Review for the newest local restaurant, Centara Thai Cuisine

“I’m having a bad day—only a lunch break can make it better,” I said, morosely, to Daryl. Daryl is never one to turn down good food, which is why we’re such a good pair.

“I’ve only got about an hour before I have to go back to the lab,” he crackled through the phone.  He was likely in his 12^th floor office at the hospital, and I was calculating exactly how long it would take to pick him up, navigate through the parking garage and get something delicious to soothe my crankiness.

I don’t like to rush my dining experiences, but knew Daryl was always more flexible when food was involved—He’d sit an extra few minutes.

I had been meaning to try Centara, the Thai restaurant near the Stony Brook train station that replaced Cosmo’s, a pizza and gyro place.  I never visited Cosmo’s since I’m too elitist with my pizza, and due to its closing I suspect it was just one of the many mediocre pizza suppliers that pepper Long Island.

As we walk through the glass door with a taped sign reading “Cash Only J,” the breeze behind us seems to follow and transform into a bright, simple décor.  I love the light green color of the walls, and the big windows surrounding the dining room allow diners to bask in the sunlight.

I’ve found that a Thai restaurant’s idea of a Thai iced tea is a good indicator of how the rest of the meal will follow.  Daryl and I each order one, and it’s decent.  Thai iced teas are similar to chai tea in flavor because they both usually feature anise, cinnamon and cardamom—there’s no hard and fast way to make either.  I prefer a good Thai iced tea to a chai because of the added sugar and the floating layer of condensed milk on top.  Don’t let the “condensed” part get you—it’s wonderful when it mixes with the spiced black tea underneath and turns the whole drink to a bright orange color.  I’ve seen variations of the drink that have half and half or coconut milk on top instead, and I’ve always enjoyed the condensed milk best because it gives the best creamy flavor.

Centara’s  Thai iced tea has a good level of sugar that won’t hurt your teeth like commercially brewed and sweetened iced teas can, and I believe theirs has half and half as the dairy layer.

The appetizers are only a few dollars each, so we order both the fried spring rolls with chicken and chicken satay.  The spring rolls are very pleasantly crispy and not overly oily, and they pair well with the chili sauce accompaniment.  However, the little morsels of chicken are few and far between.

“You ever notice how a lot of appetizers come in odd numbers?” I ask Daryl, cutting the fifth in half.  It’s always an issue for me, as I prefer my lunch and dinner dates with only one other person.

Fortunately, there are four skewers of chicken satay, seasoned yellow with turmeric and paired with a peanut dipping sauce.  The chicken is nicely seasoned, but the peanut sauce is mediocre and tastes too jarred for my liking.

The satay is served with a tiny bowl of equally mediocre cucumber salad.  It is far too watered down to taste the vinegary and sweet notes of the dressing over cucumbers, carrots and onions.  Luckily, there are only about two big spoonfuls in the bowl.

The “Dancing Squid” entrée I ordered is more of a slow shuffle—the awkward dance at Prom you just wish would end.  The dish of squid, vegetables and noodles is saturated with a sauce that is salty and a tad fishy.  The fishiness isn’t necessarily a detriment, but the salt accentuates it to a point where no other flavors are noticeable.  The small, curling pieces of plump squid aren’t particularly flavorful and the delicate vegetable flavors are muted by the salty, fishy sauce.

Finally, the squid’s dance is over, and I jealously eye Daryl’s lunch.  He lets me steal a couple spoonfuls of peanut curry, a nutty and spicy mixture of the spice, creamy coconut milk and peanuts.  It is served with rice along with zucchini, carrots and red pepper, and is just spicy enough to merit itself as a curry.

Daryl would later say that it tasted like spicy Jiffy, but I don’t think it was quite thick enough.  I learned my lesson, though—stick to what you know at Centara.

Yet despite the massive undertaking, there was never any disclosure made to the students that the census was being filled out on their behalf. Nor does it seem there was any desire on the part of the university to engage and involve the campus community in the process at all.

Census officials from the local Ronkonkoma field office were provided with records of every student living in dormitories on campus, according to Alan DeVries, Associate Director of Residential Programs.

“They came with an authorization for specific data contained in our housing database and I provided them with rosters that did not include student ID,” he said via email.

The census, which is conducted every ten years, is a series of questions aimed at determining just how many people are currently residing in each state, as well as the demographic makeup of the nation. Figures compiled by the U.S Census Bureau dictate the distribution of over $400 billion in federal funding, as well as representation in Congress.

