Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Articles”
Some years ago I worked for a mid-sized financial multinational. Towards the end of my tenure my employer merged with another company, and the senior executives in my department were replaced with Americans. (It was the smallest department in the division, and they felt they should give the Americans something.) There had been some… dubious… practices before, stuff that skirted …
The 2016 election season started last year with a cheap stunt. The roguish clown Donald Trump set fire to the circus tent, then made fun of the fleeing performers. Many of us laughed in a sick sort of way, enjoying the Republican distress. Next the campaign became a cartoonish version of reality TV, with naughty name-calling and occasional sexual innuendo. Shock …
Every time a person of Middle Eastern heritage who ought to have been committed to an insane asylum but wasn’t (because rich people who don’t want to pay taxes successfully lobbied to get rid of insane asylums) commits violence, our press and politicians hit the panic button. This is so even though you are more likely to die falling in …
Though it may not have seemed possible, climate catastrophe is even closer than previously thought, with new figures released Thursday finding that—when the wells already drilled, pits dug, and pipelines built, are taken under consideration—we are well on our way to going beyond 2°C of warming. “If you’re in a hole, stop digging,” begins the study, put forth by the …
There is much angst in the Northern financial media about how the era of globalisation led actively by the United States may well be coming to an end. This is said to be exemplified in the changed political attitudes to mega regional trade deals like the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) that was signed (but has not yet been ratified) …
After assuming Hillary Clinton would coast to victory, Democrats are shocked to find that she is in a virtual tie with Donald Trump in the polls. Trump in fact leads in a number of key swing states, like Florida and Ohio. The New York Times roamed New York’s Upper West Side, a liberal bastion, and discovered Democrats freaking out. ‘It’s like someone …
The same hotspot in Earth’s mantle that feeds Iceland’s active volcanoes has been playing a trick on the scientists who are trying to measure how much ice is melting on nearby Greenland. According to a new study in the journal Science Advances, the hotspot softened the mantle rock beneath Greenland in a way that ultimately distorted their calculations for ice loss …
Last April Terrill Thomas, a 38-year-old inmate in the Milwaukee County Jail suffering from severe mental illness, died of “profound dehydration.” He spent his last days pleading — begging — for something to drink, after the water in his cell was shut off. Corrections officers in the jail had no problem torturing him, watching him die slowly and painfully because …
As the nation reels from two recent fatal police shootings of black men, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Wednesday called for cities nationwide to adopt “stop-and-frisk”—a widely condemned police practice that New York City was forced to abandon after a federal judge struck it down as unconstitutional, finding that it disproportionately targeted minorities. “‘I would do stop-and-frisk. I think you have to,’ Trump said, according …
The ruling institutions of this world are quite comfortable with a virus. First with SARS, then H1N1, then ebola and now the Zika virus, mainstream media and official organizations have been quick to recognize and counter the threat with travel advisories, quarantines, research funding, vaccine development, and heightened levels of vigilance. Yet information about other kinds of threats that are …
