New year, new semester

This morning, Sunny was disgusted with the ubiquity & eternality of the death of Our Ford

▲ YEAR IN REVIEW. Coming soon: Dissent the Blog’s (DtB) “year in review”

▲ TEXTBOOK RENTAL PROGRAM? As DtB readers know, SOCCCD trustees are aware of the high cost of textbooks. Some trustees (Tom Fuentes, Don Wagner) have pressured our bookstores and student government to try to lower costs. Well, that's one approach.

Another approach to the problem of high textbook cost, evidently, is a “textbook rental program.” Well, according to the North Coast Times, Palomar College faculty have rejected the rental program approach. They seem to have good reasons. Not sure. Check it out.

▲ BANISHED WORDS. For a laugh, take a look at Lake Superior State University’s annual list of "banished words.". Among the banished: “we’re pregnant,” “undocumented alien,” and “Gitmo.”

▲ THOSE WONDERFUL PEOPLE OUT THERE IN THE DARK! I’ve got my own list. It’s a list of the peculiar ways in which Trustee Tom Fuentes refers to the dear taxpayers. Every time he talks about ‘em, you’re left with the impression that, in Fuentes’ world, those “good people” (imagine his deliberate and melodramatic articulation of each consonant, his odd verbal love-making) are a community of pious innocents in white. They've got donkeys.

And us? Well, we’re just Fred C. Dobbs. We're a bunch of greedy rat bastards.

I think I'll go to sleep and dream about piles of gold getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

--From The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

▲ Don’t know about you, but I didn’t get an INVITE to Governor Schwarzenegger’s inaugural ball. But the SPECIAL INTERESTS sure did. Check out today’s Wall Street Journal. According to WSJ,

Chevron Corp. maxed out on its permissible yearly political contributions to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's re-election campaign…early in 2006. But that didn't stop the big oil company from chipping in $50,000 to be a "Gold Sponsor" of the governor's inaugural celebration. The contribution, one of the five largest that the inaugural committee received, gives Chevron officials access to the Republican governor at two events for sponsors and an invitation-only black-tie ball.

▲ MEAT MACHINES. It doesn’t often happen that what I discuss in my classes and what’s in the New York Times are the same thing! Check out “Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t” in this morning’s edition. The “free will” debate, if it ever goes mainstream, will undoubtedly become a part of the “culture wars.” You know, the wars that trustees Fuentes and Wagner seem to be waging. An excerpt:

“Is it an illusion? That’s the question,” said Michael Silberstein, a science philosopher at Elizabethtown College in Maryland. Another question, he added, is whether talking about this in public will fan the culture wars. “If people freak at evolution, etc.,” he wrote in an e-mail message, “how much more will they freak if scientists and philosophers tell them they are nothing more than sophisticated meat machines, and is that conclusion now clearly warranted or is it premature?”

One of Sierra's recent pots