Traditionally, the bureau mails census forms to every home address in the country. Families then fill out one form and mail it back to their regional office. But for college students living away from home, the process is different. Instead of being counted on their parents’ census forms, students are usually counted using the census’ “group quarters operation.”

“We started the group quarters program for people who live in places not considered housing units,” said Patricia Valle, an Assistant Regional Manager at the New York regional census center. That includes places like nursing homes and prisons in addition to colleges and universities. Unlike the standard ten question census form mailed to millions of homes, the group quarters census form asks for less information and is used to gather accurate counts quickly. The form asks for name, age, date of birth, race or origin and gender.

The option of conducting a group quarters enumeration instead of door to door enumeration is left up to individual campuses, according to Valle. Since the group quarters method relies on official—and, generally, confidential—records kept by the university, they must obtain authorization from the administration. Often, universities actually prefer the group quarters method, says Valle, as the prospect of dozens of census workers patrolling dormitories for days raises concerns about security and privacy.

“We ask each administration ‘What is the best way to enumerate on a college campus?’” said Yolanda Finley, a spokeswoman for the New York regional census office. “The directive on how to enumerate would have to come from the university.”

According to university spokeswoman Lauren Sheprow, however, Stony Brook was never given any alternative to the group quarters process.

“At no time was the University offered the opportunity to use any approach other than a group census,” she said via email. “Had the option been presented to do it another way we would have implemented it, but that was not the case.”

But those claims are strongly disputed by the regional census office.

“There were many conversations,” said Valle. “We offered the option of doing this door to door.” If anything, she added, the census would have recommended direct communication with the campus community.

“We always prefer to go door to door,” she said.

“A recommendation was made by administrators to conduct a group quarters enumeration and not go door to door,” added Finley.

Valle said that conversations were held with Alan DeVries on multiple occasions, dating back to last year.

“In September ’09 we began identifying natural targets for group quarters operations,” said Valle. From there, advance units were dispatched to begin laying out the framework at each group quarters location. At Stony Brook, a coordinator was dispatched to campus in February to prepare for the census.

DeVries was the point of contact for the census this year, but it was unclear whether the decision to use the group quarters method came from him or someone else at the university.

The biggest question remains why the enumeration process was kept a secret. There appears to have been no significant effort made by the university to inform students that they were being counted. After speaking with roughly 100 students who reside in the dorms, exactly zero knew that the census was ever here.

The New York Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin delivers a clear history of the current financial crisis.

A raving review from The Atlantic Monthly on the flap jacket of “Too Big To Fail” states: “Andrew Ross Sorkin pens what may be the definitive history of the banking crisis.” The adulation is not undeserved as Sorkin describes the tumultuous global financial crisis in adept detail and succinctness. The business lexicon of “too big to fail” may appear anachronistic to readers, but Sorkin makes it accessible. Too big to fail refers to the practice of governments deeming certain financial institutions to be of systematic importance and whose continued ineptitude would have adverse effects on the economy. “Too Big To Fail” is a harrowing account of the demise of the Second Gilded Age exemplified by the largest scale government intervention in modern history at the expense of the American taxpayer.

Andrew Ross Sorkin at the offset does not profess to be an economics professor. Sorkin provides a sociological examination of Wall Street executives and government bureaucrats. He devotes a portion of each chapter encapsulating the biographical details and related factoids of key figures in the book. The narrative of “Too Big To Fail” is driven by jarring interviews conducted by the author and loosely construed anecdotes. Readers have to assert their own judgment in evaluating the truthfulness and validity of Sorkin’s claims.

Sorkin depicts an insulated world where sordid type A individuals inhabit. One bemusing anecdote involves the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Timothy Geithner. Geithner’s meticulous personality is tested by a driver who fails to show up in a prompt manner. Sorkin states: “Geithner, arguably the second most powerful central banker in the nation after Bernanke, stepped into the twenty-person deep taxi line. Panting his pockets, he looked sheepishly at Mitchell. “Do you have cash on you?” (60). Geithner can be noted for his bargaining efforts and strong-arming in orchestrating proposed mergers for Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley respectively.

“Too Big To Fail” progresses in a linear fashion from the initial murmurs of Lehman Brothers’ insolvency to the roundtable of the “Big 9” Wall Street firms accepting TARP (Trouble Asset Relief Program) funds. Sorkin in a NYMag interview describes how his work mirrors that of the film Crash: “And of course as the story progresses, they cataclysmically come together and you start seeing the connections between things” (Sorkin). A further parallel can be drawn in the conflicted and morally bankrupt nature of the characters in Crash to that of Wall Street executives.

