the great uc berkeley power outage of '02 ... this is the stuff cs nightmares are made of. with the rapidly approaching due date of the first major project of the semester, cs students flocked to soda to feverishly hack away at their finicky code.
little did they know what misfortune they would meet at 5:03 (the time that the campinile still displays). the power flashed off. and the darkness came, and a bit of sadness and frustration followed. hours of work that might have been lost, and no way to continue working on any code.
no ssh, no ftp, no lab machines, these cs students are a sad bunch. they huddle outside the labs in the cold wind for minutes, hours, still no knowing whether power will ever resume.

... such are the rigors of a cs student ...

Some members of the staff received death threats, though that is nothing new to members of the two groups

3. At our Editorial Board meeting last night, we not only decided that we
would rerun the February issue but also we decided that we will produce a 16
page March issue. The theme will loosely follow "Racial and Religious
Segregation". The issue will include responses from both sides about the
MEChA controversy and all that has happened in the past week. We must include
the coverage of the DeCal class on Male Sexuality in this issue (instead of
the April one on education) while it is still relevant. Professor Moore from USC (the
college roommate of Daniel Pearl) has put up the money for the reprint of the
February issue in memory of his friend and we will include and article from
him about Daniel Pearl.

Any college students out there in blogland? Here’s an idea. Two important scandals at Berkeley have just drawn national attention, at least in the conservative press--the male-sexuality course featuring live (possibly gay) sex and a party game with genital photographs, and the theft of a campus conservative paper (probably because of a story exposing reverse racism by a college Hispanic organization). I’ve written on both scandals here on The Corner, and thereby played some small roll in spreading the story, but it’s really Kevin Deenihan’s CalStuff blog that enabled the rest of us to spread the story. What if we had at least one good conservative blog at every college that now has a campus conservative newspaper? Right now, there are a tremendous number of PC outrages on campuses across the country that no one ever finds out about. It’s increasingly clear that one of the best things about the Internet is the end-run it allows us to make around the iron control of the liberal media. With conservative blogs on campuses across the country able to link quickly to national blogs and to campus newspapers alike, we could break through the barrier of politically correct campus censorship and rapidly expose any number of scandals. The general public would quickly start to act as a counterweight to the campus Left. Look at Berkeley. As a result of all the blogging, the campus conservative paper has collected thousands of dollars in contributions, reprinted its stolen press run, and spread knowledge of reverse racism on campus nationally. Let a hundred bloggers bloom!

As the author of the article in the California Patriot which led to its theft "MEChA: Student Funded Bigotry and Hate"), I would like to state that, although it is unfortunate that the California Patriot was stolen, along with its theft is also the theft of my right to speech. This is a particularly egregious abridgement of a fundamental right guaranteed by our government and constitution. Just as the First Amendment protects the hate speech of MEChA, so too does it protect my fundamental right to speak the truth about MEChA. As a result, amidst the clamor, it is also unfortunate that the relevant issue has drifted from a hate issue to a speech issue. The fact that the California Patriot was stolen serves as a testament to the sad state of free speech on our campus.

I was hoping to increase the public's awareness of what amounts to the equivalent of a Mexican Ku Klux Klan (MEChA) at every university in California, and instead the debate has steered towards free speech. The fact remains: MEChA is a hate group, funded entirely by your compulsory student fees, operating under the guise of "cultural identity" as a "student initiated service organization." Of course there can be no defense coming from the Mechistas, because their own words (El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan) were used in establishing them as a hate group in my article. If you don't believe MEChA is a hate group, just ask the Anti-Defamation League (which is not exactly a conservative organization) about the anti-semitism inherent in MEChA's political activities and public declarations. Visit MEChA's web site at www.aztlan.net. Better yet, read the article I wrote in the California Patriot- if it ever sees the light of day.

The theft of the California Patriot is typical of the Stalinist thought reform that occurs in the classrooms and elsewhere on campus. Students must resist the systematic thought oppression, incessant liberal political orthodoxy and the "stripping away" of American cultural identity through classroom indoctrination and racist bureaucratization.

