The Indicator Online

The sticker affixed to the front of Float (Side One Dummy, 2008) brags that The Alternative Press considers it “one of the most important records of the year, if not the decade.” That’s somewhat of a stretch, but there’s no doubt that Flogging Molly’s latest release is its most mature and significant. What little the record lacks in the brash, raucous fun that used to define the band’s sound is more than compensated for by a marked increase in the quality of songwriting.It’s unfortunate that a group this good needs an introduction, but for most of Massachusetts, Flogging Molly is probably known as “that band that sounds like the Dropkick Murphys.” Following the (not undeserved) commercial success of the Murphys in the wake of “Shipping Up To Boston’s” memorable scene in The Departed, it’s easy to forget that Flogging Molly has been around just as long, has more authentic Irish street cred and is a better band. Formed in the mid-’90s by Irish expatriate Dave King, the septet has released four albums of consistently high quality and endeared itself to legions of fans by virtue of their relentless enthusiasm onstage.Yet I’ve always wondered how this band can peacefully coexist with its more popular doppelgänger—the two groups have the same number of members, very similar instrumentation, the same infectious blending of Celtic melodies with punk-rock speed and intensity and the same affinity for rolling 12/8 rhythms. During a recent trip to Newbury Comics, I noticed that Float and DKM’s latest release, The Meanest of Times, were right next to each other on the best-sellers rack, and was taken aback for a minute by the redundancy. But Float, whether deliberately or not, clearly delineates Flogging Molly’s presence in the Irish-American rock sphere as different from that of the Murphys. The Meanest of Times proves that the Dropkick Murphys have mastered their signature sound, but that sword cuts both ways; while a lot of fun to listen to, it’s unmistakably the product of a band trapped by precedent and expectations. [Read more →]

As the war in Iraq enters its sixth year, its unrelenting criticism only increases in volume as new voices stand out in what has become a Greek chorus of indignations lambasting the never-ending venture. The critique of the war provided by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes in their new book, The Three Trillion Dollar War, is much more soberly written than the average attack on the Bush administration’s policy: It puts the war into an economic perspective by calculating the bevy of opportunity costs and expenditures arising from the war, and concludes with a normative assessment of how wars can be more economically efficient in the future. Replete with unsubstantiated pontifications while other parts are filled with well-articulated arguments, War falls somewhere between a college student slapping a “Make Peace, Not War” sticker onto his laptop and Martin Luther nailing his Ninety-Five Theses to Castle Church.
How do Stiglitz and Bilmes calculate such alarming costs? Well, War is the end result of an extensive economic study that sifted through skewed statistics manufactured by government bureaucracy in an attempt to find every party that has been hurt financially by the meddling in Iraq. The book expands upon the “upfront” costs of the war, or those calculated by the government, which are currently logged at around $800 billion (the initial cost projection was $200 billion). War considers a “realistic-moderate” scenario in order to do this, in which the war lasts until 2011. Costs factored into this equation include “reset” value, or the $250-375 billion needed to rebuild the armed forces, $20 million for demobilization, the $500 billion increase in the defense budget and $1.6 trillion in oil losses since the price of a barrel of oil has increased by $75 since the beginning of the war. What is especially shocking is that the $3 trillion estimate only includes costs to the American economy resulting from the war. [Read more →]

On Saturday, April 26, the alternative rock band Third Eye Blind will be gracing Amherst with its presence for our annual Spring Weekend concert. In theory, this should be a focal point of the semester, as we usher in spring with a raucous weekend of celebration and music. Yet the excitement surrounding the event is minimal and its significance seems diminished—with good reason.
I listened to Third Eye Blind around the same time everyone else did (in middle school), when the songs seemed mature and grown-up, dealing with serious topics that were far enough outside our realm of experience to be intriguing. That was nearly a decade ago, and none of us are in middle school anymore. But while we’ve grown up, Third Eye Blind apparently has not; the band hasn’t released anything notable in years, and is currently touring an expansive slate of colleges on the strength of its first album and the memories it provokes. While Mount Holyoke was treated to a concert by über-hip rapper MIA and Smith will welcome the soulful Canadian songstress Feist for its Spring Weekend, we are left with a one-album wonder whose fame has long expired. Come April 26, we will be reminiscing about the past when we should be excited about the show and celebrating the few warm days we have at Amherst. [Read more →]