“Too Big To Fail” operates to a certain extent as a self reflective meditative work. Sorkin provides instances in which the key figures of the book absolve or eradicate prior missteps and erroneous misjudgments. The interplay of characters and events is a recurring theme in the book. One poignant example involves the ouster of Jamie Dimon (current CEO and Chairman of JP Morgan) from Citigroup. Sorkin states: “The untenable situation finally came to head a few days after the new Citigroup reported a disappointing third quarter, the result of a summer of turmoil as Russia defaulted and the hedge fund LTCM nearly collapsed” (75). The ouster motivated Dimon to build JP Morgan as an efficient business model and revered financial institution. Dimon gutted unnecessary expenditures and minimized risk, while employing less leverage to boost returns in the financial balance sheet.

Sorkin surmises that the endearing pretense of being ‘top dog’ was galvanized upon by most Wall Street firms. The gold standard or titan in the investment banking industry is Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs’ practice of over leveraging its assets led to Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley following suit. Leveraging is a financial ratio measuring a company’s debt to assets. While overleveraging may result in greater returns and maximization of gains, the unintended consequence is costlier rates of borrowing and riskier bets incurred by the company. Sorkin notes the trend with the following: “Lehman was leveraged 30:7 to 1; Merrill Lynch was only slightly better, at 26.9 to 1. Paulson knew that Merrill, like Lehman, was awash in bad assets” (72). The notion that Merrill Lynch operated in the short term in relying on firm rather than client money served as a red herring to the firm’s insolvency in the subsequent months.

Sorkin noting the sequence of events that transpired in the latter months of 2008 states: “Each of the former Big Five investment banks failed, was sold, or was converted into a bank holding company. Two mortgage-lending giants and the world’s largest insurer were placed under government control” (529). One can easily vilify the greed and hubris that typifies Wall Street. The only figure that Sorkin ascribes a degree of humility to is Treasury Sec. Paulson. Paulson in his brief tenure was assailed by the ‘left’ and ‘right’ of the political spectrum for his decision making and bore the media purported moniker of ‘Mr. Bailout.’

Paulson was an unlikely candidate for the position of Treasury Secretary. He had served in Goldman Sachs for 32 years, accumulating a personal net worth of an estimated $700 million in the process. The opportunity to shape history amidst the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression outweighed the contentious nature of the Treasury Secretary position in a lame duck Administration. Sorkin on Paulson foreseeing the impending fiasco states: “The sub prime mortgage mess, which had already begun to have repercussions. Bear Stearns and others were deeply involved in this business, and he needed to find a way to obtain “wind down authority” (49). Paulson had a vested interest in extending the ‘wind authority’ to Goldman Sachs and other investment banks as the aforementioned institutions lacked expansive failsafe preventative measures.

The unprecedented government intervention to temper the precipitous decline in the financial markets resulted in Paulson assuming the role of a scapegoat. The Treasury Sec. was adamant in his decision of forcing Lehman Brothers towards a path of insolvency, while providing a direct taxpayer funded financial pipeline to AIG. It is disparaging to note that AIG received $60 billion in TARP funds tabulating to an 80% ownership stakes by the American taxpayer. Goldman Sachs in a roundabout manner received $12.9 billion from the AIG bailout. This poses an incriminating conflict of interest on the part of former Goldman Sachs CEO turned Treasury Sec. Paulson’s role in guiding the AIG bailout.

“Too Big To Fail” will prove a compelling read to business aficionados and more importantly the American public. The $700 bailout has been described among commentators as both a necessary evil and corporate welfare. If you are looking to arrive at your own opinion, Sorkin’s book is a great place to start.

Stop the presses. That is what the Statesman faces in the wake of massive USG budget cuts.

The Statesman, Stony Brook University’s oldest newspaper dating back to the Oyster Bay campus in the late 1950s, is facing the biggest cut in USG funding in it’s 53 year history.

The Undergraduate Student Government budget for the 2010-2011 academic year, which was approved by the Senate Tuesday evening, reduces the Statesman’s USG line budget to $2,500 from an allocation last year of over $27,000.

That will be a steep and painful cut the paper will have to endure if they do not recoup some of the lost funding. Last year, despite substantial revenue generated from the sale of ads, the paper was operating at a $39,000 loss according to the paper’s business manager Frank D’Alessandro.

