Browsing: Editorials

The college basketball season is one of the most exciting times of the year. Fans watch their teams battle to get into the NCAA Tournament, which is filled with Cinderella stories and buzzer-beating 3-pointers. But since the NBA’s 2005 collective bargaining agreement, college basketball has been robbed of its true quality.

In 2005, the NBA changed its rules regarding player eligibility. Commonly referred to as the “one-and-done rule,” all players must meet certain criteria before playing in the NBA. The NCAA usually takes the brunt of the criticism for this, but it is an NBA rule that the NCAA has no control over.

When the student body president for Northwest Christian University came out, he sent shockwaves throughout his campus and Christian community. He did not come out as a homosexual, but as an atheist.

In a column published by the Beacon Bolt, the student newspaper for NCU, senior Eric Fromm announced to the student body that he was an atheist while calling out the judgmental peers that shunned, or worse, attacked him verbally.

Thirty squats might be your exercise for the day. Thirty squats could also get you a ride on the subway. At least, that’s the case in Russia.

A vending machine has been set up in a Moscow subway station that would allow people to buy a subway ticket by doing 30 squats. A ticket would normally cost 30 rubles, or 92 cents.

Since its inception, the Motion Picture Association of America has enabled filmmakers to produce art while protecting their rights as companies. In addition, the MPAA rating system keeps a close eye on the content that makes up this art.

In the United States, films are rated for adult content, language, violence and thematic elements. However, in Sweden, worrying about too many f-bombs in a film isn’t the only issue causing concern.

A passionate sport is in the middle of its playoffs in America and nobody seems to notice. While flying under the radar, the Major League Soccer Playoffs have been filled with raucous crowds and thrilling action on the pitch.

With the knockout rounds and conference semifinals over, it’s now down to the Western Conference Championship between the Portland Timbers and Real Salt Lake. In the Eastern Conference, the last two teams remaining are Sporting Kansas City and the Houston Dynamo.

Freedom of religion is again at the forefront of a Supreme Court case. On Nov. 6, justices heard oral arguments in Town of Greece v. Galloway, No. 12-696.

Two residents, Susan Galloway and Linda Stephens, in the town of Greece, N.Y., a suburb of Rochester, filed a lawsuit against the town complaining that they and other residents that attend council meetings are a captive audience because the council opens every meeting in prayer. They contend that because nearly every prayer offered in an 11-year span were overtly Christian, that the town was endorsing Christianity, which is viewed as a violation of the First Amendment’s establishment clause.

Holiday all-nighters should be about burning the midnight oil with family, playing games, drinking hot chocolate and eating leftovers. It should not be about standing in line, fighting the cold and racing for the last big-screen TV.

This year, K-mart and its sister store Sears are leading the way in a shopping marathon that forces Black Friday onto Thanksgiving Day, and many holiday purists are not happy about it.

Student football tickets have been at the forefront of people’s minds recently. First there was the issue with student section crowding at homecoming and then Baylor ran out of student tickets for Baylor’s game against Oklahoma.

Now that Baylor football is ranked in the top 10, football tickets are a hot commodity. For the past few decades, Baylor has done a great job of giving every student the ability to make it to football games with minimal effort on the students’ part.

“The greatest part of the President’s job is to make decisions — big ones and small ones, dozens of them almost every day,” President Harry S. Truman said. “The papers may circulate around the Government for a while but they finally reach this desk. And then, there’s no place else for them to go. The President — whoever he is — has to decide. He can’t pass the buck to anybody. No one else can do the deciding for him. That’s his job.”

Truman made that statement during his farewell address on Jan. 15, 1953. During most of his presidency, Truman had a sign on his desk that read “The Buck Stops Here.”

We all like to hear the inspirational stories of someone who managed to turn unlikely ambitions into realities. For example, Cristy Nicole Deweese is a former Playboy model. She aspired to be a teacher even during her time as a model. She started working at Dallas ISD as a Spanish teacher this year, and the school was aware of her past when she was hired.

Unfortunately, by October, she was fired. She wasn’t fired because she was a bad teacher. She wasn’t fired because she was mean to her students. She was fired for her Playboy past.

One of the things Baylor is known for is its low student-teacher ratio of 15:1. It boasts that more than 88 percent of classes are taught by professors. We understand that it’s not possible to have 100 percent of classes taught by professors, but it’s frustrating to walk into a class expecting a professor and then see a bunch of graduate teaching assistants teaching the course.

If a professor is listed as the instructor of the course, the professor should be the primary person teaching the class — not a graduate student.

Life is filled with inconveniences, but technology exists to help ease these troubles.

People needed ways to get around, so Henry Ford invented the automobile. People wanted to talk with friends and family across the country, so Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. People were grossed out by the smell of farts, so Paul O’Leary invented Shreddies.

What happened to music? Will the music of our generation have any lasting power?

Iconic bands of the past still blast through stadium speakers at events and legendary music from decades ago still fills the atmosphere at restaurants and shopping malls.

When we go to football games, we root for our team. We cheer to the extent of encouraging our team to “kill” the other, all in good fun of course. Baylor is certainly no stranger to whooping another team by way of points, especially this season. We, however, have never been accused of bullying.

