The column from Feb. 7 entitled “The debt debate” on the U.S. debt and our seamlessly never-faltering credit score is wildly off base and out of touch with financial reality. Mr. Brawer points out, “The U.S. debt doesn’t really matter.” The Greek government probably thought along the same lines. We see how that is working out for them. I understand that Mr. Brawer is a columnist and exercises his right of speaking freely, but I highly encourage him to seek counsel from finance professionals and people who are in touch with the inner-happenings of our complex economy. He may find out that our debt does matter and is a burden on the taxpayer.

Mr. Brawer points out the debt ceiling extension by Senate in his column. So I am concluding that he remembers the U.S. credit downgrade by Standard and Poor’s. Mr. Brawer may see this as irrelevant, but the Dow Jones Industrial Average swung violently down to 10,700 after the U.S. credit downgrade. This DJIA loss translates in a massive devaluation of America’s leading companies. Companies like McDonalds and Bank of America, popular investment avenues for many Americans, lost value. This led to personal portfolio value loss, something that affects all of us either directly or indirectly. In fact, many college endowments have investments in the Dow Jones. These endowments lost value during this credit downgrade caused by an enormous amount of United States debt.

What Mr. Brawer fails to understand is that the revenues from taxpayers enable the U.S. to overspend. Taxpayers provide the U.S. government revenue to go out and borrow against, usually from bond issuance. Our “military might” is a direct effect of taxpayer revenues. What happens when taxpayers move out of the country to find better, higher-paying jobs and harbor their savings in banks with positive real interest rates? This is an improbable scenario, but crazier things have happened.

An explanation of the Federal Reserve and the role they play in conducting this drunken circus is necessary for describing our web of financial problems. The devaluation of the currency you hold in your pocket is dangerous and could potentially lead to the change of the world’s reserve currency. If this event takes place, we could see a major decline in our quality of life. But hey, let’s keep spending! It’s all on credit. It is time for fiscally-responsible leaders in this country to remedy our scary debt situation.

Brandon Morris
Junior, plant science

I attended a town hall meeting on Feb. 10 lead by a team of lawyers, charged by the Office of the President to propose a comprehensive police policy for all UC campuses. After this meeting, a reporter from The Aggie came up to me and asked, “What side are you on?” and “Why are you here?” I was taken aback by these questions, particularly the first one.

I hope that both The Aggie and the campus community is sophisticated enough not to paint a binary, black and white response to this crisis we find ourselves in, or the protests on campus. To fall into such a trap is dangerous and ultimately harmful as we try to seek solutions to our shared problems. To answer the question, I would hope that I am on the side everyone else is on in this campus, the side that wants to improve the operations of this university so that everyone has access to a good education, a community without bias and discrimination and a safe, all-inclusive campus. I would hope that everyone reading this is on that side with me.

As to the second question, as to why I was at this town hall: I was quoted in a recent article in your publication as saying, “I support civil disobedience,” which I do not remember saying so unconditionally. The reporter can be excused though, as we were interrupted by campus staff. So let me expand.

I was at this meeting because there seems to be a particular type of logic pervasive in this university that I feel threatens all of our long term goals, and should be brought into question. Take, for example, the logic behind the investigative team from the Office of the President on Friday. Why is it that, in all of the university’s staff and resources, the team researching how better to improve our police practices is made entirely of lawyers? We have a host of experts in the university who study protest, criminology, ethics and civil rights. Why were none of these scholars called to be on this committee? When this committee wanted to get feedback from protesters, this logic somehow prevented them from going down and actually talking to them where they were at the bank.

I can’t help but feel that this logic is part of a larger logic of privatization, that which finds it more efficient to allow income generated by managing the new West Village Properties to go to a private corporation, rather than funneled back into the university. This logic has undergraduates paying higher tuition, and yet teaching services are one of the first things cut, with ever larger class sizes and fewer TAs per student.

This particular brand of logic prevalent in the UC system is harmful to us all, and should be challenged by all parts of our community: students, protesters, administrators and especially by The Aggie. This isn’t an “us vs. them” story; rather, it is all of us trying to figure out a better way to run this institution.

I think several aspects of this logic were successfully challenged at the town hall by several very well spoken and articulate members of our community. I hope that we are able to avoid the divisive language suggested by the question asked to me by the reporter, and instead are able to come together as a community to find better ways to solve our problems.

We are all on the same side.

Living in the peacefully-mundane Central Valley of California, it’s hard to comprehend that in other parts of the world people are harassed, tortured and even killed for their beliefs every day. But they are.

It’s been over a year since the beginning of what was hopefully termed the “Arab Spring,” an explosion of political and social upheaval in the Middle East and North Africa that led to the overthrow of three dictatorial regimes and the destabilization of several more. But amid the exuberance of change, troubling trends have emerged. Of these, perhaps the most troubling is a marked increase in persecution of religious minorities by democratic Islamic fundamentalists.