“We were operating at a loss the previous year too, but not as bad,” he said.

The cut has Statesman Editor-in-Chief April Warren and the rest of the student staff questioning how to further cut costs and minimize the damage.

“The Statesman has been looking into going weekly,” said Warren. “We’ve asked Frank [D’Alessandro] to crunch the numbers.”  The paper currently puts out two issues per week.

Reducing the frequency of publication would be just the latest in a series cost cutting maneuvers for the Statesman. In the last year, the paper reduced the circulation of each issue by 1000 copies, they eliminated their paid advertising staff position, D’Alessandro took a pay cut, and expenses like travel costs that had previously been covered by the paper now must be paid out of pocket by the student editors and writers.

But the USG argues that even with little or no funding from student activities fees, the paper should be able to put out a quality paper at least once a week.

“If the Press can operate with $40,000 every other week, the Statesman should be able to get by with $80,000,” the approximate amount generated by advertising each year, said one USG source who is familiar with the budget process but wished to remain anonymous because the budget is not yet finalized.

Other campus publications like The Press and The Patriot were granted budgets at the same level or slightly higher than this year’s. And the online news site The Independent is seeking USG funding for the first time. Think Magazine does not currently receive USG funding.

“The fact that they are unable to function properly means they haven’t done a good job managing their money,” the USG official continued.

The cut may have been particularly severe because The Statesman failed to schedule a budget hearing, which would have allowed the staff to explain their financial situation to a member of the USG budget committee in person.

“That was a huge oversight on our part,” admitted Warren.

But one USG representative, again wishing to remain nameless until everything was finalized, cited that as an example of a feeling of entitlement.

Expensive purchases, like ambulances, are paid in large part by undergraduate students.

Your professor is in the middle of a lecture when he suddenly begins having severe chest pains and fears he is having a heart attack. Someone dials 911. An ambulance is dispatched, and within minutes, he’s on his way to the hospital. Everyone in the lecture hall probably took it for granted that a 911 call would receive this response. But whose ambulance responded, and who paid for that ambulance ride? The ambulance was likely operated by the Stony Brook Volunteer Ambulance Corps (SBVAC), and as for who paid for it, that answer may surprise you: if you’re an undergraduate student, it was financed in large part by the Student Activity Fees you and your classmates pay every semester.

The idea for this article came into my mind as some friends and I, all relatively familiar with the Undergraduate Student Government budget, were casually discussing the issue of club funding before a USG Senate meeting. We were talking about which clubs received the largest budget allocations when someone mentioned SBVAC. Founded in 1970 and staffed by fully qualified student volunteers, SBVAC is not only our primary emergency medical service but also one of the largest and oldest student organizations on campus, and one that consistently receives some of the largest budget allocations from the USG. My friend opined that SBVAC provides a vital service to the entire campus community, not just undergraduate students – after all, someone had to respond when your professor was having that possible heart attack – and that it was therefore unfair for USG to bear the burden of being the organization’s primary source of funding. USG serves not only undergraduates, but graduate students, faculty, staff, visitors and anyone else who happened to need emergency medical attention while on campus.

I’d seen the USG budget many times before, and was aware of the large size of SBVAC’s budget allocation in comparison to those of other student clubs. In 2008-2009, it was the only club that allocated more than $200,000, or around 13% of the total allocation for club budgets, which was spread over 98 clubs. But I’d never given it a second thought; after all, as my friend had pointed out, running the primary emergency medical service on a campus with a population in the tens of thousands is an important job, and one that inevitably costs a lot more money than the operations of a typical club. Perhaps I hadn’t seen the ‘forest for the trees’: sure, SBVAC deserves to be well funded, but why was it treated not as a public service but as a student club, and why were undergraduate students disproportionately responsible for it’s funding?

A bit of cursory research on the web site of the National Collegiate EMS Foundation, of which SBVAC is a member, revealed that this arrangement is not terribly uncommon, but there is a wide variety of funding arrangements for college and university EMS groups. For example, similar organizations at Binghamton University and the University at Albany are funded in the same way as SBVAC, by their respective student governments. The ambulance service at SUNY New Paltz supplements funding from the college by billing the patients it transports, unlike SBVAC, whose services are provided free of charge. Outside the SUNY system, Columbia University’s ambulance service again relies both on funding from the university and on reimbursements from patients’ health insurance; Rochester Institute of Technology’s service is funded entirely by its Student Health Center; and at Cornell University, emergency service is funded much like SBVAC, through the student government. So despite the array of funding options on display, money from student governments seems to be a very popular way of paying for what seems more like an important public safety function than an activity for students (even if the organization is made up of student volunteers, as SBVAC is).

