We have a disposable society. We love using things once or twice and then throwing them into pits in the ground. Cups, plates, gloves, hats…you name it. Perhaps this tendency towards the disposable is a reflection of our transient, liminal, earthly nature. Everything dies – everything, even our species, will be eventually “disposed of.” But more likely our love of the single serving is a sign of our inability to grasp the scale of our disposable lifestyle.

We are producing sterile, unusable trash outputs faster than we are receiving inputs from our planet. The scales are off. Units are wrong. We’re headed for trouble.

Luckily, a few simple changes in lifestyle can change our trajectory.

Try reuse.stanford.edu the next time you need something for your dorm room. Welcome to the craigslist of Stanford! Bulletin boards, desks, chairs and refrigerators abound. A sweet resource. And let’s face it, used stuff is super trendy right now.

Furthermore, if you’re feeling really saucy consider refusepact.org. This Stanford-produced idea is simple: refuse to use disposables. Bring your own plate/containers/silverware to those wonderful info session lunches. I know I go to them for the free food and am always dismayed by the predominance of flimsy disposable plates/forks/knives that are bound straight for the landfill with my saliva still on them. Join me in refusing disposables and bring your own! Feel nerdy or awkward bringing your own supplies? GET OVER YOURSELF. You are on the cutting edge of a snowballing trend. Be a role model and suck it up.

Near the end of my workday today I gave my e-mail one final check and discovered that a, shall we say, “critical” review of Stanford Dining’s new pilot “trayless dining” policy had been published in the Daily. After muttering a few frustrated expletives to my co-worker, I soon resigned myself to the fact that if someone hates the idea of trayless dining then it is not their fault. If anything, it is a sign of my failure as someone fighting to increase the resilience and sustainability of our society in the face of, let’s be honest, some crazy environmental shit.

As such, here is my educational two cents about the infamous dining hall tray.

The facts about trayless dining at Stanford (and why not using trays is a good thing):

1) You can have a tray if you need one/want one/desire one/passionately lust for one in the fashion of the Stanford student who wrote the aforementioned article found here http://www.stanforddaily.com/cgi-bin/?p=1033368 .

2) Trayless dining is a pilot program of Stanford Dining based on a survey of approximately 500 Stanford students completed last spring. It’s part of their well-established Love Food, Hate Waste Campaign. It has been planned with rationality and care, and is not what I would define as a radical move.

3) Trays = unnecessary waste. You and I both know that it’s easy to trudge home for dinner at the end of the day and totally load up on all-you-can-eat munchies, only to realize five minutes in that you will probably vomit if you consume everything on your plate. Excess food = waste of water/energy/land resources + unnecessary carbon dioxide emissions (both due to the food production process, and due to the emissions that go along with dealing with food waste). No tray = less likely to take too much food. Logical. Beneficial. End of story.

4) No trays = saves water (they say it takes half a gallon to wash one tray one time) = saves money for Stanford Dining = they have other money to do things like buy good food and keep staff on board.

5) Trayless dining is an awareness campaign. It is visible. It is personal. It may not have huge effects on our school’s water consumption, but it makes Stanford students think a little more about the resources they consume in a one-way, irreversible manner (RANDOM FACT: the freshwater we use at Stanford is treated and expelled to SF bay, a saltwater body, and is not reused). If this is not apparent enough, then it’s on us – the students who care about it – to step up and help Dining advertise the reasons behind their apparently appalling traylessness.

I could throw a bunch of statistics/official-ish facts at you to back all this stuff up (feel free to contact me if you would like them – elainea1@stanford.edu); but I will refrain.

The moral of the story is, if you can’t deal with going without trays in your dining hall then maybe you should sit down for a chat with one of the tropical climate refugees who has already lost their home and livelihood due to permanent island inundation. Or maybe you should talk to your children in fifty years and explain to them why the Colorado River and the Sierra Snowpack are no longer able to provide water to the Californian public. Or maybe you should consider the facts, consider your morals, and readjust your position on trayless dining accordingly.

Two-hundred and sixty five Stanford students gathered today at the Women's Community Center on campus for a "MEGAPHONEBANK MARATHON to Defeat Prop 8", according to a representative from the Stanford Student Coalition for Marriage Equality (SCME). This makes the effort the single largest phone bank organized this year in California to Oppose CA Proposition 8.

