The best water fountains in Ithaca

Now when browsing through this campus, sometimes you will find yourself riddled with thirst. What is to be done? Find a water fountain of course, but which one? Since I am a man who finds himself parched often, I have found the best three water fountains in Ithaca College.

#3 The water fountain in CNS between room 118 and 119. The water forms a perfect arc, and it is completely temperate. Slightly below room temperature, it won't shock you when it touches your lips.

#2 If you want that cold cold delight, look no further than third floor Park near the Janitor's closet. Mmmm... so cold. I'll run around campus for excercise and stop there when I'm finished. Tastes great.

#1 It doesn't taste great, it isn't cold, but this one is an experience. Outside Textor 102 lies a flawed design that if you are not familiar with will leave you soaked. The arc shoots two feet in the air with such force that most of the water doesn't even fall into the drain. The best method of tackling this monster is to position yourself two inches above the "gun." Pound the button and brace yourself. Your life will flash before your eyes, and when you're finished you will reach "the absolute."

I hope this helps my H2O loving readers.

Andrew Carnegie has Horatio Alger tied up in his basement. Occasionally he beats the crap out of him just for kicks.

The Gilded Age was a time of massive industrialization. The American lifestyle became one of consumerism, fueled by a middle glass growing like a magical sponge dinosaur. The water was provided by the lower end of society, the workers whose plight made men like Marx wake up in cold sweats. Sheer exploitation is what it looks like today, but not then. It makes perfect sense when you put the puzzle pieces together.

Unions were not permitted in the United States at this time in history. The government believed that if a job was treating you poorly, you can quit and get a better one somewhere else. In theory, if enough people quit the factory to slow production, the company would have to raise worker benefits in order to fill those slots.

The only problem was that supply and demand played a queer role in this ideal system. This work in the factory required little to no special skill, so anyone could do it, even the newcomers.

Immigration into the United States was getting pretty serious, nine million people in the 1890s, that is about a seventh of the population at the time. With all this ample work, if anyone quit their post it would be filled by someone else without employers thinking twice. This supply of workers and their dependence on this system only allowed conditions to deteriorate. Companies could push the envelope very safely, as long as no union existed. If the working class was much much tinier, results could have been completely different.

They were not different, workers did suffer from this libertarian outlook. Until next time kids, ponder the glorious beginnings of the political career of Eugene V Debs.

My nice friend who does what I do.

There is a wonderful girl who lives in my building on the first floor. She is a mathematics major, and her love for math is impressive. Today I received a Valentine's Day card reading "You are my ln(e) and only sin^20 +cos^20! Will you be my integrating factor?"

Pardon my language, but to me that's just plain badass. To meet people of passion, especially one of an academic kind, is so rare. I wear my knowledge on the arms of my jacket, I make jokes about the Pullman strike and the feeling I get when my friends laugh along is one of the warmest. Not only do these little humorous jokes showcase a sense of ability, they breed respect into the hearts of the audience, who understand that this ability is no parlor trick.

I've met gentlemen as well as ladies who take pride in burping the alphabet or a double jointed elbow. People who know me will see my pride and joy that is my bookshelf, stacked with dozens upon dozens of volumes that never end. I haven't read all of them yet, it will take me a long time, but what doesn't represent acquired knowledge showcases my lofty ambition.

Knowledge and ambition are two things that breed respect to me, and this girl wears that knowledge on the straps of her tank top... what a great thing.

Illness

I spend my time tonight writing three entries in this blog in order to keep up with the workload that I am slacking on. I assume that mononucleosis is the culprit.

The particular problem with this illness is that it has left my mind cloudy, it stands like a locked repository with a forgotten combination. This makes studying very hard, it makes writing offhand blog entries even harder. All of my entries so far have had some academic merit to them, can I keep up this trend if I am indeed incapacitated? These are all things that will be revealed in the linear plot of time.

I don't like to miss classes, as I did today, both of them. Tomorrow I will go to work at 9 o'clock, so I should sleep soon. Until then, I will write two relatively well-informed blog entries.

Why history is so important!