Egypt, where Islamist militias led by the Muslim Brotherhood ousted long-time dictator Hosni Mubarak, has seen liberty for religious minorities enter a crisis. Coptic Christians — who comprise approximately 10 percent of Egypt’s population — had experienced persecution for decades from Muslim groups, but until the fall of Mubarak, the government provided the Copts with official protection.

Since Mubarak’s demise, however, the situation for Copts has deteriorated. A wave of targeted murders, rapes, mob beatings and church burnings has devastated the Coptic Christian community on an almost daily basis for the past year. Despite the brutality of these attacks, the new democratic government has shown no desire to stop the persecution. Last October, a peaceful march protesting the destruction of a Coptic Christian church was broken up by police and military forces. Over 20 people were killed and more than 300 people were injured, some of them run over by military vehicles. In a recent and typical instance, when a mob of 3,000 Muslims attacked and burned Coptic homes, churches and shops in the village of Kobry-el-Sharbat, the police waited outside the village until the mob had enough of looting and beating.

Aside from direct persecution, Egypt’s religious minorities face societal discrimination and pressure as well. Barbaric practices such as “chitan,” or female circumcision, which had been banned under Mubarak, have become popular again. Christian women, easily identifiable for their lack of a head covering, are a target for rapes and beatings. Christians and other non-Muslims also face a virtual apartheid in legal and societal standing based on radical interpretations of Sharia law. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has recommended that Egypt be placed alongside North Korea, Iraq and Saudi Arabia as a “Country of Particular Concern.”  Not surprisingly, human rights groups in Egypt have estimated that 100,000 to 200,000 Coptic Christians have left Egypt since the Revolution.

While Egypt is perhaps the most visible offender, the democratization caused by the Arab Spring has had negative effects elsewhere as well. Mark Hetfield, a former senior advisor to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, stated that throughout the Middle East, “Democratization has resulted in ethnic cleansing.” Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a bestselling author who left Islam to become a women’s rights activist, says, “From one end of the Muslim world to the other, Christians are being murdered for their faith.”

For those who hoped for an improved human rights climate in the Middle East, the reports of increased persecution are a discouraging reminder that democracy alone cannot create liberty or civilization on its own. If there is one message conveyed by the Arab Spring, it is that institutions of democracy cannot mask the brutality and intolerance that can characterize fundamentalist Islam.

For those of us living in safety in the West, the fear of living in a fundamentalist country can seem distant, even unreal. But we can still make a difference. With Egypt and others increasingly dependent on aid from the U.S. to survive, we must have the political will to demand equal treatment for non-Muslims as a condition of that aid.

The first step, as always, is to speak the truth. The famously-astute Vice President Biden, rhapsodizing about the Arab Spring in December, compared it to the American Revolution, and quoted poetry about the “terrible beauty” of the movement.

Unfortunately for the minorities living in fear throughout the Middle East, the Arab Spring promises far more terror than beauty.

SAM HOEL can be reached at swhoel@ucdavis.edu.

Here’s a fun prank idea. Watch an episode of “Jeopardy” on On Demand, paying careful attention to all the answers. Then a couple of minutes before your roommate gets home from class, replay the episode. See where this is going?

Your friend might not be too impressed when you declare Nerva as the first of the five great emperors (thank you, Professor Spyridakis), but be sure to take a picture of his/her reaction when you know that the answer to “In 1812 he became a disciple and friend to social philosopher William Godwin, later his father-in-law” is: “Who is Percey Shelley?” Just make sure you don’t put any money on it or someone might call a big party foul. For some reason, people get upset if you bet on something when you secretly already know the outcome.

Well, that’s exactly what Reps. Louise Slaughter (D-New York) and Tim Walz (D-Minnesota) are trying to prevent with their new STOCK Bill (Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge).

Let’s rewind for a moment. Most people have heard of trading on insider information and how it’s illegal. For those who haven’t, insider information is basically any information that isn’t public. Of course, in many cases it’s impossible to not have some insider information. The problem comes when people take advantage of that information to profit from it. For example, let’s say the company I work for is competing for a government contract and I learn that we got it before it’s publicly announced. If I then invest a lot of money in our stock, that is illegal — I have to wait until it’s publicly announced. Well, this makes sense and applies to everyone, right? Wrong.

Quick, think of the number-one reason you hate Congress. Now prepare yourself because I’m about to give you a better one. Take the exact same situation from before, but now instead of me, that guy is your congressman. If he learns that information through congressional activity, he isn’t required by law to not act on it. In fact, he has all sorts of fun options, including — but not limited to — investing a lot of money in that company’s stock or, if all his money is already tied up in other inside investing, arranging a little meeting with some VIPs over at Stanley Morgan and charging them upward of $10,000 for a little chit chat. Ever wonder why so many members of Congress are rich?