Lately, Stephen Colbert’s presidential campaign coverage has been opening with a visual of the Democratic donkey running full speed ahead towards a fork in a road and then splitting in two upon collision with a street sign that points Obama one way and Clinton the other. Gruesome though it may be, the Colbert visual aptly summarizes a growing fear amongst Democrats that the continued infighting between Obama and Clinton is turning a general election that should have been a slam dunk for the Democrats into one that is now John McCain’s to lose. With that in mind, and with Clinton facing virtually insurmountable deficits in pledged delegates and the popular vote, several Democrats—admittedly, Obama supporters—have begun calling on her to withdraw from the race for the good of the party. But would that actually be in the best interests of the party? Is the protracted campaign really hurting the Democrats’ general election chances?
Certainly, Hillary Clinton does not think so. Despite being up against seemingly impossible odds, Hillary has shown no sign that she plans to drop out of the race any time soon. In fact, she has said repeatedly that she plans to take the nomination fight to the convention floor in Denver if she must. But barring an unlikely Obama implosion, her only window to the nomination now rests in making Obama seem so unelectable that the superdelegates would choose to overturn the voters’ decisions. Hence the “kitchen sink” that just keeps on coming, the constant harping on Jeremiah Wright and the not-so-subtle hints that John McCain is more ready to be Commander-in-Chief than Barack Obama. Admittedly, a fair amount of pot shots have come from the Obama campaign as well, but regardless of which side is throwing more mud, the end result is the same: Clinton and Obama are dirtying each up other while McCain is getting a free pass. [Read more →]

In the high stakes world of professional sports, one laden with multi-million dollar television contracts and astronomical merchandise revenue, it has become increasingly difficult for professional leagues to foster fair competition while boosting public interest and the money that follows. The question of parity, or “equal opportunity” for all competitors, is not a new one, and the concept of salary caps and luxury taxes has lost its novelty, but the problem now seems to extend beyond the financial details of professional competition.
The question of parity itself, regardless of its causes, is still a point of contention. On the one hand, parity promotes the time-honored values of fairness and gentlemanly competition; on the other, it robs the sport of the excitement of having dominant teams or rivalries. No one can question that people are excited by the prospect of records being broken or the clash of two top teams, but few would consent to undermining the integrity of the sport or promoting dominance through artificial means that have little or no relevance to the sport itself. Regardless of team affiliations, the same people that couldn’t turn their televisions away from ESPN when the Patriots were attempting to go undefeated are also the ones that lament the unfairness of the New York Yankees’ $200 million payroll. Clearly, the idea of being able to buy sporting success is contrary to most peoples’ sensibilities, but where is the line drawn? [Read more →]

When the class of 2008 graduates, Tony Marx will finish his fifth year as president of Amherst College. Some would say this warrants celebration, while other civic-minded folks with nothing better to read would demand a progress report. Having nothing better to write, let this be the latter.
If I make an assessment of the Marx presidency, however, it doesn’t pretend to be comprehensive. For one, it conspicuously lacks significant staff input, both in inspiration and in interview; for another, it conspicuously lacks significant criticism, either of school or president. A March 10, 2005 Indicator article by Claire Rann and Patrick Harrison suggests the two may be correlated. The two-part investigation into living wage at Amherst College portrayed a less-than-rosy state of affairs among college staff, many of whom hold multiple jobs. It is surprising to some that progressive Amherst can’t afford a living wage for some of its earliest-rising employees, and one can only imagine that these individuals would make cutting criticism of the school. [Read more →]

March marked two chilling milestones in the Iraq war: the fifth anniversary of our invasion and the death of our 4,000th American soldier.
However, there was little talk of either of these events on the home front. There were no moments of silence, no lowering of flags, no tears shed for our dead—certainly not at Amherst College, at least. Nonetheless, pained mothers and fathers were indeed reminded of their fallen sons and daughters. And, through their despair, they no doubt found themselves wondering why their fellow Americans were not reminded of the same loss, why the rest of us seem so ignorant of the heart-wrenching realities of this war.
Yet a closer inspection of the American psyche shows that what plagues us is not so much conscious ignorance as sheer oblivion. While our young soldiers fight day and night in Iraq, dodging enemy fire and trying to evade hidden Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), back on the home front we are preoccupied with college basketball finals and our ridiculous reality shows. Having little interaction with the war beyond a few short seconds of Iraq footage on cable news as we swiftly flip through the channels, we have the unsettling power to turn on and off the bloodshed with the press of a remote. And with approximately one half of one percent of the American population directly engaged in the fighting, it perhaps seems only natural that the other 99.95 percent of Americans would be so detached from the battlefield 6,000 miles away. [Read more →]

