This July a computer developer who goes by the handle Doctor Nefario landed at the Seattle-Tacoma airport from China for a two-month mind-meld with various U.S. developers, which he planned to mostly fund using the increasingly popular decentralized digital currency bitcoin. After explaining to suspicious Customs and Border Protection agents that he had $600 in cash in his possession and another $1,500 to exchange in bitcoin — plenty for a two-month visit, he insisted — Nefario, founder of the Global Bitcoin Stock Exchange, was promptly sent back to China after agents spent hours trying to wrap their heads around the concept of real money that exists only in virtual reality.

‘Avoid any mention of bitcoin,’ Nefario advised in a blog post recounting the tragicomic affair. ‘They don’t like it at all.’

Good luck with that. Founded in 2009 from a self-published 2008 white paper by developer Satoshi Nakamoto, whose actual identity still remains a mystery, bitcoin’s peer-to-peer virtual currency has gone viral, from WikiLeaks to Google and beyond. It’s a fascinating experiment in economic evolution, where goods and services can be exchanged using an opensourced mobile currency mostly outside the reach of regulators, speculators and central bankers. There are over six […]

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Last week, a conservative panel of judges on the D.C. Circuit’s Court of Appeals-the second-most important court in the land-struck down an effort to inject a tiny bit of democracy into corporate governance.

The back story is a bit turgid, but bear with me. The SEC, in an effort to enhance shareholder rights, enacted a rule that permitted shareholders who have owned 3 percent of a corporation for at least three years to nominate a slate of directors in opposition to those proposed by the incumbent board of directors. Additionally, the company would be required to circulate the alternate slate’s names, and a brief statement, in conjunction with the board’s own nominated slate of directors. This rule was a small step toward turning the now perfunctory process of board elections into true democracy.

The D.C. circuit struck down the rule (PDF), saying that the SEC had acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner, not adequately considering the costs to corporations of burdens imposed by being required to include and circulate this information. Corporations, of course, spend untold millions promoting and compensating their entrenched incumbent board members. Yet even this one small effort to open the door to corporate democracy was slammed shut.

Why […]

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New data from polling firm Gallup shows that out of all the religious groups in the U.S., Muslims are most likely to reject violence, followed by the non-religious atheists and agnostics.

Through interviews with 2,482 Americans, Gallup found that 78 percent of Muslims believe violence which kills civilians is never justified, whereas just 38 percent of Protestant Christians and 39 percent of Catholics agreed with that sentiment. Fifty-six percent of atheists answered similarly.

When Gallup put the question a bit more pointedly, asking if it would be justified for ‘an individual person or a small group of persons to target and kill civilians,’ the responses were a bit more uniform. Respondents from nearly all groups were widely opposed to such tactics, with Protestants and Catholics at 71 percent against. Muslims still had the highest number opposed, at 89 percent. Seventy-six percent of atheists were also opposed.

The Gallup survey, conducted over the course of a year, was designed to measure religious and non-religious attitudes toward violence 10 years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Perhaps most tellingly, 92 percent of Muslims surveyed said they did not believe any Muslim in their community had sympathy toward al Qaeda terrorists, but just 56 percent of […]

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I noticed the sound one evening about a year ago. At first, I thought an alarm had been set off. Then I realized that the noise-a high-pitched drone-was mainly in my right ear. It has been with me ever since. The tone varies, from a soft whoosh like a shower to a piercing screech resembling a dental drill. When I am engaged in work at the hospital or in the laboratory, it seems distant. But in idle moments it gets louder and more annoying, once even jarring me from a dream.

Tinnitus-the false perception of sound in the absence of an acoustic stimulus, a phantom noise-is one of the most common clinical syndromes in the United States, affecting twelve per cent of men and almost fourteen per cent of women who are sixty-five and older. It only rarely afflicts the young, with one significant exception: those serving in the armed forces. Tinnitus affects nearly half the soldiers exposed to blasts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This past August, I visited SUNY Buffalo, which houses one of the major clinical and research centers for the evaluation and study of tinnitus. After filling out a detailed questionnaire, I met with Christina Stocking of the Speech-Language […]

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Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination.

Young Americans-even more so than older Americans-appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that they are helpless to do anything about it. A 2010 Gallup poll asked Americans ‘Do you think the Social Security system will be able to pay you a benefit when you retire?

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