Natural Disasters: Columbia University researchers have said that the retreat rate an Antarctic glacier will be sped up 20 years, thus increasing global sea levels. (RedOrbit)

Monsters: The protagonist of the prequel to The Thing that is being released this week is a Columbia University graduate student. (Craig Daily Press)

Finance: Bloomberg has rated Columbia the most expensive university of 2011. (Bloomberg)

Hunger: Upper West Side police are taking an initiative to crack down on illegal food vendors. (DNA Info)

War: 13 Americans are said to have been killed by a Taliban suicide car bomb in Kabul. (NY Times)

Disease: The government is considering testing the Anthrax vaccine on young children. (NY Daily News)

Ghosts: The etymology of the the word “Boo” reveals it won’t work for scaring people in other countries. (Slate)

Vintage Spookies via Wikimedia Commons

We imagine the battle will look something like this.

We apologize for being a little late to the game on this one (the events began yesterday), but Clash of the Classes is finally here! As of Friday, we hear that the juniors are in the lead with 1820 points, followed by the freshmen with 1170. You’d think the seniors are slackin’ with only 180 points, but the true slacker title belongs to the sophs—they haven’t scored a single point! If class pride is your thing, now is the time to defend your year’s dignity! And of course, there’s an added incentive: the winning class gets a barbecue on Sunday in its honor!

If any of these events tickle your fancy, sign up to participate here.

Water War: Saturday, April 9 at 3 pm, Ancel Plaza (outside EC)

Water Balloon Tossing: Saturday, April 9 at 3 pm, EC Bridge

Soccer Tournament: Saturday, April 9 at 7 pm, Levien Gym

Dodgeball Tournament: Sunday, April 10 at 10 am, University Gym

Men on Horseback via Wikimedia Commons

David Xia wandered into SIPA last night for a Saltzman Institute event on the fate of the American war in Afghanistan.

The United States’ war in Afghanistan is not working, and we’re not sure how to fix it.

This was the gist of Col. David Gray and Col. Gian Gentile’s (both of whom have served in Iraq and Afghanistan) talk last night at SIPA.

“We don’t have strategy,” Gentile said. “Instead we have commander’s talking points, maxims, and catechisms.” The prospects of counter-insurgency and nation building have “seduced” army officials to the extent that they lost sight of a bigger strategy.

According to Gray, the army initially wanted to leave a “light footprint” – utilizing strategic raids, advanced technology, special operations forces, intelligence agencies, and native human resources – to avoid attracting Al Qaeda fighters into a chaotic vacuum. And it worked just fine. For two years.

Gray painted a gloomy picture of the many challenges the army faced in creating a viable strategy. These included fighting government corruption, countering the rampant drug trade, and reeling in intractable drug lords, and dealing with the Pashtunwali tribal code to which 70 percent of Afghans subscribe: “In the morning they’ll offer you green tea and a goat grab…at night they’ll be shooting at you.” Moreover, tribal interests do not always align with the Afghan government’s interests. “Some guy from Mazari Sharif in the north isn’t crazy about going down to Kandahar in the south to fight,” he said.

Read more…

CUAssassins, ESC’s finely crafted squirt-gun war, is returning to campus next weekend. Although we don’t have a web link this time, VP Kim Manis wrote in to inform us that registration takes place next Friday and Saturday (February 15th-16th) on the ramps at Lerner.

The games begin on Thursday, the 21st. It’s $20 for a team of four to play. It’s not an event to miss — unless you enjoy feeling safe and relaxed. And who does, really?

Not content with battling it out in the U.S. News and World Report rankings, the Ivies are throwing it down by way of that most gentlemanly of pastimes: war! Or rather, inter-campus computerized simulations of games that simulate war! Kind of!

Our buddies at GoCrossCampus have organized an Ivy League championship. While Columbia hasn’t won a single outright basketball or football championship in the League, we all know that cross-country Risk is the glamour sport of the future. So take up arms, Columbians! Let our arrows blot out the sun! We’ll make Princeton pine for 1777! Hoohah!

-ARR

With kids back in school, autumn is a perfect time for street-hitting activism to bubble up through the cracks in society. In the next few weeks, anyone seeking an interesting day-trip, a way to act on latent strains of idealism, or an excuse to visit friends at school in DC should check out one of the following events:

Declaration of Peace, Sept. 14-21 

March on Washington, Sept. 15

People’s March on Congress, Sept. 17

Protest Bush at the UN, Sept. 25

Encampment (in front of Congress) and March, Sept. 22-29

National anti-war mobilizations, Oct. 27

No snark from us in this department.

- KER

The Columbia Undergraduate Science Journal has fired another salvo in their ongoing feud against Jester, claiming responsibility for the recent disappearance of 700 issues of the most recent Jester issue. They’ve placed the once-missing issues all over campus, and attached a message: “Jester Promotes Scientific Fallacies.” The full-page manifesto contains many of the CUSJ grievances, a sampling of which can be found on the (truly crazy, and we’re not sure if it’s in a good or bad way) website the CUSJ missive directs readers to.

First among them: “The ‘Liquid Issue’ is clearly not made of LIQUID at all but rather PAPER, which is SOLID. Jester should be ashamed for misleading readers regarding states of matter.”

