Patriotism that loves our country, our land, and our planet
By David Brin Grand challenges! It’s an approach to stimulating research and technology that has been around for a while, stretching back to the British longitude prize of the 1700s. Aviation medals and awards spurred rapid advances during the 1920s and 1930s and sparked breakthroughs in human-powered flight in the 1980s and 1990s. One contest helped lead to creation [...]
By James Howard Kunstler Where on earth did Paul Krugman get the idea — expressed Monday morning — that ours is “a weak economy?” The Dow Jones Industrial Average is about to scale previously uncharted heights and the Standard & Poors Index is piling onto its molehill, too. If stocks are up the economy can’t [...]
By James Howard Kunstler Wishful thinking now runs so thick and deep across the USA that our hopes for a credible future are being drowned in a tidal wave of yellow smiley-face stories recklessly issued by institutions that ought to know better. A case in point is the Charles C. Mann’s tragically dumb cover story [...]
By David Brin People ask me – Do you worry about the loss of privacy as both the government and amateurs have more and more access to surveillance? I got some of my nicest letters based on Chapter 9 of The Transparent Society, where I disassemble my own theory, and appraise and talk about all sorts of [...]
By Anthony Swift As the American public becomes acquainted with images of tar sands flowing across lawns, driveways and streets of an Arkansas suburb near Little Rock (for video of the spill go here), Exxon is now making the claim that the crude spilled from its ruptured Pegasus pipeline isn’t technically tar sands. This attempt is reminiscent [...]
By David Brin Straight from the pages of Existence… though sooner than I expected… researchers now claim to have the entire Neanderthal genome in published form, as clear as that of “any person on the street.” Okay, start your countdown till someone announces she is pregnant with… That will be a real boat-rocker… …but there are other events on [...]
The Situation in 2013 As I updated this article (see part 1, here), studies have revealed that much of the shine is coming off of America’s love affair with ethanol. (Well, the GOP’s love affair, as ethanol allowed the party to offer an “alternative” that both sounded plausible and poured billions toward their friends.) Now, [...]
By James Howard Kunstler If you’ve never had major surgery before – there’s this cool part after they’ve got you all scrubbed and prepped in pre-op, and inserted IVs in your veins, and you’re ready to rock and roll with whatever’s on the program. I’m familiar with this routine. It’s the only part of the [...]
By David Brin Amid all the talk of budget balancing and sequesters, I’d like to shift attention to a topic that may – at first sight – seem a bit wonkish and detached: farm subsidies. In fact, they are an area where Blue America remains frightfully ignorant and where the flood of entitlement spending merits closer [...]
By James Howard Kunstler Last week, extreme right-wing, hyper-patriot blogger and “Christian Reconstructionist” Gary North published a piece that bounced around the Web titled “JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER: FOUL-MOUTHED APOLOGIST FOR THE GOOD OLD BOYS.” Gary North was inflamed because I had put out a recent blog inveighing against the chain-store rape of local economies from [...]
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