It is a shame that I have to remain anonymous for fear of my own safety, for simply speaking the truth. This anonymity is particularly unsettling, for I will constantly be looking over my shoulder, wary of cultural terrorists who wish to silence me. If the Mechistas are able to resort to criminal theft to suit their ideological purposes of violent irredentism, what would they do to me if they knew who I was? When Subcommandante Marcos leading the revolution in Chiapas reveals his identity, so too will I. Until then, I must remain anonymous for my own safety, for there is no one to protect me from imminent, violent revenge.

Moreover, in reporting the incident, the Daily Californian staff has deemed the theft of a goat more important than the theft of someone's right to free speech- just look at where the incident was placed on the front page. If the Daily Californian is so committed to free speech, then why doesn't it print the article that was so effectively silenced by the thugs in question? Perhaps the leftist-liberal bias of the Daily California has reared its ugly head for everyone to see. Even the token conservative is relegated to Friday, when no one reads the paper. Whatever happened to "journalistic integrity?" Conservatives know that the advisory board of the Daily Californian is made up of wealthy liberals whose bias is self-evident with each issue of the Daily Cal.

Finally, I am a person who considers himself a mestizo, and MEChA does not speak for my people or my culture. I have no tolerance for hate, racism and bigotry in whatever form it manifests itself. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said that "sunlight is the best disinfectant." Unfortunately, what I have to say has been summarily, via criminal theft, kept in the shade. What MEChA needs is sunlight, public scrutiny of its mission, principles and doctrines of hate.

Incidents such as the theft have happened in the past and will happen in the future under an oppressive University regime dominated by the left- and the McCarthyism from the left will continue for many years to come unless someone takes a stand. I am not very optimistic that anything will be done about the theft, because history has shown that nothing has been done in the past. Thus, a leftist monopoly of the marketplace of ideas will continue long after I have left this wretched institution. The students at this University should stand up, take notice, and demand their right to speak the truth.


Juan Carlos Leal Solis
Student, UC Berkeley

The group, which spent time in the capital city of Havana and the rural province of Pinar del Rio, visited a pair of radio stations, a facility which produces chamomile and aloe vera for medicinal purposes, and a local doctor participating in Cuba’s system of nationalized health care.

With the countryside struggling to produce and transport an adequate supply of crops to the cities, he said, the government gave away land to urban residents willing to produce crops. Today, according to Bourque, one-third of Cuban produce comes from city gardens.

Bourque said the exchange of ideas in the press was limited, but not as limited as some Americans might think.

“Any fundamental critique of the government isn’t reported,” he said. “But there is a lot of debate within the system. I think that’s something people miss when they say, ‘oh, it’s state-run media.’ ”

Bourque added that the Cuban media does not dig into the personal lives of politicians like the American media.

“It’s refreshing. Why should we spend so much time on a president’s personal life,” he asked, in reference to the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, “when there are such pressing public issues?”

I think your analysis of Berdahl's statement misses a crucial point. You
have made the issue that the stealings are likely ideologically motivated.
The op-ed (reprinted under Berdahl's on your website) mentions this as well.
Berdahl is calling them perpetrators and speaking of jail time because he is
trying to avoid making this an ideological issue. This is quite the
opposite of what you suspect - "1. It makes reference to past attacks,
drawing clear parallels. Before, every paper-stealing or book burning was
taken on its own terms, with the ideologies involved being ignored and no
blame being placed. But this ties all the attacks together as one giant
community-dimishing whole." The ideologies are once again being willfully
ignored - if I may indulge in an extreme metaphor, it's like saying that Bin
Laden is a hoodlum who is in no way connected to radical Islam and it's
ideals. Pay no attention to the ideology behind the curtain.

"The personal is political" - this statement has now drawn us to one of it's
inevitable conclusions; namely, that your (free) speech doesn't please me,
therefore I should seek redress and deserve to do so and, what's more, it's
"right." Believe me, that's their mentality. I saw it all the time at
University of Maryland - we had similar shouting-down-of-speaker incidents
(we were one of the schools profiled in Stossel's excellent piece about this
behavior of a couple years back).

It's good that Berdahl is willing to speak strongly about the people who
actually did this. It's unfortunate and sadly predictable that he would
ignore the groups and the ideologies that drive those actions

Keep fighting the good fight.