Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Articles”
Last week, after a great deal of debate, the passengers aboard theTitanic voted to impose modest limits sometime soon on the rate at which water is pouring into the doomed ship’s hull. Despite the torrents of self-congratulatory rhetoric currently flooding into the media from the White House and an assortment of groups on the domesticated end of the environmental movement, that’s …
On May 20 1999, Nature magazine sounded what might have been the death knell of the biotech food industry. A short paper in the respected British science magazine by John Losey, an assistant professor of entomology at Cornell University, reported the ominous results of his laboratory study on the effects of pollen from genetically modified corn on the Monarch butterfly. Losey found …
Not even a day seems to go by anymore without some whack job in academia, a public health department or even the entertainment industry spewing pseudoscientific nonsense in defense of vaccines, pharmaceuticals or government-run healthcare. And the year 2015 was notably saturated with more than its fair share of bad science outbursts by some very well-recognized names in popular culture, …
The year 2015 will be remembered as a year of expanding global warfare and militarism. It began with discussions of the possibility of “total war” against Russia over the Ukraine crisis, saw new provocations against China in the South China Sea, and draws to a close amid the escalation of the US and European war in Iraq and Syria and …
American Exceptionalism is the belief that, even when the US is flawed in its policies, those politics are justifiable because there is something innately morally superior about being an American. This alleged moral high ground comes from our international commitment to promote and enforce democracy and free-market capitalism–even when it boils down to supporting dictatorships and economic exploitation. This view …
It’s the job of science journalists to look beyond data – we have to look at the people doing the science and whether they have conflicts of interest s a science journalist, a lot of your time is spent reporting on new studies, natural phenomena and how research may affect our lives. But there is another key piece to science, …
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images. – Guy Duborg Have you seen The Best of Enemies? It’s a documentary about the famous 1968 debates between William F. Buckley, Jr. and Gore Vidal. The whole thing culminates in a moment where — after heated exchange — Buckley, taking Vidal’s bait, explodes, Now …
One hundred years ago European civilization, as it had been known, was ending its life in the Great War, later renamed World War I. Millions of soldiers ordered by mindless generals into the hostile arms of barbed wire and machine gun fire had left the armies stalemated in trenches. A reasonable peace could have been reached, but US President Woodrow …
Bad things happen when the Pentagon tries to run itself like a business. ifty-four years ago, the brand-new Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara thought he could bring Pentagon spending on everyday items under control by applying efficiencies he had used to help turn around Ford Motor Co. Instead, he created a monster. McNamara’s creation, known as the Defense Logistics …
As I illustrate in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we in the emerging American police state find ourselves reliving the same set of circumstances over and over again: egregious surveillance, strip searches, police shootings of unarmed citizens, government spying, the criminalization of lawful activities, warmongering, etc. What remains to be seen is whether 2016 will bring …
