New Orleans began its celebration of Mardi Gras Friday without official corporate sponsorship. Although festivities have been covered by the city in the past, Hurricane Katrina has left the Crescent City’s coffers empty. Sponsorship would have funded expenses for security during the celebration and for post-party clean-up which together are estimated at $2.7 million. The eight-day festival is an investment the city cannot afford to let pass.

Lack of sufficient funding and financial support in rebuilding New Orleans has turned Mardi Gras into a controversial effort, in the process raising publicity for an event which plays a crucial role in Nola’s tourist economy. Resources are few and progress is slow. The city’s demographic has changed: the majority of the current population has enough money in the bank to wait out the process of reconstruction.

Trash bag manufacturer Glad Products has contributed 100,000 trash bags as well as a six-figure donation to the Mardi Gras celebration. Meanwhile, Shell Exploration and Production Co. has been signed on to sponsor the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, another of the city’s key tourist attractions, this April.

Andrew Jones, the 24-year-old head of the Bruin Alumni Association at UCLA, is offering a $100 bounty to students who offer information on instructors who are “abusive, one-sided or off-topic” in their discussion of political ideas. Never mind the fact that many of these professors are recipients of teaching awards conferred by students.

Jones has posted a list he calls the “Dirty 30,” in which he accuses 28 professors of unpatriotic behavior with a rating system of “Power Fists.” The last two names on the list have, apparently, not yet been determined.

The most offensive contenders for the list this month are professors Peter McLaren and Kent Wong, both receiving a Jones score of 5/5 “Power Fists”:

1. Peter McLaren (5/5 Power Fists)
This Canadian native teaches the next generation of teachers and professors how to properly indoctrinate students — Paolo Freire-style.  Thanks to his hard-charging efforts, McLaren debuts at the top of the charts.  Long live the king!

2. Kent Wong (5/5 Power Fists)
In any other group, Kent Wong, the dyed-red laborista radical, would be hold [sic] an undisputed title for heavyweight extremism.  If Wong keeps up his public attack on everything to the right of Chairman Mao, he may still do it.  Stay tuned!

Los Angeles Times writers Stuart Silverstein and Peter Y. Hong observe that “although the group says it is concerned about radical professors of any political stripe, it has named an initial ‘Dirty 30’ of teachers it identifies with left-wing or liberal causes.” So far Jones has raised $22,000 from 100 donors in support of his efforts.

Jones is the former chairman of the UCLA student group, the Bruin Republicans. He graduated in June 2003 and now supports himself as the only full-time employee of the Bruin Alumni Organization.

On Monday, August 29, thousands of people will converge upon the Black Rock desert 120 miles north of Reno, Nevada, to create an ephemeral arts utopia known as Burning Man. For eight days, their nomadic community in a city of tents and caravans will flourish in the desert. On the sixth of September they will depart, and the desert will be as empty as it was before they descended upon it.

Burning Man is an annual event which has grown from an interactive performing and visual arts community of twenty people in 1986 to its current manifestation of over 35,000 in 2004. Its “Leave No Trace” manifesto both preserves the integrity of the desert environment as well as perpetuates one of its many reasons for being: Burning Man has been described as an alternative to modern consumerist, capitalist society.

The festival takes shape from the supplies its visitors bring with them in their cars. Since weather is extreme, “radical self-reliance” is advised in order to avoid overexposure to a drastic range of temperatures. The only goods sold are ice and coffee: participants must bring with them everything they will need to survive for a week in the desert. Tickets are sold in advance to discourage last-minute participants from traveling into the desert unprepared.

The focus, according to founder Larry Harvey, is to create a visionary utopia where participation, creativity, diversity and self-expression are valued above consumerism and capitalism. Each year artists are given a different theme. This year participants are invited to explore the Psyche: the amorphous, ever-changing territory of identity and dreams.

Burning Man has been viewed as a modern-day Woodstock, a Las Vegas which rises each year from its own ashes to which many escape the obligations of modern life. However, the tremendous success of the festival, well-documented on the website, suggests that Burning Man has transcended mere escapism and has accomplished what many artists aim to achieve with their work: an inspiration which outlasts the moment of contact between audience and artwork and follows the public into their homes.

The “Afterburn Report,” published by Burning Man organizers each year on its website, details the evolution of the festival and of efforts to respond to the needs and interests of its participants. Last year’s report describes a recent effort to organize a regional network “designed to aid and enhance the independent efforts of our far-flung communities,” providing “a means for regional groups to gather, collaborate, and interact all year long.”  

For the many participants motivated to extend the ideas of the community they helped create to their daily lives, Burning Man has become more than a laboratory for social change: it is a growing grassroots movement which is gaining momentum and crossing continents.

