THE ORACLE: I hate sports. Watching the UC Irvine men's soccer team fall to St. John's on Saturday in below 40-degree weather in Queens, NY just reminded me how lame sports can be.
THE HYPOTHESIS: We fans are not as good as the people on the field, court, rink or track. They simply are better athletes than us. That is why we are fans. I understand that sometimes that is hard to accept, but if the case were otherwise, we would not be fans — we would be players. With that in mind, we need to now understand our part, as fans, in the game. Trash talking.
In order to close California's massive deficit, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed a mid-year budget cut earlier this month to cut $65.5 million from the University of California this fiscal year, adding to the $48 million already cut this year. Furthermore, the proposed 2008-09 budget means that the UC would need to save an additional $100 million to cover student enrollment, expansion and other rising costs not funded by the state. For those doing the math, that means the UC must make $213.5 million appear out of thin air.
Like the eye of some monstrous storm, the Thanksgiving season has come, promising some kind of respite from the terrible news in the financial sector, the worse news of the opaque nature of the bailout and the fact that it's boom-time for the repo business. We can take a break, watch football, stuff our faces and forget about the world for a second.
When most people think of pirates, they probably think of recent movies or of a bygone era when wooden ships using sails were attacked by people looking for precious cargo like gold. However, piracy is running strong in the Gulf of Aden – the body of water between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula and Somalia east of Africa – one of the world's most important waterways. Around 11 percent of the world's shipped petroleum goes through it.
As California cuts college admissions and introduces the prospect of tuition hikes to help rescue the state from its self-inflicted billion-dollar financial mess, higher education gets pushed even further out of reach. It's a cold dose of reality for an 18-year-old just getting started.
According to estimates provided by the Harvard News Office in February of 2008, in the United States alone there are 73,000 individuals who are on the waiting list to receive kidneys. Worldwide there are over a million people with end-stage renal disease, which results in death without a kidney transplant. Poverty levels are as high as ever and unfortunately the economic crisis in the U.S. goes beyond its borders. People need organs, while others need money. Therefore, the question must be posed: Should the poor be allowed to sell their organs?