When I spoke to SBVAC President Christine Larose about her organization’s funding, she lamented the instability inherent in the USG budget allocation process, but did not necessarily welcome a change in its funding structure. She noted the large fluctuations in the size of budget allocations from year to year, and that it has been “lately, more down than up,” but was not particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of being funded by the university.

A direct financial relationship with the university “would have its pros and its cons,” Larose explained. “It might be financially beneficial, but we would lose some of the autonomy we have now.”

Direct funding from the university, of which SBVAC currently receives none, would mean more direct control by the university’s administration and less flexibility for the organization, a situation of which Larose is understandably leery. For now it seems that SBVAC is content to sacrifice a bit of financial security for greater freedom in conducting its operations. Besides, with rampant budget cuts always looming on the horizon, university funding might barely be less volatile than that provided by the USG.

So that leaves me where I started, with the issue of fairness to those of us who, as undergraduates, are mainly responsible for funding SBVAC. For the 2009-2010 academic year, SBVAC requested a budget allocation of $182,000 from the USG. Combined with a projected $2,000 in funding from the Graduate Student Organization and $25,000 from New York State – the latter being the only funding SBVAC receives that is not directly from student fees – it projected a total income of $209,000. In this situation, undergraduates would have provided 98.9% of SBVAC’s student-provided funding, with graduate students paying just 1.1%. This, despite the fact that undergraduates make up only 76% of full-time students and 66.4% of total students at Stony Brook according to the Fall 2009 enrollment figures provided by the university. And despite the service also being used by its employees, visitors and others, the university contributes nothing at all.

Regardless, SBVAC does not appear set to receive the $182,000 it requested from the USG; while budgets are still subject to revision, its current allocation for 2009-2010 is $145,209.30. Based on Fall 2009 enrollment figures, that’s approximately $9.85 per full-time undergraduate. (Part-time students don’t pay the Student Activity Fee.) This is significantly less than the $201,000 it received in 2008-2009 (when it requested $199,410), but far more than the $98,189 it received in 2007-2008 (when it requested $131,419.20). Even with the lower contribution, if the GSO contributes the projected $2,000 (which works out to about $0.42 per full-time graduate student, or about 4.3% of what each full-time undergraduate pays), USG will be responsible for 98.6% of the student contribution to the SBVAC budget for 2009-2010 and, assuming a $25,000 contribution from New York State, 84.3% of the total.

Even at this relatively high cost, SBVAC is still clearly an asset to the Stony Brook University community. But that is the entire community, not just undergraduates; and whether the burden of funding it is distributed fairly across that community is another matter, and certainly a debatable one.

Bulldozing a publicly funded classroom at one of the nation’s best public universities to make room for a corporate hotel is another matter entirely.

Salamanders like this one are a part of the living laboratory that will be torn down when construction of the hotel begins.

But in a manner of speaking, that is exactly what is being proposed here at Stony Brook. The “classroom” doesn’t have walls or desks, but the woods by the main entrance of the university do serve as a living laboratory for thousands of students.

Caitlin Fisher-Reid is one of those students. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of Ecology and Evolution whose dissertation on the evolutionary processes of the terrestrial woodland salamander will be significantly impacted should construction on the property begin before she completes her research in two years.

The 13-acre plot of land appropriated for the hotel is one of Fisher-Reid’s most successful field sites for her research, out of 30 other locations across Suffolk County.

“I consider it one of my high quality sites because every time I go there I find salamanders,” she said.

For two years, from March to mid-November, Fisher-Reid has been taking expeditions into the forest twice a week to find salamanders and take various measurements of environmental factors and the creatures themselves.

The focus of Fisher-Reid’s dissertation, color variations (or morphs) within the same species, makes the site even more valuable. That particular forest is home to one of the best contact zones between two color morphs of the species, she says.

“My project has the potential to generate a lot of long term monitoring of these salamanders and of the environment in general,” said Fisher-Reid.

While Fisher-Reid may be the biggest beneficiary of the forest, its educational significance is felt by many more students and faculty on campus.

“Beyond the scope of my dissertation, the forest is used,” she said. “Once I leave, the forest is still going to be used.”

