Editor, While I understand the need for the LoboAlerts advisory text messages, something really needs to be done about the timeliness of them, or lack thereof.
It’s that time of year again — students are sleeping less, studying more and questioning if they really need a college degree. That’s right, it’s finals week. Wheather someone is a Chemistry major, or a journalism major like myself, chances are they are counting down the days until winter break, and calculating exactly what grade they need on their final to still pass — C’s get degrees after all, right? Preparing for finals has become so notorious for contributing to an exponential rise in stress that many students refer to it as “Dead Week."
Editor, This letter is written in response to a letter to the editor published on Nov. 19, titled "UNM should be careful with upcoming Banner overhaul." Thank you for taking the time to respond to the UNM News story regarding the updates to the Banner system. The resources you reviewed on the published site were intended to provide a high-level view of the steps we have in place to prepare Banner 9 for go-live, and, as you note, they do not show the level of detail to address your concern about our approach to testing, nor do they represent the full project hours for each implementation.
Editor, I, as an older student, am here to say to younger students: never commit suicide. I'll tell you why. It isn't as it I have never wanted to, because I have when I was in my 20s. I had two almost tragically close attempts. Then after the second attempt, I made a decision that no matter how hard life got, I would never do that.
This past Thanksgiving, my grandfather passed away. For most people, such an event would be very emotionally-trying. Yet, from the moment he passed until the day he was buried, I felt strangely conflicted. As cliché as it may sound, my grandfather was very religious. No — that’s putting it mildly. Religion, specifically Orthodox Christianity, was the dominant force in his life.
Editor, As I meet and speak with other students, as I notice which groups are setting up where and how often, I am struck by how great a presence religion has on campus. To be sure, it is always Christians evangelizing, but my concern stretches to any faith-based tradition. Religion does not belong on campus. We are here to learn. Importantly, we are here to sophisticate our knowledge.
Editor, The misogynist history of Donald Trump’s predatory mindset is nothing new and should not surprise anyone. The fact that it still does, speaks against the hypocritical self-conception of this country as a beacon of justice. A quick glance at Trump’s trail of verbal abuse is indicative of even worse atrocities this man is accused of having committed during the course of his parasitic existence.
Editor's Note: This piece was originally published online in the UNM BioBlog on Nov. 23, 2017, written by the students of the Biology Department’s BioBlog class. This is part of our project to help connect the Daily Lobo audience to more members of our community. When you look down on your Thanksgiving dinner plate, do you see a distortion of evolution? If not, you should. What we consider to be corn today is more robust than what was eaten by early settlers, and is unrecognizable compared to its ancestor, teosinte. A recent UNM BioBlog discusses how and why teosinte, a wild grass that produces a small, 2-inch “cob,” evolved into modern corn.
It's December now, but last month many people chose to forego shaving to take part in the phenomenon known as "no-shave November". Many men started growing out their facial hair and some women stopped their routine of leg-shaving as the 30-day event kicked off. A lot of people—perhaps even some of those who participate in no-shave November festivities—may not know there is a reason behind making the decision to forego grooming.
A student has to write a report on Joan of Arc for her history class. She goes home and flips open her mother’s laptop hitting the Google Chrome button on the bottom of the screen. The icon brings up the search engine for her instantly, and she types in “Joan of Arc.” It doesn’t matter if she even spells “Joan of Arc” correctly; it doesn’t even matter that she doesn’t know the last name of the individual she is researching. With the three simple words, “Joan of Arc,” the search engine comes to life, instantly connecting her to 29,700,000, results all providing information on the historical figure. And isn’t that amazing?
When I was a junior in high school and Prom was just around the corner, my history teacher asked the class to sit down and have a little talk. He wrote three lines on the board: “Rule No. 1: All men are pigs. Rule No. 2: There are no exceptions to Rule No. 1.” Rule No. 3 was something fun and arbitrary about enjoying the dance.
Editor, In October 2017, The Chronicle of Higher Education sent a video warning to its online list that hate fliers by white supremacists are appearing with greater frequency on college campuses.Here is the link: chronicle.com/article/inside-an-unprecedented. I am an alum (PhD, American Studies, 1983) and retired college professor who has studied hate crimes since the late 1980s. Hate crimes cause trauma, injury and death. Here is a link to a recent Southern Poverty Law Center article drawn from the FBI Uniform Crime report about the rise in hate crimes since the 2016 election of President Donald Trump: splcenter.org/hatewatch.
Editor, What is going on with the Rohingyas who were exiled from their own home country is an atrocity. Why is the world still tolerating these horrendous ethnic cleansing practices?
Editor, I would not trade speaking, writing and living my conscience for any high-paying job pressing me to shut up my convictions. I would not trade living below the federal income tax level to refuse to pay for war — for all the money in the world. I would not trade mostly walking, sometimes riding the bus — for owning a luxury car.
Thanksgiving has been well known for being controversial in its roots in the genocide of Indigenous peoples dating back to the original colonization of the Americas. The celebration of this holiday is a sensitive subject, as the arguments on both sides come from places of deep emotional ties. For individuals of indigenous lineage, Thanksgiving celebrates a portion of history that led to a devastating genocide that diminished their population by over ten million, according to EndGenocide.org. What some may see as a warm-hearted holiday that celebrates patriotic gratitude, the reality of what event this holiday honors has left a scar on the ethics of colonial America.
Black Friday is a holiday that stands on its own — or it used to be. Over the last couple of years Black Friday has been bleeding over into Thanksgiving. Just a few years ago Black Friday meant getting up at 3 a.m. to get in line at your local Target, Best Buy or Walmart and waiting until 6 a.m. to run to the tech section and fight for the lowest priced television sets. Shopping cart traffic jams and gabfests over discounted DVD players were the enjoyable drama that constituted the normal/abnormal behavior.
Editor, On Nov. 15, U.S. Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) and US Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) introduced one of the shortest bills in the histories of their two parliamentary bodies. Shorn of the obligatory "be it enacted, blah, blah, blah" boilerplate, the bill's content comes to 14 words: "It is the policy of the United States to not use nuclear weapons first." It's a short bill and it's a good bill, but it could be made both shorter and better by eliminating the word "first." What America needs is a "no use of nukes, period" policy, followed quickly by an "elimination of the nuclear arsenal" policy.
Editor's Note: This piece submitted by a student in the UNM Geography & Environmental Studies Department is part of our project to help connect the Daily Lobo audience to more members of our community. A new partnership at the University of New Mexico’s Lobo Gardens is enhancing opportunities for the UNM and Albuquerque community to learn how the health of our urban communities and natural worlds are connected. The new collaboration among the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, AmeriCorps VISTA, UNM’s STEAMLabs, the Community Engaged Learning and Research Office and the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies increases the resources and enhances the focus of Lobo Gardens, which was first established in 2010.
The City of Albuquerque District Attorney’s office announced a new program to prevent and reduce crime — SCAN, or Security Camera Analytic Network. The idea is to encourage homes and businesses to register their cameras and join the security camera map. Every day in Albuquerque, we hear about crime, and it is often hard for investigators to pinpoint who was involved and what happened. Investigators try to utilize security cameras located near the area, hoping to get any information they can by obtaining relevant videos of the crime.
Editor, “The saddest thing is, because I am the president of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department,” Trump said. “I’m not supposed to be involved with the FBI. I’m not supposed to be doing the kind of things I would love to be doing, and I am very frustrated by it.”
Solutions by The State News
