aggienaut | CALMUN Buena Park 2008

   Done at Kenobi Marten Olsen & Bear LLC. Originally scheduled to be there a week, I got extended another week, then until the following Wednesday, and then till the following Friday, totalling three weeks. It was pleasant, but dreadfully boring.

   This past Saturday was the CALMUN Buana Park MUN Conference. It was fun we had an all-star staff consisting of: Gov & Sec Generals Shy & Liz; Matt "Papa Smurf" Wilkerson; Alexandra "Equinox" Vinagradova; Rabiah Rahman; NAU's Kerri White, Jen Hartman & Laura Hays; & the excellent Tiarrie Gaddis. Also my good friend Mark Carlin attended for the first time as a delegate and now he's all about going to the Berkeley and AMPAC conferences, so I've brought another over to the dark side muahahaha.
   Friday night we had a mock session (of the model UN!) where we debated "pepsi versus coke" so the new chairs could practice chairin. We all chose random countries (or people?!) to represent: I was Kurdistan; two of the Riverside Community College (RCC) people were Iran and "Madam Ahmadinejad," respectively. I thought it was rather odd that the first lady was represented seperately from the state, silly RCC kids; Matt represented the opinion of Papa Smurf; and then someone spoked as Hillary Clinton about the harmful effects of caffiene and sugar and how it should be regulated. So I quickly turned over my placard and wrote "Barack Obama" and proceeded to make a speech about how "cola is about DREAMS, we should have the audacity to DREAM that we live in a world where we all have the opportunity to enjoy cola..."

Authority vs Majority - While explaining rules and such PAXMUN newcomer boardmember Drew Schneider kept referring to "majority" vote as being "50 percent plus one." Its silly and I'll let it go a few times but after he kept saying it I finally had to mention that no, majority is NOT "50 percent plus one," but rather "more than half," which is not the same. After I briefly explained the mathematical differences he retreated to an Appeal to Authority by claiming that "well '50% plus one' is how its defined in the rules and in real constitutions, such as the Bolivian Constitution." Well he knows that I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of the Bolivian Constitution, and I know that while its possible he read it, I am CERTAIN he didn't read it with an eye towards how they defined majority, ie he was pulling it out of his ass.
   Anyway, I just wanted to point out that if you look up majority in Wikipedia, the second paragraph of the explanation of how it works in parliamentary rules reads: "A common error is to list a majority as being "one more than half" or "fifty percent plus one". This is incorrect when there is an odd number of votes cast. When there are 51 votes cast, half is 25.5. So, only 26 votes is needed, not 26.5 votes." So, yeah. I'm not going to look up the Bolivan Constitution, but I'll believe it defines it otherwise when someone shows me evidence of that.

   In completely unrelated news, I apparently have used 1000 tags on livejournal now and can no longer tag anything. )=
   Also, we got some pumpkin-cocoanut goiabada and it is excellent.