Columnists

One of the most surprising aspects of contemporary Republican politics has been their across-the-board attack on women’s health services and women’s rights. Rather than an isolated misogynistic program, these attacks should be viewed as one part of a conservative agenda to roll back gains made in the sixties.

Recently, MoveOn reported Top 10 Shocking Attacks from the GOP’s War on Women ranging from changing the definition of rape to denying abortions in all circumstances to limiting access to contraception to defunding preschool programs and family planning agencies. It’s not only the women’s movement that’s being attacked, but also the civil-rights movement, the consumer movement, the environmental movement, and the gay-rights movement. All the accomplishments of the sixties are under attack by Republicans. They’ve returned to the conservative ideological framework that worked for them up until the McCain-Palin campaign, -more-

Writers are forever eight, over aware, and indignant.

—Adam Gopnik New Yorker, 3/17/08 in an article categorizing types of artists by mental/temperamental age. -more-

Medical scientists believe that the brain structure is abnormal for persons with a major mental illness such as schizophrenia. Some persons with schizophrenia, perhaps a third, have enlarged ventricles, or empty spaces within the brain, which translates into less overall ability to function, reason, and experience the environment. Other brains of persons with schizophrenia are closer to normal, with structural problems that are more subtle, and more localized to within only some areas. Because of this theory, it makes sense to believe that a person with schizophrenia will still have problems even while medicated. A lack of control of impulses is frequently one of those problems. -more-

In 1976 Margaret Elliot Murdock was interviewed about her father and her San Francisco and UC, B early days. I gleaned herstory from her responses. Part 1 was mainly about her San Francisco childhood. Part 2 (last week’s column) took her to Berkeley and the University, and this week, Part 3 to the Sather Tower bells. -more-

Editor's Note: Twenty years ago, journalist and historians Ruth Rosen, then a professor at U.C Davis and a columnist on the op-ed page of the Los Angeles Times, anticipated the public and state's unwillingness to stop the decline of the University of California. We reprint this to remind our readers that the gradual free fall of education in California has a long history.

Californians can no longer assume that their children can aspire to attend one of our public universities. In the next few weeks, legislators and administrators, faced with the state's whopping budget crisis, plan to raise student fees, chop departments, slice budgets and fire hundreds of faculty. Before long, access to California’s public universities will be sharply limited and higher education will become a privilege for the few. -more-

Insect metamorphosis is a strange and stirring phenomenon. Complex metamorphosis, that is, the process as it occurs in beetles, butterflies, bees, and flies. Whereas grasshoppers, say, just get larger at each successive molt, a moth completely reorganizes itself at every life stage. Gross anatomy, internal organs, physiological processes—everything changes when it transforms from larva to pupa, and again from pupa to adult. -more-

Antipsychotic and other types of medications, when used to help people get well, are moderately good things. Before these medications existed, countless mentally ill persons spent a lifetime literally being chained up, and had nothing added to them to hold their horrific disease in check. If not chained up in an asylum, persons with severe mental illness often became the “town idiot” or the “town drunkard.” It isn’t accurate to claim that mental illnesses didn’t exist prior to the invention of the medications. They did exist, and they who suffered from them had a very sorry lot in life. -more-