Students can affect City Council ordinances
On Tuesday, March 5, the City Council will vote on several items that directly affect us as students. First is an ordinance entitled \Tenant Rights and Responsibilities."" This item would require your landlord to distribute a document with a list of your rights as a renter, a list of the things for which you are legally responsible and contact information that you need to have your rights enforced.
Second, there is also an ordinance entitled ""Notice of Denial of Tenancy"" which, if you weren't accepted for an apartment, would require that the property owner notify you in writing why you weren't accepted.
Another item on the agenda is the ""anti-loitering ordinance."" Although this ordinance may not directly affect the lives of everyday students, it is something that we should all step up and speak out against.
The Council meetings are held on the second floor of the City-County Building, located at 210 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.' the street that runs between the Monona Terrace and the Capitol Building. The meeting starts at 6:30 p.m. and you need to register by 7 p.m. You can register in support or opposition and you don't have to speak if you don't want to. Every person who shows up makes a big difference.
Please call or e-mail me (district8@council.ci.madison.wi.us) with any questions or concerns, or if there are any issues on which you'd like to work.
Pocan legislation aims to label GM products
You thought the extent to which you had to worry about genetically modified foods was limited to the occasional fish gene in your grapes. Well, add cigarettes, or more specifically, tobacco to the list of common products that have seen their genetic sequence manipulated in the name of profit margin.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has confirmed the development of a strain of tobacco which inhibits the production of nicotine in the plant's roots.
Hey, this seems like a win-win situation, right? Lower nicotine naturally translates into lower addictiveness, right? Well, truth be told, these cigarettes will still be overwhelmingly addictive, will still carry the same number of carcinogens and tar, and will force the smoker to smoke more cigarettes in order to satisfy the craving for nicotine. Imagine essentially smoking more of the bad stuff just to get the same amount of ""needed"" stuff.
Perhaps this doesn't alarm you because you can simply avoid those cigarette brands containing genetic modifications. Superb idea'if you were able to distinguish between which cigarettes were genetically modified and which were not. But, because the government requires neither the testing nor the labeling of any genetically modified products, including the 60 percent of food you eat that is genetically modified, avoiding these products is nearly impossible. And Vector Group, the tobacco's developer, has vehemently not revealed where or under what name these cigarettes will be sold.
We could be better informed of all genetically modified products if state legislator Mark Pocan's, D-Madison, bill to make Wisconsin the first state to require the labeling of genetically modified products is passed. It's written; it's good; it just needs your support.
Extending arguments alters their meanings
I would like to propose some arguments that merely logically extend Daniel Guenther's ""arguments"" (""Open mind needed to absorb 'facts' of history,"" March 4) in response to Nishant Bagadia's article (""Accepting true history requires an open mind,"" March 1-3).
First, why not say God created the earth, the solar system, the universe, your mother and father, society and society's rules at the instant you were born? For example, Kurt Vonnegut set up a story where you are the only person with free will and God created a bunch of robots to see what you would do with your free will.
Going even further, why not say that ""God created [you] with age as well,"" to paraphrase Guenther? That is to say, all of your ""memories"" and all of any history are set up at this moment. Or even more darkly, we are all on auto-pilot with a set destination. Pre-determination (by God) of destiny destroys the concept of free will. ""Six-thousand years"" is merely a line drawn in the sand of unstable logic.
Next, Guenther attributes the slow shift of the continents to Noah's flood, but does not say why. Then Guenther gets very exact about Lucy's knee. Finally, he points to unsighted ""problems"" with dating techniques.
I, too, hope that Mr. Guenther and you, the reader, think about my extensions of his arguments and understand the ramifications.