Catherine Graham, a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution, is constantly looking for ways to provide students with real world examples of what is discussed in class, and the forest provides the best window for doing just that.

Over the last few months, the most prevalent issue in the national political discussion has been President Obama’s crusade to reform our broken health care system.  As one of the only developed industrial nations without a universal health care system, the United States ranks shockingly low on many international health rankings.  Whether one is a single parent, a small business owner, or a college student, the fight to provide suitable health care coverage is a salient issue for most Americans.

The Stony Brook University Medical Center is home to the best ideas in medicine, save for one: universal health care. At least not yet.

Fortunately, legislation has recently been proposed in Congress to remedy this problem.  Although not perfect, the proposed health care bill recently put forth by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nevada) would expand coverage to 94% of all Americans, and would simultaneously reduce the federal budget deficit.   Rather than fit the stereotype of an intrusive liberal program, this bill allows those Americans who are happy with their coverage to keep it as is. This bill will clearly be a boon for our federal government, for many Americans struggling to provide their families with proper health insurance, and not least of all for businesses weighed down by the overwhelming costs of providing their employees with health coverage.  Here at Think, we wonder whether these expected positive results will also translate to college campuses.

Many of the uninsured are college students or recent college graduates.  Currently, college students are usually covered by their parent’s health plans, but upon graduating they are left to fend for themselves.  The proposed health care bill would extend the aforementioned privilege to include young adults as old as twenty-six.  This would ease the burden on college graduates, who are one of the most susceptible demographics to health care problems.  Already saddled with student loans and the pressure of finding gainful employment, the news that health care will be provided for college graduates is a good sign that the Obama administration has remembered that even college graduates need assistance at times.

While it is true that many young Americans do choose not to purchase health insurance, believing themselves to be invincible, this is not as widespread a phenomenon as the opponents of universal health care would like the public to believe.  To hear conservatives tell it, the vast majority of the uninsured are arrogant young people in their twenties who distort national statistics by refusing to purchase coverage that they could easily afford.  In fact, a majority of the uninsured truly are those who cannot afford it, including a great number of college graduates who do not possess the financial means to insure themselves.  Furthermore, there are an unknown, but substantial, number of college students who are electing to intentionally delay their graduation in the hopes of remaining on their parent’s insurance.  The resulting glut of college students has had a negative effect on the college experience, most palpably felt by students who are now struggling to find housing on campus.  Many of these older students have conditions that can only be treated using the health care available to them as college students.

I recently spoke with Dr. Raymond Goldstein to discuss the Baucus health care bill and its prospective effects on college students, and on the country as a whole. The following are a summation of his thoughts on the issue, prompted by three overarching questions I asked him during my interview with him.

What effects, if any, will the proposed health care bill have on college students?

The health care bill as it stands right now will not do enough to remedy the current situation.  Rather than excise the harmful inclusion of insurance companies in our health car system, the Baucus bill will be a windfall for these same companies who have so badly harmed our nation.

In regards to college students, Dr. Goldstein’s prognosis is hardly more promising.  Although he predicts that the stipulation in the bill that young adults can remain on their parent’s coverage until the age of 26 may result in short term improvements for our demographic, he believes that this is only on the margins of our age group, and that this part of the bill will also help the companies.  The lack of regulation in the bill will allow insurance companies to charge higher premiums for the young adults remaining on their parent’s plans.

Dr. Goldstein believes that real reform would be a boon to college students, but that any bill without a strong public option included will do nothing to alleviate any current or potential suffering that we experience.  Without a public option, or at least clear regulations on predatory practices by insurance companies, this bill may exacerbate current problems in our system, rather than cure them.

Does the University Medical Center have an official position on the proposed legislation?

The University has not officially weighed in on the issue, although the individuals in the medical center obviously have their own strong opinions.  Dr. Goldstein referred to Dr. David Brown as being a strong proponent of a single payer system, although he assured me that most doctors on campus are opponents of any progressive health reform.

Are there any common myths and misconceptions about health care that you would like to dispel?

It is important to stress that Americans should look to Western European health care systems for guidance, rather than demonizing them for simply being “un-American”.   Dr. Goldstein thinks that our pervasive ideology of what he calls “rugged individualism” has harmed us in this area, and that this mode of thinking is responsible for the insurance companies being able to maximize their profits at the expense of public welfare.  In an interesting side note, he also submitted that the current state of our health care system in relation to Western Europe’s is a definite contributing factor in the continuing weakness of the US dollar compared to the Euro.