Flying in an airplane these days is a major hassle and relief is not on its way.

Major United States airline companies are removing old, hefty seats in airplane models and replacing them with slimline model seats that will take up less space from front to back.

Put yourself in the shoes of somebody who needs government assistance to purchase groceries. If it weren’t for your Electronic Benefit Transfer card, you wouldn’t be able to purchase enough food for your family to eat. If you did, then other bills would go unpaid.

With talent and grace, these women have trained for most of their lives on how to sit up straight, flash the pearly whites and wave without the bend of a wrist.

While it’s certainly a spectacle here, France has finally gotten to the heart of it.

According to the Los Angeles Times, 40 percent of U.S. food is thrown away. Yes, you read that correctly.

Roughly 90 percent of Americans misread the “sell by,” “use by” and “best before” labels on food. This causes people to throw away perfectly healthy food just because of a simple mistake.

There are a lot of things said about our generation, Gen Y, and one of the things is our apparent sense of entitlement. And we agree. We grew up in a time where we were coddled into thinking we were great at something, even if we weren’t.

Throughout our life, our parents and society in general have treated us with “kid gloves.” In other words, in this idealized reality, everyone is special.

It’s October, and that means it’s breast cancer awareness month. Cancer is a horrible disease that scientists will hopefully find a cure for soon, and during breast cancer awareness month, people are called to donate toward research organizations.

Some organizations, however, have turned these pink ribbons into green stacks of cash.

We’ve all had that class where we show up preparing to learn something with a professor that doesn’t do much more than tell copious number of personal stories and mentally kick his feet up on a desk to teach the class.

Typically, most of these students admit they’re there because they only want to pass the class.

As the government shutdown continues, America is realizing exactly how much the government manages. While Republicans and Democrats continue to bicker and argue, America is paying the price of this temper tantrum though several avenues.

The shutdown is supposed to prevent non-essential spending, but this isn’t happening in all cases. The servers that host government websites are still running, but they are redirecting to a shutdown page. It would have made more sense, if the government wanted to really save money, to shut down the servers to federal websites. It isn’t saving the government any money to block these websites. They’re only annoying the American people.

When college students consider whether to accept an internship with a company, typically they look at numerous factors: is the company reputable, is it in a nice area, is it in their field of study and is it a paid or unpaid internship.

In the future, college students need to take a closer look at whether or not an internship is paid.

In its present form, the Affordable Care Act provides every American with health care, which will benefit the country in the long run. Unfortunately, the cost associated with this might drive away both current and future doctors.

With the government currently shut down and the debt ceiling looming, the immediate future of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, is in question. The act has been passed and is the law of the land, but this law needs to be amended. The United States needs affordable universal coverage, but it has to figure out a way to do this without making doctors suffer.

In recent days, it has come to light that the NSA conducted a secret experimental program during 2010 and 2011 that collected bulk data concerning the location of Americans’ cellphones. The agency claims it never moved ahead with the program and the data was never available for intelligence analysis purposes.

It has also been revealed that the NSA has used its data to create graphs of Americans’ social connections. These graphs are able to identify Americans’ associates, locations, traveling companions and other personal information. However, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, NSA chief, denied the NSA was creating these dossiers on Americans.

Gov. Rick Perry signed Texas House Bill 2 into law July 18. The bill, which will go into effect Oct. 29, places restrictions on abortion clinics. These restrictions have the potential to increase women’s health and safety during this procedure. While we support the right to life, this law is a step in the right direction.

Abortion clinics in Texas will not be allowed to administer abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, which is four weeks shy of the standard set by Roe v. Wade. The reasoning behind this statement is that the unborn child could potentially feel pain after the 20-week mark of pregnancy. This is reasonable, as research supports this claim.

Central Texas is in a drought, but when walking on Baylor’s campus, no one would know.

Campus is slowly turning into a swampland, lacking only the gators and Cajun food.

The squish of nearly every grassy patch on campus indicates the healthy dose of water that was administered overnight by way of sprinklers.

While Baylor’s campus has lush green grass, it’s coming at a price.

Students have to balance a variety of schoolwork, jobs, as well as several extracurricular activities in any given week. As a result, many students have very little time to do anything other than their to-do lists, such as sleep or spend any time with their friends and maintain relationships.

To add to students’ already busy and unpredictable schedules, professors have been scheduling several out-of-class activities that students are unaware of when signing up for the class.

Long gone are the days of speaking with an actual human when the Internet service is down or the latest technology gets a glitch.

In most cases, a mere phone call to a company’s tech support results in countless automated menu options offered by a recorded voice.

It seems as though technology companies want more than just an arm’s length from their patrons. However, Amazon’s new Kindle Fire just might make that customer connection again.

Allegations of NCAA rules violations rocked the world of college football several times during the 2013 football season, and we are only in week six.

Before the season even began, ESPN Outside The Lines reported Johnny Manziel was under investigation by the NCAA for accepting money for signing hundreds of autographs. He is accused of receiving a five-figure flat fee while in Miami for the Discover BCS National Championship in January.