"Excuse me, but I'm looking for Hate."

Looking for Hate Man...

"Oh, Hate? He's sleeping right now," he said, pointing to a lump underneath a blue tarp. "Hey, Hate!" the man yelled. "Hate!"

The tarp twitched, then stopped.

"Hate! Wake up, man! Someone's here to see you!"...

"Hi, Hate," the reporter said. "Um, fuck you."

"Hi, fuck you, too. I hate you," he responded, without hesitation or an ounce of vitriol....

Via Metafilter, which also links to this collection of articles he wrote back in the 1960s when he was a reporter for the New York Times. Imagine leaving the conventional life and going the way of a colorful street character. What would you be... if not Hate Man... who?

In case anyone cares what a bunch of lefty academics in Berkeley are saying at a conference called "Fractures, Alliances, and Mobilizations: Emerging Analyses of the Tea Party Movement."

David Weigel has typed up his notes for your enlightenment. Good lord, the very idea of a Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements makes me want to run in the other direction.

"Here, it's tie-dye and marijuana. It's just like the 1960s, with the Vietnam War still to protest."

John Yoo, back at Berkeley, endures his environs.

"I think of myself as being West Berlin during the Cold War, a shining beacon of capitalism and democracy surrounded by a sea of Marxism," Yoo observes, sipping iced tea in the faculty club lounge, a wan smile registering the discomfort of colleagues walking by en route to the bar.

He sees his neighbors as the human figures of "a natural history museum of the 1960s," the Telegraph Avenue tableau of a graying, long-haired, pot-smoking counterculture stuck in the ideology's half-century-old heyday.

He's happy in Berkeley, he says, and that's something I understand.

What to do about those science classes at Berkeley High School — where the classes that don't require science labs are full of black and Latino students...

... and it's mainly white students who get the advantage of all the money spent on all those great labs.

Campus leadership has proposed cutting before- and after-school labs -- decreasing science instruction by 20% to 40% -- and using that money to fund "equity" programs for struggling students in an effort to close one of the widest racial and ethnic achievement gaps in the state....

"There's a big fear of taking away from high-end achievers," said Linda Gonzalez, co-chair of the school governance council, which crafted the controversial proposal. But "why are we having science classes with two or three labs when there are kids in science classes with no labs?" wondered Gonzalez, a parent who supports the shift....

"This became a race issue, because just about everything that happens in Berkeley is fundamentally viewed through that lens," said [student teacher Aaron] Glimme, who acknowledged that "there's a very clear difference by race as to who shows up to the lab classes."

It seems terrible to pit the hard-working, high-achieving students against the struggling students. You might think all the students are making their choices and getting what they've earned, but consider:

[Teacher Philip] Halpern said. "A public school like Berkeley High has an equal obligation to students who have struggled. We shouldn't be continuing to allocate resources to students who have had them all along."

As Halpern notes, "Berkeley High is the only high school in town. You get the professors' kids, the dot-commers' kids and the kids of the working class."

Yoo.

Too.