———- Forwarded message ———-
From: LRDP-Resistance Media
Date: Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 10:44 AM
Subject: [counterlrdpcoalition] From the UCSC Tree Sit: Statement on Feb. 24 Incident

To all those concerned,

As you may have heard, on February 24th, some kind of protest took place at the home of a UCSC researcher who experiments on animals. Hyped-up news articles and administrative messages on campus have led
some people to associate this protest with the Tree-Sit on Science Hill. We wish to take this opportunity to make it clear that the tree-sit is NOT affiliated.

The tree-sit uses civil disobedience as a way of drawing attention to the issues of expansion, and physically preventing trees from being cut down. While many of us are concerned with the University’s plan to replace animal habitats with animal testing facilities, we are focusing on the long term impacts that the university’s planned construction will have on life in Santa Cruz and the forest in upper campus.

Yours in resistance,
Science Hill tree-sit organizers and supporters

Thank you for this clarification. I look forward to seeing a public condemnation of the events that took place on the 24th from you, preferably with a list of names of people for whom you are speaking.

Dave Kliger

Dave,
Thank you for your comment. I will pass on your gratitude to the people who wrote the statement, as well as your suggestion. In the mean time, I look forward to seeing the University administration publicly condemn the use of pepper spray, pressure point pain-compliance, and baton-beating used by the UC Police against non-violent campus protests since 2005, preferably with a list of the law enforcement officers involved in those events.

Jennifer Charles

Though barely measurable, these pharmaceuticals are present in a variety worthy of a medicine cabinet: drugs for aches, infections, seizures and high blood pressure; hormones for menopause; the active ingredient in a popular sedative; and caffeine _ all bound for the city that never sleeps. How did they reach waterways? The vast watershed, while mainly rural, stretches almost from Pennsylvania to Connecticut and encompasses lots of human activity. Human and veterinary medicines are excreted or discarded, and eventually enter source waters mostly through residential sewage or farm runoff. And while these waters are processed at wastewater treatment plants upstate, much of the pharmaceutical residue passes right through, studies show.

My top students in Course 6 are all telling me that they don’t want to be engineers. They are heading for professional school. We will live in a society where the best educated engineers are not designing anti-lock brakes. They are either managing comparatively poorly educated people who are designing anti-lock brakes, stitching up wounds in people who were injured by faulty anti-lock brakes, or defending companies that got sued for their anti-lock brake systems that didn’t work.

The etymology of the word trivia seems to start with Latin tri- = “three”, and via = “way”, “road”, thus trivium, “Where three roads meet”, especially as a place of public resort. The Latin adjective triviÄlis, derived from trivium, thus meant “appropriate to the street corner, commonplace, vulgar.” The first known usage of the word “trivial” in Modern English is from 1589; it was used with a sense identical to that of triviÄlis. Shortly after that trivial is recorded in the sense most familiar to us: “of little importance or significance.” Gradually, the word trivia came to be used in English for what in Latin would have called “triviÄlia”, for anything information or concern which is treated as everyday and unimportant.

The word “trivia” was popularized in its current meaning in the 1960s by Columbia University students Ed Goodgold and Dan Carlinsky, who created the earliest inter-collegiate quizzes that tested culturally important and unimportant facts, which they dubbed “trivia contests”.