Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Articles”
To followers of Ayn Rand and Ronald Reagan, and to all the business people who despise government, ‘community’ is a form of ‘communism.’ Even taking the train is too communal for them. Americans have been led to believe that only individuals matter, that every person should fend for him/herself, that “winner-take-all” is the ultimate goal, and that the winners have …
While the scandal surrounding the emails sent and received by Hillary Clinton during her time as U.S. secretary of state continues to grow, Clinton has resorted to laughing it off. This past weekend she told an audience of Iowa Democrats that she loves her Snapchat account because the messages automatically disappear. No one in the audience laughed. Clinton admits deleting …
The explosion in worldwide coffee consumption in the past two decades has generally not benefitted farmers of coffee beans in poorer nations along the equator. A University of Kansas (KU) researcher studying trade and globalization has found that the shift to “technified” coffee production in the 1970s and 1980s has created harsher economic and ecological consequences for heavy coffee-producing nations, …
I’ve decided that, at least in the United States, the religiously devout really do have the interests of rationalist nonbelievers at heart, at least as far as providing us with (a sick, unseemly sort of) entertainment goes. They strive ceaselessly and tirelessly, without remiss, on holidays, weekends, and during the work week, to provide us with new episodes of the …
One of the sad but important consequences for our system of government, in the face of such a process, is that not only do the economic elites now control the system, but more importantly, our elitist-backed politicians have no vision beyond the self-interestedness of catering to the money the elites use to support them. The people are out; the future is irrelevant; …
More Americans than ever before are supporting their local food markets, and it’s not just because they believe the food is fresher and tastes better. According to a new University of Iowa study, people are shopping farmers markets and joining food coops at record numbers because they enjoy knowing who grows their food. These so-called “locavores” are also driven to …
As Labor Day looms, more Americans than ever don’t know how much they’ll be earning next week or even tomorrow. This varied group includes independent contractors, temporary workers, the self-employed, part-timers, freelancers, and free agents. Most file 1099s rather than W2s, for tax purposes. On demand and on call – in the “share” economy, the “gig” economy, or, more prosaically, the …
A woman in a black and white dress stood with a huge pot on her head. She had walked for days, with her two young children also carrying goods, to reach the camp for internally displaced persons in Bentiu, South Sudan. They were all exhausted by the time they registered with the International Organisation for Migration at the facility that …
It is worth revisiting the famous Russell-Einstein Peace Manifesto. Offered to the world in 1955 in the icy winds of Cold War One, two of the greatest humanists and scientific minds of the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) and Albert Einstein (1879-1955), proposed a stark question to humankind. “Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind …
Hybrid cars, backyard composters and household rain barrels have much in common with green burial these days. Opting for a biodegradable casket or shroud and forgoing chemical embalming and the use of a burial vault are just a few more eco-choices Americans now have in the midst of overwhelming environmental problems. Over the last decade or more news stories have done …
