Waste is Food (book: Cradle to Cradle)

Every so often I come across a book that makes it onto my “must read” list. It’s been a while, but William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the way we make things is one of those books. For people unfamiliar with McDonough’s work, he is an environmentalist, architect and designer who has […]

Bowling Deaths Double

This is an earlier draft of an essay that appears in my collection of essays, Raised by Turtles: A Book in American. Some day, I will take the final version and reformat it and paste it in here, but for now it is only available in print for $4.95 $6.44 (I guess inflation has hit […]

Switzerland declares neutrality on Sweden

In a move that shocked the international diplomatic community, Switzerland today declared neutrality on Sweden. The small land-locked European nation is best known for declaring neutrality on Nazi German during World War II and on Turkey during the latter nation’s struggle with Kurdish separatists. A small group of neo-con scholars thinkers commentators have long noticed […]

Era of Change Upon Us Again

I get the headlines from the New York Times emailed to me every day. It saves a lot of money, fuel and paper in the long run. Today, the venerable NYT sent me this headline for the article about Bill Gates stepping down at Microsoft: Gates to Cede Software Reins in Era of Change. At […]

Nation of Sheep (book)

In the summer of 1959 there occurred a series of events which demonstrated our national ignorance in a shameful and nearly fatal manner. Briefly, the United States threatened intervention in a foreign country for reasons which, it turned out, had no basis in fact… Our Secretary of State called the situation grave; our ambassador to […]

Wal-mart is not the Problem

Wal-mart critics still seem focussed on social and moral pressure, while the Renaissance scholastics teach us to trust to institutions, not the virtues of men. Nevertheless, recent victories against Wal-mart bode well for activists who would like to see health care divorced from employment.

Terrorism, Sex, Inequality and UFOs — Turtle Index, January 2006

In the tradition of the Harper’s Index, here’s the first ever Turtle Index, a compendium of numerical one-liners mostly based on polls. What percentage of American cell phone users have stopped having sex to answer the phone? How does that compare to Italians? It’s all in here as well as a few odd facts about […]

Intelligent Design vs Calvin’s Doctrine of Accommodation

Intelligent Design is a smokescreen that purports to be based on rigorous science, but is simply an attempt to squeeze neo-creationism in the back door. In fact, NPR reported that according to evidence presented as part of the case that was settled today in Pennsylvania prohibiting the teaching of Intelligent Design in school, the original manuscript […]

Lost Lessons from the War on Communism

One would think that, having spent the second half of the twentieth century fighting one protractrated struggle against an implacable ideological enemy, we might have learned something. The Bush administration’s actions would seem to indicate that we did not. What should we have learned? That in a war of ideals, ideals that are not practiced […]

John Calvin Joins The Ranter in the War on Christmas

NEWSFLASH: The Ranter has declared war on Christmas! Or at least Bill O’Reilly and John Gibson and the other genius right-wingers at Faux News believe that liberal, left, secularists like The Ranter have declared war on Christmas. I hate to disappoint, so I have created a “Make war on Christmas, not Iraq” bumper sticker. Joining […]