On Wednesday, April 2, Amherst sponsored a colloquium titled “Reducing Global Poverty” featuring Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz ’64, former chief economist of the World Bank, and William Easterly, a former World Bank research economist. Both were supposed to propose concrete solutions for reforming the institutions that regulate aid and trade. Though the two are distinguished scholars and captivating speakers who offer devastating critiques of the current aid and trade systems, neither proposed any particularly satisfying solutions for the problems that plague the developing world.
Easterly charged that $2.5 trillion of aid to developing countries over the years hasn’t produced any positive results. Statistical analyses, he claimed, have shown no correlation between growth and aid. He blamed aid agencies’ reliance on quick fixes—development fads that would eventually die out, but not before vast resources had been wasted. These projects partly failed because of misguided optimism but more so because of the lack of incentives—especially among politically appointed managerial staffers—to effectively review particular aid programs. Easterly pointed to the latest development fad, the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDG), as, “one of the worst designed policy initiatives of all time.” The MDG campaign set forth 48 targets for development, presenting an endlessly tangled web of incentives for even the most well-intentioned and ambitious of aid workers. [Read more →]

I recently fell in love with a man five years older and with much more experience in relationships than I. I was scared of telling him I loved him, but when I couldn’t keep the words inside any longer, I blurted them out. He said nothing. I cried tears of confusion and embarrassment in the realization that I was, in fact, what I feared most—naïve. Through my tears, I told him that I had to go; I didn’t want him to realize that underneath my tough and stubborn shell, I was just as fragile and sensitive as the rest of them. Finally, as I was pulling away, he said, “I love you.” “Say it again,” I said. He looked me straight in the eye: “No.”
When I pressed him, he explained, “It’s obvious that we’re in love; anyone can see that. Once you say ‘I love you,’ it’s over, you no longer feel the need to find other ways of expressing yourself. Saying ‘I love you’ kills all imagination…” I was stunned—I had never thought about it that way before. Yet, it made sense to me: The concept of love has become so large as to encompass all surrounding emotions and thus mean nothing at all.
There are so many different types of love today that the use of the word begs explanation, yet most of us fail to clarify what we mean and instead merely fall back on what we’re used to saying. We should put to use all the vocabulary our parents made us memorize for the SATs and start explaining ourselves. But do we know how? When you utter the words “I love you,” what are you really saying? If even you don’t know what you’re saying, it seems silly to think you’re getting across what you mean. Too often, people say “I love you” because it’s second nature—it’s what you’re supposed to say when you care about someone. Some say love is too great to be put into words, that love surpasses language, but to me that just seems like a girly load of crap. We use one word to cover so many emotions that we couldn’t possibly be getting across what we mean. In some sense it speaks to the efficient, or rather, lazy ways of our generation. [Read more →]

The entire student body should care about the Amherst College endowment––whether you’re among the roughly 50 percent who receive financial aid, which averages annually around $30,000, or whether you’re in the half who would be paying closer to $75,000 per year for your education if its costs weren’t partially subsidized by the College. But you shouldn’t care about the endowment only because you’re its beneficiary; you should also care about how exactly that money is made.

First of all, endowments don’t just sit there––our endowment has nearly doubled over the past five years, from $860 million in 2002 to $1.66 billion in 2007. Nor do they grow on their own accord––money continually flows in from alumni giving, of course, but the bulk of endowment growth comes from returns on investments (largely equities and stocks). Nor would any of this happen at Amherst without the expert management of the endowment by the Office of the Treasurer, located across Route 116 on the second floor of College Hall. I’ll bet you didn’t know it existed. But for many of us, it is the reason we’re here. [Read more →]