On Feb. 28, 2017, President Donald Trump gave his first address to a joint session of Congress, delineating and consolidating many of his campaign and executive proposals unrolled in the first hundred days of his office. This address to a joint session to Congress was ostensibly an attempt to clarify his program and present a united front for the...
As I was driving home from UCR last Friday, I was unlucky enough to be flipping through the channels on my car radio (most of the stations were on commercial breaks) and happened upon a pair of musical monstrosities. No, it wasn’t Taylor Swift; I would have been able to ignore bad pop music. Instead, it was a pair...
People like to talk badly about covers of popular songs or disqualify them from being considered art because they seem like a glorified version of karaoke. And true, much cover music doesn’t exactly improve on the original and just ends up polluting the radio and other music streaming services (there are way too many versions of “All I Want...
American history and American culture are both completely intertwined with protest and rebellion. To protest something that you see as injustice in order to fix that injustice is among one of the most patriotic actions you can take. However, that doesn’t mean all protests are constructive or useful. If not handled carefully, protests can easily explode into violence, resulting...
Last week’s fiery events at Berkeley ignited a new debate over the drawbacks and downfalls of protesting. Armchair activists, safe behind their keyboards, stick their nose up and declare protests to be a nuisance or claim that these riots have somehow discredited any peaceful opposition to the “alt-right” and the Trump administration. These are the same people who said,...
In 2012, the permanent secretary of the Nobel Committee, Horace Engdahl, made a controversial statement that “American literature is too isolated, too insular,” prompting fears that the Swedish Academy had ruled out American writers for the prize in the foreseeable future. With this statement, and the recent trajectory of Nobel prize winners being authors not very well known in...
Effective at the start of the 2018-2019 academic year, most high school students in California will be required to complete CPR training in order to graduate. While usually involving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, the new requirement will teach hands-only CPR. California will become the 37th state to add this requirement. In some cases, students will be taught to use an “automated...
Governor Jerry Brown signed a law on September 24th that will mandate all high schools to teach their students how to conduct CPR and become familiar with medical tools like defibrillators. This is amazing. No, I’m not a big fan of government intervention in the daily lives of citizens, but there is no downside to this law. Unlike most...
We’ve entered a new phase in transportation technology. With companies such as Tesla and Google at the front, the way we get around is being revolutionized by the ongoing development of self-driving cars. The cars may not be perfect, and they may be expensive, but they offer huge promise; taking the process of driving out of the hands of...
With 90 percent of car crashes being attributed to human error, car developers are looking toward self-driving cars as the remedy for vehicular accidents. Even the government supports their development and distribution because, perhaps by taking out the “human” aspect of driving, errors won’t occur. With some self-driving cars already on the market, people are hopeful that a future...