On Tuesday of this week Tony Blair announced that May 5, 2005 would be the date of the British General Election. As a liberal Englishman and a traditional Labour voter, this puts me in something of a quandary. The Labour Party has mutated over the past four years into nothing more than an embarrassing and […]
Author Archives: Matthew Kennard
Appointments not supportive of peace
John Lewis Gaddis, professor of history at Yale, writes in the latest edition of the influential Foreign Affairs Journal, “Second terms in the White House open the way for second thoughts. They provide the least awkward moment at which to replace or reshuffle key advisers.” He is right, of course. The aftermath of a second […]
Author uses faulty scholarship
In October 2003, the noisy Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz was a visitor to the UCLA campus. He came to give a typically nuanced talk at Royce Hall titled “The Case for Israel.” At the time of his speech, attention was being brought to the charge that his new book of the same name […]
UCLA needs to pay up
First lady Eleanor Roosevelt told the Congress of Industrial Organizations Convention in 1943, “I believe you should tell the story of injustices, of inequalities, of bad conditions, so that the people as a whole in this country really face the problems that people who are pushed to the point of striking know all about, but […]
Global exploitation must be curbed
In academic circles, the current vogue word used to describe the world is the infuriatingly fuzzy “globalization.” And if you’re not sure you know what this word means, you should get to know it. According to the international studies Web site, “Globalization has come to UCLA.” This event, of course, describes the new global studies […]
Marijuana laws outdated, unfounded
The 1936 anti-marijuana propaganda movie “Reefer Madness” ““ still watched by giggling red-eyed students across the country ““ purports to show how taking a toke of “the devil’s weed” can turn the nicest all-American boy or girl into an uncontrollably horny, violent and crazy addict. It’s funny because as anyone who smokes weed knows, a […]
LaRouche hard to take seriously
Did you know that one-time UCLA philosophy Professor Bertrand Russell was the most evil man of the 20th century? Ever heard that the Bush administration and parts of the U.S. security service were complicit in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks? If you haven’t been made privy to these outlandish theories then you’re probably not familiar […]