Opinion

The email from the Tikkun organization which the Planet received yesterday with the news that vandals had pasted up threatening messages at the home of founder Rabbi Michael Lerner said this: “The police say that this is not a "hate crime" because the attackers were not attacking Rabbi Lerner for his religion, but for his politics.” With all due respect, the police have it exactly backwards. It’s his religion, not just his politics, that infuriates the crazies. -more-

The question of how to provide a sustainable information source for a small city in a metropolitan area is ongoing around here. It’s a subset of what now constitutes news, since even on a national level the main “news” outlets are increasingly aggregators (an insider word meaning collectors) of news stories created in other media. The ratio of “new news” to repeats on sites like the Huffington Post is small. -more-

Anyone who's worried about BP's seeming lock on a lot of space and people here in Berkeley had better read this :"...from my investigation, BP has figured out a very low-cost way to prepare for this task: BP lies. BP prevaricates, BP fabricates and BP obfuscates. That's because responding to a spill may be easy and simple, but not at all cheap. And BP is cheap. Deadly cheap." -more-

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Proponents of bus rapid transit (BRT) have often engaged in a form of propaganda known as 'Lying by omission'--omitting important facts to deliberately leave someone with a misconception. It is common in our history textbooks, and on Fox News. -more-

While I was brought up in a very traditional Muslim environment during my early childhood years, my views on religion have changed drastically. Now I am more of an agnostic who is verging on atheism. I don’t believe there are going to be multitude of Hoors (indescribably gorgeous women of paradise) in the offing for me after I die and go to heaven eventually – I am sure I have to endure some fire and brimstone! Having been brought up traditionally, I do have a unique perspective of looking from inside out without really being an insider. -more-

Petroleum executives assure us that their giant tankers and offshore oil rigs pose no danger to the environment; coal company CEOs insist that their mines are safe and that blasting away mountaintops is ecologically benign; natural gas companies insist that “fracking” deep underground geological formations will not contaminate fresh water aquifers; and nuclear power promoters tell us not to worry about core meltdowns or the disposal of millions of tons of highly radioactive waste.

Do we have S-T-U-P-I-D written on our foreheads? Or do we just choose to swallow these lies because, like addicts everywhere, we need these pushers to provide us with our daily energy fix? -more-

On Mayday, I participated in the march and rally in SF for immigrant rights. I do this because I think that people should come before profits, human rights before property rights, and if those principles held true, we wouldn't need borders in the first place. -more-

In the wake of the emotional debate about the divestment bill in the Berkeley Student Senate (titled, “A Bill In Support of UC Divestment from War Crimes”[1]), a number of antisemitic incidents have occurred on campus. Most notably, last week there were two instances of large swastikas drawn on the walls of student dorms. We don’t know if the perpetrators were mischief-makers or sociopaths. During the official public discussion of the bill, some participants uttered offensive speech. One woman accosted a yarmulke-clad man and said, “You really look like a Nazi.” Later that evening a male student shouted to a group of Jewish students, “You killed Jesus.” On the one hand, the perpetrators of these and other recent antisemitic gestures are exceptions to the normal standard of behavior at Berkeley, which generally prizes tolerance of ethnic, racial, and religious minorities. On the other hand, tolerance for the rights of others has taken a beating during this emotion-laden debate. -more-

04-30-10 Letters to The Editor -more-

Everyone's celebrating the Governor's "pledge" to save the Cal Grant... everyone except for students, that is. The pledge to save the Cal grant doesn't save anything at all. In fact, it hurts low income students and their families. -more-