Opinion

iPads are easily one of the most innovative Apple products yet. They are changing the way we do everything from entertaining ourselves to organizing professional business presentations. There is even talk of the iPad replacing the clipboard in our hospitals. It is staggering to consider the technological progress of the past 50 years. This quantum leap can’t help but tease the mind with visions of what may come to be 50 years from now.

We, as human beings, are known to do some pretty odd things. Just like the rest of the natural world, we as a species exhibit certain behaviors and rituals that are exclusive to our race alone. We gasp spastically when we find something to be amusing. We clap our palms together to show appreciation. We move around in metal boxes on wheels. And due to the repetition of habit, along with the apparent popularity of such customs, we often fail to recognize the peculiar nature of these practices, as seen from a detached and unbiased standpoint.

The times they are changin’, Mr. Dylan. They’re changing, indeed. I remember growing up in a time that now seems long ago, when the government actually encouraged people to vote. They had entire campaigns dedicated to it. They even got Jason Mraz to tell me to do it. That was back in the day. Back before the Republican party decided that it wanted to try and stop people from voting. And I’m not talking about the good old-fashioned “put the fewest number of voting booths in the most inaccessible part of town, to prevent all the minorities from voting” trick. I’m talking about the newest war on Americans that the GOP is fighting.

After six months of debating, campaigning and pandering, the official race for the GOP nomination has begun. Over the next five months the frontrunners will continue to claw at each other and wrestle with capricious Tea Partiers and the feisty Republican base until the dust settles in June and Barack Obama’s challenger emerges. The great irony of this circus is that the person whom Republicans have been trying to avoid will end up leading them. I am talking, of course, about Mitt Romney.

In 1995, when Kim Jong-il consolidated power, an alarming number of frogs disappeared from North Korea. The reason was that desperate North Koreans were eating frogs to ward off starvation. The famine that occurred between 1995 and 1998 ranks among the most underreported and obscured man-made tragedies. Half a million to 2 million people died; yet no one believed these estimates because the insular nature of the North Korean government turned any information about it into propaganda or rumors.

The new year has arrived, and college students are all probably feeling the same post-holiday blues and agitation in regards to us not being accustomed to writing 2012 on our homework assignments and papers. 2012 is here though, and whether this is our last year on Earth or not, with the looming predictions by Nostradamus and the Mayan calendar, we must continue living our lives here at Irvine.

Letter to the campus community from Federated University Police Officers Association (FUPOA)

The Penn State scandal is a story about one man whose legacy has been tarnished because of his failure to report his knowledge of his defensive coordinator’s alleged rape of a 10-year-old child. Joe Paterno is a man who claimed to put integrity and character above the game of football. A seasoned champion of the game like what John Wooden was to college basketball. Now his career is tainted and the reputation of the Penn State Nittany Lions lies in question. This is the story right?

In 2008, Barack Obama featured one of the most innovative and attractive campaigns ever launched. His fresh-look propaganda, proper cause, even those who were pledged to the red side of the political spectrum were showing their support. College students especially were showing great enthusiasm about Obama’s campaign and his election featured one of the highest young-voter turnouts in history. Fast-forward to 2011 and nearly four years of his run in the president’s seat and things look quite different. Students who once were avid Obama supporters are less excited for the upcoming campaign, myself included.

Rhetorical language has its place. However, the exaggerations used by Aminah and the argument put forward hardly constitutes anything constructive. A key to constructive writing is unwavering cogency — that is, it must make sense.

The term apartheid is mostly identified with the 1948-1994 apartheid system in South Africa, where the white minority subjugated the black majority to a brutal system of oppression, stealing their land and depriving them of their basic human rights. It was a system that was condemned by the whole world. Apartheid, as defined by the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime and Apartheid, is “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.”

There is not doubt in my mind that if someone walked into Congress and presented the very bill that would get us out of this horrible debt crisis with enough money to spare to give everyone free ice cream for a year, the U.S. population would still not be as engaged as they are in Kim Kardashian’s life.