Although CBGB's is long gone, evidence of its existence are everywhere.

On the Bowery in New York City in the 1970s, a crappy little bar would become a monument in the history of rock & roll. For 33 years, CBGB & OMFUG, or Country, Blue Grass, Blues, and Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers, was located at 315 Bowery & Bleecker Street. The club was founded in 1973 by owner Hilly Kristal, who originally intended to host artists in the genres that the title implies, but in bands like The Ramones and Television, who were the first punk bands to play the venue, Kristal found a pleasant surprise – not only a new breed of rock music, but a new anti-establishment attitude and a fashion and performance style that would be remembered and emulated for decades to come.

Other groups like The Talking Heads, Blondie, and The Patti Smith Group made the club famous, but as punk died CBGB still functioned as a popular venue for emerging artists up until it closed down.

Kristal owed tens of thousands of dollars in back rent to the Bowery Residents Committee, and after a legal battle ensued and rent was eventually doubled, keeping CBGB open was simply unaffordable. On October 15, 2006, the club hosted its final show, and on October 31, the CBGB store closed down, eliminating an important landmark from the Bowery forever.

Ideas to reconstruct CBGB in Las Vegas were not materialized, as Hilly Kristal passed away in 2007 from lung cancer at the age of 75. The original awning and many other artifacts from the club, such as some sound equipment, some of the walls, and a urinal can be found at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Annex NYC, located at 76 Mercer Street, about a ten minute walk from Bowery & Bleecker. The website, www.cbgb.com, is still up and running, and provides interesting information about the history of the club, links to the online store, a cool 360 degree virtual tour.

The John Varvatos store now occupies 315 Bowery & Bleecker Street in place of CBGB OMFUG

Today, 315 Bowery & Bleecker Street is home to a John Varvatos store, which opened in 2008. It’s a great place to go if you’re in the market for all things leather and grossly overpriced, or if you just want to take in what remains of the walls of CBGB, which were covered in graffiti, fliers, stickers, and possibly a decent amount of blood and other bodily fluids (rock & roll!).

Though the infamous club no longer remains and the street seems to have mellowed over the past three years, Bowery & Bleecker Street is still a highly recommended area for the music fanatic or the modern day beatnik looking for something to do over the weekend. Some of the gems in the immediate vicinity include the Morrison Hotel Gallery of music photography next door to the Varvatos store, he Bowery Poetry Club across the street, and Think coffee shop, a quaint shop with Fair Trade shade grown and organic coffee that is open daily until 11:30 p.m.

Certainly, social conservatives pushed hard against this legislation, arguing that LGBT people didn’t deserve “special rights” based on what they see as immoral, sinful or even evil behavior. But it is not merely the purveyors of hate who oppose hate-crimes laws. Others argue that these laws effectively criminalize certain thoughts or opinions, and that they undermine the principle of equality before the law. Those who argue this may be well intentioned and legitimately concerned about civil liberties and legal equality, but they ignore the fundamental purpose and nature of hate crimes. Hate crimes are not merely ordinary criminal acts; they are acts of terrorism.

Terrorism is commonly defined as the use of violence to instill fear among a population in hopes of achieving a political goal. This is why people assassinate presidents and monarchs and blow up office towers and train stations: the hope that the population will become so fearful and demoralized that it will submit to the terrorists’ will.

Hate crimes operate on precisely the same principle. The point of beating up or killing a member of a certain group because they are a member of that group is to instill fear in all the members of that group. If a white racist lynches a black person, it is in the hope that black people will leave town, or at least live in enough fear of white people so as not to attempt to gain equality with them. If someone murders a gay person for being gay, it is in the hope that gay people will be too fearful to live openly and fight for equality. The goal of a hate crime is not merely to harm the immediate victim of the crime; it is to send a message to everyone else sharing the same attribute that caused that person to be the victim in the first place, a message that they are not safe and they’d better not try to live on equal terms, “or else” — or else they might wind up in the hospital or in the grave.

