When 250 people turn out to a general club meeting, and it's not THON, that club must be doing something right. With the acrid smell of free Red Bull (a sponsor) hanging in the air, hundreds of students interested in going skiing and snowboarding packed into an undersized Willard classroom. The President of the Penn State Ski club sheepishly admitted that “we didn’t know this many people would come.”
At the State Senate Majority Policy Committee hearing held in the borough yesterday, you might think students were the bane of the existence of adults, or dogs in one of Pavlov's studies. It seems that the senators and speakers forgot about their times in college, talking about the students as if they were unable to regulate themselves without the heavy, cumbersome hand of the law.
The campus community observed the anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001, with two separate memorials.
Sometimes the legal system that we put our trust in fails the most vulnerable members of society. Many times it is for something simple, like a disputed traffic ticket. However, when the death penalty is the sentence, the government needs to be 100% certain that no innocent people are wrongly found guilty, unlike the case of a Texas man who was featured in the New Yorker.
Today members of Amnesty International on campus brought light to a most egregious violation: That of the case of Troy Davis, who was sentenced to death for a 1989 murder of a Savannah, Georgia police officer.
Students make up a majority of the borough population, but do not have any representation on borough council, with no direct input on such dull subjects as trash collection and bond financing. This situation is the result of the rational behaviour by each and every student, who for whatever reason do not devote 15 minutes to vote.
According to Congressman Glenn Thompson, a Republican from Howard, PA (about 15 miles from State College), the estate tax (aka death tax) is a threat to national security. This was merely one quixotic proclamation by the congressional representative last evening at a talk on national security post-9/11. According to Congressman Thompson, the nation faces five significant threats to security, including lax borders, continuing operations in the Middle East, food security, debt, and energy dependence.
Find out more about his talk after the jump.