Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Articles”
This is Part 2 of a three-part series on the insidious techniques of trolls, spooks, feds, saboteurs, provocateurs, disinformants — whatever you wish to call them. These techniques were posted anonymously on the Internet some time ago. They appear to have been written by a professional troll for the “benefit” of less experienced trolls on how to prevent the sharing …
On Friday, a team of researchers led by Stanford economist Raj Chetty released a paper on how growing up in poverty affects boys and girls differently. Their core finding: Boys who grow up in poor families fare substantially worse in adulthood, in terms of employment and earnings, than girls who grow up in the same circumstances. (The Washington Post has a good write-up of …
If a mainstay treatment of natural medicine doctors is shown to be safe and effective by government research, what do you do? Ban it! Action Alert! Congress passed the Drug Quality and Security Act in response to bad medicine from a rogue compounded-drug company, which the FDA had known about and refused to shut down. The FDA, ever the opportunist, and …
Russia’s economic crisis is so bad that President Vladimir Putin is now hoping to sell stakes in some of the nation’s most prized businesses to raise money. Putin discussed the privatization plans with officials on Monday, saying the sales should be made quickly but not at “bargain basement prices,” according to a government statement. Strategically important companies should not be up for …
It was half a century ago, but I still remember it vividly. “We have to help South Vietnam,” I explained. “It’s a sovereign nation being invaded by another nation, North Vietnam.” “No, no,” my friend protested. “There’s just one Vietnam, from north to south, divided artificially. It’s a civil war. And we have no business getting involved. We’re just making …
They’re making fuel from thin air at the USC Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute. For the first time, researchers there have directly converted carbon dioxide from the air into methanol at relatively low temperatures. The work, led by G.K. Surya Prakash and George Olah of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, is part of a broader effort to …
The term “schizophrenia,” with its connotation of hopeless chronic brain disease, should be dropped and replaced with something like “psychosis spectrum syndrome,” argues a professor of psychiatry in The BMJ today. Professor Jim van Os at Maastricht University Medical Centre says several others have called for updated psychiatric classifications, particularly regarding the term “schizophrenia.” Japan and South Korea have already abandoned this …
It took the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti to expose the rot in the world’s charities. Well-meaning people and their governments donated about $12 billion dollars of emergency aid, virtually none of which reached individual Haitians. The funds that were delivered went mostly to enrich the donor countries’ government agencies, aid agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGO), and the vast majority of …
Robert Ford was US Ambassador to Syria when the revolt against Syrian president Assad was launched. He not only was a chief architect of regime change in Syria, but actively worked with rebels to aid their overthrow of the Syrian government. Ford assured us that those taking up arms to overthrow the Syrian government were simply moderates and democrats seeking …
In a curiously upbeat account, The New York Times reported that Islamic militants have joined with Ukraine’s far-right and neo-Nazi battalions to fight ethnic Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine. It appears that no combination of violent extremists is too wretched to celebrate as long as they’re killing Russ-kies. The article by Andrew E. Kramer reported that there were three Islamic battalions “deployed …