Too far, or not far enough? Catelyn Liu reproduced CUSJ‘s damning allegations in full, featured after the jump.

Read more…

More letters added to Columbia’s delicious alphabet soup

UAlbany students told their teetotalist public service announcement patronizing, lame. We know some substances that could fire their creativity…

Plus, without drinking, how could we learn that “blackout activity range[s] from sex to urination to fluent sentences in Hebrew” or forget “social standards, repercussions, your future, and other extraneous details”?

Morningside residents commemorate war anniversairy, bemoan lack of youngins

Meanwhile, one of the aforementioned youngins mocks “poorly-attended rallies,” concocts bold new plan to stop the war: “Let your life be a counter-friction”

Last night, Columbia poli-sci professors Robert Jervis and Richard Betts tag-teamed Mount St. Vincent’s College’s Joseph Skelly on the situation in Iraq and Bwog artist Rachel Lindsay was on scene. This one was begging for a cartoon.

A digest of activisty news we missed from the last week.

Copycats! Over at UCLA–which showed up on our “WTF” radar last year because of that taser business–protesters actually shut down a talk by some Minutemen-affiliated speakers. (note: This is not the Minuteman Project, but the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps.) Or, rather, according to the site above (the media coverage of this has been rather sparse, we might add…) admins pulled the plug on the event because of “security concerns.”

Speaking loudly: The Dems, determined to “take a strong stance on Iraq,” met on Wednesday to endorse a withdrawal plan. They didn’t, but will be meeting again on Tuesday to decide on a position. Sophomore president George Krebs sez they need to consider- ”What the clearest vision for us is, and then take that vision and go to the next level with it. If you don’t do that, then you find yourself in a place where you’re concerned about how it’s going to be viewed rather than the substance of it.” Aw, the circumlocutions of budding politicos.

Carrying a big stick? In case you hadn’t seen the flyers, this Thursday there will be a mass walk-out at noon and a teach-in at 2 PM in Lerner against, well, the War. It was organized in conjunction with a national strike by an ad hoc group called the Columbia Coalition Against the War, who also set up an online petition, which has been signed by such illustrious presences as Prof. Robert Thurman, SGB prez Sakib Khan, and SAMER THE JUMBALAYA DESTROYER (?).

Update, 3:00 PM: The Dems, who were not consulted in the reporting of this post (to Bwog’s discredit) have some additions and clarifications after the jump.

The College Democrats, who collaborated with several anti-war groups (Students for Justice in the Middle East, the Working Families Party, Lucha, World Can’t Wait, and the ISO) on sending people down to DC last week, are done with all this left wing solidarity: Dems President Mike Nadler just sent an e-mail announcing that his group would pull out of the coalition’s next event, a walkout planned for February 15 (the anniversary of the massive walkouts in 2003). David Judd of the ISO had this to say:

“The Dems have decided to not participate as a club in the walkout and rally, though individual members will do so. they have left because of ideological differences which could not be reconciled despite much effort to do so. the remaining members of the coalition are disappointed with this decision and continue to hope that the Democrats will reconsider. the walkout and rally will continue, and the Columbia Coalition Against the War believes that it will be very successful. a broad spectrum of groups and individuals are still participating in planning, student strikes are moving forward on a national level with endorsements by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, the latter delivered at Columbia yesterday, and we are all very excited to take concrete action against the war on the 15th.”

Both sides are staying mum to avoid a public shit show, but one person less personally invested gave Bwog the backstory. In a nutshell, the groups parted ways over how to request that Columbia study divestment from certain defense contractors to protest the war. Representatives of the Coalition groups compromised on only three companies (Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin, which constitute $4.3 out of Columbia’s $836 million in public holdings) for the duration of the war, but the Dems said no. The Coalition reps declined to say definitively what they would recommend to their groups, which the Dems took as a sign of bad faith, finally pulling out of the deal altogether.

Is this how it’s like in the real world?

Full announcement from Dems Board after the jump.

Read more…

Nothing like a volatile region pushed to the brink of nuclear conflict to make onstage riots seem like academic minutiae.  For perspective on the Korean peninsula’s unfolding crisis, Bwog’s Nicholas Frisch turned to Joseph Hong, SEAS’07, a Korean-American student, and a human rights activist. 

On a personal level, how has this affected you in terms of friends or family in Korea? 

Actually all my family is in South Korea right now, so it does cause great concern for me.  But this isn’t the first time this has happened, especially this past summer, North Korea tested the seven missiles, in 1994 there was a nuclear scare, and what came out of that was the Agreed Framework with Bill Clinton, so this nuclear crisis, brinksmanship, nuclear proliferation has always been something at the forefront.  What really worries me is that although this is important for the international community, it’s something that eclipses human rights crisis that’s also going on there, so I’m worried that those within the US government who are backing regime change would only take the human rights crisis as a further vehicle for the regime change alongside the nuclear crisis.

So have you talked with your family yet? 

No. 

Read more…

What’s the theme of this year’s GS Spring Formal?

“50 Years in One Night…1900-1950.”

Spectacular. As if the phrase “50 Years in One Night” weren’t funny enough in connection with my fellow GSmates, they manage to pick, of all the possible 50 year spans of time, the one most likely to inspire stories that begin, “Well, you kids may think you’re something, but when I was in one or both of the Great Wars…”
- Cody Owen Stine