For the seventh consecutive year, Lance Armstrong has  won the Tour de France. One day and 125 miles remain of the 2005 Tour, but Armstrong’s results in the time trials today have lent him an unbeatable 2 minute, 46 second advantage over the Tour’s next fastest rider, Ivan Basso. His victory in Paris tomorrow will mark the end of a cycling career which many believe will remain unsurpassed.

Linda Robertson reports in the The Miami Herald that the physical attributes Armstrong was born with and has worked to strengthen are exceptional.

”His oversized heart can pump nine gallons of blood per minute compared to five for the average person. His lungs can absorb twice as much oxygen. His muscles produce half as much lactic acid and can expel it faster, which enables him to ride harder up the steep slopes of the Alps and the Pyrenees and recover quickly.”

Physiologist Edward Coyle has worked with Armstrong for eight years, studying Armstrong’s body’s responses to a dedicated training regimen. Although Coyle’s findings show Armstrong belongs in the top 98th percentile of human beings, Coyle notes that the physical traits Armstrong possesses are not the only reason he has proven to be a world-class cyclist.

“There are about 1,000 people in the U.S. between the ages of 15 and 20 with the same physiological potential as Lance, but none of them will achieve what he has without the training and daring of Lance,” Coyle explains.

Robertson points out that cyclist Jan Ullrich shares several and even surpasses one of Armstrong’s physical attributes (“[Jan’s] oxygen capacity is higher”), but he has not reached the victories Armstrong enjoys. What has given Armstrong the edge over athletes like Ullrich? Robertson believes that Armstrong’s will to win is stronger, his discipline unrivaled.

Tomorrow after the Tour ends in Paris, Lance Armstrong will leave the world stage and begin his retirement from his cycling career in order to begin another career he has stated he anticipates will bring him immense satisfaction: fatherhood. He will leave the world wondering how many Tours he might have continued to win, had he not opted to retire at 33; and whether any cyclist will match the remarkable dedication Armstrong has brought to cycling — the mental fortitude and stamina many suspect are responsible for his victory over cancer.

In Los Angeles, the fight for diversity extends to the choice a person makes regarding transportation. It’s not merely the idea that what you drive is a reflection of your social status or dating potential. There’s an unspoken, competitive edge in the smoggy city where commuting and traveling across town to several destinations every day have become standard expectations for the “reliable” employee. Paradoxically, the yearly increase of cars and traffic in Los Angeles, which perpetually threaten to slow the city to a halt, may give cycling a new, more acceptable, and even enticing image as a transportation alternative.

BikeSummer’s Los Angeles citywide cycling festival has let some air out of the myth that to live in Los Angeles, residents need cars. The festival ran through June into the first days of July and hosted hundreds of events, showcasing the advantages of traveling by bicycle in a city with ideal cycling weather, raising cyclist awareness through visibility, and strengthening the cycling community one city at a time. An annual bike extravaganza, BikeSummer was established in 1999 and is held by various hosting cities, which have included San Francisco, Chicago, Vancouver, Portland, New York, and Seattle.

Newly awakened Los Angeles cycling advocates can join several local Critical Mass rides, support the efforts of the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition in making Los Angeles streets safer for bicyclists, and look up bicycle routes across the city on the bicycle-centered alternative to MapQuest, BikeMetro. Ken Kifer’s cyclist Web pages provide a wealth of cyclist-related articles, one of which questions the viability of “fearmongering,” an attitude which, through an emphasis on the inspiration of fear,

…discourages vehicular cycling and by doing so increases the number of deaths; bicycling is at worst no more dangerous than driving an automobile and has compensatory health benefits that greatly overshadow the risks.”

The timing of the recent London terrorist attack, according to café babel’s Chris Yeomans, is a threat not only in the practical sense of what terrorism means to people living on British soil, but also because it diverts aid and energy away from other key concerns.

…[T]he attacks could not have come at a worse time for Blair. Hosting the G8 in Gleneagles and at the start of the UK six-month presidency of the European Union, Blair’s mandates to increase aid and debt relief to Africa and for European reform may well fall by the wayside as the powerful nations, especially the United States, become more insular and refocus their efforts on the bellicose notion of a ‘War on Terror.’

Further, as Yeomans points out, energy spent on the “War on Terror” is an investment in the “politics of fear” which “gives credence to the state to further curb the liberties of its citizens.” In case anyone needs a refresher on the “politics of fear,” Matt Stone’s animated sequence in Michael Moore’s 2002 film, Bowling for Colombine, illustrates the concept brilliantly.