While hate-crimes laws are usually seen in terms of protecting members of minorities, this is not exclusively the case. For example, protection against hate crimes committed on the basis of sexual orientation does not just protect non-heterosexuals. Protection against hate crimes committed on the basis of race does not just protect non-whites. It is certainly true that a person is far more likely to be a victim of a hate crime because of being black or Jewish or gay than because of being white or Protestant or straight, but any victims of hate crimes based on whiteness or straightness or such will be protected too. It’s not the fault of the law that most hate crimes are perpetrated against certain groups of people. This law does not create groups of people who receive special treatment, inasmuch as just about everyone has a sexual orientation, a gender identity, a religion (or lack thereof), and so on. And contrary to popular belief, the law does not make any crime committed against a member of any group into a hate crime; the crime still has to be motivated by hatred. The cases of a black person and a white person murdered in the process of being robbed will be treated exactly the same way (i.e., not as a hate crime), and so would those of a gay person and a straight person. The law targets crimes based on motive, not on who the victim is.

The law also does not criminalize thought or speech. It is impossible to criminalize thought without being able to read people’s minds, and as for speech, it is still perfectly legal to stand on a street corner with a sign reading, “God hates fags,” even if that street corner is outside the funeral of the victim of a homophobic attack. So the infamous Westboro Baptist Church, which picketed the funeral of bill namesake Matthew Shepard, is safe, as are more mainstream hatemongers.

Indeed, perhaps the most valid criticism of the law is that it does not make anything illegal that was not already illegal, putting it in danger of being redundant. And it is true that it means certain resources will be dedicated to combating hate crimes that will not be available in the fight against other crimes. But if hate crimes are considered not as crimes but as acts of terrorism, dedicating extra resources to them seems eminently justifiable. And while it is debatable whether the law will actually help stop hate crimes, it does not seem likely to harm anyone either, other than the violent criminals who will be prosecuted under it.

Like the film before it, Paranormal Activity begins and ends with the same cinematic device that Blair Witch uses; realism. Paramount Pictures makes the audience believe that the film is footage found from a camera chronicling the ignominious fates of aspiring film-makers who ventured too deep into the supernatural. Because this trope has been used in Blair Witch and other films such as Cannibal Holocaust, Cloverfield, and REC, it seems rather trite. However, by the finale Paranormal seems even more chilling than the aforementioned films. Despite the similarities, Peli’s film is far superior to the Blair Witch Project in terms of quality.

Honey, is that you standing by the door?

The unlucky couple in the film, Katie and Micah, is portrayed by Katie Featherston and Micah Stout, both debuting as film actors. Their roles were particularly demanding because of the lack of a script; they were only given an outline and were expected to improvise their dialogue. As a result, the dialogue flows well and seems natural. The characters are consequently much easier to relate to and easier to root for. This makes the film more terrifying as the audience does not want to see the characters come to any harm, a direct contrast to Blair Witch, when I was personally rooting for the Witch to kill those arrogant students. Although Micah can be quite dense and tactless and Katie somewhat strung out, these faults make them more endearing, and let’s face it, who wouldn’t be strung out while being stalked by a literal demon?

The demon of the film is never fully explained. Because of its demonic status, there is no need to delve into its past nor do the characters really seek to communicate with it. In fact, Katie specifically does not wish to contact it, in contrast to other horror films where the protagonists usually try to seek some way to approach their tormentors.

Because the demon remains unexplained throughout, the audience’s imagination runs amok, and this, in the same vein as Jaws, makes the villain more terrifying. It is explained that an evil spirit has been haunting Katie since she was only eight years old, and that while it sometimes leaves her alone for years, it always returns again. The demon has also caused physical harm as it is heavily implied that it was responsible for the loss of Katie’s child hood home in a fire soon after the first haunting began.

Now, after years of dormancy, it has come back into Katie’s life, prompting Micah to purchase a camera to record any activity.

The demon starts off small at first, spending its time knocking on walls, flicking lights and messing with Katie’s keys. The couple consults a psychic who tells them that the beast feeds on negative energy to become stronger, and the best way to counter the demon is to not let it get to them. But, as Micah sets up the camera to capture the haunting, he antagonizes the creature, causing it to resort to more terrifying methods to antagonize the couple so they can release more negative energy, beginning a vicious cycle as it increases its strength and leads to the horrifying finale.

Paranormal Activity has been marketed as the “most horrifying film ever,” which is more a sign of the state of horror films than it is about the quality of the film. As demonstrated by the Saw franchise, Hostel, and various other Eli Roth and Rob Zombie films, horror today is all about gore and mutilation. Subtle, creeping horror films have unfortunately been rarities in recent horror cinema, which is a big reason why this film was so overly hyped.

Although it doesn’t quite live up to the “most horrifying” standard, it sure comes close, and its success will hopefully see a flowering of non-gory horror films.

Review: 3.5 out of 5 Stars