Tonight I was listening to Radio Habana Cuba, which has, providing you can look past the obvious bias, decent news reports that are incredibly in-depth compared to our 10-second sound-bite news. One of their headlines was about this "Academic Freedom Bill of Rights" being pushed through by Republicans in Florida.

"According to a legislative staff analysis of the bill, the law would give students who think their beliefs are not being respected legal standing to sue professors and universities."

There is also an Ohio version.

Oh, what a mess this is going to be. Do you really think it's going to encourage any sort of in-depth discussion or debate when professors are going to watch every word they say - forget bringing up anything controversial - for fear of being sued? Anyway, I thought the Republicans hated lawyers and lawsuits... I'm confused.

I also learned that high-potency dioxin-based herbicides spread by the US Army during the war of aggression against Vietnam continue to pose a danger to the health of the Vietnamese people. Apparently we dismissed an Agent Orange lawsuit brought by 4 million Vietnamese because "the plaintiffs could not prove that Agent Orange had caused their illnesses, largely because of a lack of large-scale research." A couple weeks prior to the suit, we canceled a study on the issue, so I guess we'll never know.

And speaking of radio... why do these radical Christians act as though they're so oppressed when every other damn station I pick up on my shortwave is a bunch of preaching bleeding over into the station I actually want to listen to??

posted by Zack circa 7:58 PM  [0 comments]

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