Italian politicians might do well to consider Yeoman’s call to place careful thought above reactionism, in the case that Italy does wind up as the target of the next terrorist attack.

However tragic the London attacks have been, we must not opt for a knee-jerk reaction, for if we erode our own democracy then we are doing the terrorists’ job for them.

“[T]he more time we spend thinking about this sensible, pragmatic jurist, the better. Perhaps it will convince President George W. Bush that he can best serve the country, and his own party, by nominating a new justice with the same values.”

According to today’s article on United States Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in the International Herald Tribune, in order to look to the future, the United States — and its president — would be well advised to take a close look at what they’ll be replacing. O’Connor’s decision to retire has come as no great surprise to the nation during this presidential term; the anticipated replacement of judges on the Supreme Court by the incoming president was one of the issues on the forefront of the 2004 election. This is no time to give in to knee-jerk reactions provoked by the omnipresent percolations between political parties. Perhaps the replacement choices aren’t obvious. As the article points out, O’Connor’s own nomination in 1981 was not.

True, O’Connor has the dubious fame of being the “first woman justice in American history.” Her role as a tiebreaker was more consistent throughout her career than her judgments on women’s issues. She is known for her “skepticism about doctrinal and ideological absolutes, and her concern about the effect of her decisions on real people.”

As Adam Liptak writes in his article for the same paper, O’Connor was not the obvious choice at the time she was nominated by President Ronald Reagan, who fulfilled a campaign promise to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court. Twenty-four years ago, there were few women at the time with the necessary credentials while now the number is significantly higher: in 1981, 48 of 700 active federal judges were women; today there are 201 women and 622 men.

Current speculation holds that Bush will aim to please the conservatives or the growing Hispanic population. As to whether he will replace O’Connor with another woman, according to a recent article in The Christian Science Monitor, political scientist Linda Fowler of Dartmouth College believes that “ideology…trumps gender.” In other words, the political climate of the moment seems to hold political beliefs as a factor of higher significance than the current gender of potential nominees.

Are they right? As reporters Linda Feldmann and Warren Richey write, “[if Bush] replaces O’Connor with a man, the high court goes back to eight men and one woman, hardly a balance that looks like America.” They also quote the venerable Justice O’Connor at the beginning of their article:

“Wise old men and wise old women usually decide cases the same way.”

The publicized aim of the anti-gay “Love Won Out” conference in Seattle this weekend is to “heal” homosexuals. The Stranger’s Wayne Besen believes otherwise.

The organization behind the conference, Focus on the Family, contends that homosexuality is a choice rather than a genetic predisposition. What is interesting about this, Besen points out, is that

Poll after poll show that when people believe that homosexuality is inborn, a dramatic and undeniable shift toward full acceptance occurs. A November 2004 Lake, Snell, Perry, and Associates survey showed that 79 percent of people who think homosexuality is inborn support civil unions or marriage equality. Among those who believe sexual orientation is a choice, only 22 percent support civil unions or marriage rights.

Besen concludes that “Love Won Out is not about changing gay people – which isn’t possible – but about changing public opinion.” As The Stranger’s Dan Savage writes in “It’s War,” another article in the weekly’s Queer Issue 2005,

“We’re at war. There’s the shooting war, of course, the one over in Iraq. There’s a war at home too.”

Gabriel von Toggenburg reports on the dilemmas facing the development of the European Union as it embraces linguistic plurality in his article, “Europe’s Linguistic Plurality: Gem or Stumbling Stone?”

The toll on the EU pocketbook is heavy: according to von Toggenburg, it takes roughly 800 million euros a year to pay for the amount of translation and interpretation the law currently requires for the benefit of European citizens.

It’s not so much due to the vanity of member nations, von Toggenburg reasons, so much as it is the result of Community law, which dictates that “national parliaments cannot position themselves between their citizens and Brussels as ‘official translators’ of the law.” And the reality behind the “equality” accorded to so many “official” languages in the European Union is that the minority languages wind up “mostly ignored,” possibly due to the relatively low frequency with which they are used in official circumstances. After all, Von Toggenburg notes, “there is no constitutional principle governing the strict equality of the official languages.”

He points out that while English has become the primary transitional language within Europe, the European Union never intended to become a monolingual entity. As a result, the new European Action Plan for Language Learning and Linguistic Diversity has been launched with the objective that European citizens speak “as many languages as possible, at the very least two languages in addition to their mother tongue.”

As to the question posed by the German Constitutional Court ten years ago, regarding whether democracy is possible without a “shared open space” and a single “European discourse,” von Toggenburg refers to the working examples of India and Switzerland.

