he Power of Misinformation

On April 12, columnist Nick Morinigo ‘01 wrote in The Dartmouth that the Right on campus is unfairly vilified while the Left gets away with offensive statements and acts. Morinigo outlined one of his charges, that a Leftist hangs a Mao poster in full view of all passing students. Morinigo wrote:“I walked by a certain dorm everyday this past fall and saw a huge poster of Mao Tse Tung hung in a first floor dorm room in a manner that put it on display to all passing students. Imagine for a moment that someone were to hang a poster of Hitler so the entire community could see it as they walked to class.” Unbeknownst to Morinigo, the “offensive” Mao poster in question belonged to Andrew Grossman ‘02, now Editor-in-Chief of The Dartmouth Review. In a statement given to The Free Press, Grossman wrote: “It belonged to me, at the time managing ed. of the Review, and now editor. It was produced by dissidents during the Cultural Revolution; I had it smuggled out of the country two years ago. I think of it as a good reminder of the power of propaganda and iconography. Sorta a semiotics thing.”

Keep on trucking, Nick. You’ll get those pinkos next time.

Caribou-boo

Ian Thomas, an employee of the United States Geologic Survey (USGS) and an avid cartographer, recently mapped out his own dismissal, according to a British paper, The Guardian. Thomas was studying caribou movements in Alaska in his spare time, and posted a map of calving areas on the internet last month. Unfortunately for Thomas (and the caribou), the caribou are not the only ones interested in one of the most concentrated calving areas. Gale Norton and the Department of Interior had already picked that spot as the ideal place to “give birth” to the Bush administration’s initiative to drill for oil in the Artic wildlife refuge. Thomas was fired without warning.

The Department of Interior would not comment on whether the proposed habitat destruction qualifies as “Violence Against the Unborn.”

Falwell goes Secular

George W. Bush’s plan to provide federal funding for faith-based charities has hit a road block in the last few weeks: Jerry Falwell. Falwell, along with many other ultra-conservative Christian leaders, opposes the federal program because he fears that government funding will allow federal regulation of the charities in question, some of which may not comply with non-discrimination standards. The fundamentalists also object to the funding of such non-Christian faith-based organizations as the Scientologists, and even oppose funding for Islamic charities. Instead, they propose an alternative system which would provide “vouchers” directly to the poverty-stricken, allowing them to choose their own, presumably Christian, source of aid.

The Dartmouth Free Press would like to express its wholehearted support of this proposal, although we would suggest a few cosmetic changes. For instance, we would change the word “vouchers” to “checks”, and call the system “welfare.”

Crimson-Faced

The Harvard Crimson recently ran this interesting correction: "An article about the Harvard-Princeton women’s lacrosse game that ran in the Crimson’s weekly sport supplement on Monday contained an inordinate number of factual errors. The article was accidentally written using a press release from last year’s lacrosse game."

The U.S. Defense Department made a similar gaffe recently when they inadvertantly cancelled all military ties between the U.S. and China. Apparently the decision, like many of the Bush Adminstration’s, was made using a press release from the ’50’s.

Short Changed

According to the Associated Press, the city of San Francisco will soon be the only governmental entity to pay for its public employees to have a sex change. While human rights advocates have hailed this as a victory against discrimination, it turns out that there is a problem. The law would limit reimbursement to employees to a lifetime cap of $50,000. Although the surgery to change from a man to a woman generally costs around $37,000, it costs a woman about $77,000 to change into a man.

It just goes to show that a woman always has to work twice as hard as a man in our society to do the same thing.