Proposition 8, which would amend the state constitution to eliminate the right for same-sex couples to marry, has been a key focus for activism, campaigning, and education this political season. Stanford's White Plaza has been a host to a number of Student rallies, from an early October rally featuring Candace Gingrich to rallies which brought in speakers and celebrities from all over California.

In related news, a Stanford Computer Science student launched an iPhone-based (mobile) Guide to California Propositions [in Plain English].

This iPhone-based guide is intended to help voters quickly read about California Propositions as they face long lines to vote come Election Day, and can be found at http://rspace.stanford.edu/. Users can quickly browse the California propositions, read short summaries of each proposition, and follow web links to find out more information about each ballot measure.

For more information on California Propositions, please see the California 2008 ballot measures on Ballotpedia.org, and rock the vote!

This summer I read a book that shocked me. It made me realize that I, an intelligent female, had put myself in situations where I could have been date-raped. And before I read the book, I never even realized how close I could have been. Now perhaps I'm slightly naive- but honestly, until it happens to you or your friend, who isn't?
I was lucky- I wasn’t one of the unfortunate women who said no and were ignored. But I want to share with everyone “The mindset of justification” that can lead some men into date-rape. Without remorse. Without regret. Without recognizing that they did anything wrong.

The following are sections of the book I read- How Dangerous Men Think. This is from the date rape chapter. (Note- the book was written in Australia, so some of the words are a bit foreign- like lift instead of elevator)

“I remember interviewing a young guy under arrest for the rape of a young woman he had met at a nightclub earlier in the evening. To my surprise he was quite happy to talk about the events of the evening, even to the point of admitting that he had had intercourse with the young woman in question when it was quite clear that she didn't want him to. In an attempt to defend his actions he told me he had been invited back to the woman's place, that he had been buying her drinks during the night and had even paid for the taxi. He added that they had already had sex once that evening and that about an hour later he wanted to do it again, but she wasn't so keen. He told me she "wasn't so keen" because she was yelling and screaming at him to stop and trying to push him off. I asked him what he did at this stage, to which he replied, that he held her down and had sex with her. When I asked if he could see the problem with that he said "mate, I’d been buying her drinks all night; I paid for the bloody taxi; we'd already done it once. Yeah she was saying "no", come on mate, they all say "no" what's the problem?” The “problem” was he had just admitted to committing sexual assault. The "problem" was he ended up going to prison for it. The "problem" was that he didn't think he had done anything wrong"

Do you know Lilly Ledbetter? Well, I don’t either (at least not personally), but her story is a familiar tale of women and pay discrimination. Girl meets world, girl gets job, girl works at Goodyear Tire for 20 or so years, girl gets anonymous memo at the brink of her retirement indicating that she has been the victim of chronic pay discrimination (making, on average, 30% less than numerous male peers). Girl’s plea gets rejected by the Supreme Court. Yea, that sounds about right. No, but seriously…

Lilly’s supervisors had prohibited her from discussing pay with her coworkers, enabling this vast discrepancy to persist for her entire professional career. When she did find out though, she brought the charges before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Long story short, Lebetter was awarded a bunch of money for back-pay, punitive damages, anguish etc… only to have it revoked because, well, it took her too long to file the law suit. According to Title VII, discrimination charges must be filed 180 after the initiation of the discrimination. That’s right, even though she found out about the discrimination 20 years after it’s initiation. Read more about it here.

Academics, politicians, and laypeople have all hypothesized about women and the infamous pay gap: women’s inability to negotiate pay, awkward gender dynamics in the workplace, women prioritizing motherhood over the office, etc… but this is a very real example of a woman speaking out against sex-based discrimination (and did I mention she is 70!), and the system is quashing her demand for justice. Senate republicans blocked a bill that would have instituted the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. McCain also spoke out against the bill, claiming that it would enable frivolous lawsuits to hurt big business. I’m speechless…

I recently heard a report on NPR about the role Yahoo played in China helping the Chinese government track down and imprison a political dissident Shi Tao-
Shi Tao’s political offense was contacting the Asia Democracy Project through his Yahoo email account to tell them about an order the Chinese Government gave to all journalists: not to report on any democratic protesters on the 15th anniversary of Tiananmen Square (June 4, 2004).

