• Sally Kern could be on to something (but it’s not what she thinks)
• How the tax incentives war puts states in a terrible bargaining position
• Bill would raise taxes for 1 million low-income Oklahomans
• New OK Policy report lays out options for protecting Oklahoma public services
• More states push to end the Amazon tax loophole. Will Oklahoma join them?
• When a job is not enough: New measure looks at what’s needed for economic security
• A tale of two closing funds, the Chinese Communist Party, and genetically modified mice
• What’s at stake: the toll of budget cuts
• Politics for architects, or how fewer elections can be good for democracy
• The three part test for tax credits – and the fourth part we should be asking
• Cutting the top income tax rate: Who benefits?
• Unfair, inefficient, and bad for business: Why Oklahoma needs sales tax reform
• OK Policy Roundtable: Should the state of Oklahoma be promoting marriage?
• When “business-friendly” regulations are bad for the rest of us
• Why education reform is not like musical chairs

1. The matter composing my body was formed more than five but less than 14 billion years ago by a fusion reaction occurring at the center of an enormous ball of plasma.
2. When this star ran out of fuel in its core, it went nova, pushing the carbon and other elements that compose my body out into the universe.
3. Gravitational forces eventually brought these elements into orbit around another ball of plasma where they condensed into a planet.
4. By at least 2.4 billion years ago, my ancestors formed on this planet out of organic chemicals that stored and transferred information via self-replicating nucleic acids.
5. My ancestors multiplied and diversified over trillions of generations through random genetic variations.
6. This led different types of organisms to find separate niches for survival and reproduction, thus allowing the most successful to pass on their genes.
7. About 150 to 250 million years ago, a branch of this genetic lineage had become what we call mammals, with sweat glands, hair, and mammary glands that they use to feed their young.
8. A branch of these mammals evolved into human beings between 400,000 and 200,000 years ago.
9. My earliest traceable female human ancestor lived about 140,000 years ago in what is now Ethiopia, Kenya or Tanzania.
10. My ancestors began migrating and eventually spread all over the world between between 70,000 and 50,000 years ago.
11. The language I speak originated among Anglo-Saxon people who invaded England at about 449 AD from the regions of Denmark and northern Germany.
12. This language was further influenced by more waves of invasion from Scandinavia in the 8th and 9th centuries and Normandy (modern-day France) in the 11th century.
13. My ancestor Daniel Ross was a Scottish trader who came to the United States in the 18th century.
14. He married a Scots-Cherokee woman named Mary McDonald and they had 9 children, including my ancestor Andrew Ross and his older brother John Ross, who would become Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation.
15. In 1835, Andrew Ross signed the Treaty of New Echota, trading Cherokee land in Georgia for land in Arkansas and Oklahoma.
16. This treaty, which culminated in the Trail of Tears, was signed against the wishes of John Ross and a majority of Cherokees. Most signers of the treaty were later assassinated by Cherokees loyal to John Ross, though Andrew managed to escape.
17. Other of my ancestors lived in the 19th Century in the village of Belgorodka, in a region along the western Russian border known as the Pale of Settlement.
18. This region was the only place in Russia where Jews were allowed permanent residence.
19. Today it is part of the Ukraine.
20. My great-great-grandmother came from Belgorodka to the United States through Ellis Island on Oct 5, 1906, eventually setting in St. Louis, Missouri.
21. Her son, my great-grandfather Louis Chuver, was on a Navy ship outside Pearl Harbor on the day of the raid, though fortunately far enough away to not be attacked was on the US Neshoba, ready to invade Japan when WWII ended. He was 37 and a radar man. He was drafted after Pearl Harbor even though he had 2 kids, 15 and 5.
22. My mom was born in Washington DC and grew up in St. Louis and Oklahoma.
23. My dad was born in Oklahoma and grew up in Oklahoma and California.
24. At 4:10 am, September 11, 1981, I was born.
25.

My great-grandfather Louis “Zazy” Chuver and me.

As The Hub’s first bloggers, I hope we’ve launched something that will grow and improve in years to come. I think we’ve featured quite a few interesting, sometimes fantastic posts all semester.

However, one flaw that I’ve felt from very early on is that our voices have been limited. A while ago Meredith passed on an e-mail from the campus Republicans criticizing the balance of the Daily’s coverage. Now, I don’t expect that a political advocacy group will ever be completely happy with the local mainstream media; it’s their job to push from the margins and shift the debate, in ways that are often unfair to those trying to fairly and accurately report the news.