Does European democracy need a European language? The answer is no. How else would the democracies of India or Switzerland be possible? What is lacking is a European press which deals with European issues for a European readership and audience. Multilingual initiatives such as café babel are what is called for, and not just in the name of linguistic plurality, but for the love of Europe.

Fiona Wollensack translated von Toggenburg’s article from the German.

According the article “Sex Changes” in this week’s The Economist, the glass ceilings women face have been replaced by “glass partitions.” Sure, women may be entering professions once dominated by men. Evidently, recent studies reveal that they’re winding up in the “less well-paid bits of them.”

Cambridge surgeon Helen Fernandes is quoted as explaining that the highest-paid positions in medicine are the most demanding. Consequently many women choose lower-paid alternatives which allow them more flexibility: “You can’t leave in the middle of an operation, even if you have a child to pick up from the nursery and will lose your place there if you are late.”

The article intimates that women limit themselves by desiring part-time work, as well as by prioritizing their roles as mothers, with the conclusion:

Cathy Sherry’s piece in Australia’s The Age offers a delightful antidote to The Economist with her analysis of the propensities of a spotlight-hungry media which makes up for lack of research with an abundance of “vibe”:

Is higher pay meant to be considered as a reward? Should a person be rewarded with higher pay for giving up more of her life? And if maintaining a standard of living requires two people per household to work full-time, who will raise the children?

Last fall when I started graduate school my sense of proportion seemed healthy. I took the required number of courses and earned straight As. I completed two freelance jobs. And though I always seemed to be working on papers and reading, there was time to spend with the people I love. Maybe the seven years I spent in the “real world” free from school strengthened my immunity to the guilt I witnessed in other grad students, who seemed to take school much too seriously. But it had been a hard summer: too much death.

I won the fellowships I applied for in winter while I watched what I didn’t know about Italian and Russian literature eclipse what I knew exponentially. Questions multiplied like rabbits. Answers, on the other hand, bloomed like yuccas: beautifully, slowly.

It seemed logical to call upon my experience working on set and behind the scenes in the film industry, where no alternative to getting the shot exists: on set, “impossible” is not an option. I would tackle the challenge of learning an immense body of knowledge as anyone on set confronts a film production dilemma. As on most film sets, I threw personal safety and well-being to the wolves. It seemed to follow that I should be able to learn more if I could devote more of my time to my studies. I sacrificed my time away from my books. And the quality, and amount of work I accomplished, remained the same as it had the first quarter.

Now I face down the last two weeks of spring quarter with what seems to be an insane pile of work. The time stretching ahead of me appears inadequate, my brain too slow. Will I complete it? Will I decide to forfeit perfect grades and request an “incomplete” in order to spend the first weeks of summer finishing spring course work? I can sit for hours in front of my computer screen, trying to outline a paper that will write itself. The time left for writing the paper is slipping away.

On my birthday, death and seven years of life outside academia melt away. Guilt rises at the thought of abandoning my books to see my family. It’s absurd. Where did the perspective go? When did it vanish? My family planned an ambush for my birthday: I succumbed. I didn’t crack a book this afternoon, but I ate two kinds of cake.

Is it failure I’m facing, or courage? I persist, clueless as to whether I’ll get everything done this time or whether, for the first time, I’ll come up short. With twice the required courseload, I’ve raised the stakes. What do I call what I’ve been given today? Family? Love? Perspective? An immunization against guilt?

All I know for sure is that I wouldn’t trade it for a bigger, better brain.

In an article for the International Herald Tribune, Katrin Bennhold ties the development of a new European identity to the European university foreign exchange program, Erasmus, which has enabled 1.2 million university students to study abroad since 1987. Around one-third of Europeans between the ages of 21 and 35 claim they consider themselves “more European than German, French or Italian,” Bennhold writes, citing a Time magazine survey from 2001. Professor of Political Science Stefan Wolff, of the University of Bath, refers to them as the “Erasmus generation.”

With the birth of the European Union, many university students not only study outside their country of origin, but also elect to remain in their host country to work after graduation, according to Bennhold. Erasmus has grown from 3,000 grants in 1987 to a current 136,000 grants to study abroad per year. And as Bennhold points out, the impact subsidized exchange opportunities may have upon the newest members of the European Union is significant. Participation in Erasmus programs has increased by a third among the new Eastern European EU members since their admittance to the EU one year ago to a current 20,000 students. Wolff’s hopes for the future are high:

“For the first time in history, we’re seeing the seeds of a truly European identity … Give it 15, 20, or 25 years, and Europe will be run by leaders with a completely different socialization from those of today. I’m quite optimistic that in the future there will be less national wrangling, less Brussels-bashing, and more unity in EU policy making – even if that is hard to picture today.”