The Chinese government found out about this email, and demanded that Yahoo provide the user’s private information, which Yahoo did without asking why. This became a US scandal when the US Yahoo representatives told the US Senate that Chinese Yahoo had done no such thing, which it later retracted, claiming that it had made this claim on the grounds of an inaccurate translation from the Chinese Yahoo office.

My friend sent me this article today, Studies say death penalty deters crime - Yahoo! News, and I found it pretty interesting. He knows I'm against the death penalty mainly because I believe that it does not deter crime.

The article might change my views. Apparently there have been several studies in the past 6 years that are all suggesting that for in each state, an execution deters between 3-18 homicides. This is accounting for other factors like unemployment data, income per capita and others. I haven't looked at the studies myself but they sound pretty good - but have attracted a lot of controversy.

So say it's true - that more executions could prevent more innocent people from dying. Does that necessarily make the death penalty right? Perhaps.

Some things are intrinsically wrong, no matter what the consequences are. For example - we can't force people to be organ donors even if it means many more people would be able to stay alive.

I think what it boils down to is your opinion on the purpose of sentences for crimes:
1) to prevent other people from doing it
2) to stop those who commit crimes from committing more crimes
3) or to exact punishment on people who commit crimes - to make them "pay".
Personally I'm with number 2. What's your take on sentences? On the death penalty?

Good luck with finals everyone! Sign up to blog for the summer!

Today's Daily front cover prominently features a very interesting story about Azia Kim's involvement in ROTC, but the biggest news of the day--that Stanford is joining the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) and the Fair Labor Association (FLA)--received no notice on the news pages, and was relegated to a long op-ed by President Hennessy.

The WRC is a consortium of colleges pledging to ensure sweatshop labor is not used to produce licensed apparel with their logos, with a governing board split evenly among university administrators, representatives of United Students Against Sweatshops, and human and labor rights experts. Their website has a list of useful FAQs. (One thing to note, in particular, is that the WRC requires participating colleges to pay 1% of their gross licensing revenues up to a maximum of $50,000. I'd be curious to know how much that would end up being for Stanford.) The FLA, by contrast, is an organization with more corporate influence; according to its website, it's a "multi-stakeholder coalition" of corporations, universities, and NGOs. Hennessy makes a good point in his op-ed that an optimal solution would have both labor activists and corporations working together in one organization; I imagine that either side would be very distrustful of an organization dominated by the other side.

Notably, Hennessy said that Stanford will not join the DSP, or Designated Suppliers Program, an additional program of the WRC that takes a significantly more activist role in ensuring sweatfree labor. In this program, universities are obligated to shift their licensed apparel (over a several year period) into factories which primarily produce college apparel. The argument is that doing so ensures that the colleges will have significant negotiating power. (Technically, the DSP will allow factories in which less than 50% of the apparel is from colleges, so long as the rest of the apparel comes from makers that will abide by the DSP's standards, but that seems unlikely.)

I came across this BBC article called "Cruelty in the Kitchen" on how some animals are ok to eat (Whales in Japan, and Dog in Vietnam) and others are not ok (In the US/Europe, eating whale and dog meat would be unthinkable).

The author discusses how people argue that whales are endangered species (but not all of them are, and Japan didn't make them that way, Europe and America did). He also discusses how many people think killing whales with harpoons is cruel.

But what's not cruel about slicing the beaks off chickens minutes after they are born, or keeping sows in 2" by 7" gestation crates for their entire lives? Why is it ok to eat chicken and pork but not whale and pig? I would eat any animal given the right circumstance.

Let me be clear. I love eating meat. A tasty steak makes my mouth water and I'm sure I've eaten hundreds of pounds of meat in my lifetime. But I won't eat it anymore. It's wrong.

If you think kicking a stray dog in ribs or breaking the neck of a stray cat is wrong; you must realize you do the same thing every time you eat meat that is not locally produced. You are supporting an industry that does horrendous things to living, feeling creatures.