I ran into a sign from a place called ProtestWarrior.com that said "Communism has only killed 100 million people, Let's give it another try!" It was in reaction to a poster on socialism sitting to the left.

I felt compelled to staple this statement next to it:

Dear poster of “Protest Warrior” sign,

I am not quite affiliated with this Socialist poster that you seemed to be so upset with, but whether socialism is right or wrong your belief is terribly flawed.

First and foremost, the original poster seemed to confuse communism with socialism. There is actually a distinction between the two. Communism is a stateless, classless society in which ownership of all goods is common. Socialism itself is a fragmented doctrine, and there are many different interpretations of it. The gist of it is the state controls the economy in order to prevent unfair distribution of wealth. So there have been many killed, but not by communism, and you certainly cannot blame an ideology whose interpretations are so vast its hard to nail down.

To further piss on your “Protest Warrior” parade, the website makes the statement that “Except for ending Slavery, Fascism, Nazism, and Communism, War has never solved anything.” Let me take a deep breath, OK, here we are.

The African slave trade began in war, as most African slaves were war captives from rival tribes. I’m assuming that this comment refers to the American Civil War, but just because the end of the war was met with freed African Americans, does not mean war shook off their fetters. In the beginning of what was eventually known as the “Emancipation Proclamation,” Lincoln freed slaves in the territories they didn’t control, but allowed slavery in any lands with slaves held by the Union. Why? Lincoln was all about the preservation of the union, not necessarily the ending of slavery.

Fascism (including Nazism) was born in harsh economic toil. Germany’s currency in 1923 had reached 4.2 trillion marks to the dollar. Whew, if money is that worthless, poverty must be rampant. Furthermore, when poverty reigns supreme, “basic” needs are no longer fulfilled. Potential autocrats who desire power have the luxury of promising to fulfill these needs where the current state has failed, and in Hitler’s case, rest the blame in cultural antagonisms. Furthermore, Hitler’s platform including repealing the harshly felt restrictions placed on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles, you know, the peace treaty for World War I.

Communism was not destroyed by Reagan, it was well known at that time that the state economy of the USSR was stagnant, not failing. The USSR (which were socialist republics, by the way) fell apart due to Gorbachev’s misguided reform policies. His lack of direction and inability to garner support from other party members brought the end of the USSR, not war.

Now, I’m not saying that I hate war, I certainly don’t. What I do hate is misinformation, and the belief that someone can sum up complicated historical movements in a few short sentences. Hopefully this will clear it up for you and the people who saw that sign.


This fellow who put up the original poster is currently in written fisticuffs with me. Tonight I finish my third paper on the subject.

Chris Hedges isn't a bad guy, really.

Anyone who may actually read this probably already heard my feelings about Chris Hedges and his bias towards "Americentrism," or as a friend calls it "living in the shadow of Vietnam."

Now I want to touch on a completely different subject, a subject he neglected to mention during his Ithaca speech: the war in Iraq.

In his famous Rockford College speech, the one where he was booed off the stage, he siad "We are trying to transplant a modern system of politics invented in Europe characterized, among other things, by the division of earth into independent secular states based on national citizenship in a land where the belief in a secular civil government is an alien creed."

Profound. The best point anyone can make about this war. It's the very reason as to why Turkey is such an unstable nation. Despite being almost entirely Islamic, Turkey stuggles with secularism. It's speculated that the very reason they hope to join the European Union is for the stability it could provide them.

Actions like the war in Iraq are reminiscent of the founding days of the American republic. Thomas Jefferson speculated the Native Americans who lived beyond the frontier were lacking "letters," a poor way of saying that they had no written language. To Jefferson, the written language meant the education of Western Civilization that evolved over centuries. If they understand "letters" soon they could be assimilated into our culture.

Well, that wasn't how it ended, the Native American tribal system was a rock solid institution. What incentive other than desperation did they have to join the Anglo world? Desperation eventually took hold, and I think we know how it went.

Saddam was able to hold a quasi-secular government only because of the iron girp in his hands. We cannot go into Iraq thinking that Western Civilization is more just than Islam, or a culture deeply rooted in the Iraqi mind can change during our short occupation.