Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Articles”
On Tuesday evening I watched president Obama’s state of the union address. It was brilliant. Obama rang all the bells, dotted all the i’s, and attacked all the ghosts. At times, he even made sense. All in all, it was a brilliant effort, possibly his best speech ever, even though his speech was essentially bullshit. In case you missed that …
Jan. 11, 2015 – For half a century, the accepted research on happiness has shown our lives on a U-shaped curve, punctuated by a low point that we’ve come to know as the “mid-life crisis”. A number of studies have claimed over the years that happiness declines for most from the early 20s to middle age (40 to 60). Today, …
If your top political figures need to constantly state that your country is not a tax haven, then the chances are it probably is a tax haven. And as the UN’s Philip Aston says, ‘When lists of tax havens are drawn up, Ireland is always prominently among them’. Following their investigation into the tax affairs of Apple, Senators Carl Levin …
Alice Padilla’s laugh cut through the air at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo. Fresh off an hour-long exhibit tour, she and 16 other friends sat in the zoo cafeteria, snacking on sugar cookies and mocking current bestsellers. The group could appear to be just another cluster of friends visiting the zoo. But they were there for another purpose, too: to provide …
Back in August I wrote a piece here in Salon about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies and how it was a mistake for liberals to laugh too much about them. At the time, we were mostly concerned with his signature plan to deport over 11 million people and build his “big beautiful wall” with a “big beautiful door” and have Mexico pay for it. …
I watched a documentary about North Korea which explained how the government there assigns a score to each citizen, based on how large a threat to the regime s/he is perceived to be. When I lived in Taiwan under a military government years ago, such a number was encoded into every national ID card. Those citizens every interaction with the …
GMO promoters enthuse about how GM crops will be able to help the poor and hungry, far in the future, writes Claire Robinson. But they are silent about the currently-planted GM crops – 99% of them herbicide-tolerant or insecticidal. Could it be because opponents of the technology are being proved right at every turn? Insofar as reason and science are …
Once again, the fear machine is going into full force as the Presidential primary campaign heats up. If there’s one thing the politicians in general and Republicans in particular don’t want, it’s people going to the polls with their wits about them. They need people to think and vote with their limbic lizard brains, not their prefrontal cortex. And nothing …
Those who have been reading my work for any length of time know I have been adamant we would someday face a “global margin call”. I believe this call was issued last week! No matter how you look at the world, whether financially, geopolitically, macro, micro or whatever …what underlies everything in our world today is “credit”. Credit is used …
Humans have experienced two centuries of vaccine orthodoxy. That orthodoxy dictates that we believe vaccination is safe and effective and should be mandated by governments. It began with medical doctors insisting we get one dose of smallpox vaccine, 1 and has exploded over the past century into a U.S. government dictate that every child get 69 doses of 16 vaccines. …