Mad yet? Here, I’ll do you one better. After the STOCK bill was introduced to make congressmen play by the same rules as everybody else, it passed in the Senate. The House, however, took out key provisions on the argument that it “was overly broad and could ensnare too many people.”

My personal favorite justification — which, after reading multiple times I’m still trying to understand — comes from Cantor spokesman Brad Dayspring: “Worse, the unintended consequences on the provision could have affected the First Amendment rights of everyone participating in local rotaries to national media conglomerates. For example, members of the media who report on federal and congressional issues to a paid subscriber list might have to register as political intelligence consultants for their reporting under the provision.”

That would be a great point if the Senate bill didn’t specifically outline that members of the press were exempt.

The key provision taken out required those who collect financial information and sell it to Wall Street to register the same way lobbyists do. Think about that for a moment. It isn’t enough that Congress still gets to sell its secret information for thousands of dollars — it also wants the right to continue to do that all under the table. Heaven forbid Republicans get the reputation that they’re in bed with Wall Street.

Personally, I think the whole thing is simply Linsane.

If you’re interested in STOCK or Jeremy Lin puns, send your thoughts to DANNY BRAWER at dabrawer@ucdavis.edu.

Today’s topic is a bit sensitive. It involves an act that, as far as your standard magazines tell it, is considered the holy grail of sex by one gender and the bane of existence by the other. An act that women only give up for birthdays and anniversaries and that men must pursue relentlessly. That’s right, everyone, I’m talking about anal sex.

I have two problems with the common view of anal sex. First of all, it assumes — as so many sex cliches do — that the only people having sex are heterosexual couples. Secondly, any representation of a sex act that holds sexual behaviors up as a token to be earned puts me off. Sex, like any relationship, involves compromise. This much is true. But there is a difference between you and your lover taking turns choosing sexual activities and you dangling a given act in front of them like a carrot. There may be some people who have satisfying relationships built on that dynamic, but for many of us it’s not the best approach.

Some of you are probably thinking that I, consummate feminist that I am, am leading up to the advice that you should forget about anal sex altogether. But really, don’t you know me better than that by now? I’m here to tell you that anal sex, done correctly, can be quite pleasurable. Depending on your anatomy, there are various glands and nerve endings that feel really good when stimulated by anal sex. This makes it an excellent addition to your sexual repertoire.

If you are someone who wants to be on the giving end of the act, I want you to consider if you are willing (and I mean willing) to be on the receiving end. Your partner may never take you up on the offer, but the possibility should be there. If this gives you pause, think about why and discuss it with your partner. You may find that they are weighing similar pros and cons, and the discussion will help you decide just how anal sex will fit into your relationship. Oh, and for those of you who think this exchange doesn’t apply to you because your lover does not have a penis, let me remind you of something called a strap-on.

Now, communication is paramount during anal sex. If you are receiving and something is painful, tell your partner to stop. If you are told to stop, stop. That may be the end of anal play for that occasion, or it might just mean you need to re-group. But if you keep going when it’s uncomfortable, you are doing yourself and your partner a disservice. Even if things aren’t painful, feedback is important. Your enjoyment may require that the penetration is slower or faster, shallower or deeper, and your lover can only know this if you tell them how you’re feeling. So check in with each other throughout the process.

A guaranteed way to make anal sex painful is to try having it without properly relaxing the muscles in the area. You may be tense for all sorts of reasons, but if you stay that way the experience will be unpleasant for everyone. So, focus on your breathing and on removing the anxiety from your body (a bit like yoga exercises). If you’re the partner who’s on top, help your lover out. Massage them, paying special attention to their legs and butt. Whisper sweet (or dirty) nothings in their ear to keep them in the mood, as being turned on helps release any tension.

Once you’re relaxed, it’s time to explore without inserting anything large. Try stimulating the outside of the anus first and then working up to penetration with a finger or a small toy. For all of this, wear gloves. This is both for sanitary and comfort purposes, as sharp nails or callouses can cause painful sensations for the receiver. Latex gloves work fine, but if anyone involved has a latex allergy you should look for gloves made from alternate materials, such as nitrile.

Lastly, you can’t have good anal sex without lubrication. Unfortunately, unlike the vagina, the anus is not self-lubricating. So, outside lube is required. The recommended types are silicone-based lubes because they don’t dry out and don’t get too sticky. They do take slightly more effort to clean up but, much like anal sex itself, the extra work is worth it.

SAM WALL had a harder time than she cares to admit finding a printable title for this column. Ask her about it by contacting sewall@ucdavis.edu.