Rep. Michelle Bachmann, R- Minn.
Credit: Carolyn Kaster/AP
One of the creepiest aspects of contemporary American politics is the unholy alliance between the Christian right and Israel. It’s uncomfortable because the religious right’s affinity for Israel is tied to a rather disturbing fever dream: Israel’s destruction. Many evangelicals are utterly convinced that every addition to the sum of suffering in the Middle East is but a sign of the end times, of Christ’s return.
In India, fertility rates are down to 2.48 children per woman.
Credit: Reuters/Danish Ismail
For the past 200 years the global population has risen explosively. There were 1 billion humans in 1850. There are 7.3 billion today. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, humanity has lived in quiet dread that somewhere there is a limit, and the Malthusian horsemen of plague, starvation and war will one day punish our effrontery.
Demographic change is easy to miss, because it happens slowly, but we stand on the cusp of a profound change in the human condition. New projections from the UN suggest that, in a few decades, we could secure a stable global population.
To be clear, the forecasts do not show an imminent end to population growth – far from it. The global population has the momentum of an elephant on an ice rink. The UN’s medium-variant projection shows a rise to 9.7 billion people in 2050 and 11.2 billion by […]
People are apparently aware of the physical dangers of radiation, but the psychological ones are regularly overlooked.
Credit: David Woodfall/David Woodfall
Radiation protection research has been focused upon the bodily effects of exposure to ionising radiation, rather than upon the psychology of survivors. However, recent work, including my own, has shown that the most significant impacts of radiation emergencies are often in our minds.
The physical consequences of radiation exposure are well documented, from radiation sickness to cancer. However, there is another insidious and debilitating impact upon the people in areas affected by nuclear accident, regardless of proximity to hazards and actual exposure; something that has a greater prevalence and a higher rate of morbidity and mortality than all physical health cases combined – mental health effects.
Ionising radiation and mental health are both sorry subjects of misunderstanding and flagrant misinformation. The immediate physical wellbeing of radiation emergency survivors is rightly prioritised, with the […]
Paul Craig Roberts
Credit: www.paulcraigroberts.org
Do you remember when real reporters existed? Those were the days before the Clinton regime concentrated the media into a few hands and turned the media into a Ministry of Propaganda, a tool of Big Brother. The false reality in which Americans live extends into economic life. Last Friday’s employment report was a continuation of a long string of bad news spun into good news. The media repeats two numbers as if they mean something—the monthly payroll jobs gains and the unemployment rate—and ignores the numbers that show the continuing multi-year decline in employment opportunities while the economy is allegedly recovering.
The so-called recovery is based on the U.3 measure of the unemployment rate. This measure does not include any unemployed person who has become discouraged from the inability to find a job and has not looked for a job in four weeks. The U.3 measure of unemployment only includes the still hopeful who think they will find a job.
The government has a second official measure […]
Ken Langone, a co-founder of Home Depot
Credit: Richard Drew/AP
I’ve written previously about the growing fear among elites that they’ve pushed economic inequality too far. That fear is proliferating, according to a New York Times Op-Ed this weekend by former marketing conglomerate CEO Peter Georgescu. Joined by his friend Ken Langone, founder of Home Depot, Georgescu warns his fellow 1 percenters that “[w]e are creating a caste system from which it’s almost impossible to escape.” The column raises the specter of “major social unrest” if inequality is not addressed.
Georgescu writes:
I’m scared. The billionaire hedge funder Paul Tudor Jones is scared. My friend Ken Langone, a founder of the Home Depot, is scared. So are many other chief executives. Not of Al Qaeda, or the vicious Islamic State or some other evolving radical group from the Middle East, Africa or Asia. We are afraid where income inequality will lead.
In June, Cartier chief Johann Rupert — worth an […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
