulfed in flames from the sauce.

Most recent shocking pice of news recently: Yeterday I was watching PBS and saw a program that was hosted by Bill Moyer  that showed  there is a division between Evangelical christans. when It comes to the envionment. This because that Evangelical christans tradtionally don’t support the envionmental movement but now some are.

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Spitzer

A Gilded Path to Political Stardom, With Detours

By DANNY HAKIM

Published: October 12, 2006

There could hardly be a more perfect road map to becoming a rich lawyer than the bullet points laid out on Eliot Spitzer’s formidable résumé. There was high school at prestigious Horace Mann, then Princeton and Harvard Law, followed by stints as a prosecutor for Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, and at top law firms like Paul, Weiss and Skadden, Arps.

But along the way, Eliot Spitzer would deviate from that gilded
path: at age 20 and while still at Princeton, he set off for a summer
in the Deep South to dig ditches and mop rooms at Georgia Tech, before going to pick tomatoes in upstate New York, a trip that he said “opened my eyes into a part of life I hadn’t seen.”

Fifteen
years later, at age 35, he took the biggest gamble of his life, giving
up his job as a corporate lawyer to run for New York attorney general,
a bid many considered preposterous.

What his opponents did not
count on were twin weapons in the Spitzer arsenal: a fearsome ambition
to win, and the millions of dollars that his father, Bernard Spitzer,
brought to bear on his son’s early campaigns.

The money led to accusations, later dismissed by election officials,
that Mr. Spitzer was circumventing campaign finance laws to buy the
race.

He finally prevailed in his second run, and would
transform the position to take on corporate fraud and propel himself to
national renown with his prosecutions of Wall Street investment firms
and the insurance industry.

Now, with a commanding lead in the
polls in the race for governor, Mr. Spitzer stands at the brink of
taking over a state government that is legendary for its dysfunction
and backroom deal-making.

http://www.nytimes.com/

Opinion: Spitzer has a  formidable resume but he still needs to keep his eye’s on the prize to win in november.

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Pope-Secret

Pope Meets Muslims in Bid to Defuse Anger

CASTEL GANDOLFO, Italy, Sept. 25 — Pope Benedict XVI
sought again today to repair the Catholic Church’s rift with the
Islamic world, telling ambassadors from 22 Muslim countries that he
respects Muslims and that “interreligious and intercultural dialogue is
a necessity.”

In a brief meeting at the Pope’s summer residence here, which was broadcast live on the Al Jazeera
satellite network around the Muslim world, the pope did not apologize
for the speech he made nearly two weeks ago that set off waves of
protest in Muslim countries; he did not even refer directly to the
speech, in which he quoted a Byzantine emperor of the 14th Century
calling Islam “evil and inhuman.”

“The circumstances which have
given rise to our gathering are well known,” he told the envoys, along
with representatives of Italian Muslim groups.

Instead, in
remarks lasting about five minutes, the pope said that he respected
“Muslim believers.” He said he hoped that Christians and Muslims could
“work together, as indeed they already do in many common undertakings,
in order to guard against all forms of intolerance and to oppose all
manifestations of violence.”

The meeting underscored the Vatican’s strong desire to defuse tensions caused by the speech and to set the worlds of Islam and Catholicism back on good terms.

On Sept. 17, the pope said he was “very sorry” that his speech, given
at a German university the previous week, had apparently precipitated a
storm of anger, including firebombings of several churches and threats
on the pope’s life from extremist groups. A nun was gunned down in
Somalia, though the circumstances remain unclear.

Three days
later, the pope issued a second expression of regret, saying that his
words had been misunderstood. Some Muslims have been demanding a more
explicit apology, not just for the reaction to his words but for
speaking them at all.

OPINION: This artical shows the need for the Roman catholic church to change. I am Roman catholic and know the church has to modernize, like letting priests get married because no where does it say in the Bible that priest cannot marry, that was Vatican law passed in the middle ages. and seconly promote the use of conraceptives because “be fruitful and mulitply” has no place today when a world population of 6 billion and see another billion in another 20 years.

http://www.nytimes.com

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smash brothers

In Brothers and Keepers, John Edgar Wideman uses a range of narrative
techniques to unravel the complicated relationship between he and his
brother Robert Wideman. These different narrative techniques, such as
letter writing, greatly assisted to the overall movement of the writing. Wideman engages the reader with detailed descriptions of not only the
physical barriers between himself and Robby but the emotional canyons
that separated them.

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green house gases

SACRAMENTO — In the Rocky Mountain States and the fast-growing desert
Southwest, more than 20 power plants, designed to burn coal that is
plentiful and cheap, are on the drawing boards. Much of the power,
their owners expected, would be destined for the people of California.

But such plants would also be among the country’s most potent producers of carbon dioxide, the king of gases linked to global warming.
So California has just delivered a new message to these energy
suppliers: If you cannot produce power with the lowest possible
emissions of these greenhouse gases, we are not interested.

“When your biggest customer says, ‘I ain’t buying,’ you rethink,” said
Hal Harvey, the environment program director at the William and Flora
Hewlett Foundation, in Menlo Park, Calif. “When you have 38 million
customers you don’t have access to, you rethink. Selling to Phoenix is
nice. Las Vegas is nice. But they aren’t California.”

California’s
decision to impose stringent demands on suppliers even outside its
borders, broadened by the Legislature on Aug. 31 and awaiting the
governor’s signature, is but one example of the state’s wide-ranging
effort to remake its energy future.

The Democratic-controlled
legislature and the Republican governor also agreed at that time on
legislation to reduce industrial carbon dioxide emissions by 25 percent
by 2020, a measure that affects not only power plants but also other
large producers of carbon dioxide, including oil refineries and cement
plants.

The state’s aim is to reduce emissions of
climate-changing gases produced by burning coal, oil and gas. Other
states, particularly New York, are moving in some of the same
directions, but no state is moving as aggressively on as many fronts.
No state has been at it longer. No state is putting more at risk.

http://www.nytimes.com/

Personal opinion:  We had this clean energy programs in the 1970’s during ther Carter administration.  But it was Ronald Regan who got rid of all the tax ensentives and burried all inovations, so the oil companies could make a profit.  Now it has taken 30 years to catch up.

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Prison

The state of the American prison system is appauling. Thats only regular prisons, Death row is a whole different system.  “Life here oscillates between the banal and the bizarre”.  I know the point of prisons is to strip your freedom and all you love from you.  The issue of race is another big problem that Mumia dicribes in detail.  living for years in death row is unamaginable to me. I have an idea of what it is like because my brother is a arcatect for the New York State Prison systems. He can describe the living spaces of all the prisons in New York. My brother said that it is hard to design prisons because in College you are taught to make comfortable living spaces for everone, in prison it is the exact opposite. Each  day is suppost a torcher of the mind

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