In other words, despite their rhetoric, most advocates do not actually want fair media; they just want the bias to be more on their side.

But even so, I could not help but agree with some of the Republicans’ criticisms. And if they read me, Meredith, Tiara, and Tres, I’m sure we’ve only provided them more ammo. It’s fairly easy to recognize us as the nest of liberal conspiracists that we are (Dane, as a sports guy, is at least immune from this critique, though on this campus talking football is probably even more dangerous than talking politics.)

Now, I don’t think we should temper our opinions to appease some imagined ideal of balance. That would be dishonest, and, perhaps even worse, result in less interesting writing. Nor do I think we must have a house Republican to insert right-wing talking points on every issue we discuss. Political balance may not even be the right way to look at it, since there are so many other voices out there that don’t fit into the cages of left-right, liberal-conservative, Democrat-Republican.

Heck, we could improve diversity just by looking outside the journalism school. I’m sure there are many fascinating voices working in the fine arts or hard sciences that would provide a genuinely different take on campus life than those of us who live or have at some point lived inside the Daily newsroom.

Ideally, new voices would not just provide the opposite perspective on the same old topics, but point out other issues that we may not even have considered worth looking at.

But that will be a project for editors of later years. In any case, after an admittedly shaky start, The Hub Web site has improved greatly and is getting better all the time.

Besides, as a student newspaper, we’re all learning. Hopefully the lessons of The Hub have helped form some of the great new media minds in the next generation of journalists.

Anyway, it’s been fun. Thanks so much for reading.

Photo by Flickr user Krista76 used under a Creative Commons license.

For a news junkie, it was an obvious next step, because with blogs we can go beyond just reading the news. We can join the discussion that decides what the news means.

And where a newspaper is constrained by journalistic objectivity, a blog can be the authentic, warts-and-all voice of a real person.

I don’t mean to denigrate newspapers. Without journalists doing the hard job of reporting, we’d have nothing to blog about. And if more people knew how much work the dedicated reporters and editors put into every issue of the Daily, they would not be so quick to criticize.

But in a blog we are not tied to whatever the one source that returned our calls may have said that afternoon. Our only limitations are the imagination and logic that we can marshal to our cause.

In that spirit, I am excited to be joining Tres, Tiara, Meredith, and Dane as the first bloggers of the Hub. I hope to be part of a lively conversation with the OU community. I want to hear what you think, even if it is that I am wrong about everything. I will do my best to publicly respond to your comments on the blog, in the message boards, and at periscopeblog@gmail.com.

A little about me: I’m a journalism grad student in my last semester (knock on wood) at OU. I got my undergraduate degree here in history, and I’ve lived in Norman since 2001. For the last few months, I’ve been blogging at my own site, http://genelewis.wordpress.com/. At the wordpress blog I have followed the Cherokee Freedmen, national politics, nerd-tastic spelling bee champion Evan O’Dorney, and whatever else catches my interest. I plan to do the same here.

My master’s thesis is on religion journalism, and I am interested in how both religion and science shape our world. I am Jewish, but I admire the vibrancy of the Christian community at OU. When it comes to religion and nonbelief, I think we waste too much breath talking past each other. There is a lot of bluster and not enough understanding on all sides. I hope this blog will play a small part in reducing those misconceptions.

I am active in local environmental groups, and I believe that global warming will be the defining crisis of this generation. Momentum is on the side of change, but we have a long way to go. The Periscope will try to examine the state of our planet and what we can do to save it.

Oh, that name? Well, it sort of resembles my own, and it implies looking at things from around a corner or a different perspective. That is another goal of this blog, to find some of the idiosyncratic, but nonetheless important, stories and angles hidden in the wilds of the Interweb.

That is an ambitious plan, no? Yes. Luckily I have you all to tell me when I am full of it.

And a side view with house for perspective.

Pictured here are some Colorado potato beetle larvae, currently in the process of eating my potatoes. I’ve always wondered where these things come from. They only ever show up on potato plants, but they are almost always on those plants, and in force. But how does a critter with such a limited diet manage to be so widespread? I live in an urban area, no hub for potato agriculture, and the plants only got there from the throwing old vegetables at the brick wall on the side of my house game.

According to this site, the beetles simply fly around until they find the right plant. So they are traversing the countryside, ready to settle down in every small garden potato and eggplant they might find. For some reason, this thought makes me happy.