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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • Here are some of the professor’s comments in the interview in question (not the one linked in this article), from a year ago, at least this is what I think most likely to be construed by the university as targeting a group of students:

    And what the students were able to do is examine video from that protest and identify, I think, three older students. We have a — Columbia has a program. It’s a graduate relationship with older students from other countries, including Israel. And it’s something that many of us were concerned about, because so many of those Israeli students, who then come to the Columbia campus, are coming right out of their military service. And they’ve been known to harass Palestinian and other students on our campus. And it’s something the university has not taken seriously in the past. But we’ve never seen anything like this. And the students were able to identify three of these exchange students, basically, from Israel, who had just come out of military service, who were spraying the pro-Palestinian students with this skunk water. And they were disguised in keffiyehs so that they could mix in with the students who were demanding that the university divest from companies that are supporting the occupation and the war, and were protesting and demanding a ceasefire. So we know who they were.



  • I may be wrong as I haven’t read closely, but I don’t believe anyone is surprised by these fires. Growing up in the area, fire burned those same areas more than once during my school years. It’s chaparral and it is supposed to burn every 10 years or so. But like anytime else it’s a big deal when it hits your (or a celebrity) neighborhood vs a couple miles away, and the biggest difference is over the last few decades is that they keep building higher and higher into the mountain, so what used to just be a wildfire is now a neighborhood burning down.





  • Remember that the stories you hear are always going to be the ones that are most controversial, otherwise they would not be news. The day in day out work of the FDA is enormous and most of it, I believe, necessary for the level of trust in what you find on the shelf, what you’re doctor recommends, what your pharmacist hands you, that we enjoy.

    I don’t want to have to know my farmer, my chemical compounder, my importer, my distributor, my restaurant chef, etc, etc, for every stupid thing just to avoid eating lead or feeding hepatitis to my kids.

    The loudest complaints-- selling raw milk is technically illegal? they allow red food coloring as long as you list it in the ingredients? they may or may not allow you to call oat liquid a “milk”?-- sound pretty small to me, and also even these issues are reviewed and discussed more or less transparently in response to people’s concerns.